“It is.”
“Is this the man you know as Jesse Ventura?”
“Yes.”
In that pulse of an interval before Byron could ask another question, Justin Goldberg said: “We will go into recess.”
Two days later, Byron Johnson stepped out of the number 6 train at the City Hall station. Rainwater dripped from the street-level grating to the concrete subway platform. Above the station, as in all Manhattan, wind-driven, cold gusts of rain had been falling steadily since the night before. Most of the leaves had finally been stripped from the trees. They lay sodden on the pavement.
Byron fastened his raincoat up to his neck and put on his wide-brimmed Barsolino hat. He had carried the Humphrey Bogart-style hat since looking out at the street that morning from his tall bedroom windows. He knew a hat would be more useful because destroyed umbrellas were strewn across the plaza’s gray pavement and piled against the ornate railings around the Federalist-era City Hall.
Holding down the soaked brim of his hat, Byron trotted through the noisy congestion of cars, yellow taxis, and trucks that had crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and come to a halt in the narrow maze of streets around Foley Square. Alert, agile and quick, Byron went through the colonnades of the Municipal Building. The passageways were wet, but he was briefly sheltered from the downpour. Even in heavy, windswept rain, people still walked while gazing down at the lit screens of their cell phones.
As soon as he emerged from the colonnades under the Municipal Building, Byron almost sprinted to the nearby entrance of One St. Andrew’s Plaza, that Soviet-style building that housed the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He made his way through the two security checkpoints that led to the lobby. Several well-dressed men were waiting near the security machines. He sat on a plastic chair in the waiting room. Now dominated by big photographs of Barack Obama and Eric Holder-both with that look of eager, youthful aptitude-the waiting room was a place through which John Gotti, Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, and other legendary criminals had passed, together with their lawyers. There were also forlorn Puerto Rican and black women in the rows of chairs that resembled the sitting areas in bus stations. As he waited, he spent fifteen minutes reading the soaked paperback edition of Emma he had carried in the roomy pocket of his raincoat. It took Byron a second before he recognized the man walking into the waiting room.
It was Jesse Ventura.
Byron stood up.
“Good morning, Mr. Ventura.”
“You came for this, Mr. Johnson.”
He handed Byron a computer disk that Byron knew contained the video of Ali Hussein’s day-long hearing. The man also gave him a handwritten receipt describing the disk Byron had just been given. Byron signed it.
Without speaking, the man gave a hard, deliberately insincere smile as Byron turned away and left the brown lobby.
Waverly Place-tree-lined, orderly, and quietly beautiful-was empty. Rain still fell. Water ran along the old gutters and pooled at each sewer, congested with fallen leaves. The Three Lives Bookstore had just opened for the day. In its warm interior, a young woman with purple hair sat near the cash register, head bowed, reading. There were no customers in the store.
Just inside the front door of the townhouse in which Simeon Black lived, Byron pressed the intercom button. The peremptory buzzer sounded at the door, and Byron quickly pulled it open. Shaking the water off his felt hat, Byron walked up the creaking stairs. The carpeting was worn. The hallway was d & it smelled of wet wool and soaked newspapers.
The door was unlocked. At the end of the bookshelf-lined hallway, Simeon, at his desk, lifted his right hand and waved Byron in. He was smiling. Byron had grown to feel comfortable in the shabby, scholarly aura of Simeon Black’s apartment-it reminded him of the cozy, book-filled, and cluttered apartments of some of his bachelor professors at Princeton. Even though it was the 1960s, those genteel men actually still wore tweedy blazers with elbow patches. They were literate and kind, and they seemed completely at ease in a style of life that would soon end, in fact had already ended without their knowing it.
And now, in Simeon’s old-world, immensely attractive apartment, Byron, taking off his raincoat and draping it on a standing hat rack, felt a sudden uneasiness. Those professors at Princeton-all certainly dead by now-had only wished Byron and the other students well. They were intelligent, privileged, and kind. They had no agenda other than to live out their lives in the austere luxury of Princeton, and to accomplish that, all they had to do was teach and, if they could, write books of literary criticism, history, or, in one case, a wildly successful novel about a year at a New England prep school.
But, as Byron knew, Simeon was not a kindly professor, and his mission was not to move Byron safely forward in life. Simeon was a reporter. He had written about Army generals and politicians who had waged a secret war. Simeon had named the killers in his books and articles. He had once uncovered the secret financial life of a House of Representatives Democrat who, not long after Simeon’s articles appeared, shot himself in the head in his office. Byron had recently read, because he was now skilled at finding information in the deep recesses of Google, Yahoo, and Bing, that the man’s seventeen-year-old daughter had naively begged Simeon not to publish the articles about her father. Byron also knew the old adage about dealing with reporters: Those who ride the tiger’s back might end up in the tiger’s stomach.
Simeon reached over the clutter on his desk and shook Byron’s hand. He assumed Byron had come to describe what had happened two days earlier, when Ali Hussein testified at the secret hearings in a sealed courtroom about years of physical and emotional torture, the mind-numbing pain of total isolation, and the persistent demon who had followed him for years. Jesse Ventura.
Byron held the gleaming disk. “I want you to make a copy of this, Sy. What’s that called? Burn the CD.”
“What is it?
“It’s the transcript of the hearings, word for word. And the video.”
Simeon knew that, as Ali Hussein’s lawyer, Byron had a legitimate right to have the disk, but he had no right to give it away.
Byron handed the disk to Simeon. He inserted it into the slot at the side of his computer. They could both hear the whirring hum as it was replicated.
“Is the hearing over?”
“It is.”
“When will the judge make his decision?”
“Don’t know.” Byron smiled. “He may never make it. It’s an old trick some judges use. Never ruling. Remember, these federal judges are our modern royalty. They have lifetime appointments. That literally means they stay until they die. And the truth is they can do, or not do, whatever they want. One of those stupid lawyers’ jokes is this: ‘What’s the difference between God and a federal judge? God wants to be a federal judge.’ If Goldberg never rules, then I can never appeal.”
Simeon smiled. “So, Dr. Johnson, what’s your next step?”
“Will you be my Boswell?”
“Of course, I’m already writing Life of Johnson.”
Rain flowed down the windows just beyond Simeon’s desk. All the leaves had been stripped from the London plane trees.
“My next step? I’m going to start insisting that the government turn over to me every videotape, report, note, plane ticket, picture, blood sample, bank record, and DNA sheet that relates in any way to Ali.”
“Talk to me about the videotapes of the torture.”
“Ali testified that cameras were often running, especially in the times when Jesse Ventura was with him.” Byron paused. “Including when he was pushed under water.”
“Waterboarded?”
“That’s what it’s called, although Ali never heard the word, since it started to be used after he was picked up. Waterboarding, it turns out, is being pushed under water. Just like fourteen-year-old boys do in school pools to twelve-year-old boys. But in this case, it’s men doing it. And it lasts longer, long after it stops feeling like a prank. A whole different order of magnitude.”