They also knew that he was a consummate lawyer, a man with an enormous capacity to extract facts from clients and to inspire confidence in them. Byron was one of those increasingly rare lawyers who looked like what people once viewed as the prototype of a lawyer-handsome, tall, well-mannered, projecting an aura of noblesse oblige without any trace of arrogance or haughtiness.
And, finally, they knew he had become restless, irritable, and discontented as he entered and warily moved into his early sixties.
From that gorgeous moment in the dusk at the Central Park Zoo, the Rosario strategy worked. I not only became your lover, she wrote in the text message, I became your alter ego. Like any new lover, you let me roam through your life. I had free access to your notes, your computer and cell phone (although I had to work to haul you into the 21st century), and what I knew to be your soul. I took all of that from you, and gave it to others so that they could sift it all to find money, like those prospectors in the California Gold Rush who screened sand and water for gold.
It was because I fell in love with you that Hurd and his minions started a campaign of disinformation and deception. When the $52 million kissed your account and fled, I asked Hurd where the money came from and how it had landed in your account and skipped off like a stone a kid tosses on the surface of the water.
“Ask your boyfriend,” he told me.
It was never in the plan and strategy as disclosed to her, she wrote, that Byron’s life would be put at such profound risk. She told Hurd it was crazy to suggest that Byron had divined how to locate the funds, move them to himself, and then managed to have the money pass through multiple accounts until it slipped into a black hole somewhere. If he has it, Hurd said to her, then he has a choice: he can give it to me or he will never be able to use it. Unless, of course, he said, you’ve got it, too.
And in that moment, Carlos, I knew he had decided I’d betrayed him. He kills people, Byron, for the sport of it. Remember King Lear? “Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.” Be careful, Carlos. I love you.
Gazing through the windows at the ice-silvered pine trees and the boulders against which the Atlantic crashed, tossing icy foam into the air, Byron hit the keys on his BlackBerry and forwarded her text message to his own email account. Life at risk. It felt as though every muscle, bone, and organ in his body were dissolving. The bathroom was cold. But he felt the overwhelming need to strip off all his clothes. Job’s words came to his mind, and he spoke them out loud: Naked, naked came I into the world, and naked shall I return.
When the ferry docked at Boothbay Harbor on the mainland, he stopped at the coffee shop on the wharf. He sat at the counter, on a circular stool with no arms or backrest. The new weekly edition of the local newspaper, the Harbor Express, was on the countertop. He casually pulled it toward him and spread open the first page on the worn counter as his black coffee and glazed doughnut-known here as a honey-dipped doughnut (a name that to him always had a wonderful sexual resonance)-arrived.
At the top of the front page was a driver’s license picture of Christina Rosario: Frozen Body Found on Beach in Acadia.
Byron struggled for breath, holding his hand over his mouth. The prematurely old waitress, her face worn by cigarettes and perennial cold weather, asked in that laconic Maine accent as she gestured at the headline, “Isn’t that something?”
He glanced at her, overwhelmed by a desire to have her take him to wherever she lived on this isolated coast and protect him. He shook his head. He couldn’t speak.
40
AS ALWAYS, ALI HUSSEIN appeared to grow younger each time Byron Johnson saw him. Somehow the dark pockets in which his eyes were set-the dominant feature of his face when Byron first saw him in Miami-had noticeably lightened. He had also become more talkative, almost light-hearted. He wanted to know more about news in the outside world, including news about himself. “Was I on CNN this week?” he once asked. He had more questions about his case. He was more interested in Byron. Over time, as Ali became more chatty, Byron admired him less.
And he had stopped giving Byron quotations from the Koran and hearing the Imam’s guidance for readings from the Koran. He knows, Byron thought, that I’ve been changing them, that now I’m the only one who holds the messages.
Byron was tense and intense. He leaned toward Ali’s ear. “We will be in court tomorrow. I have asked the judge to throw out the charges against you.”
“How?”
“I was given a video of Jesse Ventura trying to drown you.”
Ali raised his hand to his ear, leaning closer to Byron.
“The government said there were no videos of you. But there is one.”
“I told you that, Mr. Johnson.”
“And I believed you. And now I have a tape.”
“I saw the camera. It was humiliating. I was stripped, I was crying, my body was exposed, I was weak. I thought it was insane that they were filming it.”
“Ali, you have to understand that there’s no way to know what Goldberg will do.”
“Mr. Johnson, he’s an animal. His heart is bad.”
“You don’t want to die?”
“No, I don’t.”
“There’s a way to save yourself without relying on Goldberg. The other side has told me that they want to do a deal with you.”
“What kind of deal?”
“They say they know that the passages from the Koran you gave me, and the ones the Imam had me bring back to you, were codes. They think they’re close to knowing what the codes are, but they don’t know enough.”
“These people are crazy, Mr. Johnson. I never had money, I never took money, I never gave money to anyone.”
“All I can do is convey word for word what their offer is. I have an obligation to do that. You have to decide what you want to do.”
“I want to live, I want to leave here, I want to be in the world again.”
“They are offering you a deal to let you live.”
“And what do they want me to do?”
“To sit and talk with them. To cooperate, by which they mean to tell them everything you knew. People, conversations, money, your relationship with the Imam, names of banks, account numbers.”
“If I do all that, then what?”
“Then, after you give them all of that, they decide whether they will do a deal with you.”
“You mean the idea is that I give away everything first, and they get to decide later. I give, they take, and they can leave me where I am.”
“That’s the way it works.”
“But I don’t know anything, Mr. Johnson.”
“Then you have nothing to give them.”
“Unless I make things up.”
“They would tell me they don’t want you to make things up. And I can tell you that won’t work.”
“They are crazy people, Mr. Johnson.”
“They are the only people you can deal with. For us there are no other people in the world.”
“There is the judge.”
“There is.”
“And what if he does what you’re asking him to do? He sets me free. Then I don’t have these people trying to kill me.”
“Don’t invest too much in him, Ali. He was made a judge by Mr. Bush. He despises criminal defendants. He despises me. He despises you. He doesn’t have an Arab friend.”
“And he’s a Jew.”