“I think you dialed the wrong number.”
“Why the hell would I dial the wrong number?” he shouts. “I’m goddamned calling to scream at you — you academically impaired idiot.”
“What seems to be the problem?”
“International arms dealing.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Of course you have no idea, I wouldn’t expect you to have an idea. Let me be blunt, did you or did you not send your brother an iPad?”
“I did, as a birthday gift. I thought it would be nice to send pictures of the kids, or so he could map his way if he got lost in the woods, or stream movies on a cold winter night. It’s hard to think of what to get for a guy like George.”
“You provided the hardware for illegal commerce on an international scale. We could throw you in jail and lose the key.”
“That certainly wasn’t my intention,” I say.
“Open your e-mail — I sent you something.”
I go to the desk and, as instructed, open the mail; it’s a series of infrared aerial photos of George with the iPad in hand. There’s another guy peering over George’s shoulder.
“Is that your brother?”
“Sure looks like him. Who’s the other guy?”
“The Israeli arms dealer,” Walter Penny says.
“How did he get in the picture?”
“He’s one of our inmates from New Jersey.”
“But you said this program was only for hard-core types, not your average white-collar—”
“Quit whining. This guy is a former used-car dealer, Jersey Jewish mafioso, left his family for the Israeli army. When he came back, his wife had taken up with another man; he killed the guy point-blank at the dinner table, in front of everyone. Funny enough, we didn’t want to put some Israeli commando in one of our standard facilities. What the fuck made you think you could send your brother ‘presents’?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal to send a birthday gift.”
“You opened a portal to the free world, asshole. These guys are on Amazon Prime and have stuff coming every day — food, clothing, pornography.” He stops screaming and then takes a long, thin sucking breath. “Where to begin?” Walter says. “This is now a federal incident, the purview of the Secret Service, ATF, FBI, and the CIA — that’s how big it gets. Can you imagine the number of eyes on my little pilot program that I worked so hard on, the one with the wood-grain logo, the one with the yellow, green, red, black — four-color printing! Can you imagine how fast they’d like to close me down? I’m disappointed in you, Silver. When we met, I thought you had some good ideas, a sense of justice. You presented yourself as a thinker, and it turns out you are just another idiot.”
“What can I do to fix it?” I ask.
“We’re gonna come up with a plan,” Walter says.
“It’s set up on auto-pay; I can cut it off. I’d be happy to do it right now, while we’re on the phone.”
“Don’t do anything — we don’t want to arouse suspicions. Let me liaise with the others and get back to you. But for now, one move without my approval and you will go to jail. Oh, and think of something George would like to have, something he can’t get on Amazon.”
Walter calls me again a few days later. “I have been in conversation with the related agencies: ATF, FBI, Secret Service, National Guard. We are going to use you as bait and bring the Israeli in.”
“I am at your disposal,” I say.
“You bet you are. E-mail George as per the address you got from Jason.”
“You know about Jason?”
“He’s a good boy,” Walter says.
“Is he in on this?”
“We’re using a range of assets.”
“Have you been in my e-mail?”
“First stop on the tour,” Walter says. “Tell George you’re driving up Friday night to get his signature on some paperwork.”
“But I’ve got company on Friday — Ricardo will be here for the weekend,” I say.
Walter Penny doesn’t even acknowledge what I’m saying. “Tell George you’re able to meet anytime after six on Friday through six on Saturday.”
I do as I’m told; George replies he can do it anytime before sundown on Friday or after sundown on Saturday. I call Walter.
“Crap,” Walter says, “this confirms my suspicion. Your brother is practicing Judaism. He and Lenny are observing the Sabbath; that’s what we’ve been seeing them doing on Friday nights. The feds couldn’t figure it out — said they were lighting some kind of ‘flares’ and then sitting dormant — as if waiting for something. The feds couldn’t crack it.”
“A Jersey used-car dealer got George hooked on religion?”
“Strange things happen when men are left to themselves.” In the background a phone rings. “That’s the big boys — do nothing further until you hear from me.”
Meanwhile, another message from George appears in my inbox: “When you come, bring my silk boxers — upstairs dresser on the left. And some cookware — pots, pans, a spatula, and a ladle — and maybe Mom’s old candlesticks, not the silver ones — glass?”
A little while later, the phone rings. “So what’s your special gift, something you can bring that he can’t get from Amazon?”
“Aunt Lillian’s chocolate-chip cookies,” I say, not telling him that (a) I’m not in possession of her actual cookies and (b) I don’t have the recipe to attempt re-creation.
“It’s like the frontier; your brother and this Lenny character are running a general store up there. The bad boys bring them a dead duck and get Hershey bars in return. They’ve used the Amazon boxes to build themselves some sort of fort in a fort, which at the moment our camera can’t penetrate — we’re thinking it’s made out of some kind of river mud.”
“Dung,” I say. “Grass and dung.”
“Shit?” Penny asks.
“Yes.”
Aunt Lillian’s cookies. I make it my secret mission to replicate the cookies and the tin. I go to CVS, buy a tin of Danish Butter Cookies, come home, play kick-the-can with it while I walk Tessie, send it through the dishwasher, tumble it in the clothes dryer on hot with a bunch of towels, basically abuse the hell out of it, in a program to rapidly achieve the patina that would otherwise come with age. I buy the semi-sweet morsels, walnut halves, brown sugar, white sugar, vanilla, butter, flour, salt, baking soda, and remember the all-important tablespoon of warm water that Ashley told me about. Soon I am turning out Toll House hockey pucks that are equal in size, color, and lumpitude to Lillian’s famous. I leave them out to air-dry. Each day, fewer cookies remain — I say nothing to the suspected culprits at home, except that I am counting and know exactly what I’ve got, and I offer them a two-for-one special on the “defective” batch, which is actually far better.
And then, when I’ve got all the details, I call Ricardo’s aunt and tell her that I’ve got to work late in the city and ask if she can come and keep an eye on the kids.
“Of course,” she says.
And then — the real craziness starts. Later, I will wonder if this part really happened or if I dreamed it.
I am directed to a location several hours from home, and then, once I’m there, I’m led by an unmarked car to a deserted airstrip lit like a film set. Parked on the dirt runway are a small private plane and two military helicopters. By the time I arrive, the sky is sinking from twilight to the flat black of a starless night. On the grass nearby are several unmarked black cars, four guys in ATF nylon jackets, a dozen or more National Guard in full gear, Secret Service men trying to look low-key in polo shirts and khakis, a couple of unidentified men, assumedly FBI or CIA, and Walter Penny with a clipboard and a whistle on a lanyard around his neck, looking like a coach, preparing for the big game. The field is lit with giant floodlights — there’s even a quilted silver snack truck serving hot coffee and doughnuts.