“This couldn’t have been cheap to renovate,” I said.
We made our way across the lawn to the church’s administrative offices. Double doors opened into a rounded portico where a young woman with a headset on sat behind a small desk. Unlike the young women who had the same job at the hotels along South Beach or the busy offices in Coconut Grove, this woman had a ragged scar that stretched from the corner of her right eye, crossed over her nose and continued all the way over her left cheek and down across her jawline. It was rippled and red and maybe half an inch wide. It was unmistakable: Someone had slashed her face with a razor blade.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to see Eduardo,” I stopped myself, considered the surroundings, and then corrected, “Father Eduardo.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No,” I said, “but he’s expecting me. Tell him his friend from the car wash is here.”
The girl touched her ear and spoke into the headset. “Father Santiago? Your friend from the car wash is here. Would you like me to take them to the conference room? Yes, no problem, Father.” The girl tapped her ear again and smiled up at us. “Father Santiago is running a few minutes behind schedule. He says he’ll be right out to see you in a moment. Can I get you something to drink while you wait?”
“What do you have in a bottle?” Sam asked.
“Evian or Dasani,” she said.
“He’ll have Evian,” I said before Sam could answer.
“No problem,” she said. She slid a clipboard toward me and asked me to sign in, which I did. Except that I said my name was Napoleon Solo, because I thought it prudent not to have my name on the official visitor’s list of any organization. I handed the clipboard to Sam. He signed it Illya Kuryakin and handed it back to the girl, who then proceeded to not even bother to look at it, which Sam clearly viewed as a shame. The girl then got up and walked down the narrow hall to her left, and I saw that her scar actually stretched around her neck, too.
Sam and I sat down in the lobby, and a few moments later, the girl returned with our waters.
“Can I get you anything else?” she asked.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
Immediately, the girl’s hand flared up toward the scar on her face. “Sure,” she said, though I could tell she felt uneasy. “I get asked questions all the time.”
“Do you like working here?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Do you like your job here? Has it been good for you to work here?”
“Working for Father Santiago is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” she said.
I looked at Sam to see if he was gloating, but he was too busy trying to figure out the twist top of his water.
“How long have you been here?”
“A year. Maybe a little more. Soon as I got out, Father Santiago told me I could work for him.”
Got out. So comfortable telling a stranger she’d done time. “Where were you?”
“Homestead,” she said. “You ever been there?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s south of here. It wasn’t so bad. You know. It was actually safer for me. Crazy, right?”
“Crazy,” I said. “How old are you?”
“You don’t ask a lady that,” Sam said, which made the girl smile. “You ask how young they are, right?”
“Twenty-three,” she said. “But I feel older.”
“You look like a million bucks,” Sam said.
The girl touched her scar. She was pretty, you could see that, even with the gouge across her face and neck. “Father Santiago says that I could get plastic surgery for this. What do you think?”
“You could,” I said. I pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”
“Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying-when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation-but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”
“I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”
“He have a lot of friends?” I asked.
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” she asked.
Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.
He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.
“Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.
“The mayor,” Sam said.
“Of where?”
“Miami,” Sam said.
Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”
Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.
The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.
I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”
“I knew his wife,” he said.
“A buddy of yours?”
“Of a kind, yes.”
When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.
“Gentlemen,” Eduardo Santiago said, “please, come into my office. We have much to talk about.”
3
There are offices-like the one I sat in with my mother and Eduardo Santiago the previous day-that serve a specific purpose, as a place where one person can sit comfortably to work on a computer. And then there are offices like the one Eduardo Santiago kept for himself at Honrado Incorporated, which was as wide as my loft, contained two leather sofas, a flat-screen television mounted to the wall, a small glass-faced refrigerator filled with bottled water, a round table covered in blueprints and an entire wall dedicated to photos. Eduardo with various celebrities, politicians, athletes and entertainers, certainly, but most of the photos were actually of Eduardo with kids and with young men and women out in the community. There were also framed news stories and features from the Miami Herald, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and even a snappy little color thing from USA Today. I stopped and read a few lines in each. Everything my mother and Sam said was parroted in the pages of the nation’s most esteemed newspapers: Eduardo Santiago had done the impossible and now was using himself as a prime example for the kids coming out of Miami’s battle-hardened neighborhoods.
“You’ll have to pardon my ego,” Eduardo said when he saw me reading his wall.
“It looks like you’ve done some great things,” I said. “My mother didn’t lie.”
“Not this time,” Sam said.
“I’ve been very blessed.” Eduardo motioned to the round conference table. “Please, my friends, have a seat.”
It was very strange. When I had seen Eduardo the previous day, he spoke to me in a kind of refined street patois, but here he spoke as if he’d gone to private schools his entire life. Perhaps that was the surest sign Eduardo Santiago was a different person now-he knew how to change his persona for a given situation. That was a talent I could appreciate.