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  LA: WILD JUSTICE

  Copyright © 2021 by Blake Banner

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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  One

  Early spring on 128th Street, seen through the bow window of my living room, was like a cool, mischievous smile: it offered hope, without ever letting on exactly what you might be hopeful about. Might it be a kiss behind the bike shed? Or did it hint at something more? Something altogether more exhilarating, like the freedom to see people’s faces again, the natural, uninhibited pleasure of seeing a smile, a thoughtful frown or a laugh—some basic, unmasked human expression. It was indeed a cruel sickness that forbids us that most basic comfort of seeing each other’s faces.

  I was brought home from these thoughts by the jangling of my Bakelite telephone.

  “Yeah, Bauer.”

  The colonel’s deceptively cool, feminine voice answered.

  “Good morning, Harry, are you busy?”

  “Considering it’s been three months since you gave me a job, that question is at risk of being dumb.”

  “Good. Are you bored yet?”

  “I’m waxing philosophical about Covid-19, so I guess I must be. I’m even considering taking up watercoloring classes with Mrs. Hamish next door. She’s ninety-six and these days I find her company exhilarating.”

  “Quit griping, you needed the rest and you know it. How’s your shoulder?”

  “Hanging from my neck. How’s yours?”

  “Fine, but I haven’t been shot recently.”

  “You haven’t? It’s fun. You should try it sometime.”

  “I take it you’re ready for another job, then.”

  “You’re sharp, Colonel. What gave you the clue?”

  “Fine, take me to dinner. I’m at the Hyatt, Union Square.”

  “Funds running low since you stopped giving me work?”

  “I’m keeping a low profile, Harry. You should try that sometimes. I thought we could go to the Buddha Bodai Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant on Mott Street.”

  I suppressed a snort of laughter. It was of the derisive kind. “We’ll go to Keens Steakhouse on East 36th. You want to go vegetarian we’ll ask the waiter for a carrot and a couple of lettuce leaves you can nibble at. If rabbits are anything to go by they’re real aphrodisiacs.”

  “Do you know, Harry, you are really quite offensive sometimes.”

  “I’ve been told that, but I never really believed it. I’ll pick you up at seven thirty for cocktails. Wear something nice.”

  I hung up before she could answer and stood smiling out of the window for a while, thinking of spring’s wicked promises.

  At six PM I showered and shaved, and splashed my face with juniper-scented aftershave. Then I put on a black, understated tuxedo and climbed into my brand-new TVR Griffith which looked like a particularly expensive kind of motorized sin, and sounded like an especially expensive kind of beast from Hell. I growled my way to 4th Avenue, parked illegally outside the Hyatt and found the colonel in a low-cut, red satin dress with diamonds and emeralds around her throat in a choker that made you want to bite her neck. She also had a red satin mask to match her dress. We arched our eyebrows at each other and she said, “Please don’t call me ‘colonel.’”

  “I won’t. You don’t look like a colonel at the moment. I may even forget you are one.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t. You have an unfortunate habit of going too far, too often. Now, take me to this restaurant. What was it? The Cholesterol Club?”

  “Carnivore’s Corner. You’ll like it.” I took her elbow and guided her toward the door. “Nobody ever goes too far there. Their sirloin steaks are never more than sixteen ounces.”

  We stepped out into the Manhattan evening, where the dusk streetlamps lay luxuriant across the burgundy paintwork of my car. “That’s obscene,” she said, referring to the sixteen-ounce steaks. I nodded. “You’re right. But the walls are all paneled in mahogany, and they have eighty thousand pipes hanging from the ceiling, so it kind of doesn’t count.”

  I opened the door and she climbed down into her seat with some difficulty. I got in beside her and we growled our way down East 14th to 6th Avenue in a slightly tense silence.

  Keens Steakhouse is probably my favorite restaurant in New York, and one of my favorites in the world. It clings on, with apparent effortlessness, to a kind of sanity and common sense that has long since been lost by the rest of the Western world in a miasma of rules, regulations and arbitrary prohibitions. The head waiter took our coats and showed us to our seats. I ordered two Vesper martinis and he went away to fetch them while we studied the menu. When he returned I told him we would have a dozen fresh oysters, accompanied by a chilled bottle of Fino Manzanilla, La Guita. Then the colonel would have steamed Maine lobster with filet mignon, and I would have the prime New York sirloin. We would have steamed asparagus and sautéed broccoli with both, and a bottle of Muga Gran Prado Enea, Gran Reserva, 2006.

  When the waiter had gone I confronted her chilly stare with a bland smile.

  “If,” she said, “I ever go to a restaurant with you again, kindly allow me to order my own food and drinks.”

  “So, who do you want me to kill, Jane?”

  She sipped her martini and gave her lips a small smack as she set the glass down again on the table.

  “You know, Harry, there are times, a few, occasionally, when I think I could almost like you.” She nodded, as though I had questioned what she said. “Seriously, sometimes you display humanity, honor, kindness and indisputable courage.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

  “And at those times I really think I could come to actually like you, as a person. But then I remember that underneath it all, you are you.”

  “That’s disappointing, and you were doing so well. So why are you doing this instead of the brigadier? He likes me.”

  “Because I am the head of operations, and I told him we have to stop mollycoddling you. You take your orders from me, Harry, not from the brigadier.”

  I lopsided a smile and chuckled in a way I knew was annoying. “Last time I checked, Jane, I didn’t take orders from anybody. So are you going to tell me who the target is, or do I have to guess?”

  She considered me for a moment with no trace of amusement on her face.

  “As always,” she said, “the choice is yours as to whether you take the job or not.”

  “That’s kind of hard to decide if you don’t tell me what
the job is. Why are you being so cagey?”

  The waiter arrived with an ice bucket containing a bottle of Manzanilla. He poured us two glasses while a waitress brought the oysters and the lemon. When they had left, the colonel said, “This target is not quite like any target you’ve been after before.”

  I had an oyster halfway to my mouth and I froze to look at her.

  “Is it a woman?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Obviously it’s not a child,” I said with some heavy irony. “So what’s the problem?”

  “This target is an American, he is a one-time senator, the head of a foundation which undertakes work all over the Third World to build schools and hospitals, water purifiers…” She made an “on and on” gesture with her hand. “He also invests millions of dollars every year in medical research, vaccines…”

  “Bill Gates was never a senator, so it’s not him.”

  “Funny, that’s funny. Can we stop wasting time on facetious jokes now?”

  “Sure, why don’t you tell me who it is? And when you’ve done that, you can explain to me what we have against this guy.”

  “The target is Charles Cavendish.”

  I laid down the oyster and sat back in my chair. “Are you out of your minds? In the first place we have due process of law in this country. If, and I stress if, this guy has committed crimes against humanity then the FBI should be dealing with it. And in the second place, I thought we only went after people who were guilty of crimes against humanity. This guy has devoted most of his adult life to doing exactly the opposite; exactly what you have outlined. It’s not just the Cavendish Foundation that provides these places with schools and hospitals, he gets personally involved. If we take out Charles Cavendish, we do immeasurable harm to thousands of vulnerable people all over the Third World. He has water purifying and irrigation projects all over central and southern Africa. He has school and hospital building projects from Panama to Tierra del Fuego. What the hell are we doing going after this guy? Have we turned political while I’ve been convalescing? Are we taking contracts for money now?”

  She had been quietly eating oysters while I ranted. Now she sipped her wine and watched me over the rim.

  “Are you done?”

  “I’m ready to hear your answers, if that’s what you mean.”

  “OK, so eat your oysters and shut up for a bit while I explain.”

  I took an oyster, swallowed it and followed up with a sip of wine. The colonel screwed up her napkin and placed it gently beside her plate.

  “Charles Cavendish is one of the richest men in America—in the world, but his fortune is hard to quantify. Aside from the fact that he has a lot of it stashed in offshore accounts around the world, a very large proportion of his cash is concealed through the activities of his foundation.”

  I shrugged. “So what?”

  She raised one hand. “Please, just be quiet. Don’t talk for a bit. The way he works is this: he finds an organization which is trying to set up schools, or bring clean water to deprived areas, for example, and he will offer them a substantial amount of money as a grant. A fair chunk of that cash will go into executive salaries. In exchange he requires the foundation to have a leading executive role in the organization, ostensibly to ensure it is guided in the right direction. But once the foundation has that role he appoints his own directors, and sacks anyone on the board who opposes him. Now he owns the organization.

  “That’s phase one. In phase two he pumps money into the organization, appoints middle managers with impeccable records and sets vigorously about doing wonderful things, delivering medicine, building hospitals, bringing schools to remote areas. All that stuff. But at the same time he does other things.”

  I swallowed my last oyster. “What kind of things?”

  For a start, he will, in many cases, quietly reregister these organizations as limited companies, providing the same services they were offering originally to impoverished areas, but now as private enterprises instead of charities or NGOs. As part of those companies he will set up pension funds with discretion to invest in any business or industries that will provide a profit to the investor.”

  “Naturally. Where is this going, Colonel? So far I can’t see a problem.”

  “If you’ll keep quiet I’ll get there. Now, take the Clean Water Supplies Agency, in Colombia.”

  “Does this company exist?”

  “It’s fictitious, an example. The Cavendish Foundation approaches them and offers them an injection of a million US dollars in exchange for an executive position. It’s an offer they can’t refuse. Over the next couple of months or so they identify and sack any members of management who might cause problems, and they increase the salaries of the remaining members of the board. After that they propose converting the agency into a company. Appropriate palms are greased at local government level, and above if needed. Now it’s the Clean Water Supplies Company, with a pension fund for its employees which it is free to invest as it sees fit. The foundation injects a fresh dose of cash into the company and the company uses that money to buy a second company, let’s call it the Colombian International Procurements Company, which goes through a similar metamorphosis as the agency, only this company then undertakes freelance United States weapons procurement for, amongst other clients, the Colombian government.”

  “Aren’t there already government agencies who procure US weapons for the Colombian government?”

  “Sure, and there are also private sector companies that do it, but not all of them can claim to have the ear of a US Senator who can pull significant strings at home for them. So our new Colombian Procurements Company now buys two thousand assault rifles and two dozen helicopters. A thousand rifles and a dozen helicopters go to the approved end user, the Colombian government, to fight crime and drugs manufacturing in the jungle. The balance get sold to anyone from the Taliban to Al Qaeda, or governments in the Middle East who are not approved by the US Government. Those weapons fetch top dollar. But that’s not the end of the story. This company—which does not have to be in Colombia, it could as easily be in Panama, Brazil or Cote d’Ivoire—is now free not only to sell to whomever it wishes, but to buy from whomever it wishes. And that includes North Korea, China, Iran…you name it.”

  “And Cavendish is doing this? He knows his foundation is doing this?”

  The waiter came and removed our plates and replaced them with my steak and the colonel’s lobster. The wine waiter poured the wine and left. The colonel said:

  “Yeah, he knows, and he’s been doing it for the last ten years. What I have outlined is a very simplified model of what he does, but you can be sure that he is very good at covering his tracks. Even if you could connect all the rogue companies to him by following an electronic paper trail, you could never prove that he knew what was going on. There are a dozen people along the way who could and would take the fall for him.”

  “So how do you know he’s responsible? How can you be sure? You can’t pass this kind of sentence on a man unless you know, beyond a doubt, that he is guilty.”

  She nodded and picked up her knife and fork. “You don’t need to lecture me on that, Harry. I drafted our constitution and our code of conduct. We know because we have people who work with him at the highest level, and the orders and the decisions come from him.”

  She paused to put a forkful of lobster in her mouth.

  “You remember the Al-Habaja massacre, where five thousand people, many of them women and children, were gassed to death in north Iraq, just west of Zummar near the Turkish border?”

  “Of course.”

  “That gas was supplied by one of Cavendish’s companies. Another one that will be of interest to you: You will remember Mohammed Ben-Amini’s attack on Belandhawa, in Helmand province, because you were there.”

  “I’m not allowed to talk about that.”

  She gave something like a smile. “Don’t worry about it. The same people who told you not to talk about it ar
e the ones who briefed me.”

  I snorted something like an ironic laugh. “The brigadier? OK, they used a chemical agent, phosVX, that killed the entire population of the village, eight hundred people. Their deaths were agonizing, with convulsions and internal hemorrhaging. It took about twenty minutes for them to die. There were grandparents, parents, children, everybody. They were just farmers. The excuse for the attack was that one of the men in the village had taken a Christian wife. But the real reason was that they were trying out a variant of phosgene which was harder to detect and more lethal. It not only attacked lung tissue, but also blocked the enzyme acetyl cholinesterase, causing violent spasms and accelerating the damage to the lungs. That was what we were told, anyhow. It was never proved because the village was torched, some said by Ben-Amini, others said by the CIA. But they were probably just conspiracy nuts, right?”

  “I can tell you that it was Ben-Amini who torched the village, and I can also tell you that it was Charles Cavendish who provided the Taliban with the phosVX that wiped out that village. If you decide to take the job, I will provide you with a full list of the crimes that he has been associated with, and which he provided the hardware for. Believe me, Harry, we have not put him on the list lightly. We would rather see him subjected to due process of law, but he is immune.”

  I picked up my knife and fork and cut into the steak, and watched the blood ooze into the oil.

  “You know I’ll take the job,” I said, “just tell me what to do.”

  Two

  The meal was as good as you’d expect it to be at Keens Steakhouse. When we’d finished the food and the wine, we ordered a Courvoisier and a Macallan and two espresso coffees, and a cheese board to pick at between sips. Predictably, the colonel focused on the Camembert, the ripe Brie and the Wensleydale peppered with blueberries. All good cheeses, but not much point eating them when you have a good Stilton and the best Scotch whisky on the planet at your disposal.

  The colonel, sporting slightly flushed cheeks and bright blue eyes, put a small piece of Camembert on a salted cracker and popped it in her mouth. I watched her do it while I savored the rich, warming amber Scotch and wondered, foolishly, what it would be like to take her to bed. I smiled as I imagined whispering, “Colonel,” in her ear and she smiled back.