Page 76 of Goodbye Girl
He looked up the street and down. He checked the alley. He went from one parked vehicle to the next, peering through windows, checking the front seat and back. Nothing.
Gigi had vanished.
He stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the basement apartment, wondering what Judge and Gigi—“Goodbye Girl”—had to do with MAP. Then he ran to the phone booth at the corner and dialed Madeline Coffey’s number. She answered.
“Mr. Knight, I am not your handler anymore. You cannot dial this number.”
“Just listen,” said Theo, breathless from the run to the booth. “I think I may have found the place where Amongus Sicario got shot.”
Chapter 30
On Saturday at 9:00 a.m., Jack and Imani were in the FBI’s Miami field office for a debriefing. Arnie Greenberg, Miami’s assistant agent in charge, and the tech agents from the surveillance van were in the conference room with them, seated on the other side of the long rectangular table. Madeline Coffey from London, and an assistant United States attorney on the New York prosecution team, participated remotely by video conference, their boxed images lighting up the sixty-inch LCD screen on the wall.
Friday night’s concert at the Kava estate had gone off without a hitch. Imani had left without incident and, more importantly, without SWAT support. The mystery—and the focus of Saturday’s debriefing—was the private conversation between Imani and Kava that had taken place indoors, “without ears.”
The ASAC began with his tech team’s findings. “Our tech unit has thoroughly examined the device Imani was wearing last night,” said Greenberg. “They found absolutely nothing wrong with it.”
“Then why did it stop working?” asked Jack.
“Somebody made it stop working,” said Greenberg.
“How?” asked Jack.
The ASAC turned very serious. “If I told you, then you and your client would hire a tech expert to concoct an explanation of how it wasn’t Imani’s fault.”
“Are you accusing my client of tampering with the device?”
“Not formally. At least not yet. But the fact remains that the transmission cut out at a very convenient time. Just when Imani was about to make the proposal to Mr. Kava that we scripted for her.”
“I don’t accept your characterization of ‘convenient,’” said Jack. “My client kept her end of the deal. She made the proposal, and Mr. Kava responded. It’s unfortunate that the device malfunctioned and failed to pick up the conversation, but that doesn’t relieve the government of its obligations under our agreement. All charges in New York must be dropped.”
Greenberg shook his head. “The deal was premised on a successful wire transmission of their conversation.”
“No,” Jack said firmly. “I struck that language from the agreement before signing it. Technical difficulties are the government’s problem, not mine. You may prefer a recording of the conversation, but my client can uphold her end of the bargain by testifying as to what was said between her and Kava.”
The ASAC seemed surprised. “I didn’t approve that modification.”
“I did,” said Coffey, her voice coming over the speaker. “With New York’s approval.”
The ASAC’s surprise drifted toward annoyance, if not anger. “You didn’t think to raise this with me directly, Jack?”
It hadn’t been Jack’s intention to do an end run on the Miami office, but unfortunately that seemed to be Greenberg’s take on the situation.
“I assumed you guys talk to each other,” said Jack.
“This isn’t productive,” said Coffey. “The bottom line is that unless the technical malfunction was an intentional act of sabotage, Ms. Nichols can satisfy the agreement through her testimony. But we need a proffer of what that testimony would be.”
The ASAC still seemed put off, but Jack was fully prepared and had a written proffer with him. He forged ahead, though it troubled him on multiple levels to have lost at least some support from Andie’s boss.
“Imani and I worked on it this morning,” he said. “I’ll read it to you.”
Jack read aloud, starting with the usual preliminaries of a witness statement, then a description of the setting and circumstances of the conversation. Imani was with Vladimir Kava in the art room, where his private collection was on display. They walked slowly from one painting or sculpture to the next, as Kava described his finest pieces. Classical music was playing in the background. Stravinsky, she believed. The onlyother person in the room was Kava’s bodyguard, who stood at the door, which was closed.
Then Jack read, in Imani’s words, the proposal she’d made to the oligarch:
“‘I asked Mr. Kava if he had heard about my “go pirate” campaign, and if he was aware that I was telling all of my fans to get my old songs on piracy websites. He said yes, he was aware, and that, from what he had read in the newspapers, I was trying to hurt my husband, Shaky Nichols, who owned my master recordings and stood to lose the most from the pirating of my music. Mr. Kava then asked, “How long do you intend to keep this up?” I told him I could keep it up forever, if he could make it worth my while. He asked what I meant, and I told him I had a business proposal for him: “I’ll keep telling my fans to pirate my songs, if you and Sergei will pay me at least double what I make under my record contract.”’”
Jack stopped there, taking a moment to address Coffey via videoconference. “I would point out that Imani’s proposal is the exact proposal you asked her to make.”