Basically marijuana, some hallucinogens. Heâd dropped out of Stanford and was working for a moving company, smoking pot every day with the guys on the truck. Then he got busted with some marijuana heâd brought down to the city from Mendocino. His mother was devastated. Heâd been her golden child. Star athlete, president of the student council, the most popular girls for his girlfriends. His father got the charges dropped in exchange for his going to a drug clinic.â
She sees Leonardâs consternation. Despite Klara, Leonard had managed to bump along through his boysâ teenage years with Marc a beerguzzling frat boy and Saul never even touching coffee.
âBy the time I met Reed, he was on a macrobiotic diet. He drank wheat grass juice and ate mostly Japanese food. His friends called him Seaweed. Thatâs why it was so hard for me, at first, to believe heâd gotten back into drugs.â
Leonard holds the picture close to his face. âWhy did he come to New York?â
âTo finish college. His parents hated New York, but Columbia was the only place heâd go. It was the same year I started Yale. He was the only person I knew from California, and I sort of clung to him. Iâd come down on weekends, and heâd take me around.â
She knows Leonard must be thinking that Reed was a boyfriend. That it would be hard for Leonard, knowing her now, to imagine how Reed, with his exotic girlfriends and ease everywhere, had seemed back then out of her league.
âAfter he graduated, he bought a van he drove to Peru. We lost touch. It was just luckââshe pauses on this wordââbumping into him that day at the Whitney. Heâd gone to law school and got a job working for a top firm. He hated it, said it was like hazing, seventy hours a week working on some glitch involving the intersection of American and French tax law.â
Leonard hands the photo back to Rena. She can see on his face that heâs wondering if sheâs holding something back. If so, itâs more about Saul than Reed: how, to Saul, Reed had seemed like a benign version of Marc. A breath of fresh air in the claustrophobia of medicine, someone who didnât regard Hispanics as poor people who are more inconvenient than other poor people because they donât speak English and have their own healing practices. As for her relationship with Reed, Saul had commented on it only once. It saddened him, he said, that Reed, not he, had known her as a girlâ as a girl , Saulâs euphemism for when her life was scrappy and sordid, every corner filled with shame.
M ORTON GIVES HER the lowdown heâs heard from the lawyer for Reedâs girlfriend, Bria, a twenty-three-year-old Brazilian divorcée with platinum hair and a Spanish passport that lists her address as her familyâs compound in the Tenerife district of the Canary Islands: that Reed quit his job in lieu of being fired, that heâd been doing what Morton called âsome private work for a Eurotrash crowd.â
Bria, Morton says, is the one who was busted at Kennedy three days before Saulâs arrest. âDumb,â Morton says over the phone. âTelling the customs agent the stuffed panda she was carrying was a Valentineâs Day present for her mother. Too cute. The agents get suspicious with cute. Especially the female ones.â
What the agent on the four-to-twelve shift saw before her was a girl with white hair dark at the roots, an armful of silver bracelets and a purple suede jacket. Her nostrils looked raw. Slitting the lining of the Louis Vuitton suitcases, the agent found a pharmacy of pills.
âThat, too, the Vuitton, was dumb. The sharp smugglers know youâre better off with Amelia Earhart.â
With her one phone call, Bria called her lawyerâReed. When no lawyer arrived, the Treasury guys realized the call had been a tip-off. By then, Reed was on a plane from Hartford to