The Patriot Act

THE PATRIOT ACT

a novel by

Robin Polseno

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Patriot Act

Copyright © 2005 by Robin Polseno

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-595-36088-8 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-80536-5 (ebk)

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Bob LaBelle, one of Milwaukee’s foremost criminal attorneys, for vetting this manuscript regarding legal issues and court proceedings. That assistance notwithstanding, I am obliged to point out that any omissions, exaggerations, or outright mistakes regarding the practice of criminal law are all my own.

PROLOGUE

September 11, 2002

The plaintive cry of bagpipes and the stirring tattoo of snare drums came to me on the predawn breeze drifting off the mist-shrouded Hudson River, but I could not yet see the pipe and drum corps making its way toward me along upper Broadway, one of five New York City Fire Department units staging a marching vigil through the city’s boroughs in the dead of night, heading for the hideous crater in lower Manhattan forever to be known as Ground Zero, in commemoration of the first anniversary of what had arguably been the darkest day in our nation’s history. The misty blackness in the sky perfectly suited the mood hanging over the somnolent city: the night air was heavy and somber, freighted with sadness, resolute, but also reverent, aching and silent, save for the heartrending strains of the pipes and the spine tingling rasp of the drums.

The moment was a complex one for me in that I had only been back in New York for a little more than a week, after a seven-year hiatus in Mexico. That unexpected branching-off of my journey through life had followed hard on the heels of my twenty-five-year residence in this city and a deeply vexing divorce, leading to my decision to transplant myself south of the border, to lick my wounds and take stock of what forty-five years on the planet had wrought on my body and soul, both of which had been considerably battered by thirty years of escalating substance abuse. In many ways it had been a predictable midlife crisis, perhaps remarkable only for the fact that it had also ushered in a midlife sobering that allowed me to clean my act up in a way that surprised both the mental health professionals and myself, testament to the fact that change, if not miracles, could be manifested in the midst of even the most unseemly shit storm.

A year earlier I had been camping deep in the wilds of the Yucatan Peninsula on that fateful day of 9/11/01, and only belatedly learned of the tragedy that had befallen the city and country that were still home to me no matter how much I had steeped myself in the life of an expatriate. I emerged from the jungle on September 14 to learn that the world had forever changed, and could only grieve for my city from afar. So now that an unpredictable twist of fate had brought me back at this sad and momentous time to take up the life of a big-city musician again, I felt duty-bound to rise at two-thirty in the morning and walk the darkened streets with the kilt-clad pipers and the swelling crowds of like-minded New Yorkers who could not bear the confines of their beds on that night on which we mourned the loss of nearly three thousand souls.

I stood at the corner of 157t Street and Broadway, the eerie notes of the pipes wafting towards me from out of the darkness. Then the tune was swallowed by the night as if it had been ghost music—gone without warning, just like the people who had perished a year earlier without a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones. A few moments passed in which only the drums pierced the stillness: the high-pitched rat-a-tat of the snares followed by the weighty under-song of a bass drum, with the pipers momentarily tacit, husbanding their breath for the long march southward. When they were a block away from me, the bagpipes came back in, sixteen strong, letting loose their full, mournful voice with such force that the first phrase of the melody hit me with the visceral power of a fist to the solar plexus. Tears were streaming from my eyes before I was even fully aware of the wave of emotion crashing over me, and I numbly fell into a funereal march-step behind the last row of drummers, along with a small assemblage of humanity representing a cross section of what that day was all about: a handful of grim-faced firemen in their dress blues—some from New York, others from upstate and New Jersey—a small-town policeman who had come all the way from Key West, Florida, to pay his respects to fallen comrades; a grizzled, pot-bellied construction worker wearing a hardhat and carrying a big American flag; a soldier wearing camouflage battle fatigues and a special forces beret; a sad-eyed woman wearing jeans and a NYFD tee-shirt who cradled a big orange candle that made her face light up like a Japanese lantern; and a few dozen plain folks like myself.

As I took up the pace beside the silent mourners, the pipers segued from the oddly moving Marine Corps anthem, From the Halls of Montezuma, to a more soulful and chilling rendition of Amazing Grace, while an eerie clanking of forged steel could be heard echoing the cadence of the drums, and I wondered where this eccentric accompaniment was coming from, almost otherworldly in its rhythmic juxtaposition, a little out of step, like an off-kilter backbeat supplied by some wraith trying to keep pace with the living from whom he has been forever separated by the netherworld of what might have been. But every time I focused on this mysterious percussiveness it seemed to fade away.

Passing Columbia University, thirty blocks to the south, the booming reverberation of the drums set off a car alarm that suddenly blared away in drunken syncopation to the march-step, the mysterious clanging returned as if on cue, and it was like being in the middle of an avant-garde opera composed by Karlheinze Stockhausen or John Cage. Surely, the Metropolitan Opera could not have staged the moment more skillfully, I thought, at last realizing that the ghostly paradiddle of forged steel I had intermittently been hearing was not the result of some beleaguered knight-errant, but a pair of huge ironworker’s wrenches slung from the hardhat’s work belt, swinging to and fro with the pulse of his heavyset stride.

The streets of upper Manhattan had been pretty much deserted, as the disparate sampling of humanity gathered behind the pipers slowly traversed the neighborhoods. But upon reaching 96th Street, the residents of the Upper West Side began pouring out of their buildings, to line the sidewalks while waving flags and hand-lettered signs of solace, and to light scores of candles lined up in woeful rows along the traffic meridian that separates Broadway into its uptown and downtown lanes. Not surprisingly, there was an emotional charge in the air that had the hairs at the back of my neck standing straight up, and of course there was a personal aspect to this chilling horripilation, as well as the civic-minded one that had drawn me out into the night. Only having been back in the city for a week, I saw that night as an opportunity to reconnect with the community in which I had once been deeply embedded. And there I was, tracing the main artery of the district that had been home to me for a quarter-century, not having walked that stretch of Broadway since the breakup of my marriage in 1995, being carried back in time by this strange, sad homecoming.

Within the span of a few miles I would pass within a block of every apartment I had ever lived in since coming to New York to study classical guitar at the Manhattan School of Music: three different brownstone studios scattered throughout the west 70s; the quaint garden apartment on the Columbia campus at 114th Street, where my ex-wife and I had lived when we were first married; and the far more grand duplex we eventually bought on 94th just off Broadway. And as the march approached that intersection, so freighted with the ghosts of my past, I couldn’t help but wonder if the long-silent woman to whom I had been so devoted might be among the onlookers, or even intended to join this somber procession, and would unknowingly take up the pace only feet from me. Wouldn’t that be a jolt after all the years in which our paths had not crossed and we had only spoken by phone a handful of times, in brief, nervous exchanges more notable for what hadn’t been said rather than for what had been uttered so cautiously. Was that hope or dread I was feeling at the prospect of finding her unexpectedly at my side?—hard to tell with the knot of emotions welling up from my insides.

Shakespeare, of course, was dead on in noting what tangled webs we weave, but as the bagpipes continued to issue their lament, I tried to force all such personal reminiscences from my mind, chiding myself for bringing my own personal complications to bear on this commemorative act that should have been purer in its intent. But there were just too many reminders of my early years in this city and the aspirations of a young artist. No doubt, some of the energy I had cast off in those days still lingered in the backstage areas and orchestra pits of the theaters that graced the very avenue on which we marched, from the highbrow concert halls of Lincoln Center, to the converted vaudeville houses of Times Square, where musical comedy was the fare. I had done a bit of it all, then left it behind for the life of an expatriate, only to find myself unexpectedly called back to New York for another stint as a hotshot Broadway musician—one more chance to grab the elusive brass ring—all at a time when the world was being convulsed by forces that were beyond the powers of the human mind to comprehend.

In the darkness and swirl of sentiment, the only way to avert a total emotional meltdown seemed to lie in the act of putting one foot in front of the other and pushing on towards the tip of Manhattan, and it seemed only a matter of minutes before we were hooking around Columbus Circle, turning down the stretch of Broadway that would lead us through Times Square.

At 57th Street, the sixteen pipers and eight drummers we had been following were reinforced by a like number of players from a drum corps made up of fire fighters from the midtown station houses. They fell in step and added their instruments’ voices to the swelling refrain, now reverberating off the glass and steel canyons of downtown with heartrending verve, filling the air with bittersweet music that one was sure could reach all the way to heaven.

Entering Times Square, I once again found myself caught up in a convoluted reverie concerning not only the personal odyssey that had brought me back to this storied landmark at this particular moment in time, but also the mind-boggling forces that roiled our world. When I left New York in 1995, this quarter of the city had been in marked decline for years, if not decades, suffering through a kind of blight that seemed to mimic my own, and the prognosis for its future—not to mention mine—had seemed rather shaky, at best. But there I was, Patrick Pellegrino, seven years clean and sober, unexpectedly fluent in Spanish in my early fifties, about to open a high-profile Broadway revival in a totally rejuvenated

Times Square, and the stretch of sidewalk along 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues that the street hustlers, pimps and drug dealers used to call The Deuce currently looked more like Disneyland than the seedy warren of peep shows and sleazy bars that characterized the area for most of my tenure in this city.

None of it seemed quite real to me: not my own personal metamorphosis, nor the rejuvenation of Times Square; and certainly not the need to march through the heart of Manhattan at 4:00 a.m. to mourn the cold-blooded murder of three thousand innocents and the reality that the nascent 21st century was witnessing

the coalescence of a worldscape few could have envisioned just a handful of years ag°.

Our transit down 7th Avenue to 14th Street became a blur, not because of simple fatigue—though we were all feeling the drain of the miles by then—but because of a kind of sensory overload that came from all the poignant reminiscences constantly firing across the synapses. The mind can only take so much of this before it starts to shut down, and the result was that both physical distance and the passing of the hours became hyper-compressed. So much so that it seemed we no longer traveled through space and time in the accepted linear fashion and in a bizarre sort of way actually defied the laws of physics. It was as if that morning existed outside the bounds of time, as did the wound cleaved in the fabric of our universe when the World Trade Center collapsed into the black hole of maniacal religiosity at the center of the twisted galaxy occupied by Osama bin Laden and his followers.

As we turned west on 14th Street, the heavens directly overhead began to pale ever so slightly. Behind us, in Queens, where another march was making the same sad journey along different sorrow-filled streets, the horizon was turning peach-colored, expanding into a pulsing, luminescent brush-stoke of light that was slowly siphoning the darkness from the rest of the sky. By the time we gained 11th Avenue it was fully light, and for the first time I could really see what was etched on the faces of those who had just walked something like twelve miles through the dark of night to honor the fallen: I could see the torment within the set of a jaw line, but also the defiance chiseled into the very bones of the faces around me; the flintiness in the eyes that spoke of both weariness and of as-yet-untapped strength; the way that skin and muscle tissue sagged on the faces of the bereaved; and the determined gait that said we had only just begun walking the miles required to see this through.

Much as it must have looked a year earlier, the broad, watery thoroughfare of the Hudson River was dappled with the reflection of rose-blushed clouds. And the rational mind refused to accept that something of such heartbreaking tran-quility and stirring beauty could have been the guiding landmark that directed Mohamed Atta to his rendezvous with infamy. But follow it he had, leaving us with no choice but to follow it again that morning.

The last mile to Ground Zero was marked by the constant nervous flicking of eyes between the asphalt in front of us and the monstrous breadth of open air in the downtown skyline where the World Trade Center complex used to rise above the financial district: a yawning chasm that would not soon be filled, in our city or in our hearts. No one seemed to be able to look into that emptiness for very long without an equal amount of vacancy creeping into their eyes, a hollow swoon that signified their struggle with the meaninglessness that had seized our lives.

The journey then came to its end, at least for us civilians, as we reached the restricted area around what the rescue workers of a year earlier had simply called the pit. We stood in a silent, awkward scrum, wishing there was more we could do, as the pipe and drum corps and the uniformed fire fighters continued on into the very heart of the volcano. But we had already offered up all that was ours to give: prayers and the drumbeat of our footsteps; and the time had come to let go of the hold this night had upon us. As for me, I had a nine o’clock rehearsal call back in the theater district, and having discharged my obligation to the dead, was then obliged to fulfill my responsibility to the living. Still, there was a degree of paralysis evident in my feet that I had only discerned twice before in my life, in the moments when it was time to leave the cemetery after my parents were laid to rest, ten years apart. My feet didn’t want to carry me away from those moments, as they again refused to on that September morning. For to step away from the gravesite is the first symbolic act of getting on with your life, and the mute feet of the bereaved somehow know better than the reeling, chattering mind that this is asking more of oneself than would seem possible.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the ghostly shell of the Deutsche Bank building on the southern edge of what had been the World Trade Center complex, now clad in a mesh of black fabric meant to keep debris from blowing out of its gutted innards. It looked for all the world like a robed sentinel, silently standing watch over the crater/grave below, and I felt as rooted in the ground and unable to move away from the gruesome landmark as it was. Only a silent prayer could return to me the command over my feet I sought. So I issued a simple yet heartfelt entreaty that this wound in the bedrock of Manhattan and the heart of the nation would heal, that the world could somehow find its way through the darkness of these frightening times. And even if it seemed petty and self-centered to bond my personal affairs with the momentousness of what had occurred here,

I prayed that my own dreams might soon be realized and that this sad homecoming would yield more than the ghosts and lament that had dogged my every step thus far.

CHAPTER 1

September 1, 2003

A handful of cool-looking dudes wearing the Broadway musicians’ uniform of black Levis and turtlenecks stood around the stage door in a morose circle, as I fought my way through the throng of tourists lining up under the theater marquee. It looked like it would be a full house for the last performance of the show that we men in black were about to perform, a nice way to end a run, but a turn-out that was coming a little too late to save our gigs, not to mention all the greenbacks the investors had poured into the show.

I gave Robby a lackluster high five as I reached the stage door; he was our bass player, an intense-looking guy with a shaved head and a braid of hair worn in a very smart chignon at the nape of his neck.

So what’s shaking with you? Patrick, he asked, now that we’re closing.

Same old, same old, I lamented, the big-time, to the unemployment line. You know the drill.

All too well, Robby agreed, with a bemused smile. I’ve got a couple of weeks booked doing jazz festivals this fall, and that’s it.

Well, that’s more ink in the date book than I’m likely to see.

Feast or famine was the name of the game as a New York freelance musician, one of the reasons I had fled Manhattan for Mexico in the mid-90s. The pay scale in the hotels of Margaritaville couldn’t compare to that of a big-city gig, but you couldn’t complain about the weather, and I had been able to work consistently, which was more than I could say for all the years I’d spent in the Big Apple. Still, there had been great hopes that this current go-round on the theater scene might turn into one of those gigs that ran for years at a time, shows like Cats, or Phantom, which yielded paid-for houses and some measure of real financial security for those lucky enough to be in them.

A year earlier, upon my sudden return to New York at the sad anniversary of 9/11, things had looked quite bright. I had unexpectedly landed this plum gig—principal guitarist in the Broadway revival of Man ofLaMancha—one that held a lot of promise even though the show had been nearly flogged to death as a perennial favorite of American musical theater. The show’s producer had hired a hotshot British director to re-conceive the piece, and the timing certainly appeared right for a play rooted in such unbridled idealism. After all, in a period of national crisis and mourning, the battered American psyche seemed sorely in need of embracing another Impossible Dream, for if nothing else the country was being asked to "…run where the brave dare not go…bear with unbearable sorrow…" and to attempt to—at the least—"… right the unrightable wrong."

The show received reasonably good reviews and started out with a strong box office. But then there was the scary run-up to the war in Iraq, the shock and awe of the invasion itself, the numerous color-coded terrorist alerts that inevitably kept the suburbanites who are the mainstay of Broadway audiences from coming into the city, the lackluster economy—despite the loopy predictions of a recovery from the Republicans—and the first strike by Broadway musicians in nearly thirty years, a negotiating stance I deeply lamented but wholeheartedly supported. Circumstances, it seemed, had conspired against us, not to mention the fact that the sheer magnitude of the investment required to launch a major musical these days meant a show had to run for nearly two years just to turn a profit. So, after eleven lackluster months the producer had pulled the plug, and there we all were, a bunch of musicians standing around on the sidewalk of west 45th Street, waiting to play the last show, bank the final paycheck, and then start scrambling all over again.

Nothing new in any of it.

While waiting for the sad moment when I would put my initials on the sign-in sheet for the last time, the Mister Softy ice cream truck came down the block and parked at the curb, playing that annoying, bell-tone theme music that drives New Yorkers crazy, but attracts them like flies to horse shit. It was right on schedule—fifteen minutes before the half-hour call, and the theatrical gypsies began swarming out of the stage door, as if on cue, jonesing for that sugar rush like a bunch of junkies. This had become a daily event in the routine-filled pre-show schedule, and it was always a carnival-like moment—with the cloying soundtrack of the canned jingle playing in the background—no less rambunctious on that day simply because everyone was bummed out over the closing of the show. Evidence of the fact, if nothing else, that show-folk are an eager bunch, with a sweet tooth to match their resiliency.

As usual, the lead dancer finessed her way to the front of the line simply by appearing in a dressing robe that barely covered her tantalizingly firm bottom. A drop-dead gorgeous gal, with a pair of legs that seemed to rise all the way to her armpits, all she had to do was step out of the stage door and a kind of paralysis came over the men, allowing her to scoot ahead of them while their mouths opened and closed like carp in a fishpond.

She came away with a huge, whipped-cream-topped sundae and a wry smile on her face, and I asked, How the hell do you eat all that and stay so slim, Sylvia?

Lot’s of sex, she quipped, and I lamented the fact that she was half my age and had never shown the slightest interest in getting it on with a guy from the older generation. Well, who could blame her when she had the pick of the young studs?

Who’s the lucky guy, theses days? I inquired, coyly.

I never kiss and tell, Patrick; you know that. A girl’s gotta look out for her reputation.

Yeah, well if you safeguard your reputation half as well as you preserve that incredible ass of yours you’ll have no worries.

So what’s up with you? she asked, without even batting an eyelash at my salacious comment; just one more indication she simply wasn’t interested. Oh well, I had to try one last time.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of nothing, I said, which spoke for both my sex life, as well as current professional prospects.

You heading back to Mexico, or you gonna stick around?

Haven’t decided yet. If the producers send this baby out on tour in the spring, I’ll definitely hang around. We’ll see what develops over the next few months.

Then we’ll being seeing you around, no doubt.

Not very likely, I thought, even as I nodded my head and said, yeah, sure thing.

Theatrical companies are like temporary extended families, held together by camaraderie and a kind of synthesized intimacy. A show closes, and everyone tends to go their own way, like cousins who will rarely see each other after the death of a matriarch who has regularly brought them all together for family reunions, leaving a void in the nucleus around which everyone has been in orbit. This is especially true of road companies—bound together by months of travel and living in the same hotels—but the Broadway scene tends to whirl on in a similar pattern. So I doubted I’d be seeing Sylvia any time soon unless we wound up doing another production together, the odds for which were about as long as my getting in her pants. Still, I’m a gambler at heart, and I gave her a big hug and a hopeful kiss, just in case the theater gods felt inclined to work a miracle, as you never know what lies just over the horizon in this crazy world.

My fellow musicians were eyeing me with envy as the stage manager’s voice came over the intercom to announce the half-hour call, and it was time to shift the scene from the sidewalk to the backstage enclave, with the band members heading for the dreary basement room adjacent to the orchestra pit, and the cast retreating to their dressing rooms. In this regard, I had the unusual distinction of not only appearing in the play in costume, as a gypsy-like troubadour, but also being the principal guitarist in the orchestra, so I shared a dressing room with the men’s chorus and headed upstairs for what would be the last time, expecting the usual off-color preening that characterized the backstage drama in the predominantly gay world of chorus boys. It was a realm in which sarcasm and wit reigned supreme; little was taken seriously and nothing was sacred. Sometimes it was hard to believe disciplined performances could come from the same guys who took such delight in glib, often asinine banter, but this crew had proven over and over again that when they stepped into the spotlight they were pros, and as talented onstage as they were madcap in the dressing room.

When I reached the fifth floor, the costume mistress was prowling around the men’s dressing room, obviously taking mental inventory before the last show. She was a curmudgeonly old butch-dyke who ruled her domain with an iron fist, and wanted everyone to know the lay of the land on this last day of the show.

No taking any souvenirs, girls, she quipped, in the inane reversal of gender common to the theatrical cosmos. Any of you with sticky fingers will have your last paycheck docked, and me hounding you to the ends of the earth.

We had all been given gorgeous flamenco boots to perform in, at considerable expense to the producer: handcrafted beauties made of the finest Spanish leather, and I, for one, had been thinking of walking off with mine until that very minute. But I wasn’t crazy enough to give Vivian the Visigoth—as she was referred to behind her back—reason to hunt me down, even if I again retreated south of the border. That’s how tough this crusty dame was, so I put all thoughts of making the boots mine out of my head.

One of the few straight guys in the company was the dance captain, Tony, and as usual he was in the midst of his customary half-hour routine; his pre-show show, as everyone called it. He had the body of an Adonis and the vocabulary of a longshoreman, with which he dispensed a constant stream of genial though decidedly macho humor and he was afflicted with the kind of narcissism that demanded he stand around in the buff in front of all the queens. As I sat down at my dressing table he was admiring himself in a full-length mirror while praising his ass as the best buns on Broadway, and shamelessly adjusting the way his dick was going to snuggle into his dance belt, which is nothing more than an artistically glorified jock strap.

The best buns on Broadway, maybe, someone yelped. "But an ugly