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on their books. Fine. Why not call your friend the mayor?”
    Eduardo did that squirming thing again. I was beginning to know his tells—he might be a pious man, but he was also a nervous man. “Junior called the other day. Understand, I have not spoken to this man in almost twenty years. He said to me that he was happy to see that I was prospering and that I was doing good things in the community, and that I’d helped Emperors that had been released from prison get jobs,” Eduardo said. “And then he told me that if I didn’t do as he asked, he’d go public with what he knows about our past, about where the bodies are buried—literally, where the bodies are buried.”
    “I thought you didn’t kill anyone. I thought you never got arrested for violent crimes,” I said.
    “How do you get arrested for a crime no one knows was committed?” Eduardo said. “These men, they weren’t missed by anyone. These are criminals, Michael, that maybe rolled down to Miami after getting out of prison, or they’re people who never had families, or people whose families never expected to hear from them again. These were not good people. But the fact is, I did not kill them. I did not order their deaths.”
    “How can that be if you ran the gang?” Sam said.
    “Division of labor,” Eduardo said, “and plausible deniability, I suppose. In terms you can both understand, Junior ran the defense and the judicial, and I was in charge of the economy and outreach. Those were our skill sets.”
    “Obviously,” I said.
    “And if I am arrested again,” Eduardo says, “I’m in prison for life. And that would be a short life. I would be dead within an hour, I assure you. Even though I am innocent, it wouldn’t matter. I’m confident my involvement at all would constitute a conspiracy charge, and I am confident that the judicial system would happily use me as a public relations target. All of this, all of what you see here, would be gone. This is all because of me, Michael, because of my desire to atone and my desire to help these kids so that they don’t necessarily make the mistakes I made. And here, my past can ruin it. I did my time. I admit my mistakes. I admit my crimes. I will not let all of the good I am doing fall to waste. And that—that, Mr. Westen—is why I cannot call the mayor or the president or anyone. You are my only hope.”
    The room fell silent. I frankly didn’t know what I was going to do to help Eduardo, but I had the sense that he was right—no one else could help him, and without help, all that he’d done would crumble.
    Plus, I liked being called his only hope. I felt a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi.
    “Okay,” I said. “I need time to think about this.”
    “And I can pay you whatever you require,” he said.
    “Well,” Sam said, “there are going to be some expenses. ...”
    I put a hand up to stop Sam, which is a bit like hoping a feather could stop a freight train, but luckily it was still pretty early in the day for Sam, and he didn’t quite have his normal midafternoon head of steam yet. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I need the karma. And so does Sam.”
    “One question,” Eduardo said. “Are you actually a spy?”
    “I am,” I said. “Or I was. You and me, we’ve both been excommunicated from our organizations. You by choice, me by someone working behind me, trying to discredit the good I did, so I understand uniquely the situation you’re in.”
    “How did you go from here to there?” Eduardo said. “And why are you back?”
    “I could ask you the same question,” I said. “We all make choices, Eduardo. I made the right ones. You made the wrong ones. And yet here we both are.”
    “A strange fact of life,” he said.
    I couldn’t imagine a stranger one. “When are you supposed to have an answer for Junior?” I said.
    “Two days,” he said.
    “You have a way of contacting him?”
    “One of his soldiers is to come by tomorrow to confirm.”
    “No phone