The Reformed Read Online Free PDF Page A

pointed at the scar under my left eye. “I was going to get this fixed, but I decided it gave me character. Something to talk about on dates. Sam, you have any scars?”
    “Let me tell you about scars,” Sam said, and then proceeded to regale the girl with stories about the myriad holes and punctures and cuts that littered his body, each one another battlefield somewhere. I got the sense that the girl didn’t believe a word he was saying—when he brought up that shrapnel wound from the Falklands, I actually heard her sigh with something near to resignation—but the sad fact is that I don’t think he made anything up. “All of which is to say,” Sam continued, “it’s all about quality of life. If you think you’ll have a better life without that scar, then I say do yourself a favor, sister, and get it taken care of.”
    “I will, then,” she said. “Father Santiago says he’s going to get a friend to help pay for it.”
    “He have a lot of friends?” I asked.
    “Don’t you read the newspaper?” she asked.
    Before I could answer again, that no, I didn’t read the newspaper, Eduardo Santiago emerged from a conference room with his arm over a man’s shoulder. The man wore a beautifully tailored charcoal gray suit, a crisp white shirt and a silver tie. On his feet were wing-tips shined to a glow, on his wrist was an understated gold watch with a black face and on his head was a perfectly combed field of salt-and-pepper hair.
    He looked like somebody. He looked like a Somebody. But then so did Eduardo in his navy blue suit and tan shirt opened at the collar, enough so that you could still make out the tattoos crawling up from his chest.
    “Who is that with Eduardo?” I asked Sam.
    “The mayor,” Sam said.
    “Of where?”
    “Miami,” Sam said.
    Eduardo and the mayor shook hands, laughed about something, shook hands again and then the mayor said, as he walked toward us, “And remember to let me know when I can get you stuck in that sand trap again, Father!”
    Sam stood up when the mayor was just a few feet away. “Mr. Mayor,” he said, and gave the politician a dignified nod of his head.
    The mayor had a flicker of recognition when he saw Sam. And it wasn’t a flicker that screamed with joy. “Mr. Axe,” he said, and nodded right back at Sam, but also quickened his step out the door.
    I looked at Sam. “You know the mayor of Miami?”
    “I knew his wife,” he said.
    “A buddy of yours?”
    “Of a kind, yes.”
    When you’re a spy, there’s no such thing as too much information. When you’re someone’s friend, the same rules do not apply.
    “Gentlemen,” Eduardo Santiago said, “please, come into my office. We have much to talk about.”

3
     
    There are offices—like the one I sat in with my mother and Eduardo Santiago the previous day—that serve a specific purpose, as a place where one person can sit comfortably to work on a computer. And then there are offices like the one Eduardo Santiago kept for himself at Honrado Incorporated, which was as wide as my loft, contained two leather sofas, a flat-screen television mounted to the wall, a small glass-faced refrigerator filled with bottled water, a round table covered in blueprints and an entire wall dedicated to photos. Eduardo with various celebrities, politicians, athletes and entertainers, certainly, but most of the photos were actually of Eduardo with kids and with young men and women out in the community. There were also framed news stories and features from the Miami Herald, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and even a snappy little color thing from USA Today. I stopped and read a few lines in each. Everything my mother and Sam said was parroted in the pages of the nation’s most esteemed newspapers: Eduardo Santiago had done the impossible and now was using himself as a prime example for the kids coming out of Miami’s battle-hardened neighborhoods.
    “You’ll have to pardon my ego,” Eduardo said when he saw me reading