Twenty Years Later

Manhattan, NY Wednesday, June 30, 2021

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AVERY WAS UP EARLY. DRESSED IN SKINNY jeans and comfortable walking shoes, she tucked her purse tight to her side, adjusted her Prada sunglasses, walked out of the lobby of her hotel, and headed toward the nearest subway hub. She took the F train from Midtown to Brooklyn, riding for thirty minutes until she exited at Fourth Avenue in the Park Slope neighborhood. She’d planned her route the night before and could practically close her eyes and find her way. Still, she pulled the small piece of paper from her purse as she walked and looked at the address one more time. The brownstone was six blocks from the train. She tried to control her nerves as she walked. She eventually turned on Sixteenth Avenue, where halfway down the street, she found the address. Climbing the front porch steps, she rang the bell and clutched her purse to her side as if she was worried she may be mugged.

The front door opened and a man stood in pajama pants and a white ribbed shirt under a long bathrobe. His hair was greasy, an unlit cigarette dangled from his lips, and the fingers of his right hand curled around the handle of a coffee cup. Tiny oval glasses, the lenses of which were streaked and dirty, shielded his eyes.

“Five hundred,” the man said in a German accent that had been Americanized over the years and then tainted further by his time in Brooklyn.

“I’m sorry?” Avery said, confused by the random statement.

“Five hundred,” he said again, the mumble making the cigarette flutter between his lips.

Avery raised her eyebrows, took a conspicuous look up and down the street. “Are we going to do this on your front stoop?”

“Five hundred gets you inside. Then we talk.”

Avery nodded, reached into her purse, and produced five crisp hundred-dollar bills. The man snatched the cash out of her hands like a hungry dog nipping a treat from its owner’s fingers, stepped to the side, and pushed the front door the rest of the way open. Avery walked inside as a cool prickle of apprehension moved in a slow wave across the back of her neck. The man pointed to a worn couch as he headed to a safe that stood against the far wall. He hunched in front of it, spun the dial, and pulled the door open. Depositing the cash inside, he removed a folder and slammed the safe door shut. The man turned around and sat in a side chair, placing his coffee cup on the table in front of him.

Avery hadn’t moved from her spot just inside the front door. The man looked at her with a confused expression. He pushed the petite glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Sit,” he said. “I don’t bite.”

Avery walked to the couch and sat down.

“I’m André,” the man said. “I hear we have a mutual friend?”

Avery nodded. “That’s why I’m here.”

“So here’s how this works. Passports are difficult. Not impossible, but difficult. At least, if you want them done right. You want something. . .” He waved his hands, searching for the correct English word. “Shit.” He shrugged his shoulder. “You go anywhere. You want something good, you come to André. That’s why my price is my price. So I’m going to ask, even though I know the answer due to our mutual friend’s . . . background, I guess you’d say. But there’s a lot of work involved for me producing a believable passport. Some liability, too. So, I must ask, can you afford?”

“Yes,” Avery said without hesitation.

This man charged $5,000 to produce a single American passport. Legitimate, believable passports that would, André claimed, pass scrutiny by any customs agent on the planet. Of course, the validity of that claim could only be proven in practice. It could only be confirmed when the one using the passport handed it to a customs agent as they tried to enter another country. At that moment, André’s claim would be either true or false. At that moment it would also be too late to complain if things went wrong. If some sensor beeped when the document was scanned, and some warning was triggered, their “mutual friend” was shit out of luck.

“I figured the price was not an issue,” André said. “Now, timing. When do you need this?”

“As soon as possible.”

André held out his hand and twitched his index finger. “Give me the photo. Let me see what I’m working with.”

Avery produced the photo from her purse and handed it to André, who opened the folder he had taken from the safe and laid the image onto a template to check the dimensions.

“Good quality. Right size.” He nodded his head as he analyzed the photo. “Okay, this’ll take me a week. I’ll need twenty-five hundred now, twenty-five hundred when I’m done.”

“And the five hundred I just gave you?”

“I told you, that got you in the door.”

Avery was in no position to haggle. She produced another envelope from her purse and handed it across the coffee table. André quickly fingered the cash to make sure the count was correct. He stood and walked back to the front door, his silk bathrobe swirling like a cape behind him. He peered through the peephole and then opened the door.

“Out you go,” he said. “Come back in a week.”