Shaban was tired and ready for sleep, but there was unfinished business to attend to. His grandfather had asked to see him at Port Newark, where the container ship was being loaded for tomorrow’s voyage.
It was late—nearly midnight—but Shaban knew Arian Dragusha had never required more than three hours’ sleep. And he did like to watch as his cargo was hoisted aboard the ship. Shaban himself took no pleasure in it. He rarely visited the docks.
His connection with the Dragusha family got him through the gate at the port. He left his car in a parking lot that would be crowded with trucks during the day, but which was nearly empty now, long past the 6 PM cutoff for deliveries.
The ship, the six-hundred-foot bluewater freighter Mazeppa out of Liberia, had sailed into Newark Bay via the Kill Van Kull and stopped overnight to discharge some five hundred containers of cargo, while taking on a few hundred more. Tomorrow, the automobiles now parked in the vast floodlit lot would be driven on board. The cars had no connection with his family, but among the new containers were two hundred from an import-export concern that was one of Arian Dragusha’s shell companies. The merchandise was entirely legal—textiles, leather goods, and tobacco coming in; tanned hides, medicines, and factory equipment going out. The Dragusha syndicate had been diversifying into legitimate businesses for years.
The Mazeppa was an odd-looking beast, nothing like Shaban’s idea of a proper ship. It looked more like drawings he had seen of Noah’s Ark—a great squarish crate, a floating box, with so little of its hull submerged that the whole vessel appeared curiously top-heavy. The seven-story deckhouse, positioned aft, broke the stark monotony of its profile. The flags of several nations fluttered from the flying bridge above the wheelhouse.
Panamax gantry cranes loomed over the cargo on the dock. Spreader jaws, like giant mandibles, bit down on each twenty-ton steel box and lifted it high into the air before depositing it in the freighter’s hold, first centering it inside a vertical shaft, then lowering it gently between the shaft’s steel rails. Tall vehicles called straddle carriers lugged fresh containers from the storage depot to the dockside. At the freighter’s stern, a ramp had descended onto the quay, providing access for vehicles that would be driven aboard in the morning and stowed as cargo. Giant wharf lights blazed over the scene.
Few human beings were involved. A dozen or so longshoremen were in sight, reduced to insignificance by the immense moving structures that towered over them. Nearly all the work was done by gleaming automatons, giant insects in a humming mechanized hive.
There was something unsettling about it, something alien, inhuman. But that in itself wasn’t why Shaban so seldom came here. It was his knowledge of one particular container that was always stowed at the bottom of the stack in one of the forward holds. A container that carried no cargo—or at least no cargo of the ordinary kind.
Reflexively, he crossed himself.
He knew where to find his grandfather. He took an elevator to the top floor of an administrative building, where, in an air-conditioned aerie, controllers worked the night watch, following the progress of the containers on banks of computer screens.
Seated in a corner of the room was Arian Dragusha. He gazed out at the panorama framed in floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the show—the pendulous swings of the cranes, the lift and fall of containers, the multiplying boxes in their geometrical arrays.
Shaban approached. “Grandfather?” he said.
The old man started. He turned in his seat, looking up at Shaban, and blinked several times.
Bowing, Shaban kissed him ritually on each gray-bearded cheek, then took a chair opposite him. “I am told you wanted to see me.”
“Yes. Yes …” Arian looked away, his gaze returning to the windows. The silver-handled cane lay on his lap, gripped by both hands. “The man Patterson, the one who stole from me—he was found tonight.”
“Sure, yes,” Shaban said.
“And you attended to him?”
“I did.”
“He is dead, then?”
Shaban hesitated, but he knew the truth could be withheld no longer. “No, Grandfather. It was—I thought it was not needed to kill him. The other two men are dead, and so I thought—”
“Yes, you thought. You thought.” Arian spat the word. “You do much thinking.”
Shaban watched him. Slowly he said, “You knew already.”
“I know much more than you think. I am not so old that I can be tricked and fooled.”
“There was no trick.”
“It is easy to snip the dead wolf’s tail, eh?” A proverb from the old country.
“I had no such thought,” Shaban said stiffly.
Arian waved him silent. “By good fortune, Ahmeti arrived at Saint Astius soon after you left. He saw Luan and Jozef put Patterson in a car. He saw them dump the man near the Jacobi Medical Center. You told them to do this?”
Shaban nodded. “Was done on my orders.”
“Because you had chosen to leave Patterson alive?”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“This was not your choice to make. You do not run the show, boy. You are not hired by me to think. You are hired to do as you are told. To follow orders. To obey.”
“In this case, I did not see the need—”
“It is not you who decides about the need. If I say a man is to die, he dies.”
Shaban knew his safest move was to apologize and agree. But there was pride in him. He could not bring himself to do it.
“I took care of the two others,” he said carefully. “I left Patterson a cripple. It should have been enough.”
“So you say. But I say it was not enough. That is why, when Ahmeti called with the news, I had Patterson picked up and brought to me at the bakery.”
He removed a cell phone from his pocket and brought up the photo gallery, then passed it to Shaban. Framed in the bezel was a flash photo of Todd Patterson sprawled across a tiled tabletop. Shaban recognized those tiles. It was the table in the back room of the bakery where he had sat with his grandfather nearly a year ago.
The tiles were discolored now, stained by a bright red plume. Patterson’s brains had been blown out the top of his head.
Shaban did not flinch. “Who shot him?” he asked.
“I did.”
“You?”
“Yes. Me. You are surprised? You think I am an old woman who faints at the sight of blood?”
Arian snatched up the phone. It went back into his pocket.
“Ahmeti told me none of this when I was with him,” Shaban said. “He told me only that you wished to see me here.”
“It was not his place to tell you. So you have seen him, have you? Yet all day you avoided his calls.”
“I was … busy.”
“He went looking for you. This is why he visited the church. He knows you are there so often.” Arian, no churchgoer himself, put a faint contemptuous emphasis on the last words. “You wasted his time.”
“This was not my intention. It is only that I knew why he was calling. There was a delay in the latest shipment. But it was my problem. It is taken care of now.”
“You took care of it.”
“Sure, yes.”
“Just as you took care of Patterson—on your own, without consulting anyone, without authorization.”
“However it was,” Shaban said with calm stubbornness, “I delivered the package.”
Arian’s hands on the walking stick curled into fists. His voice sank lower, the hiss of a fuse. “The package is nothing. One shipment out of hundreds. A few dollars. Unimportant. What matters is discipline. What matters is organization. What matters is respect.”
“I respect you, baba.”
The use of the honorific left his grandfather unmoved. “You are too sure of yourself,” Arian said coldly. “Too proud, rebellious. You have the inat, the dangerous pride. Like your father, you think and you plan and you scheme—” He stopped himself.
“What about my father?”
Arian’s age-spotted hand rose and fell in a dismissive gesture. “He was like you in many ways.”
Shaban lifted his chin. “I am glad to know this.”
He let a moment pass, daring the old man to speak. Arian said nothing.
“Is this all, Grandfather?”
“Yes. It is all.” Arian’s cold, staring eyes flicked over him. “You are a clever boy.”
His attention refocused on the window. He did not speak again.
Shaban stood. He bowed once more and walked slowly out of the room.
He was not thinking of Todd Patterson or of Ahmeti. He was remembering the moment when the Wolf had first laid eyes on him. The way he had started. His brief uncertainty.
He had looked—it was not possible—but Shaban could almost swear that his grandfather had looked afraid.