WHEN FORCED TO BULLDOG a problem, Stanley Moodrow could be as tenacious as any cop in the city, patiently shaking out a rumor or a witness until some tiny slice of truth emerged. He pushed when he could get away with it—pushing made things move more quickly—but he was careful to draw the line between good guy, bad guy, and civilian. No amount of pushing, however, had uncovered the slightest trace of Enrique Hentados, and Moodrow was a bad loser who tended to console himself with equal doses of alcohol and anger. On this occasion, though, seated in his customary booth at the Killarney Harp with Captain Epstein, he was more confused than annoyed. Confused and worried. He was convinced that none of the dozen or so people he’d questioned was lying to him. Enrique Hentados had simply disappeared.
Speculation had it that the kid had taken a huge amount of money from Ronald Chadwick and was living it up somewhere on the West Coast. This was ghetto nonsense. A boy like Enrique had only a limited number of possibilities. He could not take his loot and disappear into the heartland of America. A slight, dark-complexioned Puerto Rican, he spoke heavily accented English and had never really been one of Ronald Chadwick’s soldiers. He was much closer to being Chadwick’s mascot, a gofer who made sure the electric bills were paid and the refrigerator well-stocked with beer and cold cuts. Even if he had the physical strength to pick up Chadwick, who outweighed him by sixty pounds, Moodrow could not visualize him, hand grenade at the ready, crouching by the fifth-floor stairwell. It was inconceivable.
Initially, Moodrow had assumed that some rival to Chadwick’s exalted position within the heroin community had used Hentados for information, then killed him to keep it quiet. But no other dealer had jumped in to occupy Chadwick’s throne and Chadwick’s suppliers were in a panic, desperately searching for retailers with sufficient capital. The price of heroin on the street, when it was available at all, had tripled in the week since Chadwick’s death.
“Hentados is dead, Captain,” Moodrow said, staring directly into Epstein’s eyes. “There’s just no place he could be hiding. But you know the funny thing? Not only don’t I know who killed him, I don’t even know why he was killed.”
“So what, Stanley?” The captain drained his beer quickly, his stomach quiet for the first time in a week. He felt suddenly expansive, almost jocular. “Hey, look, everything’s working out perfectly. You’re pounding the streets, knocking down doors. It’s great. Now we can go back to keeping order in the Seventh. Which is all I ever gave a shit about anyway.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Captain.” Moodrow picked at his sleeve, trying to brush away a large, dark stain. “Look at this. The goddamn thing’s wet.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Epstein sighed. “When you lay your arm in a puddle of beer, it generally does come out wet.”
“See, Captain, it always strikes me as strange when every potential suspect in a case turns out to be innocent. It just worries the shit out of me, because I know it’s gonna move some way I’m not ready for.”
Epstein signaled Rita over to the table. “Say, what kind of lady are you? You let my friend’s glass go empty like that?”
Rita put her hand on Moodrow’s shoulder. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll make it up to him later.”
“Make it up to him now, Rita. Bring him a beer. And as long as you’re going anyway, bring me one, too.” He turned back to Moodrow. “So, what’s next, Stanley? I have the feeling you’re not finished with this one.”
Moodrow shrugged. “I’m gonna see the FBI tomorrow. I still got a couple more names to check out from the list I made with Paco.”
“And then?”
“And then nothing.”
Detective Sergeant Stanley Moodrow’s speculations were essentially correct and his fears entirely justified. Enrique Hentados would never turn up in Las Vegas, one arm around the waist of some impossibly blonde chorus girl. He slept a more peaceful sleep in a basement at 1109 Clinton Street, the third in a row of five burned-out brownstones, long abandoned, the open windows devoid even of their frames. In the early spring warmth, his body had begun to decay and the rats had caught the scent, digging fitfully. He wasn’t buried deeply. It was understood by the occupants of these buildings, usually junkies looking for a safe place to fix, that one might use any upstairs room, but the basements, dark and damp, held secrets no sane junkie needed to know.
Enrique Hentados, a boy of limited intelligence, had worked very hard to please his cousin, Paco. After all, Ronald Chadwick had represented Enrique’s only hope of success. He had been too timid, too small, ever to fight his way up. And things had gone well for him. He had had money in his pocket all the time and the promise of more to come. His clothes were clean and new, his trousers pressed to a knife’s edge. And he carried a gun. Enrique Hentados, the worst shortstop in Cabo Rojas, Puerto Rico, had carried a pistol in New York and openly scolded the street urchins who strayed too close to Ronald Chadwick’s home. He knew all the pushers. They spoke to him on the street, inquiring into the health of his mother and of Paco and Ronald Chadwick. He even knew the smaller dealers, including a newcomer to the heroin wars called Johnny Katanos, streetnamed Zorba the Freak.
Johnny’s appearance on the drug scene had been sudden and, in its limited way, spectacular. He had been introduced to the Lower East Side drug scene by Jason Peters, a small-time black dealer he’d met in a bar on 27th Street. Jason had sold him small amounts of heroin on several occasions, but Johnny had clamored for more, always more, so Jason had agreed to turn him on to the wholesalers on Attorney Street, where heroin and cocaine were sold in a kind of impromptu flea market which assembled each day in a rubble-strewn lot one block from Ronald Chadwick’s fortress. Johnny’s success was nothing short of miraculous, even if his approach to business was unorthodox. He would buy for whatever price was asked and sell for whatever was offered. Accumulating profit and avoiding loss was never his aim. His target, right from the beginning, had been Ronald Jefferson Chadwick and Enrique Hentados had been no more than a highly specialized tool that, once used, would never again be needed. Besides, Enrique hadn’t willingly turned against his boss. He’d tried very hard to preserve his integrity, but a man named Muzzafer had been much more determined and his need, in the end, had overcome Enrique’s reluctance.
In some way, Muzzafer had been very sympathetic to Enrique. He’d felt a certain kinship with the boy because he, Muzzafer, knew exactly what it was like to begin at the bottom. He had spent his childhood in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. At that time, his full name was Aftab Qwazi Malik. It is the earliest name ascribed to him, though, doubtless, there had been others before. His father, a leader, had struggled in the movement to oust the British and had been forced to change identities time and again. Muzzafer grew up in a world of rebellion and had caught the fever early on, so that, by the time he’d reached manhood, he’d married technique to desire and been hailed as an unqualified success. All by himself (though with the blessing of the PLO), he’d destroyed a concrete-reinforced, machine gun emplacement, along with the four Israeli soldiers manning it. It had been his entry into manhood, the Palestinian equivalent of the Italian ceremony known as “making your bones.” After that he’d been sent to Syria for special training, and from Syria to a dozen operations throughout the world.
Probably the single biggest factor in the longevity of Muzzafer’s career had been his physical appearance. No one, seeing him for the first time, could take him for a criminal of any kind. He stood five foot six inches tall and weighed a soft one hundred twenty-three pounds. His face was smooth, almost boneless, and was overshadowed by huge, liquid-brown eyes that in an attractive female might have been characterized as limpid. The effect of these eyes, offset by a narrow, full-lipped mouth, was to attract both men and women and the men who hunted for him, who had been hunting for fifteen years, considered him sexually androgynous. Nevertheless, it had been a decade since Muzzafer had been anything other than completely in charge of a project. The one he worked on now had been his creation right from the start.
It would have been most fitting if the conference which launched the course of action leading to the death of Ronald Jefferson Chadwick had taken place somewhere in the vast deserts of Arabia, in a bedouin tent, perhaps, spread with densely-woven carpets or a mud-walled hut as old as the Bible. The participants should have spoken in Arabic, in an obscure nomad dialect, and smoked from a hookah while veiled women, draped in black from head to toe, served heavily sweetened tea. The air outside the tent, shimmering with desert heat, should have been filled with the calls of camel drivers or the high, sparkling laughter of women drawing water from a well.
This was not the case. There was no conference, only a meeting of two childhood friends in a motel on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia. The men spoke softly and smoked Marlboro Golden Lights. They saw on green, vinyl-covered chairs, their faces close together, while the coarse yowling of Lucille Ball poured from the television speaker, a foil for potential eavesdroppers. They took a long time getting down to business, gossiping as old comrades will, repeating stories of mutual friends and enemies. They recalled the wretched poverty of the Palestinian camps in Jordan, the women and the adventures they had shared, the martyrs dead in Israel and Jordan and Lebanon, great victories in Munich and Jerusalem. They drank sherry, a habit picked up from the British, and as he filled their glasses, Muzzafer reminded himself of how much he hated the Moslem fanatics who threatened to overrun the Arab world. And they were not even Arabs, but Persians, the spawn of the mad Ayatollah. As he listened to his companion, nodding now and again, he wondered idly if, fresh from the final victory over the Zionist foe, he would be forced to take up the sword against the insatiable mullahs. He would, he vowed, never submit to their will.
“Ah, my friend, wake up.” The fat man shifted in his seat. “You are dreaming and we must get down to business.” He smiled, his jowls rippling. “You see? I have become just like an American. Always on a schedule and, what is worse, always on time.” His name was Hassan Fakhr, though he’d checked into the Fairview Holiday Inn under the name Moshe Berg, a small joke on any Israeli antiterrorist who might someday investigate the meeting. He was obese, with a soft, fleshy nose and a lower lip which overshot his upper jaw, creating an impression of extreme stubbornness, though he’d come to his present position through his ability to yield ground whenever necessary. Hassan was temporarily attached to the Libyan Mission to the United Nations and enjoyed the privilege of diplomatic immunity, a fact which added considerably to his sense of well-being.
Muzzafer, though unprotected, showed no sign of being ill at ease. The meeting had taken place in the United States at his request. Both men held the American intelligence community in utter contempt.
“Certainly,” Muzzafer said, raising his glass in mock salute. “To business. Above all else.” He hesitated, though he knew Hassan understood his purpose. “Well,” he continued, nonchalantly, almost diffident, “I wish to go to America.”
“Ah!” Hassan raised a finger in the air, grinning happily. “But, unless I am mistaken, we are already in America.”
“I’m serious, Hassan. I want to bring our business to America. They’ve escaped us for too long. I want to teach them to be afraid.” He paused, letting the message sink in. “I’m going to teach them to be afraid.”
“This has been attempted before…”
Muzzafer stopped Hassan with a wave of his hand. “The time is right, Hassan. I am determined. And I plan to do it in a way that’s never been done before. Our methods will become a model for a completely new form of revolutionary struggle. We are not going to have contact with anyone outside of our group after we have armed ourselves. The FBI? The CIA? Our enemies work only through informants, through spies. If no one knows where we are or what we will do next, then we can’t be sold out. It’s that simple: No contact means no betrayal. We will not have to hit-and-run as we have in the past. We will remain in place and the pressure we exert will be irresistible.
“We will seek the destruction of life and property toward no other end than the destruction of life and property. We will feed the media with bullshit demands that are so sweeping and so vague, they can never be met. Think about it! An invisible organization with a name that has no meaning attacking random targets in one of the most crowded cities in the world. The Americans will be forced to realize that they can’t escape the fate of the rest of the world. They can’t hide behind their oceans while millions of our people starve. In Europe, they understand us already. The British, the French, the Germans, the Spanish—they know only too well and they leave us alone. Now it’s time to teach America a lesson. You know, Hassan, Herr Marx tells us that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses,’ but Marx is wrong. Times have changed. Today, democracy is the opiate of the masses and we shall see how long their democracy lasts when they are really afraid.”
Muzzafer stood up abruptly and began to pace the room. “I’m not speaking just to hear my own voice, Hassan. I’m determined to bring it off. Right now, America seems monstrous, virtually invincible, but they can be frightened, terrified, like any other people. When that happens, when they truly know that death may come any time they leave their homes, they will not hesitate to betray the Jews. Let’s face the truth—without the Americans, the Jews will not last two years in Africa. We will drive them back to Germany.”
Though his face remained passive, Hassan watched this performance with amazement. Muzzafer’s eyes blazed. His hands swung through the air as if conducting his rage and his voice rose with each succeeding phrase. It was not an unfamiliar situation for Hassan and the outcome he feared most was leaving the room with Muzzafer for an enemy. But what if he was asked to join the project? He had dropped out of active participation in terrorist projects in 1980, precisely because he feared becoming addicted to the violence, and as a result, had been forced to walk a fine line. If these killers ever branded him a traitor, there would, he knew, be no place on earth secure enough to keep him safe.
Muzzafer walked to the bureau and took a manila folder from his suitcase. “Here,” he said, walking back to the bed, “is my Army. My American Red Army.” Laughing, he spread a handful of photos on the bedspread. “This first is Theresa Aviles. She was born Anna Rosa Gomez in the Dominican Republic, but raised in the United States. She joined a radical offshoot of the old Weather Underground, the Green Faction, while she was a student at the University of Maryland. In 1978, in what was really a pitiful attempt to raise money, she and her companions murdered two bank guards in Luther, Tennessee. She was captured immediately, but instead of turning informer, she stabbed a prison guard and escaped before her trial.
“This is her lover, Johnny Katanos.”
Muzzafer held the photo up and Hassan, curious, stared at the dark, expressionless eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the incongruous boyish smile. “He looks like he doesn’t care one way or the other. The rest of them are so intense. So sincere.”
“Katanos looks like a little boy,” Muzzafer said, “because he doesn’t want you ever to know what he’s thinking. He told us that he grew up mainly in institutions, in New York City, and he learned very young not to expose himself. To always hold something back. But he is in love with violence, Hassan. In Europe, he would pose as a drug dealer, work himself into a position of trust within some…” He paused for a moment, searching for the word. “Would you say drug ‘ring’ or drug ‘gang’? In any event, once he understood the operation well enough to know where the money would be and when it would be there, he would simply take it. And usually in the most violent way possible. That is how he came to Algiers and how he met Theresa. He was living in Spain, in Malaga, when everyone caught up to him—the criminals, the French police, the German police and Interpol. He came to Africa through Gibraltar with his enemies one step behind him, then met Theresa and now he enjoys the protection of the Algerian government.
“Hassan, he is the hardest man I’ve ever met. Not a leader, of course, but a fantastic physical specimen. Perfectly willing to do anything asked of him, as long as it’s violent and dangerous. I sent him to Haifa, to take care of a certain arms dealer who sold us defective rockets. He brought back the man’s eyes.”
Muzzafer held up another photo, taking that of Johnny Katanos from Hassan’s hands. “This one is born Sarah Cohen, but is presently using the name Effie Bloom. She is a lesbian and very committed. She has read everything and will do anything, except sleep with a man for pleasure. After she assassinated the Grand Knight of the Christian Brotherhood of Georgia, Lester Hagen, she was sentenced to ninety-five years by an Atlanta jury. In prison, she killed another convict in a dispute over the favors of Jane Mathews, also a felon. Jane’s father was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and it was expected that Jane, an A student in her junior year, would follow in his footsteps. Right up until the day she planted a bomb in Blair Hall. After she and Effie met, it was love at first sight, at least on Effie’s part, so, naturally, when Effie decided to escape, she took Jane along. You probably remember the story. The bus taking Jane and Effie to Effie’s trial was attacked by six of Effie’s sisters. Effie and Jane were liberated and smuggled out of the country. If I remember correctly, there was quite a high body count on that particular adventure.”
“Eight dead,” Hassan grunted.
Muzzafer sat down again, resting his elbows on the table. “They will follow me. I’m sure of it. You see, right now they are living in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean, in Algeria. Very beautiful, my brother, but I have played a little trick on them. I have persuaded the Algerians to expel them. Where can they go? The Americans are waiting for any opportunity to return them to prison, and this time precautions will be taken to see that they never again have any hope of escape. Effie and Jane would certainly be separated and this is Effie’s greatest fear. It terrifies her.
“I will offer the chance to strike again and they will accept. What I need from you is permission to bring them into Libya, to have your doctors alter their features so they cannot be recognized from a poster or a prison photograph. I want you to supply them with documents and cash. We will remain in Libya for no more than a month and once we reach the United States, you’ll never hear from us again.”
Hassan smiled and relief flowed through him so quickly, his mood went from caution to euphoria without any seeming transition. “I don’t think I will have any problem with this,” he began. “Our friend, Muammar, is still angry over the death of his child, not to mention the attempt on his own life. As long as it’s not an official Libyan project…”
“The American Red Army,” Muzzafer explained, “will have no roots anywhere. Its identity will be as shadowy as its name.”
Hassan reached into his pocket and removed his lighter, an old Zippo with a Marine Corps insignia on its face, and lit a cigarette. Offering the pack to Muzzafer, he asked, “Can I tell you what I really think? Can I be honest with you?”
“Go ahead.” Muzzafer sat back. He knew what was coming, the obvious weak point in his project. “Let’s hear it.”
“These are not revolutionaries,” Hassan said gently. His hands swept across the photographs. “Three amateurs, two of them lesbians, and a common criminal. You and I have been hardened by years in exile. By having to accept the leavings of other nations while the Jews squat on our homeland. We can accept the discipline, the isolation, but these college students…”He shook his head. “I know what you are trying to do and it’s true that if your aim is to disappear, you will have to use Americans, but somehow you must find real professionals. You know very well that the most difficult part of any project is keeping the unit together. It’s hard enough even when you have hardened professionals, with families that are easy to find. How do you expect to keep your Americans working in isolation for an indefinite period of time?” He paused briefly. “Within six weeks of your arrival in America, they will be bickering among themselves. Within six months, they will make you as much an amateur as they are. They will make you a criminal to match the one you’re bringing with you.”
“You mustn’t underestimate him, Hassan. I have never seen a man as eager as he is. Physically, he’s one in a million.”
Something in Muzzafer’s voice, in his enthusiasm, brought Hassan up short. He recalled the rumors surrounding Muzzafer’s sexual preferences. He had never believed the stories, blaming them on the bad luck of Muzzafer’s being dealt a soft body and a softer face, but listening to Muzzafer describe the abilities of the young Greek, he began to have his doubts. Not that he was upset. His relief at not being asked for anything he couldn’t deliver allowed him the confidence to be objective.
“My friend, I don’t care how dangerous he is. I don’t care if he’s killed a hundred people. If we’ve learned any lesson from our years in the struggle, it’s to keep amateurs and common criminals away from our projects.”
“Listen, Hassan,” Muzzafer said, his voice tight, “there is nothing common about Johnny Katanos.”