He had never been shot before, shot at plenty of times, but always before this the bullets had gone wide, diverted by the miraculous protection of the saints, and it was this demonstration of his vulnerability rather than the wound itself that wrapped a chilling hand around the heart of El Chivato. Of course, it still hurt a great deal, but he was actually glad of the pain, since it served both to remind him of his recent stupidity and as a warning that he must not overstay his time.
There was an employees’ washroom at the back of the warehouse that had cold water running in it, and here he washed off the spattered blood from his job on the Arab, and also washed, as best he could, the bullet wound, which was a long, deep groove in his left side, right above the hip bone. He cut a clean strip from the old-fashioned roller towel in the washroom to make a bandage, which he wrapped tightly around his waist, like a cummerbund.
Nude but for this binding, he went to inspect the crates the Arab had mentioned. One of them had already been opened, and the top layer of excelsior and ceramic parts had been removed and set aside. El Chivato rummaged through the contents for a good while, selecting some items and placing them on a tarp. His weapons had been taken from him by the Arabs, and here was a new supply, and of a better sort as well. He was used to this manner of providence, and he thought it was possible that the protectors had not entirely deserted him: the wound was a warning, then, and not abandonment.
When he had laid out as much as he thought he could conveniently carry, he wrapped up the tarp, slung it over his shoulder and brought it out to the loading dock, where he placed it next to the LTD. Then he got dressed, took the car keys and the two pistols from the dead Arabs, distributed the various items from the crates in appropriate places, and drove off.
Chouza Khalid said, “Perhaps the little thing was tougher than he looked. I can’t think of anything else that would be taking them so long.”
The man known as Ibn-Salemeh did not look away from his television, which was playing a rerun of I Dream of Jeannie. He said, “Perhaps they discovered another spy. You should go and check. In fact, you should have interrogated him yourself.”
“I was preparing for tonight,” said Khalid, trying to keep the resentment out of his voice. “As it is, if they don’t show up soon, we will have to call it off.”
“We will not call it off. This is interesting, here, I’ve noticed on many of these programs: the man is a moron and the woman is the clever one. Even without magical powers. And this one is especially blatant. We have the familiar orientalism: the submissive woman, the harem pants, the little waistcoat with sequins, but in fact she is entirely in control. What do you suppose it signifies?”
Khalid shrugged. The only things he watched on television were wrestling and soccer. He said, “We cannot do this operation without Ahmed and Bashar. In fact, I don’t understand why we are doing it at all. The Daoud boy is not going to take his truck back if we don’t give him his sister.”
For the first time Ibn-Salemeh turned away from the screen. He gave Khalid a long, slow look. In the darkened room Khalid could make out nothing of the man’s eyes but two black pits, in each of which there burned a tiny flickering spark. He felt a chill, and was about to make leaving noises when the man spoke.
“It has nothing to do with the Daoud boy or his sister. It is a political issue, a political decision, and you know I don’t discuss political issues with you. However …” and now the bearded man did something he had never done before. He rose and switched off the volume on the television set, and courteously gestured to a chair near the old couch on which he spent almost all his time. Khalid sat, not knowing what to think.
“… however, this time I will make an exception,” the man resumed, when he had seated himself at the far end of the couch, facing Khalid, with his legs curled up underneath him, like a cat. “You are, after all, an Arab, and although you are a mercenary, you are still part of the struggle. So: what have I done? You notice that at the center is our plan. What is the purpose of this plan? To harm the Zionists and their Jew allies in this country, of course. That is the obvious purpose, but not the only one, perhaps not even the chief one. You also notice that I improvise with the tools at hand. I arrange for a group of Arab boys to kill a Jew. A stupid, meaningless act, you think. But no, its very meaninglessness, its triviality, is its virtue. The Jews howl, and the Americans think, these Arabs are capable of anything, any of them could have a knife. Now this raid tomorrow. Another outrage. The police descend on the Arab community, looking for the murderers, the kidnappers. Jars are broken, women are insulted. The Daoud family will be arrested, but, as we have arranged, they will have been in mosque, with many to attest to their presence. The police will not believe these distinguished men perhaps. More insults. Then our centerpiece occurs. There is true terror now. Now the U.S. government is called in. There are mass arrests of Arabs, but even more important, the Americans strike at the Arab community. Who are these foreigners, these aliens? Again, jars are broken, and women are insulted, perhaps now heads are broken. More insulting cartoons are published, on the television, on radio, the voices are angry—at the Arabs, of course, but also at the Jews. Why have you involved us in your quarrels, so many dead in an American city? And so on.”
He paused here, and Khalid felt he was required to say something, to demonstrate that he understood. But he did not. He wet his lips and asked, “But if the Americans hate and fear the Arabs, why will they help us in Palestine?”
The other man made a harsh, breathy noise, like escaping steam. “No! You have missed the point. The Americans will never help the Arabs in Palestine. The Jews here are too powerful. You should watch more television, Chouza: watch the little names flash on the screen, read who is in control of what the Americans believe. But there are perhaps a million Arabs in this country. And they, of course, are so busy getting rich that they have forgotten us, forgotten their struggle and their honor, so we must remind them what it is to be despised and abused. Many of them will become our allies as a result. With this base we can mount more actions, have even greater freedom of movement, and this in turn will create even more oppression upon the Arabs here. It builds like that, do you see? Finally, the Americans, who have no stomach for such suffering, who want only to enjoy their wealth and watch this kind of nonsense”—he gestured to the TV screen—“the Americans will say, enough! Let the dogs fight it out between themselves and leave us alone. And thus we will win.”
“We will?” asked Khalid spontaneously. He had seen Israeli jets and tanks in Lebanon, and thought that, all in all, the Zionists could take care of themselves.
“Of course! Can you doubt it? How could the Arabs, the most heroic people in history, seventy million Arabs, be defeated by less than four million Jews, people who for thousands of years let themselves be killed like sheep? How is it possible? It is not possible, for it is the Americans that have done it. And this I will stop.”
Khalid had, of course, heard this argument before, many times. It might well be true, for all he knew, but he was not interested in politics, and he was quite indifferent to the fevered patriotic psychopathy of Ibn-Salemeh and his associates. He waited, saying nothing, and after a while the other man seemed to emerge from the reverie into which he had apparently been placed by the sound of his own rhetoric, and he rose and turned up the volume again. A laugh track filled the room, which seemed appropriate, in a way, to Chouza Khalid. He rose himself, said he was going to try to find the two missing men, and was dismissed with a flick of the hand.
After leaving the Osborne Group, Marlene boarded a southbound Lexington Avenue train and got off at Bleecker Street, from which she walked to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry and went inside, putting a black lace scarf over her head as she did. Today the nave was draped for Lent, in the old-fashioned way, with dark purple palls on the altar and the statuary, suiting perfectly Marlene’s present mood.
She chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer to her home, for reasons both aesthetic and spiritual. Old St. Pat’s was a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. The spiritual reasons were more complex. In general, Marlene did not hold with parish shopping, as smacking of the Donatist heresy, which held that the character of the priest influenced the efficacy of the sacraments. Marlene did not go to church for the Christian fellowship, the style of the services, or the brilliance of the sermons, nor was she particularly bothered by the policies of the current pope. She went for the magic, because, she firmly believed, if it wasn’t magic, the whole affair was so much gilt horseshit, and if it was magic, the personality of the priest was the last thing to bother with. It was like believing that because the president of a bank was a son of a bitch, the money that came out of the cash machines wasn’t any good. Old St. Pat’s was run as closely as possible to the old devotional style that Marlene had grown up on, and which the current parishioners, Latin American and Caribbean types, also seemed to prefer. The fresh breezes of Vatican II did not penetrate very far up the nave of Old St. Pat’s, which was fine with Marlene, whose deeply held opinion was that Vat Deuce had got it mainly wrong, changing the stuff that didn’t need changing and leaving alone the stuff that did. Marlene thought the Tridentine Mass had been just fine as it was, and in Latin (and if you couldn’t understand it, tough shit, Mac, you could look it up), and the rosary, and the stations of the cross, and the clunky statues with the red lamps—candles, incense, mystery, old ladies in black mumbling on their knees—that was church.
The pastor of Old St. Pat’s was a man who supported this view. Father Raymond was a genial, sheep-faced Irish gentleman of a certain age, as Pre-Vat II as it was possible to be without getting actually defrocked, and without a brain in his head. His sermons concerned, in ascending order of frequency, foreign missions, the evils of communism, and the certainty of Hell for anyone participating in any sexual behavior whatever except for the express purpose of peopling Heaven with new souls. Marlene, although for long an enthusiastic participant in the non-peopling sort of behavior, accepted these clerical commonplaces as she did the wafts of incense and the music, without resentment, with fondness even, as representing something familiar and calming, like the sound of surf.
Lately, however, Marlene had acquired yet another reason for attendance here, and it was for this she had come on the present occasion. The curate, Father Dugan, was hearing during this slot, and Father Dugan was interesting enough as a human being for Marlene to suspend her notions about it not mattering who was on the other side of the little grille. He was, to begin with, a Jesuit, uncommon enough among diocesan clergy, but also, in former days, one of the Church’s high flyers. He had once been on the very small staff of the Jesuit Superior General in Rome. How an aide to the Black Pope had been busted down to a curacy in a second-rate New York parish was a mystery that Marlene had not solved. The usual priestly errors—Punch or Judy, a weakness for choirboys—did not seem to fit what she had been able to gather about his character, but his personal glamour added to the already very great appeal of sitting in a dark box and whispering secrets to a strange man who could never reveal them to anyone. Since her first communion Marlene had been an enthusiastic patron of the confessional, and had, during an unusually libertine adolescence, expanded the sexual horizons of any number of celibate gentlemen. She told the truth, of course, took the penance, was genuinely sorry, and always did as she pleased thereafter. This was how the system was supposed to work, in her opinion, and very well it worked too, especially nowadays, when she had so much on her soul.
She entered the confessional and, after the ritual words, began an account of her week’s transgressions, concentrating on the various tortures and death traps she had involved herself in, ending, as usual, with the statement that she found it impossible to believe in God.
“When you were torturing this man, did you feel any pleasure?” asked the priest.
“No, Father. I was sick. I was literally sick outside afterward.”
“I see. Don’t you think that’s odd? You do something you have rationalized is necessary, and yet your very body rebels.”
“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
“Clever and mocking as usual,” said the priest. His tone was not angry, or contemptuous, but tired, exhausted. Marlene felt an instant pang of shame. “But cleverness and mockery won’t give you the peace you seek, which is why you come here. Why do you come here since you say you don’t believe?”
“I hope that adherence to the forms will prepare my heart for the grace of faith,” said Marlene with sincerity.
“You still hope, then?”
“I do, Father.”
“That’s something, anyway. Tell me, do you consider that breaking the law as you do is the only way to prevent the deaths of these women?”
“I do, Father.”
“That seems unlikely. You could hide them, for example.”
“I could, but that means condemning women to a lifetime of hiding and subterfuge, with still no guarantee that the man wouldn’t find them years later. Why should they? Give up their lives, their careers, their names, when they’ve committed no crime? Just because some guy has decided to make their lives hell—”
“You’ve answered the question. It is your choice rather than actual necessity. Do you know this verse: ‘All things have I seen in the days of my vanity; there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over-wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?’?”
“No. It sounds like Ecclesiastes.”
“It is. It’s a good warning. The world is full of inexplicable and incurable evil. That’s why the Lord told us that our responsibility was to the care of our own souls and the extension of loving kindness to our neighbors, and not the elimination of evil. That’s also why we render unto Caesar. You know all this. Even your body knows it. Look at yourself now. Your partner has left you. You can’t speak to your husband about what you do. Your children are endangered. Your only companions are either fanatics or those with damaged souls and no moral compass. If you continue as you’ve been going, you will either become a monster or you will be destroyed in some awful disaster. And I don’t think you will become a monster.”
Marlene thought, he’s talking about himself too.
“Your heart is full of pride,” he went on after a pause, “so full that there is no room for faith, and because what you do is for the good of others, and at some sacrifice to yourself, you think it doesn’t matter, that it’s not really pride. But that kind is the worst kind. Do you think the Devil only tempts us with sensual lusts?”
“No, Father,” said Marlene meekly, regressing to childhood, as she often did here.
The priest caught her tone. “All right, all right: when you’re ready. I pray that you are not one of those who has to be smashed to pieces before the light dawns. Your penance is to read the Spiritual Exercises, let’s say through the first Meditation. If you insist on being a warrior, you should learn something about discipline.”
“You know nothing about discipline,” said Tran, “which is normal among people with remarkable gifts, such as yourself. Without discipline, however, all your gifts will come to nothing.”
Tran was sitting with Lucy on a bench in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Lucy had just failed for the third time to recall, with her eyes closed, the costume and characteristics of every person visible from her vantage point. The park was crowded in the mild late afternoon with the sort of exotics who normally populated that well-known roofless after-care clinic.
“You do it, then!” said Lucy irritably. Tran sighed and closed his eyes, and rattled off concise descriptions of a dozen people, until Lucy said, “Okay, okay, I believe you. But I’ll never get it.” She slumped and started kicking her leg. “I don’t see why I have to do it anyway.”
“No, you do not, because all your energy is going into worrying why you must do it. And squirming. Sit straight! Calm yourself! Breathe as I have told you! One … two. One … two. Yes. When you learn how, you can stay quiet all day, like a stone.”
“No one can stay quiet all day,” objected Lucy. “What if you have to pee?”
“For that there are bottles. Once I lay on a roof for twelve hours without moving, just watching.”
“What for?”
“To shoot someone,” replied Tran blandly. He did not believe in sheltering children from the realities, especially not this child.
“A bad guy?”
“An enemy. There are neither bad nor good in war, only friends and enemies.”
Lucy thought about that for a while. She was vaguely aware of something called the Vietnam War, which her mom also called, when she thought Lucy was out of range, That Fucking War, mainly because of her Uncle Dom. His service therein was the explanation given by her mom for Uncle Dom’s odd walk, and for his peculiar and frightening behavior at family gatherings, or his absence from them, both of which made her nonna cry. She knew Tran was a Vietnamese, she knew there was a Vietnamese language, but until that moment she had not fully realized that the Vietnam of Uncle Dom’s war and the place that Tran came from were the same place, rather than being, like Joan of Arc and Noah’s Ark, two entities whose apparent congruence of name did not denote a true connection.
“Was that in the Vietnam War when you shot that guy?” Lucy asked to confirm this insight.
“Not as such,” said Tran delicately. “It was another war, before that one, against the French.”
“I thought you liked the French,” exclaimed Lucy in surprise, speaking French, as they had all afternoon.
“I love the French,” said Tran. “I love them in their own country, however, rather than in mine, just as, let us say, you love horses, but one suspects you would not like ten of them living in your bedroom.”
Lucy was examining Tran with new eyes; it is one of the great revelations of childhood, this comprehension that our elders have a past prior to their connection with ourselves. “Is that where you got that dent in your head?” Lucy asked with characteristic bluntness.
“No. That was given to me by my own former comrades. I fought for twenty-five years against three armies and received not so much as a scratch. After the war was over, I was imprisoned and there, in the midst of peace and victory, I received all my wounds. This on my head comes from a beating.”
“But why did they? If you won.”
Tran watched the smoke from his cigarette whip away through the maple buds and considered that question, which was one he had spent, naturally enough, a great deal of time contemplating. “They thought I was too good at fighting, perhaps. Especially against unpleasant and oppressive regimes. It is a long, sad story.”
Which Lucy was not that interested in hearing, truth to tell, and so she asked, “Uncle Tran, when will you teach me a martial art?”
As if in answer, Tran threw his arms around her and placed his hands over her eyes. “Maybe. When you can tell me who was the last person to walk by on this path, from the right.”
“Old lady, short, not too fat, brown coat, glasses, pulling a cart, blue wool hat.”
“And before her?”
“Two black teenagers, one fat, one tall and skinny, fat one with a Raiders coat, gray baggies, tall one with blue track pants, Monsignor Ryan jacket, Nike gym bag, both wearing Nikes. Hey! I did it!”
Tran pulled his hands away and hugged her, beaming. “Yes, you did. Without knowing, which is how you must do such things. I will buy you an ice cream.”
“What about my martial art?”
“Ah, as to that, I regret that I know no martial arts other than the few holds I learned in the army. Unlike the Koreans and the Okinawans, we Vietnamese have never developed any unarmed combat of our own.”
“Why is that, Uncle Tran?”
“Because we have always made sure we had arms, I suppose. This shouting, this kicking, are for people without swords, without guns.” He rose from the bench, stretched and yawned like an old dog, and held out his hand, which she took. They proceeded eastward on the path out of the park.
Khalid knew it was a disaster the moment he saw that the steel gate of the loading dock was raised and the LTD was gone. What he found inside the warehouse merely confirmed it. Khalid had an extremely strong stomach, and he had seen a lot of corpses, but what had been done to Bashar brought up his gorge, and he had to flee back to the dock for some deep breaths of air. The entire front half of the man’s skin, from the wrists to the ankles, had been removed in a single piece, which object had been neatly laid out on a pallet next to the former owner’s body. Khalid had not much liked Bashar, but he felt a pang of sympathy nonetheless, and understood instantly that whatever Bashar knew, back to his earliest retrievable memories, and certainly including the details of Ibn-Salemeh’s plan, was now in the possession of the Mexican youth.
He went out onto the dock and sat down on its lip, and smoked a cigarette and considered his options. Option one was to get in his car, drive to the house he had rented in Crown Heights, take the considerable trove of cash he had sequestered from the dope deal, drive to the airport, and get out of town. The disadvantage of this was that for the rest of his life he would have to protect himself from the revenge of Ibn-Salemeh and his many admirers, which span, given the reputation and talents of that body of men, was likely to be quite short.
Option two was to go back to Ibn-Salemeh and explain that a boy who had appeared to be a mere pawn, whom any reasonable man could not have imagined to be anything else, had turned out to be a frighteningly dangerous monster, one who was now at large and, it could not be doubted, in possession of all of Ibn-Salemeh’s deepest secrets. As the word possession entered his mind, Khalid felt a still greater pang of fear and leaped to his feet. He trotted back to where the crates were stashed and did a quick inventory. Some small arms missing, but the cylinder and the other specialized equipment had not been disturbed. Khalid leaned against a crate, sighing with relief, and continued with his train of thought.
Option two also left something to be desired. Ibn-Salemeh would blame him for the debacle, and for the loss of two prized subordinates. This also was not conducive to a long and peaceful life.
Option three … Khalid was not experienced at creative thought, but he found that the prospect of facing the wrath of his employer concentrated his limited faculties to a wonderful degree. He thought it through, then thought it through again, taking a walk through the warehouse as he did. Yes, it would work; it would be a close thing, but it would work, and might offer the best chance of getting out of this miserable association alive.
He went back to the dock and drew down the corrugated door, locking it with his key. Then he drove to a building-supply place on Eleventh Avenue and bought a four-by-eight-foot sheet of rough plywood, several plastic tarps, a length of one-by-two fir, a circular saw, an extension cord and work lamp, a garden hose, a cheap plastic wheelbarrow, four bags of ready-mix concrete, a box of plastic bags, a box of nails, and a hammer.
Back at the warehouse, he stripped to his underwear, wrapped his shoes in plastic bags, wrapped Bashar’s corpse and his former, now stiff skin in a tarp, and hauled it and all of his materials to the building’s elevator shaft, using the wheelbarrow. He raised the freight car to the second floor and walked down. He hooked the hose up to a wash sink in a nearby janitor’s closet and plugged in the work lamp. He had worked construction in Israel as a youth, before discovering that smuggling paid better, and he was reasonably skilled at this sort of rough work. In an hour he had ripped the plywood into one-foot-wide strips, from which he built a shallow four-sided form, using the fir as bracing.
He climbed into the bottom of the shaft, carrying the form, and set it on the bottom. He brought the wheelbarrow down and, using the hose, mixed up a bag of ready-mix, and poured it into the form. He added the tarp-wrapped carnage and then covered it with the rest of the concrete, finishing the task by dumping assorted debris into the shaft and bringing the car down to the first floor again. He loaded Ahmed’s body into the wheelbarrow and took it to a small room off the main bay that had previously been used as some sort of office. He placed the body in an empty closet and nailed the door shut.
Khalid sprayed water from the hose onto his sweating face and then had a cigarette, contemplating the next steps. This was going to work.
Marlene walked back home from church, feeling a good deal better than she had earlier, despite Father Dugan’s grim tone, accepting this as yet another proof of the efficacy of the sacraments, and burying the moral lessons in the corner of her mind where she kept such things between her religious visits. There was no one in the loft, but the dog was gone, which meant Posie had taken them all for another outing. She changed into jeans, boots, sweater, and leather jacket, and left, whistling gaily, for her car.
She spotted them on Canal Street, the boys in their stroller, hideously covered with chocolate ice cream, Posie flirting with some Con Ed workers, while the dog heaved at its leash in an attempt to grab a morsel of decomposed matter in the gutter. Marlene honked and ordered them all into the VW. Then they drove to the East Village Women’s Shelter.
Marlene’s boys loved the women’s shelter. It had action. It had a large playroom covered with industrial carpeting and full of decrepit toys, cardboard cartons to crawl into, a varied and changing cast of other kids, and all manner of interesting filth. After hosing off the chocolate, Posie left them in the playroom and went into the kitchen to socialize.
Lucy had also looked forward to visiting the shelter. She wanted to speak Arabic with Fatyma, for while she had memorized the relatively simple conjugations of that tongue already, there was nothing like conversation with a native speaker to flesh out the bones of a language, to clothe it in idiom and nuance, to generate in the seemingly infinite partitions of her mind yet another person, one with the thoughts and concepts of an Arab. Failing that, Mattie was always willing to fill in her knowledge of racy Texas Spanish, but now, in the kitchen, she found that even this was not about to happen. The three women—Mattie, Marlene, and Posie—and the Arab girl were sitting around the table, eating honey cakes and drinking coffee and talking in boring old English, and their subject was the most boring one of all.
It had begun with Marlene ribbing Posie about her flirting with the Con Ed men, after which there were passed remarks about “laying cable” and “getting your pipes reamed out” that provoked wild witch-like laughter, which Lucy didn’t care for, because while she followed the double meanings (for, of course, these had to be explained to Fatyma, which occasioned even more chortles), she didn’t see what was so funny. Then Posie told a story about how this guy had taken her home with him and they were “balling,” as she said, on a bed, and a woman had walked in and changed into a pink waitress uniform and walked out without saying a word.
“I go, like, ‘Who was that?’ “ said Posie. “And he goes, ‘Just my wife, but don’t worry, she works all night.’ Then he says he loves me. Then he goes, do I have a job? I guess he’s fixing up a schedule.”
Loud laughter at this, more from the expression on Posie’s face than the story, so similar to those Posie had told often before, and Mattie and Marlene hummed the first two bars of “Isn’t It Romantic,” which cracked them up, and then explained the thing to Fatyma, and laughed some more.
“I’m about ready to get, like, a cucumber,” said Posie. “I must be doing something real wrong, but I’m always thinking, this is the one, you know? But it never is.”
“Hell, no! What you got to do, girl, is get ’em young. Young and hung,” said Mattie. “Use ’em and lose ’em. Get ’em young enough, you can break ’em and train ’em: a little pussy, a little taste of the whip.” Marlene snorted and rolled her eyes. Mattie’s actual sexuality was something of a puzzle to her friend. Marlene had assumed at first that the woman was aggressively lesbic, because she’d at least mentioned lovers with female names and also from her general attitude toward the other sex, but from time to time over the years she’d noticed young men hanging about, usually possessing a slim cowboy beauty and a hangdog expression, and from that she had gathered that Mattie practiced a bluff bisexuality, the key to her heart apparently being the understanding that she was always entirely in charge.
Of course, in Marlene’s opinion there was not a chance that someone like Posie was going to benefit from this sort of Amazonian pep talk, and said so, and they got into a not entirely humorous argument about dominance in relationships, which made Lucy even more uncomfortable, because her dad’s name was brought up and used to demonstrate various points on either side, and then Posie said she didn’t care about any of that, but that all she wanted was a good fuck a couple times a week, and then, remembering Lucy’s presence, she said, “Oops, sorry!” and then Fatyma said, “You should meet my brother. All the time with his dumb friends, all they are talking is sex, sex, but they never have girls, you know?”
And after that they talked about Fatyma’s family, which Lucy found sort of interesting, and she passed around little photos of her sibs (Posie pronouncing Walid gorgeous) and then they started talking about really gross stuff, whereupon Lucy walked out.
She stopped by the playroom first and messed around with the twins, mainly to continue her secret experiment, which consisted of speaking to Zak only in Cantonese and to Zik only in French, to see if they would start speaking those languages to each other, or invent a new one, hybridizing the two, or drive themselves crazy. It didn’t seem to be working, although she noted, with some interest, that they each seemed to make sense of the other’s babble, and they jabbered at one another in a sort of imitation conversation, with the appropriate tonalities, just as she used to imitate adult writing by making looping squiggles on paper before she learned cursive.
There were no girls her age in the shelter at the moment, and no one with an interesting language to convey, so she trotted up four floors and climbed the narrow stairs to the roof. There, as she had expected, she found Tran, leaning against the roof parapet and smoking. She stood next to him and joined him in watching the street below. It was chilly on the roof; she had come up without her jacket, but after a few minutes Tran seemed to sense this, and unbuttoned his pea coat and drew her to him, enfolding her in his left arm and the thick, stiff wool. He smelled of tobacco, damp wool, and, more faintly, the peculiar combination of odors Lucy associated with Asian men: fish, frying oil, and the scented hair tonic they all used in Chinatown. She liked it. She slid her thin arm around his waist and nestled closer to his wiry body, feeling content and safe, as she did with her dad, but also slightly excited. It was like hugging a wolf.
“What are you watching, Uncle Tran?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.
“Look yourself, Little Sister. What do you think I am watching?”
“That gray van, Jersey plates. It drove by and let two men out, and drove away. The two men didn’t go into any stores. Then a white car came up, and one of the men talked to the driver and it went away. Then the two men went into the building next door to the shelter.”
“Yes,” said Tran. “And what do you think about this?”
“Dope, or something. I don’t know. Or maybe they’re going to rob the check-cashing place. What do you think?”
But Tran only shrugged, and then suggested that it was getting too cold, and took her back into the shelter.
Down in the warm kitchen, the little group had broken up. Fatyma was busy with something at the stove, some women needed Mattie’s urgent attention, and Posie had been called away to the playroom by some unusually loud squalls from the boys. Marlene helped her settle the twins and played with them for a few minutes, and then went to Mattie’s office.
“We have to talk about Fatyma,” she said without preamble.
Mattie came back with “What about her?” switching to her truculent self, and Marlene struggled not to roll her eyes and sigh, or put out any of the other silent signals we use when a pal is being a pain in the ass.
“The cops are after her. She really did whack that pimp on the Deuce, and they know who she is. There’s a warrant out on her, and this’ll be one of the places they’ll check.”
“So? When they come, she’ll get lost.”
“Uh-uh, Mattie. This isn’t some woman who’s hiding her kids from a man with a better lawyer, or a parole jumper. This is an A felony. As of right now you’re liable on a charge of hindering prosecution, and technically, so am I, for not speaking right up when a cop told me they were looking for her and I knew where she was.”
“So … what, you’re going to rat us out?”
“Of course I’m not going to rat you out,” Marlene snarled. “Will you just listen?” One of two things has to happen. One, she has to turn herself in, tell her story, and cop out to a self-defense plea. That’s what I would recommend to her, and I’ll represent her in that if she wants. She’s a kid with no record, and they’re not going to drop the courthouse on her head for wasting a lowlife who tried to hurt her.”
“I bet,” said Mattie. “You forgot dear dad’s gunning for her too. And the brother. Once she’s in the system they’re going to send her back to her loving family, and it’s good-bye, baby. What’s the other thing?”
“She has to disappear. Out of town, gone, never existed. I know you’ve got some kind of network you move women through. You could place her with a family until she’s grown.”
“Okay, I’ll think about it.”
“You have to do more than think about it, Mattie. You could wind up losing this whole place.”
“I said, I’ll think about it!” snapped the other woman. Marlene saw the warning signs, the clenched fists, the bar of darker color on the broad cheekbones, the eyes becoming hot, and she was about to marshal her forces for a knock-down hair-puller when Lucy burst into the room.
“Mom! Fatyma says I could stay over with her tonight. Can I? Can I?”
“Well, I don’t know, Lucy—” Marlene began.
“Puh-leeze? It’s a Friday.”
Marlene looked at Mattie for some indication, hoping that the woman would say no, but of course Mattie grinned and said it would be fine, and Marlene, who had just tossed away a brilliant career opportunity to be able to continue to work for places like EVWS, could not bring herself to articulate her thought that the actual place was dangerous and rather dirty and not the kind of place she felt comfortable leaving her little girl in. So she relented, but assuaged her conscience by having a few discreet words with Tran before Posie stumped into the kitchen with a squalling, damp-diapered brat on each hip, and she had to clear out. Tran was an exception to the EVWS rule about no men on the premises. He was a hell of a cook, willing to whip up exotic delicacies for the semi-imprisoned ladies, and make cheerful jokes and himself useful in various other ways, including (which Mattie well understood) as a guard beyond compare.
Khalid inspected his troops by the light of a yellow street lamp on a deserted lane near the Lillian Wald project on the lower East Side of Manhattan. He had only six men instead of eight, which meant that he would have only one man to secure the rear entrance, and that he would have to participate directly, which he did not at all like. This could not be helped. He went down the row of black-clad armed men standing in front of the gray van and questioned them each for the last time about what they were supposed to do. Rifaat, Abdel, Jemil, and Big Mahmoud were all Palestinians and experienced fedayin, and he expected them to do their parts well. The other two, Hussein and Little Mahmoud, were immigrant boys who had never been on a real operation before, but they would probably suffice for front and rear security. They were, or should be, already in position at the target. He did not expect serious opposition in a house full of women taken by surprise.
It had not been difficult to determine where the girl had gone to ground once they started to make serious inquiries. Professor Adouri had been his usual helpful self, with a timely phone call about the Daoud dagger and the police interest in it, and from there it had not been hard to find the name of the victim in the case with the funny knife, which had led to the pimp, Kingman, who had been delighted to supply the name of the blondie ho the girl they were looking for used to hang with, and it had not been hard to lift Cindy one evening at the bus station, and a quite brief conversation with her had led to the EVWS being mentioned as one of the places Cindy had recommended someone like Fatyma could run to. They had then paid a woman to go in there with a story and a couple of brats, and this person had confirmed Fatyma’s residence and its precise location. So far, so easy. On the other hand, his confidence had been badly shaken by the affair of the Mexican. Nevertheless, he clapped each man on the back and cried, as expected, “Usrub! Aleikum!” with his fist raised. Strike! On to them! And they all echoed. He hoped it raised their spirits, as it did not his own. They climbed into the van and drove slowly off.