Tran was dozing in a stuffing-gushing armchair in a hallway on the second floor of the shelter when he heard the thump from above, a thump and then the squeal of bending metal. The origin of these noises told him that the place was being raided by people who knew what they were doing, because you assault any urban structure from the roof down. Then you can set up your kill and capture zones at the more easily controllable street-level exits. The only question now was, were they just good, or very good? If they were good, he had ninety seconds, and that must be the case because if they had been very good he would have heard nothing; he would have been dead already. He moved quickly into the bedroom behind him, snatched up the sleeping Lucy in her blankets, and slipped into the clothes closet.
Lucy jerked awake and stiffened. Tran placed his hand over her mouth and whispered in Cantonese, “Do not make a sound. Someone is attacking the shelter, and we must be very silent. You must hide under this blanket at the back of the closet, and do not move! Understand?”
Lucy made a faint noise and curled into a ball, with the blanket over her. She wondered if she were dreaming or if this were real life.
Tran cracked the closet door a half inch. Three men dressed in dark track suits and ski masks entered the room. The first two were armed with machine pistols. The third carried nothing but a large sack of some thick cloth. He had strips of duct tape stuck to his chest. This last man leaped upon Fatyma as she slept, mashed a strip of tape over her mouth, spun her around, secured her hands behind her with tape strips, got her thrashing legs under control and taped them too, and finally pulled the sack over her head and shoulders, securing it with additional taped strips. The man spoke to the others briefly in a language Tran did not know. He hoisted the girl up on his shoulders like a rolled carpet, and the three men left.
Tran, who knew a good deal about the subject, thought it a fairly competent snatch, a little noisy perhaps, a hair slow, but certainly sufficient against a site that was prepared to deal only with the random violence expected from estranged boyfriends. He put his pistol away and got Lucy to her feet.
“What happened?” she asked, now sure that it was not a dream.
“Your friend Fatyma has been kidnapped by several men.”
“What!” The girl rushed into the room, saw that it was true, and turned angrily on Tran. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
“Because they were many and heavily armed and I am one, and besides it is my duty to protect you and not others. Put your clothes on. We must leave instantly.”
Lucy was about to object, but something in Tran’s look dissuaded her from doing so. “Don’t look!” she said. Tran turned his back while she yanked off the T-shirt she’d slept in and pulled on her clothes. As she did, she heard heavy footsteps from above, a shout, the report of a large-caliber handgun, more shouts, screams, the peculiar ripping roar of an automatic weapon, a slamming door, a woman crying for help. These sounds accelerated her dressing. Then she was being pulled and pushed through hallways full of frightened women and children out into the chilly street. Tran hailed a cab on Avenue B. Sirens sounded in the distance as they drove off. Shortly they were back at the loft, confronting a white-faced Marlene, who, surprisingly, was not in bed but up and in the process of getting dressed as they entered.
“Where are you going?” Lucy demanded, after she had blurted out her version of the recent events, and Tran had delivered a less emotional précis.
“I have to see a client,” said Marlene. “It’s an emergency.”
“But what about Fatyma?” cried Lucy.
“Who’s Fatyma?” asked Karp, staggering into the kitchen in his robe and pajamas. “What’s going on, Marlene? It’s three in the morning.”
“I’ll explain later,” said the wife. “Could you please put Lucy to bed?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Karp sleepily. Then he noticed that Marlene was dressed. “Wait a second … you’re going out? What’s happening?”
“Joan Savitch just shot and killed her husband,” said Marlene. “A client. I got to go walk her through the system, and I have to leave now. Please, just get Lucy to bed and I’ll call you later today.” She kissed him and left, followed by the Vietnamese. Karp sighed and led his daughter to her bedroom, where he watched her undress with perfect modesty under her nightie, and then tucked her in, and comforted her while she cried about Fatyma, in the process learning a little about who Fatyma was, and, putting the night’s events together with what he knew about an Arab girl wanted for a killing and connected somehow with a terrorist operation, he experienced (and suppressed) a wave of white-hot rage against his wife.
“What will happen to Fatyma, Daddy?”
“Don’t worry about it now, baby. Just try to get some sleep.”
“No, tell me! I can’t sleep because I’m worried about her.”
“Okay, look: the cops will come, and maybe the FBI too, because it’s a kidnapping. They’ll check all the people she knew to find out who would want to kidnap her. Maybe the kidnappers left some clues. They’ll find her. The main thing is, it’s not your worry. You’re ten years old, Luce. You’re a little girl. Just ’cause your mom’s decided to be Batwoman, it doesn’t mean you have to get sucked up in all this stuff. All right?”
“They were Arabs,” Lucy said sleepily.
“Who were, honey?”
“Those men. The kidnappers. They were talking Arabic.” She yawned. “He said, ‘Abdel, you go first, Rifaat behind. Let’s go!’ ”
Detective Ray Netski had this Saturday as his regular day off, but he was working anyway, and he was not going to put in for overtime either. For the last few days Hrcany had been on his butt about Morilla, which seemed in the process of becoming seriously untied. Then there was this business about the threats. Netski could not imagine who would be so stupid as to threaten a prosecutor; in his experience such threats were entirely the province of wackos. Professional criminals like the Obregons simply did not do such things, although twenty years on the job had taught him that there was an exception to nearly any rule.
Which was why he was now standing alone in front of the door to an apartment in Washington Heights, on his own time, preparing to brace the woman, Concepción Erbes, and find out whether she was the source of the threatening notes or knew who was. Netski knew from looking over the jail’s phone records that Jesus Obregon had made numerous calls to this apartment. He had interviewed Connie Erbes several times way back when the case was fresh, and had found her in possession of only limited gun-moll knowledge of the criminal doings of her pals (although she had confirmed their phony story in every particular, sad to say), but he had to start someplace, and there were all those calls.
He knocked on the door. Some seconds later it was flung wide, not by Connie but by a thin young man who was snarling, “Where the fuck you been …” as he opened the door and stopped, scowling, when he saw that the person at the door was not the one he had anticipated.
Netski flashed his shield. “I want to talk to Connie Erbes,” he said, looking this character over. He was dressed in white jeans and socks, and had a wide bandage wrapped low around his bare abdomen. There was a spot of brownish red about the size of a nickel soaking through just over the hipbone.
“She ain’t here,” said the young man, starting to close the door.
“Know where I could find her?” asked Netski, moving his foot and his body forward.
“No,” said the young man, and Netski said, “Mind if I come in and wait?” clearly a rhetorical question, since he had already pushed his wide shoulders and solid hips through the door. Netski was a big guy, well over two hundred pounds. He had a meat-slab face, graying blond hair, and pale eyes. These took in the immediate scene in the apartment’s living room. Some smashed furniture. Stacks of take-out containers on the coffee table. Wads of bloody dressings strewn around. An assemblage of first-aid supplies—antiseptic, bandages, gauze pads, tape, scissors.
“Looks like you got hurt, fella,” said Netski. “How’d it happen?”
“At work. Is construction job. I fell on a nail.”
“Oh, yeah? Where was that? I mean, what job?”
“Some job. Downtown.”
“Uh-huh. What’s your name, fella?”
“Fernando Zedillo.”
“And what’re you doing here, Paco? I mean, excuse me, but you don’t look like you work much construction. You keeping the old bed warm for Obregon? A little snuggle with Connie while the big man’s in the calaboza? I tell you what, Paco, let’s you and me take a tour of this crib, see what we can find, all right?”
Netski gestured to the hallway that led from the living room. The young man hesitated a moment and then walked off docilely enough. The first door led to the kitchen—dirty but otherwise innocent. The next door led to a bedroom.
Netski had no sense of danger. He was there to interview a woman; the real bad guys were in jail; there was this pretty boy who looked like maybe somebody stuck him, which in Netski’s experience was an occupational hazard of pretty boys.
So he didn’t have his gun out, he didn’t have his hands on the kid, he didn’t kick the doors open, holding the kid in front of him like a shield, which is what he would have done had he had any sense of danger.
The kid walked into the bedroom and over to the bed, which was unmade, and picked up a pillow. Netski just had time to take in what else was in the room, in the corners, stacked, the machine guns, the rocket launchers, the magazines, the little egg pile of hand grenades, and time to feel the first thrill of fear and reach for his pistol, but not enough time to do anything useful before El Chivato shot him three times in the chest through the pillow.
Marlene came back to the loft shortly before eleven on Saturday morning, having shepherded Joan Savitch through criminal justice system hell, and then visited Mattie Duran in the hospital. Of the two women, Marlene thought that Mattie would recover sooner, despite having taken 9mm rounds through thigh and collarbone.
The Savitch business had, fortunately, been a perfectly straightforward case. Gerald Savitch, ex-husband of Ms. Savitch, having been released from prison the day before, had used a wrecking bar to break into Ms. Savitch’s apartment, thus gaining entry illegally during the hours of the night, upon the discovery of which Ms. Savitch had confronted him and ordered him to leave, whereupon, he refusing and advancing toward her in a menacing fashion with the wrecking bar, and she in fear of her life or grievous bodily harm, she had fired five .38-caliber hollow-points into his chest, killing him instantly. Marlene had managed to get the woman released on her own recognizance even given the charge of homicide, the authorities being fairly sympathetic to householders who shoot guys who break in at night. Savitch would have to appear before a grand jury at some future time and explain the death, but Marlene had little doubt that the jury would find the shooting justifiable homicide and no crime.
Yes, the legal part was dandy. What Marlene was dragging behind her like a sack of dead mackerel as she entered her home was the other stuff that always surrounded death by violence, especially death by violence by loved ones, especially messy death by violence by loved ones, with big hollow-point wounds, not as seen on the TV, blowing great gouts of estranged-Dad flesh over the tweed couch and the framed picture of the kids and the nice blue shag rug, and the blood actually gurgling and hissing out of the blown aorta, another thing (besides, of course, the smell) that the media are reluctant to depict, blood mist filling the air and spraying a fine carmine airbrush-like pattern over the table and the chairs and the ceiling, and over Mom with the smoking gun and the two little boys, seven and ten, standing there, watching.
And, inevitably, the various horrified feelings, the real, the ancient gut-ripping feelings, which turn out to be not at all ameliorated by all the hundreds or thousands of dramatized killings we have all seen, but are just as vivid as they were the day Clytemnestra whacked Agamemnon, king of men, those feelings, after taking some twisting caroms around the psyche of the formerly abused lady, popped out at—who else?—the author of the event, the supplier of the deadly weapon, the enabler, Marlene herself. And Marlene had to take it, the blame, the rage, the shame, the horror, the dumping, because what could she say? Congratulations? Ding-dong, the witch is dead?
Baby giggles and a peculiar shuffling sound greeted her as she entered the loft. Her husband had brought out a four-foot-high plastic basket and backboard into the wide, smooth hallway, and he was on his knees playing b-ball of a sort with his twin sons, using a six-inch green Nerf sphere. Much of this game consisted of wild heaves by the boys and scrambling after the loose ball, but occasionally one of them caught a pass or hit close enough to the backboard so that Karp could flick it in and crow, “Swish! Two points!”
Ordinarily, this scene lifted Marlene’s heart, but not today, with the faces of Savitch’s two boys occupying her interior TV. And there was the unfinished business with the shelter and the Arab girl that would have to be thrashed through with Butch and, God knew, she didn’t have the energy just now. She waved at Karp and got a wave in return, a formal one, like a salute, and then she went into the bedroom and stripped. She hooked up the thick, old-fashioned Koss headphones to the cassette deck of the bedroom’s stereo and slapped in Glenn Gould doing The Well-Tempered Clavier. Wrapped in her sleazy kimono and trailing the twenty-foot cord that was pumping heavenly order into her ears, she marched to the huge rubber hot tub, dropped the robe, and submerged up to her neck. Hot tears leaked from her eyes and dimpled the black surface of the water.
As for Karp, contrary to appearances, he had not spent the morning entirely in fatherly Saturday a.m. pursuits. Posie had left him with cleaned and fed twins before departing for her regular day off. Lucy was sleeping in. Plopping the boys in front of the most lurid and violent cartoons on offer, he had worked the phones. As the district attorney’s sole deputy, and as a former homicide bureau chief of some luster, Karp still drew a good deal of water in the murky channels of Manhattan’s criminal justice system. Cops from working-stiff detectives to precinct captains took his calls, and fed him more or less the straight line. He managed to grab the Fifth Precinct night-shift detective lieutenant, a man named Eric Schenck, before that tired fellow had gone off duty, and extracted from him the full story of the women’s shelter raid.
“Funny business,” Schenck said, his voice husky with smoke and coffee and the end of a Friday night East Village shift. “They came in through the roof door. Looked like a pro job, but nothing taken—hell, nothing there to take. The director there, that Duran woman, blasted away at the perps with that big Colt she keeps, and they returned fire from some kind of nine-milli auto weapon, the proverbial hail of fucking lead. She got hit twice, but lucky. She’s stable at Saint Vs. What’s your interest here?”
“Couple of angles,” said Karp. “One, my wife works with them—a kind of volunteer, so I was concerned. The other thing is that Arab girl that got lifted—she’s connected to a couple of homicides I’m looking at. …”
“Wait a second! What Arab girl? Nobody said anything about an Arab girl.”
“Yeah, I guess. I imagine you know, the shelter being on your turf and all, that Ms. Duran sometimes pinches the criminal code of the state of New York when it suits her.”
A short, hollow chuckle sounded on the other end. “Oh, yeah. Mattie and I go way back. We’ve been known to look the other way, and she does what she thinks is right, which if you want to know, most cops would agree with. We cut her a lot of slack because she’s a fucking indispensable resource. Harboring a homicide suspect is a little rich even for her, though. Who was she?”
“Name’s Fatyma Daoud,” said Karp. “Age fourteen, around there. The story is she’s a runaway, the dad is an old-fashioned kind of guy, wanted to marry her off, kept her chained up. Yeah, literally. This is the kind of daddy who when the girl acts up figures death before dishonor. In any case, she runs, ends up on the Deuce, with the usual results. Oh, yeah, when she split she took the family dagger, and apparently when some pimp tried to get heavy with her, she stuck him with it. That’s how we traced it was her. Then she headed for the shelter.”
“Okay,” said Schenck ruminatively, “this stuff is coming back. There was a circular about this girl a little while ago. So she whacked a pimp on the Deuce—this is not the focus of your interest, I’m thinking. I mean, it’s not the kind of case you guys usually go after teeth and claws.”
“No, we usually handle those with a framed certificate of appreciation and a nice dinner,” said Karp. “The interesting part is the Daoud connection. The girl’s brother, Walid, was the guy who fingered the perps in the Shilkes case. You remember Shilkes?”
“Who could forget?” There was a brief silence on the line as Lieutenant Schenck engaged his experienced and highly paid, if exhausted, detective brains. “Um. So … brother Walid has, could I say, terrorist connections? The family wants the sister back, and suddenly we have the sister kidnapped by a well-drilled team carrying automatic weapons. You’re assuming that Arabs grabbed her? That there’s an operating Arab terrorist cell in New York City?”
“Oh, it’s more than an assumption. There’s no question she was lifted by Arabs.”
“What do you mean, no question?”
“My daughter happened to be staying in the same room as the girl. She was hiding when the snatch went down and heard the perps speaking Arabic. By the way, according to her, you’re looking for an Abdel and a Rifaat.”
“Your daughter speaks Arabic?”
“Among other things—it’s a long story. Meanwhile…”
“And—wait a minute—she was, like, pals with this fugitive …”
“Well, Lieutenant,” replied Karp, dropping his tone down half the Kelvin scale, “of course no one in my family knew she was a fugitive. What do you take me for?”
“Yeah, sure, but … okay, let’s see here. Tell you the truth, Mr. Karp, I got a lot of expertise chasing P.R.’s down stairways in Alphabet City. Black fucking September is a little out of my line. I’m open for suggestions. I mean, there must be other parts of the system plugged into this.”
“Yeah, there is, sort of. The key guy is Jim Raney up at Midtown South. You know him?”
“Oh, yeah, everybody knows Pistol Jim. He was through the Five a couple years back. He’s got the Shilkes thing, right?”
“Right. What you need to do is give Jim a heads-up on this raid, share your material with him, the ballistics and other forensic stuff. My sense is this is going to end up in a city-wide task force, operating out of the fourteenth floor, and you might as well start laying it off on Raney.”
Karp knew that neither Schenck nor his watch commander would have to be nudged very hard to get rid of a file like that, and his casual mention of the deck of One Police Plaza where the chiefs of the NYPD dwelt in their glory could not but accelerate such a movement. After Karp had finished with Schenck, he called Midtown South and, on being told Raney was at home, used Marlene’s Rolodex to get Raney’s home number. The detective listened without comment as Karp filled him in on the night’s events.
“That’s what we know so far,” Karp said, “and the obvious next step is to talk to the Daouds, dad and junior.”
“Yeah, I’ll get on it,” Raney said. Then, after a thoughtful pause, “Well. It’s out of the closet now, anyway. That ought to make Fulton happy. Have you heard from him on the FBI angle yet?”
“Not yet,” said Karp. “I got to go now, Raney. I have to call the D.A.”
Which he did, and informed that gentleman about what was indeed out of the closet: that an armed, skilled body of Arab terrorists was in fact operational and at large in New York City.
Khalid owned nearly a dozen separate identifications, only some of which were known to his employer, and he selected one of the unknown ones, which conveniently had an Hispanic surname (Jorge Gomez) for his Saturday visit to Rikers Island. Jodón Obregon did not know any Jorge Gomez, but he assumed that this was a pseudonym of his agent, El Chivato. He was therefore astounded to discover the visitor’s chair on the other side of the glass occupied by the man he knew as Lucky.
They stared at one another for a moment, each of them maintaining the calm visage required in such meetings. Khalid spoke first, in English, their common tongue. “That’s quite a boy you sent after me.”
Obregon allowed himself a tiny smile. “Yes. He is really the best.”
Khalid shrugged. “Well, he has succeeded in disturbing my business, and I can’t afford to have my business disturbed. I underestimated you, I admit that. I thought you were a chicken; it turns out you are a tiger. So, I was mistaken, and I have to pay for the mistake. The main thing is for both of us to return to business with no hard feelings.”
“I’m listening,” said Obregon.
“Hard feelings are not businesslike. I figure, your interests are elsewhere, my interests are elsewhere too. We started out on the wrong foot, but we could make it right. On the other hand, you could say, hey, this guy Lucky, he fucked me, I have to get revenge, but in that case we have war. Maybe your guy gets me, maybe I get you, maybe we’re both dead. This don’t make sense, agree?”
Obregon nodded.
“Okay,” Khalid continued, “here’s what I see the fix is. The guy who killed the cop Morilla is named Ahmed Falani. As it happens, he’s dead too. Now, suppose the police find his body, and on this body they find the policeman Morilla’s identification—”
“And the fingerprints,” Obregon interrupted. “Tell me, did this Falani really do it, or is this another story?”
“No, really. Morilla was too close to our operation, and … what did you mean about fingerprints?”
“My lawyer tells me that besides my idiot brother’s fingerprints on the gun there are others, on the bullets in the magazine. This was to be a point in our favor at the trial, a weak one, but you know, if your man’s really match these …”
“Of course. Also, there is a little man I know, a smalltime distributor who informs for the police. Sometimes these people are useful, as now, do you see? Let us say, he goes to the police, he says, ah, this Ahmed Falani, he was boasting to me how he killed this Narco cop and blamed the Obregons, and of course, he will have the whole story, with many details that only the police know, as if from the mouth of Ahmed. So that confirms the story, and you will be released. Now, as to the money … let us say our original agreement, the two million, plus, oh, ten percent for this … trouble, and to ensure good feelings. You are now—how should I say?—whole, with something extra, and free to go your way. This is satisfactory?”
Obregon did not answer immediately. He had imagined this scene many times. He had planned it, of course, and now it was bearing fruit. The problem was Lucky himself. He had expected to encounter a man terrorized, helpless, not the calm and confident figure who now faced him. There was not enough suffering here, and that made him suspicious. Ten percent, that was fine, but did it really pay for the indignity? No, of course not, but revenge could wait. In fact, it was better to wait, until this chingada would be off his guard, relaxed, enjoying himself, at which time Jesus Obregon would repay. He smiled at the man and nodded. “Yes, satisfactory, as you say. My lawyer is named Manuel Huerta. He will accept the money. When it is in his hands and your arrangements have made them release me and my brother, I will call off El Chivato.”
“Is that his name? Yes, but there is one other small thing. This man, he has taken something of mine, some information, which he must not have. It is not a matter of money, but political. You must arrange for him to be … delivered to me. Or else there is no deal—we go back to start and either your boy gets me or I get him, but either way you’re in jail and broke. So decide.”
It took little additional thought. Getting rid of El Chivato would represent a substantial savings for Jodón on the boy’s fee, as well as putting Lucky off his guard. There were any number of boys working the same trade along the border, and if none of them had quite the style of El Chivato, one or another of them would do just as well: when he returned to Mexico he could send them against this Arab in squads.
“All right,” Obregon said. “When the money is paid and we are released, I will give him to you.”
“When you are released, but before the money is paid,” said Khalid.
“Half the money first,” said Obregon, “and half after.”
“As you like,” said Khalid.
It was one of the chief virtues of the Karps’ marriage that in times of stress, when the fan was roaring and spraying the local volume with innumerable fragments of shit, they could suspend the usual who-struck-John business that occupies so much of married discourse, and drop together into the sort of cool collegial space in which they had both been trained to function.
It was by this time about two in the afternoon, on the Saturday before Palm Sunday. The boys had been exhausted, fed, and laid out for their naps; Marlene had finished her healing music and her bath and taken a nap of her own; Lucy had emerged around noon, made some calls and been picked up by a gaggle of Chinese-American girls of her own age, and was off watching a Bruce Lee marathon at the Chinese movie house on Canal, discreetly trailed by Tran; Karp had made a large number of calls, nearly all of which were unwelcome to the recipients, and was taking his ease in front of the TV, desultorily watching Wake Forest play a basketball game against Syracuse, and toying with some notes for the meeting he had set up for the Monday.
His wife entered the living room and plopped herself down next to him. She was warm and smelled of roses, and he put his arm around her.
“What’s the score, counselor?” she asked, snuggling in.
“I’m just calculating that very thing, counselor,” Karp replied. “I believe the bad guys are ahead at present, but the good guys are tanned, rested, and about to come out swinging.” Whereupon he reviewed the calls and arrangements he had made, she commenting intelligently and making several good suggestions, and, by way of coda, adding, “I note you did not rat me out on the Fatyma thing. I appreciate it.”
“Your appreciation is noted and stored away for when needed,” said Karp.
“Short-term, my big worry is Fatyma. She was a nice kid: born yesterday, but a good spirit. Luce was really down about it.”
“Clearly a priority for the cops. Raney’s on it as we speak.”
“Yeah, well, good, but I intend to look around myself too,” she said, glancing at Karp significantly.
“Look away, Wonder Person,” said Karp blandly. “I wish you luck.”
“Hmm, a changed fellow,” said Marlene. “No lectures? No furrowed brow?”
“Not a furrow,” said Karp. “And I also get points for not saying a word about you leaving our precious little girl in environs where automatic weapons are likely to be discharged.”
“I noticed. So what’s up? You changed your medication?”
“Not at all. Just the calm resignation that comes with maturity. Now that I’m semi-retired, I have time to take the long view, and also recent events have reconnected me with the ancient Talmudic traditions of my people. I’m married to you—that’s not going to change. As I’ve often said, either you’ll get nailed or you won’t. If not, fine, life goes on. If yes, I will visit you every weekend at the Bedford Correctional Institution, I’ll bring you from Dean and DeLuca, I’ll bring you from Zabar’s. I’ll take videos, the kids shouldn’t forget what you look like. When you get out, I’ll help with your rehabilitation, find you a decent job—maybe food service, maybe transportation …”
“Gosh, what a prince!” said Marlene. “I’m throbbing with gratitude.”
“As well you should be. As for the rest, the risks, the kids, I figure, you live in Kansas, it’s tornadoes; in California, it’s quakes; in New York, it’s my wife’s chosen lifestyle, so I’m either going to live in fear forever, or just live, and forget this Jewish mother catastrophe business. I’m overcoming my cultural conditioning is what it is.”
“I thought you were getting closer to the traditions of your people.”
“Closer, further, what’s the difference? It’s a mystical thing. It’s hard to explain.”
“To a shiksa, yeah. Is this where you start going dy-da-dee-dee-dee-deedle like in Fiddler on the Roof?”
“If it would make you love me more.”
“Um, let me pass on that,” she said. “As a matter of fact, though, I can’t recall a time recently when I did love you more. Understanding always makes me throb. Do you think that there’s the remotest chance that we could sneak in a hot quickie without waking up the twins?”
The phone awakened Roland Hrcany out of a sodden sleep just past noon on Palm Sunday. He cursed and pulled the pillow over his head and let the machine pick it up.
But when he heard the message, he cursed again and rolled over and grabbed the phone. Into it he growled, “Timmons, it’s Palm Sunday, why aren’t you in church?”
An unenthusiastic chuckle on the line. Detective Inspector Pat Timmons was a Police Plaza suit known to be close to the chief of detectives himself, and the man especially charged with following cases of particular interest to the NYPD in the County of New York. Like cop killings.
“Roland, yeah, I’m sorry to bother you at home, but we got a situation here. It’s going to reflect on Morilla.”
Roland was instantly awake and alert. “What happened?”
“Last night the Six logged an anonymous call, there’s a body in the trunk of a car under the highway. They checked it out and there it is, late model Firebird, New York plates, a stiff in the trunk, dark-complexioned male, late twenties, took one shot, small-caliber, in the face. The preliminary from the M.E. says dead a couple of days. They search him and find Morilla’s shield and ID in his pocket. So naturally, their attention is drawn.”
“No shit. Who was he?”
“No other ID, but a little later, this’d be around five this morning, a skell picked up in a drug sweep in Brooklyn last night calls a detective named Melville out of the Seven-seven. This mutt’s Melville’s snitch, been feeding him stuff for years, named Crenshaw, Kibble Crenshaw. He’s got a story. Apparently he’s in a bar last week talking to one of his associates, an Arab named Falani, supposed to be muscle for some kind of dope gang, and this Falani tells him the whole story about how he whacked Morilla, and ripped off these two greasers, and planted the murder gun on them. Melville figures this is worth checking out, so he calls Ray Netski. He doesn’t get him. No Netski. It turns out nobody’s seen Netski since Friday, when he told his squad sergeant at the Two-five he was going to look into something for you. You got any idea where he went, by the way?”
“Not a clue. He didn’t call in or anything?” Roland felt his stomach start to roll into a hard, painful knot.
“Not that I’ve heard,” said Timmons. “In any case, Fuller, the sergeant there, tells Melville to drive the mutt over to the Two-five and Netski’ll talk to him when he shows. Meanwhile, Fuller fields another call for Netski from Detective Alfasano at the Six, who’s holding Morilla’s ID in his hand and what should he do? After that this shit fucking flies up the chain of command, and I get a call at about seven this morning. Let me cut to the chase. One, Crenshaw ID’d the stiff positively as Ahmed Falani, the guy he heard the story from. Two, the plates on the Firebird are stolen, and the VIN’s etched off. Three, Netski’s not at his apartment, he’s not at his girlfriend’s apartment, and his kids don’t know where he is. We got a bulletin out on him, city-wide. Four—you’re gonna love this…”
“Let me guess,” said Roland. “The unmatched thumb prints on the unfired bullets in the Morilla murder weapon are from the dead guy.”
“You got it, son. Speaking of bullets, I think you just dodged a big one. You would’ve looked like a piece of shit this stuff had come up during the trial.”
“Yeah,” said Roland weakly. “Lucky me.”
“Look, I got Fuller coordinating all the paperwork, the forensics, the snitch’s statement and so forth, and he’ll ship that over to your shop. I’ll have our P.R. people get with your P.R. people, and we’ll work up a joint statement for the press.”
The conversation dribbled away in details. Roland hardly listened. For some reason, all he could think of at the moment was Karp.
Somewhat to Khalid’s surprise, Ibn-Salemeh was perfectly calm when he heard the story Khalid had concocted. Bashar and Ahmed were gone, and they had apparently taken two point two million dollars from one of the cash drops the organization maintained.
“The other drops are safe?”
“I checked them all and moved them in case they thought to come back. Nothing else is missing.” He watched Ibn-Salemeh stroke his beard. The man’s eyes never left the television set, which was showing Jeopardy.
“Will we cancel the mission, effendi?” Khalid asked.
“No. Why should we?”
“If they betrayed us in this, why not in everything?”
“Pah! Ahmed and Bashar did not betray us. Clearly they were tortured into revealing the hiding place of the money, and they are surely dead now. This is the work of those Mexicans. I see now that it was an error to have cheated them. We must find some way of eliminating that pressure.”
Khalid could hardly believe what he was hearing. Controlling his elation, he said, “That would be a wise move, effendi. If you will allow, I will take care of it myself.”
Karp arrived at Moiseh’s Second Avenue Dairy a little before one on Sunday. The place was jammed, and he had to wait for a table. The customers appeared to consist of a minority of actual eastern European-derived Jews enjoying their native cuisine and a majority of assorted goyim having an exotic experience of a vanishing culture: bagels, lox, blintzes, and the famously rude waiters. Karp hadn’t been here for years, and although himself an assimilation cheerleader, the transformation of Moiseh’s from a living cultural institution to a sort of museum de cuisine made him inexplicably sad.
Aaron Zwiller’s arrival, punctually at one, in his full Hasidic regalia, caused a minor stir, a raising of heads and a murmur from the tourists (Is that a Jew, Ma? Shh, dear!), and when the tan-coated elderly waiter came by, slamming a basket of rolls down on the table, they ordered. Karp went for the cold borscht with sour cream with a boiled potato in it and the blintzes; Zwiller ordered the white fish plate and a glass of tea. After ordering, he excused himself, and Karp figured he was going to wash his hands, as required by ritual.
The food came, Zwiller returned, sat, and murmured a borucha. They started to eat. Zwiller did not seem in any hurry to convey information. To make conversation, Karp commented on the goodness and authenticity of the food, and that he did not get much of it anymore.
Zwiller raised a set of bushy eyebrows. “Your wife don’t cook?”
“She cooks very well, but not this. I married an Italian.”
Zwiller frowned. “You know, this is an interesting thing, Mr. Karp. People like you marry outside and become goyim, and at the same time completely assimilated Jews, people very much like yourself, return to orthodoxy. Baalei teshuva, they’re called.”
“I know,” said Karp. “My brother is one.”
Zwiller nodded. “Yes. Some of these simply wish to be reunited with their people, and to live and raise their children in holiness and piety. Others … others are angry, full of rage—it gives them a kind of reason for living, to think of themselves as defenders of embattled Israel. Perhaps it is part of the poison left over from the Holocaust; perhaps it is from some mixed-up notions about the state of Israel. You know, there are many orthodox who believe that we must rebuild the temple in Jerusalem before the Mosiach will return. In any case, many of these Americans make the aliyah, and in Israel they join the radical right parties, Kach, for example, and build settlements in Judea and Samaria, and carry guns, and beat up Arabs, and behave like people in cowboy movies. I find this very distressing. My reading of Torah is that it is all about peace and justice and the respect for human life.”
“I take it Rabbi Lowenstein doesn’t agree.”
Zwiller put his knife and fork down and directed a blue glare at Karp. “I didn’t say that. Rabbi Lowenstein is young. He is about to inherit the leadership from a genuine saint, a tzaddik. Reb Lowenstein, whatever his talents, is not a tzaddik. I believe this gnaws at him. He has great energy. It may be that, in confusion of spirit, this energy flows into areas that may not be in accord with the spirit of the Law.”
“By law,” asked Karp, “do you mean those of New York state or the Talmud?”
Zwiller sighed and twirled a finger in the fringes of his beard. Karp judged that he was a man in some discomfort, pulled between his loyalty to a tight-knit group and his sense of righteousness. “Both,” said Zwiller. Almost to himself, he added, “It is better to betray a city, so that the city fall, than to be false to the Lord, blessed be He.”
Karp felt there was no good response to this statement, so he waited. After what seemed a long time, it came. “As you may know, I handle various financial duties for our community. In this regard I’ve noticed recently, the past few months or so, certain transfers of funds for which I have no good explanation. Through Israeli banks. Not a lot, but enough to be troublesome. Then just in the last week we have had visitors. From Israel. This is not unusual, of course: between Williamsburg and Israel there is naturally a continual going and coming, our people visit the holy land, those who have made aliyah return to visit relatives and so on. But these boys … I don’t know, Mr. Karp. They are supposed to be teachers, in our yeshivas, this is the story, but they don’t look like yeshiva teachers to me. Also they have bags, big green military duffel bags, that maybe are not full of clothes.” He paused and checked to see that Karp was following this somewhat oblique account.
Karp said, “You think the rabbi is assembling a group of hard guys and serious weapons.”
Zwiller seemed to ignore this statement. “You know, first it was the Guardians of Israel, a few boys in cars, patrolling the neighborhood at night with radios. They discourage burglars, nogoodniks from the other areas—we had break-ins, rapes, people are incensed, and the police don’t seem to be able to stop it. Then the boys start carrying clubs, bats, they chase away the schvartzers, the Spanish. Then I hear they’re quoting Talmud: if anyone comes to kill you, you are permitted to kill him first. So it follows from this, why wait like lambs for them to come after us? Why don’t we go where they are, make them fear us, like in Israel. They don’t wait to get attacked, they go in, they clean out the nests of terrorists in Lebanon. …”
He stopped. More beard twirling. His food was forgotten, but he took a deep draft of sweetened, lemony tea. Karp said, “Mr. Zwiller, if you have any information about a specific illegal act these men are about to commit, or even knowledge that they plan to break the law, you’re obliged to tell the authorities.”
Zwiller nodded. “Yes, I know, but I’ve been careful to hide my eyes, Mr. Karp. I’m not a policeman. I have nothing that could be used as evidence in a court of law, not even, I bet, enough for you to get a search warrant. Do you know, in ghetto days it was a crime under the Talmud to denounce a Jew to the goyische authorities, whatever the offense. A capital crime, Mr. Karp.”
“Do you think you might be in danger yourself, Mr. Zwiller?”
He smiled. “From the rabbinical court? I don’t think so. Times have changed. On the other hand, I have this fear. There seems to be so much anger, it seems so easy for it to slip over into violence. And so I think, yes, I’m in danger, you’re in danger, we’re all in danger.”