In the older sections of Brooklyn, anciently prosperous and some still well-off, the houses stand separately and are brick-built, and each one comes supplied with a ready-made dungeon, for until the clean-air ordinances of the mid-sixties, these houses were all heated by coal. Twice a year the filthy, huge trucks would back into the alleys that bordered each house, and out would come the steel chute, to be inserted into the cellar hole that stared blackly from the side of the house. Then the sooty man would haul on the chain, and with a rattling roar the coal cellar would fill with a couple of tons of number nine anthracite. With the coming of oil and gas heat, each householder had found himself with a small, brick-walled, uncleanably filthy room having a small outlet to the sky and a door leading to where the coal furnace used to be. Most of these coal cellars vanished behind the pine paneling of rumpus rooms or dens, their chutes bricked up, their doors replaced by gypsum-board walls.
In the house at 308 Sterling Street in Crown Heights owned by Chouza Khalid, the coal-cellar chute had indeed been bricked up, but the space had otherwise hardly been changed since the last load of coal had gone up the chimney. The house itself was a ninety-year-old three-story yellow brick town house with sandstone facings, set back from the street, the former front garden grown up with weeds and ailanthus and maple trees ten feet high that seemed to be trying hard to obscure the weathered realtor’s sign. The windows were boarded up with plywood. In its semi-derelict condition it had been a good deal for Khalid, who wanted a cheap place that no one else knew about, a bolt hole, and a hide for various liquid assets.
Naturally, the place had been used as a shooting gallery by the local addicts for some time, and Khalid’s first task, even before having the electricity, gas, and water turned on, was to discourage these people. This he did with a savagery unusual even in Brooklyn, and the word soon spread on the junkie grapevine that people who went into that house emerged seriously messed up or did not emerge at all. So they avoided the place. Khalid restored one bedroom and one bathroom to use, and put a thick, solid-core door on the coal cellar, doing all the work himself.
Fatyma lay on a mattress in this former coal cellar. A razor-thin bar of light came from under the door, dim during what must be the hours of daylight, and sharp on those occasions when someone turned an electric light on in the room outside the coal cellar. Otherwise, it was dark. And damp. The mattress was supplied with a gray wool blanket, and she spent most of the endless hours huddled in this. Twice each day (she thought) the light would go on outside, she would hear the sound of the bolts sliding out, and a big man would come in with a plastic box and a plastic bottle. He was very quick. He removed the old plastic box and bottle and left, locking the door behind him. Once, Fatyma had flattened herself next to the door frame and tried to dash out, but he had caught her easily, then he had hit her so hard on the jaw that she had blacked out for a moment. Her face still hurt from the blow. She had not tried it again; nor had she bothered to scream after the first day, when she had screamed until her throat was raw. She had no idea what he had planned for her, and this was perhaps the worst part of her captivity. Besides that first horrible moment in the car, when he had felt every part of her body, he had not molested her at all. This did not, however, assuage her fears for the future.
The light came on. The big man came in and made his switch of box and bottle. She heard him sniff. It was the smell from the portable toilet in the corner, a sharp chemical smell that did not quite cover the foetor of her waste. Then he left. Fatyma did not bother checking the food box. It was always the same: two hard-boiled eggs, two large, flat Arab loaves, a handful of olives, a sliced tomato, and a little paper packet of salt. Instead, she lay down flat with her cheek against the floor and took the thin, pointed sliver of slate she had found and dug. She was digging away at the thick layer of compressed coal dust that former decades had deposited on the floor of the coal cellar. For the past day she had dug a shallow bowllike hollow, filling it up with loose dust so she would not be found out. A few more scrapes and she was able to set the side of her head into the space so that her left eye was just level with the crack between the new door and the old uneven brick door sill. She could see a room harshly lit from overhead and the bottom of a large, dirty gray cylindrical form. The man’s shoes and ankles. Then his knees. He was kneeling before the gray structure. She heard the squeal of a metallic door opening, a scraping sound. She sighed in frustration. The angle was wrong for her to see what he was doing. A dull clang: he had closed the metallic door. She saw his feet move away, and nothing but utter blackness as he switched off the light.
Khalid was thinking about the girl as he washed his hands in the bathroom sink. He was reflecting about the time just after he captured her when he had run his finger into her warm little slit and found, to his great surprise, that she was an actual virgin. Khalid had dabbled in pimping during his Beirut days, and had occasionally engaged in the specialized aspect of the trade that involves the procuring of virgins for wealthy elderly men, in the course of which he had done that sort of probing enough to know what was what. The business had been enormously lucrative, but risky and a great deal of trouble, and after a while he had drifted into the more sensible and straightforward drugs and guns trade. The problem, in Lebanon, at least, was the Arab attitude toward their women. Even extremely poor families would not sell girls, so they had to be lifted, which was risky. It was not something one wished to get a reputation for doing. The usual practice was to import them from Albania, or buy them from Italian gypsies, or (more commonly) ship them in from the Far East, where apparently they grew on trees. The problem was that an eleven-year-old Thai or Filipino girl, although certified intact, was not an object to inflame the lusts of the average wealthy Arab customer. This girl was another thing entirely—a full woman’s body, a face like a ripe peach, and she spoke Arabic. Such an item could command any amount of money from one of a half dozen men that Khalid knew in the Gulf, and more than that, the girl offered as a gift (for Khalid had plenty of money now) to one of these men would go a long way toward securing sanctuary, a new identity in some air-conditioned villa in Kuwait or Bahrain where Ibn-Salemeh and his friends would not find him. He would have to think about how this might be accomplished.
Khalid drove the white Mercury carefully through the Brooklyn streets, just beginning to fill with the afternoon rush—east on Dean to Saratoga, left to Fulton, west to Ralph, where the gas station was. It had once been a Mobil station, and one wall still bore a faded mural of the old-style flying horse. The illuminated logo signs and the pumps were gone, but not the pump islands and the concrete roof that hung over them. Behind these stood a concrete-block three-bay garage and a small office. The place was now used as a brake and transmission shop. Four miscellaneous sedans were lined up on the apron to the left of the former pump island, in front of the wide bay doors, which were shut. A large red-painted wrecker was parked at the curb. A long, high pile of old tires stretched along the right side of the property, from near the street back to the rear lot. Khalid parked in this rear lot, a good spot, giving access to both Fulton Street and Ralph Avenue, at ten minutes before five and went into the office carrying a white Samsonite suitcase, Pullman size. He turned the light on, placed the suitcase on the counter, and sat down in a plastic chair to wait. From where he sat, he could not see Jemil or Hussein or Big Mahmoud, but he knew they were in position and armed with automatic weapons. As soon as the boy passed into the shadow of the pump island’s overhead shelter, there would be a brief spurt of fire from the Dodge Dart parked on the apron and from the shadows among the piles of tires. Hussein, he knew, was crouched below window level in the seat of the wrecker. If the boy became suspicious for any reason and tried to get back to his car, Hussein would roar out in the wrecker and block his move. So they waited for the Mexican.
Who was at the moment parked several streets away, in his Ford LTD, reading a sort of comic book with great interest. The comic book, a simple four-fold, was printed on thick, oil-proof paper, and its illustrations, drawn with the uncompromising clarity of Socialist Realism, showed how to set up, aim, and fire the RPG-7 rocket launcher. El Chivato had taken one of these weapons from the warehouse, together with a rack of three missiles for it, attached to a convenient backpack. He finished the comic book and compared its illustrations to the fat green, pipe-like device on his lap. After a little study he was able to load and arm the thing. The illustrations seemed to assume that two men would operate the weapon, but it was also clear that it could be loaded and fired by one. He flicked up the sight assembly and peered through it at the peaceful Brooklyn street. He returned the arming lever to the safe position and placed the rocket launcher on the passenger seat beside him.
As El Chivato drove off, he was extremely angry, actually more than angry (since he was angry most of the time), rather in a state beyond anger, a kind of single-minded, icy murderous calm. It had been a long time since someone had tried to set him up, and then it had been an extremely clever trap, involving a woman and occurring in a place where he had every reason to feel secure. He had killed four people for that (including the woman, who was, in fact, the first person he had actually skinned entire), and so no one had ever tried it again. To be set up in this incredibly clumsy way not only required vengeance as a professional matter, but involved a personal insult as well—did they really imagine him to be stupid! Beyond that, he was angry because, naturally, he would have to kill Lucky and all his party, and search out the Obregon brothers and kill them too, which meant, unless he was extraordinarily fortunate, a long search in New York, and perhaps Mexico, which meant that he might miss Easter with his family. And he did not feel fortunate anymore. His side ached. The wound was puffy and swollen. He had not had a bath in several days, having left the apartment where he killed the policeman. Now he lived in the car. This added to his anger, for he enjoyed being neat and clean.
At five-thirty, right on schedule, El Chivato pulled into the gas station. He did not drive up to the vacant pump island as if buying ten gallons of ghost hi-test, but parked just in from the street, turning the car so that the passenger side faced the island and the station structures.
Khalid saw the car stop, saw the boy get out. He hoped that his gunmen would wait, as he had instructed, until the little shit was well within the shadow of the pump-island shelter before opening fire. Then he saw the flash and instantly thereafter heard a peculiar flat, whooshing noise.
To anyone who spent the seventies in Beirut, as Khalid had, that particular flash and noise were nearly as familiar as the sound of traffic. Every one of the innumerable contending parties of that sad town had accumulated Soviet rocket launchers in numbers and used them with enthusiasm. They were not as common as Kalashnikovs, but common enough. Khalid had never had one fired directly at him before: it was like a tiny approaching sun with a black dot in its center. Almost without thought he dived over the counter and lay flat on the floor, with the Samsonite suitcase pulled close over his head and his knees drawn up in fetal position.
The rocket smashed through the plate-glass window and the double wallboard wall behind the counter. Antitank rockets need to hit something massive before they will explode, and this particular rocket found it in the rear concrete wall of the garage. Khalid heard a dull boom as the warhead blasted a foot-wide hole through the wall and sprayed the area behind it with molten steel and concrete.
A long ten seconds of silence. Khalid heard the sound of a submachine gun opening up—Jemil in the car out on the apron, from the sound, and then another from the Dumpster—Big Mahmoud, leaning on the trigger as usual. He would spray only the clouds and the trees shooting at that rate and probably a few bystanders as well. Khalid did not intend to stay around to find out which. He crawled through broken glass to the door that led from the office to the repair bays, and scuttled, bent nearly double, to the rear door of the garage.
The Mercury was there, smoking gently, no longer white. It had not received the full blast of the rocket’s charge, but a by-blow had been sufficient to render it permanently undriveable. Khalid said “Elaghkna!” (shit) and ran for the left side of the building. Poking his head around the corner at knee level, he observed that Jemil was still directing controlled fire at the Mexican’s car, which he now recognized as the Ford LTD Bashar had used. It was doubtful that he was doing any damage to the man, however, not with 9mm Parabellum. Khalid could not help but admire the positioning of the Mexican’s car, blocking lines of fire from the parked cars and all obvious cover on either side of the building. He really should have put someone on the roof with a Kalashnikov, he thought, but who could have imagined … ? What should be happening now was for Jemil to lay down a base of fire from the Dart and for Mahmoud, who was pouring slugs senselessly into the wreckage of the LTD, to work his way among the old tires to take the Mexican on his right flank, but Mahmoud would not have the sense to do this. When Mahmoud’s firing paused, Khalid yelled out in Arabic the order to do just that. Back came the shout, “I have no more ammunition.” Perfect. Then there was another flash-whoosh. Khalid ducked back behind the building and covered his head with his arms.
This rocket penetrated the engine block of the Dart and did what it was designed to do, which was to turn a small mass of solid steel into white-hot liquid. The car turned instantly into a fireball. The cars on either side burst into flame. Thick, choking black smoke poured into the air. From where he stood, Khalid could no longer see the Mexican’s car. He assumed that the Mexican could not see him either, and made his move. Pistol in hand, he raced around the rear ends of the flaming cars and, with a step on the running board, dived into the open window of the wrecker. There he found Hussein, crouched in the well of the driver’s side, holding his submachine gun like a teddy bear. There was white showing all around the pupils of his eyes as he stammered, “Effendi, I did not know what to do.”
“Then I will tell you what to do, Hussein,” said Khalid slowly, gasping for breath. “Start this vehicle and drive away.”
Enveloped in thick smoke, El Chivato did not see Khalid make his escape, but he heard the engine of the wrecker roar into life and saw the red blur as it pulled away from the curb. He heard sirens from many different directions. Even in Brooklyn, it is not possible to have a battle involving serious military hardware without attracting the attention to the authorities. El Chivato loaded his last rocket and carefully placed it with the rest of his equipment in a green duffel bag. He slung its strap across his chest, bandoleer style, and walked out of the smoke.
Cars were slowing down on Fulton Street to view the fire. No one took any notice of the slim youth as he walked quickly up the center line of the roadway. He could see the high red crane of the wrecker several streets ahead. At the first red light he walked up to the driver’s side of the first car in line and stuck dead Bashar’s 9mm Smith in the driver’s face.
The car was a black Chrysler New Yorker. As soon as El Chivato was in the driver’s seat, he gunned the engine and took off after the wrecker, cutting through the intersection of Fulton Street and Ralph Avenue against the light and causing a chorus of horns and two minor traffic accidents.
This maneuver caught the attention of the RMP called Seven Frank, manned by patrolmen Ed Graves and Manolo Echeverria. Seven Frank was a Seventy-ninth Precinct RMP, and it was responding to the “shots fired” call as a matter of routine. Seeing the smoke and hearing the fire engine sirens and seeing a large black car zoom through the intersection created a picture in the minds of the two patrolmen, a non-routine picture. Without a word Graves, who was driving, hooked a U-turn on Fulton and took off in pursuit. Echeverria called in the action and gave a description of the vehicle and its heading.
El Chivato swerved around a line of cars, driving down the center line of Fulton Street until he was directly behind the wrecker. He saw the flasher and heard the siren of the police car behind him, but paid no attention to it. He steered with his left hand, and with his right worked the wire-stocked AK-47 out of the duffel bag and placed it across his lap. After a moment he reached in again and brought out two Soviet RGN hand grenades and placed them in the cushioned rectangular hollow between the front seats that most drivers use to hold coffee cups and toll change.
Ahead, Hussein checked his rearview and spotted the Mexican tailgating them behind the wheel of the black sedan. Hussein was a much better driver than he was a street fighter, and he had a heavy, powerful vehicle to demonstrate it. He swerved from side to side, keeping the Mexican from coming up on his flank, and incidentally driving a half dozen cars into crashes of varying severity.
In Seven Frank, Patrolman Echeverria was working his radio, talking to his dispatcher, impressing upon her that this was something out of the ordinary. The dispatcher was responding, calling other RMPs in the area to set up a block somewhere up ahead.
“Holy shit!” said Patrolman Echeverria. This was not a phrase recognized in NYPD radio parlance. The dispatcher came back with, “Say again, Seven Frank.”
Echeverria said, “We’re taking automatic fire! A white male on the tow truck ahead of the black Chrysler, he just leaned out the window and fired an automatic weapon at us.”
The dispatcher acknowledged this and fielded calls from RMPs Three Eddie and Eight George, who said they were converging on the junction of Fulton Street and Bedford Avenue. They intended to close Fulton east-bound to avoid more civilian casualties, and wait for the fleeing vehicles to arrive. The dispatcher also fielded a call from Boy Sector ESU, which declared itself rolling toward the scene. The emergency service unit consisted of twelve heavily armed, specially trained police officers wearing attractive black costumes, Kevlar vests, helmets, and face shields. The dispatcher, hearing this, declared a “no further” on the call, on the reasonable assumption that this unit and the three RMPs represented enough police power to handle a couple of cars full of bad guys.
On the wide running board of the wrecker, Chouza Khalid fired another four rounds from Hussein’s Model 25, and cursed as they went high, shattering the light bar of the police car following. It was an impossible shooting task: he had to hold on to the door frame with his left hand and try to fire one-handed with his right, while the wrecker swerved this way and that and bounced wildly on the decrepit surface of the thoroughfare. He gave up and swung himself back into the seat, just in time to hear Hussein shriek, “What should I do? What should I do?”
Two police cars with their lights flashing were parked athwart the street, partially blocking all four lanes of the thoroughfare. White-helmeted police crouched behind the cars, and beyond these Khalid saw the flashing lights of a large blue and white van, which must mean reinforcements.
“Right turn!” screamed Khalid. “Don’t stop, smash through!”
This is what Hussein did: he floored the gas pedal, swung right, struck Three Eddie, the right-lane RMP, behind its rear wheel and knocked it skidding out of the way like a child’s toy. The two officers sheltering behind it, Joshua Rollins and Paula Nolan, were both dashed flat. The officers from Eight North fired after the wrecker but did not damage the massive vehicle.
El Chivato stepped on it too, roaring through the hole the wrecker had made in the roadblock like a running back following a guard. A bullet smashed through the left rear window of the Chrysler, spattering the back of his neck with sharp flakes of glass. He cursed, grabbed one of the grenades, pulled the pin, and tossed it backward out the window.
The grenade bounced twice and rolled, spending its forward velocity. After four seconds it exploded, three feet from the driver’s-side door of Seven Frank as it raced through the roadblock in hot pursuit.
Echeverria saw the flash and felt the heat of it, and heard the enormously loud sound. Something hard and hot slapped him on the side of the head. He looked over at Graves, who had no face and was on fire. Echeverria noted that he himself was on fire too, and that there was something that looked like a human lower jaw on his lap. Then Seven Frank crashed into the side of a parked truck.
Patrolman Lou Kravitzki of RMP Eight North sprang into his vehicle and grabbed the radio handset. He was the only cop available to do this at the roadblock, because his partner, Tom Parmignano, was giving CPR to Joshua Rollins, who looked to be going into shock with a cracked skull. Into the handset he shouted, “Eight North to Central. Ten-thirteen! Ten-thirteen! Officers down! Three … no, four officers down!”
As these magic words hit the air, the police world of north Brooklyn was transformed. The dispatcher pressed a button that generated a rapid, high beeping on all channels, and she repeated the message that police officers were injured at the junction of Fulton and Bedford. Kravitzki told his story over the air. Grenades. Machine guns. The cops in every RMP within five miles dropped what they were doing and sped forthwith to join the pursuit.
Bedford Avenue turns one-way north of Fulton Street, four lanes of normally fairly sedate traffic feeding commuters toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and trucks toward the Brooklyn industrial zones. Into this flow, at just past six on a Tuesday afternoon, a nodule of chaos inserted itself.
Hussein, having crashed through a police barrier, having heard the bullets strike his machine, now had his blood well and truly up, and he hit on the plan of slowing down the pursuit by strewing wreckage across the avenue. Therefore he proceeded to slam his heavy wrecker into the cars he overtook, in the manner of small boys playing bumper cars at Coney Island.
Unfortunately, the traffic was moving too slowly to allow the creation of any really horrendous pile-ups, although nearly twenty people were injured and one was killed. Behind them, their pursuers, the Mexican and the cops, were indeed slowed by the wreckage, but not entirely stopped.
Khalid was an experienced criminal and a wily man, and so he realized that one could not long escape pursuit in the streets of a major city in a large red-painted tow truck. It was clearly necessary to ditch the thing, and in such a way that they could escape unobserved. Accordingly he gave orders to Hussein.
As the wrecker crossed Flushing Avenue, it bulled its way into the center lane. In the rearview mirror Hussein observed that the black car had done the same, and also that there were now three police cars visible, lights flashing, sirens screaming, besides the large van, in pursuit.
A few seconds later Khalid shouted, “Now!” and Hussein whipped the wrecker into a screeching right turn across two lanes of traffic and onto narrow Hayward Street. They were going forty as they made the turn into the heart of orthodox Williamsburg.
Khalid’s plan was to quickly make another right, and then, out of view of all pursuers, ditch the wrecker and lose themselves on the streets, get to a subway, steal another car. …
Two RMPs, far enough back in the parade to do so, peeled off to follow the tow truck, but El Chivato missed the turn. Screaming curses, he pulled right and made the next turn, onto Rutledge. The ESU van and four RMPs followed him. Williamsburg is not a good neighborhood for exciting car chases, however. The Hasidim who live there are very densely packed, and reasonably well-off, and there are lots of vehicles, both private and the property of religious organizations. They line the streets; they double-park with otherworldly disdain for the NYC traffic code; they move slowly in the narrow roads, which are typically jammed with pedestrians, many of whom cannot be counted upon to focus on the here and now.
The ESU van tore around the corner of Rutledge. In its front seat the response team leader, Lieutenant Paul McElroy, saw what was happening ahead and said to his driver, “Slow it down, we got him,” and shouted to the troops behind him, “Lock and load! We’re rolling out.”
The junction ahead, at Lee Avenue, was solidly plugged with vehicles. El Chivato did not, however, slow down. There was a short gap in the line of parked cars left open for a fire hydrant. He jerked his wheel, bumped over the curb, clipped the hydrant from its base, and shot along the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians like duck pins. A jet of water twenty feet high sprang into the air and quickly turned the street into a shallow canal.
People were screaming. A dark van in front of the ESU immediately stopped, blocking the street, and spilled a dozen Hasidim, who started giving succor to the injured people in the Chrysler’s wake.
“Get up on the sidewalk!” McElroy ordered the driver. “Follow the bastard!”
The driver inched by the Hasidic vehicle, mounted the curb, and was instantly blinded by the torrent of water falling on his windshield. He turned the wipers on, and when the window cleared, McElroy saw that the black sedan had stopped thirty yards ahead. A meat truck had been making a delivery to a butcher shop and had run two wheels up on the sidewalk so that the driver could set up a roller chute leading into the basement of the shop. The basement entry was the common New York type (quite unknown in Nogales) in which two steel doors set flush with the sidewalk could be raised to give access to underground. The sedan had crashed into this arrangement and buried its right front wheel in the cellar opening.
McElroy ordered his van to stop, yelled for his men to deploy, and leaped from the van himself, taking cover behind its open door. He saw the front door of the black sedan open. McElroy had run a squad in a Marine rifle company in 1967 in Quang Tri province, so he knew just what he was seeing. He wasn’t sure he believed it, quite, but he knew what it was. He screamed a warning—“Spread out, take cover, incoming, incoming!”—and raised his M-16, to try to shoot the son of a bitch before he got a round off.
It was too late. He saw the flash and heard that unforgettable sound. He scrambled for a doorway and crouched there. The rocket struck the front of the ESU van, which had quarter-inch steel plating over the radiator to protect it from the odd bullet. This armor was enough to trigger the warhead, sending a gout of superheated gas and incandescent metal through the length of the van. Its body burst like a toy balloon, and then the gas tank (full with thirty-two gallons of regular lead-free) exploded, and then, at intervals, off went the remarkable range of explosive devices normally carried in ESU vehicles—tear-gas rounds, shotgun rounds, rifle and pistol bullets, concussion grenades.
McElroy got to his feet and put his gas mask on. He could not see more than a yard in front of his face, so thick was the combined fog of smoke and gas. He stumbled along in the general direction of Bedford Avenue, hoping to find an intact RMP so he could get back in communication. He had no idea if any of his men had survived.
He heard coughing all around him, and the sound of hopeless retching, and the crackle of things burning, the continuous wailing of sirens, the weirdly discordant splash and rush of water from the broken hydrant, the pop-bang-pop of miscellaneous ordnance exploding. Someone in dark clothes blundered by him coughing, but he could not see whether it was a Hasid or an ESU cop. Then a new sound, the wacketa-wacketa of helicopters, more than one, he was sure. It was exactly like Vietnam, was his thought—we get creamed on the ground, the bad guys book out, and the choppers come in to dust off the survivors. McElroy found his RMP and began the slow process of rallying his troops and coping with the awful mess on the street.
But within twenty minutes the sun went down and an evening breeze sprang up from the East River nearby, which blew the gas away, at the same time fanning the dozen or so fires that had broken out in buildings on either side of the van explosion, when white-hot chunks of debris flew into shops and apartments. It took another half hour to clear the fourteen RMPs back out of Rutledge Street so the fire trucks and the ambulances could enter. The clearer air brought shocking sights. McElroy had, of course, seen a good deal of bad stuff in his work, and during the war; this rivaled the worst of that. All down the street Hasidim were stumbling through the ruins, screaming for their relatives in Yiddish and English. Hasidic ambulance-society men were cruising with stretchers, occasionally arguing with the regular paramedics over possession of the wounded. There were enough for both; they lay thick on the street, black and limp like shot crows. He recalled the old grainy black-and-white films and photos he had seen, and decided that, the helicopters apart, it looked less like ’Nam than like the Warsaw Ghetto.
El Chivato had not stopped to enjoy the havoc he had caused, but immediately after the rocket had left its tube, he had shoved his assault rifle into a deep pocket of his canvas coat, filled the other pockets with grenades, and walked down Rutledge to Lee Avenue. He still hoped to find the man he was chasing. He had to push through crowds of the curious, running in the opposite direction, trying to see what was happening around the corner, and as he did so, he could not help noticing that nearly all the men he was passing were dressed almost exactly alike, in long, shiny black wraparound coats and black hats trimmed with red fur. He found this somewhat strange, but not that much stranger than many other aspects of this accursed city. Several police cars raced up Lee, sirens wailing. One stopped across the street and two officers emerged. El Chivato kept walking, searching the storefronts for a place to hide. Many of the signs were in a language he could not read. This made him nervous.
One shop caught his eye. In the window, garments like the ones he saw on the street were displayed, coats and hats and other cloth objects, whose purpose he could not guess. He went in. There was a bearded man in black behind the counter who stared at him in open-mouthed surprise. El Chivato looked around the little shop. There were no display dummies—caftans of different sizes were hung on the walls and from hooks depending from the ceiling. Hasidic hats in various styles were stacked on shelves along one wall.
Without a word the youth pulled a largish caftan from its hanger and tried it on over his canvas coat. It reached to the tops of his boots and made him look heavier than he was. He went to the hats and tried on several, choosing a fur-trimmed one with a wide brim that shaded his face. The shopkeeper still had not made a sound.
El Chivato went to a mirror and looked at his reflection, turning this way and that. He had not shaved in over a week, so that was to the good, although he could do nothing about the tone of his skin. Something was missing, though. He went to the counter and confronted the shopkeeper.
“How much?”
The man cleared his throat and cocked his head to one side appraisingly. His glasses glinted. “You want this? It’s a little tight across the shoulders.”
“I don’t mind,” said El Chivato. “How much … no, wait, I want this too.”
“What, reading glasses?”
“Yes.” El Chivato selected a green-tinted pair from a dusty rotating rack on the glass counter and slipped them on. If he pulled them down on his nose a bit, he could avoid seeing blur through the lenses.
The shopkeeper totted up a bill. “Four sixty-eight seventy-two, with tax.”
El Chivato paid with twenties from the roll in his pocket, waited for his change, and walked out.
He walked north on Lee past knots of excited people, past squads of police searching every building. There were now a score of police vehicles of all sizes, RMPs, vans, buses, parked on Lee and the streets surrounding. No one stopped him. He walked up to Broadway and west, over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. Looking back from the center of the bridge, he saw a thick mantle of smoke hanging over the district he had just left.
On Columbia Street just off the Manhattan end of the bridge he found a white van driven by a black pimp who was running a mobile two-whore brothel for the early trade. El Chivato approached him, got a nice gold-cap smile, which turned to an expression of fear and dismay as the putative Hasid shoved a big pistol in his face.
“Anything on the tube tonight?” Karp asked just before eight.
“The usual crap, I guess,” answered his wife from her position on the living room couch, which was supine, with a glass of red wine handy. “I’m too tired to watch, and I still have some calls to make. Sit down here and stroke my brow.”
Karp did so. Karp was a plain vanilla erotic arts sort of guy, but over the years she had taught him a thing or two, brow stroking being one of them.
“Poor baby,” he said sincerely (since she really did look frazzled), “they’re pounding you into the ground. Can’t Harry take some of the freight?”
“Oh, Harry! Yes, in fact Harry can take some of the freight, as long as I do what he and Osborne want me to do. He volunteered, so to speak, to pick up some of my stalking and abuse load if I do a chore for Osborne. Some meeting-security horseshit.”
“So? What’s the problem?”
“A little back, over the ear, please. No problem, except I hate meeting security, and also it’s a dick-head two-day job that a couple of square badges could do in their sleep, and they only want me because I’m the girl on the team and it’s a girl’s club that’s having the meeting. Nice Jewish girls, as a matter of fact.”
“What, like Hadassah?”
“Not like Hadassah, Hadassah,” said Marlene. “I have an appointment with an Amy Weinstein tomorrow. Is that a sketch or what?”
“It’ll broaden your cultural horizons,” said Karp. “What’s the matter, they couldn’t get a Jewish girl? Jewish girls don’t pack heat?”
Marlene struck a pose, wrists bent, fingers splayed, and said in thick Lawn Guyland syllables, “What, you want me to break a nail?”
Karp laughed and continued with his stroking. “Oh, good, it’s remarks like that’ll win their hearts over by Hadassah. This has made my week, Marlene. I only wish my mother was here to see it. Remember, when you go up there, you should bring a little something, a cake from Babka, maybe a nice challah …”
Marlene suddenly shook herself and sat up. “No, no, Marlene,” she said, “we can’t sink into mere animal luxury until we’ve made all our calls. Are we a Sacred Heart girl? Are we imbued with the twin imperatives of the Mesdames, guilt and high achievement? Oh, yes, we are!” She rose groaning to her feet and walked out of the living room toward her office.
Alert as only a mother can be, she picked up all the evening noises chez Karp: Posie playing R.E.M. at top volume through her earphones, singing tunelessly along; tiny soft snores from the boys’ room; a strange droning mumble from Lucy’s.
Marlene was a firm believer in the principle that children deserved privacy and a life of their own, although in practice she spied like the KGB every chance she got. She pressed her face up against the door frame and peered through the gap. Her daughter was sitting tailor fashion on the bed, rocking back and forth.
“Tomorrow,” she chanted, “bukra, tomorrow morning bukra e-sub ’h tomorrow afternoon bukra e-dohr tomorrow evening bukra bil layl the day after tomorrow ba’ghkd bukra see you tomorrow ashoofak bukra tongue lissan …”
Marlene stopped looking and continued down the hallway, feeling odd. Her daughter was memorizing an Arabic dictionary. It was something she did, memorize dictionaries, for amusement. One time through and she had the whole thing. She’d done it with a French one and a Spanish one and a Mandarin one. Marlene knew this, but every time she observed the actual process, she got a little chill, as if watching something beyond the ordinary realm of human achievement, something one could not do oneself in a million years, like watching Nolan Ryan pitch. If the genetic sweepstakes had thrown up such a weird ringer (for she herself, although reasonably competent with languages, was nothing out of the ordinary, while Karp, though a natural mimic, was entirely monoglot), what else was in store, what other mysteries would play out, for Lucy and the boys? And she felt the half-shameful irritation that even a good parent feels when the kid has gone beyond her in some way.
At her desk, she shook off these thoughts and turned to business. She was looking over her list of calls, trying to decide which ones would take the least time, when the house phone rang. She picked it up, and it was Clay Fulton.
“Hey, Marlene. Butch there?”
“Yeah, I’ll yell. How’s it going?”
A rueful chuckle. “Oh, I’ve been better, lady. I’ve had better days.”
“Why, what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? Don’t you people have a damn TV?”
“Yeah, but it’s not on. What’s happening?”
“Oh, not much,” said Fulton, and now Marlene picked up the absolute exhaustion in his voice, “just that a couple hours ago Arab terrorists burnt down half of Williamsburg, and killed about twenty-five people, seven of them cops.”
Ibn-Salemeh was watching the news, for the news had preempted nearly every channel, and he was fascinated.
“I should be angry with you,” he said. “This could have jeopardized everything, and yet … it was so brilliantly done, I cannot find it in my heart to criticize you. You say it was entirely spontaneous?”
“Yes, effendi,” answered Chouza Khalid. “When I thought of what the Zionists, may they roast in hell, had done to Bashar and Ahmed I could not control myself. I had to strike back at the Jews. I am sorry if I did wrong.”
“Well, killing a few Jews is never wrong, but please, no more until after the operation. It is truly amazing that you were able to escape after doing this.”
“Yes, effendi, but … who can explain the will of God? Jemil was martyred, and I escaped, and Hussein and Mahmoud.”
“Yes, the will of God is truly inexplicable,” said Ibn-Salemeh, and he went back to watching the scenes of carnage.
Khalid sat back in his chair and discreetly dabbed at the beads of sweat on his upper lip. Perhaps God had been involved. It was certain that he was enjoying a remarkable run of good luck, both in the world and in relation to satisfying Ibn-Salemeh. He would, of course, have to go completely underground after this, to disappear from his usual haunts. The police were stupid, but after this business, they would grab up every Arab who hadn’t been in the country for fifty years, and some of them too.
It was certainly what the man next to him wanted. Perhaps, Khalid having performed (as he imagined) this unexpected outrage, Ibn-Salemeh would be accommodating about the girl. If not, he would have to fall back on initiative. With luck it would all work out. And his luck had always been good, always left him one up. Like there being a hand truck and an oil drum in the bed of the wrecker. They’d loaded the oil drum on the hand truck, Khalid had picked up a clipboard with some old invoices on it, and they’d walked away from the thing, a couple of working stiffs making a delivery down an alley. In that way they’d gone through to Lynch Street and by that back to Bedford Avenue. Nobody expects fleeing felons to be hauling a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. This was abandoned when they entered the subway at Flushing Avenue. An hour of riding back and forth, and they’d made their way to Grand Army Plaza and walked back to the house on Tenth Street.
Khalid turned his attention back to the television screen. He was not, naturally, as happy with the chaos as his employer was, first since he knew the absurd origins of the thing, and second because he thought that the present carnage and the attention it would draw from the authorities would make it nearly impossible to carry out the original mission. Which the madman next to him would in no way consider postponing. He turned his inner thoughts away from the television, away from Brooklyn, to the villa on the Gulf which he would one day occupy, to the girl Fatyma, her round brown body, and to his luck, which had not so far deserted him and which, God willing, only needed to hold out for a few more days, less than a week.