Fanatics (12 page)

Azalea Butte, although from South Dakota, was all New York, work and spend, strive and design, love and cling, uphold and give way, envy and desire and hide the past.

Ballz Busta lived at the center of a spider's web of wealthy, powerful contacts, and these would not be people eagerly agreeable to questioning in a murder case.

Nor could Flo envision any of them lugging around an old steel bar to settle outstanding scores with Ballz.

These thoughts haunted and intoxicated her, and she dozed fitfully through subway-tunnel darkness, down along the East Side of Manhattan and over to Brooklyn, the noise of the trains a terrible force, screaming into her dreams, and in this nightmare, as in all nightmares, everything however cruel and grotesque, however inhuman and immense, acquired life and became possible…the assassins' promise successful, unpunished, unstoppable.

2:50 P.M
.

The broad-shouldered, tall, dark-haired man carried an Armenian passport, genuine insofar as the document had an authentic foreign ministry provenance from the capital Yerevan, and wasn't stolen or forged, and hadn't expired.

The passport possessed a valid, twelve-month U.S. visa for the holder, a visiting scholar in American literature. But it was inauthentic insofar as Paul Santarian, the passport's given holder, didn't exist, the passport's actual bearer being in fact Russian, the dark-haired Igor Zanonovich.

Zanonovich arrived in New York from California without difficulty and went by taxi directly to his organization's safe house, a rented five-room apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where his partners, four Chechens, spent much of their time drinking, eating pickled herring and corned beef sandwiches, and watching television. The rest of the time, they were cleaning their weapons or sleeping.

The Brighton Beach neighborhood was predominantly Russian and, on his partners' rare excursions outdoors, they blended right in.

The Russian Zanonovich didn't share Chechen tastes, and certainly not their causes or vulgarities, or ethnic and religious grievances, but he understood his partners. Like many sociopaths, he was surprisingly empathic.

The Chechens' names, as far as he was ever to know, were Ivan, Ben, Vlad, and Lenny.

To them, he was simply Paul.

Ivan and Ben were Le Mans–class drivers; their sparkling stats included a successful mortar launch and immediate getaway after their rocket blew up a synagogue in Paris. They issued a claim on behalf of a Muslim group no one had ever heard of in France.

Vlad, an explosives expert, fired the actual mortar round.

Lenny was a close-quarters assassin and a long-distance sniper, among his foreign accomplishments a triple-crossing bigmouthed Russian banker swinging from a girder beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, each of the dead banker's pockets stuffed with a mason's brick. This killing they credited to an Italian Masonic group long defunct, a ploy that gave the Vatican bad press for months and greatly amused the organization back in Moscow.

In America, attempting to appear homegrown, these killers called themselves Aryans.

Arriving in New York, Zanonovich was exhausted after an overnight flight from California, a red-eye special, and he slept soundly his first day in the Brooklyn apartment, despite icy New York-in-November rains hammering at the windows and a television droning nonstop in the living room.

Over the past ten months, he'd spent a great deal of his time traveling around the States, visiting top universities in the East—Harvard, Yale, Princeton—working his way through the Rocky Mountain states, Denver an especially rewarding experience, and after several stops along the West Coast, New York was a relief, his favorite city in America.

Especially the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Back in April, on another rainy day, they enjoyed a clean hit and escape without ever having to leave the city, after a successful operation outside New York University in Washington Square.

The organization had American offices in companies and diplomatic missions, but Zanonovich never approached an official from back home.

Orders were clear, no contacts. The reasoning faultless.

All communiqués in the Double-A Committee's name—to his mind, an oddly named front, for whose ostensible purposes they performed their jobs—got blasted out onto the airwaves and over the Internet from who knows where, but certainly not from him. He didn't concern himself with propaganda. He was a field operative.

He and his partners stuck to applying their particular expertise to pursuits that, while hardly prosaic in commission, were certainly more purposeful, more elevated than claims of racial and religious superiority. The public statements, the explanations, the exhortations came from others whose names he would never know and didn't want to learn.

So far the method was working as well as any professional assassins aiming for terror could hope: destabilizing and provoking countermeasures that, in their results, resembled nothing more than life back home, America becoming more like Russia.

In Brooklyn, they were anticipating similar success for this, their twentieth and final assignment before leaving the country.

Indelible messages delivered. Moral equivalency restored. Ambiguity extinguished.

5:02 P.M.

A shaking woke Zanonovich from his much-loved afternoon siesta.

Lenny was peering down at him.

“Hey, Paul. Up and at 'em,
tovarich
. We got it, we got a call. You're on a supper meeting. Six-thirty. Twelfth Street Bar and Grill, it's in Brooklyn. His name is Mr. Charlie.”

Alert now, Zanonovich showered and put on clean clothes. Tan trench coat, tan Dockers, blue oxford button-down, Ralph Lauren charcoal-gray crewneck, penny loafers. An all-American preppie look, nothing distinctive, nothing memorable.

He'd be part of the wallpaper.

6:23 P.M.

A half-hour subway ride and a couple of blocks to the restaurant on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The rain had stopped and the sidewalks were slippery with wet leaves. Apartment lights were on, suppers cooking, televisions casting a blue glow from every other window he passed.

At the 12th Street Bar & Grill, the man the Double-A Committee had signaled would be Mr. Charlie was seated in a booth by the far wall, positioned to observe whoever entered the restaurant.

He nodded at Zanonovich.

They'd met once before, the evening preceding the successful NYU job in Washington Square.

Pleasantries exchanged, they both ordered the day's special, grilled swordfish, and a bottle of pinot grigio.

Nothing of consequence was discussed during the meal. Zanonovich paid cash and they left.

7:40 P.M.

“It's a block and a half from here,” Mr. Charlie said as they walked along Eighth Avenue toward Thirteenth Street, a minute's stroll from the cobblestone courtyard where someone had smashed open Ballz Busta's skull with a steel bar.

A local crime of no interest to them, and of interest locally only because a celebrity was killed.

The streets were quiet, traffic sparse. They arrived at a school building.

“Same school I went to,” Mr. Charlie said. “Before I transferred to Catholic school and got the shit beat out of me by a Brother Jan, a huge Polack brute. You know the kind. But he made me the man I am today, so I'm grateful to the dirty old bastard. Still it's amazing, isn't it? Same old public school. I got the call right before I called you. I got relatives still on the force in precincts near here. We'll walk around a little there now, check it out. Tomorrow afternoon he shows up, two-thirty sharp. That's what I'm told. He's supposed to go in the front door and up a flight to the principal's office for the welcome. Then up to the auditorium on the top floor, where the kids and teachers are waiting. He's set for fifteen minutes with them. But your moment is exactly when he arrives. Outside front steps, wide open, unobstructed visibility. You got a clear line of fire. No teachers, no kids. You can't miss him. So soon as you spot a tall black bastard on the steps, go for it. Let loose.”

The Committee's Mr. Charlie, to Zanonovich's ears, sounded like the New York police he was hearing on all the TV crime shows his Chechen partners loved to watch, but Mr. Charlie was no longer a cop.

“We appreciate this,” Zanonovich said, and he handed his informant an envelope stuffed with cash.

The school was a large, rather grand brownstone building built in the late nineteenth century and stretching along Eighth Avenue from Thirteenth Street for half a block and continuing to the corner of Fourteenth Street, with a fenced-in school yard illuminated at night.

Zanonovich and his Mr. Charlie slowed as they reached the school's front steps.

The American said, “Across the avenue, just off the corner there on Fourteenth Street, you got your clear line of fire to these steps right here. Both sides of the street over there are quiet. You got the armory on that far side, the big redbrick place and that's closed. And on this other corner here, where the building is boarded up. Used to be a synagogue. You pull up by the armory.”

Zanonovich nodded. He was a knowledgeable man. He knew a little about everything, and almost everything about one thing, assassinations.

He liked this arrangement Mr. Charlie described. Traffic went up Fourteenth Street for a block to the park, where Ben and Ivan could both turn their vehicles to the right and vanish. They'd take off the instant after firing. One round was all they could risk. At the moment of impact, attention would immediately focus on the explosion, and they'd already be on their way.

The two conspirators stopped for a moment at the wide steps leading up to the school's front entrance. The gate at the foot of the steps was closed and locked.

“Mr. Charlie,” Zanonovich said, “I approve. Well done.”

“Great, God bless you.”

Mr. Charlie was a collaborating asset, who rewarded patience, understanding, and loving care.

They parted at the corner, and Zanonovich rode the subway back out to Brighton Beach and the safe apartment.

6:30 A.M.

Flo Ott examined her new pantsuit.

Pale gray cashmere with mohair, a burgundy-silk-lined Castelbajac. Seventy percent off list at Aaron's on Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn.

Would she be tempting fate to wear it today? Drawing unnecessary stares?

Attracting attention from faculty and church groups, attention drawn to herself and away from the new senator.

No, she decided, little likelihood of upstaging a tall and beaming Cecil King.

Castelbajac cashmere with mohair or not, she would simply fade into the background of vigilant retainers.

Any audience would be all eyes on the senator-elect, while she and Frank Murphy, plus however many patrolmen could be spared from Park Slope beats, would be watching everyone else.

Flo anticipated little danger inside the buildings. The moments of vulnerability would be at entries and exits.

7:22 A.M.

“Seen the
Times
this morning?”

Senator-elect Cecil King brushed toast crumbs off the editorial page.

“No,” Flo said. “Haven't had a chance.”

She and Frank Murphy were seated at the breakfast table in the King family's apartment.

The evening before, Frank's wife, Ann-Marie, and their kids had joined the King family for supper. Ann-Marie did the cooking, the gesture an attempt to squeeze as much normalcy as possible into the egregious, the unparalleled, the unnatural life of an assassination target.

“Padino's a quick one,” the senator-elect said. “He's got an op-ed piece. Under his name anyway, but I doubt if he wrote it. Some PR agency's piece of work. Not a bad first shot, though, almost eloquent. And all about Mr. Busta.”

“Yes,” Flo said. “We're on that one. We've got some strong leads. But what about today, where are we with you?”

“I got a synagogue group on the Upper West Side, then Saint Bartholomew's on the East Side. That's the morning. Back in Brooklyn for two schools and a church in the afternoon.”

“Terrific,” Flo said, and she meant this. “All indoors. And the rotten weather is on our side.”

They laughed. Preliminary uncertainties were a stimulus as long as the outcome looked assured.

“Padino certainly knows what to do with a spotlight,” Cecil King said, tapping the
Times
. “Keeps my schedule in the dark. Great place for a politician, the dark.”

He laughed again, his good nature struggling to remain buoyant, and he began reading aloud the new DA's trumpet call in the
Times.

“Culture Killing Will Stop,” by Jimmy Padino
…
“Politically motivated would be too mild an explanation…Racial bigotry resurgent…The musical loss incalculable…We will defend our cultural treasures in New York…The death penalty is clearly deserved, and we should as soon as possible reinstate capital punishment in New York. There is nothing arbitrary about murder, murder is final, and there should be nothing arbitrary about its punishment…Our great artists must not be intimidated. We will all stand up and be counted.”

Pulling out all the stops, pounding the mighty organ of righteousness, every majestic pipe blasting away at the top of the register, the new DA wasn't one to let a good crisis go to waste. His opinion piece was museum-quality, world-class chutzpah.

Feeling foolish reading his successor's puffery, looking almost as if he'd caught himself doing something unseemly, Cecil King tossed the paper aside.

“Senator,” Frank Murphy said. “I'd like to get a head start. The cars are ready downstairs. I'd like to take different routes, drive around a bit, no indication of where we're actually heading.”

“Crazy, isn't it?” the senator-elect said. “Like we're losing touch with what's really real.”

But it's a real enough force, Flo thought. These pressures were undeniable, even if they were as invisible as the motion of the earth beneath their feet. The new senator and the police were flying into this almost blind, nearly winging it, fueled by fear and a will to lose no more.

7:52 A.M.

They accompanied the senator-elect down in the elevator.

In the building's lobby, a single patrolman was waiting. He led them to the entrance and held the door open for them.

“Senator! Senator!”

The shouts caught them entirely by surprise. Happy, exuberant, worshipful. An admirer, a tall African American man, was waving a pen and a picture of Cecil King and was standing only a few feet from them on the sidewalk.

“Please sign it, Senator, please.”

Cecil King turned and beamed at the man. This was a pol's reality as it should be.

Flo Ott and Frank Murphy stepped up on each side of Cecil King, their eyes locked on the man's hands.

“Sure,” the senator-elect said. “Who do I dedicate it to?”

“Claiborne. God bless you, Senator. Keep the faith.”

Cecil King signed his photograph, a standard campaign glossy, and the man stood there, his eyes wide with admiration and gratitude.

“Thank you, Senator. May the Lord bless you.”

Frank Murphy gave instructions to the patrolman. “We're doing a West Side synagogue, an East Side church, lunch, back here for MS 51 and PS 107. Then another church and home. You get relieved at what time?”

“Lunch.”

“Good. Tell the next guy.”

They piled into the car and drove off down Eastern Parkway toward Grand Armp Plaza, leaving the senator's admirer on the sidewalk, smiling at the patrolman and writing on the back of the photograph…
lunch…MS 51…
PS 107.

He circled “PS 107.”

8:06 A.M.

At the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge, just off Park Row, Flo Ott switched cars, joining homicide detective Sergeant Marty Keane for the morning.

She planned to link up with the senator-elect for the afternoon in Brooklyn, but right now she and Marty Keane were meeting the late Ballz Busta's accountant, Vincent J. Narcissi, at the offices of the deceased's record company.

The Manhattan SoHo offices of B Busta Records were designed by Azalea Butte in a vaguely Moorish style, Marrakesh meets South Miami. A nearly seven-foot Nigerian, in a green turban and a long white cotton robe, opened a pair of iron gates right outside the elevator on the ninth floor. He led the detectives through the lobby, where a forest of bonsai trees and potted palms glistened, embroidered with strings of tiny winking white lights, the air heavy with the fragrance of burning incense and thick scents of fresh-cut yellow, red, and white roses, rows of silver buckets full of flowers.

They passed into a room alive with pale shadows cast from filigree screens of carved ivory.

No desks, no chairs.

Instead, lining the walls were brocaded banquettes piled high with silk pillows laced with filaments of silver and gold.

The floor was thick with overlapping antique Oriental rugs, pools of soft woven colors.

On a round, hammered-brass tabletop, a sweating gold ice bucket held a bottle of Krug Reserve champagne. Next to the bucket, four Baccarat crystal champagne flutes and a laptop computer.

Tapping the keys, B Busta Records' chief financial officer, Vincent J. Narcissi, accountant, a yellow-skinned Jamaican. He wore a long white woolen robe not unlike the Nigerian porter's jellaba, but no turban. His eyeglasses were tortoiseshell, his accent unadulterated Brixton, South London.

“Watch'er. Have a seat, Officers. Relax, make yourselves comfortable here. Bloody bollocksed-up around this place, I can tell you, good and nasty ever since Ballz—please, God help me, but I can't even bear to think about it yet. I do hope you get the bastard, that crazy bugger who did it. And get him soon, before the brothers on the street, before Ballz's fans find him and lynch him, whoever he is. I'm all yours. I want to see you get the swine who did this, I want to see a trial and conviction. We have to set a good example. This could prove incredibly negative for our business over the long run. But look, I've got all our financial reports right here for you. And we can load a memory stick with anything you want. Here you go.”

He slid the laptop across the brass table to Marty Keane.

“Mint tea or champagne?” the accountant said.

“Tea, please.” Flo opened her briefcase. “We've got a warrant here.”

“No problem, Captain. Everything's yours. We're totally open and cleaner than a shark's tooth.” He took the warrant from Flo's hand. “I'll pass it to our lawyers. You're welcome to see everything we've got in these offices.”

“We're from homicide, not rackets. Rackets will be here soon. They'll decide what they want to see. Destruction of any data—you're on notice now—will be prosecuted.”

CFO Vincent J. Narcissi removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Tea will be here in a sec. No champagne, you're sure, Captain?”

The detectives ignored his offer. Marty Keane tapped away at the computer keys and scrolled through disbursements.

His first thought…
Horseshit on a platter
.

His second: “His wife gets an additional ten thousand a month? Walking around money?”

A possible source of payments to a killer? Christine Smith certainly had her reasons.

The accountant said, “Mrs. Smith, you mean?”

“Right. His wife.”

“No, that's his mother. Ten K a month. Till she dies, that's always been the deal.”

His mother.
Flo was surprised. However often the word “
mother”
was spoken as a form of abuse, no one had yet uttered a word about a real mother of Owen Smith. Not a mention from his wife or his mother-in-law or from the family lawyer, Golden Bobby, about any other relative of the late Owen Smith.

“You got an address?” Flo said.

“Somewhere in Brooklyn,” the accountant said. “Let me have a look.” He retrieved the laptop. A few keystrokes, and he passed the computer back to Marty Keane.

“Bed-Stuy,” Marty said.

Next stop,
Flo thought.

“Have you fired any employees recently?” she asked the accountant. “Anyone here who might've had a grudge against him?”

“
Vous jestez,
Captain. We all loved him. Everyone kissed the ground he walked on. And no one ever gets fired around here, we're extremely careful about all our hires. Zero disgruntlement. Quite frankly, Captain, in my opinion, it would have to be a madman. He had no enemies. Zero. None.”

Yeah, right
. But Flo said, “That's great, thanks, Mr. Narcissi. Look, we got to move on now, and we'll be back again soon.”

“You want the whole computer? Please, take it with you.”

Useless,
Marty thought. “Rackets will be here. Give it to them.”

“Sorry you have to run. Tea's just on its way.” The accountant's face sagged like a Bed-Stuy tenement.

“We'll take a raincheck,” Flo said. “Next time.”

CFO Vincent J. Narcissi summoned the seven-foot Nigerian, who led the detectives back through the palm and bonsai jungle out to the elevator.

On their way down, Flo said to Marty, “We get back to Brooklyn, I'll need a car and driver for Bed-Stuy. Tell Frank I'll catch him at lunch at the Kings' apartment, but I might be late.”

They stepped outside into a sudden sleet storm.

The drive back to downtown Brooklyn—Marty on the phone, Flo drafting the urgent request for a search warrant—was treacherous and slow, the streets slick with ice.

9:20 A.M.

Mrs. Kitty Smith, the victim's mother in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was a surprise.

Flo grew intensely curious about this woman. She felt any mother who'd lost a son to violence, a son as wildly successful in his business as Owen Smith/Ballz Busta, a man extravagantly uninhibited with his women, a son who'd kept his mother distant to the point of secrecy, her pension steady if small considering his wealth…a woman like this could deliver some answers.

“But hang on,” accountant Narcissi had said to Flo as they were leaving. “Don't get her hopes up. He didn't leave his mum anything but the monthly payments, same amount till she dies.”

Mrs. Kitty Smith lived in a front-to-back apartment on the ground floor of a large brownstone building that had seen its good days as a townhouse several generations before.

She received her police visitor in her bedroom, seated up in bed like a queen, impoverished but in control, a semi-invalid air about her thin reclining figure.

Otherwise, she appeared about as incapacitated as a Comanche brave on the warpath, her makeup right up to the job: slanted eyes, lashes thick with mascara, dark brown pupils heavily flecked with yellow, limpid and alert as the eyes of a young cat, although she looked to be on the far side of eighty.

A lean and clever face powdered party-rouge.

Her lips, for all her advanced years, were slippery, a glossy vibrant chorus-girl red, and her hair was pale reddish, almost rosy, a spry spray of thin wispy curls.

The room smelled of dust and old paper and of Mrs. Kitty Smith's perfume (vanilla extract) and of steam heat and morning tea with lemon.

“Now,” Mrs. Smith said, getting right down to business. “Tell me what you expect from me, Officer. Who did it, right? Well, don't ask me. I don't know nothing about that world outside. Evil, only evil out there. Envy and malice and spite. And greed and filth. I don't know nothing about any of that. And I don't wanna know. He was a grown-up man, out there. But in here…” She tapped her chest, thin and bony, at the spot over her heart. “…in here, he was still a young boy. Even in death. I ain't been invited to no funeral. They don't want to know me, they never did. I didn't hear nothing about what happened to him, excepting what's on TV, and that's mainly disgusting. You got to know more than I do, Officer, don't you? You're a cop.” She paused to sneeze and to wipe her nose with a lacy pink handkerchief tucked up the sleeve of her bathrobe. “I hate cold weather. Wish I could go someplace warm. But at least the steam heat here works. Warm enough for you?”