Reckless Endangerment (17 page)

But to the pimp’s immense surprise, his assistant let the girl go and dropped to his knees. He seemed to be praying. The girl was running down the street toward the bright lights of Broadway. Kingman ran to the car, and from the glove compartment he took a huge nickel-plated .44 magnum pistol. He fired it at the girl’s retreating back, missed, and was blinded by the enormous gout of flame the gun produced, rendering further shots nugatory. He took them anyway, doing considerable damage to street furniture, cars, and trash cans, but none to his target.

He went to check on his assistant, who was now lying on his side in the middle of a widening pool of blood. The blood pool glistened black as molasses under the sodium lights, and Kingman was not about to tread through it in his pale yellow glove-leather high-heeled pumps. The guy was obviously dead. Kingman heard the first faint warble of approaching sirens. He cursed, got into the car, and drove off, leaving on the pavement a corpse with the bone handle of a curved Arab dagger sticking out of its belly.

SEVEN

O
n the whole, Karp preferred Aaron Zwiller to Rabbi Mendel Lowenstein, and was more pleased than he should have been when Lowenstein’s aide called and told him that the rabbi would not be venturing out into the perilous streets to attend this meeting, and that a substitute would be sent. Zwiller was a prosperous diamond merchant and a major financial backer of the Ostropoler Hasidim. Karp had decided that he was tired of meeting with the Arab and the Jewish representatives separately. Let them spend their energy yelling at each other instead of at him, was his thought. When Zwiller arrived, late, Karp realized that he had seen him before, during his ill-fated foray into Williamsburg, in Lowenstein’s tiny office, the man at the adding machine. He was large and heavy, approaching sixty, broad and sallow of face, with a bushy gray beard and thick side locks shoved behind his ears and held in place by the frames of sturdy hornrimmed glasses. His eyes were blue, large, hooded, glabrous, and intelligent, and they did not burn with fanatical fires—a negotiator, was Karp’s take, and not on the ballot for the next Messiah.

He shook hands stiffly and formally with Karp and with John Haddad, sat with a soft sigh across the table from Haddad, and folded his hands. Just like fucking Geneva, thought Karp, and he launched into the story of the case thus far. It would go to the grand jury that week; they had been waiting for Mr. Shilkes to recover somewhat from his wounds so he could testify. There was no question that they would get an indictment and that a trial would be scheduled. The charges were murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and aggravated assault.

“First-degree murder?” asked Zwiller.

“It doesn’t work that way, Mr. Zwiller. In New York state, first-degree murder is what we call the murder of a police or corrections officer in the line of duty. Second-degree murder is for—”

“For lesser beings like Mrs. Shilkes?” asked Zwiller. He had a gravelly, loud voice, compelling attention, or at least that was the one he used now. Karp imagined that he had others.

“It’s what the law says, sir. That’s how we play it. But I have no doubt we’ll get a conviction and that the defendants will be put away for a very long time.”

“What’s this conspiracy business?” asked Haddad.

“That means—” Karp began, at which point Zwiller put in helpfully, “They’re terrorists. That’s what terrorists do. First they conspire, then they murder.”

“That’s what you call it,” snapped Haddad, “but when a foreign occupying power is murdering innocent people every day, we don’t have such an inflammatory name for it.”

“Self-defense! Self-defense is the name for it against terrorists.”

And from there they were off into history, back to the Hebron Massacre in 1929, up to ’48 and Deir Yassin, to ’56 to ’67 to ’73 and to the present antics of Black September and the Mossad and Shin Bet and al-Fatah. It was a form of boasting in reverse, each side competing to be the weakest, the most helpless, the most sinned against. Karp let them scream for a few minutes. This was part of the plan. They would yell and accuse, and after this meeting they would each come to him individually and try to make nice. Karp had used the ploy any number of times with scumbags accused of crimes and saw no reason why it should not work just as well with political types. Zwiller was just rolling out the Six Million when Karp rapped his knuckles on the table three times. They were very large knuckles, and they made a commanding sound.

“Gentlemen! Let me just say this once again. This meeting, and any future meetings we may have, are a courtesy of the district attorney’s office. We don’t
have
to do this, and we’re not
going
to do this, unless we can keep focus on the case at hand. I don’t care what happened in the Middle East back then or whose side is doing what to whom.” He paused and glared at first one, then the other. “Now, we were discussing the issue of conspiracy. Conspiracy to commit murder is a crime in and of itself. We are charging all three defendants, Naijer, Hamshari, and Daoud, with conspiracy—”

Haddad broke in. “Wait a second: Daoud wasn’t at the crime at all. He was in jail.”

“Correct. But he conspired. He was part of the gang. That’s a crime under Section 105 of the state criminal code. And he freely admits it.”

“But he’s just a kid!”

“They’re all just kids, Mr. Haddad,” said Karp. “Two of them are murderers.”

“So what is this, guilt by association? He had political talks with people who were nuts, so he has to suffer? Look, Mr. Karp, I know this family. They’re decent hardworking people, very strict, very old-fashioned—”

“Like the Shilkeses,” rumbled Zwiller.

“Thank you, Mr. Zwiller,” said Karp acidly. “Let’s move on. I should inform you that Ali al-Qabbani has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. We’re treating it as a homicide.”

“Who?” asked Zwiller, and Karp looked at him very closely as he asked it. He seemed genuinely puzzled; that, or he was an extremely competent actor.

“So, the retaliation is starting,” declared Haddad. He clenched his fists.

“What retaliation? What is he talking about?” asked Zwiller.

“Mr. Haddad thinks that militant Jewish groups may have had something to do with Mr. al-Qabbani’s death,” Karp answered, still watching Zwiller’s face.

This reddened angrily, and the man snarled, “Yes, not only did we kill him, we used his blood to make matzos. Mr. Karp, I didn’t come here to listen to blood libels from this man.”

“What, it’s so beyond belief that Jews are murdering Arabs?” Haddad shot back, yelling. “Get a television! Watch the news!”

“Gentlemen! Cut it out!” said Karp in an even louder voice. “You’re supposed to be reasonable men. Act like it!” He waited for a few beats. He had their petulant attention. “Now, we’ve had one Jew killed, allegedly by Arabs, and we’ve had one Arab killed, by persons unknown. And I am going to press upon you, and I expect you to take this back to your communities, that we are not going to tolerate vigilantism, and we are not going to tolerate revenge, or incitement to revenge. This is not Beirut, and it’s not the West Bank.”

He let that sink in. “Returning to the matter of Mr. al-Qabbani: we have what looks like a professional execution-style killing. We also believe that Mr. al-Qabbani was a contact between the two defendants in the Shilkes case and someone else, perhaps someone who planned and directed this crime, and—”

“Oh, please!” Haddad broke in. “I can’t believe you’re bringing up that Dar al-Harb business again. I told you, there’s no such group.”

“Yes, you did,” said Karp quietly. “So what groups
are
there, Mr. Haddad?”

That stopped him. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, just that every ethnic group in this city has its bad boys, and the respectable people know who they are, even if they don’t talk about it much.”

“That’s nonsense! You’re implying that I’m involved with
terrorists
? I’m a member of the city council, for God’s sake.”

“Did I say ‘involved’? No. Let me explain something, Mr. Haddad. I was raised in Brooklyn, in a middle-class neighborhood. My father owned a manufacturing business. He had trucks. He had a lot of paper waste to dispose of. In those days, if you had trucks, if you had waste, you were in bed with gangsters. He used to complain about having to pay them off, but he did it. A good friend of his was a lawyer for some of the guys from Murder Incorporated. These are Jewish gangsters, by the way. Mr. Keegan down the hall, I bet he could tell you who’s going around buying arms for the Irish Republican Army these days, or if not him, people he knows, in the Irish community. My friend Ray Guma knows half the Cosa Nostra in New York on a first-name basis. So, we know, and they know, and so do you, or people you know do. And if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this kid was killed by his own people, your people, in fact, then you could be real helpful.”

“You want me to
spy
?” said Haddad. His nostrils had gone white against his olive skin.

“No, of course not,” said Karp dismissively. “I just wanted to point out that you have the kind of access to your community that the police can never have, and that you probably know more than you think you do about this kind of thing.”

He turned to stare at Zwiller, who was enjoying Haddad’s discomfort rather too much for Karp’s liking. “That goes for you too, Mr. Zwiller. I’d be very disturbed if any further violence emerged from the group you represent.”

Zwiller’s mouth dropped open. “That’s ridiculous! We are peaceful people.”

“Who started a riot in which two police officers and several civilians were injured. I want to remind both of you that you have a positive duty to inform the authorities when you have knowledge of any plans to break the law. The state statutes provide six different levels of conspiracy, from misdemeanors to class A felonies. I’m sure we can find something to suit in the event it’s required.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Karp?” demanded Zwiller.

“No, sir,” said Karp, smiling. “I’m just expounding the law. It’s an old Jewish tradition.”

Marlene and her partner, Harry Bello, were arguing, as they had many times before, to little permanent effect, about the future of their security firm. She felt at a disadvantage in this argument because the changes that had come over Harry in the five years since they had launched Bello & Ciampi were almost entirely admirable. Then he had been a recently dried-out depressive detective, whose nickname on the Job—Dead Harry—was frighteningly apt. When she had first conceived of a security firm specializing in the peculiar problems of women, Marlene had brought him in almost as an afterthought. He was uncomfortable in the cops, she got along with him pretty well, and he was a terrific detective, as well as being personally fearless and devoted to her. Now, however, there was a new Harry, by almost any standard a better person, although for some perverse reason Marlene did not get on with him as well as she had with the former version. She had heard that reformed drunks often wanted to draw away from those who had known them during their degradation, and that those who had helped them often wished to retain the newly dry in their former condition of docile dependence. She expected that something like this was happening between Harry and her. It made her helplessly sad; more to the point, it promised to disrupt her business.

They were in the little firm’s offices in a loft on Walker Street off Broadway, in Marlene’s cubicle, which had room for a desk, a desk chair, two wooden visitors chairs, and a small bookcase, all from a Canal Street ex-used-furniture emporium. A dirty industrial-sized window glazed in chicken-wire glass looked out on Walker Street. They did have one really great window in the place, a large semi-circular affair with the firm’s name in gold on it, but that one served the large room where they met with clients, which was also where all their decent furniture was. Harry was finishing his latest, and thus far most disturbing, pitch, which was that Bello & Ciampi should merge with a larger, more conventional security outfit called the Osborne Group.

“I don’t like it, Harry,” she said. “I don’t see why we can’t just stay the way we are.”

“Because nothing stays the same, Marlene. Businesses grow or they die, and this is our chance to grow. Personal security is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the country, and we should take advantage of it.”

Marlene thought about this, studying her partner as she did so. Harry looked good; he had tossed his cheap, rumpled suits and his plastic raincoat and now wore banker’s gray, and a sharp white-on-white shirt and crisp, patterned silk tie. His color was pinkish-tan rather than old-paper-bag dun, and much of the black had gone from under his eye sockets. Harry was still a somewhat scary figure, but no longer so in the Halloween sense. Whereas before he had hardly said a word from one day to the next, he was now fluent, a great talker on the phone, his speech freckled with statistics from
Fortune
and
U.S. News & World Report.
Somehow he had recreated himself as a go-getting businessman. She should have been pleased; she
was
pleased, and at one level of her mind she understood that he was right about the firm. But she still didn’t like it. A vague picture of herself as a recalcitrant little girl being dragged away from her mud pies crossed her mind. She lit a cigarette and pouted silently, irritated at herself, and him.

After a pause he resumed. “Also, Marlene, you got to realize we can’t go on the way we have. No way.”

“What do you mean?” She bridled. “We’re not making enough
money
?”

“Money’s got nothing to do with it. I’m talking about the tricky stuff. Setups.”

“I don’t do that anymore,” she protested.

“Yeah, you do. You can’t work it any other way, Marlene, because you don’t have the resources to guard all the women you’re guarding, so you go talk to the guys, get them to lay off. …”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, except when they don’t roll over for you, you set it up so you know the guy’s going to come at the client, and then you what we used to call lie in wait, wave a gun at them, tune them up a little with a bat, maybe sic that goddamn dog on them. It’s illegal, Marlene. And this business of giving the ladies guns—”