Reckless Endangerment (24 page)

“Ah, shit!” said Raney under his breath and then, louder, “Okay, how do you want to play this?”

Fulton nodded and replied, “The main thing is this terrorist business. Butch, you had a guy at the FBI?”

“The son of a bitch retired on me. Before that, he sort of dirtied the nest up there. If Carlos the Jackal was hiding in my bathroom, they might tell me, but otherwise …”

“Okay, I got a few contacts in the Bureau,” said Fulton. “I’ll check it out, see if there’s any buzz. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to turn the heat up on this al-Qabbani killing. Someone must have seen him with this Khalid guy or his home boys.”

Raney said, “Yeah, all right, we could do that. We could even have a talk with Khalid himself, if he’s really operating in the open like Butch’s guy said.”

Fulton and Karp exchanged glances. Karp said, “True, but the last thing we want is for this guy to spook and disappear with a load of weapons and explosives. Let’s leave him alone until we see what kind of coverage the Feds have. And let’s keep this tight. If we’re assembling a conspiracy case, then it’s critical that the bad guys don’t catch on until we’re ready to go in with wiretaps and warrants.”

They discussed details and coordination for a while after that, Marlene listening and not saying much, until Raney brought up the girl, at which point she stopped saying anything at all. Of course, Fatyma, the pastry queen of the women’s shelter, was the girl involved; Marlene knew that as soon as Raney had told his story, but she’d said nothing then and would say nothing now, knowing it was stupid, knowing the risk.

She thought about this later, at two-thirty in the morning, sitting in the lightless kitchen, as she was getting into her terror outfit, which was built around a black, rip-stop nylon coverall, with many pockets and zippers. She hadn’t slept at all, but had tossed beside the warm, roughly breathing bulk of her husband, playing endless self-recrimination and self-justification tapes through her head, the usual double feature. Had she been a less scrupulously fair woman, she might have blamed it all on Harry Bello, who in forcing upon her a decision she had carefully avoided making for years, had upset the finely balanced segmentation of her life, those layers of licit and illicit activity she had maintained with the force of her own will and warped conscience, like some elaborate pousse-café. Without knowing it herself, she had already made her decision
in re:
Bello & Ciampi, which was why she had not betrayed the Arab girl to the police.

She finished tying up her hair and stuffing it into a rolled-up black silk ski mask perched on top of her head, and bent to pull on her black Converse high-tops. This done, she walked silently down to her office at the end of the loft and took her pistol from the gun safe. On the way back, she looked in on her children. Lucy was sprawled in her usual horizontal frozen leap with her Italian-flag-striped duvet half kicked aside. Marlene covered her again, extracted the little clutch of foreign-language dictionaries that had become tangled in the bedclothes, and replaced them on the bedside table. In the next room she found Zak with his butt up in the air and snuffling, Zik rolled up against the crib bars like a prisoner straining for freedom. She carefully adjusted their positions and kissed them both, inhaling their powdery odor. She secretly thought that at some level they recorded this attention and would count it to her credit as a mother and, when they came necessarily to hate her, would hate her somewhat less.

In the street, Tran was waiting, dressed as Marlene was, smoking and sitting crosswise on the seat of his old black Jawa motorcycle. When he saw Marlene, he flicked the cigarette away and kick-started the motor. Marlene got on the pillion seat, and they rode off north on Crosby.

There was little traffic at that hour, and in ten minutes Tran had the motorcycle parked at Eleventh Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. From there they walked to a six-story apartment house on Forty-seventh. Some minutes later, Marlene having easily picked the locks of the street and apartment doors, they stood, with their ski masks down over their faces, and surgical gloves on their hands, in the one-bedroom apartment of Ernesto Valone, estranged husband and tormentor of Kitty Valone. Marlene brought out a pencil flashlight, and by its beam they entered the bedroom. Few people are capable of resisting an armed attack when awakened from a deep sleep in the small hours, and Valone was not one of them; with Marlene’s gun in his face, he gave, after a few strangled protestations, no trouble. In two minutes they had him trussed hand and foot with the kind of plastic restraints the police use in riots, with a strip of duct tape over his mouth. Valone was a squat, blocky man in his mid-thirties, with a nascent beer gut and a brush mustache. He slept in a T-shirt and Jockey shorts.

Marlene kept the flashlight in his eyes as she spoke. “Mr. Valone, we’re here to give you an intelligence test. We want to see if you’re smart enough to stay alive, or if you’re so stupid that we have to really hurt you. The test is, can you stay away from your ex-wife? So far it doesn’t look good, Mr. Valone, I got to tell you that. You’ve violated the terms of your restraining order fourteen times in the last year and a half. You’ve been arrested twice. Something is not getting through. This is where we come in. You want to know who we are? The Mafia. The CIA. We’re from outer space. We know where you live, we know where you work, we can get you anytime. We’re always watching. We’re
stalking
you, Mr. Valone, just like you’re stalking your ex-wife. We can do anything we want to you anytime we want. We could break your arms and legs. We could cut out your tongue. We could cut out your eyes. How would you like that? It’d be real hard to bother your ex-wife if you were blind and couldn’t talk. But we won’t do that, not yet, because this is your first warning. It’s also your last warning. Bother your wife one more time, and unbelievably bad things are going to happen to you. Things like this.”

Marlene had been speaking in a low, caressing voice, with her mouth close to Valone’s face. She could see his eyes bulging with terror and hear the breath gushing heavily through his nostrils. A rank scent rose from him. Now she let out her impression of a crazy person’s giggle and moved away from the head of the bed. Tran moved deliberately onto the bed, straddling the prostrate man’s knees. From a pocket he brought out a straight razor. Marlene shone her light onto Valone’s chest. When he saw the hideous glitter of the razor, he made a strangled, high-pitched noise deep in his throat.

Marlene said, “I wouldn’t move if I were you, Mr. Valone. I would try to be very still.”

Slowly, Tran ran the razor down Valone’s chest, slitting the T-shirt and then the Jockey shorts. The shorts were soaked with fresh urine. With short, precise strokes Tran shaved off Valone’s pubic hair. Then he got off the bed, held Valone’s jaw, and shaved off half his mustache, as much of it as he could reach over the tape. There was very little blood. Valone was shaking like a man in a fever. He made another high-pitched noise when Tran rolled him over, but all Tran did was nick the plastic restraints with his blade. The man could struggle free of them in a half hour or so.

“We’re going now, Mr. Valone,” Marlene said. “I hope you got the point, I really do. We’re bad, but we don’t want
you
to do anything bad. Just obey the law. Leave your ex-wife alone and you’ll never see us again.”

They slipped out. On the street, Marlene staggered away from the doorway, leaned against a lamp post, and threw up. Tran gave her a clean handkerchief, which she accepted and used to wipe her mouth. Tran always brought along a number of clean handkerchiefs on these expeditions, because Marlene always threw up. As they walked back down the sleeping street to the motorcycle, Tran said, in French, “Forgive me, Marie-Helene, but I fear you are not suited to this work. Perhaps next time you should stay away.”

“This may be true,” answered Marlene wearily, for they had this conversation every time, “but if you will forgive
me,
your English is not yet sufficient to allow you to make the proper impression upon those whom we must interview. In any case, it is my responsibility, and so I must attend.” They walked a little farther, Marlene muttered something, and Tran said, “Pardon?”

“Just talking to myself, the mark of a collapsing mind. I was thinking, all this, and what if it fails to work.”

“Oh, I think it will work, more or less. Of those whom the law does not dissuade, very few will resist this kind of interview.”

“You’re the expert,” Marlene said sourly, and immediately regretted it.

“So I am. There will, of course, be some in whom folly is so deeply seated that even this will not root it out, and these will have to be disposed of in some other way. All this is quite remarkable to me, you know. We do not have this problem in my country.”

“What! That’s absurd. In a—a …” Marlene closed her mouth.

“You are embarrassed to say, ‘a male-dominated society where women are mere chattels.’ In truth, my dear Marie-Helene, Vietnamese women are not particularly oppressed, by Asian standards. But what I meant was that in a society where the family is paramount, a man would not be allowed to molest a woman in this way. Her brothers or her uncles would do to such a man far worse than we have done to that filthy specimen just now. The Americans have abandoned the family, however, in the name of freedom for the individual and put their hope of protection in the law. Which, as we have seen, is incompetent in such cases.”

“You should talk to my mother,” said Marlene.

“I would be charmed, of course. Here is the motorcycle. Do you care to mount, or are you still sick?”

“I am still sick, but I will mount nevertheless. And, Monsieur, if it ever occurs that I am not sick after such an excursion, I beg that you will shoot me.”

“My pleasure,” said Tran, and booted the machine into roaring life.

Marlene slipped into the loft and undressed in the bathroom and washed her face and her mouth as quietly as she could; it was just past three-thirty. But to her dismay Karp reached out and touched her and said sleepily, “You were out.”

“Yeah, Sweetie was whining. I forgot to walk him earlier,” she said.

A pause. He said, “Next time you walk the dog, you should remember to take the dog. He was tromping around while you were gone.”

A longer pause. “Am I going to get
grilled
now?” she asked stiffly.

Karp rolled into a more comfortable position. “Uh-uh. I din see nothin’. I don’ know nothin’ and I don’
wanna
know nothin’. Let’s just get some sleep.”

“Could you hold me?” she asked, her voice near breaking. “I need to be held.”

“Sure,” he said, and wrapped his long, long arms around her, pulling her close.

“That’s nice,” she said.

“It
is
nice,” he agreed. “It’s the nicest thing there is, just about, but just so we’re clear on this, if it should come to my official attention that you’re breaking the law, I will put your ass in Bedford,
this
ass”—here he grasped the literal naked, warm globes—“which will break my heart, but my kids are not going to have both parents in jail at the same time. Just so we’re clear.”

“That sounds fair enough,” said Marlene, who now threw her leg up over his hip, their usual signal, for the desire she now urgently felt for a certain kind of oblivion could not be turned off by any amount of legal warning.

TEN

I
n the pre-dawn darkness, Chouza Khalid watched his men load the material into the Daoud bread truck. There were four large wooden crates marked in Arabic, French, and English as industrial ceramics, with the appropriate customs tags and seal still affixed to them, and one long tan fiberglass shipping cylinder, marked as a compressor unit carrying the logo of a French firm. The men grunted as they lifted the cylinder into the truck, which was fortunately low to the curb. Khalid had men with radios posted on the surrounding streets. They reported no sign that the house in Park Slope was under observation.

Ibn-Salemeh had ordered the move immediately upon hearing Khalid’s report that the Palm coffee house had been under observation, and at the same time he also instituted what he called Beirut rules governing communication and the movement of people and supplies. Beirut rules meant coded telephone and radio communications and elaborate route-changing and car-switching routines. Chouza grumbled at this, for like most professional criminals he was lazy and ill-disciplined, but he grumbled inwardly and carried out the orders. He was afraid of Ibn-Salemeh, which was not something he could say about any other man he had met. Fortunately, their connection would not last much longer. The other man would have his victory here in New York, and Khalid would be gone, with a good deal of money, provided he could extricate himself safely. Ibn-Salemeh controlled the papers and the preplanned escape routes, and Khalid was cognizant of the possibility that he himself might be as dispensable as the young Walid. It was like holding a jewel and a scorpion in the same hand; the trick was to get rid of the scorpion without losing the jewel, and without being stung.

That was, however, a thought for tomorrow. Tonight all he had to do was to transfer the goods to a warehouse in Manhattan that he had leased in the name of one of his dummy corporations. He would drive the truck himself, with Bashar and Ahmed to help unload. Bashar and Ahmed were, of course, Ibn-Salemeh’s boys, but that could not be helped. The man was not going to let him drive off with his goods without them along. The four of them were the only ones who were supposed to know the location of the drop.

When the truck was loaded, Khalid drove off, and during the ride he naturally paid exquisite attention to all the traffic regulations. Weaving around the truck, sometimes passing, sometimes hanging back (Beirut rules), were three other cars full of their men, checking for followers. In this way they proceeded northwest, avoiding the elevated highway, sticking with the surface streets, which gleamed wet and nearly deserted at this hour. At the Brooklyn Bridge each of the escort drivers informed him that they were unobserved, and Chouza sent them away, proceeding up the west side of Manhattan, under the shadow of the old highway with only Bashar and Ahmed for company. This was a district of old industrial buildings and warehouses around what remained of the great rail-freight-handling district that used to cover much of the middle west coast of Manhattan. It was undergoing redevelopment, and Khalid had gotten a good deal on the lease of a depot scheduled for demolition. He arrived at the building, a four-story concrete structure with an enclosed loading dock secured by a corrugated steel door. They unloaded without incident. After that they drove back to Brooklyn and returned the truck to Walid, who had been waiting, impatient and confused, in a back room at the Palm. Walid received the grateful thanks of his comrades, together with many assurances that “after his training” he would be allowed to take a more active part in operations, and he was sent off. Then Khalid and his associates prepared coffee and sat down to plan how they would determine the identity and the resources of whoever was spying on them.