Reckless Endangerment (49 page)

El Chivato did not mind, although it was a new wrinkle in his experience. His clients more often prayed than sang. It was another aspect of what was already an unreal situation. He hoped his mother would speak to him again through the girl.

Marlene began to sing a nursery song Lucy had known since forever. “
Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse
…” She sang two choruses, Lucy joining in, and then she began a verse Lucy did not know because her mother was making it up as she went along:

“
Ma fille, écoute bien, il faut s’échapper
Nous nous arrêterons au feu rouge
Du feu vert, quand je diterai, ‘Va!
’
Ouverte la porte et sorte
Reste immobile sur le pavé
Tran nous suit en moto, dite lui tout, des Arabs, des Juifs, de la bombe
Si tu comprendes, faites une signe de tête.
”

Marlene sang this through twice. Lucy hummed along in harmony with it, and at the end nodded her head sharply several times, as if transported by the simple tune. The light ahead at Thirty-seventh Street turned yellow; Marlene shifted lanes so that she was at the head of traffic when the light went red. They waited. For the busiest shopping day of the week there seemed oddly few people crossing the street in front of them, and the city sounds seemed unusually rich in sirens.

The green light lit. Marlene, in a conversational voice, said “
Va!
”

Lucy flung open the door and rolled out of the seat. Marlene floored the pedal and popped the clutch in one coordinated motion. The little engine whined, and the VW leaped forward, not like a Corvette, of course, but hard enough to press the surprised Mexican back into his seat and fling the door closed with a bang. An instant later he had recovered, and Marlene felt his hand knotted painfully in her hair and the muzzle of his pistol grinding into the tender spot below her ear.

“Stop the car! Stop the car
now!
” he demanded. His mother.

“No,” answered Marlene. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll last five seconds more than me, and your enemies will be laughing at you. The idiot shot a woman and the cops killed him. Look out the goddamn window!”

El Chivato looked. The street was full of blue and white police cars. One of them was level with the VW, and in its passenger seat was a grim-faced, flak-vested, helmeted cop pointing a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun out the window straight at him. He cursed and let go of Marlene. Then he kicked the front seat forward and slid himself into it. Marlene watched Tran and Lucy on the Jawa shoot ahead down the empty avenue. She kept driving north on Sixth Avenue, accompanied by twenty-two police cars.

“Lucy’s out of the car,” shouted Fulton. “A guy on a motorcycle just picked her up. Cars in pursuit.”

“That would be Tran,” said Karp. “He’s a good guy. Call them off.”

Fulton looked at him sharply. “What’s going on?”

“I have no idea,” said Karp, “but Marlene’s got something going. Make sure nobody queers her act.”

He had removed his tie and jacket, and he drove carefully, easing the clumsy truck through the traffic on Sixth. At Fourteenth, he saw a large number of flashing red lights ahead, so he turned left and proceeded north on Eighth. He turned right on Fifty-seventh, north on Sixth, and right again on Fifty-eighth. He noted in the long side mirror that the gray van was right behind him.

There were two black limousines parked in front of number 50, which told him that the distinguished guests had arrived and were in the building. He double-parked at the service drive of the hotel opposite, went into the back of the truck, grabbed a cardboard tray stacked with white pasteboard boxes, and went out through the double doors in the back.

“Hey, buddy!” shouted a large man in a gray uniform. “You gonna be long?”

“Three minutes only,” replied Ibn-Salemeh and trotted quickly down the street, pausing occasionally so that it seemed like he was looking for an address.

Back in the gray van, Hussein studied the street through his side mirror. Some kind of parade? The street was full of police vehicles flashing their lights.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

El Chivato saw the van as soon as they passed Fifty-seventh Street. The last time he had seen it was just before they captured him, coming toward him, but he recognized it from the rear too, a gray Chevrolet with blacked-out windows and Jersey plates. He said to Marlene, “Pull over by that gray van. Now stop.”

Marlene stopped the car. All the police cars stopped too. Hussein looked out his window and saw the head of death grinning at him. Death reached out a hand and tossed a ball into his lap.

El Chivato said, “Drive!” Marlene hit the gas, the VW lurched forward, there was an enormous thunderclap of sound behind them, the rear window of the VW shattered and fell inward in crystal rags, and Marlene saw through the rearview that the gray van was gone, replaced by a smoky bonfire.

“What was that?” asked Lucy in alarm.

“An explosion of some kind,” said Tran, “but certainly not the one we are worried about. The truck is still there and intact.”

He had scooped Lucy up off the pavement and placed her behind him on the motorcycle. He had intended to follow Marlene, but when Lucy, shouting, had told him where Marlene was going and about the Arab bomb, he had turned on the speed and preceded her to the building on Fifty-eighth Street. He had seen the bread truck park and the man get out. Now he was following the man. He saw him stop when the explosion went off around the corner.

Ibn-Salemeh paused at the corner of Sixth and Fifty-eighth and stared at the wreckage of the gray van and of his careful plans. He sighed and placed his cake boxes down by a wastebasket and headed north on Sixth. He had no pressing appointments, sufficient money, an excellent set of false papers, and a ravaging thirst. He entered a luncheonette and ordered an iced tea.

“Is that truck going to explode?” asked Lucy as they walked past it.

“Perhaps. For that reason we must hurry to get away.”

“But we have to tell someone!” said Lucy, and she broke away from Tran’s hand and went up to a man in a gray uniform standing near the door of a building opposite the truck.

“There’s a bomb in that truck,” she said, pointing.

The guard looked down at her without interest. “Yeah? How do you know?”

“My mom told me. You should check it out and call the cops.” She skipped away to where Tran was waiting impatiently.

“He just blew up a van,” said Fulton. “On Sixth at Fifty-eighth. Tossed a grenade into the window. The guy’s gone crazy. I’m going to stop him.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Karp, “not until you find out who was in that van. Remember, this bastard’s fighting a war with our other pals. Where’s Marlene now?”

Fulton listened to the chatter on the radio for a moment. “They just hung a left on Central Park South.” A long pause. “They’re heading south on Ninth. They’re coming here.”

“That’s what I thought she’d do eventually,” said Karp.

“She? I hate to tell you, Butch, Marlene’s not in charge in there.”

“Oh, no?” said Karp.

Ibn-Salemeh, lost as he was in rueful thought, did not pay any attention to the oriental man and the little girl when they entered the luncheonette until he heard himself addressed in French.

“Excuse me, sir, but I believe we are acquainted.”

The Arab looked up, scowling, and answered in Arabic, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” To his immense surprise, the little American girl answered in Palestinian-accented Arabic, “We can speak in Arabic, if you prefer. I would be happy to translate.”

Tran grinned as the Arab’s jaw dropped, and he slid into the seat opposite. Lucy sat next to him. He continued, in French, “In fact, sir, I believe you do speak French, for I well recall many long conversations we had about our plans to overthrow the imperialist yoke. Moscow, 1965. You were using the name Feisal at the time. Feisal Anani, if I recall. I was using Pho Nguyen Binh. Do you remember now?”

Ibn-Salemeh felt his mind skidding like a Buick on glare ice. It could not be that a senior Viet Cong cadre in the company of an American child who spoke Palestinian Arabic was sitting with him in a restaurant in New York, chatting about a meeting in Moscow fifteen years ago. An insane coincidence? It had to be.

Ibn-Salemeh smiled and shrugged, and answered, again in Arabic, “Please, I cannot understand what you are saying.”

Lucy translated this into French. Her eyes were shining, and she had to concentrate hard to maintain the correct posture and deportment.

Tran said, “You still don’t remember me? Ah, how quickly we forget our idealistic youth! Once I too thought it was amusing to set bombs and murder innocent people. Now I prefer to kill only the guilty.” Tran saw the man tense at the word “bomb” and thought, in another two seconds he will push the table over on me and run, and so he brought his Tokarev pistol out and pointed it at Ibn-Salemeh.

“Should I translate that, Uncle Tran?” asked Lucy.

“No, it will not be necessary. We have come to an understanding. There must be a phone here. Please go and call the police.”

She went off to call, and Ibn-Salemeh said, in French, “Why are you doing this? After what they did to you? The bombs? The tortures? What kind of man are you?”

“I often wonder,” answered Tran pleasantly. “Once I had attachments to my homeland, and in my dreams I still do. But my attachments in this life were all severed. The Americans killed my wife and child, and the rest of the people I cared about were destroyed after the war, by people who were not too unlike you, sir. Now I have formed attachments here in this remarkable city, that little girl among them, and I must object to bombs that might hurt them.”

“Bourgeois sentimentality!” snarled Ibn-Salemeh.

“
Précisemént!
” said Tran, beaming.

Marlene said, “You don’t have to do this, you know. I could take you to a hospital.”

El Chivato looked at her through the red tunnel that represented the dregs of his vision. “They would never let me out of jail.”

“But you’d be
alive.
That’s something. You could see your mother again, and your sisters.”

He curled his lip, speaking slowly around quick, shallow breaths. “You are a fool if you think I would allow my family to see me in prison.” He stared out through the windshield at the front of the Terminal Hotel. It was a five-story dirty brown brick building with a heavy vertical sign and double glass doors leading to a small lobby. There were no cars parked on the street in front of it and no sign of a police presence within. Outside, of course, a solid line of police cars blocked off both Ninth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in both directions.

He’s going to shoot me now, Marlene thought. It’s the end of the line for him, why shouldn’t he take me along? She tried to compose her thoughts. What a terrific life I’ve had, she thought, and now no worries about cancer or Alzheimer’s. She prayed briefly, waited. She opened her eye and stared into the red-rimmed blankness of El Chivato’s gaze. This poor bastard, she thought. What a fucking life!

“Please,” she said, “live.”

He reached into his coat and brought out a crumpled envelope. “Send this to her. I didn’t have no stamp.” She took it. He said, “Get out of the car!” and she did.

El Chivato slid over to the driver’s seat, gunned the engine, and drove directly toward the glass doors of the Terminal Hotel. He crashed through them into the lobby. There was an instant’s hush. Marlene discovered her knees no longer worked. She sat down on the curb.

Then the automatic fire started, and it went on for a very long time, a continuous roaring clatter. Marlene bent over and put her hands over her ears. Later, she learned that he had managed to shoot five cops, but since they were all armored like Ivanhoe, no serious damage had been done, and also that the medical examiner had found 126 bullet holes in his body, a NYPD record.

Cops surrounded her. One of them was Raney, in a flak vest.

“We solved the case, Raney,” she said inanely.

“Yeah, kid, we did,” he said gently and led her off.

It took several hours to reunite the family Karp. The police insisted on taking Marlene to a hospital, which was standard procedure for hostages. At the luncheonette, a heavily armed assault team arrested Ibn-Salemeh without incident, but they also arrested Tran for possession of an unregistered weapon, as a result of which Lucy threw a fit so violent that she was taken to juvenile detention. Karp and Fulton raced around town with screaming sirens, gathering up first Marlene, then Lucy (Marlene had to be physically restrained from striking a social worker), and finally Tran. Karp dropped the charges against him so hard it made the walls shake.

At a little past six, then, the Karps, Tran, and Fulton arrived at Crosby Street in Fulton’s car. As none of them had eaten since the morning, Marlene invited them all up for a feed. Posie greeted Marlene at the door.

“Marlene! God, what a day! You’ll never guess what happened.”

“Try me, Posie,” said Marlene wearily. She had almost completely forgotten the girl during the day’s interesting events.

“There was a bomb in Walid’s truck.”

“Really!”

“Yeah, no lie. We ran like crazy. Walid’s afraid to go home, his old man’s gonna kill him. Marlene, it was like the movies. We’re just driving along, and these Arab guys put this, like, rolled-up tarp in the truck, and I go over and there’s a
guy
in it. And we like open it up and it’s this dude Chouza Khalid that Walid knows from before, and he tells us about the bomb, and we let him loose and then we booked out. God, I was scared!”

Fulton and Karp and Marlene exchanged looks. Marlene asked, “So what happened then, Posie?”

“Oh, we went into this place to sit down and, like, figure out what to do. Khalid was really on a downer because, like, these guys had ripped off all his bread and his ID and all. So I said, hey, the lady I work for like can help you out, because these women? They’re running from guys beat them up and stuff, and she like gets them away and maybe she’d help you too. And he goes, I don’t have any money, and I go, shit, she does it for free. And he goes, what about the cops, and I told him, hey, she doesn’t mess with the cops and they don’t mess with her. So they came back here and I, like, warmed up that Chinese stuff from the other night for us. I hope that’s okay.”