The Fifth Horseman (47 page)

Angelo stood above his desk looking down at the agitated fence. He slowly rolled his cigar between his thumb and forefinger, striving to fix Benny with his gray eyes, giving the little man the full force of what he called his Godfather look. Finally he lifted his cigar from his mouth. “Got a friend of yours here, wants to say hello to you.”

He turned to the door, and, as he had hoped, Rand and Torres were standing there. Angelo waved them into the office.

“Who is this fucking creep?” Benny roared. “I never seen him before in my life.”

From the Godfather, Angelo became the Prosecuting Attorney. “Pedro Torres,”

he intoned, “do you recognize and identify Mr. Benjamin Moscowitz here present as the individual who requested you to pick the pocket of a commuter in the Long Island Rail Road Terminal for his identity papers Friday morning and to whom you delivered same?” The legal jargon was utterly meaningless, but it occasionally shook up guys like Benny.

Torres shifted on his feet. “Yeah,” he replied, “it’s heem.”

“The fucking spic don’t know what he’s talking about,” Benny shrieked.

“What is this anyway, some kind of setup?” He leaped to his feet, his arms flailing in the air.

Angelo turned to Rand. “Get him out of here,” he said. He pointed his cigar at the fence. “Sit down, Benny, I want to talk to you.”

The fence, still babbling a protest, settled in his chair. Angelo perched on one corner of his desk so that he towered over him. He rested there, his face set, building the edge, letting the flow of Benny’s angry words trickle away to nothingness like the last sparks spurting from a dying Roman candle. The room, he noted, was a pigsty of papers, files, overflowing trashcans.

“Look, Benny, I know from the Colombian there you’re doing fifty cards a week.” Angelo’s voice vibrated with the husky, sincere tone of a salesman trying to close an order. “But I’m not interested in fifty. I only want to know about the one you did for order last Friday.”

“Hey, what do you mean? I don’t do nothing like that.”

Angelo bestowed a cold smile on Benny that was meant to tell him that they both knew how meaningless that protest was. “Torres out there hits the guy at the terminal after the nine A.M. train. Brings the papers here. Ten o’clock some guy is renting a Hertz truck with them over on Fourth Avenue.”

“Listen, you guys got some fucking nerve.” Benny’s snarls were as defiant as ever, but under their surface Angelo detected the first tremulous quiver of concern.

“This is a legitimate shop here. I got records. All kinds of records. Tax records. You want to see my records?”

“Benny, I don’t want to see nothing. I just want to know where that card went. It’s very important to me, Benny.” An understated sense of menace seeped into the friendly salesman’s tone on the last words, but if it frightened the fence, he gave no indication of it.

“I didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m a secondhand dealer. I got all that stuff there, legitimate.” He waved at the vast jumble of goods he was fencing.

“Benny.” There was no friendly intimacy left in Angelo’s voice now. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve got here. Talk to me about this day, this one day, last Friday. Torres there comes in with some ID he found, right? We all know he found it. And it went right back out. Where, Benny? Where did it go?”

Behind Angelo the office door opened and closed softly. It was Rand. He had turned Torres over to a backup team downstairs. The mousy secretary, Angelo noted, was still doing her nails as though nothing unusual was happening.

She must be used to seeing cops in here, he thought. Her boss probably gets busted all the time and gets off with a good lawyer.

“I don’t know nothing about that.”

“Benny.” Angelo waved his cigar at an “Out to Lunch” sign behind the office door. “You don’t cooperate with us, we’re going to close you down. You’re going to be flying that thing for a month.”

Benny sat, despondent but defiant, in his chair.

“We’ll close you down, Benny. And if we do, I hope you got a lot of fire insurance.” Very slowly, very deliberately, Angelo scattered the ashes from his cigar over some of the rubbish strewn on the floor. “Real firetrap you got here. Owner’s away, fires happen, you know what I mean?”

Benny paled. “You son of a bitch. You wouldn’t …

“Who said anything?” Angelo asked, flicking some more ashes on the papers on the fence’s desk. “Hell of a fire this place’d make, though.”

“I’ll get you on a civilian complaint. Tell ‘em you threatened to burn me out.”

Angelo remembered Feldman’s whispered injunction a few hours earlier. “You know what you can do with your civilian complaint, Benny? You can shove it up your ass.”

The fence blinked, perplexed. He bad been arrested six times and walked each time. This time there was an element of menace, of coercion, he hadn’t experienced before. “Okay,” he said, resignation creeping into his voice.

“I don’t keep much cash around here, but we’ll make a deal.”

“Benny.” Angelo’s voice was low but firm. “That’s not the kind of deal I’m talking about. I don’t give a shit what you’re doing in here. I don’t give a shit how many welfare checks you’re making, whatever. I only want to know one thing, Benny: where did that card go?”

“Hey,” Benny said, mustering what defiance remained. “You gotta let me call my lawyer. I got a right to call my lawyer.”

“Sure thing, Benny.” The mirthless smile spread over Angelo’s teeth. “Call your lawyer.” The cigar came out of the detective’s mouth. With a low chuckle, he tapped the ashes on the fence’s desk. “What is he, anyway, your lawyer-some kind of fucking fireman?”

The dark-brown eyes that had been so full of fury a few minutes before were soft and liquid now, brimming with tears. Angelo studied his quarry. There came in every interrogation a critical moment like this when a man hovered on the brink, when one deft thrust could nudge him over. Or when, afraid of the consequences of giving somebody up, he’d step back, go in and take the collar. The detective leaned close to Benny, real warmth on his features this time. His voice was a hoarse seductive whisper. “All I need to know is where that card went, Benny. Then you and I got no problems.”

The lip, the lower lip, thrust out in its permanent pout, quivered slightly. The fence’s chin sank into his chest. It remained there awhile before he looked up at the detective. “Fuck it,” he said, “bust me.”

“Angelo.” It was Rand, his voice as soft and well modulated as that of a bank vice-president extending a new client a line of credit. “Perhaps you could let Mr. Moscowitz and me have a word together before we take him in?”

The detective looked irritably at the younger man, then at the fence. A sense of impotent rage, of humiliation, caused by his failure in front of Rand overwhelmed him. “Sure, kid,” he replied, making no effort to conceal his bitterness. “Talk to the motherfucker if you want.” He got up from Benny’s desk, his joints creaking, and walked wearily to the door to the anteroom. “Try to sell him a little fire insurance while you’re at it.”

“Mr. Moscowitz,” Rand said as the door closed behind his partner, “you are, I presume, of the Jewish faith?” He let his eyes rest on the gold Star of David peeking through the fence’s open shirt.

Benny looked at him, stunned. What the fuck have we got here, he thought scornfully, some kind of professor or something, talking like that, “of the Jewish faith”? His chin thrust defiantly forward. “Yeah. I’m Jewish. So what?”

“And you are, I presume, concerned about the security and well-being of the State of Israel?”

“Hey,” Benny’s poise was returning. “What are you cops doing? Selling bonds for Israel?”

“Mr. Moscowitz.” Rand leaned forward, his arms resting on the fence’s desk.

“What I’m about to tell you, I’m telling you in the strictest confidence, because I think you of all people should know it. It is of far greater concern to the State of Israel than the sale of a few bonds.”

Angelo was watching them through the glass panels. Benny seemed first skeptical, then concerned, then intensely interested. Finally his puckered little face exploded with emotion. He leaped up from his desk, barged through the door into the anteroom, headed past Angelo toward the window without even glancing at the detective. He thrust an angry outstretched arm at the window.

“It was a fucking Arab son of a bitch who wanted it.” He pronounced the word A-rab. “Hangs out there in that bar down the street!”

Tiens, General Henri Bertrand thought. Our cardinal has metamorphosed into Sacha Guitry going to Maxim’s. Once again he was in the elegant study of PaulHenri de Serre, the nuclear physicist who had supervised the construction and initial operations of Libya’s Frenchbuilt nuclear reactor. This time de Serre was dressed in a burgundy velvet dinner jacket and black tie. On his feet, the director of the SDECE noted, were black velvet pumps, their toes embroidered with gold brocade.

“So sorry to keep you waiting.” De Serre’s greeting was effusive, particularly so in view of the fact that Bertrand’s visit had interrupted a small sit-down dinner he was offering a group of friends. “We were just finishing dessert.” He went to his desk and picked up a mahogany humidor. “Do have a cigar,” he said, opening its heavy lid. “Try one of the Davidoff Chateau-Lafites.

They’re excellent.”

While Bertrand carefully prepared the cigar, the scientist stepped to the bar and poured two balloons of cognac from a crystal decanter. He offered one to Bertrand, then sank into a leather armchair opposite him, savoring as he did his first taste of his own cigar. “Tell me, any progress on the matter we spoke of this morning?”

Bertrand sniffed his cognac. It was superb. His eyes were half closed, a weary, melancholy gaze on his face. “Virtually none at all, I’m afraid.

There was one point I thought I should review with you, however.” The fatigue of his long and difficult day had weakened the General’s voice.

“That early breakdown that forced you to remove the fuel rods.”

“Ah, yes.” De Serre waved his cigar expansively. “Rather embarrassing that, since the fuel in question was French-made. Most of our uranium fuel, as you are perhaps aware, is American-made.”

Bertrand nodded. “I was somewhat surprised you hadn’t mentioned the incident in our chat this morning.”

“Well, cher ami”-there was no indication of concern or discomfiture in de Serre’s reply-“it’s such a technical, complex business I really didn’t think it was the sort of thing you were interested in.”

“I see.”

The conversation between the two men drifted on inconclusively for fifteen more minutes. Finally, with a weary sigh, Bertrand drained his cognac glass and got to his feet.

“Well, cher monsieur, you must excuse me once again for imposing on your time, but these matters …” Bertrand’s voice dwindled away. He started for the door, then paused to stare in rapt wonder at the bust glowing in its cabinet in the center of the room.

“Such a magnificent piece,” he remarked. “I’m sure the Louvre has few like it.”

“Quite true.” De Serre made no attempt to conceal his pride. “I’ve never seen anything there to match it.”

“You must have had an awful time persuading the Libyans to give you an export permit to take it out of the country.”

“Oh!” The scientist’s voice seemed to ring with the memory of recollected frustrations. “You can’t imagine how difficult it was.”

“But you finally managed to persuade them, did you not?” Bertrand said, chuckling softly.

“Yes. After weeks, literally weeks of arguing.”

“Well, you are a lucky man, Monsieur de Serre. A lucky man. I really must be on my way.”

The General strolled to the door. His hand was on the knob when he stopped.

For a moment he hesitated. Then he spun around. There was no hint of fatigue on his face now. The eyes that were usually half closed were wide open, glimmering with malice.

“You’re a liarl”

The scientist paled and tottered half a step backward.

“The Libyans didn’t give you an export permit to take that bust out of the country. They haven’t given anybody a permit to take anything out of there for the past five years!”

De Serre staggered backward across the room and collapsed in his leather armchair. His usually florid features glistened with the clammy pallor of the physically ill; the hand that clutched his cognac glass quivered lightly.

“This is preposterous!” he gasped. “Outrageous!”

Bertrand towered above him like Torquemada contemplating a heretic stretched out on his rack. “We spoke to the Libyans. And incidentally had a chance to learn about your misadventures in India. You’ve been lying to me,” he intoned, “since I walked in that door this morning. You’ve been lying about that reactor and how the Libyans cheated on it, and I know damn well you have.” The General was following his instincts, stabbing in the dark for the target the inquisitor in him told him was there. He leaned down and placed his powerful thumbs in the ridges of the scientist’s collarbones. “But you’re not going to lie anymore, my friend. You’re going to tell me everything that happened down there. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow morning. Right now.”

The General squeezed de Serre’s collarbones so hard he squirmed in pain.

“Because if you don’t, I shall personally see to it that you spend the rest of your life in Fresnes Prison. Do you know what prison is like?”

The word “prison” brought a wild, almost hallucinated flicker to de Serre’s eyes. “They don’t serve Davidoffs and Remy Martins after dinner at Fresnes, cher am!. What they do after dinner at Fresnes is sit around and bugger helpless old bastards like you silly.”

Bertrand felt the panic beginning to overwhelm the man. It was now, in these first instants of fear and hysteria, that all the advantages were with the inquisitor. Break him, the General’s instincts told him, break him quickly before he can start to reassemble his shattered psyche. Those long-honed instincts also suggested where the trembling man in the armchair would be most vulnerable.