Depraved Indifference (9 page)

Daphne West was by this time the only one of the cabin crew remaining fully functional. Alice had designated herself as the personal servant of the hijacker group, while Jerry was collapsed in an aisle seat, his face white and clammy with heat prostration.

Most of the passengers were in the same state. Daphne had scrounged salt packets from the trash and had tried to force tepid salted water down several throats. She had tried to talk Karavitch into at least opening the doors, but he was adamant: security. He was afraid the police would rush the plane. For the same reason he was keeping all ground crew at a distance until a deal had been struck with the authorities, which meant no resupply of food and water. It occurred to her that the suffering of the passengers was another bargaining chip to him.

She heard a crackling noise outside the plane. A few seconds later, the plane lurched and sank.

She heard a cry of rage. “Blow them up! Blow them up, the bastards!” Macek was dancing around in the aisle, trying to wrench the pot bomb away from the little guy with glasses, who had it clutched to his bosom. More shouts in that foreign language followed. Daphne heard Alice's shrill scream over the shouts, and the agonized mooing of the passengers.

Once again Karavitch restored calm. He waded into the scuffle between his compatriots, shoved them back in their seats, and restored control of the pot to Rukovina. Then he hurried to the flight deck.

When the tires were shot out, Karavitch understood that a certain portion of the initial plan would have to be abandoned. This did not upset him. He had never expected the reds to allow him to fly over their country. Still, it was well to open the bidding high; if you never gambled for high stakes, you never got rich. Also, the drama of it had made recruiting easier, and would make excellent propaganda in the Croatian community.

The question was, what to do now. The important thing was to keep out of the clutches of the Yugoslavs. Also, the French were not to be trusted; with their volatile politics, they could have a red-loving regime in power at any time that might listen too sympathetically to the demands of the communists. And the French loved the Serbs in any case and always had. No, he had to get back to the United States, to New York, where he had friends. Or at least people in high places who owed him favors. He began to think of how he might contrive to bring this about. He thought well under pressure and did not especially mind the heat. In an hour he had come up with several plans, none of which was entirely satisfactory, but none of which was, in the event, required. To his great delight, they soon dropped the thing in his lap.

Marlene Ciampi puffed her first cigarette in two hours on the sidewalk outside Bronx Municipal Hospital Center. She had talked to both Doheny and D'Amato. Doheny was in bad shape and could barely mumble, but D'Amato had been lively and voluble. Doheny swore he was not drunk. The blast that had killed Doyle seemed to have sent chunks of shrapnel into his soul; he blamed himself entirely.

Marlene did not think he was lying to save his job, and D'Amato confirmed this. The sergeant may have been feeling the results of the previous night's drinking, but D'Amato swore that Jack Doheny never took a drink on the job. Nobody in a bomb disposal gang would have worked with him if he had.

This made sense to Marlene, even if nothing else did. She stamped out her cigarette and looked idly across the street. The great massif of the Bronx Psychiatric Center loomed over Eastchester Road and the railroad tracks. It was half empty, she had heard, since they had let the crazy people out onto the streets. Marlene watched an elderly black woman in a long purple coat, pink trousers, and a brown turban, pushing a rickety baby stroller. It was loaded with greasy brown paper bags that appeared to be full of garbage. Naturally, the woman was talking to the city at large, announcing to its citizenry seen and unseen, temporal and spiritual: “My cherry, my chicken, they got me all right, all right. May the Lord bless and keep you forever.”

Marlene was jumpy by the time she got to Rodman. She wanted to get to work, to move. With little difficulty she talked Captain Marino into lending her a set of blue coveralls and letting her help out in the pit. For the rest of the afternoon she sifted sand and picked and bagged odd bits of matter. The sky went yellow, then purple as the sun sank into The Bronx. A salty breeze drove in from the bay. The gang completed its work and went home.

Marlene went back to Marino's office. He wasn't there, but she found him in a larger room down the hall fitted out with black-topped lab tables. On them had been placed large enamel trays and piles of plastic bags. Several men were examining things through magnifiers and binocular microscopes.

Marino greeted her and waved her over to where he stood next to a balding man at one of the microscopes. “Long day, huh Marlene?” he said cheerfully. For a man who had been going for more than twenty-four hours, he looked remarkably fresh.

“Yeah. You look bright, though. How do you do it?”

He chuckled. “Eat right and stay regular. And lots of black pepper—it washes the blood. Hey, you want to see something? Here, I think we might have got lucky.”

He led her over to an enamel tray that contained some small blackened metal bits. “Look at that. Neat, huh?”

“What is it?”

“It's how they set it off. We still got samples being analyzed at the lab. We're doing GC-mass spec work-ups plus the usual chemistry, but we think we got basically a disassembled hand grenade. The lab's got formulations for just about every conventional explosive in the world, civilian and military. It'll help a lot to know where it came from.”

“How do you know it's a grenade?” Marlene asked. “What
is
this stuff?”

Marino grinned and picked up a stainless steel forceps. “You know the general principle, right? You pull the pin on a grenade, release the lever, and a spring drives a pin into a percussion cap. This sets off a five-second or so fuse, which detonates the primer charge, which sets off the main charge. This here, we think, is the mounting for the percussion cap, and this little twisted bit coming off it was where the fuse was inserted.” Marino picked up and rotated the tiny blackened bits of metal as he spoke. They all looked remarkably alike to Marlene, but Marino sounded confident.

“Now, they got to fire it at the right time. They're working in a real tight space, so instead of the normal lever-and-spring firing mechanism, they use this.” Marino pointed to a blackened tube bent almost double.

“What is it?”

“It's a solenoid. A little electromagnet with a shaft riding in it. You got them in automobile starters. When the juice hits the magnet, it tries to shove the magnetized shaft out of the tube. They rigged it to strike the grenade's cap.”

“But where did they get the juice? I thought Doyle cut the wires.”

Marino's jaw tightened. “Yeah, he did. He cut the wires leading from the battery to the timer and the wires leading into the pot. That's the fiendish part. Over here. Hey, Barney, let's have a look at that gizmo.”

The balding man got up from his stool and made room for them in front of the binocular microscope. It had two sets of eyepieces so that two people could examine the specimen simultaneously.

“This I've never seen before,” Marino said, manipulating the object on the microscope stage with his forceps. Marlene peered into the scope and saw what appeared to be a split tube about four inches long, broken in three places.

“See that shiny glob at the top? It's glass.”

“An acid timer?”

“Probably. That big, fused mass above it's got to be a relay of some kind. As long as there's juice in the circuit, the relay stays open against the force of a spring. When the juice stops, the relay snaps shut and drives a pin into the acid reservoir and cracks it, starting the timer. Now, if you look inside the tube, see that fragment—black stuff, sandwiched with metal layers?”

“Yeah?”

“A capacitor. It stores current and lets it out in a burst. That's where they got the juice for the solenoid. Fucking fiendish, right?”

“Yeah,” Marlene said thoughtfully, “also wacky.”

“Wacky? Well yeah, you gotta be wacky, put a fucking thing like this in a—”

“No, I mean the
bomb
doesn't make sense. Look, they've got two independent sources of juice, one the taped-on six-volt, the other this weird gizmo for the booby trap.”

“It makes a lot of sense if you wanted to blow somebody up. Poor sap cuts the outside wires thinking he's cut the juice when in fact he's just activated the bomb.”

They were silent for a minute, staring at the evidence. Then Marlene pointed to the microscope stage and said, “Frank, could they have made this out of, like, spare parts?”

“It's possible, but not likely. I think what we got here is a serious piece of military hardware. Look, it's even got a serial number.”

It was true. Marlene could make out figures inscribed in the metal of the tube: D 144 Z.

“And you don't know what it is?”

“Nope. We could check with the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms unit. Or the military at Aberdeen. I was planning to do it anyway with the grenade mechanism.”

“Could you just send them photographs without telling them where it was from?”

“I guess so. Why?”

Marlene straightened from the microscope and rubbed her eyes. “Just caution. This case is getting weirder by the minute. I'm not exactly sure who's on our team. Look, Frank, when you get all this together, the physical evidence, the reports and all, could you seal it in a big box and hand carry it to my office? I need this all kept in the family for a while. When do you think you'll be done?”

Marino glanced at his watch. “Seven-thirty now. I expect the lab reports in about ten. I could wire the photographs with an emergency priority. They're usually pretty good about that. If they recognize the stuff, I should be able to get back to you late tonight or tomorrow morning.”

“Great. Look, I'm going now. If I give you my number, will you call me at home?”

“Sure thing, Marlene. Hey, Marlene, what do you think?” He waved his hand to encompass the scientifically arranged debris. “What's going on here? We gonna nail these guys?”

“Or die trying. But I'd give a lot to know where they got all these toys.”

“Not in Woolworth's.”

Marlene hitched a ride with a couple of cops who were going home to Staten Island and didn't mind dropping her in lower Manhattan. She sat in the back of the car, smoking and watching the reflection of her glowing cigarette move against the lights of the traffic on the Major Deegan and against the fairyland lights festooning the Triboro Bridge. The cops talked about the Jets, about PBA politics and the contract up for renegotiation this year, about good deals on washing machines.

No shop talk. A good idea, Marlene thought: put in your shift, do your eight and turn it off. She couldn't do it herself, and Karp couldn't either, for sure. They were both workaholics.

Heading south on the FDR, the driver said, “Where are you, Marlene, Canal? Houston?”

“Houston, hang a right on Lafayette.”

They soon pulled up in front of her loft. She slid across the seat and was starting to get out when the driver said, “Hold it, there's a guy in the doorway. You know him?”

“What is it, a bum?” the other cop asked.

Marlene peered into the shadows and saw a figure in light trousers and sneakers drinking from a bottle.

“Yeah, I know him,” Marlene said, getting out. She crossed the sidewalk and reached into her purse for her key. “I knew it was you when I saw the orange soda. No piss-bum would ruin his stomach with that shit.”

“Whimper, whimper, cringe,” Karp said.

She opened the door and looked down at him. “Jesus, Karp, you look like Greyfriar's Bobby. How long've you been waiting for me?”

“My whole life.”

“Well, you better come in, then.” She entered the building and began to climb the worn wooden stairs to the top floor, four flights up. As she opened the police lock on her loft door, she felt Karp come up close behind her and palm her butt. She looked at him over her shoulder. “What are you doing back there, sonny?”

“Rubbing your ass, in a crude effort to get you interested in me.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, first things first. This kid has been grubbing in the sandbox for three hours and every tiny crevice in my body is packed with abrasive grains. First, a bath.”

She opened the door and flicked on the lights. She lived in what was essentially a single immense room, a hundred feet long by thirty-five wide. It had windows on either end and a skylight in the center. The walls and sheet-tin ceiling were painted white and indirectly lit by aluminum clip-on reflector lamps that only partially dispelled the gloom.

“Sure you wouldn't rather have a tongue bath from a close personal friend?” Karp said, following her in and locking the door.

Marlene laughed. “Uh-uh, baby, this is a job for Keystone Plate-E-Z.” She disappeared behind a row of folding screens in the center of the room. Many lofts in SoHo have bathtubs in the middle of the living room or in the kitchen, depending on the distribution of the piping when they were converted by artists with little patience or money. Marlene's bathtub was black, four feet high, and the size of a queen-sized bed. The loft's previous tenant had been an electroplating firm, and when Marlene had first seen the place, it had been a tangle of ruined machinery, including four huge tubs used in the electroplating process. Marlene had saved one of these out of the general toss-out, scrubbed it, resealed it, installed a filter and a heater, painted it, and picked out its name and origin—Keystone Plate-E-Z, Scranton, Pa.—in sequins.

Karp sat himself down on a decrepit couch as Marlene flung various articles of clothing over the screens. A pair of filmy underpants floated through the air and landed at his feet. He heard Marlene lower herself into the tub with a long, gasping sigh. Then she said, “Butch, what're you doing?”