Reckless Endangerment (3 page)

“Morning, actually. Maybe four.”

“So he was in custody at like around seven this morning?”

“Oh, yeah. He must have gone out with the van to central booking at eight or around there. But like I say, that’s unusual. Most of ’em are pretty peaceful. Although, now that I think of it, a couple months ago we had a guy beat up his wife pretty bad, an Arab—”

“Yeah, well, look, Sarge, we got to get going right now—” Raney began, and then the broom said, “He was gonna kill him some Jews, that boy. Boy had a mother-fuckin’
thing
about the Jews. Him and his friends. Said he had some damn organization. Damn sumbitch didn’t have no more sense than a chicken. I said to him, hey, man—”

“Say, Skeeter?” Raney interrupted, vibrating now, feeling the luck flow and the sweat pop up on his scalp. “This kid say exactly which Jews he was planning to kill?”

“Nah. He just running his mouth, you know? Like, he said his organization was gonna do one this morning, and he was real pissed he wasn’t gonna be there, on account of his ass being in jail, you know? He was hot to go. He kept asking me, when we get out, when we get out? Like I the fuckin
judge,
you know?” The man laughed, a phlegmy, unpleasant rattle that turned into a cough.

Raney said, “Sarge, I think we’re gonna need to borrow Skeeter for a while.” McIlvey grunted and looked at the floor, and for an instant Raney actually thought he was going to refuse until Skeeter finished a sweep and a damp-mop.

The Arab misdemeanant, whose name was Walid Daoud, had a job and a father who owned a business, and so had been released on his own recognizance by the time they got to the Brooklyn jail. They drove the short hop to Atlantic Avenue, where the bakery was at which Daoud supposedly worked. Raney looked around him with greater interest. This neighborhood had expanded a good deal in the last decade. Once a relatively small community of Syrian and other Mideastern Christians, it had burgeoned down Atlantic Avenue east of its former boundary at Court Street and become more exotic, more Muslim. Women with shawls and shapeless dresses whose hems touched their shoes pulled shopping carts and hand-held strings of olive-skinned children down the street and in and out of small shops. There were even some women wearing the full traditional robes, with veil, and there were old bearded men wearing checkered headdresses. Sunday was clearly a big shopping day among the Brooklyn Arabs. There were a lot of kids. The day had turned warm, a herald of spring, and the storekeepers had moved the merchandise out on the sidewalk on homemade flats, and the clothing merchants had hung garments up on poles, giving the street the air of a
souk,
as did also the odors, burnt coffee, baking bread, and something spicy that Raney did not recognize, but which, he thought, was probably as familiar to these people as … what was a typical Irish fragrance? Cabbage? Whiskey? This had been an Irish neighborhood once, eighty years back, then Italian, now Arab.

Raney reflected on this transition to White, who was unimpressed. “Mutts are mutts, it don’t matter a fuck where they come from.”

“No? You don’t think there’s a difference? A Jew mutt and a black mutt?”

“What, you think the Jew mutt is smarter?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Just… different people put a different curve on the ball. It changes, but it’s always the same. Twenty-five years the houses and stores’ll still be here, but the cops’ll be Arabs and the people, the mutts’ll be, I don’t know, Eskimos, Tibetans, whatever.”

The interested tone in Raney’s voice did not spark any enthusiasm in White, who was a sports-and-pussy rather than a sociological-speculation kind of guy, nor in Skeeter, who was snoring liquidly in the backseat. They drove in relative silence therefore until Gallatin Street, where White said, “There it is. Want me to go around the back?”

“No, I don’t think so. This guy’s not going to run.”

Nor did he. Walid Daoud was summoned from the back of the shop by the pretty, sullen teenage girl minding the counter and came out trailing his father and clouds of white dust. The detectives made the usual explanation about wanting to ask a few more questions, the father berated the boy strenuously in Arabic, swatted him on the head a few, and they left without resistance. If Walid was surprised to see Skeeter in the car, he made no show of it, riding in silence during the twenty-five-minute trip to Midtown South.

They got Walid in the little room, and White, of course, was the bad cop. Raney thought he did a good job, no rough stuff, but a lot of shouting, and banging of chairs and throwing of telephone books, and impugning the manhood of the interviewee. You and your friends planned this, and then you chickened out, didn’t you? You little coward! What are you, some kind of faggot, you don’t have the guts to knife an old Jew? And so on, which got the expected rise out of Walid and an excuse—I was going, I was hurrying, I got arrested. What were their names? Your friends? Silence. Rage from White, threats, a final chair kicking, and then Raney stopped it and hustled White out of the room.

Offer of coffee, offer of cigarettes, apologies for White, a little racist remark, just to solidify the bond, we’re white men, you and I, he’s … well, you know what
they’re
like. Then the schtick.

“Look, Walid, you know, if it was a political crime, that’s one thing, we respect that. I mean, a man’s got to stand up for his rights, am I right?”

Walid nodded at this. A good-looking kid, Raney thought: big eyes, clear skin, good little body. Those eyelashes—little shit probably gets more pussy than Warren Beatty.

“We are fighters for free Palestine,
fedayin,
” said Walid with feeling.

“I appreciate that, Walid, but I got to say, you’re in a lot of trouble over this. I don’t like to see that, a kid your age.

“But … I was not there!”

“Yeah, we know that. But you’re what we call an accessory. You helped your friends plan this crime. You can be charged with conspiracy. You could go to jail for a long time.”

“I do not care!” said Walid. “The Zionists put hundreds in jail, hundreds, hundreds, so I join them. I do not care.”

“Right, I see that, but Walid, for you it wouldn’t be like that. You see … I’m not supposed to tell you this, but…” Raney looked over his shoulder and leaned forward conspiratorially. “The thing is, your friends robbed the people they attacked. They took the money from the store, so this won’t be treated as a political crime at all. It’s just gonna go down as another store robbery and murder. It’s not gonna help your cause one little bit.”

Walid stared, his mouth slightly open.

“Yeah, see, they screwed up, and the shame of it is, you’re gonna have to take the fall, for nothing.” He let that sink in for a moment and then resumed. “Now, this place where you planned the thing, the attack, that’s your organization headquarters, right?”

“Yes. Duhd el Dar al-Harb. This is us.”

“Uh-huh. What does that mean exactly?”

“It means, Against the House of War. It is the struggle. The Dar ul-Islam fights against the Zionists, the imperialists. These we call the Dar al-Harb, the House of War.” He banged his fists together violently to mime the intensity of the thing.

“I see. Now in this headquarters you probably have posters, pamphlets, all about what you’re doing, political stuff, right?”

“Yes, of course. We have this. And cassettes, from Palestine.”

“Well, that’s great, Walid. So, if we went there and found that stuff, see, it
would
be political then. You’d be in a whole different situation. You’d be a hero.”

Walid frowned. “You want … just the place, the garage. Not the names. I don’t give the names.”

“Hey, right, just the place. You’re a stand-up guy, Walid. We respect that. No, just the address. So we can get the political stuff.”

Raney left the room elated, with an address. An hour later, armed with a search warrant and backed up by a dozen heavily armed and flak-jacketed uniforms from the Eighty-fourth, Raney and White burst through the back door of a garage on Adams Street, Brooklyn, where they found posters of Yassir Arafat, pamphlets justifying the destruction of Israel, cassettes urging the same, a pair of field jackets spotted with a reddish-brown substance, one with a big green magic marker (similarly stained) in a pocket, and the other with eight packs of Salems in a pocket, two eight-inch hunting knives, stained with a reddish-brown substance, and two surprised young men. The young men did not speak much English, but sometime later they were identified (with the aid of a Syrian-American patrolman from the Eighty-fourth) as Yussuf Naijer and Mahmoud Hamshari, both late of Gaza, in the occupied territories of Palestine, and illegally in the United States. They were both taken to Midtown South, where they were put into a lineup and videotaped, which tape was then brought to Beth Israel, where it was shown to Mr. Shilkes. He had no trouble picking Naijer and Hamshari out as the men who had killed his wife. Raney went back to Midtown South and booked the two men for murder and Walid for conspiracy to commit murder.

As he sat down at his desk to complete the paperwork, he looked at his watch. It was a little over twelve hours since the crime. The suits would be pleased.

Ali al-Qabbani watched the police take away his two comrades and seal the room behind the garage. He doubted that Abdel, the garage’s owner, would wish to re-employ him after this, which meant that he had no money, no job, no clothes or possessions other than what he stood in now, and no place to sleep. He had, however, one place to go, and so he went there.

It was a long walk in the waning light, up Atlantic Avenue and south down Sixth Avenue into the more genteel, tree-shaded precincts of Park Slope. There he walked through a wrought-iron gate up to a nicely groomed brownstone and rang the bell. The man who answered it was well-fleshed and short, with a beautiful head of dark hair swept back from his forehead. He was wearing red leather slippers, blue jeans, and a white shirt buttoned at the collar. And he was sleek in the way that some men were where Ali came from, the men with the big cars and the bodyguards. You went to men like that when you were in trouble, and they helped you or they did not. The expression on this man’s face when he saw Ali standing there did not promise well.

“What are you doing here, you idiot?” he said in Arabic. “You were told never, ever to come here.”

Ali looked down from his height and said, “Please, Khalid-effendi, the police have been to Abdel’s. I have no place to go and no money.”

Chouza Khalid’s angry look was replaced by one of calculation and then one of beneficence, which, had Ali any brains at all, would have made him flee as from wild dogs. Instead, he followed the man’s gesturing arm into the tiled entranceway and then through another door into a carpeted hallway lit with sconces and furnished with a gold-framed mirror, a shining wooden table holding a vase of flowers, and a carved red velvet chair. There Khalid bade him wait and he did, standing, of course, because it would never have occurred to him to take the liberty of sitting in the velvet chair.

Khalid left the hallway and went through a large, modern kitchen to a door, which he unlocked, and then descended to the basement. He then unlocked another door and entered a small darkened room, where a man sat on a couch, smoking and watching television. The man had a short gray-black beard, deeply socketed dark eyes, visible now only as pits lit by the flickering TV, and long, tapering, elegant fingers. He was wearing a white
djelaba
and a white, knitted skullcap. He did not take his eyes from the TV as Khalid spoke.

“It is Ali.”

“Inevitably,” said the bearded man. “The poor lad has nowhere else to go. Tell me, he is our only contact?”

“Yes. I ordered him not to tell, and he is an obedient boy. Dull like the rest, but reliable. I don’t think he would have spoken of it to Naijer or Mahmoud. He didn’t like them. He was most friendly with Walid, but, of course, Walid did not participate, and will not be much bothered by the police, if God wills. So … a long journey?”

“Yes, by water,” said the bearded man. For the first time he looked up at Khalid. “And the other enterprise?”

“They arrive tomorrow, men and supplies. It is all arranged. If God wills, it will all go as we have planned.”

“If God wills,” echoed the bearded man and then returned his full attention to the screen, where a drama depicting the lives of the police was in progress. Apparently the American police spent much of their time seducing women, which was interesting if true. The bearded man watched television almost all the time. He felt it was the best way for him to understand this truly amazing nation.

Dismissed, Chouza Khalid went up the stairs, locking both doors behind him.

TWO

T
he office of the District Attorney for the County of New York (that is, the island of Manhattan) has for years, and with some reason, considered itself the best prosecutorial organization in the nation. Within this office the Homicide Bureau is the elite corps. The chief of this unit, therefore, has every right to consider himself at the very top of his profession, and the current chief had no trouble doing so. He had worked hard for the job, and he felt he deserved it. His name was Roland Hrcany, and he did deserve it. He was an excellent homicide prosecutor, tough-minded, skilled in the law and its stratagems, on excellent terms with the NYPD, and possessed of both a bullish determination and a keen political sense. As for his vices, he was, in the office, perhaps too fond of throwing his weight around, too quick to judgment, too slow to admit error, and in the personal sphere too fond of women way too young for him (he was thirty-seven), of whom he had a prodigious skein.

Had Roland been at all capable of self-examination, he might have found an explanation for both virtues and vices in his own sad history. Aged eleven, he had walked out of the Hungarian forests across the Austrian border, holding his father’s hand. His mother had fallen to one of the innumerable bullets fired during the confused days of the 1956 rebellion. Settled at last in New York, the elder Hrcany (once a high school teacher) had found work as a superintendent of a building in the rough Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York, also moonlighting as a truck driver. Roland, then a spindly, nervous kid, had been sent to public school, where his fate was what might be expected for a smallish boy speaking broken English, with a funny name and studious to boot, among what was then a rough Irish and Italian crowd. He was tortured, with no one to tell about it. His father was working like an ox in the good old immigrant way, and Roland could not bear to bother him. Instead, inspired by an ad in the subway, and without telling anyone, Roland joined the Boys’ Club, where there was a weight room. By the time he was fourteen, Roland, though still short, had a seventeen-inch neck and could bench 220. Nobody bothered him in school anymore. He also joined the Police Athletic League, where he began his lifelong love affair with the NYPD, and also excelled at football.