Reckless Endangerment (37 page)

It was too late. He saw the flash and heard that unforgettable sound. He scrambled for a doorway and crouched there. The rocket struck the front of the ESU van, which had quarter-inch steel plating over the radiator to protect it from the odd bullet. This armor was enough to trigger the warhead, sending a gout of superheated gas and incandescent metal through the length of the van. Its body burst like a toy balloon, and then the gas tank (full with thirty-two gallons of regular lead-free) exploded, and then, at intervals, off went the remarkable range of explosive devices normally carried in ESU vehicles—tear-gas rounds, shotgun rounds, rifle and pistol bullets, concussion grenades.

McElroy got to his feet and put his gas mask on. He could not see more than a yard in front of his face, so thick was the combined fog of smoke and gas. He stumbled along in the general direction of Bedford Avenue, hoping to find an intact RMP so he could get back in communication. He had no idea if any of his men had survived.

He heard coughing all around him, and the sound of hopeless retching, and the crackle of things burning, the continuous wailing of sirens, the weirdly discordant splash and rush of water from the broken hydrant, the pop-bang-pop of miscellaneous ordnance exploding. Someone in dark clothes blundered by him coughing, but he could not see whether it was a Hasid or an ESU cop. Then a new sound, the
wacketa-wacketa
of helicopters, more than one, he was sure. It was exactly like Vietnam, was his thought—we get creamed on the ground, the bad guys book out, and the choppers come in to dust off the survivors. McElroy found his RMP and began the slow process of rallying his troops and coping with the awful mess on the street.

But within twenty minutes the sun went down and an evening breeze sprang up from the East River nearby, which blew the gas away, at the same time fanning the dozen or so fires that had broken out in buildings on either side of the van explosion, when white-hot chunks of debris flew into shops and apartments. It took another half hour to clear the fourteen RMPs back out of Rutledge Street so the fire trucks and the ambulances could enter. The clearer air brought shocking sights. McElroy had, of course, seen a good deal of bad stuff in his work, and during the war; this rivaled the worst of that. All down the street Hasidim were stumbling through the ruins, screaming for their relatives in Yiddish and English. Hasidic ambulance-society men were cruising with stretchers, occasionally arguing with the regular paramedics over possession of the wounded. There were enough for both; they lay thick on the street, black and limp like shot crows. He recalled the old grainy black-and-white films and photos he had seen, and decided that, the helicopters apart, it looked less like ’Nam than like the Warsaw Ghetto.

El Chivato had not stopped to enjoy the havoc he had caused, but immediately after the rocket had left its tube, he had shoved his assault rifle into a deep pocket of his canvas coat, filled the other pockets with grenades, and walked down Rutledge to Lee Avenue. He still hoped to find the man he was chasing. He had to push through crowds of the curious, running in the opposite direction, trying to see what was happening around the corner, and as he did so, he could not help noticing that nearly all the men he was passing were dressed almost exactly alike, in long, shiny black wraparound coats and black hats trimmed with red fur. He found this somewhat strange, but not that much stranger than many other aspects of this accursed city. Several police cars raced up Lee, sirens wailing. One stopped across the street and two officers emerged. El Chivato kept walking, searching the storefronts for a place to hide. Many of the signs were in a language he could not read. This made him nervous.

One shop caught his eye. In the window, garments like the ones he saw on the street were displayed, coats and hats and other cloth objects, whose purpose he could not guess. He went in. There was a bearded man in black behind the counter who stared at him in open-mouthed surprise. El Chivato looked around the little shop. There were no display dummies—caftans of different sizes were hung on the walls and from hooks depending from the ceiling. Hasidic hats in various styles were stacked on shelves along one wall.

Without a word the youth pulled a largish caftan from its hanger and tried it on over his canvas coat. It reached to the tops of his boots and made him look heavier than he was. He went to the hats and tried on several, choosing a fur-trimmed one with a wide brim that shaded his face. The shopkeeper still had not made a sound.

El Chivato went to a mirror and looked at his reflection, turning this way and that. He had not shaved in over a week, so that was to the good, although he could do nothing about the tone of his skin. Something was missing, though. He went to the counter and confronted the shopkeeper.

“How much?”

The man cleared his throat and cocked his head to one side appraisingly. His glasses glinted. “You want this? It’s a little tight across the shoulders.”

“I don’t mind,” said El Chivato. “How much … no, wait, I want this too.”

“What, reading glasses?”

“Yes.” El Chivato selected a green-tinted pair from a dusty rotating rack on the glass counter and slipped them on. If he pulled them down on his nose a bit, he could avoid seeing blur through the lenses.

The shopkeeper totted up a bill. “Four sixty-eight seventy-two, with tax.”

El Chivato paid with twenties from the roll in his pocket, waited for his change, and walked out.

He walked north on Lee past knots of excited people, past squads of police searching every building. There were now a score of police vehicles of all sizes, RMPs, vans, buses, parked on Lee and the streets surrounding. No one stopped him. He walked up to Broadway and west, over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan. Looking back from the center of the bridge, he saw a thick mantle of smoke hanging over the district he had just left.

On Columbia Street just off the Manhattan end of the bridge he found a white van driven by a black pimp who was running a mobile two-whore brothel for the early trade. El Chivato approached him, got a nice gold-cap smile, which turned to an expression of fear and dismay as the putative Hasid shoved a big pistol in his face.

“Anything on the tube tonight?” Karp asked just before eight.

“The usual crap, I guess,” answered his wife from her position on the living room couch, which was supine, with a glass of red wine handy. “I’m too tired to watch, and I still have some calls to make. Sit down here and stroke my brow.”

Karp did so. Karp was a plain vanilla erotic arts sort of guy, but over the years she had taught him a thing or two, brow stroking being one of them.

“Poor baby,” he said sincerely (since she really did look frazzled), “they’re pounding you into the ground. Can’t Harry take some of the freight?”

“Oh, Harry! Yes, in fact Harry can take some of the freight, as long as I do what he and Osborne want me to do. He volunteered, so to speak, to pick up some of my stalking and abuse load if I do a chore for Osborne. Some meeting-security horseshit.”

“So? What’s the problem?”

“A little back, over the ear, please. No problem, except I hate meeting security, and also it’s a dick-head two-day job that a couple of square badges could do in their sleep, and they only want me because I’m the girl on the team and it’s a girl’s club that’s having the meeting. Nice Jewish girls, as a matter of fact.”

“What, like Hadassah?”

“Not
like
Hadassah, Hadassah,” said Marlene. “I have an appointment with an Amy Weinstein tomorrow. Is that a sketch or what?”

“It’ll broaden your cultural horizons,” said Karp. “What’s the matter, they couldn’t get a Jewish girl? Jewish girls don’t pack heat?”

Marlene struck a pose, wrists bent, fingers splayed, and said in thick Lawn Guyland syllables, “What, you want me to break a nail?”

Karp laughed and continued with his stroking. “Oh, good, it’s remarks like that’ll win their hearts over by Hadassah. This has made my week, Marlene. I only wish my mother was here to see it. Remember, when you go up there, you should bring a little something, a cake from Babka, maybe a nice challah …”

Marlene suddenly shook herself and sat up. “No, no, Marlene,” she said, “we can’t sink into mere animal luxury until we’ve made all our calls. Are we a Sacred Heart girl? Are we imbued with the twin imperatives of the Mesdames, guilt and high achievement? Oh, yes, we are!” She rose groaning to her feet and walked out of the living room toward her office.

Alert as only a mother can be, she picked up all the evening noises chez Karp: Posie playing R.E.M. at top volume through her earphones, singing tunelessly along; tiny soft snores from the boys’ room; a strange droning mumble from Lucy’s.

Marlene was a firm believer in the principle that children deserved privacy and a life of their own, although in practice she spied like the KGB every chance she got. She pressed her face up against the door frame and peered through the gap. Her daughter was sitting tailor fashion on the bed, rocking back and forth.

“Tomorrow,” she chanted, “
bukra,
tomorrow morning
bukra e-sub
’h
tomorrow afternoon
bukra e-dohr
tomorrow evening
bukra bil layl
the day after tomorrow
ba’ghkd bukra
see you tomorrow
ashoofak bukra
tongue
lissan …
”

Marlene stopped looking and continued down the hallway, feeling odd. Her daughter was memorizing an Arabic dictionary. It was something she did, memorize dictionaries, for amusement. One time through and she had the whole thing. She’d done it with a French one and a Spanish one and a Mandarin one. Marlene knew this, but every time she observed the actual process, she got a little chill, as if watching something beyond the ordinary realm of human achievement, something one could not do oneself in a million years, like watching Nolan Ryan pitch. If the genetic sweepstakes had thrown up such a weird ringer (for she herself, although reasonably competent with languages, was nothing out of the ordinary, while Karp, though a natural mimic, was entirely monoglot), what else was in store, what other mysteries would play out, for Lucy and the boys? And she felt the half-shameful irritation that even a good parent feels when the kid has gone beyond her in some way.

At her desk, she shook off these thoughts and turned to business. She was looking over her list of calls, trying to decide which ones would take the least time, when the house phone rang. She picked it up, and it was Clay Fulton.

“Hey, Marlene. Butch there?”

“Yeah, I’ll yell. How’s it going?”

A rueful chuckle. “Oh, I’ve been better, lady. I’ve had better days.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“
What’s the matter?
Don’t you people have a damn TV?”

“Yeah, but it’s not on. What’s happening?”

“Oh, not much,” said Fulton, and now Marlene picked up the absolute exhaustion in his voice, “just that a couple hours ago Arab terrorists burnt down half of Williamsburg, and killed about twenty-five people, seven of them cops.”

Ibn-Salemeh was watching the news, for the news had preempted nearly every channel, and he was fascinated.

“I should be angry with you,” he said. “This could have jeopardized everything, and yet … it was so brilliantly done, I cannot find it in my heart to criticize you. You say it was entirely spontaneous?”

“Yes, effendi,” answered Chouza Khalid. “When I thought of what the Zionists, may they roast in hell, had done to Bashar and Ahmed I could not control myself. I had to strike back at the Jews. I am sorry if I did wrong.”

“Well, killing a few Jews is never wrong, but please, no more until after the operation. It is truly amazing that you were able to escape after doing this.”

“Yes, effendi, but … who can explain the will of God? Jemil was martyred, and I escaped, and Hussein and Mahmoud.”

“Yes, the will of God is truly inexplicable,” said Ibn-Salemeh, and he went back to watching the scenes of carnage.

Khalid sat back in his chair and discreetly dabbed at the beads of sweat on his upper lip. Perhaps God
had
been involved. It was certain that he was enjoying a remarkable run of good luck, both in the world and in relation to satisfying Ibn-Salemeh. He would, of course, have to go completely underground after this, to disappear from his usual haunts. The police were stupid, but after this business, they would grab up every Arab who hadn’t been in the country for fifty years, and some of them too.

It was certainly what the man next to him wanted. Perhaps, Khalid having performed (as he imagined) this unexpected outrage, Ibn-Salemeh would be accommodating about the girl. If not, he would have to fall back on initiative. With luck it would all work out. And his luck had always been good, always left him one up. Like there being a hand truck and an oil drum in the bed of the wrecker. They’d loaded the oil drum on the hand truck, Khalid had picked up a clipboard with some old invoices on it, and they’d walked away from the thing, a couple of working stiffs making a delivery down an alley. In that way they’d gone through to Lynch Street and by that back to Bedford Avenue. Nobody expects fleeing felons to be hauling a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. This was abandoned when they entered the subway at Flushing Avenue. An hour of riding back and forth, and they’d made their way to Grand Army Plaza and walked back to the house on Tenth Street.

Khalid turned his attention back to the television screen. He was not, naturally, as happy with the chaos as his employer was, first since he knew the absurd origins of the thing, and second because he thought that the present carnage and the attention it would draw from the authorities would make it nearly impossible to carry out the original mission. Which the madman next to him would in no way consider postponing. He turned his inner thoughts away from the television, away from Brooklyn, to the villa on the Gulf which he would one day occupy, to the girl Fatyma, her round brown body, and to his luck, which had not so far deserted him and which, God willing, only needed to hold out for a few more days, less than a week.

FIFTEEN