Reckless Endangerment (44 page)

As he drove to the other address he had tortured out of Bashar, he reflected on how foolish he had been to approach the prosecutor. If the Obregons went to jail again, that was no problem, for no place was easier to get into than a jail. He would come back at a later date, when the police no longer sought him quite as avidly. If the Obregons were released, they would eventually return to Mexico, and that was no problem either, as he could certainly find and kill anyone in Mexico. Naturally, if he had a good, easy chance he would do them, but it was something he could leave for later. No, it was this maddening pressure of time that had thrown off his instincts, that and the fever. His wound was not healing; the whole side of his body was now red and swollen, and it hurt, although he tried to push back the pain and the hot fog that clouded his vision and his judgment by eating Percodan and aspirin like gumdrops. He shook four more tablets, two of each, into his hand and swallowed them dry.

There was the house. El Chivato found a parking space opposite and watched it for a while. His forehead broke out in a sweat, and he was glad he had sunglasses. The day was overcast but bright, and the light bothered his eyes.

He left the car and went through the overgrown front yard and around the back of the house. The back door had grilles and a new lock on it, but underneath it was the old-fashioned glass-windowed kind, dating from the days when this had been a civilized street and the resident housewife might have looked through that window, pushing back a thin white curtain to smile at the delivery boy. El Chivato went back to the car, opened the trunk, wrestled a tire tool out from under the woman’s flaccid body, and went back to the house, where he used the tire tool to pry up the grille. He broke a pane and let himself in.

The backdoor led via a short hallway to the kitchen, which was clean and in reasonable repair. Not so the rest of the house. The first floor was a ruin of fallen plaster, hanging wiring, and cracked wood, dimly lit by sunlight entering through gaps in the plywood covering the windows. It had clearly been used at some time in the past as a haunt of junkies. El Chivato wrinkled his nose and climbed to the second floor. There one bedroom and its adjoining bath had been renovated to a degree. They were clean at least and supplied with electricity and water. There were sheets and blankets on a simple cot that made up the bedroom’s sole furniture. A cardboard carton held folded clothes—jeans and shirts, socks and underwear. On the sink in the bathroom he found toothpaste, a toothbrush (quite dry), and a bottle of aspirin. El Chivato took the bottle and descended the stairs, past the first floor, and through a door he found behind the main staircase.

A hanging lamp cord brushed his face. He yanked it and walked down the narrow, worn steps. A large, empty room, floored with concrete. Dim light entered through narrow, filthy windows near the ceiling. A door from this led to a smaller room with an oil furnace in it, a square brown box that stood next to the cylindrical gray coal-burning unit it had replaced. He pulled another hanging string and turned on the overhead bulb.

As he did so, he heard a faint noise coming from behind a new, steel-framed wooden door built into the brick wall next to the coal furnace. It was locked from the outside by a turn bolt. El Chivato flattened himself against the wall, turned the bolt, and flung back the door. Nothing. He peeked around the frame, pistol pointing, and saw a young girl crouched on a mattress. At first he thought she was a black girl, but closer inspection showed that she was merely filthy with coal dust. He asked her who she was, and she told him her story, how the man she had heard called Chouza had kidnapped her on behalf of her family, who wanted her dead because she was a whore, although she wasn’t really. As the girl prattled on, El Chivato considered whether it would harm his enemy worse to kill the girl or let her go, and decided that it was the latter. He asked her when Chouza would return, to which she replied that she didn’t know, but that she had not been fed that day, and so she expected him at any time. He always comes down here? Yes. He made a decision.

“Go,” he said, “but before you leave, lock me in here.”

“Why?” Fatyma was mildly surprised at being rescued by a transvestite. She had known several on the Deuce, and most of them had been eccentric in one way or another. Wanting to be locked into a coal cellar was, however, a new one.

“Just do it,” he said, and gave her a look that made her swallow hard. He sat down on the cleanest part of the mattress and leaned against the brick. Fatyma shut the door and turned the bolt.

After that she went immediately to the coal furnace, knelt, rummaged in the ash grate, and pulled out a plastic-wrapped package the size of two bricks. Peeling back a corner of the plastic, she saw that it was composed of currency—twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills. She ran upstairs to the kitchen and washed her face and her hands at the sink, and found a grocery bag into which she placed the package. She found a steak knife in a drawer and put that in the bag too. Then she went searching for clothes, because she was not about to walk through the streets in a T-shirt and panties. In the upstairs bedroom she found a pair of jeans, which when hoisted to breast height and tied with a strip of cloth torn from the bed sheet, and hacked off for length, would serve as a covering. She found some rubber zoris in the bathroom, slipped them on, put the money in a shopping bag she had found, and slipped out of the house. A few streets away, on Atlantic Avenue, she found a large, cheap variety store, where she bought herself several outfits, a straw handbag, some sneakers, big sunglasses, a large and unlikely platinum-blond wig, and a cloth suitcase to hold what she wasn’t wearing. Then she hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to the airport.

Khalid entered his house by the front door and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare a meal for his prisoner. He began to fill a pot at the sink. When he saw the soot stains, he let out a cry of dismay and dropped the pot. It made a sound like a gong. He checked the back door, saw the broken glass, ran down the cellar stairs, knelt by the furnace door, his pulse thrumming in his ears. He reached deeply into the ash grate and let out another cry and a string of curses. One of his packages was gone. And the other one, all the way in the back…? He grasped it with sweating hands and drew it out, holding it to his breast like an infant.

He stayed there a moment, willing his stricken brain to unfreeze. Someone had broken in and taken half his money and released the girl. Ibn-Salemeh or the Mexican? Certainly, the Mexican. Ibn-Salemeh had been playing sheik since the last time Khalid visited the girl, and if any of the others had explored the furnace, they would have taken all the money—and told Ibn-Salemeh that Khalid had been skimming money and Khalid would now be floating in the harbor. So where was the Mexican now? With the girl? Or …

At that moment Khalid noticed that the door to the coal cellar was closed. And locked. Why would the girl lock it behind her? He drew his pistol from his waistband and fired a half dozen shots through the wooden door. Then he turned and ran, as the door panel flew into splinters from the sleet of automatic fire that came from inside the coal cellar.

“I must go now,” said Walid importantly, looking at his watch. He was tired and irritable, having been up all night repairing the damage that the dirty Jews had done to their bakery and baking too. His father had burned his hands extinguishing the fire in the shop, preventing the flames from reaching the kitchen. Although Hassan could not bake at present, there was nothing wrong with his mouth, and he found plenty of fault with Walid’s technique. Toward dawn, having, of course, overexerted himself, he began to have trouble breathing, and was now under observation in Bellevue, which was why Walid was free with the truck on a Friday afternoon.

“Can I come with you?” asked Posie. They were lying on a bed of cardboard cartons in the back of the bread van. Posie felt pretty good, even though Walid didn’t know shit about women; it had been necessary to show him where everything was and what it was for. She still hadn’t let him do it yet—Marlene had reiterated her orders about that the other night—but she figured a quick blowjob wasn’t really
doing
it, and the poor dude was popping out of his pants. It went like a trick a biker she once knew could do, cracking the top off a beer bottle with his teeth, and the foam gushing out, that fast. And it was nice to be with a guy who was
grateful
instead of like you were lighting their cigarette or something. She had her dress unbuttoned all the way down the front and her breasts out of her bra. His head was resting on these now. Another neat thing about Walid, he didn’t get up right away after he shot his rocks, like some guys, like you were a Kleenex they’d just used.

“No, because it is a secret,” said Walid. “I am not allowed to talk of it.”

“Oh, come on, man! You could tell
me.
Who am I gonna tell?”

Walid sighed and nuzzled deeper into those unbelievably soft pillows. It was moving too fast for him. His life had not prepared him for these events: first nineteen years in which all he had to do was obey older people, first his uncles in Palestine, then his father, then Ali and the others, which hadn’t worked out too well, he had to admit, and then his sister disappearing, kidnapped by the Zionists, and Chouza and his mission, which was something he might have imagined, at least, politics, the struggle, and now this girl, a gift, it seemed from heaven, well, not heaven perhaps, but not, in any case, something he was going to take any chance on losing.

“It is a secret,” he repeated. “They are going to put special equipment in my truck. For operations.”

“What do you mean, operations?” Posie knew that this was the kind of stuff Marlene wanted to know, although he hadn’t mentioned his sister at all, which was supposed to be the point.

“Secret operations.” He suddenly felt the urge to move and turned his head away from her and rose. “You must get dressed now and go,” he said. But she rose too and followed him and put her arms around him from behind.

“Aw, Wally, couldn’t I just come along a little way? I could get out when you do the secret stuff. Please?”

“Where is Hussein?” asked Ibn-Salemeh, frowning. He did not like it when plans were changed.

“He is helping Abdel with the steel. It was a bigger job than we thought.”

Ibn-Salemeh grunted and swept out of the hotel room, followed by Little Mahmoud, both of them in robes. Khalid was wearing a chauffeur’s black coat and cap, with a clip-on leather bow tie. He felt only slightly less foolish than he had in the robes.

It had not, in fact, taken the NYPD long to find out where a bunch of rich Arabs were staying, just, as it turned out, twenty minutes too long, which was about the interval between the white Caddie pulling away from the curb, and the arrival, at the same curb, of Detectives Raney and White. They showed their warrant and went upstairs with the assistant manager. Behind the desk, a young man, late of Amman, Kingdom of Jordan, waited until the elevator door closed and made a phone call to a number he had been given.

Holidays are time machines, was Marlene’s thought as she knelt in Old St. Pat’s and listened to the familiar Good Friday service: this is the Wood of the Cross on which was hung the Savior of the World, said the priest, and she responded with all the others, come, let us worship. It was all in English now, not Latin, and she had Lucy there next to her, solemn and still, but it did take you back, she thought, to all the churches she’d been in, back to St. Joseph’s in Ozone Park, Queens. She looked sideways at the small dark head beside her, saw the entranced expression, and felt a pang of envy, and a greater one of regret. Apprehension too: she recalled vividly what it had felt like, the Real Presence, as they say, at nine, ten, and eleven, and afterward the fading, the loss, so gradual and subtle that you didn’t even know it was gone, and one day it was just words, and you had it not. Sex and modern rationalism: a hard combo for anything to go up against, and in her case it had been no contest, and yet here she was still going, still kneeling, still offering her child to the Church, and all of her liberal friends thinking she was dotty on the subject. As she was, although none of her liberal friends went armed all the time and shot people on a fairly regular basis, and tortured people, and sent their gormless nursemaids out to seduce terrorists, and so they were perhaps not entitled to an opinion about why Marlene chose to open herself, on Sundays and holidays, to the possibility of infinite mercy.

The priest was consuming the Host, facing the stripped altar (“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you”), and in fact Marlene did not feel worthy and declined. Lucy shot her a worried look, but moved out of the row toward the communion rail, her back stiff and pointing straight up to Heaven.

The service over, the congregation having filed silently out in the traditional way, they went to their car. On the drive home, Marlene noticed that Lucy was as still as one of the plaster saints in the place they had just left.

“Are you okay, Luce?”

“Sure. Why?”

“You’re not moving. I thought you might be sick or something.”

“No, Tran is teaching me how to be still. He says it’ll improve my concentration, and also make me ready for, you know … like, an attack.”

“Uh-huh. Is it working?”

“I think so. I do conjugations and vocabulary in my head. I think my memory is improving. And I’m more relaxed. I don’t get so pissed—I mean, annoyed at things. The twins, school stuff. I still get a kind of annoyance when they mention the Jews in church. I think about Dad.”

“Well, that was a long time ago,” said Marlene carefully. “I think they’ve dropped the business about the guilt of modern Jews.”

“I know that. Sister Teresa explained that part in Sunday school. But it’s still in the words. They didn’t change the Gospels. And like the news and stuff? The Arab terrorists and those black guys. Do you think they’ll ever like
genocide
Jews again, like in the old days?”

“No, and in any case, it’s unlikely they’d start in New York. Does it worry you?”