Black Market (13 page)

He couldn't think clearly. Everything was blurry. His forehead, his cheeks, and the back of his neck throbbed from the splinters of glass embedded in his flesh. He felt dizzy and sick. And he was filled with rage.

Gunshot explosions and horrible screams continued to echo through the Société Générale building. Then warbling police sirens shrieked and howled outside. They filled the air with the sudden news of terrifying disaster. Carroll finally took off his shirt and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding arm.

Michel Chevron would be telling nothing about the powerful black market in Europe and the Middle East now. Nothing about what Green Band might be.

Who was behind this horrifying noonday massacre? What could the French banker Michel Chevron have possibly known?

Carroll was too weak to stand. He slumped against a plaster wall, his head down between his knees.

What could Chevron have possibly known?

What could be worth this terrifying massacre?

What in the name of God could justify this?

Queens, New York

It was a magical moment, one that Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew he would never be able to forget. It was like a fantastic movie scene he'd been dreaming about for as long as he could remember.

As dawn edged through soiled, slate-gray skies, Stemkowsky rolled his wheelchair down the concrete ramp he'd built to get in and out of his house in Jackson Heights, Queens. His wife, Mary, a former nurse who was ten years older than Harry, sauntered close behind him.

“This is it, sweetheart,” she said in a whisper.

“This is definitely it,” Harry said brightly.

Mary Stemkowsky carefully set down Harry's two new Dunhill travel bags. She glanced at her husband. She couldn't believe how impressive and businesslike he looked in his dark pin-striped suit. His blond hair and beard were neatly trimmed and shaped. He held a soft leather attaché case that looked as if it cost big money, impossible money.

“Excited, Harry? I'll bet you are.” Mary Stemkowsky couldn't control a shy, softly blossoming grin as she spoke. She believed that Harry was truly a saint. You could ask any of his friends at the Vets Cab Company, any of the physical therapists who worked with him at the VA hospital, where she and Harry had originally met.

Mary Stemkowsky didn't know how he'd done it, but Harry seemed to completely accept what had happened to him more than a decade before in Vietnam. He almost never complained about the wounds or the constant pain. In fact, he seemed to live his life for other people, for their happiness, especially her own.

“Tell the truth, I'm a li-li-little scared. Nuh-nuh-nice scared.”

Harry tried to smile, but he looked pale around the gills, Mary thought. She immediately bent and kissed him on both cheeks, then on his slightly bloated lips. It was strange the way she loved him so much, what with his infirmities, his physical limitations. But she did. She truly loved Harry more than she loved the rest of the world combined.

“Sa-sorry
you
can't go, Muh-Mary.”

“Oh, I'll go next time, I guess. Sure, sure. You better believe I will.” Mary suddenly laughed, and her broad, horsey smile was close to radiant. “You look like the president of a bank or something. President of Chase Manhattan Bank. You do, Harry. I'm so proud of you.”

She stooped and kissed him again. She didn't want him to ruin one minute, not a single heartbeat, of his European trip just because she couldn't go with him this time.

“Oh, here he comes! Here comes Mitchell now.” She pointed up along the row of dull, virtually faceless tract houses.

A yellow cab had turned onto their street. Mary could make out Mitchell Cohen at the wheel, wearing his usual flap-eared Russian fur hat.

She knew that Mitchell and Harry had been working on their business scheme for almost two years. All they would tell her and Neva Cohen was that it had to do with arbitrage-which Mary loosely understood as trading currencies from country to country, making money on discrepancies in the exchange rates-and that this arbitrage scheme was their ticket out of hacking cabs for the rest of their lives.

“He takes two Dilantins before bedtime,” Mary said as she and Mitchell Cohen helped load Harry into the Vets cab.

Harry absolutely cracked up at that remark. He loved the way Mary continually worried about him, worried about dumb things like the Dilantin, which he took regularly every night and three times during the day.

“You have a wonderful trip over to Europe, Harry. Don't work
too
hard. Miss me a little.”

“Awhh, cah-cah-mon. I muh-muh-miss you already,” Harry Stemkowsky muttered, and he sincerely meant it.

He'd never really been able to understand why Mary had decided to live with a cripple in the first place. He was just happy that she had. Now he was going to do something for her, something that both of them deserved. Harry Stemkowsky was going to become an instant winner in life. And fuck everybody who didn't believe in him.

Tears suddenly welled in his red-rimmed eyes. They continued to roll down his cheeks as the Vets cab slowly bumped up the deserted early morning Queens street. He had wanted desperately to take Mary along-it just wasn't possible. Among other complications, he wasn't going to Geneva, Switzerland, as he'd told her. He and Mitchell Cohen were flying to Tel Aviv, then to Tehran… They were going to be in considerable danger for the next thirty-six hours, danger they hadn't seen since Southeast Asia. But there was another side to the trip, too. There was a whole other perspective both men couldn't help considering…

Harry Stemkowsky and Mitchell Cohen were feeling alive for the first time in almost fifteen years.

The Green Band mission had brought them back to life.

While Stemkowsky and Cohen drove to Kennedy Airport, another of the chosen couriers, Vets 7, was already on board Pan Am flight 311, winging its way toward Japan.

Jimmy Holm was entertaining a first-class stewardess, skillfully recounting the true stories of how he had survived three years in a North Vietnamese prison, then two more years in a Bakersfield, California, VA hospital. Bakersfield, he said, had been much, much worse.

“And now, here I am. This high-and-mighty clipper-class life-style. Europe, the Far East.” Holm smiled and drained his glass of Moët & Chandon. “God bless America. With all the ugly warts we hear so much about, God bless our country. Isn't this the greatest?”

At approximately the same hour, Vets 15, Paul Melindez, and Vets 9, Steve Glickman, were enjoying similar first-class treatment on another Pan Am flight scheduled for Bangkok 's Don Muang Airport. Both Melindez and Glickman had recently worked as private rent-a-cops in Orlando, Florida. Today, December 9, they were personally in control of something over sixteen million dollars…

“Samples.”

Vets 5, Harold Freedman, had already arrived in London. Vets 12, Jimmy Cassio, was in Zurich. Vets 8, Gary Barr, was settled in Rome -where he was sitting on a classically beautiful stone terrazzo terrace that overlooked the dazzling Tiber.

Barr had most recently been a comedy nightclub bouncer for over four years on Sunset Drive in Los Angeles. Now he was thinking that this had to be a dream. Vets 8 finally closed his eyes. He blinked them open again… and Rome along the Tiber was still there.

So was the twenty-two million for his upcoming negotiations.

More “samples.”

Manhattan

In the West Village section of New York, Vets 3 wasn't flying or even living very first class. Nick Tricosas had no four-hundred-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. He had no leather Dunhill wallet full of fancy credit cards. Vets 3 was wearing a cut-off USMC T-shirt, a greaser's head bandanna, and faded khaki-drab fatigue trousers.

He was playacting that he was in ' Nam again. In a weird way, he figured that he was. Green Band was the unofficial end of Vietnam, wasn't it? It was something close to that.

Tricosas stared around the cramped radio room and felt a rush of claustrophobia tighten his chest. The broom closet was tucked up on the third floor of the Vets garage. The place was bare but for a gray metal card table and matching folding chair, the PRC transmitter-receiver, and a
First Blood
movie poster taped to the greasy walls.

“Contact. This is Vets Three.” Tricosas's finger finally clicked on the PRC again.

“All right, all you brave veterans of foreign wars, you Purple Heart and Medal of Honor winners… who can handle a pickup at Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street?… A Ms. Austin and her day nurse, Nazreen… Ms. Austin is a very sweet lady with a fold-it-up wheelchair. Fits very nicelike in the trunk of a Checker. She'll be going to Lenox Hill Hospital for her weekly chemotherapy. Over.”

“Over. This is Vets Twenty-two. I'm at Mad Ave and five two. I'll pick up and take Ms. Austin. I know the old chick. Be there in approximately five minutes. Over.”

“Thank you kindly, Vets Twenty-two… Okay, here's another hot one. I have a corporate account at Twenty-five Central Park West. Account T-Twenty-one. Mr. Sidney Solovey is headed for the Yale Club at Fifty Vanderbilt. Mr. Solovey used to work for Salomon Brothers. Before somebody blew the living shit out of Wall Street, that is. Over.”

“Over. Vets Nineteen. I'm CPS and Sixth. I'll take Mr. Solovey to Yale. Listen, Trichinosis, who you like, Knicks and the Philly Sixers? Knicks laying two and a half
at home
. Over.”

“Contact. Bet your life on the powerful shoulders of young Mr. Moses Malone. Knicks are point three nine one lifetime against the Sixers and the spread. Over and out.”

Nick Tricosas stood up. He stretched another three inches into his body and rubbed the small of his back. He needed a break from the taxi-dispatcher radio clatter, the constant radioman duty since five that morning.

He lit up a cigar, rolling it gently between his thumb and index finger. Then he wandered down the winding back stairs of the Vets building, trailing clouds of expensive smoke. He climbed down another twisting flight of stairs to the main garage.

The basement floor was thick with collected filth and debris. It was a typically rat-infested New York cellar. There was a second dispatcher's office flanked by cabbie waiting benches. Off to the left were rusted candy and soda machines and an unpainted gray metal door.

Tricosas squinted and started down the serpentine, dungeon-type hallway. He sighed. Colonel Hudson had said nobody was to go inside the locked basement room under any circumstances.

Tricosas produced a key, anyway. He turned it into the stout Chubb mortise lock and heard the releasing click-click-click. He pushed the creaking door open. Then he peeked inside Colonel Hudson's forbidden holy of holies…

Nick Tricosas couldn't help smiling, almost laughing out loud. He sucked in his breath. His deep brown eyes doubled in size. His head tensed, felt as if it might actually explode, blow off his shoulders. Right back up three flights of stairs to the claustrophobic radio-dispatcher room.

He had never actually seen so much money! What he was looking at just didn't seem possible.

Billions of dollars.
Billions!

Colonel David Hudson did a highly unusual thing-he hesitated before acting. He reconsidered one final time as he waited in the phone booth at the southeast corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue and stared at the condensation on the glass panes. He understood that he was taking an unnecessary chance here, asking for the same girl again.

He lightly tapped a quarter against the black metal box and listened to it drop.

Ding. Ding
. Connection made.

Yes, he wanted to see Billie again. He wanted to see her very much.

Less than an hour later she glided into the buzzing and crowded O'Neal's on West Fifty-seventh and Sixth. Hudson watched her from a stool at the bar. His head began to swim.

Yes, he wanted to see her again. Billie… just Billie.

She had on a long, speckled charcoal-gray coat and black leather boots to her thighs. A soft gray beret was placed carefully on the side of her flowing blond hair. She stood out in the tide of young and middle-aged businesswomen crowding into the popular bistro.

She smiled when she finally saw him and smoothly moved his way.

“I see you're coming up in the world. Finished and sold your play already, have you?”

“That's a possibility. Or maybe I robbed a bank so I could afford to see you again.” His smile was quiet, genuine.

Billie bowed her head slightly at the mention of payment for their time spent together. The unusual blush he'd seen at the hotel once again streaked her forehead and cheeks. He had the feeling she hadn't been in the business very long-though perhaps that was what he
wanted
to feel. Perhaps it was her best skill as an escort-to seem so innocent, such an ingenue.

“They set an hour for your appointment. Should we go someplace? An hour isn't that long.”

“I'd like to have a drink here with you. We have time. One drink.”

Hudson signaled for the bartender, who came immediately, in his crisp white shirt and black bow tie, like a man answering an urgent summons. Hudson seemed to have a way of getting whatever he wanted, Billie had already noticed. He was very much in command for the Washington-Jefferson Hotel type.

She ordered the house white, finally smiling and shaking her head at Hudson -as if he were a little hopeless, bewildering certainly.

A hundred and fifty dollars an hour, plus the bar tab, seemed extremely steep for the honor of tipping a drink with an attractive call girl. He certainly didn't look as if he could afford it-but she knew enough not to put a lot of faith in appearances and superficial impressions.

“You don't have to pay. I'll say you didn't show.” Then she seemed instantly flustered and embarrassed again.

Now Hudson was quite certain she hadn't been doing this kind of work very long. Sometimes it happened to young actresses, to up-and-coming New York models.

“I like you. I don't think I understand you, but I like you,” she said.

They looked into each other's eyes, and it was if they were all alone in the hectic buzzing barroom. Hudson could feel a strong desire for her growing again. In his mind, he saw her rose-tipped breasts. He remembered her fast breathing as she came.

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek-he kissed her as gently as he'd ever kissed anyone. He had the desire to get close, to try to open up a little with her. At the same time he felt a soldier's warning, an instinct powerfully holding him back.

“Tell me something about yourself. Just one small thing… It doesn't have to be anything important.”

She smiled again, seeming to be enjoying herself. The missing arm, the way he carried himself, made him quite dashing. “All right. Sometimes I'm too impulsive. I shouldn't be offering you what's commonly called a freebie. I could be fired from Vintage. Now tell me something about yourself.”

“I don't even have enough money to pay this bar tab,” Hudson said, and laughed.

“You really don't?”

“Really. Now tell me one
true
fact. Anything, just something true.”

She hesitated, then shrugged. “I have two older sisters back in Birmingham. Back in England.”