He stared at the phone. It wasn’t in a booth. There weren’t many real booths around these days, the kind with the folding door, like a small closet, that offered privacy; too expensive, Ma Bell said. This was a phone on a pole, with a scoop-shaped sound baffle bending around three sides of it. Over the years, he had passed a few other public telephones that had been ringing when there was no one waiting nearby to answer them; on those occasions, he had never given them a second glance, had never been the least bit tempted to lift the receiver and find out who was there; it had been none of his business. Just as
this
was none of his business. And yet... this time was somehow... different. The ringing snaked out like a lariat of sound, roping him, snaring him, holding him.
Ringing...
Ringing...
Insistent.
Beckoning.
Hypnotic.
Ringing...
A strange and disturbing transformation occurred in the Harlem neighborhood around him. Only three things remained solid and real: the telephone, a narrow stretch of snow-covered pavement leading to the telephone, and Jack himself. The rest of the world seemed to recede into a mist that rose out of nowhere. The buildings appeared to fade away, dissolving as if this were a film in which one scene was fading out to be replaced by another. The few cars progressing hesitantly along the snowy street began to ... evaporate; they were replaced by the creeping mist, a white-white mist that was like a movie theater screen splashed with brilliant light but with no images. The pedestrians, heads bent, shoulders hunched, struggled against the wind and stinging snow; and gradually they receded and faded, as well. Only Jack was real. And the narrow pathway to the phone. And the telephone itself.
Ringing...
He was drawn.
Ringing...
Drawn toward the phone.
He tried to resist.
Ringing...
He suddenly realized he’d taken a step. Toward the phone.
And another.
A third.
He felt as if he were floating.
Ringing...
He was moving as if in a dream or a fever.
He took another step.
He tried to stop. Couldn’t.
He tried to turn toward the patrol car. Couldn’t.
His heart was hammering.
He was dizzy, disoriented.
In spite of the frigid air, he was sweating along the back of his neck.
The ringing of the telephone was analogous to the rhythmic, glittering, pendulum movement of a hypnotist’s pocketwatch. The sound drew him relentlessly forward as surely as, in ancient times, the sirens’ songs had pulled unwary sailors to their death upon the reefs.
He knew the call was for him. Knew it without understanding
how
he knew it.
He picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Detective Dawson! I’m delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you. My good man, we are most definitely overdue for a chat.”
The voice was deep, although not a bass voice, and smooth and elegant, characterized by an educated British accent filtered through the lilting patterns of speech common to tropical zones, so that words like “man” came out as “mon.” Clearly a Caribbean accent.
Jack said, “Lavelle?”
“Why, of course! Who else?”
“But how did you know—”
“That you were there? My dear fellow, in an offhanded sort of way, I am keeping tabs on you.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Somewhere along the street, in one of the apartment buildings here.”
“Far from it. Harlem is not to my taste.”
“I’d like to talk to you,” Jack said.
“We are talking.”
“I mean, face-to-face.”
“Oh, I hardly think that’s necessary.”
“I wouldn’t arrest you.”
“You couldn’t. No evidence.”
“Well, then—”
“But you’d detain me for a day or two on one excuse or another.”
“No.”
“And I don’t wish to be detained. I’ve work to do.”
“I give you my word we’d only hold you a couple of hours, just for questioning.”
“Is that so?”
“You can trust my word when I give it. I don’t give it lightly.”
“Oddly enough, I’m quite sure that’s true.”
“Then why not come in, answer some questions, and clear the air, remove the suspicion from yourself?”
“Well, of course, I can’t remove the suspicion because, in fact, I’m guilty,” Lavelle said. He laughed.
“You’re telling me you’re behind the murders?”
“Certainly. Isn’t that what everyone’s been telling you?”
“You’ve called me to confess?”
Lavelle laughed again. Then: “I’ve called to give you some advice.”
“Yeah?”
“Handle this as the police in my native Haiti would handle it.”
“How’s that?”
“They wouldn’t interfere with a
Bocor
who possessed powers like mine.”
“Is that right?”
“They wouldn’t dare.”
“This is New York, not Haiti. Superstitious fear isn’t something they teach at the police academy.”
Jack kept his voice calm, unruffled. But his heart continued to bang against his rib cage.
Lavelle said, “Besides, in Haiti, the police would not
want
to interfere if the
Bocor’s
targets were such worthless filth as the Carramazza family. Don’t think of me as a murderer, Lieutenant. Think of me as an exterminator, performing a valuable service for society. That’s how they’d look at this in Haiti.”
“Our philosophy is different here.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We think murder is wrong regardless of who the victim is.”
“How unsophisticated.”
“We believe in the sanctity of human life.”
“How foolish. If the Carramazzas die, what will the world lose? Only thieves, murderers, pimps. Other thieves, murderers, and pimps will move in to take their place. Not me, you understand. You may think of me as their equal, as only a murderer, but I am not of their kind. I am a priest. 1 don’t want to rule the drug trade in New York. I only want to take it away from Gennaro Carramazza as part of his punishment. I want to ruin him financially, leave him with no respect among his kind, and take his family and friends away from him, slaughter them, teach him how to grieve. When that is done, when he’s isolated, lonely, afraid, when he has suffered for a while, when he’s filled with blackest despair, I will at last dispose of him, too, but slowly and with much torture. Then I’ll go away, back to the islands, and you won’t ever be bothered with me again. I am merely an instrument of justice, Lieutenant Dawson.”
“Does justice really necessitate the murder of Carramazza’s grandchildren?”
“Yes.”
“Innocent little children?”
“They aren’t innocent. They carry his blood, his genes. That makes them as guilty as he is.”
Carver Hampton was right: Lavelle was insane.
“Now,” Lavelle said, “I understand that you will be in trouble with your superiors if you fail to bring someone to trial for at least a few of these killings. The entire police department will take a beating at the hands of the press if something isn’t done. I quite understand. So, if you wish, I will arrange to plant a wide variety of evidence incriminating members of one of the city’s other Mafia families. You can pin the murders of the Carramazzas on some other undesirables, you see, put them in prison, and be rid of yet another troublesome group of hoodlums. I’d be quite happy to let you off the hook that way.”
It wasn’t only the circumstances of this conversation—the dreamlike quality of the street around the pay phone, the feeling of floating, the fever haze—that made it all seem so unreal; the conversation itself was so bizarre that it would have defied belief regardless of the circumstances in which it had taken place. Jack shook himself, but the world wasn’t jarred to life like a stubborn wristwatch; reality didn’t begin to tick again.
He said, “You actually think I could take such an offer seriously?”
“The evidence I plant will be irrefutable. It will stand up in any court. You needn’t fear you’d lose the case.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Jack said. “Do you really believe I’d conspire with you to frame innocent men?”
“They wouldn’t be innocent. Hardly. I’m talking about framing other murderers, thieves, and pimps.”
“But they’d be innocent of
these
crimes.”
“A technicality.”
“Not in my book.”
Lavelle was silent for a moment. Then: “You’re an interesting man, Lieutenant. Naive. Foolish. But nevertheless interesting.”
“Gennaro Carramazza tells us that you’re motivated by revenge.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“He didn’t tell you that?”
“No. What’s the story?”
Silence.
Jack waited, almost asked the question again.
Then Lavelle spoke, at last, and there was a new edge to his voice, a hardness, a ferocity. “I had a younger brother. His name was Gregory. Half brother, really. Last name was Pontrain. He didn’t embrace the ancient arts of witchcraft and sorcery. He shunned them. He wouldn’t have anything to do with the old religions of Africa. He had no time for voodoo, no interest in it. His was a very modern soul, a machine-age sensibility. He believed in science, not magic; he put his faith in progress and technology, not in the power of ancient gods. He didn’t approve of my vocation, but he didn’t believe I could really do harm to anyone—or do good, either, for that matter. He thought of me as a harmless eccentric. Yet, for all this misunderstanding, I loved him, and he loved me. We were brothers.
Brothers.
I would have done anything for him.”
“Gregory Pontrain ...” Jack said thoughtfully. “There’s something familiar about the name.”
“Years ago, Gregory came here as a legal immigrant. He worked very hard, worked his way through college, received a scholarship. He always had writing talent, even as a boy, and he thought he knew what he ought to do with it. Here, he earned a degree in journalism from Columbia. He was first in his class. Went to work for the
New York Times.
For a year or so he didn’t even do any writing, just verified research in other reporters’ pieces. Gradually, he promoted several writing assignments for himself. Small things. Of no consequence. What you would call ‘human interest’ stories. And then—”
“Gregory Pontrain,” Jack said. “Of course. The crime reporter.”
“In time, my brother was assigned a few crime stories. Robberies. Dope busts. He did a good job of covering them. Indeed, he started going after stories that hadn’t been handed to him, bigger stories that he’d dug up all by himself. And eventually he became the
Times’
resident expert on narcotics trafficking in the city. No one knew more about the subject, the involvement of the Carramazzas, the way the Carramazza organization had subverted so many vice squad detectives and city politicians; no one knew more than Gregory; no one. He published those articles—”
“I read them. Good work. Four pieces, I believe.”
“Yes. He intended to do more, at least half a dozen more articles. There was talk of a Pulitzer, just based on what he’d written so far. Already, he had dug up enough evidence to interest the police and to generate three indictments by the grand jury. He had the sources, you see: insiders in the police and in the Carramazza family, insiders who trusted him. He was convinced he could bring down Dominick Carramazza himself before it was all over. Poor, noble, foolish, brave little Gregory. He thought it was his duty to fight evil wherever he found it. The crusading reporter. He thought he could make a difference, all by himself. He didn’t understand that the only way to deal with the powers of darkness is to make peace with them, accommodate yourself to them, as I have done. One night last March, he and his wife, Ona, were on their way to dinner...”
“The car bomb,” Jack said.
“They were both blown to bits. Ona was pregnant. It would have been their first child. So I owe Gennaro Carramazza for three lives—Gregory, Ona, and the baby.”
“The case was never solved,” Jack reminded him. “There was no proof that Carramazza was behind it.”
“He was.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Yes, I can. I have my sources, too. Better even than Gregory’s. I have the eyes and ears of the Underworld working for me.” He laughed. He had a musical, appealing laugh that Jack found unsettling. A madman should have a madman’s laugh, not the warm chuckle of a favorite uncle. “The Underworld, Lieutenant. But I don’t mean the criminal underworld, the miserable cosa
nostra
with its Sicilian pride and empty code of honor. The Underworld of which I speak is a place much deeper than that which the Mafia inhabits, deeper and darker. I have the eyes and ears of the ancient ones, the reports of demons and dark angels, the testimony of those entities who see all and know all.”
Madness, Jack thought. The man belongs in an institution.
But in addition to the madness, there was something else in Lavelle’s voice that nudged and poked the cop’s instincts in Jack. When Lavelle spoke of the supernatural, he did so with genuine awe and conviction; however, when he spoke of his brother, his voice became oily with phony sentiment and unconvincing grief. Jack sensed that revenge was not Lavelle’s primary motivation and that, in fact, he might even have hated his straight-arrow brother, might even be glad or at least relieved that he was dead.
“Your brother wouldn’t approve of this revenge you’re taking,” Jack said.
“Perhaps he would. You didn’t know him.”
“But I know enough about him to say with some confidence that he wasn’t at all like you. He was a decent man. He wouldn’t want all this slaughter. He would be repelled by it.”
Lavelle said nothing, but there was somehow a pouting quality to his silence, a smoldering anger.
Jack said, “He wouldn’t approve of the murder of anyone’s grandchildren, revenge unto the third generation. He wasn’t sick, like you. He wasn’t crazy.”