Reckless Endangerment (27 page)

“The water?”

“No, no …” said Khalid quickly, thinking of the floating Ali. “Take him to the warehouse, get some lime and concrete—you know what to do.”

“The warehouse—are you sure, effendi?” It had been deeply impressed upon Bashar that only four people were to know the location of that place and what was in it.

“Yes—look, we don’t have time to secure another location and I don’t want this boy found until afterward, so it’s better we don’t dump him. Besides, it’s isolated and it has thick walls. He’s going to scream like a baby.”

Bashar nodded and looked grave. He understood the necessity, but still he was glad that Ahmed was the expert in that department.

Ahmed tossed El Chivato into the trunk of the LTD. They were less than a quarter of a mile from their destination. Bashar drove the car up to the loading dock, and Ahmed raised the steel door. They opened the trunk and frog-marched the young man up a flight of steel stairs into a vast, dark, chilly hall. Bashar threw a switch, and a row of fluorescent fixtures high above came on. Many of the tubes were out, however, and the light seemed swallowed by the great, dust-speckled volume of the room. El Chivato could make out receding lines of thick concrete pillars and a concrete floor littered by industrial trash, piles of steel pipe, tangles of wire, broken glass, stacks of old wooden pallets and, in a far corner, an angular mass covered by tarps.

Ahmed had hold of El Chivato by the collar of his canvas coat and by his right arm, which was hammer-locked behind the Mexican’s back. He leaned over and said caressingly, “You’re going to tell us all about your friends, but first we’re going to have some fun, yes? I’m going to split your little girl’s ass like a peach. How about that, little faggot?”

El Chivato said, “I told you I work alone, you ape.”

Ahmed snapped his arms out and threw the youth against a pillar, hard. El Chivato took the impact on his shoulder and crumpled at the base of the pillar.

‘Take your clothes off!” ordered Ahmed. Bashar walked a few steps away and sat on a convenient stack of pallets, first brushing the dust off with his handkerchief. He lit a cigarette and watched. The boy took off one of his fancy boots, then the other. He rose, staggering slightly, and Bashar thought he saw him extend his arm, as if to reach out to Ahmed for support.

There was a sharp pop. To Bashar’s immense surprise, Ahmed fell down. Blood was gushing from a wound in the top of his skull. The boy turned toward Bashar. Something small shone in his hand. Bashar sprang to his feet and reached inside his coat for his pistol. He saw a flash and heard another pop. He felt a hard blow strike him in the chest. He touched the place and looked stupidly at his hand; the fingers were tipped with blood. He had his pistol out now and pointed it at the boy, but the boy was no longer there.

Bashar took a few steps forward. He could not catch his breath, and his vision was going gray. He looked down at Ahmed. The blood had stopped spurting from the wound in his head. Bashar noticed the hole above his upper lip. The boy had pulled a small gun from his boot, that was it—it had all happened so fast! Bashar felt his knees soften, and he leaned against the pillar for support. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and tried to bring his pistol around to face it, but now everything was too slow, as in a dream. He fired once, and then a steel pipe hit him square across the temple.

When he came back to consciousness, he was naked, spread out on a pallet, tied with lengths of electrical wire. The kid was kneeling by his side. He had stripped to his undershorts, which seemed to be half white and half red. He wore around his neck several gold chains, from which depended a large cross, a gold medallion, and a small enamel portrait of a saint, and also a leather thong holding a small square canvas pouch, much stained. From this the young man took a roughly S-shaped shiny object, somewhat smaller than a playing card. It had a wooden handle along the base of the S and a curved and pointed razor-sharp blade on the upper limb of the S: a skinning knife.

Bashar had been tortured by the Israeli Shin Bet and beaten by the Syrian police in Lebanon and he thought that he was pretty tough, but he had never been skinned alive by an expert. In the interminable hour before he died, he told El Chivato everything El Chivato wanted to know, about the house in Park Slope, about the details of Khalid’s security arrangements, about Ibn-Salemeh’s plan, about what was in the crates under the tarpaulin in the corner of the warehouse.

ELEVEN

H
e had never been shot before, shot
at
plenty of times, but always before this the bullets had gone wide, diverted by the miraculous protection of the saints, and it was this demonstration of his vulnerability rather than the wound itself that wrapped a chilling hand around the heart of El Chivato. Of course, it still hurt a great deal, but he was actually glad of the pain, since it served both to remind him of his recent stupidity and as a warning that he must not overstay his time.

There was an employees’ washroom at the back of the warehouse that had cold water running in it, and here he washed off the spattered blood from his job on the Arab, and also washed, as best he could, the bullet wound, which was a long, deep groove in his left side, right above the hip bone. He cut a clean strip from the old-fashioned roller towel in the washroom to make a bandage, which he wrapped tightly around his waist, like a cummerbund.

Nude but for this binding, he went to inspect the crates the Arab had mentioned. One of them had already been opened, and the top layer of excelsior and ceramic parts had been removed and set aside. El Chivato rummaged through the contents for a good while, selecting some items and placing them on a tarp. His weapons had been taken from him by the Arabs, and here was a new supply, and of a better sort as well. He was used to this manner of providence, and he thought it was possible that the protectors had not entirely deserted him: the wound was a warning, then, and not abandonment.

When he had laid out as much as he thought he could conveniently carry, he wrapped up the tarp, slung it over his shoulder and brought it out to the loading dock, where he placed it next to the LTD. Then he got dressed, took the car keys and the two pistols from the dead Arabs, distributed the various items from the crates in appropriate places, and drove off.

Chouza Khalid said, “Perhaps the little thing was tougher than he looked. I can’t think of anything else that would be taking them so long.”

The man known as Ibn-Salemeh did not look away from his television, which was playing a rerun of
I
Dream of Jeannie.
He said, “Perhaps they discovered another spy. You should go and check. In fact, you should have interrogated him yourself.”

“I was preparing for tonight,” said Khalid, trying to keep the resentment out of his voice. “As it is, if they don’t show up soon, we will have to call it off.”

“We will not call it off. This is interesting, here, I’ve noticed on many of these programs: the man is a moron and the woman is the clever one. Even without magical powers. And this one is especially blatant. We have the familiar orientalism: the submissive woman, the harem pants, the little waistcoat with sequins, but in fact she is entirely in control. What do you suppose it signifies?”

Khalid shrugged. The only things he watched on television were wrestling and soccer. He said, “We cannot do this operation without Ahmed and Bashar. In fact, I don’t understand why we are doing it at all. The Daoud boy is not going to take his truck back if we don’t give him his sister.”

For the first time Ibn-Salemeh turned away from the screen. He gave Khalid a long, slow look. In the darkened room Khalid could make out nothing of the man’s eyes but two black pits, in each of which there burned a tiny flickering spark. He felt a chill, and was about to make leaving noises when the man spoke.

“It has nothing to do with the Daoud boy or his sister. It is a political issue, a political decision, and you know I don’t discuss political issues with you. However …” and now the bearded man did something he had never done before. He rose and switched off the volume on the television set, and courteously gestured to a chair near the old couch on which he spent almost all his time. Khalid sat, not knowing what to think.

“… however, this time I will make an exception,” the man resumed, when he had seated himself at the far end of the couch, facing Khalid, with his legs curled up underneath him, like a cat. “You are, after all, an Arab, and although you are a mercenary, you are still part of the struggle. So: what have I done? You notice that at the center is our plan. What is the purpose of this plan? To harm the Zionists and their Jew allies in this country, of course. That is the obvious purpose, but not the only one, perhaps not even the chief one. You also notice that I improvise with the tools at hand. I arrange for a group of Arab boys to kill a Jew. A stupid, meaningless act, you think. But no, its very meaninglessness, its triviality, is its virtue. The Jews howl, and the Americans think, these Arabs are capable of anything, any of them could have a knife. Now this raid tomorrow. Another outrage. The police descend on the Arab community, looking for the murderers, the kidnappers. Jars are broken, women are insulted. The Daoud family will be arrested, but, as we have arranged, they will have been in mosque, with many to attest to their presence. The police will not believe these distinguished men perhaps. More insults. Then our centerpiece occurs. There is true terror now. Now the U.S. government is called in. There are mass arrests of Arabs, but even more important, the Americans strike at the Arab community. Who are these foreigners, these aliens? Again, jars are broken, and women are insulted, perhaps now heads are broken. More insulting cartoons are published, on the television, on radio, the voices are angry—at the Arabs, of course, but also at the Jews. Why have you involved us in your quarrels, so many dead in an American city? And so on.”

He paused here, and Khalid felt he was required to say something, to demonstrate that he understood. But he did not. He wet his lips and asked, “But if the Americans hate and fear the Arabs, why will they help us in Palestine?”

The other man made a harsh, breathy noise, like escaping steam. “No! You have missed the point. The Americans will
never
help the Arabs in Palestine. The Jews here are too powerful. You should watch more television, Chouza: watch the little names flash on the screen, read who is in control of what the Americans believe. But there are perhaps a million Arabs in this country. And they, of course, are so busy getting rich that they have forgotten us, forgotten their struggle and their honor, so we must remind them what it is to be despised and abused. Many of them will become our allies as a result. With this base we can mount more actions, have even greater freedom of movement, and this in turn will create even more oppression upon the Arabs here. It builds like that, do you see? Finally, the Americans, who have no stomach for such suffering, who want only to enjoy their wealth and watch this kind of nonsense”—he gestured to the TV screen—“the Americans will say,
enough
! Let the dogs fight it out between themselves and leave us alone. And thus we will win.”

“We will?” asked Khalid spontaneously. He had seen Israeli jets and tanks in Lebanon, and thought that, all in all, the Zionists could take care of themselves.

“Of course! Can you doubt it? How could the Arabs, the most heroic people in history, seventy million Arabs, be defeated by less than four million Jews, people who for thousands of years let themselves be killed like sheep? How is it possible? It is
not
possible, for it is the Americans that have done it.
And this I will stop.
”

Khalid had, of course, heard this argument before, many times. It might well be true, for all he knew, but he was not interested in politics, and he was quite indifferent to the fevered patriotic psychopathy of Ibn-Salemeh and his associates. He waited, saying nothing, and after a while the other man seemed to emerge from the reverie into which he had apparently been placed by the sound of his own rhetoric, and he rose and turned up the volume again. A laugh track filled the room, which seemed appropriate, in a way, to Chouza Khalid. He rose himself, said he was going to try to find the two missing men, and was dismissed with a flick of the hand.

After leaving the Osborne Group, Marlene boarded a southbound Lexington Avenue train and got off at Bleecker Street, from which she walked to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry and went inside, putting a black lace scarf over her head as she did. Today the nave was draped for Lent, in the old-fashioned way, with dark purple palls on the altar and the statuary, suiting perfectly Marlene’s present mood.

She chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer to her home, for reasons both aesthetic and spiritual. Old St. Pat’s was a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. The spiritual reasons were more complex. In general, Marlene did not hold with parish shopping, as smacking of the Donatist heresy, which held that the character of the priest influenced the efficacy of the sacraments. Marlene did not go to church for the Christian fellowship, the style of the services, or the brilliance of the sermons, nor was she particularly bothered by the policies of the current pope. She went for the magic, because, she firmly believed, if it wasn’t magic, the whole affair was so much gilt horseshit, and if it
was
magic, the personality of the priest was the last thing to bother with. It was like believing that because the president of a bank was a son of a bitch, the money that came out of the cash machines wasn’t any good. Old St. Pat’s was run as closely as possible to the old devotional style that Marlene had grown up on, and which the current parishioners, Latin American and Caribbean types, also seemed to prefer. The fresh breezes of Vatican II did not penetrate very far up the nave of Old St. Pat’s, which was fine with Marlene, whose deeply held opinion was that Vat Deuce had got it mainly wrong, changing the stuff that didn’t need changing and leaving alone the stuff that did. Marlene thought the Tridentine Mass had been just fine as it was, and in Latin (and if you couldn’t understand it, tough shit, Mac, you could look it up), and the rosary, and the stations of the cross, and the clunky statues with the red lamps—candles, incense, mystery, old ladies in black mumbling on their knees—that was
church.