Reckless Endangerment (29 page)

He climbed into the bottom of the shaft, carrying the form, and set it on the bottom. He brought the wheelbarrow down and, using the hose, mixed up a bag of ready-mix, and poured it into the form. He added the tarp-wrapped carnage and then covered it with the rest of the concrete, finishing the task by dumping assorted debris into the shaft and bringing the car down to the first floor again. He loaded Ahmed’s body into the wheelbarrow and took it to a small room off the main bay that had previously been used as some sort of office. He placed the body in an empty closet and nailed the door shut.

Khalid sprayed water from the hose onto his sweating face and then had a cigarette, contemplating the next steps. This was going to work.

Marlene walked back home from church, feeling a good deal better than she had earlier, despite Father Dugan’s grim tone, accepting this as yet another proof of the efficacy of the sacraments, and burying the moral lessons in the corner of her mind where she kept such things between her religious visits. There was no one in the loft, but the dog was gone, which meant Posie had taken them all for another outing. She changed into jeans, boots, sweater, and leather jacket, and left, whistling gaily, for her car.

She spotted them on Canal Street, the boys in their stroller, hideously covered with chocolate ice cream, Posie flirting with some Con Ed workers, while the dog heaved at its leash in an attempt to grab a morsel of decomposed matter in the gutter. Marlene honked and ordered them all into the VW. Then they drove to the East Village Women’s Shelter.

Marlene’s boys loved the women’s shelter. It had action. It had a large playroom covered with industrial carpeting and full of decrepit toys, cardboard cartons to crawl into, a varied and changing cast of other kids, and all manner of interesting filth. After hosing off the chocolate, Posie left them in the playroom and went into the kitchen to socialize.

Lucy had also looked forward to visiting the shelter. She wanted to speak Arabic with Fatyma, for while she had memorized the relatively simple conjugations of that tongue already, there was nothing like conversation with a native speaker to flesh out the bones of a language, to clothe it in idiom and nuance, to generate in the seemingly infinite partitions of her mind yet another person, one with the thoughts and concepts of an Arab. Failing that, Mattie was always willing to fill in her knowledge of racy Texas Spanish, but now, in the kitchen, she found that even this was not about to happen. The three women—Mattie, Marlene, and Posie—and the Arab girl were sitting around the table, eating honey cakes and drinking coffee and talking in boring old English, and their subject was the most boring one of all.

It had begun with Marlene ribbing Posie about her flirting with the Con Ed men, after which there were passed remarks about “laying cable” and “getting your pipes reamed out” that provoked wild witch-like laughter, which Lucy didn’t care for, because while she followed the double meanings (for, of course, these had to be explained to Fatyma, which occasioned even more chortles), she didn’t see what was so funny. Then Posie told a story about how this guy had taken her home with him and they were “balling,” as she said, on a bed, and a woman had walked in and changed into a pink waitress uniform and walked out without saying a word.

“I go, like, ‘Who was that?’ “ said Posie. “And he goes, ‘Just my wife, but don’t worry, she works all night.’ Then he says he loves me. Then he goes, do I have a job? I guess he’s fixing up a schedule.”

Loud laughter at this, more from the expression on Posie’s face than the story, so similar to those Posie had told often before, and Mattie and Marlene hummed the first two bars of “Isn’t It Romantic,” which cracked them up, and then explained the thing to Fatyma, and laughed some more.

“I’m about ready to get, like, a cucumber,” said Posie. “I must be doing something real wrong, but I’m always thinking, this is the one, you know? But it never is.”

“Hell, no! What you got to do, girl, is get ’em young. Young and hung,” said Mattie. “Use ’em and lose ’em. Get ’em young enough, you can break ’em and train ’em: a little pussy, a little taste of the whip.” Marlene snorted and rolled her eyes. Mattie’s actual sexuality was something of a puzzle to her friend. Marlene had assumed at first that the woman was aggressively lesbic, because she’d at least mentioned lovers with female names and also from her general attitude toward the other sex, but from time to time over the years she’d noticed young men hanging about, usually possessing a slim cowboy beauty and a hangdog expression, and from that she had gathered that Mattie practiced a bluff bisexuality, the key to her heart apparently being the understanding that she was always entirely in charge.

Of course, in Marlene’s opinion there was not a chance that someone like Posie was going to benefit from this sort of Amazonian pep talk, and said so, and they got into a not entirely humorous argument about dominance in relationships, which made Lucy even more uncomfortable, because her dad’s name was brought up and used to demonstrate various points on either side, and then Posie said she didn’t care about any of that, but that all she wanted was a good fuck a couple times a week, and then, remembering Lucy’s presence, she said, “Oops, sorry!” and then Fatyma said, “You should meet my brother. All the time with his dumb friends, all they are talking is sex, sex, but they never have girls, you know?”

And after that they talked about Fatyma’s family, which Lucy found sort of interesting, and she passed around little photos of her sibs (Posie pronouncing Walid gorgeous) and then they started talking about
really
gross stuff, whereupon Lucy walked out.

She stopped by the playroom first and messed around with the twins, mainly to continue her secret experiment, which consisted of speaking to Zak only in Cantonese and to Zik only in French, to see if they would start speaking those languages to each other, or invent a new one, hybridizing the two, or drive themselves crazy. It didn’t seem to be working, although she noted, with some interest, that they each seemed to make sense of the other’s babble, and they jabbered at one another in a sort of imitation conversation, with the appropriate tonalities, just as she used to imitate adult writing by making looping squiggles on paper before she learned cursive.

There were no girls her age in the shelter at the moment, and no one with an interesting language to convey, so she trotted up four floors and climbed the narrow stairs to the roof. There, as she had expected, she found Tran, leaning against the roof parapet and smoking. She stood next to him and joined him in watching the street below. It was chilly on the roof; she had come up without her jacket, but after a few minutes Tran seemed to sense this, and unbuttoned his pea coat and drew her to him, enfolding her in his left arm and the thick, stiff wool. He smelled of tobacco, damp wool, and, more faintly, the peculiar combination of odors Lucy associated with Asian men: fish, frying oil, and the scented hair tonic they all used in Chinatown. She liked it. She slid her thin arm around his waist and nestled closer to his wiry body, feeling content and safe, as she did with her dad, but also slightly excited. It was like hugging a wolf.

“What are you watching, Uncle Tran?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.

“Look yourself, Little Sister. What do you think I am watching?”

“That gray van, Jersey plates. It drove by and let two men out, and drove away. The two men didn’t go into any stores. Then a white car came up, and one of the men talked to the driver and it went away. Then the two men went into the building next door to the shelter.”

“Yes,” said Tran. “And what do you think about this?”

“Dope, or something. I don’t know. Or maybe they’re going to rob the check-cashing place. What do you think?”

But Tran only shrugged, and then suggested that it was getting too cold, and took her back into the shelter.

Down in the warm kitchen, the little group had broken up. Fatyma was busy with something at the stove, some women needed Mattie’s urgent attention, and Posie had been called away to the playroom by some unusually loud squalls from the boys. Marlene helped her settle the twins and played with them for a few minutes, and then went to Mattie’s office.

“We have to talk about Fatyma,” she said without preamble.

Mattie came back with “What about her?” switching to her truculent self, and Marlene struggled not to roll her eyes and sigh, or put out any of the other silent signals we use when a pal is being a pain in the ass.

“The cops are after her. She really did whack that pimp on the Deuce, and they know who she is. There’s a warrant out on her, and this’ll be one of the places they’ll check.”

“So? When they come, she’ll get lost.”

“Uh-uh, Mattie. This isn’t some woman who’s hiding her kids from a man with a better lawyer, or a parole jumper. This is an A felony. As of right now you’re liable on a charge of hindering prosecution, and technically, so am I, for not speaking right up when a cop told me they were looking for her and I knew where she was.”

“So … what, you’re going to rat us out?”

“Of course I’m not going to rat you out,” Marlene snarled. “Will you just
listen
?” One of two things has to happen. One, she has to turn herself in, tell her story, and cop out to a self-defense plea. That’s what I would recommend to her, and I’ll represent her in that if she wants. She’s a kid with no record, and they’re not going to drop the courthouse on her head for wasting a lowlife who tried to hurt her.”

“I bet,” said Mattie. “You forgot dear dad’s gunning for her too. And the brother. Once she’s in the system they’re going to send her back to her loving family, and it’s good-bye, baby. What’s the other thing?”

“She has to disappear. Out of town, gone, never existed. I know you’ve got some kind of network you move women through. You could place her with a family until she’s grown.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“You have to do more than think about it, Mattie. You could wind up losing this whole place.”

“I
said,
I’ll think about it!” snapped the other woman. Marlene saw the warning signs, the clenched fists, the bar of darker color on the broad cheekbones, the eyes becoming hot, and she was about to marshal her forces for a knock-down hair-puller when Lucy burst into the room.

“Mom! Fatyma says I could stay over with her tonight. Can I? Can I?”

“Well, I don’t know, Lucy—” Marlene began.

“Puh-leeze? It’s a Friday.”

Marlene looked at Mattie for some indication, hoping that the woman would say no, but of course Mattie grinned and said it would be fine, and Marlene, who had just tossed away a brilliant career opportunity to be able to continue to work for places like EVWS, could not bring herself to articulate her thought that the actual place was dangerous and rather dirty and not the kind of place she felt comfortable leaving
her
little girl in. So she relented, but assuaged her conscience by having a few discreet words with Tran before Posie stumped into the kitchen with a squalling, damp-diapered brat on each hip, and she had to clear out. Tran was an exception to the EVWS rule about no men on the premises. He was a hell of a cook, willing to whip up exotic delicacies for the semi-imprisoned ladies, and make cheerful jokes and himself useful in various other ways, including (which Mattie well understood) as a guard beyond compare.

Khalid inspected his troops by the light of a yellow street lamp on a deserted lane near the Lillian Wald project on the lower East Side of Manhattan. He had only six men instead of eight, which meant that he would have only one man to secure the rear entrance, and that he would have to participate directly, which he did not at all like. This could not be helped. He went down the row of black-clad armed men standing in front of the gray van and questioned them each for the last time about what they were supposed to do. Rifaat, Abdel, Jemil, and Big Mahmoud were all Palestinians and experienced
fedayin
, and he expected them to do their parts well. The other two, Hussein and Little Mahmoud, were immigrant boys who had never been on a real operation before, but they would probably suffice for front and rear security. They were, or should be, already in position at the target. He did not expect serious opposition in a house full of women taken by surprise.

It had not been difficult to determine where the girl had gone to ground once they started to make serious inquiries. Professor Adouri had been his usual helpful self, with a timely phone call about the Daoud dagger and the police interest in it, and from there it had not been hard to find the name of the victim in the case with the funny knife, which had led to the pimp, Kingman, who had been delighted to supply the name of the blondie ho the girl they were looking for used to hang with, and it had not been hard to lift Cindy one evening at the bus station, and a quite brief conversation with her had led to the EVWS being mentioned as one of the places Cindy had recommended someone like Fatyma could run to. They had then paid a woman to go in there with a story and a couple of brats, and this person had confirmed Fatyma’s residence and its precise location. So far, so easy. On the other hand, his confidence had been badly shaken by the affair of the Mexican. Nevertheless, he clapped each man on the back and cried, as expected, “
Usrub! Aleikum!
” with his fist raised. Strike! On to them! And they all echoed. He hoped it raised their spirits, as it did not his own. They climbed into the van and drove slowly off.

TWELVE

T
ran was dozing in a stuffing-gushing armchair in a hallway on the second floor of the shelter when he heard the thump from above, a thump and then the squeal of bending metal. The origin of these noises told him that the place was being raided by people who knew what they were doing, because you assault any urban structure from the roof down. Then you can set up your kill and capture zones at the more easily controllable street-level exits. The only question now was, were they just good, or very good? If they were good, he had ninety seconds, and that must be the case because if they had been very good he would have heard nothing; he would have been dead already. He moved quickly into the bedroom behind him, snatched up the sleeping Lucy in her blankets, and slipped into the clothes closet.