Reckless Endangerment (35 page)

A miserable day, and now this. “Ah, Lucy, darling,” she said weakly, “I’m sorry, but I got my hands full already. There is no way we can mount a search for Fatyma.”

“I thought you were a detective,” said the implacable child. “I bet her father knows where she is. I bet he’s just waiting to do something bad to her, and it’ll be your fault.”

Marlene groaned and looked around the room for support. Tran was sipping coffee with his usual neutral expression, looking remarkably like a feeble, retired clerk. A tiny Frenchified jerk of the mouth and eyebrows was all she got from him—what can one do? it said. Posie was supervising a finger-food meal with the boys—cooked carrots and bread-and-jam slivers—giggling with them and spilling sunny personality around the room.

“Or the brother,” Lucy added contemptuously, “Mr. Gorgeous.”

“Walid,” said Posie. “I never dated a Walid. I bet he’s got a great body.”

“Posie, you could think about something
else
for one minute, you know,” snarled Lucy, and she got a sly giggle back.

An idea drifted lazily into Marlene’s exhausted brain. She looked at Posie more closely. The girl was wearing oversized USMC fatigue pants that hung nicely on her broad hips, and over that she wore a sleeveless garment of some shiny silver-blue fabric, a retro-shop find, that stretched tightly over her cantaloupe-sized breasts, solid as round shot. She was on one of her interminable diets (grapefruit and yogurt), and this one actually seemed to be doing her some good. She’d dropped some suet (with the resilience of youth), and the arrival of spring had allowed her constant excursions with her small charges, which had toned her legs and put some color into her formerly doughy complexion. Her best feature was still her hair, which ran like a river of hot tar, straight as a die, down her back to her buttocks.

No, I can’t do that, was Marlene’s first thought, it’s evil; and then, no, it wouldn’t work; and then, no, it’d be too dangerous. But of course, once it had been reduced to a protection problem, it was a done deal as far as Marlene was concerned, since she knew a great deal about protecting people and had every confidence in pulling that part of it off.

“Um, Posie …” said Marlene.

Posie turned to her, her gigantic smile pumping out innocence and animal sensuality in equal measure, and Marlene, thinking, oh, my, what a piece of work I’ve become, said, “You know, Posie, maybe it’s time you dated a guy named Walid.”

FOURTEEN

I
n the older sections of Brooklyn, anciently prosperous and some still well-off, the houses stand separately and are brick-built, and each one comes supplied with a ready-made dungeon, for until the clean-air ordinances of the mid-sixties, these houses were all heated by coal. Twice a year the filthy, huge trucks would back into the alleys that bordered each house, and out would come the steel chute, to be inserted into the cellar hole that stared blackly from the side of the house. Then the sooty man would haul on the chain, and with a rattling roar the coal cellar would fill with a couple of tons of number nine anthracite. With the coming of oil and gas heat, each householder had found himself with a small, brick-walled, uncleanably filthy room having a small outlet to the sky and a door leading to where the coal furnace used to be. Most of these coal cellars vanished behind the pine paneling of rumpus rooms or dens, their chutes bricked up, their doors replaced by gypsum-board walls.

In the house at 308 Sterling Street in Crown Heights owned by Chouza Khalid, the coal-cellar chute had indeed been bricked up, but the space had otherwise hardly been changed since the last load of coal had gone up the chimney. The house itself was a ninety-year-old three-story yellow brick town house with sandstone facings, set back from the street, the former front garden grown up with weeds and ailanthus and maple trees ten feet high that seemed to be trying hard to obscure the weathered realtor’s sign. The windows were boarded up with plywood. In its semi-derelict condition it had been a good deal for Khalid, who wanted a cheap place that no one else knew about, a bolt hole, and a hide for various liquid assets.

Naturally, the place had been used as a shooting gallery by the local addicts for some time, and Khalid’s first task, even before having the electricity, gas, and water turned on, was to discourage these people. This he did with a savagery unusual even in Brooklyn, and the word soon spread on the junkie grapevine that people who went into that house emerged seriously messed up or did not emerge at all. So they avoided the place. Khalid restored one bedroom and one bathroom to use, and put a thick, solid-core door on the coal cellar, doing all the work himself.

Fatyma lay on a mattress in this former coal cellar. A razor-thin bar of light came from under the door, dim during what must be the hours of daylight, and sharp on those occasions when someone turned an electric light on in the room outside the coal cellar. Otherwise, it was dark. And damp. The mattress was supplied with a gray wool blanket, and she spent most of the endless hours huddled in this. Twice each day (she thought) the light would go on outside, she would hear the sound of the bolts sliding out, and a big man would come in with a plastic box and a plastic bottle. He was very quick. He removed the old plastic box and bottle and left, locking the door behind him. Once, Fatyma had flattened herself next to the door frame and tried to dash out, but he had caught her easily, then he had hit her so hard on the jaw that she had blacked out for a moment. Her face still hurt from the blow. She had not tried it again; nor had she bothered to scream after the first day, when she had screamed until her throat was raw. She had no idea what he had planned for her, and this was perhaps the worst part of her captivity. Besides that first horrible moment in the car, when he had felt every part of her body, he had not molested her at all. This did not, however, assuage her fears for the future.

The light came on. The big man came in and made his switch of box and bottle. She heard him sniff. It was the smell from the portable toilet in the corner, a sharp chemical smell that did not quite cover the foetor of her waste. Then he left. Fatyma did not bother checking the food box. It was always the same: two hard-boiled eggs, two large, flat Arab loaves, a handful of olives, a sliced tomato, and a little paper packet of salt. Instead, she lay down flat with her cheek against the floor and took the thin, pointed sliver of slate she had found and dug. She was digging away at the thick layer of compressed coal dust that former decades had deposited on the floor of the coal cellar. For the past day she had dug a shallow bowllike hollow, filling it up with loose dust so she would not be found out. A few more scrapes and she was able to set the side of her head into the space so that her left eye was just level with the crack between the new door and the old uneven brick door sill. She could see a room harshly lit from overhead and the bottom of a large, dirty gray cylindrical form. The man’s shoes and ankles. Then his knees. He was kneeling before the gray structure. She heard the squeal of a metallic door opening, a scraping sound. She sighed in frustration. The angle was wrong for her to see what he was doing. A dull clang: he had closed the metallic door. She saw his feet move away, and nothing but utter blackness as he switched off the light.

Khalid was thinking about the girl as he washed his hands in the bathroom sink. He was reflecting about the time just after he captured her when he had run his finger into her warm little slit and found, to his great surprise, that she was an actual virgin. Khalid had dabbled in pimping during his Beirut days, and had occasionally engaged in the specialized aspect of the trade that involves the procuring of virgins for wealthy elderly men, in the course of which he had done that sort of probing enough to know what was what. The business had been enormously lucrative, but risky and a great deal of trouble, and after a while he had drifted into the more sensible and straightforward drugs and guns trade. The problem, in Lebanon, at least, was the Arab attitude toward their women. Even extremely poor families would not sell girls, so they had to be lifted, which was risky. It was not something one wished to get a reputation for doing. The usual practice was to import them from Albania, or buy them from Italian gypsies, or (more commonly) ship them in from the Far East, where apparently they grew on trees. The problem was that an eleven-year-old Thai or Filipino girl, although certified intact, was not an object to inflame the lusts of the average wealthy Arab customer. This girl was another thing entirely—a full woman’s body, a face like a ripe peach, and she spoke Arabic. Such an item could command any amount of money from one of a half dozen men that Khalid knew in the Gulf, and more than that, the girl offered
as a gift
(for Khalid had plenty of money now) to one of these men would go a long way toward securing sanctuary, a new identity in some air-conditioned villa in Kuwait or Bahrain where Ibn-Salemeh and his friends would not find him. He would have to think about how this might be accomplished.

Khalid drove the white Mercury carefully through the Brooklyn streets, just beginning to fill with the afternoon rush—east on Dean to Saratoga, left to Fulton, west to Ralph, where the gas station was. It had once been a Mobil station, and one wall still bore a faded mural of the old-style flying horse. The illuminated logo signs and the pumps were gone, but not the pump islands and the concrete roof that hung over them. Behind these stood a concrete-block three-bay garage and a small office. The place was now used as a brake and transmission shop. Four miscellaneous sedans were lined up on the apron to the left of the former pump island, in front of the wide bay doors, which were shut. A large red-painted wrecker was parked at the curb. A long, high pile of old tires stretched along the right side of the property, from near the street back to the rear lot. Khalid parked in this rear lot, a good spot, giving access to both Fulton Street and Ralph Avenue, at ten minutes before five and went into the office carrying a white Samsonite suitcase, Pullman size. He turned the light on, placed the suitcase on the counter, and sat down in a plastic chair to wait. From where he sat, he could not see Jemil or Hussein or Big Mahmoud, but he knew they were in position and armed with automatic weapons. As soon as the boy passed into the shadow of the pump island’s overhead shelter, there would be a brief spurt of fire from the Dodge Dart parked on the apron and from the shadows among the piles of tires. Hussein, he knew, was crouched below window level in the seat of the wrecker. If the boy became suspicious for any reason and tried to get back to his car, Hussein would roar out in the wrecker and block his move. So they waited for the Mexican.

Who was at the moment parked several streets away, in his Ford LTD, reading a sort of comic book with great interest. The comic book, a simple four-fold, was printed on thick, oil-proof paper, and its illustrations, drawn with the uncompromising clarity of Socialist Realism, showed how to set up, aim, and fire the RPG-7 rocket launcher. El Chivato had taken one of these weapons from the warehouse, together with a rack of three missiles for it, attached to a convenient backpack. He finished the comic book and compared its illustrations to the fat green, pipe-like device on his lap. After a little study he was able to load and arm the thing. The illustrations seemed to assume that two men would operate the weapon, but it was also clear that it could be loaded and fired by one. He flicked up the sight assembly and peered through it at the peaceful Brooklyn street. He returned the arming lever to the safe position and placed the rocket launcher on the passenger seat beside him.

As El Chivato drove off, he was extremely angry, actually more than angry (since he was angry most of the time), rather in a state beyond anger, a kind of single-minded, icy murderous calm. It had been a long time since someone had tried to set him up, and then it had been an extremely clever trap, involving a woman and occurring in a place where he had every reason to feel secure. He had killed four people for that (including the woman, who was, in fact, the first person he had actually skinned entire), and so no one had ever tried it again. To be set up in this incredibly clumsy way not only required vengeance as a professional matter, but involved a personal insult as well—did they really imagine him to be
stupid!
Beyond that, he was angry because, naturally, he would have to kill Lucky and all his party,
and
search out the Obregon brothers and kill them too, which meant, unless he was extraordinarily fortunate, a long search in New York, and perhaps Mexico, which meant that he might miss Easter with his family. And he did not feel fortunate anymore. His side ached. The wound was puffy and swollen. He had not had a bath in several days, having left the apartment where he killed the policeman. Now he lived in the car. This added to his anger, for he enjoyed being neat and clean.

At five-thirty, right on schedule, El Chivato pulled into the gas station. He did not drive up to the vacant pump island as if buying ten gallons of ghost hi-test, but parked just in from the street, turning the car so that the passenger side faced the island and the station structures.

Khalid saw the car stop, saw the boy get out. He hoped that his gunmen would wait, as he had instructed, until the little shit was well within the shadow of the pump-island shelter before opening fire. Then he saw the flash and instantly thereafter heard a peculiar flat, whooshing noise.

To anyone who spent the seventies in Beirut, as Khalid had, that particular flash and noise were nearly as familiar as the sound of traffic. Every one of the innumerable contending parties of that sad town had accumulated Soviet rocket launchers in numbers and used them with enthusiasm. They were not as common as Kalashnikovs, but common enough. Khalid had never had one fired directly at him before: it was like a tiny approaching sun with a black dot in its center. Almost without thought he dived over the counter and lay flat on the floor, with the Samsonite suitcase pulled close over his head and his knees drawn up in fetal position.

The rocket smashed through the plate-glass window and the double wallboard wall behind the counter. Antitank rockets need to hit something massive before they will explode, and this particular rocket found it in the rear concrete wall of the garage. Khalid heard a dull boom as the warhead blasted a foot-wide hole through the wall and sprayed the area behind it with molten steel and concrete.