The Ninth Step (13 page)

Back at the Seven-oh house, the detectives hunkered down for a little computer search. Having a name for their suspect made all the difference. Without it, they might as well have been searching for a ghost; with it, every new bit of data gave him more corporeal form. Nadim Hasni, they soon learned, was thirty-two years old. He had arrived in the States back in 1993, on a tourist visa. He had applied for a green card years later, after marrying a U.S. citizen, one Ghizala Mamund, but it had not come through by the time they divorced in 2003.

The detectives searched through every database they could think of and called every contact who might be able to provide more information, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, utility companies, the city’s Department of Finance …

When they finally ran out of sources, Jack turned to his partner. “Let’s go for a drive.”

Ghizala Mamund’s residence, in Jackson Heights, Queens, was one of a row of modest homes with muddled architecture: drab brick façades topped with fussy mansard roofs, and red-tiled front awnings peaked like Swiss chalets. A skinny, serious-looking young girl, maybe nine or ten, answered the doorbell for Mamund’s apartment. She wore a plain, high-waisted brown dress over a pair of blue jeans. Her hair was tied back in two braids, and she wore a little metal stud in one nostril, and a bead necklace.

“Is your mother home?” Jack asked.

The girl stared, wide-eyed.

“Do you speak English?”

She frowned. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” She sounded like any American kid.

“It’s okay,” Jack said. He held up his badge. “We’re not strangers; we’re policemen. And we don’t need to talk to you, just to Ghizala Mamund.”

“She’s not my mother,” the girl said solemnly. “She’s my auntie.”

“Okay,” Jack said patiently. “Is she home?”

The girl chewed her bottom lip for a moment. “Wait here,” she finally said, and then she quietly closed the door. A minute later, she came back and led them into this dining room, where the old man sat, smoking his odd improvised hand-pipe and gazing off into the ether. Jack wondered if he might be blind. “How you doing?” he said, but the man didn’t respond.

The dining room did double duty as a parlor; it was decorated with the kind of cheap but pretentiously ornate furniture you could buy on the installment plan in a discount showroom, and smelled powerfully of foreign spices. Jack noticed a stack of schoolbooks on the dining table, next to an open notebook. Moving away from the table and the rather disturbing old man, he wandered toward the front of the apartment, past a big old TV and some armchairs. On a side table he noticed several photos, silver-framed. They all showed a young girl, but she wasn’t the one who had answered the door. They looked to be about the same age, but this one wore big clunky eyeglasses and she had a round, rather plain face.

After a rather awkward minute, a woman emerged from a back doorway, adjusting a headscarf. She wore a shapeless black dress, but Jack could see that she was plump. She gestured to the detectives to sit on a sofa, and then she perched on the edge of an armchair. She had big, doe-like eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips; Jack guessed that she had once been something of a beauty. Her niece stood next to her.

“Thank you for talking to us, Ms. Mamund,” Jack said. “Or is it Mrs. Hasni?”

The girl responded. “She doesn’t speak any English.” Jack turned toward the old man, but she shook her head. “He doesn’t either.”

Jack frowned: the last thing he wanted was to put a little girl in the middle of a case involving murder and terrorism, but he seemed to have little choice. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Raani.”

“Well, Raani: Do you think you could maybe help us out by translating what your auntie says? That means—”

“I know what ‘translating’ means,” she said with a touch of pride, and Jack guessed that she did pretty well with her homework.

“That’s great. Thank you. Could you ask her when was the last time she saw Nadim Hasni?”

The girl did the honors.

Her aunt stiffened. She drew herself up, like a pigeon inflating its chest, and spoke rapidly in her foreign tongue.

The girl turned to Jack. “She says not for more than a year.”

Jack tugged at his earlobe. Nadim’s ex-wife had clearly said more than that, and he wished he could have understood it all. Despite her dumpy surroundings, the woman had an imperious air, as if she were some foreign princess being interviewed by low-caste inferiors.

“Does she know where he might be right now?”

Again, the translation and the rapid, bitter answer.

The girl shook her head.

“What did she say?” Jack asked.

The girl wrinkled her nose. “She doesn’t care where he is or what he’s doing, as long as he pays the … um …”

“Alimony?”

“Yes.”

Jack regarded the scowling woman. He thought of the early days of his own divorce, of the tornado of feelings that had whirled inside of him back then: fierce anger and resentment, inextricably bound to remnants of true love. Christ, what a mess romance could be! He saw it all the time at work: people shot, stabbed, beaten, and battered, all in the name of disappointed love.

Richie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photo of Robert Brasciak. “Ask her if she’s ever seen this man.”

The woman showed no signs of recognition. She shook her head.

“And you?” Richie asked the girl.

She shook her head too.

Jack nodded toward the old man. “What about him?”

The girl shook her head. “He never leaves the house.”

Jack thought for a moment. “All right. Ask her if she saw any signs of erratic behavior in Nadim.” He squinted. “That means—”

“I know what ‘erratic’ means. We had it in my spelling bee.” She translated for her aunt.

Another angry outburst.

The girl frowned. “She says yes, of course. That he was a crazy man.”

“How?”

“He was very nervous. He got angry for no reason. He couldn’t sleep.”

“Was he always like that, or was there something that made him change?”

The girl translated and Jack watched something flit across the woman’s face. It was so brief that anyone but a trained inter- viewer might well have missed it. But Ghizala Mamund just shrugged and muttered briefly.

“Who knows what made him so? It was the will of Allah.”

Jack stared at her. “If he was crazy, why did you marry him?”

During the translation, the woman squirmed. “He was not always like that. He was different when I met him.”

“When did he start to change?”

It was interesting, not speaking the woman’s tongue. That left Jack free to focus on her body language, the tone of her voice. And she sounded more anxious now than angry.

The girl turned to the detectives. “She says she doesn’t want to talk anymore.”

Jack wasn’t ready to let it go. “Tell her that this is very important.”

A brief exchange. “She must start cooking dinner.”

Jack frowned. “Tell her that if she won’t talk to us, we might have to bring her down to the police station.”

The woman’s haughty attitude crumpled; she looked like she might even cry. She finally said something in a faint little voice.

“He changed three years ago.”

Jack stayed still, careful not to spook the woman. “Did something happen at that time?”

The woman pressed a hand to her mouth and mumbled something.

“That was …” The girl lowered her voice. “That was when Enny died.”

Jack sat up a little straighten “Who was Enny?”

After the translation into Urdu, Ghizala pressed a hand to her mouth. Her response was barely audible.

“She doesn’t want to talk anymore.”

Jack had a sudden inspiration. “‘Enny’? Is that a girl?”

The niece nodded, sad-faced.

“The girl in those pictures?” Jack said, pointing to the side table. “Was she their daughter? Ghizala and Nadim’s?”

Again the girl nodded.

“How old was she?”

“Eleven.”

Jack glanced at Richie. What if Robert Brasciak had had something to do with the girl’s death, and Hasni had wanted revenge? Maybe Brasciak had killed the girl in a car accident or something? But then, why wait three years to kill him? Perhaps Hasni had nursed a powerful grudge, and then a chance encounter in the deli had led to the killing?

“How did she die?”

Raani answered; she sounded somber, older than her years. “She was sick. Pneumonia. It happened very fast.”

Jack slumped back. So much for
that
theory. He sighed. “Ask her if she has any idea where Nadim might be. Any idea at all.”

Ghizala Mamund shook her head and muttered.

“She doesn’t know anything about his life now and doesn’t want to know.”

Richie sat forward. “Ask her who he might be hanging out with.”

This time the woman almost spat her answer: “
Koora!
”

“What does that mean?”

“It means garbage,” the girl said. “Low people.”

Jack wondered what the word might be for
terrorists
. He stood up and moved in front of the woman. “Ask her—”

The two detectives were startled by a loud sound from the rear of the room. The old man had slammed his hand down on the table. He stood up now and said something angry.

“That’s enough,” the girl translated. “He would like for you to leave.”

“PNEUMONIA IS NOT A
motive,” Richie said as the two detectives got in their car and drove away.

“For killing some stranger in a deli? Not exactly. But I can imagine that having his kid die suddenly might make a guy a bit emotionally disturbed.”

They chewed on that silently for a minute—detectives, yes, but also fathers.

“That must be some damn tough stuff to deal with in a marriage,” Jack added, thinking of the bitterness in Ghizala’s face.

“I don’t like to think about it.”

Jack stared out the windshield as they drove out of Jackson Heights. It was amazing, the sea of different faces here. He pulled over outside a Starbucks so Richie could run in to take a piss; Jack noticed that the counter girl was wearing an Arab headscarf. On the road again, they passed a shop selling international phone cards, and another one advertising global money transfers. Jack thought about phone calls and cash flowing back and forth from overseas, and about all the talk he’d heard of terrorist cells, camouflaged and imbedded in the fabric of daily American life. If Nadim Hasni was a hidden time bomb, evidently he had started to go off early.

They passed an Indian bakery, a taqueria, a Tibetan restaurant. Jack couldn’t help thinking of his near-fiancée, how she would have liked this area. Michelle had always pushed him to try new food, expand his boundaries, step outside his comfort zone. Sometimes he’d felt irked by that, but mostly he had been grateful. He traveled all over the city and dealt with all kinds of people, but she had shown him that his view of the world could still be a bit limited. (Though what could you expect from the son of a Red Hook longshoreman?) If Michelle were here right now, she’d lead him into some exotic store or restaurant, laughing at his befuddled expressions. He’d pretend to be annoyed, but deep down he wouldn’t mind.

Christ, he thought to himself—here he was, years later, still mooning about his lost love. Why? He remembered his urgent dream the other night. One thing you could say about the threat of terrorism: it had a wondrous power to focus the mind (and heart). If there was an attack now, the first thing he’d want would be to make sure his son was okay, but the second would be to find Michelle. He hated to admit it, but even after their disastrous parting, after what she had done, he still loved her. A lot of time had gone by. Maybe she wasn’t with that other guy anymore. Maybe she regretted her affair. What if she wanted him back?

A car horn jolted him and he realized that he was cruising along the busy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “Wow,” he said. He glanced at his partner. “You ever have this thing where you’re driving and you have no memory of the last mile or so?”

Richie’s eyes widened. “You’re telling me this now? Christ—maybe
I
should drive.”

Both men fell silent for a moment, but then Jack’s partner spoke again.

“You know, here we are, looking for a guy who’s supposed to be a terrorist. Don’t you think we should be taking part in big task force meetings and stuff? Shouldn’t there be briefings and meetings with NYPD brass, and crap like that?”

Jack shrugged. “We’re only on this case because of the homicide. The terrorist part is Homeland Security’s thing. And maybe the FBI. They don’t want us involved, unless we can help find Hasni.” He sighed. “I suppose I can understand. If we’d been following a case for a while, I wouldn’t want some feds coming in and screwing everything up.”

He drove on. There was something small and odd tugging at his subconscious, some little detail that he might have missed, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He sighed and let it go; it would come to him eventually, maybe later tonight, as he was drifting off to sleep.

They were going over the Kosciuszko Bridge now, that connected Queens to Brooklyn. To the west, a sort of grim visual pun: the bristly gray tombstones of Calvary Cemetery in the foreground, superimposed against the bristly gray skyscrapers of Manhattan in the distance.

A FEW MINUTES AFTER
he dropped Richie off at the Seven-oh house, Jack’s cell phone trilled. He fished it out of the cup holder and flipped it open with one hand.

“Leightner. Who’s this?”

“It’s Brent Charlson.”

Jack’s eyebrows went up. “How do you like that? We were just talking about you.”

“
We
who?”

“Just me and my partner.”

“Are you having any luck?”

“Nope. Not really.”

“All right. I was just checking in.”

Jack was about to sign off, but his partner’s question came to mind. “You know, Richie was wondering: how come we’re not being invited to any meetings on this? I mean, you must be coordinating with people, right? FBI, joint task forces, whatever?”

“That’s right: we’re working very closely with the FBI.” There was a short pause. “Do you know where I am right now, detective?”