The Ninth Step (14 page)

“Of course I don’t.”

“I’ll tell you: I’m in Hoboken, outside a storage facility. Inside, we’ve got a unit under surveillance. It was rented out by Nadim Hasni and his pals on December fifteenth. Does that date mean anything to you?”

“No. Why?”

“Remember what I told you about that Iranian ship getting hijacked with the radioactive cargo? That happened three days later, on December eighteenth. Now let me ask you, if you were transporting some radioactive material into New York, and you needed some time to build it into a bomb, where would you put it? Your apartment? Somebody else’s apartment? In ’ninety-three, they worked out of a storage unit. In Jersey City.”

Jack pressed the phone more tightly to his ear. “Did you look inside? What’s in there?”

“
Nothing
, detective. They’ve been renting the unit for four months now, with nothing in it. Now why would they do that?”

Jack chewed on the question for a moment. “Because they’re waiting for another shipment?”

“That seems like the best bet. This is not just some abstract plan. These guys are ready to move. Now,
you
can see how serious this is, and
I
certainly can. Why can’t your partner?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, feeling torn between Richie Powker, whom he was getting to know and like, and this relative stranger.

“I’ll tell you what,” Charlson said. “Why don’t you ask Detective Powker about his wife?”

J
ACK SPUTTERED. “WHAT THE
hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Ask
him
,” Charlson said. “I’ve gotta run. One of Hasni’s buddies just showed up here.”

The line went dead.

Jack pulled over to the side of Coney Island Avenue and sat there for a moment, troubled and confused. What could Richie Powker’s wife have to do with anything? He was about to turn around and head back to the Seven-oh when his phone trilled again.

“Jack? It’s Larry.”

“What’s up?” Jack said, rather coldly. He was not very impressed with his old friend at the moment.

“Look,” Cosenza said. “I’m sorry about what happened the last time you were here.”

“I told you: don’t worry about it.”

“Come on, Jack—how long have we been friends? I’ve been feeling bad about not helping you out, and now maybe I can.”

Jack perked up. “What’s new? You want me to come over to the funeral home?”

Larry’s voice sounded tight. “No. Don’t do that. Just listen. I’ve got a guy I did a favor for. A couple years ago his grandson got killed by a car, a hit-and-run over on Hamilton Avenue. I can’t say I like the old man, but the grandson was a decent kid. He worked for me a while back, a part-time job, after school. When I heard about the accident, I did the embalming for free.”

Jack squinted. “Okay—but what does this have to do with me?”

“This guy, the grandfather, he said he owed me a favor. And he, uh, he was
connected
. And he used to know your old man. Listen—you got a pencil?”

JUST AN HOUR, JACK
told himself. Even though his shift had ended, he knew he needed to press on with the search for Nadim Hasni. And he needed to have a talk with his partner about Brent Charlson’s mysterious implication. But for now, he finally had a lead on what might have really happened to his brother, and the urge to pursue it was just too great.

Brooklyn’s Third Avenue looked grubby in the late afternoon sun. It was a long corridor of automotive repair shops, quick-oil-change drive-throughs, and sidewalk fix-a-flat joints, punctuated by strip clubs and XXX video shops that had been forced to this out-of-the-way stretch by city zoning changes. The avenue lay under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway, which ran above it on stilts out toward Bay Ridge.

The area had always had its seedy side. The drive took Jack back in time to when his mother used to send him out to the bars to find his father and bring him home. If the longshoremen weren’t drinking after work in Red Hook, they sometimes hung out on this side of the harbor, along with the ship machinists and welders and pipefitters. Hard workers and hard drinkers; their bars were rough. Jack remembered a joint on Thirty-ninth Street run by a transvestite named Queenie, and a place on Second or Third Ave. where the Norwegian riggers and seamen gathered. (They were known as
squareheads
, and their nights out involved a predictable three-step process: they would drink themselves silly, then they would dance to the jukebox, and then they would beat the crap out of each other.)

These were general memories, but right now Jack was pointed toward one very specific date. If he had been asked what was going on in the world during most years of his life, he might have been hard-pressed to answer, but 1965 was crammed with memorable events. There was the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, and the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium, and Malcolm X getting whacked up in Washington Heights. Civil rights activists got sprayed with fire hoses down in Selma, college kids burned draft cards in Berkeley, and Watts went up in flames. An astronaut took the first walk out into the black void of space, and the first U.S. combat troops sailed off to Vietnam.

For one fifteen-year-old from Brooklyn, the end of the year brought three significant events.

In October, Sandy Koufax of the L.A. (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers decided not to pitch in Game One of the World Series because it fell on a Jewish high holy day. He took a lot of flak for that stand, but then went on to win the Series and the MVP award. A Jewish hero! That meant a lot to a kid in a rough neighborhood who was kind of small and had foreign parents and frequently got called a kike.

One November evening, just after John Lindsay became mayor, a partial electrical blackout spread across much of the five boroughs. Not a very big deal, not like the wild night to come when the lights went out in ’77, but it taught Jack a lot about how a city could bond together—or be just a heartbeat away from utter chaos.

But for Jack Leightner, 1965 was not the year of space-walks or riots, of World Series or World’s Fairs.

It was the year his brother had been robbed of his young life.

EVEN THOUGH THE TREES
were budding and the air warmed with the rich, loamy scent of spring, the old man had a blanket over his lap. He sat in a wheelchair in front of his little Bay Ridge row house, with a middle-aged black nurse standing behind. Across the street, in a modest green spot called Owl’s Head Park, a barking Labrador retriever leapt up in the air to catch a Frisbee.

“Goddamn mutts,” the man said as Jack walked up the sidewalk. “They shit all over the goddamn place.” His face was gray and liver-spotted, with sunken cheeks. A bad toupee sat awkwardly on his head.

“Mr. Farro?”

Instead of answering, Orlando Farro twisted in his chair to scowl up at his nurse. “Ya see this, Shirley? This is what I’m reduced to. My own goddamn son can’t even be bothered to visit, so I have to rely on
cops
for a social life.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” Jack said.

The man just waved a hand as if he was pushing away some unpleasant food.

“Should we go inside?” Jack figured the old Mob soldier would not want to be seen with him in public.

“Bah. Let’s go to the park.”

“You sure?”

Farro scoffed. “I don’t give a crap who sees me talkin’ ta you. What’re they gonna do? Kill me? It’d be a goddamned blessing.”

The nurse spoke up. “Shall I push you, Mr. Farro?” She had a pleasant Caribbean accent and a placid face; already, Jack was able to guess that her job required plenty of patience.

“
Phfft
. The cop here looks strong enough—let
him
push me. My tax dollars at work.” Farro chuckled at his own joke, but the laugh cost him: he sputtered and wheezed.

Jack looked at the nurse. “Uh, I need to speak to Mr. Farro in private, but maybe you could follow us?” The old geezer looked like he might kick the bucket at any second.

The woman shrugged. “As you wish.”

Jack took her place behind the wheelchair, and then he pushed the old man out across the street. The area was quiet and unassuming and working-class, two-story brick row houses with aluminum awnings over their front doors and American flags flying over postage-stamp lawns. Once it had been mostly Italian and Irish, but now Jack noticed Asians and Arabs walking by. Farro lived on the edge of the neighborhood, right near the harbor. Down at the end of his street, as if framed in a picture window, cars whizzed past on the Belt Parkway, and then—just beyond—stretched the great expanse of water.

The park was just a few square blocks. To the east, kids’ high-pitched voices drifted across from a busy playground; Jack pushed the old man west, past a row of some of the grandest old trees he had seen in Brooklyn, and then he turned onto a curving asphalt path leading up the park’s big hill. It was quite a tableau, Jack mused: a Russian-Jewish-American cop pushing an old Sicilian-American mobster, trailed at a distance of thirty yards by a Caribbean-American woman. As they made their way up to the crest of the hill, the sounds of the neighborhood—birds chittering, cars roaring along the parkway,
the ponk!
of a baseball hit by an aluminum bat—faded away, leaving a kind of dignified hush.

After a couple of silent minutes, they came to the peak and Jack pushed the chair over to a bench, which offered a spectacular view of New York Harbor. The nurse sat several benches down, out of earshot.

Jack took a moment to look around. To the south, the Brooklyn tower of the Verrazano Bridge rose up over the houses of Bay Ridge like a giant blue clothespin. Across the harbor he saw the wooded outline of Staten Island, and then—to its right—the docks and loading cranes of Bayonne, New Jersey. Gazing north, he saw Governors Island out in the middle of the water, and then—just past it—the tip of lower Manhattan. He couldn’t help remembering Brent Charlson’s story about a hijacked freighter emitting deadly radioactivity, and a chill went up his spine as he imagined such a ship sliding into the harbor.

He glanced northeast, toward the peninsula of Red Hook, where he had been born, where his father had worked the docks, and where his younger brother had been slain. With any luck, this old man sitting next to him was about to say something about that.

“It’s goin’ the wrong way,” Orlando Farro muttered instead, and Jack was confused for a moment, until he followed the man’s gaze out toward the center of the slate-blue harbor, where a huge red freighter, loaded down with big cargo containers, like a pile of multicolored bricks, was wending its way toward the Jersey docks.

Jack knew just what the man meant. When he had been little, the Hook had been one of the busiest shipping destinations in the country. A longshoreman like Jack’s father could find all the work he’d ever want, and the neighborhood had been an incredibly lively place. Then, in the late fifties, the whole industry changed. Where once the stevedores had hauled cargo up out of the ships’ holds with brute muscle, now the goods were packed in giant metal containers. All it took was one guy sitting up in the cabin of a crane to swing them up out of the ship and onto the bed of a waiting truck or railroad train. And there was much more room for trucks and trains on the Jersey shore, so most of the industry had shifted across the harbor. Pretty soon, hard-laboring men like Jack’s father were scrambling for scraps.

At Jack’s side, Orlando Farro squirmed for a more comfortable position. “I hate this goddamn chair.” He looked up. “Did you know that I used to be a Golden Gloves champ? I was ranked number three in the city back in ’thirty-nine. And now? I’m
shrinking
, and I cough my guts up, and I can’t control my goddamn bowels. This is what old age will do to ya.”

Jack felt a twinge of sympathy for the old man, so anxious to demonstrate that he had once been someone else, someone
more
. But he wasn’t here to feel sorry for some thug. “I understand you knew my father. What can you tell me about him?”

The old man frowned. “You ever hear a saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for’?”

Jack ignored the question. “I don’t know how much Larry told you.”

“He said you want to know what happened to your brother. Terrible thing.” Farro squirmed in his chair again. “I loved ta fight. I was in the citywide championships in ’forty-one.”

Jack resisted the urge to grab the old man and shake him, to demand the identity of the person behind his brother’s killing. Take it slow, he told himself. Treat this like a professional interview. “What happened with my brother … I always thought it was just a random mugging.”

Farro shrugged. “That was a long time ago. Maybe it’s best to just let sleeping—”

Jack held up a hand. “I just wanna know what happened. I’m not looking to stir up any trouble.” The lie came easily, though what he really wanted was to find the perpetrator and beat his face to a bloody pulp. “So you knew my father?”

“I knew him,” Farro said. “He was one tough bastard.”

Jack nodded. The old man had been—like Jack himself—rather small, but he carried himself like a giant, with a cocky, rolling swagger. A handsome man in a rather crude way, Maxim Leightner had confronted the world with one eye squinting and a hand-rolled cigarette perched on his lower lip. Jack could picture him now, sitting in their kitchen eating soup, sucking the marrow out of an ox shoulder and eating garlic cloves like peanuts.

“He was one hell of a worker,” Farro said. “Nobody earned a paycheck more than that crazy Russkie.” The old man snorted. “He didn’t have to work so hard.”

Jack turned sharply. “What do you mean?”

Farro shrugged. “A guy like that, he could’a just worked for us.”

Jack’s face tightened. “Did he ever?”

“Ever what?”

“Do any work for you?” Jack already had a low enough opinion of his father, and he hardly wanted to abase it further—but he had to ask.

Farro didn’t respond.

“I have a memory,” Jack said slowly. “I don’t know what it means. I know that when I was older, a teenager, my father didn’t, ah, didn’t want anything to do with … the, uh, people who ran the neighborhood.” He felt like he was tiptoeing through a minefield, trying not to offend the old mobster before the man could tell him what he needed to know. “But there were a few times when I was little, I remember getting up late at night and seeing him get into a car filled with men. It would drive away, and he wouldn’t come back until the morning. He would never talk about where he’d been.”