The Ninth Step (15 page)

Orlando Farro nodded. “You saw that, huh? I was drivin’ that car.”

Jack’s heartbeat quickened. “Can you tell me where you were going?”

Farro shrugged. “Sure. We went down ta Philly.”

Jack considered that info. Philadelphia was about eighty miles from NYC; he imagined his father headed down the Jersey Turnpike in the middle of the night, then cruising back in the wee morning hours. “What was going on down there? What did you need him for?”

Farro made a face. “Ya know, I hear you’re a squeaky clean cop. Why the hell do you wanna know about this?”

Jack stared at him. “Do you have any brothers?”

Farro nodded gravely. “Yeah. I had one, real proud like you. He didn’t want nothin’ to do with our thing. A lotta good it did him, being such an upright citizen—he died on Guadalcanal back in ’forty-two.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said. It was weird to feel any kinship with this old mobster. An airplane slowly ripped the sky overhead, and a breeze ruffled some daffodils next to the bench. “
So
—what was going on in Philly?”

Farro shrugged again. “We had some people down there we needed to do business with. Some Russkies. Only thing was, none of us spoke the lingo.”

“You needed my father to translate?”

“That’s right.”

“This business,” Jack said, stomach sinking. “What did it involve?”

“Narcotics,” Farro said. “Child prostitution. A little rubout, when someone was givin’ us trouble.”

Jack winced, but then the old man laughed. “I’m bustin’ yer balls, kid. It was just a crew down there that used ta hijack some trucks. Furs, cigarettes, crap like that. We’d sell the goods up here in the city. Your old man helped us out now and then.”

Jack sat thinking for a moment. “I can’t really imagine it. I remember him being pretty uptight about … you people.”

Farro shrugged. “Hey, the work down the docks was drying up. And he had a couple’a young mouths to feed …”

That got under Jack’s skin. Stay on track, he told himself. “Something changed, though. … Did he do something that pissed somebody off?”

Farro hacked up some nasty phlegm and spit it on the sidewalk. “What I heard, he decided he was too good for us. Didn’t want to get his precious hands dirty no more.”

“What do you mean, ‘you heard’? Weren’t you there?”

Farro took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his mouth.

“I was away at that pernt. I went up to Ossining for a few years back in ’sixty-four.” Ossining, an hour north of the city, was home to Sing Prison. The mobster turned to Jack. “So now what? You sorry you asked about all this shit? It doesn’t exactly make you feel proud of your old poppy now, does it?”

Jack sat thinking for a minute, watching a little toddler chase after an anxious-looking dachshund, reaching out to try to pull the dog’s tail. It seemed logical that the thug who had hired his father would be the man who’d want to teach him a lesson, if he stopped playing ball.

“This crew you had traveling down to Philly,” he said carefully. “Was it a Joe Gallo thing?”

The old man scoffed. “Nah. Our little operation would’a just been peanuts for him.”

“Who then? Who ran the operation?”

Orlando Farro didn’t answer. He just made a pained face.

“It’s ancient history,” Jack said. “Just tell me who it was.”

The old man moaned and pressed a hand to his stomach. Jack realized that his bowels were acting up.

“Listen,” Farro said, squirming. “I think I already repaid my favor to Cosenza.” He turned and looked over his shoulder for his nurse.

“
Please
,” Jack said. “Whoever it was, he probably died a long time ago …”

The old mobster grimaced; he looked like he was about to weep from frustration and shame. “It was Frank Raucci, goddamnit! And last I heard, he was plenty alive and kickin’.” He cried out, “Shirley! I need you! Take me home!”

The nurse rushed over and began to wheel the man away. Farro looked over his shoulder and offered one bitter parting comment. “For chrissakes, Leightner, don’t get old!”

Raucci.
Jack frowned; he couldn’t remember the thug from his childhood. Well, at least he had a name to work with.

He stood up and headed down the path toward his car. Right now, he needed to keep moving forward on the Nadim Hasni case. He was off duty, but that didn’t matter: the possible consequences of not catching this suspect were more drastic than he liked to contemplate.

The first stop was the Homicide Task Force, to see if any of his contacts had come up with more information about Hasni. He found a new fax in his in-box. Sitting at his desk in the crowded detectives’ squad room, he read it with mounting excitement. He made a couple of calls, and then he dialed Richie Powker. “You still at the Seven-oh? Something very interesting just came in. Hold tight—I’ll be right over.”

“I’M GLAD YOU’RE STILL
here,” he told his partner as he hurried into the squad room, bearing a manila folder.

“Whaddaya got? Richie asked. The Seven-oh detective was sitting amidst a mess of case files, message slips, and half-eaten food.

“When we were running Nadim Hasni’s name through the computer the other day, I called someone I know over at the Department of Finance.” Jack sat down next to his partner’s desk, opened his folder, and took out several sheets of paper. “She faxed me these this afternoon. For the past couple years, Hasni has paid regular taxes for his car-service driving, but his income went way down in 2001 and 2002. Here’s the weird thing: there’s a period where he seems to go completely off the record: no taxes taken out, no paychecks at all.”

Richie ran a hand through his thatch of red hair. “From when to when?”

“Mid-October 2001 to April of 2002.”

The Seven-oh detective squinted. “I wonder when his daughter died? Maybe he just didn’t feel up to going to work.”

Jack shook his head. “I looked it up. She did die during that time, but not until March of 2002.”

Richie thought for a moment. “Who knows? Maybe the guy was just driving for somebody who let him work off the books.”

“Maybe—but notice that he went off the radar just after Nine-eleven.”

Richie frowned. “Do you think he might have gone out of the country? Maybe to some training camp in Afghanistan or something? Isn’t that what these guys do?”

“That doesn’t seem like a very good time for a Pakistani terrorist to go traveling overseas by plane. I checked with Customs anyhow: there’s no record of him flying anywhere. Unless he had a fake passport … But take a look at this.” Jack flipped through the papers and held one up. “Just for the hell of it, I asked my friend to look up our
victim’s
tax records. Robert Brasciak took in regular pay from his job at R. J. Stanley for the last couple of years. ‘Go back a little,’ I told her. It turns out that there’s also a complete hole in Brasciak’s records, from early October 2001 to April of 2002. Coincidence?”

Richie scrutinized the paper.

Jack’s gaze drifted around the squad room. Now that his excitement about the new information had leveled off, he had time to think—and to remember. He looked at his partner.

Richie glanced up. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve got this weird look on your face.”

Jack sighed. “I got a phone call from our pal Charlson a couple hours ago. He wanted to check in, see how we were doing.”

Richie shrugged. “Okay … So?”

Jack frowned. “Listen, I have no idea what this means, but he, ah, he said I should ask you about your wife.”

Richie stared in disbelief, and then he shook his head and looked away. After a few seconds, he turned back and spoke in a low voice. “Her name is Amina. She was born in Pakistan.”

Jack scratched his cheek. “And you didn’t mention this?” He had heard his partner briefly refer to his wife a couple of times but had imagined some red-haired, doughy white woman.

“Mention it? Why should I?” Richie’s voice started to rise—he glanced around the squad room, then lowered his voice again. “She’s
American
. She’s a goddamn citizen. Why should I have to mention her? I’m married to a Pakistani-American and that means I support terrorists or something?”

“
Easy
. No one is saying that.”

“Charlson is, apparently.”

Jack shrugged. “It’s just …
interesting
that you didn’t bring it up.”

Richie gripped the arms of his chair. “What am I supposed to do,
apologize
? I lived through Nine-eleven in New York City. I heard what people were saying. What my fellow
cops
were saying.
Towelheads. Sand niggers. We should go over there and bomb those fuckers and turn their countries into parking lots.
My wife had to live through that, people giving her dirty looks on the subway, making nasty comments. There were ignorant bastards around here beating up
Sikhs
, just because they wore turbans. What do you think all that did to my
kids
?”

“All right,” Jack said. “I’m certainly not accusing you of anything. Or your wife. It’s just … Charlson seems to be saying that you might be a little less than
gung-ho
about this case.”

His partner stared in disbelief again and gestured at the paperwork in front of him. “What do you think I’m doing right now, on my own time?! I’m a
cop
, Jack. True blue. And a native New Yorker. I love this goddamn city. You think I’m not gonna work to track down some asshole who wants to blow it up?”

Jack held up his hands in apology. “I don’t think that at all. Look, I’m sorry. Let’s just forget about it, okay?” He stood up. “Listen: I’ve got a court appearance tomorrow morning, but after lunch I’ll come by here and we’ll work on this together, okay?”

Richie scowled. “That fed can kiss my ass.”

N
EAR SUNSET, NADIM HASNI
paused after he rounded the corner onto his home block.

He looked carefully up and down the street. His gaze darted from sight to sight: a couple of little Pakistani children bouncing a ball outside the big twenty-four-hour Laundromat in the middle of the block; a cat poised halfway up the mottled trunk of an old sycamore tree. Nervous, Nadim lit a cigarette. He heard a skittering noise right behind him and his heart almost leapt out of his chest. He whirled around, only to see a squirrel dart behind a couple of trash cans.

Nadim pressed a hand to his chest and waited for his heart rate to slow. Anyone else might have attributed such jitters to the shock of having recently killed a man, but Nadim knew that he couldn’t rely on such an obvious explanation. The truth was that he’d been having problems with his nerves for a long time now. He wondered if he was going mad.

Two lanky Pakistani teenagers walked toward him, both raptly listening to little earphones. Nadim wondered if they would startle when they saw him, if they would shout
Murderer!
and run, but they moved blithely past, slouching like true American teens. He looked away and spotted an old black man sitting on his front porch, staring idly into the distance. Again, Nadim wondered if this neighbor would jump up at the sight of him, but the man gazed right through him. It seemed that word of the murder had not gotten out—or at least that he himself was still anonymous and invisible, as usual. Just another Pak car-service driver, like a thousand others.

He smoked the rest of his cigarette, watching the block. After a couple more tense minutes, he had to conclude that the block looked as it always did: a modest series of row houses in Kensington, Brooklyn. Concrete stoops, aluminum-sided houses, cheap cars in the driveways. But there had been a time when he would have marveled to think that he might ever live on such a respectable street. Back when he had first come to America, when he had been forced to sleep on couches in the homes of distant relatives, in dingy old brick apartment buildings whose hallways smelled of stale sweat and cat piss.

Nadim looked down. His heart rate had slowed, but his hands were trembling. He crushed his cigarette underfoot, took a deep breath, and moved on down the sidewalk. As he neared his apartment, he paused to look again for any sign that he was being followed. Nothing. He exhaled. It seemed impossible, given how the police always found the culprits quickly on the TV crime shows, but maybe he had come out of that deli the other day unobserved.

He walked around a battered white contractor’s van parked in front of the house and gingerly moved up the concrete driveway, past the sign in the middle of the lawn:
DR. TEKCHAND PARKASH, ADOLESCENT GYNECOLOGY
. The doctor, a Hindu from a little town outside Delhi, kept to himself, which suited Nadim just fine; he came and went to his basement apartment from a separate door on the side of the house, so he didn’t have to find out why on earth adolescent girls might be in need of such treatment.

He continued up the driveway, then paused to dig in his pockets. He caught his reflection in the glass outer door: he looked exhausted and disheveled. With difficulty, he managed to locate his keys. After he pulled the key ring out, he accidentally dropped it on the asphalt. As he bent down to pick it up, he heard a sharp
thwack
overhead. A chunk of brick fell at his feet and some crumbs of it landed on his hair. He looked up, dazed with lack of sleep—had it fallen off the top of the building? He didn’t see anything up there. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a stranger moving up the driveway toward him, a stern fellow with severely short hair, holding up a long, thin wrapped bundle. Farther off, he saw the back door of the contractor’s van hanging open in the street. A flash and a muffled sound came out of the front of the bundle and then Nadim heard another
thwack
on the wall next to him.

He glanced wildly around, but there were no neighbors in sight to help him. He scrambled to his feet and bolted, his chest gripped by an icy band of fear.

He heard shouting behind him, several voices, but he didn’t look back, just sprinted up the driveway and veered around the little freestanding garage at the back of the house. There was a narrow space between the weathered gray wall and a chain-link fence; he hurtled into it, squeezed past some prickly yellow-budding shrubs, and burst out into a neighbor’s backyard. He banged into a pole, part of a child’s swing set, and careened around the side of that house, through another side passage, and out onto the next block.