The Ninth Step (3 page)

Jack stared off down the sunny thoroughfare, but in his mind’s eye he was seeing a little street in Red Hook, watching a police car come along several blocks down, waiting for it to arrive. But it never would, no matter how many years he waited. No matter how many times he replayed the scene, his brother would always drop to the sidewalk, holding his mortally wounded side. One little moment in time, one split second when the whole world turned upside down. Jack had spent a lifetime obsessing about that random encounter, wishing he could go back and fix it, wishing he could pull the harsh words back into his mouth.

Only, the thing was, based on what the stranger had told him, it hadn’t been random at all. Maybe he had been carrying this burden of guilt for nothing.

He sighed and turned; like it or not, he needed to go back inside and wrap up this silly bodega killing. Maybe the perp was nuts; maybe he had had some prior run-in with the vic. Perhaps the guy had been screwing his wife. Either way, it looked to be just another rinky-dink slaying, like a thousand others.

Routine—until the van came screeching up and the men in the protective bodysuits jumped out.

T
HERE WERE FOUR OF
them, and they looked like deep-sea divers as they piled out of the vehicle, which was not at all like a typical NYPD undercover van (dented and unwashed). No, this was a shiny black ride that might as well have had signs painted on it:
PROPERTY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
. The men—they all
looked
like men, though it was hard to tell, considering their bulky, hooded suits—wore oxygen masks. Jack’s first thought was
biohazard
, but then he saw the yellow-and-black radiation symbols, which always reminded him of the fallout shelter sign in his elementary school cafeteria. The last man out carried a clicking device.

The NYPD uniforms guarding the perimeter tried to question this odd crew, but they ducked right under the tape.

Jack held up a hand. “Whoa! What the hell’s going on?”

The man in front tugged at his mask; the rubber squeaked as he lifted it over his hooded head. An older guy with a bland, round face, wire-rimmed spectacles, rather stringy white hair combed over his balding pate. Grandfatherly. “You in charge here?”

Jack nodded. “NYPD, Brooklyn South Homicide. Now, who are
you
?”

The man pulled out an unfamiliar I.D. “Brent Charlson. Homeland Security.”

Jack threw a skeptical glance back at the little deli. “You sure you got the right address?”

The man didn’t bat an eye. “How long have you been inside there?”

Jack was definitely starting to get the creeps. “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to have to ask you to clear out any personnel from inside. Immediately.”

A street person, a big man wearing a wool watch cap, soiled sweatpants, and scrunched-up leather slippers, came shuffling around the corner. He stopped short when he saw the crime scene tape and the frogmen. “Yo! What’s happ’nin’? Is this some of that
anthraps
?”

A uniform waved him away.

Jack watched the guy look back anxiously as he shuffled off. Any New Yorker who had lived through 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax mailings took the potential for terrorist activity very seriously. Even four years later, it didn’t take much to get you worrying: any siren, a sudden halt on a subway train, an unattended knapsack.

He turned back to the Homeland Security agent. “So why are you guys here?”

The man gestured for his colleagues to move toward the door. “Call your supervisor,” he said over his shoulder. And in they went.

Jack didn’t like feds. Their Big Swinging Dick attitudes didn’t impress him one bit. They were definitely not team players. He remembered a double homicide in Bensonhurst, a Mob case, where a bunch of FBI agents had actually started hauling away the bodies before the NYPD had even gotten on the scene. And 9/11 had made it starkly clear how uncooperative the different governmental agencies could be, with the Feebs and the CIA withholding vital intelligence from each other. Things had supposedly gotten better since then, each agency pledging to pull together, but everybody still liked a good pissing match. And the three-letter guys—FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS—were the cockiest of all.

Jack pulled out his cell and called Lieutenant Frank Cardulli, the head of his unit. “Hey boss, I’ve got a weird situation here at—”

Cardulli cut him off. “I know. I got a call just a minute ago from downtown. They say we have to let these guys do their thing.”

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

A second later the door of the deli swung open; out came the owner and his clerk, followed by Richie Powker and the M.E.’s crew. Looking anxious, they moved out past the crime scene tape and a good few yards down the block.

Ten minutes later, the boys in the bodysuits came back out. Their leader followed. “All clear.”

“Was there a problem?” Jack asked. He couldn’t imagine why there would be any radiation inside a deli, but he knew that he didn’t want any on
him
.

“We didn’t get a reading,” Charlson said. “Not this time.” He moved off toward the van.

“Whoa,” Jack repeated. “You wanna tell us what this is all about?”

The man shrugged. “I can understand that you guys don’t like anybody stepping on your toes, and I apologize for the inconvenience.” He took out a card and handed it over. “If you find out anything about the perpetrator, I’m going to need for you to call me right away. And if you get a bead on him, I’m gonna really emphasize this:
don’t try to bring him in yourselves.
There’s a definite radiation risk. Call me and we’ll take care of him.”

Richie Powker made a face. “What’s all this about radiation? The guy killed the vic with a can of beans.”

The Homeland Security agent shrugged. “I know this must seem confusing, and I’m sorry, but I’m simply not at liberty to talk about this. Thanks for letting us do our job here; we appreciate your cooperation.” He turned, strode away, and joined his colleagues in the van.

Off they went.

“‘
Simply not at liberty,
’” Richie mimicked, sourly. “I hate feds.”

Jack went back into the deli. The first thing he noticed was that the can of beans was missing. It took him another minute to discover that the videotape was also gone.

A
S HE HANDED OVER
the admission fee to the New York Aquarium, out by Coney Island, Nadim Hasni noticed that his hands were still shaking. He willed them to stop, without success, but luckily the girl behind the ticket window seemed lost in her own private daydream.

Nadim moved into the cool interior of the entrance hall, grateful for the dim lighting and the near emptiness of the place. A weekday morning. On weekends the place was usually packed, full of tourists and New Yorkers out on family expeditions.

Nadim’s nerves still jangled. It was a small miracle that he had managed to get here without being noticed or stopped, sitting on a public bus, in broad daylight, trembling. Well, it wasn’t exactly as if he were covered in blood, though he couldn’t help feeling as if he was. He thought of his windbreaker, how he had quickly stripped it off outside the deli, after he saw the red stains splashed across the front. He had folded it up, strode several blocks, then stuffed it deep into a trash can. Americans did not do things like this, he thought, throwing clothes away in public trash receptacles. He had straightened up and looked around wildly, but no one paid him any mind.

Now he walked farther into the aquarium’s dark interior, past a tank full of gliding manta rays. They circled through the cool blue depths. Why had he come here now? He didn’t know; he had simply seen the bus coming and gotten on, had sat there in a daze while it moved down Coney Island Avenue, all the way to the shore. He had gravitated like an automaton toward a familiar place, a place of comfort, where he could be inside, away from public view, in the dark.

He wanted a cigarette, desperately, but knew he wouldn’t be allowed to smoke inside the aquarium. He also needed to relieve himself. He saw a sign for a men’s bathroom and went inside. A man was holding his little son up over a urinal.

As Nadim zipped up his fly, he noticed—to his horror—that several flecks of dried blood still dotted the back of his right hand. He hurried over to the sink, turned to make sure the stranger was not watching, and scrubbed the blood away. It reconstituted under the water, bright red, like some terrible magic potion, then swirled away down the drain.

He hurried out of the bathroom and made his way out into the aquarium’s center courtyard. After the dim interior, the morning sunlight blazed harsh overhead. With no particular destination in mind, he stumbled along a path between a series of outdoor pools: seals, walruses, penguins. … He groaned and punched himself in the thigh. What had he done? In one crazed, impulsive moment, he had ruined everything. He had spoiled the entire plan.

Across the way, a roar of applause went up from the arena for the sea lion show. The noise grated on him, and the thought of all the spectators; he ducked through another door, waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and descended a flight of steps, thankful for the quiet. A floor-to-ceiling picture window afforded a side view into the penguin tank. Aboveground the creatures looked comical as they waddled along, but underwater they were transformed into startlingly graceful little torpedoes. Nadim watched for a few minutes, kneading his hands together. Enny had loved the penguins. But her favorites had been the jellyfish, those diaphanous, glowing pink and orange umbrellas, pulsing open and closed as they floated through the depths. His daughter had loved to watch the creatures, and Nadim had loved to watch her little face as she looked on, bathed in the blue light of their subterranean tanks.

He shook his head. The last thing he needed was to get lost in memories, but he couldn’t seem to focus on what he needed to do now. Could he go back home? Would he
ever
be able to return home, after what he had done?

Light from the viewing windows rippled and shimmied against the dark walls. Nadim moved on to the next room, where he could see into the walrus pool. The big tank was filled with waving seaweed. A huge bull swooped down from the sunlit surface. It zoomed up until its whiskered face was just an inch from the glass, flipped over, and zoomed away.

Suddenly Nadim saw before him the face of the big man in the deli, his rough, hard-hammered face, his odd little snapping-turtle mouth. He heard the man’s gruff voice. Nadim looked down: his hands were shaking again. He sat on a bench in the middle of the dark room and tucked them underneath his thighs. His heart was thumping and he had to wait several minutes before it finally slowed.

A woman came in, holding the hand of a little boy. The child squirmed away from her, ran over to the window, and pressed his face to the glass. He gasped as the walrus swam right up and stared at him. Nadim wondered if it might give the child nightmares. Enny had had powerful bad dreams, perhaps because the other children teased her at school. Nadim remembered how he and his wife would rise in the middle of the night, stroke her forehead, tell her old folk tales to calm her down.
The Farmer, the Crocodile, and the Jackal
.
The Seven Wise Men of Buneyr
. And her favorite:
Heer and Ranjha
.

He pictured his daughter’s face, plump and round, listening to that last one, that grand, doomed love story, her thick, round eyeglasses glinting in the low light of her bedside lamp. (Without them, she could barely even see her parents’ faces.) She listened as they told her of the peasant musician Ranjha, and how he was prevented from marrying Heer, his upper-caste love. Heer’s family married her off to someone else, but the young lovers still managed to elope one night. When her kinsmen recaptured her and took her back to their town of Rangpur, Heer cried out, “Oh, Lord, destroy this town and these cruel people so that justice may be done!” And then a fierce fire broke out and began to devastate the town.

At this point, Enny would always interrupt to ask, wide-eyed, why all this suffering was necessary.

It was her mother who answered, more often than not: “Because it was the will of Allah.”

Nadim knew that others—Enny’s fourth-grade classmates especially—had found her plain and bookish, had made fun of the hijab that covered her pigtails. Without mercy they had teased his daughter, who had proclaimed her wish to become a scientist—
a marine biologist,
no less—a girl whose ancestors came from a landlocked desert state! She had loved this place, this aquarium, had never grown tired of it. Had loved coming here with her father.

And now he had become a killer. What would she have thought of him? He would have explained to her, if he could. He had done it for her. For
justice
. Like the Christian Bible said.
An eye for an eye.

He stood up and moved to the next dark room. He thought again of the plan. Was it too late? Perhaps not. He doubted that the deli clerk had gotten a good look at him. He had run wildly out of the store, but he’d had the good sense to slow down outside, and he couldn’t recall anyone watching him go.

He stopped in front of another huge window, watching a seal rocket down toward the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles, then spin around and corkscrew up toward the surface.

As if it were free.

“M
AYBE WE SHOULD JUST
let them have it,” said Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney two hours later.

The man was Jack’s direct boss. They were crammed into his little office, along with Frank Cardulli, the head of Brooklyn South Homicide. Richie Powker, new to the headquarters, was gazing at the walls, checking out the clusters of red pins, one for each murder of the year, covering a map of the borough, and the clipboards for each of the seventeen precincts in their region.

“I mean,” Tanney continued, “if the feds want the case so bad, why not let it be their problem?” The young sergeant always reminded Jack of a Hollywood actor wearing a fake mustache and trying to play a tough guy; he was the kind of boss who couldn’t appreciate the competence of his crew without considering it a challenge to his own tenuous control.