by Norman Green
“Yeah you do,” Al told her, “but I don’t have time to look for it.” She squatted down. “Maybe I’ll beat you silly until you tell me where it is. Where are you from?”
“What? What?” the woman sputtered.
Al slowed her words down. “Where do you come from.”
The woman spat out a word that Al didn’t understand.
“Okay. Where is that?”
“Yemen.”
“All right. Get up. You and I are gonna take a tour through your little corner of paradise and we’re gonna see who’s home.”
They made a slow tour of the place, the woman muttering and complaining the entire time. The stairs were particularly hard on her, and Al guessed it was the first time she’d seen the upper floors of the building in a long time. Al prodded her along with the bat. The men living in the place were oddly silent, they watched the two women with the passivity of sheep watching the farmer carry his knife to the barn. Maybe they had been behind the bars of the zoo so long that they didn’t know, any longer, what to do when someone left the cage door ajar. Al couldn’t escape the impression that the woman was an obese black spider sitting at the center of her web, sucking out the soul of anyone who got too close.
The man Al was seeking, the parking valet from Costello’s restaurant, was not in evidence. On the way back down, Al paused in the center of each floor and gave the same speech. “Okay, listen up!” she yelled. “One week from today! One week! Seven days! I’m coming back with Immigration! You understand? Seven days! Immigration!” She looked into lifeless eyes, not knowing if they understood her or not. “Don’t come back here! Run away, this place is no good for you! One week, don’t be here!”
“You’re killing me,” the woman whispered. “Why do you do this?”
Al stared at the pinched and drawn faces of the men they passed on their way out. “Because these men are human beings, and you are a pig.” No one deserves to live like this, she thought, no one. “This is worse than usury.”
“No!” the woman shouted. “No! They are . . .” She went silent when Al hefted the bat.
“There’s a room in hell with your name on it,” she told the woman, who went pale. “You’ll burn for this.”
It was wonderful to get back out into the cold clean air. Al hacked and spat, trying to clear the taste of despair out of the back of her throat. Maybe that wasn’t a complete waste of time, she thought. Maybe some of those guys will get away, maybe they’ll move on, maybe they’ll find something better.
She drove past Costello’s, still in her uncle’s van. There were a few cars in the parking lot, but the lunch crowd would not begin to arrive for at least another hour. Al looked in the cars parked on both sides of the street as she went by, and then she did a slow tour of the neighborhood, doing the same thing. She was looking for someone sitting in a car, someone parked in a spot that gave them a decent view of the restaurant. Finding nothing, she parked up the hill, got out, and took a walk. She saw nothing out of place, no one eyeing her through drawn curtains, no tall guys from Nebraska. Thoroughly chilled, she went back to the van, got inside, fired it up, and cranked the heat to max.
The parking valet arrived on a bicycle about twenty minutes after she got back to the van. She was about a block away, but she was sure it was him, the real one, she had watched him for hours that first night at Costello’s and she had a good fix on him. She wondered how to approach the guy. She could knock him in the head and throw him in the back of the van, she could pretend to be with Immigration, she could even dragoon Salathiel Edwards and get him to help out, but in the end she decided on the simple approach, which entailed a trip to an ATM. When she got back, her parking spot was taken so she double-parked nearby and waited for the noonday crowd at Costello’s to dissipate.
I should take up knitting, she told herself, it would help me pass the time. And wouldn’t that be funny? Me, knitting, that would be like your sweet old grandmother smoking a cigar.
Confuse your enemies, she thought. Mystify your friends.
Probably already doing that . . .
Finally the parking lot dwindled down to eight cars and Al drove down the hill, pulled up in front of the restaurant, and rolled her window down. The valet trotted over smiling, but he lost the smile when he saw the fifty-dollar bill protruding from Al’s fist.
“Senorita?” he said, uncertain.
“I need to talk to you,” she told him, and she waggled the fifty like it was a worm on a fishhook. “This is for your time.”
He didn’t lunge at the bill, instead he walked around to the front of the van and peered inside.
Cautious man, she thought. He’s making sure I’m alone in here.
He went the rest of the way around, opened the passenger side door, and climbed inside. She handed him the bill. “I’m gonna drive up the block,” she told him. “Not far,” she said, noting his look of worry. “I don’t wanna sit here at the restaurant. They might not like you talking to me.”
He nodded. She went back up the hill, pulled a U-turn, and parked pointing downhill. “The other night,” she said, “when that man got shot. You were working here that night.”
He nodded. “I heard the noise of the shooting. I was parking a car down in the way far end of the lot, I stay over there until everything is finish. I don’t see nothing.”
His story sounded well rehearsed. “That’s what you told the cops, right? What’s your name?” she said.
“Juan,” he told her, unhappy.
“Juan what?”
“Juan Castro.”
“Any relation?”
“In case he’s my uncle, I don’t gonna be parking the cars,” he said.
“I guess not,” she said. “Juanito, you see that red Toyota right there?”
He nodded, looking bleak.
“That night,” she told him, “I was parked right there, where that red car is, so I know that you’re full of shit.”
“No, Senorita, I swear, I was working . . .”
Sometimes a good lie works better than the truth. “Juan, stop. I saw them drive up in the Lincoln, I watched you park it for them. Then they set off the alarm on that Chevy Suburban, and when the big guy came out they grabbed him and took off. Am I right?”
He just looked down at the floor of the van.
“Juanito, I am not with the police. There’s nobody here but you and me. Tell me what happened. I know you were right there, I know you saw everything, and I need to find those guys.”
He looked over at her. “Bad people,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “And they’re gonna get what they got coming, but you have to help me find them first.”
He sat there thinking about it.
“Juan . . .”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, okay. The old man with the limp, he comes the day before, he gives me two hundred. His hands are all broken. Somebody work him over good, long time ago. He says, okay, they gonna come tomorrow, they wait for their friend, then they gonna go away with him, please for me to take their car, bring it to such and such a place.”
“Smith Street,” she said. “Brooklyn.”
He looked at her, his eyes wide. “Smith Street.”
“So far so good, Juan. How did they trip the alarm on the Suburban?”
“Break the weendow,” he said.
“Okay, they broke the window. The big guy came running out. Then what?”
He nodded. “The big guy comes to check his truck, they have guns, they make him get inside and they drive away.”
“Okay. How did the one guy get shot?”
Juan swallowed. “His friend, behind him, he is pointing the gun and yelling. His gun shoots, I think he is surprise by that, he jump, like, ‘oh shit.’ His friend is hit here, in the back.” He pointed to his own back, just above his belt.
“Then what?”
“The old man say something, the rest of them shut up and get into the truck, then the old man shoots the one lying on the ground. Two times in the head.
Pop, pop. Then he gets in the truck and they drive away.”
“Killed his own man.”
He shrugged. “No doctor, no hospital, no police.”
“The old man tell you his name?”
“No.”
“You sure? Was he Italian?”
“No.”
“Not Italian? Are you sure? How do you know?”
“I hear them talk to each other. No Italia.”
Son of a bitch, Al thought. Uncle Paolo, who are you? “And then you drove the Lincoln to Smith Street, up off Atlantic.”
He nodded. “Bad people in that place. Very bad people.”
“Why you say that, Juan?”
He sighed. “Those men inside. They bring those men to the United State. Fifteen thousand each.”
“Fifteen grand? Where do guys like that get—”
“The families pay,” he said. “They save up, maybe they sell one daughter. Send one son over here to work, he send the money home. From Lebanon, Syria, they do this.”
“Sell the daughters? To who?”
He shrugged. “Saudi Arabia. Kuwait. Plenty rich men wanting young girl.”
“How do you know all this, Juan?”
“We park your car,” he said, shrugging again. “Cook your food, cut your grass. We come here for the working. But we are not stupid. We talk to each other.”
“Land of milk and honey,” she said.
“Finish now?” he asked her. “I go now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But why’d you do it, Juan? Why’d you deliver the car? You could have sold it.”
Juan looked down at the floor again. “Two hundred dollar more, from the bruja up in that house. Plus, that old man, he say he find me. Kill me if I back out.”
“You believe him?”
“Yes. I go now? Please . . .”
“Yeah. Thank you, Juan.”
He got out, paused before he shut the door. “Bad people,” he said. “I go away from here now. You don’t gonna see me anymore.”
She watched him walk back down the hill.
“Will you accept a collect call from Mr. Daniel Caughlan?”
“Yeah.” Al was surprised to hear from him. “Yeah, sure.”
“Miss Martillo,” Caughlan said. “How’re you keeping yourself these days?”
“All right,” Al said. Caughlan was upstate, in prison, he had to be calling her from the pay phone in jail. Her natural caution kicked in. They have to be taping this, she thought. I sure would, if I had his ass in my jail . . . “How much time do you get for this call?”
“Time enough,” he said. “Talked to Marty the udder day.”
“Yeah, he told me,” she said. “He tell you what kind of shape he’s in?”
“No. Mostly he wanted to talk about how you was fookin’ him over, ye ungrateful scut.” His Irish accent was noticeably broader than usual. “On yer own now, is it?”
“No. Not yet. Could go either way. You knew he took a bullet in the back at the end of that job we did for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, he’s in a wheelchair, and it looks like he’s gonna stay in it. He decides to pull himself together and come back, I’ll work with him. If he decides to sit in that chair and stare at the wall, there’s nothing I can do for him.”
“You know something,” Caughlan said, “you step on a cockroach, you hear his bones breaking, half the time when you let off he’ll get up and run away, broken back and all. I always thought Stiles had plenty of roach in him.”
“He hasn’t gotten up yet.”
“Walk away, then.”
“Doesn’t feel right.”
“Ye’ve got a generous heart, Martillo. Most men would have walked away already. Don’t be a sap. He used you, you hafta know that. Walk away, you don’t owe him a t’ing. You ever wonder if walkin’ away might not be the kindest choice? Leave him be.”
Marty’s old buddy, Al thought. “Maybe I’ll give him a few more days.”
“Listen, Martillo. Don’t keep making yeself so hard to get hold of, fer fook’s sake.”
It clicked then. Caughlan’s exaggerated accent went too well with the phone call Sarah had taken in the office from the “Irish-American Mothers and Fathers Association,” whatever that really was, and with the rosy-faced cab driver who’d turned up on her doorstep, twice. They were all linked, but she would get nowhere asking Caughlan about it, he would never talk about it over the prison phone, and he might not, regardless of the circumstances. “I get nervous when people I don’t know show up asking for me,” she told him. You never knew with guys like Caughlan. She’d always had the feeling that he genuinely liked her, but that would not necessarily stop him from selling her out if the conditions were right. Caughlan had risen to the top of his chosen field of endeavor by climbing over bodies, some of them his friends’. “Everyone keeps telling me I’m paranoid, but then every once in a while somebody shows up and tries to kick my ass.”
“I do understand,” he said, “but I got every confidence that they’ll have a hard job of it. Anyhow, do me this one favor, Martillo, since I’m stuck in this God-awful hole for anudder year, go on and have a pint for me.”
“Sure,” she said. “Be glad to.”
“And none of this damn drinking it out of a paper bag in some bodega, neither,” he said. “Go on and sit downstairs from yer place and sit down inside a proper saloon like the civilized girl I know ye’d like to be.”
Downstairs? He knows where I live? And he wants me to meet someone there. But for what? Is he setting me up? “You’re such a sweet talker.”
“Good,” he said. “Monday afternoon, say. Listen, Martillo, I never thanked you properly for seein’ after my son.”
“I just did what I thought was right.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Don’t forget about that beer.”
He hung up.
Al walked across the park and got into the front passenger side of a black Chevrolet gypsy cab that sat curbside on Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. The car looked like it had been painted with a brush and the windows were darkened. Salathiel Edwards sat behind the wheel. He looked over at Al, then pulled away from the curb without comment.
“What’s up?” Al asked him.
“Thanks for coming,” he said.
He turned onto Tillary Street and drove down to the entry ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It was an elevated section which ran past the Fort Greene housing project. The cars on the clogged highway were barely moving.
“We going somewhere?” Al said.
“No,” Edwards told her. “Just need a safe place to shoot the shit.”
“Okay.”
He let a minute pass. “Alessandra,” he finally said. “Are you a patriotic American?”
She was surprised by the question. “What?”
He elbowed his way into the center lane, settled in behind a UPS truck. “Do you,” he said, “consider yourself a patriotic American.” He shifted in his seat so he could stare over at her.
She shrugged. “I guess. I never thought about it much. Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. “That sounds like a truthful answer,” he finally said.
“Sal, what’s going on?”
“I could be suspended for talking to you,” he told her. “Actually, I could be fired. I want you to understand how serious this is. I could lose my pension over this conversation.”
“You got my attention, Sal.”
“Good,” he said. “The Harkonnen Group.”
“What about ’em?”
“They were contracted by Homeland Security to map the arms trade. What’s on the table, what’s under the table, gray market, black market, who’s got what, where it is, where it came from, who’s buying, how it gets from point A to point B, how does the money change hands. What Homeland Security wanted was a second opinion from an independent source, one with no axes to grind. The Harkonnen Group is completely separate from the intelligence community.”
; “Okay.”
“The job took almost two years. Cost the government something like seven million bucks.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I was briefed,” he told her. “Your name came up. Matter of fact, that’s the only reason I was in the room.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“No,” he said. “One of the active groups in the market is a bunch that specializes in weapons delivery. They’re smugglers, basically. They are not particularly political, but they work mostly in Africa and the Middle East. They’ve worked for just about everyone except the Israelis. They used to be based in Libya, but they moved out when Qaddafi lost his enthusiasm for the business. We don’t know precisely where they call home now.”
“What’s all this got to do with me?”
He sighed. “One of their operatives turned up in New York. In the parking lot of a restaurant in Brooklyn. Costello’s. You know the place, I believe. The man was dead, professionally done, one in the torso, two in the head, two separate weapons. You were there.”
“Yeah,” Al said. “I was inside.”
“What the fuck were you doing there, Al?”
“My partner got a phone call from her ex.”
“Frank Waters,” Sal said.
“Yeah,” she said, surprised. “He said he wanted to see her, but she was afraid of him. I went along so she’d have someone on her side if things got weird.”
“Frank Waters,” Sal told her, “is on a watch list. He is associated with a group of far-right-wing nuts. Ex-military, white supremacist, burn down Washington D.C., and start over again lunatics. So he meets with two or more members of a known group of arms smugglers, he caps one, the rest of them drive away. You figure it out.”
“No fucking way. Frank Waters would never—”
“We have him on video, Al, marching, protesting, making speeches. He’s made no secret of his opinions about the U.S. government. Now he’s been seen with people who move weapons systems around the world. We’re not talking M-16s and hand grenades, either. We’re talking some serious ordnance, Al.”
“You think he’s trying to import what, bombs or something? Into New York City?”
“No,” Sal said. “We think he’s already done it. Homeland Security considers Frank Waters to be a current, active, and genuine threat.”