by Norman Green
Lovely.
A hundred feet farther down the road a body shop occupied another patch of gravel surrounded by reeds. There’s my parking spot, Al thought, her uncle’s aging van would look right at home there. Whoever worked in the body shop was already gone, the place was shuttered up and dark. She drove on by. A half-mile farther on she drove under a highway where one of the major arteries ran over a bridge, one of the tethers connecting Staten Island to New Jersey. It gave the locals on the Jersey side their connection to the city, it was their bane and their lifeblood. Gotta be hell, Al thought, gotta be, fighting your way through that mad crush every morning and every evening, God, how can you keep from going insane?
She kept going, followed Arthur Kill Road all the way down to where it ended in the tiny enclave of Tottenville, a thumb on the far end of Staten Island that stuck out into Raritan Bay. It was only a half-dozen blocks wide. Al found a parking spot, got out and stretched.
Cold air rolled gently up off the water, flowed on past her and pushed the vapors fuming out of Staten Island’s toxic garbage dumps away northward. For today, at least, there was no smell. Look at us, Al thought, shivering as she wrapped her arms around herself, look at us, ain’t we something. Even here, we build our little houses, we shovel our sidewalks, and we tend our yards. No matter what, inspired or insane, we keep on planting things regardless of the odds against them taking root, or of us surviving long enough to see them grow. Goes to show you, she told herself, you might as well go ahead and do what you can. What the hell . . .
Nineteen
The sun vanished somewhere on the far side of New Jersey, the racket of rush hour faded and ordinary people took refuge inside their warm houses. Al got back into the van and drove up Arthur Kill Road. She parked the van next to the driveway of the body shop. Someone drove up the road while she sat there, it was a big Mercedes sedan. God, she thought, what the hell can they be doing down here? Then she realized that if they had seen her, they would be wondering what the hell she was doing. Traffic was sparse, but it wasn’t nonexistent . . .
Too bad, Al thought. All you’ve gotta do is get a look at what’s up inside that garage, and then you can call in the cavalry.
Something was alive inside the garage, there was some mechanical thing humming, something working. Alessandra put her palms up against the side of the building and she could feel it. She found the single window in the side of the garage, but it was so black inside that she could not be sure she saw anything or not. Maybe the suggestion of a dark looming shape, and then again maybe not, she could not be sure. I’ve got to get inside, she told herself. They’ve already warned me away twice, if I call the cops out here and this turns out to be a false alarm, I will have put myself and Sarah in the path of Harkonnen’s freight train and we’ll get run down, and for nothing . . .
There was a single garage door in the front, it spanned nearly the width of the building, easily wide enough for two vehicles side by side, even oversized ones, like a landscaper’s trucks or like the two separate modules that Robbie had showed her on his computer. Each one would have been towed here, possibly behind a behemoth Chevy Suburban such as the one Frank Waters had been driving. Once in place the two modules would be mated by their umbilical cords and the power unit would be started, rendering the radar unit, and presumably the missile launcher, operative. They would wait until just before the anticipated launch time to power up, because according to Robbie, you couldn’t just light up some stray radar signal without attracting immediate and unfriendly attention from the military, who might even recognize the signal for what it was. “They’ll wait,” he’d told her. “If they have some way of knowing when the president’s plane is coming, they’ll wait until it’s on approach, then they’ll crank that bitch up and fire off their missiles because you got to know someone will be honing in on that radar source within minutes. If they’re lucky, they’ll have enough time to launch and then get clear before the counterstrike.”
“You can’t be serious,” she’d told him. “You really think we’d fire a, what, an anti-radar missile into a metropolitan region? There would have to be civilian casualties . . .”
“Don’t you think they’ve game-planned all of these scenarios already? They already made that decision. Bet on it. If Air Force One gets lit up by an unknown radar source, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be anywhere near where it’s coming from.”
Or the garage could be totally empty.
Find out first, she told herself.
There was a personnel door set into the big roll-up garage door in the front so that you could enter the building without opening the big door, but it seemed to be locked. She made a slow, careful circuit around the garage. There were no other points of entry, just the window and the door. There was, however, soft yellow light coming from two windows in the back of the house, and the reflected, flickering blue of a television in a front room.
This place is empty, she thought, it’s another dead end. Otherwise they’d have posted a sentry, she thought. If you spent a small fortune just to get to this point, you bought the missile system, paid someone to go over it to make sure it still worked, then you smuggled it over here and got your people into place, you had to be way past committed. You had to be ready to die or to spend your life in prison before you came on a mission like this. So where was the guard? She made another slow circuit, but there was no one.
Break the window? Too loud, she thought. You can’t have them come running while you’re still inside. That only left the two doors . . . She went back around to the front, tried the personnel door again, with no better result. The bigger door, however, had certainly seen better days. It was locked and latched, but only on one side, when she tried hoisting on the extreme left side, it had about six inches of give. She put her back to the door, squatted down, got both hands under the bottom and heaved. She put all of herself into it, strained with everything she had, and she got about another inch. She stopped, rested for a moment. When she was ready, she did it again, strained against the door with every muscle fiber at her disposal, strained until she thought her bones would crack, but she couldn’t tell if she’d gained any ground or not. She rested again, longer this time, then did it again. It did not feel to her that she was capable of exerting the same force one more time, or that the door had moved any more. She knelt down and measured the opening with her hands. That’s all you’re gonna get, she told herself. You are gonna have to make it through there. She lay on her back in front of the opening, turned her head sideways and inched her way under. Dirt from the bottom of the door fell onto her face, into her mouth and one of her eyes. She ignored it and wormed her way farther under, kept going until her rib cage was wedged into the opening. Collapse your chest, she told herself, exhale all of the air out of your lungs and push hard . . . But you better make it through, you better not get stuck or you’ll suffocate, they’ll find you here dead in the morning . . .
She exhaled as hard as she could, pushed herself farther into the gap. She could not breathe, her feet slipped on the frozen driveway, she saw sparks of light somewhere behind her eyes, she felt the rough bottom edge of the door digging into her chest. I’m screwed, she thought, I really did it this time, but then she pushed again, got an inch, then another one, and then enough of her ribs cleared the door for her to suck in some air. I made it, she thought, but then she thought she heard something, she was blinded by a sudden burst of light.
A harsh voice said, “Don’t move or I will cut your throat.”
The two others came in response to his phone call. Alessandra couldn’t really see their faces, but she was sure it was them, these were the guys she had tormented, the ones who’d hated taking orders from her so much, the ones who worked for Paolo Torrente. One of the new arrivals unlocked the roll-up door and then the two of them heaved it open. There was a second of blinding pain because Al’s side of the door dropped back down even before it went up and for a moment the flashlight in her face had nothing on t
he lights exploding in her brain. She could hardly breathe through the pain in her chest as hands hauled her roughly erect, and then she nearly passed out when they jerked her arms around behind her back. One of them held her arms, a second one grabbed a handful of her hair and then they marched her out into the driveway and through the snow, over to the side entrance of the house. They stopped just inside the door. She was vaguely conscious of excited speech and some laughter, as well as some distressing noises that might have been coming from her. They were in some kind of a mud room, not yet in the house proper. She fought for breath, fought against the pain, but she did not struggle against her captors, she stood no chance against them in her current shape. She went rigid when she felt them lifting her up, they threw her onto her back on a counter against one wall. She felt one of them leaning down on her chest, pinning her down, and then a second one sat on her ankles.
Not exactly what she’d been expecting.
She heard water then, flowing out of something and splattering all over the floor. The third man came into view, he was carrying a garden hose, it had water pouring softly out of the end. He grabbed her hair and held the hose in her face.
The water was so cold it was almost like being hit with an electrical current. She closed her eyes and held her breath. No big deal, for maybe ten seconds.
God, they could drown her like this.
It wouldn’t take more than a minute or so . . .
Her body began fighting her. Her mind screamed, how can you drown on dry land, Jesus, what if they didn’t let her get another breath, God, what a stupid way to go . . . She did her best to counteract her body’s insistent demands that she inhale, but it was an involuntary reflex, a mindless overwhelming command that bypassed her higher consciousness, the part of her brain that knew there was no air for her, only water. Her control slipped and she got a nose full of water, she tried to cough it out but got more in instead, she began fighting against the men holding her down, bucking against them like a wild thing, but they had her good. She felt a knot of white-hot pain right in the center of her chest as she lost the battle to keep her airways closed. She was dying . . .
She came to on the floor, one of them had his knees on her stomach, she coughed and then threw up. The one on his knees jumped back out of the way to the sounds of laughter and then they grabbed her again, lifted her back up onto the counter.
One of them went for the hose, she heard the water, and she screamed.
They were doing this for fun . . .
The fourth time they did it she had no more strength. Maybe this is it, she thought, this must be what it feels like to die, to lose awareness of the world, of the air just out of reach, to forget why you came, who you are, even, to sense your spirit ebbing away, to feel the enveloping darkness . . . It ended, though, after only seconds the water stopped, the other two let go of her and she rolled over on her side and coughed the water out of her nose and throat. They grabbed her and dropped her to the floor where she kept coughing until her throat was raw.
She noticed a voice yelling, it was not hers and it did not belong to any of the other three, either. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of him, a polished black shoe, a tailored trouser leg, a crippled hand. It was the man she knew as Paolo Torrente, and he had come to yank back the leashes on his dogs.
“Idiots!” he shrieked. Al heard the unmistakable sound of a hand striking flesh. “What are you doing? Did she come alone? Did you even look?” One of them tried to answer him and he shouted the man into silence. “Have you completely lost your mind? Have you forgotten our purpose? When we leave here tomorrow she must walk out with us! We cannot leave her here!” He went on, then, in a language she did not recognize.
She lay on the floor, breathing shallowly. The awareness of her body returned slowly, she felt her hair matted on her face, her sore ribs, she was once again able to command her hands and feet. She stayed still and gathered what strength she could.
Paolo ended his tirade, but then continued a moment later in a more normal tone of voice, in English. “After tomorrow,” he said, “I do not care what you do with her. Until then, put her with the other one.”
She didn’t move. Whatever it is that makes you alive, she could feel it flowing back into her. She remembered Coughlan’s words, thought she might just have enough cockroach in her, too, and then she knew at that moment that Paolo’s first mistake had been to leave his dead comrade in the parking lot at Costello’s. His second was this one, not killing her while he had the chance. If I let them march me out of this place tomorrow, she thought, I am really and truly done for . . .
It was a small unlit basement room, rough concrete floor, exterior walls of stone, interior walls of concrete blocks, a thin layer of dirt on everything. They rolled her in there onto the floor, left her in the pitch darkness, locked the door behind her. She spat the dirt and hair out of her mouth and sat up slowly, head throbbing.
There was someone else in the room. “Frank,” she said. “Frank Waters. Is that you?”
“Wow,” a voice said. “How’d you reckanize me in the dark? And what the hell is going on? Can you tell me what’s happening?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You been set up. They want you to be the next John Wilkes Booth.”
“John what? What the hell are you talking about? Where are you? I’m reaching out, I’m right here.” She felt his hand brush against her face. “God, you’re freezing,” he said. “What the hell did they do to you? C’mere. No, it’s all right, c’mere, you could catch your death in this place.”
“Yeah, you got a point. Be a little careful, okay, I think I got a cracked rib or two.”
“I got you,” he said, and she let him pull her to him. She had to admit it felt pretty good, she had forgotten what warm was like. “Tell me,” he said. “Who the hell are you, and what’s going on?”
She told him. They sat in silence a while after she finished.
“You warm enough now?” he finally asked her.
“Yeah, I’m good. Thanks. Did you get all that, Frank?” She eased away from him, found a block wall, leaned back against it.
“I got it all right,” he said. “I got it. There’s water here if you’re thirsty.”
“Hell, no,” she said. “Thanks anyway. How can we get outa here, Frank?”
“We can’t,” he told her, his voice quiet. “The room is too small, they can see clear into every corner from the window in the door. Do you know how to fuck up that launcher if you get clear?”
“I’ll find a way.”
He thought about that for some time.
“Well, listen,” he said, going on in a quieter voice. “You need to rest up. I got a jacket here, you can use it for a pillow.”
She felt him thrust a soft cloth bundle into her hands. “Are you sure there’s no way out of here, Frank?”
“I had plenty of time to figure it out, believe me.”
“Do they ever open that door?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “When they bring breakfast. One guy with a gun and one with the food. And the guy with the gun is on the ball, you ain’t gonna surprise him and you ain’t gonna jump him.”
“We might have to try,” she told him. “That might be our only chance.”
“It ain’t no chance at all,” he told her. “Listen, you lay down and try to get some sleep.”
She woke up with a start, confused first and sore second, felt his hand on her knee. It took her a second or so to put it all together. She couldn’t see him, but she sensed him close, heard his hoarse whisper. “How ya feeling?” he said. “I know ya slept good.”
“Yeah?” God, it even hurt to breathe. “How do you know that?”
“’Cause ya snore like a truck driver.”
“Sorry. I keep you awake?”
“S’all right. I needed the time to think. Here’s what I got: if these guys with Paolo really want me to take the fall for this, they need me alive and without any bullet holes in me. I didn’t
know that before. Ya know what I mean?”
“I don’t think I like the sound of this, Frank.”
“Listen, I ain’t nuts about it neither, but if we don’t do something, the shit just goes downhill from here. I mean, it just gets worse. So the way they do it in the mornings, the guy with the gun shows up, he opens the door first and then stands to the left of the door there while the kid brings in the food. Just cereal. Anyhow, I didn’t know the guy couldn’t shoot me, ya know what I’m saying? Not if they want me to be the patsy. So I’m gonna bum-rush the guy. Ya gonna have to get past the kid.”
“You’re betting your life on this, Frank.”
He was silent for a minute. “When they come,” he finally said, “I take out the soldier. Raffi, the one with the gun.”
“Raffi,” she said. “He look like a fucking ferret?”
“Yeah, that’s him. The kid’s name is Tonio. If ya can get past the kid, ya might have a chance. I mean, it won’t be a great chance, there’s one more soldier and he’s a real hard-ass, ya gotta stay away from him. But we need to catch a break somewhere along the line here. Ya know what I mean? We might get lucky. He might be busy doing something else.”