A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

  “Well, this guy somehow got past the dogs and through the gate on the window. He didn’t trip the shotgun in the air conditioner. How did he know? You must have thought about it.”

  “Well,” Paco explained, “you know I been in a lotta pain, man.”

  “I understand, Paco. Really. But you must have spent a few minutes thinking about the man who did this to you.”

  “Well, I have thought about it a couple of times. I think it might be someone out to eliminate the competition.”

  Moodrow sat down at the edge of the bed. He placed his fingers on the bandages covering Paco’s right arm and began to stroke them gently. “And who would that be?”

  Paco began to speak quickly, looking for the right words. “I believe the man would have to be Joseph Imoyeva, the African. He’s the only one with the organization to handle our business. He has very good soldiers working for him.”

  Moodrow pressed down hard enough to bring Paco up into a sitting position. The injured man opened his mouth to scream, but could only manage a series of hoarse grunts. The sergeant, completely satisfied, dropped into a chair by Paco’s right side and waited patiently for him to squeeze back the pain. The drugs Paco had been given to control his suffering had imparted a false sense of security, and he hadn’t been prepared for the fire that swept up into his shoulder. The worst part was the inability to see it coming, to anticipate. Even now, he didn’t know where the policeman was.

  Moodrow cleared his throat. “You should remind yourself that you’re gonna tell me what I need to know. Just the way you did before. I realize you want your own revenge. That’s all you have left. But I also need. I need to talk to whoever dropped that grenade. Now you know fucking well nobody got in that house without having the layout beforehand. It just ain’t possible.”

  “Sure,” Paco agreed quickly, trying to smile. “That makes good sense to me. I go along with what you say one hundred percent. But how do I know which one it was?” Quietly, without interrupting, Moodrow removed the shoe from his right foot and raised it high in the air. “There must have been a dozen guys who knew the layout. It might be any one of the soldiers. How am I supposed…”

  This time Paco Baquili screamed. He screamed for a long time, then fell back, half-unconscious. He realized, dimly, that no one had come to investigate, no doctor and no nurse and that he was completely and utterly alone with Detective Sergeant Stanley Moodrow, who sat by his side, chuckling softly. “Ah, Paco,” the sergeant whispered. “I really didn’t enjoy that. I know my reputation among you people, but it’s not justified and I’m going to prove that right now. See, I think that if I just whack that arm a couple more times, you’ll tell me what I need to know. But, instead, I’m offering value for value, favor for favor. Give him up. You can’t do shit from in here anyway. Look, I promise I’ll try to give you a shot when I’m finished. I won’t protect him. Also, if I can, I’ll put some of the heat on him and take it off of you. But no more bullshit, Paco. Not one little piece of bullshit or I swear I’ll tear that fuckin’ arm right off your shoulder. I want the name.”

  “Enrique Hentados.” Involuntarily, without his even knowing it, Paco began to cry.

  “How do ya know?” Moodrow leaned forward eagerly.

  “He’s not around no more. Nobody can find him.”

  “Maybe he just got lost for a few days.”

  Paco panicked. “Jesus Christ, man, I am tellin’ you the truth. Only a few people knew about the dogs and that shotgun. Enrique knew. Shit, he was my mother’s cousin, from my hometown in Puerto Rico. I got him that job as a favor. When I find him, I’m going to burn him with a torch until his flesh melts off his bones. I want him to die slow, man.”

  “All right. Enough.” Moodrow pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket and began to fish for his pencil. “Let’s start with his relatives and friends.”

  3

  WHEN FORCED TO BULLDOG a problem, Stanley Moodrow could be as tenacious as any cop in the city, patiently shaking out a rumor or a witness until some tiny slice of truth emerged. He pushed when he could get away with it—pushing made things move more quickly—but he was careful to draw the line between good guy, bad guy, and civilian. No amount of pushing, however, had uncovered the slightest trace of Enrique Hentados, and Moodrow was a bad loser who tended to console himself with equal doses of alcohol and anger. On this occasion, though, seated in his customary booth at the Killarney Harp with Captain Epstein, he was more confused than annoyed. Confused and worried. He was convinced that none of the dozen or so people he’d questioned was lying to him. Enrique Hentados had simply disappeared.

  Speculation had it that the kid had taken a huge amount of money from Ronald Chadwick and was living it up somewhere on the West Coast. This was ghetto nonsense. A boy like Enrique had only a limited number of possibilities. He could not take his loot and disappear into the heartland of America. A slight, dark-complexioned Puerto Rican, he spoke heavily accented English and had never really been one of Ronald Chadwick’s soldiers. He was much closer to being Chadwick’s mascot, a gofer who made sure the electric bills were paid and the refrigerator well-stocked with beer and cold cuts. Even if he had the physical strength to pick up Chadwick, who outweighed him by sixty pounds, Moodrow could not visualize him, hand grenade at the ready, crouching by the fifth-floor stairwell. It was inconceivable.

  Initially, Moodrow had assumed that some rival to Chadwick’s exalted position within the heroin community had used Hentados for information, then killed him to keep it quiet. But no other dealer had jumped in to occupy Chadwick’s throne and Chadwick’s suppliers were in a panic, desperately searching for retailers with sufficient capital. The price of heroin on the street, when it was available at all, had tripled in the week since Chadwick’s death.

  “Hentados is dead, Captain,” Moodrow said, staring directly into Epstein’s eyes. “There’s just no place he could be hiding. But you know the funny thing? Not only don’t I know who killed him, I don’t even know why he was killed.”

  “So what, Stanley?” The captain drained his beer quickly, his stomach quiet for the first time in a week. He felt suddenly expansive, almost jocular. “Hey, look, everything’s working out perfectly. You’re pounding the streets, knocking down doors. It’s great. Now we can go back to keeping order in the Seventh. Which is all I ever gave a shit about anyway.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Captain.” Moodrow picked at his sleeve, trying to brush away a large, dark stain. “Look at this. The goddamn thing’s wet.”

  “Well, what do you expect?” Epstein sighed. “When you lay your arm in a puddle of beer, it generally does come out wet.”

  “See, Captain, it always strikes me as strange when every potential suspect in a case turns out to be innocent. It just worries the shit out of me, because I know it’s gonna move some way I’m not ready for.”

  Epstein signaled Rita over to the table. “Say, what kind of lady are you? You let my friend’s glass go empty like that?”

  Rita put her hand on Moodrow’s shoulder. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll make it up to him later.”

  “Make it up to him now, Rita. Bring him a beer. And as long as you’re going anyway, bring me one, too.” He turned back to Moodrow. “So, what’s next, Stanley? I have the feeling you’re not finished with this one.”

  Moodrow shrugged. “I’m gonna see the FBI tomorrow. I still got a couple more names to check out from the list I made with Paco.”

  “And then?”

  “And then nothing.”

  Detective Sergeant Stanley Moodrow’s speculations were essentially correct and his fears entirely justified. Enrique Hentados would never turn up in Las Vegas, one arm around the waist of some impossibly blonde chorus girl. He slept a more peaceful sleep in a basement at 1109 Clinton Street, the third in a row of five burned-out brownstones, long abandoned, the open windows devoid even of their frames. In the early spring warmth, his body had begun to
decay and the rats had caught the scent, digging fitfully. He wasn’t buried deeply. It was understood by the occupants of these buildings, usually junkies looking for a safe place to fix, that one might use any upstairs room, but the basements, dark and damp, held secrets no sane junkie needed to know.

  Enrique Hentados, a boy of limited intelligence, had worked very hard to please his cousin, Paco. After all, Ronald Chadwick had represented Enrique’s only hope of success. He had been too timid, too small, ever to fight his way up. And things had gone well for him. He had had money in his pocket all the time and the promise of more to come. His clothes were clean and new, his trousers pressed to a knife’s edge. And he carried a gun. Enrique Hentados, the worst shortstop in Cabo Rojas, Puerto Rico, had carried a pistol in New York and openly scolded the street urchins who strayed too close to Ronald Chadwick’s home. He knew all the pushers. They spoke to him on the street, inquiring into the health of his mother and of Paco and Ronald Chadwick. He even knew the smaller dealers, including a newcomer to the heroin wars called Johnny Katanos, streetnamed Zorba the Freak.

  Johnny’s appearance on the drug scene had been sudden and, in its limited way, spectacular. He had been introduced to the Lower East Side drug scene by Jason Peters, a small-time black dealer he’d met in a bar on 27th Street. Jason had sold him small amounts of heroin on several occasions, but Johnny had clamored for more, always more, so Jason had agreed to turn him on to the wholesalers on Attorney Street, where heroin and cocaine were sold in a kind of impromptu flea market which assembled each day in a rubble-strewn lot one block from Ronald Chadwick’s fortress. Johnny’s success was nothing short of miraculous, even if his approach to business was unorthodox. He would buy for whatever price was asked and sell for whatever was offered. Accumulating profit and avoiding loss was never his aim. His target, right from the beginning, had been Ronald Jefferson Chadwick and Enrique Hentados had been no more than a highly specialized tool that, once used, would never again be needed. Besides, Enrique hadn’t willingly turned against his boss. He’d tried very hard to preserve his integrity, but a man named Muzzafer had been much more determined and his need, in the end, had overcome Enrique’s reluctance.

  In some way, Muzzafer had been very sympathetic to Enrique. He’d felt a certain kinship with the boy because he, Muzzafer, knew exactly what it was like to begin at the bottom. He had spent his childhood in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. At that time, his full name was Aftab Qwazi Malik. It is the earliest name ascribed to him, though, doubtless, there had been others before. His father, a leader, had struggled in the movement to oust the British and had been forced to change identities time and again. Muzzafer grew up in a world of rebellion and had caught the fever early on, so that, by the time he’d reached manhood, he’d married technique to desire and been hailed as an unqualified success. All by himself (though with the blessing of the PLO), he’d destroyed a concrete-reinforced, machine gun emplacement, along with the four Israeli soldiers manning it. It had been his entry into manhood, the Palestinian equivalent of the Italian ceremony known as “making your bones.” After that he’d been sent to Syria for special training, and from Syria to a dozen operations throughout the world.

  Probably the single biggest factor in the longevity of Muzzafer’s career had been his physical appearance. No one, seeing him for the first time, could take him for a criminal of any kind. He stood five foot six inches tall and weighed a soft one hundred twenty-three pounds. His face was smooth, almost boneless, and was overshadowed by huge, liquid-brown eyes that in an attractive female might have been characterized as limpid. The effect of these eyes, offset by a narrow, full-lipped mouth, was to attract both men and women and the men who hunted for him, who had been hunting for fifteen years, considered him sexually androgynous. Nevertheless, it had been a decade since Muzzafer had been anything other than completely in charge of a project. The one he worked on now had been his creation right from the start.

  It would have been most fitting if the conference which launched the course of action leading to the death of Ronald Jefferson Chadwick had taken place somewhere in the vast deserts of Arabia, in a bedouin tent, perhaps, spread with densely-woven carpets or a mud-walled hut as old as the Bible. The participants should have spoken in Arabic, in an obscure nomad dialect, and smoked from a hookah while veiled women, draped in black from head to toe, served heavily sweetened tea. The air outside the tent, shimmering with desert heat, should have been filled with the calls of camel drivers or the high, sparkling laughter of women drawing water from a well.

  This was not the case. There was no conference, only a meeting of two childhood friends in a motel on the outskirts of Athens, Georgia. The men spoke softly and smoked Marlboro Golden Lights. They saw on green, vinyl-covered chairs, their faces close together, while the coarse yowling of Lucille Ball poured from the television speaker, a foil for potential eavesdroppers. They took a long time getting down to business, gossiping as old comrades will, repeating stories of mutual friends and enemies. They recalled the wretched poverty of the Palestinian camps in Jordan, the women and the adventures they had shared, the martyrs dead in Israel and Jordan and Lebanon, great victories in Munich and Jerusalem. They drank sherry, a habit picked up from the British, and as he filled their glasses, Muzzafer reminded himself of how much he hated the Moslem fanatics who threatened to overrun the Arab world. And they were not even Arabs, but Persians, the spawn of the mad Ayatollah. As he listened to his companion, nodding now and again, he wondered idly if, fresh from the final victory over the Zionist foe, he would be forced to take up the sword against the insatiable mullahs. He would, he vowed, never submit to their will.

  “Ah, my friend, wake up.” The fat man shifted in his seat. “You are dreaming and we must get down to business.” He smiled, his jowls rippling. “You see? I have become just like an American. Always on a schedule and, what is worse, always on time.” His name was Hassan Fakhr, though he’d checked into the Fairview Holiday Inn under the name Moshe Berg, a small joke on any Israeli antiterrorist who might someday investigate the meeting. He was obese, with a soft, fleshy nose and a lower lip which overshot his upper jaw, creating an impression of extreme stubbornness, though he’d come to his present position through his ability to yield ground whenever necessary. Hassan was temporarily attached to the Libyan Mission to the United Nations and enjoyed the privilege of diplomatic immunity, a fact which added considerably to his sense of well-being.

  Muzzafer, though unprotected, showed no sign of being ill at ease. The meeting had taken place in the United States at his request. Both men held the American intelligence community in utter contempt.

  “Certainly,” Muzzafer said, raising his glass in mock salute. “To business. Above all else.” He hesitated, though he knew Hassan understood his purpose. “Well,” he continued, nonchalantly, almost diffident, “I wish to go to America.”

  “Ah!” Hassan raised a finger in the air, grinning happily. “But, unless I am mistaken, we are already in America.”

  “I’m serious, Hassan. I want to bring our business to America. They’ve escaped us for too long. I want to teach them to be afraid.” He paused, letting the message sink in. “I’m going to teach them to be afraid.”

  “This has been attempted before…”

  Muzzafer stopped Hassan with a wave of his hand. “The time is right, Hassan. I am determined. And I plan to do it in a way that’s never been done before. Our methods will become a model for a completely new form of revolutionary struggle. We are not going to have contact with anyone outside of our group after we have armed ourselves. The FBI? The CIA? Our enemies work only through informants, through spies. If no one knows where we are or what we will do next, then we can’t be sold out. It’s that simple: No contact means no betrayal. We will not have to hit-and-run as we have in the past. We will remain in place and the pressure we exert will be irresistible.

  “We will seek the destruction of life and property toward no other end than the
destruction of life and property. We will feed the media with bullshit demands that are so sweeping and so vague, they can never be met. Think about it! An invisible organization with a name that has no meaning attacking random targets in one of the most crowded cities in the world. The Americans will be forced to realize that they can’t escape the fate of the rest of the world. They can’t hide behind their oceans while millions of our people starve. In Europe, they understand us already. The British, the French, the Germans, the Spanish—they know only too well and they leave us alone. Now it’s time to teach America a lesson. You know, Hassan, Herr Marx tells us that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses,’ but Marx is wrong. Times have changed. Today, democracy is the opiate of the masses and we shall see how long their democracy lasts when they are really afraid.”

  Muzzafer stood up abruptly and began to pace the room. “I’m not speaking just to hear my own voice, Hassan. I’m determined to bring it off. Right now, America seems monstrous, virtually invincible, but they can be frightened, terrified, like any other people. When that happens, when they truly know that death may come any time they leave their homes, they will not hesitate to betray the Jews. Let’s face the truth—without the Americans, the Jews will not last two years in Africa. We will drive them back to Germany.”

  Though his face remained passive, Hassan watched this performance with amazement. Muzzafer’s eyes blazed. His hands swung through the air as if conducting his rage and his voice rose with each succeeding phrase. It was not an unfamiliar situation for Hassan and the outcome he feared most was leaving the room with Muzzafer for an enemy. But what if he was asked to join the project? He had dropped out of active participation in terrorist projects in 1980, precisely because he feared becoming addicted to the violence, and as a result, had been forced to walk a fine line. If these killers ever branded him a traitor, there would, he knew, be no place on earth secure enough to keep him safe.