A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

“A tape. Yes, by all means.” Muzzafer removed a TDK videocassette from its cardboard holder. It was marked, “Day 1. 6:00 PM/9:30 PM, ABC,” and as he placed it into the recorder, he could feel their attention turn to the screen.

  After the explosion, all three networks had suspended local programming for the remainder of the evening. They did this, they said, in order to show their respect for the dead, though no reduction was made in the number of “messages.” The ratings, shared more or less evenly, added up to an astonishing 97 percent of all the sets in the greater New York area, due in large part to some especially graphic footage which the networks reran at every opportunity. It seems that two video teams, one from ABC and the other from NBC, were already on hand covering the opening day festivities at A&S and, for the half hour it took the police to seal off the scene, they roamed through the carnage, literally shooting even as the cops dragged them away.

  And the footage they got was, indeed, spectacular. With virtually every eye in New York glued to a television screen, network censors had looked the other way as closeup after closeup revealed the damage done by temperatures hot enough to melt steel. Even Muzzafer had been initially rooted to the scene after the explosion. He’d watched the cops arrive, followed by fire trucks and ambulances, until the square, filled with the glare of revolving lights, seemed like a parody of the original blast. Finally, Johnny had pulled him away, leading him to the subway and escape. They’d made one stop on the way to Queens, in an electronics store where Muzzafer bought a dozen blank videocassettes. Then, at home, he had tuned the three television sets, one in each apartment, to the three networks and began to record their triumph. Eventually he hoped to mail these tapes, along with his own description of the project and its methods, to friends in Lebanon who would edit them and pass them on to terrorists everywhere. Even if the American Red Army never completed another operation, Muzzafer knew they could lay claim to the most successful act of terrorism ever executed in the United States. But, of course, he was only just beginning. Just getting up a head of steam.

  On the screen, New York’s medical examiner, Dr. David Chang, a small, balding man, removed his glasses and began to explain the difficulties involved in identifying the bodies. “Ordinarily,” he declared, his voice surprisingly strong, “in cases of murder, each body would have to be autopsied separately, but because of the scope of this tragedy, we are going to release the bodies as soon as they are properly identified. The identifications will be made by relatives, where possible, or through written identification found on the person. Where bodies have been…” He stopped for a moment, as if realizing for the first time exactly what he was saying. When he resumed, his voice was much softer. “There are people in there who have been burned beyond recognition. No ID or if there was ID, it’s been burned up too. We’ll use jewelry, dental records, tattoos—whatever we can find, but it will take some time.”

  “We seen this tape before,” Johnny Katanos broke in loudly. “Let’s try another one. What do you say?” He held a tape aloft. “I took this one off this morning’s news. Just a quick piece buried in the Macy’s coverage.”

  Theresa shook her head, then staggered slightly. “You know what you are, Johnny? You’re a party pooper.”

  Johnny, calm, glanced at her, then walked across to the television. “Shut up, Theresa.”

  Though he could not interfere in their domestic affairs, at least not until they threatened his project, Muzzafer nevertheless found himself wishing that he’d stopped pouring champagne several glasses ago. He was not being attacked personally, but the party had been his idea, a brief interlude during which they might savor their triumph, and he felt the need to maintain control.

  “Muzzafer, check this out. Tell me if this isn’t perfect for us.” Johnny walked across the room, put his arm around Muzzafer’s shoulders and pulled him down on the couch next to Jane. He could feel the Arab’s resistance, that Muzzafer did not want to be handled in this way, but once they were seated, squeezed in next to the two women, the alcohol took over and he relaxed.

  Johnny, flicking the remote to start the VCR, said, “If this isn’t the best thing you’ve ever heard, you could cut off my balls.” He let his arm slide along the backrest until Muzzafer’s neck lay against the inside of his elbow, then smiled his sweetest, most innocent smile. “I swear to God, Muzzafer, when I saw this, I was so happy, I nearly shit.”

  The report, six minutes long, was by no means unique. It concerned an abandoned warehouse, Parillo Bros. Carting, on North 5th Street, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just south of Kent Avenue. Two blocks from the East River, it sat less than half a mile from densely populated Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. The owners, Guido and Giovanni Parillo, formerly in the private sanitation business, had disappeared, leaving city and state authorities with the job of cleaning up thousands of fifty-gallon drums of toxic waste. There was the usual alphabet soup of PCBs, PVCs, dioxin, hydrochloric acid, cyanide and all the rest, but what made this dump special was an additional five thousand drums of waste oil mixed with as yet unidentified chemicals. If the oil should ever catch fire (though waste oil is very difficult to ignite, the reporter prudently counseled) the resulting cloud of smoke might cause a disaster on the scale of that in Bhopal, India. To make matters worse, the cleanup could not begin until the owners were tracked down or the property and the building condemned, a process that would, in either event, take many months. “In the meantime,” the reporter intoned while the camera swept over a damp, gray warehouse, “New Yorkers will just have to live with the prospect of catastrophe hanging over their heads. This is John Brolin, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.”

  Later, alone with Johnny Katanos in the kitchen, Muzzafer complained about the way in which Johnny had broken up the party. “Your idea was fine,” he said, “but it could have waited another day. Before I began this project, before we left Algeria, I met with a friend. To ask for his assistance. He told me that any plan involving criminals would fail. He said you would let your personal feelings get in the way and sooner or later…”

  Without warning, Johnny turned to Muzzafer, stepping forward until their faces were almost touching. Far from his usual calm self, his dark eyes burned with conviction and for the first time, his smile was unforced and anything but innocent. “Did I let my personal feelings get in the way on Sixth Avenue? Have I ever let you down even one time?”

  “Your games with Jane and your tongue with Theresa will break us apart. I’ve seen it happen before.”

  “So what? We don’t need the women, man. All they do is go to the fucking library and cook dinner.” He paused to let his message sink in. “One last job, Muzzafer. We’ll do the warehouse, dump the cunts and then take the show on the road. Think about a major project every six weeks for a year. Each one in a different city. You have all the contacts. You can get us the supplies we need.” He put his hands on Muzzafer’s shoulders, his fingers kneading the back of the Arab’s neck. “Just think about it, man. Let all the bullshit lessons go. If you got the balls, we can get very high together.”

  14

  EVEN AS JOHNNY KATANOS and Aftab Muzzafer toasted the successes of the American Red Army, on the Lower East Side, at Pulaski’s Funeral Home, the remains of Rita Melengic, shreds of charred flesh peeling off a blackened skeleton, rested in a closed, mahogany coffin, an altar before which rows of gray, folding chairs were arranged, like pews, to accommodate the worshippers. There were no flowers, the nature of her death precluding even the smallest touch of color.

  Downstairs, in the smoking room, Stanley Moodrow, expressionless, sat in an enormous, brown, overstuffed chair and listened to the condolences of those who’d come to pay their respects, both to him and to Rita. Off to one side, Sarah Pulaski, crying in spite of herself, for she’d known Rita for decades, still managed to watch the proceedings with that professional eye which never rests. She was amazed by the number of people coming into the building. It was Easter Sunday, a traditional family day and nobody was really obligated to make an
appearance before evening. Yet they began to arrive early in the morning. They came from all over the city, mostly cops, in their best uniforms, uniforms ordinarily reserved for official functions, but worn here for an old acquaintance, Stanley Moodrow. For the word had gone out early. Stanley Moodrow had not only lost the woman he loved in the most terrible way imaginable, but had been there, had seen it happen, had seen the fireball mushroom outward to engulf her.

  He could see it still. Still hear the same words revolving through his mind, revolving with whirlpool speed, commanding so much of his attention that he appeared to be unaware of the uniformed men who bent over him, whispering, “Sorry, anything I can do. Just let me know. Let me know. Let me know.” They were not sure if he even heard them, though he, using whatever concentration he could pull away from his continued involvement with the moment of the explosion, noted every face, added a name and precinct number and filed it away. Because the vacuum which had been filled with Rita two days before had begun to fill again, and he was growing more and more aware of an anger so great as to carry with it all the purpose necessary to avoid grief.

  At 1 PM they were still pouring in. The cops came from Manhattan and Queens and Brooklyn, from Staten Island and the Bronx, from New Jersey and Westchester and Long Island. They mingled, united for once, with the people of the Lower East Side, with every nationality, every race. Rita Melengic and Stanley Moodrow were the prince and the princess for people accustomed to hard lives, to struggle and poverty, to roaches and Budweiser, to plastic flowers and junkies in the streets, burglaries and babies. They had no use for the trappings of royalty. Rita Melengic, grown into middle age, alone, finds a big, taciturn cop, a patented one-step-from-the-edge flatfoot named Stanley Moodrow and she moves from her tenement to his. This is love, the blue-collar fairy tale. But she is not supposed to die before the wedding, not like this. Not even the Brothers Grimm would invent such a useless fable.

  They came in such numbers that the cops finally closed 11th Street between First and Avenue A. In their own way, they reflected the mood of a battered city. The anonymous phone call proclaiming the victory of the American Red Army had been received by three newspapers and the city’s anguish was about to be replaced with rage. Even the reporters recognized the parallel, and though they had spread out to cover nearly a dozen separate wakes, most of them for rich or famous people, several veteran police-beat reporters were on hand at Pulaski’s, measuring the crowd reaction, looking for usable quotes, yet, hardened as they were by years of experience, unwilling to intrude on the grief of this small piece of New York. Still, the one thing they sensed, echoing in the accents of a dozen nationalities, in Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian, Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Hebrew, Rumanian, Hungarian, was the wrongness of what had happened. And when they finally pushed their way to the center of that quiet storm, to Stanley Moodrow, a man they knew from a dozen big arrests, a man they would love to quote, his look froze the questions in their throats and they could only mutter, as had all the others, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Anything I can do. Just let me know. Sorry, sorry.”

  It went on that way for two days. A parade of humans shuffling between two fixed points, Rita Melengic in her coffin and Stanley Moodrow, silent and still on a chair two floors below. He ate no more than she did, spoke no more than she, almost never left his station until the hour of the funeral when Rita was carried across the street to Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, where Father Jarolawski delivered the eulogy along with a Mass. He spoke at length, though all Moodrow heard, sitting by Captain Epstein in the front pew, was “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”

  Then they rode out to Calvary Cemetery in Queens and a dark hole in a new field, a hundred people standing about, watching Moodrow, expecting surely, at the last moment, some sign. When, as the coffin descended, he broke into a smile, they fell away, thinking this cop will not last another month. This cop has already swallowed his gun.

  Although Stanley Moodrow was not surprised to get the call, he had not expected it on the afternoon of Rita’s funeral. Yet there it was, from a reluctant Captain Epstein.

  “Stanley, you know I don’t want to do this, but you have to come by my office tomorrow morning.”

  “Let me guess,” Moodrow replied in a neutral voice. “Inspector Flynn and the FBI want to see me.”

  “What are you,” Epstein asked, exasperated, “a fucking prophet? They been busting my chops for two days and I can’t hold ’em off anymore.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Captain. They have to cover all bases so they can explain how they’re working real hard even if they got no results.”

  “Listen, Stanley,” Epstein said, more softly, “are you okay. You know, if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll put it off. I don’t care what they say.”

  “You don’t have to play ‘daddy’ with me. What time tomorrow?”

  “Nine-thirty. By the way, if it’s any consolation, Bradley isn’t coming. Just Higgins.”

  . “Yeah? I don’t know whether to be insulted or stand up and cheer. I’ll see you in the morning. And don’t worry so much. Worrying fucks up your gut, remember?”

  But Epstein did not stop worrying. It was his precinct and one of his men was hurt, injured as if in the line of duty and still under attack. Moodrow’s calm tone only made matters worse. Unless, of course, Moodrow was substituting something for his grief, some fantasy of revenge. Unless, like the ticket stubs to the Ridgewood Theater, there were other items being suppressed. This notion kept Epstein awake most of the night, and even as he tried to explain Moodrow’s expected condition to Flynn and Higgins, he found himself mistrusting his own words.

  “Look,” he said, as soon as they’d both arrived (he’d deliberately asked them to show up fifteen minutes before Moodrow), “I don’t know if you heard about it, but Sergeant Moodrow’s woman was killed in that blast. She was standing in front of the truck. Right in the middle of it.”

  Flynn nodded. “Allowances will be made. We’re not here to crucify the sergeant.” He looked straight across at Higgins, not bothering to disguise his disdain. “I looked through the Ronald Chadwick file on the way over and I’m more convinced than ever that Moodrow’s investigation was professional in every detail.”

  Leonora Higgins smoothed the skirt of her blue business suit and smiled benignly. Flynn’s attitude was no surprise, but as she expected to spend the morning fighting with Moodrow, there was no sense in wasting energy before he arrived.

  As if on cue, Moodrow opened the door, walked inside and looked around the room. Knowing his anger and his purpose, he had already decided not to give anything away.

  “Good morning, lady and gentlemen,” he announced confidently. “What could I do for you?”

  “Stanley,” Epstein came in first, “why don’t you sit down. Do you feel all right?”

  “I feel fine.” Moodrow sat on a metal folding chair, broken out of storage for the conference.

  “Sergeant,” Higgins began.

  “Excuse me,” Flynn interrupted immediately. “Id like to ask Sergeant Moodrow a few questions first. If you don’t mind.”

  For a moment, Leonora Higgins almost let her annoyance show. She was confident that if it came down to it, she could get to Flynn’s superiors with her complaints. But, aside from all the power games, something else struck her as wrong. The cop was too calm. She’d expected a half-broken alcoholic and found an imperturbable, purposeful cop.

  “Thank you,” Flynn continued, after Higgins sat back in her chair. “Sergeant Moodrow, I’m sure you remember the bombing incident a few months ago—the one where Ronald Chadwick was killed?”

  “Sure, I remember it. That bombing’s become a legend in the neighborhood.”

  “Good, good,” Flynn smiled his best “we’re all on the same team” smile. “Tell me, have you gotten any closer to making an arrest?”

  Moodrow twisted about to give Inspector Flynn his best “gee, what’s going on here” look. “But you took me off that case yourself. At least, I think you di
d.”

  Epstein broke in curtly. “Inspector Flynn doesn’t give out assignments, Stanley. I do.”

  “Sorry, Captain.”

  “A moment.” Flynn, his face reddening, waved a hand between Moodrow and Epstein. “Let’s get back to business. Can I assume, Sergeant, that you have moved no closer to the resolution of the case?”

  Moodrow looked directly into Flynn’s eyes. “To tell you the truth, Inspector, I haven’t even thought about it since the last time I spoke to you. The rumors on the street haven’t changed. Some Greek kid they called Zorba supposedly planned out the whole thing himself and he hasn’t been seen since the rip-off took place.”

  “Well,” Flynn continued, trying to anticipate all of Higgins’ questions, “how do you suppose the Greek got his hands on a Russian hand grenade?”

  “Well, jeez, I don’t know. I mean it wasn’t like my bust, but I got a friend up in the Bronx and he told me how he went on a raid with some Feds and they caught a dealer with ten AK-47s he was planning to sell off to local street gangs. AK-47s are Russian, right? That’s Kalishnikovs.”

  Higgins, unable to contain herself any longer, broke in. “That was a dealer with a long record of arms smuggling. Not some Greek nobody ever heard of.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Moodrow complained. “I’m just giving a for instance, not exactly how it happened. I mean I’ve seen your face twice and both times you told me I didn’t have anything. I feel like a yo-yo.”

  “Stop playing games, goddamn it.” Leonora finally lost her temper. She hadn’t wanted this assignment, but Bradley had insisted she handle it alone. More and more she felt Bradley pushing her away. She had expected to become his equal, his partner, but now that he headed up the federal task force, she was kept far from the reporters with the microphones and cameras.

  “I won’t have that,” Flynn said.

  Higgins looked him full in the face. “I don’t know if you believe this ‘oh, golly’ face he puts on whenever he talks to his superiors, but I don’t buy it for a second. Just for once, I’d like to see him play it straight.”