BY LUNCHTIME, HE WAS back on his home turf in Brooklyn. He arrived five minutes before his son, at their usual spot, a coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue.
On a number of previous occasions he had been caught up in work and rushed in late, or had even forgotten their appointments, and he knew that the kid registered every disappointment in a mental ledger, a stack of little resentments perched atop the great fat letdown of his parents’ divorce. Luckily, though, he’d had the foresight to set the alarm in his cell phone. And he swore to himself that when his son arrived, he would forget about everything else and pay total attention to the kid.
The waitress brought him a cup of coffee, and he stared at the luncheonette’s back wall, which was covered with nets and plastic fish, in keeping with the general Greek theme. He mused about this morning’s perp who had lost his marbles and bludgeoned his wife, and about terrorists, and about a long-ago murder in Red Hook.
His son slid into the booth, startling him.
“Wow,” Ben said, “you actually beat me here! That’s gotta be a record.”
Jack decided to ignore the slight snark and accept the acknowledgment. “You want some coffee or something?”
Ben picked up a menu. “Let me think about it for a sec.”
Jack watched his son consider his choices. The kid was several inches taller than his old man. He wore a red flannel shirt; he looked rather gaunt in it, but he might have put on a couple of pounds since their last get-together. Jack noticed that his son’s skin seemed to be clearing up and he was glad for that; the mid-twenties were already a pretty self-conscious age, but Ben’s acne had burdened the kid with extra shyness.
Jack’s mind began to drift again. Don’t think about Nadim Hasni, he told himself. Or Frank Raucci. Think about your son, right here in front of you. “D’you know what you want?” he asked, then turned to look for the waitress. “I’m just gonna get a cheeseburger.” He turned back to Ben. “So—are you eating meat these days, or are you a veggie again?” Ben tended to fluctuate between the two, and to get annoyed if Jack couldn’t remember his latest stance.
The kid started to answer, but Jack sat bolt upright. Remembering.
He jumped up. “Listen: I’ve just gotta do something real quick. I’ll be back in two minutes, I swear.”
Ben’s face settled into its customary pout, but Jack was already on his way out of the coffee shop. Out on the sidewalk, he glanced up and down the avenue, then turned down the cross street. Up ahead, on the next corner, he spotted a deli and broke into a trot.
He hurried in between several ranks of brightly colored floral bouquets, barely acknowledged the nod of the Korean proprietor, and moved into one of the aisles, scanning the products arrayed there. No. He turned a corner and came up the other aisle. There! He stared at a row of cans of baked beans, the same brand that Nadim Hasni had used to crush the head of Robert Brasciak. Jack could picture the original clearly in his mind. Not the label with the green stripe, like those on the left. Not the vegetarian variety, but the ones on the right, with the blue stripe. He reached out, picked up a can, and turned it so he could see the list of contents.
And there it was.
Jack returned to the luncheonette and his son but spent the rest of their lunch in a bit of a daze. What was a radical Islamic fundamentalist, a Muslim fanatic, doing shopping for a dinner that contained a substantial helping of pork?
THERE WAS A SILENCE on the other end of the line, and then Brent Charlson finally spoke.
“Let me get this straight: we’re in the middle of investigating a major threat to national security and you want to talk to me about the ingredients in a can of beans?”
Jack looked out the windshield of his car, still parked on busy Smith Street, outside the diner. “These guys, these terrorists, they’re supposed to be fundamentalist Islamic—”
“So he was shopping for a neighbor! So what?! Is that your idea of detective work?”
“I’m just looking at the evidence.”
“You don’t know the evidence, detective, not even a tenth of it. You’re not in the middle of this investigation. We already have enough rock solid information to put these guys away for life.”
“Why don’t you, then?”
Charlson’s voice rose. “Why don’t we? Because we want to make sure we get the whole goddamn cell, that’s why. And this ridiculous beans nonsense is a great example of why we didn’t bring the NYPD into this in the first place. This isn’t amateur hour.”
“All I’m saying, is it possible that Nadim Hasni is not really a part of the group?”
“Oh, I see,” Charlson said, voice dripping with irony. “Maybe he’s just an innocent bystander who got caught up in this case by accident?”
“I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you forgetting one little detail? The man has already murdered someone in cold blood. What kind of goddamn beans he was buying doesn’t alter that fact!”
“Okay, but—”
“You know what I’m looking at right this moment, detective? I’m in my office, staring at a confidential memo from the NSA. You know what ‘NSA’ stands for?”
Jack knew full well, but he was so irritated by the condescension in the fed’s voice that he didn’t bother to reply. “What does it say?”
“I’ll tell you: it says there’s been a considerable spike this week in intercepted international chatter. It says they recognized a number of coded words, like ‘New York’ and April’ and ‘Semtech’. That’s a plastic explosive.”
Again with the condescension. “Okay, but I was just—”
“Do I need to draw you a fucking picture? All right, I will: the next time I see you, I’m going to show you surveillance photographs of Nadim Hasni welcoming other members of the terrorist cell into his own goddamn apartment. And I’ll show you some recent big wire transfers of cash that just came in from Pakistan. But right now, detective, you’re wasting my time, and every second in this case is precious. So get off the phone and go take care of your own business.”
Jack started to say something else, but his phone went dead. He sat there in his car and resolved to double his efforts on the case.
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, even Richie Powker was not terribly impressed by Jack’s baked bean theory.
The squad room was busy: phones ringing, radios squawking, some detective in the corner having a heated phone argument with what sounded like her daughter or son. Jack watched as a couple of beefy white detectives marched in, herding a handcuffed, fairly harmless-looking Hispanic teen. The kid wore a profound look of despair: he’d probably gotten caught doing something stupid, and now the consequences—which he had previously ignored—were staring him smack in his young mook face.
Richie leaned forward in his overburdened chair. “I don’t like this Charlson guy,” he said to Jack. “I don’t like feds in general. They didn’t work the real evidence they had before Nine-eleven, and then they went and made up stuff so they could go into Iraq. Not to mention that this particular bastard is implying some nasty crap about me and my wife.” He frowned. “But even I have to admit that this beans thing seems a little thin. Maybe Hasni was just doing some shopping as a favor to a neighbor. Or maybe he’s not a religious nut—maybe he just likes blowing shit up.”
The Seven-oh detective squared one of the piles of paperwork on his desk, a lost cause. “I still think that fed is an asshole. But you know what? Even if he’s a total clown, that’s all the more reason why you and I need to be on our best game. We both lived through Nine-eleven here. And we know these terrorist bastards are out there.”
Jack nodded somberly. He straightened up and pulled his chair closer to his partner’s desk. “Anything new on the ATM front?”
As they would with any fugitive, the detectives had tracked down Nadim Hasni’s bank accounts and asked to be informed about any automatic-teller transactions. (They wouldn’t get the info in time to catch him at any particular branch, but at least a recent withdrawal could tell the
m that their suspect was still in town—and several might indicate that he was hiding out in a particular neighborhood.)
Richie shook his head. “Nada. The guy worked in a cash business and I bet he had some dough squirreled away.”
Jack sighed. These days, only the dumbest perps didn’t watch enough cop shows on TV to know that they shouldn’t use their debit or credit cards when on the lam.
Richie laced his hands behind his head. “So what do you want to do next?”
Jack frowned. “I wanna put the bastard’s picture on the front page of the Daily News and the Post. I wanna go interview every one of his car-service buddies. And I wanna give every cop in the city his goddamn photo.”
Richie snorted. “Our buddy Charlson would love that.”
Jack glanced at the clock on the squad room wall: their shift had ended half an hour ago. He shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna just go home and watch TV. How about we drive back over to Jackson Heights and take another crack at Hasni’s wife? I mean, at least I’ll go—I know you’ve got a wife of your own to get home to …”
Richie stood up and grabbed his car keys. “We’re trying to protect the city from a radiation bomb. I don’t think my wife is gonna complain.”
AND SO THEY SET off to re-interview Nadim Hasni’s ex. Or, at least, they made it to Queens …
“I’ll drive,” Richie said, pointedly referring to Jack’s spacey command of the steering wheel during their last trip to the neighboring borough.
Jack was happy to give in. He found a toothpick in the pocket of his sports jacket and chewed all the mint out of it as his partner steered toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Over the Kosciuszko Bridge they went, past the backdrop of little gravestones and big skyscrapers, Jack absorbed in thinking about Hasni and Charlson. And about an old man sitting in a wheelchair on a hill in Bay Ridge.
Despite the expressway’s notorious problems (frequent mysterious traffic jams; potholes the size of meteor craters), they reached Queens in excellent time and got off the highway just a few blocks from Ghizala Mamund’s apartment. As always, Jack was impressed by the foreignness of the neighborhood. New York City had a number of these little compact transplants from other worlds: Little Korea on Thirty-second Street in Manhattan, Little Brazil in the Forties … Somewhere, undoubtedly, there must be a Little Burkina Faso and a Little Iceland. Despite the vastness of the city, people liked to clump together with their own, often spending most of their lives within a familiar quarter-mile. Jack gazed at the scenery as they cruised down Thirty-seventh Avenue; the passing faces growing browner, the clothing more colorful …
“Stop the car!” Jack blurted. “Be subtle!”
“What the hell?” Richie was puzzled, but he managed to pull over without too much fuss.
“Back there,” Jack said, looking into the side mirror. “In front of the bakery with the green-and-white awning. You’re not gonna believe this!”
Richie stared up at the rearview mirror. “You think it’s possible?”
They had spent a lot of time studying the driver’s license photo. And now Nadim Hasni, or a young brown-skinned guy who looked one hell of a lot like him, was standing outside the shop, wearing bleached jeans and a navy blue tracksuit jacket. He held a paper bag in one hand and peered up and down the street like an anxious bird. In fact, after Jack’s decades of police work on city streets, those nervous head motions had drawn his attention before he even registered the man’s face.
Hasni walked away from them, disappeared from view behind a newsstand, then reappeared. He paused for a moment on the next corner, looked right, then turned left, out of sight.
Jack was already out of the car. “Drive around!” he urged his partner through the open window. “Come down the block and close him off!”
He was in pursuit before Richie had time to hit the gas.
NADIM PAUSED AS HE came out of the bakery with his brown paper bag. A serving of rasmalai—he could already taste the sweet cheese balls floating in their soothing cream.
That childhood favorite seemed particularly appealing at this stressful time, but it was actually the need for cigarettes that had driven him out of hiding. For the past day he had been holed up in Malik’s little fourth-floor walk-up two blocks away. Last night, the young stud had gone out to a nightclub. “Come with me,” Malik had urged, but Nadim said that his stomach didn’t feel well. And it didn’t: he had spent a good part of the afternoon in the bathroom retching, and then he had tried to sleep, but he was still trembling too hard. Thank God he managed to calm down a bit before his friend came home—Malik still didn’t know anything about the incident in the deli or the subsequent attempt on Nadim’s own life. As Malik dressed for his date, Nadim anxiously watched the TV news, but there was nothing about the man in the deli or about any kind of manhunt for his killer. Very puzzling. At least no one had trailed him here to Jackson Heights. Not yet, anyhow … He had not taken any chances today, though, and stayed inside. But he had smoked his last cigarette while watching the news. All day long, the need for a smoke had gripped him, like a big fist, squeezing. He knew Malik didn’t smoke, but he hoped that one of the other two roommates did. He had ransacked their tiny bedrooms, had scrounged under the piles of magazines and random detritus in the messy little common room … No cigarettes, anywhere. Nadim held out for as long as he could. What had he read somewhere? Nicotine was more addictive than heroin.
I’ll just step out for a second, he finally told himself. I’ll be very careful. He peered out the front window for a full fifteen minutes, scanning the street below. Nothing suspicious. No vans in sight. Wary, he edged out the front door, ready to duck back at the first sign of anything suspicious. Quiet. He allowed himself to exhale. And he had set off down the block, without incident. Turned onto Thirty-seventh Avenue: no problem. Stopped at a deli and bought his smokes. He turned to go back to Malik’s, then realized that he was starving. Malik’s bachelor refrigerator was empty.
With his stomach so upset, Nadim figured that there was only one thing he might be able to keep down: a helping of rasmalai. And Kabir’s Bakery was just a half block down … After the harrowing past few days he could really use a bit of a treat.
Now he stepped out onto the sidewalk, feeling like a successful secret agent. He had completed his stealth mission: cigarettes in his breast pocket, his dinner in his hand. Enough tempting fate, though: it was time to hurry back to Malik’s, to his safe hiding place.
He set off, savoring the fresh air outside and the gorgeous spring afternoon. The new-leafed trees along the avenue provided some shade from the bright sun; their dappled shadows danced on the sidewalk. Nadim reached the corner of Seventy-fourth Street, glanced right, and panicked. Just what he needed today: his wife—his ex-wife—was standing right there on the opposite corner! She was looking down, thankfully—digging for something in her ever-bulging leather purse, a cheap Gucci knockoff she had bought one time for ten dollars on Canal Street, stupidly convinced that she had scored a miraculous bargain. Yes, it was definitely Ghizala, under those dowdy clothes: her doe eyes, those plush lips that had once driven him wild. Amazing to think how she had once made his heart swell with love.
It certainly wasn’t love that swelled his heart right now—it was anger, a raw surge of grievance and resentment, and maybe even another rash impulse toward homicide. He felt it wash over him, a scalding red wave, but all of his common sense was not carried away. That was the last thing he needed right now: another killing. The plan would be ruined for sure.
He turned quickly, in the opposite direction, down Seventy-fourth Street, into the heart of Little India.
JACK WAS THIRTY YARDS behind, running.
He forced himself to slow down as he rounded the corner onto busy Seventy-fourth Street. The sidewalks were thronged with shoppers, which was good, providing him with cover, but he wished this was a street in midtown Manhattan, where a white man in a sports jacket and tie could blend in. He was blitzed by distrac
tions as he moved down the packed shopping street: a heap of battery-powered, arm-waving baby dolls on a card table outside a gift shop, a couple of women in dazzling orange and purple saris strolling hand in hand down the middle of the crowded sidewalk. He kept his eyes fixed on the back of Nadim Hasni’s blue jacket.
He glanced up ahead, hoping to see Richie Powker maneuvering toward him through the crowds. Should they grab Hasni now, bring him in for the Brasciak murder? Or should he call Brent Charlson first? He had promised to do so, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off his quarry long enough to find Charlson’s number. His heart was racing—it was one thing to be chasing a murder suspect, but now he was after someone who was also plotting another vicious, depraved terrorist attack on the citizens of New York.
Down the block, Hasni stumbled against something and then regained his balance.
Two men carrying a big cardboard box suddenly emerged from a store and stepped in front of Jack. Cursing under his breath, he veered around them.
SEEING HIS EX-WIFE AGAIN stirred up so many powerful emotions at once that they threatened to overwhelm Nadim. He needed to escape, immediately. Random faces, garish colors, dazzling glints of light—they streamed past him in a blur as he plunged off through the Little India crowds.
The Ninth Step Page 13