“Maybe keep him out of there. Those are his people, too obvious he’d be with them. This’ll get out, exactly where he’s been.”
“He’ll be pissed if he can’t go where they love him. He was good, too, he listens more than he talks. Lookit, Flo, we’re heading back to his place now. My wife’s come over there, helping his wife with supper.”
“God help us. A shoestring operation. Catch you later, Frank.”
“You look awful,” Azalea said. “You’re not glad you stuck with me? You can never tell, you know, what might pop up. Anything.” Azalea turned to the bartender. “Bottle of bubbly, Jackie, good and cold. And have some yourself, please. Just give Princess Di her usual.”
Princess Di was the bartender’s white toy poodle, keeping her owner company behind the bar. Jackie Fitz poured a bottle of lemon-flavored Perrier into a bowl for Princess Di and popped open a bottle of Roederer Cristal. He set three champagne flutes on the bar. “Just a splash for you, Detective,” Jackie said. “I know you’re on duty.”
Azalea Butte sat astride her red leather bar stool as if born to the manners of classy saloons like the Penguin Lounge. She produced a yellow vitamin pill, and swallowed it with a long draft of bubbly. Relieved exhalation.
“Jeez, Azalea,” Jackie said, a sad smile creasing his face, his bony, liver-spotted hand enclosing hers. “I’m really sorry about your friend there. What a terrible thing. I read all about it in the Post. They weren’t very complimentary toward Mr. Busta. And what they said there about the cops—”
“Careful, she’s investigating it.”
“My late wife was a cop, God rest her soul, over on the other side of the park she worked. Family fights break out and they’d always call her in. She didn’t do murders, though, if they started killing each other. You’re with homicide?”
“Brooklyn.”
“And a lieutenant,” Azalea said.
“Look,” Jackie said. “Any way I can help, Lieutenant, you just ask. For my wife’s sake, if nothing else. She’s out in Calvary now over twenty years, waiting for me. And I got my place there, too, right next to her. Maureen Shea Fitz. A quarter century on the force. So what can I tell you, Lieutenant, about Mr. Busta? I only want to help.”
“Did he come in here often?”
“He wasn’t a regular, if that’s what you mean. When he was in the neighborhood, he’d just drop by. Always stood the whole house. A very popular guy, of course. I don’t know who’d want to do something like this to him. Unless it was a robber.”
“Everybody liked him? Never got in any arguments, any fights?”
“Not in here, not really. Out there maybe, out on the sidewalk. Once or twice, I think. Guys would recognize him and go wise-mouthing, hoping to start something. Show off for their girlfriends, that kind of stuff.”
“Any weapons? Anyone ever get hurt?”
“They didn’t come in here, if they did. I run a quiet place. I give to the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Sergeants Benevolent Association, Detectives’ Endowment Association. But you know, Lieutenant, a guy like Mr. Busta, rich, famous, not shy, a guy like him attracts envy. Other guys want to challenge him. Maybe it was something like that, if it wasn’t just your ordinary robbery situation. Straight-out envy.”
“Anyone he got into arguments with here, would you recognize them?”
“Hard to say. People come, people go. But maybe you find someone, I might remember a face. I’m pretty good on faces. Just ask me. I’m always here. Until I move out to Calvary.”
“You’ve been very helpful, Mr. Fitz. And thanks for the champagne, Azalea, and the tour. But I got to run, it’s getting late. I’ll see you both again soon, okay? There’ll be more questions.”
“One for the road, Lieutenant, a short one. You, too.” Jackie refilled their glasses.
“What was that song?” Azalea said. “The one you and Ballz used to sing.”
“Yeah, he got a kick out of that, didn’t he? Irish rap, he called it.” Jackie began singing, his voice low and gruff, a slow tempo at odds with the cheeky lyrics, a pace closer to a funeral dirge than a hip-hop number…
Ireland was Ireland,
When England was a pup.
Ireland was Ireland,
’Fore England she grew up.
And any limey son of a bitch,
Wot doesn’t like me sass,
Can pucker up his limey lips
And kiss me Irish ass.
2:41 P.M.
As Flo left the Penguin Lounge, she smiled.
She hadn’t heard the tavern rebels’ ditty since her grandfather died at age ninety-one.
She walked fast toward the subway at Eighty-sixth and Lex, not simply because the air was cold with that damp sea mistiness of a soggy New York November, but because she hoped the exercise would so exhaust her, she’d doze off into a dreamless snooze as soon as she found a seat on the train and settled in for the ride back to downtown Brooklyn. Quicker than a car, the subway.
And she did snooze, but it wasn’t dreamless.
Her head was spinning, the effect of champagne on an empty stomach, topped up by the full force of the witches’ brew thickening her brain, the cauldron’s mix grown more potent with the day’s fresh ingredients.
Gym pickups and hedge-fund gamblers.
Manly magazines and cock-of-the-roost challengers.
More money laundering and murkier businesses to stash dirty cash.
And for that final dash of spice, the hottest touch of Tabasco, the unlikeliest but most vengeful of players, hizonnah da mare, Flo’s maximum commander, the mayor himself a noontime lover boy, cross-dressing competitor with Mr. Busta for a Wall Street mistress’s favors.
Azalea Butte, although from South Dakota, was all New York, work and spend, strive and design, love and cling, uphold and give way, envy and desire and hide the past.
Ballz Busta lived at the center of a spider’s web of wealthy, powerful contacts, and these would not be people eagerly agreeable to questioning in a murder case.
Nor could Flo envision any of them lugging around an old steel bar to settle outstanding scores with Ballz.
These thoughts haunted and intoxicated her, and she dozed fitfully through subway-tunnel darkness, down along the East Side of Manhattan and over to Brooklyn, the noise of the trains a terrible force, screaming into her dreams, and in this nightmare, as in all nightmares, everything however cruel and grotesque, however inhuman and immense, acquired life and became possible…the assassins’ promise successful, unpunished, unstoppable.
The Committee
2:50 P.M.
The broad-shouldered, tall, dark-haired man carried an Armenian passport, genuine insofar as the document had an authentic foreign ministry provenance from the capital Yerevan, and wasn’t stolen or forged, and hadn’t expired.
The passport possessed a valid, twelve-month U.S. visa for the holder, a visiting scholar in American literature. But it was inauthentic insofar as Paul Santarian, the passport’s given holder, didn’t exist, the passport’s actual bearer being in fact Russian, the dark-haired Igor Zanonovich.
Zanonovich arrived in New York from California without difficulty and went by taxi directly to his organization’s safe house, a rented five-room apartment in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where his partners, four Chechens, spent much of their time drinking, eating pickled herring and corned beef sandwiches, and watching television. The rest of the time, they were cleaning their weapons or sleeping.
The Brighton Beach neighborhood was predominantly Russian and, on his partners’ rare excursions outdoors, they blended right in.
The Russian Zanonovich didn’t share Chechen tastes, and certainly not their causes or vulgarities, or ethnic and religious grievances, but he understood his partners. Like many sociopaths, he was surprisingly empathic.
The Chechens’ names, as far as he was ever to know, were Ivan, Ben, Vlad, and Lenny.
To them, he was simply Paul.
Ivan and Ben were Le Mans�
��class drivers; their sparkling stats included a successful mortar launch and immediate getaway after their rocket blew up a synagogue in Paris. They issued a claim on behalf of a Muslim group no one had ever heard of in France.
Vlad, an explosives expert, fired the actual mortar round.
Lenny was a close-quarters assassin and a long-distance sniper, among his foreign accomplishments a triple-crossing bigmouthed Russian banker swinging from a girder beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, each of the dead banker’s pockets stuffed with a mason’s brick. This killing they credited to an Italian Masonic group long defunct, a ploy that gave the Vatican bad press for months and greatly amused the organization back in Moscow.
In America, attempting to appear homegrown, these killers called themselves Aryans.
Arriving in New York, Zanonovich was exhausted after an overnight flight from California, a red-eye special, and he slept soundly his first day in the Brooklyn apartment, despite icy New York-in-November rains hammering at the windows and a television droning nonstop in the living room.
Over the past ten months, he’d spent a great deal of his time traveling around the States, visiting top universities in the East—Harvard, Yale, Princeton—working his way through the Rocky Mountain states, Denver an especially rewarding experience, and after several stops along the West Coast, New York was a relief, his favorite city in America.
Especially the Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
Back in April, on another rainy day, they enjoyed a clean hit and escape without ever having to leave the city, after a successful operation outside New York University in Washington Square.
The organization had American offices in companies and diplomatic missions, but Zanonovich never approached an official from back home.
Orders were clear, no contacts. The reasoning faultless.
All communiqués in the Double-A Committee’s name—to his mind, an oddly named front, for whose ostensible purposes they performed their jobs—got blasted out onto the airwaves and over the Internet from who knows where, but certainly not from him. He didn’t concern himself with propaganda. He was a field operative.
He and his partners stuck to applying their particular expertise to pursuits that, while hardly prosaic in commission, were certainly more purposeful, more elevated than claims of racial and religious superiority. The public statements, the explanations, the exhortations came from others whose names he would never know and didn’t want to learn.
So far the method was working as well as any professional assassins aiming for terror could hope: destabilizing and provoking countermeasures that, in their results, resembled nothing more than life back home, America becoming more like Russia.
In Brooklyn, they were anticipating similar success for this, their twentieth and final assignment before leaving the country.
Indelible messages delivered. Moral equivalency restored. Ambiguity extinguished.
5:02 P.M.
A shaking woke Zanonovich from his much-loved afternoon siesta.
Lenny was peering down at him.
“Hey, Paul. Up and at ’em, tovarich. We got it, we got a call. You’re on a supper meeting. Six-thirty. Twelfth Street Bar and Grill, it’s in Brooklyn. His name is Mr. Charlie.”
Alert now, Zanonovich showered and put on clean clothes. Tan trench coat, tan Dockers, blue oxford button-down, Ralph Lauren charcoal-gray crewneck, penny loafers. An all-American preppie look, nothing distinctive, nothing memorable.
He’d be part of the wallpaper.
6:23 P.M.
A half-hour subway ride and a couple of blocks to the restaurant on Eighth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
The rain had stopped and the sidewalks were slippery with wet leaves. Apartment lights were on, suppers cooking, televisions casting a blue glow from every other window he passed.
At the 12th Street Bar & Grill, the man the Double-A Committee had signaled would be Mr. Charlie was seated in a booth by the far wall, positioned to observe whoever entered the restaurant.
He nodded at Zanonovich.
They’d met once before, the evening preceding the successful NYU job in Washington Square.
Pleasantries exchanged, they both ordered the day’s special, grilled swordfish, and a bottle of pinot grigio.
Nothing of consequence was discussed during the meal. Zanonovich paid cash and they left.
7:40 P.M.
“It’s a block and a half from here,” Mr. Charlie said as they walked along Eighth Avenue toward Thirteenth Street, a minute’s stroll from the cobblestone courtyard where someone had smashed open Ballz Busta’s skull with a steel bar.
A local crime of no interest to them, and of interest locally only because a celebrity was killed.
The streets were quiet, traffic sparse. They arrived at a school building.
“Same school I went to,” Mr. Charlie said. “Before I transferred to Catholic school and got the shit beat out of me by a Brother Jan, a huge Polack brute. You know the kind. But he made me the man I am today, so I’m grateful to the dirty old bastard. Still it’s amazing, isn’t it? Same old public school. I got the call right before I called you. I got relatives still on the force in precincts near here. We’ll walk around a little there now, check it out. Tomorrow afternoon he shows up, two-thirty sharp. That’s what I’m told. He’s supposed to go in the front door and up a flight to the principal’s office for the welcome. Then up to the auditorium on the top floor, where the kids and teachers are waiting. He’s set for fifteen minutes with them. But your moment is exactly when he arrives. Outside front steps, wide open, unobstructed visibility. You got a clear line of fire. No teachers, no kids. You can’t miss him. So soon as you spot a tall black bastard on the steps, go for it. Let loose.”
The Committee’s Mr. Charlie, to Zanonovich’s ears, sounded like the New York police he was hearing on all the TV crime shows his Chechen partners loved to watch, but Mr. Charlie was no longer a cop.
“We appreciate this,” Zanonovich said, and he handed his informant an envelope stuffed with cash.
The school was a large, rather grand brownstone building built in the late nineteenth century and stretching along Eighth Avenue from Thirteenth Street for half a block and continuing to the corner of Fourteenth Street, with a fenced-in school yard illuminated at night.
Zanonovich and his Mr. Charlie slowed as they reached the school’s front steps.
The American said, “Across the avenue, just off the corner there on Fourteenth Street, you got your clear line of fire to these steps right here. Both sides of the street over there are quiet. You got the armory on that far side, the big redbrick place and that’s closed. And on this other corner here, where the building is boarded up. Used to be a synagogue. You pull up by the armory.”
Zanonovich nodded. He was a knowledgeable man. He knew a little about everything, and almost everything about one thing, assassinations.
He liked this arrangement Mr. Charlie described. Traffic went up Fourteenth Street for a block to the park, where Ben and Ivan could both turn their vehicles to the right and vanish. They’d take off the instant after firing. One round was all they could risk. At the moment of impact, attention would immediately focus on the explosion, and they’d already be on their way.
The two conspirators stopped for a moment at the wide steps leading up to the school’s front entrance. The gate at the foot of the steps was closed and locked.
“Mr. Charlie,” Zanonovich said, “I approve. Well done.”
“Great, God bless you.”
Mr. Charlie was a collaborating asset, who rewarded patience, understanding, and loving care.
They parted at the corner, and Zanonovich rode the subway back out to Brighton Beach and the safe apartment.
Friday
6:30 A.M.
Flo Ott examined her new pantsuit.
Pale gray cashmere with mohair, a burgundy-silk-lined Castelbajac. Seventy percent off list at Aaron’s on Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn.
Would she be tempting fate to wear it today? Drawing unnecessary stares?
Attracting attention from faculty and church groups, attention drawn to herself and away from the new senator.
No, she decided, little likelihood of upstaging a tall and beaming Cecil King.
Castelbajac cashmere with mohair or not, she would simply fade into the background of vigilant retainers.
Any audience would be all eyes on the senator-elect, while she and Frank Murphy, plus however many patrolmen could be spared from Park Slope beats, would be watching everyone else.
Flo anticipated little danger inside the buildings. The moments of vulnerability would be at entries and exits.
7:22 A.M.
“Seen the Times this morning?”
Senator-elect Cecil King brushed toast crumbs off the editorial page.
“No,” Flo said. “Haven’t had a chance.”
She and Frank Murphy were seated at the breakfast table in the King family’s apartment.
The evening before, Frank’s wife, Ann-Marie, and their kids had joined the King family for supper. Ann-Marie did the cooking, the gesture an attempt to squeeze as much normalcy as possible into the egregious, the unparalleled, the unnatural life of an assassination target.
“Padino’s a quick one,” the senator-elect said. “He’s got an op-ed piece. Under his name anyway, but I doubt if he wrote it. Some PR agency’s piece of work. Not a bad first shot, though, almost eloquent. And all about Mr. Busta.”
“Yes,” Flo said. “We’re on that one. We’ve got some strong leads. But what about today, where are we with you?”
“I got a synagogue group on the Upper West Side, then Saint Bartholomew’s on the East Side. That’s the morning. Back in Brooklyn for two schools and a church in the afternoon.”
“Terrific,” Flo said, and she meant this. “All indoors. And the rotten weather is on our side.”
They laughed. Preliminary uncertainties were a stimulus as long as the outcome looked assured.
“Padino certainly knows what to do with a spotlight,” Cecil King said, tapping the Times. “Keeps my schedule in the dark. Great place for a politician, the dark.”
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