Subheads: “20 Vows, 20 Victims Pages 3, 4, 5…Secret Witnesses or Cops Snookered?” And a photo of the glowering mayor and his pugnacious police commissioner.
“Would you run through it again for Lieutenant Ott?” Marty Keane asked the bartender.
“Pleasure,” Frankie Carr said. “Whatever I can do for you.”
“Start with them,” Marty said.
“Right, the foreign guys. Four of them, vodka drinkers, stick to themselves. Nothing unusual, mind you, not around here.”
Flo said, “What about them?”
“I didn’t think nothing about them, not until I seen the papers about the green van. They had one. And then the school blows up, 107, and I don’t see them no more. And then a cop comes in here almost right after, asking me about a green van. And that’s about it, I guess. You think they did it? You figure it’s these crazy assassin characters running around killing everywhere? Scares the hell out of me now, I can tell you, them coming in here and I didn’t suspect nothing. But there was nothing unusual about these guys, you see, not in here.” Frankie Carr slipped a fresh Tums into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “You know, only one thing funny, they talked about the beach and going swimming now this time of year. I says whereabouts, and they say Brighton, I ought to try it there, they say the cold water out at Brighton is very healthy for you.”
10:24 A.M.
Checking out a third Russian café in Brighton Beach, Flo Ott and Frank Murphy got a response from a bartender.
“They talk Russian, yeah, but with Chechen accent. Their super don’t like them.”
“Who’s she?”
“Lara. Lives back there.”
Back there was a block from the boardwalk.
10:33 A.M.
Flo rang the superintendent’s bell.
A woman of indeterminate age, certainly not young, opened the vestibule door. She was overweight and wheezing heavily, a cigarette between her yellow-stained fingers, a half inch of ash threatening to drop on her faded blue quilted housecoat. She gave the detectives a sharp assessor’s once-over, eyes squinting through curling smoke.
“Yeah?” Lara said.
Frank produced his detective’s shield. “We’re from homicide.”
“So? Who you looking for? Not me, I hope.”
“Some tenants, maybe Russians, maybe Chechens.”
“We’re almost all Russians around here, always. Chechens, they’re different. We don’t like them. Look, c’mon in, it’s freezing out here. Lousy landlord won’t put no radiators in the vestibule. Chintziest bastard I ever know, swear to God.”
Inside her apartment off the front hall, Lara shuffled over to a chair, webs of varicose veins peeping out from under her housecoat. She sat down, took a long puff, and exhaled a stream of smoke.
“What happened?” she said. “Somebody get whacked?”
“We’re interested in four men,” Flo said. “They may have been living in this building. Russian or Chechen.”
“Them? Yeah, they were short timers. In and out. There was five of them, though. Only one real Russian. And all of them right off the boat.”
“One Russian.”
“Very snooty. Ain’t seen any of them in a couple of days. But they was around all the time, maybe a week or so, ten days, then poof, they’re gone just like that. Still the rent’s all paid up. Six months, in advance. Some company rented it, furnished. I don’t know what business they were in, salesmen? They never seemed to go to work, though. And they never gave me back no keys. So maybe they’re coming around again.”
“Which apartment?”
“Top floor, last on the right. You got a warrant?” Lara smiled, yellow-stained teeth, and exhaled a stream of smoke.
“Soon,” Frank said.
“Don’t worry, it don’t matter. I got a key. I’ll let you in.”
In the building’s single elevator, they rode up to the fifth floor.
“You know their names?” Flo said.
“Never introduced themselves. Unfriendly type, know what I mean? Creeps, you really want to know the truth. God forgive me talking about people like that, but tell you honestly I’m glad they’re out of here. Hell you want them for? They kill somebody? Jesus, just the kind who would, the lousy stinkers.”
10:42 A.M.
Lara the super opened the door to the apartment recently vacated by Zanonovich and the four Chechens.
“Christ Almighty,” she said. “Look at this place. I didn’t think five men could be so clean, quite frankly. You could eat off the floor here now.”
The apartment appeared unlived in.
Flo said, “Our colleagues will be back with a warrant to examine this apartment. Anybody else comes around or you see any of them again—although I doubt you will—you call me right away, okay?”
She gave Lara her card. The woman shook her head and sighed. “C’mon, tell me, what the hell did they do, these jerks.”
“We don’t know exactly. But we’ve got some serious questions.”
“Wait a minute, now I know. That bomb at the school, that’s it, right? Jesus Christ Almighty and they was living right here all that time. You know, you’re right, that’s exactly when they disappeared. When that bomb went off. They must have had bombs in this apartment. Or in that garage across the street. Chrissakes, they could’ve blown this place up. You ain’t safe nowheres no more. Not even in your own apartment building.”
“What garage?”
“I’m the super here, right, I’m supposed to know everything. Listen, they had a green van, I don’t know what make, they all look the same far as I’m concerned, and they had a black Mercedes, Jersey plates. I always remember out-of-state licenses. ‘Garden State,’ right? I’m a very good noticer, see what I mean? Maybe I should’ve been a cop.” Lara laughed and lit another cigarette with the stub of the first.
Flo said, “Did you notice the numbers on the plates?”
The building superintendent inhaled deeply and released a long stream of smoke before replying. “Nah, I’m not that good, I could never give no parking tickets.”
She laughed again. “So you got more? Or can I lock up here now and wait for your partners? Just tell them call first, okay? And not too late. I got trouble sleeping nights. Lara Oshinsky, I’m in the book.” Shaking her head, puffing heavily, she led the detectives out into the hallway. “Bombs, right here in my own building. Jesus Christ have mercy on us. You should go knock on every door in this building, my advice. Somebody else might’ve seen something. You never know, right? See what I mean? I shoulda been a cop.”
“An artist will come by,” Flo said. “This afternoon. You’ll describe these people to her, all five of them, and she’ll draw their faces until she gets it right, until they look like the men you saw. Okay?”
“Okay? You kidding? I can’t wait. You make my day. We’ll get these creeps, just you watch. Give them the hot seat, the bastards.” Lara put the cigarette in her mouth, and with her right hand made the Orthodox sign of the cross. “Bombs in my own building, Jesus Christ Almighty.”
11:07 A.M.
Zanonovich boarded the F-train subway at Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn and rode five stops to the Seventh Avenue Park Slope station, a mere five-minute walk from the catastrophic failure at Public School 107.
He exited at the front end of the train and walked up the stairs to Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue, where he continued two blocks to Eleventh Street, turned left at the corner, pausing a few doors up the block in front of the stoop at number 610.
Snow was suddenly falling again so dense and heavy, he could barely discern building number 611 across the street. Red brick, yes, he could see that much. Three stories. Narrow. Probably two apartments. One floor for the upper, two for the lower. Not unlike old Professor McLaughlin’s house on Garden Place in the Heights, if not as upmarket here, certainly not if a police detective was living in number 610. Still, all in all, a cozy house. Smaller windows here than in Garden Place. Easy target from a
building across the way, if no snow. Clear line of fire from a rooftop and into any nearby window, since none of the windows was too small for framing your average human target.
But today, tomorrow…a perilous, probably impossible undertaking during or after a snowfall as thick as this storm.
She lived there, homicide detective Lieutenant Florence Ott. The bitch outsmarted him once but not again. Not if he could help it. He received no orders to eliminate this obstacle. But, always a “but,” he had a responsibility to ensure that any orders to resume the last operation of their mission in this country could be carried out. Send them a message. Extract the brain and the body is helpless.
Homicide detective Lieutenant Florence Ott had to be removed.
And very soon.
But not here, not in this death trap.
Too many neighbors, too close quarters.
And too much damn snow.
Zanonovich circled the block, down Twelfth Street and back over to the subway, where he began the long ride of underground transfers to the Q-train and on out to Sheepshead Bay.
Surely a dutiful, loyal wife wouldn’t be abandoning her husband to loneliness and institutional cooking, not for too long, even if she was a cop.
Not even if she was a cop.
And perhaps Sheepshead Bay wouldn’t prove as cozy and close, as treacherous a death trap as Eleventh Street in Park Slope.
At any rate, in Zanonovich’s memory of the marina there, of the buildings along Emmons Avenue and open, unobstructed spaces between mixed commercial and residential properties, and that god-awful wind roaring in off the ocean, blowing away most of the snow, all this gave his assassin’s heart growing cause to be sanguine, lifting his spirits and his aspirations.
Surely something good would come of this…
Zanonovich was a hopeful man and, in performing God’s work, he placed his fullest trust in the Almighty.
11:32 A.M.
Back down in the subway tunnels, the noise had a strength all its own, a fearsome force that penetrated Zanonovich’s thoughts.
He felt no fear.
Riding through the tunnels across Brooklyn and up onto the elevated tracks, he sensed hidden forces stoking themselves as if driving up toward a divine energy.
When the train arrived at the Sheepshead Bay East 16th Street station, he made a quick Orthodox sign of the cross and stepped off onto the outdoor platform into brisk blasts of salty winds.
Redemption…In this invigorating ocean air and blessed with his gift of faith, he could almost smell salvation happening, feel deliverance rising. And this wonderful, intoxicating sensation pumped his blood.
12:04 P.M.
“No usable prints,” the forensics chief said. “Not yet, Lieutenant. And no DNA.”
He and Flo Ott were standing in a garage beside the green van.
“But there’s not much doubt. A mortar round was fired out of here through this sliding roof up top. We got traces of that much all over the van.”
The old garage, a dilapidated wooden structure, not so long ago housed an illegal live-poultry outlet.
“Figure if these killers haven’t already left the country,” Flo said, “they’re lying low, waiting. Soon as we get drawings from Lara Oshinsky in Brighton Beach, we have something to circulate. Email to the Bureau. INTERPOL. Every jurisdiction in the country where the Double-A claims a killing. It’s a front, you get right down to it, the Double-A has to be a cutout. We don’t know exactly who actually hired these killers. And I’d be surprised if even they have any real idea. Or care. Not as long as they’re paid their price.”
Practical police work was built on experience, logic, evidence, observation. The Mother Glorias and their tea leaves were larks. The killers would be waiting if the threats weren’t a smoke screen, waiting for orders, for intelligence on the senator’s movements.
And if that was the case, somebody was watching the senator.
Closely.
The senator had to stay put. Cecil King had guts. But he also had brains. He was no daredevil.
12:08 P.M.
A string of naked lightbulbs, from which any warmth was drained, shed some light on the cold, windy exit at the elevated Sheepshead Bay East 16th Street subway station.
The steps down from the platform to the street were covered in a layer of black ice, but Zanonovich didn’t fear cold, he was Russian and the intensity of his uplifted spirits and the alpaca fur lining of his hooded Burberry tan storm coat were enough to keep him warm.
In the left pocket of the coat, he carried the telescopic night-vision sight for the rifle he’d left in the cupboard under the sink in the upstairs apartment of the professor’s house at 8 Garden Place in Brooklyn Heights.
Head bent into the wind, Zanonovich walked along the harbor front until he reached a point directly across the road from the nursing home where he believed Edward Ott, disabled former Marine Corps reserve officer, lay stricken.
Divine providence…a jumble of dumpsters filled the quayside in front of the Breezy Point ferry dock, closed now for the season.
The sky was dim, and no one else was walking along the wind-blasted harbor front. Zanonovich slipped in between two dumpsters where, hidden from sight, he still had a good view of the three-story nursing home.
He removed the night-vision scope from his coat pocket and, beginning with the top floor, surveyed the façade a window at a time. His pulse quickened with pleasure. By late afternoon, the sky would be even darker. And the views through his scope were picture perfect. He could even read the news text crawl at the bottom of television screens in some of the rooms. Between him and the windows of the nursing home were four lanes of noisy, steady traffic, a parking lot, a sidewalk. He would fire, fold the rifle back into the tennis bag and fade away into the dusk, into the bowels of the New York City rapid transit system.
Obstacle removed.
Message delivered.
Thanks be to God…
Now there remained only the question of which window.
Pocketing the scope, Zanonovich continued along the waterfront to a crosswalk. Across the road, a block from the nursing home, he saw what he thought might be a possible solution.
12:34 P.M.
A florist shop.
Zanonovich entered the shop and bought a bouquet of appropriately autumnal mums.
He paid cash, and on the gift card he wrote, From the brothers at arms. Our warmest wishes to you & your family in this holiday season.
12:52 P.M.
Entering the lobby of the nursing home, he kept the hood up on his storm coat.
And the autumnal-colored mums obscured much of his face.
He approached the reception desk. A large African American woman was chatting on the phone. He coughed.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“Ed Ott. Which room?”
“What lovely flowers. He’s in 2-G. Elevator by the stairs on your left. He might be snoozing now.”
The receptionist returned to her phone conversation and Zanonovich walked up the stairs. In a nursing home, almost everyone would use the elevator.
Best not to be remembered here.
The second-floor corridor was quiet and empty. He stopped at 2-G and listened. No television. No radio. No sound at all. He opened the door a crack. The room was all shadows. The man on the bed appeared asleep.
Zanonovich placed the bouquet on the night table and quickly surveyed the room. Nothing exceptional, a normal bedroom, a bathroom, a harbor view. He could barely make out the dark shapes of the dumpsters across the road.
He left Eddie Ott’s room, closing the door quietly. He took the stairs again and exited out the back door to avoid the receptionist still jabbering away on the phone.
Thanks be to God. The cold air was bracing, the sensation in his blood warming him. He looked forward to returning .
3:04 P.M.
The police artist’s drawings of the Chechens and the Russian went out over an internal network to every pol
ice precinct in the city and to every squad car.
5:57 P.M.
On her way up the church steps to Saturday evening Mass at Saint Saviour’s, Flo Ott got the call of positive identification relayed from Frank Murphy.
The venue was an Irish bar in Rockaway, McDonough’s Grill, a block from the beach and the Atlantic Ocean on the southerly coast of the New York City borough of Queens.
Flo turned back from the church.
6:44 P.M.
Marty Keane was waiting for Flo Ott and Frank Murphy when they entered McDonough’s Grill.
He was sitting next to a clutch of drinkers gathered below the TV set at one end of the long room, all the men—no women present, only Flo now—keenly anticipating the kickoff of a college football game.
Frank was specific over the phone. “We don’t go in looking like cops on duty, says Marty. Just come in like it’s a weekend day of rest.”
Marty introduced the bartender, Donny Reilly, and Flo slipped him a photocopy of the drawings. Reilly nodded and pointed up at the television. “Yeah, I saw those before. Watch the TV. It’s supposed to be a good game. Behind me, the two at the other end. I think it’s them. No, I’m sure.” He slid the page back over the bar to Flo. “They’ve been in here before and so have the other two. Never together. Sour bastards, all of them. No idea what they’re talking. Always mumbling. Their English is okay, when they talk, nothing great. What can I get you?”
“Two ginger ales,” Flo said, her eyes fixed on the boring pregame entertainment. A clown was chasing cheerleaders down the sidelines. Flo glanced at her watch. She would have preferred to be at the Sheepshead Bay nursing home for supper with her husband, Eddie. But if God was on their side, she hoped the evening might instead be spent in a courtroom at the killers’ arraignment for the murder of Claiborne Smith.
Or at a meeting at the morgue linking identities with the assassins’ corpses.
Or, if God turned angry, they’d be visiting houses, consoling colleagues’ families.
“Marty,” she said, “go to the john and call in. No marked cars. Civvies, no uniforms. As many people as they can get here, fast. They don’t come in the bar. Just cruise. And wait. We’ll tell them when and where to move. We want all four alive. Or five. What about this fifth guy?” Flo asked the bartender, referring to the drawing of the distinguished-looking older man.
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