Resolved kac-15

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  "That I am," she said with a laugh, "and don't I rue the day I came to America and married a policeman. Well, don't stand there like statues, come in!"

  They entered the house. The living room, Marlene saw, was furnished with a combination of Mom and Dada stuff, the kind of solid dark pieces that Irish immigrants bought in the 1920s when the man of the house got on the civil service, and lighter, brighter young-marrieds gear from Ikea and the Door Store. It was the same sort of furniture (substituting Italian for Irish) that Marlene had supplied her own home with twenty years ago, and she felt a pang of… something. Regret? Sorrow? Fear? Yeah, fear was a lot of it, always bubbling up, tainting all the homely sessions of her life. Smile, Marlene, she told herself, this is supposed to be fun. She caught Nora looking at her. Could she smell it, too? No, that was just the young bride checking out the old flame, who wasn't even really an old flame anyway. Good for Raney, though, and the kid was gorgeous.

  They were in the kitchen, where a pot was steaming on the stove and piles of potatoes sat in a plastic basket on the table.

  "There's not a bite in the house except those spuds…"

  "Gosh, you really are Irish," said Giancarlo, and got the back of his mother's hand lightly across the top of his head. But Nora laughed, and said, "Yes, and isn't it a bloody parody. And I was going to make a potato salad to go with the barbecue that Raney's supposedly bringing home, but he's not home. He came down from that prison he was visiting and checked in at headquarters, and there he's sat with no word since he called at half three this afternoon. And I would have been here to go to the shops, y'see, but Moira Flannery asked me to take a shift for her, and I couldn't say no, could I, because hasn't she covered for me a thousand times when Meghan was a babe? Well, and so here we are, I swear it's just like the Great Famine, but at least there's beer."

  Bottles of cold Harp lager were distributed to the adults. Zak grabbed one, was yelled at, allowed a swallow, and then set to peeling potatoes with his brother. The others went out the back door and lounged in the somewhat scruffy yard, and got acquainted. Nora was a surgical nurse by profession, and seemed to know a lot about the Karps. She exchanged some phrases in Gaelic with Lucy ("And that exhausts me knowledge of the dear old tongue, I'm afraid"), listened to Marlene's version of the adventures she'd been through with Jim Raney (in which Raney came out a deal more heroic than he apparently had when he'd recounted them to the bride), and then the women got into child-rearing practices. Karp was content to listen to their talk as he might have the sound of the surf. Lucy drifted inside to supervise the boys, who, from the sounds they made, were spending more time flicking bits of spud at each other than actually peeling.

  They were all well into their second beers when Raney arrived, laden with meats and looking wilted and whipped. Beers were provided him, he showered and changed into cutoffs and T-shirt, the fire was started, sweet smoke rose to heaven, the party ate the burgers and hot dogs, plus a French potato salad that Lucy had pulled together while Nora, the slut, had taken her ease like a duchess. Who piled compliments on Marlene, for her talented daughter.

  "Oh, the Karp show has only started," said Marlene, who had by then lost track of the beers. "G.C.!" she called, "give us a tune!" One never had to ask him twice. Zak trotted out to the car and returned with the box. Giancarlo played "The Night We Had the Goat."

  Nora said, "Ah, that's grand, but say, can you play a slip jig at all?"

  Giancarlo launched into "The Windy Stairs," and then "Up in the Garret," with Nora doing a credible dance with the baby jouncing and giggling in her arms.

  Meanwhile, Marlene had sidled up to Raney.

  "Tell me," she said.

  "The short version is there's something bent going on. We don't know who's in on it yet, but I think I got them interested enough to get an investigation going. The doc up there is a junkie, and they showed me a kid supposedly in charge of the ward where Felix supposedly died, who was lying through his teeth. The orderly station had a bunch of books there that belonged to someone who was not the hick pretending to be in charge, two in French, one in Arabic."

  "Oh, hot damn!"

  "Yeah. In French we got Reflections on the French Algerian War by Mouloud Faroun and The Black Book of Jihad by Gilles Kepel. In Arabic there's an admiring biography of Sabri al-Banna, a.k.a. Abu Nidal. Close associate in the old days of…?"

  "Not what's-his-name: the B'nai Brith bomber?"

  "Him. Feisal ibn-Salemeh. Resident at Auburn. It was a pretty slick setup. Salemeh was in total charge of the infirmary for years, and it'd be nothing for him to slip Felix out. They even had this ringer all ready to pretend to be in charge of the prison clinic if anyone came by."

  "I can't believe that no one connected him with the bombings."

  "Hey, he was in jail, under an assumed name. The guys who knew about his background weren't talking to the people trying to find the Manbomber. We'll be having a conversation with ibn-Salemeh's lawyer, I'm pretty sure. He was the conduit, apparently. And it would've been cool if Feisal had remembered to take his library when he ducked out. Auburn will be crawling with feds and state cops by tomorrow. Of course, the feebs immediately cut us out of it, but who gives a shit about that. I just want Felix."

  "And the cops are happy with this?"

  "More or less. At least One PP isn't looking at me like I'm a nut anymore. The main thing the Felix connection does for them is to explain the bombing pattern. Yeah, it looked random, because Felix was settling scores and there was no connection between him and anyone with bomb skills. Now there is."

  "But besides Judge Horowitz there's no one who's died in the bombings that has a connection to Salemeh. Or is there?"

  Raney's face had grown grim. He stared at his dancing wife and then back to Marlene. "Well, there's you. The Karp family is on both bad guys' lists."

  "Oh, right. Shit!"

  "And there's Daoud got killed, the baker. Also the theory is the bombing so far's been a sideshow, and that they're saving it all up for some big bang. Or were until their base blew up on them. I'm not supposed to tell anyone this… but, we got a tip. They're planning to attack the tunnels: Lincoln, Holland, Queens, and Battery. According to the rat, they have fucking tons of high explosive manufactured and ready to go. They were planning on using septic tanker trucks to carry the bombs in."

  "Oh, great! This is going to do wonders for traffic."

  "Tell me about it. Anyway, the interesting thing is, they played us the tape of the guy who called it in. He had his voice disguised, but it was obvious that it was a regular American voice, no accent."

  "Oh-ho."

  "I'd bet on it. Once you have the general outlines, the plot is pretty clear. Salemeh gets Felix out of Auburn and ships him to his pals in the city. Why? Easy. The whole world is searching for skulking Arabs and Felix is an all-American-looking guy. By the way, there's our fella in the ball hat for sure now. So he plants the bombs, buys explosives, whatever. But since Felix is Felix, he's not a happy camper at all. Did you know he was a big racist? Oh, yeah, he doesn't miss a trick, Felix. So he probably wasn't happy taking orders from a bunch of Ay-rabs. So he does a few operations on his own, bombs or people he had a grudge against, that double murder right here in Queens. Which couldn't have made Salemeh's people too happy. So they break up."

  "Wait a minute, what makes you think that there are any Salemeh people left? Who died in the Queens house?"

  "Two brothers named Alfiyah, Omar and Fuad, from Brooklyn. Palestinians, born here but very hot Islamists. Dying to be martyrs, according to the neighbors and police intelligence. So to speak. I guess they got their wish."

  "But they were recruited by someone."

  "Oh, yeah, they were just the kind of assholes Salemeh liked to recruit- disposables, okay to put together bombs and then get rid of them. It might have worked, too, except for Felix. I'm guessing that Felix might have helped that house explode. It's a Felix kind of thing. But they're still in business, so since Felix doesn
't ever let go of a grudge, as his good-bye present he lets us know what he learned about their plans."

  "I like it. Did the bosses?"

  "Not all of it. Now, needless to say, they love that Arabs are in the picture now. Arabs they can handle. They're a little spooked about putting a dead guy out on a wanted bulletin, they want to wait for-"

  Raney was snatched away with a jerk on his wrist by his wife, who pulled him into a reel. Marlene had no idea that Raney could do Irish dancing. Maybe Nora had taught him. Before Pete Balducci's funeral it had been several years since she'd seen Raney, and she probably would have let him drop out of her life completely had they not met there. Why? They'd always liked each other. Sexual guilt on Raney's part, her own withdrawal from the world after going crazy, and more so after what had happened in West Virginia.

  No, let's not think about this shit, Marlene, let's just have a normal evening with friends, and my, didn't they make a handsome couple, dancing to the wild music. Zak was banging out the tempo on a beer tray with a piece of wood from some toy. Lucy was bouncing the baby on her lap in time. Marlene went over and sat on a wide chaise next to her husband.

  "Happy times," he said. She didn't answer, but laid her head against his shoulder. He put an arm around her. He was still nursing his first beer.

  Karp watched the dancers turn. He was listening to the music, but through his head still traveled the lyrics of that song, about keep holding, keep holding on. It was almost there. The weight of Marlene's head on his arm was pressing it against the pipe frame of the chair, making it tingle unpleasantly. The ulnar nerve, the median nerve, the axillary nerve were tingling. He knew that because…

  He knew that because…

  A drop of water fell on his hand. He looked up at the sky, darkening to deep blue with approaching evening, but clear of clouds. Not rain, but a tear. His wife was crying; her cheeks were wet with it.

  "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing. Life. I'm in terror."

  "What? What is it?"

  "I can't have this. Peace. Felicity. Friends and music and the kids happy and us together. I feel like the skeleton at the feast."

  "That's… not true, Marlene." He had almost said, "That's crazy."

  "It's okay. I'm being an idiot. Jim thinks Felix Tighe is still alive, and on the loose."

  "What? I thought…"

  "That he died in prison, like everyone else thought. Well, he didn't, and he's b-a-a-a-a-a-ck! Apparently, he's also the Manbomber. At least he distributed the bombs. There's probably a cell connected with our old pal ibn-Salemeh. It looks like he masterminded the whole thing from prison."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Deadly. I'm sure the details will emerge, but just now they're keeping it all real dark." A howl sounded over the music. "Shit, what does that dog want?"

  "Hamburgers?"

  "No, it's something… I better go check." She heaved herself up and went through the chain-link gate to the driveway. Gog was whining and fretting and when she opened the camper back door, he stuck his face in hers, drooling buckets.

  "What is it, pal? What's up? Calm down! Be quiet, everything's okay." She walked around the truck, looked beneath it, walked down the driveway past Raney's sedan, and out into the street. There were some kids on a bike riding around in the twilight. They zoomed past, shrieking, and the mastiff growled. That was it.

  "It's just kids, you big silly. Calm down. It's all right. Look, Magog is fine. Settle down!"

  She poured the rest of her beer into the dog's dish and walked back to the party.

  Which went on. They finished the beer and started on the Jameson. Nora was imposed upon to sing "West Coast of Clare" and "Four Green Fields," which she did in a pleasant contralto. A Pogues poster had been discovered in the bathroom, and Zak announced that his brother could play nearly everything on "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash," so they had to hear some of that, too. Then Marlene tickled her son until he consented to play "Lady of Spain," which he did off-key, while she sang the lyrics with drunken vigor. Karp watched this resignedly. He didn't much care to drive and he would be driving tonight, but it was worth it to see her having fun. So she drank a little too much, so what? He was feeling better than he had felt in a long while because solution to Nixon amp; Gerber had just that minute popped into his head.

  The shot through the arm, not mentioned in the original testimony from the medical examiner because not contributory to cause of death, but noted in the autopsy report. Everyone focused on the fatal bullets from Gerber, ignoring Nixon's non-fatal ones. Keep holding on, keep holding on, like in the song, like they both said the victim had. But he hadn't. He couldn't. Karp knew he would have to check when he got back to the office, but he was as sure about it as he was about anything.

  Now it was full night. Little Meghan had been put to bed. Raney was on the couch nodding. Karp was making eye signals to his wife.

  "We should go," he announced. He looked out the narrow window that gave a view of the driveway. "You need to move your car, Jim."

  "Oh, hell, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking." Raney rubbed his face and started to look for his keys.

  "Ah, would you look at the man, too plastered to back a car down a drive!" said Nora cheerfully. "And the old lady's got to do it for him." She snatched a set of keys from a china bowl on a side table and went out.

  Karp supervised the boys' retreat, gathering up shoes and socks and various bits of boyish equipage. Lucy supervised her mother. Raney walked them out to the front walk and they were all standing there in front of the house watching as Nora Raney backed her husband's Pontiac out of the driveway. There was a small drop where the lip of the driveway met the road, ordinarily a hardly noticeable little bump. But it was quite enough to trip the trembler switch in Felix Tighe's last bomb, which was fixed by its magnet to the chassis right under the seat she sat on. No one else was even scratched by the blast, although Raney burned all the skin off his hands trying to reach his wife.

  16

  "WE MUST EXPECT SOME REVERSES," SAID RASHID WITH A confidence he did not really feel. "We are in combat with a super-power, just we few, but the central plan is still intact."

  "How? How is it intact?" demanded Habib, the false Felнpe. "Felix blows up the wife of a policeman with one of our bombs, after the bombings were supposed to be over because the bombers blew themselves up in Queens. Now they know that all that was a fraud, and the search for us is still on. We should have killed that piece of shit when we had our hands on him, and then this would not have happened. But, no, we had to have your circles within circles of deception. I think we should leave the city and regroup somewhere else."

  They were sitting in the dingy office of Scarpese General Contractors, the last of the businesses Rashid had purchased over the years. This was their final redoubt, the storehouse of the explosives that they had garnered and made with such care. It was located on St. Nicholas Avenue in Inwood, a neighborhood of upper Manhattan occupied almost entirely by Caribbean and Central American Latinos. The premises consisted of a three-story red-brick workshop/office and a large yard guarded by a high chain-link and razor-wire fence. In the yard were several large flatbed trucks and big black industrial boilers on pallets.

  Rashid walked over to the grimy window of the office and looked out on the yard, as if to assure himself that the physical assets of his operation were still there. He had not really recovered from the news that ibn-Salemeh was under investigation by the FBI, that the whole business about Felix Tighe had been discovered. Admit your mistakes, then move on: that was one of ibn-Salemeh's precepts. Rashid had to admit that he had been mistaken about Tighe. He thought the man was just interested in money. He also had no idea that Tighe had the brains to build a bomb himself, with stolen materials, but there it was, and now the television was saying he had been running his own vendetta with what were supposed to be random attacks. That's how they had known that his death was fraud. He had put his signature on everything.

  "Leave? No, that is
out of the question," said Rashid. "The plan will go through. But staying very quiet is a good idea. Staying quiet in place. Our papers are good, we have green cards, we pay our bills, we live quietly, we work, day by day we advance the plan. There is no reason for anyone to bother us. However, we cannot allow Felix to be taken by the police. They will sit him down with an artist, or perhaps even have him go through visa photos, and then our faces will become known, mine and yours, Mamoud and yours, Habib. So he must be eliminated."

  "What are we going to do about Rifaat?" asked Mamoud, called Carlos.

  All three of them glanced toward the door, where in the next office, a man lay on a cot, scarcely breathing. The child's knife had nicked an artery and the man was slowly bleeding to death. There was no possibility of getting him any medical attention. Rashid lifted two hands palms facing, the classic gesture invoking fate. "He will live or he will die, as God wills. Is the target still staying in that storage place?"

  "That is what Saad tells me," said Carlos-Mamoud.

  "Let him do it, then. Tonight. See he has the necessary equipment and drive him away afterward."

  "Saad? Are you sure? I could do it."

  "No, you are critical to the plan. You can not be risked at this stage. And why not Saad? He will be happy to get revenge for his brothers. He already thinks Felix caused the explosion. Make sure there is no body found. Use the casting furnace here. Oh, and be sure to collect the ashes. Perhaps we can still convince them that Felix has always been dead."

  ***

  Lucy convinced Karp with some difficulty that he was not needed at home in the aftermath of the Raney bombing, and that the best thing he could do on the Monday was to go to court and resume trying the Gerber amp; Nixon case. So he had, leaving his stricken family: the boys silent and prone to fits of weeping; Marlene red-eyed, smoking continuously, and sitting in her rocker, creaking gothically back and forth by the hour, and dry as a stone, with an expression on her face that he did not remember ever seeing there before, a look of ashes. And Lucy, girl of steel, even Lucy looking a little rusty under the eyes as she made sure the family ran along, that there was food on the table, and clean clothes and the floor mopped and the dishes done.