New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  Within ten minutes, Frankie was being hustled toward an interrogation room in the 115th Precinct. Jackson Heights was just a stone’s throw from Woodside, so it didn’t take long. As he passed one of the other interrogation rooms, he glanced inside and saw his wife sitting at a table, chatting with a bunch of detectives. Her jacket was draped over her shoulders in defense against the air-conditioning, and she warmed her hands around a steaming paper cup of coffee.

  “María, you bitch!” he screamed as he passed the window.

  Guzman shoved him into the next room and plunked him into a hard chair. “You wanna tell me about it?” she asked, pulling out a notebook.

  “You bet,” Frankie said. “It was all her idea.”

  Guzman held up her hand. “You sure you don’t want to wait for your delegate before you talk to me? You don’t want me to Mirandize you?”

  “Hell no!” Frankie replied. He missed the small smile that curled up at the corner of Guzman’s mouth for a fleeting moment.

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  * * *

  Officer Guzman opened the door to the neighboring interrogation room. “Thanks for coming down and waiting, María,” she said. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t look too good for Frankie. He’s confessed to a lot of crimes, and he didn’t wait for his delegate before he talked.”

  María shook her head. “My father told me not to marry him, but I thought I knew better. What am I going to tell the kids?”

  Guzman patted her hand. “I know it looks tough now, but you’ll make it through. Can you take your children to your parents’ house tonight? It’s only a matter of time before the press comes knocking on your door.”

  “That’s a good idea, thanks. Does Frankie want to see me now?”

  “I don’t think that would be for the best. You can see him once he’s booked.”

  María stood up. “Well. Thanks for everything.”

  “You’re welcome. And it will all work out. You’ll see.”

  You bet it will, María thought.

  As she slid behind the wheel of her car, she mentally ran through the contents of her home office. She had packed up the laptop, scanner, and printer and stashed them in the trunk of her car as soon as Roberta Guzman called. She’d had a mental escape plan in place since the day she and Frankie had gotten involved in what she thought of as “refunding for profit.”

  Her family and Roberta’s had been close for at least two generations, but the two women hadn’t seen each other very often since Roberta went on the job. She had let María know that she would have to take a step back because she was going to play it straight. (Roberta’s family had treated her like the proverbial black sheep—What’s wrong with the girl that she isn’t open to taking bribes? How could we have gone so wrong?)

  María only pretended to understand her friend’s choices. She heard about Roberta’s successes in the department through her parents and aunts and uncles, but like her relatives, she always puzzled over why her longtime friend would work harder than she had to.

  Well, no matter. She’d held Roberta’s marker from when they were teenagers. María held the key to a moment of youthful indiscretion on Roberta’s part, and Roberta owed her for keeping her mouth shut. She knew she’d collect on it someday, but she’d always hoped it would be for something bigger than this harmless little scam.

  She fingered the tickets in her handbag. Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., she and the kids were taking off for a long-overdue vacation to visit relatives in Mexico. Depending on what happened with Frankie, she might just stay there.

  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

  August 30, 2006

  Jackson Heights, N.Y.—Roberta Guzman, an NYPD spokeswoman, revealed today that Francisco Hernandez, the police officer who was arrested last month on multiple counts of fraud and was to be prosecuted under the Federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations) statute for conspiring with al-Qaeda terrorists to resell stolen merchandise as part of a fundraising scheme, has committed suicide while in protective custody at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center. “Mr. Hernandez appears to have wound a bedsheet around the top bunk in his cell and used it to strangle himself,” Guzman reported at a press conference late yesterday afternoon.

  Other members of the alleged fraud ring include Alba Terremoto, Pedro Volcan, and Mohammed al-Yakub, who is also suspected of having links to al-Qaeda and is charged with funneling profits from illegally sold merchandise into terrorist activities.

  CONVERSION OF THE JEWS

  BY JILLIAN ABBOTT

  Richmond Hill

  Ramzi Saleh wondered how this nation had become the most powerful in the world. The despicable little urchins who turned up to harass him at Richmond Hill High, where he taught math to ninth graders, were indifferent to his lessons. They cheated him of his time on earth.

  It was with no little pleasure that he contemplated being an instrument of their demise, those cocksure boys and strutting girls. Now that winter had set in and the sidewalks were treacherous with ice, he was spared the exposed flesh that assaulted him every warm day. What sort of parents let their daughters out wearing less than what would pass for acceptable underwear at home? And the boys were little better. He found their lack of modesty and wayward attitudes blasphemous.

  Ramzi pulled the collar of his overcoat tight against a biting wind. Above him, the 7 train rattled by, its brakes screeching as it pulled into the Roosevelt Avenue station. Beneath his feet the sidewalk trembled. Two levels underground, a subway train, maybe the E he’d just gotten off, was pulling up or leaving.

  He knew no one here, at least not in person. He kept walking, and soon caught a whiff of fennel as he approached his destination: the paan seller on 74th Street. It seemed that Satan himself had a hand in his being here. How else could he explain the impulse that had propelled him to the E train? He told himself that he was going to pray, but when he got to Sutphin Boulevard, instead of leaving the station and making his way along Jamaica Avenue toward Azis’s mosque tucked away on 146th Street, he’d raced onto the E, which brought him straight here to Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights.

  This neighborhood meant peril. At how many points along the way could he have abandoned his quest and gone to Azis’s, or even home to Liberty Avenue? But now his destination was Little India. He stopped outside the paan shop. Why not? He’d resisted for as long as he could, but the first time he’d slid the paan inside his cheek to an explosion of flavor, he’d known he was lost.

  He was supposed to avoid his countrymen and spend his time among the gora. Not that Richmond Hill was Infidel Central. But many of the Asians there were West Indians who had lived in the Caribbean for generations before coming to America. The neighborhood was mixed, not exclusive, and while the roti shops had few rivals, the paan could not compete. He should take it home. He should eat it unobserved in his recliner, but he couldn’t.

  At times it seemed to Ramzi that America offered nothing but temptation. Could a man be wise, let alone moral, living among such sirens? Was his sophisticated Jackson Heights palate evidence that the Great Satan had corrupted him? Perhaps he should buy two paan? One for now, and one he could put in the fridge for after dinner.

  As he pressed toward the paan seller, his worst fear was realized: He recognized a man ahead of him in the line. They had been at camp together in Afghanistan. The fellow licked his lips and inched closer to the booth as if mesmerized by the vendor’s red-gummed grin and nimble fingers as he smeared red kathha and chuna on a fresh betel leaf. The veins in Ramzi’s neck throbbed. Even if the fellow recognized him, they would not acknowledge each other.

  His breath quickened. Their time at camp was long ago, and he wondered if this man was part of the same mission? He knew little about his task other than that he was to assimilate and wait. On that glorious day of victory, when, with the rest of the world, he’d watched the Twin Towers fall, he’d hoped his time among the infidels would end. But it was not to be.r />
  The man from camp took his paan, looked around with the sly delight of a thief, and, using his thumb, thrust it inside his cheek and disappeared into the throng.

  The paan seller remembered Ramzi. “Meetha paan, no coconut,” he said, his eyes bright with the pride of a man who knows his customers.

  Despite his inward panic at being known, Ramzi smiled and nodded. “How do you do it?” he asked. “Every time, your paan is delicious.”

  “It is all in the balance of chuna and kathha,” the paan seller said, rolling his head from side to side as he smeared a leaf with his special masala.

  The proportion of betel nut to lime paste was crucial to a good paan, but Ramzi came to this fellow for his perfect masala—no one around mixed the spices and chutneys quite like he did. Now he behaved as if Ramzi was one of his regulars. Was that good or bad? To leave one or two footprints might be for the best. Ramzi imagined the Queens Chronicle story following his mission . . . They’d quote this man. A paan seller on 74th Street described Ramzi Saleh as a polite man, quiet and predictable. “He loved my meetha paan, but it was always, ‘Hold the coconut.’” Ramzi smiled to himself. Not a bad epitaph.

  He stuffed the folded packet inside his cheek and turned toward the street to watch the bustle of rush-hour traffic nudge by. The heady smells of curry leaves, cardamom, and incense wafted from the many restaurants and swirled around him. In his time at Richmond Hill High, he had not met one child—well, there was one—who was grateful for the education his cover required him to provide. His teaching was scrupulously average, he knew. His biggest challenge: to remain invisible.

  He had a talent for teaching. He had been plucked from the rubble of an earthquake, all his parents’ properties ruined, and had been educated by the charity of the Great Satan itself. But it had promised and not delivered. Before the earthquake his family had been among the wealthiest in the village; afterwards they had nothing. When the American aid workers left, he was no longer hungry and ignorant, he was hungry and educated.

  When the mujahideen entered his village in western Pakistan as they fled the Russians, he had seen fear in the village elders’ eyes. He had vowed to teach all who wished to learn, so that no Pakistani would ever again know ignorance and hunger, but he was still hungry himself, as were all his pupils. He craved to be the cause of that fear he saw in his elders—he saw the respect it inspired. From the day he joined the jihad, he lost the knowledge of hunger. That was nearly twenty years ago.

  Saliva stimulated by the paan built in his mouth and he spat a stream of red liquid onto the sidewalk. Behind him a door opened and Hindi music spilled out to compete with the sounds of traffic. Ramzi’s nose twitched at the blasphemy. Bloody Hindus with their Devil’s music, idolatry, and fuzzy logic. There is no God but Allah. Praise be to Allah. And yet lounging in the street, chewing paan, and feeling contemptuously superior to Hindus brought a deep comfort and satisfaction to Ramzi. Oddly, it was like going home—his real home, not the squat little one-bedroom, eat-in-kitchen apartment on 115th Street off Liberty Avenue. There were Hindus in Richmond Hill, but not nearly so many. He lingered to drink in the sights of brazen, sari-clad Hindu whores, their faces fully exposed to him, and to the world.

  Allah is merciful. He led Ramzi to Azis. Azis had helped him find the righteous path. At the training camp he had learned the art of destruction. The American education taught him that he would always be less than they were. When the time came he would play his part.

  The earthquake had taken everything from his parents and denied him his future as a landowner. But this loss left him free for jihad. In due course, the Americans would lose their livelihoods. Husbands would lose wives, though Ramzi wondered if that would cause them pain. He doubted it. In this godforsaken nation, whores were elevated and virtuous women despised. A young girl in salwar-kameez skipped by clutching her mother’s hand. Something about her brought back the image of his laughing sister the day before the kitchen collapsed on her, and a sharp pain stabbed at his chest as if someone had slammed a knife into his heart. Soon their sisters would be taken away: a mass of bloody, twisted bodies and tangled limbs all that remained.

  The Great Satan was so naïve—had helped him to immigrate when he had shown them his certificate from the Peace Corps. And now, between his salary as a teacher and his payments from al-Qaeda, he would be able to take another wife, maybe two—virtuous Muslim women to keep his current wife, Fatima, company and produce more mujahideen for the cause.

  A group of women wearing saris and salwar-kameez glided by. How much more beautiful and elegant than the jeans and T-shirts of Richmond Hill. He should not have come to this neighborhood. The sight of these glorious hussies stirred long-dormant yearnings in Ramzi and he silently cursed himself for giving into temptation. Tears welled in his eyes, but he steeled himself. He missed his wife and children, and understood he might not live to see them again, let alone take another wife. He had pledged his life to this holy war and would do whatever was asked.

  He turned back toward the subway and headed for Azis, exchanging the noise and crush of the street for the noise and crush of Mexicans, blacks, and West Indians packed like sardines into the E. Perhaps there would be word. Perhaps today his long wait would end.

  He remembered the anticipation he felt when he first arrived in Queens. Back then, he thought his mission was imminent, and he would take the stairs down from the J train two at a time in his rush to get to the mosque. Always his heart pounded in his chest as he waited for Azis. Was today the day? He would catch Azis’s eye, his own face hot with anticipation, but Azis would shake his head discreetly and lower his eyes. Ramzi waited. He undertook reconnaissance as instructed. He reported to Azis. Time passed. In his daily life he was indistinguishable from every other Pakistani immigrant. Familiar, reliable, recognizable, known by no one.

  He knew that he should stop by the mosque on the way home. There was no excuse. He’d be right there at Sutphin Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue. But he felt no enthusiasm, no anticipation. Jihad had become rather like his day job. He went through the motions.

  By the time he got to Liberty Avenue it was dark, and the roadway was treacherous to cross. In the shade of the elevated A line, the ice never melted, and if he slipped and fell in his haste to be out of the cold, it wouldn’t be the first time. He turned onto 115th Street and climbed the steps to his front door. In his mailbox he found the usual array of bills and magazines. He clicked his tongue. What a country this was, so many magazines, so much information. The day an issue of the Herald arrived in his isolated village, the men would gather at the tea house and Ramzi would read it out loud. It was never less than six months out of date, but they were hungry for its wealth of knowledge.

  The Smithsonian had arrived. He went inside and dropped into his recliner. Such luxury, if only Fatima could see his leather chair. He flipped through the magazine to examine the pictures. Then he read the headlines and breakout paragraphs. He always did this to decide the order in which he’d read the articles. Then he’d put on a pot of coffee, slide back into his recliner, and read every word. Today he broke his routine. Five pages in he found a piece on the science of biological weaponry. The infidel never tired of telling him all he needed to know. He would not rise again until he’d read it at least twice.

  * * *

  Ramzi Saleh basked in the fortune of having the staff room at Richmond Hill High all to himself. This was a first. The place was always overcrowded and stuffy. Heat blasted from the radiator, and the musty odor of too many bodies lingered. Ramzi headed for the coffee machine, found a clean cup—Praise be to Allah, this is a great day—poured his coffee, heaped in four spoons of sugar and extra cream, and made his way toward his cramped cubbyhole at the back of the room. He raised his mug in thanks for the twenty-five-percent absentee rate due to Monday flu and dropped into his chair. Just as he finished arranging his desk exactly the way he liked it—coffee on the left, pens on the right—he heard the door fly open. Too good
to last. The sound of women’s voices reached him over the thump and hiss of the radiator. He identified them instantly. Beryl Johnson was a science teacher; Lucy Gruber a fellow math teacher.

  They kept chatting. Perhaps they couldn’t see him back here.

  “You’re too ordinary?” Lucy said. “Hello. He’s an assistant manager at Home Depot.”

  “Manager. They promoted him just before he left.”

  Ah, thought Ramzi, they were talking about Beryl’s husband. What a scoundrel. He’d run out on her two years ago for a girl just six years older than their daughter. Why would he do such a thing? Beryl was a nice enough woman, nothing special, but for an infidel whore she had a good heart. It never ceased to surprise Ramzi the way even the most humble citizens here tried to live like movie stars—to their ruin.

  He should speak up, let his presence be known, but the godless fornicators fascinated him, so he continued to eavesdrop. As they loitered by the coffee machine, Ramzi could see their bobbing shadows on the linoleum.

  “It makes me sick to admit I went to an online dating site, but what could I do? I was so lonely,” Beryl said, her voice choked with emotion. “I wanted someone to hold me, to be tender.”

  “I know,” Lucy replied.

  Ramzi detected a catty undertone. Beryl should hold her tongue—this Lucy was no friend, and besides, why would anyone publicize their shame in this way? Living among the godless affected him, moderating his true beliefs. He knew Beryl was contemptible, but he pitied her anyway. He had known her from his first day at this school. He had been bewildered, not knowing where to go and what to do, and Beryl had found him wandering in the corridor.