Orso, drawn by the angry tone, came to lean on Cassidy’s desk. “What’s going on, Mike?”
“You, butt out,” Cherry said.
“Go fuck yourself. This is my squad room.”
Cherry was one of those men who always teetered on the edge of anger. It took little to push him over. He stood up, fists clenched. Blood rose in his face.
“Careful, Tony,” Cassidy said. “He’s an FBI agent, and Mr. Hoover’s boys are a rough-and-ready bunch of accountants and lawyers.”
Susdorf slapped the clipboard down on the desk with a bang. “All right. All right. Paul,” he said to Cherry, “would you mind giving me a minute with Detective Cassidy? Detective Orso, may I ask the same of you?”
Orso winked at Cassidy and went off toward the coffeepot. Cherry kicked a chair out of his way as he left the squad room.
Susdorf pulled up a chair and sat down facing Cassidy. He scrubbed his face with his hand and sighed. “I don’t understand you, Detective Cassidy. I don’t understand you at all.”
31
“I don’t much understand you either. Of course, I don’t give a shit. This business of understanding people is way overrated. Live and let live, I say. Still, what part of you was giving Agent Susdorf so much trouble?” Orso accepted his martini from Al and took an appreciative sip. “Mother’s milk.” He raised the glass to the after-work crowd thronging the bar at Toots Shor’s. “God, I love this place. And some people say there isn’t a heaven.”
“He was disappointed in my lack of commitment and trust. We are at war with a godless system that wants to destroy our way of life. We should all be working for the common cause of freedom and democracy, and he doesn’t feel that I am giving my all.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“He wanted to know if I was a friend of Joe Stalin’s and if I wanted Stalin’s people to be running this country.”
“Isn’t Stalin dead?”
“Yeah, but his people, Tony. His people.”
“And the country’s going to fall because you did what?”
“I have been holding back on the Ingram case.”
“Shame on you. So what’d you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“More than he deserves.”
“When he was asking me questions, he forgot to ask the one he should have thought of first. How was Stanley Fisher connected to Alex Ingram? Why didn’t he ask?”
“’Cause he already knew?”
“Right.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means they’re hiding things from us. They know things that we don’t know, and trust doesn’t run two ways.”
“Yeah. Too bad Fisher didn’t say something before he died.”
“He did.”
Orso started, and some martini sloshed from his glass. “What did he say?” He licked the gin from his wrist.
“Sweet shine.”
“What?”
“He said it twice. There was something before and then he said, ‘Shine. Sweet shine.’ And then there was something at the end like ‘ear’ or ‘mere.’ I asked him again, but he was going. That was it.”
“Great. Clears up everything.”
“The man died saying it. It has to mean something.”
“Sweet shine?”
“He said it twice.”
* * *
Cassidy met Dylan for dinner at Minetta Tavern, where they had first eaten together.
They ordered, and Cassidy let Dylan talk while he watched her. Did she look different now that he knew what he knew? Did she act the same? Was it an act? She glanced up at him and smiled, and his heart squeezed in his chest.
“Is this boring you?”
“No.”
She told him about the piece she was working on now, the replacement for the smashed sculpture. Part of it would be welded steel, and part would be forged bronze. They were using a foundry in Connecticut to pour the bronze. It was run by Basques from northern Spain who spoke a language that sounded like rocks cracking. It would represent a man breaking loose of earthly bounds. “At least that’s what I think he said. Sometimes Ribera’s English is a little strange.”
Cassidy pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette.
“What’s wrong, Michael?”
“Nothing.”
“You haven’t said a word.”
“I was happy to listen to you.”
“Did something happen?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Something at work?” She watched him with grave eyes.
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s nothing to tell.” He picked up the bottle to pour the last of the wine, but she put her hand over her glass.
“I have to go back to work.”
“Oh. All right.”
“We’re going to be working all night. That’s how he is when he gets toward the end of something.” She took a drag from his cigarette and gave it back. “I don’t know when we’ll finish. I think I’ll sleep at my place.”
“All right.”
She shook her head as if it was not the answer she wanted. She got up and came around and kissed him and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He watched her walk away, straight backed, head held high, aware of the men watching her, and unconcerned. He sensed how much he was losing and wondered whether betrayal was always the reward for caring.
* * *
That night the dream he had had in the hospital came again. He was on a dark street. Someplace familiar. Featureless buildings, but someplace he walked often. He knew it but did not recognize it. He was scared. Why was he scared? Something waited for him ahead in the darkness. There was a darker darkness ahead of him where something waited. He wanted to stop, but he kept walking. Victor Amado stood on the sidewalk ahead of him and told him to go back. Why was Amado telling him to go back? He kept walking. Amado disappeared. Now he was at the point of danger. Now. Turn around. It’s here. Turn around!
Cassidy woke gasping for breath. He got out of bed and went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face to wash away the last of sleep, to wake completely from the dream. He went into the living room and lit a cigarette and looked out across the dark river. It was a dream. Just a dream. It was the second time he’d had it.
In the distance, a train loaded with dressed carcasses rumbled along the elevated track leading into the meatpacking district and then stopped with a metal squeal of brakes. Crofoot had asked if Cassidy had found anything in Ingram’s locker at the theater dressing room. How had he known that Cassidy had searched the locker? Nobody had been there but Victor Amado. Is that why Amado was in the dream? What was he warning Cassidy about? Amado had been tortured to death. By Crofoot? Maybe. Or by someone he knew. Susdorf hid that he knew of the relationship between Ingram and Fisher. Everyone was lying to him. His mind spun through the details, but he could get no grip. Ingram had died by mistake under torture, and what he had hidden had not been found. Amado was tortured to find it, tortured with a knife while Ingram’s torturer had used pliers. Fisher had simply been executed. Two different torturers were looking for what Ingram hid, but someone else was cleaning up the loose ends of an operation. Whoever it was wasn’t interested in whether Stanley Fisher knew where Ingram’s photographs were. He just wanted him dead. And what about Perry Werth, the salesman? Where the hell was he?
He turned on the lamp and moved it so it threw light on the gray cold-water pipe that ran to the ceiling in the corner of the room. Two days ago he had brought the coin he found in Victor Amado’s locker down from where he had hidden it in the squad room and had taped it there to the pipe with gray tape, and even knowing where it was he could not see it and had to feel for it. He scraped the tape loose with a fingernail and pulled it free and held it close to the light to examine it. It remained what it had always been—a common fifty-cent piece, indistinguish
able from the millions like it in pockets and purses all over the country. He flicked it with his thumb, and it spun up into the air and then dropped to his open palm. He flipped it again, higher. It spun up in the light toward the high ceiling. As it fell, a boat horn blew on the river, and for a moment Cassidy took his eye off the coin. It hit his hand, bounced, ticked the table, fell to the floor, and rattled under the easy chair near the window.
“Shit.”
He got down on his belly and reached deep under the chair and found it way at the back. It felt different. One edge of the coin felt thicker than the other. He held it to the light. Was one edge higher?
“Jesus.” His heart raced.
He carried the coin into the kitchen and turned on the bright light over the counter and found a small paring knife. He stuck the tip in the crack where the two sides were separating and twisted, and the coin came apart. One side flipped away, rolled on the counter, and then fell over and rocked to a stop. The coin was hollow. The side in Cassidy’s hand held a tiny piece of film. Cassidy tipped the coin toward the light, but he could make out nothing on the film. He put the coin down and protected it with an overturned coffee cup and went to the bathroom to find the tweezers Gwen had left. He found a magnifying glass in a desk drawer.
He uncovered the hollow coin and teased up one edge of the film square with the knife point until he could grip it with the tweezers. He lifted it out. There was another square of film beneath it. He held the film up to the light and looked at it through the magnifier, but he still could not make out the image. He carefully put the film on the counter and pried up the next piece. There was another under it. There were five in all, five tiny pieces of film for which four men had died.
32
“Cassidy, it’s six o’clock in the morning.” The door opened as far as the safety chain would let it.
“I need a favor, Howie.”
“Come back in a couple of hours.”
“It’s important.”
“Yeah, yeah. Without it the world goes up in a mushroom cloud.”
“Howie, what’s going on? Who is it?” A woman’s querulous voice from a distant bedroom.
“Mike Cassidy. He needs a favor. Go back to sleep, Marnie.”
“Tell him to go to hell.”
“Go to hell. Come on in. I’m awake now anyway.”
Cassidy stepped past Howie Lodin into the basement apartment of a brownstone on West 4th. Lodin was a short, wide man in his thirties in a shabby blue cotton robe over striped pajamas. His hair was afly from sleep. He closed the door and led Cassidy down the hall to a small studio. The walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of New York City street scenes: a couple kissing in front of a movie theater advertising The Big Heat; a woman in a fur coat and high heels dancing with a man in a diaper and top hat on New Year’s Eve; a street fair, garlanded with strings of lights, crowded with booths, dense with people, the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy; a dead man in a gutter leaking dark blood, one arm flung up on the pavement, his hat resting against his face; pigeons covering the statue of William Tecumseh Sherman at the south end of Central Park; laughing cops leading a sullen, handcuffed prisoner into a station house. There were a number of cameras on shelves near the window that looked out on a scruffy patch of garden.
Lodin took a cigarette from a box on the desk and lit it with a kitchen match scraped on the radiator. He coughed up morning phlegm and scratched his chest where his pajama top was unbuttoned. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait till I have coffee. I’m shit for brains till then. You want some?”
“Sure.” Cassidy followed him into the kitchen.
After the second strong and bitter cup, Lodin lit another cigarette, coughed, spat into the sink, and said, “What do you need?”
From somewhere at the back of the house Marnie’s voice called, “Are you spitting in the sink? Howie, are you?”
“No,” he yelled back, and raised his eyebrows to Cassidy as if to say, What are you going to do? Then he quietly turned on the tap for a moment.
Cassidy took an envelope from his pocket and slipped one of the squares of film onto the zinc top of the kitchen table. Lodin bent to look, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“Microfilm,” he said. “Huh.” He bent closer.
“What?”
“You mind if I take a closer look?”
“Go ahead.”
Lodin went out of the room and came back with tweezers and a handheld viewer. He slipped the square of microfilm into a slot and held the viewer up to the window light. “Huh.”
“Come on.”
“Color.”
“So?”
“Unusual. Mostly you use microfilm to archive stuff, papers, historic documents, newspapers, store it for years, a couple of hundred, even. You don’t use color for that. Color degrades easier than black-and-white, so if you’re archiving, you use black-and-white.”
“What do you use color for?”
“Well, if color is important to the image, like with a painting or something like that, an interior, and you don’t care if the image lasts a hundred years, then you take it with color micro, but even if you don’t care if it lasts, you’ve got to store it correctly. Too much heat, and the image degrades fast. My guess is this guy left it on a radiator or something.”
“What do you mean?” Cassidy’s voice was sharp.
“Well, I can see that it was color, and I can see that there were images, but it’s all a blur now. See for yourself.” He passed the viewer to Cassidy.
Cassidy held it to the light. There were streaks of color, shapeless forms, but nothing identifiable. “Shit.” Ingram must have hidden the coin near a heat source in the theater wall behind his locker.
“I’ve got something that’ll give us a bigger image in my studio. Maybe you can see something with it.”
Lodin projected the image on a patch of bare wall. It was bigger but no clearer.
“Jesus…”
“Bad, huh.”
“I was hoping … I’ve been chasing something. I thought this was going to clear it up. Is there any way to get the images back?”
“We can try developing them. We can do some things in the darkroom, dodging, burning, maybe clarify some stuff that’s just mud in the viewer.”
Cassidy hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“What’s the deal? You said these were important.”
“Yeah.”
“So? Let’s go. How many negs have you got?”
“Five.”
“Come on. It’ll take no time.”
“Howie, there’s a problem.”
“Yeah, there’s a problem. Someone screwed up the negs, but we’ll get something.”
“No. Look, four people have been killed over what’s on these negatives. Knowing about them is dangerous. I don’t want to put you in that position.”
“So what are you going to do? You’ve got to see them, right? Are you going to take them to the police lab?”
“I can’t do that. I don’t have anyone I could trust over there.”
“Well, then?”
“Is there some way I could do it myself? You teach me. You tell me what to do. You don’t see the pictures.”
“No. You fuck up the negatives, they’re gone. And there’s no way to teach you in the next hour what it took me fifteen years to learn. You want to get images off these negs, you’re going to have to let me try.”
“I don’t know what we’re going to find, but you can’t tell Marnie.”
“Okay.”
“If anyone finds out, they’ll come after you.”
“I heard you. I understand. Now do you want to do this or not?”
“Yes. If you’re sure.”
The darkroom was in a converted pantry off the kitchen. Howie talked while he worked. “During the war, we used microfilm to ship images, you know, to save space and weight. Like V-mail. You must’ve gotten V-mail. They take a picture of the letter over here, sen
d it over there as microfilm, then turn it back into a printed letter over there. And of course the spies, the Resistance, they all used that stuff. Little cameras you could hide. You reduce the image to a microdot, stick it under the stamp on a postcard, and send it off to your Aunt Fanny with an innocent note like, ‘Weather is here, wish you were beautiful.’ Only Aunt Fanny is a guy in a safe house somewhere and he knows the score. He retrieves the microdot, and now he’s got the plans for the Hitler bunker.” He pulled an eight-by-ten print from the chemical bath. “There. Okay. Let’s take a look.” He hung it on a line with clothespins at two of the corners, turned on the light, and they moved in. “Shit. That’s not much, is it?” The print was a blur of indistinct colors. “Okay. I’ve got some ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Go sit down. Don’t hover. Let me work.”
In the end there was a stack of discarded prints on a table near the enlarger, and the best print from each negative hung on the line. Cassidy’s hopes had dwindled bit by bit as Howie had handed each of the first four prints to him to hang up. They still showed indistinct shapes. Some of the shapes could be recognized as a table or chair, or the bright glow of a lamp, but there was no indication of where they were. There were darker shapes that were people, but they were featureless, unidentifiable.
Howie pinned up the last print and stepped aside so Cassidy could see. There was something in Howie’s face that made his hopes rise again. Then he saw the print.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Howie said.
“Howie—” He started the warning, but Howie stopped him.
“I know. I know. I’m not stupid. I won’t say anything. Who’d believe it?”
“Not even Marnie.”
“No. Tell Marnie, I might as well put it on the radio.”
They went back into the studio to wait while the prints dried.
“He had to have some sort of camera that no one would notice, right? Something small that he could palm.”
“Or something that no one would look at twice. Here, I’ll show you. I’ve got a few things I liberated during the war.”
Lodin opened a drawer under the shelves of cameras and took out a shoe box held shut by tape. He cleared a space on the desk for it, slit the tape with a box cutter, took off the top, and arranged the little cameras in a row.
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