"Hey, how you doing?" Paul says when they meet. "What'll it be?"
Lenny hesitates for a moment. "Can I have a go at one of those sweet, little machine pistols, the modified Glocks?"
"The modified Glock 19s? You know they're not legal in Texas…." But Paul decides the range is quiet at this particular moment and without a word leads him to the far end and punches in the security code for a small steel locker there. "We can go with this, but one quick magazine and that's it."
Paul sets him up. Lenny puts on ear protectors and safety goggles and looks down range at the target—the silhouette of a man running. He picks up the gun, which has no extended stock and will be hard to control, releases the safety, and crouches, two hands on the weapon. He looks through the open sights at the target. His arms shake violently: bam, bam, bam. The bullets pour from the muzzle in a staccato burst. He's emptied a 15-shot clip in seconds. A broad smile fills his face. "I smoked 'em. Goddamn, that's good." He takes off the ear protectors and looks at Paul, who does not comment on Lenny's accuracy.
"Want to go again? Once more and then we have to switch weapons."
The scene is repeated. Lenny, who is no experienced marksman, covers all the bases. If that rascal target moves, he's got him covered. Paper man could run for the door, and Lenny's scatter pattern would stop him in his tracks. At the end of the escapade Lenny looks elated.
Paul has brought Lenny along over a period of months. He suggested that Lenny stick to the fundamentals, and both agreed that target pistols were the place to start. He has purchased a five-shot Ruger—small, lightweight, and easily concealable—it's the weapon Ethan, Portia's ex, used the night a few years ago when he shot Florentino in his own bar. And a bigger, more powerful standard 9mm Glock. Today he works diligently for almost an hour. Both the Ruger and the Glock see service. Truth be told, Lenny's not bad. He's no pro, but he has nothing to be ashamed of.
At the end he asks Paul if he shoots well enough to graduate from the police academy. Paul's diplomatic. "We're making good progress. I don't think it will be too long now." On the way out, Lenny palms his instructor an extra Benjamin.
He enjoys his sessions. It's a break from the gym and his walks—and the low-key routine of early retirement. He also likes skill building. And more to the point, today it has taken him away from the insoluble problem of the barista's identity.
Lenny had pretty much put Mrs. Babcock on the back burner. And then it happened. The next evening he was taking a constitutional around the block, and there was the looker with the highlighted, wiry ponytail and the perfectly shaped bottom, walking two Dobermans. One was doing its business on the Gleesons' lawn. He smiled. She smiled. Normally Lenny didn't stop to make small talk with neighbors. Walks were a time for meditation. This was different. Mrs. Babcock was a person of interest. He loved that term from all the police procedurals he has seen on Netflix and Amazon. He paused and admired the dogs—personally he was indifferent to dogs, but now was not the time for a confession. She and her husband had bought them in Chicago and brought them back to Houston a year ago, she said. There was an accent that he couldn't place. They are Mr. and Mrs. Sabra, she explained and then added that Mr. Sabra was not quite Mr. Sabra anymore. She fell silent and let out a rasping, little laugh that sounded like rusty garden shears closing.
Finally she said, "I am Naavah Ben David. We are renting down the street." She pointed to a yellow structure with the twin dormers and a wrought iron fence. "The one next to the teardown with the Gwendolyn Properties FOR SALE sign in the yard. We're Israeli. My husband N.K. is doing a tour with the Israeli Consulate here." When she asked him about himself, Lenny gave her the standard details and mentioned that she and his girlfriend Portia would like each other. "Babcock" never came up. He was right: she hadn't noticed him watching her and the barista on Christmas morning.
That evening after dark, Lenny strolled by the house. It was as Naavah described. Nothing unusual about a yellow clapboard house with dormers and a porch with a swing. Some lights shone though curtains in the back where he thought the kitchen was. The fence was perhaps sturdier than he might have expected, but they were renting. The satellite TV dish on the roof looked a bit oversized to him. Maybe it had something to do with his being with the consulate. Communications. If she bought and used under an assumed name, what difference did it make to him? And Lenny D., of all people, had no right to call out someone over a hidden identity. He looked at the decrepit red brick ranch for sale next door. Empty, he decided, and harmless. No, it was only the Israeli couple's house that worried him.
Maybe it was time to call in Portia to do a little sleuthing. It was odd that Naavah did not know better. Mrs. Babcock was a security risk. She was an Israeli, a user, subject to blackmail or even kidnapping, and her supplier was Egyptian. Well, maybe there was more cooperation between the two counties that either side wanted to admit. Could she really be that clueless? Or maybe, he admitted to himself, he didn't understand how completely addiction took over a person's life.
Snorri waited outside that evening in his battered Toyota Corolla until Sammy came out of the Starbucks. There was no missing him. He looked just like the guy in Lenny's photo, minus the Santa hat. He rode away on a little putt-putt Vespa—with Michigan plates. Snorri followed, and in fifteen minutes they pulled onto the FDU campus. Sammy headed for student parking, and he made his way to a visitor's lot. It was a split second decision, but he pulled out a Dale Samuelson credit card for entry. It was surprisingly easy to follow him into the biomedical engineering building and up the stairs. Snorri looked into a large room filled with desktops and over-large monitors. Outside again, he sat on a bench for several hours until Sammy emerged and walked to one of the residential colleges and disappeared. When he didn't emerge for hours, Snorri wondered if graduate students could live in residential colleges. Eventually, he gave up and headed for his Corolla, but not before Google informed him that graduate students lived off campus. Was he crashing or did he have a girlfriend? It would have to keep for another time.
The next day was frustrating. Dale Samuelson visited the engineering school, pretending to be interested in enrolling in a Chem. E. master's program. The woman who welcomed him was effusive in her praise of FDU engineering, but most of their graduate students entered the Ph.D. program. And yes, they were very cosmopolitan in their admissions. He didn't dare ask about Egypt. Too pointed. He picked up an application form and was about to leave when the woman asked if he'd like a tour. Well, yes, he would. It too turned out to be useless—mostly bricks and mortar and platitudes. And he couldn't very well ask the tour guide if she knew his friend Sammy A.—I don't know his last name. The surveillance approach was going nowhere. He swung by the Student Center about noon, hoping he might spot Sammy, but if he was at any of the tables drinking coffee or shooting the shit with his friends, Snorri could not spot him. He found a locator website for FDU students, but it wasn't any help. Noodling around on it would only raise suspicions.
Nothing. Snorri had come up empty.
4.
Lenny can't contain himself. He's blunt: "Naavah is using under a false name, as Mrs. Babcock, and her husband is with the Israeli Consulate. A young Egyptian is supplying her—an Israeli official's wife, dependent on an Egyptian for her scores, if you can believe. Time for a little reconnaissance."
"Lenny, stay out of it," Portia said. "We've been through this. You know what? Even if you're right about everything, our government is not going to touch her. She's a hot potato. He's a graduate student. They could deport him or maybe just encourage him to leave. And so?" Her look said, is this what Lenny D. wants to do with his time—bust a graduate student who's a small time dealer on the side? Some great adventure. Or maybe this is what Lenny thought he saw in her dismissive look.
"A neighborly coffee, let's have them over, Naavah and her husband, for coffee and get to know them. Nothing elaborate, coffee and desert or wine maybe. It's good to know your neighbors."
That's how N
aavah and N.K. Ben David happened to be sitting in Portia and Lenny's living room a few nights later over coffee and carrot cake.
Portia watched Naavah take in the mismatched decor. "I know, we're a blended family. The couch was mine, the chairs his, and of course the hideous marble parrot on the mantle is from Lenny's side of the family."
"No worries, glad to be invited. We don't get the chance to meet many Americans informally. Most of what we do socially is with other diplomats and their families or at various command performance functions. Anyway, tell me about you guys, how did you two get together?"
"I picked her up at a bar a few years ago. I spun a few stories that she liked and the rest is history. Isn't that right, Portia?"
"Sure, something like that. So Lenny's a retired securities trader and I sell software to businesses, nothing very glamorous, I'm afraid. You guys live the glittery life. Tell us."
"I wouldn't say so," N.K. began. "It sounds exciting, but most of what I do is low level press releases, VISA applications, show the flag at public events. But it's nice to be posted in different parts of the world. You get to see how people live. And Naavah, it's hard for her. Most places she can't really work. So she can get bored. And there are a lot of social functions where we talk to bored people. They bore us, we bore them, and we all drink too much."
"Well, the stereotype is that a lot of drugs and contraband gets moved around in those diplomatic pouches," Lenny probed.
"Much less than you might think. Especially in second tier cities where we have often been posted: Montreal, Marseilles, Alexandria, Vladivostok."
That's the way the evening went—the smallest of small talk and nothing more. Lenny had nothing to hang his hat on—except some unsubstantiable impressions. N.K. was smart, smart, smart, and careful about what he disclosed. He was paunchy and balding, but he exuded intelligence and energy. What was he doing in Houston as a midlevel consular officer? And why so many also-ran postings—Vladivostok? It made no sense. He couldn't read Naavah. One minute she seemed very savvy and able: "In the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, a one state solution is a no state solution." But then she would say something inane about the Kardashians.
Later as they were cleaning up, Portia said, "Okay, I'll grant you they were not what I was expecting. But I'll tell you one thing, that guy does more than speak to Rotary Clubs around the world."
"Yeah, told you. Maybe sometime you'll do that girls-only lunch."
His only handle on this was the barista. What was he going to do, spy on the Israeli Consulate? The swagger in Lenny dearly wanted to, but the realist informed him he was not an operator, not in the sense he would need to be. His only way forward was to keep Sammy under loose surveillance. Effectively that meant going to Starbucks most days and buying a Grande or a Grande in overdrive and chatting amiably with the person of interest. On days when he bought the laced coffee, he was careful to get it to-go and flush it down the toilet at home.
One morning he was sitting in one of the leatherette chairs, and Naavah walked in. He called out, and she smiled and came over. Turbulence welled in Sammy's face. What have we here? How do they know one another?
She looked down on a sprawling, contented Lenny. "Hey, this is a surprise. Didn't realize this was one of your haunts."
"Yeah, I like to get out of the house. As I try to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life, I find I do better with noise and people, if you can believe."
"Thanks for having us over the other night. As N.K. said, we really don't know many ordinary Americans. Sorry, I didn't mean that the way it sounded."
"No offense taken."
"So where is your family from, anyway? Every American, especially those who are not ordinary, has a family story. And that would be you."
"I don't know about that, but actually since you're Israeli, Jewish, you might find it interesting that I was born in Slovenia of Jewish parents, the original family name was Durenstein. But I've been here since age four."
"You got me. I never think of Slovenia as a place Jews are from. We should talk sometime, but now I've got to get a coffee and meet someone. Nice to see you again."
He watched the bright bob of her ponytail as she went to the counter. Out of Lenny's earshot, she whispered, "Today, just coffee, coffee only." She turned and saw that Lenny was safely reading something on his phone. "More later, Sammy."
5.
The baby cried and squirmed, his face flushed with fever. She opened the backdoor of the car and reached in to feel his forehead. He's warm. Some baby Tylenol and then a bottle when they got upstairs. Edie Villanueva turned from the infant and slipped her laden backpack over her thin shoulders. She unbuckled Leon from the rear-facing car seat, hoisted his flailing body and kissed him. "Oh, no, sweet baby, mama's got you. You're going to be fine," and she hummed a Spanish melody.
It was her standard routine—expect for Leon's fever: out of her FDU cubbyhole by five, at daycare by 5:15 or 5:20, and home by 5:40, if she didn't have to stop for groceries.
She climbed the two flights of stairs, unlocked the apartment door, and with practiced maternal skill, she put a bottle in the microwave, went to the medicine chest, took the Tylenol from it, and spooned the red liquid into Leon's angry mouth. She set him in a rocker and wound it, and only then did she slip off the backpack and let it fall to the floor by her desk. Tonight's student papers were just where they needed to be. Now he seemed calmer, at least he had stopped crying. Some nights when he was colicky, she got nothing done. She was hopeful the Tylenol would bring down the fever, and if it wasn't an ear infection, she could get something done after dinner.
It was easier when Barry was home, but this week her boyfriend, Leon's father, was away on business in San Francisco. He could have gotten dinner started while she changed Leon and comforted him. Soon she would have to change him, but for the moment she let him sleep in the moving swing.
The three of them were comfortable in the third-floor apartment they rented in the brightly painted, wood frame house near the university. She worked at preparing dinner at the far end of the large front room that served as kitchen and dining room-living room. At the back, far from the stairwell and the noise it conveyed, were their bedroom and an office with a bed for Leon—though many nights he slept with them.
She had barely gotten the leftover chicken casserole into the microwave when the phone rang. "Hello, love, I ducked out of a meeting to see how your day was."
"It was fine till I picked up Leon," and she told Barry about his sick son.
"Oh, pobrecito. So sorry. And how's the love of my life?"
"Overworked, harried, and missing you. Both you, and another pair of hands if you want an honest answer." Leon started to scream, and she thought about their downstairs neighbors, two guys, also FDU graduate students. "Look, I've got to run. You can hear the monster in the background. See you tomorrow night. Love you."
They, her downstairs neighbors, were polite, but private. She and Barry had invited them to dinner, but they declined. At times she felt they were almost evasive. Earlier on, when she had dropped by with a coffee cake—why not be neighborly? she said to herself—one of them, a dark, curly-haired Middle Easterner, she thought, had come out into the hall to accept it and seemed to block her line of sight. Only when he was sure he had eclipsed it, did he offer a perfunctory thank you. "Well," Barry said, when she told him about it, "we are all passing through, that's all. It's not as if we actually live in a neighborhood with them."
She finally got the child changed and into a Snuggie. She put him in the big bed between two bolsters. She would be there for him if he fussed in the night. Then she turned to a stack of papers to grade for Dr. Lopez-Smithton's course in Spanish literature in translation. Maybe, just maybe, when she got them out of the way and if Leon continued to sleep, she could get to her dissertation. How was it, she wondered, that at twenty-five her own needs already seemed to come last? She loved Leon, God, she loved him. She loved Barry, and she was glad for
the university fellowship even with the teaching obligations. And some days she was resentful of all of it. Would she ever finish her dissertation and get her degree? Not that she thought the world would much care about her thoughts on the feminist novel in Latin America.
Finally she climbed into bed beside little Leon and clipped a tiny reading light to a book of Gabriela Mistral's poems. The work of the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature was a must for her, more an obligation than a pleasure.
Her cell phone buzzed beside her. It was Barry's voice. "Hola, mi amor. How's Leon?"
"Asleep next to me. Okay for now. What are you up to?"
"Nothing. I just broke away from dinner with Faraday and Klastan to see how things were. Nothing to report here. I'm hoping we can come to some sort of agreement tonight before I fly home in the morning. But you, what about you?"
She suppressed her discontent. "Promise me something, okay? I'm slogging through the Mistral stuff, and she always makes me think of Neruda. You know she discovered him. Anyway, I love his work. Here's what. The poem of his I like best is, well, in English, The Heights of Macchu Picchu. So promise me one day, maybe when Leon is old enough, we can go to Peru as a family and see Machu Picchu for ourselves."
"Yeah, of course, how could I deny you that? Okay, I love you, and I'm going back to the salt mines. Sleep tight and kiss the little one for me."
She did just that and pulled the heavy quilt up over them. Then she got up and opened the window widely. It was blowy outside and the air billowed in. Perfect. She loved sleeping in the coolness under the quilt, a rare treat in Houston. In the back of the building if was perfectly silent and almost at once she fell into a deep sleep.
The Nano-Thief: A Lenny D. Novel (Lenny. D. Novels Book 1) Page 3