Black Sand

by William Caunitz

“Your first lesson in the street is to follow orders and don’t get involved,” McGovern said. “Do you know why you’re spending your first tour here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s so you won’t get into any kind of trouble that could jam you up while you’re on probation and cause you to lose your job.”

  Lucas looked around the balcony and saw several classmates contentedly watching the movie.

  During the next five months Lucas and the other recruits spent their field duties stashed away in movie houses, garages, and firehouses.

  Graduation.

  Chief Clerk Flynn read out the names off the assignment sheet. “Lucas, T.”

  “Here, sir.”

  “The Six-seven.”

  Lucas ran into McGovern on his second tour.

  “Teddy, now that you’re out of the Academy, how’d you like me to teach you the real Job?”

  “I’d like it a lot.”

  Cormick McGovern commenced his in-service training course. He showed Lucas how to maintain two memo books, one for the bosses and a protector, a book that contained altered versions of each entry, designed to cover your ass. He demonstrated the correct way to search a prisoner, warning him not to be squeamish about searching women. “They can kill you just as dead.”

  McGovern gave him his trust/no trust list. Trust: Italians, wiseguys, Jews, Greeks, Irish, WASPs, Hispanics, except Puerto Ricans. No trust: Hookers, junkies, dealers, FBI, newsmen, West Indians, all lawyers, girlfriends. Golden rule: Never tell your wife, your girlfriend, neighbor, relative, friend anything about the Job, especially how much money you earn. He told Teddy about one of his friends who had died. When the grieving widow went to the pension bureau to inquire about Patrolman Bill Murphy’s pension, she was advised that no Patrolman Murphy had died. However, a Lieutenant Bill Murphy had recently expired. “Now there was a cop who knew how to keep his mouth shut,” McGovern said.

  Cormick McGovern’s public relations tenet: send the following cards to businessmen on your post – Christmas, Hanukkah, bar mitzvah, Holy Communion, confirmation, weddings, get well, and condolences.

  Three years later Lucas was transferred into one of the department’s plainclothes gambling units. McGovern’s final lesson was: “Teddy, my lad, never go back.”

  Six years later Lucas found himself the Second Whip in Second Homicide. The district took in the Ninth, Tenth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Precincts. He and his old field training officer had kept in touch through occasional telephone conversations, met at a local watering hole, had dinner together once or twice a year. Lucas was surprised one day when he read in the Personal Orders that Cormick McGovern had been dumped out of the Six-seven and into the Fourteenth during one of the Job’s mass corruption upheavals.

  Lucas telephoned his friend. “What happened?”

  “A lad with a year in the Job bragged to his girlfriend about the Christmas list and then a month later stopped seeing her. I don’t know what they’re taking into the Job these days.”

  “Are they taking care of you at the Fourteenth?”

  “’Tis a lovely house to work in, Teddy. The roll call man and I are old friends. I’m out there meeting people and sending out my greeting cards, making friends.”

  The following June, Second District Homicide found itself swamped with homicides coming off the docks in the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Precincts. Lucas looked up his old friend. They met in the back of Roth’s liquor store. Sipping Irish whiskey from a mug, McGovern said, “It’s Denny McKay and his bunch.”

  “What’s going on?” Lucas asked.

  “A leprechaun who drives a forklift on the dock, whispered into my ear that some young turks are trying to wrestle control from McKay.”

  “Will you nose around for me, see if you can dig up anything that will stand in court?”

  “Will do, Teddy. I’ll give you a call in a day or two,” McGovern said.

  Three days later Cormick McGovern’s body was found lying face up at the end of Pier Thirty-eight. His features had been pounded into gore; fourteen bullets had mutilated his body; someone had defecated on his face. His shield had been torn from his uniform and was missing. The word that seeped through the pall of silence that fell over the docks was that Denny McKay had ordered McGovern killed because he had found out something about the killings that had been done on McKay’s orders. But Teddy Lucas did not have to be told that. He knew that his friend had died because he had been poking around asking questions, speaking to the people to whom he had sent greeting cards.

  Lucas did not get his chance to get at McKay. The district commander had the Second Whip transferred. The forty-nine read: “His personal friendship with the victim precludes objectivity.”

  Ten years later and some months later, despite a maximum effort by the NYPD to nail McGovern’s killers, the case folder was stored with the rest of the unsolved homicides in the old record room of the Second District Homicide Squad. And like the rest of the homicide folders, it was weighed down by the perfunctory addition of semiannual DD 14, Resumé of Homicide Case forms.

  Lucas would visit the old record room from time to time and sit in a musty corner with the McGovern folder. He would read through the file, looking for any additional facts; there never were any. He’d study the crime scene photos of his friend’s battered body and recall the vibrant man who used to stash him in the Loews Kings. Time had distilled Lucas’s rage into pure and abiding hatred for McKay and his people. C of D Edgeworth’s assignment to work with Vassos had given Lucas another shot at McKay. The Job has a strange way of giving you another turn in the batter’s box, he thought, turning onto his side and closing his eyes.

  Tomorrow was a big day.

  Trevor Hughes walked out of the lobby of the Plaza Hotel and stopped on top of the steps to admire the urban view laid out before him. Hansom cabs and taxis cluttered the street; a stream of people flowed along Fifth Avenue; stylish mannequins stood in Bergdorf’s windows; a reggae band played in the plaza.

  Hughes took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Everything was going as he had planned; he felt wonderful. With half a million dollars, plus his pension and investments, he could continue to live the good life without his wife. He adjusted his tie and moved down the steps, wondering why the man with the ring was so insistent on meeting him now, at eleven o’clock at night. Just like him, he thought. Secretive to a fault. “Wear a bright yellow tie and walk north along Central Park West,” he had said when he telephoned an hour earlier. “Sit on the thirtieth bench along the park wall. I’ll meet you there tonight at eleven, and we’ll make arrangements for the delivery of the initiation fee.”

  “Why not come to my hotel?”

  “Walls have ears, Trevor, or have you forgotten? I stretched a point by having lunch with you there.”

  He went west on Central Park South and then turned at Columbus Circle. Walking north along Central Park West, Hughes painstakingly counted park benches. When he reached the right one, he sat down. A bicyclist whooshed past, blowing his whistle, startling him. Eerie night sounds floated out of the park. More than a little spooked, he looked around. The park side of the street was dark. On the other side, people strolled in much brighter light. On his side he could see people moving north a long way from him. A black man on a skateboard wove his way toward him.

  Hughes felt terribly isolated and vulnerable. A chilling thought popped into his mind. He was alone; why couldn’t they have met him in the lobby or in some other public place? My God! I’ve allowed greed to overcome my common sense. He leaped to his feet. A rustle behind him caused him to whirl, his scared eyes searching the shadows in the bushes on the other side of the low stone wall. Seeing nothing, he turned to cross to safety on the other side of the street. He started to run. The skateboarder wove in front of him and pivoted to an abrupt stop, blocking his path.

  Hughes saw only a mouthful of flashing white teeth. He heard a pop and felt himself backpedaling, his arms flailing out at his sides. He cru
mpled onto the bench. Clouds were forming over his eyes, but he was able to make out the smiling black face that looked down at him.

  “You’ve killed me,” Hughes said, and died.

  The skater lifted his brightly colored shirt and tucked the silenced .38 caliber S & W Chief into his waistband. He pulled a gravity knife from his back pocket and popped the blade out. Bending over Hughes’s body he cut out the trouser pockets and dumped them and their contents into a paper bag. He stripped off the dead man’s wristwatch and wedding ring and added them to the collection.

  He looked around. A lone taxi sped past. The skater pushed off on his board. At Seventy-second Street he jumped the curb into the roadway and whirled to stop on the driver’s side of a double-parked automobile.

  Denny McKay rolled down the window.

  “A piece of cake,” the skater said, passing McKay the bag.

  He opened it and looked inside. “Is it all here?”

  “Yeah, it’s all there.”

  “You didn’t get stupid and grab a souvenir, I hope.”

  “M’man,” protested the skater, “I bees a motherfuckin’ professional.”

  “See ya ’round.” The window slipped up and the skater danced off into the night.

  7

  Colonel Dimitri Pappas braked for the red light on Amalias Street. Morning traffic was heavy; the cloudless sky seemed an infinity of blue. A broad grin pulled up Pappas’s lips when his gaze fell on the graffiti on the wall of St. Paul’s Anglican Church. “Long live Rudolf Hess” was bracketed between two swastikas. The subtleties of Greek political life, he thought, are endless. Prime Minister Papandreou was a politician with a socialist kink; the graffiti artist had an obvious neo-fascist twist. The meaning of the urban art: Fuck you, Papandreou.

  Driving along Vassilissis Sofias, Pappas passed the gardens and slowed the car so that he could look up at the huge flag billowing atop Lykavitos Hill. A sense of pride surged through him, as it always did whenever he looked up at Athens’ highest hill and saw the emblem of Greek sovereignty.

  Seventeen minutes later Colonel Pappas was walking up the steps of 173 Leoforos Alexandras, headquarters of the Hellenic Police Department. It was a square building constructed entirely of white marble, with a bank of doors made of silvery one-way mirrored glass. Pappas went inside through the only unlocked door and was fed into the security cordon that funneled him to the control desk manned by four officers, three males and one female. The sergeant in charge of the checkpoint recognized the colonel and entered Pappas’s name, rank, and the time in the service book.

  Pappas stopped at his office and read the night’s situation reports. One shooting in Piraeus, four stabbings in Kolonaki, a rape in Athens, and one armed robbery in Glifádha. We’re becoming like New York, he thought, ripping off the top page of his desk calendar. It was Monday, July 13.

  He left his office and took the elevator to the thirteenth floor. Interpol, Minister of Public Order, was written in French across the glass doors. He pushed inside the suite of rooms. Eight A.M., the change of tours. Tired men and women gathered in offices to pass on information to the day team. The communications room, a large space crammed with sophisticated equipment, was on Pappas’s right. The rancid smell of stale cigarettes seeped into the hallway. Pappas walked quickly down the corridor to the end and entered the suite occupied by Colonel Teddy Tritsis, the minister’s representative to Interpol.

  Tritsis nodded Pappas into a chair while he spoke on the telephone. There was a large painting of Christ baring his bleeding heart on the wall. Pappas absently stared at the other man’s thick, bushy white hair; it had an almost startling band of black around it just over the top of his ears.

  “Dimitri, how are you?” he asked, hanging up the telephone.

  “Good, Teddy, and you?”

  “Busy as hell. Everyone wants their information yesterday. Want some coffee?”

  “That would be nice.”

  Tritsis pushed the intercom button and spoke into the machine. “So? How goes the Voúla investigation?”

  “I need a name, Teddy. One name. Someone who was close to Orhan Iskur.”

  The head of Interpol leaned forward. “Was his murder tied in with Voúla?”

  “We think so, yes. But that is confidential.”

  Tritsis raised his palms. “Of course.” He signed regret. “I might not be able to help you on this one, old friend.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “This assignment puts me in an awkward position sometimes. I’m a Greek policeman, assigned by the minister to run Interpol’s Greek station. The job guarantees me promotion, but it also guarantees me a lot of headaches. I’ve got to do a balancing act between our regulations, Interpol’s, and my own loyalty to the department. I’m required by this assignment to operate within sets of rules set down by both organizations.”

  “So?”

  “The damn problem is that Interpol is prohibited from getting involved in any investigation with a racial, religious, military, or political angle. Voúla, from everything I know, was the work of terrorists, which would make it political.” He leaned back, drumming his fingertips on the top of his desk.

  Pappas noticed how deeply Tritsis’s cheeks had sunken over the years. Then a tall man entered the office carrying a Turkish aski, a tray suspended on three chains, holding two small cups of coffee and two glasses of water. Raising the tray’s chains, the man removed the coffee cups and set them down in front of each man. The water came next.

  “How was the traffic this morning?” Tritsis asked, watching the man turn to leave.

  “You need the eyes of Argus to drive in Athens,” Pappas said as the door closed. Tritsis sipped his coffee.

  “Voúla was murder, pure and simple,” Pappas said. “The terrorist thing was a ploy we used so that we could conduct the real investigation without having the newspapers crawling up our asses.”

  “Who was the intended victim?” Tritsis asked, lowering his cup.

  “Takis Milaraki, the café owner,” Pappas lied. “We think that Iskur and Milaraki had narcotics deals going that turned sour.”

  Grinning broadly, Tritsis shook his finger at Pappas. “You old fox. That terrorist story sounded phony to me from the beginning.” He got up and moved out from behind his desk. “I anticipated that someone would be around to ask about Orhan Iskur, so I telephoned Paris and asked them to send me whatever they had on him.” He crossed the room to the row of locked file cabinets. He punched in the combination and the top drawer of the middle file opened. He took out a folder, opened it, and removed a sheet of paper. Walking back to his desk, Interpol’s station chief said, “Iskur was always a very careful man.”

  Two kilometers outside of Vouliagmeni, on the coastal road leading toward Voúla, a thin road branched off and seemed to go nowhere. The artery twisted and turned under an umbrella of cypress trees that at night created a tunnel of darkness. The landscape on either side of the road sloped up the sides of hills, and here and there a light sparkled in a distant farmhouse.

  Suddenly, when you least expected it, the tunnel burst into a street of glitter and noise known as the Vari district. It was a long block of hassapo tavernas, meat restaurants, each one with a butcher shop attached to it where patrons could make a leisurely selection for their main course from the rows of lambs, goats, and pigs.

  Each taverna was aglow in flashing lights and had its own man in the roadway, thrusting his body in front of moving cars, beckoning drivers into his taverna. Many of the tavernas had strands of cowbells hanging from posts and young boys to shake them in a further attempt to lure customers.

  George’s was the gaudiest of the tavernas and was famous for its wine room, a damp, earth-floored space in the rear where patrons wandered among the rows of casks, sampling the homemade wines, choosing the brew that most tempted their palates. George’s was also famous for its desserts, especially the homemade meli, a platter of thick yogurt smothered with golden honey.

  Yiann
is Yiotas, a small, weasel-faced man with two brown moles on his nose, had just finished eating a platter of goat meat and french fries. He poured the last of the retsina from the pitcher and settled back to enjoy his cigarette and people watch before he ordered his meli.

  Yiotas was a thief and a bigamist. A thief because the thought of working for a living made him sick to his stomach. A bigamist because he loved to screw fat woman, and because there were so many of them and they were so easy to get into bed and they were so grateful and motherly, he just couldn’t break their hearts by leaving them, so he ended up getting married to them. Having more than one wife added a pleasant dimension to Yiannis’s life. He loved leading a life of lies, living on the edge.

  He looked around the restaurant – a mixed bag of Greeks and tourists. Children ran up and down the aisles; cats crouched near tables, waiting for scraps; a butcher was chopping up a lamb. Yiannis finished his wine; the homemade brew had a heavy pine-resin taste that caused him to smack his lips. He yelled out to the rushing waiter, “Pahrahkahlo.”

  The waiter paused long enough to look his way.

  “Meli and retsina,” Yiannis yelled.

  The waiter nodded and rushed off.

  He lighted and drew hard on a cigarette, pulling the relaxing smoke in deep, savoring its tranquil cloud. He thought about Niki, the fattest of his four wives. She lived in Filothei and thought her loving husband was a deckhand aboard a cruise ship. He thought of her pretty face and her big, wrinkled ass. And he thought of the sounds she made when he stuck his prick up her ass and played with her pussy at the same time. A warm flush spread through his groin, and he decided that he would visit Niki tomorrow. No! Tomorrow was Tuesday, bad luck for a Greek to plan anything. This had been so since that Tuesday in the fifteenth century when Constantinople fell to the Turks.

  The waiter rushed over to his table, set down the meli and wine, and rushed off. Yiannis crushed his cigarette out in the tin ashtray, poured wine into his small glass, picked up the spoon off the platter, and began to stir the yogurt and honey into a pink mixture. The sound of bouzoukis and tambourines floated across the night.