Black Sand

by William Caunitz

  “Yes.” Vassos replayed the tape of Nina’s conversation with Ann.

  While the recorder was on, Lucas picked up the photo of the men standing in front of the Shinto shrine. “Iskur and McKay, but who the hell is the other guy?”

  The tape played out and Vassos shut off the machine.

  “I’m sure that the first column in those ledgers is a record of stolen artwork,” Katina said.

  “That we all agree on,” Lucas said, “but that doesn’t help us find the casket-copy.”

  Katina shook her head at the records. “I assumed all of this was going to lead us to Alexander’s Iliad.”

  “It will,” Lucas said. “I would be surprised if McKay didn’t know something about the casket-copy.”

  Elisabeth tugged at her cowboy boots. “I can’t believe that Iskur would knowingly allow himself to become involved in something like Voúla.”

  “He didn’t,” Vassos said, his face in a tortured mask. “I caused the massacre. Cuttler and Simmons were sent to Greece for the purpose of killing two policemen. If I hadn’t taken action that day, they would have done what they had come to do and left, leaving all the others alive, my wife and son included.”

  Lucas jumped to his feet. “That’s the craziest thing you’ve ever said. You’re a cop, for chrissake. You think you’re supposed to stand by and do nothing while two other cops are getting killed? What happened to you could have happened to any policeman in the world. Don’t give yourself a guilt trip, Andreas.”

  They fell silent.

  Katina was the first to speak: “Why would anyone want to kill Adele Matrazzo?”

  “It was her uncle who rediscovered the casket-copy,” Lucas said, closing one of the food cartons.

  “But that was in 1939,” Katina said. “He’s long dead.”

  “Is he?” Lucas said, picking up another half-empty carton.

  Everyone looked at Lucas.

  “You’re not saying he’s alive?” Katina questioned.

  “What I’m saying is that the only connection Adele Matrazzo had with the case is through her family. And the only reason I can come up with killing her was to prevent her from talking to us, to prevent her from identifying some member of the family.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Elisabeth Syros said. “Paolo Matrazzo would be too old to commit murder.”

  “Yes, he would be ninety-seven,” Lucas said, “but he had two sons.” He picked up a yellow pad and read: “Corporal Anthony Matrazzo, B Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, killed on the night of October 24, 1942, during the battle of Bloody Ridge on Guadalcanal.

  “Paolo Junior, the other son, the one Adele told us had died? Well, I can’t find any record of his death. And army records show that he served in Japan during the Korean War. He was there the same time exactly as McKay and Iskur.”

  “Did the army send you a copy of his fingerprints?” Elisabeth asked.

  “Yes,” Lucas said. “So I had our fingerprint man compare them, and the best he could do was a possible maybe. There were not enough points of comparison in the latents lifted at the Iskur scene to make a positive I.D.”

  “What about a photo of Paolo Junior?” Katina asked.

  “The army didn’t have one and I can’t find any,” Lucas said. “We traced the guy all the way back to high school. He didn’t pose for the yearbook, nor did he pose for anything during his college days. Seems to me that Paolo Junior was a very shy type.” Lucas rummaged through the material on the sofa and came up with an artist’s sketch. He compared it to the unknown member of the trio posing in front of the Shinto shrine. “Just doesn’t look like the same man,” he observed.

  Elisabeth took them from Lucas and compared them. “They might be the same person.”

  “How?” Lucas questioned.

  “Plastic surgery,” Elisabeth suggested.

  Katina added, “If I wanted to disappear and still remain in New York, that would certainly be an option I’d consider.”

  “Widener knows who our third man is,” Vassos said. “Give him to me for a few minutes and we’ll know too.”

  “That’s not the way to go, Andreas, not yet, anyway,” Lucas said.

  “I still do not understand why your detectives prevented me from following Widener into that restaurant,” Vassos complained.

  “They did it because Maison Blanche is one of the more fashionable joints in this town. You can’t get in without a reservation and you can’t get a reservation unless your name is known,” Lucas explained. “If you had tried to push your way inside, some blow-dried headwaiter would have tried to stop you and we would have had a commotion that could have alerted Widener to the fact that he had a shadow.”

  Vassos made a disagreeable face.

  “We’re going to be tailing a lot of people during the next few days,” Lucas said. “It’s too bad we don’t have enough troops to cover the clock.”

  Vassos picked up his pad. “I’ve been worried about that so I’ve worked out a plan.”

  Lucas squeezed in next to Katina. “I’m listening.”

  “The best way to cover Pazza, Widener, and McKay is with a fluid surveillance. With your four detectives and the two of us, we have six officers. I’ll be able to supply six additional men,” Vassos said, watching the Whip.

  “And from where will you get these six bodies?” Lucas asked.

  “From me,” Elisabeth said, “so, counting me, it will be seven additional bodies.”

  Lucas looked at Vassos’s control, heaved a sigh, and thought: do what ya’ gotta do, but do it right. “Are your people reliable?”

  Vassos grinned. “I would think so.”

  They spent the next hour arranging schedules. When they had completed that, Vassos said, “There will still be a hole after two A.M.”

  “I’ll take care of that,” Lucas said, adding, “You understand, Andreas, that your people are to observe and report, nothing else.”

  “Of course,” Vassos said, gathering up his notes.

  “Andreas, nothing else,” Lucas said.

  “I understand,” Vassos said, checking his watch. “It’s after midnight.”

  “I’ll drive you back to your hotel,” Lucas said, starting to get up.

  A gleam of humorous wisdom showed in Vassos’s eyes. “Elisabeth can take me. Why don’t you stay and help Katina clean up?”

  Katina accompanied them to the door. She touched her lips to Elisabeth’s cheek and said in Greek, “Thank you for all your help.”

  Elisabeth smiled and said good night.

  Katina closed the door behind them to find Lucas carrying cartons and dirty plates into the kitchen.

  She followed after him.

  “Where’s the garbage?” he asked.

  “Under the sink,” she said, bending to open the cabinet, and taking out a plastic bag. She held it open in front of her and watched as he dumped the refuse inside. “Why don’t you like to speak Greek?”

  Without replying, he stepped around her and moved back into the living room. She hurriedly placed the plastic garbage bag in the sink and followed him. She found him sitting on the sofa sorting through papers. “I didn’t mean to pry. I’m sorry,” she said, sitting beside him.

  He looked at her and then went on stacking the papers in a neat pile, all the time brooding over the maddening inhibition he felt when he was close to her. “I’d better get going.”

  “Please stay.”

  Her warm hand came to rest on his arm and he felt a sudden thump in his heart. He returned her gaze and slowly, haltingly, moved to meet her lips with his.

  Lucas sat up in the bed, gazing out the window at the orange sun pasted high in the sky. Recalling their night of unreserved lovemaking, he looked down at her naked beauty. For the first time in many years he felt really wanted and secure. He kissed her head, whispered, “You’re wonderful.”

  “So are you,” she mumbled, stretching. Suddenly her eyes went wide with disbelief, and she quickly gathered the sheet over her bo
dy. “I can’t believe what I did last night. I … I actually asked a man to, to stay.”

  “I’m very happy that you did.”

  She tenderly brushed the side of his head. He took her into his arms and they made love again.

  Afterward, as they were locked together on the rumpled sheets, she said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for you, Theodorous Loucopolous.”

  “Not as long as I have for you. How, may I inquire, did you know my Greek name?”

  “I asked Andreas.” She kissed his neck. “The last time we were together you asked me to tell you about my baby.”

  “I remember.”

  She shivered with a painful remembrance. “I miscarried in my fourth month. Kenneth didn’t bother to visit me in the hospital.”

  He pressed her closer to him, pulling her leg across his stomach, and then, to his surprise, his own painful litany burst forth: his childhood, his self-image, his failed marriage.

  When he finished he felt as though he had worked free of some awful curse. He kissed her and she kissed him back. “I’d better get going,” he said softly.

  She clutched him to her, “Just a few minutes more, please.”

  Andreas Vassos sat up, looking at his travel alarm clock for the time. His eyes fell on the empty wine bottle on the writing desk. He looked down at the sleeping hooker next to him and came to the painful realization that his nocturnal fantasy could not stand up to the light of day. Her mascara had run and her hair was spread out over her puffy face. He didn’t even know her real name, nor did he want to know it. His self-disgust rose. The driving force of his life now should be vengeance, not self-pity. He closed his hands over his face and spoke to Soula and Stephanos, telling them that he missed them and promising them their memorial.

  He felt a warm hand on his back. “I love you, Andreas,” she said in Greek.

  “I have to get to work,” he said, playing out his macabre part.

  “Make love to me, please.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “No one has ever loved me the way you love Soula. Just once I want to be made love to that way, just once, even if it is make-believe.”

  “I can’t do that,” he said, pushing up off the bed and going into the shower.

  Businessmen entered the atrium on the Fifty-sixth Street side and walked through into the lobby of the IBM Building. Homeless men and women had already gathered around the atrium’s windows to eat their inadequate breakfasts and watch Madison Avenue’s human traffic. Colonel Sergei Nashin, dressed in jeans, penny loafers, and a Konstantin chamois shirt, lounged at one of the tiny wire tables, his keen interest obviously on a woman passing by in an orange sundress.

  “Good morning, Sergei,” Lucas said, sitting across from the KGB man. “Thanks for coming.”

  “I assumed it was important. Where is Comrade Ulanov?”

  “On an assignment.”

  “We’ve never before met alone. Are you planning to defect?”

  Lucas laughed. “Not today, comrade.” He shoved a roll of photocopied papers across the table. “Here are copies of some ledgers the Greek P.D. came up with. They record the theft of art from various countries in Europe, including yours.”

  Picking up the roll, Nashin said, “Thanks.”

  “Now I need a favor.”

  Nashin’s eyes grew wary. “If I can.”

  “I’d like to borrow some of your people for a surveillance job.”

  Disbelief was plainly evident in the Russian’s face. “Your brains must have turned to borscht, my friend.”

  “The bad guys are the same ones who’ve been helping themselves to your heritage. I just thought that you’d want to be in on it in case we recover any of your goodies, including, maybe, the painting of St. Sava that’s listed on one of the sheets in that roll.”

  Pointing the roll at Lucas, Nashin said, “Policemen stationed in foreign countries – i.e., your FBI and me – are not, repeat not, to engage in criminal investigations within the host country. Their function is to act as liaison in the expeditious flow of criminal information and to report on developments in investigative and forensic methods and techniques.” He made a self-satisfied nod, smiled, and asked, “Why not use your own policemen?”

  “My allotment’s been used up. I can’t trust the feds so I’ve got to improvise. All you’d have to do is observe and report, nothing else.”

  “Observe and report?”

  “Correct.”

  “And if I see you or any of your men in a difficult situation I’m to walk away.”

  “Correct.”

  “Xepбbuнa, which translated means bullshit.”

  17

  Darkness had spread over the city, sending a swarm of transvestites out onto the street, where they dominated their Ninth Avenue turf. A tractor-trailer turned into the avenue. A hooker hailed the driver, stepping out into the roadway, gesturing to him by sucking on her lip and reaching into her open blouse and squeezing her breasts together. The driver steered the semi to the curb and parked. The hooker ambled over. A brief conversation ensued; the hooker removed her spiked heels and climbed up into the cab.

  “Love is wonderful,” Lucas observed, maintaining his grim vigil at The Den. They had parked the surveillance van in front of the pizza parlor that was one door uptown from the bar.

  Lucas and Vassos had been planted there for almost an hour, watching people going in and out of McKay’s headquarters and the gaudily-clad hookers turning tricks. They had spent the day cooped up inside the van listening to field reports. Nina Pazza had left her hotel at eleven in the morning, spent her day shopping, and returned to the Plaza a little after six. Denny McKay passed his day closeted inside the bar. He left around seven and drove to his Christopher Street bachelor apartment, arriving there at seven-twenty. Belmont Widener worked all day in his rare book store and retired upstairs to his living quarters a little after eight o’clock.

  It was eleven P.M. when Lucas decided it was time to have a look inside McKay’s headquarters. He slid off the stool and opened the equipment chest on the floor next to the communications console. He took out a pair of night surveillance binoculars, two ten-inch tubes that electro-optically amplified ambient light and used it to make green-phosphor images. It had a pistol-grip attachment, with a round, glass-fronted cylinder in front that gave out a powerful beam of infrared light and acted as a kind of invisible spotlight.

  He rested the rubber eyepiece against his face and scanned the area. The building that housed the bar and the two adjoining buildings were in the same state of dilapidation. With the exception of the pizza parlor and the bar, all the windows and doors had been cinder-blocked.

  Carefully scanning the area with the glasses, he saw the transvestite raise her head off the driver’s lap, adjust her wig, spit a wad into a tissue, and toss the paper out the window. She climbed down out of the cab, put on her shoes, and joined her sisters on the stroll.

  Lowering the glasses, Lucas turned to Vassos and said, “Those hookers make good watchdogs. I can’t imagine McKay allowing them to work his turf without some kind of payback.”

  “McKay’s Praetorians,” Vassos said, watching out the other window, studying the sleazy scene. “How are we going to get in?”

  “It’s time to break a few rules,” Lucas answered, taking an army knapsack out of the equipment locker, selecting items he thought he might need, and shoving them inside the sack. Then he moved over to the radio locker on the wall and removed two walkie-talkies, handing one to Vassos. “I’m going to need you here to protect my back. We’ll communicate with these. Set the channel selector switch to three. I’m going to keep my volume control low in case there’s anyone inside the building. If you have to communicate, press the transmit button three times.” Lucas did that and both radios squawked each time he pressed.

  Lucas returned his attention to the street. “I’ll wait until all the ‘ladies’ are working and then make a dash for the pizza parlor.”

  �
��Why not go directly for the bar?”

  “McKay is the type of guy to have some extra insurance, like a couple of hungry pit bulls. I’ll go in through the pizza store, make my way up onto the roof, cross over, and go down the roof stairwell into the bar.”

  “How will you make it from the store up onto the roof?”

  “That type of tenement generally has a door leading from the street level store into the building’s vestibule.”

  Fifteen minutes passed.

  The street had become a runway for cars and vans, for hookers getting in and out of vehicles.

  “Aren’t there any female hookers in this area?” Vassos asked, sitting on the stool, watching out his side of the van.

  “We’ve got plenty of them, too,” Lucas told him, “but this is a transvestite stroll. The women are around the corner.”

  Vassos looked out both windows. “They’re all busy, go now.”

  Lucas remained seated. “I learned a long time ago that when you’re all set to go, wait.” As if to confirm his instincts, a hooker pranced out from behind a stoop and strutted over to a car that had just double-parked.

  Lucas slid open the side door, turned to Vassos. “If you get anyone snooping around, press that button.” He pointed to a black disk on the control monitor and slipped outside, dashing into the deeply recessed doorway.

  Pressing back into the shadows, he fell to his knees and slid the knapsack off his shoulder. He took out a penlight and stuck it between his teeth, aiming the beam at the lock on the door to the pizza parlor in the ground floor of the building that stood next to The Den. He inserted a pick and began raking open the cylinder, smiling when he heard a hooker shout, “Don’t hold my ears. I know my job.”

  The latch sprung open. He slipped inside, closing the door behind him. Reaching down to his belt, he pressed the transmit button twice.

  His radio gurgled twice in response.

  The dry smell of flour and rotten tomatoes filled the air. Moving cautiously, the beam roving ahead of him, he searched for the door that would lead out into the building’s common stairway. Unable to find it, he knelt and threw the beam under a rack of ovens; there he saw the door. Realizing there was not enough space between the wall and the back of the ovens to squeeze through, he got down on his stomach and, pushing the knapsack ahead of him, crawled under the ovens to the door. The scurrying sounds of rats made him silently swear never to eat pizza again.