Black Sand

by William Caunitz

  There was not enough space between the back of the ovens and door for him to reach up and try the doorknob. He pushed against the bottom of the door trying to get it open, but the paint of countless years had sealed it into the jamb. He opened the knapsack and, directing the penlight’s beam inside, fished around until he found the fiberscope. He took it out and snaked the quarter-inch braided steel cable under the door. He fitted the eyepiece to his face and pressed the trigger.

  The optical glass fibers inside the cable transmitted images from the other side. Taking hold of the bottom of the cable, he twisted the scope’s optical tip. The illuminated images he saw were those of a deserted staircase cluttered with debris. He became aware of the dryness in his mouth, the annoying tickle of flour invading his nostrils, and the distracting beads of sweat rolling down from his hairline. He wiped his face against the canvas knapsack.

  The pine door had a panel seven inches up from the bottom. He took out a serrated hunting knife and scored a line until he pushed the blade through the wood. He took out a battery-powered jigsaw, inserted the blade through the hole, and cut out the panel.

  After dropping the satchel through to the other side, he wriggled through the hole and stood in the tomblike cold of the building’s central stairway, breathing in the alkaline odor of cinder block. He punched his arm through the knapsack’s harness, shouldered the load, and projecting the circle of light ahead of him, climbed the squeaking staircase to the roof.

  He crossed over the parapet to the roof of the adjoining building. After checking the roof door for alarm wires and finding none, he took out the fiberscope, pushed it under the door, and cursed when he saw the cutouts in the walls and ceiling of the immaculately clean staircase. They were about the size of two packages of cigarettes, and they ringed the stairs in an infrared alarm system that sent out sensory feelers that measured movement and heat changes. No wonder the stairs are so clean, he thought. Mice could set off the alarm. Rummaging through the knapsack and not finding what he needed, he slipped the radio off his belt and pressed the transmit button three times.

  Vassos answered in Greek, “Nai?” yes.

  To his surprise, Lucas found himself whispering Greek into the mouthpiece.

  Leaving his equipment behind, he made his way back over and down to the pizza parlor and waited. Soon a shadow appeared, dropped something in the doorway, and was gone. Lucas reached out, grabbed the package, closed the door, and made his way back up to the roof.

  He undressed down to his shorts and stepped into the neoprene wet suit, pulling the hood securely over his head and face. Neoprene, a synthetic rubber derived from acetylene and hydrochloric acid, was one of the few available ways to circumvent an infrared system, permitting a person to pass through the system undetected.

  He stuck the penlight up his sleeve. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to use it because the heat from its tiny bulb would set off the alarm, but he decided to bring it anyway. He wouldn’t be able to take the radio or his revolver because there was not room in the tight-fitting wet suit. Removing the hunting knife from the knapsack, he slid it up his other sleeve.

  Working with the picklock and rake, he carefully unlocked the roof door leading to the staircase that went down to McKay’s bar, but did not open it because he was afraid the ambient night light might be enough to set off the alarm system. Deciding he’d have to chance it, he opened the door just enough for him to slide inside. Holding his breath, he guardedly closed the door behind him. He remained perfectly still, forcing himself to adapt to his new environment. Soon he was able to make out the wall and the banister. He groped for the next step, and then the next, and the next.

  He came first to the fifth-floor landing and discovered a steel fire door bolted shut. He continued down to the next level only to discover the same thing. He moved on to the third floor and was disappointed again. Groping in the dark toward the second floor, he became aware of the unmistakable odor of beer; he remembered Andreas’s description of the closet in the rear of the bar that contained the staircase without stairs. Probing the space in front of him, he encountered some kind of soft material at the bottom of the flight of steps that led to the second floor. He stopped, gingerly patted the invisible material, and decided it was a curtain.

  Sliding his hand over its softness until he reached the seam, he parted the material slightly, moved his hooded face to peek around to the other side, and saw that he was about to step down onto the second level above the street. It contained a landing with a bolted fire door and the stairwell of the skeletonized staircase leading down to the ground floor.

  He stepped out from behind the curtain and saw that there was no alarm system. He squatted down and peered down into the light coming up from the back room of the bar. He could make out faint street sounds. The downstairs door to the closet concealing the skeletonized staircase was obviously partly open. He slipped out the penlight and cast its beam down into the stairwell, searching for an alarm system. Finding none, he got to his feet and, gripping the banister with both hands, slid his foot out onto the first riser’s edge, starting down cautiously.

  Reaching the bottom, he knelt, quickly assessing his surroundings. He slipped into a prone position and crawled out into the back room and then the front bar. Three transvestites were talking in the doorway just outside. There was enough light so that he did not have to use the penlight. Looking around, he could see no way of getting up to the sealed-off upper floors and decided to leave. He turned to crawl back to the staircase when he saw a dumbwaiter hatch on the wall at the end of the bar. He wiggled over to it. Lucas was about to reach up for the latch when he caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye and froze. A sudden urge to urinate caused him to stifle a moan. He lay in the unyielding stench of stale alcohol, his mouth open, his eyes wide in shock and disbelief. There, asleep on the bar’s slatted floor, were the folded muscular coils of a huge boa constrictor. McKay’s backup system. That crazy bastard, he screamed inwardly, recalling the street talk awhile back that some Colombian drug barons were flying in constrictors with their shipments to sell to other dealers who used them as persuaders.

  Motionless, he watched the big snake, desperately trying to remember everything he knew about them. They kill their prey by crushing and suffocating them and then swallow them whole. They don’t hunt often, maybe once a week or so, and most importantly, they don’t move fast.

  Lucas got up off the floor slowly and lifted the latch, opening the hatch and hunkering backward into the dumbwaiter.

  The creature’s eyes flicked open; its serpentine head coming up off its thick coil.

  “Nice doggie,” Lucas whispered, closing the hatch. Grabbing hold of the pulley ropes, he hoisted the cart upward.

  “I gotta piss,” he moaned quietly, working the ropes, positive that his bladder was about to burst.

  Reaching the second-story hatch, he slid out the knife and worked the blade between the door and the jamb, pushing it upward until he caught the latch and kicked it up out of the gate. He opened the door and, peering out, saw no alarm system, so he slid out onto the floor. Working the rubberized zipper down his neoprene armor, he reached into the suit, hauled out his penis, and, emitting a long sigh, pissed into the dumbwaiter shaft.

  Done, he zippered up and looked around. He was in a long narrow room that had been divided into several different work areas. Moving around the room, he saw a separate place for woodworking, another one for printing with the latest high-tech equipment, a painting section, and an area where marble was being worked on.

  Brandt Industries, he thought, they steal it there and copy it here. Suddenly realizing that he had not signaled Andreas in a while, he reached for his radio but then remembered that he had been forced to leave it on the roof along with the other stuff.

  His penlight beam hit a glass-enclosed office. Before entering it, he checked for wires. The big spenders wouldn’t go for the money to protect every room, he thought, going inside. A rolltop desk,
a filing cabinet, an illustrator’s board, a photocopier, and an old-style telephone. He moved to the desk, lifted the receiver, and dialed Communications. When the police operator answered he asked to be connected to Citywide, the elite unit within the Communications Division that routes undercover and Detective Division transmissions.

  “Citywide, Dolan,” a gruff voice answered.

  “This is Lieutenant Lucas, Sixteenth Squad. Pipe me though to surveillance van one-two-four.”

  “Hello?” Vassos’s uncertain voice came on the line.

  “How are things going?”

  “Why are you telephoning instead of using the radio?”

  “It’s a long story. I’m inside the plant where they forge the art. They have enough equipment here to reproduce the Sphinx. How is everything on the street?”

  “Busy. The prostitutes must be running a sale.”

  “I’m going to leave this line open while I look around,” Lucas said.

  Vassos spotted a pimp doing a sly sashay over to the van. He wore black leather trousers and a green shirt with the top five buttons open revealing a chest and neck bejeweled in a glittering array of nugget necklaces. The pimp tried the rear door. He opened the blade of a gravity knife and stuck it into the lock.

  Vassos pushed the alarm button on the control monitor. The threatening growls of Doberman pinschers leaped from a speaker within the van; the pimp leaped back onto the sidewalk and rushed away.

  Lucas had found nothing of interest in the rolltop desk. The top three drawers of the file cabinet were empty; the bottom one contained a swing-hinge binder with Brandt Industries shipping invoices for the years 1986 and 1987. He unfastened the joints and removed the invoices. Placing four of them at a time on the duplicating machine, he spent the next forty minutes making copies. He rolled them up and stuck them into his wet suit, returned the originals to the binder, and, picking up the telephone, told Vassos that he was on his way back.

  After checking out the other floors and finding nothing, he got back into the dumbwaiter and lowered himself back down to the ground floor. He opened the hatch and peeked out. “Baby” was resting behind the bar. Dozens of transvestites strolled the street; three of them were holding a conference in the bar’s doorway. He knew that he’d never make it to the van without being seen. He looked at the dormant snake and thought: why not?

  He slipped out of the dumbwaiter and skulked on all fours over to the door. He quietly slipped the bolt and, leaving the door slightly ajar, crawled to the back of the bar. He remembered that a shuffleboard was in the back room. He crawled into the back room and picked up four of the disks. Rolling one of them into the barroom, he crooned, “Meow, meow, meow.” The metal disk thudded into the bar stool and toppled over onto its side. He rolled another one.

  Without warning the serpentine head popped up over the bar, swaying in the dark, seeking out its prey.

  Lucas rolled another one. The snake’s homing system zeroed in on the disk and its long, thick body flowed over the bar to the floor, slithering toward the sound.

  “That mother wanted me to take it in the ass for twenty dollars. ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘my ass is worth fifty,’” a hooker with orange hair was telling her sisters.

  One with a rhinestone-studded blouse and short shorts confessed, “I did my golden shower trick tonight. That man just loves it when I pass my pissin’ dick over his face. And he told me … what’s that on the ground? Oho-i-ooo-ooooo!

  “Nooooooooo!”

  “Uuummmmmmmm aaaaahhhhhhhnnnnn.”

  Their ghastly, panic-stricken screams reverberated across the avenue, setting off a wave of hysteria that sent the hookers fleeing, littering the street with an assortment of shoes, wigs, pocketbooks, and broken pint bottles of booze. The boa constrictor slithered out into the bar’s doorway and arranged its muscular coils, its green diamond-backed eyes watching.

  Steam misted the tiles. Lucas drew a line through the condensation and slipped deeper into the water, relaxing his head against the rim.

  He laughed when he thought about the snake caper; it was the kind of tale that added to the Job’s folklore.

  After making his way back to the van, they had to wait ten minutes for Emergency Service to come and gather up Baby in a snake bag for delivery to the animal shelter. Lucas was sure that McKay would blame one of his people for leaving the door open. Then they went back to the office so that Lucas could read the fives on the day’s surveillances. All negative reports. But that didn’t discourage him. Every cop bone in his body told Lucas that Nina Pazza was taking her time sanitizing herself; she’d come to New York for a meet and wanted to make sure she didn’t have any guardian angels hovering nearby.

  After going over the fives, Lucas and Vassos gave the surveillance units a “see.” They were all on station. Elisabeth Syros and the Greek contingent were covering Belmont Widener. At 1:15 A.M. two Soviet policemen relieved Ulanov and Gregory at the Plaza Hotel.

  At one-thirty in the morning, after parking the van in the Sixteenth Precinct’s garage, Lucas and Vassos stopped off at Heidi’s for a quick taste. They found the owner, Ulanov, Gregory, and Sergei Nashin together in a back booth doing a number on a bottle of Russian vodka.

  A fast reading of the scene told Lucas that the impromptu party had all the makings of an all-night session. He had promised Katina that he would come to her place as soon as he was finished and fill her in on what happened. He had one fast drink and said good night, leaving Vassos and Sergei corkscrewing on the dance floor, whooping what he assumed were Cossack war cries. Making for the door, Lucas heard Vassos call out, “One day you will dance, my friend.”

  Katina had greeted him in a pale pink nightgown and panties. She rushed into his arms, her tongue searching his mouth. He pulled up her nightgown and they made love on the floor, and then they got up and went into the bedroom and loved again.

  Afterward, locked in a lovers’ embrace, he told her about his day and how he had bent the rules.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Theodorous,” she said.

  “You’re not going to.” Reluctantly, he got off her bed and went into the bathroom.

  Lucas reached out and picked up a plastic bottle: ESSENCE OF LILAC BATH GEL. He unscrewed the cap and poured the contents into the tub, stirring the water to make bubbles and causing waves of water to splash over the rim of the tub and make puddles on the floor.

  Reaching up, he yanked down two towels from the rack. He leaned over the rim, soaked up the water, and left the towels in a sodden heap on the floor.

  A soft knock came to the bathroom door. “Theodorous, may I come in, I need my makeup remover.”

  “Of course.”

  “Theodorous!” she said, stepping inside. “You’ve made a flood.”

  He made a weak-hearted shrug and sank below the water. When he surfaced he found her on her knees mopping up the floor with towels. “You don’t look like the Morgan’s Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts.”

  “Lieutenant, we have to have a talk.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing down the remaining towel and, standing, drying himself. He stepped out of the tub and kneeling down beside her, mopped. “Is this what they mean by a meaningful relationship?”

  She hurled a look of feigned anger his way and said, “I think so.”

  He worked his way behind her and lifted her bathrobe and nightgown.

  She stopped wiping, remained on her knees.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, guiding his finger over the crescent opening between her legs.

  “You make me feel alive again,” she moaned, resting her face on the toilet lid, undulating against him and gasping when he opened her body and mounted her.

  18

  Belmont Widener daintily spread his fingers and admired his fresh manicure while Claude, the owner of the exclusive and ridiculously expensive Madison Avenue salon, styled his hair. Widener paid no attention to the woman who slipped into the adjacent chair. Elisabeth Syros hitched
up her jeans and crossed her legs, revealing the Mayan design carved into the sides of her cowboy boots. She threw up her arms, letting her many bracelets slide down to her elbows, and said to her stylist, “Just a trim, please.”

  Denny McKay crashed his fist on the table and shouted, “I lost my fucking snake because one of you dumb cock-suckers left the door open.”

  The two men sitting in the same booth with McKay looked at each other uneasily.

  Three other men were sitting on bar stools nearby. One gazed vacantly into the faded mirror, the second hunched silently over the copper-topped bar, and the third, a man called Patty Guts, sat with his back to the bar, his arms folded across his stomach, watching McKay’s every gesture.

  “I’ll get you another snake, Denny, a bigger one,” the man known as Bubblebelly promised, wiping beads of sweat from his upper lip.

  “Yeah, Denny, a bigger one,” the other man in the booth said. His name was Pussy Lyne.

  “Make sure that the door is locked from now on, understand?” McKay growled.

  “Yeah, Denny, I’ll see to it,” Pussy Lyne said meekly.

  McKay studied the two men. “The take from the docks is off this week. You guys wouldn’t be playing games, would you?”

  “No. Denny, I swear,” Bubblebelly said. “A few of the longshoremen came up short with their vig.”

  “One of them is three weeks behind,” Pussy Lyne added.

  “Three weeks,” McKay repeated, thoughfully pursing his lips and nodding slowly. “I want you two to employ some modern collection techniques with the hump who is three weeks late. Chop off his leg below the knee.”

  “Below the knee?” Bubblebelly questioned.