“Um, I don’t know. We got a murder involving an actual Turkish person.”
“What, the hit on that dip? Roland’s thing? You think there’s a connection? But that’s the vic. Why would Sally be worried about a Turk being under control if the Turk’s already dead.”
“Another Turk?” suggested Raney.
Guma wrinkled his nose and curled his lip back. “Guys, come on! This is your basic gangland slaying, like they say in the papers. Don’t fuck me over with Turks, Assyrians, Armenians, or whatever.”
“Maybe I’ll check out where Minzone spent the night of,” said Raney.
“Now, that makes sense,” said Guma.
Marlene and Harry Bello rode up the elevator in One U.N. Plaza, the undistinguished building across the street from the great glass Secretariat of the United Nations, where the missions had their offices. Like most people educated in the City, Marlene had made the ritual visit to the place in the fifth grade, and never again thereafter. Harry made no sign that he was impressed with the world body. They rode up with three men chatting in an incomprehensible guttural tongue. For all they knew, it might have been Turkish.
The second secretary of the mission, a Mr. Abdelaziz Kilic, welcomed them gravely into his small office, sat down behind his cluttered desk, and indicated chairs for them to sit in. He was a smallish man with slicked-back graying black hair and a nervous hatchet face. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that seemed to date from the first time that such suits had been popular. Marlene recalled having read that it was always 1937 in Istanbul, and she now understood what that meant. Kilic’s desk was covered with brown folders tied carefully with literal red tape.
Mr. Kilic was in no hurry to get to the meat of the appointment. Coffee was ordered and delivered by a large, swarthy woman in a severely tailored black suit. They drank the heavy, sweet brew and talked about the heat of the day, whether it was hotter than in Turkey, which Mr. Kilic pronounced Turk-iy-eh, and about the many and varied differences between the two nations. That done, the talk switched to crime in general, to crime in the City, and at last, with many a parenthesis, to the crime in question.
“A truly dreadful happening,” observed Kilic. “We at the mission were most shocked.” He shook his head rapidly back and forth to indicate the severity of the shock. “But please, you must tell me what I can do for you. As I understand it, the investigation is concluded. You have hands on the criminal, isn’t it so?”
Marlene was about to speak when Harry, to her surprise, answered the question. “Yes, we do have a suspect in custody, sir,” he said, “but in order to complete our case, it’s necessary to find out all we can about the victim of the crime, especially to discover any reasons the victim might have been killed other than the reason we tell the jury he was killed. That way the defense won’t be able to place a doubt in the jury’s mind.”
This was the longest sentence Marlene had ever heard Harry utter, and she had to struggle to keep herself from gaping at him.
Kilic registered profound puzzlement. “What doubt can there be?” he asked. “Mr. Ersoy was assassinated by Armenian terrorists.”
“And why would they want to kill Mr. Ersoy?” asked Bello. “Was he a particular enemy of Armenians?”
Kilic smiled at this naïveté. “They are terrorists, Mr. Bello. Mehmet was a Turk; one is as good as another. This man you have arrested is well known to us. He has written abusive letters to us, full of the usual provocative lies.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Marlene found herself asking, “What lies are those, Mr. Kilic?”
An elegant dismissive gesture of the hand. “They accuse us of massacre during the first war.”
“And that’s not true? The Turks didn’t kill any Armenians?”
He gave her a sharp look, then smiled appeasingly at Bello. Who is this silly woman? “It was wartime. The Armenians were allied with the enemies of the Turkish people. Some were therefore removed to places where they could not practice their mischief. Of course, there were some deaths in the traveling, but massacre? There was none. We have rejected these lies authoritatively many times, and—”
Harry broke in. “Be that as it may, sir, we’re really more interested in Mr. Ersoy’s personal affairs. For example, sir, to your knowledge, did Mr. Ersoy have any business interests in the United States?”
“Business? No, he was a professional diplomat. He was not in business.”
Bello inscribed this information into a small notebook. “How about relatives? Did Mr. Ersoy have any relatives in the States?”
This required some thought. “I do not believe so. He was unmarried.”
“But he had a family—in Turkey, I mean.”
“He had a brother, I know. A quite prominent curator of one of the national museums, and an archaeologist as well. Other than that, I would have to look up. Is it essential?”
“Not for now,” said Bello. “Did Mr. Ersoy have any close personal relations with any of the mission staff?”
“Personal … ?”
“Yes, close friends, people he was always with.”
Kilic shrugged slowly and elegantly. “Mehmet was a friendly man. He was friendly with everyone.”
“Did he keep a desk diary, or did his secretary keep one, and may we be allowed to look at it?”
A significant pause. “To answer your question, I suppose he did keep a diary, for appointments, but I believe the chief of mission would have to authorize such an inspection.”
At this remark Harry scribbled again in his notebook, but this time he looked over at Marlene and fixed her with his eyes, which made at that instant a tiny motion toward the door. Then he continued with his interview. “Might we see a list of all the employees of the mission with their responsibilities?”
A list was produced. Harry read it and began to discuss individuals with Mr. Kilic. Marlene excused herself and slipped out.
She did not know quite how she knew, but she understood precisely what Harry Bello had asked her to do with his millimetric twitch of the eyes. Outside the office, at a secretary’s desk, she spotted the grave woman who had served the coffee and asked her where Mehmet Ersoy’s office had been. Following these directions, she found herself in a similar secretarial anteroom. Here the person at the desk was, fortunately, a young man. Marlene smiled and introduced herself, and perched on his desk in such a way that the slit of her maxiskirt dangled open, revealing to his gaze a rich slice of nyloned thigh.
It was thereafter not hard for Marlene to get this young man to inform her that the office diary of Mehmet Ersoy was in the hands of Mr. Ahmet Djelal. Mr. Djelal was with the economic section, the young man told Marlene, but when he said the name, he averted his eyes in a manner that suggested to Marlene that whoever Djelal was, he was not the man to see about the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.
Undismayed by this setback, Marlene asked if the mission kept a telephone log, adding that Mr. Kilic was particularly anxious that Marlene have a look at it. The young man seemed delighted to provide her with this document, which Marlene rapidly scanned, taking notes in shorthand.
When she returned to Kilic’s office, she found the diplomat and Harry Bello deeply involved in a discussion of the table of organization of the Turkish mission. Kilic was smiling and seemed willing to carry on all day about who reported to whom on what issues. Harry brought the conversation to an abrupt halt as soon as he saw Marlene come in.
“I think that’s enough for now, sir; you’ve been very helpful,” he said, closing his notebook and standing. The diplomat rose too, smiling and bobbing his head, uttering polite phrases. Harry paused and seemed to think of some detail. “Oh, one other thing. Mr. Kilic, can you think of any reason why Mr. Ersoy should have had nearly a million dollars in U.S. currency in a personal safe-deposit box?”
An indeterminate look passed over the diplomat’s bland face. They waited several beats in uncomfortable silence before he spoke.
“Ah, that. An embarrassment. I had n
ot thought that this would have a bearing on the prosecution of the criminals. Surely, it is not necessary to have this exposed to the public view?”
“That depends on what the money represented,” said Bello. “But you say you knew about it?”
“Ah, yes. One of Mr. Ersoy’s tasks was cultural … shall we say, retrieval. Türkiye is the repository of much ancient treasure, as I’m sure you know. Unfortunately, now and in the past, some of our patrimony is diverted by smugglers and thieves. Much of this comes to New York, for the art market here. My government finds it convenient to repatriate these treasures quietly and without the notice of the law. A payment is made in cash, the object is returned under diplomatic seal.” He paused and tapped his mustache. “I tell you this to avoid any shadow of impropriety falling on poor Mehmet, and so that the way will be clear to punish the terrorists responsible. My government, and perhaps your government as well, would appreciate it if these dealings would remain confidential.”
Marlene said, “If, as you say, this money has no connection with the shooting, there’s no reason for it to come out.”
After that, in a flurry of pleasantries and bows, they left. In the lobby of the Secretariat, Marlene clutched Harry’s arm and said, “Harry, Harry—you can talk! It’s a miracle! I brought out the big guns for you, Harry—my rosary with the transparent plastic beads filled with water from Lourdes. And it worked.”
The corners of Bello’s mouth lifted a fraction of an inch—paralytic hilarity. He said, “So?”
Back to the gnomic. Marlene realized that Bello could slip into the persona of a skilled and articulate interviewer the way he could melt into a doorway during a tail job. It was part of the equipment.
“I got a look at the phone logs. He spent a lot of time on the horn with this Ahmet Djelal, the one who has his diary.”
“Security chief. It figures. The art.”
“Yeah. Another thing, the last couple weeks of his life he made about a dozen real long outside calls to the same number.”
Bello took out his notebook and wrote down the number Marlene gave him. He went to a phone booth in the lobby and dialed the reverse directory service the phone company makes available for the police.
“Who was it?” asked Marlene when Bello returned.
Bello read from his notebook. “Somebody named Sarkis Kerbussyan.”
10
Karp came floating up out of the pentathol fog, out of the dream he always had when he was anesthetized, the one with the little room full of dead people in it, people he knew, his mother, his grandparents, and victims of murder. They were whispering the secrets of the dead, and however hard he strained his dream ears, he could never quite make them out.
He opened his eyes. A white shape swam into view, and resolved itself into Marlene’s face. Karp tried to speak, croaked, and touched his lips. Marlene passed him a plastic cup with a bent straw attached. He drank and said, “I survived.”
“Of course you survived, you big silly. How does your knee feel?”
Karp looked down at the massive plaster log lying on the bed where his leg used to be. “I don’t know—it feels different.” A thought struck him. “My God, I have an artificial organ.”
“This disturbs you?”
“It’s better than being crippled, assuming I’m actually not crippled. Did you see Hudson, the bastard?”
“Yeah, we conversed. He said it went fine, and provided you don’t abuse it and come to physical therapy like you’re supposed to—which he doubts you’ll do, by the way—you shouldn’t have any trouble.”
“Thank you, Dr. Hudson.” He relaxed back on the pillows, and they chatted about Lucy and about inconsequentials for a while. Karp’s head slowly cleared. He said briskly, “So, what’s up in the big world? Did you see Roland?”
“Yeah, I made his month with that information about Ersoy’s loot. He was practically cackling.”
“Let him cackle. It’s still a frame job. Anything on the connection with Kerbussyan?”
“No. Hey, it’s been one day, okay? I plan on getting with V.T. to see if there’s a money trail connecting the two of them. Maybe Kerbussyan got hold of ripped-off Turkish art treasures and the Turk was buying it back.”
The Turk. The conversation with Guma still plucked at Karp’s mind. Turks and Armenians. Funny money. A gang of wise guys that specialized in taking things from airports. And the Alphabet City women. The pattern wouldn’t emerge, and maybe there wasn’t one at all. Maybe he and Marlene had been doing this too long, so that the need of the mind to make sense of the random and unpredictable violence of the City was producing hallucinations of meaning.
“What about the sex maniac?” he asked.
“Harry’s going to take me around there tonight, show me the guys.”
“They have cops for that, Marlene,” he rumbled. “Heavily armed and trained cops.”
“I don’t want to hear this, Butch.”
He said a curse under his breath, reached for the water cup, found he couldn’t twist his body far enough around to reach it, and fell back, frustrated and angry.
“I hate this,” he said as she passed him the cup. He held her hand, running his thumb across the warm meat of her palm. “And I’m horny.”
“That’s good news,” said Marlene. “A complete recovery can be expected. Does the door lock?”
“You’re not serious.”
She got up from the bed and discovered that while the door didn’t lock, the hallway outside was deserted. She went back to the bed and pulled the curtains around it.
“Actually,” she said, wriggling out of her panties, “I should be wearing a white nurse’s uniform for the absolute height of lubricity. Do you mind? You know how I am about weird places to do it. And having you helpless there is more than I can stand. I’m gushing.”
“Be gentle with me,” said Karp.
“The big one, long hair and the sideburns,” said Harry Bello. “Vincent Boguluso. Calls himself Vinnie the Guinea. The skinny one with the pizza face is Eric Ritter. Monkey Ritter. The one with the headband and the red beard is Duane Womrath.”
“What, no cute nickname?” asked Marlene. They were sitting in Harry’s Plymouth on 5th Street, where they had a good view of the three men sitting on the stoop of 525, drinking malt liquor out of quart bottles. A steamy night on 5th Street off A, people out on all the stoops, young men and girls doing the paseo, the street full of cars, their stereos blasting Latin, little boys racing up and down with toy guns, screaming, other boys, a little older, with real guns, moving envelopes of dope.
“No, just plain Duane,” said Harry. “There’s half a dozen others live in there. Men. Plus girls. Everybody else has been chased out. They use a couple of the apartments as a garage for their bikes.” He pointed at four gleaming, chopped Harleys lined up against the curb.
“And these guys did it for sure?”
“When the girl was beaten, the yells were coming from that house. Also the bites. Forensics says the wound are consistent with the same set of teeth. But.”
“Yeah, we can’t tie them positively to the roof job. Get me a witness, Harry.”
Bello didn’t answer, but stared out the driver’s side window at the three men on the stoop. After a few minutes they appeared to become aware of his inspection. The big one, Vinnie, stood up. Marlene measured his size against the doorway and gasped. “Harry, he’s a monster! What is he, six-eight?”
“Six-nine, three hundred ten pounds the last time he was in jail. I think he put on a little weight since then. Got a sheet on him: assault, disorderly, car theft, burglary—”
A green quart bottle glinted in the streetlight as it arced toward them and shattered on the pavement inches short of their car. Harry Bello had the door handle jacked and was halfway out the door before Marlene put a restraining hand on his arm.
“Harry, no!”
He resisted her pull for a moment and then relaxed and closed the door. “Do it right, Harry,” she said.
“That must have felt good,” said Marlene as they drove at a sedate pace up Avenue B. And then she snapped her head back, looking over her shoulder. “There’s that little girl again.”
“Hm?”
“A little girl I met in the park, the fairy princess. She was just there.” Marlene had caught just a glimpse, but the thin child was unmistakable. She was wearing a long bridal veil of white tulle as she skipped between the cars.
Bello checked the rearview mirror but saw nothing.
“What about her?”
“Oh, nothing, just a funny little kid. I was worried about her—she thought she could really fly.”
Morning, a week has passed. Marlene in her lonely bed was awakened by a call from Lillian Dillard at the day-care center. Dillard was down with a bad cold and neuritis, and the care group was canceled for the day.
Marlene cursed vividly, her cries joining the chorus of the thousands of working women to whom this very thing was happening at this very moment all across the City.
Lucy wailed from her crib, and Marlene struggled to suppress the sour juices of resentment, so as not to present a harridan’s face to her child, who in fact she dearly loved. She threw on her tattered blue robe, cleaned, diapered, and ate with the baby, watching Sesame Street, and placed Lucy in her playpen. Then she cleaned and dressed herself and called her office.
Luisa Beckett, Marlene’s deputy, responded competently to the procedural disaster that Marlene’s absence represented. The other attorneys would have to be shuffled to fill the places where the People had to be represented, motions would have to be filed or opposed, meetings would have to be canceled and rescheduled. Competent but not all that sympathetic, Luisa had no children, nor did the other female attorneys on the rape bureau staff. Marlene hung up the phone, depressed and irritated, and with no human being in range to unload on but a tiny child.
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