The door inched open and one of Nick’s crew, a muscular kid named Bakach, leaned his head inside.
“The Arab woman is here,” he said in thickly accented English. “With her friend.”
Nicky shifted his attention back to the mirror and gave himself a final inspection. She was even earlier than he’d expected. Whatever her ultimate plans for the merchandise, she obviously wasn’t wasting a minute.
“Send them in,” he said, satisfied with his appearance. “And tell Janos and Kos I want the packages.”
Bakach nodded, disappeared, and returned a minute later with Nick’s two visitors.
Nick turned toward the woman as she entered.
“Hello, Gilea,” he said, looking at her. She was beautiful, really very sexy, her shoulder-length black hair cut at a neat angle, her large slanting eyes reminding him of an exotic cat. Her tweed coat was open and revealed fine long legs below a short leather skirt.
He wondered fleetingly whether she might be interested in something more than a professional relationship.
“Nick,” she said, her high-heeled boots clicking on the floor as she came farther into the room. The tall man who had arrived with her had a thin scar curling down his cheek under a scruffy growth of beard. He followed a step behind her and stopped moving when she stopped. Nick saw the slight bulge of a pistol beneath his car jacket.
“I saw the truck outside,” she said. “Can 1 assume my delivery has arrived?”
“My men are bringing it up right now,” he said, and motioned to a chair by his desk. “Why don’t you relax while you wait?”
She stared coldly into his face.
“I’ll stand,” she said.
Minutes later there was another knock on the door. Nick opened it and a couple of his men came in carrying a medium-sized wooden shipping crate between them. There were two more crates in the outer corridor. The men carefully set the first crate on the floor and brought the others in one at a time, putting them down beside it. The third box had a crowbar resting on its lid.
Gilea stood there in silence, her dark brown eyes trained on the crates.
“I want to have a look,” she said.
Nick gave Kos a nod.
Kos lifted the crowbar, slid its flat edge between the lid and the upper corner of the box, and began prying it open. While he waited, Nick glanced over at Gilea. Her eyes had narrowed, and the tip of her tongue was gliding back and forth across her bottom lip.
The lid finally came loose. Gilea bent over the crate and reached inside, her hand burrowing through a layer of Styrofoam packing material.
The crate was filled with mirrored globes of the sort that would throw off whirling spangles of light in theaters and dance halls. Each was about the size of a grapefruit. Nick had a much larger one suspended from the ceiling in his own club and usually referred to it as a “disco ball.”
“Give me the crowbar.” Gilea extended her hand toward Kos, still looking raptly down into the wooden box.
He passed her the tool without a word.
She studied the reflective globes a moment, then lifted one of them out of the crate and brought the edge of the crowbar sharply down against it. A crack spread across its circumference. She hit it again, splitting it into several pieces, letting them drop to the floor in a small avalanche of glitter dust.
Leaving only the smuggled contents of the globe in her hand.
The flat, rectangular packet had Chinese markings on one side. Its transparent wrapping contained a white, waxy substance that resembled a stick of modeling clay.
“The plastique,” Gilea said. She closed her eyes and stood with her head cocked back, her lips trembling a little, her fingers tightly gripping the packet.
Watching her, Nick thought she almost looked like a woman in ecstasy.
“You do nice work,” she said, turning to him after a long moment. Her eyes gleamed.
He smiled and met her gaze with his own.
“Always,” he said.
Nick Roma watched through the window in his office and waited. Finally Kos stuck his head inside the door and confirmed what Nick already knew. Gilea and her henchman had gone. He nodded to Kos. Kos left, shutting the door behind him.
It was time to check his insurance.
Nick walked across to his mirror, pulled his comb from his back pocket, and straightened his hair. He’d mussed it bowing over the beautiful hand of a dangerous lady.
Then he put his comb up and pressed a small button on the lower left panel of his mirror—a button so completely unobtrusive you had to know it was there to see it.
The giant mirrored panel slowly opened before his eyes. Behind that panel were banks of VCRs, each recording its assigned sector of the building. The tapes in the machines were endless loops, recording for twenty-four hours, then overtaping onto the previous material. That way, he only had to pull them if something worth saving was likely to be on them.
Like insurance.
He reached into the cavity behind the mirror and pulled the tape that recorded events in his office. That tape—of Gilea opening the disco ball and rubbing the C-4 inside like it was a sex toy she couldn’t wait to take home and try out—was a keeper. Not that he’d ever be caught. But if he was, he was betting that that tape, and a library of tapes much like it that he’d stashed in a very secret location, would buy him a really nice “get out of jail free” card.
After he reloaded the tape machine with a new blank tape, he pushed a button inset in the mirror’s inner frame. He watched a giant ultra-thin TV screen pop out of the ceiling at the back of his office, along with eight Bose speakers placed at strategic points throughout the room. Nothing but the best for Nick Roma. As he waited, he couldn’t help thinking of the other uses his mirror could be put to with such a beautiful lady. It made for a very pleasant picture.
Unlikely as such a scene was, a man needed his fantasies.
They kept him young.
He popped the tape into the VCR/DVD reader inset behind a hidden panel in his office wall, then settled back in his desk chair to watch the show.
Halfway across the city, in an abandoned warehouse whose ownership was shrouded by so many shell companies that even the most motivated searcher would never sniff it out, a remote feed of the very same footage that Nick was watching loaded itself in digital format into a powerful computer. Stamped electronically with the date the footage was taken and the location it was taped from, the information existed quietly, secretly, almost invisibly. Nick’s system performed its job perfectly.
In its own way, the scene just recorded, and all the others like it stored on the hard drive, were as explosive as the C-4 Nick had just sold Gilea.
Information, like plastique, could kill.
And, soon, it would.
ELEVEN
NEW YORK CITY DECEMBER 23, 1999
POLICE COMMISSIONER BILL HARRISON COULD HARDLY wait for the Titanic to sink so he could hurry home to his report.
In general, he hated musicals. Just didn’t get them. And the one he was watching right now had to be the most confusing one he’d ever sat through. The worst maritime disaster in history, maybe fifteen hundred people drowned, eaten by sea creatures, God only knew, and somebody’d gotten the idea to turn it into a Broadway spectacle. He really didn’t see the entertainment value in such horrendous human tragedy. What was everybody singing and kicking up their heels about? They were all going down with the ship!
He glanced over at his wife, who was in the seat beside him gazing intently at the stage. She seemed to be enjoying herself. No, not seemed to be. Was. He could tell from the tilt of her chin, the faint dimples at the corners of her mouth. When two people were married as long as they’d been, it got so you could read each other at a glance. Later, over coffee and cake, she would speak appreciatively of the sets, the score, the choreography, the staging. And he would study her with something akin to the love-struck awe he’d felt thirty years ago on their first high school date, admiring her lively, in
telligent features, her smooth coffee-brown skin, the way she put together her clothes, and the graceful movements of her hands as she commented on the various aspects of the show, marveling at everything about her for that matter, and wondering what he had ever done to deserve the constant support she had given him throughout their marriage, a faith and perseverance that helped lift him from the tough streets of Harlem to the highest post in the New York Police Department.
But later was later, and now was still Act One of a maddeningly incomprehensible songfest about a magnificent wreck whose passengers had suffered a cold, airless death. Harrison glanced at his watch, wondering how much longer his own torment would last. Nine P.M. An hour to go. Maybe more. Didn’t some plays run until ten-thirty or eleven?
Harrison felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment. That was something the city’s top cop really should know, wasn’t it? He damn well hoped he wasn’t losing touch. You could dress Times Square up all you wanted, you could even push the sex shops off the strip to make room for the wonderful world of Disney, but the hands under those bright white Mickey Mouse gloves would always have grimy fingernails, and it would always be a place where vice and violence could reach out of the shadows and drag you down like those dancing fools onstage. So much fuss had been made about the neighborhood’s renaissance in recent years, one could sometimes forget that a decrease in crime did not necessarily mean the criminals had packed their bags and gone south. In fact, it was only an intensified and very visible police presence in the area that held the bump-and-run muggers, junkies, hookers and other lowlife at bay. There were still pockets of darkness amid the lights of the Great White Way, and people needed to be aware of them. Especially the PC.
Harrison tried to concentrate on the show, wanting to keep track of the storyline so he would have something to say about it to Rosetta. Who was the character with the beard? The captain? A mad scientist? Jesus, it was no good, he was lost. A lushly melodramatic chord swelled from the orchestra pit, and one of the actors broke into song. The lyrics mentioned something about a ship of dreams. Harrison listened for a minute, but then faded back into his reverie, as if he were a radio moving beyond the broadcast range of a particular station.
His eyes staring at the stage without seeing anything on it, he thought again of the plan he wanted to look over before going to bed. He’d been calling it Operation 2000, which had the sort of nice, official-sounding ring that would inspire confidence in City Hall.
Over the past month, he had been conferring on an almost daily basis with his chief deputies, as well as commanders from the Transit Police, the Emergency Services Unit, and the NYPD-FBI Counter-Terrorism Task Force, about the problems they would face trying to safeguard the multitude of celebrants who would be crowding Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Even in an ordinary year, the job was a major pain in the ass—and this year was far from ordinary. This time around they were looking at December 31, 1999. The turn of the century. A once-in-a-lifetime Event, capital E, ladies and germs.
And while Harrison and his team of planners had been laboring to draw out a sound logistical blueprint for a situation that unquestionably defied logistics, what had the mayor been doing? Why, hitting the media in pursuit of visitor dollars, of course! He had been on every local news program frothing about the city’s plans for the big countdown. He had been plugging away on Letterman and Conan O’Brien. He had even been on radio shows like Imus in the Morning and Howard Stern, billing the triangle formed by the intersection of Seventh Avenue, Broadway, and Forty-second Street as the “center of the world,” all but popping open a champagne bottle over the airwaves as he invited listeners to join the millennial bash.
Harrison’s mind filled with an odd blend of worry and resignation. From every indication, people were responding to the mayor’s pitch in droves. Based on the massive volume of tourist inquiries, polling data, and the record number of hotel and restaurant reservations in the midtown area, it had been estimated that two million revelers would be thronging Times Square to watch the ball drop. Add to that three or four million more spectators scattered throughout Battery Park, the South Street Seaport, and the entire Brooklyn shoreline to watch the fireworks over New York Harbor, and the police force would be stretched far beyond its capacity to maintain anything close to an adequate presence. And for what? There were some who believed an age of miracles was approaching, and others who were expecting the end of existence. Harrison just kind of figured that, come January 1, the world would be the same orbiting lunatic asylum it had always been—minus a somewhat higher than usual number of holiday fatalities.
He sighed without being aware of it. In his more nervous moments, he had fantasized about giving up, taking a hike, escaping the whole damn chocolate mess so it could fall where it belonged, which was right on the mayor’s lap. Maybe he’d get a job working security in Stonehenge, or Mount Fuji, where the crowds of millennialists were bound to be thinner. Or how about Egypt? He’d heard that ten grand would buy admission to a gala some tour organizer was throwing at the Great Pyramid of Giza. Surely a seasoned big city police commissioner could be of help keeping things orderly over there. If Hizzoner wanted to be an impresario, ringmaster of the greatest show on earth, fine, more power to him. But what right did he have to drive anybody else crazy with it?
Harrison heard a crash of applause and studied the stage. The curtain had gone down. The houselights slowly brightened. What was going on? A glance at his watch revealed that it was only nine-thirty, too early for the show to have ended. Besides, he hadn’t seen the Titanic sink yet.
Intermission, then. It had to be intermission.
Rosetta was nudging him with her elbow.
“So, what do you think of the show?” she asked. Sounding, well, buoyant.
It’s hackneyed and tiresome and I can’t wait to go home, he thought.
“Love it,” he said. “Especially that song about the ship of dreams.”
Rosetta nodded in agreement and smiled. “Can’t wait to see how things work out for Ida and Isidor. Should we go to the bar and have a drink?”
He took hold of her hand.
As they rose, brushed past the couple sitting at the end of their row, and began moving up the aisle toward the lobby, Harrison mused that Ida and Isidor, whoever they were, really didn’t have too many options. Either they’d squeeze into one of the lifeboats and be rescued by the Carpathia, or they’d sink with captain and crew. But he didn’t comment on that to Rosetta.
Whatever lay ahead, he sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to spoil things for her.
TWELVE
NEW YORK CITY DECEMBER 28, 1999
MINUTES BEFORE HIS DEATH, JULIUS AGOSTEN WAS rolling his vender’s stand out of the parking lot on Twenty-third Street and trying to imagine what he would do if he hit the lottery.
The first thing on his list, he thought, would be to turn his stand over to his brother-in-law, vender’s license, garage space, and all. Stefan was still young enough to tolerate the long hours out on the street, leaving the house at four o’clock in the morning, getting home after eight at night, sometimes after midnight on weekends, summer and winter, rain or shine. What with Rene and Stefan having had the baby recently, the stand would give them a chance to make some decent money, maybe even put away a few dollars for the little girl’s future.
There were only a limited number of vender licenses available in the city, and even fewer locations as busy as the one Julius had staked out for himself, Forty-second Street and Broadway, the heart of midtown. During the week you had the professional people, men with briefcases, women in stylish outfits, thousands of them jamming the sidewalks, pouring from the subways, rushing this way and that out there on Times Square, stopping for coffee and something to eat—a Danish, roll, whatever—as they hurried to their jobs. And then you had the cabbies, the cops, the shop clerks—everybody, really. Who had time for breakfast at home nowadays?
Julius pushed the stand down the block toward his waiting van, i
ts metal casters rattling on the pavement, the noise very loud in the predawn hush. In three hours the city would awaken, but now the insurance gates were still drawn over the storefronts, and no one was pushing through the revolving doors of the office buildings, and the only traffic was an occasional newspaper truck or taxi swishing by under the dim throw of the street lamps. Thankfully. Because if the street got crowded, the traffic cops would come out in force, and he’d be fined for illegally parking the van while he got his stand out of the lot. But what else was he supposed to do? Wheel it all the way uptown on foot, twenty blocks, which was a long walk even in decent weather, and seemed a lot longer in December?
Forty million bucks, he thought, remembering the Lotto ticket in his pocket again. If he won, he would retire and head someplace warm. Buy a big house, a mansion, one with acres of lawn and a curving gravel driveway behind high iron gates. Maybe it would have an ocean view on one side—Gerty, God rest her soul, had always loved the ocean. There would be no more leaving the wagon overnight in the parking garage, no more paying two hundred a month for the privilege of keeping it safe from vandals and thieves. No more dragging himself out of bed at three A.M. so he could drive to the wholesaler in Queens for his rolls and pastries, then get the wagon out of the lot, and be set up on his corner by the start of the rush hour.
This had been his routine for over a decade, week after week, year after year. And while Julius wasn’t a man to forget his blessings, he couldn’t deny that it had taken a toll on him. Waking up early was getting more difficult every day. His work hours left him with no time to spend with his grandchildren. The circulation in his right leg had been giving him trouble, and his left shoulder very often ached.
Most of all, though, he was getting sick and tired of the brutal winters.
Today he was wearing a quilted parka and had the hood drawn up over his head, but the sharp wind coming off the Hudson stung his exposed cheeks, and his bones felt brittle from the glacial cold. These days, Julius was always adding layers of insulation to his clothing, but somehow there were never enough to keep him comfortable.
Politika (1997) Page 6