Fatyma still went on tricks with guys in cars, with the same result, although she never made a score like the first one again. After a couple of weeks she had over six hundred dollars stuffed in the change purse she kept under the waistband of her new red lace panties. She had a new coat too, lush brown leather with a fur collar, bought out of the trunk of a car from a twitchy little man who did not collect the required sales tax. She was wearing a short skirt and white tights and black plastic shoes with a strap across the instep and a white shirt with frills and a round girlish collar, and she looked like the sort of girl who carried Juicy Fruit in her coat pocket instead of a big knife, which was the point.
It was seven or so, already dark, and the traffic was thinning on Ninth. The weather had turned chilly again, and damp, which she was still not entirely used to, even after years in New York, and the cars were not slowing down for a look as often as they had. She decided to take a break at the Ham & Eggs on Eighth and Forty-third Street. There would be whores there, real ones (Fatyma having copped to the hyperbolic aspects of her father’s nomenclature), but she didn’t think much of that. Cindy had gotten stoned after explaining the mechanics of whoredom; she had not yet covered the economics.
Fatyma was eating a sweet roll at the counter when she felt presences on either side of her. Looking up, she saw that it was Carlotta and Daneesha, two regulars on the Deuce. Carlotta was a large yellowish woman with a blond wig like a pile of snakes and an intelligent harvest-moon face. Daneesha was bigger, darker, wigged with black braids and was not strictly speaking a woman at all.
“Oooh, honey,” said Carlotta, “you better not sit with your back to the door. You in big trouble. Big trouble.”
“What?”
“Trouble, sugar. Death type trouble. Kingman looking for you.”
“I don’t understand. Who is Kingman?”
“Kingman the mack,” said Daneesha. “The pimp. He don’t like what you been pulling out on the avenue there.” She sat on the next stool and stretched out her long, lovely legs. They were encased in boots to the knee. “Let me explain, child, see if your little Puerto Rican brain can take this in—”
“Am not Puerto Rican. Am Arab.”
“Whatever, you a fool. Listen up. Carlotta, darling, am I the ho with a heart of gold to explain this so this baby don’t get herself killed?”
“Pure gold,” agreed the other.
“So, what it is, you be ripping off the Johns, sugar. With your little knife, dig? So the word get around, the other night this regular John tell the girl and the girl tell Kingman. Now Kingman, he got his business to run, he don’t want no little girl scaring the trade away, taking off the Johns like you been doing, dig? He be looking for you. He got his razor, he got his little bottle of acid. He find you, honey child, you gonna need a new face, dig?”
“I was you, girl,” added Carlotta, “I’d get small real fast. That Kingman a mean motherfucker. Where you from anyway?”
“Brooklyn.”
“No good. He from Brooklyn. Where you from before that?”
“Palestine.”
“Where the fuck’s that? Montana?”
“Is near,” said Fatyma.
“Then you best get your young ass the fuck back to Palestine while you still got it, sugar,” said Daneesha “And watch your back. You see a baby blue Cadillac in your rearview, thass the end.” Daneesha turned away and began to study her reflection in the mirror behind the counter, adjusting her braids just so.
Fatyma waited until they had gone, so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing her frightened, and then went back to the shared apartment, keeping her head down and staying, where possible, in the shadows. Although she was a remarkably courageous girl by nature, the exposure of her recent ignorance had shaken her self-confidence, and she felt a strong need for another tutorial.
When she arrived, she found Cindy where she usually was, on the sagging brown corduroy couch she used as a bed, eyes closed, the Walkman earphones stuck in her ears, singing a song from Purple Rain in the peculiar wavering manner that emerges when people are stoned with headphones on. Fatyma looked around the room and curled her lip. Fast-food bags and wrappers littered the floor along with beer bottles, glassine envelopes, the cassette tape boxes, filthy sheets and pillows. A lavender condom, used, poked its head out from under the skirt of the couch. Fatyma yanked the plug from the Walkman. Cindy opened her eyes and frowned, slowly focusing her gaze on the other girl.
“Wha’?”
“I need your help. I am in big trouble.” Fatyma shook the older girl until she snarled and pulled away, and sat up, pouting like an infant, with a dirty red quilt hiked up around her.
The story poured out. Fatyma finished by asking, “Why does this mack want to hurt me, Cindy? There are plenty of joes. Every night they come in cars and cars.”
“Johns, not joes,” said Cindy. “And it’s, like, the principle of the thing. It’s his turf. He’s supposed to, like, control it, make it peaceful for business and stuff. Enough shit like this goes down and the cops get pissed and start cracking down on the Deuce again, and worse than that, the other pimps get on his case, how come he can’t take care of business and stuff. So he has to mess you up.”
“But what should I do, Cindy?”
Cindy shrugged and sniffed, and started feeling, casually, under the quilt for her stash bag. “Well, shit, you got to stay off the street a while, that’s for sure. And you can’t go ripping off Johns anymore. Like, see, Kingman might’ve just wanted to, like, scare the shit out of you. If you don’t rub it in his face anymore, he might forget about it, you know?”
“But then how will I get the money? If I don’t do this with the Johns?”
“Hell, kid, you gonna have to sell your ass like the regular people do,” Cindy said, with no small amount of satisfaction in her voice. She put the headphones back on and lay back again. Fatyma saw her slip something into her mouth and swallow.
Angry now, she walked out of the room and through the apartment to the kitchen. She had wanted to make herself a cup of tea, but the roaches and the smell and something a good deal bigger than any roach rooting through a plastic garbage bag drove her away. She couldn’t understand these people. They were Americans! Those left behind in Gaza, those in refugee camps, people with nothing, lived better than this, and these fools seemed proud of it, as if it were an accomplishment to be filthy and lazy and whore and take drugs. It was a mystery, but one she did not care to pursue at any length. All these, Cindy and the rest, were going down, and she herself wished to rise.
It did not take her long to pack, since she lived out of her suitcase. Some of her things had been taken, “borrowed” in the local cant, but she did not bother herself with a search through the personal piles of things in the closets and corners. The drug Cindy had just taken was one that prompted a rosy emotional tone and gushing sentimentality, and so Fatyma found herself tearfully embraced, begged not to leave, showered with good wishes and advice.
“You should check out the East Village,” Cindy said. “You might dig that scene better.”
Fatyma furrowed her brow. The word “village” conjured up to her mind a cluster of mud huts full of women draped in black and children covered with flies. “The village?”
“Yeah, like Tompkins Square, around there. They let you crash in the park.”
“I will go to Hollywood, I think,” said Fatyma with firm resolve and, picking up her suitcase, which was a lot heavier now than it had been when she arrived, she walked out.
She set out for the subway. After half a block the cheap plastic handle of the thing was cutting into her fingers so painfully that she stopped, dropped it, and began to look around for a taxi. It was fortunate that she did so, for she was thus able to see the pale blue car that had been following her stop abruptly at the curb, and see the heavy, shaven-headed black man spring from the driver’s side and rush toward her. Before she could move, he had snatched her up on his hip and was carrying he
r toward the car. The back door of the Cadillac opened, and a tan, tall man wearing a knee-length silver fox emerged and held the door open. Fatyma could see something sparkle in his mouth when he spoke. This must be, she thought, the pimp Kingman. He said, “Come on, come on, throw the bitch in here!”
But to the pimp’s immense surprise, his assistant let the girl go and dropped to his knees. He seemed to be praying. The girl was running down the street toward the bright lights of Broadway. Kingman ran to the car, and from the glove compartment he took a huge nickel-plated .44 magnum pistol. He fired it at the girl’s retreating back, missed, and was blinded by the enormous gout of flame the gun produced, rendering further shots nugatory. He took them anyway, doing considerable damage to street furniture, cars, and trash cans, but none to his target.
He went to check on his assistant, who was now lying on his side in the middle of a widening pool of blood. The blood pool glistened black as molasses under the sodium lights, and Kingman was not about to tread through it in his pale yellow glove-leather high-heeled pumps. The guy was obviously dead. Kingman heard the first faint warble of approaching sirens. He cursed, got into the car, and drove off, leaving on the pavement a corpse with the bone handle of a curved Arab dagger sticking out of its belly.
SEVEN
On the whole, Karp preferred Aaron Zwiller to Rabbi Mendel Lowenstein, and was more pleased than he should have been when Lowenstein’s aide called and told him that the rabbi would not be venturing out into the perilous streets to attend this meeting, and that a substitute would be sent. Zwiller was a prosperous diamond merchant and a major financial backer of the Ostropoler Hasidim. Karp had decided that he was tired of meeting with the Arab and the Jewish representatives separately. Let them spend their energy yelling at each other instead of at him, was his thought. When Zwiller arrived, late, Karp realized that he had seen him before, during his ill-fated foray into Williamsburg, in Lowenstein’s tiny office, the man at the adding machine. He was large and heavy, approaching sixty, broad and sallow of face, with a bushy gray beard and thick side locks shoved behind his ears and held in place by the frames of sturdy hornrimmed glasses. His eyes were blue, large, hooded, glabrous, and intelligent, and they did not burn with fanatical fires—a negotiator, was Karp’s take, and not on the ballot for the next Messiah.
He shook hands stiffly and formally with Karp and with John Haddad, sat with a soft sigh across the table from Haddad, and folded his hands. Just like fucking Geneva, thought Karp, and he launched into the story of the case thus far. It would go to the grand jury that week; they had been waiting for Mr. Shilkes to recover somewhat from his wounds so he could testify. There was no question that they would get an indictment and that a trial would be scheduled. The charges were murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and aggravated assault.
“First-degree murder?” asked Zwiller.
“It doesn’t work that way, Mr. Zwiller. In New York state, first-degree murder is what we call the murder of a police or corrections officer in the line of duty. Second-degree murder is for—”
“For lesser beings like Mrs. Shilkes?” asked Zwiller. He had a gravelly, loud voice, compelling attention, or at least that was the one he used now. Karp imagined that he had others.
“It’s what the law says, sir. That’s how we play it. But I have no doubt we’ll get a conviction and that the defendants will be put away for a very long time.”
“What’s this conspiracy business?” asked Haddad.
“That means—” Karp began, at which point Zwiller put in helpfully, “They’re terrorists. That’s what terrorists do. First they conspire, then they murder.”
“That’s what you call it,” snapped Haddad, “but when a foreign occupying power is murdering innocent people every day, we don’t have such an inflammatory name for it.”
“Self-defense! Self-defense is the name for it against terrorists.”
And from there they were off into history, back to the Hebron Massacre in 1929, up to ’48 and Deir Yassin, to ’56 to ’67 to ’73 and to the present antics of Black September and the Mossad and Shin Bet and al-Fatah. It was a form of boasting in reverse, each side competing to be the weakest, the most helpless, the most sinned against. Karp let them scream for a few minutes. This was part of the plan. They would yell and accuse, and after this meeting they would each come to him individually and try to make nice. Karp had used the ploy any number of times with scumbags accused of crimes and saw no reason why it should not work just as well with political types. Zwiller was just rolling out the Six Million when Karp rapped his knuckles on the table three times. They were very large knuckles, and they made a commanding sound.
“Gentlemen! Let me just say this once again. This meeting, and any future meetings we may have, are a courtesy of the district attorney’s office. We don’t have to do this, and we’re not going to do this, unless we can keep focus on the case at hand. I don’t care what happened in the Middle East back then or whose side is doing what to whom.” He paused and glared at first one, then the other. “Now, we were discussing the issue of conspiracy. Conspiracy to commit murder is a crime in and of itself. We are charging all three defendants, Naijer, Hamshari, and Daoud, with conspiracy—”
Haddad broke in. “Wait a second: Daoud wasn’t at the crime at all. He was in jail.”
“Correct. But he conspired. He was part of the gang. That’s a crime under Section 105 of the state criminal code. And he freely admits it.”
“But he’s just a kid!”
“They’re all just kids, Mr. Haddad,” said Karp. “Two of them are murderers.”
“So what is this, guilt by association? He had political talks with people who were nuts, so he has to suffer? Look, Mr. Karp, I know this family. They’re decent hardworking people, very strict, very old-fashioned—”
“Like the Shilkeses,” rumbled Zwiller.
“Thank you, Mr. Zwiller,” said Karp acidly. “Let’s move on. I should inform you that Ali al-Qabbani has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. We’re treating it as a homicide.”
“Who?” asked Zwiller, and Karp looked at him very closely as he asked it. He seemed genuinely puzzled; that, or he was an extremely competent actor.
“So, the retaliation is starting,” declared Haddad. He clenched his fists.
“What retaliation? What is he talking about?” asked Zwiller.
“Mr. Haddad thinks that militant Jewish groups may have had something to do with Mr. al-Qabbani’s death,” Karp answered, still watching Zwiller’s face.
This reddened angrily, and the man snarled, “Yes, not only did we kill him, we used his blood to make matzos. Mr. Karp, I didn’t come here to listen to blood libels from this man.”
“What, it’s so beyond belief that Jews are murdering Arabs?” Haddad shot back, yelling. “Get a television! Watch the news!”
“Gentlemen! Cut it out!” said Karp in an even louder voice. “You’re supposed to be reasonable men. Act like it!” He waited for a few beats. He had their petulant attention. “Now, we’ve had one Jew killed, allegedly by Arabs, and we’ve had one Arab killed, by persons unknown. And I am going to press upon you, and I expect you to take this back to your communities, that we are not going to tolerate vigilantism, and we are not going to tolerate revenge, or incitement to revenge. This is not Beirut, and it’s not the West Bank.”
He let that sink in. “Returning to the matter of Mr. al-Qabbani: we have what looks like a professional execution-style killing. We also believe that Mr. al-Qabbani was a contact between the two defendants in the Shilkes case and someone else, perhaps someone who planned and directed this crime, and—”
“Oh, please!” Haddad broke in. “I can’t believe you’re bringing up that Dar al-Harb business again. I told you, there’s no such group.”
“Yes, you did,” said Karp quietly. “So what groups are there, Mr. Haddad?”
That stopped him. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, just that every ethnic group
in this city has its bad boys, and the respectable people know who they are, even if they don’t talk about it much.”
“That’s nonsense! You’re implying that I’m involved with terrorists? I’m a member of the city council, for God’s sake.”
“Did I say ‘involved’? No. Let me explain something, Mr. Haddad. I was raised in Brooklyn, in a middle-class neighborhood. My father owned a manufacturing business. He had trucks. He had a lot of paper waste to dispose of. In those days, if you had trucks, if you had waste, you were in bed with gangsters. He used to complain about having to pay them off, but he did it. A good friend of his was a lawyer for some of the guys from Murder Incorporated. These are Jewish gangsters, by the way. Mr. Keegan down the hall, I bet he could tell you who’s going around buying arms for the Irish Republican Army these days, or if not him, people he knows, in the Irish community. My friend Ray Guma knows half the Cosa Nostra in New York on a first-name basis. So, we know, and they know, and so do you, or people you know do. And if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this kid was killed by his own people, your people, in fact, then you could be real helpful.”
“You want me to spy?” said Haddad. His nostrils had gone white against his olive skin.
“No, of course not,” said Karp dismissively. “I just wanted to point out that you have the kind of access to your community that the police can never have, and that you probably know more than you think you do about this kind of thing.”
He turned to stare at Zwiller, who was enjoying Haddad’s discomfort rather too much for Karp’s liking. “That goes for you too, Mr. Zwiller. I’d be very disturbed if any further violence emerged from the group you represent.”
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