Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Lucy came in, seeming subdued, poured herself a glass of milk and took a pastry from a plate. Mattie was called away to handle some crisis. Tran finished grinding his pistachios and went out to smoke a cigarette. Marlene and Lucy chatted about school, until gradually Lucy became aware that the baker girl was singing in a language she did not recognize.

  “What’s that language?” she boldly asked, and when Fatyma answered, with some surprise, that it was Arabic, Lucy focused her considerable charm on the older girl and got her to teach her the words to the song, which was a simple repetitive ditty about girls and goats going up and down the hill, and the girl looking in the clouds to see the face of her future husband. In ten minutes, with much giggling on both sides, Lucy had the song down. To Marlene’s ear there was no difference in accent or intonation between Lucy’s and Fatyma’s words. Fascinated, for she had never observed this process before, she watched Lucy attack the new language. How do you say this, how do you say that, in Arabic? and so on to every object in the room, and the basic verbs. By degrees Lucy spoke greater proportions of actual Arabic in her questioning (soon it was “Tib ’a ’eyh ‘shoes’ bil arabee?” and was corrected, laughingly, by Fatyma, and plunged on, never forgetting a correction, the ferocious throaty consonants of the language apparently posing no problems for her supple tongue. By the time Marlene dragged her away, complaining loudly, an hour later, she had a vocabulary of over two hundred words and a solid grasp of grammatical construction.

  In the car, Marlene said, “Lucy, Tran and I have to go do something right now—it won’t take long, but I’m going to drop you off at home. Set the table and make a salad—if I’m not home by the time your father gets there, throw a box from the freezer into the microwave. And don’t forget your homework.”

  “Yes, master,” said Lucy in sepulchral tones.

  “Don’t be smart. The other thing is—you know about Fatyma? I think it would be a good idea if we kept her between the three of us for now. She’s in trouble, and she’s safe at the shelter, but she might not be if word got out that that’s where she’s staying. Okay?”

  “Not even Daddy?”

  “I think especially Daddy. I hate to ask you to keep a secret like that, but it’s probably only for a short time. Will it make you neurotic?”

  “Probably. Anyway, Daddy and I have lots of secrets from you.”

  Lucy saw Marlene’s eyes appear, startled, in the rear-view mirror. “What!” exclaimed the wounded mother. “What secrets? What are they?”

  “If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, Mother,” replied Lucy, cool as a peeled egg.

  Marlene opened her mouth to fume but stopped. Hoist by my own petard, she thought, which I deserve. “Shut up, Tran!” she snarled, but he kept laughing, a soft, breathy clicking vibration, and Lucy started guffawing too, and after a while she joined in. After that, instead of driving straight home, she stopped off at Bello & Ciampi and told Harry that, as much as she hated to do it, she didn’t think she could be quite as straight-up a security operative as he required, and that if he wanted to bail and go work for a slick uptown outfit, okay, lots of luck, and no hard feelings.

  Harry looked at her for a long time, or so it seemed, not with his cop’s eyes either, rather with the burnt ones, and Marlene realized how much all this was paining him, and she felt even worse, and so when he said, “Marlene, before you make up your mind, see the man, see Lou Osborne,” Marlene sighed, and felt her eyes prickling in a non-hard-boiled way, a soft-boiled way, actually, and said, “Okay, Harry, set it up.”

  After leaving Guma’s, Karp went back to his desk and ordered a roast beef sandwich and a soda from a take-out place. While he was waiting, he made a series of calls to people he did not want to speak to, but wanted to leave messages with. It was an old bureaucratic ploy, but one he was fond of anyway. He was laying a trail, weaving a web. Trailing a coat. The messages he left with Czermak, Carrozza, Netski, and Roland Hrcany would act as little crystals around which paranoia would form, and upon these might grow useful actions.

  The problem was, he didn’t have enough to go to the D. A. with, not enough to cause him to drop an indictment against a couple of putative cop killers. It would be a political disaster, and Keegan would never go for it, except if the folks who actually did the deed were waiting in jail and there was a plausible case against these new fellows all wrapped up. Karp realized he was far from that, and there was only so much he could do quietly to get there. He wanted other people to make the noise. He wanted Carrozza talking to Czermak about a missing load of brown Mexican heroin. He wanted Czermak to go to Roland, worried. He wanted Roland to lean on Netski so that Netski would get the cops stirred up, in the hopes that something would float to the surface, something fat enough to allow him to modify his lame tale about Morilla investigating the Mexicans. And the more they talked, the worse it would be, because word would get out—it always did. Every detective, every senior A.D.A., had a pet reporter to whom juicy tidbits might be fed, against the day when a sympathetic ear might be required among the jackal press. There would be a buzz, it would soon reach the ears of the defense, and so it would become imperative that Roland and his minions either uncover the reality behind the buzz, and use it in the People’s case against persons now unknown or, if the buzz was actually false, learn enough to torpedo it in court and actually convict the Obregons.

  This was Karp’s thinking. He knew that the people he had called would not hurry to return his messages (or would call when they knew he would be out of the office—the ploy worked both ways), because it is an iron law of bureaucracy that when someone up the line or one who has the ear of the big boss calls and leaves a cryptic message (such as “what about this Lucky on the Morilla murder? The brown heroin angle?”), it is a foolish worker bee who calls back without having exhaustively researched the reason for the call. So they would call one another, and plot and plan, and Karp would observe and keep poking, which is what good staff is for.

  Shilkes was meanwhile on the back burner. The girl might turn up, but Karp did not think, from Raney’s story, that she was part of a conspiracy. That there was a conspiracy he now thought a reasonable bet, but this would not greatly affect the course of the trial of the Arab youths. Karp was mainly concerned at this point with the suppression of vendetta and the extraction of back-channel information from the hostile communities.

  It came sooner than he thought. He was about to leave for home when John Haddad called, sounding both nervous and full of himself. There was someone Karp should meet. He gave Karp an address in Brooklyn, a law office on Washington Avenue. It had to be today or not at all. Karp called his driver, and in ten minutes they were in the car.

  “Brooklyn,” said Karp to Ed Morris. “Take the Manhattan Bridge.”

  “The rabbi again?”

  “No, this time it’s the Arabs,” said Karp. “I’m an equal-opportunity schmoozer.”

  NINE

  John Haddad’s office was located in a small commercial building near Pratt Institute, old but well kept, a relic of the time when Brooklyn had been a major metropolis on its own. Karp took a creaky, mahogany-lined elevator up to the sixth floor. At the receptionist’s desk in the waiting room of the suite, which seemed otherwise deserted, sat a dark-skinned man in a leather jacket. This person expressed a mien that made it doubtful to Karp that his ordinary task in life was uttering cheerful greetings to clients and fetching coffee. One of his hands was hidden beneath the desk, in a way that suggested it was not empty of lethal force. This person pointed silently at a door, and Karp nodded and followed the point.

  Inside was a walnut-paneled office that might have belonged to any mildly prosperous lawyer, of the deeds, closings, trusts and wills sort, its panels decorated with the usual diplomas and awards. Since Haddad was also a politician, the walls also included photos of the owner with various big shots—the last couple of mayors and governors prominent among them. There was an old oak desk in the center of the room, set on a pale r
ed oriental rug, behind which three large old-fashioned windows looked out on the avenue. Fort Green Park was just visible as a brown smudge in the distance. Haddad and another man were seated on a tufted green leather sofa set along one wall. On a low, ornately inlaid coffee table before them was a brass coffee service, brightly polished. Both men rose when Karp entered, and Haddad made the introductions: Mr. Rahmali, Mr. Karp. Haddad’s eyes shone behind his spectacles. This was a big moment for him, a far cry from bitching about street-cleaning schedules. They sat and Karp drank some bitter coffee and they exchanged pleasantries. Karp took this occasion to examine the stranger. Tired, was his take, maybe forty-five, but with a lot of hard miles, a small, compact, Peter Lorre-model fellow, a round, cropped head, clean-shaven, deep-set eyes, a bony, flaring nose, all set in a face brown as a grocery bag. Karp had spent a lot of time learning to tell the serious players from the bullshitters. Haddad was a bullshitter, more or less; Mr. Rahmali was a serious player.

  There was a delicate pause in the light talk. Mr. Rahmali fixed Karp with his eyes.

  “Mr. Karp,” he began, “forgive me, but it is my understanding that you are Jewish, true?”

  The voice was well modulated, the accent the familiar one spread by the British throughout their late empire, with the r’s heavily rolled.

  “What about it?” replied Karp.

  “Then, I must ask you, what is your position on the current troubles in the Middle East?”

  Karp took a deep breath and tried to suppress his annoyance. “Mr. Rahmali, my position on the Middle East is neither here nor there. My only purpose here is to advance the interest of criminal justice and, secondarily, to prevent civic unrest in this city. As a private individual, I would hope that the various parties out there would learn to live in peace.”

  A smile flickered across Rahmali’s lips. “Yes, these are noble sentiments, which I, of course, share. Tell me, are you aware of what has been happening over the past few months in Lebanon?”

  Karp ignored this and asked sharply, “Who are you, Mr. Rahmali? Why am I here talking to you?”

  Haddad drew in his breath. Rahmali’s face did not change in the slightest.

  “Ah, I thought you had been briefed,” Rahmali said. “Allow me to explain. In 1948, during the first Zionist war, Golda Meir came to the United States to raise money and proselytize the cause of her people. She collected over five million dollars in less than a month. I do not hope to do as well, but my cause is similar. If there were a Palestinian state today, I might hope to be its foreign minister. I have the honor to be one of Mr. Arafat’s oldest colleagues. Is this sufficient identification?”

  “You’re with the PLO.”

  “Yes, and unlike the more fortunate Mrs. Meir, I am not here legally, which is the reason for our precipitous and surreptitious meeting. You will have understood that Rahmali is not my real name. May I continue? As to the Lebanese situation?”

  Karp shrugged. “Just what I read in the papers. You’ve taken a big hit is what I gather.”

  “Yes. A complete defeat. It is essentially the end of the dream that we could, by means of guerrilla warfare, do to the Zionists what the Vietnamese did to you—extract political concessions from the gun. We have been driven out of Lebanon, eight hundred of our women and children massacred at the Sabra and Shatilla camps. Lebanon is now divided between the Zionists and the Syrians, Jordan and Egypt are both closed to us, and we cannot get any closer to Palestine than Tunis. So, we are realistic men. If armed conflict fails, we try political means. What are the political realities of the current situation? One, Israel depends for its existence on the support of the United States. Two, this support will be forthcoming only if Israel can pretend to be a just state, defending itself against foreign enemies. Three, Israel cannot continue this pretense while suppressing a million and a half Palestinians in the occupied territories. It is impossible. There will be atrocities, as in South Africa. Israel will become an international pariah. This they cannot stand, and so sooner or later they will deal with us. We will accept the existence of Israel, forgoing violence, and they will accept our existence, and after a great long while, your innocent hope will become reality. Meanwhile, however, there will be transitional difficulties.”

  “You mean like terrorist murders?”

  A tiny nod of acknowledgment. “Just so. You understand that the Palestinian cause has always been used to further political ambitions that had nothing to do with the happiness of the actual Palestinian people. It is the great litmus test for Arab politicians—perhaps I should say for Muslim politicians now that Iran is what it is—just as communism was at one time for your country. It produces irrationalities as great. The Mideast is unusually rich in young, passionate men who have no serious education, no jobs, no future, and who are willing to sacrifice for a cause. Some of them are in this country, in this city …”

  “You mean like the suspects in the Shilkes murder?”

  “Them, and others. These can be organized by … let us call them entrepreneurs of violence. They are by and large extremely clever and talented men who have lived underground for many, many years, who have been trained to kill and destroy by experts, and who have learned to love that mode of life. It is an addiction with them, like a drug. The Irish have them, the Basques have them, the Corsicans. And for various reasons they are not short of funding. Iran I have already mentioned. Libya. Syria. A Gulf prince or two. The Soviets, although they are perhaps more afraid of the ayatollahs than they are of the Jews. Give me two million dollars, Mr. Karp, a tiny sum on international scales, and I will launch you a terror campaign on behalf of vegetarianism, Esperanto, what you like.”

  “Mr. Rahmali, this is all fascinating, but could you make your point?”

  Another ghostly smile. “I beg your pardon. Patience is a great virtue in the PLO, and perhaps I have too much of it. Or a cultural thing. We Arabs say, speed is of the devil. But you are, of course, American, so—to the point. There is a man. He was trained in al-Fatah, the striking force of the PLO. He was expelled for … let us say, excesses. After this he engineered, we believe, the assassination of a senior PLO official with whom he had political differences, an occurrence all too common, and one which our enemies have never been slow to exploit, which is one reason we are in Tunis rather than Jerusalem. He was briefly a Marxist and was resident in Moscow in the mid-sixties. Later he joined Black September. He fought in Lebanon for two years, in an operation funded by Iran. He calls himself Feisal Ibn-Salemeh. Does the name Salemeh mean anything to you? No? Well, then, Ali Hassan Salemeh was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich attack on the Israeli athletes. Feisal started calling himself Ibn-Salemeh—son of Salemeh—as a commemoration when the original was blown up by the Israelis in 1979 in Beirut.”

  “Not a sweetheart, I gather.”

  “No. A dangerous man, and quite out of control. Of course, we tried to keep track of him, just as our opposites in the Shin Bet and Mossad did, but about eight months ago he vanished. He walked into the Hotel du Roc in Algiers one Sunday morning and never emerged.”

  Karp was getting antsy again. He didn’t want to hear the details. “You’re telling me this because you think he’s here? Because you think he’s somehow behind this dumb stabbing?”

  Rahmali seemed unperturbed by the interruption and cruised ahead with his unveiling. “So there was great consternation among those who consider these things, on both sides. But there was nothing but silence—where Ibn-Salemeh had been there was a vacuum, as in outer space. Then some other quite interesting things start to happen. A man named Abdel Hussein Khalid, Chouza Khalid as he calls himself, who has a reputation in Beirut as a small-time arms and narcotics smuggler, suddenly begins to expand his horizons. He flies to Tripoli and meets with some senior Libyan military and state security people. He charters a small merchant vessel on a trip to Marseilles. He makes investments in several legitimate American firms dealing with the Middle East. On the strength of these investments he obtains a resi
dency permit and moves to New York. He imports and exports. Recently, he traveled again to Libya and other interesting places, including the city of Newport, Virginia, where he met the vessel Adouana, Liberian registry, out of Marseilles, and arranged for the off-loading and transport of several large crates of cargo.”

  “How do you know all this? And what does Khalid have to do with this Ibn-Salemeh guy?”

  Rahmali raised his hand in a mollifying gesture. “One moment, if you please, Mr. Karp. I promise it will all make sense. We know because one of the men close to Khalid has a cousin, who is close to us. Also from this cousin we know that something important is being planned, an outrage. What it is, we don’t know, but from our Libyan sources we are fairly certain that Khalid took delivery of at least one 250-kilogram Soviet aerial bomb, from the Libyan military, plus a good deal of miscellaneous weaponry. Now, Khalid is a criminal, not a terrorist. He works for money, although I suppose it would please his vanity to be respected as a freedom fighter. It is inconceivable that he could or would mount an operation of this type by himself, or that the Libyans would even let him in the door without some major sponsorship or association with some important figure. Now, as you can imagine, we have a pretty good idea what the other groups are doing at any time—Hamas, the Hezbollah, Abu Nidal, and so on, and we have no indication that they have the will or the resources to mount an operation on American soil. Thus, we have an inexplicable operation, without an obvious leader, and a bold and ruthless leader who has utterly vanished. It gives one pause, does it not? And there is one other thing, which is why I am talking to you this evening. I said that Feisal was expelled from al-Fatah. Why was this? Because he preferred, in violation of the policy of concentrating on military targets, the organizing of little groups of boys to do stupid things. One group took over a school bus and crashed it, killing themselves and all the children on board. Another threw a grenade into a bathhouse on a kibbutz, killing three elderly women. They killed hitchhikers, they shot up restaurants. Every one of the boys he sent out was killed or captured. Every one! When we asked him to account for this failure, and for the stupidity of the targets, he laughed and said we did not understand how to wage war in this way. The point was to create rage in the target populations. Here he meant both the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews would be enraged by the choice of targets, and press more heavily on the Arabs under their control, which would enhance recruitment of fedayin, and so would the loss of the boys, because their families would require vengeance. He thought it was a good thing that his boys were killed, do you see? He recruited among the layabouts, the slow-witted, the dreamers. …”