Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I thought that was precisely the point of terrorism, Mr. Rahmali. He sounds like a champ to me.”

  The man made a deprecating movement of his hands, a fluttering, as if brushing flies away. “Yes, we do terrible things, it is true, but we justify them by reference to a political purpose. There is at least—what do you say?—the color of a military action. Feisal was after rage for the sake of rage, unconnected with any political aim. Let me make myself clear, Mr. Karp. If I could achieve the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people by detonating a nuclear bomb in this city, I would do it. I would hold the bomb on my lap and push the button. I am a fanatic, I admit it. But once I understand that such an act would not bring my goal closer, would make it impossible, in fact, then participating in violence becomes not a tool in a just war, but an insane fantasy which feeds on itself. This is the case with ibn-Salemeh. Now, you are involved in this situation because two or perhaps three Arab boys have killed a Jew …”

  “And you suggest that the crime and the choice of the perpetrators is characteristic of this man’s former style.”

  “Certainly. Ibn-Salemeh is missing. His presumptive associate, Khalid, is in the city now. We have a crime, with implications of a wider conspiracy. I assure you that the PLO is not involved. Who else could it be?”

  “Okay, sir, but if you’re right, this is a matter for the FBI, not just the Manhattan prosecutor. I will be obliged to inform them of our talk.” This brought a startled expression to Haddad’s face, but the other man waved his hand dismissively and said, in a weary voice, “Of course, but your FBI has this information, and has for some time, through various sources. But whether they will stop the action or not is questionable. The FBI has difficulty in infiltrating Arab organizations, for obvious reasons. It would not be difficult to arrest Khalid—he operates quite openly—but this would accomplish nothing. It would not secure the explosives and weapons, and it would not catch Ibn-Salemeh.”

  “But what have they done? Anything? Do you know?”

  “I know very little,” said Rahmali evasively. “I am, as you can imagine, merely passing through. Mr. Haddad asked me to talk with you, and so I did.”

  “Why did you? What do you get out of telling me all this?” asked Karp, since Mr. Rahmali, the potential former would-be suicide nuclear bomber of New York, did not strike him as one ordinarily at the beck of the Haddads of the world.

  Rahmali pursed his lips and smiled, making the sort of patient face one presented to a slow student. Karp saw him as he might have once been, a high school teacher in a dusty desert place.

  “I thought I explained this. It no longer serves our cause to have the Americans see us as a gang of merciless fanatics, not specifically the PLO, I mean. We wish to separate ourselves from … others who are less discriminate in their actions. The Arab, the Muslim, population of the States is growing, becoming more powerful, not at present as powerful as the Jews are, but not inconsiderable in both New York, Michigan, and California, and these are important political states, as you know. So this is the battlefield of public opinion, and what we require is that when Americans think of Arabs, they think of people like Mr. Haddad here, not, as you say, rag heads with bombs and Kalashnikovs.”

  Karp allowed that this would be a good thing, checked his watch, and, after some desultory closing conversation, thanked Haddad and Mr. Rahmali, and made his exit. On the ride back to Manhattan, Karp was silent and emitting don’t-bother-me vibes, so Morris left him alone with his thoughts. The councilman had, surprisingly enough, done the right thing, quickly and discreetly, although Karp had to wonder how much of the event had been constructed by the dangerous and anonymous “Mr. Rahmali.” Assuming the man was more or less on the level, Karp now had confirmation of a conspiracy behind the stupid killing of an elderly food merchant. Karp was conscious of a roiled, slightly nauseated feeling in his belly that was not a result of bouncing over the corrugated surface of the Manhattan Bridge. Rather, it was the uncomfortable knowledge he now possessed. As a responsible citizen, Karp was naturally interested in preventing an outrage that would take innocent lives. As a prosecutor, even as the direct agent of a district attorney, he had, however, a much narrower interest, which was the preparation of an actual case, of a type that was ordinarily considered one of the most difficult to prosecute, a case of conspiracy. An Arab gentleman living in Brooklyn who might commit some violation of the New York criminal code at some future date was perfectly safe from the hand of the New York County D.A. except if, and only if, he had entered into an agreement with at least one other to commit a felony, that agreement being the “overt act” required by the relevant statute.

  It would be a bear to try, which Karp would not have minded had he more to go on than a secret meeting with an unknown man, who might very well have some obscure political ax to grind against this Khalid character. So he was uneasy about that, but what really riled him was what he referred to privately as “foreign shit,” the various ejecta from the world’s trouble spots that happened to land within the jurisdiction of the County of New York. The Shilkes case and its dark surround certainly qualified as foreign shit. What to do with it was the problem.

  The first duty of a staffer is to decide what is to be presented to the principal and in what manner. The staffer who goes to the principal with every little thing will not last long; if the big guy wanted to dick around with every little thing, he would not require the services of staff. On the other hand, the principal must never be surprised, so the staffer has to keep up a continuous flow of information, which, however, must be delivered in an appropriate form. Not “Oh, fuck, boss, what’ll we do now?” but “I’ve done this and that, and it’s fixed, boss.” The staffer has no real authority, being a mere doppelganger of the boss, so the process of getting it under control can be a complex matter of threats and persuasion, with the great hole card being the level of information already slipped to the boss. Only the staffer knows this for sure, but naturally those he hopes to manipulate would dearly wish to know it too, so that they can slide by the staffer and sandbag him with the big guy. These conditions insure that most staffers are (or quickly become) sly, slippery, subtle rats.

  That he understood himself to be becoming ever more ratlike, against the demands of his natural temperament, added no little to Karp’s discomfort. Nevertheless, what he had learned and its implications needed sharing, and as he rode up in the elevator to his loft, he decided who were going to be the sharers.

  Karp was a firm believer in the separation of church and state, and since his home and his family were the closest thing he had to a church, he almost never brought his business to his home. He made an exception only when privacy was of inordinate importance, as now. Somewhat after nine that evening, therefore, Karp sat at his round dining room table drinking Marlene’s cocaine-strength coffee with three people, two of whom he trusted utterly and one who was merely a necessary participant. His wife, naturally, was of that number: Karp would not have dreamed of plotting anything in his home without including her. That this was not entirely reciprocated by Marlene, who had plotted things aplenty around this very table without including him, was of no moment. He was an officer of the law and she was not, and besides, Marlene was Marlene and came with a whole package of surprises, like a cereal box. The next was Jim Raney, who was necessary as the investigating officer in Shilkes. Karp understood that the foreign shit was way above the competence of a mere detective, but he thought that was Raney’s problem. If he didn’t want to carry the freight for something like a possible terrorist cell, all he had to do was inform his lieutenant and the thing would be whisked up into the fourteenth floor of One Police Plaza in a New York minute. That suited Karp well enough; whether it would suit Raney, or the other cop at the table, remained to be seen.

  The other cop was Detective Lieutenant Clay Fulton. Fulton was Karp’s oldest friend on the police force, had known him since his first stumbling days at the D.A., and had saved his young butt innumerable time
s. Karp expected him to try once more, and had confidence in his ability to do so, and since he was assigned to the D.A. squad, and more or less worked for Karp, he would have the primary responsibility if Karp were to go ahead and institute some sort of conspiracy investigation. Fulton was at this time in his early fifties, his athletic body only slightly thickened, his pleasant mahogany-colored face smooth except for two deep lines at the corners of his mouth and three that shot down between his heavy brows, like arbitrary marks on a piece of expensive sports equipment. He was one of very few black detective lieutenants in the NYPD, and one of fewer still with a college degree. Fulton had broken a theater date with his wife to come here tonight, when Karp, as he had mentioned sourly, sent up the Bat Signal, and he was not charitably disposed.

  Karp told his tale to complete silence. No questions were needed because there were few people in the country who could tell a complex story ex tempore better than Butch Karp. He gave them the Shilkes case from the beginning, as if opening to a jury: the crime itself; the scribbled slogans of a somehow not very real organization; Raney’s discovery of the murder weapons and other evidence; the discovery of Ali al-Qabbani’s corpse and what it implied; the peculiar incident of the pimp’s assistant getting stabbed by a person who appeared to be the sister of a conspirator; and finally the intelligence garnered in Councilman Haddad’s office.

  After he stopped talking, there was a pause, which was broken by Fulton’s deep chuckle, which, as it always did, made Karp start laughing too, and then they all started laughing. When the hilarity died down, Fulton said, “I knew this would be better than Man of La Mancha. You’re in deep shit again, Chief, assuming what the rag head says is true.”

  “You think it might not be?” asked Karp.

  “The hell I know! I wasn’t there; you were. But … assuming that Mr. what’s-his-name is what he says he is, a PLO guy, why should he be such a pal as to tell you what’s really going on?”

  “What, you don’t believe that business about the PLO pulling back from terrorism against Americans?”

  “I don’t disbelieve it, necessarily,” replied Fulton, “but there’s also no reason I should believe it either. You got no independent confirmation, just the word of an anonymous alien that two other aliens you also don’t know are some kind of bad guys, going to blow up the city. But just focus on the facts for a minute. What do we know for sure? One, a couple or maybe three punks kill an old lady in a robbery—”

  “It wasn’t a robbery—they left the cash envelope,” put in Jim Raney.

  “Okay, a botched robbery, then. Two, a week-old floater turns up, and you ID him off a slogan that he’s got tattooed on his arm, which is the same slogan that your punks left at the murder scene. A professional hit, which feeds your idea that it’s not just a couple of punks, but something wider, a ‘conspiracy.’ ” Fulton said this last word in a tone he usually reserved for referencing Santa. He had their attention.

  “Three is this Arab girl sticking the pimp. Again, you got one story about how she came to be wandering around in the Deuce and why she was packing a blade. No confirmation of that either.”

  “What’s your point, Lieutenant?” asked Raney, his voice tending toward the tight. What Fulton was saying was starting to look like a criticism of the police work that had been done on the various cases, mainly by him.

  “It’s not ‘Lieutenant,’ Jim. ‘Clay’ is fine,” said Fulton, smiling to show he meant it. “Believe me, this is so off the record and out of channels, we should’ve both left our shields out on the landing there. My point is, we got a bunch of apparent connections that don’t add up to a whole hell of a lot, and don’t give us a basis for any real police work, not to mention building any cases.” Here he looked pointedly at Karp, whose motto, repeated to the point of tedium, was that it didn’t matter who did the crime, but rather whether you could construct a case that stood up in court. Fulton drank some coffee, shuddered slightly, and continued. “But on the other hand, you got the possibility that Butch’s Arab is on the level and somebody is planning a major crime. So the choice is, do we sniff around some more, just us, until we got a … a package, something that makes sense, that makes a case, or do we go to the brass with what we got and holler wah-wah-wah the Ay-rabs is comin’?”

  “Holler,” said Raney immediately. “This is too damn rich for my blood.”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we,’ ” said Karp to Fulton.

  “Oh, yeah,” answered Fulton with a grin, “I haven’t nursed you along all these years to see you screw up at this late date.” He addressed Raney. “Okay, you holler to your watch commander—what does he do?”

  Raney shrugged. “Hell, that’s his lookout. Pass it up the line, I guess.”

  Fulton chuckled. “Really? Say I’m your lieutenant. What am I hearing? ‘Uh, Loo, I just closed the hottest case in the zone, but see, the sister of the pal of the perps stabbed this pimp, but we don’t have her in yet, and also we got a DOA ain’t even on our chart that could’ve been a pal of the perps too, and, oh yeah, a city councilman arranged a secret meeting with the D.A.’s main man, and some guy we don’t even know his real name says the Arab boys are part of a plot to blow up the city.’ What’s he going to do, Jim? Is he going to smile and stroke your hair?”

  Raney shifted uncomfortably and felt a flush rise on his face. Fulton was perfectly correct; Raney would look like a fool going to his commander with a story like that, but he did not appreciate it being pointed out in this way, especially not in front of Marlene. And her husband. There was an uncomfortable silence, which Raney was about to break with something sharp and injudicious when Karp surprisingly came to his rescue.

  “Yeah, but Clay, Jim’s still in a crummy position. Some damn bomb goes off and there’s another killing, and they find he’s been sitting on all this, he’s shafted. What do you expect him to do?”

  Fulton considered this question for a moment, and replied with more gravity, “I don’t have any expectations for him, and I didn’t mean to make light of his problem. All I can say is what I’d do in his place, which is not to go up the line until I have the full story, or more of it than I got now. But that’s just me, my style. That’s what I’ve always done.” He looked at Raney and smiled wryly. “On the other hand, I’m a fifty-one-year-old detective lieutenant, and I’m not feeling any big groundswell toward making me a captain in the near future. I’m almost ready to give up my boyhood dream of being chief of detectives. Playing it safe, going through channels, and dumping this heap of shit on somebody else is one kind of career move. Trying to solve the goddamn thing, taking the chance that it’ll blow up—ha! Bite my tongue!—that takes a different kind of cop. You got to decide which kind you are.”

  Marlene followed this colloquy with fascinated interest, but kept her face neutral. She already knew which way Raney would roll, and wondered whether Fulton was manipulating him. Probably not, she decided; Fulton was like Karp, a straight shooter, unlike herself. What an odd little group the four of them were! Sitting around a civilized table spread with coffee and chocolate biscotti, tied to one another by bonds formed of dreadful violence, with her as a kind of center. She had once saved Raney’s life, Raney had saved her daughter’s life, she had saved Karp’s life, and Karp had saved Fulton’s on information she had developed. What kind of people were they? Not the kind that flourish in organizations. When Raney, for example, had discovered that bakery robbery, he should have slipped away and called for backup instead of barging in there and killing four people, in which case he might not have been the kind of cop who would have head-shot a thug holding the infant Lucy with a knife to her throat. In any case, he must know that having killed more people in line of duty than probably any currently serving NYPD officer was not going to contribute to his rapid advancement. Fulton was a hero too, but clearly the brass, while they admired heroes, did not want them as fellow brass. She could see the thoughts roiling behind Raney’s freckled forehead. He was going to cast his lot with the cr
azies; what else could he do?

  “Ah, shit!” said Raney under his breath and then, louder, “Okay, how do you want to play this?”

  Fulton nodded and replied, “The main thing is this terrorist business. Butch, you had a guy at the FBI?”

  “The son of a bitch retired on me. Before that, he sort of dirtied the nest up there. If Carlos the Jackal was hiding in my bathroom, they might tell me, but otherwise …”