Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Khalid had, of course, heard this argument before, many times. It might well be true, for all he knew, but he was not interested in politics, and he was quite indifferent to the fevered patriotic psychopathy of Ibn-Salemeh and his associates. He waited, saying nothing, and after a while the other man seemed to emerge from the reverie into which he had apparently been placed by the sound of his own rhetoric, and he rose and turned up the volume again. A laugh track filled the room, which seemed appropriate, in a way, to Chouza Khalid. He rose himself, said he was going to try to find the two missing men, and was dismissed with a flick of the hand.

  After leaving the Osborne Group, Marlene boarded a southbound Lexington Avenue train and got off at Bleecker Street, from which she walked to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry and went inside, putting a black lace scarf over her head as she did. Today the nave was draped for Lent, in the old-fashioned way, with dark purple palls on the altar and the statuary, suiting perfectly Marlene’s present mood.

  She chose to go to Old St. Pat’s instead of to St. Anthony of Padua, where every other Italian in lower Manhattan went, or Transfiguration, which was closer to her home, for reasons both aesthetic and spiritual. Old St. Pat’s was a venerable Gothic Revival pile, parts of it dating back to the War of 1812 (which antiquity she thought gave worship there an almost European style) and full of the ghosts of departed poor Irishmen and the present bodies of poor Latinos. The spiritual reasons were more complex. In general, Marlene did not hold with parish shopping, as smacking of the Donatist heresy, which held that the character of the priest influenced the efficacy of the sacraments. Marlene did not go to church for the Christian fellowship, the style of the services, or the brilliance of the sermons, nor was she particularly bothered by the policies of the current pope. She went for the magic, because, she firmly believed, if it wasn’t magic, the whole affair was so much gilt horseshit, and if it was magic, the personality of the priest was the last thing to bother with. It was like believing that because the president of a bank was a son of a bitch, the money that came out of the cash machines wasn’t any good. Old St. Pat’s was run as closely as possible to the old devotional style that Marlene had grown up on, and which the current parishioners, Latin American and Caribbean types, also seemed to prefer. The fresh breezes of Vatican II did not penetrate very far up the nave of Old St. Pat’s, which was fine with Marlene, whose deeply held opinion was that Vat Deuce had got it mainly wrong, changing the stuff that didn’t need changing and leaving alone the stuff that did. Marlene thought the Tridentine Mass had been just fine as it was, and in Latin (and if you couldn’t understand it, tough shit, Mac, you could look it up), and the rosary, and the stations of the cross, and the clunky statues with the red lamps—candles, incense, mystery, old ladies in black mumbling on their knees—that was church.

  The pastor of Old St. Pat’s was a man who supported this view. Father Raymond was a genial, sheep-faced Irish gentleman of a certain age, as Pre-Vat II as it was possible to be without getting actually defrocked, and without a brain in his head. His sermons concerned, in ascending order of frequency, foreign missions, the evils of communism, and the certainty of Hell for anyone participating in any sexual behavior whatever except for the express purpose of peopling Heaven with new souls. Marlene, although for long an enthusiastic participant in the non-peopling sort of behavior, accepted these clerical commonplaces as she did the wafts of incense and the music, without resentment, with fondness even, as representing something familiar and calming, like the sound of surf.

  Lately, however, Marlene had acquired yet another reason for attendance here, and it was for this she had come on the present occasion. The curate, Father Dugan, was hearing during this slot, and Father Dugan was interesting enough as a human being for Marlene to suspend her notions about it not mattering who was on the other side of the little grille. He was, to begin with, a Jesuit, uncommon enough among diocesan clergy, but also, in former days, one of the Church’s high flyers. He had once been on the very small staff of the Jesuit Superior General in Rome. How an aide to the Black Pope had been busted down to a curacy in a second-rate New York parish was a mystery that Marlene had not solved. The usual priestly errors—Punch or Judy, a weakness for choirboys—did not seem to fit what she had been able to gather about his character, but his personal glamour added to the already very great appeal of sitting in a dark box and whispering secrets to a strange man who could never reveal them to anyone. Since her first communion Marlene had been an enthusiastic patron of the confessional, and had, during an unusually libertine adolescence, expanded the sexual horizons of any number of celibate gentlemen. She told the truth, of course, took the penance, was genuinely sorry, and always did as she pleased thereafter. This was how the system was supposed to work, in her opinion, and very well it worked too, especially nowadays, when she had so much on her soul.

  She entered the confessional and, after the ritual words, began an account of her week’s transgressions, concentrating on the various tortures and death traps she had involved herself in, ending, as usual, with the statement that she found it impossible to believe in God.

  “When you were torturing this man, did you feel any pleasure?” asked the priest.

  “No, Father. I was sick. I was literally sick outside afterward.”

  “I see. Don’t you think that’s odd? You do something you have rationalized is necessary, and yet your very body rebels.”

  “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

  “Clever and mocking as usual,” said the priest. His tone was not angry, or contemptuous, but tired, exhausted. Marlene felt an instant pang of shame. “But cleverness and mockery won’t give you the peace you seek, which is why you come here. Why do you come here since you say you don’t believe?”

  “I hope that adherence to the forms will prepare my heart for the grace of faith,” said Marlene with sincerity.

  “You still hope, then?”

  “I do, Father.”

  “That’s something, anyway. Tell me, do you consider that breaking the law as you do is the only way to prevent the deaths of these women?”

  “I do, Father.”

  “That seems unlikely. You could hide them, for example.”

  “I could, but that means condemning women to a lifetime of hiding and subterfuge, with still no guarantee that the man wouldn’t find them years later. Why should they? Give up their lives, their careers, their names, when they’ve committed no crime? Just because some guy has decided to make their lives hell—”

  “You’ve answered the question. It is your choice rather than actual necessity. Do you know this verse: ‘All things have I seen in the days of my vanity; there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over-wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?’?”

  “No. It sounds like Ecclesiastes.”

  “It is. It’s a good warning. The world is full of inexplicable and incurable evil. That’s why the Lord told us that our responsibility was to the care of our own souls and the extension of loving kindness to our neighbors, and not the elimination of evil. That’s also why we render unto Caesar. You know all this. Even your body knows it. Look at yourself now. Your partner has left you. You can’t speak to your husband about what you do. Your children are endangered. Your only companions are either fanatics or those with damaged souls and no moral compass. If you continue as you’ve been going, you will either become a monster or you will be destroyed in some awful disaster. And I don’t think you will become a monster.”

  Marlene thought, he’s talking about himself too.

  “Your heart is full of pride,” he went on after a pause, “so full that there is no room for faith, and because what you do is for the good of others, and at some sacrifice to yourself, you think it doesn’t matter, that it’s not really pride. But that kind is the worst kind. Do you think the Devil only tempts us with
sensual lusts?”

  “No, Father,” said Marlene meekly, regressing to childhood, as she often did here.

  The priest caught her tone. “All right, all right: when you’re ready. I pray that you are not one of those who has to be smashed to pieces before the light dawns. Your penance is to read the Spiritual Exercises, let’s say through the first Meditation. If you insist on being a warrior, you should learn something about discipline.”

  “You know nothing about discipline,” said Tran, “which is normal among people with remarkable gifts, such as yourself. Without discipline, however, all your gifts will come to nothing.”

  Tran was sitting with Lucy on a bench in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. Lucy had just failed for the third time to recall, with her eyes closed, the costume and characteristics of every person visible from her vantage point. The park was crowded in the mild late afternoon with the sort of exotics who normally populated that well-known roofless after-care clinic.

  “You do it, then!” said Lucy irritably. Tran sighed and closed his eyes, and rattled off concise descriptions of a dozen people, until Lucy said, “Okay, okay, I believe you. But I’ll never get it.” She slumped and started kicking her leg. “I don’t see why I have to do it anyway.”

  “No, you do not, because all your energy is going into worrying why you must do it. And squirming. Sit straight! Calm yourself! Breathe as I have told you! One … two. One … two. Yes. When you learn how, you can stay quiet all day, like a stone.”

  “No one can stay quiet all day,” objected Lucy. “What if you have to pee?”

  “For that there are bottles. Once I lay on a roof for twelve hours without moving, just watching.”

  “What for?”

  “To shoot someone,” replied Tran blandly. He did not believe in sheltering children from the realities, especially not this child.

  “A bad guy?”

  “An enemy. There are neither bad nor good in war, only friends and enemies.”

  Lucy thought about that for a while. She was vaguely aware of something called the Vietnam War, which her mom also called, when she thought Lucy was out of range, That Fucking War, mainly because of her Uncle Dom. His service therein was the explanation given by her mom for Uncle Dom’s odd walk, and for his peculiar and frightening behavior at family gatherings, or his absence from them, both of which made her nonna cry. She knew Tran was a Vietnamese, she knew there was a Vietnamese language, but until that moment she had not fully realized that the Vietnam of Uncle Dom’s war and the place that Tran came from were the same place, rather than being, like Joan of Arc and Noah’s Ark, two entities whose apparent congruence of name did not denote a true connection.

  “Was that in the Vietnam War when you shot that guy?” Lucy asked to confirm this insight.

  “Not as such,” said Tran delicately. “It was another war, before that one, against the French.”

  “I thought you liked the French,” exclaimed Lucy in surprise, speaking French, as they had all afternoon.

  “I love the French,” said Tran. “I love them in their own country, however, rather than in mine, just as, let us say, you love horses, but one suspects you would not like ten of them living in your bedroom.”

  Lucy was examining Tran with new eyes; it is one of the great revelations of childhood, this comprehension that our elders have a past prior to their connection with ourselves. “Is that where you got that dent in your head?” Lucy asked with characteristic bluntness.

  “No. That was given to me by my own former comrades. I fought for twenty-five years against three armies and received not so much as a scratch. After the war was over, I was imprisoned and there, in the midst of peace and victory, I received all my wounds. This on my head comes from a beating.”

  “But why did they? If you won.”

  Tran watched the smoke from his cigarette whip away through the maple buds and considered that question, which was one he had spent, naturally enough, a great deal of time contemplating. “They thought I was too good at fighting, perhaps. Especially against unpleasant and oppressive regimes. It is a long, sad story.”

  Which Lucy was not that interested in hearing, truth to tell, and so she asked, “Uncle Tran, when will you teach me a martial art?”

  As if in answer, Tran threw his arms around her and placed his hands over her eyes. “Maybe. When you can tell me who was the last person to walk by on this path, from the right.”

  “Old lady, short, not too fat, brown coat, glasses, pulling a cart, blue wool hat.”

  “And before her?”

  “Two black teenagers, one fat, one tall and skinny, fat one with a Raiders coat, gray baggies, tall one with blue track pants, Monsignor Ryan jacket, Nike gym bag, both wearing Nikes. Hey! I did it!”

  Tran pulled his hands away and hugged her, beaming. “Yes, you did. Without knowing, which is how you must do such things. I will buy you an ice cream.”

  “What about my martial art?”

  “Ah, as to that, I regret that I know no martial arts other than the few holds I learned in the army. Unlike the Koreans and the Okinawans, we Vietnamese have never developed any unarmed combat of our own.”

  “Why is that, Uncle Tran?”

  “Because we have always made sure we had arms, I suppose. This shouting, this kicking, are for people without swords, without guns.” He rose from the bench, stretched and yawned like an old dog, and held out his hand, which she took. They proceeded eastward on the path out of the park.

  Khalid knew it was a disaster the moment he saw that the steel gate of the loading dock was raised and the LTD was gone. What he found inside the warehouse merely confirmed it. Khalid had an extremely strong stomach, and he had seen a lot of corpses, but what had been done to Bashar brought up his gorge, and he had to flee back to the dock for some deep breaths of air. The entire front half of the man’s skin, from the wrists to the ankles, had been removed in a single piece, which object had been neatly laid out on a pallet next to the former owner’s body. Khalid had not much liked Bashar, but he felt a pang of sympathy nonetheless, and understood instantly that whatever Bashar knew, back to his earliest retrievable memories, and certainly including the details of Ibn-Salemeh’s plan, was now in the possession of the Mexican youth.

  He went out onto the dock and sat down on its lip, and smoked a cigarette and considered his options. Option one was to get in his car, drive to the house he had rented in Crown Heights, take the considerable trove of cash he had sequestered from the dope deal, drive to the airport, and get out of town. The disadvantage of this was that for the rest of his life he would have to protect himself from the revenge of Ibn-Salemeh and his many admirers, which span, given the reputation and talents of that body of men, was likely to be quite short.

  Option two was to go back to Ibn-Salemeh and explain that a boy who had appeared to be a mere pawn, whom any reasonable man could not have imagined to be anything else, had turned out to be a frighteningly dangerous monster, one who was now at large and, it could not be doubted, in possession of all of Ibn-Salemeh’s deepest secrets. As the word possession entered his mind, Khalid felt a still greater pang of fear and leaped to his feet. He trotted back to where the crates were stashed and did a quick inventory. Some small arms missing, but the cylinder and the other specialized equipment had not been disturbed. Khalid leaned against a crate, sighing with relief, and continued with his train of thought.

  Option two also left something to be desired. Ibn-Salemeh would blame him for the debacle, and for the loss of two prized subordinates. This also was not conducive to a long and peaceful life.

  Option three … Khalid was not experienced at creative thought, but he found that the prospect of facing the wrath of his employer concentrated his limited faculties to a wonderful degree. He thought it through, then thought it through again, taking a walk through the warehouse as he did. Yes, it would work; it would be a close thing, but it would work, and might offer the best chance of getting out of this miserable ass
ociation alive.

  He went back to the dock and drew down the corrugated door, locking it with his key. Then he drove to a building-supply place on Eleventh Avenue and bought a four-by-eight-foot sheet of rough plywood, several plastic tarps, a length of one-by-two fir, a circular saw, an extension cord and work lamp, a garden hose, a cheap plastic wheelbarrow, four bags of ready-mix concrete, a box of plastic bags, a box of nails, and a hammer.

  Back at the warehouse, he stripped to his underwear, wrapped his shoes in plastic bags, wrapped Bashar’s corpse and his former, now stiff skin in a tarp, and hauled it and all of his materials to the building’s elevator shaft, using the wheelbarrow. He raised the freight car to the second floor and walked down. He hooked the hose up to a wash sink in a nearby janitor’s closet and plugged in the work lamp. He had worked construction in Israel as a youth, before discovering that smuggling paid better, and he was reasonably skilled at this sort of rough work. In an hour he had ripped the plywood into one-foot-wide strips, from which he built a shallow four-sided form, using the fir as bracing.

  He climbed into the bottom of the shaft, carrying the form, and set it on the bottom. He brought the wheelbarrow down and, using the hose, mixed up a bag of ready-mix, and poured it into the form. He added the tarp-wrapped carnage and then covered it with the rest of the concrete, finishing the task by dumping assorted debris into the shaft and bringing the car down to the first floor again. He loaded Ahmed’s body into the wheelbarrow and took it to a small room off the main bay that had previously been used as some sort of office. He placed the body in an empty closet and nailed the door shut.

  Khalid sprayed water from the hose onto his sweating face and then had a cigarette, contemplating the next steps. This was going to work.

  Marlene walked back home from church, feeling a good deal better than she had earlier, despite Father Dugan’s grim tone, accepting this as yet another proof of the efficacy of the sacraments, and burying the moral lessons in the corner of her mind where she kept such things between her religious visits. There was no one in the loft, but the dog was gone, which meant Posie had taken them all for another outing. She changed into jeans, boots, sweater, and leather jacket, and left, whistling gaily, for her car.