Khalid entered his house by the front door and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare a meal for his prisoner. He began to fill a pot at the sink. When he saw the soot stains, he let out a cry of dismay and dropped the pot. It made a sound like a gong. He checked the back door, saw the broken glass, ran down the cellar stairs, knelt by the furnace door, his pulse thrumming in his ears. He reached deeply into the ash grate and let out another cry and a string of curses. One of his packages was gone. And the other one, all the way in the back…? He grasped it with sweating hands and drew it out, holding it to his breast like an infant.
He stayed there a moment, willing his stricken brain to unfreeze. Someone had broken in and taken half his money and released the girl. Ibn-Salemeh or the Mexican? Certainly, the Mexican. Ibn-Salemeh had been playing sheik since the last time Khalid visited the girl, and if any of the others had explored the furnace, they would have taken all the money—and told Ibn-Salemeh that Khalid had been skimming money and Khalid would now be floating in the harbor. So where was the Mexican now? With the girl? Or …
At that moment Khalid noticed that the door to the coal cellar was closed. And locked. Why would the girl lock it behind her? He drew his pistol from his waistband and fired a half dozen shots through the wooden door. Then he turned and ran, as the door panel flew into splinters from the sleet of automatic fire that came from inside the coal cellar.
“I must go now,” said Walid importantly, looking at his watch. He was tired and irritable, having been up all night repairing the damage that the dirty Jews had done to their bakery and baking too. His father had burned his hands extinguishing the fire in the shop, preventing the flames from reaching the kitchen. Although Hassan could not bake at present, there was nothing wrong with his mouth, and he found plenty of fault with Walid’s technique. Toward dawn, having, of course, overexerted himself, he began to have trouble breathing, and was now under observation in Bellevue, which was why Walid was free with the truck on a Friday afternoon.
“Can I come with you?” asked Posie. They were lying on a bed of cardboard cartons in the back of the bread van. Posie felt pretty good, even though Walid didn’t know shit about women; it had been necessary to show him where everything was and what it was for. She still hadn’t let him do it yet—Marlene had reiterated her orders about that the other night—but she figured a quick blowjob wasn’t really doing it, and the poor dude was popping out of his pants. It went like a trick a biker she once knew could do, cracking the top off a beer bottle with his teeth, and the foam gushing out, that fast. And it was nice to be with a guy who was grateful instead of like you were lighting their cigarette or something. She had her dress unbuttoned all the way down the front and her breasts out of her bra. His head was resting on these now. Another neat thing about Walid, he didn’t get up right away after he shot his rocks, like some guys, like you were a Kleenex they’d just used.
“No, because it is a secret,” said Walid. “I am not allowed to talk of it.”
“Oh, come on, man! You could tell me. Who am I gonna tell?”
Walid sighed and nuzzled deeper into those unbelievably soft pillows. It was moving too fast for him. His life had not prepared him for these events: first nineteen years in which all he had to do was obey older people, first his uncles in Palestine, then his father, then Ali and the others, which hadn’t worked out too well, he had to admit, and then his sister disappearing, kidnapped by the Zionists, and Chouza and his mission, which was something he might have imagined, at least, politics, the struggle, and now this girl, a gift, it seemed from heaven, well, not heaven perhaps, but not, in any case, something he was going to take any chance on losing.
“It is a secret,” he repeated. “They are going to put special equipment in my truck. For operations.”
“What do you mean, operations?” Posie knew that this was the kind of stuff Marlene wanted to know, although he hadn’t mentioned his sister at all, which was supposed to be the point.
“Secret operations.” He suddenly felt the urge to move and turned his head away from her and rose. “You must get dressed now and go,” he said. But she rose too and followed him and put her arms around him from behind.
“Aw, Wally, couldn’t I just come along a little way? I could get out when you do the secret stuff. Please?”
“Where is Hussein?” asked Ibn-Salemeh, frowning. He did not like it when plans were changed.
“He is helping Abdel with the steel. It was a bigger job than we thought.”
Ibn-Salemeh grunted and swept out of the hotel room, followed by Little Mahmoud, both of them in robes. Khalid was wearing a chauffeur’s black coat and cap, with a clip-on leather bow tie. He felt only slightly less foolish than he had in the robes.
It had not, in fact, taken the NYPD long to find out where a bunch of rich Arabs were staying, just, as it turned out, twenty minutes too long, which was about the interval between the white Caddie pulling away from the curb, and the arrival, at the same curb, of Detectives Raney and White. They showed their warrant and went upstairs with the assistant manager. Behind the desk, a young man, late of Amman, Kingdom of Jordan, waited until the elevator door closed and made a phone call to a number he had been given.
Holidays are time machines, was Marlene’s thought as she knelt in Old St. Pat’s and listened to the familiar Good Friday service: this is the Wood of the Cross on which was hung the Savior of the World, said the priest, and she responded with all the others, come, let us worship. It was all in English now, not Latin, and she had Lucy there next to her, solemn and still, but it did take you back, she thought, to all the churches she’d been in, back to St. Joseph’s in Ozone Park, Queens. She looked sideways at the small dark head beside her, saw the entranced expression, and felt a pang of envy, and a greater one of regret. Apprehension too: she recalled vividly what it had felt like, the Real Presence, as they say, at nine, ten, and eleven, and afterward the fading, the loss, so gradual and subtle that you didn’t even know it was gone, and one day it was just words, and you had it not. Sex and modern rationalism: a hard combo for anything to go up against, and in her case it had been no contest, and yet here she was still going, still kneeling, still offering her child to the Church, and all of her liberal friends thinking she was dotty on the subject. As she was, although none of her liberal friends went armed all the time and shot people on a fairly regular basis, and tortured people, and sent their gormless nursemaids out to seduce terrorists, and so they were perhaps not entitled to an opinion about why Marlene chose to open herself, on Sundays and holidays, to the possibility of infinite mercy.
The priest was consuming the Host, facing the stripped altar (“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you”), and in fact Marlene did not feel worthy and declined. Lucy shot her a worried look, but moved out of the row toward the communion rail, her back stiff and pointing straight up to Heaven.
The service over, the congregation having filed silently out in the traditional way, they went to their car. On the drive home, Marlene noticed that Lucy was as still as one of the plaster saints in the place they had just left.
“Are you okay, Luce?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You’re not moving. I thought you might be sick or something.”
“No, Tran is teaching me how to be still. He says it’ll improve my concentration, and also make me ready for, you know … like, an attack.”
“Uh-huh. Is it working?”
“I think so. I do conjugations and vocabulary in my head. I think my memory is improving. And I’m more relaxed. I don’t get so pissed—I mean, annoyed at things. The twins, school stuff. I still get a kind of annoyance when they mention the Jews in church. I think about Dad.”
“Well, that was a long time ago,” said Marlene carefully. “I think they’ve dropped the business about the guilt of modern Jews.”
“I know that. Sister Teresa explained that part in Sunday school. But it’s still in the words. They didn’t change the Gospels. And like the news
and stuff? The Arab terrorists and those black guys. Do you think they’ll ever like genocide Jews again, like in the old days?”
“No, and in any case, it’s unlikely they’d start in New York. Does it worry you?”
“No, not really,” said Lucy. “We have guns. Do you think when Tran dies, he’ll be a holy soul in purgatory?”
Marlene had to clear her throat. “Well, you know that’s hard to say, Lucy. It’s not something I’m comfortable speculating on.” What a mealy-mouthed answer, thought Marlene. The kid’s looking for spiritual guidance, and here I am…
“At least he’ll have me to pray for him,” said Lucy. “I’m probably the only one in the whole world he’ll have praying. Do you ever think about that? What it’s really like after you die?”
“As little as I can. When I do, it’s me being carried up to Heaven by angels blowing trumpets.” Meant as a light remark, but Lucy responded straight-faced.
“You know, Mom,” she said, “honestly, the way you’re going … I wouldn’t count on it.”
The radio detonator was manufactured in Czechoslovakia and was an excellent and reliable design. Ibn-Salemeh sat at a table made of pallets and plywood in his warehouse and tested its circuits with a Radio Shack galvanometer, one of the few articles of equipment he had purchased in New York. That too was part of the plan—everything had been shipped in through America’s porous borders—no suspicious purchases of ingredients, no risky thefts to accomplish. What they needed was in the crates. He picked up the code transmitter and gave it to Khalid, who walked away with it to the end of the warehouse. At Ibn-Salemeh’s shouted directions, he pushed buttons and Ibn-Salemeh noted with satisfaction that the detonator armed itself and sent the correct signal to the circuit that actually fired the detonating charge. He called Khalid back.
“Does it work?” Khalid asked.
“Perfectly. Are they almost ready?”
Khalid went to check. The Daoud bakery van had been backed up to the lip of the loading dock. The steel shelves that had lined both sides of the van had been removed, and the men had just finished bolting the last of the thick steel plates into place. The five-gallon cans, twenty of them, were filled and lined up on the dock. Khalid squatted down and looked inside the van. The driver’s side, the floor, and the overhead had been reinforced with the plate steel. The passenger side remained the original thin sheet-metal. Khalid understood the principle. When a bomb explodes, a relatively small volume of solid turns almost instantly into a very, very large quantity of hot gas. The key word is almost. Left to themselves, explosives explode spherically, exerting equal pressure in all directions, but if early in the explosion the nascent event is directed, shown that there is less resistance to expansion in one direction than in another, then the explosion can be directed, shaped even, like an ephemeral sculpture. This was the point of the steel plates. When the 250-kilogram bomb detonated, it would first vaporize the plastic fuel cans and ignite the diesel fuel. The fetal inferno would probe its womb, seeking a way out. In the first few milliseconds of its existence, it would discover the weak passenger-side wall, and that is where the main force of the explosion would go. A great fiery bubble would erupt from the side of the van. Traveling at thousands of feet per second, it would knock down, pulverize, and roast anything in its path.
Walid was confined to the warehouse office while they worked on his truck. He looked at his watch every five minutes, and wondered if Posie would be waiting at the arranged place when they let him go. Previously, when alone and with nothing to do, he had thought about self-sacrifice, and about honor, which involved slaughtering his sister; and he had also thought, in a vague, incoherent way, about sex. Now he thought more concretely, about breasts, and about the slippery feel and scent of the woman’s genitals, and about how she squirmed and cried out when, after much instruction, he was able to manipulate them in a satisfactory way. Dying for the cause had become less attractive to him.
They finished bolting in the plates and returned the shelf units to the interior of the van. They rolled the bomb out on its dolly. Ibn-Salemeh screwed the radio fuse into the detonator and placed it into the fuse socket in the nose of the bomb. He supervised the movement of the bomb—three men working slowly and in complete concentration—from the dolly to its place on the lowest shelf on the driver’s side. It was secured to the shelf with strapping. A plywood box, painted black, was fitted over it. Then the jerry cans of fuel were arranged around it, taking up the rest of the lower shelf and most of the one above it.
“Fine. Get the boy,” said Ibn-Salemeh.
Walid came out, blinking. He was told to get into the truck. Khalid spoke to him through the window.
“Here are your orders: you must first of all behave normally. Go directly home. Go to the mosque. Bake your bread. Tomorrow morning and Sunday you will travel the route you have been traveling these past weeks, exactly. Exactly! Do you understand?”
“Yes. What have you done to the truck?” He shrank from the other man’s glare. “If someone asks.”
“We have installed communications equipment,” said Khalid. “Very advanced, so the Zionists will not be able to spy on us. This is also the explanation of the steel plates. It is shielding, you understand?”
“Yes. What is that smell?”
“Diesel oil. It is for a secret generator we have. You will be informed where to take it through the communications device.”
“Really? But I have no earphones.”
“There is a loudspeaker. Believe me, Walid, you will have no trouble hearing it.”
“Roland’s back with us,” said the D.A. when Karp came into his office. “The hospital just called. Hillyer’s in intensive care; they doubt he’ll make it. My God! I’ve lost count. What is that, eight cops? Why can’t they catch this guy?”
Karp sat down in a side chair, massaged his brow, and said, “I asked Fulton that very question just now. It’s not so crazy when you think about it. How do we catch any criminal once we have his face? The cops hit the usual hangouts, ask around. Snitches love dropping one on a cop killer. Yeah, that looks like Ernie. He hangs at the White Rose on Third. Guys have girlfriends, pals, relatives. This guy’s from out of town. He’s got no known connection in the City except the Erbes woman and the Obregons. The woman, we now find, ran to the Dominican Republic last week. The Obregons we have. He doesn’t hang out. He changes his appearance. Hillyer said, just before he went out, that the guy showed at Roland’s as a woman.”
“Wonderful! And on the Arab front?”
“Some progress. They located the house in Park Slope the Arabs were using and raided it. Not much in it, and what there was led to stuff we already knew about. Packing material from the basement seems to match the stuff found in the Daoud van, but we knew that too. These guys are good, boss.”
“Yeah, and I’m tired of hearing that. What about the airplane business, that sheik?”
“Same thing—the cops arrive at the Carlyle, where they were staying, and just missed them. They’re at large in a white stretch limo, if you can believe it. The cops are stopping everything that even looks like a white Caddie limo. The beautiful people could be in for some lumps. Expect irate calls.”
“I’ll brace myself. Any other good news?”
“No. Beatings and scuffles all over town, mini-riots. The cops canceled leaves this afternoon, indefinitely, until these guys are in the can. Easter weekend. So we got fifteen thousand armed men wandering around the city, all of them with attitudes. To add to the civic peace, Rabbi Lowenstein has announced a rally and a march down Bedford Avenue on Sunday.”
“I heard. The cops refused a permit.”
“Right, but he claims he’s going ahead with it anyway, according to my many contacts in the Jewish community.”
“I thought he died,” said the D.A.
“Thank you,” said Karp sourly. “You forget, my brother is a fanatic too. I got one of my infrequent calls from him this afternoon, asking me to use my influence to
get the permit issued. When I told him I thought it was a shitty idea, he vouchsafed to me, in so many words, that the rabbi didn’t need no stinkin’ permit.”
“Christ!”
“Yeah, that too, Easter Sunday. I realize the big churches have toned down the anti-Semitic aspects, but there’s a lot of little churches in town that haven’t got the message. Then you’ve got a huge black community, maybe a fifth of them either Nation of Islam members or sympathizers. There’s a Muslim leader in Bed-Stuy who’s saying that if the Jews do a march, he’s going to take his people out on the streets too. Okay, that’s Brooklyn, but if Brooklyn goes up, we won’t be far behind. The other thing is, we got a lot of itchy, scared cops looking for a thin Hispanic guy armed with a machine gun and grenades. There are at least fifty thousand people in the city who fit that general description, not counting girls, who he might be too. Okay, let’s say a cop spots somebody he thinks might be our guy. What’s he going to do? Excuse me, sir, or ma’am, could I see some identification? No, he is not. He’s going to pull his piece and scream, ‘Freeze, motherfucker!’ This is going to cause tensions in the Hispanic community. The wrong people are going to get shot. It won’t do, Jack.”
“What’s the alternative?” asked Keegan.
“We have to draw him to a place we choose, where there won’t be any confusion, and where there’s a reduced chance of bullets taking out innocent people. And we already know what’ll draw him.”
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