Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Marlene, Lucy kidnapped,” said Tran, reduced to his Charlie Chan-oid English. “Take babies. I must go follow.”

  He thrust the two squirming lumps into Boudreau’s arms, dropped the travel bag, and raced down the steps.

  Once on the street, he unchained his motorcycle, cranked it up, and headed north. He caught sight of the yellow car and its unmarked pursuer at Broadway and West Houston. The cop had not done anything stupid yet, and Tran expected that he was being controlled by whoever was in charge of the trap. They would go to the Terminal Hotel, then, at which time Tran would be able to make some move. He hoped that he would not die in this incident, for he wished very much to see Lucy grow up, but he was certainly prepared to do so in her interest.

  Marlene drove the yellow car, glancing to the side every few moments to make eye contact with Lucy, who sat in her new still mode on the seat beside her. The Mexican was slumped in the back, his eyes half closed, his pistol held loosely on his lap. Marlene was under no illusions as to his state of alertness, and she had no dramatic plan to influence events. It was like one of Lucy’s elementary school jokes: where do you take an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in a VW? Anywhere he wants to go.

  El Chivato was staring at the girl, who occasionally looked back at him with curiosity rather than fear. He was not in pain, only aware that his body was broken in some irreparable way, and his thoughts raced over the surface of his life like a dragonfly over a pond, never penetrating the surface of the events, incapable of deriving some deeper meaning from the actions of his short existence. He hoped that it would not be necessary to kill this child. He asked her, “Where did you learn to speak Spanish like you do?”

  “A friend of my mom’s taught me. She’s a Mexican from Texas.”

  “Ah, Texas!” It was uncanny how much she sounded like Carmen. “I am from Arizona, from Nogales. But I live in Hermosillo. My family is still in Nogales. Nogales, Mexico.” Some family chat: he named himself and his siblings and their ages. Lucy asked polite questions. Then she asked, “Why are you killing people?”

  El Chivato shrugged and answered. “They are my enemies or they are the enemies of my friends. So I kill them.”

  “Jesus said we should love our enemies,” said Lucy primly.

  “Jesus Christ?” asked El Chivato. Lucy nodded.

  “That is ridiculous! Why would he say something so stupid? Jesus Christ was not stupid.”

  “It’s in the Bible,” offered Lucy.

  “Then the Bible is wrong,” said El Chivato definitely, his jaw getting stiff. Lucy wisely turned the conversation to food preferences.

  I can’t believe this, thought Marlene, and then, but why not? How is it different from the rest of my life? My little girl is chatting in border Spanish with a heavily armed Mexican chutero whom I am chauffeuring to a police trap set up by my husband. We’ll all be killed and they’ll make a TV special about it. I should have, on second thought, gone to the hotel like Butch said, but maybe he could’ve gotten in there too, and maybe some cops would’ve gotten hurt. I hope that cop following me doesn’t try anything. They’re probably calling Osborne now, wondering why I haven’t shown up at Hadassah. Maybe the chutero will let me stop by, check in, make sure nobody’s blown anything up, and as she thought that, in the slightly manic way that thoughts drift across the surface of our minds when our deepest attention is focused on some vital transaction, the whole thing popped into her mind, like a strobe-lit photo.

  “Jesus Christ, what an idiot!” she cried out, and the car swerved. “They’re going to blow it up!”

  The Arabs were going to blow up the Hadassah building. Not the U.N., not the bridges or tunnels. Walid’s truck. They knew he had a truck, had used it, in fact. Tran’s map. Why hadn’t she seen it? The neat looping blue line Tran had drawn, with all the stops marked, and that inexplicable loop north and east down Fifty-eighth Street, when his last delivery was on Forty-sixth and Sixth. They wanted him to show his truck on the route so that if anyone was watching, they would become used to a white bakery van going down that particular street, twice a day. The street was right by the back of the Plaza Hotel; there were dozens of delivery vans going by on regular schedules. And, of course, they were going to do it today. Today or tomorrow, on both of which days the building would be full of over two hundred Zionist youth leaders from all over the country. And the wife of the president of Israel.

  “Who, Mom? Who’s going to blow what up?”

  “The Arabs. And Fatyma’s brother, Walid. And—oh, God! Posie’s with him. They’re going to blow up the Jewish organization I was working for. Probably today!”

  To her immense surprise, El Chivato said, “Not today, Sunday.”

  “You knew this? How did you find out?” Marlene asked, searching his face in her rearview.

  He shrugged. “I found out. It was not hard. Tomorrow I will go there and kill him too.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, you! Let me tell you something, whatever your name is—”

  “His name’s Paco, Mom.”

  “Paco—you’re not going anywhere tomorrow if you go by that hotel today. You will be dead or in jail. Why can’t you understand this? There must be a hundred cops down there, and they’re all waiting for you to show up.”

  “They will not shoot me while you are with me.”

  “Yes, they will! They have guys that can take the nose off a fly at two hundred yards. They’ll blow you up as soon as you stick your head out of the car. And what makes you think your Arabs are going to do it on Sunday? Why not today?”

  “I was told. I believe him.”

  “Right, but maybe that was before you started using the police force for target practice. This is a whole different situation now; this is not normal sleepy New York. Every cop in the city who isn’t after you is after those guys, and they’re close, real close. They’ve stuffed up all the holes, they cut off the escape route they were going to use. They’ve got to get out of town or get caught, and the target they’re aiming at is the same today as it would be tomorrow. So why should they wait? I’m telling you, man—they’re going to be there today, this afternoon.”

  The car approached Fourteenth Street, and El Chivato said, “The next left.”

  Marlene slowed for the light, and when it went green, she shot through the intersection and headed north on Sixth. El Chivato straightened up and raised his pistol menacingly. “Stupid woman! Didn’t you hear me? I said, turn left!”

  Marlene pulled the car over to the curb, stopped, and turned to face the Mexican.

  “Listen to me, Paco. You want to kill me and my little girl? Go ahead. It’s just two more bodies, and why should you care? But I tell you as sure as the sun is in the sky, you can’t get to the Obregon brothers. You can get to Chouza Khalid, a man who tried to kill you, the man whose crimes brought you away from your home to this city. And you can prevent hundreds of people from getting killed at the same time, not that you care about that, but I do. So—I’m going to drive to Fifty-eighth Street. You want to shoot, shoot!”

  She turned to the wheel again. El Chivato felt rage building in him. He aimed his pistol at her head. Then the little girl said, in that clear and familiar voice, “Más vale un toma que cien te daré.”

  The words acted upon him like an electric current. It was a well-worn family expression, one of his mother’s favorites. Better to grasp one than try for a hundred. This was true. Somehow his mother was speaking to him through this child. He had heard of such things, of course, but only with respect to the recently dead. His mother was not dead, but naturally, she being a saint, the rules did not necessarily apply to her. He sat back in the seat and let the hand holding the pistol fall to his lap. “All right. Go!” he said.

  “Where are they now?” Karp asked. He felt unnaturally calm, and in some corner of his mind he recognized that this was due to a kind of habituation. The loved ones of cops and firemen and test pilots got to this point, he knew, and they
either broke away, went batty, or resigned themselves to the possibility of loss, accepted this awful set of feelings as a concomitant of their love. Karp had over the years of being with Marlene clearly reached this point. But his throat still felt like it contained a large, angular, dry object, an empty box of Fig Newtons perhaps.

  Fulton said, “What?” into his mike, then, “No, keep following, but keep your distance. K.” To Karp he said, “They’re not coming here, it looks like. She just drove past Sixteenth on Sixth. What the hell are they doing?”

  Karp didn’t know. He was an observer here, with nothing to contribute. He thought, Marlene is up to something. He took some deep breaths and watched his friend talk back and forth with the central police dispatcher as he vectored mobile units from all over Manhattan toward the vehicle that contained Marlene and Lucy and the unknown assassin.

  “Something is wrong,” said Ibn-Salemeh. “He should have moved by now. Hussein, go see what is going on.”

  Hussein left the driver’s seat of the gray van and trotted up the street to the bread truck. He came back on a run. Breathless, eyes bulging, he said, “They’re gone! The boy and Khalid are not there.”

  Ibn-Salemeh pursed his lips, maintaining his usual calm face while he considered what to do next. Clearly, it had been an error to place Khalid alive in the truck. The boy was undisciplined and, it seemed, could not resist a glance at a Zionist spy, and the results were now plain. Ibn-Salemeh knew it was a personal fault, but he could not resist the satisfaction of imagining Khalid lying helpless, waiting for the bomb to go off. In mitigation, it was acts of that sort that enhanced his legend, and the legend was what gave him power.

  He felt their eyes on him as he came out of his contemplation. Fixing Hussein with his gaze, he ordered, “Hussein will drive the truck. I will drive this van. Now, go!”

  Hussein did not move. Ibn-Salemeh heard a murmur behind him. He felt a great wave of anger, which he suppressed. The project was in danger. Someone was going to notice the bread truck parked for so long, and the streets were unusually thick with police.

  “Then I will drive the truck,” he said. “I will park it in front of the target and walk back to Sixth Avenue, where you will be parked, Hussein, at the southeast corner. We will set off the bomb and drive north.”

  He opened the door of the van and prepared to get out.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. Big Mahmoud said, “Effendi, the detonator?”

  “The detonator?”

  “Yes. You cannot take the detonator into the truck with you. It is too dangerous. We will keep it here.”

  “It is safe. The arming switch is set to off.”

  There were grumbling sounds from the dim rear of the van. Mahmoud said, “Still. These are rules we all agreed to follow.” The huge hand was outstretched, like a salver. Gritting teeth behind his bland smile, Ibn-Salemeh handed over the squat plastic cylinder and walked up to the bread truck. He thought, When we are back in Tripoli, I will see every one of them dead.

  “Do you mind if we sing?” asked Marlene. She had just spotted Tran in her side mirror as they passed Thirty-fourth Street. The traffic was unusually light for a sunny Saturday. The unmarked police car was keeping a car length behind. Tran had shot out between lanes and hung there for a good while so that Marlene would be sure to see him. The window was open, and she had her hand resting on the sill. She made an okay sign with her hand. Tran dropped back into his lane.

  El Chivato did not mind, although it was a new wrinkle in his experience. His clients more often prayed than sang. It was another aspect of what was already an unreal situation. He hoped his mother would speak to him again through the girl.

  Marlene began to sing a nursery song Lucy had known since forever. “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse …” She sang two choruses, Lucy joining in, and then she began a verse Lucy did not know because her mother was making it up as she went along:

  “Ma fille, écoute bien, il faut s’échapper

  Nous nous arrêterons au feu rouge

  Du feu vert, quand je diterai, ‘Va!’

  Ouverte la porte et sorte

  Reste immobile sur le pavé

  Tran nous suit en moto, dite lui tout, des Arabs, des Juifs, de la bombe

  Si tu comprendes, faites une signe de tête.”

  Marlene sang this through twice. Lucy hummed along in harmony with it, and at the end nodded her head sharply several times, as if transported by the simple tune. The light ahead at Thirty-seventh Street turned yellow; Marlene shifted lanes so that she was at the head of traffic when the light went red. They waited. For the busiest shopping day of the week there seemed oddly few people crossing the street in front of them, and the city sounds seemed unusually rich in sirens.

  The green light lit. Marlene, in a conversational voice, said “Va!”

  Lucy flung open the door and rolled out of the seat. Marlene floored the pedal and popped the clutch in one coordinated motion. The little engine whined, and the VW leaped forward, not like a Corvette, of course, but hard enough to press the surprised Mexican back into his seat and fling the door closed with a bang. An instant later he had recovered, and Marlene felt his hand knotted painfully in her hair and the muzzle of his pistol grinding into the tender spot below her ear.

  “Stop the car! Stop the car now!” he demanded. His mother.

  “No,” answered Marlene. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll last five seconds more than me, and your enemies will be laughing at you. The idiot shot a woman and the cops killed him. Look out the goddamn window!”

  El Chivato looked. The street was full of blue and white police cars. One of them was level with the VW, and in its passenger seat was a grim-faced, flak-vested, helmeted cop pointing a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun out the window straight at him. He cursed and let go of Marlene. Then he kicked the front seat forward and slid himself into it. Marlene watched Tran and Lucy on the Jawa shoot ahead down the empty avenue. She kept driving north on Sixth Avenue, accompanied by twenty-two police cars.

  “Lucy’s out of the car,” shouted Fulton. “A guy on a motorcycle just picked her up. Cars in pursuit.”

  “That would be Tran,” said Karp. “He’s a good guy. Call them off.”

  Fulton looked at him sharply. “What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea,” said Karp, “but Marlene’s got something going. Make sure nobody queers her act.”

  He had removed his tie and jacket, and he drove carefully, easing the clumsy truck through the traffic on Sixth. At Fourteenth, he saw a large number of flashing red lights ahead, so he turned left and proceeded north on Eighth. He turned right on Fifty-seventh, north on Sixth, and right again on Fifty-eighth. He noted in the long side mirror that the gray van was right behind him.

  There were two black limousines parked in front of number 50, which told him that the distinguished guests had arrived and were in the building. He double-parked at the service drive of the hotel opposite, went into the back of the truck, grabbed a cardboard tray stacked with white pasteboard boxes, and went out through the double doors in the back.

  “Hey, buddy!” shouted a large man in a gray uniform. “You gonna be long?”

  “Three minutes only,” replied Ibn-Salemeh and trotted quickly down the street, pausing occasionally so that it seemed like he was looking for an address.

  Back in the gray van, Hussein studied the street through his side mirror. Some kind of parade? The street was full of police vehicles flashing their lights.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  El Chivato saw the van as soon as they passed Fifty-seventh Street. The last time he had seen it was just before they captured him, coming toward him, but he recognized it from the rear too, a gray Chevrolet with blacked-out windows and Jersey plates. He said to Marlene, “Pull over by that gray van. Now stop.”

  Marlene stopped the car. All the police cars stopped too. Hussein looked out his window and saw the head of death grinning at him. Death reached out a hand a
nd tossed a ball into his lap.

  El Chivato said, “Drive!” Marlene hit the gas, the VW lurched forward, there was an enormous thunderclap of sound behind them, the rear window of the VW shattered and fell inward in crystal rags, and Marlene saw through the rearview that the gray van was gone, replaced by a smoky bonfire.

  “What was that?” asked Lucy in alarm.

  “An explosion of some kind,” said Tran, “but certainly not the one we are worried about. The truck is still there and intact.”

  He had scooped Lucy up off the pavement and placed her behind him on the motorcycle. He had intended to follow Marlene, but when Lucy, shouting, had told him where Marlene was going and about the Arab bomb, he had turned on the speed and preceded her to the building on Fifty-eighth Street. He had seen the bread truck park and the man get out. Now he was following the man. He saw him stop when the explosion went off around the corner.

  Ibn-Salemeh paused at the corner of Sixth and Fifty-eighth and stared at the wreckage of the gray van and of his careful plans. He sighed and placed his cake boxes down by a wastebasket and headed north on Sixth. He had no pressing appointments, sufficient money, an excellent set of false papers, and a ravaging thirst. He entered a luncheonette and ordered an iced tea.

  “Is that truck going to explode?” asked Lucy as they walked past it.

  “Perhaps. For that reason we must hurry to get away.”

  “But we have to tell someone!” said Lucy, and she broke away from Tran’s hand and went up to a man in a gray uniform standing near the door of a building opposite the truck.

  “There’s a bomb in that truck,” she said, pointing.

  The guard looked down at her without interest. “Yeah? How do you know?”

  “My mom told me. You should check it out and call the cops.” She skipped away to where Tran was waiting impatiently.

  “He just blew up a van,” said Fulton. “On Sixth at Fifty-eighth. Tossed a grenade into the window. The guy’s gone crazy. I’m going to stop him.”