by Ed McBain
As if to confirm Parker’s fact-finding acumen, the two witnesses who’d heard the shot last night were both named Ali. They’d been coming home from a party at the time, and each of them had been a little drunk. They explained at once that this was not a habit of theirs. They fully understood that the imbibing of alcoholic beverages was strictly forbidden in the Koran.
“Haram,” the first Ali said, shaking his head. “Most definitely haram.”
“Oh yes, unacceptable,” the second Ali agreed, shaking his head as well. “Forbidden. Prohibited. In the Koran, it is written, ‘They ask thee concerning wine and gambling. In them is great sin, and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit.’ ”
“But our friend was celebrating his birthday,” the first Ali said, and smiled apologetically.
“It was a party,” the second Ali explained.
“Where?” Eileen asked.
The two Alis looked at each other.
At last, they admitted that the party had taken place at a club named Buffers, which Eileen and Willis both knew was a topless joint, but the Alis claimed that no one in their party had gone back to the club’s so-called private room but had instead merely enjoyed the young ladies dancing around their poles.
Eileen wondered whose poles?
The young ladies’ poles?
Or the poles of Ali and Company?
She guessed she maybe had a dirty mind.
At any rate, the two Alis were staggering out of Buffers at two o’clock in the morning when they spotted a yellow cab parked at the curb up the block. They were planning on taking the subway home, but one never argued with divine providence so they decided on the spot to take a taxi instead. As they tottered and swayed toward the idling cab—the first Ali raising his hand to hail it, the second Ali breaking into a trot toward it and almost tripping—they heard a single shot from inside the cab. They both stopped dead still in the middle of the pavement.
“A man jumped out,” the first Ali said now, his eyes wide with the excitement of recall.
“What’d he look like?” Eileen asked.
“A tall man,” the second Ali said. “Dressed all in black.”
“Black suit, black coat, black hat.”
“Was he bearded or clean-shaven?”
“No beard. No.”
“You’re sure it was a man?”
“Oh yes, positive,” the second Ali said.
“What’d he do after he got out of the cab?”
“Went to the windshield.”
“Sprayed the windshield.”
“You saw him spraying the windshield?”
“Yes.”
“Oh yes.”
“Then what?”
“He ran away.”
“Up the street.”
“Toward the subway.”
“There’s an entrance there.”
“For the subway.”
Which could have taken him anywhere in the city, Eileen thought.
“Thanks,” Willis said.
It was 2:15 P.M.
Parker and Genero were the two detectives who spoke once again to Ozzie Kiraz, the cousin of the second dead cabbie.
Kiraz was just leaving for work when they got there at a quarter past three that afternoon. He introduced them to his wife, a diminutive woman who seemed half his size, and who immediately went into the kitchen of their tiny apartment to prepare tea for the men. Fine-featured, dark-haired and dark-eyed, Badria Kiraz was a woman in her late twenties, Parker guessed. Exotic features aside, she looked very American to him, sporting lipstick and eye shadow, displaying a nice ass in beige tailored slacks, and good tits in a white cotton blouse.
Kiraz explained that he and his wife both worked night shifts at different places in different parts of the city. He worked at a pharmacy in Majesta, where he was manager of the store. Badria worked as a cashier in a supermarket in Calm’s Point. They both started work at four, and got off at midnight. Kiraz told them that in Afghanistan he’d once hoped to become a schoolteacher. That was before he started fighting the Russians. Now, here in America, he was the manager of a drugstore.
“Land of the free, right?” he said, and grinned.
Genero didn’t know if he was being a wise guy or not.
“So tell us a little more about your cousin,” he said.
“What would you like to know?”
“One of the men interviewed by our colleagues . . .”
Genero liked using the word “colleagues.” Made him sound like a university professor. He consulted his notebook, which made him feel even more professorial.
“Man named Ajmal, is that how you pronounce it?”
“Yes,” Kiraz said.
“Ajmal Khan, a short-order cook at a deli named Max’s in Midtown South. Do you know him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Friend of your cousin’s,” Parker said.
He was eyeing Kiraz’s wife, who was carrying a tray in from the kitchen. She set it down on the low table in front of the sofa, smiled, and said, “We drink it sweet, but I didn’t add sugar. It’s there if you want it. Cream and lemon, too. Oz,” she said, “do you know what time it is?”
“I’m watching it, Badria, don’t worry. Maybe you should leave.”
“Would that be all right?” she asked the detectives.
“Yes, sure,” Genero said, and both detectives rose politely. Kiraz kissed his wife on the cheek. She smiled again and left the room. They heard the front door to the apartment closing. The men sat again. Through the open windows, they could heard the loudspeakered cry of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.
“The third prayer of the day,” Kiraz explained. “The Salat al-’Asr,” and added almost regretfully, “I never pray anymore. It’s too difficult here in America. If you want to be American, you follow American ways, am I right? You do what Americans do.”
“Oh sure,” Parker agreed, even though he’d never had any problem following American ways or doing what Americans do.
“Anyway,” Genero said, squeezing a little lemon into one of the tea glasses, and then picking it up, “this guy at the deli told our colleagues your cousin was dating quite a few girls . . .”
“That’s news to me,” Kiraz said.
“Well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Parker said. “We thought you might be able to help us with their names.”
“The names of these girls,” Genero said.
“Because this guy in the deli didn’t know who they might be,” Parker said.
“I don’t know, either,” Kiraz said, and looked at his watch.
Parker looked at his watch, too.
It was twenty minutes past three.
“Ever talk to you about any of these girls?” Genero asked.
“Never. We were not that close, you know. He was single, I’m married. We have our own friends, Badria and I. This is America. There are different customs, different ways. When you live here, you do what Americans do, right?”
He grinned again.
Again, Genero didn’t know if he was getting smart with them.
“You wouldn’t know if any of these girls were Jewish, would you?” Parker asked.
“Because of the blue star, you mean?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“I would sincerely doubt that my cousin was dating any Jewish girls.”
“Because sometimes . . .”
“Oh sure,” Kiraz said. “Sometimes things aren’t as simple as they appear. You’re thinking this wasn’t a simple hate crime. You’re thinking this wasn’t a mere matter of a Jew killing a Muslim simply because he was a Muslim. You’re looking for complications. Was Salim involved with a Jewish girl? Did the Jewish girl’s father or brother become enraged by the very thought of such a relationship? Was Salim killed as a warning to any other Muslim with interfaith aspirations? Is that why the Jewish star was painted on the windshield? Stay away! Keep off!”
“Well, we weren’t thinking e
xactly that,” Parker said, “but, yes, that’s a possibility.”
“But you’re forgetting the other two Muslims, aren’t you?” Kiraz said, and smiled in what Genero felt was a superior manner, fuckin guy thought he was Chief of Detectives here.
“No, we’re not forgetting them,” Parker said. “We’re just trying to consider all the possibilities.”
“A mistake,” Kiraz said. “I sometimes talk to this doctor who comes into the pharmacy. He tells me, ‘Oz, if it has stripes like a zebra, don’t look for a horse.’ Because people come in asking me what I’ve got for this or that ailment, you know? Who knows why?” he said, and shrugged, but he seemed pleased by his position of importance in the workplace. “I’m only the manager of the store, I’m not a pharmacist, but they ask me,” he said, and shrugged again. “What’s good for a headache, or a cough, or the sniffles, or this or that? They ask me all the time. And I remember what my friend the doctor told me,” he said, and smiled, seemingly pleased by this, too, the fact that his friend was a doctor. “If it has the symptoms of a common cold, don’t go looking for SARS. Period.” He opened his hands to them, palms up, explaining the utter simplicity of it all. “Stop looking for zebras,” he said, and smiled again. “Just find the fucking Jew who shot my cousin in the head, hmm?”
The time was 3:27 P.M.
In the movies these days, it was not unusual for a working girl to become a princess overnight, like the chambermaid who not only gets the hero onscreen but in real life as well, talk about Cinderella stories! In other movies of this stripe, you saw common working class girls who aspired to become college students. Or soccer players. It was a popular theme nowadays. America was the land of opportunity. So was Japan, apparently, although Ruriko—the prostitute in the film all these people were waiting on line to see—was a “working girl” in the truest sense, and she didn’t even want to become a princess, just a concert violinist. She was about to become just that in about three minutes.
The two girls standing on line outside the theater box office also happened to be true working girls, which was why they were here to catch the four o’clock screening of the Japanese film. They had each separately seen Pretty Woman, another Working Girl Becomes Princess film, and did not for a moment believe that Julia Roberts had ever blown anybody for fifty bucks, but maybe it would be different with this Japanese actress, whatever her name was. Maybe this time, they’d believe that these One in a Million fairy tales could really happen to girls who actually did this sort of thing for a living.
The two girls, Heidi and Roseanne, looked and dressed just like any secretary who’d got out of work early today . . .
It was now 3:46 P.M.
. . . and even sounded somewhat like girls with junior college educations. As the line inched closer to the box office, they began talking about what Heidi was going to do to celebrate her birthday tonight. Heidi was nineteen years old today. She’d been hooking for two years now. The closest she’d got to becoming a princess was when one of her old-fart regulars asked her to come to London with him on a weekend trip. He rescinded the offer when he learned she was expecting her period, worse luck.
“You doing anything special tonight?” Roseanne asked.
“Jimmy’s taking me out to dinner,” Heidi said.
Jimmy was a cop she dated. He knew what profession she was in.
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah.”
In about fifteen seconds, it would be 3:48 P.M.
“I still can’t get over it,” Roseanne said.
“What’s that, hon?”
“The coincidence!” Roseanne said, amazed. “Does your birthday always fall on Cinco de Mayo?”
A couple sitting in the seats just behind the one under which the Gucci dispatch case had been left were seriously necking when the bomb exploded.
The boy had his hand under the girl’s skirt, and she had her hand inside his unzippered fly, their fitful manual activity covered by the raincoat he had thrown over both their laps. Neither of them really gave a damn about whether or not Ruriko passed muster with the judges at Juilliard, or went back instead to a life of hopeless despair in the slums of Yokohama. All that mattered to them was achieving mutual orgasm here in the flickering darkness of the theater while the soulful strains of Aram Khacaturian’s Spartacus flowed from Ruriko’s violin under the expert coaxing of her talented fingers.
When the bomb exploded, they both thought for the tiniest tick of an instant that they’d died and gone to heaven.
Fortunately for the Eight-Seven, the movie-theater bombing occurred in the Two-One downtown. Since there was no immediate connection between this new outburst of violence and the Muslim Murders, nobody from the Two-One called uptown in an attempt to unload the case there. Instead, because this was an obvious act of terrorism, they called the Joint Terrorist Task Force at One Federal Square further downtown, and dumped the entire matter into their laps. This did not, however, stop the talking heads on television from linking the movie bombing to the murders of the three cabbies.
The liberal TV commentators noisily insisted that the total mess we’d made in Iraq was directly responsible for this new wave of violence here in the United States. The conservative commentators wagged their heads in tolerant understanding of their colleagues’ supreme ignorance, and then sagely suggested that if the police in this city would only learn how to handle the problems manifest in a gloriously diverse population, there wouldn’t be any civic violence at all.
It took no more than an hour and a half before all of the cable channels were demanding immediate arrests in what was now perceived as a single case. On the six-thirty network news broadcasts, the movie-theater bombing was the headline story, and without fail the bombing was linked to the cab-driver killings, the blue Star of David on the windshields televised over and over again as the unifying leitmotif.
Ali Al-Barak, the third Muslim victim, had worked for a company that called itself simply Cabco. Its garage was located in the shadow of the Calm’s Point Bridge, not too distant from the market under the massive stone supporting pillars on the Isola side of the bridge. The market was closed and shuttered when Meyer and Carella drove past it at a quarter to seven that evening. They had trouble finding Cabco’s garage and drove around the block several times, getting entangled in bridge traffic. At one point, Carella suggested that they hit the hammer, but Meyer felt use of the siren might be excessive.
They finally located the garage tucked between two massive apartment buildings. It could have been the underground garage for either of them, but a discreet sign identified it as Cabco. They drove down the ramp, found the dispatcher’s office, identified themselves, and explained why they were there.
“Yeah,” the dispatcher said, and nodded. His name was Hazhir Demirkol. He explained that like Al-Barak, he too was a Muslim, though not a Saudi. “I’m a Kurd,” he told them. “I came to this country ten years ago.”
“What can you tell us about Al-Barak?” Meyer asked.
“I knew someone would kill him sooner or later,” Demirkol said. “The way he was shooting up his mouth all the time.”
Shooting off, Carella thought, but didn’t correct him.
“In what way?” he asked.
“He kept complaining that Israel was responsible for all the trouble in the Arab world. If there was no Israel, there would have been no Iraqi war. There would be no terrorism. There would be no 9/11. Well, he’s a Saudi, you know. His countrymen were the ones who bombed the World Trade Center! But he was being foolish. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Jews. I feel the same way. But in this city, I have learned to keep my thoughts to myself.”
“Why’s that?” Meyer asked.
Demirkol turned to him, looked him over. One eyebrow arched. Sudden recognition crossed his face. This man was a Jew. This detective was a Jew.
“It doesn’t matter why,” he said. “Look what happened to Ali. That is why.”
“You think a Jew killed him, is tha
t it?”
“No, an angel from Paradise painted that blue star on his windshield.”
“Who might’ve heard him when he was airing all these complaints?” Carella asked.
“Who knows? Ali talked freely, too freely, you ask me. This is a democracy, no? Like the one America brought to Iraq, no?” Demirkol asked sarcastically. “He talked everywhere. He talked here in the garage with his friends, he talked to his passengers, I’m sure he talked at the mosque, too, when he went to prayer. Freedom of speech, correct? Even if it gets you killed.”
“You think he expressed his views to the wrong person, is that it?” Meyer asked. “The wrong Jew.”
“The same Jew who killed the other drivers,” Demirkol said, and nodded emphatically, looking Meyer dead in the eye, challenging him.
“This mosque you mentioned,” Carella said. “Would you know . . . ?”
“Majid At-Abu,” Demirkol said at once. “Close by here,” he said, and gestured vaguely uptown.
Now this was a mosque.
This was what one conjured when the very word was uttered. This was straight out of Arabian Nights, minarets and domes, blue tile and gold leaf. This was the real McCoy.
Opulent and imposing, Majid At-Abu was not as “close by” as Demirkol had suggested, it was in fact a good mile and a half uptown. When the detectives got there at a little past eight that night, the faithful were already gathered inside for the sunset prayer. The sky beyond the mosque’s single glittering dome was streaked with the last red-purple streaks of a dying sun. The minaret from which the muezzin called worshippers to prayer stood tall and stately to the right of the arched entrance doors. Meyer and Carella stood on the sidewalk outside, listening to the prayers intoned within, waiting for an opportune time to enter.
Across the street, some Arabic-looking boys in T-shirts and jeans were cracking themselves up. Meyer wondered what they were saying. Carella wondered why they weren’t inside praying.
“Ivan Sikimiavuçlyor!” one of the kids shouted, and the others all burst out laughing.
“How about Alexandr Siksallandr?” one of the other kids suggested, and again they all laughed.