Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  “Or Madame Döllemer,” another boy said.

  More laughter. Carella was surprised they didn’t all fall to the sidewalk clutching their bellies. It took both of the detectives a moment to realize that these were names the boys were bandying about. They had no idea that in Turkish “Ivan Sikimiavuçlyor” meant “Ivan Holding My Cock,” or that “Alexandr Siksallandr” meant “Alexander Who Swings a Cock,” or that poor “Madame Döllemer” was just a lady “Sucking Sperm.” Like the dirty names Meyer and Carella had attached to fictitious book titles when they themselves were kids . . .

  The Open Robe by Seymour Hare.

  The Russian Revenge by Ivana Kutchakokoff.

  The Chinese Curse by Wan Hong Lo.

  Hawaiian Paradise by A’wana Leia Oo’aa.

  . . . these Arab teenagers growing up here in America were now making puns on their parents’ native tongue.

  “Fenasi Kerim!” one of the boys shouted finally and triumphantly, and whereas neither of the detectives knew that this invented name meant “I Fuck You Bad,” the boys’ ensuing exuberant laughter caused them to laugh as well.

  The sunset prayer had ended.

  They took off their shoes and placed them outside in the foyer—alongside the loafers and sandals and jogging shoes and boots and laced brogans parked there like autos in a used-car lot—and went inside to find the imam.

  “I never heard Ali Al-Barak utter a single threatening word about the Jewish people, or the Jewish state, or any Jew in particular,” Mohammad Talal Awad said.

  They were standing in the vast open hall of the mosque proper, a white space the size of a ballroom, with arched windows and tiled floors and an overhead clerestory through which the detectives could see the beginnings of a starry night. The imam was wearing white baggy trousers and a flowing white tunic and a little while pillbox hat. He had a long black beard, a narrow nose and eyes almost black, and he directed his every word to Meyer.

  “Nor is there anything in the Koran that directs Muslims to kill anyone,” he said. “Not Jews, not anyone. There is nothing there. Search the Koran. You will find not a word about murdering in the name of Allah.”

  “We understand Al-Barak made remarks some people might have found inflammatory,” Carella said.

  “Political observations. They had nothing to do with Islam. He was young, he was brash, perhaps he was foolish to express his opinions so openly. But this is America, and one may speak freely, isn’t that so? Isn’t that what democracy is all about?”

  Here we go again, Meyer thought.

  “But if you think Ali’s murder had anything to do with the bombing downtown . . .”

  Oh? Carella thought.

  “ . . . you are mistaken. Ali was a pious young man who lived with another man his own age, recently arrived from Saudi Arabia. In their native land, they were both students. Here, one drove a taxi and the other bags groceries in a supermarket. If you think Ali’s friend, in revenge for his murder, bombed that theater downtown . . .”

  Oh? Carella thought again.

  “. . . you are very sadly mistaken.”

  “We’re not investigating that bombing,” Meyer said. “We’re investigating Ali’s murder. And the murder of two other Muslim cab drivers. If you can think of anyone who might possibly . . .”

  “I know no Jews,” the imam said.

  You know one now, Meyer thought.

  “This friend he lived with,” Carella said. “What’s his name, and where can we find him?”

  The music coming from behind the door to the third-floor apartment was very definitely rap. The singers were very definitely black, and the lyrics were in English. But the words weren’t telling young kids to do dope or knock women around or even up. As they listened at the wood, the lyrics the detectives heard spoke of intentions alone not being sufficient to bring reward . . .

  When help is needed, prayer to Allah is the answer. . . Allah alone can assist in . . .

  Meyer knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” a voice yelled.

  “Police,” Carella said.

  The music continued to blare.

  “Hello?” Carella said. “Mind if we ask you some questions?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  He looked at Meyer.

  Meyer shrugged. Over the blare of the music, he yelled, “Hello in there!”

  Still no answer.

  “This is the police!” he yelled. “Would you mind coming to the door, please?”

  The door opened a crack, held by a night chain.

  They saw part of a narrow face. Part of a mustache. Part of a mouth. A single brown eye.

  “Mr. Rajab?”

  “Yes?”

  Wariness in the voice and in the single eye they could see.

  “Mind if we come in? Few questions we’d like to ask you.”

  “What about?”

  “You a friend of Ali Al-Barak?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know he was murdered last . . .?”

  The door slammed shut.

  They heard the sudden click of a bolt turning.

  Carella backed off across the hall. His gun was already in his right hand, his knee coming up for a jackknife kick. The sole of his shoe collided with the door, just below the lock. The lock held.

  “The yard!” he yelled, and Meyer flew off down the stairs.

  Carella kicked at the lock again. This time, it sprang. He followed the splintered door into the room. The black rap group was still singing praise to Allah. The window across the room was open, a curtain fluttering in the mild evening breeze. He ran across the room, followed his gun hand out the window and onto a fire escape. He could hear footsteps clattering down the iron rungs to the second floor.

  “Stop!” he yelled. “Police!”

  Nobody stopped.

  He came out onto the fire escape, took a quick look below, and started down.

  From below, he heard Meyer racketing into the backyard. They had Rajab sandwiched.

  “Hold it right there!” Meyer yelled.

  Carella came down to the first-floor fire escape, out of breath, and handcuffed Rajab’s hands behind his back.

  They listened in total amazement as Ishak Rajab told them all about how he had plotted instant revenge for the murder of his friend and roommate, Ali Al-Barak. They listened as he told them how he had constructed the suitcase bomb . . .

  He called the Gucci dispatch case a suitcase.

  . . . and then had carefully chosen a movie theater showing so-called art films because he knew Jews pretended to culture, and there would most likely be many Jews in the audience. Jews had to be taught that Arabs could not wantonly be killed without reprisal.

  “Ali was killed by a Jew,” Rajab said. “And so it was fitting and just that Jews be killed in return.”

  Meyer called the JTTF at Fed Square and told them they’d accidentally lucked into catching the guy who did their movie-theater bombing.

  Ungrateful humps didn’t even say thanks.

  It was almost ten o’clock when he and Carella left the squadroom for home. As they passed the swing room downstairs, they looked in through the open door to where a uniformed cop was half-dozing on one of the couches, watching television. One of cable’s most vociferous talking heads was demanding to know when a terrorist was not a terrorist.

  “Here’s the story,” he said, and glared out of the screen. “A green-card Saudi-Arabian named Ishak Rajab was arrested and charged with the wanton slaying of sixteen movie patrons and the wounding of twelve others. Our own police and the Joint Terrorist Task Force are to be highly commended for their swift actions in this case. It is now to be hoped that a trial and conviction will be equally swift.

  “However. . .

  “Rajab’s attorneys are already indicating they’ll be entering a plea of insanity. Their reasoning seems to be that a man who deliberately leaves a bomb in a public place is not a terrorist—have you got that? Not a ter
rorist! Then what is he, huh, guys? Well, according to his attorneys, he was merely a man blinded by rage and seeking retaliation. The rationale for Rajab’s behavior would seem to be his close friendship with Ali Al-Barak, the third victim in the wave of taxi-driver slayings that have swept the city since last Friday: Rajab was Al-Barak’s roommate.

  “Well, neither I nor any right-minded citizen would condone the senseless murder of Muslim cab drivers. That goes without saying. But to invoke a surely inappropriate Biblical—Biblical, mind you—‘eye for an eye’ defense by labeling premeditated mass murder ‘insanity’ is in itself insanity. A terrorist is a terrorist, and this was an act of terrorism, pure and simple. Anything less than the death penalty would be gross injustice in the case of Ishak Rajab. That’s my opinion, now let’s hear yours. You can e-mail me at. . .”

  The detectives walked out of the building and into the night.

  In four hours, another Muslim cabbie would be killed.

  The police knew at once that this wasn’t their man.

  To begin with, none of the other victims had been robbed.

  This one was.

  All of the other victims had been shot only once, at the base of the skull.

  This one was shot three times through the open driver-side window of his cab, two of the bullets entering his face at the left temple and just below the cheek, the third passing through his neck and lodging in the opposite door panel.

  Shell casings were found on the street outside the cab, indicating that the murder weapon had been an automatic, and not the revolver that had been used in the previous three murders. Ballistics confirmed this. The bullets and casings were consistent with samples fired from a Colt .45 automatic.

  Moreover, two witnesses had seen a man leaning into the cab window moments before they heard shots, and he was definitely not a tall white man dressed entirely in black.

  There were only two similarities in all four murders. The drivers were all Muslims, and a blue star had been spray-painted onto each of their windshields.

  But the Star of David had six points, and this new one had only five, and it was turned on end like the inverted pentagram used by devil-worshippers.

  They hoped to hell yet another religion wasn’t intruding its beliefs into this case.

  But they knew for sure this wasn’t their man.

  This was a copycat.

  CABBIE SHOT AND KILLED

  FOURTH MUSLIM MURDER

  So read the headline in the Metro Section of the city’s staid morning newspaper. The story under it was largely put together from details supplied in a Police Department press release. The flak that had gone out from the Public Relations Office on the previous three murders had significantly withheld any information about the killer himself or his MO. None of the reporters—print, radio, or television—had been informed that the killer had been dressed in black from head to toe, or that he’d fired just a single shot into his separate victims’ heads. They were hoping the killer himself—if ever they caught him—would reveal this information, thereby incriminating himself.

  But this time around, because the police knew this was a copycat, the PR release was a bit more generous, stating that the cabbie had been shot three times, that he’d been robbed of his night’s receipts, and that his assailant, as described by two eyewitnesses, was a black man in his early twenties, about five feet seven inches tall, weighing some hundred and sixty pounds and wearing blue jeans, white sneakers, a brown leather jacket, and a black ski cap pulled low on his forehead.

  The man who’d murdered the previous three cabbies must have laughed himself silly.

  Especially when another bombing took place that Tuesday afternoon.

  The city’s Joint Terrorist Task Force was an odd mix of elite city detectives, FBI Special Agents, Homeland Security people, and a handful of CIA spooks. Special Agent in Charge Brian Hooper and a team of four other Task Force officers arrived at The Merrie Coffee Bean at three that afternoon, not half an hour after a suicide bomber had killed himself and a dozen patrons sitting at tables on the sidewalk outside. Seven wounded people had already been carried by ambulance to the closest hospital, Abingdon Memorial, on the river at Condon Street.

  The coffee shop was a shambles.

  Wrought iron tables and chairs had been twisted into surreal and smoldering bits of modern sculpture. Glass shards lay all over the sidewalk and inside the shop gutted and flooded by the Fire Department.

  A dazed and dazzled waitress, wide-eyed and smoke-smudged but remarkably unharmed otherwise, told Hooper that she was at the cappuccino machine picking up an order when she heard someone yelling outside. She thought at first it was one of the customers, sometimes they got into arguments over choice tables. She turned from the counter to look outside, and saw this slight man running toward the door of the shop, yelling at the top of his lungs . . .

  “What was he yelling, miss, do you remember?” Hooper asked.

  Hooper was polite and soft-spoken, wearing a blue suit, a white shirt, a blue tie, and polished black shoes. Two detectives from the Five-Oh had also responded. Casually, dressed in sport jackets, slacks, and shirts open at the throat, they looked like bums in contrast. They stood by trying to look interested and significant while Hooper conducted the questioning.

  “Something about Jews,” the waitress said. “He had a foreign accent, you know, so it was hard to understand him to begin with. And this was like a rant, so that made it even more difficult. Besides, it all happened so fast. He was running from the open sidewalk down this, like, space we have between the tables? Like an aisle that leads to the front of the shop? And he was yelling Jews-this, Jews-that, and waving his arms in the air like some kind of nut? Then all at once there was this terrific explosion, it almost knocked me off my feet, and I was all the way inside the shop, near the cap machine. And I saw . . . there was like sunshine outside, you know? Like shining through the windows? And all of a sudden I saw all body parts flying in the air in the sunshine. Like in silhouette. All these people getting blown apart. It was, like, awesome.”

  Hooper and his men went picking through the rubble.

  The two detectives from the Five-Oh were thinking this was very bad shit here.

  ______

  If I’ve already realized what I hoped to accomplish, why press my luck, as they say? The thing has escalated beyond my wildest expectations. So leave it well enough alone, he told himself.

  But that idiot last night has surely complicated matters. The police aren’t fools, they’ll recognize at once that last night’s murder couldn’t possibly be linked to the other three. So perhaps another one was in order, after all. To nail it to the wall. Four would round it off, wouldn’t it?

  To the Navajo Indians—well, Native Americans, as they say—the number four was sacred. Four different times of day, four sacred mountains, four sacred plants, four different directions. East was symbolic of Positive Thinking. South was for Planning. West for Life itself. North for Hope and Strength. They believed all this, the Navajo people. Religions were so peculiar. The things people believed. The things he himself had once believed, long ago, so very long ago.

  Of course the number four wasn’t truly sacred, that was just something the Navajos believed. The way Christians believed that the number 666 was the mark of the beast, who was the Antichrist and who—well, of course, what else?—had to be Jewish, right? There were even people who believed that the Internet acronym “www” for “World Wide Web” really transliterated into the Hebrew letter “vav” repeated three times, vav, vav, vav, the numerical equivalent of 666, the mark of the beast. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six, Revelations 13. Oh yes, I’ve read the Bible, thank you, and the Koran, and the teachings of Buddha, and they’re all total bullshit, as they say. But there are people who believe in a matrix, too, and not all of them are in padded rooms wearing straitjackets.

  So, ye
s, I think there should be another one tonight, a tip of the hat, as they say, to the Navajo’s sacred number four, and that will be the end of it. The last one. The same signature mark of the beast, the six-pointed star of the Antichrist. Then let them go searching the synagogues for me. Let them try to find the murdering Jew. After tonight, I will be finished!

  Tonight, he thought.

  Yes.

  ______

  Abbas Miandad was a Muslim cab driver, and no fool.

  Four Muslim cabbies had already been killed since Friday night, and he didn’t want to be number five. He did not own a pistol—carrying a pistol would be exceedingly stupid in a city already so en-flamed against people of the Islamic faith—nor did he own a dagger or a sword, but his wife’s kitchen was well stocked with utensils and before he set out on his midnight shift he took a huge bread knife from the rack . . .

  “Where are you going with that?” his wife asked.

  She was watching television.

  They were reporting that there’d been a suicide bombing that afternoon. They were saying the bomber had not been identified as yet.

  “Never mind,” he told her, and wrapped a dishtowel around the knife and packed it in a small tote bag that had BARNES & NOBLE lettered on it.

  He had unwrapped the knife the moment he drove out of the garage. At three that Wednesday morning, it was still in the pouch on the driver’s side of the cab. He had locked the cab when he stopped for a coffee break. Now, he walked up the street to where he’d parked the cab near the corner, and saw a man dressed all in black, bending to look into the back seat. He walked to him swiftly.

  “Help you, sir?” he asked.

  The man straightened up.

  “I thought you might be napping in there,” he said, and smiled.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Did you need a taxi?”

  “Is this your cab?”

  “It is.”

  “Can you take me to Majesta?” he said.

  “Where are you going, sir?”