Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  When Emily asked, “Who’s Florin?” he took a moment to explain. “He was at the party. Pink tux. Looked very self-important. And was talking to our man there.” He gestured toward Chowdhury, whose feet were now disappearing into the ambulance pod. She nodded, and he added, “Runs a casino. God knows what else. Probably drugs, now.”

  The medics finished securing the gurney, climbed into the front of the ambulance pod, fired their twin jet engines, and boosted quickly into the air. Their siren was silent, for the emergency was over. Chowdhury was no longer in medical danger, and there was no need to rush to get him to the cell that would hold him until a lawyer could pry him loose, or failing that, until his trial.

  When the Pigeon was out of sight, Emily said, “There’s another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “He has a real boss, you know, who was also at the party.”

  Bernie was still for a moment, thinking of locked doors, another Greenacres address, greenery once glimpsed behind a window, something Emily had told him before, that very morning, and the smell of money. “I’ll need another warrant.”

  “So get one.”

  Within an hour, the Hawk had landed again at the Neoform lot and Bernie was telling Miss Carol that he needed to see Gelarean. The receptionist looked at Emily, who nodded and said, “Yes, we caught Ralph.”

  Miss Carol’s eyes widened. “And he told you someone else was involved? Was it…?”

  “Miss Carol!” Bernie’s voice was firm.

  “Well!” She pulsed her lips. “I am sorry. He’s not here.”

  “Where is he?” asked Emily.

  “He went home right after you left before. When you were chasing Ralph. He said he didn’t feel very good. I offered him an aspirin, but…”

  She had lost her audience. Bernie had turned and begun to run for the door and the Hawk as soon as she said Gelarean had gone home. Emily was right behind him, and minutes later they were in the air over Greenacres.

  “There’s his place.” Bernie didn’t bother to point. The upturned shape of the gengineered squash was unmistakable.

  The Hawk swept closer, and the dome of Gelarean’s tower study became distinguishable, the broad expanse of glass, the green of the plants he grew there, the brown smudge that must be his desk. Closer yet, and that smudge was indeed a desk, its edges overhung by plants, a chair drawn close to one edge, someone in the chair.

  “That must be him.” This time he pointed, and Emily, leaning over his shoulder, grunted in agreement. They drew closer, and they could make out small, white-bordered squares upon the desktop. Their centers were dark. They seemed about the size of the hands that lay beside them. “Photos,” Bernie guessed. “But of what?”

  As the Hawk landed on the lawn, Victoria Gelarean opened the front door to stand on the porch, her hands clasped before her and her birthmark far brighter than it had been at the party. Bernie guessed that its lividity meant that she was worried for her husband. The slacks and blouse she wore neither concealed her lumpy figure nor hid the blotch on her face as had the robe at the party. When they approached her, she said, “He told me to keep you out, but…” Bernie could almost read her mind: Her husband had worried her for years, now that was at an end, and locking the door would do no good at all. He wondered whether she knew just what Gelarean had been up to, or cared.

  She shrugged and gestured toward the interior of her home. “He’s upstairs. In the tower.”

  Bernie put the badge he had had ready to display back in his pocket. The search warrant he had taken the time to obtain, and now held rolled in his right hand, was less easy to dispose of. He passed it to Emily, said, “Thank you,” to Gelarean’s wife, and led the way into the house.

  He paid no attention to the artworks on the walls or the comfortable furniture or the thick carpets that had impressed him at the party. He headed directly toward where he thought the entrance to the tower and Gelarean’s den must be, letting himself be guided by Victoria Gelarean’s small gestures. The entrance, when they came to it, was an ordinary-looking door at the end of a short hallway. It was, however, locked, and Victoria Gelarean did not have a key. “He keeps it to himself,” she said. “He calls it his castle. This is his drawbridge.” After a moment of awkward silence, she added, “It’s up now.”

  When Bernie swore and tried to kick this door down too, as he had the one to Chowdhury’s apartment, it shrugged him off. “Steel frame,” he panted, drew his gun, and aimed its muzzle at the lock. The roar of the magnum was deafening in the confined space of the hall, but it was effective. As the echoes died, they saw that the door was now ajar, revealing a narrow stairway.

  “He always said that was the only way anyone would break that door down.”

  Gun still in his hand, he peered up the stairs. Green light, the hue of forest shade on a sunny day, spilled down to meet him and announced that there were no further obstacles between him and Gelarean. He turned to look at Victoria, said quietly, ”You stay here,” and went through the door. Emily followed him.

  At the head of the stairs, they became part of a tableau of classic simplicity: The room, Gelarean’s den, was a ring of green in which they stood like lurking predators. Gelarean’s desk sat in full sunlight, the only part of the room so illuminated, like a spotlit stage. A small oriental rug lay on the polished wooden floor to one side. Gelarean himself was a gray-haired, round-faced, beak-nosed figure, arms spread, hands flat on the empty desktop. He might have been a medieval judge at his bench, a priest at the altar, a lord about to receive tribute.

  He said, “It’s all up then, is it?” and Bernie thought that resignation never sounded quite so final as when it was expressed in a British accent.

  He pointed his gun at the man, stepped out of the green shadows, nodded, and said, “You are under arrest.” Taking the warrant from Emily, he tossed it onto the desk. Then, drawing a small and tattered card from his shirt pocket, he added, “Anything you say may be used…”

  Gelarean heard him out expressionlessly, his eyes fixed on the cop. When Bernie was done, he shrugged and said, “So much for tradition.”

  Emily pointed at the desk. “What happened to the photos?”

  Gelarean’s eyes shifted to her, and his expression grew dark and threatening. Bernie heard the woman step backward beside him, just far enough to tell him that she felt Gelarean’s glare like a blow. “You!” he said. “You must have been born under a bloody lucky star.”

  He shifted his attention back to Bernie. “Nothing worked, did it? And I only wanted her out of the way.”

  “You wanted your name on my Bioblimps. You’ve done that before,” said Emily.

  “I never had to kill for it.”

  “The photos?” asked Bernie.

  “What photos?” He tried to pull himself closer to the desk, but Bernie was already leaning over him, pushing him back with the muzzle of his magnum, pulling open the desk’s central drawer.

  The photos were there, face down, scattered as if they had been swept suddenly into hiding. Bernie picked them up and threw them on the desk, face up.

  They were dim, shadowed, their colors off as colors can only be in instant photos of the sort taken to commemorate important occasions. But the subject was clear: Each one showed a woman, young and black and nude; the poses varied, as did what had been done to her.

  “Jasmine.” Bernie’s voice was barely above a whisper, hoarse and tortured. In a moment, he looked down at his hand. His knuckles had whitened where he gripped the gun. He looked past his hand, past his gun, to the shadows beneath Gelarean’s chair. Gelarean had folded his feet beneath him there, as if to hide them. But Bernie could see them clearly, see how small they were, just the size of a certain bloody footprint that he still bore imprinted on his mind.

  “Eee kai vai.” He felt like vomiting. Deliberately, he relaxed his grip. He forced himself to put the gun back in its shoulder holster. He took a deep breath. He turned to look at the plants that filled the room and glowed in
the sunlight. “Nettles,” he said. “Cocaine nettles. You are a son of a bitch. I’ll bet you even put that chip in the Sparrow yourself.” He paused. “Care to tell us how you did it?”

  The first time Bernie had met Gelarean had been when the man had so cheerfully announced that Emily had won her patent. He had struck him then as a man whose joviality was a false front, a man who concealed his true self. Now that true self shone through in a smirk of triumph, and Bernie was not happy to be proven right.

  “I am,” said Gelarean, “a Palestinian. And my fellows are everywhere.” Bernie vaguely remembered the Palestinian diaspora from his childhood. The refugee camps had finally emptied, and their occupants had settled throughout the world. They had not, however, surrendered their hatred of Israel, or of its allies. “It was not hard to gain access to the Sparrow,” he added, and his smirk became once more a glare. “I thought I left no traces. But then you appeared, pretending to be sniffing after Dr. Gilman.” He shrugged. “I delegated the next attempts.”

  “To Chowdhury. Why him?”

  “He was in debt to my wife’s cousin. And he was already making…” A gesture indicated the nettles and drew Bernie’s attention to a single fish tank on the far side of the room. It held three snakes, larger ones than those in Chowdhury’s lab.

  “He was…” He hesitated as if he were searching for the right word. “Vulnerable. Biddable. He would do what I told him to do.”

  Emily made a disgusted noise. “And you had already told him to make those drug…”

  He shook his head. “I was not involved with the nettles. The genimals, yes.”

  He glanced toward the fish tank and the snakes and began to sidle out from behind the desk. Bernie stopped him with one upraised hand. “But why? And how did the girl come in?”

  Gelarean’s open hands moved up and out. “It was good business for the family. But…” Gelarean’s tone remained as reasonable as ever, but now his forehead wrinkled and his eyes widened in the intent stare of the fanatic. “The country deserved it. It’s always been the Great Satan, the stronghold of Zionism. If it had virtue, if it knew and followed Allah, there would be no problem. It would not be the enemy of all Palestinians, and there would be no market for the drugs.”

  “But we’re not Moslems,” said Emily. “We don’t know Allah. We have no virtue. And that makes us fair game.”

  He nodded earnestly, as if pleased that she understood him so well.

  “You’re raving.”

  “Let’s go,” said Bernie.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE CASE WAS not quite closed. Bernie had the villains, one in a hospital bed, the other in a cell, and he had many of the answers. But he did not have them all, and he knew that Gelarean’s lawyers would be trying to pry him loose as quickly as possible. The weekend therefore gave him little rest. He had to interrogate his catches more thoroughly, turn his ferrets loose in Gelarean’s computers, survey Chowdhury’s disks, question Victoria Gelarean, and try to find Greg Florin. Unfortunately, though the disks held clear evidence of his involvement, Florin had dropped out of sight. He was not at his casino, nor at his new project, the “farm,” and his employees and associates all claimed that they knew nothing.

  Bernie had no time for anything but the investigation until well into the next week. It was then that Lieutenant Napoleon Alexander, the Count, called him into his office, pursed his bright red lips, and said, “Well?” Bernie’s preliminary report, its cover sheet only slightly curled, was on the desk in front of him. He looked at it and added, “I’ve skimmed it, but let’s have the gist of it.”

  Bernie gave his boss his usual sloppy salute. “I remember thinking,” he said. “When the call went out about the Sparrow. That it was terrorists.” He shrugged. “Gelarean’s Palestinian, and his records show that he’s been giving them money since before he came to this country.”

  “You can’t hang him for that,” the Count said. “Randecker gives to the Irish Republican Army, but he’s no terrorist.”

  “No, sir. But Gelarean may have done a little more. When I confronted him Friday, he bragged about his contacts. And the records say he’s had guests from abroad. They may have been more active terrorists.”

  “So he’s aided and abetted.”

  Bernie nodded. “That changed when Chowdhury piled up his gambling debt with Florin. As it happens, Gelarean’s wife is a Campana. So he had a line into the Mob.”

  “If we had known that…”

  “We might have suspected his involvement earlier, but that’s all. If we could be damned for our relatives, none of us would have any hope of heaven.”

  He paused while Lieutenant Alexander rummaged in a drawer, found an old pipe, tucked its bit between his teeth and muttered, “There’s a little flavor left.”

  “Anyway, Florin pushed,” Bernie continued. “He wanted something to revive the drug trade, and Chowdhury suggested the cocaine nettle. When he produced it, and it worked, that was when the word reached Gelarean. He thought of asking Chowdhury to come up with drug-producing genimals, and when he realized what a grip he had on the man, he had him install the chips, program the Assassin, and so on.”

  The Count shook his head. “You’ve done a good job, Bernie. But what’s his motive? Greed for the drug money, I can understand.” He patted the report on the desk before him with one hand. “Even that business about attacking the ‘Great Satan.’ But why did he want to kill Dr. Gilman?”

  “He has a nasty habit of stealing credit whenever he can. Once her patent was through, there wasn’t much point in continuing to try to kill her, but by then I was on the scene. They both thought I was after them.”

  “And Chowdhury panicked.”

  “It only has to happen once.”

  “And the girl? Jasmine Willison?”

  Bernie made a face. He had been telling Connie everything, repeating his report to the Count, and she had asked precisely the question their boss had asked toward the end. He wished there were a better answer than the one he had: He had to shrug and say, “For a while, I thought that would turn out to be Chowdhury. But it was Gelarean, though he won’t talk about that. He’s guilty, he admits it, and the photos in his desk are quite enough proof of his guilt. But why? He’s nuts. All fanatics are nuts, and too many of them are nuts about blood.” Now all he could do was repeat the words.

  They were in Connie’s small living room, side by side on a couch that was little more than a pad of foam rubber covered with soft, loosely woven fabric. An internal frame let it be bent to hold various configurations. Its back was a line of colorful pillows leaned against the wall. A bolster covered in purple shag served them as a hassock. To one side, a low table of zebra wood and slate held their empty coffee cups.

  The rest of the room was no more elaborate. A ceiling fixture threw spots of light onto one end of the couch, three metallic photos upon the wall, a veedo unit with slots for tapes and disks. A goldfish bush sat by the window, where light could hit the leaves; two colorful fruit, nearly ripe, wriggled on their stems above a bowl of water. A third had already fallen into the bowl, where it swam about as if it had always been a fish. On the floor near the plant’s pot lay the feather Connie had retrieved from the dead Hawk.

  “Or damage, anyway,” she said. She flipped a pillow flat on the end of the couch and stretched out. Her bare foot poked at his knee. He captured it in a large hand and kneaded the toes. “Wasn’t that why he wanted the drug genimals? And why he didn’t simply take an axe to Emily?”

  “Yeah.” Bernie sighed. “He liked gore, didn’t he? Emily didn’t.”

  Her toes curled around his thumb. “You do too.”

  “Even if it makes me throw up?”

  “In a way. And so do I. That’s why we’re cops.”

  “Two of a kind,” he said.

  “Predators. Hawks.”

  “But not wild. Not wolves.” He meant, he thought, that they did not prey upon society. They were domesticated, an
d they served society, as dogs did the sheep and shepherd. Perhaps, for all that he liked to compare himself to a Hawk, he was not a hawk. Yes, hawks were as domesticated as dogs. but they were hunters, fighters, not protectors, guardians. If he were truly a hawk, he would have to join the army. But that did not appeal to him at all. He was a cop.

  He sighed. He wished it really mattered to anyone but the girl’s family and friends why Gelarean had done to her what he had done. But whatever the reason, the man would spend many years in prison. The Sparrow alone was enough to guarantee that. And when he got out, he would surely be deported. He would be no problem ever again for this society. Sadly, there was no shortage of people like him. There never had been. There never would be.

  Some things never changed.

  With a wiggle of her toes and a shift in position of her foot, Connie changed the subject. “And now she’s done with you?”

  He nodded. “You were right. At least, we had our fling. And now she’s gone back to her husband.”

  “I thought that might…”

  He let his hand slide up her calf. “You going to leave me too?”

  “No husband to go back to.”

  He hesitated, letting his eyes search her face. “We could change that.”

  Now it was her turn to hesitate, and he thought that she must be as used as he to the single life, perhaps as reluctant to let it change. But…“Was that a proposal?” she asked. Her voice had a small crack in it.

  He looked away. “I suppose it was.”

  Later, they mounted the dead Hawk’s feather on the wall above the couch.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  WHERE BERNIE HAD spent the weekend in a frenzy of investigation, Emily had spent it feeling frustrated and bored. The threat that had been hanging over her was gone, but so were the suspense and excitement that had accompanied that threat. She felt let down, disappointed. There would be no more Sparrows landing on the freeway to gobble her up, no more Assassins in the trees, no more Mack trucks lunging out of traffic to run her down, no more runaway Tortoises. Nor would there be handsome policemen to sweep her off her feet. The romance was gone from her life.