A Walk Among the Tombstones

A Walk Among the Tombstones

A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

Lawrence Block

for LYNNE

Baby, baby, naughty baby

Hush, you squalling thing, I say

Peace this moment, peace, or maybe

Bonaparte will pass this way

Baby, baby, he's a giant

Tall and black as Monmouth steeple

And he breakfasts, dines and suppers

Every day on naughty people

Baby, baby, if he hears you

As he gallops past the house

Limb from limb at once he'll tear you

Just as pussy tears a mouse

And he'll beat you, beat you, beat you

And he'll beat you all to pap

And he'll eat you, eat you, eat you

Every morsel snap snap snap!

ENGLISH LULLABY

Chapter 1

On the last Thursday in March, somewhere between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning, Francine Khoury told her husband she was going out for a while, she had marketing to do.

"Take my car," he suggested. "I'm not going anywhere."

"It's too big," she said. "Time I took it, I felt like I was steering a boat."

"Whatever you say," he said.

The cars, his Buick Park Avenue and her Toyota Camry, shared the garage behind their house, a mock-Tudor structure of half-timbered stucco on Colonial Road between Seventy-eighth and Seventy-ninth streets, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn . She started up the Camry, backed out of the garage, triggered the remote unit to close the garage door, then backed all the way out to the street. At the first red light she popped a classical cassette into the tape deck. Beethoven, one of the late quartets.

She listened to jazz at home, it was Kenan's favorite music, but classical chamber music was what she played when she drove.

She was an attractive woman, five-six, 115 pounds, built large on top, narrow at the waist, trim in the hips. Dark hair, lustrous and curly, combed back off her face. Dark eyes, and aquiline nose, a generous, full-lipped mouth.

The mouth is always closed in photographs. She had, I understand, prominent upper incisors and a substantial overbite, and anxiety over this feature kept her from smiling much. In her wedding pictures she is beaming and radiant, but her teeth remain invisible.

Her complexion was olive, and her skin tanned deeply and readily.

She already had a start on the summer's tan; she and Kenan had spent the last week of February on the beach at Negril, in Jamaica .

She'd have been darker, but Kenan made her use sunscreen and limited her hours of exposure. "It's not good for you," he told her. "Too dark's not attractive. Lying in the sun's what turns a plum into a prune."

What was so good about plums, she wanted to know. They're ripe and juicy, he told her.

When she had driven half a block from her driveway, about the time she reached the corner of Seventy-eighth and Colonial, the driver of a blue panel truck started his engine. He gave her another half-block lead, then pulled out from the curb and followed after her.

She turned right at Bay Ridge Avenue , then left again at Fourth Avenue , heading north. She slowed when she reached the D'Agostino's at the corner of Sixty-third Street , and eased the Camry into a parking space half a block past it.

The blue panel truck passed the Camry, circled the block, and parked at a fire hydrant right in front of the supermarket.

* * *

WHEN Francine Khoury left her house, I was still having breakfast.

I'd been up late the previous night. Elaine and I had had dinner at one of the Indian joints on East Sixth Street , then caught a revival of Mother Courage at the Public Theater on Lafayette . Our seats weren't great and it was hard to hear some of the actors. We would have left at intermission, but one of the actors was the boyfriend of one of Elaine's neighbors, and we wanted to go backstage after the final curtain and assure him that he was wonderful. We wound up joining him for a drink at a bar around the corner that was absolutely packed for no reason I could fathom.

"That was great," I told her when we got out of there. "For three hours I couldn't hear him onstage, and for the past hour I couldn't hear him across the table. I wonder if he's got a voice."

"The play didn't last three hours," she said. "More like two and a half."

"It seemed like three hours."

"It seemed like five," she said. "Let's go home."

We went to her place. She made coffee for me and a cup of tea for herself and we watched CNN for half an hour and talked through the commercials. Then we went to bed, and after an hour or so I got up and dressed in the dark. I was on my way out of the bedroom when she asked me where I was going.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

"That's all right. Can't you sleep?"

"Evidently not. I feel wired. I don't know why."

"Read in the living room. Or put the TV on, it won't bother me."

"No," I said. "I'm too restless. The walk across town might do me good."

Elaine's apartment is on Fifty-first between First and Second. My hotel, the Northwestern, is on Fifty-seventh between Eighth and Ninth. It was cold enough out that at first I thought I might take a cab, but by the time I'd walked a block I wasn't feeling it.

Waiting for a light to change, I happened to catch a glimpse of the moon between a couple of tall buildings. It was just about full, and that didn't come as a surprise. The night had a full-moon feel to it, stirring tides in the blood. I felt like doing something and couldn't think what.

If Mick Ballou had been in town I might have gone over to his saloon looking for him. But he was out of the country, and a saloon of any sort was no place for me, as restless as I was feeling. I went home and picked up a book, and somewhere around four I turned the light off and went to sleep.

By ten o'clock I was around the corner at the Flame. I had a light breakfast and read a newspaper, giving most of my attention to the local crime stories and the sports pages. Globally we were between crises, so I wasn't paying much attention to the bigger picture. The shit really has to hit the fan before I take an interest in national and international issues.

Otherwise they seem too remote and my mind refuses to come to grips with them.

God knows I had time for all the news, and the want ads and legals, too. I'd had three days' work the previous week at Reliable, a big detective agency with offices in the Flatiron Building , but they'd had nothing for me since, and the last work I'd done on my own hook had been ages ago. I was all right for money so I didn't have to work, and I've always been able to find ways to get through the days, but I would have been glad of something to do. The restlessness I'd felt the night before hadn't passed with the setting of the moon. It was still there, a low-grade fever in the blood, an itch somewhere down beneath the skin, where you couldn't scratch it.

* * *

FRANCINE Khoury spent half an hour in D'Agostino's, filling a shopping cart in the process. She paid cash for her groceries. A bag boy loaded her three shopping bags into her cart and followed her out of the store and down the street to where her car was parked.

The blue panel truck was still parked at the hydrant. Its rear doors were open, and two men had emerged from it and were on the sidewalk, apparently studying something on a clipboard one of them was holding.

When Francine passed them, accompanied by the bag boy, they glanced in her direction.

By the time she had opened the trunk of the Camry, they were back in the truck with the doors closed.

The boy put the bags in the trunk. Francine gave him two dollars, which was twice what most people gave him, to say nothing of the surprisingly high percentage of shoppers who didn't tip him at all. Kenan had taught her to tip well, not ostentatiously but generously. "We can always afford to be generous," he had told her.

The boy wheeled the cart back to the market. Francine got behind the wheel, started the engine, headed north on Fourth Avenue .

The blue panel truck stayed half a block behind.

I don't know precisely what route Francine took to get from D'Agostino's to the imported-foods store on Atlantic Avenue . She could have stayed on Fourth Avenue all the way to Atlantic, could have taken the Gowanus Expressway into South Brooklyn . There's no way to know, and it doesn't much matter.

One way or another she drove the Camry to the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street . There is a Syrian restaurant called Aleppo on the southwest corner, and next to it, on Atlantic , is a food market, a large delicatessen, really, called The Arabian Gourmet. (Francine never called it that. Like most of the people who shopped there, she called the store Ayoub's after the former owner who had sold out and moved toSan Diego ten years ago.)

Francine parked at a metered spot on the north side of Atlantic , almost directly across the street from The Arabian Gourmet. She walked to the corner, waited for the light to turn, then crossed the street. By the time she entered the food store, the blue panel truck was parked in a loading zone in front of the Aleppo restaurant, and just next door to The Arabian Gourmet.

She was not in the store long. She only bought a few things, and she didn't need any help carrying them.

She left the store at approximately 12:20. She was wearing a camel-hair car coat over charcoal-gray slacks and two sweaters, a beige cable-knit cardigan over a chocolate turtleneck. She had her purse over her shoulder, and was carrying a plastic shopping bag in one hand and her car keys in the other.

The back doors of the panel truck were open, and the two men who had gotten out of it earlier were on the sidewalk once again. When Francine emerged from the store, they moved up on either side of her. At the same time, a third man, the driver of the truck, started his engine.

One of the men said, "Mrs. Khoury?" She turned, and he flipped his wallet open and shut, giving her a quick peek at a badge, or at nothing at all. The second man said, "You'll have to come with us."

"Who are you?" she said. "What's this about, what do you want?"

They each took hold of an arm. Before she could have known what was happening they had hurried her across the sidewalk and up into the open back of the truck. Within seconds they were inside the truck with her and the doors were shut and the truck was pulling away from the curb and into the stream of traffic.

Although it was the middle of the day, and although the abduction took place on a busy commercial street, hardly anyone was in a position to see what happened, and the few people who did witness it had no clear idea what they were seeing. Everything must have happened very quickly.

If Francine had stepped back and cried out at their first approach…

But she didn't. Before she could do anything she was in the truck with the doors shut. She may have screamed then, or struggled, or tried to. But by then it was too late.

I KNOW exactly where I was when they snatched her. I went to the noon meeting of the Fireside group, which runs from 12:30 to 1:30

weekdays at the Y on West Sixty-third Street . I got there early, so I was almost certainly sitting with a cup of coffee when the two of them hustled Francine across the sidewalk and into the back of the panel truck.

I don't remember any of the details of the meeting. For several years now I've been going to AA meetings on a surprisingly regular basis. I don't go to quite so many as I did when I first got sober, but I still must average somewhere around five a week. This meeting would have followed the group's usual format, with a speaker telling his or her own story for fifteen or twenty minutes and the rest of the hour given over to general discussion. I don't think I spoke up during the discussion period. I'd be likely to remember it if I had. I'm sure there were interesting things said, and funny things. There always are, but I can't remember anything specific.

After the meeting I had lunch somewhere, and after lunch I called Elaine. Her answering machine picked up, which meant either that she was out or that she had company. Elaine is a call girl, and having company is what she does for a living.

I met Elaine a couple of lives ago, when I was a hard-drinking cop with a new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons out on Long Island . For a couple of years we had a relationship that served us both very well. I was her friend on the job, there to steer her through hassles, and once called upon to pilot a dead client from her bed to an alley down in the financial district. And she was the dream mistress, beautiful, bright, funny, professionally adept, and throughout it all as agreeable and undemanding as only a whore can be. Who could have asked for anything more?

After I left my home and my family and my job, Elaine and I pretty much lost touch with one another.

Then a monster from out of our shared past turned up to threaten us both, and we were thrown together by circumstance. And, remarkably, we stayed together.

She had her apartment and I had my hotel room. Two or three or four nights a week we would see each other. Generally those nights would end at her apartment, and more often than not I would stay over.

Occasionally we left the city together for a week or a weekend. On the days when we didn't see each other, we almost always spoke on the phone, sometimes more than once.

Although we hadn't said anything about forsaking all others, we had essentially done so. I wasn't seeing anybody else, and neither was she— with the singular exception of clients. Periodically she would trot off to a hotel room, or have someone up to her apartment. This had never bothered me in the early days of our relationship— it had probably been, truth to tell, part of the attraction— so I didn't see why it should bother me now.

If it did bother me, I could always ask her to stop. She had earned good money over the years and had saved most of it, putting the bulk of it in income-producing real estate. She could quit the life without having to change her lifestyle.

Something kept me from asking her. I suppose I was reluctant to admit to either of us that it bothered me. And I was at least as reluctant to do anything that would change any of the elements of our relationship. It wasn't broke, and I didn't want to fix it.

Things change, though. They can't do otherwise. If nothing else, they are altered by the sheer fact of their not changing.

We avoided using the L-word, although love is surely what I felt for her, and she for me. We avoided discussing the possibility of getting married, or living together, although I know I thought about it and had no doubt that she did. But we didn't talk about it. It was the thing we didn't talk about, except when we were not talking about love, or about what she did for a living.

Sooner or later, of course, we would have to think about these things, and talk about them, and even deal with them. Meanwhile we took it all one day at a time, which was how I had been taught to take all of life ever since I stopped trying to drink whiskey faster than they could distill it. As someone pointed out, you might as well take the whole business a day at a time. That, after all, is how the world hands it to you.

AT a quarter to four the same Thursday afternoon the telephone rang at the Khoury house on Colonial Road . When Kenan Khoury answered it a male voice said, "Hey, Khoury. She never came home, did she?"

"Who is this?"

"None of your fuckin' business is who it is. We got your wife, you Arab fuck. You want her back or what?"

"Where is she? Let me talk to her."

"Hey, fuck you, Khoury," the man said, and broke the connection.

Khoury stood there for a moment, shouting "hello" into a dead phone and trying to figure out what to do next. He ran outside, went to the garage, established that his Buick was there and her Camry was not.

He ran the length of the driveway to the street; looked in either direction, returned to the house, and picked up the phone. He listened to the dial tone and tried to think of someone to call.

"Jesus Christ," he said out loud. He put the phone down and yelled

"Francey!"

He dashed upstairs and burst into their bedroom, calling her name.

Of course she wasn't there, but he couldn't help himself, he had to check every room. It was a big house and he ran in and out of every room in it, shouting her name, at once the spectator and the participant in his own panic. Finally he was back in the living room and he saw that he had left the phone off the hook. That was brilliant. If they were trying to reach him, they couldn't get through. He hung up the phone and willed it to ring, and almost immediately it did.

It was a different male voice this time, calmer, more cultured. He said, "Mr. Khoury, I've been trying to reach you and getting a busy signal. Who were you talking to?"

"Nobody. I had the phone off the hook."

"I hope you didn't call the police."

"I didn't call anybody," Khoury said. "I made a mistake, I thought I hung up the phone, but I set it down alongside it. Where's my wife? Let me talk to my wife."

"You shouldn't leave the phone off the hook. And you shouldn't call anyone."

"I didn't."

"And certainly not the police."

"What do you want?"

"I want to help you get your wife back. If you want her back, that is. Do you want her back?"

"Jesus, what are you—"

"Answer the question, Mr. Khoury."

"Yes, I want her back. Of course I want her back."

"And I want to help you. Keep the line open, Mr. Khoury. I'll be in touch."

"Hello?" he said. "Hello?"

But the line was dead.

For ten minutes he paced the floor, waiting for the phone to ring.

Then an icy calm settled over him and he relaxed into it. He stopped walking the floor and sat in a chair next to the phone. When it rang he picked it up but said nothing.

"Khoury?" The first man again, the crude one.

"What do you want?"

"What do I want? What the fuck you think I want?"

He didn't respond.

"Money," the man said after a moment. "We want money."

"How much?"

"You fuckin' sand nigger, where do you get off askin' the questions? You want to tell me that?"

He waited.

"A million dollars. How's that strike you, asshole?"

"That's ridiculous," he said. "Look, I can't talk with you. Have your friend call me, maybe I can talk with him."

"Hey, you raghead fuck, what are you tryin' to—"

This time it was Khoury who broke the connection.

IT seemed to him that it was about control.

Trying to control a situation like this, that was what made you crazy. Because you couldn't do it. They had all the cards.

But if you let go of the need to control it, you could at least quit dancing to their music, shuffling around like a trained bear in a Bulgarian circus.

He went into the kitchen and made himself a cup of thick sweet coffee, preparing it in the long-handled brass pot. While it cooled he got a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured himself two ounces, drank it down in a single swallow, and felt the icy calm taking him over entirely. He carried his coffee into the other room, and he was just finishing it when the phone rang again.

It was the second man, the nice one. "You upset my friend, Mr.

Khoury," he said. "He's difficult to deal with when he's upset."

"I think it would be better if you made the calls from now on."

"I don't see—"

"Because that way we can get this handled instead of getting all hung up in drama," he said. "He mentioned a million dollars. That's out of the question."

"Don't you think she's worth it?"

"She's worth any amount," he said, "but—"

"What does she weigh, Mr. Khoury? One-ten, one-twenty, somewhere in that neighborhood?"

"I don't—"

"Something like fifty kilograms, we might say."

Cute.

"Fifty keys at twenty a key, well, run the numbers for me, why don't you, Mr. Khoury? Comes to a mil, doesn't it?"

"What's the point?"

"The point is you'd pay a million for her if she was product, Mr.

Khoury. You'd pay that if she was powder. Isn't she worth as much in flesh and blood?"

"I can't pay what I don't have."

"You have plenty."

"I don't have a million."

"What do you have?"

He'd had time to think of the answer. "Four hundred."

"Four hundred thousand."

"Yes."

"That's less than half."

"It's four hundred thousand," he said. "It's less than some things and it's more than others. It's what I've got."

"You could get the rest."

"I don't see how. I could probably make some promises and call in some favors and raise a little that way, but not that much. And it would take at least a few days, probably more like a week."

"You assume we're in a hurry?"

"I'm in a hurry," he said. "I want my wife back and I want you out of my life, and I'm in a big hurry as far as those two things are concerned."

"Five hundred thousand."

See? There were elements he could control after all. "No," he said.

"I'm not bargaining, not where my wife's life is concerned. I gave you the top figure right away. Four."

A pause, then a sigh. "Ah, well. Silly of me to think I could get the better of one of your kind in a business deal. You people have been playing this game for years, haven't you? You're as bad as the Jews."

He didn't know how to answer that, so he left it alone.

"Four it is," the man said. "How long will it take you to get it ready?"

Fifteen minutes, he thought. "A couple of hours," he said.

"We can do it tonight."

"All right."

"Get it ready. Don't call anyone."

"Who would I call?"

HALF an hour later he was sitting at the kitchen table looking at four hundred thousand dollars. He had

a safe in the basement, a big old Mosler that weighed over a ton, itself set in the wall and screened by pine paneling and protected by a burglar alarm along with its own lock system. The bills were all hundreds, fifty in each banded stack, eighty stacks each containing five thousand dollars. He'd counted them out and tossed three and four stacks at a time into a woven plastic bushel basket Francine used for laundry.

She didn't have to do the laundry herself, for God's sake. She could hire all the help she needed, he'd told her that often enough. But she liked that, she was old-fashioned, she liked cooking and cleaning and keeping house.

He picked up the phone, held the receiver at arm's length, then dropped it in its cradle. Don't call anyone, the man had said. Who would I call? he'd demanded.

Who had done this to him? Set him up, stolen his wife away from him. Who would do something like that?

Well, maybe a lot of people would. Maybe anybody would, if they thought they could get away with it.

He picked up the phone again. It was clean, untapped. The whole house was free of bugs, as far as that went. He had two devices, both of them supposed to be state of the art, ought to be for what they cost him.

One was a telephone-tap alert, installed in the phone line. Any change in the voltage, resistance, or capacitance anywhere on the line and he'd know it. The other was a TrackLock, automatically scanning the radio spectrum for hidden microphones. Five, six grand he'd paid for the two units, something like that, and it was worth it if it kept his private conversations private.

Almost a shame there hadn't been cops listening the past couple of hours. Cops to trace the caller, come down on the kidnappers, bring Francey back to him—

No, last thing he needed. Cops would just fuck up the whole thing beyond recognition. He had the money. He'd pay it, and he'd either get her back or he wouldn't. Things you can control and things you can't—

he could control paying the money, control how that went to some degree, but he couldn't control what happened afterward.

Don't call anyone.

Who would I call?

He picked up the phone one more time and dialed a number he didn't have to look up. His brother answered on the third ring.

He said, "Petey, I need you out here. Jump in a cab, I'll pay for it, but get out here right away, you hear me?"

A pause. Then, "Babe, I'd do anything for you, you know that—"

"So jump in a cab, man!"

"— but I can't be in anything has to do with your business. I just can't, babe."

"It's not business."

"What is it?"

"It's Francine."

"Jesus, what's the matter? Never mind, you'll tell me when I get out there. You're at home, right?"

"Yeah, I'm at home."

"I'll get a cab. I'll be right out."

WHILE Peter Khoury was looking for a cabdriver willing to take him to his brother's house inBrooklyn , I was watching a group of reporters on ESPN discussing the likelihood of a cap on players' salaries.

It didn't break my heart when the phone rang. It was Mick Ballou, calling from the town ofCastlebar inCountyMayo . The line was clear as a bell; he might have been calling from the back room at Grogan's.

"It's grand here," he said. "If you think the Irish are crazy inNew York you should meet them on their own home ground. Every other storefront's a pub, and no one's out the door before closing hour."

"They close early, don't they?"

"Too bloody early by half. In your hotel, though, they have to serve drink at any hour to any registered guest that wants it. Now that's the mark of a civilized country, don't you think?"

"Absolutely."

"They all smoke, though. They're forever lighting cigarettes and offering the pack around. The French are even worse that way. When I was over there visiting my father's people they were peeved with me for not smoking. I believe Americans are the only people in the world who've had the sense to give it up."

"You'll still find a few smokers in this country, Mick."

"Good luck to them, then, suffering through plane rides and films and all the rules against it in public places." He told a long story about a man and a woman he'd met a few nights before. It was funny and we both laughed, and then he asked about me and I said I was all right. "Are you, then," he said.

"A little restless, maybe. I've had time on my hands lately. And the moon's full."

"Is it," he said. "Here, too."

"What a coincidence."

"But then it's always full overIreland . Good job it's always raining so you don't have to look at it all the time. Matt, I've an idea. Get on a plane and come over here."

"What?"

"I'll bet you've never been toIreland ."

"I've never been out of the country," I said. "Wait a minute, that's not true, I've been toCanada a couple of times andMexico once, but—"

"You've never been toEurope ?"

"No."

"Well, for Jesus' sake, get on a plane and come over. Bring herself if you want"— meaning Elaine— "or come alone, it makes no matter. I talked to Rosenstein and he says I'd best stay out of the country awhile yet. He says he can get it all straightened out but they've got this fucking federal task force and he doesn't want me on American soil until the all clear's sounded. I could be stuck in this fucking pesthole another month or more. What's so funny?"

"I thought you loved the place, and now it's a pesthole."

"Anywhere's a pesthole when you haven't your friends about you.

Come on over, man. What do you say?"

PETER Khoury got to his brother's house just after Kenan had had still another conversation with the gentler of the kidnappers. The man had seemed rather less gentle this time, especially toward the end of the conversation when Khoury tried to demand some evidence that Francine was alive and well. The conversation went something like this: KHOURY: I want to talk to my wife.

KIDNAPPER: That's impossible. She's at a safe house. I'm at a pay phone.

KHOURY: How do I know she's all right?

KIDNAPPER: Because we've had every reason to take good care of her. Look how much she's worth to us.

KHOURY: Jesus, how do I even know you've got her in the first place?

KIDNAPPER: Are you familiar with her breasts?

KHOURY: Huh?

KIDNAPPER: Would you recognize one of them? That would be the simplest way. I'll cut off one of her tits and leave it on your doorstep, and that will put your mind at rest.

KHOURY: Jesus, don't say that. Don't even say that.

KIDNAPPER: Then let's not talk about proof, shall we? We have to trust each other, Mr. Khoury.

Believe me, trust is everything in this business.

That was the whole thing, Kenan told Peter. He had to trust them, and how could he do that? He didn't even know who they were.

"I tried to think who I could call," he said. "You know, people in the business. Someone to stand by me,

back me up. Anybody I can think of, for all I know, they're in on it.

How can I rule anybody out?

Somebody set this up."

"How did they—"

"I don't know. I don't know anything, all I know is she went shopping and she never came back. She went out, took the car, and five hours later the phone rings."

"Five hours?"

"I don't know, something like that. Petey, I don't know what I'm doing here, I got no experience in this shit."

"You do deals all the time, babe."

"A dope deal's completely different. You structure that so everybody's safe, everybody's covered. This case—"

"People get killed in dope deals all the time."

"Yeah, but there's generally a reason. Number one, dealing with people you don't know. That's the killer. It looks good and it turns into a rip-off. Number two, or maybe its number one and a half, dealing with people you think you know but you don't really. And the other thing, whatever number you want to give it, people get in trouble because they try to chisel. They try to do the deal without the money, figure they'll make it good afterward. They get in over their heads, they get away with it, and then one time they don't. You know where that comes from nine times out of ten, it's people who get into their own product and their judgment goes down the toilet."

"Or they do everything right and then six Jamaicans kick the door in and shoot everybody."

"Well, that happens," Kenan said. "It doesn't have to be Jamokes.

What was I reading the other day,

Laotians inSan Francisco . Every week there's some new ethnic group looking to kill you." He shook his head. "The thing is, in a righteous dope deal you can walk away from anything that doesn't look right.

You never have to do the deal. If you've got the money, you can spend it somewhere else. If you've got the product, you can sell it to somebody else. You're only in the deal for as long as it works, and you can back yourself up, build in safeguards along the way, and from the jump you know the people and whether or not you can trust them."

"Whereas here—"

"Whereas here we got nothing. We got our thumb up our ass, that's what we got. I said we'll bring the money and you bring my wife, they said no. They said that's not the way it works. What am I gonna say, keep my wife? Sell her to somebody else, you don't like the way I do business? I can't do that."

"No."

"Except I could. He said a million, I said four hundred thousand. I said fuck you, that's all there is, and he bought it. Suppose I said—"

The phone rang. Kenan talked a few minutes, making notes on a scratch pad. "I'm not coming alone," he said at one point. "I got my brother here, he's coming with me. No arguments." He listened some more and was about to say something else when the phone clicked in his ear.

"We gotta roll," he said. "They want the money in two Hefty bags.

That's easy enough. Why two, I wonder? Maybe they don't know what four hundred large is, how much space it takes up."

"Maybe the doctor told them no heavy lifting."

"Maybe. We're supposed to go to the corner ofOcean Avenue andFarragut Road ."

"That's in Flatbush, isn't it?"

"I think so."

"Sure,Farragut Road , that's a couple of blocks fromBrooklynCollege . What's there?"

"A phone booth." When they had the money divided up and packed in a pair of garbage bags, Kenan handed Peter a gun, a 9-mm automatic. "Take it," he insisted. "We don't want to walk into this unarmed."

"We don't want to walk into it at all. What good's a gun gonna do me?"

"I don't know. Take it anyway."

On the way out the door Peter grabbed his brother's arm. "You forgot to set the alarm," he said.

"So? They got Francey and we're carrying the money. What's left to steal?"

"You got the alarm, you might as well set it. It can't be any less useful than the goddamn guns."

"Yeah, you're right," he said, and ducked into the house. When he emerged he said, "State-of-the-art security system. You can't break into my house, can't tap my phones, can't bug the premises. All you can do is snatch my wife and make me run around the city with trash bags full of hundred-dollar bills."

"What's the best way, babe? I was thinkingBay Ridge Parkway and thenKings Highway to Ocean."

"Yeah, I guess. There's a dozen ways you could go, but that's as good as any. You want to drive, Petey?"

"You want me to?"

"Yeah, why don't you? I'd probably rear-end a cop car, the way I am now. Or run over a nun."

THEY were supposed to be at theFarragut Road pay phone at eight-thirty. They got there three minutes early, according to Peter's watch. He stayed in the car while Kenan went over to the phone and stood there waiting for it to ring. Earlier, Peter had wedged the gun under his belt in the small of his back. He'd been conscious of the pressure of it while he was driving, and now he took it out and held it in his lap.

The phone rang and Kenan answered it. Eight-thirty, Peter's watch said. Were they doing this by the clock or were they eyeballing the whole operation, somebody sitting in a window in one of the buildings across the street, watching it all happen?

Kenan trotted back to the car, leaned against it. "Veterans Avenue," he said.

"Never heard of it."

"It's somewhere between Flatlands andMillBasin , that area. He gave me directions, Farragut to Flatbush and Flatbush to Avenue N and that runs you right intoVeterans Avenue ."

"And then what happens?"

"Another pay phone at the corner of Veterans andEast Sixty-sixth Street ."

"Why the running around, do you have any idea?"

"Make us crazy. Make sure we don't have a backup. I don't know, Petey. Maybe they're just trying to break our balls."

"It's working." Kenan went around to the passenger side, got in.

Peter said, "Farragut to Flatbush, Flatbush to N. That'd be a right on Flatbush and then I guess a left turn on N?"

"Right. I mean yes, right on Flatbush and left on N."

"How much time have we got?"

"They didn't say. I don't think they said a time. They said to hurry."

"I guess we won't stop for coffee."

"No," Kenan said. "I guess not."

* * *

THE drill was the same at the corner of Veterans and Sixty-sixth.

Peter waited in the car. Kenan went to the phone, and it rang almost immediately.

The kidnapper said, "Very good. That didn't take long."

"Now what?"

"Where's the money?"

"In the backseat. In two Hefty bags, just like you said."

"Good. Now I want you and your brother to walk upSixty-sixth Street to Avenue M."

"You want us to walk there?"

"Yes."

"With the money?"

"No, leave the money right where it is."

"In the backseat of the car."

"Yes. And leave the car unlocked."

"We leave the money in an unlocked car and walk a block—"

"Two blocks, actually."

"And then what?"

"Wait on the corner of Avenue M for five minutes. Then get in your car and go home."

"What about my wife?"

"Your wife is fine."

"How do I—"

"She'll be in the car waiting for you."

"She better be."

"What was that?"

"Nothing. Look, there's one thing bothers me, that's leaving the money unattended in an unlocked car.

What I'm worried, somebody grabbing it before you get to it."

"Not to worry," the man said. "This is a good neighborhood."

THEY left the car unlocked, left the money in it, walked one short block and one long block to Avenue M. They waited five minutes by Peter's watch. Then they headed back toward the Buick.

I don't think I ever described them, did I? They looked like brothers, Kenan and Peter. Kenan stood five-ten, which made him a scant inch taller than his brother. They were both built like rangy middleweights, although Peter was beginning to thicken just the least bit at the waist. Both had olive skin tones and straight dark hair, parted on the left and combed back neatly. At thirty-three, Kenan was starting to develop a slightly higher forehead as his hairline receded. Peter, two years older, still had all his hair.

They were handsome men, with long straight noses and dark eyes set deep under prominent brows.

Peter had a mustache, neatly trimmed. Kenan was cleanshaven.

If you were going by appearances, and if you were up against the two of them, you would take Kenan out first. Or try to, anyway. There was something about him that suggested he was the more dangerous of the two, that his responses would be more sudden and more certain.

That's how they looked, then, walking rapidly but not too rapidly back to the corner where Kenan's car was parked. It was still there, and still unlocked. The bags of money were no longer in the backseat.

Francine Khoury wasn't there, either.

Kenan said, "Fuck this shit, man."

"The trunk?"

He opened the glove box, triggered the trunk release. He went around and lifted the lid. There was nothing in the trunk but the spare tire and the jack. He had just closed the trunk lid when the pay phone rang a dozen yards away.

He ran to it, grabbed it.

"Go home," the man said. "She'll probably get there before you do."

* * *

I WENT to my usual evening meeting around the corner from my hotel atSt. Paul the Apostle, but I left on the break. I returned to my room and called Elaine and told her about the conversation with Mick.

"I think you should go," she said. "I think that's a great idea."

"Suppose we both go."

"Oh, I don't know, Matt. It would mean missing classes."

She was taking a course Thursday evenings at Hunter, in fact she'd just got back from it when I called.

"Indian Art and Architecture Under the Moghuls." "We'd just go for a week or ten days," I said. "You'd miss one class."

"One class isn't such a big deal."

"Exactly, so—"

"So I guess what it comes down to is I don't really want to go. I'd be a fifth wheel, wouldn't I? I have this picture in my mind of you and Mick rocketing around the countryside and teaching the Irish how to raise hell."

"That's some picture."

"But what I mean is it'd be a sort of boy's night out, wouldn't it, and who needs a girl along? Seriously, I don't particularly want to go, and I know you're restless and I think it would do you a world of good.

You've never been anywhere inEurope ?"

"Never."

"How long has Mick been gone? A month?"

"Just about."

"I think you should go."

"Maybe," I said. "I'll think about it."

SHE wasn't there.

Nowhere in the house. Kenan went compulsively from room to room, knowing it was senseless, knowing she couldn't have gotten past the alarm system without either setting it off or disarming it. When he ran out of rooms he went back to the kitchen, where Peter was making coffee.

He said, "Petey, this really sucks."

"I know it, babe."

"You're making coffee? I don't think I want any. Bother you if I have a drink?"

"Bother me if I have a drink. Not if you do."

"I just thought— never mind. I don't even want one."

"That's where we differ, babe."

"Yeah, I guess." He spun around. "Why the fuck are they jerking me around like this, Petey? They say she's gonna be in the car and then she's not. They say she'll be here and she isn't. What the fuck's going on?"

"Maybe they got stuck in traffic."

"Man, what happens now? We fucking sit here and wait? I don't even know what we're waiting for.

They got the money and we got what? Fucked is what we got. I don't know who they are or where they are. I don't know zip, and—

Petey, what do we do?"

"I don't know."

"I think she's dead," he said.

Peter was silent.

"Because why wouldn't they, the fucks? She could identify them.

Safer to kill her than to give her back.

Kill her, bury her, and that's the end of it. Case closed. That's what I would do, I was them."

"No you wouldn't."

"I said if I was them. I'm not, I wouldn't kidnap some woman in the first place, innocent gentle lady who never did anybody any harm, never had an unkind thought—"

"Easy, babe."

They would fall silent and then the conversation would begin again, because what else was there to do?

After half an hour of this the phone rang and Kenan jumped for it.

"Mr. Khoury."

"Where is she?"

"My apologies. There was a slight change in plans."

"Where is she?"

"Just around the corner from you, oh, uh,Seventy-ninth Street , I believe it's the south side of the street, three or four houses from the corner—"

"What?"

"There's a car parked illegally at a fire hydrant. A gray Ford Tempo. Your wife is in it."

"She's in the car?"

"In the trunk."

"You put her in the trunk?"

"There's plenty of air. But it's cold out tonight so you'll want to get her out of there as soon as possible."

"Is there a key? How do I—"

"The lock's broken. You won't need a key."

Running down the street and around the corner, he said to Peter,

"What did he mean, the lock's broken?

If the trunk's not locked why can't she just crawl out? What's he talking about?"

"I don't know, babe."

"Maybe she's tied up. Tape, handcuffs, something so she can't move."

"Maybe."

"Oh, Jesus, Pete—"

The car was where it was supposed to be, a battered Tempo several years old, its windshield starred

and the passenger door deeply dented. The trunk lock was missing altogether. Kenan flung the lid open.

No one in there. Just packages, bundles of some sort. Bundles of various sizes wrapped in black plastic and secured with freezer tape.

"No," Kenan said.

He stood there, saying "No, no, no." After a moment Peter took one of the parcels from the trunk, got a jackknife from his pocket, and cut away the tape. He unwound the length of black plastic— it was not unlike the Hefty bags in which the money had been delivered— and drew out a human foot, severed a couple of inches above the ankle.

Three toenails showed circles of red polish. The other two toes were missing.

Kenan put his head back and howled like a dog.

Chapter 2

That was Thursday. Monday I got back from lunch and there was a message for me at the desk. Call Peter Curry, it said, and there was a number and the 718 area code, which meant Brooklyn orQueens . I didn't think I knew a Peter Curry in Brooklyn orQueens , or anywhere else for that matter, but it's not unheard-of for me to get calls from people I don't know. I went up to my room and called the number on the slip, and when a man answered I said, "Mr. Curry?"

"Yes?"

"My name's Matthew Scudder, I got a message to call you."

"You got a message to call me?"

"That's right. It says here you called at twelve-fifteen."

"What was the name again?" I gave it to him again, and he said,

"Oh, wait a minute, you're the detective, right? My brother called you, my brother Peter."

"It says Peter Curry."

"Hold on."

I held on, and after a moment another voice, close to the first but a note deeper, a little bit softer, said,

"Matt, this is Pete."

"Pete," I said. "Do I know you, Pete?"

"Yeah, we know each other, but you wouldn't necessarily know my name. I'm pretty regular atSt. Paul

's, I led a meeting there, oh, five or six weeks ago."

"Peter Curry," I said.

"It's Khoury," he said. "I'm of Lebanese descent, lemme see how to describe myself. I'm sober about a year and a half, I'm in a rooming house way west on Fifty-fifth Street, I've been working as a messenger and delivery boy but my field is film editing, only I don't know if I'll be able to get back into it—"

"Lotof drugs in your story."

"That's right, but it was alcohol really stuck it to me at the end.

You've got me placed?"

"Uh-huh. I was there the night you spoke. I just never knew your last name."

"Well, that's the program for you."

"What can I do for you, Pete?"

"I'd like it if you could come out and talk with me and my brother.

You're a detective and I think that's what we need."

"Could you give me some idea what it's about?"

"Well—"

"Not over the phone?"

"Probably better not to, Matt. It's detective work and it's important, and we'll pay whatever you say."

"Well," I said, "I don't know that I'm open to work right now, Pete.

As a matter of fact I've got a trip planned, I'll be going overseas the end of the week."

"Whereabouts?"

"Ireland."

"That sounds great," he said. "But look, Matt, couldn't you just come out here and let us lay it out for you? You listen, and if you decide you can't do anything for us, no hard feelings and we'll pay for your time and your cab out and back." In the background the brother said something I couldn't make out, and Pete said, "I'll tell him. Matt, Kenan says we could drive in and pick you up, but we'd have to come back here and I think it's quicker if you just jump in a taxi."

It struck me I was hearing a lot about cabs from somebody who was working as a messenger and delivery boy, and then his brother's name rang a bell. I said, "You have more than one brother, Pete?"

"Just the one."

"I think you mentioned him in your qualification, something about his occupation."

A pause. Then, "Matt, I'm just asking you to come out and listen."

"Where are you?"

"Do you knowBrooklyn ?"

"I'd have to be dead."

"How's that?"

"Nothing, I was just thinking out loud. A famous short story, 'Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.' I used to know parts of the borough reasonably well. Where are you inBrooklyn ?"

"Bay Ridge.Colonial Road ."

"That's easy."

He gave me the address and I wrote it down.

THE R train, also known as the Broadway local of the BMT, runs all the way from179th Street inJamaica to within a few blocks of theVerrazanoBridge at the southwest corner ofBrooklyn . I caught it at Fifty-seventh and Seventh and got off two stops from the end of the line.

There are those who hold that once you leaveManhattan you're out of the city. They're wrong, you're just in another part of the city, but there's no question that the difference is palpable. You could spot it with your eyes closed. The energy level is different, the air doesn't hum with the same urgent intensity.

I walked a block onFourth Avenue , past a Chinese restaurant and a Korean greengrocer and an OTB

parlor and a couple of Irish bars, then cut over toColonial Road and found Kenan Khoury's house. It was one of a group of detached single-family homes, solid square structures that looked to have been built sometime between the wars. A tiny lawn, a half-flight of wooden steps leading to the front entrance.

I climbed them and rang the bell.

Pete let me in and led me into the kitchen. He introduced me to his brother, who stood to shake hands, then motioned for me to take a chair.

He stayed on his feet, walked over to the stove, then turned to look at me."Appreciate your coming," he said. "You mind a couple of questions, Mr. Scudder? Before we get started?"

"Not at all."

"Something to drink first? Not a drink drink, I know you know Petey from AA, but there's coffee made or I can offer you a soft drink.

The coffee's Lebanese style, which is the same general idea as Turkish coffee or Armenian coffee, very thick and strong. Or there's a jar of instant Yuban if you'd rather have that."

"The Lebanese coffee sounds good."

It tasted good, too. I took a sip and he said, "You're a detective, is that right?"

"Unlicensed."

"What's that mean?"

"That I have no official standing. I do per diem work for one of the big agencies occasionally, and on those occasions I'm operating on their license, but otherwise what I do is private and unofficial."

"And you used to be a cop."

"That's right. Some years ago."

"Uh-huh. Uniform or plainclothes or what?"

"I was a detective."

"Had a gold shield, huh?"

"That's right. I was attached to the Sixth Precinct in the Village for several years, and before I was stationed for a little while inBrooklyn .

That was the Seventy-eighth Precinct, that's Park Slope and just north of it, the area they're calling Boerum Hill."

"Yeah, I know where it is. I grew up in the Seventy-eighth Precinct. You knowBergen Street ? Between Bond and Nevins?"

"Sure."

"That's where we grew up, me and Petey. You'll find a lot of people from the Middle East in that neighborhood, within a few blocks of Court andAtlantic . Lebanese, Syrians, Yemenites, Palestinians.

My wife was Palestinian, her folks lived onPresident Street just off Henry. That's South Brooklyn, but I guess they're calling itCarrollGardens now. That coffee all right?"

"It's fine."

"You want more, just speak up." He started to say something else, then turned to face his brother. "I don't know, man," he said. "I don't think this is going to work out."

"Tell him the situation, babe."

"I just don't know." He turned to me, spun a chair around, sat down straddling it. "Here's the deal, Matt.

Okay to call you that?" I said it was. "Here's the deal. What I need to know is whether I can tell you something without worrying who you're gonna tell it to. I guess what I'm asking is to what extent you're still a cop."

It was a good question, and I'd often pondered it myself. I said, "I was a policeman for a lot of years.

I've been a little less of one every year since I left the job. What you're asking is if what you tell me will stay confidential. Legally, I don't have the status of attorney. What you tell me isn't privileged information.

At the same time, I'm not an officer of the court, either, so I'm no more obliged than any other private citizen to report matters that come to my attention."

"What's the bottom line?"

"I don't know what the bottom line is. It seems to move around a lot. I can't offer you a lot in the way of reassurance, because I don't know what it is you're thinking about telling me. I came all the way out here because Pete didn't want to say anything over the phone, and now you don't seem to want to say anything here, either. Maybe I should go home."

"Maybe you should," he said.

"Babe—"

"No," he said, getting to his feet. "It was a good idea, man, but it's not working out. We'll find 'em ourselves." He took a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a hundred, extending it across the table to me.

"For your cabs out and back and for your time, Mr. Scudder. I'm sorry we dragged you all the way out here for nothing." When I didn't take the bill he said, "Maybe your time's worth more than I figured. Here, and no hard feelings, huh?" He added a second bill to the first and I still didn't reach for it.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. "You don't owe me anything," I said. "I don't know what my time's worth. Let's call it an even-up trade for the coffee."

"Take the money. For Christ's sake, the cab had to be twenty-five each way."

"I took the subway."

He stared at me. "You came out here on the subway? Didn't my brother tell you to take a cab? What do you want to save nickels and dimes for, especially when I'm paying for it?"

"Put your money away," I said. "I took the subway because it's simpler and faster. How I get from one place to another is my business, Mr. Khoury, and I run my business the way I want. You don't tell me how to get around town and I won't tell you how to sell crack to schoolchildren, how does that strike you?"

"Jesus," he said.

To Pete I said, "I'm sorry we wasted each other's time. Thanks for thinking of me." He asked me if I wanted to ride back to the city, or at least a lift to the subway stop. "No," I said, "I think I'd like to walk around Bay Ridge a little. I haven't been out here in years. I had a case that brought me to within a few blocks of here, right onColonial Road but a little ways to the north. Right across from the park.

Owl'sHeadPark , I think it is."

"That's eight, ten blocks from here," Kenan Khoury said.

"That sounds right. The guy who hired me was charged with killing his wife, and the work I did for him helped get the charges dropped."

"And he was innocent?"

"No, he killed her," I said, remembering the whole thing. "I didn't know that. I found out after."

"When there was nothing you could do."

"Sure there was," I said. "Tommy Tillary, that was his name. I forget his wife's name, but his girlfriend was Carolyn Cheatham. When she died, he wound up going away for it."

"He killed her, too?"

"No, she killed herself. I fixed it so it looked like murder, and I fixed it so he would go away for it. I got him out of one scrape that he didn't deserve to get out of, so it seemed fitting to get him into another one."

"How much time did he do?"

"As much as he could. He died in prison. Somebody stuck a knife in him." I sighed. "I thought I'd go walk past his house, see if it brought back any memories, but they seem to have come back all by themselves."

"It bother you?"

"Remembering, you mean? Not particularly. I can think of a lot of things I've done that bother me more."

I looked around for my coat, then remembered I hadn't worn one.

It was spring outside, sport jacket weather, although it would be going down into the forties in the evening.

I started for the door and he said, "Hold it a minute, will you, Mr.

Scudder?"

I looked at him.

"I was out of line," he said. "I apologize."

"You don't have to apologize."

"Yes I do. I flew off the handle. This is nothing. Earlier today I broke a phone, I got a busy signal and I flew into a rage and smashed the receiver against the wall until the housing splintered." He shook his head. "I never get like that. I've been under a strain."

"There's a lot of that going around."

"Yeah, I suppose there is. The other day some guys kidnapped my wife, cut her up in little pieces wrapped in plastic and sent her back to me in the trunk of a car. Maybe that's the same strain everybody else is under. I wouldn't know."

Pete said, "Easy, babe—"

"No, I'm all right," Kenan said. "Matt, sit down a minute. Let me just run the whole thing down for you, top to bottom, and then you decide if you want to walk or not. Forget what I said before. I'm not worried, who you're gonna tell or not tell. I just don't want to say it out loud 'cause it makes it all real, but it's real already, isn't it?"

HE took me through it, giving me the story essentially as I recounted it earlier. There were some details I supplied that came out later in my own investigation, but the Khoury brothers had already unearthed a certain amount of data on their own. Friday they found the Toyota Camry where she'd parked it onAtlantic Avenue , and that had led them to The Arabian Gourmet, while the bags of groceries in the trunk had let them know about her stop at D'Agostino's.

When he was done telling it I declined the offer of another cup of coffee and accepted a glass of club soda. I said, "I have some questions."

"Go ahead."

"What did you do with the body?"

The brothers exchanged glances, and Pete gestured for Kenan to go ahead. He took a breath and said,

"I have this cousin, he's a veterinarian, has an animal hospital on—

well, it doesn't matter where it is, it's in the old neighborhood. I called him and told him I needed private access to his place of business."

"When was this?"

"This was Friday afternoon that I called him and Friday night that I got the key from him and we went over there. He has a unit, I guess you would call it an oven, that he uses for cremating people's pets that he puts to sleep. We took the, uh, we took the—"

"Easy, babe."

He shook his head, impatient. "I'm all right, I just don't know how to say it. What do you call it? We took the pieces of, of Francine, and we cremated her."

"You unwrapped all of the, uh—"

"No, what for? The tape and plastic burned along with everything else."

"But you're sure it was her."

"Yeah. Yeah, we unwrapped enough to, uh, to be sure."

"I have to ask all this."

"I understand."

"The point is there's no corpse left, is that correct?"

He nodded. "Just ashes. Ashes and bone chips, is what it amounts to. You think cremation and you think you'll wind up with nothing but powdery ash, like what comes out of a furnace, but that's not how it works. There's an auxiliary unit he's got for pulverizing the bone segments so it's less obvious what you've got." He raised his eyes to meet mine. "When I was in high school I worked afternoons at Lou's place. I wasn't going to mention his name. Fuck it, what difference does it make? My father wanted me to become a doctor, he thought this would be good training. I don't know if it was or not, but I was familiar with the place, the equipment."

"Does your cousin know why you wanted to use his place?"

"People know what they want to know. He couldn't have figured I wanted to slip in there at night and give myself a rabies shot. We were there all night. The unit he has is pet size, we had to do several loads and let the unit cool down in between. Jesus, it's killing me to talk about it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault. Did Lou know I used the cooker? I figure he had to know. He has to have a pretty good idea what kind of business I'm in. He probably figures I killed a competitor and wanted to get rid of the evidence. People see all this shit on television and they think that's how the world works."

"And he didn't object?"

"He's family. He knew it was urgent and he knew it wasn't something we should talk about. And I gave him some money. He didn't want to take it, but the guy's got two kids in college so how can he not take it? It wasn't that much."

"How much?"

"Two grand. That's pretty low-budget for a funeral, isn't it? I mean you can spend more than that on a casket." He shook his head. "I got the ashes in a tin can in the safe downstairs. I don't know what to do with them. No idea what she would have wanted. We never discussed it.

Jesus, she was twenty-four years old. Nine years younger than me, nine years less a month. We were married two years."

"No children."

"No. We were gonna wait one more year and then— oh, Jesus, this is terrible. It bother you if I have a drink?"

"No."

"Petey says the same. Fuck it, I'm not having one. I had one pop Thursday afternoon after I talked on the phone with them and I haven't had anything since. I get the urge and I just push it away. You know why?"

"Why?"

"Because I want to feel this. You think I did the wrong thing?

Taking her to Lou's place, cremating her.

You think that was wrong?"

"I think it was unlawful."

"Yeah, well, I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it."

"I know you weren't. You were just trying to do what was decent.

But in the process you destroyed evidence. Dead bodies hold a great deal of information for someone who knows what to look for. When you reduce a body to ashes and bone chips, all that information is lost."

"Does it matter?"

"It might be helpful to know how she died."

"I don't care how. All I want to know is who."

"One might lead to the other."

"So you think I did the wrong thing. Jesus, I couldn't call the cops, hand them a sack full of cuts of meat, say, 'This is my wife, take good care of her.' I never call the cops, I'm in a business where you don't, but if I had opened the trunk of the Tempo and she was there in one piece, dead but intact, maybe, maybe, I'd have reported it. But this way—"

"I understand."

"But you think I did the wrong thing."

"You did what you had to do," Peter said.

Isn't that what everybody always does? I said, "I don't know a lot about right and wrong. I probably would have done the same thing, if I'd had a cousin with a crematorium in his back room. But what I would have done is beside the point. You did what you did. The question is, where do you go from here?"

"Where?"

"That's the question."

IT wasn't the only question. I asked a great many questions, and I asked most of them more than once. I took them both back and forth over their story, and I wrote down a lot of notes in my notebook. It began to look as though the segmented remains of Francine Khoury constituted the only piece of tangible evidence in the entire affair, and they had gone up in smoke.

When I finally closed my notebook the two Khoury brothers sat waiting for a word from me. "On the face of it," I said, "they look pretty safe. They made their play and carried it off without giving you a clue who they are. If they left tracks anywhere, they haven't shown up yet. It's possible someone at the supermarket or the place onAtlantic Avenue recognized one of them or caught a license number, and it's worth an intensive investigation to try to turn up such a witness, but he's no more than hypothetical at this point. The odds are that there won't be a witness, or that what he saw won't lead anywhere."

"You're saying we got no chance."

"No," I said. "That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying an investigation has to do something besides work with the clues they left behind. One starting point lies in the fact that they got away with almost half a million dollars. There's two things they could do, and either one could spotlight them."

Kenan thought about it. "Spend it's one of them," he said. "What's the other?"

"Talk about it. Crooks talk all the time, especially when they've got something to brag about, and sometimes they talk to people who'll happily sell them out. The trick is to get the word out so those people know who the buyer is."

"You've got an idea how to do that?"

"I've got a lot of ideas," I admitted. "Earlier you wanted to know to what extent I was still a cop. I don't know, but I still approach this kind of problem the way I did when I carried a badge, turning it this way and that until I can get some kind of grip on it. In a case like this one I can immediately see several different lines of investigation to pursue.

There's every chance in the world that none of them will lead anywhere, but they're still the approaches that ought to be tried."

"So you want to give it a shot?"

I looked down at my notebook. I said, "Well, I have two problems.

The first one I think I mentioned to

Pete on the phone. I'm supposed to go to Ireland the end of the week."

"On business?"

"Pleasure. I just made the arrangements this morning."

"You could cancel."

"I could."

"You lose any money canceling, your fee from me'd make that up to you. What's the other problem?"

"The other problem's what use you'll make of whatever I might turn up."

"Well, you know the answer to that."

I nodded. "That's the problem."

"Because you can't make a case against them, prosecute them for kidnapping and homicide. There's no evidence of any crime committed, there's just a woman who disappeared."

"That's right."

"So you must know what I want, what the point of all this is. You want me to say it?"

"You might as well."

"I want those fuckers dead. I want to be there, I want to do it, I want to see them die." He said this calmly, levelly, in a voice with no emotion in it. "That's what I want," he said. "Right now I want it so bad I don't want anything else. I can't imagine ever wanting anything else.

That about what you figured?"

"Just about."

"People who'd do something like this, take an innocent woman and turn her into cutlets, does it bother you what happens to them?"

I thought about it, but not for very long. "No," I said.

"We'll do what has to be done, me and my brother. You won't have a part of that."

"In other words I'd just be sentencing them to death."

He shook his head. "They sentenced themselves," he said. "By what they did. You're just helping play out the hand. What do you say?"

I hesitated.

He said, "You've got another problem, don't you? My profession."

"It's a factor," I said.

"That line about selling crack to schoolchildren. I don't, uh, set up shop in the schoolyard."

"I didn't figure you did."

"Properly speaking, I'm not a dealer. I'm what they call a trafficker.

You understand the distinction?"

"Sure," I said. "You're the big fish that manages to stay out of the nets."

He laughed. "I don't know that I'm big particularly. In certain respects the middle-level distributors are the biggest, do the most volume. I deal in weight, meaning I either bring product in in quantity or I buy it from the person who brings it in and turn it over to someone who sells smaller amounts. My customer probably does more business than I do because he's buying and selling all the time, where I may only do two or three deals a year."

"But you make out all right."

"I make out. It's hazardous, you've got the law to worry about and you've got people looking to rip you off. Where the risks are high the rewards are generally high also. And the business is there. People want the product."

"By product you mean cocaine."

"Actually I don't do much with coke. Most of my business is heroin. Some hash, but mostly heroin the past couple of years. Look, I'll tell you right out, I'm not gonna apologize for it. People take it, they get hooked, they rob their mother's purse, they break into houses, they OD

and die with needles in their arms, they share needles and get AIDS. I know the whole story. There's people who make guns, people who distill liquor, people who grow tobacco. How many people a year die of liquor and tobacco compared to the number die from drugs?"

"Alcohol and tobacco are legal."

"What difference does that make?"

"It makes some kind of difference. I'm not sure how much."

"Maybe. I don't see it myself. Either case, the product is dirty. It kills people, or it's the substance they use to kill themselves or each other. One thing in my favor, I don't advertise what I sell, I don't have lobbyists in Congress, I don't hire PR people to tell the public the shit I sell is good for them. The day people stop wanting drugs is the day I find something else to buy and sell, and I won't whine about it and look for the government to give me a federal subsidy, either."

Peter said, "It's still not lollipops you're selling, babe."

"No, it's not. The product's dirty. I never said it wasn't. But what I do I do clean. I don't screw people, I don't kill people, I deal fair and I'm careful who I deal with. That's why I'm alive and that's why I'm not in jail."

"Have you ever been?"

"No. I've never been arrested. So if that's a consideration, how it would look, you working for a known dope dealer—"

"That's not a consideration."

"Well, from an official standpoint, I'm not a known dealer. I won't say there's nobody in the Narcotics Squad or the DEA who knows who I am, but I don't have a record. I've never to my knowledge been the official subject of an investigation. My house isn't bugged and my phone's not tapped. I'd know if it was, I told you about that."

"Yes."

"Sit still a minute, I want to show you something." He went into another room and came back with a picture, a five-by-seven color shot in a silver frame. "That's at our wedding," he said. "That's two years ago, not quite two years, be two years in May."

He was in a tuxedo and she was all in white. He was smiling hugely, while she was not smiling, as I think I mentioned earlier. She was beaming, though, and you could see that she was radiant with happiness.

I didn't know what to say.

"I don't know what they did to her," he said. "That's one of the things I won't let myself think about. But they killed her and they butchered her, they made some kind of dirty joke out of her, and I have to do something about it because I'll die if I don't. I'd do it all myself if I could. In fact we tried, me and Petey, but we don't know what to do, we don't have the knowledge, we don't know the moves. The questions you asked before, the approach you took, if nothing else it showed me that this is an area where I don't know what I'm doing. So I want your help and I can pay you whatever I have to, money's not a problem, I've got plenty of money and I'll spend whatever I have to. And if you say no I'll either find someone else or try to do it myself because what the hell else am I gonna do?" He reached across the table and took the picture away from me and looked at it. "Jesus, what a perfect day that was," he said,

"and all the days since, and then it all turned to shit." He looked at me.

He said, "Yes, I'm a trafficker, a dope dealer, whatever you want to call it, and yes, it's my intention to kill these fucks. So that's all out on the table.

What do you say? Are you in or out?"

My best friend, the man I'd planned to join in Ireland, was a career criminal. According to legend, he had one night walked the streets of Hell's Kitchen carrying a bowler's bag from which he displayed the severed head of an enemy. I couldn't swear it happened, but more recently I'd been at his side in a cellar in Maspeth when he severed a man's hand with one blow of a cleaver. I'd had a gun in my hand that night, and I'd used it.

So if I was still very much a cop in some respects, in other ways I had undergone considerable change.

I'd long since swallowed the camel; why strain at the gnat?

"I'm in," I said.

Chapter 3

I got back to my hotel a little after nine. I'd had a long session with Kenan Khoury, filling pages of my notebook with names of friends and associates and family members. I'd gone to the garage to inspect the Toyota, and found the Beethoven cassette still in the tape deck. If there were any other clues in Francine's car, I couldn't spot them.

The other car, the gray Tempo used to deliver her segmented remains, was not available for inspection.

The kidnappers had parked it illegally, and sometime in the course of the weekend a tow truck from Traffic had showed up to haul it away.

I could have attempted to track it down, but what was the point?

It had surely been stolen for the occasion, and had probably been previously abandoned, given the condition of it. A police lab crew might have turned up something in the trunk or interior, stains or fibers or markings of some sort, that would point out a profitable line of investigation. But I didn't have the resources for that kind of inspection.

I'd be running all over Brooklyn to look at a car that wouldn't tell me a thing.

In the Buick the three of us traced a long, circuitous course, past the D'Agostino's and the Arabian market on Atlantic Avenue, then south to the first pay phone at Ocean and Farragut, then south on Flatbush and east on N to the second booth on Veterans Avenue. I didn't really have to see these sights, there's not a tremendous amount of information you can glean by staring at a public telephone, but I've always found it worthwhile to put in time on the scene, to walk the pavements and climb the stairs and see it all firsthand. It helps make it real.

It also gave me a way to take the Khourys through it again. In a police investigation, witnesses almost always complain about having to relate the same story over and over to a host of different people. It seems pointless to them, but there's a point to it. If you tell it enough times to enough different people, maybe you'll come up with something you've previously left out, or maybe one person will hear something that sailed past everybody else.

Somewhere in the course of things we stopped at the Apollo, a coffee shop on Flatbush. We all ordered the souv-laki. It was good, but Kenan hardly touched his. In the car afterward he said, "I should have ordered eggs or something. Ever since the other night I got no taste for meat. I can't eat it, it turns my stomach. I'm sure I'll get over it, but for the time being I've got to remember to order something else. It makes no sense, ordering something and then you can't bring yourself to eat it."

PETER drove me home in the Camry. He was staying at Colonial Road, he'd been there since the kidnapping, sleeping on the couch in the living room, and he needed to stop by his room to pick up clothes.

Otherwise I'd have called a livery service and taken a taxi. I'm comfortable enough on the subway, I rarely feel unsafe on it, but it seemed a false economy to stint on cab fare with ten thousand dollars in my pocket. I'd have felt pretty silly if I ran into a mugger.

That was my retainer, two banded stacks of hundreds with fifty bills in each, two packets of bills indistinguishable from the eighty packets paid to ransom Francine Khoury. I've always had trouble putting a price on my services, but in this case I'd been spared the decision.

Kenan had dropped the two stacks on the table and asked if that was enough to start with. I told him it was on the high side.

"I can afford it," he said. "I've got plenty of money. They didn't tap me out, they didn't come close."

"Could you have paid the million?"

"Not without leaving the country. I've got an account in the Caymans with half a mil in it. I had just under seven hundred large in the safe here. Actually I probably could have raised the other three here in town, if I made a few phone calls. I wonder."

"What?"

"Oh, crazy thinking. Like suppose I paid the mil, would they have returned her alive? Suppose I never pressed on the phone, suppose I was polite, kissed their asses and all."

"They'd have killed her anyway."

"That's what I tell myself, but how do I know? I can't keep myself from wondering if there was something I could have done. Suppose I played hardball all the way, not a penny paid unless they showed me proof she was alive."

"She was probably already dead when they called you."

"I pray you're right," he said, "but I don't know. I keep thinking there must have been some way I could have saved her. I keep figuring it was my fault."

* * *

WE took expressways back to Manhattan, the Shore Parkway and the Gowanus into the tunnel. Traffic was light at that hour but Pete took it slow, rarely pushing the Camry past forty miles an hour. We didn't talk much at first, and the silences tended to stretch.

"It's been some couple of days," he said finally. I asked him how he was holding up. "Oh, I'm all right,"

he said.

"Have you been getting to meetings?"

"I'm pretty regular." After a moment he said, "I haven't had a chance to get to a meeting since this shit started. I've been, you know, pretty busy."

"You're no good to your brother unless you stay sober."

"I know that."

"There are meetings in Bay Ridge. You wouldn't have to come into the city."

"I know. I was gonna go to one last night, but I didn't get to it." His fingers drummed the steering wheel.

"I thought maybe we'd get back in time to get over to St. Paul's tonight, but we missed it. It's gonna be way past nine by the time we get there."

"There's a ten o'clock meeting on Houston Street."

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "By the time I get to my room, pick up what I need—"

"If you miss the ten there's a midnight meeting. Same place, Houston between Sixth and Varick."

"I know where it is."

Something in his tone did not invite further suggestion. After a moment he said, "I know I shouldn't let my meetings slide. I'll try to make the ten o'clock. The midnight, I don't know about that. I don't want to leave Kenan alone for that long."

"Maybe you'll catch a Brooklyn meeting tomorrow during the day."

"Maybe."

"What about your job? You're letting that slide?"

"For the time being. I called in sick Friday and today, but if they wind up letting me go it's no big deal.

Job like that's not hard to come by."

"What is it, messenger work?"

"Delivering lunches, actually. For the deli on Fifty-seventh and Ninth."

"It must be hard, working a get-well job like that while your brother's raking it in."

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I have to keep all that separate, you know? Kenan wanted me to work for him, with him, whatever you want to call it. I can't be in that business and stay sober.

It's not that you're around drugs all the time, because actually you're not, there's not that much physical contact with the product. It's the whole attitude, the mind-set, you know what I mean?"

"Sure."

"You were right, what you said about meetings. I've been wanting to drink ever since I found out about Francey. I mean about her being kidnapped, before they did what they did. I haven't come close or anything but it's hard keeping the thought out of my mind. I push it away and it comes right back."

"Have you been in touch with your sponsor?"

"I don't exactly have one. They gave me an interim sponsor when I first got sober, and I called him fairly regularly at first but we more or less drifted apart. He's hard to get on the phone, anyway. I should find a regular sponsor, but for some reason I never got around to it."

"One of these days—"

"I know. Do you have a sponsor?"

I nodded. "We got together just last night. We generally have dinner Sunday, go over the week together."

"Does he give you advice?"

"Sometimes," I said. "And then I go ahead and do what I want."

WHEN I got back to my hotel room, the first call I made was to Jim Faber. "I was just talking about you," I told him. "A fellow asked if my sponsor gives advice, and I told him how I always do exactly what you suggest."

"You're lucky God didn't strike you dead on the spot."

"I know. But I've decided not to go to Ireland."

"Oh? You seemed determined last night. Did it look different to you after a night's sleep?"

"No," I admitted. "It looked about the same, and this morning I went to a travel agent and managed to get a cheap seat on a flight leaving Friday evening."

"Oh?"

"And then this afternoon somebody offered me a job and I said yes. You want to go to Ireland for three weeks? I don't think I can get my money back for the ticket."

"Are you sure? It's a shame to lose the money."

"Well, they told me it was nonrefundable, and I already paid for it.

It's all right, I'm making enough on the job so that I can write off a couple hundred. But I did want to let you know that I wasn't on my way to the land of Sodom and Begorrah."

"It sounded like you were setting yourself up," he said. "That's why I was concerned. You've managed to hang out with your friend in his saloon and still stay sober—"

"He does the drinking for both of us."

"Well, one way or another it seems to work. But on the other side of the ocean with your usual support system thousands of miles away, and with you restless to begin with—"

"I know. But you can rest easy now."

"Even if I can't take the credit."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Maybe it's your doing. God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to

perform."

"Yeah," he said. "Doesn't He just."

ELAINE thought it was too bad I wouldn't be going to Ireland after all. "I don't suppose there was any possibility of postponing the job," she said.

"No."

"Or that you'll be done by Friday."

"I'll barely be started by Friday."

"It's too bad, but you don't sound disappointed."

"I guess I'm not. At least I didn't call Mick, so that saves having to call again and tell him I changed my mind. To tell you the truth, I'm glad I've got the work."

"Something to sink your teeth into."

"That's right. That's what I really need, more than I need a vacation."

"And it's a good case?"

I hadn't told her anything about it. I thought for a moment and said,

"It's a terrible case."

"Oh?"

"Jesus, the things people do to each other. You'd think I'd get used to it, but I never do."

"You want to talk about it?"

"When I see you. Are we on for tomorrow night?"

"Unless your work gets in the way."

"I don't see why it should. I'll come by for you around seven. If I'm going to be later than that I'll call."

I HAD a hot bath and a good night's sleep, and in the morning I went to the bank and added seventy $100 bills to the stash in my safe-deposit box. I deposited two thousand dollars to my checking account and kept the remaining thousand in my hip pocket.

There was a time when I would have rushed to give it away. I used to spend a lot of idle hours in empty churches, and I tithed religiously, so to speak, stuffing a precise ten percent of the cash I received into the next poor box I passed. This quaint custom had faded away in sobriety. I don't know why I stopped doing it, but then I couldn't tell you why I ever started doing it in the first place.

I could have stuffed my Aer Lingus ticket in the nearest poor box, for all the good I was going to get out of it. I stopped at the travel agent's and confirmed what I had already suspected, that my ticket was indeed nonrefundable. "Ordinarily I'd say get a doctor to write a letter saying you had to cancel for medical reasons," he said, "but that wouldn't work here because it's not the airline you're dealing with, it's an outfit that buys space wholesale from the airlines and offers it at a deep discount."

He offered to try to resell it for me, and I left it with him and walked to the subway.

I spent the whole day in Brooklyn. I'd taken a picture of Francine Khoury when I left the house on Colonial Road, and I showed it around at the Fourth Avenue D'Agostino's and at The Arabian Gourmet on Atlantic Avenue. I was working a colder trail than I would have liked—

it was Tuesday now, and the abduction had taken place on Thursday—

but there was nothing I could do about that now. It would have been nice if Pete had called me on Friday instead of waiting until the weekend had passed, but they'd had other things to do.

Along with the picture, I showed around a card from Reliable with my name on it. I was investigating in connection with an insurance claim, I explained. My client's car had been clipped by another vehicle, which had sped off without stopping, and it would expedite the processing of her claim if we could identify the other party.

At D'Agostino's I talked with a cashier, who remembered Francine as a regular customer who always paid cash, a memorable trait in our society but par for the course in dope-dealing circles. "And I can tell you something else about her," the woman said. "I bet she's a good cook." I must have looked mystified.

"No prepared foods, no frozen this and that. Always fresh ingredients. Young as she is, you don't find many that are into cooking.

But you never see any TV dinners in her cart."

The bag boy remembered her, too, and volunteered the information that she was always a two-dollar tipper. I asked about a truck, and he remembered a blue panel truck that had been parked out front and moved off after her. He hadn't noticed the make of the truck or the license plate but was reasonably certain of the color, and he thought there was something about TV repair painted on the side.

They remembered more on Atlantic Avenue because there had been more to notice. The woman behind the counter recognized the picture immediately and was able to tell me just what Francine had bought—olive oil, sesame tahini, foul mudamas, and some other terms I didn't recognize. She hadn't seen the actual abduction, though, because she'd been waiting on another customer. She knew something curious had happened, because a customer had come in with some story about two men and a woman running from the store and leaping into the back of a truck. The customer had been concerned that they might have robbed the store and were making a getaway.

I managed a few more interviews before noon, at which time I thought I'd go next door for lunch.

Instead I remembered the advice I'd been so quick to hand out to Peter Khoury. I hadn't been to a meeting myself since Saturday, and here it was Tuesday and I'd be spending the evening with Elaine. I called the Intergroup office and learned that there was a twelve-thirty meeting about ten minutes away in Brooklyn Heights. The speaker was a little old lady, as prim and proper in appearance as could be, and her story made it clear that she had not been ever thus. She'd been a bag lady, evidently, sleeping in doorways and never bathing or changing her clothes, and she kept stressing how filthy she had been, how foul she had smelled. It was hard to square the story with the person at the head of the table.

AFTER the meeting I went back to Atlantic Avenue and picked up where I'd left off. I bought a sandwich and a can of cream soda at a deli and interviewed the proprietor while I was there. I ate my lunch standing up outside, then talked to the clerk and a couple of customers at a corner newsstand. I went into Aleppo and talked to the cashier and two of the waiters. I went back to Ayoub's— I'd taken to thinking of The Arabian Gourmet by that name, since I kept talking to people who were calling it that.

I went back there, and by this time the woman had been able to come up with the name of the customer who'd been afraid the men in the blue van had robbed the place. I found the man listed in the phone book, but no one answered when I rang the number.

I had dropped the insurance-investigation story when I got to Atlantic Avenue because it didn't seem likely to jibe with what people would have seen. On the other hand, I didn't want to leave the impression that anything on the scale of kidnapping and homicide had taken place, or someone might deem it his civic duty to report the matter to the police. The story I put together, and it tended to vary somewhat depending upon my audience of the moment, went more or less along these lines: My client had a sister who was considering an arranged marriage to an illegal alien who was hoping to stay in the country. The prospective groom had a girlfriend whose family was bitterly opposed to the marriage. Two men, relatives of the girlfriend, had been harassing my client for days in an attempt to enlist her aid to stop the marriage.

She was sympathetic to their position but didn't really want to get involved.

They had been dogging her steps on Thursday, and followed her to Ayoub's. When she left they got her into the back of their truck on a pretext and drove around with her, trying to convince her. By the time they let her out she was slightly hysterical, and in the course of getting away from them she lost not only the groceries (olive oil, tahini, and so on) but also her purse, which at the time contained a rather valuable bracelet. She didn't know the name of these men, or how to get in touch with them, and—

I don't suppose it made much sense, but I wasn't pitching it to the networks for a TV pilot, I was just using it to reassure some reasonably solid citizens that it was both safe and noble to be as helpful as possible.

I got a lot of gratuitous advice— "Those marriages are a bad thing, she should tell her sister it's not worth it," for instance. But I also got a fair amount of information.

I KNOCKED off a little after four and caught a train to Columbus Circle, beating the rush hour by a few minutes. There was mail for me at the desk, most of it junk. I ordered something from a catalog once and now I get dozens of them every month. I live in one small room and wouldn't have room for the catalogs themselves, let alone the products they want me to buy.

Upstairs, I tossed everything but the phone bill and two message slips, both informing me that "Ken Curry" had called, once at 2:30, and again at 3:45. I didn't call him right away. I was exhausted.

The day had taken it out of me. I hadn't done that much physically, hadn't spent eight hours hefting sacks of cement, but all those conversations with all those people had taken their toll. You have to concentrate hard, and the process is especially demanding when you're running a story of your own. Unless you're a

pathological liar, a fiction is more arduous to utter than the truth; that's the principle on which the lie detector is based, and my own experience tends to bear it out. A full day of lying and role-playing takes it out of you, especially if you're on your feet for most of it.

I took a shower and touched up my shave, then put the TV news on and listened to fifteen minutes of it with my feet up and my eyes closed.

Around five-thirty I called Kenan Khoury and told him I'd made some progress, although I didn't have anything specific to report. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

"Not just yet," I said. "I'll be going back to Atlantic Avenue tomorrow to see if the picture fills in a little more. When I'm done there I'll come to your place. Will you be there?"

"Sure," he said. "I got no place to go."

I SET the alarm and closed my eyes again, and the clock snatched me out of a dream at half past six. I put on a suit and tie and went over to Elaine's. She poured coffee for me and Perrier for herself, and then we caught a cab uptown to the Asia Society, where they had recently opened an exhibit that centered on the Taj Mahal, and thus tied right in with the course she was taking at Hunter. After we'd walked through the three exhibit rooms and made the appropriate noises we followed the crowd into another room, where we sat in folding chairs and listened to a soloist perform on the sitar. I have no idea whether he was any good or not. I don't know how you could tell, or how he himself would know if his instrument was out of tune.

Afterward there was a wine-and-cheese reception. "This need not detain us long," Elaine murmured, and after a few minutes of smiling and mumbling we were on the street.

"You loved every minute of it," she said.

"It was all right."

"Oh boy," she said. "The things a man will put himself through in the hope of getting laid."

"Come on," I said. "It wasn't that bad. It's the same music they play at Indian restaurants."

"But there you don't have to listen to it."

"Who listened?"

We went to an Italian restaurant, and over espresso I told her about Kenan Khoury and what had happened to his wife. When I was finished she sat for a moment looking down at the tablecloth in front of her as if there were something written on it. Then she raised her eyes slowly to meet mine. She is a resourceful woman, and a durable one, but just then she looked touchingly vulnerable.

"Dear God," she said.

"The things people do."

"There's just no end, is there? No bottom to it." She took a sip of water. "The cruelty of it, the utter sadism. Why would anyone— well, why ask why?"

"I figure it has to be pleasure," I said. "They must have gotten off on it, not just on the killing but on rubbing his nose in it, jerking him around, telling him she'll be in the car, she'll be home when he gets there, then finally letting him find her in pieces in the trunk of the Ford.

They wouldn't have to be sadists to kill her. They could see it as safer that way than to leave a witness who could identify them. But there was no practical advantage in twisting the knife the way they did. They went to a lot of trouble dismembering the body. I'm sorry, this is great table talk, isn't it?"

"That's nothing compared to what a great pre-bedtime story it makes."

"Puts you right in the mood, huh?"

"Nothing like it to get the juices flowing. No, really, I don't mind it. I mean I mind, of course I mind, but I'm not squeamish. It's gross, cutting somebody up, but that's really the least of it, isn't it? The real shock is that there's that kind of evil in the world and it can come from out of nowhere and zap you for no good

reason at all. That's what's awful, and it's just as bad on an empty stomach as on a full one."

WE went back to her apartment and she put on a Cedar Walton solo piano album that we both liked, and we sat together on the couch, not saying much. When the record ended she turned it over, and halfway through Side Two we went into the bedroom and made love with a curious intensity. Afterward neither of us spoke for a long time, until she said, "I'll tell you, kiddo. If we keep on like this, one of these days we're gonna get good at it."

"You think so, huh?"

"It wouldn't surprise me. Matt? Stay over tonight."

I kissed her. "I was planning to."

"Mmmm. Good plan. I don't want to be alone."

Neither did I.

Chapter 4

I stayed for breakfast, and by the time I got out to Atlantic Avenue it was almost eleven. I spent five hours there, most if it on the street and in shops but some of it in a branch library and on the phone. A little after four I walked a couple of blocks and caught a bus to Bay Ridge.

When I'd seen him last he'd been rumpled and unshaven, but now Kenan Khoury looked cool and composed in gray gabardine slacks and a muted plaid shirt. I followed him into the kitchen and he told me his brother had gone to work in Manhattan that morning. "Petey said he'd stay here, he didn't care about work, but how many times are we gonna have the same conversation? I made him take the Toyota so he's got that to get back and forth. How about you, Matt? You getting anywhere?"

I said, "Two men about my size took your wife off the street in front of The Arabian Gourmet and hustled her into a dark blue panel truck or van. A similar truck, probably the same one, was tailing her when she left D'Agostino's. The truck had lettering on the doors, white lettering according to one witness.

TV Sales & Service, with the company name composed of indeterminate initials. B & L, H & M, different people saw different things. Two people remembered an address in Queens and one specifically recalled it as Long Island City."

"Is there such a firm?"

"The description's vague enough so that there are a dozen or more firms that would fit. A couple of initials, TV repair, a Queens address. I called six or eight outfits and couldn't come up with anybody who runs dark blue trucks or who had a vehicle stolen recently. I didn't expect to."

"Why not?"

"I don't think the truck was stolen. My guess is that they had your house staked out Thursday morning hoping your wife would go out by herself. When she did they followed her. It probably wasn't the first time they tailed her, waiting for an opportunity to make their play. They wouldn't want to steal a truck each time and ride around all day in something that's liable to show up any hour on the hot-car sheet."

"You think it was their truck?"

"Most likely. I think they painted a phony company name and address on the doors, and once they completed the snatch they painted the old name out and a new name in. By now I wouldn't be surprised if the whole body's repainted some color other than blue."

"What about the license plate?"

"It had probably been switched for the occasion, but it hardly matters because nobody got the plate number. One witness thought the three of them had just knocked over the food market, that they were robbers, but all he wanted to do was get inside the store and make sure everybody was all right. Another man thought something funny was going on and he did take a look at the plate, but all he remembered was that it had a nine in it."

"That's helpful."

"Very. The men were dressed alike, dark pants and matching work shirts, matching blue windbreakers.

They looked to be in uniform, and, between that and the commercial vehicle they were driving, they appeared legitimate. I learned years ago that you can walk in almost anywhere if you're carrying a clipboard because it looks as though you're doing your job.

They had that edge going for them. Two different people told me they thought they were watching two undercover guys from the INS taking an illegal alien off the street. That's one reason nobody interfered, that and the fact that it was over and done with before anyone had time to react."

"Pretty slick," he said.

"The uniform dress did something else, too. It made them invisible, because all people saw was their clothing, and all they remember was that both of them looked the same. Did I mention that they had caps on, too? The witnesses described the caps and the jackets, things they put on for the job and got rid of afterward."

"So we don't really have anything."

"That's not really true," I said. "We don't have anything that leads directly to them, but we've got something. We know what they did and how they did it, that they're resourceful, that they planned their approach. How do you figure they picked you?"

He shrugged. "They knew I was a trafficker. That was mentioned.

That makes you a good target. They know you've got money and they know you're not going to call the police."

"What else did they know about you?"

"My ethnic background. The one guy, the first one, he called me some names."

"I think you mentioned that."

"Raghead, sand nigger. That's a nice one, huh? Sand nigger. He left out camel jockey, that's one I used to hear from the Italian kids at St.

Ignatius. 'Hey, Khoury, ya fuckin' camel jockey!' Only camel I ever saw was on a cigarette pack."

"You think being an Arab made you a target?"

"It never occurred to me. There's a certain amount of prejudice, no question about it, but I'm not usually that conscious of it. Francine's people are Palestinian, did I mention that?"

"Yes."

"They have it tougher. I know Palestinians who say they're Lebanese or Syrian just to avoid hassles.

'Oh, you're Palestinian, you must be a terrorist.' That kind of ignorant remark, and there are people who have bigoted ideas about Arabs in general." He rolled his eyes. "My father, for instance."

"Your father?"

"I wouldn't say he was anti-Arab, but he had this whole theory that we weren't actually Arabs. Our family's Christian, see."

"I wondered what you were doing at St. Ignatius."

"There were times I wondered myself. No, we were Maronite Christians, and according to my old man we were Phoenicians. You ever hear of the Phoenicians?"

"Back in biblical times, weren't they? Traders and explorers, something like that?"

"You got it. Great sailors, they sailed all around Africa, they colonized Spain, they probably reached Britain. They founded Carthage in North Africa, and there were a lot of Carthaginian coins dug up in England. They were the first people to discover Polaris, that's the North Star, I mean to discover that it was always in the same spot and could be used for navigation. They developed an alphabet that served as the basis for the Greek alphabet." He broke off, slightly embarrassed. "My old man talked about them all the time. I guess some of it must have soaked in."

"It looks like it."

"He wasn't a lunatic on the subject, but he knew a lot about it.

That's where my name comes from. The Phoenicians called themselves the Kena'ani, or Canaanites. My name should be pronounced Keh-nahn, but everyone's always said Kee-nan."

" 'Ken Curry' is the message I got yesterday."

"Yeah, that's typical. I've ordered things on the phone and they turn up addressed to Keane & Curry, it sounds like a couple of Irish lawyers.

Anyway, according to my father the Phoenicians were a completely different people from the Arabs. They were the Canaanites, they were already a people at the time of Abraham. Whereas the Arabs were descended from Abraham."

"I thought the Jews were descendants of Abraham."

"Right, through Isaac, who was the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah. Meanwhile the Arabs were the sons of Ishmael, who was the son Abraham fathered with Hagar. Jesus, here's something I haven't thought of in a long time. When I was a kid my father had this mild feud with this grocer around the block on Dean Street, and he used to refer to him as 'that Ishmaelite bastard.' God, what a character he was."

"Is he still living?"

"No, he died three years ago. He was diabetic, and over the years it weakened his heart. When I'm down on myself I tell myself he died of a broken heart because of how his sons turned out. He was hoping for an architect and a doctor and instead he got a drunk and a dope dealer. But that's not what killed him. His diet killed him. He was diabetic and he was fifty pounds overweight. Me and Petey could have turned out to be Jonas Salk and Frank Lloyd Wright and it wouldn't have done him any good."

AROUND six Kenan made the first of a series of phone calls after the two of us had worked out an approach. He dialed a number, waited for a tone, then punched in his own number and hung up. "Now we wait," he said, but we didn't have to wait very long. In less than five minutes the phone rang.

He said, "Hey, Phil, how's it going? Great. Here's the deal. I don't know if you ever met my wife. The thing is, we had this kidnap threat, I had to send her out of the country. I don't know what it's about but I think it has to do with the business, you follow me? So what I'm doing, I've got a guy checking it out for me, like a professional. And I wanted, you know, to pass the word, because the sense I got is these people are serious about this and my impression is they're stone killers. Right.

Yeah, that's the thing, man, we sit here and we're easy marks, we got plenty of cash and we can't holler for the law, and that makes us the perfect target for home invasions and every goddam thing… Right. So all I'm saying is be careful, you know, and keep an eye and an ear open.

And pass the word around, you know, to whoever you think ought to hear it. And if any shit comes down, man, call me, you understand?

Right."

He hung up and turned to me. "I don't know," he said. "I think all I did was convince him I'm getting paranoid in my old age. 'Why'd you send her out of the country, man? Why not just buy a dog, hire a bodyguard?' Because she's dead, you dumb fuck, but I didn't want to tell him that. If the word gets around it's got to mean problems. Shit."

"What's the matter?"

"What do I tell Francine's family? Every time the phone rings I'm afraid it's one of her cousins. Her parents are separated and her mother moved back to Jordan, but her father's still in the old neighborhood and she's got relatives all over Brooklyn. What do I tell them?"

"I don't know."

"I'll have to fill them in sooner or later. Time being, I'll say she went on a cruise, something like that. You know what they'll figure?"

"Marital problems."

"That's it. We're just back from Negril, so why's she going on a cruise? Must be trouble between the

Khourys. Well, they can think whatever they want. Truth of the matter is we never had a cross word, we never had a bad day. Jesus." He picked up the phone, punched in a number, keyed in his own number at the tone. He hung up and drummed the tabletop impatiently, and when the phone rang he picked it up and said, "Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, yeah? No shit. Hey, here's the deal…."

Chapter 5

I went to the eight-thirty meeting at St. Paul's. On the way over it had crossed my mind that I might run into Pete Khoury there, but he didn't show up. Afterward I helped fold chairs, then joined a group of people for coffee at the Flame. I didn't stay there long, though, because by eleven I was at Poogan's Pub on West Seventy-second Street, one of the two places where Danny Boy Bell could generally be found between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. The rest of the time you couldn't count on finding him anywhere.

His other place is a jazz club called Mother Goose on Amsterdam.

Poogan's was closer, so I tried it first. Danny Boy was at his usual table in back, deep in conversation with a dark-skinned black man with a pointed chin and a button nose. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses with mirrored lenses and a powder-blue suit with more in the shoulders than God or Gold's Gym could have put there. A little cocoa-brown straw hat perched on top of his head, adorned with a flamingo-pink hatband.

I had a Coke at the bar and waited while he finished his business with Danny Boy. After five minutes or so he uncoiled himself from his chair, clapped Danny Boy on the shoulder, laughed heartily, and headed for the street. I turned around to get my change from the bar, and when I turned back again his place had been taken by a balding white man with a brushy mustache and a belly straining at his shirtfront. I hadn't recognized the first fellow, other then generically, but I knew this man.

His name was Selig Wolf and he owned a couple of parking lots and took bets on sporting events. I had arrested him once ages ago on an assault charge, but the complainant had decided not to press it.

When Wolf left I took my second Coke with me and sat down.

"Busy evening," I said.

"I know," Danny Boy said. "Pick a number and wait, it's getting as bad as Zabar's. It's good to see you, Matthew. I saw you before but I had to suffer through the hour of the Wolf. You must know Selig."

"Sure, but I didn't know the other fellow. He's head of fundraising for the United Negro College Fund, right?"

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste," he said solemnly. "To think you would waste yours judging by appearances. The gentleman was wearing a sartorial classic, Matthew, known as the zoot suit. That's a zoot suit, you know, with a drape shape and a reet pleat. My father had one in his closet, a souvenir of his flaming youth. Every now and then he would take it out and threaten to wear it, and my mother would roll her eyes."

"Good for her."

"His name is Nicholson James," Danny Boy said. "It should have been James Nicholson, but the names were reversed on some official document early on and he decided it had more style that way. You might say it goes with his retro fashion statement. Mr. James is a pimp."

"Go figure. I never would have guessed."

Danny Boy poured himself some vodka. His own fashion statement was one of quiet elegance, a tailored dark suit and tie, a boldly patterned red-and-black vest. He is a very short, slightly built albino African-American— it would be way off the mark to call him black, since he's anything but. He spends his nights in saloons, and he's partial to dim lighting and low noise levels. He's as rigid as Dracula about not venturing out in daylight, and rarely answers the phone or the door during those hours. Every night, though, he's in Poogan's or Mother Goose, listening to people and telling them things.

"Elaine's not with you," he said.

"Not tonight."

"Give her my love."

"I will," I said. "I brought you something, Danny Boy."

"Oh?"

I palmed him a pair of hundreds. He looked at the money without flashing it, then glanced at me with his eyebrows elevated.

"I have a prosperous client," I said. "He wants me to take cabs."

"Did you want me to call you one?"

"No, but I thought I ought to spread a little of his dough around.

All you have to spread is the word."

"What word is that?"

I ran through the official story without mentioning Kenan Khoury's name. Danny Boy listened, frowning occasionally in concentration.

When I finished he took out a cigarette, looked at it for a moment, then put it back in the pack.

"A question arises," he said.

"Go."

"Your client's wife is out of the country, and presumably safe from those who would harm her. So he assumes they'll direct their attention at someone else."

"Right."

"Well, why should he care? I love the idea of a public-spirited dope dealer, like all those marijuana growers in Oregon who make huge anonymous cash donations to Earth First and the eco-saboteurs.

Well, when I was growing up I liked Robin Hood, as far as that goes. But what difference does it make to your man if the bad guys snatch somebody else's sweetie? They get the ransom and that just leaves

one of his competitors in a negative cash-flow situation, that's all.

Or they screw up and that's the end of them. As long as his own wife's out of the picture—"

"Jesus, it was a perfectly good story until I told it to you, Danny Boy."

"Sorry."

"His wife didn't make it out of the country. They snatched her and they killed her."

"He tried to stonewall? Wouldn't pay the ransom?"

"He paid four hundred large. They killed her anyway." His eyes widened. "Your ears only," I added.

"The death isn't being reported, so that part of it shouldn't get out on the street."

"I understand. Well, that makes his motive easier to grasp. He wants to get even. Any idea who they are?"

"No."

"But you figure they'll do it again."

"Why quit on a winning roll?"

"Nobody ever does." He helped himself to more vodka. At both of his regular places they bring him the bottle in an ice bucket, and he drinks great quantities of it without paying much attention to it, just drinking it down like water. I don't know where he puts it, or how his body processes it.

He said, "How many bad guys?"

"Minimum of three."

"Splitting four tenths of a mil. They might be taking cabs a lot themselves, don't you think?"

"I had that thought myself."

"So if somebody's throwing a lot of money around, that would be useful information."

"It might."

"And the drug dealers, especially the major players, should get the word that they're at risk for kidnapping. They might just as easily grab a dealer, don't you think? It wouldn't have to be a woman."

"I'm not sure about that."

"Why's that?"

"I think they enjoyed the killing. I think they got off on it. I think they used her sexually, and I think they tortured her, and then when the novelty wore off they killed her."

"The body showed signs of torture?"

"The body came back in twenty or thirty pieces, individually wrapped. And that's not for the street, either. I hadn't planned on mentioning it."

"I'd just as soon you hadn't, to tell you the truth. Matthew, is it my imagination or is the world turning nastier?"

"It doesn't seem to be lightening up."

"It doesn't, does it? Remember the Harmonic Convergence, all the planets lining up like soldiers? Wasn't that supposed to signal the dawn of some kind of New Age?"

"I'm not holding my breath."

"Well, they say it's always darkest before the dawn. I see what you mean, though. If killing's part of the fun, and if they're into rape and torture, well, they won't pick some raggedy-ass dope dealer with a beer gut and a five o'clock shadow. Nothing queer about these fellows."

"No."

He thought for a moment. "They'll have to do it again," he said.

"They could hardly be expected to quit after a score like that. I wonder, though."

"If they've done it before? I was wondering the same thing myself."

"And?"

"They were pretty slick," I said. "I get the feeling they had some practice."

FIRST thing after breakfast the next morning I walked over to the Midtown North station house on West Fifty-fourth. I caught Joe Durkin at his desk, and he caught me off balance by complimenting me on my appearance. "You're dressing better these days," he said. "I think it's that woman's doing. Elaine, right?"

"That's right."

"Well, I think she's a good influence on you."

"I'm sure she is," I said, "but what the hell are you talking about?"

"That's a nice-looking jacket, that's all."

"This blazer? It must be ten years old."

"Well, you never wear it."

"I wear it all the time."

"Maybe it's the tie."

"What's so special about the tie?"

"Jesus Christ," he said. "Did anybody ever tell you you're a difficult son of a bitch? I tell you you look nice and the next thing I know I'm on the fucking witness stand. How about we start over? 'Hello, Matt, it's great to see you. You look like shit. Have a seat.' Is that better?"

"Much better."

"I'm glad. Sit down. What brings you here?"

"I had the urge to commit a felony."

"I know the feeling. There's hardly a day goes by that I don't get the urge myself. You got any particular felony in mind?"

"I was thinking of a class D felony."

"Well, we got lots of those. Criminal possession of forgery devices is a class D felony, and you're probably committing that one at this very minute. You got a pen in your pocket?"

"Two pens and a pencil."

"Gee, it sounds as though I better Mirandize you and get you booked and printed. But I don't suppose that's the class D felony you had in mind."

I shook my head. "I was thinking of violating Section Two Hundred Point Zero Zero of the Criminal Code."

"Two Hundred Point Zero Zero. You're gonna make me look that up, aren't you?"

"Why not?"

He gave me a look, then reached for a black looseleaf binder and flipped through it. "It's a familiar number," he said. "Oh, right, here we are. 'Two Hundred Point Zero Zero. Bribery in the third degree. A person is guilty of bribery in the third degree when he confers, or offers or agrees to confer, any benefit upon a public servant upon an agreement or understanding that such public servant's vote, opinion, judgment, action, decision or exercise of discretion as a public servant will thereby be influenced. Bribery in the third degree is a class D felony.' " He went on reading silently for a moment, then said, "Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to violate Section Two Hundred Point Zero Three?"

"What's that?"

"That's bribery in the second degree. It's the same as the other only it's a class C felony. To qualify for Bribery Two, the benefit you confer or offer or agree to confer, Jesus, don't you love the way they word these things, the benefit has to be in excess of ten thousand dollars."

"Ah," I said. "I think class D is my limit."

"I was afraid of that. Can I ask you something? Before you commit your class D felony? How many years has it been since you were on the job?"

"It's been a while."

"So how'd you remember the class of felony, let alone the article number?"

"I've got that kind of memory."

"Bullshit. They've renumbered the sections over the years, they've changed half the book at one time or another. I just want to know how you did it."

"You really want to know?"

"Yes."

"I looked it up in Andreotti's book on my way up here."

"Just to break my balls, right?"

"Just to keep you on your toes."

"Only my best interests at heart."

"Absolutely," I said. I'd set aside a bill in my jacket pocket earlier, and I palmed it now and tucked it into the pocket where he keeps his cigarettes, except during those intervals when he swears off and smokes other people's. "Buy yourself a suit," I told him.

We were all alone in the office, so he took the bill out and examined it. "We'll have to update the terminology. A hat's twenty-five dollars, a suit's a hundred. I don't know what a decent hat costs these days, I can't remember the last time I bought one. But I don't know where you'd get a suit for a hundred bucks outside a thrift shop. 'Here's a hundred bucks, take your wife to dinner.' What's this for, anyway?"

"I need a favor."

"Oh?"

"There was a case I read about," I said. "Had to be six months ago and it could have been as much as a year. Couple of guys grabbed a woman off the street, rode off with her in a truck. She turned up a few days later in the park."

"Dead, I'm assuming."

"Dead."

" 'Police suspect foul play.' Can't say it rings a bell. It wasn't one of our cases, was it?"

"It wasn't even Manhattan. I seem to remember that she turned up on a golf course in Queens, but it could as easily have been somewhere in Brooklyn. I didn't pay any attention at the time, it was just an item I read while I drank a second cup of coffee."

"And what do you want now?"

"I want my memory refreshed."

He looked at me. "You're getting pretty free with a buck, aren't you? Why make a donation to my wardrobe fund when you could go to the library, look it up in the Times Index?"

"Under what? I don't know where or when it happened or any of the names. I'd have to scan every issue for the last year, and I don't even know what paper I read it in. It may not have made the Times."

"Be easier if I made a couple of phone calls."

"That's what I was thinking."

"Why don't you take a walk? Have yourself a cup of coffee. Get yourself a table at the Greek place on Eighth Avenue. I'll probably drop in there an hour from now, have myself some coffee and a piece of Danish."

Forty minutes later he came to my table in the coffee shop at Eighth and Fifty-third. "Just over a year ago," he said. "Woman named Marie Gotteskind. What's that mean, God is kind?"

"I think it means 'child of God.' "

"That's better, because God wasn't kind to Marie. She was reported abducted in broad daylight while shopping on Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven. Two men drove off with her in a truck, and three days later a couple of kids walking across the Forest Park Golf Course came upon her body. Sexual assault, multiple stab wounds. The One-Oh-Four caught the case and bounced it back to the One-Twelve once they ID'd her, because that was where the original abduction took place."

"They get anywhere?"

He shook his head. "Guy I talked to remembered the case well enough. It had people in the neighborhood pretty shook up for a couple of weeks there. Respectable woman walks down the street, couple of clowns grab her, it's like getting struck by lightning, you know what I mean? If it can happen to her it can happen to anybody, and you're not even safe in your own home. They were afraid there'd be more of the same, gang rape on wheels, the whole serial-killer bit. What was that case in L.A., they made a miniseries out of it?"

"I don't know."

"Two Italian guys, I think they were cousins. They were doing hookers and leaving them up in the hills.

Hillside Strangler, that's what they called it. Stranglers, it should have been, but I guess the media named the case before they knew it was more than one person."

"The woman in Woodhaven," I said.

"Right. They were afraid she was the first of a series, but then there weren't any more and everybody relaxed. They still put a lot of effort into the case but nothing led anywhere. It's an open file now, and the thinking is that the only way they'll break it is if the perps get caught doing it again. He asked if we had anything tied into it. Do we?"

"No. What did the woman's husband do, did you happen to notice?"

"I don't think she was married. I think she was a schoolteacher.

Why?"

"She live alone?"

"What difference does it make?"

"I'd love to see the file, Joe."

"You would, huh? Whyntcha ride out to the One-Twelve and ask them to show it to you."

"I don't think that would work."

"You don't, huh? You mean there are cops in this town won't go out of their way to do a favor for a private license? Jesus, I'm shocked."

"I'd appreciate it."

"A phone call or two's one thing," he said. "I didn't have to commit a flagrant breach of departmental regulations and neither did the guy on the job in Queens. But you're asking for disclosure of confidential materials. That file's not supposed to leave the office."

"It doesn't have to. All he has to do is take five minutes to fax it."

"You want the whole file? Full-scale homicide investigation, there's got to be twenty, thirty pages in that file."

"The department can afford the fax charges."

"I don't know," he said. "The mayor keeps telling us the city's going broke. What's your interest in it, anyway?"

"I can't say."

"Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. You want it all flowing in one direction, don't you?"

"It's a confidential matter."

"No shit. It's confidential, but departmental files are an open book, is that it?" He lit a cigarette and coughed. He said, "This wouldn't have anything to do with a friend of yours, would it?"

"I don't follow you."

"Your buddy Ballou. This got anything to do with him?"

"Of course not."

"You sure of that?"

"He's out of the country," I said. "He's been gone for over a month and I don't know when he's coming back. And he's never been big on raping women and leaving them in the middle of the fairway."

"I know, he's a gentleman, he replaces all divots. They're looking to put together a RICO case against him, but I suppose you already knew that."

"I heard something about it."

"I hope they make it stick, tuck him away in a federal joint for the next twenty years. But I suppose you feel differently."

"He's a friend of mine."

"Yeah, so I've been told."

"Anyway, he's got nothing to do with this matter." He just looked at me, and I said, "I have a client whose wife disappeared. The MO

looks similar to the Woodhaven incident."

"She was abducted?"

"It looks that way."

"He report it?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I guess he had his reasons."

"That's not good enough, Matt."

"Suppose he's in the country illegally."

"Half the city's in the country illegally. You think we catch a kidnap case, the first thing we do is turn the victim over to the INS? And who is this guy, he can't swing a green card but he's got the money for a private investigator? Sounds to me like he's got to be dirty."

"Whatever you say."

"Whatever I say, huh?" He put out the cigarette and frowned at me.

"The woman dead?"

"It's beginning to look that way. If it's the same people—"

"Yeah, but why would it be the same people? What's the connection, the MO of the abduction?" When I didn't say anything he picked up the check, glanced at it, and tossed it across the table to me.

"Here,"

he said. "Your treat. You still at the same number? I'll call you this afternoon."

"Thanks Joe."

"No, don't thank me. I have to figure out if there's any way this is going to come back and haunt me. If not I'll make the call. Otherwise forget it."

I WENT to the noon meeting at Fireside, then back to my room.

There was nothing from Durkin, but a message slip indicated that I'd had a call from TJ. Just that— no number, no further message. I crumpled the slip and tossed it.

TJ is a black teenager I met about a year and a half ago on Times Square. That's his street name, and if he has another name he's kept it to himself. I'd found him breezy and saucy and irreverent, a breath of fresh air in the fetid swamp of Forty-second Street, and the two of us had hit it off together. I let him do some minor legwork on a case a little later on with a Times Square handle on it, and since then he'd kept in infrequent contact. Every couple of weeks there would be a call or a series of calls from him. He never left a number and I had no way of getting in touch with him, so his messages were just a way of letting me know he was thinking of me. If he really wanted to contact me he'd keep calling until he caught me at home.

When he did, we sometimes talked until his quarter ran out, or sometimes we would meet in his neighborhood or mine and I would buy him a meal. Twice I'd given him little jobs to do in connection with cases I was working, and he seemed to get a kick out of the work that couldn't be explained by the small sums I paid him.

I went to my room and called Elaine. "Danny Boy says hello," I said. "And Joe Durkin says you're a good influence on me."

"Of course I am," she said. "But how does he know?"

"He says I'm better dressed since we started keeping company."

"I told you that new suit is special."

"That's not what I was wearing."

"Oh."

"I was wearing my blazer. I've had the damn thing forever."

"Well, it still looks nice. Gray slacks with it? Which shirt and tie?"

I told her, and she said, "Well, that's a nice outfit."

"Pretty ordinary, though. I saw a zoot suit last night."

"Honestly?"

"With a drape shape and a reet pleat, according to Danny Boy."

"Danny Boy wasn't wearing a zoot suit."

"No, it was an associate of his named— well, it doesn't matter what his name was. He was also wearing a straw hat with a shocking-pink band. Now if I'd worn something like that to Durkin's office—"

"He would have been impressed. Maybe it's something in your stance, honey, maybe it's an attitude thing that Durkin's picking up on.

You're wearing your clothes with more authority."

"Because my heart is pure."

"That must be it."

We kibitzed a little more. She had a class that night and we talked about getting together afterward but decided against it. "Tomorrow's better," she said. "Maybe a movie? Except I hate to go on the weekend, everything decent is mobbed. I know, maybe an afternoon movie and dinner after it, assuming you're not working." I told her that sounded good.

I hung up and the man on the desk rang to say I'd had a call while I was on the phone with Elaine.

They've changed the phone system a few times since I've been at the Northwestern. Originally all calls had to go through the switchboard.

Then they fixed it so you could dial out directly, but incoming calls were still routed through the board. Now I have a direct line for making or receiving calls, but if I don't pick up after four rings it gets transferred downstairs. I get my own bill from NYNEX, the hotel doesn't impose any charges, and I come out of it with a free answering service.

The call was from Durkin, and I rang him back. "You left something here," he said. "You want to pick it up or should I toss it?"

I said I'd be right over.

He was on the phone when I got to the squad room. He had his chair tilted back and he was smoking a cigarette while another one burned up in the ashtray. At the desk next to his, a detective named Bellamy was peering over the tops of his eyeglasses at the screen of his computer.

Joe covered the mouthpiece of the phone and said, "I think that's your envelope there, it's got your name on it. You left it when you were here earlier."

Without waiting for a reply he went back to his conversation. I reached over his shoulder and picked up a nine-by-twelve manila clasp envelope with my name on it. Behind me, Bellamy told the computer,

"Well, that makes no fucking sense at all."

I didn't argue the point.

Chapter 6

Back in my room I spread a sheaf of curling fax copies on my bed.

They had evidently faxed the whole file, thirty-six pages of it. Some of them only had a few lines on them, but others were densely packed with information.

Shuffling through them, it struck me what a different proposition all this would have been in my own cop days. We didn't have copying machines, let alone fax. The only way to see Marie Gotteskind's file would have required traipsing out to Queens and going through it on the spot, with some anxious cop looking over your shoulder and trying to hurry you along.

Nowadays you just fed everything into a fax transmitter and it came out by sheer magic five or ten miles away— or on the other side of the world, for that matter. The original file never left the office where it was kept, and no unauthorized person snuck in for a peek at it, so nobody had to get uptight about a breach in security.

And I had all the time I needed to pore over the Gottes-kind file.

It's just as well I did because I had no clear idea what I was looking for. One thing that hasn't changed a bit since I got out of the Police Academy is the amount of paperwork the job entails. Whatever kind of cop you are, you spend less time doing things than you do establishing a record on paper of what you've done. Some of this is the usual bureaucratic horseshit and some comes under the general heading of covering your ass, but much of it is probably inescapable. Police work is a collective effort, with a variety of people contributing to even the simpler sort of investigation, and if it's not all written down somewhere nobody can get an overview of it and figure out what it amounts to.

I read everything, and when I got to the end I went back and pulled a few pieces of paper for a second look. One thing that became evident early on was the extraordinary similarity between the Gotteskind abduction and the way Francine Khoury was taken in Brooklyn. I noted the following points of similarity: 1. Both women were abducted from commercial streets.

2. Both women had parked cars nearby and were shopping on foot.

3. Both were seized by a pair of men.

4. In both instances, the men were described as being similar in height and weight, and were dressed alike. The Gotteskind kidnappers had worn khaki trousers and navy windbreakers.

5. Both women were carried off in trucks. The truck used in Woodhaven was described by several witnesses as a light blue van. One witness identified it specifically as a Ford, and supplied a partial plate number, but it hadn't led anywhere.

6. Several witnesses agreed that the body of the truck was lettered with the name of a household appliance firm. They variously identified the firm as P J Home Appliance, B & J Household Appliance, and variations on the foregoing. A second line read sales and service. There was no address, but witnesses reported that there was a phone number, although no one could supply it. A thorough investigation had failed to link the truck to any of the innumerable companies in the borough that sold and serviced home appliances, and the conclusion seemed warranted that the firm's name, like the plate number, was spurious.

7. Marie Gotteskind was twenty-eight years old and employed as a substitute teacher in the New York City primary schools. For three days, including the day of her abduction, she had filled in for a fourth-grade teacher in Ridgewood. She was about the same height as Francine Khoury and within a few pounds of her in weight, blond and light-complected where Francine was dark-haired and olive-skinned.

There was no photograph in the file except for those taken at the scene in Forest Park, but testimony from acquaintances indicated that she was considered attractive.

There were differences. Marie Gotteskind was unmarried. She had had a few dates with a male teacher whom she'd met on an earlier substitute assignment, but their relationship does not seem to have amounted to much and his alibi for the time of her death was in any case unassailable.

Marie lived at home with her parents. Her father, a former steamfitter with a disability pension for a job-related injury, operated a small mail-order business from his home. Her mother helped him with the business and also served as a part-time bookkeeper for several neighborhood enterprises. Neither Marie nor either of her parents had any demonstrable connection to the drug subculture. Nor were they Arabs,

or Phoenicians.

The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other.

An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.

In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.

Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiner's report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victim's left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.

Cute.

READING the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. That's very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through.

The report of the woman's injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.

I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said,

"So where's it at, Matt?"

"Hey, TJ."

"How you doin'? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin' places, doin' things."

"I got your message but you didn't leave a number."

"Don't have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?"

"If you were a dealer you'd have a cellular phone."

"Now you talkin'. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin' in it thinkin' long thoughts and doin' long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.

"Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message."

"Well, see, I don't always like to waste the quarter."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you know, I got your phone figured. It's like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it ain't about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, 'less you be in the bathroom or something."

"So you hang up after three rings."

"And get my quarter back. 'Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an'

there's a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, 'This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he don't know what to do with.' "

I laughed.

"So you workin'?"

"As a matter of fact I am."

"Big job?"

"Fairly big."

"Any room in it for TJ?"

"Not as far as I can see."

"Man, you not lookin' hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin' you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Glad to hear it, because those cats are bad, Tad. You see Goodfellas? Man, they nasty. Oh, damn, my quarter be runnin' out."

A recorded voice cut in, demanding five cents for a minute's worth of phone time.

I said, "Give me the number and I'll call you back."

"Can't."

"The number of the phone you're talking on."

"Can't," he said again. "Ain't no number on it. They takin' 'em off all the pay phones so the players can't get calls back on 'em. No problem, I got some change." The phone chimed as he dropped a coin in. "The dealers, they got certain pay phones where they know the number whether it shows there or not. So it still business as usual, only somebody like you wants to call somebody like me back, ain't no way to do it."

"It's a great system."

"It's cool. We still talkin', ain't we? Nobody stoppin' us doin' what we want to do. They just forcin' us to be resourceful."

"By putting in another quarter?"

"You got it, Matt. I be drawin' on my resources. That's what you call bein' resourceful."

"Where are you going to be tomorrow, TJ?"

"Where I be? Oh, I dunno. Maybe I fly to Paris on the Concorde. I ain't made up my mind yet." It struck me that he could take my ticket and go to Ireland, but he wasn't likely to have a passport. Nor did it seem probable that Ireland was ready for him, or he for Ireland. "Where I be,"

he said heavily. "I be on the fuckin' Deuce, man. Where else I gonna be?"

"I thought maybe we could get something to eat."

"What time?"

"Oh, I don't know. Say around twelve, twelve-thirty?"

"Which?"

"Twelve-thirty."

"That's twelve-thirty in the daytime or in the night?"

"Daytime. We'll have some lunch."

"Ain't no time of the day or night you can't have lunch," he said.

"You want me to come by your hotel?"

"No," I said, "because there's a chance I'll have to cancel and I wouldn't have any way to let you know.

So I don't want to hang you up. Pick a place on the Deuce and if I don't show up we'll make it another time."

"That's cool," he said. "You know the video arcade? Uptown side of the street, two, three doors from Eighth Avenue? There's the store with the switchknives in the window, man, I don't know how they get away with that—"

"They're sold in kit form."

"Yeah, an' they use it for an IQ test. You can't put the kit together, you have to go back an' do first grade all over again. You know the store I mean."

"Sure."

"Right next to it there's the entrance to the subway, and before you go down the stairs there's an entranceway to the video arcade. You know where it's at?"

"I have a hunch I can find it."

"Say twelve-thirty?"

"It's a date, Kate."

"Hey," he said. "You know somethin'? You learnin'."

* * *

I FELT better when I got off the phone with TJ. He usually had that effect on me. I made a note of our lunch date, then picked up the Gotteskind material again.

It was the same perpetrators. Had to be. The similarity of MO was too great to be coincidental, and the amputation and insertion of the thumb and forefinger looked like a rehearsal for the more extensive butchery they'd practiced on Francine Khoury.

But what did they do, go into hibernation? Lie low for a year?

It seemed unlikely. Sex-linked violence— serial rape, lust murder— seems to be addictive, like any strong drug that releases you momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskind's killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive.

Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?

Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don't get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you've got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.

On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.

Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.

Or maybe they'd been active, but in a way that hadn't drawn any attention.

Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.

Because they'd do it again.

Chapter 7

Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games— i.e., that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm.

If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in.

I couldn't argue with that.

We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the player's name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadn't noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didn't come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasn't it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldn't get any better, and eventually you lost interest.

We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.

"What you need," he said, "you need me workin' for you."

"Doing what?"

"Anything you say! You don't want to be runnin' all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You don't think I can find things out? Man, I'm down here on the Deuce every day findin'

things out. It's what I do."

"SO I gave him something," I told Elaine. We'd met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four o'clock movie, then went to a new place she'd heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. "He'd said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me."

"What was that?"

"The pay phones," I said. "When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike."

"I remember."

"Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldn't, because the number wasn't posted on the phone he was calling from. I walked around the neighborhood on my way to the library this morning, and most of the phones are like that."

"You mean the little slips are missing? I know people will steal absolutely anything, but that's the stupidest thing I ever heard of."

"The phone company removes them," I said, "to discourage drug dealers. They beep each other from pay phones, you know how it works, and now they can't do that."

"And that's why all the drug dealers are going out of business," she said.

"Well, I'm sure it looked good on paper. Anyway, I got to thinking about those pay phones in Brooklyn, and I wondered if their numbers were posted."

"What difference does it make?"

"I don't know," I said. "Probably somewhere between not much and none at all, which is why I didn't chase out to Brooklyn myself. But I can't see where it would hurt me to have the information, so I gave TJ a couple of dollars and sent him to Brooklyn."

"Does he know his way around Brooklyn?"

"He will by the time he gets back. The first phone's a few blocks from the last stop on the Flatbush IRT, so that's fairly easy to find, but I don't know how the hell he's going to get to Veterans Avenue. A bus out of Flatbush, I suppose, and then a long hike."

"What kind of neighborhood is it?"

"It looked all right when I drove through it with the Khourys. I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. A basic white working-class neighborhood, as far as I could tell. Why?"

"You mean like Bensonhurst or Howard Beach? What I mean is will TJ stand out like a dark thumb?"

"I never even thought of that."

"Because there are parts of Brooklyn where they get funny when a black kid walks down the street, even if he is conservatively dressed in high-top sneakers and a Raiders jacket, and I just know he has one of those haircuts."

"He's got a sort of geometric design cut into the hair on the back of his neck."

"I thought he might. I hope he comes back alive."

"He'll be all right."

Later in the evening she said, "Matt, you were just making work for him, weren't you? TJ, I mean."

"No, he's saving me a trip. I would have had to run out there myself sooner or later, or catch a ride with one of the Khourys."

"Why? Couldn't you use your old cop tricks to wheedle the number out of the operator? Or look it up in a reverse directory?"

"You have to know a number to look it up in a reverse directory. A reverse directory has phones listed numerically, and you look up the number and it tells you the location."

"Oh."

"But there is a book that lists pay phones by location, yes. And yes, I could call an operator and pass myself off as a police officer in order to obtain a number."

"So you were just being nice to TJ."

"Nice? According to you I was sending him to his death. No, I wasn't just being nice. Looking in the book or conning the operator would give me the number of the pay phone, but it wouldn't tell me if the number's posted on the phone. That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Oh," she said. And, a few minutes later, "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you care if the number's posted on the phone? What difference does it make?"

"I don't know that it does make a difference. But the kidnappers knew to call those phones. If the number's posted, well, then there was nothing special about their knowledge. If not, they found out one way or another."

"By conning the operator or looking in the book."

"Which would mean that they know how to con an operator, or where to find a list of pay phones. I don't know what it would mean.

Probably nothing. Maybe I want to get the information because it's the only thing about the phones I can find out."

"What do you mean?"

"It's been nagging at me," I said. "Not what I sent TJ for, that's easy enough to find out with or without his help. But I was sitting up last night and it struck me that the only contact with the kidnappers was phone contact. That was the only trace they left of themselves. The abduction itself was clean as a whistle. A few people saw them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didn't leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khoury's house in Bay Ridge."

"There's no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?"

"There ought to be," I said. "I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged."

"Even local calls?"

"Uh-huh. That's how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It's not like a gas meter where they're just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account."

"How long do they keep that data?"

"Sixty days."

"So you could get a list—"

"Of all the calls made from a particular number. That's how the data is organized. Say I'm Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made."

"But that's not what you want."

"No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk."

"That's not available yet, is it?"

"No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous."

"If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone—"

"Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones."

"Is that important?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what's important. But it doesn't matter because I can't get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That's not the way they're stored, so they can't be accessed that way."

"I don't know anything about computers."

"Neither do I, and it's a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don't understand half the words they use."

"I know what you mean," she said. "That's how I feel when we watch football."

I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.

Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work.

What I wanted— well, that was the problem, I didn't really know what I wanted. I was fishing.

Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.

My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn't do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims— at least until they get to court, where the defendant's attorney gets to violate them all over again in front of God and everybody. Nobody was going to give out the names of rape victims over the phone.

So my pitch changed for the sex-crimes units. I became a private investigator again, Matthew Scudder, retained by a film producer who was making a TV movie of the week about abduction and rape. The actress selected for the lead— I wasn't authorized to disclose her name at the present time— wanted an opportunity to research the role in depth, specifically by meeting one-on-one with women who had themselves been through this ordeal. She wanted, essentially, to learn as much as she could about the experience short of undergoing it herself, and the women who assisted her would be compensated as technical advisers and could be listed as such in the credits or not, as they preferred.

Naturally I didn't want names or numbers, and had no intention of attempting to initiate contact myself.

My thought was that perhaps someone from the unit, possibly a woman who had done victim counseling, could make contact with whatever victims struck her as likely prospects. The woman in our scenario, I explained, was abducted by a pair of sadistic rapists who forced her into a truck, brutalized her, and threatened her with grievous physical harm, threatened specifically to maim her. Obviously someone whose experience was in any way parallel to our fictional narrative would be just what we were looking for. If such a woman was interested in helping us out, and perhaps in helping in some small way other women who might be exposed to such treatment in the future, or who had already gone through it, and might find it a cathartic, even a therapeutic, experience to coach a Hollywood actress in what could be a showcase role—

The whole thing played surprisingly well. Even in New York, where you're always coming upon film crews shooting location sequences on the street, the mere mention of the movie business tends to turn people's heads. "Just have anyone who's interested give me a call," I wound up, leaving my name and number. "They don't have to give their names. They can remain anonymous throughout the entire process, if they want."

Elaine walked in just as I was finishing my pitch to a woman in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit. When I got off the phone she said, "How are you going to get all of these calls at your hotel? You're never there."

"They'll take messages at the desk."

"From people who don't want to leave a name or number? Look, give them my number. I'm usually here, and if I'm not they'll at least get an answering machine with a woman's voice on it. I'll be your assistant, I can certainly screen the calls and get names and addresses from the ones who are willing to

give them. What's wrong with that?"

"Nothing," I said. "Are you sure you want to do it?"

"Sure."

"Well, I'm delighted. That was the Manhattan unit I was just talking to, and I called the Bronx earlier. I was saving Brooklyn and Queens for last, since we know they've operated there. I wanted to work the bugs out of my routine before I called them."

"Is it bug-free now? And I don't want to horn in, but is there any advantage in my making the calls? You sounded low-key and sympathetic as could be, but it seems to me that whenever a man talks about rape there's the undercurrent of suspicion that he's getting off on the whole thing."

"I know."

"I mean, all you have to do is say 'movie of the week' and the subtext a woman gets is that sisterhood is going to be violated yet again in another tacky exploitation drama. Whereas if I say it the subliminal message is that the whole thing's under the sponsorship of NOW."

"You're right. I think it went reasonably well, especially on the Manhattan call, but there was a lot of resistance there."

"You sounded terrific, honey. But can I try?"

We went over the premise first to make sure she had it down, and then I got through to the Sex Crimes Unit at the Queens County DA's office and gave her the phone. She was on the phone for almost ten minutes, at once earnest and polished and professional, and when she rang off I felt like applauding.

"What do you think?" she asked. "A little too sincere?"

"I thought you were perfect."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh. It's almost scary to see what a slick liar you are."

"I know. When I was listening to you I thought, he's so honest, where did he learn to lie like that?"

"I never knew a good cop who wasn't a good liar," I said. "You're playing a part all the time, creating an attitude to fit the person you're dealing with. The same skill's even more important when you work private, because you're constantly asking for information you've got no legal right to. So if I'm good at it, you can say it's part of the job description."

"For me, too," she said. "Now that I come to think of it. I'm always acting, it's what I do."

"That was great acting last night, incidentally."

She gave me a look. "It's tiring, though, isn't it? Lying, I mean."

"You want to quit?"

"Screw that, I'm just getting warmed up. Who else do I do, Brooklyn and Staten Island?"

"Forget Staten Island."

"Why? No sex crimes in Staten Island?"

"All sex is a crime in Staten Island."

"Har har."

"No, they could have a unit, for all I know, although the incidence there is nothing compared to the other boroughs. But I can't see our three men in a van zooming across the Verrazano Bridge bent on rape and mayhem."

"So I've only got one more call to make?"

"Well," I said, "there are also sex-crime units in the various police-department borough commands, and there are frequently rape specialists in individual precincts. You just ask the desk officer to route the call to the appropriate person. I could make a list, but I don't know how much time you've got for this."

She gave me a come-hither look. "If you've got the money, honey,"

she said archly, "I've got the time."

"As a matter of fact, there's no reason why you shouldn't get paid for this. There's no reason you shouldn't be on Khoury's payroll."

"Oh, please," she said. "Whenever I find something I like somebody tries to get me to take money for it.

No, seriously, I don't want to get paid. When this is all but a memory you can take me out for a really extravagant dinner somewhere, okay?"

"Whatever you say."

"And afterward," she said, "you can slip me a hundred for cab fare."

Chapter 8

I stayed around while she charmed the daylights out of a staffer in the Brooklyn DA's Office, then left her with a list of people to call and walked to the library. There was no need for me to supervise her. She was a natural.

In the library I did what I'd started doing the previous morning, working my way through six months'

worth of The New York Times on microfilm. I wasn't looking for abductions because I didn't really expect to find any reported as such.

Instead I was assuming that they had occasionally snatched someone off the street without anyone witnessing the act, or at least without their reporting it. I was looking for victims who turned up dead in parks or alleys, especially victims who'd been sexually assaulted and mutilated, specifically dismembered.

A problem lay in the fact that touches of that sort weren't very likely to make the papers. It's standard police policy to withhold specific details of mutilation in order to spare themselves a variety of aggravations— phony confessions, copycat offenders, false witnesses.

For their part, newspapers tend to spare their readers the more graphic details. By the time the news gets to the reader, it's hard to tell what happened.

Some years ago there was a sex criminal who was killing young boys on the Lower East Side. He lured them onto rooftops, stabbed or strangled them, and amputated and carried off their penises. He was at it long enough for cops on the case to come up with a name for him. They called him Charlie Chopoff.

Naturally enough, the police reporters called him the same thing—

but not in print. There was no way any New York newspaper was going to provide that little detail for their readers, and there was no way to use the nickname without the reader having a pretty fair idea as to just what was chopped off. So they didn't call him anything, and reported only that the killer had mutilated or disfigured his victims, which could cover anything from ritual disembowelment to a lousy haircut.

Nowadays they might be less restrained.

ONCE I got the hang of it, I was able to go through the weeks with fair speed. I didn't have to scan an entire paper, just the Metropolitan section, where the local crime news was concentrated. The biggest time waster was the same one I always have in a library, which is a tendency to get sidetracked by something interesting that has nothing to do with what brought me there. Fortunately they don't carry comics in the Times.

Otherwise I'd have had to wrestle with the temptation to wallow in six months'

worth of Doonesbury.

By the time I got out of there I had half a dozen possible cases jotted down in my notebook. One was particularly likely, the victim an accounting major at Brooklyn College who went missing three days before a birdwatcher encountered her one morning in Green-Wood Cemetery. The story said that she'd been subjected to sexual assault and sexual mutilation, which suggested to me that someone had done a job on her with a carving knife. Evidence at the scene indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and dumped at the cemetery, and police had drawn a similar conclusion about Marie Gotteskind, that she had already been dead when her killers discarded her body on the Forest Park Golf course.

I got back to my hotel around six. There were messages from Elaine and both Khourys, along with three slips announcing simply that TJ had called.

I called Elaine first and she reported that she'd made all the calls.

"By the end I was beginning to believe my own cover story," she said. "I was thinking to myself, This is fun, but it'll be even more fun when we make the movie. Except there's not going to be a movie."

"I think somebody already made it."

"I wonder if anybody will actually call."

I got Kenan Khoury and he wanted to know how things were coming along. I told him I had managed to open up several lines of inquiry, but that I didn't expect quick results.

"But you think we got a shot," he said.

"Definitely."

"Good," he said. "Listen, why I called, I'm going to be out of the country on business for a couple of days. I have to go to Europe. I'm flying out tomorrow from JFK and I'll be coming back Thursday or Friday. Anything comes up, just call my brother. You've got his phone number, don't you?"

I had it on a message slip right in front of me, and I called it after I got off the phone with Kenan. Peter sounded groggy when he answered and I apologized for waking him. He said, "No, that's okay, I'm glad you did. I was watching basketball and I dozed off in front of the set. I hate when that happens, I always wind up with a stiff neck. Reason I called, I was wondering if you were planning to go to a meeting tonight."

"I thought I would, yes."

"Well, how about if I pick you up and we go together? There's a Saturday night meeting in Chelsea I got in the habit of going to, nice little group, meets at eight o'clock in the Spanish church on Nineteenth Street."

"I don't think I know it."

"It's a little out of the way, but when I first got sober I was in an outpatient program in that neighborhood and this became my regular Saturday meeting. I don't get down there as much these days but having the car and all, you know I've got Francine's Toyota—"

"Yes."

"So suppose I pick you up in front of your hotel around seven-thirty? That sound good?"

I said it sounded fine, and when I left the hotel at seven-thirty he was parked out in front. I was just as glad I didn't have to walk anywhere. It had been drizzling on and off during the afternoon, and now it was coming down steadily.

On the way to the meeting we talked about sports. The baseball teams were a month into spring training, with the season opener less than a month away. I'd been having a little trouble getting interested this spring, although I would probably get caught up in it once they got going. For the time being, though, most of the news was about contract negotiations, with one player sulking because he knew he was worth more than $83 million a year. I don't know, maybe he's worth it, maybe they're all worth it, but it makes it hard for me to give a damn whether they win or lose.

"I think Darryl's finally ready to dig in and play," Peter said. "He's been hitting a ton the past few weeks."

"Now that we don't have him anymore."

"Always the way it is, huh? Years we spend waiting for him to reach his full potential, and we got to see him do it in a Dodger uniform."

We parked on Twentieth Street and walked around the block to the church. It was Pentecostal, and held services in both Spanish and English. The meeting was in the basement, with perhaps forty people in attendance. I saw a few faces I recognized from other meetings around town, and Pete said hello to quite a few people, one of whom said she hadn't seen him in a while. He said he'd been going to other meetings.

The format was one you didn't encounter that often in New York.

After the speaker told his story, the meeting broke up into small groups, with seven to ten people sitting around each of five tables. There was a table for beginners, one for general discussion, one to discuss one of the Twelve Steps, and I forget what else. Pete and I both wound up at the general discussion table, where people tended to talk about what was going on in their lives at the moment and how they were managing to stay sober. I usually seem to get more out of that than discussion that centers around a topic, or on one of the philosophical underpinnings of the program.

One woman had recently started work as an alcoholism counselor, and she talked about how it was difficult for her to retain her enthusiasm for meetings after spending eight hours dealing with the same issues at her job. "It's hard to keep it separate," she said. A man talked about the fact that he had just been diagnosed as HIV-positive, and how he was dealing with that. I talked about the cyclical nature of my work, and how I grew restless when I went too long between jobs and put myself under too much pressure when a job did come along. "It was easy to balance things out when I drank," I said, "but I can't do that anymore. Meetings help."

Pete talked when it was his turn, mostly commenting on some points other people had made. He didn't say much about himself.

At ten o'clock we stood in a big circle and held hands and said the prayer. Outside, the rain had softened some. We walked to the Camry and he asked if I was hungry. I realized that I was. I hadn't had dinner, just a slice of pizza on the way home from the library.

"You like Middle Eastern food, Matt? I don't mean your hole-in-the-wall falafel stand, I mean the real thing. Because there's a place in the Village that's really good." I said it sounded fine. "Or you know what we could do, we could take a run out to the old neighborhood. Unless you spent so much time on Atlantic Avenue lately that you're sick of it."

"It's out of the way, isn't it?"

"Hey, we got a car, right? We got it, we might as well get some use out of it."

He took the Brooklyn Bridge. I was thinking that it was beautiful in the rain, and he said, "I love this bridge. I was reading the other day how all the bridges are deteriorating. You can't just leave a bridge alone, you got to maintain it, and the city does, but not sufficiently."

"There's no money."

"How did that happen? For years the city could afford to do whatever it had to do, and now all the time there's no money. Why is that, do you happen to know?"

I shook my head. "I don't think it's just New York. It's the same story everywhere."

"Is it? Because all I see is New York, and it's like the city is crumbling. The whadayacallit, the infrastructure? Is that the word I want?"

"I guess."

"The infrastructure's falling apart. There was another water main break last month. What it is, the system is old and everything's wearing out. Who ever heard of water mains bursting ten, twenty years ago? Do you remember that sort of thing happening?"

"No, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Lots of things happened that I didn't notice."

"Yeah, well, you got a point. That would go for me, too. Lots of things still happen that I don't notice."

The restaurant he chose was on Court half a block from Atlantic.

At his suggestion I had the spinach pie appetizer, which he assured me would be entirely different from the spanakopita they served in Greek coffee shops. He was right. The main course, a casserole of cracked wheat and sauteed chopped meat and onions, was also excellent, but too much for me to finish.

"So you can take it home," he said. "You like this place? Nothing fancy, but you can't beat the food."

"I'm surprised they're open this late."

"Saturday night? They'll be serving until midnight, probably later."

He leaned back in his chair. "Now the way to cap off the meal, if you were to do it right. You ever had something called arak?"

"Is that anything like ouzo?"

"Sort of like ouzo. There's a difference, but yeah, it's sort of like it.

You like ouzo?"

"I wouldn't say I liked it. There used to be a bar on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth called Antares and Spiro's, a Greek joint—"

"No kidding, with that name."

"— and sometimes I'd drop in after a long night drinking bourbon at Jimmy Armstrong's and have a glass or two of ouzo for a nightcap."

"Ouzo on top of bourbon, huh?"

"As a digestive," I said. "To settle the stomach."

"Settle it once and for all, from the sound of it." He caught the waiter's eye, signaled for more coffee. "I really wanted to drink the other day," he said.

"But you didn't."

"No."

"That's the important thing, Pete. Wanting to is normal. This isn't the first time you wanted to drink since you got sober, is it?"

"No," he said. The waiter came and filled our cups. When he'd walked away Pete said, "But it's the first time I considered it."

"Seriously considered it?"

"Yeah, I would say seriously. I would say so."

"But you didn't do it."

"No," he said. He was looking down into his coffee cup. "What I almost did, I almost copped."

"Drugs?"

He nodded. "Smack," he said. "You ever have any experience with heroin?"

"None."

"Never even tried it?"

"Never even considered the possibility. Never even knew anybody who used it, not in the days when I was drinking. Except for the kind of people I had occasion to arrest."

"Smack was strictly for lowlife types, then."

"That's how I always saw it."

He smiled gently. "You probably knew some people who used it.

They just didn't let you know it."

"That's possible."

"I always liked it," he said. "I never shot it, I only snorted. I was afraid of needles, which was lucky, because otherwise I'd probably be dead of AIDS by now. You know, you don't have to shoot to develop a jones."

"So I understand."

"I got dopesick a couple of times and it scared me. I kicked it with the help of booze, and then, well, you know the rest of the story. I kicked junk on my own, but I had to go to a rehab to stop drinking. So it was alcohol that really kicked my ass, but in my heart I'm a junkie as much as I'm a drunk."

He took a sip of coffee. "And the thing is," he said, "it's a different city out there when you can see it through a junkie's eyes. I mean, you were a cop and all, and you've got street smarts, but if the two of us walk down the street together I'm going to see more dealers than you are. I'm gonna see them and they're gonna see me and we're gonna recognize each other. I go anywhere in this city and it wouldn't take me more than five minutes to find somebody happy to sell me a bag of dope."

"So? I walk past bars all day, and so do you. It's the same thing, isn't it?"

"I guess. Heroin's been looking real good lately."

"Nobody ever said it was going to be easy, Pete."

"It was easy for a while. It's harder now."

In the car he took up the theme again. "I think, why bother? Or I go to a meeting and I'm like, who are these people? Where are they coming from? All this shit about turning everything over to a Higher Power and then life's a piece of cake. You believe in that?"

"That life's a piece of cake? Not quite."

"More like a shit sandwich. No, do you believe in God?"

"It depends when you ask me."

"Well, today. That's when I'm asking you. Do you believe in God?" I didn't say anything at first, and he said, "Never mind, I got no right to pry. Sorry."

"No, I was just trying to come up with an answer. I guess the reason I'm having trouble is I don't think the question's important."

"It's not important whether there's a God or not?"

"Well, what difference does it make? Either way I've got the day to get through. God or no God, I'm an alcoholic who can't drink safely.

What's the difference?"

"The program's all about a Higher Power."

"Yes, but it works the same whether He exists or not, and whether I believe in Him or not."

"How can you turn over your will to something you don't believe in?"

"By letting go. By not trying to control things. By taking appropriate action and letting things work out the way God wants them to."

"Whether He exists or not."

"Right."

He thought about it for a moment. "I don't know," he said. "I grew up believing in God. I went to parochial school, I learned what they teach you. I never questioned it. I got sober, they said get a Higher Power, okay, no problem. Then when those fuckers send Francey back in pieces, man, what kind of a God lets something like that happen?"

"Shit happens."

"You never knew her, man. She was a really good woman. Sweet, decent, innocent. A beautiful human being. Being around her made you want to be a better human being yourself. More than that. It made you feel like you could." He braked at a red light, looked both ways, went on through it. "Got a ticket like that once. Middle of the night, I stop, there's no one for miles in either direction, so what kind of idiot stands there waiting for the light to change? Fucking cop's lying doggo halfway down the block with his lights out, gives me a ticket."

"I think we got away with it this time."

"Looks like it. Kenan uses smack now and then. I don't know if you knew that."

"How would I know it?"

"I didn't figure you did. Maybe once a month he'll snort up a bag.

Maybe less than that. It's recreational with him, he'll go to a jazz club and do up a bag in the john so that he can get into the music better. The thing is, he didn't let Francey know. He was sure she wouldn't approve, and he didn't want to do anything that would lower him in her eyes."

"Did she know he trafficked in it?"

"That was different. That was business, that was what he did. And he wasn't going to stay in it forever. A few years and out, that's his plan."

"That's everybody's plan."

"I see what you're saying. Anyway, she was cool about it. It was something he did, it was his business, it was off to one side in a separate world. But he didn't want her to know he used sometimes." He was silent for a beat. Then he said, "He was stoned the other day. I called him on it and he denied it. I mean, fuck, man, he's gonna deceive a junkie on the subject of dope? Man's obviously high and swears he's not.

I guess it's because I'm clean and sober, he don't want to put temptation in front of me, but give me credit for some basic intelligence, huh?"

"Does it bother you that he can get high and you can't?"

"Does it bother me? Of course it fucking bothers me. He's going to Europe tomorrow."

"He told me."

"Like he's got to do a deal right away, build up the cash. That's a good way to get arrested, rushing into deals. Or worse than arrested."

"Are you worried about him?"

"Jesus," he said. "I'm worried about all of us."

ON the bridge back to Manhattan he said, "When I was a kid I loved bridges. I collected pictures of them. My old man got it into his head that I should be an architect."

"You still could, you know."

He laughed. "What, go back to school? No, see, I never wanted that for myself. I didn't have an inclination to build bridges. I just liked to look at 'em. I ever get the urge to pack it in, maybe I'll do a Brodie off the Brooklyn Bridge. Be something to change your mind halfway down, wouldn't it?"

"I heard a guy qualify once. He came out of a blackout on one of the bridges, I think it was this one, on the other side of the railing and with one foot in space."

"Seriously?"

"He sounded pretty serious to me. No memory of having gone there, just whammo, there he is with one hand on the rail and one foot in the air. He climbed back and went home."

"And had a drink, probably."

"I would think so. But imagine if he came to five seconds later."

"You mean after he took another step? Be a horrible feeling, wouldn't it? Only good thing about it is it wouldn't last long. Oh, shit, I should have got in the other lane. That's all right, we'll go a few blocks out of our way. I like it down here, anyway. You get down here much, Matt?"

We were driving around the South Street Seaport, a restored area around the Fulton Street fish market.

"Last summer," I said, "my girlfriend and I spent the afternoon, walked around the shops, ate at one of the restaurants."

"It's a little yuppied up, but I like it. Not in the summer, though.

You know when it's nicest? On a night like this when it's cold and empty and you've got a light rain falling. That's when it's really beautiful down here." He laughed. "Now that," he said, "is a stone junkie talking, man.

Show him the Garden of Eden and he'll say he wants it dark and cold and miserable. An' he wants to be the only one there."

IN front of my hotel he said, "Thanks, Matt."

"For what? I was planning on going to a meeting. I should be thanking you for the ride."

"Yeah, well, thanks for the company. Before you go, one thing I've been meaning to ask you all night.

This job you're doing for Kenan. You think you got much of a chance of getting anyplace with it?"

"I'm not just going through the motions."

"No, I realize you're giving it your best shot. I just wondered if you figured there was much chance it would pay off."

"There's a chance," I said. "I don't know how good it is. I didn't start out with a lot to work with."

"I realize that. You started with next to nothing, the way it looked to me. Of course you're looking at it from a professional standpoint, you're going to see it differently."

"A lot depends on whether some of the actions I'm taking lead anywhere, Pete. And their actions in the future are a factor, too, and they're impossible to foresee. Am I optimistic? It depends when you ask me."

"Same as your Higher Power, huh? The thing is, if you come to the conclusion that it's hopeless, don't be in a rush to tell my brother, huh?

Stay on it an extra week or two. So he'll think he did everything he can."

I didn't say anything.

"What I mean—"

"I know what you mean," I said. "The thing is, it's not something I have to be told. I've always been a stubborn son of a bitch. When I start something I have a hell of a time letting go of it. I think that's the main way I solve things, to tell you the truth. I don't do it by being brilliant. I just hang on like a bulldog until something shakes loose."

"And sooner or later something does? I know they used to say nobody gets away with murder."

"Is that what they used to say? They don't say it much anymore.

People get away with murder all the time." I got out of the car, then leaned in to finish the thought. "That's in one sense," I said, "but in another sense they don't. I don't honestly think anybody ever gets away with anything."

Chapter 9

I was up late that night. I tried sleeping and couldn't, tried reading and couldn't, and wound up sitting in the dark at my window, looking out at the rain falling through the light of the streetlamps. I sat and thought long thoughts. "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

I read that line in a poem once, but you can think long thoughts at any age, if you can't sleep and there's a light rain falling.

I was still in bed when the phone rang around ten. TJ said, "You got a pen, Glenn? You want to get one, write this down." He reeled off a pair of seven-digit numbers. "Better write down seven-one-eight, too,

'cause you got to dial that first."

"Who will I get if I do?"

"Woulda got me, was you home first time I called you. Man you harder to get than lucky! Called you Friday afternoon, called you Friday night, called you yesterday all day and all night up until midnight. You a hard man to reach."

"I was out."

"Well, I more or less 'stablished that. Man, that was some trip you sent me on. Ol' Brooklyn, it go on for days."

"There's a lot of it," I agreed.

"More than you'd have a need for. First place I went, rode to the end of the line. Train came up above ground and I got to see some pretty houses. Looked like an old-time town in a movie, not like New York at all. Got to the first phone, called you. Nobody home. Went chasin' out to the next phone, and man, that was a trip. I went down some streets that the people looked at me like, nigger, what you doin'

here? Didn't nobody say anything, but you didn't have to listen real hard to hear what they thinkin'."

"But you didn't have any trouble."

"Man, I never have trouble. What I do, I make it a point to see trouble 'fore trouble sees me. I found the second telephone, called you a second time. Didn't get you 'cause you wasn't there to be got. So I thinkin', hey, maybe I'm closer to some other subway, on account of I am miles from where I get off the last one. So I go into this candy store, say, like, 'Can you tell me where the nearest subway station is?' I say it like that, you know, you woulda thought you was hearin' an announcer on TV. Man looks at me, says, 'Subway?' Like it not just a word he don't know, it a whole concept he can't get his mind around.

So I just went back the way I came, man, back to the end of the Flatbush line, 'cause at least I knew how to do that."

"I think that was probably the closest station anyway."

"I think you right, 'cause I looked at subway map later an' I couldn't see one closer. One more reason to stay in Manhattan, man.

You never far from a train."

"I'll keep it in mind."

"I sure was hopin' you be there when I called. Had it all set, I run the number by you, say, 'Call it right now.' You dial, I pick up an' say,

'Here I am.' Tellin' you about it now it don't seem all that cool, but I couldn't wait to do it."

"I gather the phones had the numbers posted."

"Oh, right! That's what I left out. Second one, the one way to hell an' gone out Veterans Avenue?

Where everybody look at you real strange? That phone did have the number posted. The other one, Flatbush an' Farragut, it didn't."

"Then how'd you get it?"

"Well, I resourceful. Told you that, didn't I?"

"More than once."

"What I did, I call the operator. Say, 'Hey, girl, somebody screwed up, ain't no number here on the phone, so how do I know where I callin'

from?' An' she say how she got no way to tell what the number is of the phone I'm at, so she can't help me."

"That seems unlikely."

"Thought so myself. Thought they got all that equipment, you ask them a number at Information an' they

can say it about as fast as you can ask it, so how come they can't give you the number of your own phone? An' I thought, TJ, you fool, they took out the numbers to fuck up dope dealers, an' here you go soundin' just like one. So I dial 0 again, on account of you can call the operator all day long an' never spend no quarter, it a free call. An' you know you get somebody different every time you call. So I got some other chick, an' this time I took all the street out of my voice, I said,

'Perhaps you can help me, miss. I'm at a pay phone and I have to leave the number with my office for a call back, and someone defaced the phone with spray-painted graffiti in such a way that the number is impossible to make out. I wonder if you could possibly check the line and supply it for me.' An' I ain't even through sayin' it when she's readin'

off the number for me. Matt? Oh, shit."

The recording had cut in to ask for more money.

"Quarter ran out," he said. "I got to feed in another one."

"Give me the number, I'll call you."

"Can't. I ain't in Brooklyn now, I didn't happen to con nobody out of the number for this particular phone." The phone chimed as his coin dropped. "There, we be all right now. Pretty slick, though, way I got the other number. You there? How come you ain't sayin' nothing'?"

"I'm stunned," I said. "I didn't know you could talk like that."

"What, you mean talk straight? 'Course I can. Just because I street don't mean I be ignorant. They two different languages, man, and you talkin' to a cat's bilingual."

"Well, I'm impressed."

"Yeah? I figured you'd be impressed I got to Brooklyn an' back.

What you got for me to do next?"

"Nothing right now."

"Nothin'? Sheee, ought to be something I can do. I did good on this, didn't I?"

"You did great."

"I mean, man didn't have to be a rocket scientist to find his way to Brooklyn an' back. But it was cool how I got the number out of that operator, wasn't it?"

"Definitely."

"I was bein' resourceful."

"Very resourceful."

"But you still ain't got nothin' for me today."

"I'm afraid not," I said. "Check with me in a day or two."

"Check with you," he said. "Man, I'd check with you anytime you say if only you was there to be checked with. You know who oughta have a beeper? Man, you oughta have a beeper. I could beep you, you'd say to yourself, 'Must be TJ tryin' to get hold of me, must be important.'

What's so funny?"

"Nothing."

"Then how come you laughin'? I be checkin' with you every day, my man, because I think you need me workin' for you. An' that is final, Lionel."

"Hey, I like that."

"Thought you would," he said. "Been savin' it up for you."

IT rained all day Sunday and I spent most of the day in my room. I had the TV on and switched back and forth between tennis on ESPN and golf on one of the networks. There are days when I can get caught up in a tennis match but this wasn't one of them. I can never get caught up in golf, but the scenery is pretty and the announcers aren't as relentlessly chatty as they are in most other sports, so it's not a bad thing to have going on while I sit thinking about something else.

Jim Faber called in the middle of the afternoon to cancel our standing dinner date. A cousin of his wife's had died and they had to go put in an appearance. "We could meet someplace now for a cup of coffee,"

he said, "except it's such a lousy day outside."

We spent ten minutes on the phone instead. I mentioned that I was a little worried about Peter Khoury, that he might pick up a drink or a drug. "The way he talked about heroin," I said, "he had me wanting some myself."

"I noticed that about junkies," he said. "They get this wistful quality, like an old man talking about his lost youth. You know you can't keep him sober."

"I know."

"You're not sponsoring him, are you?"

"No, but neither is anybody else. And last night he was using me like a sponsor."

"Be just as well if he didn't formally ask you to be his sponsor.

You've already got a professional relationship with his brother, and to an extent with him."

"I thought of that."

"But even if he did, that still doesn't make him your responsibility.

You know what constitutes being a successful sponsor? Staying sober yourself."

"It seems to me I've heard that."

"From me, probably. But nobody can keep anybody else sober. I'm your sponsor. Do I keep you sober?"

"No," I said. "I stay sober in spite of you."

"In spite of me or to spite me?"

"Maybe a little of both."

"What's Peter's problem, anyway? Feeling sorry for himself because he can't drink or shoot up?"

"Snort."

"Huh?"

"He stayed away from needles. But yeah, that's most of it. And he's pissed off at God."

"Shit, who isn't?"

"Because what kind of a God would let something like that happen to a wonderful person like his sister-in-law?"

"God pulls that kind of shit all the time."

"I know."

"And maybe he had a reason. Maybe Jesus wants her for a sunbeam. Remember that song?"

"I don't think I ever heard it."

"Well, I hope to God you never hear it from me, because I'd have to be drunk to sing it. Do you figure he was fucking her?"

"Do I figure who was fucking who?"

"Whom. Do you figure Peter was fucking the sister-in-law?"

"Jesus," I said. "Why would I think that? You've got a hell of a mind, you know that?"

"It's the people I hang around with."

"It must be. No, I don't think he was. I think he's just feeling sad, and I think he wants to drink and take dope, and I hope he doesn't. That's all."

I called Elaine and told her I was free for dinner, but she'd already made arrangements for her friend Monica to come over. She said they were going to order Chinese food in, and I was welcome to come over, that way they could order more dishes. I said I would pass.

"You're afraid it'll be an evening of girl talk," she said. "And you're probably right."

Mick Ballou called while I was watching 60 Minutes and we talked for ten or twelve of them. I told him in the same breath that I had booked a trip to Ireland and that I'd had to cancel it. He was sorry I wasn't coming over but glad I'd found something to keep me busy.

I told him a little about what I was doing, but not the sort of person I was working for. He had no sympathy for drug dealers, and occasionally supplemented his income by invading their homes and taking their cash.

He asked about the weather and I said it had been raining all day.

He said it was always raining there, that he was finding it hard to recall what the sun looked like. Oh, and had I heard? They'd come up with evidence that Our Lord was Irish.

"Is that so?"

"It is," he said. "Consider the facts. He lived with his parents until He was twenty-nine years old. He went out drinking with the lads the last night of His life. He thought His mother was a virgin, and herself, a good woman, she thought He was God."

THE week started slowly. I hammered away at the Khoury case, if you want to call it that. I managed to get the name of one of the officers who'd caught the Leila Alvarez homicide. She was the Brooklyn College student who'd been dumped in GreenWood Cemetery, and the case belonged not to the Seventy-second Precinct but to Brooklyn Homicide.

A Detective John Kelly had headed the investigation, but I had trouble reaching him and was reluctant to leave a name and number.

I saw Elaine Monday and she was disappointed that her phone hadn't been ringing off the hook with calls from rape victims. I told her she might not get any response, that it was like that sometimes, that you had to throw a lot of baited hooks in the water and sometimes you went a long time without a bite. And it was early, I said. It was unlikely the people she spoke to would have made any calls until the weekend was over.

"It was over today," she reminded me. I said if they did make calls it might take them a while to reach people, and it might take the victims a couple of days to make up their minds to call.

"Or not to call," she said.

She was more discouraged when Tuesday passed without a call.

When I spoke to her Wednesday evening she was excited. The good news was that three women had called her. The bad news was that none of the calls looked to have anything to do with the men who had killed Francine Khoury.

One was a woman who had been ambushed by a solitary assailant in the hallway of her apartment house. He had raped her and stolen her purse. Another had accepted a ride home from school with someone she took to be another student; he had shown her a knife and ordered her into the backseat, but she had been able to escape.

"He was a skinny kid and he was alone," Elaine said, "so I thought it was stretching it to figure him as a possibility. And the third call was date rape. Or pickup rape, I don't know what you'd call it. According to her, she and her girlfriend picked up these two guys in a bar in Sunnyside. They went for a ride in the guys' car and her girlfriend got carsick so they stopped the car so she could get out and vomit. And then they drove off and left her there. Can you believe that?"

"Well, it's not very considerate," I said, "but I don't think I'd call it rape."

"Funny. Anyway, they drove around for a while and then they went back to her house and they wanted to have sex with her, and she said nothing doing, what kind of a girl do you think I am, blah blah blah, and finally she agreed that she'd fuck one of them, the one she'd been more or less partnered with, and the other one would wait in the living room. Except he didn't, he walked in while they were getting it on and watched, which did little to cool his ardor, as you might have figured."