Justice Denied

9

Harry Bello walked the night streets of Alphabet City, that part of the upper lower East Side of Manhattan where the avenues are named not for great men or events but for letters of the alphabet, as if it might have been inappropriate to name them after anything admirable. There are many slums in New York that have fallen from better times-Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were once proud middle-class districts-but Alphabet City was built as a slum and had not risen in the world. It contains block after block of New Law tenements, five-story walk-ups with fire escapes and air shafts. Down the bleak avenues parade the storefronts of bodegas, liquor stores, cheap furniture and clothing marts, record and hairdressing rooms, pentecostal churches, and the rest of the economy of poverty, all heavily grilled and shuttered at night.

In the sixties, tens of thousands of young people seeking bohemia flooded into New York, and naturally gravitated to the famous art enclave of Greenwich Village. They were thirty years too late; the rents there were designed for art patrons rather than actual artists and their friends. So they moved east, displacing elderly Ukranians, and the East Village was born. There, middle-class kids on the bum could live in agreeable squalor, take drugs, catch sexual diseases, and (a few of them) make music and art.

Where the East Village ends and Alphabet City begins is a question only real estate brokers care much about. To a homicide cop like Bello the presence of a borderland like this one, between the faux poor and the hard cases, meant mainly that it was a place where taxpayers’ children in search of excitement were particularly likely to get themselves killed.

Every night for the past week Bello had walked the streets around midnight. This was after a full day’s work acting as Marlene Ciampi’s private detective on a variety of other cases. Bello didn’t need much sleep, and he had no hobbies except Lucy Karp, who was not available in the wee hours.

He was looking for a middle-aged black man, the man who had called 911 at 1:58 one evening a month or so ago and said, “There’s a dead woman on Fifth Street off Avenue A.” When the operator had asked for his name and number, he had shouted, “You heard me. Fifth and A,” and hung up. Bello had listened to the tape many times. The pronunciation was diagnostic: “there’s” was “deh’s”; “Fifth” was “Fi’t”; “dead” was “daid”; and, most interesting, “heard” was “hoid.” You didn’t get that much among the recent generations. The guy would be over fifty.

Bello had canvassed all the houses on both sides of 5th between avenues A and B and come up blank. A lot of “no comprende” on 5th Street. Bello understood enough Spanish to understand that something was being hidden, but not enough to squeeze for it. So he continued to walk the night streets. He bought cigarettes and coffee in the bodegas. He stared down the guapos swaggering on the streets. He was polite, almost courtly, to the women.

After a while the people got used to him, and when they found he was not interested in their minor grifts, they almost forgot about him, except that, to the majority of the people, it was nice having their own private lajara on the street at night. He became invisible. He was good at it; he felt invisible.

On this night Harry Bello crosses Avenue A to a little comidas y criollas, where he buys a cup of excellent coffee and a greasy sugar bun. He reads the News, the other three men in the place, Puerto Ricans and a Dominican, chat, smoke, read El Diario. Two whores come in for beer, indulge in light raillery, leave with a scream of tires. An elderly black man in dark green work clothes comes in, buys a pack of Camels and a newspaper. When the man gives his order, Bello puts down his paper. There is a brief, inexplicable hiatus in the Spanish conversation.

The black man leaves. Bello, without a word, rises and drifts out behind him. The black man is mid-sixties; he walks stiffly, but his shoulders are square and his back is erect. He enters a building on A off 7th Street. Bello follows him into the building. The man hears a step sounding behind him, whirls in fear. Bello holds up his gold shield. He says, “Tell me about the girl. How she died.”

Marlene said, “He said they were laughing?”

“Yeah,” said Bello. “Laughing their heads off. Shouting stuff. Have a nice trip. Like that. Two of them, that he saw over the parapet.”

They were in her office, and Bello was telling her what he had learned from William Braintree, sixty-four, a Con Ed maintenance worker who, walking home from his swing-shift job at a local substation, had nearly been struck by the falling body of a young woman.

“No, he couldn’t ID them,” Bello continued, anticipating as usual. “Just saw silhouettes.” Pause. “The problem is proof.”

Marlene struggled to keep up with the detective. “Um, Harry, you know who did it?”

“Oh, yeah. There’ll be somebody saw it. Let you know.” He got up and left.

Weeks now pass. The season moves into full summer, the City heats ups, and geographically literate New Yorkers recall that they live at the steamy latitudes of Madrid and Naples. Having no corrida to distract them, the poor cannot pass the unbearable summer like the dignified Madrileños and so take up the habits of the Neapolitans, shooting and stabbing one another in increasing numbers.

Lennie Bergman’s case against the despicable Emilio Morales collapses amid scandal. Bergman receives a scathing lecture from the judge. Karp is subjected to a public tongue-lashing by the district attorney, who is able to use some tough-guy lines that he has been saving up for years. (“What kind of whorehouse are you running down there, Karp? You can’t keep your people in line, maybe I better find someone who can!”) Karp takes it calmly, as he does most things these days. He is convinced that he will never recover from his impending operation. Nevertheless, he prepares the case against Hosie Russell for the grand jury and gets his indictment.

Lucy Karp grows two tiny fangs. She is not amused. Sleep is banished. In desperation, and secretly, Marlene dips a rag in marsala wine and sugar and sticks it in Lucy’s little gob. It works like a charm. Marlene decides not to think about her daughter’s brain cells perishing in squadrons, or what Karp will have to say if he finds out.

Emilio Morales returns to his neighborhood, to no great enthusiasm among the home boys. The People’s Republic of East 112th Street having not, like the state of New York, suspended the death penalty, Morales is found one sunny morning among the trash cans with two through the ear. Another listless murder investigation begins.

Frangi and Wayne do as little as possible on the Tomasian case. It is the height of the murder season, and they have much to occupy them. They visit the mistress of Mehmet Ersoy, from whom they learn that the late Turk was a big spender, unsurprising information. They also learn that Sarkis Kerbussyan is precisely what he appears to be, a wealthy Armenian art collector with no obvious criminal ties. Aram Tomasian languishes in jail. Gabrielle Avanian is still among the missing. She had never returned from California after the credit card ran out. The police have ceased to look for her with any ardor.

Geri Stone, the sister, collapses the day after Susan Weiner’s murder. She is briefly hospitalized and then released, laden with tranquilizing drugs she forgets to take. Her grooming slips, her work deteriorates. She revokes the paroles of an unacceptably high proportion of her case load, and her supervisor asks her to take extended sick leave. She haunts the Criminal Courts building, mumbling, occasionally shouting at nothing. She fits right in.

On 5th Street, in August, around midnight, a woman was being tortured. Her screams and the heavy, meaty sounds of blows shot out into the blackness and melded with the other sounds of the moist summer night-the Spanish music playing on the big radios propped up on the stoops, the punk and heavy metal and salsa from stolen stereos, the roar of cars, the shrieks of children out too late, loud conversation from small knots of men dealing drugs, the buzz of a thousand televisions. It was not an unusual addition to the summer symphony in Alphabet City. Nobody called the cops.

Later that night, two men emerged from 525 East 5th Street, carrying a long bundle wrapped in a dirty green blanket. They walked a half block west to a housing project on Avenue A, cursing the unwieldy weight, and tossed their burden unceremoniously next to a blue Dumpster. They walked away. The bundle moved slightly and a mewling sound arose from it, but no one noticed.

“This is a bad one,” said Mimi Kellerman, passing Marlene an eight-by-ten photograph. “They took this at Beekman when they brought her in.” Kellerman was one of Marlene’s four attorneys in Sex Crimes, a birdlike woman with a crisp head of curls and a hard eye. If she said it was bad …

Marlene looked. It was a photo of a woman naked from the waist up. It was bad, and Marlene thought for an instant of her Jane Doe. The woman’s face was one huge bruise, but worse that that, it had been crumpled like a beer can: the optical orbits and the cheekbones crushed, the nose flattened, the teeth bashed in, the jaw broken. Bruises also covered her upper body, and there was a gaping hole full of clotted blood on the surface of one breast. Above the hole, obscenely grinning, was a small tattoo of a skull with a red rose in its teeth.

Marlene tossed the photo down. “Sexual activity too, no doubt?”

Kellerman read from a page in a folder. “Raped repeatedly and sodomized, substantial tearing of the vaginal and anal mucosa, internal bleeding, foreign objects forced into both anus and vagina-”

“What objects?”

“Let’s see … in the anus, a rubber grip from a motorcycle. In the vagina, a folded-over plastic card, some sort of credit card. Nice, huh?”

“I’m enthralled. I assume an autopsy has been scheduled. Who’s handling it for Homicide?”

Kellerman gave her an odd look. “What homicide? She’s alive.”

A bubble of nausea rose in Marlene’s belly, and she felt the dampness of sweat on her forehead. That the tortured flesh in the photograph was still vulnerable to pain seemed a grosser violation than mere murder.

“How is she? Can she talk?”

“No, she’s still unconscious. Not that she would be able to actually say anything-he did a good job on her mouth.”

Marlene picked up the photograph again. “Christ! It’s hard to believe anyone survived this. She’s got a hole in her chest the size of my fist.”

Kellerman looked at her folder again. “Oh, that-that’s the least of her problems. It looks like hell, but it’s superficial compared to the head and facial damage. Apparently he took an actual bite out of her.”

“A bite? And this was where, Alphabet City?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“Because he did it before. A Jane Doe, except then he tossed her off a roof after he chewed on her. Not ‘he,’ I should say ‘they.’ Harry found the guy who called in the Jane Doe, and he saw two people throw the Jane Doe off the roof. Speaking of which, do we have an ID on this woman?”

“Not exactly,” said Kellerman. “She was nude under the blanket they found her in. But, um, that credit card? It had a name on it.” She read it off. “Gabrielle P. Avanian.” Then she said, “Marlene, why is your mouth hanging open?”

“Yes, Marlene,” said Karp, “I do think it’s crazy, but luckily it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m going into the hospital tomorrow. I’ll be lying on my bed of pain, clinging tenuously to life. Somebody else can think about the Armenians.”

“I hate it when you play for sympathy,” said Marlene, getting up and walking to the window of his office, “especially for a minor operation. What about me? You think it’s going to be fun being a single parent for however long? I don’t see why you can’t just stay at home until your cast is off.”

“I explained this already, babe,” he said, controlling his irritation. “I’m starting the Russell trial. I can stay in my office while it’s on. After, I can get somebody to carry me up the stairs and take some time off.”

Marlene stiffened her jaw and turned to look at him, ready to spew invective, but something in his eyes made her check. Was it fear? Karp wasn’t afraid of anything. He was the solid, steady, unchanging one. She was the nut prone to weird fantasies. A tide of empathy burst through the elaborate structure she had built, as a quasi-modern woman, to keep the “relationship” on track and prevent herself from being trodden on. She walked over to him and touched his hand. He gripped her fingers, tight enough to sting. They remained that way silent, for minutes, while the sounds of the working day flowed in through the glass of the door.

Karp cleared his throat, and spoke again about what she had discovered, as if nothing important had happened.

“I think it’s a good break, this woman, but tying it to the Tomasian case is speculation beyond the facts. It’s loopy to tie a sexual predator to a political assassination-”

“But we agree that it looks less and less like a real political assassination,” Marlene objected. “Tomasian’s being framed. Look, what’s the big anomaly in this case? The money. Where did the money come from? Blackmail? Maybe Ersoy knew somebody with money who was into snuff sex. The victim decides a hit is cheaper than paying off forever. The killer decides to frame Tomasian. He knows Tomasian has an alibi, so he has to wax the girlfriend too. But she runs. When she has to come back, maybe because she’s broke, they grab her and do her like they did the Jane Doe.”

Karp held up an admonishing hand. “Marlene, stop! You don’t know any of this. Even if the same guy did Avanian and the other girl, it could still be a nutcase selecting at random, like you thought before. There’s nothing else solid to tie these Alphabet City cases to Ersoy.”

“Then why did she split?” Marlene asked with some heat. “Why did she leave town the day after the murder? With her boyfriend accused of the crime? It wasn’t like she just decided to take a vacation and didn’t know about it. This case made the network news, for chrissake. She went on the lam for a reason, Butch.”

“Okay, Marlene, you’re right,” said Karp crankily. “It’s a great story. So what are you gonna do with it? Where does it take you? Nowhere. Roland’ll laugh in your face if you bring him that connection.” Then, observing the growing tightness of her jaw, he temporized.

“Look, let’s review the plot here. What do we know as facts?” He ticked them off on his long fingers. “One, Ersoy is killed. Two, he has a big pile of money in a box. Three, Tomasian’s alibi disappears after the crime. Four, a woman who may be Gabrielle Avanian is badly beaten. Five, another unidentified woman is thrown off a roof, the only association with Avanian being they both were bitten. What else? Okay, not quite a fact, but I’m almost positive that Kerbussyan was lying to me when he said he didn’t know anything about Ersoy’s cash.”

“I still don’t see why it couldn’t be a sex thing.”

“You have sex things on the brain, Marlene,” said Karp, snappish, “and don’t tell me all about how you were right about sex rings that once. You want to know what I’d do? I’d find out where that money came from. And I’d find out who killed those women.”

Marlene did not like being lectured to by Karp in this way, which was one reason why she had maneuvered in the past to get out from under his direct supervision. On the other hand, she had laden him with enough lectures of her own, and regarded that aspect of their marriage as an inevitable result of two lawyers literally, rather than figuratively, screwing one another on a regular basis. Also, to her credit, she was able to see, through the fog of conjugality, the reason in what he was saying. Her preferred view was still little more than a fairy tale.

“Okay, how would you approach the money angle?” she challenged. “Kerbussyan?”

“No, he’s extremely slick and hard to get at. I’d go through Ersoy’s connections. The Turks at the U.N. His hang-outs.”

“Wasn’t there a girlfriend?” Marlene asked.

“Uh-uh, the girlfriend’s a semi-pro. She knows from nothing, according to the report Wayne and Frangi filed-he was just one of her regular dates. But come to think of it, I don’t recall that anybody checked out the U.N. yet. I mean, why should they, since they had the guy already?”

“Look,” she said after a moment of thought, “don’t get mad, but this is starting to look like a big complicated thing. On the assumption that my cases are connected somehow to Tomasian-no, don’t look like that, I said assumption-why don’t me and Harry do some poking around on the Tomasian case while you’re loafing in the hospital? Maybe drop by the U.N., see what we can shake out.”

“No, but you’ll do it anyway. But do you really think a diplomat hung out in the East Village and threw a girl off a roof and beat another one to a pulp?”

“Well, as to that,” said Marlene blithely, “I was thinking more of a diplomat paying to have it done. Harry already knows who did the jobs on the women.”

“What? Who was it?”

“Harry won’t say yet,” she replied.

“He won’t say? What the hell does that mean? Why did we just go through this whole song and dance if he’s already found the killer?”

Marlene shrugged. “What Harry knows and what you can bring to court are two different things.”

“What kind of statement is that, Marlene? If he has evidence sufficient to identify the killer, he should bring it to us to see if there’s a case. He’s not supposed to make those judgments. Or are we talking about his mystic intuition?”

“Come on, Butch. It’s Harry. You know he has his little ways.”

“Okay, fine,” Karp said grumpily. “Do your thing. Just keep Roland informed, okay?”

“You’re upset,” she said inanely.

“No, I’m not. Yeah, I am. I think that’s why I’m hot to do this Russell case. It’s clean. The guy did it. We caught him. We have a case. We’ll convict. It’s like a cold shower after all this horseshit Armenian business.”

After Marlene left, Karp took two little white pills. Since he had scheduled the operation, he had become more generous to himself with respect to codeine. He figured he wasn’t going to become a junkie because of a few days’ excess, and he was willing to trade a slight fuzziness for increased mobility-that and surcease from continual pain and the irritability it caused.

Over the next half hour a pleasant numbness crept through his body. He signed some routine papers and then, growing restless, he walked down to Ray Guma’s office to talk about some things he wanted done while he was in the hospital.

“Well, you look happy,” observed Guma as Karp came into the steel and glass cage that served him for an office. Raney, the cop, was there too. They had been listening to a tape recording. Guma flicked the machine off, and Karp sat down clumsily in a spare chair.

“Raney, I think you oughta make him pee in a bottle. I think he’s been tapping the evidence lockers.”

“I have a prescription,” said Karp with dignity.

“That’s how it starts,” said Raney. “Then it’s boosting car stereos and gold chains. Do you have a street name yet?”

“Yeah, Butch the Crip. What was that tape?”

“The thoughts of Chairman Joey; it’s from the tap we got on Castelmaggiore’s phone-on the Viacchenza shootings. Wanna hear? It’s pretty interesting if you like stupid dirty talk.”

Karp made a go-ahead gesture. Guma pushed the rewind. As the tape whined backward, he said, “Okay, on this part you’re going to hear, he’s talking to Little Sally Bollano, who’s sort of the smoother-over for the family at this point. They got another guy who handles it when they don’t need to smooth it over. The problem is Lou Viacchenza, the older brother, was a made guy. He’d done a lot of good business for the Bollanos over the years, and Joey had him whacked without clearing it with the family. So Joey’s got to show it’s for business, not, like, he just got pissed and had them taken out.”

“I understand,” said Karp. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“You got it,” said Guma, “not to mention he has to discuss this problem without actually coming out and saying anything indictable. He hopes.”

“You figure they know there’s a tap in?”

“They’d be assholes if they didn’t,” replied Guma, and pushed the play button.

The first voice on the tape was Little Sally Bollano’s, a nasal snarl.

“What the fuck, Joey, you don’t know how we do business? How the fuck long you been doing fuckin’ business, Joey? Answer me that!”

“A long time, Sally.” This voice was low and grumbling: Joey Castles.

“So you shoulda fuckin’ known better, right?” the voice of Sally Bollano continued. “Lemme tell you something, Joey: the Don don’t know shit about this, I been making sure of that; he finds out, old as he is, he’d fuckin’ have your culliones on a plate. So, what I’m saying, this thing, it gotta be put right. Okay, the women, the kids, they gotta be taken care of. You understand what I’m saying, Joey? Out of your fuckin’ pocket. Not my fuckin’ pocket. Not the Don’s fuckin’ pocket. Capisc’?”

A significant pause on the line. Then Joey said, “It was business, Sally. It wasn’t, like, they parked in my fuckin’ parking place, like personal. They were taking us off, Sally. They had their own fuckin’ little like warehouse over by Ozone Park-”

“Hey! I din’ say they shouldn’ta been. Did I fuckin’ say that? Been up to me, hey, go do it! It was the way it went down, Joey. No talk, no … no fuckin’ courtesy. Guys are fuckin’ pissed.”

“Okay, they’re pissed, the cocksuckers-what, I gotta open my fuckin’ veins? I’ll do the right thing with the family-what the fuck’s it to me? But, you fuckin’ believe it, man, next time some cocksucker rips all a you off, I din’ see nothin’, I din’ hear nothin’, I ain’t gonna do nothin’. The fuck I care, right?”

“Hey, that kinda talk, Joey-”

“Hey, cut the shit, Sally, I’m fuckin’ shakin’ already. So, is that it? Everybody’s fuckin’ happy now?”

“No, that ain’t all. They’re fuckin’ unhappy about the Turk, they wanna know he’s gonna hang in there.”

“Hey, let me worry about the fuckin’ Turk. The Turk ain’t gonna do nothin’.”

“And what you said, before, this thing goin’ down, it’s still on with them all?”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay-hey, here’s a fuckin’ tip, Sally, you worry about your business and let me fuckin’ worry about mine-”

Karp cleared his throat and said, “Hold it there, Goom. Roll it back about a minute.” Guma did so; the machine squawked and played the last few sentences of dialogue again.

“What is this Turk business?” asked Karp.

“Street name. We think it could be Turk Minzone.”

“Who is …?”

“A Bollano soldier-Red Hook boy, nobody special.”

“You like him for the shotgun on the Viacchenzas?”

Guma waggled a hand, palm down. “It’s not his usual line of work. He does sports action and a little sharking. Joey could’ve called in a favor, though, had him do the hit. I mean, it’s not like he got scruples about it.”

Raney asked, “Why do they call him Turk?”

Guma said, “Turk? It’s an expression. They say, ‘Il fuma’ com’ un turco.’ The guy chain-smokes De Nobilis; he’s always got one in his face. The story is he ground one out in Jilly Manfredo’s eye when Jilly wouldn’t come up with his vig.”

Karp said, “Yeah, but he said ‘the Turk,’ not just ‘Turk.’ Why would he do that?”

“No big thing, Butch. It’s like saying ‘the Babe’ instead of Babe Ruth, no? Or, what, you got another idea?”

“Um, I don’t know. We got a murder involving an actual Turkish person.”

“What, the hit on that dip? Roland’s thing? You think there’s a connection? But that’s the vic. Why would Sally be worried about a Turk being under control if the Turk’s already dead.”

“Another Turk?” suggested Raney.

Guma wrinkled his nose and curled his lip back. “Guys, come on! This is your basic gangland slaying, like they say in the papers. Don’t fuck me over with Turks, Assyrians, Armenians, or whatever.”

“Maybe I’ll check out where Minzone spent the night of,” said Raney.

“Now, that makes sense,” said Guma.

Marlene and Harry Bello rode up the elevator in One U.N. Plaza, the undistinguished building across the street from the great glass Secretariat of the United Nations, where the missions had their offices. Like most people educated in the City, Marlene had made the ritual visit to the place in the fifth grade, and never again thereafter. Harry made no sign that he was impressed with the world body. They rode up with three men chatting in an incomprehensible guttural tongue. For all they knew, it might have been Turkish.

The second secretary of the mission, a Mr. Abdelaziz Kilic, welcomed them gravely into his small office, sat down behind his cluttered desk, and indicated chairs for them to sit in. He was a smallish man with slicked-back graying black hair and a nervous hatchet face. He was wearing a double-breasted suit that seemed to date from the first time that such suits had been popular. Marlene recalled having read that it was always 1937 in Istanbul, and she now understood what that meant. Kilic’s desk was covered with brown folders tied carefully with literal red tape.

Mr. Kilic was in no hurry to get to the meat of the appointment. Coffee was ordered and delivered by a large, swarthy woman in a severely tailored black suit. They drank the heavy, sweet brew and talked about the heat of the day, whether it was hotter than in Turkey, which Mr. Kilic pronounced Turk-iy-eh, and about the many and varied differences between the two nations. That done, the talk switched to crime in general, to crime in the City, and at last, with many a parenthesis, to the crime in question.

“A truly dreadful happening,” observed Kilic. “We at the mission were most shocked.” He shook his head rapidly back and forth to indicate the severity of the shock. “But please, you must tell me what I can do for you. As I understand it, the investigation is concluded. You have hands on the criminal, isn’t it so?”

Marlene was about to speak when Harry, to her surprise, answered the question. “Yes, we do have a suspect in custody, sir,” he said, “but in order to complete our case, it’s necessary to find out all we can about the victim of the crime, especially to discover any reasons the victim might have been killed other than the reason we tell the jury he was killed. That way the defense won’t be able to place a doubt in the jury’s mind.”

This was the longest sentence Marlene had ever heard Harry utter, and she had to struggle to keep herself from gaping at him.

Kilic registered profound puzzlement. “What doubt can there be?” he asked. “Mr. Ersoy was assassinated by Armenian terrorists.”

“And why would they want to kill Mr. Ersoy?” asked Bello. “Was he a particular enemy of Armenians?”

Kilic smiled at this naïveté. “They are terrorists, Mr. Bello. Mehmet was a Turk; one is as good as another. This man you have arrested is well known to us. He has written abusive letters to us, full of the usual provocative lies.”

Somewhat to her surprise, Marlene found herself asking, “What lies are those, Mr. Kilic?”

An elegant dismissive gesture of the hand. “They accuse us of massacre during the first war.”

“And that’s not true? The Turks didn’t kill any Armenians?”

He gave her a sharp look, then smiled appeasingly at Bello. Who is this silly woman? “It was wartime. The Armenians were allied with the enemies of the Turkish people. Some were therefore removed to places where they could not practice their mischief. Of course, there were some deaths in the traveling, but massacre? There was none. We have rejected these lies authoritatively many times, and-”

Harry broke in. “Be that as it may, sir, we’re really more interested in Mr. Ersoy’s personal affairs. For example, sir, to your knowledge, did Mr. Ersoy have any business interests in the United States?”

“Business? No, he was a professional diplomat. He was not in business.”

Bello inscribed this information into a small notebook. “How about relatives? Did Mr. Ersoy have any relatives in the States?”

This required some thought. “I do not believe so. He was unmarried.”

“But he had a family-in Turkey, I mean.”

“He had a brother, I know. A quite prominent curator of one of the national museums, and an archaeologist as well. Other than that, I would have to look up. Is it essential?”

“Not for now,” said Bello. “Did Mr. Ersoy have any close personal relations with any of the mission staff?”

“Personal …?”

“Yes, close friends, people he was always with.”

Kilic shrugged slowly and elegantly. “Mehmet was a friendly man. He was friendly with everyone.”

“Did he keep a desk diary, or did his secretary keep one, and may we be allowed to look at it?”

A significant pause. “To answer your question, I suppose he did keep a diary, for appointments, but I believe the chief of mission would have to authorize such an inspection.”

At this remark Harry scribbled again in his notebook, but this time he looked over at Marlene and fixed her with his eyes, which made at that instant a tiny motion toward the door. Then he continued with his interview. “Might we see a list of all the employees of the mission with their responsibilities?”

A list was produced. Harry read it and began to discuss individuals with Mr. Kilic. Marlene excused herself and slipped out.

She did not know quite how she knew, but she understood precisely what Harry Bello had asked her to do with his millimetric twitch of the eyes. Outside the office, at a secretary’s desk, she spotted the grave woman who had served the coffee and asked her where Mehmet Ersoy’s office had been. Following these directions, she found herself in a similar secretarial anteroom. Here the person at the desk was, fortunately, a young man. Marlene smiled and introduced herself, and perched on his desk in such a way that the slit of her maxiskirt dangled open, revealing to his gaze a rich slice of nyloned thigh.

It was thereafter not hard for Marlene to get this young man to inform her that the office diary of Mehmet Ersoy was in the hands of Mr. Ahmet Djelal. Mr. Djelal was with the economic section, the young man told Marlene, but when he said the name, he averted his eyes in a manner that suggested to Marlene that whoever Djelal was, he was not the man to see about the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.

Undismayed by this setback, Marlene asked if the mission kept a telephone log, adding that Mr. Kilic was particularly anxious that Marlene have a look at it. The young man seemed delighted to provide her with this document, which Marlene rapidly scanned, taking notes in shorthand.

When she returned to Kilic’s office, she found the diplomat and Harry Bello deeply involved in a discussion of the table of organization of the Turkish mission. Kilic was smiling and seemed willing to carry on all day about who reported to whom on what issues. Harry brought the conversation to an abrupt halt as soon as he saw Marlene come in.

“I think that’s enough for now, sir; you’ve been very helpful,” he said, closing his notebook and standing. The diplomat rose too, smiling and bobbing his head, uttering polite phrases. Harry paused and seemed to think of some detail. “Oh, one other thing. Mr. Kilic, can you think of any reason why Mr. Ersoy should have had nearly a million dollars in U.S. currency in a personal safe-deposit box?”

An indeterminate look passed over the diplomat’s bland face. They waited several beats in uncomfortable silence before he spoke.

“Ah, that. An embarrassment. I had not thought that this would have a bearing on the prosecution of the criminals. Surely, it is not necessary to have this exposed to the public view?”

“That depends on what the money represented,” said Bello. “But you say you knew about it?”

“Ah, yes. One of Mr. Ersoy’s tasks was cultural … shall we say, retrieval. Türkiye is the repository of much ancient treasure, as I’m sure you know. Unfortunately, now and in the past, some of our patrimony is diverted by smugglers and thieves. Much of this comes to New York, for the art market here. My government finds it convenient to repatriate these treasures quietly and without the notice of the law. A payment is made in cash, the object is returned under diplomatic seal.” He paused and tapped his mustache. “I tell you this to avoid any shadow of impropriety falling on poor Mehmet, and so that the way will be clear to punish the terrorists responsible. My government, and perhaps your government as well, would appreciate it if these dealings would remain confidential.”

Marlene said, “If, as you say, this money has no connection with the shooting, there’s no reason for it to come out.”

After that, in a flurry of pleasantries and bows, they left. In the lobby of the Secretariat, Marlene clutched Harry’s arm and said, “Harry, Harry-you can talk! It’s a miracle! I brought out the big guns for you, Harry-my rosary with the transparent plastic beads filled with water from Lourdes. And it worked.”

The corners of Bello’s mouth lifted a fraction of an inch-paralytic hilarity. He said, “So?”

Back to the gnomic. Marlene realized that Bello could slip into the persona of a skilled and articulate interviewer the way he could melt into a doorway during a tail job. It was part of the equipment.

“I got a look at the phone logs. He spent a lot of time on the horn with this Ahmet Djelal, the one who has his diary.”

“Security chief. It figures. The art.”

“Yeah. Another thing, the last couple weeks of his life he made about a dozen real long outside calls to the same number.”

Bello took out his notebook and wrote down the number Marlene gave him. He went to a phone booth in the lobby and dialed the reverse directory service the phone company makes available for the police.

“Who was it?” asked Marlene when Bello returned.

Bello read from his notebook. “Somebody named Sarkis Kerbussyan.”