Goulart’s nonsense was obnoxious at times, if Zach bothered to pay attention to it. But, on the other hand, the New Yorker was one of the best detectives he had ever worked with. Goulart had an instinctive sense about people that was almost like mind-reading. He was funny. And generous, for all his blabber. Basically, a good partner all around.
And there was this, too: despite all the hogwash the Brooklyn hard-ass spewed out, there was always a bit of truth mixed in. April Gomez had, in fact, been promoted to detective because she was a Latina and because some loud-mouthed pol and the media had complained about the absence of Latina detectives on the job. She was a sweet girl and by no means stupid, but she had as much business being called to a crime scene as a vase of carnations. Everyone in the department who knew anything about it knew that this was true.
That said, April was doing a good job with the boy right now. The kid seemed mesmerized by her gentle sisterly gaze. Still clutching his one-eyed Teddy bear, he was speaking to her in a fluid half-whisper.
So when Goulart started up again: “It’s like we’re all supposed to pretend that women are what they aren’t and if we pretend hard enough that’s going to somehow make it true. Which is the opposite of police work, when you think about it. Which I mean is, what? It’s figuring out what’s true no matter what you want it to be. Take the Muzzies, for example . . .”
. . . Zach lifted a finger and said, “Turn your face off and listen.”
Goulart’s voice trailed to silence, and the two of them focused on the monitor, standing just beneath them on an old conference table.
“I think April just asked him if he heard any names mentioned,” said Zach.
The boy’s tremulous voice continued, only just audible—and suddenly April Gomez, assuming the detectives were watching her, glanced up, startled, at the video camera hanging in one corner of the ceiling above her.
And simultaneously Goulart said, “What?”
And simultaneously Zach said, “Did you hear that?”
April apparently couldn’t believe it either, because she turned back to the boy and asked him to repeat himself: “Dijo Abend?”
The boy nodded solemnly. In a corner of the room, an older black woman from Children’s Services looked on with her hands folded on the skirt of her purple dress. Even she seemed to understand that something important had happened.
“Si,” said Mickey Paz. “Señor Abend. Señor Abend.” Then he went off into another musical strain of something akin to Castilian.
Zach and Goulart listened, leaning their heads forward as if that would help them understand.
“Are you getting any of this?” said Goulart. “What exactly did he say about Señor Abend?”
Zach, who knew just enough Texican to avoid a bar fight, said, “I think he said one of the men was named Abend, that someone called one of the killers Señor Abend.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Goulart. “You mean, as in: Abend was there himself? In the room? Standing there while they’re hacking these people apart? You think that’s even possible?”
“No,” Zach murmured. “I don’t. Sure ain’t likely, anyway.”
“But that is what he’s saying?”
“Near as I can make out. Have we found any security footage from the scene yet? Anyone who took a picture with a cell phone? Any pictures at all?”
“Last I heard, they were still canvassing,” said Goulart. “But I’ll go check.”
He detached himself from Zach’s shoulder and left the room. Zach stayed where he was, still gazing down intently at the monitor. He remained like that, in hyper-focus mode, for another few seconds; but as the boy was now rattling on much too rapidly for him to comprehend, his mind eventually drifted. To Dominic Abend. Who was said to be the chieftain of the BLK. Which had wafted out of the post-World War II gulags to infiltrate every level of Soviet tyranny; and had then become the very medium of Eastern Europe’s post-Communist gangsterocracy; and had then, with the fall of the Iron Curtain that had once contained it, spread like a miasma over the free nations of Western Europe, infecting every organized crime operation on the continent and in Britain, transforming all of them into mere agents of itself.
Now, these last few years, the Brüderlichkeit was said to have traveled here, to the U. S. of A., breathing a new, poisonous, unifying zombie-life into the homeland’s beleaguered organized crime operations—Cosa Nostra and Yakuza, the black Disciples and the Mexican mob, and the Russian Bratva, which had never been more than a tendril of the BLK anyway, and all the rest.
Back in Europe, journalists and academics had heard of the Brotherhood, though no one had yet seemed to grasp its pervasive dominance. But the fact that the organization had now come to America—this was unknown to the media and the professoriate alike. Evidence, testimony, reports, and statistics simply did not reflect the BLK’s mushrooming influence in the U.S.
But law officers in all the major cities sensed it nonetheless, the way family doctors sense a new, more drug-resistant strain of an old disease. Coast to coast, the law dogs confided in one another: criminal operations were proceeding with heightened brutality and smoother efficiency. Gangs were harder to penetrate, their transactions harder to detect. Old capos, lieutenants, and muscle-men were vanishing without a trace. Suspects who once would have betrayed their mothers for a plea bargain suddenly preferred to take the fall. A new silence seemed to underlie the tips of even the most reliable confidential informants. None of the cops was certain, but they all felt it: a new cancer of corruption was eating into the country. The underworld was on the rise.
All of it was linked to Abend. In lawman legend, at least, Abend was the source and controlling genius of the invasion.
Dominic Abend was a German-Russian billionaire of unknown occupation and murky antecedents. He had gone invisible after the USSR collapsed, and then risen into the consciousness of Western law enforcement as more shadow than light, as an empty Dominic-Abend-shaped space at the center of what little information they had about him. There were a few old photographs of him. A few mentions of him in criminal testimony. Some hints from tipsters here and there. An occasional sighting. And, most recently, a digital snapshot taken by an ambitious plainclothesman working the crowd at Times Square on New Year’s eve one year back. That last suggested Abend, like the BLK, might himself be in the country.
So little Mickey Paz’s statement that Abend—the international criminal mastermind—had been personally present at the scene of a mass murder turned Zach Adams’s blood hunter-hot with excitement. Because Abend and the BLK were the reasons Task Force Zero had been formed in the first place. Finding them—stopping them—destroying them: this was Extraordinary Crimes’ underlying commission.
Zach’s mind was called back to the moment by his phone buzzing in his jacket pocket—a text message, judging by the length of the vibration. He began to reach for it but stopped with his hand hovering in front of his sternum as something new developed on the Observation Room monitor.
The little boy in the Interview Room had begun speaking English. He had slipped into it unconsciously, it seemed, as April Gomez’s warmth and gentleness slowly soothed and relaxed him.
“They kept saying to him again and again, ‘Where is it? Where is it?’” said Mickey Paz, the fingers of one hand absently massaging his Teddy bear’s ear as if to comfort it. “But Papa didn’t know. He said, ‘I don’t know. I swear.’ He kept saying that to them, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“Where is what?” said April Gomez, who slipped into English just as smoothly as the boy in her effort to keep him comfortable. “What were the men looking for, Mickey? What were they trying to find? Did they say?”
Zach noticed the little boy’s eyes shift to the left—which might possibly mean he was trying to access an auditory memory. Zach also noticed that the kid went on fiddling with the Teddy bear’s ear—it was touching; pathetic.
Then, haltingly, the boy said, “Stu . . . stu . . . stupe bassard . . . s
tum . . . they said a word I don’t know. Stoomp bassard. Bassard.”
“Bastard?” suggested April Gomez. “Stupid bastard?
“No!” whispered Zach urgently to the empty room. “Don’t tell him what he’s saying, April.”
The boy thought about it and then gave a strong and certain nod. “Bastard. Yes. Stupid bastard.”
Well, sure, thought Zach. Now that you put it in his head.
April Gomez sat back in her chair, glancing up at the video camera with an air of satisfaction. “Stupid bastard,” she repeated.
With a flicker of annoyance at the corner of his mouth, Zach reached for his phone again to check that text. But he was interrupted—again—as the door came open fast and Goulart charged in after it.
“Look at this.”
He slapped two pages onto the desk and Zach moved closer, leaned in over them for a better look. Two printed photos, two blurry images. Goulart pointed at one, then the other.
“That’s the one the uncle took on New Year’s eve, right?—the one the feds think is the guy Interpol lost track of in Brussels five years ago. And that—is from last night, from a security cam Paz himself had placed in his building. The killers took out the cam above the door, but this one was hidden in the super’s basement flat and trained up at the door through the window.”
“Because Paz knew they were coming,” said Zach, “and wanted to make sure we got a picture of him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it was just to foil the neighborhood vandals.”
Zach turned the second photo this way and that under his fingertips as he studied it. Neither this image nor the other was very clear. The New Year’s eve shot—which he’d examined many times before—showed a man standing absolutely still at the edge of a dense and roiling Times Square mob. The man was fifty, or maybe fifty-five or a fit sixty. Tall, square-shouldered, wearing a long dark overcoat, his hands in the pockets. He had a shaven head, a bulbous nose, and thin lips. And his expression. . . . Possibly Zach projected this onto him—probably—the shot was so grainy, how could anyone tell for sure?—but the man’s expression seemed predatory, the smile sadistic, the glint in the eyes likewise cruel. It was as if the man were eyeballing the humanity massed around him and trying to decide how he would best like to have it cooked for his supper.
The other photo—the one under his fingertips—the one from just before the Paz slaughter—showed four men hustling through the autumn darkness toward the front door of Paz’s grimy white-bricked building. Three of the men were hunched over, their chins sunk into their overcoats, their hands gripping black dry-cleaning bags in which, Zach assumed, they were hiding their sheathed longswords.
The fourth man—the man surrounded by the others—was, as near as Zach could tell, the same man as the one in the New Year’s eve photo: tall, broad, shaven-headed, European, cruel.
“If that—” said Goulart pointing to the Paz shot, “is the same man as that,” pointing now to the New Year’s eve photo, “and that is the same as the guy Interpol lost track of in Brussels. . . .”
“And if the guy in Brussels was in fact Dominic Abend. . . .” Zach added.
“Right. If he was.”
“Well, then,” said Zach with a wry smile, “we are on his trail for damn sure!”
Broadway Joe Goulart grinned, nodding with that silent laughter of his.
Whereupon Zach’s phone buzzed again—which is what it did if he didn’t read a text soon enough after the first buzz. He glanced at the monitor on the desk. The lady from Children’s Services was standing up out of her chair now, apparently bringing Mickey’s interview with April Gomez to a close. Zach reached into his pocket, drew out the phone, and called up the message.
“What’s the matter?” said Goulart casually. It wasn’t that Zach had gone pale or anything like that. He’d barely changed expressions at all. It was just that Goulart was that good. He could read faces like he was reading a street sign.
Zach shook his head as he slid his phone back into his pocket. “Nothing,” he said with a quick frown. “Just—the usual flapdoodle.”
He didn’t for a minute think Goulart believed him, but that was beside the point. Whether Goulart believed him or not, there was no possibility Zach was going to tell his partner what had been in that text, or who had sent it, or that he had been dreading just such a message for weeks and weeks, and that now that it had come, the low boil of suspense that had been robbing him of sleep in the small hours of more nights than he cared to think about was bubbling over into a sour and sickening certainty that the worst mistake of his life had come back to haunt him.
3
GRACE
Driving home through darkfall on the out-borough streets, Zach listened to the news on the radio—or, that is, he set the radio to the news station and drove without listening at all. The radio reporters—one reporter after another—described the second day of looting, rioting, and arson fires in London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and Athens far away. The urgency in their voices, at once pompous and terse, became a wordless drone, part of Zach’s aural ambience, along with the sea-like sough of tires on pavement and the hoarse rush of air from his Pontiac’s vents. He gazed out the windshield at the twilight streets—at brownstones and supermarkets, at white headlights and red taillights, at brown-skinned women pushing silver shopping carts under Chinese restaurant marquees and Spanish grocery awnings—and half to himself and half to God, he cursed the day that Margo Heatherton had found him.
She had found him. He knew that now. She had seen—well, everyone had seen—the photograph of him after the Emily Watson kidnapping, the famous Cowboy shot of him holstering his nine as he swaggered out of the Flint Hill farmhouse where he’d out-gunned Ray Mima. She had set her sights on him and sought him out. But, of course, he hadn’t realized that at the time.
At the time, there were a lot of things he didn’t realize. He was not a man who thought about his own emotions much. They came and went, a distraction more than anything. As far as he was concerned, emotions did little more than distort the shape and color of the landscape of events, turned it gray when he was down, turned it bright when he was feeling good. Which was all only in his mind, because the landscape of situations and events remained unchanged no matter how he felt, no matter how his feelings colored it. Best to keep his eyes on the world and out of his own shirt pocket, that was his philosophy. Let his heart feel what it would, it made no difference to the facts of the matter.
At the time Margo found him, Zach’s wife, Grace, normally sweet-natured, cheerful, and efficient, was feeling low and disoriented after their move to New York. She missed her mama and her sisters and her church people back in Houston. She was harried with relocation details and, though she never said as much, Zach sensed that she resented the long hours he had to spend on the job. For the first time in their marriage, she gave off an air of sweat and weariness when he approached her. Meanwhile, he himself was coming down from what he hadn’t even realized was the excitement of his year-plus of fame, suffering delayed withdrawal from the drug-like thrill of the chase and the gunfight and the public triumph afterward. He was lonesome and bored.
Not that he considered any of this an excuse for what happened. Zach Adams never excused himself for anything. He carried in his mind a precise catalogue of his moral errors going back to the age of three, and he lost sleep over all of them. It was not about excuses—it was just that he realized now, looking back, how restless and dissatisfied he’d been, whereas at the time he hadn’t given it a thought. It was only emotion.
Margo Heatherton had had a friend in the governor’s press office and had gotten his e-mail address from her—that’s what she said. She wrote to him asking if she could interview him for background to a novel she was writing about a kidnapping. That sounded different, anyway. After a month or two of back-and-forth, Zach had arranged to have lunch with her. She was a poised, elegant 25-year-old with long, silky blond hair and fine rose-white features. She had a sympathetic a
ir and a mischievous wit. Not the usual class of woman he came into contact with: she had an aura of high society.
He cursed the day.
The Pontiac now veered from the crowded commercial streets onto a grid of neighborhood back roads. The heavy-hearted Zach traveled from stop sign to stop sign until he reached his home territory: green lawns divided by front walks leading to front steps rising to the front doors of two-story red-brick houses with white bay windows below and gray cross-gabled roofs above—one after another of them.
He pulled into his driveway. As he was stepping out of the car, his five-year-old boy Tom came banging through the house’s storm door. He shouted “Daddy!” and dashed to Zach across the lawn. Zach’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Ann, gripping the wrought-iron bannister, was carefully negotiating the cement steps. Grace was right behind her, bending forward to shepherd her down. They were this way every evening when he came home, as excited to see him as if he were returning from an ocean voyage of many months. He put his arm around Tom’s shoulder and hoisted Ann up into the crook of his other elbow. The boy chattered to him about the day’s heroics and the girl showed him her crayon picture. Grace met him on the walk and kissed him, her eyes smiling. She had a scent, he would have sworn, a sort of atmosphere about her that, even now that they were nine years married, gave him a yearning feeling deep down.
This was all the love life Zach had ever wanted. Despite his romantic good looks, he had never been much of a Romeo. Maybe it was his religious upbringing, but the sexual pursuit of strangers had never inspired him the way it does some men; a lot of men. He had had a few flings in college. A few longer relationships afterward. But there had always seemed to him something vaguely—what was the word?—disfiguring to his sense of himself—even corrupting—about being naked with—being asleep in the arms of—being physically inside somebody he didn’t much give a damn about.