“You think they’re doing this with two guys?”
“They only had two when they kidnapped the girl on Park Avenue. I can’t see going out and recruiting an extra person for an operation like this. This is lust murder that developed a commercial hook to it, not an ordinary professional criminal operation where you can go out and put a string of men together. There are some witnesses who would seem to indicate the existence of a third man in the two abductions that were witnessed, but they may just have assumed there was a driver, because that’s the way you would expect people to do it. But if you only had two people to start with, one of them would double as the driver. And that’s what I think happened.”
“So we can forget the third man.”
“No,” I said. “That’s the aggravating thing about it. We have to assume he’s there.”
I went into the kitchen for more coffee. When I came back Yuri asked how many men I wanted. He said, “We have you, me, Kenan, Peter, Dani, and Pavel. Pavel is downstairs, you met him coming into the building. I got three more men ready to come, all I got to do is tell them.”
“I can think of a dozen,” Kenan said. “People I talked to, whether they had money to kick in or not, everybody said the same thing. ‘You can use a hand, tell me, be right there.’ ” He leaned over the map. “We can let them get in position, then bring in a dozen more men in three or four cars. Seal up both exits, plus the rest of them, here and here. You’re shaking your head. Why not?”
“I want to let them get away with the money.”
“You don’t even want to try for it? After we’ve got the girl back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s crazy to get into a firefight in a graveyard at night, or shoot at each other from cars careening around Park Slope. An operation like that’s no good unless you can control it, and there are too many ways this one can slip out of control. Look, I sold this by setting it up as a standoff, and I did a good job designing it that way. It is a standoff. We get the girl, they get the money, and everybody goes home alive. A few minutes ago that was all we wanted out of the deal. Is that still how we feel?”
Yuri said it was. Kenan said, “Yeah, sure, it’s all I ever wanted. I just hate to see them get away with anything.”
“They won’t. Callander thinks he’s got a week to pack his valise and get out of town. He hasn’t got a week. It won’t take me that long to find him. Meanwhile, how many men do we need? I think we’re fine with the people we’ve already got. Say three cars. Dani and Yuri in one, Peter and . . . is it Pavel in the lobby downstairs? Peter and Pavel in the Toyota, and I’ll ride with Kenan in the Buick. That’s all we need. Six men.”
The phone rang in Lucia’s room. I answered it and spoke to TJ, who was back at the laundromat after having no luck looking in driveways and at curbs for the Honda.
I went back to the living room. “Make that seven,” I said.
Chapter 21
In the car Kenan said, “I figure the Shore Parkway and the Gowanus. That sound okay to you?” I told him he knew more about it than I did. He said, “This kid we’re picking up. How’s he fit into the picture?”
“He’s a kid from the ghetto who hangs out in Times Square. God knows where he lives. He goes by his initials, assuming they’re his initials and he didn’t find them in a bowl of alphabet soup. He’s been a big help, believe it or not. He put me on to the computer wizards, and he saw Callander tonight and got the license number.”
“You think he’s gonna do anything for us at the cemetery?”
“I hope he doesn’t try,” I said. “We’re picking him up because I don’t want him wandering around Sunset Park being resourceful when Callander and his friends are on their way home. I’d like to keep him out of harm’s way.”
“You say he’s a kid?”
I nodded. “Fifteen, sixteen.”
“What’s he want to be when he grows up? A detective like you?”
“That’s what he wants to be now. He doesn’t want to wait until he grows up. I can’t say I blame him. So many of them don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Grow up. A black teenager living on the streets? They’ve got the average life expectancy of a fruit fly. TJ’s a good kid. I hope he makes it.”
“And you really don’t know his last name.”
“No.”
“You know what’s funny? Between AA and the streets, you know a hell of a lot of people without last names.”
A little later he said, “You get any sense of Dani? He a relative of Yuri’s or what?”
“No idea. Why?”
“I was just thinking, the two of them riding around in that Lincoln with a million dollars in the backseat. We know Dani’s got a gun. Say he pops Yuri and takes off. We wouldn’t even know who to look for, just a Russian guy with a jacket that don’t fit him too good. He’s another guy with no last name. Must be a friend of yours, huh?”
“I think Yuri trusts him.”
“He’s probably family. Who else you gonna trust like that?”
“Anyway, it’s not a million.”
“Eight hundred thousand. You gonna make me a liar for a lousy two hundred thousand?”
“And almost a third of it’s counterfeit.”
“You’re right, it’s hardly worth stealing. We’re lucky if these two jokers we’re meeting are willing to haul it away. If not it goes in the basement, save it for the next Boy Scout paper drive. You want to do me a favor? When you’re up there with a suitcase in each hand, you want to ask our friends a question?”
“What?”
“Ask ’em how the hell they picked me, will you? Because it’s still driving me nuts.”
“Oh,” I said. “I think I know.”
“Seriously?”
“Uh-huh. My first thought was that he was in the dope business on some level or other.”
“Makes sense, but—”
“But he’s not, I’m almost certain, because I had somebody run a check and he hasn’t got a criminal record.”
“Neither have I.”
“You’re an exception.”
“That’s true. How about Yuri?”
“Several arrests in the Soviet Union, no serious jail time. One bust here for receiving stolen goods but the charges were dropped.”
“But nothing involving narcotics.”
“No.”
“All right, Callander’s got a clean slate. So he’s not in the dope business, so—”
“The DEA was trying to make a case against you a while ago.”
“Yeah, but it didn’t get anywheres.”
“I was talking to Yuri before. He said he backed out of a deal last year because he sensed that some agency was trying to trap him with a sting. He had the sense it was federal.”
He turned to look at me, then forced his eyes front and swung out to pass a car. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “This a new national law-enforcement policy? They can’t make a case against us so they kill our wives and daughters?”
“I think Callander worked for the DEA,” I said. “Probably not for very long, and almost certainly not as an accredited agent. Maybe they used him once or twice as a confidential informant, maybe he was strictly office help. He wouldn’t have gone very far and he wouldn’t have lasted very long.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s crazy. He probably got into it because of a low-grade obsession about dope dealers. That’s an asset in that line of work but not when it’s out of proportion. Look, I’m just going on a hunch. There was something he said on the phone when I told him I was Yuri’s partner. It was as if he was starting to say that explained why they hadn’t been able to rope Yuri in.”
“Jesus.”
“It’s something I can find out tomorrow or the next day, if I can get a hook into the DEA and see if his name rings a bell with them. Or take an unauthorized dip into their files, if my computer geniuses can swing it.”
Kenan looke
d thoughtful. “He didn’t sound like a cop.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“But the guy you described wouldn’t really be a cop, would he?”
“More like a buff. But a buff with the Feds, and fixated on the subject of narcotics.”
“He knew the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine,” Kenan said, “but I don’t know what that proves. Your friend TJ probably knows the wholesale price of a key.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Lucia’s classmates at this girls’ school, they probably know it, too. Kind of world we live in.”
“You should have been a doctor.”
“Like my old man wanted. No, I don’t think so. But maybe I should have been a counterfeiter. You meet a nicer class of people. At least I wouldn’t have the fucking DEA on my back.”
“Counterfeiting? You’d have the Secret Service.”
“Jesus,” he said. “If it’s not one goddamn thing it’s another.”
“THAT the laundromat? There on the right?” I said it was, and Kenan pulled up in front but kept the motor running. He said, “How are we on time?” then glanced at his watch and the dashboard clock and answered his own question. “We’re fine. Running a little early.”
I was watching the laundromat, but TJ emerged instead from a doorway on the other side of the avenue and crossed over, getting in the back. I introduced them, and each claimed to be pleased to meet the other. TJ shrank back against the seat and Kenan put the car in gear.
He said, “They get there at ten-thirty, right? And we’re due ten minutes later, and then we work our way up to where they’re waiting. Is that about right?”
I said it was.
“So we’ll be face-to-face across no-man’s-land about ten minutes of eleven, is that about how you figure it?”
“Something like that.”
“And how long to make the trade and get out? Half an hour?”
“Probably a lot less than that, if nothing goes wrong. If the shit hits the fan, well, it’s another story.”
“Yeah, so let’s hope it doesn’t. I was just wondering about getting back out again, but I guess they don’t lock the gates until midnight.”
“Lock the gates?”
“Yeah, I woulda guessed it’d be earlier, but I guess not or you would have picked someplace else.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I never even thought of that,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
“Then what would you do, call him back?”
“No, I guess not. It never occurred to me that they might lock the gates. Don’t cemeteries stay open all night? Why would you have to lock them up?”
“To keep people out.”
“Because everybody’s dying to get in? Jesus, I must have heard that one in the fourth grade. ‘Why do they have a fence around the cemetery?’ ”
“I guess they get vandals,” Kenan said. “Kids who tip over the gravestones, take a shit in the floral urns.”
“You think the kids can’t climb fences?”
“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m not setting the policy here. It’s up to me, all the graveyards in town’ll be open admission. How’s that?”
“I just hope I didn’t screw up. If they get there and the gates are locked—”
“Yeah? What are they gonna do, sell her to white slave traders in Argentina? They’ll climb the fence, same as we’ll do. Matter of fact, they probably don’t lock it before midnight. People might want to go after work, pay a late call on the dear departed.”
“At eleven o’clock?”
He shrugged. “People work late. They got office jobs in Manhattan, stop for a couple of drinks after work, they have dinner, then they go to wait half an hour for the subway because they’re like some people I know, they’re too cheap to take a cab—”
“Jesus,” I said.
“—and it’s late by the time they get back to Brooklyn and they say, ‘Hey, I think I’ll go over to Green-Wood, see if I can find where Uncle Vic is planted, I never liked him, I think I’ll go piss on his grave.’ ”
“You nervous, Kenan?”
“Yeah, I’m nervous. What do you fucking think? You’re the one’s gotta walk up to a couple of stone killers armed with nothing but money. You must be starting to sweat.”
“Maybe a little bit. Slow down, that’s the entrance coming up. I think it’s open.”
“Yeah, it looks like it. You know, even if they’re supposed to lock up, they probably don’t get around to it.”
“Maybe not. Let’s drive once around the entire cemetery, all right? And then we’ll find a place to park near our entrance.”
We circled the cemetery in silence. There was no traffic to speak of, and there was a stillness to the night, as if the deep silence within the cemetery fence could reach out and suppress all sound in the vicinity.
When we were just about back where we’d started TJ said, “We goin’ in a cemetery?”
Kenan turned aside to hide a grin. I said, “You can stay in the car if you’d rather.”
“What for?”
“If you’d be more comfortable.”
“Man,” he said, “I ain’t scared of no dead people. That what you think? That I scared?”
“My mistake.”
“Your mistake is right, Dwight. Dead folks don’t bother me.”
DEAD people didn’t bother me much, either. It was some of the live ones that worried me.
We met at the Thirty-fifth Street gate and slipped inside right away, not wanting to draw attention on the street. For now, Yuri and Pavel were carrying the money. We had two flashlights among the seven of us. Kenan took one of them. I had the other, and I led the way.
I didn’t use the light much, just flicked it quickly on and off when I needed to see where I was going. This wasn’t necessary most of the time. There was a waxing moon overhead, and a certain amount of light from the streetlamps on the avenue. The tombstones were mostly of white marble and they showed up well once your eyes were accustomed to the dimness. I threaded my way among them and wondered whose bones I was walking over. One of the papers had run a story within the past year or so on where the bodies were buried, an inventory of gravesites of the rich and famous throughout the five boroughs. I hadn’t paid too much attention to it, but I seemed to recall that a fair number of prominent New Yorkers were interred at Green-Wood.
Some enthusiasts, I’d read, make a hobby of visiting graves. Some take photographs, others make rubbings of tombstone inscriptions. I couldn’t imagine what they got out of it, but it doesn’t sound that much nuttier than some of the things I do. Their pursuit only brought them out in the daytime. They weren’t stumbling around in the dark, trying to keep from tripping over a chunk of granite.
I soldiered on. I stayed close enough to the fence to see the street signs, and I slowed down when I got to Twenty-seventh Street. The others drew closer, and I gestured for them to fan out a ways without advancing any farther north. Then I turned toward where Raymond Callander was supposed to be and pointed my flashlight out in front of me, triggering the trio of flashes we’d agreed on.
For a long moment the only answer was darkness and silence. Then three flashes of light blinked back at me, coming from a little right of dead ahead. They were, I calculated, something like a hundred yards from us, maybe more. It didn’t seem that far when someone was running with a football under his arm. Now, though, it looked much too distant.
“Stay where you are,” I called out. “We’re going to approach a little closer.”
“Not too close!”
“About fifty yards,” I said. “The way we arranged.”
Flanked by Kenan and one of Yuri’s men, with the rest of our party not far behind, I covered about half the distance separating us. “That’s far enough,” Callander called out at one point, but it wasn’t far enough and I ignored him and kept on walking. We had to be close enough so that someone coul
d cover the transfer. We had one rifle, and Peter had been entrusted with it, having proved a good marksman during a six-month hitch a while back in the National Guard. Of course that was before a lengthy apprenticeship as a drunk and a dope addict, but he still figured to be the best shot in the group. He had a decent rifle with a scope sight, but the scope wasn’t infrared so he’d be aiming by moonlight. I wanted to keep the distance down so that he could make his shots count if he had to.
Although I wondered what difference it made to me. The only reason he’d start shooting would be if the players on the other side tried a cross, and if they did they’d take me out in the first minute of the opening round. If Peter started firing back at them, I wouldn’t be around to know where the bullets went.
Cheering thoughts.
When we’d cut the distance in half I signaled to Peter, and he moved off to the side and selected a shooting stand for himself, propping the rifle barrel on a low marble grave marker. I looked for Ray and his partner and could only see shapes. They had drawn back into the darkness.
I said, “Come out where we can see you. And show the girl.”
They moved into view. Two forms, and then as the light got better you could see that one form was made up of two persons, that one of the men had the girl in front of him. I heard Yuri’s intake of breath and just hoped he’d keep his cool.
“I’ve got a knife to her throat,” Callander called. “If my hand slips—”
“It better not.”
“Then you’d better bring the money. And not try anything cute.”
I turned, hefted the suitcases, checked our troops. I didn’t see TJ and asked Kenan what had happened to him. He said he thought he might have gone back to the car. “ ‘Feet, do yo’ stuff,’ ” he said. “I don’t think he’s crazy about graveyards at night.”
“Neither am I.”
“Listen,” he said, “whyntcha tell them we’re changing the rules, the money’s too heavy for one person to carry, and I’ll walk up there with you.”
“No.”
“Gotta be the hero, huh?”
I can’t say I felt terribly heroic. The weight of the suitcases kept me from being particularly jaunty. It looked as though one of the men had a gun, not the one holding the girl, and it looked as though the gun was pointed at me, but I didn’t feel in danger of being shot, not unless someone on our side panicked and got off a round and everybody just let fly. If they were going to kill me, they’d at least wait until I’d brought them the money. They might be crazy but they weren’t stupid.