Gods and Fathers (7 page)

After being excused by Basil, Mustafa retired to his office, a converted pantry off of the kitchen, where he listened for a few seconds to his employer’s conversation with a reporter from the Cambridge Business News. An innocuous conversation. One of many involving Basil and his American wife and stepson that Mustafa had listened to since he took his current position six years ago. He disconnected his listening device, which had also recorded the call, and sat back to think. Unlike the wealthy and pampered Basil al-Hassan, he had no window in his office, nowhere to look but inward. This he did, recalling in vivid detail the dark paneled, hushed room in the Lebanese consulate on Lexington Avenue where, in November, his efforts and his patience of the past six years had begun to bear fruit.

I think it is time, Mustafa
, the colonel had said,
that we bring our orphans to New York.

Is there work to be done here, sire?

No, but we are going to have new friends in Washington. We think they may want to help us with Monteverde.

Yes, sire.

When the time is right, we will show our good faith by offering them our orphans. They acted alone, you see. They are fanatics, angry at the west, at Lebanese secularism.

The case would be solved.

Yes, Mustafa. You and our war hero can keep them occupied until the moment is right. What safer place than right here in New York.

The Middle East is a very dangerous place, sire.

Yes, Mustafa, too dangerous to keep our orphans there.

Am I to still watch him? Our war hero?

Yes, and listen. He is up to something. Deir ez-Zour is drying up. If I catch him, no one will protect him.

I have some new information.

Yes?

He ordered a grave marker today.

A grave marker?

Yes, a replacement, from a stone mason in Latakia.

His home town.

Yes.

And the name of this stone mason?

It is in the envelope, with my report.

A grave marker?

Yes.

Mustafa had slipped out of a rear servant’s door at the consulate that night. On his way through an unused kitchen he had caught a glimpse of the party, the women in glittering gowns, the men in tuxedoes, the food and drink on silver platters, the lush furniture and carpeting, all softly lit from above by three massive crystal chandeliers, glowing like the planets he used to look at in the night sky from the roof of his tenement in Beirut when he was a boy. He did not see Hassan, but he saw his American wife, smiling her supremely confident smile, and her son, Michael, talking in a corner to Yasmine Hayek, the daughter of a politician in Lebanon that Mustafa knew well, a politician who was helping to destroy the country of his birth by westernizing it, a man who thought women should work and get divorced and vote. A man who allowed himself and his wife and daughter to be photographed for western newspapers.

And then there was the meeting, just a month ago, in the cold, on a bench in Battery Park, the Statute of Liberty shrouded in fog in the bay.

This is hard to believe, Mustafa.

Yes, sire.

I cannot tell Damascus. We have joined the family of peace-loving nations.

Yes, sire.

Temporarily.

Yes, sire.

I have learned our war hero’s secret. Damascus will blame him.

Yes, sire.

And you have her on video?

Yes, sire.

Then yes, go ahead.

And after?

They must both be killed.

I cannot tell Damascus, the colonel had said
. Damascus will blame him.
Smiling
,
Mustafa rose and laid out his mat in anticipation of
Isha’,
his last prayer before bed. So, he said to himself, my colonel will act alone in this matter, without the blessing of his superiors.
Therefore so will I, and, Insha’Allah, I will have my revenge
at last.

The ground was snow covered but the sky a clear blue on the day of Nick Loh’s funeral. In addition to the hearse and the limousines carrying the family, there were some fifty cars in the motorcade from St. Rocco’s church in Glen Cove to Holy Rood Cemetery in Westbury. Included in these were the chiefs’ cars from a dozen towns on Long Island and spotless NYPD SUV’s carrying brass from the five boroughs. Arriving late to the funeral mass, Matt DeMarco had been lucky to find a seat at the back of the crowded church. Jade Lee sat a few pews in front of him, her raven black hair unmistakable. Next to her was a man who, even from behind, had the look and bearing of an athlete. At a slender six-five or six, he towered above the people around him when standing was required during the mass.
Her new man,
Matt thought, thinking of the Dutch dinner they were supposed to have. He couldn’t remember how they had left it, but he had not called her, and now knew why she hadn’t called him.

Afterward, Matt stood among a group of civilians on the crest of a low hill and watched as an honor guard consisting of five rows of blue-dress-uniformed policemen and women, about a hundred in total, lined up at attention and raised their right hands—clad in pristine white cotton dress gloves—to salute, while six others, including Bobby Davila at the right front, lifted Loh’s casket, draped with the American flag, to their shoulders. At least five hundred other uniformed police officers surrounded the gravesite, their gold jacket buttons, hat braids and insignia sparkling in the late morning sun. All came to attention as the pallbearers slowly walked their burden through the grassy corridor that separated the immediate family and friends, placing it gently on a low steel trestle next to the open grave. A bagpiper in kilts came to the last mournful note of Taps as they saluted and backed away.

Matt did not know Loh’s wife personally and thought better of trying to approach her through the crowd when the service was over. He had paid his respects to her the night before at the wake, where another sea of blue had washed in and around the small, overwhelmed funeral home in town. When he got to the parking lot he saw Jack McCann, his hands in his overcoat pockets, a cigarette in his mouth, standing next to his car.

“Jack,” Matt said. “What’s up?”

“You resign and don’t call me, Matt? What the fuck?” McCann took a last drag on his cigarette after he said this, then threw the butt on the asphalt pavement, where it hissed itself out in the melting snow.

“I didn’t want to get you in any more trouble than you were already in.”

“I’m not in any trouble. The two cases are connected, so I reported it.”

“You reported it to
me
.”

“Fuck it.”

“Healy’s got more shit on more people, Jack,” Matt said. “You know that. And he holds a grudge. He can hurt you.”

“Clarke’s pissed too.”

Matt could see that his friend of fifteen years was not angry, just unable, or unwilling, to control his flare for the dramatic, the Irish volatility that he laid on friend and foe alike as he went through his day.

“I’ll call him.” Matt said.

“What did Healy say?”

“You haven’t heard?”

“No.”

“He thinks Diaz was coincidental,” Matt said, surprised. Healy had more than the usual control over his organization, but in an office with six hundred lawyers and three times the staff, news traveled very fast. “He’s not telling Stryker.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. I wish I were.”

“Is that why you quit?”

“Yes. I’m seeing Stryker on Monday.”

McCann nodded and was about to say something but was interrupted by the ringing of his cell phone. Matt watched as the detective extracted the phone from his coat pocket, flipped it open and looked at the screen. “Hold on,” he said, “it’s Clarke.”

“Yeah,” he said, putting the phone to his ear, and then listening for a few seconds.

“O.K… I’m with him right now,” McCann said, closing the phone and putting it away. “Something else you can tell Stryker,” he said, looking at Matt.

“What?”

“The security system in the Excelsior, the girl’s building, it looks like it was tampered with in some way.”

“How?”

“Technical assistance just went through it all. They’re not sure, a deletion maybe, editing of some kind.”

“It’s legit?”

“They say it’s very sophisticated, that whoever did it used software that only big players have, intelligence agencies.”

“Like the CIA?”

“Yes, million dollar software. They’re taking a hard look, calling people in the industry, in friendly agencies.”

“And Diaz is dead. The only witness.”

“There’s more,” McCann said. “Clarke went out to the company that operated the system, in Jersey. That’s where he was just now. They’re gone, closed up. The people next door said they vanished overnight.”

Matt shook his head.

“The neighbors said they were Arabs. Syrian. They had a black and red flag in the window.”

“Can someone be framing Michael? Is that possible?”

“Or just covering up for the real killer,” McCann said.

“Either way, Jon Healy doesn’t give a shit.”

“No, he wants to be governor or some other bullshit.”

“Thank you, Jack,” Matt said. “I really appreciate this. Stay out of it now. Don’t get yourself in trouble. I’ll tell Stryker. He’ll know how to handle it.”

“Don’t try to protect me,” McCann said. “I’m not staying out of it. Nick Loh was a good kid, a good cop. And your son is in a big jam.”

Matt looked at his friend of fifteen years. Jack and Clarke were the only people he had ever told the Johnny Taylor story to. Not Debra, certainly not Michael. Just them. And he knew about McCann’s small piece of hell as well: the wife and teenage daughter who he never saw, who had walked away from him because of his drinking, the AA meetings he made and the many he skipped.

“Sorry, Jack,” Matt said.

“I think the girl was executed,” said McCann, nodding slightly, acknowledging Matt’s apology.

“For political reasons, you mean?” Matt replied. He knew, as did Jack, that Yasmine’s father was a pro-West big shot in Lebanon, that a political assassination on U.S. soil was the last thing the new administration in Washington wanted. Hence the joy at the state department to learn that her killing was one of passion:
the jilted boyfriend did it, thank God.

“Maybe just to frame Michael.”

“Jack, the kid’s an arrogant fool, but who would want to frame him for murder? What’s the motive?”

“Maybe it’s you, Matt,” McCann answered, his face grim, the perennial twinkle in his blue eyes gone for a second. “You’ve made some enemies. All D.A.’s do. Think about it.”

Hell’s Kitchen was no longer Hell’s Kitchen, but Rudy’s, the bar on Ninth Avenue where Matt had his first legal drink, had not changed. The faux Tiffany lamps above the bar and over the leather-cushioned booths still cast their mellow light, the wood floor was as scuffed as ever, and the unpretentious crowd—balding men in khakis and women who drank beer—chatted and watched the same small television that Matt watched with his friends in 1980. On the night of Nick Loh’s funeral, Matt, in jeans, a navy blue wool sweater, and Gore-Tex boots, walked the twenty blocks from his apartment to Rudy’s, his gloved hands stuffed in his overcoat pockets, a thick scarf around his neck to fend off Ninth Avenue’s whistling headwind. It was fifteen degrees out, but for the first time in three weeks he felt like getting out and moving around.

At the bar he ordered a shot of Jameson and a glass of draft Heineken. He had two pieces of information that were very important: the doorman at Yasmine’s building had been killed in what looked like an execution, and the Excelsior’s digital surveillance system had been tampered with. Someone else had entered Yasmine’s apartment on the afternoon of the murder, someone who had been deleted from the building’s security video, and who had coerced Felix Diaz into lying to the police. And then killed him for his trouble.

On the ride home this afternoon from Long Island, Matt had called Jane Manning, the head of T.A.R.U., the NYPD’s technical assistance unit, and asked her point blank if she was willing to testify about the security system. She said she certainly would. On Monday, Matt would impart all of this to Everett Stryker. Stryker would kill Healy with this information, both in court and, worse for Healy, in the press. The case against Michael was getting weaker all the time. The scotches that Matt had been nursing in his apartment in the evenings had been medicinal—anti-depressants—but the Jameson and beer chaser were celebratory. The fact that Michael hated his guts didn’t matter. He was no murderer and would soon be free of the absurd charges against him.

He was about to order another whiskey when his cell phone rang. Jade Lee’s name and number were on the screen

“I saw you today,” he said, after putting the phone to his ear.

“I saw you too. Where did you go?”

“I took the back way to the parking lot.”

“Where are you? Are you busy?”

“I’m at Rudy’s.”

“Really? Are you with somebody?”

“No.”

“You’re drinking alone?”

“Yes.”

“We need to talk. How about if I come over?”

“Fine. Are you bringing your new guy?”

“New guy?”

“The tall one next to you in church today.”

“That was Antonio. I’ll be right there.”

Matt clicked the phone off.
Antonio? The kid must have grown a foot since I last saw him.

“Antonio’s grown up,” Matt said to Jade.

They were sitting in a booth along the back wall, Rudy’s prized seats because they were dark and out of the way and private but still afforded a view of the entire one-room bar.
Summer Wind,
the Lyle Lovett version, was playing on the jukebox. Most of the men in the place had turned to stare at Jade when she came in through the glass front door and stood to look around for Matt. When she greeted him with a kiss on the cheek he felt the pride that all men feel when they are seen by other men with a beautiful woman. The booth had cost him a twenty-dollar tip to the bartender, but it was worth it. A young waitress had just placed shots of Jameson and Heineken chasers in front of them.

“He has,” Jade answered.

“What’s he up to, besides basketball?”

“The Jesuits are kicking his ass.”

“The Jesuits?”

“He goes to Regis.”

Matt smiled. He had gone, on his father’s orders, to the all boys Regis High School, on East 84
^th
Street, for three years, from 1976 to 1979, an hour-plus commute from the Bronx everyday. Though he had been kicked out for fighting—he had broken a classmate’s nose during a basketball scrimmage, and then broke it again two weeks later in a confrontation on the street—and though he had hated it while he was there, he later came to feel a quiet love for the place, and had tried to get Michael to go there, but Debra had other ideas, as usual.

“No game tonight?” Matt asked.

“He’s in Florida with the team. They play three games down there on their winter break.”

“To Antonio,” Matt said, lifting his shot of whiskey.

“I haven’t done this in a while,” Jade said, lifting hers.

“It’s a cold winter night,” Matt said. “It’ll do you good.”

“Here goes,” Jade said. “To Michael as well.” She lifted her shot glass and clinked it against Matt’s. They knocked their drinks back simultaneously, then sipped their beers.

“How about you?” Matt asked, putting his beer down. “Are you O.K.?” Jade looked fine, more beautiful than ever, if that was possible, her color high from the walk in the cold, and her amazing eyes aglow as the Irish whiskey did its work. There was, though, something off about her, something slightly forced about her smile that made him ask this question. Maybe she’s lonely, he thought, with her son away. Lonely like me, he added, surprising himself.
No job, no son. Drinking alone…

“Antonio wants to visit his father in Los Angeles. He found him on the internet.”

“The producer.”

“Yes.”

Matt knew the bare bones of the story of Jade’s relationship with Antonio’s father. At seventeen, young and tall and voluptuous and unbelievably beautiful, she had left Queens and gone to Los Angeles to become an actress. She returned three months later, pregnant with Antonio, the father a producer who she described succinctly as a scumbag who wore too much cologne. Her two marriages followed, both short and painful. When she moved to 45th Street after her second divorce, she went to Mass every day at St. Malachy’s, the actors’ chapel across the street, to remind herself, she said, of her stupidity and of the inevitable consequences of vainglory.

“Let him go,” Matt said.

Jade did not answer.

“He’ll go anyway.”

“The guy’s rich, a player in Hollywood,” Jade said. “He does big budget movies now.”

“You think the kid will be seduced,” Matt said, wincing inwardly at his poor choice of words, watching Jade’s eyes, which went vacant for a second. She did not answer.

“You can’t stop him, Jade,” Matt said. “The thing is, if you try, he’ll only want to go more. When does he want to go?”

“Spring break, in six weeks.”

“It’s his father.” Matt felt the full weight of the irony of this sentence as he uttered it. Antonio would be traveling three thousand miles to see a father he had never met and who had ignored him for seventeen years. Michael could not walk thirty blocks to visit Matt. The pull of blood to blood, ancient and primal, had had no effect on his own son.

Jade remained silent. Matt watched her as she took a sip of her beer and returned the traditional, curved glass to the wooden table. Her eyes rose to meet his, and in that meeting Matt saw not acceptance on Jade’s part, but something else, something more akin to fear than resignation. What was she afraid of?

“What about you?” Jade said, breaking their eye contact, and her chain of thoughts, whatever they were. “How’s Michael doing?”

“I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” Matt replied. “I tried to get him to come to Nick Loh’s funeral with me, but he couldn’t.”

“Too bad,” Jade said. “Five hundred cops, not to mention Healy and the Mayor, would have gotten the message.”

“Yes, that was the point, but he couldn’t make it.”

This was a lie. Matt had not spoken to his son since he was released on bail on the Monday after Yasmine’s murder. His several messages had gone unreturned. He was sure Jade would see through it. How busy could Michael be as he hung around Manhattan waiting for trial? She would understand, he knew she would, but it stung too much for him to talk about it.

“I’m here about Michael,” Jade said.

“Not me?”

“You too.”

“What about him?”

“I got a strange call from Bob Davila.”

“What kind of a call?”

“He knows I go to St. Malachy’s. He told me there was something there for me, in a missal in a back pew on the left.”

“
Was
there?”

“Yes. I went to 5:30 Mass tonight. This is what I found.” Jade reached into her shoulder bag on the bench seat next to her, extracted an eight-by-ten manila envelope, and handed it to Matt.

The first thing he pulled out was a three page document with
United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission
below the UN’s iconic light blue, olive branch-encircled globe,
at the top of each page.

“Where did he get these?” he asked, after carefully reading all three pages.

“I don’t know,” Jade replied.

“Do you know what they are?”

“I think so.”

“Did you see the entry for January 30?”

“Yes.”

“’Fifteen-ten. Suspects 1 and 2 enter apartment building at 1011 Central Park West. Fifteen-thirty, suspects exit building.’
This is a United Nations surveillance log. The investigators’ identifications are coded.
China 1 and China 6.”

“Did you see the one on the night before?” Jade asked. “They went into Lucky’s in Queens.”

“I see it,” Matt answered after flipping the pages backward. “That’s the club Michael mentioned.”

Laying the surveillance log aside, Matt pulled the remaining documents from the light brown envelope: various identification cards for one Ali al-Najjar, two three-by-five color photographs, a half sheet of plain white paper with
Bill Crow, FBI???
written on it and a print-out of a magazine article by Christopher Hatch, titled
The West Selling Its Soul.
Matt read the I.D. cards, then, after staring at the photos intently, said, “Adnan and Ali. Suspect 1 and Suspect 2. Michael’s friends.”

“I thought so,” Jade said. “There’s one more thing. Davila asked me if
Monteverde
meant anything to me. I went online. There are a bunch of hotels around the world named Monteverde. One of them is closed. It’s in Lebanon. It’s the headquarters of the United Nations team investigating the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri.”

“They’re looking at Syria.”

“Yes. It’s supposed to come to trial in March in The Hague. I also found the Hatch article. It’s pretty interesting.”

“What does he say?”

“He thinks the US has offered to shut down Monteverde if Syria will make peace with Israel.”

“Does he have proof?”

“Who has proof of things like that?”

“The papers said Loh was working on a drug task force.”

“I don’t think so, Matt.”

“I don’t either. Not now. Do you have Davila’s number?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s call him. We’ll ask him who Bill Crow is.”

“I already talked to him. I told him you’d want to talk to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He’s being very cautious,” Jade continued, “I think he stole this report.”

“Did he say that?” Matt said.

“No, but why all the cloak-and-dagger?”

Matt let his mind drift for a moment to the day he first met Davila in 1993, when he prepped him for his trial testimony in
People v. Hakimi
. Only twenty-years old, with a background similar to Matt’s, the newly-minted, bantam-weight Hispanic cop had quickly acknowledged that he had created a Miranda problem for Matt, but he was proud that he had done the right thing by Jack McCann, a fellow officer, had saved his career most likely, and his pension.

“He told me the story about your honor-killing case.” Jade said.

“What story?”

“The thing with McCann, the problem he created. He said you saved his ass.”

“He’s exaggerating.”

“You’re a tough guy, Matt, a stoic, but you’ve got a lot of friends.”

Matt let this pass, thinking
not enough to keep my son from getting indicted for a murder he didn’t commit.

“He wants to meet us tonight,” Jade said. “He said he’d call me at ten to fix a time and place.”

Matt looked at his watch. It was nine-thirty. “We’ll sip our beer,” he said.

“No more whiskey.”

“No. My limit is two anyway.”

“Mine is one.”

Their eyes met again, and Matt was suddenly reticent, a condition he had not encountered in himself in a long time. “I have to ask you,” he said, finding his tongue. “
Is
there a new guy?”

“No, there’s not,” Jade replied. “And you? Is there a woman?”

Matt shook his head. “No,” he said. He took a sip of his beer and replaced the glass on the table. He had a question to ask:
Why did you break up with me, Jade, really?
But he couldn’t get it to his lips. Five years was a long time to wait to ask a question like that. All breakups are the same and all breakups are different, but theirs was a strange and surely an aberrant one. They date for a few weeks, they make love once, and then she abruptly ends it.
I can’t do it, Matt
, was all she said.
I can’t do it.
Stranger still was his refusal to press her, to ask her what she meant, unable to even think about swallowing his pride, to beg. Now she was here to help his idiot son, and his pride suddenly looked more like arrogance or some weird macho self-indulgence. Matt the tough guy, Matt the guy who begged no one.

“Jade… ,” he said, but the ringing of Jade’s cell phone interrupted him.

“It’s Bobby,” Jade said, looking at the screen. “He’s early.”