Gods and Fathers (9 page)

“He’ll call me back,” Matt said after pushing the
end
button on his phone. In the distance they could see the billows of smoke above the explosion site lessen as the firefighters did their work. Dozens of blue and red police and fire strobes lit up the night sky. Two helicopters appeared, searchlights shooting from each as they swept the neighborhood.

“Too late,” Matt murmured.

“Too late?” Jade asked.

“Whoever wired that car is long gone.”

“Matt,” Jade said, increasing her grip pressure, “don’t leave me tonight. If Bobby’s been killed…”

“I won’t,” Matt answered. “And by the way, you were right.”

“No, Matt, I wasn’t.”

Before Matt could answer, his cell phone rang. He saw on its small front screen that it was Clarke Goode. He put it to his ear, knowing in his bones that the news was bad.

Matt sat at his desk in his apartment looking down at Lincoln Center below and to his left. People were fanning out along the Center’s main plaza, emerging from an event that had just ended. Bundled against the cold, the breath streamed from their mouths as they talked about what they had seen, or what time they had to get up in the morning, or the price of gold in Timbuktu. Not about the death of a beautiful young Lebanese girl, or of a second detective friend in less than ten days, or of a son falsely accused of murder. An angry son, filled with hatred for his father. How could those innocent-looking people be talking about such terrible things?

Jade Lee was asleep in his bed, the bedroom’s door slightly ajar at her request. He had made her one of his faux cappuccinos, this one laced heavily with whiskey, and put her to bed. On the couch in his pre-war sunken living room was the pile of bedding he would unravel and use when he felt like sleeping. But he didn’t feel like sleeping. Too much was on his mind: Nick Loh dead; Bob Davila dead; Jade, wearing one of his shirts and not much else, asleep in his bed; the look in her eyes when she told him about Antonio going off to see his father, to meet him for the first time; the tone in his own son’s voice when they last spoke, over three weeks ago.

I’m glad you’re out.

No answer.

How much was the bail?

Two million.

Basil put it up?

Who do you think?

We need to talk.

About what?

Your case.

My lawyer said not to talk to anyone.

That doesn’t include me.

I’m fucked.

We’ll beat it. It’ll turn out fine.

It’s all bullshit.

I want to talk about Adnan and Ali.

What about them?

They obviously planted the gun.

Mr. Stryker is looking for them.

Did you handle the gun, Michael?

You’re talking to me like I’m six years old.

Did you?

I’m not supposed to talk about the case.

Let’s have dinner tonight. I can help.

You want to help? You work for the office that’s prosecuting me. Go look up what their case is all about.

That would be illegal.

Then what can you do? I’ve got a good lawyer.

Where are you now?

Park Avenue.

We have to talk. Get settled, then call me.

Pause.

Sure.

Click.

Matt went into the kitchen, found his good bourbon and poured some over ice. He returned to his desk, bringing the bottle with him. Below, the Center’s concourse was now empty. One last couple, arms entwined, was hailing a cab, in tandem, with their free arms. They might have been laughing. The moonlight that had bathed the sky over Glen Cove was not quite penetrating to the streets of the city, but above the buildings the night was very clear, with stars scattered among a few wispy clouds.

Sipping his drink, Matt turned on his computer and went to the Regis High School web site. A few more clicks and he came across the one-paragraph announcement of Regis’ two-point win earlier that night over Miami’s Bishop Shelby High. He printed the page and, using a yellow marker, highlighted a line in the box score indicating that Antonio Lee had scored 10 points and fouled out at 2:11 of the fourth quarter. Slipping quietly into his bedroom, he put the printout on his dresser, where Jade, sleeping the sleep of the dead, had left her wallet and jewelry.

Matt had hoped that Michael would go to Regis, and play basketball. The summer after Michael graduated from eighth grade, Matt surprised him with a professional hoop, glass backboard and all, in the driveway in Pound Ridge. He had marked off and painted the lane and three point lines himself, and put a new Wilson basketball on the free-throw line. This ball, still brand new, was on a shelf in the garage. It had never been used, never even been bounced except by Matt when he was arranging the surprise.

Take the first shot
, he had said to Michael.

I suck at basketball
, Michael had replied, after glancing at the set-up, then heading casually toward the house, his knapsack over his shoulder.
Oh, by the way
, he had said, turning around at the front door to face Matt
, I can’t sleep over tonight.

Why not? That’s three in a row.

I’m sleeping at Jake’s. His father’s taking us to the Yankee game tomorrow.

By the time Matt learned the rules of soccer, a game he had neither played nor watched growing up, Michael’s career at Parnell—a career he seemed to take only a half-hearted interest in—was over. At graduation, Debra showed up with her new husband, who took them afterwards in a limousine to a fancy Tribeca restaurant to celebrate. Matt tried to pay, but Basil had given his credit card to the maitre’d on the way in. His son barely acknowledged him as they ate an absurdly overpriced meal and talked about the opportunities Michael would have at NYU, where he would be a communications major in the fall.

Matt, sipping his bourbon, looking down at the traffic on Columbus Avenue, remembered thinking at the time,
maybe college will be better.
But it wasn’t. It just got worse. Now there was a hole in him where his relationship with his son should have been, his healthy relationship with his son. She could fill it, he thought, thinking of Jade sleeping in his bed. Would that be love, or need? There was his pride again, always stopping him. Maybe that’s all he’d have left in the end, his pride. And his anger.

Leaning back, he noticed the books on the shelf above his desk. One of them was Marcus Aurelius’
Meditations
, given to him by his father the day he left for Parris Island.
You are angry,
Matteo, Sr. had said, handing the book to him as they sat in the bowels of the dank and cavernous Port Authority Bus Terminal in mid-town.
You lost your mother. I do not say much. The neighborhood is bad. You lose your temper. You fight. I do not put my hand up to stop you.

“Tell me about the war,” Matt had asked, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice, but not succeeding. “Your Navy Cross.”

“I did not win it,” his father had answered. “A boy named Matteo DeMarco did. He died in the war.”

“Dad…”

“Here’s your bus.”

Somewhere along the way on that twenty hour bus ride to South Carolina, Matt had flipped through
Meditations
. He remembered now that Matteo had highlighted a few passages in yellow marker. He pulled the book from the shelf and, thinking of the spackle-covered black guy feeding the pigeons in Union Square Park, he found the one he was looking for:
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.

Born and raised in Amsterdam, Erhard Fuchs was used to cold weather in winter, but not the continuous snow that seemed to fall in New York. A woolen cap on his head, his bulky coat’s collar turned up, he walked next to Bill Crow on Bryant Park’s perimeter path, trying to ignore the heavy wet flakes that were, according to reports, the beginning of another storm. He usually met his grisly-looking CIA contact at the Starbucks on the corner, but today they were having their chat as they walked.
I need the exercise
, Crow had said, the scarred stumps of his missing left pinky and ring fingers on display for a moment as he handed Fuchs a container of hot coffee.

“They will not be claimed,” Fuchs said. The Native American with the dark eyes and the pitted face and the loping stride had just inquired after the bodies of three of the men killed in Locust Valley last week.
Like a forest creature,
Fuchs thought.
Be careful.

“They can’t stay in the morgue forever.”

“I agree.”

“We’ll take them off your hands.”

“This offer I will decline.”

“You just said they wouldn’t be claimed.”

“I may have a use for them.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet”

Out of the corner of his eye, Fuchs could see Crow shaking his head. They walked for a while in silence. Both Ali al-Hajjar and Adnan Farah were Syrian citizens, with documented connections to the Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret police. Both, using aliases, were known to be in Beirut in early 2005. A cell phone linked to Farah had been used to detonate the explosives, equivalent to a ton of TNT, that had killed Rafik Hariri and many others as his motorcade drove past the St. George Hotel on 14 February.

Hajjar and Farah disappeared afterward, but continuous satellite and security camera sweeps of various Syrian embassies and Syrian Arab Airlines’ comings and goings had them arriving in New York, on work visas, in October last, their sponsor one Mustafa al-Rahim, the servant of Syrian oil magnate, Basil al-Hassan. Fuchs, working at the Monteverde headquarters of the UN’s special commission investigating the Hariri assassination, had been sent to the United States, where he hastily put together a team to follow Hajjar and Farah night and day.

“It’s a dead-end,” said Crow.

“I don’t agree. Someone here in New York was controlling them. I am convinced of it.”

“They may be taking a different tack in Washington.”

So this is what he has come
to
tell me,
thought Fuchs.

“I take my orders from Monteverde.”

“You may be hearing from Monteverde.”

“And the Hayek girl?” Fuchs said, “I can’t sit on that much longer.”

“They are considering their options in Washington.”

“
Washington
is considering its options? This is a
UN
investigation. I am personally responsible. The DeMarco boy faces the death penalty.”

“He raped her.”

“He’s charged with murder one.”

“A deal may be worked out on the rape.”

“You mean drop the murder charges?”

“Yes.”

“I will wait a day or two, no more. I will not let the boy hang.”

They parted at the park’s Fifth Avenue exit, and Fuchs watched Crow walk uptown through the thickening snow. He did not tell the CIA agent with the rough-hewn face that early this morning he had attended a meeting with the New York City Police Commissioner, the NYPD’s Homicide Bureau Chief and two veteran detectives named McCann and Goode. Nor of his conversation last night with Daniel LeClair, the independent investigator in charge of Monteverde, who, with Farah and Hajjar dead, had given him two days to tie up any loose ends and return with his team to Beirut.

Who to trust? He did not yet know. He had been closely following the international news, as he always did. There was no doubt that the wind between Washington and Damascus had been blowing differently under the new U.S. administration. Were they actually thinking of trusting Syria? Did they not know that Damascus took orders from Tehran? Senator Kerry’s press release had been amateurishly revealing:
We discussed the possibility of cooperating on a number of issues.
Did the United States not know that any prize it hoped to win from such cooperation would turn out to be an illusion, a mirage in a desert? Or worse, a knife in the back?

Fuchs headed across town to the U.N., where he had an office and a small command center. He had been in New York long enough to know that there were no cabs to be had when it rained or snowed. He did not need the walk, as the chain-smoking Crow obviously did. He used the U.N.’s lavishly appointed gym and spa several times a week. Stocky but agile, his blond hair only slightly thinning, he was fit at fifty, or
fit at fitty
as the American gangster rappers might say.

Walking east on 40th Street, hunching against the wind that was now starting to blow, Fuchs’ thoughts returned to his meeting at One Police Plaza this morning. The looks on the faces of the four New York policemen were grim. Worse than grim. They had lost two of their own. Both were working for Fuchs at or near the time of their violent deaths.
What was he working on? Who were his suspects?
He had been polite, respectful, humble: you must petition your State Department or your Justice Department. I am not the one to answer your questions. Was
petition
the right word? He was not sure, there being so many words for the simple verb
vraag
in English.

Fuchs had worked for MIVD, Holland’s Military Intelligence and Security Service, for twenty years before taking his current job with the U.N. Childless, the death of his wife from ovarian cancer the year before had almost killed him too. Leaving his homeland, with its countless reminders of his beloved Kaat, had saved him. But not by much. He had nothing left to lose, and was therefore free to pursue his own agenda, to choose whom to trust and whom not. The faces of detectives Goode and McCann had been especially dark. Lethal, actually.

Erhard Fuchs feared the Mukhabarat, Syria’s secret police. He feared Bill Crow and the CIA, who could crush him in an instant if they wished. But it was Detectives McCann and Goode that he feared the most. As he was leaving One Police Plaza this morning, the black detective, Clarke Goode, had caught up to him on the street and walked with him to his car.

“Colder than hell out here,”
Clarke had said. He had not replied, just kept walking. His car, parked on the perimeter of a dozen or more patrol and unmarked cars situated at various angles to the curb, was only fifty paces away.

“Do you believe in hell?”
Goode had asked, as they continued walking, the wind kicking scraps of paper up around them.
“Good and evil?”
He had remained silent.

“I’ll tell you why I ask,”
Goode had said, the car quite near now.
“We’ve got two cops dead who were working for you. You can’t tell us what they were working on. We’ll have to ask your bosses at the UN. But they won’t tell us either, will they?”

“I doubt it.”

“I do too, which means you, personally, have a problem.”

“I believe you want to tell me what it is.”

“I do. The thing is, I really want to know what you’re working on. My partner and I want to help you. I know you’re a tough guy, Fuchs. I know you were in the Marines over there in Holland, the BBE, counterterrorism. All that. The thing is, if you won’t let us help you, then we’ll have no choice but to be against you. I’m talking about the entire NYPD. That’s forty-thousand pissed off cops. Are you following me?”

“Please don’t patronize me, detective. I respect you, but I am not afraid of you.”

“I think you should be.”

“Why? Are you threatening me?”

“No, Mr. Fuchs, I’m not.”
They had reached his car.
“Let’s call it a warning. A fair warning.”

As he turned right onto U.N. Plaza, Fuchs felt the vibrating of his Blackberry, which he dug out of his inside coat pocket and covered with his free hand to keep the snow from hitting it. The message was from Daniel LeClair.
Two days,
it said,
then shut down NY.

Bill Crow’s scarred face was not the result of smallpox. It was acne that had done it, the result of too much alcohol and cigarettes and junk food consumed as a wild teenager on his reservation in New Mexico. When his mother died of cirrhosis he was in the midst of those wild years, seventeen and suddenly alone, his father unknown to him. The tribal council placed him with a family who took him in only for the monthly stipend that came with him. On the day of his high school graduation, he took off into the mountains, the Sangre de Christos, aflame at sunset with the dark red color that New Mexico’s earliest settlers likened to the blood of Christ. He stayed through all four seasons—one year—emerging with his face scarred but no longer erupting, two fingers lost to a homemade beaver trap, and the certain knowledge that his salvation lay in isolation and total self-reliance.

He joined the army for the sole purpose of getting special forces training, which put him on the path to his present career as a contract operative for various United States government agencies, most often the CIA or the FBI or, as in the present case, both. He lived and worked—they were the same to him—in a vaguely-bounded no-man’s land with no rules except his own, killing to eat, going to sleep each night fully prepared to be awoken by the grunts of a night monster he would have to grapple with at close quarters if he could not gun it down. The mountains.

Bill Crow did not have a Blackberry, but he knew, before Erhard Fuchs did, that Fuchs’ operation in New York had come to an end. It ended, not on February 25, with the deaths of Adnan Farah and Ali al-Najjar, although that was convenient, but a month earlier, with the arrival of a new administration in Washington. The Syrians would be courted.
Would they make a separate peace with Israel? Would they help broker a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians? What would they like in return? How about the closing down of the UN investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri? Would they like that?

Crow had
also
talked to Daniel LeClair—a very bitter Daniel LeClair—last night. Washington, it appears, had spoken. So easy for the great white fathers to switch sides. Fuchs and his team would be returning to Lebanon. Crow’s contact in the CIA, a boy of thirty with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East, thought the case was closed. But Crow was not so sure. As it turned out, there was no need to kill Farah and al-Najjar. The UN investigation would have been shut down anyway, on one pretext or another. The Syrians had overplayed their hand, and in the process two New York cops had been killed. The NYPD could not be happy about that.

The second cop, Davila, had taken something from the UN commission’s command post in Glen Cove and been blown to pieces for his trouble. That there was a traitor in his midst was by now obvious to Fuchs. And then there was the issue of the dead bodies.
I may have a use for them
, the Dutchman had said
. I am determined to continue.
No, the case was not over. There was prey out there, and more hunters than before.