Hark! (18 page)

 

I
T WAS NOW TWELVE-THIRTY
, and here came Konstantinos!

Striding out of the stage door, saying hello to the armed guard there, and then marching off up the avenue toward his favorite little deli.

Dutifully, the Deaf Man followed.

Every day so far, Sallas left the concert hall at twelve-thirty, walked to the Greek delicatessen—surprise!—on Sakonuff, had lunch there, and then walked back to the hall to resume rehearsal at 1:00
P.M.
At 4:00
P.M.
every day, he exited through the stage door, bodyguard beside him, violin case swinging from his right hand, took a brief brisk stroll up Grover Avenue, past the museum and the 87th Precinct stationhouse, and then turned back toward the hotel again.

Later, the Deaf Man thought.

I
T WAS ONLY AFTER THE
second messenger arrived that the police detected a pattern here: Carmela Sammarone was drafting junkies to do her legwork. At least today, anyway. At least in the selection of her delivery boys.

It wasn't too difficult to find a junkie on any street corner in this city. Lay some shit on him, or just the cash to buy the shit, and he'd go out to kill his own mother for you. It wasn't difficult to recognize a junkie, either. There were always the red watery eyes, the pupils either too large or too small. There was the puffy face, or the cold, sweaty palms, or the shaking hands, or the pale skin. Sometimes there was the smell of this week's substance of choice—cocaine or heroin or ecstasy or meth or OxyContin—on the breath or the body or the clothes.

But more than any of these, there was the blank desperate stare of the addict. And behind those dead eyes, the knowledge that he or she was married to a tyrannical slaveholder. And the further knowledge that not a single soul on earth—sister, mother, brother, father, spouse, significant other, social worker, doctor, or cop—looked upon you with anything but pity or contempt because they felt you had no one but yourself to blame for your predicament.

“Where'd you get this letter, Joseph?” they asked the first messenger.

At the time, they suspected he might be a junkie, but they didn't yet realize a pattern was about to emerge.

“Girl give it to me Langley Park.”

“What girl?”

“Doan know who she was.”

“She give you a name?”

“Nossir. Lay a C-note on me, say she be watchin me deliver the en'lope.”

“Where was this, Joseph?”

“Tole you. Langley Park.”

“How old was she?”

“Ain' no good with ages. Young.”

“How young? Young like you?”

“Older.”

“How old are you, Joseph?”

“Seventeen.”

“What'd she look like?”

“Short red hair, brown eyes.”

The second messenger was a girl with bleached blond hair and green eyes. Her hair was matted and stringy and greasy. Her eyes had lost all their luster, and she was as thin as a rail, and her clothes were bedraggled and stained and smelled of vomit and Christ knew what else. She was probably somewhere in her mid-twenties, but she could easily have been mistaken for a woman in her thirties. Maybe even older. A tired woman in her thirties.

Speaking with a Calm's Point accent—the Irish, not the black or Italian variety—she told them she'd been an addict since she was seventeen, a hooker since she was eighteen. Started with crack, which was all the rage then, moved on to gremmies and sherms and even did some fry before starting to shoot hop directly into the vein, welcome to the club, sweetheart! She told them this girl with long black hair had made her an offer she couldn't refuse, two bills to deliver this envelope here, told her she didn't know who the girl was, didn't know her name, had never seen her before this morning, wouldn't recognize her again if she tripped over her in church.

She was stoned out of her mind when she delivered the envelope, and she couldn't remember where, or even when, she'd met the girl with the long black hair.

“I'm a natural redhead, wanna see?” she said, and lifted her skirt.

She spelled her name Aine Duggan, but she pronounced it Anya Doogan.

They figured her for a lost cause.

But now they knew for sure that Carmela Sammarone was finding her messengers in the city's pool of drug addicts.

And the pool was bottomless.

“He's sticking it to us,” Parker said.

“That's what he means by ‘thrusting it,' ” Genero agreed.

“Sticking it right in our eye.”

“ ‘
Thrusting
it.' ”

“ ‘I may say,' ” Meyer said, quoting from the note. “He sounds like Rumsfeld. Next thing you know, he'll be saying ‘Golly!' and ‘Gee whiz!' ”

“There's that sword again,” Eileen said.

“Where?” Willis asked.

“ ‘Piercing steel.' ”

“Poisoned darts, too,” Kling said.

“I don't see any poisoned darts,” Genero said.

“ ‘Darts envenomed.' That's poisoned darts, Dickie-boy.”

“No one calls me ‘Dickie,' ” Genero told Parker.

“Not even your mama?”

“Everyone calls me Richard.”

“ ‘Darts envenomed' are poisoned darts, Richard.”

“Thanks for the information.”

“ ‘Welcome to the ears,' ” Carella said, typing the words into the computer.

“Joking about his own infirmity,” Hawes said.

“You think so?”

“Signing the note, in effect. I am the Deaf Man, remember?”

“
Julius Caesar
, Act Five, Scene Three,” Carella said, reading from the screen.

“How many is that so far?”

“How many is what?”

“The plays he's quoted from.”

“Nine?” Kling said.

“No, ten, I think.”

“No, wait…”

“Plus one from the sonnets. The one about the darling buds of May,” Eileen said, and glanced at Willis.

“And we
still
don't know where the first one came from,” Carella said.

“Which one?”

“About ‘an actor's art,' all that.”

“ ‘An actor's art can die, and live, to act a second part,' ” Kling quoted.

“So how many is that?”

“Nine plays for sure. Or ten. Plus the sonnet.”

“Out of how many?” Genero asked.

They all looked at him.

“How many did he write?”

“Thousands,” Parker said.

“Must be a place we can find out,” Genero said. “Isn't there a collection or something?”

“What difference does it make how
many
he wrote, Richard?”

“I thought if there was a collection someplace…”

“Yes, Richard?”

“We could figure out how many he wrote.”

“And then what?”

“One thing could lead to another,” Genero said, and shrugged.

 

T
HE
D
EAF
M
AN
was thinking that almost anywhere in America, almost anyone could walk in with a bomb and blow the place to smithereens. Walk into any restaurant, any theater, any sporting event, any prayer meeting with a bomb strapped around your waist, and the rest was late-night news. When death was preferable to life, when death promised a heaven where there'd be seven, or seventeen, or seventy waiting virgins, however many there were supposed to be—he personally didn't think there were
any
virgins left in the entire world—then what was to stop any lunatic from walking in with his ticket to paradise strapped around his waist?

Security?

Impossible to maintain in a free society.

Right this minute, he was walking into the biggest library in the city, stopping at a checkpoint where uniformed guards examined his briefcase, peering into it like the trained watchdogs they were, but never asking him to open his jacket or take off his shoes because so far no one in America had marched in loaded. Once that happened, things would change. Before long, you'd be strip-searched before you were permitted to watch the latest hit movie. But for now…

“Thank you, sir. If you'll check the bag, please.”

He walked across the echoing, vaulted marble lobby to a cloakroom behind and to the right of the security guards. He handed the briefcase across the counter, received a claim check for it, and followed the signs to FOLGER FIRST FOLIO.

 

T
HERE USED TO BE
a time when Ollie frequented girls like the ones employed or previously employed by Ambrose Carter. Not that he'd been personally intimate with anyone in the man's stable. But he was certainly familiar with the species. There was a time, too, when Ollie might have called a prostitute of the Hispanic persuasion a “spic slut,” but that was before he'd met Patricia Gomez, who was Puerto Rican and a police officer besides and who was…well…not his girlfriend, quite, but someone he was…well…sort of seeing. And nowadays, he would break anyone's head who called Patricia a spic.

The first hooker he talked to was, in fact, a spic slut named Paquita Flores, a very dark-skinned voluptuous cutie dressed somewhat scantily for so early in June, not even summer yet here in the city, sitting on the front stoop of her own building, skirt up to her ass, long legs flashing, licking a lollipop, as if she needed further advertisement.

“Yo,
hombre
,” she said, looking up, licking. “Long time no see.”

He tried to remember those days back then when he frequently traded police lenience for sexual favors. Paquita had been sixteen or thereabouts. She was now, what, twenty, twenty-one? He sat down beside her. Her skimpy frilled skirt flapped about her knees in a mild breeze. She kept licking the lollipop.

“
Que pasa, maricon
?” she said.

“What's the word on Carter?” he asked.

“Oh, man, he's like dead, you dinn know?” she said, and grinned around the lollipop.

“The street guessing why?”

“Maybe he ratted out a whore.”

“Which one?”

“Don't know, man.”

“Who
would
know?”

“Carter wasn' my
abadesa
,” Paquita said. “You axin the wrong person.”

“Who
should
I ask?”

“Go the Three Flies. His girls hang there.”

 

T
HE BOOK WAS
in a thick glass case surrounded on all four sides by uniformed guards. The Deaf Man knew that the case was alarmed and that if anyone so much as touched the glass, the alarms would sound not only here on the second floor of the library, but also at the offices of Security Plus, who would immediately alert the Midtown South Squad, four blocks from the library.