Touch of the White Tiger (5 page)

I gasped, unable to believe the mayor had exposed his niece’s violation before the entire world. When he’d hired me, he had been so adamant that he wanted the rape and retribution to remain secret out of respect for Carmella’s privacy.

“With all due respect, Mr. Mayor,” the reporter said, “that’s why the retribution profession came into existence. Victims want justice. Are you saying you will throw your support behind the Certified Retribution Specialists, even though their
tactics are coming under increasing criticism from traditional law-enforcement groups?”

Mayor Alvarez hesitated only a moment before replying, “No, I can no longer support the CRS profession. Not after the death of my son. We cannot tolerate any group, no matter how well-meaning, if it turns into a rogue force of assassins.”

“Do you agree with prosecutors who say that Angel Baker was motivated by professional jealousy? She was allegedly envious that your son had passed her over when he hired Roy Leibman.”

“I will not speculate on the matter, nor will I comment on the case until it’s settled.”

“One last question, Mr. Mayor. If Angel Baker were here right now, what would you say to her?”

Hatred filled the mayor’s brown, hooded eyes. “I have nothing to say to her. I hope I never have to see her again.”

I flipped off the digivision with a remote control and sank down into a couch, burying my face in my hands. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take. But a little voice of logic inside my head wouldn’t allow me to wallow long in pity.

“Something’s not right here,” I said, trying to jump-start my resolve with logic.

The door flew open and Lin bounded in, her flip-flops slapping the blond wood floor. “Angel? Are you back?”

“Lin!” I called out and threw open my arms. She ran into them, and I hugged her as hard as I dared. I didn’t want to scare her with the depth of my need for this particular hug.

Lin was a petite seven-year-old, nimble and graceful, with bangs and shoulder-length hair as dark as night. Her lovely almond-shaped eyes always lit up when she saw me, which I considered the eighth wonder of the world.

When Lin had first come to live here, she’d been understandably reserved, but she’d thawed a little with each pass
ing day. And though it would probably take years for her to fully accept me as a mother, we’d bonded in new, unspoken ways during the past week.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said, beaming up at me with a resilient smile, minus one front baby tooth. “Was your trip productive?”

I laughed to hear such a sophisticated word from her little mouth, but I quickly sobered and felt cold inside. How and when would I tell Lin that I was a murder suspect? After my disastrous interview with the Diva, I’d called Lola from P.S. #1 and told her my retribution job was over and that I’d decided to spend the night with Marco. I wasn’t prepared to admit to my ex-con mother that I, too, was now in trouble with the law. Lola had decided to tell Lin that I’d unexpectedly gone on an overnight trip.

Lola, of all people, didn’t want Lin to think I was sleeping with a man. When I was a kid, I’d lost count of her lovers, but I couldn’t fault her for trying to be better at grandmothering than she’d been at motherhood.

I pressed Lin’s head gently between my hands and positioned her for a loud, smacking kiss on the forehead. “Yes, my darling girl, I had a productive night.”

Lola tromped up the stairs, fanning herself. Her frazzled red hair had obviously revolted in the late blast of summer heat. Her cheeks were flushed and, beneath her voluminous red polysynthe gown, her double-D breasts heaved in her bid for air.

“Hello, Lola,” I said.

“Honey, you got problems down there. Some idiot reporter just asked me if you’d ever threatened to kill anyone when you were growing up. I said, ‘Other than me? No.’” She laughed and I groaned.

Lola was the only person I’d ever known who could catch
her breath and expend it without pause at the same time. Suddenly remembering my alleged sleepover at Marco’s, she raised her brows with prudish disdain. “Did you enjoy your
trip?
”

“It’s a long story,” I said, combing Lin’s silken black hair with my splayed fingers.

“I have all the time in the world,” Lola replied as she headed for the couch. “Lin, honey, fetch Grandma
ma
a glass of iced tea.”

“
Grandmama?
” I repeated.

She flopped down on the couch and leaned her head back so she could mouth at me: mind your own business. Nothing Lola did was my business, yet everything I did was hers. But now wasn’t the time to get in a mother-daughter spat.

“What’s wrong with Grandma
ma?
” Lola asked petulantly.

I held up both hands in surrender. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“What is the matter, Baker?” Mike came up beside me.

I hadn’t heard him coming up the stairs. His calm, accented words washed over me like warm, soothing water. “Oh, Mike, am I glad to see you.”

I put my arms around him, craving his strength. He held himself upright and firm, yet I felt his affection in the light embrace he gave me in return. “What happened, Baker?”

While Lola and Lin played cards in the living room, I joined Mike in his renovated coach house in the back of my garden. I ended up drinking an entire pot of green tea while I told him all that had happened. Fortunately, I had a twelve-foot wooden privacy fence around my oblong garden, so I didn’t have to worry about snooping reporters.

Sitting on the futon on Mike’s floor, gazing at his small stone fish pond through the open French doors of his one-room haven, I began to unwind and restore a sense of inner peace.

Mike listened to my incredible tale and took it all in stride. That was easy to do because he was a former Chinese Shao
lin monk who had survived three years of indentured servitude in the poppy fields of Joliet, Illinois, before finding a place to call his own in my backyard. Opium production was legal as long as the harvest was sold only to legitimate pharmaceutical firms. But the poppy farms kept a low profile, preferring to hire foreign immigrants. Mike was such a one. He’d naively signed away his freedom when he signed up to work for the Red Fields opium plant. I’d rescued him and he’d been devoted to me ever since, saving my butt on numerous occasions. Nothing could shock or defeat Mike.

“Who do you think did this, Baker?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, but can’t say for sure. Lots of petty criminals I’ve hauled in for retribution might want to harm me or my friends. But none of them has the power to alter phone records or get into my safety deposit box.”

“What about one of the mobs?”

“That’s more likely.”

There was so much governmental and corporate corruption and the various criminal syndicates had so successfully infiltrated the establishment that sophisticated crimes were hard to trace.

“It could be anybody,” I said. “But the person who comes to mind is Corleone Capone.”

That was the ridiculously archetypal alias of the head of the Mongolian Mob. He’d chosen Capone because he was obsessed with the notorious Prohibition-era gangs that became rich through bootlegging. As for Corleone, he’d supposedly chosen the name in homage to Don Corleone, the main character in the novel and movie
The Godfather
.

His alias notwithstanding, Corleone Capone dressed like an eighteenth-century Mongolian warlord and spent most of his time trying to outdo the neo-Russian syndicate.

I’d majorly pissed him off last month when I’d negotiated
the release of the Chinese orphans from his archrival, Vladimir Gorky. Gorky had kidnapped the girls from Capone for the sole purpose of foiling the competition. Gorky knew that Capone had spent seven years preparing the girls for sale. For Capone, losing the girls permanently to loving, adoptive homes was humiliating and financially devastating. I had been waiting for him to get back at me in some way. Maybe this was it.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It was probably Corleone Capone. But why didn’t he just kill me? Why did he involve me in a bizarre and pointless double murder?”

“Maybe he wants to make you suffer.”

“Well, he succeeded.”

“Do not worry, Baker. We will prove your innocence, Baker,” Mike said with his usual lack of expression. He didn’t need histrionics to prove his points. Not when he could down three men at once with
fei mai qiao
, “the leg flying like a feather,” or
gang jin juan
, “the diamond fist,” or any number of the other amazing kung fu moves he used so effortlessly. “You need rest now.”

I nodded and stretched out. Mike pulled a sheet up to my chin and tucked it around my shoulders with great care. I felt safe and loved. Why could I feel that way with a friend but not with a lover?

“Marco betrayed me,” I said with cool detachment that belied the pain I wasn’t prepared to deal with.

Mike exhaled and assumed a lotus pose, sitting next to the futon. “Perhaps he had a reason.”

“He could have given me a character reference to Q.E.D., but he didn’t even admit to the lead investigator that we knew each other. And I believe he planted my gun at the scene. He was the only one who knew I’d put it in the bank.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have a chance. I’m not sure I want one.”

Mike mulled this over silently, and I felt a prick of irritation that he didn’t immediately condemn Marco. A breeze softly buffeted the wind chimes hanging outside. They tinkled soothingly.

“You should get your crystal ball,” Mike said at last. “Find out why Detective Marco betrayed you.”

I could do it. Marco himself had forced me to accept the fact that I’d inherited Lola’s psychic abilities. I’d used them to help us find Lin’s missing friends. I suppose I could use my talents to help myself as well. But the very thought of learning any more about Marco made me feel queasy.

“The less I know about Marco the better,” I said, closing my eyes for much needed sleep. For now, ignorance would be my only bliss.

Date With Destiny

D
etective Riccuccio Marco had an inbred devotion to truth, justice and the American way. Granted, all three lived in the shadows of his own crimes and guilt, but he’d learn to compartmentalize his life, and so far the positives still had his dark side on a tight leash.

Two years ago he’d entered a new program to streamline the training of solo detectives to replace those killed by the R.M.O., the Mongolian Mob, and other crime syndicates. His colleagues in the psy-ops department of the Chicago PD assumed he’d been motivated by the desire to learn more about the drug-related shoot-out that killed his rookie-cop kid brother, and in part that was true.

Handsome, articulate, sensitive to emotions and bred into a lifetime of nuance, Marco had easily excelled at crime-
fighting propaganda campaigns, psychological profiles on seriously twisted suspects and media appearances. None of his superiors would guess that he’d majored in psychology so he could understand his own horrific crimes. R.M.O. attorneys had illicitly wiped his record clean.

Prior to his long years of study at the University of Chicago, he’d been a
sgarrista
—a foot soldier—for the Russian Mafiya Organizatsia. And before that, he’d been an innocent kid. Everybody started out in life innocent. Few were lucky enough to die that way.

Angel was still innocent, though she pretended otherwise. But she wouldn’t be for long if she got stuck in the prison system. She needed help. So Marco made two calls. One was to one of the best lawyers in town, a former prosecuting attorney who was so clean his shit didn’t even stink. The other call was to a shyster who acted as an equivalent of a
capo bastone
, or underboss, to R.M.O. leader Vladimir Gorky. That call cost Marco—how much he didn’t even want to know.

Both attorneys—upstanding and crooked—essentially said the same thing: Angel Baker was screwed.

Gossip in the substation’s coffee bar confirmed as much. While the department sold whiskey-flavored coffee, Marco concluded that he needed a shot of the real thing. Not even the chameleon-flavored alcohol marketed as Vivante would do. So he tossed back a quadruple espresso and headed for the nearest exit, glancing at his watch. Six in the morning wasn’t too early, or late, to drink he concluded. Not considering the circumstances. Then it would be time to call in some more chips.

Marco almost made it out the door. His mistake was taking a shortcut through the eastern corridor, which took him past the psy-ops interview suites.

“Hey, Marco, is that you?” came a bulldog voice. Captain
Mitchell Deloire stuck his head out of one of the suites. “Fancy meeting you here. I need you to come in and interview a suspect before you go.”

“I’m leaving, Del,” he said, waving off the older man.

With a round, seemingly neckless head planted on broad shoulders, Deloire looked like a bulldog. But instead of growling, he whined.

“Come on, Marco, give me a break. I got nobody here from psy-ops and this nut-ball they call the Cyclops says he’s ready to talk. I just need somebody to do a quick psych profile. Then you can wash your hands. He thinks he’s King Richard III. You can brush up on your Shakespeare.”

Marco stopped and looked back with longing. He’d always had a weakness for delusional personality disorder. “I’d like to help you out, Del, I really would. But I hung up my shrink hat. Now I’m—”

“Yeah, yeah, a hotshot detective. Maybe he’ll tell you something to help with the Cloisters case. That suspect you brought in with Townsend—Angel Baker—she’s the one who brought down this wacko thespian. Maybe King Richard can tell you something about her that will nail your investigation.”

News travels fast, was Marco’s first thought. Of course, when the mayor’s son is killed, the details would travel like wildfire throughout the department. His second thought was that Angel had never told him she’d tussled personally with the Cyclops. To know she had risked her life so thoroughly and hadn’t even told him made the low-burning flame of frustration she fed in his gut flare up.

Angel was a damned stubborn woman. She’d never had any intention of giving up her work for him. That he’d allowed himself to think that she would made him feel like a sap. He didn’t doubt that she wanted him. What he doubted was her ability to reveal her hand. He wasn’t even sure if she could play straight.

From a psychological viewpoint, she was damnably intriguing and gutsy as hell. He was curious to hear what the Cyclops would have to say about his defeat at Angel’s hands.

“Okay, Del,” Marco said, massaging his frown away, “but this better be quick.”

“I heard she was here tonight,” Cy said as soon as he entered the darkened room.

Marco always turned down the lights when he interviewed a mole who had spent his life underground in Emerald City. It didn’t matter that Cy was blind. He would sense the lack of heat from the ceiling and know it was dark and feel safer.

“Who was here?” Marco asked casually.

“Angel Baker.” The stooped and disfigured young man said the name with such loathing that Marco’s arm hair bristled to a stand.

“If she were here, would that be all right with you, Scott?” he said, glancing down to make sure he said Cyclops’s birth name correctly.

“Call me Richard,” Cy said. He took a limping step forward.

According to the files Marco had quickly perused, Cy’s legs had been badly burned in the underground fire that had killed or disfigured most of his family about ten years ago. Cy was born and raised as a mole, one of the many descendants of Chicago’s homeless who had moved into the labyrinthine subway system in 2020 when the CTA abandoned the train tracks in favor of aboveground superconductor lines. Undesirable though the real estate might be, it had been dubbed Emerald City and had largely been left alone by Chicago politicians and law enforcement agencies.

The moles, who congregated in loose clanlike affiliations, often pirated gas from underground pipelines to light their dreary subway tunnels and stations. Cy’s clan had acciden
tally set off a gas explosion, and many of his family members were killed. Those who survived had been ravaged with burns and were treated like lepers by other clans.

Cy’s twisted scars, which covered most of his body, had left him lame and sightless in one eye. His disabilities and the loss of his loved ones had sent him over the edge. Delusional and frustrated by his misfortune, Cy had built an underground prison and hired out his services as a jailer to the various mobs, apparently enjoying his ability to control the fates of others. He called his prison the Globe and was fond of quoting Shakespeare.

“I’ll call you Richard if you’d like,” Marco said in his neutral therapist’s voice. “But according to your file, your name is Scott Owen. And I understand some call you Cyclops. The headlines refer to you as Cy. Who are you really?”

“‘I am a villain. Yet I lie: I am not. Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.’”

“You’re quoting Shakespeare,” Marco said.

“Am I? I merely speak the words that come to mind.”

“Then what is on your mind? Captain Deloire tells me you wanted to talk to someone.”

He lurched forward and felt for the chair on the opposite side of the table. He slunk down into it and stared at Marco as if he could see. “She blinded me, you know. I had one good eye, and she thrust a stick into it to free that worthless old vagabond mother of hers.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Cy laughed low like a feral hyena. “Don’t be. I’ll make her pay. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Let her know that I will find her if I have to walk through the city streets with a white cane. And when I do find her, I’ll make her pay. Tell her, De
tective, that I am a hell-hound that crept from the kennel of my mother’s womb, and I will hunt Angel Baker down and kill her.”

After spilling his guts over the wrongs done to him by Angel, the Cyclops docilely answered Marco’s basic questions for an initial profile. As two guards took the prisoner away, Lieutenant Townsend entered the suite.

“Did you learn anything of use about Angel Baker?” Townsend said in his clipped British accent. “Deloire says the mole has information about her.”

Marco closed the file and handed it to the Q.E.D. director. “It’s all in here. The only thing I learned about Angel Baker is that she has one more enemy to worry about.”

“If she attacked this so-called Cyclops,” Townsend pressed, “perhaps we can add assault and battery to her case.”

Marco skewered him with a look of disgust. “The Cyclops is accused of starving people to death in his prison, Townsend. Aren’t you forgetting why he’s here?”

“I hope you aren’t forgetting why Angel Baker was here.”

“Let’s keep the two cases separate. Angel Baker confronted the Cyclops in order to free her mother from his underground prison. Is that a crime?”

“Perhaps we can make it one. Whose side are you on, Marco?”

“I’m on the side of justice, Townsend. Aren’t you?”

There was a long pause. Townsend’s gray eyes studied Marco with silent calculation, but no emotion.

And it was the lack of that simple but crucial spark of humanity that grated at Marco’s gut.

Marco had been heartened when legislators first decided to fund Q.E.D. He’d long thought it was time for legitimate law officers to regain control of the city. In spite of his shad
owed past, Marco inherently believed in the law and the need for civility in civilization. But at what price? Did investigators really have to dehumanize themselves in order to catch the bad guys? Weren’t integrity and strength of character enough to face down evil?

“Your disdain for me, Detective, is obvious,” Townsend said. “But can you at least appreciate my dedication to law and order? Do you know how much I have sacrificed in the name of justice?”

Your humanity
, Marco thought. “Yeah, you went under the knife so you could think like a computer. But I hope you’re going to keep me on the case. You just may need someone who has old-fashioned hunches to help you sort through all of your strategic and logical conclusions. I’m a psychologist. I’m into emotions.”

Marco walked away, but stopped when Townsend called his name.

“How is it you were the first on the scene of the crime, Detective? I didn’t get a chance to ask.”

Marco shrugged. “Fate, I guess. Right time at the right place. I happened to be in the neighborhood.” He grinned charmingly. “Don’t you worry. We’re going to nail her, Townsend. You and me. We’ll get that wicked Angel Baker if it’s the last thing we do.”

Townsend turned briskly and walked away. He may have lost his emotions, but he still recognized sarcasm when he heard it.

There was always a point when Marco realized that summer was over. It would take him by surprise, then make him wistful and, finally, restless for change. Sometimes it was the sunlight, that went from brilliant in June to a mellow August gold. Sometimes it was a noticeable crispness in the air. This
morning, as he zoomed in his PD aerocar over the bridge to Little Venice, it was the mist that hugged the shoreline, looming in gray and foreboding tufts. The hawk—Chicago’s famously bitter and powerful wind—was getting ready to attack.

Marco made good time over the bridge and parked in the floating commuter lot that sat a quarter of a mile offshore. From there he’d have to take a turbo-gondola to his mother’s apartment.

To keep her safe, Marco had moved Natasha Marco Black here to the old neighborhood nearly twenty years ago when he’d broken with the R.M.O. Though she’d raised Marco here until he was five, she’d moved back to her old Russian neighborhood after his father, Luigi Marco, had died. On the north side, she settled down with a nice postal worker named George Black, who passed away five years later. Natasha and George had one son, Danny, Marco’s beloved kid brother.

As the gondola sliced through Lake Michigan’s choppy, dark water, inching down the Grand Canal, Marco inhaled the cool lake air. He admired the small palazzi as he passed, and the crooked line of multicolored town houses that towered over either side of the waterway.

Little Venice had been built about seventy-five years ago when Chicago became totally landlocked. When the Italian Mafia had been put out of business by a string of federal lawsuits and competition from other ethnic syndicates, the former Mob bosses turned to legitimate real estate.

The idea was to build a replica of Venice in the American Midwest. But when the original Venice in Italy sank into the sea beyond repair, many of the sixteenth-century buildings, piazzas and basilicas had been shipped to Chicago. What resulted was a charming, historically significant piece of lake property that was partly residential and partly a tourist attraction. The tourist angle insured that it was safe.

Marco visited his mother whenever he could, which was not as often as he should, and he steeled himself against her usual admonishments.

“Marco, Marco, why didn’t you come see me sooner?” she cooed when he entered her small, second-story apartment.

It was filled with a garish mix of iconography from old Russia, Italy and Vatican City. She’d downloaded photos of the newly consecrated Pope John Paul VI, otherwise known as El Papa Mabuto Ganni, the first Swahili to hold the post. She’d positioned the photo next to a portrait of Rasputin, who’d finally achieved sainthood a decade ago.

“Marco,” Natasha said, stroking his cheeks with smooth, warm palms. “You don’t look good, my darling boy. What is the matter? You can tell your mama.”

He gently gripped her frail shoulders and kissed her forehead. She possessed the best—and most trying—qualities of motherhood shared by her inherited Russian culture and her adopted Italian. She was overprotective, doting and superstitious. Her long dark, silver-streaked hair fell out of a bun, occasionally tumbling in front of dark, lined eyes that ominously studied his face as if his worry lines could portend the future.