Monkey in the Middle (14 page)

‘Never better.'

At the door, Paulie stops to button his coat. His Caddy's at the far end of a large parking lot and the wind, if anything, is blowing harder. Before he can take a step, Paulie's eyes begin to water, blurring his vision. He swipes at his eyes with his sleeve, then lowers his head and limps toward the car. He's halfway across the lot before he notices a man bent over the front door of a Toyota parked beside his Cadillac. The man faces away from him and seems to be trying keys in the door on the passenger's side.

Paulie continues on, wondering if he's interrupted a car thief. Or not interrupted, because the man doesn't turn around until Paulie's within a few yards. Then he spins on the balls of his feet to fix Paulie with a pair of blue eyes as cold and impersonal as the barrel of the automatic he holds in his right hand.

‘Here's what you're about to do, Paulie. You're about to open all the doors with that remote, then slide in on the driver's side and put both hands on the steering wheel. And you're about to do it now.'

Paulie's first thought, when he saw the gun, was that his turn had finally come. He was going to die and his main regret was that he'd never have the opportunity to get even. Now he's having trouble assimilating Carter's demands. But somehow, even as his brain spins away, his body gets the point. He slides into the car and his hands find the top of the steering wheel. Only then does it occur to him that murdering Paulie Marginella before he pays up is not in Thorpe's interest.

Carter slips into the back and closes the door. ‘Good news, Paulie. You're off the hook, at least temporarily. Thorpe and I, we had a falling out. Now, give me the cell phone.'

‘You want my cell phone?' Paulie tries for nonchalant, but his voice squeaks at the end. He's remembering Carter's eyes.

‘I want the cell phone I put in your car.'

‘What about Thorpe? How will he reach me?'

‘He won't, Paulie. That's the point. Now take the cell phone out of your pocket and pass it to me.'

Paulie's not carrying a weapon, but he certainly could be. Carter must know this, but he seems unconcerned. Is he stupid, or at least over-confident? As he hands over the cell phone, Paulie glances into the rear-view mirror to find Carter tucked against the door out of sight.

‘Now what?'

‘A question. Two, actually.'

‘Let's hear 'em.'

‘How much will you pay if I take Thorpe off your back, if I bring you his head? Keep in mind, Thorpe's too heavily invested to simply abandon the project. In the very near future, he'll either dispatch another shooter to collect his money, or come himself.'

Now Paulie's all ears, not least because he's got a flesh-and-blood enemy sitting in his back seat. Paulie's had enough of ghosts. And then there's the little matter of 350 grand.

‘How would I know it was Thorpe and not some poor jerk you picked off at random? In fact, how do I know that you're not Thorpe yourself?'

Carter drops a photo on the front seat. The photo lands face-up, a matter of pure luck. From where he sits, with his hands firmly gripping the wheel, Paulie can make out a group of soldiers, perhaps a dozen, with their arms around each other's shoulders. In the center of the photo, the head of one individual has been circled. Paulie can't discern the man's features, or even guess at his age, but he grunts in appreciation.

‘That Thorpe?'

‘Yeah. He's identified in the caption.'

Paulie looks down again, then says, ‘What's the second question?'

‘How much will you pay if I bring Thorpe to you alive?'

Eighteen

J
anie's sound asleep when Carter shows up at four o'clock in the afternoon. She seems at peace and he watches her for a moment before settling into a chair, his attention vaguely drawn to the TV hanging over her bed. The set's tuned to CNN, where John Roberts anchors a regular feature,
This Week at War
. Carter isn't much interested until Roberts leads into a segment about an honor killing in the Kurdish north of Iraq, a Yazidi girl stoned to death by her father and brothers because she was seen talking to a Sunni boy.

Carter asks himself why this item is newsworthy. Honor killings take place in Iraq every day. But the answer is pretty obvious. This particular murder was recorded, either on film or digitally, then sold to CNN. There's even a photo of the girl in better days, a formal portrait with her eyebrows tinted blue, her mouth covered in red lipstick and her face coated with porcelain-white make-up. The girl is lovely, without doubt. Just as, without doubt, her portrait was shown to eligible Yazidi men in order to drive up the bride price. At least before she committed her little indiscretion. Perhaps, if she'd been a good girl, she might have found herself the third spouse of an elderly tribal sheikh. As it was, she became an object lesson for other women.

A moment later, Carter's musings are interrupted by the entrance of a man with a stethoscope draped around his neck. Carter shuts off the TV and introduces himself. This is the first doctor he's come across at Cabrini.

‘I'm Jane Carter's brother.' Carter explains.

‘I am Doctor Ilgowski.' The man's heavy accent places his origins somewhere in eastern Europe. He's young, in his late twenties at most, with a thick head of unruly brown hair that flops over an already narrow forehead. Although his mouth is little more than a scar between his nose and his dimpled chin, he manages a smile when Carter offers his hand. Doctors in New York nursing homes are paid by the head, no matter how much or little time they spend with a patient, and speed is the name of the game. More than likely, Ilgowski is a moonlighting resident at a local hospital.

Carter glances at his sister. She's sound asleep. When he turns back, Ilgowski is reviewing Janie's chart. ‘I want to speak with you about my sister's –' he searches for the right word, finally settles on prognosis – ‘my sister's prognosis.'

‘There is privacy issue here.'

‘Even though I'm her healthcare proxy?' This is a lie. Janie's religious beliefs preclude the termination of her life before natural death, no matter how great her suffering. But Ilgowski doesn't challenge the assertion.

‘There is no recovery from this disease,' he declares without looking up.

‘I know that, Doctor. But right now I'm more interested in a timeline.'

Ilgowski begins to write furiously. The interview is nearly over. ‘Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is not amenable to treatment. There are no remissions, but there are sometimes plateaus. Your sister is right now in a plateau.' He puts down the chart and turns his eyes to his patient. When he speaks again, his voice is not unkind. ‘One year perhaps she will live, or she may decline rapidly. Predicting is not possible. Only I can say that she will not recover.'

Janie awakens a short time later. She asks that Carter read to her, but her eyes close almost immediately and Carter is left with the wheeze of the ventilator for company. Fifteen minutes later, he quits the nursing home.

Carter has no particular destination in mind, but he's not ready to settle in for the night. He walks cross-town, to Fifth Avenue, then turns north. Carter wants company, even the company of anonymous pedestrians. These he finds in greater and greater numbers as he makes his way through the mid-town shopping district to the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral. At another time, he might be impressed by the cathedral's massive bronze doors and the statuary around them. But on this evening his eyes are drawn to the far side of Fifth Avenue. Set before an office tower at the end of a long promenade, Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree rises seventy feet into the air, its branches flashing lights of every color, thousands upon thousands of them.

Carter is suitably dazzled, as are, he supposes, the gawkers packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the promenade. On a whim, Carter decides to work his way toward the tree. He crosses Fifth Avenue, then slowly edges around and between his fellow pilgrims. The tree at Rockefeller Center is an even bigger draw than Macy's showroom windows and the turnout is impressive, despite the bone-penetrating cold. Carter knows what's coming, the physical contact, the press of bodies. But he persists until his belly presses up against a rail surrounding a sunken plaza with a skating rink at the bottom. Around him, the flags of all the world's nations ripple in a steady breeze. Before him, the great tree blazes away.

Overwhelmed, Carter remains still for several minutes before finally turning his attention to the skating rink where a young skater, a girl wearing a gauzy white tunic over a matching body suit, stands in the center of the ice. Though she is no more than nine or ten, her make-up is thick enough to shame the Yazidi girl murdered by her relatives.

At a signal from a woman at the edge of the rink, cameras begin to roll and the girl begins to skate. Sweeping arabesques at first, smooth, graceful and assured, followed by a series of twisting leaps before she comes to an abrupt stop, unleashing a shower of ice. For a moment, the girl remains stationary, smiling a smile that seems to Carter at once innocent and wise. She's still smiling as she begins to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, her elbows tucking into her sides as her tunic and her long black hair billow out. When she finally stops short and raises her arms in triumph, the crowd along the rim of the plaza bursts into applause.

Suddenly, Carter is transported back to Afghanistan, to his first days in-country. He's on a recon mission, tucked into the shadows beneath a rocky outcropping that overlooks a walled compound some fifteen hundred yards away. Carter and a soldier named Martinson. As they watch through binoculars, a boy carrying a soccer ball emerges from one of the buildings, shortly followed by a younger girl. Initially, the children merely stand where they are, seemingly engulfed by the ferocious sun. Then the boy lays the ball at his feet and begins to dribble it across the yard. Nothing grows in the courtyard, not a tree or a bush or a single blade of grass, and the boy kicks up a mini-explosion of dust with each step.

Fifty yards away, along a dirt road, two men sit in a foxhole. The men bear AK47s and RPG launchers. Atop one of the buildings, the largest, a man squats behind a Russian-manufactured PKM machine gun. Snipers wait in the small windows of every building, motionless silhouettes who seem as much a part of the landscape as the mud walls that conceal them.

Carter and Martinson have been in place for six hours. In that time, they've observed thirty armed combatants, many wearing the black turban of the Taliban. They've observed six women and the two children as well.

Even a few weeks hence, neither will hesitate. They are fighting a war among the people, a war that cannot be fought without a significant number of the people being killed. That's what Captain Warren told them, way back when they were training at Fort Drum. More to the point, their orders require them to forward the compound's exact location, via satellite, to central command. They're supposed to tell the spooks who dispatched them,
Hey, yeah, you were right. The compound is definitely hostile.

But they're both green. They're new to the game. And they're not being attacked, or even threatened. They have time to think. At least Carter does. He's thinking that the kids he watches are like kids anyplace, with hopes and dreams that bear no relation to the reality at hand. The boy is six or seven, the girl still a toddler. She chases behind the boy, her excited squealing so loud that Carter hears her voice, despite the distance.

‘Maybe we should pull back and radio this in.' Tall and gangly, a string-bean of a man, Martinson has emerged from the hill country in western Pennsylvania to fight for his country.

Carter doesn't reply. Their mission is to rid the countryside of enemy combatants. American soldiers will be coming this way in less than twenty-four hours. So, there's nothing to discuss and he finally transmits the coordinates of every building in the compound. To his surprise, he begins to relax within seconds. He's blown the bridge and there's no going back. By the time the compound is obliterated, some thirty minutes later, he's ready to move on.

Not so Martinson. He lays a hand on Carter's shoulder and they wait until the dust settles, until it becomes apparent that there are no survivors. ‘Holy goddamn,' he tells Carter, ‘we really done it now. Holy goddamn.'

God-damned. That's what Carter takes with him. Damned by God. And what he understands is that it's possible to do God's work and still be damned by God, that neither good intentions, nor good results, mean a mother-fucking thing.

Nineteen

C
arter makes two stops on his way back to Janie's apartment. The first is at an internet café on Avenue B, only a few blocks from the nursing home, where he composes an e-mail. He doesn't rush the process. There's much to consider. For instance, did the cop, Lieutenant Epstein, admit his failure to Thorpe? If not, will the cop make another run at Carter? And what will Thorpe do, now that he's unable to contact Paulie Margarine? Conclude that Paulie's decided not to pay? Or that Carter's meddling? And either way, will he then give up? To Carter, this seems unlikely. But if Thorpe's determined to pursue the matter, will he then ask Epstein to approach the gangster, hoping the cop will make a better emissary than he did an assassin? Or will he come himself?

A sudden irrelevant thought snakes through Carter's mind, breaking his concentration. No more slippage. He's alert and ready. Hallelujah.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I cannot justify further risk without compensation. Pay up, Monty. And no more crying poverty. You've got your fingers in a dozen pies and we both know it. A debt is a debt.

Carter makes his second stop in a trendy bar on Woodhaven Boulevard, The Tub of Blood Saloon. Carter knows it's trendy because he's been here any number of times and the neighborhood's middle-class. But the joint's tricked out like a skid-row dive. Every item of furniture in the Tub of Blood is mismatched and brutally scarred, and the bar is a thick plank laid across a row of barrels. Chunks of brick lie where they've fallen, on splintered floors, while exposed light bulbs at the ends of dangling black wires provide a suitably dim light.