Resolved (5 page)

“I have a number of functions.”

“Yeah, bring the beer, cook the food, make the beds. What about the money. You got it here, right?”

“It is where I can get it, Felix. And you cannot.” Rashid stared into his eyes. “So you must put out of your mind any thought that you can, ah, get what you want and disappear. Rip us off, as you say. We require an American to travel around and go places where someone who looks like me would draw suspicion. That's why you are here and not rotting in that prison. There will be eyes on you all the time, Felix. And I would keep in mind if I were you the fact that you are already a dead man. And that you can be easily replaced. There is no shortage of Americans. Am I making myself perfectly clear now?”

Felix shrugged. “Whatever,” he said, and pulled his eyes away. Not a butler, Rashid, that was a mistake, but the fucker had no call to talk to him like one of his niggers. Felix added him to the long list of people he would get if the opportunity presented.

“W
HAT DO YOU DO ALL DAY UP IN THAT ROOM
, R
ASHID
?”
Felix asked, smiling. They were at lunch at the picnic table in the backyard of the Queens house.

“I work with the computers,” said the Arab. “I have a computer business.”

“Yeah? What kind of business?” Felix had the con man's art of feigning interest, but in this case he was genuinely interested. He had been in the joint while the computer revolution unfolded and was anxious to catch up. Felix had always been a reader of magazines, and the constant association in them of the words “computer” and “fraud” had piqued his interest.

Rashid, for his part, was not reluctant to expound. His weakness, which Felix had not been long in ferreting out, was that he felt unappreciated. The glory of derring-do, of planting bombs and carrying out midnight strikes was not for him. Rather, he was an arranger, a mover of paper and electrons and funds, vital but never to be a star. Even the Spaniards, who could barely read or speak English, had the gall to condescend to him. He thought Felix respected him. He thought Felix had been properly cowed.

He was therefore inclined to be expansive. “It is a very simple business. Now, you understand e-mail, yes? Very well, then, you see it is possible to send out an extremely large number of e-mail messages for no cost at all. Ten, twenty million messages, all around the world. So, even if only a few respond, there you have a business.”

“What, you're selling something?”

“Of course. A number of things. Stock tips. Pills for various energy-type things. Special interest videos.”

“What d'you mean, like fuck videos?”

“I don't see them, I just take the orders,” said Rashid delicately. “Mainly, it is books, a program. You pay up front, and you get material showing how to run an on-line business, so you recruit others in the same way. Everyone pays a little up the line. It grows automatically.”

“Yeah? You doing okay, then?”

“Well enough for my modest needs.”

“Man, I'd like to get into that. I used to sell credit furniture. What a pain in the butt that was! Going into a million shitty apartments, putting on the fucking charm for a bunch of old bitches. No more, man. Was it hard to learn?”

“It requires concentration, of course.” Rashid looked carefully at Felix. “I could teach you, if you like to.”

Bingo, thought Felix. “Yeah,” he said, “that would be cool.”

Concentration was not Felix's strongest point; when difficulties presented themselves in his life, his instinct was to smash something or someone, or blame someone, or both. But he also had the ability to suspend this instinct in a good cause. He had learned karate in this way, and a variety of swindling tricks, and in this way also he learned how to operate a computer, and was soon cruising the Web and sending out millions of e-mail messages, and ordering useless or obscene junk for the remarkable numbers of suckers who responded. He was delighted with the sorts of things you could find on the Web nowadays, and amazed that they were allowed. You could spend all day viewing videos of very young girls being raped, for example, if you had stolen credit card numbers, and Felix spent many happy hours thus enriching his fantasy life. Even more valuable, however, was the ability of the Web to locate people. If you had a social security number, it was no trick to find an address. Felix had one and found the address he needed, which was, remarkably, only a few miles away, in Forest Hills, Queens.

Rashid was a pedantic and exhausting teacher, always offering more than his student wanted to know, or really needed to know about the mysteries of Windows and the Internet. He also ran a thick sidebar of editorial comment on the decadence of the West and the contempt he had for the pornography available on the Web. His own tastes were not quite as exotic as Felix's in this, running more to fat, older women in degrading poses and lovely young men in copulation. Of course, they both spied on each other's movements across the electronic prairie. Rashid had password-protected files and Felix devoted a considerable amount of time trying to crack these, but with no success.

Three weeks after Felix's “death” in prison, Rashid called him over to a monitor and showed him a color photograph of a young girl. She was talking, it seemed, to a man dressed in layered rags with a strange hat on his head. The photo had been taken from the side, and showed the girl's generous curved nose and strong jaw. She was very thin, with prominent cheekbones.

A dog, was Felix's thought. “Who's that?” he asked.

“Karp's daughter. Her name is Lucy. She volunteers in a soup kitchen. It's where I took this picture. At great risk to myself,” he added importantly. “My face is known to the authorities. Here is another one, with the zoom lens, from the street.” She was wearing shorts in this one, baggy ones, and a loose black T-shirt. No body, decent legs. Put a bag over the face and she'd be halfway fuckable, Felix thought. He said, “You want me to whack her?”

“Eventually, but first we need that she gives us some information. There is a man we need to settle with first, a Vietnamese, a friend of hers. He's disappeared. We believe she knows where he can be found. First you find out that, and then you can dispose of the girl.”

“Why do you want the guy?”

“That's not your concern,” said Rashid quickly, and then, unable to resist demonstrating the confidence placed in him by those higher in the organization, he added, “He was instrumental in the capture of ibn-Salemeh. A traitor to the oppressed peoples.”

“Well, we can't let him get away with that shit,” said Felix. “So, what's the plan—I grab the girl and we make her talk?” Felix looked at the photo of the screen again and imagined this procedure. He felt a pleasant tightening in his belly.

“No, of course not! Can you imagine the uproar if we kidnapped the child of a senior prosecutor? Not only would our major operations be entirely compromised, but the Vietnamese would surely hear of it and go deeper into hiding.”

“What major operation?”

Rashid shook his head. “Need-to-know, need-to-know basis entirely. It does not concern you at this point in time. No, what you must do is to befriend the girl, get close to her, tell her a story, perhaps she will tell you a story, as well. Patience is the thing here. She is a kind girl, this work with the charities. She should not be hard to approach. And you are charming, I understand. It should not be difficult for a man like you.”

It was not. Felix held it as a matter of deep faith that all cunts were essentially stupid and that they would believe any line of bullshit you threw at them. Also that they secretly wanted to be hurt. It had worked that way throughout his life. The few exceptions required special treatment, after which the dogma re-established itself, since the exceptions were no longer among us.

The next morning, Felix had his photograph taken with a digital camera, and watched, fascinated as Rashid reduced it in size and printed it out, and then delaminated a New York State driver's license, substituted Felix's picture, and relaminated it. Felix was now Larry Larsen. He was somewhat disappointed to learn that no car went along with the license. Rashid explained that the less the cell interacted with the authorities the better. No credit cards, no cars to get into accidents with or collect tickets. Felix would take the subway. He was given a hundred dollars for what Rashid called operating expenses.

“I'm not going to do much fucking operating with a hundred bucks,” said Felix, eyeing the sheaf of old twenties that Rashid extended.

“It is for subway and meals,” said Rashid. “An occasional taxi. Buy flowers for the young lady. No drugs and no drinking.”

“Never touch the stuff,” said Felix. Except for speed and downers that was entirely true, but speed and downers weren't really drugs as far as Felix was concerned. They were medication; doctors prescribed them to millions of squares.

In any case, it felt good to be out of the house. Felix thought he could get to like being a terrorist. He walked over to Broadway in Astoria and entered a large hardware store, where he purchased a set of painter's gear—white coveralls, cap, and booties—plus some rubber gloves, an Ace Hardware ball cap, a masonry hammer, a roll of duct tape, and an eight-inch butcher knife. At a CVS nearby he bought a package of condoms, and made a phone call. Then he stopped at a coffee shop, where he had coffee and a Danish, and used the men's room to change into the coveralls and cap. Carrying his clothes and the hardware in the store bag, he walked down to the Steinway Street subway station, a working stiff on his way to a job.

The house was a solid middle-class dwelling in the lower-priced north end of Forest Hills, a two-story red-brick detached, set back from the street behind a small front yard deeply shaded by a maple. Felix went up the front walk and rang the bell, although he was pretty sure no one was home. That was why he had called. There was a neat label below the doorbell that read C
HALFONTE
.

He walked down the side alley to the back door. He found it locked by a solid dead bolt, but this was no problem because the lady of the house had conveniently left a key under a flowerpot at the edge of the back stoop. He let himself into the kitchen after replacing the key under the flowerpot, but then cursed softly, reversed direction, and retrieved the key. He wiped it off, slipped on rubber gloves, and replaced it again. Leave no trace. Felix had once left a good many traces at a murder he'd committed, which was what had nailed him. But he had been young and foolish then, and not dead. Leave no traces. He had learned a lot in prison.

Felix slipped on the painter's booties, removed the butcher knife from its cardboard sheath, and slipped it into the thin leg pocket of the coveralls. He ripped a number of strips off the roll of duct tape and stuck them on the edge of the kitchen counter. He would use the kitchen. The one small window faced a hedge, and the door led to the heavy foliage of the backyard. He didn't figure that there'd be much noise in any case. He strolled through the house while he waited. Mary had done all right for herself, he concluded. There was a picture over the mantelpiece in the living room, an oil portrait made from a photograph. The new husband looked like a banker, a middle manager—a three-piece suit, bald dome, a little moustache, a pleasant sheeplike benignity in his expression. Mary looked like a church lady standing next to him. There was a teenage boy, probably his, and a little girl, four or five, who had Mary's round face and blue eyes. Theirs. Felix felt a pleasant glow of anticipation.

A car rumbled down the driveway. Felix grabbed his hammer and took up a position behind the door that led to the basement, leaving the door open just a crack. His ex-wife had gained a little weight since he had last seen her, which was not surprising since the last time he had seen her she had been tied hand and foot to a bed, and had not been eating all that well. She was wearing a sleeveless white top and blue Bermudas and was carrying two grocery bags. She'd let her hair go back to its natural color, which was brown. He'd always insisted that she wear it blonde.

He let her place the bags on the kitchen table before he stepped out from behind the door. He said, “Hi, honey, I'm home.” She whirled around. He had thought a good deal about this moment, about what the expression on her face was going to be, and he was not disappointed. He didn't even have to grab her or sock her one with the hammer, because she crumpled to the floor in a faint.

It was a quiet neighborhood and no one disturbed Felix for the three hours the business took. The phone rang a couple of times, but he let the answering machine take it. An unexpected bonus was that her little girl came home and let herself in through the back door. The portrait over the mantel must have been done a while ago, because the girl was about nine, just old enough to be interesting. He had Mary in the chair and the girl, Sharon, taped facedown on the table, so Mary could watch the whole thing. He could have kept it going on for a lot longer if he'd wanted to, but he was worried about hubby coming home. He changed out of the painter's stuff, jammed it and the tools in the hardware store bag—it was plastic and wouldn't drip—and went out the back with the ball cap jammed on his head. The tricky part was how long to hold on to the stuff. The farther away he got, the less likely that the cops would find it and associate it with the scene, but the longer he held onto it the more chance there was of some dumb-ass lucky cop spotting him and wondering why a guy in his forties was wandering through a residential neighborhood on a workday, carrying a shopping bag.

But he got to the subway station all right and here he caught a break. A crew was just emptying the station trashcans. He knotted the top of his bag and thrust it into one that had not been emptied yet. The stuff would be on a barge by the end of the day. He took it as an omen of good fortune. He felt ready for anything now. All he needed was a little notebook. He liked to write stuff down in a notebook, and today would make a terrific entry. People started looking at him in the subway going from Queens to the city because he was grinning. He switched to a scowl and changed cars.

 

A jailbird was her first thought when he came down the line, not a homeless. The overdeveloped arms and neck said prison, as did the new suntan. They were always in a rush to lose the prison pallor so they stayed out in the sun too long, or under the lamp, leaving tell-tale redness along the rims of the ears. Clean clothes that looked new; he might have a place to stay. A halfway house? Probably. A number of guys from St. Dismas took their meals here at Holy Redeemer. She ladled out his stew and he smiled at her. She smiled back, a formal one, because she couldn't see his eyes behind his dark glasses, and she felt uncomfortable about smiling without meeting the eyes of the person. That's what the social work ladies did, the professional smile. No one looked these guys in the eye from one week to the next, except her. Guys had told her this, that they felt invisible on the streets.