The Fifth Horseman (33 page)

Rand peered down at the manifest. “Angelo,” he said, “these barrels weigh five hundred pounds apiece.”

“No kidding?” Angelo gave Piccardi a look of illfeigned wonder. “Kid here, he’s got a mind like a computer.”

“So, in view of that, why are we wasting time on this when we’ve got two more piers to cover?”

Angelo twisted around on his stool until he faced the young agent. The smile, the wide toothy smile, was there, but his eyes had lost none of their chill. “Kid, you know something? You are right. Send this thing downtown, it’ll be ‘What’samatter? Can’t those guys divider But just for us, let’s check it out. That way tonight, over there in that Howard Johnson Motor Lodge they got you in, you put your head on the pillow, you’re going to sleep. You’ll know you’ve covered. Haven’t left anything hanging. Tony,” the detective interrogated the pier boss, “anybody here deal with this likely to remember anything about it?”

Piccardi pointed to two names at the bottom of the pier sheet. “Maybe the checker and the loader that handled the stuff.”

Angelo got up, his knee joints creaking. “Paisan, how about you taking us up there and introducing us to them?” He gave a wave of his index finger to Rand. “Come on, kid. Here’s your chance to see what a Brooklyn pier looks like.”

The Brooklyn Ocean Terminal was an endless dark cavern as wide as a football field and twice as long. The odor of burlap mingled in the dust-clogged air with the scent of spices, nuts and coffee, giving it a strange resemblance to an Oriental bazaar. At intervals along its length, shafts of light penetrated the dimness from the doors opening onto the ships tied up at the pier. Forklift trucks darted and circled through the pools of light they formed like water bugs skimming the surface of a pond.

Marching down the pier, Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand passed pyramiding stacks of Greek olive oil, silver cans of cornseed oil from Turkey, dried raisins from the Sudan, sacks of Indian cashew nuts, bales of cotton from Pakistan, stinking cowhides from Afghanistan, burlap bags of coffee beans from Kenya.

The New Yorker waved at the row of goods disappearing into the shadows.

“You poke around in the corners, you wouldn’t believe the shit these longshoremen got stashed away.”

“Hey, Tony,” Angelo called after Piccardi, “tell me something. You get many rental trucks making pickups down here?”

“Naw,” Piccardi replied. “Two, three a week. Depends.”

He led them up to a cluster of longshoremen unloading pallets of copper tubing and beckoned to a short swarthy man, a cargo hook dangling from his right hand. Angelo noted the whites of the man’s eyes. They were spider-webbed with little pink tracings. Likes the vino, he thought.

Piccardi showed the man the sheet. “Guy here wants to know you remember anything about this pickup.”

Behind the man, work had stopped. The circle of longshoremen looked at Rand and Angelo in sullen, hostile silence. The docker didn’t even bother to look at Piccardi’s sheet. “Naw,” he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. “I wouldn’t remember nothing about it.”

Booze has got his voice too, Angelo mused. He reached into his pocket for a pack of Marlboros. It had been years since he’d given up smoking, but he always carried a pack, right beside his peanuts.

“Here, gumba,” he said to the docker in Italian, “have a smoke.”

As the man lit up, Angelo continued. “Look, what I got here got nothing to do with putting anybody locally in the can, you know what I mean?”

The docker gave Piccardi a wary glance. At that instant, all Angelo’s seemingly meaningless chatter in Piccardi’s office had its reward. With a barely discernible movement of his eyebrows, the pier boss indicated he was all right.

“What do them barrels look like?” Angelo prodded gently.

“Hey, you know, they’re big cans. Big fucking cans. Like garbage cans.”

“You remember the guy made the pickup?”

“No.”

“I mean, you know, was he a regular? A guy who knows his way around down here? Do the right thing and all?”

It was the tradition of the piers to “smear” the longshoremen who handled your load, to slip them five or ten dollars for their help. Angelo’s mention of the custom brought to the docker’s face the first intimation of a feeling, other than that of ill-will, that the detective had seen on it.

“Yeah.” The reply was a long growl. “Now I remember that jerk. He forgot.

We had to let him know something was dragging. You know-” he half whistled, half blew a spurt of air through his teeth-“put a little kabootz on him.

When he got the message, he come half a yard. Sure.” There was even a smile on the docker’s saturnine features. “I remember him.”

Angelo’s thick eyebrows rose. Who comes up with fifty bucks? he wondered. No Italian. No Irishman. In fact, no one who’s been around the docks. Has to be a stranger, a guy who isn’t onto it.

“You remember what he looked like?”

“Hey, you know, he was a guy. What could I tell you? A guy…

“Angelo.” Rand’s voice was sharp. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s get on to the next dock.”

“Sure, kid, we’re on our way.” Angelo indicated Piccardi’s pier sheet. “How about the other guy that handled the load? The checker?”

“He’s on a break over at the Longshoremen’s Club.”

“Okay, kid, let’s stop in there on our way out.” Before Rand could articulate the protest Angelo knew was coming, the detective threw an arm around his shoulder. “Let me tell you what happens in an Italian club like this longshoremen’s place, kid,” he said, his voice a friendly growl. “They play Italian card games. You know how an Italian card game is? Everybody sits at the same side of the table.”

He gave a jovial laugh and slapped Rand on the back. “You interview guys at an Italian card game, it goes like this. `Who shot the guy?’ ‘Hey, I don’t know, I didn’t see nothin’. I was playing cards. Had my back to the door.’

So you ask the next guy, `What’d you see?T ‘Nothing, what could I tell you?

I was sitting my back to the door. Playing cards.’

“It’s always like that. Everybody sits on the same side. With their backs to the door. Nobody’s ever on the other three sides.” Angelo laughed, then stopped his march back down the pier. This guy, he told himself, is going to be no help to me in that club. I won’t get the time of day out of anybody with him standing beside me.

“Look, kid,” he cajoled. “You’re in a hurry. I’m in a hurry.” He took the pier sheet from Piccardi and pointed to the license number of the truck that had made the pickup. “While I’m in there, why don’t you go to Tony’s office, call Hertz, find out where this truck comes from and get what they have off the rental agreement?”

Less than five minutes later, Angelo was back. His visit to the club had been totally unproductive. Rand handed him a slip of paper with the details of the Hertz truck’s rental agreement on it. The truck had been rented at a Hertz truck agency on Fourth Avenue, just behind the docks, at ten Friday morning, a few minutes before the pier sheet showed it had reached the pier. It had been returned at the end of the day. The man who had rented it bad used his American Express card to pay. His New York State driver’s license gave his name and address: Gerald Putman, Inter-ocean Imports, 123 Cadman Plaza West, Brooklyn.

Angelo gave the address an appraising glance. “Looks legitimate to me.

Let’s just check it out. One telephone call and we know we’re clean.” He picked up the telephone directory, found Inter-ocean’s number and dialed it.

Rand heard Angelo identifying himself to a switchboard operator, then asking for Putman. In the silence that followed, the New Yorker gave the agent a bemused smile. “Ever heard of a truck driver who’s got a secretary?”

“Mr. Putman,” he announced. “Detective Angelo Rocchia, New York Police Department. We’ve been informed by the Hertz Rent-A-Truck office over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, that you rented one of their vehicles last Friday morning around ten and we’d just like to-“

Three feet away, Rand could hear Putman’s surprised and angry voice interrupting the detective. “I what? Listen, officer, last Friday was the day I lost my wallet. I spent the whole morning right here in this office.”

The headquarters of the pier search of which Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand were a small part was in New York’s emergency command center. It had become operational a few minutes after nine. Buried three floors below the State Supreme Court Building on Foley Square, it was an ideal place to manage a crisis in secret. So infrequently bad the center been used in the years since it had been installed by the Lindsay administration that nearly everyone involved with it, including the City Hall press corps, had forgotten it was there.

It was entered through an obscure side door to the courthouse. Basically, it was just a huge underground cavern divided into areas by salmon-pink wood panels eight feet high. Everything else in it was administrative gray: gray walls, gray floors, gray filing cabinets, gray redundant furniture thrown out of City Hall, gray faces on the policemen assigned to watch over it twenty-four hours a day. The last time the place had been used was during the great blackout in July 1977, when, to the Police Department’s embarrassment, its lights had gone out along with everyone else’s. Someone had forgotten to keep its generators serviced.

Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, had taken on the job of organizing the center. He did it in the methodical, careful manner for which the Bureau was famous. By the time the Police Commissioner and Al Feldman, his Chief of Detectives, had finished dispatching their manpower, he was ready to give them a guided tour of the place. The first room, designed to be the center’s switchboard in an emergency, he had assigned to the effort to run down the Arabs who, according to their forms, had come into the New York area in the last six months. The room had fifty telephone lines. Each was manned by an agent, some holding open phones to JFK or the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

On one desk was a minicomputer serving as a central locator file. Every incoming name and address was punched into it. If the person belonging to the name hadn’t been found and cleared in two hours, the computer dumped the name into a higher-priority file.

The operation next door was even more impressive. It had been designated by Dewing as the headquarters for the pier search. Maps of New York and New Jersey’s 578 miles of waterfront hung on the walls. All of the waterfront’s two hundred piers were listed on charts under the maps.

Every time one of the teams working the piers came across a suspicious piece of cargo, the name and address of the consignee was telephoned to the center. If the cargo had been delivered in the New York area, the center dispatched a team of Customs inspectors or drug enforcement agents to track it down. If it had been shipped outside New York, an agent from the nearest FBI office was sent after it.

The tour completed, Dewing took Bannion and Feldman to his own command post set up in what was meant to be the Mayor’s suite in an emergency. Next door, the CIA and the FBI had installed multiflex printout receivers to deliver to the New York operation the harvest of their files and their overseas contacts.

While the Chief listened, resting against an old desk, his arms folded across his chest, Dewing explained how Clifford Salisbury of the CIA was combing through the terrorist files, sorting out those individuals who had spent time in the United States and appeared to have a high level of sophistication. On a morning like this, Al Feldman looked every one of his sixty-two years. His hair, what was left of it, was grayish white and greasy, popping out from his skull in disorderly little spirals that invariably sprinkled a glaze of dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit. He picked his nose and looked at the CIA man, at the pile of dossiers on his desk.

Terrific, he thought, he’ll have a hundred of those things before he’s through. And they would be perfectly useless. What would you do with them?

Take them out to some bartender in Arab town and say, “Hey, have you ever seen this guy? This guy? This guy?” After three or four photos, the guy would have switched off. Be so confused, he wouldn’t be able to recognize a picture of his sister.

Feldman pulled a Camel from a pack that looked as if he’d slept on it and lit it. He had a lot of respect for the methodical, almost ponderous approach the Bureau used. Most investigations were, after all, like this one, shaped like a pyramid. They started across a broad base and worked, hopefully, to one very precise point. It was a proven system. Given a week, ten days, it got results.

The trouble is, Feldman thought, this guy has forgotten he’s only got thirty hours. Qaddafi will have fried this place and he’ll still be in Phase Three of his investigation. If all this is going to get anywhere, Feldman mused, we’ve got to have that big break, the Son of Sam parking ticket, the one face in the crowd to look for. And we’ve got to have it awfully fast.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dewing,” he said, looking at his watch. “I told my intelligence officer who covers the Arab neighborhoods over in Brooklyn there to bring in the material he’s got on the PLO. I’d better go find him.”

“Of course, Chief. It would be helpful if we could have a look at anything worthwhile you might have.” The tone of the FBI man’s voice made it clear how unlikely he thought that possibility was.

The intelligence officer was a genial, freckle-faced Irishman to whom the Department, with a fine sense of balance, had also assigned the responsibility of following the activities of the Jewish Defense League. His files contained almost nothing worthwhile and hadn’t since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. Police intelligence represented educated gossip, a tip picked up by a cop on the beat from a friendly bartender or grocer, an item squeezed from an informer: “The Arab Red Crescent Society, 135 Atlantic Avenue, which has filed for a tax exemption as a charity, is suspected of raising funds for the PLO.” “The Damascus Coffee House, 204 Atlantic Avenue, is frequently patronized by supporters of George Habbash.”