The Fifth Horseman (34 page)

With the FOI that material could eventually come under public scrutiny, and since no one wanted it out, nothing worthwhile ever went into the files.

The good stuff was held “on the bip,” in an intelligence officer’s personal notebook that no one but he had the right to open, and the Irishman’s listed this December morning thirty-eight PLO suspects, most of them among the younger, poorer Palestinian immigrants living in the neighborhoods crowding up toward the fringes of the black slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“At least we know where they are,” Feldman commented. “Not like the ones they’ve got in there. Bring them all in. Grill them. Establish everything they’ve been doing in the last seventy-two hours.”

“On what grounds, Chief?”

“Find some. Immigration papers. Half of ‘em probably are illegals anyway.”

“Christ! We do that, we’ll have every civil-rights lawyer in the city on our backs.”

And so what, Feldman was about to add, there may not be any civil-rights lawyers around in a couple of days anyway, when a plainclothesman interrupted. “Telephone, Chief.”

It was Angelo Rocchia. The Chief was neither surprised nor irritated by the fact that Rocchia had called him directly, short-circuiting the formal chain of command that Dewing had just finished showing him. He knew who the good guys in his division were, the solid diggers whose work could make him look good upstairs, and those guys he had always encouraged to act independently, to come directly to him with a problem. He listened to Angelo’s story, then uttered the three words used more often than any others in the Detective Division of the New York Police Department: “Repeat that again.”

This time, Feldman scrawled a series of hasty notes on a pad on the desk.

When Angelo had finished, it took him five seconds to reach a decision.

“You get over to that guy’s office in Brooklyn and see if you can get a line on who grabbed his wallet,” he ordered. “I’ll have someone else cover your piers.”

As he talked, he was already dialing the head of the Pickpocket Squad on a second phone. “Get the photos of all the dips who work Brooklyn,” he ordered, “and get your ass over to 123 Cadman Plaza West.”

“Got something, Chief?” the intelligence officer asked.

“I doubt it,” Feldman growled. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee, though.”

The Chief headed toward the custodian’s office, where he had spotted a Silex and a hot plate. It was the first moment he’d had to himself since he left his office two hours earlier, and, meditating almost, he blew at the hot black coffee, then glanced at the wall over the hot plate. Stuck to it was what appeared to be an old Civil Defense poster bearing the once familiar “CD” in its black circle and white triangle. He noted its government printing number and the headline “
PROCEDURE TO FOLLOW IN THE EVENT OF A THERMONUCLEAR ATTACK
.”

Seven points were listed there, beginning with “1. Stay clear of all windows.”

Feldman scanned the list.

At the last line, the detective burst out laughing. No words could have rammed up better than the ones he saw there the insane, desperate mess they were in:

“We got a situation in this town …” Angelo Rocchia, Jack Rand noted with exasperation, was embarked on yet another of his monologues.

The FBI agent was still burning at the freewheeling manner with which the New Yorker had bypassed the chain of command and gotten them taken off their pier assignment to go chasing pickpockets. Like the Marines, the FBI taught its recruits that discipline was the key to success: spiritual discipline to build character, intellectual discipline in an investigation, collective discipline when working as a team so that every team member knew he could count on every other team member to do exactly what he was supposed to do. That kind of discipline, Rand reflected sourly, was a quality conspicuously lacking in his New York partner.

If Angelo was aware of the young man’s anger, however, he gave no indication of it. He went on as though he were lecturing a group of recruits at the Police Academy. “Dips in this townT pick your pocket by appointment. No big deal. Custom work, they call it. Fence comes to the dip, says, `Hey, Charlie, I need some fresh cards noon tomorrow. No more than two, three hours old. Wanta buy a color TV for the old lady, it’s her birthday.’ So the dip takes the job on consignment. He gets to keep the cash in the guy’s wallet and gets a couple of yards for his ID and two, three cards. Guy’s got a whole lot of plastic, the dip’ll hold a few cards back. Sell ‘em to somebody else for a dime apiece. He’ll make two, three hundred bucks on the deal. That ain’t bad.”

Yards, Rand thought, dimes. They can’t even speak English in this city.

“So, Angelo, if I understand you, what you’re suggesting is that something like this might have happened here.”

“I think it might have, yeah”

“Angelo, how many pickpockets would you reckon work the New York area?”

Angelo whistled softly, maneuvering his Chevrolet as he did into the inside lane to get a jump on the traffic at the stop light ahead. “Three, four, five hundred.”

Rand tapped the crystal of his Rolex. “It’s after eleven, Angelo. And that damn barrel’s supposed to go off at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Do you really think we’re going to find an interrogate five hundred pickpockets? Pick out of that mess the one who may-or may not-have stolen the guy’s wallet, find out whom he gave it to, locate that guy, all by three o’clock tomorrow?”

“Kid, how the fuck would I know?” Angelo was moving along Fulton Street now, and he could see the outlines of Cadman Plaza rising by the exit loops of the Brooklyn Bridge. “But for now, it’s the best thing we’ve got. In fact, for now it’s the only thing we’ve got.”

He was already searching for an illegal parking place close to their destination. “Besides, you and I aren’t going to bust this thing. None of us are here. We’re just window-dressing. It’s the people in Washington who gotta handle this one, not us.”

The people in Washington bad been in semipermanent session since their first Crisis Committee meeting with Abe Stern. The President came and went, depending on his schedule and his efforts to maintain a fagade of normality for the benefit of the press. He had just rejoined the meeting after turning over the session of his Council of Economic Advisers to Charlie Schultz.

“Have we heard from Tripoli? Is Qaddafi ready to talk?” he asked the Deputy Secretary of State as he lowered himself into his chair.

“Sir, we’ve just had the consulate on the blower” the Deputy Secretary of State replied. “The charge’s still out at the villa where Qaddafi’s supposed to be staying.”

A few seats away, Harold Brown spoke. It was almost as though he was thinking out loud. “You know, since the beginning of this thing no one has actually seen Qaddafi or heard his threat articulated from his own lips.

This is, after all, such a fantastic escalation of the threat level. Are we sure he’s behind it? Could he have been kidnapped? The victim of some kind of Palestinian coup?”

Almost automatically, the attention in the room shifted to the CIA’s Bennington. The stack of papers in front of his chair was conspicuously higher than anyone else’s. That reflected the fact that since the Cuban Missile Crisis it had been government policy to make the raw input of intelligence sources available to the President in an emergency even if they differed, rather than having an agency analyst synthesize the material for him.

“We’ve looked at that one,” Bennington replied, “and our decision is no.

The nuclear program has always been strictly Qaddafi’s work. He keeps his own Palestinians on a tight leash and under close guard. His relations with Arafat and the PLO have been more than strained since he broke with them because he accused them of being too ready to compromise. And our voice analysts have now confirmed that that’s his voice on the original tape.”

“Better late than never,” the President tartly observed. “Do we have anything new from New York?”

Before William Webster of the FBI could answer, the red warning light on the Deputy Secretary of State’s telephone flashed. “Sir,” he said, after listening a second, “the operations center is pulling in a Cherokee NODIS

from Tripoli.” A Cherokee NODIS was the State Department’s highest cable priority, a term assigned it by Dean Rusk in honor of his native Cherokee County, Georgia. “We’ll have it in a second.”

In the Department’s seventh-floor operations center the incoming coded text was automatically fed into a computer which decoded it instantaneously and printed a clear text on the duty officer’s cable console. He, in turn, relayed it immediately to the White House communications center, where a warrant officer pushed a button on another console that spewed out a printed text as fast as the cable’s words rose on the screen. The Deputy Secretary had barely hung up his phone when the warrant officer handed the message to Eastman.

“Sir,” he said, glancing at it, “the charg6 has just spoken personally with Qaddafi.”

“And?”

“And he says everything he has to say is in his original message. He refuses to talk to you.”

The New York Police Department, Gerald Putman thought, is a much maligned body. He had not even bothered to report his wallet to the police as lost or stolen, assuming, as he supposed any citizen in a similar situation would, that his report would be lost in a morass of bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude. Yet here in his office were an obviously senior detective, the head of the Pickpocket Squad and a federal officer, all trying to help him establish what had happened to his wallet.

“All right, Mr. Putman,” Angelo Rocchia said, “let’s just go through that one more time. You spent all Friday morning here in this office. Then, at about…’

“Twelve-thirty.”

The detective checked his notebook. “Right. You went over to the Fulton Fish Market to Luigi’s for lunch. At approximately two P.M. you reached for your wallet to get your American Express card to pay the check and found your wallet was missing, right?”

“Right.”

“You returned here, where you keep a record of all your credit card numbers, and had your secretary call them to report the loss.”

“That’s correct, Officer.”

“And you didn’t bother to notify the local precinct?”

Putman gave Angelo an awkward smile. “I’m sorry, Officer, I just thought that with everything you people have to do these days, something like this would, you know …” His voice dwindled to an embarrassed mumble.

The detective returned the smile, but his gray eyes were cold and appraising. Angelo liked to give people like Putman the impression he was a little slow, a bit of a plodder. It never hurt to disarm a client, to get him to relax a bit. Putman was in his midthirties, medium height, a trifle stocky, with a dark tan and a swarthy complexion. Maybe an Italian had wandered into the bed of one of Putman’s WASP ancestors, Angelo mused.

“Now, Mr. Putman, let’s go over everything that happened to you that day very slowly, very carefully. First of all, where do you keep your wallet?”

“Right here.” Putman tapped the right hip pocket of his pants. He was wearing gray slacks, a blue button-down shirt and a striped tie. Everything in his office, the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, the understated mahogany furniture, the huge window looking over to the tip of Manhattan, indicated upper-middle-class affluence.

“You were wearing an overcoat, I suppose?” This time the question came from the head of the Pickpocket Squad whom Feldman had ordered to meet Angelo here.

“Oh yes,” Putman replied. “I’ve got it right there.”

He walked to a closet and took out a Cheviot tweed coat he had bought at Burberry’s in London. The head of the Pickpocket Squad examined it, then slipped his fingers up its high-cut center vent.

“Convenient.” He smiled.

Methodicallyţ prompted by Angelo, Putman recreated his activities of Friday, December 11. He’d gotten up at 7 A.M. in his home in Oyster Bay.

His wife had driven him, as she did regularly, to the station, where he’d bought The Wall Street Journal and waited only two minutes on the platform for the 8:07 Long Island Rail Road train. On the way in, he had sat next to his friend and squash partner Grant Esterling, an IBM executive. He’d gotten off, as always, at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal and walked the rest of the way to his office. He remembered absolutely nothing unusual, out of the way, on the train, at the terminal or on his ten-minute walk to the office: no one bumping into him, no one shoving him, no jarring movement, nothing.

When be had finished, the room was so quiet that all four men could hear the tick-tock of the old-fashioned grandfather’s clock in one corner of Putman’s office. Rand impatiently crossed, then uncrossed his legs.

“It sounds like we got a very artistic bit of work here,” the head of the Pickpocket Squad noted with respect.

“It sure does.” Angelo made a swift doodle in his notepad, a stick figure of a doll. My good idea, he mused, doesn’t look so good anymore. He rose.

“Mr. Putman,” he said, “we’re going to show you some pictures. Take all the time you want to look at them. Study them very carefully and tell us if you think you’ve ever seen any of these people anywhere before.”

If travel broadened, the young men and women in the procession of photographs Angelo laid one by one on Putman’s desk should have constituted a unique cultural elite. Only a handful of experienced travelers could claim the knowledge of the capitals of the world they possessed. No great international gathering from the Olympic Games in Montreal or Lake Placid, the election of a Pope in the Vatican, the Queen’s Jubilee in London, the World Cup in Buenos Aires could be celebrated without their presence. They were the best of the world’s pickpockets, and, almost without exception, the dark-haired, dark-complexioned youths in the mug shots passing through Gerald Putman’s hands were Colombian.