The Godless One (6 page)

"My wife and son are staying with a
sick relative."

"In Italy? Mr. Nottoway says you’re
Italian."

"In Sicily, yes," said Ari, sticking to
the cover story Karen Sylvester had concocted.

"Sicily?" Diane shivered as the cold
air coming through the open front door reached the
kitchen.

"Have you ever seen a map of Italy?"
When she nodded, he continued: "You’ve seen how it’s shaped like a
big boot, and the boot is kicking a football?" She thought a
moment, then nodded again. He concluded: "I’m from the football
that’s being kicked."

"Well…I’m sorry you’re all alone. But
so am I, most of the time."

Her eyes darkened and Ari
realized he was finally witnessing genuine emotion in the
girl.
Yela’an
, he
thought bitterly. What a country, where immigrants and little girls
had only pets as families. But he remained resolute. "I’m sorry,
Diane. I can imagine your situation. But Sphinx
belongs—"

Tired of being manhandled, the cat
suddenly put its all into escaping. Ari fought Sphinx for a moment,
but let go when Diane gave a cry of dismay and repeated, "You’re
hurting him!"

Sphinx leapt onto the floor and dashed
into the dining room.

"He’s getting out!"

But when they followed, they found
Sphinx hesitating at the threshold. Sensing the frigid air, he was
having second thoughts about the benefits of freedom. Not wanting
to scare him outdoors, Ari and Diane kept their
distance.

"See?" said Ari. "He wants to
stay."

"He wants to stay
warm
. My house is warmer
than this. And we’ve got furniture he can sleep on. I’ve got a
scratching post, too."

This was new to Ari. A scratching post?
A host of improbabilities flew through his mind, but he had no
desire to once again put his ignorance on display before this
girl.

"Not everything revolves around
comfort," said Ari, a little pompously.

She spent a moment rolling this around
in her mind. Physical comfort was the norm for her and she was
struggling to think of a contrasting situation.

A car door slammed in the street. This
spooked Sphinx, who made a dash for the stairs. With striking
agility, Diane swooped down and trapped him against the floor. Ari
moved in to assist—not her, but the cat. It was obvious to him that
Sphinx was running for the safety of the bedroom.

"Stop!" the girl cried out loudly,
trying to intimidate the adult with an emotional
childburst.

"Let him go!" Ari commanded.

"You're killing me!"

Ari was aghast at this exaggeration,
especially as he had not touched her. He remembered clearly Deputy
Sylvester's admonition against approaching children in this
country, where strangers (and especially strange men) were
automatically assumed to be perverts. Karen had told him this just
minutes before he grabbed her by the throat with such violence that
she was sent to the hospital.

Ari did not back away. The girl who had
complained that he was holding the cat too tightly was now pressing
him against the floorboards with all her might. Ari doubted she was
actually injuring Sphinx. It was more likely that he would scratch
out her eyes in the tussle. Ari was reaching down to pull her hands
away—she was in his house uninvited, after all—when there was a
cough at the door.

Ari was in a half-crouch. He was caught
dead to rights, without his gun, with an innocent girl who would
perish with him. He jumped sideways from the crouch, ready to come
up with arms raised. But he lost his balance and landed on his
seat. Diane began to laugh at the spectacle, but fell silent when
she saw the newcomers.

Officers Jackson and Mangioni were
staring down at them.

Ari was not entirely relieved. He did
not think the officers were in the pay of Al-Qaeda and planning to
assassinate him. Nor were they (so far as he knew) involved with
the Kayak Express, a small-time drug operation that Ari had put out
of business—although this was problematic, since their superior had
been very much involved. Former members of the former Express might
be looking for revenge against the irksome foreigner who had shamed
and robbed them. In Iraq, a similar scenario would have played out
in a bloodbath.

Ari was well-versed in both the subtle
and extreme expressions of killers, and he could say with
reasonable certainty that neither of the policemen had murder in
mind. They might, however, be concerned about what he was doing on
the floor with a small girl.

"He’s trying to steal my cat!" Diane
shrieked.

The officers were instantly put at ease
by her melodramatic performance. Her overacting would not curry
favor with this particular audience. Jackson and Mangioni shared
several ‘tsks’.

"I’m not surprised," said Mangioni.
"Mr. Ciminon here is a notorious cat burglar."

Ari clocked his eyes in warning,
saying, "Diane is my neighbor."

Mangioni got the message. It would be
poor public relations to allow a false rumor about a man to be
broadcasted throughout that man’s neighborhood. And a little girl
was just the type to start a ball like that rolling.

"Actually, Diane, I’m just funning you.
As you can see, Mr. Ciminon is from a different land, and he
doesn’t quite comprehend our ways."

That’s not much of an
improvement
, Ari thought.

But the girl nodded quickly. "That’s
it! He doesn’t understand that a cat can belong to
someone."

"I…" Ari raised his hand, palm out, an
incredibly rude gesture in his country but one which Americans
seemed to approve of.

Diane cut him off before he could
present his version of the dispute.

"He can’t even speak English. He talks
like Mr. Ed."

The policemen chuckled at the
reference, although it eluded Ari. Sensing his bemusement, Mangioni
said, "Mr. Ed is a talking horse, Mr. Ciminon.

Which left Ari even more in the dark.
He felt he had no choice but to watch helplessly as Diane shifted
pressure off Sphinx and tumbled him deftly into her arms. For some
reason the cat declined to fight, despite Ari’s mental
urging.

"Say ‘good-bye’, Marmaduke," the girl
said brightly as she carried the cat out the door. Ari felt his
heart go flat.

"Good-bye, Diane and Marmaduke," said
Jackson.

"You dodged a bullet there, Mr.
Ciminon," said Mangioni. "I wish I could get rid of my cat
infestation as easily. But my kids…" He nodded at the departing
girl as though she was one of his brood.

Ari grimaced as he stood. Had he pulled
a back muscle? After all the fights he had been in, the irony of
injuring himself while chasing a cat was not lost on
him.

"Could you explain ‘funning’?" he
said.

"Joshing, joking," Mangioni answered
amiably. "I guess it’s not proper grammar." He glanced at his
partner. "Is it?"

"Not my department," said Jackson, who
was never quite free of surliness. Ari could not tell if this was
the result of a philosophical world view, or simply dyspepsia.
Jackson had a pouch in his hand. If he was here on some kind of
business, Ari did not want it conducted inside his house. The smell
embarrassed him and the gun on his refrigerator could get him
arrested.

"You want to speak to me about
something?" he inquired politely. "Maybe we should talk outside.
I’ve had an accident in the kitchen."

"You seem to have a lot of
those," Jackson smirked. They had once entered his house to find
the rooms filled with smoke. Ari had been attempting to cook
masgouf
, unaware that
the stove’s exhaust tube was blocked by Moria Riggins’ stash of
cocaine.

As soon as he closed the door behind
him, Ari realized the impracticality of his suggestion. It would be
hard to hold a conversation if their teeth were
chattering.

"You want to get a coat?" inquired
Jackson.

"Or we can sit in the patrol car,"
Mangioni offered.

Ari nodded towards the street and they
proceeded down the sidewalk. He glanced up Beach Court Lane to see
if Sphinx had made his escape, but Diane was already out of
sight.

Jackson held open the back door of the
patrol car, handing Ari the pouch as he got in. "We’ll have to let
you out," he said as he closed the door. "There’s no handle
inside."

The officers slid into their front
seats. The engine was running and the heater going full blast. Ari
noted the new flowers next to the mailbox. Jackson and Mangioni had
been placing these commemorative mementoes at the same spot for
just over a year now, in memory of the Riggins family. The man who
had instigated the practice was now dead. They must be doing this
out of habit. But when Ari looked more closely, he realized the
flowers were, for the first time, plastic. This made sense in the
winter, but he could not shrug off the sense that the bogus flowers
represented artificial sentiment. He was sure this was the last
bouquet, that Jackson and Mangioni were finished with tributes. Yet
they had been on the scene when the bodies were discovered. Not the
first ones, as it turned out, but early enough to catch a hint of
the truth.

The two men up front did not appear to
know how to begin. Ari started to unzip the pouch.

"You don’t have to open that," said
Mangioni nervously. "Not if you don’t want to."

"I don’t understand. I had the
impression you wanted me to study the contents."

"We do, but…" Mangioni had turned in
his seat and was studying Ari. "Are you all right, Mr. Ciminon? I
hope you don’t mind me saying, but you don’t look well."

Ari bushed this off with a brusque wave
of the hand. "A little problem with adjusting to American
food."

"What?" Mangioni grinned. "Are you
saying Italian isn’t American?"

It was a major slip. For a
moment, Ari had forgotten that these men believed he was from
Sicily. Pizza was not as alien here as
shakshouka
. They wouldn’t know that
the gustatory leap was far greater than they had been led to
believe. However, the fact that the metropolitan police and U.S.
Marshals Service were not in sync with each other gave Ari some
measure of comfort. He was accustomed to a culture of secrecy and
thuggish bureaucratic infighting.

"Let’s get on with it," Jackson said
impatiently.

"I just want him to be prepared,"
Mangioni responded, frowning. "It’s pretty grisly, right? Not
everybody can stomach this sort of thing." He turned back to Ari.
"What’s in the pouch are pictures of Louis Carrington after he shot
himself."

"Yes?" said Ari, his interest piqued.
Detective Louis B. Carrington had been intimately involved with the
Riggins family, and had in part been the death of them. Ari
concocted an expression of mild dismay, with a touch of disgust
thrown in—just to show the policemen that he was as sickened as
they presumably were by Carrington’s suicide; nor was he so
depraved as to relish gory images.

"There’s a summary from the police
report, too," said Jackson.

"There’s not much detail." Mangioni
gave him a cryptic look. "But you don’t seem to need much in the
way of detail, do you?"

Although the bodies and every trace of
evidence (not to mention every stick of furniture) had been removed
long before Ari arrived at Beach Court Lane, he had been able (with
Sphinx and a little unofficial help from Karen Sylvester) to piece
together the solution to the crime. In fact, he had discovered far
more than Karen intended.

"We’ve heard some rumors about
you…"

Ari’s eyes went to the car door.
Jackson had been telling the truth. Not merely was there no lock on
the handle…there was no handle at all. If they were here to accuse
him, he was already neatly packaged for delivery.

"Rumors?" he inquired
politely.

"We started asking around about you,
after Carrington," said Jackson, a little menacingly. "We didn’t
get far before downtown stopped us. They said you weren’t involved,
and that was that. But we did hear that you were the last one to
see him alive. You said something to him and he went and offed
himself."

Ari’s face was magnificently
blank.

"Then some detective from the absolute
wrong precinct magically discovered that Louis killed Moria Riggins
after she had killed everyone else."

Ari performed a small cough and shook
his head sadly.

"This is the kind of bollocks we get
from the feds when they want to hide something. FBI, Homeland
Security…" Jackson had a stiff neck. Turning around was difficult
for him. But he managed to give Ari a good dose of eye-fever. "So
we think you’re not who you say you are, or who anybody we know
says you are. All we know for sure is that you told one set of
folks you were an architect, another set that you worked for the
Cirque du Soleil, a third that you were a croupier for a casino in
Lebanon. Sounds like you were having fun."