The Nylon Hand of God

by Steven Hartov

  “I may be, I warn you.” She hinted at inebriation she did not feel, for with all the touching of her glass to her lips, she had imbibed nearly nothing.

  They set the drinks down on a chair, and she took his hand and walked him onto the floor. She turned to face him, and still holding her shoes on the pegs of two fingers, draped her arms over his shoulders and looked up into his eyes. Neither was smiling now, and Delgado joined his hands behind her waist, letting his cap fall against her buttocks, and they danced.

  The spotlights on the disco ball dimmed, and Benny Goodman’s nostalgic ballad was accompanied by a gentle throb of hues, the swish of dresses, and the murmurs of the swaying crowd. Placing her cheek against the cloth below Delgado’s collar, Martina let her warm breath flow over his throat. She pressed the cushion of her breasts against his chest and smiled to herself as she made it happen, feeling his erection as it began to push against her belly. His body stiffened and embarrassed, he tried to retreat with his hips, so she slowly dropped a hand, slipped it around his waist, and tightened him against her until she heard him swallow hard.

  “Where do you have to be?” she whispered.

  “Nowhere.” His voice was hoarse. “I’m on leave until Monday.”

  “Then no one will miss you, Lieutenant Delgado.”

  “No.” And knowing that they were quickly working out the logistics, he added, “But I’m at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The BOQ.”

  “Be what?”

  “Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.”

  “You have a roommate?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have none.”

  “Where do you live, Sandra?”

  “Close enough.”

  They danced in silence for a moment, and Martina pressed her other arm across his wide back and held him that way. His enthusiasm had not diminished. Her voiced dropped to a serious tone.

  “But you must tell me two things, Lieutenant.”

  “Fire away.”

  “Do you know how to handle a garter belt?”

  “God.” He nearly choked on the image. “I think I can manage.”

  “And one more question.” She lifted her face and placed a finger on his cheek. “Do you practice safe sex?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes glistening with the blaze of a tortured animal.

  “Good,” said Martina. “Me too.” And as she brought his head down, and just before she pressed her lips against his mouth, she whispered, “No fucking while skydiving.”

  The cab ride had been a blur of tangled hair, fingers, and tongues. Martina hardly released his mouth, drinking in his lips with a persistence that made Delgado wonder which of them was the sailor. He held her breast through the cloth of her gown, and when she pushed up harder against him he dropped his hand to her knee, gathering the dress there, and then moved toward her thigh, over the exotic clips she had promised and into the satin that was damp with her genuine excitement at near victory. The cabbie, who had chauffeured hundreds of randy couples in his time, kept his bored attention to the streets and said only, “Nearly there, folks,” as he turned onto East Sixty-second Street, hoping to avoid the ugly task of cleaning semen from his back seat. At that point, with a final long groan, Martina slipped her hand into Delgado’s trousers and gripped him, knowing that a man so hard sees little of his surroundings.

  And now they were on the bed in Sandra Russel’s modest studio, the bunched uniform sprawled across an armchair like a deflated scarecrow, Martina’s garter belt and bra straddling the pile of his shoes and cap on the carpet.

  When she first saw his muscled body, she had quickly decided to proceed at her leisure. The timing was hers, and she sat down on the corner of the coverlet and pulled him in to bury his face in her while she slipped her dress over her head, then she lay back and asked for him to do the rest, and he had stripped her in a frenzy and then entered her. She was amazed when she came before he did, loving him for a moment, the way a hunter loves the bird he follows in his sights.

  And after he came, with a painful cry freed by drink and her urgent encouragement, she pushed him onto his back and quickly brought him back to full staff.

  Now he gripped her waist, stunned with pleasure as she rode him. She rose and fell, her fingers digging at the muscles of his chest, faster, although she was not really coming now. Yet Delgado could not discern a mimicry as he thought of his incredible good fortune, and he watched her mouth as it uttered small screams, louder and longer, until she finally shouted, “Jetzt! Jetzt! Jetzt!”

  The door to the apartment burst open, just six feet from the bed, and three hooded men were inside. Heaven knows what Delgado thought as the point man swept Martina through the air and onto the floor with a single backhand swipe. And then they had replaced her, silently pummeling his head with blackjacks that sent him quickly into unconsciousness.

  They trussed him with duct tape, mouth, arms, hands, legs, and feet. Then two injections of Sodium Pentothal, bordering on lethal, and they placed his heavy form in a body bag, left a foot of zipper open for oxygen, and locked him in a clothes closet that was surprisingly empty for the flat of a fashionable woman.

  There was not much housekeeping to do, for Sandra Russel’s drawers held only dust, and everything else was a disposable prop. They folded Delgado’s uniform, took his shoes, and held their breath as they checked his wallet. It was a treasure trove of U.S. Navy credentials.

  Finally, the three men removed their balaclavas. Mussa stood in the center of the room, using the woolen mask to wipe the sweat from his face. He was still breathing heavily, and he smoothed his wringing-wet hair with his fingers and looked over at Martina with a squint of satisfaction, a superior grin of arrogance. Yes, her way had worked, but she had also proved to him that when he branded her sharmootah, he was not wrong.

  She was wearing a blue silk robe, her arms folded across her chest. Her cheek still hurt where Mussa’s watch had smacked into the skin, yet that did not anger her.

  It was his expression, and those of her other two men, who watched her now with sheepish grins, having witnessed their commander in a position no soldier should ever see.

  There was only a second to regain control, and then it would be lost, perhaps forever. Martina stepped up to Mussa, cocked her right arm back; and slapped him with a force that sent him sprawling on the bed.

  He pulled himself slowly to his elbows, then touched his face, staring up at her in stunned disbelief.

  “I would not want you to enjoy your work too much,” she said.

  Chapter 7: New York Police Department

  The midtown north detective squad occupied most of the second floor of a lackluster precinct house on West Fifty-fourth Street, and those of its members who had envisioned their investigative careers amid the historical architecture of old New York were slow to overcome their initial disappointment. No feature film studios ever sent location scouts here, no police show crews dragged klieg lights through the quarters too cramped for camera dollies, and not a single Manhattan photographer in search of grainy reality had ever shot a cop at MTN. The squad room had all the character of an urban high school converted to a reformatory.

  There was not a stick of structural wood in the entire space, no heavy balustrades or creaking plank floors, no cathedral ceilings or arching windows through which the sunlight from the rivers could shaft through swirls of cigarette smoke. The squad room was a long rectangle of linoleum and painted cinder block, narrow windows with metal cross-frames, and rows of steel desks and chairs ordered with all the imagination of a fly-by-night real estate office. Every desk lamp had the same corrugated neck and fluorescent head, exuding the same warmth as a dentist’s X-ray.

  The pervasive decor was paper, reams of it, white and buff rectangles stuck up on the walls, piles sliding across glass blotter covers, manila files overflowing wire baskets, and the pink and blue copies of Supplementary Complaint Reports rolling in and out of humming Selectrics. No photograph, colored poster, or even the classi
c Rockwell print of New England cop and child, graced any spot to ease the eye. There was nothing irrelevant to NYPD business, by order of the lieutenant, who was determined to demonstrate that all the softer aspects of her gender had been retired.

  All in all, the Midtown North squad room was bland to the point of demotivation, an opinion offered by an IAD psychologist who toured the precincts. There was hardly evidence to differentiate the place from any other municipal bureaucracy, except for the occasional pistol butt poking from a waistband or the ten-foot temporary lockup cell. However, the final word on layout belonged to the squad’s lieutenant, king of the realm. Or in this case, queen.

  A uniformed cop, bundled up for the winter, her nightstick, cuffs, and holster clanking like a horseless knight, hauled herself up the stairway and passed two prim black women typing reports at the squad room’s entrance. She turned right and knocked shyly on a door with an engraved plate that said, simply, Sergeant.

  “Come on.” A voice vibrated through the glass.

  Aside from the lieutenant’s office at the northeast corner of the squad, Detective Michael O’Donovan’s cubicle was the only private room on the floor. It was hardly an executive suite, being just large enough for his desk, a standing coatrack, a low bookshelf, a metal filing cabinet, and a “guest” chair. There was a mesh window that looked out over the squad, the view occluded by Wanted posters and police-artist sketches taped to the glass from the outside. Below the window, two computer terminals sat on a slim counter, and unless O’Donovan had hung his Sheraton Hotel DO NOT DISTURB card on the doorknob, the admin women often squeezed between his desk and a Compaq to run down a license plate or a fingerprint record. Behind O’Donovan’s head were corkboards covered with notices and rosters. A pair of dot-matrix printouts served as nameplates, displaying Sgt. O’Donovan on one and Sgt. Ramos, with whom he shared his tasks, on the other. The fuzzy print was a reminder that nothing was engraved here, and job security depended on performance.

  “It’s a phone message from the desk, Sergeant,” said the uniform.

  O’Donovan was reading a powder-blue DD5, an update on an unsolved homicide. He retrieved the slip without looking up. “Thanks,” he murmured.

  The uniform turned for the door.

  “Officer,” said O’Donovan.

  “Yeah?”

  “Leave it open.” He smiled at her. “And stay warm.” She blushed and lowered her head as she left.

  O’Donovan pursed his lips, wondering why all the female uniforms in mid-town looked like trolls, while the women down at One Police Plaza looked like Charlie’s Angels. Then he stopped wondering. He knew why.

  He read the desk sergeant’s neat print, frowned, mumbled “Terrific,” then balled the paper and threw it into his wastebasket. “How did I catch this cluster fuck?” He dropped the “Five” sheet on the desk and laced his fingers behind his blond head, arching back until his cartilage cracked. He looked up at the low ceiling and took a couple of long, slow breaths.

  Michael O’Donovan’s plate was already so full that just the thought of it was causing painful intestinal sensations. He was the sergeant in charge of the MTN squad, which meant that he ran the show, even though a lieutenant was the titular boss. Just like in the military, the noncoms did all the work. It was O’Donovan’s responsibility to assign detectives to cases, supervise the progress of investigations, dispatch the radios, equipment, conversion cars, make sure the paperwork was up-to-date, and liaise with all the other department units that might be called in on a case. Of the more than 2,500 cases that MTN caught each year, it seemed to O’Donovan that fewer and fewer were “grounders,” easy solves that wrapped up fast and went to court. With the upsurge of violent crime and the flood of cheap firearms in the hands of younger and wilder sociopaths, the bulk of robberies and homicides was falling into the “mystery” category—the unsolved open files for which a man like O’Donovan felt responsibility and shame. He wanted to do well, which did not mean the attainment of rank or glory. To O’Donovan, doing well meant accomplishing his mission.

  He had mustered out of the army in 1980, an embittered twenty-three-year-old who had fully intended a lifelong military career. Yet he had returned to his native New York, plowed through his B.A. at John Jay, gone straight to the Academy, and finished up his six months near the top of his class. Then it was two years in uniform, another year in plainclothes with Auto Theft, and he was given his gold shield while still at patrolman’s rank. O’Donovan was going to the apex, one of the SID special outfits, a task force like Joint Terrorism, Robbery, or Narcotics. He was not going to be one of those “hair bags” who kicked back, served out their twenty, and retired to some houseboat in Florida.

  Yet here he was, halfway through his own twenty, and it seemed that every time he got a foot in the door, his damned conscience would yank him back. Just recently he had sunk his teeth into a big ten-thirty at a local Chemical Bank branch, six armed men who shot the old guard and took off with nearly a million. O’Donovan would not let go, working round the clock as he pushed the squad’s nine men and one woman until they nailed the perps in Brooklyn. Some hotshot from the Major Case Squad had taken notice, inviting O’Donovan to make his move. But with his squad floundering in backlogged cases, he was left struggling to cover the chart—the schedule of detective shifts and assignments—instead of kissing the right asses in the proper downtown watering holes. Someone else had gotten the Major Case slot.

  And now it was flu season. O’Donovan’s chart had holes in it you could drive a truck through. He often found himself on the street, covering the types of crime scenes he had not attended to in years. Fit and healthy, as one might expect of an ex-Special Forces sergeant, he was cursing his own fortitude. The sergeant over at the Seventeenth Precinct was down with pneumonia, and O’Donovan had been ordered to cover that chart as well, which was doubly difficult since a third of the Seventeenth’s squad were out on a steal to Organized Crime.

  And that was how he had wound up catching this bomb thing at the Israeli Consulate, which was in the Seventeenth’s jurisdiction. It was big, an opportunity to go Joint Terrorism Task Force. And O’Donovan wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Hey, O.D.” Jerry Binder stuck his head around the edge of O’Donovan’s door. Binder was a muscle-swollen forty-five-year-old who never missed his daily routine bench-pressing 230 pounds. “You do lunch yet?”

  O’Donovan jerked a thumb at a wire basket overflowing with Fives. “Can’t get out from under.”

  “Come on,” Binder coaxed. “We’ll hit the deli. Two pounds of nice lean corned beef on rye.” He flopped his black eyebrows, which almost made O’Donovan laugh. Binder’s huge jaw, evil grin, and thistle-thick black hair always reminded the younger man of Sergeant Rock of comic book fame. Binder was also a Special Forces veteran, a fact that had instantly bonded the two men. It was Binder who had graced the sergeant with the nickname “O.D.,” for Olive Drab.

  “Can’t make it, Binder,” said O’Donovan without apology. “I’ll order up.”

  Binder stepped into the doorway, straightening his tie and looking hurt. “You ain’t S.F.,” he accused. There were only two kinds of people in Binder’s world, Special Forces and All Others, and his greatest insult was to place you in the latter category. “Can’t be.” He shook his head as if O’Donovan’s rejection of corned beef was the final clue. “I wanna see your DD-214.” He meant the sergeant’s military record.

  “You’re gonna get it with a side order of .38s, if you don’t get out of my office.”

  “Ha!” Binder pounded his pectorals like Tarzan. “Bounce right off!” He dropped his hands. “Which reminds me. When the fuck are we gonna get nine-millimeters?”

  “You don’t need a nine,” said O’Donovan with a grin. “As a matter of fact, we should take your issue away from you. It’s redundant.”

  It was only a partial joke. When perpetrators saw Binder’s fullback form bearing down on them, they usually surrendered without his ha
ving to draw his service revolver.

  “Itchy Bahn,” said Binder, a holdover phrase from his two tours in Vietnam, which he used as an all-purpose “Right on.”

  “Hey, Jerry,” someone called from the squad room. “Ten-one your wife.” PD code for “Phone home.”

  Binder turned. “I always give her ten, Mancuso,” he said. “And she wishes it was just one less.”

  “All right, all right,” O’Donovan scolded. “We have ladies here.”

  Frank Mancuso joined Binder in the doorway. He was a slim thirty-year-old of northern Italian descent, with sandy hair, a manicured mustache, and an easy smile that always made him the “good cop” in any interrogation.

  “Don’t sweat it, O.D.,” said Mancuso. “Lou’s in Martinique, or wherever the hell she went.”

  The lieutenant was on vacation, which was usually a license for the rise of profanity.

  “And don’t call her Lou,” O’Donovan warned with a pointed finger. “You remember the last time.”

  “Yeah.” Mancuso actually looked frightened as he recalled the gaffe.

  “You’ll never make sergeant,” said Binder as he went off to make his call.

  “Hey, Sarge.” Tim Griffin loomed in O’Donovan’s doorway. A large Irishman who had emigrated long ago from Boston, with his white hair and pink features he could probably have retired to an easy life of playing cops for the local soap operas. Griffin had already put in twenty-five years, but he liked the work. “What’s up with the beard case?” In NYPD parlance, beards were Jews.

  “Which beard case?” O’Donovan asked impatiently. Midtown North covered the diamond district, and the squad had fifty cases that could fall into that category.

  “The beard case,” said Griff. “Boom.”

  “Stuff’s just starting to come in.”

  “What’d the M.E. say?” Mancuso asked.

  “Two DOAs had fragmentation wounds, fatal compression, usual bullshit,” said O’Donovan. “Bomber wasn’t even whole, but the M.E. took some shrapnel out of him and the girl. You saw the girl.”