Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Pay phones don’t call you,” she now tries to explain patiently to the two adults. “They’re there for you to call someone else.”

  While Carmen suppresses a laugh, Goodman does his best to justify what they’re doing here. “The someone else knows this number, and he wanted to call us right around this time, when we knew we’d be here.”

  “What about?”

  “About work,” Goodman says. “A new job, maybe.”

  “Sounds weird to me,” Kelly says.

  “Can I have a bite?” Goodman asks. He’s reaching for the pretzel when they’re all startled by a loud ringing noise.

  “There,” he says. “You see?”

  Carmen picks up the receiver and speaks into it. After a minute, she hands it to Goodman, mouthing the initials T.M. Goodman pulls a scrap of paper and a pen out of his pocket. He waits until Carmen’s walked Kelly out of earshot before he says “Hello” into the phone.

  “Hello,” says a raspy voice. “You her friend?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hear you got sompin speshul.”

  “That’s right,” Goodman says.

  “My people are interested in checkin’ it out,” the voice says. “Whaddaya need for a quadda oh-zee?”

  Goodman doesn’t know what to say. He has no idea what T.M. has just asked him. He scribbles down what it sounded like, but he’s afraid to try to answer whatever the question was.

  “Too large be okay?” the voice asks.

  Goodman is stumped again, but he figures he’s got to say something. “Sure,” he says, “that’ll be okay.”

  “You know the big bookstore over on Lexington?” the voice wants to know. “The Barney Noble?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll meet there same time tomorrow - in the travel book section. You be carrying some flowers wrapped up in white paper. Put the thing inside the paper. But make sure it don’t get wet. That’s very important.

  Okay?”

  “Okay,” Goodman says. “How will I recognize you?”

  “You won’t,” the voice says. “I’ll recanize you. Remember, I’m the one’s stickin’ my neck out here.”

  “What do I call the girl in my report?” Riley asks Abbruzzo as they sit shivering in the wiretap plant, trying their best to keep warm from the space heater. The phone they’re listening in on has been quiet all morning. Riley is bent over a three-page document, about halfway through filling in blanks. Fortunately, most police reports tend to be multiple choice in format, or, at worst, short-answer. Essays are rarely called for.

  “I don’t know,” Abbruzzo says. “We don’t have her name yet.”

  “No,” Riley says. “I don’t mean her name. I mean like ‘girlfriend’ or ‘companion’ - that kinda thing.”

  “I think ‘companion’ is when they’re gay,” Abbruzzo says. “How about ‘lady friend’?”

  “Too English.”

  “‘Lover’?”

  “Too romantic,” Riley says. “We’re supposed to be making this guy sound like a major drug violator, remember? Not a fucking movie star.”

  “I’ve got it,” Abbruzzo says. “She’s his paramour.”

  “Ooooh, that’s good - pure Mafia.” It’s a few seconds before he looks up from his writing. “P-A-R-A?”

  “M-O-R-E,” Abbruzzo says.

  “Right,” says Riley.

  That evening, after Kelly’s fallen asleep, Goodman fishes out the scrap of paper from his pocket and flattens it out on the table for Carmen to help him decipher. They stare at the writing on it.

  Quadda ohzee?

  Too Large

  Barnes & Noble Lex

  same time tomorrow

  Travel books

  Flowers - white paper Keep dry!

  “What was he talking about when he said these things?” Carmen asks.

  “The Barnes & Noble part I understood,” Goodman says. “That’s where we’re supposed to meet tomorrow. I guess at quarter after twelve. I’m supposed to be in the travel section, with the stuff in a bunch of flowers. It’s the first part I’m confused about. I think he was telling me how much I’m supposed to bring.”

  “And that’s when he said, ‘Quadda-’“

  “‘Quadda ohzee.’“

  “Sounds like a Quarter Pounder with cheese,” Carmen says.

  “That’s it!”

  “What’s it?”

  “‘Quaddah’ is quarter,” he announces with all the pride of a spy who’s just cracked the enemy’s master code, “and ‘ohzee’ is oz., as in ounce.”

  “They want a quarter of an ounce,” Carmen agrees. “Like a sample. Did you discuss price?”

  “I think so,” Goodman says. “I think that’s where the ‘too large’ came in.”

  “That’s the price,” she says.

  “What’s the price?”

  “Two large.”

  “What’s too large?” Goodman asks, beginning to feel like he’s caught up in an Abbott and Costello routine.

  “Two large means $2,000,” she explains. “Paulie was all the time talking like that. ‘Two C’s’ or ‘two yards’ would mean 200. ‘Two G’s’ or ‘two big ones’ or ‘two large’ is 2,000. You know - God forbid he should’ve spoken English.”

  But Goodman’s no longer paying attention. His accountant’s brain has taken over once again. If a quarter of an ounce goes for $2,000, then an ounce is worth $8,000. Multiply that by sixteen, and a pound will bring close to $130,000. A kilo, or 2.2 pounds, should be $286,000. And twenty kilos brings you slightly over $5.7 million.

  “These guys pay a lot more than the black guys,” he says softly.

  “As I remember the story, the black guys weren’t into paying anything. Weren’t they the ones who took your pants?”

  “Yup,” Goodman says. “What do you think these guys’ll try to take?”

  “Oh, not much. Your liver, your heart.”

  “Nothing important.”

  “That’s why you’re going to let me help you,” Carmen says, putting her hand on his.

  “Right,” he laughs.” ‘Cause you’re so good about holding on to your pants.”

  She pulls her hand away as though from an open flame. “That was cruel,” she tells him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean it that way.” And when he reaches for her hand, she reluctantly lets him take it back. But in that brief exchange, Michael Goodman knows this: There’s a tiny part of him that did mean to hurt her just now, a part of him that blames her, that’s angry at her for having given in to Paulie, for having surrendered - what, her body, her love? Not quite trusting himself to put these feelings into words just yet, he says nothing. Instead, he gives her hand a gentle squeeze.

  Hours later, Goodman lies on the floor and listens in the dark to the sounds that come from the sofa bed. After awhile, he’s able to recognize the tiny exhalations of his daughter. Ever since she first came home from the hospital as a newborn, she’s been a mouth-breather. He remembers how, in the first days and weeks of her life, he would stand beside her crib and listen to the rhythm of her breathing, marveling at this tiny creature with a life of her own. In later months, he would find himself in the doorway to her room, checking to make sure she was safe, hearing again the little puffs of air coming from her lips. Now he hears them again, identifies them as hers as surely as a mother seal can pick out her own pup by its smell from thousands on the beach.

  Next, he hears the occasional purr of Pop-Tart, a miniature motor idling so gently that he knows he’d miss it altogether if he didn’t know to listen for it.

  Finally, he makes out the sound he’s been searching for: yet a third noise, this one so soft that he’s dependent not on its volume but upon its frequency. Twenty years ago, Michael Goodman was an ensign in the navy on a training ship hugging the coast from New London, Connecticut, to Norfolk, Virginia. Too sick to sleep one night, he’d come up on deck and clung to the rail, afraid he might die, and afraid he might not. He remembers now pickin
g out the beacon of a distant lighthouse not by its brightness - there were hundreds of stars and other lights on shore that were brighter - but by the constant, regular intervals that punctuated its flashes.

  He does his best now to filter out the sounds of his daughter’s exhalations and the purring of the kitten, so that he can isolate this third sound and concentrate on it. He times the intervals at six seconds, thinks how that might appear on a nautical chart as “BS 6sec” - breathing sound, every six seconds. Only when he’s completely certain that the rhythm is too regular to mean anything but deep sleep does he rise as quietly as he possibly can, tiptoe in his socks to the door, and slip out silently, wedging a sock in the door frame to avoid making a clicking noise.

  Down in the basement, he aims his flashlight and works the combination of his lock. He unzips the black duffel bag and retrieves the same blue plastic package as before. Carefully, he taps some of its powder into a small baggie, stopping when he guesses he has a quarter of an ounce. Then he replaces things as they were, makes his way back upstairs, and returns to his spot on the floor. When his own heartbeat finally quiets, he’s able to pick out his daughter’s tiny exhalations, the kitten’s occasional purring, and the six-second breathing sounds that he knows can only belong to Carmen.

  At the plant, Abbruzzo and Riley share a pizza and a six-pack of warm Pepsi. They’re working twelve-hour rotations now, beginning with the graveyard shift, midnight to 0800. They’ll be on until noon Thursday.

  “Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Excitement are down for the night,” Abbruzzo says.

  “No question about it,” Riley agrees. He enters a notation on the log sheet:

  2315 Subject & paramore asleep. No further calls or suspicious activity.

  Michael Goodman stands in the travel section of Barnes & Noble and does his best to pretend he’s browsing. This is not easy to do, because his right hand holds a large bunch of daisies wrapped in plain white paper.

  But while Goodman has pretty much followed the instructions given him over the phone yesterday by an individual known to him only as T.M., he’s also departed from those same instructions with respect to one detail. Specifically, the plastic baggie containing the white powder is not inside the paper that holds the flowers.

  This departure is partly the product of Carmen’s concern and partly the product of Goodman’s willingness to listen to her suggestion, limited only by his continuing reluctance to allow her to get involved in this business of his.

  After calling the Bronx Tire Exchange and asking Manny if he could come in tomorrow instead of this afternoon, Goodman and Carmen had dropped off Kelly at her grandmother’s. Then they’d made a stop at a florist.

  “I want some flowers,” Goodman had told the clerk, “but I need them wrapped in white paper.”

  The clerk had checked his inventory. “I got blue and I got lavender,” he’d reported. “I got a white background with a pink-and-green pattern. I got red, white, and blue stripes left over from Independence Day. I got silver and gold foil-”

  “I need plain white,” Goodman had said.

  “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  And all had seemed lost until Carmen had come to the rescue, pointing out that all one had to do was to reverse the white background with the pink-and-green pattern, and - voilà! - one suddenly had plain white paper.

  Then, on their way to Barnes & Noble, she’d spoken up again. “You’re asking to get robbed again if you put the package in there,” she’d told him. “All they have to do is see some guy standing around holding a bunch of flowers in white paper. They grab it from you and run out the door. End of scene.”

  Goodman had been forced to admit that she had a point there. “So what do we do?” he’d asked her.

  “We’ll both be in the store,” she’d suggested. “Only we won’t stand together. We’ll act like we don’t know each other. You’ll hold the flowers,” she’d said. “Let me hold the package. If T.M. shows up with the money, have him give it to you. Then I’ll be the one to hand him the package.”

  “No good. I told you, I don’t want you messed up in this, and I mean it. There’s got to be some other way of doing it, without getting you involved.”

  “All right,” she’d said then. “How about this? Once he shows you the money, you tell him to wait a minute. You come over to me, and I’ll give you the package. That way, you’re the one who gives it to him, and I stay out of it.”

  And they’d agreed to do it that way.

  Now he studies Fodor’s Paris, London on $50 a Day, Trekking in the Himalayas, and Street’s Cruising Guide to the East Carribean. He had no idea there could be so many travel books, and he’s astonished to find that they’ve all ended up in a single store. He crouches down, zeroing in on a whole shelf of books on the West Indies. He has to squint just a bit to read the titles, because he’s not wearing his glasses. Carmen’s convinced him to leave them home. Not only that - she’s actually dressed him. She’s made him give up his jeans for a pair of black cotton slacks. She said they looked more “hip,” whatever she meant by that. And she found in his drawer a black imitation Lacoste shirt, from which she’d painstakingly removed the alligator logo with a razor blade. An almost-black suit jacket and a pair of black shoes and socks had finished off the outfit.

  “You look like Batman, Daddy” had been Kelly’s only comment.

  Finally, Carmen had insisted on wetting his hair and had tried to slick it back, but she’d succeeded only in making it look something like wet Brillo.

  “Pickin’ out a nice place to go to with all that money you’ll be gettin’?”

  Goodman recognizes the gravelly voice before he even sees who’s addressing him. He straightens up but finds he still has to look slightly upward into a heavy-featured face dominated by bushy, dark eyebrows that barely break in the middle. Everything about the man suggests power, perhaps even violence - everything, that is, except the bunch of flowers wrapped in white paper he holds tucked under one arm like a football.

  “Lookathat, we musta both bought flowers at the same place,” the man says, nodding at Goodman’s.

  “I guess so,” Goodman acknowledges, realizing that the man hasn’t made a grab for Goodman’s flowers after all, though certainly Goodman would be totally powerless to stop him. He wonders for the first time if this might actually turn out to be the deal it’s supposed to be, and not another rip-off, as they’d feared.

  “This one looks good,” the man says, pointing to a book on the bottom shelf. As he lowers himself to one knee, he removes his flowers from under his arm and places them on the carpeted floor.

  Goodman has to squat to read the title of the book that’s drawn the man’s attention. He’s lip-reading Pacific Northwest when the man makes a suggestion to him: “Put your flowers down.”

  And suddenly, Goodman gets it. He’s supposed to lay his flowers right next to the other bunch. Then, when it’s time to get up, they’ll do a switch - Goodman will end up with the money flowers and the man will end up with the drug flowers. Just like he’s seen it done in the movies.

  Only thing is, Goodman knows the drugs aren’t in his flowers.

  “Put your flowers down,” the man repeats. This time, it sounds more like a command than a suggestion. Goodman does as he’s told.

  Sure enough, after a second or two, the man places a meaty hand on Goodman’s flowers and straightens up into a standing position. With no choice, Goodman follows his cue. He’s struck immediately by the fact that his new flowers are much heavier than his old ones.

  “You got a phone where I can get back in touch with you?” the man asks, and before Goodman can think of a reason not to, he’s given him his home number.

  “Listen,” he tells the man, knowing he somehow has to break the news that the drugs aren’t in with the flowers as they’re supposed to be. But before he can explain that he has to get them, Carmen is there between the two of them.

  “Excuse me,” she says as she reaches with o
ne hand for a copy of Frommer’s New England, her other hand finding its way into the flowers in the man’s hand. There’s nothing stealthy about the way she does it - she just does it, gives them each a wink, and continues down the aisle, nose in her book, boning up on Cape Cod, or maybe Martha’s Vineyard.

  The startled look on the man’s face gives way to one of confusion. Goodman decides he’d better say something. “You know how it is. In this business, you can never be too careful” is what he says. Then he follows Carmen toward the front of the store and out onto Lexington Avenue.

  Across the avenue, Abbruzzo and Riley huddle with Weems and Sheridan. All four detectives are there because, just before 1020 hours, Abbruzzo picked up a call from Goodman to an unidentified female that he’d be dropping his daughter off in a while so he could attend to “some business.”

  “Sounds like a deal all right,” Riley had agreed.

  Then, around 1100, they’d spotted the three of them headed out - the Mole, his daughter, and his “paramore.”

  “They’re makin’ a move,” Abbruzzo had announced.

  They’d followed them on foot, contacting Weems and Sheridan to let them know what was happening. They’d seen Goodman take his daughter into a building on Seventy-Second Street, then waited for him to emerge. Their log entries chronicle each activity that followed:

  1129 Subject exits premises without daughter. Rejoins paramore. Walks N on Lexington.

  1136 Subject & paramore enter florist at 83rd St.

  1142 Subject & paramore exit florist. Subject in possession of 1 boukay of flowers.

  1153 Subject & paramore enter bookstore at 86th St.

  1209 Subject & paramore exit bookstore. Subject still in possession of boukay.

  Now the four of them - Abbruzzo and Riley, who should be off duty by now, and Weems and Sheridan, who’ve just begun their tour - fall in behind the two people and resume following them. In the process, they fail to note a large man with dark eyebrows and a thick neck, who comes out of the store moments later, carrying a very similar bunch of flowers. By the time he crosses Eighty-Fifth Street and joins another man, the four detectives are heading north, trailing the first man and the woman he’s with. Riley enters one final log entry before handing the book over to Sheridan: