Nadim looked back to make sure that Aarif was out of sight, then edged over to the front window. Down below, Thirty-seventh Avenue held a fair amount of pedestrian traffic, but he saw few white faces, and none looking up at the building, none who seemed like undercover police. He still felt shaken, but the hard knot of tension that had pressed against the bottom of his breastbone for the past four days eased a bit. It was starting to seem possible that he might actually walk away from the incident in the deli unscathed, that he might even be able to return to his apartment and his normal life. And, of course, to continue working toward the plan.
He spotted Husain and Malik hurrying down the sidewalk in the light spring rain, the former young and bookish, the latter handsome and stylish with his sporty sweatshirt and gelled pompadour.
Aarif—gaunt, stern-faced, always a bit sour—came out of the kitchen with a tea tray. He wore drab brown and beige clothes; though he was not yet thirty, he managed to convey the tired authority of a village elder, and had become the de facto leader of their little group. He set the tea down on a side table, then began to unroll the sajadas and spread them on the floor, pointing east toward Mecca.
As soon as the others arrived upstairs, they had a quick cup of tea, then made wud’u, the ritual ablutions, then knelt down for the Asr, the late afternoon prayer, as the sound of the adhan wafted in through the window from a masjid down the block. As always these days, Nadim felt like a bit of a fraud as he went through the motions, but they were so deeply ingrained in him that he could have performed them in his sleep. Halfway through the second raka’ah, he snuck a peek at Malik, whose eyes looked glazed; Nadim sensed that he wasn’t the only one who was putting less than his whole heart into the ritual. He felt a twinge of guilt again: he had spent the past couple of nights on Malik’s couch. The last thing he wanted was to get anyone else in trouble, but he and Malik didn’t work at the same place and they lived in different boroughs. He hoped that there would be no way to tie the two of them together in case the incident in the deli caught up with him. One thing he had learned recently: everybody on the planet had to have somewhere to sleep every night, and you didn’t want that to be a park bench or a cardboard box out on the street, not if you could help it.
When they were done, they rolled up the sajadas, stowed them away, and got down to business.
“I have great news,” said Husain, in Urdu. “Since last we met, I went home for a week. And I talked to my uncle, the one with the factory in Peshawar. He says he will come in for half a crore.”
Nadim and the others whistled. That was over sixty thousand dollars!
“I hope you have not discussed this on the phone or by e-mail,” Aarif said. The others turned to him.
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you hear about Tajmmul?”
“What happened?”
“He was taken away. The CIA was tapping his calls back home. This is how it works: they hear you talking about any kind of big money transfer, and kudha hafiz!” Good-bye.
Husain’s face fell. “I e-mailed my uncle to say thank you last night.”
Aarif scowled. “Let’s hope you’re still around for our next meeting, yaar. Let’s hope we all are. Just use better sense in the future, all right?” He turned to Malik. “How about you?”
Malik reached inside his jacket and handed over a thick envelope. Nadim knew that it would be full of cash.
And then it was his turn.
“And you?”
His heart rate jumped. “I … I am continuing to save. I should have my portion ready … soon. Very soon.” He didn’t mention the fact that he had not gone to work for the past three nights, that Rafik-kahn would surely not take him back. But that was okay. There were hundreds of car service and taxi companies out there, and drivers came and went. He would find new work just as soon as it was safe.
Aarif scowled, but then he turned to the others. “No matter. Husain’s uncle’s share puts us very close to what we need. I think we’re ready to move forward.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
IT WASN’T EVERY DAY that a veteran New York detective like Jack Leightner saw something he’d never seen before.
Nadim Hasni’s former father-in-law sat at one end of the dining room table. The old man had a face like burnished, cracked teak, with piercing blue eyes. He paid Jack and Richie Powker absolutely no mind. He picked a cigarette out of a pack in front of him, made a fist, tucked the filter between his middle and ring fingers so that the cig projected up like a little chimney, fired it up, and then inhaled through one end of his chambered fist. Was this some Middle Eastern custom, or just a personal invention? Jack had no idea.
After their drive-by of Hasni’s residence, on the way back to the Seven-oh house, the two detectives had stopped off to interview the man’s employer at a Pakistani car service on Coney Island Avenue. The owner, a heavy, ill-tempered man, offered little useful information. He told them that Hasni had not come to work for the past few nights. They tried questioning him about Nadim’s habits, friends, etc., but the man waved a hand in dismissal. “I have many drivers. Their life when they are not at work? Not my problem. I don’t need this bullshit. If you see Nadim, tell him: don’t come back.”
Back at the Seven-oh house, the detectives hunkered down for a little computer search. Having a name for their suspect made all the difference. Without it, they might as well have been searching for a ghost; with it, every new bit of data gave him more corporeal form. Nadim Hasni, they soon learned, was thirty-two years old. He had arrived in the States back in 1993, on a tourist visa. He had applied for a green card years later, after marrying a U.S. citizen, one Ghizala Mamund, but it had not come through by the time they divorced in 2003.
The detectives searched through every database they could think of and called every contact who might be able to provide more information, at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, utility companies, the city’s Department of Finance …
When they finally ran out of sources, Jack turned to his partner. “Let’s go for a drive.”
Ghizala Mamund’s residence, in Jackson Heights, Queens, was one of a row of modest homes with muddled architecture: drab brick façades topped with fussy mansard roofs, and red-tiled front awnings peaked like Swiss chalets. A skinny, serious-looking young girl, maybe nine or ten, answered the doorbell for Mamund’s apartment. She wore a plain, high-waisted brown dress over a pair of blue jeans. Her hair was tied back in two braids, and she wore a little metal stud in one nostril, and a bead necklace.
“Is your mother home?” Jack asked.
The girl stared, wide-eyed.
“Do you speak English?”
She frowned. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.” She sounded like any American kid.
“It’s okay,” Jack said. He held up his badge. “We’re not strangers; we’re policemen. And we don’t need to talk to you, just to Ghizala Mamund.”
“She’s not my mother,” the girl said solemnly. “She’s my auntie.”
“Okay,” Jack said patiently. “Is she home?”
The girl chewed her bottom lip for a moment. “Wait here,” she finally said, and then she quietly closed the door. A minute later, she came back and led them into this dining room, where the old man sat, smoking his odd improvised hand-pipe and gazing off into the ether. Jack wondered if he might be blind. “How you doing?” he said, but the man didn’t respond.
The dining room did double duty as a parlor; it was decorated with the kind of cheap but pretentiously ornate furniture you could buy on the installment plan in a discount showroom, and smelled powerfully of foreign spices. Jack noticed a stack of schoolbooks on the dining table, next to an open notebook. Moving away from the table and the rather disturbing old man, he wandered toward the front of the apartment, past a big old TV and some armchairs. On a side table he noticed several photos, silver-framed. They all showed a young girl, but she wasn’t the one who had answered the door. They looked
to be about the same age, but this one wore big clunky eyeglasses and she had a round, rather plain face.
After a rather awkward minute, a woman emerged from a back doorway, adjusting a headscarf. She wore a shapeless black dress, but Jack could see that she was plump. She gestured to the detectives to sit on a sofa, and then she perched on the edge of an armchair. She had big, doe-like eyes, high cheekbones, and full lips; Jack guessed that she had once been something of a beauty. Her niece stood next to her.
“Thank you for talking to us, Ms. Mamund,” Jack said. “Or is it Mrs. Hasni?”
The girl responded. “She doesn’t speak any English.” Jack turned toward the old man, but she shook her head. “He doesn’t either.”
Jack frowned: the last thing he wanted was to put a little girl in the middle of a case involving murder and terrorism, but he seemed to have little choice. “What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Raani.”
“Well, Raani: Do you think you could maybe help us out by translating what your auntie says? That means—”
“I know what ‘translating’ means,” she said with a touch of pride, and Jack guessed that she did pretty well with her homework.
“That’s great. Thank you. Could you ask her when was the last time she saw Nadim Hasni?”
The girl did the honors.
Her aunt stiffened. She drew herself up, like a pigeon inflating its chest, and spoke rapidly in her foreign tongue.
The girl turned to Jack. “She says not for more than a year.”
Jack tugged at his earlobe. Nadim’s ex-wife had clearly said more than that, and he wished he could have understood it all. Despite her dumpy surroundings, the woman had an imperious air, as if she were some foreign princess being interviewed by low-caste inferiors.
“Does she know where he might be right now?”
Again, the translation and the rapid, bitter answer.
The girl shook her head.
“What did she say?” Jack asked.
The girl wrinkled her nose. “She doesn’t care where he is or what he’s doing, as long as he pays the … um …”
“Alimony?”
“Yes.”
Jack regarded the scowling woman. He thought of the early days of his own divorce, of the tornado of feelings that had whirled inside of him back then: fierce anger and resentment, inextricably bound to remnants of true love. Christ, what a mess romance could be! He saw it all the time at work: people shot, stabbed, beaten, and battered, all in the name of disappointed love.
Richie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a photo of Robert Brasciak. “Ask her if she’s ever seen this man.”
The woman showed no signs of recognition. She shook her head.
“And you?” Richie asked the girl.
She shook her head too.
Jack nodded toward the old man. “What about him?”
The girl shook her head. “He never leaves the house.”
Jack thought for a moment. “All right. Ask her if she saw any signs of erratic behavior in Nadim.” He squinted. “That means—”
“I know what ‘erratic’ means. We had it in my spelling bee.” She translated for her aunt.
Another angry outburst.
The girl frowned. “She says yes, of course. That he was a crazy man.”
“How?”
“He was very nervous. He got angry for no reason. He couldn’t sleep.”
“Was he always like that, or was there something that made him change?”
The girl translated and Jack watched something flit across the woman’s face. It was so brief that anyone but a trained inter- viewer might well have missed it. But Ghizala Mamund just shrugged and muttered briefly.
“Who knows what made him so? It was the will of Allah.”
Jack stared at her. “If he was crazy, why did you marry him?”
During the translation, the woman squirmed. “He was not always like that. He was different when I met him.”
“When did he start to change?”
It was interesting, not speaking the woman’s tongue. That left Jack free to focus on her body language, the tone of her voice. And she sounded more anxious now than angry.
The girl turned to the detectives. “She says she doesn’t want to talk anymore.”
Jack wasn’t ready to let it go. “Tell her that this is very important.”
A brief exchange. “She must start cooking dinner.”
Jack frowned. “Tell her that if she won’t talk to us, we might have to bring her down to the police station.”
The woman’s haughty attitude crumpled; she looked like she might even cry. She finally said something in a faint little voice.
“He changed three years ago.”
Jack stayed still, careful not to spook the woman. “Did something happen at that time?”
The woman pressed a hand to her mouth and mumbled something.
“That was …” The girl lowered her voice. “That was when Enny died.”
Jack sat up a little straighten “Who was Enny?”
After the translation into Urdu, Ghizala pressed a hand to her mouth. Her response was barely audible.
“She doesn’t want to talk anymore.”
Jack had a sudden inspiration. “‘Enny’? Is that a girl?”
The niece nodded, sad-faced.
“The girl in those pictures?” Jack said, pointing to the side table. “Was she their daughter? Ghizala and Nadim’s?”
Again the girl nodded.
“How old was she?”
“Eleven.”
Jack glanced at Richie. What if Robert Brasciak had had something to do with the girl’s death, and Hasni had wanted revenge? Maybe Brasciak had killed the girl in a car accident or something? But then, why wait three years to kill him? Perhaps Hasni had nursed a powerful grudge, and then a chance encounter in the deli had led to the killing?
“How did she die?”
Raani answered; she sounded somber, older than her years. “She was sick. Pneumonia. It happened very fast.”
Jack slumped back. So much for that theory. He sighed. “Ask her if she has any idea where Nadim might be. Any idea at all.”
Ghizala Mamund shook her head and muttered.
“She doesn’t know anything about his life now and doesn’t want to know.”
Richie sat forward. “Ask her who he might be hanging out with.”
This time the woman almost spat her answer: “Koora!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means garbage,” the girl said. “Low people.”
Jack wondered what the word might be for terrorists. He stood up and moved in front of the woman. “Ask her—”
The two detectives were startled by a loud sound from the rear of the room. The old man had slammed his hand down on the table. He stood up now and said something angry.
“That’s enough,” the girl translated. “He would like for you to leave.”
“PNEUMONIA IS NOT A motive,” Richie said as the two detectives got in their car and drove away.
“For killing some stranger in a deli? Not exactly. But I can imagine that having his kid die suddenly might make a guy a bit emotionally disturbed.”
They chewed on that silently for a minute—detectives, yes, but also fathers.
“That must be some damn tough stuff to deal with in a marriage,” Jack added, thinking of the bitterness in Ghizala’s face.
“I don’t like to think about it.”
Jack stared out the windshield as they drove out of Jackson Heights. It was amazing, the sea of different faces here. He pulled over outside a Starbucks so Richie could run in to take a piss; Jack noticed that the counter girl was wearing an Arab headscarf. On the road again, they passed a shop selling international phone cards, and another one advertising global money transfers. Jack thought about phone calls and cash flowing back and forth from overseas, and about all the talk he’d heard of terrorist cells, camouflaged and imbedded in the fabric
of daily American life. If Nadim Hasni was a hidden time bomb, evidently he had started to go off early.
They passed an Indian bakery, a taqueria, a Tibetan restaurant. Jack couldn’t help thinking of his near-fiancée, how she would have liked this area. Michelle had always pushed him to try new food, expand his boundaries, step outside his comfort zone. Sometimes he’d felt irked by that, but mostly he had been grateful. He traveled all over the city and dealt with all kinds of people, but she had shown him that his view of the world could still be a bit limited. (Though what could you expect from the son of a Red Hook longshoreman?) If Michelle were here right now, she’d lead him into some exotic store or restaurant, laughing at his befuddled expressions. He’d pretend to be annoyed, but deep down he wouldn’t mind.
Christ, he thought to himself—here he was, years later, still mooning about his lost love. Why? He remembered his urgent dream the other night. One thing you could say about the threat of terrorism: it had a wondrous power to focus the mind (and heart). If there was an attack now, the first thing he’d want would be to make sure his son was okay, but the second would be to find Michelle. He hated to admit it, but even after their disastrous parting, after what she had done, he still loved her. A lot of time had gone by. Maybe she wasn’t with that other guy anymore. Maybe she regretted her affair. What if she wanted him back?
A car horn jolted him and he realized that he was cruising along the busy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. “Wow,” he said. He glanced at his partner. “You ever have this thing where you’re driving and you have no memory of the last mile or so?”
Richie’s eyes widened. “You’re telling me this now? Christ—maybe I should drive.”
Both men fell silent for a moment, but then Jack’s partner spoke again.
“You know, here we are, looking for a guy who’s supposed to be a terrorist. Don’t you think we should be taking part in big task force meetings and stuff? Shouldn’t there be briefings and meetings with NYPD brass, and crap like that?”
The Ninth Step Page 10
