Tower of Babel

by Michael Sears

  “Are you okay?” Ted asked.

  “Well, I’d like my steak,” Kenzie said, attempting a laugh that failed to rise above a cough. She dropped into her seat and looked around for the waiter with a forced air of distraction.

  “He didn’t scare you?”

  “He did. So? I’m on the street in front of the courthouse three or four days a week. I have an office in the rectory of the church three blocks from my apartment. I walk there every day. If someone wants to hurt me, they have plenty of opportunities. And my job is pissing off powerful people.”

  “They’ve already come for Lester and for me. I don’t think you’re immune.”

  “You’ve made your point,” she said. “But if I choose not to be afraid, I . . .”

  “Your steaks.” The beer-keg waiter dropped the plates and backed away without serving the sides of potatoes or spinach.

  She attacked her steak with knife and fork and popped a bite into her mouth. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes as she concentrated. The second martini arrived, and she swallowed half of it. Ted sipped the beer.

  “You were talking about choice,” Ted ventured.

  “I know it’s scary,” she said. “I feel it. But what am I going to do? People do scary shit all the time. I don’t jump out of airplanes, run into burning buildings, or ski down mountains at eighty miles an hour. Some people do. I stand up to powerful people. Sometimes I get arrested. More often I get pushed aside. But what I hate the most is when they ignore me.”

  “Well, I don’t know who that guy was, but he is not ignoring you.”

  “Exactly. I win.”

  “I don’t want to see you hurt,” he said.

  “And in an earlier century, that thought might have been very sweet.”

  “They put Lester in the hospital.”

  “My call, Ted.” She emphasized her words by jabbing her fork in his direction. “My call.”

  “I think they killed Richie Rubiano.”

  “And I don’t want you to order for me. Understood?”

  “I think we’re talking a huge difference in magnitude here.”

  “Actually, we’re not. I like you, Ted. I think we have some chemistry. I’d like to see how we are together. I’m intrigued.”

  “You are?” Ted had never felt more out of his depth. He’d been sure he had been hitting all the wrong notes.

  “Just don’t try and be my daddy. Please?”

  “Are you saying you’d like to . . .” He slid to a halt, unsure how to finish the question.

  “Maybe,” she said with a grin.

  “Then I will squash all chivalric notions.”

  “Get the check.” She dropped her fork onto the plate and swigged the remains of her drink. She waved a hand for a waiter. None were in sight.

  Ted fished out a credit card and flashed it at a passing busboy.

  “No crédito,” the kid said, not breaking stride.

  “They’re leaving,” Kenzie said. “I want to follow Pak. Have you got cash?”

  Ted felt as if he’d hitched himself to a whirlwind. He pulled out the envelope with Cheryl’s supply of hundred-dollar bills and threw two of them on the table.

  “Hurry,” she said. “Catch up with me out front. I’ll grab us a cab.” Kenzie stood and strode through the dining room, following the disappearing figures of Cheryl and her boss.

  Ted ran through the math, computing the smallest acceptable tip. Two bills wouldn’t cover the meal. Three would constitute an enormous tip for world’s worst service. But Kenzie was out the door, and he couldn’t wait for change. With an “Aw, shit” that resounded loud enough to turn heads, he dropped a third bill and raced to follow.

  -43-

  The bar was packed with large, loud people waiting for their reservations to be honored. Ted saw Kenzie disappear through the archway at the far end of the room. He maneuvered through the crowd after her, held back by his own size and a disinclination to use brute force. By the time he got free, she was out the front door.

  “Was everything all right, sir?” The tuxedoed maître d’ was Ted’s last hurdle. Armed only with a greasy smile, the man was partially blocking the way. Ted sidestepped him and dashed out onto the street.

  There was no sign of Kenzie, nor of Cheryl, Pak, or Reisner. Reisner would have had a car waiting. Possibly Pak, too. Where was Kenzie? The rain was no longer a steady mist. It was approaching a deluge, and he’d left the damned umbrella inside. He wasn’t going back.

  He surrendered his sanctuary in the doorway and quickstepped out into the rain.

  The lights from the dealership across the road cast jagged shadows sliced through with stark shafts of brilliance on the wet pavement. Fluorescent puddles with multicolored neon reflections created an effect somewhere between psychedelia and cubism. And far down the sidewalk, a thin and bedraggled figure lurched on unsteady heels, heading for the Queens border. It was Kenzie.

  “McKenzie!” Ted yelled. “There’s got to be a better plan than this,” he muttered. “I’m coming,” he called. The pelting rain had already soaked through his suit jacket. “Ah, hell,” he said and ran after her.

  A big intersection loomed ahead. Across the boulevard, store signs beckoned in English, Korean, and Spanish. Blue-white light from above rearranged the scene from cubism to hyperrealism. Kenzie rushed the crosswalk as the pedestrian light ticked down the last four seconds. A horn blasted as she failed to make the curb before the light changed. Off in the distance, Ted saw a black limousine being swallowed by the flood of traffic entering from Little Neck Parkway.

  “This is not working,” he thought aloud. They needed to have a discussion about strategy and chain of command.

  He leaped off the curb and landed ankle deep in cold rainwater. His foot squelched with each running step, but he was catching up. He called again and saw her stop. She waved him on impatiently, then turned to the oncoming traffic and held up a hand for a cab.

  Any yellow cabs in Queens were heading for the airport or Manhattan. They weren’t going to stop for a sodden woman with mascara running down her cheeks. Ted waved and called again, but she was staring into the oncoming lights and did not respond. He kept running.

  Kenzie was speaking to him, one hand cupped next to her mouth, projecting words that failed to carry over the noise of the traffic and the rain. He read urgency but also a sense of the absurdity of it all—her bedraggled Don Quixote to his rain-soaked Sancho Panza racing on foot to keep up with a low-level politician rapidly escaping in the dry comfort of a limousine.

  Afterward he remembered quite clearly the sound of the approaching automobile. It was a distinctive sound—deep, throaty, and revved much too high. But if it had stood out so blatantly, why hadn’t he reacted quicker?

  Kenzie’s expression changed in an instant to one of pure horror. Sometime in their thousands of years of evolutionary survival, his people had developed the fast-track neural response to immediate danger. He did not consciously connect the sound of the approaching automobile with the look on Kenzie’s face, but his body reacted anyway: tuck the chin, roll on the shoulder, push down with both hands, spring upright.

  The movement, drilled in to him by wrestling coaches decades earlier and forgotten by all but muscle memory, saved his life.

  The car was a blur as it flew past him, so close that he staggered backward two steps before finding his balance.

  He didn’t know cars. Didn’t all sedans look alike these days? Later that night, the detectives said it was a BMW 6 Series. Ted didn’t know what that meant. Like most native New Yorkers, his automobile knowledge began and ended with the difference between taxis and everything else. Jill had owned an old Saab, which he had sometimes driven on weekends, but if he had ever had to leave it parked in a crowded outdoor lot, he never would have been able to find it again.

  Kenzie had had a beat more ti
me in which to react. Unfortunately, she had wasted it in frozen fear. At the last possible second, she threw her body to the right, making a lopsided swimmer’s racing dive onto the pavement. Though it saved her life, it wasn’t enough.

  The car’s tires bounced up over the curb. She scrambled on hands and knees out of the direct path and almost made it. The right front fender clipped her ankle, spinning her body like a toy on a string. A street sign that declared no parking here to corner stopped her. Then the car was gone, swerving across lanes and out of sight.

  Through the cacophony of the racing engine, squealing tires, car horns, and his own scream of “Nooo!” Ted was sure he heard Kenzie’s head smack against the pavement. He ran to her and dropped to his knees. She was moaning loudly. That was good. She was alive. Her eyes were open but unseeing. Blood was seeping out from beneath the wig. Rain pelted her face and those open eyes, but she made no move to cover herself. She was both wide awake and unconscious. Ted put one hand over her face and with the other dug into his pocket for his cell phone.

  -44-

  The jurisdictional issues slowed the early hours of the investigation. Nobody wanted it. The incident referred to as a carjacking by Nassau County Police took place at the steak house in their jurisdiction. The attempted vehicular homicide, as it was identified by New York’s finest, had clearly been in Queens. With Lester’s words regarding outer-borough hospitals in mind, Ted demanded that Kenzie be taken to a Nassau County hospital, further complicating matters. One of Cheryl’s hundred-dollar bills slipped to the EMTs resolved the issue of where to take her. The two NYPD detectives argued that the victim was no longer in their jurisdiction. The Nassau cops countered that the more serious crime had occurred on the other side of the county line. Ted wanted to leave and check on Kenzie.

  Cops from both sides questioned what witnesses they could find.

  The heavyset waiter reported that the couple had been arguing at the table and had left without finishing their meal. The hostess, who had barely acknowledged Ted when they arrived, remembered the woman running out alone. The maître d’ thought the man had been wild-eyed and aggressive. The valet parking attendant had seen the man chasing the woman and yelling at her. No, he didn’t know what the man had been saying, but he’d sounded angry. Or frightened maybe. And, no again, the attendant couldn’t remember a thing about the two guys who stole the car, despite having handed one of them the keys to the BMW while standing under the full glare of the overhead light above the entrance. Ted, still nursing bruises from his previous encounter and now with new scrapes and dents, understood the man’s selective memory and forgave it. Bad things happened to people who remembered too much.

  Ted didn’t say much. Beyond a perfect faith in his intuition, he didn’t have a lot to offer. Remarkably little that could have been called “fact.” The central piece of information that he might have provided—that Kenzie had been chasing a city councilman who had been driving away in a limousine—sounded too preposterous to be believed. Unless, of course, you knew McKenzie from Ridgewood, the fearless and sometimes impulsive community organizer.

  Orders finally came down from some higher level, New York lost the toss, and the Nassau cops melted into the night. Ted rode to the hospital with two unhappy detectives. Their moods didn’t improve when they arrived.

  “Mr. Molloy?” The nurse approached Ted, ignoring the two hulking men bracketing him. “The patient is asking for you. Will you come this way?”

  “This man is a suspect. We’re going to want to talk to her first,” one of the detectives said, latching on to Ted’s arm.

  “Am I under arrest?” Ted pointedly asked the other cop.

  “No,” he said. “You’re a witness.”

  Ted shrugged off the first detective’s grip.

  “A person of interest,” the first one countered.

  Ted looked to the RN for adjudication.

  “You’ll get your turn,” the nurse said to the first detective. She spoke with absolute authority.

  The cop considered his options. He had none. They were on her turf. “All right. You can have him. But for five minutes only.”

  The nurse gave him a withering look before turning to Ted. “This way, please.” She led him past the security and triage desks and into the heart of the ER. Ted was braced for the usual chaos and clutter of a New York emergency room. He was stunned to find an orderly, clean, and modern facility that gave off a quiet, controlled hum of coordinated efficiency. It was like stepping into a futuristic movie version of an ER.

  Kenzie was in a glass-walled room on the far side of the area. The door slid open automatically as Ted and the nurse approached. “I’ll hold them off for at least ten minutes,” she said. “If you need anything, press the button on the cord. If it’s an emergency, hit that red button on the wall.”

  Kenzie smiled as he entered. Ted was hit by her transformation from a tough woman into a vulnerable girl. She’d somehow shrunk four inches and dropped forty pounds. They’d washed the mascara off her face, and a gauze wrap had replaced the wig, but there were brown splotches of dried blood matting her hair, and her right ankle was immobilized in a Velcroed splint. Blood pressure and pulse monitors beeped quietly. She looked pale and a little tired. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and stroke her face with his fingers and tell her how frightened he had been and how relieved he felt at that moment. But he didn’t. He let her lead.

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she said.

  “Were you seriously trying to hail a cab within city limits in the rain?”

  “I thought they’d have to wait for their car to be brought round. I stepped outside the door, and they were already pulling away. How are you?”

  “Bumped and bruised,” Ted answered. “My suit’s a goner. I’m okay.” He’d taken worse falls but not in more than a decade and a half. “What have they said about you?”

  “I’m lucky. They keep saying that.”

  “Anything more specific?”

  “Will you tell my folks?”

  After his last session with her father, Ted would rather have gargled razor blades.

  She read his reaction and his feeble attempt at hiding it. “I’m kidding. I already spoke to them. My mom is on her way.”

  “I would have, you know.” He hoped he sounded convincing.

  “Yeah,” she said with a light laugh. She wasn’t buying it. “So I’ll be wearing a boot for the next couple of weeks. It’s a fracture, not a sprain. It’s supposed to heal quicker with no lasting effects. Except fifty years from now I’ll get arthritis there and be able to predict changes in the weather by how much pain I’m having. I’ll be sure to blame it on you.”

  “How’s the head?” he asked.

  “This old thing?” She pointed to the gauze bandage. “I just wear it to generate sympathy. Is it working?”

  “I was there, Kenzie. I heard you hit the ground.”

  “Yeah. They want to keep me overnight for observation. They did a scan. I’m waiting to hear.”

  “Are you in pain?” he asked.

  “See? Sympathy. It’s working.” She pointed to the bandage again.

  She was hurting. He could see it in the strain around her eyes, in the paleness of her skin. But she wasn’t going to admit to it.

  “Why did you take off without me?” he asked.

  “I was sure you’d catch up. If I’d found a cab, we’d be staking out Pak’s office right now. Or getting pictures of Cheryl delivering the payoff. We’re going to get those bastards.”

  “From what I’ve been able to figure out from listening to the cops argue about it, two well-dressed guys in ski masks walked up to the parking lot, flashed guns, and drove off in the first car they saw.”

  “That’s crazy,” she said sounding as though it wasn’t crazy at all. “Nobody’s telling me nothing. Keep talking.”

 
“Well, after trying to run you down—and almost succeeding—they left the car in a diner parking lot out by Alley Pond. Nobody has come forward with an ID or even a decent description.” Ted didn’t need either. He knew who had done it.

  “They weren’t after me. They were trying to hit you,” she said. “If you hadn’t jumped, they would have hit you and knocked you into next week.”

  “Maybe,” he said after a too-long pause. It occurred to him that he had now twice taken a lesser beating. Were these messages? Was his proximity to Lester and Kenzie putting them in greater danger? No, he decided, this wasn’t about him. The threat had been immediate, targeted, and directly in response to her standing up to the man in the restaurant. “No, I think the fat man sent them. To get you.”

  “Right. Like I’m a big threat to any of them. They don’t need to kill me; they can just ignore me.”

  “I want the cops to keep watch on you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You need protection more than I do. And you need a place to stay. A hideout. Talk to my friend the Preacher. He’ll know someone who can help.”

  “Already on my agenda.” He was less afraid for himself than for her. He needed to think, to plan. And he couldn’t do either while he worried about her.

  “You know, you have pissed off all the right people. I’m proud of you. If I could move, I’d give you a kiss.”

  “Don’t move,” Ted said. “Let me.” He bent over and lightly kissed her on the lips. He liked kissing her. “I had this wild fantasy that we were dashing out of the restaurant to go have mad, passionate sex.”

  “That’s sweet. Give me another kiss.”

  He did, less gently this time. She returned it.