Vector

by James Abel

  “You don’t think evil people go to hell?”

  “What is being lost forever if not that?”

  At 10 P.M. we had stopped in while strolling from office to dinner. A seedy-looking man on the front steps had tried to sell us “fresh malaria medicine,” then backed away when he saw my face. Eddie had gone back to Stuart’s apartment, to sleep, he said, but I think he just wanted Izabel and me to be alone. Eddie the matchmaker. Saint John dominates a hilly area on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where, back on Amsterdam Avenue, we passed the cathedral’s Alice in Wonderland sculpture garden, and bronzes of Alice and the Mad Hatter, eternally watching each other, eternally healthy. A convertible BMW pulled up beside us, filled with laughing young people, blasting music. Many of those who had malaria pills were as oblivious to fear as tourists in a malarial country. They went on with life.

  Izabel’s frizzy hair fell against her bare shoulders, in an inverted V of coppery waves. Her eyes were a burnished dark green that highlighted the mocha skin and single gold-link necklace around her slender throat. She wore a black top with spaghetti straps, fitted white jeans, and cork-heeled sandals with rainbow straps at the toes. She carried a lightweight cashmere sweater against air-conditioning. She smelled of musk.

  Her nearness created a fluid weakness in my groin, a stirring in my chest. It was not a romantic feeling. It was more of an animal waking up after a long sleep. Over two years had passed since I had chosen to be alone. This all felt quite strange.

  “It is good to take a few hours off,” she said as we strolled beneath hundred-year-old oaks. A blinking airplane, high above, moved west over the metropolis. It would have been sprayed with pesticides between trips.

  “Look, Joe.” She held out her wrist. Beneath the mosquito that had landed on it, I saw the small pulsing motion of life beneath her skin. “Killer? Or not?”

  She smashed the insect with her other hand, leaving a smear of blood, hers, perhaps, or a prior victim’s. What remained was a pinprick mass of mashed-up membranes.

  “My people have located Cizinio, Joe. They’re making drawings of the men who bought art from the Indians, and of the man who Cizinio said came there and directed buying.”

  “When can I see these drawings?”

  “Probably faxed tonight. Or tomorrow.”

  “What have you learned in the Brazilian neighborhoods?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing yet. But tomorrow I will zero in on Indian folk art shops. Who collects it? Who ships it to the cities that were hit so far?”

  “Aya is working on that, too, on Customs lists.”

  “Yes, I spoke to this girl.” Izabel smiled admiringly and wryly. “She is very passionate,” she remarked.

  I glanced down into the heart-shaped face, and sensed that what she had meant was, She doesn’t like me too much.

  “She’s sixteen. But she is very smart, Izabel.”

  “You had sex with her mother?”

  I halted, startled by the directness, although I shouldn’t have been by now. I shook my head. Why not answer? “Aya wanted us to get together but it never happened,” I said.

  “I see. Because of you? Or the mother?”

  “Both,” I lied. It had been my decision.

  “And Chris—Aya’s mother—is engaged to Ray Havlicek?”

  “Yes.”

  Izabel nodded as if some mystery had been cleared up. “So we can conclude that all the bullshit that has happened to us is a result of this situation?”

  “Ray is a professional.”

  “Are you telling yourself this lie, too, or just me?”

  I laughed. Business over. She slipped her arm in mine, her shoulder brushed me, and her hip grazed me, quick as thought, clear as intent. The few taxis on Amsterdam Avenue seemed to float through heat-convoluted air. The restaurant, Miss Mamie’s Spoonbread Too, serves the best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten, candied yams, and sweet tea in mason jars, so sugary that it hurts your teeth. It’s a small, homey place frequented by neighborhood and university types. OPEN! WE WON’T BE DEFEATED BY FEAR, a sign in the window said.

  A few restaurants had reopened over the last few days as the infection rate slowed, although none offered outdoor tables. We sat beneath the blowup black-and-white photo of the ex–fashion model who had founded the place.

  The restaurant was only half filled. Clearly, a couple by the front door recognized us, from the news. But in New York celebrities are left alone. Privacy is a gift given by this rambunctious city to celebrities. And at the moment, our TV appearances put us in that category. Our table was small and we sat very close.

  “Are you married?” she asked, then laughed when she saw my reaction. “You think Brazilians are too direct?”

  “I’m not married. I was, years ago.”

  “Then your fiancée was killed after that. I know. I am sorry.”

  “Me, too.” Someone must have had a handheld TV on nearby. I heard a news broadcaster. “Here in San Francisco it’s hard to believe there’s an outbreak elsewhere. Life goes on. But the question in some minds is, are we next?”

  She picked up a piece of corn bread and buttered it. She ate in small bites. A dab of butter remained on the corner of her mouth, by a freckle. She said, “Nelson and I worked together for four years. He wanted to be my lover. I tried it once with him. But it was uncomfortable. He was energetic. But he wanted to be more involved.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this.”

  “Why not? What shall we talk about, then? The ten thousandth conversation about malaria? You know as well as I do what is going on between us. Or not.”

  I sighed. I said, “Yeah.”

  She placed her hand on top of my wrist. “We are on a crucial investigation, and it is always best to give your body what it needs. It needs to eat. If you do not sleep, you are not fresh. Why is this different? I can’t do anything with Eddie. He is married. To sleep with a married man is against my belief. Joe, if you think that every single waking minute is a moral question, you should be a priest. And not live as a regular man.”

  “You won’t sleep with married guys but you shoot them.”

  “You do that, too.”

  “Very romantic.”

  She laughed. I laughed. Neither of us wanted romance. Something in common. It felt as if months had passed since I’d laughed in a way that made my stomach muscles ease, even at the same time that other muscles tightened. The waitress laid down heaping plates of golden crispy chicken, and mason jars of sweet tea. The cook had doubled our portions. This was a gift of respect. The couple by the front door was now taking photos of us on their phones.

  Okay, so maybe the city doesn’t give privacy so much.

  As I ate, my skin felt alive in a thousand different places. I drank the sweet tea, yet my throat remained dry. The way the overhead light hit the contours of her bare shoulders. The way the coconut smell seemed to roll off her long hair. The way the little freckle by the mouth moved up and down when she was chewing. I could feel my nostrils flare with lust; my fingertips were numb, and inside my knees was the sensation of hollowness. We ate in silence, but with a hungry relish. She told me about growing up in the favelas of Rio, in a one-room concrete shack with a tin roof. She told me about the way gangs had run the favela, and how it was only recently that a woman could work for the Brazilian Federal Police. She said that she had to be tougher than the other cops, the men, and that she had been assigned to work in her own old favela. She said, as she licked the bones clean on a wing and asked the waitress for one of the huge pieces of banana cake sitting under glass, on the front counter, that those favelas were war zones, and in war zones, “you must do special things or you lose.”

  Izabel had a small body that demanded lots of fuel.

  Ten minutes later we were back out on the street.

  “I’ll walk you home, Izabel.”

&n
bsp; “Good, Joe. Yes. Very good.”

  She had, I thought, been right on every level. Out there at this moment was a group seeking to kill thousands of people who I had sworn as a Marine and as a doctor to protect. You must do special things. I had done them in the past. I would probably do them again. Why be a hypocrite and pretend otherwise? Eddie had not done these things. Nor had Stuart or my old boss, the Admiral. But Izabel had done these things. She was like me.

  The apartment that Stuart had arranged for her, a one-bedroom walk-up in a brownstone, lay on Riverside Drive with a third-floor view of the edifice of Grant’s tomb and leafy Riverside Park. She did not turn on the lights. She did not offer me a drink. We both did nothing at first except stand at the window and gaze out at the elms and quietly parked automobiles and the massive general’s tomb and beyond that, the strip of park. We were not delaying. I think we were savoring the immediate future.

  “I saw a small boy out there last night, at two A.M.,” Izabel said. “Then I thought I saw a man with him, with a beard. Smoking a cigar. Wearing a uniform. But not a uniform I recognized. Neither person had protection.”

  I turned to her.

  “They looked up at me. It was foggy and then suddenly they were not there anymore.”

  “You saw this?”

  “I see these things sometimes,” she said. “Do you?”

  “You saw the boy and the general?”

  “Maybe only a grandfather and a child, at two A.M.”

  I peered out and wanted what she said to be true. Because across the street from the round rising edifice of the general’s final resting place is a child’s grave, one of only three publicly protected single grave sites in the city. The tombstone names a boy who fell to his death in 1797. He is called the Amiable Child. In my brief stint as a part-time visitor to the neighborhood, during strolls, I had seen colorful balloons or bright flowers that some residents still leave at the grave of the boy, as if his spirit relishes presents, as if his pain can be assuaged, centuries later, by recognition or love.

  Had Izabel actually seen the boy and the general? It shook me. Because she was telling me that she, like I, sometimes wondered at 2 A.M. whether those who are no longer physically with us still populate a thin space between the past and present. That they travel somehow; maybe scientists call them nanoparticles. That they try to visit, and that they occupy a category without a label; they represent a triumph of spirit over known fact.

  I don’t know which one of us moved first. I do know that when my arms encircled her, the body felt surprisingly small, the arm and belly muscles hard. The moon glittered on mica flecks embedded in the general’s mausoleum. There was no blanket on the bed, just sheets. In the heat, I guess, she slept in the nude. Her eyes remained open and smiling the whole time, and the muscles in her belly clenched in slowly, and then faster, and then in a circular pattern that made me want to cry out in pleasure, made me grit my teeth to keep from release.

  I was behind her, thigh to rump. Then, on our sides. Her hair was wet at the tips, and those tips were in my mouth. Later, when we woke and started up again, the moon was in a different quadrant of the window. Her tongue tasted like banana cake. It had been too long since I’d done anything like this. The next time we woke up, it was almost dawn and a hawk was on the railing outside, looking in.

  When it was over I felt as if the fluid that had pumped out of me had built up for two years and now there was once again space in my head to fill up. I looked into her beautiful eyes and saw pleasure. I knew that what we both felt was not romantic attachment, only the filling of mutual need, and that was more than enough. What is so bad about that? Because we were two assassins, who had shared choices. We were killers who had used each other to armor up so we could go out into the world and fight again.

  • • •

  Aya called as we exited the brownstone and walked toward the office, 9 A.M., on a sullen late July day. Grant’s tomb stood gray and mist coated and half shrouded in a humid fog that resembled the spray from a pesticide container. The Amiable Child’s grave was a small plot contained by a black picket fence, across the grassy median strip from the monument. A trio of joggers passed, in shorts; they’ve got medicines. An ambulance screamed by, heading toward Columbia-Presbyterian. Malaria victim?

  I felt a surge of irritation seeing Aya’s number on my screen. It was as if the teen had been spying on Izabel and me, and was calling to catch me out. It was stupid to feel that way. But I did.

  “What?” I snapped.

  She sounded hurt. “Why are you so grouchy, Joe?”

  “Sorry. Bad night. What’s up, Aya?”

  “I found something funny.”

  I halted, and so did Izabel. This morning she wore white, tight jeans and a tight-fitting V-necked white T-shirt, and she carried a V-necked cobalt-blue cashmere sweater over her arm, against air-conditioning. Her hair was pulled tightly in a bun. The earrings were gold studs. She smelled of coconut body lotion. The Nikes would allow her to move quickly in an emergency. If she had a gun, like Eddie believed, it would be in the drawstring leather bucket bag, which could easily hide a pistol.

  “What?” I asked Aya. Her words ran together in excitement as she answered.

  “I didn’t go home last night. There’s cots set up on the fourth floor here. Agents use them. I found an extra. Mom’s in Newark and she said I could stay.”

  “And?”

  “They gave us dinner at eleven: roast beef and beets, which I usually hate. But these were pretty good.”

  I sighed.

  “You’d think the FBI would have better food, but it was like the high school cafeteria. Then I was talking to Clara? She’s the girl next to me? She used to work in a shop that sold souvenirs at the mall?”

  “Aya, get to what you found.”

  “I am! You asked me to go through Customs lists, stuff coming in from Brazil. But a lot of other people are doing the same thing. So I thought, after Clara was talking about shops and how they work, why not do something extra?”

  “And?” But I gave the kid time now, because she was good. And she got to things her own way.

  “So I got the list? There’s like thousands of items there? Like, in a million years, you could never open all the crates and boxes. Like, there’s a billion dollars’ worth of all kinds of stuff.”

  “So what did you do, Aya?”

  “I worked it backward. I went online and made lists of places in New York, Philadelphia, and Newark selling stuff from Brazil. Advertising online. Like, I wasn’t just looking at Customs forms for incoming. Like, I tried to match shipments and destinations, backward and forward.”

  “Don’t say like all the time.”

  “Anyway, I found this funny thing? Like this one shop? In Brooklyn? That advertises Indian stuff from Brazil? But Customs has no record of anything going there from Brazil. So how can they sell stuff if they never get it?”

  I felt my breathing slow. “What’s the name of the shop?”

  “It’s like a chain? There’s a bunch of them around the United States? It’s called Nizhoni Yee. That means beautiful in Navajo. Because the first shop sold Southwest stuff, then they branched out. Your voice is different this morning, Joe. Are you all right?”

  “It’s just the connection.”

  “Can you use this information?”

  “It’s definitely something to look into. Worth a shot.”

  “I did good?” she asked eagerly, like any sixteen-year-old.

  “You did great, Aya, as always.”

  I felt her grin. “Will you tell Mom that? So she isn’t mad because I stayed here all night?”

  “I thought you said you had her permission.”

  Silence. “Kind of. Well, I thought I did.”

  I sighed. Considering what we could have been fighting over, this was easy. “Sure. And you find out every
thing you can about that shop. The owner. Contact information. But don’t call the shop. Don’t call anyone. Do it all online.”

  “Why not? I found the place!”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “All right, but you should visit there.”

  “I will. Today if I can. I’ll head out, take a look.”

  And I would have that morning, I really would have gone out to Brooklyn to scout the place, except when Izabel and I got to the office, the man from Washington had shown up. He said he’d been trying to reach us for days, but that his phone messages had gone unanswered. This made sense, since we got hundreds of them each day, and lacked support staff to sift through them. He showed us ID identifying him as a Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor. He was in his early thirties and seemed smart and lacked the demanding aspect that I had found marked too many men and women once they received high-level designations. He seemed more burdened than self-important, and I liked him immediately. He’d taken the 6 A.M. train up from D.C. this morning, in order to reach New York when our office opened.

  “I want to tell you a story, Colonel.”

  Kyle Utley said that he wanted to ask us about the island in the jungle.

  “Did anyone ever mention a place called Tol-e-Khomri when you were there?” he asked.

  NINETEEN

  “Why did he come to me?” Kyle Utley said.

  He’d walked in without official fanfare; no demand for a briefing, no black car pulling up outside. Just a lone figure arriving hat in hand on a private mission. Kyle Utley regarded me with fatigue-reddened eyes from a steel-backed chair as steam spiraled from disposable cups of coffee that Eddie had fetched from the diner below. On the sides, Greek warriors from the time of the Iliad wielded spears, fearsome weapons in the Bronze Age, useless in the age of AK-47s, satellite surveillance, bacterial war.

  The man from Washington had dressed in a casual style that conflicted with the agony on his face; pressed khakis and a dark blue jacket, open-necked collared shirt, rubber-soled Bass shoes. He laid a thin manila folder on my desk. The edge of a black-and-white photo protruded from the edge, but there wasn’t enough visible to know what it showed. The label on the folder said TOL-E-KHOMRI.