In the dream, Zach struggled against the compulsion to turn and face the gangster—and so he went on watching the hundreds of bodies being bulldozed—and that’s how he came to focus on one pair of eyes among all those staring corpse-witnesses—a young woman’s eyes—staring directly back at him—until she blinked!
Sweet Jesus, she’s still alive!
Whereupon he woke, with a little gasp, his heart hammering.
He lay on his back, taking steady breaths to calm himself—and, as he did, a tendril of that death-camp stench wafted into his nostrils.
He sat up hard, searching the darkness, the thudding flutter of his pulse loud in his ears. But he was in his bedroom, just in his bedroom, and the smell was dissipating with the dream. Relieved, he was about to lie back down.
Then he saw something—someone—in the shadows.
A figure was sitting in the armchair in the far corner by the dark window, a frail, childlike figure, slumped in a posture of defeat. Zach glanced over at Grace, to make sure she was still in bed with him and, yes, there she was, curled on her side right by him, turned away, breathing lightly.
And the figure was still there in the chair. A woman, he saw now as his eyes adjusted to the dark. The death smell coming off her was faint but unmistakable. She lifted her hand. She lit a match, making Zach recoil from the glare. She held the flame to the cigarette bobbing between her lips. Her face in the orange match-light was more horrible than anything Zach had ever seen, because she was so obviously dead and yet alive.
In the low, heavy German accent he remembered, she said, “It’s history, Agent Adams. History is in your blood now, and the sins of history. All your American ignorance can’t save you. You do not have to remember to know.” Then she waved out the match and her features sank back into the shadows.
“What?” murmured Grace. She rolled over to face him, lifting her head. “You say something, baby?” And before he could tell her no, before he could tell her go back to sleep, she rose up farther, propping her elbow on the mattress, and said, “I smell smoke.”
Staring at the figure in the chair in the corner, Zach reached out blindly for the bedside lamp. He turned it on.
The chair was empty. The figure was gone.
“Do you smell cigarette smoke?” said Grace.
He placed his hand on her hair, her curls soft and springy beneath his palm. “It’s all right. Go back to sleep.”
“What’s going on?” Her eyes were open, but she settled back down under his touch.
“I think someone just passed by outside smoking, that’s all. I smelled it too.”
“Are the kids all right?”
“They’re fine. I’ll go check on them. Go back to sleep.”
She didn’t, of course, not until he came back from the children’s bedrooms and reported, “They’re fine.”
She was sitting up in bed now, blinking in the light from the lamp. “Something still smells in here,” she said to him.
“I’ll open a window.”
“What is that? It smells like something’s rotten.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” He was at the window. As he pushed it up, he glanced over at the chair in the corner. From here, he could see the slight indentation on the floral seat cushion, as if someone had just been sitting there. His pulse was still racing, and the dreadful sight of Gretchen Dankl’s face in the match-light still haunted him, making him faintly nauseous. From here, he could tell that the smell—the smell of the death camp—was plainly coming from the chair. Then the cool, fresh autumn night air blew in through the screen and swept it away.
“You think something went bad in the fridge?” said Grace.
He paused, breathing through his nose, testing the atmosphere. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s gone now. It’s all right.”
But his pulse was still racing, and he was sick with knowing what he was only just beginning to know.
14
THE GUYLAND HEISTS
Three days later, shoulder to shoulder, Zach and Goulart pushed out through the doors of the one-six precinct, and Goulart asked “Is that her over there? Is that your Margo Heatherton?”
Zach couldn’t stop himself: his head jerked up and his mouth opened and his eyes widened as he followed his partner’s gesture. But then he said, “No. No. I don’t know who that is.”
“She sure had her eyes on us. And look at her take off.”
The woman had, in fact, been watching them from beside the entrance to the parking garage across the street—and she was, in fact, hurrying away now that Goulart had spotted her. But Zach was telling the truth: he didn’t know her—though he did have the vague sense that he had seen her somewhere before. It definitely wasn’t Margo, anyway. This was a slender, pretty, bird-like woman in her twenties with short black hair and a turned-up nose—nothing like the blond and glamorous Margo. Plus she was wearing a belted purple woolen thing over a pair of jeans, the sort of tatty stuff even Zach knew you bought off the rack in some department store. Not something Margo would ever wear.
“You sure that wasn’t your girlfriend?” asked Goulart. He gave Zach an insinuating look over the top of the Crown Vic just before he lowered himself into the passenger seat.
Zach rolled his eyes at him and got in behind the wheel.
“Just wondering,” said Goulart. “Now that we’re keeping secrets and all. . . .”
“We’re not keeping secrets, Broadway. Damn, man!” Zach made a show of shaking his head and sighing loudly as he put the car into gear and headed into the morning traffic. Goulart was still giving him hell over going to Long Island City without him, without even calling him. They’d been busy writing reports and making phone calls for two days and hadn’t really had the chance to work the bad feelings out between them. As Zach guided the car among the weaving yellow cabs on Second Avenue, he said, “I made a mistake not calling you. I told you that. I already told you I made a mistake. I’ve been sick, all right? Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Goulart was turned away from him, though, looking out the window, tapping one fingertip against his knee, something on his mind, still eating at him. He didn’t say anything until they were on 42nd Street, going by the rising silver slab of the United Nations, the gray-blue sky reflecting off its mirrored windows. All he said even then was, “You hear about that guy in England got assassinated?”
“It was on the news this morning as I was coming in. Some anti-immigrant politician or something?”
Goulart shook his head. “Bunch of savages. They just gun him down, cut his throat while he’s lying there. And now the lunatic lefties are saying it served him right ’cause he was a fascist. And what’s worse, he was a fascist! And now his guys are on the streets with torches practically, looking for any poor schmuck of an immigrant who happens to be walking by. First France, now this. You mark my words: they’re finished over there. The whole continent is going down the drain—and we’re next, if we’re not careful.”
The car dipped into the Midtown Tunnel. The underground whoosh and rumble made them both fall silent again. The grimy yellow walls went rushing past. Goulart’s words had gotten Zach’s mind working. He was trying not to think about the specter on his bedroom chair, trying not to consider the possibility that his meeting in the woods with Gretchen Dankl had actually happened, had not been a fever dream.
She is gone. My country . . . my continent . . . my culture.
You mark my words: they’re finished over there. The whole continent is going down the drain—and we’re next, if we’re not careful.
They broke out of the tunnel’s end into the grayish light of day, and Goulart rounded on him and said, “She thinks I’m on the take, doesn’t she? Rebecca. Abraham-Hartwell. Is that what she thinks? That bitch. She does, doesn’t she?”
Zach had not been expecting this at all, but Goulart had such a great detective mind, it actually didn’t startle him much. He decided on the spot he wasn’t going to lie about it, not to his partner, n
ot for Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell.
He nodded. He said, “She does.”
“She got you spying on me?”
“She’s on your phone, your computer. Says you’ve been calling burners—”
“Big surprise. I got CI’s—”
“And setting up e-mail drops. And—what else—oh, yeah, visiting some deserted mansion somewhere in the dead of night.”
“Jesus.” Goulart shook his head, disgusted. “She show you anything? She got anything? Anything real?”
“Circumstantial stuff,” said Zach. He kept his eyes on the highway, on the gigantic movie-star faces smiling from the billboards, the ashen expanse of the factory flatlands beyond. “She says the Chevalier was tipped off that the Coast Guard was coming for them, that they killed Abend’s girls and dumped them overboard because they got a tip.”
“Oh, and she thinks I did that? I tipped them?”
“And she’s . . . concerned, you know, about the way Abend stays ahead of us. The warehouse. The storage bin. The Brothers Grimhouse.”
“So you went out to Queens without calling me,” Goulart sneered. “So I wouldn’t tip him off.”
“Fatboy Mooch told me Abend’s got half the force on his payroll. I thought if there was any chance you’d gone rotten, I better go it alone.”
“You think that lowlife Kraut piece of shit has enough money to buy me with? Fuck you too. Partner.”
“Yeah. I deserve that,” Zach said flatly. “I let Rebecca get in my head.”
“The bitch.” Goulart frowned out the window, but he nodded to himself at Zach’s apology. You had to say this: the Cowboy was a straight-up guy and everyone knew it. He made mistakes like everybody, but he was a man about it and never dodged the consequences. After he’d had a few minutes to chew on it, Goulart made an offering. “Your head’s probably all messed up over that Margo Heatherton piece blackmailing you or whatever she’s doing,” he said.
Zach laughed. Goulart. “That’s probably it.”
Goulart laughed too. Nodded out the window some more. Tapped his knee with his fingertip some more. Then he said “I’m sick, Cowboy.”
Zach glanced over at him. “What do you mean?” But he could tell by the look on his face exactly what Goulart meant. “You mean like sick-sick?”
“Might be.” Goulart let out a long sigh. “That’s why the e-mail drops. Been communicating with my doctors that way. Even staying clear of the ‘Feeb’ plan till I’m sure. You just never know who’s listening in. As we see. And I didn’t want anyone telling me I had to stand down, that I wasn’t up to the job, whatever.”
Zach took his time finding the right tone to answer with. Not pity—Goulart would hate pity. They were both men, and death was death. “It’s bad then,” he said.
“Might be, might be. They just don’t know yet. They’re doing, you know, tests.”
“How bad? Might it be.”
“Bad like you might as well drop me off right here.”
They were driving past a vast cemetery, endless crowds of graves, stones and steles rising—when Zach glanced up at them in the sideview mirror—rising against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline, so that they seemed a small, visual echo of the city towers—as if the vaunting monuments of the living were reflected by the dwindled markers of the dead.
“Man!” Zach said. “Man. I’m sorry, partner.”
“Eh.”
“I’ll pray for you. I’ll get Grace to pray, better yet. God’s more likely to listen to Grace.”
“Well . . .” said Goulart, shrugging it off. “Just figured you should know, at this point. Where all that circumstantial crap is coming from. All the skullduggery on my end. That’s why.”
Zach nodded, his lips in a tight frown. He wished now he’d told Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell to go to hell.
They drove on in silence.
They had a list of homes that had been hit in the Grimhouses’ Guyland Heists. Thirteen of them, from garish mansions in Kings Point to grand old estates way out beyond the Hamptons. They had no clue what they were hoping to find in any of them, so it seemed a waste of time to phone. But they thought: maybe if they went out there, talked to the homeowners, saw the crime scenes with their own eyes . . . well, maybe something stinking of Abend would jump out at them.
Anyway, it was the best lead they had at this point. The Frenzies—the forensic teams—were still combing the Grimhouse murder sites for clues. They had what was left of both brothers and were dissecting and weighing and pondering the scraps. Other Task Force Zero agents were out canvassing underworld informers. In the wake of Zach’s face-to-face with Abend in Long Island City, there was excitement in the shop, an unspoken hope that for the first time, they had their all-but-invisible quarry in sight.
And yet . . . yet for all that, there was an underlying sense throughout Extraordinary Crimes that they had hit—if not a dead end, then a dark alley with a brick wall waiting in its shadows. Suddenly they were hearing silence on the streets, an epidemic of silence. The sort of thing a lawman sensed but couldn’t prove. No one knew anything. No one said a word. Which was the sort of crap that didn’t actually happen too much anymore, not at the upper reaches of corruption at least, not since wiretaps and conspiracy laws had broken through omerta, the code of silence that used to keep gangsters mum. Nowadays, much of the time, thugs had no honor and everybody talked.
But Dominic Abend was no ordinary thug. In fact, it was beginning to seem he was not even a gang-leader, not in the usual style. There seemed no center to his organization. No headquarters, no crew, no specific turf. Rats and rivals never knew which shoulder to look over to spot the threat. He was like a flu-bug or a heat wave or maybe like an idea whose time had come—one day it was business as usual, and the next day he was the air you breathed and you were dead of him. No one wanted to talk about him, not even in general, not even in theory. Even Fatboy Mooch, who would talk about anything, had reached his limit and was nowhere to be found.
But if Abend was in fact searching for something that had been ripped off by the Grimhouses in one of the Guyland Heists, then it stood to reason one of the houses hit in the heists was his or was connected to him. So Zach and Goulart were heading out to the Island in the hope of escaping the Abend Fever of shut-uppery that seemed to have struck the five boroughs and their under-city.
They interviewed homeowners and housewives.
They asked: “What was the most valuable thing you lost in the robberies?”
“Well, as I already told the other detectives. . . .”
They casually examined the mansions as the owners spoke, looking for telltale signs of their man.
“Was there anything special about the jewelry that was taken—any heirlooms, anything with a history?”
“My mother’s necklace. She bought it on her honeymoon. . . .”
They searched for anything German, anything European, anything just out-of-place.
“Did you happen to own a dagger of any kind, or a ceremonial sword?” Zach asked at each location.
“No . . . no . . . nothing like that.”
“Would you look at this picture? The bald man at the edge of the crowd—he look familiar to you at all?”
“Never seen him.”
This went on for more than a week. The travel was what slowed them down. The first four houses took them all the way out to Huntington, at which point they had to head back. Then there was the day NYPD uncovered a couple of storage units owned by the Grimhouses. They’d already been ransacked, of course—the brothers would have given up everything under Abend’s torture. And then there was the weekend before they could go out to the Island again.
Mostly, the entire enterprise felt like a big fat waste of time; but there was one house—all the way out near Westhampton Beach—one of the last houses they went to—where Zach, at least, felt as if they had touched on something, though he wasn’t sure what.
The place was a three-story shingled mansion, right on the water. The so
rt of house that had a name. Its name was Sea View. You approached it by a driveway lined with perfectly manicured, perfectly spaced cypress trees—until you reached a fountain in a circle of flowers on the rolling lawn. There was a curtain of black oaks protecting the long, gabled façade. The curtain opened in the middle to reveal the white portico before the front door.
“How much you think a place like this would set you back?” said Goulart as they stepped out of the Crown Vic—both of them sorely aware of how paltry the junker looked parked beside the silver-blue Bentley in the raked, pristine gravel of the cul-de-sac.
“Twenty-five, thirty million,” Zach guessed. “How the hell should I know?” It was the sort of conversation they’d been having for days so as to avoid talking about the results of Goulart’s medical tests, none definitive yet, but each so far more ominous than the last.
Shoulder to shoulder, they walked to the door, their shoes crunching on the gravel.
Sea View was the home of one Angela Bose—the first name pronounced with a hard G, the way the Germans do it, which right there had both detectives on the alert. According to newspaper reports of the burglary, Miss Bose was an eccentric and reclusive young beauty, already at twenty-seven a leading donor to local charities, who single-handedly supported many of the homeless shelters and rehab centers between Montauk and Queens. The local gossip was that she had retired from the wayward party-days of her teens about a year and a half ago. Chastened by suffering, she had come here to live with her father, a European businessman, likewise reclusive. But when Zach called her on the phone, she told him “Come out anytime, I’m here all alone.”
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