‘Father,’ I said, ‘do you remember a prize fighter named Joe Frazier?’
The priest nodded once. ‘Smokin’ Joe Frazier. He fought Muhammad Ali three times. What about him?’
‘Well, I saw him interviewed on television once, at a Golden Gloves tournament, and I remember he was asked if he had any advice he’d like to offer younger fighters. “Fire back,” was what he told the kids. “No matter how bad you’re hurt, get up and fire back.”?’
‘Is this another confession?’
I gestured to the painting. ‘If I was God, nobody would crown me with thorns, or whip me, or force me to carry my own cross.’
‘Not even if you could offer mankind the hope of redemption by submitting?’
‘Not even then.’
‘Maybe that’s because you’re only a man.’
‘And maybe it’s because I’ve spent most of my adult life protecting society from the unredeemed.’
Father Manicki led me out of the church and down the sidewalk, retracing the route I’d taken with Sister Kassia a few days before. He walked with his hands behind his back, leaning forward as though into a wind. But there was no wind that day, only a layer of haze and humidity that seemed to grow thicker, step by step.
‘You’re much more subtle than I gave you credit for,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his voice hinting of a resentment he wasn’t supposed to feel.
‘How so?’
‘When you suggested that Mynka came to me for counseling, I failed to register the comment. Perhaps because you followed it with a very ugly accusation.’
I smiled. In the Fornes case, Father Towle had evaded the seal of the confessional by claiming that counseling, not absolution, had been the purpose of his encounter with Fornes. My lawyerly argument was that counseling and forgiveness were also separate events in Mynka’s encounter with Father Manicki.
Because I’d chosen them carefully, I could still remember my exact words: I’m thinking that she was confused, that she sought counseling from the only counselor available. That would be you, Father.
‘I showed you a photo of Mynka,’ I said, ‘with her belly ripped open, but I never told you why she was gutted.’
‘Actually,’ the priest was good enough to point out, ‘you led me to believe that she was mutilated by a psycho.’
‘Well, she wasn’t. Aslan sliced her because he wanted to be certain we couldn’t use her child to establish paternity through a DNA test. His objective was entirely rational.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because the man has to be stopped.’
We trudged on, eventually circling the block. Only when we were within yards of the church did Father Manicki speak again.
‘The truth,’ he announced, ‘is that Mynka did come to me for counseling, exactly as you suggested. I’ve examined my own conscience and discussed the matter with my superiors. We’re all on the same page. Nevertheless.?.?.’ The priest hesitated, his mouth continuing to work. Then he took a deep breath and smiled. ‘Nevertheless, my superiors would prefer that my.?.?. my contribution.?.?. not be made public.’
I laughed out loud. ‘If I remember right, I already made that offer.’
There was nowhere to go now. We were standing by the church doors. I watched the priest straighten himself, then jam his hands into his pockets and suck on his lower lip. Finally, he said, ‘You were right. Mynka was being pressured to have an abortion, by Aslan and by the family she worked for, and she didn’t know what to do. But I did not, as you suggested, tell her that abortion is murder and that she was obligated to resist. I told her that if she ran away, we’d protect her and her unborn child.’
‘I know that, Father.’
‘Then why.?.?.’
‘It was just a ploy, a wedge, the kind of thing I do every day.’ I motioned for him to continue.
‘Well, she came into the confessional in early June. She didn’t tell me much. I don’t even know the name of the baby’s father. But she did tell me that she and the baby’s father were in love, and she also mentioned the name of the family, Portola. They live somewhere on the upper west side of Manhattan.’
I felt an onrush of powerful emotions at that moment, just as I had when the priest revealed Mynka’s name. Though I was careful to show nothing of what I felt — neither joy, nor triumph, nor even cold-blooded calculation — I doubt that I fooled the priest.
‘Anything else?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all?’
‘Only this. There’s a large refrigerator somewhere in the Portola home, large enough to step into. Mynka kept referring to it as “the cold room.” That was the threat, you see. If she didn’t work hard enough, if she wasn’t properly subservient, if she refused to abort her child, she would be confined in the cold room. Sometimes the baby’s father would intervene, but he wasn’t always present. Detective, the way she described it, the cold and the absolute darkness, it must have been hell.’
‘Who put her there?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask and she didn’t say.’
I recalled John Roach, the NYPD profiler, telling me that there was a sadist in the mix. Now I knew where to find him. Or her. Or them.
‘At this point,’ I said, ‘I’m supposed to say something like, I know how difficult this was for you. But.?.?.’
‘But, in fact, you don’t give a damn how hard this might or might not have been.’
‘I get paid to produce results, Father, and I’ve lost track of the lies I’ve told you.’
The priest laughed at that point. ‘Most people, every day they go out to a job they don’t want to do, motivated solely by a pay check at the end of the week. But that’s not your fate. No, no. You’re one of a small number of men and women who’ve found their true calling.’
‘One of the lucky ones?’
‘Vocation and talent are not free passes. There are always unforeseen consequences, penalties to be paid, a soul to be healed. For instance, didn’t you, at some point, think it might be possible to persuade me with reason?’
‘I did.’
‘Yet you chose to assault me, with the accusations and the photographs.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I felt, on balance, you’d be easier to persuade if I softened you up first.’
TWENTY-FIVE
I was up and out at seven a.m., riding the L Train cross-town, then the A north to 72nd Street. Both trains were packed on the first day of the new week, even at that early hour. I rocked along, alone with my thoughts despite the crush of bodies and the commingled odors, fair and foul. I’d spoken to Hansen just before leaving my apartment. Though I didn’t ask, I simply assumed that at some point he’d explained the facts of life to Aslan, then suggested deportation in lieu of prison. If so, Aslan had refused.
‘We don’t have enough to hold him,’ Linde told me. ‘Come noon, he’ll walk out the door.’
I liked the sound of that.
The A Train came to a stop in the tunnel between Penn Station and Times Square, remaining motionless for several long moments. Rush-hour delays are common enough, and I wasn’t particularly concerned, but I found myself looking down at my watch, shifting my weight from foot to foot, as if the Portola household would simply vanish should I arrive at eight o’clock. In fact, the household was entirely unsuspecting and it wouldn’t matter if I got there tomorrow. All the question marks concerned their maid; assuming they still had a maid, assuming that Aslan was still supplying that maid, assuming all of Aslan’s little maids weren’t on route to some distant land.
The train began to move, a sharp jerk, first, then the hiss of the air brakes, then a slow steady roll into the station. Automatically, I gauged the number of passengers about to get off, the number coming on, the many directions from which they would go and come, finally adjusting my position to impede as few as possible. I thought of Adele, then, very briefly. Raised in the New Jersey suburbs, Adele hated the subways. Her obje
ctions were perfectly reasonable. The subways did stink, and they were always filthy, and the scream of steel on steel when the trains rounded a curve was, indeed, loud enough to cause hearing damage. Myself, I wasn’t bothered. I’d been riding the subways all my life and knew that subways were very private places. No one spoke to you, or even looked at you, and the tendency was to withdraw into yourself, as I did on that morning, my focus gradually narrowing. Adele was gone before I climbed to the surface at 72nd Street.
As it turned out, the Portolas lived in a splendid townhouse across the street from Riverside Park, making them far easier to identify and track than if I’d found them living in one of the many high-rise warrens to the east. And then there was Riverside Park itself, the perfect location for a long-term surveillance. In addition to the pedestrians on its winding paths and the traffic flowing north-south along the West Side Highway, there were groves of trees, dense shrubbery and a huge outcropping of bedrock set far enough away from the townhouse to make it unlikely that I would be spotted.
I settled down on a small ledge about halfway to the top of a jagged boulder, sliding out of my backpack, then fishing inside for the container of coffee, fried-egg sandwich and bottle of water I’d purchased at a deli on Broadway. Finally, I removed a small pair of binoculars, settling the strap around my neck.
The atmosphere around me was gray with haze, even at seven thirty in the morning, the air humid enough to virtually guarantee rainfall later in the day. Still, the park was busy, not with strollers who would come later, but with serious joggers, bikers, skateboarders and power walkers. I watched a young woman pass by. She pushed a three-wheeled stroller with extra long handles and sweat dripped from every pore in her body. A border collie trotted alongside the stroller, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, its breath coming in short pants. The dog’s head swung in my direction as it passed, looking not at me, or even at my sandwich, but at the bottle of water at my feet.
I pressed the binoculars to my eyes and made a quick sweep of the Portola townhouse. The four-story building, with its limestone facade, attic dormer and mansard roof, was typical of the row houses on Riverside Drive. The front was bowed, from the second through the fourth floors, and the main entrance, a narrow archway leading to an elaborate, wrought-iron storm door, was set almost at street level. At minimum, the house, even if the interior had been trashed, was worth a cool five million. And if it had been decently preserved or lovingly restored, the price might be fifty percent higher. I left the binoculars to dangle at the end of their strap and went to work on my sandwich. The Portola family wealth was not something I could ignore. Should one or more be arrested, their dream team would be top-notch and my every move would be carefully examined by attorneys who could recite the Constitution backwards in Sanskrit. Over the past twenty years, the Supreme Court has given cops a lot of room to maneuver, but the line was still invisible. If I crossed it, I was likely to find myself on the losing side at an evidence suppression hearing.
I finished the sandwich, chased it with the last of the coffee, and deposited the trash in a nearby trash basket. Of course, I had no idea when Domestic Solutions’ workers were due at their jobs. According to Giselle and Dimitri, a van carrying five or six women left the warehouse around seven thirty on Monday mornings. When any of them might arrive at a given address was far from certain. Still, as time passed, and eight became nine, then ten, I began to get antsy. I told myself that if nobody showed, it would be the priest’s fault, not mine. And if Sister Kassia had a beef, she could take it to Father Stan, maybe hear his confession. Arresting Mynka’s killer was my first priority. If the fate of these women was taken out of my hands, so much the better. My conscience was clean.
I was still fortifying my argument when a Ford Explorer double-parked in front of the Portola townhouse shortly before eleven. I raised the binoculars to my eyes. They were self-focusing and took several seconds to compensate for the soft edges generated by the fog. By the time I had a clear image, a woman had already exited the vehicle. I caught a glimpse of her red hair, contained beneath a white hairnet, and of a blue skirt and a white blouse. Then she was gone and the door closed behind her.
I shifted quickly to the Ford’s driver and found her sitting with her head turned away from me. But I didn’t need to see her face to know that we’d met before. The fire-red hair was a dead giveaway. Welcome to the conspiracy. As the SUV pulled away, I wrote down the license plate number. Then I closed my eyes and said a little prayer. Not to the God who lay in the Jerusalem dust, nearly broken by his own cross, but to the God who rained fire and brimstone on those wicked kingdoms, Sodom and Gomorrah. I could put the red-headed woman in the warehouse when Barsakov was killed. She was the key to pinning the murder on Aslan.
At eleven thirty, I moved a hundred yards closer to the Portola home. By chance, the door to the Portola residence swung out twenty minutes later and three people emerged: a middle-aged woman, a man in his twenties and a teenaged boy.
I slid the backpack over my shoulders and headed for the nearest exit, fifty yards to the north. Again, I got lucky. The trio also headed north, until they reached 86th street where they turned east. By that time, I’d exited the park. Tails are easily maintained in Manhattan. There are always pedestrians about and people generally mind their own business. The Portolas, for example, never looked back, not once. They didn’t speak to each other, either, content to maintain a steady pace until they reached the doors of a well-known French restaurant, L’Heures, on the east side of Columbus Avenue. I watched them go inside, then headed for a Turkish restaurant called Ishtan on the other side of the street. Ishtan had an outdoor cafe with a perfect view of L’Heures.
I was just finishing my second cup of espresso when the Portolas emerged, followed closely by a man wearing a cummerbund, a starched white shirt and a thin black tie. Obviously a restaurant employee, he engaged the woman in conversation for several minutes, his manner clearly apologetic.
As I brought the binoculars to my eyes, taking advantage of the family’s preoccupation, I felt my heart turn to stone and my world shrink down to these three people. The women of Domestic Solutions, Bill Sarney, Hansen Linde, Drew Millard, even Adele — banished one and all to some anonymous patch of neurons in the recesses of my brain.
The woman was taller than either of her sons. Too blond to be natural, her hair curled in a tight line almost to her shoulders where it hung stiffly, every strand in place. Her cheekbones were very high, her nose short and straight, and while her mouth was naturally full, she’d thickened her lips with a heavy layer of pink lipstick. The make-up on her cheeks was just a bit too thick as well, though it failed to conceal a narrow line of acne-pitted skin beneath her cheekbones.
The older boy’s expression was more bemused than annoyed. He stood to one side with both hands in the pockets of his off-white linen trousers. Although his features were much softer, his resemblance to the woman was evident in his fleshy mouth and his heart-shaped face. Perhaps in an effort to blur that resemblance, he’d grown a skimpy beard and a mustache, neither of which was thick enough to conceal the pale flesh beneath. As I watched, his hand fluttered up to play with an earring, an enamel rainbow, which hung from his left ear.
The teenager had drawn the shortest straw from the gene pool. All three had weak chins, but his was concealed beneath a lower lip that he thrust forward as though in a permanent state of petulance. Meanwhile, his eyes were small and overhung by a heavy brow that only emphasized his receding jaw. The boy seemed uninterested in the ritual humiliation of the restaurant employee. He’d wandered a few yards away and was staring south at the oncoming traffic, his expression sullen, the tension in his cheeks, mouth and neck obvious at a glance. But I couldn’t find even a hint of cruelty in his look and it occurred to me that I was probably staring at the father of Mynka’s child. Not only was he closer to Mynka’s age than the man in his mid-twenties, he wasn’t gay.
‘Sir, will there be anything else?’
&
nbsp; I yanked the binoculars away from my eyes and put them back in the case. The waitress was a twenty-something brunette with her midriff exposed from her waist to below her navel. She was holding an espresso pot in one hand and my check in the other, her professional smile exposing a set of the whitest teeth I’d ever seen.
‘Are you, like, a private eye?’ she asked.
I watched the Portolas cross Columbus Avenue, then disappear along 86th Street. I might have followed, but I had a better use for my time.
‘Private ass is more like it.’ I motioned her to leave the check as I retrieved my cell phone and dialed Bill Sarney’s office number.
Shaved and showered, I met Inspector Bill Sarney at five o’clock in a bar on Lispenard Street. Although the bar had a neon shamrock in the window, it appeared not to have a name. Maybe that was because it had no character. The men at the bar huddled protectively over their drinks, mostly drafts and shots. They didn’t turn their heads when I came in, as if somewhere on the downhill side, they’d renounced curiosity itself.
Sarney was standing at the end of the bar, leaning back against the wall, grinning. Message sent, message received. This was one joint his boyos from the Puzzle Palace were very unlikely to enter. I walked the length of the bar, my mood so elevated I found myself admiring Sarney’s unabashed theatricality. Playful was as much a part of his charisma as inscrutable. After a quick shake, I ordered a bottle of Bud. The bartender fetched it, popped the cap, then laid it on the bar without offering a glass.
‘So, what’s up, Harry?’
‘I didn’t report to the Nine-Two this afternoon,’ I told him, ‘and I don’t expect to report for at least a week. I want you to fix it.’
‘And what’s my motive?’
‘There was someone else in the warehouse when Barsakov was killed, another adult. Do you remember?’
He thought about it for a moment, then said, ‘The woman with the red hair.’
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