The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

“Naw,” Piccardi replied. “Two, three a week. Depends.”

  He led them up to a cluster of longshoremen unloading pallets of copper tubing and beckoned to a short swarthy man, a cargo hook dangling from his right hand. Angelo noted the whites of the man’s eyes. They were spider-webbed with little pink tracings. Likes the vino, he thought.

  Piccardi showed the man the sheet. “Guy here wants to know you remember anything about this pickup.”

  Behind the man, work had stopped. The circle of longshoremen looked at Rand and Angelo in sullen, hostile silence. The docker didn’t even bother to look at Piccardi’s sheet. “Naw,” he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. “I wouldn’t remember nothing about it.”

  Booze has got his voice too, Angelo mused. He reached into his pocket for a pack of Marlboros. It had been years since he’d given up smoking, but he always carried a pack, right beside his peanuts.

  “Here, gumba,” he said to the docker in Italian, “have a smoke.”

  As the man lit up, Angelo continued. “Look, what I got here got nothing to do with putting anybody locally in the can, you know what I mean?”

  The docker gave Piccardi a wary glance. At that instant, all Angelo’s seemingly meaningless chatter in Piccardi’s office had its reward. With a barely discernible movement of his eyebrows, the pier boss indicated he was all right.

  “What do them barrels look like?” Angelo prodded gently.

  “Hey, you know, they’re big cans. Big fucking cans. Like garbage cans.”

  “You remember the guy made the pickup?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, you know, was he a regular? A guy who knows his way around down here? Do the right thing and all?”

  It was the tradition of the piers to “smear” the longshoremen who handled your load, to slip them five or ten dollars for their help. Angelo’s mention of the custom brought to the docker’s face the first intimation of a feeling, other than that of ill-will, that the detective had seen on it.

  “Yeah.” The reply was a long growl. “Now I remember that jerk. He forgot.

  We had to let him know something was dragging. You know-” he half whistled, half blew a spurt of air through his teeth-“put a little kabootz on him.

  When he got the message, he come half a yard. Sure.” There was even a smile on the docker’s saturnine features. “I remember him.”

  Angelo’s thick eyebrows rose. Who comes up with fifty bucks? he wondered. No Italian. No Irishman. In fact, no one who’s been around the docks. Has to be a stranger, a guy who isn’t onto it.

  “You remember what he looked like?”

  “Hey, you know, he was a guy. What could I tell you? A guy…

  “Angelo.” Rand’s voice was sharp. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s get on to the next dock.”

  “Sure, kid, we’re on our way.” Angelo indicated Piccardi’s pier sheet. “How about the other guy that handled the load? The checker?”

  “He’s on a break over at the Longshoremen’s Club.”

  “Okay, kid, let’s stop in there on our way out.” Before Rand could articulate the protest Angelo knew was coming, the detective threw an arm around his shoulder. “Let me tell you what happens in an Italian club like this longshoremen’s place, kid,” he said, his voice a friendly growl. “They play Italian card games. You know how an Italian card game is? Everybody sits at the same side of the table.”

  He gave a jovial laugh and slapped Rand on the back. “You interview guys at an Italian card game, it goes like this. `Who shot the guy?’ ‘Hey, I don’t know, I didn’t see nothin’. I was playing cards. Had my back to the door.’

  So you ask the next guy, `What’d you see?T ‘Nothing, what could I tell you?

  I was sitting my back to the door. Playing cards.’

  “It’s always like that. Everybody sits on the same side. With their backs to the door. Nobody’s ever on the other three sides.” Angelo laughed, then stopped his march back down the pier. This guy, he told himself, is going to be no help to me in that club. I won’t get the time of day out of anybody with him standing beside me.

  “Look, kid,” he cajoled. “You’re in a hurry. I’m in a hurry.” He took the pier sheet from Piccardi and pointed to the license number of the truck that had made the pickup. “While I’m in there, why don’t you go to Tony’s office, call Hertz, find out where this truck comes from and get what they have off the rental agreement?”

  Less than five minutes later, Angelo was back. His visit to the club had been totally unproductive. Rand handed him a slip of paper with the details of the Hertz truck’s rental agreement on it. The truck had been rented at a Hertz truck agency on Fourth Avenue, just behind the docks, at ten Friday morning, a few minutes before the pier sheet showed it had reached the pier. It had been returned at the end of the day. The man who had rented it bad used his American Express card to pay. His New York State driver’s license gave his name and address: Gerald Putman, Inter-ocean Imports, 123 Cadman Plaza West, Brooklyn.

  Angelo gave the address an appraising glance. “Looks legitimate to me.

  Let’s just check it out. One telephone call and we know we’re clean.” He picked up the telephone directory, found Inter-ocean’s number and dialed it.

  Rand heard Angelo identifying himself to a switchboard operator, then asking for Putman. In the silence that followed, the New Yorker gave the agent a bemused smile. “Ever heard of a truck driver who’s got a secretary?”

  “Mr. Putman,” he announced. “Detective Angelo Rocchia, New York Police Department. We’ve been informed by the Hertz Rent-A-Truck office over on Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, that you rented one of their vehicles last Friday morning around ten and we’d just like to-“

  Three feet away, Rand could hear Putman’s surprised and angry voice interrupting the detective. “I what? Listen, officer, last Friday was the day I lost my wallet. I spent the whole morning right here in this office.”

  * * *

  The headquarters of the pier search of which Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand were a small part was in New York’s emergency command center. It had become operational a few minutes after nine. Buried three floors below the State Supreme Court Building on Foley Square, it was an ideal place to manage a crisis in secret. So infrequently bad the center been used in the years since it had been installed by the Lindsay administration that nearly everyone involved with it, including the City Hall press corps, had forgotten it was there.

  It was entered through an obscure side door to the courthouse. Basically, it was just a huge underground cavern divided into areas by salmon-pink wood panels eight feet high. Everything else in it was administrative gray: gray walls, gray floors, gray filing cabinets, gray redundant furniture thrown out of City Hall, gray faces on the policemen assigned to watch over it twenty-four hours a day. The last time the place had been used was during the great blackout in July 1977, when, to the Police Department’s embarrassment, its lights had gone out along with everyone else’s. Someone had forgotten to keep its generators serviced.

  Quentin Dewing, the FBI assistant director for investigation, had taken on the job of organizing the center. He did it in the methodical, careful manner for which the Bureau was famous. By the time the Police Commissioner and Al Feldman, his Chief of Detectives, had finished dispatching their manpower, he was ready to give them a guided tour of the place. The first room, designed to be the center’s switchboard in an emergency, he had assigned to the effort to run down the Arabs who, according to their forms, had come into the New York area in the last six months. The room had fifty telephone lines. Each was manned by an agent, some holding open phones to JFK or the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.

  On one desk was a minicomputer serving as a central locator file. Every incoming name and address was punched into it. If the person belonging to the name hadn’t been found and cleared in two hours, the computer dumped the name into a higher-priority file.

  The operation next door was even more impressiv
e. It had been designated by Dewing as the headquarters for the pier search. Maps of New York and New Jersey’s 578 miles of waterfront hung on the walls. All of the waterfront’s two hundred piers were listed on charts under the maps.

  Every time one of the teams working the piers came across a suspicious piece of cargo, the name and address of the consignee was telephoned to the center. If the cargo had been delivered in the New York area, the center dispatched a team of Customs inspectors or drug enforcement agents to track it down. If it had been shipped outside New York, an agent from the nearest FBI office was sent after it.

  The tour completed, Dewing took Bannion and Feldman to his own command post set up in what was meant to be the Mayor’s suite in an emergency. Next door, the CIA and the FBI had installed multiflex printout receivers to deliver to the New York operation the harvest of their files and their overseas contacts.

  While the Chief listened, resting against an old desk, his arms folded across his chest, Dewing explained how Clifford Salisbury of the CIA was combing through the terrorist files, sorting out those individuals who had spent time in the United States and appeared to have a high level of sophistication. On a morning like this, Al Feldman looked every one of his sixty-two years. His hair, what was left of it, was grayish white and greasy, popping out from his skull in disorderly little spirals that invariably sprinkled a glaze of dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit. He picked his nose and looked at the CIA man, at the pile of dossiers on his desk.

  Terrific, he thought, he’ll have a hundred of those things before he’s through. And they would be perfectly useless. What would you do with them?

  Take them out to some bartender in Arab town and say, “Hey, have you ever seen this guy? This guy? This guy?” After three or four photos, the guy would have switched off. Be so confused, he wouldn’t be able to recognize a picture of his sister.

  Feldman pulled a Camel from a pack that looked as if he’d slept on it and lit it. He had a lot of respect for the methodical, almost ponderous approach the Bureau used. Most investigations were, after all, like this one, shaped like a pyramid. They started across a broad base and worked, hopefully, to one very precise point. It was a proven system. Given a week, ten days, it got results.

  The trouble is, Feldman thought, this guy has forgotten he’s only got thirty hours. Qaddafi will have fried this place and he’ll still be in Phase Three of his investigation. If all this is going to get anywhere, Feldman mused, we’ve got to have that big break, the Son of Sam parking ticket, the one face in the crowd to look for. And we’ve got to have it awfully fast.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Dewing,” he said, looking at his watch. “I told my intelligence officer who covers the Arab neighborhoods over in Brooklyn there to bring in the material he’s got on the PLO. I’d better go find him.”

  “Of course, Chief. It would be helpful if we could have a look at anything worthwhile you might have.” The tone of the FBI man’s voice made it clear how unlikely he thought that possibility was.

  The intelligence officer was a genial, freckle-faced Irishman to whom the Department, with a fine sense of balance, had also assigned the responsibility of following the activities of the Jewish Defense League. His files contained almost nothing worthwhile and hadn’t since the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. Police intelligence represented educated gossip, a tip picked up by a cop on the beat from a friendly bartender or grocer, an item squeezed from an informer: “The Arab Red Crescent Society, 135 Atlantic Avenue, which has filed for a tax exemption as a charity, is suspected of raising funds for the PLO.” “The Damascus Coffee House, 204 Atlantic Avenue, is frequently patronized by supporters of George Habbash.”

  With the FOI that material could eventually come under public scrutiny, and since no one wanted it out, nothing worthwhile ever went into the files.

  The good stuff was held “on the bip,” in an intelligence officer’s personal notebook that no one but he had the right to open, and the Irishman’s listed this December morning thirty-eight PLO suspects, most of them among the younger, poorer Palestinian immigrants living in the neighborhoods crowding up toward the fringes of the black slums of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

  “At least we know where they are,” Feldman commented. “Not like the ones they’ve got in there. Bring them all in. Grill them. Establish everything they’ve been doing in the last seventy-two hours.”

  “On what grounds, Chief?”

  “Find some. Immigration papers. Half of ‘em probably are illegals anyway.”

  “Christ! We do that, we’ll have every civil-rights lawyer in the city on our backs.”

  And so what, Feldman was about to add, there may not be any civil-rights lawyers around in a couple of days anyway, when a plainclothesman interrupted. “Telephone, Chief.”

  It was Angelo Rocchia. The Chief was neither surprised nor irritated by the fact that Rocchia had called him directly, short-circuiting the formal chain of command that Dewing had just finished showing him. He knew who the good guys in his division were, the solid diggers whose work could make him look good upstairs, and those guys he had always encouraged to act independently, to come directly to him with a problem. He listened to Angelo’s story, then uttered the three words used more often than any others in the Detective Division of the New York Police Department: “Repeat that again.”

  This time, Feldman scrawled a series of hasty notes on a pad on the desk.

  When Angelo had finished, it took him five seconds to reach a decision.

  “You get over to that guy’s office in Brooklyn and see if you can get a line on who grabbed his wallet,” he ordered. “I’ll have someone else cover your piers.”

  As he talked, he was already dialing the head of the Pickpocket Squad on a second phone. “Get the photos of all the dips who work Brooklyn,” he ordered, “and get your ass over to 123 Cadman Plaza West.”

  “Got something, Chief?” the intelligence officer asked.

  “I doubt it,” Feldman growled. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee, though.”

  The Chief headed toward the custodian’s office, where he had spotted a Silex and a hot plate. It was the first moment he’d had to himself since he left his office two hours earlier, and, meditating almost, he blew at the hot black coffee, then glanced at the wall over the hot plate. Stuck to it was what appeared to be an old Civil Defense poster bearing the once familiar “CD” in its black circle and white triangle. He noted its government printing number and the headline “PROCEDURE TO FOLLOW IN THE EVENT OF A THERMONUCLEAR ATTACK.”

  Seven points were listed there, beginning with “1. Stay clear of all windows.”

  Feldman scanned the list.

  5. Loosen necktie, unbutton shift sleeves, and any other restrictive clothing.

  6. Immediately upon seeing the brilliant flash of a nuclear explosion, bend over and place your head firmly between your legs.

  At the last line, the detective burst out laughing. No words could have rammed up better than the ones he saw there the insane, desperate mess they were in:

  7. Kiss your ass goodbye.

  “We got a situation in this town …” Angelo Rocchia, Jack Rand noted with exasperation, was embarked on yet another of his monologues.

  The FBI agent was still burning at the freewheeling manner with which the New Yorker had bypassed the chain of command and gotten them taken off their pier assignment to go chasing pickpockets. Like the Marines, the FBI taught its recruits that discipline was the key to success: spiritual discipline to build character, intellectual discipline in an investigation, collective discipline when working as a team so that every team member knew he could count on every other team member to do exactly what he was supposed to do. That kind of discipline, Rand reflected sourly, was a quality conspicuously lacking in his New York partner.

  If Angelo was aware of the young man’s anger, however, he gave no indication of it. He went on as though he were lecturing a group of recruits at the Police Academy. “Dips in this town
T pick your pocket by appointment. No big deal. Custom work, they call it. Fence comes to the dip, says, `Hey, Charlie, I need some fresh cards noon tomorrow. No more than two, three hours old. Wanta buy a color TV for the old lady, it’s her birthday.’ So the dip takes the job on consignment. He gets to keep the cash in the guy’s wallet and gets a couple of yards for his ID and two, three cards. Guy’s got a whole lot of plastic, the dip’ll hold a few cards back. Sell ‘em to somebody else for a dime apiece. He’ll make two, three hundred bucks on the deal. That ain’t bad.”

  Yards, Rand thought, dimes. They can’t even speak English in this city.

  “So, Angelo, if I understand you, what you’re suggesting is that something like this might have happened here.”

  “I think it might have, yeah”

  “Angelo, how many pickpockets would you reckon work the New York area?”

  Angelo whistled softly, maneuvering his Chevrolet as he did into the inside lane to get a jump on the traffic at the stop light ahead. “Three, four, five hundred.”

  Rand tapped the crystal of his Rolex. “It’s after eleven, Angelo. And that damn barrel’s supposed to go off at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Do you really think we’re going to find an interrogate five hundred pickpockets? Pick out of that mess the one who may-or may not-have stolen the guy’s wallet, find out whom he gave it to, locate that guy, all by three o’clock tomorrow?”

  “Kid, how the fuck would I know?” Angelo was moving along Fulton Street now, and he could see the outlines of Cadman Plaza rising by the exit loops of the Brooklyn Bridge. “But for now, it’s the best thing we’ve got. In fact, for now it’s the only thing we’ve got.”

  He was already searching for an illegal parking place close to their destination. “Besides, you and I aren’t going to bust this thing. None of us are here. We’re just window-dressing. It’s the people in Washington who gotta handle this one, not us.”

  * * *

  The people in Washington bad been in semipermanent session since their first Crisis Committee meeting with Abe Stern. The President came and went, depending on his schedule and his efforts to maintain a fagade of normality for the benefit of the press. He had just rejoined the meeting after turning over the session of his Council of Economic Advisers to Charlie Schultz.