The Fifth Horseman

by Larry Collins

  “The icky one that looks like someone peed on it?”

  “Yes.” The “icky” one was a Jackson Pollack appraised by Crandell’s insurance adjusters at $350,000. “And the one to the left of the television?”

  “The one with those funny eyes?”

  “Right.” That was a Picasso. “Get those two and the gray one in the bedroom.” Crandell did not need to identify his Modigliani further. “And bring them back down here. Just as fast as you can drive.”

  “Ah, honey, ah really have to-” Cindy began, hoping that coquetry might somehow spare her the ordeal her lover had just proposed.

  “Shut up!” Crandell interrupted. “Just get your ass moving to New York.” He hung up, then decided to make a second call, this one to his real-estate agent at Douglas Elliman in New York. Finally, relaxed for almost the first time since this crisis had begun, he hurried up the stairs to the Blue Room.

  * * *

  Harvey Hudson, the New York director of the FBI, listened with growing concern to his deputy’s account of Grace Knowland’s conversation at the Seventh Regiment Armory. “How can we be so unlucky?”

  His aide nodded sympathetically and continued his report. “So she got all excited when the MP said ‘snow removal.’ She pulled out her press card and insisted on talking to somebody. They finally gave her the cutout number we’re using to protect NEST. It’s a dummy line that’s supposed to go to First Armory PIO. Rings downstairs. She’s on the line now, insisting on a briefing on our `snow removal’ exercise tomorrow morning.”

  Hudson clutched his head in dismay. “Can you imagine? Some fucking kid can’t get a tennis racket and we risk blowing the whole operation to The New York Times?” He tugged at the ends of his red-and-yellow bow tie, dangling like wilting vines from each side of his shirt collar. He seemed to have shrunk physically from the strains of this terrible day, from the horror that had come with each hour that had gone by with Qaddafi’s bomb undiscovered.

  “Okay,” he ordered. “You stuff somebody into an Army uniform and get him up to that armory tomorrow morning. Give that woman the goddamndest song-and-dance briefing on snow removal that anybody’s ever heard. I don’t care what the hell you tell her, but make it good. The one thing we don’t need right now is to have The New York Times on our backsl”

  * * *

  In the Blue Room of the White House, a Marine Corps band struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Smiling warmly, his wife the rigorous one pace behind him that protocol prescribed, the President strode into the diplomatic reception. Admiringly, Jack Eastman watched the couple drift through the room, shaking hands, chatting, laughing politely at the Bulgarian ambassador’s clumsy attempt at humor. Quite a performance, Eastman thought. You could fault the man for his infuriating tendency to vacillate, for his lack of personal warmth, but one thing you couldn’t take away from him was his icy self-control, his stoic front in a crisis.

  Eastman was about to sip his grapefruit juice when he felt a slight pressure at his elbow. It was his wife, late as usual. He bent down to kiss her, smelling as he did the alcohol on her breath.

  “Darling,” she whispered as he pulled away from her, “I’ve got to talk to you. Alone.”

  Eastman wanted to laugh. Talking privately to your wife at diplomatic receptions was a privilege not accorded to high government officials.

  Sally had him by the arm. “It’s about Cathy.”

  Her husband tensed, then followed as she threaded deftly through the room seeking out an empty corner by the bar. When she found it she turned to him almost angrily. “She’s home,” she blurted.

  “Home?” Eastman was stunned. “How come?”

  “Because what you laid on me last night was too heavy, Jack.” Sally Eastman’s brief show of defiance had already passed and tears diluted her eyes. “I’m a mother, not a soldier.”

  “Sal-“

  She turned at his word, moved to the bar and thrust her glass at a bartender. “A vodka martini on the rocks,” she ordered.

  Eastman stepped behind her, fighting now to maintain his own composure.

  “Sally,” he hissed, “you had no right to do that. No right at all.”

  His wife turned around. The mascara was beginning to run a bit as the tears started to unravel the careful fagade of her worn and tired face. She started to reply, but before she could, Eastman leaned and brushed his lips to her forehead. “But thank God you did,” he whispered. “Dab up the eyes. We’ve got to go back to the party.”

  * * *

  The battered Toyota slid silently past the deserted warehouses. Rico was in front, beside the driver. To his right, through the high wire fence wrapping the Bayonne docks, he could catch an occasional glimpse of the black sheen of the harbor and, in the distance, the gleaming lights of Manhattan.

  “Aquf.”

  The driver stopped and snapped off the headlights. They were in total darkness. The only sound the pimp could hear was the keening of the sea gulls down by the water’s edge.

  The three men left the car and walked down a long alley toward the rear of an abandoned loft. At the end of the alley, the leader rapped on a door. It opened, and from the darkness inside a flashlight’s narrow beam trapped each face a brief instant in its glow.

  “Venga,” a voice commanded.

  As soon as he stepped into the loft, Rico knew why he was there. At one end a long wooden slab rested upon a pair of trestles. Five chairs were ranged behind it. A pair of kerosene lanterns were on the table, their flickering glow falling on two portraits on the wall, Che Guevara and the founder of the FALN.

  The Puerto Rican movement was the only terrorist organization firmly implanted on the soil of the United States, and it had succeeded in maintaining its integrity there because of procedures as ruthless as the one about to begin. It was the trial of a traitor, and Rico noted to his intense relief that the accused was already in place, firmly bound and gagged, in a chair facing the trestle table.

  Rico, as a senior member of the FALN, took his place in one of the judges’ chairs. He tried to avoid looking at the accused, at his wildly moving eyes, at the veins bulging in his neck as he strained to articulate through his gag the defense he would not be permitted to make.

  The trial, which was nothing more than a ritualized justification for murder, was brief. The accused was a police informer, brought up from Philadelphia to be “tried” in Bayonne because it would be easier to execute his sentence here. When the evidence had been heard, the man in the center of the table polled his fellow judges. One after another they intoned, “Muerte.”

  No one suggested clemency. With the exception of a few people like Rico, the leadership of the FALN was composed of lower-middle-class intellectuals, second-rate history instructors and professional graduate students, and mercy was not a feeling that registered in the sterile reaches of their academic, revolutionary minds.

  On the table in front of the chief judge was a Walther P38. Wordlessly, he passed it along the table to Rico. This too was a FALN ritual. To kill deliberately in cold blood on the orders of the organization was the ultimate proof of a man’s loyalty.

  Rico took the gun, got up and walked around the table. Trembling slightly, concentrating his eyes on a corner of the warehouse floor so that he did not have to look at his victim’s head, he drew the pistol up, pushed off the safety, felt briefly for the soft flesh of the temple and pulled the trigger.

  There was a sharp click.

  Rico looked down to see the mocking laughter in his victim’s eyes. Six men moved out of the shadows, thrust Rico into the chair, bound and gagged him.

  “There is a traitor in this room,” the chief judge announced in Spanish.

  “But it is not he.”

  This time there was no need for a trial. It had already taken place before Rico arrived. The chief judge took back the Walther and drew out the clip.

  Methodically, he filled it with 9mm. cartridges, then slapped it shut with the heel of his hand. He offered it to the
figure who stepped from the shadows at the back of the loft. It was the man Rico had given to the FBI.

  Noiselessly, the man walked around the table and placed the cold black barrel to Rico’s temple. He stood there a moment. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Rico’s brains halfway across the loft.

  * * *

  Angelo Rocchia stared from his office window, out across the darkened, snow-frosted rooftops of lower Manhattan, feeling as he did the heat burning up his throat. The Rolaids, he thought, cursing himself for ordering the spaghetti al pesto, where did I put the Rolaids?

  He turned back to his desk and started to fumble through its drawers. There was little to distinguish his office from most of the others on the detectives’ floor of Police Plaza. On his blotter was a desk set made of the shields that had marked his progress through the department-and life.

  Hung from the walls were the obligatory career photos: Angelo graduating from the Police Academy, being congratulated on the four citations he had won by an assortment of commissioners, at the Columbian Society banquet the night he had been elected president of the Department’s Italian-American fraternal association. There was a portrait of Maria and one of his late wife, the black felt mourning button he had worn religiously for a year now fixed to its silver frame.

  He found his tube of Rolaids, popped one into his mouth and returned to the window, waiting anxiously for the relief it would bring. They said heart attacks sometimes started this way, with the burning in the gut and all. So many of the older guys were going that way, the guys he had come in with right after the war; what with the hours, the strain, the fear, the smoking, they said your chances were a lot worse than most people’s.

  He never should have eaten so much, but he wanted to take the kid out, show him Forlini’s. He had made him stick around while he typed up their fives, the supplementary investigation reports, that left every NYPD investigation, even one as critical as this, inches deep in paper. A good detective, he’d kept reminding the kid, always keeps his paper up.

  Shit, what did they want to know, these kids like Rand? he suddenly asked himself. Wanted to have it all right away, they did. Learning slowly, putting it all together the hard way, they had no time for that. You saw them all over the Department now, figured they already had all the answers, didn’t have to pay their dues the way the older guys had, out there doing the horseshit jobs, getting down the routine, the routine, the routine until it was as much a part of you as your dandruff or your body odor, soaking up experience until certain things became such a natural reaction you didn’t even think about them anymore.

  Angelo could see Rand now sitting opposite him in Forlini’s telling him how good the wine was, at the same time letting him know he didn’t approve of throwing guys like the pickpocket against the wall. Already so sure of himself he was just a little patronizing to the older guy.

  He started at the sound of the telephone, its jangle echoing through the deserted offices.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you all day.ţ

  Hearing her voice, Angelo slid happily into his desk chair. “I’ve been enjoying a typical New York detective’s day. Looking for a needle in the haystack with a bunch of the boys.”

  “I called you this morning, but they said everybody was off at a meeting.”

  “Yeah. Got a lot of people on this.” Angelo’s voice was gruff, but the gruffness was as transparent as his office window. “I shoulda called you, Grace, but I wasn’t certain …” He hesitated. “I mean after last night and all.”

  “I know. I thought a great deal about last night, too, Angelo. I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to keep the baby.”

  “Grace, you don’t really mean that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You want another kid that bad?”

  “I do.”

  * * *

  How can so much happen in twenty-four hours? Angelo wondered. How can things suddenly change so much? “Grace, if that-” he dabbed at the touch of dampness on his forehead-“if that’s what you really, honestly want, I mean, what the hell, a detective first grade’s pension doesn’t go very far these days, but I wouldn’t know what to do when I retire anyway. There was a guy a couple of months ago was talking to me about taking something in security over at American Express. What I mean is, Grace, if it’s what you really want, I’ll do the right thing by you, you know?”

  “Angelo.” She pronounced his name as tenderly as she sometimes did when they were lying beside each other in the darkness of his bedroom, but there was something distant there, too, and it wasn’t just because they were speaking over the phone. “That’s a wonderful thing to say and I’ll never forget you for having said it.” He could hear her slowly inhaling her cigarette. He’d been after her to give that up, except she’d never listened. “But that’s not what I want, Angelo.”

  “What do you mean, that’s not what you want?” He tried to conceal the hurt and surprise with the roughness of his voice.

  “Angelo, I am not trying to force you to marry me. That’s not why I’m doing this. I tried to tell you last night. I want a child, yes. But not another marriage.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Grace, you’re not going to try to bring up a kid just like that? All by yourself? Without a father?”

  “I won’t be the first woman in New York to do it, Angelo.”

  “Goddammit.” Rage escaped Angelo like steam hissing from a ruptured heating duct. “Grace, you can’t do this.”

  “Yes, I can, Angelo. The world has changed a lot, you know.”

  “And what about me? It’s my child, too, after all. What am I supposed to do? Come around once a year, pat him on the cheek and say, `Hey, kid, how you getting on? Old lady teaching you how to throw a forward pass and all?”’

  “Angelo.” She sounded so quiet, so determined, that the detective’

  understood just how completely her mind was made up. “One of the reasons I want this child is because I hope he-or she-will have some of those qualities I love and admire so much in you. But I’m having it for myself, because I want it and I’m ready to accept the responsibilities that go with having it. Alone. Of course, if you want to see the child, there’ll always be a place for you in his or her and my life.”

  “Thanks, Grace. Thanks a lot.” As he pronounced the words, Angelo could feel the dull ache constricting his stomach. He was staring out through the windows to the city lights again. This time their edges were blurred and indistinct because Angelo Rocchia had just understood that the last love affair of his life was drawing to an end.

  “I’ll call you someday and we can have a nice talk about it.”

  When they had hung up, he started to unfold his portable camp bed.

  Lieutenant Walsh’s Office of Civil Preparedness had passed out a bunch of them during Friday’s snow emergency and some of them had gotten lost — like the one that had happened to get lost behind Angelo’s door. He had hung up his tie and taken off his cufflinks when he saw the night desk man, Terry Keegan, in his doorway.

  “Sleeping in?” Keegan asked.

  “Yeah. I got to be over to Hertz Rent-A-Truck at Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, sixthirty tomorrow morning.” That, Angelo reflected, was typical of a detective’s life. Tonight you’re a hero, tomorrow you’re a hack, assigned to be an errand boy for the FBI forensic guys busting up the truck that got the barrels. “Christ, the older I get, the more I hate these early calls.”

  “Me too.” Keegan laughed. “Like that ballbreaker they gave us back in ‘fifty-two when we were just breaking in up at the Tenth Precinct. You remember that one?”

  “Do I?” Angelo laughed. It had been a hit and run, a leaving the scene, with the victim DOA. Every morning they had had to get out on the West Side Highway at sixthirty stopping cars in the bitter winter cold. “Excuse me, sir, do you go by this way every day? See anything that looked like an accident last Friday?” A thousand cars they must have stopped.

  “It was an out-of-town sale
sman, came in to his office every Friday, remember?” Angelo said. “Come up with the kind of car because his brother-in-law had one just like it.”

  “Yeah.” Keegan smiled at the memory, its pain washed away by time. “And the guy walked on us anyway because his lawyer said the other guy died of a heart attack.”

  Angelo was stretching, yawning. “All the work that went into that one horseshit collar.”

  “You imagine the overtime we’d make if we bad that kind of a case today?”

  “Shit,” Angelo sighed, “they never put that kind of effort into a case anymore.”

  Keegan disappeared and Angelo stepped to the window for a last glimpse of his city. He thought of that barrel of gas someone had hidden somewhere out there. What kind of guy would do something like that? he wondered. Could he look at the pictures of the people he’d killed in the papers the next day? Could he stand to watch kids, parents, relatives crying their hearts out on television for the people he’d killed? He shook his head. So much had changed since he had come up, the world was so different now.

  He turned out the light and lay down on his camp bed, letting the kaleidoscope of oncoming sleep tumble the images before his mind, of Grace looking up at him in Forlini’s, of his reproachful young FBI partner, of a frightened Arab and a handsome young detective, his hair as black as the shadows of the night, stopping the cars on the West Side Highway so long ago. _

  PART VII

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15:

  L:30 A.M. TO 1:15 P.M.

  “I have reached a decision.”

  The President allowed the icy jets of water to batter him, savoring the numbness their chill streams inflicted on his exhausted body. His shower stall adjacent to the Presidential bedroom suite was still referred to in the White House as “Lyndon Johnson’s wakeup shower.” The Texan had ordered it installed during the Vietnam War, cursing as he did the inability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to force the water pressure high enough to satisfy him. The current Chief Executive had every reason to be thankful for its presence. He’d been living on black coffee and its periodic assaults for twentyfour hours. At 4:30 A.M. he had finally left the NSC conference room to return to the living quarters in the hopes of getting a couple of hours’ sleep. His gesture had been futile.