A Twist of the Knife Read online

  Muzzafer walked to the bureau and took a manila folder from his suitcase. “Here,” he said, walking back to the bed, “is my Army. My American Red Army.” Laughing, he spread a handful of photos on the bedspread. “This first is Theresa Aviles. She was born Anna Rosa Gomez in the Dominican Republic, but raised in the United States. She joined a radical offshoot of the old Weather Underground, the Green Faction, while she was a student at the University of Maryland. In 1978, in what was really a pitiful attempt to raise money, she and her companions murdered two bank guards in Luther, Tennessee. She was captured immediately, but instead of turning informer, she stabbed a prison guard and escaped before her trial.

  “This is her lover, Johnny Katanos.”

  Muzzafer held the photo up and Hassan, curious, stared at the dark, expressionless eyes, the prominent cheekbones, the incongruous boyish smile. “He looks like he doesn’t care one way or the other. The rest of them are so intense. So sincere.”

  “Katanos looks like a little boy,” Muzzafer said, “because he doesn’t want you ever to know what he’s thinking. He told us that he grew up mainly in institutions, in New York City, and he learned very young not to expose himself. To always hold something back. But he is in love with violence, Hassan. In Europe, he would pose as a drug dealer, work himself into a position of trust within some…” He paused for a moment, searching for the word. “Would you say drug ‘ring’ or drug ‘gang’? In any event, once he understood the operation well enough to know where the money would be and when it would be there, he would simply take it. And usually in the most violent way possible. That is how he came to Algiers and how he met Theresa. He was living in Spain, in Malaga, when everyone caught up to him—the criminals, the French police, the German police and Interpol. He came to Africa through Gibraltar with his enemies one step behind him, then met Theresa and now he enjoys the protection of the Algerian government.

  “Hassan, he is the hardest man I’ve ever met. Not a leader, of course, but a fantastic physical specimen. Perfectly willing to do anything asked of him, as long as it’s violent and dangerous. I sent him to Haifa, to take care of a certain arms dealer who sold us defective rockets. He brought back the man’s eyes.”

  Muzzafer held up another photo, taking that of Johnny Katanos from Hassan’s hands. “This one is born Sarah Cohen, but is presently using the name Effie Bloom. She is a lesbian and very committed. She has read everything and will do anything, except sleep with a man for pleasure. After she assassinated the Grand Knight of the Christian Brotherhood of Georgia, Lester Hagen, she was sentenced to ninety-five years by an Atlanta jury. In prison, she killed another convict in a dispute over the favors of Jane Mathews, also a felon. Jane’s father was a professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and it was expected that Jane, an A student in her junior year, would follow in his footsteps. Right up until the day she planted a bomb in Blair Hall. After she and Effie met, it was love at first sight, at least on Effie’s part, so, naturally, when Effie decided to escape, she took Jane along. You probably remember the story. The bus taking Jane and Effie to Effie’s trial was attacked by six of Effie’s sisters. Effie and Jane were liberated and smuggled out of the country. If I remember correctly, there was quite a high body count on that particular adventure.”

  “Eight dead,” Hassan grunted.

  Muzzafer sat down again, resting his elbows on the table. “They will follow me. I’m sure of it. You see, right now they are living in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean, in Algeria. Very beautiful, my brother, but I have played a little trick on them. I have persuaded the Algerians to expel them. Where can they go? The Americans are waiting for any opportunity to return them to prison, and this time precautions will be taken to see that they never again have any hope of escape. Effie and Jane would certainly be separated and this is Effie’s greatest fear. It terrifies her.

  “I will offer the chance to strike again and they will accept. What I need from you is permission to bring them into Libya, to have your doctors alter their features so they cannot be recognized from a poster or a prison photograph. I want you to supply them with documents and cash. We will remain in Libya for no more than a month and once we reach the United States, you’ll never hear from us again.”

  Hassan smiled and relief flowed through him so quickly, his mood went from caution to euphoria without any seeming transition. “I don’t think I will have any problem with this,” he began. “Our friend, Muammar, is still angry over the death of his child, not to mention the attempt on his own life. As long as it’s not an official Libyan project…”

  “The American Red Army,” Muzzafer explained, “will have no roots anywhere. Its identity will be as shadowy as its name.”

  Hassan reached into his pocket and removed his lighter, an old Zippo with a Marine Corps insignia on its face, and lit a cigarette. Offering the pack to Muzzafer, he asked, “Can I tell you what I really think? Can I be honest with you?”

  “Go ahead.” Muzzafer sat back. He knew what was coming, the obvious weak point in his project. “Let’s hear it.”

  “These are not revolutionaries,” Hassan said gently. His hands swept across the photographs. “Three amateurs, two of them lesbians, and a common criminal. You and I have been hardened by years in exile. By having to accept the leavings of other nations while the Jews squat on our homeland. We can accept the discipline, the isolation, but these college students…”He shook his head. “I know what you are trying to do and it’s true that if your aim is to disappear, you will have to use Americans, but somehow you must find real professionals. You know very well that the most difficult part of any project is keeping the unit together. It’s hard enough even when you have hardened professionals, with families that are easy to find. How do you expect to keep your Americans working in isolation for an indefinite period of time?” He paused briefly. “Within six weeks of your arrival in America, they will be bickering among themselves. Within six months, they will make you as much an amateur as they are. They will make you a criminal to match the one you’re bringing with you.”

  “You mustn’t underestimate him, Hassan. I have never seen a man as eager as he is. Physically, he’s one in a million.”

  Something in Muzzafer’s voice, in his enthusiasm, brought Hassan up short. He recalled the rumors surrounding Muzzafer’s sexual preferences. He had never believed the stories, blaming them on the bad luck of Muzzafer’s being dealt a soft body and a softer face, but listening to Muzzafer describe the abilities of the young Greek, he began to have his doubts. Not that he was upset. His relief at not being asked for anything he couldn’t deliver allowed him the confidence to be objective.

  “My friend, I don’t care how dangerous he is. I don’t care if he’s killed a hundred people. If we’ve learned any lesson from our years in the struggle, it’s to keep amateurs and common criminals away from our projects.”

  “Listen, Hassan,” Muzzafer said, his voice tight, “there is nothing common about Johnny Katanos.”

  4

  TEN O’CLOCK ON A cold, Tuesday morning. The air so clear the skyline of Manhattan seemed etched in deep, blue glass. Johnny Katanos and Muzzafer sat in a black van parked by a meter across from a large, supermarket parking lot. Their position gave them a perfect view of the lot and they carefully inspected the cars entering and leaving.

  They were looking for any sign of surveillance, nervous because the appointment they waited to keep (and which would not take place for hours) represented one of the few times their paths would intersect the main currents of international terrorism. On this day, for these few hours, they would be vulnerable to betrayal from outside the group. Of course, they could not have manufactured the instruments with which they would attack New York, nor did they have the means to smuggle weapons across borders, so the situation was truly unavoidable.

  Still, Muzzafer had seen so many of his friends taken in situations like this, he couldn’t stop tapping his fingers on the door handle, and Katanos finally re
ached out a hand to slow him down.

  “Ease up, man. Relax. I’m the one gonna retrieve the merchandise. You’re gonna take off, remember?”

  Muzzafer smiled ruefully. “I think I fear the idea of betrayal more than actually being captured. You can sustain yourself in prison with your hatred, but it’s hard to get over the sense that someone you trusted, that you called your comrade, sold you out.”

  “Shit, where I come from, you expect your partner to rat. If he don’t that’s when you get surprised. Anyways, there’s nothing we can do, but watch the drop. What’s coming is coming and that’s the end of it.”

  “Maybe not the end,” Muzzafer shook his head.

  “What’s more to do?”

  “We can hope they didn’t pick an asshole to make delivery.”

  In January of 1961, Julio Rafael Ramirez had come to the United States to spy on the tens of thousands of refugees who fled Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution. As these refugees were, for the most part, allowed to leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they were more than a little resentful, especially considering they had formed the bulk of the wealthy and middle classes under the dictator, Batista. Fidel was not unmindful of this situation. Suspecting that the American government might take advantage of their resentment, spurring the dissident expatriates on to deeds of sabotage and assassination, he asked twenty student supporters to go into exile with the refugees. They settled in Miami, Florida, and Union City, New Jersey, had gotten married, established businesses, had babies and christenings and first Holy Communions. Julio Ramirez, financed by the Cuban government, opened a barber shop on Kennedy Boulevard in Union City, never growing rich, but paying the bills all the same. This fall, from university student to barber, gave credibility to his tale of disenchantment with Cuban Marxism. Over the years, he’d established his roots within the community. He’d married, had children and continued to report each month to a representative of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations.

  Unfortunately, Julio no longer enjoyed his work. He’d never really been an adventurous child, but as a young man—his imagination fired by a brother who’d gone to the mountains in the earliest days of the revolution—he’d seen Fidel’s request as a golden opportunity to serve the cause of world socialism. He was fifty-two now, and while he hadn’t exactly become a capitalist, he definitely preferred sitting at home with “The Cosby Show” to undertaking secret missions.

  But Julio did what he was told, because his sponsors left him no choice. He could not return to Cuba and he didn’t have enough information to interest the Americans. He’d realized long before, that his life, as well as the lives of his wife and children, would be worthless should the refugee community discover his true loyalties.

  Fortunately for Julio’s sense of well-being, he was not used very often. Instead of penetrating to the heart of Omega 7, Julio had remained on the outside, confining his efforts to membership in the most public religious and civic organizations. Havana saw him as a messenger, a mule to be used only for operations requiring the talents of a mule. On this particular evening, he’d been ordered to pick up a small ford van at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 99th Street, in Brooklyn, and deliver it to a supermarket parking lot in Queens. He was to wait inside the truck until a man in a green, corduroy jacket approached from the front with his hands in his pockets. The man would enter the van on the driver’s side, whereupon they would proceed to a nearby subway stop and Julio would find his way home.

  Perhaps Julio’s sense of importance would have been less compromised if he’d known he carried enough plastic explosives in the cargo area to blow the little Ford back across the Hudson River, but the rear of the van was sealed off and the doors welded shut, so he had no opportunity to examine the merchandise. The sellers were, of course, Cuban, good friends of Muzzafer’s and enthusiastic supporters of his projects, but the ordnance, automatic weapons, and a hodgepodge of special explosives, had been smuggled into South Carolina, along with 27 tons of marijuana, by Colombian guerrillas anxious to finance their own revolution. From South Carolina, it has been trucked as ordinary freight aboard a Penn Central trailer and received in Brooklyn by an attaché of the Cuban Mission, acting under the umbrella of diplomatic immunity. Then it had been left to cool for six months, just in case.

  It is interesting to note that payment had been given long before delivery. It wasn’t that the Cubans didn’t trust Muzzafer. Actually, they would have financed the project from beginning to end if Muzzafer had been willing to surrender control. Of course, Muzzafer preferred to pay, parting with almost all the contents of Ronald Chadwick’s suitcase. Then Julio Ramirez had been chosen to make delivery precisely because he was a nonentity who was not only unlikely to be caught, but who could tell his interrogators nothing in any event. The neighborhood in which the van was parked was predominantly Italian and Jewish. The neighborhood of delivery was Greek and Czech. There would be no Cubans to recognize Ramirez. To the all-white worlds of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Astoria, Queens, Julio was just another spic.

  Julio was not unaware of his status within these communities and his nervousness was evident as he drove out the Gowanus Expressway toward Bay Ridge Parkway. More than once, the good citizens of Bay Ridge had taken the stick to their darker brethren. But Julio needn’t have worried. The garage was located on an industrial block with an auto-parts store on one side and an aluminum warehouse on the other. There were black and Puerto Rican workers in abundance and nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Everything went smoothly, as usual. The keys to the garage worked on the first attempt and the van started immediately. Julio pulled the Ford out, replacing it with his own car, a dusty, green Renault, and carefully locked the garage door.

  The van rolled smoothly over the ruts and dips on 86th Street and Julio was able to let his attention wander. He drove through Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst toward Sheepshead Bay. Easter was approaching and, with the first warm weather, the shoppers were out along 86th Street. Julio noted the small, family-owned clothing and furniture stores. On one block, Wo Fong’s Cantonese Delight was flanked by Slim’s Bagels and Gino’s Best Pizza. Julio recalled his mother’s cousin, Emilio Evans, who’d fled Cuba on a small boat in 1980. He’d wanted to work in Julio’s shop and they’d taken a long drive by way of an interview. Newly arrived from a country where toilet paper was rationed, Emilio could not stop talking about the abundance of America. It wasn’t even the supermarkets or department stores that impressed him so much. The small shops, the butcher stores and fruit stands and hardware stores, often pressed one against the other in some obscure New Jersey neighborhood, seemed absolutely miraculous. Where did the money come from? Growing up in Cuba, Emilio had been led to believe that the majority of American workers lived in grinding poverty, but these Cuban-Americans not only had cars and color television sets, but videocassette recorders and ten-speed bicycles as well. They were sending their children to heavily subsidized state colleges while paying off thirty-year mortgages.

  Julio turned north on Bedford Avenue and began the long drive through the center of Brooklyn. The shops on 86th Street gave way to blocks of single family homes set back on what were, for New York, substantial pieces of property. The owners were almost exclusively Jewish and the children played on immaculately kept lawns, the boys tossing Frisbees or baseballs while the girls gossiped on porch swings. The husbands were returning from work, driving Cutlass Supremes into driveways, trudging through unlocked front doors, attaché case in hand. A firm universe, established and secure. It did not seem possible that the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn began just on the other side of Foster Avenue and was the start of the largest black ghetto in America. Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Bushwick, Brownsville, East New York—a world of dark people which extended into Queens through Jamaica and Hollis and St. Albans right to the border of Nassau County, and included more than a million and a half citizens.

  As Julio made the right turn onto Empire Boulevard and began to driv
e, his surroundings grew more and more threatening. Whole blocks of devastated four-and five-story tenements, their windows covered with gray, galvanized sheet metal, seemed to lean toward the street, almost beckoning him. Knots of men, gathered around aluminum drums filled with burning trash, threw grotesque shadows across the alleyways. Night was falling quickly and the old women scuttled down the streets, seeking the safety of locked doors. The total effect was demonic and Julio began to sense an awful malevolence. He felt like an angel strayed into hell and he fought his fear with anger and indignation. He remembered the white world, the Anglos who associated him with this horror. To them, if you were a spic or a nigger, this was your only world, the sum total of all your possibilities, and nothing you could ever achieve would rid them of this attitude. Julio became more and more impatient at the red lights, cursing under his breath and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. By the time he saw the mouth of the Interboro Parkway, he could control himself no longer. He slapped his foot down on the gas pedal and shot free of the ghetto.

  Unfortunately for Julio, black Brooklyn had had an identical effect on another good New Yorker, Dr. Morris Katz, who hit the accelerator of his Olds Regency at almost the same second, so that the two of them flew toward a space large enough for only one. Seeing this, they simultaneously jammed on the brakes, sending both cars into counter-clockwise spins. The two vehicles, as if their dance had been choreographed by Hollywood stuntmen, spun around each other twice before coming to a stop. Julio, furious, opened the door, leaped out and came within an eyeblink of being just the asshole Muzzafer, sitting in a parking lot ten miles away, was afraid of. But then he remembered himself for the first time since crossing Foster Avenue. He looked at his van and recalled that he was carrying an unknown cargo to an unknown group of terrorists on behalf of the Communist government of Cuba. Without a word, in a near panic, he got back into the truck, locked the door and drove off toward Queens.