A Twist of the Knife Page 5
The remainder of the journey was smooth and uneventful. New York parkways are dirty and gray and essentially featureless. There wasn’t a great deal of traffic going north and Julio stayed in the right-hand lane, driving slowly and carefully. He took the Interboro Parkway into the Grand Central, an eight-lane highway connecting upper Manhattan, through Queens, to the further reaches of Long Island, and whisked past Flushing Meadow Park and La Guardia Airport, getting off at Hoyt Avenue, the last exit before the Triboro Bridge. Astoria, like Bay Ridge, was active and prosperous, bustling with shoppers, and the supermarket parking lot was crowded. He waited less than five minutes before being approached. The man was tall and moved very quickly, entering the van through Julio’s door. Julio shifted to the helper side of the front seat. He was careful not to look directly into the man’s face. There was no conversation, no “hello” and no “goodbye.” They arrived at the elevated subway stop at 31st Street and Julio got out, heading immediately up the stairway to the train.
Johnny Katanos took the van back home to his friends. He drove slowly at first, wandering through quiet residential neighborhoods, eyes on the image in the rearview mirror. Then he began to turn corners quickly, without signaling, pulling immediately to the curb and snapping the headlights off. Though he could find no sign of pursuit, he persisted. Driving along 21st Street toward Long Island City, he turned into a closed carwash, accelerating through the lot to emerge on 20th Street heading in the opposite direction. He drove across the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan, turned left onto Second Avenue, then swung quickly back onto the bridge toward Queens. He parked the van in a diner parking lot and went inside for dinner, watching all the time from a booth by the window. He saw nothing.
When he finished eating, he walked back to the van and began to drive straight toward his destination, going just fast enough to force pursuers to expose themselves, but not fast enough to attract the attention of ordinary policemen. He was convinced that they had brought it off, but he would not abandon his natural caution. Disaster, he believed, lay in wait around every corner, yet disaster could be avoided. It was a game he played. He would pretend that he had just that moment come alive, fully grown, and that his continued existence depended on constant vigilance. The minute he relaxed it was all over, and who could tell when he might be resurrected again? He tried to watch every window, every doorway. To be taken by surprise meant certain annihilation.
He drove to the end of Vernon Boulevard, then up onto the service road of the Long Island Expressway, passing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Maurice Avenue before turning right at 61st Street. Two blocks past Flushing Avenue, he made another right onto 59th Road, a block of brand-new, three-family homes, some still unoccupied. As he spun the wheel, he pressed the button on a brown, plastic transmitter and the garage door on the third house swung open. With a final, backward look, Johnny slid the van neatly into the garage and closed the door behind him.
This was their place of refuge, a true “safe house.” Its creation had been the topic of long debates in Algeria and, later, in Libya. Muzzafer had been accustomed to operating with the aid of local revolutionary groups, but in the United States they needed to be completely independent, which necessitated their finding a way to live anonymously. In Europe, most neighborhoods have been established for generations, many for centuries, and it would not be possible to move in without attracting attention, but in the constantly shifting neighborhoods of New York City’s outer boroughs, a sense of enduring community is impossible to find. Anonymity is part and parcel of everyday existence.
Muzzafer had used this condition to his own advantage. They had rented apartments in a house at 461-22 Fifty-ninth Road, in Ridgewood, Queens, under three different names. Effie Bloom and Jane Mathews lived on the top floor, girlfriends from Indiana come to study at New York University’s Graduate School of Social Work. John Katanos and Theresa Aviles, husband and wife, moved into the center apartment, Theresa telling the real-estate dealer that her husband was a long-distance trucker while she herself used to work at Citibank before she become pregnant. Muzzafer took the bottom floor, posing as an importer of oriental carpets, Muhammad Malik. It amused him no end to play the part of a Pakistani. Were Americans so unsophisticated as to be unable to tell the difference between an Asian and an Arab? Then he recalled that the British had one term to describe the Indian and the Egyptian. They referred to both as “wogs.”
It was Muzzafer’s habit to begin every meeting with a long story about life in the refugee camps of Palestine, stories which Johnny Katanos found both dull and amusing. Dull because they never varied—the same tale of injustice and deprivation was repeated time after time. Only the name of the characters changed, the characters and the towns and cities. The amusing part was the attention paid by the others and their obvious need to justify their actions. Having watched them in the performance of their duties, Johnny fully believed that they enjoyed what they were doing. Now why, he wondered, can’t they allow themselves to know it? Why do they have to pretend it has something to do with “justice”?
The meetings were rigidly controlled. Heeding the warnings of Hassan Fakhr, Muzzafer had insisted the two couples not associate with each other outside the house, and that even their relationships inside be no more intense than those of ordinary neighbors. Nevertheless, he wanted them to have a strong sense of solidarity and purpose; hence the stories. He could see the enthusiasm in the eyes of the women, Effie Bloom, Jane Mathews and Theresa Aviles, and though he could not read Johnny’s face at all, he was not worried about Johnny losing his desire for action.
And in truth, Johnny had no real interest in this end of the business. The fact that the group was committed to spreading fear throughout New York City and had the means to do so was proof enough that his own aims would be well-served. And just as Muzzafer had no doubt that Johnny Katanos would remain loyal as long as there were projects and the weapons to execute them, Johnny was certain that Muzzafer would continue to increase the intensity of his assault on America until they were caught. He did not, of course, include himself in the “they.” Nor did he exclude Theresa Aviles.
“The problem, as I see it,” Effie began, “is that we don’t have a hell of a lot of anything, so we have to find some way to stretch what we do have. That’s if we want to appear to be what we call ourselves—an army.”
“Exactly,” Muzzafer said. “In fact, in some ways all antipersonnel devices already do that. You have a small core of explosive, surrounded by jagged metal. The metal is easy to come by and increases the damage tenfold.”
Theresa’s fingernails tapped the lace tablecloth absently. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t make antipersonnel devices. We’re not idiots, are we?” She looked from face to face, her shoulders hunched up to her ears, a characteristic gesture. Theresa was a short, wiry woman, very intense and very nervous, who loved to talk of life in the Dominican Republic. Of the small farming communities, the warm winds, the brilliant tropical flowers. She could also speak of the poverty and degradation of a life without money or a real job. In this setting, in New York City, poverty occupied most of her reflections on her homeland. She was absolutely loyal to Muzzafer and totally in love with Johnny Katanos. The utterly distasteful sex in Ronald Chadwick’s house had been Muzzafer’s test for her and for Effie as well. Theresa understood it as a test and was proud to have passed with honors.
“A pipe and a handful of common nails with a couple of firecrackers in the middle. When I was a kid, me and my girlfriend blew up this boy’s doghouse. Not with the dog in it, of course, but when the kid found out who did it, he never bothered us again.” Effie Bloom, tall and rawboned, sat in a gray leather armchair which she’d pulled up to the kitchen table. It was her apartment, hers and Jane’s, and she was very comfortable. “If we had enough pipe and enough nails, we wouldn’t need very much explosive. It would hardly touch our stock.”
“How much?” Muzzafer asked. “How much exactly? How many pounds of C-
4 to how many pounds of nails to what length of pipe?” He nodded toward the kitchen where Jane Mathews was arranging mugs of hot coffee on a tray. “Shall we ask the expert?”
“Jane,” Effie called. “Are you coming in or what?”
“Or what,” Jane said, crossing the room to place the tray on the table. As a student of mechanical and chemical engineering, she was expected to answer any question on explosives. “There’s milk and sugar on the side. Does anyone want cookies?”
“We were talking about manufacturing our own antipersonnel devices,” Muzzafer said gently. Upsetting the relationship between Effie and Jane could easily lead to the destruction of his little army and he was careful never to criticize Jane in Effie’s presence.
“I know. I heard you talking. First, you have to consider the diameter of the pipe as well as the length. You have to measure the thickness of the pipe walls, how much explosive pressure they can withstand. Will the pipe be anchored or loose? If it’s anchored and one end is plugged, the energy of the explosion will be focused in a single direction and that’s where you get the most bang for the buck.” She smiled and laid her hand on Effie’s shoulder. “Simple, right? Now all we have to do is find a pipe supermarket and order the plugged and anchored special.”
Muzzafer’s mouth turned upward, a huge grin which only increased the sensitivity of his features. Johnny, watching the Arab closely, asked himself the same question Hassan had asked and answered it with the realization that if he saw Muzzafer on the street, he would swear the man was gay. No other possibility. Johnny flashed back to his early life, the years in juvenile institutions, sometimes for crimes, but more often because no one else would take him. In such a setting, unless he had someone to protect him, Muzzafer would be attacked every day of his life. The fantasy aroused Johnny Katanos and as he reached for his coffee, he let his left hand brush against Muzzafer’s arm, noting that the Arab, though aware of the pressure, did not move his arm away.
“Why don’t you take it, Jane? You and Effie,” Muzzafer said. “Let’s figure to use it in about three weeks. In the meantime, I want Theresa and Johnny to work with me on a little project. It’s a payback for the help we got from Mr. Khadafy. It seems there’s a certain Zionist living in Staten Island who has the ear of the American Defense Department. Our benefactors believe this Zionist played a big part in convincing Reagan to attack Khadafy and his family a couple of years ago. It’s to be a simple assassination and our first public work.” He raised his coffee cup in toast. “To the success of our efforts. May they all be as quick and as neat and as profitable as the demise of Mr. Ronald Jefferson Chadwick.”
5
MOST NEW YORK CITY cops are committed to the belief that the rest of the world—not only civilians, but all federal agents and state troopers as well—regards them as inevitably corrupt and incompetent, as brutal morons equally willing to abuse a felon or accept a bribe. The psychology is “them or us,” and just as blacks insist that whites can never comprehend the black experience, can never even come close, cops regard themselves as perennial outcasts, almost as outlaws in support of the law. Stanley Moodrow had long ago surrendered to this particular fantasy. Whenever he was forced to deal with outside agencies, he expected to be humiliated and his summons to the office of Agent Leonora Higgins at the Queens headquarters of the FBI was, for him, just another confirmation of his basic paranoia. He took it without flinching. The Manhattan branch, located at Federal Plaza near City Hall was less than two miles from the 7th Precinct, but apparently Moodrow’s request for a briefing on local terrorist activity had been passed down the line until it came to rest in the lap of Leonora Higgins, one of two female agents in the New York area. Moodrow took it as an insult, clean and simple, and he fully expected Ms. Higgins to compound it by delivering a sharp lecture on the limitations of the New York City Police Department.
It was 8:30 AM when Moodrow began to drive out to Forest Hills, in Queens, and it was raining hard. The wipers, long overdue for replacement, smeared grease haphazardly across the windshield, forcing Moodrow to peer, squint-eyed, through a single patch of clear glass located just beneath the rearview mirror. Still, the sergeant refused to allow himself to become upset. Actually, he reasoned, he’d been lucky to get this Fairmount. The only other vehicle, a Plymouth Reliant, was notorious for stalling in wet weather.
He drove against the rush-hour current, heading out to Queens via the Williamsburg Bridge. The inbound traffic, buses and trucks as well as commuters, was backed up along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the foot of the Kosciuszko Bridge. Moodrow stayed in the right lane, driving slowly. He passed the time composing obscene lyrics to the music of a Merle Haggard tune, “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good”, while the radio squawked continually, spouting a series of near-unintelligible requests for police action. A traffic jam at the junction of the Brooklyn-Queens and Long Island Expressways brought him back to life. He could see the revolving amber lights of a tow truck at the Grand Avenue on-ramp and he quickly pulled onto the shoulder of the highway and began to drive around the problem. Two hundred yards ahead, a patrolman on traffic detail recognized the unmarked car and waved him through. The Toyota which tried to follow him wasn’t as well received and the sergeant, glancing back through the rearview mirror, saw the driver rolling down his window, prepared to scream out his sense of the injustice done to him. The situation cheered Moodrow considerably.
FBI headquarters in Queens turned out to be a floor of offices in the old Lefrak Building on Queens Boulevard. The lobby was crowded and the bureaucrats, in regulation suit and tie, edged away from him in the elevator. He took it calmly, almost amused. Even the thirty-minute wait and the receptionist’s abrupt manner failed to dampen his good spirits. There was a moment, however, as he entered the small office to discover that Leonora Higgins was not only female, but dark, chocolate-brown as well, when Moodrow’s day nearly turned completely around. He stood for a moment, red faced, filling the door with his bulk, but then the absurdity of the situation overwhelmed him and he began to laugh, a crude, barbaric howl that had more insult to it than an upraised finger.
To her everlasting credit, Agent Higgins took Moodrow’s ridicule without flinching. Tall and very dark, she stood, solemn faced, the light reflecting from high, prominent cheekbones, and absorbed his laughter. She would take this energy and store it for later use, a longstanding technique for enduring humiliation. She observed Moodrow’s blocky silhouette in the doorway, and reflected on his rumpled, hounds-tooth jacket and stained tie. Her own navy business suit had been purchased at Lord and Taylor and was ironed nearly to a crisp. But this was, of course, irrelevant. She understood that she would never be granted any personal dignity by the white, Moodrow world, no matter what she did.
And she had achieved a great deal in her thirty-three years. The daughter of an accountant mother and a track-star-turned-junkie father, she had seen both sides—her mother, steady, going out to work each morning and her father, searching the house for money or nodding away in a corner. After high school, she’d agreed to enlist in the army in return for six-months’ training as a paramedic. The army had kept to the bargain, putting her through a cram course in battlefield medicine before shipping her off to Vietnam.
On January 30, 1968, opening day of the great Tet offensive, she’d been stationed in a hospital in Phu Bai, a hamlet ten miles southeast of Hue. For the next week, she worked, day and night, as the soldiers poured into her station. Thinking of it now, her memory was a jumble of torn, moaning GIs, their cries punctuated by the slap of helicopter blades and the sharp, helpless orders of heart-broken surgeons. At week’s end, just as she reached the limits of her endurance, the hospital had come under attack. Suddenly, wounded soldiers found the strength to get out of their beds and fight. Cold with anger, Leonora dropped her bandages and ran off to grab an M16. In fact, it was not an all-out assault by NVA Regulars, but a local guerrilla action involving fifteen men who chose to approach head-on, rifles blazing.
Leonora had taken one man out at point-blank range, had seen three holes appear in a line across his chest. At first, the man’s face had become puzzled, eyes turning inward, and then his life had gone. Leonora saw it run out as clearly as she saw his body jump backward and topple into the dust of the courtyard. She’d grunted with satisfaction, noting her lack of emotion, and had gone out to seek another yellow body for destruction. Later, she felt as if she’d lost something that had once been beautiful, but was now, like a withered flower, strangely repulsive, almost rotten.
After the war, she’d attended U.S.C. on a track scholarship, though she was never good enough for the better regional meets. However, she was more than happy to be getting a free education, while USC, for its part, was overjoyed to have found a female, black student who managed to maintain a 3.7 overall grade index. Leonora found she had a natural ability to recall almost everything she read. She combined this with a willingness to provide for the peculiar needs of her individual instructors. She scored 675 out of a possible 700 on her law boards and moved on to Stanford Law where her special talents proved even more effective. After graduation, she was heavily recruited by a dozen corporations, including the FBI. One company especially, the Chicago Consolidated Bank, under heavy fire for past and present deeds of discrimination against blacks and women, had offered Leonora a huge starting salary, as well as guaranteed advancement and an office with beige carpeting. Leonora chose the FBI because they offered her action and a chance to carry firearms, something no business could match. They promised her frontline experience in the bureau’s antiterrorist arm and they kept their word, briefing her extensively before sending her off to apprentice under Agent George Bradley. Together, they headed a new intelligence-gathering effort directed at the hundreds of thousands of Indian, Pakistani, Arab, and Turkish immigrants pouring into the United States. Moodrow’s information was to be part of this overall effort and Leonora was determined to make him fill that role, if she had to wait an hour for him to shut up.