“So you pretended to sign on to help El Halcón to shore up our case?”
“Not really. That was just serendipitous. Obviously there was another reason.”
“Which was?”
“To find Mr. X, of course.” Rhyme scowled. “At which I wasn’t very successful.”
“Mr. X?” Bishop squinted. His lips tightened for a moment. “Oh. You mean El Halcón’s U.S. partner?”
Obviously…
“He might not have been at the shoot-out but he’s behind the whole operation.”
Fallow nodded. “We’re sure his company owns the warehouse complex, but we couldn’t trace it.”
“And he’s as responsible for Barry Sales’s injury as El Halcón. But I couldn’t find any connection.”
Bishop sighed. The frustration was evident in his face as he said, “We’ve done everything. We’ve looked everywhere. Every document, followed every lead. Nothing.”
Fallow added, “CIs, surveillance. I even called the CIA and NSA about overseas communications. Whoever this guy is, he’s a ghost.”
Rhyme said, “I hoped there’d be some bit of evidence, some reference in the notes that led me to the U.S. partner.” A shrug. “But nothing.”
“Well, you nailed down the case against El Halcón, Lincoln. Thank you for that.”
Bishop gave what Rhyme supposed was an uncharacteristic smile. He said, “So how’re you going to handle the money, fee he paid you?”
Rhyme said, “Oh, I put it in an irrevocable trust for Barry. Anonymous. He won’t know who it came from.”
Sellitto laughed. “Don’t you think Carreras-López ain’t gonna be too happy about that? Whatta you think he’s going to do?”
Rhyme shrugged. “He’s a lawyer. Let him sue me.”
Bishop nodded to Fallow and glanced at Pulaski’s wrists. The agent uncuffed him and, without saying anything further, the foursome left.
Rhyme watched them leave. Pulaski or Cooper said something. He didn’t hear. He was preoccupied with a single thought. An image, actually. Of Barry Sales, his friend.
He thought once more about the word he’d uttered when Carreras-López had first come to him, a word that the defense lawyer undoubtedly took in a very different context from that which Rhyme had had in mind when he uttered it: Justice.
Rhyme glanced toward Sachs, who was still avoiding his eyes. Then he heard her phone hum.
She glanced at it. “Edward Ackroyd.” She answered and had a brief conversation. He could tell from the way her eyes narrowed—just slightly—that the news was important.
When she disconnected, she said, “That dealer? The one who put Edward onto Shapiro? He’s agreed to talk to us. But only plainclothes, no uniforms. He’s worried about customers seeing cops. Edward suggested me and he agreed.”
Then she walked to Rhyme and bent close. Only he could hear her say, “Not completely forthcoming, hm?”
She’d be referring to the clandestine operation involving El Halcón’s lawyer. Reflecting on it, he wasn’t in fact sure why he hadn’t said anything. Maybe he wanted to keep her at arms’ length in case something went south. Condescending of him, he now understood.
His lips grew taut. He held her eye. “No. I wasn’t. I should’ve been.”
She smiled. “I mean both of us. I didn’t tell you about what happened at the drilling site. You didn’t tell me about your little investigation.”
He said, “After all these years, we’re still kind of new to it, Sachs. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“I won’t either.” She kissed him hard and then headed for the door. “I’ll call in from downtown.”
Chapter 54
Amelia Sachs felt every cobblestone in her back as the old Ford rocked over the worn streets of the Lower East Side. The fall at the construction site—the initial tumble onto the plank, not the cushioning, though horrifying, mud—had twisted her spine in some elaborate way.
Another thud.
Ah, that one hurt bad.
There was some asphalt but a lot of stone, brick and road repair steel plates.
The Torino Cobra is a car made for smooth.
Sachs had always had a soft spot in her heart for the neighborhood—abbreviated by some as the LES, which she could never accept. Far too precious and hipster a moniker, the antithesis of the place. It had a more colorful and varied history than any other part of Manhattan: In the late nineteenth century, the place became the home of Germans, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and other European immigrants. The teeming neighborhood, filled with dark and claustrophobic tenements and chaotic pushcart-cluttered streets, gave birth to entertainers like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and the Gershwins. Film companies like Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and 20th Century Fox could trace their ancestry to the Lower East Side.
The neighborhood became the first truly integrated enclave in New York City after the Second World War, when black and Puerto Rican families joined the white longtimers and everyone lived in relative harmony.
The Lower East Side was also the site of the city’s worst tragedy until September 11. The General Slocum, a ship chartered to take thirteen hundred German Americans to a church event, caught fire in the East River. More than a thousand passengers perished, and the sorrow that spread like plague through the community spawned a migration. Virtually every resident of Little Germany on the Lower East Side moved several miles north and resettled in Yorkville.
Discovery Channel stuff aside, Amelia Sachs had a special connection with the area. It was here, many years ago, that she had made her first felony bust—stopping an armed robbery in progress while off duty. She’d been on a Sunday brunch date, and she and—what was his name? Fred. No, Frank. She and Frank were walking back from a numbingly massive meal at Katz’s Deli when her companion had stopped abruptly. He’d pointed with an uneasy finger. “Hey. Does that guy, see him? Does he have a gun?”
Then Sachs’s doggy bag was tumbling to the sidewalk, her Glock was in her hand and Frank was being shoved unceremoniously to safety behind a Dumpster. She charged forward, crying to passersby, “Get down, get down, police!” Then things turned ugly. She traded a few rounds with the crackhead, who’d had the doubly bad judgment to stick up a wholesale lamp store (a window sign read, Credit Cards Only) and to point his weapon her way. NYPD procedure dictated that if an officer shoots, he or she should shoot to kill, but Sachs hadn’t been prepared to make an existential decision under those circumstances. She’d sent a slug into his hand, removing the weapon and any future threat. An easy shot for her and, far better, less paperwork than with a fatality. Chatting manically the entire time, Frank had walked her to the subway and never asked her out again.
She now turned off this very same High Noon street—the Bowery—and made her way through the labyrinth until she came to a shadowy canyon. Those same tenements that had survived for 150 years still rose five stories toward the rectangle of, today, gray sky. The tall buildings bristled with fire escapes. One featured a real, old-fashioned laundry line, on which ghosts of shirts and jeans and skirts fluttered. Maybe to lessen, in a small, small way, a carbon footprint.
The street was mostly residential, but there were some ground-floor retail stores. A dry cleaner. A “vintage” (that is, used) clothing shop. A secondhand bookstore, specializing largely in the occult.
And Blaustein’s Jewelry.
She parked half on the sidewalk, tossed the NYPD placard on the dash and climbed out. The cool day kept people home and the absence of much to do on this street kept the sightseers elsewhere. The sidewalk was deserted.
She walked to the front of the store. There was a Closed sign on the door, but Edward Ackroyd had told her that Abe Blaustein was expecting her. She peered inside. The showroom, filled with display cases, was empty and dark but there was a light in the back and she saw some motion there. A man in a dusty black suit and wearing a yarmulke glanced up and waved her in.