He took Nikki to Bouley in Tribeca, still one of the greatest meals in a city of great meals. Roach phoned just as they were entering, and Heat and Rook stopped while she took their call in the vestibule—not the worst place to wait, surrounded by walls that were decorated by shelves of aromatic fresh apples.
Between drink orders and bread selection she briefed Rook on the main points of the Graf investigation, including some of the problems she was having with Captain Montrose. She left out his link to the old Huddleston case, since even she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Plus she was in public. They had an alcove to themselves, but you never knew. He listened intently, and she enjoyed watching him suppress his urge to blurt premature theories based on his writer’s imagination instead of facts. He did interrupt when she told him Raley and Ochoa had just left the headquarters of Justicia a Guarda.
“Those are militant Marxists,” he said. “Not your warm and fuzzy Kumbaya demonstrators at all. A few of them are ex-Colombian FARC rebels who’d be happier with rifles instead of picket signs.”
“I’ll have to look into that part,” and Heat got out her notepad. “Roach says, according to the office staff there, Father Graf was a staunch supporter of their cause, and they’re mourning him. Even though one of the leaders threw him out of the meeting the other morning when he showed up drunk.” She pondered a Graf connection with armed rebels. “How violent are they, I mean here in New York?”
“Probably no more than, say, the IRA back in The Troubles.” He tore off a piece of raisin bread. “They’re fresh on my mind because I witnessed some assault rifles and grenade launchers being delivered to them in Colombia.”
“Rook, you were in Colombia?”
“You’d know that if you ever asked me how my month was.” He dabbed a fake tear from his eye with his napkin. Then he grew pensive. “Do you know Faustino Velez Arango?”
“Sure, the dissident writer who disappeared.”
“Justicia a Guarda are the dudes whose small army broke him out of his political prison and snuck him underground last fall. If your priest was mixed up with those guys, I’d start taking a hard look at them.”
Nikki finished her cosmo. “You had me worried, Rook. I thought we were going to go the whole night without a wild, half-baked theory.”
On their walk back to his loft it had warmed just enough for rain to mix with the ice pellets. The cruiser that was following them pulled alongside, and The Discourager lowered the passenger window. “You two sure you won’t take a ride?” She thanked him and waved it off. Heat could accept protection, but not a chauffeur.
She opened a bottle of wine while he flipped on the eleven o’clock news. The reporter live on the scene of a manhole explosion in the East Village said, “When the rain came down, it washed road salt away and it corroded a junction box, causing the blowout.”
“And the itsy bitsy spider went up in about a gazillion pieces,” said Rook. Nikki handed him his glass, then killed the TV during the teaser for the shooting in Brooklyn Heights. “I can’t believe you don’t want to see it. Do you know what some people do just to get on the news?”
“I lived it all day,” she said, slipping off her shoes. “I don’t need to see it at night.” He opened his arms wide, and Nikki nestled herself into him on the sofa, burying her nose into the open throat of his shirt, breathing him in.
“How are you going to work things out with Montrose?”
“Hell if I know.” She sat up, cross-legged on the cushion beside him, taking a sip of her wine and resting her palm on his thigh. “I don’t even know what to make of him, he’s so not Montrose to me. The attitude, and the behavior—that’s the tough thing. Searching the rectory, roadblocking my case. I don’t get it.”