Hark! (21 page)

“Would you recall the name on that card?”

“Come on, willya? How do you expect me to remember…?”

“Or what kind of card it was?”

“We honor all the major credit cards here. How do you expect me to…?”

“Is the cashier's office open now?” Ollie asked.

“The credit card slips from last Wednesday are long gone, if that's what you're think…”

“Gone
where
?” Ollie asked.

 

T
HAT
N
AZI BASTARD
Deaf Man had kept him awake most of the night, so Meyer had come to work early this morning, arriving at the tail end of the Graveyard Shift, with only Fujiwara and O'Brien here in the squadroom, the rest of the 8-7's courageous team out preventing crime in these mean streets.

Now, in the comparative 6:30
A.M.
stillness, no phones ringing, no keyboards clattering and clacking, he tried to make some sense of what they'd got so far. Copies of all the delivered notes were spread across his desktop. A copy of the list of plays plundered by Mr. Adam Fen was close at hand. All he had to do was piece it all together, ha!

Compared to all this Shakespearean lore, the earlier anagrams seemed elementary. Well, perhaps not. On their simplest level, the quotes were telling them:

• 1) This is going to be Shakespeare 101, kiddies.
  
• 2) I am going to dribble out the information bit by bit, piece by piece.
  
• 3) I am going to use darts as my weapon.
  

Perfectly clear.

But on the Deaf Man's turf, nothing was ever what it seemed. All was illusion and deception, a showoff smirking at them, telling them how goddamn smart he was while they were so goddamn stupid.

So what
else
was he trying to tell them?

Was there something here other than the obvious “Shakespeare, boys! Patience, girls! Darts, anyone?”

He set aside the anagrams, looked at the Shakespearean quotes again. Arranged them in order on his desktop. Okay. If the Deaf Man had chosen to start with
shakes
and then
spear
, he was without question telling them “Shakespeare.” Step to the head of the class. Shakespeare. We're finished with all the anagrammatic fun and games, kiddies, and now we're moving on to more scholarly matters. Graduate school, kiddies.

Okay.

So what next?

More
spear
quotes.

Spear-grass, boar-spear,
and
venom'd spear.

All right, separate the non-spear words, maybe there's something there.

Grass, boar, venom'd.

Anything?

Not that he could see.

Well, grass was pot, and a boar was a pig, and venom was poison.

Pot, pig, poison.

Still nothing.

He looked more closely at the
arrows
notes.

Broke his arrows.

Slings and arrows.

Narrow lanes.

The
arrow
buried in the
narrow
of the last note.

The unrelated words were
broke, slings
, and
lanes.

Nothing there, either.

How about the darts?

Thither he darts it.

Darts envenomed

Advanced and darts.

Thither, envenomed, and advanced.

Mean anything to you, Meyer, old boy?

No? Then how about the three kings he'd chosen?

Beats three jacks any day of the week.

Raise you a dollar.

Henry the Fourth, Richard the Third, Richard the Second.

Fourth, third, second.

Four, three, two.

Hold it…

The numbers were getting smaller.

Four, three, two.

Well, maybe that was an accident.

No, with the Deaf Man, nothing was accidental.

He was giving them information in
reverse
order!

Four, three, two. Spears, arrows, darts.

Moving from larger to smaller, in effect heading
backwards.
Zeroing in on the weapon he would use.

Their reasoning yesterday had been right on the mark.

The Deaf Man's weapon would be darts.

No question about it.

They had broken the code.

 

I
N
A
MERICA
, it is not a crime to be a drug addict.

This means that you can walk into any police station and announce, “I am a drug addict,” and they will tell you to run along, sonny. Unless you're in possession of drugs. That's another matter.

In this city, the subsections of Article 220 of the Penal Law define the various degrees of criminal offense for possessing any of the so-called controlled substances listed in Section 3306. There are a lot of them. More than a hundred and thirty of them. Some of them you never heard of. Unless you're addicted to them. Like, for example, Furethidine. Or Alfentanil.

In the eyes of the law, you can be a drug addict, but you cannot possess any of the narcotics that make you an addict. If this sounds somewhat bass-ackwards, consider the law that makes it a crime to solicit a prostitute. The pertinent section of the Penal Law's “solicitation” articles reads:

“A person is guilty of patronizing a prostitute when he patronizes a prostitute.”

Swear to God.

This means you cannot go into a police station to confess that you're either a prostitute or have just patronized a prostitute because then you're guilty of two separate crimes, whereas if you say you're a drug addict you're not guilty of anything but being a damn fool.

That's why the girl who delivered the first note that morning at 8:30
A.M.
freely admitted that she was a drug addict who'd been approached in Harrison Park in Riverhead by a girl with long black hair who'd paid her a hundred and fifty dollars to deliver this here letter here, but she did not mention that she was also a prostitute who'd been working the park all night long the night before.

This was her prerogative here in the land of the free.

 

“A
H-HA
!” M
EYER SAID
. “This time we're ahead of you, wise guy!”

The first note that Tuesday morning read:

“Romeo and Juliet,”
Willis said from the computer. “Act One, Scene Three.”

“Didn't he use that play before?” Parker asked. “ ‘To be or not to be?' Didn't he?”

“He's simply telling us he's doing it backwards. But we already
know
that, big shot!” Meyer said, and jabbed his extended forefinger at the air like a pistol.

“Now he's saying
hast
, “the friggin faggot,” Parker said, modifying his language in deference to the presence of a lady.

“He's telling us we're witless,” Eileen said.

“Telling us when we smarten up, we'll fall over backwards.”

“Is he gonna blow some poisoned darts at somebody's back?” Genero asked.

L
UIGI
F
ONTERO HAD
boarded Alitalia's flight 0413 at Milan's Linate airport at 4:05
P.M.
yesterday. He'd spent two hours and fifteen minutes on the ground in Frankfurt and was scheduled to arrive here at 9:00
A.M.
It was now twenty minutes to ten, and he still wasn't here. Carella, waiting in the area just outside Customs with his mother and what appeared to be ten thousand other people, was beginning to get itchy. He'd told the lieutenant he'd be in by eleven o'clock latest. Now he was beginning to wonder.

“Do you think we should ask again?” his mother said.

“Mom, they said a half-hour late.”

“That was forty minutes ago.”

“He'll be here, don't worry.”

For the occasion, his mother was wearing a simple pale blue suit and French-heeled shoes. She would not have her hair done until the day before the wedding; she was wearing it now in a youngish bob under a cloche hat Carella's grandmother had probably worn as a Twenties flapper, blue velvet with blue satin trim. Her brown eyes sparkled. She kept looking at the clock across the hall.

“You don't think anything's…?”

“No, Mom, they'd've told us.”

“Sometimes they don't,” she said.

“Everything's fine.”

“These days,” she said, and let the sentence trail.

It had occurred to him, too.

He, too, looked at the clock.

 

H
ONEY
B
LAIR HAD NOT
told Hawes about the shooter's note, and she felt absolutely rotten about keeping such vital—well, probably not—information from him. But she justified this by telling herself the Note wouldn't be of much value, anyway, fingerprint-wise, since it had been passed from hand to hand at yesterday afternoon's meeting. Besides, the overnights had shown that during her second defiant challenge to the shooter at a quarter past six yesterday, ratings had soared.

So, naturally, whereas she wanted Cotton to catch the guy who was trying to kill him, at the same time she hoped he wouldn't catch him too soon, not while she was enjoying the kind of celebrity she'd only dreamed about before now. It was one thing to have some guy ask you to sign his program at a concert; it was quite another to be stopped on the street, six seven times in a single morning, people telling her “Go get him, Honey!” or “We're with you, Honey!”

Celebrity was a funny thing.

People could turn on you in a minute—witness the whole Michael Jackson circus—or they could suddenly make you their darling. She enjoyed being their darling. But of course she didn't want anyone hurting her own precious darling, who at that very moment was on his way to the orthopedist's office building downtown, not because his foot was hurting him but because Jefferson Avenue wasn't the Eight-Seven where nobody never saw nothing nohow.

Actually, Honey wished him luck.

 

L
UIGI
F
ONTERO CAME STRIDING
out of Customs wearing a brown silk suit with a matching brown-and-yellow striped tie over a beige shirt, a brown homburg tilted rakishly over one eye. He looked like Rossano Brazzi about to seduce Katherine Hepburn, all grins, hopeful expectation in his eyes.

When he spotted Carella's mother, he rushed to her at once. They fell into each others' arms like young lovers who'd been parted by war or famine. Luigi kissed her. Kissed Carella's mother. Not on the cheek, or even both cheeks the way Europeans did, but full on the lips, Carella's mother, a real smackeroo, right there in front of her own son.

“You are so beautiful,” Luigi told her.

Carella wanted to retch.

“How are you, Steve,” Luigi said at last, and offered his hand.

Carella accompanied them to the baggage claim area, listening invisibly to his mother's questions about the flight and the food on the flight, and the weather when Luigi left Milan, and when his relatives and friends would be arriving, listened to Luigi's answers, hearing him call Carella's mother “Luisa,” his eyes never leaving her face, calling her “
cara mia
” and “
tesora bella
,” kissing her again and again, not on the lips, on the nose instead and the forehead and the chin, not offering to help when Carella yanked first one heavy suitcase, and then another, off the carousel, Luigi's arm around Carella's mother's waist, Luisa's waist,
cara mia
's waist,
tesora bella
's waist, her head on his shoulder, the big furniture-maker from Milan, Luigi Fontero.