Caller unknown, p.26
Caller Unknown, page 26
Ed could hear the voices in Benzema’s office but not make out the words. Silhouettes moved in front of the glass, arms occasionally gesticulating. During the afternoon, two associates were summoned by Raffaella. They came, heads bowed, dragging their feet, and shortly afterward emerged with empty cardboard boxes in their hands, escorted by Fallows. Fallows took the condemned to their desks, allowed them to gather their personal possessions and escorted them to the elevator bank.
The two terminated associates had probably billed more hours than Ed that year. It was another clue to his special status: he was untouchable.
The clock slowly circled. His last day at Merriweather’s was approaching its end, as was his life in Miami and his life with his wife and unborn child. He could not think about Sarah and the child for long. He had to believe he would somehow find them again after tonight.
Midafternoon, the phone rang on his desk. Ed started out of his reverie. It was Godin.
The surgeon was brusque. “Mr. Cruz, despite frequent reminders from my nurse I see that you have yet to schedule your procedure.”
“It’s been a busy time,” Ed answered.
“Well, Mr. Cruz, there’s no point being busy when your health is at risk. Delay is not an option.”
“Yes, sir, I understand,” Ed answered.
“With the holidays coming my schedule is nearly full. Please call my nurse at the earliest opportunity.”
“You have my word,” Ed answered.
He put the receiver down. If Godin was personally hustling him, things must be moving fast.
More partners and associates came and went. The empty boxes were produced again and Fallows’ death march repeated. Others went in to Benzema like condemned men but left smiling, clutching envelopes undoubtedly informing them of promotions or bonus payments.
More time passed and still Ed was not summoned. Too bad. It was approaching the official knocking-off time. If Benzema was saving him for one of her after-hours schmoozes it was too late.
On the stroke of five he got up, grabbed his coat and briefcase and hustled out. Raffaella stared at him, her mouth slightly open, but if she said something Ed didn’t hear it, because he was already at the elevator bank.
He exited the Merriweather building. First stop was an ATM to get cash for Shannon, then a cab to Allapattah. He was just about to cross the road to the bank opposite when his eyes fell on the headline displayed on a nearby newsstand: “POLICE KILLED IN HIGHWAY GUN BATTLE.” The Dade County Wars were at their height, so the headline was not a surprise. But, despite this, it arrested him. It was November and mild in the Sunshine State, but he suddenly felt cold. He dug in his pocket for change and bought a copy of the paper.
The Herald didn’t give every fatal shooting in the Miami Dade area in 1989 the front page—there were any number of those drug cartel incidents—but the death of Shannon Quincy had made it there, principally because she took two policemen with her.
According to the report, it began when a traffic cop pulled her over for running a red light in Hialeah Gardens that morning. She had been driving her partner’s El Camino over the speed limit. Instead of producing a license as requested, Shannon brought out a pistol from the dash and shot Officer Logan Patrick through the right eye.
A high-speed pursuit followed until Shannon’s vehicle was cornered beneath an underpass on the Don Shula Expressway. Despite being cautioned to surrender, Shannon continued to return fire. An unlucky shot caught another officer in the jugular and he bled out at the scene before paramedics could save him. The other cops, a dozen or more at the final count, reported that Shannon had not taken cover behind her vehicle but stood in front of it as she took down the second policeman. In return, she was hit by eight police bullets. The phrase “suicide by cop” was used by the reporter.
Ed stared at the newspaper without moving, as the bustling pedestrians on the sidewalk divided either side of him.
The blood of dead men. As with Catrine, so with Shannon. His body, every corpuscle, felt numb, was invaded by that deadly cold. There was a thin keening in his mind like a barely audible radio frequency.
He realized he was drawing attention to himself, standing stock-still in the middle of the busy sidewalk. There was a Cuban café across the street where he sometimes took breaks. He went in and ordered a coffee, then promptly forgot its existence. It took a few moments for his eyes to clear so he could continue reading. The report was nothing but thorough: the writer had covered some ground to get all this into the evening edition. Motives for the shooting were at best anecdotal. The sad sequence of foster homes; the minimum wage jobs; the bad relationships; the opioid addiction… They had discovered all this very quickly, it seemed to Ed. As if they had a privileged source who knew everything about Shannon.
The police had visited the Allapattah apartment. Here was a new twist: Nate and Alice Mae were missing. The police recovered what was described as Black Power literature inside, most notably the autobiography of the Panther Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide. A note next to the book written in Shannon’s hand cast doubt on Newton’s murder earlier that year by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family, and ascribed it to FBI-sponsored assassins. Ominously, Shannon’s note ended with Newton’s assertion about Malcolm X and black liberation: “Only with the gun were the black masses denied this victory. But they learned from Malcolm that with the gun, they can recapture their dreams and bring them into reality.”
Neighbors on NW 15th Avenue reported violent arguments emanating from Apartment 2C over the course of several weeks. They expressed neither surprise at nor understanding of Shannon’s actions—she was largely unknown to all of them. However, her downstairs neighbor, Jakub Zielinski, seventy-eight, was reported as being shocked by events and was quoted as saying that Shannon was incapable of doing what had been done that morning.
Ed rifled through the inner pages looking for any continuation. There was none. It seemed the moment the story had dropped it had taken the front page, fully formed.
He tried to get his breathing and heart rate under control. He somehow knew his visit last night had killed Shannon, and the two policemen as well. His first instinct was to call Sarah. He went to the diner pay phone, numbly picked up the receiver and loaded in a dime, then thought better of it. The house phone could be bugged. He hit the coin return and went back to his seat.
There was nothing in the report that made sense apart from Zielinski’s statement. He agreed: the Shannon he had met last night was incapable of these actions. She was downtrodden, down on her luck, addicted, yes, but nevertheless hopeful of escaping her situation. He was confident she would have fled with the cash he was going to bring her. There had been none of those revolutionary books visible in 2C last night. In fact, there hadn’t been any books at all apart from the baby ones. They must have been planted there after the event. The Black Power theory was beyond bogus. It was a Typhon play. The Panthers had been dissolved seven years before. Newton’s murder had been widely reported as a narcotics-related killing.
The deaths of the two officers would cause a nationwide furor, an outcry against the defunct Panthers: even those now pursuing careers in mainstream politics would be derided as ex-terrorists, their reputations tainted by association with Shannon’s actions.
There was a purpose here: a perpetuation of the race war, the threat level increased nationwide, public paranoia, cries for more law enforcement, more funds for the FBI, more liberal arms regimes… Who benefited? A right-wing, militaristic government intent on repressing the people. Maybe one day, when the fear levels were ratcheted to maximum and anarchy loomed, the people would accept a right-wing dictatorship.
Nate and Alice Mae had disappeared. Why? If Shannon had acted alone as suggested, why had Nate fled? Shannon’s description of Nate’s courtship came back to him. The guy falling over backward to make nice, interspersed by violent outbursts. The sudden move to Miami, the pressure to have a kid. At first, he had thought Nate was just some kind of manipulative asshole.
Now he began to wonder whether Shannon’s partner had had an agenda all along. He had wanted a child, nothing more. He had used Shannon.
A suspicion dawned on him. Why were all the children on the Lot untraceable? After their rescue on Highway 11, surely someone would have come forward to claim at least one of them? Despite nationwide and international appeals, no one had. The conclusion had been that the abductors had killed every single one of their parents, a theory that statistically was vanishingly unlikely.
So where had the kids come from? What if they were the product of the same kind of honey trap as the one that had existed between Shannon and Nate? One partner lured in, rendered powerless, abused; a child produced, the excess partner gotten rid of in a Typhon-inspired act of violence, or, if not biddable, coldly assassinated, the child taken to whatever new compound had taken the place of the Lot. Kill the Vessel, abduct the child. Simple. A much more familiar story in the United States, where this narrative of partner homicide and child abduction happened virtually every day.
His head spun. Vessels. It had never occurred to him what the description on that recovered piece of paper from the Lot had meant. Now he knew: more robot agents were being produced for Typhon’s war. Maybe right now there were Nates out there looking for the next vulnerable single woman. Or vice versa: women looking for a vulnerable male.
He presumed Alice Mae had now gone into the same kind of hell as the Lot. Not Maine, but somewhere else, like the wilds of Wyoming or the deserts of New Mexico, thirty minutes from the nearest road. Another house with lonely, desperate children who would never be heard of until the day they were released, unwitting, upon the world.
And then it came to him. As with Shannon, so with him. Was his relationship with Sarah a lie? Whatever could be said of men surely could be said of women. How well do we ever know our partner?
He reviewed his relationship years: the first meeting in the Over and Under, the first date, the Paris story, the disengaged relatives at the funeral and at the wedding, the unexpected job offer at Merriweather’s, everything that had followed…
He knew the Miami life was a lie. Was his marriage one as well?
He paid up, left the diner and hailed a cab. Twenty minutes later, he was at NW 15th Avenue. By now it was after six and getting dark. There was not much going on outside the apartment considering the notoriety of the crime committed that morning. By now the police forensics van was gone, and any reporters had lost interest. Even the cops, who had no doubt posted an officer outside on the sidewalk for the hours after the shooting, were gone.
The police tape fluttered in the breeze. There were no gawkers. From when he had worked as a legal intern before Merriweather’s, Ed knew the period of interest in an accident or crime was about the same time as the police presence at the scene. The minute the cops went, the story was over.
Nevertheless, he told the driver to go past Shannon’s apartment. He saw that the parking lot hosted the same rusted, semi-derelict cars as the previous night, the leaves of the shade trees fallen dead and sere on their hoods. But as they cruised down the road he saw something else. Some five driveways down, a black Cadillac was parked at the curb. Tinted windows, the heat of its exhaust distorting the warm evening air as it idled. A black shark, out of place in this neighborhood.
The sidewalks and porches were curiously deserted, as if sensing the menace from the car. He told the driver to circle back on the parallel street. He paid the guy off and took a service back alley parallel to NW 15th, counting the blocks until he came to the fence of the Zielinski/Quincy block. He stood on a dumpster and took a peek over. There was a scrappy communal back lawn laid with buffalo grass. The upper apartments were dark, but there was a single light on in the lower apartment. It fell on the back stoop, where there was a canopied swing bench with a figure sitting on it. A shock of white hair glowed in the shadows: Zielinski.
Ed took hold of the top of the fence panel, got a foothold on a cross-strut and levered himself over. He landed quietly in the buffalo grass. The yard looked like it had been cultivated some time ago, maybe when Mrs. Zielinski was still alive, but now the lawn was shin high and the borders were overgrown with weeds and untrimmed bushes. He wondered how to approach Zielinski without giving the old guy a shock, but when he looked again Zielinski had stood up and was staring right at him. Zielinski jerked his head toward the apartment, as if telling Ed to follow him, and disappeared through the screen door into the kitchen. The light went out. Darkness fell on the garden.
Ed went at a crouch to the porch and, looking around the dim yard to check he wasn’t observed, slipped through the screen door. A match snapped and there was Zielinski’s underlit ghost face.
“Good thing these old eyes’re still good,” he said. “Here,” he added curtly, and applied the match to the stub of a candle that stood in a wax-pooled saucer on the kitchen table. The space came into view. It was a mirror image of Shannon’s combined kitchen/living room above.
“Sit,” Zielinski said.
Ed pulled out a chair, his eyes fixed on that ghostly white face. He was about to speak, but Zielinski held up his hand. “I know why you’ve come. You want to find out the truth. Same as me.”
It was muggy in the apartment, but Zielinski was wearing a ragged cable-knit sweater as if against a chill. The sleeve on his right arm had ridden up and there was a numerical tattoo as blue as his veins on his forearm. Zielinski saw the direction of Ed’s stare. “The Warsaw Ghetto. I was one of the few of my unit to survive. I escaped through the canals, threw away my gun, but was rounded up anyway. I survived Treblinka.” Before Ed could interject, he held up his hand.
“Spare your sympathy. Braver men committed suicide.”
Ed looked up to the ceiling at Shannon’s apartment, then back at the old man. “Can you tell me what happened?” he said.
Zielinski didn’t respond directly. “These walls and ceilings are thin. You hear everything, even when you’re old. Always the arguing. Then the blows. I should have called the cops, but she always said, ‘Don’t call them, Jakub. Nate’s OK. I’ll figure it out.’ I shouldn’t have listened. Now she’s gone.”
He was silent a beat. “It was late. I had the TV on, the sound was up, not because of my hearing, but mostly not wanting to hear them upstairs. Anyway. Cars arrived outside. The curtains are pretty thin—the lights shone through. I peeked. It was Nate’s truck and another car, quite a fancy sedan, pulling up into the lot. I thought, hope Nate’s sober and there’s not another argument. The headlights went out and I saw two men crossing the lot and going up the steps to 2C. Nate and a stranger. This is unusual. Neither of them ever have people around. I turned the TV down. Maybe I heard there was, I dunno, like a note of surprise when the door opened upstairs, then I guess the stranger’s voice. He says something quite short, a couple of sentences, then there’s nothing more—that I heard, anyway. Least there was no screaming and shouting. I think that’s good. Maybe they’re all sitting down and having coffee. My show ends. Like most nights, there’s not much to do after the show. But I don’t sleep too well. Don’t even need too much sleep. That comes later.
“Just then I hear the two guys coming down. Nate says to the other guy something like, ‘She going to be OK until the morning?’ The other guy answers. He sounds smooth, not like Nate at all. ‘Relax, she’ll be quiet as a mouse until the call comes.’ Then they go out, leave Nate’s pickup and take the guy’s car, and I’m thinking maybe they went to a bar or something. Good riddance. At least it’s all quiet upstairs. No baby crying, nothing.
“They didn’t come back that night as far as I know. But the next morning, I’m up at first light. It’s still all quiet upstairs, which is unusual. Normally the baby’s crying. I’m just wondering if I should check on them when I hear this sound that I never heard before. Like a bird, you know, chirping but electronic.”
“Like a cell phone ringtone?” Ed asked.
“Could be. Never heard one. Leastways, the sound cuts off, so I guess she answers it. A minute later I hear the door upstairs. I go out and there’s Shannon coming down the steps. No baby. She has this handbag, which ain’t like her, but she’s not carrying it on her shoulder but in her arms, like it’s Alice Mae, and there seems something heavy in it.
“‘You OK?’ I ask, but she just brushes past and heads down to the pickup in the lot. ‘Hey!’ I say, but she don’t even look back, just unlocks it like one of them hypnotized people, fires it up and takes, off down 15th. Transmission’s whining, rubber’s burning. She don’t even shift gears, it’s like in first and she’s going forty or more.
“First thought I have is she flipped and just run out on Alice Mae and no one’s at home looking after the baby. So I grab my spare key and go up there. Crib’s empty, but there’s this strange noise. It’s that cell phone the social worker gave her. It’s on. There’s this tinny voice coming out of it and I pick it up and have a listen. It’s a recorded voice, you know, like a robot on a science fiction show. It’s repeating this message over and over. Makes no sense, sounds like the Bible but something I don’t know. Something about wheat and barley and oil and wine.”
Ed felt the room spin.
“You OK, son?” Zielinski asked.
Ed held up a hand. “It’s alright. Go on.”
Zielinski said, “Midday, I turn the news on, same as always, and there it is. Not naming names, but two cops and a young black woman dead in a shootout. News helicopter over an underpass, and there’s that old El Camino with its driver door open and a sheet covering something on the ground next to it. I dunno what I did. I guess I just stared at the screen.
“Not long after, the cops and reporters were here like a swarm of flies. Well, I guess you read the papers—it’s all in there.” He smiled grimly “’Cept it ain’t. Nothing about that cell phone. Guess they took that as evidence. Then there’s those commie books they said she’d been reading. I been up in that apartment dozens of times. Never a book in sight. And Shannon with a gun? That’s a joke. Maybe you can tell me what’s going on, mister?”
