“All this presumes, of course,” Lisa Dyson observed, “that he’ll talk to us. It would be very much in character for him to say,” she gave Jagerman an angelic smile, “please forgive my French, Doctor, `Screw you. Don’t talk to me. Just do what I say.’ ”
These American girls, Jagerman thought. Their language is worse than a Dutch prison warden’s. “Don’t worry, young lady,” he replied. “He’ll talk. Your excellent study makes that clear. That dirty little Arab boy from the desert the kids all ridiculed once is now going to become the hero of all the Arabs by imposing his will on the most important man in the world. Believe me, he’ll talk.”
“I hope to Christ you’re right.” Eastman had been following Jagerman with feelings that were a mixture of his skepticism of the psychiatrist’s trade and his desperate hope that this man could provide them with the answers they needed. “But don’t forget, Doctor, we’re not dealing here with some wild-eyed terrorists holding a gun against a little old lady’s head. This man has the power to kill six million people in his hands. And he knows it.”
Jagerman nodded. “Quite right,” he agreed. “But what we are dealing with are certain immutable psychological patterns and principles. They apply to a chief of state just as well as they do to a terrorist gunman. Most terrorists see themselves as oppressed luminaries striving to avenge some wrong. Clearly, the man we have in front of us here is a luminary, a true religious fanatic, which complicates matters, because religion can always radicalize a man, as we all saw in Iran with Khomeini.”
Jagerman glanced toward Lisa Dyson, an approving, paternal air in his regard. “Once again, your portrait is most instructive. He knows that you Americans, like the English, the French, even the Russians, think he’s crazy. Well, he’s going to prove you’re wrong. He, that miserable, despised Arab, is going to force you to make his impossible dream come true. And to prove to you he’s not as crazy as you think he is, he’s ready to pay the final price: to destroy you and himself and his own people if he has to to get his way.”
Angelo Rocchia glanced at the group of men warming their hands by the old coal stove in one corner of the office of the pier boss of the Hellenic Stevedore Company. Dock bosses. Italians mostly, with a token black in their circle, the Mob’s reluctant concession to the pressures of the times. In their leather caps, their faded lumberjackets and dungarees, they were a casting man’s dream for a remake of On the Waterfront. Their conversation was a series of guttural grunts, a mixture of English and Sicilian, touching on sex and the cold, money and the Knicks, punctuated by regular hostile glances at Angelo and the FBI man beside him.
No one, the detective knew, was as unwelcome on the docks as a cop. Those guys, he thought cheerfully, have got to be going crazy trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing here. Beyond the office, from the huge pier of the Brooklyn Ocean Terminal, Angelo could hear the snarl of forklift trucks, the clang of metal, the grinding of the cranes hoisting pallets of cargo out of the holds of the four ships tied up to the terminal’s wharves.
It was a soup-tonuts pier, one of the few piers left in the Port of New York that still handled the old loose cargo slung onto the pallets, an anachronism in the days of containerized cargo.
Angelo remembered the old days when everything had come in on pallets and the longshoremen went at them like a rat pack, eating away at their loads at every stage of their progress along the docks. Pilferage then had been a fringe benefit of being a longshoreman.
Not anymore. Everything was containers now. Three, four days it would take to unload by crane and hand the ships tied up at the terminal. Across the bay, in the modern container ports at Elizabeth and Newark, they took off thirty tons in half an hour, snapped a hustler, a tow cab onto each container and drove it away. The savings to the shippers were enormous and the conversion had probably saved the Port of New York.
It had done something else too, and Angelo was well aware of what it was.
It had turned the port into a smugglers’ paradise. Customs had to pay the cost of busting open a container, unloading it and repacking it while the shippers stood by screaming bloody murder because their shipment was being harassed. As a result, the random sampling of goods for Customs’ purposes had been practically abandoned. Customs just didn’t touch a container unless they had hard intelligence on it. You could run a hundred barrels of whatever this stuff was they were looking for across those docks over there in Jersey, Angelo reflected, and there was no way in the world anyone would find out what you were doing.
He rubbed his eyes and turned his attention back to his methodical progress through the manifest of the Lash Turkiye, fifty-two cargoes, each one different, it seemed, each loaded in a different port. Already he had picked up two shipments that had fitted into the frame they were looking for. There was nothing in the last dozen cargoes. Wearily, Angelo tossed the manifest on top of the others he had already finished and reached for the next one in the pile before him.
As he spread it out on the table, he felt a familiar rumble in his stomach.
“Hey,” he called to the pier boss. Tony Piccardi was seated at a long counter in front of a row of bank-teller-like windows. “That restaurant, Salvatore’s, over there on Fifth Avenue. It still open?”
Piccardi looked up from the documents he was checking for one of the truckers standing in front of his window. “No. The old guy died a couple of years back.”
“Too bad. He made a manicotti you wouldn’t believe.”
Jack Rand glanced impatiently at his detective partner. Bullshitting. Since he arrived he had spent half of his time bullshitting with these guys, mostly in Italian. Impatiently, the young agent flicked over a page of his manifest. He started at the sight of the first entry on his new page.
“I’ve got one,” he called, his voice sliding sharply upward with excitement.
Angelo leaned over and followed Rand’s finger across the manifest.
Shippers: Libyan Oil Service, Tripoli, Libya.
Consignees: Kansas Drill International, Kansas City, Kansas.
Marks and Numbers: LOS 8477/8484.
Quantity: Five pallets.
Description: Oil Drilling Equipment.
Gross Weight: 17,000 tbs.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “that’s a live one all right. Better call it in.”
Rand moved off toward the phone, and Angelo went back to his own manifest.
It was the shortest one he’d studied, listing barely a dozen items. Guy owns this ship, Angelo mused, can’t be making much money. He went quickly through the usual run of Mediterranean products: Greek olive oil in tins, Syrian copperware. He stopped short at the word “Benghazi.”
That had a familiar ring. Uncle Giacomo. That’s where the British captured Uncle Giacomo in 1941. In Benghazi, Libya. He studied the entry.
Shipper: Am Al Fasi Export, Benghazi.
Consignee: Durkee Filters, 194 Jewel Avenue, Queens.
Marks and Numbers: 18/378.
Quantity: One pallet.
Description: 10 barrels of Diatome.
Gross Weight: 5,000 tbs.
Angelo thought for a second. Ten barrels, so each one weighed five hundred pounds, well below the size they were looking for.
“Hey, Tony,” he said to the pier boss. “Take a look at this.” He thrust the manifest at Piccardi. “What’s this stuff?”
“Kind of white powder. Busted-up seashells.”
“What the hell do they use that for?”
“I don’t know. Filtering water, I think. Swimming pools, you know?”
“Sure. I use mine all the time.” Angelo noted the word “Filters” by the name of the consignee. “You know this ship?”