“Oh sure,” Parker agreed, even though he’d never had any problem following American ways or doing what Americans do.
“Anyway,” Genero said, squeezing a little lemon into one of the tea glasses, and then picking it up, “this guy at the deli told our colleagues your cousin was dating quite a few girls...”
“That’s news to me,” Kiraz said.
“Well, that’s what we wanted to talk to you about,” Parker said. “We thought you might be able to help us with their names.”
“The names of these girls,” Genero said.
“Because this guy in the deli didn’t know who they might be,” Parker said.
“I don’t know, either,” Kiraz said, and looked at his watch.
Parker looked at his watch, too.
It was twenty minutes past three.
“Ever talk to you about any of these girls?” Genero asked.
“Never. We were not that close, you know. He was single, I’m married. We have our own friends, Badria and I. This is America. There are different customs, different ways. When you live here, you do what Americans do, right?”
He grinned again.
Again, Genero didn’t know if he was getting smart with them.
“You wouldn’t know if any of these girls were Jewish, would you?” Parker asked.
“Because of the blue star, you mean?”
“Well... yes.”
“I would sincerely doubt that my cousin was dating any Jewish girls.”
“Because sometimes...”
“Oh sure,” Kiraz said. “Sometimes things aren’t as simple as they appear. You’re thinking this wasn’t a simple hate crime. You’re thinking this wasn’t a mere matter of a Jew killing a Muslim simply because he was a Muslim. You’re looking for complications. Was Salim involved with a Jewish girl? Did the Jewish girl’s father or brother become enraged by the very thought of such a relationship? Was Salim killed as a warning to any other Muslim with interfaith aspirations? Is that why the Jewish star was painted on the windshield? Stay away! Keep off!”
“Well, we weren’t thinking exactly that,” Parker said, “but, yes, that’s a possibility.”
“But you’re forgetting the other two Muslims, aren’t you?” Kiraz said, and smiled in what Genero felt was a superior manner, fuckin guy thought he was Chief of Detectives here.
“No, we’re not forgetting them,” Parker said. “We’re just trying to consider all the possibilities.”
“A mistake,” Kiraz said. “I sometimes talk to this doctor who comes into the pharmacy. He tells me, ‘Oz, if it has stripes like a zebra, don’t look for a horse.’ Because people come in asking me what I’ve got for this or that ailment, you know? Who knows why?” he said, and shrugged, but he seemed pleased by his position of importance in the workplace. “I’m only the manager of the store, I’m not a pharmacist, but they ask me,” he said, and shrugged again. “What’s good for a headache, or a cough, or the sniffles, or this or that? They ask me all the time. And I remember what my friend the doctor told me,” he said, and smiled, seemingly pleased by this, too, the fact that his friend was a doctor. “If it has the symptoms of a common cold, don’t go looking for SARS. Period.” He opened his hands to them, palms up, explaining the utter simplicity of it all. “Stop looking for zebras,” he said, and smiled again. “Just find the fucking Jew who shot my cousin in the head, hmm?”
The time was 3:27 P.M.
In the movies these days, it was not unusual for a working girl to become a princess overnight, like the chambermaid who not only gets the hero onscreen but in real life as well, talk about Cinderella stories! In other movies of this stripe, you saw common working class girls who aspired to become college students. Or soccer players. It was a popular theme nowadays. America was the land of opportunity. So was Japan, apparently, although Ruriko — the prostitute in the film all these people were waiting on line to see — was a “working girl” in the truest sense, and she didn’t even want to become a princess, just a concert violinist. She was about to become just that in about three minutes.
The two girls standing on line outside the theater box office also happened to be true working girls, which was why they were here to catch the four o’clock screening of the Japanese film. They had each separately seen Pretty Woman, another Working Girl Becomes Princess film, and did not for a moment believe that Julia Roberts had ever blown anybody for fifty bucks, but maybe it would be different with this Japanese actress, whatever her name was. Maybe this time, they’d believe that these One in a Million fairy tales could really happen to girls who actually did this sort of thing for a living.
The two girls, Heidi and Roseanne, looked and dressed just like any secretary who’d got out of work early today...
It was now 3:46 P.M.
...and even sounded somewhat like girls with junior college educations. As the line inched closer to the box office, they began talking about what Heidi was going to do to celebrate her birthday tonight. Heidi was nineteen years old today. She’d been hooking for two years now. The closest she’d got to becoming a princess was when one of her old-fart regulars asked her to come to London with him on a weekend trip. He rescinded the offer when he learned she was expecting her period, worse luck.
“You doing anything special tonight?” Roseanne asked.
“Jimmy’s taking me out to dinner,” Heidi said.
Jimmy was a cop she dated. He knew what profession she was in.
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah.”
In about fifteen seconds, it would be 3:48 P.M.
“I still can’t get over it,” Roseanne said.
“What’s that, hon?”
“The coincidence!” Roseanne said, amazed. “Does your birthday always fall on Cinco de Mayo?”
A couple sitting in the seats just behind the one under which the Gucci dispatch case had been left were seriously necking when the bomb exploded.
The boy had his hand under the girl’s skirt, and she had her hand inside his unzippered fly, their fitful manual activity covered by the raincoat he had thrown over both their laps. Neither of them really gave a damn about whether or not Ruriko passed muster with the judges at Juilliard, or went back instead to a life of hopeless despair in the slums of Yokohama. All that mattered to them was achieving mutual orgasm here in the flickering darkness of the theater while the soulful strains of Aram Khacaturian’s Spartacus flowed from Ruriko’s violin under the expert coaxing of her talented fingers.
When the bomb exploded, they both thought for the tiniest tick of an instant that they’d died and gone to heaven.
Fortunately for the Eight-Seven, the movie-theater bombing occurred in the Two-One downtown. Since there was no immediate connection between this new outburst of violence and the Muslim Murders, nobody from the Two-One called uptown in an attempt to unload the case there. Instead, because this was an obvious act of terrorism, they called the Joint Terrorist Task Force at One Federal Square further downtown, and dumped the entire matter into their laps. This did not, however, stop the talking heads on television from linking the movie bombing to the murders of the three cabbies.
The liberal TV commentators noisily insisted that the total mess we’d made in Iraq was directly responsible for this new wave of violence here in the United States. The conservative commentators wagged their heads in tolerant understanding of their colleagues’ supreme ignorance, and then sagely suggested that if the police in this city would only learn how to handle the problems manifest in a gloriously diverse population, there wouldn’t be any civic violence at all.