Notices in shop windows read:
— SORRY! ALL GRISTEDES SUPERMARKETS CLOSED.
— KNOW YOUR MOSQUITOES. LEARN TO TELL HARMLESS ONES FROM DANGEROUS…
— KEEP CHILDREN INSIDE AT DAWN AND DUSK.
He arrived at the folk art shop to find no FBI here. So far, so good. If they come, I will take many of them with me, he thought, fishing for the key, unrolling the steel grate.
Two p.m. No shipper showed up.
He called Singh, but got no answer. Probably the shipper was just running late. That was all.
Tom sat and tried to stay calm behind the cash register, surrounded by pottery, blowguns, paintings; plundered art from poor people the world over that his mother had made a fortune selling over the years, in her chain of shops around the U.S. At his back, leering war masks, mahogany boxes carved with gods of sickness or fertility. Whole cultures for sale. History for $20. Gods and devils arrayed like candy.
He turned on the TV, where Joe Rush was on television again, still at Columbia University, where his special unit was headquartered. The reporters never stopped going there. Like Rush was some sort of protective god.
“How did it feel to destroy a terrorist lab?” the journalist asked.
Everything had changed because of Rush. Only days ago there were thousands of insects awaiting transport from Brazil. Total ignorance in Washington. And then, because of Rush, one of those flukes happened upon which history can turn, as Hobart used to say. The Spanish Armada runs into a storm and thus ends an empire. The chauffeur driving Austrian Archduke Ferdinand makes a wrong turn, backs up to change direction, and stops in front of an assassin. World War One begins as a result.
And now the accidental discovery of a lab in the jungle threatened Tom’s plan.
Singh the shipper was ninety minutes late.
Tom told himself that in New York, everything runs late even normally. The Verizon repairman doesn’t show up. The subway halts between stops. The Governor of New Jersey shuts down the George Washington Bridge to take vengeance on a rival. Tom looked up to see taunting news footage from the Amazon, another sickening replay showing the martyrs in New Extrema, bodies in the jungle, because of Rush.
I’d like to just go up to 116th Street and wait for him to come out onto Broadway and kill him, he thought as his cellular rang and his heart leaped with hope that it would be Singh. But caller ID told him it was only Rebeca, trying to reach him for the second time in an hour.
He didn’t answer.
The reporter on TV asked Rush, “How did it feel to kill the terrorists?”
I knew those men. I prayed with them. I ate with them and recited poetry with them.
And then suddenly a voice called out, “Hello?” almost at the same time that the front buzzer sounded. A customer? Tom spun to see a stranger advancing into the shop. He realized with a sinking feeling that he’d seen the man twice over the last hour, passing outside, once going east, once west.
“You’re in trouble, sir,” the man said, as his hand disappeared behind his back.
Tom slid open the drawer behind the counter, hidden from the man’s sight. Inside lay a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol.
“Trouble?” he asked as the man’s hand came back into view.
The ID said NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. The man was slim, fit, young, clean-cut, like a gym rat or undercover agent. Military haircut. Shiny black shoes. Lightweight khaki jeans below a neat, tennis-style olive drab shirt. The clipboard meant nothing. The guy could be wired up. The soldiers could be outside, out back, on the roof.
“You’re the only shop open on this block,” the man said, seemingly more as an observation than accusation.
Tom shrugged good-naturedly. His Sig Sauer lay six inches from his hand. “Gotta make money.”
“Not a lot of customers out.”
“Tell me about it,” Tom groaned.
The astringent smell of DEET rolled off the man. You needed to apply the repellent every eight hours for it to work. It blocked mosquito taste and smell receptors, confused insects, caused them to fly away, not feed.
“Been in this location long?” The brown eyes flicked to a batch of blowguns jutting from a tall vase in a corner. They’d been stocked with insects a month ago, when the last shipment arrived.
Tom’s heart seemed to be beating louder than the man’s voice. It’s an adrenaline problem, not a fear problem. Maybe he’s really who he says he is.
Tom replied, “We leased the property twenty-five years ago. The neighborhood was worse then, rent low. Then it went sky-high. But we’re locked in for another year.”
“Did you know that you left a flowerpot in the alley out back, collecting rainwater? Mosquitoes can breed there. Surely you’ve seen our advisories about that.”
Tom felt air come back into the world. His hand moved back an inch in the drawer. “Sorry. I’ll empty it right away. Thanks,” Tom said.
“That’s not all. Your rain gutters are full of leaves. Standing water, sir! You must have seen the notices!”
“I’ll clean them right away,” Tom said.
The man eyed him distastefully. Are you making fun of me? He looked annoyed, but that was good. If he was federal, annoyed wouldn’t be his telegraphed emotion. Tom watched the guy’s hands. He was not wearing an earbud. The man glanced outside, but the street looked empty.
Why isn’t he writing a citation?
The inspector, if that’s what he really was, began wandering around the shop, peering at displays. His right hand scratched his lower back, and came back, again empty. Tom knew the trick. Do it twice and the quarry relaxes. The third time, bring out the gun.
“Venezuela, huh?” The guy held up a wooden death mask, to be worn at an Amazon funeral. A leering face.
“Orinoco River area,” Tom said.
“Go down there a lot? To Venezuela?”
Tom nodded. “On buying trips.” He tried to sound casual. “I guess I’m lucky. I had a supply of malarial medicines already because I take them when I go south.”
The man put back the mask and drifted to a large clay urn containing blowguns from Rondônia. The man raised a blowgun and peered inside. He sniffed it. Tom felt the steel of the Sig brush his fingers, in the drawer.
“Ever shoot one of these?” the guy asked.
“No.”
“Go to Brazil a lot?” the inspector asked casually.
“Beautiful country.” Tom nodded. “Hot.”
“Do Indians really use these things? Still?”
“They shoot darts coated with curare, anesthesia, which they extract from a fish. Get hit with one of those darts, it’d paralyze you,” Tom replied.
“A fish?” the guy said, looking surprised, and suddenly innocent. “No kidding.”
“All kinds of natural poisons down there,” Tom said. “Touch a certain frog, you stop breathing. Touch a caterpillar, your heart stops minutes later. Osmosis.”
“Lots of malaria there, too,” the guy said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Ever get it? Malaria?”
The man moved closer, and laid his clipboard on a shelf. Was he freeing up his hands? His eyes flicked outside, to the street. Microphones were so small now that they could be in a shirt button. Hell, a camera could be in a button. There was no way to know if the guy was alone.