“She’s an animal, Joe. Up at four A.M., works out two hours a day. Did you see those calf muscles? No wedding ring. No engagement ring. You ought to see the way she eyes you when you’re not looking. It’s been two years now for you, Uno. A man has physical needs.”
“Eating and sleeping.”
“Also, notice how she stopped pestering us for a gun?”
I sighed. “She has a gun, Eddie? How the hell did she get it?”
“She’s out half the time in the foreign neighborhoods. How the hell do you think she got it?”
He was right, I realized. If she’d stopped asking, she was armed. And who was I to stop her? She’d provided weapons to me in Brazil.
“Where is she today, Dos?”
“Brazilian neighborhoods again. Newark yesterday. Astoria today. Restaurants. Social clubs. Churches. Garages. We’re still trying to figure, what connects those three cities? New York, Philly, and Newark?”
“They’re close to one another. They’re linked by rail lines and multiple highways. I wonder if we’ve got one group moving around. Not several.”
“Izabel’s been trying to get her guys back in Brazil to track down that Indian, Cizinio, and ask more questions.”
I did not tell Eddie about the talk I’d had with Ray concerning Izabel, and accusations against her back home. I was protective of the person who’d saved Eddie and me.
“There’s some concern about Captain Santo,” Ray had said.
“Concern?”
“Look, I know she saved your ass down there. But she’s a problem for her own people. I checked. Turns out she was assigned to Rondônia after being sent away from the east. She may have been involved with the police death squads.”
I’d started. I’d heard a little about these, but Ray knew more. “Death squads?”
“Secret groups that operate in the favelas, the slums, taking out gang members, drug runners. Big scandal there. She’s under internal investigation, and so was the officer with her, Salazar, the one who got killed.”
But if Ray had sought to make me less sympathetic to Izabel, he’d accomplished the opposite. Because I had done exactly what she was accused of, a couple of years back. There was a man dead in Norway, and another in Russia, because I had murdered them. They kept me up at night sometimes, as a breeze coming through my window in Massachusetts, a silvery slit of moonlight that shouldn’t be there at 2 A.M. It’s nothing, I’d think. Natural. But deep inside I believed it was them, and I knew that I would hurt them again if I had another chance.
A good friend of mine, the dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, once asked me if I believed in God. When I said I did, she told me, “Well, if you believe in God, then you don’t have to play God. What a relief.”
“That’s an excuse for doing nothing,” I’d replied.
And so I’d told Ray, “I don’t care what she’s done. Izabel was with us when you were four thousand miles away.”
“Fair enough. But you’re responsible if she screws up. Can’t you give her busy work, keep her off somewhere?”
“Is that how you handle people you want frozen out? Give them shitty work?”
I had to hand it to Ray. He stuck to his principles. His voice went low and angry. “Joe, grow up. You’re not trained in handling crime scene work. You haven’t the slightest idea how easy it is to fuck things up so a perp goes free on a technicality that you never knew existed. You demand autonomy. Pride, Joe! You got your unit because of threats, but you’re damn right I keep you three away!”
My reaction upon hearing his accusations against Izabel was curious. Both Eddie and Aya had — in their own way — underlined her as a desirable woman, but it was Ray who put me over the line.
Death squads? Joe Rush, what’s the matter with you? You hear that and then you pay more attention to her?
But the answer was easy. I knew which side she served. I’d seen it up close.
I’d been a one-man death squad, too.
When she came back to the office that night I noticed — in a different way — how her rump swayed when she walked, how she seemed to move forward on her toes, with a kind of eagerness, head high, shoulders back, posture superb. Her perfume seemed more interesting, and the way her long, wild, frizzy hair framed her heart-shaped face and made her glow. I felt a surprising stirring — the kind that I thought was dead. I’d not slept with a woman since my fiancée was killed two years ago. I’d not dated anyone, or acted on any slightest interest, if I felt it. I’d turned away Aya’s mother. I did not want to be responsible for anyone else getting hurt because of me.
I did not want soft.
But that evening I was shocked that something in me had relaxed. I didn’t do anything about it. But I knew I felt it.
Go figure, I thought.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” I told Ray. I hadn’t, though. Izabel would use her language skills here, and contacts back in Brazil, use them her own way.
Twenty minutes before I saw what I had missed in Brazil, the clue, I groaned inwardly, seeing the crowd waiting for Eddie and me outside a Riverside Drive apartment building. The co-op was one of those prewar edifices housing people powerful enough to arrange with city hall for a private speech. Trees lined 89th Street. So did well-kept brownstones and a couple of redbrick apartment buildings. Any pedestrians out were walking toward the corner building where Eddie and I would give our talk.
Another waste of time, I thought, wrongly.
There was an ABC News van outside, antenna up. We pushed our way through the throngs fanning onto the sidewalk and around parked cars. The doorman beamed at us. The lobby was done up in Elizabethan decor: dark wood paneling, marble floor, multi-bulb chandeliers above overstuffed furniture on which sat more elderly residents, clapping, or holding canes. Rows of metal folding chairs held middle-aged and younger people: lawyers, publishing, or Wall Street types, applauding the heroes of the Amazon as we made our way to a long folding table by the elevator. I shook hands with the president of the block association. He thanked us for taking time from fighting the scourge as my eyes rose above the crowd to the lobby decorations. It took a moment. I felt it coming.
And there it was.
I froze, my tired resentment turning to astonishment.
Eddie sensed it. “One?”
The co-op president was saying, “Colonel Rush and Major Nakamura will tell us how to better protect our loved ones. And give us a heads-up on the latest progress in tracking down those responsible for this heinous attack.”
“One, what are you staring at?”
Eddie followed my gaze to the wall decorations. It was all folk art. Early Appalachian style; handmade quilts and paintings showing maple farmers in Vermont making slashes in trees, like rubber tappers did in Brazil. Pouring the syrup into tin cups, as rubber tappers did with latex. In one cracked oil, a trio of Mohawk Indians smoked pipes as early colonists planted corn, and an ox stood by, its tail swatting insects away. Flies probably.
Maybe mosquitoes.
“Shit,” I said, my voice magnified by the microphone.
Eddie covered the mike with his palm. People in the audience laughed uneasily. The condo president stared.
“The artwork!” I said.
“And?”
“Cizinio said the guards were always buying art from the Karitianas. After the lab was set up, Indians were barred from the island but the guards kept buying art!”
“So?”
I looked at the ox’s tail in the painting, swatting flies. “You told me they were fanatics, praying ten times a day. Jihadists, Eddie! We saw what they did in Iraq. Churches? Tear ’em down. Statues? Use sledgehammers. And send the pictures over the Net. They destroy other cultures. They don’t collect souvenirs. They’re five thousand miles from home. So why buy vases? Cizinio said there was even a man there telling them which work to buy.”