Brainquake Read online

  She walked with her head up and her back straight.

  From a distance came the crying, the baby in that carriage busting its lungs to live in the world of savagery it had been born into.

  Like Zara had cried, a baby sitting on her father’s knee, her mother standing beside them proudly, the three of them posing for the newspaper cameras the day her father, Ray Zara, became the first colored Captain of Detectives. He never liked the word colored, preferring Negro to the day he was hammered to death in a Harlem race riot.

  The same savage world had awaited the baby sitting on Ray Zara’s knee, now working as the first black female Homicide Detective First Class, battle-scarred, with five citations for bravery, and as contemptuous of pithy epithets as her daddy had been. Nigra, nigger, colored, now black. What would they next change the color of black to?

  Her mind turned to Frankie Troy. The dead man rankled her.

  If he had no record, she had nothing. If he had no friends, she had only the widow’s word based on Frankie’s word that a man called Black Psycho had threatened his life. She only had the widow’s word about the ten thousand dollars Frankie supposedly owed.

  If she could find out what business transactions Frankie Troy was involved in, maybe she’d have something to go on. But Michelle Troy looked to be no help there.

  Was Black Psycho an actual psycho, a psych ward patient, a medicated schizophrenic? Or was it just a sobriquet, a nom de guerre? In gutter business or pavement conning, characters called each other psychos. Like Crazy Eddie wasn’t really crazy. Just his prices were insane.

  Her watch said 10:30. Kelleher should be finished checking Frankie Troy’s prints. Zara was banking on those prints. She had to know all about Frankie Troy before she could go after his killer.

  A sudden roar made her look up. A news helicopter was hovering above the carriage. They were filming three men wheeling a big machine down the ramp of the Bomb Squad van, moving it across grass to the side of the carriage. One officer waved the helicopter away but it remained. A second camera was on the crying baby.

  Zara pulled out her gun, aimed it at the cameras. The chopper swept off like a hawk.

  Would she have fired? Didn’t matter. What mattered was, they believed she would.

  Reputation. It cost something, but it was worth something too.

  * * *

  Paul watched Zara put her gun away. He’d seen her first only at a distance, a woman crossing No Man’s Land. Not a single cop ran out to order her behind the cordon. Which meant she was a cop herself. When she got closer, he saw who she was. Black female detective, over six feet tall—there was only one. The Boss had told him about Zara, how she’d shot a pirate who killed a bagman and got away with his bag of cash. Zara tracked down the pirate, who drew first. She shot him between the eyes, read his rights to the corpse. In the hijacked bag was $12 million, which she turned over to her captain. The pirate was black. The Boss said that Zara was color blind when it came to homicide.

  Paul looked over toward the ambulance, saw Ivory Face sitting up, watching the scene anxiously. He wanted to go over to her, find out if she was all right, tell her she didn’t have to face this alone.

  But when he made a move in her direction, the cop on the Blood Bay drove Paul back to his spot.

  * * *

  Zara watched the Bomb Squad ready the X-ray. If there was a bomb…if it exploded with that baby still on top of it…

  What happened six years ago could happen again. Six years ago Tolly Coleman used the headline BLACK MAN BLOWS UP WHITE WOMAN WITH GRENADE to cause a riot. A massacre—fourteen blacks had been killed. The men who held the bats, the pipes, the bricks were punished, sentenced, but Coleman? Coleman’s weapons were words. Zara failed to nail Tolly Coleman with multiple murder.

  Of course Tolly Coleman was dead now. Four months later Tolly Coleman had raped a 15-year-old black girl in her basement. In court, found guilty, Tolly Coleman went berserk, seized a cop’s gun, shot him, ran out into the street shooting people, and was shot dead by another cop in front of the traffic-jammed Criminal Courts Building.

  But Tolly Coleman’s organization, White America First, was still alive. The headline BLACK PSYCHO MURDERS WHITE BABY could bring another massacre.

  But then, hell, so could BLACK PSYCHO USES WHITE BABY TO KILL ITS FATHER.

  Zara had to talk to the Police Commissioner. He’d listen to her. A battalion of cops at the White America First headquarters would be enough to stop them from using this incident as a reason to butcher more blacks.

  She would speak to the Commissioner right after the Bomb Squad did its job.

  But the baby came first.

  5

  Caked blood stung the baby’s face. Its howls could be heard all over Central Park. Zara squatted down beside the three men at the foot of the carriage.

  She had seen baby skeletons in the remains of fires; hoisted from a rotted barge; under garbage; in stinking wooden boxes abandoned by mothers; in sewers, attics, excavation dumps.

  Now—through the powerful X-ray machine—she saw, for the first time in her life, a tiny skeleton screaming for help. From the moving skull to the moving phalanges, she saw a living skeleton thrashing, wailing.

  Charlie pointed. “The extension’s a different make.”

  Zara ignored the dead wire holding up the toy monkey to focus on the extension spliced to it and continuing through tiny metal rings behind the upholstery of the carriage.

  Charlie felt her body trembling against his.

  “You okay, Lieutenant?”

  “Are you?”

  “No,” Charlie said.

  Zara’s eyes followed the extension down the side, snaking under the comforter to end fastened to the trigger. The small gun was snugly wedged in a wooden box. The muzzle was between the tiny tarsal bones of the baby’s kicking feet.

  Charlie said, “A pro would’ve used more metal rings to make sure the extension wouldn’t snag.”

  “But it didn’t snag.”

  “No, it didn’t.”

  “Is that shape under the pelvis the bomb?”

  “No, that’s part of the carriage.”

  “Under the femur?”

  “No. It’s under the spinal column.”

  She saw a small, round area of darkness on the X-ray. “You sure that’s what it is?”

  “Uh-huh. See that thinner wire that blends with the cartilage?”

  “No.”

  “Lowest vertebra.”

  “Still can’t see it.”

  “Near the disk?”

  “Still can’t see it, Charlie.”

  “Hidden behind the markings of the gun butt.”

  “Thin as a strand of hair?”

  “That’s extension number two tied to the trigger.”

  “Two wires on the trigger?”

  “Uh-huh. When the wire pulled the trigger that fired the gun, the second extension simultaneously activated the agitator over here.” He pointed.

  “But then the bomb’s a dud, Charlie. It didn’t go off.”

  “It’s reverse action. Weight keeps it from exploding.”

  “The baby’s weight?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You mean lift the baby—and it blows?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The three men rose, stretched their legs. Zara followed them to the van twenty feet away. Charlie gave her an auxiliary suit and the four donned their padded gear. They returned to the carriage. The crying of the baby grew louder, the repetitive earknifing squeal of a trapped and wounded cat.

  Charlie moved to one side of the carriage, George beside him. Joe squatted across from them on the other side and gestured to Zara who squatted beside him. All wore protective gloves but Charlie.

  Silence fell over the crowd as they watched. They didn’t know what was happening, but they knew something was.

  Zara watched Charlie lowering his hands. His nails were cut short. She saw Charlie’s flesh vanish and then, through the baby’s ribs,
his finger bone-tips appear, creeping along the squirming skeleton toward the small round object under it.

  This time she could make out part of the mechanism inside the object…a mechanism like the works inside a tiny watch.

  “One inch right,” Joe said.

  Zara watched Charlie’s bone-tips moving right in direct line with the object. Seeing them through the bomb, through the baby, made Zara hold her breath.

  Charlie sneaked five finger bones, palm up, under the skeleton as he sneaked his other finger bones toward the object. Bonetips touched it. The skeleton shifted partially off the object.

  “Careful!”

  Charlie’s bone fingers in unison stopped the shifting.

  “Back one,” Joe said. “Left three quarters of an inch.”

  Zara watched finger bones move the squirming skeleton back above the object.

  “On target,” Joe said.

  Finger bone-tips repeated the procedure, slowly shifting the skeleton with one hand, slipping the other hand toward the object. The skeleton of a fly landed on the tiny jaw bone, at the corner of the skull’s mouth. Zara watched finger bone-tips coming at her, creeping over the object until it was completely covered.

  Then she saw the bone fingers pressing down hard on the object.

  “Now,” Charlie said.

  George lifted the baby. The skeleton fly took off. Flesh returned.

  George hit the ground face down, covering the baby with his body. Zara hit the ground on the other side. Charlie raced with the object in his cupped hands to the van, Joe running beside him. Charlie thrust his hands into the van. Joe carefully closed the door until it reached Charlie’s hands.

  Charlie jerked empty hands out as Joe slammed the door shut. The blast shook the van. Earth trembled. The crowd shook.

  Joe swung the door open. Smoke burst out from the van. Zara heard the siren. Through the swirling black and gray smoke she caught a flash of the ambulance coming toward her. Shedding suit and gloves swiftly, Zara took the baby from George, still howling, but free now, safe. She hugged him to her breast.

  “Get that carriage to the lab!” Zara said.

  Paul saw her running with the baby toward the ambulance, climbing in, saw Ivory Face reach for her baby as the doctor, inside with them, pulled the rear door shut. The crowd’s silence broke, sound erupting again, some applause, some cheers, some shouts. But the balance shifted quickly, away from euphoria. Resentment swept the people, escalated as the police raised batons and tried to disperse the crowd. All the tension, pent up, had to go somewhere. One man stepped past the barricade, demanding something loudly of the policeman in front of him. Then another. Then all the barricades were going down.

  6

  One of the first swept up in the press of bodies, Paul crashed into the Blood Bay, which reared, throwing the cop. Hoofs missed Paul by inches.

  Dodging them cost him his footing. Paul rolled and skidded and crashed into others buffeted like leaves in a cyclone.

  Panic took over.

  Paul ran, slipped, ducked behind a bench. Took an elbow to the eye. Through a haze he saw the ambulance carrying Ivory Face speed away, siren screaming. People were chasing after it on foot. Journalists, maybe. Maybe spectators. It was like trying to catch up with a bullet in flight.

  Another elbow, and Paul went down. In one corner of his brain he could see himself running in the rain at 12 and suffering his first attack, the first of the splitting headaches…or was he 14 then?…it was the headache that eventually led to his brainquake…

  …at 14 running in the rain he saw for the first time pink rain…

  …at 15 running in the rain he found refuge in a bookshop from the storm…he had never seen so many books…

  …he picked up a book and rain from his clothes dropped on it…it was called 100 FAVORITE POEMS…he didn’t know what a poem was…

  …he wiped the rain off and opened the book and one word stood out like a giant: SOLITUDE…the words were not like words in the books he read…there were only three or four words on a line…more words under it…sometimes only one or two words…he read the whole line…he read the whole poem…he read words that danced for him and words that he understood and words that understood him and were about him…words about being alone and liking to be alone…

  …and that night, at the table in the shack, he tried to write his first poem, but it was hard to find words that meant what he felt…and he devoured every new word he could…

  …at 16 he rode in the rain with his father, known all up and down the West Side as Barney the Bookie…a name Paul had loved hearing as a boy, it was so musical…and they collected small racing bets at different stores where the owner took bets for Barney…

  …then his father gave him $10 a week to walk a route around the Battery and collect the bets that were given to him in envelopes…once when his father found scribbling on the back of an envelope and was puzzled and read the scribbling aloud, “The last horizon never goes away, it is there to stay day after day,” Paul told him it was a poem he wrote, and his father was proud until Paul told him he wanted to be a poet, and his father was upset…because though Paul would never get a normal job for many reasons, he couldn’t feed himself writing poems…Paul had to have a job that came with security, a paycheck while he did it and a pension after, so he wouldn’t die a bum looking for handouts…and Barney only knew one person that would give Paul a steady job like that…Paul could write his poems at night, and have security for the rest of his life…

  7

  The baptism of Pegasus Storage and Moving Company in 1902 was held on a triangular dirt lot in New York City. Thousands came to hear President Theodore Roosevelt reminisce about Pete Pegasus, who rode with Teddy’s Rough Riders in Cuba in 1898.

  Decades later skyscraper snobs dubbed Pegasus “Flatiron Island” because of its snub-nosed prow and wide stern. The current ten-story structure housing offices and storage room, built in 1919, occupied the same triangular block.

  The Lilliputian island in the turbulent sea of traffic was dwarfed by the world’s tallest office buildings. At its south end was Police Headquarters. At its tip, the PEGASUS DELIVERY sign over the entrance with its trademark, a winged horse.

  In the eye of the horse was a concealed camera.

  In a small stone cell on the seventh floor a 60-year-old was sitting by the window watching traffic on a monitor when a blue pickup pulled to a stop. The lettering on its door read INTERBOROUGH TRANSIT. The man noted the time on a long yellow pad and watched the blue-clad driver open the rear door and drag out a big canvas mailsack bulging with parcels that he carried into the building.

  The 60-year-old man turned to another monitor and saw the driver emerge from the elevator on the eighth floor and advance to the camera to insert his card in the wall slot. An iron door slid open. He stepped into a small office. The door slid shut.

  The watcher returned his attention to the traffic outside.

  * * *

  Mr. Yoshimura was at his desk checking brown-paper-bound stacks of cash. In front of him on six monitors his crew was sorting bills in denominations of $20 and $50 and $100. Four musical chimes rang. He glanced up at the number 28 blinking red on the wall. He pushed a button. The blinking stopped. He pushed a second button. A wall bin opened up. The bin was between the windowless Receiving Room and the blue-clad driver in the small office. The driver’s hands began dumping parcels from his canvas bag into the waist-high bin. The driver’s face could not be seen.

  On the other side of the bin, men tossed the parcels on a long metal table. Others cut them open, dumped cash on the table. Others fed the empty parcels into a mammoth shredder. Others fed the cash from the table into four automatic X-ray machines to detect counterfeit bills.

  On each of the X-ray machines was the name of their former owner: UNITED STATES TREASURY.

  A bell rang. Machine #3 ejected a flurry of $100 bills that fell into the slot for funny money. The bills were brought to Mr. Yoshimura, wh
o banded and bagged them, stapled the bag to a yellow card, and neatly wrote “28” on it. When the X-ray machines finished their screening, the cash was dumped into a big basket that was put in the dumbwaiter. Mr. Yoshimura placed the bagged bills with their yellow card on top of the rest of the cash, pushed a button. The dumbwaiter started its ascent.

  * * *

  Bossing the Laundry Room on the ninth floor, Mr. Grigor watched the dumbwaiter ascend to a stop, plucked the phony bills from the yellow card, and brought them to his desk as a man dumped the basket out on a long table. While his crew separated the denominations and fed the bills into three counting and packaging machines (also stamped united states treasury), Mr. Grigor fanned the bills that had been marked 28 on the yellow card and examined them with his good eye.

  Near him, Moe Scolari, placing stacks of cash on a long table, knocked over a stack. In domino fashion several stacks tumbled to the floor.

  “Why so nervous, Moe?”

  “I need another century, Mr. Grigor.”

  “You already owe me a hundred twenty-five.”

  Mr. Grigor glanced at his watch, pulled out a slip of blue paper from his shirt pocket, checked the coded drops and amount for the day. Moe picked up the fallen stacks and neatly arranged them on the table.

  “I’m hurting, Mr. Grigor.”

  “I’m no bank.” Turning to a bony man checking stacks on another table, Mr. Grigor said, “Eleven A.M. Drop 92. Five hundred thousand.”

  The bony man drew a small leather notebook from his upper vest pocket, and an old Waterman pen from the other pocket, unscrewed the top, neatly code-entered time, drop, amount. Dangling on his watchchain was a gold fob. His cufflinks were gold.

  “How about you, Mr. Hendrix?” Moe said.

  “A penny loaned is a penny flushed down the toilet.” Hendrix closed the pen, shoved it back in vest pocket, began to place stacks of bound cash in a basket.

  Mr. Grigor pulled out three twenties and a ten from his pocket. “Here’s sixty, Moe,” handing over the twenties. “Makes a hundred eighty-five you owe me.”