A Walk Among the Tombstones

I called Brooklyn Information and tried to find a listing for a Raymond Callander, or an R or RJ Callander. The operator pointed out that there were other ways to spell that last name, and checked more possibilities than would have occurred to me. Spelled one way or another, there were a couple of listings for R and one RJ, but the addresses were way off, one on Meserole in Greenpoint, another way over in Brownsville, none of them anywhere near Sunset Park.

Maddening, but then the whole case had been like that from the beginning. I kept getting teased, making major breakthroughs that didn't really lead anywhere. Turning up Pam Cassidy had been the best example. From out of nowhere we'd managed to produce a living witness, and the bottom-line result of that was that the cops had taken three dead cases and shoved them all into a single open file.

Pam had provided a first name. Now I had a last name to go with it, and even a middle name, all thanks to TJ with an assist from Bellamy. I had an address, too, but it had probably stopped being valid at about the time the phone was disconnected.

He wouldn't be all that hard to find. It's easier when you know who you're looking for. I had enough now to find him, if I was able to wait until daytime, and if I could allow a few days for the search.

But that wasn't good enough. I wanted to find him now.

IN the living room, Kenan was on the phone, Peter at the window. I didn't see Yuri. I joined Peter, and he told me that Yuri had gone out to look for more money.

"I couldn't look at the money," he said. "I was getting an anxiety attack. Rapid heartbeat, cold damp hands, the whole bit."

"What was the fear?"

"Fear? I don't know. It just made me want to do some dope, that's all. You gave me a word-association test right now, every response'd be heroin. A Rorschach, every ink-blot'd look like some dope fiend bangin' himself in a vein."

"But you're not doing it, Pete."

"What's the difference, man? I know I'm gonna. All it is is a question of when. Beautiful out there, isn't it?"

"The ocean?"

He nodded. "Only you can't really see it anymore. Must be nice living where you can look out at water. I had a girlfriend once, she was into astrology, told me that's my element, water. You believe in that stuff?"

"I don't know much about it."

"She was right that it's my element. I don't like the others too much. Air, I never liked to fly. Wouldn't want to burn up in a fire or be buried in the earth. But the sea, that's the mother of us all, isn't that what they say?"

"I guess."

"That's the ocean out there, too. Not a river or a bay. That's just nothing but water, straight on out, farther than you can see. Makes me feel clean just to look at it."

I clapped him on the shoulder and left him looking at the ocean. Kenan was off the phone, and I went to ask him how the count stood.

"We got a shade under half of it," he said. "I been calling in every favor I got coming and Yuri's been doing the same. I got to tell you, I don't think we're going to find a whole lot more."

"The only person I can think of is in Ireland. I hope this looks like a million, that's all. All it has to do is get past whatever rough count they give it on the spot."

"Suppose we shoot some air into it. If every pack of hundreds is short five bills, you got a tenth again more packs."

"Which is fine unless they pick one pack at random and spot-count it."

"Good point," he said. "First glance, this is going to look like a good deal more than what I handed over to them. That was all hundreds. This has about twenty-five percent of the total in fifties. You know there's a way to make it look like a lot more than it is."

"Bulk it up with cut paper."

"I was thinking with singles. The paper's right, the color, everything but the denomination. Say you got a stack, supposed to be fifty hundred-dollar bills, total of five grand. You dummy it up with ten hundreds on top and ten on the bottom and fill in with thirty singles. 'Stead of five grand you have a little over two grand looking like five. Fan it, all you see is green."

"Same problem. It works unless you take a good look at one of the dummied-up packets. Then you see it's not what it's supposed to be, and you know right away, no argument, that it was phonied up that way to fool you. And if you're a nut case to begin with, and you've been looking for an excuse to murder all night long-"

"You kill the girl, bang, and it's over."

"That's the trouble with anything flagrant. If it looks as though we're trying to screw them-"

"They'll take it personally." He nodded. "Maybe they won't count the stacks. You got fifties and hundreds mixed, five thousand to a stack, half that in a stack of fifties, how many stacks are we talking if we come in at half a mil? A hundred if it's all hundreds, so call it a hundred and twenty, thirty, something like that?"

"Sounds right."

"I don't know, would you count it? You count in a dope deal, but you've got time, you sit back, you count the money and inspect the product. Different story. Even so, you know how the big traffickers count? The guys who turn upwards of a mil in each transaction?"

"I know the banks have machines that can count a stack of bills as quickly as you can riffle through it."

"Sometimes they use those," he said, "but mostly it's weight. You know how much money weighs, so you just load it on the scale."

"Is that what they did at the family enterprise in Togo?"

He smiled at the thought. "No, that was different," he said. "They counted every bill. But nobody was in a hurry."

The phone rang. We looked at each other. I picked it up, and it was Yuri on the car phone, saying he was on his way. When I hung up Kenan said, "Every time the phone rings-"

"I know. I think it's him. When you were out before we had a wrong number, some guy who called twice because he kept forgetting to dial two-one-two for Manhattan."

"Pain in the ass," he said. "When I was a kid we had a number that was one digit off from a pizzeria on Prospect and Flatbush. You can imagine the wrong numbers we got."

"Must have been a nuisance."

"For my parents. Me and Petey, we loved it. We'd take the fucking order. 'Half cheese and half pepperoni? No anchovies? Yessir, we'll have it ready for you.' And fuck 'em, let 'em go hungry. We were terrible."

"Poor bastard in the pizza place."

"Yeah, I know. I don't get many wrong numbers these days. You know when I got a couple? The day Francey was kidnapped. That morning, like God was sending me a message, trying to give me some kind of a warning. God, when I think what she must have gone through. And what that kid's going through now."

I said, "I know his name, Kenan."

"Whose name?"

"The one on the phone. Not the rough half of their rough-and-smooth act. The other one, the one who does most of the talking."

"You told me. Ray."

"Ray Callander. I know his old address in Queens. I know the license plate on his Honda."

"I thought he had a truck."

"He's got a two-door Civic, too. We're going to get him, Kenan. Maybe not tonight, but we're going to get him."

"That's good," he said slowly. "But I have to tell you something. You know, I got in on this because of what happened to my wife. That's why I hired you, that's why I'm here to begin with. But right now none of that means shit. Right now the only thing matters to me is this kid, Lucia, Luschka, Ludmilla, she's got all these different names and I don't know what to call her and I never met her in my life. But all I care about now is getting her back."

Thank you, I thought.

Because, as it says on the T-shirts, when you're up to your ass in alligators you can forget that your primary purpose is to drain the swamp. It didn't matter right now where the two of them were holed up in Sunset Park, didn't matter if I found out tonight or tomorrow or never. In the morning I could hand everything I had to John Kelly and let him take it from there. It didn't matter who brought Callander in, and it didn't matter if he did fifteen years or twenty-five years or life, or if he died in some side street at Kenan Khoury's hands or at mine. Or if he got away scot-free, with or without the money. That might matter tomorrow. It might not. But it didn't matter tonight.

It was very clear suddenly, as it really should have been all along. The only thing of importance was getting the girl back. Nothing else mattered at all.

YURI and Dani came back a few minutes before eight. Yuri had a flight bag in either hand, both bearing the logo of an airline that had vanished in mergers. Dani was carrying a shopping bag.

"Hey, we're in business," Kenan said, and his brother beat his hands together in applause. I didn't start clapping, but I felt the same excitement. You'd have thought the money was for us.

Yuri said, "Kenan, come here a minute. Look at this."

He opened one of the flight bags and spilled out its contents, banded stacks of hundreds, each wrapper bearing the imprint of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

"Beautiful," he said. "What'd you do, Yuri, make an unauthorized withdrawal? How'd you find a bank to rob this hour of the night?"

Yuri handed him a stack of bills. Kenan slipped them from their wrapper, looked at the top one, and said, "I don't have to look, do I? You wouldn't ask me if everything was kosher. This is schlock, right?" He looked closely, thumbed the bill aside and looked at the next one. "Schlock," he confirmed. "But very nice. All the same serial number? No, this one's different."

"Three different numbers," Yuri said.

"Wouldn't pass banks," Kenan said. "They got scanners, pick up something electronically. Aside from that, they look good to me." He crumpled a bill, smoothed it out, held it to the light and squinted at it. "Paper's good. Ink looks right. Nice used bills, must have soaked 'em with coffee grounds and then ran 'em through the Maytag. No bleach, hold the fabric softener. Matt?"

I took a real bill- or what I assumed was a real bill- from my own wallet and held it next to the one Kenan handed me. It seemed to me that Franklin looked a little less serene on the counterfeit specimen, a little more rakish. But I would never have given the bill a second glance in the ordinary course of things.

"Very nice," Kenan said. "What's the discount?"

"Sixty percent in quantity. You pay forty cents on the dollar."

"High."

"Good stuff don't come cheap," Yuri said.

"That's true. It's a cleaner business than dope, too. Because who gets hurt, you stop and think about it?"

"Debases the currency," Peter said.

"Does it really? It's such a drop in the bucket. One savings-and-loan goes belly-up and it debases the currency more than twenty years' worth of counterfeiting."

Yuri said, "This is on loan. No charge if we recover it and I bring it back. Otherwise I owe for it. Forty cents on the dollar."

"That's very decent."

"He's doing me a favor. What I want to know, will they spot it? And if they do-"

"They won't," I said. "They'll be looking quickly in bad light, and I don't think they'll be thinking of counterfeit. The bank wrappers are a nice touch. He print them, too?"