F Train (11 page)

Flo regarded him quizzically. “Is this what you're intending to do? Kill someone?”

“Past tense. Intended. Let me give you the truth now, a whole truth and nothing but, so help me Yahweh, if He's still listening way up there. Yes, the Cossacks got my business, my antiques store, half my life. But that's not all they got. They got the other half, too. A man named William McCusker. Ex-priest, a onetime Jesuit. But don't hold that against him. He was the man I loved. My partner in business and my partner in life. The price they offered me for the business part, all of it, wasn't bad, but it wasn't too good either. So to help me make up my mind, as they put it, they stripped William and they burned William with lit cigars—”

“Oh, my God, the poor man.” If Flo were obliged to say whether she meant the cigar-burned William McCusker or the doomed and homicidal Paul Kaner, she would have found it almost impossible to give a precise answer. “I don't remember hearing any of this.”

“Nobody heard, but me.” Paul Kaner paused, lifted his glass, and put it back down again without taking a sip. “I heard all his screams. And I watched him get burned and kicked and urinated on. I had to watch the whole sado trip and I was tied and gagged. After all, the show was entirely for my benefit as sole legal owner of the business. ‘Faggot, nancy boy, cocksucker, butt fucker'…they wrote it all in lipstick, all over William's body. In great big scarlet letters. I mean, they really enjoyed themselves, the Cossacks, they had a swell time there on William.”

Flo watched Paul Kaner intently, but saw no change in his calm, nearly numb expression, until he half-smiled at her,
apologetically.

“So when I saw the pictures in the paper. And on TV. Of what happened on the F train, I thought about luck and destiny and things like that, if you know what I mean. ‘But dreadful is the mysterious power of fate.' That's from a Greek tragedy, and that's exactly what I thought when I saw one of the victims was one of the Cossacks, one of the same Russian pigs who tortured William. My God, was I ever elated. I was totally beside myself. You see, I signed right there, the night they put William through all that agony right in front of me…. I signed all the papers. Just to stop them killing him. I sold the shop and everything in it and they gave me a check and I took William home. We lived on Garden Place in the Heights, and I still do for the time being. I washed William and put antiseptic and salve on his burns, and gave him painkillers and he slept. He slept for almost four days, he slept almost all the time it seemed, and then he went into cardiac arrest and died. Just like that, quietly.
Coincidentally,
it was the same day their check cleared and got credited to my account. Russian businessmen. So I confess I was thinking about killing the sons of bitches, one by one. Until I saw those pictures in the paper. Someone beat me to it.”

Flo was stunned. “Could you? Could you really have done it?”

“I don't know. You really don't know until you've actually pulled it off, right? Listen, when I was a boy I was a hunter. I used to shoot. I shot deer and birds. I was raised in Oklahoma City, where my father owned a haberdashery, one of the few Jews in Oklahoma. Although I'm proud to say I lost my Okie accent years ago.” He sipped his drink and put the glass down on the bar. “But long ago I also lost the taste for hunting, for killing animals, even for killing buzzards and snakes. And then when I saw those pictures in the paper and online, and I spotted one of them, one of those Russian shits stretched out dead like he's fainted away drunk on the F train…my God, but I felt the same elation I did when I was a boy in Oklahoma and I shot an animal. Elation, quickly followed by shame. So to answer your question, could I really have done it? I don't know, maybe not. But I can't say for a moment there I wasn't glad someone else did it. And then I looked at those other bodies and I was immediately ashamed of myself…utter, abject shame.”

“Paul,” Frank said, his large hands opening as if in supplication. “I think I understand. I can get exactly how you felt, Paul, because something like that happened to me once, too. And I killed the guy who did it, the guy who shot my partner when I was a patrolman. Killing is never normal. I killed him and I felt great. And then right after that I felt as miserable as I've ever felt in my life. But there's just one thing here I really don't understand, Paul, about your business. What the hell do these Russians want with a goddamn antiques store, no matter how good it is?”

“It's an excellent laundry for dirty money. Even better than an art gallery. Even better than fake or overpriced Andy Warhols and Sol LeWitts.” He drank delicately from his glass of vodka and lime. “Naturally, I imagine these ‘businessmen' always have a great deal of cash to wash clean. So with an established, respected, really thriving antiques business—like mine was—they can do exactly that. Whiter than white. But you're right, I don't think it was the antiques that captured their imaginations.” Paul Kaner laughed, his joyless half-laugh.

Looking at the man, Flo never would have thought anything out of the ordinary ever happened to him. But Paul Kaner proved special. As much as he typified—no, surpassed—her opinion of bars as wells of sadness, places she preferred to avoid, she had to sit there and go right on listening to him. No matter how tempting the idea was to be elsewhere—to be out in Sheepshead Bay with Eddie—she couldn't head off now. This sad man captivated her, because he was on to something she needed.

“So there you are,” he said. “You've heard my whole confession, my dear friends. And may God help poor little old me. I trust it's of some value to you.” Paul Kaner stopped and his face twitched. His voice resumed the other tone, flat and near dead. “May it help you nail all the mean sons of bitches who killed on that subway train.”

“Are you willing to press charges against those thugs, for what they did to you and William?” Flo looked at him anxiously, gauging his reaction. “Would you testify against them if the DA asks you?”

For a moment, Paul Kaner sat in silence, perched straight-backed on the barstool, slowly sipping his vodka. Then: “I'd rather stay alive, thank you. And I don't mean to be snide or flippant. Or denigrate you and your worthy work. I'm not being facetious here. Because when it comes to business, I do have confidence in our police force, believe it or not, just ask Bucky. It's them I don't trust. The Russians. Or rather, just the opposite. I know exactly what they'd do to me—that much about the Russians you can take to the bank. William was constantly telling me to leave Brooklyn, get the hell out of New York. That I was too trusting, if not downright unthinking. The city is full of monsters…it's absurd to pretend we're even an ounce more civilized than anyone else in this world. We only have more money, that's all. Or we used to. William was screaming that night, screaming for his life, but who knows from screaming? Who pays attention here? You hear all kinds of noises, all the time. It could've been a television show and the volume up too loud.” He wrapped his feet around the bar stool legs and again held his glass with both hands in front of his eyes. “It's been very kind of you to hear me out. Ever since I sold the store and since William…Well, let's just say, I don't get to see many people very often. People avoid me. I'm too much trouble. Nothing's normal. My doctor tells me, ‘Winter kills, move before you die, Paul.' So I'm moving. To the desert. Palm Springs, here I come, my sunny cactus flowers, ready or not. Follow the doctor's orders, son. My God, Bucky, when the saints come marching in, what in the name of holy mother Marriott is this parade?”

Bucky glanced at the lounge. “It's interview night, almost every Saturday this time of year. Watch.”

In the lounge behind them, a long line of couples entered, filling each table, one pair per table. The young men wore black suits and white shirts, dark ties and black yarmulkes. The young women were in dark knee-length dresses. At the door between the lounge and the lobby, a late-middle-aged man with a bushy beard, a round black hat, and a long black overcoat planted himself as if standing guard, two young male acolytes at his sides.

Flo and Frank watched the performance in amazement. “The women all have identical hairstyles,” Flo said. “In fact, it looks like they have exactly the same hair.”

“Wigs,” says Paul Kaner. “They're probably some kind of Lubavitcher. The kosher Rockettes.
Fundamentalists.
They can't show their real hair in public. Or maybe they're even shaved bald—some of the women are, you know, in certain sects. It's so grim.”

Two servers hustled out into the lounge to take the couples' orders.

“What are they doing here?” Flo said.

“The men are interviewing the women,” Skelly said. “Some of them they've probably never even met before. Interviewing for marriage. They always sit in pairs, never two pairs together and nobody on the couches, always a table between them. No touching. And the rabbi stands there in the doorway making sure there's no hanky-panky, no swapping around. No talking between tables. Nobody orders anything but soda or tea, maybe ice cream, a slice of cake. It's a ritual, and only on Saturday nights. Our Russian friends often slip in and take up that last couch. With all this show going on around them, no one much notices they're here. Hiding out in full view.”

“I'll notice,” Paul Kaner said. “That's why I'm leaving…right now.” He slid off the bar stool and turned to the detectives. “Look, I'm sorry I can't do more to help you. But it's been a real pleasure meeting you, even if all too briefly. I do hope you understand. I must go home while I can still find my way. I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.”

“Before you go,” Flo said. “One more thing, Paul. Who's running the shop now?”

“Oh, her? You mean the redhead? Wait till you meet the redhead. She's got to be somebody's bimbo. Yes, by all means do talk to her. She's a beaut. She runs the store these days. I don't really know her, but who can say what you'll learn from that one, and she is a doozy, believe me. Just don't say I sent you, okay? You've never even met me, though I don't know who'd attack me now. I don't mean terrorists, not that kind of threat. What I'm really afraid of are nameless, formless things haunting my brain like Furies. I can get through a day comfortably only when some drinks knock this crazy fear out of me. Anyway, good luck with that redhead.” Paul Kaner stood, and walked away muttering to himself, weaving unsteadily toward the other end of the bar and the exit.

Flo took out her iPhone and dashed off a few notes to herself.
Antiques. Davidov v. Bastards? v. anyone else?
Returning the phone to her bag, she turned her gaze back to the lounge. “The store, Frank, for starters it's money laundering. Not for us to investigate, but we'll pass it on. And we'll definitely visit the redhead.”

“I'm not sure the Russians are coming tonight,” Skelly said. “Or they'd be here by now.”

He turned out to be right. An hour after the parade of young hopefuls entered the lounge—almost to the minute—on a signal from the rabbi, the couples rose and departed, the men poker-faced, the women beaming or brokenhearted.

But no Russians.

“Thanks, Bucky,” Flo said. “We'll keep in touch.” She had to hope the Russians hadn't somehow been tipped off.

10:20
A.M.

A pale winter sun peeked through the clouds over Bay Ridge.

Flo Ott mounted the top step of the now familiar red-brick stoop and rang the bell to Arlene Reilly's home. The two Reilly children were at church before having brunch with their grandparents.

In her briefcase, Flo carried her iPhone notes from her meeting with Marie Priester's mother. She felt anxious, but relieved that John James Reilly's widow agreed to see her again. So far the media had no inkling of the late special agent's multiple,
incommensurable
lives. If the likes of the
Post
's Terry Dangler caught so much as a sniff of this family's scandal, Arlene Reilly would have to barricade herself and her children against hordes of media bloodsuckers who made their living preying on others' tragedies.

Arlene Reilly's doorbell still worked, so far she hadn't disconnected the wires. And when the chimes tolled inside, sounding to Flo's ears like funereal church bells, she seemed to hear the mournful melody pursuing whomever was inside all the way down to a back room as though whatever joy might have still remained in this stricken home was ebbing away.

It took a while before Arlene Reilly opened the door.

“Thanks for letting me come again.”

The widow shrugged, said nothing, and led Flo toward the kitchen, where she stopped, looked over at the breakfast dishes still on the table, and turned back into the living room. The air smelled stuffy and stale, the living room was untidy, as though it hadn't been cleaned in several days.

Flo sat in an armchair while Arlene Reilly paced silently in front of the couch. In the short time since Flo last saw her, the widow had changed. Her hair needed brushing, her gaze was remote, dark circles under her eyes, her lips dry and cracked. She appeared uncomfortable with her own hands, taking them in and out of the pockets of her tan corduroy jeans. She wore a gray sweatshirt, on the front
Fordham Athletics
in maroon letters, and it, too, could have used a good wash.

“So okay, Lieutenant, what is it this time?” Her voice was tired, low and monotone.

Uncertain where to begin, Flo shifted in her chair. Reassuring Arlene Reilly was essential. Her best opening gambit was to surrender a solid piece of information to put the widow's mind, if not at ease, then at least less guarded, less resentful.

“Marie Priester was engaged to marry a lawyer at the firm where she worked. Her mother told me this. When she died, she was five weeks pregnant with his child.” Flo wasn't completely sure of this final attribution of paternity, but she knew for certain the baby wasn't John James Reilly's.

Arlene Reilly remained wretched. She stood stiffly as if scarcely relieved by this news, her eyes steadily inexpressive, revealing no thoughts.

“Why don't you sit down, Arlene, and let's agree we'll be open with each other.”

The widow dropped onto the couch and sighed. “What have I got left to hide? John James was away a lot, okay, I didn't know what he was up to. He could never tell me. After a while you start imagining all kinds of things, you know what I mean?”

“Did he usually go out with his service weapon, even off-duty?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“He liked his guns.”

“He had more than one?”

“Two more that I know of, both here in the house. They make me nervous now. But I don't know what to do with them.”

She paused as if weighing the consequences of an act, and abruptly stood up from the couch and walked over to a bookcase, reaching up to the top shelf and taking down a leather-bound volume of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. She opened the cover of the book and held it out for Flo to examine.

The book wasn't a book, just a box, no pages, and inside the box nestled in white plastic foam was a Glock 32 pistol.

Flo recognized the weapon at once, the same model Frank Murphy carried, a .357 with a law enforcement magazine capacity of thirteen rounds, a weapon with no other purpose than to kill someone. The same model she carried only when a situation looked as if a gun might be needed. A Glock 32 wasn't a sporting arm or a hunter's tool, but a gun capable at close quarters of blowing an exit wound as big as a breakfast bowl in another person, a gun far more likely to kill than injure. A gun that wasn't issued by the FBI.

“Did he always keep this in the house?”

“Only the last few months. He had another one just like it, locked in a drawer next to our bed. It's still there. He kept them both loaded.”

“Did he say why? Why he had loaded guns in the house?”

Arlene Reilly looked at a loss for explanation. “I didn't really ask, I didn't push. I had to assume he knew what he was doing.”

Flo lifted the weapon from its resting place in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and, keeping her finger away from the trigger guard, opened the action and removed the magazine. She emptied all thirteen cartridges into her briefcase.

“Take the gun, too, Lieutenant. Keep it. I don't want guns in the house anymore. Not with the kids and the kids' friends around. I don't need a gun.”

Flo put the unloaded Glock 32 in her briefcase. “And the other one?”

“Still in the bedroom. Locked up. I never touch it.”

Together they went down the short hall to the bedroom. The bed was made up only on the one side where no one had been sleeping.

“It's in that night table over on my side. The key is in this one.” She took out the key from her husband's night table drawer and handed it to Flo.

“Why is the gun on your side?”

“He wanted me to be able to get at it, if anything happened and I was here by myself. I was supposed to keep my drawer open at night.”

“What could happen?”

“I don't know. Like something dangerous. He didn't really specify. And I didn't want to probe. I've never fired a gun in my life and he knew it.”

“Did he keep a gun for himself in the bedroom?”

“These past few months, yes. He kept his service gun under his pillow whenever he was in bed.”

Flo concluded—how could she not?—that Reilly must have felt himself under extreme threat the past few months. Either that or he was suffering from clinical paranoia. She simply couldn't believe he was so obtuse he couldn't detect his wife's distress over guns in the house.

Flo removed the second Glock 32 from the night table drawer, unloaded it, and put the pistol and its magazine contents of thirteen cartridges in her briefcase. She felt like a walking armory.

“I suppose I can understand your husband having all these guns around. I mean, if someone is so totally fascinated with weapons.” What she really meant was someone so obsessed with fear, but she cautiously opted for the inanimate. The widow looked as though she was already sinking into more than enough grief and Flo didn't want to drive her into drowning.

“Arlene, is there a café nearby?”

“There's a couple on Third Avenue.”

“Let's go get some coffee.” She saw little hope of the widow's opening up in the house, surrounded by so many reminders of “these past few months.”

11:30
A.M.

On their walk down to Third Avenue, Arlene Reilly stayed quiet and Flo bided her time, keeping her own counsel.

After a half-block, the widow stopped to wipe tears from her cheeks. “It's the cold. I haven't been out much, not since the funeral.”

In the café, after they got their coffee, Arlene Reilly looked Flo directly in the eye and held her gaze for the first time that day. “Well, now what?” she said.

“For starters, Arlene, how do you feel?”

“Not much better. Just different. You can ask me whatever you want now. And I'll try my best. You've got a job, the right job. Only tell me one thing first.”

“I'll also try my best.”

“Have you totally leveled with me, do I know everything I should know?”

“Not everything. Not yet. There's an official explanation put out by City Hall. The lone mad killer theory. But the truth is, my colleagues and I don't put much faith in it. I want to be candid here. Regardless of whether your husband was or wasn't having an affair with Marie Priester—or whatever you want to call their
relationship—he
was in that subway car with her for a reason. Moreover, he was clearly a man afraid something awful might happen.”

“What do you suspect, what was he afraid of?”

“I think you put your finger on it when you described his behavior these past few months. By your own account, and by the evidence of the guns in your house, he had to be convinced someone extremely dangerous was after him. And maybe after her, too, after Marie Priester. We just don't know yet.”

“But you confirmed he was off-duty, that he was on leave time.”

“Officially, yes. That's right, as far as we've been told. But from everything you've said, I think he may have been telling you the real truth, a bigger truth, if maybe not in so many words. He was still on the job, as far as he was concerned, and for some reason that he thought very good, he didn't want to let on at the office he was still working that week.”

“So what does the Bureau say?”

“Just about nothing. All we've learned is your husband was assigned to a UN member nation's delegation and for reasons of national security they can't even tell us which one. This may or may not be directly pertinent.”

“China,” Arlene Reilly said abruptly.

“China?”

“He was assigned to cover the Chinese.”

China…
A vision of a billion and more people flashed through Flo's brain, people hard at work, people marching, red flags, people conversing in dozens of Chinese dialects no one but they could understand.

“He told you?” Flo said. “What did he tell you?”

“That's about it. That and how he was getting sick and tired of Chinese food. He joked about this, of course, he always had a sense of humor even when things got bad. He said it was only out of duty to his country he was eating Chinese almost every day. John was a steaks and chops man. He preferred eating at home. But he wasn't eating at home much, not for the past few months anyway. Look, I think maybe it's enough now, enough talk, too many things in all this just don't add up for me.”

“It looks pretty clear he was working on something neither you nor I know anything about. And if the Bureau knows, they're not saying. My feeling—at least fifty-fifty—is that even at the Bureau they're still not sure. But before that night…over the past few months…how was your husband changing?”

Arlene Reilly stared into her empty coffee cup as if an explanation might lie somewhere at the bottom among the milky remains of the morning. “Hard for me to pinpoint. And quite frankly I'm not sure I've got the level of trust in you yet that I need…you know, to keep going on and on now about details.”

Flo's palms grew moist and she wiped them with a paper napkin. She felt nervous with their roles reversing, Arlene Reilly shifting into resistance.

“Listen, Lieutenant, bottom line, I loved him, okay? The kids loved him. But yes, we had different temperaments, our outlooks weren't the same. We didn't make equal demands on life, we never had the same expectations.” She gave Flo a guarded, searching glance. “But no matter, you can still be happy together, right? You just learn to accommodate, adapt. You must know how it is, I'm sure you understand.”

“Yes, I do. I can understand.”

“But I'm not so sure your male colleagues would understand. They wouldn't get it, they'd probably blame
me
for the way he was changing. I drove him out of the house. Another woman and so on, how he was out all hours. Lying about where he was and what he was doing.”

Lying
…“How did you know he was lying, what made you so sure?”

“John James was very ambitious. And something happened last year, I don't know what, but something made him want to work even
harder…something
he really wanted a lot of credit for. Maybe all the credit.”

“He told you this?”

“He implied it. And for a while I went along, I kept quiet. I felt he knew what he was after. And at first I really had no reason to think otherwise. John James was a hard worker and he wanted to go far. But then there were those pictures with that woman in different places. And I had to ask myself, is this ambition? Or just a bimbo? The opposite of ambition, running a gambler's biggest risk. But the thing is I never knew him as reckless, he was never a gambler.”

“Any other people in those pictures?”

“Sometimes. It looked like they went to a lot of Chinese restaurants together. Bars, too. But my husband wasn't a bar kind of guy, not as long as I knew him. More than once I got woken up two, three o'clock in the morning, when he'd come home and slip into bed, and I could smell where he'd been.”

“The pictures, the ones you burned—”

“No. Look, I lied, okay? I kept them. What's more my husband wasn't in the habit of hiding things. I always knew exactly where the guns were, and of course he made sure of that. And then I discovered the pictures, and after it happened…I went digging for more. And I found some notes. A notebook buried under a pile of junk in his closet. My husband wasn't very neat. So if you want the book, you can have it. I can't figure out anything in it. Names, places, dates, short indecipherable remarks, and that's about it, almost like hieroglyphics, all of it impossible to read. I don't know what any of it means, if it means anything at all. Still, he must have hidden it there for a reason.”

“Please, Arlene, whatever you can give me, anything could help. There may be a link there. I'd really like to see his notebook. We got to nail the monsters who killed your husband and six other people. We got to stop them from ever doing anything like this again.”