The Ninth Step (20 page)

Tenzin Pemo smoothed her robes. “We don’t proselytize, detective. Anyway, he seems quite content being a Baptist. I just go so that he has someone to talk to now and then. And I bring him comic books.”

Jack smiled: it was pretty weird to think about, a white British Buddhist nun bringing a black Baptist kid from Flatbush comic books in Juvie. He turned on Flatbush Avenue and drove north, instinctively heading for the waterfront, where he and the nun had last discussed his personal affairs—in the midst of their official business, he had somehow ended up telling her about his girlfriend’s abrupt departure.

They made small talk until they reached the neighborhood between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, a quiet area of big old factory buildings that were being converted into condos and co-ops. Jack parked and they walked through the dark echoing streets until they came to a little park next to the East River. High above them, a subway train thundered over the Manhattan Bridge, which was strung with white beads of light. Across the river, the glowing office towers of Manhattan rose into the darkness.

“I hope this isn’t too personal,” Jack said. He cleared his throat.

The little nun strolled along with her hands clasped behind her back. “What’s on your mind?”

“The first time we came down here, you told me a story about how you became a nun.”

Tenzin Pemo nodded and waited for him to say more.

“You told me about how your husband was cheating and left you for that other woman.”

“That’s right,” she said simply. This was one of the things he appreciated about her: she seemed to take everything in stride, without getting huffy or passing judgment.

He took off his sports jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It wasn’t that the night was so warm, but he was starting to sweat. “I was wondering something. After that happened, and you became a nun and all … Were you able to forgive him?”

She gazed up at him calmly. They were walking along an asphalt path above a little riverside beach layered with pebbles, which shone faintly under the park’s streetlamps.

“I don’t mind discussing my marriage,” she said. “Not at all. But I don’t think you’re asking me this out of some casual interest.”

Jack chewed his bottom lip. “No, I guess not. Do you remember what I told you about my fiancée? I mean, the woman I asked to be my fiancée?”

The little nun nodded. “She left rather suddenly, as I recall.”

Jack looked down at the sidewalk, embarrassed. “I’ve been thinking about calling her up again. And, uh, about this whole forgiveness deal.”

Tenzin Pemo thought for a minute. “If you called her, what would you expect to get out of it?”

Jack pulled back. “
Get out of it?
What do you mean?”

“What would you hope to achieve? Would you just want to forgive her for her sake, or would you be hoping she might respond in a certain way?”

There it was again: that sense that she was able to look right into him. He sighed. “I dunno.” Yet when he looked into his heart of hearts, he could see that in fact he did; he hoped Michelle might apologize, and couldn’t help fantasizing that she might want to come back.

“Forgiveness is an interesting beast,” said Tenzin Pemo. “It’s not really something we can do in hopes of a certain result. What would happen if you forgave her but she refused to admit any wrongdoing? Or if she told you that she was still in love with that other man?”

Jack’s face tightened.

“Would your forgiveness be a failure then?”

He didn’t answer. The conversation wasn’t going the way he’d hoped.

“Here’s a thought: What if you forgave her but didn’t tell her?”

Jack squinted. “What good would that do?”

Tenzin Pemo shrugged. “It might help
you
. We tend to think of forgiveness as something we do for someone else. But you’re the one who’s been carrying around the burden of what happened between the two of you. Wouldn’t it feel good to set it down?”

“What about you?” Jack said. “Did you forgive your husband? I mean, that was pretty awful, what he did.”

“I forgave him,” she said simply. “He was just a human being, not thinking very carefully about what he was doing. And things ended up for the better, anyhow. We had a not very interesting marriage, and I had a not very interesting life, and now I do. I get to meet all sorts of intriguing people, including even the occasional homicide detective. I was a big fan of Agatha Christie, you know.”

Jack smiled. He couldn’t really see the nun as a big reader of mystery novels. But then, he hadn’t seen her as a former wife either.

A couple of blond teens on skateboards came
click-clacking
into the park, swooping in and out of the circles of light cast by its streetlamps. Jack watched them round the bend of a hill. Finally, still looking away from the nun, he said in a small, tight voice, “I’m not really sure I want to forgive her.”

“Do you think that forgiveness means that you would have to excuse what she did? That you’d be giving up your right to say that it was wrong? Because it doesn’t, you know. It just means that you acknowledge that she’s a human being, and you can forgive her for her mistakes. Maybe you could let go of a bit of your anger about what happened.”

He thought about that. Because he
was
still angry. Sometimes, anyhow. When he wasn’t just sad or mooning over what he and Michelle had had together.

“It’s a funny thing, anger,” the nun said. “Someone once said that it’s like a poison we drink, believing it will cause someone else to suffer.”

They had walked all the way around the little park and were almost back out on the street.

Jack stopped. “Well—do you think I should try calling her? I mean, do you think that would be a mistake?”

Tenzin Pemo shrugged. “What do you have to lose?”

More pain, if she blows me off again.

He pulled his car keys from his pocket. “I’ll think about it.”

H
E SPENT HALF THE
night rolling around thinking about it. He woke up without any better idea of what to do. Now he had a whole second day to keep chasing the thought, like a lab rat on a treadmill. He took a long shower and let the water drum down on his stubborn noggin. It occurred to him that he was probably just thinking about Michelle as a substitute for worrying about more pressing matters, but it seemed like the more he tried to let her go, the more the idea of making the call obsessed him.

By early afternoon, he was pacing his apartment like a mangy lion at the zoo. He went out and got into his car. Where to? He considered for a minute, then turned the key in the ignition.

HE CIRCLED NADIM HASNI’S
block twice, searching for surveillance vehicles. There wasn’t a single van on the block. The second time he went slow enough so that he could see into every parked car. Nothing. Unless Brent Charlson and his crew had found some empty apartment nearby, he couldn’t see how they might be operating a stakeout.

He parked twenty yards up the block and then walked over to the house. There was the sign on the lawn:
DR. TEKCHAND PARKASH, ADOLESCENT GYNECOLOGY
. Yikes. Jack walked up onto the stoop. Only two doorbells: one for the doctor’s office, and one that just said
T.P.
He walked back to the sidewalk, then looked up the driveway.

Another entrance. He pinched his lower lip, musing. Officially speaking, he would need a warrant to enter. If he didn’t have the warrant, he might still be able to get inside, but any evidence he found could be compromised in court. But he assumed that Charlson and his crew had already gone over the place. So it wasn’t evidence that he wanted, so much as a simple clue to Hasni’s whereabouts. He pondered what to do; he wasn’t a bureaucratic stickler, but once you started playing around with the law, you found yourself on a slippery slope.

And then, from fifteen yards away, something caught his eye. He glanced around to see if any neighbors might be watching, then hurried up the drive.

There
, on the wall of the house just next to the door: a missing chunk of brick. And
there
: a furrow across several other bricks. He had seen a lot of crime scenes in his day, and many such traces. A couple of bullets had passed this way.

He looked sharply around, then walked back down the driveway and peered at the edges of the little lawn, hoping to find a shell casing or two. Nothing.

He went back to his car and sat there, musing. Someone had fired a gun in Nadim Hasni’s driveway. At Hasni? Or had Hasni shot at someone else?

He felt a gray weight of suspicion rise in his chest. Maybe Brent Charlson and his men had decided to take justice into their own hands. Rather than letting the court system have a chance to free their terrorist, why not just take him out? Such things were not unheard of. Covert missions. Black ops. There were certainly people in the upper reaches of the government who would argue that in the War on Terror any means of eradicating terrorist threats were justified.

He was startled by a sudden rap on his window. He looked out at a stern, crew-cut young man with a soldier’s stiff bearing. One of Charlson’s guys; Jack recognized him from the recent hunt in Jackson Heights.

He rolled down his window.

“Mr. Leightner?” the man said. He held up a cell phone. “My boss would like a word.”

BRENT CHARLSON’S VOICE. THE
irate grandfather. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m looking for our suspect.”

“The house is under surveillance, Leightner. We’ve got it covered.”

“We need to work together on—”

“
We
don’t need to do anything, detective.
You
need to butt out of this case and let us handle it.”

“Are you trying to say that the NYPD is not competent to handle our share of this case?” Make him spell it out, the arrogant bastard.

“I’m not trying to say anything: I let you do the talking. And so you have, with that ridiculous baked bean bullshit, and the way you screwed up a simple surveillance the other day in the very first minutes.”

Jack’s face burned; he looked out the windshield and was glad to see that Charlson’s man was staring manfully off into the distance.

“Yeah,” he responded. “Like
you guys
are doing such an excellent job of tracking this suspect. Aren’t you forgetting something?
I’m
the one who found him.”

“All right, kudos then. Good for you: you found him. Now for chrissakes, give it a rest! I don’t pop up in the middle of your cases and try to run the show.”

“You could’ve at least told me about the ballistics traces in the driveway.”

“What? What the hell are you talking about now?”

“I was just there; I saw them. Is Hasni gone? Did you guys take him out?”

“Have you completely lost your mind? Look—I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I’ll have my guys check it out. In the meantime, you need to just butt the hell out of my case.”

“It’s not just your case. We’ve got a murder that happened in the middle of south Brooklyn, and that makes it an NYPD matter.”

“So what—you close one piddling little homicide but screw up an entire national terrorism investigation? Is that what you want? Now what do I need to do? Go to your bosses and tell them you’re interfering? Make them yank your goddamn chain?”

Jack scowled. “Yeah, why don’t you try that? In the meantime, I’m gonna keep doing my job. That’s what I get paid for. And after I find Hasni and we talk to him about our homicide for a day or two, maybe I’ll give you a call.” He hung up, then reached the phone out the window and dropped it on the grass. He started his car and zoomed away, leaving Charlson’s man staring after him.

Two blocks away, he came to a red light. He slammed his hand on the dashboard in frustration.
Little fed prick. Nobody talks to an NYPD detective like that. Nobody.

By the time he reached home, he had managed to calm down. It was stupid and pointless: two grown men, both on the same team, squabbling over jurisdiction like dogs over a bone, while a team of terrorists were getting ready to move against their city.
Someone needs to be the grown-up here,
he thought. He was going to have to stop letting the fed get under his skin. Nadim Hasni might have a real weapon now. Someone was going to have to find him very soon. As to who actually made the collar, and who got the credit, that didn’t matter one damn bit.

HE WAS PARKING THE
car when his cell phone trilled. He glanced down at the caller ID: Larry Cosenza.

“Christ, what did you do?” the funeral-home owner said.

For a second Jack was discombobulated: How on earth could Larry know that he’d just tangled with a Homeland Security agent? Then he remembered the scene in Carroll Gardens two nights back.

“I guess word travels fast,” he said.

“What, do you think Raucci told me directly? Is that what you think, that I’m in cahoots with these guys?”

“Whoa,” Jack said. “I know how things work in the neighborhood. Somebody was looking out their window or sitting on their front porch. And they told someone, who told someone.”

“That’s right. So now the word is out that there’s a rogue cop on the loose, going around threatening old men. Is that what you want?”

Jack leaned back in his seat and sighed. At this point, he just wanted to go upstairs and watch soap operas all afternoon with Mr. Gardner. Or maybe scrub his bathroom tiles. He could hardly remember two less relaxing days off.

“What did I tell you?” Larry continued. “I’d love nothing better than to be able to say that the days of these wiseguys are over around here, but you read the papers. Hell, you’re a cop—you know what still goes on. Don’t go pushing these guys around unless you’ve got a rock-solid case! I would hate to see something happen to you.”

Jack was about to sputter, to ask if Cosenza was making some kind of veiled threat, but he had the wisdom to shut up. His old friend wasn’t the problem. Larry just lived in the neighborhood. He made a living for his family. For a fee, he’d put anyone in the ground, be they wiseguy or cop.