Robert Tanenbaum: Counterplay

“Akhmed Kadyrov,” she said. “A Chechen.”

“Hmmm…gives me an idea,” Kane said. “Finish him and leave the body. We’ll call our friends later and suggest that this presents an opportunity.”

“And the infidel children?”

Kane scowled as though annoyed by one too many questions. “Must I tell you everything?”

“God, no!” Fulton shouted looking at the school bus where the children he’d seen earlier were now sitting, obviously crying.

The first woman shouted something else toward the men standing with the children. Apparently, one of the men there understood her and didn’t need a translator. Immediately, there were several bursts of automatic rifle fire, which echoed across the fields. An eerie silence followed, which was broken by the cawing of crows and, after a moment, a bellow of rage from Fulton.

“God damn you, you murdering son of a bitch,” he yelled. He tried to rise to his feet to go after Kane but was clubbed back to the ground by the two guards. Dazed, he rolled over onto his back. “Better finish it,” he swore at Kane. “Or someday I’m going to kill you, you insane piece of crap.”

Kane put a finger to his lips. “Oooooh. Down ‘Shaft.’ Always playing the hero, but it didn’t do those children who were kind enough to participate in my little ruse any good, now did it? Or save any of these fine police officers and marshals? Guess being a hero didn’t mean shit today.”

Waving Agent Grover’s gun at the detective, Kane said, “You know, I really should shoot you now. Isn’t it always the way in movies: the bad guy doesn’t kill the good guy when he has the chance and lives only long enough to regret it?”

Without warning, Kane rushed at Fulton and kicked him hard in the ribs, knocking the wind out of the detective. He kicked him again and again like he was punting a football. “You going to kill me, Detective?” he raged. “You think a piece of shit nigger is going to kill Andrew Kane?” He rained more blows.

Finally, Kane tired and stopped. Panting from his exertions, he said, “However, no, Detective Fulton. As much as I would like to stomp you to death like a cockroach, I’m not going to kill you. Not yet. I want you to have to live with this fine job you did weighing on your conscience for a while, maybe you’ll decide to suck on the end of your gun and blow your ugly head off because all those kids were counting on you to deliver crazy Mr. Kane to the hospital safe and sound. But first, I need you to take a message back to our mutual friend Mr. Karp.”

“Fuck you,” Fulton croaked, spitting blood out on the snow. “I ain’t your messenger boy.”

“Oh, I think you’ll do as told,” Kane said, kicking Fulton again. “After all, ol’ Butchie is going to want to know everything that happened here today. So tell him I said, ‘The game is on.’ And that I hope he’s up to the challenge. I don’t want this to be too easy when I kill every thing he loves-his bitch, his idiot kids, his imbecile friends, and even his fucking dog-before I come for him.”

A black helicopter appeared from over the top of the trees and landed on the highway behind the last burning car. “Ah, my ride awaits,” Kane said. “Samira, my love, would you do the honors.”

Fulton looked back and saw that the first woman had a handgun pointed at his leg. She pulled the trigger and the bullet tore into his knee. He screamed in rage and pain, and then screamed louder as a second bullet blew his other knee apart.

“Just a little something to remember me by,” Kane said. “I think your chasing days are done, don’t you?” He giggled and took off at a trot for the helicopter with Samira and the other female terrorist on his heels.

As the helicopter took off, Fulton lay in the snow wishing that Kane had killed him. Then he thought of Helen and his children and slowly, painfully, began dragging himself through the snow toward the overturned school bus.

March

The gnome-like italian grandmother dropped her oversized purse in the crosswalk as she tried to jostle her way through the crowd at the corner of Canal and Centre streets in Lower Manhattan. A short, bandy-legged fellow with big ears stooped to pick it up but was nearly knocked over when she pushed him away and ripped the bag out of his grasp.

“Watch it, minchione, ” the old crone hissed.

Having essentially just been labeled a “fucking idiot,” Ray Guma backed off as his octogenarian assailant fixed him with what he assumed to be her version of malocchio, the “evil eye,” while she scuttled back to the curb.

“I’ll call the cops,” she shouted at him and gave him il ditto medio.

You got to love us Eye-ties, Guma thought, we’re such an expressive people. He hurried across the street and reached the curb where he turned right and headed south toward his destination, the Criminal Courts building at 10 °Centre Street.

A storm had blown in Friday, dumping two feet of snow on the city, which by Monday morning was melting slush piles along the curbs and inescapable puddles on the sidewalks. Although the temperature had risen to fifty degrees, the skies were overcast with the weatherman hedging his bets-“a fifty percent chance”-on whether more snow was on the way. But even wets socks and irascible old women couldn’t dampen Guma’s mood as he approached the courthouse.

From a distance the building, with its four front towers and the jail behind it, looked massive, reminding him of an enormous gray toad towering seventeen stories above the streets and gobbling up the insect-sized humans who passed between the stone pillars at its mouth. The limestone and granite exterior was not welcoming to most, and many of those who went inside had reason to fear they would not be coming out-at least not for a while. But Assistant District Attorney Ray Guma never failed to appreciate the building as the scene of some of his greatest triumphs in life, or to reflect on the irony of the location, a trait that might have surprised those of his colleagues who thought he was not the contemplative sort.

The site on which it stood had once been known as Collect Pond, a large lake at the southern end of Manhattan that had teemed with fish and wildlife, first a favorite of the Indians, and then of picnickers and fishermen. But eventually the tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries moved in and polluted the water until it was little more than a cesspool and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease.

In 1802, the city had drained the lake and surrounding swamp to make room for houses, and for a brief few years, the area enjoyed a reputation as a respectable, if modest, neighborhood called Five Points for the convergence of streets that met there. But the homes had fallen into disrepair, and the upwardly mobile members of the neighborhood left for greener pasture uptown.

Through most of the nineteenth century, Five Points was a notorious hellhole of rotting tenement houses-occupied by the latest wave of impoverished immigrants and “free Negroes,” as well as brothels and saloons. There, the law-abiding residents had been extorted, shanghaied, murdered, and terrorized by gangs and corrupt politicians until the victims, too, could flee or turn from prey to predator.

“This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here bear the same fruit here as elsewhere,” Guma recited quietly as he wove through the crowd toward the building with his eyes on the deliciously round ass of the woman walking in front of him-a favorite pastime.

The quote was from a passage that Charles Dickens had written about Five Points in American Notes after visiting the area escorted by two police officers. Guma’s fifth-grade teacher had insisted that her class of Italian, Irish, German, African, Puerto Rican, and other children of immigrants memorize parts of it as being integral to their personal histories. He was surprised that more than four decades later he could remember even that much of it.