Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

On the fourth day, Rashid let him out in the yard, a patch of ragged grass surrounded by a chain-link fence and equipped with a picnic table and a couple of aluminum lawn chairs. The house was a three-story structure sheathed in gray asphalt shingles, one of a row of identical houses, with alleys leading back to small yards and detached garages. He could see the backs of another, similar row through the trees and foliage of the adjacent backyard. It was, he learned, in Astoria, Queens.

Felix sat in one of the chairs, and basked in the afternoon sun. They had supplied him with jeans and T-shirts, in the right sizes, and socks and sneakers, as well. Rashid sat on the edge of the other chair and handed him a beer.

"I thought Arabs didn't drink," Felix said. "I thought that was a big Muslim no-no."

"It is as you say. But here we are obliged to fit in and act like Americans. We drink, we eat swine, we look at women's bodies."

"I'd like to look at some of that. What about throwing a little party?"

"Perhaps later. When our work is done."

"What kind of work is that?"

"We are going to blow some things up. Our friend believes you would not object to this kind of work."

"Our friend? You mean the Arab?"

"Ibn-Salemeh, yes. Was he correct in this?"

"Hey, if there's any money in it I don't have a problem. What're you going to blow?"

"We'll tell you when the time comes. We have a number of targets. Some will be of interest to you personally."

"Meaning Karp."

"Yes, him," said Rashid. "But first his family, one by one."

"Uh-huh," said Felix. "And what's the story with you? You're what, the butler?"

"I have a number of functions."

"Yeah, bring the beer, cook the food, make the beds. What about the money. You got it here, right?"

"It is where I can get it, Felix. And you cannot." Rashid stared into his eyes. "So you must put out of your mind any thought that you can, ah, get what you want and disappear. Rip us off, as you say. We require an American to travel around and go places where someone who looks like me would draw suspicion. That's why you are here and not rotting in that prison. There will be eyes on you all the time, Felix. And I would keep in mind if I were you the fact that you are already a dead man. And that you can be easily replaced. There is no shortage of Americans. Am I making myself perfectly clear now?"

Felix shrugged. "Whatever," he said, and pulled his eyes away. Not a butler, Rashid, that was a mistake, but the fucker had no call to talk to him like one of his niggers. Felix added him to the long list of people he would get if the opportunity presented.

"What do you do all day up in that room, Rashid?" Felix asked, smiling. They were at lunch at the picnic table in the backyard of the Queens house.

"I work with the computers," said the Arab. "I have a computer business."

"Yeah? What kind of business?" Felix had the con man's art of feigning interest, but in this case he was genuinely interested. He had been in the joint while the computer revolution unfolded and was anxious to catch up. Felix had always been a reader of magazines, and the constant association in them of the words "computer" and "fraud" had piqued his interest.

Rashid, for his part, was not reluctant to expound. His weakness, which Felix had not been long in ferreting out, was that he felt unappreciated. The glory of derring-do, of planting bombs and carrying out midnight strikes was not for him. Rather, he was an arranger, a mover of paper and electrons and funds, vital but never to be a star. Even the Spaniards, who could barely read or speak English, had the gall to condescend to him. He thought Felix respected him. He thought Felix had been properly cowed.

He was therefore inclined to be expansive. "It is a very simple business. Now, you understand e-mail, yes? Very well, then, you see it is possible to send out an extremely large number of e-mail messages for no cost at all. Ten, twenty million messages, all around the world. So, even if only a few respond, there you have a business."

"What, you're selling something?"

"Of course. A number of things. Stock tips. Pills for various energy-type things. Special interest videos."

"What d'you mean, like fuck videos?"

"I don't see them, I just take the orders," said Rashid delicately. "Mainly, it is books, a program. You pay up front, and you get material showing how to run an on-line business, so you recruit others in the same way. Everyone pays a little up the line. It grows automatically."

"Yeah? You doing okay, then?"

"Well enough for my modest needs."

"Man, I'd like to get into that. I used to sell credit furniture. What a pain in the butt that was! Going into a million shitty apartments, putting on the fucking charm for a bunch of old bitches. No more, man. Was it hard to learn?"

"It requires concentration, of course." Rashid looked carefully at Felix. "I could teach you, if you like to."

Bingo, thought Felix. "Yeah," he said, "that would be cool."

Concentration was not Felix's strongest point; when difficulties presented themselves in his life, his instinct was to smash something or someone, or blame someone, or both. But he also had the ability to suspend this instinct in a good cause. He had learned karate in this way, and a variety of swindling tricks, and in this way also he learned how to operate a computer, and was soon cruising the Web and sending out millions of e-mail messages, and ordering useless or obscene junk for the remarkable numbers of suckers who responded. He was delighted with the sorts of things you could find on the Web nowadays, and amazed that they were allowed. You could spend all day viewing videos of very young girls being raped, for example, if you had stolen credit card numbers, and Felix spent many happy hours thus enriching his fantasy life. Even more valuable, however, was the ability of the Web to locate people. If you had a social security number, it was no trick to find an address. Felix had one and found the address he needed, which was, remarkably, only a few miles away, in Forest Hills, Queens.

Rashid was a pedantic and exhausting teacher, always offering more than his student wanted to know, or really needed to know about the mysteries of Windows and the Internet. He also ran a thick sidebar of editorial comment on the decadence of the West and the contempt he had for the pornography available on the Web. His own tastes were not quite as exotic as Felix's in this, running more to fat, older women in degrading poses and lovely young men in copulation. Of course, they both spied on each other's movements across the electronic prairie. Rashid had password-protected files and Felix devoted a considerable amount of time trying to crack these, but with no success.

Three weeks after Felix's "death" in prison, Rashid called him over to a monitor and showed him a color photograph of a young girl. She was talking, it seemed, to a man dressed in layered rags with a strange hat on his head. The photo had been taken from the side, and showed the girl's generous curved nose and strong jaw. She was very thin, with prominent cheekbones.

A dog, was Felix's thought. "Who's that?" he asked.

"Karp's daughter. Her name is Lucy. She volunteers in a soup kitchen. It's where I took this picture. At great risk to myself," he added importantly. "My face is known to the authorities. Here is another one, with the zoom lens, from the street." She was wearing shorts in this one, baggy ones, and a loose black T-shirt. No body, decent legs. Put a bag over the face and she'd be halfway fuckable, Felix thought. He said, "You want me to whack her?"

"Eventually, but first we need that she gives us some information. There is a man we need to settle with first, a Vietnamese, a friend of hers. He's disappeared. We believe she knows where he can be found. First you find out that, and then you can dispose of the girl."