William Bayer: Mirror Maze

"She went away?"

Figueras nodded. "She went back to Cuba, Lieutenant. Now I give you her address."

When Gabelli heard, he turned on Rampersad. "Cuba! Fuck! You're trying to screw us, Netti!"

"What?"

"The deal's invalid."

"Fuck you, Tony!"

Janek glanced at Kit. She didn't look angry at all.

"I didn't know where his sister was," Netti Rampersad said. "But it doesn't matter if she's in Timbuktu. The information's good, the deal's good." She turned to Kit. "Are you satisfied, Chief?"

"Sure I am, Counselor."

"Good. Now can we all go home?"

Kit nodded to Tommy Shandy, who unlocked Angel's cuffs. The little Cuban shook his wrists and grinned.

"I'll drive you," Netti Rampersad told him.

"Drop me at the subway's okay," Angel said.

While Angel retired to the bathroom to clean up, Janek followed Rampersad downstairs. She went into the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee. Janek joined her. She was still glowing.

"Feeling victorious?"

She raised her eyebrows. "Interesting situation, you have to admit."

"I'd like to ask you something."

"Sure." "Angel asked for you. Does he know you? You don't exactly strike me as a legal-aid type."

"Oh?" She arched her eyebrows higher. "Fill me in, will you, Lieutenant?

Exactly what type's that?"

Janek shrugged. "14ollow eyes. Bitter mouth. Lots of yak about prosecutorial misconduct and infringed constitutional rights. " She smiled. "Go on."

"Well, let's see." Janek scratched his head. "Polyester blouse.

Ten-buck hairdo. Hmmm… way too many cigarettes. "

She laughed. "Tell you the truth, Angel and I didn't meet until this morning."

"Then, why-?" "His sister told him to request me. Just like she told him to ask for you." She paused. "I'm thinking I should go to work now on Mendoza's appeal." She met his eyes carefully, as if she wanted him to understand how strong and confident she felt. "How many lawyers do you think he's had?"

Janek shrugged. "Three or four. They keep getting grungier." He looked at her. "Think the tide's turned?"

"You never know, do you? But Angel's not lying. Everything he told you's true."

"I have your word on that, Ms. Rampersad?"

"Oh, sure," she said. "You have my word."

Suddenly she was bored. She glanced at her watch. "Gotta go." She yelled roughly out to the hall: "Angel! Let's haul ass!" She turned back to Janek, stuck out her hand and then, to his amazement, addressed him in a mock Chinese accent: "Velly nice to meet yoo, I'm shoo."

It was three-thirty by the time he left with Kit. She'd dismissed Tommy Shandy, who'd driven her in from Manhattan. Baldwin stayed behind to straighten up the safe house.

Janek and Kit sat together in Janek's car, trying to decide where to go.

It was the deadest hour of the morning, the favored time for shootouts between drugged-out thieves and trigger-happy clerks and therefore the most dangerous time to enter a twenty-four-hour convenience store. It was also the hour when desperate battered wives put bullets into their sleeping husbands' heads. Most of the bars had closed and most of the coffee shops hadn't yet opened. Kit suggested they drive to Hunts Point Market. She knew a place where they could get themselves a good breakfast there, she said.

On the way to the Bronx they passed Shea Stadium, silent, looming, and for a moment Janek saw grandeur in it. Then, for no particular reason, he recalled a vacation he'd taken two years before, a late-summer camping trip to the Macneil River in Alaska.

He and the woman he'd been in love with, a Germ@ n psychiatrist named Monika whom he'd met on vacation n Venice, had gone there to hike, fish and observe the wild brown bears. It was a glorious time. The wildflowers were in bloom, the sun had blazed, and at night the northern lights had glowed like jewels in the sky. In the mornings he'd gathered birch twigs to make a fire, mixed batter, flipped flapjacks, then served them to Monika from an old black skillet.

She had told him she loved him. He had told her the same. But when they got back to civilization, the romance started going sour. Her life was in Europe-, his was in New York. Her friends were academics; his were cops. She had patients; he had snitches. She wanted to relieve people of torment; he strove for an ideal that he laughingly called justice. In the end, being adults, they acknowledged their incompatibility and agreed to part. They vowed to stay friends, and genuinely tried, but it had been nine months since either had written or called the other.

"It's like the Dreyfus case," Kit said.

Janek, reverie broken, turned to her. "What?"

"Mendoza. It's haunted us the way the Dreyfus Affair haunted the French army. It's made us question our honor. That's why we've got to get to the bottom of it, Frank."

She seemed to sigh then, a sound he couldn't remember hearing her make before. He looked at her. She was huddled, eyes closed, against the passenger door, head crooked between the window and the seat. Turning back to the parkway, his brain flashing with memories of the labyrinth everyone now called, simply, "Mendoza," Janek was inclined to give out a sigh himself.

The crime-scene photos had been horrific, even to cops who thought they'd seen it all: shots taken from various angles of the body of Edith Mendoza, naked, gagged, wrists cuffed, feet tied together with rope, then suspended upside down from a hook implanted in the ceiling of the doubleheight mirror-lined studio apartment in Chelsea that she and her husband had kept for fun and games.

There was one shot in particular that Janek remembered. The photographer would have had to have taken it on his belly. Janek could still recall the way Edith's finely sculpted features filled the frame, the way her thick dark hair hung loosely, barely scraping the polished floor. What was memorable was the tranquillity of her features, the lack of any expression of anguish, the repose. Her face had been the only part of her that had not been bruised. Her torso, beaten mercilessly by her killer, had home terrifying- marks.

C, The moment they reached Hunts Point, Kit came awake. They passed men tossing food crates off the backs of trucks, Korean shopkeepers bargaining with Italian wholesalers, piles of eggplants and tomatoes, carrots and onions, multiplying wildly in the huge main selling hall.

Kit guided Janek to a diner just behind. Teamsters, who'd driven produce in from Long Island and New Jersey, crowded the counter demanding coffee.

"My cousin's place," Kit explained as she nudged him toward a booth.

Janek smiled. He knew that Kit, who always seemed to enjoy telling him how lonely she was and how she spent most holidays at home watching sports events and sipping ouzo, was actually a member of a vast extended Greek-American family that owned coffee shops all over the city.

"I didn't like Baldwin's coffee," she said when they were seated. "And I didn't think much of his spread."

"He'll take it home and feed it to his kids for breakfast," Janek said.

"It'll give them bad breath. Later at school they won't understand when the other kids turn away."

Kit laughed. "You've got everyone figured out, don't you, Frank?" "Not everyone," he said. "Not you."

She stared at him, blinked.

"Hi, Chief!" A handsome young waiter with a Greek accent took their breakfast orders, then moved away.

"My nephew," Kit explained.

"I know what you're thinking," Janek said. Kit looked at him curiously.

"You want me to interview Tania. I'm wondering how you think I'm going to do it."

"Only one way I can think of," Kit said. "Fly down to Cuba and knock on her door."

"You're kidding!"

"Uh-uh, not kidding, Frank. There's no extradition, no cooperation, but there's nothing to stop you going down there as a tourist."