Thomas Harris - Black Sunday

“Where would you run, if you were this man?”

“I would have watched the boat for a day after it was back, to make sure it wasn’t staked out. Then if I had a place to work I’d paint it, put the legit registration back on and change it up—I’d put a tuna tower on it. I’d catch a string of Gold Platers running south to Florida along the ditch and I’d get right in with ‘em—a string of yachts going down the Intra-coastal Waterway,” Eddie explained. “Those rich guys like to go in a pack.”

“Give me a high-profit item away from here that would make him surface,” Kabakov said. “Something that would require the boat.”

“Smack,” Eddie said, with a guilty glance toward Rachel. “Heroin. Out of Mexico into, say, Corpus Christi or Aransas Pass on the Texas coast. He might go for that. There would have to be some front money, though. And he would have to be approached very careful. He would spook easy.”

“Think about the contact, Eddie. And thank you,” Kabakov said.

“I did it for the doc.” The sharks moved silently in the lighted tank. “Look, I’m gonna split now. I don’t want to look at these things anymore.”

“I’ll meet you back in town, David,” Rachel said.

Kabakov was surprised to see a kind of distaste in her eyes when she looked at him. She and Eddie walked away together, their heads bent, talking. Her arm was around the little man’s shoulders.

Kabakov would have preferred to keep Corley out of it. So far, the FBI agent knew nothing of this business of Jerry Sapp and his boat. Kabakov wanted to pursue it alone. He needed to talk to Sapp before the man wrapped himself in the Constitution.

Kabakov did not mind violating a man’s rights, his dignity, or his person if the violation provided immediate benefits. The fact of doing it did not bother him, but the seed within him that was nourished by the success of these tactics made him uneasy.

He felt himself developing contemptuous attitudes toward the web of safeguards between the citizen and the expediency of investigation. He did not try to rationalize his acts with catchphrases like “the greater good,” for he was not a reflective man. While Kabakov believed his measures to be necessary—knew that they worked—he feared that the mentality a man could develop in their practice was an ugly and dangerous thing, and for him it wore a face. The face of Hitler.

Kabakov recognized that the things he did marked his mind as surely as they marked his body. He wanted to think that his increasing impatience with the restraints of the law were entirely the result of his experience, that he felt anger against these obstacles just as he felt stiffness in old wounds on winter mornings.

But this was not entirely true. The seed of his attitudes was in his nature, a fact he had discovered years ago near Tiberias, in Galilee.

He was en route to inspect some positions on the Syrian border when he stopped his jeep at a well on a mountainside. A windmill, an old American Aermotor, pumped the cold water out of the rock. The windmill creaked at regular intervals as the blades slowly revolved, a lonely sound on a bright and quiet day. Leaning against his jeep, the water still cool on his face, Kabakov watched a flock of sheep grazing above him on the mountainside. A sense of aloneness pressed around him and made him aware of the shape and position of his body in these great tilted spaces. And then he saw an eagle, high, riding a thermal, wingtip feathers splayed like fingers, slipping sideways over the mountain’s face, his shadow slipping fast over the rocks. The eagle was not hunting sheep, for it was winter and there were no lambs among them, but it was above the sheep and they saw it and baaed among themselves. Kabakov became dizzy watching the bird, his horizontal reference distorted by the mountain slope. He found himself holding on to the jeep for balance.

And then he realized that he loved the eagle better than the sheep and that he always would and that, because he did, because it was in him to do it, he could never be perfect in the sight of God.

Kabakov was glad that he would never have any real power.

Now, in an apartment in a cliff face in Manhattan, Kabakov considered how the bait could be presented to Jerry Sapp. If he pursued Sapp alone, then Eddie Stiles had to make the contact. He was the only person Kabakov knew who had access to crime circles along the waterfront. Without him, Kabakov would have to use Corley’s resources. Stiles would do it for Rachel.

“No,” Rachel said at breakfast.

“He would do it if you asked him. We could cover him all the time—”

“He’s not going to do it, so forget it.”

It was hard to believe that twenty minutes before, she had been so warm and morning-rosy over him, her hair a gentle pendulum that brushed his face and chest.

“I know you don’t like to use him, but Goddamn it—”

“I don’t like me using him, I don’t like you using me. I’m using you, too, in a different way that I haven’t figured out yet. It’s okay, our using each other. We have something besides that and it’s good. But no more Eddie.”

She was really splendid, Kabakov thought, with the flush creeping out of the lace and up her neck.

“I can’t do it. I won’t do it,” she said. “Would you like some orange juice?”

“Please.”

Reluctantly, Kabakov went to Corley. He gave him the information on Jerry Sapp. He did not give the source.

Corley worked on the bait for two days with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He spent an hour on the telephone to Mexico City. Then he met with Kabakov in the FBI’s Manhattan office.

“Anything on the Greek?”

“Not yet,” Kabakov said. “Moshevsky is still working the bars. Go on with Sapp.”

“The Bureau has no record on a Jerry Sapp,” Corley said. “Whoever he is, he’s clean under that name. Coast Guard registration does not have him. Their files are not cross-indexed on boat type down to the detail we need. The paint we have will do for positive comparison, but tracing origin is another matter. It’s not marine paint. It’s a commercial brand of semi-gloss over a heavy sealer, available anywhere.”

“Tell me about the dope.”

“I’m getting to that. Here’s the package. Did you follow the Krapf-Mendoza case in Chihuahua by any chance? Well, I didn’t know the details either. From 1970 through 1973 they got 115 pounds of heroin into this country. It went to Boston. Clever method. For each shipment they used a pretext to hire an American citizen to go down to Mexico. Sometimes it was a man, sometimes a woman, but always a loner who had no close relatives. The stooge flew down on a tourist visa and after a few days unfortunately died. The body was shipped home with a belly full of heroin. They had a funeral home on this end. Your hair is growing out nicely by the way.”

“Go on, go on.”

“Two things we got out of it. The money man in Boston still has a good name with the mob. He helps us out because he’s trying to stave off forty years mandatory in the joint. The Mexican authorities left a guy in Cozumel on the street. Better not to ask what he’s trying to stave off.”

“So if our man sends word down the pipeline that he is looking for a good man with a boat to run the stuff out of Cozumel into Texas, it would look reasonable because the old method was stopped,” Kabakov said. “And if Sapp calls our man, he can give references in Mexico and in Boston.”

“Yeah. This Sapp would check it out before he showed himself. Even getting the word to him will probably involve a couple of cutouts. This is what bothers me, if we find him we’ve got almost nothing on him. We might get him on some bullshit conspiracy charge involving the use of his boat, but that would take time to develop. We’ve got nothing to threaten him with.”