They had that edge going for them. Two different people told me they thought they were watching two undercover guys from the INS taking an illegal alien off the street. That's one reason nobody interfered, that and the fact that it was over and done with before anyone had time to react."
"Pretty slick," he said.
"The uniform dress did something else, too. It made them invisible, because all people saw was their clothing, and all they remember was that both of them looked the same. Did I mention that they had caps on, too? The witnesses described the caps and the jackets, things they put on for the job and got rid of afterward."
"So we don't really have anything."
"That's not really true," I said. "We don't have anything that leads directly to them, but we've got something. We know what they did and how they did it, that they're resourceful, that they planned their approach. How do you figure they picked you?"
He shrugged. "They knew I was a trafficker. That was mentioned.
That makes you a good target. They know you've got money and they know you're not going to call the police."
"What else did they know about you?"
"My ethnic background. The one guy, the first one, he called me some names."
"I think you mentioned that."
"Raghead, sand nigger. That's a nice one, huh? Sand nigger. He left out camel jockey, that's one I used to hear from the Italian kids at St.
Ignatius. 'Hey, Khoury, ya fuckin' camel jockey!' Only camel I ever saw was on a cigarette pack."
"You think being an Arab made you a target?"
"It never occurred to me. There's a certain amount of prejudice, no question about it, but I'm not usually that conscious of it. Francine's people are Palestinian, did I mention that?"
"Yes."
"They have it tougher. I know Palestinians who say they're Lebanese or Syrian just to avoid hassles.
'Oh, you're Palestinian, you must be a terrorist.' That kind of ignorant remark, and there are people who have bigoted ideas about Arabs in general." He rolled his eyes. "My father, for instance."
"Your father?"
"I wouldn't say he was anti-Arab, but he had this whole theory that we weren't actually Arabs. Our family's Christian, see."
"I wondered what you were doing at St. Ignatius."
"There were times I wondered myself. No, we were Maronite Christians, and according to my old man we were Phoenicians. You ever hear of the Phoenicians?"
"Back in biblical times, weren't they? Traders and explorers, something like that?"
"You got it. Great sailors, they sailed all around Africa, they colonized Spain, they probably reached Britain. They founded Carthage in North Africa, and there were a lot of Carthaginian coins dug up in England. They were the first people to discover Polaris, that's the North Star, I mean to discover that it was always in the same spot and could be used for navigation. They developed an alphabet that served as the basis for the Greek alphabet." He broke off, slightly embarrassed. "My old man talked about them all the time. I guess some of it must have soaked in."
"It looks like it."
"He wasn't a lunatic on the subject, but he knew a lot about it.
That's where my name comes from. The Phoenicians called themselves the Kena'ani, or Canaanites. My name should be pronounced Keh-nahn, but everyone's always said Kee-nan."
" 'Ken Curry' is the message I got yesterday."
"Yeah, that's typical. I've ordered things on the phone and they turn up addressed to Keane & Curry, it sounds like a couple of Irish lawyers.
Anyway, according to my father the Phoenicians were a completely different people from the Arabs. They were the Canaanites, they were already a people at the time of Abraham. Whereas the Arabs were descended from Abraham."
"I thought the Jews were descendants of Abraham."
"Right, through Isaac, who was the legitimate son of Abraham and Sarah. Meanwhile the Arabs were the sons of Ishmael, who was the son Abraham fathered with Hagar. Jesus, here's something I haven't thought of in a long time. When I was a kid my father had this mild feud with this grocer around the block on Dean Street, and he used to refer to him as 'that Ishmaelite bastard.' God, what a character he was."
"Is he still living?"
"No, he died three years ago. He was diabetic, and over the years it weakened his heart. When I'm down on myself I tell myself he died of a broken heart because of how his sons turned out. He was hoping for an architect and a doctor and instead he got a drunk and a dope dealer. But that's not what killed him. His diet killed him. He was diabetic and he was fifty pounds overweight. Me and Petey could have turned out to be Jonas Salk and Frank Lloyd Wright and it wouldn't have done him any good."
AROUND six Kenan made the first of a series of phone calls after the two of us had worked out an approach. He dialed a number, waited for a tone, then punched in his own number and hung up. "Now we wait," he said, but we didn't have to wait very long. In less than five minutes the phone rang.
He said, "Hey, Phil, how's it going? Great. Here's the deal. I don't know if you ever met my wife. The thing is, we had this kidnap threat, I had to send her out of the country. I don't know what it's about but I think it has to do with the business, you follow me? So what I'm doing, I've got a guy checking it out for me, like a professional. And I wanted, you know, to pass the word, because the sense I got is these people are serious about this and my impression is they're stone killers. Right.
Yeah, that's the thing, man, we sit here and we're easy marks, we got plenty of cash and we can't holler for the law, and that makes us the perfect target for home invasions and every goddam thing… Right. So all I'm saying is be careful, you know, and keep an eye and an ear open.
And pass the word around, you know, to whoever you think ought to hear it. And if any shit comes down, man, call me, you understand?
Right."
He hung up and turned to me. "I don't know," he said. "I think all I did was convince him I'm getting paranoid in my old age. 'Why'd you send her out of the country, man? Why not just buy a dog, hire a bodyguard?' Because she's dead, you dumb fuck, but I didn't want to tell him that. If the word gets around it's got to mean problems. Shit."
"What's the matter?"
"What do I tell Francine's family? Every time the phone rings I'm afraid it's one of her cousins. Her parents are separated and her mother moved back to Jordan, but her father's still in the old neighborhood and she's got relatives all over Brooklyn. What do I tell them?"
"I don't know."
"I'll have to fill them in sooner or later. Time being, I'll say she went on a cruise, something like that. You know what they'll figure?"
"Marital problems."
"That's it. We're just back from Negril, so why's she going on a cruise? Must be trouble between the
Khourys. Well, they can think whatever they want. Truth of the matter is we never had a cross word, we never had a bad day. Jesus." He picked up the phone, punched in a number, keyed in his own number at the tone. He hung up and drummed the tabletop impatiently, and when the phone rang he picked it up and said, "Hey, man, how's it going? Oh, yeah? No shit. Hey, here's the deal…."
Chapter 5
I went to the eight-thirty meeting at St. Paul's. On the way over it had crossed my mind that I might run into Pete Khoury there, but he didn't show up. Afterward I helped fold chairs, then joined a group of people for coffee at the Flame. I didn't stay there long, though, because by eleven I was at Poogan's Pub on West Seventy-second Street, one of the two places where Danny Boy Bell could generally be found between the hours of 9:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. The rest of the time you couldn't count on finding him anywhere.
His other place is a jazz club called Mother Goose on Amsterdam.
Poogan's was closer, so I tried it first. Danny Boy was at his usual table in back, deep in conversation with a dark-skinned black man with a pointed chin and a button nose. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses with mirrored lenses and a powder-blue suit with more in the shoulders than God or Gold's Gym could have put there. A little cocoa-brown straw hat perched on top of his head, adorned with a flamingo-pink hatband.