Security?
Impossible to maintain in a free society.
Right this minute, he was walking into the biggest library in the city, stopping at a checkpoint where uniformed guards examined his briefcase, peering into it like the trained watchdogs they were, but never asking him to open his jacket or take off his shoes because so far
no one in America had marched in loaded. Once that happened, things would change. Before long, you'd be strip-searched before you were permitted to watch the latest hit movie. But for now . . .
'Thank you, sir. If you'll check the bag, please.' He walked across the echoing, vaulted marble lobby to a cloakroom behind and to the right of the security guards. He handed the briefcase across the counter, received a claim check for it, and followed the signs to FOLGER FIRST FOLIO.
THERE USED TO be a time when Ollie frequented girls like the ones employed or previously employed by Ambrose Carter. Not that he'd been personally intimate with anyone in the man's stable. But he was certainly familiar with the species. There was a time, too, when Ollie might have called a prostitute of the Hispanic persuasion a 'spic slut,' but that was before he'd met Patricia Gomez, who was Puerto Rican and a police officer besides and who was . . . well . . . not his girlfriend, quite, but someone he was . . . well. . . sort of seeing. And nowadays, he would break anyone's head who called Patricia a spic.
The first hooker he talked to was, in fact, a spic slut named Paquita Flores, a very dark-skinned voluptuous cutie dressed somewhat scantily for so early in June, not even summer yet here in the city, sitting on the front stoop of her own building, skirt up to her ass, long legs flashing, licking a lollipop, as if she needed further advertisement.
'Yo, hombre,' she said, looking up, licking. 'Long time
no see.'
He tried to remember those days back then when
he frequently traded police lenience for sexual favors. Paquita had been sixteen or thereabouts. She was now, what, twenty, twenty-one? He sat down beside her. Her skimpy frilled skirt flapped about her knees in a mild breeze. She kept licking the lollipop.
'Quepasa, maricon?' she said.
'What's the word on Carter?' he asked.
'Oh, man, he's like dead, you dinn know?' she said, and grinned around the lollipop.
'The street guessing why?'
'Maybe he ratted out a whore.'
'Which one?'
'Don't know, man.'
'Who would know?'
'Carter wasn' my abadesa,' Paquita said. 'You axin the wrong person.'
'Who should I ask?'
'Go the Three Flies. His girls hang there.'
THE BOOK WAS in a thick glass case surrounded on all four sides by uniformed guards. The Deaf Man knew that the case was alarmed and that if anyone so much as touched the glass, the alarms would sound not only here on the second floor of the library, but also at the offices of Security Plus, who would immediately alert the Midtown South Squad, four blocks from the library.
A red velvet rope hanging on stanchions kept visitors back some four feet from the exhibit. The book in its glass case was opened to its title page:
A notice behind a plexiglas shield was fastened to one wall of the library's Elizabethan Room, advising visitors that the book on display was on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., home to the largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works. Included in the Folger's collections were more than 310,000 books and manuscripts, 250,000 playbills, 27,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, and prints, and musical instruments, costumes, and films.
The notice further advised that the rare book on exhibit was one of only four copies of the earliest complete editions of plays written by William Shakespeare. Whereas only eighteen of his plays had appeared in print during his lifetime, the First Folio collection contained thirty-six of his plays, together with a list of the names of the principal actors in the company, as well as comments and eulogies from them. The book had been printed in London in 1623, at an estimated cost of a bit more than six shillings per copy, marked up to a London retail
price of fifteen shillings for the unbound edition, and an even one pound for the edition bound in plain calf. It was now worth 6.2 million dollars.
THE THREE FLIES was a bar in what used to be a notorious red-light section of the Eight-Eight once upon a time before an off-duty cop got shot in the neighborhood by a pimp who didn't like one of his girls having sex with the cop a few dozen times. The girl's developing bad habit led to all the other neighborhood pimps calling the pimp in question — to his face, no less - un ahuevado. Which subsequently led to the hapless cop getting shot, and incidentally killed. So the other cops of the Eight-Eight took offense and went marching in there like it was Iraq. The area was now relatively clean, but the Three Flies was still a hangout for hookers and college boys who wandered over from Beasley U across the park, looking for sex or dope or both.
When Ollie got there at three that afternoon, the place was still comparatively empty; the schoolboys were still at their studies, and most of the hookers were still sleeping off last night's revelries. The jukebox was playing some kind of bullfight music, and two girls were sitting in a booth bullshitting in time to it. Ollie walked over to them. He didn't know either one of them, so he flashed the buzzer to let them know this was the Law here, and sat down opposite them, and grinned across the table at them. The girls didn't look scared in the slightest; cops were some of their best customers.
'Ambrose Carter,' he said.
One of the girls stared at him. She was a black girl with blond hair. The other one was white, also blond. Both of them in their twenties, Ollie guessed. Both of
them smoking and drinking beer straight from the same bottle, passing it back and forth between them. Ollie wondered if they worked as a team, passing similarly shaped things back and forth between them.
"What about him?' the black blonde asked.
'Who'd he rat out? And why?'
The two blondes looked at each other.
Dead-panned, they turned back to Ollie.
'So?' he said.
'What's in it for us?' the white blonde asked.
'Look, almeja,' Ollie said, which meant 'cunt' in Spanish, but which the white blonde didn't understand because she happened to be of Scotch-Irish descent, 'I don't have time to waste here, okay?'
The black blonde didn't know what almeja meant, either, her great-great grandparents having come from the Ivory Coast. But she knew what the look on this fat hump's face meant.
So she said, 'Carmela Sammarone.'
Which was what led him to the Eighty-seventh Precinct.
OLLIE ARRIVED JUST a few minutes after the third note that day was delivered.
'She's got the city's whole damn powder crowd marching in here with her damn messages,' Byrnes told his assembled detectives.
'Your needle freaks and sleepwalkers, too,' Parker said.
This after they realized the third messenger was a heroin addict.
The third note read:
And that you not delay the present, but, Filling the air with swords advanced and darts,
We prove this very hour.
'Swords again,' Meyer said.
'Spears to arrows to swords.'
'Or darts,' Carella said. 'Maybe that's where he's leading us. Darts.'