“Martin found Samat where you stashed him—upstate New York in the middle of Amish country. He persuaded him to give his wife a religious divorce. Some rabbis in Brooklyn did the paper work.”
“What happened to Samat after he signed on the dotted line?”
“He said something about wanting to see Russian friends in Little Odessa. That’s the last anyone saw of him, flagging down a taxi and telling the driver to take him to Brighton Beach.”
“Now that Samat’s been found, the case is closed.”
“There’s still the Oligarkh. You wouldn’t by any chance know where he hangs his hat these days?”
“I don’t know. If I did I wouldn’t tell you. On the off chance you can find him, don’t. Remember what happened to Jozef. Touch a hair on the Oligarkh’s wallahs will bury you alive.”
“Thanks for the free advice, Felix.”
“You saved my life once, Lincoln. Now I’m trying to save yours.”
1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN FEELS THE RECOIL IN HIS SHOULDER BLADES
THE SANCTUM LINCOLN HAD SUSSED OUT WAS AS SUITABLE AS A sniper’s blind gets. Most of the panes were missing from the window, which meant he could steady the Whitworth on a sash at shoulder height—Lincoln shot best standing up, with his left elbow braced against a rib. The window itself was covered with a canopy of ivy that had spread across the facade of the abandoned hospital across the street and slightly uphill from the U-shaped tenement at 621 Crown Street, off Albany Avenue. For a sharpshooter, weather conditions—it was sunny and cold—were ideal; humid air could slow down a bullet and cause it to drop, dry hot air could cause it to fire high. Lugging the rifle and a shopping bag up the stairs littered with broken glass and trash to the corner room on the fourth floor, Lincoln had removed the thick work gloves and coated all of his finger tips with Super Glue, then set out the bottles of drinking water, the Mars bars and the containers of liquid yogurts on a sheet of newspaper. He knotted Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk scarf around his neck before sighting in the Whitworth. He judged the distance from the front door of the hospital to the sidewalk in front of the tenement to be eighty yards, then calculated his height above ground and the length of the hypotenuse of the resulting triangle. He adjusted the small wheels on the rear of the brass telescopic sight atop the Whitworth, focusing on the crucifix hanging in a ground floor window giving out onto the street. Sighted correctly and fired with a firm arm, the hexagonal barrel of the Whitworth—rifled to spit out a .45-caliber hex-shaped lead bullet that made one complete turn every twenty yards—could hit anything the marksman could see. Queen Victoria herself had once gotten a bull’s eye at four-hundred yards; she’d been so thrilled with the exploit that she had knighted Mr. Whitworth, the rifle’s inventor, on the spot. Lincoln tapped home the ramrod, working the hand-rolled cartridge into the barrel, then carefully fitted the primer cap over the rifle’s nipple. Finally he removed the brass tampon on the barrel and stretched a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from dust and moisture. With his weapon ready to fire, Lincoln crouched at the sill to study the target building across the street from what had once been the Carson C. Peck Memorial Hospital.
Lincoln had made use of one of Martin Odum’s old tricks to find the address that corresponded to the unlisted phone number 718-555-9291. He’d called the local telephone company from a booth on Eastern Parkway. A woman had come on the line. Like Martin in London, Lincoln had retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion.
“Could you tell me, then, how I can get my hands on a new phone book after my dog chewed the bejesus out of the old one?”
“What type of directory do you want, sir?”
“Yellow pages for Brooklyn.”
“We’ll be glad to send it to you. Could I trouble you for your phone number?”
“You’re not troubling me,” Lincoln had said. “It’s 718-555-9291.”
The woman had repeated the number to be sure she had it right. Then she’d asked, “What kind of dog do you have?”
“An Irish setter, of course.”
“Well, hide the phone book from him next time. Will you be needing anything else today?”
“A new yellow pages will do me fine. Are you sure you know where to send it?”
The woman had said, “Let me check the screen. Here it is. You’re at 621 Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York, right?”
“That’s it, darlin’.”
“Have a nice day.”
“I plan to,” Lincoln had said just before he hung up.
From his hideaway on the fourth floor of the abandoned and soon to be demolished hospital, Lincoln watched a black teenager balancing a ghetto blaster on one shoulder skate past 621 Crown Street. As dusk shrouded the neighborhood and the streetlights flickered on, what Lincoln took to be a group of Nicaraguans in dreadlocks and colorful bandannas piled out of a gypsy cab and filed into the building. Settling down to camp for the night, Lincoln examined the building across the street more closely through the scope on the rifle. All the windows on the first five floors had cheap shades, some of them drawn, some of them half raised; the people he caught glimpses of in the windows looked to be Puerto Ricans or blacks. The entire top floor appeared to have been taken over by the target; every window was fitted with venetian blinds, all but one tightly closed. The one where he could see through the slats turned out to be a kitchen, equipped with an enormous Frigidaire and a gas stove with a double oven. A stocky black woman wearing an apron appeared to be preparing dinner. Now and then men would wander through the kitchen; one of them had his sports jacket off and Lincoln could make out a large-caliber pistol tucked into a shoulder holster. The black woman opened the oven to baste a large bird, then prepared two enormous bowls of dog food. She seemed to shout to someone in another room as she set the bowls down on the floor. A moment later two Borzois romped into sight and were promptly lost to view under the sill of the window.
Cleaning away the debris, settling down on the floor with his back against a wall, Lincoln treated himself to a Mars bar and half a container of yogurt. All things considered, he was relieved that he was the one doing the shooting and not Martin Odum. Marksmanship was not Martin’s strong suit; he was too impatient to stalk a target and crank in one or two clicks on the sights for distance and windage and slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger; too cerebral to kill in cold blood unless he was goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln Dittmann or Dante Pippen. In short, Martin was too involved, too temperamental. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. Staking out the target, taking your sweet time to be sure you got the kill, one shot to a target, Lincoln was in his element. He had owned a rifle since he was a child in Pennsylvania, hunting rabbits and birds in the woods and fields behind his house in Jonestown. Once, packed off to the Company’s Farm for a refresher course in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, he’d impressed the instructors the first day on the firing range when they’d put an antiquated gas-operated semiautomatic M-l in his hands. Without a word, Lincoln had screwed down the iron sights and fired off a round at the thirty-six-inch target hoping to spot a spurt of dirt somewhere in front of it. When he did he’d turned up the sights one click, which was the equivalent of one minute of elevation or ten inches of height on the target, and fired the second round into the black. He’d notched in a one-click windage adjustment and raised his sights and hit the bulls eye on the third try.