“The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
“He left it dead, and with its head
“He went galumphing back.”
The rap ended.
The beast in its enraged red mask lay dead on the floor at Tamar’s feet.
Now there was only the B-flat note again, that single repeated bass note, and Tamar fluidly moving the tune into the bluesy figure of its opening melody.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
“Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
“O Frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!
“He chortled in his joy.”
Tamar’s eyes shone, her voice rang out. She was home, baby, she was home.
“ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
“Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
“All mimsy were the…”
“Don’t nobody fuckingmove! ”
Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat were coming down the wide mahogany staircase.
2
TALL AND LEANand with the easy stride of an athlete—which he most certainly wasn’t—Steve Carella came into the squadroom at twenty minutes to twelve that Saturday night, fresh as a daisy, and ready to go to work.
“It’s for you,” Andy Parker said, and handed him the phone.
Actually, it wasn’t for Carella.
It was for whichever detective happened to be on duty at the Eight-Seven at this hour of the night. But the Graveyard Shift was just beginning to meander in, and Parker was never too eager to catch a new case, so he considered himself officially relieved, and passed the call on to Carella, who was a bit bewildered by the precise timing.
“Carella,” he said into the phone.
“Hello, Carella,” a gruff, smoke-tarnished voice said. “This is Captain Jimson, Harbor Patrol.”
A jumper, Carella thought at once. Someone’s taken a dive off the Hamilton Bridge.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
“I just had a call from one of my people out on the water, a Sergeant McIntosh, aboard one of our thirty-six footers. At around ten-thirty, he responded to a distress call from the skipper of a cruise yacht called theRiver Princess …are you with me, Coppola?”
“It’s Carella, sir.”
“Sorry. TheRiver Princess, some kind of party for a rock singer.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Two armed masked men boarded the boat around ten-fifteen and kidnapped her.”
Oh boy, Carella thought.
“You’re the local onshore precinct. Coast Guard has a DPB waiting to take you out there from Pier 39…”
“Yes, sir,” Carella said.
He didn’t know what a DPB was.
“…that’s on the river and Twelfth. How long will it take you to get crosstown?”
Carella glanced at the precinct wall map.
“Give me fifteen minutes, sir,” he said.
“The man you’re meeting is a lieutenant j.g. named Carlyle Apted.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, would you know who the singer…?”
But the captain had already hung up, and Cotton Hawes was just walking into the squadroom.
“Cotton,” he said, “don’t get comfortable. We’re up.”
COTTON HAWESfelt right at home on the Coast Guard’s little 38-foot DPB. This was the kind of boat he’d commanded duringhis little war. Everybody in America had his own little war, and everybody in that war did his own little thing. Carella had trudged through mud as a grunt in the infantry. Hawes had stood on the bridge of a boat not unlike this one, grinning into flying bullets, spray and spume. Everybody in America who’d ever fought or merely served in any of the country’s innumerable little wars would never forget his own particular war, although sometimes he would like to. But there would always be more little wars and even some big ones, and therefore many more opportunities to remember. Or perhaps forget.
Cotton Hawes stood on the bridge of the cutter alongside Lieutenant Carlyle Apted, a man in his late twenties, he guessed, who had been summoned to the scene the moment Sergeant McIntosh realized he was dealing with a kidnapping here.
“Guess he figured this would get Federal sooner or later,” Apted said.
Then what arewe ding here? Carella wondered. Let the Feebs have it now, and welcome to it.
“What you’re on now,” Apted told Hawes, perhaps suspecting that Carella didn’t really care to know, “is a Deployable Pursuit Boat, what we call a DPB. She’s a thirty-eight footer, designed to give the Coast Guard a new capability in the war against drugs.”
Another little war, Carella thought.
“What it is, you see, most of your illegal narcotics are smuggled in on these ‘go-fasts,’ we call ’em. They’re these small, high-speed boats that can carry up to two thousand keys of cocaine. But they can’t outrun our DPBs. Means we can intercept and board and make a sizable dent in the traffic.”
Carella hated boats. He hated anything that moved on water. Especially DPBs, which seemed to move faster than any damn thing he’d ever seen on water. When he used to bathe his infant twins—lo, those many years ago—even the floating rubber duck in the bathtub made him seasick. Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration. But hewas feeling a bit queasy now, and he was also fearful that all that dark greasy water splashing over the bow might be polluted. His face wet, his hair flying in the wind, he wondered what a nice boy like himself was doing on a swiftly moving vehicle in the middle of a deep river on a shift that had just barely begun.
Tonight, Carella felt—and therefore looked—more like a beloved professor of economics at a municipal college than a detective. Hatless, dark-haired and brown-eyed, the eyes slanting downward to give his face a somewhat Oriental appearance, he was wearing an orange-colored life vest over dark brown slacks and matching loafers and socks, a blue button-down shirt, a brown tie, and a tweed jacket that was, in truth, a bit too heavy for the mild weather and a bit too shabby for the sort of party that had been interrupted out there on theRiver Princess. He was frowning. Well, he was more than frowning. In fact, he looked as if he might throw up. Unamused, he stood on the deck of a tossing peanut-shell vessel, braving the raging briny while two old sea-faring types chatted it up and grinned into the wind.
Hawes, on the other hand, was in his element.
Dressed somewhat casually, even for the midnight-to-eightA.M. shift, he was wearing his life jacket over blue jeans, a crew neck green sweater, a zippered brown leather jacket, and ankle high brown boots. He had not expected to be pulled out onto the River Harb tonight—in fact, he’d been planning to do a field follow-up on some bikers he suspected were involved in a liquor store holdup, and he figured the protective coloration might help him. Actually, though, his costume would have fit in beautifully at Tamar Valparaiso’s launch party, where many of the music industry’s moguls were similarly dressed.
“Ever hear of this girl before?” Apted asked him.
He had given up on Carella as a lost-cause landlubber.
“What’s her name?” Hawes asked.
“Tamar Valentino,” Apted said.
“No. Is she famous or something?”
“Not to me,” Apted said.
“Me, neither,” Hawes said. “Steve!” he yelled over the roar of the wind. “You ever hear of a singer named Tamar Valentino?”
“No!” Carella yelled back. “Who is she?”
“The one who got snatched,” Apted said.
“If she got snatched, she must be somebody,” Hawes said reasonably.
Carella was wondering if the FBI had already been notified.
“I HAVE TOtell you the truth,” Sergeant McIntosh said, “I been with the Harbor Patrol Unit for twenty-two years now, this is the first time I ever caught a kidnapping.”