' 'Cause you don't approve?'
'I don't approve or disapprove.'
'But it's not the kind of thing you would ever do.'
'No,' I said, 'that's not it at all. Because I have done it, I've appointed myself executioner. It's not a role I'd want to make a habit of.'
'No.'
'And there's no reason why I should in this case. I could turn him over to Brooklyn Homicide and sleep fine.'
He thought about it. 'I don't think I could,' he said.
'That's why I said it has to be your decision.'
'Yeah, well, I guess I just made it. I have to take care of it myself.'
'Then I guess I'll be going.'
'Yeah, you and everybody else,' he said. 'Here's what we'll do. It's a shame we didn't bring two cars.
Matt, you and TJ and Petey'll take the money to Yuri.'
'Some of it's yours. Do you want to take out the money you lent him?'
'Separate it out at his place, will you? I don't want to wind up with any of the counterfeit.'
'It's all in the packages with the Chase wrappers,' Peter said.
'Yeah, except it all got mixed around when this dickhead here counted it, so check it out at Yuri's, okay? And then you'll pick me up.
Figure what? Twenty minutes to Yuri's and twenty minutes back, twenty minutes there, figure an hour. You'll come back here and pick me up on the corner an hour and fifteen minutes from now.'
'All right.'
He grabbed a bag. 'C'mon,' he said. 'We'll take these out to the car. Matt, watch him, huh?'
They left, and TJ and I stood looking down at Raymond Callander.
We both had guns, but either of us could have guarded him with a flyswatter at this point. He seemed barely present.
I looked at him and remembered our conversation in the cemetery, that minute or two when something human had been talking. I wanted to talk to him again and see what would come out this time.
I said, 'Were you just going to leave Albert there?'
'Albert?' He had to think about it. 'No,' he said at length. 'I was going to tidy up before I left.'
'What would you do with him?'
'Cut him up. Wrap him. There's plenty of Hefty bags in the cupboard.'
'And then what? Deliver him to somebody in the trunk of the car?'
'Oh,' he said, remembering. 'No, that was for the Arab's benefit.
But it's easy. You spread them around, put them in dumpsters, trash cans. No one ever notices. Put them in with restaurant garbage and they just pass as meat scraps.'
'You've done this before.'
'Oh, yes,' he said. 'There were more women then you know about.' He looked at TJ. 'One black one I remember. She was just about your color.' He heaved a sigh. 'I'm tired,' he said.
'It won't be long.'
'You're going to leave me with him,' he said, 'and he's going to kill me. That Arab.'
Phoenician, I thought.
'You and I know each other,' he said. 'I know you lied to me, I know you broke your promise, that was what you had to do. But you and I had a conversation. How can you just let him kill me?'
Whining, querulous. It was impossible not to think of Eichmann in the dock in Israel. How could we do this to him?
And I thought, too, of a question I had asked him in the graveyard, and I fed his own remarkable answer back to him.
'You got in the truck,' I said.
'I don't understand.'
'Once you got in the truck,' I said, 'you're just body parts.'
WE picked up Kenan as arranged at a quarter to three in the morning in front of a credit jeweler on Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from Albert Wallens's house. He saw me behind the wheel and asked where his brother was. I said we'd dropped him off a few minutes ago at the house on Colonial Road. He was going to pick up the Toyota, but changed his mind and said he'd go straight to sleep.
'Yeah? Me, I'm so wired you'd have to hit me over the head with a mallet to put me out. No, stay there, Matt. You drive.' He walked around the car, looked in back at TJ, sprawled across the rear seat like a rag doll. 'Past his
