'My nephew,' Kit explained.
'I know what you're thinking,' Janek said. Kit looked at him curiously.
'You want me to interview Tania. I'm wondering how you think I'm going to do it.'
'Only one way I can think of,' Kit said. 'Fly down to Cuba and knock on her door.'
'You're kidding!'
'Uh-uh, not kidding, Frank. There's no extradition, no cooperation, but there's nothing to stop you going down there as a tourist.'
'Sure. Without my badge, without my gun.'
'What do you need them for? You're just going to talk to the woman.
It's perfectly legal to go. There're charters out of Miami-though I wouldn't advise taking one. Your best bet's Mexico. You don't want to attract attention by going as a cop, so you work up a cover identity under your own name, something they'd appreciate, something slightly socialist, like… labor organizer? Yeah, that sounds right. Then go to a tour operator and arrange a week's vacation. The Cubans are hungry for dollars. They'll show you a good time.'
'Then one afternoon I just slip out to the address.' Janek pulled out his notebook, laid it on the table. 'Ring the buzzer. Ask for Tania Figueras. Ask her if she'd like to fill me in on a few little matters that happened one night nine years ago.'
'Sounds good to me.'
'I don't believe this!'
'Why not?' She eyed him sternly. 'You know you're going to go. You knew it, same as me, soon as you heard where she was.'
Kit was right. But somehow he hadn't been able to picture himself playing detective in a country where he would have no authority, where, at best, he would be tolerate only because he carried hard currency.
'We thought Tania was dead. Now it turns out she's been living this close for years. She has to know what's been going on. But she never came forward, never even wrote a letter. Why should she talk to me now?
What's to stop her, soon as I identify myself, from slamming her door in my face?'
'She may do that. She may even call the cops and have them heave you out. But can you think of any other way to handle it? Be honest, Frank.
Can you really imagine yourself, now that you know where she is, shrugging the information off?'
The waiter brought their food. Kit dug into her scrambled eggs. Janek sipped his coffee and watched her eat. How can she feel so ravenous?
'No. I I 'No-what?' she asked, not looking up.
'No, I can't imagine that.'
'So-?'
'So, I'll go.' He paused. 'Want to know why?' She nodded. 'I'll go there for you-because you want me to.'
She looked up at him then, her tired face breaking into a grin.
'You'll not only go, Frank. You'll bring back the goods.' Her smiled turned truly beauteous. 'I know you will.'
He spent the next several days in a small bare room off Central Files reviewing the Mendoza folders, scanning the documents, rereading the notes, trying to fill in the well remembered outlines of the case with its texture, smell what he thought of as its 'buzz.' Halfway through the material he was moved to pity. Mendoza was a cop's nightmare, and, for New York City cops, it was a great nightmare shared.
The photographs told the initial story well. There was one, clipped out of an issue of New York magazine, that had appeared a year before the killings. It showed the Mendozas in happier days: short, chubby, balding Jake, the corporate-takeover genius, standing proudly beside Edith, his younger, taller, slimmer wife. Both Mendozas gazed at the camera. Jake wore his shy, dimpled, baby-face grin; Edith's smile was more restrained. What came through strongest was their confidence-'Look at us, we've made it big. Now we're reaping the harvest.'
The setting for this shot, the vast living room of their Central Park West apartment, was as interesting to Janek as the portraits. Polished floors, priceless antiques, radiant old-master paintings mounted on glazed and glowing walls-the artifacts spoke of wealth and striving, props in a room conceived of as a theater in which the elites of Manhattan mingled, and by so doing imbued their hosts with glamour.
Jake and Edith had been involved with the great cultural institutions of the city-Metropolitan Museum of Art, Metropolitan Opera, New York Public Library, New York City Ballet. But there was a dark side unseen by their attractive society friends, bizarre scripted encounters enacted in another, smaller, less-glittering theater: the covertly rented, mirror-lined studio in Chelsea in which Edith Mendoza had been found hanging from a hook.
There were photographs in the file of that apartment, too, showing the Mendozas at play with partners recruited from the lower depths. The pictures had been discovered in the suburban home of an undercover narcotics detective named Howard Clury a week after Clury, while starting up his Cadillac, had been blown to bits by a plastic explosive expertly wired to his accelerator. It was the discovery of Clury's cache, and -the coincidental timing of his execution (one day after Edith's), that pushed the case out of the category of 'brutal society sex murder' into another, more esoteric realm of criminal phenomena.
Janek inspected the Clury pictures closely. They had been taken with an extreme wide-angle lens so that everything in the Chelsea studio could be seen. The mirrors that lined the walls tripled the impact of the images. They showed Edith, bound naked to the bed with rope, being ravaged by a muscular black man (later identified as an aspirant boxer named Carl Washington), while Jake, bound tightly to a chair, looked on with anguished eyes.
But was Edith truly being violated? Or could her expression be characterized as ecstatic? Was Jake helpless and humiliated? Or was he simply fascinated? Janek compared one of the pictures from this series with the portrait in New York magazine. Except for their nakedness, the Mendozas looked the same. Jake's grin was just as broad. Edith's smile was similarly enigmatic. Their expressions projected the same smug sense of entitlement, perhaps tinged in the sex photos by an additional blush of almost otherworldly delight.
After three days of studying the file, Janek arranged to meet his former partner, Timmy Sheehan, at a pub called O'Malley's on Second Avenue near Ninety-third. O'Malley's was a typical neighborhood Paddy bar, catering to a mix of bluecollar people, brassy local women and apartment-house doormen of Irish descent. It was not a cop hangout, which, Timmy said, was why he found it tolerable.
When Janek arrived a little after six P. m., Timmy was waiting at the bar. Janek didn't spot him at first; the afternoon sunlight was so bright he was temporarily blinded when he walked in. But then, as his eyes adjusted, he made out Timmy's face-pink cheeks, squared-off chin, thick gray hair rising straight back from the forehead. Timmy was staring at him, waiting to be recognized. A TV, set above the bar, was carrying the local news.
'Have I gotten that fat, Frank?' he asked as Janek approached.
'Yeah, I think so. In the jowls,' Janek said.
They cuffed at one another, ordered beers, then moved to a booth in the dark back half of the room. There they chatted briefly about a former supervisor named Mcgavin who had shot himself the week before, after seven years' retirement, in Arizona.
'Way I heard it,' Timmy said, 'he ate his Popsicle in a service-station rest room.'
'Leave a note?'
Timmy shook his head. 'He just sat down on the toilet. Then… ping!'
Timmy formed his right hand into a pistol, pulled an imaginary trigger.
'His wife, Jo-remember her, Frank?-she was out by the pump filling up the tank. When she heard the shot she knew what had happened. People at the station started going crazy, but Jo just stood there pumping gas till it ran down the side of the car.'
'Jesus!' No matter how many such stories Janek heard, he never became inured to them.
'Mcgavin was always an inconsiderate bastard.' Timmy squinted.
'Anyway, Frank, what's on your mind?'
Janek met Timmy's eyes. They were smart and quick. There had always been something cool about him, swift and cold behind the banter.
'Heard the latest on Mendoza?'
Timmy laughed. 'Like what? He still hates my guts?'
