land lies. I’m just going to have to wing it.”
“Maybe you should just go and hang out in your room. Hold off on going to the medical examiner’s for today. You’ve been running around like crazy and you got beat up last night, for Christ’s sake. I can’t go with you this afternoon, but perhaps we can go together in the morning?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I have no idea if the ME’s office is even open. I don’t know how long they keep the bodies there, either. I would imagine the office encourages families to arrange to take their relatives to the funeral homes as quickly as possible. Plus, if we go tomorrow, they’re likely to be short-staffed. They’ll probably say, ‘Come back Monday.’ And I just can’t sit around. I have to know.”
“You’re probably right about Saturdays,” George said. “But-”
“No, George, I’m going today. You go to class. There’s no way I can get in trouble at the OCME.”
“You’re very resourceful,” George said with a wry smile.
Pia ignored the comment. “I’ll leave now. Would you mind hanging on to this coffee cup? I’ll keep the Geiger counter and hope I need it.”
George took the bag. “Not at all. We’ll meet up as soon as you get back.” He watched a focused Pia leap up and lift her cafeteria tray. “And be careful! Try to stay out of trouble!”
Pia merely glowered at him before leaving.
George watched her wend her way among the tables, deposit her tray at the window, and then leave. The idea occurred to him to call the police now that Pia was safely out of sight. But he knew if he did that, whatever the outcome, Pia would never talk to him again. He was certain that she would consider it an act of betrayal.
Tossing back the remains of his coffee, George got to his feet. At least he was going to be on time for the lecture.
PART III
45.
BELMONT SECTION OF THE BRONX NEW YORK CITY MARCH 25, 2011, 3:28 P.M.
Aleksander Buda ended the call on his cell phone and held the device in his hand, then used his spatula-like index finger to tap the end-call button. There was now a problem in an operation that had gone so smoothly up to now, and he hated problems. Problems gave him terrible heartburn. He found the container of different-colored antacid tablets he always carried, took a handful, and chewed them quickly, one after another. Buda was fifty-something-fifty-what he didn’t know for sure, because his family had left Albania with a few pots and pans and a little money but no documentation indicating when he was born. Over time, first in Italy and then in the United States, he had acquired the paper trappings of the immigrant, including a date of birth in 1958, but he had no idea if it was true.
Buda wasn’t a big man, perhaps five-nine, but he had close-cropped hair with a scar that ran into his hairline on the right side of his broad face and enough prison tattoos on his arms, should he care to show them, to make anyone think twice about approaching him. Buda dressed unobtrusively, today in a tan long-sleeved shirt and jeans and sneakers. One might imagine he actually was a handyman for a group of East Side co-ops, work he showed up for every now and again, rather than what he really was: the head of a crew in the Albanian mob.
Buda’s crew, or clan, was less hierarchically organized than a Cosa Nostra family, and leadership was often fluid and based strictly on results. Through a combination of caution and brutality, Buda’s power had remained unchallenged for years. The members of the crew shared their compatriot’s reputation for ruthlessness and violence, gained over more than twenty-five years of aggressive criminal activity. The Albanians had come late on the New York scene and they had been keen to make up for lost time. They took low-level positions in Italian organizations only to rise up and challenge the longer-established Mafia stalwarts.
In Europe, Albanian groups established a strong presence in hard and soft drug trafficking, dominating the heroin trade in many countries, running the raw materials from Afghanistan through Turkey to Albania. Processed heroin and other drugs could then be distributed anywhere in the world, through hubs like the terminals at Port Newark, New Jersey. Heroin was just one business the crews were involved in. They also had interests in such prosaic activities as extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling. Aleksander Buda had lieutenants working such operations so he could keep a low profile and take on more lucrative projects, such as the one he was working now, the one with a problem.
Buda was very aware that Albanian crews had developed a profile. One based in Queens had been taken down by the FBI a few years before; another in Staten Island was broken up in 2010. There were now more than two hundred thousand Albanians in the New York metro area, maybe three hundred thousand. The vast majority, all save a couple of hundred, were hardworking and law-abiding. Buda and his men drifted in and out of this Albanian diaspora, hiding among them in plain sight. The mob groups were clannish and secretive, hypersensitive to any kind of insult, and quick to use violence for the sake of vengeance. Under the Albanian code of
After Jerry Trotter made his proposal to Edmund three weeks previously, it had taken Edmund two days to call the number Trotter gave him. Ten, fifteen times he had told himself that he wouldn’t call, that he’d throw the piece of paper in the fireplace and forget all about it. Other times, he convinced himself that this was a test of his resolve set by Jerry, that if he called the number, Jerry himself would answer the phone. But at times, usually in the dead of night, when he sat by himself in his study drinking whiskey, Edmund ran through what such a call would be like to make. Say this guy actually was a killer for hire; how do you introduce yourself to someone like that? What do you say? He figured that if you called on business like this, you didn’t use your own phone.
Edmund finally called the number from a pay phone in a Laundromat on Second Avenue in the Sixties in Manhattan, a busy spot without any obvious security cameras trained on it. Edmund steeled himself, inserted his money, and dialed the number. Someone picked up but didn’t speak, and Edmund ran through his rehearsed lines.
“Hello. I got your number from a friend. I have a proposition for you. This isn’t a joke.”
Edmund didn’t say any more; the phone line quickly went dead.
An hour later, Edmund called again, from the same pay phone.
“Can we meet somewhere? I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say-”
Click.
The next day, on the fourth attempt, at ten in the morning, a thickly accented voice said, “Call in an hour. Pay phone bank at Grand Central. Main-level concourse.”
Edmund did as he was told.
“Take six train to Morrison Avenue, exit platform north side and wait.”
Edmund was at a point of no return. All he’d done was make a few phone calls, but now he was going to meet someone he knew was a killer. He looked at the commuters walking through Grand Central, ordinary people like him. If he went ahead with this, he would no longer be ordinary. In the recent endless days and sleepless nights, Edmund had weighed the possible costs of doing what Jerry demanded and doing nothing. If he failed to act, he’d be ruined financially and personally. But Jerry’s terrible scheme gave him a chance.
Another thought had occurred to Edmund and was proving impossible to ignore. These doctors were destroying his business. It was their fault he was in this position, and he was damned if he was going to let them get away with it.
Edmund rode the subway north to a section of the Bronx he’d never visited before. He got off the train on a windswept elevated platform. There was hardly anyone else around at eleven in the morning, just two men who
