The four men in the car didn't talk. They really didn't seem concerned with him.
That scared him.
Details:
Apartment tracts knocked up quickly for new immigrants -clusters of no-frills rectangles, cinder block faced with limestone, sitting on dry beds devoid of landscaping. Depressing. Like the housing projects back in New York, but these had a ghost-town quality to them, separated from one another by acres of sand.
Laundry on lines.
A vest-pocket park shaded by pines and olives. Kerchiefed women pushing strollers. Hassid types walking with their hands clasped behind their backs. A small shopping center.
A handful of people. Too far to notice what was happening.
Or care.
The Escort kept barreling along, traveling so fast the chassis was rattling.
Ramot Pollin.
Fewer people, then none. Things were starting to look downright desolate.
Half-finished foundations. Scaffolding. The skeletal underpinnings of buildings. A prefab gas station on a concrete pad, the windows opaque with dust and still X-taped, four oblong trenches where the pumps were going to be.
But no workers, no signs of construction activity. Some goddamned strike, no doubt.
Trenches. Tractor treads. Craters occupied by dormant bulldozers and cranes, the dirt pushed up around the rims in soft brown pyramids.
Unfinished roads bleeding off into dust.
Quiet. Silent. Too damned silent.
A roller-coaster hump in the road, then a sharp dip, another construction site at the bottom, this one stillborn, completely deserted: a single story of cinder block, the rest wood frame. Off in the distance, Wilbur could see tents. Bedouins-where the hell were they taking him?
Kinky answered that question by driving off the road, down a muddy ditch, and onto the side. He circled the cinder-block wall until coming to a six-foot opening at the rear and driving through it.
Another car was parked inside, half-hidden by shadows. Red BMW, grayed by dust.
Kinky turned off the engine.
Wilbur looked around: dark, damp place, probably the future subterranean garage. Roofed with sheets of plywood and black plastic tarp. Garbage all over the dirt floor: nail-studded wood scraps, plasterboard fragments, shreds of insulation, bent metal rods, probably a healthy dose of asbestos particles floating in the air.
During orientation, Grabowsky had amused him with stories of how the Israeli mafia buried their victims in the foundations of buildings under construction. Religious Hassid who were kohens-some special kind of priest- afraid of going into the buildings because Jewish law prohibited them from being near dead bodies.
No longer amusing.
No, couldn't be. Kinky wore a yarmulke. Nice Jewish boy, no mafia.
Then he remembered some of the stuff that guys with yarmulkes had pulled off in the diamond district.
Oh, shit.
'Okay,' said Dry Voice. He opened the door. Wilbur saw the gun bulge under his suit jacket. Wool suit- asshole wasn't even sweating.
All of them except Kinky got out of the car. Dry Voice took Wilbur's elbow and led him a few feet past the front bumper.
Handsome and Iron Pumper folded their arms across their chests, stood there staring at him. Iron Pumper turned full face. Wilbur saw he was an Oriental-goddamned Oriental giant with cold slit eyes. This had to be a dream. Too much booze-he'd wake up any moment with a four-plus hangover.
A door slammed. Kinky was out of the car now, holding an attache case in one hand, the paper he'd used to shield his face in the other.
Wilbur looked at the paper. This morning's international Trib, his Butcher-letter story on page two.
Dry Voice held on to his elbow. Handsome and Slant-Eye had backed away into the shadows, but he could still sense their presence.
Kinky came closer. Small guy-not black, more like a mixed-blood, the kind you saw all over Brazil. But with weird golden eyes that shone in the dimness like those of a cat. The hand holding the paper was a mess-stiff- looking, covered with shiny pink scars. Real contrast to the rest of him, which was all brown and smooth and seamless. Baby face. But the eyes were old.
'Hello, Mr. Wilbur.' Soft voice, barely an accent.
'Who are you?' Who the fuck are you!
'Daniel Sharavi. I understand you've been asking about me.'
Goddamned geezer at the archives. They all stuck together.
'In the course of my work-'
