F Train Read online

  …ambassador. None other than His Excellency, the ambassador to the United Nations from the People’s Republic of China. Or a different ambassador from another country?

  And wherever this diplomat was from, what was His Excellency the ambassador doing with snakes? or skins? Ten, or sixty, or thirty or however many?

  True, Chinese ate snakes, they swore by snake soup to ward off winter colds or increase male potency or simply for protein and taste, but why were Chinese dietary habits such a concern to Special Agent John James Reilly, a burden of such gravity he connived to conceal these truths even from his colleagues?

  And if food was out of the question, then the dangerous story was interlinear, secreted somewhere deeper within Reilly’s hasty code. Flo felt certain darker truths lay well locked in. And still she lacked the key.

  She glanced at her kitchen window frosting over with new snow, thick flakes too heavy to float. The snow fell straight to the ground and hid the backyard flower beds. She walked to front room, stretching her legs, and peering through iced panes she found Eleventh Street white and empty, lifeless except for a streetlamp, its light flickering behind a curtain of blizzard growing dense. The shops and the restaurants around the corner on Eighth Avenue were closed, and wintry somberness, a stillness, a shadowy gloom induced dark moods, restless foreboding and solitary speculations: unnerving, unexpected, unpredictable, all of this light-years distant from the pristine, pragmatic perceptions Flo hoped to deliver to her colleagues the next morning, sensible insights that could help clarify Special Agent John James Reilly’s actions, illuminate his deeper motivations.

  Instead, she sensed a witch’s brew foaming up, a headful of fears and uncertain facts, if indeed these were facts and not fictions in Reilly’s notebook. The disturbing sum of it, whatever it was, seemed far removed from the exploits of money-laundering antique dealers or two-timing husbands out on the prowl. Strong emotions, fears edging toward panic, all these worked to demolish logic, the essential tool of a determined detective.

  That night, as Flo tried out different interpretations for Reilly’s cryptic notes, dreamy images formed, faded, formed again. Visions of snakeskins swirling wildly in a winter wind. Seven cadavers floating past on snowy clouds. Under great red flags, a billion people marched.

  Nightmare images.

  Sleep, in the curving path of a subway train rounding a bend on elevated tracks, seeped into her brain, in the end always the F train. Anxiety, psychiatrists say, is triggered by depression, and depression, the same psychiatric experts insist, is caused by anxiety. All night long Flo rotated round and round this dreamy rats’ maze, never really sleeping, never fully awake. And by dawn, that rodent pair—anxiety and depression—linked claws, and Flo sat up in bed, dreading the day ahead but determined to ride it out, the fatal train carrying her wherever it would lead.

  Monday

  8 A.M.

  Crossing the lobby of a nondescript Federal Services building in Lower Manhattan, Flo Ott announced herself to the security guard at the reception desk.

  She showed him her police shield, before shaking like a wet dog, stamping her feet on the tiled floor to knock the slush off her boots. Temperature up twenty degrees in less than a couple of hours, then plummeting again—nothing unusual in New York’s protean weather. Since dawn, a second sleet storm had been beating in steadily from the north.

  The reception guard phoned upstairs. “Special Agent Canane will meet you at the elevator,” he said. “On the third floor.”

  Beside the elevator doors on that floor, Maureen Canane—stone-faced, crabby-eyed, toe-tapping impatient—greeted Flo and led her to a bare-walled interview room.

  After all that sleet, Flo could have used a cup of hot coffee, but none was in sight, not even bottled water on the table in the anonymous room, clearly not the high end of the U.S. Department of Justice.

  “Lieutenant Ott, I’m just going to lay it out on the line for you.” Special Agent Canane’s voice was an inflectionless drone.

  Flo nodded and waited. She knew the value of silence.

  “Special Agent John James Reilly was assigned to a United Nations member state delegation. Which nation, I’m not authorized to name. The nature of assignments like this involves U.S. national security. Totally. And whatever pertains to national security is classified. Totally. Regarding the late Special Agent Reilly’s specific duties, there I can’t share any information at all, not with someone lacking the necessary security clearances. Regardless of who it is. Or why they want it. So I’m afraid that’s it, Lieutenant Ott, and I’m very sorry.”

  “So am I.” Thank God for Raymond O’Hara was her next thought.

  “Thank you for your understanding, Lieutenant.”

  “But the woman he was with, she didn’t work for the Bureau. We have her identified as a paralegal at a Wall Street law firm. That’s all covered in the material we sent you. Is there anything at all you can tell me now, at least about her?”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Ott. But you seem to know more about this woman than we do. The Bureau appreciates your cooperation, for sharing files with us, but there’s nothing more we can add. At least not at this point.”

  Flo sensed an opening maybe down the road, and she saw no edge now in banging her head against unmovable stones. No point in beating herself up.

  “Thank you, Ms. Canane, we’ll stay in touch.”

  “No problem, Lieutenant.”

  8:50 A.M.

  Ella Mae Bontemps alighted from a livery service SUV, dressed in black, top to toe, sable hat and sable coat repelling arctic winds, a pair of saucer-size dark glasses concealing her eyes from a total absence of sun.

  She had the driver stop down the block and across the street from Brooklyn police headquarters. She fought her way through the sleet storm to the building and headed up to Detective Lieutenant Florence Ott’s homicide investigations office.

  Flo was waiting for this voluntary visitation. Frank Murphy had filled her in on the flamboyant revelations dropped like paste diamonds from Heights Antiques’s nominal proprietress. “You’ll love her, Flo, the most jawbacious person I’ve ever met. An immaculate misconception, Ella Mae, she’s Attila the Hen incarnate.”

  “Frank, you got a gift for epithet that goes right to the jugular.”

  Under hastily applied makeup, Ella Mae appeared uncharacteristically pale, her red coloring lacking its usual luster and no white rose tucked behind her ear.

  Judging from Frank’s colorful preliminary description of her visitor, Flo concluded Ms. Bontemps in the fabulous flesh might have appeared to more alluring—and talkative—advantage within the dusty dimness of her antiques caves than under the harsh neon strip lighting of the homicide investigations office.

  Flo’s intern, Krish Krishnaswami, set up a digital tape recording system linked to a laptop mic and Ella Mae Bontemps pulled up a chair facing Flo. In front of them, pictures of the F train massacre were projected on a wall, almost life-size images.

  “Sweet pleading Jesus, Officer, these pictures, they give a girl nightmares even when she’s wide awake.” Ella Mae closed her eyes to the display of seven bodies sprawled around the subway car, a stereoscopic scene of death haunting the room. “I swear, Ms. Ott, I don’t know how you can stand living with all this, staring you right in the face the whole time.”

  “I can’t. That’s why we want to wrap this one up.”

  “And I wish I could give you a real big helping hand on it, ma’am, I really do. But like I told your partner there, on my momma’s head I swear I wasn’t around here for any of this. I was way out of the country then. Or maybe down in Charleston. Or out in Santa Barbara. In any case, I don’t know anything…except it’s Sid Davidov up in that picture there. I can identify him, yes, I’m sorry about that, but I can. Because it’s not really something I’m all that proudful of. Still, it’s pretty much everything I know now. So you just have to understand one thing here, ma’am, I’m simply not the kind to go around asking a lot
of inquisitive questions, you see. I’m not really your Nosey Parker category of person, no matter what some people might think, not me, no way, not for two pins or a Confederate dollar. There’s absolutely no profit in it for me, if you get my meaning now, ma’am.”

  The rambling performance amazed Flo. Ella Mae was a walking reality show contestant.

  “Yes, Ms. Bontemps, I think I get your meaning all right. But nosy is part of my job, the biggest part by far. Asking questions all the time goes with solving homicides. And so what I have to know right now is…exactly what was your relationship to Sidney R. Davidov?”

  Ella Mae Bontemps executed an anxious wriggle in her Bergdorf let’s-pretend widow’s weeds, writhing flesh seeking room in roomless black casing. Her painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. She managed a quick sniffle. “Sid kept me.”

  “How long?”

  “Couple of years, until he got me the job.”

  “Just like that, a job as a favor?”

  “Oh no, I’ve always worked with valuables. I got tons of dealing experience. Jewelry, art, antiques, you name it. I’m totally qualified. I understand the collector’s mentality, you see. Grabby, show-offy, never satisfied. So I thought I understood Sid. But I didn’t. Still, he set me up for life, more or less. And believe me I’m not ungrateful, I’m truly thankful for that, you betcha, and I’m certainly sorry Sid had to die the way he did.”

  “Had to, Ms. Bontemps?”

  “Lookit, Sid was no saint, ma’am, you must’ve figured out that much by now.”

  “What do you mean, he was asking for it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So with Sid gone, who’s your current employer?”

  “The investors.”

  “Like who?”

  “The people who put up the backing.”

  “I know what investor means, Ms. Bontemps. What I’m asking is who do you deal with? How many of them are involved here? Names, numbers, c’mon, speak English.”

  “I don’t know how many, nobody ever told me.”

  “So who pays you? Who gets the day’s receipts?”

  “I can’t say right now.” Ella Mae Bontemps shook her head, her eyes puddling with tears, and she choked back a sob. “I just can’t, Officer.”

  “Ms. Bontemps, it’s either now or later under oath for the public record. This isn’t something you don’t know anything about.”

  The putative widow glanced down at the floor, her party-pretty face collapsing like a failed soufflé. “Archie,” she said softly.

  “Archie who?”

  “That’s all I know. Archie picks up the cash and the checks and handles all the books. The business is cash heavy. He pays me my commissions and covers all my expenses. He delivers stuff, sometimes he picks up stuff. But you’re not going to tell them now, are you? You won’t finger me? Because honey, this is all I got. It’s my job. This is my whole life.”

  Flo shot a quick look at Ella Mae Bontemps’s sable coat draped over a chair, noted the fur hat she wore—about a month’s worth of Flo’s salary crouching up there on her visitor’s glossy red top—and Flo felt her mind closing to the whole cornpone cascade of self-serving entreaties, a ring now forming around her hardening heart like the frosty haze around a winter moon before snow falls.

  The stark images of the dead haunting Flo’s office walls rendered nearly impossible any sisterly empathy for this backcountry yam-and-ham cutie’s sassy drawl of fabrications. The downhome visitor might plead for protection, but aroused no pity, her anxious performance inducing little empathy. Flo recognized the character Ella Mae Bontemps played right up to the slippery hilt, a professional arm-piece, eye candy, a trophy accessory of which New York boasted an extravagant abundance, charmless and unsound career girls who started coloring their hair at age eleven and by twenty-two carried four or five expropriated husbands on their books. They came to New York from all over the world, the American Southland being an especially fruitful source of so much restless talent.

  “Okay, you can go now, Ms. Bontemps, and we’ll get back to you. But it’s in your interest not to go too far. I hear you’re a traveler. Don’t even think about it. Or you become a fugitive from justice. In fact, if you don’t want to get charged, I advise you to call in every day, twice a day, maybe three to be on the safe side. Let us know where you are and how you’re doing. So if we don’t hear from you, then we’ll know maybe something’s wrong and we can come looking. And maybe find some measureable truth.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, that’s so encouraging, but you’re mistaken. There’s nothing involving me in all this. Sweet precious Lord hold my hand, no way would I ever get mixed up in that.” A ballet-like wave of her hand encompassed the death scene photos projected onto Flo’s office walls. The shifting instability of Ella Mae Bontemps’s character wouldn’t let her admit to involvement in much of anything. “None of this got a damn thing to do with me. So no reason now handing me a lot of hot beer and horse pee.” She sniffled and closed her eyes, utterly weary. “Stupid me. Never should’ve met him.”

  Who knows, who cares? Flo thought. Not I, said the spider to the fly…absolutely not I.

  9:50 A.M.

  The sky outside Flo Ott’s office window was midnight dark with storm clouds.

  Inside the office, the mood wasn’t much brighter.

  Frank Murphy said, “Okay, Flo, the sum-up. In the middle of what desert are we standing?”

  “I got Reilly’s notebook full of what looks like some code he concocted. A simple code. I’m deciphering it. The Bureau kept Reilly’s laptop. But if he bothered to write notes in code only for himself, in a book he stashed away, my guess is none of it’s on his computer anyway. And here are the snapshots his wife gave me. She didn’t burn them after all. Although they’re not exactly incendiary. Still, the way I figure it, if you’re already convinced your husband is running around, even the flimsiest proof looks totally damning.”

  Snapshots…Marie Priester and John James Reilly sitting at a bar. Ensconced in a restaurant. Another bar. Another restaurant. A third person, male, business suit, appears at the edge of some shots as if sitting with them, usually just half his face visible, often blurred. Serving personnel almost always somewhere in the frame. The pictures’ subjects appeared unaware of the camera, images cramped, lighting dim as though the photos were taken on a cellphone half-concealed or a microlens minicamera, also hidden.

  All the photo prints were computer hard copies.

  And except for Marie Priester and John James Reilly, everyone else in the pictures appeared to be Asian. As did all the locations. All the restaurants. All the bars.

  “See what I mean, Frank?”

  “Not much to get excited about. Except maybe who took the pictures.”

  “Reilly had copies, maybe it’s someone he knew.”

  “Another agent,” Frank said.

  “Could be.”

  “He’s at work, Flo. He’s on the job.”

  “Then as far as the Bureau is concerned, it’s national security.”

  “And we’re on our own.”

  “Marie Priester’s fiancé returned from China a few hours ago. He seems very protective of his professional time. I got an appointment to see him at his office this morning.”

  “And that redhead, Marty’s watching the store now. Freezing his butt off. Anything fishy pops up, he’s got the warrant.”

  11 A.M.

  Attorney William Eng finished his phone conversation—in Chinese—as Lieutenant Detective Flo Ott took a seat in his office.

  She waited and let her gaze wander around. Outside the window, a shifting screen of snow gave a ghostly aspect to the neighboring office towers on Wall Street, gray contours appearing and fading, shadowy, mysterious, secret. A hard north wind whipping at the window warned that spring was still a long way off. But the sounds of wind and an incomprehensible phone conversation were only murmurs in Flo’s head, lost under the racket o
f a subway train rattling down a tunnel again and again, seven passengers dead, and with the imagined noise, an image: subway car windows laced in melting snow, corpses illuminated under harsh lights, heads lolling side to side bouncing at the curves, and there she was, lawyer William Eng’s late fiancée, Marie Priester, an FBI special agent’s head in her lap.

  Flo listened more closely to the wind at the window, letting it blow away the death scene.

  The phone call intonations of spoken Chinese, as rapid and harsh as tiles hitting tables in a Chinatown mah-jongg parlor, filled the room. Out of the corner of her eye, Flo noticed something unusual in William Eng’s office, unusual, at any rate, for an attorney’s workplace. The room, small like most lawyers’ offices in high-rent buildings, accommodated two shelves of nonlegal books. She glanced at the titles: one shelf dedicated to American political history and analysis—Neustadt, Hofstadter, William Pfaff, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—the other devoted to novels, all of these the selections of an intelligent man with taste, partial to Graham Greene, le Carré, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Roth, Joan Didion.

  Hanging up the phone, Eng noticed Flo’s interest in his reading choices. “I have trouble sleeping on planes.” His tones were New England prep school nasal. “Here to China is a very long flight. And you never know who’s sitting next to you. So I keep my business papers out of sight, my laptop closed, and my nose in a good book.”

  Eng smiled, almost ceremoniously. A solemn presence, he wasn’t remotely Ivy League smarmy but professed the look of knowing extraordinary wisdom, a characteristic of men who possessed natural power gazing down at a weak world from the safe heights of their convictions, regarding other humans’ frailties as unfortunate flaws on creation. His eyeglasses were wire-rimmed and the dark brown eyes looming behind the thick lenses revealed character: eyes alert, cagey, intelligent, confidently superior. His face had a high, wide forehead—a sign of great intelligence, they say—a straight nose, and under those thick, bushy eyebrows his amused eyes were set far apart: a strikingly mandarin face.