heading for the office. The FBI department on Church Avenue in Kensington where Mark was working now had opened three years before. It belonged to the NIFO, the FBI field department in New York, and was the second largest in the city. His boss, SAC Julius Beck, also known as ‘The Mogul,’ was a black man who had climbed all the steps in the Bureau hierarchy. He had even run for the job of head of the Security Department. In the Brooklyn department he had almost two hundred agents under his command.
His trump cards were his strictness and severity. Few could brag about ever seeing him laugh. There was even a story that went about the department according to which, while at a party, he had once told a joke to a secretary. Yet nobody had been able to trace that secretary.
Beck had no family. He had dedicated his entire life to his career. He was a tough guy and never called his co-workers by their first names. In college, he had shared a room with Will Bratton, head of the NYPD, and they had remained friends ever since. ‘The Mogul’ was very keen on his habits the way most bachelors are. Twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, he went to Harlem and had dinner at Sylvia’s.
While heading for the office Mark kept running into the “young wolves.” They rushed up and down the steps and along the corridors giving off an air of vitality and exuberance. They were heartless to the ones they investigated but turned rapidly into yes-men in front of their bosses. In ten or fifteen years, Mark thought bitterly, most of them would be calling for a premature heart attack while scheming to hit their bosses from behind.
The office of the D2 squad whose head was Mark was downstairs, halfway down the hallway. D2 was also called the “international squad” due to its heterogeneous makeup. They were all American citizens but had their origins in various corners of the world. D2 was made up of a Jew—Arty Steimberg, a Greek—Sean Paulardis, a Pole—Dumpy Kulikovski, a Frenchman—Mark Du Nancy, and the Irish Mary O’Gavin from Poplar Bluff, nicknamed ‘Miss Bluff.’ The squad dealt mainly with serial killers but in quiet times they received various other assignments.
When Mark entered the room Paulardis, Steimberg and the woman greeted him. Kulikovski was on vacation, in Hawaii, and would not return until Wednesday. As usual, Sean was making passes at the young female agent.
“Come on, Mary, say you’ll join me to the Halloween ball.”
“No, Sean. I’ve told you before. My immune system has already produced antibodies to the idea. If I have to, I’ll ask the Mayor to display my refusal on a board in Time Square. I’ve already accepted Kurren’s invitation.”
“Who? That moron who tripped over a drug dealer and busted him?”
“Yes, man,” Steimberg broke in, “only that busting made the headlines. Kurren’s a star now!”
“Of course,” Paulardis agreed, “and Mary won’t go out with a nobody like myself. She only goes out with hot shots. But mind you: one of these days my name will make the front page too.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” Mary said, “but that’ll happen only when scientists discover you’re the missing link in the chain of evolution.”
Mark was already feeling better. They were all his team and he knew he could rely on them at any time. He knew what each of them was worth and they would jump off a bridge if he asked them to.
He had picked Sean Paulardis during a raid in the Bronx. He belonged to a motorcycle gang. Mark had personally convinced ‘The Mogul’ to send him to Quantico. He was a dark, medium-size guy, extremely well-built and agile.
When he had first laid eye on him, Mark had compared him to a mustang colting around in the prairie. He is young and hungry, he had said to himself, and these are important things. His attention had also been drawn by the fact that Sean had been in the Navy SEALS. For a five-foot tall guy like Paulardis to be in the elite unit of the U.S. Navy was not a common thing. Mark had found out soon that Sean had finished BUDS top of the list and that he was an excellent marksman, probably better than any other in the NYFO. That had been his best argument to Beck. For during the preliminary theoretical tests, the Greek’s paper had by far been the worst. And very saucy too. It contained only two correct answers: his first name and his last. That was all, for under the third heading, “Sex,” he had written “six or seven times a week.”
At the physical tests and the target shooting he had ranged way above the others. Sometimes Mark called him Epaulard because of the way he entered a room during a raid. Actually his nickname in the department was ‘cowboy.’ And he did look like a modern cowboy. No matter the season, he always wore navy blue clothes and the indispensable navy blue cowboy hat which he only gave up four or five days a year when the heat was unbearable.
He dressed like the Wild West men and tried to mimic their phlegmatic speech; sometimes he could be very rude, though. Once in a while he would take his guitar from the locker and sing some nice old country songs with his beautiful bass voice. His idol was Johnny Cash whom he worshipped. He didn’t dare copy his dress style which is why he had replaced the black with the navy blue. Sean was an ingenious tough guy who knew all the tricks he needed to survive and Mark was glad he wasn’t on the wrong side of the road, where he had found him.
To Paulardis everything was a joke. Even his own life. He was more like the white version of Cassius Clay. He insisted that in the dictionary his picture be placed next to the word ‘virility.’ He was a sworn bachelor and famous for it. He would say he’d rather make more women happy than a single one miserable. At home he kept an amulet to protect him against getting married. It was a picture showing his Uncle Demetrios with an apron on and a sink full of dirty dishes in front of him. Sean looked like a big baby whose much delayed maturity lingered like some chronic disease. He owned a ’63 Corvette, a Zippo lighter, and said he only needed a Harley Davidson to feel truly American. Like a drug addict, Sean needed to feel heavy adrenaline discharges in his blood. And he got them driving his car at 130 mph or bungee jumping from one of the East River bridges.
He was an excellent man of action although his methods weren’t exactly orthodox. The Bronx gangs were made up of really tough young men. Paulardis had been one of their leaders. His tendency to react violently had been polished, however, first by the SEALS, then at Quantico, through the various Taekwondo techniques. That was why he was one of the few agents who could deal, empty-handed sometimes, with several attackers at the same time.
Arty Steimberg, the skinny Jew, looked like a typical austere person, always fearful and discontent, always doubting his abilities. Generations before, his forefathers had learned about the inscription on the Statue of Liberty and had taken it for granted. They had packed their hopes and sufferings and came here for a piece of the great American dream. From them, Arty had inherited enough fear and insecurity to feel lonely in a city where yet other two million Jews lived. Steimberg was a natural born activist, one of Yehudah Levin’s assistants in the Jews for Morality Association.
As a teenager he had worked as a secretary for Simon Wiesenthal. Maybe his countenance, often morose and disgusted, came exactly from the terrible things that had filled his mind back then. Whenever Mark tried to soothe him he would say, “I’m a Jew, man! I know what nails and thorn wreaths are for.” A series of Jewish publications from all over the country had appointed him their correspondent in New York.
Despite his protesting armor, he was in fact a very shy man. The lampoonist’s aggressiveness was meant to conceal the self-consciousness and disappointment of a man who had dreamed himself a fighter pilot as a child and now used the plastic bags on the plane every time he flew. When he was sad, Arty had a baroque way of expressing himself. More than once during their assignments he had proven a power of anticipation the others failed to grasp. “I can simply smell danger in the air,” he joked about it. His passion for computers had made him the squad’s
