12
Were you to ask a New Yorker what separates his city from a Bostonian’s or a Bostonian what distinguishes hers from a New Yorker’s answers might include culture, attitude, intensity, class, fashion, pennants won, pace, size, size-envy, late night eateries, and relative importance. The only measurement with a significant digit, however, the distance between them: two hundred miles. Even that changes depending upon the route one chooses.
Mislava was out on the deck, facing east and shielding her eyes from the sun when I got out of the shower. Michael, she said, had gone: termites in Tewksbury. She was not as animated as she had been with him the night before.
“If you want to shower, go ahead,” I said. “Otherwise we can leave in five minutes.
Yes, I need shower. We leave after?”
“Sure, right after.”
I ground some beans and made a carafe of coffee while she showered. I asked through the door if she wanted breakfast. She said no, just coffee with cream.
I poured it into two travel mugs, one my highly effective detective’s special stainless steel with black trim shaped-like-a-bullet insulated like a lawyer’s heart mug. The other one, a thick plastic cylinder, in dishwasher worn letters said Java Sun on the side. I snapped the lids on each. Fifteen minutes later we were wending our way through the remnants of Boston’s Big Dig project, heading south.
Mislava asked if I would mind taking the coastal route, through Providence and down along the south-facing Connecticut shore. It was longer but more stimulating than the route through Hartford and the rest of central Connecticut. She handed me fifty dollars.
“For petrol,” she said.
Four hours and a little later we had crossed the bridge into Manhattan and were on FDR Drive south. Mislava loosened the drawstring on her bag and took out her phone. She punched in a chain of digits. Her brief conversation, after a pause, when I assumed she was awaiting connection to the person to whom she wished to speak, was in Croat.
“We need go Second Avenue. Is not far from here.” She pointed to the sign for the next exit.
I slid down the ramp depositing us on 38th Street, east side. We pulled into a garage on Second Avenue at 44th St.
“You seem to know New York pretty well,” I said.
“Yes, I have been here many, many times.”
The Croatian Permanent Mission to the United Nations is between East 43rd and 44th Streets, not far from UN Plaza and the East River. It shared a building with a center for Jewish women, an office furniture retailer, and a commercial real estate enterprise that specialized in high-end condo sales.
There is a world of difference between the Croatian Mission to the UN and a UN mission to Croatia. It is an interesting twist within the language of diplomacy. The former is often incorrectly called the embassy, while the latter is an international attempt to keep one group in the region from exiling, “cleansing,” or exterminating another. It appeared we were to see someone from the Mission.
Mislava and her contact person, she told me, had agreed to meet at a small less-than-world-class deli around the corner on 43rd near Third. We arrived first. He came alone from the direction of 4th Avenue, walking with hunched shoulders and his hands in his pockets against the wind. We sat at a Formica table in the smudged window, she and I, side by each, were dressed as though we belonged there. He was not: Armani suit and Bruno Magli shoes. There were no introductions.
I had never been fully sure why I was here. Nor was this man. He cocked his head in my direction, asking something in Croat. Mislava answered. He never looked at me again.
When the two began to converse in Croat, my “never fully sure” became utter, face borne confusion. It was obvious I wasn’t there to hear something, at least something I could understand.
The exchanges crossing the narrow scratched and chipped table quickly were becoming louder and the gestures larger and more confrontational. No one in the dingy deli cared: this was New York, after all.
I was trying to figure out if Mislava had been less than truthful with me or if her meaning or my understanding had been a casualty of her limited English, when my concern became academic. She pulled a small handgun, as small as her hand, from her bag and shot the man on the other side of the table square in his solar plexus. His chair tipped backwards from the impact of the bullet and at once sideways from his vain escape attempt. I slid hard to the floor, my arms flailing as I went. He and I were sharing space and a stare beneath the Formica table. Only I was blinking. Before I could compose myself enough to roll from beneath the table, and well before I could stand, another shot. Mislava’s legs, at my eye level, were quivering and then they were not. Something metal hit the table above me. I sensed in an opaque sort of awareness that people were colliding in the doorway fleeing from the deli. I lay there until the sirens were audible, though with the blood rushing in my ears as if released from behind a dam they weren’t all that audible. I pulled myself up from the floor and from the two commingling flows of blood and stood. As I did Mislava slumped towards the window and out of her chair, sending it clattering into mine. She hit the floor hard. The air filling her lungs when she fired a bullet into her right temple rushed out. I put my hands up and walked out to the sidewalk. A New York City police officer, with her weapon out and lain against her thigh, suggested sharply I lie down and put my hands behind me. It was a really, really good suggestion. I couldn’t support my weight anymore.
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