He could see Darnell’s face even now. One of his fifth-graders at East
New York, Darnel! had been a good kid, an A student, bright and
curious, the best in his class. Then something happened to him. His
grades dropped, and before long he stopped handing in homework
altogether. Darnell never got in fights with the other kids, and yet
from time to time welts would be visible on his face. Ben talked to him
after class one day. Darnell couldn’t look him in the eye. His
expression was cloudy with fear. Finally he told him that Orlando, his
mother’s new boyfriend, didn’t want him to waste time on schoolwork; he
needed him to help bring in money. “Bring in money how?” Ben had
asked, but Darnell wouldn’t answer. When he telephoned Darnell’s
mother, Joyce Stuart, her responses were skittish, evasive. She
wouldn’t come into the school, refused to discuss the situation, refused
to admit anything might be wrong. She, too, sounded scared. A few days
later, he found Darnell’s address from student records and paid a visit.
Darnell lived on the second floor of a building with a ruined facade, a
stairwell festooned with graffiti. The buzzer was broken, but the
apartment door was unlocked, and so he traipsed up the stairs and
knocked on 2B. After a long wait, Darnell’s mother appeared, visibly
battered her cheeks bruised, her lips swollen. He introduced himself
and asked to come in. Joyce paused, then led him toward the small
kitchen, with its deeply gouged countertops of beige Formica and yellow
cotton drapes flapping in the breeze.
Ben heard yelling in the background before the mother’s boyfriend strode
over. “Who the fuck are you?” demanded Orlando, a tall, powerfully
built man in a red tank top and loose jeans. Ben recognized a convict’s
physique: an upper body so overdeveloped that the muscles looked draped
over his chest and shoulders like a life jacket
“He’s Darnell’s schoolteacher,” Darnell’s mother said, the words cottony
from her bruised lips.
“And you are you Darnell’s guardian?” Ben asked Orlando.
“Hell, you could say I’m his teacher now. Only, I’m teaching him shit
he needs to know. Unlike you.”
Now Ben saw Darnell, fear making him look even younger than his ten
years, padding into the kitchen to join them. “Go away, Darnell,” his
mother said in a half-whisper.
“Darnell don’t need you filling his head with bullshit. Darnell needs
to learn how to move rocks.” Orlando smiled, revealing a gleaming gold
front.
Ben felt a jolt. Moving rocks: selling crack. “He’s a fifth-grader.
He’s ten years old.”
“That’s right. A juvenile. Cops know he ain’t worth arresting.” He
laughed. “I gave him the choice, though: he could either peddle rocks
or peddle his ass.”
The words, the man’s casual brutality, sickened Ben, but he forced
himself to speak calmly. “Darnell has more potential than anyone in his
class. You have a duty to let him excel.”
Orlando snorted. “He can make his living on the street, same as me.”
Then he heard Darnell’s treble voice, shaky but resolute. “I don’t want
to do it anymore,” he told Orlando. “Mr. Hartman knows what’s right.”
Then, louder, bravely: “I don’t want to be like you.”
Joyce Stuart’s features froze in a preemptive cringe: “Don’t, Darnell.”
It was too late. Orlando lashed out, cracking the ten-year-old in the
jaw, the blow propelling him out of the room. He turned to Ben: “Now
get your ass out of here. In fact, let me help you.”
Ben felt himself stiffen as rage coursed through his body. Orlando
slammed his open hand against Ben’s chest, but instead of staggering
backward, Ben lunged toward him, pounding a fist into the man’s temple,
then another, pummeling his head like a speed bag Stunned, Orlando
froze for a crucial few moments, and then his powerful arms banged
uselessly against Ben’s sides Ben was too close for him to land a punch.
And the frenzy of rage was an anaesthetic, anyway: Ben didn’t even feel
the body blows until Orlando slid limply to the floor. He was down, not
out.
Orlando’s eyes flicked at him, the leering defrance replaced by fear.
“You crazy,” he murmured.
Was he? What had come over him? “If you ever touch Darnell again,” Ben
said, with a deliberate calm he did not feel, “I will kill you.” He
paused between each word for emphasis. “Do we understand each other?”
Later, from his friend Carmen in social services, he’d find out that
Orlando left Joyce and Darnell later that day, never to return. If Ben
hadn’t been told, though, he soon would have guessed from the dramatic
improvement in Darnell’s grades and general demeanor.
“All right, man,” Orlando had said at the time, in a subdued tone,
gazing up at him from the kitchen floor. “See, we just had a
misunderstanding.” He coughed. “I ain’t looking for more trouble.” He
coughed again and murmured, “You crazy. You crazy.”
“Mr. Hartman, can you please put your right thumb here?” Schmid
indicated a small white oblong marked identix touch view on top of which
a small oval glass panel glowed ruby red.
Ben placed his right thumb on the glass oval, then did the same with his
left. His prints appeared immediately, much enlarged, on a computer
monitor angled partly toward him.
Schmid tapped in a few numbers and hit the return key, setting off the
high-pitched screech of a modem. He turned toward Ben and said
apologetically, “This goes right to Bern. We will know in five or ten
minutes.”
“Know what?”
The detective rose and gestured for Ben to follow him back to the first
room. “Whether there is already a warrant for your arrest in
Switzerland.”
“I think I might remember if there was one.”
Schmid stared at him a long time before he started to speak. “I know
your type, Mr. Hartman. For rich Americans like you, Switzerland is a
country of chocolates, banks, cuckoo clocks, and ski resorts. You’d
like to imagine that each of us is your Hausdiener, your manservant,
yes? But you do know Switzerland. For centuries, every European power
wished to make us its duchy. None ever succeeded. Now maybe your
country, with its power and wealth, thinks it can do the same. But you
are not what is your expression ‘calling the shots’ here. There is no
chocolate for you in this office. And it is not up to you to decide
when, or whether, you are released.” He leaned back in his chair,
smiling gravely. “Welcome to Switzerland, Herr Hartman.”
Another man, tall and thin, in a heavily starched white lab coat, came
into the room as if on cue. He wore rimless glasses and had a small
bristle mustache. Without introducing himself, he pointed to a white
tiled section of the wall marked with metric gradations. “You will
please to stand there,” he ordered.
Trying not to show his exasperation, Ben stood with his back flat
against the tiles. The technician measured his height, then led him to
a white lab sink, where he turned a lever that extruded a white paste
and instructed Ben to wash his hands. The soap was creamy yet gritty
and smelled of lavender. At another station, the tech rolled sticky
black ink onto a glass plate and had Ben place each hand flat onto it.
With long, delicate, manicured fingers, he rolled each of Ben’s fingers
first on blotter paper, then carefully onto separate squares on a form.
While the technician worked, Schmid got up and went into the adjoining
room, then returned a few moments later. “Well, Mr. Hartman, we did
not get a hit. There is no warrant outstanding.”
“What a surprise,” Ben muttered. He felt oddly relieved.
“Still, there are questions. The ballistics will come back in a few
days from the Wissenschaftlicher Dienst der Stadtpolizei Zurich -the
ballistics lab but we already know that the bullets recovered from the
platform are ,765 Browning.”
“Is that a kind of bullet?” Ben asked innocently.
“It is the sort of ammunition used in the gun that was found during the
search of your luggage.”
“Well, what do you know,” Ben said, forcing a smile, then tried another
tack: bluntness. “Look, there’s no question the bullets were fired by
the gun in question. Which was planted in my luggage. So why don’t you
just do whatever that test is on my hands that tells you whether I fired
a gun?”
“The gunshot residue analysis. We’ve already done it.” Schmid mimed a
swabbing motion.
“And the results?”
“We’ll have them soon. After you are photographed.”
“You won’t find my fingerprints on the gun either.” Thank God I didn’t
handle it, Ben thought.
The detective shrugged theatrically. “Fingerprints can be removed.”
“Well, the witnesses ”
“The eyewitnesses describe a well-dressed man of about your age. There
was much confusion. But five people are dead, seven seriously injured.
Again, you tell us you killed the perpetrator. Yet when we look there