I loved the precision they demanded, their perfect utility. For my twelfth birthday, my foster parents du jour gave me an old single-shot, bolt-action .22 with a red cocking indicator and a battered walnut stock. It was the most animate inanimate object I’d ever seen, let alone owned. I worked every job I could get — digging irrigation ditches, shoveling snow, pulling weeds — to buy ammunition, and target practiced endlessly. Cans, bottles, rocks, birds on the wing, varmints on the run. After awhile, I could hit anything with consistency and at ranges that sounded more like bragging than marksmanship. Which helps explain why, after being admitted to the Air Force Academy, I consistently registered among the highest scores in school history with both pistol and M-16.
My performance on the firing range was not lost on my superiors when they sought to find me a suitable new job after clipping my wings. Such ability, they concluded, lent itself to the wonderful world of military informational gathering and assessment. What one’s shooting skills had to do with flying a desk as an intelligence analyst was beyond me, but I didn’t ask many questions. Most things in the military make no sense. And thus, with some initial reluctance, I accepted a series of ground-based assignments, first to the Air Intelligence Agency at Wright-Patterson, then to the National Air Intelligence Center at Lackland Air Force Base, until, finally, I ended up where I did, in the darkest shadows, on the blackest operations, a token zoomie in the land of snake eaters — among them a warrior of Mayan ancestry who one day would steal from me the only woman I’d ever truly loved.
I was lounging on a rope hammock in my landlady’s backyard, hoping the sun would bake away all thoughts of Savannah and her unannounced visit that morning. The plan wasn’t working. I thought about going inside, maybe catching up on my reading, but when it’s ninety-four degrees and your home is a converted two-car garage with a flat roof and no insulation or air conditioning, going inside isn’t something you do voluntarily until well after sundown. So I just lay there. Even my feline idiot of a roommate, Kiddiot, the world’s most worthless cat, was showing the effects of the heat. He was dozing in the oak tree above me with his tongue lolling lethargically out one corner of his mouth. His lanky orange and white limbs straddled the tree like some Bulgarian gymnast passed out on a balance beam. A mockingbird perched on the same branch not two feet away from him, singing every song in its vast repertoire, untroubled by the cat’s proximity. Kiddiot’s slothful reputation obviously had preceded him.
I slipped the photo of Echevarria and me out of my pocket and studied it for the umpteenth time. I’d lied to Savannah. The blood in the picture was as real as the dead Al-Qaeda operative who’d spilled it. He was a pharmacist from Damascus, mastermind of at least four jihadist bombings in Madrid and Islamabad. More than eighty innocents had met their end, courtesy of his handiwork. Any one of the attacks might’ve easily landed him atop Alpha’s tasking board. But the Syrian pharmacist was definitely three strikes and you’re out material: it just so happened that he was related by marriage to a prominent Arab-American politico with personal ties to the White House. The President’s handlers were not keen on seeing that story above the fold in the Times. So telephone calls were placed on encrypted lines and options discussed — obliquely, to be sure, and always off-the-record. Make the evil pharmacist disappear.
Great patience and skill were needed to bag him — that and a $250,000 reward. In the end, his own daughter gave him up. He was not merely a crazy mad-dog bomber. As it turned out, he was also a member of the Disneyana Fan Club, an avid collector of all things Mickey. That alone was reason enough, the daughter would later insist, to drop a dime on Daddy. We helicoptered in on a moonless night and tracked him for almost a week before cornering him and two of his lieutenants in a wadi southeast of nowhere. When they tried to run, we shot all three with Kalashnikovs to make it look like the handiwork of local warlords. We photographed and fingerprinted the bodies to confirm their identities, then left them to rot in the sun.
The screen door swung open with a crash, disrupting my stroll down memory lane, as my landlady, Mrs. Schmulowitz, emerged from her modest 1920’s bungalow, shuffling backward, all eightyeight pounds of her, while struggling to balance an orange plastic tray with two glasses and what looked to be a pitcher of iced tea.
“Global warming, schmoble warming. This is nothing. Try August in Bensonhurst.”
“Here, let me get that for you, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
I pocketed the photo as I bounded out of the hammock and steadied her by a bony elbow, commandeering the tray of drinks a half-second before she took a tumble.
“Always helpful Cordell, who never gives me trouble and pays his rent on time — and good-looking to boot,” the old lady said, beaming at me. “You are one handsome man, you know that? The most handsome man I ever saw.”
“You told me your first husband was the most handsome man you ever saw, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
“Don’t get me started. My first husband, such a shmendrick, that man. A man more in love with a mirror you never saw in your life, may he rest in peace.”
Mrs. Schmulowitz was pushing ninety and crooked like a question mark. Her sun-baked skin was the color and approximate texture of an apricot fruit roll. A retired elementary school gym teacher, she was the only octogenarian I ever saw whose preference in warm weather attire was Lycra bicycle shorts and a fire-engine red sports bra. Her hair was Einstein frizzy and thinning at the crown, but the years, so far as I could ever tell, had done nothing to dim her mind. Rhodes Scholars and stand-up comics only wished they were half as sharp as Mrs. Schmulowitz.
I carried the tray of drinks and set it down on a rusting wrought-iron patio table that could’ve stood a new coat of paint.
“Even money Tampa Bay chokes on Sunday,” she said, pouring me a glass of iced tea. “Their passing game stinks, they can’t stop the run, and that coach of theirs. They shouldn’t fire him. They should indict him.”
“Be honest, Mrs. Schmulowitz. New York could start Rudolf Hess at fullback and you’d still pull for the Giants.”
“Hess? Hess was a pitseleh,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “Hermann Goering, now there was a fascist who had starting fullback written all over him.” Gingerly, she lowered her arthritic back into a chair and exhaled, like air escaping a tire. “I’m making a nice brisket Monday night. With those green beans in the cream sauce you like — and, yes, I realize dairy with meat violates every kosher law in the book, but so does bacon and I think it goes without saying where we all stand on bacon, am I right? Anyway, you coming, yes or no? Be there or be square.”
“Brisket? Green beans in cream sauce? Of course, I’m coming.”
She double-clicked her dentures approvingly.
I’d signed the lease the previous summer after relocating to Rancho Bonita, where I’d vacationed one spring break in college and had wanted to live ever since. Every Monday night during football season, Mrs. Schmulowitz cooked me dinner. We’d sit together on a blue mohair sofa more shabby than chic, eating off of metal TV trays and watching the game on the world’s only still-functioning black and white console television. Cocooned in a cabinet of real mahogany which she dusted every day, it was a twenty-one-inch Magnavox that took ten minutes to warm up and hummed like a transmission tower, drowning out the announcers. But Mrs. Schmulowitz never seemed to mind. She knew more about offense and defense then any announcer who ever lived. It was in her blood. Her uncle was Sid Luckman, the late great Jewish quarterback. Accordingly, Monday nights were spent with Mrs. Schmulowitz offering her own expert play-by-play commentary, when she was not speculating aloud as to whether certain players were members of her tribe based on the names stitched on the backs of their jerseys.