The Twelfth Card

“Yep. I need to get some papers to her this afternoon. The district attorney’s going to be indicting some of the people involved in the case and we need her signature on a statement. Can I speak to her?”

“Sure. Hold on.” A pause as he asked someone else in the room about the girl’s schedule. Ashberry heard something about her being absent. The administrator came back on. “She’s not in school today. She’ll be back Monday.”

“Oh, is she at home?”

“Wait, hold on a minute…”

Another voice was speaking to the principal, offering a suggestion.

Please, Ashberry thought…

The man came back on the line. “One of her teachers thinks she’s at Columbia this afternoon, working on some project.”

“The university?”

“Yeah. Try a Professor Mathers. I don’t have his first name, sorry.”

The administrator sounded preoccupied, but to make sure the man didn’t call the police just to check on him, Ashberry said in a dismissing way, “You know, I’ll just call the officers who’re guarding her. Thanks.”

“Yeah, so long.”

Ashberry hung up and paused, looking over the busy street. He’d only wanted her address but this might work out better – even though the principal didn’t sound surprised when Ashberry mentioned the guards, which meant that somebody might still be protecting her. He’d have to take that fact into account. He called the main Columbia switchboard and learned that Professor Mathers’s office hours today were from one to six.

How long would Geneva be there? Ashberry wondered. He hoped it would be for most of the day; he had a lot to do.

At four-thirty that afternoon, William Ashberry was cruising in his BMW M5 through Harlem, looking around him. He didn’t think of the place in racial or cultural terms. He saw it as an opportunity. For him a man’s worth was determined by his ability to pay his debts on time – specifically, and from a self-interested point of view – a man’s ability to cough up the rent or mortgage on one of the redevelopment projects that Sanford Bank had going on in Harlem. If a borrower was black or Hispanic or white or Asian, if he was a drug dealer or an ad agency executive…didn’t matter. As long as he wrote that monthly check.

Now, on 125th Street, he passed one of the very buildings his bank was renovating. The graffiti had been scrubbed off, the interior gutted, building materials stacked on the ground floor. The old tenants had been given incentives to relocate. Some reluctant residents had been “urged” to and had taken the hint. Several new renters had already signed expensive leases, even though the construction wouldn’t be completed for six months.

He turned onto a crowded, commercial street, looking at the vendors. Not what he needed. The banker continued on his search – the final task in an afternoon that had been hectic, to say the least. After leaving his office at the Sanford Foundation he’d sped to his weekend house in New Jersey. There he’d unlocked the gun cabinet and removed his double-barreled shotgun. At the workbench in the garage he’d sawed the barrels off, making the gun only about eighteen inches long – a surprisingly hard job, which had cost him a half dozen electric-saw blades. Tossing the discarded barrels into the pond behind the house, the banker had paused, looking around him, reflecting that this deck was the place where his oldest daughter would be getting married next year after she graduated from Vassar.

He’d remained there for a long moment, gazing at the sun breaking on the cold, blue water. Then he’d loaded the shortened gun and placed it and a dozen shells in a cardboard carton, covered them with some old books, newspapers and magazines. He wouldn’t need any props better than these; the professor and Geneva weren’t going to survive long enough to even look inside the box.

Dressed in a mismatched sports coat and suit, hair slicked back, with drugstore reading glasses – the best disguise he could come up with – Ashberry had then sped across the George Washington Bridge and into Harlem, where he now was, searching for the last prop for the drama.

Ah, there…

The banker parked and got out of the car. He walked up to the Nation of Islam street vendor and bought a kufi, an Islamic skullcap, drawing not the least blink of surprise from the man. Ashberry, who took the hat in his gloved hand (thanks again, Thompson), then returned to the car. When no one was looking he bent down and rubbed the hat on the ground beneath a telephone kiosk, where he guessed many people had stood during the past day or so. The hat would pick up some dirt and other evidence – ideally a hair or two – which would give the police even more false leads on the terrorist co

He now found the old faculty building that housed Mathers’s office. The businessman spotted a police car parked in front, an officer sitting in the front seat, looking vigilantly over the street. So she did have a guard.

Well, he could handle it. He’d survived tougher situations than this – on the streets of South Philly and in boardrooms down on Wall Street. Surprise was the best advantage – you could beat overwhelming odds if you did the unexpected.

Continuing along the street, he made a U-turn and parked behind the building, his car well out of sight and aimed toward the highway for a fast escape. He climbed out and looked around. Yes, it could work, he could approach the office from the side, then slip through the front door when the cop was looking elsewhere.

As for getting away…there was a back door to the building. Two ground-level windows too. If the cop ran for the building the minute he heard the shots, Ashberry could shoot him from one of the front windows. In any case he should have enough time to drop the kufi as evidence and get to his car before any other police arrived.

He found a pay phone. He called the school’s main switchboard.

“ Columbia University,” a voice replied.

“Professor Mathers, please.”

“One moment.”

A black-inflected voice answered, “Hello?”

“Professor Mathers?”

“That’s right.”

In the persona of Steve Macy again, Ashberry explained that he was an author from Philadelphia, doing research at the Lehman Library – the Columbia facility devoted to social science and journalism (the Sanford Foundation had given a lot of money to libraries and schools like this one. Ashberry had attended benefits there; he could describe it if he had to). He then said that one of the librarians had heard Mathers had been looking into nineteenth-century New York history, particularly the Reconstruction era. Was that right?

The professor gave a surprised laugh. “I am, as a matter of fact. It’s not for me, actually. I’m helping out a high school student. She’s with me right now.”

Thank God. The girl was still there. I can get it all over with now, get on with my life.

Ashberry said that he’d brought quite a lot of material up from Philly. Would he and this student be interested in taking a look?

The professor said they definitely would, thanked him then asked what would be a convenient time to come by.

When he was seventeen Billy Ashberry had held a box cutter against the thigh of an elderly shopkeeper and reminded him that the man’s protection payments were past due. The razor was going to cut one inch for every day the payment was late unless he paid up instantly. His voice had been as calm then as it was now, saying to Mathers, “I’m leaving tonight but I could drop by now. You can make copies if you want. You have a Xerox machine?”

“I do, yes.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”