Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Apparently, last night,” Jaxon said. “But nobody counted him missing until this morning. They found him out in the barn…. I have no idea why it took so long to discover he was missing and get word to me, but I flew out as soon as I heard.”

  Karp heard the disgust, and the suspicion, in the agent’s voice. “How’d it happen?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I’d rather talk about some of this in person, tomorrow morning when I get back,” he said. “But he was strangled…with a set of rosary beads.”

  There it is, Karp thought, the other shoe…or maybe better, the ax, has fallen. “Kane,” he said.

  “Looks like it,” Jaxon replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He’d hardly hung up when the intercom on his desk buzzed again. “Your wife is here to see you, Mr. Karp?”

  Karp slapped a hand to his head. “Shit. I forgot,” he said to Murrow, who got up and started to leave. “I’m having dinner with Marlene and…some old friends.” He was about to tell Mrs. Milquetost to send Marlene in when there was a squawk—some sort of strangled cry really—from the intercom and Karp’s office door flew open, nearly knocking Murrow off his feet.

  “Well hello, Gilbert,” Marlene Ciampi said, her eyes narrowing. “Are you the reason my husband is having the gendarme stop me from entering?”

  “Don’t hurt me,” Murrow squeaked, only half in jest, and scooted past her.

  Marlene slammed the door on the still protesting Mrs. Milquetost. “The next time that woman tries to stop me, I’m going to scratch her eyes out.”

  9

  TEN MINUTES EARLIER, THE SECURITY GUARDS AT THE JUSTICE Center tensed as the attractive woman with the dark hair and Mediterranean features nonchalantly pulled the Glock 9 mm from her purse. She’d already shown them her license to carry a concealed weapon and told them about the contents of the purse. But it wasn’t until she expertly slid the magazine from the handle, pulled back the slide to demonstrate there was no bullet in the chamber, and handed it to them that they were able to relax.

  “Hold on, boys, there’s more,” she said, her hand moving slowly to the small of her back and lifting her shirt above the top of her blue jeans to expose the smaller Colt .380 tucked into a belt holster. She removed the gun, went through the same motions as with the first weapon, and handed it with a smile to the slack-jawed guards.

  “Oh, and you’ll find a knife and a can of pepper spray in here,” she said, shoving her handbag toward one of them.

  “Expecting a war today, Marlene?” asked Harry Kipman, the brilliant chief of the DAO’s appellate division. His security pass had allowed him to waltz in the building ahead of her though they’d arrived at 100 Centre Street at the same time.

  “I’m expecting a war every day,” Marlene Ciampi replied.

  “I thought your hubby told me you’d given up gunslinging,” said Ray Guma, who’d seen them enter the building and had waited beyond the security desk.

  “Times change,” Marlene said.

  “Criminal masterminds escape,” Guma added.

  “It’s just plain frickin’ dangerous out here,” noted Kipman, who absently patted his other arm, which was being supported by a sling. He was still recovering from being stabbed in the shoulder by Sarah Ryder and subsequent surgeries to repair nerve damage.

  “I know, poor Harry,” Marlene said, passing through the metal detector and walking up to kiss him on the cheek. “Threw himself in front of me just like Superman and took the bullet.”

  “Scissors.”

  “Bullet…scissors sounds like you got in a fight with Hillary Clinton and she won.”

  “Okay, bullet,” Kipman agreed.

  “Machine-gun bullet, fifty cal,” Guma laughed.

  “ ’Twas only a flesh wound,” Kipman replied with what he thought of as his “stiff upper lip” English accent as they walked to the elevator.

  Even though it was almost closing time, they had to navigate through the human flotsam and jetsam that floated about the lobby. They skirted a mother who slapped her son, a hulking three-hundred-pounder, and scolded him for “hanging around that bad element.” The young man hung his head and took his medicine, though he looked like he would have preferred hearing it from a judge. “Yes, Momma. Sorry, Momma.”

  A little further toward the elevators, a frightened young woman huddled against her husband and told an earnest assistant district attorney that she just didn’t think she could face the man who raped her. “I can’t handle having his eyes looking at me again. I’d rather drop the charges.”

  Over near the water fountain, a wild-looking vagabond in a tie-dyed shirt shouted that the end was near. A cop moved to silence him.

  A bleary-eyed drunk sailed out of the crowd to offer Marlene a business card proclaiming Jimmy Jones Bail Bonds to be the best. “Come on, lady, the faster I give these out,” he complained to Marlene who’d declined, “the sooner I get a drink and can stop this shakin’.”

  Every step of the way toward the elevator there seemed to be someone crying, or a lawyer chasing a frightened or sullen client insisting that he “accept the deal or I am out of here,” or bewildered citizens running around with official-looking documents in their hands and lost looks on their faces. “God, sometimes I forget how depressing this place can be,” Marlene said as they stepped on the elevator and hit the button for the eighth floor and the offices of the New York District Attorney.

  “You certainly see an interesting slice of the human pie down here,” Kipman remarked somewhat awkwardly, his face turning red. He hadn’t been kissed anywhere by anyone in quite some time, not since before his wife had died, and he was intoxicatedly aware of the lingering presence of Marlene’s perfume.

  Marlene smiled up at Kipman, her one good eye sparkling with a bravado she wasn’t really feeling. She’d lost the other eye more than two decades earlier when as an ADA she’d opened a letter bomb intended for Karp, whom she was dating. The injury marked the beginning of what had surprisingly veered from the normal life track of a Catholic schoolgirl raised in Queens, educated at Sacred Heart High School, then college at Smith and finally Yale Law School. Right after law school, she’d entered the DAO, eventually heading the sex crimes unit. Frustrated with the system’s inability to not only mete out true justice, but also its pathetic ineptness at protecting the innocent, her path had deviated away from the practice of law and entered the realm of dispensing street justice.

  Whether as the head of a firm providing security for high-profile VIPs or volunteering to take on men who were terrorizing women and ignoring court-issued restraining orders to leave them alone, Marlene had discovered a latent talent for violence. Even the dogs she raised on a farm in Long Island weren’t the usual fare for a Manhattan housewife. No poodles or schnauzers for Marlene, no it was Presa Canarios, massive, potentially ferocious guard dogs that could be trained for bomb, drug, or simply protection duties.

  At some point, the lines between protecting the weak and vigilantism had grown increasingly blurred; her response to confrontation more violent. In a sort of last-ditch effort to pull out of the dive into moral oblivion, she’d gone with her daughter, Lucy, to a retreat in Taos, New Mexico, for women suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. The retreat had steadied her nerves and left her psyche open to possibility. A possibility realized when she met John Jojola, the police chief of the Taos Pueblo who was investigating the murders of young Indian boys.

  She’d liked Jojola right away—from his self-deprecating humor to his air of a man who was comfortable in his own skin. But it had taken some time to realize the depth of him. Jojola wasn’t allowed to talk to her about the details of his people’s beliefs. We are an ancient people—one of the few American Indian tribes still living in the lands of their ancestors, he explained. There are secrets we don’t share with anyone, friend or foe. Just like we don’t teach people our language, Tewa, though Lucy has assimilated enough to almost carry on a conversation. Sorry, it’s
not meant to be rude, just sacred.

  It was the beginning of Marlene’s return to the world, but not an easy road to travel with her family’s propensity to attract trouble. She’d been forced to call on her violent tendencies again on New Year’s Eve to save her son Zak and help stop terrorists from blowing up Times Square. But she had done it with a clear conscience, quite sure that killing terrorists fell under the heading of protecting the community.

  After that, she’d hoped for a respite from danger. But then Fulton had been shot and Kane escaped. She hadn’t needed to hear Fulton’s message from Kane; she knew that the game was on and had been back to packing heat ever since.

  And yet, her concerns recently had more to do with her father than Kane’s escape or her husband’s election campaign.

  At noon she’d gone to take her father to lunch with the purpose of trying to talk him into moving out of the family home in Queens and into a nice assisted-living community.

  He’d been living alone ever since her mother had died earlier that year, and she worried that he wasn’t coming out of his funk. The last years of her mother’s life had been rough. Concetta Ciampi had developed Alzheimer’s and had become increasingly difficult to deal with. Half the time she couldn’t remember Marlene’s name and had taken to walking out of the house and wandering the neighborhood, lost.

  Mariano Ciampi had grown increasingly frustrated and frightened by the whole process. The woman he’d been married to for more than sixty years no longer knew who he was most of the time or thought he’d replaced the “real” Mariano. And he no longer recognized her as the woman he loved since meeting her on the boat on the way to the United States from Italy. His frustrations had made him angry, and Marlene had worried that he might physically harm his wife in a fit.

  Then came the morning when he called. Her mother, he said, wasn’t breathing. He was afraid that she was dead. She’d arrived to find her father grieving downstairs and her mother lying on her back upstairs, her sightless eyes fixed on the crucifix above her bed. She’d bent over to close her mother’s eyes and noticed the tiny spots that indicated hemorrhaging in the eyes, sometimes an indication of strangulation or smothering.

  She’d gone back downstairs and gently questioned her father. He said they’d gone to bed early, like normal, and when he woke up that morning, her body was cold and she wouldn’t respond when he called her name and touched her.

  The medical examiner, who knew Marlene and didn’t want to extend the formalities any longer than necessary, did a cursory examination and pronounced the verdict “natural causes.” There’d been a quick burial, a service attended by dozens of people Marlene didn’t know as well as family, then a period of grieving in which she had not allowed herself to entertain the thought that her father might have killed her mother. Gradually the immediate sadness passed, but the question continued to trouble her sleep. Many nights she got up and made her way across Crosby to the loft building on the other side and up to the little art studio Butch had created for her. There she’d paint away into the morning, imagining how to ask her father if he’d murdered the woman he loved.

  Using the excuse that she was working on a case, Marlene had questioned another medical examiner to see if there were other explanations for the hemorrhage spots besides murder.

  Oh sure, he said. She might have had a stroke or even choked on something…although an autopsy should have revealed it if that was the case.

  Marlene had decided then that her mother’s death had been through natural causes. She was wrong to think otherwise of her father, a good and gentle man all of his life, dedicated to his family, and absolutely and madly in love with his wife. But that didn’t answer the problem of what to do with him.

  He wasn’t as bad off as her mother had been, but he wasn’t all there anymore, either. He often forgot things—whether it was a doctor’s appointment, or something as simple as his key and locking himself out of his house. A couple of times he’d called her, his voice weepy and on the edge of panic, to say he had driven somewhere but couldn’t quite figure out how to get back. He was lost but too afraid of strangers to ask for directions, so Marlene would have to go retrieve him, or call the neighbor she’d left a spare house key with to let him in.

  Ever since the death of her mother, he’d grown more frail. She was worried that he wasn’t eating or sleeping well. She had plenty of money from the sale of her security company—more than she or Butch or their children would be able to use in their lifetimes—and wanted to use it to make his life, and hers, easier. She’d found a fabulous assisted-care facility, “more like a permanent vacation in a five-star hotel,” she told him. But he refused to go.

  “I will not go into a nursing home,” he’d shouted.

  “Take it easy, Pops,” she replied in as calm a voice as she could muster. “It’s not a nursing home. I would never do that to you. It’s a community for senior citizens. You’d have your own apartment, a social center, including a pool and a billiards and card room. There’s someone around 24/7 if you need help, and all your meals and laundry and stuff is taken care of…. It’s like Club Med.”

  “Call it whatever you want, but it’s where you send people to die who are no longer useful,” her father shouted again and retreated up to his bedroom.

  “I plan to die in the same house I lived in with your mother for more than fifty years!” he yelled through the door when she asked him to open it. “This is the house where you and your sisters and brothers were brought the day you was born. You were all raised here…this is where we were a family, goddammit!”

  Marlene used a bobby pin from her hair and unlocked the door. He didn’t seem to notice but looked around behind her as if he expected to see someone spying. “You know I’ve seen her,” he whispered.

  “Who, Pops?”

  “Your mother. She sometimes shows up in the doorway at night when I’m in bed. If I get up and try to find her, she disappears. But I can hear her moving around out there…. I think she’s waiting for me. But if I go to this living facility, she won’t know where to find me so that we can go to heaven together.”

  The old man had sat down on the bed and started weeping. “I miss her so much,” he said. “I’d even take the crazy version back.”

  Marlene had laid down on the bed next to him and pulled him close. In some ways, it was romantic, the way her old man looked forward to spending eternity with his sweetheart. But his visions of an unsettled ghost made her wonder if the manner of her mother’s death was weighing on her father’s conscience. But she couldn’t ask him. She just couldn’t, and instead she said, “It’s your imagination, Pops. Mom’s in heaven with Jesus waiting for you there.”

  She repeated an offer for him to come live with her, Butch, and the boys, but not even the promise of daily contact with his beloved grandsons could get him to budge. “We’d get on each other’s nerves,” he said, “and then I’d have no place to go that was my own. I want my house, where I can do what I want, when I want. Besides, the guys at the VFW would miss me.”

  So she’d left the debate for another day. Marlene had arrived at 100 Centre Street a bit unsettled, but she brightened when she saw Harry Kipman walking up to the entrance. She adored Harry. He liked to play the irascible intellectual, but she knew he was not just bright, but kind and warm. She hadn’t minded the teasing about her weaponry, but it did remind her that she was falling back into old patterns.

  Doesn’t matter, she thought, I’m defending my family, and I’m not about to leave their security up to someone else.

  As soon as he could start barking orders, Fulton had immediately beefed up the police presence around her husband until wherever Butch went, he looked like a presidential candidate surrounded by Secret Service agents. She accepted the extra police patrols around the loft and even the presence of escorts when the boys went out. But she’d declined her own bodyguard.

  You lose your edge when you depend on someone else, she’d told Fulton. And he’d known h
er better than to argue.

  She’d fought it again when Butch came home and announced that the Department of Homeland Security was beefing up the detail. However, Jaxon, another longtime friend of the family, had persuaded her that the new teams were professionals who knew how to stay out of the way but would be ready just in case.

  Marlene wasn’t the only one who wasn’t thrilled with being shadowed by federal agents. Even more adamantly against the whole idea was Lucy. She was back in Taos, New Mexico, with Ned, and didn’t want anybody spying on her. I’ve got Ned, she pointed out before she left. He’s the only secret agent man I need.

  No one’s doubting Ned’s abilities, Marlene had said as the subject of the conversation stood bashfully to the side with his head down and Stetson in his hand while mother and daughter argued in the loft before they left that past January to return to Taos.

  Like her husband, Marlene liked the young man and acknowledged that his hobby as a quick-draw gunslinger at Western competitions had come in handy when Lucy’s life had been threatened several times over the past year. But again, that had all been about reactions; he wasn’t trained to be proactive when dealing with a security threat. He’s only one man, and he may be a target himself. Kane, or whomever he sends, is not going to step out onto the street and ask for a fair fight. You won’t even know the feds are there.

  Yes, I will, Lucy said, placing her hands on her hips with her feet apart, an obstinate stance she’d inherited from her mother. And I’m not going to give up my privacy for the latest madman du jour who has it in for this family.

  Looking at her defiant daughter, Marlene was struck again by the changes in the thin, pale, and frightened young woman who’d gone to Taos, New Mexico, almost a year earlier to help at a Catholic mission for Taos Indian kids. Bookish and wrapped up in Catholic mysticism, she’d done little up to that point to make herself attractive to members of the opposite sex. A savant at picking up languages—having mastered nearly sixty already—she’d accompanied her mother to Taos, hoping to learn Tewa, one of the oldest and most individualistic languages left in the world from the Pueblo Indians there. Whether it was the outdoor life or her love for her young cowboy, Lucy had blossomed into a tanned, muscular but well-filled-out young woman, who if not pretty in the classical sense of a rose was certainly beautiful in the sense of a desert flower.