"You seem to have made your peace with it, regardless."
"That shows how much you know," said Karp. Her eyes widened with interest. I'm making a serious mistake here, thought Karp. I'm a public official getting drunk with a reporter, and if I'm not careful, I'm going to spill my guts and get into trouble. He then considered that, although he had been in trouble many times before, he had not ever got into this particular kind of trouble. It was not great virtue; he just didn't drink and never had. Then he thought, and here the unbidden idea surprised him, that maybe it was time he did. Was that the booze talking? Was this how it happened, the descent into disgrace? He found he didn't much care and took another sip of the cognac. It seemed to grow smoother the more you drank. Stupenagel was looking at him with a peculiar smile, and her face seemed to glow.
"You never make peace with it," he said. "It just grinds you down, like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. Dickens said something about it, the inevitable hardening of the soul that results from a life in the courts. You just live with it. You have technical pride- is the case as perfect as you can make it? Even though, even though, we can put guys in jail behind shitty half-baked cases, because the defense is overworked and second rate a lot of the time and lame, and also, do you have the stones to drop a case when it's not perfect, even though the guy's probably guilty and it pisses off the victims and the cops, and the media make a big thing of it? Thin soup, but that's all we have."
"What happens when the pencil is ground down to the eraser?"
"Oh, well, that hasn't happened yet," said Karp. "I have a very long pencil."
A long honking laugh from the reporter. "So anyhow, you let the big one get away. How did you feel?"
"How do you feel always asking people how they feel? Why does the media do that?"
"It sells. People are voyeurs. They're dead inside most of the time, so when someone's kid gets burned up they like to see the mike shoved in the mom's face. The amazing thing is that the mom usually loves the attention. Was Rohbling the bottom of the barrel, do you think? The most evil?"
"Oh, no way," said Karp instantly. "Rohbling was, in fact, a nut. I argued that he wasn't, but he was. We had an eleven-year-old a couple of years ago who killed both his parents, same thing. Also with a screw missing. But there is evil."
"You think so?" she said. "It depends on how you define evil. I had an interview once with a man who ordered the massacre of an entire village in Guatemala. He was right there watching his men murder old women and little kids. He had no regrets. He thought it was necessary to suppress the Communists. Slept like a baby. Wanted to sleep with me, too, although probably not like a baby."
"Did you let him?" asked Murrow.
Karp and Stupenagel both stared at him. The reporter laughed, that astounding bellow. "Why, Murrow, I thought you'd drifted off to bye-byes. What flattering curiosity, too! As a matter of fact, I didn't, but not because he was a brutal mass-murdering scumbag piece of shit. The problem was he had the most appalling bad breath; it was as if his conscience had crawled into his glottis and died. I have, however, shared my silky body with men who could have eaten that fellow for breakfast. I have unusual tastes…"- here she batted her thickly mascaraed eyelashes at Murrow and licked her lips in a parody of lasciviousness-"… which is probably why I'm not married and driving my little girls to soccer practice. My point, however, was that doing things that most of us would consider grossly evil seems to have no effect on the personality, precisely because no one really believes that anything they do is really evil. There's always a justifying excuse. Eichmann famously went to the gallows with the perfectly clear conscience of a man who just did his duty. Milosevic is outraged that the Hague tribunal thinks he did anything wrong. So evil is something we call other people, people we don't agree with, or else a word we use for a particularly gross violation of the law. Shooting a liquor store clerk is bad. Raping and murdering lots of little girls is evil. The first represents nothing but a difference in power: the winners get to say what's evil. The second is an essentially meaningless verbal enhancer, like 'heinous' or 'inhuman.' Or don't you agree?"
"I don't. Everyone knows right and wrong, no matter how much they rationalize it or deny it. Even the Nazis knew they were doing wrong, and they had a whole elaborate system for making thousands of murderers think they were doing the world a favor. But they kept it real dark, even to the end, and they denied that any of it took place." He paused. The word "evil" was not one he used in the courtroom; he didn't think it added anything to an argument, and it rarely crossed his lips in everyday speech. He had been surprised, just now, to hear the word slip out of his mouth. He continued, "Well, it's a religious rather than a legal term, isn't it? My daughter's take on it is that it's real and palpable, but then she believes in God and the devil. She thinks that what makes evil evil is the lie. Your guy really didn't massacre helpless people, he was fighting communism. The pedophile isn't really raping children because the children really like it. Every crook I ever met had an excuse. In fact, that's how we nail most of them. They're actually anxious to tell their sad story. How I didn't mean any harm. How she made me do it. Lucy thinks that demonic forces actually get into people and whisper this kind of shit into their heads, and that's why they do stuff that doesn't make any rational sense. Man kills wife, kids, self."
"It's a theory," said Stupenagel. "How is little Lucy, by the way? Not so little anymore. God, how the years fly! I don't know how I'd feel having a little time clock staring me in the face every day. My child is an adult? My child is fucking guys, having babies? Tick tock." She shuddered. "Or maybe not. Has she recovered?"
Karp didn't like to talk about what had happened to his daughter. "I guess. She seems all right. She goes to school in Boston. She just came back for the Christmas break."
"He tortured her, I heard. You must have used mucho chips to keep it out of the press."
"I did and I will continue to do so," he said coldly, and with his sternest look.
"Sor-ry. And you never actually found the scumbag?"
"The case was closed by forensic evidence."
"I heard someone left a cleaned skull in a plastic bag in a church."
"No comment."
"Oh, please! We're just talking. I heard there were little gnaw marks all over it."
"What part of 'no comment' didn't you understand, Stupenagel?"
"Okay, okay. So she's fine. Well, good. Any dish in her life, or is she still on that virginity kick?"
"You'd have to ask her," said Karp, with an increased chill in his tone, and gave her another and more intense blast of the Karp Stare. The reporter let her eyes slide away from his and chuckled. "Maybe I will. I assume she's still with the languages? How many does she know, now?"
"I don't know, fifty or sixty."
"Christ! Yet another thing to be envious about. Here I am traveling in obscure corners of the world and aside from French and Spanish I can barely order a drink or ask where's the bathroom. Speaking of which, where is it? I have to take a slash."
Karp told her. She unfolded herself from her chair like a complex doll. Karp was not surprised to see that, although she had drunk more than the two men put together, she did not weave or stagger.
"Don't go anywhere, boys," she called out. "This is starting to be fun." She slammed the door closed with a twitch of her hip.
"You're rolling your eyes, Murrow," said Karp. "Does that mean you're falling in love?"
"Oh, yeah, I'm totally smitten. Christ, what a monster! But I'll admit to a certain morbid fascination, like watching a crocodile eat a deer. Is she always like that?"
"As far as I know. According to my wife, she's utterly unreliable as a friend and entirely lacking in moral values, aside from bravery and fanatical devotion to journalism. She's very good, too. She gets the story. Marlene says she likes to be around Stupe because she's the only person she knows who makes her feel like a good person in comparison."
"Is she serious? About lusting after you?"<
br />
"I think so. We've had some odd moments over the years. The occasional grope. I always say, 'no, thanks,' and she takes it with a laugh, like now."
"What if you said 'yes, please'?"
"Oh, she'd be in the rack in a heartbeat. She has a kind of competitive thing with Marlene, from years back. Marlene apparently didn't put out much in college and Stupe was always stalking her boyfriends with sex."
"And they're still friends?"
"Yes. The human heart is mysterious. The heart has its reasons."
"You're waxing philosophical, boss."
"I'm waxing drunk. I may throw up on the governor. I believe that's what Brenda Starr in the girls' can is kind of hoping for."
"Is that a real danger?"
"I don't know. I doubt it. I'll probably nod off in a while, get up choking on vomit, stagger into the toilet and puke, and then emerge as a steely-eyed and sober public servant with a massive headache. It's my bon vivant mode. Is that a pitying look, Murrow?"
"No. But if you don't mind my saying so, you've had a rough time recently. Maybe you should take a break."
"I do mind your saying so," snapped Karp. "I'm fine. I can do my job fine."
Murrow got up. "Maybe I should take off."
"Sit down!" Karp ordered. "If you think I'm going to let you leave me alone, drunk, with the dragon lady of American journalism, you're nuts."
Murrow sat down. He poured himself another little drink.
A long silence ensued. In the distance telephones rang and there was an occasional metallic clang from the barely functioning heating system.
***
Marlene had not intended to attend Karp's coronation. She had avoided the city since Lucy's release from New York Hospital in September and thought she would be wrongfooted to appear as the Wife in her husband's moment of triumph. Also, she thought her wide reputation as an unindicted violent felon would not add luster to the occasion. But when she expressed these thoughts during a phone conversation with her daughter, she got an earful, including an accusation that her hesitance had nothing whatever to do with diffidence or finer feelings, but stemmed entirely from her monstrous narcissistic ego and her superstitious, moronic paranoia, the diatribe ending with the threat that if Marlene did not attend this party she would not be invited to Lucy's wedding. Marlene meekly acquiesced; she found she was willing to avoid present pain in the form of her daughter yelling at her even if it promised greater pain in the future: returning to the city, seeing her husband and children. So she'd become a moral coward, too. It didn't matter much. It was just days. When she thought about it, she realized she had gotten her wish. She was more and more like the dogs. She thought she might as well let Billy Ireland fuck her. Why not? She didn't care for the flirty tension anymore, it was too much like having a real personality. But she would only let him do her dog style. That would be most suitable. First, though, this trip to town.
She had, of course, no suitable clothes at the farm. Buy a new outfit? No, she had a closet full of costly garments from her brief stint as an IPO millionaire. But they were all at the loft, which meant she would have to go back there. Could she sneak in and out? No, the boys and Lucy were on winter break from school. Was she so low that she would buy an outfit she didn't need and would never wear again just because she didn't have the courage to face her children? No, that was lower than letting her dog boy fuck her from behind. She was mildly surprised to see that there were still some things beyond her.
So on the Friday morning she left before dawn, having slept hardly at all, and drove west in her truck. The weather reports the night before had been full of the massive storm that had socked Buffalo and smothered Albany and was now whistling down the Hudson Valley like the Twentieth Century Limited. There were only two inches on the ground when she got out of the tunnel, but traffic was already incurably snarled, even without the tunnel security delays. It was just past 8:30 in the morning when she came up into the gray daylight of Manhattan. The hundred-mile trip had taken her four and a half hours.
***
"She's been gone a long time," said Murrow. He was starting to feel the liquor, just a trace of blurriness, of fuzzy face, but he was far from drunk. Murrow was of the class, nearly extinct in the city, where children were taught to drink at their parents' table. He had been taking sherry or a light cocktail with his mother from the age of fourteen, and at Brown he had been famous for drinking men twice his size under the table. Karp was over twice his size, but not any kind of a drinker. He looked at his boss and regretted having brought the cognac, for he had not expected the arrival of the reporter, or that the afternoon would have, under her influence, degenerated into a debauch. Karp, he knew, had a tendency to be a little morose, even when cold sober. Murrow did not want to think about how he was going to get Karp into shape to meet the governor in the time remaining. He checked the bottle and glanced at his watch. He prayed for more snow, for blizzards, lightnings, earthquakes.
Karp observed Murrow glancing at his wrist. "Maybe she fell in. Maybe her bladder is the size of the Chrysler Building. Would you like to go to the ladies' and check?"
He spoke with unnatural slowness and deliberation. Murrow thought that Karp had no real idea how drunk he was. That could be a problem. He poured more cognac into his own glass, filling it over the halfway mark. It was one way to keep Karp from drinking much more. If that goddamned woman would just get back and absorb the rest, things might still be rescued.
"No, I think I won't," said Murrow. "She's a big girl."
Two minutes later she reappeared, brandishing a magnum bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Murrow's heart sank; the city was practically shut down by the blizzard and he couldn't imagine where she had found a liquor store open. He expressed this thought, somewhat sourly. "My child," said Stupenagel, "only four things are required of an international correspondent: accuracy, speed, courage, and the ability to find alcoholic beverages any place in the world at any hour." She yanked out the cork with a bang and a flourish.
"Some people think it's vulgar to make a loud pop when you open wine," said Murrow, but held out his glass.
"Well, they're not invited to our party, are they?" she said, pouring. "I was in the can, and I thought, Hey, it's a celebration, we require champagne. And also to wash the cognac out of the system, to clear our heads, polish our wits, so we don't disgrace ourselves when the governor arrives. Is he sleeping?"
"Stunned, I think," said Murrow. "You know, you really are a wicked person."
"Wicked?" she exclaimed. "Wicked. That's a word you don't hear much anymore, except as an intensifier in New England. Wicked good maple syrup. What else is wicked besides witches? I can't think of anything. You wouldn't say 'wicked empire,' or 'wicked dictator,' would you? Evil is the classier term, because it's about power, and whatever we say, we can't help loving power. But I like wicked, the implied cleverness in there, the delight in turning things to one's own advantage, outsmarting the goody-goodies, generating a healthy and renewing chaos. As here. Wake up, Karp, it's time for your champagne. Jesus, it's cold in this office. We won't need an ice bucket for the bottle. Is something wrong with the radiators?"
"They've been fixing the system for months," said Murrow. "That, or it's an experiment to see if criminal justice can be improved by rapidly changing the temperature of the courthouse. They've tried everything else. Last summer they actually had the heat on, or so it seemed. At least this building is old enough so that the windows still open. Why are you so intent on getting him drunk?"
"I'm not getting him drunk, Murrow. You can't get someone drunk nowadays like you could in Victorian novels." She added in an oily voice: " 'Have some Madeira, m'dear.' " Champagne splashed into the glass that Karp held out. He drank some, finding it cooling after the brandy and quite pleasant.
"See?" said Stupenagel. "He wants to get drunk. Why? Perhaps his life has gotten away from him. Perhaps things haven't worked out the way he planned, and he wishes a few blessed moments of oblivion?"
"Perhaps you're a pathetic, lonely alcoholic who wants company," said Karp.
"Oooh!" crowed Stupenagel. "A new side of Karp emerges. See, Murrow, I may be wicked, but that was cruel."
Karp was starting to feel queasy. He couldn't recall what he had eaten for lunch, but if the past was any guide, he would shortly learn what it had been in full Ektachrome. It was twenty years since he had been this drunk at an office event- that horrible, magical night when Marlene had helped him stagger back to his lonely apartment and his life with her had started. They had all been drinking Olde Medical Examiner then, a punch concocted by some wiseasses from the morgue out of fruit juice and absolute alcohol. The present drunk was rather more elegant. He wondered if he would be quite as sick. But other than the messages from his belly, he felt fine. He hadn't thought about Marlene, or what she was doing, or whether she was really going to show up here with his family or not, and he hadn't thought obsessively about his own future, either, for the better part of two hours. He felt enclosed in a comfortable blanket, the fuzz of it against his face, its warmth relaxing his limbs. Everything was going to be just fine. This was why people became drunks, he thought. If you could feel like this all the time, it might make more sense than he had previously imagined to live in a cardboard box and never bathe. He felt a sudden burst of affection for his fellow drunks.
"I'm sorry, Stupenagel," he said. "It was the liquor talking, not me."
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