Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The woman sat poised with pen in hand over the contract, stretching her little moment out. She was talking about how her little dog had died.

  She was thinking about getting another one. Felix smiled and invented a little dog of his own. He didn’t mind old ladies, up to a point. It was always amazing to him how people could get through fifty, sixty years of life and stay so dumb, so pluckable.

  Suddenly, for no reason he could think of, the image of his own mother flashed into his mind. His mother didn’t know what he did for a living. She thought he was a big-time executive, which stopped her from nagging him, but made it difficult to hit her up for money. She had money, that was for sure, and friends with money. Not for the first time, Felix began to think about how he could get his hands on some of it, or maybe use her contacts to set himself up in something with a little more class. But if he did that …

  The woman signed the contract and held it out to him, smiling, flapping the pages slightly, like a five-year-old back from the first day of school with a finger painting. Felix took it from her, his smile blank, his eyes elsewhere. The woman felt the first stirrings of disappointment.

  “When will they deliver, you think?” she asked brightly, trying to recover the mood.

  “Soon, a couple of days. I’ll call you,” he growled, and made his escape. Outside, he paused and shook his head. No, Ma was for emergencies, like this burglary business, or the odd hundred “loan.”

  Whether she believed his success story or not, he didn’t know, or care. He only knew that he couldn’t ask her for anything serious or accept anything from her that would give her an edge on him. He stopped, startled. Where did that thought come from? His Ma loved him. He was her favorite boy. But he knew if he ever got dependent on her she would get him involved in that church of hers and he couldn’t hack that. That was it. He turned off those thoughts, which were starting to make him nervous. He was good at that, shutting off thoughts.

  When he wanted to remember things, he wrote them down. In the car he noted the sale down in the small black diary he always carried. He used a fine-pointed marker pen and wrote in tiny capitals, like the lettering on engineering drawings. He looked over the display of the week’s appointments. Each completed task had a tiny check next to it. “Date w. Anna” was checked. “Take care of M. /move out.” M. was Mary, his wife. That was checked. He had taken care of her. “Date w. Denise” wasn’t checked. It was written in the slot representing this coming evening.

  Therefore Felix did not tarry in the neighborhood after making his sale. He drove quickly back to Manhattan, to Steve Lutz’s apartment on Tenth Street. There he showered and dressed carefully in his best suit and tie. He had all his stuff at Lutz’s now, in suitcases and cardboard boxes. He could tell Lutz was starting to get pissed off, but he didn’t care. Lutz was a pussy, one, and two, he would be moving in with Anna soon.

  He checked himself in the full-length mirror. The suit was a real Armani and the tie had cost thirty-five dollars. Denise had bought both for him, for his last birthday. She was pretty good to him, all things considered. Although she would never give him any money, she didn’t mind buying him stuff. And she didn’t want anything from him, anything permanent, except she was loopy about keeping it quiet, which was why when Mary had followed him that time and freaked out he had to put her away, lock her up and pound on her head and scare the shit out of her. He didn’t understand that too well, since Denise seemed otherwise to be a pretty sophisticated old broad. Why should she give a shit? Unless she had lied to him and she really was still married. Something else he couldn’t understand was why Mary had gone batshit. It wasn’t the first time he had played around, so …

  As he thought about this, and about seeing Denise, Felix became increasingly nervous. His palms began to sweat and his stomach started to spin over. This was a familiar feeling and he knew how to deal with it. From a suitcase he took a large plastic jar and shook from it into his hand two Gelusil and two yellow Valium tablets. He threw them down and swallowed them dry. Before he hit the street both his stomach and his nerves had begun to relax. Felix, of course, had no more interior life than a salamander, so that he never wondered why this liaison affected him this way, and why he continued to make himself available to Denise.

  By the time he arrived at the East Side hotel that was their usual rendezvous, he had managed to cast an almost romantic light on what he was about to do, almost Boy Scoutish in a way, the equivalent of helping an old lady across the street. This did not last as long as his trip up to the twelfth floor in the elevator, for by the time he stepped out he was excited and sick at the same time, with his sex throbbing and the sour taste of bile in his mouth.

  As always, the door to the room was open; as always the room itself was dim: the lights off, the curtains drawn. The scent of her was heavy in the air. Her face was a white nimbus framed by coils of thick black hair. Pale, soft arms reached out to him and he heard her deep laugh. His breath came in gasps now, as he tore off his expensive clothes and threw them to the floor. He heard a sound, a whining sob, and barely understood that it was coming from his own throat.

  She threw the covers aside and he saw her naked body, saw her wide hips roiling and her thighs lolling apart. With a cry he flung himself on her, his eyes tight shut. As his body moved spasmodically, his mind became totally blank, as if he were in a deep sleep fragmented by nightmares. In an hour or so, he would find himself neatly dressed, walking in the street in a state of lassitude and exhaustion, and remember that he had had a date with Denise, and that he could now go to an expensive store and buy something for himself. There would be scratches on his back sometimes, and he would recall someone shouting in his ear a man’s name, one that was not his own. But of the thing itself, he retained no memory.

  CHAPTER

  7

  The next day the People of Queens tried Felix Tighe for attempted murder and the other charges in their Courthouse on Queens Boulevard. The trial occupied two and a half days. On the first two of these, the prosecution presented its case: the arresting officer, the injured officer, the huge knife covered with Felix’s fingerprints, the forensic evidence, the bag of swag also covered with Felix’s prints.

  By the end of the second day Felix had gotten the hint and on the third day, which had been reserved for closing arguments, the guest of honor chose not to attend. This did not stop the trial. While the Constitution gives us the right to confront our accusers in open court, it doesn’t say we have to hear ourselves convicted, and so Felix was convicted, on all counts, in absentia, like an escaped spy.

  A warrant was duly issued for his arrest. His folder, with its mug shots and personal information, was thrown into the felony warrant basket and taken to the office where the warrants were converted into arrest cards and sent to the NYPD and to police departments throughout the country and to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. There it rested a while among its thousands of fellows, until a clerk pulled it from a bottomless stack and began to prepare the arrest card.

  Then she noticed something peculiar. Most arrest warrants are for people who are avoiding prosecution, but here, right in the folder, was a Disposition of Trial form that said the guy had just been convicted. But if he was convicted, he would already be in jail. Something had to be wrong. The clerk was a fast worker and didn’t want to fall behind in her quotas. She stuck Felix Tighe’s file in the center drawer of her desk, intending to ask her supervisor about it later. She forgot. Two weeks after this she was promoted and had to move her desk. By that time Felix’s file was an embarrassment. She stuck it in a drawer where they kept incomplete records and, after a short interval, expunged it from her mind, and thus from the consciousness of the law. Felix Tighe, fugitive from justice, was now, for practical purposes, a free man.

  This made no substantial difference to Felix himself, since he had put out of his own mind long since any possibility of having to pay for his crime. If he was tense and irritable all day that Friday, it wa
s not because he felt the law at his heels. Instead, it was the usual aftermath of a session with Denise. Felix’s ordinary relief for tension was violence. He went to a Chinese theatre on Canal Street that showed Bruce Lee films continuously, and watched Enter the Dragon for the fifth time. His body twitched in time with the action and he grunted along with Bruce’s punches. Thus warmed up, he went to his karate dojo for some of the real thing.

  Felix’s dojo was a small room above a restaurant on Division Street. He had selected it because it was cheap, and none too selective about whom it let in; because it allowed full-contact karate; and because most of the clientele were Asiatic men, whose typically slight build made them convenient victims. Felix believed, with some justification, that a good big man can beat a good little man any day, and was anxious to demonstrate the principle. “Pounding chinks” was how he put it among his acquaintances.

  Although sport karate is supposed to be about using form as a means to physical, moral, and spiritual development, Felix believed, and said so often to his fellow karatekas, that such considerations were a pile of horseshit, and that the whole point of turning your body into a deadly weapon was to use it on other people and make them hurt. The sensei of the dojo, a small, elderly Korean man named Wan, smiled vaguely and shook his head whenever Felix unloaded this line, but made no move to confront him. Felix knew he was frightened of him, which added to the pleasure of the sport.

  Today Felix hurried into his outfit and strode confidently out into the dojo mat room. After doing his warm-up and some katas, he looked around for a likely victim. All the clientele of the dojo were gathered in a circle watching a sparring match. Felix went over and looked over a small shoulder to see what was going on. Wan was engaged in ipon-kumite, a kind of restricted no-contact sparring with a man Felix had never seen in the dojo before. Felix was amazed. He had not realized that there existed Oriental people who were that large. He observed that the enormous Manchurian was also very fast and very good.

  When Wan saw Felix, he stopped his exercises at once. He smiled at Felix. The Manchurian smiled. All the other karatekas smiled too, and backed away to form a large circle. The Manchurian bowed and, still smiling, proceeded to pound the living shit out of Felix Tighe for fifteen minutes.

  When Felix got to Larry’s Place later that afternoon, the first thing he did, after drinking two scotch and waters, with Valium, was to call up a guy he knew who did freelance torch work, to see about burning down Mr. Wan’s dojo. After Felix explained the situation, the man said he would do it for five hundred, over the weekend.

  “I want the people in there, you understand?” Felix said.

  “You want the people … ? You mean burn them up?”

  “Yeah, that’s part of the deal.”

  The man laughed. “No fuckin’ way, man. Hey, let me explain something. Anybody’s in a place when I torch it, and they can’t get out, that’s tough titty, you understand? It’s like a bonus—I don’t charge for that. But making sure they fry—that’s a whole ’nother line of work than what I do, dig. Hey, you talking about frying a dozen people, you talking specialists, you talking the Mob, you understand? Job like that set you back maybe ten, twelve yards easy.”

  “Yeah, well, I got to think about that.”

  “Yeah, I guess. So—you want the torch job or not?”

  Felix decided against it. He had by this time calmed down enough to realize that he didn’t have even five hundred dollars, and he doubted that this guy would take Visa, not even if it was a real card.

  He wasn’t thinking clearly and he hurt all over. It was worse than when that cop had bopped him. He sat down in a booth and ordered another scotch. Then he opened his attaché case and took out his diary. He wrote, “Anna—move in, tonite.” That was critical. He had to get settled, get out of that shithole at Lutz’s. That was what was bringing him down. He needed some space, and someone to take care of the daily bullshit, the rent, the cleaning, the meals, so he could do some serious planning. Also, once he was set up there he could try a move on that Stephanie, see if there was any real money involved there. He thought for a moment. There was something missing. It took him a few seconds to think of what it was. Then he wrote, “Get knife,”

  Which he did. At a shlock joint on Eighth Avenue he purchased a bowie knife with a wide fourteen inch blade and a fake horn handle. It came with a leather sheath. It was just like the one he had stuck Officer Slayton with in Queens. He put it into his attaché case and walked back to Larry’s. He felt much better.

  When the courts recessed for lunch that Friday, Marlene remembered what she had promised Dana Woodley and, instead of camping in her office with a yogurt and a trashy book, went to visit Suzanne Loesser. Loesser was a social worker assigned to the Criminal Courts building by the New York State Department of Social Services. Her official function was to arrange protective custody for the minor children of convicted felons, but over the years she had taken on a wide selection of other duties occasioned by the blowback of crime.

  This was because, unlike virtually every other social worker in the City, Loesser never said no, never said, “It’s not my department,” always treated her pathetic clientele with some measure of dignity. The existence of Loesser meant that no agent of the criminal justice system needed ever to exercise any compassion or evince any human feeling. As long as they had Loesser’s number on a slip of paper they would never have to deal with a messy problem, and could concentrate on their vital and implacable mission of assembling criminals, saying words at one another, moving the criminals around and returning them to the streets.

  Throughout the Streets of Calcutta, she was known as Suzie Loser. She weighed well over two hundred pounds, lived on coffee, Danish pastry, and cigarillos, and only God knew more about the intimate problems of the poor folks of New York, although He was often not as sympathetic.

  She was on the phone (she was always on the phone) when Marlene walked into her office, a space that made Marlene’s office look like an operating theater.

  “Hi, Marlene, baby, get me that long green box please,” said Loesser. Then, into the phone, “No Audrey, they are eligible under section 20. I just told you …”

  Marlene lifted a speckled green card file box off a swivel chair piled with folders and handed it to Loesser across her massively disordered desk. The social worker thumbed through the dingy cards, pulled one out, plucked a chewed pencil from her pepper-and-salt bun and made a notation on a yellow pad. “Audrey, listen to me! I got all the forms filled out. Just get Ben to sign the requisition when I send Rivera up there. I’ll cover it with Welfare personally. Thanks, Audrey, you’re a doll.”

  She hung up the phone, which immediately began to ring again. “Suzie, I got a problem …” Marlene began.

  “Who doesn’t? So how’s by you? You never come by. Listen, you want to adopt a kid? Seven years old, half Puerto Rican, half Oriental, a sweetheart …”

  “Not today, Suzie. What it is, a friend of mine has a kid in a day-care center and she’s getting weird vibes off it. I thought I’d check it out with you….”

  “Uh-huh. Wait a minute, let me get this.” Loesser picked up the phone and began a conversation. While the other person talked, she put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “What’s the organization?”

  “St. Michael’s, up on the Drive.”

  Loesser said, “Yeah, I’m here, Sullivan. How old are the kids?” Then to Marlene, “St. Michael’s? Fancy schmancy. Good works for the poor. This friend of yours on welfare?”

  “No, she’s a clerk.” Marlene related what Dana had told her about Carol Anne. Loesser responded in the interstices of her conversation with Sullivan.

  “OK, the center’s affiliated with St. Michael Archangel Church—very high tone. The Reverend Andrew Pinder, a lot of social conscience—runs the Crusade for Children. They started this center about three years ago in a big brownstone one of his parishioners contributed. It’s supposed to be a model. The board of directors is gold-p
lated. OK, Sullivan, I get the picture. Send them around, I’ll see what I can do.”

  She hung up. “Mom kills Dad, my favorite. Usually, when Dad kills Mom, he takes out the kids too. Anyway, I never heard anything but good about St. Michael’s but you never can tell. It’s a sick world. If you were a child molestor, where would you get a job? In an old age home? Making boxer shorts?”

  “So one of the staff could be a creep?”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely. This place is first cabin—the staff ratios are right up there. But who knows? It’s New York, right? Look, here’s the director’s name and their phone number. You can go check it out yourself.” Loesser pulled out a card and scribbled on a piece of paper, which she handed to Marlene. The phone rang again. Loesser smiled and shrugged helplessly. Marlene smiled and made for the door. As she left, a court officer was delivering two weeping, fatherless little boys to Suzie Loser.

  The name of the place was on a black iron plate in raised letters: St. Michael Archangel Child Development Center. The building was a five-story brownstone, one of three biscuit-colored aristocrats set in a row in the middle of a Riverside Drive block dominated by towering apartment houses. Marlene didn’t even want to think about what such a building might cost. She climbed the front steps and pushed the buzzer on the side of an ornate wrought-iron and glass door.

  A fresh-faced young woman opened the door. Marlene said she had an appointment with the director. The woman smiled pleasantly and ushered Marlene into a paneled hallway floored with parquet. The place smelled of furniture polish and leather. As the woman led her down the hall, Marlene asked, “Where are the kids?”

  “Oh, they’ll be in the back now. It’s nice out today and there’s a little yard. Actually, the center occupies only the rear of this floor and the basement floor. The rest of the house is the director’s residence.”