Immoral Certainty

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “If I come in, will you promise no gun bore talk? No hollow-point muzzle velocity crap?” she asked.

  “You got it, counselor,” said Raney, his eyes throwing blue sparks.

  The ranges were in the basement of the Academy building. Through a thick glass window Marlene could see that all the lanes were full of men firing pistols at man-shaped silhouettes. Raney shook hands with a fat uniformed sergeant with a large red nose and long, unfashionable sideburns.

  “Marlene,” said Raney, “I want you to meet Sergeant Frank McLaughlin, runs things around here. Frank, this here’s Marlene Ciampi. She’s the head coach at Sacred Heart. I brought her along ’cause they’re thinking of starting a pistol team for the girls.”

  “No kidding?” said McLaughlin. “Sacred Heart, huh?”

  “Yes,” said Marlene. “We think it would be very beneficial, with the City like it is nowadays. We think it might be a good idea if all the girls started carrying too. Like Sister Marie Augustine says, ‘Trust in God, but pack a rod.’”

  “Is she serious?” asked McLaughlin with an uncertain smile.

  “Could be,” said Raney. “Strange times we got now.” He winked at Marlene, and led her by the arm into the range proper. The noise was a continuous harsh crackling, an immense popping of corn. Like most people in the City, Marlene had never heard a pistol fired at close range before and she was surprised at how different—punier and less dramatic—the sound was than its simulacrum in the movies. The air was unnaturally cool and stank of burnt powder.

  She adjusted her ear protectors and watched Raney as he set up to shoot. He opened his aluminum case at the shooter’s table, revealing a foam bed neatly cut out to hold three pistols and their associated ammunition and equipment. Raney removed a large blue revolver and began loading it with fat, shiny cartridges.

  As he did, Marlene noticed some of the uniformed officers waiting to fire nudge one another and look at him. Olivier drops in at the summer stock theater, she thought. He’s famous in the pistol world.

  McLaughlin shouted at Raney over the din, “You still using that old piece of shit?”

  “It’s a good gun,” said Raney flatly.

  “Yeah, thirty years ago it was. Whyn’t you get a Cobra? Or something with a little stopping power there.”

  Raney didn’t answer. He bellied up to the lane barrier, clipped a silhouette target to the traveller and sent it twenty-five yards down the lane. Assuming a rigid two-handed stance, he fired six spaced shots. Then he brought the target back and scored his hits. Marlene came forward to look.

  “Did you get him?” she asked.

  “You could say that,” said McLaughlin. He put out a hand and covered all six of the holes that Raney had put in the chest of the target. “Six in the five. Nice pattern, Jim. OK, do your rapid.”

  Raney qualified easily on rapid fire and at longer ranges. McLaughlin signed the qual sheet and went off to observe the other shooters. Raney popped the cylinder of his revolver open and dropped the spent shells into his hand.

  Marlene said, “Nice gun, but no stopping power.”

  “You heard that?” Raney said, smiling. “Yeah, this is the classic police .38 revolver. Smith and Wesson Model 10. They started making them back in the twenties and must have sold a zillion of them. Now out of fashion among the young gun-slingers on the job. They all want fucking cannons, like Clint. This particular one belonged to my dad, and I humped it when I was in the blue bag. Pretty touching, huh?”

  “I’m dabbing my eyes—it’s like the Waltons.”

  “Just. Thirty-four years on the hip and never fired a shot in anger. Typical.”

  He put the revolver away in its hollow and brought a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter automatic out of his shoulder holster. He set up another target and shot it into rags.

  “Very impressive,” said Marlene. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. Unless you want to try.”

  “What, shoot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I allowed?”

  “No, but go ahead. I’ll say you overpowered me and tore the gun from my hand.” He reloaded the Browning and held it out to her, butt first.

  She took it from him and her hand sagged with the weight of it. “It’s heavy,” she said, as a peculiar and unwelcome thrill began to rise through her middle. I can kill people now, she thought inanely, and then suppressed the thought, as one suppresses the unbidden thoughts of horrible death that afflict one on the subway platform or on a high roof.

  Raney clipped a fresh target to the traveller and sent it out to the twenty-five yard mark. Then he came back and stood close to Marlene.

  “OK, tiger,” he said, “let me show you how this works. Push the little button there and hold your left hand under the butt. That’s the magazine. It holds fourteen shots. Nine millimeter Parabellum rounds, hollowpoints, so I got the feed ramp throated out so it won’t hang up and jam. It’s got a four and a half pound pull—”

  “Snore,” said Marlene. “You promised. Where does the bullet come out? This little hole here?”

  “Yeah, OK, I’ll skip the gun-nut talk. But the fact is it’s a lot easier to hit something with an automatic than with a revolver. OK, slam the magazine back in hard so it clicks. Now hold it in your left hand and pull the slide all the way back until it locks.”

  Marlene did so and the gun’s snout emerged from the cover of the slide. “It looks like an excited Doberman,” said Marlene, with a nervous giggle. What is this thing doing in my hand? she thought. Her breath was coming shorter and she was suddenly conscious of her heart.

  Raney was standing behind her now, with his arms around hers guiding her hands over the pistol. He was warm and smelled of gunpowder. Marlene’s uncomfortable feelings intensified. Her stomach rolled and the backs of her hands prickled with sweat. She saw her hands under Raney’s push the slide forward. He said into her ear, “Pushing the slide home strips the top round off the magazine and chambers it. This is a single action gun, so you’re already cocked and ready to fire. It’ll fire the same way every time you squeeze the trigger.” He continued to talk softly about the stance and the trigger pull and other gun stuff. It was like a seduction, and she didn’t want to hear it.

  Abruptly, Marlene stepped away from Raney, faced down range, looked down the barrel with her good eye, pointed it at the target and emptied the pistol as fast as she could pull the trigger. She dropped the weapon on the shooter’s table with a clunk and turned away, feeling giddy and slightly sick, like a kid after the first fumbling experiment with sex.

  Raney touched her arm. “Hey, are you all right?”

  She swallowed hard and said, “Sure. Fine … but, I don’t know, it had an effect on me I didn’t expect.”

  “Death in my hand,” Raney said quietly.

  “What?”

  “The feeling. That you could really kill a bunch of real live human beings right now, no more trouble than ringing up an elevator. Plus yourself. Some people have it, some don’t. I never had it.” He reloaded the automatic, put it back in his holster and shut his aluminum case. Then he brought Marlene’s target back to the rail. Marlene sagged against the wall. “Raney, I could use a drink. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Sure, right away, Marlene,” said Raney, examining the target. He whistled softly through his teeth. “Hey, don’t you want to see how you did?”

  She walked over to him. “I missed every shot, right?”

  “No. You hit fourteen times and all on the money.” Marlene saw that the head and trunk of the silhouette were riddled with holes. She felt sick again. “How could that be,” she asked weakly, “I wasn’t even aiming.”

  “That’s why. You didn’t worry or get nervous about your score. Just pointed and shot. It’s the latest training theory anyway. You ever shoot before? A pistol, I mean.”

  “No, and never again’ll be too soon.”

  “Too bad—it’s a major talent down the tubes. I think you’re what us gun-nuts call a
natural shot.”

  Marlene laughed heartily and started singing “You Cain’t Get a Man with a Gun,” at high volume, attracting many odd looks until Raney hustled her unceremoniously out of the range.

  He took her to an Irish place on Second Avenue in the Seventies, a place with dark wood but no ferns, where the bartenders were middle-aged and had slicked-down hair and the customers were mostly serious men who drank neat whiskeys with beer on the side.

  They each tossed down a Jameson’s and ordered another. Raney lit a cigarette and lit Marlene’s. She relaxed and smiled at him, reflecting on how long it had been since she had come to a decent saloon. That tune came into her head again:

  Broken hearted I’ll wander

  Broken hearted I’ll remain

  For my bonny light horseman

  Will n’er come again.

  Karp did not take her to saloons, she reflected, not without a momentary twinge of shame for this disloyal thought. Karp’s idea of a good time was a pizza and a movie, or a long walk across the lower East Side to Yoineh Schimmel’s for a knish. Marlene had nothing against the knish, but she liked bar-hopping and she didn’t like Karp’s unspoken disapproval when she drank and smoked. She glanced at Raney, who was deep in his second drink. He must have lots of bad points, too, and they were probably nasty and macho ones.

  “Raney,” she said abruptly, “that gun I shot … was that the one that you used in the bakery?”

  “The murder weapon? No, I didn’t bring that to the range. I usually wear the Browning if I got a jacket on, like now, but if I’m in a T-shirt, or I’m just running out for a couple of minutes I got this little Astra Constable automatic I throw in a pocket. It’s a .38 double-action, so you can keep a round in the chamber and the safety off. I had it in my raincoat that night. It’s not what McLaughlin would call a man-stopper, unless you shoot the man in the head. Then it stops them pretty good.” He threw back the rest of his drink and studied the baseball game playing on the TV above the bar.

  Marlene tried to imagine what it would be like never to go out in the street without the ability to deliver instant death to other people. Although she had worked with cops for years, and had been on good terms with quite a few, the issue had never come up. She wondered why it was coming up now.

  They watched the Yankees play for a couple of innings in companionable silence and then went into the restaurant part of the saloon. They had steaks and salads and finished up with coffee and Hennessey. It was not a cheap dinner. When it was over, Marlene started to take out money, but Raney insisted on paying.

  Marlene shrugged and put her wallet away. “You throw money around like that, Raney, people are gonna think you’re on the wire.”

  “Hey, I don’t do this all the time. You can’t take a Sacred Heart girl to Nedicks.”

  She looked at him sharply. “That’s like the fourth time you’ve dragged that out, son. Are we playing out some boyhood fantasy here? Do we see some wistful Irish lad of humble means on some Queens street corner gazing raptly at the unobtainably classy girls trooping toward the IND line and the Mesdames? Learning how to become yet more unobtainable? OK, Raney, you got my attention. What is it now, a dance at the Legion on Queens Boulevard? Are you blushing, Raney?”

  Raney laughed and said, “Nah, let’s skip the dance. How about we go out to Kennedy and park somewhere along Race Track Road and watch the jets come in. We could get into the vibrations when the big ones come over at thirty feet.”

  “You don’t have a back seat, Raney.”

  “I got a blanket in the trunk,” he shot back, and then added archly, “And what does a nice Italian girl like you know about back seats out by Kennedy?”

  “Raney, don’t kid yourself. I spent so much time out at the runways, I had reviews in the in-flight magazines. It’s true. The pilots used to point me out: ‘Folks, passengers on the left side of the aircraft will be able to see Marlene Ciampi getting her rocks off while remaining technically a virgin in that green ’57 Mercury.’”

  Raney cracked up at that, and Marlene laughed with him, but she was thinking, I’m flirting my ass off with this guy, and why am I doing it? And he’s not just being jolly company either. He’s been giving me lingering looks all through dinner. And I’m leading him on. Because 1 want to see if the Champ can still reel them in, with the one eye and all? Because now that I can get serious about marrying Karp, 1 want to screw it up by having a flinger with this cop?

  This cop, who by the way has terrific blue-green eyes and is trying as hard as he can not to be overbearing and is treating me like spun sugar, and who would be just the person to do something completely crazy and irresponsible with without having to practically twist his arm, and drinks and smokes and is a Catholic and. She shut that down and stood up, her face flushed.

  “Time to go, Raney. Can I get a lift?”

  He rose as well and clasped her arm. It was the first time he had touched her since the firing range and she felt herself stiffen. He said, “No problem. Your place or mine?”

  Her response to this sally was to keep her face hard and turn away, and she kept the chill on for the drive downtown. As they pulled up in front of her loft on Crosby Street, Raney asked, “Hey, what did I do? I thought we were having a good time.”

  “Yeah, we were,” she said, her face softening a little. “But do me a favor, Raney. Don’t hit on me, all right? I’m going through all kinds of shit right now and I can’t handle it. Just compadres and fellow gun-nuts, OK?”

  Raney nodded and said, “Sure, Marlene. Whatever,” as blithely as he could manage, which was not all that blithe, because for his forty-two fifty-five plus tip he had been expecting a little clinch at least, and maybe even a shot at the Main Event. He glanced down at his watch. It was still early enough to zip by and see if a waitress he knew in Maspeth was interested in fooling around. She was Italian too.

  The Ghia roared away, the sound of its engine echoing in the empty narrow streets. Marlene climbed the four flights to her loft. Outside the door, as she groped for her keys, she heard the sound of her TV going. She felt that odd mixture of irritation and anticipation that had become familiar since the day, not many months before, when she had at last offered Karp a key to her place.

  He was stretched out on her green velvet sofa, in chinos and sweatshirt, watching two men in blazers talk about baseball. His enormous sneakers were lying on the floor next to him like beached whaleboats. A hanging Tiffany lamp, one of her few real treasures, cast a warm light over the loft’s living and dining regions; beyond, the remainder of the huge single room, an area the size of a couple of basketball courts, lay swathed in darkness.

  “The Yanks took it six to four. Munson hit two homers,” said Karp.

  Marlene said, “Hello Marlene darling, it seems like years, I’ve missed you so much.”

  Karp looked up and said, deadpan, “Hello Marlene darling, it seems like years, I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Not as much as you’d miss Thurman Munson,” she said sourly. “How long have you been lurking here?”

  “I wasn’t lurking. I came here after I got finished pumping Noodles. They said you were out with the cops, but I figured you’d be back soon, so I picked up a pizza and some Cokes. I guess you ate already, huh?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Marlene said, and then added quickly, to change the subject, “How did it go with Noodles?”

  “Great,” said Karp, giving her an odd look. “We got the whole story of the Ferro hit, for starters. Joey Bottles was the trigger, like we thought, but Piaccere gave the go-ahead, and Sallie Bollano, the capo’s kid, was in on it too. Also Charlie Tonnatti. So we could possibly get the bunch on criminal conspiracy, if we can get corroboration on the killing.”

  “A big if, no?”

  “Yeah. The cops are beating the bushes. Meanwhile he gave us a half dozen bodies stashed under cement in parking garages the Bollanos own. We’re going to go after them starting tomorrow. If we score, it’s more pressure we can put on
them. Plus other stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how come I’m sitting here talking to you and you’re standing over there by the door like you think you came in the wrong place? Is something wrong? I got spinach on my teeth?”

  She walked over and sat down on the couch about a yard away from him, but he reached out a long arm and pulled her closer. He kissed her hair, then sniffed loudly several times. “What’s that funny smell?” he asked. “Like a chemical or something burning.”

  She sat up and sniffed at a strand of her hair. “It must be gunpowder. I was at the police range this afternoon. Raney was showing me how to shoot.”

  “Out with Pistol Jim, hey? You hit anything?”

  “Everything, as a matter of fact. I’m a natural shot, according to Raney, another of my little girl’s ambitions fulfilled. God, now that you mention it, I really stink. I’m going to take a bath.”

  With that she rose and went behind a painted Japanese screen, where rested the five-hundred gallon black rubber former electroplating tank, a souvenir of the loft’s previous occupants, that Marlene had refitted for domestic use. Karp turned off the TV. The loft was silent but for the delicious slithery sounds of a woman undressing. When he heard the soft splash of Marlene’s descent into the deep tank, Karp went around the screen, pulled up a wooden kitchen stool, and sat down next to the tank.

  The only light was a faint glow from the street through the distant windows and the jewel-like reflection of the Tiffany shade on the white tin ceiling above the bath. Of Marlene, only a white neck was visible as it rose above the black lip of the tank. Her head was lost against the black water.

  “You want me to do your hair?” asked Karp.

  “Oh, would you? I’d love it.” She ducked her head and came up dripping rubies and amethysts. Karp squirted a glob of herbal shampoo on her head and rubbed it into her thick hair. She sighed and leaned back against the side of the tank.