Enemy within kac-13

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  They all stared at him. "How do you know that?" the DA asked.

  "She was a client of my wife's. Or, no, I think she just came in for a consult. Marlene trailed around after her for a couple of days, but couldn't spot anyone. That doesn't mean she wasn't being followed by someone."

  "See! There you are," crowed Fuller.

  "Not really," said Karp coldly. "It just means she was spooked. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the shooting we have here. Look, this is a premature discussion. I don't know why we're here. Clearly, there's a prima facie case against Ms. Marshak on the evidence as it now stands. We should charge her, as Roland suggests, with manslaughter second and see what develops. The police may find the witness, and depending on what he says, and whether we believe him or not, we can reconsider the charges, up or down." He looked at the DA. "Or am I wrong, Jack? Are we really starting to throw naked political influence into the balance when we assess charges?"

  Keegan held his gaze for what seemed a long time before he looked away, and then there was a quick, barely perceptible glance at Fuller. The DA said, "No, of course not. We'll charge her and see what happens with the witness, if any. It's early days yet on this."

  The meeting dispersed, although Keegan motioned Fuller to stay behind to talk press and politics.

  Karp motioned Hrcany to step into his office. "What do you think?"

  "Of all that?" Hrcany gestured in the direction of the DA's office. "Pure politics. I think Jack's running scared on this election, and the little scumbag is feeding off it. We haven't had a serious contested election for DA in I don't know how long, and now we do. McBright is waving the figures for how we charge people on account of their race, heavier the blacker, and how we never go after bad cops or corrupt landlords or the kind of respectable people who make a good living off the misery of the downtrodden, et cetera. It's a pile of shit, we know that, but we also have an electorate that's more swayed by that kind of thing than it used to be. If McBright really gets the vote out uptown, Jack's in trouble. Let's say he holds on to the unions, the cops and all, and he loses the beautiful mosaic-then the white guilty-liberal vote is the swing, and now we got a leader of that vote up for homicide. I think it's rich." He laughed unpleasantly.

  "I mean, do you think Jack or Fuller is going to… I don't know, screw up this case in some way to win the election?"

  "Not to win the election, no. But Jack's not worried only about the election or, mainly, to tell the truth. I don't know if even little Norton understands that. Did you see him? He's scared shitless about his federal judgeship. He sees it flying away with old Sybil because if she goes down for this and the party thinks Jack didn't pull every wire he could to get her off, he'll never get sponsored, unless he moves to North Dakota and starts a new life under an assumed name. Sybil's got strings to every politician in the state."

  "And this cuts no ice with you," said Karp dully. Roland's attitude always tended to annoy him a little, and now it annoyed him a lot. Although Roland had supported the outcome Karp sought, a pursuit of the case without fear or favor, it was clear that the man had a personal issue with the accused.

  "No ice at all, buddy. Oh, I'm going to love nailing that hypocritical bitch. It will give me an enormous amount of pleasure to put her fat ass in jail for a long time."

  "Assuming she's guilty."

  "Yeah, right," said Hrcany dismissively. "Actually, I'd like it better if Marshak was the bum slasher, but this'll have to do."

  "So you're saying that Marshak was not officially a client of ours," said Lou Osborne.

  "Not officially," said Marlene. They were in Osborne's office, an expensive area that yielded nothing in modernity to Captain Picard's office on the starship Enterprise -the expected glass and chrome, and the smooth and snaky molded wooden desk and cabinets, and chairs like clever steel-and-fabric traps. Osborne had to be content with non-imaginary technology though, and he had a lot of it-a computer workstation behind his desk on an AnthroCart, and two large-screen monitors set into a bookcase that lined one wall. One of these had a stock market feed on it, and the other had CNN running silently. The other walls, those that weren't windows, contained Osborne's photos-with-the-famous collection and various awards and testimonials, and a large, bland abstract oil.

  To Osborne's questioning look, she responded, "Someone comes in and says they're being stalked, the first thing we do is find out if there's any solid evidence for it. Otherwise we're running a therapy shop, not a security operation. Even VIPs are nuts sometimes, hard as that is to believe."

  "But there was a real stalker with Marshak, wasn't there?" He poked his chin at the TV screen. "They're saying that's why she had the gun, she was in fear of her life."

  "That may well be, but, in fact, no one we saw followed her into that garage. We were there. In fact, Marshak almost ran me over getting away. Now, I'm not saying she wasn't so spooked that some bum walks up to her to ask her the time and she plugs him in a panic. I actually told her to get rid of that gun."

  "And you're a witness. You're going to have to testify against her, that you saw her there at the time of the shooting. And they'll say she came to you expressing fear and you told her to, in effect, see a psychiatrist. Jesus Christ! That's why we have a VIP department in the first place. A prominent woman walks in here, I don't care if she says she's being chased by Martians, you put someone with her!"

  He stared at her briefly, that cold Secret Service-Marine Corps stare, and then his eyes flicked up to the TV screen.

  She decided not to get mad. "Lou, relax-you know this isn't about me, or about Sybil Marshak. I take it there's no news about Perry or his people?"

  "Not a word. Oleg flew out there the minute we heard, of course, and he's off in the mountains with a crew he put together. God knows he's got enough contacts out East there, but… they don't even know if it's political, Serbs or Albanians, or just a gang of freelancers."

  "Assuming there's much difference. Have you thought about delaying the offering?"

  At this, Osborne tossed a glance at the stock market screen, where he had hoped to see his own stock floating ever upward the day after tomorrow. "I've been on the phone with the underwriters all morning. They're panicking. If we don't go out on schedule, it'll be a signal to the market that we don't have our shit together. It'll be years if ever before we can float another one." Again the glance at the screen. "It's like voodoo; once you have the curse, it's hard to get clean again. What about that singer?"

  "Kelsie? A problem, too. But we're covering her at the depth she needs without involving her people. We got a man in the building, twenty-four/seven, and we follow her when she's out. She knows about that, but not about the inside guy."

  "And this Coleman? The stalker?"

  "He's out and we're looking for him, but… it's not like we're the cops. I got Wayne on it."

  "Fine, fine… but, Marlene?" Here he shrugged into his inspiring-boss persona. It was a little frayed just now, but she had to applaud the effort. "Let's make an extra effort to ensure that no one newsworthy gets into trouble this week? Please?"

  "I'll try. And don't worry too much about the IPO. I'm sure it'll be fine. Fastest-growing business in the U.S., la-di-da."

  A thin smile. "Lap of the gods, right. Aren't you spending the money already? Everyone else is, including my wife and kids. What have we got you down for-one point two million shares."

  "Yeah, just like Harry. At three cents a share, what does that come to? A whole year's worth of Big Macs."

  "No, Marlene, that's not the way it works. Your strike price is set at six and a half. We're planning to offer at eight, which means that you don't make any money at all unless…" He stopped, because his vice president for special security had her eyes crossed and her fingers in her ears and was going wah-wah-wah.

  "Well, I'm glad someone around here's still happy," said Osborne.

  Lucy Karp was lying on her back inside a narrow metal tube full of clanging noise. In her ears were
air-powered earphones, like the ones that serve out dull music to passengers in flight, and there was a similarly designed microphone in front of her mouth. Through the headset a man was speaking phrases in German and then repeating them in English. Lucy repeated the German phrases and answered the question asked. It was simplified language, the kind native speakers use with children and foreigners (What is your name? My name is Lucy. How old are you? I am seventeen. That is a table. That is a chair). Over the next few days, she would be introduced to the elements of grammar, a vocabulary of about sixteen hundred words, and a raft of idiomatic expressions. At the end of the week she expected that she would be indistinguishable, except for a certain poverty of expression, from a native speaker of that language. As she spoke the words and acquired the language and perfected her pronunciation, the magnetic-resonance-imaging machine was recording the flow of blood to different areas of her brain. Pictures of this would later be printed out in brilliant false colors and distributed to scientists around the world, who would argue interminably about what, if anything, the patterns meant.

  The session ended. Lucy slid from the maw of the device and replaced the metal articles she had removed, a gold cross and several sacred medals, and a couple of enamel pinks from a junk shop, and her belt. She spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with the technicians in charge of the MRI machines and with Kurt the German, then went in to see Dr. Shadkin, who ran the lab and who had seduced her, with an astute combination of money and friendship, into becoming an experimental subject.

  "Lucy! How did it go?" said Shadkin when Lucy rapped on the doorframe. He was rotund, bespectacled, bush-bearded, with thick, ear-length hair parted in the middle. He looked more like a medieval innkeeper than one of the world's great lights on the acquisition of language by the human brain. Lucy answered, "Squeak, squeak-a, squeak squeak."

  "No kidding? Would you like a food pellet? A sip of water? Access to sexual intercourse?"

  Lucy smiled. Shadkin was the only one of the scientists she had met who still treated her like a regular kid. The others all acted as if they regretted the silly ethical laws that prevented the vivisection of teenagers. No, unfair; but they did seem to look right through her, or maybe that was only, as Shadkin maintained, the general lack of social skills among scientists, especially, oddly enough, social scientists.

  "Not right now, thanks. Make any great discoveries today?"

  Shadkin looked sourly at his monitor, on which was an outline of a brain pieced with blotches of blue, yellow, and red. "Progress is slow, but don't tell the NSF. The variations that seem to appear in your brain are real, but they don't seem significant enough to explain what you do. And then there's this damn delay. You use the noodle and then comes the blood. What we really need are recordings at the neuronal level. You wouldn't reconsider having the top of your head sliced off?"

  "Squeak-a squeak squeak!"

  "Just kidding, ha-ha. Meanwhile, the linguistic geographers are pretty excited about the Indo-European project, though. Are you having fun with it?"

  "It's just a job, Doc," said Lucy morosely, but seeing the look of concern that appeared on his face, added, "No, I take that back. I kind of like the idea that languages evolved, and I wonder why. Why do they always diverge and never converge? Why don't they ever improve, like everything else? Surely, by now there should be a language in which everything thinkable could be said without ambiguity."

  "I thought that was French."

  She laughed. "Yeah, right. Anyway, it is kind of interesting, except…" She let out a sigh. "I'm tired."

  "I guess you are. Look, kiddo, you need a break, take some time off. Let the big-domes wait for their data."

  "Maybe."

  "Hey, I'm not kidding." He tapped the monitor with a knuckle. "See this blue smear? Excessive seriousness. You need to loosen up. Go a little crazy. I say this as your personal physician."

  "Okay, Doc. I'll try, in my pathetically serious way. I shall buy a box of Cracker Jacks and, perhaps, if I feel up to it, ride the carousel."

  She waved and left, before she had to absorb any more well-meaning advice. The subway was filling up. A ragged black man on crutches got on at Seventy-second Street and sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he shuffled through the car. Lucy put a wad of dollar bills in his cup as he went by. All the other passengers pretended not to see this, although several shot her dirty looks. She pulled out a German dictionary and memorized Bleibe through Boden for the rest of the trip to Thirty-fourth Street.

  At Holy Redeemer, people were starting to gather for the fiveo'clock mass. She sat in the rearmost pew, pulled out a kneeler, and got down, but her mind was too restless for common prayer. She did not, in any case, wish to pray. In the recent past, the spirit would have come to her, unbidden, filling her with uncanny joy, and she had imagined, despite all she had read, that this would be a constant thing, like her talent with languages, but it proved not to be so. Treats for beginners, one of the saints had called it, and like the spoiled baby she was, Lucy wanted more. The notion of actually doing spiritual work dismayed her: Was God yet another struggle like math? Oh, far, far harder than quadratic equations, as she knew in her bones. The worst was that she suspected that her mother had gone through the same crisis at about the same age-there had been hints enough-and had blown a big raspberry at deep religion and had gone off on her merry way, doing exactly what she pleased, while punching her card every week in the good old thoughtless devotional Catholic way. Lucy had no intention of going that route, no intention, but intention was not, apparently, good enough. Her mind wandered, as did her gaze, and she spotted David Grale in a side chapel. He was lighting candles, five of them, and then he sank down before an image of the Virgin and appeared deep in prayer. She watched him, examining as best she could in the dim light the curl of his hair and the tender, exposed nape of his neck as he bowed his head. She discovered her mind filling up brimful with what they used to call impulse thoughts; she became disgusted with herself entirely and stalked out.

  Lucy sat on the steps, hunched under her cloak in the late-afternoon chill. In her bag were scattered packs of the cigarettes she gave away, and she found some Marlboros, twitched one out, and smoked it, without much pleasure, to get back at her body via that small pollution. She watched people: old Latinas in black, people from the varied races of Asia, mostly poor, a few old white Catholics in shabby, unfashionable clothes-the small daily mass crowd, the pathetic remnants of her mother's church.

  He came out and sat next to her. They sat in silence for a while, for which she was grateful. He always had this calming effect on her, stilling the boil of language in her head.

  Then he asked, "Anything wrong?"

  "No!" instinctively; then, "Yes. I find that the world is not perfect."

  "Then the world must be changed." He laughed. She laughed, too. The line was from Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows, St. Francis's comeback to the friars sent to preach the Gospel to the birds. The hawks still killed the sparrows; what can we do? cried the friars, it is the way of the world. Then the world must be changed. David had a tape of it, and they had watched it together in a church basement.

  "I'm going over to the yards. I heard someone say they saw Canman today. I thought I'd check it out."

  "I'll come with you."

  They walked over. She made amusing conversation, with mimicry. She was, of course, a perfect mimic. Sometimes when he laughed, he clutched her around the shoulder, and she felt blood flush into her face, and not just her face either.

  They went through the fence and down the rutted, trash-strewn path to the walkway. There they heard the sounds: shouts and a shrill keening. Lila Sue.

  David broke into a run and Lucy followed him, her bag slamming against her hip, her cloak flying behind. When they got to the settlement, they found Real Ali attempting to get between Doug Drug and Benz, who were apparently trying to kill each other. They were in the center of a circle made up of inhabitants, watching the fight with fear
on their faces, or avidity or insanity, depending on the twists of their particular psyches. Benz clutched a forty-ounce beer bottle with the bottom smashed off; Doug held a long chunk of dark pallet wood like a ball bat. Someone had kicked the fire barrel over. Smoke and sparks and cinders filled the air, the red glow from the fire lighting the faces of the combatants from below: Doug's dark skin like a furnace coal, his eyes red-lit, Benz's big teeth glittering demonically, the large black warts on her sweaty face throwing little moving shadows. The two fighters, the man and the woman, shouted curses at one another, not very imaginatively but with feeling and much spit. Ali was dancing between them, arms out, palms flattened, making soothing noises, "Come on, man, you don't wanna hurt nobody"; but they did. Lila Sue stood off to one side, in front of the hut she shared with Benz, howling, seemingly without taking a breath, her knuckles screwed into her eye sockets like spark plugs.

  Grale moved instantly to stand before Doug and started to talk in his sweet voice, the meaningless, calming nonsense spoken to mad dogs or crazies. The poised stick wavered. Benz screamed and tried a dash around Ali. She was a great heavy sack of a woman, swaddled like l'homme Michelin in many layers, and she drove him backward several steps. Doug swung his stake at David. The blow whistled by his ear and landed on his shoulder. He staggered almost to his knees. Still, he did not try to protect himself. He spread his arms outward, martyrlike, offering himself.

  "Hit me again, Doug!" he cried. "Does that make you feel better? Go ahead, hit me!"

  Without knowing exactly how she had come by it, Lucy found she had a piece of fractured concrete in her hand, about the size of a softball, with a protruding sharp edge, and she found herself running toward Doug, around the struggling Ali and Benz, toward his blind side.

  "Lucy! No!" David shouted. What she heard, though, was only the breath rushing through her mouth and the drum of her mother's blood in her ears. She wound up like an outfielder and slugged the man as hard as she could behind his ear, and when he went down, she was kneeling on his chest with the rock raised high above her head for the death blow when David swept her into his arms and smothered with his body the demon she had somehow become.