"What, um, what happened?" Candlelight on faces, David's and Ali's. She looked around. They were in Ali's hovel of cardboard, pallet wood, and plastic, familiar ground, but something was wrong. She was lying on his mattress, and there should have been a table with the Qur'an on it, and a straight chair and the neatly stacked orange crates that held Ali's paperback library. But everything had been smashed and broken and pushed into piles. "Did he hit me?"
"No, girl," said Ali, "you hit him. Like to busted his head."
A shock of fear. She looked at David, who had an awful red scrape down one side of his neck. "I didn't hurt him, did I?"
Ali said, "Nah, he got a hard head, Doug."
She rubbed her face. "God! This is weird-I can't remember hitting him. I remember the fight, Doug and Benz and you trying to break it up, you and David, and then Doug hit David. I thought he was going to kill you. And then I…" She shook her head energetically. "No, it's… wait a second… now it's coming back. I had a rock. I hit him in the head with a rock."
"Yes, you did," said David gently. "That was a different Lucy than the one we usually see around church." She felt herself blushing and was glad of the dark.
Ali chuckled and said, "Good thing, too. The boy needed a rock upside his head. Fool been smoking sherms all morning. I hate that angel dust."
"Was that what the fight was about?" Lucy asked.
"Nah, I don't know what in hell that was about. I think Benz thought he was messing with Lila Sue. You know how she gets."
"I calmed her down," said David. "She's really a very loving person." He sighed. "I guess if we were going to get all social worky, we would try to find someplace for that girl, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it. They make each other so happy." He looked around and seemed to see the wreckage for the first time.
"What happened in here? Not Doug?"
"Nah, the damn cops," said Ali. He started picking up items, examining them for damage, and tossing those few that failed to meet his generous standards of usefulness out the door.
"Cops?" asked Lucy. "Cops can't do that. They can't even come in here without a warrant."
Ali laughed and said, "Uh-uh, sugar, warrant's for when they bust into a home. Me being a homeless man, I don't have no home, so I guess they don't need no warrant."
"I don't think that's true, but anyway, they had no right to break up your stuff. Why did they do it?"
Ali set an orange crate on end and placed a couple of books carefully on its shelf. "Well, you know they don't need no reason, but these particular cops that did it was looking for Canman. I told them I didn't know where he was staying. They said, I mean the white one, they said I do know, I was his running buddy, and he starts pushing me around, like they do, and I go, 'Officer, only thing I know is there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.' And my own name. Everything else is speculation, and did they want me to speculate. And I told them that if they wanted to know every damn thing I knew about Canman, they should go talk to the other cop who came around last night. That's when the white guy went nuts and started busting up my stuff. The black fella, he wasn't too enthusiastic about it, I could tell, but I guess he had to back up his partner's play."
David started to help Ali pick up, but the older man waved him away, saying he had his own way of doing things, and he didn't want anything good to be mistakenly tossed out. He set up his rickety table, and after wiping off and kissing his Qur'an, he placed it in the center. "The funny thing was I did see Canman this morning, early, just after I done my morning prayers. I'm always the first one up around here anyway. He was skulking around the paper house with his dog, just like a dog his own self, to look at him. I asked him was he coming back to live here, and he snarled at me, just like a damn dog. Pulled a knife on me, too. Boy was scared, I tell you that."
"Of what?" asked Lucy. "Of the cops?"
"Maybe. The first cop kind of hinted that they had him in their sights for the slasher since Fake Ali got it. That would scare me. But, look, that Canman, he been scared for a long time, scared of stuff that go way past the cops. Stuff nobody but him can see. A sad cat, that Canman."
David asked, "Ali, do you think he's the one?"
"He could be. He got enough hate in his soul to cut people up. But it's not like I got any what you call evidence for it?"
"Where do you think he is?"
Ali gave David a long apprising look and answered, "Well, like I told them all, I don't know, which is God's honest truth. But if I was going to look for Canman, which I am not, I guess I'd start under Penn. I hung out there five, seven years, back before they cleaned us all out of there, before they cleaned us out and all. And when I got there, he'd been there longer than any of us. Not that there ain't some been there longer than him. Some people been down there so long they ain't hardly people anymore. Live on rats and garbage." Ali lowered his voice. "And other stuff. Human flesh. Someone goes down a station at three in the morning and never comes back up. What they say, anyway. I guess he's gone back under. No cops down there."
"But there are," said David. "There are regular patrols. I've been on some of them."
"Uh-huh, son," said Ali, stooping to pick up a broken chair. He shifted it in his big hands, trying to see how it could be fitted together again. "I mean under. Under under. Them tunnels is deep. Nobody down there but the rats and the mole people."
Lucy and David left a little while later. When they were back on the street, Lucy turned to him and said, "I'm sorry."
"Sorry? About what?"
"You know… losing it. Getting violent. It never happened to me before. I feel sick."
He stopped walking, faced her, and put both hands on her shoulders. "Stop it! You do this all the time. Stop eating at yourself! You did something wrong, but you did it for good reasons."
"Why should that make a difference?"
"It does. The intent of the act counts. You didn't do it out of some secret pleasure or to go along with what someone else was doing, or out of fear. You thought Doug was going to hurt me, and you acted without thought. It was a failure of attention." He grinned at her. "That seems to be your particular fault, if you don't mind me saying so."
After a moment, she smiled back. " Mea maxima culpa. I guess I was upset because, well, I was thinking of my mother and how I would rather not turn out the way she has, and when I do things like… oh, just things in general that remind me, yin shui si yuan, it drives me up the wall."
"Your mother seems very nice," he said diplomatically.
"In her saner moments," she snapped, and then sighed. "Oh, she is very nice. She's a great woman, and I admire the hell out of her, but I don't want to be her. We drive each other crazy. I guess all kids do."
"I wouldn't know. I never had a family." Then, to cover her embarrassment, he added quickly, "What was that thing you said? Was it Chinese?"
"Oh, yeah, a four-character idiom. It's a habit I picked up when I was living a lot with this family, the Chens. Chinese speakers are always slipping them into their speech, practically without thinking, like we do with 'anyway' and 'whatever' and 'like.' It means 'When you drink water, think of the source.' Anyway"-they both laughed-"what are we going to do about Canman?"
"I don't know. Finding him would be a good start."
"Down in the tunnels."
"I guess, if that's where he is. You're dying to come, aren't you?"
She nodded. "Do you think the mole people really live on human flesh?"
"I have no idea. But people do, if they're desperate enough. In the Sudan, where I was, there were famines all the time. In the camps you would see some people eating meat, sheep they said, but you never saw any sheep around." They were at a light, the evening traffic rushing up by Tenth Avenue. He looked out at the river of steel, and she saw that his face had lost the brightness that ordinarily shone from it, replaced by the sort of expression they put up on crucifixes in rural Spain. "But God forgives all," he said. And then suddenly the brightness turned on a
gain, like the light that just then turned from red to green. "Even you, Lucy, you horrible old sinner. Even me, if you can believe it."
"But you're good," she blurted out.
A ghostly smile. "Only God is good, kid. Me? Oh, me, you have no idea."
8
The next morning Lucy and her father, typically the two earliest risers in the household, sat companionably at breakfast, Karp whipping through the Times, ignoring the travails of nations, including his own, focusing on the scant crime news and sports. Here a little basketball discussion, March Madness, they were nearly down to the Final Four, when she asked abruptly, "Daddy, the police need a warrant to come into somebody's house, don't they?"
"Ordinarily, yes, unless in hot pursuit of a suspected felon," Karp replied, reading on.
"What if it's not a regular house or apartment? Like if it's a little shack where a homeless person is living?"
Karp dropped the paper shield. "Hm. That would depend. If a guy's sitting on a park bench or sleeping in a doorway, no-it's a public place. In the home, the governing rule is from Payton v. New York -you need a warrant except in exigent circumstances. The question then is, what's a home? A homeless shelter is a home under Payton; a cave on government property is not. But there was a case a couple of years back where the cops rousted a guy out of a tent he'd set up in Central Park, and the courts threw out the search. Kind of a nice decision, too; the judge said something to the effect that a place of usual repair at night was a home under the law, regardless of its lack of ordinary amenities."
"So if cops like came into someone's shack that they built, and busted up all his stuff, that would be against the law."
"Well, destroying property without good probable cause is always against the law, warrant or no warrant. An exception would be, for example, if they have reason to suspect there's drugs hidden in the bodywork of a car, they could tear it apart. This is an actual situation?"
"Yeah. A guy I know who lives down by the yards was raided the other day. They roughed him up and smashed all his things. They were looking for the slasher, but Ali didn't know anything."
"They arrested him?"
"No."
"Interesting. He get the name of the cops? Badge numbers?"
"No. They were detectives, I think. Plainclothes. They were looking for this man, they call him Canman, who had the place where I found Fake Ali's body. And Ali-I mean Real Ali-he already told another detective what he knew, which was nothing. He's black-Ali is-and, you know, you think, 'Oh, it's more cop racism,' but one of the two cops was black, so I guess it couldn't be that. But why would they send two different cops to talk to the same person?"
"Oh, some screwup," said Karp. "Tell your friend to report the abuse anyway."
"They won't really do anything, will they?"
"Probably not, but it adds to the record. The type of cop who racks up a sheet of persistent abuse, sooner or later he's going to do something they can't ignore, and at that point, if he's got fifty complaints against him, the bosses will maybe toss him out on his ear. If not, they might let it slide or defend him."
"That sucks."
"What else is new?" Karp agreed, but as he took up his paper again, he was thinking. Detectives harassing the homeless; okay, it happened, they were hot on a trail, sometimes they did not bother with the niceties. A pair of detectives, one white, one black, not exactly common in the NYPD, and they weren't the team primarily responsible for the slasher murders. That was Paradisio and Rastenberg, a pair of lilies. It could have been some other players from that team, but Karp doubted it. Why? No reason, except that little tingle that told him he was right. The rail yards were right in their stomping grounds, too. Had Cooley and Nash been assigned to the slasher team? Unlikely, and even if so, why would they cover the same ground that other cops already had? Preventing just that, conserving resources, was the whole point of a police task force. Again, the notion that Cooley was pursuing something personal, as with Lomax. Now Detective Cooley wanted this Canman character, but for what? Karp's eye paused at an article on the New York page: "Marshak Assailant Had Violent Juvenile Record." Oh, the Times! Now they've decided he was an assailant, not a victim, which went well with the statement of a "source" at the DA that they had not settled on the precise nature of the charges pending further investigation, although second-degree manslaughter could not be ruled out. There was no evidence that Ms. Marshak (the actual assailant here) had been attacked. Police sought a possible witness. Karp wondered who the source was. Roland, probably. More significant was the unnamed source who had sent Ramsey's juvenile records to the reporter, C. Melville Bateson. A great name for a Times reporter-solid, like the pillars of a public building. Ramsey, it seemed, had done six months in Spofford for armed robbery at age seventeen. Juvenile records were supposed to be sealed, and their revelation at an adult trial was prohibited by law. They were easy enough to obtain, however, if you made the effort, and you wanted to blacken the character of a victim, and you were inside the system; like, for example, Norton Fuller.
As he mused on this, Lucy interrupted his thoughts. "It's so unjust. Can't you do anything?"
Karp put the paper down again. "Technically, yes; practically, not much. It would come down to the word of two police officers against that of a homeless man. No case, even if your guy's telling the absolute truth. It's an imperfect system."
"The system!" Contemptuously. "Everyone blames the system, but the system's made up of people, all of them doing bad things a lot of the time. How do you stand it?"
Karp often wondered the same thing, and now he thought, uncomfortably, of his conversation with Solotoff. Sighing heavily, he replied, "It's not easy, kid. It is just that it's better than the obvious alternatives. Letting crime flourish, for example. Arbitrary violence, for example, which is a lot more feel-good than the law. Look at how popular those movies about the Mob and rogue cops are. The law can't touch the villain, so the hero whacks him out. End of story. But in real life…? You know, your mom was into that for a long time, in real life. Did you like it?"
The girl sniffed. "Oh, I guess not. But can't you do anything?"
"Oh, yeah," said Karp, smiling. "I'll think of something."
Lucy walked out the door, fully intending to go to school. But as she strode down Lafayette to the Lex station, the events of the past days bore her down. She could not remove from her mind the moment when she had touched Fake Ali's shoulder, and his body had slid backward, and the wound in his throat had gaped open like an obscene grin. And the fight with Doug, and what the cops had done to the harmless, decent Real Ali. The world was full of death, sin, and depravity, a choking fog. The thought of sitting in a bright classroom full of silly girls, concentrating on the glories of literature or the course of American history, nauseated her, as did the fact that she had been cutting classes fairly regularly and was hopelessly behind, had failed or would fail all her midterms, and owed in the next two weeks term papers in both French lit and American history that she had not started to think about. At the subway station, therefore, she found her body moving as if controlled by an outside force, away from the Lexington line and through the crowded tunnels to the uptown N train. She toed the yellow line, close to the edge, and stood there as the train came in, the scream of the wheels and the roar of air and engine obliterating thought for a grateful instant. Maybe a crazy person would push her and that would be it, but none did, and she let herself be jostled into the car by the crowd, exhausted and ashamed of these thoughts. She found a seat and gave it up immediately to an old man with a cane. She got the usual embarrassed smile from him, and the usual scowls or confused looks from the able-bodied in their seats. The faces around her seemed gargoylish, oozing sin, selfishness, cruelty. And was she different? Hardly. She would have committed murder, too, had she not been stopped by David.
Rising panic, a foul taste in her mouth, sweat cold on her forehead. The bodies pressed against her as the train swayed. She couldn't bear it. The train stopped,
and she squirmed out. Thirty-fourth Street. She stood on the platform, frozen in the moving mob. I'm losing my mind, she thought, this isn't happening to me. The train pulled out. She heard music, a saxophone. She turned. A black man in a skullcap and a long, dirty raincoat was playing "Autumn Leaves," a sweet, rich sound, amplified by the concrete vault of the subway. Across the tracks, on the downtown side, she saw a Chinese man kneel and open a violin case and begin to play the same song, in harmony, a spontaneous duet.
She listened, rapt, until the end of the song, then dropped a dollar into the horn man's case and found that she could move again. One of the little city miracles. She left the subway with a lighter heart and went off to find David Grale. At Holy Redeemer, she found that he had been by the kitchen earlier and had gone off with the bike. This was a grocery man's rig with a big hamper over the front wheel, which was used to bring supplies and food to people too debilitated or ornery to come in for services. One of the layworkers said that David was planning to cruise the yards. Lucy walked west and found the bike where she expected, leaning against a torn chain-link fence. She descended to the homeless village, where she found David and Benz half-dragging, half-carrying what looked like an enormous duffel bag, which, from the sound it made, must have been full of scrap metal. Lila Sue danced around them, flapping her hands in agitation. As Lucy came closer, she saw that it was not a duffel bag, but a man.
"It's a balloon man, he fell from the upstairs tracks in the sky," said Lila Sue helpfully. Lucy's heart sank.
"Hi, Lucy," said David. "Can you give us a hand here?"
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