Karp said, “But there is an Armenian nationalist movement locally, isn’t there? You keep tabs on them, don’t you?”
A longer pause. “I don’t know about tabs. I wouldn’t say tabs. Freedom of association and political activity is guaranteed by the Constitution. We don’t infringe on that unless we have reason to believe that such activity is a front for illegal activities.”
“Thank you, Agent Pillman, and I hope you had a flag flapping in the background when you said that. Meanwhile, cut the crap: who runs the Armenian nationalists locally?”
“Hang on,” said Pillman. The line echoed hollowly for four minutes. When he got back on the line he said only, “Sarkis Kerbussyan,” and then an address in Riverdale.
Karp said, “Thanks, Pillman. As always it’s been a-”
“We never talked,” said Pillman, and hung up.
The next morning, a Saturday, Karp rose early and, after checking that his knee worked, grabbed a quick bowl of Wheaties and left the loft for an unpleasant but necessary mission. He took the BMT uptown to 8th Street in the Village, stopped at a bakery, walked a block and then up the handsome pale sandstone steps of a town house. He rang the buzzer energetically for a full minute until he was admitted. He climbed a flight and rang the bell.
Roland Hrcany stood in the open doorway, looking frowsty, with his long tresses in a blond halo, dressed only in a heavy black terry robe. He said, “I oughta punch you the fuck out.”
“Yeah, and I oughta punch you out too, but you’re not and I’m not. It’s just another goddamn case, Roland. It’s not worth it. So I came here to get this settled.” He held up a redolent, warm paper bag. “I brought you a dozen onion bagels.”
Roland tried to maintain his glare, but it collapsed seconds later into something between a scowl and grin.
“Bagels! Fuckin’ guy! Okay, get in here, asshole!”
Roland stood out of the doorway, and Karp walked in. Hrcany had the whole floor, a two-bedroom with a large living room, a separate dining room, a real, as opposed to a Pullman, kitchen, and a nice view of 9th Street. It would have taken three-quarters or more of his salary to pay for it, except that he lived here for free, courtesy of his father, who was a substantial player in Manhattan real estate. Roland had the place furnished in Playboy modern: lots of black leather furniture, shaggy white rugs, chrome and glass tables and shelves, a Macintosh sound system with six-foot speakers, and big Warhol silk screens of Marilyn, one in yellow and one in red, chrome-framed on the walls. The place had an appropriate odor-sandlewood incense and some musky cologne. It stuck in Karp’s throat and made him want to sneeze.
They went into the kitchen, where Roland set about making coffee, using instruments that looked like they belonged in a jet fighter. He ground beans, which Karp had never seen anyone do in a house before. Karp found a knife, sliced two bagels, and Roland put them on a plate with chunks of butter and cream cheese. Roland poured the coffee, telling Karp stuff he didn’t much want to know about the origin of the beans. It tasted like regular coffee, thought Karp the peasant.
“So,” said Roland, “this little visit, it means you’re gonna get off my ass on Tomasian?”
“Well, yes and no, Roland. It’s not that simple.”
“Then let me hear the yes part first.”
“Okay, Tomasian is your case. You do it how you want, and I won’t make any more public comments about how you’re handling it. I’m going to sit on my private opinion that the case is fucked.”
Hrcany flushed and was about to say something, but Karp stopped him with a hand gesture and continued, “Hold on a second. Here’s my problem. You’re an experienced prosecutor. You got an instinct. You want to play it a little cute sometimes, a little closer to the horns than I do, than I’d like, that’s fine. For you.
“But I got fifteen, twenty kids on the staff who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. They weren’t trained by Garrahy’s old homicide bureau, like you and me. They see the stuff you pull, they think it’s cool for them to do it too. And it’s not. I can’t have thirty or so cases I think are fucked up running all the time, and I can’t nursemaid every case individually. You see the problem?”
“Assuming I do,” said Roland carefully, “what’re you going to do about it? This is the no part coming, right?”
“Yeah. Basically, I want to fill in around your investigation. You say the cash and the letters and the details of the vic’s life are irrelevant. Fine. Go that way. But I need to find out for sure. And I’m going to.”
“What, you’re going to investigate my investigation?” asked Roland with some heat.
“No, that’s not the point. I just want to check out the stuff you thought wasn’t worth checking out. If it doesn’t amount to anything, you’re the hero and I’m the goat.”
“And the opposite if it does, right?”
“No, as a matter of fact: I intend to feed you anything I find out. Like I said, it’s your case. And if it turns out that Tomasian is innocent, you’ll do the right thing. And it’ll be a good lesson for the kids.”
The glower was back in Roland’s eyes. “Fuck the kids! I don’t like this. It’s like you’re working D. against me.”
“No, it’s not,” said Karp. “I’m just completing the investigation for the People.” Roland snorted derisively, but Karp continued in the same calm tone. “The thing of it is, Roland, I’m going to do it either way. Now, we can duke it out in public and split the bureau and make Wharton and them real happy, or we can approach it like friends and colleagues who’re trying to work out a difference of opinion. It’s really up to you how it goes down.”
Hrcany sipped his coffee and considered this at length. He thought Karp was chasing rainbows, but still, the notion that Karp would, in a sense, be working for him on the case was certainly attractive. And he knew he could depend on Karp’s promise that any new stuff that came up would not be used in an embarrassing way. It was a covered bet, a two-way win, the kind that Roland liked best.
He looked Karp in the eye and rapped sharply, once, on the table. “Okay, deal.” A smile spread across his face. “You wouldn’t want to make it more interesting? A little side bet?”
“Okay, if I lose, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window,” said Karp.
“No, I mean for real. Money. Say a yard. Come on!”
“No bet, Roland. You know I don’t bet.”
Roland laughed. “Yeah, right. Okay, I’m mollified. How about a piece of ass as long as you’re here?”
“What!”
“Yeah, in the bedroom. Seventeen. Got a cooze on her feels like she’s only been fucked about a dozen times. Hah! That’s not counting last night and this morning.” He cupped his hand to his mouth.
“Hey, Mollie! You wanna fuck my friend here?”
From the direction of the bedroom came a querulous reply that Karp could not make out. Roland gestured in that direction. “Go ahead. In return for the bagels. I’m serious. She’ll do you.”
“Not today, Roland,” said Karp, rising and suppressing a wince. “But I appreciate the offer. Catch you later.”
Karp let himself out. The air was crisp and clean, springlike, not too laden with distillates, for which Karp was grateful. Although accustomed to wading ankle-deep in society’s rotted pus, depravity on a more intimate level, as, for instance, practiced by friends, disturbed him. That it disturbed him also disturbed him. It cut him off in a way from the prevailing mood of his times, which, being at heart a companionable man, he would have liked to have shared.
But no, having dipped lightly into the fleshpots immediately after his first wife had run out on him, he had found that he didn’t much care for casual sex, or any of the ordinary weirdnesses of his era.
He had just resigned himself to young-fogeyhood when Marlene dropped into his life. She had, in contrast, stinted herself nothing in the sexual phantasmagoria that was 1970s New York, and Karp was content to thus sample the fleshpots at, as it were, second hand. Feeli
ng virtuous, warmed by recalling his most recent encounter just that morning with his very own sensual calliope, Karp walked back toward the downtown subway.
Marlene, at this moment, had completed the ever-wrenching transition from scented houri to cart horse. She was about to take her infant daughter to the park, an enterprise which, if one lives in a five-floor walk-up in the City and the nearest park is ten blocks away, requires nearly the equipment and preparation of an assault on the Eiger.
With the baby on one hip and a huge canvas bag on the other, and while balancing a collapsible stroller on her shoulder, Marlene clumped down the narrow stairs. Out on the sun-dappled, filthy street she set up the contraption and placed the child in it, and leaned over to strap her in.
It was a scene still oddly out of place on that industrial street. All around her, cursing workmen were offloading huge spools of heavy wire from a truck and manhandling them to the cable hoist in Marlene’s building, where they would be hauled up to the drawing mill that occupied the two middle loft floors. This was one reason why Marlene had decided to get out of her loft for the day. The ancient motor that ran the hoist was located in her home, and all morning it would be producing a deafening racket.
She set off down Crosby to Grand and then headed east. Soon she left the industrial loft zone and entered the heart of Little Italy. At Grand and Mulberry she passed the tenement where her grandmother had lived for most of her long life. From before Marlene could remember until she had left for college, she had spent every Sunday in that apartment, and afterward, on fine evenings, she had played on these streets, potsy and jump rope and the various lost street games of the City that amused children in the era before TV took over the hours between dinner and bedtime: ringalevio, red light green light, giant steps, Chinese handball.
The neighborhood was still the same on the surface. The shops were still nearly all Italian, as were the restaurants, although the Chinese were pressing in, especially around the junction with Mott Street. Yet Little Italy was shrinking and growing older. Marlene’s parents’ generation had largely abandoned it for the near suburbs, and most of her contemporaries were not interested in walk-up tenements.
The remaining old folks were out in force today, however, it being one of the first warm weekends of the year. Marlene stopped and spoke with several black-clad grand dames, friends of her grandmother’s, who were sitting out in front of their doors on folding chairs. Lucy was made much of.
The old men were out too, and the doors of the social clubs, storefronts with their large windows painted brown or dark green, were open to catch the spring breezes. Marlene spent a few minutes chatting with a retired capo of the Lucchese family, who tried to give Lucy a cube of nougat exactly the right size to jam in a six-month-old’s trachea. Marlene intervened in time to avert what might have been the old gentleman’s first unintentional murder and moved on.
She had by this time quite recovered from her earlier irritation. She belonged here, in the old heart of the City; roots were worth a good deal of schlepping.
Marlene now entered an area that constituted one of the many open-air after-care clinics provided by the City for its mentally distressed. Sprawlers, sleepers, fighters, talkers to spirits, hearers of voices, disported themselves as if in a day room at one of the bad old upstate loony bins, although here they had the benefit of exposure to the healthful elements and were responsible for obtaining their own medication. Marlene could not help but observe this being provided by thoughtful citizens at many points along the street.
Crossing Chrystie Street, she entered Sara Roosevelt Park. There are still parks in the City where, on such a pleasant Saturday in spring, the quality disport themselves, and have elegant picnics, and tourists ride in overpriced carriages, and nurses wheel expensive perambulators, but Sara Roosevelt Park is not one of them. It is a narrow strip of asphalt decorated with tired lawns and dispirited trees, populated heavily not only by the distressed but by gangs from Alphabet City, which begins a few streets to the north.
On the other hand, even so pitiful a green space was rare enough in that part of the City to promote some accommodation. There was at least one section of the park, a lawn around a small playground and basketball court, where respectable people-mainly Puerto Rican families from the Lower East Side-could congregate and watch their children play.
The baby was asleep. Marlene sank gratefully onto a bench, lit a cigarette, and watched the action. Platoons of kids were shrieking in the playground, largely unsupervised, and on a patch of scabrous grass a Latina matron was setting out the ingredients for a picnic, while her husband lay on his back and drank a beer. Another Latino family group was starting a portable grill, laughing as the flames from their lighter fluid shot with a whoosh and a fragrant stink up into the sky.
A small Puerto Rican girl, perhaps seven, skinny and dirty, was weaving through the crowd, wrapped in some internal fantasy. She was dressed in a grubby pink satin dress several sizes too small for her, to which she had affixed a red crinoline which hung limply to her ankles. On her head she had placed a tiara made of crumpled tinfoil, and she had pinned chiffon scarves to her shoulders so that as she leaped and whirled, they fluttered behind her like wings.
Marlene’s attention was distracted by angry shouts and the sound of breaking glass. She looked down the row of benches. Perhaps some drunks were fighting, but she couldn’t see. The baby, awakened by the racket, began to fret, and Marlene reached into her bag for a bottle. When she looked up again, the little girl was standing in front of her.
“Are you a pirate?” she said without preamble. Marlene was wearing her black eye patch, covering the space where her eye had been blown out by a letter bomb some years back.
“Yes,” said Marlene. “You’re a fairy princess, right?” The child nodded. She was holding a long dowel that must have once been a balloon stick, the end of which was covered with a ball of the gold foil used by one of the fast-food chains to wrap sandwiches. She wore cracked patent leather Mary Janes and grungy white socks. Her knees were scabbed. A pinched little thing but pretty, despite the visible neglect.
“Is that your baby?”
“Yes.”
“Can I play with him?”
“Her. No, she’s too little to play.”
The child smirked and whipped her wand back and forth. “I could, I could turn her into a frog,” she said confidently.
“Yes, but please don’t. I have zillions of frogs, but only one baby.”
The girl pirouetted on a toe, to make her scarves flutter. She was holding her body very stiff in an effort to maintain the appropriate hauteur, and looking down her nose at Marlene in a way that would have been funny were it not so serious. Marlene said, “What’s your name?”
“Princess, no, Special Fairy Princess Latameeshiana. The first. What’s yours?”
Marlene introduced herself and the baby and then asked, “You live around here?”
“I live on the moon,” said the girl, staring at an ordinary-looking man in a dark coat walking down the path. As he passed, the girl leaned close to Marlene and said in a stage whisper, “You see that man? He’s a werewolf.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t believe in werewolves?”
“Not that much.”
“How about … witches? Do you believe in witches?”
Marlene thought seriously about it. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
The child laughed out loud. “Ha-hah! There’s no such thing as witches.”
“No? Then what do you believe in?”
The girl intoned her credo portentously, ticking it off on her fingers. “I believe in werewolves, monsters … God, dinosaurs, vampires, fairies, and … angels. You can see angels. It’s true.”
Marlene let her face show an interest that was less than half patronizing. The sun was warm, the baby was sucking happily at her bottle, and Marlene was content to learn all about the characteristics of angels from an urchin. It was more interesting th
an condo-buying details, and more pleasant than listening to women talk about being raped.
More glass broke, the sound coming from around the bend in the path. The force of the argument rose a degree. The little girl stopped talking, and Marlene realized that she had asked a question.
The girl asked it again, “Did you ever see one?”
“An angel? No, I don’t think so. Did you?”
“All the time. Do you know what happens if an angel is bad? God takes off their wings, and they fall down and smoosh. They have real blood and goosh in them. Really! Or they could become vampires. It depends.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” Marlene agreed.
The child pirouetted again, admiring her wings.
“Fairies have special wings, so they could never get smooshed. I can really fly.”
Marlene smiled uncertainly and gave the child a close look. Imagination was all very well, but the Princess, who, by the ragged look of her was not one of reality’s darlings, might be taking it too far. Oddly, Marlene thought of the Jane Doe on the slab at the morgue. Maybe she had thought she could fly too.
“You know, Princess,” Marlene began, “pretend wings are very pretty, but they’re different from real wings, aren’t they? I mean, birds have real wings and they can really fly-”
Marlene’s introduction to ontology was interrupted, as such discussions so often are in the City, by a major felony. There was a hoarse scream, and a ragged man came racing down the asphalt path, staggering, his face a perfect mask of blood. Before Marlene knew it, she was on her feet, positioned between the gory apparition and little Lucy. The wounded man did not, however, spare them a look, but crashed through a low bush and across the picnic field, to a chorus of curses and more screams. His pursuers, two tattered louts, one with a knife in hand and the other clutching a broken wine bottle, came racing after. By that time Marlene was wheeling her stroller rapidly in the opposite direction. After thirty yards or so, she thought to look for her recent companion, but the little girl had entirely vanished. In this respect, at least, a fairy indeed.
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