Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Jojola despised so-called Indian medicine men who sold peyote and charged to perform the rites for Anglos who, dissatisfied with their own culture, tried to become “white Indians.” But he knew Lucy was not trying to become something she was not, she was trying to understand who she was. When she talked about her dreams, he saw the fear in her eyes and knew that the answers she needed might be found in the otherworld.

  So he’d led her to the desert butte where they now sat and up the steep, narrow trail to the top. He’d often traveled there himself because it was the home to eagles, who he considered to be messengers to the gods. There he’d heard her confession and tied knots in a string, quietly amused at how few knots there were compared to his own first time. Then they’d burned the string.

  When she was prepared, he gave Lucy six pieces of mescal. As she sat looking at the cactus fruit, he told her to be careful not to overanalyze the journey she was about to take. “There will be things you don’t understand or might misinterpret,” he said. “We believe that a powerful spirit resides in the peyote and that spirit can be fickle. You may see visions that seem important, but aren’t; and often there will be experiences that don’t seem like much, but in the end are the most valuable to remember. Do you understand?”

  Lucy nodded and began to place a piece of mescal in her mouth when Jojola restrained her arm with his hand. “It is not too late to turn back from the otherworld,” he said. “People have lost their minds to peyote or injured themselves. I will be here with you, but I cannot protect you from everything in the spirit world.”

  The girl had held his eyes for a long minute, then patted his hand. “I understand,” she said, and placed the first button in her mouth, making a face as the astringent chemicals hit her tongue. An hour later, she became violently ill as her body tried futilely to rid itself of the hallucinogenic poison. But it was already working on her liver and coursing through her blood. And then she’d found herself locked in the trunk of a car about to be murdered.

  “What did you see?” Jojola asked gently. “I heard you scream and you spoke in a language I did not recognize.”

  Lucy shuddered. “I saw my death,” she said, and relayed what she remembered though the details were already blurring in her mind.

  When she finished, Jojola was quiet for a long time. Death dreams were not to be discounted. But he also knew that the visions could not always be taken literally. “Sometimes a vision of death actually represents a new beginning, just as death is merely the next step onward in our existence,” he told her. “The spirit of peyote is fond of symbolism.”

  Lucy was quiet. “Maybe,” she said. “I hope so, but even if it was literal, I still think it was important for some reason that I saw it now.” She looked out to where the sun was now a pastel memory on the horizon and suddenly felt incredibly tired.

  She yawned. “So what’s next?”

  Jojola smiled back. “Sleep.”

  As if he’d cast a spell, Lucy fell backward, but Jojola was ready and caught her by the waist. He picked her up and carried her to a bed he’d made of soft cedar clippings piled several inches thick. She breathed deep the fragrant aroma of the cedar and began to drift off.

  “Rest now, Lucy,” Jojola said, covering her with a blanket. “You will dream because the spirit of peyote lingers in your blood. But I will be here.”

  Lying on her side with her eyelids growing heavier, Lucy watched him walk over to a ring of stones, where he lit a fire and sat down next to his hide-covered drum. Picking up a stick covered on one end with doeskin, he began to beat the drum softly to a rhythm that matched the beating of her heart. Then he began to sing in Tiwa. “May the gods bless me, help me, and give me power and understanding.”

  4

  BUTCH KARP WINCED AS HE STEPPED UP ONTO THE CURB AT the corner of Grand and Mercer. The physical therapist at the hospital had suggested that he use a cane as he worked his wounded leg back into shape, but he was damned if he was going to hobble around Manhattan like an old man. Instead, he forced himself to walk without support, and as normally as possible, so that he wouldn’t develop a limp.

  He was making good progress, too, except for the occasional misstep that reminded him that a piece of metal had passed through his thigh at a tremendous rate of speed. It will take time, he reminded himself as he straightened and resumed his stroll down the sidewalk at what he considered a respectable clip for having been shot three times.

  A second bullet had hit him in the chest, but he’d lucked out and the 9 mm bullet was deflected by a rib and so only nicked a lung before passing out of his back. It broke two ribs, and he might have bled to death if not for the quick reactions of his wife and a passing stranger. But once the bleeding was stopped, the danger had passed.

  However, the third bullet was a killer. Almost…as in close only counts in horseshoes, dancing, and hand grenades. The bullet that hit him in the chest spun him so that the next bullet entered the back of his neck. It should have killed him—pierced his skull right where it met the brain stem and shut off the lights before he even hit the ground. But X-rays revealed that the bullet had miraculously stopped just short of doing any real damage.

  No one—not the police investigators, not the emergency room surgeons who thought that they’d seen it all—could explain why the bullet stopped. At that range, a 9 mm could have passed through a two-by-four. In fact, several other rounds that missed him took out tennis-ball-sized chunks from the marble facade of the Criminal Courts Building.

  “The bullet probably didn’t get the right charge at the factory,” Clay Fulton said, and shrugged. “Or maybe you tensed your muscles at the perfect moment…I heard there’s guys in the circus who can do that.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Probably,” the detective agreed, then gave him a meaningful look. “Or maybe it was a God thing. Maybe the Man upstairs wasn’t ready to see your sorry ass.”

  “Maybe so,” Karp replied with a smile.

  That the bullet stopped short was the good news. The bad news was that it came to rest against the vertebrae and a major artery to his brain. Several surgeons had been consulted and he’d been offered two options.

  Removing it was risky. The slightest slip of the scalpel or too much pressure on the bullet, and he could end up paralyzed or dead. Leaving it in was the other possibility; the hope would be that scar tissue would build up around the bullet and hold it in place. However, a blow to the back of his neck, an awkward fall, or even a sudden jerk of his head could shove the bullet against the artery and cause a stroke that could kill him.

  After talking it over with Marlene, Karp had opted for the surgery. He just couldn’t stand the thought of some evil piece of metal beneath his skin. Or the idea that some everyday event—even playing basketball with his two boys—could kill him. He would have to limit what he did, and that just wasn’t in him.

  Karp had gone into surgery wondering if he would wake up paralyzed, or wake up at all. He tried not to worry his kids or wife. “This is nothing,” he growled when their faces grew long and tears welled in their eyes in the pre-op room. “See you in a few hours.” But when he was wheeled away to the operating room, he wished he’d said something more memorable for his last words to his family. However, the surgery went well, and he’d come out of it knowing that his wife was holding his hand even before he opened his eyes and saw the expectant, hopeful faces of their three children, Lucy, Zak, and Giancarlo.

  Not that someone had waved a magic wand and he was suddenly all better. During the first couple of weeks of recuperation, it felt like someone was poking him in the neck with a red-hot piece of iron. Now it didn’t hurt as much, even when he felt for the lump of the ugly purple scar just beneath the hairline. But at times he wondered if he’d ever get strength back in his leg, or stop feeling—especially late at night—the trajectory of bullets through his body.

  Still, he’d accepted that what he did now about his injuries was up to him. He’d had plenty of experience
with the process of rehabilitation, including when he was a highly recruited basketball player at the University of California, Berkeley and a freak fall destroyed the ligaments in his knee. The injury ended his dreams of a pro career, but it had taught him how to mentally, as well as physically, recover from a devastating injury and move on with his life.

  Moving on was the toughest part. With his wife threatening to finish the bullet’s job if he got within shouting distance of the Criminal Courts Building—ever since the little traitor Murrow gave me up, he thought—he’d had to find other ways to occupy his time and use up some of his prodigious energy.

  After he was released from the hospital, the doctors had set him up with a physical therapist who’d put him on a regime of light lifting to strengthen the injured muscles and frequent massages to keep the scar tissue broken up, and encouraged him to “just get out and walk.” So he’d gotten in the habit of taking a long walk every morning, often joined by Father Jim Sunderland, the Catholic priest who’d put pressure on his wounds as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

  It was Sunderland’s voice that had stuck in his head, reminding him that he had unfinished business. Then one day when he was still in the hospital, Sunderland had come by to see how he was doing. Karp had thought the name was familiar, but it took the sight of the priest’s collar to put it together. Sunderland had angered his church and the U.S. government as a vocal antiwar activist during the Vietnam conflict; he’d also popped up in the civil rights movement, linking arms with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi to face the fire hoses, German shepherds, and the Ku Klux Klan. Time and again over the next forty years, if there was a war, he tried to stop it; if there was an injustice, he spoke out against it. His liberal ideology had often brought him into conflict with the conservative hierarchy of his church, as well as the Christian Right in general, and only his popularity with the masses kept him from formal censure. Most recently, he’d been organizing New York Catholics against the war in Iraq.

  If they’d met in other circumstances, Karp might have dismissed him as a publicity seeker. Even now he didn’t agree with all of the man’s politics. But he found him to be sincere and committed in his beliefs. He respected that, and as a private individual, not the strident public activist, the priest was warm and caring, with a delightful and wicked sense of humor. He could also defend his positions on their legal and ethical—as opposed to emotional—merits as well as any law professor. In fact, to Karp’s surprise, he had been a practicing attorney before “as Timothy Leary suggested to me in the sixties, I ‘turned on, tuned in, and dropped out’ of the rat race and became a Jesuit.”

  After Karp got out of the hospital, Sunderland had called to see if he wanted to go for a walk, and they’d spent several mornings wandering around Chinatown or Little Italy or Soho or the Village. Both men found in each other a worthy opponent and would become so wrapped up in their debates and conversations that they would walk for many blocks without paying attention to where they were going, until they looked up and had to figure out where they were.

  As they strolled, they discussed a wide variety of topics, such as the death penalty. Sunderland, of course, opposed it on moral grounds. However, his opposition wasn’t just a blanket “Thou shalt not kill,” or even that state-sponsored executions were still cold-blooded murders that debased the society that perpetuated them. There was also no evidence, he argued, that the death penalty acted as a deterrent to other murderers.

  By and large, Karp agreed that the death penalty was ineffective for those reasons, as well as costing the taxpayers “a bloody fortune” to prosecute and then defend on appeal. However, his opposition had a caveat. “There are times when the crime is so heinous, the perpetrator so depraved that society has the right to seek retribution by casting this evil from the circle of humanity,” he argued.

  “Oh really?” the priest said. “‘Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.’”

  “Was that out of the Bible, I don’t seem to remember the citation,” Karp asked.

  Sunderland laughed. “No, actually, I was quoting from The Lord of the Rings. But I think that even evil men may play out roles that neither they nor we can foresee may, without their choosing, work out for the good.”

  Over such discussions, the two had quickly become friends, and Karp looked forward to each encounter. That morning, Sunderland called and suggested that Karp join him and a small group of his friends—“all of us retired or semiretired with nothing better to do than discuss the great issues of the day; some might call them ‘bitch sessions’”—for breakfast at a bustling little Tribeca café called Kitchenette.

  “Even if the company is wretched, you’ll love the peach and blueberry pancakes smothered in real maple syrup and washed down with Saxbys French Roast, which just so happens to be the finest coffee in the land,” the priest added. “Or my current favorite, the ‘Farmhouse’ breakfast of eggs and bacon and the pièce de résistance, a huge, warm biscuit absolutely dripping with homemade strawberry butter. Anyway, we’re commemorating an anniversary there this morning and you might find the conversation of interest.”

  “Really? And what anniversary is that?” Karp asked.

  “Why, it’s October 29, the black day in history when Sir Walter Raleigh was executed,” Sunderland replied. “I’d have thought that a constitutional scholar such as yourself would be well aware of such an important date.”

  Karp chuckled. Every law student had the date drilled into his head at one time or another. The injustices of Raleigh’s trial had been the fertile soil from which many of the U.S. Constitution’s most important protections had sprung. “But of course,” he replied. “It’s just that the mention of the pancakes has driven all thought of history from my mind.”

  Throwing on a light jacket against the chill of the October air, he’d quickly left the loft and headed west on Grand Street past the Soho art galleries and, after the minor twinge at Mercer, continued to West Broadway where he turned left and headed south.

  Although he’d never been to Kitchenette, Karp had heard of it as a locals’ meeting place. Sunderland said that whenever the weather allowed, his friends liked to sit at the tables outside to discuss politics, the arts, “and pretty girls,” while they ate what passed for down-home cooking in Manhattan. On less temperate days, the worthies crowded into the café to sit at tables crammed into the long, narrow corridor of the interior.

  Even with the nip in the air, it was a beautiful fall day in New York City. The leaves had long since changed color and, except for a few stragglers, had fallen to the ground, but the skies were a bright blue and the air fresh with breezes blowing east from the nearby Hudson River. And really, the temperature was quite pleasant in the sun, which was what he spotted Sunderland enjoying as he approached the café.

  After shaking Karp’s hand, Sunderland led him over to a table where a group of older men were engaged in lively debate. Although Sunderland had not told him who they were meeting, Karp had figured that they would likely be an unusual group. He was not disappointed, identifying several of them as distinguished members of the legal profession.

  The first face he recognized was that of a tall, lean, almost-to-the-point-of-gaunt man whose long silver hair was tied back in a ponytail like some aging hippy. He had looked quite a bit different the last time Karp had seen him, but there was no mistaking the deep-set probing eyes of Frank Plaut, a former federal judge with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

  Karp was impressed. Plaut was considered one of the finest constitutional minds of his and many other generations. The New York DAO’s appeals bureau chief—Harry “Hotspur” Kipman, a friend who Karp also regarded as one of the best legal scholars he’d ever met—worshipped the jurist. And Karp had argued several cases before him and learned, once or twice the hard way, to be on his t
oes when citing precedent or making an argument before Plaut.

  By all accounts, Plaut had been destined for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. But for reasons known only to himself, he had one day stepped down from the bench and accepted a position teaching constitutional law at Columbia University. Now here he sat presiding over coffee and what appeared to be waffles at a Tribeca café.

  Karp also recognized a second man as a former U.S. attorney for Manhattan, Dennis Hall. He was a conservatives’ darling and a regular commentator on Fox, but he was not a poorly researched, mindless TV talking head. His arguments were always reasoned and based upon a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

  Seated next to him was his legal opposite, Murray Epstein, a ferocious defense attorney who’d terrorized many an assistant district attorney of the New York DAO. The man could have made a living as a Shakespearean actor with his flair for language and dramatic gestures, but he was no empty suit. Epstein knew the law inside and out, and as a defender of the liberal camp of constitutional law, he’d argued, and won, his share of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Some of Epstein’s battles with Karp’s mentor, the longtime New York City DA Francis Garrahy, were the stuff of legend at the DAO. And he’d even put a much younger Butch Karp through his paces a time or two; in fact, he’d nearly won what had appeared to be a slam-dunk homicide case for the prosecution. Karp’s bacon had been pulled from the fire only because Garrahy insisted on meticulous preparation and, conveniently, because the truth was on his side.

  Karp didn’t recognize the other men at the table. But if the company they kept hadn’t already identified them as formidable thinkers, their conversation as Sunderland and Karp walked up certainly did.

  “I still contend that the biggest impact of Raleigh’s trial on U.S. constitutional law was the right to a fair and impartial hearing before a judge and a jury of one’s peers,” Hall argued.