Malice

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Fulton let the last sentence hang in the air. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that Vladimir Karchovski was the nephew of Karp’s paternal grandfather. As a young man, Vladimir had been forced to flee the Soviet Union, leaving his young wife and son, Ivgeny, behind. Ivgeny had overcome his Jewish heritage—definitely not an advantage then in that part of the world, no more than it had been in the past—to become a colonel in the Red Army. But after he’d been wounded in Afghanistan and forced out of the military, he’d immigrated to America to join his father.

  There’d never been much contact between Karp’s family and the Karchovskis over the years; they had a mutual understanding that their respective careers made it problematic. Karp was the district attorney of New York. The Karchovskis ran a crime syndicate. Granted, it was one of the more benign criminal enterprises—no drugs, no prostitution, just smuggling Russian émigrés and goods like caviar into the United States and exporting U.S. goods into the black market in Moscow. But they’d been known to defend themselves and their turf with swift, ruthless violence.

  The Karchovskis had been careful not to let their business affairs cross into Karp’s jurisdiction and put him in an awkward position. But over the past year, their paths had suddenly converged. It began when the Karchovskis had come into information that helped Karp nail a gang that had viciously raped and nearly killed a young woman. And, by seeming coincidence, Marlene had proved the innocence of Ivgeny’s half brother, a professor of Russian literature, who’d been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a student. The cases had brought the families back into each other’s orbit and it had grown from there.

  Compounding the problem was the fact that Karp actually liked his relatives, not to mention Marlene had been practically adopted by Vladimir as the daughter he’d never had. Thus far, the family connections had been kept a secret from the outside world, but Karp had deemed it necessary to let a few of his closest advisors in on “the family skeleton.”

  As the keeper of Karp’s schedule and office administrator, Murrow had been told of Karp’s connection to the Karchovskis, and to Karp’s surprise he had apparently kept the information from his girlfriend; at least it had never appeared in print. V. T. Newbury, Ray Guma, and Harry Kipman, the trio who formed the inner circle of his office confidants, had been told because they were also his best friends and the men he trusted most. Of them, Guma had seemed the least surprised, and Karp surmised that due to Ray’s own familial ties to the Italian mob, he might have already known. The other two had taken it in stride. In fact, nothing seemed to surprise anybody when it came to the Karp-Ciampi clan anymore. “The Coincidence Fairy needs to take a Valium when it comes to this family,” Butch had told Marlene. “Even fiction doesn’t get this weird.”

  And, of course, Fulton knew about the Karchovskis because he was responsible for Karp’s security. His response was typical, a shrug and a comment: I’m like you. As long as they’re not breaking any laws in my neck of the woods, I don’t have time to worry about it. Besides, you can’t pick your relatives, and you know the rest.

  “Who do you think planted the bomb and why?” Karp now asked Fulton, and could almost hear the big detective again shrug his shoulders.

  “This stuff happens in gangland,” Fulton said. “There’s no saying what Ariadne was up to except that the guy she was with was part of the Karchovski family. She could have been working on a story about the Russian mob. Then again, there are those reports she’s been writing about Kane and the hostage situation at St. Patrick’s.”

  Ivgeny Karchovski was convinced that elements of the Russian government were complicit in staging “terrorist” attacks in Chechnya in part through the efforts of Russian agent Nadya Malovo, who’d pulled off Kane’s escape. He believed that these elements were using the threat of Islamic terrorism to cast aspersions on the legitimate aims of Chechen nationalists, who happened to be Muslim, in order to control the oil flow through that satellite state.

  Karp was about to ask which theory Fulton was leaning toward when he heard a shout in the background. “Hey, Butch! Looks like they found somebody alive,” Fulton yelled into the phone. “I’m handing this back to Gilbert.”

  The next thing Karp heard was the sound of Murrow’s breathing as he apparently ran toward where the shouts were coming from. “Gilbert, tell me what’s going on,” he demanded.

  “They’ve found somebody, Butch,” Gilbert replied breathlessly.

  Karp detected the hope in his friend’s voice and prayed that it wouldn’t turn out to be false. This time his prayer was answered.

  “It’s her, Butch,” Murrow shouted. “And she’s alive! I think I saw her move her fingers. They’re bringing her out on a backboard.” There was silence and when Murrow came back, he was more subdued. “She’s unconscious and…she looks pretty banged up. Sorry, Butch, I gotta go. I want to ride with her to the hospital.”

  The telephone went dead, but Fulton had called back from his phone a few minutes later. “Hard to tell,” he replied when asked about Stupenagel’s condition. “Out cold. Unresponsive. They had her strapped to a backboard, but that could have been precautionary. They loaded her up pretty quick into the ambulance.”

  “Let’s get her some protection,” Karp said. “I don’t want to see what happens when somebody swings a third time.”

  “Already on it,” Fulton said. “A couple of my guys are on their way to the hospital as we speak. Not that any bad guys will get past Murrow. They weren’t going to let him on the ambulance, but he climbed in anyway and wouldn’t come out. I had to have a word with the driver. I also sent a couple more to watch your place, just in case this is the start of something big.”

  Karp hung up and told Marlene and their two visitors what he knew. He walked over and looked down at the street from his window just as an unmarked police car pulled up and parked across the street.

  “Wow,” O’Toole said. “My problems are pretty insignificant compared to something like this. Maybe it’s not fair to ask you to help me.”

  Karp looked at his wife, who was waiting to see how he would answer. “We’ll play it by ear,” he said. “But for now, I’m still on your team.”

  Two weeks later, Karp and Marlene walked into the room at Beth Israel hospital where they found Murrow sitting next to Stupenagel, reading to her from David McCullough’s book 1776.

  “Amazing we ever won the Revolutionary War,” Murrow said when he saw them. “I think Americans today could learn a lesson or two from those first guys about courage and faith in the face of adversity.” He put the book down and stood to hug them, then excused himself.

  It had looked dicey when Stupenagel was brought in. Along with a broken arm, cracked vertebrae in her neck, and burns to her left leg, her skull had been fractured and there’d been significant swelling of her brain that could have proved fatal. But the doctors had induced a coma to allow her brain to heal, and she’d hung in there until gradually awakening on her own.

  When she woke, the first person she saw was Gilbert Murrow sleeping in a chair next to the bed. With his round cheeks and pouty lips, his glasses askew on his face, he looked like a little boy, except for several days’ growth of beard. He appeared to have been wearing the same clothes for a week.

  In that instant, Ariadne’s qualms about spending the rest of her life with just one man evaporated. She was content to watch him sleep and get used to the idea that she was completely in love with him. When he finally opened his eyes and saw that she was awake, he smiled and wiped away at a tear that rolled down his cheek, then stood to lean over and kiss her tenderly on her bruised lips.

  “I love you, Ariadne,” he said quietly. “You are never to go where I can’t follow.”

  “I love you, too, Gilbert,” she whispered. “And I would never dream of it.”

  They had all since learned that it was the call of nature that had saved her. “I was sitting on the damn toilet when the world came apart.” She’d been found sandwiched betwe
en the steel walls of the toilet stall, which had protected her from most of the flying debris, the flash fire, and the weight of the wall that collapsed on top of her.

  “Glad to see you’re doing okay,” Karp said after his assistant left the room. “But we didn’t mean to chase Gilbert off.”

  “I asked him to give us a few minutes alone when you arrived,” Stupenagel explained. “Hearing about all of this upsets him. Anyway, I know you don’t have to answer me, Butch, but I need to ask if you’ve reviewed the evidence from the crime scene?”

  Karp nodded. “I’m on the Five Boroughs antiterrorism committee and we got a report. Plus, Fulton and I asked to sit down with the detectives handling the case and review what they’d found to see if we might spot something that would indicate this was something more than gang warfare.”

  “So you’ve concluded that this was a terrorist attack, not a mob thing?” Stupenagel asked.

  “Do you ever stop being a nosy reporter? Only a few days removed from getting blown up, and you’re trying to get a quote out of me,” Karp said, shaking his head.

  “Nah, I’m not looking for a quote,” Stupenagel insisted with a laugh that made her wince in pain. “At least not at the moment, though give me a couple more days and I’ll be banging on your door.”

  “Well—and this is off the record, just in case you ‘forget’ what you just said—we’re not sure yet if this was a turf battle or something else,” Karp said. “But we’re treating any mass murder, particularly in this fashion, as a terrorist act.”

  “I think you know better,” Stupenagel said. “They were after me and/or the guy I was meeting and what he was about to give me.”

  “Yeah, and what was that? I heard you haven’t been too cooperative about your dinner date,” Karp replied.

  The forensics guys had told him what they knew. The bomb had been contained in a blue Samsonite Oyster 26" Cartwheel, purchased in 2005 at the company’s store in Stratford, Canada. It had contained hundreds of ball bearings packed around a very difficult to obtain, military-grade plastic explosive, and a canister of high-octane fuel. The bomb had been detonated by remote control using a transmitter and receiver from a toy car available at any electronics store—presumably by the couple who had been sitting with the suitcase when Stupenagel entered the restaurant.

  Stupenagel’s official statement to the police was that she’d gone to the restaurant to interview an unnamed source for a story. “Just a travel piece,” she’d said when the detectives asked what the story was about.

  Of course, no one believed her. Stupenagel’s stories about the St. Patrick’s Cathedral hostage crisis and her subsequent investigation into ties to the Russian agent who’d been captured and apparently released had been the talk of the town ever since they first appeared. There were plenty of people in New York City, as well as elsewhere, who believed the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government knew there would be an attack on 9/11 and allowed it to happen as a pretext for the War on Terrorism. Her stories just added to the conspiracy fodder.

  “I didn’t know who I could trust,” Stupenagel now told Karp and Marlene. “No one except Gilbert and my source knew I was going there. So either I was followed, which doesn’t make sense because that couple was there before I arrived. Or somebody followed Gregory, but he seemed to be the sort who would have taken precautions against that. Or somebody was listening in on my telephone conversations, and I don’t like that one bit.”

  “So what did Gregory have to say?” Karp asked.

  “Nice interview technique, Karp, subtle,” Stupenagel scoffed. “What makes you think I trust you either?”

  “Then whisper it into Marlene’s ear, and I’ll get it out of her later,” he said.

  “Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me, buster,” Marlene said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, well, I know that Marlene is a Chatty Cathy with a couple of glasses of wine in her, so I’ll just tell you what I know and save you the cheap merlot,” Stupenagel said. “It’s going to be in the newspaper anyway as soon as I can persuade Gilbert to bring me a laptop.”

  Karp sensed that Stupenagel was avoiding the subject of the people who’d been killed in the attack. Though she was tough and brassy, with the usual journalist’s dark sense of humor, he knew that she actually had a big heart and that it had to be tearing at her that others, especially children, had been killed by someone trying to get at her or her source.

  “The source, Gregory, was about to give me a photograph that he said showed Kane, Nadya Malovo…and Jamys Kellagh meeting in Aspen,” she said, watching Karp’s face for his reaction. When she saw it, she nodded. “Yeah, I know that would have been big. But that’s when I had to take a tinkle, and we all know what happened after that. Which is why I’d like to know if a black-and-white photograph, probably inside a manila envelope, was found in the debris.”

  “The only photographs I’m aware of that survived were those found inside wallets and purses,” Karp said, wondering what part his cousin Ivgeny had played in Gregory’s meeting with Stupenagel. “Maybe there’s another copy.”

  Stupenagel shook her head. “I don’t think so. He said it was one of a kind and had been faxed to his employer, who I guess are the Karchovskis. Apparently, the photographer has since been murdered and his darkroom burned to the ground.”

  “Did you see the photograph?”

  “Unfortunately, that’s when I decided to answer the call,” she said. “He said it wasn’t very good quality, being a fax and all. But I hoped it would be good enough to smear all over the front page of the newspaper. Maybe we could have smoked that fucking weasel Jamys Kellagh out of whatever hole he crawls into between murders.”

  “Such language from a lady.” Karp smiled. “But I wish your friend had brought that photograph to the authorities so they could arrest that ‘fucking weasel’ when we had a case to present to the grand jury.” Next time I get the chance, he thought, I’m going to have words about this with my cousin.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Stupenagel said. “No one is sure who to trust.”

  “Like me?”

  “No, not necessarily. Then again, what takes you off the list of suspects any faster than some other people who have to be on it?”

  Karp thought about the columns and names on his legal pad. I don’t know who to trust either. Maybe I should put my own name on the lists.

  “But it’s not a matter of trusting you,” Stupenagel went on. “Maybe they don’t trust anybody in your office, or maybe they don’t trust the people your office has to deal with in other agencies. But I’ll tell you what, Butch. This is getting scary. The Karchovskis are nobody to fuck with. Not to mention that whoever did this was perfectly willing to murder a member of the press—tried twice, as a matter of fact—and risk the publicity just to stop me from finishing this story.”

  “Maybe you ought to cool it for a while,” Karp suggested.

  “Like hell I will,” Stupenagel fumed. “This is going to come down to the last man standing…or in this case, the last woman standing.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Karp responded, then patted her on the shoulder. “My money’s on the woman.”

  Three days later, it became apparent that Stupenagel had talked her boyfriend into bringing her a laptop. The proof was on the front page:

  One of the victims of the terrorist bombing at the Black Sea Café last week was killed just before identifying the murderous mastermind behind the St. Patrick’s Cathedral hostage crisis and other vicious crimes.

  Reputed Russian gangster Gregory Karamazov was about to reveal to this reporter a photograph purported to be of a shadowy figure named Jamys Kellagh meeting last summer with Andrew Kane and Russian agent Nadya Malovo in a bar in Aspen, Colorado when the bomb exploded. Eleven people died in the blast, including Karamazov.

  A well-placed source told this reporter that the bombing appears to have been a desperate move to hide the identity of Kellagh, and confirmation of Malovo’s quiet involve
ment. According to the source, Malovo was arrested inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral but was handed over to the Russian government.

  A spokesman for the Russian embassy in Manhattan denied that any of its government’s agents were involved in the St. Patrick’s debacle. He would not comment on the existence of Malovo.

  “Damn straight, they’re worried,” the source says. “Imagine the implications.”

  Officials with the U.S. government and law enforcement agencies have also refused to comment….

  Karp read the story as he was enjoying peach pancakes at Kitchenette. The Sons of Liberty were carrying on at another table, but he’d politely declined their offer to join the frivolity so that he could work.

  He looked down at his much-traveled legal pad, which had a new column headed by thick, dark letters spelling out Black Sea Café. There were three names beneath it—Stupenagel, Murrow, Ivgeny Karchovski—the fewest in any of the columns, and he had to concede that there was a very good chance that whoever knew Stupenagel was meeting Karamazov at the café wasn’t on the list and might not have been on any of the other lists either.

  Someone, or someones, with the resources and know-how to listen in on telephone conversations, and brazen enough—or powerful enough—to feel safe bombing a restaurant owned by a powerful Russian gangster, he thought. Jamys Kellagh, or whoever he works for—or she; I don’t know for sure if Jamys is male or female.

  The conclusions did not sit well with him. Nothing made sense. It was as if God had taken a giant swizzle stick to the solar system. The planets were speeding every which way, careening off course, sometimes on collision paths with other planets, or narrowly missing, but with no discernible pattern to the whole. And every day seemed to bring new worries.

  Karp would have liked to talk to Espey Jaxon about his thoughts. But the former agent had disappeared after dropping Lucy off at the loft and didn’t answer his telephone messages.

  He had recently learned that at least one other person wasn’t thrilled about Jaxon’s career change. Jon Ellis, the assistant director of special operations for the Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t happy about it either.