“Marlene, this is a stick shift,” he said, examining the huge chrome shaft sticking out of the floorboards. It had a white plastic skull on its end with red jeweled eyes.
“Yeah, right, a Hurst shifter. We got 446 cubes under the hood, too. Let’s roll, big boy!” She looked at him oddly. “Karp, don’t say you can’t use a stick shift. That’s like saying you can’t get it up.”
“Oh, no, sure I can. It’s just, I don’t drive much.” The truth was that Karp had not driven a car more than half a dozen times since law school, where he had owned a sedate secondhand Plymouth with automatic. He had perhaps three hours’ total experience with a stick shift, logged at age seventeen on his brother’s VW.
The important thing, he recalled, was not to stall. He pressed the accelerator gingerly. The engine rumbled. Muffling had obviously been of secondary interest to whatever redneck maniac had built this car. He recalled vaguely that something called a tachometer had something to do with shifting. There was a large black gauge bolted to the top of the dash that jerked every time he goosed the gas. That must be it. He cautiously depressed the clutch and slid the skull in the direction first gear was in the 1951 VW.
“Hey, let’s go,” she said, “time’s a-wastin’.”
The tach went from one to seven. He decided four was a safe bet. He pointed the wheel away from the curb and tromped on the gas until the needle hit four. The air was filled with an ear-rattling roar that sounded like a dive bomber taking off from a carrier. Karp smiled bravely at his best girl and popped the clutch.
Twenty minutes later, they were barreling north on the Saw Mill River Parkway through a mild blizzard. The snow was bone dry, forming dancing pinpoints of brilliance in the headlights.
“Good thing there’s no traffic,” Marlene said. She was curled up in the suicide seat, her high boots tucked up under her black wool skirt, trying to light a cigarette with shaking hands. “You’re, ah, quite a driver there, Butch.”
“Thanks,” he said hoarsely around a tongue as dry as flannel.
“But, um, maybe you should shift out of second. You’ll get better mileage. Third’s probably up and to the right. If you want.”
“Yeah, oh sure, I was just warming her up,” he said, reaching over to do it. But as he looked down, he had occasion to notice for the first time something odd. “Say, Marlene? This car has no ignition key.”
“Yeah, well, actually, it doesn’t really need one.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Well, I sort of forgot to get the keys from Larry, so I sort of jumped the ignition.”
“You boosted this car? That I’m driving?”
“Don’t be mad, Butch. It’s cool, honestly.”
“Oh, shit, Marlene! What if we get stopped? That’s it, curtains. No job, no future. You lunatic, don’t you realize that assistant district attorneys are not supposed to do crimes? Christ, Marlene, sometimes I don’t know … Oh, God, is there registration in the car? At least if we have the goddamn registration …”
Karp began to look for it, behind the front visor first, and then stretched across to pop open the glove compartment and fumble inside it. The car veered back and forth across the road, as he yanked out a handful of assorted material.
“Butch, take it easy, it’s all right!” she cried as they hit the shoulder.
“It’s not all right. Turn on the dome light. OK, what’s this: map, map, tire bill—oh, shit.” He held up a plastic baggie. In the yellow light she saw that the bag contained a miniature wooden pipe, a packet of Zig-Zag cigarette papers, and a half ounce of brownish vegetable substance that Karp doubted very much was Bugle cigarette tobacco. He let it drop to the seat.
“I can’t believe this. This is not happening,” he said in a faint voice.
“We could throw it out the window,” she suggested brightly.
“Good idea, Ciampi. I’m sure the car isn’t dirty down to the floorboards. The trunk is probably full of toot, for chrissakes.”
They drove in strained silence for a minute or two. Then he gradually became aware that odd splatting sounds were issuing from between her clenched lips.
“What’s so funny, Marlene?”
She exploded into hysteria, thick, choking, exhausting laughter. “Karp,” she gasped at last between guffaws, “we’ll cop a plea … we’re first offenders … they’ll give us—they’ll give us six months suspended …” and she started laughing uncontrollably again. And it was, after all, pretty funny, and so he started to laugh, too, harder and harder. He had to wipe the tears away so he could see the snowy road.
When they had finally quieted down, she snuggled up to him and he put his arm around her and used the make-out knob to steer. She said, “I love this. I want to drive through this blizzard with you forever and never stop.”
“Sounds good. We’d have to stop to get food. And pee,” he said, always the sensible one.
“No. We’d keep driving. We’d never eat and we’d pee in the backseat.” She turned on the radio. It was tuned to a rock station and the Birds playing “Eight Miles High.”
“We’d have to stop to … you know, do the dirty,” he said, acutely aware of her pointed tongue scrounging around his right ear.
“No, we wouldn’t,” she whispered.
Then she pulled away from him and he was aware of her bouncing on the seat. In a flash she had reached up and hung a pair of rose silk bikini underpants on the rearview mirror. “I’ve wanted to do this all my life,” she said, “and the moment has come.”
“Marlene, what are you doing? Stop that! Ahhgh, there’s the turnoff!”
The Chevy shot across three lanes onto the Taconic Parkway as she unzipped his fly and began to fumble within. “Mar … stop it, we’ll get killed!” he yelled.
“Who cares? It’ll be a once in a lifetime experience. Ah, there he is. Yumm.”
“Wait, I’ll pull over,” he gasped as her head descended.
“’on’t ’ou ’are!” she said, her mouth full and moving like the pistons in the straining 446, just as hot but much slower. With a final noisy lick she raised her head, flicked off the dome light, and heaved her naked thigh across his lap. “Marlene, this isn’t wise,” he wheezed.
“Yeah, it’s real foolish. But I’m dying for you. It’s going to fry like a sausage. OK, let me just …”
She reached under her full skirt and clutched the blazing item shooting up from his groin like a Hurst four-speed stick, pointed it into the right place, and sank down with an audible slurp and a grunt of pleasure. “Don’t slow down, don’t, don’t slow down,” she hissed around the teeth she had sunk into the curve of his neck. In a minute the first wave of climax rolled through her, and she yelled over the scream of the engine and the tires, over the pounding of the music.
Karp’s life was passing across his eyes as he wove S-shapes on the snow of the Taconic State Parkway and jammed his hips up to meet Marlene’s frantic bouncing. The tiny part of him still capable of thought was trying to figure out how he could have predicted that a stable and idealistic young lawyer would spend the last few seconds of his life fucking a crazy woman while going sixty-five miles an hour through a blizzard in a stolen car loaded with dope. But after a short while that part of him was completely extinguished, and he surrendered to the oblivion of pleasure.
16
THEY DIDN’T DIE. To Karp’s immense surprise, not only did they survive, but they were able to navigate the worsening blizzard and arrive at their destination at eight o’clock. They were just in time for dinner.
Their hostess, Annabelle Partland, owned an isolated farmhouse in the hill country outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and as they pulled the Chevy into the snowbound farmyard, all they could see of her was a person wearing an immense orange parka, the kind used in Antarctic expeditions, and a fur-lined hood pulled tight around a face. When the car engine was finally turned off, Karp found his ears ringing in the unaccustomed silence. As he stepped out into the freezing wind he could actually h
ear the snowflakes striking the windshield.
Marlene threw her red parka up over her shoulders and dashed for the house, with Karp and Annabelle behind her, lugging bags. The door lintel was so low that he had to duck to enter. As he did, he noticed a carved wooden sign over it, which said:
I haven’t got any.
And I don’t want any.
In the mud room inside the door, Annabelle shucked off her great garment and hung it on one of a row of wooden pegs. When her hood came off she released a mane of pale coppery hair vibrating with static, and a round, wide-mouthed, pleasant freckled face. She was wearing a gray Ragg sweater, a set of Oshkosh overalls much stained with clay, and high woolen leg warmers patterned with Icelandic designs. She smiled at Karp and said, “My, you certainly don’t look prepared for this blizzard.” He took off his Yankee baseball jacket and stamped the snow off his high-top sneakers. “Yeah, right,” he admitted. “I don’t get out of town much.”
“Well, you’re really out of town now,” she said and led him down a narrow passageway to a small dining room, where a table was set for six and where Marlene was already pouring herself a glass of red wine. V.T. came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“Hi, Butch, Marlene. What’s happening,” he said cheerfully.
“Grand theft auto,” Karp answered.
“Pardon?”
“Ask her,” he said. “For the record, I’m an unwitting accessory.”
“Karp, you rat! V.T., this man is going to turn my ass in to the law because I … oh, never mind, it’s entirely too tedious to go into right now.” She stuck her tongue out at Karp, then looked around the beamed, candlelit dining room. “Gosh, this is a great place, Annabelle. When did you get it?”
“In 1793,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
An hour later, Karp was sitting with Marlene on a couch in the low-ceilinged living room. They were stuffed with white bean soup and sausage washed down with quantities of thick French wine. Marlene, mellow and slightly drunk, was smoking. Karp was staring at the fire and playing with a smooth rock he had picked up off the walnut coffee table. A stereo was playing a McGarrigle Sisters record.
Cold sober and just starting to relax from the drive, he looked around the room, fascinated. It was filled with remarkable objects. On the walls, besides dozens of paintings and drawings, some richly framed, others stuck up with pins, there were elaborate tufted quilts that looked like the vestments of extraterrestrial priests. The rugs on the polished wide-planked floor were irregular in shape and had the energy of bright animals. Pots and ceramic sculptures in fantastic variety sat on shelves, on tables, or were scattered in rows on the floor, some like stones from a riverbed, some like relics of ancient civilizations, some like silver and neon explosions. The furniture was a mix of heirloom antique and extravagant crafts. The couch on which they sat was a Duncan Phyfe upholstered in blue silk, on which a variety of embroidery work had been flung, together with a collection of odd pillows that were themselves soft sculptures. The chairs placed at either end of the coffee table were artful constructions of smooth tree-limbs laced together with rawhide, hemp cable, and soft, quilted leather.
“This is some place,” he said, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” Marlene answered, “not your usual motel modern. What do you think of old Annabelle?”
Karp shrugged. “She seems pretty nice. V.T. is obviously her total slave. He wants to marry her.”
“Yeah? Will they?”
“It’s in doubt. V.T. wants to stay in the city and Annabelle refuses to leave here.”
“I don’t blame her. In fact, I sympathize entirely. She’s in her own place, and she’s her own boss. I really like her, which is strange, because when I walked in here, for about two seconds I was blinded with envy. But she’s, I don’t know, so completely herself. Like the Wife of Bath. ‘I am my own woman, well at ease.’”
“Like the sign on the door—‘I don’t have any …’”
“Right. Every woman’s secret wish—to be ten forever, with all your toys arranged just so and infinite playtime and no nasty boys to break in and mess things up.”
Karp looked at her as she stared into the fire. The good side of her face, fine-boned and noble, caught the glow of the flames and seemed to shine with its own light, like a cameo carved from a red gem. He fought down the intense desire that gripped him. He said coolly, “Boys, huh?”
“Yeah, or men. Oh, naturally one wants a man on tap, should one wish to fuck one’s brains out on the odd evening. Oh, shit, Butch, your expression. You take everything so personal.”
“I thought sex was personal.”
“Yeah, sure, but I was talking generally. Never mind, it’s just girl stuff. God, I needed this break.” She gestured broadly to the room. “Look at this. This is a beautiful place. Remember beauty, Butchie? Funny, in school I hung around with a gang of artists, sculptors, musicians, whatever. After a while, I started to think they weren’t, I don’t know, serious? Solid?
“I would talk to them, and they would just smile or joke. It finally struck me that they had nothing to say, or what I mean is, if they had something to say, they would draw it, or sing it. I couldn’t understand it then. It pissed me off, all the shit going down in the world, and they’re farting around with paint.
“So I switched to pre-law and started hanging around with political types. Engaged, but boring.”
“Smash the state?”
“No, never those guys. Male chauvinists, every damn one of them. Serve the people and squash your old lady, it never fails. No, more like Free the Tanktown Seven. A bleeding heart.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t go into public D.”
“Yeah, only I figured the wretched of the earth get more lumps from the skels than they do from the cops. Besides, there’s the power—”
“Ah, power, my favorite subject,” V.T. said as he entered the room, holding a bottle in one hand and four stemmed glasses in the other. “Annabelle decided to break out one of these in your honor. A ’70 Margaux, the beverage of the ruling classes. Her father sends her a case for her birthday every year, in the hopes that the wine will befuddle her into marrying a bond salesman and moving to Darien.”
As he poured the wine, Annabelle entered, checked the fire, and flung a couple of chunks of applewood onto it. Sitting in a leather chair, she pulled an embroidery hoop out of a canvas bag and began to stitch, in between sips of wine.
“Hey, V.T.,” Karp said, “you sure Guma said he was going to come tonight?”
“He said, but you never know with Raymond. We’ll have to make do without him for the nonce. Meanwhile, you can tell me all about Ruiz the Serpent and his Soviet grenade.”
Karp recounted the events at the bomb range and the carton that linked Tel-Air and the Croat bombers, and then related his conversation with Pillman. “So you guessed right, V.T.,” he concluded. “Ruiz must have whacked somebody in Miami, and Pillman went along for the ride. You should have seen Pillman’s face when I slipped that in.”
V.T. said, “Uh-hmm,” and stared into the fire.
“V.T., you’re thinking something.”
“Yes, I am. This is really puzzling, isn’t it?”
“You noticed. Well, spit it out.”
“That call that Pillman got right after the hijacking, saying he should lay off Karavitch because Ruiz supplied the Croats in Marseilles with Warsaw Pact weapons, and two of the Croats on the hijack were involved in it—that’s puzzling.”
“Why? It was bullshit anyway. Whoever called must have figured the Grand Central bomb came from that same load, but why tell Pillman that? Better let him think he’s covering up for something besides a New York cop killing.”
Marlene said, “That can’t be right, Butch. According to Pillman, he got that call before Terry was killed.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, so either Pillman’s lying or—”
V.T. cut in, “Or the phone call was the truth. The caller was really conce
rned about the Marseilles connection. Rukovina and Raditch were really involved. Somebody was using them as mules to carry munitions to Croat terrorists. Which means the Grand Central bomb wasn’t part of any conspiracy outside our little band in New York.”
“Right,” Karp said. “Now I’m with you. I’ve been thinking that’s the key to understanding this case. The political, the institutional stuff, it’s just smoke. Really, it’s all private: secrets, ripoffs, ambitions, egos.”
“Why is that different from the way it always is?” asked Annabelle calmly. She got three blank looks from the others. “I mean,” she continued, “that sounds to me like the ordinary life of institutions—just what you said—secrets, ripoffs, ambitions, and egos. The odd thing is why you’re surprised.”
There was a brief, embarrassed silence into which V.T. said, “Umm, the point is, dear, it’s not supposed to be that way, which is why it’s interesting. Watergate was an aberration, after all.”
“Was it?” Annabelle said, more sharply. “How come you’re so sure?”
“Because they screwed up, Annabelle,” Marlene said. “Just like our guys screwed up. That’s the problem with conspiracies. Christ, it’s hard enough to get anything done in real life out in the open, with the full force of the law, and public opinion working for you. It’s almost impossible to do anything that’s both illegal and secret, if it requires a lot of organization and lots of people working together. Almost all criminal action is massively simple and stupid.”
Annabelle shrugged and picked up her embroidery hoop again. “You may be right. What do I know? It just seems to me that things could hardly be as dreadful as V.T. says without some form of connivance between the bad guys and the supposed good guys.”
“Oh, connivance!” exclaimed V.T., laughing. “That’s a different story. Do we have connivance, Butch?”
“Lots of connivance, V.T. Yeah, you see, Annabelle, we all work for a guy, connivance is like his middle name. Not the same as conspiracy, though. More opportunistic.”
“That’s the point,” put in Marlene. “Nobody plans that things should be screwed up. It’s just the sum of everybody working a private angle in the public business. And Bloom has a real big angle.”
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