Marlene had to visit the fourteenth-floor ladies room three times before she found Rhoda Klepp. She sidled up next to Rhoda’s sink and began to comb her perfectly combed hair. For this occasion she was wearing the most debauched costume she felt she could get away with in the office, a size-three lavender sweater dress that buttoned down the front, with the top six and the bottom four unbuttoned. You could count her rib bones.
She sighed loudly. “God, I’m beat,” she exclaimed. “What a weekend.”
Rhoda glanced over and did a double take. It wasn’t that Marlene looked slutty, it was just that she had shaved the line between low-class lawyer and high-class whore to near transparency. “Oh? Where did you go?” she asked casually.
“Up to V.T. Newbury’s place. What a scene! That woman he hangs out with is too much. You’ve heard of Annabelle Partland? I wouldn’t call her a porn queen exactly, more of a classy erotica sort of thing, but she’s into some incredibly kinky scenes. I mean internationally—the Velvet Underground, the Hellfire Club and all that West End stuff in London, and of course that thing that was in all the papers, with those Greek millionaires in Juan Les Pins? You remember, with the corrupt little girls?”
“You’re putting me on, right?”
“No, really,” Marlene laughed, “I mean, my dear, I’m no blushing virgin, but this was a bit much for even me. She showed us a film some guy had made, starring her and a couple of dudes, one of whom is now a big TV star, but I’m not supposed to say who. We were positively writhing by the time it was finished. After that it was every girl for herself and no holes barred.”
Marlene hesitated before using this last line: its grotesque vulgarity might spill the beans. But no, she observed, Rhoda was now looking at her without her usual supercilious air, and her vixen face exhibited instead that mixed expression of disgust and fascination of a rubbernecker at a fatal automobile crash.
“Hey, swinging,” Rhoda observed, too flatly. Her brain was reeling. It was simply not possible that Marlene Ciampi, whom she had patronized as being hopelessly naive, could have attained this level of sophistication. Not to mention that Marlene was apparently a delicious source of gossip and scandal of which Rhoda had been completely unaware. It could not be tolerated.
“Um, who was there?”
“Just me and V.T. and Annabelle. And Butch, of course. Naturally, it didn’t get really weird until Guma showed up. Now, there’s a hunk!”
“Guma? You think Guma is a—a hunk?” Rhoda asked incredulously, wrinkling her nose.
“Yeah, well, I guess you got to get to, ah, know him, if you get what I mean.”
“You’re joking.”
Marlene fixed her with a level stare and did her best Joan Crawford. “Darling, you have absolutely no idea. You know, Rhoda, as you get older and more experienced, you’ll find you have certain needs, needs that can’t be satisfied by some pretty boy. The man is a master. What an imagination! Not to mention the equipment!”
“The e-e-quipment?” Rhoda stammered.
“Giganteroso. And indefatigable.”
“Umm, you mean you and, ah, Guma—”
“Did I ever! Oh, he spent most of the evening in a threesome with this pro he brought and Annabelle, but I got my licks in. So to speak.” Marlene started to titter involuntarily and managed to turn it into a dirty laugh. It sounded utterly phony to her own ears, but Rhoda didn’t seem to notice. In fact, as Marlene had correctly judged, Rhoda was hooked. Although she was a habitual petty liar herself, and shrewd enough in detecting the little inconsistencies and fibs of office life, a piece of malarkey as enormous as what Marlene was handing out was quite outside her experience.
“Hmm, but Marlene,” said Rhoda, her mouth dry, “I thought you and Karp were an item.”
“Oh, we are, we are, but what has that got to do with it? Oh, you mean fidelity. Going steady? Like in junior high? Seriously, I mean, it is 1976. We are capable of some sophistication. He has his—how can I put it—his interests, and I have mine.” Marlene finished her face and picked up her bag to go. “By the way, you might consider giving that a fling yourself. Of course, he’s picky. God knows, with his reputation in certain circles he could have any woman in town.”
“Who, Karp?”
Marlene laughed hysterically. “Karp? How silly! No, Guma! On the other hand, he might be a little too piquant for somebody your age. I don’t know. I mean, he had this bag of implements he brought back from Thailand. Annabelle volunteered, of course. I thought the poor woman was going to have a seizure—” She glanced at her watch. “My God, I’m due in Part Thirty-three two minutes ago. See you.”
Marlene ran down the hall and into the stairwell. There she commenced to laugh so hard that she had difficulty negotiating the stairs. Her nose ran, her eyes teared; she gasped and wheezed. Later, going about her grim business in court, an image kept jumping into her mind bringing to her face a loony grin unsuitable to the venue: Rhoda Klepp, naked and wet, flopping around on a sandy beach like a landed salmon—in her mouth, firmly hooked, a cylindrical pale lure carved into the shape of an equally nude Guma, cigar and all.
Guma stood in the men’s washroom, his hair oil, comb, cologne, and deodorant arranged on the edge of the basin while he ran an electric razor over his blue jowls. As he did so, he was smoking the first El Producto cigar of the day, a habit he had pursued since the age of sixteen. It slowed down the shave, especially around the mouth, but he didn’t mind. He did his best thinking at such moments, and at this particular moment he was thinking about Rhoda Klepp and about his approach. He reviewed his standard repertoire: Little Boy, Tough Guy With Heart of Gold, Noble But Injured and in Search of the Right Woman. He doubted any of these would work. Although the personality of the woman was hardly ever a factor in his romantic life, in the case of Rhoda Klepp he had to make an exception. His heart was not in the chase, and where the heart would not go, it was unlikely that the more operational units of anatomy would follow.
He now began to consider how he could weasel out of his deal with Karp. Suddenly he smiled. After all, he had promised only to try. He put down his razor and patted cologne liberally on his face and neck. An elderly court clerk came in to the men’s room and stepped up to a urinal. Glancing at Guma, he said, “Hey, Ray, who’s the lucky girl?”
“Rhoda Klepp,” Guma said. The clerk laughed so hard he had to stop peeing.
An hour later, Rhoda Klepp was talking to her secretary in Wharton’s outer office. When she was done, she turned to go back to her own office. That’s when she saw Guma leaning casually against a wall near a potted palm. He was chewing gum. She gave him what she thought was a cool and sophisticated look. At the same time she was unpleasantly conscious of the flush that was running up her cheeks. He strolled over to her. In a neutral voice he said, “Hey, Rhoda. Wanna fuck?”
“Sure,” she said, surprising the hell out of both of them.
By five, the only item left in Karp’s portfolio was the sealed envelope with the Q and A from Flanagan. He told Connie he was walking over to Police Plaza to deliver something to Chief Denton and that if Marlene called, he would meet her in her office around six. He left the building by the Baxter Street exit. They were still tearing up the pavement, and the sounds of the drills echoed like gunfire through the narrow, walled-in streets. He examined the road and the sidewalk carefully. No blue van, and in any case, with traffic clogged as it was, it would be impossible for a vehicle to follow him on foot. No weightlifter either. Of course, there could be others on his tail. A short, wiry man wearing a brown parka crossed the street toward him. The man scowled and muttered something in an unfamiliar language, then moved on. A threat, or a guy who just remembered he had to pick up the dry cleaning? Karp fought down his paranoia. Taking a deep breath, he started walking toward police headquarters three blocks away, his hand on the envelope deep in his coat pocket.
The old police headquarters, on Centre, was a baroque domed pile easily confused with a church. It had obviously be
en designed, at least in part, to overawe the proletariat with the greatness of the law, or failing that, to hold off an attack in force. The new building was a triangular modern structure that looked like the world headquarters of an insurance company. It was on a street that had been renamed Avenue of the Finest. Hype is cheap.
Karp wasn’t carrying any bombs or weapons, so they let him in and he took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where the superchiefs have their offices. He introduced himself to Denton’s secretary and said he’d like to see the chief for a minute. Her eyes widened in surprise. “You’re Roger Karp? But you’re supposed to be in Bellevue.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The chief just rushed out of here about ten minutes ago. Somebody called from Bellevue Emergency and said they had a Roger Karp who’d just been shot on the street and was asking for Chief Denton.”
Karp’s belly knotted. “OK, there’s some kind of scam going on,” he said carefully, trying to control his breathing. “When the chief calls back, tell him I was here and that I’ll call him later this evening, OK?”
She looked concerned. “Mr. Karp, is there some kind of trouble? Maybe you should stay here. I could call his driver and get the message to him right now.”
Karp merely shook his head. He was holding an envelope containing evidence that somebody high up in the NYPD had tried to destroy a case against a cop killer. Given the phony call from Bellevue, the last thing he wanted was his whereabouts broadcast over police radio.
He left the building and began trotting back to the courthouse. He was not at all surprised when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the weightlifter step out of a doorway and follow him at the same slow trot, like two joggers on the path around the reservoir in Central Park.
The courthouse was closing down when he arrived. The weightlifter did not follow him, but continued trotting past the entrance as if on a more important errand. Karp walked up the fire stairs to the second floor, to one of the vast depositories of court records that occupied almost all of the courthouse’s first three floors. The room was dim and empty. He went to a file cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and yanked out a file at random. People v. Dodd, 1947, a routine burglary. He stuck the envelope in the file and returned it to its place. He knew where it was, but for anyone else it was now as lost as it would have been at the bottom of the Mindanao Trench.
In the main lobby, by the guard’s desk and its metal-detecting frames, Karp made some small talk with the guards, then made a show of checking his wristwatch. “Hey, it’s five-forty,” he said. “Got to run. Good night.”
I’ve established the time of death, he thought, make it a little easier for whoever picks up the case. Walking out onto the wide sidewalk facing Collect Pond Park, he heard a shout and spun around. The weightlifter was running toward him, his mouth open. As Karp started back for the entrance, he heard the pneumatic drills clanging up the street, and a part of his mind wondered why they had started again. Something popped like a firecracker next to him, and he felt a hard jolt in his upper arm.
Then, without quite understanding how, he was lying with his cheek on the cold pavement. His ears were filled with the sound of the drills. His shoulder and side hurt, his nose stung and dripped. Some huge weight was resting on his back. He tried to push off against it, but the pain grew unbearably when he did so.
He opened his eyes and saw gray concrete through a blur of tears. Something hot hit the back of his neck, skittered across his face, and bounced, tinkling, onto the sidewalk. He blinked the tears away. There was a squat brass cylinder lying a few inches from his eye. Dozens more littered the pavement, and as he watched, others fell from above. The deafening racket continued, and he could smell a sharp firecracker stench.
He at last made the connection: somebody was firing an automatic weapon about four inches from his left ear. He heaved upward and tried to roll. He might as well have been under an Oldsmobile. He heard the roar of a large engine and the squeal of tires, and saw the bottom half of a white van tear off down the street. The side was open and a man was lying in the doorway, his arm hanging down, the hand smacking against the roadway. The hand was bright red.
Then someone lifted him off the ground. He was being carried over someone’s shoulder. He saw the pavement swiftly moving beneath. His arm flopped down and he was engulfed in agony. A wave of nausea rose from his gut, and he lost his struggle to remain conscious.
He awoke lying on his back in a dark, shaking, rumbling space. The pain was gone. Instead he felt a comfortable warmth and his face seemed covered with soft flannel. He had spent enough time in orthopedic hospitals to know the feeling. Somebody had given him a shot of morphine. People were moving around him in the darkness. They were talking softly in a foreign language, a guttural, rolling language that was oddly familiar. His mouth was bone dry and when he finally forced a few words out, he croaked.
“What’s going on? What’s—what—”
“Relax, you’re all right now,” said a woman’s voice in accented English.
He tried to sit up, but there was something across his chest holding him down. “What the hell is going on? Who are you?”
Suddenly there was light. Karp blinked and saw that he was in a van, tied to a stretcher. Somebody had just turned on the dome light. Kneeling over him, looking concerned, was a familiar face.
“Leventhal?” he asked in amazement. “The Stereo King?”
“Yes, Mr. Karp, it’s me.”
“But what the hell … what are you, working for the Cubans?”
Leventhal shook his head, then said something in the foreign language. Karp tried to gather his thoughts, but the dope was making his mind slow. The language, what was it? He couldn’t control his mouth. It felt two feet wide. “Crosse? Kwats? Yugo-Yugoslob? Woo?”
The Stereo King reached up and flicked off the dome light. Karp closed his eyes and drifted in and out of drugged sleep for a while. The voices murmured around him. What was that language? It wasn’t Serbo-Croat. He remembered the interviews with the hijackers in the FBI office. It wasn’t German either. Karp’s grandparents had spoken both German and Yiddish. Recalling his grandparents was what did it. Grandparents. Funerals. Shul. The voices in the darkness were speaking Hebrew.
“Goddy?” Marlene Ciampi said, “we got problems and I need your help.” She was amazed at how calm she was. She was also amazed that when Bill Denton had called and told her that Karp had been snatched in front of the courthouse in a hail of lead, she had not told him about her Yugoslavian connection. Which was why she was on the phone with G.F.S. Taylor.
“Why, my dear, whatever is the matter?” he asked.
“Somebody just tried to machine gun Butch Karp in front of the courthouse.”
“Good God! New York gets more Balkan every day. Renko and Peter will feel quite at home soon. You said ‘tried,’ so I presume he’s not dead.”
“No, I don’t think so. But … there was blood on the sidewalk where he was lying.”
“And where were the police?”
“Well, the detective who witnessed the thing was waiting for Karp at the wrong entrance. By the time he heard the shots and ran around the building, the whole thing was over. It couldn’t have lasted more than a minute.”
“I see. And how can I help?”
“Well, there were two groups, see. One tried to whack him out and the other saved him but kidnapped him. It’d be good to know which is which. But I’d lay odds that one of them is Ruiz’s Cubans and the other is—”
“Beg pardon. Ruiz?”
“Oh crap, I’m sorry, Goddy, just some other thugs in this case, a bunch of guys who used to work for the CIA and are doing free-lance evil.”
“Um-hmmm. The CIA, you say. How interesting.”
“Why?”
“Oh, nothing, nothing. Just thought of something. Now, who did you say the other gang was?”
“That I don’t know. I’d sort of like your opinion on whether they could be Yugos.
Maybe Croats.”
There was a long pause on the line. “We’d better talk, and not by phone. Why don’t you come to my place? Half an hour.”
And he hung up before she could say anything more.
In fact, they did not talk much in any case. When Marlene arrived at Taylor’s apartment and they were seated in the stuffy parlor, the old man simply gave her a slip of paper with an address written on it.
“Marlene, do you recall the last time we saw Renko, you asked me whether I had any idea of why Karavitch would become active after all these years, and I said I would try to set up a meeting with a man named Dushan, who might know more about it?”
“Yeah, I do.” She held up the paper. “This is him?”
“Right. I think it’s time for you to see him. And, Marlene, these are very serious, very dangerous people you are going to meet. Not like Renko. But I think that if Croatians are involved in this shooting match today, Dushan will know. More important, he might tell you, provided he thinks he can get something from you in return.” As he said this, his expression was so grave that Marlene had to grin. “Wow, real spies,” she exclaimed, “this is a first for me. Do I have to eat the paper?”
He returned the smile, but faintly. “I’m serious, my dear. If you get into trouble, I’m not sure I have the resources to extricate you. And I’m not sure you have anything to bargain with.”
“Oh, I think I do. I’ve got Karavitch and his friends for starters, which I bet was the reason this guy agreed to meet me in the first place.”
Taylor looked uneasy. “Well, yes, of course. But still, do be careful.”
“Sure, Goddy, I know. Hey, Ms. Caution, that’s me. Don’t worry so much, you’re starting to look like my mother.” Marlene stood up and hoisted her shoulder bag. “OK, I’m going now—”
“Marlene, perhaps we should call in the police—”
“Shit, Goddy! That’s the last thing we need. All we’re after is a little information. Denton’s got enough to do. Besides, if I sit still, I’ll go crazy. No, now I’m really going, and Goddy … ?”
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