Freddy finished his routine, and told them what they were going to eat that evening. No menus at Freddy’s for regulars. He went back to his guard post, and Millie, his daughter, brought bread sticks and wine, the wine in an unlabeled bottle. Marlene drank off a glass of the potent red and felt herself relax. She looked around. Paoletti’s was neither a cop hangout nor a mob hangout, but a place where denizens of either subculture could enjoy civilized dining. No one had ever been shot or arrested in Paoletti’s. This evening two gangsters were entertaining their families at the next table, and beyond that one, by the wall, a couple of senior cops from the nearby police headquarters were finishing a meal.
Her eyes returned to her own table, where she found her husband looking at her and smiling.
“Back on earth?” he asked.
She smiled back. “Yeah. I was a little wound.”
“Like a cheap watch. You know, that’s what Harry’s getting at, Marlene. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about money or business plans. He doesn’t want you killing yourself. Or getting killed.”
Marlene poured another glass of wine. “I’m okay,” she said.
No, you’re not, thought Karp. You’re living the life of a cop without the social and legal underpinning that cops have. You’re doing stuff that’s barely within the compass of the law, and some things that I don’t want to know about because they’re frankly criminal, and I’m an officer of the court and I can’t know about them and it’s a darkness between us, and it’s going to wreck us. This, and similar thoughts, were Karp’s version of those speeches that people long married play out in their heads but do not say to the other, or say, and then the marriage collapses, or is put on a different and better footing. Karp was not ready to take the risk. What he ventured at this time was, “Your name came up today. Keegan asked about you. He wishes you not to shoot anyone in New York County.”
“Tell him I try to keep my blood lust under control. How is he?”
“Flourishing. He likes being the D.A., and he’s good at it. He thinks I’m working too hard, though.”
“Are you?”
“I will be. I’m going to try Rohbling myself.”
Marlene’s wineglass paused halfway to her lips. Her eyes narrowed. “You have to be joking.”
“No. No joke.”
“Why are you doing this? A major trial? Now?”
“Because I think I’m the best person for the job,” said Karp, conscious of the pomposity of the phrase, but too tired to think of another. Besides which, it was true. He went on, “It’ll be a team effort, needless to say, but I want to run it.”
“This is because of his lawyer, isn’t it? What’s-his-face-”
“Waley,” said Karp. “No, it’s not-”
“Yes, it is. It’s yet another of your dick-measuring contests.”
“That’s nuts, Marlene. You know I’d always planned to take a couple of important cases a year. This is the one.”
Millie placed an immense plate of antipasto on the table, smiled at them, heard their usual comments about the impossibility of consuming so much antipasto, and left. The interruption was timed just right. Marlene did not utter the vicious one-liner that had poised itself on her tongue’s tip, but ate a stuffed mushroom, sighed deeply, and said, “I must be getting more mature. In former times, had you dropped one like that on me, darling, I would have accused you of planning this so as to put more pressure on me, knowing that I would pull time away from my work so that Lucy wouldn’t go down the tubes, even though I seem to recall that you just volunteered to spend more time with her.”
“Marlene, I-”
She stopped the attempt at rejoinder by holding up a hand in which flopped a round slice of provolone. “No, no, that’s what I would have said, when I still thought life made sense. What I am saying is as follows. I intend to eat this marvelous meal, drugging my higher faculties with food. I intend to get mildly drunk as well, which I recommend to you also. I intend further to drag you up to our luxurious SoHo loft, where I will attempt to get my monthly or maybe it’s my quarterly lay, after which I will recline in a hot, perfumed tub while you, my dear, get dressed and drive over to the office to get the kids.” “Sounds good,” said Karp, deadpan. “What’s the catch?”
THREE
Marlene’s morning meditation: a thundering speed bag, her flying gloves maintaining the rhythm independent of her conscious mind, which floated in what the Zen people call mushin, a no-thought realm supposedly good for the soul. A final slam, and the squeaking rattle of the punching bag shackle as the bag precessed into stillness. She stripped off her speed gloves and picked up the rope and skipped fast, snapping hard, both feet, alternate feet, five minutes with the sweat flying off her forehead in the air and blackening her gray T-shirt under the arms. By the time she hung it up, she could hear the twins burbling to each other in the nursery next door, and she let herself drift back into real life.
Boxing training was no affectation for Marlene: her father had briefly been a welterweight contender in the forties and had taught all six of his children to box. Marlene was the only one of the three girls who had taken to it, and she had kept it up over the years. Not a Jazzercise girl, Marlene.
She stripped off her sodden shorts and T-shirt, pulled a ragged terrycloth robe over her bare skin, and went into the nursery next door. It had once been Lucy’s playroom, another deeply felt injustice, but what could they do? The loft was large but not infinite, and Lucy was a little old now to need a separate playroom.
In the nursery she moved with dispatch. First, Zak out of the crib (because if she did Zik first, Zak would go crazy, whereas Zik would watch placidly as she tended Zak) and onto the changing table, crooning (Zak, did you sleep well? Yes, you did, yes, you did, didn’t wake up screaming even one little time, what a good-looking beautiful baby, what a yucky monster ugly baby, yes, you are, and so on) whipping the sodden Pamper off and into the waiting plastic bag, quick check for diaper rash, a blown raspberry on the hot little belly, squeals of delight, wipe-off with pre-moistened towelettes, dust with baby powder, new Pamper out, swick-swick, strip off p.j.’s, toss into hamper, into baby T-shirt, back into crib. Next!
Identical twins, Marlene had always thought, were among the most interesting things that could happen to a family, fascinating for the parents, but often a disaster to any other children. Who could compete for attention with such a show? Looking down at Zik as she serviced him (but in a slightly different way, with a different patter than she had used with his brother), she was struck by how differently he had played out the same genetic cards Zak had been dealt. His eyes: the same lovely mahogany, completely different expression. Zak’s eyes said, “Yumm-yumm! Gimme!” Zik’s said, “What’s your story?” Zak was violent motion, quick moods; Zik was a gentle prober, and placid. Now he was touching her lower lip as she taped his Pamper. Zak never did that; punch and slap, yes, but not this delicate palpation.
However, no time to dawdle in naughty maternal eroticism! One babe on each hip, she marched into the kitchen, punched up the lights and placed each boy in his own high chair. She could hear the roar of water from where her husband was up and taking his shower. Briefly, she considered slipping under the steaming spray with him, to renew the stolen passion of the night before, stolen, because the twins absolutely refused to allow them any sexual space. Since the evening they were brought home from the hospital, their subtle oedipal radar had detected even the most careful insinuation of moist organs, at which time both sirens would go off full blast, banishing romance and wakening Lucy. It was uncanny. On the other hand, on the occasions when they did manage a date, their sex had the furtive urgency of an illicit affair. Still reasonably good sex too, for a wonder, after nearly eleven years, Marlene thought, not like it was at first, when they and screwed themselves sore every night, but comfortable, pleasing, married, a checkpoint. (Is it still you? Yes, it’s still me.)
The water stopped; too late, Marlene. In any case, as she well understood,
there was no time for anything that might upset the precise and scientific scheduling of the Karp amp; Ciampi Every Morning Railroad. Two bottles filled and warmed in the microwave (oh, blessed technology!), stuck into two little gobs, and then it was time for Lucy’s first wake-up kick.
“I’m not going to school today,” said a faint voice from beneath the Italian-flag-colored quilt. “I’m sick.”
“You are? Let me feel you.”
“No, I’m too sick to have a fever. I’m past the fever part.”
Marlene reached under the quilt and grabbed a skinny limb, which was warm but not abnormally so, and heaved.
“Ow! Child abuse!”
“It’ll be assault one unless I hear water running and dressing noises in two minutes.”
Marlene left her daughter’s room and walked down the long main hallway of her loft, as always experiencing a thrill of satisfaction with her home. She’d lived here over a dozen years, starting back in the illegal days, and for most of that time the place had been a barely habitable former wire factory. Two years of the big bucks had changed that; Karp’s career with a firm of downtown tortmeisters and a couple of immense wins had sufficed to convert the vast space into a civilized apartment with real walls and doors, central heating and A/C, Swedish-finish oak floors, two bathrooms, and a kitchen out of Architectural Digest with a Vulcan stove and a stainless steel reefer. The building had gone condo in the great So-Hoization of lower Manhattan, and Marlene now owned the place outright. She intended never to leave.
She passed the kitchen in time to see her husband, in his lawyer blue suit trousers, shirt, and boring dark tie, putting on a yellow rubberized apron with prop, bellevue morgue stenciled on the bib. Zak flung his bottle at her and yelled some happy gibberish. She fielded it neatly, wiped the nipple on her robe, and replaced it in its wet, pink hole. Karp extended one of his long arms and snagged the opening of her robe.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I wonder if you’ve seen the woman who gave me that really incredibly great piece of ass last night.”
“Oh, Estelle? She’s with a customer,” said Marlene as a remarkably long finger whipped out to tickle her crotch. She giggled and pulled away. Zak’s bottle flew again, and this time Karp caught it on the fly, and settled down to feed his two sons a jar of baby food each, in precisely alternating spoonfuls.
Showering under the antique brass shower head, nearly the size of a dinner plate, Marlene let the water beat against her face and soaped her body with patchouli soap, allowing herself her usual private ninety seconds for illicit sensual thoughts, making a short list of the men she knew who might serve if the opportunity ever arose, and imagining what it would be-no, time’s up. Off with the water, a quick dry, hair and face slapped together, then dressing in her court uniform: low-heeled boots, a tan calf-length full skirt with leather belt, a maroon silk blouse, a short, loose tweedy jacket. She plumped the pillows, threw a duvet over the marital bed, and left the boudoir, now in full high gear.
To Lucy’s second wake-up, a brief screaming match, while Karp swabbed down the twins and dressed them in determinedly non-matching outfits. Whip some food into Lucy, make her bag lunch. Feed the dog, walk the dog, scoop the dog, run up the stairs with the dog.
Then, the last thing, while her family clumped down the stairs, a walk to the gun safe under the desk in the office that occupied the opposite end of the loft from the master bedroom, and the extraction and donning of her Colt Mustang Pocket-Lite pistol in its black nylon sheath. She clipped it to her belt, reversed, on the left side. Marlene had a horror of someone sneaking up behind her and yanking out the weapon, and preferred to cross-draw if need be. The Pocket-Lite is an alloy.380 semi-automatic pistol that weighs twelve and a half ounces, which in Marlene’s opinion was twelve and a half ounces too much, but Harry Bello insisted that she go armed, given her habit of insisting to enraged men that they could no longer pound on their women. One last check in the mirror to make sure her fashionable silhouette was free of unsightly armament bulges, and then she clicked on the security system, told the dog to guard, and cleared the door, twenty-two minutes after her alarm had gone off.
Marlene’s car, a bright yellow VW square-back of a certain age, was parked in a nearby alley. Her family was waiting around it as she approached, Karp carrying a kid on each hip, a briefcase dangling from a hooked finger, Lucy hunched and sullen. First a little peek at the telltale tiny magnets she’d left on the hood and all the doors, to make sure some naughty person had not left an explosive device. This done, they strapped the twins into their tiny astronaut seats, and Marlene said the little prayer she always said that the car would once again start. Answered. She drove Karp to the courthouse and Lucy to school, and then herself to Walker Street and work. She unbuckled the twins and hauled them out of the car, using the convenient handles of their carapace-like car seats. They were both snoozing, simultaneously for a wonder; they usually alternated naps, to make sure that nothing important escaped their joint eye. She staggered up the stairs to her office with one in each arm and her purse draped fetchingly around her neck, reflecting for the millionth time that rearing twins was not twice, but four times, as hard as rearing one child.
Marlene had now been up for over forty-five minutes without either coffee or a cigarette, and so it was with gratitude that she beheld the face of Sym, who ordinarily supplied her with the morning’s first hit of both.
“Coffee’s ready,” said Sym when Marlene came in, which is what she always said, and pushed forward her pack of Marlboro Lights so that her boss could take one. In the office Marlene pretended not to have cigarettes of her own, as she had officially stopped smoking.
Marlene plopped the car seats on the floor and poured herself a mug of dripped Medaglia D’Oro, tarry black, drank a grateful dose, and lit up.
“You got messages,” said Sym. “Tamara says she don’t want to go to court today. And some lady want us to whack her old man.”
Marlene laughed. “What, she just called up, like L.L. Bean, I want to order a hit, size XL? Did you get her VISA?”
“I told her we didn’t do like that,” said Sym primly. “Also this lady name Edith Wooten called again. I wrote it down.”
Marlene took the message slip and looked closely at the girl. Sym tended to be morose, which many visitors interpreted as hostility, but today she looked as if she was holding something in, or rather, that she was holding in even more than you might expect to be held in by a girl raped at age twelve and turned out as a whore by her daddy.
“Anything wrong, Sym? He hasn’t been bothering you again?”
“Nah. It ain’t, it isn’t me.”
“Who, then? Posie?”
A tiny shrug, which would have to do in place of a deposition. It was Posie, but Sym was not going to rat her roommate out.
“Okay, Sym, I’ll take care of it.” Marlene picked up the twins and headed for the door, which buzzed and clicked. In a low voice, to the closing door, Sym said, “You look real nice today, Marlene.” She was in love, something Marlene would never see and Sym would never reveal.
Marlene took the twins to the playroom and placed them on the rug. Posie came in from the kitchen, barefoot, in ragged jeans and an old sweatshirt of Marlene’s. She beamed at Marlene and the twins.
“They’re sleeping!” she said, as if it were a scientific discovery.
Marlene’s answering smile was stiff. “Yes, lucky you. Look, Posie, we need to talk about you running men in here at night.”
“Oh, no, Marlene, I wouldn’t do that,” replied Posie, lying with crystalline transparency.
“Yeah, you did. Look, kiddo, I don’t mind what you do on your off time, which is nearly every night and most weekends. Go ahead, knock yourself out, get laid, whatever. But not here. Who was it? Luke again?”
Posie had, as far as Marlene was able to observe, only two emotional states: beaming, all-encompassing love and mulish withdrawal. She now flicked into the latter. “Uh-huh, no,” she replied, h
anging her head so that her long, lank black hair partially hid her face.
“Posie, listen to me. Our job is to protect women from men who want to get at them, just like when Luke was pounding on you-we protected you, we gave you a job and a place to stay. You pick up guys on the street, they could be anybody. They could get into our records, copy keys, burn the place down. It’s a breach of security.”
Ah, a third state: confused alarm. “Aw, Marlene, Luke wouldn’t do nothing like that!” Posie protested, and then blushed and stammered, “I mean-I mean, if he was here. Not that I saw him or anything.”
“Posie, not only did you see him, but you smoked dope with him.”
“Uh-uh!”
“Oh, for crying out loud, Posie, I can smell it on your clothes. No, just be quiet and listen to me. I told you, I don’t care what you do on the outside, although I can’t believe you’re seeing that little shit again-”
“He was nice to me, Marlene. No kidding! He’s really changed. He got a job and all-”
“… that little shit again, unless you want to give him a shot at knocking the rest of your teeth out, but not here. Never again, Posie, I mean it! And no dope here either.”
The twins started to wake, whining. Marlene walked out as Posie’s pathetic excuses and apologies blended with their more appropriately infantile wails. She looked into Harry Bello’s office and found him on the phone. Waving a greeting, she went into her own cubicle, took off her coat, sat down, lusted for another cigarette, regretted yelling at Posie, yearned for a child-care worker who was not a street person, felt guilty about this, briefly considered the alternatives (sullen third-world types, day-care centers with restrictive hours), dismissed these, thought about how marvelous Posie was ninety-nine percent of the time, sighed, and dialed the number Sym had written down.
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