Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Khalid left the hallway and went through a large, modern kitchen to a door, which he unlocked, and then descended to the basement. He then unlocked another door and entered a small darkened room, where a man sat on a couch, smoking and watching television. The man had a short gray-black beard, deeply socketed dark eyes, visible now only as pits lit by the flickering TV, and long, tapering, elegant fingers. He was wearing a white djelaba and a white, knitted skullcap. He did not take his eyes from the TV as Khalid spoke.

  “It is Ali.”

  “Inevitably,” said the bearded man. “The poor lad has nowhere else to go. Tell me, he is our only contact?”

  “Yes. I ordered him not to tell, and he is an obedient boy. Dull like the rest, but reliable. I don’t think he would have spoken of it to Naijer or Mahmoud. He didn’t like them. He was most friendly with Walid, but, of course, Walid did not participate, and will not be much bothered by the police, if God wills. So … a long journey?”

  “Yes, by water,” said the bearded man. For the first time he looked up at Khalid. “And the other enterprise?”

  “They arrive tomorrow, men and supplies. It is all arranged. If God wills, it will all go as we have planned.”

  “If God wills,” echoed the bearded man and then returned his full attention to the screen, where a drama depicting the lives of the police was in progress. Apparently the American police spent much of their time seducing women, which was interesting if true. The bearded man watched television almost all the time. He felt it was the best way for him to understand this truly amazing nation.

  Dismissed, Chouza Khalid went up the stairs, locking both doors behind him.

  TWO

  The office of the District Attorney for the County of New York (that is, the island of Manhattan) has for years, and with some reason, considered itself the best prosecutorial organization in the nation. Within this office the Homicide Bureau is the elite corps. The chief of this unit, therefore, has every right to consider himself at the very top of his profession, and the current chief had no trouble doing so. He had worked hard for the job, and he felt he deserved it. His name was Roland Hrcany, and he did deserve it. He was an excellent homicide prosecutor, tough-minded, skilled in the law and its stratagems, on excellent terms with the NYPD, and possessed of both a bullish determination and a keen political sense. As for his vices, he was, in the office, perhaps too fond of throwing his weight around, too quick to judgment, too slow to admit error, and in the personal sphere too fond of women way too young for him (he was thirty-seven), of whom he had a prodigious skein.

  Had Roland been at all capable of self-examination, he might have found an explanation for both virtues and vices in his own sad history. Aged eleven, he had walked out of the Hungarian forests across the Austrian border, holding his father’s hand. His mother had fallen to one of the innumerable bullets fired during the confused days of the 1956 rebellion. Settled at last in New York, the elder Hrcany (once a high school teacher) had found work as a superintendent of a building in the rough Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York, also moonlighting as a truck driver. Roland, then a spindly, nervous kid, had been sent to public school, where his fate was what might be expected for a smallish boy speaking broken English, with a funny name and studious to boot, among what was then a rough Irish and Italian crowd. He was tortured, with no one to tell about it. His father was working like an ox in the good old immigrant way, and Roland could not bear to bother him. Instead, inspired by an ad in the subway, and without telling anyone, Roland joined the Boys’ Club, where there was a weight room. By the time he was fourteen, Roland, though still short, had a seventeen-inch neck and could bench 220. Nobody bothered him in school anymore. He also joined the Police Athletic League, where he began his lifelong love affair with the NYPD, and also excelled at football.

  Meanwhile, his father had taken to capitalism as one too long deprived of its healing magic. Saving every conceivable penny from both his jobs, he managed to buy the building he worked in, and then immediately used his equity in this as collateral to buy a shabby brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Working nights, with Roland at his side, he renovated it, sold it, bought another. He had a good eye for gentrifying neighborhoods, in an era when it was hard to lose money in New York real estate. By 1968 he was a millionaire, and when the stock market went sour that year, he bought everything he could at distress prices. Now he was a multimillionaire, semi-retired, living in a duplex penthouse on Sutton Place with his third wife, who was three years older than his son.

  In whom he was disappointed. He could not understand why a boy so bright would want to labor for a pittance in the bureaucracy, like the despised apparatchiki of the Soviets, when there was so much money to be made in America. Nevertheless, the old man was generous. Roland lived rent-free in the first floor of one of his father’s buildings, a brownstone in the east Seventies, had substantial trust income, and could use his pittance salary for fun.

  An odd history, then, and Roland cultivated an appearance to match. He looked like a professional wrestler, or what professional wrestlers would look like if they wore beautiful hand-tailored, European-cut suits. He wore his white-blond hair swept back and long enough to reach his collar, and kept his face tan and his body rippling with layers of stony muscle.

  In contrast, the man sitting across from him this morning, two weeks or so after the Shilkes killing, was a native of the City, and had been reasonably well off since birth, although he was not ordinary in appearance either. He had been the previous incumbent of the position Roland now held, before being kicked upstairs to a vague and (Roland believed) meaningless sinecure: Deputy District Attorney for Special Projects. His name was Roger Karp, answering still to the name “Butch,” although this was a faintly absurd name for an enormous, serious man in his late thirties, which he well knew, but still, he stubbornly kept it. In fact, he was the same age as Hrcany and had started at the D.A. in the same week, back in sixty-eight. Since they were the two standouts in their class, they had maintained a friendly rivalry during the intervening years, sometimes not so friendly. Roland, it must be said, had difficulty being friends with men whom he could not dominate at some level, and he could not do this with Karp. First, the physical thing: Roland was five-eight, and although he could now bench nearly four hundred pounds, this did not compensate for Karp being nine inches taller. Roland had been a varsity football player at Penn State, making up in sheer strength and will what he lacked in height, but Karp had been an all-state basketball star, and an all-conference player at Berkeley, and had played part of one season in the NBA. Second, at work too Karp had been always half a step ahead, his win record not much better than Roland’s, but undeniably better. He had lost but one murder case in his career, a politicized monster that was what had gotten him kicked upstairs, leaving the job to Roland. This rankled, but what rankled most of all was that Karp did not, by word or action, recognize, nor had he ever recognized, that any competition was going on at all.

  They were talking now, sports and light shop talk, Roland waiting with growing irritation for Karp to spit out what it was he had come down from the D.A.’s office to learn or tell. Yet another rankle: Karp should have been castrated by his promotion-demotion. In the D.A., trying and winning cases was the way you weighed the testicles, especially in Homicide, and Karp did not try or supervise the trying of cases anymore. He was really just an overpaid office boy for Jack Keegan, the D.A. He should have been diminished. He was not. He seemed, on the contrary, more relaxed and happy than he had in the past. Roland yearned for Karp to tell him to do something he didn’t want to do, so that Roland could get angry and rush upstairs to Keegan and get Karp reversed, thus demonstrating the difference between an essential bureau chief and an exiguous staff drone. But Karp never did.

  Roland now reached for the needle. “So, Butch, keeping busy? All those important meetings? Saving office supplies? Who gets their place painted first? Affirmative action?”

  Karp smiled. “Oh,
yeah, there are a lot of meetings.”

  “You better watch it, you don’t become a lard-ass. A lard-ass your size would be a terrible thing. They’d have to upgrade the elevators.”

  Karp kept the smile. “You know, Roland, now that you bring it up, Jack asked me to mention affirmative action to you.”

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “Nope. You have one black man and two women as attorneys here. Felony has six and twelve. There are rumblings.”

  “Fuck the rumblings!” snapped Roland, his face starting to flush. “Not to mention who I inherited this staff from.”

  “Good point,” said Karp equably. “You can profit from my mistakes. But the point is, it’s your staff now and you need to make an effort.”

  “Okay, fine! Give me the fucking quotas and I’ll go down the hall and hire the first ones I spot. Do I get to use two-fers?”

  “Just make an effort, Roland. Build a record. Interview from the entire spangled rainbow that is our great city. Keep records. I’m sure you can do it.” This was said in an even, almost tired tone. Roland realized that Karp was treating him like just another recalcitrant bureaucrat. He found himself grinding his jaw.

  “Oh, and another thing …” Karp continued. “Jack wants to know who’s going to handle the Shilkes trial. I said you’d probably go with Ray Guma or Tony Harris.”

  “No,” said Roland instantly, off the top of his head. “I’m going to do it myself.”

  A pause. Karp said, “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything, Roland,” Karp replied. “ ‘Uh-huh’ is an acknowledgment that I’ve understood your statement and have no opinion about it. Why are you, by the way?”

  “Taking the case? Why not?” He rolled his shoulders and flexed his biceps, a habit of his when under tension; the cloth in the arms of his shirt made a small but audible creak. “What, you don’t think I can win it?” Roland said this with a challenging scowl.

  “Not at all. It seems like a straightforward case.” Karp answered the scowl with a benign look. “Anything else doing? How are the Mexican brothers?”

  “Ah, the Mexican brothers! Jesus and José are fine, Butch. I’ll tell them you asked after them. It’ll brighten their day.”

  Karp’s smile grew a little strained, as it does when we spend time among people for whom sarcasm is the natural mode of discourse. “I assume they’re still denying.”

  “You assume right. Somebody else killed that cop. Somebody else fired the shot that killed the cop from José’s gun and dropped the gun in their apartment. And ripped them off. The usual horseshit, we din do nothin’. They’ll go down for the murder one.” Then, suspicious again, “Why? Jack doesn’t think I can handle this either?”

  “I didn’t even imply that, Roland,” said Karp, starting to lose patience. “A cop killing’s always on the top of his to-do list until the trial’s over. There’s no chance they’re telling the truth, then?”

  “None.” He grinned. “You want to hear the cherry on top? They tried to bribe me.”

  “Yeah? How much?”

  “A hundred K. They call me over to Rikers, me and Frank Czermak, I figure, great! Finally they’re going to give it up, so I get there and Jesus says, okay, you get us out, fifty K, cash. I look at Czermak, like I can’t believe I’m hearing this, and they whisper for a minute, and then the offer goes up to a hundred. I tell them it’s a crime to bribe a public official, and they kind of smile, like, oh, yeah, right. I mean, these guys think they’re still in Mexico. A cop gets in your way, bang, bang, and then you fix it with the judge, with the prosecutor, and it’s back to business.”

  “That’s quite a story. It’s just my luck to get canned from the job before the real money starts getting passed around. I’d feel a lot better, though, if we had a witness, or some evidence besides the gun. Also, I noticed the forensic report on the gun says there are nice prints on the bullets that don’t belong to either of the two Obregon boys.”

  Roland was surprised that Karp knew this; it meant that Karp was following the case details at least as closely as Roland himself was. Roland didn’t like this at all. He put on a cajoling expression and said, “So they used a gun loaded by persons unknown. Who gives a shit? It’s the gun that killed Morilla, and José’s prints are all over it.”

  Karp gave Roland a long, uncomfortably searching look. “So that’s still the case, a gun and zip else?”

  “Come on, Butch! They’re dope dealers. They got a Mexican sheet as long as your arm. They come up here with a suitcase of brown smack, they try to sell it to Morilla, they find out he’s a cop somehow, and they waste him.”

  “So where’s the smack, Roland?”

  “The fuck I know!” replied Roland, flushing again. “They moved it. Shit, maybe they shot it up. It’s not germane to the case, and anyway…”

  Roland was about to get seriously angry, because Karp had put his finger on the flaw in the Mexican brothers case, which Roland knew all too well, and on which every cop that could be spared in Manhattan was working: who were these scumbags, how did they get connected with Morilla, who was working undercover on something entirely different, where was the dope that Morilla was supposedly going to buy from them, where was the marked money that Morilla had for the buy? Roland changed the subject to one where he felt an undoubted superiority to Karp, which was sex. Karp was chained to a wife and three kids, the wife seriously over the hill now, must be thirty-five, and one-eyed, and with a screw loose.

  “So, how’s the family?” he asked, slyly smiling. “How’s Marlene?”

  “All fine,” said Karp. “Marlene’s doing okay. Business is booming.”

  “So to speak. She hasn’t shot anybody else recently?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Karp uncomfortably, after which Roland regaled him with a detailed accounting of his own recent date with a model whose image, clad only in designer undies, was plastered over nearly every vertical surface in the City. Having gotten back on top, as he imagined, Roland made a show of checking his watch, a Le Coultre made from a twenty-dollar gold piece, and said, “Well, Butch, I’d love to chat, but unless you have any more little messages from upstairs, I got a bureau to run. Don’t you have another meeting?”

  Karp rose. “Always a pleasure, Roland,” he said, and left.

  He nodded to some of his former bureau colleagues as he left the office. They seemed not to miss him very much, he observed; not one of them clutched his knees and tearfully pleaded for him to return. Karp had to admit that Roland, despite being a male chauvinist, demi-racist son of a bitch, was much more popular around the bureau and the D.A.’s generally than Karp was. Roland was extremely charming when he wanted to be, a quality Karp lacked. He flirted with the secretaries and clerks, and was lavish in his distributions of birthday flowers and candy and purchases of pastries for the coffee room. The cops and the younger assistant D.A.’s seemed to prefer Roland’s hearty obscenity to Karp’s graver demeanor, and his histrionic rages to Karp’s icy contempt. A cold fish, was the book on Karp.

  These thoughts did not much engage Karp as he ascended on the elevator to the D.A.’s suite on the eighth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. His life had moved into a quiet harbor after a decade and a half of the most extreme combat his society offered for professionals not actually carrying firearms, and he was content to let the weed and barnacles accumulate on his hull. He liked his boss well enough, and the job itself, though tedious, was, as his wife often remarked, indoor work with no heavy lifting.

  He gestured inquiringly at Marcie O’Malley, Keegan’s iron-faced, iron-haired guard dog, who looked up from her typing and waved in the direction of the door. Karp knocked perfunctorily and went in.

  The district attorney was on the phone. Karp sat on a leather couch, selected a Sports Illustrated from among the publications lying on the coffee table in front of him, and leafed through it until the call was over.

  “That w
as John Haddad,” said the D.A. He rose from his desk and walked over to sit in a club chair near the couch. Keegan was a big man with white hair and a broad pink Irish face. He still moved, at sixty, like the fullback he had once been at Fordham.

  “You know who he is?” Keegan asked. Karp did not. “He’s a city councilman from Brooklyn. A leader of our fine Arab community. He doesn’t want a lynching. I assured him that the suspects in Shilkes would be treated precisely according to law, and that I would encourage the judge in the case to be tyrannical with the press, and that absolutely, positively we would not attempt to denigrate the Arabs during our presentation, and that there would be no damaging leaks to the press from this office. The usual. What did Roland have to say?”

  “What he always says. Everything’s okay, the case is a lock, and would I not bother him. He’s taking it himself, by the way.”

  This last was received as Karp knew it would be: reddening face, flashing of blue eye-sparks, muttering of curses. “Why in hell is he going to do that?” Keegan demanded.

  “Oh, I think that’s pretty clear. Last year I took a big political case, which I shouldn’t have as bureau chief, and lost it. He’s going to take a big political case, which he shouldn’t as bureau chief, and win it. It’s important to Roland to show me up.”

  “Of all the asinine things …”

  “Hey, boss, that’s part of the package with Roland. God bless him, he’s a hell of a prosecutor, but he does carry a ruler along when he goes to the John, make sure he’s still got the longest dick.”