Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The woman expended her final bullet and clicked the traveler switch to bring the target home. They both looked at it. “Am I getting any better?” Savitch asked doubtfully. Like most New Yorkers, she had never fired a pistol before. She was a short woman, somewhat overweight by the standards of the fashion magazines, with a pleasant, intelligent, forty-ish face. Her blond-streaked light brown hair was arranged in a stylish flip cut. She was wearing a maroon jersey over the skirt to her gray suit. An ordinary New York woman of the moderately successful professional classes, two young sons in an apartment in Peter Cooper, formerly married to a guy who turned out to be a maniac. It happened, more often than people supposed.

  “You’re doing fine,” said Marlene, although in truth she did not think there had been much improvement over the last half box of rounds. One of Marlene’s people, Lonnie Dane, usually took this duty. Dane (now, unfortunately, running a touchy assignment) was a gun nut who really thought that being able to put five holes through a playing-card-sized area at twenty-five yards was as important as the ability to tie up one’s sneakers, and he was a good, patient teacher, and a man, which Marlene, to her dismay (she being a good enough feminist) found that most of her clients (all female) really preferred. The remarkable things about Marlene and guns were (in ascending order of improbability): she thought they were necessary to her work; she hated them; she was a crack shot. This last had come as a considerable surprise—that she shot like an expert the first time she had ever picked up a pistol. Dane had assured her that, while rare, such things were not unknown in gun circles. Marlene had already used this skill to kill three men, and more than practically anything else in this world, she wished never to have to do so again.

  This was, in fact, a prime reason for the training. Four years previously, on leaving the D.A.’s office, Marlene had started a private security agency for the express purpose of protecting women from the deadly attentions of men. Ninety percent of this work was paper shuffling and phone calls—arranging for protective orders, urging the police to enforce same, riding herd on the prosecution of villains, or a kind of social work—encouraging women to get out of violent situations. When this did not work, in perhaps nine percent of her cases, Marlene moved bodies, supplying women and their children with new homes, in apartments if they could afford it, or shelters if they could not, and new identities when required. Marlene was also not averse to engaging in heart-to-heart talks with the men involved, explaining in some detail what would happen to them if they did not lay off. Often this worked.

  It was the remaining one percent that caused Marlene the most trouble. This small fraction consisted of men who would not be dissuaded by the law or by Marlene’s threats. Some odd derangement of their brains had conflated love with absolute possession, so that if they could not have access to their chosen one on their terms, they would eventually kill her, any children that happened to be convenient, and, ordinarily, themselves afterward. Marlene preferred that they die before rather than afterward, and since she could not afford to mount a perpetual watch on the women in question (for the proportion, while small, represented in a city the size of New York a considerable number), she had started the gun classes.

  Strictly speaking, this was illegal. New York does not approve of its citizens carrying concealed weapons, and Marlene tended to agree. New York makes an exception for retired cops working private, security guards, and storekeepers, but not usually for women in fear of their lives. Marlene’s scam was to “hire” Joan Savitch and her other clients in similar straits as “trainees.” They paid Marlene a fee, and she trained them as bodyguards, each of whose sole client was herself. Thus they could carry guns under Marlene’s ticket, just like Wackenhut’s square-badge legions.

  “Let’s forget about the .22 now,” said Marlene to her trainee. “The statistics tell you that most people who get shot get it from a range of seven feet or less. The main thing here is not to turn you into Annie Oakley, but to get you used to firing a serious pistol.”

  Savitch pointed at the .22. “This isn’t a serious pistol?”

  “No.” Marlene opened an aluminum suitcase lined with foam fingers and brought out a Smith & Wesson Airweight Model 49 and a box of .38 Special IP hollow-points. “This is a serious pistol. A .38, two-inch barrel, weighs a pound and a half loaded, got a shrouded hammer so it doesn’t catch on anything. Load it up and try it.”

  Savitch took the thing, grimacing as she felt the solid weight of it, and filled the cylinder. Marlene clipped a new target to the traveler and sent it down-range, but only for about ten feet. Savitch took aim and fired a round and yelped.

  “Yeah, it’s a lot louder. You have to get used to it. You’re going to have to shoot a couple of loads with the earmuffs off too.”

  The woman shot off the rest of the cylinder, in two-round bursts as she had been taught, nicely chewing up the chest area of the man-shape. Still a crummy pattern, but Marlene was mainly interested in her pupil’s ability to get off large-caliber rounds without flinching. She had the woman reload and fire again.

  “How do you like it?” asked Marlene.

  “I love it,” Savitch said with an edge in her voice. “Do you have it in beige?”

  “Yeah, right,” said Marlene. “This is what we do instead of Tupperware. Want to try some more?”

  “No, I think I’m all shot out today.” She placed the pistol—thud—on the shooting stand and turned away from the target.

  “That’s your gun, Joan,” Marlene said gently. “You have to take it with you. No,” she added as Savitch started to put it in her purse, “you have to load it. It don’t work without the bullets.”

  Savitch started her cry then, during which Marlene held her and tried to say all the right things, thinking it was better she got this over with now, and also that she, Marlene, was perhaps the only woman in the city who regularly left for work with a supply of both bullets and Kleenex.

  “I can’t do this, Marlene,” she said, snuffling. “I really … I just can’t!”

  “Uh-huh. Well, maybe you can’t. I can’t make you do it, and in fact, even advising you to do it is probably illegal. All I can do is make it possible for you to protect yourself, and advise you as to your rights of self-protection.”

  Marlene disliked the sound of her own voice, too dull, too lawyerly, as she generated these necessary and familiar words. “You know that your ex is getting out of prison on Tuesday, after serving five and a half for first-degree assault. On you. Before that he served an eighteen-month sentence for second-degree assault. On you also. After that first stretch he went directly to where you were living and committed the crime for which he did the second stretch. Okay, so what do you think he’s going to do the minute he gets off the bus at the Port Authority?”

  The woman seemed to ignore the question. “I can’t do it,” she wept. “I … just … can’t.”

  “Yeah, that’s a possibility. Some people can’t,” Marlene agreed.

  Savitch glared wetly at her. “It doesn’t seem to bother you.”

  “What? Wait, you think I like this? You think this is fun for me? I hate this. The only thing I hate worse is when the guy kills the woman and the kids before he shoots himself.”

  Renewed crying. Marlene led the woman to a metal folding chair and sat her down in it. She knelt beside her and held her hand. “There’s something wrong with his brain, Joan. I wish there was something we could do for him besides what we’ve been talking about, but I don’t know of anything. The law kind of stalls out on stuff like this. It frowns on locking people up for things they’re probably going to do. But the law allows you to protect yourself with deadly force under a particular set of conditions. If you’re accosted on the street, unless you’re in imminent fear of your life or of grievous bodily harm, you have to retreat. You can’t just spot the guy across the way and shoot. If he approaches with a weapon, then you are in immediate fear, et cetera, and you can use deadly force. In your home or place of work, you’re under no
obligation to retreat. If he refuses to leave, you can shoot him. And, Joan? This is very important. If you draw a gun, you must be prepared to use it. It’s not the movies, where you have a conversation while you’re pointing. Draw bang bang, just like we’ve been practicing. Do you understand?”

  Marlene wasn’t sure if this was penetrating at all.

  “Joan? Do you understand what I’m telling you? This is a legal alternative to imminent death or serious injury to you or someone else. Like your kids.”

  “I could leave. I could hide someplace.”

  Marlene kept her tone neutral. “Right. And there’s a woman I know who helps people in your situation do just that. I’ll put you in touch with her if you want. I don’t want to sell you on something you’re not completely comfortable with.”

  “Why don’t you?” asked the woman, reaching for some theme that would distract her from her predicament.

  “Do get-aways? Because I have a moral objection to asking an innocent person to live in terror for the rest of her life. You have a life here, your job, your kids’ school, your friends and relatives. You could give it all up and trade it for the chance he won’t find you out in Tucson or wherever, but I personally think that’s wrong. My thought is, you defend your life, you make your stand, with deadly force in the last extremity, if and when deadly force is being used against you.”

  Savitch nodded woefully, and after another fifteen minutes of quiet talk, Marlene got her together enough to face the street. She had scheduled another two sessions, after which Joan Savitch would be on her own. Marlene hoped she would do the unpleasant thing and put enough bullets into her ex-husband to make him dead, but she also knew that, oddly enough, women involved with men like Gerald Savitch often declined to defend themselves, even in the face of imminent death. She was a good deal less optimistic about her work now than when she had started, and also about the possibility of any simple resolution of the politics of sex.

  After bundling her client into a cab, Marlene went back into the range and set up a fresh silhouette target, and sent it twenty-five yards down the lane. She composed herself and took a few deep breaths. Then she pulled her own pistol out of a cross-draw holster on her hip and shot the target twice. She replaced the pistol and did it again. And again. Marlene used a Colt Mustang .380 Pocketlite, which at twelve and a half ounces—about the heft of a set of pliers—was the smallest serious weapon she had been able to buy. She punched the traveler switch and brought the target back. Its upper arms were decorated with neat pairs of holes, very close together. This was another part of Marlene’s plan for not killing anyone anymore. Combat shooters are taught to fire at the center of mass, and that is what Marlene taught her clients to do as well. But Marlene was interested in reliably shattering the bones and nerves of the upper arms, which was a lot safer for the target, if also a lot riskier for the target’s target. Marlene did not care; let the women do the killing, was her thought.

  She shot off the rest of her box in this way, then packed up and left. Marlene crossed Tenth, walking in the quick, aggressive manner of the born New Yorker, swinging her aluminum case. She was wearing jeans, a black turtleneck jersey, a navy pea coat, and black Converse high-tops. Now in her early thirties, Marlene remained a semi-beauty; although the startling bloom of her youth was gone, she still had the bones, the oval, strong-featured face beloved of Baroque sculptors. She still wore her hair as a tumble of thick black, neck-length curls, skillfully cut so as to draw attention from the left side of her face, where the eye was glass. Marlene had a wiry, muscular body, not quite that of a flyweight in training but close; she worked out with boxing bags and ropes every day, as she had since childhood.

  Marlene’s car, a venerable VW square-back in yellow, was parked illegally as usual, and as usual the old D.A. placard had kept the meter maids away. In the luggage space in the rear of the car lay a Neapolitan mastiff, coal black, red-eyed, and of prodigious size and excellent training. It responded to commands in Sicilian and answered to the ridiculous name of Sweetie.

  Marlene entered her car and drove off to the south. She turned the radio on and then snapped it off again. Instead, she sang to herself. She had a decent, soft contralto. She sang a verse from the old Billie Holiday song: “If I don’t call no copper, when I get beat up by my poppa, ain’t nobody’s business but my own.” Yes, indeed.

  Lucy Karp waited outside the old building on Mott Street that housed the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and its famous Chinese school. It irked her that she had to wait to be picked up, as she was less than a quarter of a mile from home, but she understood that her mother had enemies who might try to hurt her. Lucy was the only Caucasian person in her class at the Chinese school, which had been founded to transmit Chinese culture and language to the children of immigrants. Why the authorities had allowed her entry was something of a mystery, although Lucy thought that it had to do with the net of favors both her father and her mother had bestowed in the past and might bestow in the future to various residents of Chinatown. Besides this, the elders of the association had allowed themselves to be charmed by the idea of a gwailo child who spoke their language so well, rather as they might have been charmed by a performing dog, and Chinese-American parents were wont to use her example as a rod to inspire their less willing offspring to excel in their studies.

  The accomplishment had not been anticipated, although Lucy had been playing with Chinese children since before kindergarten, picking up Cantonese. It had turned out, much to her own and her parents’ surprise, that Lucy had something of a genius for languages. Besides Cantonese (in which she was perfectly bilingual and now affected a slangy Hong Kong accent) she had learned Mandarin in school, spoke enough Sicilian to impress the few remaining speakers of that tongue in Little Italy and delight her aged great-grandmother, and was working successfully on several other tongues.

  She slouched against the wall, swinging her book bag, chatting casually with other students and people she knew. Chinatown is a tight community, and Lucy was mildly famous in it; people would actually seek her out to converse in Chinese with the prodigy. But, of course, Lucy was not actually Chinese, not bound by the loving, merciless bonds of family and clan, and her demeanor was not all that could be wished from a young girl, the lowest and most useless of the ten thousand things, not sufficiently deferent at all, which was why, when the young people said her name in Cantonese they slightly lifted the tone of the first syllable so that it came out almost as lóuhsai, which in that language is a less-than-respectful word for boss.

  Lucy felt a hand on her shoulder and started, and then relaxed and smiled when she saw who it was, a reedy oriental man in his early fifties, dressed in a cheap plastic raincoat over a navy blue suit and a white shirt, tie-less, buttoned to the collar. He looked at first glance like a clerk in one of the many trading firms of the neighborhood, but closer inspection would have made that assessment unlikely. For one thing, his face was curiously scarred, in particular by an indentation in the skull behind his right eye, as if someone had battered it in with a pipe. The hand he laid on the girl was scarred too, its nails malformed and yellow. And he did not move like a clerk.

  “Cháo ông, Tran,” said Lucy.

  “Cháo cô, Lucy,” said Tran Vinh, and he continued in Vietnamese. “How was your day in school? Did you study hard?”

  “I studied sufficiently,” said Lucy in the same language, sliding past the question. School was a bore, and she studied just enough to keep out of trouble. Learning Chinese or other languages was no work at all, so she preferred to devote her energy to that. Unfortunately, this is often a consequence of special genius. “Can we go for goûter, Uncle Tran?” she said, switching to French. He had taught her French in four weeks, much to her mother’s annoyance, since she no longer had a private tongue for discussions with Tran. Tran worked for Marlene in various capacities, some of which required a good deal of privacy.

  “Of course, my dear,” said Tran. “Noodles or cake?”r />
  They continued down the street, holding hands, chatting in a mixture of French and Vietnamese, she asking for translations of things seen and thought of, he answering, making small jokes. He was happy, more than he could recall being for a long time. The girl was about the age his daughter had been when she was killed, along with his wife, by American bombs. After that the war and hope for victory had kept him alive, and after the victory, when the northerners had purged the people who had led the war in the south, especially those like Tran who came from old bourgeois families, nothing had kept him alive, except his apparently indestructible body and a mild desire to see what the next day might add to an already incomprehensible life. That he now found himself amanuensis to a remarkable woman and bodyguard to various other women and to this little girl was a situation no stranger than the rest of his life, which he had begun with the desire to teach French literature in a Saigon lycée and raise a family. Now he no longer thought of making plans beyond the day, beyond sharing a little meal with this child and walking her home.

  Lucy, for her part, was as fond of Tran as she was of any adult besides her parents. He taught her things, he was amusing in three languages, and he did not treat her like a baby, which her father, for all his many virtues, still did. At ten, Lucy had entered that period when the interior life is first discovered, the period to which many intelligent women look back across the bleeding battlefield of sex as to a golden age. She had always been a somewhat secretive child, but now she fully inhabited a world separate from that of her parents, and resented their intrusions into it, especially those of her mother. Lucy loved her mother dearly and admired her to the high heavens, but would have preferred a mom who was not, by profession, a detective. Thus she cherished her outings with Tran, a man at home with secrets, a man from a world utterly outside the conventional tedium of home and school, a man with the air of those mysterious characters that appeared in the fantasy novels she had recently discovered and now devoured in stacks. She knew, of course, that Tran was a … no, not an assassin, but someone who could efficiently and calmly kill. She had the previous summer observed this with her own eyes. She accepted this as she accepted, in the reasonable manner of children, the presence of violence and danger in her own life, as a child living near a pulp mill accepts the stench or the daughter of coal miners will come to ignore the omnipresence of black grit. On a similar level of subconsciousness she understood that Tran loved her and would do, within very broad limits, what she asked, and would not necessarily tell her mother about it. This knowledge contributed in no small way to her already remarkable self-confidence, similar to that exhibited by children in fairy tales who come into possession of a genie.