Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp smiled sourly. “Ah, Goom, you always make my day, a little inspirational message. But, seriously, on Morilla, frankly—what’s your take?”

  Guma shared a narrow-eyed glance. “Frankly. Well, I work for the guy, and he’s a friend, but since it’s you, and it’s not gonna go any further …” He spread the fingers of one chunky hand and waggled the hand on a horizontal plane. “It’s fucked. I don’t know what Roland’s thinking here, going with this case. Huerta’s going to cream us.”

  Karp nodded. “Manny Huerta’s on D?”

  “Uh-huh. The little fuckers at least know to buy talent.”

  “Hmm. Roland tell you he’s been getting threatening letters?”

  Guma frowned. “No. About the Obregons and Morilla?”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t sound like Huerta, though, does it? He’s a scumbag dope lawyer, but he’s a stand-up scumbag dope lawyer. Christ, all he really needs is a couple of citizens confirming the Obregons’ story about that phony police raid, and they walk behind the theory that the gun was a frame-up.”

  “Right, if the jury doesn’t buy Netski’s story,” said Guma.

  “Yeah, but Netski does not contribute powerfully to my comfort level.” They were silent for a while, thinking about Ray Netski. Netski was a narcotics cop and, like many such, was often a witness in homicide cases. On a particular one of these occasions last year, Roland had caught him in a larger than usual fib, that is, a fib just outside the wire in the fairly wide sway given to police testimony by prosecutors and the courts. If a couple of cops followed a guy into an apartment to talk to him about an acquaintance recently slain with a sawed-off shotgun, and if during the interview a cop gently teased open the door of a closet and lifted up a dirty shirt with his toe, and discovered a twelve-gauge Remington with ten inches missing from the barrel, and thereafter swore on the Bible that the said weapon had been in plain view when they were invited in, as required by the Fourth Amendment in warrantless searches, the D. A. would not normally gag on the morsel. Netski’s sin had been considerably greater than that, involving actually moving a weapon from one place to another. Roland, no stranger to such tricks, had caught him at it, had copped the suspect out to a lesser, and then had done nothing else, which is what he almost always did when he caught a cop lying. Roland liked to have cops on his gaff, and in Netski’s case the hook was sunk good and deep.

  Karp cleared his throat heavily, and said, “Um, Goom, you don’t think that, ah … Roland … ?”

  “Ah, shit, no! No fucking way!” replied Guma in outraged tones. “Nah, what I think is they found somebody else’s setup and it was neat enough to believe it, and they sort of kissed each other through it. Roland fell in love with it—it’s his first cop killer since he’s been the chief, right? And he wants to show, like, velocity here, and Netski bought in for sloppy seconds, like he’s saying, Oh, yeah, Roland, it turns out Morilla was closing in on a couple of Mexicans. What’s he gonna do anyway, contradict the guy who saved his butt? It happens. Not usually with a guy who’s as good as Roland, and as wised up as Roland, but since he took over, Roland’s … what can I say? Not Roland. He don’t have you to grab him by the belt anymore, maybe.” He snorted and seemed, if such a word could be used in connection with Guma, embarrassed.

  “Unfortunately, he does,” said Karp, almost to himself. “So—anything else?”

  “Not really. Carrozza says there’s a name floating around. Lucky.”

  Karp snorted a laugh. “Lucky? Is that the one that hangs out with Lefty and Blacky?”

  This forced another grin onto Guma’s wide mouth. “What can I say? We’re talking about an un-fucking-believably tight little dope operation. They came, they dumped, they scored, they’re gone.”

  “They popped Morilla and framed the Mexican brothers.”

  “I didn’t say that, Butch,” said Guma after a meaningful pause. “The Obregons are the defendants in Morilla.”

  That was it, then, a lot more than he would have extracted from Czermak, who, unlike Guma, retained ambition. Karp rose and said, “Thanks, Guma. This helps.”

  Guma’s eyes slid away. “Hey, don’t thank me,” he said, “we never talked about it.”

  Lucy Karp was thinking in Cantonese, something she did often, and with pleasure. It had been her first foreign language, almost a cradle tongue, and she still loved the sound of it in her head, the rolling burr and gong of it, and the music of the tones. It was in Cantonese that she first had discovered, almost as early as her memory went back, that when there was a different language in your head, you were a different person, you could think thoughts you couldn’t think in another language. In Cantonese there was a whole world of puns and tone and syllable connections that did not exist in English. Her Chinese friends did not, to her surprise, seem to have this sense of wonder. Later, when she discovered that she could pick up other languages—to date, Sicilian, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese—with hardly any effort, and that other people could not do this, and that they found it strange, even disturbing, it made her glad, and she had grown her odd little personality around this difference.

  She was sitting in the backseat of the yellow VW reading a book her mother had bought her as a reward for being good about clothes (she was wearing a blue wool jumper over a yellow turtleneck jersey, with navy tights and Adidas, part of the recent raid on Bloomies). The book was The Story of Language, and from it she had learned that one could actually get paid for learning languages, and for thinking about how languages were connected and analyzing their structure, which information had blown all thoughts of other potential careers (cowgirl, detective, spy, nun) clean out of her head. Next to a loving family, such an early vocation is about the best thing that can happen to a child, and Lucy had become a happier person since: calmer, sweeter to her little brothers, more tolerant. The book was a permanent resident of her backpack, along with a Petite Larousse, an old red-bound Mandarin-English dictionary, a Vietnamese-English phrase book lent to her by Tran, and The Catcher in the Rye. Lucy read dictionaries and grammars like other girls her age read Judy Blume, and she never forgot anything she read.

  Just now she was reading through a brief discussion of the history of linguistics in the nineteenth century, of, to be exact, the brothers Grimm and their discovery of consonant shifting among the European languages. Lucy was reading this in English, thinking about it in Cantonese, and listening, with a fragment of attention, to a conversation going on in the front seat between her mother and Tran, which was being conducted in French. She did this with no more thought than she would have given to the coordination of her various muscle groups while skipping rope.

  The conversation was becoming somewhat strained: the parties had begun addressing each other as Madame and Monsieur. Lucy had noticed her mother’s irritation on being picked up after Chinese school, and this seemed to increase after they had driven up to retrieve Tran from some mission in Clinton. When her mother was irritated, Lucy had noticed, she often expressed it by attempting to exert minute control over an unruly world. It was not pleasant being the object of such control, and Tran was becoming stiffer and colder in his locutions. Lucy paid more attention. It was, she gathered, a stupid argument about a surveillance Marlene wanted done. Marlene was giving him precise instructions instead of just telling him to do it, as she ordinarily did.

  “… take the whole roll,” she was saying, “and make sure you get the license plate number. Can you use a telephoto lens?”

  Tran made the hissing sound he uttered when he was annoyed. “Madame,” he snapped, “I wish that you would stop treating me like an incompetent, and asking me if I can do this or that simple thing. It is insulting.”

  “I beg your pardon, Monsieur,” replied Marlene in a similar tone. “I was not aware that you could do everything in the world.”

  Tran turned away and said something in Vietnamese to the side window.

  “Pardon me, I did not hear that,” said Marlene.

  “It was nothin
g, Madame!”

  “He said, ‘I cannot yet menstruate, you foolish woman,’ ” supplied Lucy without thought.

  They both turned and stared at her, gaping, and were called back to reality only by the blare of a car horn. Marlene had drifted over the center line and had narrowly missed a careening taxi. She cursed and dragged the VW back into lane, almost sideswiping a truck. More horns. Marlene pulled into the right lane, and at the next red light she said, “Jesus, I almost killed us! Tran, I’m sorry, I’m nervous and disturbed.”

  “I had noticed, Marie-Hélène,” he answered dryly. “Is there something I can do to help?”

  “No. I’m sorry, actually, yes, yes … but we must talk of it at length, without the presence of an injudicious infant.”

  “I am not an infant,” said Lucy in French. “I am a linguist.”

  “Yes,” said her mother, “but sadly, because of your unfortunate personality, probably unemployable as a diplomat. Are you enjoying that book?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Lucy politely. She had noticed that her French self was more elegantly mannered than her regular self. She wondered whether this was a quality of the tongue itself, or because she was still not entirely comfortable in it, or because the language she had learned from Tran was not a street argot but the French of the schoolroom, with Tran’s colonial accent. She was more polite in Cantonese too, but since her mother did not speak Cantonese, this was wasted on her. She continued, “In any case, I have no desire to be a diplomat. I intend to be like Mezzofanti.”

  “Who?”

  “Cardinal Mezzofanti was the greatest linguist who ever lived. He’s in the book. He knew a hundred and seventeen languages perfectly. Once he learned Swedish in forty-eight hours, so well that he spoke it better than most Swedes.”

  This was one of Lucy’s apparently unlimited supply of conversation stoppers, so the three of them rode in a restful silence the rest of the way to the East Village Women’s Shelter.

  The first thing Marlene noticed when she entered the shelter was the new smell. Instead of the usual institutional pong of fry grease, disinfectant, and old tenement, there was a waft of fresh bread baking and an undertone of exotic spice, as of some oriental market. Tran slipped away to the kitchen to investigate the source. Marlene inquired of the proprietor.

  Mattie Duran grinned and replied enthusiastically, “Yeah, ain’t it grand? Every so often the street tosses up a pearl. The kid walked in last week, middle of the night, soaking wet. She’d been sleeping in Tompkins Square. Anyway, it turns out she’s a baker, and the rest is history. I’m gonna gain thirty pounds.”

  “I thought you didn’t take runaways. Or do you make exceptions for bakers?”

  Mattie frowned. “Yeah, well, she’s a runaway, but there’s a difference. It took me a couple of hours to get the story out of her, she lied like a trooper, but you know me …”

  Marlene nodded; she did. Mattie never judged, but she would not be lied to by any of her wards.

  “Her name’s Fatyma, she’s an Arab kid from Brooklyn. Her daddy sounds like he got him a thing about keeping her cherry in one piece. She says he chained her up every night as soon as she started growing tits and getting interested in boys. She wants to be an American in the worst way, but let me tell you, she knows nothing, I mean zip, about how things work in the States. Anyhow, the old man was about to ship her off to marry some old guy in the Middle East, so she lit out. Says she spent some time up on the Deuce ripping off Johns.”

  “She was on the stroll?”

  “Not according to her, and I believe her. She was an armed robber, technically. Fourteen years old.” She snorted, as if to express her opinion of the way men had screwed up the world. “Anyway, she ran foul of some pimp and he sent muscle after her, and she stuck a blade in his gut and ran.”

  “So she’s a killer? Is this, ah, wise, Mattie?”

  “She didn’t say she killed him, so she’s not a killer in my book,” said Mattie dismissively. “I got no reason to believe the cops are after her. Besides, she’s not a resident—she’s staff. I gave her a job and that’s it.”

  Marlene had to chuckle. It was a typical Duran solution, full of humane criminality.

  Just then the door to the little office burst open, and in came Lucy, breathless and leading, or rather, being led by, the black mastiff, which she had been walking.

  She greeted Mattie enthusiastically, and they had a brief conversation in Chicano Spanish. Lucy and the Mexican woman were fond of one another. Mattie enjoyed the occasional presence of a sprightly child who was not the product of a marriage made in hell, which was all she usually got to see. For Lucy’s part, Mattie was the only actual cowgirl-like personage Lucy had met so far and, in addition, knew a foreign language and was willing to teach it, nearly always a compelling recommendation. And there was one other thing.

  “Can I see your Colt?” asked Lucy, as she always did.

  “Sure, pardner,” said Mattie, smiling. She reached into her desk and pulled out her family heirloom, an actual .44 Peacemaker.

  Marlene was at the moment distracted by the troublesome thoughts that had clouded her mind since leaving Harry earlier that day, and so her shouted “No!” was somewhat too late. As soon as the big revolver appeared in Mattie’s hand, the great dog growled and leaped across the desk, knocking Mattie off her chair and onto the floor, where she lay screaming curses at the ceiling, with her gun hand gripped in the vast, hot, spiky cavern of its mouth.

  Marlene ordered the animal off and into a corner, and helped Mattie to her feet, apologizing profusely. Lucy was sent off to return Sweetie to the VW. The two women went off to the kitchen for some restorative coffee and pastry.

  “I ought to sue you,” said Mattie. “That fucking dog! Do you know a good lawyer?”

  “An oxymoron. Honestly, thank God you’re all right! I was in outer space, or I would never have let you pull that hog-leg Colt out. He doesn’t need a command to take out anyone he thinks is pointing a gun at me. Is your back really okay?”

  “I’ll live,” said Mattie. They entered the kitchen, which smelled like the anteroom to Paradise, and Mattie introduced the beaming, flour-spattered olive-skinned girl. Tran was seated at the table mashing pistachio nuts in a bowl. The two women sat and drank coffee and ate little cakes made with honey and almonds, light and delicate as blossoms. Mattie brought up the Valone woman again, and this time Marlene, feeling she owed one for the dog incident, relented and said she would help.

  “So what’s on your mind, chica?” asked Mattie.

  “What’re you thinking about so hard I almost got ate by your dog?”

  “Oh, just business problems. My partner and I don’t see things the same way. He thinks we should merge with a big security firm and that I should lose all the fringe stuff.”

  “Fringe stuff like me?”

  “Since you ask, yeah.”

  “Him’s the one you should lose, chica. What you should do is come in with us, work full-time out of the shelter.”

  “Yeah, well, I need to think it through. My life in general …”

  Mattie sniffed and struck herself solidly between her substantial breasts. “You think too much. There’s women who need your help, who got nobody else. You know that in your heart. You should go with the heart. Fuck all the rest of it!”

  Marlene had heard this speech before, of course, and had taken it in as the usual Mattie rhetoric, but now that Harry was pushing her into a decision, it cut more deeply. Did she really want to devote her life to this kind of work? She was a wife and mother with three children, after all. She was a feminist, whatever that meant nowadays, of course equal-opportunity and abortion rights and all that good shit, but she didn’t follow it all the way, not by any means. She despised the whining about the oppressive patriarchy from privileged college professors. She didn’t hate men, the poor saps. What she really liked was the tense, amphibious structure of her life, being both a good Catholic mom and an armed femi-semi-terrorist. Th
is was hard to explain to the utterly committed like Mattie, or her husband. She thought briefly of the smug advice she had given him about picking his team and cringed inwardly; she was just as bad; no, worse.

  Lamely she said, “I’ll think of something,” and after that they were mainly quiet, watching the baker girl. She was rolling out filo sheets by hand, something Marlene had never tried to do herself. As the girl worked, she hummed and sang snatches of a mournful-sounding song in what Marlene supposed was Arabic.

  It was warm in the kitchen, and Marlene felt herself relax for the first time since leaving her office, with baking smells and the rhythmic rolling and grinding going on, and people drifting in to talk to Mattie or get coffee. The shelter seemed to run on its own time, in a slower and more traditional pace, like a tiny medieval court—the barbarians raging outside, and within, the inhabitants maintaining a precarious peace, preparing food, caring for children, having their lives. If, as Mattie urged, she followed her heart, Marlene thought that she would choose this over what she referred to privately as heavy metal: the high-technology guarding of the rich for some big firm. On the other hand, she had a brain, and a good one. This worldlet partook more than she liked of what Marx called the idiocy of village life, the dullness of the incompetent poor. She watched the girl roll out the translucent dough and wondered idly what she was thinking.

  This is what: Fatyma was reasonably happy. She had endured a terrible fright and some miserable nights living out in the park with the weirdos, without even the knife to protect her, afraid to sleep at all. She had abandoned her suitcase, with all her recent purchases in it when she fled, and now owned nothing but the clothes she stood in, plus the wad of money sewn into a pouch inside her jeans. She missed her two books most of all, although she comprehended now that as a complete guide to the culture of the United States they left much to be desired. But she was safe; the woman had assured her of that, safe from her family and from the police. It was very much like living in the village in the occupied territories, better really, because there were no men ordering everyone about. Here there were only mothers and their children, fleeing as she herself had. This made her miss her mother and her little sister, but she thought there would be a way to get a message to them after a while, when she was far away and rich. The Duran woman paid her a good salary, and she had no expenses to speak of, so the savings would grow quickly. The baking was easy, although the oven was not right, not a true baker’s oven; but she had been baking since she could stand, and she could work around that. Her English was improving. She could watch television all she wanted, real television, not just tapes, and listen to the radio too. She felt lucky to have stumbled on the place. She wondered what had become of her first friend, Cindy.