Reckless Endangerment

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Karp, “not until you find out who was in that van. Remember, this bastard’s fighting a war with our other pals. Where’s Marlene now?”

  Fulton listened to the chatter on the radio for a moment. “They just hung a left on Central Park South.” A long pause. “They’re heading south on Ninth. They’re coming here.”

  “That’s what I thought she’d do eventually,” said Karp.

  “She? I hate to tell you, Butch, Marlene’s not in charge in there.”

  “Oh, no?” said Karp.

  Ibn-Salemeh, lost as he was in rueful thought, did not pay any attention to the oriental man and the little girl when they entered the luncheonette until he heard himself addressed in French.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I believe we are acquainted.”

  The Arab looked up, scowling, and answered in Arabic, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” To his immense surprise, the little American girl answered in Palestinian-accented Arabic, “We can speak in Arabic, if you prefer. I would be happy to translate.”

  Tran grinned as the Arab’s jaw dropped, and he slid into the seat opposite. Lucy sat next to him. He continued, in French, “In fact, sir, I believe you do speak French, for I well recall many long conversations we had about our plans to overthrow the imperialist yoke. Moscow, 1965. You were using the name Feisal at the time. Feisal Anani, if I recall. I was using Pho Nguyen Binh. Do you remember now?”

  Ibn-Salemeh felt his mind skidding like a Buick on glare ice. It could not be that a senior Viet Cong cadre in the company of an American child who spoke Palestinian Arabic was sitting with him in a restaurant in New York, chatting about a meeting in Moscow fifteen years ago. An insane coincidence? It had to be.

  Ibn-Salemeh smiled and shrugged, and answered, again in Arabic, “Please, I cannot understand what you are saying.”

  Lucy translated this into French. Her eyes were shining, and she had to concentrate hard to maintain the correct posture and deportment.

  Tran said, “You still don’t remember me? Ah, how quickly we forget our idealistic youth! Once I too thought it was amusing to set bombs and murder innocent people. Now I prefer to kill only the guilty.” Tran saw the man tense at the word “bomb” and thought, in another two seconds he will push the table over on me and run, and so he brought his Tokarev pistol out and pointed it at Ibn-Salemeh.

  “Should I translate that, Uncle Tran?” asked Lucy.

  “No, it will not be necessary. We have come to an understanding. There must be a phone here. Please go and call the police.”

  She went off to call, and Ibn-Salemeh said, in French, “Why are you doing this? After what they did to you? The bombs? The tortures? What kind of man are you?”

  “I often wonder,” answered Tran pleasantly. “Once I had attachments to my homeland, and in my dreams I still do. But my attachments in this life were all severed. The Americans killed my wife and child, and the rest of the people I cared about were destroyed after the war, by people who were not too unlike you, sir. Now I have formed attachments here in this remarkable city, that little girl among them, and I must object to bombs that might hurt them.”

  “Bourgeois sentimentality!” snarled Ibn-Salemeh.

  “Précisemént!” said Tran, beaming.

  Marlene said, “You don’t have to do this, you know. I could take you to a hospital.”

  El Chivato looked at her through the red tunnel that represented the dregs of his vision. “They would never let me out of jail.”

  “But you’d be alive. That’s something. You could see your mother again, and your sisters.”

  He curled his lip, speaking slowly around quick, shallow breaths. “You are a fool if you think I would allow my family to see me in prison.” He stared out through the windshield at the front of the Terminal Hotel. It was a five-story dirty brown brick building with a heavy vertical sign and double glass doors leading to a small lobby. There were no cars parked on the street in front of it and no sign of a police presence within. Outside, of course, a solid line of police cars blocked off both Ninth Avenue and Fifteenth Street in both directions.

  He’s going to shoot me now, Marlene thought. It’s the end of the line for him, why shouldn’t he take me along? She tried to compose her thoughts. What a terrific life I’ve had, she thought, and now no worries about cancer or Alzheimer’s. She prayed briefly, waited. She opened her eye and stared into the red-rimmed blankness of El Chivato’s gaze. This poor bastard, she thought. What a fucking life!

  “Please,” she said, “live.”

  He reached into his coat and brought out a crumpled envelope. “Send this to her. I didn’t have no stamp.” She took it. He said, “Get out of the car!” and she did.

  El Chivato slid over to the driver’s seat, gunned the engine, and drove directly toward the glass doors of the Terminal Hotel. He crashed through them into the lobby. There was an instant’s hush. Marlene discovered her knees no longer worked. She sat down on the curb.

  Then the automatic fire started, and it went on for a very long time, a continuous roaring clatter. Marlene bent over and put her hands over her ears. Later, she learned that he had managed to shoot five cops, but since they were all armored like Ivanhoe, no serious damage had been done, and also that the medical examiner had found 126 bullet holes in his body, a NYPD record.

  Cops surrounded her. One of them was Raney, in a flak vest.

  “We solved the case, Raney,” she said inanely.

  “Yeah, kid, we did,” he said gently and led her off.

  It took several hours to reunite the family Karp. The police insisted on taking Marlene to a hospital, which was standard procedure for hostages. At the luncheonette, a heavily armed assault team arrested Ibn-Salemeh without incident, but they also arrested Tran for possession of an unregistered weapon, as a result of which Lucy threw a fit so violent that she was taken to juvenile detention. Karp and Fulton raced around town with screaming sirens, gathering up first Marlene, then Lucy (Marlene had to be physically restrained from striking a social worker), and finally Tran. Karp dropped the charges against him so hard it made the walls shake.

  At a little past six, then, the Karps, Tran, and Fulton arrived at Crosby Street in Fulton’s car. As none of them had eaten since the morning, Marlene invited them all up for a feed. Posie greeted Marlene at the door.

  “Marlene! God, what a day! You’ll never guess what happened.”

  “Try me, Posie,” said Marlene wearily. She had almost completely forgotten the girl during the day’s interesting events.

  “There was a bomb in Walid’s truck.”

  “Really!”

  “Yeah, no lie. We ran like crazy. Walid’s afraid to go home, his old man’s gonna kill him. Marlene, it was like the movies. We’re just driving along, and these Arab guys put this, like, rolled-up tarp in the truck, and I go over and there’s a guy in it. And we like open it up and it’s this dude Chouza Khalid that Walid knows from before, and he tells us about the bomb, and we let him loose and then we booked out. God, I was scared!”

  Fulton and Karp and Marlene exchanged looks. Marlene asked, “So what happened then, Posie?”

  “Oh, we went into this place to sit down and, like, figure out what to do. Khalid was really on a downer because, like, these guys had ripped off all his bread and his ID and all. So I said, hey, the lady I work for like can help you out, because these women? They’re running from guys beat them up and stuff, and she like gets them away and maybe she’d help you too. And he goes, I don’t have any money, and I go, shit, she does it for free. And he goes, what about the cops, and I told him, hey, she doesn’t mess with the cops and they don’t mess with her. So they came back here and I, like, warmed up that Chinese stuff from the other night for us. I hope that’s okay.”

  Marlene took a deep breath. “That’s fine, Posie. Are you saying that Chouza Khalid and Walid Daoud are here? Right now?”

  “Yeah,” said Posie, her smile saggin
g slightly. “You said I could entertain my friends in my room sometimes, and the boys are fine. I figured they would be at Larry’s, and I checked in there and …”

  “It’s fine, Posie. I tell you what: I think we’d all like to meet your friends. Clay? Why don’t you lead the way?”

  On Easter Sunday, Marlene took her kids out to Ozone Park to spend the holiday with her family. There was an egg hunt in the tiny backyard for the twenty-odd cousins in Lucy’s generation, and it was a tradition important enough to Marlene that she was willing to stand the grilling from her folks about her recent exploits, and to bear the associated load of guilt. (“What’re you, crazy! I almost had a heart attack! Your father couldn’t eat!”) Karp had to work. Chouza Khalid was spilling his guts out at the jail, and Karp had first dibs, and every agency from the Brooklyn D.A. to the CIA was lining up, hat in hand, for a taste. Rabbi Lowenstein held his march without either incident or publicity, the media being fully occupied with the capture and shoot-out stories. The Muslim march never developed.

  On Monday, Marlene cold-cocked a TV reporter who was trying to interview her child. The reporter insisted to the policeman on duty in front of the Karps’ loft that he arrest her for assault. He declined to do this, having seen not a thing, but he did confiscate the cameraman’s tape as evidence, which tape later proved to be completely blank. The press got the hint, and after a day or so the Karps were left alone. On Tuesday, Rabbi Lowenstein was arrested along with several young Israelis, and accused of conspiring to firebomb the Daoud shop and two other Arab businesses. He gave an impassioned speech at his arraignment, comparing his arrest to Kristallnacht, but this was not much covered by the press.

  On Tuesday, the United Jewish Philanthropies announced that their $25,000 reward would be given to Tran Vinh and Lucy Karp for the capture of the terrorist chief.

  Marlene thought this hilarious. “What are you going to do with all that money, Tran?” she asked.

  “I believe I will invest it in stocks,” he replied after due consideration. “I will first determine which companies are best at grinding the faces of the poor and exploiting the oppressed masses of the Third World. These, I have heard, are the ones to choose.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Marlene.

  On Friday, Karp came home from a hard day (he was doing his regular job and helping out with the preparation of the case against Ibn-Salemeh, who still insisted he was a Lebanese businessman named Ali Ibrahim Mansoufi and knew nothing of any bombs, and keeping an eye on Homicide while Roland Hrcany was laid up), sat down to dinner, and looked down in amazement at the steaming bowl his wife placed before him.

  “What is this?” he inquired.

  “What does it look like?”

  “It looks, smells, and”—using his spoon—“tastes like matzo-ball soup.”

  “It is matzo-ball soup. I went down to Rivington Street today and got an elderly kosher chicken for the purpose, and your daughter sculpted the balls with her own semi-Jewish hands. How is it?”

  “It’s incredibly good. Thank you, Lucy.” He paused. “Is there some special reason for this that I’m missing?”

  “Well, as it’s the first day of Passover, I thought it’d be nice to recognize the other half of your children’s heritage.”

  “It is nice,” said Karp, abashed. “Are we going to have seders from now on?”

  “Not unless you want to,” said Marlene. “I just primed the pump.”

  Lucy trilled some Mandarin and translated: “Respect for ancestors is the basis of character.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Karp, which seemed to satisfy the moment, because Marlene smiled and handed him a postcard. “This came today.”

  Karp took it. It was a picture of the famous Hollywood sign, white letters on a hillside. On the back it said: “Dir Luci: I am fine. Im having apratment in Hollywood hills and boyfriend in movie busnis. He thinks im eiteen ha ha. His gets me serin test soon and I will be star soon too. On day I com see you. Bye bye. Yor freind, Fatyma.”

  “Well, well,” said Karp. “I guess we should contact the authorities out there. Technically, she’s a fleeing felon. Old Khalid claims she lifted around two hundred K off him, quite aside from the manslaughter charge we had pending.”

  “You wouldn’t!” said Marlene.

  “I’ll think about that too. What’s this Arabic stuff down at the bottom?”

  Lucy got her dictionary and consulted it. She said, “It means, ‘Everything has transpired according to the will of God.’ ”

  A BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT K. TANENBAUM

  Robert K. Tanenbaum is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five legal thrillers and has an accomplished legal career of his own. Before his first book was published, Tanenbaum had already been the Bureau Chief of the Criminal Courts, had run the Homicide Bureau, and had been in charge of the training program for the legal staff for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. He also served as Deputy Chief Counsel to the Congressional Committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. In his professional career, Tanenbaum has never lost a felony case. His courtroom experiences bring his books to life, especially in his bestselling series featuring prosecutor Roger “Butch” Karp and his wife, Marlene Ciampi.

  Tanenbaum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, and remained at Cal, where he earned his law degree from the prestigious Boalt Hall School of Law. After graduating from Berkeley Law, Tanenbaum moved back to New York to work as an assistant district attorney under the legendary New York County DA Frank Hogan. Tanenbaum then served as Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the Congressional investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

  The blockbuster novel Corruption of Blood (1994), is a fictionalized account of his experience in Washington, D.C.

  Tanenbaum returned to the West Coast and began to serve in public office. He was elected to the Beverly Hills City Council in 1986 and twice served as the mayor of Beverly Hills. It was during this time that Tanenbaum began his career as a novelist, drawing from the many fascinating stories of his time as a New York ADA. His successful debut novel, No Lesser Plea (1987), introduces Butch Karp, an assistant district attorney who is battling for justice, and Marlene Ciampi, his associate and love interest. Tanenbaum’s subsequent twenty-five novels portrayed Karp and his crime-fighting family and eclectic colleagues facing off against drug lords, corrupt politicians, international assassins, the mafia, and hard-core violent felons.

  In addition to the twenty-six Butch Karp legal thrillers, he has published two nonfiction titles: The Piano Teacher (1987), exploring his investigation and prosecution of a recidivist psychosexual killer, and Badge of the Assassin (1979), about his prosecution of cop killers, which was made into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum.

  Tanenbaum and his wife of forty-three years have three children. He currently resides in California where he has taught Advanced Criminal Procedure at the Boalt Hall School of Law and maintains a private law practice.

  Tanenbaum as a toddler in the early 1940s. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York.

  A five-year-old Tanenbaum in Brooklyn, near Ocean Parkway.

  Tanenbaum’s family in the early 1950s. From left to right: Bob; his mother, Ruth (a teacher and homemaker); his father, Julius (businessman and lawyer); and his older brother, Bill.

  Tanenbaum’s high school varsity basketball photo from the ’59–’60 season. He played shooting guard, center, and forward, and earned an athletic scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued to play.

  Tanenbaum shooting during a basketball game his junior year of high school. He wore the number 14 throughout high school and college.

  Tanenbaum’s senior portrait. In addition to basketball, he also played first base for his school’s baseball team.

  Standing outsid
e a courthouse in downtown Manhattan are Tanenbaum, James Woods, NYPD detective Cliff Fenton, and Yaphet Kotto. Woods and Kotto played Tanenbaum and Fenton in the 1985 movie Badge of the Assassin, based on Tanenbaum’s book of the same name about a real-life murder mystery in 1971 Harlem.

  Seen here in the late 1980s, Mayor Tanenbaum poses with Ed Koch, then mayor of New York City, while Tanenbaum’s son Billy stands in front wearing a hat given to him by Koch. The two mayors were meeting to discuss a tourist exchange program between Beverly Hills and New York City.

  While mayor of Beverly Hills, Tanenbaum awarded Jimmy Stewart, seen here, with this proclamation of Outstanding Citizen of Beverly Hills in the late 1980s.

  Tanenbaum and his wife, Patti.

  Tanenbaum with Patti and their children Roger, Rachael, and Billy at home in California.

  Tanenbaum’s author photo, which has graced the covers of many of his books.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1998 by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  cover design by Karen Horton

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-1030-7