Act of Revenge

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “They definitely did a deal. The feds rousted Joe Pigetti out of the La Roma restaurant twenty minutes ago.”

  “See, that’s what we get for being honest guys. We get to finish our lunch.”

  Fulton said, “You thinking now you should’ve grabbed him when you had him, maybe.”

  “Not on the terms he was offering. Next time I grab him, he won’t be doing the bargaining.”

  “You’re mighty sure of that, considering you got jack shit solid on the man.”

  Karp resumed his lunch, leaning forward, saying between bites, “Clay, the guy’s dirty. All you got to do is find the dirt.”

  “Oh, we’ll look, all right, but it’s Chinatown. And I thought I taught you to avoid betting on the come.”

  “I have perfect faith in your talents,” said Karp, balling up his waxed paper and napkin and tossing it ten feet into a trash basket.

  A shadow fell on them, and they both looked up to see a ragged, ashy black man pushing a shopping cart full of stuffed plastic bags. “Spare some change, brother,” the man said to Clay.

  Fulton pulled a money clip out of his pocket, peeled a single off, and gave it to the man. “Take care, pop,” he said.

  “Pop yourself,” said the man. “You old enough to be my daddy.” He rolled his establishment away, grumbling.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” said Karp.

  “You said it, man, and to think that at one time that guy was an assistant district attorney. The man just wouldn’t stop betting on the come.”

  Karp laughed and pointed with his chin across the park. “No, there’s the lawyer. See her legal pad?” It was the old woman Karp had met previously, sitting in the shade of a tree, scratching away with her pencil. She raised her head, peered across the dusty lawn, made getting-under-way motions, and waved to Karp. Who rose hastily and said, “Clay, I got to go before she comes over here and starts bending my ear. She’s got me confused with the court of appeals. Keep in touch.”

  The call from Freddie Phat’s watcher came in at a little past three, and about five minutes later Tran got the word that the Vo gang had dragged a blanket-wrapped bundle into their Brooklyn house. It took him forty minutes to drive his motorcycle from Manhattan to Avenue J in Brooklyn, via the Battery Tunnel and Ocean Parkway. He parked across the broad boulevard, crossed it, and walked up to the door of the modest two-story semidetached house. He rang. He saw part of a face looking out through the slats of a venetian blind in the front window. The door opened, and the large Vietnamese who opened it scowled and said in halting Cantonese, “Fuck! Where you been, man? They went looking for you.”

  “The girl is here?” asked Tran.

  “Yes. I must go page my brother now. Wait here.”

  He turned to go, but Tran did not wait. Instead Tran slid his great big Colt .45 Commander out of his waistband and slugged Sharkmeat over the head with it. The man grunted and dropped to his hands and knees. Tran kicked him hard in the short ribs, and he fell over onto his side.

  Tran quickly knelt and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into Sharkmeat’s ear.

  “Where is she?” he asked in Vietnamese. Blood seeped up around the grinding muzzle, covered the front sight blade, and filled the little channels of Sharkmeat’s ear.

  In a while, Sharkmeat told him where, and also that he was alone, even volunteering that the door was locked with a padlock, the key for which was hanging on a nail by the basement door. Tran whipped out a pair of heavy-duty plastic cable ties and trussed the man up hand and foot.

  “What took you so long?” asked Lucy, who was waiting at the door when Tran burst through, she having heard and interpreted the unpleasant noises that had lately come from above.

  He looked at her face a moment and said, “Who did this to you?”

  “It’s nothing, Uncle Tran, really. Let’s just go.”

  He grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her roughly behind him, up the stairs and to where the Vietnamese lay bound.

  “Him?”

  “They all did, come on, Uncle . . . no, don’t do that, please, please!” Struggling, she managed to get between Tran and the bleeding man, so that Tran had to stop hitting him with his pistol, and knelt, breathing hard, like a blown horse.

  Tran wiped blood and bits of broken tooth from his pistol barrel on Sharkmeat’s shirt front, and then he stood up, grabbed Lucy’s wrist again, and pulled her out of the house and across Ocean Parkway, Lucy protesting and demanding to be released all the way. Tran lifted her onto the pillion seat, cranked the motorcycle, and sped northwest to the Battery Tunnel. After reaching the Manhattan side, Tran turned into a narrow side street and stopped. He reversed himself on the seat and faced Lucy, his eyes terrible.

  “How?” he demanded in Vietnamese. “How were you captured, and by the Vo brothers, too, who are turtle heads, crude thugs—how?”

  “I found the book, Uncle Tran. And I was reading it, translating it, on the subway, and I got too caught up in it, I guess. . . .”

  “On the subway? You were reading on the subway? You are supposed to watch on the subway. You read behind locked doors. How did they take you on the subway?”

  “They didn’t. I mean, I spotted them after I missed my stop, and then I ran but they grabbed my bag and I followed them out . . .”

  “You followed them? Did I understand that you followed them?”

  “Yes, see, they took my bag. With your Tale of Kieu in it . . .”

  Tran grimaced and stuck all his fingers in his mouth and chewed them, growling.

  When this fit concluded, he shouted at her, “Imbecile child! For a book? You put your life in danger for a book? Are you insane!”

  And then, of course, Lucy did what she hadn’t done yet, which was break down and blubber like a three-year-old, the deadly fear boiling up now that she was safe, but also because of the unfairness of Tran, to be angry with her when she had saved his relic, and so he had to comfort her, dragging her down the seat and pressing her against his small, iron-hard chest, and stroking her dirty, damp curls until she was calm again. He gave her a clean handkerchief to mop herself up, and he said, in gentler tones, “My very dear idiot child, we must decide what we are to do now. The Vo will be angry about this, and they are as relentless as hungry dogs. I cannot guard you every minute of every day. Therefore, we must remove the Vo.”

  “You intend to kill them?” she asked, a mixture of awe and disgust in her tone.

  Tran rolled his eyes. “Of course I don’t intend any such thing. Where do you get these ideas? No, we must go to the police and they will arrest them. They committed very serious crimes, and it will be better for us if they are in prison.”

  Lucy gaped, astounded. It was like hearing that the president of Pepsi was thinking about putting Coke machines in the corporate headquarters snack bar. “The police! We never go to the police.”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. Your mother has made it a principle never to engage in any activity that the police and the courts can do better—”

  “My mother!” cried Lucy in an unpleasant sneering voice.

  “Yes, your mother, who will, of course, have to be told of this. And your father also.”

  “You would tell them!” she cried, tears welling once more. “Traitor! I will never speak to you again as long as I live.” She jumped off the pillion seat and flounced away, in the direction of Broadway. Tran cursed and called after her, but she didn’t stop. He kicked his motor into life and followed her down the street.

  She walked on, ignoring him, her back stiff and straight as a mast. Tran found himself quite baffled; his long career as a terrorist and guerrilla leader had not prepared him for combat with an American teenager in a snit. In time they reached Broadway, at which point Lucy stopped, turned, and came up to him.

  “Go away!” she commanded.

  “Lucy, have some sense,” Tran said. “Get on the motorcycle and we will go someplace quiet and talk. You must be hungry—”

  “No! You
see that policeman over there?” She pointed to where a blue-and-white was parked, its occupant out ticketing cars. “If you don’t go away, I will tell him I am a frightened little girl and you are the bad old man who has been following me and that you hit my face.”

  Tran took in a startled breath, so long and deep that his nostrils pinched and whitened. Without another word he swung the machine away and roared off back the way they had come. Lucy watched him disappear, feeling empty. Really empty, for she was starving as well as spiritually desolate. She had no money for food, but she did have a subway token. She never left the house without one secreted in the little change pocket of her jeans. She walked to Wall Street and took a northbound train, intending to go to Canal Street and home, but at the Chambers/Centre Street stop, she jumped to her feet, impelled by a pressure she could not have described, but which could not be resisted, and left the train.

  “So much for the organization of the office and what you can expect to be doing in your first months here,” said Karp. “I want to finish by telling you some stuff I wish someone had told me back when I started here, way back in the second Roosevelt administration.” This raised a polite titter from the fifteen young lawyers assembled in the jury box of a temporarily vacant courtroom. Karp stood in the well of the court facing them, incidentally demonstrating how to stand in the well of a court and talk to a jury, which it seemed to him some of these kids might not know how to do, so green were they.

  “First of all, you all have something in common, besides being lawyers. Can anybody guess what that is?”

  The group looked around at one another speculatively. Eight men, seven women, four black, two Hispanic, one Asian, the rest white, or white-ish. Nobody had a clue.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Karp. “Every one of you participated in a competitive sport. Most of you are team athletes, but we have a varsity sprinter, a couple of state-level tennis players, two women’s varsity crew oars, and a junior chess master. This is not an accident. Prosecuting in an adversarial system requires the same kind of competitiveness, endurance, guts, mercilessness, and ability to play when hurt that’re necessary to succeed in sports. Just like sports, this game is about winning under a set of rules, but it’s not all about winning. It’s mainly about doing the right thing. Just do the right thing and don’t get all concerned about your won and lost record. Doing the right thing and keeping your integrity is important because you’re probably not going to contribute much to making the world a better place, not that you’re going to be able to see at any rate.” Here he paused and looked a selection of them in the eye, using his ever useful Severe yet Compassionate Look.

  “This is a hopeless job,” he said vehemently. “Your work will not help make things better, because we don’t understand what causes crime, and it’s not entirely clear that punishment, which is what we mostly do here, helps the problem. It may even make it worse. This society, this city, is like a ship that’s hit a rock. We don’t get to steer it to safety and we don’t get to plot the course to avoid more rocks and we don’t get to evacuate the women and children. What we do get is a crummy little office in the bilge of the ship, where we work the pumps, keep the water level down, and prevent the ship from going under entirely. Right now the water’s coming in a little faster than we’re pumping it out, which sucks, so to speak, but on the other hand, if we stopped pumping, it’d be all over in a pretty short time. What I’ve just described is damned near the full extent of the job satisfaction: pump, pump, pump, and listen to that water slosh out. That’s the good part. The downside . . .”—here he waited for the laughter to subside—“the downside is you may screw up and let someone out who should’ve been in the can, and he does something bad again, and it’s on you, he kills someone, say, and it’s on you.” He waited for that to sink in.

  “Fortunately, there are ways around both these problems. It turns out there are some objective standards for doing this job, about how to prepare a case for prosecution, and you will find that preparing a case in this way is a source of real satisfaction. Once again, sports: it’s great to win, but sometimes the other guys are just better, so you have to be content with just playing your best. Justice and success are not defined by the vagaries of jury deliberations. The only issue for you is whether each case is a legitimate case to prosecute. Are you convinced a thousand percent that the defendant is guilty and that you had legally admissible evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt? It’s a gem of a system, folks, but it can be corrupted by the people in it. Don’t become one of those people! Now, we will ensure that you prepare cases in the proper manner, and that you play your best, by yelling at you when you don’t. We have a large number of expert yellers on staff, and you’ll meet all of them as time goes on. If you really push at it, and you can take the yelling, you will learn how to prepare cases in such a way that the likelihood of screwing up is reduced to near zero. One final thing: it’s never personal. You’re doing the law, you’re not trying to get some guy. You start eating your liver on these cases, in a month you won’t have enough liver to make a decent chopped-liver sandwich. Oh, yeah, one final, final thing. You think what I just said is cynical. It’s not, it’s just hard-boiled. This is a hard-boiled outfit here. It’s also the best prosecutorial organization in the free world, because, by and large, it’s not cynical. I’ll tell you what cynical is. Cynical is saying, rules are made to be broken, and then breaking them. Cynical is drilling some poor bastard because you think it looks good in the press. Cynical is letting politics into your legal decisions. Cynical is rolling over for the cops because it’s popular and it makes your job nicer if the cops like you. Cynical is not trying because the Supreme Court has tied your hands with all these crime-coddling decisions. Don’t be cynical, guys. It’s not part of the job, and it’s not nice.”

  Karp looked up as a short brown woman in a dark blue suit came through the door.

  “Ah, here she is,” said Karp. “Folks, this is Rita Mehta, one of our fine assistant bureau chiefs. Rita helps run the Criminal Courts Bureau, where you’ll start your work here at the D.A. Criminal Courts handles the misdemeanors we cop felonies down to when we’re feeling cranky, and Rita here is going to teach you how to slap the wrists of hardened criminals.”

  “Softened criminals, too, don’t forget those, Butch,” said Ms. Mehta.

  The usual relief of nervous laughter. He had noticed some of the kids really listening, not being embarrassed, or just taking notes, as in law school. He turned the group over to Ms. Mehta, got the (also usual) nice round of applause, some worshipful stares, most of them from the women, and left the courtroom.

  She was curled up on a couch in his office, reading a small blue book, and when he saw her face, he cried out, “Good God!” and felt a clench around his heart. He knelt down beside her, his face close, examining the bruises. “Lucy, what happened to you?”

  “Nothing, I, like, got mugged,” said the daughter blandly.

  “Mugged? Where? Did you report it? Did the cops bring you here? What—”

  “Dad, settle down. I’m not hurt. It looks a lot worse than it is. But I have to talk to you, now. I think I’m in trouble.”

  Karp drew up a straight chair and sat down on it, his heart pounding. There was an instant of ice-cold, ignoble rage against his wife (why isn’t she watching this child?), which he suppressed, and a cacophony of head voices suggesting modes of trouble—drugs, thefts, sex, diseases—which he could not. He swallowed hard and asked, “Felony or misdemeanor trouble?”

  “Um, well, I didn’t do anything bad, but there’s like a big felony involved.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  She looked away from him. “I can’t, Daddy, that’s the problem. I swore an oath I wouldn’t and there are other people involved, and they’d get in giant trouble if I told and they didn’t do anything wrong either.”

  Karp resisted the impulse to switch from Daddy mode into interrogator mode. This was hard on him because he had
no doubts about his skills in the latter and considerable doubts about his skills in the former. He made himself say, gently, “That’s quite a problem, Luce. How are you going to handle it?”

  “I don’t kno-o-o-w,” she wailed, and started to cry. Karp moved next to her on the couch and swept her into his arms. Lucy was startled by the difference between being hugged by her father and being hugged by Tran, so much so that she stopped crying. She totted up the differences, fascinated. The smell. Daddy was regular American, like the air, a little soap, a little aftershave, clean cotton and wool, Home. Tran was fish sauce, lilac hair oil, motorcycle oil, leather, foreign, Other. The feel. Daddy was large, comforting, deep, summoning thoughts of babyhood, absolute security, the moments before sleep. Tran was hard, protective, too, but like an iron shield, something you had to use, not just sink into, and a wild heat came off him, in her imagination like hugging a leopard. It then occurred to her that once Tran had hugged his own daughter, and that he had not been like that to her, no, he must have been to that girl the same as her father was to her. She tried to imagine Tran different, softer, and then the Asian thing struck her again, the suffering. She was sobbed out by now; still, thick tears trickled down her cheeks. And a last thought, more of a wordless feeling: this sinking safety, delightful as it was, belonged to her past, she was going away from it even now, but Tran, or something Tran-like, was her future. She recalled how she had acted the spoiled baby and threatened him and felt deep, blushing shame.

  Karp held his daughter away from him, at arm’s length, saw the agony in her face, said as gently as he could, “Lucy, listen to me. You are a kid. This is over your head. You can’t handle this yourself. You have to tell me about this, now, the whole story.”

  “I can’t, Daddy.”

  “Well, then let me tell you what I think I know already,” he said, his voice growing sterner. “You witnessed a crime. What crime? A good guess would be the double murder at the Asia Mall. Why? It went down in a place you hang out in all the time. I know you and your pals like to play hide in that storeroom; maybe you were there when it happened and saw who did it. I know you got beat up today, and I doubt it was a random mugging. Somebody was sending you a message. They were telling you to keep your mouth shut. And you’re doing just what they want, just what the bad guys want.”