Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Maybe she got that from him. He understood that he was known around the courthouse as something of a Boy Scout, not exactly a figure of fun, but not one of the boys either. Was he becoming a prig? Butch Javert? Sea-green incorruptible, like Robespierre? Inhuman? He didn’t think so. Like he’d told Murrow, he’d covered up corruption in his day, slid around the strict letter of the law from time to time, in a good cause. It was inevitable, law being a human institution and humans being all crooked timber. So was keeping Jack Keegan in office a good enough cause to justify what Fuller was clearly doing? Karp had to trust his gut on that, and his gut roiled when he thought of putting spin on criminal cases to satisfy political ends. Or maybe that was old-fashioned, too. Was he yesterday’s man? A pathetic relic of a better time? Old, getting old . . .

  He physically shook his head to clear these thoughts out of it, drawing a sidelong look from Morris. He heard a warbling, which at first he didn’t recognize. Something wrong with the car?

  “That’s for you, Butch,” said Morris. Blank look. “Your cell phone.”

  Karp fished it out, found the right button, and punched it. He listened and said, “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Yes, that’s a new service of MCI,” said his wife. “The cell phone reads your mind while it gives you brain cancer. Where are you?”

  “On Fourteenth behind a garbage truck, symbol of my day. I just left Lucy at Chelsea Pier.”

  “Good game?”

  “They beat us.”

  A whoop in his ear. “I love it. The fall of the patriarchy cannot be long delayed. Did she gloat?”

  “No. In fact, she was very commiserating, which made me feel worse.”

  “Poor Butch! I suppose I will have to pump up your ego tonight via my marital obligations.”

  “Assuming I can still get it up. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, the usual. I have an appointment with Kelsie Solette this afternoon, which I am not looking forward to, and I have yet another meeting on our filing.”

  “Kelsie Solette is big-time. Why does she need protection?”

  “Oh, they all need protection, largely from themselves. They bust their hump to get to be superstars, and then they discover that seven million people have no other thought than to rip a piece of their garment off. Or their flesh, and then it’s boo hoo, Marlene Ciampi can save me. But, of course, they still have to be seen, which means hanging around clubs in basements with no lighting and one exit, run by the Mob, with the drug supermarket going on in the ladies’.” She sighed theatrically. “Meanwhile, everyone down to the stock clerks are going around comparing how much money they’re going to be worth when we get this IPO off the ground.”

  “How much will you be worth? Not that you’re not priceless already.”

  “I haven’t a clue. In fact, I think the whole thing is going to fall apart. Internet stocks, yes. I mean that’s a feeding frenzy like the tulip mania or the twenties before the crash. But not a security operation, I mean, be serious. It’s about as sexy as a sink full of dirty dishes. Unfortunately, Osborne’s become a maniac on the subject, and Harry, too, who I always thought had his head screwed on right. What it comes down to at this point is sitting in endless meetings with a lot of little jerks in five-thousand-dollar suits and trying not to drift off. Apparently the next stage is to drag us around to institutional investors to give our spiel and show them that we’re not a bunch of thugs with saps and tiny cameras.”

  “I thought you were.”

  “Yes, but this is the new security. The world is a dangerous place, the rich getting richer, the poor getting ever more pissed off, governments collapsing, and so on and so on, opportunities internationally for a highly disciplined firm, with modern management, blah blah blah. Complete horseshit, but since I’m a good little soldier . . .” Marlene sighed again. “Listen, the reason I called, I’ll be late at one of these crap sessions, and I wanted to make sure you’d be home when the boys were delivered from after-school.”

  “No problem. Now that we conquered crime, there’s not a hell of a lot for me to do. Will you be home for dinner?”

  “Probably later. Feed the monsters and I’ll see you around eight. Is Lucy dining in?”

  “I forgot to ask. She wandered off with that look where she doesn’t want to say what she’s doing. The bums, is my guess.”

  A good guess. After she left her father, Lucy walked north along Eleventh Avenue, the unfashionable western edge of the Chelsea district. For now, the residents were still largely Puerto Rican, the landlords were too somnolent to smash and condify everything, the bodegas were still bodegas rather than galleries, and the restaurants served comidas croillas and not Mediterranean. There were still small remnants here of the New York that was, a fur warehouse, a few small factories, the big rail yards north of Twentieth. These tended to block the yuppie tide, as did the public housing projects and the two mental-health outpatient centers. Lucy should have been heading back to the Upper East Side, where her school was, to make her three- and four-o’clock classes, but she had already decided to cut them. It was something she did more often than formerly. It was a very good school, but it bored her. Her classmates bored her even more, rich girls, lunching on ice cubes to stay razor-thin, talking about clothes and boys.

  She had promised to work a shift at the soup kitchen run by Holy Redeemer at Twentieth-ninth and Ninth, but that was not until five, and before she went there she wanted to check on some people who lived in the neighborhood of the rail yards.

  The wind was blowing south, driving cold rain with it, and she walked with her head down and the hood of her cloak drawn up over her beret and clutched tight. She was therefore nearly upon the slow-moving, dark figure before she was aware of her, an oversize mobile fireplug, the familiar shape of people who in cold weather habitually wear every piece of clothing they own. It was a woman, pushing a rusting grocery cart piled with the usual plastic bags. She wore a wool cap, with a cheap, flowered, plastic rain kerchief over that and a set of men’s overcoats, and a poncho made of a tan garbage bag. Lucy said, “Hey, Elmira.”

  The woman looked at her suspiciously, as if surprised to hear her name on human lips. Her face was cinnamon-colored and ashy with the chill. She blinked away raindrops, saw who it was, grunted, and said, “Gimme a cigarette.”

  Lucy, who did not smoke, always carried cigarettes. She offered a Marlboro. The woman took it, stuck it in her nearly toothless mouth, waited for a light like a duchess. Lucy gave her one with a Bic.

  Lucy asked, “Are you going up to Holy Redeemer?”

  “No, I’m gon’ eat in peace today. I got me bread and SPAM. And cheese. I got me a nice piece of cheese today.”

  “You should get some warm food on a day like today, though. Hot coffee. We’re making vegetable soup and biscuits. And salad. And pie.”

  “What kind of pie?” Suspicious. Greedy.

  “I think apple.”

  The woman pushed her cart along for half a block, puffing the cigarette hard and mumbling to herself. “I might do it. Or I might not.”

  Lucy doubted Elmira would come. Some of them would not emerge from the isolation they had imposed on themselves for dinner at Le Cirque, much less for a church-kitchen meal. From things others had told her, Lucy knew that Elmira was ashamed of her missing teeth. And she was too disorganized to set up and keep the free dental-clinic appointments she would need to get them fixed. Elmira was low-end homeless, although not the lowest, not by a long way.

  “Well, I’ll see you, Elmira. Take care.” The woman didn’t answer. Lucy stretched into her usual aggressive urban pace and quickly left the shuffling woman behind. At Thirtieth Street, Lucy turned west toward the yards. It was a scruffy area: warehouses, garages, anonymous, blankfaced industrial structures, five-story apartments built for workers back when this was the south end of the great freight-handling district of the metropolis. It was one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan still connected with the physical movement of material th
ings, another world from the real New York, the one that grew rich beyond all imagination off the fabrication of images and the manipulation of data.

  Lucy came to a rusted chain-link fence with one end peeled back from its support. She slid through and descended a rough, weedy embankment to a concrete apron overlooking the sunken Metro Transit Authority–Long Island Railroad yards. Graffiti covered every vertical service, some of it elaborately wrought, and with a certain barbaric beauty, a museum of the doomed. There in the shadow of a high, buttressed, gang-tagged retaining wall, she found what she was looking for.

  It was a kind of village. The dwellings were constructed with varying degrees of art and skill out of large corrugated cartons, fiberglass, scrap lumber, sheet metal, and the ubiquitous black plastic. There were a dozen or so of these structures, each occupying one of the bays marked off by the tapering buttresses of the wall. At either end of this fancy district (walls, roofs), there were humbler dwellings, sometimes only a plastic tarp covering a shopping cart, or a crude tent. The social center of the village was a fire flaring in an oil drum, silhouetting half a dozen lumpy figures clustered around it. Her foot struck a pebble, making a small sound, and the group stopped its buzz of conversation. Two dogs yelped and growled. Every face turned to look at her, wariness showing in each one. When they saw who it was, they visibly relaxed.

  A tall, bearded black man wearing a greasy olive-drab mechanic’s jumpsuit hailed, “Hey, Lucy. My girl! What you got for us today? Chicken?”

  “Vegetable soup, bread, salad, and pie.”

  “Pie? Pie is good,” said the tall man, who was called Real Ali. “Hey, Benz, you going to get some of that pie?”

  “I might,” said the woman thus addressed, a large, heavily swaddled woman with a pitted Hispanic complexion. “Lila Sue likes pie. Is there any meat in that soup?”

  Lucy said, “No, no meat, but we got a bunch of bones cooking in with it. How’s Lila Sue today?”

  Mercedes Ortiz, who was never called anything but Benz, stroked the head of the creature leaning comfortably against her padded bosom. Lila Sue was looking at the fire with pleasure, her large, dark eyes reflecting the sparks. She was a pretty girl, as far as features went, elfin, yellowy tan, with a sharply pointed chin and a straight little nose. Lucy thought she was probably in her late teens, although it was hard to tell. No one knew where Benz had picked her up, but they were inseparable.

  Another man, dark, thin, spoke up. “Lucy, what we want is a little room service around here. How come you don’t deliver, is what I want to know. I’m too beat, to use my feet, to go and eat.”

  Real Ali said, “Man, you think you still in Vegas.”

  The other man became animated and started jumping around the fire, shadowboxing. “Yeah, Vegas, that’s where I beat Ron Lyle, eleven rounds. Pow! Ka-pow! Okay, first round, he goes, left, left, right to the body. It don’t hurt me none, I’m feeling him out. Pow! Left jab . . . pow!”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Ali!” This from a man standing opposite, wearing a Raiders cap over dreadlocks and a greasy blue parka with stuffing oozing out of it. He had the twitchy moves and fuzzy features of a crankhead. The shadowboxer bounced away from the fire barrel and started dancing around, twirling his fists artistically. “Hey, let’s go. You want to go with the greatest? Come on!”

  Real Ali walked over and put a big arm over Fake Ali’s shoulders. “Take it easy, champ. It’s not worth it. Doug ain’t in your class.”

  “Fuckin’ nutcase,” said Doug Drug under his breath. “Jesus, I got a fuckin’ headache about to take my skull off. You got any aspirin there, Lucy?”

  Lucy handed him a flat tin of Bayer. He popped it open and tossed half a dozen into his mouth and swallowed them dry. He said, “Think I’ll go by Redeemer and get some of that pie.”

  “Pie,” said Lila Sue. “A pie was walking down the street and saw an elephant a flying elephant with silver wings and he said hello Mr. Elephant I want to go to pie heaven will you take me and the elephant says yes I will and then they flew up high high high high high up on top of the clouds and then the elephant said here we are in heaven but first I must have a bite of you, no no said the pie I must have a bite of you because I am a vampire pie—”

  “Christ, can’t you shut that bitch up!” yelled Doug. “Benz!”

  “Shut up yourself, asshole. She ain’t doing you no harm. She just telling a story.”

  “—And all the other vampire pies came out of vampire heaven,” Lila Sue continued, “and bit on the elephant and the elephant said oh oh I am all eaten I will change into an angel so he did and the angels came and changed all the vampire pies into flowers but flowers that had wheels and televisions and they rode down the hill until they weren’t in heaven anymore and they said let’s look for the mother pie . . .”

  Doug Drug pulled a filthy rag out of the pocket of his jacket. “Hey, stick this in her mouth, Benz.”

  “Get fucked,” said Benz.

  Real Ali said, “Go eat, Doug, or go score one. Your fuckin’ personality is deteriorating.”

  Doug looked across the fire at Desmondo and Ralphie, the two other men in the group, but saw no rush of support. He said, “You going over?”

  “Yeah, we’ll go over,” said Desmondo, and Ralphie nodded in agreement. “I think I heard this story before, anyway.” A chuckle of acknowledgment floated around the fire barrel. Every story was different, and every one had the same pointless eloquence. Lucy reflected that of all the people in the little group, Lila Sue and she probably had the most in common, both of them having strange brains. Lila Sue could tell stories by the hour, that being the only part of her intellect that had any real function. She could not dress herself or go a block without getting lost or stepping into traffic and would walk away cheerfully with anyone.

  The three men departed, and Lucy moved around the fire to get closer to Real Ali. Lila Sue’s story had sunk to a low warble, like a TV on in a distant room. He grinned at her and said, “You looking for your boyfriend?”

  She felt her face heat. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “You wish he was, though.”

  “I do not!”

  “Uh-huh. Well, he ain’t been by today. You probably meet up with him up at the church, cut up some vegetables together.”

  Lucy ignored this. “How’s Canman?”

  “Hell, honey, I don’t know. He’s acting like a spooked cat. He keeps talking about Joe Romero.”

  “Was he friends with him?”

  “Oh, he just knew him from around, you know, from the streets. Joe helped him haul stuff once in a while. He thinks the slasher’s after him, gonna do him like he did Joe. He’s talking about moving out of the paper house.”

  “You mean to a shelter?”

  Real Ali laughed. “Hell, no. The Canman, he rather get his throat cut than go in a damn shelter. Canman don’t like rules and regulations. I’m not particularly fond of them myself, if you want to know. Nah, he was talking about the tunnels.”

  “I should go talk to him. Is everyone else afraid, too?”

  “Not particularly. I figure we’re pretty safe here, all of us being together. Someone’s up most of the time, and we got the dogs. No, the slasher, he’s going to take out people sleeping alone, like Joe, and the guy he did before Christmas, that Chaney character, over by the convention center. Anyway, life on the mean streets.” Real Ali laughed. “You ain’t afraid of no slasher, are you, Ali?”

  Fake Ali did a little shuffle and said, “The greatest ain’t afraid of no man or beast.”

  “I’m going to see him now,” said Lucy, and walked down the cracked concrete to a low black structure snuggled into one of the bays. It was made almost entirely of baled newspapers covered with tar and plastic. Its roof was a cone of scrap lumber and lath, tied together tepee fashion, and covered with a wrapping of tar paper, plastic, and foil sheeting from insulation. Smoke emerged from a tin pipe above. It had two windows covered with translucent plastic sheeting and a low
door, made of packing-crate slats, plastic, and duct tape. A canvas laundry cart was parked next to it, like a Toyota at a suburban ranch house. Lucy knocked on the door.

  “Who?” said a voice after a considerable pause. A dog barked sharply, twice.

  “Lucy.”

  “What?”

  “I want to talk. Can I come in?”

  Nothing. Lucy pulled back the door and entered. A small yellow mutt trotted up to her, sniffed her, and hopped back up to his master’s side. The man was sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed made out of baled newspaper, with a layer of orange finger-foam on top. A thin white man in his mid-thirties, he had a patchy tan beard and long, unwashed hair. He wore a mixture of military surplus and Vincent de Paul throwouts: OD fatigue pants, a flannel shirt, a gray wool sweater with ragged elbows, Adidas patched with duct tape. It was warm in the room, musty with the smell of dog, unwashed man, wood smoke, wet newspaper, cigarettes, and over all, the sweetish stink of the residues in the hundreds of aluminum cans, which, in bags and cartons, occupied half the volume of the dwelling. Hanging from the low ceiling and stuck in corners were hundreds of beautifully crafted ornaments made from tin cans—flowers, angels, animals, human figures. They jingled faintly in the slow air currents. Tools were lying neatly on a low brick-and-board table, with coils of wire and, more ominously, a large can of Hercules smokeless powder. Canman made booby traps to protect his gear from thieves. No one went into the paper house when Canman was gone from it.

  The place was heated by a small stove made out of a washing-machine drum. It had a hood and pipes of scrap sheet metal and was swathed in pink fiberglass insulation and duct tape where it ran through the tepee roof, and a little door cut out of a car door, incorporating a single hinge. Like everything made by Canman, it was simple, elegant, perfectly functional. Light came from fat plumber’s candles stuck in elaborate tin-can candlesticks, posed in niches carved into the paper walls. Lucy sat down on the floor, which was thick with industrial-carpet remnants.