Enemy Within

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “Shit!” said Marlene. “Oh, shut it off!”

  Karp did. “It’s a dangerous place.”

  “Yeah, but, not to be self-centered, he’s also a client of ours. I think we’re providing security for that trip. Oleg must be throwing up. Christ, they’ll probably delay this goddamn IPO now, and we’ll have to go through the whole thing again from scratch.”

  “Well, now that you’re in such a good mood,” Karp said, “I should tell you that Zak got into another fight today.”

  “Oh, for the love of Christ! Is he okay?”

  “A shiner. I spoke to him sternly. He was protecting Giancarlo, which I thought was at least mildly exculpatory, but I suggested to him that a quick trigger for violence was not a successful life strategy in the long run.”

  “Is that a sly dig, my sweet?”

  “Not at all, my angel,” replied Karp with a straight face. “You’re a responsible corporate executive and a model of civility. Who was the woman, by the way?”

  “What woman?”

  “The one who kept you from the bosom of your family until the middle of the night.”

  “Oh, that one. It was Sybil Marshak, as a matter of fact.”

  “No kidding? What did she want?”

  “She . . .” But at that moment the boys arrived and swarmed their mother, full of the news, questions, arguments, stupid riddles, and small-boy presence, demanding and tender. She dispensed maternal being for half an hour and then rousted them off to bath and bed, at which time they both regressed five years, as they usually did, and she indulged herself in the hidden romance, her chief joy nowadays, truth to tell, and all the sweeter for the knowledge that it would not last much longer. She stroked, she talked, she read from the current favorite (The Hobbit), she answered the questions that baffled the great thinkers, about death, heaven, God, and kissed them good-night, whispering into their ears her secret name for each, which, she thought, they had not ever shared, not even with each other.

  By the time she was through, Karp was in bed. She undressed and climbed in with him.

  “You were saying?”

  “Was I? Oh, right: Sybil Marshak. You know who she is, obviously.”

  “Runs the West Side Dems.”

  “Yeah. The last person I expected to see. You ever meet her?”

  “Just to handshake, and to receive compliments on my extraordinary physical beauty. Jack and she are fairly close. It’s hard to get on a state ticket under the D. column without Sybil. What did she want?”

  “She says she’s being stalked.”

  “Stalked, huh? Those damn Republicans!”

  “Hot flashes, more likely.”

  “It’s not legit?”

  “I don’t know yet, but it doesn’t look like a serious case. There’s no specific guy involved, just feelings, doors slamming in the parking garage, phone calls that hang up, seeing the same person on the street at the same time every day. No letters, no recordings, no physical evidence at all . . .”

  “What, she’s nuts?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. If you rub my back, I’ll be your friend for life. . . . Oh, thank you. Great.” After silence interrupted by sighs of pleasure, talking into the pillow. “Anyway we get people in there a lot, in VIP, mostly women, I’m sorry to say, but some men, too. Famous, right? Rich. They’re not supposed to have any problems. But actually they’re under a lot of stress. Okay, they got the pills, they got the therapist, they got the sex and the toys. But still there’s this panic—‘Oh, am I worthy, oh, will I lose it all?’ And eventually it comes out. They go agoraphobic, or they can’t fly in planes anymore, or they get all compulsive. Sometimes it comes out in paranoia, which is what I think we got here.”

  “So what did you tell her?”

  “I said we’d watch her for a couple of days, a week, see if anything jumped out. I also advised her to get rid of her gun.”

  “Sybil Marshak packs heat?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Got a license and everything, which is no surprise: she could get a city license to do pedophilia in public. I tried to convey to her the downsides of firearms, accidents and so forth, but she’s a hardhead. She really thinks someone’s after her. She insisted I take care of her personally.”

  “Which you refused.”

  “Which I accepted. It struck me today that if I don’t get out of the office once in a while, I am going to go batshit.”

  “No guns, right?”

  “Oh, put a cork in it! No, all’s I’m going to do is watch her back for a day or so, with a light team, see if I see any characters hanging around her I don’t like. I’ll put a trace on her phone, too, talk to her building—the usual. Min Dykstra can run the place perfectly well for a couple of days, I mean the bureaucratic stuff, and it’ll make Lou happy. He likes me to mingle with the great and near great.”

  “Speaking of greatness, when is this stock thing coming off?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it!” Marlene groaned. “In fact, technically, I’m not allowed to talk about any of it. Ha! I love when the law demands behavior I would do anyway. Virtue without pain.” Some silence here.

  “Is that still my back you’re rubbing?” she asked with a small gasp.

  “Not technically, no.”

  The following morning, whatever good mood Karp had brought to the day from the high jinks of the previous night was dissipated by the news Murrow brought.

  “He can’t be serious,” said Karp.

  “Apparently he is. The grand jury is scheduled for tomorrow. My new friend Flatow intends to waltz in there, call Cooley, call Nash, call the guy from the ME, and that’s it. No homicide investigators.”

  “Did you ask him why?”

  “In a roundabout way. He said Catafalco told him that it would be a waste of time because it would just confirm the testimony of the two officers.”

  “Oh, Christ! Did you get the report?”

  “No, Flatow just had the precis from headquarters. Apparently he handed it over to Catafalco and hasn’t seen it since.”

  “And he didn’t think it was important enough to ask for?”

  “Um, not really. George is a follow-orders kind of guy. A stamp collector, by the way. He has a nearly complete set of British Empire Trinidad and Tobago.” Murrow vamped extreme ennui. “Tell me I don’t have to keep hanging out with him.”

  “If you didn’t want to be bored shitless, you shouldn’t have become a lawyer.”

  “I’m sorry—everything I know I learned from TV. Who are you calling?”

  “Catafalco,” said Karp, punching a speed-dial button. He waited. Murrow heard: “Butch Karp. Is Lou in? . . . Yes, I would. . . . Lou? . . . Yeah, fine. Look, Lou, on that Cooley thing, do you think you could shoot the homicide report on that over to me? . . . Because I want to read it, Lou. . . . Uh-huh. . . . Fuller is handling it? What does that mean, Fuller is handling it? . . . Uh-huh. Yeah, I see. Okay, Lou, right. I understand. . . . Uh-huh. Right, talk to you later.” Slam of the phone. “Fuck!”

  “Uh-oh,” said Murrow.

  “Uh-oh is right.” Karp knitted his hands behind his head and leaned back in his tall judge’s chair. After a minute or so of silence, during which his assistant could practically see the gears whirling behind his eyes, Karp said, “Murrow, this is an interesting situation. My colleague Mr. Fuller has informed one of our fine bureau chiefs that all matters to do with the appearance of Detective Cooley before the grand jury are to be referred to him and to no one else. The question I put to you is, what is my play in response?”

  Murrow waited a beat to see whether this was a rhetorical question. Karp’s gaze told him it was not. He answered, “Well, in the first place, it’s a big incursion on your authority. You’re chief for operations, he’s chief for admin. This is clearly part of an operation, so—”

  “But is it? Public relations comes under admin. Cooley’s is a case that might have a major impact on the office’s public image. And the DA’s political future. Not a
bright line, at least not to Fuller.”

  “Then you should go to the DA, grab up Fuller, and duke it out.”

  “Okay, but think how that would play. I go in there whining that Catafalco’s keeping the homicide report to himself because Fuller told him to. Fuller smiles his rat smile and says, ‘Oh, Butch, I didn’t mean you. Of course, you can read it. I just didn’t want to read about it in the papers until the legal process is complete. I mean, grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret, aren’t they? I’m trying to control copies,’ and so on and so forth. So I look like a turf-covering whiner, and I wasted the DA’s time, one; and, two, suppose I do look at the homicide report and I say, ‘Whoa, this is a fishy shooting.’ What happens then?”

  “You pull the case off the schedule until we figure out how to handle it.”

  “Uh-huh, but that lands us back in the DA’s office again. Now we have to look at the DA’s motivation.”

  “Which is . . . ?”

  “Ah, now you have me. What is, in fact, going on in the tortured soul of Jack Keegan? Here we have a confident and talented public figure, a man who aspires to greatness. Unfortunately, he spent his formative years under the influence of a man who was undeniably great, and who had what was basically a very simple soul. Francis P. Garrahy just knew what was right and just did it. He wasn’t perfect, of course; maybe sometimes he wasn’t even right. But when he did decide that something was right, he had absolutely no doubt about what to do. Jack isn’t like that. He lives in a world that’s a lot more complex than the one Garrahy lived in, and it worries him. And he’s ambitious in a way that Garrahy never was. Garrahy thought that just being the best district attorney in the history of the world was a pretty good deal. Jack wants to sit on the Supreme Court someday, and it colors his every decision. Be warned, Murrow: if you want a pure heart, eschew ambition.”

  “Like you?”

  “We’re not talking about me, though,” said Karp a little sharply. “So . . . Jack is serving two masters—his sense of decency that he learned at Phil Garrahy’s knee, and the demon ambition. As we’re in an election year, the demon has got a lot more power, which is why Norton Fuller is being jacked up to his present influence. Jack wants to think that because he’s got me in there, the great traditions of the office are being maintained, and meanwhile Fuller will handle the dirty jobs, with Jack sort of not knowing what’s going on.”

  “You think Mr. Keegan is in on this business with Cooley?”

  “Good question. He’s in but not in. Fuller would never throw his weight around with Catafalco like he’s doing unless he thought he had backing from Jack. But Jack hasn’t actually told him to do anything. He doesn’t need to. Fuller’s skill is knowing when Jack needs faintly stinky stuff done on his behalf without having to be told. Okay, now let’s say I go in there and say, ‘Jack, this grand jury case is fucked—the shooting stinks.’ Fuller then says, ‘That’s a matter of opinion, Jack, but what’s sure as God’s green apples is that if we come down hard on Cooley, we will lose the police unions, and the election.’ Jack turns his noble head and looks at me. Now, what’s my play?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then listen and be enlightened. I have two alternatives. One, I can let Fuller roll me, which would mean he could roll me at will in the future, which means that my usefulness to Jack and this office would be at an end. Or I could say, ‘Jack, if you do this, I will resign in protest, go to the press, make a stink.’ In which case, I’m out of a job I can do better than anyone else on the horizon, and which Jack and the office badly needs. So for me, and for what I still pretend are the higher values of the New York DA, it’s lose-lose. This was a conclusion also arrived at by the nuclear powers. I have the H-bomb, but I don’t use it. It gives me status and leverage, but not control. And therefore . . . ?”

  “And therefore you will avoid such a confrontation.”

  Karp grinned. “Very good, Murrow. We’ll make a conspirator of you yet.”

  “My boyhood dream. Meanwhile, what do we do?”

  “Oh, I’ll think of something. But before I get any further into it, I need to get my hands on that report. Make it happen.”

  Sybil Marshak lived in the Wyoming, a famous pile of rococo white limestone on Central Park West in the Eighties. Marlene picked up the surveillance a little after four, having spent the day flashing false smiles at a covey of investment bankers, literally on Wall Street. The Osborne agent was Wayne Segovia, a sharp, dark, wiry man with a neat spade beard. When Marlene walked up to his car, he was smoking a cigarillo and doing crossword puzzles in a pulp crossword magazine.

  “What’s a five-letter word meaning ‘black,’ starts with an s ?” he asked when she slipped into the car, an anonymous gray Honda. On the front seat was a big Nikon with a Polaroid back and a 500mm lens on it.

  “Try sable,” said Marlene. “Anything doing?”

  “Just snapping citizens.” He indicated an envelope full of Polaroid photos on the dashboard. “So far nothing stands out. I was hoping for a guy with long hair and fangs carrying a ‘Death to Marshak’ sign, but no.”

  “She go out?”

  “Once. Hopped a cab to a hair salon on Sixty-third and Madison, got a rinse and set. I would’ve gone with a lighter color, bring out her eyes a little.”

  “We’ll put that in the report. Anything interesting?”

  “Not that I could see. But this is a damn stupid way to check for stalkers.”

  “Yeah, it is, but humor me for a couple of days. Anything on the phone?”

  A black electronic device was on the backseat, with a coiled lead that ran into a plug in Segovia’s ear. “Just the usual. She gets a lot of calls. Makes a lot, too. If I was her, I wouldn’t be so casual about using a cordless to make them, considering the kind of political stuff she’s into.”

  “I could mention that, too. Most people don’t realize how easy it is to steal off a cordless.” Marlene popped the door. “I think I’ll go up and talk to the building staff.”

  She did so. The doorman on duty said he had noticed nothing, heard nothing about any stalker. He assured Marlene that no one could get into the building without being checked out. Every visitor had to be announced. It was a good building. Marlene thought it was a good building and, like all buildings, was about as secure as Central Park if anyone really wanted to get in. Kelsie Solette’s building was a good building, too. She did not say that, however, but went into the bowels of the basement to interview the janitorial staff and the super, who also assured her of the goodness, etc.

  When she emerged into daylight again, she found that Wayne was standing outside the car waving wildly. She trotted across Central Park West.

  “What’s up?”

  “She’s in her car, heading south.”

  They both jumped into the Honda, and Wayne screeched into a U-turn.

  “Why the car? Why not a cab?”

  “Maybe she wants to park and neck,” he said. “Maybe she’s going out of town. There she is, the Lexus.”

  By running a light at Seventy-seventh, Wayne had slid into convenient trailing range of the black Lexus. They followed it down to Broadway and Fifty-fifth, where the car hung a right and disappeared into an underground parking garage.

  They pulled into a loading zone across the street. A building was being renovated two doors down. The sound of riveters and metal bashing made it hard to converse. “What now?” shouted Wayne.

  “Use our highly trained mental powers to intuit where she’s going and whether anyone there is plotting to harass her.”

  Wayne chuckled. “Ah, boss, I wish I had you along every day. Meanwhile, what’s a Siberian river, two letters?”

  “Ob,” she replied as her phone warbled. She thumbed it, announced herself, stuck a finger in the other ear, listened.

  “Doesn’t fit,” said Wayne. “I think it ends with k.”

  “Agh!” Marlene cried.

  “Ag? Nah, no good. I said it ends with . . .” He stopped b
ecause she was talking rapidly into the phone, snapping out directions to someone, promising to arrive at a place.

  She thumbed off the phone and thrust it back into her bag, cursing softly.

  “What’s up, chief?”

  “Oh, nothing—my daughter is involved in a murder again.” She met his eyes, gaped, made a shrill sound edged with hysteria. “Not a sentence we hear much, do we? Especially the ‘again’ part.”

  “She’s not . . . ?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. She hangs around with a class of people who tend to get their throats ripped out more than your average taxpayer, and apparently it was her turn to find one today. I should go.”

  “You want me to drive you?”

  “No, I’ll hop a cab. I might have to scream my head off a little while, and I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the staff.”

  With that she got out of the car and was just about to cross the driveway of an underground garage when a squeal of tires and the roar of a powerful engine made her hesitate. She saw the Lexus race up the ramp. It was moving so fast it actually flew for a part of a second when it crossed the drainage depression at the ramp entrance, then crashed down heavily on its springs. It missed her by a foot, and she had barely a glimpse of Sybil Marshak’s pale face as the car hung a screeching left and accelerated down the street.

  Marlene went back to the car. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “A sale at Bloomingdale’s?” offered Wayne Segovia.

  “Follow her, wise guy. Call me on the cell when you get to where she’s going.”

  The Honda zoomed away. Marlene paused and stared for a moment into the entrance to the garage. What had frightened Marshak so much that she had driven her car without really looking into a New York street, a maneuver that nine times out of ten would have resulted in a crash? It was only the construction vehicles parked to the east that had slowed the traffic enough to make the rapid exit and turn possible. Something real or a phantom of the mind? Marlene turned and walked back toward Broadway, a cab, and her daughter. One crazy person at a time was her thought.