The choir stopped singing, and the pastor rose to stand behind the podium. Many clergymen in New York bear the title of reverend, of course, but when people said “the Reverend” in a certain tone, they meant this particular one. He was massive, cocoa-colored, broad of brow, heavy of jaw, bristly of mustache, and wavy of hair, and he had a great, deep, growling voice. His theme this morning was youth, African-American youth in particular. These youth were in trouble: babies having babies, drugs, gangs, gangster music, no jobs, no religion. Why had this situation come about? The Reverend didn’t say outright. He cast broad hints, though. There were forces that did not want African-American people to advance, and these forces were in cowardly fashion targeting black children. But, he declared ringingly, we can fight racism. (Cries of approval.) We can fight prejudice. (Again.) But when the forces of so-called law and order, the representatives of privilege, start murdering our young men with impunity, that’s different. (Angry shouts of agreement.) And he went on to describe one version of the death of Desmondo Ramsey, in which Ramsey had innocently approached a wealthy white woman, and she had shot him down just like those Alabama sheriffs used to, and the authorities were just going to give her a pass on it. Is that right? (No, no!) He touched on Benson, railroaded for a crime he didn’t commit because they had a rich Jew killed and they needed a black boy to throw to the wolves. (Angry cries.) Then there were these homeless getting killed in their sleep—all black men or Hispanic men. The police said there was no racial angle. No racial angle? Stand on your head, anyone who believes that. (Laughter, calls of “Tell it!” and “Right on!”)
Then, somewhat to Karp’s surprise, the Reverend took up the tale of Cisco Lomax. Cisco, he said, was a local child. His mother was right here today. Cisco was not an angel. He had a record. White men had poisoned him with their dope. He had stolen and been punished for it. But he had a woman and children he was caring for, unlike so many others. He was getting his life turned around. And he was shot down like a dog on the highway, by a white cop who didn’t even get a slap on the wrist. Is that justice? They said he tried to run down the cop with his car, and they had to shoot him. They had to shoot him ten times, ten times! In the back!
Here Karp, who had been allowing the sermon to glide past him until now, snapped to attention. As the Reverend ran through the changes on this bit of fact, in the skillful, ironic manner for which he was known, with the congregation following him heartily with the traditional responses, Karp had little trouble figuring out who had leaked it, for it had to be a leak. As far as he knew, only a limited number of people knew the location and number of Lomax’s wounds. The autopsy details had, significantly, not been presented to the grand jury. Interesting, and almost as interesting, come to think of it, was that depiction of the Ramsey-Marshak confrontation, and the detail about the watch. An even smaller number of people knew about the watch. Karp found that since he had become a leaker himself, he was much more interested in fellow leakers, and in whether they were malign scumbags like Fuller or good guys doing bad things out of necessity, like him. He hoped.
The Reverend finished his sermon with a roaring peroration, during which no one in the cavernous place could have entertained any doubts that African-Americans were in a bad way; that the white power structure liked it like that; that they were virtually lynching black kids again; that we were not going to sit down for stuff like that; and that with the help of Jesus, the eternal judge, we would see justice done in the end.
There was more music after that. Karp expressed the body language of boredom and got a number of not-terribly-Christian looks from his neighbors. When the service concluded, he lounged by a pillar and let the crowds flow past him. Someone touched his elbow. He turned and found he was looking into the face of Lucius McBright. They shook hands. McBright had a powerful grip, powerful enough that he did not have to show it off. Karp recalled that the man had been, of all things, a boxer in his youth, and a Golden Gloves contender, or maybe an actual champion, he couldn’t recall which.
“You have a car?” McBright asked.
“No, I came by cab.”
“Up to Harlem? Lucky man. Come on, we can go in my car, we’ll get us some breakfast.”
Karp followed him out of the church, McBright stopping to chat with the Reverend at the doorway. He introduced Karp, who got a formal nod and no offer to shake hands. McBright was about Karp’s age and had put on some pounds since his light-heavyweight days, but he was still an impressive-looking man, five inches shorter than Karp but broader across the shoulders. He wore round, rimless glasses and a short, natural haircut and had on a beautifully tailored, navy, pin-striped, double-breasted suit. His color was coffee with two creams, and his eyes were a surprising shade of hazel.
McBright drove a silver Chrysler Concord Lxi. They got in and drove up St. Nicholas. A sunny day, blue sky, little fleecy clouds showing above the apartment houses, God’s golden Sunday light over battered Harlem.
“Like the sermon?”
“I thought it was inspiring,” said Karp. “The Reverend is a great public speaker.”
“I’ll tell him you said so. It’ll make his day.”
“And besides the inspiration, I was also impressed by the information. He revealed a number of things that are not generally known.”
“The Reverend has a lot of friends,” said McBright in a tone that closed the discussion, and he shifted the conversation to Collins, whom they both agreed was a fine young man, and then to basketball, and they talked about the teams in the Final Four for the rest of the drive.
At 145th Street they parked and walked a short distance to a large restaurant. Called Suellen’s, it was clearly the place to go after church for Harlem’s gratin. Karp spotted a congressman, a university chancellor, and a major narcotics dealer, although not at the same table. McBright was obviously well known in the place, and they were seated immediately, but it took them a while to get to their seats, as McBright stopped along the way to chat with the occupants of several tables. Karp was the invisible man here, which was rather the point, he thought. He didn’t feel as uncomfortable as McBright probably thought he was feeling, having spent many hours of his youthful athletic career in milieus in which he was the only, or nearly the only, whitey.
They sat; a venerable waiter brought coffee and a basket of sweet rolls. McBright pointed to these. “Don’t start on them. They sold those on the street, fools forget all about crack cocaine.” He took one. Karp did, too, and they were indeed marvelous, as was the coffee.
McBright sat back, chewing, and made a gesture with his hand. “Your meeting, boss.”
Karp had the feeling of setting out on one of those rope bridges in action movies. This meeting seemed like the worst idea he had ever had, and it had a lot of competition in that league. But thinking this made him laugh, and he admitted it to McBright. “Yeah, well, this seemed like a great idea when I thought it up, but now . . .? The thing is, Jack Keegan doesn’t know I’m doing this, and if he did, he would fire me, without hesitation. He would regard it as a betrayal.”
“Isn’t it? Maybe you think I’m going to win, and you’re currying favor.”
“Obviously, you don’t really think that, and Collins doesn’t think that, or neither of you would have participated in this meeting. But if we’re going to probe each other’s sincerity, we might as well just eat sweet rolls and talk basketball.” A little eye-wrestling here, ending with a wry grin from McBright. Karp continued, “I read that speech you gave at the Urban League. I thought it was a good speech. I thought you were right on principle and wrong on the DA. We don’t have a racial bias that I’ve been able to see. It’s not part of the culture.”
“Yes, well, we disagree on that. Was that your point?”
“No, my point is that injecting the race question into a DA campaign is the wrong thing to do. Even if it helps you win, it’s still the wrong thing to do because you will win upon a basis that will make it difficult or impossible to run the office. The p
ower of a DA is just different from the power of a mayor or a governor. You introduce ethnic politics into it, you’re going to call for an equal but opposite response from Jack, and there are plenty of people happy to encourage him to do that. And then you have something real ugly. I don’t want to see that.”
McBright was looking at him incredulously, a bemused smile on his lips. “You’re advising me on my campaign?”
“I’m giving you my take on what’s going to happen.”
McBright laughed. “I can’t believe this. Nobody is that naive.”
“Actually, I am. I’m a total loss when it comes to politics. I’m always doing the wrong thing. When I was a kid just starting out in the DA, we had Phil Garrahy in there, and when I knew him, he was old and sick, and he was undecided on whether he wanted to run again. Keegan was homicide chief then, and he thought he had a lock on the job, if Garrahy declined, and I took it upon myself to convince Mr. Garrahy that he should run, and he did, and won, and he died seven months later, and the governor appointed a complete asshole into the job. That was my first foray into electoral politics, and this is my second. Just so you know I have a track record.”
A chuckle this time. McBright seemed genuinely amused. “Okay, I take your point. I’ll consider it.”
The waiter hovered. McBright asked, “You want to order?” and Karp said, “I’m fine with coffee and rolls. I’m not a breakfast guy.”
“I am.” McBright ordered steak and eggs with grits, then the waiter glided off. “So, was that it?”
“No. I also wanted to say that we have three major cases with racial overtones, Benson, Lomax, and Marshak. In my opinion, all three of them are flawed.”
“I rest my case.”
“No, because I am on them, and I will fix them. Now, I am not going to insult your intelligence by claiming that if the three gentlemen of color in question had been solid citizens, they would be in just as much trouble, or dead. They were not solid, they all had some kind of sheet on them, plus Ramsey was homeless, and cops are lazy. Show them something that quacks and waddles and they’ll say it’s a duck, never mind if it’s the right duck. If you want to get into an argument about why black kids get introduced into the criminal justice system at about nine times the rate that white kids do, then fine, but leave the DA out of it. That’s not the first, or even the fifth, place you should look, and the proof of it is me sitting right here.”
“And you’re a big racist.”
“That’s right, I’m a big racist. Everyone else in the office is way to the left of me.”
“Since they got rid of Hrcany, anyway.”
“Roland wasn’t much of a racist, if by racist you mean someone who does bad things to people because they’re the wrong color. I never saw him do that, and I worked with him for nearly twenty years. I’ll give you that he had a mouth on him, and when he had something nasty to say, which was often, he touched on all the characteristics of the target, including the unmentionable ones. I talked to him about it a million times, but it didn’t penetrate. But you could also say that the Reverend Jackson was a racist because he once said that when he heard footsteps behind him at night and he turned around and he saw it was a white guy, he felt a rush of relief.”
“And was ashamed of it, don’t forget that part. Well, we could chat about race relations and who’s the biggest bigot all day, but why don’t we just turn to the last page? Why should I believe you? I mean you are from the enemy camp.”
Karp sighed in frustration. “Oh, for crying out loud, McBright! I know, and you must know that I know, that young Collins has been leaking you everything that’s been going on in the DA since day one, and you’ve been leaking tidbits to the Reverend for amplification. You have to know I’m telling the truth, unless Collins is making stuff up, and I kind of doubt that. As far as loyalty goes, I’m not a camp guy. Ask Collins. I’m loyal to Jack in the sense that I’m not about to betray any confidences or weaknesses of his to you or anyone else, but my primary, no my only, loyalty is to the office and what it’s supposed to stand for, my idea of it. Let’s say I’m loyal to the better angels of Jack Keegan’s nature, and not to other kinds.”
McBright shook his head. “You’re a piece of work, Karp. Don’t put any of that shit on your job application.”
“I don’t need the work, man,” said Karp sourly. “I have a rich wife.”
Who at that moment was emerging from a nasty dream, in which haughty, black-clad store clerks wearing maroon lip-gloss insisted on removing her daughter’s clothing in the main aisle of Calvin Klein, explaining that she was not creditworthy and refusing to look at any of Marlene’s own credit cards. It’s all right, Mom, said the dream daughter, you can’t pay for this with money.
Marlene sat bolt upright in bed, her stomach churning, and shook her head violently. Which was a mistake. Something in her head had come loose and was bouncing around in there, causing terminal damage, or so it felt.
That’s it, she thought, absolutely no more drinking. Hard liquor, a known poison, what could I have been thinking? No more. Wine only from now on. She got out of bed, did the bathroom, shuffled into the kitchen in her gorgeous robe, now a little rumpled and stained, for she spent a good deal more time in it than she had in any previous robe. The great mass of the Sunday Times lay strewn on the big kitchen table. Observing it, she concluded, after a small pause, that it was Sunday and she had missed church. Since the house was empty, she further concluded that her daughter had dressed and fed the boys and led them off to St. Pat’s, thus demonstrating yet again her moral superiority over her mom. They must have walked.
Her husband was not at home either. The dog was at home, and now he came wagging in, looking particularly lugubrious, to rest his massive head on her knee, the better to stain her pashmina anew with his copious slobber. She patted him absently and then, yielding to a pang of yet another addiction, she rose, loaded up the Gaggia, made herself a double shot of espresso, and burnt a couple of pieces of toast umber. The coffee and the charcoal would absorb the poisons, she calculated, and she swallowed four Advil in case that didn’t work. She sat again and waited for the dizziness to cease. The dog made his three circles and collapsed at her feet, sighing.
“I am not having blackouts,” she said to the dog conversationally. “Honestly, Sweets, I recall everything that occurred last night. We went to the opera. I bought a season because I always promised myself that if I got rich I would, and I did, and I took Butch because I bought him four season tickets at Yankee Stadium, and it’s only fair. I remember he was acting peculiar, like distant. I wore the crystal coat and the Molinari sequined silk with the sleeves. It was Turandot, the opera, I remember that all right. With Casolla, Larin, and Frittoli. Butch fell asleep, which I guess is par, and this woman came up to me in the intermission . . . Binky? Bootie? And I said I didn’t remember her from this speech I gave once at the Coalition Against Violence, which I didn’t, but I said I did, and she invited us to a party over on the East Side, Seventy-something off Park, and we went and . . .” She stopped. The dog sighed again.
“No, wait a second, Sweets,” she said and started again. “We went to this party, a big town house, and there was a bar, of course, and I think I was drinking champagne, which was fine because, really, you can’t get very drunk on champers. It’s only wine. But then later . . . we went someplace else, a saloon, and I was drinking brandy Alexanders, which, they’re practically a dessert, not really drinking, and . . . no, I didn’t get thrown out for throwing a drink . . .” An image popped into her mind, looking up, the tops of buildings whirling around, and the whitish night sky you get on a cloudy night in the city, as if she was looking up at it from the ground. The coat!
She leaped up and ran into the bedroom, threw open the closet. There was the coat, hanging there, and she saw a big streak of city gutter grease down the back of it and hundreds of tiny crystals torn off the hem. How awful, she thought, but only vaguely. The emotion did not bite deep. For some reason she
was not attached to this costly possession. In truth, she was hardly attached to anything much anymore. She shrugged and closed the closet and went back to her coffee. What she really wanted, actually, was some Irish coffee with lots of whipped cream, and so she made a pot of drip with the espresso grind and whipped up a bowl of cream, pausing to admire the cleanliness and order of her refrigerator. A little man now had the food order and took care of all that, and a number of other little men and women now took care of other things: cleaning, the children, the dog, transporting physical objects to and fro. Ms. Lipopo at the bank apparently knew, or knew people who knew, an apparently limitless supply of people who made life in the city a delight of ease and comfort for those with enough money. Which had, of course, formerly included Marlene, but not now. There were even people who shopped for you, should you be blessed with funds and not with taste, but Marlene didn’t have any of those because she liked shopping now, loved it, in fact: it was what she did, although she would have to get back to the office sometime. Yes, after she’d had a rest, everyone said she deserved one. She made the Irish coffee in one of the big ceramic mugs because, with those little whiskey-sour glasses that restaurants served the drink in, you hardly had time to taste it before it was gone. She filled the mug halfway with powerful coffee, poured in a lot of John Jameson, and dolloped out the whipped cream. A little shaved chocolate on the top. Perfect.
As was the next one. She sat in front of the TV and drank it, sipping slowly, inhaling the lovely fumes of Irish and coffee and cream. She surfed through the cable fare until she found Life Styles of the Rich and Famous and watched that for a while and entertained the idea that she herself was now rich and famous. She could have one of those houses, too. It would take so much time to fill one of them with art and furniture, and when you were done, you could do it all over again, as the woman who was being profiled obviously liked doing. Using up time had recently become extremely important to her. Odd, because she could recall never having enough time. Marlene watched avidly and on the first commercial break made herself another Irish coffee, omitting the whipped cream this time. Terrible for the arteries, that whipped cream! Then she watched a quiz show, then the shopping channel, keeping the Irish coffee flowing, although, to be honest, there was really no point in making more coffee—why jangle the nerves? So she just sloshed the Jameson into the mug. Life was good, she thought, good and getting better. She called the dog over, who licked up various spills and washed her face with his tongue. “Yes, you still love me, don’t you?” she crooned. “Don’t you? Yes, you do. Unlike some people.”
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