Thereafter was peace restored, comfort tendered, cruelty chastised, the weeping hound treated with ice cubes and kisses, dinner whipped together and served, the boys cossetted into their beds by Mom for an unusually long time, it seemed, but not begrudged by Mom at all. Marlene came back to find Karp sitting on the costly couch idly thumbing through the television guide. The immense, expensive television was dark. She sat on his lap and kissed him. He noted the taste change—sausages, peppers, coffee. Not as exotic, but more delicious, haimish, his favorite flavor.
“I’m thinking of having some people over,” she said, “a kind of welcome-home party.”
“Like who?” Unenthusiastically.
“Don’t grump. Real people. Tran’ll be in tonight with Lucy, and we have to thank him, and besides, I have some stuff I need to talk with him about, and Mike Dugan, and your little guy, Murrow, and Guma. I haven’t seen him in ages. And let’s see . . . how about Clay Fulton?”
“Clay? You can’t have Clay, not with Tran in the room.”
“Why not?”
“Because Tran’s got a fugitive warrant on him. He shot all those people out on Long Beach. Which Clay knows about.”
“Yes, and he shot those people in the course of saving your daughter’s life. It’s not like he was a drug baron or a serial killer.”
“He is a serial killer, and he might be a drug baron, for all we know. And our guest list is a little peculiar. This wouldn’t be a working party, would it?”
“Wine and cheese,” said Marlene, “sober discussion about your problem. Your problem, remember? I assume you still want it solved.”
“Not that way. Not using gangsters. And Clay will walk out, and I’ll lose a friend. Shit! I hate this!”
“I know you do, but you have to trust me. Look, if I wanted to know about some arcane point of criminal law, say the definition of conspiracy in New York v. Patterson, who would I turn to, hm?”
“Patterson has nothing to do with conspiracy. It says that the state may refuse to sustain the affirmative defense of insanity unless demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence.”
“See! I defer to your greater knowledge. In the same way, if you want to pull off a surreptitious investigation involving deception, chicanery, and a casual attitude toward the law, who would you turn to?”
Karp said nothing. She tickled him in the ribs. “Come on, Butch! You know I’m the man when it comes to the gray areas.”
He sighed. He was so far gone in vice, he thought, that another increment could hardly damn him deeper. Besides, and not inconsiderable in itself, his wife was back. Real Marlene was sitting on his lap, her eye sparkling with the old light. It was worth losing a chunk of soul for. “Oh, all right!” he snapped. “Have your damn party.”
“Good!” she said, and cuddled closer. “Now, where were we when the dog howled?”
At which point they heard the elevator crank up, and they sighed and rolled their eyes and felt each other up in a friendly way, and shortly after in came the prodigal daughter, alone. She, after greeting her parents warmly, and after a mutual exchange of apologies, went to the refrigerator and peered in. “I could kill for a corned beef sandwich on rye,” she exclaimed, which, oddly enough, made Karp feel better than he had for a while: she was not entirely lost to the Orient, it appeared. This item was prepared, and she ate it, and they had a reunion. After a while Karp picked up the vibes telling him that the two of them wanted some time by themselves. This he was glad to give, for though he was a devout father and uxorious to the point of absurdity, given the typical mores of last-century New York, there was stuff, some weird gynospecific energy, that passed between the two chief females in his life that he did not care to be around. He went off to watch television.
“Where’s Tran?” Marlene asked when he was gone. “I thought he was going to stay with us.”
“He has a place on Bayard he stays in. Business associates, ha ha. He thinks Dad doesn’t like him.”
“It’s my house, too.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not a sensitive, liberated New Age man. What can I say? He would probably deal direct with Dad and cut you out entirely as far as I was concerned except he’s embarrassed about his English. Boy, but he’s a good teacher!”
“Determined. I was saying the same to your father.”
“Yes, but not just that. He just knows how to light something up, so you say. Oh, God, how could I have been so dumb not to see it! And he doesn’t make you feel bad, except in that funny shtick he does about you’re totally worthless and should be drowned so there’ll be more rice for everyone else. It’s so sad. That must be the saddest thing in the world—someone finds their métier, the only thing in the world they really want to do, and they’re really good at it, too, but for one reason or another they don’t get to do it.”
“I don’t know. People do what comes along, more or less. Your dad wanted to be a basketball player, but he’s pretty happy as a prosecutor.”
“But he’s not a prosecutor,” said Lucy vehemently. “That’s my point. He’s good at prosecuting cases, but they won’t let him. He pushes paper and bureaucratizes. He hates it.” Lucy looked closely at her mother. “And how about you, Mom? Still enjoying the ill-gotten gains?”
Marlene could not help a start at this comment. “Why ‘ill-gotten’?”
“Oh, just a figure of speech. I guess they’re not gotten too ill, in comparison.”
“Actually,” Marlene said after a considered pause, “they are. Wait here: I want you to help me with something. It’s very important. Speaking of métier.”
She left and returned a moment later carrying her Sony microrecorder. “Okay, here’s the deal. You’ll recall that two days before our IPO came out, your pal and mine, Oleg Sirmenkov, and a team of God knows what kind of hard boys he dug up, hit a farmhouse in Kosovo and rescued Dick Perry and his party from the grip of Serbian kidnappers. All the good guys were unharmed, and all the bad guys were killed in the assault, including two women. Osborne was all over every network in the world—you remember those shots with Perry getting out of the car with those big guys in black jumpsuits with Osborne plastered across their backs?”
“Yeah, they played it like continuously. What about it?”
“Just that a couple of days before the kidnapping, Oleg was walking around the office like the cat that ate the canary. Everyone else was gritting their teeth about the offering, but not Oleg. He was confident it would fly to the moon. And, of course, it did. I asked him why he was so up on it, and he said something to the effect that events would be in our favor.”
Lucy looked puzzled. “So . . . you think he knew about the kidnapping before it happened? Then why didn’t he stop it?”
“Why indeed? It’s been bugging me for weeks. Also, it was only four days from the time they snatched Perry off a street in Pristina until Oleg’s people sprang him, with half of NATO beating the bushes looking, with no result.”
“What, you think he set it up? Kidnapped his own client?”
“No, but I think he knew the snatch was going down, and he let it happen. Dropped an agent into a Serbian extremist cell maybe. He had his rescue team all primed, he must have had the location and layout of the farmhouse before he went in. There’s no other way he could’ve done that operation the way it went down, to pull out four people without injury, and kill eleven kidnappers. Oleg’s good, but not that good. And all the bad guys dead, by the way, that’s significant, too. No tales afterwards.”
“But that’s horrible!”
“Yeah. And the more I tried not to think about it, the worse it got. Drunk as I was, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. That business with Kelsie, that was just the last straw.” Marlene let out a large sigh. “Anyway, I lifted all the international-call recordings—all the calls to Russia or Pristina for the relevant time period I mean—off his computer and decrypted them.” She tapped the tape recorder. “I played them out onto tape. They’re in Russian, of course. I could go to a com
mercial translation service, but who knows what Oleg’s contacts are in the local Russian community? I’d like you to listen to them and make me a transcript.”
Lucy stared at the thin tape recorder with a peculiar expression on her face—repugnance mixed with fascinated delight. “Sure. When do you want it?”
“Now. As soon as possible. I’m not enough of a computer jockey to hide my traces. If Oleg’s got some kind of snooper program on his machine, which he’s bound to, being Oleg, he’ll know someone was in his files. And it won’t take him long to figure out who it was. I want to go in there Monday all loaded and ready to kick butt.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know exactly. Something nasty and unreasonable, I guess.”
Lucy smiled at her mother. “This is your métier, isn’t it?”
Marlene grinned back. “Being nasty and unreasonable? I guess.”
“No, I mean figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it regardless of who it hurts, even if it hurts you.”
“That’s a moral stance, not a métier. I really don’t know what mine is. I can do a lot of different things pretty well, but none of them seem to make me particularly happy.” Marlene laughed. “But enough of me. What about you, baby? You know what you’re going to do with your life more than any of us.”
“Do I? Oh, yeah, the languages—obviously, I like to learn them, but for me that’s like walking or breathing. It’s not life’s work, and also obviously, you don’t see me bursting at the seams with joy.”
“No, we don’t. It’s depressing, too, and guilt-making. You know I always think every downer in the family is my fault.”
“Well, it is, Mom, and you better believe we hate you for it.”
“Thank you, darling. But I wish, I don’t know, I wish you were more gay.”
“What!”
“Oh, Christ, I don’t mean gay gay! I mean lighter, more like a teenager. I mean you are only seventeen. I mean when I was seventeen . . .”
Lucy put her hands over her ears and said, “La la la la la . . . !”
“Oh, stop that! You know very well what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do.” Lucy sobered instantly and bit nervously at a ragged fingernail. “How can I explain this without sounding like a nut? Look, you know the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible?”
“Of course. What about it?”
“Well, you know the right-wing fundamentalists, that’s an important story to them. They claim God wants different people to stay different, and that’s their interpretation of the story. It’s why they object to the UN, and racial mixing.”
“Okay, but they’re crazy. What does that have to do with you?”
The girl looked down, tapped nervously on the edge of her plate. Then she raised her head and looked directly at Marlene with eyes that were like hot copper pennies.
“Right, it’s symbolic, it’s a metaphor, but there’s also something real under it. Language is . . . I don’t know, a mystery, and partly it’s a religious mystery. ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ you know? What does that mean? And like the Pentecost, when they all spoke in tongues. Language comes from meat, but it’s not meat itself. No one understands why there are so many of them or what that means either. But, Mom, the thing is, I think God is putting Babel together again. In my head. That’s what I’m for. I’m an instrument, for some use. And I don’t know what it is. I’m supposed to wait to be told. You can see why that would make it hard to get into teenage chitchat and hanging out. I mean it takes all my energy.”
Lucy rose and picked up the recorder. “Let me get going on this.” She started to leave, but before she could, Marlene stood up, too, and gave her a long, silent hug and kissed the shorn head, half-terrified of its contents.
It was not a cheerful group that gathered in the Karp loft the following day, a Saturday afternoon, the guests having been selected for qualities other than congeniality. Tran and Marlene were in a kitchen corner, speaking low in French; Father Dugan was talking with Lucy, catching up with her academic exploits of the past weeks and drinking a good deal of better wine than he was used to. Somewhat later, the four of them were huddled in the living room, speaking in low voices, in both French and English, with Lucy jumping in as occasional translator. Dugan and Tran had, of course, both heard a good deal about one another, but this was their first vis-à-vis. To Marlene’s great relief, they seemed to get along, both of them being basically conspirators. Plots thickened.
Karp, Clay Fulton, Guma, and Murrow were meanwhile sitting around the dining room table, amid a litter of beer bottles, drinking and swabbing tortilla chips through Marlene’s salsa. Fulton loved Marlene’s salsa, but did not like what he was hearing, the business with Firmo, the gold watches, the hookup between Cisco Lomax and Firmo, and how that connected (they thought) to bullets flying down the Henry Hudson Parkway in the middle of a rainy night. Fulton was silent and glowering when Karp finished with the story of the visit to the Cooley home.
After half a minute or so, Karp asked, “Well? What do you think?”
“What do I think? I think you got a lot of nerve dragging me in here for this horseshit.”
“It’s not horseshit, Clay,” Karp replied. “It’s the only story that explains the facts. Cisco Lomax screwed Brendan Cooley out of the collar of his life, the collar his father couldn’t make, and when he saw him driving by in the night, he lost his head, took off after him, and blew him up.”
“You want to think that, fine! There’s a thing called a grand jury you use for checking out if someone maybe did a crime. You think you got a case, take it to them. That’s the way the system works.”
“I know how the system works,” snapped Karp. “The problem is the system isn’t working in this case, which is why we’re having this cockamamy meeting. There’s only one person we know about who can testify to the connection between Lomax and Cooley before the parkway shooting, and that’s John Carey Williams, aka Canman.”
“No, you only think that. You don’t actually know shit. And, anyway, what the hell do you expect me to do about it? Crawl through the tunnels and catch him myself? The guy is already the subject of a major search, for chrissake. He’s the chief suspect in the bum slashings.”
“If the cops catch Canman, he’ll never see a courtroom.”
“Oh, right, your theory about Cooley knocking off bums to cover his story. I mean really, Butch. Take a breath and just think that through. You’re off the rails there completely.”
Karp said, “Think what you want. Meanwhile, you asked me what I want you to do. Well, what I really want you to do is start a full-scale investigation of Brendan Cooley, a real one, not another half-assed whitewash.”
“That’s out of the question.”
“I know. And I’m sorry about that, I really am. How about this, though? You’ve got access to personnel records. Find out where he was the days those victims got it. It shouldn’t take long, and if you’re right, an alibi should turn up. On the other hand, if he was off-shift and unobserved at the time of every single one of the six killings . . .”
Fulton gritted his teeth. “All right, I guess I can do that. Is that all?”
“No. When we pick up Canman, I want to turn him over to you personally.”
“You know where Canman is?” asked Fulton in a tone and with an expression that made his astonishment plain.
“Yeah, we do. We have contacts, let’s say, in the tunnel community. Father Dugan does, I mean. You make the arrest and keep him in your sight until we can get him in front of a grand jury. How about it?”
Fulton scowled and thought for a long moment. “Okay, you got it. But I didn’t hear any of this other shit. And—last time—that is all I’m going to do in connection with this abortion.” He stood up. “Thanks for the beers.”
“There’s one other thing,” said Karp.
“I told you . . .”
“No, this has nothing to do with Cooley. You said you had responsibil
ity for locating high-crime areas on the computer and reinforcing the cops there, drug corners and that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I do. What about it?”
“There’s a character, a person we’d like to see some pressure put on.”
“A dealer?”
“Well, he’s into a lot of things,” said Karp smoothly. “Name’s Ralphie Paxton. He’s at 542 West Forty-fifth, apartment 3B. We want a lot of cops on the street for a week or so, busting people, frisking the usual suspects.”
“Uh-huh. Well, a neighborhood like that, we wouldn’t need much excuse. I can do that, no problem. You want to tell me what it’s about?”
“Do you want to know?”
For the first time in a while, Fulton favored Karp with his familiar toothy grin and deep chuckle. He waved a big finger in Karp’s face. “You’re getting too smart for your own good, Stretch. I’m going to have to lock you up one day.”
“I learned it all from you. You’re an accessory.”
Still waggling his head and chuckling, Fulton left.
“Well, that went well,” said Guma after a significant pause. “Do you think he’ll rat us out?”
“It’s not ratting out. Clay is Nash’s rabbi in the cops, he’s supposed to look out for him. Now we told him we know where Canman is, he’ll tell Nash that Cooley may be going down, and why, and try to find some way to cover him. Nash is Cooley’s partner, so he’ll tell Cooley, although I’m sure that Clay will tell him not to. That’s the cops, that’s the Blue Wall, only it’s not a wall. It’s a bunch of little castles, defended against the outside, but also from each other, the bosses jockeying for power and the little guys all working their own game with their rabbis, and IAD working against all of them, except where they’re not, and the whole thing dipped in enough chickenshit regulations so that the bosses can burn anyone they want to, almost arbitrarily. And the secrets: Clay Fulton is practically my best friend, but when I deal with Inspector Fulton, I can’t be out-front, and frank. It wouldn’t be fair to him, it would rip him up, so we have to go around the barn, like I just did.” Karp looked disconsolate as he sucked on a beer.
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