Act of Revenge

Chapter 16

“No makeup,” said Karp.

“It’s only powder,” said the television woman. She had approached him in the chaos behind the set of the Morning Report show. Karp had arranged to be on the show just after speaking with Keegan the previous evening, to answer questions about the Guma-Scarpi tape. By now the tape had been seen at least a hundred times on all the local stations and the networks, too (The fix is in: wink), and Dudley Bryson, the newsman who was about to interview Karp, had, at their initial meeting earlier that morning, practically to wipe the saliva from his chin, so eager was he to get Karp before his cameras. A dangerous man, according to Bill McHenry, the D.A.’s public affairs chief, who had lectured Karp on how to handle Morning Report, a detailed strategy that had gone in one ear and out the other.

The television woman said, “Everybody uses it. It takes away the shine.” She smiled as for a recalcitrant child and leaned closer, paper bib and puff in hand. Karp gave her a knifing yellow look, of the type he ordinarily reserved for violent pedophiles.

“I. Said. No.”

She paled and scuttled away, muttering.

A young man wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard approached and led Karp out to the set, a matte blue wall dressed with a coffee table and two tan padded chairs. Karp was seated in one and fitted with a tiny microphone that clipped to his tie. Asked for a sound level, Karp said, “I wish for this entire enterprise to be destroyed by fire from the heavens, destroyed utterly, leaving only ashes and horribly disfigured corpses,” which apparently sufficed, and in short order the host came out, pancaked and hairsprayed to a mannikin perfection, and sat in the other seat, and had his mike attached, and attempted some small talk with Karp, not very successfully, and then the makeup person came out again and patted some powder on Bryson’s thick orangey makeup, and he said something to her, indicating the guest with a gesture of his chin, and she shook her head and stalked off stage. Then the kid with the headset crouched in front of them and made three-two-one signs with his fingers and snapped his index finger pistol-like on the last count and the red light on the camera went on and Karp made a concentrated effort to relax the set of his jaw, which felt wired, and then Bryson was talking.

Karp tried to tell himself that this was just like a jury trial, that he was about to make a presentation to a jury of millions rather than just twelve, but he knew at some level that this was not so. Juries were grave affairs; whatever their origins, jurors were almost always ennobled by their function, which was seeking truth, that tender thing, and while Karp, if pressed, might agree that at its best journalism reached for something similar, what he was doing now had little to do with journalism at even its second best. What this jabbering little pimp next to him was doing was entertaining slobs in hopes that they would buy Miller rather than Bud, and Pontiac rather than Ford.

The scant intros over, Bryson called for the tape, and once again they all watched Ray Guma at work. Bryson’s false smile spoke: “Mr. Karp, many people believe that what we’ve just seen suggests criminal activity and the possible corruption of the district attorney’s office by organized crime. What’s your response to that?”

Karp said, “Oh, there’s no doubt that it’s evidence of a crime.”

Bryson had expected wriggling here, and so he was somewhat taken aback. “And what is the district attorney’s office going to do about it?” he asked.

Karp raised his eyebrows. “Nothing, with respect to prosecution. It’s a federal crime.”

The false smile grew confused; the face turned to the camera to show it was not dismayed. “Excuse me?”

“Yes. It’s illegal under federal statute and Department of Justice regulation to reveal the proceedings of a grand jury, and that includes the evidence collected pursuant to those proceedings.”

“But surely the First Amendment overrides some regulation,” said Bryson. “Think of the Pentagon Papers-”

“Yes, but that’s for a judge to decide. And I assure you that our office will protest most vigorously to Judge Oberst, the federal judge who empanelled the federal grand jury, regarding the release of this evidence. The issue of whether the U.S. attorney’s office deliberately violated the seal of the grand jury in this case has nothing to do with your action as a member of the press to publish material you have in hand under supposed First Amendment privileges. The release itself is, in our opinion, frankly illegal.”

Bryson was starting to feel uneasy. On a live show there was always the danger of an interview subject going ballistic, but the reporter had a vast faith in the power of television to produce awe and terror and bland agreeableness in the people upon whom its searchlight fell. People wanted to be loved by television reporters. He moved now to regain control. “But Mr. Colombo has denied any deliberate leak of the tape we just saw, and in any case, the issue here is whether Mr. Guma has-”

“I am not accusing Mr. Colombo directly,” Karp interrupted. “It is entirely within the realm of possibility that an intrepid reporter penetrated the interior of the Southern District offices, got past dozens of armed federal law enforcement officers, located the tape in question from among hundreds and hundreds of evidence tapes, and purloined it. In that case Mr. Colombo would be merely incompetent and not culpable.”

Bryson’s face now arranged itself into an expression of pained forebearance, suitable to guests who claimed alien abduction. “Mr. Karp, as I said, the issue here is the content of the tape itself, and whether an assistant district attorney was in collusion with organized crime.”

The camera focused in on Karp here, so as to watch him sweat out an answer to this one, but Karp was not looking at the camera. He was staring at Bryson. The show’s director instinctively switched to a two-shot and got a good one of Karp’s center punch of a finger pointing at the host. “I know you!” he cried. “I’ve seen you around my daughter’s school. You were trying to trade heroin for sexual favors from little girls. Yeah! You’re the guy!”

Bryson’s face took on a rictus of surprise and horror, which the unforgiving camera recorded forever. The show stopped for two beats, and then Karp said, “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. You’re not the guy after all. It was someone else. Do you get it now, Mr. Bryson?”

“You’re avoiding this issue, sir. .”

“I beg to differ-this is the issue. Say I don’t like you, Mr. Bryson. Say I hauled you into court on that preposterous charge, and brought up a cloud of witnesses who claimed to have seen you do awful things. I bet you have plenty of malicious enemies. Oh, you’d probably get off, and you might afterward sue for false arrest, but think of the cost! And then I might do it again. Why not? If we had a system where someone like me could make a baseless accusation against someone like you, even if the case proved false, your reputation would never survive. I don’t even mention your bank account. That’s why there are grand juries, and that’s why they’re secret. Before I can make you a defendant in a felony, before I can indict you, I have to convince a majority of twenty-three of your fellow citizens that there is enough evidence to hold you to answer for the crime at a public trial, and if there isn’t, if the charge does not hold up, no one knows about it, ever. Absent that constraint, the authority of prosecutors to do damage is very nearly absolute. Absent that, I could tear you apart, Mr. Bryson. I could tear anyone apart.”

“Yes, that’s all very well, but you haven’t answered-”

“Listen to me! We are your dogs, Mr. Bryson. Me and Mr. Colombo and all the others who are supposed to represent the people. You want us to keep you safe from the wolves in our society. But we have very, very sharp teeth and powerful jaws, and we need strong chains. The grand jury is one of those chains, and secrecy is its most important link. Weaken it, and even though greedy journalists think it’s swell to get leaks from a grand jury, I guarantee you, you won’t like what happens. Mr. Colombo’s office has slipped that chain, and as a result a distinguished public servant, a man who has in thirty years of dedicated work done more to fight organized crime in this city than anyone I know, has had his reputation besmirched. You mentioned the Pentagon Papers? How can you compare the breaching of executive secrecy in a matter of transcendent national importance with a cheap political stunt by an out-of-control federal prosecutor?”

Bryson made a series of inarticulate noises as he tried to regain momentum. The director, who was one of the many who did not like Dudley Bryson, held the camera steady on this gabbling: “But, but, but, um, but, if that’s the, I mean, if. . then you. . are not going to pursue any, disciplinary measures against Mr. Guma?”

The camera moved to Karp’s face, on which there was a bemused expression that all New Yorkers could recognize as the one that appeared on their very own faces when trying to explain to a group of Korean tourists how to get to the Cloisters.

Cue commercial.

In the Karp home, all were glued to the little screen in the kitchen, watching the man of the house on Morning Report.

“Why is Daddy so shiny, Mom?” asked Lucy. “He looks weird.”

“I believe that’s the light of truth and justice issuing forth,” said Marlene. “They usually don’t let it on TV. It’s like full-frontal nudity.”

Zak was dancing around snapping a red plastic pistol and crying, “My daddy’s on television!” repeatedly. Zik was not watching at all, which offended his brother, who urged him to lift up his eyes and gaze. “Watch Daddy, Zik! Daddy’s on TV.”

“Daddy’s not on TV,” replied Zik disdainfully. “Daddy’s in real life!”

And back in real life, Karp got a round of applause and humorous cheers from those he passed as he went to his office, and within five minutes of arriving at his desk, he got a call from Jack Keegan.

“I haven’t had so much fun since the pigs ate grandma,” said Keegan without preamble.

“I’m glad you liked it,” said Karp.

“Like is not the word. You added ten years to my life, boyo, and you set public relations back twenty-five. McHenry’s been bending my ear for the last ten minutes. He’s going to require sedation. He reminds me, and I now remind you, that the press never forgets. You made one of them look like a jackass, boyo. I hope you’re prepared to live a life of absolute perfection from now on. You’re a marked man.”

Karp thought briefly not of himself but of Marlene and the extraordinary vulnerability and imperfection of her life and of what a couple of skilled investigative reporters could do to her with it, and then suppressed that unhappy line of thought. “Perfection? No problem,” he replied lightly, and asked, “How are your peers responding?”

“Mixed. I like to imagine all the honest ones are on our side. The guys I watched the show with were cheering, at any rate. How’s Ray holding up?”

“I sent him home with one of the guys from the squad for company.”

“You don’t think he’s in any serious danger?”

“I got the word out he didn’t know about the bug, but whether that will satisfy Scarpi and his brothers is another question. But fuck them, they’re the bad guys. I’m more worried about the good guys.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, Jack, not to put too fine a point on it, Ray Guma, in addition to being, as I said to millions, a helluva crime fighter, is also, as you well know, excessively fond of dipping his wick, and he has dipped it on occasion in places where maybe he shouldn’t have, being an officer of the court. Lovely witnesses, for example. Lovely former defendants, for example. High-class ladies of the evening with strong ties to some prominent Italian-American gentlemen, for example. Colombo puts the full-court press on this, he’s going to come up with a lot of dirt, and the media will eat it up. D.A.’s man in Mafia sex ring. Keegan’s Italian stallion in bed with Mob. .”

Keegan cursed briefly, and then there was an ominous silence on the line, leaving Karp to imagine that Keegan was thinking nasty thoughts about how to cut Guma loose, and about what he, the district attorney, could plausibly have known and when about the fellow’s deplorable lusts. Karp decided to save Keegan embarrassment by changing tack.

“Which means we have only a limited time to derail this entire operation and make Tommy look like a horse’s ass not only on the Guma thing but on the Catalano thing as well, so much so that the jackals will forget Ray. So I need some scope, and I need some cover.”

“What do you have in mind?” growled the D.A.

“Not a goddamn thing right now,” said Karp. “But I’ll think of something.”

Tran came to convey Lucy to the cops for her lineup, and Marlene and Posie, the kids and the mastiff, piled into the Volvo. All but Marlene exited at Central Park South for a healthy romp, and Marlene headed north and east. James Nobile was in the phone book, which meant that Marlene needed no detection skill greater than the ability to find a large tan apartment building at 70th and Third.

There was no doorman, and Marlene entered with the standard ruse: being well dressed, with nice legs, and fumbling with keys while a legit male tenant was entering.

As usual, Sym had called to determine if the man was home, and he opened the door at Marlene’s ring. She looked down, trying to hide her surprise. Abe had not mentioned anything about Nobile’s physical appearance, so she was unprepared for a man less than five feet high. Paint him red and screw a big hex nut into his skull, and he would have passed for a fire hydrant on a dim night. He must have been near seventy, and he had retained, or returned to, the face of an irascible infant.

“Yeah?” he snapped. “What is it now? And how did you get into the building? If this is another goddamn charity collection, you can forget it.”

“Mr. James Nobile?” Marlene inquired.

“Yeah?”

“Did you work at the law firm of Fein, Kusher and Panofsky in the fifties and sixties?”

“What if I did? Who are you, lady?”

Straight is not going to work with this guy, Marlene thought. Doherty might have been a bent cop, but as a human being he was relatively decent; this little fellow was warped to the core. She smiled and said, “My name is Ariadne Stupenagel, I’m a freelance writer, and I’m doing a story on famous suicides in the New York area. Can I come in?” So saying, she used her hip and entered the apartment, closing the door behind her.

“Hey,” said Nobile, “I didn’t say you could come in here.”

“I won’t take up much of your time, Mr. Nobile,” said Marlene, looking around. Musty, the smell of whiskey in the close air. Expensive, flashy furniture from twenty-five years ago, the low point in American design, crowded the living room, lots of crushed velvet, a Barcalounger, a twenty-one-inch television in an immense mahogany console, a nude on velvet on the wall; no sad clowns, but he might have saved that for the bedroom.

She chivvied him into letting her sit on his sofa; he sat in a fading brocade armchair facing her from halfway across the room, as if she were carrying a communicable disease.

“Now, what I wanted to ask you about was the suicide of Gerald Fein, one of the partners in the law firm you worked at. Do you recall that tragedy, Mr. Nobile?”

“Sure, yeah, but I don’t know anything about it. I mean, all I know is from the papers and whatnot.”

A lie, thought Marlene. A whopper. She was always surprised at how badly ordinary people lied. Being careful to stare into the interrogator’s eye more than was common, that was one sign. Nobile’s eyes were like some curdled dessert, a dab of grainy chocolate in stale, yellowing creme.

“But you worked for the firm at the time. You must have seen Mr. Fein every day, just about. Did you get the impression that he was troubled?”

“Hey, I just did my job. I didn’t poke into anybody’s business.”

“Mr. Panofsky thought that Fein was troubled, though, didn’t he?” Shrug.

“Did he ever mention it to you?”

“Hell, lady, it was twenty-five years ago,” Nobile said irritably. “You think I keep crap like that in my head? He must’ve been crazy or he wouldn’t have jumped off of the Empire State.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you’re right, it was a long time ago. I guess you’re retired now yourself.” She looked around admiringly. “You must have a nice pension to afford this place. Upper East Side, wow! I’m jealous.”

“Not a pension. Those days only the big guys gave pensions. Nah, I got Social Security and I got investments.”

“Lucky you! So, tell me, how did you come to work for Fein’s law firm?”

“I answered an ad in the Journal-American. I was with them seventeen years.”

“Uh-huh. And before that?”

“I was in building management.” His look grew narrower. “What do you want to know this stuff for?”

“Just background, Mr. Nobile. So, was carrying important packages part of your work? Confidential information and so on?”

“Yeah, I did that, I did a little of everything. What does that have to do with the suicide?”

“I’m getting to that. The packages were mostly from Mr. Panofsky, weren’t they? Thick envelopes. You took them to politicians all over town, didn’t you?”

“You’re not a reporter,” said Nobile, and shot to his feet.

“But you took them from Panofsky, not Fein, didn’t you? Fein wasn’t in the thick-envelope business. Except once.”

“Get out of here!” Nobile’s clay-colored face was going red around the edges.

Marlene got up and stalked slowly toward him. “Except once, and that envelope was the one that got him disbarred. I bet you could tell me a lot about that deal, couldn’t you? Is that how you got your investments?”

Sometimes they talked when they were scared, and sometimes they fought, and if they were decent folks, they called the police. Nobile was terrified, she could see that, but not necessarily of her. He turned and ran into the kitchen. Marlene heard a drawer violently open and metallic rummaging sounds. Gun, or knife, or hammer? She recalled that she was unarmed and dogless, and beat a retreat.

Tran and Lucy were about to leave the loft when the phone rang. Lucy picked it up. “Lucy Karp, please,” said an unfamiliar voice.

“Speaking.”

“Good. Listen, this is Detective Wu from the Fifth Precinct. You’re supposed to come down here and look at a lineup.”

“We were just leaving,” she said.

“Your mom’s there?”

“No, I’m coming with a friend.”

“Well, your dad said I was to go pick you up. I’ll be by in ten minutes. Why don’t you be outside your building, okay?”

“Wait a second, how come I can’t-”

“Just be outside, okay?” He hung up.

When she told Tran about the change in plans, he frowned. Tran did not like changes in plans at the last minute.

He said, in French, their best mutual language, “Let us go look at this policeman before he drives away with you. Anyone can say he is of the police.”

They went down in the elevator, and Tran led her a few buildings away and across Crosby Street, where they waited in a deeply shadowed doorway. A brown sedan approached from Howard and stopped in front of the Karps’ building. After a few minutes, a neatly dressed Asian man emerged and pressed the Karps’ buzzer.

“That must be him,” said Lucy. “The detective.” She began to wave and walk forward, but Tran swept her up, pulled her deeper into the doorway, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Be still,” he whispered. She could feel the warmth of his breath and smell his scent: nuoc mam and lilacs. “I have seen that man before, accepting something from our Mr. Leung. You mustn’t go with him.” He took his hand away from her mouth.

She stared at the man, who was now gazing up at the windows of the family loft.

“Are you sure? I thought he was a cop.”

“Whether he is or not, which I will determine later, I do not care to have you go off alone with anyone who takes thick envelopes from a triad agent. Ah, good! He is going into your building. Now we will make our getaway.”

“Where will we go?” asked Lucy, trotting along beside him.

“Well, as to that, here is the problem. We believe Leung has corrupted one policeman, but perhaps there are others who are on the take. A policeman comes up to you on the street, shows his badge, orders you into his car, and you go, and poof! No more Lucy. He takes you for a ride, yes? So properly, we should blow town.”

They reached the alley where Tran kept his elderly Jawa. Lucy said, “Uncle Tran, I don’t think people say blow town anymore.”

“Do they not? You astound me. In any case, I believe we will not do that thing at all, but instead travel to the Queens, where we will be quite safe. Climb on! I want you out of sight before he realizes you are not going to place yourself in his hands.”

If it was a tail, Marlene thought, it was a stupid one, or maybe they figured she would think that. Nobody sane would use a dirty red Dodge pickup with a pale green front fender to tail a car in the city. The vehicle had impinged mildly on her consciousness when parking near Nobile’s apartment building, and then moved up on the awareness scale when it appeared in her side mirror as she drove south on Second Avenue. She cocked her head to center the rearview in her good eye. There it was, two cars back. A man driving, wearing sunglasses and a dark ball cap-could be anyone. When paranoia strikes, Marlene believed, respond as if the danger were real, because all in all a little social embarrassment, even including a brief stay in a nice clinic enriched with soothing medication, is better than being dead. Consequently she signaled, hung a right at 54th Street, and was not really that surprised to see the Dodge make the same turn, nor to see it again after her left onto Third. Marlene now demonstrated why you need at least three cars in radio communication to set and keep a proper tail in a city. By 48th Street she had maneuvered herself so that when the light at that corner turned red, she was right at the crosswalk, and then, just before the cross-street traffic entered the intersection, she leaned on her horn and shot through, scattering pedestrians and summoning forth the usual cacophony of honking horns and screamed curses in several languages. The tail was pinned, and Marlene cut west at 45th, parked in a loading zone for fifteen minutes, and then continued south.

She left the car in a garage of a hotel on Madison off 34th and set out on foot. At a bank she changed a hundred dollars into a stack of crisp ones and fives and went looking for the homeless. After a couple of hours she was thirty-five dollars lighter and not much wiser. The homeless are not your best informants, especially when trying to locate one of their number, most especially when you don’t have a good recent description of your quarry. Shirley Waldorf could have been the Tinfoil Lady, or the Dog Lady, or the Leopardskin Lady, or Crazy Annie. She could have been the Demon Queen that haunted one particular person who, dressed in a toga and a paper hat bearing mystic signs designed to fend off just such evils, assured Marlene that the woman she sought was just across the street, but currently invisible.

“I know who you mean,” said a voice behind her.

A Latino man in kitchen whites was puffing on a cigarette under a ventilator blowing grease and coffee smells out onto 33rd Street. Marlene slapped a buck into the filthy palm of Toga Man and turned to her new informant, who had clearly overheard her recent conversation with the nut.

“You know Shirley Waldorf?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Shirley. She come by in the mornings, and I give her a cup of coffee and a bagel. A old bagel, you know? She give me fifteen cents.” He laughed. “Old lady think a cup of coffee and a bagel still cost fifteen cents. Crazy but never give me no trouble. But I ain’t seen her, three, four days now.” He raised his eyes to the vast gray cliff of the building across the street. “She was always going on about that Empire State. She used to work there or something, I don’t know. Anyway, maybe something happen to her. You check with the cops or the hospitals, I think that would be the thing to do.”

Marlene asked a few questions, but the man knew little more than he had already offered. He accepted a five-dollar bill and a card with her number on it, and promised to call if Shirley Waldorf ever came by again for a bagel and coffee.

Back in the Volvo, Marlene drove downtown to her appointment at the courthouse. The red pickup did not show, which meant little. There could be other cars. How about that tan Mercury with the two guys in the front? Control the paranoia, Marlene. Of course, she did have more than the usual number of enemies; still she was having trouble assuring herself that she was operating at her best. It seemed to take more effort just to keep focused, and she wondered about neuron loss.

She was an hour early, on purpose. She wanted to see Judge Paine in action, and so she slipped into Part 52, where the current show was People v. Macaluso. Jilly Macaluso ran a crew for Salvatore Bollano, and his prosecution for extortion and other felonies was a part of Frank Anselmo’s crusade against that crime family. Jilly had been nailed in the hope that he would turn and implicate higher-ups, but Jilly was a stand-up guy and here they all were.

Marlene sat on the hard and shiny seat and reflected upon how dull trials were, if you were not a principal player. It was always a wonder to her why the media had seized on this slow-motion institution as the symbol of dramatic tension-the wizardry of cutting, perhaps, otherwise “legal thriller” would be another oxymoron. Batting for the People was a guy named Motile, a senior rackets ADA, and on D. was, of course, Marvin P. Kronsky. Kronsky was having a bad day, but the smile on his broad, perfectly shaved face was intact, and his voice as he objected had the even resonance of an oboe in low register. The source of the bad day was up there on top of the presidium, a lumpy, chinless, Brillo-fringed head bobbing above the expanse of black serge like the noggin of a hand puppet. Paine was batting down Kronsky’s objections to the line of questioning, which, as far as Marlene could see, were perfectly legit. The testimony was hearsay, and did not fall into any of the numerous exceptions to the hearsay rule. Of course, she had not been in a courtroom for several years. Maybe the law had changed, and the exception had broadened. In any case, the witness was more or less allowed to spin out his inculpatory tale. On cross, Kronsky brought out that the witness was as much a slimeball as his client, and then they broke for lunch.

Marlene walked down the hallway to Judge Paine’s office, identified herself to the secretary there, and shortly Judge Paine himself appeared, still robed, to greet her. He gave her a big smile and, after a glance at her face, addressed his remarks to her nipples.

How nice to see you again, we don’t get many attorneys as gorgeous as you (taking her arm, the backs of the fingers pressing against tit), sit down in that chair and I’ll sit here (unspoken: so I can look up your skirt), did you hear the one about. . (a mildly dirty joke), and the rest of the usual prelims with this kind of asshole. Marlene was used to it, knew the routine, smiled and giggled at the right times. Jesus, she thought, it was like working with a hot wire and a pithed frog, and after a good deal of this they got down to the reason she had come.

Gerald Fein? Oh, of course he remembered Gerald Fein. Marlene watched him closely as he spun what must have been a familiar tale. He really was an ugly little fuck, she thought, and this must have colored his life. People trust the handsome more than they do the ugly, she recalled, and it must have been. . what? Excruciating? To be working with a couple of slick, good-looking men like Jerry and Bernie. He told the story well, and Marlene entertained the thought that he’d been tipped to expect her.

“Judge, tell me one thing,” she interjected at a pause. “I have not been able to find anyone else besides you who recalls Jerry Fein being despondent in the days before the event. How do you explain that?”

The genial smile lost some of its temperature. “I don’t have to explain it, Marlene. This isn’t an interrogation. I’m telling you what happened as a courtesy, so that you won’t go down any wrong paths. Jerry was severely depressed about the loss of the appeal. He didn’t want to go on. I tried to cheer him up, but it was, obviously, not enough. I’ve always felt guilty about that. Maybe if I’d said something else-”

“Well, it really wouldn’t have mattered what you said, if he was killed. If the suicide was phony.”

“There’s absolutely no evidence for that,” Paine said sharply. The smile was but a ghost of its former self.

“Actually, there is, and I have some of it, and I hope to gather more,” said Marlene, lying for effect.

The smile was dead and buried, replaced by a look honed to be terrifying if one was a prisoner awaiting sentencing. “You know, Marlene, if you poke a stick into a hornet’s nest, you’re liable to get stung.”

“Oh, God, that’s good!” said Marlene brightly, flipping up a fresh page in her steno pad. “I have to write that down. To whom shall I attribute it? The Honorable H. I. Paine, distinguished jurist, or Heshy Panofsky, the payoff man for the Mob?”

Paine went white around the eyes and lips, the lips pressing into an almost invisible line. He pressed a button on his desk. Five seconds later, a side door opened and a uniformed guard appeared.

“Out,” said Judge Paine, “and remember, there are laws against spreading slander.”

The house was in Elmhurst on one of the short, anonymous streets that lie between Queens Boulevard and Corona Avenue, a two-story wooden structure painted light green, with an unkempt, slanting yard out front surrounded by a low chain-link fence. The houses on this street had been built in the twenties for big Catholic families escaping from the tenements of Manhattan, and they all had more or less the same plan: big front parlor, seldom used, big kitchen in the back, narrow hallways, lots of small bedrooms, one bath on the second floor, a toilet near the kitchen. Now the block was full of big Asian families, although a few of the houses contained truly remarkable numbers of people whose only relationship was that they all hailed from Quang Ngai province or were all semi-serfs of the same sweatshop, or had no connection at all except that they were all single men trying to make it in Meiguo, the Beautiful Country.

This was the case in the house Lucy and Tran now entered (the heavy glass-paned door opened to Tran’s knock by a surprised young Vietnamese) and moved through from warm sunlight into shadows scented with the cuisine of Southeast Asia: mint, fermented fish, chilies, coriander, the wet, heavy odor of boiling noodles.

Four men were in the front room, playing cards around a folding table, while a large television showed a silent soap opera. They looked up when they saw the two newcomers, and one of them stood to greet them. Lucy recognized him from the raid on the Vo brothers in Manhattan: Sonny Thu, the dai lo of this crew, and one of Freddie Phat’s main men. He was large for a Vietnamese and wore his hair in a rooster crest in the front and long in the back; two thin wisps of hair grew from either side of his wide mouth, lending an animal look to his hard face. They all had hard faces, thought Lucy, although none of them could have been over twenty-five. They were all people whose childhoods had been shattered by the American war, and Lucy found it hard to imagine them as cherished moon-faced little Asian babies. Being an Asian from this class is a rough lot, but Chinese and Vietnamese babies, especially male babies, live in the closest thing to paradise this earth affords. Contemplating the sort of lives that had converted those semi-divine infants into these terrible-looking men made her inexpressibly sad.

Tran was speaking to Thu in low tones over to one side of the room. Discussing what to do with me, she thought, and she found herself irritated. Once again, nothing normal for Lucy. In a loud voice she said, in Vietnamese, “I have to use the toilet. Where is it?”

One of the card players giggled humorlessly. Thu told her where it was, and she walked out of the room.

“I thought I would find you here,” she said.

Cowboy looked up from the cluttered sink, where he was scrubbing out a pan. He turned and wiped his hands on a towel. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He seemed startled to see her, and nervous.

“I am hiding from the villains, like you.”

“I’m not hiding, I’m a prisoner,” he said with dignity.

“Excuse me. Are you well treated?”

He shrugged and said, “I wash pots and sweep and scrub toilets. They don’t beat me.” His eyes slid away from her. He mumbled to the laden sink.

“What did you say?”

In a louder, defiant voice he snarled, “What do you care?”

He was agitated and upset, and seeing him thus gave Lucy an odd feeling of power. It was rather like it was with Warren Wang, and very unlike how she behaved with the teenage boys who hung out with her male cousins, or most of the boys in middle school, and she wondered why. Was it that they were Asian? No, she decided; it was her, she was different, she felt different and behaved differently, and it was because of. . the situation, yeah, that, she thought, but really it was that with both boys the situation-mystery with a lurking danger-allowed her to slide out of freak hideous Lucy into being someone else, into one of those personas her reading had supplied, like crisp dresses just back from the cleaners, hanging in plastic in a closet, ready to wear. Or more than one, as now, as she added to the mix of Kim and Claudine the exquisitely sensitive and long-suffering Kieu.

“ ‘That we have met means fate binds us,’ ” Lucy quoted. “ ‘The will of man has often beaten back the whim of blue Heaven, but should the knot that ties us fail, I’ll keep to what is etched on bronze and cut in stone, and die.’ ” He gaped. Lucy placed her hand on her cocked hip, smiled, and batted her eyelashes rapidly. After a stunned moment he burst into laughter. Which she joined.

And after they stopped laughing she said, “I wasn’t really joking, Minh. I will be your friend. You’re not like the others out there, or the Vo.”

But he hung his head and looked away. “I have to get working. They want me to cook the pho for lunch, and I haven’t finished cleaning.”

“Go ahead, I’ll make the pho. Where do you keep all the stuff?”

“You can make pho?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I was making pho before you were born.” Again, startled, he laughed, and his face was again transformed into that of a real kid, the dull mask of the hard man cast aside for an instant. She seized the moment to say, “Only trust me, Minh, you’ll see. Listen, those others, they can’t help what they are, and I don’t blame them, no, and I don’t hate them. I love Uncle Tran more than anyone besides my family, and he is a very bad man. He could eat them all. But you’re still young. .”

He looked at her now out of his real self. “You don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You’ve killed people, right?”

“Yes. And robberies. And worse, torture to make them tell. .”

“But you’re not going to do that anymore, are you?” God will forgive you, she thought, and almost said it, but her native good taste intervened.

He held the look for a moment longer, and then it fell away. He went back to the sink. “All the food is in the refrigerator,” he said. “We have rats.”

Marlene called Osborne on the car phone as she drove south on Second Avenue and got a woman named Meg Morrison in the research unit and asked her to generate a full history on James C. Nobile. She could’ve asked Sym, but Osborne would be quicker, and Marlene had a feeling that time was beginning to press in this case, after twenty-some years, and she had other things for Sym to do. She definitely did not like that Shirley Waldorf was missing from her accustomed streets.

“Credit and criminal only?” asked Morrison.

“And employment history, as far back as it goes.”

“By close of business all right?”

“That’ll be fine,” said Marlene. She hung up and turned east on Canal. The phone buzzed, and it was Tran. She had a short, unpleasant, and unsatisfactory conversation with him. She did not want to hear, or believe, that the NYPD was dirty with triad money. That was too much. She said so. Tran was silent, waiting. Marlene found herself thinking about how she was going to explain this to her husband. An unusual thought: Marlene in general did not much concern herself with explaining her actions, but this affair had moved beyond even her generous boundaries of what was acceptable in family life. She inquired after her daughter’s health, was told it was satisfactory, that the child had made a lunch for the gangsters. Perfect. Karp would be so pleased. She told Tran to sit tight and she’d be in touch.

The cherry on top of this marvelous morning was that when she pulled into the little parking lot near her office, there was the red pickup truck with the green fender parked across the street, empty. Cursing, she got out and walked over to it. It was locked. The gun rack behind the cab was empty, but peering through the dirty window, Marlene could just make out a box of Remington double-ought twelve-gauge shells. Charming. She wrote down the number of the Jersey plates and tried to think who she had offended in that state recently, and came up blank.

In the office she lunched on cottage cheese, a chunk of pepperoni, black coffee, and a cigarette, and got Sym involved in calling the city’s homeless shelters and hospitals to inquire whether they had a Shirley Waldorf. Marlene called Jim Raney and asked him to run the plate number of the pickup. He called back twenty minutes later with the news that the registered owner of that truck was a firm called Buttzville Landscaping, of that town, and they had not reported their license stolen either. Marlene laughed, only semihysterically, and Raney said, “You’ve been sneaking off to Buttzville again, Marlene, and doing it with the sod crews and now it’s coming back to haunt you.”

“What can I say, Raney, the smell of cut grass gets me off. Or maybe I forgot to pay for a load of mulch.”

“Yeah, I always forget the mulch bill, too. You want me to drop around, have a talk with the guy when he comes back?”

“Thanks, Jim, but no. I got too many factors going on in my life, and I’m just going to forget this guy right now. Tell the truth, it could just be my imagination, or coincidence. And if not. . well, if I can’t handle a shotgun-wielding hick gardener from Jersey, it’s time to hang it up.”

The calls drew a blank on Waldorf, and at three Marlene left and went to pick up the kids and Posie at the park. The pickup truck was gone when she looked. Maybe it was my imagination, she thought, or maybe it was the Mercury, and when she reached the park twenty minutes later, and Green Fender had not appeared behind her, she had nearly bought the story.

Posie and the boys were waiting at the appointed spot on Central Park South as Marlene pulled up.

“We got kidnappered, Mommy!” Zak screamed gleefully as the twins, Posie, and the dog piled in.

“I want to tell it, Zak,” Zik complained. “It’s my tell, because, I got kidnappered, not you.”

Marlene looked at Posie, who rolled her eyes. “It was nothing, some creep. .”

“My tell! My tell!” screamed Zik.

“Okay, darling, you tell Mommy,” said Marlene, heart in throat.

Zik said, “Once upon a time, Zik was playing in the sandbox in the park. .”

Zak said, “And Zak was playing in the sandbox, too.”

Zik shrieked out the rage of the thwarted artist and had to be calmed and Zak had to be made to promise to let Zik tell the whole thing in his way, and then Zik began with the same trope and then, “. . and I was making a duck with my red duck mold, I was making a whole long line of ducks in the sand, and this man came over and he said, hello, Zik, and he said, I know where there is some real-life ducks you can play with and you should come with me and I said could Zak and Posie come too and he said no, just you, Zik, and he came over me and held my hand and then Posie yelled and Sweety scared him away. The end.”

“Could I tell my story now, Mommy?” Zak shouted.

Marlene felt the hot, penetrating band between her eyes that signaled the start of a major, soul-threatening headache. She gripped the wheel until her knuckles glowed and said, with preternatural calm, “In a little bit, honey, but now it’s Posie’s turn to tell all about the man in the park. Posie?”

“Marlene, honest, it was no big deal. I saw this guy leaning over Zik and I watched him, and when he grabbed Zik’s hand, I yelled and he started to pull him up and I yelled again and grabbed Sweety’s lead and ran over there and Sweety was real upset and doing his Turner and Hooch thing, growling and slobbering and the guy saw it and booked. That’s it. Oh, yeah, and I caught a cop passing by and gave her a description of the guy.”

“Uh-huh. Good. Uh, Posie, this was an Asian guy, right?”

“Asian? No, he wasn’t Asian. He was, like, a regular American guy. But big, like a football player. He had wraparound shades and a suit and a shirt but not a tie kind of shirt, more of a. . what do they call those guys who hang around in Vegas? In the casinos?”

“You mean gangsters?” Marlene inquired in a weak voice.

“No, there’s another word. . oh, yeah, like a bouncer. He looked like a bouncer. He had a bunch of gold chains, I saw that, and black shoes. Marlene, are you okay? You look green.”