Act of Revenge

Chapter 4

One of the habits that Karp had retained from his days as a worker bee was culinary, or rather anti-culinary. In the lunch hour, in fine weather when he had no unavoidable business luncheon, he repaired to one of the shiny cancer wagons lined up along the edges of Foley Square, and there consumed remarkable quantities of what his mother always called chazerei, or pig swill. Today he was eating macerated beef lips and pork by-products forced into a condom and served in a piquant mustard sauce on lozenges of absorbent cotton, with kraut, washing this (the second of a matched pair) down with fizzy orange sugar water. Next to him, on the bench, there rested a yellowish square in waxed paper, the shape and very nearly the taste of paving material, which had been purveyed as a knish.

As he ate, he read through a stack of files, moving them, after reading, from one side of his seated position to the other, using the knish as a convenient paperweight. Although Karp could not possibly keep abreast of the thousands of live felony cases handled by the D.A.’s office, he made an effort to examine enough of a sample to give him a feeling for the tone of the office as a whole. From time to time he found some funny business and he pounced. As now. This, from Felony Bureau, was a major prosecution against a car-theft ring, an interstate operation involving numerous chop shops, crooked parts dealers, and gangs of thieves who functioned as suppliers. It was an elaborate case that had required many months to develop and involved cooperation with the FBI.

Karp muttered and made notes on a legal pad, ripped off the pages, stuck them in the folder, and was about to move on to the next one when he looked up and was startled to see an elderly woman sitting on a bench across the path from him who was also muttering and making notes on a legal pad. Her pad was tattered and faded, and she was using a stumpy pencil instead of an office ballpoint, and she was wearing more than one dress and had next to her a shopping cart stacked with boxes and black plastic bags. Like most New Yorkers, Karp was careful to give the homeless their privacy and did not ordinarily stare, but this woman’s face was interesting, plain, large-nosed, but with deep-set, large dark eyes, rimmed with brownish skin, like rust stains. Her drawn cheeks were decorated with spots of cherry rouge, and there were flakes of bright lipstick clinging to her lips and the skin surrounding them. Her hair was frizzy and dirty gray, and upon it she wore a black velvet hat with a tiny veil, such as his mother had worn back in the fifties. The woman stopped and looked up just then, and met his gaze, hers turning wary. He smiled and indicated his pad and hers.

“Nice day to work outside,” he said.

“Are you a counselor, sir?” she asked after rather a long pause. Her voice was cracked from disuse, but she spoke with the exaggerated clarity of the New York native who has been at pains to disguise the accent.

“I’m with the D.A.,” said Karp.

“Oh. I have such an interesting case here,” she said, waving a thick and filthy manila folder. “Maybe you would be so kind as to give me your legal opinion. I believe a great injustice has been done, a very great, a very great, great injustice, and they’re getting away with it.” She lowered her voice and glanced theatrically over both shoulders. “With murder.”

“Would you care for a knish?” Karp asked, hoping by this gesture to forestall what he knew could be an unpleasant encounter. The courthouse area was, naturally enough, well supplied with those of the mad whose nuttiness came out in legal colors, and this person was clearly one of them.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t take your lunch,” she fluttered.

“Please.” He stood and extended the brick to her in its square of waxed paper, meanwhile slapping his (actually quite flat) stomach with his other hand. “I don’t need it,” he said heartily. “It’d only go to waste.”

“Oh, well, in that case, thank you very much,” she said, and accepted it and took a first small bite, closing her eyes as if she were tasting a spoonful of molossal at Le Pavillon.

Karp took this opportunity to make his escape, feeling somewhat ratty about it, but not too ratty, and not really regretting his lost knish.

Back in the office, he called the ADA in charge of the car-theft-ring prosecution, a luminary of the Felony Bureau named Weingarten, and asked him to stop by if he had no other commitments. Officially, Karp should have called Weingarten’s bureau chief, Tim Sullivan, and taken it through channels, or, failing that, he should have had O’Malley call the Felony office secretary to set up an appointment, but he chose not to. Sullivan would bitch to Keegan, of course, and Keegan would answer that the chief assistant could call anyone in the office he damn pleased, and then yell at Karp to for chrissake go through the chain of command, and Karp would forget to do so the next time, and thus each of the hundreds of attorneys in the office would learn that they could at any moment expect such a call and have to answer instantly for any of the cases under their control, which, of course, was the point of Karp doing it in so outrageously unbureaucratic a fashion.

Weingarten said the only thing he could say, which was that he had no other commitments and would be right up, and then he spent a frantic five minutes juggling his many commitments, and arrived at Karp’s door breathless, a long-faced young man with pale eyes and thinning blondish hair. Karp pointed him to a seat and held up the case file.

“People v. Ragosi, nice job,” Karp said.

A smile pulled tentatively at Weingarten’s mouth and the ginger mustache that sat upon it. “Uh, thanks.”

“Yeah, how long did it take you to build the case, a year?”

“Fourteen months, including the grand jury.”

“Yeah, this Ragosi seems to be the kingpin, all right. And you got him the usual way, by turning each layer of his organization. The cops went undercover, posed as car thieves, got the evidence on the chop shops, the chop shops gave you the parts brokers, and one particular parts broker, what was his name? I got it right here. .” He thumbed through the thick file.

“Ortiz, Luis Ortiz,” said Weingarten.

“Yeah, here it is. I see Luis was a very bad boy. You started him out on fifty-seven separate B-felony counts, criminal possession of stolen property, first-degree-wow, this was a multimillion-dollar operation-plus forgery of a VIN, forty counts, plus odds and ends: falsifying business records, illegal possession of a VIN, and then you let him plead down to, let’s see here, three counts of CPSP four, an E felony, plus some misdemeanor trash, and the payoff was he gave you Mr. Ragosi, who is the mastermind behind the ring. Is that right?”

Weingarten said, “Yeah, we thought that was a good deal for us. The cops and the feds have been after Ragosi for years, but he was always too sharp.”

“Yeah, I see where Ortiz testifies to the grand jury the guy always used cutouts for cash transfers, would never meet face to face with his suppliers. And I don’t see any evidence from the phone taps and mail covers, so I presume you got zip. A careful guy, Ragosi. So it was real fortunate that Mr. Ragosi decides one fine day to personally hand a manila envelope with forty grand in it to your pal Ortiz, and even more fortunate that Ortiz decides to keep that envelope, and sure enough, it’s got Mr. Ragosi’s prints on it. And on that evidence the cops get a warrant and raid Mr. Ragosi’s place of business, and what do they find? All sorts of incriminating paperwork from our boy Ortiz. None from all the other limbs of his vast criminal enterprise, only from Ortiz. What do you make of that, Weingarten?”

“What can I say? The guy got sloppy for once, and we got lucky. It happens.”

“Yeah, it does. It also happens that defendants under the hammer of a big jolt perjure themselves, and it also happens that cops anxious to close out a big one encourage that perjury and plant evidence. Ragosi may be a criminal mastermind, like you say, but I would be willing to bet my next paycheck that in this case he was framed.”

Weingarten felt sweat bead up on his hairline and resisted the urge to wipe at it. “Wait a minute, you don’t seriously think I-”

“Suborned perjury? No, I don’t. I think the cops arranged it, and you bought it. Be more careful next time. Do you realize that you have no real independent corroboration of Ragosi’s personal involvement in a criminal enterprise?”

“But we have half a dozen of his employees-”

“The same as Ortiz. They’re ratting the boss out to save their asses. No, as far as I can see from this, you have a legitimate case against Ragosi for a number of counts of falsifying business records, period.”

The young prosecutor gaped. “But that’s. . nothing!”

“It’s not much,” agreed Karp, “but it’s all I’m going to let you go ahead with on Ragosi. The shame of it is that this is a really good operation. Ortiz and the other chop kings are bad guys and you got them. You broke up a major car-theft ring. If the big guy beat you, hey, you might get him the next time. There’s no shame in getting whipped. The shame would be in this office bringing a case that stinks of perjury and manufactured evidence. If you’re still set on Ragosi, my advice to you is go back to his operation and look harder.”

“But we did!” cried Weingarten in a strangled tone. “We looked everywhere, his wife, his banks, his daughter, his fucking cousins, we bugged his house, his office. . Jesus Christ, every skank, drugged-out car thief on the East Coast knows Ragosi is the man, and we didn’t find a fucking mark on him, and if it wasn’t for Ortiz. .” He stopped, flushed, and hissed, “Ah, shit!”

“I rest my case,” said Karp.

When Weingarten had slunk off, Karp made a note to talk to Keegan and Sullivan about canning the Ragosi trial, and also to let the police chain of command know in the nicest possible way that he wasn’t having any of that particular brand of horseshit this month. Then he picked up the phone and called his wife.

“Where are you?” Karp asked when she answered. Marlene’s car phone was still enough of a novelty that Karp always asked, even though he had been talking to cops in their cars for years without querying their 10–20 unless necessary. It was different when it was your wife.

“I’m on Woodhaven in Queens,” said Marlene.

“Oh, yeah? Seeing the folks?”

“No, an old boyfriend. Rocco Lopata.”

“Uh-huh. Is this like something I should be worrying about?”

“Nah, it’s just that every so often I have to get it on in a grease pit with a short, hairy, overweight body-shop manager. I’ll be in and out of there in twenty minutes.”

“Hey, no problem, I’m an eighties guy. You’ll wash up after?”

“Of course. Oh, also, I had a charming conversation with your daughter on the subject of how the Chens are taking this shooting thing. I happened to mention I had been by there, and she went ballistic on me. Apparently, I totally destroyed her life, and none of her friends will ever talk to her again.”

“What? By offering to help?”

“Yes, and don’t ask me to explain it because half of it was in Chinese. What I sort of gathered was that by appearing there I implied that I wished them to incur even more obligation to me than they already owed, which is sort of an insult, if you can figure that out. Also, she’d already heard through some grapevine that I was wearing a yellow shirt, which made it worse, yellow being an inauspicious color in time of trouble. Anyway, I was elaborately cursed out and had the phone slammed in my ear. I called back right away, and Posie said she’d stormed out.”

“Wait a second-Lucy? She used language to you?”

“Oh, not in English, she’s not that crazy, but I got the tone through whatever she was speaking-Cantonese or Tibetan, for all I know. Butch, we’ve got to do something about that kid.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Karp said grumpily, thinking, as he did often these days, why can’t she for God’s sakes get along with the kid-Lucy’s perfectly okay with me. The family drama was something of a closed book to Karp, who still thought that mere kindness and honesty would suffice to untangle that tale.

Marlene worked to keep the snap from her voice. “Yeah, well, I was thinking more along the lines of a Catholic military school in Alabama, but give it a try.”

“I guess that wasn’t the moment to bring up Sacred Heart again,” Karp said.

Marlene laughed bitterly. “Oh, right. The last time I did she bit my head off. I explain the advantages, I tell her she’s not going to be happy in public school ninth grade, and I get, I’m not going to leave my friends and that’s final, Mother.”

“It’s her life,” said Karp.

“It’s not her life,” cried Marlene, and then sighed and in a tone of false brightness she asked, “And how was your day, darling?”

“Great. I just shit-canned a case out of Felony that took a year and a half to construct, and probably drove some kid ADA to drink or worse.”

“Was it fun?”

“Made my week. I’m going to have to ream Jimmy Sullivan’s ass again. The thing never should’ve gotten this far in the first place. But look, why I called, whatever the Chens say, I’m going to find the ADA on this Chinatown thing and get the full story. I assume you’re looking into it, too.”

“I have Jim on it-he hasn’t got back to me yet,” said Marlene, after which static intervened and she clicked the thing off.

Atlantic Avenue Paint amp; Body was located on that thoroughfare just after it crosses Woodlawn Avenue, in the Ozone Park neighborhood in the borough of Queens, and consisted of the usual one-story concrete-block loft, with an asphalt apron in front packed with vehicles. It was painted bright blue, with the name of the firm picked out in fancy shadowed white lettering. Marlene had grown up six blocks away and would never have considered taking her trade anywhere but Lopata’s, as the place was called locally. Although at this point both her paint and her body were fine.

Marlene sat in her car for a while, feeling the sun through the windshield, warm but not unpleasantly so, listening to the rumble of the dog’s breathing from the back and the sounds of metal bashing from inside Lopata’s, and letting the old neighborhood soak in. Contra the famous saying, Marlene, unlike New Yorkers from Iowa, say, could go home again and did so fairly often. Her family and their neighbors thought she was crazy but not a danger to anyone but herself, and the mild celebrity she enjoyed did not hurt. Lately, her mother had started asking why Marlene did not appear on the talk shows, since she “knew more than all of those idiots they got on there put together.” Also, although she would have denied it, the stability of this neighborhood was a comfort. Ozone Park had been inhabited by Italians and other Catholics of the old immigration when Marlene was born, and it was inhabited by them and their children still. Ordinarily, Marlene rather enjoyed dwelling in one of the districts of the city most boiling with ethnic weirdness, but sometimes not, as now; in the wake of the Chen unpleasantness she had paisan hunger, and had semiconsciously contrived a business excuse for a journey here to assuage it.

Through the dusty window of the garage she could see a burly man in a filthy pinstriped mechanic’s coverall speaking on the phone. His gestures as he spoke were eloquently violent, and she could imagine the tenor of his language. Remembered, more than imagined, and that went for the gestures, too. Rocky Lopata as a high school junior had been a lean, cocky, mildly criminal kid with a duck-tail haircut and a black motorcycle jacket, the heartthrob of the whole girls’ eighth grade at St. Joseph’s parochial school. He hung with the kind of bad girls who wore their collars up in back and hung Chesterfields from their scarlet mouths, and it was a known thing that Terry Riccio had gone all the way with him. It was therefore a wonder to the school when little Marlene, of the straight A’s and perfect behavior record, laid a heavy flirt on him at the Holy Martyrs basketball game (to which he, of course, responded, she being at the time as beautiful as the dawn) and even more of a wonder when Terry came after her with claws out after the game and Marlene knocked her sprawling with three punches. This, naturally, won the heart of Rocky, and there followed three months of educational evenings in the back of Rocky’s chopped Plymouth out by the airport, the planes roaring overhead, while Marlene learned what she wanted to know about the physical aspects of love. Rocky never got her to go all the way, but he wasn’t complaining, considering what he was getting, and thinking himself in love until the day when she skillfully dumped him. It was his first heartbreak, and Marlene’s first as a breaker, though far, far from her last.

Rocky finished his call, slammed down the phone, felt eyes on him, cocked his hand to shade a peering look through the window, and then walked out to her car. He grinned as he came closer.

“I thought to myself, that can’t be Marlene Ciampi in a orange Volvo,” he said, “but I was wrong. All right, she had the VW, she’s a old hippie, I can live with that, but a Volvo?”

Marlene grinned back and got out of the car. “They’re very reliable,” she said primly.

“Oh, yeah, and safe. Hey, I got a cherry ’78 Trans I could put you in. Silver flake lacquer?”

“Rocky, give me a break. I’m an old lady with a big dog.”

“So get a poodle. You belong in serious wheels, Marlene.” He looked her boldly up and down. “Meanwhile, you’re still the hottest thing in the borough.”

“Thank you. You probably clean up pretty good yourself. How’s Terry?”

After that they spent a pleasant fifteen minutes catching up on the old gang, many of whom had stayed close to home.

“So, what’re you, visiting the folks?” Rocky asked when that had run its course.

“Yeah, I’ll fall by after, but really, I needed to talk with Chester.”

Rocky’s face took on a pained expression. “Ah, shit, Marlene. .”

“No trouble this time, honest to God, Rocky, I just want to talk to him.”

“He quit on me, Marlene. I ain’t seen him in a week.”

“Horseshit, Rocky.” She gave him that look, the one they had both learned from the nuns. He sagged, sighed, said, “Not with the dog, Marlene.”

“No dog, and there wouldn’t have been one last time, if he hadn’t tried to bash my head in with a body hammer.”

Rocky was still frowning and shaking his head when Marlene leaned into him, grabbed the collar of his coverall at an unsoiled spot, and said, “And I also came by to see a real good old friend,” with which she planted a semi-sisterly kiss full on his mouth.

He gasped. He rolled his eyes to heaven and flapped his hand, as if it were on fire. “Oh, marone!” he said, and then, “Marlene, you’re gonna burn in Hell, you know that.”

“Yeah, but they’ll have to catch me first. Where is he?”

Rocky punched a thumb over his shoulder. “Back in bay three. Be nice, now.”

Marlene stood in the doorway of the cinder-block room and watched Chester Durrell fill a dent. He was a small, narrow, dark man of mixed Latin and Irish ancestry, with long black hair tucked under a reversed ball cap. His sleeves were rolled back, showing muscular forearms, the dun skin elaborately illustrated with blue, red, and green tattooing. His long fingers worked a pad of wet sandpaper back and forth on a gray patch of Bondo on the neatly masked rear fender of a new black Lincoln. Marlene knew that Chester had a city-wide rep as a body guy, and that in a couple of hours you would need an electron microscope to know that the bright black surface had ever been marred.

Marlene loved to watch a competent craftsman mold the physical world. As a girl she had begged her father to be allowed along on weekend plumbing jobs, where if the old man was feeling good, she would get a shot at turning a pipe cutter. Chester rubbed his patch to perfection, tossed his sandpaper into the water bowl, stretched, scratched, and reached behind him for a spray can of primer, at which point he saw Marlene.

He’s looking for the dog, thought Marlene as she observed the tension in Chester’s body and the jerking of his head. His pleasantly goofy face showed a near ludicrous apprehension, like the kind you see the doomed bit-part actors wearing just before the jaws snap shut in the early scenes of a monster movie.

“He’s in the car, Chester,” Marlene called out. “I just want to talk. Why don’t you put your first coat down and we’ll chat while it dries?”

After an uncertain pause he did that, in a dozen smooth strokes, the solvent smell filling the room despite the roaring fans.

He put the can down and leaned against the draped fender of the big car. “She sent you, right?”

“No, actually, I came on my own. You probably figured out Brenda’s at the shelter again. Chester, I thought we talked about your hand problem. I thought that was all over.”

“Hey, it wasn’t like that, I swear to Christ, Marlene. You want to hear how it went down? Okay. We get invited to this party, right? Up in Inwood, man, my cousin Clarisse’s. I say, Brenda, let’s go, we’ll have some laughs, but she says, no, she don’t like Clarisse. Okay, so I say, I’ll drop by myself, fuck it, she invited me and all, and she says, okay, go. Fine. So I go. A couple hours, I’m there, feeling good, I had a couple, few drinks, what happens? Bam! In walks Brenda, dressed up and all, so I go over to talk with her and so forth, why she changed her mind, and I see she’s coked to the ears. So, fine, right away I knew there’s gonna be trouble, and sure enough, pretty soon she’s mixing it up with Clarisse, Brenda made some remark. You know like she does?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So Clarisse and her start scuffling, and we all break it up, and I pull Brenda into the bedroom, and I try to talk to her, you know, but now she’s like yelling shit, all kinds of personal stuff. I mean really yelling so’s everybody could hear it. So I like lost it and I popped her a couple, not hard, and she runs out, crying. So I had a few more and I take the subway home.”

“That’s it?”

“No, later back at our place, she comes in, maybe three in the morning, stoned. She takes her fuckin’ panties, which I actually bought her, out of her bag in front of me and tosses them on the floor. In front of me, you understand? And. . fuck, man, I don’t want to get into what she was saying, but it was real bad, mean stuff, and like I must’ve blacked out because the next thing I knew, there’s blood all over the bed, and I’m standing there in my shorts and she’s gone.”

“You busted her face up pretty good, Chester.”

He hung his head and then lifted it abruptly and stared at her. The beginning of panic showed in his eyes. “Are you gonna get me arrested again?”

“No. Look, let me explain something. You know what I do, right?”

“Yeah. You beat up on guys who pound their old ladies.”

“Not exactly. Chester, there’s bad guys out there. Sick guys. Guys who get their rocks giving women grief, guys who don’t feel like men unless they got a woman who’s a slave. There’s guys who just pick a woman off the street, or in a store or a bank, they see her and they stalk her, and they make her life hell. I can stop that kind of guy sometimes.”

“With one through the skull is what I hear.”

“If necessary,” Marlene said coldly, “but my point is, you’re not a bad guy. You’re a good guy. You’re just in a bad relationship. I’m telling you now that if you stay with Brenda Nero, one day you’re going to wake up next to her corpse. No, wait, I know what you’re going to say. She’s great a lot of the time and you love her, and you’re right, she is great. She’s sexy, pretty, she’s classy, she’s smart-but she’s also crazy, Chester. Disaster happens around her. You got to break it up. I mean now. You understand what I’m saying?”

She wanted to shake him as he stood there by his fender, rolling his eyes and shaking his head, like an unusually stupid horse shying from a proffered halter. I’m no good at this, she thought. He’s right, one through the head is where my true talent lies. But eventually she got him to promise more or less that he’d ditch the woman, and she left him, thinking that she would have to do the same thing with Brenda, too, with even less chance of success. Marlene had met more than one woman whose life was a disorganized sprint toward an early grave, and most often they got some poor schmuck to help them into it. Tragedy, whereas Marlene did best at melodrama, with a clear villain in the black suit and the tender maiden in white pining for rescue. Depressing, and she had wanted to be cheery for Mom, or so she thought, and naturally, there was no question of coming to the old neighborhood and neglecting a family visit. The NSA would be happy if it could track Chinese missile tests as accurately as Marlene’s family recorded the trajectories of their absent children.

The elder Ciampis dwelt in a pre-war two-story bungalow, built of dark brick, the sort of sturdy, simple house that working-stiff vets could buy in the late 1940s when the nation was still poor enough to afford it. In the front, two small patches of immaculate clipped lawn greenly gleamed behind low privet growing through a chain-link fence. To the left the lawn patch was decorated with the usual Virgin w/blue mirror ball and birdbath, and on the right there was the fig tree, stunted and twisted but still alive, still throwing out green shoots. These items demonstrated, as they did in all the old boroughs of the city, that second-generation Italian-Americans lived here.

Marlene hitched herself around in the car seat, removed her pistol and its holster, and locked them in the glove compartment. Marlene had a new gun. The old gun had killed two men and it had started giving her the sick shivers when she touched it, so she had sold it and bought this thing, a SITES AW9 “Resolver,” one of the lightest 9mm semiautomatic pistols available, made in Turin, sleekly Italian in design. She prayed daily and sincerely that it would never have to resolve anything, would forever remain a shooting-range virgin. It was a little less than twice as long as a king-sized cigarette and about twice as thick and weighed about the same as an office stapler. This made it much too heavy to carry into her mother’s house.

The front door was, as always, unlocked. Marlene went in and passed directly into the kitchen.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Good, you can help me hang,” said her mother, indicating the wicker basket of wet wash on the kitchen table, as if this visit had been arranged, or as if Marlene had never left home. Mrs. Ciampi, despite the book on Italians, had never been a physically demonstrative parent.

Marlene heaved the basket up on her hip and followed her mother out through the screen door to the tiny backyard. She and Mrs. Ciampi began to hang clothes on plastic lines strung between two T-shaped poles.

“Didn’t we get you a dryer, Ma?”

“I like it better when they hang. They don’t smell right from the dryer.”

Marlene was out of practice, being totally dryer dependent herself, and her mother placed four clothespins to every one of hers. Marlene cast glances at her mother through the flapping linen. Aside from the hair, which had gone pepper and salt, and a thickening middle, she looked more or less as she had looked during Marlene’s youth, or perhaps it was merely imagination. She had the kind of face that holds age well, Marlene thought, handsome rather than beautiful, too bony for that, the features too prominent. The main difference seemed to be the track suit she was wearing instead of the flowered housedresses she had worn every day back then. Mrs. Ciampi had discovered track suits late in life and had adopted them for every occasion that did not involve the Roman Catholic Church. She had a dozen, this one being aqua with a beige stripe. Combined with her mother’s energetic movements, the outfits suggested that she was about to strip and run the five-hundred-meter hurdles.

While they worked, Mrs. Ciampi wormed into, with a skill that the KGB would not have disdained, every cranny of her daughter’s life, having already detected on her secret mother radar the unidentified bogey menacing Marlene’s heart. The twins first, their little doings elaborated, discussed, the peculiar difference between them made light of, on the basis of other family twins, not to worry; Marlene’s own work, deplored sadly, the infant Marlene, her brilliance and hoped-for future recalled, with the familiar anecdotes, the necessary dollop of guilt offered and accepted; the brothers and sisters analyzed, their recent triumphs and travails recounted, nor could one neglect highlights from the lives of Marlene’s twenty-three first cousins, none of whom, it seemed, was required to shoot people in their chosen fields of endeavor.

The wash hung, the two women entered the house. Mrs. Ciampi offered coffee, which Marlene accepted with an internal shudder. It would be instant, with water barely boiled. Marlene’s mother, unlike Marlene, had no interest in cuisine beyond assuring quantity, and had raised six children on canned and frozen, on Kraft dinners and Velveeta and Pepsi, unlike her own mother, who was a maestra assoluta of south Italian cuisine. Marlene thought about generations, about inheritance, about what she was doing here, really, as she sipped the weak and bitter cup.

“And how’s my doll?” asked Mrs. Ciampi, feigning innocence, comprehending perfectly, of course, that the one person they hadn’t discussed was the one most on Marlene’s mind. “What’s with Lucy?”

So it all came out, the rudeness, the disobedience, the sullen contempt. Mrs. Ciampi listened, gently encouraging, withholding comment. Marlene felt some of the misery lift and wondered how women her age who were estranged from their own mothers managed to raise children-who could they talk to? Books? Therapists? Not that Marlene considered Teresa Ciampi any great expert on child rearing: look how Marlene had turned out, after all, but she had the history, she’d been there, when the seeds were planted that-so Marlene believed in her deepest heart-were bearing in Lucy such unlikely fruit.

“Tell me,” Mrs. Ciampi said after her daughter had run down, “does she still go to church?”

“Oh, does she ever! I can’t get her out of there. She makes the Little Flower look like Lenny Bruce.”

Her mother shot her a look dense with meaning. Decoded: you and your wise mouth, I told you a million times, you mock the church, you’re going to get trouble and here it is.

Aloud, she said, “And you? Or you just drop her off?”

“I go, Ma. You know me. I punch the clock even if I don’t work the shift. What, you think it’s a punishment from God Lucy’s giving me grief?”

“No, she’s just taking after her mother.”

“Get out of here! I was a little angel compared to Lucy. I never opened my mouth.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I must have been in amnesia eighteen years, I wasn’t really here.”

“When? Give me one time!”

“One time? Oh, let’s see. . you were fourteen, because it was the summer your great-aunt Angela passed away, God rest her soul. I came home from shopping and you were in the kitchen leaned over the ironing board, ironing your hair like you used to do, the hair God gave you wasn’t good enough. You remember that?”

“I remember ironing my hair.”

Mrs. Ciampi raised her eyes. “Oh, thank you, Madonna, I’m not losing my mind. So I come in, I put my bags down, and I say, because it was a weekday, and you were working at Uncle Manny’s, why’re you doing that on a Tuesday, or whatever it was, you got work tomorrow, you’re not going out, and you don’t say anything, like a mule. So I ask you, where’re you going you’re ironing your hair. Still no answer. So I think, this is my house, my kitchen, and this little strega’s pretending I’m not there? So I yank the cord from the iron out of the wall.”

She paused for effect, nodding, took a sip of coffee, assured herself that she had Marlene’s full and fascinated attention, and resumed.

“You let out a yell like I never heard, and you called me a bad word, I won’t even say what it was, and then you threw the iron at me. At my head.”

“No!”

“Yes. You think I’m making this up? Look over there on the door post, on the left. See that mark? It’s painted two times since then, but you could still see it. That’s the mark. Then you ran out, we didn’t see you until God knows when at night. That was when you were climbing in and out up the drainpipe.”

“Oh, Jesus, you knew about the drainpipe?”

“Don’t swear. Yeah, I know you think my head’s full of lasagna, but I got eyes.”

“And you never said anything. Did you tell Pop about the drainpipe?”

Mrs. Ciampi sniffed disdainfully. “Are you joking? You’d be six feet underground I ever told him the things you pulled. I didn’t tell him about the iron either. He came home and saw the mark, I said I was changing the kitchen bulb and the ladder fell.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Marlene. She felt an odd constriction in her chest, and the room seemed to be growing warmer. “I don’t remember any of that. And you didn’t do anything about it?”

“I prayed, Marlene. I sent up so many novenas. . Father Martini, if you remember him, let him rest in peace, Father Martini said, ‘Teresa, you wore out the roof on the church. That’s why we need a new roof, Teresa Ciampi.’ What else could I do? Whip you like a dog? Lock you up?” She sighed, sipped the cooling coffee. “Anyway, it turned out better than I expected, tell you the honest truth. You stopped with those bums with the motorcycles, you won the scholarship to Sacred Heart. . I’m not saying you’re not still pazza, but it’s your life, darling. But what I’m saying, about Lucy, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Have patience and bring her by more, I’ll talk to her.”

Marlene nodded, hardly hearing. “I’m stunned, Ma. Now you’re going to tell me you were out of your skull when you were Lucy’s age, too.” Silence at this. “Well, were you?”

“That’s none of your business,” said Mrs. Ciampi, and looked away.

The object of this discussion, having calmed her fury just enough so that she was no longer shaking, dressed in her usual jeans, sneakers, and embroidered vest over a T-shirt, this one imprinted with a color rendition of a can of Chung-King Chicken Chow Mein, and fled the loft. On an ordinary summer vacation day she would have headed, of course, for the Asia Mall to hang out and help out, but this was, naturally, impossible, her mother having ruined her life forever. She had her musette bag stocked with her favorite books, her journal, pens, a compact dictionary or two, and something less than $200 in crumpled bills, her stash.

She walked in a northerly direction, up Crosby, over to Broadway on Spring, up Broadway, through the heart of cast-iron Soho. She almost headed for Old St. Patrick’s, where she might dump some part of her burden of pain, but decided against doing so until the wrath had left her heart. Father Dugan was a smart fellow, and he would snatch the secret from her in no time, as one could not lie to a priest, and she did not want to give it up just yet. She began playing with the idea of going to Washington Square Park and making a start as a junkie prostitute street person. Pro: it would focus the entire energy and attention of the family on Lucy, where it truly belonged, and would make her mother utterly miserable, which she deserved. Con: hideous pain and early death. Still, she had to do something. .

At Prince Street she became aware that someone was following her. In an instant the stupid adolescent maundering left her mind by the nearest exit. Her true self popped up out of the mire, looked around, and took charge.

Lucy paused, as she had learned to do, at a corner window and checked the reflection, and then turned east on Prince. Halfway down the block, she suddenly dashed across the street, as if attracted by the display in a gallery window opposite. She saw an oriental man in dark clothes and a cheap straw hat walk past on the north side of Prince and stop to examine some rugs on display in a window. He could see her reflection as she could see his. When Lucy moved west again, he followed, keeping to the opposite side of the street. Then, between one of her sideways glances and another, he vanished.

Lucy was impressed. She had been taught that (non-crazy) people follow other people for one of two reasons: either they wish to know where the target is going and what she’s doing there, or they wish to find her in a vulnerable position, alone, for example, in the classic dark alley, and there do her mischief. In both cases, of course, the follower must be careful not to let the target know she is being followed, while the target should perform various maneuvers when she suspects she is, so as to break the follower from cover. This Lucy had just done, and the follower, spotted, had broken off his follow.

Or maybe not. Back on Broadway by this time, she waited until the light had just turned red against her and flew across the honking street and down into the Prince Street subway station. There she did the standard drill, waiting for a downtown train, boarding it, jumping off an instant before the doors closed. The platform was empty. She crossed to the other platform, waited for an uptown local, and took it to Eighth Street. From there she walked over to Washington Square and found a bench by the chess tables.

This park was, like many another in the city, a drug market and urban squalor demo. Around the noble arch, dingy and scrawled upon, a fake cake in the window of an unprosperous baker, bored Guatemalan nannies of bond trader/ad executives’ babies alternated with crack dealers, with their zoned-out clients, with bemused Asian architecture students, with kids from the Tisch School making videos about the collapse of civilization, the soundtrack provided by folk singers encouraging people to join the coal miners’ union, their warbles competing with a half dozen boom boxes blasting salsa, ska, punk, R amp;B, and heavy metal into the innocent green canopy, echoing back, mixing strangely, assaulting the ears of those who were not yet used to the love songs of the city, hardly disturbing the slumber of the bond trader/ad executives’ babies, as the Guatemalan nannies gently rocked them to whatever transient beat penetrated, their flat brown faces closed tight against America.

For Lucy, child of the city, all this was as a wheat field to a Kansas kid, an unremarkable background, against which only a few objects had any chance of standing out. A disheveled person holding an automatic weapon might engage her interest, for example, or the guy who had been following her. Meanwhile, she sat and read Claudine en Menage. It would be hard for anyone who has never been captivated by a fictional character to comprehend the depths of Lucy’s disappointment in Claudine, or to credit that the end of the second book in the series-in which Claudine agrees to marry a man old enough to be her father-had contributed considerably to the recent explosion with her mother. In one corner of her mind she had imagined (while understanding at some level the absurdity of the notion) that Claudine would marry Kim, and somehow combine a life of intimate sensuality with exotic adventures involving a large number of foreign languages.

Her devotion to the series was such, however, that she read grimly on, and after a while found some satisfaction in Claudine’s discovery that marriage to the old fart was not what she had expected, and increasing fascination in the prospect of her lesbian affair with the delicious Rezi. Naturally these juicy parts made her think of spinning it all out to her friends in the fur room, and the recollection that all that was lost forever, and probably her friends with it, pierced her heart anew, and the pages blurred.

She dabbed her eyes and then gasped, for standing right in front of her was the oriental man in the straw hat.

“You know,” he said in French, “it does little good to make your escape so brilliantly and then to come sit here all oblivious like an eggplant on a windowsill. Would you care for a peanut?”

She took one from the proffered bag, and he sat down next to her.

“How did you do that?” she asked grumpily. “I thought I got away clean on the subway.”

“So you did, but, as you are aware, my study of the secrets of the Orient has given me certain mystic powers far beyond your puny Western abilities.” With this he slitted his eyes mysteriously and waggled his thick eyebrows. This person, who called himself Tran Vinh Din, was a medium-sized Vietnamese of unprepossessing appearance, somewhat more than fifty years old, wiry of build, calm of demeanor. Except for the shallow dent in the side of his head and the scars on his hands and the oddly twisted fingernails, he looked like someone to whom nothing interesting had happened, a schoolteacher, say, or a cook in a noodle joint. In fact, he had been a schoolteacher and a cook in a noodle joint, but between those two occupations, in the years between 1954 and 1975, he had been a member, and eventually quite a senior member, of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, known inaccurately as the Viet Cong. After that he had been a political prisoner of the People’s Republic of Vietnam and after that a boat person and after that a fraudulent immigrant under his false name (a common enough story at the time in New York, save the Viet Cong part), and now was a sometime employee of Marlene Ciampi, as well as her daughter’s best friend over the age of thirteen.

“Merde,” responded Lucy with assurance and took a handful of nuts.

“So you respond with the word of Cambronne, and properly in this case. In fact, I meet you here entirely by accident, although you still should not have let me approach. I could have been two rough fellows with a big sack.”

“In full day in the middle of a crowded park?”

“Oh, yes, these chess players would have leaped to your defense, I have no doubt. Many unpleasant things may happen in the full light of day.”

She sighed, for this was familiar, and asked, “So, what are you doing here, Uncle Tran?”

He gestured with the bag. “I come for the peanuts. The man there on the corner sells freshly roasted ones, which I enjoy. So, truthfully, it was entirely happenstance that I found you here. What is that book in which you were so abandoned as to forget your caution? Hm! A fine writer, but with no political ideas, mere decadent sensuality; also, that is not her best work. Yet, in any case, it is better than condescending oriental fantasies by Kipling.”

“I like oriental fantasies, and I don’t care about condescending. Everyone condescends to someone. What I would really like is an oriental fantasy with decadent sensuality.”

“I’m sure, but then you would have something like Ouida, unreadable even by your deplorable standards. What is going on between you and your mother?”

An old interrogator’s trick, slipping the zinger in among trivialities, but it struck. Lucy flushed and said, “Nothing.”

“Not nothing,” said Tran, “a great deal, I think. Will you tell me about it? No? Then I will have to use my mystical oriental arts. First, you have been angry and sullen with your mother for some time. Americans tolerate this in their children, as I have observed on the television, and it is of no consequence-fireworks on Tet, as we say: boom, boom, and it passes, leaving everything as before. But today it is much worse. Your mother visited the Chens yesterday and was turned away, quite properly, but on hearing of it, you attack her with your tongue. Also, I find you alone and aimlessly wandering instead of plotting outrages with your two friends. The two events are connected, isn’t it so?”

“She ruined my life,” Lucy mumbled, staring down at a smear of old gum on the pavement between her sneakers. “I’ll never be able to go to the Chens anymore-”

“What, because you think your mother has lost face and you have to because she is your mother? This is absurd. You have done nothing improper, and in this case your duty is to go to them like a good foster child and offer support. As for what your mother did, it never happened. No one pays any attention to your mother, except as they do to a thunderstorm or an earthquake.”

“Really? So you think I would be welcomed at Janice’s.”

“I believe so,” said Tran. “Of course, as they are Cantonese, they may cut you up in small pieces and fry you with green onions and garlic.”

This brought a smile to her face, and seeing it, Tran felt a warm current in the place his heart used to be. His own daughter had never reached thirteen, having been incinerated by a B-52 along with his wife in 1968. He had no photographs of them anymore, and to his dismay their faces were fading from his mind. When he dreamed of his daughter now, she had Lucy’s face. Pathetic and sentimental, he thought, but there it was.

“Perhaps I’ll call her and go over now.”

“A fine idea, after you have apologized to your mother. In a harmonious world, parents should teach children, and it is an unfortunate thing when the child knows more than the parent about certain things. I have observed that this is more common in America than elsewhere, especially among those from foreign lands. Nevertheless, you must apologize. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Lucy. It had not occurred to her that her mother was in any way imperfect, and the knowledge both intrigued and appalled her.

“Now,” said Tran, “of what are you so afraid?”

Lucy’s heart performed an unpleasant leap. “What makes you say that?”

“In the instant you spotted me awhile ago, before you understood that it was me playing a game, you had a look of terror on your face and in the stance of your body. Is it possible that someone is after you in earnest, my child?”

Lucy waited some long seconds before answering. “You won’t tell my mother?”

Tran looked down at his devastated hands. “I believe I can keep a secret.”

“I can’t tell you the whole thing because I swore not to, but. . it might be a good thing if you watched my back for a while.” She placed her hand in his.

Tran nodded and rose, and they walked out of the park hand in hand.

“Who is Cambronne?” Lucy asked abruptly.

“Ah, Cambronne. Marshal Cambronne was the commander of the Old Guard at Waterloo. At school all of us little mites were taught that when the British called upon him to surrender, he said, ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender.’ ”

“What is mites?”

“Oh, that is just a word the French used. From Annamites. That is to say, we Vietnamese. You would say ‘gooks.’ But, naturally, we also knew this expression, ‘the word of Cambronne.’ ”

“You mean, he really didn’t say that heroic thing, he just said, ‘merde’?”

“So it seems. Another thing among many that confirmed for us the absolute hypocrisy of the French. You Americans are insane, but far less developed in your hypocrisy. This is refreshing. I am proud to be an illegal immigrant in your country.”