Enemy within

14

Traffic stopped Karp at a corner. for the first time since he had fled the clinic, he looked around to see where he was. A glance at a street sign located him in Murray Hill. He knew this corner-that deli, that chicken place, that saloon, the red awning in front of the Italian restaurant. He crossed the street, went through a glass door into a tiny entranceway, found and pressed a little button.

"Yeah?" said a gravelly voice out of the rosette of holes in dull brass.

"Guma, it's Butch."

A pause. "Butch Karp?"

"No, Butch Stellarezze, the numbers guy. Let me in, huh?"

The buzzer sounded. Karp went through and took the creaky elevator to six. The hallway he entered was dark and peeling, lit by a single fortywatt bulb. Water stains splotched the ceiling. This was a rent-controlled building, and the landlord was not generous. Raymond Guma was waiting in his open doorway. Karp had been prepared for some changes-he had not seen Guma (and he felt the shame of it now) in over six months-but he was startled by the man's appearance. Guma had always been a stocky, fleshy man, a combination of Yogi Berra and something out of an illustration in Rabelais or Boccaccio. Now his flesh hung slackly on his frame, his once-generous belly shrunken almost to nothing. He was wearing a velour bathrobe in dark green, gray sweatpants, and a white T-shirt, none of them too clean.

"Been a while, Butch," said Guma, shaking Karp's hand. "Come on in. Don't mind the mess. The girl's coming in tomorrow." He stood aside to let Karp enter.

Smells of cigars and Scotch over the base pong of old apartment, unwashed clothes, of which a pile sat on a straight chair, a stink unpleasantly familiar, reminding Karp of forced childhood visits to aged relatives. When did Guma get old? He had retired barely a year ago, after forty-odd years prosecuting for the DA both here and in Brooklyn, and at the retirement party, a blast of historic dimensions, he had still been the Mad Dog of Centre Street, the Goom, grabbing women, sucking down his Teacher's, singing in Italian, telling the old nasty jokes. Playing the clown. A pose. He was not, in fact, a clown. Among other things, he knew more about the New York Mob than anyone else on either side of the law and had taught Karp rather more than Karp wanted to learn about manipulating the legal system.

Guma led Karp into the living room, pointed to an armchair, closed the door to the kitchen (not before Karp had seen its piles of soiled dishes, the brown bags overflowing with garbage, the stacks of pizza boxes), and sat down on a dingy sofa with a little sigh. It was dim in the room; the avenue just visible through three big windows dressed with venetian blinds, all at different heights, one crooked. The sofa faced a large TV set, switched on with the volume a low grumble, the screen showing thousands of white birds in some rookery. Karp recalled that Guma was a nature-documentary fan, a surprising taste in one so thoroughly urban.

"Want a drink?" Guma asked. "You look like you need one."

"I'm fine. You go ahead yourself."

"Sure? Okay, I think I will." A fifth was on the coffee table among the stacks of black videotape boxes, and Guma splashed a little of it into a squat tumbler, raised it, said, "Absent friends," and took a sip.

"You lost a little weight there, Goom. You feeling okay?"

"You mean besides the cancer? I'm doing great. Never better."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know."

"Yeah, well, the networks didn't pick it up for some reason." Guma shrugged, grinned, showing large, uneven teeth. "Hey, what the fuck-I'll go out with all my marbles intact." He held the glass up, swirled its contents. "Actually, they chopped a couple parts out, they say I'm in remission. I'm supposed to revamp my lifestyle, but I can't see the percentage in it, you know? If it comes back, it comes back." He plucked three-quarters of a Macanudo Lonsdale from a brown-glass ashtray and relit it.

"It's funny," he said, leaning back in a cloud of pungent smoke, "months go by, I don't hear from my old pals at the office, and then in the same week I get a visit from Roland and now from you. I figure Jack'll be by tomorrow." He looked around the room appraisingly. "Maybe I should redecorate, my social life is starting to look up so much."

"Roland came by?"

"Yeah, right after you guys canned his ass. He was drunk and looking for someone to get drunker with. Which we did. We watched my Serengeti tape. I figure he wanted to see rending flesh. He's really pissed at Jack. You, too, matter of fact."

"Why me? Christ, I was on him for years to keep a goddamn cork in it. And I practically begged Keegan to let it slide."

"Yeah, well, he wasn't being that rational. He thinks he was set up."

"I know."

"Was he?"

"Probably. Why, I don't now. Not that he had any shortage of enemies."

"No. Still it's a shame. What about you? I hear you're running homicide again."

"Not exactly. He wants me to clean up the political cases, make sure nothing interferes with his coronation. If anything goes wrong, he's got someone to toss out the door after Roland."

Guma squinted at Karp through the smoke. "That don't sound like the old Butch. You were never a cleanup type of guy. You were more of a look-under-the-rug kind of guy, see what other people stuck in there. How's Marlene?"

Karp shot him a sharp look. "As usual. Why do you ask?"

Shrug. Puff. Sip. "Oh, you know. Even here in the leper colony people drift by. Such as yourself. Roland. A couple others. You know, share views, listen to the drums of the distant villages."

"Oh, yeah? And what do the drums say?"

"They say Marlene made a bundle off her firm's IPO. They say she started buying out the stores, riding around in a limo. They say she started hitting the bottle pretty good, and she fucked up and got some people killed."

"You believe that?"

"I don't know. No offense, but you know and I know your bride was never that tightly wrapped to begin with. Be honest? I never figured her for a lush, but still you got to admit she pulled a lot of weird shit back in the day."

Karp wanted to go. This had been a stupid idea, coming here. He hadn't seen the guy in a while, he was in the neighborhood, he dropped by. Guma had never been what you could call a confidant of his, not like V.T., but there were things you couldn't even say to a confidant, stuff you needed a wife to talk about, but his wife was out of action just now, occupied by a hostile power. So now he had to either get up and leave, like an asshole, or start talking about Marlene, which he definitely did not want to do, not to Guma-but he could change the subject. And, of course, Guma knew the DA, knew not only where the bodies were buried, but who had stashed them there and why, and now Karp started in on it, the whole miserable thing.

"You leaked that story on Cooley? You?" was the response when Karp got to that part.

"Yeah, I did. It was that or quit and go public with it, which for some reason I wasn't willing to do. I couldn't in good conscience ask Clay to help any more than he had already. Keegan was in the tank. I wasn't going to get any resources for doing an investigation. I was pissed, Goom. I figured if I lit a fire, make it impossible for them to bury it, Roland would get behind it-"

"Roland?"

"Yeah, I know he's a cop groupie, but there's a line. He'll blink at a little perjury, and little taint in the evidence, but he's hell on bent cops. It's a point of pride with him. Was. He was no way going to stay quiet for what's starting to look a lot like an assassination and a cover-up. Not by the cops so much, but by us. They presented us with a load of stinking fish, and we said, 'What smell? We don't smell anything.' The fucking election."

"You should've got Roland in on it from the beginning."

"Yeah, I know, I know! But I had no idea he was going to get sandbagged at that press conference or ruin himself after. It was the background I didn't count on, the racial thing. Benson, boom! Marshak, boom! Lomax, ka-boom!"

"You have a political-wile deficit, pal, is what it is. It's a murky pool."

"I know it. I still can't believe I took that route." Karp paused, remembering, reconstructing the origins of the debacle. "You know what it was? It was Shelly Solotoff. I had lunch with him just before, and he gave me this load of horseshit about the DA, how corrupt it was, Garrahy was a fraud, I was wasting my time-you know, the usual crap you get from people like that. God knows why they feel it necessary to shit on the system. But, anyway, he went on and on, and I just decided right after that I was going to do something crazy, just to kick-start the damn thing, bring Jack to his senses-"

"Oh, Shelly Solotoff," Guma interrupted. "He's a piece of work. You knew I got him canned?"

"You did? I thought he quit to go private."

"We let him resign, let's say. This was way back there. Garrahy's last year; Jack was heading homicide. You were doing that crazy liquor-store holdup artist, and Shelly was working the Victoria Falla case. It was his first major, and Jack had me looking over his shoulder. You remember that one?"

"Little girl, found naked, raped and murdered up in Inwood, yeah. They liked a guy for it, a bum, and then… didn't it turn out he was the wrong guy?"

"Right. The bum's name was Manuel Echiverra, a local drunk. Had a sheet on him for dickie-waving, annoying little schoolgirls. Anyway, you know the cops always grab up characters like that in a child sex case, and they looked at him pretty good because he was on the block a lot where the vic lived. He stayed in a box under the highway. Slept on a bag of rags, and when the cops tossed it, some of the rags turned out to be little Victoria's clothes."

"Uh-huh. It's coming back now. You got the indictment."

"Of course, but some stuff didn't fit. Not a hint of violence in the record. The guy could barely walk around. He was crippled up some way, I forget how, and he had the syph, too: the guy's brain was cheese. On the other hand, after claiming he found the clothes in a Dumpster, he made a full and free confession after a couple of days in custody, hoho. Okay, the bottom line was that the cops also looked at the vic's stepdad hard, too, but since they had Manuel-you know how it is. They filed and forgot. It ain't like in the movies, as you well know. Shelly was all set to nail Manuel, but wonder of wonders, there was a serious player on D, Jerry Felkes; you know Jerry?… Right, he's a judge now. A terrific lawyer, and Shelly was getting spooked a little. So it comes time to hand over the Rosario material, he doesn't hand over the incriminatory stuff on the stepdad. I mean, why cloud the issue with another guy who also attracted the attention of the cops? Reasonable doubt, shit, we don't want any of that."

Guma finished his drink, reached for the bottle, hesitated, put it down, thus demonstrating that he could still leave it alone. "Armand Figuroa, the stepdad. A real prince. He was fucking the other daughter, too, as it turned out. Seven years old. By the way, Shelly didn't vouchsafe us any of this stepfather business when he presented the case to the bureau. Just the Manuel stuff, and it looked solid."

"When did you find out?"

"Felkes called Jack. He actually hired a PI out of his own pocket, and the guy came up with the missing police records. Jack and me talked about getting Shelly disbarred, but we decided not to. A high-profile case, the scandal… Jack reamed him out and gave him the boot. He hated you, by the way, Shelly. I mean back then. Maybe he still does."

"What? Why the hell did he hate me? I never did anything to him. He invited me to lunch, for crying out loud."

"And was he a pleasant companion?"

Karp did not need to think. "No, it was pretty clear the whole thing was set up to make me feel like an asshole and a loser. I didn't cop to it then because… Christ, who the fuck knows? I guess I couldn't really imagine why anybody would go through that much trouble."

"Shelly is strange. He used to ask me about you, obsess practically. You were the fair-haired boy, you were winning all those cases, looking good. How did you do it? You must've been cutting corners." Guma took a last puff on the Macanudo and placed it neatly in the ashtray. He splashed another quarter inch of whiskey into his glass. "Some guys never get it, the line. The biggest case he was ever on, and he cut some corners to win it because he assumed you and me and everyone else was doing it, too. Especially you. And now? Let's face it, the guy's a high-priced pimp living on a rich wife, draping himself in a lot of liberal causes, bitching about the corruption of the district attorney's office…"

"That he got canned from. The scales fall from my eyes. Guma, I'm a college graduate, I'm not a dope. Why didn't I see that about him? Back then or recently?"

Shrug, smile, hands out, palms up. "What can I say? You got a blind spot. You're a fucking superstar in a very hard business, and you got no idea that people could look at you and be jealous, and hate you, and smile at you while they hate you."

"He's Sybil Marshak's attorney."

"I know. And he's going to walk her and spit right in your face. I'd give odds that's why he took the case in the first place."

"But he wouldn't have faced me. I had nothing to do with homicide until after Roland pulled his boner in the elevator."

Guma grinned, extended an index finger, and slowly tugged down on his lower left eyelid.

"Oh, please," cried Karp. "You're not suggesting he set that up to get Roland out of the way so he'd have a shot at me! How could he? How'd he know that Roland would shoot his mouth off?"

"Hey, he worked in the bureau. He knew Roland had a tendency to unload all kinds of unpopular shit when he thought no one from the outside was listening. The press conference was common knowledge. He took a chance, and he lucked out. And who else is Jack going to turn to, a case like this Marshak thing? Butch, the Fireman, Karp is who. Matter of fact, it's a wonder Roland's lasted so long. If that hadn't've worked, Shelly would've tried something else. An underage girl would've been my personal choice, I wanted to shaft Roland Hrcany. You find that guy in the elevator, a hundred bucks says he's linked up some way with old Shel."

"I can't believe it."

"Then don't. Meanwhile, he's going to cream you in Marshak. If it ever comes to it."

"Unless I find out about the watch."

"Come again?"

Karp explained all about the watch. Guma's face seemed to take on more life as Karp talked, his body becoming more erect, fuller, as if someone were inflating it with a pump.

"What do you think?" Karp asked when he was finished. "Am I crazy or what?"

"No, you're not crazy. Jesus, Augie Al Firmo! He's connected up to his ears, you know. With the Gambinos."

"I didn't know. We ever catch him?"

"Never, and he's been in business now for a long time. Shit, he might even be older than me. I don't know how many times they've tried to sting him, but he always slips away, or someone else takes the fall for him. I remember back in '84, Ray Cooley tried to take him down. They had a sting set up over two years. A bunch of detectives were running one of the biggest fake burglary rings on the East Coast. I mean they were pretend ripping off shipping containers and pretend fencing stuff all over the place. They were paying off the Mob. Half a dozen of them liked it so much they were doing it for real. You remember that… the Mollen people were real cranky behind it."

"Yeah, now I do. That was Ray Cooley?"

"Yeah. He really wanted Augie Al, but no soap. They picked up a bunch of his associates and a couple of the cugini, but they couldn't make anything stick to the man. Nobody ratted him out either, which is unusual. But Augie Al's always been a big carrot-and-stick guy. Nowadays he's semiretired, only handles high-end ice, watches, opticals, like that. Guns, too. Fancy stuff they truck in from those Second Amendment-type states." Guma stopped, scratched his head. "You know, now that I'm thinking about it, there was a thing back then where he was using street people to move stuff around. Smart, really."

"Why smart?"

"Hiding the shit in plain sight. You got a guy in an army jacket with fifty fake Rolexes, who's gonna think three of them are real? There's five cutouts between Firmo and the skell."

"And he doesn't get ripped off?"

"Hey, probably all the time, same like the dope guys. It happens once, the skell gets toasted, and move on. A cost of doing business. He buys wholesale, he sells retail. What can I say, it's a living. So to bring it back, probably the guy Marshak shot was a mule for Firmo. I don't see what that buys you on your case against her."

"I don't either. It was just a loose end." But Karp's mind was vibrating with notions. The watch. Ramsey shot. Firmo. The Cooleys, father and son. The father failing to catch Firmo. The son chasing a skell named Canman. Bent cops. Skells muling hot items. An unusual number of skells found with their throats cut. Toasted. Canman a suspect. Cooley chasing Canman. Cooley killing Lomax, whom he knew. How? Lomax, a sheet for fencing, theft. Connection between Lomax and Firmo? Don't know. Cooley on a gun-running stakeout the night of the Lomax shooting. Connection? Don't know. Firmo linked up with Cooley? Don't know. Cooley linked to the bum slashings? Don't know. How to find out?

"Ah, shit!" Karp snarled.

"What?"

Karp shook his head. "Nothing. Just that I need an investigative apparatus to figure out something, and the one supplied by the taxpayers for just such purposes seems to be out of order." He explained the tantalizing connections.

"Do like Felkes-hire a PI," said Guma.

"Be serious."

"Hey, why not? Your wife's rich. Come to think of it, your wife's a PI. Hell, you want to, I'll ask around. I take it you think Cooley's dirty."

"Filthy. Got to be. Why else would he take a chance like that, a big public shooting, to get Lomax? What, you don't think so?"

Guma waggled a hand, palm down. "Hey, anything's possible. The pope could be hocking the Vatican silver. But Cooley being dirty I would tend to doubt."

"Why, because he's a hero?"

"No. But I knew Ray. I knew all of them, matter of fact. Did you know they were from south Brooklyn?"

"No. But you know everybody."

"I don't know Donald Trump. I don't know Jennifer Lopez…"

Karp ignored this. "How well do you?"

"Ray Cooley was a year ahead of me in Cardinal Hughes. We were on the same teams. He was a pitcher. The 'Two Rays of Sunshine,' as the Brooklyn Eagle had it. Neither of us had the stuff for the bigs, but we fucking burnt up the parochial-school league. I hit.387, he had like fifty strikeouts his senior year."

"And that's why Brendan Cooley isn't dirty?"

"The Cooleys," said Guma portentously, waving an admonitory finger, "are not as you and I. If you're interested, I could probably find out whether anyone on the cops got a bad smell off the kid. And I could talk to Connie Sassone."

"Who is…?"

"Brendan's ex. She's a niece of my ex's. My first ex. Nice kid. I was there when they got married."

"Would you?"

"Sure, why not? Dying don't take that much of my time."

Karp let that pass. To fill the silence he asked, "Remind me what happened in the Falla case. I recall you got a conviction."

"Yeah, I did. Felkes did great, brought the bastard stepfather up there, but he couldn't break him, hammered the cops, but they did their usual 'Hey, it's routine, we talk to the relatives in a child case,' blah blah. Felkes got the confession tossed, but it didn't do him a lot of good. The thing was Manuel didn't help himself, the way he looked. Fucking hulk, fat, greasy hair, pockmarked, falling asleep at the trial. Guy looked like Frankenstein in a suit. One time he was actually drooling. Every mother's nightmare, right? They were only out forty minutes and convicted on the top counts, rape and murder two. Felkes didn't give up though. He was running out his appeals when science marches on, they invent DNA, and it turns out Manuel doesn't match the semen they found in the kid. He did eleven years anyway, they turned him loose, and he dropped dead within a week. We got the stepfather though. I did him, too, as a matter of fact. Twenty-five to life. It was when you were out private." Guma laughed, raised his glass. "The fucking system, right? Gotta love it."

Drag enough folding money through the lobby of a pricey hotel, Marlene found, and you can get your two-hundred-pound drooling mastiff into your suite. She ensconced herself, hung up her clothes, had the concierge take her crystal jacket and other drunked-over garments out for cleaning and repair, made an appointment at Danilo's for hair and at Lamy's for a complete overhaul, killed time until the appointments by playing with the dog and watching cable, and did not drink even one of the charming little bottles in the minibar. At three she kissed the dog good-bye and walked over to Lamy's on Madison and Sixty-third, where she got boiled, seared, stripped of exfoliations, mud-packed, massaged, oiled, plucked, waxed, and manicured. She felt pretty good until her hostess told her she shouldn't wait too long before beginning plastic surgery. Mildly depressed by this news, she went over by limo to Fiftyseventh, where Danilo gave her a $300 haircut so skillful that after it her hair looked just as it had when she went in. Then she shopped some, an evening bag and some perfume, and a few things for the office, to assure herself that she was going back to the office, someday, and then back to the hotel.

At around six-thirty she called home.

"It's me," she said when Karp answered.

"Where are you?"

"At the Plaza."

"Uh-huh. What're you doing?"

"Having a vacation from my life."

"Drinking much?"

"I might. Are you going to send a spy to find out if I do?" she asked, and immediately regretted it.

After a silence, Karp said coolly, "Well, do what you need to do, Marlene. You'll keep in touch, yes?"

"You're pissed off at me."

"Yeah, I guess I am. I kind of thought we were a family. One of us has a problem, we're supposed to duke it out, not run away."

"You'd be happy if I was in a twenty-eight-day program with Dr. Eichmann though, wouldn't you?"

"Einkorn. Frankly? Yeah, I would. But you're not going to do that, so why should I even mention it?" A long pause. "So… what are you doing?"

"Right now? I'm getting ready to go to a rich people's party over at the Regency."

"A party, huh? Wear some of those clothes you bought."

"I guess. Look, Butch, this is not a permanent thing. I mean I love you. I just need to be away for a while. When I have to be around, you know, people I care about, I just want to die, I'm so ashamed. I know you're not like that, but I am. I can't bear the idea that I'm draining energy from everyone making everyone miserable. I want to crawl into a hole until I'm better."

And more of this. Marlene was not entirely sure if it was true, the words were just coming out without much reflection. It was unbearable to see him and the kids, but it was also unbearable to be alone. She did not say that, however, and the conversation rattled to a close, as such conversations will, on square wheels.

Once off the phone, Marlene went to the minibar and drank down two Baileys, to line her stomach, and then, remembering Dottie, ate a banana from the fruit basket the hotel had provided. The valet service knocked, and there were her things, the crystal jacket shorn of a few inches but otherwise perfect. Then she dressed in her white Valentino outfit, strapped white Manolo spikes on her feet, spritzed herself with Chanel, snatched up her new bag, a confection of silver and bronze links over black silk, threw the jacket over her shoulders, and after a quick doggy kiss, left the room.

The do for the New York Foundation for the Arts was familiar ground for Marlene. People who provide security for the rich log a lot of hours at such affairs, and she had been to many, but as security rather than as a guest. There was a discreet table where one gave in one's invitation and passed over one's hefty check; Marlene stopped there, gave and passed, got a smile from a couple of old face-lifts, and moved on. She spotted a number of familiar people as she entered the ballroom, for it was the usual gang: old money, media moguls, a scattering of bored-looking art makers, New York movers and shakers, a sprinkle of Eurotrash, a few pretty-boy crashers who owned dinner suits and little else, half a dozen people who had achieved the nirvana of first-name identifiability, with their retinues, and a small group of nouveaux being allowed to buy entry into the good side of the red velvet rope. Of whom Marlene imagined she was now one.

She snagged a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, drank it down, and cast her eye across the crowd. Who cast back, for Marlene in full rig was a spectacular sight. Everyone was wearing crystals that season, but Marlene, being a parvenue from Queens, had more crystals than anyone else. Everyone in the place was to some degree well-known, but Marlene was notorious-not exactly the same thing. People came up to her, anorexic women with rigid golden hair helmets and couture gowns, men of moderate size spraying ego from their tanned or pig-pink faces, blank-eyed supermodels on the arms of debauched stockbrokers, they were all dying to meet her, a heroine, someone who had actually killed people. How did it feel? Were you scared? Are you carrying a gun now? To which she answered: It made me vomit. Yes. No. And every time the waiter came by, a glass of Krug. That made three, her limit this evening.

She wandered over to a table of little yummies, but was repelled by the creamed crustaceans, the tapenades, the caviar, and salmon mousse. But there was a large cornucopia made of pastry, from which spilled a mass of real fruit, and she selected a banana to go with her fifth champagne.

She felt a presence close at her side and turned. A young man, red-haired, thin, good-looking in the way she happened to like, with clever blue eyes.

"That's quite a jacket," he remarked.

"Yes, it is. I feel like I should be stationed in front of an auto dealership on Linden Boulevard, slowly rotating."

He laughed. "You won't get far with this crowd if you make fun of expensive clothes. Eating a banana is also not the done thing, although I love the way you do it."

She chomped another section of the fruit, chewed, said, "Is that right? You're an expert?"

"No, just another working stiff like you, but with less money. A private dick, too." He held out his hand. "Peter Walsh."

She took it, squeezed, warm and dry, good, and he didn't try to hang on to it, which she always hated. "Marlene Ciampi. But you know that."

"I did. In fact, I spotted you when you came in, and I've been working up my courage to come over and slip in and talk to you. In between the beautiful people in my rented tux."

"Really. About what?"

"Oh, a job, I guess. I'd like to protect the famous and get stock options."

Marlene looked him up and down while she drained her glass. Miraculously, a tray and waiter appeared, and she replaced the empty with a full. "You don't look like a private dick, Walsh. You're too pretty."

"You're pretty."

"Yes, but I'm hard as nails. Are you hard as nails?"

"Hard enough, in the right circumstances." He had moved closer. She wanted to sag against him, sag against something, but she held back. A good thing she had kept the champagne down to four hits.

"You're not an ex-cop, though, are you?"

"No. I'm an actor. But I played a cop once."

"Anything I would've seen?"

"Not unless you're a connoisseur of New Jersey community theater. If you watch TV real late, you can sometimes catch me demonstrating the amazing multiwrench."

"An unusual background for a PI. Most of them are ex-cops, ex-military. Sometimes ex-DA, like me. Where did you learn how to investigate?"

"Oh, off a matchbook. Good jobs at high pay. No, what they hire me for is hanging out, blending in with a crowd, seeing what you can pick up."

"Impersonation."

"Not necessarily. If you show up at a place in the right clothes, with the right look and speech, people assume you belong there. In a factory, they assume you're a worker. In a DA's office they assume you're a DA. At a function like this, they assume you're a rich art lover. People say things, do things, they wouldn't ordinarily do in front of an outsider."

"So you're working now?"

A shrug. "Not really. A client of mine passed me a ticket. Since I don't have any stock options, I appreciate the free eats. And, of course, you never can tell when you might pick up something." He waggled his eyebrows theatrically, and she laughed.

"Oh, Walsh, you are too smooth for me, too smooth by far. I need more traction nowadays. I don't like to skid out of control." She gave a tiny tug at his cummerbund, presented her gaudiest smile, finished her… what was it, fourth?… glass of champagne, and flounced away.

A dull gong sounded, and she found herself caught up in the flow of people. The dinner. Did she want dinner? Not really, but it was too much trouble to fight the flow. Besides, she had to sit down-the marvelous jacket felt like a full combat load on her shoulders. She felt her elbow gripped. It was a large man, beautifully barbered, tanned, with deep, dark eyes. "You're at table four," he said.

"Am I? How do you know?"

"I know because I arranged it." A little squeeze on her upper arm. "I'm Shelly Solotoff. I'm an old pal of Butch's. He's not here tonight?"

Somehow Marlene suspected Solotoff already knew that. "No, he's home with the babies. Besides, he has no interest in being nouveau riche."

"But you do?"

She yawned. "Excuse me. Three champagnes and I'm off my feet. Do I? I don't know. It serves to pass the time and show off one's taste in clothes."

They arrived at the table. He held her chair; she sank gratefully and slipped out of the jacket.

"I used to work with your husband, back in the stone age, when the sainted Phil Garrahy was still in charge."

"That must have been before I got there. Do you do this kind of service for all the wives of men you worked with twenty years ago?"

He chuckled. "That would depend on how many wives they had. But only when they're beautiful, exciting, and dangerous."

"And rich?"

"That comes under excitement. The poor are so dull, don't you think? Noble maybe, but dull."

Marlene fanned her face. "Gosh, Shelly, all this charm. I'm quite overcome. Now tell me about the time shares in St. Bart's you're selling. Or mutual funds."

He grinned. "Nope, no deals at this table. This is the laid-back table, right, Jimmy?"

This was a cell phone magnate, who seemed disappointed when Marlene did not immediately recognize his name. He obviously knew Solotoff. They exchanged some good-natured ribbing as between men who have little to say to one another. Also at the table: one of the one-name people, whom Marlene thought looked older than she appeared on TV, with her boy toy, sculptured from bronze and clearly coked up; and two rubicund middle-aged men with silvery toupees and women young enough to be daughters. Laid-back, indeed. The star cooed when Marlene was introduced to her and wanted to know about shooting people and pouted when Marlene declined to expatiate on the delights thereof.

Silent waiters brought the heavily worked and barely identifiable food of the rich: cuttlefish cannelloni with morel-asparagus puree; lobster bisque with carmelized truffles; terrine of baby lamb, roasted foie gras, Scottish salmon, ambergris, cocaine, uranium… Solotoff gorged and was excessively knowledgeable about the food and wine. Marlene picked at the food, longed for a banana, drank the succession of wines. Also gorging: the boy toy, the daughters, although Marlene felt sure they were scheduled for an after-dinner barf in the ladies'. Their men ate lightly and conversed about possessions and exotic and strenuous vacations. The cell magnate flirted with the one-named star. Solotoff had eyes for no one but Marlene, however, which Marlene thought was flattering, considering the lookers at the table. Something about the guy was off, however; there was more than the instinctive drive to try to seduce an available woman, although she had enough of a load on for that not to matter too much. She was having a little vacation was all, nothing wrong with that. Solotoff, though, seemed inordinately interested in her husband. Every other sentence seemed to be fishing around about Karp, and there were insinuating remarks, backhanded compliments. Even partly anesthetized by drink, Marlene did not like it and said so.

"Why're we talking about Butch? Butch is fine. Butch is home with the babies."

"What I said, he's a great man. Watches babies. Bestrides the legal system like a colossus. Beautiful wife, who he doesn't mind is running around town. Total confidence, Butch. I mean who could compete with the almighty Karp? It must be hard, though, married to perfection."

Marlene giggled. "He's far from perfect, believe me."

Solotoff leaned closer. She could feel his breath on her face and smell his winey exhalations. "Oh, yeah? Tell me some of his imperfections." Under the tablecloth, his hand fell upon her thigh.

"He's more perfect than me, that's the main one," she said, and then the waiter was there with a wine bottle, and Marlene found that her hand had moved without conscious will to cover the glass.

Solotoff's hand increased its stroking pressure. "Oh, go ahead. It's Chambertin. A very good year, too."

"No." She closed her eyes. Something bad was happening. There were hidden messages in the sounds of the banquet, the murmurs and the clink of implements. Her skin felt clammy, and the rich food roiled in her belly. There was someone she had to see, someone she had to talk to, a friend… who was it? Who had the answer? Or the question?

Someone was talking into her ear, things about Butch. About a different Butch, a cheat, a hypocrite, corrupt and manipulative, which made kind of sense because she was a different Marlene. What had happened to the real ones? She didn't know. A shudder ran through her. She shook her head, and the room reeled around her in slow motion, the chandeliers making long, slow circles. The one-named star had her head thrown back, cackling, showing the little face-lift scars under her ears. The waiters passed out peach bavarois with goat's-milk ice cream, swirled with semisweet chocolate. Hieroglyphics in the swirls. The message… horrible, horrible.

"I have to go now," she said, and rose to her feet and fell hard against Solotoff, who rose, too, and grabbed her around the waist. She felt the crystal jacket being dropped on her shoulders, and she floated through the room, leaning into the man. Butch? How did Butch get here? Butch didn't like these kind of things. Maybe the different Butch, the monster.

Now in a car, a limo, dark. Far away, someone was doing stuff to her body, fingers probing up her skirt, plucking at her underwear, squeezing her breasts, breath on her neck, a leech of some kind there sucking away. She let it go on; she had no strength, and besides, she was not even sure it was her, whoever she was now.

Brightness, a hotel lobby, an elevator, more grappling. Pausing before a door, the man was probing through her purse, finding the key card, the little light going green, into the room. Marlene saw the bed, its coverlet turned down, the green-wrapped chocolate on the pillow. Oh, good, once she was in bed, everything had to stop. She took three steps and flung herself on it, facedown.

Solotoff looked at the prone figure with satisfaction. Her skirt had flown up, exposing the full length of her thighs and one buttock, enclosed in patterned silk. He took off his jacket and tie, unhitched his cummerbund, and kicked off his pumps. He had drunk a good deal of wine, but knew that it was not enough to keep him from screwing Karp's wife. She was a little older than he liked for strange pussy, but she could have been a hundred and he would still have gone for it. He slipped his suspenders off his shoulders and dropped his trousers. Too bad he didn't have a camera, but who knew he would luck out this way? In his mind he anticipated his next meeting with Karp. I fucked your wife and now I'm going to fuck you in court. No, too crude. Had to be subtle, make it last, make it hurt more. Things had not worked out well for Solotoff in recent years. He had the practice, he had the rich wife, but something was missing. There was a nasty ache where contentment should have been. But this, somehow this was going to make up for a lot of it. This was going to be sweet. Maybe she'd even like it. Maybe she'd like it from him better than from Karp. His groin stirred. That would be a bonus.

He took a step toward the bed. Yank those panties down and fuck her like a dog. A set of heavy thumping steps sounded behind him, and then a sound, like some machinery starting up, a low growl. He spun around, his heart pounding, and tripped over his pants. From the floor the dog looked as large as a grizzly bear. It growled again and came a step closer, moving to put itself between Solotoff and the bed.

"Easy, boy, good boy." Solotoff looked wildly around for a leash or something. How did the goddamn thing get in here? He got slowly to his feet. Lock it in the bathroom, that was a plan. The thing looked stupid as shit. Holding his pants up with one hand, he made shooing motions. The dog didn't budge. He went to the bathroom, opened the door.

"C'mon, boy," he crooned, walking slowly around to get behind the monster. The dog held its ground, the great head swiveling to follow him. A little nudge with the toe to give the fucking animal the idea…

Thirty seconds later, Shelly Solotoff found himself in the hallway outside Marlene's room, shaking and sans shoes, sans jacket, sans tie, sans cummerbund, sans the seat and half of one leg of his trousers (these remains well-soaked with urine) and now divesting himself of an expensive meal and a good deal of slightly used Chambertin. Yet another thing to blame Karp for.