Enemy within

16

Lucy's fingers snapped down on the keys, and the words snaked across the screen. Ten past three in the morning and she was pulling an all-nighter. She had heard the phrase often enough but had never actually done one herself until now. Pulling an all-nighter, a deed dense with scholastic virtue, and she felt good about it, an unexpected attainment of the new her. She was writing an essay in French on the subject of Paul Claudel's Cinq Grandes Odes. Tran had suggested the theme, somewhat ironically, as being suitable for a Catholic schoolgirl. He had, in fact, known Claudel in Paris in the late forties, if known, as he said, was not too strong a word for the relationship between a Vietnamese student busboy and a literary lion. Lucy liked the poems anyway, full as they were of homages to the glories of creation and expressions of longing for God. She loved the line about the girl in the white palace who felt no regret for home but was like a little tiger ready to spring, and whose whole heart was lifted by love and by the great force of laughter. One of the great advantages of fluency is that one has perfect access to poetry in the original. She had not thought about this much before, not being, she had thought, the kind of person who liked things that other people demanded she read, but she had to admit she had changed her mind about this. She had, almost without knowing it, become an educable person. Not quite the little tiger girl yet, and she did regret her home, but she could now see that she could become someone like that. She could be open to joy.

She finished a page, mashed the save button, got up, stretched. A reward was due, a fresh cup of coffee and a cigarette. Everyone in the house smoked like coke furnaces, and she had taken up the habit in a desultory way, more for self-protection than because she enjoyed it. Although the taste of tobacco, the first toasty puff, was delicious, she could do without the trays full of butts and the constant acrid stench. She went into the kitchen and stood for a moment at the sink, enjoying the ticking silence of the house. She filled the coffeemaker, poked in the refrigerator, ate a couple of cold spring rolls, licking fish sauce from her fingers afterward. The smell of coffee filled the room, and something other than coffee, a sweetish, heavy odor, something burning. She sniffed; it was coming from the door that led to the finished basement that Tran used as his office. She sniffed again. Burning insulation? She opened the door, walked down a couple of stairs. The smell was overpowering. She trotted down the rest of the flight and came into the room.

The overhead lights were off, and the room was lit only by a tiny blue flame that hovered like Tinker Bell near the far wall. Something flashed copper-colored in the glow, a pipe of some kind. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that Tran was lying on his side on the brown leather couch, holding a long, brass, small-bowled pipe. His eyes were closed, and his face was more peaceful than she had ever seen it. He looked ten years younger. His eyes opened. She felt a flush of embarrassment.

"I'm sorry, Uncle. I thought something was on fire."

He smiled and beckoned. She walked over and sat next to him on the couch.

"Now you know my secret vice. Are you shocked?"

"I am scandalized, Uncle. Why do you do it?"

"Take opium? To assuage my grief. It is very effective." He spoke slowly, with long pauses between the phrases, as if each one required substantial consideration. "Have you finished your work? It is very late."

"It is. I can't imagine how you are up every morning so early."

"Oh, I don't sleep. Perhaps a short nap in the afternoons. And the work…?"

"I think I have the math and science down. The history paper is done, as you know." She had written about the effect of the battle of An Loc on American and Vietcong diplomatic and military policy, including some insights not at that time known to the CIA, much less the American-history teacher at Sacred Heart. "Also, I'm almost finished with the Claudel paper. I intend to work through the night."

He smiled and nodded and upended the bowl of the pipe over the flame of the alcohol lamp. He took a deep breath of the fumes, released it, and sighed. Raising his eyebrow, grinning, he offered Lucy the mouthpiece, which she could now see was made of amber.

She giggled. "Maybe later."

A deep chuckle. "An excellent, virtuous answer. Also, it avoids my being shot by your mother or put in jail for a hundred years by your father. I believe it is time for us to return."

"Us?"

"Yes, I am coming with you. Your mother requires more service."

"You talked to her?"

Another long puff and a longer silence. "Of course. I talk to her almost every day. It is a benefit of the telephone."

Lucy gaped, she grinned.

"Surely, you did not imagine she was unconcerned about your welfare, or that I was in any sense helping you to hide from your family."

Lucy was offended and felt betrayed. She was, on another and more genuine level, delighted and relieved. She was silent for a while as these feelings fought among each other, with the latter gradually triumphing.

Tran inspected the bowl of his pipe, scratched at it with a fingernail. "I am going to prepare another pipe. You may watch and see how it is done. Perhaps one day you will be the mistress of an Asian warlord, and the skill will be a useful addition to your many other talents."

"Do you think that is at all likely, Uncle?"

"With you, one cannot tell. Life is full of surprises, which is why I am not teaching French literature at the Lycee Chasseloup Laubat in Saigon, as my father planned."

So she watched as he manipulated the yen-hok needles, twirling and roasting the tarry ball over the flame, and carefully placed the fuming pellet into the pipe. He drew heavily and lay back. She was dying to ask him about the service her mother wanted, but he looked so relaxed and peaceful that instead she kissed him quickly on the cheek and returned to Claudel.

It cost Marlene a nice lunch and a lot of guilt, of which she could afford the former a good deal more than the latter, but Wayne Segovia seemed genuinely happy, and that might count for something in the halls of purgatory. He had lost twenty-five pounds, and his normally olive skin was the color of old dishwater. She watched him eat a whole lobster, a dozen cherrystones, a scoop of garlic mashed potatoes half the size of his head, and a dark brown dessert made entirely of unblended calories. She picked at a Cobb salad and drank most of a pricey bottle of Meursault.

"Lobster for lunch," he said wonderingly when he was finished. "I don't know, Marlene. I don't think I better tell my wife about this. She might think you got designs on me."

"Oh, your virtue's safe. A couple years ago maybe not, but I'm a reformed old lady now." Marlene sipped from her glass. "Actually, there was one little favor."

"Oh, ho. See, women take me to two-hundred-dollar lunches at the Palm all the time just to look at my face, so, frankly, this comes as quite a shock." He laughed, which was pleasant to see. "So what can I do for you?"

"I want to change my password."

He looked puzzled. "Marlene, that's not worth a hot dog and a Coke. You press the change-password button when you log on and just do it."

"Yes, but you have to know your old password before you can do that."

"You forgot your password?"

"Yes, this is so embarrassing. They sent a memo around the other day that everyone should change their password, and since I'm such a good girl, I did, and I used the little program that generates a random password and changed it, and then something came up, and I forgot to write it down, and when I turned my machine on this morning, it wouldn't let me."

"Yes, that's how computers make our lives easier. Okay, no problemo-we'll go back to my joint after and fix you up."

They did. Segovia sat at his chair in his tiny cube, and Marlene stood behind him. Segovia got into the root level of the Osborne system, found Marlene's password, decrypted it, and wrote it on a slip of paper.

"Tape it to your monitor," he said, handing it over.

She laughed dutifully and pulled a notebook from her bag. "I'm going to write it down right now in a safe place," she said, and did, and also wrote down the system administrator password he had tapped out several times, which she had read and memorized from over his shoulder.

She waited until the end of the day and slipped into an unused office and logged in as a system administrator using Segovia's password. It let her into any file in the Osborne system, and she was able to bring up Sirmenkov's phone records, hundreds of neatly ranked, compressed, and encrypted WAV files with the phone numbers they represented, and the time and charges. She selected a subset of these and with a few strokes dumped them all into a Zip disc, added Sirmenkov's decrypt key, logged off, and went back to her office, where she unpacked them, decrypted them, and burned them into a rewritable compact disk. She connected a headset to the machine and brought up a conversation of some length that had occurred in the right time frame. In Russian, of course. He would be talking to Uncle Fred in Minsk, or ordering a fur hat… or doing something extremely naughty. Marlene did not speak Russian, but that, of course, was not going to be a problem.

She pulled a CD case at random out of the rack next to her computer and saw it was Dire Straits, the Brothers in Arms album, and laughed. She put the CD she had just made into the Dire Straits jewel box, took a bottle of Hennessy out of her bottom drawer, and like a private eye should, poured herself a stiffer hooker and sat in her chair facing the wall that celebrated her sordid career and drank it slowly. In a while, she slipped the album into the CD slot on her machine and put the earphones on and poured herself another, and in time she got to the point where rock-and-roll lyrics seemed to be, more than the gospels and the prophets, a guide to proper living. She thought, after all the violence and double-talk you do the walk, you do the walk of life. When the music stopped, she went to the bathroom, fixed her face, sprayed some Binaca into her mouth, left the building, walked to her hotel, checked out, had the doorman hail her a cab, and headed for home.

Karp went back to the office after the Jersey expedition and hung around until the building was as deserted as a courthouse ever gets, waiting for Murrow to get back or call, but neither happened. Who called instead was his wife, saying she had come home to his bed and board. A brief call, and unsatisfactory. She sounded drunk, in fact. Karp put that out of his mind, as he was by now so skilled at doing, and continued his paperwork. The homicide bureau was operating fairly well, he thought. The city was now running at a pace of around six-hundred murders a year, of which somewhat less than half were his. A few years back it had been more like twenty-two hundred a year, with three a day in Manhattan. Now the pressure for corrupting plea bargains was a lot less. People who killed people could expect to go away for a reasonably long time, which might deter them from doing it again, or from sinking into crimes the law considered worse, such as selling marijuana. But, oddly enough, he was finding, the prep on the cases before him was no better than it had been when the same staff was working three times as hard. Not as good, even, in some cases. A mystery, one he did not expect to solve.

He worked swiftly, efficiently, peppering the files with notes, most of them pointed, merciless, finding inconsistencies, omissions, unwarranted assumptions. He was surprised that he could still do this, on autopilot almost. He could still penetrate through the fog of semiliterate police reports, technical gibberish, precedents, motions, testimony, lies and veracities, to a place where the truth lay plain. Or rather its predicate; the jury would, if the prosecutor didn't mess up, transubstantiate this tangled mess into truth, or legal truth at least, not necessarily the same thing.

Karp became aware that it had grown dark outside. It was 7:38 by his watch. He began stuffing files into the worn cardboard envelope he used as a briefcase, then stopped. Why bother? He was tired. The thought of lying in bed next to Marlene and working on cases, as they had on so many nights, she beside him reading a magazine, or a novel, companionable… no, he wasn't ready for that yet. Leave the office in the office. Yet it was hard, he found, surprisingly hard, to leave the place naked of legal impedimenta. Nothing to hide behind. He laughed at himself. Workaholic, not just a figure of speech, a joke. He actually felt lightheaded in the elevator; withdrawal symptoms.

The evening air was mild, damp, smelling of concrete and buses. The courthouse district was nearly deserted at this time of day, except of the homeless, moving into the vacated public spaces, the broad plazas, the architectural nooks, even here a few streets from the center of police presence. He heard a bottle smashed, a yell, and walked on, north on Centre, past the new high jail, with the Best Health Deli and the Nha Hang Pho noodle restaurant conveniently built into its street-level floor (message: we're part of the economy, too), and across Canal, where the air changed, becoming warmer and spiced with the indefinable melange of Chinatown. Here it was not deserted, not at all; the crowds were still out shopping, looking for action; in the many lofts above, the indentured needlewomen of Fujian were just getting their second wind, moving into double-digit hours. As Karp jaywalked and reached the north side of the broad thoroughfare, the crowd parted for a young oriental woman in pigtails and a padded jacket and loose trousers, calling, "Kissamee, kissamee," as she shoved a heavy canvas cart full of cut cloth. The crowd tittered knowingly; yet another just off the boat, excuse me her only phrase of English, and mispronounced.

Karp crossed Lafayette onto Howard and left the crowd behind. Crosby Street was dark and nearly deserted as he approached the entrance to the loft. A man was leaning against a dark sedan, and as Karp passed, the man said, "Hey, Karp!"

Karp turned and was not entirely surprised to be looking into the belligerent face of Brendan Cooley.

"You know who I am?"

"Yeah, you're Brendan Cooley." Karp extended his hand.

Cooley ignored it. "I want you to lay off my family. That's out of line. You got something to say to me, you come see me."

"Your ex-wife wanted to see me. I went out to her home with her cousin, Ray Guma."

"That's bullshit, and you know it. And I'm gonna have a little talk with Uncle Ray, too. The pair of you were out pumping her."

"And what were we pumping her about, Detective?"

"The fuck I know! You got some bug in your head that I'm dirty or something. You're going around talking to people, making these suggestions… I don't know where you get this shit… I'm the bum slasher? Why not the Boston Strangler? Maybe you think I got Jimmy Hoffa, too."

"You know what it's about, Detective," said Karp softly, but Cooley didn't seem to hear him.

"I don't understand, what is it? My dog pissed on your car?"

"Lomax."

"Lomax? Lomax? I went through a fucking grand jury on Lomax. Your fucking grand jury, as a matter of fact. I was cleared. It was a good shooting, end of story. So what is this shit about the slasher? Why am I singled out for special persecution, huh? Answer me that!"

Karp looked at the detective. He was dressed in plain clothes, anticrime clothes, a flannel shirt (to hide the pistol) over a faded red T-shirt, blue jeans, and tan leather work boots. He looked like a typical New York artisan, which was the point. He was angry, with what seemed like righteous anger, which Karp thought was as well thought-out and authentic as his construction-guy costume.

"I live just up there," said Karp, pointing. "You could come in and we could talk about it."

"I know where you fucking live, man. And there's nothing to talk about, except you telling me you're gonna leave me alone, me and my family, especially my family."

Cooley took a step closer to Karp and waved a finger in his face, like a gun. The thought briefly crossed Karp's mind that if Cooley had really done what Karp thought he had, then the policeman was crazy and might kill him right here, in front of his home. Then he dismissed that thought. Cooley's anger did not look like crazy anger, but the controlled kind, a standard policeman's tool, and then another, perhaps more disturbing, thought arose: What if Karp was wrong? No one had anything but nice to say about Brendan Cooley, so where did Karp get off playing Javert to his Jean Valjean?

"Okay, Detective Cooley," Karp said in as mollifying a tone as he could manage, "I will never disturb your family again. I'm sorry my visit to Connie upset you so much."

Cooley glared at him, but still the set of his jaw relaxed slightly, and his face showed confusion, then a hint of suspicion. "You fucking better not. And what about the rest of this horseshit?"

"Lomax? Well, that's a different story, isn't it? I know you knew Lomax, and I know why you went after him that night. I know about Firmo and the stolen watches, and how Lomax screwed up your operation. I know you pursued him and shot him to death, shot him from your car, and finished him off with a shot through the passenger-side window. It was an assassination, Detective."

Cooley stared at him. His face lost its angry red and went the color of white jade under the sodium lights. "It was self-defense," he said, and choked. "It was self-defense. I was cleared, for chrissake!"

"Yes, and I'm going to unclear you."

"You can't prove shit!"

"Yes, I know. I'm working on that."

Karp walked away and went up the five flights instead of taking the elevator because he wanted some exercise to burn the adrenaline out of his system before, as he expected, getting another jolt from whatever Marlene was cooking up.

Cooking up indeed-a sweetish odor with a burnt undertone filled the loft; he headed for the kitchen, where he found his sons roasting sweet peppers over the gas stove. The mighty Vulcan was turned up all the way, and six-inch blue flames shot close to the intent, small faces.

"Hi, Dad," chirped Giancarlo, "we're charring peppers."

"I burned my hand," said Zak, exhibiting a tiny blister.

"Uh-huh, that's nice," said Karp distractedly, turning the flames down. "Where's Mom?"

"In the bedroom," said Zak. "Lucy's coming home, too. Mom said."

"Isn't that great, Dad?" exclaimed Zak's brother. "We're all home together!"

In the bedroom Karp found his wife lying prone on the bed amid a litter of unpacking-gaping bags, scattered hangers, open closets and drawers-with a folded, wet washcloth across her eyes. And the smell of brandy, sweet and dense.

"Have they burned the house down yet?" she asked weakly.

"Not yet. How are you feeling?"

"Horrible, like I had a rusty railroad spike through my temples. And please don't look at me like that. I can't stand it."

"How do you know how I'm looking at you? You have a compress over your eyes."

"It doesn't matter. I know you're looking at me with disapproval tinged with horror."

Karp did, in fact, have a look of this sort on his face, and he felt ashamed. He sat down on the side of the bed and took her hand. "What're we going to do, babe? You can't do this to yourself."

"I know, I know," she groaned. "I thought I could be a working drunk, but the body won't take it. Wrong genes. I'm starting to feel sick all the time; I want a drink right now, but I know if I do, I'll upchuck. I'm a failure as a wife, as a mother, as a security guard, as a millionaire, and now as an alcoholic."

"Marlene, I believe that is the single stupidest thing you ever said, and that's a tough league."

"Yes, but you have to say that."

"This is ridiculous, Marlene. You're not a failure, you're a success. I love you, your kids love you, your staff loves you, you have to fight the clients off, you're rich as God… tell me, what is the problem?"

"None of that is true. My daughter hates me."

"Oh, horseshit! She worships you. I hear she's coming home."

"Yes. According to Tran, she finished a whole term's work in three weeks, all the papers, and she's prepped to retake her exams. They'll be here later tonight."

"Well, great," said Karp without much enthusiasm. "But I still don't understand why she'll work for him and not for us."

"Yeah, it puzzled the hell out of Lyndon Johnson, too." She lifted the washcloth to expose her real eye. "Look, Butchie: this is not forever, okay? I sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel, speaking of LBJ. I got to do some things, and then I think it'll be all right. It'll be different, but all right."

"I don't understand."

"My company is corrupt. I have to get out of it, and I'm trying to figure out how."

"You want to give me the details?"

"Not right now. It's not a DA thing anyway; maybe SEC, but I'm not interested in whistle-blowing, just getting out." She paused and studied his face. "You look terrible! What have you been doing to yourself?"

"Oh, just fucking up right and left," said Karp bitterly. "We're a pair. Look, Marlene-I need your help."

"My… help? As in wifely support or something professional?" She sat up in the bed and removed the compress.

He took a deep breath. "I can't believe I'm saying this. Basically, I'm in a position where I can't use the official investigation apparatus. I need to find out stuff neither my own organization nor the police want found out. I could go public with it, get the feds or the state involved, but for a lot of reasons I don't want to do that. So I need the resources of a private army."

"This is the Marshak thing, right?"

"Yeah, and the Lomax shooting." And he gave her a quick briefing on the two cases. And as he talked, he felt a lightness flow into him, into his body and his head. It was almost like being a little drunk himself. Marlene was leaning forward now, shooting questions at him, intelligent questions. Her face had on it an expression he had not seen in some time. It was very much like real life again; not euphoria exactly, but a lessening of the dysphoria he had become used to, like the impact of daylight on a prisoner long in the dungeons.

"I see the problem," said Marlene. "You need to find Canman before the cops do, one, and you need to find some way of turning this Ralphie character. You're sure he's lying about what went down in the garage?"

"I'm not sure of anything, but it's a good bet. I need him watched, though. I need to get inside his head."

"Will Clay help with that end?"

"I think so. I think he'll help with Cooley if I can drop the whole package into his hands. He just won't conspire with me, not on this one."

"Some pal!" She studied his face. "Poor Butch! You hate this kind of shit, don't you?"

"I despise it. I'm like Giancarlo. I love it when things are regular. But you, of course, are a different kettle of fish."

"I am. Unfortunately, things being how they are at Osborne, I can't use my troops there. It'll have to be amateur hour, with a little apparat, as Oleg would say, running things. Let's see, who do we know who has a large body of tough guys with no discernible morals on call…?"

"Not him," said Karp.

Marlene shrugged. "Okay, but then I'll have to think about it for a little while." She leaned back on the pillow. "In the interim, I haven't had a big messy kiss from my husband since 1987, so it feels."

"But from others, many?"

"Don't be legalistic," she said, holding out her arms, and he fell into them with relief. She tasted of brandy, like an expensive, warm dessert.

Then from the direction of the kitchen came a shrill cry, a crash, a howl. They were off the bed in an instant, colliding in the doorway, Marlene scooting ahead, her thoughts full of little boys flaming like torches and the presagement of real, rather than neurotic, unbearable guilt.

"Sweetie ate my pepper," Giancarlo wailed. Zak, the semisadist, was giggling. The mastiff was pawing at his mouth and making horrible groaning sounds. The two skilled investigators had little trouble reconstructing the events: the pepper, roasted a shade too long, had dropped off its fork, and the dog, trained from puppyhood to respond to the plop of dropped food, had raced over and sucked up an object with the core temperature of a thermite bomb.

Thereafter was peace restored, comfort tendered, cruelty chastised, the weeping hound treated with ice cubes and kisses, dinner whipped together and served, the boys cossetted into their beds by Mom for an unusually long time, it seemed, but not begrudged by Mom at all. Marlene came back to find Karp sitting on the costly couch idly thumbing through the television guide. The immense, expensive television was dark. She sat on his lap and kissed him. He noted the taste change-sausages, peppers, coffee. Not as exotic, but more delicious, haimish, his favorite flavor.

"I'm thinking of having some people over," she said, "a kind of welcome-home party."

"Like who?" Unenthusiastically.

"Don't grump. Real people. Tran'll be in tonight with Lucy, and we have to thank him, and besides, I have some stuff I need to talk with him about, and Mike Dugan, and your little guy, Murrow, and Guma. I haven't seen him in ages. And let's see… how about Clay Fulton?"

"Clay? You can't have Clay, not with Tran in the room."

"Why not?"

"Because Tran's got a fugitive warrant on him. He shot all those people out on Long Beach. Which Clay knows about."

"Yes, and he shot those people in the course of saving your daughter's life. It's not like he was a drug baron or a serial killer."

"He is a serial killer, and he might be a drug baron, for all we know. And our guest list is a little peculiar. This wouldn't be a working party, would it?"

"Wine and cheese," said Marlene, "sober discussion about your problem. Your problem, remember? I assume you still want it solved."

"Not that way. Not using gangsters. And Clay will walk out, and I'll lose a friend. Shit! I hate this!"

"I know you do, but you have to trust me. Look, if I wanted to know about some arcane point of criminal law, say the definition of conspiracy in New York v. Patterson, who would I turn to, hm?"

"Patterson has nothing to do with conspiracy. It says that the state may refuse to sustain the affirmative defense of insanity unless demonstrated by a preponderance of the evidence."

"See! I defer to your greater knowledge. In the same way, if you want to pull off a surreptitious investigation involving deception, chicanery, and a casual attitude toward the law, who would you turn to?"

Karp said nothing. She tickled him in the ribs. "Come on, Butch! You know I'm the man when it comes to the gray areas."

He sighed. He was so far gone in vice, he thought, that another increment could hardly damn him deeper. Besides, and not inconsiderable in itself, his wife was back. Real Marlene was sitting on his lap, her eye sparkling with the old light. It was worth losing a chunk of soul for. "Oh, all right!" he snapped. "Have your damn party."

"Good!" she said, and cuddled closer. "Now, where were we when the dog howled?"

At which point they heard the elevator crank up, and they sighed and rolled their eyes and felt each other up in a friendly way, and shortly after in came the prodigal daughter, alone. She, after greeting her parents warmly, and after a mutual exchange of apologies, went to the refrigerator and peered in. "I could kill for a corned beef sandwich on rye," she exclaimed, which, oddly enough, made Karp feel better than he had for a while: she was not entirely lost to the Orient, it appeared. This item was prepared, and she ate it, and they had a reunion. After a while Karp picked up the vibes telling him that the two of them wanted some time by themselves. This he was glad to give, for though he was a devout father and uxorious to the point of absurdity, given the typical mores of last-century New York, there was stuff, some weird gynospecific energy, that passed between the two chief females in his life that he did not care to be around. He went off to watch television.

"Where's Tran?" Marlene asked when he was gone. "I thought he was going to stay with us."

"He has a place on Bayard he stays in. Business associates, ha ha. He thinks Dad doesn't like him."

"It's my house, too."

"Yeah, well, he's not a sensitive, liberated New Age man. What can I say? He would probably deal direct with Dad and cut you out entirely as far as I was concerned except he's embarrassed about his English. Boy, but he's a good teacher!"

"Determined. I was saying the same to your father."

"Yes, but not just that. He just knows how to light something up, so you say. Oh, God, how could I have been so dumb not to see it! And he doesn't make you feel bad, except in that funny shtick he does about you're totally worthless and should be drowned so there'll be more rice for everyone else. It's so sad. That must be the saddest thing in the world-someone finds their metier, the only thing in the world they really want to do, and they're really good at it, too, but for one reason or another they don't get to do it."

"I don't know. People do what comes along, more or less. Your dad wanted to be a basketball player, but he's pretty happy as a prosecutor."

"But he's not a prosecutor," said Lucy vehemently. "That's my point. He's good at prosecuting cases, but they won't let him. He pushes paper and bureaucratizes. He hates it." Lucy looked closely at her mother. "And how about you, Mom? Still enjoying the ill-gotten gains?"

Marlene could not help a start at this comment. "Why 'ill-gotten'?"

"Oh, just a figure of speech. I guess they're not gotten too ill, in comparison."

"Actually," Marlene said after a considered pause, "they are. Wait here: I want you to help me with something. It's very important. Speaking of metier."

She left and returned a moment later carrying her Sony microrecorder. "Okay, here's the deal. You'll recall that two days before our IPO came out, your pal and mine, Oleg Sirmenkov, and a team of God knows what kind of hard boys he dug up, hit a farmhouse in Kosovo and rescued Dick Perry and his party from the grip of Serbian kidnappers. All the good guys were unharmed, and all the bad guys were killed in the assault, including two women. Osborne was all over every network in the world-you remember those shots with Perry getting out of the car with those big guys in black jumpsuits with Osborne plastered across their backs?"

"Yeah, they played it like continuously. What about it?"

"Just that a couple of days before the kidnapping, Oleg was walking around the office like the cat that ate the canary. Everyone else was gritting their teeth about the offering, but not Oleg. He was confident it would fly to the moon. And, of course, it did. I asked him why he was so up on it, and he said something to the effect that events would be in our favor."

Lucy looked puzzled. "So… you think he knew about the kidnapping before it happened? Then why didn't he stop it?"

"Why indeed? It's been bugging me for weeks. Also, it was only four days from the time they snatched Perry off a street in Pristina until Oleg's people sprang him, with half of NATO beating the bushes looking, with no result."

"What, you think he set it up? Kidnapped his own client?"

"No, but I think he knew the snatch was going down, and he let it happen. Dropped an agent into a Serbian extremist cell maybe. He had his rescue team all primed, he must have had the location and layout of the farmhouse before he went in. There's no other way he could've done that operation the way it went down, to pull out four people without injury, and kill eleven kidnappers. Oleg's good, but not that good. And all the bad guys dead, by the way, that's significant, too. No tales afterwards."

"But that's horrible!"

"Yeah. And the more I tried not to think about it, the worse it got. Drunk as I was, I couldn't get it out of my mind. That business with Kelsie, that was just the last straw." Marlene let out a large sigh. "Anyway, I lifted all the international-call recordings-all the calls to Russia or Pristina for the relevant time period I mean-off his computer and decrypted them." She tapped the tape recorder. "I played them out onto tape. They're in Russian, of course. I could go to a commercial translation service, but who knows what Oleg's contacts are in the local Russian community? I'd like you to listen to them and make me a transcript."

Lucy stared at the thin tape recorder with a peculiar expression on her face-repugnance mixed with fascinated delight. "Sure. When do you want it?"

"Now. As soon as possible. I'm not enough of a computer jockey to hide my traces. If Oleg's got some kind of snooper program on his machine, which he's bound to, being Oleg, he'll know someone was in his files. And it won't take him long to figure out who it was. I want to go in there Monday all loaded and ready to kick butt."

"What're you going to do?"

"I don't know exactly. Something nasty and unreasonable, I guess."

Lucy smiled at her mother. "This is your metier, isn't it?"

Marlene grinned back. "Being nasty and unreasonable? I guess."

"No, I mean figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it regardless of who it hurts, even if it hurts you."

"That's a moral stance, not a metier. I really don't know what mine is. I can do a lot of different things pretty well, but none of them seem to make me particularly happy." Marlene laughed. "But enough of me. What about you, baby? You know what you're going to do with your life more than any of us."

"Do I? Oh, yeah, the languages-obviously, I like to learn them, but for me that's like walking or breathing. It's not life's work, and also obviously, you don't see me bursting at the seams with joy."

"No, we don't. It's depressing, too, and guilt-making. You know I always think every downer in the family is my fault."

"Well, it is, Mom, and you better believe we hate you for it."

"Thank you, darling. But I wish, I don't know, I wish you were more gay."

"What!"

"Oh, Christ, I don't mean gay gay! I mean lighter, more like a teenager. I mean you are only seventeen. I mean when I was seventeen…"

Lucy put her hands over her ears and said, "La la la la la…!"

"Oh, stop that! You know very well what I mean."

"Yeah, I do." Lucy sobered instantly and bit nervously at a ragged fingernail. "How can I explain this without sounding like a nut? Look, you know the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible?"

"Of course. What about it?"

"Well, you know the right-wing fundamentalists, that's an important story to them. They claim God wants different people to stay different, and that's their interpretation of the story. It's why they object to the UN, and racial mixing."

"Okay, but they're crazy. What does that have to do with you?"

The girl looked down, tapped nervously on the edge of her plate. Then she raised her head and looked directly at Marlene with eyes that were like hot copper pennies.

"Right, it's symbolic, it's a metaphor, but there's also something real under it. Language is… I don't know, a mystery, and partly it's a religious mystery. 'In the beginning was the Word,' you know? What does that mean? And like the Pentecost, when they all spoke in tongues. Language comes from meat, but it's not meat itself. No one understands why there are so many of them or what that means either. But, Mom, the thing is, I think God is putting Babel together again. In my head. That's what I'm for. I'm an instrument, for some use. And I don't know what it is. I'm supposed to wait to be told. You can see why that would make it hard to get into teenage chitchat and hanging out. I mean it takes all my energy."

Lucy rose and picked up the recorder. "Let me get going on this." She started to leave, but before she could, Marlene stood up, too, and gave her a long, silent hug and kissed the shorn head, half-terrified of its contents.

It was not a cheerful group that gathered in the Karp loft the following day, a Saturday afternoon, the guests having been selected for qualities other than congeniality. Tran and Marlene were in a kitchen corner, speaking low in French; Father Dugan was talking with Lucy, catching up with her academic exploits of the past weeks and drinking a good deal of better wine than he was used to. Somewhat later, the four of them were huddled in the living room, speaking in low voices, in both French and English, with Lucy jumping in as occasional translator. Dugan and Tran had, of course, both heard a good deal about one another, but this was their first vis-a-vis. To Marlene's great relief, they seemed to get along, both of them being basically conspirators. Plots thickened.

Karp, Clay Fulton, Guma, and Murrow were meanwhile sitting around the dining room table, amid a litter of beer bottles, drinking and swabbing tortilla chips through Marlene's salsa. Fulton loved Marlene's salsa, but did not like what he was hearing, the business with Firmo, the gold watches, the hookup between Cisco Lomax and Firmo, and how that connected (they thought) to bullets flying down the Henry Hudson Parkway in the middle of a rainy night. Fulton was silent and glowering when Karp finished with the story of the visit to the Cooley home.

After half a minute or so, Karp asked, "Well? What do you think?"

"What do I think? I think you got a lot of nerve dragging me in here for this horseshit."

"It's not horseshit, Clay," Karp relied. "It's the only story that explains the facts. Cisco Lomax screwed Brendan Cooley out of the collar of his life, the collar his father couldn't make, and when he saw him driving by in the night, he lost his head, took off after him, and blew him up."

"You want to think that, fine! There's a thing called a grand jury you use for checking out if someone maybe did a crime. You think you got a case, take it to them. That's the way the system works."

"I know how the system works," snapped Karp. "The problem is the system isn't working in this case, which is why we're having this cockamamy meeting. There's only one person we know about who can testify to the connection between Lomax and Cooley before the parkway shooting, and that's John Carey Williams, aka Canman."

"No, you only think that. You don't actually know shit. And, anyway, what the hell do you expect me to do about it? Crawl through the tunnels and catch him myself? The guy is already the subject of a major search, for chrissake. He's the chief suspect in the bum slashings."

"If the cops catch Canman, he'll never see a courtroom."

"Oh, right, your theory about Cooley knocking off bums to cover his story. I mean really, Butch. Take a breath and just think that through. You're off the rails there completely."

Karp said, "Think what you want. Meanwhile, you asked me what I want you to do. Well, what I really want you to do is start a full-scale investigation of Brendan Cooley, a real one, not another half-assed whitewash."

"That's out of the question."

"I know. And I'm sorry about that, I really am. How about this, though? You've got access to personnel records. Find out where he was the days those victims got it. It shouldn't take long, and if you're right, an alibi should turn up. On the other hand, if he was off-shift and unobserved at the time of every single one of the six killings…"

Fulton gritted his teeth. "All right, I guess I can do that. Is that all?"

"No. When we pick up Canman, I want to turn him over to you personally."

"You know where Canman is?" asked Fulton in a tone and with an expression that made his astonishment plain.

"Yeah, we do. We have contacts, let's say, in the tunnel community. Father Dugan does, I mean. You make the arrest and keep him in your sight until we can get him in front of a grand jury. How about it?"

Fulton scowled and thought for a long moment. "Okay, you got it. But I didn't hear any of this other shit. And-last time-that is all I'm going to do in connection with this abortion." He stood up. "Thanks for the beers."

"There's one other thing," said Karp.

"I told you…"

"No, this has nothing to do with Cooley. You said you had responsibility for locating high-crime areas on the computer and reinforcing the cops there, drug corners and that sort of thing."

"Yeah, I do. What about it?"

"There's a character, a person we'd like to see some pressure put on."

"A dealer?"

"Well, he's into a lot of things," said Karp smoothly. "Name's Ralphie Paxton. He's at 542 West Forty-fifth, apartment 3B. We want a lot of cops on the street for a week or so, busting people, frisking the usual suspects."

"Uh-huh. Well, a neighborhood like that, we wouldn't need much excuse. I can do that, no problem. You want to tell me what it's about?"

"Do you want to know?"

For the first time in a while, Fulton favored Karp with his familiar toothy grin and deep chuckle. He waved a big finger in Karp's face. "You're getting too smart for your own good, Stretch. I'm going to have to lock you up one day."

"I learned it all from you. You're an accessory."

Still waggling his head and chuckling, Fulton left.

"Well, that went well," said Guma after a significant pause. "Do you think he'll rat us out?"

"It's not ratting out. Clay is Nash's rabbi in the cops, he's supposed to look out for him. Now we told him we know where Canman is, he'll tell Nash that Cooley may be going down, and why, and try to find some way to cover him. Nash is Cooley's partner, so he'll tell Cooley, although I'm sure that Clay will tell him not to. That's the cops, that's the Blue Wall, only it's not a wall. It's a bunch of little castles, defended against the outside, but also from each other, the bosses jockeying for power and the little guys all working their own game with their rabbis, and IAD working against all of them, except where they're not, and the whole thing dipped in enough chickenshit regulations so that the bosses can burn anyone they want to, almost arbitrarily. And the secrets: Clay Fulton is practically my best friend, but when I deal with Inspector Fulton, I can't be out-front, and frank. It wouldn't be fair to him, it would rip him up, so we have to go around the barn, like I just did." Karp looked disconsolate as he sucked on a beer.

"But, meanwhile, you think this will draw Cooley out?" Guma asked. "You think he'll follow Dugan into the tunnels?"

"He'll have to. And we'll be there, too. But not you, Murrow, even though you're small and could wriggle through any narrow ratlike passages. How have you been doing with Paradisio?"

"He's still laughing in my face on the Cooley theory."

"And?"

"I reasoned with him. He's fixated on Canman, and I told him we had evidence that Canman was linked to Firmo, and maybe he was acting as a hit man, and that the victims were stolen-goods couriers who'd dipped some items. He said he'd check it out. The other thing he said was the cops are planning a big drive through the homeless areas underground. Three, four hundred troops. They intend to roust everyone down there and flush him out."

"When is this?"

"He said next Wednesday."

"Shit! Then we better get moving. Meanwhile, he already leaked our interest to Cooley, which was the point. Cooley came after me once already. The pressure's building on him, too. Goom, on the Mr. Ralphie, the lying-douche-bag front, you're okay with that? What you have to do?"

"Yeah, I'm cool. But it seems like the weakest part of this whole business. It sounds like something your bride dreamed up."

"It was a mutual effort, thank you. It's the product of two highly trained criminal-justice minds, one of which is only loosely connected to reality. But you're wrong about that."

"About what?"

"The weakest part," said Karp. "The weakest part is, we have no fucking idea where Canman is."