Enemy within

3

As Karp left the office, his secretary got up from her desk in the tiny cubicle she occupied and ran after him. A small, pale, red-haired young woman from the Republic of Ireland, she spent much of her considerable energy snapping at the heels of her gigantic boss like a terrier at a bull, so that he would show up where he was supposed to show up without, as she put it, fergettin' his bluidy head.

"And where are you off to now?"

"Personal time. I'm going to play basketball."

"Basketball?"

"Yes, Flynn. The player attempts to fling a large orange rubber ball through a steel hoop set high above the floor, while other players try to stop him. Or her."

"I know what basketball is, sir. I'm not a complete yokel, you know."

"Of course you're not a yokel, Flynn. When I think of sophisticated women, you come right after Simone Signouret. Now what can I do for you?"

"Yer fergettin' yer mobile." She did not say "again," although she dearly wished to, and held out the device to him.

"D'you see, sir, the principle of the t'ing is it's supposed to go with you. That's why they made it so small, if you take me point."

Karp exhibited one of his famous glowers, jammed the cell phone in his raincoat pocket, and stalked out. He was one of the dwindling minority who thought that the whole point of ditching work was to ditch work and be out of reach for the duration of the ditch. But Flynn had never once allowed him to slip from the office without that goddamn warbling pickle.

An hour and some minutes later he was playing basketball, three-on-three, half-court, twenty-one wins, winners' ball, and not, in fact, thinking great legal thoughts, but rather thinking nothing substantive at all, which was a delicious relief. Karp had at one time been one of the best young basketball players in the country, a high school all-American, and a standout freshman at Cal. In his sophomore year, however, some gigantic people had tromped on his knee in a game, ending any possibility that he would be another Bill Bradley, and turning his competitive instincts toward the law. He now had an artificial left knee, but he could still score a phenomenal percentage of shots from anywhere on the half-court.

If this kid would get out of his face. The kid was a little over fivenine, and lucky if she hit one-twelve on a damp day. She had a peculiar, large-featured face, not pretty nor plain either-remarkable, memorable in a way hard to describe-with close-cropped dark hair, now sweat-welded to her forehead, and looking at him like a hunting python out of odd, slanted eyes the color of Lucky Strike's fine tobacco. She was guarding him just right, too: close enough to block the sort of feeble jumper Karp was up to these days, and far enough back to avoid a hip and a blast past. He himself had taught her to guard like that, and wasn't he sorry now?

Karp caught a movement out of the corner of his eye, faked left, and whipped a pass around his back at a charging teammate, who went in for a score. That made it eighteen all. The two other men on Karp's team were both his age or a little younger, a dentist named Irv and an NYU professor named Doug, both of whom had played some college ball, although not at Karp's level. The three opposing players were their daughters, all of whom could outrun and outjump their old-fart opponents, which advantage the old farts typically negated by skill, guile, brutal use of their heavier bodies, and selective cheating. Today, however, the girls were hot, and the dads were having trouble even staying even. Karp moved around his daughter, took a pass in the paint, dribbled once, pushed off his good leg, and released the ball. To his astonishment, Lucy Karp came out of hyperspace and blocked the shot. Karp leaped in to smother her return shot, but she outstepped him easily and passed to Althea, who, outpacing her own sire, passed to Jessie, who sank an eight-footer.

From there it went downhill (the penny at last having dropped), and the girls kept the game wide and ran the pants off the fathers, who were reduced to howling, fouling, red-faced, sweat-streaming impotence. On the last play of the game, Karp's daughter and Althea executed a pick-and-roll that would not have embarrassed Larry Bird, and Karp, who had seen it coming, raced to the basket to block the shot, found himself a step late, and had to watch Lucy Karp go up like a homing salmon at the falls to sink it for twenty-one and game.

Irv the dentist threw himself on the floor and pounded it with his fists. "That's it!" he cried. "Beat by a bunch of girls! I'm taking the gas. Honey, the insurance and the will are in my desk in the office. Have a nice life!" The girls were dancing around, hooting with glee and giving each other high fives. Doug slapped Karp on the back and leaned against him, in a parody of exhaustion. "Oh, sharper than a serpent's tooth."

"It had to happen," said Karp. "They're getting better and we're getting older."

"Yeah, but so soon? I was hoping for an early pregnancy to intervene."

Irv got up off the floor, pointedly ignoring Jessie's offered hand. "Get away from me, you! And from now on, back to the kitchen! Knit me a sweater!"

After a good deal of similar, they left for the respective locker rooms. In the lobby, showered and breathing easily again, Karp suggested taking the girls out for a bite, to celebrate their first victory.

"Not this time," said Doug. "I have to grade papers. And, believe me, it's going to be all F's. I hate the young."

"That's a fine idea," said Irv. "I got two root canals this afternoon, and if they think they're getting any novocaine, they got another think coming. Let 'em writhe."

Then the girls emerged looking rosy, even Althea, who was rosy in a milk chocolaty way, and the others left, Irv loudly talking about golf from now on, leaving Karp alone with his daughter. Lucy was wearing a nurse's dark wool cloak, a beret, a black wool skirt, black tights, and heavy lace-up, black boots. She carried her school gear and her athletic stuff in a big Swedish army musette bag. As far as Karp knew, his daughter had hardly ever bought clothes that had not been used at least once. This did not jibe with what he had learned from the fathers of similarly aged daughters, but he had long since given up expecting his kid to fit into any common social groove.

"You're not crying, I see," she said.

"I'm a big boy. I can take a whipping. I have to say, you looked pretty good. You're improving."

"Thank you. But I do play just about every day. And we have a good coach at school. Girls' basketball is suddenly big, so they're more serious."

They walked out of the huge Chelsea sports complex and into a blustery day. Rain was still falling in fits, and the wind from the Hudson bit at the face.

"You haven't changed your mind about the team, I guess," said Karp.

"Don't start, Dad."

"Hey, it's your life. But, like you say, girls' ball is big. And you have the skills. And the size. You're probably still growing."

"Bite your tongue!"

"You could get a scholarship."

"Dad, I speak thirty-eight languages. Getting a scholarship is not going to be a problem. Assuming I want to go to college."

"I didn't hear that," said Karp. "All I'm saying is why not give it a try? You can always drop it, if you really hate playing."

"I'm not competitive."

"Oh, really? Gosh, you could've fooled me in there just now."

"That's not the same thing. That's just fun. I like playing the game. I don't like the winning and losing part. Beating the other guys. It makes me sad. And winning-the way people look at you like you're something special, like they won something because they're in the same school as you. And the way the parents act at the games… it's not for me." She looked up at him. "I'm sorry, really."

She really was sorry, he thought, and he made himself shrug and say, "Ah, forget it, it's no big thing. I'll have to wait for the twins."

"Oh, there's competitive. If they can stop fighting each other for five minutes, they'll be a terror on the boards. Although, you know, Giancarlo is probably more like me than he is like Zak. Zak eggs him on, and he goes with it because he can't stand for Zak to be doing something he's not. Which is weird, because twins are supposed to be the same. Like when they find two of them separated at birth and they both married Mabels and they're both firemen who like to go ice-skating."

"The mystery of genetics."

"Yeah, especially in our family."

Karp declined to pursue that subject, always a vexed one when conversing with his mutant offspring. They waited in the scant shelter of a doorway for his car. Karp watched the traffic flow by and reflected briefly that this was the street up which Cooley had pursued his car thief. No, a little north of here. He wondered whether he should ask Morris to drive him up to the scene, take a look at the ground. He had always done that when he was trying a murder, actually walk the pavements, look in the apartments where human blood had been shed… and then he dismissed the idea. It wasn't his case, not his responsibility. That was for the young farts now, he was done with that part of it.

"What's the matter, Dad?"

"Huh? Why? Did I look like something was the matter?"

"Yeah, you looked like you lost your dog."

Karp laughed. "You've inherited your mom's laser vision."

"Your laser vision, too." Lucy squeezed his arm. "You looked sad. It's not me again, is it?"

"No, just the usual-work, everyday corruption and stupidity."

"Who's being corrupt and stupid?"

"Everyone but me, of course. No, we got this stupid kid accused of killing a citizen, a subway stabbing. It's a death-penalty case, or Jack's going to make it one. It annoys me, is all."

"Did he do it?"

"I don't know. Probably. Convictable, but not ironclad enough for me to want him dead. This god-awful death-penalty crap screws everything up."

"A good Catholic position. We'll convert you yet."

"You better bring your lunch, girl. Here's Morris with the car. Can I drop you someplace? Home?"

"No, thanks. I have some places to go."

"Like where?" asked the dad.

"Just around," Lucy evaded. "Friends. I might go by the church after."

Karp nodded and got into the car. "See you for dinner. Great game, kid."

She waved as they pulled away from the curb.

"How was the game?" asked Ed Morris.

"We got whipped."

"By girls?"

"A fluke, obviously."

Morris laughed. "Or you're getting old, boss."

"Just drive, Ed," said Karp sourly. He sat back in his seat, banished thoughts of aging bodies, and contemplated his daughter. It was hard to know what to do about Lucy. Karp was not the only one trying to figure her out. There was a whole cottage industry up at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical School studying her brain by means of the most advanced technology, and they seemed to be stumped, too. But they had already determined that Lucy Karp could unerringly reproduce all the sounds the human vocal apparatus was capable of generating, with no apparent effort, had an eidetic memory for grammar and vocabulary, and if exposed to a native speaker, could master any language that had yet been thrown at her in something like seventy-two hours. Of the earth's 6 billion, there appeared to be only one other example of a hyperlinguistic prodigy, a Russian boy. In all history, the phenomenon had appeared less than half a dozen times.

Karp recalled that Mozart had had a major problem with his father, and Karp had long since resolved that, despite her gift, Lucy would have as normal a childhood as possible: no going on quiz shows, no exhibition as a freak of any kind. Nor had she, although her childhood had been as far from normal as could be imagined. Which was Marlene's fault. No, don't get into the blaming business. At least Lucy had physically survived her mother's bullet-riddled home life and was now a fine kid, really, although he wished she would have more fun. Clean fun, of course, not the kind he read about in the papers, blow-job clubs at fancy schools. No, safe from that, at least. He thought about the game. Lucy had been wearing a baby sweat suit, as usual, but the other girls had been wearing what Karp continued to think of as underwear, although it was marketed as sports apparel. Jessie had been clad in a cut-down top that left her belly bare and had chosen to cover her loins in what looked like silver paint, thin paint, too, that Lycra or spandex, whatever they called it. Irv seemed not to care that his daughter's butt and sexual organs were perfectly visible. Come to think of it, wasn't noticing the sexual allure of girls of one's daughter's age a sure sign of incipient senility? One good thing about Lucy, in that regard, she was practically a nun-modest clothing, like today's World War II refugee look, and for school she had concocted a kind of uniform-even though uniforms were no longer required at Sacred Heart-out of thrift-shop scroungings. Not a violet-hair or piercings type, Lucy, and no tattoos either, that he could see, although she could have the entire Book of Revelation illustrated on her somewhere he couldn't see. That would be like Lucy, a secretive kid. Also, from her mother, he himself being as frank as the new day, or so he truly believed.

Like where she was going just now? Not to the malt shoppe with the gang, unfortunately. Good works, probably, with street bums. Which you couldn't call them anymore, Karp knew, having been informed by his daughter with some heat that they were "the unhoused." Fine, he was enough of a bleeding heart to sympathize, but he also knew that the bottom layers of society were particularly rich in predators, not to mention the violently unhinged. His baby! Of course, Lucy could take care of herself, not a naif, her, but still… she also got that from her mother, along with the instinct for the hidden life, the peculiar unhealthy interest in the wrong side of society, in violence. No, the violence, that was pure Marlene, not Lucy. Lucy wouldn't hurt a beetle, a girl who would not step on a spider, would probably cuddle up to Son of Sam and try to make him change his ways; Marlene, it would be two in the ear and move on. No, unfair, she was trying. She had given up the crazy shit, the poking guns at men, and worse stuff she used to do in the line of protecting women that he did not want to think about, and now a respectable executive in a growing security firm, a relief, so that all his formidable Jewish worrying energies could concentrate on the girl, didn't want to stifle her though, it was her life… and the church stuff, he was waiting for her to grow out of that, something completely beyond him, although reportedly on his mother's side a long line of Talmudic scholars, so maybe that was genes, too. Losing a child to vice, that was common. There was one guy he knew, a lawyer, whose daughter was an actual call girl, and the drugs, that wasn't just uptown anymore-but losing a child to virtue, that was harder. What could he say? Don't be so good? Girls didn't become nuns anymore, did they? His secret fear.

Maybe she got that from him. He understood that he was known around the courthouse as something of a Boy Scout, not exactly a figure of fun, but not one of the boys either. Was he becoming a prig? Butch Javert? Sea-green incorruptible, like Robespierre? Inhuman? He didn't think so. Like he'd told Murrow, he'd covered up corruption in his day, slid around the strict letter of the law from time to time, in a good cause. It was inevitable, law being a human institution and humans being all crooked timber. So was keeping Jack Keegan in office a good enough cause to justify what Fuller was clearly doing? Karp had to trust his gut on that, and his gut roiled when he thought of putting spin on criminal cases to satisfy political ends. Or maybe that was old-fashioned, too. Was he yesterday's man? A pathetic relic of a better time? Old, getting old…

He physically shook his head to clear these thoughts out of it, drawing a sidelong look from Morris. He heard a warbling, which at first he didn't recognize. Something wrong with the car?

"That's for you, Butch," said Morris. Blank look. "Your cell phone."

Karp fished it out, found the right button, and punched it. He listened and said, "I was just thinking about you."

"Yes, that's a new service of MCI," said his wife. "The cell phone reads your mind while it gives you brain cancer. Where are you?"

"On Fourteenth behind a garbage truck, symbol of my day. I just left Lucy at Chelsea Pier."

"Good game?"

"They beat us."

A whoop in his ear. "I love it. The fall of the patriarchy cannot be long delayed. Did she gloat?"

"No. In fact, she was very commiserating, which made me feel worse."

"Poor Butch! I suppose I will have to pump up your ego tonight via my marital obligations."

"Assuming I can still get it up. What's going on?"

"Oh, the usual. I have an appointment with Kelsie Solette this afternoon, which I am not looking forward to, and I have yet another meeting on our filing."

"Kelsie Solette is big-time. Why does she need protection?"

"Oh, they all need protection, largely from themselves. They bust their hump to get to be superstars, and then they discover that seven million people have no other thought than to rip a piece of their garment off. Or their flesh, and then it's boo hoo, Marlene Ciampi can save me. But, of course, they still have to be seen, which means hanging around clubs in basements with no lighting and one exit, run by the Mob, with the drug supermarket going on in the ladies'." She sighed theatrically. "Meanwhile, everyone down to the stock clerks are going around comparing how much money they're going to be worth when we get this IPO off the ground."

"How much will you be worth? Not that you're not priceless already."

"I haven't a clue. In fact, I think the whole thing is going to fall apart. Internet stocks, yes. I mean that's a feeding frenzy like the tulip mania or the twenties before the crash. But not a security operation, I mean, be serious. It's about as sexy as a sink full of dirty dishes. Unfortunately, Osborne's become a maniac on the subject, and Harry, too, who I always thought had his head screwed on right. What it comes down to at this point is sitting in endless meetings with a lot of little jerks in five-thousand-dollar suits and trying not to drift off. Apparently the next stage is to drag us around to institutional investors to give our spiel and show them that we're not a bunch of thugs with saps and tiny cameras."

"I thought you were."

"Yes, but this is the new security. The world is a dangerous place, the rich getting richer, the poor getting ever more pissed off, governments collapsing, and so on and so on, opportunities internationally for a highly disciplined firm, with modern management, blah blah blah. Complete horseshit, but since I'm a good little soldier…" Marlene sighed again. "Listen, the reason I called, I'll be late at one of these crap sessions, and I wanted to make sure you'd be home when the boys were delivered from after-school."

"No problem. Now that we conquered crime, there's not a hell of a lot for me to do. Will you be home for dinner?"

"Probably later. Feed the monsters and I'll see you around eight. Is Lucy dining in?"

"I forgot to ask. She wandered off with that look where she doesn't want to say what she's doing. The bums, is my guess."

A good guess. After she left her father, Lucy walked north along Eleventh Avenue, the unfashionable western edge of the Chelsea district. For now, the residents were still largely Puerto Rican, the landlords were too somnolent to smash and condify everything, the bodegas were still bodegas rather than galleries, and the restaurants served comidas croillas and not Mediterranean. There were still small remnants here of the New York that was, a fur warehouse, a few small factories, the big rail yards north of Twentieth. These tended to block the yuppie tide, as did the public housing projects and the two mental-health outpatient centers. Lucy should have been heading back to the Upper East Side, where her school was, to make her three- and four-o'clock classes, but she had already decided to cut them. It was something she did more often than formerly. It was a very good school, but it bored her. Her classmates bored her even more, rich girls, lunching on ice cubes to stay razor-thin, talking about clothes and boys.

She had promised to work a shift at the soup kitchen run by Holy Redeemer at Twentieth-ninth and Ninth, but that was not until five, and before she went there she wanted to check on some people who lived in the neighborhood of the rail yards.

The wind was blowing south, driving cold rain with it, and she walked with her head down and the hood of her cloak drawn up over her beret and clutched tight. She was therefore nearly upon the slow-moving, dark figure before she was aware of her, an oversize mobile fireplug, the familiar shape of people who in cold weather habitually wear every piece of clothing they own. It was a woman, pushing a rusting grocery cart piled with the usual plastic bags. She wore a wool cap, with a cheap, flowered, plastic rain kerchief over that and a set of men's overcoats, and a poncho made of a tan garbage bag. Lucy said, "Hey, Elmira."

The woman looked at her suspiciously, as if surprised to hear her name on human lips. Her face was cinnamon-colored and ashy with the chill. She blinked away raindrops, saw who it was, grunted, and said, "Gimme a cigarette."

Lucy, who did not smoke, always carried cigarettes. She offered a Marlboro. The woman took it, stuck it in her nearly toothless mouth, waited for a light like a duchess. Lucy gave her one with a Bic.

Lucy asked, "Are you going up to Holy Redeemer?"

"No, I'm gon' eat in peace today. I got me bread and SPAM. And cheese. I got me a nice piece of cheese today."

"You should get some warm food on a day like today, though. Hot coffee. We're making vegetable soup and biscuits. And salad. And pie."

"What kind of pie?" Suspicious. Greedy.

"I think apple."

The woman pushed her cart along for half a block, puffing the cigarette hard and mumbling to herself. "I might do it. Or I might not."

Lucy doubted Elmira would come. Some of them would not emerge from the isolation they had imposed on themselves for dinner at Le Cirque, much less for a church-kitchen meal. From things others had told her, Lucy knew that Elmira was ashamed of her missing teeth. And she was too disorganized to set up and keep the free dental-clinic appointments she would need to get them fixed. Elmira was low-end homeless, although not the lowest, not by a long way.

"Well, I'll see you, Elmira. Take care." The woman didn't answer. Lucy stretched into her usual aggressive urban pace and quickly left the shuffling woman behind. At Thirtieth Street, Lucy turned west toward the yards. It was a scruffy area: warehouses, garages, anonymous, blankfaced industrial structures, five-story apartments built for workers back when this was the south end of the great freight-handling district of the metropolis. It was one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan still connected with the physical movement of material things, another world from the real New York, the one that grew rich beyond all imagination off the fabrication of images and the manipulation of data.

Lucy came to a rusted chain-link fence with one end peeled back from its support. She slid through and descended a rough, weedy embankment to a concrete apron overlooking the sunken Metro Transit Authority-Long Island Railroad yards. Graffiti covered every vertical service, some of it elaborately wrought, and with a certain barbaric beauty, a museum of the doomed. There in the shadow of a high, buttressed, gang-tagged retaining wall, she found what she was looking for.

It was a kind of village. The dwellings were constructed with varying degrees of art and skill out of large corrugated cartons, fiberglass, scrap lumber, sheet metal, and the ubiquitous black plastic. There were a dozen or so of these structures, each occupying one of the bays marked off by the tapering buttresses of the wall. At either end of this fancy district (walls, roofs), there were humbler dwellings, sometimes only a plastic tarp covering a shopping cart, or a crude tent. The social center of the village was a fire flaring in an oil drum, silhouetting half a dozen lumpy figures clustered around it. Her foot struck a pebble, making a small sound, and the group stopped its buzz of conversation. Two dogs yelped and growled. Every face turned to look at her, wariness showing in each one. When they saw who it was, they visibly relaxed.

A tall, bearded black man wearing a greasy olive-drab mechanic's jumpsuit hailed, "Hey, Lucy. My girl! What you got for us today? Chicken?"

"Vegetable soup, bread, salad, and pie."

"Pie? Pie is good," said the tall man, who was called Real Ali. "Hey, Benz, you going to get some of that pie?"

"I might," said the woman thus addressed, a large, heavily swaddled woman with a pitted Hispanic complexion. "Lila Sue likes pie. Is there any meat in that soup?"

Lucy said, "No, no meat, but we got a bunch of bones cooking in with it. How's Lila Sue today?"

Mercedes Ortiz, who was never called anything but Benz, stroked the head of the creature leaning comfortably against her padded bosom. Lila Sue was looking at the fire with pleasure, her large, dark eyes reflecting the sparks. She was a pretty girl, as far as features went, elfin, yellowy tan, with a sharply pointed chin and a straight little nose. Lucy thought she was probably in her late teens, although it was hard to tell. No one knew where Benz had picked her up, but they were inseparable.

Another man, dark, thin, spoke up. "Lucy, what we want is a little room service around here. How come you don't deliver, is what I want to know. I'm too beat, to use my feet, to go and eat."

Real Ali said, "Man, you think you still in Vegas."

The other man became animated and started jumping around the fire, shadowboxing. "Yeah, Vegas, that's where I beat Ron Lyle, eleven rounds. Pow! Ka-pow! Okay, first round, he goes, left, left, right to the body. It don't hurt me none, I'm feeling him out. Pow! Left jab… pow!"

"Oh, shut the fuck up, Ali!" This from a man standing opposite, wearing a Raiders cap over dreadlocks and a greasy blue parka with stuffing oozing out of it. He had the twitchy moves and fuzzy features of a crankhead. The shadowboxer bounced away from the fire barrel and started dancing around, twirling his fists artistically. "Hey, let's go. You want to go with the greatest? Come on!"

Real Ali walked over and put a big arm over Fake Ali's shoulders. "Take it easy, champ. It's not worth it. Doug ain't in your class."

"Fuckin' nutcase," said Doug Drug under his breath. "Jesus, I got a fuckin' headache about to take my skull off. You got any aspirin there, Lucy?"

Lucy handed him a flat tin of Bayer. He popped it open and tossed half a dozen into his mouth and swallowed them dry. He said, "Think I'll go by Redeemer and get some of that pie."

"Pie," said Lila Sue. "A pie was walking down the street and saw an elephant a flying elephant with silver wings and he said hello Mr. Elephant I want to go to pie heaven will you take me and the elephant says yes I will and then they flew up high high high high high up on top of the clouds and then the elephant said here we are in heaven but first I must have a bite of you, no no said the pie I must have a bite of you because I am a vampire pie-"

"Christ, can't you shut that bitch up!" yelled Doug. "Benz!"

"Shut up yourself, asshole. She ain't doing you no harm. She just telling a story."

"-And all the other vampire pies came out of vampire heaven," Lila Sue continued, "and bit on the elephant and the elephant said oh oh I am all eaten I will change into an angel so he did and the angels came and changed all the vampire pies into flowers but flowers that had wheels and televisions and they rode down the hill until they weren't in heaven anymore and they said let's look for the mother pie…"

Doug Drug pulled a filthy rag out of the pocket of his jacket. "Hey, stick this in her mouth, Benz."

"Get fucked," said Benz.

Real Ali said, "Go eat, Doug, or go score one. Your fuckin' personality is deteriorating."

Doug looked across the fire at Desmondo and Ralphie, the two other men in the group, but saw no rush of support. He said, "You going over?"

"Yeah, we'll go over," said Desmondo, and Ralphie nodded in agreement. "I think I heard this story before, anyway." A chuckle of acknowledgment floated around the fire barrel. Every story was different, and every one had the same pointless eloquence. Lucy reflected that of all the people in the little group, Lila Sue and she probably had the most in common, both of them having strange brains. Lila Sue could tell stories by the hour, that being the only part of her intellect that had any real function. She could not dress herself or go a block without getting lost or stepping into traffic and would walk away cheerfully with anyone.

The three men departed, and Lucy moved around the fire to get closer to Real Ali. Lila Sue's story had sunk to a low warble, like a TV on in a distant room. He grinned at her and said, "You looking for your boyfriend?"

She felt her face heat. "He's not my boyfriend."

"You wish he was, though."

"I do not!"

"Uh-huh. Well, he ain't been by today. You probably meet up with him up at the church, cut up some vegetables together."

Lucy ignored this. "How's Canman?"

"Hell, honey, I don't know. He's acting like a spooked cat. He keeps talking about Joe Romero."

"Was he friends with him?"

"Oh, he just knew him from around, you know, from the streets. Joe helped him haul stuff once in a while. He thinks the slasher's after him, gonna do him like he did Joe. He's talking about moving out of the paper house."

"You mean to a shelter?"

Real Ali laughed. "Hell, no. The Canman, he rather get his throat cut than go in a damn shelter. Canman don't like rules and regulations. I'm not particularly fond of them myself, if you want to know. Nah, he was talking about the tunnels."

"I should go talk to him. Is everyone else afraid, too?"

"Not particularly. I figure we're pretty safe here, all of us being together. Someone's up most of the time, and we got the dogs. No, the slasher, he's going to take out people sleeping alone, like Joe, and the guy he did before Christmas, that Chaney character, over by the convention center. Anyway, life on the mean streets." Real Ali laughed. "You ain't afraid of no slasher, are you, Ali?"

Fake Ali did a little shuffle and said, "The greatest ain't afraid of no man or beast."

"I'm going to see him now," said Lucy, and walked down the cracked concrete to a low black structure snuggled into one of the bays. It was made almost entirely of baled newspapers covered with tar and plastic. Its roof was a cone of scrap lumber and lath, tied together tepee fashion, and covered with a wrapping of tar paper, plastic, and foil sheeting from insulation. Smoke emerged from a tin pipe above. It had two windows covered with translucent plastic sheeting and a low door, made of packing-crate slats, plastic, and duct tape. A canvas laundry cart was parked next to it, like a Toyota at a suburban ranch house. Lucy knocked on the door.

"Who?" said a voice after a considerable pause. A dog barked sharply, twice.

"Lucy."

"What?"

"I want to talk. Can I come in?"

Nothing. Lucy pulled back the door and entered. A small yellow mutt trotted up to her, sniffed her, and hopped back up to his master's side. The man was sitting cross-legged on the edge of a bed made out of baled newspaper, with a layer of orange finger-foam on top. A thin white man in his mid-thirties, he had a patchy tan beard and long, unwashed hair. He wore a mixture of military surplus and Vincent de Paul throwouts: OD fatigue pants, a flannel shirt, a gray wool sweater with ragged elbows, Adidas patched with duct tape. It was warm in the room, musty with the smell of dog, unwashed man, wood smoke, wet newspaper, cigarettes, and over all, the sweetish stink of the residues in the hundreds of aluminum cans, which, in bags and cartons, occupied half the volume of the dwelling. Hanging from the low ceiling and stuck in corners were hundreds of beautifully crafted ornaments made from tin cans-flowers, angels, animals, human figures. They jingled faintly in the slow air currents. Tools were lying neatly on a low brick-and-board table, with coils of wire and, more ominously, a large can of Hercules smokeless powder. Canman made booby traps to protect his gear from thieves. No one went into the paper house when Canman was gone from it.

The place was heated by a small stove made out of a washing-machine drum. It had a hood and pipes of scrap sheet metal and was swathed in pink fiberglass insulation and duct tape where it ran through the tepee roof, and a little door cut out of a car door, incorporating a single hinge. Like everything made by Canman, it was simple, elegant, perfectly functional. Light came from fat plumber's candles stuck in elaborate tin-can candlesticks, posed in niches carved into the paper walls. Lucy sat down on the floor, which was thick with industrial-carpet remnants.

"Make yourself at home, why don't you," said the man without looking at her. He was working with a long knife and a pair of pliers on a device he held in his lap.

"What are you doing?" she asked to break the silence.

"What does it look like?"

"You're fixing your can crusher."

"Yeah, and if you knew that, why did you ask?"

"I was making conversation. I was being social."

The man snipped off a piece of wire and glared at her. He mugged looking around the room. "Uh, man's living in a place like this, what makes you think he wants to bullshit with people? Go home!"

"I'm concerned about you."

"Not my problem. Go away!"

"You're feeling better, I guess."

The man picked up his knife and pointed it at her. "Hey, look. I was flat on my back last month, you brought me juice and aspirin, you walked Maggie. I didn't ask you to, and it doesn't mean you own a piece of me either. I don't need your soup. You want for the aspirin and the juice? Take some cans. You want money. Here!" He pulled a few greasy bills out of a pocket and flung them at her. The dog growled.

She did not touch them. "Real Ali says you're running scared."

"He does, huh? Real Ali should mind his own fucking business. This is why I got to fucking get out of this slum. I came here, built my place, it was nice and peaceful, everybody was living down at the station, fucking beggars. Now it's wall-to-wall crazy people. It's like Times fucking Square here."

"It seems a shame to leave here now you've got it fixed up so nice."

"See, that's what you don't understand. I don't need this. I got a knife, a pliers, a snips. I got a hand-baler and a can crusher and my wagon. I could put a place like this together in two days, if I got the paper and the plastic. The stove takes down, but I got a better idea for one, make it out of a muffler and exhaust pipes. A smaller place, someplace quiet, just big enough for one. Build it like an igloo. Get away from these crazies."

"Then why don't you hang out with sane people, have a real life? You're smart. You read." She gestured to a double row of paperbacks sitting in a milk crate. "You can make things, fix things. You're a terrific artist. You could get those can sculptures in a gallery…"

"Sane people? Where? Wall Street? The government? Corporations? You think those people are sane? They're nuttier than Fake Ali out there. There's no fucking difference between what you hear on the news and what Lila Sue spits out. You think that's an improvement, being a slave to crazy people, wrecking the planet, turning everything into cash to buy shit they throw away? Don't even know they're crazy. Which is as crazy as you can get. You want me to hang with sane people? Find me three. Two."

"I'm sane."

"Ho! You believe angels talk to you. Jesus rose from the dead."

"What do you believe in, John?" she asked mildly.

"Me? This!" He held up his knife. It was a military knife of some kind, shiny and pointed. "I believe this is a knife." He scratched the mutt behind her ear. "I believe this is a dog. I believe life is a pile of shit and the world would be a better place if more people were dead. Especially those pathetic loonies and hypes you hang out with."

He put the can crusher down on the floor and began fumbling through his pockets, his face twitching, cursing under his breath. A baggie of pale tan pills appeared. He grinned and held it out to the girl. "Join me?"

"Maybe later."

A snort, and he ate two of the Percodans, swallowing them dry. "Maybe later," he said derisively. "You know if Jesus was hanging around nowadays, he'd be into everything, hanging around with the lowlife. I thought you were trying to be like him."

"I doubt Jesus would be a doper, John. He was always casting out unclean spirits."

"Yeah? Well, I don't have any of them." He lay back down on his bed and flung an arm across his eyes.

"Actually, you do," she said, but in a low voice. She stood up and retrieved a felt pen from her bag. She wrote her name and phone number on the newspaper wall. "If you're going to leave here, I wish you'd tell Real Ali where you're going. And I left you my number. Call me if you need anything."

"I need you to get lost."