Enemy within

7

"Actually, it went a lot better than I expected, " said Karp. "A LOT better, for example, than this bagel." He was in a rear booth at Sam's, near the courthouse. Sam's was an antiquated joint of the type that used to be called a luncheonette in New York. It was dark and cozy, and the red leatherette of its booths was nearly black with age, except where patched with Mystik tape, and the air therein was dense with the scents of coffee, toast, bacon, and the extra something that once made all places smell exactly the same. He was having breakfast with his old pal, V. T. Newbury. Newbury worked in Washington now, for Treasury, doing something fairly cryptic about big-time money laundering. He had worked for Karp for over fifteen years at the DA, and whenever he was in town arresting distinguished bankers, he arranged to spend some time with Karp. Karp prized V.T.'s judgment, although not necessarily in reference to the doughy oval.

"What's wrong with it?" asked Newbury. He was a small, ridiculously handsome man with the chisel-cut features of a twenties cigarette-ad drawing. A scion of venerable New York wealth, he had nothing whatever in common with Karp, except deep mutual affection and a mordant sense of humor about the criminal justice system.

"It's not a bagel. It's white bread in a doughnut shape. An abomination. It's like… like…"

"Ladies no longer wearing gloves out of doors. Yes, the decline of a once great tradition. My commiserations. Tell me more about this fellow. Did you like him?"

"Well, sort of, as much as I could like someone with whom my daughter spends every available moment and who is ten years older than she is. He seemed pretty decent, and everyone was on their best behavior. Got a scruffy beard, dresses down-market, but clean. Well-spoken. He's from upstate somewhere. I guess he's the kind of guy, a woman sees him and wants to fatten him up or something. That kind of appeal. He's a Franciscan."

"A priest?"

"No, what they call a Tertiary, like a lay order. I didn't know they had them. He lives in a Catholic Worker hostel on the Lower East Side. According to him, he's been in some rough places. That was what we mainly talked about, Bosnia, Sudan. He's dying to get back there, if you can believe it. Like I said, everyone was being their charming selves, even Marlene. Their charming Catholic selves. Many references to the Holy Spirit.

"You felt left out.

"I did, a little. Off-base. I mean if your kid is hanging out with a bum, that's one thing. You can give him the bum's rush. If she's hanging out with… I don't know… a saint practically, what can you say? Be a little more evil, honey?"

"You're thinking maybe this guy is taking advantage of her?"

"What, sexually? Lucy?" Karp let his jaw drop. "You know, that's the one thing that never occurred to me. Never entered my mind."

"The dad is always the last to know."

"Uh-uh, that's not the worry with Lucy, especially not with this guy. The worry is we'll get a postcard from the Congo some day: 'Dear Mom and Dad, taking care of lepers in the middle of a guerrilla war here. Don't worry.'" Karp laughed. "Go have children! Now I know."

"I wish I could give you some advice," said V.T., "but, as you know, Anabel and I have not been blessed. I was always threatened with military school, myself."

"Not an option," said Karp, "although Marlene gets on a tear sometimes she's going to ship her out of town if she doesn't get her school act together." He pushed his half-eaten pseudo-bagel aside and signaled the waitress for more coffee. Newbury took the moment to examine his friend more closely. Not a happy man, he thought, and not because of his daughter either. The skin of his face had the stretched and sallow look that, experience taught, indicated tension and frustration. His smiles seemed forced, as if having to push up through a membrane of suffering.

"How's work?" Newbury asked in a casual tone.

"Oh, the usual. Putting asses in jail."

"Not. Really, what's wrong?"

"You got time for this?"

"Oh, a long story?"

"Semilong," said Karp, and plunged into the Cooley affair, and the situation with the election, and the execrable Norton Fuller, and what Karp proposed to do about it. At the end Karp asked, "So… what do you think?"

"I think you have a serious problem. Has Clay called you back yet?"

"Not yet, no."

"An interesting moral situation. Both of you want to stay in jobs where you think you can still do some good, and where the alternatives, like letting yet another incompetent bozo take your place, seem even worse. But you might have to ignore some bad stuff to keep in there, and then you have to ask, where do you draw the line? The old Schindler's list business, the good Germans…"

"That's hardly a fair comparison," said Karp. "Whatever happens, no one is sending me to Dachau."

"No, when you leave the DA, you'll be sentenced to private practice and the chance of enormous wealth, and this will keep you out of heaven. Some people, maybe including Lucy, would say that by comparison a jolt in Dachau is a day at the beach."

"You're not being very helpful," said Karp a little grumpily.

"No, and that's because this is the four hundred and twelfth time we've had this conversation, or a similar one. You're an essentially honest and decent man working at the top levels of a system that's essentially dishonest and indecent. You have authority enough to acquire responsibility, but not enough to change things much for the better. So your choices are, also for the four hundred and twelfth time, either, one, quit and earn an honest living; two, get off the pot and run for DA or political office, where you can put on your silver armor and fight the good fight with no holds barred; or, three, do a couple of ass-kissing favors for some pols and get appointed to the bench, where you can make the kind of law you want until senility takes hold, and even beyond. But this continual angst around a DA who doesn't want to play by your rules has not made you happy, is not making you happy, and will not make you happy in the future. Granted, Keegan is in a different moral universe from Bloom, but he's obviously still not pure enough for you, and so, until the second coming of Francis P. Garrahy, you're always going to be harassed by political types like Fuller. It's part of the system."

"I know it's the system, V.T. I wasn't asking for a review of my entire life, I was soliciting your advice as to how to carry out a sneak."

"Me being a sneaky guy? Thank you. Okay, here's my advice. It's a good plan as far as it goes. But if you're fighting a political battle, you're going to have to get your hands dirty in politics. You have to manipulate your boss into a position where it's less worse for him to do what you want him to do than what Fuller wants him to do."

"Oh, crap! If I do that, I'm as bad as Fuller!"

"Yes, and if you don't, you'll lose, so why bother in the first place? Sorry, pal, you asked me, and that's the way I see it." Newbury drained his coffee cup and looked at his watch. "I'd love to share some moral agony with you, but I'm due across the street to terrorize a clutch of certified public accountants. Is that the correct noun of venery? A slick of accountants? A cheat? Whatever." He shook Karp's hand warmly. "Love to the family. And, Butch? Lighten up… it's not like it was real life."

Karp watched his friend walk down Baxter Street and felt a stab of envy, not a very familiar stab, and more irritating for that. He did not, of course, envy Newbury's wealth or family or status. What he wished he had was his light heart, his ability to accept the world as he found it, its infinite absurdities amusing, its injustices bearable, its corruptions a given, like the changes in season, without becoming nastily cynical or corrupt himself. As he walked back to the office, he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out from under the opinions V.T. had laid out, and it must have shown on his face because those of his staff he encountered gave him serious nods in greeting, and the few smiles that dawned as he passed were stillborn. And that was another thing, which he hardly dared admit. He was lonely. Unlike the lost age when he had started at the DA, when a lawyer commonly spent a whole career in public prosecution, the present was an era of flux. Except for Roland Hrcany, and Keegan himself, everyone Karp had started with was gone. Keegan could not be a friend, of course, and as for Hrcany-as Roland himself often remarked, when you had a Hungarian for a friend, you didn't need any enemies. Karp stifled the self-pity, however, like the good stoic he was and stood nobly with his hand out in front of his secretary's desk while she slapped a short stack of early phone messages into his hand. "And Himself would like to see you when it's convenient."

"Himself, eh? What did His Excellency want?"

"He did not vouchsafe to me, Mr. Karp. But Mary said it was important… about a murder, she said. Mr. Hrcany is in there now. And the other one."

Which was Fuller. Fuller, inevitably, was the sort of little toad who puffed himself up by oppressing staff and was widely resented. This he took as a token of his effectiveness in administration.

Karp went into his private office and flipped through the pink squares. Only one was of immediate interest. He pushed the button.

"You found out something," he said when Clay Fulton picked up.

"Yeah. That incident we were discussing."

"Why did the chicken cross the road?"

"That one. I'm in the information business, so it was not unusual for me to ask for all the stolen-car reports put out on the evening in question and their time of transmission. Guess what I found out?"

"That the chicken crossed the road before the car in question was reported stolen," said Karp confidently.

"You got it."

"Which means that he crossed the road for some other reason, which means that he was pursuing the driver and not the car."

"I would say that's a reasonable assumption," said Fulton after a brief pause.

"What're we going to do?"

"You know, all in all, I think St. John's is going to whip Duke. A good big guy is going to take a good small guy every time."

"Not if the small guy is very fast and very sneaky."

"Nice talking to you, Stretch. If you take my meaning."

After he hung up, Karp had this thought: I'm becoming a pain in the ass to my friends. After taking some moments to recover from the irritation and anger this revelation occasioned, he grabbed one of his ledgers and walked to Keegan's office, remembering at the last moment to bring his face back to neutral. The DA was at the head of his conference table, flanked by Fuller and Hrcany. He looked pale, and there was a pinched expression on his face that Karp did not recall seeing there before. Fear? They all looked up when Karp entered and took the chair at the foot.

"What's up?" he asked, to which Keegan glowered, Roland rolled eyes upward, and Fuller said, "We have a problem."

"It's not a problem, Norton," Hrcany replied. "We call them cases. Somebody shoots somebody else, we investigate and come to a conclusion, and then we indict or don't indict the shooter."

This was Fuller's turn to roll his eyes.

Karp looked directly at Keegan. "Jack, what's going on?"

Keegan said, "A little while ago, I got a call from Shelly Solotoff. You remember Shelly, Butch?"

"Yeah, I had lunch with him last week."

"He's representing Sybil Marshak. Apparently, one day last week she shot a mugger in a garage midtown and fled the scene. She called Solotoff this morning, and he called me. We are now deciding how to handle this mess."

"What mess?" asked Karp disingenuously. "Roland just pointed out we have a procedure here. Why don't we follow it?"

"Oh, please!" snapped Fuller. "It's absurd to pretend Sybil Marshak is the same as some drugged-up kid with a gun."

"She's no kid," said Roland. "You got that right, Norton."

"But she had a gun," said Karp. "Drugs we don't know. Did Shelly say anything about drugs?"

"Very funny," said Fuller sourly. "But the press is going to be all over us in a very short time, and we need to get our ducks in a row. Obviously, we can stall for a little bit, feed them some junk about the continuing investigation, and no comment until the results are in, but afterward… I mean she is absolutely fucking key to the campaign. I mean she controls something over thirty percent of the typical primary vote in Manhattan-"

"And?" Karp interrupted.

Fuller was taken aback. "Well… clearly, we have to ensure that

… ah…" He hung up, fumfering.

"Yeah, it's hard to come right out and say it," Karp observed. "Because putting the screws to some poor schmuck for political reasons, that's business as usual. But easing off on someone for political reasons is a crime, isn't it?"

"Who said anything about easing off?" Fuller protested. "I never used any such language."

Karp ignored this, and turned to Hrcany. "We have some facts, I presume."

"Yeah, I talked to Jim Raney, at Midtown South. The vic is a homeless named Ramsey, Desmondo. A short sheet for dope possession and trespass. Nothing but jail time. No violence, no weapons charges. The body was found in a garage on Fifty-fifth off Broadway, dead a couple of hours when they found it. Anonymous call. Well, it being a homeless, they figured it for another one off that serial killer and shifted it to the task force that's running that thing, a detective Paradisio over at the One-seven, and it rattled around there for a while, until they decided it wasn't the same guy after all, and Ed Rastenberg, Paradisio's partner, shot it back to Midtown. So it's a little stale by now, but Raney goes into it, the usual, known associates, any enemies, and so forth. A blank. Okay, this is a bum, so we're not burning overtime here, but, to his credit, Raney persists, and he gets the idea of checking the cars in the garage where it took place. Turns out there's a video camera at the entrance that picks up the license plates pretty good, and he runs the plates of everyone whose car was in the garage at the time of or thereabouts. Not an easy job, but they did it. And they get a list of names and start calling, just fishing, really, did anyone see this guy, anything peculiar. Marshak was one of the ones got called."

Hrcany paused there, significantly.

"This was yesterday?" Karp asked.

"Yeah, and this morning she calls her lawyer and comes in. Doesn't look so good for Sybil. Leaving the scene. Lying low. Only gets a conscience when the cops are nosing around. Naughty, naughty Sybil, and her such a big liberal. Her story is she was in shock, post-traumatic stress, and she's very sorry."

"Raney interviewed her?" Karp asked.

"Yeah, with her attorney present, so he didn't get a hell of a lot. He says she says Ramsey came at her with a knife, and she plugged him. Calls it in to 911 later without giving a name, which checks out. But"-Hrcany paused significantly-"there was no knife recovered at the scene. There was a watch, though, a Lady Rolex, gold, in the vic's pocket."

"Marshak's watch," said Fuller. "That proves it. He ripped her off and she-"

"No," said Hrcany, grinning, "not Marshak's. She doesn't know anything about any watch. She said it was a knife he was flashing. But right now: knife, no; watch, yes.

"Witnesses?" asked Karp.

"As a matter of fact," Hrcany replied, "Marshak said she thought she did see another man hanging out in the background while Ramsey allegedly assaulted her. Another black guy; she said she'd recognize him again. The cops are looking, but"-he waved his hand dismissively- "basically, what we have here is woman shoots and kills unarmed man, and we have only her word that he threatened her. I think we can maintain man deuce, plus leaving the scene."

"Manslaughter two?" cried Fuller in outrage. "Are you crazy! Sybil Marshak? Christ, the woman'll be a hero to every woman who ever got accosted in a parking garage. And her word-hell, if you can't trust a woman like that, who the hell can you trust?"

Karp and Hrcany looked at each other. Hrcany's eyes almost vanished beneath their upper lids. The DA was examining the tip of his unlit cigar, as if the solution had been written there in tiny letters by a remarkably prescient Nicaraguan.

Hrcany said, "Okay, Norton, we'll let her off with a warning, and not only that, we'll sponsor a law. Any rich white bitch with a gun gets to kill one poor black guy and no hard feelings. Or maybe we should make it two, or three."

"Oh, get real, Roland!" Fuller snarled. "Why the hell shouldn't we take her word for it? It's not like she knew the guy, that she had something to gain from shooting him. What, you think she was a crazed racist? Marshak? The woman marched in Selma, for crying out loud! She's the biggest ACLU bleeding heart in the city. She had to be in legitimate fear of her life, or she never would've done it. I mean, if you can't see that…"

Karp noticed that Fuller got white when angry, while Hrcany got red, and wondered idly whether this meant anything about their characters. Hrcany was just beginning a sarcastic rant to the effect that people accused of crimes often took liberties with the truth, when Karp said, almost to himself, "She probably was in fear of her life. She thought she was being stalked."

They all stared at him. "How do you know that?" the DA asked.

"She was a client of my wife's. Or, no, I think she just came in for a consult. Marlene trailed around after her for a couple of days, but couldn't spot anyone. That doesn't mean she wasn't being followed by someone."

"See! There you are," crowed Fuller.

"Not really," said Karp coldly. "It just means she was spooked. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the shooting we have here. Look, this is a premature discussion. I don't know why we're here. Clearly, there's a prima facie case against Ms. Marshak on the evidence as it now stands. We should charge her, as Roland suggests, with manslaughter second and see what develops. The police may find the witness, and depending on what he says, and whether we believe him or not, we can reconsider the charges, up or down." He looked at the DA. "Or am I wrong, Jack? Are we really starting to throw naked political influence into the balance when we assess charges?"

Keegan held his gaze for what seemed a long time before he looked away, and then there was a quick, barely perceptible glance at Fuller. The DA said, "No, of course not. We'll charge her and see what happens with the witness, if any. It's early days yet on this."

The meeting dispersed, although Keegan motioned Fuller to stay behind to talk press and politics.

Karp motioned Hrcany to step into his office. "What do you think?"

"Of all that?" Hrcany gestured in the direction of the DA's office. "Pure politics. I think Jack's running scared on this election, and the little scumbag is feeding off it. We haven't had a serious contested election for DA in I don't know how long, and now we do. McBright is waving the figures for how we charge people on account of their race, heavier the blacker, and how we never go after bad cops or corrupt landlords or the kind of respectable people who make a good living off the misery of the downtrodden, et cetera. It's a pile of shit, we know that, but we also have an electorate that's more swayed by that kind of thing than it used to be. If McBright really gets the vote out uptown, Jack's in trouble. Let's say he holds on to the unions, the cops and all, and he loses the beautiful mosaic-then the white guilty-liberal vote is the swing, and now we got a leader of that vote up for homicide. I think it's rich." He laughed unpleasantly.

"I mean, do you think Jack or Fuller is going to… I don't know, screw up this case in some way to win the election?"

"Not to win the election, no. But Jack's not worried only about the election or, mainly, to tell the truth. I don't know if even little Norton understands that. Did you see him? He's scared shitless about his federal judgeship. He sees it flying away with old Sybil because if she goes down for this and the party thinks Jack didn't pull every wire he could to get her off, he'll never get sponsored, unless he moves to North Dakota and starts a new life under an assumed name. Sybil's got strings to every politician in the state."

"And this cuts no ice with you," said Karp dully. Roland's attitude always tended to annoy him a little, and now it annoyed him a lot. Although Roland had supported the outcome Karp sought, a pursuit of the case without fear or favor, it was clear that the man had a personal issue with the accused.

"No ice at all, buddy. Oh, I'm going to love nailing that hypocritical bitch. It will give me an enormous amount of pleasure to put her fat ass in jail for a long time."

"Assuming she's guilty."

"Yeah, right," said Hrcany dismissively. "Actually, I'd like it better if Marshak was the bum slasher, but this'll have to do."

"So you're saying that Marshak was not officially a client of ours," said Lou Osborne.

"Not officially," said Marlene. They were in Osborne's office, an expensive area that yielded nothing in modernity to Captain Picard's office on the starship Enterprise -the expected glass and chrome, and the smooth and snaky molded wooden desk and cabinets, and chairs like clever steel-and-fabric traps. Osborne had to be content with non-imaginary technology though, and he had a lot of it-a computer workstation behind his desk on an AnthroCart, and two large-screen monitors set into a bookcase that lined one wall. One of these had a stock market feed on it, and the other had CNN running silently. The other walls, those that weren't windows, contained Osborne's photos-with-the-famous collection and various awards and testimonials, and a large, bland abstract oil.

To Osborne's questioning look, she responded, "Someone comes in and says they're being stalked, the first thing we do is find out if there's any solid evidence for it. Otherwise we're running a therapy shop, not a security operation. Even VIPs are nuts sometimes, hard as that is to believe."

"But there was a real stalker with Marshak, wasn't there?" He poked his chin at the TV screen. "They're saying that's why she had the gun, she was in fear of her life."

"That may well be, but, in fact, no one we saw followed her into that garage. We were there. In fact, Marshak almost ran me over getting away. Now, I'm not saying she wasn't so spooked that some bum walks up to her to ask her the time and she plugs him in a panic. I actually told her to get rid of that gun."

"And you're a witness. You're going to have to testify against her, that you saw her there at the time of the shooting. And they'll say she came to you expressing fear and you told her to, in effect, see a psychiatrist. Jesus Christ! That's why we have a VIP department in the first place. A prominent woman walks in here, I don't care if she says she's being chased by Martians, you put someone with her!"

He stared at her briefly, that cold Secret Service-Marine Corps stare, and then his eyes flicked up to the TV screen.

She decided not to get mad. "Lou, relax-you know this isn't about me, or about Sybil Marshak. I take it there's no news about Perry or his people?"

"Not a word. Oleg flew out there the minute we heard, of course, and he's off in the mountains with a crew he put together. God knows he's got enough contacts out East there, but… they don't even know if it's political, Serbs or Albanians, or just a gang of freelancers."

"Assuming there's much difference. Have you thought about delaying the offering?"

At this, Osborne tossed a glance at the stock market screen, where he had hoped to see his own stock floating ever upward the day after tomorrow. "I've been on the phone with the underwriters all morning. They're panicking. If we don't go out on schedule, it'll be a signal to the market that we don't have our shit together. It'll be years if ever before we can float another one." Again the glance at the screen. "It's like voodoo; once you have the curse, it's hard to get clean again. What about that singer?"

"Kelsie? A problem, too. But we're covering her at the depth she needs without involving her people. We got a man in the building, twenty-four/seven, and we follow her when she's out. She knows about that, but not about the inside guy."

"And this Coleman? The stalker?"

"He's out and we're looking for him, but… it's not like we're the cops. I got Wayne on it."

"Fine, fine… but, Marlene?" Here he shrugged into his inspiring-boss persona. It was a little frayed just now, but she had to applaud the effort. "Let's make an extra effort to ensure that no one newsworthy gets into trouble this week? Please?"

"I'll try. And don't worry too much about the IPO. I'm sure it'll be fine. Fastest-growing business in the U.S., la-di-da."

A thin smile. "Lap of the gods, right. Aren't you spending the money already? Everyone else is, including my wife and kids. What have we got you down for-one point two million shares."

"Yeah, just like Harry. At three cents a share, what does that come to? A whole year's worth of Big Macs."

"No, Marlene, that's not the way it works. Your strike price is set at six and a half. We're planning to offer at eight, which means that you don't make any money at all unless…" He stopped, because his vice president for special security had her eyes crossed and her fingers in her ears and was going wah-wah-wah.

"Well, I'm glad someone around here's still happy," said Osborne.

Lucy Karp was lying on her back inside a narrow metal tube full of clanging noise. In her ears were air-powered earphones, like the ones that serve out dull music to passengers in flight, and there was a similarly designed microphone in front of her mouth. Through the headset a man was speaking phrases in German and then repeating them in English. Lucy repeated the German phrases and answered the question asked. It was simplified language, the kind native speakers use with children and foreigners (What is your name? My name is Lucy. How old are you? I am seventeen. That is a table. That is a chair). Over the next few days, she would be introduced to the elements of grammar, a vocabulary of about sixteen hundred words, and a raft of idiomatic expressions. At the end of the week she expected that she would be indistinguishable, except for a certain poverty of expression, from a native speaker of that language. As she spoke the words and acquired the language and perfected her pronunciation, the magnetic-resonance-imaging machine was recording the flow of blood to different areas of her brain. Pictures of this would later be printed out in brilliant false colors and distributed to scientists around the world, who would argue interminably about what, if anything, the patterns meant.

The session ended. Lucy slid from the maw of the device and replaced the metal articles she had removed, a gold cross and several sacred medals, and a couple of enamel pinks from a junk shop, and her belt. She spent a few minutes exchanging pleasantries with the technicians in charge of the MRI machines and with Kurt the German, then went in to see Dr. Shadkin, who ran the lab and who had seduced her, with an astute combination of money and friendship, into becoming an experimental subject.

"Lucy! How did it go?" said Shadkin when Lucy rapped on the doorframe. He was rotund, bespectacled, bush-bearded, with thick, ear-length hair parted in the middle. He looked more like a medieval innkeeper than one of the world's great lights on the acquisition of language by the human brain. Lucy answered, "Squeak, squeak-a, squeak squeak."

"No kidding? Would you like a food pellet? A sip of water? Access to sexual intercourse?"

Lucy smiled. Shadkin was the only one of the scientists she had met who still treated her like a regular kid. The others all acted as if they regretted the silly ethical laws that prevented the vivisection of teenagers. No, unfair; but they did seem to look right through her, or maybe that was only, as Shadkin maintained, the general lack of social skills among scientists, especially, oddly enough, social scientists.

"Not right now, thanks. Make any great discoveries today?"

Shadkin looked sourly at his monitor, on which was an outline of a brain pieced with blotches of blue, yellow, and red. "Progress is slow, but don't tell the NSF. The variations that seem to appear in your brain are real, but they don't seem significant enough to explain what you do. And then there's this damn delay. You use the noodle and then comes the blood. What we really need are recordings at the neuronal level. You wouldn't reconsider having the top of your head sliced off?"

"Squeak-a squeak squeak!"

"Just kidding, ha-ha. Meanwhile, the linguistic geographers are pretty excited about the Indo-European project, though. Are you having fun with it?"

"It's just a job, Doc," said Lucy morosely, but seeing the look of concern that appeared on his face, added, "No, I take that back. I kind of like the idea that languages evolved, and I wonder why. Why do they always diverge and never converge? Why don't they ever improve, like everything else? Surely, by now there should be a language in which everything thinkable could be said without ambiguity."

"I thought that was French."

She laughed. "Yeah, right. Anyway, it is kind of interesting, except…" She let out a sigh. "I'm tired."

"I guess you are. Look, kiddo, you need a break, take some time off. Let the big-domes wait for their data."

"Maybe."

"Hey, I'm not kidding." He tapped the monitor with a knuckle. "See this blue smear? Excessive seriousness. You need to loosen up. Go a little crazy. I say this as your personal physician."

"Okay, Doc. I'll try, in my pathetically serious way. I shall buy a box of Cracker Jacks and, perhaps, if I feel up to it, ride the carousel."

She waved and left, before she had to absorb any more well-meaning advice. The subway was filling up. A ragged black man on crutches got on at Seventy-second Street and sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as he shuffled through the car. Lucy put a wad of dollar bills in his cup as he went by. All the other passengers pretended not to see this, although several shot her dirty looks. She pulled out a German dictionary and memorized Bleibe through Boden for the rest of the trip to Thirty-fourth Street.

At Holy Redeemer, people were starting to gather for the fiveo'clock mass. She sat in the rearmost pew, pulled out a kneeler, and got down, but her mind was too restless for common prayer. She did not, in any case, wish to pray. In the recent past, the spirit would have come to her, unbidden, filling her with uncanny joy, and she had imagined, despite all she had read, that this would be a constant thing, like her talent with languages, but it proved not to be so. Treats for beginners, one of the saints had called it, and like the spoiled baby she was, Lucy wanted more. The notion of actually doing spiritual work dismayed her: Was God yet another struggle like math? Oh, far, far harder than quadratic equations, as she knew in her bones. The worst was that she suspected that her mother had gone through the same crisis at about the same age-there had been hints enough-and had blown a big raspberry at deep religion and had gone off on her merry way, doing exactly what she pleased, while punching her card every week in the good old thoughtless devotional Catholic way. Lucy had no intention of going that route, no intention, but intention was not, apparently, good enough. Her mind wandered, as did her gaze, and she spotted David Grale in a side chapel. He was lighting candles, five of them, and then he sank down before an image of the Virgin and appeared deep in prayer. She watched him, examining as best she could in the dim light the curl of his hair and the tender, exposed nape of his neck as he bowed his head. She discovered her mind filling up brimful with what they used to call impulse thoughts; she became disgusted with herself entirely and stalked out.

Lucy sat on the steps, hunched under her cloak in the late-afternoon chill. In her bag were scattered packs of the cigarettes she gave away, and she found some Marlboros, twitched one out, and smoked it, without much pleasure, to get back at her body via that small pollution. She watched people: old Latinas in black, people from the varied races of Asia, mostly poor, a few old white Catholics in shabby, unfashionable clothes-the small daily mass crowd, the pathetic remnants of her mother's church.

He came out and sat next to her. They sat in silence for a while, for which she was grateful. He always had this calming effect on her, stilling the boil of language in her head.

Then he asked, "Anything wrong?"

"No!" instinctively; then, "Yes. I find that the world is not perfect."

"Then the world must be changed." He laughed. She laughed, too. The line was from Pasolini's The Hawks and the Sparrows, St. Francis's comeback to the friars sent to preach the Gospel to the birds. The hawks still killed the sparrows; what can we do? cried the friars, it is the way of the world. Then the world must be changed. David had a tape of it, and they had watched it together in a church basement.

"I'm going over to the yards. I heard someone say they saw Canman today. I thought I'd check it out."

"I'll come with you."

They walked over. She made amusing conversation, with mimicry. She was, of course, a perfect mimic. Sometimes when he laughed, he clutched her around the shoulder, and she felt blood flush into her face, and not just her face either.

They went through the fence and down the rutted, trash-strewn path to the walkway. There they heard the sounds: shouts and a shrill keening. Lila Sue.

David broke into a run and Lucy followed him, her bag slamming against her hip, her cloak flying behind. When they got to the settlement, they found Real Ali attempting to get between Doug Drug and Benz, who were apparently trying to kill each other. They were in the center of a circle made up of inhabitants, watching the fight with fear on their faces, or avidity or insanity, depending on the twists of their particular psyches. Benz clutched a forty-ounce beer bottle with the bottom smashed off; Doug held a long chunk of dark pallet wood like a ball bat. Someone had kicked the fire barrel over. Smoke and sparks and cinders filled the air, the red glow from the fire lighting the faces of the combatants from below: Doug's dark skin like a furnace coal, his eyes red-lit, Benz's big teeth glittering demonically, the large black warts on her sweaty face throwing little moving shadows. The two fighters, the man and the woman, shouted curses at one another, not very imaginatively but with feeling and much spit. Ali was dancing between them, arms out, palms flattened, making soothing noises, "Come on, man, you don't wanna hurt nobody"; but they did. Lila Sue stood off to one side, in front of the hut she shared with Benz, howling, seemingly without taking a breath, her knuckles screwed into her eye sockets like spark plugs.

Grale moved instantly to stand before Doug and started to talk in his sweet voice, the meaningless, calming nonsense spoken to mad dogs or crazies. The poised stick wavered. Benz screamed and tried a dash around Ali. She was a great heavy sack of a woman, swaddled like l'homme Michelin in many layers, and she drove him backward several steps. Doug swung his stake at David. The blow whistled by his ear and landed on his shoulder. He staggered almost to his knees. Still, he did not try to protect himself. He spread his arms outward, martyrlike, offering himself.

"Hit me again, Doug!" he cried. "Does that make you feel better? Go ahead, hit me!"

Without knowing exactly how she had come by it, Lucy found she had a piece of fractured concrete in her hand, about the size of a softball, with a protruding sharp edge, and she found herself running toward Doug, around the struggling Ali and Benz, toward his blind side.

"Lucy! No!" David shouted. What she heard, though, was only the breath rushing through her mouth and the drum of her mother's blood in her ears. She wound up like an outfielder and slugged the man as hard as she could behind his ear, and when he went down, she was kneeling on his chest with the rock raised high above her head for the death blow when David swept her into his arms and smothered with his body the demon she had somehow become.

"What, um, what happened?" Candlelight on faces, David's and Ali's. She looked around. They were in Ali's hovel of cardboard, pallet wood, and plastic, familiar ground, but something was wrong. She was lying on his mattress, and there should have been a table with the Qur'an on it, and a straight chair and the neatly stacked orange crates that held Ali's paperback library. But everything had been smashed and broken and pushed into piles. "Did he hit me?"

"No, girl," said Ali, "you hit him. Like to busted his head."

A shock of fear. She looked at David, who had an awful red scrape down one side of his neck. "I didn't hurt him, did I?"

Ali said, "Nah, he got a hard head, Doug."

She rubbed her face. "God! This is weird-I can't remember hitting him. I remember the fight, Doug and Benz and you trying to break it up, you and David, and then Doug hit David. I thought he was going to kill you. And then I…" She shook her head energetically. "No, it's… wait a second… now it's coming back. I had a rock. I hit him in the head with a rock."

"Yes, you did," said David gently. "That was a different Lucy than the one we usually see around church." She felt herself blushing and was glad of the dark.

Ali chuckled and said, "Good thing, too. The boy needed a rock upside his head. Fool been smoking sherms all morning. I hate that angel dust."

"Was that what the fight was about?" Lucy asked.

"Nah, I don't know what in hell that was about. I think Benz thought he was messing with Lila Sue. You know how she gets."

"I calmed her down," said David. "She's really a very loving person." He sighed. "I guess if we were going to get all social worky, we would try to find someplace for that girl, but somehow I can't bring myself to do it. They make each other so happy." He looked around and seemed to see the wreckage for the first time.

"What happened in here? Not Doug?"

"Nah, the damn cops," said Ali. He started picking up items, examining them for damage, and tossing those few that failed to meet his generous standards of usefulness out the door.

"Cops?" asked Lucy. "Cops can't do that. They can't even come in here without a warrant."

Ali laughed and said, "Uh-uh, sugar, warrant's for when they bust into a home. Me being a homeless man, I don't have no home, so I guess they don't need no warrant."

"I don't think that's true, but anyway, they had no right to break up your stuff. Why did they do it?"

Ali set an orange crate on end and placed a couple of books carefully on its shelf. "Well, you know they don't need no reason, but these particular cops that did it was looking for Canman. I told them I didn't know where he was staying. They said, I mean the white one, they said I do know, I was his running buddy, and he starts pushing me around, like they do, and I go, 'Officer, only thing I know is there is no God but God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God.' And my own name. Everything else is speculation, and did they want me to speculate. And I told them that if they wanted to know every damn thing I knew about Canman, they should go talk to the other cop who came around last night. That's when the white guy went nuts and started busting up my stuff. The black fella, he wasn't too enthusiastic about it, I could tell, but I guess he had to back up his partner's play."

David started to help Ali pick up, but the older man waved him away, saying he had his own way of doing things, and he didn't want anything good to be mistakenly tossed out. He set up his rickety table, and after wiping off and kissing his Qur'an, he placed it in the center. "The funny thing was I did see Canman this morning, early, just after I done my morning prayers. I'm always the first one up around here anyway. He was skulking around the paper house with his dog, just like a dog his own self, to look at him. I asked him was he coming back to live here, and he snarled at me, just like a damn dog. Pulled a knife on me, too. Boy was scared, I tell you that."

"Of what?" asked Lucy. "Of the cops?"

"Maybe. The first cop kind of hinted that they had him in their sights for the slasher since Fake Ali got it. That would scare me. But, look, that Canman, he been scared for a long time, scared of stuff that go way past the cops. Stuff nobody but him can see. A sad cat, that Canman."

David asked, "Ali, do you think he's the one?"

"He could be. He got enough hate in his soul to cut people up. But it's not like I got any what you call evidence for it?"

"Where do you think he is?"

Ali gave David a long apprising look and answered, "Well, like I told them all, I don't know, which is God's honest truth. But if I was going to look for Canman, which I am not, I guess I'd start under Penn. I hung out there five, seven years, back before they cleaned us all out of there, before they cleaned us out and all. And when I got there, he'd been there longer than any of us. Not that there ain't some been there longer than him. Some people been down there so long they ain't hardly people anymore. Live on rats and garbage." Ali lowered his voice. "And other stuff. Human flesh. Someone goes down a station at three in the morning and never comes back up. What they say, anyway. I guess he's gone back under. No cops down there."

"But there are," said David. "There are regular patrols. I've been on some of them."

"Uh-huh, son," said Ali, stooping to pick up a broken chair. He shifted it in his big hands, trying to see how it could be fitted together again. "I mean under. Under under. Them tunnels is deep. Nobody down there but the rats and the mole people."

Lucy and David left a little while later. When they were back on the street, Lucy turned to him and said, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry? About what?"

"You know… losing it. Getting violent. It never happened to me before. I feel sick."

He stopped walking, faced her, and put both hands on her shoulders. "Stop it! You do this all the time. Stop eating at yourself! You did something wrong, but you did it for good reasons."

"Why should that make a difference?"

"It does. The intent of the act counts. You didn't do it out of some secret pleasure or to go along with what someone else was doing, or out of fear. You thought Doug was going to hurt me, and you acted without thought. It was a failure of attention." He grinned at her. "That seems to be your particular fault, if you don't mind me saying so."

After a moment, she smiled back. " Mea maxima culpa. I guess I was upset because, well, I was thinking of my mother and how I would rather not turn out the way she has, and when I do things like… oh, just things in general that remind me, yin shui si yuan, it drives me up the wall."

"Your mother seems very nice," he said diplomatically.

"In her saner moments," she snapped, and then sighed. "Oh, she is very nice. She's a great woman, and I admire the hell out of her, but I don't want to be her. We drive each other crazy. I guess all kids do."

"I wouldn't know. I never had a family." Then, to cover her embarrassment, he added quickly, "What was that thing you said? Was it Chinese?"

"Oh, yeah, a four-character idiom. It's a habit I picked up when I was living a lot with this family, the Chens. Chinese speakers are always slipping them into their speech, practically without thinking, like we do with 'anyway' and 'whatever' and 'like.' It means 'When you drink water, think of the source.' Anyway"-they both laughed-"what are we going to do about Canman?"

"I don't know. Finding him would be a good start."

"Down in the tunnels."

"I guess, if that's where he is. You're dying to come, aren't you?"

She nodded. "Do you think the mole people really live on human flesh?"

"I have no idea. But people do, if they're desperate enough. In the Sudan, where I was, there were famines all the time. In the camps you would see some people eating meat, sheep they said, but you never saw any sheep around." They were at a light, the evening traffic rushing up by Tenth Avenue. He looked out at the river of steel, and she saw that his face had lost the brightness that ordinarily shone from it, replaced by the sort of expression they put up on crucifixes in rural Spain. "But God forgives all," he said. And then suddenly the brightness turned on again, like the light that just then turned from red to green. "Even you, Lucy, you horrible old sinner. Even me, if you can believe it."

"But you're good," she blurted out.

A ghostly smile. "Only God is good, kid. Me? Oh, me, you have no idea."