Irresistible Impulse

FOUR

“What’s up?” said Karp into the phone.

“You asked me to check out your Jewish doctor,” said Detectrive Lieutenant Clay Fulton.

Karp’s mind had been so immersed in People v. Rohbling that the statement made no sense to him. Was Fulton sick? Had Karp recommended someone?

“Um … Jewish doctor?” he ventured.

“I don’t believe it! I’ve been running around all day on this. For crying out loud, Butch! Davidoff?”

“Oh, yeah! Davidoff. The dead nurse. Murray’s case. Okay, I got it. So what went down? He’s kosher or not?”

“Not. The opposite. Tayfe.”

“Trefe, Clay. What did he do?”

“I’m not sure yet, but one, he didn’t attend this Longren woman at all as far as I can find out. Also, the apartment where the woman died is owned by a guy named Robinson, Vincent F., also an M.D., apparently a friend, or acquaintance, of Dr. D. Want to hear the kicker? Longren was insured, a private policy via Prudential with her parents as beneficiaries, plus another policy where she worked, through Mutual New York, beneficiary her boss, guess who, Vincent Robinson, M.D.”

“Longren worked for Robinson, he’s a doc, she gets sick, she dies in his apartment, and then he brings another doc in to do the death cert. Smells.”

“Stinks. I talked to the insurance investigator from Mutual. He went by Robinson’s place to check out the death scene and the beneficiary. While he was there, he used the John and noticed pills. Little white pills and caps, caught in the shag rug around the toilet, like someone wanted to flush a lot of stuff and didn’t notice a few extras. He scooped them up and they turned out to be phenobarbs and Dalmane, sleeping pills.”

“Oh-ho,” said Karp.

“Oh fucking ho is right, son. We need to dig this lady up.”

“I’ll get on it,” said Karp. “Meanwhile, why don’t you ask Dr. Davidoff to drop by for a chat? And have him bring along his treatment records for the deceased.”

Marlene spent a fairly unpleasant morning with Tamara Morno, the Tamara who did not want to go to court, standing in the hallway of her Chelsea apartment and yelling until the woman relented, and dressed and came with her, trembling and looking over her shoulder out the back window of the cab, to the courthouse on Centre Street, where Marlene arranged for an order of protection against Tamara’s boyfriend. Then she had to sit with the weeping woman, and buy her coffee and pastries and calm her down enough so that she could go home. Tamara Morno was a small, round-faced woman with a dramatically sensual figure and a mouse-like disposition, a good combo if you were looking for trouble with men. Marlene made a note to have a talk with the guy, Arnie Nobili, the lover, yet another of the very many men who thought it the peak of attractiveness to swear that if they couldn’t have her, nobody could. Having her in Mr. Nobili’s case included partial strangulation and cigarette burns, plus hocking Tamara’s stuff when he needed to pay off his gambling debts. Not lowlifes, either of them, though: she was a secretary, he was an electrician, both in work, both demonstrably sane except for a touch of impairment in the romantic zone.

Marlene checked her watch as Tamara’s cab pulled away. A little early, but she would go uptown anyway and soak up some class. It was a dull day and chilly, and a long, slow ride in a warm cab would have a calming effect. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a blast that lifted a thousand pigeons from the courthouse plaza and brought a yellow cab across two lanes of traffic to the curb.

Edith Wooten’s building was one of the old dowagers that line Park Avenue between the Fifties and the Eighties, tan, ornate, brass-bound, and well-doormanned. Marlene was asked her name by one of these, white gloved and red faced, and made to wait while he rang up. After speaking a moment into the intercom, he beckoned to Marlene and handed her the instrument.

“Ms. Ciampi?” said Edith Wooten’s voice. “I didn’t expect you so soon, and … oh, I’m devastated, but, you see, I’m in the middle of a rehearsal, and … would it completely destroy your day if I had you just wait up here for say, a tiny half hour?”

“A tiny half hour’s fine, Ms. Wooten.”

“Oh, grand! You see, Anton came over from Amsterdam for just this concert, and his wretched plane was late. And, you know”-here she lowered her voice as if offering a confidential explanation-“it’s the Shostakovich, the E minor trio, you see, so …”

“Oh, of course,” agreed Marlene blankly, “the E minor, so …”

“Yes. Well, I’ll tell Francis to send you up.”

Sent up, and greeted at the door by a uniformed maid, Marlene entered the kind of dwelling rarely encountered in hyper-transient Manhattan, for the Wootens had been in possession of it since the building was constructed in 1923. The maid parked her in a white paneled room with a nice view of Park Avenue through the champagne silk drapes. The furniture was old, of course, not the kind of old you get from antique stores, but the kind you get when you buy new from Tom Chippendale in 1804 and hang on to it: two elegant armchairs upholstered in rose silk, a small sofa in the same material, and a low Sheraton-design table with worn brass fittings. The rug was a silk Tabriz, Marlene thought, early nineteenth century, much worn. She walked across it to check out the paintings. Two nice water colors, one a park scene by Prendergast, the other a portrait sketch by Sargent. There were tuning-up sounds coming through the door to her right, and shortly this door opened and there entered a solidly built, pink-faced blond young woman with pale, dreamy, gentle eyes. She wore a simple black wool dress reaching a dowdy length below the knee.

“Ms. Ciampi!” said this person, shaking Marlene’s hand with a solid, warm grip. “I’m Edie Wooten. How good of you! I’m terribly sorry about this mess. Honestly, if you can bear to wait, I’d be so grateful.”

Marlene estimated the woman’s age at about twenty-five, although she also might have been eighteen, so fresh was her face, so mild and untroubled were her green eyes. Someone to whom nothing really bad had ever happened, was Marlene’s instant thought, followed by a pang of envy, covered by a recoil of shame: nothing until now, or else she would not have called.

“It’s no problem. You said half an hour?”

“Yes, thereabouts. One run-through. You can wait here or use the phone, whatever you like. I could have Audrey bring you some coffee? A magazine?”

“No, don’t bother.”

“I could close the door while we play, if you absolutely hate chamber music,” said Wooten, in what Marlene thought a positive surfeit of good manners.

“Not at all,” said Marlene quickly; although she was no fan, she thought this would come under the heading of “know the client.”

The young woman smiled, showing the perfect teeth of the rich, and returned the way she had come. Her shoulder-length fine hair bounced fetchingly. Through the open door Marlene could see that the room it led into was large, floored in polished oak, and held nothing but a grand piano, music stands, and two straight chairs, one occupied by a thin, angular-faced young man with long, fair hair and a violin, and the other occupied by a leaning cello. Wooten sat on this chair and took up her instrument. From her seat on the sofa Marlene could not see who was at the piano.

They began. The cello voiced the weird, unbearably pathetic harmonics of the Andante of Shostakovich’s Trio in E Minor. Marlene listened, at first repelled, then captivated, at last devastated. She was still dabbing her eyes when Edie Wooten came back into the room. The other two musicians were talking. Real Life had resumed. Wooten shut the door, sat down across from Marlene, and sighed, wiping the dampness from her face with a handkerchief. She looked as if she had just run a mile.

“That was incredible!” Marlene exclaimed. “Is that on a record?”

“Yes, but not by us,” said Wooten, smiling. “You liked it?”

“Like is not the word. I’m dog food.”

“Yes, it is a remarkable piece, isn’t it? Shostakovich wrote it during the war. Music to stack frozen corpses by. It’s what you write when most of your friends have been murdered, and the up side of your life is you work for Stalin, who killed them. The odd thing is, this … person, it’s one of his favorites. He wants me to play it. Actually, he, well, he demanded it in his last letter.”

“And you’re obliging him?”

“Oh, no! We’d planned to do the piece anyway. We’re at Juilliard next week as part of the New York Chamber Society festival. It was just a coincidence.”

Marlene took a steno pad out of her bag. “So. When did this guy start to write to you?”

A smile. “It could be a woman, you know.”

“Yes, and with a little practice I could play the cello like you. It’s a guy, Ms. Wooten.”

“Please … Edie.”

“Okay. I’m Marlene. About when was it?”

“Let me see. It must have started this summer, after we got back from Edinburgh. There are lots of letters, of course, from fans. I have a secretary, but I try to answer as many as I can. Most just ask for photographs. Then there are the critics, we call them ‘music lovers,’ people who have something to say about the actual performances. Praise mostly, in rare cases nasty-you’re not as good as … whoever. But this one was different.”

“How so?”

“Oh, it was personal.” A blush darkened the pink of her cheeks. “You know.”

“I don’t know. You have to tell me.”

“Well, like, ‘I could play your body like you play the cello. I feel your legs around me when you play.’ Like that.” She let out an embarrassed laugh. “It’s the position when we play. Women, that is. There’s that old joke, the conductor yells at the lady cellist, ‘Madam, don’t you realize you have one of the world’s greatest treasures between your thighs?’ And musical things too. He knows the cello literature. He writes lists of what he wants me to play at each concert, and of course, as here with the Shostakovish trio, sometimes he gets it right, and then in the next letter he praises me for playing the piece. He thinks I’m doing it for him. He says things like, ‘When you played the scherzo in the Beethoven Sonato in A, I knew you were playing only for me, my darling, our eyes met,’ and nonsense like that. And when I don’t play what he wants, he gets angry. Crude. He doesn’t want me to travel either. It’s like having a jealous lover.”

“I’ll need every physical object he’s sent you.”

“Oh, God, I didn’t keep any of it!”

“Well, please do in the future and hand it over. We need it if we ever get to build a harassment case.”

“He spies on me too,” said the cellist. She had twisted her handkerchief into a tight rope. “That’s why I called you. The letters are one thing, but the idea that he’s following me …” She shuddered delicately.

Marlene looked up from her notebook. “How do you know he’s following you?”

“He leaves things. A rose in my cello case at a recital. Notes in rehearsal rooms. I get phone calls and no one answers when I pick up. In one letter he said he liked my nightgown, so somehow he can see in my window, even though it’s sixteen stories up. And now I keep the curtains closed.” She made a helpless gesture. “I’m starting to be quite frightened, John Lennon and all that. Should I be? Frightened?”

“Concerned, I think,” said Marlene judiciously. “It would depend, of course, on several things. We have to determine if this guy is a genuine stranger or someone who has actual access, someone you know.”

“Oh, no, it can’t be anyone I know,” said Wooten with blithe confidence. “I mean, I know them, don’t I? I don’t know anyone who would do something like this.”

“Well, Edie,” said Marlene, in a tone usually reserved for explaining the ontology of the tooth fairy, “I didn’t actually mean your most intimate friends. Nevertheless, you have contacts who can get at you. The people who work in the building? The people who move you around and take care of you when you’re on tour? The musicians, the orchestra players, your accompanists? You say this guy knows music; it might be the place to look.”

“What, you mean people like …” She gestured toward the door to the music room, frank disbelief on her face. “I’m sorry, that’s ridiculous.”

“Well, I hope so,” said Marlene. “But you know, people do have secret lives, sometimes really nasty secret lives. You would be surprised at the number of quite distinguished citizens, many of them happily married, who every once in a while like to pay some lady to tie them up and urinate on their face. Or get a transvestite whore to give them a blow job. Or worse.”

Wooten was looking at her with a peculiar expression, which Marlene thought represented a war between her good nature and primal disgust. (Get out of my life, you horrible woman!) Marlene kept her own expression bland and professional, continuing, “On the other hand, you’re what’s generally referred to as a low-risk individual.”

“That’s nice to know,” said Wooten, her smile showing faintly again. “What would a high-risk individual be like?”

“They would be like the ladies and gentlemen who render oral sex to guys around the bridge plazas downtown. Prostitutes in general. Barmaids. Cocktail waitresses. Drug users and pushers. Promiscuous people. Party people. We expect these folks to get hit on by wackos. My assumption going in is that you don’t indulge in that sort of behavior.”

Marlene paused, raising an eyebrow, open to a confession, not that she expected one at this stage. Yet something had passed across Edie Wooten’s face as she recounted this list. A vagrant fear? Sadness? Marlene was about to ask a sharper question when the door to the music room opened. It was the Dutch violinist.

“Felix and I are off, Edie,” he announced in a mild, faintly accented voice. Wooten rose and offered a formal European embrace, linked arms with him and carried him into the other room, where she presumably said farewell to the other member of the trio, whom Marlene had not yet seen. In a few minutes she was back. She seemed to be having difficulty switching between her world, the realm of delight, art, and comfort, and the dreadful city Marlene had begun to sketch for her. Marlene had seen this reaction before. In fact, she could predict what the woman was about to say next.

“I suppose I’m having a hard time dealing with all this, Marlene. I mean, why me?”

“Yes, everyone says that,” said Marlene. “Why cancer, why car crashes? It happened, it’s happening. To you. The only question is, do you want to do something about it?”

Wooten sat on the sofa and rubbed her face. “What would you suggest?” she asked.

“Well, the first thing is, as I mentioned, you have to keep anything he gives you and give it to me. I’ll need a list of people who have access to your personal space-building workers, stagehands, record people, musicians, friends and relatives.”

“Will you have to bother my family?”

“Not at all. I just need a sense of who’s around you, who can get to you. They’ll need to be eliminated, and if they are, we’ll know we’re dealing with a true stranger. If so, I can work up a security plan. The point, by the way, is not to have you live your life under guard. The point is to find this guy and get him to stop.”

“However will you do that?” Wooten asked with interest.

Marlene grinned. “We have our methods,” she said in a German accent.

Edie Wooten returned the grin. She really had, Marlene thought, the most marvelous disposition. “No, really,” Wooten said, “how do you?”

“Really?” said Marlene. She shrugged. “It depends. Usually I talk to them. I reason with them.”

“And it works?”

“Oh, yes,” said Marlene confidently. “I have a very forceful personality.”

Lucy Karp wandered through the edges of Chinatown, growing colder, hungrier, and more miserable with each passing hour. Twice she started back to school, and twice she stopped, unwilling to contemplate the uproar that would be made over her defection: Mrs. Lawrence would have her piece of skin and then the chief gorgon, Ms. Lee, the principal, and then, worst of all, her mother would be called and come to school and all three of them would stare at her, and of course, she would have missed math and fallen even further behind.

Illness was her only hope, she concluded, a long, lingering debility that would baffle medical science-and excuse her permanently from long division. A stomach ailment would be best, she thought. Her stomach actually did ache, for it was now past her lunchtime, and her lunch was still in its box in her cubby back at school, and all she had in her parka pocket was a nickel and two pennies. She would have to upchuck, naturally, to make it convincing; then she could run back to school red faced, weeping, with vomit all over her, and say she had wandered away under the influence of a strange disease that had affected her brains and …

However, if there was one thing she couldn’t bear to do, it was puke, so she would have to really work at it. What was needed was some actual vomit to serve as an exemplar-the sight and smell would work their magic on her gut. Fortunately, finding street messes was rarely a problem in lower Manhattan.

So Lucy trod the crowded streets, looking in the gutters and in doorways, finding a good array of nauseating venues, including one bloated, stinking rat. She was gagging, well sickened, but still unable to bring up the necessary evidence. By this time she was on Canal Street, a familiar stretch. She caught sight of Tranh’s noodle shop, and at this sight, redolent of those precious afternoons with her mother, Lucy experienced the first sympathetic mental pang. As a result of her mother’s profession, there must have been few children of her age in New York as thoroughly indoctrinated as Lucy was in the dangers of kidnapping and as vividly aware of what losing a child meant. Her eyes stung with tears; she ran in desperate little circles, moaning. At last she sat on the curb and wept.

All this Tranh observed through the window of his shop. He came out and squatted down next to Lucy and said in rusty Cantonese, “Little Sister, what is the matter? Why are you crying?”

“Because-because,” answered the child in the same language, amidst the blubbering, “I ran away from school.”

“Wah! You ran away? Did they mean to beat you?”

“No,” answered Lucy. “I was afraid I could not do my lesson. I am a very stupid girl, and I feared to lose face in front of my friends. Now I am disgraced forever.”

Tranh pulled free the white towel that he habitually kept stuck in his waistband and gave it to Lucy. “It may not be as bad as that,” he said. “Forever is a long time. Wipe your face and come inside. First I will give you some soup with winter melon, noodles, and ham. Then we will think together about your difficulty.”

“I have no money,” said Lucy, rising, her stomach rumbling at the mention of food.

“That does not matter,” said Tranh. “You are a good customer.”

The school called Marlene’s office shortly before noon, and the answering service forwarded the call to her beeper. Edie Wooten showed her to a phone and went into the music room to play some Mozart to improve her mood. She had entered only a minute or so into that sunlit, ordered world when she heard Marlene shrieking from the other room. She put down her bow and went to see what the commotion was about. She found Marlene in the act of slamming down the phone. Her face was dead white, including the lips, which had formed a rigid line beneath flaring nostrils. Bolts shot from her eyes. She looked like a Medusa on a Renaissance medallion.

“Is something wrong?” Edie asked.

Marlene seemed to look through her. Then she took a long breath and said, “No. Actually, yes. A domestic thing. In any case, I have to go. I’ll be in touch. Work on that list of contacts. And don’t worry!”

Then she was gone.

Outside the building, Marlene did not wait for the doorman to whistle down a cab, but ran out into Park and waylaid one in full motion. It screamed off, with Marlene flapping twenties in the driver’s face.

From his vantage across the broad avenue, the Music Lover watched Marlene leave. He knew who she was and what she was doing in Edith Wooten’s building. He was much vexed. Whistling the opening theme from Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B-flat, he got into his car and drove off to the south.

Lucy finished her soup and brought the empty bowl to the counter. She sat on a stool while several customers came and picked up cartoned take-out orders of noodles. When the place was empty again, Tranh lit a cigarette and regarded his guest solemnly. He said, “Now we must decide what to do. The school must by now have found you are missing. They will call your mother. Can you imagine what she will think?”

“Oh, don’t remind me!” Lucy cried in English, and then explained, “Tranh sinsàang, my mother is a-I can’t think of the word in Gwóngdùngwá-she is a guard against evil people, so perhaps one of these may try to hurt her, or me. So she warns me to be careful. She will think that one of these has taken me.” Tears began again, and Tranh handed her a clean wipe rag. Then he placed a quarter before her on the counter and indicated the pay phone on the wall.

“Take this and call your mother right away, and let her know you are safe.”

Lucy hesitated. “Oh, but she’ll be so angry.”

“Yes, afterward, but first she will be very happy. There is nothing worse than losing a child. What made you do this wicked thing?”

“I told you, sir. I failed at my lesson and was afraid of disgrace.”

“You failed? So? Did this not make you work all the harder so that you would not fail?”

Lucy hung her head. Tranh said, “Listen to me. You are a clever girl, and things come easy for you. Therefore, when you need to work hard, you don’t know how. Thus you disgrace your family by failing, and disgrace your teacher by running away. But you owe everything to your family. Without a family you are a ghost person, nothing! Understand? Rather than disgrace them you must study until blood pours from your eyes. Go, call your mother, now!”

Marlene’s knees gave way when she burst into her office and Sym said, “Lucy called.”

“Oh, Jesus, thank you!” Marlene gasped and flopped onto the couch. “Where is she?”

Sym told her. Five minutes later, Marlene was walking through the door of the noodle shop, thunder breaking around her brow. Lucy was sitting at a table sipping a Coke. Marlene nodded to Tranh and then sat down opposite her daughter.

“Well?”

“Guilty,” said Lucy, “with an explanation.”

“I’ll hear it.”

Lucy explained about long division and Mrs. Lawrence and the shame and what followed. Marlene lit a cigarette. Tranh brought her a grande crème. “Well,” she said, “guilty with an explanation is a plea on a misdemeanor, like not doing homework. This is a felony. This is felony stupid, Lucy! You realize what could have happened to you?”

“Yes. I said I was sorry. I’ll never, ever do it again.”

“You bet your-you bet you won’t, my girl! Now, this is what’s going to happen. This weekend, instead of you going ice skating with Janet and Marie, and instead of having a sleepover-”

“Mom-mm!”

“Don’t you dare ‘Mom-mm’ me! Don’t you dare! Instead of doing those nice things, I was saying, you and I are going to be locked in a room together working on this math business, and we will not come out until you are on top of long division.”

“What about your clients? What about the twins?” asked Lucy in a snotty tone that made Marlene want to wring her neck. She gritted her teeth and glared at her daughter. The child looked away in shame, for Lucy was aware of Mr. Tranh watching them and sending rays of Confucian disapproval, which for some reason had a more powerful effect on her than her mother’s ire.

“I will take care of that,” said Marlene tightly. “Daddy can handle the twins with Posie, and the clients will just have to look out for themselves. You are not going to fail in school. I may have to kill you, but you are not going to fail. Now, put on your coat. I’m going to take you back to school.”

Marlene got up, her heart pounding, her mind grappling with a confusing mix of anger, fading fear, and burgeoning guilt. She shuddered and went over to the counter.

“Thank you, I … am glad you helped my daughter,” she said to Tranh, speaking slowly and distinctly.

Tranh smiled and nodded. “Is okay. I like … I like her … and I foud … feeled …” He shrugged and threw his hands wide in a gesture of frustration. This gesture, however, attracted Marlene’s attention to what was in one of his hands, which was a worn paperback book with a dirty white cover and red lettering on the spine. Marlene had a similarly worn copy of just that book on her bookshelf at home, had owned it for over twenty years. She gestured at it and said, in French, “Monsieur, I observe you are reading Baudelaire. Is it also the case that you speak French?”

Tranh’s face was at first blank with amazement and then curiously transformed: a wiry intelligence appeared to flow into it, as from a pump. “But of course I speak French, Madame. I am a Vietnamese, am I not? And I was five years a student in Paris. But I am astonished to find that you do as well. Although it is less remarkable, one supposes, than that your daughter speaks Cantonese. I have heard her speak it on the street. This was how we communicated, you see.”

“Of course,” said Marlene. “As for me, I was four years with the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart, who insist on accomplishment in French.”

“So I have always understood,” said Tranh, smiling broadly. “But surely they did not insist on Les Fleurs du Mal. Surely you proper young ladies did not read, let us say, Métamorphoses du Vampire under the watchful gaze of a nun.”

“I am afraid we proper young ladies did much worse than that, monsieur; at least I did. My four hundred blows were unusually vigorous, I fear. And you may regard my daughter to prove it to yourself: we are two of a kind. It is the wages of sin.”

“Come, Madame, it is not as bad as that. She is a brave girl, if overly proud. But you have warmed her ears, and I doubt she will repeat the offense.”

“One hopes,” said Marlene. She looked at her watch. “A pity, but we must go.”

Tranh inclined his head and intoned, “Horloge! dieu sinistre! effrayant, impassible, dont le doight nous menace et nous dit, Souviens toi!”

Marlene laughed, “You have it, my friend. Oh! I have forgotten to pay you for the child’s soup, and for the phone call.”

She reached into her purse, but Tranh held up his hand and said, “Dear Madame: I had not had a real conversation in five years; I had not had a conversation in French for ten years; and I had not had a conversation in French with a beautiful woman for thirty years. This brief moment has been worth a cauldron of soup, and a phone call to Tibet.”

“Then, Monsieur,” said Marlene with a slight bow of her head, “you have my most profound gratitude.”

Outside, in the car, Lucy said, “I like Mr. Tranh, although he’s sort of hard to understand. He’s not a Guóngdùngyàhn-I mean, he’s not Cantonese, is he?”

“No, he’s a Vietnamese, educated in France-probably an official of some kind. The commies must have given him a hard time when they took over-he looks like he’s been through it. Uh-oh, what’s this?”

Lucy looked out the car window and said, “Those are those gangsters from the other day, I think.”

Four oriental youths had just jumped from a Mercedes sedan and entered Tranh’s shop. They leaned across the counter, and one of them started gesturing violently and yelling at the older man. Another unscrewed the top of a sugar dispenser and poured its contents on the floor. A third kicked over chairs and upset tables.

“Shouldn’t we help him?” asked Lucy.

“Yeah, if he needs it. But I have a feeling that he may not.”

In fact, Tranh was speaking calmly to the youth who appeared to be the leader of the gang. Marlene could not see very clearly through the steamed window, but it was obvious that whatever Tranh had said was not something to be lightly borne. The gang leader pulled out a butterfly knife, snapped it open, and leaped over the counter. He grabbed Tranh by the front of his shirt, waving the butterfly knife under Tranh’s nose. Marlene could not see what happened after that: there was a sudden movement, a brief struggle, and the young man was somehow turned around, with his thick hair grasped in Tranh’s left fist. Tranh was holding a thin boning knife in his right hand, the point of which vanished into the kid’s ear. Everyone else was frozen. The kid dropped his butterfly knife. Tranh said something; the kid said something. The other three players began to pick up the upset chairs and tables. Then they backed out, stumbling against one another in the narrow doorway.

Tranh followed, still gripping the little thug, his thin blade held rigid, an improbable length of steel vanishing into the kid’s ear, the kid’s face twisted into a rictus of pain. Tranh was talking to the kid in a low voice. Suddenly he stopped, withdrew the knife. Blood oozed down the kid’s neck. Tranh delivered a mighty kick against the base of the kid’s spine. The kid went sprawling on the pavement. His friends picked him up, and without another word they got back in their car and drove away, tires squealing. Tranh watched them go, nodded to Marlene and Lucy, and then went back into his shop.

“Wow!” said Lucy.

“Wow, indeed,” said Marlene, starting her car. “Very impressive. You know, Luce, I think that whatever Mr. Tranh did in the war, it probably didn’t involve a desk job.”

“Or noodles either,” said Lucy.