Irresistible Impulse

SEVEN

Paul Menotti was a short, stocky, energetic man: a fireplug was the usual expression, which denoted not only his approximate shape but also carried the notion that in the event of a conflagration, he would be a good source of the wherewithal to extinguish it. Karp sat in a comfortable chair in Menotti’s office in the federal building off Foley Square reflecting, not for the first time, that the offices of those who pursued the violators of federal law were more stately than those occupied by mere state prosecutors. Menotti’s mahogany was bright, his brass shone, and his leather was thick and soft. He had a rug of some generalized colonial pattern on the floor and federally supplied artwork on the walls. He also had two windows opening on Foley Square.

With Karp and Menotti in the room were V.T. Newbury and a slim young woman with light blue eyes and nice cheekbones. Her dark blond hair was neck-long and held back by a tortoiseshell clip, but it fell forward as she wrote on the pad she had on her lap, hiding her face. She had been introduced as Cynthia Doland, Menotti’s special assistant, with no indication of what was special about her and what she assisted in. Apparently, she was there to take meeting notes, since after the introductions she had kept mum.

Menotti and V.T. were now engaged in a technical argument, clearly one of long standing, about how to draft a warrant against St. Nicholas Health Care so as to extract enough information to nail Dr. Robinson without at the same time putting him wise to the extent of their suspicions and (possibly) prompting him to crank up his shredder. V.T. was holding out for the incremental approach, the Death of a Thousand Cuts, as he called it-a small demand, followed by another and another, until there was enough cause to justify a major raid. Menotti wanted to seize everything at once.

With no direct role in this argument, Karp was free to muse, and to examine the delightful line of Ms. Doland’s neck. She was wearing a scoop-necked dress, and as she bent over recording the ever changing proposed language of the warrant in question, Karp had a nice view of her small, pointed breasts, enclosed in a pale rose bra. Karp was as faithful as a chow, but he had no objection to observing what was in plain view, as allowed by the Fourth Amendment.

Karp became aware that the discussion had ceased, that Menotti was looking at him, that Menotti knew where he had lately cast his eyes. A brief cloud crossed Menotti’s face; Karp sensed that his relationship with the tasty Ms. Doland was not entirely professional. Or perhaps it was; Karp had never been very great shakes at ferreting out the intimacies of the people he met in a business way. In any case, Menotti had asked him a question.

“Well, it’s not my area,” Karp responded, “but if I had to choose, I’d go with V.T.’s slow and steady. I don’t want this guy spooked.”

“Why not?”

“Because your boy could be a killer as well as a fraud.” V.T. had briefly mentioned the affair of the dead nurse at the start of the meeting, and Menotti grunted in acknowledgment. Karp went on, “The point here is that if in fact he went to that extreme, he’s not going to cavil at trashing some records. Or somebody else.”

They all thought about that for a while.

Then V.T. said, “Just an idea. Is it at all possible that our anonymous tipster was this nurse?”

Karp said, “Anything’s possible, but how the hell would we ever find out?”

“They record all the calls on the hotline,” said Ms. Doland. They all looked at her. She blushed faintly and batted long-lashed eyes.

“Check it out, would you, Cynthia?” said Menotti.

The woman made a note on her pad.

“I meant now, Cynthia.”

She nodded and left the room. Since clearly no federal business could transpire without a note taker, the three men talked sports and politics in a desultory fashion until Cynthia Doland returned, about twenty minutes later, the time being punctuated by Menotti accepting several calls, during which he did a good deal of snarling and did not spare the obscenities.

When Doland came back, she was carrying a Sony portable tape recorder.

“You got it,” said Menotti. It was not a question.

“They played it over the phone,” she said. “It’s fuzzy, but you can make out the type of voice.” She sat down and pushed the Play button.

A voice said: “St. Nick’s is ripping you all off big time. That Dr. Robinson got his hand in deep. They got phony patients, they got phony treatments, and there’s something bad going on with the pharmacy, I don’t know what.”

“Sounds black. Middle-aged, I’d say,” offered Menotti.

Doland clicked off the recorder and seemed about to say something. They all looked at her, but she shook her head and blushed again.

Then they all looked at Karp, who frowned and said, “Evelyn Longren was a twenty-eight-year-old white woman, so unless she was a pretty good mimic, that’s someone else.”

“In any case, are you going to pursue this as a homicide?” Menotti asked.

“Providing it’s a homicide I will,” said Karp. “They’re doing the full autopsy now. I’ll let you know when I know.”

“I thought we weren’t going to do this,” said Karp, discontented in the bosom of his family. The twins had been efficiently bedded down by Posie, who was now watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show in the kitchen with Lucy, Lucy having done her homework with less row than usual. Butch and Marlene were in the living room of the loft discussing the new domestic arrangements.

“Yes, that’s what I thought too,” said Marlene. “No live-in nannies for me. No, I was going to run a business, and take care of Lucy, and a set of twins, and continue to be married and have a relationship with a man, you. Did I leave anything out? Oh, yeah, prepare meals, and not just meals but good ones, with home-made sauces and noodles, and baking once a week. And go to church. And go to the bathroom. Well, here’s a flash: I can’t do it. I give up. I have to be able to sleep, and I can’t, and I have to be able to set my own hours and come and go more or less at will, and I can’t. And I need more time with Lucy. So that’s why Posie has to live in. We can leave the twins here in the morning now. We don’t have to schlep them down the stairs and then up the stairs to my office. We can work on weekends without having to break off every ten minutes.”

“I said I was going to watch them on weekends when you were out,” objected Karp.

“You said, yeah, but that was before you started this trial. And after this trial there’ll be another one, or some other crisis. Face it, you don’t have any time either.”

“And Posie is the best solution to this we can find? Jesus, Marlene, we don’t know a damn thing about her. She’s just somebody you picked up off the street.”

“Who’s been looking after the babies perfectly since they were twelve weeks old,” Marlene replied with some heat. It was an old argument. “You want someone from an agency, with references? Well, let me tell you, bub, someone from an agency with references is not going to put up with us, or our hours, or what we can afford to pay, or walking up five floors, or pushing the stroller through this neighborhood, not when they can take care of little Tiffany and Lance on Central Park West. Be real!”

Karp grunted, fantasies of a Swedish au pair and a place on Central Park West, or Park Slope, at least, going glimmering. He did not have the energy for the seven millionth rep of this particular unwinnable argument, based as it was on his unshakable belief that a SoHo walk-up loft, however luxuriously appointed, was no place to raise a family. Nor did he think it the right time to raise the other possible solution, that Marlene stop running a half-assed security agency and take a respectable job with a law firm or a D.A. On the other hand, the less petulant part of him said, if she were someone who wanted such a job, she wouldn’t be Marlene, and you wouldn’t love her, so there! This set of thoughts flashed through his mind like a reflex, a kind of mental cramp. He wondered whether they would ever go away, or if he would continue to think them as long as he was with Marlene.

“This has to do with another of your waifs, I understand,” he said, to change the subject. “Lucy said you’ve got the noodle man living in Posie’s old room.”

“He’s not a waif and he’s not a noodle man,” said Marlene. “I think he was a policeman, or something like that, in Vietnam. I saw him face down four fairly nasty punks without breaking a sweat. He’s educated, he speaks a couple of languages-”

“Not including English, I gather.”

“So he’ll learn. Anyway, I’m going to feel a lot better with him in the place at night, especially when we’re taking care of runaway women. And I guarantee we’re both going to feel better with Posie here.” She poked him in the ribs. “Admit it! Don’t you feel better already? The twins are fed and p.j.’d and nestling in their cribs, in clouds of baby powder. We’re lounging at our ease.” To demonstrate ease of lounging, she moved closer to him on the sofa and nuzzled his neck. “And if, God forbid, we should want to fool around in the marital bed some night and the yelling starts, Posie will leap out and do her thing.”

“This, ah, you imagine is the clinching argument?” he asked, pulling her closer.

“It better be,” said Marlene.

The following morning, feeling better than she had in weeks by reason of a luxurious eight hours in the rack, Marlene skipped lightly off to work. Posie had indeed done her thing with the night screams, so Marlene was also enjoying that oily-jointed relaxation that follows upon uninterrupted conjugal delights. Lucy was markedly calmer during the morning’s preparation and ride to school; Marlene, observing this with satisfaction, reflected that the child’s equilibrium had been as much affected as her own by the nonnegotiable demands of the twins. Things would now improve; she even had hopes for long division.

“How do you like your new roommate?” she asked Sym as the girl handed over the steaming cup.

“He’s okay for a old guy,” said Sym. “He cook better-he cooks better than Posie, anyway. He ain’t got much to say, though.”

“That’s because he doesn’t speak much English. Try to talk to him and he’ll learn. You got your TV back there-watch shows, explain what’s going on. Any messages?”

“Dane called last night. Said he ran off that Monto guy from in front of Miller’s house.”

“Any trouble?”

“He didn’t say none. Guy drove by is all, saw Dane and got small.”

“Um. Be hard to get him on a violation for that. But he’ll be back. Harry in?”

“Yeah. He looked pissed off too.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I don’t think he features the old guy.”

Harry’s emotional range was a narrow one, covering only a few degrees on either side of what in a normal person would have been suicidal depression, but Marlene had learned to read the subtle arrangement of the ridges on his stony face and was able to confirm Sym’s assessment.

“What’s wrong, Harry?”

A movement of the head in the direction of the living quarters.

“What’s the problem, Harry? He’s a good guy. He needs a place to stay and I need Posie at home. Besides, he’ll be security at night.”

Harry frowned more deeply and with his eyes and head indicated an easterly direction, where lay Chinatown. “What about …?”

“Not a problem. They put him out of business, which was what they wanted. They’re not going to pursue him all the way to regular New York.”

Harry grunted and turned to the window. The conversation was over. It would never have occurred to Marlene that Harry was jealous, that he considered himself the waif-in-chief, and wished not to share Marlene’s rescuing talents with other desperate males. After a few moments of studying the Walker Street traffic, he said, “I checked on Wolfe. He’s clean. He’ll be by today, later.”

Good, thought Marlene as she walked to the living quarters. That meant Harry had not been able to find any obvious lies or distortions in Jack Wolfe’s work history, or any criminal record in any of the states he had worked, which meant she had her extra full-time man. She found Tranh washing dishes in the little kitchen.

Tranh looked up and smiled. “Good morning. How you are?” he said in English.

“Good morning, and I’m fine, thank you,” replied Marlene in the same tongue, and then, in French, “I am impressed, sir, at your progress in our language. Recitations from Shakespeare cannot be far off. Meanwhile, I observe you have accomplished wonders of sanitation.”

The kitchen was indeed gleaming, the floor and surfaces still damp and bleach-scented, while on the small stove a pot bubbled, releasing a spicy, meaty aroma.

“It is only a little thing, Madame,” replied Tranh in French. “I am obliged to you.”

“There is no obligation, for I intend to take advantage of you, if you are willing. As I said the other day, I suspect you have talents beyond the kitchen, which I will liked to have employed-no, pardon, which I would like to employ. Is that correct? The subjunctive mode-”

“Perfectly correct, Madame. You are offering me employment, then?”

“Yes, surely.”

“Of what sort?”

“It would be in the nature of security. Often women and children, fleeing from violent men, must stay here. They require protection. Also, there is work of a similar sort outside, investigations and security …”

“But I am merely a cook,” said Tranh. He was no longer smiling.

“With respect, M. Tranh, you were not always a cook.”

Tranh dropped his eyes and scrubbed dry a spot on the already shining plate he was holding. “No, that is true. I was not always a cook. When I was younger, I was a teacher.”

“Nor always a teacher,” said Marlene. “You were, I suspect, a policeman or-”

“No, never! Not a flic!” Tranh replied curtly.

“Calm yourself, M. Tranh. I do not mean to pry. A soldier, then.”

“Yes, a soldier. Of a type,” Tranh agreed. “But you know, I do not believe I can accept your kind offer, Madame. My status in this country is … irregular. I would not wish for you to get into trouble with the authorities for employing me.”

“That does not concern me,” said Marlene. “Half or more of the waiters in Chinatown are in a similar position. I will pay you out of-how does one say- ‘petty cash’-you understand, the money we use to purchase stamps and so on. You will live here and take from the box I will show you whatever you need. For example, you will require clothing and other necessaries. I will place, let us say, five hundred dollars in the box today, and each week two hundred more. Well, what do you say?”

Tranh paused for thought and then sighed. “What can I say but thank you, Madame? I accept your kind offer. I can only hope that you have not purchased a cat in a pocket.”

“Marvelous!” exclaimed Marlene, and shook Tranh’s hand. It was like grasping a skein of cables. “And you must call me Marlene. ‘Madame’ makes me feel like a piano teacher, or the keeper of a brothel, or a nun of the Sacred Heart.”

Tranh smiled broadly, and Marlene could see that he was missing several teeth on the scarred side of his face. He said, “Marlene? That is an American name?”

“I suppose. It is a contraction of Maria Elena.”

“Ah! In that case, I will call you Marie-Helene, if I may. I am Tranh Do Vinh. Vinh.” He made a stiff little bow.

“Vinh it is,” said Marlene. “Tell me, Vinh, is it possible that you can read English?”

“Oh, surely, and well too. I have read Jack London and Mark Twain. And Shakespeare. And I can under stand the spoken words if the speech is not too rapid. Why, have you something you wish me to read?”

“Yes, wait here a moment.”

Marlene went out to the office, picked up a thick file from her desk, went back to the kitchen, and handed it to Tranh.

“This is the file on a client I believe you can help. Would you look through it please, Vinh?”

He wiped his hands on a dish towel, and seating himself at the table, he flipped through the pages. Marlene suspected that whatever he said about not being a flic, it was not the first time he had examined such a dossier.

He looked up. “Interesting. This man is now free from prison?”

“Yes. And he is evidently still obsessed with Carrie Lanin.”

“You fear that he will now do her an injury?”

“I’m certain of it. And since he knows, from before, that I will stop him, he may also try to eliminate me.”

“I see,” said Tranh. “Well, this we must prevent, no?”

He held up a photograph of Rob Pruitt that Marlene had taken when she first became involved with the stalking of Carrie Lanin. “They are a kind of vampire, these men, are they not? As in the poem: ‘It is in my blood, the black poison; I am the sinister glass in which the fury sees itself.’” He tapped the face. “This one-a nasty sparrow, I think.”

“Extremely nasty.”

They smiled at each other. He said, “But of course, we can do nothing until he makes the first attempt. That is the law, I comprehend?”

“You comprehend exactly, my friend,” replied Marlene. “He must make the first move.”

“And I am to make the second, yes? In an anonymous fashion.”

“You have seized upon the situation accurately,” said Marlene. “Please keep the file. The information we possess is all there. And inform me as to your actions.”

Marlene walked out of the kitchen feeling curiously lightheaded. She reckoned that no other member of the Smith College class of 1969 was hiring a Vietnamese hit man in stilted schoolgirl French. Perhaps “hit man” was a trifle strong: hiring “Vietnamese noodle cook with presumptive quasi-military background and frightening martial arts skills” might have been more accurate-same difference. Once again that feeling of stepping off the little platform onto the rope, no net below, a feeling that terrified her, but one that (as she had realized for some time now) she could not live without.

After his meeting with Menotti, Karp walked the few blocks back to 10 °Centre Street, where for the rest of the afternoon he watched Roland Hrcany complete the presentation of People v. Rohbling to the grand jury. Hrcany was coldly efficient at this. The witnesses were well drilled, and the whole affair proceeded with the smooth, nearly meaningless aplomb of a masque at Versailles. Hrcany did not speak to Karp either during the event or afterward, when the two of them waited in the little anteroom for the grand jury to signal the bringing in of a true bill. When the little light went on that indicated this legal milestone, Hrcany turned to Karp, made a little mock bow and a waving “it’s all yours” gesture with his hand, and went back into the jury room.

Karp wheeled the wire cart containing the Rohbling case files to the bureau law library, hoping for a few hours of uninterrupted study, but Connie Trask, who well knew all his wiles, found him before he had made much progress.

“He wants to know where you been all day,” she said, giving the pronoun the special intonation that designated the district attorney himself.

“Jesus, Connie, I was with the grand jury. He knows that,” Karp said.

“I think he meant before that, when you were hiding somewhere, where you didn’t tell me like you’re supposed to.”

“What does he want?”

“Well, you know, he don’t discuss the legal niceties with me, although the fact is I’ve been running your bureau for you recently. You might want to have a little chat with Roland too, because he’s fairly pissed off about things in general and he’s started to take it out on me, in the absence of you, which shit, boss, I don’t get paid for taking.”

“Sorry, Connie,” said Karp, genuinely ashamed. “It’s this … I get caught up.” He gestured to the stacks of files.

“Yeah, well, nobody asked you to take that on. In fact, they said not to.”

“They did and I didn’t listen and there’s no help for it now. Is my spanking over? Thank you. Okay, I’ll see Keegan and I’ll fix it with Roland. Anything else?”

“Yeah, the M.E. called. They got that autopsy done on that exhumation order. Longren.”

Karp ripped a sheet of yellow paper off his pad and wrote on it “do not touch this stuff!!! karp.” He placed it on the Rohbling material and then went back to his office and called the district attorney.

“Where the hell were you?” asked that official when he picked up.

Karp explained. Keegan said, “Let me understand this. You don’t have enough on your plate. You’re looking for a homicide where two docs swore it was a natural death?”

“It was fishy, Jack. Robinson is a bad guy.”

“Give me strength, Lord! Okay, buddy, it’s your funeral, and that’s not a figure of speech. What’s new with the case of the year? I assume you got the indictment.”

“We did. Also, I met Waley.”

“What did you think?”

“A handful.”

Keegan laughed, a full-throated noise. “Yeah, he’s that. He make an offer?”

“Uh-huh, It amounted to we walk his boy with our sincere apologies.”

“Expected. You’ll arraign on the murder indictments tomorrow.”

“Right. We’ll go with murder on all five homicides he confessed to.”

“Confession going to hold up?”

“If the judge likes it, it’ll hold up,” said Karp, verging toward the snappish, “same as always. You have some sort of problem, Jack? They revoke my law degree or what?”

“You have my full and utter confidence, Butch, you know that, until you fuck up and I throw you to the wolves.”

They both laughed, releasing tension.

“Seriously, though,” Keegan resumed, “if you lose the confession, all you have is Jane Hughes. Are we good on that?”

“We can show he did it, all right. What the jury will make of it is something else. As you’re aware.”

“Yeah, dueling shrinks. My fucking favorite. Who’s our guy in the event of?”

“I was going to go with Emanuel Perlsteiner.”

“Perlsteiner? Jesus, Butch, the guy’s a hundred eight years old and he talks like Dr. Strangelove. Can’t you get a more impressive mouthpiece for the horseshit?”

“He’s seventy-four, he’s convincing, he’s extremely impressive, in my opinion, and I trust him.”

“The Jews stick together, right? Speaking of ethnic matters, who do you have second seating on this?”

“Well, Roland can’t do it, obviously, because he has to watch the bureau,” Karp replied, and then, suddenly suspicious, asked, “Why, do you have a suggestion?”

“Yeah. What about Terrell Collins?”

Karp answered in a controlled voice, “Collins is a good lawyer. He’s one of several that might be right for it.”

“Come on, Butch,” said Keegan, “a black face on the prosecution bench is not going to do you any harm. Not in this case. It also wouldn’t hurt to let him examine some witnesses.”

“Excuse me, there must be something wrong with the connection. I thought I was talking to Jack Keegan, the guy who taught me that one prosecutor has to work the whole case because otherwise the jury’s going to get the idea that the case is too hard for one guy to understand, and therefore too hard for them to understand.”

“Be nice, Butch,” said Keegan.

“Nice is my middle name, Jack,” said Karp. “And I want to stay nice, which is why I am going to forget that you just told me to put a guy in second seat because he is brown in color.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Butch! You just said he was a good attorney.”

“He is. And I intend to give his skills due consideration when I make my selection.”

A pause on the line. Karp could imagine the red creeping up Keegan’s neck. “You do that,” said Keegan tightly, and broke the connection.

Karp took a few deep breaths, put the conversation out of his mind, and called the chief medical examiner. He got a secretary, who put him on hold. He placed the phone on his desk and began going through the stack of paperwork that Connie Trask had marked with stapled-on notes, heavily underlined in red, as requiring his immediate and personal attention. About fifteen minutes passed in this way.

At last dim noises from the phone’s earpiece informed him that the C.M.E. was on the line.

“You know, Murray,” he remarked, “there are probably high public officials in this city who would resent being put on hold for a quarter of an hour.”

“I was cutting,” said Selig. “So, what can I do for you?”

“I’m returning your call, Murray. The Longren death?”

“Oh, yeah! Interesting case. Let me get a hold of it, just a sec.”

Clunk of phone hitting desk, squeak of swivel chair, rustling papers. Minutes passed.

“Okay. She wasn’t choked or strangled. Drug analysis shows phenobarbital, flurazepam, and ciretidine.”

“Which are what? I know what phenobarb is.”

“Well, flurazepam is a common tranquilizer; it’s Dalmane, the sleeping pill. Ciretidine is an antiulcer drug.”

“She had ulcers?”

“Uh-huh. But she shouldn’t have been taking sedatives in those dosages if she was taking ciretidine, since ciretidine potentiates the effect of sedatives.”

“So cause of death was …?”

“She had the flu, she doped herself up, or was doped up, there was some fluid in the lungs, as there usually is with flu, but her breathing reflexes were so suppressed that she couldn’t clear it. Essentially she just stopped breathing.”

“You’re ruling natural causes?” said Karp, his voice rising.

“Well, Butch, what the hell else is it? She might have recovered without the dope, sure, but the dope didn’t actually kill her. I’m not saying there couldn’t be a winnable civil suit against the doctor who treated her, a malpractice thing, but homicide? I don’t think so.”

“But, damn it, Murray! Why the hell did Robinson go through that charade with Davidoff if there wasn’t something fishy going on?”

“Oh, fishy I’ll grant you. Robinson screwed up, and he wanted the signature of the well-respected internist Dr. Davidoff on the death cert: cause of death viral pneumonia. It’ll be useful in case of an inquiry, and Davidoff’s insurance will participate in any defense and settlement. Fishy, yes. Slimy and unprincipled, yes. Murder? Can’t show it.”

“Oh, hell, Murray, first we have four homicides that you guys list as natural causes, and now you cry homicide and get me all worked up and it really is natural causes. I mean, what the fuck, Murray!”

“Hey, what do you want from my life? We messed up on Rohbling’s victims, I admit it. Now we’re being extra careful with anomalous cases, like this one. You don’t want that?”

Karp let out a quantity of air. “Oh, shit, Murray, I’m just pissed off in general. Look, thanks for the quick turnaround on this. It’s one thing off my plate at least.”

Back in the law library, Karp found it hard to plunge back into the details of Rohbling. He was uncharacteristically confused as to what to do about filling the second seat in the coming trial. In fact, he had actually been thinking about picking Collins, a calm, serious man who had won a couple of nice convictions in small-time gang shootings, but had never worked on a major, high-profile case. He was certainly ambitious enough, and he was at the point in his career that he was ready to join the dozen or so senior people in the bureau, like Hrcany and Guma, who could be trusted to handle their cases with minimum supervision from Karp. Collins’s race had pressed itself on Karp’s consciousness to the same degree that Hrcany’s Hungarianess or Guma’s Italianess had; that it might be a factor in the man’s employment had simply never occurred to him. Karp felt a bit of a schmuck about this, as he occasionally did when an office adultery was revealed, which every single person in the office except him had known about, including the janitors. Now, of course, he couldn’t use Collins, because it would look to Keegan that he was acceding to a cynical manipulation. On the other hand, cutting Collins out of a chance he deserved because of that was … what? Double-English reverse nondiscrimination prejudice? With a curse he got up and stomped off down the hallway to Collins’s cubicle, where he found the man, as expected, working late.

Collins looked up from his work and smiled. He was a chocolate-colored, broad-shouldered man who retained the lithe grace he had exhibited playing football for Lafayette.

Karp said, “Look, Terry … ah, shit, this sucks!”

“What did I do?” said Collins, alarmed.

“Nothing. I want you to second-seat me on Rohbling.”

“Jesus! That’s what sucks?”

“No.” Karp felt the sweat of embarrassment on his forehead. “But. Okay, here it is: the D.A. just told me I should use you because of the politics of this particular trial.”

“Because I’m black? That does suck, if you want to know. So this would be like, a … decorative assignment?”

“Oh, fuck, no! I’ll work your ass off. As a matter of fact, I told him to get stuffed, but I was thinking of using you anyway, so you can if you want to, I mean, I do want you, but not because of that.”

Collins thought for a moment and played with his thin mustache. In the tangled racial politics of the time and place, it was a situation with which he was familiar enough, and he was mildly amused by his boss’s discomfort. He grinned and said, “Okay, boss. In that case you got yourself a boy. So to speak.”