Justice Denied

18

This is getting boring,” said Roland, sitting down at the long table in Karp’s office. The same gang sat around the periphery, called together after the day’s work by Karp in response to what Marlene had told him after court.

“We’ll try to make it interesting for you, Roland,” said Karp. “We’ve had a break in the case. Marlene?”

Marlene said, “Yeah, well, what happened is that Aziz Nassif tried to move some funny coins to Sokoloff. We just arrested him. Harry here has just completed a warranted search of his restaurant and apartment-”

“A warrant?” Roland interrupted. His voice rose. “A warrant for the Ersoy killing?”

“No, of course, not, Roland,” answered Marlene sweetly. “We would never do anything like that. How would it look if we went after a warrant for a crime in which we already had an indicted suspect? The defense would eat you up. No, the warrant was for the fraud. But, of course, objects in plain view associated with any other crimes are subject to warrantless seizure-”

“I know the doctrine, Marlene,” said Roland sourly. “What’d he find?”

“Harry?” said Marlene.

Harry Bello reached into his cheap vinyl briefcase and pulled out several clear plastic evidence bags. “One, a ski mask. Matches the description given by the witnesses at the scene. Two, blue parka with red stripes, the same. Three, box of nine-mm Parabellum pistol ammo, half empty. A clip from a nine-mm pistol, empty. Ballistics says it’s from a Kirrikale, a copy of a German gun made in Turkey.”

“Not the gun itself?” asked Roland.

“No gun,” said Bello, and continued with his inventory: “Four, a rental agreement from a National car rental in Maspeth for a ’78 Ford Fairlane two-door, blue. The make and model identified at the scene. Rented March 12, returned March 13, the day of the murder, two hours later than the hit. Fifth and last, a card showing rental rates from a mini-storage locker at Boulevard Storage, also in Maspeth. I called them. They have a hundred-square-footer rented to Ahmet Djelal. That’s it.”

Everyone looked at Roland, who sat, working his jaw, saying nothing, as the seconds passed heavily by. Finally he observed, “You don’t have much. No gun. The mask and parka don’t mean a lot. Same with the car. And I thought Nassif had an alibi.”

“Yeah, from the workers in his restaurant, who’re scared shitless of him,” said Bello. “They won’t hold up once we start pushing, start yanking their phony green cards around.”

Some more silence. Everybody there knew that Roland’s case against Tomasian was not that much more impressive than the case against Nassif. At last Karp spoke up. “Guma, what’s the story on the tap?”

“The deal is still set for Thursday, day after tomorrow,” Guma replied. “Aside from that, nothing new.”

“Why don’t we give them something new? Goom, do you think you could arrange to have Joey Castles learn that we picked up Nassif for fraud? If it comes through in the phone tap, then at least we’ll know that we’re talking about the same Turks.”

“I think I could arrange it,” said Guma.

“Do that. The next thing to do is to talk to Nassif. We’ve got him next door. V.T.? And …” Karp paused and looked at Roland. It was the critical moment, akin to the first time you sit down in a divorce lawyer’s office with your erstwhile sweetie. Roland had every right to interrogate Nassif. It was his case, and he was arguably the best interrogator in the office. The question was, would he?

The expressions raced across Roland’s face, and Karp thought he could read them like stock quotes on a tape. If he didn’t go after Nassif, Karp would do it himself, and then, if it turned out that the Turks really had done it, Roland would look like a complete asshole. Whereas if Roland got a confession out of the Turk, he’d still be the man on a hot case, the TV lights would still shine on him. Of course, the Turk could be a dud too, but then he still had Tomasian.

“Okay, let’s take a look at him,” Roland said at last.

“Terrific,” said V.T. “I’ll be the nice guy.”

The two men left the room. Frangi got up to go with them, but Karp gestured for him to remain. Marlene said, “I notice Roland didn’t mention his jailhouse snitch. What about that?”

“Yeah, what about that?” said Karp. He stared at Frangi, who was down at the other end of the table, looking ill at ease.

Frangi shrugged. “Hey, all I know is, I got a call from the jail captain said this cell mate Medford, wanted to talk about Tomasian for a deal. I told Roland and we talked to the A.D.A. on the guy’s check kiting and then we went and talked to Medford. That’s all I know.”

“Well, if we’re right about Nassif,” said Karp, “it looks like the guy’s lying.”

“Snitches lie,” said Frangi.

“Yeah, they do, but it’s hard to believe a mutt like Medford would’ve come up with a hoax like that on his own.” Frangi started to protest, but Karp held up his hand and continued, “I don’t mean it was you. Or Roland either.”

“Who, then?” asked Marlene.

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter at this point,” Karp said quickly, although he thought it did matter a lot. A suspicion was growing in his mind, but he couldn’t do anything about it at present. It would have to wait. He said, “Thanks, Joe,” and Frangi left, followed soon by Guma.

Karp said, “Djelal, guys. How do we get him?”

“Not a prayer,” said Marlene, “unless his cugine rats him out, or unless you want to totally shit on the D.A. and harass Djelal’s butt and start an international incident. Even then he’s clean. We don’t have anything on him we could put on a warrant. Renting a locker and buying a jeweler’s furnace? Having a sleazy cousin? On the other hand, I’m dying to know what he has in that locker.”

“Yeah, me too,” said Karp, “but we’re going to have to keep dying, because we got no way into it legally.”

Marlene and Bello exchanged a look, so brief that no one else saw it, but one that compressed megabytes of data, like a satellite transmission.

As they walked out of the office together after the meeting, Harry said, “I got a delivery truck I can borrow, with a lift on it.”

“Good,” said Marlene. “Don’t hurt your back.”

Roland stopped by Karp’s office at ten that night. Karp was on his cot, memorizing his summation notes for the next day.

“You look comfy,” said Roland. “Comfy but lonely. Want me to send somebody up?”

“I’ll survive. This is the last day. What did you get?”

“We got shit. Nassif wouldn’t talk. I don’t mean he wouldn’t confess. I mean he wouldn’t talk, literally. And he was scared too. I never saw anyone in that much terror. His teeth were actually chattering.”

“Well, he does have the right to remain silent,” said Karp. “I guess he took it seriously.”

“No, he was waiting for us to start the tortures. Isn’t that Turkey where they hang you upside down and beat your feet with sticks? Frangi and me were screaming at him and dancing up and down, and he must’ve thought we were the good cops.”

“So you think they did it? The cousins?”

Roland frowned. “I didn’t say that. I think they did something, but I got noreason to believe that Tomasian wasn’t part of it.”

Karp nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay? That’s it?”

“Yeah, Roland, that’s it. It’s your case, like I’ve always said. We’ll see how things develop. Meanwhile, we’ll book Nassif for the fraud and see how he likes jail, with his cousin running around free. Maybe he’ll come around.”

Karp shaved and took a whore’s bath in the hall john that night. He was too tired to walk over to the jail; more than that, he didn’t want to see Russell again, except in court.

The next morning, of course, he did. Russell did not look well: even older than his years and his cheap suit was loose around his neck. Perhaps Freeland was giving him lessons in appearing pathetic and harmless, or maybe the reality of his situation was finally coming home to him.

Freeland led off on summation, as tradition demanded. He spoke for twenty-two minutes, a shortish speech, but then he didn’t have a lot to say. His own evidence was fairly weak: Tyler’s it-wasn’t-him and Ashakian’s gymnastic feat and the Sister. He spent most of his time pointing out the various places where the authorities might have lied. If you believed in conspiracies, it was a good story.

Karp spoke for nearly three times as long, but then, he had a lot more material to cover. He started off with James Turnbull’s testimony, the dramatic scene in the police station-Russell sitting there without his blue shirt and Turnbull leaping at him, accusing him with no prompting at all, the man who was physically the closest witness to the actual murder. You swine! This was the guy.

Then the chain of police testimony-Thornby’s adventure in the stifling black basement, the hiding fugitive, the sales slip found. Then Jerry Shelton’s identification-this was the man who had fled from the pursuing crowd.

Then the discovery of the purse and the knife and the shirt, and the identification of the shirt in the jail by the defendant himself.

He disposed of Tyler: a ridiculous witness-a one-second, impossible full-face glance at thirty, or was it forty-five, feet, compared to people-the Digbys, Shelton, Turnbull-who had positively and independently identified the defendant.

Karp walked over to the evidence table and picked up the sales slip from Bloomingdale’s and walked back to stand in front of the jury box.

“Susan Weiner is dead, her life cut short on a summer’s day at twenty-eight years of age. But in a way she is here in this courtroom right now. Because when she bought a pair of stockings at Bloomingdale’s in one of the last acts of her young life, she did something that was very human. She might have been in a hurry to come home to have lunch with her husband, so when they gave her her charge slip at Bloomingdale’s, she grabbed it and shoved it down among three bills, two ones and a five, that were in her purse.

“Hosie Russell murdered her for that seven dollars, but when he tore the wages of his crime out of her purse, he didn’t notice the VISA receipt wrapped in the currency; he was in a hurry too. And Officer Thornby found it in his pocket.”

Karp fluttered the little piece of white paper in front of the jury.

“This is Susan’s last message to us all. It doesn’t just say ‘six-ninety-five plus tax.’ It says, ‘Hosie Russell murdered me on my doorstep for seven dollars.’ It says, ‘Give me justice!’

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence in this case is overwhelming and conclusive. It demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt, to a moral certainty, that Hosie Russell stabbed Susan Weiner to death in the course of a robbery. And so, in the name of the People of New York, I ask you to find Hosie Russell guilty of felony murder and guilty of intentional murder: guilty as charged.”

Karp waited a few beats, looking at each face in turn, and then spun on his crutches, walked over to his seat, and sat down.

Martino charged the jury. It was a good, fair charge, but in the nature of things, as he went over the points of evidence, explaining how the law applied to each one, it was inevitable that he mentioned prosecution evidence more than that of the defense. Karp had no problem with the charge, but Freeland did. All of his motions were, however, denied, and the jury marched out to deliberate at 4:45.

“How did it go?” Marlene asked.

“The usual.” They were in his office.

“You were brilliant and the other guy was an asshole?”

Karp laughed. “Needless to say.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we’ll get felony murder. It’s a toss-up if they’ll go for intentional murder on the second count. Man one’s more likely. The poor scumbag probably really didn’t want her dead-he just wanted the purse.”

“Will they be out long?”

Karp considered this. It was an endless topic of debate among lawyers whether a short or a long deliberation had anything to do with the outcome, and on that topic, at least, the jury was still out. He said, “Not an all-nighter. I think five, six hours.” He paused and smiled. “Then I’ll get someone to drive me home. I’ll honk and you can hoist me to heaven like a side of beef.”

“Oh, cripes, that’s right, you’ll be home,” said Marlene.

Karp noticed her expression and gave her a quizzical look. “Where’d you think I’d be? Look, you got plenty of warning. Just enough time to whip off a quick one and kiss him good-bye.”

“Oh, don’t be a jerk,” said Marlene, too quickly. “It’s just … well, I guess I was thinking I should’ve prepared some sort of official homecoming celebration.”

“Just don’t let the winch slip this time,” said Karp, wondering what his wife was up to now.

They came back at 8:50. Karp straightened his tie in the reflection of a bookcase and heaved himself down to Part 52 for the orgasm.

He had judged rightly. The jury found Hosie Russell guilty of felony murder and guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. Martino thanked the jury, set a date for sentencing, and the courtroom cleared.

Karp sat in his chair and watched them take Russell away. Their eyes met for a moment, and Russell seemed about to say something, but the moment passed, and the convict shuffled out between two court officers, head bowed at the traditional angle.

Susan Weiner did not spring miraculously to life after this transaction, and Karp felt the familiar quasi-post-coital letdown.

“Christ, I hope I get dealt a better hand next time.”

Karp looked up. It was Freeland, smiling, extending his hand for a collegial handshake. Karp ignored the hand. He stared silently at the other man until he dropped his hand and shrugged.

Freeland said, “Hey, the schmuck admitted that blue shirt-what could I do?”

“You could have refrained from suborning perjury,” said Karp quietly. “You could have refrained from dragging the sister up there for no goddamn reason.”

“Hey, just a minute there, Karp! Suborning …?”

“Uh-huh. Or the next thing to it. The old fart never saw anything, and you know it. That’s why you didn’t take a statement off him when he waltzed in. You worked him until he gave you a story.”

Freeland smiled coldly. “Believe what you want. I thought it was worth a shot. I mean, the jerk admitted he did it. I wasn’t going to put him on the stand to make me look like shit, so all I had was the other-guy defense.” He looked at his watch. “Well, it’s been a joy, Counselor-”

“Wait a minute!” Karp snapped. “Hosie told you he did it?”

“Sure.” Freeland smiled again, as at a joke. “You’re not going to tell me that only the innocent are entitled to representation?”

“No, I was going to tell you you’re a real scumbag, Freeland. And I’m going to give you a piece of advice. You got two jobs here. One is cutting pleas, cranking the system. The other is keeping the cops and the D.A.’s honest. The way you do that is the way Tom Pagano did it-by being squeaky clean yourself. You want to play cute tricks, go private. Because if I ever catch you again doing something like you did on this one, I’m going to put your cute white ass in jail.”

A brief staring and jaw-clenching contest then ensued, with no clear winner. Freeland turned and stalked away. Karp sighed. A nasty, faintly crooked Legal Aid director was just what he needed. It made a matched set with his nasty, faintly crooked boss, Sanford Bloom.

Karp went back to his office and placed the case file in the glass bookcase and closed the door on People v. Russell. He sat there in the dark for he did not know how long, listening to the distant sounds of late traffic and the hum of the building itself. Centre Street never slept; night court would be going on, and the complaint room, and babies just out of law school would be scurrying through the halls, learning how to cop felonies to misdemeanors with dispatch.

The phone rang. Karp waited for whoever it was to go away. At the eighth ring he picked it up.

“Karp.”

“This Russell. Hosie.”

“Yeah, Hosie, what is it?”

“Trial’s over.”

“I’m aware. What can I do for you?”

“Song like that, trial’s over, all my trials.” There was a pause. Then Russell cleared his throat noisily. “I can talk to you now, can’t I?”

“Yeah, Hosie, talk away. What’s on your mind?”

“They’s a dude here, name of Medford? Talkin’ about gettin’ loose on account of he snitched out this fella supposed to’ve killed some big shot over by the U.N. Said he heard this guy admit it.”

Karp felt a tingling in his belly. “Go on, what about him?”

“It’s bullshit, that’s what about it. Medford in a cell with me, not this other guy ’Arasium, somethin’ like that.”

“Tomasian. Aram Tomasian.”

“Yeah! That’s the dude. Anyway, Medford, he ain’t nowhere near this guy. Guy in some other cell. He tol’ me, like he some sharp motherfucker, this big shot from the D.A. set the whole thing up. He rat on Tomasian, he get to walk. Then they move him out, put him in the right cell, with Tomasian. And he calls the cops. Cops don’t know nothin’ till he tells them. It was all set up before by the D.A.”

“Urn, did Medford give you a name for this big shot?”

“Yeah, he ack like this motherfucker was his own cousin. Name Wharton.”

Karp got the night-duty driver to take him home to Crosby Street. He mounted the absurd contraption and rode upward in the warm, dark shaft. Mercifully the winch did not slip, and he arrived safely in the bosom of his family.

“So, tell me!” said Marlene.

“It went the way I thought.”

“My hero! You don’t seem very hyped by it. When I saw your face, I thought maybe they walked him. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I’m pissed off generally. I got into a stupid cat fight with fucking Freeland after the trial. And Roland came by and told me he didn’t get anything out of Nassif. And I got this thing on my leg. The usual.”

He clumped across the loft and collapsed on the red couch.

“And the whip cream on the charlotte russe was I got a call from my old buddy Hosie Russell. He told me who worked the scam on Tomasian. The jailhouse witness.”

“You made a deal with Russell?”

“No, that’s the weird part. He just called me up after the trial and spat the whole thing out. For free.”

“Why’d he do something like that?”

“I don’t know. I gave him a stupid lecture once about trying to just do something because it was right. I guess it sank in. Miracles happen, or maybe it was just an extra clever scam because I will do something for him after all. I’ll make sure he gets old in some nice medium-security joint. There’s no point in putting him in Attica. He’s not violent unless he’s loaded, and he’s not a runner. I think he likes prison, as a matter of fact.”

“Don’t we all, each in our own way. So who was it?”

“Wharton, who else?” said Karp dully.

“Shit! What’re you going to do?”

He rubbed his face. “I don’t know. But he’s gone-out of the office, that’s for sure. I’ll go to Bloom. He’ll do the right thing once he knows the story. I mean, he likes Conrad, but not nearly as much as he likes himself. It’ll be quiet and quick.”

“What’ll happen to him, not that I give a shit?”

Karp laughed bitterly. “They’ll probably make him a judge.” He fell back against the cushions and closed his eyes. Marlene looked at him with some alarm. She had never seen him so wan and diminished.

She said, “Poor baby! Did you eat?”

“No. You know I never eat when the jury’s out. Why? Are you going to cook me something?”

“I might open you a can,” said Marlene.

Which she did, a can of Progresso black bean soup with cheese ground thickly on top and a plate of olives and salami and provolone and egg tomatoes with olive oil on it and a chunk of warm, fresh bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic. He ate it like a wolf. Marlene drank black coffee and watched him eat.

He mopped up the soup with the last of his bread and leaned back in his chair, regarding his wife with an appraising eye. Matter-of-factly he asked, “So, Marlene, what’s in the crate?”

“The crate?”

“Yeah, that big wooden crate in the corner with all the old cartons near your speed bag. With the drop cloth on it.”

“Oh, that crate. Well, you know, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what’s in it because I haven’t opened it yet.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t think it has caviar in it? I’m just guessing that that’s what it says on the top of the crate.”

“Nope. I doubt the caviar.”

“And how did this object come to be in our domicile, if I may ask?”

“Harry brought it up last night. Don’t give me a lot of shit on this, Butchie. I only did-”

He held up a hand to stop her. “No, I don’t want to know about it. And the reason for that is, when you’re indicted for, let’s see, misfeasance, grand larceny, burglary, and tampering with physical evidence, and maybe you have to go upstate for a while, I’ll be able to say that I was not an accomplice after the fact. I’m thinking of the kid, here.”

“Yes, good point,” said Marlene. “Although I think I could make a good showing that I acted to save a priceless cultural relic from certain destruction. Harry said the furnace was all unloaded and set to go, in the locker.”

“Mmm, there’s that, although I think you’re supposed to make said showing to a judge before you conduct a raid. You’re supposed to have one of those pieces of paper-what’s the word I’m looking for-begins with a W. .?”

“I hate it when you get sarcastic like this.”

“Not to mention that, having done this bag job, you’ve destroyed the evidentiary value of whatever’s in that crate. Which may mean never being able to prove that Djelal and Nassif did the murder.”

Karp was groggy with the aftereffects of the trial. At such times he needed to sleep, to purge his mind of the accumulated memorized facts, the precedents, the points of law that had stuffed every available brain cell for weeks. He was not capable of a closely reasoned argument with his wife, nor was he capable of making the next logical connection: that there was an object worth thirty million dollars in his home, an object of interest to at least one Turkish murderer. And the mob.

He sighed and looked at her, his eyes bleary. Marlene did not respond to his last comment, so he said, “Well, whatever. You’re a nut. I love you. I married you. I can’t think about it right now. I’m going tocrash. You coming?”

“Yeah, I’ll just clean up here. Look, don’t worry, okay? It’ll be all right. About the crate.”

“What crate? I din see no stinkin’ crate,” said Karp, and clumped his way slowly to bed.

Ahmet Djelal parked the black Cadillac Sedan de Ville on Crosby Street and looked up at the loft building he had come to burgle. He didn’t much like using an embassy car, but his little sports car was too small to carry what he had to carry away. He also didn’t like the idea of hauling the crate down five flights of stairs, but there didn’t seem to be a choice. He had cased the building earlier that day, found out that his target was on the fifth floor, and learned that there wasn’t an elevator.

He got out of the car, stretched, and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. He was a large man, well over six feet tall and burly. He had a close-cropped head, a thick neck, and a dark flowing mustache. He looked like a Turkish policeman, which he was.

Djelal had no doubt that he could manage the crate by himself. Rolled up in his pocket was a furniture mover’s strap. He would carry it down the stairs on his back.

Djelal also had no doubt that he could deal with whoever had stolen his property. After the first moment of panic when he had arrived at the storage place and found the thing missing, he had made a careful search of the area and found a crumpled MasterCharge slip with a name and a telephone number, obviously dropped by the thief. It was not hard to find the address from this information. He was, after all, a policeman.

The thief had an Italian name, which suggested that the people to whom he had planned to sell the gold and jewels might have arranged the theft. He knew who Marlene Ciampi was from her visit to the embassy. Obviously she was corrupt and had somehow learned where the mask was from that idiot Nassif and told her relatives. Djelal was not particularly worried that Nassif had been arrested. It had perhaps been a mistake to involve Nassif, a mere merchant, not a warrior, as he himself was, but one had to depend on family. And at least Nassif was a real Turk. He would not betray his cousin.

Djelal picked the lock of the downstairs door with ease. He put away his lock picks and turned on a pencil-beam flashlight. Slowly he mounted the steep, dark stairs.

At the fifth-floor landing he paused and listened. There was no sound from the other side of the door. He dropped to his knees and directed his light at the lock. He had just inserted his pick when Harry Bello came up silently behind him from the shadows of the landing and hit him across the back of the head with a braided leather sap.

“He’s coming around,” said Marlene.

A skylight and a colored glass lamp swam into Djelal’s view and then a woman’s face in the center of a cloud of black hair. He was lying on his back, his hands uncomfortably constrained behind him. His head hurt and he felt the bite of handcuffs on his wrists.

The dark, fuzzy edges of his vision cleared, and Djelal could see that he was in a large room with three people, the woman, a stocky man with a gray face, and a very tall man with a cast on his leg. The stocky man held a revolver in his hand.

The woman said, “Mr. Djelal, I’m Marlene Ciampi, an assistant district attorney, and this man here is Harry Bello, a police officer. You’re under arrest for the murder of Mehmet Ersoy.” Then she told him that he had the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer, and that if he couldn’t afford a lawyer, one would be provided for him. She asked him if he understood those rights.

He said, “Bir kelime bile anlamiyorum. Bir tercüman bulabilir minisiz?”

Marlene turned to Harry. “He’s useless. Take him out and shoot him and throw the body in the river.”

Involuntarily, sweat started out of Djelal’s brow, and he gasped. Marlene looked at him sharply. “Yes, I think you understand English well enough. Now, do you understand your rights?”

Djelal said, “Yes.”

“Good. Are you willing to make a voluntary statement at this time?”

“This is an outrage. I am an official of the Turkish government. I have diplomatic status.”

“Yeah, but we’re not talking about a parking ticket, are we?”

She pulled up a straight chair and sat down just a few inches from the couch on which he lay. Her knees almost touched his shoulder. She was wearing a blue bathrobe, and he thought she might be nearly naked underneath it. He could smell her body. He thought he was going insane; women did not do this to men, question them while they lay bound and helpless. The other way around was correct, as he himself had done many times when he was an intelligence officer with the military. It was like a nightmare in which you found yourself with a saddle on your back and a horse riding you.

“You’re a very stupid man,” she said. “I think maybe Ersoy was the brains of this operation. After you killed him, the two of you have been stumbling around like a pair of idiots. Once we knew about the art theft and forgery ring, it was no problem finding you. And nailing you. You understand that expression, ‘nailing’? You’re nailed.

“You had a nice little operation going, but the Mask of Gregory was too big for you. Too much cash involved. You figured, why split three ways when you could have half each? So you killed Ersoy, probably with that pistol you brought along tonight….”

She gestured toward a low table, where his gun sat in a clear plastic bag. His mouth sagged.

“Yeah, I figured. It’s the same gun. Dumb. Bone stupid. You thought you were smart pinning it on the Armenians, but it turns out that was really stupid. That’s what got us started on the trail that led to the art scam. If you’d’ve just shot him on a dark street and lifted his watch and wallet, nobody would have asked any questions.

“But that’s not the stupidest thing you did. No, the stupidest thing was to think that half of what you were going to get from Joey Castles for the gold and jewels from the mask was more than a third of what Kerbussyan would’ve paid for the mask itself. The two of you outsmarted yourselves out of about ten million dollars.” She laughed in his face.

He broke. Djelal jerked himself upright and roared and lunged at Marlene with his teeth, his mouth throwing ropes of spit. She kicked her chair backward to avoid him, and instantly Harry Bello was between them with his pistol pressed hard against Djelal’s skull and his arm locked around his neck.

“It was not the money, whore!” the Turk shrieked. “Piç! It was the Armeniy! Ersoy was going to sell the filthy saint to the Armenians! We were going to cheat them, like they cheated us. But he said, no, Kerbussyan would not be fooled. We can get more if we sell it. But we are real Turks. How could we give this filthy thing to our enemies, for them to glory in it and defame us more? Melt it, I said. But no, he wouldn’t. He was corrupt, a politician! So we had men to steal it and we …”

“You killed him.”

“He deserved death. He was a traitor.”

Marlene said, “Wrap him up, Harry. We can get a statement from him in the morning. Did you get all that, Butch?”

Karp was no shorthand expert, but he could write like blazes when necessary; few who can’t get through law school. He finished his scribbling and said, “Yeah, I think so. Except he said something like ‘peach’ at the start. Right after ‘whore.’

“I bet it was something nasty, right, Ahmet?”

But Djelal had sunk into morose silence. He did not resist when Bello led him out of the loft.

“That was quite a performance,” said Karp. “Did you plan that whole thing? Like, how did he know to come here?”

“Harry planted a charge slip at the storage locker. I got the idea from the Russell case. Funny, isn’t it? It was patriotism, not greed, that killed Ersoy. God protect us all from noble motives.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Karp. He got up from the table and hopped over to the wall phone.

“Who are you calling? It’s two A.M.”

“Roland. I’m going to get him out of bed and get him down to Centre Street to spring Tomasian and write up Djelal.”

“Oooh, nasty!”

“No, it’s his case. He should handle it.”

“You think he’ll ever forgive you?”

“Roland isn’t into grudges. Tomorrow there’ll be a check in an envelope on my desk, and he’ll never mention it again and neither will I.”

Karp made his call, which was terse. He hung up and went back to the couch. Marlene put a kettle on to boil. She made tea, and they sat down at the porcelain-topped table in the kitchen to drink it.

“I’ve been thinking,” Karp said. “All’s well that ends well, but did you ever think that our guy might not have come alone? What if old Ahmet there’d brought three guys with machine guns along? Harry didn’t have any cops backing him up, did he?”

“Not cops,” said Marlene carefully. “Not as such. But there’s backup, and more than three guys with machine guns.”

“Kerbussyan! You tipped the Armenians this was going down. But that means …”

She sipped from her mug and waited.

“You’re going to give the thing to Kerbussyan?”

“What thing is that, Butchie?” asked Marlene, giving him a hooded look, of just the kind that some ancestress of hers might have produced in the aftermath of an affair of poisoned daggers at the Palermo court of Robert the Devil.

Kerbussyan arrived ten minutes later in the company of two silent, mustached men, the same ones Karp had seen at the house above the Hudson many months ago. They wore field jackets, though it was a warm night. They clanked with weapons.

The old man embraced Marlene warmly and kissed her hand.

“My dear, I have no words-”

“No problem, Mr. K,” said Marlene, “but before we get all excited, let’s check what’s in the box.”

Kebussyan’s two shadows followed her back through the loft and returned bearing the crate. She gave one of them a short wrecking bar, and he took the top off the crate. Inside, in a nest of straw, was a package wrapped in padded cotton, secured with rigger’s tape. One of the shadows drew it out and placed it on the dining room table. It was about the size and shape of a loveseat cushion, but obviously very heavy. The man grunted with the effort.

Kerbussyan approached the thing and studied it, as if he could see through the wrappings, through the centuries. He was pale and white around the nostrils. Marlene handed him scissors. Carefully and slowly he cut the tape and unwrapped layer after layer of gray padding.

Gold glinted as the last of the wrapping fell away.

“It is. It is!” cried the old man.

The cloth was swept aside and it stood there, a golden block the size of an atlas and as thick as an unabridged dictionary. On the closed doors of the reliquary triptych were embossed the figures of a man and a woman in Byzantine imperial regalia. They stood out, grave and holy, from a background studded with pearls and small diamonds.

“The emperor Zeno and the empress Ariadne,” breathed Kerbussyan. “The donors.” His fingers fumbled at the central catch, and then he threw open the doors of the reliquary.

Numen flooded off it like water off a broaching whale, filling the room with emotional power, like light for the deeper feelings. The door on the left was inscribed with a gold and enamel-work martyrdom of St. Hrip’sime, and on the right was St. Gregory preaching to the Armenian nobles, assisted by angels. In the center, the golden face of the Illuminator stared out, terrible and marvelous, his eyes great sapphires, alive with blue flames.

The three Armenians fell to their knees and crossed themselves, and there was a chorused prayer in the ancient tongue. Marlene felt her own knees dip involuntarily, and her hand twitched to make the cross. Karp, the Jewish pagan, just watched, fascinated in spite of himself.

After some time, they shut the doors and wrapped up the soul of Armenia in its padding. Kerbussyan was nearly speechless with gratitude.

“Please,” he said, “what can I do for you? You must let me give you some-anything … anything I have.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kerbussyan, but I can’t accept anything. It’s just my job. We return stolen property, and the fact that it was stolen a long time ago doesn’t enter. I’m glad you got it back.”

She walked them to the door. They were going to go to Centre Street to pick up Aram Tomasian. Marlene was thinking, naturally enough, about roots, about lost homelands, and a thought flashed into her mind.

“Ah, there is one small favor, if you could,” she said hesitantly.

“Ask.”

“You’re in the real estate business. Do you know a guy named Morton Lepkowitz?”

“The name is familiar. What about him?”

Marlene explained their condo-conversion predicament.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“How?”

“My dear, don’t worry about it. What you have done is worth a bracelet of buildings like this one. As long as there are Armenians you will never want for a home. That is the same as forever.” He gave her a flash of his shark’s smile and left, flanked by his minions, bearing treasure.

Marlene walked back to the mattress. She felt lightheaded, wired, and exhausted at the same time. Karp was waiting for her there, propped up on pillows, his hands behind his head. “Well,” he said, “did you get your bribe?”

“It’s not a bribe. I just asked him to see if he could convince Lepkowitz to go easy on us, and he said he’d do it.”

“I bet. Has it occurred to you what’s going to happen when all this comes out at the trial?”

Marlene got into bed and looked at him. “Trial? Who, Djelal? He’ll never go to trial. He’ll plead to the top count.”

“What makes you so sure, Counselor?”

“Because if he doesn’t, we’ll deport his ass to Turkey, and they’ll try him for stealing national treasures.”

“He won’t get much for that.”

“It’s a death sentence. How long do you think an ex-cop will last in a Turkish jail? A week? Especially the kind of cop Djelal was. And especially a Turkish jail. No, he’ll do his twenty to life in Attica and be glad about it, and he’ll give us Nassif too. What’s the matter? You look like you swallowed a frog.”

Karp blew air out, puffing his cheeks. “The bad guys are punished, the good guy is out-why don’t I feel right?”

She put an arm around his shoulder and drew him close. “Because,” she said, “you’re basically honest, and you believe in the system, and I’m basically a crook, and I only believe in the system when it comes out the way I want. I believe in myself. How’d that Dylan line go? ‘To live outside the law you must be honest …’ Whatever that means, that’s Marlene.”

Karp said, as Bogart, “Don’t be silly, you’re taking the fall.”

Marlene laughed. “Yeah, I know. You notice that Bogie doesn’t marry Mary Astor and live happily ever after in that one. One of these days you’ll turn my ass in. Why did we get married anyway?”

Karp reached for her. “Because you knew that someday you’re going to need a good lawyer.”