Resolved

6

Lieutenant Jim Raney picked up the call on his police radio on his way to work the next morning. They gave the address and said there was one man dead. Raney felt his stomach knot; he knew the address well and could figure out who the dead person was. With siren and lights he made it to Sixty-Sixth Avenue in Rego Park, Queens, in eight minutes, and found fire trucks, an EMS vehicle, blue-and-whites blocking either end of the street, and a couple of unmarked police vehicles. The firefighters were finishing up, coiling their hoses, watched by knots of people from the neighborhood, staring from behind hastily stretched tape lines. There was smoke in the heavy air, a stench of burnt wood and asphalt shingle. Raney parked, clipped his shield to his jacket, and walked toward the house, crunching on broken glass. He noticed that nearly every window on the block had been blown out, giving the rows of modest brick homes the blank-eyed look of tragic masks.

The target house had lost its faзade and almost the entire front room. A scorched upright piano sagged over a dark void, from which thin smoke emerged. Most of the ground floor had collapsed into the basement. Raney saw a carpet he recognized, impaled on floorboards. The statue of the Virgin that had stood in the little front yard was lying in scorched pieces. Also in the front yard: a paramedic picking red globs up with tongs and placing them carefully in a yellow rubber body bag. Raney's gorge heaved and he had to look away and take deep breaths.

"Pretty bad, huh?" said a voice behind him. It was Rafael Beale. Of course! Raney now realized, with something of a shock, that the crime had taken place in his own bailiwick.

"Hell of a blast. Lucky there's only one vic, but he's really dead. There isn't a piece of him wouldn't go through a one-inch hole. Guy's name was…" He looked at his notebook.

But Raney had the name: "Pete Balducci."

"Yeah," said Beale, surprised. "How did you know?"

"He was my first partner, right after I got my detective shield. In the Five, downtown in the city. He retired like twelve years ago. Christ, I've been in that house a thousand times. Shit!"

Randy kicked at a piece of debris.

"Sorry about that, Loo. And the remarks, I didn't know-"

"That's okay, Beale. We have anything so far?"

"Not much. I talked to the arson guy from the FD. He's scrambling around down there in the scene. The special unit from the bomber task force is on route."

"They think it's the guy?"

"Well, it's early yet, but the FD says it was definitely a big, high-explosive-type bomb, like the six we got over in the city. Anything new on all that the other day? At One PP?"

"We're looking for a white guy, forties, muscular. He might have a hard-on for the criminal justice system, the feds think, but really, bottom line, who the fuck knows? Anything come back on the canvass yet?"

"Nobody saw shit," replied Beale, "which figures, a neighborhood like this goes to bed early. It looks like the perp came by at night, left the thing by the front door. A motion detector on it…"

Raney cut him off. "Yeah, well, we might as well get back to the house. This case is going over to the task force."

Beale said something else, but Raney didn't hear him. The word "random" was buzzing in his mind, a word that Special Agent Bannock had used often in his presentation. Terror was random by definition: that's what made it terrifying. The universal goal of any terrorist was that no one in the target population be able to predict who might be the next victim. The task force had analyzed the connections among the victims and came up blank. Raney had seen the charts. So it had to be random that Felix Tighe's ex-wife, and a witness who had testified against him, and the cop who had arrested him had all been killed. Just a coincidence…

"Loo, are you okay?"

Raney snapped out of his reverie. "What?"

"I been talking at you for five minutes and you were someplace else."

"Sorry, Beale, I was just thinking about Pete. I need to call some people, get with the family and all. He's got two daughters, grandchildren."

His eyes drifted over the scene: the crime scene technicians, the firemen, the medics, all picking at the ruin. It seemed mindless and far too weak a response, as measured against the enormity of what had happened. September 11 again, in miniature. At some level he understood that this is what you did because it was all you could do- put things in little labeled bags, a pathetic attempt to reorder chaos. He saw an unmarked van pull up at the head of the street. Three men and a woman emerged, and Raney felt relief, tinged a little with shame.

He said, "Meanwhile, there's the task force guys. Let's turn this over and get out of here."

Marlene is selling a dog to an airport security man from New England. Selling dogs is not something she likes to do particularly, but it's necessary and she's good at it. She briefly reflects on how much of her life has been consumed (often she uses the word "ruined" to herself) by tasks where these three things are true. Also, Billy Ireland is impossible at sales. His chief sales tactic is "take it or leave it, asshole"; often they leave it. He regards any criticism of his trainees- real, implied, or imagined- as a personal affront. So Marlene does the selling. It's not hard, since there is something of a seller's market in this kind of dog nowadays.

The customer is a big, middle-aged white man with a wary look, and the dog is a medium-sized brown dog, with a black muzzle, floppy ears, and an eager expression. Marlene has noticed this before: the dogs know they are being talked about.

"Well, I don't know," says the man. "I was expecting a purebred, you know. Five thousand dollars… that seems steep for a dog that… well, it looks like a mutt."

"That's because she is a mutt, Mr. Willowes," says Marlene. "She's also a talented bomb sniffer, trained right here. She has a good disposition, she's only three years old, and she's a good worker. Aren't you, Violet?"

Violet agrees with this assessment by wagging her tail. Marlene goes to a wooden filing cabinet and takes from it a waxy red cylinder. "This is commercial dynamite," she says, "but she'll find all the conventional military and industrial explosives. I'll give you a demo." She takes a tissue from a box on her desk and wipes the dynamite stick, as if polishing it for the Terrorists' Ball. Then she hands the tissue to Willowes. "There's a flagstone path outside and a drystone wall on the other side of the yard. Go hide this, and give me a yell."

Bemused, the man does so. Marlene clips Violet to a short lead and, when she hears the man's shout, walks the dog outside into the warm afternoon. Bark. Whine. Scratch. Violet finds the bait under a stone. The man is impressed and wonders why the dog is not given a reward for finding. Marlene explains that the finding is its own reward; a little praise is enough. "They're better people than we are, you know," says Marlene sadly.

The phone in the house rings. Marlene tells Violet to lie down, excuses herself, and trots into the house. Mr. Willowes is making calculations, figuring out how many Violets he will need, how many handlers, to keep his airport safe, and whether he would be better off with expensive sniffing machines and min-wage staff to work them, when he hears a great shout from inside the house. A shout of dismay, he thinks. More shouting. A few minutes later Marlene emerges, dabbing at her face with a tissue, perhaps the same one.

"Something wrong?" he inquires politely.

"A friend of mine was killed this morning," she explained. "In the city. Another bomb."

They go back into the house, where Marlene sells him four bomb dogs: Violet, Peaches, Trampette, and Lola.

During the noon recess of the fourteenth day of People v. Gerber amp; Nixon, Karp invited Terrell Collins into his office to discuss the trial. The prosecution had concluded its case in chief that morning. Karp had the transcripts strewn in piles on his desk. Collins threw his lanky frame into a chair and puffed out air.

"What do you think?" he asked, indicating the transcripts.

"What do you think," countered Karp. "You're in the courtroom. I can only derive so much from reading transcripts. How did your case play with the jury?"

"They were polite. They listened. No one dozed off."

"That's not what I mean," said Karp.

"Yeah, I know. I guess… look, the whole point of our case is do you believe our witnesses or do you believe the two cops. Just now, with Nine Eleven and the dead heroes in the background, people in this city are inclined to believe the cops. It doesn't matter how many civilian witnesses I drag in there, and it doesn't matter if they all confirm one another and contradict what the cops say. Klopper stands up on cross and asks each of them if the DA went over their testimony with them, which they say yes to, of course, and he has a way of implying, without actually coming out and saying so, that we made it all up. I've called him on it when he actually claimed we made it all up and the judge backed me, but you know how that goes. The seed is planted." He sighed. "Frankly, I think we're gonna get creamed."

"Yeah, and as long as that's your attitude, you will get creamed," Karp snapped. "What the fuck, Terrell- don't say shit like that in the middle of a trial!"

Bridling, Collins replied, "Hey, you think you can do better, boss, be my guest!"

Karp felt the blood flowing into his cheeks and made a conscious effort to calm himself. In fact, he did think he could do better, although Collins was a perfectly competent, even a brilliant young lawyer. He had not, however, won over one hundred straight homicide cases like Karp had. He had not met Hank Klopper on two separate occasions and ground him into the courtroom floor. That made a difference.

"All right, Terry," he said soothingly, "let's not get in each other's face. This is still winnable. It's civil service, you're not going to be fired. Cheer up!" He moved his face into an expression of confidence and bonhomie. The glower on Collins's face broke into a thin smile.

"Let's talk about the defense case," said Karp. "Today is what?"

"He's leading with a Marlo Burns, a homeboy who's got a different story on the shooting. I think I can bring out that Mr. Burns has a thing against Nigerians. Then Hugo Selwyn, guy's a defense-hack forensic expert. I presume he's going to cast doubt on the trajectory data we presented, the fact that the victim took four rounds while he was lying flat on the ground. It argues against pure self-defense."

"Good. Exploit the hack aspects. Challenge his credentials. You up for that?"

"Yeah. I know the guy's whole life story. He was fired from a crime lab in Jersey for incompetence. Since then he's been a defense witness in cop shootings all around the country. Aside from that, all they have is the defendants."

"You think he'll call them? Hank never calls defendants."

"Ordinarily, yes, but this is a special case. My sense is that these guys don't just want acquittal, they want total exoneration. They may be pushing him to call them."

"What're they like?"

"Nixon's the brains, Gerber's the brawn. Not that either of them is a rocket scientist. I'm guessing that after it went down, Nixon came up with the story and got the partner to go along."

"Okay, so their story is- tell me if I got this right- the victim tried to sell them dope, they identified themselves as cops and tried to arrest him, he grappled Nixon and tried to grab his gun. In this struggle the gun fires twice and the vic takes a round through the flank. The vic's still grabbing for the Nixon pistol, and Gerber draws his gun, yells 'hands up' or 'get down,' whatever. Nixon has control of his gun now and shoots again, and hits Onabajo's arm, but the victim of steel keeps holding on. Gerber shoots him five times and he finally falls."

"You got it. The sequence we have from the witnesses and ballistics is that Onabajo slugs Nixon because Nixon is trying to make him out to be a dope dealer, which he isn't, and Nixon shoots two bullets into him. Flank and arm, but both flesh wounds, nothing mortal. He staggers away. Gerber shoots him, he falls, and Gerber shoots him four more times while he's out flat, making seven wounds in all. That's our murder case, as you know. Gerber shot a helpless man."

"Yes. But Nixon didn't."

"Yeah, right, and you'll recall we offered him a deal. He wouldn't move off the story. Like I said, they think they can beat us clean, go back on the cops, collect the pension."

Karp grunted, turned away, and looked out his window. Something was struggling to emerge from deep storage, something about this case. It wouldn't come, and he knew better than to try and force it. It was like Giancarlo's blind sight: he could see it, but he couldn't process it. That was the trouble with coaching a dozen trials and attempting to keep an eye on the whole range of cases running through the system: stuff got tangled and lost and confused, the facts blended, going spongy and vague, not standing out sharply like gems in a bracelet, as they did when he was actually running a single trial. Something about Nixon's story, maybe from the grand jury? Collins should have come up with anything real, of course, so maybe it was just the old war horse smelling gunpowder, somewhat pathetic, really… He turned back to Collins, who was staring at him with interest.

"Well, we can't let them do that, can we?" Karp said.

"No brilliant ideas?" Collins asked hopefully. "I thought I saw the mighty brain at work just then."

A derisive snort. "No, I'm clean out of brilliance nowadays. But there's something… I can't quite come up with it. In the grand jury testimony, or the ballistics… what you just said set me off, but I'm drawing a blank. You should look into the grand jury transcripts and the ballistics reports again, see if anything pops up."

"If there was anything pop-upable, don't you think it would've popped up by now," said Collins peevishly. "Jesus, I've been over this case until it's coming out of my ears."

"Do it again."

"Okay, right, but we're running a little short on time here," said Collins, rising. "The damn trial'll be over in a week or so." He rose. "I got to get back."

Collins left, drawing with him the sourness of defeat. Karp knew he had hoped that the old magician would pull a last-minute trick out of the bag, but Karp had not. He didn't believe in last-minute tricks anyway. Perfect prep and perfect delivery equaled a conviction: so he had been taught and so he had always taught. Maybe that had changed, too, though: everything else had.

He shook off the cloud enough to pursue his routine work of reviewing cases, signing papers, hosting meetings. A man delivered a sandwich and a soda and he ate it at his desk. After lunch there was a particularly rancorous and irritating meeting about the budget. Laura Rachman was there, being chief among the irritators. Karp wondered whether it was about her, or him. He detected in her manner toward him an assertiveness that bordered on the rude. He didn't think he was a caveman where professional women were concerned, but she seemed to treat him as if he were- furs, club, sloping forehead and all- and he found that this actually brought out the residual Neanderthal in him. He snarled at her, she snarled back, and seemed almost glad to have her paranoia thus confirmed. Marvelous!

Next in was Arno Nowacki, the superintendent of the courthouse, a bulky, florid man in a plaid shortsleeved shirt and a tie covered with little pictures of hard hats. He had on his face the fixed and humorless grin of a man whose every customer is dissatisfied. Karp was not in his chain of command, but still a figure to be reckoned with around the courthouse, so Nowacki's grin was a little broader and sadder than usual. After the usual guy-sports talk, Karp said, "Arno, the heat. Jurisprudence is a product of the cooler northern climes. Do you want us to descend into the lawlessness of the benighted tropics?"

"What can I say, Butch? I didn't make the decision to fix the AC system in the middle of a heat wave. We got the money late in the fiscal year and we have to spend it before the year ends in October. You know what it is: you got a state building, under city codes, and a project funded sixty percent with federal money. It's a wonder we get anything done."

Karp had to laugh. "But you can guarantee that the system will be up and running by the time the cool weather hits, right?"

Nowacki's grin became nearly genuine at this. "Almost guarantee it, and another thing I can guarantee is that we'll get to the heating system in the middle of a fucking blizzard. I got eight subcontractors on that job, including a couple of low-bid pissant outfits I never heard of. Two new boilers, installing natural gas lines, ripping out the old oil system. The boilers alone, Jesus talk about a job and a half…"

"I don't want to hear the word 'boilers' today, Arno," said Karp. "Can you get me more fans?"

"After this meeting, he left his office, telling his secretary that he might be found for the next hour in Part 39. This was the courtroom where they were trying People v. Hirsch. Karp slipped in as quietly as he could and took a seat in the spectators' area. There were plenty of empty seats, in contrast to the Gerber amp; Nixon case's courtroom, which had been packed from the first day.

An athletic woman with short dark hair and wearing a short dark suit was standing in the well of the court questioning a witness. This was the ADA, Terry Palmisano. She was an active pacer and whirler. Karp had noticed recently that with the plethora of law shows on television, the younger attorneys had begun to model their behavior on fictive representations of lawyers, much as the actual Mafia had done after the success of the Godfather films. This woman, he noted, was wearing a skirt right out of Ally McBeal, descending a good three inches below the curve of her buttock. Karp checked the jury: there were two youngish women on it, and ten rapt men. Karp wondered whether she had used her preemptory challenges to bump frumps who might be jealous. Or maybe the jury also failed to distinguish between truth and fiction, just as, during the immediate aftermath of 9-11, Karp had heard a number of people say, as if guaranteeing the veracity of their eyewitness, "It was just like the movies!"

Karp watched the Terry Palmisano Show with some interest, therefore, to find out how people were now supposed to behave in a courtroom. The witness was a distracted-looking woman, somewhere north of forty, a vaguely bohemian mien. She had on a flowered dress and a fringed shawl and a crystal pendant with which she toyed. Her graying blonde hair was worn in a three-foot braid, also toyed with alternately with the crystals. The woman, a Ms. Winograd, was describing the complex of digestive symptoms that had caused her to visit the defendant some sixteen months ago. Palmisano let her ramble on about her dietary theories and her reluctance to seek help from what she called "the medical model." The defendant's lawyer objected on the grounds of relevance. The judge waved this away: she seemed fascinated by the Oprah-like spiel from the witness.

On the bench was Her Honor Margaret Anne Fogarty, or Mad Meg as she was affectionately called around the courthouse. Mad Meg had attained to the Supreme Court of the State of New York (which is what that state somewhat idiosyncratically calls its felony trial courts) on the basis of her professional qualifications, which (as with all judges) were two in number: she had a law degree and she knew a politician. In Karp's opinion, Mad Meg Fogarty was not only unfit to rule a courtroom but barely competent to mop one, yet there she sat, robed and majestic, dumb as a sack of hammers, massively prejudiced, and destined to be overruled on appeal. Karp wondered if Laura Rachman had arranged to get this particular judge. It was against the rules, of course, but not unheard of.

So the witness was allowed to tell her story in detail: how she was drugged and seduced by Dr. Hirsch in his clinic, how he pursued her, how he subjected her to degrading sexual practices, how he finally abandoned her when she threatened to go to the authorities. Karp looked at the jury: Were they buying this lunacy? Yes, they were, it seemed. It was just like on TV.

The defense counsel was Lew Waldbaum, a well-known courthouse bull, bald and aggressive and (outside court) genially profane. But he was gentle, almost courtly, with Ms. Winograd, which is how Karp would have handled the woman, too. On cross, Ms. Winograd added some details that Palmisano had not chosen to bring out, such as that Dr. Hirsch often appeared at Ms. Winograd's apartment wearing an animal suit. What sort of animal? Here Palmisano objected as to relevance, and was sustained. Waldbaum changed tack. You testified that Dr. Hirsch supplied you with drugs? What sort of drugs. All kinds, I don't recall exactly. Um-hm. And you're no longer taking any medication? No, except for the Clozaril. I have to take that for my condition. What condition is that, Ms. Winograd? I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but it's in remission.

Objection, of course. Ms. W is not on trial. The fact that she's a fucking lunatic dragged up here to besmirch a man's reputation, to support a piece-of-shit case based on the testimony of a known liar should not be made known to the jury, Your Honor. Palmisano did not really say that, but if she had, Karp imagined, Judge Fogarty would have sustained the objection. The jury was instructed to disregard the testimony about the medication and the witness' medical history.

That was all Karp could take for the day. Outside the courtroom he spotted Laura Rachman. She gave him a nod and an empty smile, which Karp did not return. He watched her enter Part 39, to observe the work of her protegйe, he imagined.

Karp knew that if he stayed in the office, steamed as he was from his visit to the Hirsch lynching, he would make errors and enemies, neither of which he could afford. He decided to go home. The boys would be glad to see him earlier than usual; maybe he'd take them somewhere- not the video game place, someplace quiet- for a civilized meal, and Lucy, too. Lucy was always calming. He would tell her about his sad life and she would say something gnomic about the moral order that would make him feel not utterly abandoned. He wondered whether this was entirely healthy; a man was supposed to share this kind of stuff with his wife, not his daughter. Was he warping her? Clearly not: of all the people in his life, she seemed to be the one that most demonstrated the quality of straightness, like a steel rule against which everything else might be tried. But maybe he shouldn't burden her anymore. He should suck it in and drive on.

On the sidewalk in front of his door Karp threaded his way through cartons of obscure vegetables of the Orient, the overflow from the produce store on the corner. He felt an irrational surge of rage, and shoved a box of bok choy violently away with his foot, cursing, drawing frowns and Cantonese mutters from the produce clerks. Little blue flames of real racism darted momentarily through Karp's consciousness, only to be efficiently snuffed out. Thus has New York survived over the centuries.

Riding up in the elevator, he calmed himself. It was the encroachment on his role at the office that was behind it, he thought, not the damned veggies blocking his door. He was supposed to keep the system honest; that was the core of his job, but in practice it had become "only as honest as was consistent with politics," hence the monstrosity of a trial he'd just witnessed. He breathed deeply, willing the churning in his gut to cease. What was wanted was calm, a happy daddy, home, no tensions dropped on the family, shelter in a heartless world. A pleasant, stress-free evening…

The elevator door opened. His son Zak was standing there at the open door to the loft, as he often did when he heard the sound of the elevator. Through an excited grin he crowed, "Dad! Mom's home!"

"She is?" The churning returned, amplified, cubed.

"Uh-huh. She was here when we got home. Some guy got blown up is how come." He ran back into the house.

She was home indeed, sitting in her usual place on the couch in front of the immense, purchased-with-ill-gotten-gains plasma TV set, watching the news, flanked by her two boys. The mastiff Gog was at her feet, staring at Blue the guide dog, daring him to start something, Blue meanwhile uttering little growls at intervals, signifying his position that if Gog wanted to start something involving Giancarlo, he'd better bring his lunch.

Karp stared at his wife. She was thinner than she had been and tanned, not a resort tan, but in the red-leather way of outdoor working stiffs. The haircut was a mistake, he thought; no more thick curls artfully sculpted to draw attention away from the false eye. Maybe she didn't care anymore. He said, "Well. She's back."

"For the funeral," she said.

"Funeral? Zak said something about a someone being blown up…"

"Pete Balducci. You didn't hear?"

"No. Oh, boy, Pete Balducci. That's terrible! When did it happen?"

"This morning. In Queens. Jim Raney called me and I came right in. I thought about going to… you know, someplace else, but I came here." She looked up at him. The familiar illusion that he could see emotion in both eyes, pain in this case. "I hope you don't… that you're not pissed…"

"Marlene, don't be crazy. You live here. It's your loft."

She turned back to the TV. "I made gazpacho and a bean salad. And tacos for the boys. It's a hot day."

"Sounds great," he said. Some more neutral chatter. The twins discussed how to catch the Manbomber. Giancarlo opted for an elaborate sting, Zak for careful forensics. The parents joined in. Karp's voice sounded false to his ears, as if they were all reading a script for a sitcom that would be canceled after three episodes.

Karp was about to ask where Lucy was, when she walked in, carrying two grocery bags. Zak crowed out the big news. Lucy calmly put the groceries away and came into the living room, where she embraced her mother. It was a stiff, almost formal contact, like that between ambassadors from rival nations. Energies Karp could feel but not identify coursed around them as they exchanged pleasantries- love, longing, fear, resentment, all of the above. The boys felt it, too; a gelid silence fell. As usual, it was Giancarlo who forced the play. "I'm hungry," he declared. "Is there anything to eat?"

With which they all trooped into the dining room, where a truly delicious warm-weather meal was served and eaten, and everyone spoke around their real feelings, and pretended to be an intact and happy family. Toward the end of the meal, remarkably, they became through the grace of love and temporary amnesia an actual intact and happy family. Around the table hearts grew light, the old family jokes cracked out, there was laughter.

Then Marlene started to weep, silently, so that it took a while for the others to notice. The boys grew quiet, first Zak and then, after a whisper from his twin, Giancarlo also. Lucy leaped up and announced an expedition to Little Italy for Italian ice cream. In full sergeant-major mode, she overcame their objections (can't Mom come, too?) and drove them from the loft, also dragging along the two dogs.

When they were gone, Marlene released the first of many howls and rushed into the bedroom, where she flung herself down on the bed. Karp followed and sat by her, gently rubbing her back, at a loss. She used to do this, he uncomfortably realized, after she had killed someone, such sessions occurring from time to time during their marriage rather more frequently than Karp had anticipated when he stood with his bride at the altar. Stroking a weeping woman did not take up much of Karp's attention; his mind wandered. He thought about what she had looked like then, the first time he had ever seen her, hurrying down a corridor in the courthouse, a rookie ADA, arms full of legal documents, a pencil stuck rakishly in her thick, dark hair. He never really looked at her then, because she was so beautiful that his glance slid off her face like raindrops glancing from the skin of a simonized Buick. And he was married to someone else at the time, too. But it was also that something in him intuited that she didn't like the gape-mouthed stares that men sprayed her with as she did her work. He didn't truly study her until after they had become lovers, by accident really, and even then he would do this slyly. If she caught him, she would say, "What?" and he would always say, "Nothing." Or invent some triviality, make a little joke. Her beauty was a secret of their marriage.

That perfection was now long gone. A bomb had exploded in her face years ago and taken her eye, and incised tiny scars around her face that plastic surgery could not entirely conceal. She used to hide these with artful makeup, but no longer.

"What?" she said. She had stopped her crying and was looking up at him from the pillow.

"Nothing. Are you okay?"

"No. What an idiot I am! Somehow, I thought I could just waltz in, my little pied-а-terre in the city, stay a couple of days, go to the funeral, flit back to the farm. I didn't think… I didn't think about what it would be like, seeing their faces. Or I thought it would be harsh and cold and recriminatory, and I could get to snarl back, a change of clothes and out the door. I didn't think… the story of my fucking life! I can't bear to look at Giancarlo groping around, and knowing that it's my fault, and Zak desperate to protect him and everyone else in the world, doomed little gunman, just like his fucking Mom. And Lucy… looking at me like she's waiting for something, for me to… what? Confess? Repent? Kill myself? I love them, but they're knives in my heart, and every minute I'm with them I'm quaking in terror that some monster I raised when I was being Wonder Woman will crawl through the window and… I don't know, hurt them more."

"That's ridiculous, Marlene. What happened to Giancarlo, the whole West Virginia thing, wasn't your fault. You might as well say it was my fault. I was the prosecutor on the scene. If I hadn't figured out how to arrest those guys, they wouldn't have been in jail, and if they hadn't been in jail, they wouldn't've broken out, and shot Giancarlo in the middle of their jailbreak… I mean, things happen. Kids get hurt. There's a whole system we set up to distinguish culpable causes from the other kind, otherwise we couldn't have life. We'd blame Henry Ford every time someone got hurt in a car wreck."

"Maybe we should," she snapped back, refusing comfort. "Maybe the world would be a better place if everyone took ultimate responsibility for every act, down to the seventh generation. Anyway, it's not just Giancarlo. It's not even the family. Even under the strictest definition of culpability, you won't deny that I'm directly responsible for how many homicides? Thirty-four, I believe. Half of an entire family wiped out, because I was enraged that some hillbilly moron shot my kid. So I sent for my Asian gangster pals. Kill them all. I actually said that. And they did."

"That's a different story," said Karp. "Yeah, you're an unindicted conspirator in a mass homicide. That's true."

"And this doesn't bother you?"

"Yeah, it bothers me. It was wrong. Even though you probably saved the lives of an even larger number of other people, cops and women and children. A little Hiroshima morality there. In any case, none of the alleged killings took place in the County of New York, so I personally don't have a moral conflict, and also my sense is that you were operating under extreme emotional trauma, and that would take some of the sting out of it if it ever came to law. Besides which, I'd argue that you can't be held responsible for all the events that occurred in a gang war, with heavy firearms on both sides. Your guys were just a lot better. I mean it's not like Tran lined all the Cade boys up against a wall and mowed them down. So you could go back to West Virginia and confess. And you know what would happen? First they'd cut you a sweetheart deal, because they have no legal case against you at all, and then they'd probably give you a medal for getting rid of the Cades for them. You want to do that? Pay your debt to society?"

"It's a shame you're not Catholic. You would've made a hell of a Jesuit." She sat up in bed, against the headboard, staring fiercely at her husband. "It has nothing to do with a debt to society. That's your thing. Fuck society! It's a moral wound. I have no place left to stand."

"You could go see Mike Dugan. Get absolution. Isn't that what you're supposed to do?"

"I don't have the energy for it. More to the point, I don't have good intention. To be forgiven you have to make an act of contrition, you have to promise in your heart that you won't do it anymore. And I can't do that. I'm still moving in a cloud of violence. What do I do all day? Train attack dogs. Attack dogs!"

"So quit."

"And do what? Be a lawyer? A housewife? How long before someone shows up and says, 'Hey, Marlene, I got this little problem you could help me with.' And I'd do it, I'd be in the thick of it again, with the bullets flying." She sighed and hung her head. Karp could see strands of silver nestling in the dark pelt. "Sometimes, at night, out at the farm, I take out my pistol and hold it and I stare down the barrel and I think, Oh, why the fuck not?"

Without a thought, Karp found his hands on her shoulders shaking her. "Shut up!" he cried. "Shut up! Shut up!"

He jammed his mouth against hers, roughly, and bore her down beneath him. She was stiff for a moment, her jaw clenched. Their teeth clashed painfully. Then she relaxed. Her felt her nails at the back of his neck. They barely undressed. He didn't know any other way to fight the death in her.

Lucy kept the boys out a good long time, ice cream and a visit to the little museum that exhibited common objects blown up to monstrous proportions, and a trip to the music-video emporium on Canal Street, where they rummaged through racks of old CDs, searching for the kind of weird music Giancarlo liked. When they entered the loft, they heard the sound of splashing and soft parental murmurings from the hot tub.

Lucy raised her finger to her lips and walked in a comically exaggerated tiptoe, ushering them in this way to the other end of the loft, where the childrens' rooms were located. Giancarlo paused and took a deep breath, his beautifully fluted nostrils expanding. He smelled the attar of roses his mother used in the bath and on her body. And other scents.

His brother whispered, "Is she going to stay?"

"Maybe," he replied. "Anyway, she's here now."

Felix was mildly pissed that the bitch hadn't wanted to come over and see his new place. He'd helped her clean that shithole soup kitchen up, he'd smiled and charmed the old bags-"yes, sister, no, sister"- and he'd shown her his new photographs, him and his daughter, a little pale girl with an uncertain smile. He'd made up a whole line of bullshit about the girl, so fluent and detailed that he believed it himself. Felix always believed the lies he constructed, which contributed in no small way to his success as a con artist and a seducer.

As yet he hadn't touched her, not really, just a brotherly hug or two, but he could see that she liked it, liked the attention. It wouldn't be hard once he got her in the apartment. But she wouldn't come. She had to go home for dinner and she had stuff to do, she said, after. Which had to be bullshit. Like guys were lining up to date her!

He found a connection on Tenth and Forty-Second Street, and bought some black beauties and Valiums and Tuinals. He popped a couple of the downers immediately to calm himself, take the teeth-grinding edge off the uppers he was on. The tranks were starting to kick in when he opened the door to his apartment and switched on the overhead light. It didn't light. He cursed, slammed the door, and walked farther into the room. He smelled something then, faint and familiar, but before he could figure out what it was, something struck him on the back of the head and he fell into a deeper darkness.