"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.
7
Felix came out of the fog in a splash of cold water, with a crushing pain in the back of his head and the discovery that he could not move. He blinked the water from his eyes and saw Rashid's face, floating there with a peculiar expression on it, avid and self-satisfied, like a nasty schoolteacher about to mete out punishment to an errant boy. Felix also observed that the reason he couldn't move was that he was secured to an armchair with duct tape. His right arm was affixed to his side, his torso was tied to the chair back, his ankles were similarly restrained, and his left arm was stretched out and taped to the kitchen table. The hand itself was heavily wrapped in silvery strips, except for the little finger, which hung free over the table's edge. Without seeming to, Felix tested his bonds, and found no give; he was an expert in this field and recognized the work of someone who knew the art. He noticed that the big shaven-headed guy, Carlos, was standing behind Rashid, holding something in his hand. Off to one side, just within Felix's field of view stood the other one, the beard, Felнpe.
Felix cleared his throat and said, "What the fuck is this, Rashid?"
"What is this? You want to know? Listen to me. Firstly, we Arabs invented numbers, did you know that?"
"Numbers?" Felix was trying to arrange his thoughts, come up with something, but it was impossible, with the pain in his head and the mounting fear in his belly. His eyes were fixed on his little finger hanging helpless over the table's edge.
"Yes, numbers. One, two, three, four. And also zero. Zero is an Arab invention. Many years ago, of course."
"Yeah, that's great," said Felix. "And look, Rashid, I don't know what this is all about, but you got to admit this is a little extreme, whacking me on the head. I mean there's no reason for… I'm doing good for you guys, right? I mean the bombs, and the girl is coming along real good, just the-"
"Shut up! So, since we invented numbers, of course we can count. I have counted my prepared devices and instead of twelve there are ten. That is two missing. Did you think I would not notice two missing bombs? Today I hear that this old man has been blown up in Queens, and I think, Can there be a connection? I tell you, Felix, my mind boggles. Is he really so stupid that he believes that I am so stupid that I don't notice this event? But it is so. You are a stupid man, Felix. I tell you, I warn you in every way, and yet you do this." He made a little clucking sound. "So, you must be trained like a donkey now, with the stick, so you will see we are serious men." He gave a quick command in guttural Arabic. Carlos moved swiftly into position with a pruning shears and snipped off the first two joints of Felix's little finger.
Over Felix's howl, Rashid asked, "Now,
where is the other bomb?"
***
"What happened to your hand?" asked Lucy when Felix showed up at the Holy Redeemer kitchen that evening.
Felix lifted the hand, which was swathed in bandages, and presented a rueful smile. "I caught it in a crusher at the recycle plant up in Morrisania. Took half my pinkie off. My second day. I could get workmen's comp, but meanwhile I'm on the bricks again. Some shit, huh?"
"That's terrible, Larry! What are you going to do?"
"Well, the violin playing is out." He uttered a brave little laugh; she smiled at him.
"You seem to be taking it well," she said.
"Hey, what else can I do? If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all. At least, as long as there's people like you in the world, I won't go hungry."
He gave her a glittering smile. She turned away and dumped some carrots she had cut up into a huge pot.
"Thank you. How's your little girl?"
"Oh, Sharon's great. Hey, that's some good news. I got custody of her. You know, I got this job, so my parole officer fixed it for me. She's at my place now."
"By herself?"
"No, no, there's a nice old lady down the hall, glad to watch her." He paused and offered another smile. "So… want to meet her? I told her all about you."
"Sure, I'd love to. Bring her around for supper. We have chocolate cake tonight."
"No, what I thought was, she's kind of shy and maybe the first time, you could come by our place. We could get takeout, you know, like a family evening."
His eagerness was palpable. "Well, it'd have to be next week," she said. His face fell, and for an instant she saw something boiling behind his eyes.
"Oh, that's too bad," he said. "Sharon'll be real disappointed."
Lucy said, "I wish I could, but I've got something of a family crisis myself." Someone called to her from the depths of the kitchen, and smiling an excuse, she went off.
Felix had to hand it to himself. Introspection was as foreign to him as Hungarian, but he realized in a vague way that he had a short fuse and that this had meant trouble for him in the past, and so he was proud of not having picked up a knife or something heavy and killing the little bitch right there in the kitchen. Losing a piece of his body had concentrated his mind more than it was used to, besides which he was clean and sober for the first time in a while, the Arabs having found and lifted his pills. But he had to get the girl alone, he had to get her to talk about this fucking gook the Arabs were so interested in. They were going to clip another joint off if he didn't tell them about the other bomb, so he did, but it was already planted, they couldn't move it, so it would eventually go off. Rashid had asked a lot of questions about the target and Felix had answered truthfully. In the end, Rashid had shrugged and acquiesced. And why not? What the fuck did they care where the bombs went off. Then Felix had made what seemed now to be an error. He had to disarm them, make them see he was still on the team, so he'd spun a story about the girl, the girl was ready to pop, she loved him, she'd do anything for him, he was that close to getting the story on the gook. It had worked, too. Rashid's eyes lit up.
That was the insurance. They could get another mule maybe to do the bombs, some skinhead, some wacko, but this they couldn't replace, the relationship. So he had to deliver, and soon. That would get him in good again, buy him a little time to figure out how to kill the three of them.
***
"How did it go?" asked Karp.
From the doorway of Karp's office, Collins said, "About as well as could be expected. Obviously they moved to dismiss after our case in chief, and Higbee blew them off. Then I chewed Burns up pretty good, the lying scumbag."
"Good. Good for you."
"And we started on Selwyn the ballistics fraudster."
"And?"
"Okay, I guess. But you know how it goes with this technical shit. One expert says one thing, the other expert says another. Who knows what a jury will do with it? I didn't stipulate to his expertise and I got the bit about him being fired from Jersey onto the record. Higbee sustained me. That's all we did, cross and redirect. Klopper was rare. I guess he figures if it's confusing once it'll be more confusing six times, and that'll add up to reasonable doubt. Judge let most of the repetition stand. So who knows?" He hesitated, then asked, "Did you come up with that thing?"
"Not yet," Karp admitted. "It's probably an idle fantasy, old neurons firing at random. And it's a little late for it now anyway. I'm sorry."
Collins shrugged, made a what-can-you-do gesture, waved a good-bye, and walked off. As he left the courthouse he loosened his collar and headed toward the subway for the ride uptown. Crossing White Street, he heard his name called. He turned and saw it was Hank Klopper.
Klopper pointed a blunt finger and said, grinning, "You momser, you did good in there. I was sweating."
"That's nice of you to say so, Mr. Klopper," said Collins, continuing to walk. Klopper fell into step beside him.
"It's Hank," said Klopper. "Not that it's gonna do you much good, given how things are in the city nowadays. Cop shoots Muslim? Half the people in the city would be lining up to buy the bullets, give 'em the chance."
"And half wouldn't."
Klopper laughed. "Point taken, but that still doesn't help you, because you need a hundred percent to convict. Sad but true. I could walk Jack the fucking Ripper right now if he was sporting a badge."
"We'll see," said Collins, moving away from the corner. "Nice talking to you, Hank."
"Can I give you a lift? West End Avenue, right?"
"How do you know where I live?"
"Hey, if you don't know where I live, you didn't do your job. Didn't Karp teach you to do a full bio on the comp?"
Collins stopped walking. He had not done such research, and was a little guilty about it, and was conscious that he was being flattered. He realized that for the first time he had reached the professional level where top-end defense lawyers thought it worth their while to treat him collegially. And avoiding a long subway ride at 110 degrees F. had its attractions. If Klopper wanted an opportunity to feel him out privately, two could play at that. He nodded agreement and they both turned east on White.
"So, you gonna be a lifer with the DA or are you planning to emerge into the broad uplands someday?"
"I like the work I'm doing."
"Sure, what's not to like? Except the salary. You got kids?"
"Clearly you know the answer to that," said Collins.
"Yeah, just making conversation. We're down here."
They entered a subterranean parking garage on White near Franklin. The temperature dropped ten degrees.
"This must cost you," said Collins.
"More than my rent on my first apartment. But leave my car out in the sun and the lunatics all day? Forget it! Also it's new. My second childhood, my wife says, a Porsche Carrera convertible, yellow. I had it three months."
They descended a flight of dark, gray stairs to a parking deck.
"Anyway, I understand idealistic," Klopper went on, "shit, it's hard to believe, but I was idealistic, too, way back when. I worked poverty law for a couple of years in Nassau County, then did a hitch with the DA out there. Meanwhile, it's gonna cost you probably a quarter million to educate each of your… holy fucking shit!"
This last phrase was shouted. Collins saw the Porsche in its stall, gleaming like a lone lemon at the bottom of a crate, and he saw bearing down onto it an immense Ford Expedition that was cutting to back out of the stall opposite, a little faster than was wise. It was clear even from a distance of twenty yards that the driver of the SUV was using only the rearview mirror and couldn't see the low sports car, and that the huge rear bumper of the Ford was not going to clear the Porsche's yellow snout. Klopper shrieked in anguish and ran forward a few steps. Collins hunched his shoulders and screwed up his face in helpless anticipation. He heard an expensive crunch, the tinkle of falling glass. Or perhaps he just imagined it, because the next thing he remembered was waking
up on a bed in St. Vincent's Hospital.
***
Karp actually heard the explosion as he walked north on Centre Street, but did not register it as anything that should have claimed his attention. A lifetime in New York had inured him to loud noises, and even the current age of terror had not changed that. It was a dull thump, felt more through the feet than heard. He was thinking about his wife, about the passion and terror of the previous night, and about whether she would stay or not. He did not like feeling helpless, but this seemed to be a consequence of marriage to Marlene Ciampi. He was used to it, as he was to loud noises.
***
Marlene watches Peter Balducci laid to rest in St. John's Cemetery, Queens, less than a mile from where he was killed and where he had lived nearly all his adult life. That was the good thing about getting killed in Queens, she thinks, a short commute. She suppresses the thought, as she does with the other irreverent thoughts she has at funerals. Isn't there a tribe that has clowns at funerals? That would be something she would have liked to do, had she been such a tribeswoman. A Catholic funeral, of course, very old-fashioned like Pete was, no cremation for Pete, but a proper burial next to the wife, and the Knights of Columbus turned out, elderly guys with strong peasant faces, dressed in sable cloaks and white-plumed bicorne hats. A rotten day for a funeral, she thinks, hot, sunny, no shade, everyone in black and sweating bullets, not a breeze moving the yew trees. It should rain on funerals, the black umbrellas out like shiny toadstools.
The daughters are there, crying, supported by their husbands. She didn't know them. Pete was a professional friend, would call for a drink every so often; he took a quasi-paternal interest in her. They would meet in a bar downtown somewhere, Pete, Raney, and Marlene, and catch up. An amusing guy, Pete, a good storyteller, a gambler in retirement, Atlantic City, Foxwoods, the track, also the stock market. He was always pushing penny stocks at her and Raney.
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