Resolved kac-15

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Karp let out a short hard laugh and threw a big arm over Murrow's shoulders. "It was the secret of life, my son."

  "May one know it?"

  "When you're older, Murrow. It wouldn't make any sense to you now. Let's go back and join the party and see what excesses our friends have perpetrated in our absence."

  ***

  "Oh, good," said Guma when Karp and Murrow entered, "you didn't fall in. What the hell is wrong with the heating? My nuts are freezing off."

  "No loss to the world, if you ask me," said Stupenagel.

  "I didn't ask you," said Guma. "What I asked you was if you could breathe on them to take the chill off, but oh, no…"

  Karp sat on his couch, a little grumpily, because he could not figure out a polite way of kicking Stupenagel out of his chair. Instead, he said to Guma, "You can't smoke in here, Goom. In fact, you're not supposed to be smoking at all."

  Guma admired his big Macanudo and took another puff. "Excuse me, are you speaking as the deputy fire marshal or as my personal fucking physician? Every time I smoke one of these things it takes fifteen minutes off my life, and considering what my life is like nowadays, it's worth it. That's yet another thing that was better in the old days- right, Stupenagel?"

  Stupenagel said, "Yes, Karp, we've been sharing some old-fart moments, even though he's, of course, vastly older than I am. Decades. Guma longs for the days when the criminal justice system was even more arbitrary and vicious than it is now, and when, in his phrase, 'you fucking jackals' knew your place, which was to take our split of the graft and stick to the sordid affairs of the lowlifes."

  "An exaggeration," said Guma.

  "You think the system is arbitrary and vicious?" asked Karp.

  "Yes, of course," she said, "don't you?"

  "No, not really," said Karp.

  Stupenagel swiveled Karp's chair around and stared at him as if he had just wondered why, if the Earth was a ball, the people on the bottom half didn't fall off. Karp noticed this, and also that she had somehow partially undrunked herself. Her jaw had stiffened up and her eyes were no longer floating in a boozy sea. He recalled that this was one of Stupenagel's more valuable journalistic talents, but whether it was a result of ruse or immense natural capacity, he had never been able to tell.

  "I mean, it's not what it should be," he continued, "it's a human institution, like the church and the press. Humans are fallible beings."

  "There's no comparison at all," she replied. "The press, my sweet fanny! What if every time I wanted to run a story I had to convince twelve high school graduates selected at random that it was true, while some other guy tried to convince them it was false."

  "You'd be wrong less often?" suggested Karp.

  "Excuse me, but if we had to print retraction notices as often as DNA evidence freed people you guys convicted, we wouldn't have any room for the bra ads, and Guma would stop reading the paper. Can you really sit there and tell me that the American justice system has any other purpose than the aggrandizement of fucking lawyers? Oh, and to make sure that rich people don't have to pay for their crimes any more than once or twice a decade. Do you realize that over ninety percent of the people in this country believe that some innocent people are convicted of murder? A hundred and fucking ten murder and rape convictions at last count thrown out because of genetic testing."

  "What's the alternative? The Star Chamber?"

  "Yes, that's what you guys always say, although we have no evidence at all that the Star Chamber was any less unjust than trial by jury. The reason they invented juries in the first place was so that the English barons could do what they damn well pleased and be tried by their pals instead of having to face the king's justice. It's designed to give the rich a better break than the poor- that's what it's fucking for."

  "Commie pinko atheist slut," said Guma. "I guess the way they do it in Red China is better."

  "No, but the Euros get by without juries very well, thank you, and their crime rates are a tenth what ours are."

  "That's a non sequitur," said Karp. "The crime rate has nothing to do with juries."

  "No, but it's got to have something to do with your fucked-up system. Hey, you want to warehouse a third of the black male population? Go right ahead! But don't dress it up like it's justice."

  "Oh," said Guma, "now she's gonna go with the oppressed minorities. Wait a second, let me get out my towel."

  "Asshole! Tell him he's an asshole, Karp."

  Karp, who had occasionally entertained private flashes of the type the reporter was expressing, said nothing, but took refuge in aphorism: "The law is born from despair about human nature: Ortega y Gasset," he intoned, which put a temporary stopper on the conversation. After a moment, Karp said to Murrow, "Listen, go find that woman from the governor's office and get a straight answer out of her about if and when this thing is going to start."

  ***

  Marlene spent a reasonably pleasant hour watching Zak conquer Asia on the computer, and listening to Giancarlo play some new songs and watching him demonstrate a device that read pages in a book and spoke the text in a creaky mechanical voice. As she had promised, she did not break down. Around noon, Lucy and Dan emerged from the guest room, hand in hand. Marlene observed that her daughter's mouth, already generous, seemed puffed across half her face and that her normally dull skin shone with a milky light, except for the numerous red marks. Lucy engineered a lunch: cold shrimp quiche, salad, and white wine for the big people, zapped frozen tacos and lemonade for the boys. Giancarlo valiantly charmed and, Marlene noted with pleasure, Dan Heeney stepped up to the plate and batted a few long balls in that department, too. An excellent addition to the Karp family, she thought, and would get along fine with whichever respectable woman Karp would next take up with.

  After that it was time to get ready. Marlene bathed in the big tub she had made long ago out of a black rubber electroplating bath she had found onsite when she'd first taken this loft. What a long time ago it seemed, before SoHo, before Karp and the children, before the first killing. She stayed in the bath for a long time, not long enough to wash her sins away, but long enough to have a good silent weep, and to prompt her daughter to tap discreetly on the door.

  She dressed in baggy slacks of heavy, braided black silk, tucked into knee boots and a long wool tunic that buttoned down the front. By the time she emerged from the bedroom, the family was dressed and ready, the boys looking strangely unformed in jacket and tie, Lucy surprisingly elegant in the little black number.

  "Don't rush," said Lucy. "I called. Flynn said the whole thing's been delayed for a couple of hours."

  ***

  Murrow returned five minutes later. "They're setting up the cameras again," said Murrow. "The man is entering the building as we speak. They're saying half an hour."

  Stupenagel slid out of Karp's chair and turned toward the window. "And the snow seems to be letting up. I can see across the square now." She stepped back and checked her reflection in the glass. She hiked her skirt up and around and tucked in her shirt, then reached into her bag and brought out a compact, which she flipped open.

  Guma said. "If you're gonna shave your legs, Stupenagel, I believe I'll ask to be excused."

  "I never shave my legs," she replied, examining herself critically in the mirror. She wielded a hairbrush. "I have a Moldavian who likes to yank the hairs out with his teeth, one by one."

  The three men watched as she whipped through a quick and efficient toilette, finishing with a blast of breath spray. She looked as though she had been supping tea and ladyfingers for the past three hours, rather than guzzling large quantities of assorted alcohols.

  "Well, boys, I think I'll circulate and collect lies. Thanks for the drinks and the philosophy." She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder.

  "Aren't you going to take your underpants?" Murrow asked grumpily.

  She fixed him with a look down her long nose, one that made Murrow acutely aware of how much taller she was than he. "And what underpants
would those be, sir?"

  "The ones on the sprinkler head."

  She made a show of peering at them. "Lovely. What makes you think I tossed them up there?"

  "What makes me think…? Jesus, Stupenagel, I saw you yank them off and throw them."

  "Yet another demonstration of the unreliability of the eyewitness. In an alcohol-driven sex fantasy, you imagined me removing my underwear and tossing it up there, but in fact I am wearing the pair I set out with this morning. Would you like to check?"

  "Yes!"

  "Care to put some money on it, sonny? Say a hundred bucks my loins are enclosed in a pair of chaste and hygienic Hanes cottons, in black?"

  Murrow looked desperately at Guma and Karp; the former was intently examining the damp tip of his cigar, the latter made an almost imperceptible negative motion of his head.

  "I've been set up," said Murrow.

  "I don't know what you're talking about, dear boy," she said, "but clearly you're not about to put your money where your mouth is, so I will bid you all a temporary adieu. Butch, if your lovely bride shows up, tell her I said hi, and to give me a call sometime. Guma, let me know when you die, okay? I'll send a wreath."

  She left. Both Guma and Murrow blew kisses at the door. Karp sat down behind his desk and said, "Listen, both of you: speaking of being set up, why am I getting these weird looks whenever any of the big boys mentions me being the DA?"

  "Weird looks?" asked Murrow.

  "Yeah. Like they all know something I don't know. What is it, I'm going to be standing up there being sworn in and a big bucket of blood is going to come down on my head like in Carrie? What?"

  "That must be about the pool," said Murrow after a nervous silence.

  "What pool?"

  "The one about how long you'll last before fucking up so bad politically that the governor can ask you to resign with no shit sticking to him."

  "Oh," said Karp. "Why didn't you tell me about this before?"

  "I thought you'd disapprove. I mean, of my involvement."

  "In the pool? You're betting I'm going to get canned?"

  "No, I'm running the pool. I'm taking the bets. The line is fifteen to one you won't last the year, and forty to one you won't win election if you run."

  "I'll take some of that action," said Guma and laughed, and then Murrow joined him and finally Karp, who said, "Tell me, does Jack Keegan have any money in the pool?"

  "Yeah, but he's picking up some of my risk. Like me, he thinks you'll hang in there."

  "That's a surprise."

  "No it ain't," said Guma confidently. "Keegan knows he's a twisty, ambitious prick, but he also knows that you're the closest thing to a reincarnation of Francis Phillip Garrahy that he's likely to see in this life. And he loved Phil. As long as it doesn't hurt his ambitions he'd like to see one like him in the DA. Which is why he's kept you around all these years, and protected you, when it would've been a lot better for him to have given you the boot. And why he used a bunch of chips with the party of evil to get you the appointment. You didn't realize this?"

  "It's particle physics to him," said Murrow and Karp was about to come back with a rejoinder when the phone rang. He listened for a moment or two, and Murrow, observing his face, asked, "Bad news?" Karp held up a shushing hand and continued to listen. He said, "I understand" several times and hung up.

  "What?" asked Murrow.

  "Bomb threat," said Karp.

  "Here?"

  "Yeah, it sounded like the real thing, too. They said they're going to take down this building unless we release Feisal ibn-Salemeh."

  ***

  Rashid clicked off his cell phone, put his car in gear, and drove carefully away. It was his supreme moment, giving orders to Karp in that way. He felt for the first time in his life entirely in control. Except for the car.

  He had never driven in this kind of snow before, and the tension of driving racked his nerves. But besides that, he felt everything had worked out remarkably well, a tribute to his organizing genius: the gigantic coup was now fact, all the layers of deception jerked away to reveal the perfection of their plan, nearly six years in the making: assembling the papers and the money, infiltrating the sleepers, buying the necessary firms, gaining the skills. Then those morons had blown up the World Trade Center and suddenly no Arab could move freely around the country and they had had to recruit Felix. A mistake as it turned out, but he had brilliantly compensated for it, and no real harm done, because of the depth, the intricacy of the plan. The bidding for the contract to supply two boilers for the building, which, of course, they won. Everyone knew that Americans thought only of money, so in order to gain access to any place all you had to do is become the low-bid contractor. He had seen that the boilers were put in place, he had led the quick violent action that neutralized the few outside workmen. His troops were completely in charge of the courthouse basement. Rashid had wired the blasting cap to a cell phone ring circuit, and left the construction site and driven a few streets away and made his call. All that was needed now was for Carlos and Felнpe to arrive from the Inwood site with a plastic pipe full of acetone peroxide crystals. They would insert the pipe into a hollow drilled into the seventeen thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate that filled one of the boilers. Placing the initiator charge was the trickiest part of the operation, but ibn-Salemeh had been adamant about doing it that way. You had to have a good burn to bring down a prewar building of solid masonry and steel, and the initiator was essential to a good burn. But the peroxide was sensitive stuff and it had to be made fresh before use.

  Rashid checked his watch. At this moment Carlos would be installing the initiator into the heart of the great bomb.

  He drew the car to the curb, or at any rate out of the middle of the street. He had not counted on the snow, but it seemed to be letting up and would make no difference to the success of the plan. He had to keep moving because they would be trying to pinpoint the location of the cell phone from which the calls originated. He sat for a moment with the heater running full blast, enjoying the quiet of the blanketed city. Then his cell phone warbled. That would be Carlos giving the coded message that the bomb was ready for detonation, that the booby traps guarding it were in place, and that the whole crew was out of the building. He answered the phone and waited. But it wasn't the coded message.

  ***

  "They're not answering at the courthouse," said Lucy, hanging up the phone.

  "It's probably crazy there, with the snow and the governor and the ceremony," said Marlene. "Let's just go."

  "Can't we finish this game?" asked Zak.

  "No," answered his mother, tossing in her cards, "you'll have your whole life to play hearts. Get your coats!"

  So they bid Dan good-bye and bundled up in their warmest and hit the frozen streets. It was the kind of day when not people who love people, but people who own four-by-four high-bed pickup trucks with knobby tires, feel like the luckiest people in the world.

  "It seems to be letting up," observed Marlene as she steered east on a nearly empty Grand Street.

  "Yeah, from a total white-out blizzard," said Lucy, sitting next to her. "I'm glad it's you driving." In the family, Marlene was famous for her winter driving skills. As she passed Baxter, Marlene found that the sole lane down the center of the snowy road was blocked by a plumbing company van. The driver had skidded sideways and was now doing the worst possible thing, gunning his engine, spinning his wheels, and digging himself in even deeper.

  "That moron!" said Marlene and rolled down her window. "Don't do that!" she yelled, "Rock it!" The engine up ahead continued to roar, however, and sent up blue clouds of stinking smoke.

  "Can you back up?" asked Lucy.

  "No, there's a big tow truck behind me," said Marlene, after checking her side mirrors. "Crap!" The tow truck honked its air horn helpfully.

  Then the passenger-side door of the van opened and a man jumped out. He walked back to the rear of his truck and examined the situation, which was that the rea
r wheels were sunk to the hubs and spinning on solid ice. He yelled to the driver, who stuck his head out of the window and yelled back. The wheels stopped spinning. The man opened the double rear doors of the van and yelled something else. The driver stepped down from the van.

  "That's Tamazight," said Lucy.

  "What?"

  "Those guys are speaking Tamazight, like the guy we saw…" She rolled her window down and looked out at the man behind the plumber's van, who was now talking into a cell phone.

  "That's him," said Lucy. "That's Maybe Gonzales. What're they doing out here? Should we call the cops? Mom?"

  ***

  Marlene doesn't answer. She is staring at the man, who has put his cell phone away and is now removing a short length of three-inch plastic pipe from the rear of the van. The tow truck honks again. Marlene understands what she's seeing, and understands what she has to do. She hands Lucy her cell phone.

  "Yeah, call the cops. Tell them we've spotted people who are probably members of the Manbomber gang, right next to the courthouse. They've got what looks like big pipe bombs. Give them the details on the guys, and remind them that the governor is in the courthouse right now. Then call Dad and tell him the same thing."

  "What are you going to do?" Lucy asks. She doesn't like the look on her mother's face.

  "Call," says Marlene and slips from the cab of the truck. She goes to the rear and pops the camper door.

  Zak asks, "What's going on, Mom? Why did we stop?"

  "A little problem. Look, both of you, it's real important that you stay here with Lucy. I have to go and check on something."

  She takes a key ring out of her bag and uses a cylinder key to open a steel lock box bolted to the bed of the truck. The can suppressor is still screwed to the barrel of the Beretta nine-millimeter from the night she used it on Cherry and her dealer.

  "What's going on, Mom?" asks Giancarlo. The guide dog whimpers.