Reversible Error

by Robert Tanenbaum

  Guma knotted his brow. “It’s still hard to believe. I mean, there’s a zillion clubs. Why does he bother with this?”

  “Because it’s part of his thrill,” Caputo answered with passion. “It’s elegant, it’s clever, and he figures no one will ever catch on. Also, the guy’s a nut. Maybe he feels more in control this way. Maybe he’s nervous in a completely strange place. Who the hell cares? We got him.”

  Marlene was studying the altered chart. “JoAnne, what’s number fourteen? Why did you add one at the end?”

  “For Wagner. I bet if you check at the Omega Club you’re gonna find that the third weekend in June she was talking to a guy five-foot-ten, short blond hair, blue eyes, in white jeans and a windbreaker.”

  “I’ll get the cops moving on it,” said Guma, showing real excitement at last. “This, they can understand.”

  “What can I do for you, Butch?” asked Chief of Detectives Denton. The receiver of the phone was uncomfortably warm and slick against Karp’s ear. He thought, what you can do for me is to get me out of this goddamn situation, say it never happened, say Clay Fulton is back among the decent living souls instead of wherever he is, say that the line between the good guys and the bad is still bright and shiny.

  What Karp actually said was, “I got a call from Manning. You know, the cop on Bloom’s task force?”

  A pause. Then, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He was full of news. It seems somebody tried to assassinate Tecumseh Booth at his mother’s apartment house.”

  “I thought Booth was in custody,” said Denton.

  “Sprung on a technicality.”

  “Couldn’t you stop that?”

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I figured Booth in play on the street was a better bet than Booth with his lip buttoned in the cells. Not to mention that Rikers is not the safest place in the world if somebody wants to do you. And I was right, as it happened. It brought them out.”

  “Did anyone see the hit man?”

  “Yes, well, as a matter of fact, Manning said the shooter was identified leaving the scene. According to the cops there, who happened to be his own men, it was Clay Fulton himself. Speaking of whom, when your detectives pressed upon Mr. Booth the basically unsafe nature of his position, and that if he wanted police protection he was going to have to come up with some names, the name Mr. Booth came up with was Clay Fulton.”

  An expletive that Chief Denton did not ordinarily use hissed over the line. “I agree,” said Karp, “but what are we going to do about it?”

  “Do about it? Not a damn thing. So some mutt named him. We know it’s not him, and who can figure what a mutt is going to say? I could give a rat’s ass. As for the other thing—hanging out near the shooting—it’s part of the plan. Fulton can handle himself.”

  Karp took a deep breath, waited, and said, “Yeah, I guess. Look, Chief, you remember a couple of years back we had a bunch of Cubans running around killing people? I recall these guys got their start infiltrating terrorist groups for the feds, and in order to, like, prove they were the real goods, they would pop a couple of people, show their good intentions. Now, do you think it’s in the realm of possibility that Clay is doing the same thing? Showing he’s a friend by wasting this mutt?”

  A silence on the line. Then, “I’ll check it out.”

  “Please,” said Karp. “And for the record, Chief—if that’s the game plan, official or unofficial, I’m gone. I’m off the court. It’s wide open, no deal, whatever falls out. Sorry, but—”

  “I understand,” said Denton curtly, and hung up.

  “How was your day?” asked Marlene. They were in a cab, traveling north toward Karp’s aunt’s apartment.

  “Hell on earth,” replied Karp in a tone that did not encourage exploration. “How was yours?”

  Marlene shrugged. “Nothing much. Putting asses in jail.”

  “Where did you run off to in such a hurry?”

  “Oh, just had to see somebody I forgot about. Nothing special.”

  She was disinclined to share with Karp the revelations of that afternoon concerning the panty-hose rapist—or the panty-hose killer, as he now was. Karp was being withdrawn and sullen. She could play that game too, although she knew it was stupid and infantile to play back to him what he was putting out. Why should she always be the one to jolly him back to humanity? She was running a major jollying deficit herself, which she did not intend to keep doing into the indefinite future.

  Nor did she quite trust him to share her enthusiasm on this case. It wasn’t Karp’s kind of case, and he would be annoyed to see her plunging into something new when he expected her to be leaving the D.A. in a few weeks. She would drop it in his lap only when it was good and ripe, when they had the guy, and the loose ends were sewn up.

  After a few minutes Karp said in a dull voice, “I guess you’re starting to close things down, right? Since you’re leaving and all.”

  “Right,” said Marlene, intending no such thing.

  Silence reigned for the rest of the ride. Karp slouched in the corner of his seat, exhausted, the despair growing in him. He’d burned his bridges with Denton, that was for sure, however this mess turned out. He was surprised at how acutely he felt the loss. Perhaps he had imagined the extent of feeling in the relationship. What was he to Denton after all? A chip on the table? A useful tool?

  Faces flashed before his mind’s eye as he subjected various relationships to the skills honed at a thousand Q&A’s. Garrahy, a man absolutely himself, a model. How did you get that way? Where did the sureness come from? Denton. In the Garrahy mold, but … maybe it was that Karp was older, more experienced. Maybe he would have seen the same duplicity of motive in Garrahy if … No, that was crazy. Garrahy was all right. Denton was OK too. Fulton. Impossible to believe he was corrupt. There must be some mistake about shooting Booth. Maybe. Maybe nothing was as it seemed. The image of the lawyer Rich Reedy floated into his mind. A rogue, maybe, but an honest rogue. No pretenses. Maybe that was the way to survive. No illusions, no hypocrisy.

  Karp felt again a familiar painful emptiness. He defined it to himself as missing Garrahy and the ability to speak his mind frankly to a man he respected, but at some level he understood that it was more than that, something injured and missing behind the deepest defense. Now, and unusually, he thought of his father. He would have to do something about his family. He was getting married, after all.

  He imagined visiting his father, and his father’s hot young wife, and telling them. His father would take him aside. “They got any money?” he would ask confidentially, meaning Marlene’s family, feeling for the business possibilities. No? Then he would grin conspiratorially and say, “She’s a good piece of ass, huh?” Money and sex, the twin poles of existence. He might also say, “Schmuck! Rich girls got pussy too,” one of his favorite expressions.

  Dan, the younger of Karp’s two older brothers, would say the same thing, probably in the very same words. He had abraded his own personality into a pathetic clone of the old man’s, in a suicidal search for a morsel of attention. Richard, the eldest, had gone off the other end, seeking purity in a return to the faith. Assuming that Rabbi Richie could even bring himself to see Butch the Apostate, Karp imagined himself sitting in his brother’s musty living room, in which even the thick air had been passed as strictly kosher, and telling him that he was—the final infamy—marrying a shiksa. They would hear the blast in Tel Aviv.

  So much for family. Karp shook his head, as if clearing it after a physical blow. Why did he have to be alone like this? He was going to be a father soon, for God’s sake! What the hell did he know about being a father? What could he teach the kid? Shooting hoops? Cross-examination? He was the one who needed a father.

  But this thought, which might have occasioned much profitable internal dialogue, and also explained a good deal about Karp’s career thus far, was cut short by the arrival of the taxicab at its destination, a large apartment house on Central Park West.

  “That’
s four-eighty,” said the cab driver.

  “Ground control to Butch,” said Marlene. “We’re here.”

  Karp snapped to, fumbled for his wallet, paid, and left the cab. Marlene looked up at him, a worried expression on her face, and squeezed his arm. “Where were you?”

  Karp shrugged. He really didn’t know. “Just tired, I guess. Let’s go up.”

  TEN

  The woman who opened the door was half Karp’s size, and to Marlene’s eye Sophie Leo-noff bore scant resemblance to her grandnephew. Karp immediately swept her up into a hug that raised her shiny little shoes several inches off the ground. She kissed him loudly on both cheeks.

  “Uhh! What a monster!” she cried. “My ribs are broken. Come in, come in!”

  She ushered them out of the dim hallway and into a large brightly lit living room. Karp made the introductions, and Marlene could now examine her hostess more clearly. The face bore the deep lines and pouches of seventy or more years, but the huge black eyes that shone from their deep nets of wrinkles seemed younger, humorous and sharp. She was heavily but carefully made up. Her hair was dyed dark red, and she wore it in a tight nest of permed curls.

  On her thin frame she wore a marvelous dress of black silk, netted across the front and decorated with sequins, the kind they sell in the little appointment-only dress shops that dot the Fifties off Fifth Avenue.

  Aunt Sophie also wore a simple string of pearls and a clinking assortment of bracelets and jeweled rings. A rich New York matron in a remarkable state of preservation, thought Marlene, and was preparing herself to undergo an evening in her patented nice-to-old-ladies persona, when she became aware of being subjected to a scrutiny sharper than the one she herself had applied.

  Aunt Sophie had cocked her head back and was examining Marlene through shrewd and narrowed eyes, a quizzical smile playing on her lips. She fondled the material of Marlene’s suit jacket briefly, felt the lining, then made a little turning motion of her hand, jangling her bracelets. “Turn around for me, dolling,” she said.

  Marlene rotated obediently. “A nice five,” said Aunt Sophie. “Very nice. So tell me, when you’re expecting?”

  Marlene blushed and uttered an astounded laugh. Aunt Sophie patted her arm reassuringly. “Dolling, pardon me I’m calling a cat a cat. I was in the business. I made more wedding gowns than I got hairs left. You ain’t the first, believe me.”

  Marlene looked at Karp, who was standing like a phone booth, examining the ceiling. “December,” she said.

  “That’s nice,” said Aunt Sophie. “I’ll be a great-great-aunt, I should live that long.” She clutched Karp by the elbow. “You, momser, come with me to the kitchen, you can help take out from the oven. I don’t like to bend down so much, I maybe can’t stand up straight again.” To Marlene she said, “Make yourself comfortable, dolling. There’s a bar there, have what you want. You could make me a little Scotch and soda with ice, denk-you.”

  The tiny woman hauled Karp away and Marlene walked over to the bar, taking in the living room as she did so. It was furnished in the taste of the late thirties, art-deco-painted furniture in beige and pale gray, bas-relief plaques featuring sharp-eyed women with their wooden hair carved in buns, a white baby-grand piano covered with photographs in silver and wooden frames.

  The thick carpeting was beige, as were the walls, which held two large lithographs, framed and signed, one by Ben Shahn and the other by Picasso. Everything shiny and well-cared-for, without mustiness or fuss, as in the kind of museums where people actually live in costume among colonial antiques.

  The bar was also a reminder of an age when the upper middle classes poured enormous quantities of hard liquor down their throats at every occasion in which more than two people were in a room for more than three minutes. Marlene made a Scotch for Sophie and a Coke for Karp. She restricted herself to a white wine, in deference to the Little Embarrassment.

  Sipping her wine, she inspected the pictures on the piano, at first idly, then with fascination, as she realized they cast a hitherto unavailable light on the mysterious stranger to whom she had bound herself. Here were Aunt Sophie and another woman, in their twenties. Sophie, lovely as a young bluebird, was laughing, while her companion, less well-favored but still handsome, looked out at the camera suspiciously with a face full of unerring righteousness: Karp’s ferocious late grandmother.

  A wedding portrait from the thirties: a tall man, looking determined and confident, bearing Karp’s wide cheekbones, and a beautiful woman with Karp’s gray eyes, eyes that were not at all confident, in a beautiful, gentle, and introspective face. The dead mother and the estranged father. The thought exploded into her mind that all this was now growing within her body. It rocked her like the surf and she grew momentarily dizzy.

  Her vision cleared, and she reached for another frame. Three boys, aged about eight, ten, and twelve, the youngest her own lover. The other two were showing the false smiles encouraged by commercial photographers; little Butch, in contrast, was holding out, just the ghost of a secret smile on his lips and his little chin defiantly raised. Unaccountable tears stung her eyes.

  She dabbed at them and went on. A portrait of a continental-looking man with a pearl tie pin and an Adolphe Menjou mustache. Husband? Brother?

  In a black ebony frame, a small sepia photo taken before the turn of the century, a large family in front of a farmhouse in summer, the men hatted and heavily bearded, the women in long white dresses, the boys in sidelocks, the little girls in pinafores. The Old Country. Marlene’s grandmother had stacks of pictures like this one, from another Old Country. For the first time since she had begun with Karp, it came home to Marlene that the difference might be important.

  The rest of the photographs showed a younger Sophie with other people, dressed elegantly in the fashions of the twenties and thirties, usually at cafe tables covered with food and bottles, and in the street, in trios and couples, clutching one another and laughing at the camera. The streets were in Europe somewhere—ah, it was Paris—the signs in French, a typical Metro entrance in one background.

  Marlene smiled and inspected one of these photographs more closely. In this, Sophie was holding the arm of a sharp-faced woman with large intelligent eyes. With a start, Marlene recognized Colette.

  Thus was Marlene’s curiosity unbearably piqued, and after the excellent dinner, during which two bottles of an unearthly Montrachet followed the suprême de volaille down the hatch, oiling the tongues of the two ladies, while reducing Karp to grinning stupefaction, she brought up the subject of Sophie’s speckled past.

  “Colette, yeh,” laughed Sophie. “Another size five. Yeh, yeh, of course, dolling, I knew them all. We was in New York, from Poland, me and my sister may she rest in peace, five years sewing, and I run off with a dencer. A bum, but from gorgeous, quel beau, you never saw. Then after—who knows?—a year, he ran off with a putain, who knows where?

  “So, nu, I wake up, I’m in Paris, with no money, what I’m gonna do? Thank God, I could use a needle. I worked for Worth, for Mainbocher. Also, later, I had my own place on Rue Champollion.

  “They all came to me, the actresses, the girlfriends, the writers. Why not? I was good and I was cheap. Ma petite juive, they used to say.”

  She giggled. “You know what I done? I had a friend, fancy-schmancy, très beau mondaine, versteh’s? A very fine lady. We used to go to the salons for the shows. I was the servant, the little mouse in the back. I would see the dresses. Then I would run back and buy material and take it to the shop and make the dresses. For my friend and her friends.”

  “You made them? From memory?”

  “Of course, from memory—what you think? Every stitch, better than Dior and half the price. You couldn’t tell the difference. That’s how I met Max. Max, my husband, he should rest in peace. He had businesses in New York. When he found out what I did, he said, ‘Sophie, this is millions here, what you can do. Make the dresses, cut patterns, I’ll send them to New York, I got there people can
make thousands with machines.’

  “So I did, and he was right, we got rich. Cousu d’or! Every year, I would go back and forth, back and forth, boats, airplanes. All first-class. In Paris, at the George V all the time. And we got married. He said, why not mix business with pleasure? A mensch, aimable! That was Max. You would’ve loved him. Roger, you remember Uncle Max?”

  Karp stirred, mumbled something, and resumed his grinning stupor.

  “Our first season, he gave me this.” Aunt Sophie stretched her arm across the table to show Marlene a bracelet on her wrist. It was a thick wide band of gold in the art-nouveau style, decorated with a line of jaguars running through a jungle. The jaguars’ eyes were diamonds and the jungle was constructed of close-packed emeralds. Marlene examined the bracelet. “It’s incredible,” she exclaimed and then froze briefly. Just above the bracelet on the thin wrist was a line of blurred blue numbers: 75955. Below these, a tiny solid heart had been tattooed in red.

  Aunt Sophie caught the change in expression. “Yeh, that. He begged me, he said, ‘Sophie, don’t go this year, I got a bad feeling. But me, what did I know from this? I forgot I was Jewish already. I went for the spring show in 1940, and bang, comes the Nazis. I’m caught. Two years I’m hiding. I’m sewing, I’m starving. Then I get picked up—don’t ask! Un tour de cochon! I was in the camps two years, four months, thirteen days. I don’t know the minutes. Also sewing, for the Nazis, they want nice clothes for the girls too.

  “So. I got on my wrist a souvenir. I come back on the boat, Max is there. ‘In my heart I knew you would come back,’ he says to me. He wants me to get rid of this, but I say, no, we should never forget. But I put in this heart myself, to cover up, you know, the swastika.

  “Roger, here, he was always interested, so interested. His mother, she should rest in peace, would say, ‘Leave Aunt Sophie alone, she don’t want to remember these times,’ but he would ask. One time, cute! You could die from it. He brought out a little wet rag and soap. I’ll clean it off, Aunt Sophie.’ So he was scrubbing, scrubbing, and the more he was scrubbing, the more it wouldn’t come off, and he was crying and scrubbing. You remember that, Roger?”