Chapter 17
Marlene was lying in the darkened bedroom with a cold compress across her eyes and two Tylenol plus codeine caps dissolving not quickly enough in her stomach, when her husband walked in. He said, “What’s all this about somebody trying to grab Zik in the park?”
“Later,” she whispered.
Later, about ten that night, she emerged, wearing her flamingo kimono, and plopped down next to him on the couch. She picked up the remote and switched off the television. Karp immediately forgot what he had been watching and watched his wife, who slumped against his shoulder like a sandbag. “Take care of me,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Take care of me. I can’t think anymore. My brain doesn’t work right. They’re going to kill my kids, and I can’t think of how to get out of it.”
A thrill of fear. Karp shifted himself to face her. He gripped Marlene’s shoulders and stared into her face. Her head flopped, as if she were drunk, but she was not. She was crying, slowly, fat tears like glycerine flowing down her flawless cheek from the one duct that still worked, the other eye gleaming brightly, falsely, undisguised by the usual veil of hair.
“Marlene, are you okay? I mean, should I call the doc?”
“Does he pack a gun? Call the Army, call out the Marines. Call out the Monsignor Ryan High School marching band. I can’t do it anymore.” This last came out as a high-pitched whispery noise that would have been a shriek had it any energy behind it.
Karp took a couple of deep ones against the rising panic, and when he thought he had his voice under control, he said, “Marlene, okay, I’ll take care of it, but you have to tell me what ‘it’ is. What happened in the park today? I got the story from Posie, but there’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yeah. A guy’s been following me in a red Dodge pickup with a green fender. All day. And he must have gone after Zik, but the dog scared him off. A wise guy. Not from Buttzville. They killed Jumping Jerry. They probably got Shirley, too. I checked out Nobile. Building maintenance. Osborne called. You know what building? Guess!”
“Marlene, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Look, I’m going to call the doctor-”
She grasped his wrist hard, her nails digging painfully into the soft flesh of the underside. “No! Listen to me!” In a crazy voice she said, “I’m not crazy.”
Karp removed her hand and held it tenderly. “Okay, you’re not crazy, but you’re not making much sense either. Slow down, take a deep breath, and tell me the whole thing, from the start.”
There must have been few people in town more suited to elicit a complex story from a distraught witness than Karp, and he fell back on his professional skill to extract the entire tale of the Fein investigation up to and including the intelligence that before being hired at Fein’s law firm, Nobile had been a superintendent at the Empire State Building.
“That’s where they got the key,” Marlene concluded. “Panofsky must have set things up for his Mob friends. The fixer. He took care of Nobile, and Nobile got the key to the outside deck, and kept his mouth shut after, and Panofsky gave the key to whoever, and they lured Fein up there to the observation deck and then they hustled him through the door and put the key on him and tossed him over.”
“Whoever,” said Karp. “You think it’s connected, what happened in the park today?”
“Why else? A guy looks like a Vegas mobster tries to take Zik. It’s a subtle message. We don’t like what you’re doing.”
“Yeah, but, Marlene, the Mob doesn’t usually go after family. You know that. And they usually drive around in Town Cars and Crown Vics, not old pickups from Buttzville.” And saying the word “family” triggered an uncomfortable thought in Karp’s mind. “Where’s Lucy?” he asked.
Marlene uttered a series of whooping sounds that could have been laughter or weeping. “Oh, yeah, Lucy. How could I forget? Lucy is with Tran. A cop came to pick up Lucy this morning, and Tran spotted him as someone in deep with our old pal Mr. Leung; hence he decided not to let her go with him, and also decided that if one cop was bent, another might be, too, so she is in protective custody among a bunch of Vietnamese gangsters he hangs out with.” And some noises indicating incipient hysteria. The mastiff clumped in from the kitchen, drawn by dog emotional radar signals, and placed his great head on her knee. She crumpled one of his hot velvet ears and began cooing doggy talk.
Karp snapped, “Stop it! Goddamn, Marlene, what the hell is this! What cop?”
“Detective Wu. Who else?”
“Jesus! Wu’s dirty?”
“Yeah, Tran checked it out after. I guess that explains why they haven’t been making stellar progress on the Asia Mall killings and why the Chens are so freaked out. Everybody in Chinatown must know Wu is bent except all of us lo faan round-eye assholes.”
“You knew about it this morning, obviously,” said Karp a little testily. “Didn’t you think to call me up? I could’ve had Tran downtown talking to IAD. Christ, we’ll tear that whole precinct apart-”
“Not with Tran you won’t, and that’s all you have right now.”
“What, you’re saying Tran won’t talk? Why the hell not?”
Marlene sighed. She thought briefly of trying a couple of fancy lies, but no longer possessed the energy necessary for fabrication at a level that would pass; nor did she feel any longer like the Marlene who thought that sort of thing was cool.
“Because he’s not Tran. Because he’s a Viet Cong. Because he’s some kind of war criminal besides. Because he was also a hit man for the triads in the Philippines. He won’t cooperate with the police; he can’t. That’s why.”
There was a longish silence as Karp came to a boil. She stroked the dog’s head.
“You knew this?” he cried. “You let our daughter hang out with someone like that?”
She started crying again. “Oh, Butch, he’s just a big, fierce dog. He won’t hurt her any more than Sweety would. Don’t beat on me, Butch. Not now. Just fix it. He’s on a beeper; his number’s in my Rolodex.”
“Marlene. .”
“Honestly, Butch, I’m so tired,” she said, and drew her legs up and cradled her head in her hands. The dog caught the tone of the argument and gave Karp a baleful look, growled briefly, and sank to the floor below her, breathing noisily, on guard.
Karp, not having had brain surgery a few scant weeks ago, was better able than his wife to deal with a number of complex issues at once. He was angry and satisfied at the same time; his Pleistocene male instincts did not get much feeding around Marlene, and now there was warm defense-of-wife-and-family red meat. He pounded out the beeper number he found, made a couple of brief calls while he waited, and then the phone rang.
Karp heard something in French, which he didn’t get, and he said, “Do you speak enough English to understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Good. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to bring my daughter home. Now.”
A pause, then, “If you wish.”
“I wish,” Karp said, and hung up.
He made another call and then came back to the living room. Marlene had not moved, nor did she budge as he sat next to her.
“Okay, I fixed it,” he said.
She shifted to bring her real eye around to look at him. A pang of sympathy plucked at his heart, and he tried to keep it from his face. She had the bristling, fierce, helpless, desperate look of an unfledged eaglet. Her glassie had rolled out of position and now seemed to be looking at the dark TV; the staples holding her scalp together glinted horribly against the black fuzz on her scalp.
“Do you want to hear this now?” he asked gently.
“Sure.”
“Okay. Tomorrow, you, me, Posie, and the kids are going out to Long Beach to stay with Sophie at the house. I’ve arranged for Ed Morris and Debbie Bryan to come along.”
“Who’s Debbie Bryan?”
“A PW on the squad. She’s good, you’ll like her.”
&n
bsp; “Uh-huh. What about Tran?”
“No Tran. No Vietnamese shooters, Marlene. No more. This is straight up, by the book. We’ll stay out there until this goddamn mess is resolved.”
Marlene mumbled assent.
“I called Harry. I told him you’re off the Fein thing until further notice. I got Clay Fulton working on the Wu business. They’ll put a team on him and see if he makes contact with Leung again.”
“Uh-huh. What about your work?”
“Fuck it! Crime will be rampant for a week while I’m out of town. Jack will be back tomorrow, and I’ve got about a thousand hours of leave. He doesn’t like it, he can lump it. You need to rest, and I’m going to make sure you do if I have to sit on your head.”
The phone rang. Marlene visibly cringed. “Don’t answer it!”
It rang three times, and the machine cut in. A crackle of static, then, “Marlene, pick up! Marlene, this is an emergency! Marlene? Chingada madre! Look, Marlene, Brenda Nero just went crazy. Chester dumped her and left town and she thinks you got him to do it and she was screaming about how you ruined her life and she started a fire here and while we were running around like cockroaches she got into my office and stole my Colt. I think she may come looking for you. Marlene? Christ! Just call me, okay?” Click.
Marlene uttered a loud groan, almost a howl. The dog sat up, startled. Marlene burrowed into the sofa and dragged a pillow over her head. Karp stroked her back and made soothing noises, as did the mastiff, in his way. This went on for some time. They heard the elevator rumble into life, and shortly Lucy came stomping in, as if returning from the junior prom.
“Hey, what’s going on?” she asked brightly. “What’s wrong with Mom?”
“Your mom’s a little out of it right now, Lucy. What’s going on is that we’re going out to the beach tomorrow, Aunt Sophie’s.”
“All of us? What about my lab?”
“Take a break. You’ll still be a genius when we get back.”
“Can I bring Mary Ma?”
“No.”
“I’ll go call her,” she said, not hearing, and started for the phone.
“Lucy! I said-”
Marlene said, “Let her. One more won’t make a difference to Sophie, and if she doesn’t have someone to hang out with, she’ll get bored and bitchy and she’ll pick at me and the boys and she’ll drive me crazy. Crazier than I am. Please.”
So the next morning early the Volvo was packed, after the usual alarms and shrieks about forgotten things, several trips up and down the elevator, Karp admirably keeping his temper, acting as major domo, Marlene listlessly observing, and they set out. Karp drove the car, something he ordinarily did as little as possible, blessing its automatic transmission, and Marlene sat next to him, wearing huge wraparound sunglasses, a head scarf, a straw hat, a short-sleeve shirt, and blue linen shorts (looking wan and exhausted like Judy Garland in her final year), and in the rear seat sat Lucy and Mary Ma (who knew what oriental stratagems she had used to convince her parents to let her go?) and Posie, wearing a tank top (braless, as Marlene had-uncharacteristically-not even noticed until it was too late) and a pair of jean cutoffs heavily embroidered and more holes than not, and the two boys shoved down among them like chickens on a third-class Honduran bus, squealing with excitement, and the dog wheezing in the luggage compartment, squashing the bags and drooling from time to time on the bare necks of the girls.
As they pulled onto Canal Street, a dark Plymouth slipped into line behind them, this carrying Ed Morris and Debbie Bryan. Bryan was a chocolate-colored woman with a cropped afro and a long neck, her upper body stuffed fetchingly into a red tube and the lower encased in loud print culottes. Morris was wearing a pink shirt and bermudas. Neither of them was complaining about this particular duty. Cop work was rarely a day at the beach, but now it actually was.
The small caravan went through the Battery Tunnel and onto the Belt Parkway, heading south around the pregnant bulge of Brooklyn. Karp knew the way by heart, having traveled it virtually every summer day of his childhood to his family’s beach club on Atlantic Beach. He and his two brothers would nearly come to blows during the ride over who would get to pay the toll on the Marine Parkway bridge (the loser getting to pay the toll on the Atlantic Beach bridge, but since there were three of them there was always one absolute loser and since Karp was the youngest, it was usually him). They had not been particularly pleasant trips, he recalled, having been full of the civil sadism of unhappy families. This one was much better, he thought, so whatever happened he was that much to the good. Posie (the sort of person who never would have been admitted to the precincts of the elder Karp family) had devoted virtually all of her brain cells that had not been fried by drugs or required for basic body maintenance to the memorization of rock ’n’ roll lyrics, from the fifties unto the present day, and she was not shy about sharing them. Aside from Karp and the dog, everyone sang. Even Marlene, Karp was happy to observe, kicked in on “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and Mary became reasonably competent at providing doo-wah backgrounds after Lucy explained, amid general hilarity, that doo-wah did not in this case mean “inverted Chinese” as it does in the language of Guangdong. It was all in all very nearly like a happy family outing rather than a flight from killers.
Sophie Leontoff’s house was large and white, with a long screen porch across its front supported by squat pillars. It sat behind a large lawn on a side street in the town of Long Beach, alongside similar houses, most of them the property of New York’s old middle-elite, the money from schmatehs and other material substances rather than from advertising and media and show business, as in the Hamptons. Comfortable and unhip was Long Beach and this house.
Karp had debated whether to let Sophie in on the full situation and had decided to do so, first because he disliked prevarication (and a fake story that would explain two cops would have to be a doozy) and because he thought a lady who had spent three years in Paris running from the Gestapo and later survived Ravensbruck could probably handle a mere squadron or two of hit men. He was correct in this; nor was Aunt Sophie at all put out by the extra people arriving at a house with only three bedrooms. The children were shipped up to the attic, reached by a drop ladder, to the delight of the twins, and also of Mary Ma and Lucy, who got to share an ancient, lumpy four-poster in an alcove, a prime staying up to all hours giggling locus, which left one bedroom for the Karps, one for Sophie and her paramour, Jake (who sat chewing a cigar, observing the invasion with wry good humor), and the small one in the front of the house for Posie and Bryan. Ed Morris got the sofa bed on the sun porch in back. Karp noted that this arrangement meant one cop was stationed by the rear door and one overlooking the front lawn, and wondered if Aunt Sophie had figured that out by herself.
Settled, unpacked, fed (an immense tray of sandwiches from the Long Beach deli, pickles, cole slaw, beer, wine, and sodas, gorged upon), warned not to swim before digesting, the party set out for the short walk to the beach club. The twins insisted on going to the men’s locker room, so Karp had the duty of getting his kids changed into their tiny swimsuits, in a replica of the damp-smelling closet in which he and his brothers had changed a million years ago, or maybe it was exactly the same one, for this was the very beach club to which his own family had come in the forties and fifties.
“The Feins came here, too,” said Marlene when Karp happened to mention this later.
“Yeah, I guess they did,” said Karp. “A long time ago.”
“Ou est les sables d’antan?” said Marlene. “Still clinging to our belly buttons. It probably doesn’t seem like long ago to Vivian Fein Bollano.”
Karp looked over at his wife. They were lying in awning-striped sling beach chairs on the sand. Marlene was wearing her faded red Speedo suit, and he observed that her hip bones were pushing up the thin fabric and her collarbones were staring through skin that looked as thin as the nylon of the suit. Some people eat under stress; Marlene starved. She had her hat on, and the huge sunglasses, so he
could not see her face very well. A magazine, an old New Yorker, stained with suntan oil, sat on her lap unread, its pages riffling in the soft breeze.
“Are you still thinking about her, about the case?” he asked cautiously.
“Not really. I seem to have lost the ability for coherent thought. About anything.”
He saw her stiffen and raise her sunglasses, and followed her gaze toward the shore, where Zak had dashed into the surf to scoop up a bucket of water. The boy returned to his sand castle, however, and was not swept out to sea. Marlene relaxed a notch. Close by, but separated by a decent interval, his brother made mold after mold, fish, duck, star, in elaborate patterns on a carefully smoothed plateau of sand, delineated by seashells. In a short time its perfection would become unbearable to Zak, who would accidentally on purpose trample one of the shapes, and there would be a screaming fight and Zak would spitefully attempt to destroy the rest of the pattern, and Posie would scramble up from where she was sunning herself facedown on a blanket in a barely visible bikini and snatch both of them up for a splash in the mild surf, perhaps even forgetting to tie up her suit top.
Marlene waited, as she had since the previous evening, almost comfortable now with the waiting, with being passive. Something would happen and then she would respond, if she could. She concentrated on her breathing, on feeling the sun on her winter-pale skin, on listening to the seashell hiss of the surf. Zik screamed. He threw sand at his brother, who burst into tears and retaliated with a plastic shovel. Posie leaped into action, and did forget. Breasts jiggled. A yacht cruising offshore blew its air horn in appreciation. Marlene didn’t budge. She was being cared for.
Behind the Karps was a sort of pavilion or shelter, six rustic posts holding up a shingled roof over a concrete base, on which rested a brick barbecue grill and a round concrete table, around which, on deck chairs, sat Sophie, Jake, Mary Ma, and Ed Morris, playing pinochle for a penny a point. Mary Ma, who had never played pinochle before this and who had spent about four minutes learning the rules, was murdering them, much to the delight of Lucy, who had tipped her pal that a kid with an eidetic memory for numbers and a total command of the laws of probability could clean up. Lucy sat behind her friend kibitzing and giving advice in Cantonese, and on the side talking with the cop, Bryan, about the cop life (“Believe you me, sugar, it is rarely like this; this is unreal”) and about religion, Bryan being in the same class of devout as Lucy herself, although a Baptist.
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