Absolute Rage

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  It landed and Tran Do Vinh got out, crouching as everyone always did under the spinning rotors. He greeted her with the traditional cheek kisses and expressed again, as he had on the phone earlier that day, his profound regrets about what had befallen her son. He spoke to her in French. “You know, I have never before been in a helicopter, though I have seen many and shot down a good few. That hill on which your adversaries are emplaced seems a formidable position. The pilot flew quite low and we received fire, though fortunately took no hits. How can I assist you?”

  He was thoughtful when she told him what she wanted done. “Marie-Hélène, I personally am at your complete disposal,” he said, “but an operation of the type you describe, an almost, one might say, military operation, will require many men, expensive weapons, logistical supplies . . .”

  “I’ll advance whatever you need.”

  “Yes, of course, but the men . . . these are no longer soldiers fighting for a cause. And the young ones I am afraid are mere gangsters. They will not wish to endure casualties without some tangible—”

  “There is gold,” she said. “A good deal of it, I’m informed. Ben Cade has been a criminal for decades, as was his father before him. They put their profits into gold because they believe that soon all paper money will become worthless.”

  “Oh, gold!” He laughed. “Oh, well, that’s a different story entirely. With gold all things are possible. We Asians love gold. We also fear the ephemeral nature of paper, with rather more reason than M. Cade, I think. Given gold, I should have little trouble organizing the necessary people and equipment. What I do not have and need are maps, detailed maps, including maps of all local mining operations, at least one to ten thousand in scale.”

  “I can get you those. Are you familiar with computers?”

  “Alas, not I myself, but I have people. They operate a pornography site, ‘Asian Teens XXX.’ You will send the maps to me in this way?”

  She nodded.

  “And I assume this operation will require a certain settlement with these fearsome Cades, besides relieving them of their gold. Escorting them to the authorities, perhaps?”

  “No. I want them killed.”

  He was not quite sure he had heard her, for a strong breeze was whipping the grasses.

  “Pardon?”

  “Kill them,” she said more clearly. “Kill them all.”

  * * *

  Lenny Polanski arrived on Marlene’s helicopter the following day with two others, an oriental man and a striking blond woman, all three wearing Hawaiian shirts and sunglasses. The great surgeon seemed like a cross between a retired middleweight prizefighter and a stand-up comedian. He was blocky, tanned, foulmouthed, crop-haired, and athletic in stride and gesture. Karp loathed him on sight. In the dingy waiting room (Dr. Small having hovered and having been curtly dismissed), Polanski introduced to the Karp family Dr. Chao, who will be passing gas at this party, and Ms. Vava Voom, the world’s hottest scrub nurse, who will be cooling my brow, so to speak.

  Polanski focused on Lucy. “You’re that kid, Morrie’s superstar with the languages. Say something in Lithuanian.”

  “Do you speak Lithuanian?” asked Lucy.

  “I don’t know, I never tried, ha, ha, ha!”

  “If you don’t make my brother better, you ape,” said Lucy, smiling, “I will have you killed in a particularly unpleasant fashion,” in Lithuanian.

  Ms. Voom held out her hand to Marlene, who shook it. “I’m Anne Rasmussen. He’s a horse’s ass, but he really is the best brain surgeon in the country. We can’t take him anywhere.” Lenny cracked up at this.

  Karp was not amused. “You know, maybe this isn’t a good idea. I mean, this is a child’s life we’re talking about and I don’t appreciate it being treated as a joke.”

  “Hey, listen, dad,” said the doctor, “do I come into your courtroom or whatever and tell you how to act? Ever since I saw M*A*S*H, I wanted to be the pros from Dover—you know that scene? Where the two docs barge in wearing Hawaiian shirts, cure the congressman’s kid, and leave? No? Hey, check it out, a great scene! So the first thing you folks have got to do is lighten up. I know you’re worried. I’d be, too, if I was in the shit-bag hospital. But I took a look at the kid’s snaps—”

  “Giancarlo,” said Marlene.

  “Right, Giancarlo, his snaps, and it’s a no-brainer, so to speak, ha ha. I mean, first of all it’s a pellet, obviously at longish range, not the usual shot to the head from a pistol at point-blank, so there’s less damage generally. We have minimal penetration, not much bleeding, there’s no major circulatory damage—”

  “Why is he still in a coma, then?” asked Marlene.

  “Brain swelling. What do you want? He got shot in the head, okay? A couple of days being knocked out is absolutely normal here. Okay, we go in, we take out the pellet, we repair the good stuff, we snip the bad stuff, we sew him up. These guys here could have done it if they weren’t such patzers. Kid’s going to be fine, you’ll see.” Polanski beamed, and it was hard for the Karps not to share his bravado.

  “What about impairment?” Karp asked.

  Polanski made an elaborate shrug. “That I can’t tell you. I’ve seen people lose a chunk of brain the size of a Big Mac and live a perfectly normal life, and other people just get a tap on the skull and they never move again.” He pointed upward. “That’s not my department. Your kid’s going to get the best surgical care available, but what happens after that, with the brain . . . if you believe in God, he’s in charge of that part, not me.”

  At that, Lucy burst into tears and fled the room.

  “Hey, what’d I say?” asked Dr. Polanski in dismay.

  * * *

  Everyone was being extremely nice to Karp. He had not had so many strangers so solicitous toward him since his senior year in high school, when the basketball coaches had come around. He went back to the Burroughs Building two days after the New York team had operated and departed. Giancarlo was as well as could be expected. He looked like he was sleeping peacefully. His color was good, his breathing regular. But he would not awake.

  The Burroughs Building had been transformed in Karp’s absence, for Captain Hendricks and Cheryl Oggert had lent most of it to the FBI, who had over a hundred agents on the scene now, under the command of a bullnecked person named Ron Morrisey. Morrisey treated Karp like an invalid, or someone with a contagious disease, leprosy, for example. He was not invited to the big-time strategy meetings Morrisey held with the state boys.

  Still, Karp tried to show at the office in between bouts of watching at Giancarlo’s bedside. Once there, he mostly sat at his desk with his feet up and tapped on his teeth with a pencil. Sometimes he tapped on the desk with two pencils. The plan he had come up with, he now saw, was absurd. It was based on George Floyd having a credible fear that he was going to be convicted of murder, and Karp had to admit that inculcating such a fear would require not just a paper confession, but the prospect of an actual live Cade sitting on the witness stand, pointing a skinny white finger at the defendant. Which Cade he did not have. Which Cade was sitting up on Burnt Peak, thumbing its nose, or noses, at the legions of troopers and agents below. Karp had tried to find out whether Morrisey was planning an assault, and if so, whether he had some way of extracting Karp’s two confessors, but Karp did not, it seemed, have a need to know these plans. Cheryl Oggert was not helpful, either. The governor would not apply pressure here; the governor was starting to distance himself from the whole mess.

  On Thursday (and it was hard to believe that only three days had passed since the raid), Karp and Marlene and the town’s notables attended the funeral of Sheriff J. J. Swett. A surprising number of nonnotable townspeople also showed for the event. Several people, including Lester Weames and the mayor, stood up and lied about Swett’s character and achievement. Karp noted substantial negative murmurings among the crowd during Weames’s presentation, which made him feel a little better. Ernie Poole, who was there and drunk, seemed to sum up th
e general feeling when he said in a loud enough voice, “He was a corrupt old bastard, but he did the right thing in the end, God rest his soul.”

  After the funeral, the Karps went back to the hospital. Marlene took over the watch from Lucy. Zak, who had hardly eaten a bite in three days, refused to leave his brother’s bedside. Karp obtained a chocolate milk shake and threatened to send the boy to a distant state if he did not consume it.

  After an almost silent meal with Lucy (What’s wrong? Nothing.), Karp went back to his office in the Burroughs Building. Needing to pretend to himself that he was doing something productive, he called Raymond Guma in New York.

  “You’re still alive?”

  “Yeah, barely,” said Guma. “I’m smoking dope now.”

  “How is it?”

  “Eh. I don’t get what the kids see in it, to tell you the truth. It helps me eat, though. I get it off this Jamaican from that place on Third. Jerked Chicken, we deliver. What’s happening in Podunk?”

  Karp told him. Guma said, “Jesus, Butch, that’s awful. Terrible! Poor little kid! The bastards escaped, huh?”

  “For now. Look, Goom, failing something better, I got a little idea you might be able to help me with.”

  “Anything.”

  After Karp had finished the exposition, Guma said, “Well, this end maybe I could help with. It could work. We’d have to get the locals involved, probably not a problem, you being you and me being me.”

  “What about Eddie Bent?”

  “Eh, maybe a little sticky there, but Eddie owes me some big ones over the years. Your big problem is gonna be convincing Lester that what’s-his-face is going to roll on him, which is going to be hard to do at this point. Absent the hillbillies.”

  “I know. I’m working on that. But could you set things up in the City, just in case?”

  “Will do, buddy,” said Guma, “unless I die first. Or unless I come down off this high and decide it’s horseshit. I’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  That night Karp awakened at three-forty. He looked at the little vial on Marlene’s bedstand and contemplated, for the first time in his life, taking a downer. He rejected the idea. He got out of bed, slipped the lodge’s terry-cloth robe on, and began to pace the room.

  Click.

  He stopped, startled. Something had struck the sliding glass doors.

  Clack.

  Someone throwing pebbles against the glass. He slipped behind the curtains and looked out. Beyond the little concrete apron and its plastic chairs a sloping lawn dropped to a line of bushes. In front of the bushes stood a slim figure, glowing like marble in the light of a gibbous moon. Karp slid the door aside and stepped out on the apron. The figure made a beckoning motion, silently. Karp felt a chill; it was like something out of a fairy tale. A scatter of rubber zori lay at his feet, his family’s, one large, two medium, two small. An extra pair of zori? Image of giving away little clothes. No, don’t think about that now. He slipped into the largest ones and headed toward the figure.

  As he came closer, he saw it was a boy, an incredibly pale, wheat-haired boy, dressed in bib overalls and a white T-shirt.

  “You’re Darryl,” Karp said. “You talked to my wife one time.”

  “Uhn-huh. You foller me, now. He wants to say sompin’ to you.”

  Karp followed the boy down a dark pebbled path through the bushes, to a picnic area: a lawn, some tables and grills, a duck pond. Seated at one of the tables was an old man.

  Karp sat down. The boy stood behind the old man.

  “I’m Amos Jonson,” said the man.

  “I guessed you were. You spoke to my wife.”

  “Yessir, that was me. I wanted to talk to you. Startin’ off, I want to say I’m sorry for your trouble. I hope your son’s all right. I lost two of mine, so I know what that’s like.”

  “We have hopes for a recovery, but he’s not out of the woods yet.”

  The man nodded. “Since I heard, I been considerin’ what to do, and I come up with this. I been hiding for a long time, with Darryl here. In an old shaller mine on Belo. Afeared every minute the Cades were gonna send someone to get me, or Darryl. And I got to thinkin’, here’s this feller comes from away, to help get those Cades, all legal, like nobody ever tried to do before, not since eighteen and fity-six anyways. And then they shoot down his little boy. I considered and I contemplated and I said to myself, ‘Amos Jonson, are you still a man, or are you a slug worm crawlin’ in the dark?’ It got so I couldn’t hardly stand myself. So I come here tonight.”

  “What have you got to tell me, Mr. Jonson?” said Karp out of a cracker-dry throat.

  “I seen it all. Me and Darryl here. We was frog-jiggin’ under the green bridge. Two cars come over the bridge and stop on the crown of it. We hid oursels. I seen it was George Floyd’s big Chrysler car and a Ford pickup. George gets out of the car and goes over to the pickup. He has words with a man in the pickup. The man gets out. I see it’s Wayne Cade. They have more words, cussin’ and arguin’. Finally, I seen Wayne give George a pistol. Then George goes over to the winder of the pickup and talks some to whoever’s in there. I couldn’t see that feller at all. But the feller passes out a pair of yeller boots. George throws the boots and the pistol into the river. The pistol goes in the water, but the boots land on a little spit that’s there when it’s low water. Well, sir, then they go off. Me and Darryl look at the boots, but we don’t touch ’em, ’cause we can see they’re covered in blood. Then Darryl goes in and feels around with his bar feet and fishes out the pistol. We seen where it fell by the splash. Then I thought, well, George dropped his gun in the river, we ought to do him the favor of giving it back to him.”

  “So you hid it under the birdbath.”

  “Darryl done it,” said the man. “Tell him, Darryl.”

  Darryl bobbed his head. “Uhn-huh. Next night I went down to his house. I got me a Bi-Lo bag from the trash and put the gun in it, and then I calculated, where should I lay it? I saw that old birdbath he got there, and I said, that’s the place, ’cause I’d alus know where it was, do you see? And then I stopped and said, I should ought to have a memorial in it.”

  “A memorial?”

  “Yessir. So no man could say, no, that ain’t the gun he throwed in the river, it was some other gun look jest the same. So, I took my clasp knife and screwed the handle plate off’n it, and I took this small piece of paper that was in the bag, like the Bi-Lo gives out when you trade?”

  “A receipt.”

  “Uhn-huh. Well, sir, I wrote it with a pencil on that little small piece of paper: ‘This gun throwed in the river at the green bridge by George Floyd and I pulled it out,’ and under I put my name, Darryl Mark Jonson, and what the date was, which I got from a newspaper that was in the trash, too, and then I screed it up small as small and put it in the handle and screwed the plate back on. And then I buried it under the birdbath.”

  Karp said, “Darryl, would you like me to give you a great big kiss?”

  “Nosir,” said Darryl coolly, “but thank you kindly anyhow.”

  18

  “TELL ME AGAIN WHY THIS isn’t an entrapment,” said Stan Hawes.

  “Because we’re not entrapping him into the commission of a crime,” said Karp. “We have no legal interest in any crimes he may be contemplating or conspiring to commit. We’re only using the contemplated crime as a predicate to get him to admit to our agent the details of a crime that he actually did arrange, to wit, the murders of the Heeney family.”

  “I don’t know. It sounds kind of complicated. I especially don’t like using my office to engage in a . . . I guess it’s a fraud, isn’t it?”

  “It’s no different from what we did to bring the Cades into town.”

  “Yes,” snapped Hawes, “and look at how great that turned out!”

  Then Hawes recalled what had happened to Karp’s son and his face colored. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . okay, let’s start over here. You say we have a much better case agains
t Floyd now, with the gun and the Jonson testimony, and I agree. Seward and Floyd will want to deal, but you don’t want me to make a formal offer.”

  “No, no deal with Floyd. I want him to take the full hit. We won’t need his testimony against Weames if this works. That’s the whole point, Stan. But Lester has to believe that a deal is imminent, which is why you have to leak it to him and spread it widely around the courthouse.”

  “And then Lester calls George, and George says, ‘What deal? Ain’t no deal, Lester.’ ”

  “And will Lester believe him? Why should he? Do you really think that there’s so much love and loyalty between these two crook bastards that Lester Weames will credit that Floyd would be willing to spend his whole life in prison to keep his dear friend Lester safe from harm?”

  “Okay, okay, let’s say you’re right. Lester now believes he’s going to get the shaft from his good buddy. Why should he go to New York City and hire a killer, like you say? Why should he go and try to hire your killer?”

  “He’s not my killer, Stan,” said Karp, trying for patience. “But I have it on reliable information that there are very few people at the top of this profession. A number of these people based in New York have been questioned by people you don’t want to know who they are: Did a guy answering Lester’s description come by last June, July, and ask about doing a hit and backed out when he heard the price?”

  “Why would a professional hit man give out that kind of information?”

  “He might if the people who asked him were good and regular customers.” Karp’s statement hung in the air for several long seconds.

  “Oh,” said Hawes, his face wrinkling with distaste. “And you think that explains why Lester went to New York then and pulled ten grand out of the union account and put it back in again?”