Material Witness

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  That last meeting with Bloom insinuated itself into his mind. It was not just the nastiness and degradation of it, but the sense that it represented the pattern of his life, from now into the indefinite future. Bloom would not get any better. He had made a try for the governorship and failed. He would be the district attorney for all eternity. And Karp would work for him for the rest of his working life, which, as his family responsibilities grew and he became more dependent on his salary, would grow steadily worse. His defiance of Bloom would grow ever more veiled, then fade away in exhaustion and despair. He would become, at last, another empty suit.

  It was not to be borne. Karp stopped rowing. Suddenly the machine had become too much a symbol of his present state: endlessly rowing a vessel nailed to the ground. He stood upright, his stomach knotted. His eyes fell on a large cardboard carton. A pale glow had begun to fill the loft through the skylight, and something golden shone within the box. He reached in and pulled out a trophy, something from his high school days. He pulled out another and another, setting them, dusty and tarnished, on the shelf: state championships, all-state high school player of the year, most valuable player awards, awards from shooting competitions. Under the trophies were T-shirts from the basketball camps he had worked at, summer leagues he had played in, a Cal warm-up suit and his old high school uniform.

  And at the very bottom of the carton was a deflated basketball and a rusty air pump. The ball was a prize too, the game ball from when they had won the state championship in his senior year. Karp sat on the floor, stuck the needle in and began pushing the plunger. The ball took shape under his hands, slowly swelling, giving off that sweet rubbery smell that gonged up through his nose, shaking loose memories.

  The ball got hard. Karp stood up and bounced it once, twice. It made the right, well-remembered sound on the wooden floor. Karp put the ball in an old gym bag, and picked up an elaborate knee brace made of canvas and stainless steel. He hefted its weight, frowned and bounced lightly on his bad left leg.

  Then he tossed the brace aside and, rolling up his sweatpants, applied a heavy Ace bandage to the problem joint. A T-shirt with the logo of a local pizza joint on it, a hooded sweatshirt, his old Converse high-top sneakers and a light nylon jacket completed his outfit. He grabbed the gym bag and walked softly toward the door of the loft.

  Not softly enough for Marlene, who spoke from her warm nest in the sleeping loft. “You going out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus, it’s quarter to six,” she said after checking the bedside clock. “Nothing’ll be open.” Karp usually ran out on weekend mornings to pick up the papers and a breakfast treat from the local ethnic richness: bagels, Italian pastries, dim sum.

  Karp said, “Umm, I’m going to shoot some hoops before I go to the store.”

  Sounds of Marlene struggling upright in bed. “What!”

  He opened the door. “It’s OK. I’ll take it easy.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said sleepily. “We’ll have adjoining rooms in the hospital.”

  The playground to which Karp traveled is located at West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue. It is a famous place for weekend pickup games, with a rep that, while not quite as daunting as that of Rucker Memorial at 155th and Eighth in Harlem, is still plenty tough. Kareem played on this court, and the lanes in front of the baskets are known in Greenwich Village as Death Valley.

  The park was locked, of course, but its chain-link fence, like that of virtually every playground in the City, had been neatly detached from one of its supporting posts and rolled back to form a triangular entryway. Karp entered this, took out his basketball, walked to a foul line, and shot.

  The ball went through neatly, just grazing the rim. Karp trotted forward, picked up the ball, shot a right-handed lay-up, caught the ball as it went through, did the same on the other side, and then, for the next hour, without a break, ran through his whole spectacular repertoire of shots from every corner of the half court, getting up to fifty-two in a row at one point.

  The sun was well up now, filling the playground with smoky yellow light, and a dozen or so other players were on the other two half courts, taking shots or chatting. Karp had felt their eyes on him the last fifteen minutes. He sat down by the fence, mopped his face with a towel and pulled off his sweatshirt, letting the cool autumn air dry his sweat.

  A game of three-on-three organized itself, in the traditional and mysterious fashion common to pickup games. Karp found himself playing on the same side as a large coffee-colored professorial type with a pointed spade beard and thick glasses on an elastic band, and a stocky, aggressive, balding Irishman wearing a Holy Cross T-shirt. Their opponents were two curly-haired Italians and a very tall black kid with expensive high-tops and a red wool hat.

  They played hard, basic, in-your-face playground ball. The Irish guy was an aggressive rebounder who could pass and move, the professor played the classic big forward, dunking with élan, while Karp stayed outside, sinking hooks and jumpers with monotonous regularity. He discovered to his delight that he could do all the stuff he used to do—behind the back passes, between the legs dribbling, convincing pump fakes and the rest of the playground razzle-dazzle—and that it still gave him the same pure and innocent pleasure.

  Since the rule at West 4th was winners out—that is, the team that got the last basket took the ball out for the next play—Karp’s team made short work of its opponent, winning 21-4—in-your-face ball indeed.

  The next team of challengers was far tougher: two obvious Big East alumni who had played together many times before and had worked their give-and-go to a high pitch, plus a spidery black teenager wearing knee-length socks and cutoffs, who spent much of his court time floating a yard or two in the air. These forced Karp’s team to six successive game points, at which stage the Holy Cross guy was brick red and staggering, before Karp ended it with an impossible left-handed hook jumper from twenty feet.

  “Nice run, Pizza,” said the professor to Karp. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “I’ve been away,” said Karp. They were setting up for another game, but Karp begged off, packed up and walked south on Sixth Avenue. He was light-headed from hunger, and with an all-enveloping joy, as if he had found a long-lost brother or child. At an appetizer store he bought a dozen bagels and lox and cream cheese, and walked all the way back to SoHo, tearing with his teeth at one of the bagels as he walked.

  Marlene noticed the change in him the second he came through the door. “What happened? You look like you just got laid.”

  He put down the bagels and said, embracing her, “I got a couple of offers, but I decided to save it all for you.”

  “Fat and pregnant as I am?”

  “I’ll dredge you in flour and dive for the wet spot,” said Karp, dragging her, not unwillingly, toward the red velvet couch that the couple favored for their frequent quickies.

  Sighs and the creaking of the venerable springs. Then, just as Marlene was uttering the string of shrill calls that signaled both her partner, and most of the other residents of Crosby Street, that she was, despite her odd shape, still capable of Getting Her Rocks Off, a vast cacophony of noise burst upon the couple, freezing their bodies and bringing forth many a strangled curse.

  One of the disadvantages of the couple’s loft, and the reason Marlene had been able to obtain it so cheaply, was the presence of a squat black motor, about the size of a refrigerator laid on end, that occupied its own wire cage near the door. This machine, which bore a dusty brass plate stating that it had been manufactured by Thos. Edison & Co., was connected by a wide leather belt to a great spoked wheel. The wheel, when turned, operated the industrial lift that serviced the metal-working firms who still occupied the second and third floor of the building, and the sculptor who had the floor below Marlene’s loft.

  This machine invariably started up on Saturday morning, as the tenants secured their weekly deliveries relatively free of the congested traffic typical of downtown Manhattan. It ratt
led and stank of ozone in normal operation, but worse, it could not keep its belt on, throwing it off regularly with a clattering noise out of the earliest Industrial Revolution. This mishap caused the instant ringing, at shattering volume, of an emergency bell, a device with a gong as wide as a soup plate, mounted over the motor itself. This morning, as usual, the ringing was followed by clumping steps on the stairs and a cheerful pounding on the steel door.

  Marlene having fled to the bathroom, Karp yanked on his sweatpants and opened the door, to find two Puerto Rican youths grinning at him. The foremost said, as if it were news to Karp, “The machine broke, man. I hope we din interrupt nothing.”

  Karp grunted and let them in to shut off the bell and fix the machine, which they did with many a wandering look at the appurtenances of the weird people nutty enough to live in a factory, focusing special interest (evinced by many a Spanish exclamation) at Marlene’s lacy underthings, scattered in full view.

  “We have to get out of here,” Karp said when the workmen were gone, and the lift was groaning and clanking as smoothly as it ever did.

  “Why?” said Marlene.

  “Why! Give me an hour and I’ll make a list. It’s five floors up and no elevator. It’s dirty. It’s got metal dust in the floor that’ll never come up. It’s got rats. It’s nonstop truck traffic during the day and the only park within two miles is full of used spikes and junkies nodding off. Not to mention that goddamn machine. It’s no place to raise a kid.”

  Marlene’s eye narrowed and her jaw tightened, and as she was wearing her black eye patch, this gave her expression a piratical fierceness.

  “I like it here. And it’s getting more civilized. The factories are moving out, and artists and regular people are moving in. This loft is worth a fortune too. The other day Dagmar the transvestite offered me twenty-five K for the key.”

  “Good for Dagmar,” replied Karp sourly. “Let her … let him live here. With that kind of money, plus what I have, we could get a real house.”

  “What, in the burbs? Like Donna Reed? Uh-uh, baby, not this kid. You married a city girl.”

  “OK, we could get a co-op. Or an apartment in a good building.”

  “Butch, we pay $250 a month here, and I got a five-year lease with three more years to run. The owner lives in Florida and his son-in-law owns the wholesale rug place on the first floor. They forgot about us. You realize what a deal that is? You really want to move from all this space to three little boxes on the West Side, which is about all we could afford even if we’re both working?”

  Karp sighed. This was not the first time they had gone through this. He was a skilled professional disputant, but so was Marlene, and she was, he knew, passionately attached to this odd dwelling place. She had lived in it for years before meeting Karp. It represented hours of grungy work: cleaning, painting, framing, plumbing and re-wiring, most of which she had done herself or with the help of friends and relatives. She was as attached to it as any Chinese peasant to his ancestral paddy.

  And beyond that, in realms of illogic through which he feared to penetrate, the loft represented an emotional anchor for his wife. Karp was not a man who vibrated with sensitivity, but his instincts had been honed by long association with the less than tightly wrapped segment of the population. At the best of times, Marlene walked a fine edge. The shining coin of her, that he loved wholeheartedly—her fine spirit, her brilliance and passion—had on its obverse something that frightened him out of his wits. When feeling constrained, or dependent, or blocked in some purpose, she might descend into a black, heedless intensity, at which times, Karp believed, there was nothing she would not do, unto the destruction of self and anyone in the way.

  She wanted what she wanted—him, baby, glory, home, career, to nurse and to yank foul bastards off the streets and into jail, using any means at hand. Given her present state of enforced unemployment, he thought it unwise to press the point about moving.

  He said, “OK, whatever. See how you feel when the kid comes.”

  She smiled at him and said, “It’ll be fine. Both my parents grew up four blocks from here and it didn’t hurt them.” She looked at his painful effort to appear cheerful, and her smile took on a wilder aspect. “As I was doing before we were so rudely interrupted …”

  On the following Monday, Karp rose and went to work alone, leaving Marlene luxuriating in bed, declaring that she intended to remain in her peignoir until noon, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels. Karp walked to work, as he did every morning, as he had when he had lived a good deal farther north in Greenwich Village; he liked to walk and he was convinced that constant walking had improved his bad knee. The loft was ten minutes on foot from the Criminal Courts Building, and Karp had to admit that, as much as he disliked the place as a venue for family raising, you could not beat the location.

  Karp was now doing what millions of other New Yorkers do on the way to work, reading the Daily News, although few habitually do so while walking full tilt down a crowded street. His remarkable peripheral vision (one of his great advantages as a ball player) prevented excessive collisions, while his huge size and profuse apologies when one did occur avoided any unpleasantry on the street.

  He read the crime news first, of course. The News has always had a keen interest in mayhem, and Karp had no less, for such news was both a preview of what he had to look forward to and a kind of review of the performance of his office. Nothing interesting had happened the previous night in Manhattan, or at least not anything sufficiently bizarre or gory to make print. He did note with passing curiosity that the murder of Marion Simmons had quite disappeared for the press, except for the ritual deprecation of the ill effects of drugs on athletes.

  At the office, Karp moved briskly to his tasks. After nearly ten years it was second nature to him. First in importance was the manning of the whole system—the calendar courts, where justice of a sort was ground out wholesale, the arraignments, the four perpetually running grand juries, the complaint room, through which the police turned over the products of their daily zeal, and the medical hearings, at which it was decided whether the accused were mentally fit to answer for their purported crimes. All of these had to be supplied with a warm body representing the People of the State of New York, failing which the system could never reach that desired judicial orgasm known as clearance.

  Karp could arrange the warm bodies, but there was no way that he could supervise what they were doing. He could pick the best of the people who were crazy enough to want to work in the D.A.’s office, train them to his impossible standards, and selectively sample their work by reviewing indictments and other case paperwork or by dropping in at various courtrooms unannounced.

  On a very select number of cases, where the crime was particularly heinous, or where it involved a defendant who Karp thought had been getting away with murder (sometimes literally) too long, he would take charge of it himself, with a junior assistant district attorney at heel, to handle the details and to learn how the thing was done.

  Karp cursed under his breath and slapped the indictment he was reviewing down on his desk. It was flawed, and in a particularly stupid and careless way. He pulled up a yellow pad and wrote out a set of scathing comments in his bold, wandering hand, clipped it to the indictment and tossed it in a wire basket. After a few minutes he sighed, retrieved the document, and rolled up his note into a neat ball. Karp’s wastepaper basket stood not by his desk but on top of the farthest of his five low bookcases. He gently lofted the balled-up note into the air. Two points.

  The action reminded him briefly of that weekend’s pickup game, and he smiled to himself as he wrote a simple “see me” on the errant indictment and threw it again onto the proper pile.

  He stood and stretched, and bounced his weight on his bad knee, feeling the stiffness and the perpetual low ache. The little game had pleased him more than he could well express. Its cleanness, energy and brisk closure acted as an antidote to the eternal semi-nightmare of his working life. He po
ndered once more on the odd fault of character that had led him to deny himself this simple pleasure for so long.

  This pondering had just started to go deep when it was cut short by the phone: Connie Trask telling him to go to Bloom’s staff meeting. Cursing, he assembled some yellow pages of notes, together with various report forms, slipped into his blue pin-striped suit jacket, and headed upstairs.

  His fellow bureau chiefs were assembling in the D.A.’s large anteroom when Karp arrived. They were all Bloom appointees and he had little to say to them beyond the conventionalities. Not one was a serious trial lawyer. On their part, they treated Karp with varying degrees of chill, covered in some cases by a bluff and unsolicited heartiness. Karp sat in a corner of a sofa and pretended to be busy with his notes.

  The appointed hour came and went, and went some more. Inquiries at the receptionist yielded the knowledge that Mr. District Attorney was with the Press. Everyone but Karp seemed to think it a perfectly adequate excuse. Several bureau chiefs picked up spare phones and began conducting their business from the anteroom. Others settled down to a comfortable chat. It was obvious that none of them had to be in court.

  Forty-five minutes past the hour, the receptionist’s phone buzzed, their call to enter the conference room. At that moment the door to Bloom’s inner office opened and two people came out. One was a short oriental man lugging a leather bag, a long tubular case, and a motor-drive Nikon. The other was the tallest woman Karp had ever seen,

  The chiefs had all surged forward, Karp bringing up the rear, but they all froze momentarily to view this phenomenon. Karp, who was good at estimating height, judged that she was six-one and a bit. She was striking rather than strictly beautiful, with bold features—a large nose, a long, full mouth, pale eyes brought out by heavy black outlining—all topped by a frizzy mop of red-brown hair that added six inches to her apparent height. She had a black leather trenchcoat slung over her shoulders, on top of a gray pants suit that accentuated her endless legs.