The woman, Tranh thought, looked worried today. Usually she took one cigarette with her coffee, but now she had smoked two already, and the girl was barely half through with the noodles. Perhaps he should offer her another coffee. No, it was best to leave everything the same. He was well practiced in looking at things out the corner of his eye while pretending to read a newspaper. She was not like the other American women who occasionally came in to pick up a coffee or a take-out meal. She reminded him more of the women he had known in Paris before the war, the intense, shiny girls interested in politics or literature. One girl in particular-he could not recall her name, but she had that small grace, finely boned but strong, the dark curly hair, the ivory skin, still smooth, although she was no longer in the first flush of youth. Not a woman who had gone down the ordinary paths. She had only one eye too; the right one was glass. He had noticed that the first day. Also the left hand was missing fingers. Tranh was something of a connoisseur of mutilations. It could have been an auto accident, of course, but he suspected something rather more interesting had happened to her. And she carried a gun, a small automatic tucked in a plain nylon holster on her belt, on the left side, although she was right-handed. He had spotted that the first day too, although she always wore some sort of jacket to conceal it. There were, of course, many police in the neighborhood, because of the nearness of the courts and police headquarters, but he very much doubted that she was a police officer. He had a lot of experience spotting those too. In memory of Paris, he had made her the first grande crème. And she had accepted it with grace, and had not tried to use the offering as an occasion to chatter, for which he was in turn grateful. He would have liked to converse with her. He could not remember the last time he had spoken at any length to a woman. But he was stupid in English, and he would not have wanted to be stupid to this woman.
And there was the girl too, clearly her mother’s daughter, the same delicate bone structure, the heart-shaped face, the black curls. The eyes were from the father, obviously, gray with lighter flecks. Sometimes when he looked at her, just a covert glance as she ate, he felt the ache of loss so strongly that his knees wobbled and he had to look away and concentrate on his breathing. He left the counter and walked over to their table, smiling.
“Everything okay?”
Their eyes met his, three smiling eyes and one glass one. Everything was okay. It was the peak of his day.
Karp’s habit, when getting ready to leave work, was to hunt through the several yellow pads he had used during the day, and empty his pockets and wallet of the rags of paper he had used to jot down things that must not be forgotten. These he interpreted and converted into a Dictaphone tape containing instructions to his people and memos to the administrative powers, which tape he would hand to Connie Trask, the Secretary of Steel, with the confident expectation that she would cause the paper to fly in the right directions, and see that all was done that ought to be done. The junior attorneys were more afraid of Trask than they were of Karp, which was as it should be.
Karp dictated a memo holding off the trial in Morella until young Nolan had a chance to correct his errors, and was about to turn the page when his eye was caught by some notes that did not seem to fit the case at hand:
Selig/Longren/nurse/28/pneum./?? Davidoff doc/poss.hom./Fulton
He rubbed his face. The details were what got you, the necessity of keeping hundreds of names and dates in your head, the details of a dozen ongoing trials and a hundred or so active homicide cases, so that when someone came up to you on the fly and asked, “Hey, on the Ishkabibble case, should we do A or B?” you could give him a sensible answer. Karp knew himself well enough to understand that he had no natural talent for administration and required expert help to prevent the bureau from collapsing into chaos. In this, at least, he was superior to most of the world’s bureaucrats.
The meaning of the cryptic message burst into his mind. Just as quickly he got rid of it. He clicked the button. “Connie, remind me to call Clay Fulton tomorrow and get him on a possible homicide. The deceased is named L-O-N-G-R-E-N. Murray Selig has the details, so send someone over there and get his file on it.”
On to other items, most of which were covered by a “so-and-so is bugging me about X; take care of it!” and, done at last with the agony of command, Karp slipped the belt out of the machine, got into his coat, gathered his evening’s reading, and went out. The outer office was deserted, except for Trask, who looked meaningfully at the clock.
“Sorry, Connie,” said Karp, dropping the Dictaphone record on her desk.
“Some of us got a life,” she remarked.
“Busy day, Connie, what can I say?”
“Not a thing. I hear you’re going to do Rohbling yourself.”
“Yeah, I am. You going to give me heat about it too?”
Trask put a phony big-toothed smile on her shiny brown face. “Gosh, no, boss, I’m just a dumb secretary, just like you’re Superman. I’ll sing ‘Amazing Grace’ at your funeral.”
“I can handle it. I did it before.”
“Uh-huh. And we were both a lot younger then. Meanwhile, you got a date with your wife five minutes ago. Speaking of funerals.”
“Ah, shit!” cried Karp, and dashed out of the office.
“And a pleasant evening to you too,” said Connie Trask to the slamming door.
The offices of Bello amp; Ciampi Security occupied the second floor of a loft building on Walker Street off Broadway. When Karp arrived there after the ten-minute walk from the Criminal Courts building (which had taken him seven and a half minutes), the office was closed. A sign on the white-painted steel door indicated what the office hours were and gave an emergency telephone to call after hours. In fact, the office never closed. Karp knocked on the door. No answer. He pounded, feeling the familiar irritation, attempting to suppress it.
“We’re closed. Call the number,” shouted a voice.
“It’s me. Open up!”
The door opened a crack. A thin, foxy-faced, brown-skinned girl with a frizzy crew cut regarded him unsympathetically. She was wearing a black jumpsuit adorned with a remarkable number of zippers and pull rings. Seeing that it was her boss’s husband, she stood aside and Karp entered the reception area, a small white room containing two vinyl couches, a table, a magazine rack, with neatly stacked magazines in it, a lamp, several well-tended potted plants, and a desk. On one wall hung framed movie posters, all featuring women in trouble: the original King Kong, Sorry, Wrong Number, Psycho. The other wall held Marlene’s Yale Law School diploma, the private investigator licenses of Marlene and her partner, Harry Bello, and several laminated newspaper and magazine stories featuring Marlene’s excursions into public violence.
“How’s it going, Sym?” Karp said. Sym the receptionist, one of Marlene’s foundlings. Karp always thought of her as the Rejectionist.
The girl scowled and mumbled something, and went behind her desk, leaning over to press a button. A buzzer sounded and a door on the room’s opposite side clicked.
Karp went through it and entered a large, high-ceilinged room nearly forty feet long. Light came in from a single huge arch-topped window to the right, opening on Walker Street. The office furniture was Canal Street Moderne, wooden stuff from the fifties, scarred but serviceable. The floors were wide, polished oak planks, covered in the center by a threadbare, but good, red oriental rug. In the center of that sprawled Karp’s daughter.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said when she saw him. She was surrounded by school books and notepaper.
“Hello, Luce,” said Karp. This was their new grown-up relationship. Only a year or so before, Lucy would have greeted Karp’s return home with a yell of joy, a dash, and a leap into his arms. He had still not become used to this ever underestimated tragedy of fatherhood.
“How was school?”
“Boring. I have a million math problems. Mrs. Lawrence sucks.”
“I’d keep that opinion under your hat, if I were you. And keep that kind of languag
e to yourself. Where’s Mom?”
Lucy motioned with her head to the rear. “Back in the playroom, with Posie. And Them.”
Karp placed his briefcase on Harry Bello’s vacant desk and walked past Lucy to the right rear corner of the office. The partners had done a good deal of work on the loft since the birth of the twins last year. Despite himself, Karp had to admit it had been neatly done. Marlene had a little semi-private office behind a partition in the corner. There was a full bathroom next to that, and they had drawn a drywall wall across the full width of the loft, behind which were found a playroom-nursery, a small kitchen, and a sort of dormitory partitioned into a half dozen tiny private rooms supplied with junk shop beds and other necessary furniture, repaired and shiny with bright new paint. Sym, the receptionist and general factotum, slept there, as did Posie the nursemaid, and the occasional “guests,” who were generally women on the run and their kids. It was all illegal as hell, which only added to Karp’s low-level irritation.
Karp went through the door to the nursery. Marlene and Posie were lying on the bright shag rug that occupied the center of the room with Lucy’s Them, the twin boys, constructing towers out of large, colorful foam blocks. The great black dog snored in a corner.
“Can I play too?” asked Karp.
“Cancel the 911, he’s here,” said Marlene, standing and giving her husband a peck.
“Hi, Butch!” said Posie, flashing at him her usual gapped-toothed idiot grin.
“Dah,” said Isaac, lifting up his arms. Karp stooped and picked up the baby, enjoying the solid heft and talcumy smell.
“How about you?” This question was directed to the other twin, whose name was Giancarlo, but who was called Zik, to go with Zak, the nickname of his two-minute-older sibling. Karp thought the dual nicknames excessively cute, but could hardly object since he had himself started the practice of calling the twins, during that early period when they had been indistinguishable larvae, such things as Mutt and Jeff, Hekyl and Jekyl, Abbott and Costello. They were plenty distinguishable now. Zik looked up at his father and then away, and carefully placed a block on top of a tower. Somewhat cool and methodical was Zik, at one year. Karp knelt and put Zak down, emotional and aggressive Zak, who promptly knocked over Zik’s tower. Wails.
“That sounds like my cue, dear,” said Marlene brightly. “Posie?”
Posie laughed and gathered the two infants to her mighty breasts, jiggling them, rocking them, crooning to them, until they calmed down. She was a seventeen-year-old from rural Pennsylvania with a disturbing chemical and sexual history and a remarkable touch for infant care. Marlene had rescued her from life on the street and a particularly violent boyfriend.
“Hey, have a good time, you guys,” said Posie, her rubbery face grinning, as they slipped from the nursery. They had still to escape from Lucy.
Who whined, “Why can’t I come?”
“Honey, you know we all go out together on Saturday. Your daddy and I need some time for just us. Posie is going to order pizza for all of you. We’ll be home early. Did you finish your math?”
In answer Lucy sent her pencil skittering across the oak floor, and assembled on her face an expression of hollow-eyed despair suitable to a refugee from the Nazis. This expression touched Karp’s heart, as it was designed to do, but he knew better than to suggest that just this once the three of them might go out, as they often had before the twins came. Marlene would not have stood for it.
She said severely, “Pick up that pencil and finish your work! I want to look it over before school tomorrow.”
Lucy snarled something sotto voce that Marlene chose not to hear, and the two adults left the office.
“That child!” said Marlene when they were out in the street. “I swear, sometimes I want to throttle her. She was terrific this afternoon when we took our walk, and as soon as she got back to the office, she turned into a spoiled brat. She is not doing well in school either.”
“Marlene, it’s third grade,” said Karp. “Give her a break. She’ll still get into Smith.”
“She won’t get into fourth grade if she keeps on the way she’s going. You don’t get the notes from her teacher. She’s acting out, as they say.”
“The twins.”
“I can’t think of anything else,” Marlene said. “It’s too early for puberty.”
“I’ll try to spend more time with her.”
“That’d help. Poor little kid! Here she is, doted on by two parents, and bango, all of a sudden she’s an extra. We didn’t figure two babies would take so much energy.”
No, we did not, thought Karp as they walked slowly up Broadway. Nor did we calculate that one of us would be starting a heavy new job while the other of us would be up to her neck in a business that required night work, weekend work, and continual crisis. Guns in the house. Karp made a mental effort to stop this line of thought, which he knew from experience led to irritability, argument, and pain. As Marlene never tired of saying, he knew what she was before he married her. True enough, as far as it went. He had married a graduate of Smith and Yale Law, a rising prosecutor. He had long ceased to pine consciously for what still dwelt deep within his reptile brain, of a house in a leafy suburb, or a condo in a good building, himself coming home, she being there, wooden spoon in hand, smiles, the children taken care of, displayed for the paternal cuddle. No, Marlene was going to have a career, which was fine, but Karp had counted on a woman with Marlene’s talent pursuing something more regular, at the D.A.’s, or a slot at some big firm, or even teaching at a law school. Marlene was smart; she could write; her intelligence was wide-ranging. A short fantasy played out on the video of his mind: Marlene teaching at Columbia, regular hours, long summer vacations, tenure, a nice salary to add to his, a settled life in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan, the children in good schools, perhaps an au pair, an au pair from Sweden, to help with the kids, rather than a pudgy, not-too-clean street girl with no front teeth, a smaller dog …
“Are you listening?” said Marlene, breaking in on these thoughts, of which, to give him credit, Karp was slightly ashamed.
“Sorry,” said Karp. “I was drifting. What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Marlene. “Just bitching and moaning. I was saying Harry and I had a little argument today.”
“What about?”
“He wants to move into regular security. Events, rent-a-cops. Like that.” She laughed. “Good old Harry. Four years ago he was a drunk thinking about eating his gun; now he’s talking business plans, cash flow.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Oh, I’m sure he is right, technically. It’s just not right for me. Why’re you giving me that look? Hey: I went in to this business to deal with a social problem that nobody else was dealing with, and also make some money, and, to be frank, because I liked the work. The point of starting B and C was that there are men who fixate on women and won’t let go, and stalk them and, most times, either hurt or kill them. Call me crazy, but I think there should be at least one business in town that exists to prevent that.”
“There is, Marlene. It’s called the cops.”
Marlene rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe we’re having this discussion again. Of course the cops! Don’t we work with the cops? With the courts? I spend a good chunk of my personal time getting orders of protection, and making sure these guys get stung when they violate. On the other hand, there’re guys who’re like guided missiles. It doesn’t matter what you do to them; they’re going to home in on the woman, and if the choice is between letting an innocent woman get killed and taking out the guy, I have no problem deciding which. Every citizen has a right to use deadly force to prevent death or serious injury to themselves or others.”
“I already heard the commercial, Marlene.”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, as if shaking out unpleasant thoughts. “Yeah, right, sorry. We’re supposed to be relaxing tonight, I’m giving you the lecture. My point was, and I said it to Harry too,
that we have a decent business doing what I like doing and what no one else does. We have enough celebrity clients to pay the freight for the poor ones-oh, did I tell you? Speaking of the rich and famous, we got a call from Trude Speyr today. Her agent, I mean. They want us to handle personal security.”
“She’s being stalked?”
“Isn’t everyone? Apparently she’s been getting weird letters since she won at Wimbledon this year. She’ll be here for the circuit next spring, and of course she’s going to go with the most famous name in feminist security, moi-meme.” Marlene did a little mock curtsy. “We’re talking major bucks here, by the way.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Harry isn’t objecting to the money, I take it.”
“No. He has no problem guarding celebrities.”
With this, Marlene left the conversation hanging. They had reached Grand Street. A short block up was their destination, Paoletti’s a small dark restaurant that was, along with the Ferrara Bakery and Umberto’s Clam House, one of the few remnants of the original Little Italy.
Freddy the owner, a remnant likewise, a man shaped like a fine brown egg, got up from his stool behind the cigar counter and came out and shook their hands formally. Marlene had been eating at Paoletti’s for nearly twenty years, first with her parents and then as a regular since she had moved to her loft on Crosby Street in 1971. Freddy led them to their table and stood there chatting for a while. The subjects were always the same: weather (getting nippy; hot enough for you?); children (Marlene’s and Freddy’s own); family (ditto); and the decline of the neighborhood, attributable, in Freddy’s opinion, to the two-pronged invasion of weirdos (by which he meant the artists and the vastly larger number of artoids that had colonized lower Manhattan since the seventies) and of Those People, by which he meant the masses formerly of Asia, whose outposts now flowed up Mulberry and lapped at Grand Street itself. Freddy usually supplied an anecdote about the latest weirdo who had tried to obtain service in Paoletti’s and been turned away. The Asians, of course, knew better than to try. Paoletti’s clientele therefore consisted exclusively of Italians, both real and honorary. The real Italians included the locals, and their descendants, like Marlene. Honorary Italians included all police officers, of whatever, the people friendly with real Italians or police officers (a double score for Karp), and those few in the neighborhood that Freddy identified as regular people. Regular people did not wear vicious leather, had hair of a length and color appropriate to their sex and species, and, if wearing earrings, were women.
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