“Wow, that was a change of pace,” exclaimed Marlene. “Swung on and missed. Why do you want to know this for?”
“Urn,” said Stupenagel, swallowing a lump of bread, “okay, I get here and I look up some people I ran into in Guatemala City-Guats, a lot of them illegals, and gringos helping them. I’m still interested in Nenton. These people are not easy to find or talk to, for obvious reasons. So one day, I’m down in a garage in Queens talking to this bunch of gypsy cabbies, mix and match Latinos, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Panamanians, and this Guat all of a sudden says something like, hey, what you bothering about Guatemala, lady, the same thing’s going on here. All the other guys looked at him like, oh, shit! Now he’s done it! So, of course, I asked him what he meant, but he wouldn’t give anything else, just threw it off, like, oh, well, the cops hassle the gypsy drivers, what else is new? So, one thing I know is what really scared people look like. There’s a smile they get, like, please please please don’t push on this phony mask or it’ll break into pieces. Is there any more wine?” Marlene found an opened bottle and passed it over. “Thanks. Anyway, a little later I’m in this grease pit, eating rice and goat, and the little brown guy comes up to me, looks like Cochise, but with the clean white shirt buttoned up to the collar. Asks if I’m the journalista asking questions about the pendejos in the calabe-sas Nuevayorquenos. So of course I am. And the story is, after he checks I’m not a cop or la migra, the story is his brother and a bunch of other gypsies working up in Spanish Harlem are getting shaken down by the local police, and what happens, they don’t pay up, they get arrested. Only, it’s not just getting arrested: it seems these guys end up dead. He gives me the names of three guys, and the name of this cop, Clancy, who’s supposed to be investigating or involved or something. The kid won’t give his own name. I tell him I need his name, but I won’t use it if he doesn’t want me to, but no, no. I pressed him a little too hard and-wham! — he’s smoke. So all I have is this Clancy. I call him up at the precinct. He says he doesn’t talk to the press, it’s policy, I should go see Public Affairs at Police Plaza, which I go do, and I get a smoothie who tells me that of the three Latin gentlemen in question, two hanged themselves in the precinct tank and one died of natural causes. He says the M.E.’s reported on the three of them, two as consistent with hanging and the third as heart failure, and the cops closed the cases without action. And that was that, except I’d still like to get with Joe Clancy, about the shakedown side of it at least.”
“Don’t know him,” said Marlene.
“The name rings some kind of bell,” said Karp, “but there’s a lot of cops. Lots of Clancys, if it comes to that. One thing, though: I’d believe a shakedown racket; I’m not sure I’d buy that cops were knocking off people in the cells.”
“Yeah, I’d tend to go along with that,” said Stupenagel, surprising Karp, who had expected a bleeding-heart attack on the police from the journalist, and was, truth be told, rather looking forward to a row with her. Stupenagel continued, “It’s tragic. The rich world is full of young guys from poor countries doing the shit work that the rich poor people won’t do. They come from villages where they knew everyone and everyone knew them, for generations back. Suddenly, they find themselves in a place like New York, six to a room, surrounded by strangers, no hope of any emotional relationship, working at exhausting jobs for twenty hours a day, or else not finding work at all and slowly starving to death, scared of any authority, exploited by everyone. One day they get arrested. They’re locked up. They have no goddamn idea in the world of what’s going to happen to them, but they know it’s the end of everything. Of course they hang themselves. Christ, in Bangkok and Hong Kong they don’t even have to hang themselves. They just go to sleep and don’t wake up. Nobody knows the cause. It doesn’t even make the local papers anymore it’s so common. Maybe it happened to the third guy up there.”
“You could ask Roland Hrcany,” suggested Karp. “If something’s going down with cops, he’d probably know about it. Or someone he knew would.”
“Who he?” asked Stupenagel.
“A guy we used to work with at the D.A.,” said Marlene.
“Yeah? Cute?”
“Some might say so. On second thought, it might not be such a good idea. Roland has unreconstructed ideas about women.”
“You mean he’ll want to screw?”
“He may insist on it,” answered Marlene, with a side glance at her husband. His rat friends.
“Is he tall?”
“Actually, wide,” said Marlene.
“Oh, God, not a porky!”
“The furthest thing. Roland’s a weightlifter. Washboard stomach, pecs of iron, buns of steel. Brain of toad …”
“I’ll look him up,” said Stupenagel, polishing the last of the clam sauce from her plate with the last scrap of bread. She had eaten and drunk literally everything remaining on the table except the salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese. “Mmm, the little woman sure can cook!” she said, with a broad wink at Karp.
“Knock it off, Stupe,” said Marlene.
“I bet you get your underwear ironed and folded too,” said Stupenagel, ignoring her.
“I said, knock it off!” They both stared at Marlene in the ensuing silence. Her jaw was clenched and she was white around the nostrils. After a brief staring contest, Stupenagel turned her eyes away and said lightly, “Oh, my, I think I hit a nerve there. My big mouth … sorreee!”
“Didn’t you say you had an appointment uptown, Stupe?” Marlene inquired.
Stupenagel laughed and pushed her chair back. “Oh, and now I’m getting the bum’s rush, and don’t I deserve it! Thanks for the delish dinn, and the tip about the cop.” She pouted. “You’re not really mad at me, are you, Champ?”
Marlene sighed, and smiled and shook her head.
“Oh, good!” cried the journalist and rushed around the table to give Marlene a hug and a kiss. She gave Karp a hug and a kiss too, and Marlene saw from the way her husband’s body went stiff that Stupenagel was putting a lick more into the transaction than was required by convention.
“Well, that was fun,” said Karp after Stupenagel had trotted down the stairs.
“Yes, delightful. You never have to worry about whether Stupe will wear out her welcome because she always does. Yes, I know, she’s my friend. As so she is, for my sins. Let’s clean up-no, you clean up. I’m going to walk the dog, lounge in the bath, and then lose myself in a trashy romantic novel.”
Later, the two of them lying in bed, Karp was aware of a dense psychic cloud, oily smoke and troubled lightning, emanating from Marlene’s side of the bed. Her jaw grinding, her brow furrowed, she was rapidly snapping the pages of her paperback at a pace too quick for reading. At last she tossed the book aside and drew a deep sighing breath.
“What?” he ventured.
“Oh, nothing, just the usual pathetic dissatisfactions of the bourgeois matron.”
“She really got to you this time, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but I was ready to be got to.” She shifted in bed and gazed into his eyes. Out of long habit, and love, he no longer registered that one of her eyes was not real, but imagined expression in both of them. “Look,” she said, “I’m not saying this hasn’t been sweet, this last year and a half. I like cooking. I even like ironing. It’s sort of calm and dreamy and sensuous, when you have plenty of time, and I like having kids in the house and being the place where the kids come, and Lucy loves it too. And I think I needed it, after what went down in D.C. I deserved it. But now … I don’t know. Something’s stirring. Dragons.” She paused, then laughed briefly. “My vocation.”
Hesitantly Karp asked, “You’re saying you want to get back on some kind of career track, right?”
“Yeah, ‘career track.’ That’s just what I don’t want. I want my blood stirred. I want to feel the way I felt when I was with the rape bureau and I had some scumbag in my sights and I was going to send him away for eight to fifteen, and he knew it and I could see it in hi
s eyes. Or even chasing down that stuff in D.C.”
“You could land a D.A. job in a second. As you never fail to remind me, there are four other boroughs.”
“Yes, but I already explained why that won’t work,” replied Marlene impatiently. She flung herself back on the pillows and let out a puff of air. Suddenly she rolled closer to him, flicked her fingers over his lower belly, and nuzzled into his chest. “Ah, shit, we might as well start another baby. Close your mouth, Butch; flies will fly in.”
THREE
Marlene shook her daughter into grumpy wakefulness, and then tripped lightly to the toilet and puked again. It was a glorious Monday, the fourth week of first grade and Marlene was pregnant.
“How are you feeling?” asked Karp solicitously across the Times and was rewarded with a wordless snarl and a poisonous look. He shut up and raised the wide sheet of newsprint like a drawbridge. Marlene dragged on an ensemble made up of scruffy, striped OshKosh B’Gosh overalls, a T-shirt, and basketball shoes and had her usual fight with Lucy about appropriate school clothes. Lucy refused to wear skirts, and Marlene would not let her wear jeans to school. After a brief contest of wills, they compromised on corduroy slacks and a heavy red turtleneck with embroidered birdies, too hot for the season, but let the little rat sweat her butt off. Lucy brushed her own hair and shrieked when Marlene attempted to correct the snarls. By this time Karp had wisely departed the loft. Breakfast, a war between Froot Loops and a proper breakfast, with the basic food groups, was unpleasant, as was the argument about what would go into the purple Barbie lunch box.
Marlene took a deep breath, fought to control her liquefying gut, and held her hands up in a referee’s T. “Okay, time-out. I don’t want to fight with you anymore. I’m feeling sick and short-tempered and you’re probably picking it up, and it’s making you all crazy. I tell you what: Mommy’s going to wash her face and brush her hair, and while she’s doing that, you can pack your own lunch box with anything in the house.”
“Anything?”
“Hey, go for it! As long as it fits.”
After that, it went more smoothly. Marlene finished her toilette, including another little spew, and fed the mastiff a quart of kibble. Lucy, for a wonder, remembered her homework, still something of a prized novelty in first grade. It was a large collage of pictures clipped from magazines and pasted on red construction paper, which bore the legend MY NEIGHBORHOOD in careful block letters. Lucy’s neighborhood comprised a large midtown bank building, a car, a pizza, a sliver of Chinese writing, a fire engine, and a cat, all of which, except the bank, were undeniably to be found in the environs of Crosby Street. She had done it entirely by herself, including the doily-work border, making very little mess with the rubber cement, and so was inordinately proud of the thing.
The door was thrown open, and the huge dog leaped out and clattered down the stairs, followed by Lucy at a trot and Marlene at a more dignified pace. Lucy went to P.S. 1, the City’s oldest school and one of its best, rather than a somewhat closer, but undistinguished, institution. Marlene had contrived this irregular arrangement not only to provide her darling a better start up life’s slippery slope but also to partially block the outrage of the child’s maternal grandmother, to whom all schools not conducted under the auspices of the Church were nests of vice and crime. (Ma, it’s a great school; all the Chinese kids go there.) As a result, Marlene had taken upon herself not only the additional burden of fighting each morning over school clothes (surrendering the great and ever underestimated advantage of school uniforms) but also the responsibility for transport.
Marlene had a car for this purpose, a beaten-up VW hatch-back, yellow in color, that she had bought in D.C. The vehicle was parked illegally in an alley at the foot of Crosby Street, which Marlene rented at the cost of about ten traffic tickets per year. Marlene knew the beat cops, and took care of them, and only got a ticket when a substitute came on duty, or when there was a ticketing drive on. There was no paper under the wiper this morning, which improved her mood. The dog defecated promptly by the storm drain, which improved it even more.
Then Marlene, the dog, and the child piled in and drove off with a rattle, enveloped in blue stink. Though relatively rich now, she kept the beater, as she maintained that anyone who ran a decent car in the City was a moron. Which she was not.
Eight minutes-east on Canal and south on the Bowery-brought them to the school, to which, in fact, all the Chinese did send their kids. P.S. 1 was about eighty-five percent Asian, the remainder made up of the children of striving Lower Manhattan moms like Marlene, who had worked a scam to get their kids into this font of Confucian order, discipline, and achievement.
A few of these aliens stood out-blond and auburn accents-among the sable tide of little heads that bobbed above the noisy throng milling along the gate and arched entranceway of the venerable building.
“There’s Miranda Lanin!” cried Lucy, pointing at one of these, a blondie. She was out of the car in a flash, clutching her homework project but leaving her lunch box on the seat. Sighing, Marlene switched off the car and trotted after her with lunch.
There were Chinese moms at the entrance too, of course, all of them, Marlene noted with shame, better turned out than she was, although nearly all of them worked a job or two, or three, in addition to running a household. She saw Janice Chen and Mrs. Chen and waved. Janice exchanged a rapid trill of Cantonese with her departing mother and then joined Lucy and Miranda on the steps, switching effortlessly to idiomatic American English, a feat that always knocked Marlene out. As the three girls stood chattering and comparing their neighborhood-view projects, Marlene spotted another familiar face.
“Hey, Carrie,” she called.
A pretty blond woman wearing a blue head scarf gave a violent start at hearing her name called, and uttered a sigh of relief, holding her hand dramatically to her breast, when she saw who it was. Marlene had known Carrie Lanin, Miranda’s mother, for some years now, in the casual manner of women who live in the same neighborhood and have children of the same sex and age. They had sent their daughters to the same day-care center and play groups and had exchanged pediatrician intelligence. Marlene recalled that she lived in a nice Tribeca loft, without husband, and did something arty with fabrics.
Marlene passed the lunch box to Lucy, who took it without a word, being now immersed in kidworld. A bell rang inside the building, and the children vanished in a murmurous rush.
“Are you okay?” Marlene asked the woman. She was pale and her small features were marked with strain. She seemed to be looking past Marlene down the street, casting anxiously in all directions like an infantry point man seeking snipers.
“Yes,” said Lanin, then “No.” She stared blankly for a moment before her gaze settled on Marlene’s yellow VW.
“Is that your car? Could you, urn, give me a lift?” Her blue eyes were red-rimmed and pleading.
“Sure. Get in.”
Marlene cranked the engine and moved off down Henry Street, made a four-corner at Catherine, and headed back up Henry for the Bowery. Lanin sat stiffly in her seat, eyes fixed on the passenger-side mirror.
“Where’s your car?” asked Marlene conversationally.
“In the shop. We came by cab.”
“Uh-huh.” They were headed west on Canal. “You’re on what? Duane, right?”
“Yeah, 152, off West Broadway.”
Marlene hung a left on Greenwich and turned downtown. The closer they got to Duane Street, the more nervous her passenger became. As they passed Jay Street, she was twitching like a trapped rabbit and craning her neck in an attempt to cover all directions at once.
“Who are we avoiding, Carrie?” Marlene asked gently.
“Oh, God, this guy. It’s been going on for a month. I’m losing my fucking marbles behind it.” She sighed heavily and moisture pearled on her golden eyelashes.
“You called the cops?”
“Oh, right, the cops!” snapped Lanin contemptuously. “The cops do not think
this is a high priority. Wait, just pull in front of this red truck.” Marlene brought the VW to the curb. Lanin gazed into the car’s mirrors and looked out the window, checking the street and the nearby cars.
“Who is this guy? Jack the Ripper?” asked Marlene.
“Don’t joke! We’re talking somebody with a serious screw loose. Look, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but could you walk me up to my loft? I have a funny feeling-”
“No problem,” said Marlene, and started to get out of the car. Lanin seemed to notice the big dog for the first time. “He’ll be okay in the car? I wouldn’t want him to get stolen.”
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