Act of Revenge (3 page)

There was a long pause after this, a silence broken only by Mary's snuffling. Lucy felt the eyes. “Oh, right!” she said indignantly to the silence. “
I'm
really going to rat you out.
Cào dàn! Fàng gou pì!
. . .” and more of the same, for although in English Lucy was as clean-mouthed as could be wished, in either Cantonese or Mandarin she could strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. “If you think that,” she continued, switching from Mandarin to Cantonese and moderating her tone, “the pair of you are dumb as wooden chickens. Do you think I would get my foster father in trouble? Or get Mary's family kicked out?”

Shamefaced, the other girls agreed that this was not to be thought of.

“Okay, then, we have to swear never to tell
anyone
about this. Not your family or anyone. And believe me, they're going to come after you.”

“What! How!”

“Silly turtles! When they find the bodies, they'll want to talk to everyone who was back here, and Janice's parents know you both were back here. Nobody knows I'm here, and I want you to keep it that way. Now, swear it! Give me your hands!”

The three clasped their hands in a knot. Lucy felt imbued with a rich excitement, as the situation combined the best aspects of Claudine and Kim, girlish intimacy and deadly danger. She thought briefly of pulling her little pocket knife and extracting a blood oath, but her natural practicality and her apprehension that, confronted with additional gore, Mary Ma would lose it again, decided her in favor of a purely verbal ritual. In Chinese, of course.

“Mary, you go first!” she ordered.

Mary, quavering, said, “I swear.”

Janice said, “I swear to the sky.”

Lucy said, “I swear, and if I go back on my word, let me be executed by heaven and destroyed by earth!”

Under this profound doom, Lucy led the way out of the secret nest and out the rear door onto Crosby Street.

“Go around to the front entrance and get lost in the store. Find something to do—like, grab some cartons and move them around until somebody notices you. Then you say, if they ask you, you were in the front the whole time. You didn't see anything. They might not believe you, but if you stick to the story, they can't do anything. And look, they'll get each of you alone and they'll say, like, ‘Janice, Mary told us the whole story, why don't you tell us what went down.' They always do that trick. Just keep saying you didn't see anything. And cry a lot, and have to go pee every ten minutes.”

With this good advice, they dashed off. Lucy walked the two short blocks to her home. The Karp family lived in a fifth-floor floor-through loft on Crosby at Grand, which Lucy's mother had occupied since the late sixties, when Soho was barely a gleam in some speculator's eye and regular people (not to mention rich ones) did not dwell in disused factory space. It had been beautifully modified some years back as a result of a parental windfall: Swedish finish on the floor, track lighting on the ceiling, a kitchen out of a magazine spread, climate control, and a hot tub. The building had gone condo and put in an elevator entered from the street with a special key. Lucy wore hers around her neck. She twisted this, waited, ascended, and emerged. There she was greeted by, in order, her twin four-year-old brothers, Giancarlo and Isaac (called, in a deplorable excess of cute, Zik and Zak), their so-called nanny, a retired street person in her early twenties (Posie), and her father, Roger Karp (called Butch), the chief assistant district attorney for the County of New York.

All these save the last she disposed of with dispatch: a sloppy kiss and a couple of tickle rhymes for the boys, a how-was-your-day and a critical note on the Violent Femmes with Posie. Then she sidled up to her dad and clutched him about the waist, rather harder than was her habit. He looked down at her.

“Something wrong?”

“No, not really. Just need a hug.”

This was supplied, with enthusiasm. He asked, “How did the brain thing go?”

“All right, I guess. He seemed pretty excited about me. Apparently, I'm a total freak show.”

“How would you like a hit in the head?”

“Well, I
am
.”

Karp aimed a mock back-hander at his daughter's head, which she ducked, and then they sparred around a little, a familiar game and one that Karp knew did not have long to run. He was glad to get in as many bouts of affectionate roughhousing as time and biology would allow.

When he, after many shifting moves, had her in a clinch and had tormented her in the usual way by rubbing his five o'clock shadow across her tender cheek, to the usual howls, he said, “You want to know a secret? Everybody thinks they're a freak. Everybody thinks people are staring at them. Everybody thinks everybody else is better off or happier, especially kids. You want me to give you a pep talk? You want me to make a list of all your good points?”

“Not really,” she said, her gaze sliding away from his.

“Anything go wrong today, Luce?” asked Karp, his fatherly antennae vibrating.

“No, just the usual,” Lucy lied, and then changed the subject to “Are you going to cook those?”

She pointed at the counter in the gleaming kitchen where sat a pair of icy brownish Tupperware oblongs.

“Yeah, we have a choice of lamb stew or lasagna.”

“
Com'é ripugnanti
,” said Lucy, wrinkling her nose. “Where's Mom?”

“She said she was tied up. Didn't she call you? She said she was going to tell you to take a cab home.”

“Yeah, she did.”

“You got a cab all right?”

Lucy felt her face flush. Another lie in the offing, and Lucy tried as hard as ever she could not to lie to her father. The scrupulous honesty of this man was one of the foundation stones of her moral universe. In contrast, her mother had a more fluid relationship with veracity. As Lucy herself did, she had to admit. “I never lie, never, but the truth is not for everyone,” was one of her mother's sayings, delivered always in Italian.

So she uttered a vague mumble that she hoped would suffice to pass the question, which it did, and then she asked, “Can we order out? Please? I'll call Pho Bác. I'm dying for
chà giò
. Spring rolls? And noodles and lemon chicken?” She looked disdainfully at the hearty meals her mother had prepared in her weekly marathon cooking sessions. “I don't see why she bothers. Posie cooks for the boys, and we live in the take-out capital of the galaxy. Please?”

Karp laughed and said, “Hell, yeah! Let's live a little,” because by and large he agreed with his daughter about take-out, and the absurdity of a woman who worked as hard as his wife did worrying about home cooking. Besides that, he was feeling bushed and was not looking forward to eating a microwaved meal liable to be chilly in the center and dry on the edges and have to clean up after.

Lucy ran to the phone and put in the order, in Vietnamese.

Karp watched his remarkable daughter do this with his usual mix of love and concern, a little heavier on the concern this evening because he had spent fifteen years with the D.A. and knew from a few thousand confrontations what someone who had something to hide looked like. Lucy had something to hide.

Chapter 2

IT WAS KARP'S HABIT WHEN THE weather was fine to pick up the
News
and skim through it as he strode along the eight-block distance between the loft and the New York County courthouse at 100 Centre Street. He relied on his size and the determination of his walk to clear the way of all smaller mobile objects and his remarkable peripheral vision to steer clear of the larger ones, like trucks. Karp walked with the loping, graceful stride of the American athlete, which also served to sweep people from his way. Karp had, in fact, been an athlete, a very good one in his youth, a high school All-American in basketball and a Pac 10 star at Berkeley. A horrific injury to his knee had cut that career short, eliminating the jock arrogance from his personality and the knee itself from his body. Having had the orthopedic replacement, he was after nearly twenty years quite pain-free, except, on occasions, around the heart. Suffering does not always ennoble, but in Karp's case it actually had, although it would never have occurred to him (as it would have and did to his wife) to think of it that way. What he felt was a rediscovered pleasure in his body, evinced now, as it was every workday morning, in the recovery of his swift, charging, aggressive New York pace. He could usually get through his usual reading—sports and crime—by the time he reached the trash can at Foley Square, where the courthouse stood.

The weather was indeed fine, and he flew more or less blind down Centre Street from Grand, clutching the tattered red cardboard folder he used for a briefcase under his arm like a running back's football, and snapping through the pages of the tabloid. Karp had a real briefcase, a lush cordovan Mark Cross, given to him by his father for his law school graduation gift, but he never used it. This had to do with Karp's extraordinary (and in that era of luxuriant self-promotion, near-pathological) conservatism with regard to personal show, which had prevented him from appearing with a shiny new briefcase on his first day at the D.A.'s years ago, and continued to generate excuses for not now showing up with it. Lugging the tacky cardboard gave him a vague satisfaction, and also served to distinguish him in his own mind from those members of his profession not famously devoted to justice, who had been richly rewarded by society for their scumbaggery, and who typically hauled their vile shenanigans about in the finest morocco.

As for the rest of his equipage, Karp was dressed at that moment in a natural shoulder, three-button, navy tropical wool suit with the faintest of pinstripes, one virtually identical to the other nine suits he owned (half winter- and half summer-weight). With this he wore a plain-collar white silk shirt and a tie that Richard Nixon might have rejected as being a shade too understated, and a pair of black cap-toe wing tips. Except for the tie, everything visible he had on was custom-made and of the highest possible quality, which bought at retail would have set him back well over five grand. He had spent nothing like that, however, since the clothing and shoes came from Chen connections in Hong Kong and Taipei, who had supplied it at cost or less. Thus did Karp reap the benefits of being, through marriage, an honorary Chen, and therefore he read with more than usual concentration the story of the murders in the Asia Mall, and not without a sharp pang of fear, since he knew that the murder scene was one of the usual hangouts of his little girl. He parked the tabloid in his usual waste can and walked into Foley Square.

Two centuries ago, Foley Square had been Collect Pond, a body of water that early New Yorkers had soon converted into an open sewer. Hardly had the colonial filth jelled when they built the city jail on it, which sank into the mire, and then they built another one on top of it, the infamous Tombs. The four towers that Karp saw as he walked through the tiny park with its incomprehensible orange steel sculpture was the third grim structure on the site, and no longer the main New York jail, although one tower was still used as a holding facility for prisoners undergoing justice and was still called the Tombs. It was a gray and hulking fascist ziggurat, and Karp, who had slight interest in architecture, rather liked it. He thought that, considering what transpired within, a pretty building would have been an obscenity.

There was an entrance on the south side of the Criminal Courts building reserved for its staff, but Karp ordinarily preferred to come in through the main door facing Foley Square. Here he was exposed to the sentiments carved in marble on the sides of the entranceway, and, as a ritual, he read one or two of them, like a tourist. This morning it was
Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people
, which always gave Karp a chuckle, since what was just on the other side of the swinging glass doors was a pretty good argument why not. The lobby here had been known since the late sixties as the Streets of Calcutta. When someone in the D.A. said, “Hey, I saw Bernie Popkin in Calcutta yesterday,” they referred not to the Asian metropolis but to this melancholy hallway, murmurous with sighs, cries of outrage, confidential whispers, and other noises associated with a criminal-justice apparatus rusted and crumbling like the West Side Highway, and suffused, not unlike the actual Calcutta, with a peculiar and diagnostic odor, constructed of old paint, musty papers, disinfectant, the snack bar's grease-and-burnt-coffee, the expensive cologne of rich lawyers, the cheap scent of whores, and the immemorial effluvium of the unwashed poor.

This was, of course, Karp's native air, and a tonic; breathing it in and rubbing against Calcutta was the reason he took this route. In his present job he spent a lot of time handling clean paper and harrying the neatly dressed. He felt his edge slowly dulling and wanted grit, and this walk was, most days, all he would get of it. He passed the several thick lines of people waiting to traverse the guard station and its metal detectors and went toward the left side of the entryway, where there was a special gate for the anointed. People were lined up there, too, showing their passes. Karp did not show his pass, because the guard and all the other court officers knew him by sight. This was not hard to do, because Karp was six-five, with big hands and long arms on a solidly built lean frame, a tall dark slab like the one that amazed the ape men in
2001.
On top of this was an equally memorable face, a bony, sallow one with a broad, heavy brow under crisp brown hair unfashionably cut by an ancient Italian person on Mulberry Street, and high cheekbones, not the good type sported by the people who drank crystalline martinis in Connecticut, but the less prestigious kind seen on those who drank fermented mare's milk east of Odessa. A determined chin under a surprisingly sensual mouth, a nose too large and too often broken—now resembling a sock toe full of pebbles—and, his most striking feature, odd, long, slightly slanted eyes, colored gray with yellow flecks. Karp flashed this face at the guard, greeted her by name, and was waved on through. The usual murmur of resentment issued from some of the other people waiting before the gate, this being democratic New York, and
standing on line
, as they say there, being one of the last remaining flecks of cultural glue, but no actual challenges. Karp was not above taking this privilege of rank.

Another one of these was the office. It was located on the eighth floor in the suite occupied by the district attorney, and it contained rugs and paneling and wooden furniture and a big leather chair and two large windows looking out on Foley Square. Karp greeted Mary O'Malley, the D.A.'s formidable secretary, went by the supply room for a cup of her excellent coffee, and went back to his office. Karp had recently been made, somewhat to his own surprise,
chief
assistant district attorney. Before that he had held a meaningless staff post into which he had been stuffed to rescue him from a political firestorm arising out of a racially charged murder case. Since then there had been an election, which the D.A., Jack Keegan, had won by a 71 percent plurality and could thereafter do as he damn pleased, and what he pleased to do was to appoint Karp as what was essentially the chief operating officer of the entire prosecutorial organization. Karp did not particularly enjoy the bureaucratic aspects of the job, but he was vitally interested in maintaining the integrity of the D.A.'s office against all assaults, of which in the present corrupt age there were many. What Karp really liked doing, what he did better than practically anyone in the city, was trying homicide cases, and in the negotiations that had led to his present position he had arranged with Keegan, in a manner rather like some medieval symbol of a feudal obligation (the gill of pepper or the five silver fox pelts) that he would get his pick of one case per annum, to prepare and to bring before a jury. Meanwhile, he was a team player, and he discovered, also to his surprise, that he was reasonably competent at a variety of unpleasant bureaucratic tasks. He hired, he fired. He caused the drafting and distribution and approval of policy documents. He spread terror among the incompetent and lazy. He kibitzed on important trials. He distributed largesse—office furniture, remodel-ing, space, and staff—where he thought it would do the most good, he spied discreetly, and he passed on to his boss what he considered it proper for the big guy to know. And occasionally he had dumped in his lap an affair so tormented, so covered with poisonous spines and excrement, that only someone with insane bravery and no detectable ambition for higher office would touch it with a barge pole.

Then O'Malley came in abruptly, her wrist with its watch held up in front of her face. Karp stared at her. She tapped the watch dial with a blunt fingernail.

“The Hilton? It's nine-fifty.”

“Oh,
shit
!” cried Karp, leaping up. He ran for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way. The secretary slapped an envelope into his hand, like the baton of a relay racer, as he flew by.

“Ed's waiting out on Leonard Street,” shouted O'Malley, and received a shouted thanks.

Of all of Karp's duties, the most irritating (which is why he often had to be reminded of it, as now) was representing the district attorney at public events that the district attorney did not think quite important enough to require the exhibition of his actual body, but not negligible either, so that someone from the office had to go eat the chicken and peas. Karp was almost always this eater.

At least he got to go to these in a cop car. Ed Morris, his driver, goosed lights and siren to clear a path uptown. Karp dabbed his brow with his handkerchief, used the rearview to fix his tie, and pulled out the contents of the envelope. Oh, yeah,
this
, he recalled: the Metropolitan Council's annual awards luncheon. This was an assembly of the great and the good dedicated to civic improvements of all types, one of the older and less interesting of the innumerable groups doing the same in New York. It was dominated by slightly right-of-center academics, didn't give political contributions, and was not likely to soon give an award to Jack Keegan, which was why he wasn't going and Karp was. The person who
was
getting this year's award was Thomas Colombo, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a registered Republican. Karp ran his eyes down the list of speakers and discovered “John J. Keegan (invited),” who was to discourse on “The New York D.A. and Organized Crime” for fifteen minutes as a warm-up to the actual award and the main address by its distinguished recipient, whose subject was listed as “Using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Against Criminal Infiltrators.”

Karp cursed briefly, pulled out a pen, and started to make notes on the back of the flyer. Public speaking held no fears for him, and he was an extempore speaker of real talent. By the time he had arrived at the Hilton at 53rd and Sixth, he had a beginning, middle, and closing indicated by telegraphic sentences, and single-word indications referring to appropriate jokes—frog, farmer, clam—all guaranteed not to offend any conceivable ethnic, religious, disadvantaged, or sexual group.

He was late to the dais table—the fruit cup had already been proferred—but he shook hands with the owlish professor who ran the outfit, made a gracious apology for his boss's unavailability and his own lateness, and told the man who he was. He sat down between a Methodist bishop and an attractive woman whose name card said she was the president of one of the city university's colleges. The college president immediately engaged him in a conversation about Marlene Ciampi, his wife, about whom she had an unbounded curiosity, this soon shared by the bishop, and Karp found himself reluctantly recounting the inside skinny on some of her cases, and after that began to grow tedious (“But how do you stand it, the violence? And what about the children?”) he skillfully turned the subject to college presidenting and bishopry. One good thing about the people you met at these operations, he reflected, it was never hard to get them to start talking about themselves.

The owlish professor tapped a glass as Latinos carted away the remains of the meal and introduced Karp and his subject. There was no sigh of disappointment in the crowd. Karp was very nearly as well-known among the city's crime buffs as the D.A. himself, and had perhaps the more colorful background.

He rose to the podium, told the frog joke, got a mild laugh, presented the take of the man Karp considered the finest of the city's D.A.s, the late, great Francis P. Garrahy, on the Mob (They want to kill each other? I'll hire Yankee Stadium for them, and I'll pay for the bullets), and then delivered a precise and lucid talk about the origins of organized crime in New York and why it was inevitable given the predilection of Americans to legislate sin into the criminal code, and why the alternative to organized crime was not necessarily law and order, but was more often an increase in disorganized crime, verging on anarchy and the conversion of streets into war zones. He reminded his audience that when Murder Incorporated did its work back in the thirties and forties, it killed discreetly and accurately, and did not spray the streets with gunfire, wiping out kids and old ladies. Reverse course now, tell the farmer joke, remarks not meant as an endorsement of the Mob,
The Godfather
only a movie, the real guys nasty, unattractive, fortunately mostly dumb as a load of bricks, then a brief summary of the D.A.'s approach to organized crime, which was not that different from its approach to regular crime—if someone did a crime, they got prosecuted, whether their name was Gambino, Colombo, or Ishkabibble. Tell some goombah stories, the big New York cases, Tom Dewey, Garrahy, more modestly, Karp himself (moral: we don't necessarily need the feds to help us deal with these fellas), tell the clam joke, big laugh, but not from Tommy Colombo, who never liked to hear the name of that particular crime family uttered in a public place, and Karp had indeed used it as a mildly nasty zinger, see if the guy was awake there, and move to close. Burst of applause, actual, not polite hand slapping.