Reckless Endangerment (20 page)

“I intend to,” said Karp, “at the appropriate moment. This is not the appropriate moment. This is the moment when I go around to all my old pals, especially those whose ass I have covered and saved God only knows how many times, and pick up on the real stuff that nobody wants to tell the D.A.” Karp smiled sharkishly and waited.

“Oh,
that
moment,” said Guma. He grinned, showing a set of bone white false teeth, leaned back in his ancient wooden swivel chair, and placed his thumbs behind the armholes of his unbuttoned suit vest. The lip protruded again and then snapped back as he spoke. “Do you know Carrozza in Narcotics?”

“To talk to. What about him?” Karp spent as little time as he decently could in the Narcotics Bureau. It ran itself, like an abattoir, and he did not care for the smell.

“Mexican brown heroin. There’s all of a sudden a shit-load of it uptown, but mostly in Brooklyn. According to Carrozza it started showing up around about the time Morilla got hit.”

“And … ?”

“There’s not supposed to be Mexican brown heroin in New York. In L.A., yeah, but here we get it white from Turkey and the Golden Triangle through Europe. Everyone in the business is a little pissed off. There’s all kinds of murmuring among the skells.”

“What are they saying?”

“Well, the word around is that it all comes from a new kid on the block, not the
cugines,
not the uptown Zulus, not Jamakes.”

“Mexicans?”

Guma shrugged, a slow and elaborate gesture. “It could be that’s what the late Detective M. was trying to find out. Whether he did or not … you know how these undercover Narco guys are. They don’t make contact for weeks, they live the role, they fucking
become
scumbag dealers. …” His voice trailed off. Karp indeed knew, and also knew about how easy it was for people in this kind of work to drift by imperceptible stages over the line between pretense and actuality. How far Morilla had gone down that road was something else they did not know. Karp thought in silence about all the other things. Why Obregon had killed Morilla, for one. The Obregons were not the new kids, being actually behind bars during the recent distribution of Mexican brown, and Morilla hadn’t been investigating the brothers as far as anyone knew. And where was the dope? The Obregons had possessed serious weight of neither dope nor cash at the time of arrest. Who ever heard of drug lords traveling a couple of thousand miles to a strange city without either dope or cash? As he mused, he tugged idly at the top of a sealed evidence bag sitting in a box at his feet, the detritus of some case. He held up the clear plastic envelope. In it were several tiny vials with colored plastic tops, containing what looked like rock salt.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Crack cocaine,” said Guma. “Somebody finally figured out how to make coke cheap. They smoke it in pipes.” He indicated the bag. “Guy got shot over that. New kind of dope, new turf. It’s funny, the homicide rate peaked in seventy-seven, and it’s been dropping for a couple of years. Now, with this stuff, and if we start getting Mexican smack in here competing, it’s going to be blood alley up in Zululand. That shotgun job in Brooklyn? Just a taster.”

Karp smiled sourly. “Ah, Goom, you always make my day, a little inspirational message. But, seriously, on Morilla, frankly—what’s your take?”

Guma shared a narrow-eyed glance. “Frankly. Well, I work for the guy, and he’s a friend, but since it’s
you,
and it’s not gonna go any further …” He spread the fingers of one chunky hand and waggled the hand on a horizontal plane. “It’s fucked. I don’t know what Roland’s thinking here, going with this case. Huerta’s going to cream us.”

Karp nodded. “Manny Huerta’s on D?”

“Uh-huh. The little fuckers at least know to buy talent.”

“Hmm. Roland tell you he’s been getting threatening letters?”

Guma frowned. “No. About the Obregons and Morilla?”

“Yeah. It doesn’t sound like Huerta, though, does it? He’s a scumbag dope lawyer, but he’s a stand-up scumbag dope lawyer. Christ, all he really needs is a couple of citizens confirming the Obregons’ story about that phony police raid, and they walk behind the theory that the gun was a frame-up.”

“Right, if the jury doesn’t buy Netski’s story,” said Guma.

“Yeah, but Netski does not contribute powerfully to my comfort level.” They were silent for a while, thinking about Ray Netski. Netski was a narcotics cop and, like many such, was often a witness in homicide cases. On a particular one of these occasions last year, Roland had caught him in a larger than usual fib, that is, a fib just outside the wire in the fairly wide sway given to police testimony by prosecutors and the courts. If a couple of cops followed a guy into an apartment to talk to him about an acquaintance recently slain with a sawed-off shotgun, and if during the interview a cop gently teased open the door of a closet and lifted up a dirty shirt with his toe, and discovered a twelve-gauge Remington with ten inches missing from the barrel, and thereafter swore on the Bible that the said weapon had been in plain view when they were invited in, as required by the Fourth Amendment in warrantless searches, the D. A. would not normally gag on the morsel. Netski’s sin had been considerably greater than that, involving actually moving a weapon from one place to another. Roland, no stranger to such tricks, had caught him at it, had copped the suspect out to a lesser, and then had done nothing else, which is what he almost always did when he caught a cop lying. Roland liked to have cops on his gaff, and in Netski’s case the hook was sunk good and deep.

Karp cleared his throat heavily, and said, “Um, Goom, you don’t think that, ah … Roland … ?”

“Ah, shit, no! No fucking way!” replied Guma in outraged tones. “Nah, what I think is they found somebody else’s setup and it was neat enough to believe it, and they sort of kissed each other through it. Roland fell in love with it—it’s his first cop killer since he’s been the chief, right? And he wants to show, like,
velocity
here, and Netski bought in for sloppy seconds, like he’s saying, Oh, yeah, Roland, it turns out Morilla
was
closing in on a couple of Mexicans. What’s he gonna do anyway,
contradict
the guy who saved his butt? It happens. Not usually with a guy who’s as good as Roland, and as wised up as Roland, but since he took over, Roland’s … what can I say? Not Roland. He don’t have you to grab him by the belt anymore, maybe.” He snorted and seemed, if such a word could be used in connection with Guma, embarrassed.

“Unfortunately, he does,” said Karp, almost to himself. “So—anything else?”

“Not really. Carrozza says there’s a name floating around. Lucky.”

Karp snorted a laugh. “
Lucky?
Is that the one that hangs out with Lefty and Blacky?”

This forced another grin onto Guma’s wide mouth. “What can I say? We’re talking about an un-fucking-believably tight little dope operation. They came, they dumped, they scored, they’re gone.”

“They popped Morilla and framed the Mexican brothers.”

“I didn’t say that, Butch,” said Guma after a meaningful pause. “The Obregons are the defendants in Morilla.”

That was it, then, a lot more than he would have extracted from Czermak, who, unlike Guma, retained ambition. Karp rose and said, “Thanks, Guma. This helps.”

Guma’s eyes slid away. “Hey, don’t thank me,” he said, “we never talked about it.”

Lucy Karp was thinking in Cantonese, something she did often, and with pleasure. It had been her first foreign language, almost a cradle tongue, and she still loved the sound of it in her head, the rolling burr and gong of it, and the music of the tones. It was in Cantonese that she first had discovered, almost as early as her memory went back, that when there was a different language in your head, you were a different person, you could think thoughts you couldn’t think in another language. In Cantonese there was a whole world of puns and tone and syllable connections that did not exist in English. Her Chinese friends did not, to her surprise, seem to have this sense of wonder. Later, when she discovered that she could pick up other languages—to date, Sicilian, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese—with hardly any effort, and that other people could not do this, and that they found it strange, even disturbing, it made her glad, and she had grown her odd little personality around this difference.

She was sitting in the backseat of the yellow VW reading a book her mother had bought her as a reward for being good about clothes (she was wearing a blue wool jumper over a yellow turtleneck jersey, with navy tights and Adidas, part of the recent raid on Bloomies). The book was
The Story of Language,
and from it she had learned that one could actually get paid for learning languages, and for thinking about how languages were connected and analyzing their structure, which information had blown all thoughts of other potential careers (cowgirl, detective, spy, nun) clean out of her head. Next to a loving family, such an early vocation is about the best thing that can happen to a child, and Lucy had become a happier person since: calmer, sweeter to her little brothers, more tolerant. The book was a permanent resident of her backpack, along with a Petite Larousse, an old red-bound Mandarin-English dictionary, a Vietnamese-English phrase book lent to her by Tran, and
The Catcher in the Rye.
Lucy read dictionaries and grammars like other girls her age read Judy Blume, and she never forgot anything she read.

Just now she was reading through a brief discussion of the history of linguistics in the nineteenth century, of, to be exact, the brothers Grimm and their discovery of consonant shifting among the European languages. Lucy was reading this in English, thinking about it in Cantonese, and listening, with a fragment of attention, to a conversation going on in the front seat between her mother and Tran, which was being conducted in French. She did this with no more thought than she would have given to the coordination of her various muscle groups while skipping rope.

The conversation was becoming somewhat strained: the parties had begun addressing each other as Madame and Monsieur. Lucy had noticed her mother’s irritation on being picked up after Chinese school, and this seemed to increase after they had driven up to retrieve Tran from some mission in Clinton. When her mother was irritated, Lucy had noticed, she often expressed it by attempting to exert minute control over an unruly world. It was not pleasant being the object of such control, and Tran was becoming stiffer and colder in his locutions. Lucy paid more attention. It was, she gathered, a stupid argument about a surveillance Marlene wanted done. Marlene was giving him precise instructions instead of just telling him to do it, as she ordinarily did.

“… take the whole roll,” she was saying, “and make sure you get the license plate number. Can you use a telephoto lens?”

Tran made the hissing sound he uttered when he was annoyed. “Madame,” he snapped, “I wish that you would stop treating me like an incompetent, and asking me if I can do this or that simple thing. It is insulting.”

“I beg your pardon, Monsieur,” replied Marlene in a similar tone. “I was not aware that you could do everything in the world.”

Tran turned away and said something in Vietnamese to the side window.

“Pardon me, I did not hear that,” said Marlene.

“It was nothing, Madame!”

“He said, ‘I cannot yet menstruate, you foolish woman,’ ” supplied Lucy without thought.

They both turned and stared at her, gaping, and were called back to reality only by the blare of a car horn. Marlene had drifted over the center line and had narrowly missed a careening taxi. She cursed and dragged the VW back into lane, almost sideswiping a truck. More horns. Marlene pulled into the right lane, and at the next red light she said, “Jesus, I almost killed us! Tran, I’m sorry, I’m nervous and disturbed.”

“I had noticed, Marie-Hélène,” he answered dryly. “Is there something I can do to help?”

“No. I’m sorry, actually, yes, yes … but we must talk of it at length, without the presence of an injudicious infant.”

“I am not an infant,” said Lucy in French. “I am a linguist.”

“Yes,” said her mother, “but sadly, because of your unfortunate personality, probably unemployable as a diplomat. Are you enjoying that book?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Lucy politely. She had noticed that her French self was more elegantly mannered than her regular self. She wondered whether this was a quality of the tongue itself, or because she was still not entirely comfortable in it, or because the language she had learned from Tran was not a street argot but the French of the schoolroom, with Tran’s colonial accent. She was more polite in Cantonese too, but since her mother did not speak Cantonese, this was wasted on her. She continued, “In any case, I have no desire to be a diplomat. I intend to be like Mezzofanti.”

“Who?”

“Cardinal Mezzofanti was the greatest linguist who ever lived. He’s in the book. He knew a hundred and seventeen languages perfectly. Once he learned Swedish in forty-eight hours, so well that he spoke it better than most Swedes.”

This was one of Lucy’s apparently unlimited supply of conversation stoppers, so the three of them rode in a restful silence the rest of the way to the East Village Women’s Shelter.

The first thing Marlene noticed when she entered the shelter was the new smell. Instead of the usual institutional pong of fry grease, disinfectant, and old tenement, there was a waft of fresh bread baking and an undertone of exotic spice, as of some oriental market. Tran slipped away to the kitchen to investigate the source. Marlene inquired of the proprietor.

Mattie Duran grinned and replied enthusiastically, “Yeah, ain’t it grand? Every so often the street tosses up a pearl. The kid walked in last week, middle of the night, soaking wet. She’d been sleeping in Tompkins Square. Anyway, it turns out she’s a baker, and the rest is history. I’m gonna gain thirty pounds.”

“I thought you didn’t take runaways. Or do you make exceptions for bakers?”

Mattie frowned. “Yeah, well, she’s a runaway, but there’s a difference. It took me a couple of hours to get the story out of her, she lied like a trooper, but you know me …”