Reckless Endangerment (9 page)

“That would not be wise,” he said. “It is too large for you, and your mother would never allow it.”

“It is not too large,” said Lucy, shifting from French to Cantonese, where she had the advantage of fluency. “My mother let me shoot a nine once, which is larger. Also, suppose a kidnapper came in here and shot you. I would have to take your weapon and defend us both. How could I do that, never having shot it before?” She affected her most fetching sulk. “Besides, it is because I am only a girl. If I were a boy, you would never object.”

After a considerate pause, Tran replied, in French, “It is certainly true that you are a girl—more to the point, one who does not know her place. Your attempts to manipulate me are shameless indeed. Were it up to me, I would have you drowned.”

Lucy giggled. “But, truly,
Bác
Tran, will you?” “Truly, it is up to your mother,” said Tran. “Myself, I wash my hands.”

On the passenger manifest of the Delta flight from Tucson to O’Hare and that of the connecting flight from O’Hare to La Guardia he was listed as Fernando Zedillo. His mother, whom he worshiped, called him Paco, as did his four sisters. Had he any friends, they might have called him Paco too, but he was not the friendly sort. In the company of men, there would be drinking, and someone who did not know him, or was drunk enough to forget who he was, would say something impugning the virtue of his mother, or comment on Paco’s physical appearance, after which Paco would be obliged to commit one of his frequent murders. This inevitably came as a surprise to the company, since Paco had the face of an angel: his eyes were large with long, thick lashes, the bones of his face were delicate and sharply etched, his neck was narrow, long, and graceful, his mouth a pouting, dusky rose. He wore his thick black hair long, with long sideburns.

Paco was, as might be expected, a terror among the women, and had been getting it regularly from the age of twelve, which was two years after he had committed his first assassination, number one of, at last count, thirty-two. He was at this time twenty-three years of age. His actual success with women made any accusations of effeminacy particularly hard to take, and he did not take any, not ever.

Subsequent to his first few killings in the environs of Nogales, Arizona, one of his uncles had sent him down to the ancestral home in Hermosillo, in Sonora state, to make himself useful to another uncle. Paco’s family had been gangsters of one sort or another for several generations, and while
chuteros
were easy to find, one who both looked as if he had just come from his mother’s breast
and
who shot with such utter calm was rare indeed. Besides this, he had no problem doing women and children, which was not usual in those circles, but sometimes desirable. His reputation grew in the underworld of Sonora, until the mere rumor that he had been retained would cause rivals to flee with their families, ensure the prompt repayment of overdue debt, or the uttering forth of formerly guarded secrets. They called him El Chivato, which is slang for a boisterous or unruly child, although he was far from unruly. His owner and uncle, a hoodlum who called himself Don Vincente Montez, found him in all ways easily bid and no trouble at all (except to his victims). He spent most of his spare time watching television and having sexual intercourse. His chief disadvantage from Don Vincente’s standpoint was his insistence on being given time off for holidays, including Christmas, Epiphany, Easter (the whole week), the Feast of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, and the Feast of All Saints, as well as the birthdays of his mother and his sisters.

Don Vincente could live with that. After El Chivato had suppressed Vincente’s personal enemies, the boy had become an important source of revenue, and was rented out to gangsters, politicians, and betrayed lovers throughout western Mexico and as far north as Nogales. He was not, however, pleased with the request from Jodón Obregon. In vain did he argue, as an uncle should, that the boy was not ready for such a trip, that he knew nothing of the ways of North America or of a big city. He had not been even to Mexico City above a half dozen times. Surely there were local boys, in New York, as he had seen many times on the TV? No, it had to be El Chivato. There was a place to stay, someone to supply all his needs. Well, in that case—but the cost, this would have to reflect the danger. Don Vincente named an outrageous figure, and to his immense surprise and disappointment (since he might have demanded more) Obregon agreed without cavil.

As he considered it later, the gangster felt it was for the best. If the boy was successful, there was all that money; if he failed to return, then the money from his many fees that Don Vincente held for him, which was by now well over a million pesos, would not have to be paid out. El Chivato expressed no emotion when told that he was going to New York, only asking whether it was farther away than Tucson.

FOUR

T
he door of the East Village Women’s Shelter on Avenue C was made of eighth-inch steel plating and set into a steel frame. The windows of the storefront, which had once been a kosher deli and after that a bodega, were blocked with thick plywood under gray galvanized sheeting. Marlene rang the buzzer, and when the intercom box crackled the question, she told it who she was and the door buzzed open. After that door there was a short, well-lit vestibule and then another door, this one of glass with a heavy grille. A thick-bodied, dark-skinned woman behind a desk looked up from her book, then came around and opened the door.

“How’s it going, Verda?” Marlene asked, entering.

“I ain’t dead,” said the woman. “You here to see her?”

“Yeah, is she free?”

“In her office,” said Verda, and she sat heavily back into a swivel chair. Marlene saw that her book was a ragged high school math text. The door Marlene knocked on had been the entrance to a storeroom when the place was a retail establishment. Inside it was a small office, as cramped as a lunar lander, but not as clean, lined on three sides by filing cabinets and green steel shelves loaded with cardboard boxes of paper and books. In the scant vacant center of this space, behind a scarred old schoolroom desk, sat Mattie Duran, the founder and genius of the institution. She was a blocky red-brown woman, with a flat, hard, bright-eyed
indio
face, and long, thick hair worn center-parted and braided. She wore a faded turquoise blue sweatshirt with a red bandanna around her neck, black jeans, and plain black cowboy boots.

“What?” she said when Marlene walked in, looking up from a pad she had been scribbling on. “Oh, it’s you,” she continued by way of greeting. Marlene was not sure whether Mattie Duran liked her or simply tolerated her for her usefulness to the operation of the shelter. That Marlene had actually killed men was, she imagined, the main point in her favor. That Marlene lived with a man, in middle-class comfort, and was a loyal, if somewhat heterodox, Catholic, were all points against. For her own part, Marlene admired Duran and was to an extent fascinated by her. Marlene’s partner, Harry Bello, had looked into Duran’s past when Marlene first started to work with her. The woman proved to have an interesting background. She’d shot her stepfather down in Texas, blown a hole in his skull while he lay sleeping, and done a stretch in prison for it, and after that had hung with a bunch of guys who pulled bank jobs but never did any time for any of that. After the gang expired, in the violent way of such associations, she’d just shown up in New York with a hard face and plenty of cash money to start this shelter.

It was not an official shelter. It received no money from state or city agencies. It accepted only women and children who were in immediate grave danger of murder or serious injury. The official agencies frowned on the EVWS, because Mattie did not share paper with them. Women entered the EVWS and disappeared forever from the rolls of the social bureaucracy. On the other hand, the cops loved it, because it gave them a place to stash women who would otherwise have required twenty-four-hour protection, which was why Mattie never had much trouble with inspections.

Marlene did mostly transfers for the EVWS, and a little frightening-off work against the loved ones, although the guys who put their women into East Village often required more frightening than Marlene was comfortable in supplying at this stage in her life. Mattie was not sympathetic.

They had some brief business to transact, some details about moving a family, and as usual they got into an argument. It was hard to get through an hour with Mattie Duran without at least a few minutes of bared teeth and clenched fists. The woman extracted some kind of vital energy from combat, and Marlene was one of the few people in her life who was not crushed by her personality. This argument was about a woman named Kitty Valone, who, with her three children, was presently resident at the shelter. It was her fourth stay there. Each time she was placed, with enormous difficulty, at a new address, her estranged hubby, Ernesto, would find her. And she would take him in. After a brief period of bliss, Ernesto would try to kill her or one of the kids (again) and Kitty would wind up back at the shelter and Ernesto would do his stretch in jail and the charade (in Marlene’s eyes) would start all over. Marlene felt she had enough work to do on behalf of women who
wanted
to escape. She declined to involve herself with women who lacked the sense to seek their own survival.

But Mattie never gave up. She would scream at women, threaten them, but every waif had an unlimited claim on her time and space.

“I should whack the fucker myself,” muttered Duran after the argument had burned itself out.

“I didn’t hear that,” said Marlene, and left.

Karp sat in a straight chair in his kitchen waiting for supper. The room was a large area of a large SoHo loft that his wife had occupied for a dozen years, from before SoHo was invented. During Karp’s brief period of wealth, when he had won some big ones for a tort firm, they had poured cash into the loft, nearly as much as would have made a down payment on a nice West Side co-op, which Karp would have preferred, truth be told, but Marlene loved her loft, and here they now dwelt in something approaching luxury, in a residence whose only connection with its past as a wire factory was an eight-hundred-gallon hard rubber electroplating vat pressed into service as a hot tub. The loft had climate control, and Swedish oak flooring (blood-colored Mexican tiles in the kitchen), dropped ceilings with track lighting, real walls with doors in them, and a kitchen out of
Architectural Digest:
a stainless double-door refrigerator, an immense Vulcan stove, and everything else white enameled, or birch, or butcher block, except (this typically Marlene) in the very center, huge, dark, ugly, and round, Marlene’s immigrant grandmother’s dining table.

Karp sighed and shifted uneasily. He was not allowed to cook. His few early attempts in the kitchen had resulted in injury to himself, the food, or, worst of all, Marlene’s precious implements. He passed again through his mind the incidents of the interview in Williamsburg, which still rankled, and he felt, more than he usually did, the need for familial warmth and comfort. He looked about and attempted to derive some. Karp loved his family dearly, but if pressed in his secret heart, he would have admitted that it was not the one he would have chosen if families were ordered out of glossy catalogs. His wife, stirring the bean soup with a traditional wooden spoon, might have been mistaken for a paragon of domesticity. Marlene was, in fact, a superb cook. Each weekend the kitchen filled with spicy steam, as she generated a week’s worth of meals for the freezer as well as a feast for the Sunday. And a good mother too, of a sort. Karp cast his eye over his offspring. Lucy had a cutting board set up at the table and was making the salad, her usual chore. He watched her shave a carrot into thin sticks with a knife sharp enough to amputate a finger. She had been doing this since the age of seven, and Karp was well able to suppress his desire to snatch the thing out of her hand (and probably into his own carotid). Karp had been one of a family of three brothers and so had no direct experience with raising girls, but he still retained memories of girl cousins, and could not recall them being at all like Lucy. An odd child, an even odder girl child. She had never played with dolls, preferring from an early age guns and other implements of destruction. And there was an inwardness about her that worried him. You could never tell what she was up to, and so you could not extend over her the paternal cloak of protection as a dad should. And the languages. Karp, a confirmed monoglot, was amazed and somewhat pleased with his daughter’s apparent genius in this area, but again, it was so … unexpected. When he looked at the girl nowadays he found himself wondering, What next?

“So, Lucy—learn any new languages today?” he assayed. “Polynesian?”

“Polynesian isn’t a language, Daddy, it’s a language group. There are over a hundred Polynesian languages.”

“Uh-huh. How’s the Chinese coming?”

“We’re doing four-stroke radicals,” said Lucy shortly, slicing. (She loved him, but she was not going to patronize him, or flirt. This was hard on Karp; he missed her being four.)

There seemed no reasonable comeback to that, aside from asking what such a thing might be, and Lucy telling him, at length, and giving him (prematurely, he thought) the creepy feeling parents get when their kids know more than they do, so Karp turned his attention to the boys. The two-year-old twins, Isaac and Giancarlo, called Zak and Zik, had, of course, been fed long since by Posie, the live-in nursemaid, and were currently on the kitchen floor amid a selection of their toys. Zak was hammering with the plastic hammer from his tool set on the heavy-duty snap fastener that Marlene used to secure the door of the cabinet under the sink. Zak’s goal was to penetrate this forbidden space and drink deep from the delicious-looking bottles of poisonous substances kept there. Zak at two was, as they say, a handful. Zik was scribbling with washable markers on a large newsprint pad, and his hands and feet. Next to him, comfortable on the floor, was Posie, drawing mandala-like designs on her very own newsprint pad. Zik began to color on Posie’s bare feet, prompting giggles. Marlene had picked the woman up out of some domestic-abuse fracas. She was a buxom, moon-faced innocent with long, straight black hair and bad teeth. She came from some obscure hollow in Pennsylvania and had been on the street from the age of fourteen until the night Marlene had given her shelter and a job. Karp had to admit she was a good baby-sitter, although a cool and elegant Swedish au pair would have been more to his liking. Yet another nodule of discomfort around the hearth.