Act of Revenge (34 page)

“We could make arrangements to have her watched.”

“By who? Rent-a-cops? Butch, I'm in the
business
! Please do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I know what I'm doing here.”

“So what do we have now? The great and powerful Tran? That's it?”

She shook her head, irritated. “Butch, where do you think Tran is, right now, this minute?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I'm not sure either, but”—here she lifted her eyes upward—“I would guess that he's slung in a hammock on our roof with a Kalashnikov across his chest. Anybody tried to come through that door, assuming they got through the cordon of tough little Viets he's had posted around this block since the kidnapping, he'd be down through that skylight in about three seconds and turn whoever it was into shreds. You think the Valley Stream P.D. out by my sister's would mount an operation like that for Lucy?”

Karp raised his own eyes to the ceiling. “He does this every night? When does he sleep?”

“I'm not sure that Tran does sleep. In any case, does that make you feel any better?” Karp stared blankly at the screen, letting the silent images bounce meaninglessly off his eyeballs. The sitcom was over, the commercials were selling bright goods.

“It's not just that, Marlene. This whole situation, the Chinatown stuff, the genius stuff, it's, I don't know,
eroding
her.” He let out a bitter laugh. “Aside from getting pissed at you, I honestly don't know what the hell to do.”

“Yeah, well, I realize the agenda here is if only Marlene had been a normal mom, like both of our moms, if only we lived in a regular suburban house, and she went to a regular suburban school—we've been over this a million times, Butch. It's fruitless. If, if . . . if your grandmother had wheels, she could haul cement. There's no way out except
through
it, playing the cards as dealt. What you need to spend your energy on is lighting a fire under the cops to get these bastards.”

“Good advice, Marlene. I'll tell you what, why don't you let me be in charge of legal affairs in this family? You seem to have your hands full with the illegal kind.” Marlene huffed, but Karp had shifted the focus of his attention.

He grabbed for the remote, pushed the mute. A commercial for the news program scheduled for the next slot was on the screen.

“. . . startling revelations suggesting Mafia infiltration at the highest levels of the New York district attorney's office,” said the announcer, and on the screen was Ray Guma, winking slyly and saying, “The fix is in.”

“All this and the latest weather and sports. Stay tuned,” said the announcer.

Karp said, “Ah, shit! The stupid fuckers leaked the film.”

They watched as the news came on and the screen showed the artfully edited tape, thirty seconds of Guma saying those unwise sentences to Gino Scarpi, ending with that wink and “the fix is in.” After that there was an interview with Norton Peabody in the lobby of the Federal Building. Mr. P. was terribly upset that someone had leaked this piece of evidence, and an investigation was under way to find the culprit. Was there a federal investigation under way of the D.A.'s office? He was not at liberty to reveal whether or not there was. Would the federal grand jury take up the issue? The grand jury was authorized to explore all aspects of Mafia penetration of society, and the D.A.'s office was not excluded. Mr. Guma had received a subpoena and would be appearing before the grand jury in short order. The minute being up, the news switched to the doings in Lebanon, leaving Karp shrieking curses at the screen, and then the phone rang. Karp went out of the room to the kitchen and stood over the answering machine, glaring at it and snarling. It was a reporter. He left a message. Another ring. Another reporter.

Reporter. Reporter. TV reporter, could we schedule an interview for seven tomorrow? Another reporter. Then, “Butch! Jack Keegan. Pick up if you're there.”

Karp picked up. “Are you having fun yet?”

“Goddamn it, I actually was until this goddamn tape got on the TV.”

“Did they show it in West Virginia?”

“No, Mary just called and gave me the good news. Jesus, Butch, I'm here with every D.A. in the country, and it's out on network TV that I got a Mafia mole in my office. I'm gonna have to play golf tomorrow with a bag on my head. You saw it?”

“Yeah, Peabody showed it to me this afternoon. He's subpoenaed Guma based on the tape.” He paused, while Keegan said nothing. “You know it's horseshit, don't you?”

“Oh, Christ, of course it's horseshit,” said Keegan, “but that's not the point. It looks bad politically. I know you don't think that's important, but believe me it is. We could put the whole five families in jail and what people would remember is that fucking tape. Did he really wink and say ‘the fix is in'?”

“I'm afraid so. What're you going to do?”

“Hell, I feel like leaving right now. Four hours by car to D.C. and I could be on the first shuttle tomorrow morning.”

“Don't do that, Jack. It gives the fuckers more credibility than they deserve. Stay out of town and let me handle it. I'll do a press conference tomorrow morning and come out snarling. It should take the wind out of their sails a little, and if it doesn't work you can repudiate me, whatever.”

He was glad to hear Keegan's laugh over the line. “Oh, I will, my lad, never fear. Meanwhile that sounds like a start. I'll work the phones tomorrow, I got some pals at Justice, and I'll call my tame reporters in the city. Counterattack is good. I thought you didn't do politics.”

“I can do it,” said Karp. “I just hate it.”

He hung up shortly thereafter, and the phone immediately rang again. Karp cursed and listened, but it was not the press again. It was Fulton.

“We got one of them, Stretch,” he said, “and we lost two.” His voice was husky with exhaustion.

“What happened?”

“No problems going in, but two of the three weren't there. The guy we got is Vo Hoa Dung, they call him Needlenose. The big brother, Kenny Vo, was out. The other one, the cousin, disappeared this afternoon under circumstances yet to be determined. We found a bunch of weapons, too, including a couple of MAC–10 submachine guns. According to one of the girls, Kenny's packing one.”

“Terrific. Was Phil Wu there?”

“Yeah, and I got to say the man has a pair of balls. He was the first one through after the ESU popped the door. He did the interrogation, too.”

“Anything useful?”

A pause on the line. “Vo won't talk at all. The girls were saying that the Vo boys were yakking about how they were going to take out your Vietnamese buddy.”

“Tran?”

“Him. And, Butch? Jesus, I hate to have to tell you this, but they said they were going after Lucy, too.”

“Not if their asses are in jail. So out of the four original perps, one's in the prison ward at King's County, one's in custody, one's on the run, and one we don't know where he is. Is that right?”

“You got it. We're going to need Lucy down here tomorrow morning to ID Needlenose Vo in a lineup. You'll get her down to the Five?”

Karp said that he would. As he hung up, he reflected that, for at least part of the following day, his daughter would be in a police station and he could for a brief time stop worrying about her.

Chapter 16

“NO MAKEUP,” SAID KARP.

“It's only powder,” said the television woman. She had approached him in the chaos behind the set of the
Morning Report
show. Karp had arranged to be on the show just after speaking with Keegan the previous evening, to answer questions about the Guma-Scarpi tape. By now the tape had been seen at least a hundred times on all the local stations and the networks, too (
The fix is in
: wink), and Dudley Bryson, the newsman who was about to interview Karp, had, at their initial meeting earlier that morning, practically to wipe the saliva from his chin, so eager was he to get Karp before his cameras. A dangerous man, according to Bill McHenry, the D.A.'s public affairs chief, who had lectured Karp on how to handle
Morning Report
, a detailed strategy that had gone in one ear and out the other.

The television woman said, “Everybody uses it. It takes away the shine.” She smiled as for a recalcitrant child and leaned closer, paper bib and puff in hand. Karp gave her a knifing yellow look, of the type he ordinarily reserved for violent pedophiles.

“I. Said.
No
.”

She paled and scuttled away, muttering.

A young man wearing a headset and carrying a clipboard approached and led Karp out to the set, a matte blue wall dressed with a coffee table and two tan padded chairs. Karp was seated in one and fitted with a tiny microphone that clipped to his tie. Asked for a sound level, Karp said, “I wish for this entire enterprise to be destroyed by fire from the heavens, destroyed utterly, leaving only ashes and horribly disfigured corpses,” which apparently sufficed, and in short order the host came out, pancaked and hairsprayed to a mannikin perfection, and sat in the other seat, and had his mike attached, and attempted some small talk with Karp, not very successfully, and then the makeup person came out again and patted some powder on Bryson's thick orangey makeup, and he said something to her, indicating the guest with a gesture of his chin, and she shook her head and stalked off stage. Then the kid with the headset crouched in front of them and made three-two-one signs with his fingers and snapped his index finger pistol-like on the last count and the red light on the camera went on and Karp made a concentrated effort to relax the set of his jaw, which felt wired, and then Bryson was talking.

Karp tried to tell himself that this was just like a jury trial, that he was about to make a presentation to a jury of millions rather than just twelve, but he knew at some level that this was not so. Juries were grave affairs; whatever their origins, jurors were almost always ennobled by their function, which was seeking truth, that tender thing, and while Karp, if pressed, might agree that at its best journalism reached for something similar, what he was doing now had little to do with journalism at even its second best. What this jabbering little pimp next to him was doing was entertaining slobs in hopes that they would buy Miller rather than Bud, and Pontiac rather than Ford.

The scant intros over, Bryson called for the tape, and once again they all watched Ray Guma at work. Bryson's false smile spoke: “Mr. Karp, many people believe that what we've just seen suggests criminal activity and the possible corruption of the district attorney's office by organized crime. What's your response to that?”

Karp said, “Oh, there's no doubt that it's evidence of a crime.”

Bryson had expected wriggling here, and so he was somewhat taken aback. “And what is the district attorney's office going to do about it?” he asked.

Karp raised his eyebrows. “Nothing, with respect to prosecution. It's a federal crime.”

The false smile grew confused; the face turned to the camera to show it was not dismayed. “Excuse me?”

“Yes. It's illegal under federal statute and Department of Justice regulation to reveal the proceedings of a grand jury, and that includes the evidence collected pursuant to those proceedings.”

“But surely the First Amendment overrides some regulation,” said Bryson. “Think of the Pentagon Papers—”

“Yes, but that's for a judge to decide. And I assure you that our office will protest most vigorously to Judge Oberst, the federal judge who empanelled the federal grand jury, regarding the release of this evidence. The issue of whether the U.S. attorney's office deliberately violated the seal of the grand jury in this case has nothing to do with your action as a member of the press to publish material you have in hand under supposed First Amendment privileges. The release itself is, in our opinion, frankly illegal.”

Bryson was starting to feel uneasy. On a live show there was always the danger of an interview subject going ballistic, but the reporter had a vast faith in the power of television to produce awe and terror and bland agreeableness in the people upon whom its searchlight fell. People
wanted
to be loved by television reporters. He moved now to regain control. “But Mr. Colombo has denied any deliberate leak of the tape we just saw, and in any case, the issue here is whether Mr. Guma has—”

“I am not accusing Mr. Colombo directly,” Karp interrupted. “It is entirely within the realm of possibility that an intrepid reporter penetrated the interior of the Southern District offices, got past dozens of armed federal law enforcement officers, located the tape in question from among hundreds and hundreds of evidence tapes, and purloined it. In that case Mr. Colombo would be merely incompetent and not culpable.”

Bryson's face now arranged itself into an expression of pained forebearance, suitable to guests who claimed alien abduction. “Mr. Karp, as I said, the issue here is the
content
of the tape itself, and whether an assistant district attorney was in collusion with organized crime.”

The camera focused in on Karp here, so as to watch him sweat out an answer to this one, but Karp was not looking at the camera. He was staring at Bryson. The show's director instinctively switched to a two-shot and got a good one of Karp's center punch of a finger pointing at the host. “I know you!” he cried. “I've seen you around my daughter's school. You were trying to trade heroin for sexual favors from little girls. Yeah! You're the guy!”

Bryson's face took on a rictus of surprise and horror, which the unforgiving camera recorded forever. The show stopped for two beats, and then Karp said, “Oh, gosh, I'm sorry. You're not the guy after all. It was someone else. Do you get it now, Mr. Bryson?”

“You're avoiding this issue, sir . . .”

“I beg to differ—this
is
the issue. Say I don't like you, Mr. Bryson. Say I hauled you into court on that preposterous charge, and brought up a cloud of witnesses who claimed to have seen you do awful things. I bet you have plenty of malicious enemies. Oh, you'd probably get off, and you might afterward sue for false arrest, but think of the cost! And then I might do it again. Why not? If we had a system where someone like me could make a baseless accusation against someone like you, even if the case proved false, your reputation would never survive. I don't even mention your bank account. That's why there are grand juries, and that's why they're secret. Before I can make you a defendant in a felony, before I can indict you, I have to convince a majority of twenty-three of your fellow citizens that there is enough evidence to hold you to answer for the crime at a public trial, and if there isn't, if the charge does not hold up, no one knows about it,
ever
. Absent that constraint, the authority of prosecutors to do damage is very nearly absolute. Absent that, I could tear you apart, Mr. Bryson. I could tear anyone apart.”

“Yes, that's all very well, but you haven't answered—”

“Listen to me! We are your
dogs
, Mr. Bryson. Me and Mr. Colombo and all the others who are supposed to represent the people. You want us to keep you safe from the wolves in our society. But we have very, very sharp teeth and powerful jaws, and we need strong chains. The grand jury is one of those chains, and secrecy is its most important link. Weaken it, and even though greedy journalists think it's swell to get leaks from a grand jury, I guarantee you, you won't like what happens. Mr. Colombo's office has slipped that chain, and as a result a distinguished public servant, a man who has in thirty years of dedicated work done more to fight organized crime in this city than anyone I know, has had his reputation besmirched. You mentioned the Pentagon Papers? How can you compare the breaching of executive secrecy in a matter of transcendent national importance with a cheap political stunt by an out-of-control federal prosecutor?”

Bryson made a series of inarticulate noises as he tried to regain momentum. The director, who was one of the many who did not like Dudley Bryson, held the camera steady on this gabbling: “But, but, but, um, but, if that's the, I mean, if . . . then you . . . are not going to pursue any, disciplinary measures against Mr. Guma?”

The camera moved to Karp's face, on which there was a bemused expression that all New Yorkers could recognize as the one that appeared on their very own faces when trying to explain to a group of Korean tourists how to get to the Cloisters.

Cue commercial.

In the Karp home, all were glued to the little screen in the kitchen, watching the man of the house on
Morning Report.

“Why is Daddy so shiny, Mom?” asked Lucy. “He looks weird.”

“I believe that's the light of truth and justice issuing forth,” said Marlene. “They usually don't let it on TV. It's like full-frontal nudity.”

Zak was dancing around snapping a red plastic pistol and crying, “My daddy's on television!” repeatedly. Zik was not watching at all, which offended his brother, who urged him to lift up his eyes and gaze. “Watch Daddy, Zik! Daddy's on TV.”

“Daddy's not on TV,” replied Zik disdainfully. “Daddy's in
real life
!”

And back in real life, Karp got a round of applause and humorous cheers from those he passed as he went to his office, and within five minutes of arriving at his desk, he got a call from Jack Keegan.

“I haven't had so much fun since the pigs ate grandma,” said Keegan without preamble.

“I'm glad you liked it,” said Karp.

“Like is not the word. You added ten years to my life, boyo, and you set public relations back twenty-five. McHenry's been bending my ear for the last ten minutes. He's going to require sedation. He reminds me, and I now remind you, that the press never forgets. You made one of them look like a jackass, boyo. I hope you're prepared to live a life of absolute perfection from now on. You're a marked man.”

Karp thought briefly not of himself but of Marlene and the extraordinary vulnerability and imperfection of
her
life and of what a couple of skilled investigative reporters could do to her with it, and then suppressed that unhappy line of thought. “Perfection? No problem,” he replied lightly, and asked, “How are your peers responding?”

“Mixed. I like to imagine all the honest ones are on our side. The guys I watched the show with were cheering, at any rate. How's Ray holding up?”

“I sent him home with one of the guys from the squad for company.”

“You don't think he's in any serious danger?”

“I got the word out he didn't know about the bug, but whether that will satisfy Scarpi and his brothers is another question. But fuck them, they're the bad guys. I'm more worried about the good guys.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, Jack, not to put too fine a point on it, Ray Guma, in addition to being, as I said to millions, a helluva crime fighter, is also, as you well know, excessively fond of dipping his wick, and he has dipped it on occasion in places where maybe he shouldn't have, being an officer of the court. Lovely witnesses, for example. Lovely former defendants, for example. High-class ladies of the evening with strong ties to some prominent Italian-American gentlemen, for example. Colombo puts the full-court press on this, he's going to come up with a lot of dirt, and the media will eat it up. D.A.'s man in Mafia sex ring. Keegan's Italian stallion in bed with Mob . . .”

Keegan cursed briefly, and then there was an ominous silence on the line, leaving Karp to imagine that Keegan was thinking nasty thoughts about how to cut Guma loose, and about what he, the district attorney, could plausibly have known and when about the fellow's deplorable lusts. Karp decided to save Keegan embarrassment by changing tack.

“Which means we have only a limited time to derail this entire operation and make Tommy look like a horse's ass not only on the Guma thing but on the Catalano thing as well, so much so that the jackals will forget Ray. So I need some scope, and I need some cover.”

“What do you have in mind?” growled the D.A.

“Not a goddamn thing right now,” said Karp. “But I'll think of something.”

Tran came to convey Lucy to the cops for her lineup, and Marlene and Posie, the kids and the mastiff, piled into the Volvo. All but Marlene exited at Central Park South for a healthy romp, and Marlene headed north and east. James Nobile was in the phone book, which meant that Marlene needed no detection skill greater than the ability to find a large tan apartment building at 70th and Third.

There was no doorman, and Marlene entered with the standard ruse: being well dressed, with nice legs, and fumbling with keys while a legit male tenant was entering.

As usual, Sym had called to determine if the man was home, and he opened the door at Marlene's ring. She looked down, trying to hide her surprise. Abe had not mentioned anything about Nobile's physical appearance, so she was unprepared for a man less than five feet high. Paint him red and screw a big hex nut into his skull, and he would have passed for a fire hydrant on a dim night. He must have been near seventy, and he had retained, or returned to, the face of an irascible infant.