Act of Revenge (4 page)

Then the professor introduced Colombo, introduced the award, told everyone why Tommy C. was getting it, and handed it over (a crystal plaque with a bronze shield embedded within). Colombo moved to the podium. He was a stocky man of thirty-eight with thinning brown hair, a bony, big-nosed hatchet face, and a wide, lipless mouth. Under heavy eyebrows his eyes were large, heavy-lidded, and protuberant. He had a strong tenor voice and a New York accent. Karp had meanly left the microphone up so that Colombo had to bring it down seven inches, thus illustrating the difference between Karp's height and his own.

Colombo spoke RICO for twenty-five minutes, reading from a sheaf of papers, squeezing in as many invidious comparisons as possible between the old, ineffective, case-by-case way of dealing with the Mob (broadly implied: just what the New York D.A. still did, the
patzers
) and the RICO way: gigantic, thermonuclear-strength prosecutions with multiple indictments that could wipe out whole crime families at a blow. His applause was noticeably less intense than that which had followed Karp's effort.

Afterward, politeness required Karp to mingle and shake, people coming up and exclaiming how much they liked his talk and would he consent to speak at their school, church, club, retreat, picnic, commencement? He collected business cards and distributed noncommittal answers. He got vamped in a civilized way by the college president (which had the virtue of keeping others away), and after that he made his escape.

As he wrongly imagined. There was a blond, burly crew cut standing by the elevator. Karp observed that he had a little radio device in his ear. When Karp approached, the crew cut mashed the elevator button, the door slid open, Karp entered, but the crew cut didn't. Tommy Colombo was in the car.

“Nice speech, Butch,” he said, mirthlessly smiling. They shook.

“Thanks. I'm going down,” said Karp.

Colombo pushed
L.
“I always thought Jack was lucky to have you,” said Colombo. “Of course, it's a hell of a waste, you running errands like this. It's like using Reggie Jackson as a bat boy.”

“How about those Yankees?” said Karp tonelessly.

“Seriously, I never figured it out, how come you don't move somewhere where you could try cases?”

“Seriously? I tried private for a while. I didn't much like it.”

“I don't mean private,” said Colombo. “I don't mean Brooklyn or Nassau either.”

The elevator stopped. Colombo put his finger on the door-close button. “You taking up career counseling, Tom?” Karp asked.

“Like the Marines, I'm always looking for a few good men. My trial division chief is about to transfer out. You should come by, we'll talk. About trial work, major cases.”

Karp nodded and said, as to a child, “Tom, let me explain a few things. First of all, I'm controlling a case load approximately a hundred times the size of yours. I could run your whole trial division in my lunch hour. Second, I can try any case I like, and when I do I get to try it my way, without having to think about what it means to anybody's political ambitions down in D.C., or even right here in the city. Third, I work for a guy I respect.” Here he looked down at Colombo and stared expressionlessly as he would have at a felon who had just told a whopper, waiting for the skel to lose the attitude. Colombo stared back at him, a look of disbelief on his face. He was not often spoken to in this manner. Karp said, “Tom, take your finger off the button. And the next time you want to talk to me, use the phone and make an appointment. The elevator and the FBI guy business is for the movies.”

After a few seconds' hiatus to demonstrate who was in control, or something like that, Colombo released the button and Karp walked out.

On the ride downtown, he mused about the impossibility of his ever working for somebody like Tommy Colombo. Keegan was very nearly as ambitious as the other man, but Karp thought he could usually shame Jack Keegan into behaving by playing the Francis P. Garrahy card. Keegan needed at some level to feel himself right with Garrahy, his mentor, the greatest D.A. in New York's history. Over Colombo Karp would have no such control. He dismissed the man from his mind and pulled out his calendar. A meeting about handicapped accessibility around the courthouse. Wonderful!

At his office, there were two people in wheelchairs and a guy with black glasses and a white stick waiting for him. He smiled, sighed, and waved them in.

Back at the Crosby Street loft, Mrs. Karp, née and still to all the world Marlene Ciampi, sat at her kitchen table and gazed mindlessly at the smoky surface of a cup of Medaglia D'Oro coffee the color and consistency of tire paint, waiting for her personality to reassemble itself from the chaos of sleep. Flanking her were Zak and Giancarlo, four and identical, sloppily munching a brand of cartoon cereal sugary enough to cause hypoglycemia in the average adult and with little nutritional value. An enormous black Neapolitan mastiff circulated under the table, grunting and licking up spills. Mrs. Karp disapproved, mildly, but she was not in charge of breakfast.

The person who was, Posie the Hippie Slut Nanny, sat opposite, crunching the same garbage, and regally handling the remote for the small Sony depending from a corner of the ceiling. She switched channels rapidly, in a manner designed to mollify the twins, who, though alike as two eggs to the eye, had radically different tastes in morning TV, Zak preferring trashy cartoon violence, Giancarlo doting on
Sesame Street
and, strangely, game shows. Mrs. Karp ordinarily found such channel surfing unbearable, but said nothing. Officially, she was not really there, and she was bottomlessly grateful to Posie for handling the boys' mornings. The girl could have fed them human flesh and run little Satanic rituals without Marlene making much of a fuss. Morning was not her best time.

She was snapped into real consciousness because Posie's thumb happened to falter on the switch and the set rested for a moment on a morning news program. Marlene heard, “. . . further developments in last night's double murder in the stockroom of a Chinatown shopping center. The police are questioning Mr. Louie Chen, owner of the Asia Mall, where the bodies of two men reported. . . .
zzsk
. . . He-Man, we've got to get to the castle before Skeletor uses his death ray—”

“Wait! Posie, go back!” cried Marlene.

“What, the news?”

“Yeah, do it!”

But when the morning show came back, the screen showed only the front of the Asia Mall with an attractive young Chinese-American newscaster named Gloria Eng standing in front of it, saying, “. . . the possibility of a gang war in Chinatown. Back to you, Ron.”

Posie grinned broadly and pointed. “Hey, that's the Chens' place on the TV. Wow! I was just there the other day.”

Giancarlo said, “I was there, too.”

“That's where we get lichee nuts,” Zak added. “Posie, could we go there today?”

“Today is probably not a great idea, kids,” said Marlene, rising. She slurped some more coffee and took the cup down the length of the loft to her home office, where she put in a call to the Chen residence. As she had feared, she got nothing but a busy signal. After the fifth call she gave up and dialed another number which, since it was a police station, was answered. Marlene asked to speak to Detective James Raney, waited, was told he was out, and left a message. After that she trotted through the shower and dressed in her informal work outfit: black cotton slacks, black Converse footwear, and one of her large collection of Hawaiian shirts, the discreet pistol-covering kind, this with mauve orchids, clouds, and moons against bright yellow.

She was checking out this outfit in her mirror when the phone rang and it was Raney returning her call.

“You've decided to leave him and marry me,” said Raney. “I knew today was going to be my lucky day.”

“Yeah, well, we're almost there, Raney; as soon as the pope comes around on divorce, I'm yours. Meanwhile, what have you got on the thing yesterday at the Asia Mall on Canal?”

“Oh, no small talk? No how's it going, Jim, how's your life been, no tell me the secrets of your inner heart, Jim, we been pals for I forget how many years?”

“I'm sorry, Jim,” said Marlene, adopting a concerned therapist's tone, “please, tell me the secrets of your inner heart. Did you ever get help for that sexual thing? The dribble?”

Raney cracked up at this, and they chatted amiably for a few minutes. Raney was Marlene's best friend on the cops and, of course, her primary source of cop information. She quizzed him again on the Chinatown killings, and he made some information-free noises.

“Are you going to make me describe my underwear again, Raney?”

“Um, always a thrill, but I don't think I know enough for a fair trade. A mystery, is what I hear. Two guys, Hong Kong passports, shot twice each, head and back, in the stockroom of the Asia Mall. Nobody saw nothing, as usual.”

“The news said something about a gangland slaying.”

“The news would. But it's possible. Like the man said, it's Chinatown. What's your interest? Oh, wait, it's
your
Chens, right?”

“Right. My Chens. Is there any idea that they're involved?”

“This I don't know. I could find out who caught the case and what they know, if you want.”

“Oh, that'd be great, Jim! I'll owe you one.”

“And I'll collect, too,” he said, laughed a nasty laugh, and hung up.

Marlene got her gun from the gun safe, clipped it on, logged thirty seconds of quality time with her boys, whistled up the dog, and punched for the elevator. Marlene was in the security business, although the Chens were not clients.

They lived in Confucius Plaza, a seven-year-old structure that had been fully rented before the first spadeful of earth turned over. That the Chens had a nice apartment was an indication that the family was somebody in Chinatown. There were a couple of news vans parked on the street outside, and a small crowd of photo and video journalists lying in wait. Clearly, the cops had suggested, or maybe it was just a media rumor, that the Chens were connected to the “gangland slaying.” Hype about a new tong war was in the air, and the press was drooling. As was Sweety, of course. Marlene hooked him to his leash and walked toward the building entrance.

“Sweety,
si brutto
!” she ordered, and the dog went into his rabies impersonation, heaving at the leash, snarling and flinging long, disgusting ropes of sticky saliva. The media backed away in panic, tripping over cables and dropping mike poles.

“Oh, sorry, oh, gosh, excuse me,” Marlene chirped. “Oh, dear! Monster, behave yourself! . . .” until she was at the glass doors. The security guy, who knew Marlene well, was having a hard time keeping his face straight as he opened it for her.

“Way to go, Meilin,” he said. “I'll call up for you.”

Marlene had known the Chens for nearly fifteen years and had been to their home—originally an apartment on Mott and now this one—innumerable times, to deliver and pick up her daughter. On every occasion she had been offered tea and cigarettes and engaged in a short conversation, almost always about children and the unbearable difficulties brought on by their slovenliness and ingratitude. She had thought that she had, through her daughter at least, a good relationship with the Chen family, not intimate, but sufficient to make this visit perfectly natural and, with the offer of help she had in mind, even welcome. She was soon disabused of this idea. At her ring, Walter, the Chens' eldest son, came to the door and stood there, looking at her as at a stranger. Walter was a senior at Columbia, and Marlene knew him as a bright, often amusing, regular (by which she meant Americanized, predictable) kid.

“Hi, Walter,” she said, expecting him to move away from the door and usher her in. He didn't move. His eyes were very black, and flat and (she actually thought the word) inscrutable. “Walter,” she said, urging a smile to her lips, “aren't you going to let me in?”

He did not return the smile, but said, as to a stranger, “Marlene, that's not a good idea right now. My parents are extremely upset . . .”

“I bet they are. That's why I came over, to see if I—”

“. . . and they can't see anyone today,” he concluded, and closed the door firmly in her face.

Karp's intercom buzzed. The handicapped were gone and he was dealing with the aftermath, drafting a memo. He threw down his pencil, pushed the button. O'Malley said, “They're ready for you.”

“This is the Catalano meeting?” asked Karp, well knowing it was.

“At long last, and may God have mercy on your soul,” said O'Malley fervently.

As a symbol of his authority, Karp got to use the D.A.'s conference room, a stately, paneled office with a long, mellow oaken table and high, stately green leather chairs. The D.A., on attaining the office, had attempted to reproduce, in detail, in the whole executive suite, the decor favored by his predecessor-but-one, Francis P. Garrahy, of sacred memory. Keegan had run the Homicide Bureau under Garrahy, and Karp had been trained in it, and both men were subject to nostalgia for those departed times, when crime seemed slightly less overwhelming. Both men entertained the suspicion, unvoiced to be sure, that even Phil Garrahy might have trimmed a little more than he did, might have had trouble keeping his integrity untarnished under such a collapse of civil order. To his credit, Keegan tried to keep up the standards, and if his own integrity had a grungy spot or two, the symbols were at least kept brightly polished and dusted. For the conference room Keegan had even located in some forgotten Centre Street attic the framed oil portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia that Garrahy had hung on his walls and had added one of Garrahy himself, done from a photograph.

It was not a good portrait. In it the old man looked stiff and surprised, neither of which was a characteristic of himself, but it was what they had. This painting looked down upon where Keegan himself now sat at the head of the long table, in his shirtsleeves, toying with a large claro cigar that he never smoked. He was a big, florid Irishman, heavy-shouldered, carrying an elegant head: the requisite pol's mane of white hair, blue, deep-set eyes, an aristocratic beak, no lips to speak of, and a chin like an anvil. He'd played offensive end for Fordham, and retained the grace and the twisty moves. He looked up and popped the cigar into his mouth when Karp walked in, smiling cordially around it. (He never got the end damp, and so no one knew whether he didn't smoke the same one every day or retired the thing at intervals.) Karp nodded to Keegan and to the other three men, and took a seat at the end of the table, where he always sat.