Reckless Endangerment (42 page)

“You know this all, huh?”

“I was once an immigrant boy in a student quarter in Paris, with no money for the girls, and I was far, far more sophisticated than Walid,” said Tran confidently. “There were Arab boys there too, and it was very much worse for them. Once or twice during the term there would be a suicide, or a stabbing after an error in the sexual communication. The same in Moscow, although there was a good deal more supervision.”

“I bet,” said Marlene, her eyes widening. “When were you in Moscow?”

“In ‘sixty-five. A kind of terrorists’ convention, although we were all freedom fighters then. I was a speaker. My subject was, as I recall it,
ba giong thac Cach mang,
the three currents of revolution present in every people’s war: the ever growing socialist camp, the armed struggle, and the progressive forces within the imperialist nation. It was well received. There were a large number of Arabs—Algerians, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians. The Palestinians, I recall, were rather lonely, since the rest of us spoke French and they did not, not most of them anyway, and we spoke little English. The Americans had not arrived in numbers large enough to teach us their language. It is quite possible that some of my comrades from those days are loose in New York this minute. That would be amusing, would it not?”

“Hilarious,” said Marlene stiffly. She was simultaneously fascinated and repelled by her associate’s past. Tran dropped his eyes and there was a moment of uncomfortable silence. Then he said, “You must tell her to be careful, eh? He will not tolerate any insult. Also, there will be his guilt.”

And mine too, Marlene thought.

At first Walid did not believe that the girl was smiling at him, and he instinctively looked over his shoulder to see whether there was someone else there, but since he was leaning against his truck, this was impossible. He felt a flush of embarrassment rise to his cheeks. He looked away, examined his cigarette, and then risked a cautious glance out of the corner of his eye, wishing that he had a group of friends around him. The girl was still there, still smiling. With mixed horror and excitement he watched her approach.

He really was gorgeous, Posie thought as she approached him, asked for a light, got one. This was the most thrilling thing she had ever done. The new clothes seemed to make her into a new person, and doing a … she had to call it a
mission
for Marlene: it made her head swim. Marlene had filled that head with cautions, orders, strategies. These swam away like small fishes. She smiled harder. “Neat van!” she said. “Can I see inside?”

Walid did not object, and she stepped past him into the van. She was close enough for him to smell her perfume. She actually brushed his hip with hers, and showed him a long stretch of white leg as she mounted the step. He followed her in, closing the door behind.

“Oh, wow! This is cool! You could fix this up to travel in, you know? What’s on the shelves?”

“Bread. Arab breads. We are in bakery business.”

“Cool! You’re an Arab?”

“Yes.”

“Far out! I never met an Arab before.” A pause. She strolled back and forth in the bay of the van, seemingly fascinated by the bags of stale and unsold bread that Walid had retrieved along his route when he made his cake run. He could not take his eyes off her. She was an American girl, free, smelling of flowers, but not whorish like the ones who strode brazenly through the streets in their underwear. They exchanged names. She sat herself down in the passenger seat and asked him what he did for fun. He said he worked all the time. And he had political interests.

This stimulated a frayed bookmark in Posie’s brain. “That’s great,” she said. “I’m, um, real sympathetic to the, you know, the Palestinians.” She flicked her scarf.

“You are?”

“Oh, for sure. Hey, you want to go in back and do some dope?”

“Dope?”

“Yeah, like grass. Pot? Reefer?” She brought a plastic baggy out of her jacket pocket and waved it at him.

Light dawned. “Ah, hashish.”

“I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty good Colombian,” said Posie. She walked into the back of the truck, sat down with her back against the rear door, and began to roll a number on her lap. Marlene hadn’t said anything about this, but she hadn’t told her not to either. They smoked, Walid coughing a good deal. Afterward, they chatted, giggling. She found he knew nothing about rock music, or movies, or TV shows, the only subjects in which she had any expertise. Get him to talk about himself. That was one of the things Marlene had said. His family, especially his sister. She wished there was some music. The guy wasn’t putting any moves on her, which was unique in her experience of stoned young men. She moved closer to him and said, looking into his face, “You know, you have a great mouth.”

“Yes?”

He was just staring at her. Incredible! Don’t let him right away, Marlene had ordered, you have to string him along, allow him to get comfortable. Well, yeah, but this was ridiculous. She planted a good one right on that luscious mouth, with plenty of action behind it. Then she stood up.

“Got to go, Walid,” she announced. “I’ll be around here about this time tomorrow. Maybe we could, like, do something.”

Karp returned to the bosom of his family with more than his usual gratitude for its shelter from a heartless world. He had not had a meal at home since Monday.

“Don’t ask!” was the response when Marlene inquired about his day.

“Still bad, huh?”

“You’re not watching the tube?”

“Cartoons. And I’ve been in and out. Lucy’s been holding down the fort, haven’t you, dear?”

Lucy made a grumping noise. Lucy was at the kitchen table with a math workbook, using her precious Easter vacation hours doing work she should have done during the term, instead of participating in the nonstop excursions and sleep-overs with her more dutiful pals, and her mother, who claimed to love her, was actually making her do set portions of this work before being allowed out, not only that, but was taking advantage of her confinement to demand baby-sitting. They were not speaking.

Marlene was doing what she did instead of cooking when she was working, which was heating a brick of material she had previously cooked and frozen. The microwave ticked away, measuring out her domestic slavery. The boys were climbing the vast belly of the mastiff, who was delighted to serve as a hill provided it could lick them as they rolled off. They had been fed earlier, and were covered with yummy bits. Karp, surveying his hearth, noted an absence.

“Where’s Posie?” he asked.

“Out,” said Marlene quickly, and got a covert sneer from her daughter, who knew very well where Posie was. To draw attention from this she said, “I haven’t seen you—did I say I went to see Hadassah? No? Amy Weinstein was very nice. Turned out they wanted me because they found out, somehow, I was your mom’s daughter-in-law. I didn’t realize she was such a heavy hitter up there. There’s a plaque on the wall of honor and everything, and it was, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to meet you
finally.
Dora Karp, may she rest in peace, was a
saint.
And how
is
Roger—we never hear from him.’ You should be ashamed.”

“I am,” Karp said lightly, and then realized that, faintly, he actually was. “What’s the job like? Making sure no goyim get in?”

“No, but it’s not much. Honestly, I think they
were
just being nice. It’s basically a square-badge job for the meeting they’re holding over the weekend. All their youth organization leaders, and on Easter weekend, no less—they may be making a tiny point there—our ways are not your ways. Anyway, it’s checking credentials, keeping out crashers, controlling demonstrators, if any.”

This caught his attention. “They expect demonstrators?”

“She said it was a possibility. With the city like it is, a big bunch of Jews from all over the country, some celebrities. Do you think they should be worried?”

Karp blew out a long breath, like a horse. “Hell, Marlene, I don’t know anymore. I’ve never seen it like this. The cops are essentially out of control. Since Tuesday night we’ve logged over forty complaints of police brutality, and that’s just in New York County—God only knows what’s going down in Brooklyn. There was a riot and a lock-down out at Rikers today, the Muslims acting up. The Daoud family had their bakery firebombed. You know Zwiller, that old guy I told you about I had lunch with? Yeah, nice guy, trying to do the right thing. Dead.”

“What, just today?”

“No, on Tuesday, but we just found out about it today. They’re still investigating, but either he got caught in the Williamsburg mess directly or he died of natural causes because of the excitement. Or, and I hate to think this, somebody found out he ratted on Lowenstein and took him out. But the way Kirby’s handling it, we can’t get a straight story. With no Zwiller, he says he has no probable cause to search Lowenstein’s operation. It’s still kid gloves, and the more he soft-pedals with the Hasidim, the worse the Arabs bitch and moan, and the X-guys up-town start throwing heavy objects off roofs. Meanwhile the rabbi is still running the Warsaw ghetto tape. Jews, arm yourselves, the
schvartzers
are coming! It escalates. It could start shaping up into a black-white thing. I don’t know—if we don’t break this, we could have another situation like with the Haymarket bomb, like the Frick bombing, another red scare. We could see thirty years of civil liberty law go down the drain.”

“As millions cheer, including us,” she said lightly. But Karp was not in a light mood, not on this subject at any rate.

“Yeah, right, I know we like to act tough, oh, look at all the bad guys getting loose because of Warren and the Supremes, but you know and I know that not that many really bad guys get loose. In fact, the reason everybody thinks they do is that it’s so unusual that it makes headlines when it happens. You want the average cop acting as judge, jury, and executioner? I don’t. I don’t even want to do it myself.”

Marlene said, “You know, I think you’re tired, and I think you’re exaggerating. Lucy, time to move. We need the table.” She started dealing out plates and silverware. Lucy closed her book and began to lay out the settings.

“You’ll eat, you’ll feel better,” Marlene added. “You get exhausted like you are now, you always think it’s the end of the world.”

Karp bristled. “Marlene, don’t patronize me! If I say it’s bad, it’s bad. You haven’t been out there. I’m telling you—we don’t find this Chouza Khalid guy and the kid with the rockets in the next couple of days, something unbelievably terrible is going to happen.”

Marlene brought a steaming tureen of veal stew with mushrooms and a jug of red wine to the table. “Eat!” she ordered. “Drink! Forget about Chouza Khalid for an hour…”

“Daddy,” said Lucy, “why is he lucky?”

“Who, baby?” asked Karp, digging gratefully in.

“That man, Chouza Khalid. Why is he lucky?”

“I don’t get you—who said anything about him being lucky?”

“That’s what his name means, Daddy. Chouza
means
lucky.”

Karp put his fork down and stared at his daughter as the light slowly dawned.

In order to prevent immediate divorce proceedings being initiated by his spouse, Karp sat still and finished his dinner, which, after he was made to eat it, he greatly enjoyed, having subsisted entirely on
chozerai
for nearly seventy-two hours. As soon as he could, however, he left the table and called Roland’s office, fully expecting the man to be at his desk at seven-fifteen, and not being disappointed.

Roland didn’t want to believe it. It could be a coincidence. Unsaid was his reluctance to accept as fact something that seemed so obvious when explained, especially from Karp, especially originating from Karp’s linguistic genius of a kid, an unfair advantage to Karp, like a bad hop off a manhole cover in stickball. A do-over.

Karp had some notion of this element in the man’s psychology and persisted. “Roland, focus on this! It explains everything—what we knew before and stuff I just got from Fulton. The Mexican boys roll into town. They know nothing, but they have a big load of brown heroin to sell. The Arabs are in the dope business already—”

“I thought they were terrorists. Now they’re dope lords? You’re getting your James Bond movies mixed up.”

“Hey, terrorists need money too, especially a guy like this Ibn-Salemeh, a loner. He’s also working with Khalid, who we know is a drug runner from way back. But that’s
why
Morilla was investigating them in the first place. So they burn Morilla’s cover, which I can believe, because these guys have been going up against the Israelis for years, and they’re good, and then they shoot Morilla, rip off the Mexicans, and frame them for the cop killing. That explains the Arab gunman we got wrapped up.”

“Bullshit, it does! Why in hell would Khalid kill his own guy to get the Obregons off the hook?”

“Ah, there’s the ringer in this whole thing. Look—the Mexicans are in jail on the frame. They don’t like it. So they bring in some muscle from out of town—”

“Some ‘muscle from out of town’?” Roland spoke as to a child who had just done explaining that her dolls came alive at night.

“Yeah, Roland, just listen, would you? This guy moves in with Obregon’s girlfriend in the apartment in Washington Heights. He goes after Khalid. There’s a gunfight, and this Arab who shot Morilla is killed. Now Khalid’s in a jam. He’s sold the dope—we know that from Narcotics—so he’s got the money. He could care less if the Mexicans are in jail or not, because he’s not planning on spending a lot of time in the New York dope business. His main thing is to get this Obregon shooter off his ass because he doesn’t want him to queer his real agenda, which is blowing stuff up for the cause. So he gives us his Arab gunman, who’s conveniently dead. The brothers walk, but let’s say they want their cash back too. Not so fast, thinks Khalid. He sets up a meet in the garage in Brooklyn, the Mexican gets there and finds out it’s a trap. Bang! Rockets, machine guns … and a chase that ends up in Williamsburg and kills seven cops and a dozen or so other people. Our Mexican walks away, buys Hasidic clothes, and disappears. He surfaces uptown, gets jumped by a strong-arm crew, and kills two of them. Oh, I almost forgot—he also killed Ray Netski. That explains the Russian bullet, and I guarantee you the fingerprints in the Chrysler are going to match the prints of the unknown guy in the Netski murder scene.”