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“I can't talk about that stuff.”

“Why not? You're worried about the legal ramifications? Funny, that never bothered you before.”

“Now you're being nasty.”

Lucy bobbed her head, bit her lower lip: a gesture of agreement. “Yeah, sorry. Meanwhile, are we going to talk? Am I inside this with you, like family, or am I just one of the other people who clean up the messes you make?”

“You know, Lucy, I've already got a mother to nag me. I don't need another one.”

Lucy waited to see if this was going to be the last word. Her mother lit a cigarette and examined the pattern of the tin ceiling. Apparently it was. She stood. Her face became a neutral mask. “Fine,” she said. “Then I'll see you when I see you.” Lucy kissed Marlene lightly on the cheek and left the kitchen. Marlene heard her saying good-bye to her brothers. Then, she imagined, one of the girl's silent exits. No slammed doors for Lucy; rather the opposite.

Marlene finished her cigarette and her coffee, showered, and dressed in a cotton sun dress. When she came out, her boys were in the kitchen staring into the refrigerator.

“There's nothing to eat,” said Zak, meaning “bad mom.”

Marlene demonstrated that there was, although it required loving preparation: French toast, Canadian bacon, banana smoothies according to the secret Ciampi recipe. They ate. Giancarlo chattered away, filling the void for all he was worth, for there was a void there, a strain that had never before existed between Marlene and her sons. They'd always been easy together, the three of them, and Marlene had made it clear that even though they were twins, you knew what the differences were and treasured them. For her, this had been a welcome relief from her ever-fraught relationship with The Lucy. Now, however, Giancarlo's manner was almost hectic, too many puns, jokes, merry tales of the life of a street musician; Zak was more than usually taciturn, but his face spoke his need for a signed and notarized lifetime guarantee from his mother that she would stay, and be sane, and allow him to protect her.

Did they want to come grocery shopping with her? They did not. They wanted her desperately, but not enough to take a chance that anyone they knew would actually see them walking on a public thoroughfare with their mommy. She left then, so as to complete the trip before the heat got bad. “If you want faithful,” she remarked to Gog the mastiff as they hit the street, “get a dog.” The dog indicated his agreement with this proposition by shaking his massive head, spraying drool over the boxes of Chinese vegetables arrayed on the sidewalk. The produce clerk on duty watched her pass without comment and turned on his hose.

 

Karp said, “Delay almost always favors the defense, but not this time.”

“Because…?”

“Because, Murrow, of the events: the terror, the Towers, and the bombs. We're at war and the cops are soldiers. With time, that has to fade. The police will reveal themselves as the same lovable slobs they've always been. So they'll want to keep moving, keep this jury. Why shouldn't they? They're winning.”

They were in the tiny library outside the homicide bays on the sixth floor. Karp had commandeered a desk in a cubicle for his work on
People vs. Gerber & Nixon,
the papers for which were stacked in teetering piles on the table and on the floor around Karp's chair.

“But you have a plan,” said Murrow, gesturing at the paperwork.

“Of course, but I don't know what it is yet. That's why I'm going to ask for a week's recess. I know there's something here I missed, and I have to find it before the defendants get on the stand.”

“What makes you so sure they'll call them?”

“They
won't
want to. Nixon will insist on it. This case is about their word against our witnesses and evidence. He's told the lie so many times he believes it and he wants the jury to believe it, too. You get that a lot with the classic bold-faced perjurer, and sometimes they roll their counsel.”

“Do you know who the new guy is yet?”

“No. They're going to have to stretch to get someone to fill Hank Klopper's shoes. But it doesn't matter who takes it. Like I told Collins just before he got blown up, these guys are going for the perfecta. They want to be not merely judged innocent, but totally exonerated, reinstated on the cops, and for that to happen they have to go up on the stand. What they'll be hoping is that I go after Nixon and Gerber tooth and nail so it looks like I'm badgering the simple but honest cops. Which I'm not going to do.”

Murrow waited to learn what Karp
was
going to do, but his boss changed the subject. “This is going to be a load on you for the duration. Tony Harris will take over the admin as the acting chief ADA, but he'll need a lot of help with the details. Whisper the right things in his ear. If he has to face down any of the bureau chiefs on anything, let me know and I'll go up there and break some dishes. They may try to end run around Tony to Jack, but I'm not sure that's going to work right now.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know why, but Jack has become somewhat disengaged lately. He's been taking Fridays off.”

“It's the summer, Butch. People do.”

“I don't.”

“People. Human beings. I'm not talking Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken, the Statue of Liberty…”

“Fuck you, Morrow. The point is, he never did it during the previous ten summers I worked for him, so why now? Getting old? Why don't you find out?”

“Why he's taking Fridays off?”

“No, why he all of a sudden turned into a human being,” said Karp. “Find out why he's smiling.”

 

“I've seen your man,” said Father Marcus Skelly.

“And what do you think?” Lucy asked.

“Let's walk down the street here a little ways, if you don't mind. My Lord, it's hot. I don't recall it being this hot in Mexico, but maybe I can't stand it as much as I could when I was a younger man. Although they do say it's the cold that gets you when you make old bones. How about if we stopped in here and I bought us both a Coca-Cola?”

He pushed open the door of a coffee shop. They were on Twenty-Ninth just east of Eighth, a block or so from the soup kitchen run by Holy Redeemer. Lucy went in past the politely held door. The air was chilled and smelled of toast and bacon. He selected a booth in the back.

“You're being mysterious, Father.”

“Marcus. I'm retired. And incognito. When Mike called I almost laughed. I told him I was long out of the business. But if you know Mike Dugan, you know he's a convincing son of a gun, so here I am. I haven't been in the city for years.”

“Mike said you were at a monastery.” A waitress came by and they ordered Cokes.

“Not as such. The Benedictines give me hospitality and I ride a little circuit up there, saying mass for the nuns and other duties. Last rights more than anything else, I'm afraid. The monastery's St. Hilda's. It's up by Lake George. A pretty piece of country.”

“So I've heard. And you knew Mike in Latin America?”

“Yes, I worked for the Jesuit Refugee Service in Guat City, and of course you know he was very active up-country there. Quezaltenango.”

“I don't know. He never talks about it.”

“Well, I can understand that. Parts of it were very bad. He was a diocesan chancellor and his bishop was murdered. And he was jailed there for a time.”

“What did he do?”

“Oh, I imagine the usual things a chancellor does.” The old priest looked away as he said this and fiddled with the straw in his Coke.

“No, I mean what did he do wrong? He was a bright star, on staff at the Gesú, a chancellor, and then the next thing he's assigned as an assistant in a pokey little parish that hardly needs an assistant.”

Skelly looked up. His eyes were gray, red-rimmed, but still alight with intelligence. He had a small, round head with a shock of white hair sticking up above his forehead, Tintin style, and a very short white beard. A deep scar marked his lower lip and made his mouth cock peculiarly when he smiled. “I think you need to ask Mike that. I'm not at liberty to say.”

“But you know.”

“Yes.”

“Was it bad? I mean, dishonorable?”

“You know Michael. What do you think?”

“I think not.”

“You'd be right, then. I'll say this: the Society was cross-wise with the Vatican at that time about what was happening in Latin America. Mike was a casualty of the era.”

“And what about you?”

He smiled faintly. “Oh, I'm not the man Mike Dugan is. I'm more of a shadowy figure altogether. In any case, after Guatemala blew up, they pulled me out and let me wander around Rome for a while, a little recuperation, a little research, and then I drifted into an obscure little office that deals with problems like the one you brought to Mike.”

“Exorcism.”

He laughed. “That word! No one can say it anymore without thinking of that ridiculous movie. The poor old Church wants so much to be modern and hasn't the first idea of how to go about it. Well, they say, we were wrong about Galileo so let's not also be wrong about Freud, or whoever, even though Galileo was right and Freud, as far as we can tell, wasn't any more right than a gypsy fortune-teller. So they're real careful with the E word nowadays. Demons? We don't believe in demons, not really. We believe in pathology and repressed psychosexual la-de-da and temporal lobe tumors, and let's put the man in the MRI machine first, before we call for the bell, book, and candle artist.”

“You regret the passing of the Inquisitions?”

He laughed, a short bark. “To a point, miss, to a point. But backto your man. What are we to do about your man? I had a nice conversation with him, about you, as a matter of fact. He feels hurt, feels you don't trust him, the poor fella.”

“What did you make of him?”

“An interesting case. Do you know anything about him? His background?”

“Not a thing. He's a con, he admits that, armed robbery. He never talks about his past. He's well-spoken, knows the city pretty well, I get the feeling he was from here, maybe born and raised here before he went upstate. Middle class or above maybe.”

Skelly was nodding. “Yes, yes, and you know, he reminds me of a boy I was brought in to help some years ago. This kid, he was around nine, had been taken away from his parents and placed with a foster family, and he'd started to do bad stuff: torturing cats, writing obscenities. He had violent rages, too. The foster family—they were Catholics as it happened—looked into the background and found that the family had been part of a Satanist cult. You read a lot about these cults, but they're actually fairly rare. That's not the devil's style nowadays. Anyhow, the kid had seen a lot of bad stuff, he'd been sexually used, the usual. Apparently the Satanists had told him they had prepared him as a home for a demon, cooked up a fancy name for the thing, as if a real demon would let a human know its name, and the kid came to believe it. That's when they brought me in.” He took a long sip of his Coke, and sloshed the ice around with the straw, as if searching for even richer veins of soft drink.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Oh, there was something there, all right. Nothing fancy, like the prince of darkness, although you know, that's what confuses people, it's not dark at all, it's light and glorious, and gorgeous to behold. No, this was just an ordinary one, but it was socked in there in an unusual way. You call on demons and they come. Why should they look a gift horse in the mouth? But the feel of it is different. Most people who pick up an unclean spirit can't wait to get them out, at some level, although it's sometimes hard to tell. That's why you need a cooperating patient if you're running an exorcism team.”

“You have a team?”

“Oh, gosh yes! Usually half a dozen people at a minimum. It's an around the clock thing, you know, for days sometimes. I used to be able to count on losing ten, twelve pounds.”

“I had no idea.”

He smiled at her. “Well, we don't advertise it, do we? In any case, with this kid, there was a funny feel to it. The integration was far along. I mean the thing had humanized itself and the boy had become demonized, if that makes sense. The point is, I had the same feeling talking to your man. I'd say there was ritual satanism in his background, the poor fella.”

“What do you recommend, Father? Marcus.”

“Well, you know, I don't think there's a thing to be done. I suppose that if we could lay our hands on a wonder-working saint, we could try that, or if Jesus came again, He might look in on the man. I honestly don't know. As you picked up yourself, he hasn't a clue. And of course, he's very dangerous. About as dangerous as a man can be, in fact. Although he may commit no crime at all. He might just quietly spread hell on earth to everyone he meets, perfectly legal, too. Or he might take an ax or a gun and break into a school. I might try to make him go away; sometimes that works.”