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The worst of it was that he needed the fear to get sexy and so far his attempts at raping her had been unavailing. He used the handle of the knife instead, but it wasn't the same. No, he was going to actually have to cut parts off her to get her off this God shit and make her understand that
he
was what she needed to worship, the center of everything, the only thing worthy of any attention at all. The problem with that, unfortunately, is that once you started to cut pieces off they went into shock real fast and checked out, and then it was just meat, and not as much fun, although fooling with the body and thinking about the people who would find it gave him a giggle or two. But he was still a little annoyed that she had turned out to be some no-fun religious maniac. He voiced this thought to his victim as he idly twirled the point of his knife under her small breast.

“I'm not a maniac,” she said and cried out as he increased the pressure. She felt no need at all to be stoic.

“I bet you think
I'm
a maniac, though, don't you?” This was a fun game. You asked them a question and however they answered, you zapped them and when they finally agreed with you, you zapped them to say the opposite.

“No, you're not a maniac, either,” she said. “You're a demon.
He's
the maniac.”

At which she looked over his shoulder at something, like she had before. Felix paid no attention. He grabbed the substance of her breast in his left fist and set his blade for the stroke that would slice it off. He was kneeling awkwardly upon the pipe arrangement, the backs of his knees exposed by Hey Hey's baggy cutoffs, so that it was really no problem for David Grale to roll in, and in one smooth, and, Lucy thought, obviously well-practiced motion, slice through both of Felix's hamstring tendons.

Felix screamed shrilly and flopped around among the pipes like a landed tuna. His knife clattered away. David Grale searched out a short length of pipe and whacked him a few times on the head.

“Don't kill him!” Lucy cried.

“Good Christ, Lucy, look at what he did to you! Isn't that an excess of forgiveness?”

“Shame on you, David,” she said, “and thank you. Could you unwrap me, please?”

The fileting knife that Grale used went to work and, in half a minute, Lucy was free. She tried to stand up, but found she could not. He lifted her and carried her a few yards to where some junkie had once made a bed out of cardboard and pink insulation.

“You need to get to a hospital. You still have your cell phone?”

“My bag, if it's still around.” As he went to search for it, Lucy thought, This is odd: I'm naked and bleeding, but I'm perfectly comfortable with him. Maybe I'm going into shock.

There were sounds now, and voices. Into the boiler room came several people Lucy recognized from Spare Parts, and with them Spare Parts himself. The giant came to her side and spread an army blanket over her. “Oh, 'ucy, you 'oor sing! Oh!” cried Spare Parts. On his face was an expression of almost childlike grief. Grale came near, too, and handed Lucy her cell phone. “They're on their way. You may want to call home.”

“Thank you,” said Lucy, and broke down in hysterical sobs. This lasted for some time. The wounds she had endured were really starting to hurt now, and around the corners of her mind slunk fears that she had been permanently maimed. When she had somewhat recovered herself she asked, “How did you know where I was?”

“People have been following you, dear. The invisible people had you in view. I'm just sorry we didn't get here any sooner.”

“Soon enough. Did you call the cops, too? I mean, for him.”

“'e'll 'ake 'are ah 'im,” said Spare Parts.

“You mustn't hurt him,” she said sternly.

“We won't touch him,” said Grale, with his most saintly smile.

 

Felix awoke and realized immediately that he was being carried on foot by several men. The pain in his legs and the back of his head was enormous, but even worse was his fear. He was a cripple now, and would be for some time. He had to get to a doc, even if it meant turning himself in. He escaped once, he could escape again, but he had to get fixed up. He was being transported in some kind of tarpaulin; there was rough canvas against his face. They were probably taking him to a police station, he thought, because if they were going to kill him he'd be dead by now. Bunch of piss bums. Who could figure?

He had tape against his mouth and around his hands. He tested the bonds and felt a little satisfaction. An amateur job: he could get out of this with a little work, maybe an hour or two—tape stretched and his wrists were mighty. The canvas was damp and he heard the patter of drops against it. They were traveling through the streets. He could smell the rain.

Then the rain stopped and there was another smell, smoke and cooking food, and he was put down for a while. He kept working on his wrists and controlling his breathing. He felt himself being picked up again. They were taking him head first and the general direction was downward, because his head felt lower than his feet. That was good because his legs didn't ache so much when they were a little elevated. This went on for some time. He had about a quarter of an inch of play now between his crossed wrists.

Then he felt his head go much lower and he was sliding. He felt the canvas rush past his face and then smooth damp soil and small pebbles against the back of his head, and then sheer dread as he flew through space. It was only for a moment, however, for he landed heavily on his back and felt the horrible stroke of agony as his useless legs followed and hit the ground. The darkness was absolute. He heard the drip of water and a rustling sound, and smelled a dank stench. He was in a sewer.

He heard something—not so much rustling as a light clicking. He wondered what it was. Then he felt something heavy moving on his leg and something else climb up on his chest. Now he knew what that sound was. There were a lot of them; he could smell their stink, sharper than the sewer gas. Warm weight pressed on his face. He twisted and humped and made noises behind his gag. The rats did him the favor of chewing this away in order to get to his delicious soft mouth parts, and so he could scream and scream as they ate the face off his skull.

“N
O
, S
TUPENAGEL, THEY DIDN'T HAVE A POINT
,” K
ARP
snapped. “It happens to be the case, one, that the vast majority of black and Hispanic defendants are ill-defended easy outs; and two, that the insanity defense is what it is largely so that people with expensive lawyers, most of whom happen to be white, can avoid prison. It's part of the system, like the kid who sells an ounce of smack gets ten in Attica and the guy who loots a hundred million from the pension fund and wrecks the lives of ten thousand people gets, maybe, six months in a country club jail. I never said it was fair. It's just what we got.”

“You seem to have made your peace with it, regardless.”

“That shows how much
you
know,” said Karp. Her eyes widened with interest. I'm making a serious mistake here, thought Karp. I'm a public official getting drunk with a reporter, and if I'm not careful, I'm going to spill my guts and get into trouble. He then considered that, although he had been in trouble many times before, he had not ever got into this particular kind of trouble. It was not great virtue; he just didn't drink and never had. Then he thought, and here the unbidden idea surprised him, that maybe it was time he did. Was that the booze talking? Was this how it happened, the descent into disgrace? He found he didn't much care and took another sip of the cognac. It seemed to grow smoother the more you drank. Stupenagel was looking at him with a peculiar smile, and her face seemed to glow.

“You never make peace with it,” he said. “It just grinds you down, like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. Dickens said something about it, the inevitable hardening of the soul that results from a life in the courts. You just live with it. You have technical pride—is the case as perfect as you can make it? Even though,
even though,
we can put guys in jail behind shitty half-baked cases, because the defense is overworked and second rate a lot of the time and lame, and also, do you have the stones to drop a case when it's not perfect, even though the guy's probably guilty and it pisses off the victims and the cops, and the media make a big thing of it? Thin soup, but that's all we have.”

“What happens when the pencil is ground down to the eraser?”

“Oh, well, that hasn't happened yet,” said Karp. “I have a very long pencil.”

A long honking laugh from the reporter. “So anyhow, you let the big one get away. How did you feel?”

“How do you feel always asking people how they feel? Why does the media do that?”

“It sells. People are voyeurs. They're dead inside most of the time, so when someone's kid gets burned up they like to see the mike shoved in the mom's face. The amazing thing is that the mom usually loves the attention. Was Rohbling the bottom of the barrel, do you think? The most evil?”

“Oh, no way,” said Karp instantly. “Rohbling was, in fact, a nut. I argued that he wasn't, but he was. We had an eleven-year-old a couple of years ago who killed both his parents, same thing. Also with a screw missing. But there
is
evil.”

“You think so?” she said. “It depends on how you define evil. I had an interview once with a man who ordered the massacre of an entire village in Guatemala. He was right there watching his men murder old women and little kids. He had no regrets. He thought it was necessary to suppress the Communists. Slept like a baby. Wanted to sleep with me, too, although probably not like a baby.”

“Did you let him?” asked Murrow.

Karp and Stupenagel both stared at him. The reporter laughed, that astounding bellow. “Why, Murrow, I thought you'd drifted off to bye-byes. What flattering curiosity, too! As a matter of fact, I didn't, but not because he was a brutal mass-murdering scumbag piece of shit. The problem was he had the most appalling bad breath; it was as if his conscience had crawled into his glottis and died. I have, however, shared my silky body with men who could have eaten that fellow for breakfast. I have unusual tastes…”—here she batted her thickly mascaraed eyelashes at Murrow and licked her lips in a parody of lasciviousness—“…which is probably why I'm not married and driving my little girls to soccer practice. My point, however, was that doing things that most of us would consider grossly evil seems to have no effect on the personality, precisely because no one really believes that anything they do is really evil. There's always a justifying excuse. Eichmann famously went to the gallows with the perfectly clear conscience of a man who just did his duty. Milosevic is outraged that the Hague tribunal thinks he did anything wrong. So evil is something we call other people, people we don't agree with, or else a word we use for a particularly gross violation of the law. Shooting a liquor store clerk is bad. Raping and murdering lots of little girls is evil. The first represents nothing but a difference in power: the winners get to say what's evil. The second is an essentially meaningless verbal enhancer, like ‘heinous' or ‘inhuman.' Or don't you agree?”

“I don't. Everyone knows right and wrong, no matter how much they rationalize it or deny it. Even the Nazis knew they were doing wrong, and they had a whole elaborate system for making thousands of murderers think they were doing the world a favor. But they kept it real dark, even to the end, and they denied that any of it took place.” He paused. The word “evil” was not one he used in the courtroom; he didn't think it added anything to an argument, and it rarely crossed his lips in everyday speech. He had been surprised, just now, to hear the word slip out of his mouth. He continued, “Well, it's a religious rather than a legal term, isn't it? My daughter's take on it is that it's real and palpable, but then she believes in God and the devil. She thinks that what makes evil evil is the lie. Your guy really didn't massacre helpless people, he was fighting communism. The pedophile isn't really raping children because the children really like it. Every crook I ever met had an excuse. In fact, that's how we nail most of them. They're actually anxious to tell their sad story. How I didn't mean any harm. How she made me do it. Lucy thinks that demonic forces actually get into people and whisper this kind of shit into their heads, and that's why they do stuff that doesn't make any rational sense. Man kills wife, kids, self.”

“It's a theory,” said Stupenagel. “How is little Lucy, by the way? Not so little anymore. God, how the years fly! I don't know how I'd feel having a little time clock staring me in the face every day. My child is an adult? My child is fucking guys, having babies? Tick tock.” She shuddered. “Or maybe not. Has she recovered?”

Karp didn't like to talk about what had happened to his daughter. “I guess. She seems all right. She goes to school in Boston. She just came back for the Christmas break.”

“He tortured her, I heard. You must have used mucho chips to keep it out of the press.”

“I did and I will continue to do so,” he said coldly, and with his sternest look.

“Sor-ry. And you never actually found the scumbag?”

“The case was closed by forensic evidence.”

“I heard someone left a cleaned skull in a plastic bag in a church.”

“No comment.”

“Oh, please! We're just talking. I heard there were little gnaw marks all over it.”

“What part of ‘no comment' didn't you understand, Stupenagel?”

“Okay, okay. So she's fine. Well, good. Any dish in her life, or is she still on that virginity kick?”

“You'd have to ask her,” said Karp, with an increased chill in his tone, and gave her another and more intense blast of the Karp Stare. The reporter let her eyes slide away from his and chuckled. “Maybe I will. I assume she's still with the languages? How many does she know, now?”

“I don't know, fifty or sixty.”

“Christ! Yet another thing to be envious about. Here I am traveling in obscure corners of the world and aside from French and Spanish I can barely order a drink or ask where's the bathroom. Speaking of which, where is it? I have to take a slash.”

Karp told her. She unfolded herself from her chair like a complex doll. Karp was not surprised to see that, although she had drunk more than the two men put together, she did not weave or stagger.

“Don't go anywhere, boys,” she called out. “This is starting to be fun.” She slammed the door closed with a twitch of her hip.

“You're rolling your eyes, Murrow,” said Karp. “Does that mean you're falling in love?”

“Oh, yeah, I'm totally smitten. Christ, what a monster! But I'll admit to a certain morbid fascination, like watching a crocodile eat a deer. Is she always like that?”

“As far as I know. According to my wife, she's utterly unreliable as a friend and entirely lacking in moral values, aside from bravery and fanatical devotion to journalism. She's very good, too. She gets the story. Marlene says she likes to be around Stupe because she's the only person she knows who makes her feel like a good person in comparison.”

“Is she serious? About lusting after you?”

“I think so. We've had some odd moments over the years. The occasional grope. I always say, ‘no, thanks,' and she takes it with a laugh, like now.”

“What if you said ‘yes, please'?”

“Oh, she'd be in the rack in a heartbeat. She has a kind of competititive thing with Marlene, from years back. Marlene apparently didn't put out much in college and Stupe was always stalking her boyfriends with sex.”

“And they're still friends?”

“Yes. The human heart is mysterious. The heart has its reasons.”

“You're waxing philosophical, boss.”

“I'm waxing drunk. I may throw up on the governor. I believe that's what Brenda Starr in the girls' can is kind of hoping for.”

“Is that a real danger?”

“I don't know. I doubt it. I'll probably nod off in a while, get up choking on vomit, stagger into the toilet and puke, and then emerge as a steely-eyed and sober public servant with a massive headache. It's my bon vivant mode. Is that a pitying look, Murrow?”

“No. But if you don't mind my saying so, you've had a rough time recently. Maybe you should take a break.”

“I do mind your saying so,” snapped Karp. “I'm fine. I can do my job fine.”

Murrow got up. “Maybe I should take off.”

“Sit down!” Karp ordered. “If you think I'm going to let you leave me alone, drunk, with the dragon lady of American journalism, you're nuts.”

Murrow sat down. He poured himself another little drink.

A long silence ensued. In the distance telephones rang and there was an occasional metallic clang from the barely functioning heating system.

 

Marlene had not intended to attend Karp's coronation. She had avoided the city since Lucy's release from New York Hospital in September and thought she would be wrongfooted to appear as the Wife in her husband's moment of triumph. Also, she thought her wide reputation as an unindicted violent felon would not add luster to the occasion. But when she expressed these thoughts during a phone conversation with her daughter, she got an earful, including an accusation that her hesitance had nothing whatever to do with diffidence or finer feelings, but stemmed entirely from her monstrous narcissistic ego and her superstitious, moronic paranoia, the diatribe ending with the threat that if Marlene did not attend this party she would not be invited to Lucy's wedding. Marlene meekly acquiesced; she found she was willing to avoid present pain in the form of her daughter yelling at her even if it promised greater pain in the future: returning to the city, seeing her husband and children. So she'd become a moral coward, too. It didn't matter much. It was just days. When she thought about it, she realized she had gotten her wish. She was more and more like the dogs. She thought she might as well let Billy Ireland fuck her. Why not? She didn't care for the flirty tension anymore, it was too much like having a real personality. But she would only let him do her dog style. That would be most suitable. First, though, this trip to town.

She had, of course, no suitable clothes at the farm. Buy a new outfit? No, she had a closet full of costly garments from her brief stint as an IPO millionaire. But they were all at the loft, which meant she would have to go back there. Could she sneak in and out? No, the boys and Lucy were on winter break from school. Was she so low that she would buy an outfit she didn't need and would never wear again just because she didn't have the courage to face her children? No, that was lower than letting her dog boy fuck her from behind. She was mildly surprised to see that there were still some things beyond her.

So on the Friday morning she left before dawn, having slept hardly at all, and drove west in her truck. The weather reports the night before had been full of the massive storm that had socked Buffalo and smothered Albany and was now whistling down the Hudson Valley like the Twentieth Century Limited. There were only two inches on the ground when she got out of the tunnel, but traffic was already incurably snarled, even without the tunnel security delays. It was just past 8:30 in the morning when she came up into the gray daylight of Manhattan. The hundred-mile trip had taken her four and a half hours.