Depraved Indifference (16 page)

“My God! What did you do?”

“Went right through the window and landed in a snowbank. Saved my life, with the results you observe. Remarkable, really. I spend two years taking apart bombs with the Royal Engineers in UXB work during the Blitz, then over to Jugland with McLean, ten months of antidemolition, defusing mines in the cold and dark, with an electric torch in my teeth and my fingers numb. Not a bloody scratch. Then I go off like a torch in the safety of my bed. Hilarious, when you think about it, but it does rather put one off—how shall I say—making firm plans.”

“I guess I know what you mean. Since I got blown up, life seems, I don't know, unattached. You lose the smooth progress everybody else seems to expect. You're sort of ready for whatever happens, but you can't really take it seriously.

“I mean, I'd like to get my face fixed. Not the eye, the face. Just, ah, not to be gorgeous or anything, but just move back to neutral. I don't like seeing what I see in people's faces when they look at me. Sometimes, anyway. When I'm feeling bitchy, I use it, rub it in their faces. Afterward, I feel worse. Also, there's the principle of it. If I was a cop injured in L.O.D. there'd be no question—full reconstruction, full medical. But DAs, forget it. Also, the letter I opened, it wasn't for me. The state says they're not responsible. I could sue, get a contingency lawyer, but I don't just want an out-of-court, I want my—my
rights
!”

She stopped, startled by the flood of what she had said. He was observing her calmly, smoking some strong foreign cigarette. She felt her face flush with embarrassment.

“Whoosh! God, I didn't mean to get into all that.”

“No, no. It's quite all right, really. Sometimes one must … discuss. It even helps if the other person is an utter stranger. Or old. The old hear lots of secrets, you know, presumably because the silence of the tomb is relatively close …”

Now Taylor seemed embarrassed. He busied himself refilling their glasses and lit a cigarette for her. “So, Miss Ciampi,” he said brightly, “what is your puzzle?”

“Marlene, please.”

“Marlene, then. And I'm Goddy.”

“Short for Godfrey?”

“No, not at all. The G stands for Gilbert. It's the initials, G.F.S. They called me Godforsaken at school, clever but long-winded, and you can't go about calling someone ‘God,' especially not me. So Goddy it was, and has been.”

Taylor barked and produced a toothy, ingenuous smile, and Marlene laughed. You could imagine him dressed in an Edwardian sailor suit at six. Then he leaned back and waited for the unfolding of the tale.

Marlene delivered it with her usual terse precision. Taylor sat placidly, hearing her out, occasionally massaging his face with a long, bony hand. His fingers were stained yellow from the powerful cigarettes.

“A solenoid, did you say?”

“Yes, to trigger the grenade cap. I thought it was peculiar at the time. I mean, why not just detonate electrically? It doesn't make sense.”

“Not our kind of sense, no. But suppose someone fancied the idea of producing a little delay between the sound of the solenoid firing the cap and the explosion. Anyone close enough to hear it couldn't possibly get away. Someone trying to defuse a bomb, for example, who, of course, would know exactly what that sound meant. Someone might get an odd kind of pleasure out of imagining what went on in the minds of his victims during those five seconds.”

Taylor's voice had slowed as he said this, as though he were dwelling in some precinct of old memory.

“Goddy,” Marlene said carefully, “you sound like you were talking about someone you know.”

He snapped to. “Was I? Well, one met all kinds in the war. There were a few who might have fit. I daresay they're all dead now, of something slow and ghastly, one hopes. Now as to this mysterious timer—”

“I have it with me.”

“Do you? Splendid! Let's have a look.”

She took the zip-lock plastic bag with the timer scraps out of her portfolio and handed it across the table. He held it up carefully and shook it. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a monocle, which he screwed into his good eye. “I hate this thing. It makes me look like a stage colonel.”

“Pip-pip, and all that.”

“Quite. Let's see what we have here. This was what triggered the solenoid, eh?” Taylor manipulated the debris carefully through the plastic. He seemed fascinated by the little bits of metal. Finally he stopped and said peevishly, “Dammit, there's no bloody light in this mausoleum.” He sprang to his feet. “Come with me. I'll show you where I really live. But no smoking.”

She followed him down the hallway and through a side door into another room. The light was so much stronger here it made her blink. The peculiar odor was stronger as well, and Marlene realized with a shock that it was the heavy, headachey scent of nitroglycerin. The room was lit by a huge overhead industrial fluorescent fixture. Taylor had converted the apartment's master bedroom into a study-cum-workshop. One wall was lined with bookshelves, another with steel shelving containing cartons and odd bits of equipment. One wall was taken up by a long, black-topped laboratory table that held a large illuminated magnifier, a binocular microscope, and various power tools: grinders, drills, a miniature lathe. There was a comfortable armchair and a neatly made-up cot in one corner of the room. Taylor actually did live here.

Marlene wandered around the room as he sat down on a stool by the lab table and began to remove the parts from the bag with a tweezers and place them delicately on an enamel tray. As he did so, she examined a framed coat of arms on the wall. There was a crown at the top, then a pick and shovel device, then the outline of a coffin with the top slanted to show it was empty. Underneath that was a scroll with a motto in Latin:
Sepulchra multa non corpes habemus.
A label said, “64th Bomb Disposal Detachment—Royal Engineers.”

“What's this mean, Goddy?”

“What? Oh, that. Poor Latin, I'm afraid. It means ‘We have many graves, but no bodies.' The brass didn't like it, so it never became official. It was supposed to be bad for morale. What tripe! Probably had the highest morale of any bunch in the war. I mean, risking your life without having to kill anyone—who could ask for more? A marvelous bunch of men, that was, the poor bastards. All right, what have we here?”

He was peering through his magnifier, holding each piece of debris up and rotating it. He said, “Ah,

Marlene, would you be so good as to reach me down that little bottle with the blue label? Yes, that's the ticket, thank you.”

Taylor placed a few drops of clear liquid on the broken shaft of metal. “This should bring up the serial numbers,” he explained.

“What do you think it is?” she asked.

“I'm afraid I know what it is. I just want to make certain.”

He brushed the dissolved charring from the pieces with a little swab. They gleamed dully in the strong light, like gunmetal. “Here, come have a look.” He backed away from the magnifier and let Marlene look through it. The pieces were lined up on the enamel tray just as they had been in Marino's lab, but the markings were much clearer: kmf = DO 1.44 Ze er 15 M.

“What's it mean? Is it Russian?”

“Hardly. It's a Dozy, as we used to call them.”

“You've seen one before?”

“Bloody right, I have. The Jerries started using them on aerial mines in late 1940. Then after the Blitz was finished, they issued them to engineer units all over the Eastern Front and the Balkans. Clever shits, weren't they? Look, there's no bomb so dangerous as one that everybody thinks has been made harmless, right? So they build a time-delay fuse with its own power supply, which doesn't start until the power leads to the main detonator have been cut. The UXB man pulls the fuse, clips it, gives the all clear, and the navvies start moving in with their tackle. Then, boom! Good for morale, eh?”

“Goddy, hold on a second. You're telling me this is a Nazi timer?”

“Well, I don't know about Nazi, but it's a German Dozy timer, all right. Look at the markings. The ‘kmf-DO' is missing the R in front. It stands for Reichskriegsmaterialfabrik Dortmund. The ‘I' is for the Mark I model, the ‘44' is the year of manufacture. The rest should say, ‘Zeitzünder,' time-delay fuse. The ‘15' is the time in minutes it takes to go off once triggered.

“It's a marvelously simple and sturdy device. I understand the East German army still uses a variation. You see, if you even remotely suspect there's one involved, you daren't cut any wires at all. It's even dicey removing anything metallic from the body of the bomb, because you never know where the cutoff trigger might be. That means—”

“Wait, Goddy. You said the East Germans were using it. That could mean it came with the Russian grenade. Maybe the same supplier.”

Taylor chuckled. “No, dear girl. Whatever the East Germans use or don't use, this particular little bugger was made in Dortmund in 1944. It's straight from the Wehrmacht to you, with love. Someone's had it in their toy chest for nearly thirty years.”

9

A
LL THINGS CONSIDERED
, the taping had gone rather well, Karp thought as he walked downtown the following morning. Being interviewed for television was a lot less of a strain when you kept in mind that TV—and all journalism for that matter—was a division of show business. At close range, Weber had struck Karp as a prematurely aging man of no particular intellect or distinction, what they called an empty suit around the courthouse. It was difficult to speak intelligently to someone who was not in the least interested in what you were saying, but merely in his own appearance of interest and perspicacity. Besides, he had a thin scum of pink pancake makeup on the collar of his shirt. You couldn't take a guy wearing pancake makeup seriously.

Weber's questions had probed at the gory details of the bombing and whether police incompetence had contributed. Karp declined to elaborate on the first and asserted strongly that there was no evidence for the second. He recalled thinking at the time that somebody was making a point of inserting this accusation into people's minds; it must be common gossip if Weber had picked it up.

The reporter had also asked about the character of the defendants, about whether they were not, as they claimed, struggling against communist oppression, albeit with deplorable methods and unfortunate results. The implication was that with all the horrible crimes in the city, the DA's office had better things to do than harass a bunch of freedom fighters whose only real crime was that some clumsy cop blew himself up taking a bomb out of a locker. Weber felt it necessary to mention several times that no one on the plane had been injured. Karp had, with difficulty, remained calm under this barrage, answering in as dull and legalistic a manner as he could generate, that a crime had been committed and that it was his duty to prosecute it on behalf of the people out there in television land.

But toward the end of the ten-minute session Weber had suddenly asked the jurisdiction question: “Mr. Karp, it seems to me that there are other district attorneys involved in this case. The killing took place in the Bronx, did it not? And the airport is in Queens. Yet you seem to be in sole charge. Has some kind of deal been made with the other DAs?” Karp was surprised by this, as being out of character with the rest of the interview. Why should a television audience, why should Weber, give a hoot about jurisdictional issues? Warily Karp had answered, “I don't know about ‘deal.' When more than one DA's office is involved, one of them usually takes the lead, to coordinate evidence and so on. There's only one set of cops, so … it just makes for a better case.”

Weber pressed on. “And in this case it's you, correct? You have full responsibility?”

“Right. It's my case.”

“And you intend to put these people in prison, despite the complexities and conflicts we've mentioned?”

“Yes,” Karp had said bluntly, and the camera had hung on his face for what seemed like an unusually long time as Weber summarized the interview in a few brief sentences and signed off.

This morning, as he entered 100 Centre Street, Karp found he was famous for Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes. A couple of people he knew waved to him in the Streets of Calcutta. Roland Hrcany shouted across the hall and mimed the rolling of a camera and the crouch of the news photographer. Apparently, Dirty Warren had seen him too.

“Hey, Mr. Karp, I saw you with that Carl Weber. You looked real good,” he said with a boyish smile.

“Thanks, Warren.”

“Hey, you gonna be on TV again? There was all these camera guys here before. With lights and things. Shitfaced motherfucker! I'll kill ya, you bastard!”

“No kidding? No, not right away, Warren, it was probably for something else, some big shot.”

“Hey, you're a big shot, Mr. Karp. They should put you on TV more.” Karp now noticed a TV cameraman with a portapack camera shuffling rapidly toward the elevators. Instantly Warren snapped into a brilliantly accurate imitation—facial expression, carriage, movement—of the cameraman for about three seconds. Then he returned to his ordinary bland expression. The mimicry, like the obscenities, was entirely unconscious.

“Magazine, you scumbag shitface?” he inquired politely.

Karp laughed and picked an old
Cosmopolitan
off Warren's wagon, leaving a dollar on the pile. More newspeople were crowding the bank of elevators, struggling to enter the cars. Connie Trask, looking worried, pacing and biting her lip, brightened when she spotted him.

“Butch! God, am I glad I caught you! They're going crazy up there.”

“Sounds like business as usual. What's going on?”

“No, really! We got a riot in the office. I wanted to catch you before you landed in it, and I—”