Depraved Indifference (19 page)

“Goddammit! What does he say?”

“Well, he's not too enthusiastic about being a good citizen anymore. I'll work on him, but …”

“Yeah, I know. Freddy, who knew about Dorcas? I mean, being a witness and spotting Rukovina.”

“In details? Me, Sonny, you, Spicer, probably the C. of D. Anybody you told. In general, that he was a witness in the case? Who knows? The lineup wasn't no big secret. I mean, this isn't the Manhattan Project.”

“Not yet, Freddy, but who knows? Did you get to Koltan?”

“Who?”

“Emil Koltan. He's another witness. Christ! You mean Spicer didn't tell you to bring him in?”

“Not me, Butch. Never heard of him. Maybe he told Sonny or one of the other guys.”

“Right, but somehow I doubt it. Look, Freddy, he's really key. Could you go and pick him up right now?” With mounting anxiety, Karp read the name and address off to Slocum. The only people who knew about Koltan, besides the Hrcanys, were Karp and Spicer. And Denton.

After urging speed and security on Slocum, Karp hung up and tried to make sense of these new developments. He unfolded the Chinese menu diagram and spread it out on his desk. It didn't tell him anything more than it had at the take-out. He remembered what Doug Brenner had said at the clam bar on City Island—if something's moving funny, there's got to be a mover. Denton? It seemed incredible, but he had to consider it. Maybe that story about Kenny Moran and Terry Doyle was bullshit. He could check it out. But why would he put Karp in charge if it was a tank job? Bloom? Always a possibility. Did Bloom have something on Denton? But what about the FBI?

He picked up a pencil and drew a wavery light line connecting the circles marked “Bloom” and “Denton.” Then he smiled and drew near the center a stick figure with a frowning face and marked it “Karp.” He drew a heavy jagged line coming down from “Bloom” and striking the stick figure.

A shadow played across the glass on his door. Karp's stomach churned and he stood up, sweeping the diagram into his desk drawer.

“Knock, knock, anybody home?”

Karp was surprised at how much adrenaline had just pumped into his system and slightly ashamed. He sagged back into his chair, feeling faintly queasy, and called out, “Yeah, come in.”

V.T. Newbury opened the door and entered. He was dressed in a dirty Burberry trenchcoat, a faded blue sweatsuit, and sneakers, and carried a briefcase. He sniffed the air and said, “I've been running and you've been gorging on Chinese. Oriental decadence.” He sat down on Karp's wooden side chair. “What's wrong? You look sick, man.”

Karp grinned weakly. “It must be the MSG. What are you doing here so late? What is it, eight already?”

“More like eight-thirty. I came to pick up some printouts for the strike force.”

“You getting anywhere with that shit?”

“Yeah, but it's slow. Of course, we're just errand boys for the Feds, nor do they trust us that much to begin with. We're not untouchable, you know.”

“You'd think after Watergate, and Hoover, they'd have developed a sense of shame.”

“Minor lapses, my boy. Oh, speaking of which, I ran into your old buddy Pillman the other day.”

“How was he?”

“In rare form. I made so bold as to ask him about the Tel-Air operation. You remember, from Monday?”

“Yeah. Guma's pride and joy. What'd he say?”

“Tel-Air? What's Tel-Air? Playing it very close indeed. It piqued my curiosity, though. So I thought I would use some of my own connections in the financial community to noodle around, trace some transactions and so on.”

“The cousins.”

“You got it, boss. Oh, yeah, cousins. You'll be interested to know I got through to Andrew at the State Department. One of his school buddies is in intelligence liaison and Andrew tried to quiz him about all those mixed signals during the hijack negotiations. Much clearing of throat and sideways looks, but it turned out that Langley was showing inordinate interest in the affair from minute one, as soon as we knew the identity of the gang.”

“That's the CIA?”

“Yep. Also, this Simon Dettrick I told you about, the spook in Paris? No longer there. Leland called me. Apparently Dettrick flew home on the military jet that carried the hijackers back to New York. Also aboard was Jim Toomey, the guy from the New York FBI office.”

“Oh-ho! You think these guys maybe discussed the situation with our friends? Maybe gave them a little free legal advice, the scumbags?”

“It's a possibility. Well, I'll leave you to your musings. See you in court.”

V.T. rose to go. As he went out the door, something popped into Karp's mind. “V.T., wait a minute. Cousins made me think of your father. He knows the New York corporate law scene pretty well, doesn't he?”

“You could say that. Why?”

“Could you ask him about a firm called McNamara, Shannon, Shannon and Devlin?”

“What about them?”

“Just what their business is, who they represent. Marlene told me they just issued a big check for the legal defense of the Croats. It looks like they're hiring Arthur Bingham Roberts. I'd like to know who's that interested in these assholes walking away from this.”

V.T. whistled softly through his teeth. “Offhand, I'd say it was a gift from God.”

“What do you mean.”

“Well, I needn't trouble Father on this one. The fact of the matter is that McNamara, et al. get about ninety-five percent of their business from the Archdiocese of New York. I'd bet that the check was Powerhouse money. What's wrong? You look like you just ate a rat.”

“Oh, nothing. Some things are starting to come clear. Thanks, V.T., see you later.”

After Newbury had left, Karp took out his diagram.

He crossed out the question marks over “Spicer,” “Denton,” and “Hanlon,” replacing them with heavy check marks, and drew a heavy circle around all the policemen. A thick jagged line came down from this circle to strike the stick figure. Poor “Karp”! Then he made a heavy line from the police to “
FBI
” and to “
BLOOM
.”

Then he made another circle floating in the upper right of the page and labeled it “
CIA
,” and connected it with a thin line to “
CROATS
.” Question mark on that; involvement, but who knew what it was? Almost done. In the upper left he drew a heavy-sided box. An arrow came down from it and touched the dollar sign near “A.B. Roberts.” Another arrow flew over to the “
COPS
” circle. He pressed hard on this arrow, thickening it and doodling little circles and arabesques around it. Then he doodled a steeple on the heavy-sided box, and on top of it, a cross. He studied the diagram for a long minute, then folded it up carefully and placed it in his trouser pocket. “Holy shit,” he said out loud. “Holy shit.”

10

K
ARP WALKED HOME
through the deserted streets of downtown, the fateful diagram folded into a small square and stuffed in his wallet. The night was cold and damp, and he was wearing only a thin raincoat over his rumpled suit. The chill he felt in his vitals did not, however, have an entirely meteorological origin. He felt utterly alone, abandoned, a lost child on unforgiving streets. This feeling had quite overcome his natural skepticism about conspiracy. His thoughts raced in idiotic confusion, looking for some strong refuge, something undeniably real. The law? Obviously, a sham. Justice? A silly joke. Love? Give me a break! Religion? Vain mumblings of tribes.

From forgotten depths, bred in a hundred schoolyard brawls, his paranoia of Catholics blossomed like a noxious weed. He had been raised in one of the borderland areas that dot the five boroughs, this one deep in Brooklyn, where Kings Highway and Flatbush Avenue join. Go northwest from this junction and you are in Midwood, among the Jewish middle class. Karp had lived on this side of the border, but barely. Go south and you are in Flatlands—solid Irish and Italian. East is East Flatbush, now heavily black, but when Karp was growing up a mixed province of white ethnics: Italians, Poles, Germans, Hungarians.

Although native New Yorkers know that New York is not the melting pot of legend, tolerance generally prevails among the adults populating these zones. But the male youth of an age to wander the streets and play in the concrete schoolyards were subject to outbursts of tribal barbarism that would not have been misplaced in Beirut. Karp had been a husky, strong kid and had two big brothers, but he spent a lot of time in the streets and he took his lumps. He learned early that you get your lumps largely from persons who do not share your eth. In Karp's case, in the Brooklyn of the late forties, these were almost always flat-faced, snub-nosed, pale, light-haired, blue-eyed kids: Irish, Poles, Catholics.

Of course, this had been a long time ago. Karp's family had become more prosperous and moved out of the city to a homogeneous suburb just before he had gone west to college. Religion and ancestry were not big issues at Berkeley in the mid sixties. Karp's Jewish consciousness and the associated paranoia approached absolute zero. Back in New York, working for the DA's office, he was vaguely conscious of something called the Archdiocese of New York as a force to be reckoned with, like the police and the mayor's office, and the Chase Manhattan Bank, but he had never given it any particular thought. In fact, until he had caught that case on the boy burglar—Brannigan? Brannon?—he had never been asked to deal directly with the Church. Uh-oh. Why not? Because he was Jewish? Because he didn't know the secret signs? Then why now? Why did they insist he deal with it now? Part of the plot? Was there a connection between the Croats and Brannon? Ridiculous. But just as ridiculous was the confirmed fact that the NYPD was conspiring to prevent him from prosecuting a case against five people who had killed a cop. And that the Church was footing the bill for the killers.

Before he dived into a troubled sleep that night, a vivid image from childhood burst into his mind. He was walking home along a Brooklyn commercial street holding his grandmother's hand. He did not particularly like his grandmother; in fact, she terrified him. She was a broad, powerful woman from the backwoods of Galicia, a creature out of the sixteenth century, subject to fits of rage and unpredictable violence.

On this occasion she had been angry about something, and Karp was being pulled quickly down an unfamiliar street. At a corner was a larger, dark brick building with turrets and an iron-bound oak door. A church or a parochial school. In a tiny iron-railed enclosure before the building stood a life-size white statue of a gently smiling woman with her hands outstretched, palms upward. Karp remembered pulling toward the statue to get a better look, but his grandmother had hauled him roughly away and mumbled some dreadful curse in a mixture of Yiddish and Polish. Then she spat on the ground.

Karp dragged himself out of bed the next morning, feeling headachey and bilious. He threw himself on his rowing machine and exercised violently for half an hour, until his muscles screamed and his vision was red with pain. Then he took a hot shower. Physical pain was the best medicine he had found for the mental agonies of the night.

This time it didn't quite work. The headache was gone and his belly was ready for another influx of dreck, but the queasiness remained in his spirit. Something was cooking, that was for sure, and in some way he was in the pot. On the other hand, he thought, how could you go to a friend and tell him that the Catholic Church, the NYPD, the FBI, and the district attorney were conspiring against you? What could he say? What about the KGB, Butch? They miss the boat? No, his friends would be very kind, and after a while, so would the doctors at the sanitarium. No, for a while at least, he would have to play it uncomfortably solo.

And since at work Karp was normally sociable and frank to a fault, the new Karp attracted attention. He began to lock his desk. He started using public telephones for certain outgoing calls. He stopped talking about the Doyle case. He began to insert long pauses and hard stares before his responses in conversations, as if mentally reviewing the dossier of the person speaking. “Want to go for coffee, Butch?” Pause, beat, beat, beat. “Yeah, OK.”

Two days after this new Karp had emerged, Ray Guma buttonholed V.T. Newbury outside a fourteenth-floor courtroom. “Hey, wait up a minute, I got to talk to you. Look, V.T., you notice anything strange about Butch recently, last couple days?”

“Umm, well, a little diffident, perhaps. Secretive?”

“Secretive? He's acting like he's in a Gestapo movie, for crying out loud. Listen to what happened today. I got this case, a homicide, a domestic, a grounder, but it's got a little twist to it. Lady in the Village turns up dead, Bleecker Street. So, needless to say, the cops look for the old man. He ain't at work, skipped the last two days. The cops hit the streets, ask around. This is Comer and Defalco from Manhattan South, by the way. So what happens? A priest from St. Joseph's shows up at the precinct with a story. It turns out the victim, Mrs. Bendiccio, has been playing around. She goes to the priest to spill her guts—not confession, just unburdening, she's not sure she wants to dump the boyfriend, maybe she wants to know how much time she's got to do in the barbecue in the next life, whatever.

“Anyway, she tells the priest the boyfriend's got a hot temper, she's scared that if she dumps him and goes back to Augie, he'll go batshit. When the priest hears she's been whacked, naturally he comes in and lays the story on Defalco and Comer. Even got a name for the boyfriend, Ted Mores.”

V.T. glanced at the hall clock. “Goom, what does this have to do with Butch?”

“Wait, I'm getting to it. OK, it's no trick finding either man. Hubby stumbles home, surprised as hell to find somebody choked his old lady while he was off on a binge. Ted goes, ‘What girlfriend?' clams up, wants a lawyer. An insurance guy, married, lives in Peter Cooper.