Reckless Endangerment (21 page)

Marlene nodded; she did. Mattie never judged, but she would not be lied to by any of her wards.

“Her name’s Fatyma, she’s an Arab kid from Brooklyn. Her daddy sounds like he got him a
thing
about keeping her cherry in one piece. She says he chained her up every night as soon as she started growing tits and getting interested in boys. She wants to be an American in the worst way, but let me tell you, she knows nothing, I mean
zip,
about how things work in the States. Anyhow, the old man was about to ship her off to marry some old guy in the Middle East, so she lit out. Says she spent some time up on the Deuce ripping off Johns.”

“She was on the stroll?”

“Not according to her, and I believe her. She was an armed robber, technically. Fourteen years old.” She snorted, as if to express her opinion of the way men had screwed up the world. “Anyway, she ran foul of some pimp and he sent muscle after her, and she stuck a blade in his gut and ran.”

“So she’s a killer? Is this, ah,
wise,
Mattie?”

“She didn’t say she killed him, so she’s not a killer in my book,” said Mattie dismissively. “I got no reason to believe the cops are after her. Besides, she’s not a resident—she’s staff. I gave her a job and that’s it.”

Marlene had to chuckle. It was a typical Duran solution, full of humane criminality.

Just then the door to the little office burst open, and in came Lucy, breathless and leading, or rather, being led by, the black mastiff, which she had been walking.

She greeted Mattie enthusiastically, and they had a brief conversation in Chicano Spanish. Lucy and the Mexican woman were fond of one another. Mattie enjoyed the occasional presence of a sprightly child who was not the product of a marriage made in hell, which was all she usually got to see. For Lucy’s part, Mattie was the only actual cowgirl-like personage Lucy had met so far and, in addition, knew a foreign language and was willing to teach it, nearly always a compelling recommendation. And there was one other thing.

“Can I see your Colt?” asked Lucy, as she always did.

“Sure, pardner,” said Mattie, smiling. She reached into her desk and pulled out her family heirloom, an actual .44 Peacemaker.

Marlene was at the moment distracted by the troublesome thoughts that had clouded her mind since leaving Harry earlier that day, and so her shouted “No!” was somewhat too late. As soon as the big revolver appeared in Mattie’s hand, the great dog growled and leaped across the desk, knocking Mattie off her chair and onto the floor, where she lay screaming curses at the ceiling, with her gun hand gripped in the vast, hot, spiky cavern of its mouth.

Marlene ordered the animal off and into a corner, and helped Mattie to her feet, apologizing profusely. Lucy was sent off to return Sweetie to the VW. The two women went off to the kitchen for some restorative coffee and pastry.

“I ought to sue you,” said Mattie. “That fucking dog! Do you know a good lawyer?”

“An oxymoron. Honestly, thank God you’re all right! I was in outer space, or I would never have let you pull that hog-leg Colt out. He doesn’t need a command to take out anyone he thinks is pointing a gun at me. Is your back really okay?”

“I’ll live,” said Mattie. They entered the kitchen, which smelled like the anteroom to Paradise, and Mattie introduced the beaming, flour-spattered olive-skinned girl. Tran was seated at the table mashing pistachio nuts in a bowl. The two women sat and drank coffee and ate little cakes made with honey and almonds, light and delicate as blossoms. Mattie brought up the Valone woman again, and this time Marlene, feeling she owed one for the dog incident, relented and said she would help.

“So what’s on your mind,
chica
?” asked Mattie.

“What’re you thinking about so hard I almost got ate by your dog?”

“Oh, just business problems. My partner and I don’t see things the same way. He thinks we should merge with a big security firm and that I should lose all the fringe stuff.”

“Fringe stuff like me?”

“Since you ask, yeah.”

“Him’s the one you should lose,
chica.
What you should do is come in with us, work full-time out of the shelter.”

“Yeah, well, I need to think it through. My life in general …”

Mattie sniffed and struck herself solidly between her substantial breasts. “You think too much. There’s women who need your help, who got nobody else. You know that in your heart. You should go with the heart. Fuck all the rest of it!”

Marlene had heard this speech before, of course, and had taken it in as the usual Mattie rhetoric, but now that Harry was pushing her into a decision, it cut more deeply.
Did
she really want to devote her life to this kind of work? She was a wife and mother with three children, after all. She was a feminist, whatever that meant nowadays, of course equal-opportunity and abortion rights and all that good shit, but she didn’t follow it all the way, not by any means. She despised the whining about the oppressive patriarchy from privileged college professors. She didn’t hate men, the poor saps. What she really liked was the tense, amphibious structure of her life, being
both
a good Catholic mom and an armed femi-semi-terrorist. This was hard to explain to the utterly committed like Mattie, or her husband. She thought briefly of the smug advice she had given him about picking his team and cringed inwardly; she was just as bad; no, worse.

Lamely she said, “I’ll think of something,” and after that they were mainly quiet, watching the baker girl. She was rolling out
filo
sheets by hand, something Marlene had never tried to do herself. As the girl worked, she hummed and sang snatches of a mournful-sounding song in what Marlene supposed was Arabic.

It was warm in the kitchen, and Marlene felt herself relax for the first time since leaving her office, with baking smells and the rhythmic rolling and grinding going on, and people drifting in to talk to Mattie or get coffee. The shelter seemed to run on its own time, in a slower and more traditional pace, like a tiny medieval court—the barbarians raging outside, and within, the inhabitants maintaining a precarious peace, preparing food, caring for children, having their lives. If, as Mattie urged, she followed her heart, Marlene thought that she would choose this over what she referred to privately as heavy metal: the high-technology guarding of the rich for some big firm. On the other hand, she had a brain, and a good one. This worldlet partook more than she liked of what Marx called the idiocy of village life, the dullness of the incompetent poor. She watched the girl roll out the translucent dough and wondered idly what
she
was thinking.

This is what: Fatyma was reasonably happy. She had endured a terrible fright and some miserable nights living out in the park with the weirdos, without even the knife to protect her, afraid to sleep at all. She had abandoned her suitcase, with all her recent purchases in it when she fled, and now owned nothing but the clothes she stood in, plus the wad of money sewn into a pouch inside her jeans. She missed her two books most of all, although she comprehended now that as a complete guide to the culture of the United States they left much to be desired. But she was safe; the woman had assured her of that, safe from her family and from the police. It was very much like living in the village in the occupied territories, better really, because there were no men ordering everyone about. Here there were only mothers and their children, fleeing as she herself had. This made her miss her mother and her little sister, but she thought there would be a way to get a message to them after a while, when she was far away and rich. The Duran woman paid her a good salary, and she had no expenses to speak of, so the savings would grow quickly. The baking was easy, although the oven was not right, not a true baker’s oven; but she had been baking since she could stand, and she could work around that. Her English was improving. She could watch television all she wanted, real television, not just tapes, and listen to the radio too. She felt lucky to have stumbled on the place. She wondered what had become of her first friend, Cindy.

Lucy came in, seeming subdued, poured herself a glass of milk and took a pastry from a plate. Mattie was called away to handle some crisis. Tran finished grinding his pistachios and went out to smoke a cigarette. Marlene and Lucy chatted about school, until gradually Lucy became aware that the baker girl was singing in a language she did not recognize.

“What’s that language?” she boldly asked, and when Fatyma answered, with some surprise, that it was Arabic, Lucy focused her considerable charm on the older girl and got her to teach her the words to the song, which was a simple repetitive ditty about girls and goats going up and down the hill, and the girl looking in the clouds to see the face of her future husband. In ten minutes, with much giggling on both sides, Lucy had the song down. To Marlene’s ear there was no difference in accent or intonation between Lucy’s and Fatyma’s words. Fascinated, for she had never observed this process before, she watched Lucy attack the new language. How do you say this, how do you say that, in Arabic? and so on to every object in the room, and the basic verbs. By degrees Lucy spoke greater proportions of actual Arabic in her questioning (soon it was “
Tib
’a ’eyh
‘shoes’
bil arabee
?” and was corrected, laughingly, by Fatyma, and plunged on, never forgetting a correction, the ferocious throaty consonants of the language apparently posing no problems for her supple tongue. By the time Marlene dragged her away, complaining loudly, an hour later, she had a vocabulary of over two hundred words and a solid grasp of grammatical construction.

In the car, Marlene said, “Lucy, Tran and I have to go do something right now—it won’t take long, but I’m going to drop you off at home. Set the table and make a salad—if I’m not home by the time your father gets there, throw a box from the freezer into the microwave. And don’t forget your homework.”

“Yes, master,” said Lucy in sepulchral tones.

“Don’t be smart. The other thing is—you know about Fatyma? I think it would be a good idea if we kept her between the three of us for now. She’s in trouble, and she’s safe at the shelter, but she might not be if word got out that that’s where she’s staying. Okay?”

“Not even Daddy?”

“I think
especially
Daddy. I hate to ask you to keep a secret like that, but it’s probably only for a short time. Will it make you neurotic?”

“Probably. Anyway, Daddy and I have lots of secrets from
you.
”

Lucy saw Marlene’s eyes appear, startled, in the rear-view mirror. “
What!
” exclaimed the wounded mother. “What secrets? What are they?”

“If I told you, they wouldn’t be secrets, Mother,” replied Lucy, cool as a peeled egg.

Marlene opened her mouth to fume but stopped. Hoist by my own petard, she thought, which I deserve. “Shut up, Tran!” she snarled, but he kept laughing, a soft, breathy clicking vibration, and Lucy started guffawing too, and after a while she joined in. After that, instead of driving straight home, she stopped off at Bello & Ciampi and told Harry that, as much as she hated to do it, she didn’t think she could be quite as straight-up a security operative as he required, and that if he wanted to bail and go work for a slick uptown outfit, okay, lots of luck, and no hard feelings.

Harry looked at her for a long time, or so it seemed, not with his cop’s eyes either, rather with the burnt ones, and Marlene realized how much all this was paining him, and she felt even worse, and so when he said, “Marlene, before you make up your mind, see the man, see Lou Osborne,” Marlene sighed, and felt her eyes prickling in a non-hard-boiled way, a soft-boiled way, actually, and said, “Okay, Harry, set it up.”

After leaving Guma’s, Karp went back to his desk and ordered a roast beef sandwich and a soda from a take-out place. While he was waiting, he made a series of calls to people he did not want to speak to, but wanted to leave messages with. It was an old bureaucratic ploy, but one he was fond of anyway. He was laying a trail, weaving a web. Trailing a coat. The messages he left with Czermak, Carrozza, Netski, and Roland Hrcany would act as little crystals around which paranoia would form, and upon these might grow useful actions.

The problem was, he didn’t have enough to go to the D. A. with, not enough to cause him to drop an indictment against a couple of putative cop killers. It would be a political disaster, and Keegan would never go for it, except if the folks who actually did the deed were waiting in jail and there was a plausible case against these new fellows all wrapped up. Karp realized he was far from that, and there was only so much he could do quietly to get there. He wanted other people to make the noise. He wanted Carrozza talking to Czermak about a missing load of brown Mexican heroin. He wanted Czermak to go to Roland, worried. He wanted Roland to lean on Netski so that Netski would get the cops stirred up, in the hopes that something would float to the surface, something fat enough to allow him to modify his lame tale about Morilla investigating the Mexicans. And the more they talked, the worse it would be, because word would get out—it always did. Every detective, every senior A.D.A., had a pet reporter to whom juicy tidbits might be fed, against the day when a sympathetic ear might be required among the jackal press. There would be a buzz, it would soon reach the ears of the defense, and so it would become imperative that Roland and his minions either uncover the reality behind the buzz, and use it in the People’s case against persons now unknown or, if the buzz was actually false, learn enough to torpedo it in court and actually convict the Obregons.

This was Karp’s thinking. He knew that the people he had called would not hurry to return his messages (or would call when they knew he would be out of the office—the ploy worked both ways), because it is an iron law of bureaucracy that when someone up the line or one who has the ear of the big boss calls and leaves a cryptic message (such as “what about this Lucky on the Morilla murder? The brown heroin angle?”), it is a foolish worker bee who calls back without having exhaustively researched the reason for the call. So they would call one another, and plot and plan, and Karp would observe and keep poking, which is what good staff is for.