Reckless Endangerment (25 page)

“That’s one hell of a story,” said the district attorney after a long, thoughtful silence. Karp had just finished relating to the D.A. what had transpired around his dining room table the previous night, and thought he might actually light the long green cigar he habitually played with, but while he did not do that, he appeared more worried than he had ever been in Karp’s long connection with the man. Karp agreed that it was one hell of a story, and the D.A. said, “You think it’s wise to keep it close like you’re doing?”

“Shit, I don’t know, Jack. I don’t know if it’s wise or not. We’re not set up to make decisions like this. What I want Clay to come back with is something like, oh, yeah, the Feebs have this covered up to the nostrils, go back to sleep, girls. Failing that”—here Karp made a helpless gesture—“I await your orders, sir.”

“I could go holler to the police commissioner,” said the D.A. speculatively, “and he would crank out the Red Squad.”

“I don’t think they call it the Red Squad anymore, Jack.”

Keegan rolled his eyes. “I
know
that, wiseass.” He leaned back in his big chair, creaking, and sighted up at the ceiling along the length of his unlit cigar, as if watching the rise of smoke. He said, “You know what I do not love? I do not love the district attorney who goes on crusades where the interests of important constituencies are concerned. Do you know a fellow named Zwiller?”

“I met with him. He’s Lowenstein’s guy. Why, has he called you?”

“Persistently. I told Marcie to refer him to you. Why’s he trying for an end run? Aren’t you keeping him happy, bless his little Semitic heart?”

“I thought I was,” said Karp. “Unless he heard I met with the opposition and he thinks I’m ready to sell out my people for Arab gold.”

“Well, go stroke his balls for him, but we definitely don’t want Lowenstein hearing about this business, not until we get it sorted out. As to that … did your mysterious Arab gentleman make any indication as to the urgency of his warning? Any date mentioned?”

“No, it was all very general.”

“None of that ‘there’s not a moment to lose, the bomb is ticking under Fifth Avenue’ kind of thing?”

Karp shook his head, and Keegan put the cigar down, drumming his fingers on his desk, which Karp knew was an indication that he had come to a decision. “Okay, that being the case, and since I have no intention of going off half-cocked, we’ll leave it at least until Fulton gets back to you, and should our pals at the federal level not have an operation going,
we
will investigate so as to either uncover a prosecutable conspiracy, or let our minds rest that there isn’t one. In the meantime I will slip a discreet word into the ear of our friends down the street, just so we’re covered.”

That meant the cops, or rather the police commissioner, their political head. Karp thought this was a reasonably good idea.

“Meanwhile, where does Roland sit in all this?” asked Keegan.

Karp had been waiting for this one, and answered uncomfortably, “I haven’t actually brought him into it yet. I figured he had enough to worry about, just the cases and running the bureau, and until I had it more solid. …” He trailed off. Keegan’s eye did not miss his discomfort. He did not press the issue, but let Karp off the hook by saying, “Well, why don’t you let me fill him in?” Karp assented, feeling grateful. They understood one another very well. The staffer must convey information to the boss, but if the staffer routinely rats out his friends, he will soon have no information to convey, because no one will talk to him. Thus between a staffer and the very rare boss who knows how to handle staff there develops a nuanced set of signals as complex as a pas de deux. Keegan changed the subject a little. “Speaking of Roland, how’s the other festering boil?”

Here Karp could be blunter, because he knew more, and because he had already expressed his doubts about the case. “Sometimes even scumbags tell the truth,” he said, “and this is one of those times. The Obregons came in with brown heroin, major weight. They claim they got ripped off, and sure enough, the town is flooded with Mexican brown, but most of it hit the streets only
after
they were arrested. There’s no real evidence Detective Morilla was chasing the Obregons. He was chasing someone else—who we don’t know, but the name Lucky comes up a lot.”

“
Lucky?
You can’t be serious?”

“Yeah, me too, but it’s all pretty vague at this point. Netski, the cop in the case, backs up the party line pretty good, and we’ve got the right gun. The only real question is, Can you believe a conscious, planned frame against a couple of out-of-town nogoodniks? Roland and I have a difference of opinion over that, as you probably know already.”

“I do,” said the D.A., “and I don’t like it, but I can’t walk these cocksuckers until I have something to put in its place.”

“I understand that and I’m not suggesting it,” said Karp, “but there’s another angle. Roland’s been getting letters, death-threat-type letters, about the Obregons. They’re innocent, if you don’t let them go you die, Yankee dog, that kind of thing. Not what you would expect from a couple of guys who didn’t do it.”

Keegan’s face clouded. “I hope Roland’s taking this seriously.”

“No, he’s not, as a matter of fact. I was hoping you’d mention it.”

“I’ll do that.” A moment later, “Why isn’t he? His famous macho image?”

Karp had given the matter some thought, and he replied, “That, but it’s mainly that none of us have much experience with a criminal class that operates against law enforcement authorities directly. The wise guys never do that here, although the Sicilian Mafia does it all the time, and it’s practically the national sport in Mexico, bribe ’em or kill ’em.”

“You’re thinking some segment of our colorful immigrant community is bringing in those kinds of customs?”

“I don’t know, but it’s probably safe to say it’s not all knishes, pizza, and shish kebabs. Face it, I just got finished talking about people who might be planning to blow up something in New York to make a point over in the Middle East. Threatening a prosecutor seems like spare change compared to that. And we know
somebody
executed a police officer.”

“Something else to talk with my friends down the street about,” said Keegan, rapping his knuckles lightly on the desk. “Meanwhile, keep doing what you’re doing and keep me informed.” He picked up the cigar again, twirled it, replaced it carefully on the desk. That part of the conversation was over. Karp waited for the next shoe to drop, but the D.A. only leaned back, smiled, and asked, “So, who do you like in the playoffs?”

Marlene sat upright in bed, instantly awake, her heart pounding, her stomach clenched, in the sort of dreadful rising that occurs when we have overslept an appointment, or fallen asleep at the switch, or suffer from a bad conscience. She wiped her eyes, which were blurred with tears shed during sleep, an evil sign. It was full morning, and the loft was silent but for the whisper of the heat-pump fan and the noises filtering up from the street. She got out of bed, groaning as the events of the previous night re-occupied her mind and she distinguished them from her unhappy dreams. She checked the bedside clock, which bore the unlikely message that it was ten forty-five. Throwing on a silk robe—her whore’s robe, as she thought of it, a wrapper printed with green leaves and pink flamingoes—she stomped out of the bedroom.

Complete silence: no clattering of utensils in the kitchen, no baby voices, no TV, no Posie singing or talking to herself or to the boys, nothing. In the kitchen, which was spotless, the breakfast dishes put away, the counters wiped, she found the notes. One from her husband read, “Sleep in, Tiger. I’ll bring Chinese home. Love, B.” The other was in Posie’s third-grade dyslexic scrawl: “Took the boyes to the zoo. Buctch siad OK,” signed with a little heart with a curly P in it.

Marlene sat down at the table and fingered both notes. Had she been a certain type of woman, familiar from the movies, she would have clutched them to her breast and wailed tears of gratitude. Instead she dragged the somewhat grubby sleeve of her robe across her face a couple of times to stem a certain dampness, loaded the espresso maker, showered, washed her hair, dried it, and lolled about with her mind more or less blank, as the sages of the Orient advise, until the enticing odor of the finished coffee brought her back to the kitchen, where she had two big cups of jet fuel with plenty of warm milk in them, with (her secret vice) a couple of sticks of the boys’ zwieback, which she dipped biscotti-style into the brew, and a single cigarette smoked free of poisoning-her-children guilt and thus superbly delightful.

She then strolled down to her little home office and called Bello & Ciampi, where she found all in order, the miraculous Tran having covered her neglected responsibilities of the morning, and the messages not that urgent. Sym reminded her that she had an appointment at one at Osborne uptown.

Ah, yes, Osborne. She walked back to her bedroom and threw open the doors of her wardrobe closet. She noticed the heap of black rip-stop nylon she had worn the night before and, wrinkling her nose, tossed it and the underwear that went with it into the hamper. No terror clothes for Osborne, she thought. No, instead she would give him the full KL, see what he was missing and eat his liver out. She took down her one genuine Karl Lagerfeld suit, an item that must have cost five grand new, but which clever little Marlene had picked up for $450 in a consignment shop belonging to a woman whose persistent ex Marlene had discouraged, and who had given her the first crack at it. It was made of wool mixed with cashmere, had a hand like a baby’s kiss, and was colored the darkest possible shade of plum. The jacket was cut lush too, with wide shoulders, which meant the pistol didn’t break its line, probably not something old Karl had in mind, but welcome. The $250 perfectly matching fuck-me pumps that Marlene had bought new to celebrate this bargain and an ecru silk blouse completed the outfit. She did her face and hair, popped in the glassie, checked her image in the full-length mirror, declared it not bad for an aging, one-eyed, mother-of-three felon, and, lusting after the now unobtainable
noir
look, wished she had a black mink and one of those little velvet hats that sat cocked on one’s head like a bird, with a half veil. It was while unashamedly primping in this manner that the solution to her problem with Harry popped into her mind, as if the diversion of cerebral blood to the fashion lobes had somehow released a blockage in the region of sneaky creativity, something that may happen more frequently than neuroscientists suspect. Grinning and chuckling, she grabbed up her beloved trench coat, one of the old Burberrys, from before they changed the color, and her gun, and left.

El Chivato waited for the phone to ring three times before he leaned over and picked it up. The woman was watching him. He glared at her and made a shooing gesture, and she went immediately into the other room. It was the elder Obregon brother on the phone, as arranged by Connie during her recent jail visit. The conversation lasted the full ten minutes allowed by the jail authorities and was not pleasant for either party. El Chivato put, as he thought, the very sensible case for modifying the contract, since the man Lucky was guarded in such a way as to make capture and subsequent modification of his attitudes impossible. As an alternative, El Chivato would be happy to simply kill the man and his associates and, if desired, the mysteriously unbribeable prosecutor, but in any case, the business had to be finished before the end of the month, as he had pressing business back in Mexico. But this plan Obregon absolutely rejected, as it would not accomplish his main purpose, which was to win release from jail. Lucky
had
to be captured and made to confess. Here Jodón Obregon made the tactical error of suggesting that El Chivato’s talents were overrated, that perhaps he was losing his nerve. El Chivato objected in the strongest terms to this analysis, hinting also about how relatively easy it was to get at people who were incarcerated. Jodón withdrew his comment. In the last few minutes of the call they cooked together a compromise: El Chivato would make one last attempt to snatch Lucky, and failing that, he would directly approach the blond prosecutor and use his justly famous skills to win an appreciation of the innocence of the Obregon brothers, all by the end of the month, of course.

When El Chivato hung up, he was in a fury, not only because of the conversation and the insulting remarks (which he would remember) but also because, for the first time, he was experiencing a vague feeling that things were going on that he did not quite get. The way his quarry was being guarded was remarkable. He had, naturally, studied the various methods of bodyguarding available to him thus far, as a cheetah may be said to study the herding patterns of antelope, but he had never before experienced a system so elaborate, so multi-ringed and impenetrable. There were never, for example, any free parking places in front of the Palm café, and there was always a car full of men double-parked outside. He had spotted any number of lookouts on the streets surrounding the place, although these were changed in a pattern that he had not yet been able to figure out. Lucky arrived and departed according to no fixed schedule, and when he left it was in one of never less than three vehicles. Several times El Chivato had tried to follow one of these cars, and each time it had led him in a meaningless loop, at the end of which a different set of men would emerge than had entered it at the origin of the ride. He was, in fact, competing against a system designed to foil the most aggressive and efficient counterintelligence operation in the world, bringing to his mission only what he had learned in rural Mexico, where the authorities were well bribed and lax. He was out of his league, and the growing apprehension that this was so was making him crazy, or to be precise, more crazy than he already was, which was crazy indeed.

El Chivato cursed, picked up a straight chair, smashed a table lamp with it, then battered the chair into sticks against a door frame. Holding a chair leg in his hand like a club, he kicked open the door of the bedroom through which the woman had passed, but Connie, being familiar enough with the behavior of men conforming to El Chivato’s type when they were angry, had silently slipped away. The young man smashed one of the bedroom lamps and beat the cosmetics and perfumes laid out on the dresser into a mash of glass and scented mud. Ticking like a bomb, he threw on his gun-heavy canvas coat and went out.