Reckless Endangerment (7 page)

“So, Mr. Karp, here you are. What have you got to tell me? Are you going to stop this pogrom?”

Clearly no pleasantries were going to be exchanged, which was fine with Karp. He said, “I’m not sure what you mean, Rabbi. I thought a pogrom was an anti-Semitic mob organized by the government.”

Contempt blossomed on the rabbi’s face. “Bah! What, you didn’t see the police beating our boys with clubs? We get slaughtered and the police beat
us
? What do you call it, then?”

“I would call it controlling a riot, sir. Objects were thrown at the police station, and several police were injured.”

Lowenstein pointed a stubby finger at Karp, “See! This is how it starts. This is what happened before the Nazis took over. You, a Jew, sit here in the house of God, may his name be blessed, and defend the beating of Jews. It’s a
shandah!
A
shandah!
”

At this word the clicking of the adding machine ceased, and all the men in the room stared at Karp. Their faces indicated that they had accepted their leader’s verdict. It was indeed shameful.

Karp felt his face heat, and he allowed himself a calming breath. The rabbi was not finished, however. “You think because you act like the goyim, and eat like the goyim, when the time comes the goyim are going to protect you? Like they protected the six million?” And more of the same for some time. Karp let the man run out his spiel. He was more than adequately familiar with the Holocaust. Karp’s mother had been a fierce Zionist and something of a connoisseur of Holocaust details, and had imbued Karp from an early age with the necessity for Jews to be ever vigilant in an implacably hostile world. The lesson had not taken deep root in Karp’s soul, however, although he had considerable experience with practical anti-Semitism. On the streets of Brooklyn, where he had been raised, it was given that a group of Irish or Italian kids would beat up any Jewish kid they found, and Karp’s own little gang of Jews was not loath to return the favor. That they used fists, sticks, and rocks rather than the semi-automatics that later became fashionable in settling youthful disputes did not detract from the sincerity of their violence, and this experience had, perhaps regrettably, tempered his sympathy for the six million. He simply could not imagine walking meekly with his children into a cattle car, not while he had breath to fight.

Besides that, as an athlete Karp was a convinced meritocrat. Could you make the shot, could you scuffle successfully under the boards—these were to him the cosmic questions. And he had found early that he had absolutely no religious interest whatever. When he thought about it at all, which was rarely, he considered it to be a kind of talent. He himself could fling a ten-inch ball unerringly through the air into a slightly larger hoop from distances up to twenty-five feet, and he could convict people of homicide. Others could talk to God and get comfort from it. His wife, for example, or his daughter, both Catholics.

“Go outside!” Lowenstein was saying. “Go three blocks from here in any direction, and what do you find? Jamaica! Egypt! El Salvador! We are closed in by hostile goyim. Every day our people are robbed, beaten up, raped. And what do your precious authorities do?
Nothing
is what they do. They write up papers, and they forget. No one is ever arrested. You can see them, the cops, thinking, oh, the Jews, they got plenty, who cares! And I’m warning you, we will not tolerate it. Cursed be those who despoil Israel! And now they have started to kill us—”

“Yeah, right, Rabbi,” Karp interrupted, “things are tough all over. It’s the city, it’s a high-crime precinct you’re in here.” He noted, with some satisfaction, that the rabbi’s eyes had widened. His mouth was still slightly open, showing yellow, uneven teeth. He was not used to being interrupted, especially when he was in full spate about the travails of the Jews.

“Meanwhile,” Karp went on, “the reason I came over here was that Mr. Keegan asked me to report to you on the progress of the Shilkes investigation, as a courtesy. As you know by now, we have two suspects in custody, and we will charge them with murder and assault. We have substantial evidence against them, but only with respect to the crime itself. At present there’s no substantive evidence of a wider conspiracy, much less plans for a campaign against Jews generally.”

“You believe this?” Lowenstein snapped. “You think these stupid savages thought this up themselves, that they were not brought to it by some evil intelligence?” The rabbi had a habit of leaning forward in his chair and drumming his fists on his desk in rhythm with his words. Karp hesitated momentarily. The same thought had occurred to him, but he was not about to share it with Lowenstein.

“There’s no evidence for it,” said Karp a little lamely.

Lowenstein swiveled his chair abruptly away from Karp and said something in Yiddish to several of the other men. They responded with sour laughter, and Karp realized that this was the first laugh he had heard since alighting from the unmarked—not, in his experience, the usual state of affairs among Jews. The rabbi swung his chair around like a tank turret and directed the muzzle of his glare toward Karp. Again the finger.

“Listen to me—while you’re gathering this evidence, which you could trip over walking down the street if you had eyes, while you are looking, we will take care of ourselves. We are not pacifists, Mr. Karp. We have ample authority in the Talmud to protect ourselves against those who mean to harm us. Do I make myself clear?”

“Oh, yeah, Rabbi. I should point out, however, that we’re operating under the Constitution and the statutes of the state of New York here, which may have a different interpretation of self-defense than your version of Talmudic law. We would not tolerate any attempt to take the law into your own hands, for example, by pursuing people you thought might be involved in the Shilkes murder, Arab boys, for example.”

Karp was watching Lowenstein carefully as he said this, but the man gave no obvious sign of guilt or nervousness. The clicking of the adding machine stopped, though, and the elderly man using it was staring at Karp with an expression of … what? Doubt? Anger? Concern? It was hard for Karp to read these bearded, grave faces.

Meanwhile, the rabbi sniffed, rolled his eyes, sighed, and made a small dismissing gesture with the tips of his fingers, as if shooing away a small, bothersome creature. Karp might have felt diminished had he not been vaccinated against just this guilt-making ritual by his maternal grandmother, who had used almost the same mannerisms.

“Go away, Mr. Karp,” said Lowenstein in a weary voice. “Go back to the goyim, live out your little make-believe. Someday, you decide you want to be a real Jew, we’ll still be here, we’ll welcome you with open arms.”

In the car, Morris said, “How’d it go?”

“It went shitty, Morris,” said Karp, settling back in the seat and rubbing his face. “The rabbi decided I wasn’t enough of a Jew to understand their situation there. You ever get that, when you were uptown?”

Morris glanced at him. “What, that I wasn’t enough of a Jew? Hardly ever. Why?”

Karp laughed out loud, probably for longer than the remark warranted. “No, from the Muslims, from the Panthers, whatever,” he explained. “Like you were letting the team down.”

“Oh, that. Yeah, some.” He shrugged. “The Uncle Tom business. You let shit like that get to you, you might as well hang it up.”

While Karp drove back to Manhattan, his wife was doing something that she was as bad at as her husband was at mollifying militant Hasidim, which was teaching women to shoot pistols. She was now in the basement firing range of the West Side Gun Club, on Tenth and Forty-eighth Street, standing behind and to the left of an insurance company office manager named Joan Savitch, who was blazing away with a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver at a silhouette target twenty-five yards down-range. She was getting some good hits, but her pattern was lousy, and although Marlene knew enough about shooting to know that tight pattern was the key, she did not know enough to tell Savitch what she was doing wrong.

The woman expended her final bullet and clicked the traveler switch to bring the target home. They both looked at it. “Am I getting any better?” Savitch asked doubtfully. Like most New Yorkers, she had never fired a pistol before. She was a short woman, somewhat overweight by the standards of the fashion magazines, with a pleasant, intelligent, forty-ish face. Her blond-streaked light brown hair was arranged in a stylish flip cut. She was wearing a maroon jersey over the skirt to her gray suit. An ordinary New York woman of the moderately successful professional classes, two young sons in an apartment in Peter Cooper, formerly married to a guy who turned out to be a maniac. It happened, more often than people supposed.

“You’re doing fine,” said Marlene, although in truth she did not think there had been much improvement over the last half box of rounds. One of Marlene’s people, Lonnie Dane, usually took this duty. Dane (now, unfortunately, running a touchy assignment) was a gun nut who really thought that being able to put five holes through a playing-card-sized area at twenty-five yards was as important as the ability to tie up one’s sneakers, and he was a good, patient teacher, and a man, which Marlene, to her dismay (she being a good enough feminist) found that most of her clients (all female) really preferred. The remarkable things about Marlene and guns were (in ascending order of improbability): she thought they were necessary to her work; she hated them; she was a crack shot. This last had come as a considerable surprise—that she shot like an expert the first time she had ever picked up a pistol. Dane had assured her that, while rare, such things were not unknown in gun circles. Marlene had already used this skill to kill three men, and more than practically anything else in this world, she wished never to have to do so again.

This was, in fact, a prime reason for the training. Four years previously, on leaving the D.A.’s office, Marlene had started a private security agency for the express purpose of protecting women from the deadly attentions of men. Ninety percent of this work was paper shuffling and phone calls—arranging for protective orders, urging the police to enforce same, riding herd on the prosecution of villains, or a kind of social work—encouraging women to get out of violent situations. When this did not work, in perhaps nine percent of her cases, Marlene moved bodies, supplying women and their children with new homes, in apartments if they could afford it, or shelters if they could not, and new identities when required. Marlene was also not averse to engaging in heart-to-heart talks with the men involved, explaining in some detail what would happen to them if they did not lay off. Often this worked.

It was the remaining one percent that caused Marlene the most trouble. This small fraction consisted of men who would not be dissuaded by the law or by Marlene’s threats. Some odd derangement of their brains had conflated love with absolute possession, so that if they could not have access to their chosen one on their terms, they would eventually kill her, any children that happened to be convenient, and, ordinarily, themselves afterward. Marlene preferred that they die before rather than afterward, and since she could not afford to mount a perpetual watch on the women in question (for the proportion, while small, represented in a city the size of New York a considerable number), she had started the gun classes.

Strictly speaking, this was illegal. New York does not approve of its citizens carrying concealed weapons, and Marlene tended to agree. New York makes an exception for retired cops working private, security guards, and storekeepers, but not usually for women in fear of their lives. Marlene’s scam was to “hire” Joan Savitch and her other clients in similar straits as “trainees.” They paid Marlene a fee, and she trained them as bodyguards, each of whose sole client was herself. Thus they could carry guns under Marlene’s ticket, just like Wackenhut’s square-badge legions.

“Let’s forget about the .22 now,” said Marlene to her trainee. “The statistics tell you that most people who get shot get it from a range of seven feet or less. The main thing here is not to turn you into Annie Oakley, but to get you used to firing a serious pistol.”

Savitch pointed at the .22. “This isn’t a serious pistol?”

“No.” Marlene opened an aluminum suitcase lined with foam fingers and brought out a Smith & Wesson Airweight Model 49 and a box of .38 Special IP hollow-points. “This is a serious pistol. A .38, two-inch barrel, weighs a pound and a half loaded, got a shrouded hammer so it doesn’t catch on anything. Load it up and try it.”

Savitch took the thing, grimacing as she felt the solid weight of it, and filled the cylinder. Marlene clipped a new target to the traveler and sent it down-range, but only for about ten feet. Savitch took aim and fired a round and yelped.

“Yeah, it’s a lot louder. You have to get used to it. You’re going to have to shoot a couple of loads with the earmuffs off too.”

The woman shot off the rest of the cylinder, in two-round bursts as she had been taught, nicely chewing up the chest area of the man-shape. Still a crummy pattern, but Marlene was mainly interested in her pupil’s ability to get off large-caliber rounds without flinching. She had the woman reload and fire again.

“How do you like it?” asked Marlene.

“I love it,” Savitch said with an edge in her voice. “Do you have it in beige?”

“Yeah, right,” said Marlene. “This is what we do instead of Tupperware. Want to try some more?”

“No, I think I’m all shot out today.” She placed the pistol—thud—on the shooting stand and turned away from the target.

“That’s your gun, Joan,” Marlene said gently. “You have to take it with you. No,” she added as Savitch started to put it in her purse, “you have to load it. It don’t work without the bullets.”

Savitch started her cry then, during which Marlene held her and tried to say all the right things, thinking it was better she got this over with now, and also that she, Marlene, was perhaps the only woman in the city who regularly left for work with a supply of both bullets and Kleenex.

“I can’t do this, Marlene,” she said, snuffling. “I really … I just
can’t!
”