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“Actually, I consider it an act of charity. Priests used to spend half their time listening to the sexual agonies of the young, and since the young no longer have sexual agonies to relate, you all must have a big titillation deficit. I think it's an issue for the Curia.”

Dugan raised his eyes to heaven. “See! This is what it's come to. Mocked in my own office by a snip of a girl. How long, oh Lord?”

They both chuckled, the chuckles died down, Dugan's face grew sober, and they made eye contact at a deeper level than they had before. A subtle change occurred in the atmosphere of the room, as if the two of them had suddenly entered a sacred space.

“And…?” he said quietly.

“I think I've met a demon,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Who's the afflicted?”

“A guy down at Holy Redeemer. He calls himself Larry Larsen, but I doubt that's his real name. He just breathes lies. And he seems to want to get close to me, I mean personally. He's always asking me questions about my life, about my folks, friends…the other day he was pumping me about Tran.”

“That's interesting.”

“Why?”

“Because there are probably people who'd like to know where Tran is, and it's probably common knowledge in some circles that you were as close to him as anyone.”

“He's not a cop,” she declared. “I guess he could be a bounty hunter, but he doesn't even seem organized enough for that. Asking about Tran is just making conversation. He's curious about the family, too. I figure him for a low-level grifter who got possessed pretty early. There's not much left of him now. The problem is he has a little girl. I'm concerned.”

“You could contact the authorities.”

“Yeah, and what do I tell them? Beelzebub is squatting in one of their parolees? The guy is perfectly presentable—good looking, sexy, well-spoken. But he has absolutely no idea of how he appears to a person with any spiritual discernment. Of course, that probably hasn't been a problem in his life, given the modern world. The nuns go out of their way to avoid him without being able to come right out and say what it is. They're not supposed to think stuff like that. They've been taught to use psychological language like everyone else.”

“How sure are you?”

“Oh, it's the real deal all right. The thing is pretty brazen. It's almost like we're having a conversation while the poor schmuck is running his little scam on me, all oblivious. What do you think I should do?”

The priest sat back in his canvas chair, making it creak. He tented his hands in front of his face and considered his reply. This was not the first time that the fifteenth century had intruded into his life through the medium of the Karp women. The mother definitely belonged in a viperous ducal court in the Italy of that era and the daughter should have been having visions in a convent and making miracles for the peasantry. He knew that Lucy had been having visitations from Saint Teresa of Avila since age seven, so it was only a matter of time before other sorts of spirits came calling. Few men are as inoculated against superstition as old-style Jesuits (more so, oddly enough, than actual materialists), but Dugan did not dare to dismiss Lucy's report.

“I take it your guy would not take kindly to an attempt at exorcism?”

Lucy snorted. “No, he thinks the demon
is
him now. It's way too late for that.”

“Is he apt to be violent?”

“Not that I've actually witnessed. But when you cross him, or don't do what he wants, you can practically see the flames shoot from his eyes. I'd say he'd be violent if he thought he could get away with it.”

“Then you ought to bail out. Don't mess with him.”

She grinned and said, “Oh, you don't think I'm up to handling one little demon?”

The priest didn't smile now. “No. I think you very well might be able to ‘handle' him. And how proud you'll be of it.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Right. You're already so stuffed with pride that you think the rules don't apply to you, and the ones you do keep you keep with such heroic virtue that it's nearly as toxic as sin. Do you honestly think that a self-respecting demon wouldn't prefer you to some loser? Don't you understand that professional exorcists go through elaborate training to prevent just that from happening?”

Lucy dropped her eyes and bobbed her head impatiently. “Okay, right, you made your point. What about the child?” She tried to keep her voice even, but it quivered a little.

He pushed a pad across the desk. “Write her name down and anything you know about her. I'll check her out through my cookie-baker contacts. Meanwhile, keep out of this guy's way.”

“He's not going to be like that. I think he's fixated on me. And I'm damned if I'm going to let him chase me away from Holy Redeemer's.”

“Yes, you
would
say that,” sighed Father Dugan. “I suppose I'll just have to rally whatever pathetic forces God has left and see what can be done.”

A
FTER
F
ELIX'S
FINGER HAD HEALED ENOUGH
, R
ASHID BEGAN
to send him on errands again. He drove a pickup truck lettered with the name of a firm he had never heard of, and his destinations were scattered throughout the city and the surrounding suburban counties. Once he drove almost to New Paltz to pick up a load of fertilizer. Most of the time, he dropped his deliveries off at Haskell's Plumbing and Heating in Long Island City. Some of the items, small bottles or cardboard boxes, he took to the house in Queens and gave directly to Rashid. The Arab now treated him like a dog, and Felix pretended to be a changed and more doglike man. No more wise-ass remarks, no more funny tricks. Felix was a competent actor and the role seemed to convince. There were no further problems. He drove, he picked up, he delivered.

He also learned. Rashid gradually slipped back into the familiar pedantry. The man had hardly a fact in his head that he did not wish to share, and not just once, either, because he thought that Felix was stupid. This was true, in the sense that Felix had problems acknowledging that any person knew more about anything worth knowing than Felix himself did. Felix only learned through personal disaster. But there was nothing wrong with his intellect, and so he put up with the Arab's mocking tone and allowed himself to learn about bombs, explosives, and fuses.

Also, he started to collect. He did not steal. But instead of the fifty pounds of ammonium nitrate that Rashid ordered, he would use his own slim funds to buy seventy-five and keep the difference. The same with the other chemicals and the bits of electronics, and the detonators. He rented a storage locker in Long Island City near the plumbing place, and kept this stuff there. It made a convenient lab, as well, nothing fancy, just the minimum: a table, a chair, some pans, buckets, plastic containers, an extension cord and a hot plate, a postal scale, a set of glass measuring cups, and a thermometer. This equipment allowed him to purify ammonium nitrate out of commercial fertilizer using chilled methanol, to mix this with diesel oil and liquid rubber to make primary charges, to manufacture acetone peroxide for the initiator charge from bleach, acetone, and battery acid. He already knew how to make trembler switches, and the other electronics were easily available. It took him about a month after losing his little finger to assemble the materials, process them, and construct his first bomb.

He was pretty sure that Rashid had no suspicions, but he remained wary. Felix had never been particularly paranoid before: rather the opposite. His base state had been a blithe feeling of invulnerability, which was perhaps the main reason why he had spent most of his adult life in prison. Now, however, he paused before every move, he cast a sharp eye at anyone who looked Middle Eastern, he drove his truck in such a way as to foil anyone tailing him: sudden accelerations and turns, backtracks, roundabout routes down nearly deserted roadways.

It was the finger; they shouldn't have taken a part of him away, that was his thinking, it had turned him into a different kind of person. The old Felix would have struck back instantly with some ill-considered action that might not have worked. He had been way too hotheaded in the past, he saw that now. Funny, because he considered himself to be a fairly well-organized guy. He wrote lists, he kept an appointment book, and always had. But now for the first time, he found himself able to think things through from a number of angles, as if he could see himself on a chessboard, taking various actions, with the other players making their moves, and him making countermoves to theirs.

This business with the girl, for example. He had gone down to the church hall and hung around and watched her. He was a familiar enough character around there by then that several people came up to him and made conversation. Some bums. An old fart, another nut, the guy they called Hey Hey, a pain in the ass. And a new guy, old, with a white beard. Felix didn't like the way this one looked at him, and there was something wrong with his mouth. Felix had left the hall right after that, with no plans to return. Not fear, exactly; he was sure as shit not afraid of a little old guy he could break over his knee. What was it? Maybe the guy knew, maybe he recognized him from before? Anyway, that whole scene was over. It was not going to work the way he had thought it would. The Karp girl was not going to fall for him, was not going to convey the information he wanted via pillow talk. In the old days, this would have made him crazy, maybe provoked him into an assault. No longer. Now whenever he felt that old urge to violent action, he looked at the pink stump, caressed it, felt its absence, calmed himself, and planned anew. He would pull back from the girl for a while. He'd keep in touch, sure, but ease up on the pressure. He'd look for an angle, a chance to either grab her or grab someone she cared about, and then they would see about her snotty attitude. That was another big thing about the new Felix, thought Felix: No more Mr. Nice Guy.

 

“So are you going to be around tonight?” Karp asked as he tied his tie before the cheval mirror in their bedroom.

“Yes,” said his wife from the bed. “I will. I intend to spend a leisurely morning grocery shopping on Grand and Mulberry streets, and then pass the afternoon bent over a hot stove, preparing a terrific meal for my family, which has clearly been eating
rifiuti
since God knows when.”

“It's not garbage at all,” Karp protested. “We have the four food groups. There's milk. I think Lucy does a good job.”

“There are forty-three takeout containers in the refrigerator, and the freezer is full of frozen Milky Ways.”

“We like them. They're in a food group.”

“It's
chozerai,
in the language of your people.”

“In the language of my people, who the fuck asked you to leave?” said Karp, and immediately after, “Sorry. I didn't mean it that way, but really, it's a little much, Marlene.”

“I know it is,” she said in the dulled voice she often used now. “I'm a bitch on wheels, yes, I know it, and I'm ruining everyone's life.”

He sat on the side of the bed and took her hand, which was damp and warm, like the day.

“I didn't mean it that way. Obviously, we're all glad you're back, but everyone's on eggs wanting to know what's going on—are you here, are you there, in out…?”

She winced and held up her other hand, its palm toward him. “Butch, don't
hover!
Give me a little room—I'm sort of in pieces right now, okay?”

“Okay.” Tightly.

“Oh, God, I'm sorry again! And here you are with this horror show at work. Look—could we just take it one day at a time like the drunks do? Let's say I've come back to support the family in a crisis. Our cover story. How's Collins?”

“He seems okay, although they say you can't tell with concussions. I guess it was a lucky break, what happened, with that woman backing up and setting off the bomb. Klopper's in worse shape, but apparently he'll live, too.”

“I'm surprised Jack didn't make an objection, you taking the case personally.”

“I was surprised, too,” said Karp, happy to be easing into a neutral topic. There was no one he'd rather talk to about things than Marlene, always excepting those things he couldn't talk to Marlene about. “I thought he'd go ballistic, because he's always said that trial work is a full-time job and I'm still the chief ADA, and also the racial thing. But he didn't peep. In fact he positively beamed at me. ‘Good, great, keep me informed.' The hottest trial on the docket, involving blacks and cops, the two major interest groups he's got to have on his side, and they're on opposite sides in this one, and he's smiling. Why is he smiling?”

“He's smiling because he's not going to run again,” said Marlene without apparent thought.

“Not run? But he's the DA.”

“Yes, now he is,” she said, “but when he was a little Irish boy, he wasn't the DA, and someday he won't be the DA again. Not everyone dies in office, you know. He's not the pope.”

Karp checked his watch and threw on a jacket. “I have to go,” he said, leaning down to kiss her. “I'm glad you'll be here. Call me old-fashioned, but…”

“Old-fashioned!”

“Yeah, and so is Jack Keegan, and even though he's not, as you point out, the pope, it's totally inconceivable that he would not run, and now that I think about it, it strikes me that for the past week or so, the man has been…what? Uncharacteristically merry? Maybe he's starting a new medication?”

She pulled the sheet up to her chin. “That sounds right,” she said. “Find out what it is and get some for me.”

 

After Karp left, Marlene wrapped herself in her old silk kimono and went into the kitchen. She loaded the big hourglass espresso pot, sliced a bagel into the toaster, and sat hunched in the folds of the kimono while boiling and toasting proceeded. The kimono was the oldest garment she owned, made of heavy silk brocade, printed with plum blossoms against a deep violet ground. It smelled of incense, smoke, perfume, Marlene's body. “Guinea slut” was what her roomie had called her in college when she wore it. She wondered idly where Stupenagel was at this moment, and envied her, familyless, a stranger to guilt.

The espresso pot shook in its usual threatening way, and issued forth its unique scent. The pangs of exile! She had to stop and blink the clouds away as she poured the coffee into her favorite cup, which (of course!) was a hand-painted mother's day gift from the preblind Giancarlo. I am not going to break down weeping in my own kitchen, thought Marlene, and brutally wiped her eyes with the frayed collar of the kimono. She buttered her bagel, sat, chewed, drank.

“Is there any coffee left?”

She jumped, startled. Her daughter had appeared behind her, silently, as was her way. She was neatly dressed in a baggy Filipino silk shirt and khaki Bermuda shorts. Marlene jumped a little.

“Yes, there's plenty,” she answered. “I hate it when you sneak up like that. You should carry a bell.”

“Good idea, Mom. I'll stop by Leper's World and pick one up.” She poured a cup and sat down at the table.

Marlene said, “I'm sorry, kid, my nerves are no longer the best. As I recall you were a normally boisterous little girl. How did you develop the catlike tread? The Asian influence.”

“Yeah, I guess. He always said American women were like water buffaloes. I remember when I was seven or eight we used to sit silently for hours, just watching things in the park. First it was agony and then I got to like it.”

“If a parent ever tried that it'd be childrens' court and a foster home. Have you heard from him?”

“Uh-huh. I got a remailed envelope with a postcard inside of the Eiffel Tower, with a circle around the top. On the other side he'd written in French, ‘Appolinaire's favorite restaurant: the only place in Paris from which one cannot see the Eiffel Tower.' How about you?”

“Yes. Same thing. Except mine was a postcard of Chartres Cathedral. It said ‘wish you were here' in English. I guess he made it to France.”

“Or he wants us to believe that's where he is,” said Lucy. “I miss him.”

An uncomfortable silence here, while they both sipped. It was Marlene's fault that Tran was no longer in the country. She'd
used
him in her lust for revenge, without considering for one second what it would mean for him or for Lucy. She knew it; it filled her with shame; it was something that stood, reeking, between her and her daughter.

Noises from the far end of the loft told them that the twins were up. From Giancarlo's room came the hum of the accordion, from Zak's, synthesized weapon noises from the computer. Marlene said, “Maybe I'll make them French toast. And you?”

“No, I have an early lab and they don't like me to eat a lot before.”

“But you'll be home for dinner, yes? I'm going to do a shop, cook up something nice—veal marsala, maybe.”

“I'm going to have to miss that, too,” said Lucy. “I'm going up to Cambridge tonight for a couple of days.”

“Oh, that's too bad,” Marlene said, more disappointed than she thought she would be, or revealed. “Seeing Dan?”

“Yes, and Mary. I'm staying over at Mary's.”

“How're things going with Daniel?”

“About the same. Friendly.” In a flattened tone.

“Just friendly?” Not taking the hint.

“Yes.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

Lucy put her coffee cup down and looked her mother full in the face. “Uh-huh. Look, Mom? There's not going to be any intimate girl talk going down around here as long as there's this
stuff
between us, as long as I don't know who you are, as long as I don't know what my whole
life
is going to be like. Am I going to have to take care of the twins and Dad, and go to school in the city? Am I going to go back to Boston? I mean, if you have life problems you have to work on, fine, I'm willing to help, but I can't take this void. Hello, Ma? Hello? No answer. Do you realize that we've
never
had a conversation about what happened in West Virginia? What really went down, how Tran got involved, why you split for the farm after Giancarlo got out of the hospital.”