Resolved (38 page)

“Yeah? You don't look fine. A little early celebrating, huh?”

“A friendly drink with well-wishers.” Change the subject. “So, do you have anything new on the governor?”

“Yeah, we just got the word he's on the Deegan, behind a snow plow. They said figure forty-five minutes. By the way, you know anything at all about this heating plant? Jack couldn't get through to anyone. If they don't turn it on there's gonna be ice on the walls by the time the big fella gets here.”

“I know nothing,” said Karp easily. “It's a shame, we wanted to give him a warm welcome.”

Another hearty laugh, and Battle slipped away. But before he did, he gave Karp a look. It was a half-humorous, half…something else. Pitying? Contemptuous? Karp didn't know, but he had seen it far too often on the faces of Keegan and the various political hierarchs he hung with. Karp had met them all—party bosses, borough presidents, big contributors, judges—in various meetings the DA had arranged in the past months. Karp always got the big hello, the two-handed political handshake, the shoulder grip, but always there was that peculiar look. It was, of course, impossible to confront any of them on it. They'd think him crazy, or crazier than they probably thought him already.

Now it was less than an hour to the event and he still didn't know the punch line of the joke everyone else seemed to know. Maybe the governor would know what it was. Karp thought that if he got a little drunker, he might just ask him.

 

“Did you hear any of that?” Lucy asked as she entered the guest room and closed and locked the door. Dan Heeney, on the bed, looked up from the Powerbook on his lap and slipped down his headphones. “Say what?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, and lay down next to him. “What're you doing?”

“Well, since Zak told me you have a superwireless node in this building, I've been downloading some stuff from NASA, the new MAP data.”

“Map of what?”

“No, it stands for Microwave Anisotropic Probe. It's a deepspace research satellite. It measures the background radiation of the big bang. Are you bored yet?”

“Almost. You're sure you don't want to come to this thing? You could see me in a little black dress.”

“I'll see you before you leave. I'll pick lint off of you.”

“But we'll go to a fancy restaurant after. We could sit together and play footsie.”

“Gee, tempting, but I already agreed to do a conference with a couple of guys at Cal Tech and a guy at Case. Some fairly heavy hitters are supposed to join in. Besides, it should just be family going. How's your mom, by the way?”

“Ruined. Crazy, but holding it all together with masking tape and rusty wires. It's like the House of Atreus when she shows up.”

“The who?”

“A Greek myth about getting paid back for your bad deeds unto the fourth generation. The Greeks were an ancient people who lived far across the sea…”

“Yeah, ha ha. We'uns din need no furriners up t' th' homeplace. Nossiree bob! We'uns spoke English jes like the Lord Jesus done.”

“Barbarian hick. Anyway, it just kills me to see her like that. It hurts worse than torture in a way, you know? Because I don't have any memory of the pain. We don't, really, it doesn't get stored that way. We have empathy, yeah; my dad's got an awful knee injury and when he sees a guy get hurt on TV, it drives him nuts. He says he feels it all over again. That's not the same thing as recall. But spiritual pain goes on and on, because we
can
remember it. What we did to someone else, our sins against them, what we failed to do, how we let down the people who loved us, how we were violated and humiliated in the spirit.”

“That's hard to believe,” he said. “If I was mooning about, I don't know, the problem of evil or whatever, and I got a tooth abscess, I'd dump that high-tone speculation pretty fast.”

“Not the same thing at all,” said Lucy. “Yeah, you'd stop those thoughts and go to the dentist and get it fixed and then you'd have the problem of evil all over again, and the memory of the abscess wouldn't interfere with that spiritual pain. It might make it worse.”

“Yeah, but it's her problem, not yours.”

“Well, see? Physical pain can block it for a while, as can pleasure, which is why they sell so much heroin. And that's all I want to say about it.”

She wormed closer and slid the laptop to the floor. “So, could you render me unconscious right now?”

“We're fresh out of heroin.”

“Use your mouth, then,” she said.

 

Why don't they cancel this goddamn thing, Murrow thought again, looking out the window into what seemed a wall of grits, so thick was the fall of snow. He also thought, This is what hell is going to be like, trapped in a room, waiting for an event indefinitely postponed, with someone very much like Ariadne Stupenagel. He wished fervently that he had been a better man heretofore, and instantly resolved upon the reform of his character. He glanced upward past the window to the ceiling, its pipe, its sprinkler head, and the sprinkler head's new decoration, a pair of lacy lavender silk panties. It had only taken her two tries. Murrow wondered whether Karp would hold him responsible for this. Probably. He tried to estimate whether, if they moved the desk and Karp stood upon it, and upon, say, three volumes of the Criminal Code, he could reach it and pull it down. Drunk. Falling, breaking his neck. The scandal…

The demon reporter was slouched in Karp's big chair. She was facing the window, muttering and swinging her big bottle like a metronome, clunking it dully at the end of each stroke against Karp's desk. A maddening sound. Every dozen or so beats the bottle would rise into sight and then vanish again as she drank a slug, and then
clunk, clunk.

Impelled to speak by the Sartrean horror of the moment, Murrow said, “They're going to have to cancel this.”

The chair spun around. She pointed the champagne's snout at him like a shotgun. “That's where you're wrong, my son. They'll never cancel this, not if a fucking glacier came down from the Catskills and buried the Bronx. The gov can't be seen to be stopped by a little snow. It would make his little willy seem smaller than the willy of the mayor, and that would never do. Ninety percent of American politics is about who has the biggest willy. And there's another reason.” She looked stupidly at the mouth of the bottle for a moment as if the other reason dwelt there, and then stuck it into her own mouth.

“What reason?”

“Ah,” she said, “that would be telling. See the way it works is I ask
you
and you tell
me
and then you read all about it. But here's a hint: how could they possibly have picked a situation that would get this event less publicity than holding it on a Friday afternoon the week before Christmas. Okay, they didn't order the storm, but since they have it, they for sure ain't going to waste it. This party is destined for page eleven below the fold, and not even local TV coverage.”

“They didn't want to publicize it.”

“No, and that's why I'm here. You would be surprised at how many good stories start at events no one is supposed to go to. Embassy cocktail parties thrown by second-rate countries. Unveilings of statues of national poets no one's ever heard of. Friday afternoon coronations of obscure legal bureaucrats.”

“But why?”

The answer to this was a snicker. The chair swiveled back until the reporter faced the window. The champagne bottle swung and clunked against the desk. A shadow appeared in the glass of the door. Murrow felt a pulse of relief at Karp's return, until he noted that the shadow wasn't nearly tall enough. The door opened and in walked a small elderly man swathed in a fur-collared overcoat and a fur hat, both thickly encrusted with snow. The man brushed this off and looked around Karp's office owlishly. He did not fail to notice the panties on the sprinkler or that the long, booted legs reflected in the window pane did not belong to Butch Karp.

“You look like you been having a party,” he said. “Where is everybody?”

The chair swiveled. “Oh, Guma,” said the reporter. “Did you bring anything to drink?”

“What a question!” said Ray Guma, drawing from the deep pockets of his overcoat two unopened fifths of Teacher's scotch.

“What've you been up to, Guma?” asked Stupenagel. Her glass, which had held cognac and champagne, now was half full of scotch. She held it up to the cold light of the ceiling fixture to check for insects and other floaters, a habit born in the third world, where the scotch is often not what it should be.

“Dying,” said Guma. “They tell me it's in remission now, but meanwhile I got about twelve inches of gut left and I'm missing half the accessories.”

“Oh, spare us the details! To tell you the absolute truth, I thought you were dead already.”

“To tell you the absolute truth, I am,” said Guma. Murrow could believe it. He had heard stories of Guma's exploits in the old days, and it was hard to credit them to the withered man hunched in his coat on the couch, who had once been infamous as the Mad Dog of Centre Street. He looked like the mummy of a monkey, although his eyes still glowed with a calculating intelligence.

“I'm like in that Christmas carol movie, the ghost of Christmas past,” Guma continued. “I hope you've been good, Stupenagel.”

“Very, but not through any fault of my own. Being bad has fallen out of fashion, I think.”

After a moment's reflection, Guma said, “You know, Stupenagel, you really broke my heart back there when I was jumping your bones. I really thought we had something.”

“We did have something, Goom. You had information I wanted, and I had a warm body and we exchanged, quid pro fucking quo.”

“No, just come out and say it,” said Guma. “You don't have to let me down easy.”

Another snorting laugh from Stupenagel. Murrow looked at the two of them and tried to keep the horror off his face, as he envisioned this pair going at it. Where was Karp? Murrow discovered that he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. He definitely did not want to drink anymore. Guma and Stupenagel seemed to have forgotten him. They were talking companionably about events of some years back, when they had apparently had their inconceivable fling. Stupenagel was saying, “Yeah, I spent time in Guatemala, in India, in Mexico, in Argentina, in fucking Sudan, all places where beating up the press is practically like a requirement for promotion in the police, and I didn't get a scratch. I come home to the land of the free and what happens? I get pounded to shit by a corrupt cop. No wonder I drink.”

Murrow slipped out like a ferret and went straight to the men's room. He dumped the scotch down the sink and used the glass to drink tap water, as much as he could hold, a trick his mother had recommended as a way to flush the toxins from the system and avoid a hangover. As he did so, he could not help noticing an almost operatic performance from the last toilet stall. Someone was, as they used to say in his prep school, blowing lunch, although it sounded like breakfast, too, and the dinner from the night before. He waited, and was not entirely surprised when Karp emerged.

“Well, that was fun,” said Karp when he saw his underling. “Care to join me in a puke?”

“No, I'm a diluter, not an expeller,” Murrow said, holding up a glass of New York's purest. “How do you feel?”

“Like a street person has been living in my oral cavity. Can I borrow your glass? Dilution sounds good.”

Murrow looked on in wonder as Karp drank. After a long while he said, “Croton Reservoir's on the phone, boss. They're hearing sucking noises and they'd like you to cut back a little.”

Karp laughed briefly, put down the glass, and washed his face. “Tell me, Murrow, do you do this often?”

“Not that much anymore. But I did, nearly every weekend, from about age seventeen to a couple of years ago.”

“May I ask why?”

“Oh, I guess sex was a lot of it, it helps in going to bed with people you shouldn't really go to bed with. And blessed amnesia, relaxation of every moral code, tolerating boring, stupid people—the usual. And habit. I grew up with parents who drank martinis at five-thirty, every single day.”

“Amazing,” said Karp, shaking his head. “And you're still alive and halfway competent. I salute you. Is that woman still in my office?”

“Yes, she is,” Murrow admitted.

“Still drinking?”

“Steadily. Your pal Guma showed up and brought more jet fuel.”

Karp brightened. “Oh, yeah? Good old Guma! Are they playing nice?”

“Sort of. I gather they have a history.”

“Yeah, years ago. Being the two most promiscuous heterosexual people in New York with college educations, it was probably a mathematical certainty that they would sooner or later end up in the rack together. It didn't last, though.”

“A real shame,” said Murrow. “They seem to deserve each other.”

Karp gave him a stern look. “Why don't you let
me
be the disapproving puritan, Murrow. It suits my age and status better. Guma happens to be one of my best friends, and Stupenagel is one of my wife's best friends. I realize that neither of them is completely housebroken, and they leave hair on the couch, but they're both the kind of person that they don't make many of anymore, sort of throw-backs to a more dramatic and less politically correct age, and I prize them for it when they're not pissing the hell out of me. Everything is better nowadays, of course—we don't smoke, we don't drink, we're strictly monogamous, or else if we're not we have to be investigated by the whole fucking legislature and go on
Oprah
to confess, and that's fine and dandy, and it also happens that I was all goody-goody like that, way,
way
before it became fashionable, or required, if you can believe it, but still…I detect a certain shrinking of the great human canvas, especially around the neighborhood of the courthouse. Not only do we not have smoke-filled rooms, we barely have mafioso anymore, or political bosses. Instead we have pissant little white-collar criminals on the one hand and brainless thugs on the other. It makes for a lot less interesting life if you're in the business of putting asses in jail. Are we done here, by the way? We hang out together in the men's any longer, people'll start to talk.”