Resolved (39 page)

“Not that there's anything wrong with that,” said Murrow, pushing open the door.

Karp laughed. “Yeah, right. Another cosmic change. In any case, Guma and Stupenagel: both extinct—no, endangered—species. The hard-drinking, I-don't-give-a-shit reporter, and the quasi-legal DA. They're like grizzly bears. Horrible and terrific at the same time. I mean, everyone says, ‘Boo-hoo, save the bears,' but would you want one in your backyard, eating the poodle, the cat, little Susie?”

“Why is he quasi-legal?”

“Because Guma is, or was, the reigning expert on La Cosa Nostra in this office, encyclo-fucking-pedic on the subject. He knew them all, the whole Brooklyn Mob, including Murder Incorporated. He was on a first-name basis with every capo regime in the city over the last thirty-five, forty years. He saw them rise and he saw them fall, and helped out in both directions.”

“You mean he was corrupt?”

“Not as such. But his relation with the Mob was extremely Sicilian. Guma probably put more Mafiosi in prison than any other living New York prosecutor, but he also let a lot of them go, if he thought it was better for the long-term health of the criminal ecology. Not a strictly legal position, maybe, but one that suited him and the times. It was a risk, too. Swimming with the sharks. The Mob doesn't shoot people like us as a rule, but they'll make an exception for guys who pull shit like Ray pulled from time to time. Giving a break to a slightly dumber and/or less vicious guy so as to grab up a slightly more dangerous gangster—like that. And, of course, that's another thing he's got in common with Stupenagel. College-educated middle-class people usually don't put their bodies on the line in their daily work. That's the way of civilization, of course, which as reasonable men we have to approve, but it's also a little dull. Like you and me, Murrow.”

As he said this, Karp experienced a minor epiphany, in that he finally understood why being married to Marlene was necessary to his life. Yes, she drove him crazy, but she also prevented his life from going gray. He thought of the few peers who had been at it as long as he had. Keegan, his caution, his perpetually unsmoked cigar. Others, graying men who wore ratty cardigans in their offices. Some of them had Dickensian eccentricities that everyone excused, but joked about all the same. He shuddered.

“What?” said Murrow.

Karp gave him an inquiring look. “What what?”

“All of a sudden a strange expression appeared on your face, like you discovered the secret of life, or were having a stroke.”

Karp let out a short hard laugh and threw a big arm over Murrow's shoulders. “It
was
the secret of life, my son.”

“May one know it?”

“When you're older, Murrow. It wouldn't make any sense to you now. Let's go back and join the party and see what excesses our friends have perpetrated in our absence.”

 

“Oh, good,” said Guma when Karp and Murrow entered, “you didn't fall in. What the hell is wrong with the heating? My nuts are freezing off.”

“No loss to the world, if you ask me,” said Stupenagel.

“I didn't ask you,” said Guma. “What I asked you was if you could breathe on them to take the chill off, but oh, no…”

Karp sat on his couch, a little grumpily, because he could not figure out a polite way of kicking Stupenagel out of his chair. Instead, he said to Guma, “You can't smoke in here, Goom. In fact, you're not supposed to be smoking at all.”

Guma admired his big Macanudo and took another puff. “Excuse me, are you speaking as the deputy fire marshal or as my personal fucking physician? Every time I smoke one of these things it takes fifteen minutes off my life, and considering what my life is like nowadays, it's worth it. That's yet another thing that was better in the old days—right, Stupenagel?”

Stupenagel said, “Yes, Karp, we've been sharing some old-fart moments, even though he's, of course, vastly older than I am. Decades. Guma longs for the days when the criminal justice system was even more arbitrary and vicious than it is now, and when, in his phrase, ‘you fucking jackals' knew your place, which was to take our split of the graft and stick to the sordid affairs of the lowlifes.”

“An exaggeration,” said Guma.

“You think the system is arbitrary and vicious?” asked Karp.

“Yes, of course,” she said, “don't you?”

“No, not really,” said Karp.

Stupenagel swiveled Karp's chair around and stared at him as if he had just wondered why, if the Earth was a ball, the people on the bottom half didn't fall off. Karp noticed this, and also that she had somehow partially undrunked herself. Her jaw had stiffened up and her eyes were no longer floating in a boozy sea. He recalled that this was one of Stupenagel's more valuable journalistic talents, but whether it was a result of ruse or immense natural capacity, he had never been able to tell.

“I mean, it's not what it should be,” he continued, “it's a human institution, like the church and the press. Humans are fallible beings.”

“There's no comparison at all,” she replied. “The press, my sweet fanny! What if every time I wanted to run a story I had to convince twelve high school graduates selected at random that it was true, while some other guy tried to convince them it was false.”

“You'd be wrong less often?” suggested Karp.

“Excuse me, but if we had to print retraction notices as often as DNA evidence freed people you guys convicted, we wouldn't have any room for the bra ads, and Guma would stop reading the paper. Can you really sit there and tell me that the American justice system has
any
other purpose than the aggrandizement of fucking lawyers? Oh, and to make sure that rich people don't have to pay for their crimes any more than once or twice a decade. Do you realize that over ninety percent of the people in this country believe that some innocent people are convicted of murder? A hundred and fucking ten murder and rape convictions at last count thrown out because of genetic testing.”

“What's the alternative? The Star Chamber?”

“Yes, that's what you guys always say, although we have no evidence at all that the Star Chamber was any less unjust than trial by jury. The reason they invented juries in the first place was so that the English barons could do what they damn well pleased and be tried by their pals instead of having to face the king's justice. It's
designed
to give the rich a better break than the poor—that's what it's fucking
for.”

“Commie pinko atheist slut,” said Guma. “I guess the way they do it in Red China is better.”

“No, but the Euros get by without juries very well, thank you, and their crime rates are a tenth what ours are.”

“That's a non sequitur,” said Karp. “The crime rate has nothing to do with juries.”

“No, but it's got to have something to do with your fucked-up system. Hey, you want to warehouse a third of the black male population? Go right ahead! But don't dress it up like it's justice.”

“Oh,” said Guma, “now she's gonna go with the oppressed minorities. Wait a second, let me get out my towel.”

“Asshole! Tell him he's an asshole, Karp.”

Karp, who had occasionally entertained private flashes of the type the reporter was expressing, said nothing, but took refuge in aphorism: “The law is born from despair about human nature: Ortega y Gasset,” he intoned, which put a temporary stopper on the conversation. After a moment, Karp said to Murrow, “Listen, go find that woman from the governor's office and get a straight answer out of her about if and when this thing is going to start.”

 

Marlene spent a reasonably pleasant hour watching Zak conquer Asia on the computer, and listening to Giancarlo play some new songs and watching him demonstrate a device that read pages in a book and spoke the text in a creaky mechanical voice. As she had promised, she did not break down. Around noon, Lucy and Dan emerged from the guest room, hand in hand. Marlene observed that her daughter's mouth, already generous, seemed puffed across half her face and that her normally dull skin shone with a milky light, except for the numerous red marks. Lucy engineered a lunch: cold shrimp quiche, salad, and white wine for the big people, zapped frozen tacos and lemonade for the boys. Giancarlo valiantly charmed and, Marlene noted with pleasure, Dan Heeney stepped up to the plate and batted a few long balls in that department, too. An excellent addition to the Karp family, she thought, and would get along fine with whichever respectable woman Karp would next take up with.

After that it was time to get ready. Marlene bathed in the big tub she had made long ago out of a black rubber electroplating bath she had found onsite when she'd first taken this loft. What a long time ago it seemed, before SoHo, before Karp and the children, before the first killing. She stayed in the bath for a long time, not long enough to wash her sins away, but long enough to have a good silent weep, and to prompt her daughter to tap discreetly on the door.

She dressed in baggy slacks of heavy, braided black silk, tucked into knee boots and a long wool tunic that buttoned down the front. By the time she emerged from the bedroom, the family was dressed and ready, the boys looking strangely unformed in jacket and tie, Lucy surprisingly elegant in the little black number.

“Don't rush,” said Lucy. “I called. Flynn said the whole thing's been delayed for a couple of hours.”

 

Murrow returned five minutes later. “They're setting up the cameras again,” said Murrow. “The man is entering the building as we speak. They're saying half an hour.”

Stupenagel slid out of Karp's chair and turned toward the window. “And the snow seems to be letting up. I can see across the square now.” She stepped back and checked her reflection in the glass. She hiked her skirt up and around and tucked in her shirt, then reached into her bag and brought out a compact, which she flipped open.

Guma said. “If you're gonna shave your legs, Stupenagel, I believe I'll ask to be excused.”

“I never shave my legs,” she replied, examining herself critically in the mirror. She wielded a hairbrush. “I have a Moldavian who likes to yank the hairs out with his teeth, one by one.”

The three men watched as she whipped through a quick and efficient toilette, finishing with a blast of breath spray. She looked as though she had been supping tea and ladyfingers for the past three hours, rather than guzzling large quantities of assorted alcohols.

“Well, boys, I think I'll circulate and collect lies. Thanks for the drinks and the philosophy.” She hoisted her bag onto her shoulder.

“Aren't you going to take your underpants?” Murrow asked grumpily.

She fixed him with a look down her long nose, one that made Murrow acutely aware of how much taller she was than he. “And what underpants would those be, sir?”

“The ones on the sprinkler head.”

She made a show of peering at them. “Lovely. What makes you think I tossed them up there?”

“What makes me think…? Jesus, Stupenagel, I saw you yank them off and throw them.”

“Yet another demonstration of the unreliability of the eyewitness. In an alcohol-driven sex fantasy, you imagined me removing my underwear and tossing it up there, but in fact I am wearing the pair I set out with this morning. Would you like to check?”

“Yes!”

“Care to put some money on it, sonny? Say a hundred bucks my loins are enclosed in a pair of chaste and hygienic Hanes cottons, in black?”

Murrow looked desperately at Guma and Karp; the former was intently examining the damp tip of his cigar, the latter made an almost imperceptible negative motion of his head.

“I've been set up,” said Murrow.

“I don't know
what
you're talking about, dear boy,” she said, “but clearly you're not about to put your money where your mouth is, so I will bid you all a temporary adieu. Butch, if your lovely bride shows up, tell her I said hi, and to give me a call sometime. Guma, let me know when you die, okay? I'll send a wreath.”

She left. Both Guma and Murrow blew kisses at the door. Karp sat down behind his desk and said, “Listen, both of you: speaking of being set up, why am I getting these weird looks whenever any of the big boys mentions me being the DA?”

“Weird looks?” asked Murrow.

“Yeah. Like they all know something I don't know. What is it, I'm going to be standing up there being sworn in and a big bucket of blood is going to come down on my head like in
Carrie?
What?”

“That must be about the pool,” said Murrow after a nervous silence.

“What pool?”

“The one about how long you'll last before fucking up so bad politically that the governor can ask you to resign with no shit sticking to him.”

“Oh,” said Karp. “Why didn't you tell me about this before?”

“I thought you'd disapprove. I mean, of my involvement.”