ON THE MONDAY AFTER THE EVENTS at the East Village Women’s Shelter, Karp called Roland Hrcany.
“Doing anything for the next hour or so?”
“Why?”
“Tommy Colombo’s holding a press conference in ten minutes. He’s got his federal grand jury indictments. I want to hear what he’s going to do about the Pigetti business.”
They walked across Foley Square to the Federal Building and went to the press room on the eighth floor. They got in without difficulty, using their D.A. identification, and stood at the back of the room behind the TV cameras. Inside the miniature auditorium was the usual bedlam—cursing of technicians, the sounds of marshaling and testing media gear, the low, dull roar of the jackal press. Roland was smiles, Karp glum. He hated this, while Roland had the politician’s instinct: he understood that in the present age it was not what you were that counted but how you appeared, which was controlled by the fifty or so ladies and gentlemen seated and standing in the hot, bright room.
Nine-thirty came. Karp checked his watch irritably. Colombo was making them wait, just like the president. Roland was trading wisecracks with a couple of print guys. Karp heard him say, “Ah, the lovely and talented!” and turned to see Gloria Eng approaching, trailed by her crew. She gave Roland a professional dismissive smile and focused on Karp.
“How’s Marlene, Butch?” she asked.
“Recovering,” said Karp.
“Good. No impairment, then?”
“No.”
“That’s great. I’d really like to do a piece on the raid. Any chance of setting that up?”
“Ask her,” said Karp, continuing his well-known tradition of restricting all his conversation with the press to phrases of two words or less, a habit that had earned him among journalists the nickname “No Komment Karp.”
Eng made a gesture, and the camera light behind her shoulder went on, blinding Karp as she brought her microphone up to attack position.
“You know, Sal Bollano’s lawyer is claiming it was a setup. The story is he and his bodyguards were lured to the shelter so he could be assassinated in so-called self-defense. They claim Marlene was in on it. What about that, Butch?”
“No comment,” said Karp.
Eng rolled her eyes and turned to Roland. “Do you have anything on that, Roland? Is the D.A. going to look at this as an attempted murder?”
Roland flashed his perfect set of caps. “Well, Gloria, it’s far too early for any speculation on that score. The police investigation is still ongoing.”
“But Marlene Ciampi remains in police custody, is that right?”
“As far as I am aware,” Roland lied.
“And what about the Catalano murder?”
“That investigation is still ongoing.”
“You don’t intend to charge Joe Pigetti with that homicide?”
“As I said, Gloria—”
“Is it true that a witness to that murder presented himself to the district attorney’s office and you turned him away?”
The smile vanished from Roland’s eyes, and involuntarily they flicked over to meet Karp’s. Gloria Eng’s smile broadened, because she now had tape of the Homicide Bureau chief looking shifty in response to her questioning. Roland cleared his throat. “Gloria, we, ah, get any number of people coming in and claiming to be witnesses to crimes. There’s an assessment procedure that we go through, and I would venture to say . . .”
A venture aborted, for Roland was saved from having to concoct a load of nonsense by a stir at the front of the room. The man himself walked across the little stage and took up position at the podium behind the Justice Department seal and a bouquet of microphones. The room settled, the lights flared, the cameras hummed. Thomas Colombo looked at what he had wrought and apparently found it good, for the small man seemed to inflate under the focused attention of the onlookers.
“As many of you are aware,” he said without preamble, “for the past three months a federal grand jury has been hearing evidence concerning the influence of organized crime on various businesses in this city. I am pleased to inform you that the grand jury has issued twenty-four indictments under the so-called RICO law, that is, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization statute. This statute is our major weapon against the ability of organized crime to infiltrate and corrupt legitimate enterprise and to launder its ill-gotten revenues. Among the criminal organizations of this city, it is the crime family run by Salvatore G. Bollano that has been most famous for the extent and subtlety of its infiltration. It has sent its grimy tentacles into commercial laundries, food importing, meat cutting, trucking, restaurants, construction, and waste hauling. To cover up these infiltrations, it has bribed and corrupted public officials at all levels, including those in the criminal justice system itself. It has threatened, beaten, kidnapped, and murdered, without mercy, without the smallest shred of human decency. For over thirty years it has operated with impunity, garnering astronomical profits, and hanging like a bloated parasite on the economic life of New York. The head of this organization, Salvatore G. Bollano, and his henchmen have considered themselves immune from the law and from the legitimate anger of the people. I’m here to tell you that as of today, that immunity is at an end.”
“He’s in rare form,” said Roland. “I like grimy tentacles.”
“Bloated parasite isn’t bad either,” said Karp. “But twenty-four RICO indictments seems kind of slim for how long he’s been hacking at this.”
“All you need is one good one,” said Roland. “Ah, here’s the charts and the pointer. I always like the way he snaps his little car aerial out. Do you think it has sexual connotations, these guys and the pointers?”
Colombo had gestured to one of his minions, who had thrown back the cover from a stack of large charts on an easel, and Colombo was indeed probing it with a gleaming extensible steel pointer. First he poked a chart depicting the organization of the Bollano family, then one showing the various businesses it controlled, then a chart summarizing various pieces of paper evidence, phone taps, and grand jury testimony, tying reputed members of the Bollanos to this or that restaurant, laundry, or trucker. It went on, and grew tedious. It seemed that a large number of people with Italian surnames (many bearing colorful sobriquets pronounced by the U.S. attorney with obvious relish) had indeed been very naughty. They had bribed platoons of petty officials and had made threatening calls to good citizens and hadn’t paid their taxes and had lied like bandits under oath. Not much juice here yet. The TV people began looking at their watches. Colombo appeared to sense this and moved toward his punch line, snapping his pointer in with a sharp click and turning back to face his audience.
“How did Salvatore Bollano assemble this vast empire of crime?” he demanded rhetorically. “By violence, by murder, and the credible threat of violence and murder. Now murder, as you know, is not a federal crime. But ordering murder to prevent testimony to a federal grand jury is a federal crime. Three weeks ago Edward Catalano was scheduled to appear before a federal grand jury. As noted in the chart I just showed you, Mr. Catalano, street name Eddie Cat, was one of Salvatore G. Bollano’s closest associates. He knew where the bodies were buried, and I mean that literally, and he was going to tell what he knew. He never got the chance because he wound up with five bullets in his head on the night before his scheduled appearance. Recently, however, a witness has emerged, a witness who will lay the murder of Eddie Cat at the doorstep of none other than Salvatore G. Bollano. This witness is a Chinese illegal alien named Willie Lie . . .” This stirred up a murmer of nervous laughter, and Colombo waited, unsmiling, for it to die away, before continuing.
“Mr. Lie has testified before the federal grand jury, and on the basis of that testimony we issued indictments and have arrested Mr. Joseph Pigetti on charges of conspiracy, interference with a federal prosecution, witness intimidation, and kidnapping in connection with the abduction and murder of Edward Catalano. That concludes my presentation, and I am open for questions at this time.”
“Oh, shit, it’s going to be a feeding frenzy,” said Roland as a forest of hands shot up from the ranks of the press.
No one asked about the various indictments, the ostensible purpose of the press conference. What they wanted to know about was the murder and the mysterious witness. Where was this witness? In protective custody. Why wasn’t Pigetti being charged with murder? Colombo was happy to explain that murder was not a federal crime. Murder was, of course, a crime under state law, and the witness, Mr. Lie, had approached the district attorney’s office with his information, but the district attorney had refused to act on it. Pandemonium, shouts, urgent wavings. Colombo picked one and got the obvious: why did the district attorney not act?
“I have no idea,” said Colombo, his expression indicating that he had a very good idea. “In general, federal investigations enjoy excellent cooperation with local law enforcement, using both state and federal statutes against defendants of this type. After all, we’re all on the same side. There are exceptions, of course, in cases where organized crime has compromised local law enforcement organizations.”
“Son of a bitch!” said Roland, loud enough to draw curious stares from several journalists.
The follow-up question was a no-brainer. Are you implying that this is the case with the New York D.A.? Through a half smirk Mr. Colombo declined to imply anything, asserting that he was interested only in evidence, but that the D.A.’s investigation of the Catalano murder seemed to be in some disarray. The police had come up with a good suspect for the trigger man, but the D.A. had declined to arrest this person. Was there an active federal investigation of the New York D.A.? Mr. Colombo reminded the assembly that grand jury procedures, especially as regards investigations in progress, were closely sealed, but that he intended to vigorously pursue any and all lines of inquiry, no matter where they led, and that was all the time he had for questions, thank you.
“I guess we saw how the pros do it,” was Karp’s comment as they weaved through mobs of rushing journalists.
“Yeah, a truly brilliant job, the little fuck. He just about accused us of sleeping with the Mob. Jack’s going to have twins. And he knew about the Marky Moron business, too. Shit!”
“Hey, we did the right thing there. Cops talk, and Tommy’s always got his ears open for bitching about his colleagues,” said Karp as they passed through the lobby of the Federal Building. “The story is the putatively mobbed-up D.A. won’t get tough with the Bollanos, so the feds have to step in.”
“Yeah, and he’s going to pressure us to give state grand jury immunity on the Eddie Cat hit. And not just for the Chinaman. He’s going to want us to walk Joe P. on it, too. He’ll be glad to forget a murder or two or three provided someone drops a dime on the Sallys.”
They paused outside the building, before the long, rusted steel Serra sculpture, another federal creation that no one liked but everyone had to live with.
“Don’t worry, Roland,” said Karp soothingly.
“Easy for you to say. Frank Anselmo is flashing his famous I-told-you-so smile and telling everyone you fucked us up.”
“Time is on our side,” said Karp.
“Is it? You mean, if we find this Lie is dirty in a previous life. I wish I was as sure as you.”
“I met him.”
“You did. What are you going on, your famous instinct?”
“That, and the fact that the guy asked for me. Why me?”
“You’re in the papers, on TV.”
“Yeah, but so are you, so’s Jack, for that matter. No, the connection has to be Chinatown, the Chens, Marlene, Lucy . . . something. I live around there, so I’ll be more . . . what? More sensitive to the plight of a poor illegal immigrant gangster? Easy to get to if I don’t do what they say? Anyway, the guy’s not what he seems, and it’s just too damn convenient him turning up to pin it all on Joe P.”
“I’d like to get my hands on the shooter. By the way, Lie has got a solid alibi. On the night of he was gambling. A couple dozen great and near great of Chinatown saw him.”
“So we’re looking for two other guys. I assume the cops are on it?”
“Balls to the wall, or what passes for it nowadays, but no real leads,” said Roland glumly. “How’s V.T. coming on the paper?”
“I was just going to go see him,” said Karp as the two men entered the courthouse via the special D.A.’s entrance on Leonard Street. “Come on along.”
Roland checked his watch. “I’d love to, but I got to see Judge Paine on something. Be nice to have him up there if we ever get a defendant on Catalano.”
Karp made a sour face.
“What, you don’t like Paine? Heshy Paine? He’s got the world’s biggest hard-on for the Mob.”
“I know that. The problem with prosecutor’s judges, as you well know, Roland, is that they’re so eager to please that they leave a trail of reversible errors the size of the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Give me fair any day.”
Roland ignored this last, waved, and went off to his date, leaving Karp feeling like a tendentious jerk. Having someone like Paine in there meant that you’d win your case, and two or three years later the guy would walk on appeal, which did not, if you were Roland and his many epigones, count on your scorecard. When Karp put them away, he wanted them to stay put for a decent interval, just as they had back in the golden age under Garrahy, but he understood that this was a minority opinion in the current age of brass.
Karp went back to his office, checked his messages, found one from his daughter and one from V. T. Newbury. Feeling only somewhat guilty, he called Newbury back first, had a brief conversation arranging for an immediate meeting, and then called Lucy.
“I have to go to the lab,” the girl said. “You still have that cop outside.”
“Lucy, we haven’t got those guys yet. I don’t want to take a chance on them trying anything again.”
“Tran will be with me. He’ll stay with me the whole time. Please, Daddy dear?”
She hadn’t called him “daddy dear” in a while, so he adopted a milder tone. What he wanted to say was, okay, Lucy, I know you think Tran is some kind of superhero, but we can’t take the chance, et cetera, et cetera, and more paternal bumf as needed, but all he managed to get out was, “Okay, Lucy—”
At which point she shrilled, “Oh, great! Bye,” and the phone went dead.
Karp yelled out a curse and redialed. Four rings and the machine picked up. He slammed down the receiver and dialed the first four digits of Marlene’s car phone before he recalled that his wife was still in the hospital. Uttering foul language, he then called Columbia information, got Shadkin’s lab number, called it. A woman answered and informed him that Lucy Karp had not yet arrived but they were expecting her. And who was she speaking to?
“Oh, never mind . . . her father, tell her her father called and have her call . . . oh, hell, just forget it!”
Who to call? He sat there for a minute, fuming. Call the cops? For what? They were doing what they should, looking for Kenny Vo and company. That damn kid! And what was he going to do when he caught up with her? Give her a spanking?
“Should I come back?” V. T. Newbury asked from the doorway.
“Huh? Oh, no, I was just thinking of something.” Embarrassed, Karp put the phone down in its cradle.
“I’ll say. You were sitting there like a waxwork. I was thinking alien abduction.”
Vernon Talcott Newbury came in and sat down in Karp’s side chair, crossed his elegantly flanneled legs, and plunked a thick folder on the desk. Newbury was a short, slight, beautifully sculptured man, somewhat younger than Karp, the scion of a family that had helped give Peter Stuyvesant the boot back in 1667, and had been prominent in the financial life of the city ever since. That such a refined creature should have chosen to labor in the deep slime pits of the criminal courts was unusual; that he had stayed made him unique. Karp thought V.T. was the smartest person currently thus employed and considered him his best friend. He was an ornament at the Fraud Bureau, where it was agreed that when it came to tracking dirty money and bad paper, the perfect little gentleman (as he called himself ) had no peer.
V.T. looked at Karp closely, a smile hesitating on his face. “You okay, Butch?”
“Yeah. No, my life is collapsing, but never mind. What’ve you got?”
“Marlene all right?”
“Yeah, recovering is what they say. Head trauma, they like to keep them in there for a while. So, you find out our guy’s secrets?”
“A few. Given the guy, I’d have to say I’m just penetrating the dew on the apple.” He opened his folder. “Okay, some background. This was explained to me by the nice Mr. Yat over at Citicorp. The first thing you start with when you want to trace someone’s movements or money is, naturally, his name. With Chinese persons this is not straightforward. The Chinese character that represents the name is unchanging, but the way we barbarians transliterate it into something we can read varies wildly, and not just because of the different systems we use, but because the way a character is pronounced varies depending on the speaker. When I say ‘varies,’ think, oh, English and Portuguese.”
“You mean the Mandarin and Cantonese business?”
“For starters. There are lots of dialects in China, really they’re independent languages, and so in the nineteenth century when they brought the telegraph in, they concocted a standard code for every character, and that’s the only way you can figure out someone’s real name, by getting him to write down the character and using a code book to look up the STC number, the standard telegraphic code. That’s what the Hong Kong cops use to keep track of people. Anyway, we obtained from Mr. Lie’s landlord a signature in characters—he says he’s Lie Tan Wo—and we faxed it to Hong Kong. His surname came up 2621, fine, but not much help. It’s like Smith, only worse, because that particular name is the third most common name in China. It means ‘plum.’ There are probably sixty million people named Li, or Loei, or Looey. Now, besides those, there are regional variations of any particular name that might not sound anything like Li. For example . . .”
One thing about V.T., Karp now recalled, was that when he got his teeth into something, he went on about it, telling you more than you wanted to know. Besides, the conversation was reminding him uncomfortably of his daughter, sinking perhaps even now into some new oriental miasma.
“Cut to the chase, V.T.,” Karp interrupted. “Did you find the guy or not?”
“But this stuff is interesting. Jeez, what a grouch! Okay, we also faxed fingerprints and a snap one of Fulton’s guys took on the street. I spoke to a Captain Chui over there, and his people ID’d him as Nia Tu Wah. They were very surprised to learn Mr. Nia, that’s the surname first here, had shown up in New York. They thought he’d gone to the Yellow Springs.”
“Where’s that?”
“The land of the dead. He was, or maybe we should say is, a hot prospect in a triad called . . . let’s see here, Da Qan Zi. It means ‘big circle gang’ or ‘big circle boys.’ ”
“And who are they?”
“Mainlanders. Big Circle was a Red Guard camp back during the Cultural Revolution. These people are all former Red Guards who got to like kicking in teeth back then and kept up the practice, except now they do it for money instead of for the Great Helmsman. Recently they’ve been expanding outside of the People’s Republic—Taiwan, Macao, Indonesia, and Hong Kong itself—leaning on the local triads. They do drugs, immigrant smuggling, prostitution, plus extortion. Very upsetting to the old-line triads is what I hear. Mr. Nia worked out of Macao.”
“Upsetting as in tong war?”
“Triads aren’t tongs, but yeah, there’s been violence. For example, in Jakarta last month . . .” He stopped and looked at Karp, on whose face he recognized the lineaments of deep thought. Karp was off line, and V.T. waited while the processor hummed. “Yes?” he said when Karp’s eyes had unglazed.
“Oh, just something else. You know, we had a double murder in Chinatown the other week. Apparently a couple of big triad honchos from Hong Kong, father and son. Isn’t Macao near Hong Kong?”
“Like the Bronx and Brooklyn. You think there’s a connection with Lie? Or Nia?”
“I don’t know. I’m worried about Lucy. She’s involved in some way in it. Some heavy guys went after her the other day. No, she’s okay, but my mind keeps going back to it. She won’t tell me anything about it, apparently because she doesn’t want to get her pals in trouble, which leads me to believe some of the pals’ parents are embroiled in it. It’s just one more damn thing.”
“Interesting, though. How many triad guys from Hong Kong are in New York at any one time?”
“Fourteen hundred and two, for all we know,” said Karp sourly. “There’s not a lot of intelligence coming from that sector.”
“True, but it strikes me as funny anyway that two of them get whacked and another claims he arranged a murder for the Mob. Maybe that’s his regular line of work.”
Karp shrugged. This was speculation, and V.T. knew that speculation in advance of any evidence was to Karp the next thing to an indictable offense. It always amazed V.T., who loved speculation himself, that his friend had no interest at all in whodunit, but only cared about how-you-got-’em.
After a vaguely embarrassing pause Karp said, “So what else do you have besides this ID?”
“Not a lot,” V.T. admitted. “The guy’s illegal, so he has no decent paper and we have no record of entry. He lives in a two-room, third-floor walk-up on Bayard Street, pays cash, no phone, no car, no bank account that anyone can find. The feds, of course, tossed the place pretty thoroughly by the time we got our warrant, so no great finds there. He hangs out in little restaurants, uses pay phones. He’s connected with a Chinatown gang called the White Dragons, runs the usual extortion business, supplies guards for illegal gambling games, provides girls for Chinatown big shots. A typical small-time gangster, just like he says he is. Or so it seems.”
“Why ‘or so it seems’?”
“Because why would a major Hong Kong triad hood come to New York with just the clothes he’s walking around in to shake down Chinese restaurants for lucky money?”
“He was a major drug trafficker.”
“So he says, but still, it doesn’t answer the question why, of all the hoods in Chinatown, he gets picked to whack a heavy wise guy. Then, instead of splitting to Hong Kong or some other Chinese neighborhood where there isn’t a chance in hell the Mob would ever find him, he walks in out of nowhere and asks for Butch Karp and spills his guts in return for immunity and protection. Which, when he doesn’t get it, he waltzes over to the feds and slips into a federal witness-protection program. This is a guy from a criminal subculture that never deals with the authorities. These guys make the Mob look like a flock of canaries. It doesn’t make sense.”
Karp made once again the deep sniffing noise he had used with Keegan earlier. V.T. grinned and nodded. Karp related the same suspicions to him.
V.T. said, “So you think somebody is knocking off the Bollano family in a very subtle way, so as not to engage the attention of the other families. The Bollanos are having a little trouble, we’ll wait and see what happens. The Gambinos, the Lucheses et al. are watching each other, nobody’s making a grab for the territory like they would if it was a full-scale intra-family struggle. And you think the Chinese might be involved?”
“It wouldn’t exactly surprise me. I wish to hell, though, I could figure out his game. The guy’s on ice. When he gets out, he’s not going to be a gangster anymore, he’s going to be a protected witness. Where’s his win, except staying alive, and you already pointed out the flaw there. All he needs is a ticket to some other Chinatown. Can you see some low-hairline Italians trying to find this guy in, say, Panama City? Or Manila?”
“It’d be nice if we had the actual trigger man in Catalano,” said V.T.
“Yeah, it would, but my suspicion is he is never going to give them up unless and until he gets full transactional immunity from all state prosecution on the evidence he presents. Which I am not going to offer. We have to come up with physical evidence, or another witness, or the trigger man or men, so we can put the squeeze on him. I might cut a deal to get the guys who ordered the hit, but I’m not giving this mutt a free ride with as little solid information as we have now. Colombo can play that game, not me. Frankly, I was hoping you’d find a stash of money with Joe’s prints all over it or a pocket diary with an entry ‘three a.m., commit murder, pick up milk and corn flakes.’ You let me down again, V.T.”
“What can I say, I’m a sack of shit. Talking about games, we don’t know what game Hong Kong is playing. We don’t know this Captain Chui from a hole in the wall. He could be bent. The real Nia wants to disappear, the cops there get this call from New York, who is this guy? Captain Chui, who’s been on the triad payroll for years, says to himself, oh, great, we’ll say it’s Mr. Nia. That way there’s a record of the guy in custody in New York, case closed in Hong Kong.”
“Yes, and they all lived happily ever after. It could be anything, V.T. This whole thing reeks of fanciness, from the bullet through the clock to Little Sally’s old lady in that goddamn shelter. Shit!” Karp rubbed his face, a characteristic gesture of terminal frustration. “I hate this crap. It’s wrong. There’s a mind behind this, fucking with us, and I think Mr. Lie knows who it is.”
“Maybe, but in any case, the fucking is succeeding. We are fucked. So what’s next, boss?”
“The usual. Keep poking. I don’t believe in criminal masterminds. Fu Manchu has left the building. There’s always something they miss. For example, where’s the money?”
“I told you, the guy doesn’t have a bank anywhere that I could find.”
“Bullshit! I can’t believe some of that murder contract didn’t stick to his fingers, and besides, the guy’s a gangster. A fucking drug lord, to quote our colorful press. Gangsters have cash money, lots of it. It’s not in his apartment, so where is it? Known associates? Girlfriends? Like the man said, follow the money. Get the cops to shake and bake down on Mott Street. And don’t take any of this oh, it’s Chinatown crap. They want to come out of there and play on our court, then they got to play by our rules. Who’re you working with in the Five?”
“Phil Wu.”
“What’s your take?”
“Good. Professional. Speaks the language. Besides that, what can I say—opaque.”
“I want to meet him. He’s got this double murder, too.”
“So you do see a connection. I thought you didn’t want to speculate.”
“I don’t,” said Karp. “But I would like to explore the issue with Detective Wu.”
After V.T. left, Karp explored the issue some more by himself and decided he needed some information from a source unconnected with the mysterious east, but mysterious enough for all that. He called Ray Guma and got him on the line, and came quickly to the point.
“You know Gino Scarpi, Goom?”
“I know all the Scarpis. I know his older brothers better, but I know Gino, too.”
“Have you visited him in the hospital yet?”
“I have not. Gino and I have drifted apart in recent years. You think I should?”
“It’d be a gesture. Go, converse, make him an offer. He’s looking at attempted murder, assault one, discharge firearms, reckless endangerment, B and E, attempted kidnap. That can’t be pleasant.”
A pause on the line. “The Scarpis tend to be stand-up fellas, Butch, I don’t know if—”
“Uh-uh, you misunderstand me, Goom. What I’m interested in is off the record, a sidebar. I need to know how they picked our Chinese guy for the hit on Eddie Cat. I mean, do you believe that they just grabbed one of their dope dealers and pressured him to whack a capo regime?”
“So you want the background on Willie, nothing you’re going to use in court?”
“Deep background. I also want to know how come it was just now that the wife left Little Sal. And how he knew where she was. And between you and me, if he plays nice on that, when it comes to it, we won’t drop the courthouse on Gino.”
“I’ll bring him some cannoli,” said Guma.
Karp hung up and, sighing, began work on one of his most tedious jobs, which was his monthly inspection of the various manning charts that attempted to ensure that whenever the criminal justice system required a representative of the People, a live and presumably competent human body would occupy a particular volume of space at a particular instant of time. This was difficult enough during three seasons of the years, but it was well-nigh impossible in summer, when people, including those who worked as ADAs, wished to take vacations. These charts were prepared by a team of trolls down on the fourth floor, but Karp had to look them over to ensure that the hardest workers were not being screwed and that the absolute power of judges to hold court when they pleased (or not, as was more common) did not become too onerous, and also that the various legal constraints on judicial delay were not being violated. He hacked away at this for an hour or so, making notes on a yellow legal pad. He reached the last page of the pad and reached for a new one from the stack on the side of his desk. The top sheet of the one on top had been scribbled on, so he ripped it off, crumpled it, and was about to shoot the paper ball into the waste can that stood on top of a bookcase at the far end of the room, as was his wont, when he paused and uncrumpled the paper. It was, in fact, the sheet that Mr. Lie had been doodling on during his interview. Doodles, yes, and what looked like Chinese characters. He smoothed the sheet out, folded it, put it in his shirt pocket, and then tried to resume work on the charts, but after a few minutes he tossed his pencil against the wall, grabbed the phone and called home.
Lucy answered, as he had hoped.
“How was the lab?” he asked.
“Labbish. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m bored. Want to go out somewhere?”
“Like where?”
“Where you choose.”
“There’s a Chinese calligraphy exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.”
“Perfect,” said Karp with, to his credit, barely an inward groan. “You can impress me with your brilliance.”
“Can Mary come?”
“No, she can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re my darling and I want to spend a couple of hours alone with you before you get married.” There was silence in response to this. Karp continued, “Is your guy around?”
“Tran? He’s in and out.”
“Tell him he’s got the afternoon off. I’m sending a heavily armed policeman to pick you up. Be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Karp rang off and pushed a speed-dial button, connecting him with Ed Morris, his driver.
“You need to pick up a witness for me, Ed,” said Karp, and gave an address.
“That’s your place,” said Morris.
“Right. My daughter.”
“Uh-oh. Will I need backup?”
“Alert the tacticals just in case.”
In the unmarked, driving uptown, Lucy asked grumpily, “Isn’t this corruption? Taking your kid out in a cop car?”
“Not in the least,” said Karp. “After this we’re going to go to the hospital to see your mother, who is a witness in a major crime. As are you. Believe me, this is official; right, Ed?”
“Extremely.” He goosed the car’s siren, moving a cab slightly out of their way. “See?”
“Then why are we going to the Met?”
“To see the Chinese stuff, and you’re entitled to police protection while we do it. Afterward, if you’re not satisfied, it’s your right as a citizen to lodge a complaint against the two of us. Meanwhile, let me see you smile. Go ahead, it won’t break your face.”
Lucy managed a thin one, with which the dad had to be content, but somewhat later, in the Asian gallery, the girl’s mood lifted. They walked together down the halls of lit glass cases containing scrolls of calligraphy, Lucy occasionally stopping to translate a poem or stopping to stare, transfixed, at one of the cases. Karp spent his time staring not at the meaningless squiggles on brown silk but at his daughter, thinking about paternal love, and fate, and genetics, and about how he, being who he was, should have been landed with this particular child.
After an hour of this, he found her looking back at him. “You hate this, don’t you?”
“Hate is too strong a word. But I’ll admit that to me it compares unfavorably to an afternoon at Yankee Stadium, Ron Guidry against Roger Clemens.”
She laughed. “We could do that, too. But it was really nice of you to make the sacrifice. I’m really glad I got to see this.”
“My pleasure. Want to see more, or go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat?”
“Eat. I’m calligraphied out.”
Seated in the cavernous eatery in the museum’s basement, the two chatted amiably about Lucy’s experiences at Columbia, the scientists who worked with her, and what they were discovering, about the doings of her friends, movies she wanted to see, her reading, her recent work at the Chinese school, exactly as if she were a regular kid, and he a regular dad. The avoidance of certain topics was hardly any strain, and it did both of their hearts good. Mention of the Chinese school triggered something in his mind, and it niggled at him until, just as they were about to leave, he recalled the yellow sheet in his pocket. He pulled it forth and spread it out in front of his daughter.
She looked at it and frowned. “Terrible characters. Very badly formed. Where is this from?”
“Someone left it in my office. Can you read them?”
“Uh-huh. This is liang. It means a roof beam. This is jí, which means rank, but it’s pronounced kàp in Cantonese.”
“What does it mean in Cantonese?”
“The same thing, but around Chinatown it’s also us. I mean, it’s the way our family name comes out. It sounds the same and it’s an auspicious character. This one I don’t know, this one, yù, I know from restaurants, it’s ‘clam,’ these two mean ‘each other,’ I don’t know this one, don’t know, don’t know, this is ‘gain’ and this is lì, ‘profits.’ ” She frowned at the line of characters, then her face brightened. “Oh, I get it! It’s a saying: yù bùng xiang zheng yú weng dé lì. Okay, down lower, this here is yú, which means fool or foolish . . .”
“Wait a second, I thought it meant clam.”
“No, Daddy, yù means clam; yú means fool. Can’t you hear the difference?”
“Nope. What does the saying mean?”
“Oh, something like, when the snipe and the clam wrestle, the fisherman benefits.”
“Ah, so,” said Karp.
She gave him an interested look, then returned to the page. “All this scraggly stuff I can’t make out. This at the bottom is . . . oh!”
“What?”
She was blushing. “It’s sort of, like, nasty.”
“I’ll forgive you. What does it say?”
“Literally? Prick hairs sautéed with Chinese chives.”
“Good God!” said Karp, laughing. “What’s that all about?”
“It’s Hong Kong slang,” Lucy explained, laughing, too. “It means, like, a total mess you can’t get out of.”
“Do you know what Stendahl said was the worst thing about being jailed?” Tran asked.
From her bed Marlene replied grumpily, “No, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“You are correct. He said that it was that one could not avoid unwelcome visitors. Do you feel so?”
“No. I welcome all visitors, except those that wish to probe and manipulate my body. Those I detest. The others are useful for ridding myself of accumulated frustration through a display of ill temper. If I am here long enough, I will have no friends left.”
“On the contrary, my dear: any friend who was liable to be put off by rudeness and ill temper has long since abandoned you.”
Marlene threw a pillow at him, which he caught, and returned tenderly to its place behind her turbaned head. She said, “This is driving me crazy. I have all these people depending on me, the clients . . . God knows what’s happening to them.”
“So far, nothing, I can assure you. I, rather than God, have been keeping track of them all while you lie at your ease like a duchess. Nothing has been let slip in the past three days.”
“What? How have you done that?”
“Operatives have been hired and assigned, schedules have been made, checks have been issued. The world goes on quite well without you, Marie-Hélène. You are perfectly dispensable.”
“I am astounded. I had no idea you were such a genius at organization.”
The man who had planned the 1968 Tet offensive in Tay Ninh province accepted the compliment with a sweet smile, saying nothing. Marlene glanced at the room’s door, for the third time in as many minutes, a concerned look blooming on her face.
“And what about Lucy?” she asked.
“I would say she seems well, despite the burden she carries,” said Tran after a moment’s consideration. “She is pinched by always having me with her when she is not at home. She spends much of her time at the laboratory, and at home Mary Ma visits her often. Today, I am happy to say, she is off with her father. I would like to see her light again, as she was, but that will not happen until this business is resolved, or until she tells what she knows.”
“They still haven’t caught those bastards?”
“No, only the one I interviewed. The Vo are elusive. I have my own inquiries out. But even if the Vo are taken off the board, Leung will still have an interest.”
“Leung set up the kidnap?”
“Without question. I was able to overhear a conversation between Leung and Mr. Yee, the leader of the Hap Tai business association. He told Yee that the Italians had killed the Sings.”
“Do you believe that, Tran?”
“Perhaps. But even if true, Leung was involved as an emissary or master of ceremonies, even if he did not pull the trigger. Then they spoke of Lucy and how she might compromise the silence of the Chen family in this matter. Leung is clearly very concerned to remain free of any taint of this assassination. Afterward, he made a phone call which, as I surmise now, could only have been to the Vo. But there are many other bastards for hire besides the Vo. Leung seems to have disappeared, by the way.”
“And this means . . . ?”
“Who can tell? Perhaps he went back to Hong Kong, where he belongs. Perhaps . . .”
This thought was lost as a rapid knock sounded on the door, and it opened to reveal Sophie Leontoff in a wheelchair, with Abe Lapidus behind her, pushing.
Cries of amazement, commiserations, imprecations (Marlene, dolling, what are you, nuts?), introductions. When the old lady learned that Tran not only spoke French but had been a resident in Paris, she began to rattle away in that language with Tran, leaving Marlene to listen with one ear, while explaining choice bits to the bemused Abe.
“Sophie told me about that kid of yours with the languages—amazing, just unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head.
Marlene acknowledged this and added, “It’s funny, we were here last time talking about Jerry Fein, and now I’m in the hospital myself because of his daughter.” She explained what had happened the other day at the shelter. “Small world, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s some story. But I got news for you, honey: it’s smaller than you think. Jerry Fein was also Morris Leontoff’s attorney, may he rest in peace. You didn’t know this? Of course, how could you? Sophie, you remember Jerry Fein?”
Sophie interrupted a description of what used to go on at a certain joint in Montparnasse, served up for comparison with Tran’s description of same (not too different) and said, “Of course I remember Jerry Fein. He jumped off the Empire State, I should forget that?”
“I mean before, when he worked for Morris.”
“Of course. Him and Ceil. We were at the beach together, also—years. What a nice man, so good-looking. And such a dresser! A tragedy he should go kill himself like that! How come you’re asking?”
“Marlene has his daughter for a client,” said Abe. “That momser she married attacked her, and Marlene got in the way.”
“That girl,” said Sophie darkly, and a look passed from her to Abe, which Marlene saw, and which popped her curiosity up a gear.
“What about her?” Marlene asked.
“Nothing,” replied Sophie, falsely bright. “A beautiful girl. All the boys were after her, at the beach, at school. She went to Erasmus. She was the queen of the, what is this, the dance . . . ?”
“The prom,” supplied Marlene.
“Right, the prom queen. Gorgeous. Jerry was so proud of her . . .” Another of those looks. What was going on here? Marlene took a plunge.
“Aunt Sophie, why do you think Jerry Fein killed himself?”
But too great a plunge, it seemed. “Oh, listen, dolling, why do you want to talk about sad old stuff? Talk about the happy. I had too much sad old stuff, dolling, believe me.”
There was a moment of embarrassed silence, and then Tran, bless his heart, launched into an innocent question about old Paris, and the French chatter cranked up again.
Abe Lapidus looked at Marlene. There was a shadow in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. He leaned over her and said, in the manner of a lawyer counseling a client at trial, “You want to know about Jerry? The whole megilla?”
“I think I have to, Abe.”
“You don’t believe let sleeping dogs lie?”
Marlene said, “You know, Abe, as a matter of fact, I do. Unfortunately, this dog is up, awake, and tearing around growling and biting. People have been hurt already, including me, and more people are going to get hurt. That’s what I think. What do you think, Abe?”
Abe sighed and said, “You get out of here, you call me. We’ll have lunch, I’ll give you some names.”