The thin March afternoon sunshine trickled down through the leafless trees of Columbus Park, a small patch of green located between the New York County Criminal Courts on the west and Chinatown to the east. Lucy Karp and Tran Vinh sat together on a bench and watched a group of elderly Chinese people doing tai chi exercises. As they watched, they slurped noodles from cardboard boxes. This was the child’s after-school snack. Marlene had instructed Tran to bring the girl here and wait while she performed some legal ritual in the courts. He was content with this. He was good at waiting. Lucy was not, nor was she looking forward to the afternoon’s activity, which was the purchasing of clothes for Easter. Lucy did not yet see the point of clothes.
Tran’s glance darted in a practiced pattern across the park, covered the full circle every minute or so. Columbus Park was among the safest patches of grass in the city, being a stone’s throw from Police Headquarters, but Tran’s wariness was by now as natural in him as a physiological function. When his gaze returned to his small charge, however, his face showed a flicker of disapproval. He thought new clothes were certainly needed. Lucy was dressed in the untidy fashion in which Americans allowed their children to go to school, a style with no respect in it, he thought, and they wondered why the children defied the teachers and learned nothing. Lucy was wearing white jeans, none too clean, scuffed Nikes, a maroon sweatshirt, with a somewhat grubby navy blue quilted parka over it. Her hair stuck out in its usual undisciplined corkscrew ringlets.
The girl was swinging her feet under the bench, scuffing the sneakers against the rough pavement, making a rhythmic and annoying sound. He had noticed this before too: Americans seemed not to be able to control their great bodies; even the adults bounced around like huge fowls in a yard, and the children were much worse. It came, he thought, from having so much space.
Lucy caught him looking at her and returned his stare. There were spots of grease on her nose and chin. “What?” she demanded.
In French he replied. “Nothing. I was merely observing you destroy your shoes, and reflecting that Americans can never keep still.”
“I’m bored,” Lucy said. “I hate clothes shopping, and I hate waiting around.”
Tran ignored this and pointed across the park. “Look, do you see those old people? What do you think they are doing?”
“They are doing tai chi,” Lucy answered in a bored tone.
“Yes, and do you know why? They seek to control their bodies, to let the vital energy flow along the proper channels, and so to control their minds and avoid confusion and stupidity. The mind controls the body, but the body also controls the mind. If you let yourself flop about like a mere puppet, you will also have clouded thoughts. You will say, ‘I am bored,’ for example.”
“I am bored. And don’t see you doing tai chi.” She said this in English, which, given their history, was mildly insulting.
“Which leads, among other things, to impudence toward elders and failure in school. …” Seeing her firm little jaw tightening, he added, “Nor, I think, will you ever learn to shoot properly.”
She snapped her chopsticks down and turned on him, with her face contorted into a miniature of her mother’s when enraged. The effect was so charming that he almost laughed but did not; she would not stand being laughed at, even by him, and Tran, although he had tortured any number of people, was not cruel enough to mock a child.
“That’s not true!” she said. “I can so shoot.” She had reverted to French.
“Anyone can shoot, but it is beneficial to also hit the target. Ah, now you are going into one of your famous blue sulks. You wish not to be treated as an infant, yet when someone gives you advice that will enable you to take on the duties of an adult, look how you behave! No, don’t hang your head like a dog, look at me! If I thought you were only another brainless American girl, I would simply watch you like a sack of rice, but, you recall, at one time I trusted you with my life and you did well, and for that reason I have responsibility for the development of your interior qualities. Your life is not to be an ordinary one, as you well know, and if you wish to live and fulfill your destiny, you must endeavor to throw off all manner of stupidity.”
Lucy’s cheeks burned, and she found it terribly difficult to continue looking into the bottomless black eyes of the Vietnamese. She said in Cantonese, the language of their first communication, “I am sorry, Older Brother. I am stubborn unto death and a worthless person.”
“That is true,” said Tran, “but worthless is not hopeless. If you are sincere, something may be made of you in time. Here is your mother coming.”
“Where?” Lucy looked around in all directions and at last spotted Marlene walking into the Leonard Street entrance to the park. “Oh, there she is,” she said, switching back to French. “You have good eyes, Uncle Tran.”
“On the contrary, I have terrible old eyes, and one of them hardly works at all. However, I know how to look, which makes a difference.”
“What do you mean? Looking is just looking.”
“To ignorant girls, yes. To those who flop their arms and legs about and chatter like sparrows, it is just looking. But there is a way to look that lets you see what is important, for example, that lets you see your enemy before being seen.”
“How?” This was beginning to sound interesting to Lucy, who had seen the Star Wars trilogy and had thus absorbed, along with the rest of the American population, a belief in miraculous powers taught (in a convenient seven minutes of screen time) by wizened, elderly beings.
But Tran said, “It may be possible to teach you when you have learned to sit properly and to breathe. And when your demeanor has become sufficiently respectful. Tell me, why do you dislike purchasing clothing with your mother?”
“Because she makes me buy things I don’t like.”
“You astound me. I am no great judge, but your mother appears to me quite chic, when she wishes.”
“Oh, yes, she is, but she wants me to wear these little dresses. She doesn’t care if I look like a dork.”
“A dork! What is this dork?”
“Oh, you know, one who is not respected, like … like…”
“Un fayot, perhaps?” Tran offered. She shrugged. “In any case,” he continued, “you appear to value the opinions of your school fellows more than the wishes of your mother. Thus you appear in the clothes of an unemployed laborer rather than those of a well-brought-up schoolgirl. I have seen this often in America, but fail to understand the reason for it. In my country, families would go without rice to enable their children to wear clothes to school that would not bring disgrace. In any case, you must honor your mother’s wishes. Your friends will come and go, but nothing can replace a parent.”
At this moment the irreplaceable arrived, looking chic enough in her best gray wool going-to-court suit, heels and stockings with a worn Burberry trench coat on top. After kissing her child and greeting Tran with the accustomed formal handshake, she passed him a slip of paper. It contained a man’s name and address.
“An interview?” asked Tran mildly.
“Not at this time. Make your presence known and leave our cards in appropriate places. He needs to know someone is watching him, as he is watching our client.”
Marlene and Lucy then took the subway to Bloomingdale’s, where Lucy evinced an agreeableness so nearly angelic that Marlene readily consented to Lucy’s request that she be allowed to go shooting with Tran on the weekend.
Which came, the clear weather continuing. Lucy disappeared with Tran, Marlene had a much coveted spate of concentrated mothering with her babies because Posie had the Saturday off, and Karp, as was his habit, went off to play basketball at the West Fourth Street courts.
Karp had been doing this nearly every Saturday for over a decade, with the only breaks coming during the year he had spent in Washington and the six months after he got his artificial left knee. He was well known, therefore, and always got some action, although he no longer played in the hottest games, which at West Fourth are hot indeed: it is known among New York playground basketball fanatics as Death Valley. NBA players have been known to play there, and they do not have an easy time.
While Karp still enjoyed playing, he did not want to be knocked to the asphalt and he did not want to do a lot of full-court running and he could not jump at all anymore. He enjoyed instead intellectual half-court games with a rotating group of a dozen or so old farts who remembered the early Red Auerbach teams, and when City College was a basketball powerhouse, and when big-time basketball was not a contact sport like hockey. Karp liked position, passing, and floating long, graceful shots through the hoop from twenty feet out.
After his first such game that morning, Karp sat against the fence with a towel around his neck, sucking on an icy Yoo-Hoo, enjoying the loose, hot feeling in his limbs and the biting pain in his back teeth, and watching the more athletic contest that was now going on on one of the full courts. His attention was drawn to one of the odd mismatches common in playground games: an Irish-looking man of average height was guarding a black man with five inches on him and a full step of speed. The Irish guy was getting the hell beat out of him, but not as much as he should have, because he stuck to the bigger man like a cocklebur, his teeth gritted with effort. Karp could see the sweat flying off him in sheets, although it was a cool March day. And he was using his brains, psyching out the other man’s fakes, countering to the extent he could the other man’s superior athletic skills. His team lost anyway.
When the man came over to the fence to retrieve a towel he had shoved into the chain-link, Karp said, “Nice game,” and realized that the man was Jim Raney.
“I got creamed,” said Raney, wiping his face. He went out to the snack wagon parked outside the gate and came back with an orange soda.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” Karp remarked as Raney sat down beside him. “I thought you lived in Queens.”
“Just moved this month. I got a deal on a condo in Clinton, or Hell’s Kitchen, as my old man still calls it. He thinks I’m a nut case. ‘Jimmy, what is it, are you broke, have you lost your job?’ They busted their humps to get out to Woodlawn, and here I am going back again. I like being in the city, though.”
“The culture,” Karp said.
Raney laughed. “Yeah. That and ten minutes to work instead of an hour.”
They talked casually for a while, watching the games and commenting on the plays, in the careful, polite way that men do when one of them is a close friend of the wife of the other, as Raney was of Marlene. So, talking in this wary way, with a part of his mind focused on gently pumping the detective a bit about the sequel to the blowup in Roland’s office, and the identity of the floating Arab corpse, a memory rose up like a scrap of dirty paper in the gutters after a rain. Karp snatched at it and said, “Ali something, Ali al something … Haddad mentioned it. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”
Raney stared at him. “You mean Ali al-Qabbani?”
Karp smiled and snapped his fingers. “That’s it! I just remembered John Haddad, this city councilman I’m supposed to keep in touch with, mentioned the name to me. He said the kid used to hang with our suspects, and he was missing. So you found somebody who knew him? In Brooklyn?”
“Yeah, it was no big deal,” said Raney. “We went back to the garage where we found the other two, and the owner I.D.’d him off the morgue Polaroid. What did Haddad say about him?”
Karp thought for a moment. “Nothing much that I recall—just about being friendly with the perps and that he disappeared about the time of the Shilkes murder. He hinted pretty broadly that the Jews got him.”
“What, he was thinking retaliation or something?” When Karp agreed, Raney asked, “What’s your take on that?”
“It’s possible but doubtful. This Ali disappeared the night after you picked up his pals, which was the same day as the murder. It would mean some Jewish revenge group found out the names of those assholes about the same time you did, figured out Ali was part of the plot, found him, and popped him in the very slick and professional manner in which he was in fact popped. So the question then becomes, do we have a Jewish revenge group around that’s as stylish as that?”
“Lowenstein?”
Karp shook his head. “The will is probably there at some level, but not the ability. The rabbi likes to run his mouth and organize marches, and he’s got a gang of black hats with clubs and walkie-talkies on neighborhood patrol. Does he have a secret death squad he runs out of a shul? Haddad probably thinks so. I don’t.”
Raney grunted in a noncommittal fashion and filed this away, together with the known fact that Karp was one of them too. He said, “So if not, we’re back to either a personal thing or the famous shadowy terrorist mastermind that Roland hates.”
That was a trailing cloak. Karp put out his large foot. “You sound like you don’t. Hate the idea, I mean.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Raney, “I’ve talked to these mutts. These mutts are followers. Not original minds. They think they’re like, some kind of fucking soldiers in this organization nobody ever heard of. Like they’re under orders. They got the literature, the tapes. You ask me, and this is just my opinion, then yeah, somebody set them up, somebody they had no direct contact with, because these guys are not really swift enough to keep the guy out of it if they were pressed. And I did, and zilch. In which case, old Primo’s idea that the mystery guy aced Ali to keep him quiet makes a lot of sense.”
“So the next step is … ?”
Raney yawned and stretched elaborately. Some man on the court called out, asking if he wanted a game, and he stood up and shouted in assent. “The next step … I was thinking I could talk to Walid again, the bakery kid that tipped us. Maybe he’d talk if I could work with that conspiracy charge.”
“That could be in play,” said Karp carefully. It was still Roland’s case. “You think he knows something?”
“Well, he’s a dim bulb, but he used to hang with the late Ali. The problem is, all this is in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn North ain’t got shit to spare for anything but that goddamn shotgun party in Red Hook. You heard about this?”
“Just on the news. It’s Brooklyn. What’s the story?”
“Oh, the usual. Some scumbag waltzed into a joint called Rudy’s and took out six guys and the bartender with a twelve-gauge. Drugs, is what I hear. Rudy’s was a place where guys who handled serious weight hung out. The six of them were in the business, and the bartender wasn’t shy about holding product either. They find the perp, most of Brooklyn North’ll probably pass the hat, give the bastard an award dinner. Look, nice talking to you—anything works out with this bozo, I’ll keep in touch. Give my best to Marlene.”
Raney trotted off. Karp rose creakily, tossed his drink bottle in the trash, and began to walk home. It had been a typical cop interaction, of the give-a-little, get-a-little type. Raney got confirmation of the floater’s connection to Shilkes and a little coverage if he wanted to work around Roland; Karp got some details without having to go through Hrcany. The mention of Marlene at the end there—just sociable, or was he being cute? Karp dismissed it from his mind; he had no jealousy at all in his nature. He thought about the shotgun killing and something nagged at him. Drugs. The Mexican brothers. Maybe a load of dope from a new source, dropped into the dog pit of the city’s great dope exchange—always good for a peck of murders. Had the brothers been in Brooklyn? Had the dead cop Morilla? Something else to look at.
Marlene cooked infrequently, but when she did, she cooked on a heroic scale. Her neighborhood, the area just north of Canal Street, had at one time, before the tony restaurants and galleries made their appearance, been the center of the restaurant-supply business in Manhattan, and Marlene had furnished her kitchen largely with its wares. Two forty-quart cauldrons now bubbled on the vast black Vulcan, one containing a winey beef stew and the other basic tomato sauce. A slightly smaller pot held furiously bubbling water, and on the fourth burner a dozen sweet sausages browned in a fourteen-inch cast-iron skillet, while in the oven roasted a free-range chicken and a pan of veal shins. Marlene herself was in a fine sweat, moving from pot to pot, stirring, prodding, shaking, leaving the stove entirely for strategic seconds while she worked up the filling and the strips for her famous Every Day of the Week Three-Cheese Lasagna, of which she planned to make about half a cubic yard.
Although she lived in the take-out capital of the habitable universe, she refused to surrender her responsibility to provide her family with daily rations of the dense, nourishing, spicy food of her ancestors. And no Progresso-canned cheating either. It also gave her something to talk to her mother and her more domestic sisters and sisters-in-law about, and helped stave off the ever recurring pangs of guilt: children stuffed to bursting with lovingly made lasagna could not be considered neglected, even by a mother who was out a lot and at odd hours and occasionally shot people. She enjoyed, too, generating meals in a fury like this, alone, in charge, juggling ten balls with no audience but her own pride. It was a simpler version of the juggling she did every day: the emergency runs, the court work, the cases, endless cases, the long, slow crawl, like a maggot, through the dead body of romance. In the books and movies the private eyes worked only one case at a time. Marlene would have liked to try that. And they didn’t have nursemaids who needed a day off either. (Marlene imagined Mike Hammer threatening one of his molls with his .45: “You’re not going anywhere, baby. You’re gonna watch these kids or I’ll blow a hole in you big enough to park a grapefruit.”) She tossed the raw lasagna strips into the boiling pot and set her unfailing internal stopwatch for six and a half minutes.
Marlene suddenly stopped what she was doing and cocked a suspicious ear. The living room was quiet. Too quiet, as your regular private eye was fond of saying. She put down her spoon and rushed out the door.
The TV was still on, purveying the usual mercantile indoctrination and cultural mores in the form of cartoons, but the twins were no longer propped drooling on the couch, happily rotting their minds, a dodge Marlene used only in the last extremity, as now. Murmurs emanated from beneath a side table. She stooped.
“What’re you doing, boys?” she asked and then, seeing what they were doing, she made an ungraceful dive and dragged Zak out from under. All the baseboard electrical outlets were, of course, baby-proofed to the technological limit, but Zak had gotten hold of a teaspoon and had nearly managed to pry the gadget off. Interrupted in his quest for a 110-volt surprise, he squalled.
She hauled him into the kitchen. He made his objection known and turned pale blue. Zik followed under his own power. She plonked them both down under the table, set out some unneeded utensils for them to play with, scooped up some dough, sculpted two spiders, as nearly identical as she could make them, sat on the floor, invented a game involving the spiders, and a spider playground made up of bowls and spoons and strainers, sang “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in a maniacal voice several times, and, with thirty seconds to spare, grabbed the lasagna pot and tottered over to the sink to drain it. At which point the intercom buzzed.
“Yeah?” Marlene snarled into the little box.
“D’Agostino’s,” said a cracking voice.
“That you, Robby?”
“Yo.”
She pressed the red button that activated the outside elevator and heard the rattling thump of the mechanism spring to life. Check the oven, baste the chicken, turn the veal shanks. Turn down the beef stew, a little water, a little salt in the sauce, uncork the Gallo, cup of burgundy for the stew and a cup for the cook, Marlene’s usual breakdown. Knock on the door.
Robby, a muscular youth with a ponytail and a team jacket that read HOLY FAMILY on the back, dropped a heavy carton on the floor of the kitchen. He looked around, stated that the place smelled real good, asked after Posie, took his tip, and left.
Marlene started to assemble the lasagna, alternating layers of fresh tomato sauce, chopped sausage, the cheeses, and the broad noodles. This was a curiously sensuous activity, requiring little dexterity, allowing the hands the comfort of immersion in warm food, food her family would consume, that would turn eventually into more child substance, that would fuel the enterprise of the family toward whatever fate awaited it. Although the various timers governing the other dishes she was preparing were still ticking away in her skull, this was the nearest thing to a break she had had in hours. She took another swallow of the indifferent red, and thought vaguely about what to have with the chicken tonight and whether she had it together enough to bake something.
Then an unearthly shriek burst through her reverie and she shot to her feet, hands dripping red like Lady Macbeth’s. The boys, Zak actually, had managed to strip the top off a box of frosted flakes from the delivery carton and had spread them liberally over the floor, himself, and his twin. Zak was holding the box; Zik was wailing and holding his face. Further investigation was not necessary—this happened at least several times a day—Zik, the junior twin (by four minutes) always grabbed and Zak always slugged him with whatever object was at hand, in this case the cereal box, whose hard corner must have caught Zik on his tender cheek.
As she alternately cooed and kissed the boo-boo away, while staring daggers at her older son and chastising him, Marlene once again experienced that tremor of doubt that underlay her rearing of these two aliens. Where did it come from, that signal that made them crazy? It’s always the mother, of course, the one who gets to sit calmly in the courtroom while Junior faces the music, but how does it happen? Marlene had seen it often enough in her work, the boys of mothers who got beat up become men who beat up women, and even acquired the added skill, more often than not, of finding women who would take it. Who even sort of liked it. A feminist heresy that, but she’d seen it, every cop had seen it—he’s pounding her pretty good and the cop steps in to break it up and what does she do? She goes and cracks a vase on the cop’s head. Not on the guy’s head, the cop’s head. The Valone woman, for example, heading for corpse-hood with a song (“My Man”?) in her heart, what to do about that, if anything, and Zik, sniff-sniff, need a diaper change—amazing, identical genes and they both ate the same stuff at the same time, but never did their diapers need changing simultaneously—and Oh, Christ! the oven …
She spun, still clutching Zik, and raced for the stove, slipping on masticated frosted flakes, banging her knee painfully against the table leg, put the child down, opened the oven, body-checking to keep Zik from the flames, grabbed a fork, rescued the roasting shanks (barely), at which point the dog, who had been lurking, waiting its chance, romped forward to scarf up the cereal, knocking down Zak with its mighty tail, who fell with a coconut-knocking sound to the hard floor and set up a howl, which got Zik started up again, of course. At that moment the door sprang open and Karp walked in, invigorated from his sport, and said brightly, “Wow, that smells good! When’s dinner?”
Marlene gave him a look that could have fused quartz and said some disrespectful things about the Deity in Sicilian, a sure sign that deeds, not words, were required of the husband. Dropping his ball, Karp scooped up his sons and headed for the showers.
Some hours later, with the kitchen squared away, the table set, and no sound in the loft louder than the ticking of a clock and the eternal city rumble from outside, Marlene went into the bedroom and found the male units of her family sprawled on the big bed fast asleep, their tiny or gigantic limbs spread out and entwined, as in casualty photographs. He really was a darling man, thought Marlene, far better than she deserved, and what an amazing bit of luck to wind up with, considering her early track record with the other sex. A pang of guilt in there too, because she got to do exactly as she pleased, while he, natively a chauvinist of the true German-Jewish variety, had to cope around her. But of course, she told herself, there was all that nice food.
She leaned over carefully and kissed his cheek. He started awake, with a look of apprehension, just like Zak.
“What?”
“Food,” she whispered, “and if we’re extremely careful we can have a quiet meal by ourselves.”
Which they did, with candles. Lucy burst in while they were washing up, cheeks red and eyes aglow and stinking of gunpowder.
“Look!” she crowed, “I got a Ballantine,” and held up a shot-up silhouette target, pointing out the place where, indeed, three bullet holes merged into one.
“Very nice,” said Marlene, Karp managing nothing more than a false smile. Marlene added, “Those don’t look like .22 holes.”
“No, Tran let me use the Tokarev. It was neat!”
“He did?” said her mother coldly. “Well, I wish he had asked me first.”
Lucy clapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! I was supposed to ask you, but I forgot.”
“How convenient for you. Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, Tran took me to a Vietnamese restaurant. I had star shrimp and soup with limes.”
“I thought they ate dogs,” said Karp.
“They only eat dogs in the north, Daddy,” Lucy explained, as if to a retarded infant. “Tran is from the south.”
“Did you do your homework?” asked Marlene.
“I’ll do it tomorrow after church. Can I watch Saturday Night Live?
“Yeah, sure. Keep it down, though.” Lucy darted away.
Karp said, “What the hell is a Tokarev? Who is this guy, Marlene?”
“Don’t start,” said his wife.
Late that night, after two, Marlene was awakened by the sound of the elevator motor, and the door, and crashing in the kitchen and a grizzling noise that sounded like crying. She put on a robe and went to the kitchen. Posie was seated at the table with the cooking Gallo and a full glass. Her crying had pooled her too-heavy mascara around her eyes, giving her the look of a bedraggled raccoon. Her dress, a thrift-shop red acetate number that was too tight and too bright for her hefty figure, was ripped at the sleeve and her long, straight hair was matted in patches by some sticky substance that Marlene did not care to identify. Marlene sighed. It was like owning a big dog that ran out in traffic and chased skunks.
The story emerged between gasps and snuffles. A guy had picked her up at a club. He had some good dope, and they smoked it in the alley and got wrecked. He had taken her back to his place and they had balled. More dope and some pills. And wine. Posie had found herself on a soiled mattress, naked, with a guy other than the original guy—no, it was two other guys. That part was a little vague. In any case, it hadn’t been true love.
“All I want is a nice guy, Marlene,” Posie said through the tears. “He doesn’t even have to be cute. Just not a shit, you know?”
Marlene knew. Any number of improving lectures flashed through her mind: the Safe Sex one, the You Meet Nicer Guys in Places of Education Than in Clubs one, the For God’s Sake Learn How to Dress one, the Don’t Get Wasted with Guys You Don’t Know one, but Marlene had not the energy for these at the present time and simply hugged the girl and promised her that someday her prince would come and tried to avoid stroking her hair.
Noise from the nursery. Posie rubbed her face on her sleeve and rose.
“Thanks, Marlene. I’ll go take care of the boys.”
“No, I will,” said Marlene a bit too quickly. “Why don’t you just get cleaned up?”
After their big score Fatyma and Cindy bought into a group apartment off Tenth Avenue in the high thirties, which they shared with a mutable population of people somewhat older than themselves, who had graduated to one level above the street. Some of them even worked at jobs, and of these jobs, some were even legal. Fatyma had a heap of new clothes and a bag heavy with cosmetics and perfumes. As against these riches she had been thoroughly deprived of her innocence. After a few days of Cindy’s amused tutelage, she now understood not only what sleeping together meant, and what the cause of burning loins was, but she was also cognizant of the blow job, the rim job, the golden shower, and the Mexican three-way. She had learned, just through observation so far, the effects of nearly the entire bootleg pharmacopoeia. She had learned to avoid pimps and cops and to call Forty-second Street the Deuce. The sexual portion of this knowledge was as yet mere theory; she remained as intact, physically, as any good Arab girl should be, nor was she in a hurry to change that. Cindy had confirmed what she had known from the cradle, the value that certain men placed on what the older girl called the cherry, and her reading of the late Ms. Monroe’s life story had convinced her that the actress, whatever her later success, had traded it too cheaply and far too early. It would be time enough for that when she got to Hollywood. Despite all, she retained her belief in true love.
The floating population of males who occupied the apartment and the drifters on the street had quickly learned that Fatyma was not up for a casual quickie, or even a longie; those who had persevered had discovered the Knife. Nobody wanted to mess with the Knife. Cindy helped out by spreading the word that Franny did not swing that way, which assuaged the egos of the males and which Fatyma did not mind, having learned also what a dyke was.
Fatyma still went on tricks with guys in cars, with the same result, although she never made a score like the first one again. After a couple of weeks she had over six hundred dollars stuffed in the change purse she kept under the waistband of her new red lace panties. She had a new coat too, lush brown leather with a fur collar, bought out of the trunk of a car from a twitchy little man who did not collect the required sales tax. She was wearing a short skirt and white tights and black plastic shoes with a strap across the instep and a white shirt with frills and a round girlish collar, and she looked like the sort of girl who carried Juicy Fruit in her coat pocket instead of a big knife, which was the point.
It was seven or so, already dark, and the traffic was thinning on Ninth. The weather had turned chilly again, and damp, which she was still not entirely used to, even after years in New York, and the cars were not slowing down for a look as often as they had. She decided to take a break at the Ham & Eggs on Eighth and Forty-third Street. There would be whores there, real ones (Fatyma having copped to the hyperbolic aspects of her father’s nomenclature), but she didn’t think much of that. Cindy had gotten stoned after explaining the mechanics of whoredom; she had not yet covered the economics.
Fatyma was eating a sweet roll at the counter when she felt presences on either side of her. Looking up, she saw that it was Carlotta and Daneesha, two regulars on the Deuce. Carlotta was a large yellowish woman with a blond wig like a pile of snakes and an intelligent harvest-moon face. Daneesha was bigger, darker, wigged with black braids and was not strictly speaking a woman at all.
“Oooh, honey,” said Carlotta, “you better not sit with your back to the door. You in big trouble. Big trouble.”
“What?”
“Trouble, sugar. Death type trouble. Kingman looking for you.”
“I don’t understand. Who is Kingman?”
“Kingman the mack,” said Daneesha. “The pimp. He don’t like what you been pulling out on the avenue there.” She sat on the next stool and stretched out her long, lovely legs. They were encased in boots to the knee. “Let me explain, child, see if your little Puerto Rican brain can take this in—”
“Am not Puerto Rican. Am Arab.”
“Whatever, you a fool. Listen up. Carlotta, darling, am I the ho with a heart of gold to explain this so this baby don’t get herself killed?”
“Pure gold,” agreed the other.
“So, what it is, you be ripping off the Johns, sugar. With your little knife, dig? So the word get around, the other night this regular John tell the girl and the girl tell Kingman. Now Kingman, he got his business to run, he don’t want no little girl scaring the trade away, taking off the Johns like you been doing, dig? He be looking for you. He got his razor, he got his little bottle of acid. He find you, honey child, you gonna need a new face, dig?”
“I was you, girl,” added Carlotta, “I’d get small real fast. That Kingman a mean motherfucker. Where you from anyway?”
“Brooklyn.”
“No good. He from Brooklyn. Where you from before that?”
“Palestine.”
“Where the fuck’s that? Montana?”
“Is near,” said Fatyma.
“Then you best get your young ass the fuck back to Palestine while you still got it, sugar,” said Daneesha “And watch your back. You see a baby blue Cadillac in your rearview, thass the end.” Daneesha turned away and began to study her reflection in the mirror behind the counter, adjusting her braids just so.
Fatyma waited until they had gone, so as not to give them the satisfaction of seeing her frightened, and then went back to the shared apartment, keeping her head down and staying, where possible, in the shadows. Although she was a remarkably courageous girl by nature, the exposure of her recent ignorance had shaken her self-confidence, and she felt a strong need for another tutorial.
When she arrived, she found Cindy where she usually was, on the sagging brown corduroy couch she used as a bed, eyes closed, the Walkman earphones stuck in her ears, singing a song from Purple Rain in the peculiar wavering manner that emerges when people are stoned with headphones on. Fatyma looked around the room and curled her lip. Fast-food bags and wrappers littered the floor along with beer bottles, glassine envelopes, the cassette tape boxes, filthy sheets and pillows. A lavender condom, used, poked its head out from under the skirt of the couch. Fatyma yanked the plug from the Walkman. Cindy opened her eyes and frowned, slowly focusing her gaze on the other girl.
“Wha’?”
“I need your help. I am in big trouble.” Fatyma shook the older girl until she snarled and pulled away, and sat up, pouting like an infant, with a dirty red quilt hiked up around her.
The story poured out. Fatyma finished by asking, “Why does this mack want to hurt me, Cindy? There are plenty of joes. Every night they come in cars and cars.”
“Johns, not joes,” said Cindy. “And it’s, like, the principle of the thing. It’s his turf. He’s supposed to, like, control it, make it peaceful for business and stuff. Enough shit like this goes down and the cops get pissed and start cracking down on the Deuce again, and worse than that, the other pimps get on his case, how come he can’t take care of business and stuff. So he has to mess you up.”
“But what should I do, Cindy?”
Cindy shrugged and sniffed, and started feeling, casually, under the quilt for her stash bag. “Well, shit, you got to stay off the street a while, that’s for sure. And you can’t go ripping off Johns anymore. Like, see, Kingman might’ve just wanted to, like, scare the shit out of you. If you don’t rub it in his face anymore, he might forget about it, you know?”
“But then how will I get the money? If I don’t do this with the Johns?”
“Hell, kid, you gonna have to sell your ass like the regular people do,” Cindy said, with no small amount of satisfaction in her voice. She put the headphones back on and lay back again. Fatyma saw her slip something into her mouth and swallow.
Angry now, she walked out of the room and through the apartment to the kitchen. She had wanted to make herself a cup of tea, but the roaches and the smell and something a good deal bigger than any roach rooting through a plastic garbage bag drove her away. She couldn’t understand these people. They were Americans! Those left behind in Gaza, those in refugee camps, people with nothing, lived better than this, and these fools seemed proud of it, as if it were an accomplishment to be filthy and lazy and whore and take drugs. It was a mystery, but one she did not care to pursue at any length. All these, Cindy and the rest, were going down, and she herself wished to rise.
It did not take her long to pack, since she lived out of her suitcase. Some of her things had been taken, “borrowed” in the local cant, but she did not bother herself with a search through the personal piles of things in the closets and corners. The drug Cindy had just taken was one that prompted a rosy emotional tone and gushing sentimentality, and so Fatyma found herself tearfully embraced, begged not to leave, showered with good wishes and advice.
“You should check out the East Village,” Cindy said. “You might dig that scene better.”
Fatyma furrowed her brow. The word “village” conjured up to her mind a cluster of mud huts full of women draped in black and children covered with flies. “The village?”
“Yeah, like Tompkins Square, around there. They let you crash in the park.”
“I will go to Hollywood, I think,” said Fatyma with firm resolve and, picking up her suitcase, which was a lot heavier now than it had been when she arrived, she walked out.
She set out for the subway. After half a block the cheap plastic handle of the thing was cutting into her fingers so painfully that she stopped, dropped it, and began to look around for a taxi. It was fortunate that she did so, for she was thus able to see the pale blue car that had been following her stop abruptly at the curb, and see the heavy, shaven-headed black man spring from the driver’s side and rush toward her. Before she could move, he had snatched her up on his hip and was carrying her toward the car. The back door of the Cadillac opened, and a tan, tall man wearing a knee-length silver fox emerged and held the door open. Fatyma could see something sparkle in his mouth when he spoke. This must be, she thought, the pimp Kingman. He said, “Come on, come on, throw the bitch in here!”
But to the pimp’s immense surprise, his assistant let the girl go and dropped to his knees. He seemed to be praying. The girl was running down the street toward the bright lights of Broadway. Kingman ran to the car, and from the glove compartment he took a huge nickel-plated .44 magnum pistol. He fired it at the girl’s retreating back, missed, and was blinded by the enormous gout of flame the gun produced, rendering further shots nugatory. He took them anyway, doing considerable damage to street furniture, cars, and trash cans, but none to his target.
He went to check on his assistant, who was now lying on his side in the middle of a widening pool of blood. The blood pool glistened black as molasses under the sodium lights, and Kingman was not about to tread through it in his pale yellow glove-leather high-heeled pumps. The guy was obviously dead. Kingman heard the first faint warble of approaching sirens. He cursed, got into the car, and drove off, leaving on the pavement a corpse with the bone handle of a curved Arab dagger sticking out of its belly.