THEY DIDN’T DIE. To Karp’s immense surprise, not only did they survive, but they were able to navigate the worsening blizzard and arrive at their destination at eight o’clock. They were just in time for dinner.
Their hostess, Annabelle Partland, owned an isolated farmhouse in the hill country outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and as they pulled the Chevy into the snowbound farmyard, all they could see of her was a person wearing an immense orange parka, the kind used in Antarctic expeditions, and a fur-lined hood pulled tight around a face. When the car engine was finally turned off, Karp found his ears ringing in the unaccustomed silence. As he stepped out into the freezing wind he could actually hear the snowflakes striking the windshield.
Marlene threw her red parka up over her shoulders and dashed for the house, with Karp and Annabelle behind her, lugging bags. The door lintel was so low that he had to duck to enter. As he did, he noticed a carved wooden sign over it, which said:
I haven’t got any.
And I don’t want any.
In the mud room inside the door, Annabelle shucked off her great garment and hung it on one of a row of wooden pegs. When her hood came off she released a mane of pale coppery hair vibrating with static, and a round, wide-mouthed, pleasant freckled face. She was wearing a gray Ragg sweater, a set of Oshkosh overalls much stained with clay, and high woolen leg warmers patterned with Icelandic designs. She smiled at Karp and said, “My, you certainly don’t look prepared for this blizzard.” He took off his Yankee baseball jacket and stamped the snow off his high-top sneakers. “Yeah, right,” he admitted. “I don’t get out of town much.”
“Well, you’re really out of town now,” she said and led him down a narrow passageway to a small dining room, where a table was set for six and where Marlene was already pouring herself a glass of red wine. V.T. came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel.
“Hi, Butch, Marlene. What’s happening,” he said cheerfully.
“Grand theft auto,” Karp answered.
“Pardon?”
“Ask her,” he said. “For the record, I’m an unwitting accessory.”
“Karp, you rat! V.T., this man is going to turn my ass in to the law because I … oh, never mind, it’s entirely too tedious to go into right now.” She stuck her tongue out at Karp, then looked around the beamed, candlelit dining room. “Gosh, this is a great place, Annabelle. When did you get it?”
“In 1793,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
An hour later, Karp was sitting with Marlene on a couch in the low-ceilinged living room. They were stuffed with white bean soup and sausage washed down with quantities of thick French wine. Marlene, mellow and slightly drunk, was smoking. Karp was staring at the fire and playing with a smooth rock he had picked up off the walnut coffee table. A stereo was playing a McGarrigle Sisters record.
Cold sober and just starting to relax from the drive, he looked around the room, fascinated. It was filled with remarkable objects. On the walls, besides dozens of paintings and drawings, some richly framed, others stuck up with pins, there were elaborate tufted quilts that looked like the vestments of extraterrestrial priests. The rugs on the polished wide-planked floor were irregular in shape and had the energy of bright animals. Pots and ceramic sculptures in fantastic variety sat on shelves, on tables, or were scattered in rows on the floor, some like stones from a riverbed, some like relics of ancient civilizations, some like silver and neon explosions. The furniture was a mix of heirloom antique and extravagant crafts. The couch on which they sat was a Duncan Phyfe upholstered in blue silk, on which a variety of embroidery work had been flung, together with a collection of odd pillows that were themselves soft sculptures. The chairs placed at either end of the coffee table were artful constructions of smooth tree-limbs laced together with rawhide, hemp cable, and soft, quilted leather.
“This is some place,” he said, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” Marlene answered, “not your usual motel modern. What do you think of old Annabelle?”
Karp shrugged. “She seems pretty nice. V.T. is obviously her total slave. He wants to marry her.”
“Yeah? Will they?”
“It’s in doubt. V.T. wants to stay in the city and Annabelle refuses to leave here.”
“I don’t blame her. In fact, I sympathize entirely. She’s in her own place, and she’s her own boss. I really like her, which is strange, because when I walked in here, for about two seconds I was blinded with envy. But she’s, I don’t know, so completely herself. Like the Wife of Bath. ‘I am my own woman, well at ease.’”
“Like the sign on the door—‘I don’t have any …’”
“Right. Every woman’s secret wish—to be ten forever, with all your toys arranged just so and infinite playtime and no nasty boys to break in and mess things up.”
Karp looked at her as she stared into the fire. The good side of her face, fine-boned and noble, caught the glow of the flames and seemed to shine with its own light, like a cameo carved from a red gem. He fought down the intense desire that gripped him. He said coolly, “Boys, huh?”
“Yeah, or men. Oh, naturally one wants a man on tap, should one wish to fuck one’s brains out on the odd evening. Oh, shit, Butch, your expression. You take everything so personal.”
“I thought sex was personal.”
“Yeah, sure, but I was talking generally. Never mind, it’s just girl stuff. God, I needed this break.” She gestured broadly to the room. “Look at this. This is a beautiful place. Remember beauty, Butchie? Funny, in school I hung around with a gang of artists, sculptors, musicians, whatever. After a while, I started to think they weren’t, I don’t know, serious? Solid?
“I would talk to them, and they would just smile or joke. It finally struck me that they had nothing to say, or what I mean is, if they had something to say, they would draw it, or sing it. I couldn’t understand it then. It pissed me off, all the shit going down in the world, and they’re farting around with paint.
“So I switched to pre-law and started hanging around with political types. Engaged, but boring.”
“Smash the state?”
“No, never those guys. Male chauvinists, every damn one of them. Serve the people and squash your old lady, it never fails. No, more like Free the Tanktown Seven. A bleeding heart.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t go into public D.”
“Yeah, only I figured the wretched of the earth get more lumps from the skels than they do from the cops. Besides, there’s the power—”
“Ah, power, my favorite subject,” V.T. said as he entered the room, holding a bottle in one hand and four stemmed glasses in the other. “Annabelle decided to break out one of these in your honor. A ’70 Margaux, the beverage of the ruling classes. Her father sends her a case for her birthday every year, in the hopes that the wine will befuddle her into marrying a bond salesman and moving to Darien.”
As he poured the wine, Annabelle entered, checked the fire, and flung a couple of chunks of applewood onto it. Sitting in a leather chair, she pulled an embroidery hoop out of a canvas bag and began to stitch, in between sips of wine.
“Hey, V.T.,” Karp said, “you sure Guma said he was going to come tonight?”
“He said, but you never know with Raymond. We’ll have to make do without him for the nonce. Meanwhile, you can tell me all about Ruiz the Serpent and his Soviet grenade.”
Karp recounted the events at the bomb range and the carton that linked Tel-Air and the Croat bombers, and then related his conversation with Pillman. “So you guessed right, V.T.,” he concluded. “Ruiz must have whacked somebody in Miami, and Pillman went along for the ride. You should have seen Pillman’s face when I slipped that in.”
V.T. said, “Uh-hmm,” and stared into the fire.
“V.T., you’re thinking something.”
“Yes, I am. This is really puzzling, isn’t it?”
“You noticed. Well, spit it out.”
“That call that Pillman got right after the hijacking, saying he should lay off Karavitch because Ruiz supplied the Croats in Marseilles with Warsaw Pact weapons, and two of the Croats on the hijack were involved in it—that’s puzzling.”
“Why? It was bullshit anyway. Whoever called must have figured the Grand Central bomb came from that same load, but why tell Pillman that? Better let him think he’s covering up for something besides a New York cop killing.”
Marlene said, “That can’t be right, Butch. According to Pillman, he got that call before Terry was killed.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, so either Pillman’s lying or—”
V.T. cut in, “Or the phone call was the truth. The caller was really concerned about the Marseilles connection. Rukovina and Raditch were really involved. Somebody was using them as mules to carry munitions to Croat terrorists. Which means the Grand Central bomb wasn’t part of any conspiracy outside our little band in New York.”
“Right,” Karp said. “Now I’m with you. I’ve been thinking that’s the key to understanding this case. The political, the institutional stuff, it’s just smoke. Really, it’s all private: secrets, ripoffs, ambitions, egos.”
“Why is that different from the way it always is?” asked Annabelle calmly. She got three blank looks from the others. “I mean,” she continued, “that sounds to me like the ordinary life of institutions—just what you said—secrets, ripoffs, ambitions, and egos. The odd thing is why you’re surprised.”
There was a brief, embarrassed silence into which V.T. said, “Umm, the point is, dear, it’s not supposed to be that way, which is why it’s interesting. Watergate was an aberration, after all.”
“Was it?” Annabelle said, more sharply. “How come you’re so sure?”
“Because they screwed up, Annabelle,” Marlene said. “Just like our guys screwed up. That’s the problem with conspiracies. Christ, it’s hard enough to get anything done in real life out in the open, with the full force of the law, and public opinion working for you. It’s almost impossible to do anything that’s both illegal and secret, if it requires a lot of organization and lots of people working together. Almost all criminal action is massively simple and stupid.”
Annabelle shrugged and picked up her embroidery hoop again. “You may be right. What do I know? It just seems to me that things could hardly be as dreadful as V.T. says without some form of connivance between the bad guys and the supposed good guys.”
“Oh, connivance!” exclaimed V.T., laughing. “That’s a different story. Do we have connivance, Butch?”
“Lots of connivance, V.T. Yeah, you see, Annabelle, we all work for a guy, connivance is like his middle name. Not the same as conspiracy, though. More opportunistic.”
“That’s the point,” put in Marlene. “Nobody plans that things should be screwed up. It’s just the sum of everybody working a private angle in the public business. And Bloom has a real big angle.”
“Yeah, but be fair, Marlene,” Karp said. “Bloom is a master at covering his tracks and letting somebody else catch the shit. For example, I’d give a lot to know who called him after the hijack. You remember I told you Denton told me that he knew Karavitch’s name before the cops or the TV had it. Even more, I’d like to confirm my hunch that somehow old Sanford was involved in getting that cop to plant the phony evidence on me. That would be a crusher—disbar city. But there’s no chance in hell of us ever finding out.”
“Yeah, unless you could get hold of his tapes,” replied Marlene.
“Tapes? What tapes are those?” he asked.
But he did not get an answer just then, because at that moment all the lights in the house went off and the stereo stopped playing. Marlene gave a little shriek of alarm.
“Oh shit, it’s a CIA hit team,” V.T. said. “They tracked us here and now they’re going to silence us because we know too much.”
“I thought you said there wasn’t any conspiracy, V.T,” said Annabelle.
“That was just a story to ease your mind, dear. I just want you to know that I’ll defend you to the death or until it becomes personally inconvenient, whichever is first.”
“That’s my man,” said Annabelle, standing up. The fireplace lit her with the eerie glow familiar from countless horror movies. With the music silenced, they were aware of the sound of the wind humming through the trees outside. “I don’t want … to die,” Marlene said in a quavery voice.
They all laughed and then V.T. stood up too. “You’re too tough to kill, Ciampi. Actually, it’s probably ice on the lines. It’ll be morning before we have power. We’ll get some lights.”
So they spent the rest of the evening in companionable semi-darkness, lit by kerosene lamps turned low. Karp and Marlene snuggled under a pile of afghans on the couch. Their hostess and host did the same on the hearth rug.
The darkness brought on an intimacy among these four private people of a kind that occurs with children at a pajama party or soldiers on the night watch. They told spy jokes and cop jokes to suit the theme of the evening. V.T. got his guitar out and they sang sentimental songs. They popped popcorn over the fire and toasted marshmallows and finished off another bottle of Margaux.
Marlene said dreamily, “This is just like Girl Scout camp. I’m going to wake up in a bunk with initials carved in the wall, and discover that my entire adult life has been just an unusually long and violent nightmare.” OK by me, she said to herself.
Karp thought, this is real life: friends, good food, fun, furniture. Why have I given this up? He could sense Marlene’s happiness. Relaxed vibrations issued from her like waves of heat from the fireplace. And she was singing; she hadn’t really sung since the bombing, and she was singing the saddest songs she knew, which meant she was really calm and happy. She sang “Dutchman” and “Wagoner’s Lad,” and a song in French that V.T. knew how to play, full of misery. Then she sang something Karp had never heard her sing before, about a maiden who gave herself for love to an enchanted knight, and rescued him from the Queen of the Fairies. She sang full-bore, high and wild, with V.T. beating out a strong rhythm on the flat of his guitar. Karp did the same with a pen on an empty bottle, a skill he had picked up in kindergarten and not much improved since.
Around midnight Guma blew in, looking like the abominable snowman, in the company of a blond who was so obviously what she was that she might have been wearing a T-shirt with “bimbo” written across it. Guma’s car had conked out at the bottom of the hill and they had trudged three-quarters of a mile through deep snow in street clothes and shoes. He was drunk, inevitably, since he considered driving so boring that he always got tanked to the nozzle before any long drive.
The woman, whose name was Sunni Dale, was about to succumb to hypothermia, having climbed the hill in the open-toed heels she wore in her nightclub act. Guma, it seemed, had invited her out for a drink with some friends, without bothering to tell her that the venue was a mountainside a hundred and twenty miles off. Guma flopped on the couch and was snoring in about four seconds. Annabelle took charge of the woman and hustled her off to a steaming tub. Karp and Marlene lit their way to bed by candlelight.
Their bedroom was tiny and cold. They shivered and giggled as they pulled off their clothes and scrambled naked under the thick pile of quilts on the antique spindle four-poster. Down in the trough provided by the ancient mattress, they intertwined every available limb in an effort to keep their body heat from draining into the icy, crisp sheets.
“This is crazy,” Karp said, “there’s no heat in this house. They’ll find us frozen and blue in the morning, like in Jack London.”
“Be quiet,” she answered. “This is the second most romantic single moment of my entire existence.”
“What was the first?”
“Sweeping into the Copa on prom night on the arm of Rocco Tedeschi. I wore a powder blue strapless. Everybody died.”
“You went out with a guy named Rocco?”
“Yeah, so what? Butch, I’m Italian. Anyway, he was gorgeous and bad and my folks hated him. It was perfecto. He was the one who taught me how to drive, and also how to drive cars that belonged to other people. What a night! Later I let him go almost all the way. Just the tip in. He popped in about three seconds, making me a true woman while allowing me to save my technical virginity for my Comp Lit professor two years later.”
“That’s pretty romantic. Speaking of which, what was that song, about the knight and the fairy queen?”
“‘Tam Lin’? It’s a good one. What about it?”
“I don’t know, I liked it. The part where the fairies turn him into different animals and she keeps holding on to him.”
She kissed his ear. “Is that what you want? To be rescued from the Queen of the Fairies?”
He laughed. “The Queen of the Fairies is named Marvin Belkin and he hangs out on Christopher Street. He’s never shown any special interest in me, but …”
“God! Will you look at that!” Marlene exclaimed.
The candle, which they had placed on the window-sill, had gone out, a victim of one of the bedroom’s vagrant drafts, and in the instant of its extinction, as the reflection of its flame died in the window, the moon burst from a nest of shining, ragged clouds and flooded the room with cold silver.
“Yeah, it’s pretty,” he said after a moment.
“Pretty? It’s ravishing! Moonlight on the newfallen snow, snuggling under perfumed quilts in an eighteenth-century farmhouse—I could stay here forever!”
“Tell me about the tapes.”
“Tapes? Oh, fuck a duck, Karp, you really know how to enhance a mood. You’re as good as drugs.”
“Sorry. But really—”
“But really, I don’t know shit. Iron Tits once vouchsafed to me in the girls’ crapper that Bloom had some sort of Nixon arrangement for taping conversations, but … shit! What’s that noise?”
The house had begun to vibrate with a strange thumping, like the sound that might be made by a spastic dragging a dead calf over a barrel. There was a thump at the door. “Sunni, goddammit, where are ya? I can’t see shit.”
Marlene giggled. “Mr. Guma, Esquire, retires for the evening.” The steps receded down the hallway. Then they heard a door opening and a muffled conversation that resembled the audio portion of a Punch and Judy show. Then silence.
“Anyway,” she resumed, “that’s all I know about the tapes, but I would guess they’re kept pretty tight.”
“Uh-huh, I guess.”
“Mmm, I can see the wheels turning. But how could we get our hands on them? We don’t even know where they’re stashed.”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
“Yeah, I bet. Christ! What’s that noise?”
“Umm. Sounds like somebody getting nooky on a creaky old bed, not unlike the one we currently occupy. I would guess Guma from the force of the thumps.” They listened breathlessly for a few minutes. “Ha, a screamer. I figured her for a moaner, like you,” he observed, stroking her back and kneading her small buttocks, hard as handballs.
“Jesus, it sounds like Moloch fucking a piece of bombazine, in Henry Miller’s immortal phrase. By the way, I’m not a moaner,” she said, throwing a leg over his hip and pulling him even closer. “I’m a gasper. Oh, my, you’re getting my attention now. Let’s see what’s going on down here.” She pulled away and he felt fingers flickering over his belly.
“Uh-oh, it’s disappeared.”
“It’s the cold.”
“Yeah. Maybe I should blow on it.”
“No, Marlene, I think you mean ‘suck,’” he said. “‘Blow’ is just a figure of speech.”
The roar of a snowplow awakened him, and the first thing Karp saw was the rear of his beloved, who was standing by the window, looking out, dressed in a heavy white sweater and nothing else. Her delicious round bottom and the enticing space between her slim thighs were at his eye level. He stared for several pleasurable minutes until she caught his eye in the window’s reflection and turned around.
“What are you looking at?”
“The greatest ass in North America.”
“Fah, it’s way too fat.”
“Bullshit,” he replied, lifting the covers, “come on back to bed, and let me use it.”
“Yuk! You’re turning into an animal. You’re as bad as Guma. No, I’m getting dressed. I want to get out in this glorious day.”
“Don’t play in the snow,” he said grumpily, pulling the quilts over his head.
But after a while he got dressed, pulled on some old galoshes he found in the mud room, and went outside. It did not seem possible that a sun so bright could yield so little heat. The air was as clear and hard as lead crystal, and cut his nostrils. He crunched through the drifts, following Marlene’s deep footprints across the farmyard. As he neared the huge barn, Marlene caught him behind the ear with a snowball. He scooped up a handful of snow. “OK, Ciampi,” he snarled, “you’re dead meat.” He heaved, she ducked, giggled, and ran into the barn. He picked up some more snow and set off in pursuit.
After the brilliance of the snowy morning the barn was like a coal mine. He stumbled over lumber and bounced off posts while his eyes adjusted. He heard a sound and saw Marlene moving toward the foot of a ladder leading to the barn’s loft. He fired and had the satisfaction of seeing a white burst of snow against the back of her red parka. She laughed and ran up the ladder, and he followed her.
“Look, isn’t this great, Butch? We could have a dance,” she said, twirling in the center of the barn’s great loft. The loft did have something of the disco about it. Although it was gloomy under the eaves, the wall was pierced by chinks and knotholes, which lit the floor and the far walls like random spotlights. At the far end was a perfect square of absolute blueness where the loft door opened to the sky.
Marlene began to hum “The Blue Danube.” She put her arms around Karp and led him into a clumsy, shuffling waltz. She upped the tempo little by little until they were whirling breathlessly across the dusty floor. They stopped. Karp kissed her hard. Her hair smelled of wood smoke. She pulled away and looked at him, her expression odd and unreadable. She stared at the blue square for a moment, then turned back to him, and said, “It looks like a swimming pool from the high board. It’s a swimming pool for birds.”
He yawned and started toward the ladder. “Yeah. Hey, let’s go back to the house and see what’s for breakfast.”
Marlene didn’t answer. Karp heard her footsteps against the boards. He spun around and saw her running full tilt toward the open door. He realized with mounting horror that she was not going to stop. With a cackling yell she launched herself into naked space, and a last image of her against the blue heavens was burnt into his mind’s eye: her thin, jean-clad legs spinning like egg beaters, her red parka flapping, her arms wide, her black hair a crazy halo around her head.
For a moment he was paralyzed, frozen between the impulse to run toward the door where she had vanished and the more sensible idea of going down to ground level. In the absolute silence he could hear the blood pound in his ears. Then he broke loose and hurled himself down the ladder and out to the front of the barn.
The square door was a black eye patch against the silvery wood, thirty feet up. Beneath it was a huge pile of snow pushed up by the plow. Karp ran to it and clambered up its side. At the top there was a Marlene-shaped hole, chillingly gravelike, and at its bottom was Marlene, looking like a frozen princess.
She appeared to be unconscious. His heart in his throat, he leaped into the hole, knelt down, and touched her face. “Marlene!” he wailed.
Her eye opened and her tongue stuck out at him. “That was great,” she said. “I want to go again.”
“You crazy idiot!” Karp yelled. “You could have killed yourself. There could have been a piece of goddamn farm equipment under the snow.” He climbed up out of the hole and looked around. “Hey, you jerk! Will you look at this?”
Marlene stood up. Karp was pointing wordlessly at a large lump in the snow pile, from which emerged the corner of a rusted metal frame and several long curved steel teeth. “You missed that by about two feet.”
Marlene giggled. “Yeah, it would have been a harrowing experience.”
“Stop it!” Karp bellowed, grabbing her shoulders. “It drives me crazy when you pull stuff like that.” He shook her and the words gushed out of him without thought. “You can’t do this to me, Marlene. You’re not some wacky kid. I love you! I can’t stand this stuff, and your on-and-off shit. This isn’t real life. I want to be with you. I want to get married.”
Marlene looked up at him with a broad grin. “Well, well,” she said. “Well, well, well, well, well.”
“Well, well, what?”
“Well, this sort of bowls a girl over, Butch. My heart’s all a-flutter. But, ah, there’s a couple of things …”
“Like?”
“Like, if we’re going to get—how can I put it?—engaged, you are going to have to meet my family.”
“I’m not marrying your family.”
“I beg to differ, but in any case I do not intend to sit through another Sunday dinner making polite conversation with nice unmarried Italian certified public accountants, who have been getting older and more desperate-looking in recent months.”
“OK, right, meet the family, you got it. You’ll want a ring too, I guess.”
“You guess right, buster, and I want it flagrant, I want my mom happy, and my cousins squirming in envy. And I want to get married in white in St. Anthony’s on 97th Street in the County of Queens.”
“Come on, Marlene—”
“No, you come on. You ask me to marry you, you unleash long-buried lower-middle-class instincts. Well, what about it, is it a deal?”
“It’s a deal. But you got to promise to stop trying to kill yourself and pulling weird shit.”
“Fine, no problem,” she said. Then she wrapped her arms around him and pulled his mouth down onto hers.
“There is one little detail, though,” she whispered into his ear.
“What’s that, babe?”
“You’re already married, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, that.”
“That. And while Vatican Deuce has made the Church more liberal, I kind of think they draw the line there, you know?”
“All right, all right, I’ll take care of it,” he said grumpily, his romantic mood vanishing. The last he had heard of his first wife was that she had repaired to a lesbian commune somewhere in northern California. It was going to be a pain in the ass to track her down.
“And I’ll wait for you forever, my prince, but meanwhile, my feet are freezing,” she said. “Cheer up, big boy, I appreciate the thought anyway. Hey, I’ll race you to the house.”
“Guma,” Karp said, “how would you like to torpedo the district attorney?” The power had come back on and the two men were sitting in the kitchen of the farmhouse, watching snowy figures play football on a small black-and-white TV. Unshaven and hung over, Guma was eating potato chips and drinking Carling and occasionally banging the side of the TV when its image displeased him. The three women and V.T. had gone to town for supplies in Annabelle’s pickup truck. Guma scratched himself and thought about Karp’s question. “Yeah, sure I’d like to. Who wouldn’t? What’d you have in mind?”
Karp told him about Bloom’s tapes and about what might reasonably be supposed to be on them. Guma listened attentively, then said, “Sounds great. You thinking about pulling a burglary?”
“Shit, no! That would be wrong. Besides, we might get caught. No, it occurred to me that Iron Tits is the key to this little problem.”
Guma snorted. “Yeah, Rhoda Klepp—Wharton in drag. What about her, the bitch?”
“Well, where could he keep the tapes? There must be a shitload of them. OK, you know the DA’s outer office? There’s a row of file cabinets along the wall to the right. One of ’em’s got a big security bar and a humongous lock on it. I figure the tapes are there.”
“Yeah? So what? How’re you gonna bust in there?”
“Klepp. She’s got a key. I saw her open it once. You know that big ring of keys she jangles around with? It’s on there.”
“You gonna ask her to lend you her key?”
“Goom, be real. No, I figure, ah, if somebody got close to her, got her relaxed, sort of, it might be possible to borrow them for a while. I’d sure like to listen to those tapes.”
“Well, shit, Butch, ask her out. Take her to Radio City and buy her an ice cream soda. She’ll come across, no problem.”
“Hey, Goom, come on, this is out of my league. I freely admit it. I’m not man enough to take on Rhoda Klepp. In fact, there’s only one man I know of who could really pull it off.”
Guma looked at Karp for ten seconds, waiting to hear the name. Then the light dawned and he grinned. “Oh no, you sneaky guy. Uh-uh, include me out. No fuckin’ way. Hey, look at this asshole, he’s gonna try a fourth-down pass.”
“Why not, Guma? I thought you were always up for a new challenge.”
“Hey, Karp, give me a break. I got a nice thing going with what’s her name there, Sunni. I want to work on it, let it blossom, you know? I don’t need any challenges right now, OK?”
“Guma, you just met the woman last night.”
“Hey, what can I say? It was magic.”
“Guma, you’re missing one of the great experiences. Imagine those incredible mazumas unleashed. They’d stalk you across the room like a beast of prey. Also, I hear she’s into every depravity.”
“Depravity, hey? Talk to a German shepherd, then. Talk to a fuckin’ pony. Not me.”
“You’re chicken.”
“I stopped listening, Karp. I’d like to help out, but let me put it to you this way: I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick.”
“Guma won’t do it,” Karp said to Marlene later that evening. “Any ideas? I guess I could try.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t get far without genitalia, and I’ll cut off your first move in that direction. No, I’ll work something out. I’ll catch her in the little girl’s room one time and lay a trip on her. I owe her one anyway.”
Shortly after lunch on Sunday the blessed isolation Karp and Marlene were enjoying was cut short by a telephone call from Bill Denton.
“I’m going to ruin your weekend,” he said.
“You already did. What’s up?”
“They found the waiter, Koltan. In a dumpster in Canarsie.”
“Ah, shit. The poor bastard. How’d he get it?”
“They tied his hands behind him with wire and cut his throat. Butch, these guys are going crazy. Their scam is coming unglued and I think they figure they got nothing to lose. I got extra guys with the hijackers and all the people I can steal looking for the Cubans, but who knows? Lot of places to hide in the city, and they could have left already. By the way, did you get that stack of shots I sent over?”
“Yeah, Ruiz and company, real beauties.”
“You recall seeing any of them yourself? I mean recently.”
“No, not that I recall. It’d be hard to miss Ruiz, the little fucker really looks like some kind of reptile. Why do you ask?”
“Well, there’s one figure in this case who’s wandering around with nobody watching him, and I’m getting a little concerned.”
“What figure is that, Bill?”
“You.”
Karp laughed. “Come on, Bill. Mutts don’t waste ADAs.”
“Yeah, but these aren’t your usual mutts. And as I recall, somebody tried real hard to punch your ticket a couple of years back. With that letter bomb.”
“Yeah, there’s that. Well, what do you suggest?”
“Get back to the city as soon as you can and stay put. I’ll get Brenner to babysit you for a couple days, until we nail these assholes. Oh, yeah, speaking of assholes, your friend Flanagan has turned up missing too.”
“Flanagan? Oh, crap!”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. I just thought of something I had to do.” It had occurred to him that the Q and A he had taken off Flanagan was sitting in its sealed envelope on the floor of his bedroom. If anything happened to the detective, he would have no proof of a conspiracy to introduce tainted evidence into Karavitch et al.
“OK, Bill,” he said, “we’re leaving in a little while. I’ll talk to you Monday.”
It took them nearly an hour to dig the car out, and they left about four. The roads were icy and Karp sweated bullets on the mountain turns. It was nearly six when they hit the clear pavement of the Taconic, a black canal between the mounds of snow pushed up on its shoulders by the plows. The sky had gone dark purple when he decided he needed some coffee and pulled into one of the Taconic’s rustic rest stops.
He was waiting at the take-out counter for his order, thinking about nothing in particular, when he happened to look out the window. At that moment, with an intensity that prickled his scalp, he was overcome by a feeling of déjà vu. A good-looking, swarthy man was using his reflection in the restaurant window to comb his long black hair. As he finished, he cocked his head at an angle and tossed it back so that a lock of hair fell just so over one eye.
Karp felt the ice form in his belly. He had seen that man before, doing just that in the window of a Chinese restaurant. He had seen that gesture reproduced in the crazy mimicry of Dirty Warren, which meant that this guy had been hanging around Centre Street for weeks. Now that he had seen Denton’s pictures, he realized that he was looking at Esteban Otero, the man who had helped to kill Alejandro Sorriendas. Hermo.
He picked up the paper bag with his order in it, paid, and walked out, trying not to shake, trying to think, trying not to look at the man four feet away. He walked toward where he had parked the Chevy, but a large green station wagon was parked in his slot.
His stomach dropped and he tasted acid on his tongue. He turned slowly in a circle, searching for the pink car. A string of curses directed at Marlene appeared on the screen of his mind. Where the hell was she? He looked back toward the restaurant. Hermo was gone. He started back to the restaurant. There was a phone there, maybe he could call Denton—
An enormous blast erupted behind him. He stumbled and almost dropped the bag of coffee as he spun around.
Marlene was sitting in the Chevy’s driver’s seat, grinning. He walked to the driver’s side and she rolled down the window. “Hell of a horn,” she said. “It’s a diesel air jobbie.”
“Marlene, what the fuck are you doing?” he choked out between clenched teeth.
Her grin faded. “I was just getting some gas. I didn’t want to bring the car back empty. Butch, what’s the matter?”
“I just spotted one of Ruiz’s men. He’s been following me. We got to get out of here. Move over.”
“Get in!” She leaned over and jerked the passenger door open.
“Marlene, move over! Stop playing around!” he shouted.
“Butch, listen. You want to get away from these guys? Get in. You can’t drive worth a shit. Hey, is that them?”
In her rearview mirror she had spotted a white Econoline van pulling out of a slot. There were two men in the front seat.
Karp looked. “Yeah, that’s them.” He felt drained. “OK, you drive.” He got in and Marlene stomped on the gas. The big engine screamed. She slammed into gear, popped the clutch, and the big Eagles on the rear wheels squealed, spinning wildly and sending up clouds of stinking rubber smoke. Then the treads caught and the car took off, hitting sixty by the time it reached the end of the exit ramp.
“So far, so good,” she said after a few minutes. “Are they following us?”
He peered through the rear window. “I can’t see them. But it’s getting dark. That was quite a takeoff, Marlene.”
“It was comme il faut at the Tastee-Freeze on Linden Boulevard. Some things you never forget. It’s a good thing we got this car. I can blow the doors off anything but a Ferrari. Assuming it holds together. Oh, crap, look at this!”
They had crested a hill and before them stretched the taillights of a monumental traffic jam. She hit the brakes, skidded sideways, corrected, and slowed to a crawl behind a Volvo with a loaded ski rack.
“Shit, if there wasn’t this goddamn snow I could cut across the median or go down the shoulder. Can you see them yet?”
“I don’t know. Yeah, I think that’s them. About four cars back.”
“OK, let me try something.”
They inched along in the center lane for about five minutes.
“Um, Marlene, what’s the plan? You going to try to get us to a phone?”
“Yeah, after we lose these guys. Pretty soon now. We should be real close to the Tuckahoe Road exit.” When the exit sign appeared, she hit the brakes and the car rolled to a stop. In seconds, horns were blaring behind them and drivers were rolling down their windows and poking their heads out. “Marlene, what’s going on?” he said anxiously.
“Wait a minute. I’m getting some maneuvering room.” The left and right lanes continued to move forward, and then they too were blocked by cars far back in the center lane attempting to get past the obstacle. A clear space of about five car lengths opened up. Marlene gave it the gas and the car screamed forward. Then she leaned on the horn.
It had a spectacular effect. Half a dozen cars in the right lane leaped into the snowy shoulders of the road as their drivers instinctively wrenched their wheels away from the terrifying sound. Marlene barreled past them and tore up the exit lane at fifty. There was a scream of brakes and a metallic crash behind them.
“What happened?” she shouted.
“Our guys tried to pull right out and cut off somebody. Shit, they’re still coming.”
She drove east on Tuckahoe Road. In the rearview she could see the headlights of the van glaring against the snow as it left the exit ramp in pursuit. A quarter mile later, she whipped the Chevy into a high-speed turn down a suburban lane.
“What are you doing now?” he asked. The van had also made the turn, and the headlights behind them were getting closer. There wasn’t another car in sight.
“My Aunt Agnes lives here,” she replied. Karp stared at her. Her lips were tight and she held the wheel in a white-knuckled, stiff-armed grip, hands in the ten of four position.
“Your Aunt Agnes? What are you talking about?” he shouted.
“Don’t yell at me, goddammit. I have to concentrate. OK, here comes the hill. Hang on to something.”
The street was a one-laner that wound through a neighborhood of large houses set back from the road. Suddenly she accelerated and spun the car across the road in a skidding left. When the car had straightened out on the new road, Karp looked ahead and gasped. The headlights shone out on nothing. Then the front of the car dipped and he was looking down a long, straight, steep hill coated with glistening black ice.
The rear wheels gently shifted to the left, farther and farther, until they were descending the hill sideways, gathering speed. Karp felt a scream well up in his throat. Marlene was shouting something, but everything was moving too fast for him to concentrate on what she was saying. The lights of houses and shadows of trees tore by in a monochromatic blur like an old movie in a broken projector.
Then it struck him that she was in control. By delicate twitches of the wheel and dabs at the gas she played the car as it continued its slow spin around the compass, at last reaching the right way around, pointing down.
The hill bottomed out and began a more gradual upgrade again. Marlene headed its nose into a snowdrift and set the brake. “Watch,” she said, turning and facing the rear window.
The white van came flying around the curve and started down the hill. It hit the ice and began to skid. Karp and Marlene saw its brake lights glow red on the snow as the driver jammed on the pedal. The van spun like a top, caromed off a pile of snow, smacked a buried car, toppled over onto the driver’s side, and skidded down the hill like a runaway carnival ride. Leaving the roadway entirely, it ripped through a high privet hedge and ended up smoking in the middle of a broad, snowy lawn.
Marlene backed out of the drift and drove slowly away. She was shaking with released tension. Karp felt a heavy pressure in his chest; it went away when he started breathing again. “That was incredible! How the hell did you learn how to do that?”
“Aunt Agnes’s hill? We used to do it every winter when we were teenagers. It was a trip. The one who spun the car the most times won.”
“Yeah, but what if the guy in the van knew how to take ice?”
“Well, I thought about that, and then I figured, Cubans? From Miami? On black ice? I figured it was worth a shot.”
“I guess. I’m glad I went to the bathroom before, though. OK, where to?”
“Well, why don’t we drop in on Aunt Agnes? I’m starving and she’s always good for a feed. And we can call Denton from there. Besides, you said you wanted to meet my family.”