Robert Tanenbaum: Irresistible Impulse

“Everything okay?”

Their eyes met his, three smiling eyes and one glass one. Everything was okay. It was the peak of his day.

Karp’s habit, when getting ready to leave work, was to hunt through the several yellow pads he had used during the day, and empty his pockets and wallet of the rags of paper he had used to jot down things that must not be forgotten. These he interpreted and converted into a Dictaphone tape containing instructions to his people and memos to the administrative powers, which tape he would hand to Connie Trask, the Secretary of Steel, with the confident expectation that she would cause the paper to fly in the right directions, and see that all was done that ought to be done. The junior attorneys were more afraid of Trask than they were of Karp, which was as it should be.

Karp dictated a memo holding off the trial in Morella until young Nolan had a chance to correct his errors, and was about to turn the page when his eye was caught by some notes that did not seem to fit the case at hand:

Selig/Longren/nurse/28/pneum./?? Davidoff doc/poss.hom./Fulton

He rubbed his face. The details were what got you, the necessity of keeping hundreds of names and dates in your head, the details of a dozen ongoing trials and a hundred or so active homicide cases, so that when someone came up to you on the fly and asked, “Hey, on the Ishkabibble case, should we do A or B?” you could give him a sensible answer. Karp knew himself well enough to understand that he had no natural talent for administration and required expert help to prevent the bureau from collapsing into chaos. In this, at least, he was superior to most of the world’s bureaucrats.

The meaning of the cryptic message burst into his mind. Just as quickly he got rid of it. He clicked the button. “Connie, remind me to call Clay Fulton tomorrow and get him on a possible homicide. The deceased is named L-O-N-G-R-E-N. Murray Selig has the details, so send someone over there and get his file on it.”

On to other items, most of which were covered by a “so-and-so is bugging me about X; take care of it!” and, done at last with the agony of command, Karp slipped the belt out of the machine, got into his coat, gathered his evening’s reading, and went out. The outer office was deserted, except for Trask, who looked meaningfully at the clock.

“Sorry, Connie,” said Karp, dropping the Dictaphone record on her desk.

“Some of us got a life,” she remarked.

“Busy day, Connie, what can I say?”

“Not a thing. I hear you’re going to do Rohbling yourself.”

“Yeah, I am. You going to give me heat about it too?”

Trask put a phony big-toothed smile on her shiny brown face. “Gosh, no, boss, I’m just a dumb secretary, just like you’re Superman. I’ll sing ‘Amazing Grace’ at your funeral.”

“I can handle it. I did it before.”

“Uh-huh. And we were both a lot younger then. Meanwhile, you got a date with your wife five minutes ago. Speaking of funerals.”

“Ah, shit!” cried Karp, and dashed out of the office.

“And a pleasant evening to you too,” said Connie Trask to the slamming door.

The offices of Bello amp; Ciampi Security occupied the second floor of a loft building on Walker Street off Broadway. When Karp arrived there after the ten-minute walk from the Criminal Courts building (which had taken him seven and a half minutes), the office was closed. A sign on the white-painted steel door indicated what the office hours were and gave an emergency telephone to call after hours. In fact, the office never closed. Karp knocked on the door. No answer. He pounded, feeling the familiar irritation, attempting to suppress it.

“We’re closed. Call the number,” shouted a voice.

“It’s me. Open up!”

The door opened a crack. A thin, foxy-faced, brown-skinned girl with a frizzy crew cut regarded him unsympathetically. She was wearing a black jumpsuit adorned with a remarkable number of zippers and pull rings. Seeing that it was her boss’s husband, she stood aside and Karp entered the reception area, a small white room containing two vinyl couches, a table, a magazine rack, with neatly stacked magazines in it, a lamp, several well-tended potted plants, and a desk. On one wall hung framed movie posters, all featuring women in trouble: the original King Kong, Sorry, Wrong Number, Psycho . The other wall held Marlene’s Yale Law School diploma, the private investigator licenses of Marlene and her partner, Harry Bello, and several laminated newspaper and magazine stories featuring Marlene’s excursions into public violence.

“How’s it going, Sym?” Karp said. Sym the receptionist, one of Marlene’s foundlings. Karp always thought of her as the Rejectionist.

The girl scowled and mumbled something, and went behind her desk, leaning over to press a button. A buzzer sounded and a door on the room’s opposite side clicked.

Karp went through it and entered a large, high-ceilinged room nearly forty feet long. Light came in from a single huge arch-topped window to the right, opening on Walker Street. The office furniture was Canal Street Moderne, wooden stuff from the fifties, scarred but serviceable. The floors were wide, polished oak planks, covered in the center by a threadbare, but good, red oriental rug. In the center of that sprawled Karp’s daughter.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said when she saw him. She was surrounded by school books and notepaper.

“Hello, Luce,” said Karp. This was their new grown-up relationship. Only a year or so before, Lucy would have greeted Karp’s return home with a yell of joy, a dash, and a leap into his arms. He had still not become used to this ever underestimated tragedy of fatherhood.

“How was school?”

“Boring. I have a million math problems. Mrs. Lawrence sucks.”

“I’d keep that opinion under your hat, if I were you. And keep that kind of language to yourself. Where’s Mom?”

Lucy motioned with her head to the rear. “Back in the playroom, with Posie. And Them.”

Karp placed his briefcase on Harry Bello’s vacant desk and walked past Lucy to the right rear corner of the office. The partners had done a good deal of work on the loft since the birth of the twins last year. Despite himself, Karp had to admit it had been neatly done. Marlene had a little semi-private office behind a partition in the corner. There was a full bathroom next to that, and they had drawn a drywall wall across the full width of the loft, behind which were found a playroom-nursery, a small kitchen, and a sort of dormitory partitioned into a half dozen tiny private rooms supplied with junk shop beds and other necessary furniture, repaired and shiny with bright new paint. Sym, the receptionist and general factotum, slept there, as did Posie the nursemaid, and the occasional “guests,” who were generally women on the run and their kids. It was all illegal as hell, which only added to Karp’s low-level irritation.

Karp went through the door to the nursery. Marlene and Posie were lying on the bright shag rug that occupied the center of the room with Lucy’s Them, the twin boys, constructing towers out of large, colorful foam blocks. The great black dog snored in a corner.

“Can I play too?” asked Karp.

“Cancel the 911, he’s here,” said Marlene, standing and giving her husband a peck.

“Hi, Butch!” said Posie, flashing at him her usual gapped-toothed idiot grin.

“Dah,” said Isaac, lifting up his arms. Karp stooped and picked up the baby, enjoying the solid heft and talcumy smell.

“How about you?” This question was directed to the other twin, whose name was Giancarlo, but who was called Zik, to go with Zak, the nickname of his two-minute-older sibling. Karp thought the dual nicknames excessively cute, but could hardly object since he had himself started the practice of calling the twins, during that early period when they had been indistinguishable larvae, such things as Mutt and Jeff, Hekyl and Jekyl, Abbott and Costello. They were plenty distinguishable now. Zik looked up at his father and then away, and carefully placed a block on top of a tower. Somewhat cool and methodical was Zik, at one year. Karp knelt and put Zak down, emotional and aggressive Zak, who promptly knocked over Zik’s tower. Wails.