Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

A tired young man in green scrubs came through swinging doors and approached the Ciampis. Karp watched from across the hall. The doctor spoke quietly to the family. Several of the women began to shriek at once. The mother fainted, and the family redirected its attention to this immediate crisis. The doctor saw Mrs. Ciampi settled on a bench and then strode briskly away. Karp followed him.

Once past the swinging doors Karp accosted the surgeon.

“Hey, Doc, wait up. What’s the story on Marlene Ciampi?”

“You are?”

“Roger Karp. I work with her. At the DA’s office.”

“Well, as I told them back there, she’s pretty badly hurt. In fact, it’s amazing she survived. Of course, she was sitting down at the desk when the explosion occurred, so there’s only minor damage from the waist down. She’s going to need extensive reconstructive surgery on her face, though. And the hand.”

“The hand?”

“Yes, it looks as though she was able to get her arm up over the left side of her face. She’s going to lose a lot of function in the left hand. And, of course, the right eye is completely gone.”

“Of course,” said Karp, the nausea rising in him again.

The doctor looked at him curiously. “Say, are you OK? You look like you got blown up, too.”

Karp looked down at his clothes, which were caked with blood and soot. “I wish,” he said. He turned away and walked out of the building.

Karp was startled to discover, on emerging from the hospital, that it was still day, the smoky yellow twilight of late summer in the city, hot and humid. He had mistakenly thought his hospital vigil had lasted through the night.

Karp began walking rapidly down First Avenue. He wanted to go home and change his clothes. He wanted to get drunk. But most of all he wanted the guy who planted the bomb, and the guy who made it, and the guy who thought it up. He had a pretty good idea about who two of these were. And he wanted them without Miranda or Escobedo. He wanted them raw.

By the time he got to 20th Street, Karp’s imagination had subjected them to a series of punishments not authorized by the New York State Penal Code. Also, in the sliver of his mind not given over to rage and grief, he was beginning to understand how seductive an idea was vengeance, and how-beneath all the talk about rehabilitation and civil rights-that idea remained as the ancient core of criminal justice. Bad guys have to be hurt, and they have to be seen to be hurt. The cops’ old song.

On the other hand, thought Karp, recoiling from his own fantasies, if you impaled criminals in Times Square, wouldn’t that brutalize the society even more? Wouldn’t that start a vicious cycle that would make a civil society impossible? What was the point of all this mindless hurting and counterhurting? Or of anything?

Karp’s mind raced around these thoughts for a while and then clattered to a stop, like the little ball in a pachinko machine. His vision grew blurred and he felt sick. He had been walking rapidly for half an hour, crossing streets whenever there was a green light, and now he wasn’t sure where he was. He sagged like a drunk against the chain-link fence around a playground. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked at his hand. It was filthy with soot and what could have been dried blood. There was a drinking fountain in the playground. Karp drank deeply from it then washed his face in the tepid water, drying himself with his shirtsleeves.

He sat on a bench, watching the slight breeze ruffle the leaves of a dusty maple tree. He watched some ants attack a Crackerjack nugget. He watched two teenagers playing horse on the basketball court, a very tall black kid in white Converse high-tops and a slightly shorter, but faster, redhead. All these were of equal interest. Everything else was on hold.

The basketball took a bad bounce off the rim and rolled to Karp’s feet. This was interesting, too. Karp picked up the ball and stood. He was about twenty-five feet from the hoop. He stared at the ball for a long moment. The kids yelled, “Hey, Mister, let’s have the ball, huh?”

Karp held the basketball in both hands. He saw a thin, glowing wire leading from the center of the ball to the basket. He gave the ball a little shove and it traveled neatly along the wire and through the basket, without touching the rim. The glowing wires were Karp’s secret. He had constructed a network of them from every square inch of a standard basketball court forward of the foul line to the basket. He knew the right combination of push and spin from every one of those square inches to the basket, left-handed, right-handed, backward over the head. He didn’t have to think about it anymore, just find the right wire and the push came from his body naturally, like breathing or walking. It had taken him only about twenty thousand hours of practice over ten years to learn how to do this.

The kids whistled and the redhead said, “Hey, luck-eee!” The black kid retrieved the ball and said, “No way, man! That old dude can shoot.”

“Shoot, my ass! Shit, he couldn’t make that shot again in a million years. Look at him, he’s a wino or some shit!”

The black kid laughed. “Baby, you wrong there. That dude could wipe his ass with you on this court.”

“Bullshit! A buck says he can’t make it again.”

The black kid looked over at Karp, who stood motionless. “Hey, mister! This little man here say you can’t make that shot again. How about it?”

Karp raised his hands silently and the kid threw him the ball and he sank the shot in a single liquid motion, one-handed this time.

“See?” said the black kid. “I told you he could play ball.”

“That still don’t mean shit. A fuckin’ foul shot don’t mean he can play ball.”

“I bet he could take you apart under the boards too.”

“No way, man!”

“Ask him, then. It’s your ball, man.”

The redhead, his face flushing now, grabbed the ball up and yelled at Karp, “Hey, you! You want to play a little one on one?”

Which was exactly what Karp wanted. He wanted to descend once again into the waking dream that had been his refuge for most of his life, the world of thump, thump, bang, swish, of trajectories and patterns, a world with no problems he couldn’t handle, where there was always another shot, where violence could be stopped by a whistle, where pain was only physical, and could be borne. Yes, Karp wanted to play a little one on one.

The black kid sat down behind the basket, leaned against the fence, and watched his friend get his ass whipped. The redhead was an OK player, but then neither of them had ever seen anything like Karp, except on TV. The redhead’s speed didn’t do him any good, because Karp seemed to know where the kid was going before he himself did. Karp could lose half a step and then the kid would make his play and Karp would be there to snatch the ball out of the air, spin, fake, shoot, and score. And he was wearing wing tips.

The redhead got madder and madder and began to foul Karp, giving him the hip, the elbow. After ten minutes, he was doing everything but holding Karp by the wrists. Karp didn’t mind and didn’t say a word. He could score off-balance, from either hand, on both sides. Karp was ahead, twenty to two, when he took to the air for a jumper, ten feet out. The kid was playing in his face and he went up too, not for the ball, but to swat Karp out of the sky. They collided with a beefy smack, their legs tangled, and Karp fell and landed on the black asphalt on his bad knee and the kid fell on top of him.

They heard Karp’s bellow across the playground, and pedestrians on First Avenue paused and turned their heads, wondering who was being murdered-before going about their business.

Karp, his body arched like a bow and rigid with agony, continued to scream at top volume until his throat was raw and he was out of breath; then he just sobbed. Through a red haze of pain he saw a circle of faces surrounding him: young ball players, elderly checkers players, mommies, kids, crazy people, an ice cream man, and, since the midtown East Side of Manhattan contains one of the world’s largest concentrations of medical establishments, an assortment of nurses, orderlies, nurses’ aides, medical technicians, and a physical therapist.