Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Marlene placed her hand over her heart and fluttered her eyelids dramatically. She said, “Monsieur, you have quite overwhelmed me. I must return at once to my husband, lest I be tempted to commit an indiscretion.” Tran made a graceful stage bow, and they both laughed. In a more sober tone she asked, “Tran, will it really be so terrible?”

“Who can say? Maxim 310 bears on this. I wish you a good night, Marie-Helene.” He walked off without another word. Marlene took the elevator up to the loft, locked up, and went into the bedroom, a small room with large windows overlooking the back of the building, a lower structure, and a parking lot. Much of the room’s floor space was occupied by an enormous brass bed that would not have disgraced a New Orleans brothel, the rest of the furnishing being the white painted “Provincial” furniture Marlene had used as a child, including a little vanity table with a pink tulle skirt. Karp thought this was weird, but one of the less objectionable parts of the Marlene package. Neither of the pair was into trendy furnishing, however, and so their loft (worth over three-quarters of a million dollars and the envy of any number of trust-fund artists and Wall Street types) was full of bits of odd junk Marlene had dragged home or inherited from Queens and, as a result, was as comfortable and as childproof as an old flannel shirt.

She found her husband stretched out on the bed, which he had converted into a desk, with folders, documents, and neat piles of paper arranged in rows and columns about his long frame.

He looked up when she entered and asked, brightly, “Was that Rocco wanting another taste?”

She ignored this and said, “I knew you were married to your job, but I didn’t think that meant you actually had to take it to bed. What is all that?”

“Oh, it’s a small part of the administration of justice, my dear. Requisitions, petitions, permissions, submissions, admonitions. . I actually blew my day with some criminal justice work, so all this has to be looked at in my, ha! , spare time.”

“Should I sleep in the guest room?”

“Just a second, let me think. . is this stuff more interesting than Marlene in bed. . well, that depends. .”

“Very funny. I’m going in there to pee, wash, and change, and when I come out I don’t want to see anything in that bed but husband.”

“Yes, dear,” said Karp. “No, dear, I don’t know, dear.” She laughed and went into the bathroom.

When she came out, smelling of Jean Nate and dressed in a worn St. John’s T-shirt that descended fetchingly to just past her groin, Karp had cleared the marital deck and was making notes on a legal pad. She got into bed, snatched the pad and pencil out of his hands, and tossed them across the room, snuggling up at the same time.

“Listen, that was Tran just now,” she said. “I’m a little worried.”

“About. .?”

“Janice Chen. Tran said the girls were followed by a couple of thugs today.”

“Thugs? They weren’t hurt, were they?”

“No. Lucy used her head and called Tran and he took care of it, but. .”

“He took. . excuse me, but don’t we have all those guys in blue suits who’re supposed to-”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Butch, it’s Chinatown! I told you, Tran took care of it.”

“Committing how many Class A felonies in the process?”

“Several, if you must know, but none that are likely to come within the cognizance of the law. Do you want to talk about this or not?”

“What’re we talking about?”

“Lucy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she’s extremely unhappy and she’s taking this business with the Chens very hard. I think they’ve closed ranks in this crisis-family only-and she’s feeling left out. She won’t talk to me about it. Maybe you can get through to her. Also. . Tran told me a lot of stuff he picked up. The details don’t matter, but the Chens could be in a bind. It’s tong stuff, like that. Jesus! Yet another reason for her to go to Sacred Heart, the damned obstinate puppy!”

“ Tong stuff? You mean for real ?” Karp was incredulous.

“So it appears. I thought maybe we could slip the word to Mimi Vasquez and the cops, to the effect that there’s no point in hassling the Chens. They don’t really know anything, and the guy who did it is probably sipping a sloe gin fizz in Kowloon as we speak.”

“Go easy because they’re our friends.”

Marlene missed his tone. “Yeah. Come on, Butch, they really don’t know anything.”

“This is what they teach in Yale? You’re pals with the D.A., so you get a free one? That’s exactly the reason they can’t get special treatment, Marlene. What’re you thinking of?”

One thing that Karp could not bear was tension in the bedroom, and there was plenty at that moment, so he curled an arm around his wife and said, “Look, Lucy just needs some attention. We’re both somewhat workaholic-”

“I’m not workaholic. .”

“No, you’re worse, you’re a fanatic. We’re supposed to be having a family here. Maybe you should cut down on the Wonder Woman routine and spend some more time with her.”

“What about you? When was the last time you spent any time with her?”

“Okay, let’s not get into it right now. Let’s both spend time with her-we’ll plan something for the weekend, all of us, the boys, too. And this thing with the Chens can’t be that bad. If Lucy knew anything really bad was going on, she’d tell us.”

Marlene thought that was about as likely as Santo Trafficante confessing to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa out of remorse, but held her mouth, which in any case was being nibbled by that of her husband. Marlene thereafter gratefully abandoned her miasmic thoughts to the brief oblivion of sex, not all that brief in this particular case, because Karp, though no Lothario (and thank God that was something she did not have to worry about, him sniffing up other women’s skirts), knew all her fleshly buttons and how to push them, and Marlene, for her part, had found that, contrary to every marriage manual she had read, screwing was better when she had something sneaky going on.

Afterward, they fell into the usual divine swoon, but at 3:10 Marlene popped awake from an unpleasant, unremembered dream, sweating, her heart thumping. She put on her T-shirt and went out of the room, stumbling as she always did on such sleepless excursions over the great dog who was sleeping across his mistress’s doorway, as mastiffs have done for three thousand years. She stifled a curse, patted the dog, went into the dark kitchen, where she filled Zak’s Star Wars tumbler half full of red wine.

She drank and tried to arrange her racing thoughts. Triads. The Mafia. The dead men from Hong Kong and the Chens. Jumping Jerry couldn’t wait. The woman in room 37. The abortion clinic. Her mother and the flying missile. Lucy. What had she mumbled? You have to be cute to be anorexic . Oh, Jesus! Oh, Mary, full of grace. Mama mia! Motherhood, an impossibility in the present age. What a tangled web we weave. She entertained vague escape thoughts (an assumed name, a trailer west of Tonapah, a job with the school board, blast away beer cans on the desert at night, fuck brainless cowboys, shoot crank, and drive her car into an abutment at ninety) and wondered how long she could sustain her current life. Perversity, its origins? Tran had got that right, the bastard. Thinking of that conversation, she chugged down the rest of the wine, gagged slightly, went through the long central hall of the loft to her little office. She looked out the window, pressing her moist forehead against the cool glass. Crosby Street was empty, lit by the nasty orange light from the street lamps. Free of danger, for now.