Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Returning home from her hospital visit, Marlene felt emotionally bedraggled and not at all looking forward to family life, especially not to another tense evening with Lucy. But when she arrived at the loft, she found not Sylvia Plath Jr. but Little Mary Sunshine, happily giggling with her brothers in her room, in her room, a treat almost beyond comprehension, Lucy’s room being, for the twins at least, the domestic equivalent of the Forbidden City. Besides that, the loft was tidied and swept, and the table laid for dinner, also Lucy’s work, since the concept of “tidy” had never imposed itself on Posie’s custardlike mind.

“Hi, Mom!” they all chorused when Marlene stuck her head in to view this marvel. Marlene had often noticed the peculiar complementarity of her moods with those of her daughter, as if they were at either end of the same seesaw. Lucy had clearly emerged from her recent private hell; Marlene felt herself descending into her own. She tried to be glad about her daughter’s return to the broad, sunlit uplands, but as the evening passed, she could not help feeling that Lucy’s mood had an aggressive edge to it, as if to say, “You’ve tried to make me miserable, wretched Mom, but I have transcended your wicked designs.” Karp was charmed out of his socks, which didn’t help much either. Marlene retired early with a headache and a pint of plain red wine.

Lucy retired early as well, not to sleep but to finish the last of the Claudine books, Claudine s’en va , which was about (and here she moved the story around in her head, describing it to herself as she would describe it to her pals) this woman Annie, and how she was married to this dork, a real conceited guy, and then she met Claudine, and Claudine had turned into this terrifically cool and sexy woman, yeah, she was still married to that guy, but it was all different somehow, she wasn’t squashed by it anymore, and anyway she shows Annie that Annie doesn’t really love her husband, and he doesn’t love her and they should break up, which was a big deal in those days, but she does anyway, and Claudine thinks about seducing her but doesn’t because she promised her own husband that she wouldn’t do stuff like that (Lucy, the dirty little thing, made a mental note to maybe modify that in the retelling) and Annie does set out for the future and life goes on. She mused for a while, imagining herself installed Claudine-like in some apartment with her father, a man engaged in his work but always ready to devote his entire attention to his little girl. Claudine had not been supplied with a mom, which was one of the chief sources of the delight Lucy took in the novels.

She closed the book and placed it neatly in its proper place on her bedside shelf. A satisfactory ending, the kind she liked, and she was glad that Claudine had moved on from merely arranging her own life to arranging those of her friends. This was also Lucy’s ambition, especially when her friends were in some trouble and the arranging might offer some Kim-style skulking and even a measure of violent adventure.

Mary had, of course, been sensible in her Mary way: children did not catch killers, especially not oriental professional killers, but now that she had her friends again, Lucy was not slow to imagine plots by which some satisfactory conclusion to the Asia Mall murder case could be brought about. Lucy’s interest in this was not principled but personal: those murdering bastards had nearly messed up her life and should pay for it with their heart’s blood. With these and similar thoughts, of a violence rather more common among young girls than their parents suspect, she drifted off to sleep.

And awoke full of energy, more than she had felt in weeks. She fed, toiletted, and dressed in mere minutes, and was out of the house at just past seven and on her way to her mother’s office while her brothers were still having their wake-up whine. The fine weather continued, but now she noticed it as for the first time, balmy springtime in the city, and was buoyed up by it, and it lent bounce to her step as she trotted down Broadway to Walker.

Bello amp; Ciampi had a suite on the second floor of an undistinguished loft building otherwise devoted to galleries and the sale of oriental rugs. The firm name was painted in gold on the large semilunar window around the portrayal of a staring eye, with investigations-security below, which Lucy thought unbelievably tacky. Her mother had surrendered part of the space when the firm had contracted with Osborne and Harry Bello had moved uptown. She had an anteroom for her secretary-receptionist, one large room behind the big window with the sign on it, a toilet with shower, and a couple of windowless cubbyholes in back. One was fitted out as a kitchen, and Tran lived in the other.

Crying out a greeting in Arabic to Mr. Habibi, who ran the rug emporium on the ground floor, she ran up the steps and pounded on the door. She knelt and shouted through the brass mail slot and peeked through it, and shortly she saw a pair of feet in rubber zoris approach.

Tran greeted her and walked back through the office to his room, which contained a neatly made-up iron cot, a particle-board wardrobe, a pine table, a wooden swivel chair, and a small block-and-board bookcase, its lower shelves full of books, mainly paperbacks, in French, English, and Vietnamese. On its top shelf sat a twelve-inch black-and-white TV, with a coat hanger antenna, and a cheap clock-radio cassette player. The walls were bare and white. Tran sat in the chair, and Lucy perched herself on the edge of the bed. The office, and Tran’s quarters within it, were among Lucy’s favorite places. She had been coming here since early childhood, and it was here that she had developed her taste for snooping. She still came to snoop into Tran’s doings, and to spy on her mother, that sink of iniquity, and it did not occur to her that her presence here also allowed her mother to keep tabs on her, both directly and through Tran. Lucy was a capable conspirator, an extraordinary one for her age, but she was not quite ready for the major leagues, where both Mom and the Vietnamese had long been players.

“What are you doing?” she asked after the usual long silence.

“I am playing pyramid, as you see. Is there something wrong with your vision?”

“I meant, what are you doing today ?” Silence, the flap of cards. Peevishly she said, “You always play that stupid game. You never win.”

“So you imagine. I like this game because it is almost impossible to cheat at it, and almost no hands play out. It is thus a good model of real life in both respects.”

“One can cheat in real life,” said Lucy. Tran raised his head from the cards and gave her one of his famous looks. Lucy had trained herself to meet her mother’s gaze, which was powerful enough, but Tran’s eyes were in a class of their own, with a range that ran from Santa-like merriment to the matte black merciless gaze of a large shark. For an instant it was like staring at hot anthracite; then it softened and he said, “Only about trivial things, money or romance. I was speaking of the essentials, that is, life itself. In any case, today I must see the boyfriend of one of our clients, who has persisted in unpleasant behavior.”

“Will you pound his lights out?”

“Certainly not,” replied Tran prissily. “I am a feeble and elderly oriental person and do not, as you say, pound out the lights of people. No, I will simply indicate to him in a variety of ways that he is being followed, and that neither his home, nor his place of work, nor his auto, is secure, should anyone wish to do him an injury, and I will further indicate that such intrusions will cease when he ceases his unwanted attentions toward his former mistress.”