Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Karp smiled and gestured in the direction of the federal building, and they left. Shortly thereafter, the crime-scene-unit tech, a small, dark man in civilian clothes, came in and took away Mr. Lie’s Coke can, carefully ensconced in a plastic bag. Then it was time for Karp’s four-thirty meeting with the administrative judge’s staff, and when that was done he fielded some phone calls, and did not break free until nearly six.

There was a message waiting from the D.A. squad desk man. Karp called him back and received the news that Willie Lie had no criminal record, no driver’s license, no Social Security number.

“This guy an illegal?” the man asked.

“He says. I got the lab guys working on pulling some prints he left here.”

“That could help if he has a sheet in another state and the locals bothered forwarding them to the NCIS. Meanwhile, you got a nobody.”

Not a nobody, Karp thought. A somebody, and a dangerous one at that. For in the last moment of the meeting, when Bill Fogel had gone out the door, Karp had used his splendid peripheral vision to observe Mr. Lie pause on the threshold and shoot back at him a look full of assessing intelligence, guile, and impersonal hatred.

After Chinese school Lucy usually went to get something to eat with Janice and a group of friends, but today she had promised to go up to the lab and have lunch with Ronnie Chau before going to the lab. Chau had invited her several times in the past weeks, when Lucy had been too depressed to go, but the new Lucy had made a cheery call from a pagoda-tipped phone booth after class and set it up.

She boarded an uptown Broadway train at Canal, found a corner seat in the first car, and reached into her bag for a copy of Sing Tao Jih Pao , the Chinese newspaper. It amused her to observe the reactions of the passengers to a white girl reading it. But as she reached into the bag, her hand touched an unfamiliar object, and she drew out, wonderingly, Tran’s copy of The Tale of Kieu .

Her eyes stung and she had to take several deep breaths of ozone-rich subway air before her emotions were back under control. She inspected the book closely. It was stained on the edges and endpapers with water and earth, and on the leather of the back cover there was a large dark brown blot of what was surely blood. She stared at it, jogging on her lap in the train’s motion, a holy thing, she thought, a relic of romance, of war, of horror, of courage, of desperate flight, and she felt honored beyond endurance that Tran had slipped it (she could not imagine how) in with her possessions.

She turned past the title page, her fingers caressing the blurred memento of the dead wife, and began to read. It was slow going, for the orthography of Vietnamese is complex and the language was poetic and refined and, in the fashion of classical Asian poetry, the poet made use of compressed references that would be familiar to any Vietnamese, whose meaning she had to guess at. The train was rushing out of 72nd Street before she had the first verse clear.

A century. In a span that long of life on earth

Talent and destiny will often war,

Sea becomes mulberry field and returns to sea

And you must watch things that sicken the heart.

Yet, is it so strange that loss and gain balance, although

Blue Heaven, in spite, strikes down the rosy-cheeked girl?

She shuddered with pleasure as the meaning revealed itself, and attacked the next verse at once. She was so absorbed in this difficult work that she forgot where she was. She did not notice the gradual emptying of the car as the train moved farther north on its route, nor did she notice the three young oriental men in black clothes and sunglasses sitting together at the car’s other end, did not even notice when the train stopped at and departed from 168th Street. Three minutes too late, in the irrational spasm well known to subway riders, she yelped and leaped to her feet, hurriedly stuffing the book back into her shoulder bag, and went and stood swinging from a strap in front of the door, cursing silently to herself and watching the columns whiz by in the dark.

Lucy exited at 181st Street and made for the crossover to get back on the southbound line, and that was when she noticed the three oriental youths for the first time. They had followed her off the train. A pulse of fear, a flush of embarrassment: How could she have been so stupid. .!

She kept walking, searching for people, but the crossover and the adjoining stairways were deserted. One of the youths moved past her, to the stairs that led to the southbound platform, and turned, grinning up at her. The other two closed in from behind. Lucy bolted down the stairs, faked past the guy below, and dashed toward the stairs to the platform. With relief she saw that there were a half dozen people waiting for the southbound Broadway express.

Then she was falling, jerked off her feet by a hand gripping her shoulder bag. She landed painfully on her hands and knees, rolled down three steps, and staggered to her feet. She saw the backs of the three men retreating, heard their running footsteps echoing off the tile walls. Her heart jerked as she realized they had taken the bag with Tran’s book inside it. Without further thought she raced after them.

On the street, out in the sunlight, she looked around wildly, spotted the three of them crossing Broadway, and headed toward them. She had no idea how she was going to get the bag away from three men. If there was anything at all rational lurking under the stew of fear and rage that occupied her mind, it was the belief that, having taken the few dollars she had in there, they would toss the bag in the gutter and she would get the book back. She was not going to leave without Tran’s Tale of Kieu .

The youths were about twenty yards ahead of her, laughing and tossing the bag back and forth. Every so often one of them would glance over his shoulder to see if she was still following. This should have tipped her off that something was up, but her usual instincts were in suspension. All she could think about was the book, and losing it, and what it would mean.

They went east on 182nd Street, Lucy following. They hadn’t looked in the bag yet. Vaguely she wondered why. They should rifle the bag, take the cash, and dump it. She prayed for a cop car to come along. It was not the sort of neighborhood where a little white girl could ask a stranger to go up against three Asian toughs over a grungy-looking canvas bag.

They stopped and conferred, the three dark heads close together, and then they headed for an abandoned building, a sooty former tenement with weathered plywood over its doors and windows. One of them found a way in, clearly much used from the evidence of the trash and crack vials scattered around it, and the three of them disappeared inside. Hopelessly, Lucy followed them in, as if drawn by an unbreakable wire. Her sneakers crunched thin glass, she ducked under a plank, entered darkness, and immediately, as she had half expected, was grabbed in a bear hug from behind, with the hand of her captor jammed across her mouth. The man holding her said nothing as he hustled her along the ruined corridor. She didn’t bother to struggle, but went dead in his arms, making him carry her weight. He was a slightly built but muscular man, smelling of acrid sweat, a lilac hair oil, and, strongest of all, a smell she knew very well. It was nuoc mam , a pungent sauce made from fermented fish, and it told her that she had been captured by Vietnamese.

“Why does this make me want to grumble?” said the district attorney. It was the morning after Karp’s interview with Fogel, and Karp was in the D.A.’s office, filling him in on the abortive negotiation.

“Because you want it to have been a break for us, and it may be a break, but not in the form it was offered. Lie thinks he’s being smart. Okay, he is smart, the little fucker. You know what they say, Jack, we only think criminals are stupid because we never meet the smart ones. Here’s a mutt who’s been selling dope and doing all kinds of evil for four or so years, and he’s got no sheet at all. If I took his bait, we could’ve found ourselves committing to look the other way on God knows what kind of mass destruction.”