Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“You speak Vietnamese!” he exclaimed.

“All Americans speak a little Vietnamese.”

He gaped at her. She said, “That was a joke.”

“But where did you learn it?”

“From a friend.” She indicated the book. “Have you read this?”

He looked down, flushing. “No, I had to leave school. To work, and then. . but I know this. .” and here he declaimed in a singsong voice, “ ‘The breeze blows cool, the moon shines clear, but in my heart still burns a thirst unquenched.’ ”

“Yes, that’s from where Kieu and Kim are on their first date and she plays her lute for him. It’s so beautiful. I wish I could read it better, it’s still hard for me. How old are you?”

“Seventeen. How old are you?”

“Fourteen,” she lied. “How long have you been in America?”

“Oh, six months, something like that.”

“And do you like this kind of work? Kidnapping people?”

He shrugged. “I have no choice. My family brought me over here, and I have to do what they say.”

They heard footsteps approaching. Lucy put her hand on his arm, which was warm and smooth. “Brother,” she said urgently, “please don’t tell them I speak your language. I think they would get angry if they knew.”

Cowboy stared at the little white hand on his arm. He nodded sharply and moved away as the other two men came back into the room. Kenny Vo, their leader, had apparently been contacted and was on his way. They sat back against the wall, chain-smoking, and talking about women and gambling and teasing Cowboy. Lucy shut her ears to that and returned to her translating, turning, as the poem recommends, the “scented leaves by lamplight to read the tale of love recorded upon green chronicles.” She had progressed to where the sisters Van and Kieu (both beauties, but Lucy decided to forgive them that, and besides, Kieu was possessed of a deeper charm and talented as well) were lamenting over the grave of a famous beauty of the past who had been betrayed and died of it, when Kenny Vo walked in and started barking orders. Vo had a family resemblance to his brothers, bearing a version both of Needlenose’s sharp features and Sharkmeat’s muscular bulk. He moved and spoke with casual brutality, and when he looked at Lucy it was as if he were looking at some inanimate and unappealing package, a sack of elderly chicken parts in need of rapid disposal, for example.

“Get her in the trunk,” he ordered. “Cowboy, watch the street.”

This was frightening. Lucy had always disliked enclosed places, and the dark, and being constrained, and so her control gave way, and she fought, and having been trained in boxing from an early age, she got a few good shots in before she was slapped silly by Sharkmeat and stuffed in the trunk of a Lincoln. Her bag was gone, but she had Tran’s book shoved down her waistband. An interminable, painful ride over New York’s infamously ragged paving, and then they popped the lid and threw a stinking blanket over her and hauled her indoors. She ended up on a mattress in what looked like the finished basement of a suburban house, a windowless room, panelled in cheap pine-look sheeting, with red and black linoleum on the floors. There were two doors, one locked, the other leading, delightfully, to a tiny bathroom. She used the toilet and then checked herself out in the medicine-cabinet mirror. Bruises on cheek and jawline, and a big smear of blood down her chin and spattered on her T-shirt from where her nose had bled: a mess. She washed her face gingerly and dried off with wads of toilet paper.

She went back into the other room, sat on the mattress, and listened. She heard the sounds of several men walking and speaking some tonal language, but could not make out what was being said. The Vo boys, she presumed, and maybe the Chinese guy. The talking became louder, turned into an argument. She heard stomping, slammed doors. From outside came the sound of car doors. A car started up and pulled away. Could they have left her here alone? No, she heard steps above. Sighing, she drew out the book and rolled over onto her belly. She translated:

Since time out of mind, cried Kieu,

harsh fate has cursed all rosy faces, sparing none.

As I see her lie there, it hurts to think

Of what will come to me hereafter

An unpleasant thought; she wished Tran would hurry the hell up.

Karp was dining in Columbus Park behind the Criminal Courts Building, using the twenty minutes he had to spare between his briefing of Jack Keegan and his appointment to address the incoming class of ADAs. He sat on the edge of a park bench, leaning over his spread knees, head down and slurping noisily, a position necessary if one wished to eat a sausage, fried onion and pepper hero laden with hot sauce and oozing grease without collecting souvenirs of the meal all over one’s immaculately pressed suit. An occasional pigeon darted in between his shoes to sample the dropped bits. Karp noted that the birds always dropped these after a taste, and took an odd comfort in the fact that his normal lunchtime diet would gag a New York pigeon. There appeared now in his restricted field of view a pair of gleaming faux crocodile loafers decorated with gold-colored clasps, above which were black silk socks, above which were the legs of a brown pinstripe on tan wool suit. A deep voice said, “Nice day for a picnic, Stretch. They said I’d find you out here, and here you are.”

Karp carefully deposited the ragged and soggy sandwich on a square of waxed paper and looked up. He saw a smiling solid man in his early fifties, broad-shouldered and half a foot shorter than Karp himself, with a brush mustache and graying sideburns on his mahogany face. Captain Clay Fulton was Karp’s first and best friend on the police force. A dozen years his senior, Fulton was the first black college-educated detective captain in the department’s history, highly decorated, feared and mistrusted by the department grandees, and hence left pretty much on his own. Officially, he ran the D.A. squad; unofficially, he was more or less Karp’s private police force, which amused him, and kept him virtually free of the cop bureaucracy he despised.

“It is,” Karp agreed. “Get yourself something from the wagons and sit.”

Fulton made a face and sat down. “I used to eat like that when I still had a stomach. You know, Stretch, when you’re a big shot you’re supposed to have lunch in a restaurant, the waiter brings you the food, the kitchen got a health permit, you bask in the admiring glances of lovely women. .”

“I’m practicing for when I get fired. You got any good news for me?”

“About this Lie character? Not to speak of. The prints came back zilch. Not known on NCIS. We’re trying Interpol, but that’ll take awhile.”

“Try the Hong Kong police.”

“You think he’s from there?”

“It’s a good guess. All these Chinese bad boys check in there sooner or later. Where did he go after I threw him out?”

“Downtown, an office building. His lawyer’s place, but they didn’t stay there long. They hopped a cab back up there.” Here he jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the federal building. “They went in, and about an hour later the lawyer came out alone.”

Karp nodded. “So they did a deal. Lie probably went out of the garage in one of those black-window vans with a couple of FBI guys to keep him company. He’s eating his chow mein in a U.S. government safe house as we speak.”

“They definitely did a deal. The feds rousted Joe Pigetti out of the La Roma restaurant twenty minutes ago.”

“See, that’s what we get for being honest guys. We get to finish our lunch.”

Fulton said, “You thinking now you should’ve grabbed him when you had him, maybe.”