Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Karp drew up a straight chair and sat down on it, his heart pounding. There was an instant of ice-cold, ignoble rage against his wife (why isn’t she watching this child?), which he suppressed, and a cacophony of head voices suggesting modes of trouble-drugs, thefts, sex, diseases-which he could not. He swallowed hard and asked, “Felony or misdemeanor trouble?”

“Um, well, I didn’t do anything bad, but there’s like a big felony involved .”

“You want to tell me about it?”

She looked away from him. “I can’t, Daddy, that’s the problem. I swore an oath I wouldn’t and there are other people involved, and they’d get in giant trouble if I told and they didn’t do anything wrong either.”

Karp resisted the impulse to switch from Daddy mode into interrogator mode. This was hard on him because he had no doubts about his skills in the latter and considerable doubts about his skills in the former. He made himself say, gently, “That’s quite a problem, Luce. How are you going to handle it?”

“I don’t kno-o-o-w,” she wailed, and started to cry. Karp moved next to her on the couch and swept her into his arms. Lucy was startled by the difference between being hugged by her father and being hugged by Tran, so much so that she stopped crying. She totted up the differences, fascinated. The smell. Daddy was regular American, like the air, a little soap, a little aftershave, clean cotton and wool, Home. Tran was fish sauce, lilac hair oil, motorcycle oil, leather, foreign, Other. The feel. Daddy was large, comforting, deep, summoning thoughts of babyhood, absolute security, the moments before sleep. Tran was hard, protective, too, but like an iron shield, something you had to use, not just sink into, and a wild heat came off him, in her imagination like hugging a leopard. It then occurred to her that once Tran had hugged his own daughter, and that he had not been like that to her, no, he must have been to that girl the same as her father was to her. She tried to imagine Tran different, softer, and then the Asian thing struck her again, the suffering. She was sobbed out by now; still, thick tears trickled down her cheeks. And a last thought, more of a wordless feeling: this sinking safety, delightful as it was, belonged to her past, she was going away from it even now, but Tran, or something Tran-like, was her future. She recalled how she had acted the spoiled baby and threatened him and felt deep, blushing shame.

Karp held his daughter away from him, at arm’s length, saw the agony in her face, said as gently as he could, “Lucy, listen to me. You are a kid. This is over your head. You can’t handle this yourself. You have to tell me about this, now, the whole story.”

“I can’t, Daddy.”

“Well, then let me tell you what I think I know already,” he said, his voice growing sterner. “You witnessed a crime. What crime? A good guess would be the double murder at the Asia Mall. Why? It went down in a place you hang out in all the time. I know you and your pals like to play hide in that storeroom; maybe you were there when it happened and saw who did it. I know you got beat up today, and I doubt it was a random mugging. Somebody was sending you a message. They were telling you to keep your mouth shut. And you’re doing just what they want, just what the bad guys want.”

“That’s not why I’m not telling. I told you, I swore I wouldn’t.”

“Lucy! Listen to me! This isn’t a kid thing anymore. You have to tell me.”

As soon as this was out, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. She stiffened, and on her face appeared the very tintype of her mother’s mulish expression. He changed tack.

“All right, Lucy. You came to me for help. What do you expect me to do? Huh? Hey, great, you’re concealing evidence of a felony, here’s a dollar for ice cream, run along and play? You know, I swore an oath, too, to uphold the law. I’m not allowed to ignore stuff like this. If you weren’t my daughter, I could get a judge to hold you as a material witness, and then you’d be put under guard, and when it came to a trial you would have to tell what you knew and if you didn’t you could be jailed for contempt and kept in jail until you talked. That’s the law.”

“Okay, arrest me, then! Go ahead! I don’t care.”

Karp sighed. “Oh, sh. . I’m not going to arrest you, okay? I’m in the same fix you’re in, kid. I’m your father, you come first, no question. But as of now, I’m breaking the law. So we’re both in a pickle.”

“Could you, like, lose your job?” she asked. This aspect of the situation had not occurred to her before. Indeed, she was over her head.

“I could, if anyone found out about this conversation,” answered Karp, feeling horribly guilty at putting this kind of pressure on the girl, but what else could he do?

Lucy wrapped her arms around her head to shut out the tormented choices and buried her face in the cool, smelly leather of the couch. Karp waited. She said something he didn’t catch.

“What was that, honey?”

“Kenny Vo,” she whimpered.

“Who’s Kenny Vo?”

“The guy who beat me up. He’s a Vietnamese gangster.” She described what had happened to her, and he took notes. His throat and nose ached with stalled weeping. When she ran down, and had another cry, he asked, “Did he do the murders, too?”

She blinked away the silvery tears, and her pale brown eyes stared levelly into his. “I don’t know anything about any murders,” she said.

“Okay,” said Karp, knowing when he was beaten. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to get Ed Morris to take you back home, and I’m going to arrange for a policeman to watch the loft. I don’t want you going out by yourself until we get this thing cleared up. Do you understand that? Not even down to the store, or to Mott Street, or Janice’s. If you can’t promise me that, then you really will have to go into protective custody.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she said meekly, carefully not promising, and to her immense relief, he turned to the phone and did not press her on it.

When Morris, Karp’s driver and also a D.A. squad detective specially trained not to ask questions, had taken Lucy away, Karp went to the men’s room, splashed cold water on his face, dried it with a towel, and looked deep into the mirror to see if the monster he had become showed much yet. No, not much, which said something for clean living and an absence of cynicism. Karp had been perfectly sincere in his lecture. He was not cynical about the law, was in truth as deeply in love with it as he had been when as a young, dewy bride he had first stepped across the threshold of 10 °Centre Street long ago, and was continually amazed at how a system so inherently stupid and run, by and large, by moral imbeciles, kept cranking along, doing as well as it in fact did. What had not come up in the lecture was what to do when dedication to the law ran up against love of family. Marlene’s shenanigans were bad enough, but Marlene was at least an adult, and Karp truly believed that if he caught his wife in a conscious felony, he would turn her in. It was different, he discovered, when his child was involved, a child who was turning out more like her mother than Daddy felt comfortable about.

Yes, the mother. Karp went back to his office and placed a furious call to the mother, and, fortunately for his marriage, did not get through. He was too old-fashioned a man to allow himself to express anger to an anwering machine, so he left a mere urgent message. He did the same at her office, and then tried the car phone (nothing) and then left another message at her paging service. He then put his notes into shape for a warrant and called Mimi Vasquez, who was in, and available at that very moment.