Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“I know that. The problem with prosecutor’s judges, as you well know, Roland, is that they’re so eager to please that they leave a trail of reversible errors the size of the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Give me fair any day.”

Roland ignored this last, waved, and went off to his date, leaving Karp feeling like a tendentious jerk. Having someone like Paine in there meant that you’d win your case, and two or three years later the guy would walk on appeal, which did not, if you were Roland and his many epigones, count on your scorecard. When Karp put them away, he wanted them to stay put for a decent interval, just as they had back in the golden age under Garrahy, but he understood that this was a minority opinion in the current age of brass.

Karp went back to his office, checked his messages, found one from his daughter and one from V. T. Newbury. Feeling only somewhat guilty, he called Newbury back first, had a brief conversation arranging for an immediate meeting, and then called Lucy.

“I have to go to the lab,” the girl said. “You still have that cop outside.”

“Lucy, we haven’t got those guys yet. I don’t want to take a chance on them trying anything again.”

“Tran will be with me. He’ll stay with me the whole time. Please, Daddy dear?”

She hadn’t called him “daddy dear” in a while, so he adopted a milder tone. What he wanted to say was, okay, Lucy, I know you think Tran is some kind of superhero, but we can’t take the chance, et cetera, et cetera, and more paternal bumf as needed, but all he managed to get out was, “Okay, Lucy-”

At which point she shrilled, “Oh, great! Bye,” and the phone went dead.

Karp yelled out a curse and redialed. Four rings and the machine picked up. He slammed down the receiver and dialed the first four digits of Marlene’s car phone before he recalled that his wife was still in the hospital. Uttering foul language, he then called Columbia information, got Shadkin’s lab number, called it. A woman answered and informed him that Lucy Karp had not yet arrived but they were expecting her. And who was she speaking to?

“Oh, never mind. . her father, tell her her father called and have her call. . oh, hell, just forget it!”

Who to call? He sat there for a minute, fuming. Call the cops? For what? They were doing what they should, looking for Kenny Vo and company. That damn kid! And what was he going to do when he caught up with her? Give her a spanking ?

“Should I come back?” V. T. Newbury asked from the doorway.

“Huh? Oh, no, I was just thinking of something.” Embarrassed, Karp put the phone down in its cradle.

“I’ll say. You were sitting there like a waxwork. I was thinking alien abduction.”

Vernon Talcott Newbury came in and sat down in Karp’s side chair, crossed his elegantly flanneled legs, and plunked a thick folder on the desk. Newbury was a short, slight, beautifully sculptured man, somewhat younger than Karp, the scion of a family that had helped give Peter Stuyvesant the boot back in 1667, and had been prominent in the financial life of the city ever since. That such a refined creature should have chosen to labor in the deep slime pits of the criminal courts was unusual; that he had stayed made him unique. Karp thought V.T. was the smartest person currently thus employed and considered him his best friend. He was an ornament at the Fraud Bureau, where it was agreed that when it came to tracking dirty money and bad paper, the perfect little gentleman (as he called himself) had no peer.

V.T. looked at Karp closely, a smile hesitating on his face. “You okay, Butch?”

“Yeah. No, my life is collapsing, but never mind. What’ve you got?”

“Marlene all right?”

“Yeah, recovering is what they say. Head trauma, they like to keep them in there for a while. So, you find out our guy’s secrets?”

“A few. Given the guy, I’d have to say I’m just penetrating the dew on the apple.” He opened his folder. “Okay, some background. This was explained to me by the nice Mr. Yat over at Citicorp. The first thing you start with when you want to trace someone’s movements or money is, naturally, his name. With Chinese persons this is not straightforward. The Chinese character that represents the name is unchanging, but the way we barbarians transliterate it into something we can read varies wildly, and not just because of the different systems we use, but because the way a character is pronounced varies depending on the speaker. When I say ‘varies,’ think, oh, English and Portuguese.”

“You mean the Mandarin and Cantonese business?”

“For starters. There are lots of dialects in China, really they’re independent languages, and so in the nineteenth century when they brought the telegraph in, they concocted a standard code for every character, and that’s the only way you can figure out someone’s real name, by getting him to write down the character and using a code book to look up the STC number, the standard telegraphic code. That’s what the Hong Kong cops use to keep track of people. Anyway, we obtained from Mr. Lie’s landlord a signature in characters-he says he’s Lie Tan Wo-and we faxed it to Hong Kong. His surname came up 2621, fine, but not much help. It’s like Smith, only worse, because that particular name is the third most common name in China. It means ‘plum.’ There are probably sixty million people named Li, or Loei, or Looey. Now, besides those, there are regional variations of any particular name that might not sound anything like Li. For example. .”

One thing about V.T., Karp now recalled, was that when he got his teeth into something, he went on about it, telling you more than you wanted to know. Besides, the conversation was reminding him uncomfortably of his daughter, sinking perhaps even now into some new oriental miasma.

“Cut to the chase, V.T.,” Karp interrupted. “Did you find the guy or not?”

“But this stuff is interesting . Jeez, what a grouch! Okay, we also faxed fingerprints and a snap one of Fulton’s guys took on the street. I spoke to a Captain Chui over there, and his people ID’d him as Nia Tu Wah. They were very surprised to learn Mr. Nia, that’s the surname first here, had shown up in New York. They thought he’d gone to the Yellow Springs.”

“Where’s that?”

“The land of the dead. He was, or maybe we should say is , a hot prospect in a triad called. . let’s see here, Da Qan Zi. It means ‘big circle gang’ or ‘big circle boys.’ ”

“And who are they?”

“Mainlanders. Big Circle was a Red Guard camp back during the Cultural Revolution. These people are all former Red Guards who got to like kicking in teeth back then and kept up the practice, except now they do it for money instead of for the Great Helmsman. Recently they’ve been expanding outside of the People’s Republic-Taiwan, Macao, Indonesia, and Hong Kong itself-leaning on the local triads. They do drugs, immigrant smuggling, prostitution, plus extortion. Very upsetting to the old-line triads is what I hear. Mr. Nia worked out of Macao.”

“Upsetting as in tong war?”

“Triads aren’t tongs, but yeah, there’s been violence. For example, in Jakarta last month. .” He stopped and looked at Karp, on whose face he recognized the lineaments of deep thought. Karp was off line, and V.T. waited while the processor hummed. “Yes?” he said when Karp’s eyes had unglazed.

“Oh, just something else. You know, we had a double murder in Chinatown the other week. Apparently a couple of big triad honchos from Hong Kong, father and son. Isn’t Macao near Hong Kong?”

“Like the Bronx and Brooklyn. You think there’s a connection with Lie? Or Nia?”

“I don’t know. I’m worried about Lucy. She’s involved in some way in it. Some heavy guys went after her the other day. No, she’s okay, but my mind keeps going back to it. She won’t tell me anything about it, apparently because she doesn’t want to get her pals in trouble, which leads me to believe some of the pals’ parents are embroiled in it. It’s just one more damn thing.”