Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Fuck! Ah, shit , I should’ve figured they had the place bugged.”

Karp threw himself into an old-fashioned wooden swivel chair, making it rattle. “Well, according to them, said tape demonstrates that you’re the Mob’s mole in the D.A. They were pretty convincing. Quote, I’m in the famiglia. Quote, you’ll be the first to know. Quote, the fix is in. Unquote. Easy to misconstrue, no?”

“Misconstrue? Shit, Butch, you can misconstrue ‘good morning’ negative if you put your mind to it. What went on between Gino and me was just the usual horseshit I do with those guys. Nobody takes it seriously.”

“Colombo does.”

“Right, and he’s a fuckhead, we know that. Next question.”

Karp took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re right. Jack will go a little ballistic, but who the fuck cares? Right is on our side, and that’s what counts. It looks like shit, but I don’t care about appearances, and you sure as shit don’t either. I mean, Guma, look at you!”

Guma looked down at his chest and then at Karp. Then he laughed. Karp laughed, too, and said, “Meanwhile, I can’t do anything about whatever passed between you and Gino, so you will respond to their fucking subpoena like a good citizen, and answer all questions asked, and explain what a jocular remark is, and fuck them if they can’t take a joke.”

Guma laughed briefly, then sobered. “It’s a damn good thing grand juries are secret.”

“Why?” asked Karp, and then it hit him. “Oh, you mean the boys might think you. .”

“Guaranteed. This gets out, nobody in town with a vowel on the end of his name’s gonna want to talk to me, and I’ll be wearing Kevlar underwear for the rest of my life.”

They were sitting on a warm rock overlooking the 97th Street transverse in Central Park, eating pho out of styrofoam boxes and washing it down with black tea from cardboard cartons, when Tran gestured with his chopsticks at the humming traffic below and said, in Vietnamese, “Dear child, suppose you have two squads, say sixteen men. Where would you dispose them so as to block that road?”

Lucy sighed dramatically and rolled her eyes. “I would have them join hands and march down the middle of it, of course. Why do you ask?”

“She mocks her elders. I see you will have to be drowned after all, and here is a large body of water convenient to the task.” He seized the back of her vest with his free hand and mock-pulled her in the direction of the reservoir. She giggled and shrugged away. “But truly, Uncle Tran, why at every street corner do you ask me, how would you attack that building, or defend it? When I was younger it was our game, but now it is peculiar. Ought I to worry about your mental powers?”

“Your concern for my failing mind is worthy and I thank you. Nevertheless, the reason for my asking such questions is plain. ‘Sea becomes mulberry fields and returns to sea.’ As you have read. Things change in unpredictable ways. When I was your age, I knew without the slightest doubt that I was going to teach literature at the Lycee Chasseloupe Laubat in Saigon. My future was planned, arranged, and secure, just as you imagine yours is. In the event, however, it proved necessary for me to acquire skills I did not dream of then, no more than poor Kieu in her father’s garden imagined she would serve in a brothel and live as a bandit queen. The potter’s wheel spins, disasters come flying on the wind, as they say.”

His eyes, as he said this, were both sad and fierce, and she felt a chill. “Very well, Uncle,” she said, and between slurps of noodle and pointing with her chopsticks she designated the positions of the riflemen, the machine guns, the fixed charges, the rocket launchers, and the planned concentrations of mortar fire in the dead ground. Tran responded with more questions, and soon they had so effective a kill zone designed that, had it been put into effect, New Yorkers would have found it far harder to get across the park than was presently the case.

They finished their meal, and Lucy trotted over the rise to find a basket for the trash. Tran had been her constant companion during her outings to the Columbia lab these last days, which was nearly the only time she got out, except for church. She was stifling but resolved not to show it, least of all to Tran.

She returned to the rock shelf and sat. Tran was still and silent, watching the road, as if he were preparing an actual ambush.

“Why are we waiting here, Uncle Tran?” she asked after some minutes. “My bottom is sore from this rock.”

“Have you any pressing engagements?”

“Only with the remainder of my life, if you can call it that,” she sighed, switching to her native tongue.

“In that case you can practice being still, a useful attainment, as you know. Squat also, as I do, rather than slouch like an empress on a divan. This will relieve your. . ah, you are saved. Here is what we await.”

A dark Ford van had pulled up on the shoulder of the transverse, discharging an Asian man in a tan suit and large sunglasses. He walked up the little hill and stopped at the base of the rock ledge. Tran formally introduced girl and gangster. They both nodded politely, and then Freddie Phat said, “They are back.”

“Where were they, do you know?” asked Tran.

“Upstate, and in Connecticut, Hartford, pulling home invasions. Kenny’s telling everyone that the first thing he’s going to do is kill you.”

Tran smiled unpleasantly. “Then I must flee for certain. Tell me, is Leung with them?”

“No, still gone. What they say on the street is he has traveled to Hong Kong, to report, and that he will return with his own people.”

Tran stood up, as did Lucy, who repressed the desire to massage her aching knees. Tran said, “That is interesting, and gives a certain urgency to our task. At this moment a freight container with ten assassins in it might be unloading at some airport. Where are the Vo now?”

“Their apartment on Hester, off Lafayette. They keep girls there. What do you want to do?”

“Oh, by all means let us visit, and join the party. Perhaps Lucy will read us passages from The Tale of Kieu , and we can all have a good cry.”

Tran and Lucy mounted the motorcycle, and they followed Phat in his van out of the park and downtown to Lafayette, parking both vehicles some distance from the junction of that broad avenue with Hester Street. Lucy sat in the back of the van and watched Phat talk to the man he had set to watch the house. There was some agitated conversation, and Phat showed considerable irritation. Lucy gathered that the two brothers had gone out a few minutes before. Tran and Phat and two of his boys went up into the house. The driver and the man Phat had used to watch the house sat in the front seats. The windows of the van were tinted to near opacity, and they kept the engine running and the A/C on, drowning out the sounds of the street. It was like being in a spaceship. The two men ignored her, nor did she wish very much to converse with them. (So, how do you like being a gangster. .?)

Instead she opened her Kieu and read about Kieu’s romance with the bandit-rebel chieftain Tu Hai, fairly hot stuff, and this kept her occupied, reading and thinking that she was uncomfortably close to hanging out with bandit chieftains herself, until the van’s door slid open and there was Tran, dragging by the arm a thin Vietnamese whom Lucy recognized from her kidnapping as Nguyen Van Minh, called Cowboy.

Tran threw the boy facedown into the space between the two rows of seats and kicked him flat, wrenched his arms around, and secured his wrists together with plastic cable tie.

“Do you recognize this garbage?” he asked Lucy.