Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“You want me to bring the Five in on this?” was one of them.

Karp thought of Phil Wu. He had been hard on Wu, and he figured it would be a decent gesture to let the guy in on a good collar. Clay Fulton was way past needing credit for big arrests. He said, “Yeah, Phil Wu’s the man there. And make sure they have a Vietnamese interpreter along. I don’t want these guys getting shot because of a mistake. Call me when you get it done, whenever. I’ll be here.”

After discussing a few more details, they hung up, and Karp went back to Lucy’s room. This time he sat next to her on the bed and pulled her close. He noticed that she had washed her hair, a good sign, and, putting his face close to the herbal-scented dark curls, he said, “All right, that was the D.A. part. This is the Daddy part. Is there anything else you want to talk about?” No answer; he felt her head shake against his chest.

“I’m worried about you, Luce,” he said. “We’re a family. There shouldn’t be any secrets in a family.”

“Hah!”

“What, you think there are secrets?”

She pulled away and looked up at him, meeting his eyes, which he thought was a good sign. She said, “Are you kidding? You’re running the D.A. and my mother is a part-time felon, so what do you think? And I’m probably a felon, too.”

“You’re not a felon, honey,” said Karp, startled as this sentence left his mouth, for it was not one that he had ever imagined saying to a child of his.

“How would you know?” she snapped, and then sagged against him again, cuddling into his arms. In a weary voice, too weary, Karp thought, for the voice of a child, she said, “I don’t want to be a freak anymore. And don’t say ‘you’re not a freak,’ because I am. It’s a scientific fact. And I’m tired of all this. . shooting and kidnapping and hospitals. I want things to be regular , like a regular family. And I love Tran, but he thinks he’s still in the war, and we have to play soldiers all the time, and I used to like it, it was fun and exciting, but now. . what’s that called when soldiers go crazy from fighting too long?”

“You mean combat fatigue?”

“Yeah. I don’t want this anymore. Sometimes, you know, like when you daydream? I dream that I have this room, with just my things in it, and attached to it is a big library with all the dictionaries and grammars in the world, and language tapes, and that’s all, just a big white room, and it’s on an island, with nobody else on it. And people could come by boat, or something, but they couldn’t get on except if I wanted them to. And I could stay there and not be bothered by all this stuff. Crazy, huh?”

“Not really,” said Karp. “Could we have cable? And bagels?”

She giggled. “Oh, right, we need one of those machines they have on Star Trek , a replicator, that gets you anything you need.”

“Good idea, and we would need some hoops, full-court on parquet, like the Boston Garden. .” He stopped because the girl’s face had fallen. “What? No parquet? Okay, a half court, on planks. We’re only going to play horse and one-on-one, anyway. Lucy, what is it?”

She shrugged. “I’m sleepy,” she said. “I need to say my prayers now.”

“Okay, Luce. But. . I don’t know how, but I’m going to fix this for you. This is wrong. You’re a kid, you shouldn’t be going through this now.” He kissed her forehead.

She gave him a bleak, heartbreaking little smile, and he went out the door. Before he shut it, he looked back and saw her cross herself and kneel by the bed, her head down on her clenched hands, resting on the bed, her body stiff with concentration. He could see the knobs of her spine through the thin cloth of her T-shirt, but he could not hear her murmurings, which, after the usual preliminaries, were, “Dear Lord, bless and keep my family and friends, and bless Tran, and take the violence and hate from his heart, he is really a good man, and help me to love my mother, and to be nice to her, and help her to love me, not just worry about me, which isn’t the same, make her understand that, please, and don’t let my father worry too much about me, it drives me crazy, and let Janice like me again the way she used to, and protect her and the Chens from the triad, and let them catch the guys who did it, and no more killing, please, and let them not hurt Cowboy, because I think he’s really not a bad gangster, and give me spiritual strength, dear Jesus, and help me control my temper, and also, if it be Your will, please, please, could I have some breasts? Amen.”

Always an uncomfortable moment for Karp, watching his child worship a God he didn’t believe existed and in so alien a fashion. He sent into the agnostic void a hopeless quasi-prayer of his own that whatever she was praying for might be delivered, after which he gently closed the door and walked down the hall to the living room, where he found his wife sprawled on the red velvet couch, sipping coffee and watching television. She lifted her legs, he sat down, and she dropped her calves across his lap, having converted Karp over the years into a pretty good foot massager. But only a desultory rub did she get tonight.

Marlene muted the volume of the show, a sitcom of no particular distinction except as an evening anodyne, and asked, “How is she?”

“Depressed. Exhausted. Marlene, we have to do something about this kid. I don’t care what you say about her special qualities, she needs to be moved out from under this load she’s carrying.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Get her out of town, for starters, until this thing blows over. Hey, it’s the summer. She could visit John or Anna or Patsy, hang out with the cousins. We could send her to camp, or. . I don’t know, a summer program, anything to get her out of here, and get her mind off what went down in that goddamn stockroom.”

Marlene considered this for some moments. “You’re concerned she could be in danger?”

“Jesus, Marlene! Of course I’m concerned. Aren’t you?”

“To an extent,” she replied with unnatural calm. “So, what is it, you have visions of Chinese hit squads bursting in and spraying bullets at her?”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility,” he admitted, “and that’s why-”

“And so you think the best place to put her is on my brother’s or my sisters’ suburban lawn with a gang of cousins? What, to absorb some of the bullets?”

“Don’t be stupid, Marlene! I only meant that-”

“And you think that if someone wanted to get her, they wouldn’t know how to find out where my relatives lived?”

“We could make arrangements to have her watched.”

“By who? Rent-a-cops? Butch, I’m in the business ! Please do me the courtesy of acknowledging that I know what I’m doing here.”

“So what do we have now? The great and powerful Tran? That’s it?”

She shook her head, irritated. “Butch, where do you think Tran is, right now, this minute?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, I’m not sure either, but”-here she lifted her eyes upward-“I would guess that he’s slung in a hammock on our roof with a Kalashnikov across his chest. Anybody tried to come through that door, assuming they got through the cordon of tough little Viets he’s had posted around this block since the kidnapping, he’d be down through that skylight in about three seconds and turn whoever it was into shreds. You think the Valley Stream P.D. out by my sister’s would mount an operation like that for Lucy?”

Karp raised his own eyes to the ceiling. “He does this every night? When does he sleep?”

“I’m not sure that Tran does sleep. In any case, does that make you feel any better?” Karp stared blankly at the screen, letting the silent images bounce meaninglessly off his eyeballs. The sitcom was over, the commercials were selling bright goods.