Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“ ‘That we have met means fate binds us,’ ” Lucy quoted. “ ‘The will of man has often beaten back the whim of blue Heaven, but should the knot that ties us fail, I’ll keep to what is etched on bronze and cut in stone, and die.’ ” He gaped. Lucy placed her hand on her cocked hip, smiled, and batted her eyelashes rapidly. After a stunned moment he burst into laughter. Which she joined.

And after they stopped laughing she said, “I wasn’t really joking, Minh. I will be your friend. You’re not like the others out there, or the Vo.”

But he hung his head and looked away. “I have to get working. They want me to cook the pho for lunch, and I haven’t finished cleaning.”

“Go ahead, I’ll make the pho. Where do you keep all the stuff?”

“You can make pho ?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I was making pho before you were born.” Again, startled, he laughed, and his face was again transformed into that of a real kid, the dull mask of the hard man cast aside for an instant. She seized the moment to say, “Only trust me, Minh, you’ll see. Listen, those others, they can’t help what they are, and I don’t blame them, no, and I don’t hate them. I love Uncle Tran more than anyone besides my family, and he is a very bad man. He could eat them all. But you’re still young. .”

He looked at her now out of his real self. “You don’t know. You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“You’ve killed people, right?”

“Yes. And robberies. And worse, torture to make them tell. .”

“But you’re not going to do that anymore, are you?” God will forgive you, she thought, and almost said it, but her native good taste intervened.

He held the look for a moment longer, and then it fell away. He went back to the sink. “All the food is in the refrigerator,” he said. “We have rats.”

Marlene called Osborne on the car phone as she drove south on Second Avenue and got a woman named Meg Morrison in the research unit and asked her to generate a full history on James C. Nobile. She could’ve asked Sym, but Osborne would be quicker, and Marlene had a feeling that time was beginning to press in this case, after twenty-some years, and she had other things for Sym to do. She definitely did not like that Shirley Waldorf was missing from her accustomed streets.

“Credit and criminal only?” asked Morrison.

“And employment history, as far back as it goes.”

“By close of business all right?”

“That’ll be fine,” said Marlene. She hung up and turned east on Canal. The phone buzzed, and it was Tran. She had a short, unpleasant, and unsatisfactory conversation with him. She did not want to hear, or believe, that the NYPD was dirty with triad money. That was too much. She said so. Tran was silent, waiting. Marlene found herself thinking about how she was going to explain this to her husband. An unusual thought: Marlene in general did not much concern herself with explaining her actions, but this affair had moved beyond even her generous boundaries of what was acceptable in family life. She inquired after her daughter’s health, was told it was satisfactory, that the child had made a lunch for the gangsters. Perfect. Karp would be so pleased. She told Tran to sit tight and she’d be in touch.

The cherry on top of this marvelous morning was that when she pulled into the little parking lot near her office, there was the red pickup truck with the green fender parked across the street, empty. Cursing, she got out and walked over to it. It was locked. The gun rack behind the cab was empty, but peering through the dirty window, Marlene could just make out a box of Remington double-ought twelve-gauge shells. Charming. She wrote down the number of the Jersey plates and tried to think who she had offended in that state recently, and came up blank.

In the office she lunched on cottage cheese, a chunk of pepperoni, black coffee, and a cigarette, and got Sym involved in calling the city’s homeless shelters and hospitals to inquire whether they had a Shirley Waldorf. Marlene called Jim Raney and asked him to run the plate number of the pickup. He called back twenty minutes later with the news that the registered owner of that truck was a firm called Buttzville Landscaping, of that town, and they had not reported their license stolen either. Marlene laughed, only semihysterically, and Raney said, “You’ve been sneaking off to Buttzville again, Marlene, and doing it with the sod crews and now it’s coming back to haunt you.”

“What can I say, Raney, the smell of cut grass gets me off. Or maybe I forgot to pay for a load of mulch.”

“Yeah, I always forget the mulch bill, too. You want me to drop around, have a talk with the guy when he comes back?”

“Thanks, Jim, but no. I got too many factors going on in my life, and I’m just going to forget this guy right now. Tell the truth, it could just be my imagination, or coincidence. And if not. . well, if I can’t handle a shotgun-wielding hick gardener from Jersey, it’s time to hang it up.”

The calls drew a blank on Waldorf, and at three Marlene left and went to pick up the kids and Posie at the park. The pickup truck was gone when she looked. Maybe it was my imagination, she thought, or maybe it was the Mercury, and when she reached the park twenty minutes later, and Green Fender had not appeared behind her, she had nearly bought the story.

Posie and the boys were waiting at the appointed spot on Central Park South as Marlene pulled up.

“We got kidnappered, Mommy!” Zak screamed gleefully as the twins, Posie, and the dog piled in.

“I want to tell it, Zak,” Zik complained. “It’s my tell, because, I got kidnappered, not you.”

Marlene looked at Posie, who rolled her eyes. “It was nothing, some creep. .”

“My tell! My tell!” screamed Zik.

“Okay, darling, you tell Mommy,” said Marlene, heart in throat.

Zik said, “Once upon a time, Zik was playing in the sandbox in the park. .”

Zak said, “And Zak was playing in the sandbox, too.”

Zik shrieked out the rage of the thwarted artist and had to be calmed and Zak had to be made to promise to let Zik tell the whole thing in his way, and then Zik began with the same trope and then, “. . and I was making a duck with my red duck mold, I was making a whole long line of ducks in the sand, and this man came over and he said, hello, Zik, and he said, I know where there is some real-life ducks you can play with and you should come with me and I said could Zak and Posie come too and he said no, just you, Zik, and he came over me and held my hand and then Posie yelled and Sweety scared him away. The end.”

“Could I tell my story now, Mommy?” Zak shouted.

Marlene felt the hot, penetrating band between her eyes that signaled the start of a major, soul-threatening headache. She gripped the wheel until her knuckles glowed and said, with preternatural calm, “In a little bit, honey, but now it’s Posie’s turn to tell all about the man in the park. Posie?”

“Marlene, honest, it was no big deal. I saw this guy leaning over Zik and I watched him, and when he grabbed Zik’s hand, I yelled and he started to pull him up and I yelled again and grabbed Sweety’s lead and ran over there and Sweety was real upset and doing his Turner and Hooch thing, growling and slobbering and the guy saw it and booked. That’s it. Oh, yeah, and I caught a cop passing by and gave her a description of the guy.”

“Uh-huh. Good. Uh, Posie, this was an Asian guy, right?”

“Asian? No, he wasn’t Asian. He was, like, a regular American guy. But big, like a football player. He had wraparound shades and a suit and a shirt but not a tie kind of shirt, more of a. . what do they call those guys who hang around in Vegas? In the casinos?”