Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Do you want to hear this now?” he asked gently.

“Sure.”

“Okay. Tomorrow, you, me, Posie, and the kids are going out to Long Beach to stay with Sophie at the house. I’ve arranged for Ed Morris and Debbie Bryan to come along.”

“Who’s Debbie Bryan?”

“A PW on the squad. She’s good, you’ll like her.”

“Uh-huh. What about Tran?”

“No Tran. No Vietnamese shooters, Marlene. No more. This is straight up, by the book. We’ll stay out there until this goddamn mess is resolved.”

Marlene mumbled assent.

“I called Harry. I told him you’re off the Fein thing until further notice. I got Clay Fulton working on the Wu business. They’ll put a team on him and see if he makes contact with Leung again.”

“Uh-huh. What about your work?”

“Fuck it! Crime will be rampant for a week while I’m out of town. Jack will be back tomorrow, and I’ve got about a thousand hours of leave. He doesn’t like it, he can lump it. You need to rest, and I’m going to make sure you do if I have to sit on your head.”

The phone rang. Marlene visibly cringed. “Don’t answer it!”

It rang three times, and the machine cut in. A crackle of static, then, “Marlene, pick up! Marlene, this is an emergency! Marlene? Chingada madre! Look, Marlene, Brenda Nero just went crazy. Chester dumped her and left town and she thinks you got him to do it and she was screaming about how you ruined her life and she started a fire here and while we were running around like cockroaches she got into my office and stole my Colt. I think she may come looking for you. Marlene? Christ! Just call me, okay?” Click.

Marlene uttered a loud groan, almost a howl. The dog sat up, startled. Marlene burrowed into the sofa and dragged a pillow over her head. Karp stroked her back and made soothing noises, as did the mastiff, in his way. This went on for some time. They heard the elevator rumble into life, and shortly Lucy came stomping in, as if returning from the junior prom.

“Hey, what’s going on?” she asked brightly. “What’s wrong with Mom?”

“Your mom’s a little out of it right now, Lucy. What’s going on is that we’re going out to the beach tomorrow, Aunt Sophie’s.”

“All of us? What about my lab?”

“Take a break. You’ll still be a genius when we get back.”

“Can I bring Mary Ma?”

“No.”

“I’ll go call her,” she said, not hearing, and started for the phone.

“Lucy! I said-”

Marlene said, “Let her. One more won’t make a difference to Sophie, and if she doesn’t have someone to hang out with, she’ll get bored and bitchy and she’ll pick at me and the boys and she’ll drive me crazy. Crazier than I am. Please.”

So the next morning early the Volvo was packed, after the usual alarms and shrieks about forgotten things, several trips up and down the elevator, Karp admirably keeping his temper, acting as major domo, Marlene listlessly observing, and they set out. Karp drove the car, something he ordinarily did as little as possible, blessing its automatic transmission, and Marlene sat next to him, wearing huge wraparound sunglasses, a head scarf, a straw hat, a short-sleeve shirt, and blue linen shorts (looking wan and exhausted like Judy Garland in her final year), and in the rear seat sat Lucy and Mary Ma (who knew what oriental stratagems she had used to convince her parents to let her go?) and Posie, wearing a tank top (braless, as Marlene had-uncharacteristically-not even noticed until it was too late) and a pair of jean cutoffs heavily embroidered and more holes than not, and the two boys shoved down among them like chickens on a third-class Honduran bus, squealing with excitement, and the dog wheezing in the luggage compartment, squashing the bags and drooling from time to time on the bare necks of the girls.

As they pulled onto Canal Street, a dark Plymouth slipped into line behind them, this carrying Ed Morris and Debbie Bryan. Bryan was a chocolate-colored woman with a cropped afro and a long neck, her upper body stuffed fetchingly into a red tube and the lower encased in loud print culottes. Morris was wearing a pink shirt and bermudas. Neither of them was complaining about this particular duty. Cop work was rarely a day at the beach, but now it actually was.

The small caravan went through the Battery Tunnel and onto the Belt Parkway, heading south around the pregnant bulge of Brooklyn. Karp knew the way by heart, having traveled it virtually every summer day of his childhood to his family’s beach club on Atlantic Beach. He and his two brothers would nearly come to blows during the ride over who would get to pay the toll on the Marine Parkway bridge (the loser getting to pay the toll on the Atlantic Beach bridge, but since there were three of them there was always one absolute loser and since Karp was the youngest, it was usually him). They had not been particularly pleasant trips, he recalled, having been full of the civil sadism of unhappy families. This one was much better, he thought, so whatever happened he was that much to the good. Posie (the sort of person who never would have been admitted to the precincts of the elder Karp family) had devoted virtually all of her brain cells that had not been fried by drugs or required for basic body maintenance to the memorization of rock ’n’ roll lyrics, from the fifties unto the present day, and she was not shy about sharing them. Aside from Karp and the dog, everyone sang. Even Marlene, Karp was happy to observe, kicked in on “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and Mary became reasonably competent at providing doo-wah backgrounds after Lucy explained, amid general hilarity, that doo-wah did not in this case mean “inverted Chinese” as it does in the language of Guangdong. It was all in all very nearly like a happy family outing rather than a flight from killers.

Sophie Leontoff’s house was large and white, with a long screen porch across its front supported by squat pillars. It sat behind a large lawn on a side street in the town of Long Beach, alongside similar houses, most of them the property of New York’s old middle-elite, the money from schmatehs and other material substances rather than from advertising and media and show business, as in the Hamptons. Comfortable and unhip was Long Beach and this house.

Karp had debated whether to let Sophie in on the full situation and had decided to do so, first because he disliked prevarication (and a fake story that would explain two cops would have to be a doozy) and because he thought a lady who had spent three years in Paris running from the Gestapo and later survived Ravensbruck could probably handle a mere squadron or two of hit men. He was correct in this; nor was Aunt Sophie at all put out by the extra people arriving at a house with only three bedrooms. The children were shipped up to the attic, reached by a drop ladder, to the delight of the twins, and also of Mary Ma and Lucy, who got to share an ancient, lumpy four-poster in an alcove, a prime staying up to all hours giggling locus, which left one bedroom for the Karps, one for Sophie and her paramour, Jake (who sat chewing a cigar, observing the invasion with wry good humor), and the small one in the front of the house for Posie and Bryan. Ed Morris got the sofa bed on the sun porch in back. Karp noted that this arrangement meant one cop was stationed by the rear door and one overlooking the front lawn, and wondered if Aunt Sophie had figured that out by herself.

Settled, unpacked, fed (an immense tray of sandwiches from the Long Beach deli, pickles, cole slaw, beer, wine, and sodas, gorged upon), warned not to swim before digesting, the party set out for the short walk to the beach club. The twins insisted on going to the men’s locker room, so Karp had the duty of getting his kids changed into their tiny swimsuits, in a replica of the damp-smelling closet in which he and his brothers had changed a million years ago, or maybe it was exactly the same one, for this was the very beach club to which his own family had come in the forties and fifties.