Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Is he going to die?” she asked. There was a piece of white paper stuck to her knee in blood. She pulled it off and crumpled it in her fist.

“I think so,” said Tran. “He is shot through the lung and blowing bright blood.”

“Did you kill Leung?”

“No, I didn’t see him. I heard someone running away, but I first wanted to see that you were safe.” He paused. “I must go now. Some of the Chinese have been shot, and I do not wish for my friends and I to be imprisoned.” He shook his beach bag, which made a Kalashnikovish noise against the floor.

“I’ll see you,” said Lucy.

“See you later, crocodile,” said Tran in English, and left.

Lucy crouched over the Vietmanese and took his hand. He opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I am ashamed, but they made. . I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “All this is my fault.”

Then, as if magically, as if in a dream, the alcove was full of people. Her mother, her father (her father? ), Detective Bryan, Mary Ma, two paramedics, several policemen.

“Lucy, come away, honey,” her father said. “Let these guys get to him.” He knelt down and placed his arm around her.

Cowboy said, “No!” with such vehemence that he coughed up a froth of blood. He gripped Lucy’s wrist so hard her tanned skin turned white around his bloody fingers. He began to speak rapidly in Vietnamese, interrupted by spells of coughing. Lucy answered softly in the same fluting language. Tears were pouring from her eyes. Karp held his daughter tightly, and in his other hand a Sony soundlessly rotated, recording the best possible exception to the hearsay rule, a dying declaration.

“You don’t have to do this now,” Karp said. “You don’t have to do it at all. I can get a Vietnamese translator tomorrow-”

“No,” said Lucy firmly. “You said the faster we can get this done, the faster the cops can start looking for Leung. And I want to do it. He was my friend. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“Lucy, now stop it! It’s not your fault.” She shriveled and started to weep again, a slow snuffling drip, almost soundless, that had been going on almost without break from the time the dying boy had grasped her hand. They were in the Karps’ bedroom at Aunt Sophie’s house, where they had returned late, after endless exhausting interviews with the local cops and then the homicide cops from county and state police, and a couple of well-dressed gents from the FBI. In fairness, it was a complex story and the telling took some time, how a Chinatown double murder and a Mafia assassination had led to a machine-gun shoot-out in a beachside shopping center, and how Lucy Karp fit into all of it. Karp had been by his daughter’s side throughout, and thought she had handled herself well. Leung was the man she and Mary and Janet had seen at the murder-there was no point in hiding that any longer, and Mary confirmed it. But the locals and the staties were interested in the four corpses on their patch. Miraculously, no one else had been killed, although there were numerous injuries among the bystanders, some grave. Of the dead, two were simply explained: Leung had killed Nguyen Van Minh, aka Cowboy, and an NYPD police officer had killed Vo Van Hai, aka Kenny Vo. There were two other Asian corpses outside the Beach Bazaar, Cai Wenshi and Yang Wo-ming from their ID, and no one knew who had shot them, or whom Kenny Vo had been shooting at, or why.

Lucy professed ignorance of these details. Karp was not so sure. The list of people who could both mount a disciplined assault with automatic weapons and who were pals with his daughter was a very short one; perhaps it had only one member. Despite this, he did not press her on it. The other great mystery of the day was what had become of Mr. Leung. By four that afternoon several hundred officers from a half dozen police agencies had searched the area of the shopping strip and beyond, stopping cars, peering into crannies under the boardwalk, and questioning people, but with no success. Leung had vanished, and Karp believed that Cowboy’s last words might hold a clue to his plans. He prepared pad and pencil and pushed the recorder switch. The sound of coughing and then the boy’s voice.

Lucy said, “He says, ‘I am sorry. He is a bad person, my cousin, he. . does not know how to live as a human being. I am bad, too, although I did not want it to. . listen, it was Leung’s plan, all of it. First, we captured the Italian man, Catalano. .’ ”

Karp heard his own voice saying, “Did you kill Catalano?” and then Lucy’s translation and Cowboy, again. Lucy translated: “No, I drove one of the cars. Kenny killed Catalano. Leung was there. He looked at the clock and said when to fire. They fired through the man’s head. I was sick. Kenny laughed and he said, ‘Next time, you will do it yourself, it’s about time,’ and other things. They all laughed at me. I wanted them to stop laughing, so I did it. I came in through the back door and I shot them both, as Leung had ordered, in the body and in the head. I went on home invasions, too. In one place we raped a woman, and I pretended to also, but I was too ashamed. I did not want this kind of life in America. He knew you were the one, that day, you saw everything. He found out from the Chen. You called, they got the address where you were. She asked you. I should have shouted out or warned, but I was afraid. We came out here. I didn’t want to, but. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy. .” And the sound of crying. Karp flicked off the machine.

She was sobbing now, and she brought forth from the pocket of her cutoffs a wad of tissues the size of a softball, bits flying everywhere, and dabbed her eyes with it and blew her nose. Karp tossed his pad away and hugged Lucy to him, making comforting sounds without meaning, until the whooping sobs stopped and she relaxed against him, snuffling and exhausted.

“You should get some rest,” he said.

“Everybody thinks it’s my fault, don’t they?”

“Nobody thinks that, Lucy.”

She pulled away and faced him. “No, don’t be a daddy , tell me the truth! None of this would’ve happened if I just came to you and told what I saw in the Asia Mall.”

“You want the truth? Okay, yeah, it would’ve been better if you came forward with it-for you. For you , Lucy, not necessarily for the other people.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing. For Mary, I mean, and Janice. Dad, how could she have? I don’t understand. I thought she was, they are-were, like my family. I loved her. Wen jing zhi jiao. ”

“What’s that?”

“Friends who would die for each other. I thought. . oh, God, what a mess.” She stood and gave her face another wipe. “I want to go see Mary now, all right?”

“Sure, baby, go ahead. I’ll see you later.”

He checked over his transcription and put it away, and bent to pick up the scraps Lucy had scattered on the floor, placing them in a large tin ashtray on the bedside table. He did a good job, glad, actually, of one mess that was easy to clean up.

Marlene made a big batch of Spanish omelettes and buttered toast for the house, but the table was far from the merry assembly it had been on previous nights. Two people were missing: Posie had been kept by the hospital for a day of observation, and Detective Bryan, placed on routine administrative leave after the shooting, had gone back to the city. The rest ate with poor appetite, in relative silence. Even the twins were subdued. The girls left for their attic as soon as they could, and Sophie left early, too, complaining of pains in her hip. Karp took the boys for a walk on the beach before bedtime, accompanied by Ed Morris, while Marlene washed up. As she stood at the sink, Jake Gurvitz came in, picked up a dish towel and started to dry.