Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

She laughed. "Dear old Guma. But that's interesting. I wonder if it happens a lot or rarely. Mother-on-son incest. The other kind we know all about, girls blabbing about what bad old Daddy did every time you switch on the fucking TV. But the boys don't blab. Does that mean there's nothing there? Silence arouses my journalistic instinct. What about it, boys? Anyone want to confess. Off the record, of course. I'm not on duty."

"Rare, but not unknown," said Murrow after a pause. "A lot of fantasy around it, which is suggestive. Just check out the Internet. As a matter of fact, about ten percent of child sex abuse vics are boys, but that includes dad as the perp, of course. Then there's art. Luna by Bertolucci, Le Souffle au Coeur by Louis Malle."

"My God, he talks!" crowed Stupenagel. "It's a pity you're not up for adoption, Murrow. Or doesn't that hold any interest? I'd wear a housedress and you could be in diapers. No? Then you can refresh my drink."

She drank, and said to Karp, "So, do you think it was Mom who warped him and sent him on a life of crime?"

"I try never to speculate on causation. It's irrelevant, although there's practically never a case where the defense doesn't try to bring up their boy's sad life. A mutt is a mutt."

"Even when he's a cop?"

"Especially then."

"I could never figure out what happened in that thing last summer," she said. "I mean, even after all the shit that's been going down about bad shootings and police brutality, why a cop would even take the chance… what did you make of it?"

"Are you back on duty?"

"No. But as a victim of police brutality in four countries, including this one, I have an interest."

"It wasn't a police brutality thing," said Karp. "Not really. It was a police stupidity thing. A hell of a lot more common, to tell you the truth."

"So there must have been a lot of pressure on that case," said the reporter. "White cops, black victim. How come you took the case?"

Karp explained the situation and added, "Even so, I didn't think Jack would let me take it. They usually keep me away from cases with racial overtones, as you know."

"But I don't know. I was out of the country at the time. I'm a foreign correspondent."

"Then what are you doing here?" Karp said, not quite keeping the snarl from his voice. I'm getting drunk, he thought. Am I going to be a mean drunk?

She appeared not to notice. He imagined people snarled at her all the time, given her personality. She said, "Every place is foreign from the standpoint of someplace else. Pretend I'm reporting on the strange customs of American jurisprudence for a Canadian paper. No, really, all I know is the gossip. You punched out a black reporter is what I heard."

"I didn't punch him out," said Karp. "He got in my face in a hallway and I pushed past him and he tripped on some TV cables. Then a guy fell on him with a TV camera and his face got bruised. There was some tape with me scowling and this little guy with blood streaming down his face. The press made a big thing of it. And it was the case I was working on at the time, that had a lot to do with it."

"Okay, now it's coming back. That was that wacko who was after black grannies. You lost that one, if memory serves. Another racial thing?"

"Not really. It was a good jury. I just got beat. The guy, Rohbling, was a weedy white boy with a lot of money. His family hired the best lawyer in the country and the rest is history. He's in Matteawan now, until the shrinks decide he's not a danger to the community. It happens. The African-American sector was not pleased."

"Was that when they started calling you KKKarp?"

"Around then. They thought I was being insufficiently aggressive. They thought it was funny that a prosecutor who'd won over a hundred straight homicide convictions, mainly, if you want to know, where the defendants were what they call people of color, just couldn't hack it when it came to nailing a rich white guy."

"Did they have a point?" she asked slyly.

The interior of New York State gets surprisingly hot in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.

The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can't actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven't are pissed off because they haven't, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that's all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men's bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.

Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman's punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then- it was Marvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled- Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started dry-humping him right there in front of everyone, and all the white guys had dropped their weights and gone after him.

Felix had picked up a weight bar and gone in, too. After that it got blurry. He remembers cracking some heads with it, before the screws came in and started whacking everyone they could reach. He touched his side, moved his left arm. It stung, but didn't feel that bad. Someone had shanked him. He'd have to find out who and get even. Felix always got even and everyone knew it. It was one of his two main things, which was why no one had fucked with him after the first week, and now it was going on nineteen years here in Auburn. He was nearly forty-two.

A face swam into his field of view. A thin, pale brown face, the color of a sandy dirt road, shaven-headed, beak-nosed over a cropped gray beard, with prison glasses glinting in front of wide-set intelligent eyes. The Arab.

"How do you feel?" the Arab asked. He had a soft voice, only slightly accented. The Arab had been the chief trustee attendant at the infirmary for at least ten years. The Arab wasn't in a gang, not even in the Muslim Brothers, although he was an actual Muslim. Everyone left him alone for two reasons: one, you never could tell when you might have to go into the infirmary and hence find yourself in his power, and two, he provided dope for the whole prison. The doc was a junkie, and nodded off half the time. The Arab ran the place. Actually, three reasons. There was something about him, a look. The toughest cons, the yard bulls, could read it, and they treated the Arab with respect, and so, accordingly, did everyone else, including Felix. The prison records gave his name as Feisal Abdel Ridwan, which was somewhat true, and the crimes for which he had been sentenced as felony murder and armed robbery were also somewhat true. His actual identity and his actual crimes were kept secret, even from the prison authorities. This was part of the deal his lawyers had negotiated, to keep him safe, and to keep the information in his head on tap, should any of a number of U.S. government agencies wish to tap it.