Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

The Inner Karp also took this opportunity to inquire why Karp was doing this, getting drunk just before such an important and prestigious occasion. Karp strove for an answer; he was interested, too. A phrase floated up from memory: You're wound up so tight that one day you're going to crack and when that happens, look out! His wife's voice. First or second wife? Hard to tell; they had both expatiated on the theme. Can't believe I married a man who doesn't drink. That was definitely Marlene. Days of wine and roses? The drunk drawing the partner down the drain of self-destruction. Not really. Marlene was what she called a maintenance drunk. Come to that, Jack Keegan was pretty nearly in the same class, along with half the cops and judges in New York. And a binge every twenty years was not exactly a ticket to Betty Ford. But why now?

You couldn't discount Stupenagel's presence, the woman did drive him crazy, her challenging routine, daring him to match her drinking, as if that were some kind of achievement. And also not wanting to look like a wuss in front of Murrow. And why had Murrow brought that cognac? To celebrate, obviously, and it had gotten out of hand.

Or had it? Karp splashed some water on his face and dried it on a rough paper towel. Karp did not let things get out of hand, not consciously anyway, and only where his wife was concerned. Marlene was perpetually out of hand. So… he wanted to get drunk? The room swam, the white walls wavered like the reflection in a swimming pool. Karp fought off a wave of nausea. No, there was a purpose here, the need for some greater access to the reptilian brain. Down there must lie the answer to… what? What was the question? Why he felt this way. He had won, triumphed over everything, it had been a great year and the next would be even better. Why then did he feel like everyone knew a secret that he didn't know? He gets to be prom queen but it's all a big practical joke, a pig date on a metropolitan scale.

A toilet flushed, a stall door swung open, and out walked a man named Kevin Battle. Chief Inspector Battle was the chief of staff of the police commissioner's office and one of the major foundation stones of the Blue Wall. He had survived half a dozen PCs and confidently expected to be PC himself someday soon. He startled a little when he saw Karp. Karp was not his favorite person this year, so his smile was even more full and false than it usually was.

"Butch Karp! Man of the hour!" Solid slap on shoulder. "How're you doin' fella?"

"Fine, Chief. You're with the DA and his…?" Karp couldn't actually say "cronies" so he hung the end of the sentence on silence. Battle did not seem to notice.

"Oh, yeah, just sitting around telling lies. You ought to come by and tell some yourself. We were wondering where you'd got to?"

"I'm talking to a reporter. Telling lies myself."

Hearty laugh. The guy was good, Karp thought. He hates my guts and if I didn't actually know that, I would think he was being genuinely friendly. Karp had the same sort of feeling he had when he heard a great musician play or saw a great athlete perform: I will never be able to do that no matter how hard I try. That effortless phoniness. He wondered, not for the first time, whether this defect was a deadly disadvantage in his chosen walk of life.

Battle said, "You want to be careful around the jackals, fella. They'll eat you alive." He washed his hands, dried them, inspected his heavily decorated uniform in the mirror, brushed off a bit of lint. He paused at the door, his sharp blue eyes narrowing slightly as he gave Karp an appraising look.

"You all right? You look a little pale."

"I'm fine, Chief." Forming the words with extra care.

"Yeah? You don't look fine. A little early celebrating, huh?"

"A friendly drink with well-wishers." Change the subject. "So, do you have anything new on the governor?"

"Yeah, we just got the word he's on the Deegan, behind a snow plow. They said figure forty-five minutes. By the way, you know anything at all about this heating plant? Jack couldn't get through to anyone. If they don't turn it on there's gonna be ice on the walls by the time the big fella gets here."

"I know nothing," said Karp easily. "It's a shame, we wanted to give him a warm welcome."

Another hearty laugh, and Battle slipped away. But before he did, he gave Karp a look. It was a half-humorous, half… something else. Pitying? Contemptuous? Karp didn't know, but he had seen it far too often on the faces of Keegan and the various political hierarchs he hung with. Karp had met them all- party bosses, borough presidents, big contributors, judges- in various meetings the DA had arranged in the past months. Karp always got the big hello, the two-handed political handshake, the shoulder grip, but always there was that peculiar look. It was, of course, impossible to confront any of them on it. They'd think him crazy, or crazier than they probably thought him already.

Now it was less than an hour to the event and he still didn't know the punch line of the joke everyone else seemed to know. Maybe the governor would know what it was. Karp thought that if he got a little drunker, he might just ask him.

"Did you hear any of that?" Lucy asked as she entered the guest room and closed and locked the door. Dan Heeney, on the bed, looked up from the Powerbook on his lap and slipped down his headphones. "Say what?"

"Oh, nothing," she said, and lay down next to him. "What're you doing?"

"Well, since Zak told me you have a superwireless node in this building, I've been downloading some stuff from NASA, the new MAP data."

"Map of what?"

"No, it stands for Microwave Anisotropic Probe. It's a deepspace research satellite. It measures the background radiation of the big bang. Are you bored yet?"

"Almost. You're sure you don't want to come to this thing? You could see me in a little black dress."

"I'll see you before you leave. I'll pick lint off of you."

"But we'll go to a fancy restaurant after. We could sit together and play footsie."

"Gee, tempting, but I already agreed to do a conference with a couple of guys at Cal Tech and a guy at Case. Some fairly heavy hitters are supposed to join in. Besides, it should just be family going. How's your mom, by the way?"

"Ruined. Crazy, but holding it all together with masking tape and rusty wires. It's like the House of Atreus when she shows up."

"The who?"

"A Greek myth about getting paid back for your bad deeds unto the fourth generation. The Greeks were an ancient people who lived far across the sea…"

"Yeah, ha ha. We'uns din need no furriners up t' th' homeplace. Nossiree bob! We'uns spoke English jes like the Lord Jesus done."

"Barbarian hick. Anyway, it just kills me to see her like that. It hurts worse than torture in a way, you know? Because I don't have any memory of the pain. We don't, really, it doesn't get stored that way. We have empathy, yeah; my dad's got an awful knee injury and when he sees a guy get hurt on TV, it drives him nuts. He says he feels it all over again. That's not the same thing as recall. But spiritual pain goes on and on, because we can remember it. What we did to someone else, our sins against them, what we failed to do, how we let down the people who loved us, how we were violated and humiliated in the spirit."

"That's hard to believe," he said. "If I was mooning about, I don't know, the problem of evil or whatever, and I got a tooth abscess, I'd dump that high-tone speculation pretty fast."

"Not the same thing at all," said Lucy. "Yeah, you'd stop those thoughts and go to the dentist and get it fixed and then you'd have the problem of evil all over again, and the memory of the abscess wouldn't interfere with that spiritual pain. It might make it worse."

"Yeah, but it's her problem, not yours."