Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Amazing," said Karp, shaking his head. "And you're still alive and halfway competent. I salute you. Is that woman still in my office?"

"Yes, she is," Murrow admitted.

"Still drinking?"

"Steadily. Your pal Guma showed up and brought more jet fuel."

Karp brightened. "Oh, yeah? Good old Guma! Are they playing nice?"

"Sort of. I gather they have a history."

"Yeah, years ago. Being the two most promiscuous heterosexual people in New York with college educations, it was probably a mathematical certainty that they would sooner or later end up in the rack together. It didn't last, though."

"A real shame," said Murrow. "They seem to deserve each other."

Karp gave him a stern look. "Why don't you let me be the disapproving puritan, Murrow. It suits my age and status better. Guma happens to be one of my best friends, and Stupenagel is one of my wife's best friends. I realize that neither of them is completely housebroken, and they leave hair on the couch, but they're both the kind of person that they don't make many of anymore, sort of throw-backs to a more dramatic and less politically correct age, and I prize them for it when they're not pissing the hell out of me. Everything is better nowadays, of course- we don't smoke, we don't drink, we're strictly monogamous, or else if we're not we have to be investigated by the whole fucking legislature and go on Oprah to confess, and that's fine and dandy, and it also happens that I was all goody-goody like that, way, way before it became fashionable, or required, if you can believe it, but still… I detect a certain shrinking of the great human canvas, especially around the neighborhood of the courthouse. Not only do we not have smoke-filled rooms, we barely have mafioso anymore, or political bosses. Instead we have pissant little white-collar criminals on the one hand and brainless thugs on the other. It makes for a lot less interesting life if you're in the business of putting asses in jail. Are we done here, by the way? We hang out together in the men's any longer, people'll start to talk."

"Not that there's anything wrong with that," said Murrow, pushing open the door.

Karp laughed. "Yeah, right. Another cosmic change. In any case, Guma and Stupenagel: both extinct- no, endangered- species. The hard-drinking, I-don't-give-a-shit reporter, and the quasi-legal DA. They're like grizzly bears. Horrible and terrific at the same time. I mean, everyone says, 'Boo-hoo, save the bears,' but would you want one in your backyard, eating the poodle, the cat, little Susie?"

"Why is he quasi-legal?"

"Because Guma is, or was, the reigning expert on La Cosa Nostra in this office, encyclo-fucking-pedic on the subject. He knew them all, the whole Brooklyn Mob, including Murder Incorporated. He was on a first-name basis with every capo regime in the city over the last thirty-five, forty years. He saw them rise and he saw them fall, and helped out in both directions."

"You mean he was corrupt?"

"Not as such. But his relation with the Mob was extremely Sicilian. Guma probably put more Mafiosi in prison than any other living New York prosecutor, but he also let a lot of them go, if he thought it was better for the long-term health of the criminal ecology. Not a strictly legal position, maybe, but one that suited him and the times. It was a risk, too. Swimming with the sharks. The Mob doesn't shoot people like us as a rule, but they'll make an exception for guys who pull shit like Ray pulled from time to time. Giving a break to a slightly dumber and/or less vicious guy so as to grab up a slightly more dangerous gangster- like that. And, of course, that's another thing he's got in common with Stupenagel. College-educated middle-class people usually don't put their bodies on the line in their daily work. That's the way of civilization, of course, which as reasonable men we have to approve, but it's also a little dull. Like you and me, Murrow."

As he said this, Karp experienced a minor epiphany, in that he finally understood why being married to Marlene was necessary to his life. Yes, she drove him crazy, but she also prevented his life from going gray. He thought of the few peers who had been at it as long as he had. Keegan, his caution, his perpetually unsmoked cigar. Others, graying men who wore ratty cardigans in their offices. Some of them had Dickensian eccentricities that everyone excused, but joked about all the same. He shuddered.

"What?" said Murrow.

Karp gave him an inquiring look. "What what?"

"All of a sudden a strange expression appeared on your face, like you discovered the secret of life, or were having a stroke."

Karp let out a short hard laugh and threw a big arm over Murrow's shoulders. "It was the secret of life, my son."

"May one know it?"

"When you're older, Murrow. It wouldn't make any sense to you now. Let's go back and join the party and see what excesses our friends have perpetrated in our absence."

"Oh, good," said Guma when Karp and Murrow entered, "you didn't fall in. What the hell is wrong with the heating? My nuts are freezing off."

"No loss to the world, if you ask me," said Stupenagel.

"I didn't ask you," said Guma. "What I asked you was if you could breathe on them to take the chill off, but oh, no…"

Karp sat on his couch, a little grumpily, because he could not figure out a polite way of kicking Stupenagel out of his chair. Instead, he said to Guma, "You can't smoke in here, Goom. In fact, you're not supposed to be smoking at all."

Guma admired his big Macanudo and took another puff. "Excuse me, are you speaking as the deputy fire marshal or as my personal fucking physician? Every time I smoke one of these things it takes fifteen minutes off my life, and considering what my life is like nowadays, it's worth it. That's yet another thing that was better in the old days- right, Stupenagel?"

Stupenagel said, "Yes, Karp, we've been sharing some old-fart moments, even though he's, of course, vastly older than I am. Decades. Guma longs for the days when the criminal justice system was even more arbitrary and vicious than it is now, and when, in his phrase, 'you fucking jackals' knew your place, which was to take our split of the graft and stick to the sordid affairs of the lowlifes."

"An exaggeration," said Guma.

"You think the system is arbitrary and vicious?" asked Karp.

"Yes, of course," she said, "don't you?"

"No, not really," said Karp.

Stupenagel swiveled Karp's chair around and stared at him as if he had just wondered why, if the Earth was a ball, the people on the bottom half didn't fall off. Karp noticed this, and also that she had somehow partially undrunked herself. Her jaw had stiffened up and her eyes were no longer floating in a boozy sea. He recalled that this was one of Stupenagel's more valuable journalistic talents, but whether it was a result of ruse or immense natural capacity, he had never been able to tell.

"I mean, it's not what it should be," he continued, "it's a human institution, like the church and the press. Humans are fallible beings."

"There's no comparison at all," she replied. "The press, my sweet fanny! What if every time I wanted to run a story I had to convince twelve high school graduates selected at random that it was true, while some other guy tried to convince them it was false."

"You'd be wrong less often?" suggested Karp.

"Excuse me, but if we had to print retraction notices as often as DNA evidence freed people you guys convicted, we wouldn't have any room for the bra ads, and Guma would stop reading the paper. Can you really sit there and tell me that the American justice system has any other purpose than the aggrandizement of fucking lawyers? Oh, and to make sure that rich people don't have to pay for their crimes any more than once or twice a decade. Do you realize that over ninety percent of the people in this country believe that some innocent people are convicted of murder? A hundred and fucking ten murder and rape convictions at last count thrown out because of genetic testing."