Robert Tanenbaum: Reversible Error

Office space was scarce in this era of New York's perpetual losing battle against crime. The building at 100 Centre Street had been constructed in the late thirties, a period when the poor knew their place, organized crime exerted a kind of discipline on criminal activity, and the police were able to apply such deterrence and punishment as they thought necessary without having to bother the courts: a golden age and long gone.

Now the system was operating at a level ten times higher than it was designed for and, when this was added to the normal tendency of bureaucracies to bloat with time, it meant that the building was bursting at the seams with the varied servitors of justice.

Given the strictures of civil service, a pleasant office is one of the few real gifts in the hands of an elected official like the D.A.; the D. A. did not incline to shower gifts upon Karp, and thus office space was especially scarce for his minions, among whom Marlene was, naturally, more than prominent, being, as was known, Karp's main squeeze.

Marlene didn't mind the office at all; it had zero status, which obviated the need to protect it from the more ambitious; it was out of the way, so that people had to make a special effort to bother her; and while it had no ventilation, it had plenty of room for cigarette smoke in its upper regions.

The alternative was accepting a cubicle in a big office bay, with only a head-high glass partition separating one from one's neighbor, who was likely to be a health fascist who would cough pointedly whenever one lit up.

Marlene put the card she had just filled out in its alphabetical place in one of her long boxes. Something about this particular case niggled at her mind, some pattern… She rubbed her temples, massaging them to stimulate greater brain power, a trick of hers since schoolgirl days. It had worked for Latin declensions and principal products of distant lands; but no longer. Her brain sat inert. She was sinking into bovine placidity, the old sharpness just a frustrating memory. She was three months gone and the baby was obviously starting to leach vital brain material from her very skull.

No, that couldn't be true! Plenty of women had borne children without any diminution of their mental powers, or sacrifice of career opportunities, or self-respect.

"Name three," said a voice in her head, the prosecuting attorney. It was a real voice and not Marlene's own, which caused her no little wonder; in fact, she admired its tone of affable contempt, and wished that she were able to summon it up herself in court. She was even able to visualize him, as composed partly of the Daumier print of an advocate that had hung in the anteroom of one of her law professors at Yale, jowly and lidded of eye; partly of that law professor himself, the son-of-a-bitch, and partly, just a hint, of her dear intended, Karp.

"Marie Curie," said Marlene out loud, whipping mentally through the pages of her NOW calendar, "umm, Rebecca West, and writers, lots of women writers-Anne Tyler, Margaret Drabble…"

"Oh?" said the prosecuting attorney. "And are you intending to become a writer? If so, you'd better hustle and establish your reputation in the next five months, so you can live on your fat royalties and hire a nanny. But you're not a writer, are you, Miss Ciampi? You're an assistant D.A. with $234.12 in your bank account and a fifth-floor walk-up loft in an industrial neighborhood. How do you intend to keep working once the baby comes?"

"I'll think of something," said Marlene, without conviction.

"Will you, now? Like what? Carrying a baby on your back while you run from courtroom to courtroom or out to crime scenes? Not likely! No, your career, such as it is, is over. It's diapers and the soaps on TV, and waiting for him to say, 'Hi, honey, I'm home!' You'll be dependent."

This last word seemed to reverberate in the courtroom of Marlene's mind like a cheap echo effect in a horror movie. Dependent. The jury in her mind, twelve aged Italian women in black, with cameo pins, rubbed their mustaches and nodded. It served her right, the crazy girl, what scandal… che pazza ragazz'. Che vergogna!"

This was too much. Marlene jumped to her feet, rapping her knees painfully against the bottom of her desk. The flash of agony cleared the court in her head. She grabbed her bag and an armload of current-case jackets and limped out of her office toward the hall to where the Criminal Courts Bureau had one of its main blocks of cubicles for junior staff.

Tony Harris was in his cubicle, on the phone. He was a gangly and engaging youth in his mid-twenties, with bright blue eyes, bad teeth, and no haircut. Seeing Marlene, he smiled and motioned with a helpless gesture to the only other chair in the tiny space, which was filled to overflowing with case jackets and stacks of green-and-white computer printouts. Marlene did not, in any event, wish to sit. She paced and smoked while Harris managed to convince a reluctant witness to appear in court for the third time.

When he finished, Marlene asked him, without preamble, "Will they do it?"

"What, your rape case correlations? Yeah, Data Processing farted around about it for a while, but I finally got them to admit it was a legit run."

Marlene brightened. "They'll do it? Great! When can I get the results?"

Harris crinkled his face. "That's the problem, Marlene-the when part. It's got-your job's got-no priority; it comes after the bookkeeping, the trial schedules, the rosters, the clearance stats, everything…"

"So, when?" Marlene snapped.

"Months. Maybe three, maybe four… and it can get bumped by nearly anything."

"But it's important!" Marlene wailed, and ran a hand through her thick tresses. "We're talking about finding criminal patterns, catching multiple rapists. And they're worried about bookkeeping?"

"Yeah, but bookkeeping is what they do, Marlene. Maybe you'd have better luck with the cops."

"Oh, sure! I tried that already. They want money to do the programming. Then maybe they'll think about it, the fuckers! I can't fucking believe this! How much time could it take? I thought computers worked like in no time at all."

Harris coughed and waved his hand against the smoke cloud. "Yeah, they do when they run," he explained, "but you got to put a lot of time in up-front to tell them what to run and make it all work. You would have to keypunch all those cards, for starters. Then you'd have to write the program, debug it, make your run, fuck with it some more, and run it again until it was right. Then, if you had any more questions, based on what you learned from the first run, you'd have to write a mod and then go back to the end of the line and wait again."

"That's outrageous,' cried Marlene. "I thought the goddamn things were supposed to make life easier!"

Harris grinned. "Your first mistake. But really it's not the machines, it's the people. And let me say that anyway these guys in D.P. are not exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to programming the kind of stuff you want to do. I mean, they can do tweaks on big standardized COBOL programs, and keep the payroll going, but correlations, social-science packages, ANOVA-it's out of their league."

"You sound like you know something about it. Could you-?"

Harris shook his head strenuously, held up both hands, palms out, and affected an expression of horror. "No, no way!"

Marlene said, "Tony, what, am I losing my charm? Wait, let me moisten my lips…"

"Marlene: N. O. Look, this is a serious piece of work, weeks at least for one guy. And I don't really know it. I mean, I made the stupid mistake of telling Karp that I knew something about computers from school and now he's got me riding herd on the numbers, so we can keep the data weenies honest, but that doesn't mean I could do a program like this right off the bat. I'd have to hit the books again-and then you still have the scheduling problem. Unless…"