Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

The call to Downstate, which was just across the street, had reminded him of a neglected duty. Neglected because Karp hated hospitals. He was ashamed of this, but he could not help it. The smell got to him, the disinfectant, the sweetish floor wax, the sharp tang of alcohol, and the darker odors against which the cleaner ones fought; and lost to a large extent. His mother had died in a place like this when he was fourteen; Marlene had spent considerable time in hospitals, too, and each time he had to go was like a small death.

Raymond Guma was sitting up in bed talking to Eddie Bent. Guma was a very old friend of Karp's. He had been a veteran at the DA's when Karp arrived, and although not strictly speaking a mentor, since his reputation was not the best and everything he had to teach was barely legal, Karp treasured him as a reminder of the dear old days at the DA, when guys in fedoras and three-piece suits with watch chains had fought the Mob in its power, and neither Miranda nor Escobedo had yet been heard from. Guma knew more about the Mafia than anyone else in New York, not excluding the heads of the traditional Five Families.

"Butch Karp!" exclaimed Guma when Karp walked in. "For a minute there I thought you were the priest. Got a little worried."

"You don't look like you need a priest, Guma," said Karp. "A girl maybe."

Guma brought up a hoarse laughlike noise. He actually did not look as bad as Karp had expected and feared. He looked like a shriveled, old monkey, true, but he had always looked a little like one. The cancer had made him into a 7/10 scale model of himself. He wore a blue stocking cap with a Mets emblem on it over his hairless head, which did not detract from the simian appearance at all.

"You know Eddie, Butch," said Guma.

"Sure. Long time, Eddie."

Eddie Bent nodded gravely to acknowledge it had been. Edigio Frascatti, a turtlish man of past seventy, was a retired caporegime of the Genovese. Guma had once put him away for a decent interval, but Eddie Bent had no hard feelings. It was never personal with those guys.

"We were just talking about great unsolved hits of the past," said Guma as Karp pulled up a straight chair. "You'll recall Sam Riccardi."

"Oh, yeah, Sam," said Butch. "Fat Sam Riccardi. We never found the body, and I always entertained the hope that Fat Sam slipped away to South America. I kind of fancied him in a flowered shirt and a big straw hat drinking margaritas with some senoritas. You're telling me no?"

"He's in Shea," said Eddie Bent, pointing Queens-ward with the corkscrew index finger from which he derived his sobriquet.

"But not taking in a game?"

A barely audible chuckle from the mobster, and the finger pointed downward. Meaning, in the concrete.

"Any idea who did it?" asked Karp, feigning an innocent grin. They both grinned, too, but wolfishly, showing a good deal of gold.

"It was an open contract," said Eddie Bent, a generous admission. "It's better to do it like that, you know? Sam was…" Here he looked pained and touched his chest.

"A friend?" Karp inquired.

"Yeah. Sam was good people. Not, you know, una bagascia."

"That's a cheap cunt to you, white man," Guma interjected.

"But he was skimming," said Karp.

Eddie Bent nodded sadly. "He was comfortable, you know? No fuckin' reason for it at all. He was warned. He was slapped around. Fuck, I slapped him around myself. What can you do, the guy won't listen to reason. What it was-I'll tell you what it was, and this is the sad part. Sam was a soft touch, you know? Guy walks in with a hard story, Sam liked to peel off from his roll. Which is fine, God bless him. But he was peeling off from our roll, too. He liked to be liked, Sam. Anyway, there's a guy you call in cases like this, been around for years. Everybody uses him. There's maybe a couple three guys in the business like that in the country, it's like a-what d'ya call it, like Con Ed?

"A public utility?" suggested Karp.

"That's right," said Eddie Bent, smiling. "A public utility. No fuss, no muss. The guy walked in here right now, I wouldn't fuckin' know him from Adam."

Karp did not actually believe this, but did not object. Instead he said, "Funny you should be talking about this stuff. I just talked to Marlene. She said a guy she knew, actually I knew him, too, a union guy, just got whacked the other night. We had dinner with them a little while ago. They killed the whole family: him, his wife, and their little girl, ten or so."

"Ah, shit, that's terrible!" said the mafioso. "That's fuckin' awful."

"Not a professional hit, would you say?"

"Oh, no. No fuckin' way. A pro, the target just vanishes, he's gone. Unless you're talkin' animals, Colombians, or the Chinks. They do shit like that. A union guy, you say?"

"Yeah. In West Virginia."

"Oh, well, West fuckin' Virginia, you're talkin' amateur hour there. That would definitely be a local thing. I would also say definitely it wasn't us. We're more or less out of that shit now, is what I hear."

"And the perp probably not one of those guys you were just talking about, either?"

Eddie Bent gave a contemptuous snort. "Nah, them're class guys. And never with a kid, like you was telling us, not a chance. Hey, expensive? Mamma mia! But, like they say, you get what you pay for."

Karp couldn't argue with this. Guma told a few stories about what was being done to him cost, and they all speculated about what he could've bought for the money, had Medicare been into fun stuff. A nurse came in and told them they had to leave in five minutes.

"Yeah," said Guma, "for what these last two months cost, I could have had myself whacked out, what, twice?"

"About there," Eddie Bent agreed. "Fifty grand, a hundred. It depends."

Karp asked, "What did Hoffa go for? Back in the days when you still did unions."

Eddie looked up at the ceiling and smiled. "I'll have to check my tax returns, see what I paid."

"But a guy like you were telling us about, that would be the kind of thing you'd call them in for. An open contract."

"That kind of thing. This one guy I'm thinking of, I mean, they don't give those, what the fuck, resumes, we did this one, we did that one. No advertising. But if you told me for sure he did Hoffa, I wouldn't fuckin' fall off my chair. You know what I'm saying?"

After her daily cry session, Lucy washed her face and spent the afternoon running dogs, first Malo and then Gringo, until her body was covered in sweat and dust. The sky was nacreous and seemed to press down heavily on land and sea. She took the twins swimming. Neither of them seemed affected now by what had befallen their late playmate. She tried to keep from resenting the easy amnesia of childhood. She could not shoo from her mind the image of Dan Heeney's face as he held the telephone tightly clenched in his hand.

Back at the farm, the Damicos had arrived with blasting gear, to remove the boulder that blocked the new water line. Assured by this event that the boys would be fixed and fascinated and out of trouble for at least a few hours, Lucy went into the house with the intent of retiring to her room for reading and a nap. Perhaps she might pray, although this had been dry for her recently. At one time, prayer had been able to move her into an alternative state of being, and this had taken the place of much that girls her age considered indispensable to life. The saints, however, had withdrawn. Perhaps that part of her life was closing down; perhaps she would become more like her mother. Thinking this, she shuddered slightly.

As she passed through, she noticed that there were messages on the answering machine and played them: her mother, from the City, informing her that she would be staying in town that evening, and issuing instructions for feeding children and animals. Next, several for her: Dr. McGinnis, from MIT, wondering when she would return to Boston, and trying to schedule something for next week; ditto, Drs. Sykes, Omura, Dunn, Salmonson. Lucy was popular in the research community, which held, not without reason, that somewhere between her ears was a clue to one of the major unsolved problems of science-how natural languages are acquired and processed. These demands tended to depress her. She understood that her gift came with responsibilities, but lately these had become more onerous, the demands of the scientists more irritating. Resentfully, she considered transferring to a school far from the centers of science, someplace isolated, West Virginia maybe, ha ha. In any case, she was too tired to return the calls just then, or not exactly tired, but drained. There was no call from Dan Heeney, not that she had really expected one, but that added to the draining.