Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Thank you. But I do play just about every day. And we have a good coach at school. Girls' basketball is suddenly big, so they're more serious."

They walked out of the huge Chelsea sports complex and into a blustery day. Rain was still falling in fits, and the wind from the Hudson bit at the face.

"You haven't changed your mind about the team, I guess," said Karp.

"Don't start, Dad."

"Hey, it's your life. But, like you say, girls' ball is big. And you have the skills. And the size. You're probably still growing."

"Bite your tongue!"

"You could get a scholarship."

"Dad, I speak thirty-eight languages. Getting a scholarship is not going to be a problem. Assuming I want to go to college."

"I didn't hear that," said Karp. "All I'm saying is why not give it a try? You can always drop it, if you really hate playing."

"I'm not competitive."

"Oh, really? Gosh, you could've fooled me in there just now."

"That's not the same thing. That's just fun. I like playing the game. I don't like the winning and losing part. Beating the other guys. It makes me sad. And winning-the way people look at you like you're something special, like they won something because they're in the same school as you. And the way the parents act at the games… it's not for me." She looked up at him. "I'm sorry, really."

She really was sorry, he thought, and he made himself shrug and say, "Ah, forget it, it's no big thing. I'll have to wait for the twins."

"Oh, there's competitive. If they can stop fighting each other for five minutes, they'll be a terror on the boards. Although, you know, Giancarlo is probably more like me than he is like Zak. Zak eggs him on, and he goes with it because he can't stand for Zak to be doing something he's not. Which is weird, because twins are supposed to be the same. Like when they find two of them separated at birth and they both married Mabels and they're both firemen who like to go ice-skating."

"The mystery of genetics."

"Yeah, especially in our family."

Karp declined to pursue that subject, always a vexed one when conversing with his mutant offspring. They waited in the scant shelter of a doorway for his car. Karp watched the traffic flow by and reflected briefly that this was the street up which Cooley had pursued his car thief. No, a little north of here. He wondered whether he should ask Morris to drive him up to the scene, take a look at the ground. He had always done that when he was trying a murder, actually walk the pavements, look in the apartments where human blood had been shed… and then he dismissed the idea. It wasn't his case, not his responsibility. That was for the young farts now, he was done with that part of it.

"What's the matter, Dad?"

"Huh? Why? Did I look like something was the matter?"

"Yeah, you looked like you lost your dog."

Karp laughed. "You've inherited your mom's laser vision."

"Your laser vision, too." Lucy squeezed his arm. "You looked sad. It's not me again, is it?"

"No, just the usual-work, everyday corruption and stupidity."

"Who's being corrupt and stupid?"

"Everyone but me, of course. No, we got this stupid kid accused of killing a citizen, a subway stabbing. It's a death-penalty case, or Jack's going to make it one. It annoys me, is all."

"Did he do it?"

"I don't know. Probably. Convictable, but not ironclad enough for me to want him dead. This god-awful death-penalty crap screws everything up."

"A good Catholic position. We'll convert you yet."

"You better bring your lunch, girl. Here's Morris with the car. Can I drop you someplace? Home?"

"No, thanks. I have some places to go."

"Like where?" asked the dad.

"Just around," Lucy evaded. "Friends. I might go by the church after."

Karp nodded and got into the car. "See you for dinner. Great game, kid."

She waved as they pulled away from the curb.

"How was the game?" asked Ed Morris.

"We got whipped."

"By girls?"

"A fluke, obviously."

Morris laughed. "Or you're getting old, boss."

"Just drive, Ed," said Karp sourly. He sat back in his seat, banished thoughts of aging bodies, and contemplated his daughter. It was hard to know what to do about Lucy. Karp was not the only one trying to figure her out. There was a whole cottage industry up at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical School studying her brain by means of the most advanced technology, and they seemed to be stumped, too. But they had already determined that Lucy Karp could unerringly reproduce all the sounds the human vocal apparatus was capable of generating, with no apparent effort, had an eidetic memory for grammar and vocabulary, and if exposed to a native speaker, could master any language that had yet been thrown at her in something like seventy-two hours. Of the earth's 6 billion, there appeared to be only one other example of a hyperlinguistic prodigy, a Russian boy. In all history, the phenomenon had appeared less than half a dozen times.

Karp recalled that Mozart had had a major problem with his father, and Karp had long since resolved that, despite her gift, Lucy would have as normal a childhood as possible: no going on quiz shows, no exhibition as a freak of any kind. Nor had she, although her childhood had been as far from normal as could be imagined. Which was Marlene's fault. No, don't get into the blaming business. At least Lucy had physically survived her mother's bullet-riddled home life and was now a fine kid, really, although he wished she would have more fun. Clean fun, of course, not the kind he read about in the papers, blow-job clubs at fancy schools. No, safe from that, at least. He thought about the game. Lucy had been wearing a baby sweat suit, as usual, but the other girls had been wearing what Karp continued to think of as underwear, although it was marketed as sports apparel. Jessie had been clad in a cut-down top that left her belly bare and had chosen to cover her loins in what looked like silver paint, thin paint, too, that Lycra or spandex, whatever they called it. Irv seemed not to care that his daughter's butt and sexual organs were perfectly visible. Come to think of it, wasn't noticing the sexual allure of girls of one's daughter's age a sure sign of incipient senility? One good thing about Lucy, in that regard, she was practically a nun-modest clothing, like today's World War II refugee look, and for school she had concocted a kind of uniform-even though uniforms were no longer required at Sacred Heart-out of thrift-shop scroungings. Not a violet-hair or piercings type, Lucy, and no tattoos either, that he could see, although she could have the entire Book of Revelation illustrated on her somewhere he couldn't see. That would be like Lucy, a secretive kid. Also, from her mother, he himself being as frank as the new day, or so he truly believed.

Like where she was going just now? Not to the malt shoppe with the gang, unfortunately. Good works, probably, with street bums. Which you couldn't call them anymore, Karp knew, having been informed by his daughter with some heat that they were "the unhoused." Fine, he was enough of a bleeding heart to sympathize, but he also knew that the bottom layers of society were particularly rich in predators, not to mention the violently unhinged. His baby! Of course, Lucy could take care of herself, not a naif, her, but still… she also got that from her mother, along with the instinct for the hidden life, the peculiar unhealthy interest in the wrong side of society, in violence. No, the violence, that was pure Marlene, not Lucy. Lucy wouldn't hurt a beetle, a girl who would not step on a spider, would probably cuddle up to Son of Sam and try to make him change his ways; Marlene, it would be two in the ear and move on. No, unfair, she was trying. She had given up the crazy shit, the poking guns at men, and worse stuff she used to do in the line of protecting women that he did not want to think about, and now a respectable executive in a growing security firm, a relief, so that all his formidable Jewish worrying energies could concentrate on the girl, didn't want to stifle her though, it was her life… and the church stuff, he was waiting for her to grow out of that, something completely beyond him, although reportedly on his mother's side a long line of Talmudic scholars, so maybe that was genes, too. Losing a child to vice, that was common. There was one guy he knew, a lawyer, whose daughter was an actual call girl, and the drugs, that wasn't just uptown anymore-but losing a child to virtue, that was harder. What could he say? Don't be so good? Girls didn't become nuns anymore, did they? His secret fear.