Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

Maybe she got that from him. He understood that he was known around the courthouse as something of a Boy Scout, not exactly a figure of fun, but not one of the boys either. Was he becoming a prig? Butch Javert? Sea-green incorruptible, like Robespierre? Inhuman? He didn't think so. Like he'd told Murrow, he'd covered up corruption in his day, slid around the strict letter of the law from time to time, in a good cause. It was inevitable, law being a human institution and humans being all crooked timber. So was keeping Jack Keegan in office a good enough cause to justify what Fuller was clearly doing? Karp had to trust his gut on that, and his gut roiled when he thought of putting spin on criminal cases to satisfy political ends. Or maybe that was old-fashioned, too. Was he yesterday's man? A pathetic relic of a better time? Old, getting old…

He physically shook his head to clear these thoughts out of it, drawing a sidelong look from Morris. He heard a warbling, which at first he didn't recognize. Something wrong with the car?

"That's for you, Butch," said Morris. Blank look. "Your cell phone."

Karp fished it out, found the right button, and punched it. He listened and said, "I was just thinking about you."

"Yes, that's a new service of MCI," said his wife. "The cell phone reads your mind while it gives you brain cancer. Where are you?"

"On Fourteenth behind a garbage truck, symbol of my day. I just left Lucy at Chelsea Pier."

"Good game?"

"They beat us."

A whoop in his ear. "I love it. The fall of the patriarchy cannot be long delayed. Did she gloat?"

"No. In fact, she was very commiserating, which made me feel worse."

"Poor Butch! I suppose I will have to pump up your ego tonight via my marital obligations."

"Assuming I can still get it up. What's going on?"

"Oh, the usual. I have an appointment with Kelsie Solette this afternoon, which I am not looking forward to, and I have yet another meeting on our filing."

"Kelsie Solette is big-time. Why does she need protection?"

"Oh, they all need protection, largely from themselves. They bust their hump to get to be superstars, and then they discover that seven million people have no other thought than to rip a piece of their garment off. Or their flesh, and then it's boo hoo, Marlene Ciampi can save me. But, of course, they still have to be seen, which means hanging around clubs in basements with no lighting and one exit, run by the Mob, with the drug supermarket going on in the ladies'." She sighed theatrically. "Meanwhile, everyone down to the stock clerks are going around comparing how much money they're going to be worth when we get this IPO off the ground."

"How much will you be worth? Not that you're not priceless already."

"I haven't a clue. In fact, I think the whole thing is going to fall apart. Internet stocks, yes. I mean that's a feeding frenzy like the tulip mania or the twenties before the crash. But not a security operation, I mean, be serious. It's about as sexy as a sink full of dirty dishes. Unfortunately, Osborne's become a maniac on the subject, and Harry, too, who I always thought had his head screwed on right. What it comes down to at this point is sitting in endless meetings with a lot of little jerks in five-thousand-dollar suits and trying not to drift off. Apparently the next stage is to drag us around to institutional investors to give our spiel and show them that we're not a bunch of thugs with saps and tiny cameras."

"I thought you were."

"Yes, but this is the new security. The world is a dangerous place, the rich getting richer, the poor getting ever more pissed off, governments collapsing, and so on and so on, opportunities internationally for a highly disciplined firm, with modern management, blah blah blah. Complete horseshit, but since I'm a good little soldier…" Marlene sighed again. "Listen, the reason I called, I'll be late at one of these crap sessions, and I wanted to make sure you'd be home when the boys were delivered from after-school."

"No problem. Now that we conquered crime, there's not a hell of a lot for me to do. Will you be home for dinner?"

"Probably later. Feed the monsters and I'll see you around eight. Is Lucy dining in?"

"I forgot to ask. She wandered off with that look where she doesn't want to say what she's doing. The bums, is my guess."

A good guess. After she left her father, Lucy walked north along Eleventh Avenue, the unfashionable western edge of the Chelsea district. For now, the residents were still largely Puerto Rican, the landlords were too somnolent to smash and condify everything, the bodegas were still bodegas rather than galleries, and the restaurants served comidas croillas and not Mediterranean. There were still small remnants here of the New York that was, a fur warehouse, a few small factories, the big rail yards north of Twentieth. These tended to block the yuppie tide, as did the public housing projects and the two mental-health outpatient centers. Lucy should have been heading back to the Upper East Side, where her school was, to make her three- and four-o'clock classes, but she had already decided to cut them. It was something she did more often than formerly. It was a very good school, but it bored her. Her classmates bored her even more, rich girls, lunching on ice cubes to stay razor-thin, talking about clothes and boys.

She had promised to work a shift at the soup kitchen run by Holy Redeemer at Twentieth-ninth and Ninth, but that was not until five, and before she went there she wanted to check on some people who lived in the neighborhood of the rail yards.

The wind was blowing south, driving cold rain with it, and she walked with her head down and the hood of her cloak drawn up over her beret and clutched tight. She was therefore nearly upon the slow-moving, dark figure before she was aware of her, an oversize mobile fireplug, the familiar shape of people who in cold weather habitually wear every piece of clothing they own. It was a woman, pushing a rusting grocery cart piled with the usual plastic bags. She wore a wool cap, with a cheap, flowered, plastic rain kerchief over that and a set of men's overcoats, and a poncho made of a tan garbage bag. Lucy said, "Hey, Elmira."

The woman looked at her suspiciously, as if surprised to hear her name on human lips. Her face was cinnamon-colored and ashy with the chill. She blinked away raindrops, saw who it was, grunted, and said, "Gimme a cigarette."

Lucy, who did not smoke, always carried cigarettes. She offered a Marlboro. The woman took it, stuck it in her nearly toothless mouth, waited for a light like a duchess. Lucy gave her one with a Bic.

Lucy asked, "Are you going up to Holy Redeemer?"

"No, I'm gon' eat in peace today. I got me bread and SPAM. And cheese. I got me a nice piece of cheese today."

"You should get some warm food on a day like today, though. Hot coffee. We're making vegetable soup and biscuits. And salad. And pie."

"What kind of pie?" Suspicious. Greedy.

"I think apple."

The woman pushed her cart along for half a block, puffing the cigarette hard and mumbling to herself. "I might do it. Or I might not."

Lucy doubted Elmira would come. Some of them would not emerge from the isolation they had imposed on themselves for dinner at Le Cirque, much less for a church-kitchen meal. From things others had told her, Lucy knew that Elmira was ashamed of her missing teeth. And she was too disorganized to set up and keep the free dental-clinic appointments she would need to get them fixed. Elmira was low-end homeless, although not the lowest, not by a long way.

"Well, I'll see you, Elmira. Take care." The woman didn't answer. Lucy stretched into her usual aggressive urban pace and quickly left the shuffling woman behind. At Thirtieth Street, Lucy turned west toward the yards. It was a scruffy area: warehouses, garages, anonymous, blankfaced industrial structures, five-story apartments built for workers back when this was the south end of the great freight-handling district of the metropolis. It was one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan still connected with the physical movement of material things, another world from the real New York, the one that grew rich beyond all imagination off the fabrication of images and the manipulation of data.