Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"Did you hear the latest? They found another dead street person."

This time Karp looked up. "Where?"

"In a midtown parking garage. What does that make this month, six?"

"The same MO?"

"No, this one was shot, apparently. It could still be the same guy."

"I doubt that very much. Murderers tend to be creatures of habit, and crazy murderers even more so. I wonder…" Karp shut down the emerging thought.

"Wonder what?"

"Nothing, Murrow, don't you have something to do?"

"Go talk to your daughter," said Marlene when Karp got home that evening. He was happy to see her by the stove stirring, which always gave him a shameful atavistic thrill. He was taken aback, however, by her tone.

"What happened?"

"You heard about the new homeless killing?"

"What, that shooting midtown? Oh, shit! Don't tell me she was involved in that one, too?"

"No, surprisingly, but she knew the guy. She's broken up about it, plus I told her if she kept hanging around those people, I was going to pack her off to live with Patsy in Santa Barbara. Unfortunately, they don't allow us to lock them up in convents anymore."

"A hollow threat, surely?"

"No, I was serious. She has to learn to listen, dammit!"

Karp let this go by. "Where are the boys?"

"I said they could stay at Matt Fleming's until later. I'll pick them up. I have to go out anyway." She lifted the cover on a pot of potatoes and turned down the heat. "By the way, the famous David is coming to dinner tonight."

"She invited him?"

"No, it was me." Marlene gave an extra stir, more vigorous than the stew really needed, and shook off the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot, like a rim-shot in Vegas. "Another crime against my name. He seemed perfectly reasonable about it, though. Maybe he can talk some sense into her. She absolutely can't go hanging out in dark alleys with bums until they catch this bastard."

Karp changed out of his lawyer costume and into jeans and a worn sweatshirt. He announced himself at Lucy's door and received a grumbled admittance. Once inside, he made that quick, near-furtive inspection familiar to all parents of teenagers, a forbidden window on the secret life. As usual, the room was neat as a nun's cell, a little too neat, to Karp's thinking, betokening a compulsive mind, perhaps unhealthily so. The room contained a simple box spring and mattress, a Door Store desk and swivel chair, a Tabriz carpet of some value on the floor, and on two of the walls modular birch bookshelves stretched from the floor to the ceiling, solid with books, almost all of them dictionaries and works in languages Karp couldn't read. Over the bed hung a large polychrome crucifix in the Spanish style, dripping blood drops and radiating agony, that always gave Karp the willies when he saw it. The wall over the desk was corked, and on it were pinned pictures and documents of various kinds, all secured with four pushpins at the corners and lined up square: family photos (numerous), school awards (few), Polaroid snaps of pals (fewer), a reproduction of a painting of Cardinal Mezzofanti, the Pete Rose of language, who could translate 114, and one of Francis E. Sommer, the DiMaggio, who was fluent in 94. Raised above these was an oval photocopy of Simone Weil, which disturbed Karp nearly as much as the vivid crucifix. All Karp knew about Weil was that she was a French Jew who, having escaped the Nazis, starved herself to death in sympathy with concentration camp victims, which in Karp's view was not the sort of role model appropriate for a seventeen-year-old. His gaze shifted quickly to the center of the cork and the large world map, which showed with pins how the kid was gaining on the language superstars. There seemed to be more every time Karp looked, pushing forty by rough count. The competition with Weil, if any, was not apparent to the paternal eye, which noted again the absence of rock stars, kittens, Garfields, or other normal teenage-girl stuff.

The abnormal was at her desk. Her head, round, shorn, and vulnerable, was drooping like a spent blossom on her long, thin neck as she wrote in a notebook. From the cassette machine on the desk came the voice of a man speaking a language curiously like English, but incomprehensible to Karp.

"What's that?" he asked.

She switched it off and swiveled around to face him. "Dutch. The text on the list. It's easy."

"Say something in it."

"Ik weet dat je het niet goed vindt, maar ik doe het touch." "Which means?"

"'I know you don't think it's right, but I'll do it anyway.'"

"That seems to be your motto." Karp sat on the bed. "What're we going to do about this, Luce? You're driving her nuts."

"She's driving me nuts. My gosh, if she wanted me to be a nice, regular little kid, she should have paid some attention a little earlier."

"She just wants you to be safe and happy."

"No, what it is, she's guilty that she neglected me while she ran around protecting women with firearms, and, mamma mia, look how I turned out. It's an embarrassment." She flung back in the chair, making it squeak. "And then she goes and… oh, God! I can't believe she called him, like I was a little kid and she was making sure he wasn't a molester. I'll die!"

"No dramatics, please," said Karp. Then they heard the elevator arrive, which they both decided to ignore. "Look, at the risk of being overly rational, this is the situation you're in, and so my advice is make the best of it for the couple of years you have left at home. Everyone has a cross to bear, so to speak. Like you all say, offer it up."

Lucy glared at him, then sighed, closed her eyes briefly. "Okay, I'll try. You're right. It's just… I was really upset is all. I tend to lose it when my friends get killed."

"You knew this guy well?"

"Oh, yeah, as well as any of them let you know them. Desmondo Ramsey. Early twenties, got into the crack business as a teenager, went to jail, tried to live at home but… he comes… he came from a respectable family, by the way, over in Newark. Three sisters, all college grads, mother runs a dry cleaner's. Anyway, he couldn't stand the pressure, his family guilting him out all the time, so he split and came to the city. Hustled things-not stealing, I mean street trade, hauling stuff for street merchants, like a lot of them do, laying stuff out, holding good sidewalks for them. That was his big ambition, to have a table. He was a good salesman, too, friendly, a nice smile. Once in a while one of his merchants would give him something to sell, a pen set or a watch or a radio. He read books, too, you know, not a dummy at all. We used to talk about stuff, Malcolm and Fanon, and the Church. And business stuff, like how to succeed, stuff like that." She sighed. "And now he's dead, someone just shot him down like a dog."

"It's a rough life," said Karp.

"Yes, I know. They're out there getting murdered, and my social role is to be protected and sheltered in the upper-middle-class cocoon, according to her, get good grades, have respectable middle-class friends, go to a good college, shop, chatter…"

"Lucy, when I rank sheltered middle-class girls, you are not in the top ten, I hate to tell you. You're not probably in the top million. I mean you've done your lower-depths adventure already, you've been shot at and kidnapped, and God knows what else. Don't you think it's time for a rest, maybe catch your breath a little?"

"No, I don't." Lucy sprang to her feet, a false and cheerful look on her face. "I should help set the table, shouldn't I?"

"Actually, it went a lot better than I expected, " said Karp. "A LOT better, for example, than this bagel." He was in a rear booth at Sam's, near the courthouse. Sam's was an antiquated joint of the type that used to be called a luncheonette in New York. It was dark and cozy, and the red leatherette of its booths was nearly black with age, except where patched with Mystik tape, and the air therein was dense with the scents of coffee, toast, bacon, and the extra something that once made all places smell exactly the same. He was having breakfast with his old pal, V. T. Newbury. Newbury worked in Washington now, for Treasury, doing something fairly cryptic about big-time money laundering. He had worked for Karp for over fifteen years at the DA, and whenever he was in town arresting distinguished bankers, he arranged to spend some time with Karp. Karp prized V.T.'s judgment, although not necessarily in reference to the doughy oval.