Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"What's wrong with it?" asked Newbury. He was a small, ridiculously handsome man with the chisel-cut features of a twenties cigarette-ad drawing. A scion of venerable New York wealth, he had nothing whatever in common with Karp, except deep mutual affection and a mordant sense of humor about the criminal justice system.

"It's not a bagel. It's white bread in a doughnut shape. An abomination. It's like… like…"

"Ladies no longer wearing gloves out of doors. Yes, the decline of a once great tradition. My commiserations. Tell me more about this fellow. Did you like him?"

"Well, sort of, as much as I could like someone with whom my daughter spends every available moment and who is ten years older than she is. He seemed pretty decent, and everyone was on their best behavior. Got a scruffy beard, dresses down-market, but clean. Well-spoken. He's from upstate somewhere. I guess he's the kind of guy, a woman sees him and wants to fatten him up or something. That kind of appeal. He's a Franciscan."

"A priest?"

"No, what they call a Tertiary, like a lay order. I didn't know they had them. He lives in a Catholic Worker hostel on the Lower East Side. According to him, he's been in some rough places. That was what we mainly talked about, Bosnia, Sudan. He's dying to get back there, if you can believe it. Like I said, everyone was being their charming selves, even Marlene. Their charming Catholic selves. Many references to the Holy Spirit.

"You felt left out.

"I did, a little. Off-base. I mean if your kid is hanging out with a bum, that's one thing. You can give him the bum's rush. If she's hanging out with… I don't know… a saint practically, what can you say? Be a little more evil, honey?"

"You're thinking maybe this guy is taking advantage of her?"

"What, sexually? Lucy?" Karp let his jaw drop. "You know, that's the one thing that never occurred to me. Never entered my mind."

"The dad is always the last to know."

"Uh-uh, that's not the worry with Lucy, especially not with this guy. The worry is we'll get a postcard from the Congo some day: 'Dear Mom and Dad, taking care of lepers in the middle of a guerrilla war here. Don't worry.'" Karp laughed. "Go have children! Now I know."

"I wish I could give you some advice," said V.T., "but, as you know, Anabel and I have not been blessed. I was always threatened with military school, myself."

"Not an option," said Karp, "although Marlene gets on a tear sometimes she's going to ship her out of town if she doesn't get her school act together." He pushed his half-eaten pseudo-bagel aside and signaled the waitress for more coffee. Newbury took the moment to examine his friend more closely. Not a happy man, he thought, and not because of his daughter either. The skin of his face had the stretched and sallow look that, experience taught, indicated tension and frustration. His smiles seemed forced, as if having to push up through a membrane of suffering.

"How's work?" Newbury asked in a casual tone.

"Oh, the usual. Putting asses in jail."

"Not. Really, what's wrong?"

"You got time for this?"

"Oh, a long story?"

"Semilong," said Karp, and plunged into the Cooley affair, and the situation with the election, and the execrable Norton Fuller, and what Karp proposed to do about it. At the end Karp asked, "So… what do you think?"

"I think you have a serious problem. Has Clay called you back yet?"

"Not yet, no."

"An interesting moral situation. Both of you want to stay in jobs where you think you can still do some good, and where the alternatives, like letting yet another incompetent bozo take your place, seem even worse. But you might have to ignore some bad stuff to keep in there, and then you have to ask, where do you draw the line? The old Schindler's list business, the good Germans…"

"That's hardly a fair comparison," said Karp. "Whatever happens, no one is sending me to Dachau."

"No, when you leave the DA, you'll be sentenced to private practice and the chance of enormous wealth, and this will keep you out of heaven. Some people, maybe including Lucy, would say that by comparison a jolt in Dachau is a day at the beach."

"You're not being very helpful," said Karp a little grumpily.

"No, and that's because this is the four hundred and twelfth time we've had this conversation, or a similar one. You're an essentially honest and decent man working at the top levels of a system that's essentially dishonest and indecent. You have authority enough to acquire responsibility, but not enough to change things much for the better. So your choices are, also for the four hundred and twelfth time, either, one, quit and earn an honest living; two, get off the pot and run for DA or political office, where you can put on your silver armor and fight the good fight with no holds barred; or, three, do a couple of ass-kissing favors for some pols and get appointed to the bench, where you can make the kind of law you want until senility takes hold, and even beyond. But this continual angst around a DA who doesn't want to play by your rules has not made you happy, is not making you happy, and will not make you happy in the future. Granted, Keegan is in a different moral universe from Bloom, but he's obviously still not pure enough for you, and so, until the second coming of Francis P. Garrahy, you're always going to be harassed by political types like Fuller. It's part of the system."

"I know it's the system, V.T. I wasn't asking for a review of my entire life, I was soliciting your advice as to how to carry out a sneak."

"Me being a sneaky guy? Thank you. Okay, here's my advice. It's a good plan as far as it goes. But if you're fighting a political battle, you're going to have to get your hands dirty in politics. You have to manipulate your boss into a position where it's less worse for him to do what you want him to do than what Fuller wants him to do."

"Oh, crap! If I do that, I'm as bad as Fuller!"

"Yes, and if you don't, you'll lose, so why bother in the first place? Sorry, pal, you asked me, and that's the way I see it." Newbury drained his coffee cup and looked at his watch. "I'd love to share some moral agony with you, but I'm due across the street to terrorize a clutch of certified public accountants. Is that the correct noun of venery? A slick of accountants? A cheat? Whatever." He shook Karp's hand warmly. "Love to the family. And, Butch? Lighten up… it's not like it was real life."

Karp watched his friend walk down Baxter Street and felt a stab of envy, not a very familiar stab, and more irritating for that. He did not, of course, envy Newbury's wealth or family or status. What he wished he had was his light heart, his ability to accept the world as he found it, its infinite absurdities amusing, its injustices bearable, its corruptions a given, like the changes in season, without becoming nastily cynical or corrupt himself. As he walked back to the office, he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out from under the opinions V.T. had laid out, and it must have shown on his face because those of his staff he encountered gave him serious nods in greeting, and the few smiles that dawned as he passed were stillborn. And that was another thing, which he hardly dared admit. He was lonely. Unlike the lost age when he had started at the DA, when a lawyer commonly spent a whole career in public prosecution, the present was an era of flux. Except for Roland Hrcany, and Keegan himself, everyone Karp had started with was gone. Keegan could not be a friend, of course, and as for Hrcany-as Roland himself often remarked, when you had a Hungarian for a friend, you didn't need any enemies. Karp stifled the self-pity, however, like the good stoic he was and stood nobly with his hand out in front of his secretary's desk while she slapped a short stack of early phone messages into his hand. "And Himself would like to see you when it's convenient."