Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

David asked, "Ali, do you think he's the one?"

"He could be. He got enough hate in his soul to cut people up. But it's not like I got any what you call evidence for it?"

"Where do you think he is?"

Ali gave David a long apprising look and answered, "Well, like I told them all, I don't know, which is God's honest truth. But if I was going to look for Canman, which I am not, I guess I'd start under Penn. I hung out there five, seven years, back before they cleaned us all out of there, before they cleaned us out and all. And when I got there, he'd been there longer than any of us. Not that there ain't some been there longer than him. Some people been down there so long they ain't hardly people anymore. Live on rats and garbage." Ali lowered his voice. "And other stuff. Human flesh. Someone goes down a station at three in the morning and never comes back up. What they say, anyway. I guess he's gone back under. No cops down there."

"But there are," said David. "There are regular patrols. I've been on some of them."

"Uh-huh, son," said Ali, stooping to pick up a broken chair. He shifted it in his big hands, trying to see how it could be fitted together again. "I mean under. Under under. Them tunnels is deep. Nobody down there but the rats and the mole people."

Lucy and David left a little while later. When they were back on the street, Lucy turned to him and said, "I'm sorry."

"Sorry? About what?"

"You know… losing it. Getting violent. It never happened to me before. I feel sick."

He stopped walking, faced her, and put both hands on her shoulders. "Stop it! You do this all the time. Stop eating at yourself! You did something wrong, but you did it for good reasons."

"Why should that make a difference?"

"It does. The intent of the act counts. You didn't do it out of some secret pleasure or to go along with what someone else was doing, or out of fear. You thought Doug was going to hurt me, and you acted without thought. It was a failure of attention." He grinned at her. "That seems to be your particular fault, if you don't mind me saying so."

After a moment, she smiled back. " Mea maxima culpa. I guess I was upset because, well, I was thinking of my mother and how I would rather not turn out the way she has, and when I do things like… oh, just things in general that remind me, yin shui si yuan, it drives me up the wall."

"Your mother seems very nice," he said diplomatically.

"In her saner moments," she snapped, and then sighed. "Oh, she is very nice. She's a great woman, and I admire the hell out of her, but I don't want to be her. We drive each other crazy. I guess all kids do."

"I wouldn't know. I never had a family." Then, to cover her embarrassment, he added quickly, "What was that thing you said? Was it Chinese?"

"Oh, yeah, a four-character idiom. It's a habit I picked up when I was living a lot with this family, the Chens. Chinese speakers are always slipping them into their speech, practically without thinking, like we do with 'anyway' and 'whatever' and 'like.' It means 'When you drink water, think of the source.' Anyway"-they both laughed-"what are we going to do about Canman?"

"I don't know. Finding him would be a good start."

"Down in the tunnels."

"I guess, if that's where he is. You're dying to come, aren't you?"

She nodded. "Do you think the mole people really live on human flesh?"

"I have no idea. But people do, if they're desperate enough. In the Sudan, where I was, there were famines all the time. In the camps you would see some people eating meat, sheep they said, but you never saw any sheep around." They were at a light, the evening traffic rushing up by Tenth Avenue. He looked out at the river of steel, and she saw that his face had lost the brightness that ordinarily shone from it, replaced by the sort of expression they put up on crucifixes in rural Spain. "But God forgives all," he said. And then suddenly the brightness turned on again, like the light that just then turned from red to green. "Even you, Lucy, you horrible old sinner. Even me, if you can believe it."

"But you're good," she blurted out.

A ghostly smile. "Only God is good, kid. Me? Oh, me, you have no idea."

The next morning Lucy and her father, typically the two earliest risers in the household, sat companionably at breakfast, Karp whipping through the Times, ignoring the travails of nations, including his own, focusing on the scant crime news and sports. Here a little basketball discussion, March Madness, they were nearly down to the Final Four, when she asked abruptly, "Daddy, the police need a warrant to come into somebody's house, don't they?"

"Ordinarily, yes, unless in hot pursuit of a suspected felon," Karp replied, reading on.

"What if it's not a regular house or apartment? Like if it's a little shack where a homeless person is living?"

Karp dropped the paper shield. "Hm. That would depend. If a guy's sitting on a park bench or sleeping in a doorway, no-it's a public place. In the home, the governing rule is from Payton v. New York -you need a warrant except in exigent circumstances. The question then is, what's a home? A homeless shelter is a home under Payton; a cave on government property is not. But there was a case a couple of years back where the cops rousted a guy out of a tent he'd set up in Central Park, and the courts threw out the search. Kind of a nice decision, too; the judge said something to the effect that a place of usual repair at night was a home under the law, regardless of its lack of ordinary amenities."

"So if cops like came into someone's shack that they built, and busted up all his stuff, that would be against the law."

"Well, destroying property without good probable cause is always against the law, warrant or no warrant. An exception would be, for example, if they have reason to suspect there's drugs hidden in the bodywork of a car, they could tear it apart. This is an actual situation?"

"Yeah. A guy I know who lives down by the yards was raided the other day. They roughed him up and smashed all his things. They were looking for the slasher, but Ali didn't know anything."

"They arrested him?"

"No."

"Interesting. He get the name of the cops? Badge numbers?"

"No. They were detectives, I think. Plainclothes. They were looking for this man, they call him Canman, who had the place where I found Fake Ali's body. And Ali-I mean Real Ali-he already told another detective what he knew, which was nothing. He's black-Ali is-and, you know, you think, 'Oh, it's more cop racism,' but one of the two cops was black, so I guess it couldn't be that. But why would they send two different cops to talk to the same person?"

"Oh, some screwup," said Karp. "Tell your friend to report the abuse anyway."

"They won't really do anything, will they?"

"Probably not, but it adds to the record. The type of cop who racks up a sheet of persistent abuse, sooner or later he's going to do something they can't ignore, and at that point, if he's got fifty complaints against him, the bosses will maybe toss him out on his ear. If not, they might let it slide or defend him."

"That sucks."

"What else is new?" Karp agreed, but as he took up his paper again, he was thinking. Detectives harassing the homeless; okay, it happened, they were hot on a trail, sometimes they did not bother with the niceties. A pair of detectives, one white, one black, not exactly common in the NYPD, and they weren't the team primarily responsible for the slasher murders. That was Paradisio and Rastenberg, a pair of lilies. It could have been some other players from that team, but Karp doubted it. Why? No reason, except that little tingle that told him he was right. The rail yards were right in their stomping grounds, too. Had Cooley and Nash been assigned to the slasher team? Unlikely, and even if so, why would they cover the same ground that other cops already had? Preventing just that, conserving resources, was the whole point of a police task force. Again, the notion that Cooley was pursuing something personal, as with Lomax. Now Detective Cooley wanted this Canman character, but for what? Karp's eye paused at an article on the New York page: "Marshak Assailant Had Violent Juvenile Record." Oh, the Times! Now they've decided he was an assailant, not a victim, which went well with the statement of a "source" at the DA that they had not settled on the precise nature of the charges pending further investigation, although second-degree manslaughter could not be ruled out. There was no evidence that Ms. Marshak (the actual assailant here) had been attacked. Police sought a possible witness. Karp wondered who the source was. Roland, probably. More significant was the unnamed source who had sent Ramsey's juvenile records to the reporter, C. Melville Bateson. A great name for a Times reporter-solid, like the pillars of a public building. Ramsey, it seemed, had done six months in Spofford for armed robbery at age seventeen. Juvenile records were supposed to be sealed, and their revelation at an adult trial was prohibited by law. They were easy enough to obtain, however, if you made the effort, and you wanted to blacken the character of a victim, and you were inside the system; like, for example, Norton Fuller.