Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"A little extreme, don't you think? He just had a bad day."

She sniffed. "If you had a bad day, would you spew out sexist, racist crap like that?"

"No, but I'm not a tormented Hungarian genius like Roland Hrcany." Karp said it lightly, but she did not smile. She was one of the ones who came to prosecution out of a desire to make the world tidy, to mete out punishment with a fair hand, to work for justice. That type tended to become chronically angry when they finally realized that this was not what public prosecution was all about.

"And what Bateson was saying? Is it true?"

"Was that Bateson? C. Melville? Of the Times?"

She nodded.

"True? I guess partly. She obviously had the police report. Like the DA said, we'll look into it. About transferring, why don't you think about it for a while? You're a good prosecutor. You should stay in homicide."

"Not while he's there. I've noticed it a lot before this, you know. With women. Sly digs, snickers with the boys. Okay, that's like par for the course, right? He never actually, you know, did anything actionable. As for just now: God knows, I hear a lot of ripe language, but this was"-she cast about for words to describe it, failed, settled on-"over the line."

Karp cleared his throat. This was not the first of this sort of conversation he'd had with sharp, young female attorneys in re Roland.

"Look, Meghan-Roland has a problem with women, and with African-Americans, true, but in almost twenty years of working with him, I've never known it to affect his substantive judgment on the job. He has a problem with women because when he was ten, his family was escaping from Hungary during the revolt there when a big Russian bullet went through his mother's head and splashed her brains all over him. I think he just froze up then, some way, in the understanding and tenderness department, and he never got around to unfreezing. I hate psychologizing anyone, but I'd say that Roland finds it hard to trust anyone female. Given that, the fact that he's never, as far as I know, blocked any woman from advancement is significant. And, as you point out, he keeps sex out of the office-no pinching, no hustling. Okay, that's one thing. Then he came to America, where he started in a school in Brownsville that was eighty percent black kids, and he was a skinny white kid with a funny name, who talked funny English. It was not pleasant, and it went on for a long, long time, which is why he made himself into the moose he now is. Is he a racist? I can only say he's kept that out of his work here, too." Karp spread his hands. "They say to understand all is to forgive all. Meanwhile, he's a great prosecutor, and you can learn a lot working for him."

She looked sulky, as the self-righteous often do when called upon to forgive. "A lot of people have had hard lives. That doesn't excuse it."

"No, I guess not." Karp took in a big breath, let it out. "Do you intend to take action, as having been damaged under the equal opportunity laws?"

Her mouth opened, but she thought again and shook her head. "No. I don't need that on my record. The boys don't like it, unless the guy's run his hand up your dress and promised you a fucking pay raise if you let him touch it. He'll dig his own grave, eventually." She got up and left.

All afternoon Karp waited for a call from Keegan, to meet, to strategize the catastrophe, but none came. Apparently, on this issue he was out of the loop. Maybe Jack didn't trust him anymore. That made them even.

He went home early, not as early as a judge, but early for him. He was surprised to find Marlene there before him, on the old couch in front of the TV, remote in her hand, flipping between NBC, ABC, and CNN.

He hung up his raincoat and sat down next to her. She offered a cheek, and he kissed it. "Where is everyone?" he asked.

"The boys are in their room playing with matches. I paged Lucy, but she hasn't called back yet."

Karp looked at the screen. There was an inset still photograph of a familiar face: Richard Perry, in happier days. The rest of the screen was taken up with a shot of a road, at night, in some town, damp from rain, tatty, trash-strewn, not America. In the background, groups of soldiers were standing around a few vehicles, drab Humvees and Land Rovers painted white, the kind of Balkan scene that had over the past decade become as familiar to television audiences as Letterman's grin. In the foreground, an earnest young woman in a rain parka was talking at them.

"Perry's dead?" asked Karp.

"No, he's alive. They got him out."

"No kidding! Who, the army?"

"No, Osborne. Shh! Watch this!"

The scene changed-a taped segment, obviously recorded earlier-it was daylight there in the Balkan village. Several tan Toyota SUVs pulled up to what seemed to be the same soldiers. A door opened and out stepped a tough-looking man in a black jumpsuit. He turned around to open a back door, and Karp saw that OSBORNE INTL. was written in white across his back. Then Richard Perry stepped out of the Toyota, and all the soldiers applauded. Cut to Perry, a close-up; he was unshaven, looking wan and exhausted, saying that it was good to be alive and that he couldn't thank enough the team that had extracted him from captivity. More tough guys in black jumpsuits got out and grinned at the cameras. The announcer came back on and gave a brief description of where Perry and his party were now-en route to a hospital in Germany-and then back to the anchorperson with a split-screen, and Lou Osborne was there, in his office, talking about how great it all was and how Osborne never gave up on its clients.

"How did Osborne get them out?" Karp asked.

"Oleg did it, him and a bunch of ex-Soviet antiterrorist hard guys he has on retainer. It was the Serbs who snatched Perry, apparently, a splinter group, pissed off about Kosovo. The news broke just as I came in with the boys. Lou called me and told me to turn on the tube. I've been riveted ever since."

"I didn't know Osborne could do that-run rescue missions."

"Oh, Oleg has a pretty free hand in that area. Drag enough dollars through those places and rats come out of the woodwork. Lou, of course, is ecstatic."

"It's a good thing. Hard to lose someone like that."

"Oh, not about Perry as such. It's the IPO. It goes out tomorrow under the best possible conditions."

"So you'll be rich," said Karp neutrally.

"I guess. Rich enough to afford to eat at Paoletti's tonight. Why don't you grab up the monsters and I'll smear some makeup over my raddled face. My treat."

"What about Lucy?"

"I'll leave a note. But she doesn't eat anyway."

The next day, a Thursday, the last one in March, Karp saw that Shawn Lomax had finally made it into history in the Newspaper of Record, front page above the fold. There was a picture of Mrs. Martha Lomax, the mother, standing with the usual liberal dignitaries in front of a church. McBright was right next to her, holding an arm. The story was bylined C. Melville Bateson. It had never occurred to Karp that C. Melville was a black woman when he had told Murrow to fax the Times city desk, anonymously, the police report on the Lomax shooting. Maybe that was racism and sexism in him, too, but it didn't matter at this point. For twenty years Karp had been married to his idea of public law, trying to build something fine, or at least to keep the memory of something fine alive, against the slow water-drip erosion of stupidity and moral rot. And now he was down in it, too. Ten, even five years ago, it would never have occurred to him to leak a document to the press, and now he had done it, in a good cause, naturally, but wasn't that what they all said? It was like the first adultery. The first time you talk yourself into thinking it's true love, and before you know it, you're taking stone-faced whores to hot-sheet hotels. He thought yet again about what V.T. had said. Karp was stuck between unsavory choices. He was not going to somehow convert Jack Keegan into the man Garrahy was, the man he needed to work for, and for some reason he did not have it in him to turn into Garrahy himself. And maybe Solotoff had been right-maybe Garrahy wasn't even Garrahy. So he had thrown a bomb. He was a fanatic, after all, everyone said so, and that's what fanatics do. He tossed the paper away, as disgusted with himself as he had ever been.