Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

"This Vietcong guy you're always telling me about?"

"Ex-Vietcong. He was a Southerner. He spent twenty years fighting the French and us, and when the war was over, the Communists threw him in jail and tortured him. For a long time he was really my best friend. I mean among grown-ups."

"Gosh, should I be jealous?"

She blushed. "Are you a grown-up?" she asked lightly, but he seemed to take the question seriously. "I'm not sure," he said. "I think there's something childlike about a certain kind of religious personality, a lightness of spirit that you get in very secure and happy children. Sometimes you see it in the faces of old priests and nuns. Unlined faces, a sort of light comes out of them. You've seen that." She had. "Anyway, I think I'm that type, although with me it might be shallowness. Unlike you."

"What type am I?"

"The suffering type. We only come in the two flavors, Good Friday and Easter." He grinned at her. "You poor girl. You seem to be suffering more than usual lately."

"Oh, I'm all right," she began, and then laughed, a sound tinted more than a little with hysteria. "My life is coming unglued, is all. I'm getting kicked out of school, and I don't seem to be able to care about it. My mother… we came home from church today, me and my little brothers, and Mom was laid out on the couch, a classic scene, a bottle of booze in her fist, vomit. I got her stirred and she wanted to go shopping, she wanted to buy us stuff. I had to talk her out of calling her car and staggering out, and she screamed at me, which I don't mind, because she's always screaming at me about something, I mean lately. I sort of muscled her into bed and hung around until my dad got home."

"Yeah, drunks are the worst. My mom was one, too."

"She's not a drunk," Lucy snapped, and then sighed. "At least I don't think so. I mean she never was before, but they say the family is the last to cop. My father seems to be pretending that nothing's wrong, but you can see it's really tearing him up. And even besides that, he's worried about something, at work. He's in some kind of trouble, I don't know what. And I'm not helping, I know that. But I just don't feel very charitable. I want to run away from everything, school, the family, church… just disappear into the languages…"

And more in this vein, Lucy was building up to revealing some of her real secrets, stuff she hadn't ever told anyone. She was trying to trust him now, and it was an act of will, not unconsciousness, as it had been before, before she'd talked to the priest. They were walking slowly south on Tenth, heading toward Penn Station and the homeless congeries in its environs, in the hope that they would meet someone who had seen Canman recently, when Lucy suddenly realized that she had lost her audience. She felt a pang of intense embarrassment. I'm boring him, was her thought, oh, God, how stupid, laying all this shit on him… but he said, "There he is."

David pointed across the street, and she looked and saw the Canman, unmistakable, the billow of dirty-tanish rattails, the pale blob of the face against the black plastic bag he carried on one shoulder, the long army overcoat, the loping stride. He was heading north on Tenth on the other side of the avenue. They both froze, like hunters just spotting deer across a naked autumn wood, but he was deerlike, too, casting his eyes back and forth, occasionally snapping a glance over his free shoulder, and he spotted them through the sparse Sunday traffic. He turned and headed back the other way, trotting, his cans making clanging music. Grale dashed into the street, crying, "Hey, John! Canman! Wait up!" Lucy started to follow, but had to step back in deference to a honking cab. She heard the squeal of tires behind her and a full chorus of horns. A black sedan zoomed out from a parking space across from the Santomas bodega, cut heedless across six lanes, and shrieked to a stop in front of the fleeing Canman. Both front doors sprang open at once, and two men leaped out. Canman instantly reversed course, streaking north again, his overcoat flapping, pursued by the two men, the one in the lead white, the other black. Canman dodged around a truck, and as he did, he dumped the bag of cans. The white man stepped on one of them, skidded, fell. His partner sidestepped around him and chased Canman, who was now running full tilt up Tenth, in the roadway. The traffic slowed as drivers stopped to gape, and this gave Lucy a chance to cut across the road, and so she was able to see Grale standing in Canman's path, his arms out as if offering a hug. Maybe he really did want to hug the fleeing man, but what he got was a stiff-arm to the chest that knocked him back against a parked car. He rebounded just in time to trip up the black man pursuing, and they both went down in a sprawl. Lucy ran over to Grale, who was bleeding from a scraped chin, but before she could get to him, something slammed into her back, and she went facedown into the asphalt.

It knocked the wind out of her, and for a full minute she could think of nothing but drawing breath. When she was able to stagger to her feet, she saw that the black man had a handful of David's hair and one arm up behind his back in a hammerlock. He pounded David's face a couple of times against the hood of a car and then snapped handcuffs on his wrists. So they were cops. She stuffed a tissue against her bleeding nose and plucked at the man's sleeve.

"What are you doing?" she demanded. "He didn't do anything."

The man whirled around, his face set in a snarl, but when he saw her, he did a double take and said, "Police business, miss. Move along now!"

"But he didn't do anything!"

"Interfering with an officer, miss. I said move along!" He finished cuffing Grale and marched him back to the black sedan, with Lucy worrying at his heels. The cop tossed Grale into the backseat of the car, which Lucy now saw was an unmarked police vehicle. She tried to stick her head into the doorway of the car, but the cop grabbed her roughly and threw her back. He slammed the car door, and they were just standing there arguing when the other man came trotting up. His face was red, and his pale hair stuck sweat-soaked to his forehead. Lucy found it hard to look at his face, so ferocious was the expression of frustrated rage. Although taken feature by feature it was a handsome face, now it was peculiarly distorted, the eyes retreating into slits, the brow bulging over them, the teeth bared, the jaw muscles knotted. He almost seemed to have a muzzle.

"I fucking lost him," he said to the black cop. "I lost him!" He struck the trunk of the car with his fist, full strength, dimpling the metal but doing no apparent injury to his hand. He paced rapidly back and forth, fists clenching and releasing, while his partner waited calmly, like a lion trainer giving some beast the time to come around.

"Fucking guy is like smoke," said the white cop, and then he shook his head, "or maybe I'm losing it." He laughed, took a few deep breaths, and looked into the car.

"What's this?"

"Guy who tripped me. Looked like he knew the suspect."

"Well, of course, he knows him," said Lucy angrily. "We're church workers, we're both volunteers out of Holy Redeemer. We were trying to find Canman, and we did find him, and then you showed up and chased him away."

"Who're you?" asked the white cop. His face, while still blotched, had once again become the face of a human.

"My name is Lucy Karp. And that's David Grale in there. He's a Franciscan, for God's sake." Lucy saw the black cop whisper something into his partner's ear.

"You know where this Canman character hangs out?" the white cop asked her. "Where he's hiding?"

"Of course not. If we knew where he was, we wouldn't have been walking all over the city looking for him."

The white cop nodded. "Okay, sure, but you could see where we might've made an honest mistake. We've been staked out by that bodega for two days. The guy finally shows up, and you queer the collar. You got to expect we're going to react a little." He turned to his partner and made a gesture, and the black cop pulled Grale out of the car and took off the cuffs. He had a bib of blood down the front of his shirt, and his face was bruised and red-splattered.