Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

After that, study all morning with Tran, math and science. He was a good teacher. Use your strengths, he said, math is a language, science is a language. She saw that it was true. The quadratic equations, the sines and cosines, the chemical formulas started for the first time to make sense, like Chinese. The boiling of foreign tongues in her head slowed to a mild bubbling. She spoke French to Tran, Vietnamese to the others. In the afternoons she would be driven to the University of Bridgeport to do research for the papers she owed. Then back home, where after dinner she would work on papers and do the assignments Tran had given her. After a few days of this she called Dr. Shadkin at the lab, another duty. He was appalled.

"Lucy, for God's sake," he cried, "you're sweating high school? High school? Okay, let me fix this-by the authority vested in me by the trustees of Columbia University, I hereby grant you a Ph.D. Now, come back here."

She laughed, she said she would be back when she got this worked out. Her parents wanted it, she had let them down, she had to do it.

"What is this, some kind of Confucian thing?"

"Yes, something like that," she said.

"I'll send you stuff."

He did, tapes and books on Lithuanian. At night, after she had finished her schoolwork, she dived into that language with relief, as a runner finishing a distance race walks easily for a while to cool off. Lithuanian was important to the Indo-European project, being the closest living language (they thought) to the mysterious root language from which nearly all the tongues of Europe had sprung. Pitch accents; richly case-inflected nouns; three rather than the usual two number designations. Fascinating!

Thus, she succeeded in occupying her mind entirely with work, leaving barely a fragment for thinking about her family, or about David Grale. Only momentarily, just as she drifted into sleep, did the shadow come back again, the one around David Grale, the secret and never-examined fear. She had a dream once about the tunnels: She was running through darkness, lit intermittently by sparks, full of the roar and screech of the trains. A figure leaped out at her, the electric discharges shining on the long knife in his hands, on his mad saint's face.

Weeks passed in this way for the divided family, and Karp waited, something he was good at. Like all first-class athletes, he understood that sometimes, for mysterious reasons, you suddenly couldn't sink the shot, hit the ball, find the inside corner of the plate. Some people railed and went a little crazy when this happened and sought doctors and witch doctors and changed how they did what they did, and beat up on their loved ones, but not Karp. It was Karp's instinct to stay the same, to be the unmoving center around which the bad luck or juju or mishegoss fluttered or screeched, in confidence that if he did that, it would all come back to the way it had been before. Or not. He could live with that, too. Meanwhile, he was not idle. He had a number of lines in the water, and from time to time he would give them a twitch or two.

One morning he summoned his favorite twitchee. "Murrow," he asked, "what are you doing with yourself these days?"

"Oh, mainly coram nobis petitions. Things seem kind of dead on Marshak."

"They do seem that way. Handling petitions is good training, though."

"Yeah, but what I don't understand is how come we convicted all these guys who didn't do it. Something's not right."

"Or else some of the convicted prisoners who're petitioning are not telling the truth. They're just trying to get out of prison."

"Really? Gosh, I never thought of that. My boyish heart is shattered. What's going on with the big cases?"

"Oh, not much. Jack's going to run out of time before he has to decide on the death penalty on Benson, which means he'll have to decide sometime next week."

"He's going to go for it?"

"Assuredly."

"And you're going to prosecute it?"

"Mine not to reason why. I've given him enough stuff that he can pretend to discover after he wins the June primary so that he really doesn't have to make a jackass of the office by trying to actually hang Benson. Of course, if McBright wins, he's probably going to go ahead with it anyway, just to show he's an equal-opportunity oppressor of the innocent."

"I've been following his campaign with interest. I notice he doesn't include Benson in the justice-is-color-blind speech anymore. He heats up Marshak and Lomax, though, in compensation. As to Marshak, do you know a Detective Paradisio?"

"The bum-slasher task-force guy?"

"That guy. I'd like you to go down and see him, and tell him… get out your little book, Murrow, this is a little complicated."

Later that day Karp could, therefore, in good conscience explain to a judge that he should not summarily dismiss the case against Sybil Marshak, as her counsel had moved, because the crime in question appeared to be part of a larger criminal conspiracy subject to a continuing investigation, which was expected to throw a clearer light on the claims of self-defense. Shelly Solotoff was livid. Surely, this was something for a grand jury to decide. Why had the DA's office declined to bring this case before its grand jury? Ms. Marshak was a public figure; it was inconceivable that she would be involved in anything criminal. She was enduring enormous pain and suffering by having this felony charge hanging over her head. Dark conspiracies were hinted; the phrase star-chamber was used more than once. Judge Frederick North Davis, a portly and phlegmatic gentleman the color of wet coffee grounds, was not overly impressed by these arguments. He pointed out that Ms. Marshak had, in fact, killed a young man with a firearm, and that her pain and suffering might well be assuaged by the fact that she was still living on Central Park West rather than Rikers Island, where almost all of the many other people who had killed young black persons with firearms were presently languishing. In the interests of evenhandedness, the judge also looked sharply at the people's rep and asked when this investigation might be expected to conclude.

Karp reached deep into the back of his trousers and pulled out a date. "No more than two weeks, Your Honor."

Solotoff followed Karp out of the courtroom and accosted him in the hallway.

"Up to your old tricks, huh, Butch?"

"What old tricks are those, Shelly?"

"Spreading confusion, looking for an angle. You know as well as I do that there's no ongoing investigation here. You just can't stand the thought that a grand jury might refuse to indict in a clear case of self-defense. This one is a lot more blatant than Bernie Goetz. The guy came at her with a knife. End of story."

"Did he? We'll see."

Solotoff laughed pityingly. "I hate a sore loser. Actually, I hope you do indict. I'm looking forward to creaming you in court."

"Me, too," said Karp amiably.

"Also, telling fibs to a judge…" Solotoff waggled an admonitory finger. "You could get into trouble, assuming I wanted to press the issue."

"It's not a fib. There is an investigation."

"Oh, horseshit! There is absolutely nothing going on in Marshak and you damn well know it."

This was said in so forceful a manner that passersby looked over, and Karp seemed to notice Solotoff in a different, far more interested way. He turned the famous gaze up a notch. "No, I don't, but I was kind of wondering how come you're so positive. Got a pal in the DA, hmm?"

Solotoff realized what he had done and tried to cover it by saying, "Come on, Butch, you know you're my only pal in the DA," followed by a hearty, patently false laugh. Karp did not join him, continuing only to stare, as at a cockroach of unusual size. In the blank seconds thus occupied, Solotoff found that instead of thinking what to say now, to recoup his advantage, his mind was playing over the images of that horrible night: creeping down the back stairs, calling a limo, sneaking out the service entrance of the hotel, stinking, in rags, shoeless, creeping into his apartment where, by miserable chance, his wife was up and entertaining some of her old school friends. He'd said he'd been mugged, an absurd story, which was accepted, if not believed. And the bitch must have told him all about it (she had not, in fact), and he was gloating over it right now. He thought briefly of just bringing it up (Speaking of pals, your wife's a friendly girl; I was squeezing her tits the other night…), but no, especially as he hadn't scored, better forget the whole thing. The key was to distract Karp from this particular line of questioning, but as it turned out he did not need to, for Karp glanced at his watch and distracted himself.