“I can’t believe I did that!” cried Marlene in anguish. “I yelled at a secretary. In public!”
She was in private now, in her tatty little office, with Luisa Beckett, her deputy. “What happened?” asked Beckett.
“Oh, nothing, just stupidity. I was in a rush to get to court to answer motions on the Schaffter thing, People v. Melville, and I just reached into the drawer and grabbed the red-tabbed file that’s supposed to have all the motions and responses in it and of course I didn’t check it and when I got there I looked and found it was full of Q and A’s. No motions.”
“Marva mixed up the tabs again.”
“Right. And so I got chewed out by the judge, who was fucking Hannegan, who hates me anyway, and I had to run back here and get the motions and run back and get there all sweaty like a kid on his first day in criminal courts. And of course got snickered at by all attending, and then I got back here, and Marva and Beverly were lounging around comparing nails, and I guess I just lost it. “Good Christ! I called her a … a… .”
“Not a dumb nigger, I hope,” said Beckett.
“No, a stupid bitch!” wailed Marlene, and pressed her face against her desk, with her arms wrapped around her head.
“She’ll get over it,” said Beckett soothingly. “Don’t take it so hard. Everybody gets mad sometimes. You’ve been under a strain.”
Marlene looked up. “Yeah, I have. So have you, so has everybody on the staff, so has fucking Marva, probably, but we don’t all carry on like that. Face it, I’m losing my mind.”
“No you’re not,” said Beckett automatically. Marlene stared at her more closely, searching her face for signs of the sort of patronizing looks people use to calm the loony down before punching 911. But Beckett seemed merely embarrassed. As well she might be, Marlene thought miserably. One of the very rare black female ADAs, and Marlene’s protégée for the past four years, Beckett was a rail-thin, pale tan woman who might have been extruded from Kevlar, and who had never been observed to exhibit any emotion except fury at rapists. Marlene figured there was a personal story behind that, but she had never asked and Luisa had never volunteered. They were close comrades on the job, but not really friends.
Marlene swallowed hard and said with a sigh, “Oh, I’m being a baby. I didn’t mean to lay a trip on you. Just, lately—it’s like someone’s running fingernails over my blackboard all the time. I can’t relax. I’m obsessive. Like this filing system that Marva screwed up. Did I really need it? I don’t know—I sort of got on all right before I set it up. I mean, I was never famous for losing stuff. But lately, I feel everything’s slipping away, that if I don’t keep track of things, minutely, everything will sort of dissolve—I’ll dissolve, or crack, or fall into little pieces… .”
Her voice died away. Great! Now Luisa would be positive her boss was crazy. Marlene’s face colored with embarrassment. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Beckett, looking at her impassively, as if waiting for this display of weakness to be over so that they could get down to business again. A good prosecutor, Beckett, but not much of a confidante.
Marlene cleared her throat and said, as briskly as she could manage, “So. You came in here for a reason, right?”
The relief was clear on Beckett’s face as she placed a file on the desk between them. “Yeah, rape and assault. I think the vic might need protection.”
Marlene took the file and skimmed it, which included glancing at several color Polaroids of a forlorn-looking woman, young, blond, pretty, with a fat shiner on one eye, a lumpy jaw, and a cut lip. The woman’s name was Maddy Merrill, twenty-three, a dancer and model. According to her statement, the accused, Albert Buonafacci, twenty-four, a tourist from Miami, had picked her up in a bar in the East Forties, bought her a nice dinner, and taken her to some clubs in a white limo. He had seemed like a nice guy. He had driven her back to her place in Chelsea, and she had invited him in for a drink. The nice guy had rounded out a magical Manhattan evening by beating her up and raping her.
“And the perp is where?” Marlene asked.
“The cops picked him up at his hotel. His story is she was a pros who tried to rip him off so he slapped her a couple. I got a hundred K bail, but he paid it without a twitch and walked out.”
“What’s the problem? Did he threaten her?”
“No, but she says he’s connected, or so he told her. She’s nervous about testifying against a Mob guy.”
“But he didn’t actually threaten her.”
“Not that she said, but …” Luisa checked and gave Marlene a penetrating look. “What, you have a problem with this? The guy’s a bastard, a violent son of a bitch. And he’s, um …” She hesitated.
“He’s Italian, right? Hence a mafioso?”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Beckett.
Marlene made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Yeah, you did. It’s okay, we get it all the time, like black men are muggers and black women are welfare sluts. Welcome to the melting pot. Let me say this: I grew up around guys who are now actually with the Mob—not a lot, but some. But for every guy who’s really with, there are a dozen sleazebags that talk about how connected they are. So our boy could be one of these. Or he could be for real. Okay, say he’s for real, there’s no guarantee that he’ll carry out on a threat. A threat is business, and the dons are not hot on mixing business with pleasure, and he’d be a lot more scared of them than he is of us. Meanwhile, there’s not even a solid threat, so …”
“No protection?”
“Not now,” said Marlene; and observing that Beckett’s fine-boned face was solidifying like a pour of epoxy, she added, “Come on, man! We have women being actively stalked and we got no place to put them.”
Luisa stood up and gathered up the case file. “Thanks for the lecture on the Mob,” she said bitterly. “I’ll pass it on to Ms. Merrill. I’m sure it’ll make her feel a lot better.”
“Oh, Luisa, for crying out loud … ,” said Marlene to the back of the departing woman. The door slammed shut.
A good day, thought Marlene: I’ve alienated my secretary and my deputy. What next?
But next, as it turned out, was a nice lift. The DA called her directly, an event about as rare as a thank-you from a New York cabbie:
“Marlene? Sandy Bloom. Are you busy?”
“Umm …”
“If you can spare a moment, I’d like you to drop by. I’m having an interesting meeting and I’d like your views.”
It happened that Marlene could just spare a moment for the district attorney. She stopped by the ladies’ to make sure that her face and outfit bore inspection, and of course, to check that her glassie was straight in its socket. Glass eyes tend to rotate and you have to check them often, unless you want to depend on the horrified looks of your interlocutors to cue you in that something’s wrong. Marlene claimed she was used to the thing and it didn’t bother her. This was a lie: besides the hair that fell artfully over her bad right eye, she was careful in public to obscure that side of her face with various practiced gestures and postures.
There were two other people sitting in the comfortable brown leather chairs in Bloom’s office when Marlene arrived, both of whom were vaguely familiar: a thin, spectacled man and a blocky, fair-haired woman in a denim suit. The DA was behind his desk, leaning backward in his thronelike judge’s chair. He stopped talking, warmly beckoned Marlene over to them, and made the introductions. The man was a prominent criminal justice scholar working on a project for the Vera Institute of Justice. The woman was the president of the New York State chapter of a national women’s organization. Marlene had seen both of them recently on a talk segment of the “Today” show.
“I was just telling Paul and Beth about you, Marlene,” said the DA, gesturing expansively toward her. “This woman has revolutionized the prosecution of sex crimes in Manhattan.”
Marlene bobbed her head at the fatuous remark, and the two celebrities beamed at her.
Paul said, “We were just talking about the possibility of identifying potentially violent sex offenders. We have some data that show violent sex offenders often have a history of misdemeanor arrests—public nuisance, exposure, sexual battery—before they become violent, and we were exploring the possibility of a program to track these people from their first appearance in the criminal courts.”
They all looked at Marlene, the revolutionary, for a brilliant response. Though feeling short on brilliance today, Marlene understood her new role as the DA’s pet smart girl. She paused for a moment to order her thoughts, and then said, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, but just because some violent sex offenders started small and went on to bigger things doesn’t mean all of them, or even the worst of them, did. Ted Bundy was clean as a whistle. So was John Wayne Gacy. The main problem we’ve had is that not potential but actual rapists walk on misdemeanor charges because we can’t nail them for a rape, or because we haven’t felt like going to trial. They plead to misdemeanor sexual abuse, or 130.20, sexual misconduct, which is a class A misdemeanor. They might get off with time served or serve at the most sixty days.”
The woman said, “Yes, but if we had some way of tracking them, we could either get them into some kind of enforced treatment program, or, I don’t know, warn people about them.”
Marlene nodded impatiently. “Yes, we could, if the law were changed, but the problem is we have no basis for assuming that these guys are any sicker than the average mugger, or that therapy would do any good. As far as tracking them, yeah …” She paused. An interesting notion had just popped into her head. “If the same people, the same staff of prosecutors, dealt with misdemeanor sex crimes in the criminal courts bureaus as well as the felonies, maybe then we’d get some perspective, maybe then we wouldn’t let these guys walk when they’ve already raped or abused some people. I mean, it wouldn’t be just another case on the calendar: like”—Marlene here imitated the monotone of a court officer calling out cases—“burglary, plead to trespass, bang, next case; dope dealing, plead to possession, bang, next case; rape, plead to sexual abuse two, bang, next case. It’d be more like, well, homicide. Something that stood out.”
The two visitors were interested in this prospect, of course, and they discussed at some length how it might work. During this interchange, Marlene cast an eye on the district attorney, and got a knowing and appreciative look. What the visitors didn’t quite understand was that the proposed unit that they were discussing, that would deal with sex cases in the criminal courts bureau as well as more serious offenses, would naturally be Marlene’s unit, which would require perhaps a tripling of her staff. But the DA understood it very well.
The meeting wound down, with the usual promises to keep in touch. As the two rape fans were leaving, Bloom motioned Marlene to stay behind. He said, “That was very good, Marlene. With you around, I got my ass covered on sex.” He grinned charmingly, showing the neat white perfect teeth of the wealthy, and patted her arm. “And real tricky too,” he continued. “You know, you set me up a little there.”
She felt her face heat. “I didn’t mean—,” she began, but Bloom interrupted with a gesture.
“No, I understand. And I tend to agree with you. But what we’re talking about here is a fairly massive reorganization of staff. The criminal courts bureau chief is going to be involved, and maybe the bench too. I’m going to have to stroke a lot of guys’ balls on this one.”
“You mean you’re interested in doing it? Actually?”
“Well, we need to talk some more,” said Bloom expansively. “But it could be done. It would put you in the big leagues around here, that’s for sure.” He tossed a sincere look into her eyes. “But you’re a big-league player, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, putting some wattage behind her return smile.
“Yes. Well, here’s the thing. I’m tied up for the rest of the afternoon, and then I have a five-thirty with some of the governor’s people, but … how about coming by my place around, say sevenish, with a preliminary plan. I’ll have a light supper prepared and we can talk about this idea of yours. Nail down the bodies and the numbers. Then you can draft something up over the weekend, a proposal, with all the figures estimated, and so on, and we can start passing it around on Monday.”
Yes, things had definitely turned up, Marlene thought with pleasure as she rode down on the elevator. She wouldn’t, of course, tell anyone about this coup until it was a done deal. After that … she basked prospectively in the praise to come. She could get Marva a promotion, as a real bureau secretary, and there’d be something in the pot for Luisa too. People looked up as she strode humming happily down the hall to her office.
She had just settled herself when the phone rang.
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Butch?”
“Yes, your husband. You sound surprised.”
“Um, yeah, you usually call later, at home. Is anything wrong?”
“Not a thing. I’m just about to leave for National. I’ll get the four-thirty shuttle and I should be home by six, six-thirty. I figured we’d have dinner out.”
“Um, dinner out?”
He caught her tone. “Yeah, like real people. You know, nothing fancy—in the neighborhood, the three of us. We can go to Bobo’s, or Villa Cella, they don’t mind kids.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t,” Marlene blurted out. “I have, um, a meeting.”
A pause on the line. “You have a meeting? At seven p.m.? What kind of meeting?”
“A meeting, Butch. It’s work. I’m a DA. Not everybody in the business keeps office hours. Remember?”
“Uh-huh, and I remember that one of the nice things about being a bureau chief was that you didn’t have to hustle around after hours. Who’s the meeting with?”
“With the person I’m going to meet,” snapped Marlene. “What, I’m under suspicion, Counselor? I’m getting grilled, as we used to say?”
“Hey, I’m sorry I asked,” said Karp quickly. “So, calm down.”
“I’m calm.”
“Calm down, and I’ll see you tonight, okay? I’ll hang out with the kid and I’ll … ah … see you when I see you, all right?”
“Yeah, and I’m sorry I bit at you,” said Marlene. “I’ll try to get away early. No kidding, I really do miss you.”
“Me too,” said Karp, huskily, not quite succeeding in keeping the worry out of his voice.
Marlene hung up the phone feeling vaguely remorseful, but not remorseful enough to call Karp back and tell him the truth. She would present him with the fait accompli: a huge new sex crimes bureau, a tamed and amenable Bloom. Marlene was not, of course, consciously devising a way to get one up on Karp. She would have denied it, if charged, and copped to a lesser: that she was entitled to her own life, her own career, that she was just doing what everyone did to get ahead, that Karp had nothing to do with it. She even believed this at times, and despised the creeping edge of guilt she now felt as she worked at the preliminary plans for her expansion.
A knock at her door, and without a pause a thin man walked into the office. He was wearing a shabby brown jacket over gray slacks and his face was putty-colored and heavily lined, with eyes like damp, dark stones. He was a hard fifty-five years old.
“Hello, Harry,” said Marlene. “I was just going to call you.”
Harry Bello was a cop who worked for Marlene. He had been a star at Brooklyn homicide for nearly twenty years before his descent into drunkenness. Marlene thought he was, when sober, as now, the best detective she had ever met. He was also Lucy Karp’s godfather.
“Tonight’s okay,” said Bello.
That was another thing about Harry Bello, and it took some getting used to. Harry not only didn’t waste words, sometimes he eliminated both sides of whole conversations. Marlene would have said something about having a late meeting and asking whether it would not be too much trouble for Harry to pick up Lucy at day care and to watch her while she was out. How Harry knew that Marlene was about to call him to ask just that favor, and not something else, was a mystery. Another one was how a man with eyes that dead could light up and be such a sweet godfather to her daughter.
“Thanks,” she said. At least one problem was taken care of. She looked up at him expectantly; Harry did not drop by for small talk; barely for large talk. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“Mrs. Morgan caved.”
“She did?” Marlene shouted, springing to her feet and clapping her hands together like a little girl. “Oh, Harry, when? What happened?”
“I told her Morgan wanted to pin it on her son, kid’s eighteen. Messing with the little girls. So … she gave him up.”
“What? When did Morgan try to pin it on the son?”
A slight tilting of the lips; Bello’s working smile. “After I suggested it to him,” he said.
Marlene shook her head in admiration. “Harry, you’re a piece of work.”
Harry said, “That protection argument. The guy’s definitely connected.”
Marlene switched gears. “Argument? Oh, yeah, Luisa’s wise guy. He is?”
“He’s Tony Bones’s oldest kid.”
“No kidding? Did he threaten her?”
A shrug.
“So do you agree with Luisa, or what? Protection?”
Another shrug. “I’ll look into it. When’ll you be home?”
“Ten or so, probably, but Butch should be home way before that. Thanks, Harry.”
He nodded and was gone.
Marlene had a final visitor, around five-thirty. She was deep in the most difficult task of public administration, figuring out how many people are required to do something that nobody has ever done before. Thick bound printouts of court records spread out across her desk, personnel manuals gaped open on chairs, and Marlene was punching a desk calculator with enthusiasm, one pencil clenched in her teeth and another, forgotten, stuck in her hair, when Raymond Guma walked in after a perfunctory tap on the glassed door.
She looked up, not pleased, and removed the pencil from her mouth, saying, “Not now, Goom.”
“This’ll just take a second,” said Guma. He was a stocky man in his late forties with a monkey face, large spreading ears, and a greasy mop of black ringlets that had just started to recede back from a low forehead. The shadow of his beard was more than Nixonian, giving him a seedy appearance that was reinforced by the big tie knot pulled down to the third button and the bagginess of the trousers. He looked at the cluttered desk. “What’re you doing, your taxes?”
“Just some admin shit,” said Marlene snappishly.
He stood staring, in no hurry to leave.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oooh, who’s got the rag on today? I heard about your little display this afternoon. Maybe you’re suffering from lack of nooky too.”
“Fuck you, Guma! Is that what you came in here for, to bust my hump?”
Guma rested a pudgy thigh on the edge of her desk. “No, it’s business. Guy charged with rape and assault, name of Buonafacci?”
“Tony Bones’s kid.”
Guma’s eyebrows lifted. “You know already?”
“Yeah, Guma, even though we’re a bunch of dumb cunts around here, we occasionally get the message. What about him?”
“Tony called me. He wants to know can anything be done.”
“Done? What is this, Guma? Since when are you running errands for the cugines?”
Guma pulled his chin in sharply, spread his hands, and frowned. “Hey! What’re you talking ‘errands.’ One, the guy’s a friend, the father, it’s a courtesy, find out what’s happening to his kid. What’s the difference he’s a don? Two, Tony could do us a lot of favors on open cases. It’d be nice having him owing us a big one. Three, he’s willing to make it right with the girl.”
Now, of course, this sort of thing happens all the time in DA’s offices. Criminals know more about crime than anyone else, and in most of the major crimes that do get solved, critical information comes from the bad guys, for which reason the law likes to cultivate favors among them. On any normal day, Marlene might have been receptive to Guma’s proposal, but this was not a normal day, nor was Marlene her normal self. Her deputy already suspected her of favoritism toward her supposed tribe, she had dissembled with her husband, she was about to go to dinner with a man she disliked in order to advance her career: she felt, in short, sufficiently corrupt without doing a big one for Tony Bones.
So she said, “Forget it, Guma. The woman’s marked up, she made a complaint, we have a good rape case. He wants to plead to the top count, rape one, I might drop the assault and I’ll see about putting in a word with the judge, but that’s it.”
Guma slapped the side of his head with the heel of his hand. “Jesus! Marlene? Earth calling Ciampi? The girl is a ‘model’; she’s a ‘dancer.’ What does that tell you?”
“I don’t care if she’s got a sheet for soliciting, Guma. This sweetheart beat her and raped the shit out of her and he’s going for it.”
Guma’s color was rising and his voice became louder.
“Marlene, what the fuck you mean ‘he’s going for it’? The kid’s gonna waltz in there with Di Bennedetti or Schoenstein, or some other distinguished criminal member of the criminal bar, tell his sad story of misguided youth and a thieving whore, and walk out of there with a suspended sentence and probation for sexual mis and assault three. The girl’ll get nothing and you all are gonna have wasted your fuckin’ time preparing a bullshit case.”
“No deal, Guma,” said Marlene.
“You’re serious?”
“Yeah.”
“Then fuck you very much, and I’ll try to do the same for you someday!” he shouted, and slammed out of the office. Marlene sighed and went back to her columns of figures, hoping that Luisa Beckett would be happy about this. Marlene certainly wasn’t.
District Attorney Bloom lived on Park Avenue just north of Sixty-fourth Street, in a duplex on the top floor. His family had made a pile as meat-packers during the Civil War and an even greater pile later when the meatpacking district had become Sutton Place and their stockyards had turned into the most gilded real estate on Manhattan Island. Bloom also owned a large spread in Westchester, where he kept his family, preferring to spend the bulk of his time in his pied-à-terre. He was the kind of person who actually called it that.
Marlene arrived shortly after seven, having splurged for a cab. She was wearing her working clothes, a plain gray wool suit, and a cream silk blouse, with a tan raincoat on top. She carried a large leather bag and a briefcase, in which rested her work of the last four hours.
A green-coated doorman smelling lightly of drink ushered her in and told her she was expected. The elevator was brass, rosewood, and mirrored. Marlene checked her face and adjusted her eye.
The door to Bloom’s place was opened by a short middle-aged Latina woman in a tan uniform and apron, who took Marlene’s coat and bag and directed her silently down a hallway lined with lit paintings. Marlene spotted a small Hockney and what looked like an Utrillo.
Bloom was waiting in a large room fitted out as a library: two walls book-lined floor to ceiling, an oriental rug on the floor, and on the third wall two large windows decked out with pale drapes and showing the lights of Park Avenue and the East Side beyond it. In the center of the room was a long mahogany library table with suitable chairs and an arrangement of side tables, standard lamps, dark leather couches, and club chairs, in one of which sat the master of the establishment.
Bloom looked up from the book he had been reading. He was wearing a baby blue knit golfing cardigan with the seal of a country club on it, an open-necked tattersall check shirt, tan whipcords, and Gucci white loafers, no socks. He rose and greeted Marlene warmly, which included a lingering squeeze on the arm and some remarks about how good she looked, as if he hadn’t seen her for months, instead of just a few hours ago. He offered her a drink and she accepted a white wine. Bloom opened a bottle of Pouilly at a small bar hidden behind a panel made from phony books, placed it in a silver ice bucket, and brought it over to a coffee table. He made a little ceremony of pouring it out into crystal goblets, accompanied by some wine-snob chatter. His eyes were bright and it was obvious that this was not his first drink of the evening.
They sat at the coffee table, Marlene on the couch, Bloom on the club chair opposite, and drank. Bloom refilled their glasses. He described his meeting with the “governor’s people": they wanted his support on a big anticrime bill now before the legislature. According to Bloom, Bloom was the pulsing center of criminal justice clout in the state of New York. The actual content of his talk was not, however, about legal or judicial ideas and plans, but about politics, specifically the politics of personal relationships, about which Marlene was ready to agree he was a reigning expert. One guy was out to get him, these two were in collusion because one owed the other a sleazy favor. That one was fucking his colleague’s wife. Bloom went on, and did not spare the bottle.
Finally, at one of the infrequent pauses, Marlene said briskly, “Well, should we get going? I’ve worked up a lot of stuff and I don’t want to be out too late.”
Bloom stared blearily at her, as if he had forgotten the ostensible purpose of their meeting. He said pettishly, “Yes, well, but supper. We haven’t had our supper yet. I’m starving, aren’t you?”
No: what Marlene was was irritated and starting to get woozy from the wine. But “Sure,” was what she said, imagining a pizza or a plate of sandwiches. Wrong again; the DA ushered her down the hallway and into a dining room, where a table had been set for two. Candles were lit. They sat, and the Latina servant began to serve a full meal: lobster bisque to start, an arugula salad, little fillets with roast potatoes and asparagus. And more wine, of course. The DA went to a wine closet built into the paneled wall of the dining room and brought out a Chateau Petrus. Marlene learned what it had cost, and what a hard bargain Bloom had driven with the wine merchant, and how hard it was to get first-growth seventies, and so on and on until Marlene wanted to throw something heavy at him. Instead, she drank three glasses of the stuff, which was, she was still able to admit, truly marvelous.
A familiar feeling struck Marlene about then, almost a déjà vu. This was exactly like a bad blind date with one of the stuffed shirts she had spent evenings with in law school. Marlene had been living with three other poor students in a New Haven fleabag, subsisting on peanut butter and spaghetti, and from time to time, when she was feeling unusually resentful of her poverty and the squalor in which she lived, she would allow herself to be picked up by some rich jerk and fed lavishly at a fancy restaurant, after which the main problem was how to keep him out of her pants. Marlene had never actually let herself be fucked for a nice meal, but she knew any number of distinguished and brilliant women, in both college and law school, who had, and thought little of it.
The dishes were cleared at last. Marlene said, “Can we get through this now? I really have to go soon.” Karp would be waiting at the loft now; Lucy would be fast asleep. She was struck by a powerful desire to be away from this bore and sitting in comfy clothes in her own kitchen talking to her husband. Or in bed.
She had interrupted one of Bloom’s insider anecdotes. He frowned petulantly and said, “Yes, yes, all right. My God, you’re relentless, aren’t you? You should relax more, my dear. Go with the flow, as the kids say. I tell you what—I have a Zabar’s cheesecake. I’ll have it served in the library, with coffee and brandy. How would that be? Cozy? And you can at long last unburden yourself. Sound good?”
“Fine,” said Marlene, rising. Okay, she thought, be polite, be correct, people do this all the time, you have to learn to get on with people you don’t particularly like, be a grown-up. She lifted her chin and constructed a smile on her face, and forced a little self-deprecating laugh.
Bloom returned the smile and chuckled. See! she thought. It’s easy. They removed to the library.
The servant brought a tray with a whole, perfect blond disk of cheesecake and a silver coffee service. Bloom went to the bar. Marlene arranged her papers on the mahogany coffee table and waited. After a while, Bloom returned with two snifter glasses, each containing a hefty shot of amber liquid. Bloom poured out the coffee and sliced the cheesecake, and sat down on the couch next to her. Marlene ignored the cake, and the pressure of his thigh next to hers, took a quick sip of coffee, slipped on her specs, and went into her spiel. She felt curiously detached now, as if she were floating back among the towering bookcases watching a windup version of Marlene making the pitch. She glanced at Bloom from time to time to see how he was receiving it. He seemed all right, with the same bland semismile he usually wore stuck like a cheap decal on his pink face.
She finished and looked up. “That’s it. Any questions?”
Bloom shook his head. “No. I’m overwhelmed. A terrific job, Marlene. I think that’s a really good base to go on with. Very feasible.”
“You think so?”
“I do. You’ve got a great, great future with the office. Onward and upward,” he said, patting her thigh several times. “Let’s drink to it!” He raised a snifter, Marlene raised hers, they clinked, they drank. Marlene liked cognac, and this was the best she had ever tasted, a bubble of smooth fire in her throat.
They had another. They talked, and now she started to talk, about herself, about Karp. Bloom seemed interested. He drew her out. The conversation became more intimate. There was something avid about his interest in Karp, in “what he was really like,” something disturbing. Marlene found herself talking automatically, without thinking. She experienced once again that feeling of detachment, of not being herself, in her body, in charge.
It was hot in the room, and Marlene slipped out of her suit jacket, for some reason not feeling it was an odd thing to do. Bloom removed his golf sweater.
A hiatus here, blankness. Marlene drifted off into a dream. She was naked in a cage, in some sort of zoo. Karp was in the next cage. There were people watching them expectantly. She was full of sexual desire and so was Karp, but she was nervous and embarrassed. Then, in the strange way of dreams, it became all right, natural. She pressed against the bars, spreading her thighs. He stroked her thighs and belly. She squirmed.
She awoke, gasping. She was lying on her back, on the couch, with her skirt hiked up and her legs asunder. Her shirt was open to the waist and her bra had been unhooked. The district attorney was kneeling over her, breathing hard, with one of his hands under the elastic of her panty hose, groping at her crotch.
In a convulsive movement, she sat up and thrust him away. She stood up, tottered, her head spinning, and fell back against the arm of the couch. Bloom stroked her leg and said soothingly, “Relax. Relax, there’s nothing wrong… .”
She struggled again and found her feet, in deep panic now, disoriented and feeling ill. There was a peculiar medicinal taste at the back of her throat. Drugged. Something in the brandy. She saw her jacket and snatched it up and shoved it under her left arm and did the same with her bag. With her right hand, she held her blouse closed. She started to walk away, but Bloom reached out and grabbed her left arm. His face was flushed. He said in his best avuncular tone, “Hey, look, let’s sit down and talk about this. Before you run off and do anything rash, let’s just sit …”
Marlene set herself, hauled back, and threw a solid right cross into Bloom’s mouth. It was not an artful blow and her father would have disapproved of the right hand lead, but it was a sincere one, with all her meat and considerable skill behind it. Bloom staggered away from the punch, caught the backs of his calves against the coffee table, and crashed down on it. Two of its legs collapsed, dumping him on the carpet, so that the cheesecake and everything else on the coffee table slipped down the slope thus created, covering him with a mess of glutinous dessert, cold coffee, cream, sugar, and shattered crockery.
Marlene ran out of the apartment, without stopping to pick up her coat or her briefcase and her carefully prepared plan. She adjusted her clothing in the elevator, and raced past the lobby without disturbing the nodding doorman in his chair. On the sidewalk she was overcome with nausea. She knelt and puked her expensive meal into the gutter. Then she wobbled herself upright, whistled through her fingers, and snagged one of Park Avenue’s plentiful yellow cabs.
Once in the warm and deodorant-scented taxi, the shock caught up with her. She came apart. One part of her, that is, stood apart and analyzed the situation with a cold and well-trained logic. She had, of course, been a fool to think that Bloom was interested in her ideas. Bloom might have actually used the rewards available to him to help her career, if that was necessary to get her into bed, but the main thing was the sexual titillation of fucking the head of the rape unit, and not just that, no, not just, or even principally, for love of Marlene’s sweet body, but to put it to Karp. To fuck Karp.
And there was, of course, no way of getting back at him, even though she was almost certain that she had been drugged. What would she tell the police, for example? That she had gone to a man’s apartment while her husband was away, and he had what … grabbed a cheap feel? And who was the guy? Oh, the district attorney? Did you talk to the rape unit? Oh, you are the rape unit? Delightful. And of course, her career was now in the toilet, permanently.
Another part of Marlene was balled up, screaming in shame and rage. Marlene was, needless to say, no stranger to sexual violence. She had, in fact, once been kidnapped and subjected to various intrusive rituals by a gang of satanists. This was different, and, in a way, worse. She herself had written this script. What had Karp called him? A corrupt fuck. Yes, and of course she had known that, and of course she had conspired to hide that from herself, to pull off a coup, to show that she could succeed where Karp had failed, in controlling Bloom, in getting—what was it?—past Butch in a way? Because that would mean that she didn’t need him in some pathetic fashion, that their relationship was purely voluntary, that she was in control, and free.
As she had been since she (sort of) stopped believing in God at the age of twelve. This thought crossed her mind quickly, but not quickly enough, for now the taps were opened and the vast reservoirs of shame and guilt supplied as part of her Catholic girlhood and held back these many years by her worldly success, by her confidence, burst forth and flooded her spirit. She blubbered noisily down Broadway, prompting a nervous look in the rearview by the cabbie.
The final part of her was barely conscious. This was the part that knew that, if only fleetingly, she had considered letting Bloom screw her, for the advantage it would bring. That she had instantly rejected it did not in the least balance the horror of having made the calculation, having considered it at all. It was indelible, like a bloodstain on white silk.
Marlene was now moving toward a state that, as she well knew, the Church calls acidie: the condition of believing that one is beyond salvation, which is itself a mortal sin, and unique among the sins in that the indulgence in it is its own punishment.
Arriving at Crosby Street, she thrust a ten-dollar bill at the cabbie, double the fare, and staggered through her door and up the stairs.
In the dark loft, she checked the child, stifling her sobs so as not to wake her. Karp was asleep too; she could hear his heavy breathing. It was past two. She rinsed her mouth out at the sink and brushed her teeth for a long time. Then she curled up on the red couch in the living room and drew a quilt around her against a chill that was as much from within her as from the air in the loft. That was how Karp found her in the morning, wide awake and staring at nothing.
The thin man settled easily into the house in Little Havana. He watched a good deal of television and slept late.
It was fairly cool for Miami, nights in the sixties, but the thin man kept the air-conditioning set high, and slept under blankets. He had a serious air-conditioning deficit, almost thirteen years’ worth. The Cuban brought him his meals, takeout from American places, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Dairy Queen. Another deficit to be made up. The man who called himself Bishop had told him not to go out, which he thought somewhat peculiar, because he would have to go out sometime, or there was no point in his being there at all.
One day, a little over a week after his arrival from Guatemala, the Cuban went out and returned with Bishop. They sat at the Formica table in the kitchen and drank American beer. For a few minutes they made small talk about how they both were doing, how the country had changed, about sports and television.
Bishop slid a paper across the table. It was a list of names. All of them were familiar to the thin man.
“You want all of these done?” the thin man asked.
“No. I wish we could leave all of them alone, but that may not be possible. The point is, we want the minimum possible hangout here. It’ll depend on how much the investigation learns before it collapses.”
“It’s going to collapse, though?”
Bishop smiled. “Assuredly. That operation’s already under way. We just need to stay one step ahead for a relatively short period.” He tapped the list of names. “We may not need to do anything. I’d prefer that, frankly.”
The thin man thought about that for a moment and drew the obvious conclusion.
“So you have people inside. The investigation.”
“Oh, yes, our sources are quite good,” said Bishop. “That’s what we do, after all. We’re spies.” He laughed, and the thin man laughed too.