Garrahy’s old office had changed. There was a new beige rug, some contemporary graphics of the traffic-accident-on-Alpha-Centauri school, and the obligatory row of Spy legal caricatures. There was also a new secretary; Ida had finally joined the other Ida’s in the dust of history. The new one, Jerri, was blonde, and dressed for success. Mr. Bloom was on the phone, Karp was told, and he should make himself comfortable in the conference room. Did he want coffee? He did not.
Karp clump-clumped into the conference room. Conrad Wharton was there, seated in one of the leather armchairs toward the head of the table. Karp maneuvered himself into one of the chairs at the other end.
“Hello, Butch,” said Wharton pleasantly. “How are you feeling?”
“I can’t complain, Conrad. What’s this all about?”
“Oh, I think we’d better wait for Sandy on that. I think he’d want to tell you personally.”
Wharton regarded Karp with a benign expression, a half-smile playing about his Kewpie doll lips. Karp thought Wharton looked a little too much like a cat studying a mouse. He began to go over in his mind all the things he had done recently that Wharton might be able to nail him for. He was just starting to get nervous when he realized this was exactly what Wharton wanted. He made himself smile back.
“And how about you, Conrad? The ship of state sailing smoothly? All the columns of figures adding up?”
“Some of them, Butch, some of them. Our throughput is holding up nicely, and that’s the important thing, isn’t it? Although, I hear rumors from time to time about padding.”
“Padding?”
“Yes, you know, inventing cases to make it look like the clearance rate is higher than it really is.”
“No joke? That’s low, Conrad, that must be really tough on your system.”
“Yes, it is. But we’re putting controls in place that should put a stop to it. Audit systems, and so on. Sandy is a real bug on clean data.”
At that, the real bug himself walked through the door. As usual, he looked tan and fit. He was wearing the trousers and vest of a navy pinstriped suit, and his sleeves were rolled up to show his Patek Phillipe, and to show he was not above a little hard work. After more than a year of contact with him, Karp thought he was about the most completely phony man he had ever encountered.
“Well, hiya guy!” said Bloom heartily. “No, don’t get up,” he said, as he reached across the table to shake Karp’s hand, although Karp had made no move to do so. Bloom sat down next to Wharton and opened a folder that Wharton handed him.
“Butch, this concerns one of your people, so I wanted to talk it over with you before I took any adverse action. I have here a Grand Jury subpoena for a Vera Higgs. Are you familiar with that?”
“Yeah, I am. What about it?”
“What about it! It’s a Grand Jury subpoena, Butch. The witness was never brought before the Grand Jury. This assistant, this Kaplan, used a legal instrument as a … a convenience so that he could break an alibi and depose new testimony in a Criminal Court case.”
“Mister Bloom, the use of Grand Jury subpoenas for things like that has been an unofficial practice in this office for all the time I’ve been here. Mister Garrahy knew about it, and …”
“You know, Butch, I get a little tired of hearing what Mister Garrahy allowed and didn’t allow. The fact remains that it’s a serious procedural violation. I had to take a very unpleasant phone call from Lennie Sussman this morning. He was furious that Kaplan and what’s-his-face, Hrcany, went out and coerced his alibi witness into changing her story, using an illegal subpoena.”
Karp struggled for control. He took a deep breath and said carefully, “Uh, Mister Bloom …”
“Please, it’s Sandy.”
“Uh, Sandy. I’m sorry you had an unpleasant phone call, but the guy the woman was protecting with her fake alibi has been wanted for three years for involvement in a double homicide. He was also the guy who blew up Marlene Ciampi. And tried to kill me.
“Now as to the legality of the usage, Miss Higgs was interviewed in an assistant district attorney’s office prior to her appearance before the Grand Jury. This is common practice. She had every opportunity to so testify, and can be rescheduled to do so at any time. So the Grand Jury subpoena was legit.”
Bloom began shaking his head even before Karp had finished.
“Butch, it won’t wash. It’s obvious that your people’s use of a Grand Jury subpoena was what pressured the woman to flip on this thing. Sussman will never accept it and neither will Judge Stein. I spoke to the judge at noon and he agreed we can work it out, but …”
“Wait a minute, you brought this business to a judge? Merv the Swerve is going to make a profound legal analysis of this crummy little procedural zit? I can’t believe I’m hearing this. And who gives a shit what Sussman will accept? He’s on the other side. What is going on here?”
Bloom’s face darkened and began to reassemble itself into a pout.
“If you would let me finish. Both the judge and Sussman would be satisfied with an agreement that the Higgs testimony will not be used in the trial, and that both Hrcany and Kaplan will be privately reprimanded.”
“I bet they would! Oh, crap, don’t tell me you agreed to that!”
“Yes, I did. It’s a good agreement. Don’t you realize that your people could be cited for abuse of process at a judicial hearing. They could even be disbarred.”
“For this bupkes? Sandy, give me a break. Uh-uh, there’s no way I’m going to go along with this deal, and Hrcany and Kaplan would be fools if they did, and they’re not fools. No, I want a full, open judicial hearing. I’ll advise Kaplan to ask for one, and I’m positive Roland will demand one. And we’re not suppressing that testimony, either. Sussman doesn’t like it, let him challenge it in open court, on the record.”
“I don’t understand your attitude, Butch. I thought you were a team player,” said Bloom petulantly.
“I am! I am a team player. I want my team to win. I play by the rules, but I still want to win. Look, let’s carry the metaphor further. What’s the score?”
“Score? What are you talking about?”
“This.” Karp opened his folder and spread his charts of trial percentages and conviction rates out on the table. He began to explain what they meant, in terms of public service and attorney morale. But as Karp spoke, and as he observed the mounting annoyance on both of the other men’s faces, he realized neither of these men was interested in either public service or attorney morale. He recalled what V.T. had said months ago about people who sought power for its own sake rather than as the means to perform useful or beloved work.
Amazing, he thought. They don’t give a damn about this. They don’t care about the subpoena either. What they want is my complicity in something stupid, arbitrary, and faintly nasty. They want to pull me away from my friends and my troops and everything that Phil Garrahy stood for. It was so simple; and what would they do once they had him? Make him dance around and gibber like an ape? Train him to flattery? He suddenly felt old.
“Yes, that was very interesting, Butch,” said Bloom, when Karp stopped talking. “Chip, check this out, would you? Good. Now, I must get to a meeting. Butch, do me a favor. I don’t want a messy hearing. There’ll be press, it’ll string out forever. Write a little note for Kaplan’s file. Drop the testimony. I mean it’s one case out of thousands. We got a big system to run here, right?”
Bloom shone his smile. Karp was impassive.
“No.”
“What? Karp, damn it, you’re being plain unreasonable. Didn’t you understand what I said?”
Karp struggled to his feet and set his crutches. “Yes, I did. And I think it sucks. And there’s going to be no secret screwing with Mike Kaplan, and no secret deals with Lennie or Irv. If anything like that goes down, I will jump the reservation in a New York minute. I will demand a judicial hearing. I will leak like a sieve. I will call Breslin. And I will call Alfredo Marchione and tell him the case against his brother’s murderers is being gutted by the DA because Mister Bloom doesn’t like a technical procedure that Phil Garrahy used every day for forty years. That ought to go down like peaches and cream at the Chelsea Democratic Club, of which Alfredo is past president and spiritual leader.”
Bloom gaped like a carp. “You. You’re threatening me. You’re threatening me?”
“No, I’m not,” said Karp, turning away and humping toward the door. “I have no reason to threaten you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
That evening Karp took a cab over to Bellevue. Three days a week he had physical therapy from Hector Delgado, ate dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and then went up to see Marlene Ciampi. He went after normal visiting hours, because during them a tide of relatives filled the room. Hector knew the nurse, so Karp got fifteen minutes alone after she had shooed the Ciampis onto the elevator.
It was hard for Marlene to talk much, with her healing face. They were tapering her off the dope, but she still drifted in and out of sleep a lot. Tonight she was out cold. Karp sat in a wheelchair, held her hand and watched TV. This is what it will be like at Golden Age Ranch, when we’re old, he thought.
It was a World War II movie. A sailor ran up to the star and said, “Captain, the Jap carrier is reported dead in the water and burning.” Karp liked the phrase. “Marlene,” he said softly, “you know what I did today? Don’t ask, but I’m dead in the water and burning.” He kissed her cheek and left. He felt light and clean, better than he had in months, better than he had since Garrahy died.
And of course he didn’t get the bureau chief job. That went to a crony of Wharton’s named S. Mervin Spence. Which meant the scam in the Complaint Room was off, or at least scaled way down. Which meant that morale dropped a little lower among the best of Karp’s young lawyers. Who simply left. Kaplan, then Dellia, then half a dozen others. Which meant that the criminal justice system became a little more of a joke. Wharton’s administrative system was in high gear. He knew exactly what was happening in every part of the DA’s office. The problem was, nothing was happening. As V.T. said, “The criminal justice system is neither a system, nor just, but it is criminal.” When the conviction rate hit twenty-five percent Karp stopped charting it.
Karp traded in his crutches for a cane and by Christmas he was walking unaided. He began once again to walk to and from the office when the streets weren’t slick. Toward the end of the winter he grew restless. I’m waiting, he thought. Waiting for what? For spring. For the girl to get better. Waiting for him, for Louis, to make his move.
In March, nearly four years from the day he had murdered the Marchiones, Mandeville Louis reappeared in court. He had spent the fall and winter back in Matteawan, worrying and making plans. He kept telling himself time was on his side. Maybe the witness would die. Maybe Karp would die, or Elvis. He covered sheets of paper with carefully drawn plans, boxes and arrows, showing what would happen if this one did this and the other one did that. He stayed up late making one backup plan after another. Somehow they never seemed to make much sense in the morning and he would take his night’s work and tear it to shreds.
He couldn’t make contact with the perfect Louis anymore. That was what hurt the most. He had to pretend so much, to be cheerful, and not act out, not give vent to his almost continuous rage. Dr. Dope didn’t like acting out. Louis’s life had, of course, been one long pretense, but then he had been the master, that was the point.
He couldn’t get Karp out of his mind. Karp knew. That was the tumor eating his brain. He had tried to destroy Karp and failed. And Elvis was ratting him out. That hurt too, after all he had done for that little punk. And he couldn’t get to him. He took his yellow legal pad and wrote, “KARP KNOWS” and “ELVIS RATS” in big block letters. He drew lines connecting different letters together, trying to make sense out of it, trying for some combination that would bring back the old Louis.
Around three one morning, eyes burning, hand aching from gripping the pencil, he knew he had found it. He wrote furiously, page after page. From time to time he laughed out loud. The next day, early, he called Leonard Sussman and told him to set a hearing date.
When Karp saw Judge Yergin on the bench, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. He had been expecting Stein, and he didn’t think even Daniel Webster could have convinced the old Swerve—with his elaborate political connections to the psychiatric community— that one of its distinguished members was both a jerk and a crook. Yergin looked irritated and bored. He must have been dragged in to preside at the last minute. Karp felt he was on a roll.
The players were in their familiar places: Louis looking docile, dull-skinned, and tired, flabby from four years of hospital food; Sussman, unchanging, immaculate, sitting rather farther away from his client than was usual. But this time there were more supporting characters. Dr. Edmund Stone, for one, had been dragged from his research and pinned to the stand, like one of his preparations, by Karp’s questions.
“Doctor Stone,” Karp was saying, “I don’t understand. Are you able to tell this court today if Mandeville Louis is competent to stand trial?”
“Yes, I am,” Stone answered. In fact, he barely remembered Louis. He had just done whatever Werner told him to do, and had signed off on whatever Werner told him to sign. Werner left him alone and didn’t ask too many questions about what experimental drugs Stone gave to indigent patients. It was a fair deal.
“Good. I ask you again, Doctor. In your medical opinion, is the defendant, Mandeville Louis, competent and ready to stand trial?”
Stone essayed a superior smile. “That would depend.”
“Doctor, you just told me you could answer the question. Do so!”
“The issue in a Ganser syndrome case, you must understand, is not the definition of ‘competence’ but of ‘ready.’ ”
“Ready? That means right now, prepared, able to understand the charges made against him and aid in the preparation of his defense. So yes or no—which is it? Doctor.” Karp put as much heat and venom into this last thrust as he thought he could get away with— without being accused of harassing the witness.
Stone was taken aback. He was used to more deference.
“No, no. You are defining competency. I am well aware of what competency means. Mister Louis is a Ganser sufferer. That means the issue is not whether he is competent, but when he is competent. Mister Louis is competent to stand trial, except when he is actually standing trial.”
Yergin coughed. “Would you repeat that?”
“Certainly,” sad Stone with more confidence. “Mister Louis is a competent adult able to do anything that competent adults do, including understanding criminal charges and assisting a lawyer in his own defense. But once such a charge is made against Mister Louis, and he finds himself in a court of law about to be prosecuted for a crime, Mister Louis loses all semblance of competency.”
“And how do you know that this loss of competence will occur when Mister Louis is tried?”
“Because he has Ganser syndrome.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because of the manifestations of incompetence at trial, of course. It’s diagnostic. The principal effect of Ganser syndrome is that the sufferer becomes incompetent to stand trial, but only once the trial begins. Or, of course, if he were remanded for trial, it would be the same. The symptoms could evince themselves at any time. Naturally, we are still doing research on the etiology of this disease.”
“Naturally,” said Yergin dryly. He turned to Sussman.
“Look, Mister Sussman, answer me this. Is your client, in your opinion, presently competent to stand trial?”
“Your Honor,” Sussman said, “it appears that my client is presently aware of this proceeding. My impression is borne out by the psychiatrists’ reports, which state that he is presently competent. Our concern is for what will happen once a trial actually begins.”
“Then maybe we should go to trial and see what happens,” said Yergin. “I mean, if the man is competent right now, that’s all I need to hear. How does that sit with you, Mister Karp?”
It sat very badly. Yergin obviously wanted to move this case, and he was playing into Louis’s hands. Without a formal finding that Louis was malingering and not suffering from a purported Ganser syndrome, he could stage another bizarre episode at trial and go through another round in his game.
“Your Honor, I think it is essential that the court make a finding as to whether the defendant does indeed suffer from so-called Ganser syndrome. This is the first time the conclusions of the Bellevue Hospital psychiatric staff have been challenged in this case. I think the court will agree that if it can be shown that Mister Louis is not in fact a sufferer from a mental disease that makes him incompetent to stand trial, the disposition of this case in the future will be quite different from what it would be if we simply remanded him at this time.”
Yergin got the point. “Very well, Mister Karp. You may resume questioning.”
Karp turned once more to Stone. “Doctor, one last question. As the defendant sits here now, is it your opinion that he is competent?”
Stone said “Yes.” Karp sat down. The judge offered Stone to Sussman, who declined to cross-examine. The court broke for lunch, and at two Karp called Dr. Milton C. Werner to the stand.
Werner liked testifying in court. His expression was benign, his carriage confident as Karp went through the preliminaries of identification and qualifications, and established that Werner agreed with Stone completely about Louis suffering from Ganser syndrome. Then Karp began to dig the pit.
“Doctor Werner, is there anything that might possibly indicate that the defendant does not suffer from Ganser syndrome?”
“No, sir, this is a classic case. In fact, I have just had a paper accepted for the journal, Forensic Psychiatry, that uses this very case as a—how would you put it?—a diagnostic paratype of this disorder.”
“But surely, Doctor, some psychiatrists might disagree. Some psychiatrists might suspect on present evidence that Mister Louis is no more than a clever malingerer.”
“Well they might, but if they did I would be glad to tell them they were wrong.” Werner chuckled at his little joke.
“So you would expect unanimity on this diagnosis among competent experts in forensic psychiatry?”
Werner checked for an instant before answering. “Um, yes, among competent experts, yes.”
“And is this reflected in the medical records pertaining to the defendant, Mister Louis?”
“Yes.”
Karp walked over to his table and picked up a sheaf of folders. “I notice, Doctor, that each time Mister Louis was examined, in Nineteen-seventy, in Nineteen-seventy-three, and just recently, all the examining physicians concurred in the diagnosis. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
Karp handed him the file. “This is Mandeville Louis’s file as delivered by you, pursuant to the subpoena. Please look through it, and would you confirm for the court that it contains the reports of all the psychiatric examinations performed on Mister Louis during his several stays at Bellevue?”
Werner thumbed carefully through the file. “Yes, they’re all here.”
“There were three stays and two reports for each stay. Correct?”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Now, Doctor, as one of the directors of Bellevue and as an official of the state of New York, are you conversant with the procedures under which competency is established under New York law?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And, so you are aware that it is a violation of New York State law to suppress or conceal the results of a psychiatric evaluation?”
“Yes, I am.” Werner was tense now. He had stopped his genial beaming after each question.
Karp handed Werner a sheaf of papers from one of his folders.
“Doctor Werner, would you tell the court what that document is?”
Werner paled when he read the first page of the document.
“Ah … it appears to be a psychiatric evaluation of Mandeville Louis.”
“Very good, Doctor Werner. It is a psychiatric evaluation of Mandeville Louis, written by Doctor Emmanuel Perlsteiner of the Bellevue staff. But it was not included in any of your original reports to the court, nor was it included in the subpoenaed material. Nor did you choose to include Doctor Perlsteiner’s other two reports on Mister Louis. Doctor, is it not a fact that you consciously suppressed these reports because they did not confirm your diagnosis, because they were adamant in their conclusion that Mister Louis was, and is, a blatant malingerer?”
“No, that’s not true, he … Doctor Perlsteiner is, well, he actually hasn’t kept abreast of modern developments in the field, and as an elderly man, he …”
Werner’s voice faded. Karp thought, Thank you, thank you. An invidious dig at your colleague’s credentials is precisely what I wanted. You’ve broken the White Wall, you asshole, and now your credentials are up for grabs, and so are Bellevue’s, not to mention the integrity of your system.
Karp lifted his folders toward the bench. “Your Honor, I would like to present as evidence these psychiatric evaluative reports on the defendant, written by Doctor Emmanuel Perlsteiner. Doctor Perlsteiner is quite certain that Mister Louis is completely sane.”
Yergin’s brow looked like corrugated cardboard. “Mister Karp, do you mean to tell me that we don’t have those reports?”
“Yes, Your Honor. Every year since his first evaluation, Mandeville Louis was examined by Doctor Stone, Doctor Perlsteiner, and Doctor Werner. But only the reports by Doctors Stone and Werner were sent to the court, for obvious reasons. This court never knew about the dissenting reports.”
From the stand, Werner tried his last shot, a desperate one.
“Your Honor, if I may. It seems to me that this Mister Karp is presuming to make judgments about the competency of psychiatric staff that lie outside his purview. I must strenuously object on behalf of the Bellevue staff.”
Yergin turned his massive head slowly toward Werner and regarded him as an alligator might a puppy. “I observe your objection, sir. I do not accept it. It is for this court to obtain the required psychiatric advice, and on the present evidence in this case, I believe that I no longer wish to obtain it from you or your staff at Bellevue Hospital. As for you, sir, I would suggest that as of now you concern yourself not with competency of medical advice, but with competency of legal advice, should the District Attorney’s Office wish to bring a charge of perjury against you.”
“Good for Yergin!” said Marlene from her bed. “What happened then? Yomm! Oh, gorgeous!”
Karp was sitting in Marlene’s room with a cardboard bucket of half-shell oysters picked up from a fish store on First Avenue. Marlene’s face was still partially bandaged, but she was off the dope and feeling more her old self. Every couple of sentences, Karp would season an oyster and slide it into her mouth. It was the sexiest thing either of them had done in months.
“Oh, it was quick work after that. He recessed and asked us for the names of two fresh shrinks. We got him two guys from Downstate Medical Center. After they had finished laughing themselves silly over Ganser syndrome, they told the judge Louis was as competent as he was, or words to that effect.”
“So he’s remanded for trial?”
“You bet. They’re selecting the jury now.”
“What do you think?”
“I think open and shut. Elvis and the physical evidence will bury him. On the other hand, I got a funny call this afternoon. From Sussman. He said, quote, ‘Mister Louis would like to see you about a deal.’ Unquote. He wouldn’t say what it was, wouldn’t say anything, in fact. Very uncharacteristic.”
“Ah, piss on him. He just knows he’s beat. By a better man. Oyster me again, big boy.”
To Karp’s surprise, when he arrived at the Tombs the next morning, Louis seemed positively glad to see him. His eyes glittered and he had an obsequious smile on his face. Sussman sat at the other end of the scarred table and merely nodded as Karp entered the interview room.
Karp examined Louis coldly. “OK, Louis, your lawyer said you wanted to see me.”
“Yeah, yeah, I did. Hey, sit down, sit down. Look, Karp, let’s cut out this jive, you know? I mean we understand each other, right? We’re the same kind, you and me. I mean, I could, you know, work with somebody like you, you dig?”
Louis brandished a fat wad of yellow legal paper, thickly covered with writing. “Look, I got it all worked out. It can’t miss. See, the deal is, we do franchises, but not just one thing, see. We franchise everything! It’s a kind of service—somebody got a product they want to franchise, they come to us, we set it up, turn it over to them. And, look, here’s the best part, we take a fee, plus, we get royalties on the franchises. Or maybe, we take over some of the spots. I, we, could work it out …”
“Louis, what are you talking about? I thought you wanted to deal.” Karp looked at Sussman, who merely shrugged and lifted his eyes to the ceiling.
“Yeah, yeah, this is the deal. It’s hot to trot, man. Man, I figure you to be, ah, Mister Outside, I’ll be Mister Inside. We’ll have us a big office with classy secretaries, you know, fine foxes. And, like, we’ll have a jet. A corporate jet. A corporate jet, man.”
Karp stood up. He addressed Sussman. “This won’t work, Lennie. It’s sneaky, but I think you’ve played your hand on this line.”
Sussman raised his palm. “Karp, cross my heart, this is all him. I have no idea what he’s up to.”
Louis was shuffling through his papers. “Hey, look at this, I got a drawing of the corporate jet. It’s got a what d’ya call it, a logo, on it. Hey, Karp, what do you think, sharp, right? Hey, Karp, where you going?”
“See you later, Louis,” said Karp, reaching for the door.
Louis got up and followed him. “Hey, Karp, let’s, you know, have lunch. We got to make plans.”
Karp turned and glared down at Louis. The man looked bad, that was a fact. His glasses were dirty, and there was a dried crust around his lips. His tan face was blotched and puffy and his hair looked greasy.
“Great, Louis. Let’s make it twenty-five years from next Thursday. I’ll call to confirm.”
Louis’s smile faded. “Twenty-five … ? Oh, shit, hey, that’s all past, man. I mean, this is a new start. Right. I mean, I’m sorry. I really mean it. I mean if I caused any trouble at all, I am truly, truly sorry. What’s past is past, though, ahh, you can’t let the past hang you up, right? I mean, I said I was sorry and I meant it. Right? That’s past.”
Louis kept talking in this vein, in an insistent monotone. Karp couldn’t take his eyes away from Louis’s face. He felt a cold chill start in his midsection and crawl up his back. He shuddered.
Then something beyond Karp’s understanding happened. He looked into Louis’s wild, yellow eyes and he saw him. He saw the patently insane creature now babbling before him (hey, Karp, whadya say, Karp, hey what a deal, right? Karp? Hey, whata, whata, deal, right, hey, I’m sorry, alright?); he saw the phony madman under that, and under that the real monster, the beast of blood, and under that, under that, down beneath the rules and the laws, and vengeance and evil, he saw, and felt, a creature, a being like himself, writhing in a white-hot, ice-cold loveless hell, enduring torments so unspeakable that to release it by death, any death, would be an act of profound mercy.
Without conscious volition, Karp observed his hand reach out and pat Louis gently on the shoulder. Then he spun on his heel and left the room. He was sticky with sweat and breathing hard as he walked down the filthy corridors. He walked out of the Tombs into a bright, early summer day. He thought, ridiculously, this is the first day of the rest of your life.
A teenager in pimp clothes bumped into him. “Have a nice day,” said Karp. “Ah, fuck ya!” snarled the pimplet. Karp laughed merrily and headed north. For the rest of the day he sat in Washington Square Park and looked at people. Everything looked scrubbed and new, and impossibly detailed, glowing. He exercised his compassion, and mourned, joyfully, his lost innocence.
“And the thing of it was,” Karp explained to Marlene that night, “I didn’t change my ideas at all. I mean, I didn’t become a bleeding heart all of a sudden. I just was conscious, really conscious, for an instant, that me, and Louis, and Sussman, and shit, even Wharton, were just playing roles, and inside us there was something huge laughing at us all. Not cruelly, or mocking, but, like, ‘when are you people going to wake up?’ It was uncanny.”
“It sounds like it. You and the Grand Inquisitor.”
“Right. I’ve got to read that sometime. And the funniest part is, I don’t care about the trial. I mean, I want him to go to jail for a long time. And he probably will, even though he’s crazy as a loon. But I realized that what got me about him, what he was doing was a violation of the game. He wouldn’t play the game. He wouldn’t suffer with the rest of us. That’s what made him a monster. And I destroyed that. Or something did. Something did.” They were silent for a long while, thinking about how it had all played out.
She was sitting in his lap on a plastic couch in the patients’ lounge. After a while, Karp felt her stiffen and she made a little noise.
“What is it, Champ? Pain?”
“No. I’m scared, Butchie. They’re coming to show me the Face tomorrow.”
“Oh, God! Do you want me to be there?”
“No! I mean, I’ll need, I guess I’ll need some time for myself, you know?”
“Look, Marlene, I got to say this, umm, whatever it turns out …”
She put her hand over his mouth. “No, don’t say anything. Just squeeze me.”
The next day, it was a Friday, she called Karp late, around five.
“Hi.”
“Well?”
“I’m at your place. I let myself in.”
“My place? Don’t move, I’ll be right there.”
It was rush hour, and Karp had to put a body check on a distinguished elderly member of the bar to get a cab.
The door was open. Karp rushed through the apartment to the bedroom.
She was standing at the foot of the bed in a long-sleeved tan summer dress. She was completely transformed. Her ordeal had stripped the softness from her, and the planes of her face showed clear, through the taut skin. The right side of her face was discolored in patches and covered with a quilting of fine white scars. A black patch covered her right eye. Her hair was cropped short, and some peculiarity of the wounding had created a white blaze through her black hair from the forehead to the crown.
The cover girl was utterly lost. Instead, she had a face out of archaic imagination, like something painted on terra-cotta on an Aegean island or cut into bronze at Mykonos, for a hero’s grave.
As Karp stood there, his heart pierced and full at once, staring, her mouth, which was perfectly still, hardened into a grim line, and her one eye flashed defiance like a hawk’s eye, out of her hawk face. Her hands were clenched at her hips, in her old way, and Karp saw that her left hand was clad in a tight black kid glove.
Karp slowly raised both hands above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he said weakly. “I give up.”
Then he went toward her and picked her up, placed her on the bed, and pinned her beneath him. And he kissed her face, starting with the scarred part, and then her mouth, for a long time. He kissed every scar and the bad eye and the good eye.
Marlene started to cry. She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe on her back. She wriggled out from under him and went into the bathroom to sob great, whooping, wracking sobs for nearly ten minutes, while Karp stood outside and said her name, and she said, “Just a second, just a second.”
She came out, and said, “Whoosh! OK, that’s over. Christ, I think my patch shrank.” She walked over and examined herself in the long mirror on the bedroom door. Karp came and stood behind her. She saw his reflection looming over her own, and suddenly she giggled.
“What?” he asked.
“Belmar. I just thought of Belmar, for no reason.”
“What’s Belmar?”
“It’s a resort town on the Jersey shore. It’s part of the ethnic Riviera—we used to go there when I was a kid. They had this severed head, it was an attraction on the Boardwalk that would tell your fortune. Anyway, there were all these blue-collar bungalow resorts, little hotels, too. Italians around us, Russians to the north, Polish, Irish.
“I just had the image of you and me walking up the Boardwalk in Belmar.”
“Do they allow Jews?”
“Only with a responsible adult. Karp, let’s go sometime. Jesus, I haven’t been there since Christ was a corporal. We’d blow their pants off—Pirate Jenny and the Giant Jewboy. They’d be strolling the sand in their Jockeys.”
“It’s a deal. However, right now this minute …”
She turned toward him. “What do you think of glass eyes? Tacky, right?” She still had tears in her voice.
“No, I think a glass eye can be tasteful,” said Karp conversationally, close to tears himself. He said, “Champ, I want you so much, I’m nauseous.”
She held her hands out, palms up. “Well,” she said, “here I am.”