Resolved, p.34
Resolved, page 34
“Ruined. Crazy, but holding it all together with masking tape and rusty wires. It’s like the House of Atreus when she shows up.”
“The who?”
“A Greek myth about getting paid back for your bad deeds unto the fourth generation. The Greeks were an ancient people who lived far across the sea…”
“Yeah, ha ha. We’uns din need no furriners up t’ th’ homeplace. Nossiree bob! We’uns spoke English jes like the Lord Jesus done.”
“Barbarian hick. Anyway, it just kills me to see her like that. It hurts worse than torture in a way, you know? Because I don’t have any memory of the pain. We don’t, really, it doesn’t get stored that way. We have empathy, yeah; my dad’s got an awful knee injury and when he sees a guy get hurt on TV, it drives him nuts. He says he feels it all over again. That’s not the same thing as recall. But spiritual pain goes on and on, because we can remember it. What we did to someone else, our sins against them, what we failed to do, how we let down the people who loved us, how we were violated and humiliated in the spirit.”
“That’s hard to believe,” he said. “If I was mooning about, I don’t know, the problem of evil or whatever, and I got a tooth abscess, I’d dump that high-tone speculation pretty fast.”
“Not the same thing at all,” said Lucy. “Yeah, you’d stop those thoughts and go to the dentist and get it fixed and then you’d have the problem of evil all over again, and the memory of the abscess wouldn’t interfere with that spiritual pain. It might make it worse.”
“Yeah, but it’s her problem, not yours.”
“Well, see? Physical pain can block it for a while, as can pleasure, which is why they sell so much heroin. And that’s all I want to say about it.”
She wormed closer and slid the laptop to the floor. “So, could you render me unconscious right now?”
“We’re fresh out of heroin.”
“Use your mouth, then,” she said.
Why don’t they cancel this goddamn thing, Murrow thought again, looking out the window into what seemed a wall of grits, so thick was the fall of snow. He also thought, This is what hell is going to be like, trapped in a room, waiting for an event indefinitely postponed, with someone very much like Ariadne Stupenagel. He wished fervently that he had been a better man heretofore, and instantly resolved upon the reform of his character. He glanced upward past the window to the ceiling, its pipe, its sprinkler head, and the sprinkler head’s new decoration, a pair of lacy lavender silk panties. It had only taken her two tries. Murrow wondered whether Karp would hold him responsible for this. Probably. He tried to estimate whether, if they moved the desk and Karp stood upon it, and upon, say, three volumes of the Criminal Code, he could reach it and pull it down. Drunk. Falling, breaking his neck. The scandal…
The demon reporter was slouched in Karp’s big chair. She was facing the window, muttering and swinging her big bottle like a metronome, clunking it dully at the end of each stroke against Karp’s desk. A maddening sound. Every dozen or so beats the bottle would rise into sight and then vanish again as she drank a slug, and then clunk, clunk.
Impelled to speak by the Sartrean horror of the moment, Murrow said, “They’re going to have to cancel this.”
The chair spun around. She pointed the champagne’s snout at him like a shotgun. “That’s where you’re wrong, my son. They’ll never cancel this, not if a fucking glacier came down from the Catskills and buried the Bronx. The gov can’t be seen to be stopped by a little snow. It would make his little willy seem smaller than the willy of the mayor, and that would never do. Ninety percent of American politics is about who has the biggest willy. And there’s another reason.” She looked stupidly at the mouth of the bottle for a moment as if the other reason dwelt there, and then stuck it into her own mouth.
“What reason?”
“Ah,” she said, “that would be telling. See the way it works is I ask you and you tell me and then you read all about it. But here’s a hint: how could they possibly have picked a situation that would get this event less publicity than holding it on a Friday afternoon the week before Christmas. Okay, they didn’t order the storm, but since they have it, they for sure ain’t going to waste it. This party is destined for page eleven below the fold, and not even local TV coverage.”
“They didn’t want to publicize it.”
“No, and that’s why I’m here. You would be surprised at how many good stories start at events no one is supposed to go to. Embassy cocktail parties thrown by second-rate countries. Unveilings of statues of national poets no one’s ever heard of. Friday afternoon coronations of obscure legal bureaucrats.”
“But why?”
The answer to this was a snicker. The chair swiveled back until the reporter faced the window. The champagne bottle swung and clunked against the desk. A shadow appeared in the glass of the door. Murrow felt a pulse of relief at Karp’s return, until he noted that the shadow wasn’t nearly tall enough. The door opened and in walked a small elderly man swathed in a fur-collared overcoat and a fur hat, both thickly encrusted with snow. The man brushed this off and looked around Karp’s office owlishly. He did not fail to notice the panties on the sprinkler or that the long, booted legs reflected in the window pane did not belong to Butch Karp.
“You look like you been having a party,” he said. “Where is everybody?”
The chair swiveled. “Oh, Guma,” said the reporter. “Did you bring anything to drink?”
“What a question!” said Ray Guma, drawing from the deep pockets of his overcoat two unopened fifths of Teacher’s scotch.
“What’ve you been up to, Guma?” asked Stupenagel. Her glass, which had held cognac and champagne, now was half full of scotch. She held it up to the cold light of the ceiling fixture to check for insects and other floaters, a habit born in the third world, where the scotch is often not what it should be.
“Dying,” said Guma. “They tell me it’s in remission now, but meanwhile I got about twelve inches of gut left and I’m missing half the accessories.”
“Oh, spare us the details! To tell you the absolute truth, I thought you were dead already.”
“To tell you the absolute truth, I am,” said Guma. Murrow could believe it. He had heard stories of Guma’s exploits in the old days, and it was hard to credit them to the withered man hunched in his coat on the couch, who had once been infamous as the Mad Dog of Centre Street. He looked like the mummy of a monkey, although his eyes still glowed with a calculating intelligence.
“I’m like in that Christmas carol movie, the ghost of Christmas past,” Guma continued. “I hope you’ve been good, Stupenagel.”
“Very, but not through any fault of my own. Being bad has fallen out of fashion, I think.”
After a moment’s reflection, Guma said, “You know, Stupenagel, you really broke my heart back there when I was jumping your bones. I really thought we had something.”
“We did have something, Goom. You had information I wanted, and I had a warm body and we exchanged, quid pro fucking quo.”
“No, just come out and say it,” said Guma. “You don’t have to let me down easy.”
Another snorting laugh from Stupenagel. Murrow looked at the two of them and tried to keep the horror off his face, as he envisioned this pair going at it. Where was Karp? Murrow discovered that he had a glass of whiskey in his hand. He definitely did not want to drink anymore. Guma and Stupenagel seemed to have forgotten him. They were talking companionably about events of some years back, when they had apparently had their inconceivable fling. Stupenagel was saying, “Yeah, I spent time in Guatemala, in India, in Mexico, in Argentina, in fucking Sudan, all places where beating up the press is practically like a requirement for promotion in the police, and I didn’t get a scratch. I come home to the land of the free and what happens? I get pounded to shit by a corrupt cop. No wonder I drink.”
Murrow slipped out like a ferret and went straight to the men’s room. He dumped the scotch down the sink and used the glass to drink tap water, as much as he could hold, a trick his mother had recommended as a way to flush the toxins from the system and avoid a hangover. As he did so, he could not help noticing an almost operatic performance from the last toilet stall. Someone was, as they used to say in his prep school, blowing lunch, although it sounded like breakfast, too, and the dinner from the night before. He waited, and was not entirely surprised when Karp emerged.
“Well, that was fun,” said Karp when he saw his underling. “Care to join me in a puke?”
“No, I’m a diluter, not an expeller,” Murrow said, holding up a glass of New York’s purest. “How do you feel?”
“Like a street person has been living in my oral cavity. Can I borrow your glass? Dilution sounds good.”
Murrow looked on in wonder as Karp drank. After a long while he said, “Croton Reservoir’s on the phone, boss. They’re hearing sucking noises and they’d like you to cut back a little.”
Karp laughed briefly, put down the glass, and washed his face. “Tell me, Murrow, do you do this often?”
“Not that much anymore. But I did, nearly every weekend, from about age seventeen to a couple of years ago.”
“May I ask why?”
“Oh, I guess sex was a lot of it, it helps in going to bed with people you shouldn’t really go to bed with. And blessed amnesia, relaxation of every moral code, tolerating boring, stupid people—the usual. And habit. I grew up with parents who drank martinis at five-thirty, every single day.”
“Amazing,” said Karp, shaking his head. “And you’re still alive and halfway competent. I salute you. Is that woman still in my office?”
“Yes, she is,” Murrow admitted.
“Still drinking?”
“Steadily. Your pal Guma showed up and brought more jet fuel.”
Karp brightened. “Oh, yeah? Good old Guma! Are they playing nice?”
“Sort of. I gather they have a history.”
“Yeah, years ago. Being the two most promiscuous heterosexual people in New York with college educations, it was probably a mathematical certainty that they would sooner or later end up in the rack together. It didn’t last, though.”
“A real shame,” said Murrow. “They seem to deserve each other.”
Karp gave him a stern look. “Why don’t you let me be the disapproving puritan, Murrow. It suits my age and status better. Guma happens to be one of my best friends, and Stupenagel is one of my wife’s best friends. I realize that neither of them is completely housebroken, and they leave hair on the couch, but they’re both the kind of person that they don’t make many of anymore, sort of throw-backs to a more dramatic and less politically correct age, and I prize them for it when they’re not pissing the hell out of me. Everything is better nowadays, of course—we don’t smoke, we don’t drink, we’re strictly monogamous, or else if we’re not we have to be investigated by the whole fucking legislature and go on Oprah to confess, and that’s fine and dandy, and it also happens that I was all goody-goody like that, way, way before it became fashionable, or required, if you can believe it, but still…I detect a certain shrinking of the great human canvas, especially around the neighborhood of the courthouse. Not only do we not have smoke-filled rooms, we barely have mafioso anymore, or political bosses. Instead we have pissant little white-collar criminals on the one hand and brainless thugs on the other. It makes for a lot less interesting life if you’re in the business of putting asses in jail. Are we done here, by the way? We hang out together in the men’s any longer, people’ll start to talk.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” said Murrow, pushing open the door.
Karp laughed. “Yeah, right. Another cosmic change. In any case, Guma and Stupenagel: both extinct—no, endangered—species. The hard-drinking, I-don’t-give-a-shit reporter, and the quasi-legal DA. They’re like grizzly bears. Horrible and terrific at the same time. I mean, everyone says, ‘Boo-hoo, save the bears,’ but would you want one in your backyard, eating the poodle, the cat, little Susie?”
“Why is he quasi-legal?”
“Because Guma is, or was, the reigning expert on La Cosa Nostra in this office, encyclo-fucking-pedic on the subject. He knew them all, the whole Brooklyn Mob, including Murder Incorporated. He was on a first-name basis with every capo regime in the city over the last thirty-five, forty years. He saw them rise and he saw them fall, and helped out in both directions.”
“You mean he was corrupt?”
“Not as such. But his relation with the Mob was extremely Sicilian. Guma probably put more Mafiosi in prison than any other living New York prosecutor, but he also let a lot of them go, if he thought it was better for the long-term health of the criminal ecology. Not a strictly legal position, maybe, but one that suited him and the times. It was a risk, too. Swimming with the sharks. The Mob doesn’t shoot people like us as a rule, but they’ll make an exception for guys who pull shit like Ray pulled from time to time. Giving a break to a slightly dumber and/or less vicious guy so as to grab up a slightly more dangerous gangster—like that. And, of course, that’s another thing he’s got in common with Stupenagel. College-educated middle-class people usually don’t put their bodies on the line in their daily work. That’s the way of civilization, of course, which as reasonable men we have to approve, but it’s also a little dull. Like you and me, Murrow.”
As he said this, Karp experienced a minor epiphany, in that he finally understood why being married to Marlene was necessary to his life. Yes, she drove him crazy, but she also prevented his life from going gray. He thought of the few peers who had been at it as long as he had. Keegan, his caution, his perpetually unsmoked cigar. Others, graying men who wore ratty cardigans in their offices. Some of them had Dickensian eccentricities that everyone excused, but joked about all the same. He shuddered.
“What?” said Murrow.
Karp gave him an inquiring look. “What what?”
“All of a sudden a strange expression appeared on your face, like you discovered the secret of life, or were having a stroke.”
Karp let out a short hard laugh and threw a big arm over Murrow’s shoulders. “It was the secret of life, my son.”
“May one know it?”
“When you’re older, Murrow. It wouldn’t make any sense to you now. Let’s go back and join the party and see what excesses our friends have perpetrated in our absence.”
“Oh, good,” said Guma when Karp and Murrow entered, “you didn’t fall in. What the hell is wrong with the heating? My nuts are freezing off.”
“No loss to the world, if you ask me,” said Stupenagel.
“I didn’t ask you,” said Guma. “What I asked you was if you could breathe on them to take the chill off, but oh, no…”
Karp sat on his couch, a little grumpily, because he could not figure out a polite way of kicking Stupenagel out of his chair. Instead, he said to Guma, “You can’t smoke in here, Goom. In fact, you’re not supposed to be smoking at all.”
Guma admired his big Macanudo and took another puff. “Excuse me, are you speaking as the deputy fire marshal or as my personal fucking physician? Every time I smoke one of these things it takes fifteen minutes off my life, and considering what my life is like nowadays, it’s worth it. That’s yet another thing that was better in the old days—right, Stupenagel?”
Stupenagel said, “Yes, Karp, we’ve been sharing some old-fart moments, even though he’s, of course, vastly older than I am. Decades. Guma longs for the days when the criminal justice system was even more arbitrary and vicious than it is now, and when, in his phrase, ‘you fucking jackals’ knew your place, which was to take our split of the graft and stick to the sordid affairs of the lowlifes.”
“An exaggeration,” said Guma.
“You think the system is arbitrary and vicious?” asked Karp.
“Yes, of course,” she said, “don’t you?”
“No, not really,” said Karp.
Stupenagel swiveled Karp’s chair around and stared at him as if he had just wondered why, if the Earth was a ball, the people on the bottom half didn’t fall off. Karp noticed this, and also that she had somehow partially undrunked herself. Her jaw had stiffened up and her eyes were no longer floating in a boozy sea. He recalled that this was one of Stupenagel’s more valuable journalistic talents, but whether it was a result of ruse or immense natural capacity, he had never been able to tell.
“I mean, it’s not what it should be,” he continued, “it’s a human institution, like the church and the press. Humans are fallible beings.”
“There’s no comparison at all,” she replied. “The press, my sweet fanny! What if every time I wanted to run a story I had to convince twelve high school graduates selected at random that it was true, while some other guy tried to convince them it was false.”
“You’d be wrong less often?” suggested Karp.
“Excuse me, but if we had to print retraction notices as often as DNA evidence freed people you guys convicted, we wouldn’t have any room for the bra ads, and Guma would stop reading the paper. Can you really sit there and tell me that the American justice system has any other purpose than the aggrandizement of fucking lawyers? Oh, and to make sure that rich people don’t have to pay for their crimes any more than once or twice a decade. Do you realize that over ninety percent of the people in this country believe that some innocent people are convicted of murder? A hundred and fucking ten murder and rape convictions at last count thrown out because of genetic testing.”
“What’s the alternative? The Star Chamber?”
“Yes, that’s what you guys always say, although we have no evidence at all that the Star Chamber was any less unjust than trial by jury. The reason they invented juries in the first place was so that the English barons could do what they damn well pleased and be tried by their pals instead of having to face the king’s justice. It’s designed to give the rich a better break than the poor—that’s what it’s fucking for.”
