Depraved Indifference (38 page)

“Sure,” she said, surprising the hell out of both of them.

By five, the only item left in Karp's portfolio was the sealed envelope with the Q and A from Flanagan. He told Connie he was walking over to Police Plaza to deliver something to Chief Denton and that if Marlene called, he would meet her in her office around six. He left the building by the Baxter Street exit. They were still tearing up the pavement, and the sounds of the drills echoed like gunfire through the narrow, walled-in streets. He examined the road and the sidewalk carefully. No blue van, and in any case, with traffic clogged as it was, it would be impossible for a vehicle to follow him on foot. No weightlifter either. Of course, there could be others on his tail. A short, wiry man wearing a brown parka crossed the street toward him. The man scowled and muttered something in an unfamiliar language, then moved on. A threat, or a guy who just remembered he had to pick up the dry cleaning? Karp fought down his paranoia. Taking a deep breath, he started walking toward police headquarters three blocks away, his hand on the envelope deep in his coat pocket.

The old police headquarters, on Centre, was a baroque domed pile easily confused with a church. It had obviously been designed, at least in part, to overawe the proletariat with the greatness of the law, or failing that, to hold off an attack in force. The new building was a triangular modern structure that looked like the world headquarters of an insurance company. It was on a street that had been renamed Avenue of the Finest. Hype is cheap.

Karp wasn't carrying any bombs or weapons, so they let him in and he took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where the superchiefs have their offices. He introduced himself to Denton's secretary and said he'd like to see the chief for a minute. Her eyes widened in surprise. “You're Roger Karp? But you're supposed to be in Bellevue.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The chief just rushed out of here about ten minutes ago. Somebody called from Bellevue Emergency and said they had a Roger Karp who'd just been shot on the street and was asking for Chief Denton.”

Karp's belly knotted. “OK, there's some kind of scam going on,” he said carefully, trying to control his breathing. “When the chief calls back, tell him I was here and that I'll call him later this evening, OK?”

She looked concerned. “Mr. Karp, is there some kind of trouble? Maybe you should stay here. I could call his driver and get the message to him right now.”

Karp merely shook his head. He was holding an envelope containing evidence that somebody high up in the NYPD had tried to destroy a case against a cop killer. Given the phony call from Bellevue, the last thing he wanted was his whereabouts broadcast over police radio.

He left the building and began trotting back to the courthouse. He was not at all surprised when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the weightlifter step out of a doorway and follow him at the same slow trot, like two joggers on the path around the reservoir in Central Park.

The courthouse was closing down when he arrived. The weightlifter did not follow him, but continued trotting past the entrance as if on a more important errand. Karp walked up the fire stairs to the second floor, to one of the vast depositories of court records that occupied almost all of the courthouse's first three floors. The room was dim and empty. He went to a file cabinet, pulled open a drawer, and yanked out a file at random.
People
v.
Dodd,
1947, a routine burglary. He stuck the envelope in the file and returned it to its place. He knew where it was, but for anyone else it was now as lost as it would have been at the bottom of the Mindanao Trench.

In the main lobby, by the guard's desk and its metal-detecting frames, Karp made some small talk with the guards, then made a show of checking his wristwatch. “Hey, it's five-forty,” he said. “Got to run. Good night.”

I've established the time of death, he thought, make it a little easier for whoever picks up the case. Walking out onto the wide sidewalk facing Collect Pond Park, he heard a shout and spun around. The weightlifter was running toward him, his mouth open. As Karp started back for the entrance, he heard the pneumatic drills clanging up the street, and a part of his mind wondered why they had started again. Something popped like a firecracker next to him, and he felt a hard jolt in his upper arm.

Then, without quite understanding how, he was lying with his cheek on the cold pavement. His ears were filled with the sound of the drills. His shoulder and side hurt, his nose stung and dripped. Some huge weight was resting on his back. He tried to push off against it, but the pain grew unbearably when he did so.

He opened his eyes and saw gray concrete through a blur of tears. Something hot hit the back of his neck, skittered across his face, and bounced, tinkling, onto the sidewalk. He blinked the tears away. There was a squat brass cylinder lying a few inches from his eye. Dozens more littered the pavement, and as he watched, others fell from above. The deafening racket continued, and he could smell a sharp firecracker stench.

He at last made the connection: somebody was firing an automatic weapon about four inches from his left ear. He heaved upward and tried to roll. He might as well have been under an Oldsmobile. He heard the roar of a large engine and the squeal of tires, and saw the bottom half of a white van tear off down the street. The side was open and a man was lying in the doorway, his arm hanging down, the hand smacking against the roadway. The hand was bright red.

Then someone lifted him off the ground. He was being carried over someone's shoulder. He saw the pavement swiftly moving beneath. His arm flopped down and he was engulfed in agony. A wave of nausea rose from his gut, and he lost his struggle to remain conscious.

He awoke lying on his back in a dark, shaking, rumbling space. The pain was gone. Instead he felt a comfortable warmth and his face seemed covered with soft flannel. He had spent enough time in orthopedic hospitals to know the feeling. Somebody had given him a shot of morphine. People were moving around him in the darkness. They were talking softly in a foreign language, a guttural, rolling language that was oddly familiar. His mouth was bone dry and when he finally forced a few words out, he croaked.

“What's going on? What's—what—”

“Relax, you're all right now,” said a woman's voice in accented English.

He tried to sit up, but there was something across his chest holding him down. “What the hell is going on? Who are you?”

Suddenly there was light. Karp blinked and saw that he was in a van, tied to a stretcher. Somebody had just turned on the dome light. Kneeling over him, looking concerned, was a familiar face.

“Leventhal?” he asked in amazement. “The Stereo King?”

“Yes, Mr. Karp, it's me.”

“But what the hell … what are you, working for the Cubans?”

Leventhal shook his head, then said something in the foreign language. Karp tried to gather his thoughts, but the dope was making his mind slow. The language, what was it? He couldn't control his mouth. It felt two feet wide. “Crosse? Kwats? Yugo-Yugoslob? Woo?”

The Stereo King reached up and flicked off the dome light. Karp closed his eyes and drifted in and out of drugged sleep for a while. The voices murmured around him. What was that language? It wasn't Serbo-Croat. He remembered the interviews with the hijackers in the FBI office. It wasn't German either. Karp's grandparents had spoken both German and Yiddish. Recalling his grandparents was what did it. Grandparents. Funerals. Shul. The voices in the darkness were speaking Hebrew.

“Goddy?” Marlene Ciampi said, “we got problems and I need your help.” She was amazed at how calm she was. She was also amazed that when Bill Denton had called and told her that Karp had been snatched in front of the courthouse in a hail of lead, she had not told him about her Yugoslavian connection. Which was why she was on the phone with G.F.S. Taylor.

“Why, my dear, whatever is the matter?” he asked.

“Somebody just tried to machine gun Butch Karp in front of the courthouse.”

“Good God! New York gets more Balkan every day. Renko and Peter will feel quite at home soon. You said ‘tried,' so I presume he's not dead.”

“No, I don't think so. But … there was blood on the sidewalk where he was lying.”

“And where were the police?”

“Well, the detective who witnessed the thing was waiting for Karp at the wrong entrance. By the time he heard the shots and ran around the building, the whole thing was over. It couldn't have lasted more than a minute.”

“I see. And how can I help?”

“Well, there were two groups, see. One tried to whack him out and the other saved him but kidnapped him. It'd be good to know which is which. But I'd lay odds that one of them is Ruiz's Cubans and the other is—”

“Beg pardon. Ruiz?”

“Oh crap, I'm sorry, Goddy, just some other thugs in this case, a bunch of guys who used to work for the CIA and are doing free-lance evil.”

“Um-hmmm. The CIA, you say. How interesting.”

“Why?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing. Just thought of something. Now, who did you say the other gang was?”

“That I don't know. I'd sort of like your opinion on whether they could be Yugos. Maybe Croats.”

There was a long pause on the line. “We'd better talk, and not by phone. Why don't you come to my place? Half an hour.”

And he hung up before she could say anything more.

In fact, they did not talk much in any case. When Marlene arrived at Taylor's apartment and they were seated in the stuffy parlor, the old man simply gave her a slip of paper with an address written on it.

“Marlene, do you recall the last time we saw Renko, you asked me whether I had any idea of why Karavitch would become active after all these years, and I said I would try to set up a meeting with a man named Dushan, who might know more about it?”

“Yeah, I do.” She held up the paper. “This is him?”

“Right. I think it's time for you to see him. And, Marlene, these are very serious, very dangerous people you are going to meet. Not like Renko. But I think that if Croatians are involved in this shooting match today, Dushan will know. More important, he might tell you, provided he thinks he can get something from you in return.” As he said this, his expression was so grave that Marlene had to grin. “Wow, real spies,” she exclaimed, “this is a first for me. Do I have to eat the paper?”

He returned the smile, but faintly. “I'm serious, my dear. If you get into trouble, I'm not sure I have the resources to extricate you. And I'm not sure you have anything to bargain with.”

“Oh, I think I do. I've got Karavitch and his friends for starters, which I bet was the reason this guy agreed to meet me in the first place.”

Taylor looked uneasy. “Well, yes, of course. But still, do be careful.”

“Sure, Goddy, I know. Hey, Ms. Caution, that's me. Don't worry so much, you're starting to look like my mother.” Marlene stood up and hoisted her shoulder bag. “OK, I'm going now—”

“Marlene, perhaps we should call in the police—”

“Shit, Goddy! That's the last thing we need. All we're after is a little information. Denton's got enough to do. Besides, if I sit still, I'll go crazy. No, now I'm really going, and Goddy … ?”

“Yes?”

“Whatever they do to me, I'll never betray you—”

“Get out of here, you lunatic!” Taylor cried, grinning now.

“Except hairy spiders. If they bring out the hairy spiders, you're finished, sorry.”

The address was an old, anonymous ten-story building in the far east Thirties. The door to suite 503 was marked “
KOR IMPORTS
” in dull gold letters. Inside, Marlene found a tiny reception area containing a tan vinyl couch, a coffee table spread with copies of
People
magazine and a two-day-old
Post
. There was a tourist poster on the wall: blue sea, rocky shore,
JUGOSLAVIE
in white letters. Marlene went up to the little sliding window, behind which sat a hard-faced blond woman reading a magazine. “I'm Marlene Ciampi,” she said. “I'm here to see Mr. Dushan.”

The woman looked at Marlene unsmilingly, put down her magazine, and punched a button on her intercom. She said a few words in a Slavic tongue, waited a second, and hung up. She indicated a door at the far end of the reception area with a twist of her head, and returned to her magazine.

The inner office was lit only by a small gooseneck lamp on the desk in the center of the room, the bulb of which was pushed down to within a few inches of the desktop. There was a man seated behind the desk. Marlene could see that he was large, but nothing beyond that; his head was a dark lump.

“Mr. Dushan?” she asked, more loudly than she had intended.

“Yes. Please have a seat.” The voice was deep, his English only slightly accented. “Forgive the illumination. I think it would be convenient if you did not see my face at present.”

Marlene arranged herself on a straight chair before the desk. “Oh? Would I know you? Are you famous?”

Dushan ignored this and said, “How can we help you, Miss Ciampi?”

Marlene took a deep breath and said, “A friend of mine, an assistant district attorney of New York County, was kidnapped this afternoon. Somebody tried to shoot him, and another group of people picked him up and drove off with him. Someone suggested that you had knowledge of … certain groups that might be involved. So …”

She trailed off. Talking to a stranger in the dark like this in circumlocutions was more disconcerting than she would have believed possible. It was like going to confession. She began to feel irrationally guilty and let out a nervous giggle.

“Something is amusing?”

“No, I was thinking of confession. Telling things to someone you don't really know in the dark. Waiting to get bawled out.”