With this good advice, they dashed off. Lucy walked the two short blocks to her home. The Karp family lived in a fifth-floor floor-through loft on Crosby at Grand, which Lucy’s mother had occupied since the late sixties, when Soho was barely a gleam in some speculator’s eye and regular people (not to mention rich ones) did not dwell in disused factory space. It had been beautifully modified some years back as a result of a parental windfalclass="underline" Swedish finish on the floor, track lighting on the ceiling, a kitchen out of a magazine spread, climate control, and a hot tub. The building had gone condo and put in an elevator entered from the street with a special key. Lucy wore hers around her neck. She twisted this, waited, ascended, and emerged. There she was greeted by, in order, her twin four-year-old brothers, Giancarlo and Isaac (called, in a deplorable excess of cute, Zik and Zak), their so-called nanny, a retired street person in her early twenties (Posie), and her father, Roger Karp (called Butch), the chief assistant district attorney for the County of New York.
All these save the last she disposed of with dispatch: a sloppy kiss and a couple of tickle rhymes for the boys, a how-was-your-day and a critical note on the Violent Femmes with Posie. Then she sidled up to her dad and clutched him about the waist, rather harder than was her habit. He looked down at her.
“Something wrong?”
“No, not really. Just need a hug.”
This was supplied, with enthusiasm. He asked, “How did the brain thing go?”
“All right, I guess. He seemed pretty excited about me. Apparently, I’m a total freak show.”
“How would you like a hit in the head?”
“Well, I am.”
Karp aimed a mock back-hander at his daughter’s head, which she ducked, and then they sparred around a little, a familiar game and one that Karp knew did not have long to run. He was glad to get in as many bouts of affectionate roughhousing as time and biology would allow.
When he, after many shifting moves, had her in a clinch and had tormented her in the usual way by rubbing his five o’clock shadow across her tender cheek, to the usual howls, he said, “You want to know a secret? Everybody thinks they’re a freak. Everybody thinks people are staring at them. Everybody thinks everybody else is better off or happier, especially kids. You want me to give you a pep talk? You want me to make a list of all your good points?”
“Not really,” she said, her gaze sliding away from his.
“Anything go wrong today, Luce?” asked Karp, his fatherly antennae vibrating.
“No, just the usual,” Lucy lied, and then changed the subject to “Are you going to cook those?”
She pointed at the counter in the gleaming kitchen where sat a pair of icy brownish Tupperware oblongs.
“Yeah, we have a choice of lamb stew or lasagna.”
“Com’e ripugnanti,” said Lucy, wrinkling her nose. “Where’s Mom?”
“She said she was tied up. Didn’t she call you? She said she was going to tell you to take a cab home.”
“Yeah, she did.”
“You got a cab all right?”
Lucy felt her face flush. Another lie in the offing, and Lucy tried as hard as ever she could not to lie to her father. The scrupulous honesty of this man was one of the foundation stones of her moral universe. In contrast, her mother had a more fluid relationship with veracity. As Lucy herself did, she had to admit. “I never lie, never, but the truth is not for everyone,” was one of her mother’s sayings, delivered always in Italian.
So she uttered a vague mumble that she hoped would suffice to pass the question, which it did, and then she asked, “Can we order out? Please? I’ll call Pho Bac. I’m dying for cha gio. Spring rolls? And noodles and lemon chicken?” She looked disdainfully at the hearty meals her mother had prepared in her weekly marathon cooking sessions. “I don’t see why she bothers. Posie cooks for the boys, and we live in the take-out capital of the galaxy. Please?”
Karp laughed and said, “Hell, yeah! Let’s live a little,” because by and large he agreed with his daughter about take-out, and the absurdity of a woman who worked as hard as his wife did worrying about home cooking. Besides that, he was feeling bushed and was not looking forward to eating a microwaved meal liable to be chilly in the center and dry on the edges and have to clean up after.
Lucy ran to the phone and put in the order, in Vietnamese.
Karp watched his remarkable daughter do this with his usual mix of love and concern, a little heavier on the concern this evening because he had spent fifteen years with the D.A. and knew from a few thousand confrontations what someone who had something to hide looked like. Lucy had something to hide.
Chapter 2
It was Karp’s habit when the weather was fine to pick up the News and skim through it as he strode along the eight-block distance between the loft and the New York County courthouse at 10 °Centre Street. He relied on his size and the determination of his walk to clear the way of all smaller mobile objects and his remarkable peripheral vision to steer clear of the larger ones, like trucks. Karp walked with the loping, graceful stride of the American athlete, which also served to sweep people from his way. Karp had, in fact, been an athlete, a very good one in his youth, a high school All-American in basketball and a Pac 10 star at Berkeley. A horrific injury to his knee had cut that career short, eliminating the jock arrogance from his personality and the knee itself from his body. Having had the orthopedic replacement, he was after nearly twenty years quite pain-free, except, on occasions, around the heart. Suffering does not always ennoble, but in Karp’s case it actually had, although it would never have occurred to him (as it would have and did to his wife) to think of it that way. What he felt was a rediscovered pleasure in his body, evinced now, as it was every workday morning, in the recovery of his swift, charging, aggressive New York pace. He could usually get through his usual reading-sports and crime-by the time he reached the trash can at Foley Square, where the courthouse stood.
The weather was indeed fine, and he flew more or less blind down Centre Street from Grand, clutching the tattered red cardboard folder he used for a briefcase under his arm like a running back’s football, and snapping through the pages of the tabloid. Karp had a real briefcase, a lush cordovan Mark Cross, given to him by his father for his law school graduation gift, but he never used it. This had to do with Karp’s extraordinary (and in that era of luxuriant self-promotion, near-pathological) conservatism with regard to personal show, which had prevented him from appearing with a shiny new briefcase on his first day at the D.A.’s years ago, and continued to generate excuses for not now showing up with it. Lugging the tacky cardboard gave him a vague satisfaction, and also served to distinguish him in his own mind from those members of his profession not famously devoted to justice, who had been richly rewarded by society for their scumbaggery, and who typically hauled their vile shenanigans about in the finest morocco.
As for the rest of his equipage, Karp was dressed at that moment in a natural shoulder, three-button, navy tropical wool suit with the faintest of pinstripes, one virtually identical to the other nine suits he owned (half winter- and half summer-weight). With this he wore a plain-collar white silk shirt and a tie that Richard Nixon might have rejected as being a shade too understated, and a pair of black cap-toe wing tips. Except for the tie, everything visible he had on was custom-made and of the highest possible quality, which bought at retail would have set him back well over five grand. He had spent nothing like that, however, since the clothing and shoes came from Chen connections in Hong Kong and Taipei, who had supplied it at cost or less. Thus did Karp reap the benefits of being, through marriage, an honorary Chen, and therefore he read with more than usual concentration the story of the murders in the Asia Mall, and not without a sharp pang of fear, since he knew that the murder scene was one of the usual hangouts of his little girl. He parked the tabloid in his usual waste can and walked into Foley Square.