Two centuries ago, Foley Square had been Collect Pond, a body of water that early New Yorkers had soon converted into an open sewer. Hardly had the colonial filth jelled when they built the city jail on it, which sank into the mire, and then they built another one on top of it, the infamous Tombs. The four towers that Karp saw as he walked through the tiny park with its incomprehensible orange steel sculpture was the third grim structure on the site, and no longer the main New York jail, although one tower was still used as a holding facility for prisoners undergoing justice and was still called the Tombs. It was a gray and hulking fascist ziggurat, and Karp, who had slight interest in architecture, rather liked it. He thought that, considering what transpired within, a pretty building would have been an obscenity.
There was an entrance on the south side of the Criminal Courts building reserved for its staff, but Karp ordinarily preferred to come in through the main door facing Foley Square. Here he was exposed to the sentiments carved in marble on the sides of the entranceway, and, as a ritual, he read one or two of them, like a tourist. This morning it was Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people, which always gave Karp a chuckle, since what was just on the other side of the swinging glass doors was a pretty good argument why not. The lobby here had been known since the late sixties as the Streets of Calcutta. When someone in the D.A. said, “Hey, I saw Bernie Popkin in Calcutta yesterday,” they referred not to the Asian metropolis but to this melancholy hallway, murmurous with sighs, cries of outrage, confidential whispers, and other noises associated with a criminal-justice apparatus rusted and crumbling like the West Side Highway, and suffused, not unlike the actual Calcutta, with a peculiar and diagnostic odor, constructed of old paint, musty papers, disinfectant, the snack bar’s grease-and-burnt-coffee, the expensive cologne of rich lawyers, the cheap scent of whores, and the immemorial effluvium of the unwashed poor.
This was, of course, Karp’s native air, and a tonic; breathing it in and rubbing against Calcutta was the reason he took this route. In his present job he spent a lot of time handling clean paper and harrying the neatly dressed. He felt his edge slowly dulling and wanted grit, and this walk was, most days, all he would get of it. He passed the several thick lines of people waiting to traverse the guard station and its metal detectors and went toward the left side of the entryway, where there was a special gate for the anointed. People were lined up there, too, showing their passes. Karp did not show his pass, because the guard and all the other court officers knew him by sight. This was not hard to do, because Karp was six-five, with big hands and long arms on a solidly built lean frame, a tall dark slab like the one that amazed the ape men in 2001. On top of this was an equally memorable face, a bony, sallow one with a broad, heavy brow under crisp brown hair unfashionably cut by an ancient Italian person on Mulberry Street, and high cheekbones, not the good type sported by the people who drank crystalline martinis in Connecticut, but the less prestigious kind seen on those who drank fermented mare’s milk east of Odessa. A determined chin under a surprisingly sensual mouth, a nose too large and too often broken-now resembling a sock toe full of pebbles-and, his most striking feature, odd, long, slightly slanted eyes, colored gray with yellow flecks. Karp flashed this face at the guard, greeted her by name, and was waved on through. The usual murmur of resentment issued from some of the other people waiting before the gate, this being democratic New York, and standing on line, as they say there, being one of the last remaining flecks of cultural glue, but no actual challenges. Karp was not above taking this privilege of rank.
Another one of these was the office. It was located on the eighth floor in the suite occupied by the district attorney, and it contained rugs and paneling and wooden furniture and a big leather chair and two large windows looking out on Foley Square. Karp greeted Mary O’Malley, the D.A.’s formidable secretary, went by the supply room for a cup of her excellent coffee, and went back to his office. Karp had recently been made, somewhat to his own surprise, chief assistant district attorney. Before that he had held a meaningless staff post into which he had been stuffed to rescue him from a political firestorm arising out of a racially charged murder case. Since then there had been an election, which the D.A., Jack Keegan, had won by a 71 percent plurality and could thereafter do as he damn pleased, and what he pleased to do was to appoint Karp as what was essentially the chief operating officer of the entire prosecutorial organization. Karp did not particularly enjoy the bureaucratic aspects of the job, but he was vitally interested in maintaining the integrity of the D.A.’s office against all assaults, of which in the present corrupt age there were many. What Karp really liked doing, what he did better than practically anyone in the city, was trying homicide cases, and in the negotiations that had led to his present position he had arranged with Keegan, in a manner rather like some medieval symbol of a feudal obligation (the gill of pepper or the five silver fox pelts) that he would get his pick of one case per annum, to prepare and to bring before a jury. Meanwhile, he was a team player, and he discovered, also to his surprise, that he was reasonably competent at a variety of unpleasant bureaucratic tasks. He hired, he fired. He caused the drafting and distribution and approval of policy documents. He spread terror among the incompetent and lazy. He kibitzed on important trials. He distributed largesse-office furniture, remodel-ing, space, and staff-where he thought it would do the most good, he spied discreetly, and he passed on to his boss what he considered it proper for the big guy to know. And occasionally he had dumped in his lap an affair so tormented, so covered with poisonous spines and excrement, that only someone with insane bravery and no detectable ambition for higher office would touch it with a barge pole.
Then O’Malley came in abruptly, her wrist with its watch held up in front of her face. Karp stared at her. She tapped the watch dial with a blunt fingernail.
“The Hilton? It’s nine-fifty.”
“Oh, shit!” cried Karp, leaping up. He ran for the door, grabbing his jacket on the way. The secretary slapped an envelope into his hand, like the baton of a relay racer, as he flew by.
“Ed’s waiting out on Leonard Street,” shouted O’Malley, and received a shouted thanks.
Of all of Karp’s duties, the most irritating (which is why he often had to be reminded of it, as now) was representing the district attorney at public events that the district attorney did not think quite important enough to require the exhibition of his actual body, but not negligible either, so that someone from the office had to go eat the chicken and peas. Karp was almost always this eater.
At least he got to go to these in a cop car. Ed Morris, his driver, goosed lights and siren to clear a path uptown. Karp dabbed his brow with his handkerchief, used the rearview to fix his tie, and pulled out the contents of the envelope. Oh, yeah, this, he recalled: the Metropolitan Council’s annual awards luncheon. This was an assembly of the great and the good dedicated to civic improvements of all types, one of the older and less interesting of the innumerable groups doing the same in New York. It was dominated by slightly right-of-center academics, didn’t give political contributions, and was not likely to soon give an award to Jack Keegan, which was why he wasn’t going and Karp was. The person who was getting this year’s award was Thomas Colombo, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a registered Republican. Karp ran his eyes down the list of speakers and discovered “John J. Keegan (invited),” who was to discourse on “The New York D.A. and Organized Crime” for fifteen minutes as a warm-up to the actual award and the main address by its distinguished recipient, whose subject was listed as “Using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Against Criminal Infiltrators.”