Karp cursed briefly, pulled out a pen, and started to make notes on the back of the flyer. Public speaking held no fears for him, and he was an extempore speaker of real talent. By the time he had arrived at the Hilton at 53rd and Sixth, he had a beginning, middle, and closing indicated by telegraphic sentences, and single-word indications referring to appropriate jokes-frog, farmer, clam-all guaranteed not to offend any conceivable ethnic, religious, disadvantaged, or sexual group.
He was late to the dais table-the fruit cup had already been proferred-but he shook hands with the owlish professor who ran the outfit, made a gracious apology for his boss’s unavailability and his own lateness, and told the man who he was. He sat down between a Methodist bishop and an attractive woman whose name card said she was the president of one of the city university’s colleges. The college president immediately engaged him in a conversation about Marlene Ciampi, his wife, about whom she had an unbounded curiosity, this soon shared by the bishop, and Karp found himself reluctantly recounting the inside skinny on some of her cases, and after that began to grow tedious (“But how do you stand it, the violence? And what about the children?”) he skillfully turned the subject to college presidenting and bishopry. One good thing about the people you met at these operations, he reflected, it was never hard to get them to start talking about themselves.
The owlish professor tapped a glass as Latinos carted away the remains of the meal and introduced Karp and his subject. There was no sigh of disappointment in the crowd. Karp was very nearly as well-known among the city’s crime buffs as the D.A. himself, and had perhaps the more colorful background.
He rose to the podium, told the frog joke, got a mild laugh, presented the take of the man Karp considered the finest of the city’s D.A.s, the late, great Francis P. Garrahy, on the Mob (They want to kill each other? I’ll hire Yankee Stadium for them, and I’ll pay for the bullets), and then delivered a precise and lucid talk about the origins of organized crime in New York and why it was inevitable given the predilection of Americans to legislate sin into the criminal code, and why the alternative to organized crime was not necessarily law and order, but was more often an increase in disorganized crime, verging on anarchy and the conversion of streets into war zones. He reminded his audience that when Murder Incorporated did its work back in the thirties and forties, it killed discreetly and accurately, and did not spray the streets with gunfire, wiping out kids and old ladies. Reverse course now, tell the farmer joke, remarks not meant as an endorsement of the Mob, The Godfather only a movie, the real guys nasty, unattractive, fortunately mostly dumb as a load of bricks, then a brief summary of the D.A.’s approach to organized crime, which was not that different from its approach to regular crime-if someone did a crime, they got prosecuted, whether their name was Gambino, Colombo, or Ishkabibble. Tell some goombah stories, the big New York cases, Tom Dewey, Garrahy, more modestly, Karp himself (moraclass="underline" we don’t necessarily need the feds to help us deal with these fellas), tell the clam joke, big laugh, but not from Tommy Colombo, who never liked to hear the name of that particular crime family uttered in a public place, and Karp had indeed used it as a mildly nasty zinger, see if the guy was awake there, and move to close. Burst of applause, actual, not polite hand slapping.
Then the professor introduced Colombo, introduced the award, told everyone why Tommy C. was getting it, and handed it over (a crystal plaque with a bronze shield embedded within). Colombo moved to the podium. He was a stocky man of thirty-eight with thinning brown hair, a bony, big-nosed hatchet face, and a wide, lipless mouth. Under heavy eyebrows his eyes were large, heavy-lidded, and protuberant. He had a strong tenor voice and a New York accent. Karp had meanly left the microphone up so that Colombo had to bring it down seven inches, thus illustrating the difference between Karp’s height and his own.
Colombo spoke RICO for twenty-five minutes, reading from a sheaf of papers, squeezing in as many invidious comparisons as possible between the old, ineffective, case-by-case way of dealing with the Mob (broadly implied: just what the New York D.A. still did, the patzers) and the RICO way: gigantic, thermonuclear-strength prosecutions with multiple indictments that could wipe out whole crime families at a blow. His applause was noticeably less intense than that which had followed Karp’s effort.
Afterward, politeness required Karp to mingle and shake, people coming up and exclaiming how much they liked his talk and would he consent to speak at their school, church, club, retreat, picnic, commencement? He collected business cards and distributed noncommittal answers. He got vamped in a civilized way by the college president (which had the virtue of keeping others away), and after that he made his escape.
As he wrongly imagined. There was a blond, burly crew cut standing by the elevator. Karp observed that he had a little radio device in his ear. When Karp approached, the crew cut mashed the elevator button, the door slid open, Karp entered, but the crew cut didn’t. Tommy Colombo was in the car.
“Nice speech, Butch,” he said, mirthlessly smiling. They shook.
“Thanks. I’m going down,” said Karp.
Colombo pushed L. “I always thought Jack was lucky to have you,” said Colombo. “Of course, it’s a hell of a waste, you running errands like this. It’s like using Reggie Jackson as a bat boy.”
“How about those Yankees?” said Karp tonelessly.
“Seriously, I never figured it out, how come you don’t move somewhere where you could try cases?”
“Seriously? I tried private for a while. I didn’t much like it.”
“I don’t mean private,” said Colombo. “I don’t mean Brooklyn or Nassau either.”
The elevator stopped. Colombo put his finger on the door-close button. “You taking up career counseling, Tom?” Karp asked.
“Like the Marines, I’m always looking for a few good men. My trial division chief is about to transfer out. You should come by, we’ll talk. About trial work, major cases.”
Karp nodded and said, as to a child, “Tom, let me explain a few things. First of all, I’m controlling a case load approximately a hundred times the size of yours. I could run your whole trial division in my lunch hour. Second, I can try any case I like, and when I do I get to try it my way, without having to think about what it means to anybody’s political ambitions down in D.C., or even right here in the city. Third, I work for a guy I respect.” Here he looked down at Colombo and stared expressionlessly as he would have at a felon who had just told a whopper, waiting for the skel to lose the attitude. Colombo stared back at him, a look of disbelief on his face. He was not often spoken to in this manner. Karp said, “Tom, take your finger off the button. And the next time you want to talk to me, use the phone and make an appointment. The elevator and the FBI guy business is for the movies.”