“That does not concern me,” said Marlene. “Half or more of the waiters in Chinatown are in a similar position. I will pay you out of-how does one say- ‘petty cash’-you understand, the money we use to purchase stamps and so on. You will live here and take from the box I will show you whatever you need. For example, you will require clothing and other necessaries. I will place, let us say, five hundred dollars in the box today, and each week two hundred more. Well, what do you say?”
Tranh paused for thought and then sighed. “What can I say but thank you, Madame? I accept your kind offer. I can only hope that you have not purchased a cat in a pocket.”
“Marvelous!” exclaimed Marlene, and shook Tranh’s hand. It was like grasping a skein of cables. “And you must call me Marlene. ‘Madame’ makes me feel like a piano teacher, or the keeper of a brothel, or a nun of the Sacred Heart.”
Tranh smiled broadly, and Marlene could see that he was missing several teeth on the scarred side of his face. He said, “Marlene? That is an American name?”
“I suppose. It is a contraction of Maria Elena.”
“Ah! In that case, I will call you Marie-Helene, if I may. I am Tranh Do Vinh. Vinh.” He made a stiff little bow.
“Vinh it is,” said Marlene. “Tell me, Vinh, is it possible that you can read English?”
“Oh, surely, and well too. I have read Jack London and Mark Twain. And Shakespeare. And I can under stand the spoken words if the speech is not too rapid. Why, have you something you wish me to read?”
“Yes, wait here a moment.”
Marlene went out to the office, picked up a thick file from her desk, went back to the kitchen, and handed it to Tranh.
“This is the file on a client I believe you can help. Would you look through it please, Vinh?”
He wiped his hands on a dish towel, and seating himself at the table, he flipped through the pages. Marlene suspected that whatever he said about not being a flic, it was not the first time he had examined such a dossier.
He looked up. “Interesting. This man is now free from prison?”
“Yes. And he is evidently still obsessed with Carrie Lanin.”
“You fear that he will now do her an injury?”
“I’m certain of it. And since he knows, from before, that I will stop him, he may also try to eliminate me.”
“I see,” said Tranh. “Well, this we must prevent, no?”
He held up a photograph of Rob Pruitt that Marlene had taken when she first became involved with the stalking of Carrie Lanin. “They are a kind of vampire, these men, are they not? As in the poem: ‘It is in my blood, the black poison; I am the sinister glass in which the fury sees itself.’” He tapped the face. “This one-a nasty sparrow, I think.”
“Extremely nasty.”
They smiled at each other. He said, “But of course, we can do nothing until he makes the first attempt. That is the law, I comprehend?”
“You comprehend exactly, my friend,” replied Marlene. “He must make the first move.”
“And I am to make the second, yes? In an anonymous fashion.”
“You have seized upon the situation accurately,” said Marlene. “Please keep the file. The information we possess is all there. And inform me as to your actions.”
Marlene walked out of the kitchen feeling curiously lightheaded. She reckoned that no other member of the Smith College class of 1969 was hiring a Vietnamese hit man in stilted schoolgirl French. Perhaps “hit man” was a trifle strong: hiring “Vietnamese noodle cook with presumptive quasi-military background and frightening martial arts skills” might have been more accurate-same difference. Once again that feeling of stepping off the little platform onto the rope, no net below, a feeling that terrified her, but one that (as she had realized for some time now) she could not live without.
After his meeting with Menotti, Karp walked the few blocks back to 10 °Centre Street, where for the rest of the afternoon he watched Roland Hrcany complete the presentation of People v. Rohbling to the grand jury. Hrcany was coldly efficient at this. The witnesses were well drilled, and the whole affair proceeded with the smooth, nearly meaningless aplomb of a masque at Versailles. Hrcany did not speak to Karp either during the event or afterward, when the two of them waited in the little anteroom for the grand jury to signal the bringing in of a true bill. When the little light went on that indicated this legal milestone, Hrcany turned to Karp, made a little mock bow and a waving “it’s all yours” gesture with his hand, and went back into the jury room.
Karp wheeled the wire cart containing the Rohbling case files to the bureau law library, hoping for a few hours of uninterrupted study, but Connie Trask, who well knew all his wiles, found him before he had made much progress.
“He wants to know where you been all day,” she said, giving the pronoun the special intonation that designated the district attorney himself.
“Jesus, Connie, I was with the grand jury. He knows that,” Karp said.
“I think he meant before that, when you were hiding somewhere, where you didn’t tell me like you’re supposed to.”
“What does he want?”
“Well, you know, he don’t discuss the legal niceties with me, although the fact is I’ve been running your bureau for you recently. You might want to have a little chat with Roland too, because he’s fairly pissed off about things in general and he’s started to take it out on me, in the absence of you, which shit, boss, I don’t get paid for taking.”
“Sorry, Connie,” said Karp, genuinely ashamed. “It’s this … I get caught up.” He gestured to the stacks of files.
“Yeah, well, nobody asked you to take that on. In fact, they said not to.”
“They did and I didn’t listen and there’s no help for it now. Is my spanking over? Thank you. Okay, I’ll see Keegan and I’ll fix it with Roland. Anything else?”
“Yeah, the M.E. called. They got that autopsy done on that exhumation order. Longren.”
Karp ripped a sheet of yellow paper off his pad and wrote on it “do not touch this stuff!!! karp.” He placed it on the Rohbling material and then went back to his office and called the district attorney.
“Where the hell were you?” asked that official when he picked up.
Karp explained. Keegan said, “Let me understand this. You don’t have enough on your plate. You’re looking for a homicide where two docs swore it was a natural death?”
“It was fishy, Jack. Robinson is a bad guy.”
“Give me strength, Lord! Okay, buddy, it’s your funeral, and that’s not a figure of speech. What’s new with the case of the year? I assume you got the indictment.”
“We did. Also, I met Waley.”
“What did you think?”
“A handful.”
Keegan laughed, a full-throated noise. “Yeah, he’s that. He make an offer?”
“Uh-huh, It amounted to we walk his boy with our sincere apologies.”
“Expected. You’ll arraign on the murder indictments tomorrow.”
“Right. We’ll go with murder on all five homicides he confessed to.”
“Confession going to hold up?”
“If the judge likes it, it’ll hold up,” said Karp, verging toward the snappish, “same as always. You have some sort of problem, Jack? They revoke my law degree or what?”
“You have my full and utter confidence, Butch, you know that, until you fuck up and I throw you to the wolves.”
They both laughed, releasing tension.
“Seriously, though,” Keegan resumed, “if you lose the confession, all you have is Jane Hughes. Are we good on that?”
“We can show he did it, all right. What the jury will make of it is something else. As you’re aware.”
“Yeah, dueling shrinks. My fucking favorite. Who’s our guy in the event of?”
“I was going to go with Emanuel Perlsteiner.”
“Perlsteiner? Jesus, Butch, the guy’s a hundred eight years old and he talks like Dr. Strangelove. Can’t you get a more impressive mouthpiece for the horseshit?”