“Yeah, he ack like this motherfucker was his own cousin. Name Wharton.”
Karp got the night-duty driver to take him home to Crosby Street. He mounted the absurd contraption and rode upward in the warm, dark shaft. Mercifully the winch did not slip, and he arrived safely in the bosom of his family.
“So, tell me!” said Marlene.
“It went the way I thought.”
“My hero! You don’t seem very hyped by it. When I saw your face, I thought maybe they walked him. What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. I’m pissed off generally. I got into a stupid cat fight with fucking Freeland after the trial. And Roland came by and told me he didn’t get anything out of Nassif. And I got this thing on my leg. The usual.”
He clumped across the loft and collapsed on the red couch.
“And the whip cream on the charlotte russe was I got a call from my old buddy Hosie Russell. He told me who worked the scam on Tomasian. The jailhouse witness.”
“You made a deal with Russell?”
“No, that’s the weird part. He just called me up after the trial and spat the whole thing out. For free.”
“Why’d he do something like that?”
“I don’t know. I gave him a stupid lecture once about trying to just do something because it was right. I guess it sank in. Miracles happen, or maybe it was just an extra clever scam because I will do something for him after all. I’ll make sure he gets old in some nice medium-security joint. There’s no point in putting him in Attica. He’s not violent unless he’s loaded, and he’s not a runner. I think he likes prison, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t we all, each in our own way. So who was it?”
“Wharton, who else?” said Karp dully.
“Shit! What’re you going to do?”
He rubbed his face. “I don’t know. But he’s gone-out of the office, that’s for sure. I’ll go to Bloom. He’ll do the right thing once he knows the story. I mean, he likes Conrad, but not nearly as much as he likes himself. It’ll be quiet and quick.”
“What’ll happen to him, not that I give a shit?”
Karp laughed bitterly. “They’ll probably make him a judge.” He fell back against the cushions and closed his eyes. Marlene looked at him with some alarm. She had never seen him so wan and diminished.
She said, “Poor baby! Did you eat?”
“No. You know I never eat when the jury’s out. Why? Are you going to cook me something?”
“I might open you a can,” said Marlene.
Which she did, a can of Progresso black bean soup with cheese ground thickly on top and a plate of olives and salami and provolone and egg tomatoes with olive oil on it and a chunk of warm, fresh bread rubbed with olive oil and garlic. He ate it like a wolf. Marlene drank black coffee and watched him eat.
He mopped up the soup with the last of his bread and leaned back in his chair, regarding his wife with an appraising eye. Matter-of-factly he asked, “So, Marlene, what’s in the crate?”
“The crate?”
“Yeah, that big wooden crate in the corner with all the old cartons near your speed bag. With the drop cloth on it.”
“Oh, that crate. Well, you know, to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what’s in it because I haven’t opened it yet.”
“Uh-huh. You don’t think it has caviar in it? I’m just guessing that that’s what it says on the top of the crate.”
“Nope. I doubt the caviar.”
“And how did this object come to be in our domicile, if I may ask?”
“Harry brought it up last night. Don’t give me a lot of shit on this, Butchie. I only did-”
He held up a hand to stop her. “No, I don’t want to know about it. And the reason for that is, when you’re indicted for, let’s see, misfeasance, grand larceny, burglary, and tampering with physical evidence, and maybe you have to go upstate for a while, I’ll be able to say that I was not an accomplice after the fact. I’m thinking of the kid, here.”
“Yes, good point,” said Marlene. “Although I think I could make a good showing that I acted to save a priceless cultural relic from certain destruction. Harry said the furnace was all unloaded and set to go, in the locker.”
“Mmm, there’s that, although I think you’re supposed to make said showing to a judge before you conduct a raid. You’re supposed to have one of those pieces of paper-what’s the word I’m looking for-begins with a W. .?”
“I hate it when you get sarcastic like this.”
“Not to mention that, having done this bag job, you’ve destroyed the evidentiary value of whatever’s in that crate. Which may mean never being able to prove that Djelal and Nassif did the murder.”
Karp was groggy with the aftereffects of the trial. At such times he needed to sleep, to purge his mind of the accumulated memorized facts, the precedents, the points of law that had stuffed every available brain cell for weeks. He was not capable of a closely reasoned argument with his wife, nor was he capable of making the next logical connection: that there was an object worth thirty million dollars in his home, an object of interest to at least one Turkish murderer. And the mob.
He sighed and looked at her, his eyes bleary. Marlene did not respond to his last comment, so he said, “Well, whatever. You’re a nut. I love you. I married you. I can’t think about it right now. I’m going tocrash. You coming?”
“Yeah, I’ll just clean up here. Look, don’t worry, okay? It’ll be all right. About the crate.”
“What crate? I din see no stinkin’ crate,” said Karp, and clumped his way slowly to bed.
Ahmet Djelal parked the black Cadillac Sedan de Ville on Crosby Street and looked up at the loft building he had come to burgle. He didn’t much like using an embassy car, but his little sports car was too small to carry what he had to carry away. He also didn’t like the idea of hauling the crate down five flights of stairs, but there didn’t seem to be a choice. He had cased the building earlier that day, found out that his target was on the fifth floor, and learned that there wasn’t an elevator.
He got out of the car, stretched, and checked the pistol in his shoulder holster. He was a large man, well over six feet tall and burly. He had a close-cropped head, a thick neck, and a dark flowing mustache. He looked like a Turkish policeman, which he was.
Djelal had no doubt that he could manage the crate by himself. Rolled up in his pocket was a furniture mover’s strap. He would carry it down the stairs on his back.
Djelal also had no doubt that he could deal with whoever had stolen his property. After the first moment of panic when he had arrived at the storage place and found the thing missing, he had made a careful search of the area and found a crumpled MasterCharge slip with a name and a telephone number, obviously dropped by the thief. It was not hard to find the address from this information. He was, after all, a policeman.
The thief had an Italian name, which suggested that the people to whom he had planned to sell the gold and jewels might have arranged the theft. He knew who Marlene Ciampi was from her visit to the embassy. Obviously she was corrupt and had somehow learned where the mask was from that idiot Nassif and told her relatives. Djelal was not particularly worried that Nassif had been arrested. It had perhaps been a mistake to involve Nassif, a mere merchant, not a warrior, as he himself was, but one had to depend on family. And at least Nassif was a real Turk. He would not betray his cousin.
Djelal picked the lock of the downstairs door with ease. He put away his lock picks and turned on a pencil-beam flashlight. Slowly he mounted the steep, dark stairs.
At the fifth-floor landing he paused and listened. There was no sound from the other side of the door. He dropped to his knees and directed his light at the lock. He had just inserted his pick when Harry Bello came up silently behind him from the shadows of the landing and hit him across the back of the head with a braided leather sap.
“He’s coming around,” said Marlene.
A skylight and a colored glass lamp swam into Djelal’s view and then a woman’s face in the center of a cloud of black hair. He was lying on his back, his hands uncomfortably constrained behind him. His head hurt and he felt the bite of handcuffs on his wrists.