“Sorry. It’s bullshit because the last thing you need is another giant upset in your life, on top of your wife and Garrahy. Give it a year with Bloom, or two. How bad could it be?”
“Real bad. Gelb’s got me doing all the administrative work. I’ll be an old man before I see a courtroom again. Also, I’m in charge of recruiting and training, which I’ve never done before. I mean how the hell do you tell if somebody is going to make a good ADA?”
“Ask them to tell you a lie. If you fall for it, they’re in. Do you mind if I stroke your fevered brow?”
“No, go right ahead. OK, then I go to see my friend Joe Lerner, we’re talking about homicide cases I’m handling, and I tell him I want to keep following this business with the Marchione killer. No way, he says-get this-because he thinks I’ll throw the case to feed the numbers. Me! I fucking invented that case.”
“So what happened?”
“Ah, we worked it out. A little screaming and yelling, clenched fists, tight jaws, your basic locker-room fight. He’s really a good guy, just being a hard-ass because he’s pissed at me from the Garrahy campaign. But he knows it’s my case, and if he can get it lifted from Homicide’s effective caseload for free, it’s gravy to him. He saw the light.
“Oh, yeah, and this is the cherry on top-Gelb told me I have to represent the bureau on Wharton’s fucking task force. Can you believe this?”
“I don’t know, you might do some good. You can’t slay dragons all the time. Sometimes you have to polish your sword, or whatever. Anyway, you’ll survive. Between me and Corncob, this is the year you get your character built.”
“Thanks, Marlene, I needed that. What was your day like?”
“Dreamy. I spent the morning with the bomb squad out at Hunts Point. Just little me and all those big, brave, macho police officers. Those guys are real men, not paper-shuffling candy-ass lawyers like you.”
“Oh yeah? What were you out there for?”
“My terrorists, remember? The cops set up a demo of different kinds of explosives and devices, fuses, detonators, timers-the works. They were falling all over themselves to show me what kind of daredevils they were. I’m surprised I wasn’t blown to smithereens. Smithereens! I’ve always loved that word. Maybe I was a bomber in a previous life. Look, I got souvenirs!”
She reached out to her desk and scooped up several objects. Holding up a sphere of tan puttylike material, she said, in a deep-voiced, heavy Queens accent, “This here’s a genuine piece of C-4, size of a golf ball, it’d blow yer ass to Canarsie, it ever went off, heh-heh. Now this here’s yer primacord. Looks like something you’d hang yer undies on, hey? You wrap a piece a this aroun’ a telephone pole, set it off, wham-cut that mother right off at the knees.”
“Marlene, this is real stuff? They gave it to you?”
“Shit, no! I ripped it off. It’s my payment for handling five hours of patronizing chauvie bullshit with unrelenting cheerfulness.”
“What’re you going to use it for?”
“I don’t know-I’ll think of something. Oh, here’s the best one. It’s a fixed-time detonator.” She held up a finger-long black plastic tube with a knurled end and a metal ring dangling from its side. “What you do is, you take the primacord and stick it in this little hole here, like this. Then you wrap the cord around the C-4, like this. Instant bomb. When you twist the end of the detonator, it breaks a vial of acid, which eats through a wire in a fixed time-this one is for two minutes-which releases a spring, setting off a cap, which explodes the primacord and the plastic. You can’t stop it going off once it’s set. Even works under water. Neat, heh?”
“Marvelous. Now put it away. It gives me the willies.”
Her face broke into a fiendish grin. “The willies? I’ll give you willies.” With which she raised herself up, twisted the detonator, pulled Karp’s waistband out, and dropped the bomb down his pants.
Karp came out of the chair like a rocket, dumping Marlene on the floor, bellowing and trying simultaneously to grab the thing by reaching down his front and to shake the bomb down his pants leg by dancing on one foot. But the irregularly shaped device had hung up somewhere in the crotch area, and Karp had to drop his trousers and pick it up. He was about to heave it over the partition toward what he prayed was a deserted hallway, when his brain started to function again, and he looked around to see what Marlene was doing.
She was still sitting on the floor, shaking in a paroxysm of silent laughter. “Oh, God,” she gasped, “It’s OK! I didn’t … I didn’t … remove the safety pin with a … Oh, God … look at you … with a sharp downward pull on the ring.”
Karp was not amused. He put the bomb down on the desk and pulled up his pants. Then he took off his belt.
“OK, Ciampi, this is it,” he snarled.
“Ahh, come on, Butch, it was just a joke. This is me, Marlene, your main squeeze. You think I would blow my favorite genitalia to smithereens? Besides, you wouldn’t want to make marks on my lush, milky-white thighs, or my adorable perfectly rounded buttocks, would you?” She spread her raised knees a few inches, waggled her hips, and contorted her face into a parody of cross-eyed lust.
Karp swung the belt menacingly for a moment. Then he sputtered into laughter, too, and reached his hand down to help her off the floor. She gave him a hot squirmy hug.
“Forgive?” she asked into his ear.
“Not only that, but I’m going to do you a good one. After I move my stuff down to Criminal Courts, I’ll help you move yours into my old office.”
“Oh goodie, a window! Is it legal?”
“Who gives a shit? Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“Ah, Butchie, when you do lawyer talk like that it makes me all shivery inside. OK, I’ll get packed up here. Then can we go out?”
“Absolutely. The usual dinner, movie, sex?”
“Yes, yawn.”
“Boring, huh. How about all three simultaneously? We could get take-out Chinese and go to Radio City.”
“Now you’re talking, Buster!”
“Champ,” he said, “some day you’re going to go too far.”
“When I do,” she said, hugging him harder, “you’ll be the first to know.”
By the tail end of that summer, Karp came to realize that the new regime was both worse and better than he had expected. Worse, because under Bloom, a brainy man with high political ambitions and no particular attachment to the notion of justice, the rule of numbers became absolute. As always, the rule of numbers meant rule by men who were comfortable with numbers, who believed that the neat boxes on their organization charts could somehow order and wash clean the screaming social chaos of crime in the City of New York. The lawyers called them data weenies.
Wharton ruled these men. He set targets for what he called “throughput” and his troops broke these out into specific targets for each bureau and for each individual attorney. Since a certain number of cases came in each week, each assistant DA was obliged to move a certain number out, and would get dinged if he came up short. This meant that plea bargaining became virtually the only way by which cases were ever disposed. There were of course standards governing the acceptability of bargains, based on the initial charges and the circumstances of the crime. But the way it turned out was that nobody ever got dinged on failure to meet standards, just on failure to meet clearance targets.
Trials virtually disappeared under this standards system, and so did the old guard of seasoned prosecutors who had grown up in the Garrahy era, the lawyers to whom trials were the center of their professional lives. One by one, and then in clumps, they left for private practice, the bench, the beach. Six weeks after taking office, Bloom dissolved the Homicide Bureau, thus abolishing the true church of the Garrahy religion. It was a natural consequence of the new order: silly to make a big deal about homicide, if a killing was just another occasion for a plea bargain, another felony clearance, another digit to keep the data weenies off your back. But oddly, in this unpromising situation Roger Karp flourished.