Things like this happen often at reformatories. The big kid had many enemies and the investigation was desultory, as Mandeville had calculated. Nobody bothered him for the rest of his stay. He also became a model prisoner. He was polite to the staff, attended lectures dutifully, and worked on his reading. He was employed in the library. Here he delved deeply into whatever books it possessed on the law and the workings of the criminal justice system. He read Crime and Punishment with great interest, as a text. He followed Raskolnikov’s rap at the beginning with approval, and was confused and annoyed when the dumb-ass turned himself in.
Mandeville got out in eight months. On returning home, he found not the prodigal’s welcome he expected as his due, but a destroyed family. His father had died-of shame mostly-and his mother had withdrawn into an impenetrable melancholia. With his brothers away at college it fell to his sister to inform him that he need no longer consider himself a member of the Louis family. This was fine with Mandeville, but, he figured, they owed him something for not sticking by him in his hour of need. After all, what was a family for?
In fact, he figured they owed him all the money in the house, his father’s gold watch and his mother’s tiny hoard of jewelry. His sister was foolish enough to try to stop him and got knocked down and kicked in the head a couple of times. There was enough to get him set up in the big city, which he reached in late 1965. The times and the man conspired-there has hardly ever been a better milieu to begin business as an armed robber than a large American city in the period between the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the resignation of Richard Nixon-“the sixties.” The citizens were rich and disinclined to divert from their private use the monies necessary to run a criminal justice system remotely adequate for the scale of the problem, a problem that stemmed from the vast increase in the number of unemployed young men and the disappearance from most big cities of anything for all those young men to do for an honest living.
Then there was the guilt. The political movements of the time had taught the middle classes something about their complicity in injustice and brutality. Perhaps people who committed crimes were simply responding to irresistible social forces. Perhaps crime was a form of political protest. Look what we were doing in Vietnam….
Thus, as London at the end of the sixteenth century was a hot place to be a literary genius, and France at the end of the eighteenth century was a hot place to be a military genius, New York in the sixties was made for a murderous psychopath like young Mandeville Louis. He thrived.
Even Louis himself understood this. As he swayed in his seat on the uptown Lexington Avenue local, with the murder weapons and the profits from his most recent crime on his person, he knew how slim his chances were of being caught, tried, and punished.
Still, there was something wrong. Something niggled at the back of his mind. Walker was wrong, for one thing. He didn’t like a junkie with a family-people could ask questions if something happened to him, and Louis’s career was founded on only the most shallow level of questions ever being asked about his criminal activities. Even Elvis, sitting happily next to him in his simple and murderous innocence, was a little wrong. Louis had never had a real accomplice-patsies, yes, but nobody who was really in with him. This need for some human contact shamed him; it was a blemish on the polished and icy globe of his perfection. Perhaps he would have to get rid of the kid, too.
But deeper than these disturbing thoughts, something else was starting to stir through the mind of Mandeville Louis, almost imperceptibly, like the flutterings of a small moth. Though he could not know it, it was in fact an intimation of the moral order of the universe, which dwells somewhere in all conscious beings, even those far gone in evil, even-the theologians tell us-within the demons in the lowest hell. It is told often proverbially: “God is not mocked,” we say, or “The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.”
A shiver ran through Louis’s body. “Somebody walked on my grave,” he thought. But it was not that. It was the first shadow of something that would have been recognized instantly in the ancient world, which understood these matters rather better than we do today. They called it nemesis.
Chapter 3
Nemesis was six-five and a bit, well-muscled, with a bad left knee. At seven o’clock on the morning after the Marchione killings, Roger Karp, called “Butch,” an assistant district attorney for New York County, was slowly rising from what was literally the sleep of the just. As he awakened he experienced, as usual, a moment of disorientation. He was not in the bedroom of the comfortable apartment he had shared with Susan. Susan was in California, with the furniture. He was in a renovated two-room apartment on West 10th Street off Sixth Avenue, with no furniture. Actually, he had a Door Store platform bed and a rowing machine; everything else he owned was in storage or at the office. The place had a kitchen, which he never used. The range and refrigerator were new and still had their packing slips and little instructional booklets tucked inside. Not a domestic guy, Karp. The bed and the rowing machine didn’t fit in the office, or he would not have needed an apartment at all.
Karp stretched, swung his legs out of bed and stood up. By habit, he bounced a little on his left leg. The knee neither locked nor collapsed. Dr. Marvin Rosenwasser, orthoped of Palo Alto, was not God (except in the opinion of his mother) but his patellar re-creation seemed to be functioning approximately as well as the original-on a light-duty basis, of course. It would not stand a pounding dash down the length of a basketball court or a leap for a rebound, which is why Karp was an attorney, rather than a professional basketball player, in New York.
In his faded Berkeley sweatpants, of which he had retained a prodigious supply, Karp walked over to his rowing machine, sat in its seat, put his feet in the stirrups, and pulled boldly into the current. The room was cool. The windows were open and the morning air was touched with the smell of rain. Still, after ten minutes Karp was running a sweat and after twenty he was dripping. He had the tension on the rowing machine set to its highest level. Karp didn’t believe in taking it easy. At thirty-two he had managed to retain a body that, legs aside, could still have started in the NBA: big shoulders, a hard slab of torso, sinewy arms, thick wrists.
He rose from the machine, stripped, and went into the bathroom. It was the best thing about the tiny apartment, being one of the original bathrooms from the days when each story of the apartment house had only four flats instead of ten. It had a patterned tile floor in three shades of tan against black and white, an alcove behind the door housing an ornate cast-iron radiator where you could heat towels, high ceilings, sculpted cornices covered with three inches of yellowing paint, a huge cast-iron bathtub with ball-and-claw feet, with a chrome shower ring, and one of those old-fashioned flat shower heads.
Karp turned on the cold water almost full and then goosed the hot faucet gingerly. The room was immediately filled with steam. Karp had retained his athlete’s taste for hot showers, but the old building, equipped with boilers on the scale of those that drove the Carinthia to win the Atlantic Blue Ribbon, often supplied too much of a good thing.
After finishing in the bathroom, Karp dressed in a lawyer’s dark blue pinstriped suit, black shoes and socks. He made the bed, picked up his briefcase, and left the apartment.