I found a pencil and wrote a response and then stomped around our camp looking for him so that I could give him a piece of my mind. He saw me coming and though the men around him looked suddenly worried-I must have seemed like an enraged Valkyrie coming for the mortals-he just smiled.
The old woman laughed. I think that is the moment I may have first realized that I loved him. But I gave him my note, which said, “How can you talk of love and marriage and bringing children into a world as evil as this one? You are a stupid man, and I am not interested.” Not very eloquent but to the point. I saw the hurt on his face-and regretted my note. But all he said was, “That’s okay. I’ll ask again tomorrow.” I told him not to bother, but the next day when I saw him walking toward me, I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat. He asked me to marry him again, and I said, “No. Love has no place in this world for me anymore.”
Day after day, however, Moishe returned and asked his question, the old woman told Lucy. And day after day, I rejected him. Goldie laughed again. I believe that I must have a world record for the most proposals by one man. Finally, one day he came up to me, but instead of asking his question, he said good-bye.
The memory brought tears to Goldie’s eyes. I pretended that I was only mildly interested but asked him where he was going. He said he was going back to Sobibor and that he would lie down there and die. I asked him why and he said-and I can remember his very words to this day-“If they can stop us from falling in love and marrying and having children… if they can convince us that the world is such a terrible place that there is no more room for love, then they have won anyway. Why not give them my bones to lie near those of my mother, sister, and father, and so many friends?”
Goldie reached across the table for Lucy’s hand. I didn’t know if he was just being dramatic, but suddenly I could not stand the thought of him leaving me. I pleaded with him not to go. I said that perhaps in the future there would be a better time to consider marriage, but it wasn’t the right time.
The old woman squeezed the young woman’s hand. And he said, “There is no right time for love, there is only now.” Then, before I could stop him-or maybe I didn’t want to stop him-he kissed me.
Goldie sighed and fell silent. Lucy wiped at the tears rolling down her own cheeks. “Then what happened?”
Goldie spread her hands to indicate the bakery and all that it stood for and signed, Don’t you know? I married my prince and lived happily ever after.
20
Although he kept his expression dispassionate, inwardly Karp was seething as he waited for Gilbert Murrow, Pat Davis, and Danielle Cohn to take their seats in his office. Guma, Fulton, and Tommy Mack, the chief of the Homicide Bureau, were already present, the former in his favorite chair, Mack seated near him, and Clay leaning his big frame against a wall.
It was midmorning, the day after his visit to Columbia University and Dale Yancy, a morning that followed a sleepless night. This could have all been so easily avoided, he thought, fuming, with just the smallest bit of patience and attention to detail. But everybody got caught up in the immediacy of the now. The cop wanted the bust. Cohn wanted to take on a big case. And Davis wanted to shine while he was at the top and position himself for when Mack gets his judgeship.
Perhaps, in the initial adrenaline rush of thinking he had the killer in front of him, Graziani had the blinders on so tight that he could see only Acevedo. But his withholding evidence that would have ruled out the ring used in support of Acevedo’s indictment was not just a serious violation of legal procedures, it obstructed justice and inexorably led to false charges being filed against-in all probability-an innocent man.
Karp had looked at Graziani’s personnel file, delivered earlier by Fulton, and saw a mixed bag. Graziani had received commendations for his service and risen in the ranks, though he seemed stuck at detective second grade. Part of that may have been the sorts of small issues that might show up in any detective’s file-complaints about harassment, “police brutality,” and shakedowns. But there was also the glaring accusation that he’d taken DEA-marked money from a drug dealer, which had gotten him transferred from the Two-Six to the Four-Eight without any other repercussions. Probably thanks to the police union, Karp thought. The “thin blue line” mentality makes it tough on occasion to deal with the few bad apples.
However, bad apple or not, Karp’s own people had screwed up big-time, and that bothered him even more than Graziani. As the district attorney of New York County, he was responsible for the six hundred assistant district attorneys who worked for the busiest DAO in the country. Together they faced the daunting challenge of prosecuting those responsible for the fifty thousand violent crimes that occurred annually on the island of Manhattan, including approximately five hundred murders, fifteen hundred rapes, and a multitude of robberies, assaults, and kidnappings. And that didn’t include the caseloads for tens of thousands of other types of nonviolent felonies, such as burglary, larceny, fraud, traffic infractions, and misdemeanor cases.
It was a monumental task, but he’d never believed that was an excuse for sloppy work or ignoring protocol. Since coming into office, he’d insisted on a system of checks and balances that his mentor DA Garrahy had employed but were abandoned or haphazardly enforced by subsequent administrations. Again borrowing from the old man’s style, he’d also brought back what he thought of as the “institutionalization of virtue,” in which the office, and the people who worked for him, would occupy the moral high ground in the administration of justice. And, as he’d been discussing with Guma and Fulton before the others arrived, not just because it was the right thing, but because “our whole system depends on keeping the trust of the public; if we destroy that trust by compromising our ethics, the whole system crumbles.” Now, because of the callous disregard for the law of a rogue cop and recklessness motivated by the personal goals of two members of his staff, the system had been compromised, and he was angry about it.
Actually, Karp had been simmering since leaving Dale Yancy and then gone to full boil within minutes after Marlene arrived home that evening and greeted him with the now all-too-familiar “We need to talk.”
After listening to Marlene and taking a stroll around the block to clear his head, Karp had called Tommy Mack and given him a brief rundown of what had happened. The homicide chief berated himself for getting distracted by the case he was prosecuting, which had gone to the jury that day, and not “riding herd better” on Assistant Bureau Chief Pat Davis and other members of his bureau. But Karp had dismissed the self-criticism; the lack of oversight was one of the disadvantages of insisting that he and his bureau chiefs try cases to keep themselves sharp.
“This one slipped through the cracks,” Karp said. “Now the thing is to correct the problem and then make sure the cracks get filled in. I have an appointment first thing in the morning, but let’s meet at about ten and have Davis and Cohn join us at about eleven.”
He then called Murrow and gave him the same briefing. When he was finished, Karp’s administrative chief groaned loudly.
“Spit it out, Gilbert,” Karp said insistently, knowing what was coming.
Gilbert Murrow was a somewhat short and pudgy fellow who favored vests and round, wire-rimmed glasses that gave him the appearance of a research librarian. One of Murrow’s roles was to act as Karp’s liaison with the media; as such he sometimes complained that he was the only one in the office conscious of the fact that the position of district attorney was an elected one.
If there was a problem with the case, the press could be expected to make his life unpleasant. “At the risk of the slap-down I know I’m going to get,” he said, “I was just contemplating how the media is going to react. They’ve been running Columbia U Slasher newspaper exposes and television specials since Acevedo’s arrest. They’ve as much as convicted him. Now they’re going to look like fools who sensationalized this, and who do you think they’re going to take this out on?”