Marlene had vaguely considered a campaign to change his diet into one that would enable him to survive into the coming decade. This was but one of the many such campaigns she had planned for after the Big Day. Karp, though a fountain of many virtues, could stand considerable improvement.
Once they learned about the baby, and Karp began to spend most of his time with Marlene, she had attempted to get her kitchen act together. She was a reasonably proficient cook, but like Karp, was no slave to the four basic food groups. Marlene subsisted largely on chocolate bars and yogurt.
Since she had started eating for two and began an effort to reform, Marlene had cooked a number of what she considered decent meals. Karp responded with enthusiasm, but he would have responded with equal enthusiasm to raw vulture, as long as there was enough of it.
More recently, she had been too exhausted to spend time in the kitchen, and on most evenings it seemed easier to take-out from one of the many grease joints, Italian, Chinese, or Greek, that perfumed the streets of lower Manhattan.
She watched Karp top off his tank and walk to the toilet. The diet hadn't affected his body yet, she thought approvingly. As large as he was, he was graceful and precise in motion, grounded and radiating contained power when at rest. The morning light flooding out through the big east windows of the loft lit up the hanging dust around his body like an aura.
The legs were long and smooth, the arms suspended from wide square shoulders down to those enormous hands, with their bony spatulate fingers. The scars-the Dr. Frankenstein mass of ladders from the knee operations and the smaller ragged ones in the shoulder where he had taken a couple of assassin's bullets-added somehow to the appeal. Scars: a real man!
What a nice butt he has, thought Marlene, scrooching around in the bed to get a better look. And how nice that he's retained that jockish habit of walking around naked all the time. How dull to be married to some lard-ass in a plaid robe. We like each other's asses, she mused; is that a really solid basis for a life relationship? Because although she knew his body nearly as well as she knew her own, her knowledge of what went on within that high and narrow skull remained vague and confused.
The light moved slowly across the floor of Marlene's loft. The big skylight in the center of its patterned tin ceiling was beginning to glow as well, like milk glass. The loft was one huge room, a hundred feet long by thirty-three, divided by portable screens into a living area, a kitchen, a dining area, and then the Limbo, a dusty zone occupied by athletic equipment- Karp's rowing machine, Marlene's body and speed bags-assorted junk, and the huge motors that ran the building's freight lift. Under the west windows, at the far end, Marlene had set up a little office, and about a hundred potted plants, ranging from African violets to giant ficus trees.
The place was entirely Marlene's creation, and waking up in it always gave her a little charge. The summer she had moved in she had taken on the herculean task of cleaning out the remnants of a defunct electroplater, heaving great tangles of wire and scrap down the freight shaft, scraping, sanding, painting, until it was as she wanted it, a great white, calm room, high above the street, flooded with light.
That summer, eight years ago, barely twenty-five people had lived full-time in the old industrial area south of Houston Street. Now they called it SoHo, the hottest property in New York. Recently a thin creature with black clothes and white hair had offered Marlene thirty thousand dollars for the key.
Marlene sighed and got out of bed, wrapped a frazzled pink blanket around her shoulders, and scooted down the ladder from the sleeping platform. She walked across the wide-planked white-painted floor, dropped the blanket, climbed four steps, and plunged into the hot water of the thousand-gallon hard rubber electroplating tank that served her as a bath.
Seated on the floor of this tank, perfumed water to her chin, she could not see over its rim. She heard the toilet flush, a door open, the sound of heavy naked steps toward the far end of the loft.
She stood up and began soaping her body and hair with almond liquid soap. She saw that Karp had pulled an old pair of sweatpants on. Now he sat down on his ancient rowing machine and began to pull at its wooden handles.
She watched the muscles in his back work as he pulled. He would row for exactly fifteen minutes, take a short wash in the tub, and be dressed and ready to leave ten minutes after that, impatiently pacing while he waited for her to complete her more complex preparations for the outside world. Then they would walk down the five splintery flights and the two grim industrial streets to the BMT subway at Prince and Broadway, or, if it were nice out and she felt up to it, they would hoof the distance, a little over a mile, to 100 Centre Street.
A routine. Marlene thought, ambivalently, about it going on indefinitely, with, eventually, a stop at the day-care to drop off the kid. Or kids, as it might turn out. She looked down at her belly. Only a slight rise as yet; she could still see her mop of pubic curls. If her mother could be believed, she would carry high and small, like all the women in her family. And have an easy labor, to hear her grandmother tell it. According to her grandmother, her Uncle Marco had been born late one night with so little trouble that he barely woke her up.
An easy slide into a stable life. Something tugged in a different direction. Watching Karp work out, the dense muscles rolling under the glowing skin, a familiar feeling spread through her groin. Her fingers began soaping more deeply between her thighs than proper hygiene strictly required.
It's been a while, she thought. She could hide in the bath and then when Karp appeared for his dip, she could spring on him, soapy and hot, and they could spend a delicious morning messing around.
But no, that would require calling in to the office, and a massive rescheduling of appointments and appearances. She could seduce Karp from his duty, but he would be racked with guilt for days afterward, and take it out on her. Besides, the staff, being skilled investigators, would soon figure out what was going on, with both of them out for the morning, and so they would also have to put up with the leers of their coworkers, ace leerers alclass="underline" Uncle George and Aunti Mabel Fainted at the breakfast table This should serve sufficient warning Never do it in the morning.
No, on second thought, better later. She rose from the bath, thinking, I'm getting to be a horny old lady. Not too surprising, since I was a horny young lady too. Tonight, then, or earlier-maybe I can inveigle him into my office. Hard and fast on the desktop, amid the papers. The thought warmed her and brought a giggle to her throat as she reached for the towel.
Dressed and primped, she in black linen suit, he in his eternal blue pinstripe, they thundered down the stairs, Karp way in the lead, Marlene feeling like Winnie-the-Pooh bumping along after her gigantic Christopher Robin.
Out in the already dieseled air, Karp bought two newspapers, the Times and the Daily News. He stuck the Times and the brown accordion folder he used as a briefcase under his left arm and flipped through the News as he walked along. He was looking for crimes, and this morning he didn't have to flip long.
"Ah, shit!" he snarled, half under his breath.
"What's happening?" asked Marlene.
"They got another one. Jason Brown, twenty-seven. AKA Joker Brown."