liver, little shrimpy hors d'oeuvres, fried wontons, tiny pizzas-and some decent liquor and beer. There were about fifty people in the bureau's outer office, where the desks had all been pushed to the walls. The secretaries had set up a big boom box, which was now blasting out the Village People's 'YMCA' for the fifth time and people were getting funky in the center of the floor, doing the peculiar spastic dancing that made the 1970s such a world of fun.
'No more,' said Karp to the man attempting to refill his glass with champagne. 'I'll get blotto.'
'That's the point,' said the man, continuing to pour. 'If the guest of honor can walk out steadily, it's an insult to his friends. We'll carry you on a door.'
The man's name was Vernon Talcott Newbury. He was a lawyer in the fraud bureau and Karp's closest friend among the people he had started with in the old DA's office. A rare bird, Newbury, in the gritty environs of 10 °Centre Street: rich, for one thing, very rich, a sprig of a family of New York bankers who regarded the Rockefellers as pushy newcomers. Yale College and Harvard Law for another, unlike most of the people working at the DA, who were more likely to have come from places like Fordham and St. Johns. A lean, small man with longish, ash blond hair, he had the remarkable good looks, 'chiseled' as the expression has it, of one of the gentlemen in white tie that Charles Dana Gibson used to draw in company with his famous girls.
Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. 'One slums,' he might say, or, 'My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it.' It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling's or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.
Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.
There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face. In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.
This damage had never interested him; he had loved her before, when she was stunning and perfect, and afterward, when she was merely a gorgeous exotic. As always, when he watched her dance, he was excited and vaguely saddened at the same time. Marlene loved to dance; Karp did not. He hadn't even before his knee had been replaced, thinking himself gawky on the floor and conspicuous with it.
As he watched, she caught his eye and winked and went through a set of parodically dirty contortions.
'Marlene's not going down with you, I hear,' said V.T.
'Not right away,' said Karp, turning back to his friend. 'We're being modern.'
V.T. nodded and smiled ruefully. He himself had been carrying on for a number of years a hopeless affair with an artist who lived in the Berkshires and who would on no account move to the city. 'Yes,' he said, 'how well I know it! Prisoners of women's liberation, a burgeoning gulag. And without even the balm of self-pity, since we richly deserve anything they can dish out, we swine. Sins of the fathers. The best cure is more wine.'
He poured himself another glass of champagne. V.T. had sprung for a case of Moet magnums, a typical gesture, and one that had contributed mightily to the current hilarious mood of the party. Nor had he stinted himself in the use of his own gift. A bar of scarlet had appeared across his cheekbones, and his intelligent blue eyes were starting to approximate the cheap plastic glitter of a baby doll's.
'Fuck 'em, anyway,' said Karp woozily. 'You know, Newbury, you should get out of here, too.'
'Why? The party's roaring and we have four bottles of wine left.'
'No, I don't mean the party. I mean the DA's.' Karp put an affectionate arm across Newbury's shoulder. 'Look, V.T., I have a slot for a head of research on our staff. Why don't you take it?'
Newbury cocked his head and looked at Karp out of a narrow eye. 'You're joking, right?'
'No, I'm not. You should do it. We'll have a ball.'
'But I'm a funny-money man. Fraud is my life.'
'The People rest,' said Karp.
V.T. laughed, sputtering around a mouthful of champagne. 'What? You have the brass to suggest that the Warren Commission and the concept of fraud can possibly exist in the same universe of discourse? It was printed in the Times! Walter Cronkite-'
'Will you?'
'Of course,' said V.T., without an instant's hesitation.
The party wore on. People drifted away, leaving the hard-core fun lovers, who became more raucous, as if hoping to make up in noise what was lost in numbers. The sun went down; the lights were doused and replaced with candles. Around nine, Karp slipped into his private office and sat down behind his desk. He began rummaging through the drawers, extracting personal items.
There were few of these, or few that he wished to retain, at any rate. A block of clear Lucite in which was embedded a round from an AR-16 that had been removed from his shoulder after an unsuccessful assassination attempt. A softball signed with the names of all the team members, and by Francis Phillip Garrahy, the year the DA's team had won the city league championship. He rose and assembled a carton taken from a stack Connie Trask had provided. He thought he would not need more than one.
Off the wall came his law school diploma and his New York bar certificate, and a framed photograph his friends had signed and given him when he had first been appointed to the homicide bureau back in Garrahy's day.
The door opened and Marlene came in.
'What are you doing lurking in here?' she said, swaying slightly. She was nicely drunk.
'I'm not lurking, I'm cleaning out.' He handed her the photograph. 'I'm taking this for inspiration,' he said.
It was a grainy reproduction of a famous World War II photograph, the charge to destruction of the Pomorske Cavalry Brigade during the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland. In the foreground were several German tanks, and coming toward them out of the smoky distance was a long line of horsemen in white tunics and schapskas, waving pennoned lances. The gift was meant as a comment on fighting homicide in New York.
Marlene looked at the relic, and at her own signature prominent on the bottom. 'You still feel like that? Charging the tanks?'
'I don't know. Lately, I've started to see myself as being on the other side-more panzerlike. I guess I don't like it.'
'I thought I was supposed to be the intractable romantic in this family,' said Marlene petulantly. 'You're supposed to be the solid one. You're supposed to be there for me.'
Karp laughed at that and tapped the photo. 'Wait-I thought I was the romantic Polish lancer, dashing into danger.'
'Yes, but a dependable romantic Polish lancer, who helps with child care and does dishes.'
Karp laughed again and went on with his packing. Some personal books and a few papers went into the carton. He walked to the line of bookcases that held the records of his hundred or so murder trials. He pulled out a few at random, and then put them back. 'I'll have to get Connie to pack these and send them home.'
'God, you're really doing it!' she said, amazement in her voice. 'It just now hit me, watching you pack.'
'Yeah, packing makes it real. I still have trouble believing it.'
'Leaving everything…'
'Not quite everything. V.T.'s coming along to run the research side. I think Clay Fulton'll go for it too.'
'How pleasant for you,' she sniffed. 'Butch and his gang. What more could a boy want?'
'You could get on the staff too, you know, if you hadn't made up your mind to be a pain in the ass about this. We could all be together…'
'I'd scrub floors before I'd work for you again.'
'You don't have to work for me,' said Karp heatedly. They'd been through this before. 'You could get a slot with Joe Lerner on the MLK side.'
