“What took you so long?” asked Lucy, who was waiting at the door when Tran burst through, she having heard and interpreted the unpleasant noises that had lately come from above.
He looked at her face a moment and said, “Who did this to you?”
“It’s nothing, Uncle Tran, really. Let’s just go.”
He grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her roughly behind him, up the stairs and to where the Vietnamese lay bound.
“Him?”
“They all did, come on, Uncle. . no, don’t do that, please, please!” Struggling, she managed to get between Tran and the bleeding man, so that Tran had to stop hitting him with his pistol, and knelt, breathing hard, like a blown horse.
Tran wiped blood and bits of broken tooth from his pistol barrel on Sharkmeat’s shirt front, and then he stood up, grabbed Lucy’s wrist again, and pulled her out of the house and across Ocean Parkway, Lucy protesting and demanding to be released all the way. Tran lifted her onto the pillion seat, cranked the motorcycle, and sped northwest to the Battery Tunnel. After reaching the Manhattan side, Tran turned into a narrow side street and stopped. He reversed himself on the seat and faced Lucy, his eyes terrible.
“How?” he demanded in Vietnamese. “How were you captured, and by the Vo brothers, too, who are turtle heads, crude thugs-how?”
“I found the book, Uncle Tran. And I was reading it, translating it, on the subway, and I got too caught up in it, I guess. . ”
“On the subway? You were reading on the subway? You are supposed to watch on the subway. You read behind locked doors. How did they take you on the subway?”
“They didn’t. I mean, I spotted them after I missed my stop, and then I ran but they grabbed my bag and I followed them out. .”
“You followed them? Did I understand that you followed them?”
“Yes, see, they took my bag. With your Tale of Kieu in it. .”
Tran grimaced and stuck all his fingers in his mouth and chewed them, growling.
When this fit concluded, he shouted at her, “Imbecile child! For a book? You put your life in danger for a book? Are you insane!”
And then, of course, Lucy did what she hadn’t done yet, which was break down and blubber like a three-year-old, the deadly fear boiling up now that she was safe, but also because of the unfairness of Tran, to be angry with her when she had saved his relic, and so he had to comfort her, dragging her down the seat and pressing her against his small, iron-hard chest, and stroking her dirty, damp curls until she was calm again. He gave her a clean handkerchief to mop herself up, and he said, in gentler tones, “My very dear idiot child, we must decide what we are to do now. The Vo will be angry about this, and they are as relentless as hungry dogs. I cannot guard you every minute of every day. Therefore, we must remove the Vo.”
“You intend to kill them?” she asked, a mixture of awe and disgust in her tone.
Tran rolled his eyes. “Of course I don’t intend any such thing. Where do you get these ideas? No, we must go to the police and they will arrest them. They committed very serious crimes, and it will be better for us if they are in prison.”
Lucy gaped, astounded. It was like hearing that the president of Pepsi was thinking about putting Coke machines in the corporate headquarters snack bar. “The police! We never go to the police.”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact we do. Your mother has made it a principle never to engage in any activity that the police and the courts can do better-”
“My mother!” cried Lucy in an unpleasant sneering voice.
“Yes, your mother, who will, of course, have to be told of this. And your father also.”
“You would tell them!” she cried, tears welling once more. “Traitor! I will never speak to you again as long as I live.” She jumped off the pillion seat and flounced away, in the direction of Broadway. Tran cursed and called after her, but she didn’t stop. He kicked his motor into life and followed her down the street.
She walked on, ignoring him, her back stiff and straight as a mast. Tran found himself quite baffled; his long career as a terrorist and guerrilla leader had not prepared him for combat with an American teenager in a snit. In time they reached Broadway, at which point Lucy stopped, turned, and came up to him.
“Go away!” she commanded.
“Lucy, have some sense,” Tran said. “Get on the motorcycle and we will go someplace quiet and talk. You must be hungry-”
“No! You see that policeman over there?” She pointed to where a blue-and-white was parked, its occupant out ticketing cars. “If you don’t go away, I will tell him I am a frightened little girl and you are the bad old man who has been following me and that you hit my face.”
Tran took in a startled breath, so long and deep that his nostrils pinched and whitened. Without another word he swung the machine away and roared off back the way they had come. Lucy watched him disappear, feeling empty. Really empty, for she was starving as well as spiritually desolate. She had no money for food, but she did have a subway token. She never left the house without one secreted in the little change pocket of her jeans. She walked to Wall Street and took a northbound train, intending to go to Canal Street and home, but at the Chambers/Centre Street stop, she jumped to her feet, impelled by a pressure she could not have described, but which could not be resisted, and left the train.
“So much for the organization of the office and what you can expect to be doing in your first months here,” said Karp. “I want to finish by telling you some stuff I wish someone had told me back when I started here, way back in the second Roosevelt administration.” This raised a polite titter from the fifteen young lawyers assembled in the jury box of a temporarily vacant courtroom. Karp stood in the well of the court facing them, incidentally demonstrating how to stand in the well of a court and talk to a jury, which it seemed to him some of these kids might not know how to do, so green were they.
“First of all, you all have something in common, besides being lawyers. Can anybody guess what that is?”
The group looked around at one another speculatively. Eight men, seven women, four black, two Hispanic, one Asian, the rest white, or white-ish. Nobody had a clue.
“I’ll tell you,” said Karp. “Every one of you participated in a competitive sport. Most of you are team athletes, but we have a varsity sprinter, a couple of state-level tennis players, two women’s varsity crew oars, and a junior chess master. This is not an accident. Prosecuting in an adversarial system requires the same kind of competitiveness, endurance, guts, mercilessness, and ability to play when hurt that’re necessary to succeed in sports. Just like sports, this game is about winning under a set of rules, but it’s not all about winning. It’s mainly about doing the right thing. Just do the right thing and don’t get all concerned about your won and lost record. Doing the right thing and keeping your integrity is important because you’re probably not going to contribute much to making the world a better place, not that you’re going to be able to see at any rate.” Here he paused and looked a selection of them in the eye, using his ever useful Severe yet Compassionate Look.
“This is a hopeless job,” he said vehemently. “Your work will not help make things better, because we don’t understand what causes crime, and it’s not entirely clear that punishment, which is what we mostly do here, helps the problem. It may even make it worse. This society, this city, is like a ship that’s hit a rock. We don’t get to steer it to safety and we don’t get to plot the course to avoid more rocks and we don’t get to evacuate the women and children. What we do get is a crummy little office in the bilge of the ship, where we work the pumps, keep the water level down, and prevent the ship from going under entirely. Right now the water’s coming in a little faster than we’re pumping it out, which sucks, so to speak, but on the other hand, if we stopped pumping, it’d be all over in a pretty short time. What I’ve just described is damned near the full extent of the job satisfaction: pump, pump, pump, and listen to that water slosh out. That’s the good part. The downside. .”-here he waited for the laughter to subside-“the downside is you may screw up and let someone out who should’ve been in the can, and he does something bad again, and it’s on you, he kills someone, say, and it’s on you.” He waited for that to sink in.