Karp was personally a good friend of the Fifth, but he also knew, as all prosecutors knew, that the vast, vast majority of criminal cases are cleared not by the clever clues beloved of lady detective story writers but by confessions. Confession (with its less respectable brother, the plea bargain) made the horrible old system work. Because of this every cop and every prosecutor in the country pushed the limits of Miranda every day, and Miranda, naturally, pushed back, the result of this shoving being a mass of case law so tortuous and recondite that even academic legal scholars, with plenty of time on their hands, could barely master its intricacies. Karp, of course, had hardly any time at all, and Waley had insured that he would have to sweat blood to answer the motion without embarrassment. Nuts, indeed, thought Karp as he scratched away.
Marlene entered her office and passed Marlon Dane going out at a run.
“Where you running to?” she called after him.
“Miller,” Dane said over his shoulder as he passed through the door.
Marlene looked inquiringly at Sym, who explained, “Mary Kay Miller called. Friend of a friend called her, says her loved one got a gun, got his load on, says he’s going to whack her. She calls here, Dane happened to be here typing up his time sheets. He went to pick her up at work.”
“Did he have his machine gun?”
“Not that I saw. We ever kill any of these bastards yet?”
Marlene hesitated. “Not as such. Not since we started the business. We haven’t lost but one client and we haven’t killed a loved one, and that’s exactly how I’d like to keep it. Anything else going on?”
“Some messages on your desk. Harry’s out. Tranh helped me with the IRS stuff.”
Marlene’s eyebrows shot north. “He did? He could read all that fine-print crap? In English?”
“Uh-huh. He real-he’s real smart, you know? Like he was some kind of professor or something.”
“You like him?”
A slow nod. It was hard for Sym to admit she liked any man. “He’s okay. For an old guy.”
The old guy was in his room. Marlene knocked and walked in. Tranh was on his narrow bunk, rummaging in his rubberized duffel bag. When Marlene entered, he seemed to freeze, his hand in the bag, as if some animal within had gripped it with its teeth. His face was unreadable.
She looked him over. He was dressed in a long-sleeve black wool shirt buttoned to the throat and black canvas pants. On his feet were cheap high-top sneakers, also black. Tranh had taken a surprisingly small amount of money out of the cash box and replaced his lost clothing. Black was apparently his color, for he had selected it in all the garments he had purchased in the surplus stores and the bargain going-out-of-business emporiums that lined Canal Street.
“What is going on, Vinh?” she asked in French. “How is Miss Lanin and her undesirable friend?”
He withdrew his hand from the duffel and rested it, with the other on his lap. “Not well, I am afraid. I have followed Pruitt to his apartment, which is located on Avenue B. There I observed him not two hours ago in conversation with a man of disreputable and malign appearance. I followed them to another apartment in the neighborhood, where they entered, and shortly afterward Pruitt emerged alone carrying a package wrapped in black plastic, like so.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “I suspect it is a weapon, a firearm.”
“Shit! What are you going to do?”
“I feel that now we must watch Miss Lanin continuously.”
Marlene chewed her lip and considered this, working out coverage schedules in her head. Tranh interrupted her train of thought. “Marie-Helene, I believe I can do this by myself, if you permit.”
“What, you’re going to move in with her?” said Marlene in English, forgetting herself in her surprise.
“On the contrary, I believe the correct strategy is to watch her dwelling and workplace at a distance until he should make an undoubted aggressive move.”
“Vinh, allow me to remind you, it requires three agents to provide effective twenty-four-hour coverage.”
“I know it; however, you have not two other agents to spare, I believe. No, Marie-Helene, I will do it myself.”
“You propose to watch her apartment from the outside all night? It is an absurdity!”
“I have done it before,” Tranh replied quietly.
This stopped Marlene’s next objection, because to pursue the point would certainly have brought up exactly how he had done it before and where and when, and she was not sure that she wanted to know. In any case, he was right. She could not mount a twenty-four-hour watch on anyone just now.
He lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she took, and they spent a few seconds on the business of mutually lighting up. “All right,” she said, “but if you spot him, I want you to call the police.”
Tranh raised an ironic eyebrow. “To be. sure, the police,” he said. “They will arrest him, one supposes.”
“Of course. He has violated his order of protection. Also, if he is in fact armed, that is another offense.”
“I see,” said Tranh. “He will be imprisoned for several years, and then released, and then?”
“Just call the cops, Vinh,” said Marlene sharply, dispensing with the French. “And don’t let anything happen to her, okay?”
“Okay,” said Tranh humbly, in English. “You the boss.”
When Marlene left, Tranh took a small bundle covered in oily rags out of his duffel, and unwrapped it on the bed, revealing a large semiautomatic pistol gleaming dully with oil. Skillfully, without thought, he began to take it apart. It was a very old pistol, a Tokarev TT M 1930, manufactured in 1932 for the Red Army. In 1959, along with a great mass of other obsolete Soviet equipment, it had been shipped to the People’s Republic of Vietnam as a token of fraternal concern with the liberation struggle against the puppet regime to the south. It had come into Tranh’s hands that year, and he had kept it with him almost continuously since then. He had not, of course, had it in prison. He had buried it, heavily greased, when he learned they were coming to arrest him, and he had dug it up after his reeducation, and taken it with him when he left the country in 1978. He had used it to shoot five Thai pirates who had attacked the crowded sailboat in which he had made his escape to the Philippines. Since then he had not required it.
After carefully cleaning and re-oiling the weapon, he assembled it, snapped a magazine of Mauser rounds into its handle, put on a navy pea coat and a wool watch cap, and, with the pistol snug in a pocket of his coat, left the office.
He took the subway uptown to Thirty-fourth Street and walked to the building at Thirty-sixth and Seventh in which Carrie Lanin was employed as a fabric designer. There he lounged among the garment district throngs until five-thirty, when Lanin emerged from the building. He followed her to the Sixth Avenue subway, getting off at Chambers Street, and then tailed her to her home, a loft on Duane Street. There he waited, crouched in a doorway. A car arrived, and he tensed, but it was only the daughter, Miranda, being dropped off after school by a car pool.
The sky became purple, then black. It was cold, but not too cold, and there was no wind. Tranh ate two Hershey bars. In a while he fell into the mental state, neither awake nor asleep, that he had developed during his military career and perfected in prison. In this state he could indulge himself in hynogogic dreams; he could imagine another life. In this life he was at the head of a classroom, teaching a class of bright youngsters in fresh school uniforms. Sometimes he taught mathematics, or it might have been French literature. After school was over, he would go home to his wife and daughter. His wife was a nurse; his daughter was nine years old.