The water stopped; too late, Marlene. In any case, as she well understood, there was no time for anything that might upset the precise and scientific scheduling of the Karp amp; Ciampi Every Morning Railroad. Two bottles filled and warmed in the microwave (oh, blessed technology!), stuck into two little gobs, and then it was time for Lucy’s first wake-up kick.
“I’m not going to school today,” said a faint voice from beneath the Italian-flag-colored quilt. “I’m sick.”
“You are? Let me feel you.”
“No, I’m too sick to have a fever. I’m past the fever part.”
Marlene reached under the quilt and grabbed a skinny limb, which was warm but not abnormally so, and heaved.
“Ow! Child abuse!”
“It’ll be assault one unless I hear water running and dressing noises in two minutes.”
Marlene left her daughter’s room and walked down the long main hallway of her loft, as always experiencing a thrill of satisfaction with her home. She’d lived here over a dozen years, starting back in the illegal days, and for most of that time the place had been a barely habitable former wire factory. Two years of the big bucks had changed that; Karp’s career with a firm of downtown tortmeisters and a couple of immense wins had sufficed to convert the vast space into a civilized apartment with real walls and doors, central heating and A/C, Swedish-finish oak floors, two bathrooms, and a kitchen out of Architectural Digest with a Vulcan stove and a stainless steel reefer. The building had gone condo in the great So-Hoization of lower Manhattan, and Marlene now owned the place outright. She intended never to leave.
She passed the kitchen in time to see her husband, in his lawyer blue suit trousers, shirt, and boring dark tie, putting on a yellow rubberized apron with prop, bellevue morgue stenciled on the bib. Zak flung his bottle at her and yelled some happy gibberish. She fielded it neatly, wiped the nipple on her robe, and replaced it in its wet, pink hole. Karp extended one of his long arms and snagged the opening of her robe.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I wonder if you’ve seen the woman who gave me that really incredibly great piece of ass last night.”
“Oh, Estelle? She’s with a customer,” said Marlene as a remarkably long finger whipped out to tickle her crotch. She giggled and pulled away. Zak’s bottle flew again, and this time Karp caught it on the fly, and settled down to feed his two sons a jar of baby food each, in precisely alternating spoonfuls.
Showering under the antique brass shower head, nearly the size of a dinner plate, Marlene let the water beat against her face and soaped her body with patchouli soap, allowing herself her usual private ninety seconds for illicit sensual thoughts, making a short list of the men she knew who might serve if the opportunity ever arose, and imagining what it would be-no, time’s up. Off with the water, a quick dry, hair and face slapped together, then dressing in her court uniform: low-heeled boots, a tan calf-length full skirt with leather belt, a maroon silk blouse, a short, loose tweedy jacket. She plumped the pillows, threw a duvet over the marital bed, and left the boudoir, now in full high gear.
To Lucy’s second wake-up, a brief screaming match, while Karp swabbed down the twins and dressed them in determinedly non-matching outfits. Whip some food into Lucy, make her bag lunch. Feed the dog, walk the dog, scoop the dog, run up the stairs with the dog.
Then, the last thing, while her family clumped down the stairs, a walk to the gun safe under the desk in the office that occupied the opposite end of the loft from the master bedroom, and the extraction and donning of her Colt Mustang Pocket-Lite pistol in its black nylon sheath. She clipped it to her belt, reversed, on the left side. Marlene had a horror of someone sneaking up behind her and yanking out the weapon, and preferred to cross-draw if need be. The Pocket-Lite is an alloy.380 semi-automatic pistol that weighs twelve and a half ounces, which in Marlene’s opinion was twelve and a half ounces too much, but Harry Bello insisted that she go armed, given her habit of insisting to enraged men that they could no longer pound on their women. One last check in the mirror to make sure her fashionable silhouette was free of unsightly armament bulges, and then she clicked on the security system, told the dog to guard, and cleared the door, twenty-two minutes after her alarm had gone off.
Marlene’s car, a bright yellow VW square-back of a certain age, was parked in a nearby alley. Her family was waiting around it as she approached, Karp carrying a kid on each hip, a briefcase dangling from a hooked finger, Lucy hunched and sullen. First a little peek at the telltale tiny magnets she’d left on the hood and all the doors, to make sure some naughty person had not left an explosive device. This done, they strapped the twins into their tiny astronaut seats, and Marlene said the little prayer she always said that the car would once again start. Answered. She drove Karp to the courthouse and Lucy to school, and then herself to Walker Street and work. She unbuckled the twins and hauled them out of the car, using the convenient handles of their carapace-like car seats. They were both snoozing, simultaneously for a wonder; they usually alternated naps, to make sure that nothing important escaped their joint eye. She staggered up the stairs to her office with one in each arm and her purse draped fetchingly around her neck, reflecting for the millionth time that rearing twins was not twice, but four times, as hard as rearing one child.
Marlene had now been up for over forty-five minutes without either coffee or a cigarette, and so it was with gratitude that she beheld the face of Sym, who ordinarily supplied her with the morning’s first hit of both.
“Coffee’s ready,” said Sym when Marlene came in, which is what she always said, and pushed forward her pack of Marlboro Lights so that her boss could take one. In the office Marlene pretended not to have cigarettes of her own, as she had officially stopped smoking.
Marlene plopped the car seats on the floor and poured herself a mug of dripped Medaglia D’Oro, tarry black, drank a grateful dose, and lit up.
“You got messages,” said Sym. “Tamara says she don’t want to go to court today. And some lady want us to whack her old man.”
Marlene laughed. “What, she just called up, like L.L. Bean, I want to order a hit, size XL? Did you get her VISA?”
“I told her we didn’t do like that,” said Sym primly. “Also this lady name Edith Wooten called again. I wrote it down.”
Marlene took the message slip and looked closely at the girl. Sym tended to be morose, which many visitors interpreted as hostility, but today she looked as if she was holding something in, or rather, that she was holding in even more than you might expect to be held in by a girl raped at age twelve and turned out as a whore by her daddy.
“Anything wrong, Sym? He hasn’t been bothering you again?”
“Nah. It ain’t, it isn’t me.”
“Who, then? Posie?”
A tiny shrug, which would have to do in place of a deposition. It was Posie, but Sym was not going to rat her roommate out.
“Okay, Sym, I’ll take care of it.” Marlene picked up the twins and headed for the door, which buzzed and clicked. In a low voice, to the closing door, Sym said, “You look real nice today, Marlene.” She was in love, something Marlene would never see and Sym would never reveal.
Marlene took the twins to the playroom and placed them on the rug. Posie came in from the kitchen, barefoot, in ragged jeans and an old sweatshirt of Marlene’s. She beamed at Marlene and the twins.