"Nonsense, Karp," Marlene said, surprising her husband and the others in the room. "You're on a leave of absence, and I think it would be good for you to get out of Manhattan. Think of it as dabbing your toe back in the water before you jump in feet first."
Karp started to protest but Marlene held up her hand, and this time the look on her face said as much as her words. "And are you really going to let them do to Mikey what they did to Fred?" The comment went right to his heart, as she had known it would. Her smile challenged him to come up with another excuse, but he surrendered.
"I guess not," he said, and turned to his visitors. "Looks like we'll be coming to Idaho. But on one condition, Richie."
"What's that?"
"There's no second seating," Karp said, standing up. "It's an equal partnership, or nothing."
Meyers laughed and stuck out his hand. "Then put it there, pardner."
O'Toole also stood to shake his hand. "Thanks, Butch, my brother was right about you. He always called you his brother."
Karp felt his throat constrict at the word. "He was a good man," he said. "I owe him."
The moment was shattered by the ringing of the telephone. Marlene and Karp both looked at the phone but neither moved to pick it up immediately.
"Late-night calls to the home of the New York district attorney are rarely good news," Marlene said to the confused visitors as she finally moved to look at the caller ID. She picked up the phone and handed it to Karp. "It's Gilbert Murrow."
12
It took a moment to grasp what Murrow was saying. He was obviously crying and it was all Karp could do to calm him down as he sat on the couch and started scribbling on his notepad.
"There's been a bomb!" Murrow yelled into the telephone. "At your uncle's restaurant in Brighton Beach. The Black Sea Cafe. And…oh my God, what am I going to do…everybody's dead…I think Ariadne's dead!"
Murrow had broken down again, and there'd been nothing Karp could do except show his notes to Marlene, who was looking over his shoulder. Bomb at the Black Sea. Ariadne may be hurt.
"Okay, Gilbert, I know this is tough," Karp said as calmly as he could. "But start at the beginning and tell me what you know is for sure."
His tone seemed to help Murrow pull it together. "Ariadne said she was going to meet someone at the Black Sea Cafe for an interview. She didn't say who or what it was for but that it had to be tonight. I shouldn't have let her go…I should have gone with her…"
"Gilbert," Karp said sharply. "I need you to stay with me. I'm sure there's nothing you could have done differently, but that's not what's important now."
Karp heard loud sniffling and throat-clearing before Murrow continued. "Anyway, she had this interview. She called me just before going into the restaurant. She had to have been there for a couple of hours at least. The police have talked to witnesses who saw someone who looks like her having dinner there with another one of the victims-some mob guy. Then the bomb went off."
The phone went quiet and Karp sensed Murrow struggling to remain in control. "I was asleep…waiting for her to come home." He choked up. "I…I got a phone call-some guy with an accent told me to turn on the news… I think he was trying to help. I turned on the television and this was all over it. As soon as I heard the name of the restaurant, I rushed over here as fast as I could. It's horrible. There's blood and bodies everywhere… Fulton's here, too. I called him on the way down."
"Thanks, Gilbert, let me speak to him for a moment," Karp said.
"Butch?"
"Yeah, Clay. Sounds bad."
"It is. According to witnesses, there was at least one family with kids, maybe two, plus some other folks and the staff. They're still trying to clear the rubble and put out small fires. But they haven't found anybody alive yet."
"Have they identified Ariadne?"
"Nope," Fulton said. "But most of the bodies they have recovered so far are pretty torn up and burned. It may take DNA testing for some of them, according to the crime scene guys. But Gilbert thinks she was here and like he told you, a woman matching her description was seen at one of the tables just before the bomb went off."
"Who do they have for suspects?"
"Not much," Fulton answered. "A couple of NYPD detectives working in organized crime think this was aimed at the Karchovskis. Apparently, some youngbloods from Moscow are trying to establish themselves."
Fulton let the last sentence hang in the air. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that Vladimir Karchovski was the nephew of Karp's paternal grandfather. As a young man, Vladimir had been forced to flee the Soviet Union, leaving his young wife and son, Ivgeny, behind. Ivgeny had overcome his Jewish heritage-definitely not an advantage then in that part of the world, no more than it had been in the past-to become a colonel in the Red Army. But after he'd been wounded in Afghanistan and forced out of the military, he'd immigrated to America to join his father.
There'd never been much contact between Karp's family and the Karchovskis over the years; they had a mutual understanding that their respective careers made it problematic. Karp was the district attorney of New York. The Karchovskis ran a crime syndicate. Granted, it was one of the more benign criminal enterprises-no drugs, no prostitution, just smuggling Russian emigres and goods like caviar into the United States and exporting U.S. goods into the black market in Moscow. But they'd been known to defend themselves and their turf with swift, ruthless violence.
The Karchovskis had been careful not to let their business affairs cross into Karp's jurisdiction and put him in an awkward position. But over the past year, their paths had suddenly converged. It began when the Karchovskis had come into information that helped Karp nail a gang that had viciously raped and nearly killed a young woman. And, by seeming coincidence, Marlene had proved the innocence of Ivgeny's half brother, a professor of Russian literature, who'd been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a student. The cases had brought the families back into each other's orbit and it had grown from there.
Compounding the problem was the fact that Karp actually liked his relatives, not to mention Marlene had been practically adopted by Vladimir as the daughter he'd never had. Thus far, the family connections had been kept a secret from the outside world, but Karp had deemed it necessary to let a few of his closest advisors in on "the family skeleton."
As the keeper of Karp's schedule and office administrator, Murrow had been told of Karp's connection to the Karchovskis, and to Karp's surprise he had apparently kept the information from his girlfriend; at least it had never appeared in print. V. T. Newbury, Ray Guma, and Harry Kipman, the trio who formed the inner circle of his office confidants, had been told because they were also his best friends and the men he trusted most. Of them, Guma had seemed the least surprised, and Karp surmised that due to Ray's own familial ties to the Italian mob, he might have already known. The other two had taken it in stride. In fact, nothing seemed to surprise anybody when it came to the Karp-Ciampi clan anymore. "The Coincidence Fairy needs to take a Valium when it comes to this family," Butch had told Marlene. "Even fiction doesn't get this weird."
And, of course, Fulton knew about the Karchovskis because he was responsible for Karp's security. His response was typical, a shrug and a comment: I'm like you. As long as they're not breaking any laws in my neck of the woods, I don't have time to worry about it. Besides, you can't pick your relatives, and you know the rest.