He lay in bed as long as he could stand it, then had a scalding long bath and got ready for playing softball with the DA office team, the season’s first game. He spent two minutes dressing in old blue sweats and high-top sneakers, after spending twenty minutes wrapping his knee in layers of wide tape and Ace bandage.
It felt fairly robust as he began walking up Sixth Avenue to Central Park, with his big glove tucked under his arm and his old-fashioned all-wool Yankee cap on his head. Playing first base he didn’t have to run much, but he ran-so it seemed to him-like a camel on eggs. And he still couldn’t risk any dramatic slides on the base paths. But maybe it was getting better.
For breakfast he stopped at the sidewalk window of a Greek joint on 14th Street for a sausage sandwich with peppers and onions and a Diet Pepsi, which he consumed while walking north. The day had clouded over and turned chilly. Spring, scheduled to appear the previous week, had reneged. At 43rd Street he bought a couple of egg rolls and an orange soda from an Oriental lady with a push wagon. He ate one and drank the soda while walking, and kept the other one in the front pouch of his sweatshirt, as a temporary hand warmer and for later snacking.
It was not a bad game. The DA’s team was called the Bullets, after the slang for a year in the pen, and because the DA liked to hire athletes, it was a good one. Today they were playing a tough team from the New York City Department of Sanitation, officially named the White Knights, but known to the city leagues as the New York Stinkees.
Pitching for the Bullets was Big Joe Lerner, the Homicide Bureau’s star trial lawyer. Lerner was taller even than Karp, and about as ferocious a competitor as one can be in slow-pitch softball. Guma at short, naturally; Karp at first; Hrcany caught and played the outfield. As they flipped the ball around the diamond before the game, Karp felt centered again. Sometimes it seemed to him that his real life was just this: leaping around on a patch of ground with ruled lines, flinging a ball around with a bunch of other guys. Everything else-marriage, family, work-was to a greater or lesser degree merely a pain in the ass.
Garrahy was there. He came to the ball field in the bottom of the first, during the Bullet’s at-bat and watched the game intently, like a major-league owner in his private box. Karp thought he looked ill and shrunken, and mentioned this to Guma on the bench. “Him?” Guma retorted. “He’s made of rock. He’ll last forever. I guarantee you, he’ll bury us all.”
“No, really, Goom. You ever think of what’ll happen to the DA’s office when he goes?”
“I don’t know, but it’ll be a helluva wake. We’ll all be drunk for a month.” A bat cracked and Guma leaped to his feet. “Way ta sock it, Jamesy baby! No pitcher, no pitcher!”
Karp glanced again at Garrahy. The old man was sitting in the small set of bleachers behind the players’ bench, hunched in a camel hair coat, his thin white hair covered by a grayish green loden hat. His nose was red and he looked cold, but his eyes were clear.
Karp did not see much of Garrahy in the normal course of work and it was always a thrill to be in his presence. Karp was an unashamed hero-worshipper. As a schoolboy athlete, he had once sat next to Mickey Mantle at an awards dinner and been speechless with awe. (He eats! He drinks! He wipes his mouth with a napkin.) Karp stole the napkin afterward; he thought he still had it somewhere. The iconoclasm of the sixties-“don’t follow leaders, avoid parking meters”-had barely touched him. In his soul Karp loved being coached. Besides his obvious physical skills, that was the one thing that made him an extraordinary player, his willingness to make himself an instrument of a larger, grander design. As they say in basketball circles-and this is a high compliment-he moved well without the ball.
Garrahy caught him staring, smiled, and gave a nod and a little wave of his gloved hand. Karp smiled back. The Bullets had a little rally going-two men on-and when Karp came up to bat, his head was full of the kind of romantic hero drivel usually found only in the kind of sports books written for ten-year-old boys. Karp was not that great a hitter, having too much of a strike zone and the wrong kind of body and reflexes, but this time he whacked the second pitch into deep center field and made it to third standing up. He scored on the next play and-as it turned out-that was the winning margin, as the Bullets took it, six to four. Garrahy shook his hand. Lerner shook his hand and said if he needed any thing when he got to homicide to be sure and look him up. After the game the whole team went as usual to McGonnigle’s on Third Avenue. They drank beer and ate corned beef and told lies and watched the Knicks win another on their march to the playoffs. A perfect day.
Sunday he went to the NYU law library and read, and didn’t think of Susan until he was in bed that night. He called, but her mother answered and he hung up without saying anything. He was hyped for the new job and didn’t want anything bringing him down.
Which was why another day in Yergin’s courtroom amid the petty miseries of New York was too much to bear. At the lunch recess he called John Conlin, and the smiling secretary told him he was out. He called Lerner, a triple ought to be good for a little information, but Lerner was out too. Or maybe they were just saying that. Not ordinarily paranoid, Karp started to get antsy. Friday the fix was on; maybe it was off again. Standing in Calcutta at lunch time he had a horrifying vision of permanent entrapment. What did he know, after all, of the deals that went down at the upper reaches of the DA’s office. Maybe he should call Garrahy? He shook himself. Don’t be an asshole, Karp. This joint is Kafkaesque, right on, but not actually Kafka itself. He went to find V.T., who usually had the inside poop, or if not, some words of what passed for wisdom on Centre Street.
A man touched his arm. “Mister Karp? I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Mervyn Stein. Representing DeLillo, Brant, Billings, and Coker? Could we talk for a moment?”
Karp had his hand taken and shaken vigorously by a large man in a three-piece banker’s gray pinstripe. The man had frizzy pepper-and-salt hair, thick tortoiseshell glasses, and the ingratiating hand-rubbing manner of a maitre d’ or an undertaker.
“What about? What’s Delilla et cetera, a law firm?”
Stein gave a little giggle. “DeLillo, Brant, Billings, and Coker are the four correctional officers at the Drug Center against whom you filed assault charges. You recall, do you not?”
“Yeah, I recall. You their lawyer?”
“I am indeed. I am also counsel to and cochairman of the Narcotic Addiction Control Center. Now, Mister Karp, or Butch, isn’t it? I thought we might have a little talk, if it’s convenient, to see if we can clear this matter up.”
“Clear what up, Mister Stein?”
“This case, Butch. You know this kind of case isn’t the kind of case that gets taken to trial, so why kid around?” He smiled broadly, except around the eyes.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Look, Butch, I used to work here, yeah, seven years. I could tell you stories you wouldn’t believe. So take my advice: save yourself a lot of trouble, because as sure as we’re standing here, the Supreme Court will never hear this case.”
“Well, you could be right, Mister Stein-”
“Please, Mervyn …”
“-Mister Stein, in that there won’t be a trial if your clients plead guilty to the top count of the indictment. If not, the case will be tried. I’m taking it to the Grand Jury myself.”
“You must be joking. Young man, you’re stirring up a hornet’s nest here, and I expect you will get more than your share of stings. All I ask is that you reconsider this precipitous action. Look at this case! Four decent young men, working under considerable pressure at a job that is vital to this city. They are brutally assaulted by a gang of depraved drug fiends, and then, before their wounds are even healed, you charge them with assault. How do you expect the city to run narcotics centers …”