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  "I didn't punch him out," said Karp. "He got in my face in a hallway and I pushed past him and he tripped on some TV cables. Then a guy fell on him with a TV camera and his face got bruised. There was some tape with me scowling and this little guy with blood streaming down his face. The press made a big thing of it. And it was the case I was working on at the time, that had a lot to do with it."

  "Okay, now it's coming back. That was that wacko who was after black grannies. You lost that one, if memory serves. Another racial thing?"

  "Not really. It was a good jury. I just got beat. The guy, Rohbling, was a weedy white boy with a lot of money. His family hired the best lawyer in the country and the rest is history. He's in Matteawan now, until the shrinks decide he's not a danger to the community. It happens. The African-American sector was not pleased."

  "Was that when they started calling you KKKarp?"

  "Around then. They thought I was being insufficiently aggressive. They thought it was funny that a prosecutor who'd won over a hundred straight homicide convictions, mainly, if you want to know, where the defendants were what they call people of color, just couldn't hack it when it came to nailing a rich white guy."

  "Did they have a point?" she asked slyly.

  Before

  1

  The interior of New York State gets surprisingly hot in the summer, and this was a hotter than usual week, even for the last of August. The guards at the Auburn Prison, located nearly in the center of this region, were more than usually interested in the weather reports, for hot weather does not play well in the cell blocks. Auburn is a maximum security joint, like Attica, its more famous sister. Most people have forgotten that in 1929, in a similar hot spell, the prisoners had rebelled and burned the whole place down. But the guards remember. Prison cell blocks are not air-conditioned. Air-conditioning would be coddling convicts and the legislature will not countenance it, although if it were up to the guards, they would chill the whole place down so low that frost would form on the bars.

  The fight started on a Monday, which is the worst day in prison, because Sunday is visiting day. Those who have received visits from loved ones are pissed off because they can't actually make love with their wives or hug their kids, and the ones who haven't are pissed off because they haven't, and the air is stale and stinking that monkey-house stink, and in the shadeless yard the sun boils the brain. Twelve hundred men, not one of whom has particularly good impulse control, all with little to lose, most with grudges against the world, mingle on that barren plain in the wilting heat. There are gangs. Half the prisoners are black, a third Hispanic, the rest white, and the gangs track this assortment. Someone makes a remark, and if the ethnicity of the remarker and the remarkee differ, that's all it takes. The guard in his tower sees a rapid movement, a coalescence of men's bodies around a center, like dirty gray water sucking down a drain. He goes for his radio and picks up his shotgun. The guards rush out with clubs swinging. They disappear into the mass.

  Felix Tighe woke up in the prison infirmary with an aching head and a dull pain in his side. It took him a little while to recall where he was and what had put him there. It was hot, he remembered that, and he was on the bench in the yard, doing bench presses, 380-pound presses, with some Aryan Nation cons around him, also working out, ignoring the niggers at their weights, as usual, and then one of the niggers had said something about the sweet little white-boy ass of Kopman's punk, Lulu, which was bad enough, but then- it was Marvelle, the Crimp, he now recalled- Marvelle had actually grabbed Lulu and started dry-humping him right there in front of everyone, and all the white guys had dropped their weights and gone after him.

  Felix had picked up a weight bar and gone in, too. After that it got blurry. He remembers cracking some heads with it, before the screws came in and started whacking everyone they could reach. He touched his side, moved his left arm. It stung, but didn't feel that bad. Someone had shanked him. He'd have to find out who and get even. Felix always got even and everyone knew it. It was one of his two main things, which was why no one had fucked with him after the first week, and now it was going on nineteen years here in Auburn. He was nearly forty-two.

  A face swam into his field of view. A thin, pale brown face, the color of a sandy dirt road, shaven-headed, beak-nosed over a cropped gray beard, with prison glasses glinting in front of wide-set intelligent eyes. The Arab.

  "How do you feel?" the Arab asked. He had a soft voice, only slightly accented. The Arab had been the chief trustee attendant at the infirmary for at least ten years. The Arab wasn't in a gang, not even in the Muslim Brothers, although he was an actual Muslim. Everyone left him alone for two reasons: one, you never could tell when you might have to go into the infirmary and hence find yourself in his power, and two, he provided dope for the whole prison. The doc was a junkie, and nodded off half the time. The Arab ran the place. Actually, three reasons. There was something about him, a look. The toughest cons, the yard bulls, could read it, and they treated the Arab with respect, and so, accordingly, did everyone else, including Felix. The prison records gave his name as Feisal Abdel Ridwan, which was somewhat true, and the crimes for which he had been sentenced as felony murder and armed robbery were also somewhat true. His actual identity and his actual crimes were kept secret, even from the prison authorities. This was part of the deal his lawyers had negotiated, to keep him safe, and to keep the information in his head on tap, should any of a number of U.S. government agencies wish to tap it.

  "Okay, I guess," said Felix. "My head hurts. What the fuck happened?"

  "You were knocked out, a concussion. Also you were stabbed, but the blade twisted against a rib and did not penetrate far. Would you like some pills for the pain?"

  "Fuck yes."

  The pills were produced, two tabs of Percocet. After swallowing them, Felix asked, "So I'm okay? No permanent damage, huh?"

  "Not to your body. Your legal situation is not so good, I am afraid."

  "My legal…?"

  "Yes. The guard Daniels is dead. They are saying you killed him."

  "The fuck they are! That's bullshit! Who's saying I killed him, the niggers?"

  "No, you were seen by several guards, apparently. Daniels was killed by a blow to the side of the neck, a blow from a naked hand. There are not many men who could deliver such a blow."

  Without thinking, Felix looked at his hands. A heavy rind of callous ran along the edge of each. The knuckles barely rose above the thick hornlike skin that encased them. Felix had been a karate black belt before coming to the prison, and he had been scrupulous about practicing during his time here. That was his other main thing- his body and its effectiveness as a weapon. Had he killed Daniels? He wasn't sure, although some details were returning now, as the drug relaxed him. The iron bar had been torn from his hands, and then he'd felt the jab of the knife. There were angry black faces all around him and he'd kicked and struck out at them. Someone had tried to grab him from behind and he'd whirled and chopped at a neck. Then nothing. That could have been Daniels. By then everything was a blur, the red haze of rage, sweat in his eyes. They couldn't hold him responsible for that. It was Marvelle who'd started the whole thing anyway.

  "It was Marvelle started the fucking thing. Whyn't they fuck with him for a change?"

  The Arab ignored this. "I think you are in a lot of trouble, Felix, you know? A great deal of big trouble. Killing a guard is murder in the first degree. They have the death penalty now. I think they intend to pin you for this murder."

  "Let them fucking try," said Felix, "I didn't kill anyone. Not on purpose anyway."

  Later that same day, however, two state police detectives arrived at Felix's bedside, to interview him and to confront him with the evidence against him. The whole thing had been captured by the video cameras perpetually trained on the yard, they said, and it was perfectly clear who had killed the guard. They desired a confession, which Felix did not give them. It was an essential part of his psychology never to confess to anything, not
for strategic reasons, but because, in his own mind, he was incapable of wrongdoing of any kind. That any act of his was justified, correct, blameless was, in a sense, the core of his being. Felix Tighe was a psychopath.

  He asked for a lawyer then, which meant that they had to stop questioning him. It did not mean, however, that they had to stop talking to him, and one of the state detectives did that, describing in some detail what would happen to him after he was convicted of first-degree murder. New York had never executed anyone under the new statute, but it was the detective's belief that the state was merely waiting for someone just like Felix: white, a convicted murderer of a woman and a child, who had killed an officer in the line of duty. "A poster boy for capital punishment" was the phrase he used more than once.

  The next day, a lawyer appeared, a court-appointed local, bored and irritably earning his twenty-five dollars per, who explained to Felix the legal doctrine of intent. It did not matter, he said, that Felix had not arisen that Monday morning planning to murder Officer Phillip K. Daniels. He had directed a blow against the victim's neck, knowing his own power and skill, knowing that it was potentially deadly. It was precisely the same as shooting a cop in the commission of a crime. "I didn't mean it" was not exculpatory under law. The lawyer advised Felix to take the plea, and he'd try to work out something that did not involve lethal injection. Felix refused. The lawyer explained what a refusal meant: that he would be tried locally, in Cuyahoga County, before a jury composed of people having zero sympathy for New York City bad boys, who all knew someone who knew someone who worked as a corrections officer at the prison. Felix then cursed out the lawyer so violently that the man got up and left.

  After that Felix napped, untroubled by the future. Like many of his fellow psychopaths, he had the imagination and foresight of a newt. It was the Arab who brought him to his senses. He was sympathetic, to start with, and Felix was a great consumer of sympathy. In the long quiet night hours of the infirmary, the Arab sat in a chair by Felix's bedside, listening to the sad story of how Felix had been shafted, screwed, betrayed by everyone with whom he had come in contact (especially women), how all his plans had been undone by bad luck, how his reasonable efforts to seek justice had been misconstrued, how he had been so many times unjustly accused of crimes, as now. To all this, the Arab listened calmly, silent except for little clucks of concern. This made Felix happy, not because he thought he was becoming friends with the man- friendship was a category void of meaning for Felix- but because the jerk seemed to be swallowing the story whole, which meant he could be manipulated to Felix's advantage. Which he already was: he was a willing source of drugs, and a faker of medical reports, so that Felix got to hang out in bed all day instead of having to hump laundry baskets or slave away in the roasting stamping shop, making license plates. The infirmary was air-conditioned.

  On one of these pleasant nights, Felix was expatiating on one of his favorite themes, how the niggers got all the breaks, because the hebes wanted it that way, so that real Americans got kept down. Felix did not actually believe all this. Sympathizing with the downtrodden, even the class of which he was a member, was quite alien to him. All of it was in service of manipulation- he figured the Arab would have a thing about Jews. And indeed, the man spoke for the first time after Felix said this, but not about the Jews.

  "They are going to execute you, you know," said the Arab. "It is inevitable. And that will be the end of your sad story. A pity, really. You are clearly a man capable of larger things."

  Felix stared at him.

  The Arab's eyes were sad as he resumed. "Yes, you see I have many contacts in the administration. And outside. It is amazing how much information one can buy if one has an endless supply of painkillers and soporifics and diet pills. Everyone is looking for the drugs smuggled into the prison; it never occurs to anyone that drugs can be smuggled out, as well. In any case, my informants tell me that the indictment is already prepared. It will be for first-degree murder, and the state has absolutely no incentive to ask for anything other than death."

  The word brought Felix back from a reverie in which he blackmailed the Arab into letting him into the drug supply business in the prison, running it, in fact. He'd be the fucking king of the yard if he could get his hands on…

  "Death?"

  "Yes. Inevitable. The trial will be a slam dunk. That is correct, yes, a slam dunk? As I say, a pity. Unless you were able to escape."

  "What're you talking about?"

  "It could be arranged. I could arrange it, in fact."

  "How?"

  An elegant shrug. "You could go into a decline. Dr. McMartin is not punctilious and we have an unusual number of patients because of the riot. Your wound becomes infected. I start an IV, for antibiotics. Unfortunately it is of no use. You slip into a coma. You die. You have no close relations, do you?"

  "No," said Felix, and had the strange, if fleeting, notion that the Arab already knew this fact. "What do you mean, I die?"

  "Just that. I will give you a substantial dose of morphine, enough to make it appear to a casual observer that you are deceased. In the early morning hours, I will move you into the morgue cooler. There are drugs I have that can slow your breathing so that it is almost imperceptible, and also your heart rate. Dr. McMartin is not a skillful physician. He will examine you briefly, with a stethoscope that I will have altered so that it would not detect a jet engine. Your skin will be quite cold. The picture will be a sick man who has passed away in the night. He will sign the death certificate with no qualms. Then I will autopsy you."

  "You'll what?"

  "It is required. I do it all the time, although it is not authorized for me to do it alone. However, the doctor does not care for autopsies and he is glad of my skill."

  "You're not a doctor, how the fuck can you fake-"

  "I am, in fact, a physician, in all but the details of licensure. I had four years of medical training in Cairo before I was arrested by the regime. I will make shallow cuts in a Y shape on your chest and sew them up again, as if I have removed your organs. I have put aside organs from a real autopsy, which I will present as yours, if anyone asks. Which I doubt that they will. Everyone, in fact, will be delighted that you are dead. Then your body will be shipped to your cousin in New York City."

  "I don't have a cousin in New York."

  "Oh, but you do," said the Arab. "It is all arranged."

  Felix felt irritation grow in him, for though he certainly wanted to get out of prison, he wanted even more the feeling of being in control of things. Nor did he enjoy being in the debt of some sand nigger.

  "What do you mean, it's all arranged. How the hell did you know I'd be in here?"

  Another little shrug. A smile. "If not you, then someone like you. You see what I look like. On the outside I have… colleagues, who look the same. People who look like us are now restricted in their movements because of the recent events in New York. I have need of someone who does not look like that, an American, for certain tasks."

  Now Felix smiled. "You're a fucking terrorist?"

  "Why use such a meaningless word?" said the Arab, not smiling at all now. "The rulers of the world, the rich, the powerful, the Jews and their agents, the same people who have spoiled your own life, as you have told me, they will always call terrorists those who refuse to be crushed. Like us. Also, I thought you would be a good choice because we have several interests in common, you and I."

  "Yeah? Such as?"

  "A desire to exact revenge on people who have hurt us. To achieve what we are meant to achieve despite the conspiracies against us. As I said, I have friends in administration. I know about you, your records."

  "Oh, yeah?" Felix didn't like this, but he kept his face friendly.

  "Yes. Do you know that we were both convicted by the same man? And not just the man. He has a wife who was involved in both of our cases. Isn't that strange? He is a Jew, of course."

  "Karp?"

  "Yes, Karp. Wouldn't you like to pay him ba
ck?"

  "Yeah, him and a lot of other people," said Felix. "So what's the plan? You got people on the outside?"

  "Yes, many. People who have been here for many years, very secure. But Arabs, unfortunately. They may be watched, do you see? Because of these events of last year. You, on the other hand, will not be looked for. You will be the invisible man."

  "The hell I will! Nobody they're looking for more than an escaped con…" Felix stopped short, as the thought hit him, and his face broke into one of its rare genuine smiles. "No, they won't. I'll be dead."

  The two men shared a laugh. "Yes," said the Arab, "you will be dead, a ghost. Like a ghost you will strike fear. Karp is a senior prosecutor, an important man, but they will not be able to protect him. Or his family. The wife, of course, and they have three children. One by one they will fall, and him last. I want him to know fear and despair and helplessness."

  "So, that's your end of this deal? You want me to whack Karp and his bitch and the three kids. That's it?"

  "Yes. Precisely."

  "What's the catch?"

  Felix had to explain the joke. After that, the two men laughed louder than before.

  The plan proceeded smoothly. No one in the prison system likes trials involving the murder of a corrections officer. Such an event speaks to incompetence, to carelessness in handling violence. It also clouds the future recruitment of guards. Thus, no one in the hierarchy of the prison was greatly put out by the news that Felix Tighe was ailing. As he approached death's door, no one insisted on heroic measures to save him. Dr. McMartin stumbled over to the bedside a few times and observed what seemed to be a dying man. When Feisal announced the death, the doctor inspected the corpse and signed the papers without demur.

  The Arab was well pleased. He had worked with men like Felix many times, and considered that he was a good example of his type. Brutal, with a grudge, intelligent enough to carry out a plan, not intelligent enough to see that once his mission had been accomplished he could under no circumstances be allowed to live, since his very existence compromised the Arab's own position at the prison. On autopsy day, then, he looked down at the faux corpse with something approaching affection.