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  Karp read through the file and then thumbed back through it again, thinking he had missed something, but he hadn't. The rape bureau was apparently going to try this fellow on the completely unsupported word of the alleged victim. According to the police report, the alleged assault had taken place on an examination table shielded from a busy ward only by curtains. Was this at all likely? And the act itself, a colonoscopy in progress, diarrhea, the smell… Karp was not at this stage capable of surprise at any of the acts that people chose to relieve the sexual itch, but this still seemed extreme.

  There was a pattern of abuse alleged in support of the state's case. The rape bureau had put out an 800 number: call if Dr. Hirsch diddled you or worse. He paged through the testimony. Four women had responded. Two thought something had happened during deep anesthesia but weren't sure what. One felt she'd had her breast touched inappropriately. The last claimed that Dr. Hirsch had seduced her in his office and they'd had a wild affair for six months and that he'd promised he'd leave his wife for her and then didn't. No tonguing of vaginas during colonoscopies. A dozen years back, Karp's wife had been the founding chief of the sex crimes bureau and so Karp knew more than most about the particular difficulties of prosecuting such cases. If this guy had done it, why hadn't he copped to a lesser? Why did he want a trial? Why, come to that, did sex crimes want a trial? Little bells were going off. Karp put the file to the side and reached for his phone.

  Laura Rachman, chief of the sex crimes bureau, was a big blonde who dressed in colors more flamboyant than were usually seen in the courthouse, the colors of national flags. Today she was wearing a crisp linen suit of an eye-challenging green with a white blouse. Her hair was arranged in sprayed waves around her wide oval face, which she had carefully painted in matte fleshtones to resemble human skin. Karp did not like Rachman particularly and was unfailingly polite to her as a result.

  "You wanted to see me?" she asked. Wonted. Rachman's vowels were artificial, like her face. She had escaped Queens and did not wish to be mistaken for an outer-borough person.

  "Yeah, have a seat." He gestured, she sat, crossing her legs. The short skirt of the suit rode up over her nylon-covered thighs. Karp focused his eyes on her face. "It's this Hirsch thing. What's the story there?"

  "What do you mean, story? It's pretty clear. He's a serial sexual abuser and we're going to hit him with the max. You have a problem with that?"

  "Yeah, I do. What did you offer him?"

  "Sex abuse two and six months. He spit in our eye. He says he didn't do it."

  "Uh-huh. Well the thing is, I don't see that you've got a trial here. That's my problem."

  Little patches of natural color appeared under the blusher. "You're questioning my judgment?"

  "It's my job, Laura. I question everyone's judgment. Basically, the whole thing rests on Coleman's testimony, with no corroborating evidence or witnesses…"

  "It's a sex case. There's never corroborating testimony in sex cases."

  "Not often, right, but here you've got a doc doing an unlikely act in a place where it'd be easy for him to get caught. You've got nothing solid that he's not a Boy Scout…"

  "That's not true. We've got three other women."

  Karp waved a hand. "You've got two women who think something happened when they were under anesthesia. The third woman says she had an affair with him, he seduced her, but I don't see any background on her. Is she cool?"

  "She's fine. She'll stand up."

  "Great, but I want to see it in writing that someone checked that she's not a fruitcake who also had passionate affairs with the mayor, the pope, and Warren Beatty. Also, your defendant, the guy's done nine thousand colonoscopies, according to his statement. And he's never indulged his taste for fecally flavored cunnilingus until now? Until your victim came along? What's she like, the victim?"

  "Wait a minute, we're blaming the victim now? I'm sorry, when did the middle ages come back?"

  Karp suppressed a sigh. "Laura, the defense is going to attack the character of the complainant because that's your entire case. The woman has to be squeaky, and I don't see from this file that you've made a significant effort to determine that. Does she have a grudge against the doc? Is she trying to muscle him on something? Is she a flake? Does she have any pattern of complaints against docs for this kind of thing?"

  But Rachman was not listening. "I can't believe I'm hearing this crap. I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is the D is a nice Jewish doctor and the victim is black."

  "No. The problem is that the case is not prepped for trial, and I'm not going to sign off on a trial slot until it is."

  She stood up and yanked her skirt down. "Fine. I'm going to Jack on this."

  "Go ahead," said Karp, "and I'll tell him the same thing I told you: The case isn't ready."

  After she was gone, Karp spent a few moments predicting what would happen if Rachman took the wretched thing to Keegan. She would get on his calendar, Keegan would call him and ask what it was about, Karp would tell him, and Keegan would yell at Karp for not handling it at his level, meaning that Keegan wanted to be protected from having to make decisions on cases that would rile either the blacks or the liberal bleeders, the two squishiest elements of his political support. And Karp would therefore need something else, something that wasn't in the case file, to give the DA.

  "Murrow!"

  In a moment the man appeared. Karp understood that Murrow was out and about much of the day on his master's business, but it seemed that whenever Karp called him, he materialized, like a djinn. Karp thrust the Hirsch file at him.

  "Look this over," said Karp and explained his problems with the case. "There could be something fishy about the vic here. Ask around."

  ***

  Felix opened his eyes upon blackness. He was stiff and crampy and didn't know where he was. It took a few seconds for him to recall even who he was. He tried to sit up and bumped his head. His exploring hands told him he was in a box, his ears said he was in a vehicle of some kind. He pushed upward against a slightly yielding stiffness slick against his palms. Waxed cardboard?

  Memories arose now, like the ghost images on photo paper rising to sharpness in the developer bath. The Arab. Injections. He touched his chest and felt the hardness of staples in the Y-shaped pattern made by an autopsy. But his own organs were intact. He was alive; it had worked; he was out.

  The vehicle slowed, turned, and came to a halt. Felix felt himself lifted, carried, heard the grunts of men and short bursts of a foreign tongue. There were clicking sounds. The cover of the cardboard coffin rose up. He blinked in the sudden light. A face came into view, tan, with a short beard and thick hornrims over dark eyes.

  "Are you all right?" The voice was soft and slightly accented.

  Felix sat up, wincing a little at the pull of the staples. There were two other men in the room. The smell of gas, gray concrete walls- it was some kind of garage. The other two men were darker than the first one, with close-cropped heads and hard features, one meaty, the other a whippet. The muscle, Felix thought, and wondered briefly if he could take them. One at a time, maybe. The two hard men grabbed his arms and helped him out of the coffin. The third man brought a striped cotton robe for him to wear. Felix felt rubbery and weak. "I got to piss," he said. His voice sounded strange to him, shaky and hollow. They had to almost carry him to the bathroom.

  It took Felix three days to get back on his feet. It was the drugs, Rashid said. Rashid was the one with the beard and the glasses. The others were Carlos (big) and Felнpe (thin). Felix didn't figure that an Arab would hang with a pair of greasers, and they were definitely that, because he heard them jabbering away in Spanish. Felix knew enough jailhouse Spanish to deliver an insult or make a demand, and so he knew they were for real. They were out of the house all day working, Rashid said. Rashid had a little home business, something to do with computers. He had a couple of machines in a room on the top floor of the house, at which he sat and tapped when he wasn't hanging arou
nd Felix, making sure he was all right and bringing him food and smokes. Felix figured him for some kind of faggot butler, not a real player.

  On the fourth day, Rashid let him out in the yard, a patch of ragged grass surrounded by a chain-link fence and equipped with a picnic table and a couple of aluminum lawn chairs. The house was a three-story structure sheathed in gray asphalt shingles, one of a row of identical houses, with alleys leading back to small yards and detached garages. He could see the backs of another, similar row through the trees and foliage of the adjacent backyard. It was, he learned, in Astoria, Queens.

  Felix sat in one of the chairs, and basked in the afternoon sun. They had supplied him with jeans and T-shirts, in the right sizes, and socks and sneakers, as well. Rashid sat on the edge of the other chair and handed him a beer.

  "I thought Arabs didn't drink," Felix said. "I thought that was a big Muslim no-no."

  "It is as you say. But here we are obliged to fit in and act like Americans. We drink, we eat swine, we look at women's bodies."

  "I'd like to look at some of that. What about throwing a little party?"

  "Perhaps later. When our work is done."

  "What kind of work is that?"

  "We are going to blow some things up. Our friend believes you would not object to this kind of work."

  "Our friend? You mean the Arab?"

  "Ibn-Salemeh, yes. Was he correct in this?"

  "Hey, if there's any money in it I don't have a problem. What're you going to blow?"

  "We'll tell you when the time comes. We have a number of targets. Some will be of interest to you personally."

  "Meaning Karp."

  "Yes, him," said Rashid. "But first his family, one by one."

  "Uh-huh," said Felix. "And what's the story with you? You're what, the butler?"

  "I have a number of functions."

  "Yeah, bring the beer, cook the food, make the beds. What about the money. You got it here, right?"

  "It is where I can get it, Felix. And you cannot." Rashid stared into his eyes. "So you must put out of your mind any thought that you can, ah, get what you want and disappear. Rip us off, as you say. We require an American to travel around and go places where someone who looks like me would draw suspicion. That's why you are here and not rotting in that prison. There will be eyes on you all the time, Felix. And I would keep in mind if I were you the fact that you are already a dead man. And that you can be easily replaced. There is no shortage of Americans. Am I making myself perfectly clear now?"

  Felix shrugged. "Whatever," he said, and pulled his eyes away. Not a butler, Rashid, that was a mistake, but the fucker had no call to talk to him like one of his niggers. Felix added him to the long list of people he would get if the opportunity presented.

  3

  "What do you do all day up in that room, Rashid?" Felix asked, smiling. They were at lunch at the picnic table in the backyard of the Queens house.

  "I work with the computers," said the Arab. "I have a computer business."

  "Yeah? What kind of business?" Felix had the con man's art of feigning interest, but in this case he was genuinely interested. He had been in the joint while the computer revolution unfolded and was anxious to catch up. Felix had always been a reader of magazines, and the constant association in them of the words "computer" and "fraud" had piqued his interest.

  Rashid, for his part, was not reluctant to expound. His weakness, which Felix had not been long in ferreting out, was that he felt unappreciated. The glory of derring-do, of planting bombs and carrying out midnight strikes was not for him. Rather, he was an arranger, a mover of paper and electrons and funds, vital but never to be a star. Even the Spaniards, who could barely read or speak English, had the gall to condescend to him. He thought Felix respected him. He thought Felix had been properly cowed.

  He was therefore inclined to be expansive. "It is a very simple business. Now, you understand e-mail, yes? Very well, then, you see it is possible to send out an extremely large number of e-mail messages for no cost at all. Ten, twenty million messages, all around the world. So, even if only a few respond, there you have a business."

  "What, you're selling something?"

  "Of course. A number of things. Stock tips. Pills for various energy-type things. Special interest videos."

  "What d'you mean, like fuck videos?"

  "I don't see them, I just take the orders," said Rashid delicately. "Mainly, it is books, a program. You pay up front, and you get material showing how to run an on-line business, so you recruit others in the same way. Everyone pays a little up the line. It grows automatically."

  "Yeah? You doing okay, then?"

  "Well enough for my modest needs."

  "Man, I'd like to get into that. I used to sell credit furniture. What a pain in the butt that was! Going into a million shitty apartments, putting on the fucking charm for a bunch of old bitches. No more, man. Was it hard to learn?"

  "It requires concentration, of course." Rashid looked carefully at Felix. "I could teach you, if you like to."

  Bingo, thought Felix. "Yeah," he said, "that would be cool."

  Concentration was not Felix's strongest point; when difficulties presented themselves in his life, his instinct was to smash something or someone, or blame someone, or both. But he also had the ability to suspend this instinct in a good cause. He had learned karate in this way, and a variety of swindling tricks, and in this way also he learned how to operate a computer, and was soon cruising the Web and sending out millions of e-mail messages, and ordering useless or obscene junk for the remarkable numbers of suckers who responded. He was delighted with the sorts of things you could find on the Web nowadays, and amazed that they were allowed. You could spend all day viewing videos of very young girls being raped, for example, if you had stolen credit card numbers, and Felix spent many happy hours thus enriching his fantasy life. Even more valuable, however, was the ability of the Web to locate people. If you had a social security number, it was no trick to find an address. Felix had one and found the address he needed, which was, remarkably, only a few miles away, in Forest Hills, Queens.

  Rashid was a pedantic and exhausting teacher, always offering more than his student wanted to know, or really needed to know about the mysteries of Windows and the Internet. He also ran a thick sidebar of editorial comment on the decadence of the West and the contempt he had for the pornography available on the Web. His own tastes were not quite as exotic as Felix's in this, running more to fat, older women in degrading poses and lovely young men in copulation. Of course, they both spied on each other's movements across the electronic prairie. Rashid had password-protected files and Felix devoted a considerable amount of time trying to crack these, but with no success.

  Three weeks after Felix's "death" in prison, Rashid called him over to a monitor and showed him a color photograph of a young girl. She was talking, it seemed, to a man dressed in layered rags with a strange hat on his head. The photo had been taken from the side, and showed the girl's generous curved nose and strong jaw. She was very thin, with prominent cheekbones.

  A dog, was Felix's thought. "Who's that?" he asked.

  "Karp's daughter. Her name is Lucy. She volunteers in a soup kitchen. It's where I took this picture. At great risk to myself," he added importantly. "My face is known to the authorities. Here is another one, with the zoom lens, from the street." She was wearing shorts in this one, baggy ones, and a loose black T-shirt. No body, decent legs. Put a bag over the face and she'd be halfway fuckable, Felix thought. He said, "You want me to whack her?"

  "Eventually, but first we need that she gives us some information. There is a man we need to settle with first, a Vietnamese, a friend of hers. He's disappeared. We believe she knows where he can be found. First you find out that, and then you can dispose of the girl."

  "Why do you want the guy?"

  "That's not your concern," said Rashid quickly, and then, unable to resist demonstrating the confidence placed in him by those higher in the
organization, he added, "He was instrumental in the capture of ibn-Salemeh. A traitor to the oppressed peoples."

  "Well, we can't let him get away with that shit," said Felix. "So, what's the plan- I grab the girl and we make her talk?" Felix looked at the photo of the screen again and imagined this procedure. He felt a pleasant tightening in his belly.

  "No, of course not! Can you imagine the uproar if we kidnapped the child of a senior prosecutor? Not only would our major operations be entirely compromised, but the Vietnamese would surely hear of it and go deeper into hiding."

  "What major operation?"

  Rashid shook his head. "Need-to-know, need-to-know basis entirely. It does not concern you at this point in time. No, what you must do is to befriend the girl, get close to her, tell her a story, perhaps she will tell you a story, as well. Patience is the thing here. She is a kind girl, this work with the charities. She should not be hard to approach. And you are charming, I understand. It should not be difficult for a man like you."

  It was not. Felix held it as a matter of deep faith that all cunts were essentially stupid and that they would believe any line of bullshit you threw at them. Also that they secretly wanted to be hurt. It had worked that way throughout his life. The few exceptions required special treatment, after which the dogma re-established itself, since the exceptions were no longer among us.

  The next morning, Felix had his photograph taken with a digital camera, and watched, fascinated as Rashid reduced it in size and printed it out, and then delaminated a New York State driver's license, substituted Felix's picture, and relaminated it. Felix was now Larry Larsen. He was somewhat disappointed to learn that no car went along with the license. Rashid explained that the less the cell interacted with the authorities the better. No credit cards, no cars to get into accidents with or collect tickets. Felix would take the subway. He was given a hundred dollars for what Rashid called operating expenses.