Act of Revenge Page 6

  She sighed, after a few dithering moments, then cursed, and turned her attention to the corner of 23rd Street and Tenth Avenue. The fire engines had left, and the crime scene unit cops were loading equipment into their van. The yellow tape that surrounded the brick storefront was by now bedraggled, drooping to the ground in places, and a couple of detectives were standing amid broken glass and blackened trash, talking to a uniformed patrolman. Above the entrance a charred sign—Chelsea Women’s Clinic—was still legible. Abortions were among the services provided there, and someone objecting to the practice had, a few hours before, blasted out the storefront window with a shotgun and tossed in a gasoline bomb. The staff had been able to smother the flames with extinguishers, however, and no one, oddly enough, had been badly injured. The director of the clinic had thereafter been informed by the police that, despite the attack, the NYPD could not post a permanent guard at the site henceforward until forever. So she had called Marlene.

  She crossed the street and walked up to the group of cops. She knew one of the detectives from the time she had spent some years ago as head of the Rape Bureau at the New York D.A.

  “How’s it going, Shanahan?”

  “Marlene Ciampi! See, guys, I knew this was gonna get more interesting. I hope you’re not here for an abortion, Marlene, ’cause I think they’re closed for the day. However, if you’re interested in a simple gynecological examination, I think Patrolman Vargas and I can accommodate you.”

  The uniformed kid snorted in surprise and looked nervously away. The other detective chuckled and said, “Vargas, watch this—now she’s gonna sue us for sexual harassment. This is good training, Vargas. Get your notebook out.”

  “Also, Patrolman Vargas,” Marlene said, “you’ll want to note that aging detectives whose sexual function has been all but destroyed by excess consumption of alcohol often try to compensate by making vulgar remarks to women, including, as in the present case, decent Catholic mothers. It’s something you’ll want to avoid as you rise through the ranks. What happened here, Shanahan?”

  The two detectives were grinning broadly. They didn’t get to do this much anymore. “You wouldn’t think it to look at her, Vargas, but this woman has the dirtiest mouth in the five boroughs, not excluding Margo the Transvestite down by Manhattan Bridge. What’s your interest?”

  “I’m not sure I have any, Shanahan. The people here called me, asked me to come by. Anything cooking yet on the perp?”

  “You see how these cheap P.I.s operate, Vargas? Trying to get confidential information off the Job? They use bribes, threats, even fading sexual allure, like now . . . what’s that on your shirt, Marlene, stick out your chest a little. Oh, yeah, Confucius say, man with erection who enter airplane door sideways going to Bangkok.”

  “That and, ‘Kiss my ass, I’m Irish,’ but, really . . . ?”

  “Really? Well, it’s a highly skilled master criminal terrorist we got here, if you want my opinion. They didn’t want to use their own vehicle for the job, oh, no, so they rented a van from Penske over in Jersey somewhere. That’s ’cause Penske don’t ask for any personal information or anything, you just give them your watch or your dog and drive away.”

  “A grounder.”

  “Uh-huh. They’re probably closing in on the desperadoes as we speak. Too bad you won’t get to use your sleuthing powers in this one, Marlene. Officer Vargas, when Marlene uses her sleuthing powers, it usually ends up with hair on the walls. You want to keep your hand on your weapon around Marlene here. So to speak.”

  Marlene grinned, waved, and stepped over the crime tape.

  Shanahan called after her, “And may I say, Marlene, that your ass is holding up pretty good, considering your age.”

  She wiggled that unit parodically in the interest of good police relations and entered the building.

  The pattern of shot had come in high, judging from the pits marking the wall above the receptionist’s desk. Either the guy had rushed his shot or he intended to miss; in any case the woman sitting behind the desk had retained her brains in her skull. She was still at her post, carefully sorting through charred files. A couple of other women and a man in rough work clothes were sweeping burnt trash into a barrel. Marlene asked the receptionist where the director’s office was; a weary motion pointed her down the hall, toward where a television crew—camera, sound, and glistening reporter—was recording an interview with Alice Reiss-Kessler, the director herself. The reporter, the same Gloria Eng who had reported on the Asia Mall killings, was wearing a peach-colored suit miraculously free of the fine soot that covered every other surface in the place, and at the moment she was asking the inane and inevitable “How do you feel” question. Ms. Reiss-Kessler, a good-sized brunette with a strong, plain face that tended to go jowly under ten-thousand-candlepower light, was not looking her best, but she was gamely doing her duty as a patriotic American by allowing television to share her pain. Marlene wished fervently for her to say something like, “I feel really great, Gloria. We’ve wanted to redecorate this crummy barn for ages, and since we’re insured up to the nipples, we’ll be able to do it right and also pay for about six hundred late-term abortions.” Instead, she did the usual victim moan, and Marlene could see Eng calculating behind her faux-sympathetic matte face how to get an eight-second sound bite out of this farrago. Marlene backed away, intending to lurk in a corner until the newsies left, but her heel came down on a pile of trash and she stumbled noisily.

  At the sound Eng looked up and, without missing a beat, broke in with, “Is it true that you’ve retained a private investigator in this matter?”

  Reiss-Kessler hesitated. “Ah, well, we’re looking into increased security, but—”

  “Does that mean you approve of counter-violence against the kind of people who might want to bomb abortion clinics?”

  “No, I believe that the police should do their job and protect the legally recognized right to choose.”

  “Then why have you hired Marlene Ciampi? Isn’t Ms. Ciampi associated with the kind of ‘security’ not very distinguishable from vigilantism?”

  “We haven’t hired anyone,” said Reiss-Kessler. “We’re talking to consultants.”

  Nice block, girl, thought Marlene, but a moment later she was bathed in the unforgiving light herself, as the reporter directed camera and microphones toward an even more interesting subject.

  “One of those consultants is apparently Marlene Ciampi, who has just entered this ruined clinic,” Eng said. “Ms. Ciampi has been involved in several fatal shootings in the last few years, and in other acts of violence against people she claimed were harassing her clients. Marlene! Could you tell us what your response will be to whoever perpetrated this attack?”

  “No comment,” said Marlene, and moved to pass the reporter, who counter-moved to remain in her path.

  “Give me something, Marlene,” said the reporter. “Have you spoken with the police? How do they feel about your involvement?”

  Marlene kept her smile, checked, faked, got by, and in a moment had clutched Ms. Reiss-Kessler by the elbow and steered her into her own office, kicking the door shut in the camera’s face.

  “Well,” said the director, “you certainly know how to make an entrance. I’d offer you coffee, but the coffee room was a casualty. Have a seat.”

  Marlene brushed plaster dust off a side chair and sat down. Reiss-Kessler settled on the edge of her desk. “You don’t care for the media, I take it.”

  “They do their job, I do mine,” Marlene said. “In fact, I had no comment.”

  “I’d think that getting your face on television would be good for business.”

  “I have enough business, Ms. Reiss-Kessler—”

  “Please, Alice.”

  “. . . Alice, and I don’t particularly want to encourage the kind of business Gloria is interested in promoting for me. I’m here representing the Osborne Group. Security? I assume that’s what you’re interested in.” She indicated the wreckage with a wave.


  The woman let out a bitter chuckle. “Yes, locking the barn door. Security, but mainly I want the people who did this caught and punished.”

  “Uh-huh. I bet. Fortunately, you don’t need me for that. The cops have a good lead on the perps here, and they should make an arrest fairly soon.”

  Reiss-Kessler’s eyes widened. “Really? They didn’t say anything about that to me.”

  “I try to cultivate good relations with the police.”

  An expression of astonishment tending toward sneer appeared on the woman’s face. “You like those chauvinist bastards?”

  Marlene stiffened and smiled falsely to cover. “Not like. They’re hard to like. A great many of them are boorish, violent, corrupt, and stupid. But I do love them. In a manner of speaking. My heart goes out to them. They see stuff and do stuff every day that if you did it, it would make you cry for a week, and they’ve got no real training to deal with it and they get no support for it, except that silly macho cynical business they’re all into, which makes it all worse, and includes the idea that only the penis-equipped can do the job. So they make comments to me, technically sexual harassment, technically clear violations of the Patrol Guide, and what I do is, I mean within limits, I don’t give them the ‘that’s not funny’ line and utter threats, I grin like a bimbo and give them a shot back or two. And when I need some help from them, which I do a lot in my business, I usually get it.”

  “It’s nice that you’re one of the boys,” said Reiss-Kessler.

  Marlene ignored the icy tone, kept her smile, and replied, “Yes, it is nice. Let’s turn to business, Alice, if you don’t mind. We both have a lot to do.”

  Alice gave a stiff nod, and Marlene went into her spiel, laying out what the Osborne Group could and could not do in the way of protection and site hardening. This included building surveys, installation of equipment and architectural mods, security seminars for clinic staff, and the provision of bonded square-badge guards. The woman listened, took some notes, asked the usual questions. Marlene could see she was disappointed, had expected something else, something more ardently feminist, a source of emotional support rather than a security firm functionary, which is why she had called Osborne and asked for Marlene by name. Marlene couldn’t help that (it happened a lot), nor could she help what she felt about the clinic. This emerged, too, in the conversation.

  At the end, the director made some noncommittal remarks that they’d be in touch. Marlene doubted this; she was being given the boot. She was not exactly famous, but she’d been in the news enough over the past decade so that there were people who would call for an appointment just to take a look, and others who wanted the cachet of having her guard their bodies, and others who thought she was in the business of shooting unwanted males on order. Marlene figured that Alice Reiss-Kessler’s initial thought in the immediate aftermath of the attack had been punishment and revenge, and since she came from a class and subculture that did not trust the police to have the right attitude toward feminist issues, she had sought a private enforcer.

  Which Marlene was not, and had made that clear, and now, leaving the sooty storefront, wondered why it was easier for her to be nice to horrible male-chauvinist cops than to a perfectly decent woman with the right liberal opinions on every subject. To be fair, she was just as impatient with the right-wing verities of most cops. And of her mother.

  She walked now, head down and grumpy, to her car, an old Volvo 240 station wagon in the usual faded orange, parked illegally on Tenth. Her personal assistant was sitting in the passenger seat. He grunted a greeting as she entered.

  “I don’t know, Sweets,” she said when the car was moving in the south-bound flow. “I screwed that up for no reason. I had to give that dumb speech about the cops, and what she wanted was the us girls against the men business, oh, bite my tongue, not girls, of course, and I had to sound off about abortion, but when she said that about those abortion-is-murder nuts, and said well, it is and they’re not all nuts, and she gave me that you can’t be serious look, and I said well, yeah, legal, safe, and available, sure, I’m for that, but you’re also killing babies, you should stand up for that, and be sad, I’d like to see more tears, more anguish, I mean it’s not a haircut and a rinse, is it? And she got chillier and chillier, and then I cracked wise about me participating in a number of post-natal abortions and I didn’t care for those either, and then we went back to talking about doors and bomb barriers. And of course, she’s big in New York feminist circles, and she’s going to spread the word about what a traitor I am to the cause, which will not help with the celebrity jobs either, and Osborne is going to start having second thoughts about bringing me in. I mean, really, Sweets, what is going on here? How can you be more of a feminist than me? Huh?”

  Sweety offered a shrug and a sympathetic look.

  “Do I put my fucking body on the line? Do I actually protect women from men? I do. And what do I get for it, huh? I’ll tell you what I don’t get. I don’t get no respect. My husband hates what I do. My daughter just hates me whatever I do, poor Marlene, and after today I doubt I’ll be invited to sit on the dais at the NOW meeting, and I bought the most darling little black dress. . . . Sweety! Talk to me! I need advice.”

  In response to this, Sweety dropped his massive head on her lap and dispensed a half cup of saliva directly onto her crotch. Marlene hooted maniacal laughter and made a dramatic turn across two lanes to catch her left onto 14th.

  Marlene was about to meet (speaking of her peculiar problems with feminism) a woman who made Ms. Reiss-Kessler look like Nancy Reagan. This person lived and worked in a five-story tenement-plus-storefront on Avenue B in the neighborhood called the East Village, if you were placing real estate ads, and Alphabet City if you were a resident, or a cop. Unlike other poor and crime-plagued sections of New York, most of which had declined from better days, this one had been designed as a slum in the previous century and was a slum still. Marlene parked her car behind a burned sofa across the street, and walked blithely away with the window open and the doors unlocked. A 200-pound dull black, red-eyed, attack-trained Neapolitan mastiff in the front seat is the sort of car alarm that still works in Alphabet City.

  The building had a small sign over the door that said east village women’s shelter, and the door itself was a steel industrial model in a steel frame. In the center of this door was a bell button and a small notice:

  ring. we are always open.

  If you’re looking for shelter,

  you are welcome,

  and if you’re looking for trouble

  we have that, too.

  The former shop windows had been replaced by bolted-on galvanized sheets backed by thick plywood. Marlene rang the bell. A whirring noise from above. She looked up and waved to the camera. Buzz. Ke-chunk. The outer door opened, and Marlene walked through and down a short blank entry corridor faced by a windowed door, behind which was a steel desk, behind which was a fullback-sized brown woman with beaded hair. This person ascertained that Marlene was really Marlene and not the spearhead of an invasion, and clicked her through the glass. The EVWC was hard to get into. Its clientele consisted exclusively of women and children under credible threat of death from that small class of men who will not be deterred from expressing their devotion to their loved ones in this unusual way even by the full pressure of the law. Almost all women’s shelters are at secret locations, to prevent the loved ones from coming by and trying to get in. This one was blatantly public, because its proprietor rather hoped the loved ones would try something, and especially that they would engage in the sort of behavior that entitles the invaded party to use lethal force.

  “What’s up, Vonda?”

  “Besides the murder rate? Not that much. We got a rare one last night. Buck-ass naked and beat.”

  “Really? Anyone I know?”

  The woman shrugged and shifted the Remington 870 on her lap. “She’ll tell you about it. I just got on.”

  Marlene went through another door in
to the shelter proper and was hit first by the smell—cooking and disinfectant and too many people—and second by a four-year-old on a Big Wheels. A thin woman chasing the child apologized in heavily accented English and dragged the child away to the play area that took up much of the first floor of the building. The children who lived here did not get out much.

  The owner was in the kitchen, dressed in her usual black jumpsuit, supervising the preparation of the evening meal, which, like most meals at the EVWS, was highly spiced, hearty, and well balanced, if plain. Marlene often reflected on the medieval aspects of this establishment: noise, squabbling, gouts of steam, the sound of a slap and a wail, hectic activity under the command of a benevolent tyrant. It must have been so in the castle when the knights were away at war. Mattie Duran was a strong, stocky Mexican woman with a fierce indio ax face set off by two thick black braids tied with red wool. She looked up, saw Marlene, nodded, settled the business she had begun, and walked out of the kitchen, Marlene following.

  Duran had a tiny office off the dining room fitted with a steel desk, industrial shelving holding what passed for her record system, a swivel chair for her, and a ratty armchair for guests. She drew a couple of cups of black coffee from an urn, sat behind the desk with a grateful sigh, and gave her guest the once-over, focusing on Marlene’s soaked crotch.

  “What happened, you piss yourself or are you just glad to see me?”

  “The dog.”

  Mattie raised an eyebrow. Then they both guffawed. Mattie had a deep, wet laugh, like an old man. Marlene had worked with the EVWS for a couple of years. Their clientele overlapped to some extent, and they more or less agreed on the principle that guys who persisted in trying to kill women should get their lumps. They were both unindicted felons, but Marlene was guilty about it and Mattie was not. Marlene related her recent experiences at the Chelsea clinic. Mattie was not sympathetic.