Reckless Endangerment (6 page)

“Sym, you only ask that if you don’t know who it is,” explained Karp. “You know who I am. Where’s Marlene?”

“Ms. Ciampi is with a client.”

Karp bit back a sharp comment. The kid was bright and trying hard, but for reasons Karp could never quite grasp, she always gave him a hard time. “Could you buzz her, please?” he asked. “I need to talk to her.”

The line went dead, and for a moment Karp thought the girl had accidentally-on-purpose cut him off. Then Marlene’s voice came on the line.

“Sorry,” he said, “you’re with a client.”

“I’m with Tran. What’s up?”

“I have to do something later this evening, and I was supposed to pick Lucy up at Chinese school.”

“Oh? What do you have to do?”

“I have to go to Williamsburg and get yelled at by Rabbi Lowenstein. He won’t come to the office because the streets are teeming with Arab terrorists and his life would be in danger. Will there be a problem with Lucy?”

“No, Tran can do it, but you owe me one. Are you going in your deputy D.A. capacity or your Jewish capacity?”

“Both, I think,” said Karp after a moment’s thought. “Although by the rabbi I’m probably not much of a Jew.”

“He should talk to my grandmother. Are you going to tell him you’re married to a shiksa?”

“If it comes up,” Karp replied.

After he got off the phone, he had forty minutes before his appointment with John Haddad. He reviewed a copy of the Shilkes case file, gleaning nothing that he did not already know. Two half-educated illegal Palestinians had killed a Jewish shopkeeper to make a point about the international Zionist conspiracy. The organization they claimed to represent seemed to be nothing more than a figment of their imaginations. The evidence was damning, and Karp reckoned that for the next quarter of a century they would fight Zionism from behind the walls of Attica.

Haddad, who showed at the appointed time, proved to be a small, well-dressed, fussy-looking man with round spectacles and a head the color and approximate shape of a brown egg. After the usual pleasantries, Haddad cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Karp, my major concern is with the impact that this trial may have on the Arab-American community in New York. In terms of defamation, I mean.”

“Yes, the D.A. told me you were concerned that we would somehow use whatever prejudice against Arabs that exists locally to inflame the jury against the defendants. Mr. Keegan wanted me to reiterate his position that this is absolutely not going to happen. On the other hand, one of the counts on the indictment is conspiracy, so it’s going to be necessary to show that the defendants were part of an organization dedicated to harming Israeli interests and Jews in general. That’s not going to add to their popularity, not in New York.”

“No,” said Haddad grimly. “The Jewish dominance of the local media is quite complete.” There did not seem to be much Karp could add to this sentiment, so he waited, and Haddad added, “What I’m concerned about is that there’s going to be open season on Arab organizations. Every neighborhood club is going to be suspect. Our kids are already getting harassed in school. And the damned thing is, there
is
no organization.”

“Isn’t there?”

“No! What you have here is three undereducated Palestinian kids who decide that they’re going to play guerrillas in the big city, and they get plenty of encouragement from maniacs. It’s pathetic, really. The Hamshari boy is only eighteen.”

“Right, but they’re old enough to have butchered an old lady and half killed her husband.”

“The Shilkes family has my every sympathy,” Haddad responded quickly. “It was a horrendous act. That the Israelis do worse than that every day in the occupied territories still doesn’t excuse it.”

“Right. But to move back to the point you were raising, Mr. Haddad, the prosecution in this case is not going to rest on the ethnicity of the defendants, but on the evidence, which is overwhelming. We don’t need anti-Arab diatribes in the courtroom.”

“What about outside the courtroom? What about this continual inflammatory rhetoric about a terrorist conspiracy?”

“Well, there’s not much we can do about that, Mr. Haddad,” said Karp. “People can say what they like in this country.”

“What about this?” the man asked, and from his briefcase he brought out a sheaf of clippings and tossed them on the table. Some of them were columns from the downmarket local dailies, but the bulk were from
The Guardian,
the Williamsburg sheet that Mendel Lowenstein put out. Karp glanced through them as Haddad railed on. Karp was content to listen passively and make occasional sympathetic noises. He had found, over time, that a good deal of the anger that citizens wished to express against the D.A.’s office could be dissipated through nothing more than courteous listening. He had spent many years listening to the complaints of the relatives of murder victims, and this was nothing in comparison with that. But something was tugging at his mind, something Haddad had said. When the man had run down somewhat, Karp asked, “You said there were three men involved. But there’re only two defendants. Who was the third man? Or do you mean the Daoud boy?”

“No, my information is that there were four boys involved, Daoud, the two defendants, and one named Ali al-Qabbani, who served as a lookout. That’s another thing, Mr. Karp. Ali al-Qabbani hasn’t been seen since the morning of the alleged crime.”

“Aren’t the police looking for him?” asked Karp, carefully avoiding the question of how Haddad knew so much about the conspirators.

“No. They don’t believe he exists. They think the other two are making him up so they can put off the blame on him. Ali planned it, we didn’t know what we were getting into, and so on. And Ali was an illegal. No records, few possessions—he lived in a corner of the room where they met, he did odd jobs, spoke hardly any English. Where could he run to? But he’s vanished.”

“Maybe he’s back in Palestine. Maybe the terrorist network got him out.”

“Oh, please! I told you, there
is
no network. This organization—Against the House of War—it doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy that’s shared by those idiot boys and Lowenstein. I certainly hope that the D.A.’s office doesn’t buy into it.”

“Well, personally, I have no opinion either way, and I doubt Mr. Keegan does either. As I say, it’ll only touch on the prosecution as it affects the conspiracy case. What do
you
think happened to this Ali?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The Jews got him. Lowenstein and his gang of thugs. But you know very well that the police will never follow up on
that
angle.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Mr. Haddad. Unlike our mayor, the district attorney doesn’t run his own foreign policy. We have a deal with the secretary of state—we don’t negotiate with foreign nations and he doesn’t prosecute murders. I promise I’ll look into it and get back to you. As a matter of fact, I’m meeting with Rabbi Lowenstein later this evening. I’ll ask him about it.”

Haddad snorted. “What do you expect him to do, admit it?”

“No, but his denial will be informative. Thanks for coming by, sir. We’ll stay in touch.”

At Battery Park, the Statue of Liberty ferry was pulling out for its last run of the day. Aboard were a group of seventh-graders from Hyattsville, Maryland, on their class trip. A cluster of boys were at the stern, laughing under a teacher’s watchful eye as they tossed bits of snack food into the air for the miraculously hovering gulls.

“Hey, look,” shouted one, above the wind and the engines, “there’s a guy swimming!” They all clustered at the rail and looked.

“Jeez!” said another, “he’s buck naked! You can see his ass!”

More laughter, shoving to look. The teacher frowned and moved toward them. Then the bow wave of the ferry tossed the man and he rolled slowly over, and they saw that he was not swimming at all.

THREE

K
arp had not been to Williamsburg in a long time. As a child he had been taken there at long intervals to visit an aunt of his mother’s, Aunt Reva, an elderly widow who lived alone in a small apartment crowded with massive dark furniture and dense with crocheted doilies and old-people smells—Vick’s, frying chicken fat, scorched feathers. Aunt Reva had pinched his cheeks painfully and given him macaroons and tea rich in lemon and sugar in a thick-sided tumbler. He had played on the floor with a menagerie of glass animals while his mother and her aunt had gabbled in Yiddish. The last time in Williamsburg had been when he was twelve. The glass animals had lost their charm. Karp resented the time spent away from basketball. His older brothers no longer had to endure the visits, but Karp, the last baby, still had to go. On this occasion the sulking Karp had deliberately snapped the legs off a glass deer and his mother had smacked him, the last (nearly the first) occasion of violence between them. He had run out of the suffocating apartment, down the stairs to the street, a street not a hundred yards from the street by which he now traveled.

Karp was not a particularly reflective man. His recollection of that day at Aunt Reva’s had been neatly plastered over, along with the repugnance he felt at the odd, un-Americanness of Williamsburg’s self-ghettoized Jews, along with the usual tag ends of guilt and remorse. Karp was a believer in the sacred American right of re-invention. The Williamsburg of his youth had seemed to him an antique remnant of a doomed way of life. Jews were like anyone else. They played basketball and lived in houses with lawns, and if they were religious they went on Saturday morning to modernistic buildings indistinguishable from Baptist churches (except for the lack of a pinnacle cross) and ate what everyone else ate.

The idea that people might
choose
to live like Aunt Reva, that people with education, people his age, might volunteer to live in the tenements and brownstones their grandparents had occupied and pursue a life of piety and ritual, was something his imagination could not grasp. He probably had (something he would be reluctant to admit) more real sympathy with that bunch of black kids hanging out on the stoop of one of the battered brown-stones on Union Avenue than he did with his putative coreligionists. The kids at least played basketball.

The Jewish part of Williamsburg is a small trapezoid lodged uncomfortably amid substantial districts inhabited by American and West Indian blacks, Puerto Ricans, and (this zone a more recent one) immigrants from various parts of Central and South America. The line is as sharp as any in Beirut or Belfast. On one block the stores cashed checks and sold liquor, Latino or reggae records, and cheap furniture. Every sixth storefront was a barbershop, a hair parlor, a nail joint, or a Pentecostal church. The people were variously brown.

On the next block the stores sold kosher meats, dairy foods, cheap clothing, and slightly better furniture. There were neither barbershops nor liquor stores, and every sixth storefront was a
shul
or a ritual bathhouse. The people were white, pale white, the men in black clothes, hatted and bearded, the women scarf-headed and accompanied by clusters of children, each little boy with his knitted yarmulke and dangling side locks.

“This is it,” said Karp to his driver, a black detective named Morris. They were on Boerum Street, in front of a substantial pink sandstone building, formerly a private home, that had been converted into a synagogue-cum-headquarters for the Ostropoler Hasidim. The house was set back from the street, and an iron paling surrounded what had once been a small garden. This had been paved over in the fashion of the Orthodox, who begrudged the time that gardening would steal from their duty to God. Karp had a vague awareness that an ancient named Reb Moise Koppelman was the leader of this small community. Reb Mendel Lowenstein, the man he had come to see, was the rebbe’s son-in-law and heir presumptive.

The street in front of the building was thronged with men, dressed either in black suits, with fedoras, or in the traditional long gabardines with round hats trimmed with red fox fur. They shot hostile looks at the car and its driver. A man came up and told Morris he couldn’t park there. Morris put a cardboard POLICE sign on the dashboard. Another couple of men came up and started arguing with Morris. Karp got out of the car. “You’ll be okay?” he asked Morris.

“I got a radio and a gun,” said the driver. “How long will you be?”

“As short as I can make it,” said Karp. He had to push through the crowd on the sidewalk and the stoop, the men yielding to him reluctantly. At the door, a burly youth wearing a brassard marked with a star of David and a lion looked Karp over, frowning. Karp told him he was here to see Reb Lowenstein, and the youth handed him a yarmulke and waited until he had placed it on his head. Then he led the way through dim and crowded hallways to a small chamber fitted out as a waiting room, told Karp to wait, and left. There were a dozen or so men waiting with him, talking softly or reading. The room was warm and stuffy; from time to time men would be called to the door at one end of the room and exit, but the room did not seem to grow less crowded. No one spoke to Karp.

After fifteen minutes of this, a thin young man with a sparse reddish beard emerged and beckoned to Karp and then led him through the door. On the other side was a small, windowless, cluttered office within which, behind a desk piled with papers, sat Mendel Lowenstein. There were several other men in the room, engaged in some business around an adding machine, which clicked and buzzed as they talked. Lowenstein looked up as Karp walked in and gestured to a straight chair in front of his desk.

Karp had been in drug dens, in wretched apartments where people had been murdered, places with blood on the walls, and he had been much in the company (almost always without rancor) of some of the worst people produced by his society, but he had not often been as angry or as uncomfortable as he was at this moment. He really didn’t like these people, and although he kept his face neutral, he sensed that Lowenstein knew it. The rabbi was a stocky, brush-bearded man with a high, domed forehead and the large, liquid, intense eyes of a fanatic or a saint, assuming there is a difference.

These examined Karp for a long, uncomfortable moment before the man spoke.