Karp had never figured out what had brought V.T., as he was universally known, into the DA, or what kept him there. V.T. would not give a straight answer. "One slums," he might say, or, "My family are practitioners of fraud; I prefer to study it." It did have something to do with his family, Karp had concluded early on: that great intermarried, extended family of WASPs, with names off the street signs of lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, as exotic as Nepalese to Karp, and as fascinating. Such clans tend to produce at least one maverick in each generation, and V.T. was the one in his. He might as easily, and with about the same level of family disapproval, have chosen to have become a lion tamer at Ringling's or opened a delicatessen in Passaic.

Karp himself had a contracted family, and had he been a reflective type he might have considered that a vicarious association was one of the things that attracted him to V.T., as well as to his wife, whose clan was also vast.

There she was now, dancing with a young black paralegal. She was wearing a full plum maxiskirt with the bottom three buttons undone, so that as she danced it whirled upward, showing her thin and splendid legs. Her black curls were shoulder length and cut so that they fell over the left side of her face. In that way, if Marlene held her head cocked, as she always did, it would be more difficult for someone to tell that her right eye was glass.

This damage had never interested him; he had loved her before, when she was stunning and perfect, and afterward, when she was merely a gorgeous exotic. As always, when he watched her dance, he was excited and vaguely saddened at the same time. Marlene loved to dance; Karp did not. He hadn't even before his knee had been replaced, thinking himself gawky on the floor and conspicuous with it.

As he watched, she caught his eye and winked and went through a set of parodically dirty contortions.

"Marlene's not going down with you, I hear," said V.T.