Reckless Endangerment Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand. His mother had fallen to one of the innumerable bullets fired during the confused days of the 1956 rebellion. Settled at last in New York, the elder Hrcany (once a high school teacher) had found work as a superintendent of a building in the rough Brooklyn neighborhood known as East New York, also moonlighting as a truck driver. Roland, then a spindly, nervous kid, had been sent to public school, where his fate was what might be expected for a smallish boy speaking broken English, with a funny name and studious to boot, among what was then a rough Irish and Italian crowd. He was tortured, with no one to tell about it. His father was working like an ox in the good old immigrant way, and Roland could not bear to bother him. Instead, inspired by an ad in the subway, and without telling anyone, Roland joined the Boys’ Club, where there was a weight room. By the time he was fourteen, Roland, though still short, had a seventeen-inch neck and could bench 220. Nobody bothered him in school anymore. He also joined the Police Athletic League, where he began his lifelong love affair with the NYPD, and also excelled at football.
    Meanwhile, his father had taken to capitalism as one too long deprived of its healing magic. Saving every conceivable penny from both his jobs, he managed to buy the building he worked in, and then immediately used his equity in this as collateral to buy a shabby brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Working nights, with Roland at his side, he renovated it, sold it, bought another. He had a good eye for gentrifying neighborhoods, in an era when it was hard to lose money in New York real estate. By 1968 he was a millionaire, and when the stock market went sour that year, he bought everything he could at distress prices. Now he was a multimillionaire, semi-retired, living in a duplex penthouse on Sutton Place with his third wife, who was three years older than his son.
    In whom he was disappointed. He could not understand why a boy so bright would want to labor for a pittance in the bureaucracy, like the despised apparatchiki of the Soviets, when there was so much money to be made in America. Nevertheless, the old man was generous. Roland lived rent-free in the first floor of one of his father’s buildings, a brownstone in the east Seventies, had substantial trust income, and could use his pittance salary for fun.
    An odd history, then, and Roland cultivated an appearance to match. He looked like a professional wrestler, or what professional wrestlers would look like if they wore beautiful hand-tailored, European-cut suits. He wore his white-blond hair swept back and long enough to reach his collar, and kept his face tan and his body rippling with layers of stony muscle.
    In contrast, the man sitting across from him this morning, two weeks or so after the Shilkes killing, was a native of the City, and had been reasonably well off since birth, although he was not ordinary in appearance either. He had been the previous incumbent of the position Roland now held, before being kicked upstairs to a vague and (Roland believed) meaningless sinecure: Deputy District Attorney for Special Projects. His name was Roger Karp, answering still to the name “Butch,” although this was a faintly absurd name for an enormous, serious man in his late thirties, which he well knew, but still, he stubbornly kept it. In fact, he was the same age as Hrcany and had started at the D.A. in the same week, back in sixty-eight. Since they were the two standouts in their class, they had maintained a friendly rivalry during the intervening years, sometimes not so friendly. Roland, it must be said, had difficulty being friends with men whom he could not dominate at some level, and he could not do this with Karp. First, the physical thing: Roland was five-eight, and although he could now bench nearly four hundred pounds, this did not compensate for Karp being nine inches taller. Roland had been a varsity football player at Penn State, making up