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clicking of the adding machine stopped, though, and the elderly man using it was staring at Karp with an expression of … what? Doubt? Anger? Concern? It was hard for Karp to read these bearded, grave faces.
    Meanwhile, the rabbi sniffed, rolled his eyes, sighed, and made a small dismissing gesture with the tips of his fingers, as if shooing away a small, bothersome creature. Karp might have felt diminished had he not been vaccinated against just this guilt-making ritual by his maternal grandmother, who had used almost the same mannerisms.
    “Go away, Mr. Karp,” said Lowenstein in a weary voice. “Go back to the goyim, live out your little make-believe. Someday, you decide you want to be a real Jew, we’ll still be here, we’ll welcome you with open arms.”
    In the car, Morris said, “How’d it go?”
    “It went shitty, Morris,” said Karp, settling back in the seat and rubbing his face. “The rabbi decided I wasn’t enough of a Jew to understand their situation there. You ever get that, when you were uptown?”
    Morris glanced at him. “What, that I wasn’t enough of a Jew? Hardly ever. Why?”
    Karp laughed out loud, probably for longer than the remark warranted. “No, from the Muslims, from the Panthers, whatever,” he explained. “Like you were letting the team down.”
    “Oh, that. Yeah, some.” He shrugged. “The Uncle Tom business. You let shit like that get to you, you might as well hang it up.”
    While Karp drove back to Manhattan, his wife was doing something that she was as bad at as her husband was at mollifying militant Hasidim, which was teaching women to shoot pistols. She was now in the basement firing range of the West Side Gun Club, on Tenth and Forty-eighth Street, standing behind and to the left of an insurance company office manager named Joan Savitch, who was blazing away with a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver at a silhouette target twenty-five yards down-range. She was getting some good hits, but her pattern was lousy, and although Marlene knew enough about shooting to know that tight pattern was the key, she did not know enough to tell Savitch what she was doing wrong.
    The woman expended her final bullet and clicked the traveler switch to bring the target home. They both looked at it. “Am I getting any better?” Savitch asked doubtfully. Like most New Yorkers, she had never fired a pistol before. She was a short woman, somewhat overweight by the standards of the fashion magazines, with a pleasant, intelligent, forty-ish face. Her blond-streaked light brown hair was arranged in a stylish flip cut. She was wearing a maroon jersey over the skirt to her gray suit. An ordinary New York woman of the moderately successful professional classes, two young sons in an apartment in Peter Cooper, formerly married to a guy who turned out to be a maniac. It happened, more often than people supposed.
    “You’re doing fine,” said Marlene, although in truth she did not think there had been much improvement over the last half box of rounds. One of Marlene’s people, Lonnie Dane, usually took this duty. Dane (now, unfortunately, running a touchy assignment) was a gun nut who really thought that being able to put five holes through a playing-card-sized area at twenty-five yards was as important as the ability to tie up one’s sneakers, and he was a good, patient teacher, and a man, which Marlene, to her dismay (she being a good enough feminist) found that most of her clients (all female) really preferred. The remarkable things about Marlene and guns were (in ascending order of improbability): she thought they were necessary to her work; she hated them; she was a crack shot. This last had come as a considerable surprise—that she shot like an expert the first time she had ever picked up a pistol. Dane had assured her that, while rare, such things were not unknown in gun circles. Marlene had already used this skill to kill three men, and more than practically anything else in this world, she