Pleading Guilty

  In response, Lumpy and Lucien more or less withdrew. Lucien said he wanted to play cards and nudged his pal along, both of them shoving off with only a bare goodbye and a quick look back in my direction.

  I stayed put in the steam, blanching like some vegetable and considering my prospects. Heat has its odd effects. In time, the limbs grow heavy and the mind is slower, as if gravity's increased, as if you'd taken a seat on Jupiter. This thing of men being men amid the intense heat revived some lost thought of my old man and the firehouse where all those guys spent so much of their lives together, bunking down in that single large room in which they dreamt uneasily, awaiting the hoarse call of the alarm, the summons to danger. We always knew when there'd been fires. You could hear the engines tearing out of the little fire-house four blocks away, the clanging of the bells, 'the sheens', as my father said, the enormous roaring motors that sounded big enough to power rocket ships. My dad came home sometimes still carrying the fire with him, a penetrating scent that hung around him like a cloud. 'Smellin like the sinners down in hell' was how he put it, weary and beaten in by physical exertion and fear, waiting for The Black Rose to open so he could have a snoot before he slept. My dreams since are full of fire, though I can't say for sure if that's from my pa or the way my ma, when she was scolding, would pinch my ear and tell me I was in league with Satan and would need to be buried in britches of asbestos.

  Cooked out, I stumbled back up to the seedy locker room. I was trying to squint up the number from my key when I heard a voice behind me.

  'Hey, yo, mister, you. Jorge wants to see you.' It was a kid with a bucket and a mop. I wasn't sure he was talking to me, but he tossed his head of sleek jet hair and waved for me to follow, which I did, clip-clopping after him in my thongs and wet sheet, leaving the locker area for something a hand-drawn sign called 'The Club Room'. Maybe somebody wanted me to buy a membership, I figured. Or to tell me about Bert.

  Here again the furnishings were the latest, if the year happened to be 1949. Cheap mahogany paneling. Brown, speckled asbestos floor tiles such as would give any OSHA inspector an instant coronary. Red vinyl furniture with the stuffing oozing out the corners and, in one case, a black spring so long exposed it was beginning to rust. At a gray Formica table, with one of those old designs of vague forms like the sight through an unfocused microscope, four men were seated, playing pinochle. The youngest of them, a smooth-looking Mexican, nodded, and behind me the kid with the bucket scooted a chair.

  'You lookin for Kam Roberts?' the Mexican asked. His eyes were on his cards. Lucien and Lumpy were nowhere in sight.

  'I'm a friend of Bert Kamin.'

  'I asked you "Kam Roberts."' He considered me now. This fella, Jorge, was a thin guy, one of those unshaved stringy-looking Mexicans who make such amazing lightweights, always whipping the fannies of these sleek black guys with bulging muscles. Unforeseen strength like that always impresses me. 'You got some ID?'

  I looked at my sheet, heavy and almost translucent from the steam.

  'Give me two minutes.'

  'How far you think you get in two minutes?' he asked and threw down a card. I took a while on that.

  'My name is Mack Malloy. Bert's my partner. I'm a lawyer.' I offered my hand.

  'No, you ain,' said Jorge. Story of my life. Lie and I make you smile. The truth, you only wonder.

  'Who are you?' I asked.

  'Who am I? I'm a guy sittin here talkin to you, okay? You're lookin for Kam Roberts, that's who I am. Okay?' Jorge studied me with what you might call Third World anger - this thing that really goes beyond skin color and echoes back across the epochs, some gene-encoded memory of the syphilis that Cortez's men spread, of the tribal chieftains that the helmeted European troops tossed into the steaming volcanic crevices. 'Mr Roberts here, that's Mr Shit. You know what I mean?' 'I hear you.'

  He turned to a guy beside him, a thick old brute who was still holding his cards.

  'He hears me.' They exchanged a laugh.

  Overall, this was not a good situation, being naked with four angry men. Jorge put both hands down on the table.

  'I say you're a cop.' He wet his lips. 'I know you're a cop.' Those dark Hispanic eyes had irises like caves and emitted no light, and I was lost in there; it was a second before I heartened with the thought that a copper was unlikely to end up beaten in the alley. 'I'd make you nine days a week. You got a star tattooed on your tushy.'

  The three guys watching thought this was a terrific line.

  I smiled faintly, that primate fear-flight thing, still trying to figure what it was this guy thought he knew about me. It had been more than twenty years, but I would bet I could remember every guy I cracked. Sort of like the kids from grade school. Some faces you don't forget.

  'Whatever you lookin for, hombre, you don' find here. You check with Hans over in Six, you'll find out.'

  'I'm looking for Bert.'

  Jorge closed his eyes, heavy-lidded like a lizard's.

  'Wouldn't know him. Don' know him and don' know nobody he knows. I tole the first copper what come around askin Kam Roberts, I tole him straight up, I don' want none of this shit. I tole him, see Hans, and now we got some fucker here playin What's My Line. Don' fuck with me.' He worked his head around completely as if it were on a string, so that I knew I'd had it right to start: a former boxer.

  I got it now, why he thought I was a cop, because the cops had already been here looking for Kam Roberts. I wanted to ask more, of course - which coppers, which unit, what they thought Bert had done - but I knew better than to press my luck.

  Jorge had leaned in his confidential way across the table once again.

  'I'm not supposed to have any this shit.' That's what he paid Hans for, that's what he was telling me. I knew Hans too, a watch commander in the Sixth District, two, three years from retirement, Hans Gudrich, real fat these days, with very clear blue eyes, quite beautiful actually, if you could say that about the eyes on a fat old cop.

  ‘I was on my way out,' I said.

  'See, that's what I thought.'

  'You were right.' I stood up, my sheet wetting the floor beneath me. 'We all have a job to do.' My impression of an honest policeman didn't sell. Jorge pointed.

  'Nobody got no jobs to do here. You want to sweat, that's fine. You come here runnin any scams, Mr Roberts or whatever, we'll take a piece of your candy-ass, I don' care what kind of star you carry. To me, Mr Roberts, man, I better not hear no Mr Roberts again, you know?'

  'Got it.'

  I was gone fast. Bert may have been a fake tough guy; these fellas knew a thing or two about making hard choices, and I was dressed and on the street in a jiffy, bombing down the walk, my insides still melted down in fear. Nice crowd, I told Bert, and, once I'd started this conversation, asked a few more questions like why he was calling himself Kam Roberts.

  I was now up to the intersection of Duhaney and Shields, one of these grand city neighborhoods, the league of nations, four blocks with eleven languages, all of them displayed on the garish signs flogging bargains that are pasted in the store windows. Taxis here are at best occasional, and I stomped around near the bus stop, where a little bit of the last snow remained in a dirty crusted hump, my cheeks stinging in the cold and my soul still seething from the trip into that inferno of tough men and intense heat. Near my native ground, I found myself in the thick grip of time and the stalled feelings that forty years ago seemed to bind my spirit like glue. I was hopelessly at odds with everyone - my ma, the Church, the nuns at school, the entire claustrophobic community with its million rules. I took no part in the joy that everybody here seemed to feel in belonging. Instead, I felt I was a spy, a clandestine agent from somewhere else, an outsider who took them all as objects, surfaces, things to see.

  Now this last couple of years, since Nora scooted, I seem to be back here more and more, my dreams set in the dim houses beneath the Callison Street Bridge, where I am searching. Four decades later, it turns out it was me who was secretly infiltrated. So
metimes in these dreams I think I'm looking for my sister, sweet Elaine, dead three years now, but I cannot find her. Outside, the wash flags in the sunshine which is bright enough to purify, but I am inside, the wind shifting in the curtains and the papers down the hall as I prowl the grim interior corridors to find some lost connection. What did I care about back then? Desperately, in the nights now, I sit up, concentrating, trying to recall the source of all of these errors, knowing that somewhere in this dark house, in one room or another, I will sweep aside a door and feel the rush of light and heat, the flames.

  III. MY LAWYER

  It was about seven-thirty when I got back to the office, and Brushy, as usual, was still there. Near as I can tell, none of my partners believes that money is the most important thing in the world - they just work as if they did. They are decent folks, my partners, men and women of refined instinct, other-thinking, many of them lively company and committed to a lot of do-good stuff, but we are joined together, like the nucleus of an atom, by the dark magnetic forces of nature - a shared weakness for our own worst desires. Get ahead. Make money. Wield power. It all takes time. In this life you're often so hard-pressed that scratching your head sometimes seems to absorb an instant you're sure will be precious later in the day.

  Brush, like many others, felt best here, burning like some torch in the dark hours. No phone, no opposing counsel or associates, no fucking management meetings. Her fierce intelligence could be concentrated on the tasks at hand, writing letters, reviewing memos, seven little things in sixty minutes, each one billable as a quarter of an hour. My own time in the office was a chain of aimless spells.

  I stuck my head in, feeling the need for someone sensible.

  'Got a minute?'

  Brushy has the corner office, the glamour spot. I'm ten years older, with smaller digs next door. She was at her desk, a plane of glass engulfed at either end by green standing plants whose fronds languished on her papers.

  'Business?' she asked. 'Who's the client?' She had reached for her time sheet already.

  'Old one,' I said. 'Me.' Brushy was my attorney in my wars with Nora. An absolutely ruthless trial lawyer, Emilia Bruccia is one of G & G's great stars. On deposition, I've seen her reform the recollections of witnesses more dramatically than if they had ingested psychoactive drugs, and she's also gifted with that wonderful, devious, clever cast of mind by which she can always explain away the opposition's most damaging documents as something not worth using to wrap fish. She's become a mainstay of our relationship with TN, while developing a dozen great clients of her own, including a big insurance company in California.

  Not only does she bill a million bucks a year, but this is a terrific person. I mean it. I would no sooner try to get a jump on Brushy than I would a hungry panther. But she is not dim to feelings. She has plenty of her own, which she exhausts in work and sexual plunder, having a terminal case of hot pants that makes her personal life, behind her back, the object of local sport. She is loyal; she is smart; she has a long memory for kindnesses done. And she is a great partner. If I had to find someone on an hour's notice to go take a dep for me a hundred miles from Tulsa in the middle of the night, I'd call Brushy first. It was her dependability, in fact, which inspired my visit. When I told her I needed a favor, she didn't even flinch.

  'I'd love it if you could grab the wheel on Toots's disciplinary hearing at BAD,' I said. 'I'll be there for the first session on Wednesday, but after that I may be on the loose.' BAD - the Bar Admissions and Disciplinary Commission - is a sagging bureaucracy ministering over entrances, exits, and timeouts from the practice of law. I spent my first four years as a lawyer there, struggling to remain afloat in the tidal crest of complaints regarding lawyerly feasance, mis, mal, and non.

  Brushy objected that she'd never handled a hearing at

  BAD and it took a second to persuade her she was up to it. Like many great successes, Brushy has her moments of doubt. She flashes the world a winning smile, then wrings her hands when she is alone, not sure she sees what everybody else does. I promised to have Lucinda, the secretary whose services we shared, copy the file, to let Brushy look it over.

  'Where will you be?' she asked.

  'Looking for Bert.'

  'Yeah, where in the world is he?'

  'That's what the Committee wants to know.'

  'The Committee?'

  Brushy warmed to my account. The Big Three tend to be tight-vested and most of my partners relish any chance to peek behind the curtains. Brushy savored each detail until she suddenly grasped the problem.

  'Just like that? Five million, six?' Her small mouth hanging open, Brushy looked dimly toward the future -the lawsuits, the recriminations. Her investment in the law firm was in jeopardy. 'How could he do that to us?'

  'There are no victims,' I told her. She didn't get it. 'Cop talk,' I said, 'it's a thing we'd say. Guy walks down a dark street alone in the wrong neighborhood and gets mugged. Some shmo cries a river cause he lost a hundred-thousand bucks hoping some con artist could make a car run on potato chips. People get what they're asking for. There are no victims.'

  She looked at me with concern. Brushy sat here tonight in a trim suit and a blouse with a big orange bow. Her short hair was cut close, a little butch, and showed off two or three prominent acne scars that pitted her left cheek, like the dimples of the moon. Her teenaged years had to have been tough.

  'It's a saying,' I said.

  'Meaning what? Here?'

  Shrugging, I went to the pencil drawer in the gunmetal credenza behind her to find a cigarette. We both sneak butts. Gage & Griswell is now a smoke-free environment, but we sit in Brushy's office or mine with the door closed. From the drawer I also removed a little makeup mirror, which I asked to borrow. Brushy couldn't have cared less. She was chewing on her thumb, still wrought up with the prospect of disaster.

  'Should you be telling me this?' Brushy asked. She always had a better sense than me for the value of a confidence.

  'Probably not,' I admitted. 'Call it attorney-client.' Privileged, I meant. Forever secret. Another of those witless jokes lawyers make about the law. Brushy wasn't really my lawyer here; I wasn't really her client. 'Besides, I need to ask you something about Bert.'

  She was still pondering the situation. She said again she couldn't believe it.

  'It's a nice idea, n 'est-ce pas! Fill your pocket with some new IDs and several million dollars and jet off to be someone else for the rest of your life.' I made a sound. 'It gives me the shivers just to think of it.'

  'What kind of new IDs?' she asked.

  'Oh, he seems to be using some screwy alias. You ever hear him call himself Kam Roberts for any reason - even just kidding around?'

  Never. I told her a little about my visit to the Russian Bath, watching these guys built like refrigerators flail each other with oak branches and soap.

  'Weird,' she said.

  'That's how it struck me. Here's the thing, Brush. These birds around there seem to think Bert has gone off with some man. He ever mention anyone named Archie?'

  'Nope.' She eyed me through the smoke. She already knew I was up to something.

  'It made me think, you know. It's been years since I saw Bert with a woman.' When Bert got here more than a decade ago, he was still squiring Doreen, his high-school honey, to firm functions. He'd made vague promises to marry this woman, a sweet schoolteacher, and in the years she waited she turned into a kind of sports-bar bimbo, with a drinking problem like mine and skirts the size of handkerchiefs and blonde hair so ravaged by chemicals that it stuck out from her head like raffia. One day at lunch Bert announced she was marrying her principal. No further comment. Ever. And no replacement.

  Always live to nuance, Brushy had perked up. 'Are you asking what I think?'

  'You mean something dirty and indiscreet? Right. I'm not asking you to speculate. I just thought you might be able to contribute pertinent information.' I sort of scratched my ear lamely but it wasn't fooling her a bit. Pugnacious,
you would call her look. She's not big - short, broad, and but for tireless health-club hours tending to the stout - but her jaw was set meanly.

  'Who are you now? The Public Health Service?'

  'Spare me the details. Yes or no will do to start.'

  'No.'

  I wasn't sure she was answering. Brushy is touchy about personal lives, since hers is always the subject of sniggering. Every office deserves a Brushy, a stalwartly single, sexually predatory female. She subscribes to a feminism of her own vision, which seems to be inspired by piracy on the high seas, regarding it as an achievement to board every passing male ship. She does not recognize any common boundary: marital status, age, social class. When she decides on a man, either for the position he occupies, the promise he radiates, or the good looks that stimulate other females to mere fancy, she is unambiguous in making her desires known. Over the years she has been seen in the company of judges and politicians, journalists, opponents, guys from the file room, a couple of former jurors - and many of her partners, including, should you be wondering, for one fitful afternoon, me. Big and good-looking, Bert had undoubtedly fallen within the circled sights of Brushy's up-periscope.

  'It's not prurient interest, Brush. It's professional. Just give me a wink. I need your opinion: Is it he's or she's when Bert dances the hokey-pokey?'

  'I don't believe you,' she said and looked off with a sour scowl. In her pursuits, Brushy, in her own way, is discreet. She generally wouldn't talk under torture, and her advances, while relentless, always recognize the proprieties of the workplace. But for her sexual follies, Brushy still pays a heavy price. Her commitment to appetites that most of us are busy trying to suppress leads folks to regard her as odd, even dangerous; other females are often downright hostile. And among her peers, the younger partners, the men and women who started together as associates and survived those years together - the giddy all-nighters in the library, the one thousand carry-in meals - Brushy is on the outs anyway. They envy her advancement in the firm, and when they gather privately for gossip, it's often about her.