Alone, Skolnick used his car phone to call his wife about a set of race cars he was supposed to pick up for his grandson’s birthday. Afterwards, as he circled up the ramp, the judge actually began quietly singing “Happy Birthday to You,” wagging his large head on the beat. Parked, he turned off the motor, which sent a jolt of static across the picture. The camera would remain on only for another two minutes, as it automatically powered down once the ignition was off to avoid draining the battery. But that figured to be long enough.
For a troubling instant, Skolnick started squeezing out from under the steering wheel without the money. Then he rammed himself in the head. “What a draykopf,” he complained about his absentmindedness. He squinted through the windshield and looked up and down the dim structure, then grunted audibly as he twisted around and heaved. The envelope came out like a weed he’d uprooted. He held it aloft, only inches from the camera, then jammed it into an interior pocket of his raincoat. With that, he grabbed the rearview mirror where the lens was secreted and angled it down so he could look himself over. His large features swelled across the screen as he straightened his tie. The pores on his nose were distorted to craterlike dimensions and he ran his tongue over his teeth. Then the poor bastard smiled with all his empty-noggined good humor and again began humming to himself, “Happy Birthday to You.”
ALL THE UCAS GATHERED to watch the tape. Evon briefly stole away from the office to join them. It was, as Klecker said, more fun than the movies. Afterwards, Sennett addressed the group. Today’s success made Stan seem more determined, more vital. He stood straight in his white shirt under the recessed spots.
This was a great achievement, he said, a relief of a kind and a tribute to the enormous hard work and sacrifice each one of them had made, to the months away from their families, and the strains they’d endured in living undercover. None of them had to worry any longer about saying it was all for nothing. They had put together a case Skolnick could never defend, and another one, on Malatesta, that would soon be at the same point.
But no one should forget these were simply first steps. Men like Skolnick, Sennett said, weren’t the deepest problem. They could roll up dozens of Skolnicks, and with luck they would. But the Skolnicks had been born into this system. They went along with no ability to change it. Altering things permanently meant reaching the people who were in command, who willed this to continue as a matter of personal privilege and gratification.
“Tuohey,” Sennett said, and let his determined look tick over each of them. “When we get to Tuohey, all of your magnificent efforts will have culminated not just in stats or headlines or stroke letters from D.C., suitable for framing”—there was appreciative laughter—“but a lasting change in the life of this community.”
Evon felt high from all of this, the success with Skolnick and Sennett’s address, but she found Feaver in a decidedly different mood when they drove home an hour later. The aftermath of these wired showdowns was beginning to assume a pattern. Much as Robbie enjoyed the moment, it demanded an intensity, a state of high alert and toe-dancing nimbleness, which left him depleted and also somewhat depressed as he confronted the results.
“Sometimes I sit up at night and think about all the people I’m fucking over,” he said now. “It’s starting to be a lot.” As the number of solid prosecutions mounted, Feaver often seemed caught between warring impulses of self-congratulation and loathing. She understood in a way. You couldn’t hate Skolnick. Even for her, there was no rush at the thought of him in a cell. But she felt no regrets.
“He knows what he’s doing,” said Evon.
“Do you? I mean, bringing out the worst in people and making them pay the price? You really think that’s okay?”
“Necessary,” she answered. She didn’t think what they were doing was terrible. There were good deeds and bad, like the two different sides of the highway with a stripe in between. And once people crossed over, they could just keep going. That was the sorry lesson of experience.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Robbie said, as the big car galloped up the ramp onto the highway, “but I know damn well you’re gonna scoop up the small fry and never land Brendan.” It was a jolt hearing that on the heels of Sennett’s halftime speech. But Robbie nodded to cement his opinion. “Never,” he said. “And I’m not saying anything about me. We get there, I’ll march in a straight line, do like I’m told. Stan’s got me by the short ones anyway. But Brendan’s way beyond crafty. He’ll see your shadow in the dark. My prediction is you guys aren’t gonna get close.”
“We get em all, Robbie,” she said.
“FBI’s like the Mounties?”
“You betchum.” She meant it, too. Inspired by Sennett, she felt starched by pride. People asked all the time, A nice girl like you, FBI, huh? And the truth was that she was hard put to say where it came from, being an agent, Effin Be I. The end of field hockey was like falling into a hole. Most of her Olympic teammates planned to be coaches. Life for them would remain the field: green Astroturf wet thoroughly before game time, the continual sharp crack of the ball on the stick, and thinking about how great they were when they were young. For her it was done. Because somehow the illusion that had gone with it had been exposed. She was twenty-four years old. She’d been to the Olympics. And there was still no place in the world where she felt right.
Just to look at options, she’d done the paralegal course at the law school at Iowa while she was finishing the degree requirements for her B.A. In the same kind of mood, she went to a job fair in the field house. Behind a folding table, sitting around with the recruiters from places like RJR Nabisco and American Can, were two guys from the Bureau in gray suits and government-issue glasses, types if they’d ever existed. But it clicked. Her mother’s father had been the Sheriff. He was a lifelong deputy who got the top job when his boss died on duty, buried in an avalanche he’d brought down on himself trying to blast loose a cornice that was threatening a road. Valiant. That was the word her grandfather used in mourning his friend. Like the prince, she thought, with his beautiful pageboy that resembled Merrel’s. It had become, in the tangle of things inside a little girl’s head, improbably large. The Sheriff’s star, a heavy gold medallion twice the size of what the deputies wore, looked to her as though all the power and obligation were pinned right there on her grandfather’s chest. She was halfway through Quantico when she found out that she wasn’t going to get a badge. Hoover never wanted the national police force to look as if they were police. That’s why they wore suits instead of uniforms, and carried credentials instead of a shield. But she still longed for a star of her own now and then.
Yet she’d never regretted the Bureau. She could lecture you until the next Flood about what was wrong, all the dumb acronyms that made them sound as if they were speaking in tongues, or the callous way women were treated. At Quantico, during training, she had the highest firearms scores in three years; the instructors would take her over to FATS—Firearms Automated Training System, where the guns fired laser beams, not bullets—and marvel at her reaction times. But they wouldn’t let her come out there as a full-time instructor because somebody was convinced women couldn’t handle .45s. She was lucky if every eighteen months she got to teach a two-week in-service, a training session for cops or other federal agents, most of whom were there for a boondoggle.
But being the Bureau meant being the best. They told you that at Quantico, so loudly and so often it seemed to echo from the rolling hills. And it was true. There was McManis, and Alf and Amari and Shirley Nagle to prove it. And her too. She believed every word about mission and duty. She lived it and liked it and liked herself for doing a good job right. And they’d get Brendan. Together. The FBI.
“That’s fine with me,” Feaver said when she repeated that prediction. “You put Brendan behind bars, I’ll take photos and frame them. I won’t feel bad for a minute. I mean, maybe I should. The guy’s always treated me like gold. On account of Mort, and his ma, and my ma. I’m in Brendan’s in crowd.
Which is why Sennett thinks I’ll have such a good shot at putting a knife in his back.” He shook his head again over his current life’s work of betrayal. She gave him the line, the shopworn agent’s special, for whatever comfort it offered.
“He’d do it to you, Robbie. Don’t worry.”
“Brendan? Never. Sennett came to Brendan’s doorstep, a moth can’t beat its wings as fast as he’d have told Stan to hit the road. Brendan kneels to no man. That’s like a credo. I can say a lot of bad stuff about Brendan, but these tables would never turn.”
“So what do you have against him?”
Robbie screwed up his face the way he did when he thought she was being difficult. But after a second he seemed to yield to her point.
“Meeting Brendan the first time,” he told her, “you’d say he’s charming. Likable. Poised. Humorous. Especially if you’ve got any power. Reporters, politicians, celebrities, anybody who can do him some good, he’ll bark like a seal if he thinks it’ll make you beholden. But when you get down through the layers, Brendan is an absolute fuck-hole of a human being. Here, this’ll tell you something. I mentioned Constanza, didn’t I?”
Tuohey’s secretary. Evon remembered.
“To this day, she’s sitting right outside his office. Beautiful little lady. But listen how Brendan got his mitts on her. All this time, twenty-some years now, Constanza’s married. Constanza had better English than her husband, Miguel. She made it through secretarial school, but Miguel, you know, he’s a busboy and, after all that time working around all the liquor he can steal, he’s also a drunk. The world beats him and he beats Constanza. And she’s pouring out her woes to her boss, of course, Judge Brendan. He’s touching her bruises and pretty soon other parts, but you know, Constanza is a Catholic girl of great virtue, Miguel is the hand God dealt her, she can’t be bad with Brendan and look her husband in the eye at night.
“Brendan, naturally, acts very understanding with all of this. ‘Well, we’ll just have to make Mike a better man. He needs a fresh start, a new job, a chance to feel some pride in himself.’ And Brendan gets him into the jail as a fry cook, standing behind the griddle suddenly, not carrying the slops. Miguel is muy contento. And then bad news for Miguel. He’s been riffed. All the Department of Corrections can offer him is a transfer downstate to Rudyard. ‘Oh, but that’s three hundred feefty miles from mi familia.’ A pity, they say. Of course, there’s a three-thousand-dollar raise, and a travel allowance. A travel allowance for a fry cook, right? Needless to mention, when Miguel gets there, he finds that his two off days are Monday and Thursday. He can go home maybe once a month. And never seems to notice his side of the bed is still warm. To this day—he’s the head of Food Services by now in the penitentiary, and, by magic, they keep extending his retirement date—whenever he sees Brendan, he actually kisses his hand. And Brendan, the fuck—” Robbie stopped to shoot the finger at a hard-looking fellow in a pickup who’d cut off the Mercedes. “Goddamn Brendan lets him. How can you not hate a guy like that? Whenever Miguel comes by chambers to pick up Constanza, Brendan’s number one thrill is to call her in for a little late dictation and get her to honk his horn while her hubby’s on the other side of the wall.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And you think your sex life’s strange.”
Robbie was just talking, but the remark hit her hard. She was afraid from the start that he’d put her down.
“My sex life’s not strange.” She eyed him severely.
“Then you’re the only one,” he said. “Sex is always strange. Whether it’s Brendan-strange or me-strange or you-strange, it’s strange.”
She hadn’t heard this theory yet.
“I mean, this is the most private, inner thing in life, isn’t it?” he asked her. “It comes out just a little bit differently in each of us, like a fingerprint. Who you do what with. And your fantasies. And what part you like best. And what you’re thinking. It’s unique. That’s why it’s intimate. That’s why it’s magic.”
She had once been at a sex club in San Francisco where she’d watched one woman fuck another with a dildo strapped to the crown of a leather hood on her head. There hadn’t been much magic in that. Not for her. But it was no business of his.
He took her silence to mean she required convincing.
“Here’s what I’m saying,” he said. “I picked up a woman one night. Well, ‘picked up.’ I wouldn’t say picked up. She works in the clerk’s office. I’ve known her forever. Single gal. Joyce—Well, forget her name, but you know, I like her. Anyway, we’re both pretty toasted. And we get to her place, she says, Sit down. And she takes out this photo album. Said she took the pictures herself. And they’re of her. She’s doing a sort of striptease for the camera. More than a tease. Very explicit. I don’t know if she sent this in to Collected Kinks of America. But she was ramping up to show it to somebody. And it was me. And you know, if I was a jerk, I could have laughed. But I was fascinated. And very touched. And also really turned on. Even though I wouldn’t exactly say she showed to advantage. She had pretty legs, but just about zip on top and, you know, the camera, it can be pretty harsh. But she was sharing it with me. Her strange little secret. Which was cool.” He peeked her way to see how she’d received this. “So,” he concluded, “you ought to ease up on yourself.”
“Myself? How’d I get into this?”
“Don’t give me that. I got you figured now.”
She laughed and, as soon as she’d done it, felt a tremor.
“Laugh all you like,” he said. “I know why you always wanna talk about it.”
“You’re the one always talking about it.”
“But you wanna listen.”
“A-gain?”
“It’s true.”
“The hell.”
“You can’t,” he told her.
“Can’t?” She felt a stab of apprehension. “Can’t what?”
“Be like that. Or at least what you think I am. Free. You can’t be like that.” He squared around to face her at a stoplight next to a shopping mall, teeming in the early hours of the evening. “I mean, I don’t know if your thing is girls or boys or lightning bugs, but whatever it is—you can’t. Not the way you’d like. Maybe you can’t come. Or maybe you’re too frozen up, inhibited, whatever you call it, to actually get it on with anybody. Or maybe you’ve gotten tanked and gone out for anything that comes your way and there’s still a whole big country of pleasure you know you can’t get to. But it’s something like that. Don’t tell me I’m wrong, because I know I’m not.”
It was a form of punishment to have to meet his eye. The heat of her flush had reached her scalp and her gut pinched. But she didn’t lock away. And in the few seconds that passed, another of those things that seemed to happen between them occurred. He was the one who emerged looking abashed and somewhat caved in on himself. He was the first to break off, to flip up the switch for the sunroof and fiddle pointlessly with all the other dials in the walnut console. He was the one who didn’t dare look at her the rest of the way home.
22
“GEORGE, I’VE BEEN MEANING TO CALL you,” said Morton Dinnerstein. I had just stepped into one of the elevators beside the grand lobby of the LeSueur. As soon as Mort saw me, he lit up with his silly off-center smile. I was a referring attorney now, a source of income and someone to whom he was obliged to show gratitude and charm. He pumped my hand several times. But it turned out he had serious business on his mind. “You didn’t by any chance get the settlement check on this Petros v. Standard Railing matter, did you? The guy who fell out of the balcony at the Hands game? The thing was over two months ago and this McManis is stringing Robbie along.”
In the brass-ribbed elevator, with the artful festoonery adorning the grillwork, I suddenly felt like a bird in a cage. I remained determined not to lie for the government.
Not so far as I know, I told him.
“And the client, this Peter Petros, he isn’t banging your door down? That’s a mi
racle. Where’d you find this guy, George? There must be a couple more like him somewhere on earth.”
I laughed far too robustly at Morty’s humor and looked up desperately at the old-fashioned clocklike mechanism that counted the floors.
“I’m going to get this taken care of this week, George,” Mort promised as I alighted. It was nearing April 15, and I guess Mort, like most Americans, was scrounging for tax money.
Again and again, Petros confirmed the lesson I’d learned over the years watching my wife, Patrice, practice architecture: you can never plan well enough. Life will always outwit you. The devices employed to avoid detection of the Project were elaborate. With no questions asked, the General Counsel at Moreland had agreed, as part of their continuing cooperation with Stan’s office, to confirm McManis’s role with the company. Every plaintiff and defendant in the contrived cases had a listing with directory assistance and a phone number that forwarded to Amari’s desk, as well as post office boxes from which the UCAs dutifully collected the mail. The companies created, like Standard Railing, were registered with the Secretary of State. But there was no controlling random events.
The day Skolnick had pressured McManis to settle the painter’s case, Klecker had rushed to the courthouse to correct a problem with the FoxBIte only to find, as he went through the metal detector, that he’d left his gun on under his jumpsuit. Amazingly, he’d gotten away with rapping on it and telling the deputies it was a tool. But the whole Project might have come down at that moment. Then last week a law student in Malatesta’s class had called Feaver. He happened to have been in court, watching the judge on the bench, the day Silvio had ruled on the motion to dismiss in Petros and the student was now thinking of doing a paper on the case for a seminar. Feaver told him he couldn’t discuss the matter without the client’s consent, but everyone was living in dread that the student might decide to investigate on his own.