“Truth? I make it up. Whatever will play. If she says breast cancer, I’ll say, ‘Amazing, God, my old man died of breast cancer. What man gets breast cancer? Two in ten thousand. But I’m scared to death of that.’”
“That’s not true, though, right?”
“My old man may be alive for all I know.”
“But they buy it?”
“Some. The ones who want to go with me. Either she buys it or she knows at least that I care about making her comfortable. So she’s not afraid to get on to what happens next. You know?”
Evon didn’t answer.
“If it’s perfect,” he said, “we have a good meal, and we split a bottle of some red wine so fantastic it could burn a hole in your sock. And then we drift back to her homestead or the Dulcimer, and I always ask this…” He dared for a second to look her way. “Where should I touch you first?”
She was briefly aware of the river of sensation rushing past her shoulders.
“Maybe you want me to come up softly from behind and put my palms on your hips. Maybe you like having your breasts touched in just this way. Almost not a touch. A hint. A grazing. Like a breath. So that your nipples get so hard it’s a little painful in your clothing.”
“Not me,” she said quietly. “Don’t talk about me.” The words had not quite cleared her throat. She had thought when she started to speak that she was going to tell him to stop completely.
“I take my time with the clothes. I’ve never cared for the strip-down-and-do-it stuff, like there’s a meter going in a taxi. Some people, all this buildup, and then it’s, Hey, let’s get it over with. I take my time. A skirt, a blouse. I like the layers. I like to say hello to each new part like it’s a jewel. Hey, look at this elbow! This shoulder. Then something sudden. Maybe I slide my tongue halfway down her ear. But I want it to be right. Everybody’s so different when it comes down to, you know, the little mannerisms of pleasure. Hard or slow. Touch me here but not there. I always want to know. I want both of us to be free. This one gets off by rubbing my business with her titties, and that one can’t come unless my finger’s up her fanny. But it’s always a gift. Always. Even if it was a five-minute stand-up in a phone booth, I’ve kept a piece of every woman I’ve ever made love to with me. Glory us,” he concluded.
She had not said a thing. Sometimes it was amazing that life had gone on. It went on and you didn’t know exactly what had happened. She didn’t know now. Across the city, somewhere, a lowing truck horn boomed out. She was going to tell him to stop. For good. If he went on, she’d tell him. But he didn’t.
“So what are you scared of?” he asked. She laughed, but he insisted. She didn’t have to reveal any details of her forsaken identity, he said, but she couldn’t simply be the interrogator. “What’s your Big One?” he asked her.
She looked out the window. Near nine o’clock, a young boy who had apparently been sent down the block to the corner store waited for the light, coatless in the cold as he clutched a brown sack.
“Death,” she said.
“That doesn’t count. Everybody’s scared of death.”
“No, I mean, it’s very strange. Some moments, I just know it. As if there’s a record stuck in my head. ‘This will end. This will end. This will end.’ I just see the light closing off, me disappearing. I can’t even move I’m so scared.” Alone. That was the worst part somehow. Fully, inalterably alone. She did not say that.
He took his time. Reflections from the road ran up the front window as the car started forward again from a light. With his serious mood, his handsomeness once more took on depth.
“And you?” she asked. “What’s your Big One?”
“Me?” He shook his head.
“Come on.”
“No laughing, right? That’s definitely part of the deal. I never laugh. I mean, a girl once told me she was afraid that as she got older she’d get ugly feet. And she meant it. I didn’t even laugh at her.”
She promised, but he took another moment.
“Sometimes I wake up at night—I mean, this is ridiculous—but sometimes I wake up, it’s dark, and I don’t know who I am. I’m just petrified. I don’t know if I can’t remember because I’m so terrified or if it’s the other way around. I mean, I can remember my name. If someone called me Robbie, sure, I’d answer. But I don’t really feel a part of anything else. I’m just sort of floating, groping along in the dark, waiting, waiting and waiting, until it comes back to me, who I am, what I am, the center. And I’m just terrified. Does that sound too weird?”
“Uh-uh.”
“You’re being nice.”
“No, I’m not.” She tried again for one second to call herself back, to think about what she was doing, and then once again succumbed. “Now. Doing this. Being UC. Undercover? I wake up and that’s exactly how I am. ‘Who am I? Who am I?’ As if I have to wait to be told.”
They were in front of her apartment.
“Frightening,” he said.
“Really,” she answered.
She turned to him then, but he had the good sense, whatever you’d call it, the intuition to make no move. He was going to let her come to him and in some infinitesimal fraction of time seemed to know that even now that was not what she’d choose. She endured an instant of pain so intense and familiar that it seemed almost a friend, then with a single solemn nod in his direction she left the comfort of the Mercedes and, in the harsh wind of the midwestern winter, picked her way between the ice patches on the street, returning to the place where she lived.
MARCH
15
“THERE ARE DEAD MEN,” SAID ROBBIE Feaver, “who are not as dumb as Barnett Skolnick. You stand before the bench, you think, God, how did this ox ever pass the bar exam? Then you realize he didn’t. Knuckles, his brother, fixed it.”
Knuckles, long gone now, was said to have fixed much more in his time than the bar exam. An associate of Toots Nuccio, he drew on the same wellsprings of influence, political clout enhanced by substantial mob ties. His nickname referred to his right hand, misshapen as the result of an infamous racial brawl at Trappers Field in the 1940s. He had been a downtown party committeeman, and the proprietor of a vast insurance agency that enjoyed uncanny success in underwriting municipal agencies.
“As the story goes,” Robbie told us, “Knuckles had to put Barney on the bench because he was too dim to practice. The guy can’t zip his fly without an instruction book. These days, at least, he looks like a judge. Beautiful head of white hair. But he just sort of sits there with this sweet, terrified expression. ‘Gosh, I like you all, please don’t ask me any hard questions.’ Rules of evidence? This schmo’s been on the bench twenty-six years and he couldn’t guess what hearsay is if you gave him multiple-choice. God only knows what Brendan owed Knuckles. Skolnick’s been here since Brendan became Presiding Judge.”
It was late afternoon. The sun was dying with style, looking, in its descent, as if it might burn a hole in the river. We sat with pretzels and soft drinks in the conference room while Robbie went on. By now all of the UCAs would make it a point to crowd into the room for Robbie’s debriefings, extended adventures, as they were, in the oral tradition. With his shirtsleeves rolled and his hands flowing through the air, Robbie worked his audience with care, aiming some gesture of connection—a deft smile, a decisive nod—at every person. Watching, I often thought about how magical he must have been before a jury.
“For all of it, it’s still hard to hate Barney. I know you’ll never believe this, Stan, but he’s a sweet guy. Doesn’t want to hurt a soul. Honest to God, he takes the money because his big brother told him to. They even tell a story about Skolnick, Lord knows if it’s true, but it’s a great tale. About twenty years ago, he’s sitting in Divorce, not long after he first came on the bench. I can’t remember who the lawyers were, two of the gods over there, guys who can talk to the judges. Well, apparently Skolnick’s getting ready to start trial, and all the sudden he calls the attorneys back into chambers, just them, an
d he gets the two into the far corner and in this iddy-biddy little voice he says, ‘Just so you know, the dough is even, so I gotta decide this straight.’”
According to Robbie, Skolnick had been bagged for several years by his court reporter, a Hasidic Jew by the name of Pincus Lebovic. Blue-eyed and foxy-looking behind the dense brown growth of his beard and pais, Pincus in his dark, outdated suits presided over the courtroom in a style bordering on tyrannical. He was cold-blooded and peremptory. It was even said that, on occasion, Pincus would halt proceedings, purportedly to change the paper in his stenographic machine, but actually to take the judge back to chambers to give him directions or, even, a scolding. The recognized brains of the team, Pincus handled all arrangements with the lawyers who ‘talked’ to the judge.
Then, last spring, Pincus’s seventh child, his first son, was struck with encephalitis. Like a body on a bier, the boy floated toward the gates of death and lingered there for days. Pincus and his wife and their daughters sat beside the boy’s hospital bed, singing to him, praying over the small, somnolent form, and begging the boy, whenever he could be roused, not to leave them. He did not. No one knew exactly what the terms were of the bargain Pincus had struck with the Almighty, but he was a changed person. He grew almost affable, and was unpleasant only when approached in his role as intermediary. He was now adamant in his refusal to take part in any further ugliness.
For some months there was, in effect, a corruption embargo in Skolnick’s courtroom. Skolnick was far too kindhearted to dismiss his court reporter and not quite certain anyway what Pincus, in his reformed state of godliness, might say when questioned about the reasons for his departure by the likes of Stew Dubinsky, who covered the courthouse for the Trib. For a few weeks, the judge succeeded in convincing his secretary, Eleanor McTierney, to handle the envelopes, but Eleanor’s husband was a police lieutenant, whose scruples stretched no further than to live and let live. At sixty-eight, Skolnick might have simply gone without, but that would have meant cutting off Tuohey as well. As a result, Skolnick would have had to accept demotion to a less esteemed courtroom—Housing Court or, worse, the ultimate hellhole, Juvenile—the kind of ego blow that Barney, like most victims of justifiable self-doubt, would have found devastating. Thus, in desperation, Skolnick began dealing hand to hand with a few well-accepted insiders, Robbie among them.
Skolnick, at least, had the sense not to allow money to pass within the courthouse. Instead, he established a schmaltzy routine in which the briber-to-be left a message from ‘tomorrow’s luncheon committee.’ The next day, at 12.30 p.m. sharp, the attorney would take a position curbside, right in front of the Temple, possessed of a cash-filled envelope and a vexed expression. Skolnick, in his Lincoln, would tool by and, noting a familiar face, pull over, inquiring if there was a problem. The lawyer would then impart a tale of automotive woe—car wouldn’t start, had been towed, stolen, sideswiped—and Judge Skolnick would offer emergency transportation. Skolnick would then circle through the Center City, while the lawyer in the passenger seat stuffed the envelope into the breach between the red calfskin backrest and the front bench.
Robbie had done this once last September, not long before Stan and his companions from the IRS had arrived on the flagstone stoop of his home. Feaver was due for another visit with Skolnick now, in early March, because Skolnick had ruled in Robbie’s favor only a day or two after the case reassigned from Judge Sullivan had arrived on his docket. In that matter, Hall v. Sentinel Repair, Skolnick had ruled that Robbie’s client, a driver paralyzed when the brakes failed on his truck, was eligible to receive punitive damages from the repair service that had found the vehicle roadworthy. Unlike Malatesta, Skolnick had dealt with the matter summarily, issuing a brief written order. Robbie would now tell the judge that the case had been settled favorably and would leave the envelope behind in appreciation.
Sennett was under increasing pressure from D.C. to justify the expense of the Project by scoring against one of the primary targets. Given that, and the fact that this would be Petros’s first direct payoff to a judge, Sennett wanted it in Technicolor. The afternoon before Robbie was scheduled to see Skolnick, Klecker visited the section reserved for judges’ cars on the first floor of the Temple parking garage, the same building where Robbie and Walter had met. With local agents covering Alf from all sides, he drove an ice pick through three of Judge Skolnick’s tires. When Skolnick trudged out of the courthouse for the day, in an old rabbit hat and a lumpy muffler knitted by his granddaughter, the agents had him under surveillance. They radioed Alf, and just as Skolnick reached the lamed automobile, Klecker came ripping down the concrete ramp in a tow truck with a huge smoking engine. He jumped on the brake and leaped from the vehicle in a greasy jumpsuit and a seed cap. Alf had a bridge, a memento of his years as a high school ice hockey player in Minnesota, and he had removed his front teeth as part of his disguise. The agents said that when he talked he was pretty much a dead ringer for Sylvester, the puddy-tat.
“Got you too?” asked Alf.
“Hah?” replied Skolnick. He was still shaking his head in embittered wonderment at the sight of the flats.
Alf related that miscreant youths had apparently gone through the parking garage popping tires on a number of cars. He offered to tow Skolnick’s Lincoln. Given the hour, he could not return it that night, but he promised to drive the car back to the judge’s house by eight the next morning. He’d give Skolnick a great price on tires and would even reduce the towing fee, assuming the judge wouldn’t forget Alf next time he needed to talk to somebody with a little pull in the courthouse when one of his guys got in a scrape on a repo.
When the vehicle was returned to Skolnick, it was somewhat enhanced. As promised, it had three fresh Dunlop X80s. It also sported a new rearview mirror, a one-way, into which a fiber-optic lens and a mike had been inserted. The input devices were wired to a 2.4 GHz cordless sound camera resting on the ribs of the auto’s ceiling. Leads ran down from the roof, through the hollow temple beside the windshield, to an existing junction box under the hood, so that the car’s battery powered the camera.
“Fry the guy with his own juice.” Alf beamed at his achievements. He described the apparatus to Robbie when we met at McManis’s about eleven-thirty on the morning of March 5 to prepare for the encounter with Skolnick. The camera, which was turned on and off by remote, operated much like a cordless phone. It emitted a black-and-white video signal over four channels. Along with the audio output, the impulse could be picked up from a surveillance van as far away as four hundred feet. The transmission was admittedly subject to occasional interference, and as a backup, Robbie was also wired with the recording component of the FoxBIte. It was Velcroed today to the small of his back in order to avoid any revealing bulges at the thigh when Feaver sat with the judge on the lipstick-red leather seat of the Lincoln.
Along with Sennett and McManis, I had my reserved spot in the surveillance van. We circled in front of the Temple, waiting for Skolnick to pick up Feaver. Amid the thick electrical odors, Klecker crawled around on the van floor in a snake pit of cables. A small monitor with a twelve-inch screen and a VCR had been added atop the pyramid of equipment that had been there the day Robbie paid off Walter.
“We’re going,” Joe Amari called from the front, meaning that Skolnick had arrived and Robbie was on board. Joe’s responsibility on Petros was surveillance. Sennett had allowed him to put together a select group of local agents from the Kindle County Division to help. As he weaved through the traffic, he made hand signals to the other cars. He wore a radio headset with a mike, which dented his smooth hairdo, but Klecker wanted him to stay off the air, if possible, to avoid disrupting the camera’s signal, the same reason he’d removed the broadcasting component from the FoxBIte.
For the moment, Joe’s assignment was to pull close enough to Skolnick that the camera could be activated by way of the remote Klecker held. Although the camera functioned from some distance, the infrared remote that controlled
it worked only within thirty feet. It was plain from the tense instructions Stan issued to both Alf and Joe that he’d had some trouble convincing Moira Winchell, Chief Judge of the Federal District Court, to sign the warrant authorizing installation of the camera. The nature of the intrusion had seemingly mortified her, inasmuch as Moira was both a judge and a car owner. Stan had reminded the agents that Judge Winchell had directed that the camera could be turned on only when Feaver was seen with Skolnick in the auto.
“Hit it,” Amari yelled out now. The small black-and-white monitor sprang to life, and we all canted forward in anticipation, while Klecker activated the VCR.
The bribery of judges is eternal. At common law, before there were statutes and codes, the word ‘bribe’ meant only this: a benefit conferred to influence a judge. It began as soon as King John signed Magna Carta and set up the courts. Probably before. Probably when Adam tried to reason with God about Eve, the first man offered Him something on the side. What we were there to see held the fierce primal attraction of any elemental wrong.
The initial picture was unfocused, a Hadean scene in which Robbie and Skolnick were reduced to images as indistinct as smoke. Klecker called directions to Amari, while Alf frantically squeezed buttons on the tiny remote. As always, the picture got worse before it got better, and then Skolnick detoured through Lower River, a covered roadway where the light was poor. But when he emerged, a relatively crisp image appeared, Feaver and Skolnick each slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens. If we fell farther behind, the digital imagery became weirdly aligned, so that little pieces of Robbie and Skolnick slid off the screen. But when Amari was able to stay within seven or eight car lengths, there was good reception.
The two men started out with warm greetings and ranged companionably over a number of topics. At McManis’s instruction, Robbie also complained about having had his tires punctured yesterday in the courthouse garage, and he and Skolnick bemoaned their shared misfortune and the deterioration of society.