A noose? I asked.
“In the eyes of a prosecutor. Or a best friend. Sennett appeared ebullient. But perhaps it was the letter ‘b.’ Or ‘R,’ for Robbie. Or simply a nervous gesture. A matter of opinion, no? And at any rate, it might be passed off as table talk, an impulse. Without some subsequent act to make the meaning more specific, it’s worth very little as evidence. No?” Stern swirled down the last of his scotch and held it in his mouth a moment to enrich the descent.
“Those are the major details. My client instructed me to report them, for whatever they might be worth. Your discretion, as always, George, is depended upon and appreciated.” He took my hand then and squared himself to seek my eyes. “There is deep feeling between these men,” he said. “Your client has already heard this directly from Dinnerstein, amid a predictable flurry of tears.”
And how had Robbie reacted? I preferred not to touch tissue so raw with my client. But these were the imperial moments of the criminal lawyer’s life. What did humanity say and do in extremis, when a death sentence was pronounced, when a jury set a guilty man free, when a fellow found that the dearest friend of a lifetime had betrayed him? How could the impoverished gestures of daily existence accommodate such a momentous change in understanding? Stern needed no explanation why I wanted to know. Instead, he let his eyes go to the oak beams crossing the ceiling, sharpening his recall of the answer to the question he, too, had asked.
“I am told,” he said, “that Feaver said, ‘What else could you do? With the kids? With Joan? What else could you do?’” Stern brought his small alert eyes back to mine. “Interesting fellow,” he added.
44
“SO WHAT ELSE COULD HE DO, RIGHT?” Robbie asked Evon. She’d had a moment of terror when it turned out Feaver had left the office unaccompanied, but he turned up in the first place she’d looked, here at home. There were two Glen Ayre cops in front, reminding several camera operators from local TV stations exactly where the Feavers’ property line fell. The officers said they had been running up and down the block for a while, shooting through the windows. There’d been a few more who’d left after getting several seconds of Robbie in the Mercedes as he came up the driveway. One jerk rushed in front of the car and Robbie had rolled him right off the hood. The coppers were still laughing about it.
She approached the door in a brusque mood, but Robbie looked like hell and he’d told her straightaway about Mort. Feaver wept, describing how Mort, too, had bawled like a baby as he admitted that he’d given up Robbie to the government to save his own skin. He didn’t put a prettier face on it. But he still wanted to be forgiven. And Robbie forgave him. Mort had the kids and Joan. Mort was Mort and he was Robbie. There was stuff each of them could do the other couldn’t, they’d always known that, and Mort couldn’t handle pen time, no way was it possible. So what else could he do?
In the paralyzed stillness that followed, she attempted to let her feelings go to him, but they became caught up instead in shock for her own sake. There were a million details to sort through, months of events that she knew intuitively had an entirely different shape than what she thought she’d seen. What the hell had she been doing here? Why an undercover agent in the office, if Mort was already reporting to Stan? But that was obvious after a while. She was a beard for Mort, to keep Robbie unsuspecting about who was really informing on him, as happened, for example, with Magda. And without recognizing she was doing it, she in turn was watching Mort for Sennett. All of them secretly spying on somebody and Sennett the only one to know the truth. He must have felt like God on a bad day, laughing at all His creatures.
Embarrassed, Evon nevertheless told Robbie at last what she was supposed to: Sennett wanted the tape.
“Well, I don’t have it. Not now. And George told me not to say anything else.”
She tipped a hand. She wasn’t going to quarrel. She called McManis to tell him Feaver was okay.
“Glad there’s one of us.” McManis had just learned about Mort from Sennett, who had been forced to explain what Tuohey meant on the tape. Jim had spent about ten minutes alone, then raised D.C. and asked them to start scouting around for a replacement, somebody to run the Project as it moved into its next phase. Thirty days was the best he could give them. The personalities here, he said, were just too rugged.
Jim had already said goodbye to her before he remembered to ask about the videotape. For the moment, he didn’t sound as if he cared much more than she did. Thinking about it, as she cradled the phone, she realized what must have been getting to McManis. Not just Sennett. But UCORC. They’d agreed from the start that Jim wouldn’t get the skinny about Mort. Some of that was understandable. Agencies rarely shared snitches. The IRS had Mort and kept him to themselves. Need-to-know, after all. But Jim had been sent out here to do all the heavy lifting, risk the life and limb of his people on the understanding he was in charge. The truth was he was just another marionette, and one who’d worked for months away from home on a case where the IRS, which had developed the critical information, would get most of the credit.
She found Robbie in the kitchen, a gigantic space, where one side was given over to floor-length sliding windows, another wall to a series of restaurant appliances which Rainey’d had privately enameled in the brightest white known to humanity. Robbie took a half-eaten chicken out of the refrigerator. They sat together at the small breakfast bar and picked at the meat while they each drank a beer. They said very little at first, then, unexpectedly, he began talking about Mort.
“You know, I didn’t like Morty at first. When I was a kid?”
“Really?” She tried to make her curiosity sound more remote than it was, but the pang which remained seemed to constrict the word.
“Well, I’m six years old. That’s when my father ditched us and my ma parked me next door with Sheilah Dinnerstein so she could go to work. Now, naturally, I feel like I’ve been given the greatest screwing since Jehovah called time and adiosed everybody from the garden. I’m all alone and I’m stuck with this geek with a leg brace, this strange, sickly momma’s boy, who can’t run, who’s got this drippy nose and this weird hair, who spent a summer in an iron lung, which made him as frightening to me as the Mummy. Not to mention that his mother’s a goy in a neighborhood with thirteen synagogues in eight square blocks.”
Robbie had begun solemnly, but by now he’d taken on some of the brightness that inevitably reflected from him as he told his stories.
“So for a good six months solid I was ragging on Morty and slapping him around. And one day I give him a belt as usual for the pure pleasure of watching him cry, and something in his eyes—It came through like a rocket, this is the moment of my life. I said to myself, almost out loud: Morty feels just as bad as I do. I’m six, seven years old now, so I mean this is basically E=mc2 for somebody at that age—and I don’t know, that young, you have to say it was only a feeling, but I knew then everybody’s got this, what I felt, this hurt, everybody has it somewhere in their heart. And I knew that I’d never really get away from it, and neither would anyone else. And life bears that out, doesn’t it? It’s being poor, or being alone, or being sick, it’s not being loved enough or not loving the way you want to, it’s feeling you’re the doormat to the world, or a mean crud, or just not quite as good as the people you want to be like or be with. But it’s always something, and it’s devouring, for most people, this parasite always eating a hole in their hearts.
“And I wondered, I wondered and wondered why. Why did God make a world where everybody’s heart is in pain? And hanging with Morty, looking at him, you know what I figured out? The answer. I mean, I think I did. You know why it’s like that? So we need each other. So we don’t just each take our guitars and go off one by one to the jungle and eat the breadfruit that falls off the trees. It’s so we stick with each other, do for each other, and build up the world. Because misery does love company, and another soul’s comfort is the only balm for the wounds.
“And how would you say it? How do the
y put it in the Bible? ‘The shadow of God came over him.’ I looked at Mort and knew all of that. And Mort knew that, too. And from then on, we just sort of held on to each other for dear life.”
She did not know exactly what this meant now, and neither did he. Perhaps he was saying again that he forgave Mort, or was explaining why he would have to. Or perhaps he was telling her that Mort had violated the fundamental assumptions of their relationship. He twirled the chicken’s wishbone in his fingers and considered it in the kitchen’s nuclear glow, resuming his silence.
Talking to McManis, she’d volunteered to stand guard over Robbie again tonight. There were several agents who’d be arriving shortly to cover the house, but this, after all, had been her assignment to start, to keep an eye on Feaver. Right now she had no other place to stay, anyway. There were reporters encamped in the lobby of her building, hoping to get a look at Secret Special Agent Evon Miller.
Elba called down that Rainey’s eyes had opened and Robbie was gone for quite some time. Rainey had seen something about him on TV during the day. He was going to tell her the story, he said, in about three sentences and skip prison. She was too weak to summon much, by now, even occasionally too weary to wear the laser contraption that looked like a miner’s light which she’d been using to control the computer and the voice device.
While he was gone, Evon settled herself again in the spare room on the second floor. It was done up with elaborate yellow frills on the window treatments and the coverlet, a dayroom of kinds. She still could not accommodate herself to this life where money was spent just to be spending money. Looking for a pillowcase, she wandered into the would-be nursery for Nancy Taylor Rosenberg next to the Feavers’ bedroom. A sofa bed was made up. Both Elba and Robbie took spells sleeping in here, while the other was looking over Rainey, massaging, applying lotion, checking the oxygen and the color of her fingernails. Through the wall, she could hear the clanking from the cuirass as it finished its cycle of compression. Over it, intermittently, Robbie’s voice was audible, cresting in the plaintive timbre of some disagreement. The speech synthesizer carried clearly through the plaster, but Rainey lacked the energy to employ it very often. Evon, however, heard one phrase that sent a shock straight to the marrow.
“You Promised,” the robot declared.
Robbie emerged a few minutes later, as Evon was going back down the corridor, and he motioned her once more into the nursery. He was blowing his nose.
“She wants to talk to you later. Now that she knows you’re FBI, she thinks you’ll make me keep my word.” He smiled faintly, but she felt a pulse, colder and more desperate, of what had traveled through her a moment before. She and Robbie had never spoken about this. Rainey must have just told him that she’d confided in her. Discovered in unexpected possession of a secret so intimate, Evon felt a brief impulse to double over in shame.
She said softly, “You don’t have to do that, Robbie.”
“Yes I do. I can’t say I was lying. Not this time. I promised if she took it a day at a time, she’d always be in control. You’d do it, too, Evon. If you’d promised. If it was someone you loved.”
Would she? The horror of the prospect sank through her. It was easy to say no, never, she’d learned right from wrong in church and in school, but those lessons took the living as healthy hopeful creatures, not the poor suffering soul who lay next door already most of the way to passing. The doctor visited every day now. He had told Robbie that he’d had one ALS patient who’d chosen ventilation at the ultimate moment, and remained alive for several more years. For days, Robbie had awaited that change of heart. But Rainey had seemingly made the other choice. As a trapped moth beats its wings, she breathed now, with famished urgency, requiring too much effort to allow normal slumber. The deprivation of oxygen and sleep would soon produce a hallucinatory state. While some clarity remained, Rainey was determined to go.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “maybe Saturday. There are a few people she has to see. I don’t know what to do about Morty and Joan right now. And I want to get past this fucking grand jury thing.” Sennett had called the first session of the Petros grand jury for the next day. Robbie raked his fingers back through his hair and took a seat on the sofa bed. “It’s not like you’re thinking anyway. It’s just letting nature take its course.”
“I’m not judging, Robbie. Nobody has that right.”
He accepted the reassurance, but, as ever, he talked. The doctor and he had tiptoed around this subject pretty carefully, he said. There were vials of leftover sleeping pills lined up on the bookshelf near her bed. Just a normal dose, the same amount she’d been taking a month ago, would be enough to plunge her into a slumber that would persist when he disconnected the cuirass. That was all. She would go on her own, in ten to twenty minutes, in peace. He was entirely still, imagining the event, the reality of being there with her at the moment she went from the present to the past. He took as much of it as he could stand, then his mind, predictably, jumped.
“So what exactly did you girls do that day when you were alone?”
She was vague. Read, she said. Talked sometimes.
“About?”
“You two,” she said. “Love.”
“Yeah, love,” he answered and shook his head over the largeness of life. Then he angled his face in curiosity. “What about you?” he asked “Ever been in love? Along the way? Like I told you about Rainey? You know: Boom. She’s right. She fits. She gets me and I get her.”
“You mean do lesbians fall in love?”
He reared back. “Fine, you don’t want to talk about it, fine.”
She suffered herself a second, then apologized, battling back the reflex not to answer him, or herself. Had she been in love? Tina Criant, if that had happened, that might have been love. But it hadn’t and she wasn’t going to pretend.
No, she told him, she couldn’t say she’d been in love.
“That’s too bad,” he answered. “You missed a lot of fun.” He gave her a level look. “There isn’t a bonus round, you know.” To soften that, he took her hand for a second. Then he seemed to come back to his own troubles.
“Jesus,” he said. “Talk about the week from hell.” He keeled over on the sofa bed and lay immobile a second, his arms thrown wide. “So would it like violate the FBI Code of Honor if I ask you to sit here for a little, while I sleep?”
“Nope.”
“I mean—”
“Hey,” she said.
He did not bother undressing or pulling the coverlet back. She went down and got a magazine to read by the hall light. His eyes popped open when she returned.
“So can I say I slept with you now?”
She reached over to bat his foot with the copy of People.
“Straight up,” he said, “have you ever thought about that?”
“What?”
“Sleeping with me.”
Good Lord! She shot her eyes toward the wall behind which his wife lay dying.
“I mean, I understand that I’m not the main attraction,” he said. “And I’m not even hinting about anything real. But I just wondered, if just for a second—”
“People think a lot of things for just a second, Robbie. Most of the world’s inside your head, right? But that’s not my play.”
“No, I know,” he told her quickly. He was pleased nonetheless.
She looked at him with the feeling of something as large as a monument moving within her. How in the world could you ever explain this? They said some sculptors often saw form, beauty in the flaws within stone.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
He did. His mouth at moments moved involuntarily like a baby’s, smacking his lips.
Once the silence settled in, she felt something returning that she’d shunted away. Then Pandora’s trunk swung wide open and she heard him again: No bonus round.
She crept down the hall to one of the bathrooms, needing to contend with that in privacy. She knew. Oh, she knew. There were moments when she felt she w
ould melt with sheer yearning. But she didn’t want what some other people settled for, what Merrel had with her husband, a love inseparable from the riches the world showered on him, or even what Rainey had put up with, loved, but as a captive, humiliated and paralyzed long before her body had deserted her. She needed something better than either woman had. So she just had to hope, like so many other people in the world, who went to bed each night and prayed, God, God, please send me love. She prayed. It was probably going to be a woman, almost for certain. She’d gotten herself that far. But today, examining herself in a mirror again under harsh light, she believed for the first time in her life that she’d actually recognize love and be willing to accept it when it came along. She’d missed her chances in the past, she knew that. But she believed—oh, truly believed as you did when the feeling of the holy entered your heart—she believed she was ready. She turned on a faucet and briefly bathed her face, then let her eyes rise so she could see herself as she dared even to think it.
She was someone else.
45
WHEN OUR LAW SCHOOL FRIEND CLIFTON Bering was prosecuted for the bribe he’d accepted in that hotel room, Stan not only withdrew from Clifton’s case but appeared as a witness in his behalf at his sentencing. It was a dramatic gesture, fond and forgiving, and I always admired Stan for it. But it also burnished the patina on his statue. It was important to Stan, the racially sensitive Republican, to be seen as Clifton’s friend. The same, I realized, could not be said about me.
Sennett was sitting on the hood of my car when I got back to the garage under the LeSueur after my meeting with Stern. As I subsequently learned, agents had been out looking for me. When one of them had noticed me trudging down Marshall Avenue, Sennett had been called and he’d relieved the G-man who’d been staked out on my BMW. There was another agent at the door to my office and a third waiting a discreet distance down the block from my home.