Blood Acre

by Peter Landesman

  "I wouldn't mind," Schreck says, and reaches for the cup.

  But Santos intercepts Schreck's wrist and brings it down to the table and pins it there. A glass falls to the floor and is smashed. "We're good," Santos says.

  The waitress returns to the counter and withdraws behind the coffee urn.

  "Why are you trying to give me Nathan?" Santos says.

  Schreck lifts his free hand, as if in surrender. "We've known each other a long time."

  "You've known Nathan a long time, too."

  "We're just talking here," Schreck says.

  "I'm glad you brought that up. Why are we doing that?"

  "I'm a lawyer," Schreck says.

  "Is that what you are?”

  "I'm obligated to give you evidence in my possession.”

  "You're not, actually," Santos says, "as a point of law.”

  "But you're telling us the truth," Barbados says. He looks at Santos. "He's a lawyer. It's the truth. He says it is."

  "Absolutely," Schreck says. "I'm done here."

  Barbados says, "Because you do have the right to remain silent."

  "What are you, reading me my rights?"

  "Don't look so worried," Barbados says. He is grinning openly. "Did you understand that part?”

  "Am I under arrest?"

  "Are you with me, Oliver?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "You have the right to consult an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning now or in the future. Do you understand that?"

  "You guys are fucking with me.” Schreck smiles at one face then the other. "I haven't done anything wrong."

  "Don't count on it," Santos says.

  "If you cannot afford an attorney," Barbados says. "One will be provided for you without cost.”

  Schreck is sputtering. "I am an attorney."

  “Is that so?" Barbados says.

  Schreck begins to smirk. "Though I do have a lawyer."

  "Who might that be?"

  "But it's Nathan."

  Silence erupts among the three of them, as if they've all Just realized their part in the farce, that they could have gone right to this part, skipped the rest.

  Schreck laughs with relief. "You guys are fucking with me."

  Santos's eyes are dull with grief. "We could never use this conversation," he says.

  Schreck lifts a shoulder. "I see a man in need."

  "That's not why you're here," Barbados says.

  Santos is shaking his head. "I know Nathan Stein."

  "No, Detective Santos, I don't think you do."

  But Santos does know Stein. He sees with perfect clarity a picture of Nathan with his arms around him and his new wife, the three leering drunkenly, smiles pasted and eyes gooey. He catches Nathan watching from the East Hampton living room across the patio, observing through two glass doors as they fucked in the yellow bug light of their room. Behind them, writhing on the wall, their silhouettes a pair of underwater swimmers dolphin-kicking in embrace. The shadows of moths flying overhead like a mute flock of birds.

  They slept in that house where he lived, the weekend house listing on a hill pale and blind. Nathan had brought Santos shopping for the bed. The matching sheets, the night tables. Pick a pattern for the carpets, he'd said. Ralph Lauren. Givenchy. Nathan and his rubber-banded rolls of C-notes. Nathan was responsible for his own supply of companionship, and he summoned them one by one to his second-floor room. Agency maid. Waitress. A toll collector. Dime-store clerk. And all of them something good to look at, disarming, razor-tongued, schooled in unarticulated sorts of street intelligence. Nathan made his opening moves as in chess, well rehearsed, without hesitation, feigning interest in their mundane and clocked days. And then he offered an invitation to a swim and then dinner and then a drink on the pool deck. And then. Then night became a holiday, a celebration in honor of Nathan's catch. The speakers filled the surrounding woods with music. The four of them laughed and drank in the gurgle of the pool and the hum of its filter and the slish of Santos's new wife as she passed beneath his feet and emerged in the shallow end scaly and slick as a reptile, and Santos looked up, to the window where Nathan Stein passed with his night's reward.

  And all this time there had been Claire. The lonely Claire left at home, the serious Claire left studying, loyal Claire in Louisiana to visit family and friends. Or sad Claire, merely left. Santos would have been happier with her, with any of the Claires, happy enough, as Nathan was so obviously willing to let her go.

  In the morning Santos woke to find Nathan gone, or going, or just returned.

  Stein and antistein.

  Not actually Stein but a cardboard construction. A life-size figure of a celebrity, the kind you stand with to have your picture taken; a celebrated figure who once, many years before, when you were a child, might have been your best friend. The kind with a father for whom your mother works, cleans, takes dictation, performs duties and functions shrouded in obscure and pleasurable forms of compensation. Vases and wood boxes. Stereos.

  Santos had known him most of his life, and yet in law school Stein became a kind of celebrity to him, and to Santos's sisters and parents. Hours behind schedule, he would drive up to Washington Heights in the famous father's sleek and expensive cars, a different one every month, a Mercedes, a Lincoln, a Cadillac, another Mercedes, but not the Rolls, never the Rolls. He would come straight from court where, dressed like a dandy, he'd assisted the maestro, ready on his tongue-he could hardly get through the door before it fell out of him-an impossible story about Milton's latest client, the drug dealer or thief or rapist whose guilt was beyond question but whose rights were invariably violated by the police. The Santos family rolled their eyes. Even the mother, Milton's secretary of twenty-five years, as though she hadn't been there, hadn't helped prepare the motions, taken them down, collated them, glanced them over, passed them to Nathan herself in the well of the courtroom; as though she hadn't witnessed Milton Stein's angle, Nathan's angle too now, Stein & Stein's best and most successful defense: the irrelevance of guilt in a court of law.

  Nathan's lateness was less forgiven than sanctioned, as though they wouldn't have him any other way. And what was to be celebrated, a birthday, a holiday, was instantly forgotten, and the party they had been waiting for to begin, with Nathan's arrival, began. And the time would grow late, it would reach two, sometimes three, with Nathan sitting on the opposite end of the couch from Santos's father, both of them with their eyes closed, listening to selections from their favorite operas, highlights they would have chosen together from Mr. Santos's vast collection. Half drunk with wine and half with the opera, upright on the couch together, they lifted their hands in concert, conducting the same passage in the score.

  Nathan seduced them all. The family's love for him, its dismissal of all the questionable things it collectively suspected-the things Mrs. Santos could confirm-was almost sexual in its blindness, in its ability to look past all they did not want to see-the already sordid, the bordering-on-criminal-to see straight through to what they'd known as chaste and pure, all that he was born with. His soul. They all looked on him, went to him, with the adoration for a lover returned to them after a long absence. Nathan Stein the celebrity. As though in his presence you felt-as Errol did, always, even at the end of that time-that there were things, so many things, you had yet to do or be.

  Still, after Nathan left, Santos's own father would stand, unsteady with exhaustion, and point through the closed door, down the creaky stairs, into the night, between the tail-lights fading down the street. "Beware that," he said, about the boy he'd watched for years. "He sees everything and nothing."

  Soon opera became Santos's own need. Not the music, but something else. He listened on his shitty little stereo with the librettos before him, as Nathan instructed. Santos wanted to learn it, to duplicate the cultured and intelligent sides of Stein. The studied knowledge of Stein. Stein. Something redeeming, something tragic. Something Downtown, something Village, something
Upper East Side. To do justice to a tenement life. The deficiency being himself. He was envy. He lacked the words to describe the fundamental. He needed Nathan Stein's good looks, even their deadliness, to gain vicarious thrill. Toward Stein, toward his looks, toward the agency maids and waitresses and barrio queens he was blind devotion. Even after he married, toward Nathan's lovely fiancee, toward Claire, he was desperation. The larger reward being forgiveness. The two young men pass silently the spotlit marble of Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera House and its pink and blue illuminated fountain, the rainbow arcs of water; through the pre-opera dinner crowds chaffing in their sweat-soaked evening wear, discouraged by the blundered nighttime promise of cooler temperatures; the happy-hour crush unknotting their ties and letting down their hair. Santos follows a half pace behind Nathan through these crowds and up Columbus Avenue while into Nathan's left ear he calls out his list of inconsequential questions. Blindly he chases Nathan toward a banner and through a door and into an air-conditioned vestibule, beyond which clumps of besuited and coiffed young men and women lean on white linen and a high mahogany bar. The customers are perfect, outrageously alive, monstrously vital. The vastness of their futures. And Santos, like a dog hanging off a backyard gate, panting toward the tall grass across the road. The night is young, is always young, its possibilities limitless. And they, he and Nathan, a couple of greyhounds in pursuit of the unseen and unnamed that lay ahead in the night. A man and his spic apprentice-

  Santos has gone to the bathroom. The knocking almost brings the door down. "Errol, you all right in there?"

  Santos bends over the little sink and kneads his puffy hands. In the dim glass his face cracks into the geometric shapes of fatigue.

  Barbados is standing in the open door, Schreck a few paces behind him, looking contrite. Santos wipes his mouth. Barbados says, his voice flat, "I think there's someone else we have to talk to."

  The doorman is asleep in his greatcoat and epaulets like a Red Army soldier.

  "Ivan," Nathan calls.

  The doorman rushes the door and Nathan enters the plush, cavernous atrium. "Ivan. Good to see you again." Nathan tugs on the man's epaulets.

  Ivan stands back, heavy-lidded, swollen-faced. He smiles a gold-capped smile and presents Nathan with a double thumbs-up. "Senor Nathan, you have grown very thin. Very strong. Like a hard bull." He jabs the air with his fists. "Like when you were a young man. You exchange last year's costume for a better model. It's the senoritas, no? Keeping my boy in fighting condition?"

  Nathan shakes his head, smiling. Compadre. "Only bad luck with the sefioritas, Ivan."

  Ivan scoffs and waves him away. "You? Please, Nathan. Look who you are talking to please."

  The two men set their feet and exchange mock blows, ducking and fending off flurries. Like old friends who have made good their bond in rougher places and harder times. Nathan lets out a little laugh, as genuine a discourse as anything he's let pass all night.

  Then Ivan connects, a little slap to the side of his head. A small twinge and the lobby tips back. Nathan staggers. Ivan's hands are on his shoulders but still Nathan spins.

  "Are you drunk?"

  "I'm fine," Nathan says, brushing off his coat.

  "Your eyes are yellow."

  An edge of cold slips through the cracks of the door into the lobby. Outside, the padded silence of a car passing through the quilted streets.

  How's my father?"

  Ivan wags his finger. "We men have to take care of our fathers. In the end there is no one to understand but other men."

  Nathan eyes the doorman warily.

  "Senor?" Ivan asks.

  "No, nothing. Forget it."

  "Your father is very fine. Now he is a famous man. Tonight the sexy TV ladies were waiting for him." Ivan extends his arm and sweeps it through the lobby, indicating where they stood waiting. "You are working on the big case with him?"

  "Of course," Nathan says.

  Ivan smiles broadly. "Then you will be famous."

  "Of course."

  "Like that other case."

  "That was a long time ago."

  "The big victory."

  "Ten years ago, at least."

  "And your face, it was everywhere." He takes Nathan's shoulder in his strong hand. "I used to lift you to my shoulder and take you upstairs like a package of groceries."

  Ivan shakes his shoulder once, but still Nathan will not raise his eyes. Ivan opens his fingers and Nathan walks out from under them toward the elevator.

  "You need sleep," the doorman calls.

  He tries four or five keys from his ring before he finds one that fits his parents' door. But the door is unlocked to begin with, and when he turns the knob he stumbles in, and, stepping through a patch of streetlight to a foyer of herringbone wood, instantly regrets having come. A living room of fluted columns, teakwood newel and finial beginning a balustrade that swirls like the hem of a woman's skirt to a second level. Furniture scattered amidst a garden of low potted trees. Cherubs watch from the high corners. Nathan stands as in a small cluttered room, as though he can turn this way and that and touch the things and the people he knows, dead and alive and in various stages in between, ghosts of themselves, led by himself, the chief ghost, at eight, ten, fifteen, a package of promise and possibility.

  In a picture window branches encased in ice beckon him, like the gnarled fingers of old women. He steps into the frame and looks down to the avenue on which he was a boy, on which he did boyish things. The buildings across the park are lost in a crosshatched blur. Up and down this street, strings of Christmas lights flail like spastic jump ropes.

  Through a cut in the skyline he can see a fragment of the East River. A light passes there, police boat, garbage barge, the luminescent ice floes running to the harbor, the water ferrying them a black and silent broth, strangely, he knows, now almost level with the road. Everything is flooded. Things north have melted. But that river has always given him a childish obsession, a thrilling fright, even more than the Hudson, which is four times as wide. The Hudson-five avenues behind him-is all relaxed grandeur with its Rip van Winkle history and its source supposedly that little mossy Lake Tear of the Clouds up in the Adirondacks. A tour of America, all of it-its sail boats and water-skiers and skim ice-sliding between Westchester's old-money mansions and New jersey's Palisades. The East River on the other hand is a moat, a razor-wire fence, all rawness and urban fuckup. Running heat, eddies of unnamed spew splitting off into competing currents, rivers within rivers, one with waves and whirlpools while the next is all smooth secrets, all of it accelerating through the Bronx, then Harlem, racing down here between mid-Manhattan and the fallow cranes and dumps of Long Island City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the barred dry docks gaping eye-sockets staring unblinking at the sky. Nathan has seen them all up close. More than one client of his has turned up broken like a rag doll at the weedy bottom. The East River is his river; that river he will take, even if it kills him. The soul thrives on its sufferings. Keep the Hudson, its sailboats, its boatdocks.

  A long, tympanic roll of thunder. The window pane trembles. In the sky, the clouds are climbing, feeding on themselves. A wind has kicked up, sending waves through the trees of Central Park below, the stripped heads boiling. Something in the jagged strength of the skyline, in the designed wildness of the park, seems to be shouting at him, a voice whose cry is familiar, some youthful passion, some point of pride, the desire to do, he thinks, what is right. The tasks materialize before him one after the other, Isabel, the Russian weasel, Rikers Island, his pills, his diagnosis, his sentence, Isabel-

  He quickly turns from all of it, and, sitting back on the windowsill with his legs stretched before him, looks at the room and its gaudy furniture, at the darkened doorways leading right and left into still more familiar regions, and with fascination remembers that occasionally he once knew great happiness here. Happiness: yet it was, he knows, a life lying in wait for annual rituals to give meaning to the dead space between. So
it was a sort of life, the roads out of it to this place here where he stands already overgrown. Childhood and what? What is that? And what, he wonders, looking around the shadows of the room, at the streetlight playing through the branches on the wall-of course knowing the answer all along-was that?

  That one late autumn morning, the last day of his childhood, a clean line between before and after. He was eighteen, home for Thanksgiving from his first semester of college in already frozen Syracuse. His father had once again invited to the apartment the citizens of his own strange country, his specially cultivated blend of Treasury agents, cocaine merchants, soap opera stars, convicted rapists, gold shield detectives, a virtuoso soprano from the Met, a Colombian money launderer, a famous composer; and sprinkled throughout, a small legion of anonymous women in tight wool sheaths who might have been models, who might have been prostitutes, who were probably a little of both, coming and going without introduction. The presentations of names and occupations were carried out in code. "Pedro is in sales," "William is in protection," "Barbra sings," "Leonard writes"-not to conceal or to be cute, but as though to leave what you did at the door with your hat and coat in order for things to settle to a better level, to the spirit of the day. These meetings were an annual suspension of hostilities, during which Milton's guests stood crowded at the bar and picture windows in virtual cease-fire. Sharing paper plates sagging with bagels and nova and whitefish salad, talking about the Giants, kids, the weather, anything. Below, between them and the park, passed the Macy’s parade. The solemn marching bands, the human snowflakes, the sanitation department brigades, the goliath balloons, happy heroes and quacky demons inflated to the size of buildings. Milton's guests gazed downward, giddily talkative, as though relieved by their proximity not to the parade but to each other. Broadway's Little Orphan Annie and smalltime Harlem dealer, District Attorney and money launderer for a Chinese crime family. As if this, this day and this food and this glass-enclosed apartment, were real life and their occupations were the contrivance, things to engage them untiI they slept again, those long days and nights until this meeting same time next year. Liquor flowed and the hills of food slowly leveled off, then flattened. The air was alive with sexual tension, the sense of abandon that comes with twiddling the forbidden fruit, punctuated by the rhythms of the passing drum corps below. It was the middle of the day, late morning even, crisp and blustery, but inside this sprawl it was midnight in a moonlit garden in springtime. People overate and drank too much.