Pardon the Ravens

by Alan Hruska

  “Exquisite,” he says. “Better than a de Kooning.”

  “A de-what?” she squeals.

  “Famous painter. But not nearly in your league.”

  They hear a doorbell ring. Vito appears in the doorway.

  “Some guy named Sid Kline?” Vito announces in a tone he tries to make sound cultured. “Says you’ll know who he is?”

  “Sidney Kline,” muses Phil. “U.S. Attorney’s Office. Lifer. Ray Sancerre’s main man.”

  “What the fuck!” says Vito.

  Phil shakes his head reprovingly, looking at his daughter who, however, seems lost in her work. “Vito! The mouth! I keep telling you.”

  “Sorry, Phil.”

  “Try to remember, will you?” says Phil, rising, putting out his cigar.

  “Sure. The guy? I’ll tell him to piss off?”

  Phil rolls his eyes. “On the contrary. Show him in.”

  “You’re gonna let him into your house? Talk to the son-of-a-bitch?”

  “I’m going to listen, Vito. You listen, you learn. Sometimes you learn more than the other guy thinks he’s revealing. You understand?”

  “Of course, boss.”

  As Vito leaves, Phil kisses his daughter on the cheek, and a nanny materializes to gather up Sarah and her drawings. “Now go up to bed, sweetheart. I’ll tuck you in in a sec.”

  “TV,” Sarah says.

  Phil looks at his watch.

  “Mister Ed.”

  “All right,” Phil relents. “One program.”

  “Yea!”

  Nanny and child leave the study as Sid Kline enters, obviously distracted by the paintings floating on the walls. “Lovely place.”

  “What’s up, Sid?”

  “Give me a moment, will ya?” Kline says, eyes fixed on the larger Rothko.

  “You know art?”

  “I know of it. I know a Rothko when I see one. Who’s the other?”

  “Cy Twombly. Relatively new. You know the Leo Castelli Gallery?”

  “Heard of it.”

  “Well, Leo thinks Cy’s the second coming.”

  “Of Rothko?”

  “Of God, Sid.” Phil resumes his seat behind the desk. “So what’s up?”

  Kline grips the back of the chair in front of him. “Thank you for seeing me, Phil.”

  “Cut the shit, will you? What the fuck you doing here?”

  “First, I have to say, if you need a lawyer present for this, you can call one, or I can come back.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer, fella. You got something to say, sit down and say it.”

  Sid pulls the chair under him. “You know Sal Martini?”

  “Man of the hour,” Phil says. “According to the media. Never met the gentleman.”

  “Thought you might have.”

  Phil gives this a puzzled expression, and Sid shifts his weight a bit. “Quite a scam he brought off.”

  “That right?” says Phil.

  “Put the Atlantic Ocean in the tanks in Bayonne where there should have been diesel.”

  “My, my.”

  “Bayonne and elsewhere. Up and down the East Coast. More than a billion dollars’ worth.”

  “And this,” Phil asks, “relates to me how?”

  “Martini—to get himself started?—needed a nut of ten million bucks. Not the sort of capital handed over, unsecured, to a twice-convicted felon… by a bank.”

  “So who gave it to him?”

  Sid stares at Anwar until the younger man laughs. “If you had anything to back up that smirk, Sidney, I’d be looking at a subpoena right now, not your adorable face.”

  Phil gets up, forcing Kline to his feet, but the prosecutor isn’t finished. “At this moment, Phil, a deal could be made. Later, when U.S. Safety goes belly-up, when fifty thousand people are out of work, and when thousands of shareholders lose their life savings—it’s not going to be so easy copping a plea.”

  Phil, smiling, urges Sid by the shoulder toward the door. “Tell that guy you work for—Ray Sancerre, king of the G-men—I respect unusual approaches, I really do. Coming to a man’s home. Implying he’s a criminal. A guilty party would have thrown you out on your ass, Sid. Me? As I say. Always a pleasure.” He shakes Kline’s hand as Vito arrives to usher Sid out, then Phil turns his back on the both of them.

  Vito watches Sid’s government car pull out of the long driveway. Standing at the front door, he gives a single shout: “Come!” In two seconds, Friday skids to a stop at his feet, happy to be there, eager for the next command. So simple, thinks Vito. So right. So nice to be appreciated.

  EIGHTEEN

  Gen. Marcus Rand gathers himself up from behind his desk—itself the size of a small office—and points a gnarled finger at Macalister. “You’re telling me I can be wiped out—my wife and family impoverished—because I didn’t crawl on top of some fucking storage tank in Bayonne and stick my arm in up to the pit?”

  Impressive, thinks Alec: the famous eye patch, the eagle beak, the perpetual scowl; and the framed photographs behind him, displaying these features on the covers of Life and Time magazines. The effect is not diminished by the enormity of the office, the thick Turkish rugs, the combat decorations and war memorabilia encased on pedestals or decorating the walls.

  “That’s the claim,” Mac says off-handedly. And you’re not being charged with simple negligence. The assertion against you, the other directors, and the company is fraud.”

  “Fraud! We haven’t defrauded anyone! We didn’t know a goddamn thing about it!”

  “The offense of fraud,” Mac says, “doesn’t require knowledge of wrongdoing or an actual intent to deceive. If you publish rosy financial statements and recklessly disregard the material facts, you’ve committed fraud. And the fact you’re charged here with having recklessly disregarded is that you were missing the oil the banks were loaning money on. One point two billion dollars’ worth of oil.”

  “What the fuck you mean reckless?” spews Rand. “We had every conceivable security check in place. There were absolutely no signs of trouble. The manager of this business, Whitman Poole, reported to the board every month.”

  “He’s the guy the plaintiffs are saying was reckless. And if he was, you get stuck with it. As a matter of law.”

  “The lawyers who brought these lawsuits—they have no idea what we did or didn’t do.”

  “Of course not. They read an article in a newspaper, they file a suit. Then they try to learn something about it.”

  “Ambulance chasers!” Rand says, finally sitting down. “No. What do you call them in your field? Strike-suiters!”

  Now Mac gets up, walks pensively to the back of the office and turns. “Little lecture,” he says. “There’s a biological principle that, in whatever nook or crevice of the Earth life can be supported, some form of it will generate. A similar principle works for lawyers. You see a corporate misfortune, you’ll find a species of lawyers in a frenzy to feed on it.”

  “And they feast,” Rand says.

  “While the victims get pennies apiece,” says Mac, “and the corporation that suffered the misfortune in the first place suffers another one almost as bad by having to pay off the lawyers.”

  Rand eyes him with a small shake of his head.

  “And as an additional result?” says Mac. “Of truly monstrous perversity? The stockholders who comprise most of the original victims still own the company that pays the damages and fees. So they get screwed again. By the lawyers who are supposedly representing them.”

  “Great system,” the general mutters. He is used to a better one, in which he picks the judges, tells them how to rule, then decides all the appeals himself.

  “You don’t want to pay off the strike-suiters?” Mac says, returning to his chair. “Then you get the best lawyer you can find, hope for an honest judge with a functioning brain and take your chances with a jury.”

  Rand gives Mac a one-eyed glare. “And is that you? The best lawyer I can find?”

  Mac stares ba
ck. “If you want it tried, General, we’ll win the case for you.”

  Rand turns to Alec. “And what do you think, son? That your view too?”

  “Yes, General. It is.”

  “Always agree with your superior officer, right? Ha!” He leans back, making a decision. “Listen to me, both of you. I want you to fight this case. No settlement. I’m not paying those bastards a penny. Not one red cent.”

  “You got it,” Mac says. He’s heard hard lines before, wonders how long Rand will stick with it.

  “You understand,” says Rand, “at the moment we’re still not out of pocket. We’ve issued more than one billion dollars’ worth of warehouse receipts for oil that Martini stole back, but the people he gave those receipts to—and borrowed money from—the warehouse receipt holders—they’re the ones who haven’t gotten paid.”

  “So you still owe them,” Mac says. “Who are they, exactly? Banks, I assume.”

  “East Coast banks, mainly. And pretty much all of them. Large and small. Which reminds me,” Rand says. “We’ve brought in special counsel to try to negotiate a settlement with them. Marius Shilling. You know him, I assume.”

  “I know him,” Mac says with no enthusiasm.

  “And while he’s at it,” Rand says, ignoring Mac’s tone, “maybe he can give us some help on the litigation front, too.”

  Heading off Wall Street down William, toward the office, Alec asks, “Is Shilling going to get in our way?”

  “Not unless we let him,” Mac says.

  “I can understand special counsel handling the settlement negotiations with the East Coast banks. But on the litigation—what do we need him for?”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll sort itself out. Shilling’s on somebody’s list.”

  “List?” Alec says.

  “For windbag lawyers who get to suck on the great corporate titty.”

  Alec muses on this for another half-block, then says to Mac, “That was a pretty bold prediction back there.”

  “You think?”

  Alec mimics the Texan’s drawl. “We’ll win this case for you, General.”

  Mac, laughing, says, “A bit of showmanship. Tell the client you’ll win, makes him easier to deal with. And if you lose, it doesn’t matter what you’ve told him. You’re never going to see him again anyway.”

  At the corner of William and Pine, Mac casts an eye to the Down Town Association, a half block away. “Want to stop for a drink?”

  “Little early for me, thanks.”

  “Bad career move,” Mac says.

  At the look on Alec’s face, Mac laughs out loud. “Kid, you got to lighten up.”

  NINETEEN

  Alec had promised his father a visit, then delayed going until he could delay no more. He’s on the verge of being too busy to see anyone for months. His dad won’t understand that. The forecast all day had been warning of a freakish early snowstorm. Nevertheless, Alec makes his way to Penn Station.

  The Long Island Rail Road terminal is a frantic hive of humans desperate to get someplace else. Since Alec’s days of frequent commuting, the LIRR has changed the trains. They’re double-deckers now, so that you either sit in a hole, as Alec does, or with your head bumping the car ceiling.

  As the train emerges from its tunnel, snow begins to fall, the first large flakes impaling themselves on the grit of his window.

  It was in high school and as an undergraduate that Alec rode this line often, back and forth to summer jobs, packed in among the sweaty businessmen, with their collars thrown open, breathing like frogs. They played gin rummy on knee boards for a tenth of a cent and chain-smoked cigars. One by one, through the years, they got off for the last time at Valley Stream or Babylon, while new commuters took their seats.

  Alec gets off at the town he lived in until he was eleven. He’d moved all over the Island after that, but his father had recently moved back to the southeastern end of Queens. By the time Alec reaches his destination, the snow, exceeding all predictions, has blanketed the streets and buildings, braceleted the trees and wires. He looks around the square in front of the train station. He hasn’t been there for years. The wooden railway platform has been rebuilt in concrete. New buildings have overgrown the old and caused them to shrink. The place, however, romanced in snow and emptied of people, has the quality of a dream.

  Instead of waiting for a cab, he starts walking. He walks east on Center Street, the snow crunching beneath his shoes. Of course there are ghosts; he had chosen to walk in order to stir them. The one-story bank branch where he opened his first savings account at age ten. The candy and stationery store, the pharmacy, the corner grocery. He had delivered packages from there on a swaying bike. Everything’s closed, and every corner holds memories of good and bad times; but more disturbing, by far, are the changes.

  On an impulse, instead of proceeding directly to his father’s new home, he walks out on the beach road. A quarter of a mile toward the water he finds the driveway he’s looking for: the entrance to the grounds of a day camp. Past high hedges that offer privacy from the street, the land rises sharply to the old gray fieldstone estate house the camp had converted, and then slopes down behind it, for thirty acres or so, bordered by marsh that leads to a bay and, beyond that, the ocean. A baseball diamond and bleachers sit on a corner of the grounds, buried in snow. He climbs to the top of the bleachers, clears some space on the plank and sits on it.

  It’s strange: this compulsion to be here without any clear idea why. He stretches his arms behind him and looks at the sky. The storm has ceased, and the clouds open to reveal a nearly full moon. It’s extremely quiet and amazingly warm. The snow, wind-rippled, shimmers in the bluish-white light.

  Alec glances across the fields to the house, once a grand mansion, to the tennis and volleyball posts denuded of nets, to the wire backstop and the soccer goals. He tries to see himself as he had been when he was eight years old, sporting a new camp T-shirt, blue shorts, blue camp sweater tied around his waist. New boy, playing fiercely at games.

  He remembers arriving home once with a bloody nose. His father, laughing at an old book he was reading, dropped it on the floor and took him into the bathroom. With his face being washed off, Alec asked what was so funny about that book. “This old Roman,” said Sam. “Name of Juvenal. Poking fun at those who, as he put it, ‘Pardon the ravens and censure the doves.’ Know what that means, pardon the ravens?”

  “Sure? Some guy keeps coming after you, it’s okay to beat the shit outta him.”

  “Which is what you just did?”

  “Otherwise he’s not gonna stop,” Alec insisted.

  Sam studied his son as if seeing himself, not altogether pleased by the reflection. “I think even Juvenal,” he said slowly, “would have pardoned that.”

  Alec gets up and tracks back through the snow to the main house. No one had bothered to lock it. It’s dank inside, smells musty, and the downstairs rooms are stacked with benches. There’s enough moonlight for Alec to navigate the staircase and the servants’ stairs to the arts and crafts room in the attic. A long shop table still stands in the center with vises fixed to its corners. He sits in the dormer enclosure and peers out.

  He used to come here at rest hours when the room was empty. From this window you can see almost the entirety of the grounds, the marsh, the bay, and clear to the sea. He remembers a view green to overflowing; and now, in the blanched shuddering of this landscape, he feels the disappearance of years. It’s still inside him, that idea or notion he had come back to find, almost retrieved because he is there.

  Tantalizing, it is so close, but not coming. He thinks, People are all brazen on the outside, full of knowing better, protected by shells of smart-aleckness. Alone in a room, their insides come out soft, not knowing anything, whimpering a little, pitying themselves for having to live without knowing. With one last lingering look he gets up from the embrasure of the window.

  Alec retraces his steps across the room, down the stairways, through the halls, out o
nto the snow-laden lawn, then down the driveway to the street. He walks at a steady clip, not looking back. There is one more place he wants to see.

  People are living there, of course. It’s a big old comfortable three-story house with a wraparound porch, built after the First World War. By the time he’d moved in, it had been converted into a two-family dwelling, and it appears still to be that. Lights are on in both bedrooms on the first floor. Alec’s old backboard and hoop have been removed from over the garage door; the bicycle rack his dad made is gone. His mother materializes on the front porch. He stands watching from across the street, listening to her call his name.

  His mother was a mystic, although she would have been astounded by the charge. She was fond of saying that what we think of as “God” was in reality spirit—a sort of force that joins us; an essence of which we were all part. In the next moment she would tell Alec to do his homework and get good grades so he would grow up to be successful. More so than his father who had failed her in that way.

  These, to Alec, were bewilderingly conflicting propositions. To what end were grades or success if we were all part of some mystical whole? And wasn’t he special? He heard plants grow and the motion of stars. He saw thoughts before they were spoken. Wouldn’t he stand out, change the world? He had thought about this to the limits of his mind’s endurance, pressing against it like a headache. He had thought about it in that attic room, sitting in the dormer window.

  Sam Brno opens the door to the upstairs of a split level.

  “Alec.”

  “Dad.”

  The entrance is to a “front” room that’s really in the back of the two-story dwelling. It has the look of a place furnished by the landlord: browns and oranges, thin cushions, spindly woods. Indistinguishable from a cheap motel room.

  “What can I get you?”

  Alec glances at his father’s half-filled beer bottle on top of an ancient TV. “Got another?”

  “Sure.”

  Sam heads to the small fridge in a kitchenette area at the end of the room, while Alec parks himself on the sofa. He moves to one side a TV tray on which sit the remnants of a frozen dinner. “So tell me about this new job,” Alec says as his father hands him a cold Miller’s.