Pardon the Ravens

by Alan Hruska

  “We should give him as little information as possible,” says Alec begrudgingly, “and should control how he uses that.”

  Mac laughs. “Control? I’m all for it. And I’d like to think, kiddo, that I had more over you.” He pushes up against the credenza. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Why’re we going to his office?” Alec asks, as he and Mac stride up Wall Street.

  “Like to put this info out on the telephone?”

  “Of course not, but he could come to ours.”

  Mac broadens his smile. “We’re the supplicants. He’s got big news—even bigger than ours, I gather—so we have to go get it. Go fetch.”

  “I assume you’re kidding.”

  “Only in part. Besides,” Mac adds, “I’d rather be in that prick’s office, nosing around his papers, than have him in mine. And I thought his place might interest you.”

  “Been there.”

  “Yeah? What did you observe?”

  “A law firm,” Alec says.

  “That’s it?”

  “This one’s different?”

  “From ours. Operates like a tribe of gorillas. Control the food source, you control the tribe. And the allocation of the money. If you want to.”

  “The food source being the clients,” Alec says.

  “What else?”

  “And our firm?”

  “The opposite extreme. We’re a fucking Athenian democracy. And we split the money by lock-step progression.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Three tiers, from youngest to oldest. Complete equality of distributions within each tier. Only small differences among them. No partner with executive power.”

  “How’s that even possible?”

  “Because the standards for making partner are almost impossibly high. So the partners are equal. Any one of them could run an army, or a nation. And we’re not scrounging for work. We’ve got too much of it. So we’re not willing to give someone power because he can bring more of it in.”

  “You know,” Alec says, “it might be a good idea to get some of that information out on interviews.”

  “About how hard it is to become a partner?” Mac says with a laugh.

  “Everyone knows that. The rest of it.”

  “People pick it up. You just did.”

  “And Shilling’s still out there hustling for clients?”

  “In his case, mainly West German clients. They love the son-of-a-bitch. He comes on like a Prussian general, with his dueling scars and his shaven head, and they eat it up. But the prize, for him, would be the general representation of U.S. Safety.”

  They confront the shorn-headed one in his personal conference room, forty-two stories above Wall Street. Shilling is holding a meeting with his associates, lecturing them by tapping his dueling saber on a blackboard covered with notes. He pauses to hear Mac’s report, then pooh-poohs the idea of an affidavit from Carrie. “At the trial, if we have one, we might want her as a witness, but, even then—” Shilling whips the sword through the air between them with a stagey laugh. “I have doubts as to the utility of an affidavit. More downside than up, I should think. Suggests too much pre-arrangement with the witness, too much intimacy.”

  At the word “intimacy,” Alec inwardly cringes.

  Mac says, with menacing affability, “You giving me trial advice, now, Marius?”

  “Is that a problem?” says Shilling, his own attitude coy. “You’re above taking advice?”

  “I’m completely open-minded. To those who know what they’re talking about.” Mac smiles innocuously—at Shilling, then at his associates, who now form an open-mouthed crew.

  “The client,” purrs Shilling, regaining his seat, “evidently believes that I do.”

  Mac sits in the next chair, and juts his jaw close to Shilling’s. “You want to steal the client, dude? Then make your move. But until it’s yours—so far as the trial is concerned—stay out of my way. Okay?” Big broad grin.

  Shilling’s eyes flutter. “So far as my negotiations with the East Coast banks are concerned, there’s been a development that rather changes things. I doubt, Mac, that anyone’s gotten around to telling you yet.” The man smiles, inviting others to relish the knife-cut that Mac is on the B-list for news. “The fact is, Whitman Poole has fled. Flight, as you probably know, is seen by the courts as an admission of guilt. Much more revealing and effective than an affidavit from the afflicted Miss Madigan.”

  For Alec, who has joined Mac at the table, surprise and relief rout feelings of discomfiture.

  “The banks know this?” asks Mac, masking his own surprise.

  Shilling smiles again, disingenuously. “Of course, they’ve been told.”

  “Makes your job easier, then,” Mac says, rising from the table and signaling Alec to leave with him. “And the sooner you do it, the sooner I can go about doing mine—litigating with Si Rosenkranz and the rest of the Dark Side bar.”

  “Oh, that case might settle too,” says Shilling as Mac heads off.

  Mac turns, openly furious. “Have you been authorized to talk to Si? Behind my back?”

  “I didn’t say that, Mac.”

  “Shilling,” says Macalister with a tone of disgust, “you mess with that—I’ll take that fucking dueling sword of yours and ram it up your Teutonic rectum!”

  Alec, trailing Mac out the door, sees Shilling’s associates in nearly convulsive acts of grin-stifling.

  THIRTY-THREE

  On the tarmac of U.S. Safety’s storage tank facility in Bayonne, Gen. Marcus Rand, topcoated but bareheaded, surveys the place as if it were a battleground strewn with bodies. About a hundred yards away, a younger, taller, sturdily built man in a navy pinstriped suit leaves a touring party to join him. They confer for a moment in the shadow of one of the tanks, while the wind whips their hair and garments. Rand gesticulates in anger at the news being imparted; the younger man, while delivering it, adjusts his Clark Kent glasses and combs his thick black hair with his fingers. Then they spot Frank Macalister and Alec Brno, both dressed for the weather, walking toward them from their car.

  “I thought Ben Braddock was coming,” Rand says.

  “Couldn’t make it,” says Mac.

  Rand’s mouth forms an expression of distaste. “Frank Macalister, Alec Brno: Brett Creighton, chief operating officer.” This by way of introduction.

  The men greet each other, and Rand says to Macalister, “You know what’s happening?”

  Mac and Alec plainly don’t.

  “Tell ’em,” says Rand.

  “Our stock’s in free-fall,” Creighton says.

  “How far?” Mac asks.

  “In half a day,” says Creighton, “we lost twenty-eight percent of our value—at which point the stock exchange suspended trading.”

  Rand asks Macalister sharply, “You know what’s causing this?”

  “I’m surprised it’s taken this long,” Mac says. “The institutions are dumping your stock.”

  “Well, no shit, Macalister. The question is why. They don’t like our side of the case, or they don’t like our lawyers?”

  Mac gives a grim laugh.

  “This amuses you?” Rand says.

  “Only in one sense. Strips the mask off Rosenkranz’s face.”

  Marcus Rand, often given to Delphic utterances himself, is intolerant of such pronouncements by others. “You care to tell us what that means?”

  “Sure,” says Mac. “What Si wants at trial—what he thinks more than anything will help him win? Getting seen by the jury as the champion of the little guy, the stockholder. But of course that’s bullshit. The reality is, Si wins and the judgment comes out of the pockets of the little guys—because that’s who your present stockholders are. And it goes primarily into the pockets of the fat cats—the funds, the insurance companies, the institutional investors—the people who have just sold out.”

  “The jury will know this?” Rand says.

  “I do my job—and I will—the jury wil
l know it.”

  Rand frowns; Mac looks as if nothing has happened. It’s Alec’s role to say nothing, unless called upon, just listen and learn. And Alec appreciates the opportunity. Two very powerful men, each having risen as high as he wants, keeping sharp by sparring. But there’s another man present whose role is to smooth things.

  “Do I correctly understand,” Creighton says with a smile, “that you and my old friend Marius Shilling are not getting on as famously as we might have hoped?”

  “So he’s your friend.”

  “We were in the Army together. He’s German by birth, but of course he fought on our side.”

  “Fought?”

  “Well, we were in Washington. Intelligence, as I gather you were, Mac, though you, I hear, were in a more active theater.”

  Mac, ignoring this, says, “If you’re a friend of the man, give him a message. I have no idea how he’s doing in his negotiations with the East Coast banks, because, oddly enough, he doesn’t consider it to be within his job description to keep me current. Up to now, that hasn’t seriously interfered with what I’m doing, and frankly it’s not likely to. So that’s an issue for you to deal with, if you care to. Up to you. But what you get him to understand—what you damn well get him to understand—is that, so far as the trial is concerned, there’s one case, meaning one ship, which means one captain. You want two captains running your ship, you’ve charted a course for disaster. And if that’s what you want, I’m out. I’m not trying a case being sabotaged by the client. You got that?”

  Rand and Creighton exchange glances. “Shilling is not the captain of the ship,” says Rand finally.

  “Very well,” Mac says. “So let’s take the tour you promised me and get the fucking ship into port.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Carrie, in the ward, waits by a pay phone, her hand on the receiver, her eye on the clock. She strangles the first ring, as the clock strikes noon. “Looney bin,” she answers.

  “On the stroke,” says Alec admiringly. “How are you?”

  “On a pink cloud, honey. Clean. Clean and sober! Can you believe it? I did it! I actually did it!”

  Carrie beams at Alec with a luminous smile. They sit facing each other in a hospital cafeteria painted, floors and ceiling, institutional green. In her white cotton pajamas and pink-striped robe, she looks as confectionary as a peppermint on a Christmas tree.

  Dr. Patel, spotting Alec while crossing the hall, waddles over to their table to join them. He takes a seat, spreads his hands, purses his fabulous lips. “We can’t keep her here, you know. We have schizophrenics here, psychotics. We can treat them. But there’s nothing we can do for an addict.”

  “I thought there were programs—”

  “Oh, yes,” Patel says, interrupting. “Very effective. For some. Not, I’m afraid, for our Carrie. She’s too clever for the programs. Outsmarts them. She plays the program.”

  Carrie makes a comic guilty face, as if it were funny.

  Alec, not amused, says, “I’m afraid I’m not clear on what that really means.”

  The doctor looks at Carrie, who gives him an expression of indifference.

  “What it means,” Patel says, and thinks for a moment. “She knows the right things to say, the right things to do, and she dutifully says and does them. Then she tries to bribe a night maintenance man to bring her cocaine.”

  “It was a joke,” Carrie says.

  “Did you do that?”

  “I wasn’t serious. I just said.”

  He looks to Patel whose expression is disbelieving.

  “So what’re you saying?” Alec asks, beginning to get angry. “There’s no chance of her staying clean?”

  Patel gives this a philosophical shrug. “What are the odds on a miracle?” he says. “For, you see, it is a miracle that we need.”

  “A what? This is a goddamn hospital. You’ve got a sick person, you treat her.”

  “What I’m telling you, my friend, is we can’t. Precisely because this is a hospital. Not a rehab facility, which, in my opinion, is what she needs. A reset. A complete overhaul. It’s not done in a week. Or here. You understand?”

  “Look at her,” Alec says. “She’s clean, happy.”

  “Oh, my dear boy.” Patel rises, smiles weakly and leaves.

  Alec watches the little doctor part the crowd now entering the cafeteria. He can barely stand to look at Carrie, because he knows Patel is right.

  His mind is filled with the memory of a conversation guiltily overheard when he was nine. His father in the kitchen of their small apartment seeing a doctor out, arguing with him, as Alec had just argued with Dr. Patel. There was no medical fix for addiction then, and there’s none now. No one’s devised a method for extracting the gene. It’s just stupid to fall in love with an addict. You either cast them adrift or they’ll pull you down with them. Of course, a kid has no choice.

  At the end of the visiting hour, as Alec says goodbye to Carrie at the threshold of her room, she pulls him inside and shuts the door behind them. She then kisses him full on the mouth, pushing him back against the wall.

  “Your roommates could come in any second,” he says.

  She shakes her head, no, emphatically.

  “You’ve made a deal with them?”

  She shakes her head, yes, just as emphatically, and pulls him down onto the bed.

  “We can’t do this, Carrie.”

  She says, “Shh! We have ten minutes. Just hold me.”

  Feeling little volition to do otherwise, he wraps his arms around her, and they topple together, both holding on tight.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It’s basically simple,” Abigail says, holding up a small silvery object having the circumference of a dime and the thickness of a nickel. “It’s like plugging an appliance into an outlet on the wall. Except instead of an outlet, you plug it into the telephone wire you’re tapping.”

  Her Formica kitchen table is cleared of everything but the equipment she needs for the tutorial, which is quite professional. For a moment, entering into it, she suspends her judgment about the lunacy of the scheme.

  “Why not plug it into the phone?” Sam asks.

  “People do. But then it’s obvious, too easy to find. Best way? Open the wall, put it on the wire.”

  “When no one’s looking.”

  “They could be looking,” she says. “As long as they think you’re doing something else.”

  Sam laughs. “Okay, how do you plug it into the wire?”

  “Easy.” With an electrician’s knife, she slices the cover from a long strand, exposing the red- and green-coated wires within. “See the green has the positive charge, the red the negative, and they go this way into this gizmo.” She cuts the wires and shows him how the ends connect to the bug. “Takes a couple of minutes, at most. Then tape the whole thing like this. Voila! Phone tapped.”

  “Then what?”

  “The device transmits by radio waves.”

  “How far?”

  “Theoretically ten miles, but you’d want the recorder to be closer, to be sure.”

  “Like here,” Sam says. “So we’d want the recorder in your house.”

  She heaves a big sigh. “Yeah. Like here.”

  “I can collect the tapes and do the listening.”

  “Terrific,” she says, returned to her senses with renewed dislike for the whole plan.

  He gives it a moment. “It’s not wonderful,” he says. “I never said it was wonderful.”

  “Right,” she says. “They have to be changed often, the reels do. They don’t hold that much.”

  “They run constantly?”

  “No, the recorder is voice-activated.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that too,” he says. “Change the reels.”

  “Guess you’re going to be around here lots.”

  Sam gets up from the table, helps himself to water from the sink. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “No,” she says. “It isn’t. It’s the only thing good abo
ut this.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Alec is in Milwaukee, about to leave a seedy hotel room for a deposition at the federal courthouse. The case is another he got assigned to after reading about it in the newspapers: the one in which the firm’s principal media client, Telemarch News, was sued for libel for accusing the police chief of a local township of stealing the department’s Christmas fund for underprivileged children. Alec’s there to depose the cop.

  Carrie reaches Alec by phone as he’s packing his lit bag. She’s standing, amongst upturned furniture and debris, in a bare-walled apartment. “I wish the hell you’d been able to come for me.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s nothing left. Most of my clothes are gone, so’s the TV, all the dishes.”

  “What?” he says. “You’ve been burglarized?”

  “You go into rehab, the word travels the street. The cokeheads break in, steal everything.”

  He snaps his bag shut. “You have someplace to stay tonight?”

  “I suppose I could go to my mother’s.” Carrie had told him about her parents. Her father, a small-time criminal lawyer and alcoholic who regularly beat up her younger sister because “Jessie talked back.” Her mother, a nasty piece of work, who once carted the girls to Ireland, sponging off relatives for a year, then returned them to New York and a life of mutual hatred.

  “Great choice,” he says.

  “Actually,” she says, “I’ll be all right here. No one’s coming back. There’s no more to take but some furniture, and that’s worthless.”

  After a pause that gets awkward, Alec says, “My apartment… on the ledge at the top of the door frame? There’s a key. You can stay with me for a while. I’ll be home tomorrow night.”

  Another pause, even longer, that Carrie breaks. “Alec, you sure?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I’m sure.”

  “Big fucking step.”

  “Just come. We can talk about it.”

  “I dunno,” she says.

  “You have to think about whether you want to?”

  “No, I don’t have to think about whether I want to.”