Pardon the Ravens

by Alan Hruska

  “And he was the judge when you bluffed J.J. Tierney out of his underwear in that price-fixing case.”

  “True. But before the bluff, I did get Tierney on a real document that he hadn’t remembered.”

  “So which does Locklear remember?” Braddock muses.

  “If either.”

  Madge Harlan walks in, white-faced and excited. “Call from the courthouse! The judge has issued an injunction!”

  Braddock looks at his watch and laughs. “You step in shit, kiddo.”

  Alec leaves to call Lipschutz, and gets him on the first ring. “You heard, Dave?”

  “Yeah, have. Sorry, Alec, but we both know it’s only the first round.”

  “What I was thinking.”

  “So,” says Lipschutz smoothly, “looking ahead, knowing one of us would want to appeal, I’ve lined up an emergency judge in the appellate division. To hear us this afternoon. He’s available in his apartment at two-thirty.”

  “Who’d you get, Dave?”

  “Lester Coogan.”

  “Wasn’t he the former Tammany leader in the Bronx?”

  “Hmm,” says Lipschutz. “I think he might have been.”

  “Thing is, I’m going to be moving before Teddy Krane at one-thirty. You can join me in his apartment if you like—this call is notice.”

  “Krane? He’s a Republican!”

  “Only nominally.”

  “I’ve already lined up Coogan,” Lipschutz sputters.

  “I’m the appellant, Dave. It’s my appeal. All I need is any judge of the appellate court to stay the decision below. So you go to Coogan’s apartment, if you prefer. But if Krane issues the stay, doesn’t matter what Coogan does until the full court can be assembled.”

  Alec steps out of the Checker cab, leaving Ben Braddock to deal with the driver. It’s the protocol of the firm: “first chair” never pays. And Braddock is observing the rule to the letter. Alec, waiting, gazes up at the white brick high-rise. “Whatta you doing?” says Braddock. “Thinking about the ways you can fuck up this case?”

  Alec play-acts a look of disdain.

  Riding up in the elevator, Braddock sniffs. “You think too much.”

  “No doubt,” says Alec.

  Amazing, Braddock is nervous. He thinks we could lose this.

  They get out on the twenty-second floor. No trouble finding the apartment; reporters spill out of it into the hall. The Hon. Theodore Krane, enthroned on the wing chair within the bay window of his living room, gazes out on the more than dozen lawyers occupying his sofas and floor. Krane is a professorial sort of man with thinning hair, a high-domed forehead, and a trim-waisted medium frame. His khakis and pink, open-collared, button-down shirt distinguish him from the lawyers in suits. He has the demeanor of a host who wants to move on with the party so he can clear all these people out of his home.

  Marty Levinson argues the copyright point. Alec counters with the obvious proposition that copyrights are given only to original works, not to plagiarized manuscripts.

  “And how,” Krane asks, “within the approximately one hour you’ve given me to rule, am I to determine that this seven-hundred page manuscript submitted by Leland Franks is nothing more—or little more—than an act of plagiarism?”

  “You obviously can’t,” says Alec, “but I have here two things that will allow your Honor to rule in a lot less time than an hour. The first is an eight-hundred-page manuscript by a man named Tanaka. He worked for Ikuda from the days their business operated out of a garage. When they split, Tanaka wrote this tome. His agent sent a translated version to two top publishing companies before it was withdrawn. Almost certainly, Franks got a copy from somebody in one of those publishing houses.”

  “Eight hundred pages, you say.” The judge holds up the manuscript and gives Alec a look that says, You surely don’t expect me to read this.

  “I show your Honor the Tanaka manuscript,” Alec says, “only to verify the second item—which is a side-by-side layout of about twenty excerpts from the Franks manuscript and the Tanaka passages that Franks stole from. As your Honor will quickly see, they’re virtually identical. Same anecdotes. Almost the same words.”

  On the judge’s coffee table sits an ashtray milled with a replica of the scales of justice. Marty Levinson lifts it above his head.

  “Yes, Marty?” says Krane.

  “There are a lot of people in your Honor’s living room at the moment, but none of them, so far as I know, is named Tanaka.” Levinson carefully returns the ashtray to the table. “So right now, we have only Mr. Brno’s statement that such a person exists, much less that he wrote this manuscript. In other words, Mr. Brno offers us classic hearsay. And the vice of hearsay is that the actual witness, whom we’re being asked to believe—Mr. Tanaka—is not here to be cross-examined. And if he were—assuming he exists—he might well tell us, under vigorous cross, that it was he who copied his manuscript from the manuscript written by Mr. Franks—not vice-versa.”

  “Mr. Brno?” the judge says. “Would you like Mr. Levinson to pass you the scales of justice?”

  “Don’t need them, your Honor. I have the doctrine of fair use.”

  “I thought we’d be getting to that.”

  “It’s the way the copyright laws reconcile the conflict between the act’s restraint on the publication of copies and the First Amendment’s prohibition of restraint on publication. So even if your Honor were to assume that the Franks manuscript were genuine, we’d still be entitled to publish our opinion to the contrary and support it with excerpts from both manuscripts. As a fair use.”

  “I happen to know something about this doctrine.”

  “I know you do, your Honor.”

  “I suspected you might. And there are limits to this doctrine of fair use. Very important limits.”

  “And we’re well within them. In the Zarenga Films case, for example, Telemarch News published without license the entirety of the film that gave it any value—the several frames showing the assassination. Here, we’re publishing a few excerpts from an eight-hundred-page book.”

  Justice Krane looks Alec in the eye. “How many words?”

  Alec hesitates for only an instant. “Twelve hundred, your Honor.”

  “I’ll give you a thousand.”

  Alec opens his mouth to protest, but the judge comes down hard. “Don’t push it, counsel!”

  “Right,” says Alec with a smile.

  “All right, everybody,” the judge says. “You heard it. I’m staying the order of injunction below. Telemarch can publish one thousand words from the Franks manuscript. You’ll have my opinion on Monday.”

  The lawyers are silent, but shouting reporters throng the hallway, and several try to interview Alec and Judge Braddock on the elevator going down. On the pavement outside, Braddock pushes Alec into the TV cameras and mics.

  A blonde with big lips rattles out the first question. “You won a great victory for the First Amendment! How does that feel?”

  “These are pretty standard doctrines,” Alec says. “Prior restraint. Fair use. Most people are aware of them.”

  “Apparently not Judge Locklear.”

  “Oh, I think he was aware of them,” says Alec. “Just had a problem applying them to our case.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Conner Madigan sits alone at the bar in Callahan’s Tavern, his pub of choice on Staten Island. He likes the actual wood the bar is made of. After two or three Irish whiskeys, he can stare at it for hours and often does. He thinks he sees meaning in the grain, as one would in the spatter of Jackson Pollock. There’s no one to talk to at home. His wife’s gone back to Ireland, maybe permanently. On balance, he prefers her being there than here. His younger daughter, Jessie, has skipped to L.A., and good riddance to her, too. She’s a mouth on her, that one! But Lord knows, he’s run out of conversation with Mike, the bartender, whose last name may or may not be Callahan. Conner’s never bothered to ask. And there’s no one else in the entire establishment.
r />   Until Vito walks in.

  Conner’s not surprised. He’d been wondering how long it would take.

  Vito pulls up the next stool. “What the fuck you still doing here?”

  “In this bar?”

  “In this city, you shithead!”

  Mike, a hirsute young man, comes over. “Whatta you have?”

  “Ginger ale,” says Vito.

  Mike shrugs and goes for the bottle.

  Vito says, “The man warned you. I was standing right there.”

  “This is my city.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Check your deed, counselor.”

  Mike deposits the drink before Vito. “Two bucks,” he says.

  Vito laughs and hands him the money. “I was wondering how you made a living in this place.”

  Vito sips his drink as Mike goes to the cash register. “So he wants to see you again.”

  “He being your boss?” Conner says haughtily.

  “Not good to get smart with me,” Vito says. “Better just to come along.”

  “I’m not really in the mood.”

  “Your going or not going… doesn’t really depend on your mood.”

  “That so? You think you can drag me out of here? My friend over there would call the cops in ten seconds.”

  “Well, let’s put it this way. You can come on your own, no fuss, or, while your friend stands there with his dick in his hand, I can carry you out like a bag of shit. Put a real hurt on you. Because, with the booze in you, the usual amount of force’s not gonna be enough for you to feel it the way I need you to feel it. So I’d have to do some serious damage. But, counselor, that’s my job. I’m real good at it. It’s what I’m paid for, and I’m paid very well. So I go either way on this. Choice is yours.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Now you’re giving me a preference.” Vito removes from his pocket a set of brass knuckles and places it on the bar. “You know where I found this? Place on Canal Street. The thing’s an antique. But it’s terrific. Protects my hand and, of course, is very painful for the guy stepping into it.”

  Conner steps off his chair with an effort at dignity. “You enjoy this?” he says. “Working for a man like that? Strong-arming? Dirty work?”

  “You call it what you like, counselor. I take pride in my work. How many people can really say that?”

  Carrie Madigan sits on the edge of her bed in her room in Phil’s apartment. It’s a sizeable room with its own bathroom, big windows, views of the park, floral wallpaper, blue velvet draperies. The furniture is Colonial, made of maple; the bed, a four-poster. She’s bought many things for Sarah’s room, nothing for her own. Everything, including the toiletries, has been purchased by Phil’s housekeepers from lists written out by Phil. In one corner is a Magnavox TV in a large maple cabinet. It’s on without the sound. She’s just put Sarah to bed and has nothing to do, but she’s not watching the screen. She’s in a prison, she feels caged. The prison is a version of hell, and she has no good idea how to get out of it.

  Beneath a false bottom in a dresser drawer is a small bag of heroin. There’s another in a talcum container in the back of a bathroom cabinet and a package of needles in the top shelf of her closet. Efforts had apparently been made to “hide” these items so she would find them. Her mind is numb—less with longing for the drugs than with hatred for the man who put them there. It’s as if the latter works against the former. The hating is so strong it reinforces her will not to give in. The last detox and all those weeks of rehab, after all those failed attempts, put her in a good place. Hating Phil will keep her there, so far as the drugs are concerned, but she wonders whether it has left her the capacity to enjoy anything else in her life.

  Phil lets her go to meetings, which seems inconsistent but probably isn’t. Most likely, the way his mind works, he’s proving to her that there’s no antidote to her dependency. While she’s in the room, with Vito outside waiting, her mind sometimes fantasizes escaping through a back door, just running away. But, of course, she can’t do that. Not without Sarah. And running to Alec would get both of them killed.

  There’s a knock on the door, and then Vito intrudes. He apes his boss in all things, including rude behavior. Phil pays no respect to her privacy, neither does he. “Phil wants you. Get up.”

  She regards him with contempt, then rises. There’s really no point in not.

  The living room presents a tableau appropriate to a B-movie gothic. There’s Vincent Price in the form of Phil. There’s her unfortunate Da, alone on a small wooden chair in the middle of the carpet. He’s not tied but probably too drunk to do anything but maintain a precarious balance to avoid pitching headlong onto the floor. He looks like a waxen image of himself, too terrified to speak. There’s the coffee table in front of him loaded with implements. What are those—knives?

  “I’ve gone to some trouble,” Phil says, “so I’ll need you to watch this.”

  “What are you doing,” Carrie says. “You crazy?”

  “Hardly. Vito, I think maybe we start with the needles. In the eyes. That may be enough for this time.”

  “You’re outta your fucking mind!” Carrie screams.

  Even Vito looks skeptical about this.

  “It’s training, Vito. Like you trained that dog of yours. If one thing doesn’t work, you try another.”

  She flies at Phil, but, with the back of his hand, he whacks her in the face, which sends her sprawling.

  All the time, this strange silence from Conner.

  “Boss,” says Vito.

  “What?”

  “Look at the guy.”

  They do.

  “Jesus Christ,” Phil says.

  Carrie, sitting up on the carpet, screams, “What?”

  “I think he’s croaked,” Vito says.

  Phil inspects more closely. “I think you may be right.”

  “We scared the dumb bastard to death.”

  Carrie jumps up, looks at her father, screams again, “Oh, no, no, no, no!”

  “No doubt we did him a service,” Phil says. “Man with a heart like that.”

  Carrie’s in a dream, where people stick needles in eyes, kill by fright, no one listens or cares.

  “All right, Vito,” Phil says. “Get Benny from downstairs to bring up a mail sack. Dump this carcass somewhere. Out to sea is always best.” He turns to his wife. “See what you did? This was totally unnecessary. Who’m I gonna have to bring in now? That lawyer boyfriend of yours?”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Alec’s phone rings at eleven-thirty that night, waking him up. It’s Bill Templeton, Telemarch’s general counsel.

  “You better get down here.”

  “What’s going on?” Alec asks, trying to shake himself into full consciousness.

  “A runaway client.”

  “Jocko Rush?”

  “No, the managing editor. Miguel Rivera.”

  “He wants more words?”

  “You got it,” Templeton says with exasperation.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Make it fifteen. Don’t even dress. We are that close to mayhem, or contempt of court.”

  Almost midnight. The Telemarch lobby: vast, empty, crypt-like. The barrenness of the place presses on Alec’s headache, as does the hum of a polishing machine operated by an unseen porter. In the chrome plating of the elevator door, Alec stares at a rippled image of his face: pale, haggard. A security guard on the thirtieth floor escorts him to the editorial wing.

  Miguel Rivera, a second cousin of Diego Rivera, the Mexican painter, is a large man, thick through the shoulders and bald on the pate. Standing in his office, his attitude toward Alec is pugnacious. “We need eleven hundred words. That’s it. Not a word less. I don’t give a shit who you are, or what you say. We can’t reach Jocko. I’m in charge. It’s my decision, and I’ve made it.”

  “You like the idea of going to jail for contempt of a court order
?” Alec asks. The question is rhetorical. Every reporter Alec’s ever known couldn’t wait to be martyred for the First Amendment. Rivera’s eyes simply shine.

  “Right,” Alec says. “How are you counting the words?”

  “What do you mean, how are we counting? One at a time. How else?”

  “Are you counting articles and conjunctions?”

  Rivera’s eyes narrow, and he turns to one of his editors. The answer doesn’t surprise him. “It appears we are.”

  “Do the recount,” says Alec. “Then we’ll talk.”

  In ten minutes a group of assistant editors come in. “We’re still three words over,” one of them says.

  Rivera’s stance remains belligerent.

  “You’re not serious,” Alec says.

  “It’s a matter of principle.”

  “Let me tell you,” Alec says, his headache turning to migraine. “We got the one judge in the appellate division who would have stayed the injunction. You go in contempt of that order for even three words, the rest of those judges will bring the house down. Not simply on you. On the whole goddamn company. The fine will be—I promise you—e-fucking-normous! I would not want to be the corporate officer who has to go before the board and try to explain how three words were worth all that money. And who made that decision against clear legal advice as to exactly what would happen. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Rivera, not pleased, turns to the assistant editor. “You can cut three words?”

  “Not a problem.”

  Rivera’s curt nod completes the editing process. Templeton says to him, as the assistant editor leaves, “He’s right, you know, Miguel. It’s not a good risk. The point is made with half the quotes we use.”

  “Lawyers!” says Rivera.

  “It’s not lawyers who’re the problem,” Templeton flares back. “Particularly, good lawyers. It’s judges like Locklear and the system that puts them on the bench. Turn your magazine on that one!”

  “Wouldn’t sell.”

  “Right. So once again, the public gets what it deserves. And so do you, my friend.”

  FIFTY-NINE