by Anna Premoli
“Given the causes that led to the resignation of my predecessor, best to make a clean break and start again,” he had said to himself, trying to appear confident of his decision.
Damn Amalia Berger and the fact that he hadn’t been able to forget about her despite all those years! It was as if a part of him had always been waiting to get back to New York. Which was grotesque, because one of the great advantages of Chicago was precisely that Amalia Berger wasn’t there. Of course, New York was the city where most of his large, rowdy family lived, and being back there would give him the chance to reinforce his family ties. But there was that terrible worm in his mind.
How ridiculous, he thought, that instead of devoting himself to the most urgent cases, the new assistant district attorney was now sitting at his desk gazing into the distance, recalling distant times and imagining far-fetched scenarios. After all, he had successfully managed to stay away from her for ten years and he would continue to do so. New York was a big city, like everyone was always saying. There would be enough room for both of them. There had to be.
2
“Michelle!” shouted Amalia, returning to the office in a fury. “Where the hell has my secretary got to?” she shouted as she threw her purse into the far corner of the room, where it crashed noisily against the wall.
“Here I am!” answered the poor girl in question as she rushed in after having managed to convince herself not to just make a run for it. Rumors got around pretty fast in the office and the scene from the courtroom had travelled from mouth to mouth at the speed of sound until it reached the ears of Michelle, who was now standing in the doorway, nervously clutching the offending fax in her hands.
“Michelle! The district attorney’s office can’t just change their assistant D.A. and put me through hell in the courtroom without giving me prior warning! So why didn’t anyone deign to inform me of the fact?!” she shouted again, venting some of the anger which had been accumulating inside her all the way back from the court to the office. Thankfully, it was a short journey.
The woman in front of her was in obvious difficulty.
“The… the fax got lost…” she ventured softly.
“What?” shouted Amalia. “Faxes don’t get ‘lost’!”
In fairness, Michelle was not used to having to deal with this furious, completely beside herself version of her boss. In all these years of working together she had always been a paragon of reason. Ok, she might not be the most easy-going person on the planet, but at least she was not normally prone to outbursts of anger. After all, it was no coincidence that her nickname among the other lawyers was the ‘ice princess’!
All of which begged an extremely interesting question: what the hell had happened in the courtroom to make her lose it this badly?
“It is obvious that the prosecution is trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works! And of course they don’t bother to call us or send us an email like everyone else does nowadays. Noooo – obviously they have to send us a goddamn fax! They’d probably have used a carrier pigeon if they could have – that way it might have been shot down by some psycho with a sniper rifle. Which, by the way, in a city that has as many nutters living in it as New York is more likely than you might imagine… So why the hell do we lose their fax?” asked Amalia, throwing herself down noisily in her black leather chair. She put her head in her hands and closed her eyes for a moment as she attempted to regain control of herself, but even years of meditation and yoga wouldn’t have been able to prepare her for an unexpected face-off with Ryan O’Moore.
Damn it, why him? Out of all the millions of graduates of Yale Law School? The thought made her suddenly re-open her eyes – the memory of Ryan’s smug face when he had unexpectedly popped up in front of her kept appearing in her mind. Oh, the bastard had prepared this one beautifully.
“Ryan O’Moore, you just wait until I’ve calmed down and then you’ll see…” she hissed, imagining her hands around that handsome neck of his.
What, had she just thought ‘handsome’?! When had he ever been handsome? she corrected herself instantly.
Her threatening tone had aroused the amazement of Michelle, who was staring at her in astonishment, and Amalia instantly realized that she had been venting her feelings about the new assistant district attorney out loud. Big mistake. But there was no point crying over spilt milk.
“Do we already know Mr O’Moore?” Michelle asked, trying in vain to hide her curiosity.
Amalia gave a sarcastic and a not particularly lady-like laugh. “Oh, I know him, and how. Mr editor-of-the-Yale-magazine…”
Needless to specify that few of those who had denied Amalia Berger something that she desperately craved had survived to tell the tale. The new District Attorney had been one of the lucky ones. Amalia’s secretary did nothing to conceal her amusement.
Her boss was usually so very composed that the way she was behaving at the moment would have been enough to make anyone doubt her sanity. She was completely unused to being taken by surprise and to not automatically coming out as the winner. At the end of the day, a bit of humiliation was good for everyone – it gave you character. Not that Amalia needed any more character: hers was already steely hard. All they could hope for was that in this case it would have the opposite effect, namely that it would serve to make her a bit more human.
“That backstabbing, slimy, hateful…”
In the meantime, Amalia was crumpling up the first poor sheet of paper that had found its way into her grasp, reducing it to a tiny unrecognisable ball. It was obvious that she still hadn’t quite got over the shock of discovering the identity of the new assistant district attorney.
“Michelle, call the trainee lawyer in immediately! In fact, call two of them, and tell them to review all the documents relating to the Stubbs case. And tell them not to overlook anything! And organize a meeting for tomorrow at noon so that they can bring me up to speed. When the bastard comes here tomorrow afternoon, I’ll take care of making him eat dirt… Is that understood?”
Her voice was so determined and flinty that the secretary wouldn’t have dared say that she didn’t agree. She wasn’t that crazy.
“Absolutely,” she replied, glad to finally be able to get out of there.
“And book me the big meeting room for tomorrow afternoon. Let’s see if we can’t intimidate the gentleman a bit.”
“Consider it booked.”
And with those words, Michelle departed the room, leaving Amalia alone with her dark thoughts. She had let herself be taken totally by surprise. First Judge Wyatt had told her off as though she was a little girl and then Ryan had served up the final blow. Well they might have won the battle that morning, but the final victory would be hers. Whatever it cost.
*
The Indian restaurant where Amalia had decided to have dinner that night with her best friend Kayla was already full of people despite the fact that it had only just gone eight. Which was pretty much still early morning in New York.
“Why the hell are so many people in here?” asked Amalia in irritation as she bent over to kiss Kayla on the cheek. Her friend must have just arrived too, because she was still pulling off her jacket.
“Everywhere’s always full, Amalia – I thought you’d have gotten used to it after living in this town all these years,” answered Kayla with a smile, not yet grasping the intensity of her friend’s bad mood. Generally it wasn’t like her to get annoyed by having to wait in line a little.
When they finally managed to get themselves a table and sat down across from one another, Kayla immediately sensed the reason for the surprise invitation of a few hours earlier.
“You okay?” she asked, eyeing the disheveled chignon and mussed-up hair.
“What, is it that obvious?” asked Amalia gloomily.
“Uhm…” said Kayla, pretending to think for a moment. “Ok, yeah, it is. Sorry, you know I’m a terrible liar. I’m not a lawyer, you know!” she joked.
“Ha ha. If you’re trying to mak
e me laugh you can give it up right now. Today, that is a totally impossible mission.”
“Come on, then,” prodded her friend immediately, “spill the beans.”
“So you mean you haven’t heard the gossip yet? I thought you journalists always knew everything…”
Kayla just shrugged.
“I’ve spent the whole day running around doing interviews. I barely had a chance to read the two emails that I managed to answer… And I didn’t even swing by the office tonight, so I’m completely clueless. Which means that you’ve got no choice but to tell me yourself, sweetheart.”
“They’ve appointed a new assistant district attorney,” began Amalia, only for Kayla to jump in immediately.
“You know, I actually did know that: seems that Heights got himself filmed by a call girl who thought it would be fun to put it up on YouTube,” she informed her through her giggles, sure that her friend would find it just as funny as she did.
“I mean, how can anyone be that dumb?” complained an exasperated Amalia as she viciously replaced a wayward curl which had dared escape from her chignon.
Kayla stopped laughing immediately.
“What do you care about Heights? I thought you’d have been happy that he’d been given the shove. You’ve always told me that he was a disgusting sexist…” she reminded her friend, puzzled by her strange reaction.
“Yeah, well I’ve changed my mind! Better Heights than Ryan O’Moore,” she muttered. “Better the devil himself, if it comes to that…”
Kayla reflected in silence for a moment.
“I take it that the first encounter didn’t go so great, then.”
“No, it went about as badly as it could have.” Amalia looked at her friend with a strange desperation in her eyes. “Haven’t I ever spoken to you about him?”
“About who? The new assistant district attorney? I thought you didn’t know about the appointment,” said Kayla, who was now a bit confused.
“No – about Ryan O’Moore, a graduate from the law school at Yale,” replied Amalia.
This immediately caught Kayla’s attention, and it didn’t take her long to put two and two together. “What, really? You two have known each other since college?”
There was a nervous laugh from across the table.
“Yes, unfortunately we have. And after college I was hoping never to have to see his face again. I knew he had gone to Chicago to work for the D.A.’s office there. He seemed determined to stay away from New York, which was pretty much the first smart decision of his life! So why is he here now?” she asked in a voice that was both plaintive and vexed.
“Maybe the position was just too good to turn down?” asked Kayla, trying to lead her friend to the logical conclusion.
But for Amalia, this was not the evening for logical conclusions. Indeed, it was clear that she’d quite happily have done without logic altogether.
“Oh, don’t be such a smart-ass!” she muttered in annoyance. “It won’t have been the only assistant district attorney position going…”
“Well I doubt there’s that many of them around…”
“Oh forget it. You know what? Actually I don’t even want to know,” Amalia cut her off before she was force to listen to any more logic.
Kayla was becoming increasingly interested in the story.
“Do you know him well?” she asked with feigned disinterest as she tried to get more information out of Amalia.
“No, although well enough. He stole the job of editor of the college magazine out from under me. We had a few quarrels and then we just ignored each other most of the time,” she concluded quickly. Too quickly not to arouse her friend’s suspicion.
“I suppose, though, that there’s more to it than that…” added Kayla, whose journalist’s nose for a good story was twitching.
“There’s no story – nothing happened between us, if that’s what you’re implying,” Amalia immediately defended herself. But there was something strange about her tone, and she answered a question that Kayla hadn’t really even asked. And Amalia never revealed anything accidentally. Kayla’s eyes lit up like a Christmas tree jam-packed with fairy lights.
“I get it – it didn’t, but you wish it had!”
And from Amalia’s desperate expression, her friend realized that she’d hit the bullseye.
“Ok, now that we’ve both got a full stomach, out with the truth,” prodded Kayla. They had decided to eat before getting into any delicate discussions that might spoil the appetite of one of them. The blonde one, to be exact.
“What can I say? I’m too sober to talk about this kind of thing, and the tragedy is that I have to stay that way, because tomorrow the worm is coming to my office to speak about the plea bargain. And I can tell you one thing: I’d rather never touch booze again than have that rat catch me unprepared,” she said, with the grim expression of a gunfighter preparing for the final showdown.
It wasn’t hard to believe her, because she looked like she was about to blow, so Kayla took the opportunity to fan the flames a bit.
“Come on, you can’t not tell me about your first unrequited crush,” she teased with great skill.
Amalia almost choked on the water she was drinking.
“Will you cut it out? You almost killed me! And anyway, it wasn’t exactly a crush…” she said, trying – without much conviction – to defend herself. There are some things where even being the best lawyer in the world isn’t of any help at all.
“Ah ha!” said Kayla laconically.
“No, really – it only lasted a few weeks. Just long enough to talk to him a couple of times and realize what a prime idiot he was,” retorted Amalia, looking down.
“Let me just remind you that you only start with the insults when you’re on the ropes, my dear Amalia. My God! So you were observing him from afar for weeks!” she exclaimed excitedly. This was really strange behavior for Amalia, and there was no point her trying to deny it. “I can’t believe it! So what was he like? Was he hot?”
An unusual blush colored Amalia’s cheeks, and she assumed an expression known to her friends as ‘the defensive’.
“I would not say hot. He is attractive, but… obvious. I mean, you know the kind: tall, chiselled, charming… You know – boring.”
Kayla was staring at her, and her eyes, a blend of brown and green, were practically glowing with excitement. Not only was Amalia doing everything she could to play the whole thing down, she was actually making the situation worse for herself every time she opened her mouth. Pretty surprising, given she was someone who made a living from her debating skills.
“I see that we ascribe a very different meaning to the word ‘boring’. I swear, I’ve never heard you speak like this about a guy,” she said, putting her hand over her heart in a solemn gesture.
Amalia fidgeted nervously in her chair, well aware that she was cornered – and the worst thing was that she had done it all by herself.
“You’re right, I don’t talk like that,” she admitted desperately, “I expressed myself badly…”
“Oh no! You don’t fool me that easily, my dear. You expressed yourself very well, and I understood exactly what you meant: this Ryan was gorgeous when he was in college. By the way, is he still?” she asked in all seriousness.
The question made Amalia lose her temper: she had never liked being put into a position from which it was impossible to escape unscathed.
“You’re not listening! He was the most self-righteous, most arrogant asshole I have ever met! He was really rude to me,” she hissed plaintively. “And apart from anything else, I don’t know what the hell his problem was: he could have just told me nicely – I’m not so stupid that I wouldn’t have got the message. But no, he actually laughed at me when I invited him out for a drink one evening. And it had taken me weeks to build up the courage to ask him…”
“Oh, you poor girl,” Kayla reassured her. “Sweetheart, we’ve all met men like that, there’s one on every girl’s CV… I don’t
think you can even claim to be a woman unless you’ve been humiliated by a bastard like that at least once in your life. Believe me, I understand perfectly – you’ve met one, I’ve met dozens. Consider yourself lucky.”
“And if turning me down in that hateful way wasn’t enough for him – he also had to snatch the post of editor of the law school magazine! And I’d wanted it so badly.”
It was as though the floodgates had opened and Amalia could no longer stop the flow of memories until Kayla eventually knew everything, every despicable little gesture or word of derision that Ryan O’Moore had addressed to her friend in those years. And to tell the truth, the new assistant district attorney did not emerge particularly well from the jumble of random recollections.
“You know why it hurt to see him again?” asked Kayla, leaning on one elbow to look into Amalia’s clear blue eyes.
“No – tell me.”
It was obvious that she was now ready to face anything. Meeting Ryan again had prepared her for the worst. Though in her heart she would have happily done without that specific piece of self-flagellating self-awareness. But she was a strong woman, so she tried to be strong and to think positively.
“Because despite everything, you never stopped liking him, for the whole time you were at college, even after he turned you down. So the question now is: are you afraid you might still like him?”
The phrase had a cathartic effect and Amalia sat in silence for a while, meditating on the situation. Then she raised her hand and gestured to the waiter.
“I’ve changed my mind – a vodka tonic please. And make it a double.”
And in the end, despite all their good intentions, they both got well and truly steaming drunk as they drank a toast to each of the bastards they’d met over the years, raising one glass after another and slowly remembering all the names they’d worked so hard to forget. Kayla, in particular, seemed to have an endless list of truly despicable exes to reminisce about, and the number of toasts meant that the waiter was forced to keep topping up their glasses.
