A Wolf Apart

by Maria Vale

  There is a man at the top of the curved atrium entrance. Looking up, I see his feet and the thin pole he uses to pull at a wave of soap. A line tethers him to the wall of glass above. I wonder if he’s ever thought of sliding down the slick of soap and leaping off, flying toward the not-so-distant smell of the ocean and the sound of the seagulls. But then the leash would tighten and pull him back, and he’d end up where he started, bumping against the glass.

  “Elijah? Are you coming?”

  The window washer starts toward the next tier of glass.

  “Max.” I nod to the little human before opening the door into the expansive lobby with its high wall of shaded glass, its marble floors and brass fixtures. The security guards behind their white desk wave us through the turnstile without demanding any ID.

  Maxim Trianoff is in his late sixties. He’d spent his early legal career as a brilliant member of the SEC’s enforcement division. He’d been, I’ve heard, a Democrat who believed deeply in social equity. Then, in the middle of his first very expensive divorce, he left the SEC for Zoerner, Marwick. By the time he was done with his second very expensive divorce, he was a Republican, committed to holding on to whatever money he still had and ready for something new. Ready to see his own name acid-etched in glass. That’s when he was approached by Aldrich Halvors with a proposition from a silent partner who wanted to fund a law firm with lobbyists to represent its interests and turn a profit.

  Great North LLC.

  “And how are our silent partners?” Max asks as he always does when I come back from trips up to the Great North. He has no idea how silent our silent partners are. Gliding through the great tangled swathes of pine- and loam-scented hardwood that his firm, our firm, was created to protect.

  “Fine, though John Torrance has stepped down.” I hadn’t been able to say it last time. It was still too raw then. I stare straight ahead at the bronze elevator.

  “Well, he was there for a long time. Have they chosen someone new?”

  Two elevators arrive at the ground floor.

  “Hmm. Evie Kitwana.” We get into the second elevator, the one with fewer people making fewer stops. Looking down, all I can see is the thinning top of Max’s scalp, but in the high shine of the elevator, his face is reflected clearly. Worn, with puffy eyes and cheeks that hang low like a bloodhound’s. Taking out a large handkerchief, he blows his nose.

  I look younger than I am, because left alone, we live a long time. We rarely do, because eventually, the most powerful wolves take a bullet, trying to defend the Pack.

  Still, I’d rather be shot during the Iron Moon than deflate soufflé-like as Max is doing.

  “And does Ms. Katana—”

  “Kitwana.”

  “And is she looking for any changes to our arrangement?”

  I can see my jaw tightening, and the door slides open onto Halvors, Sorensson & Trianoff.

  “No. She wants things to stay exactly the same.”

  From her place within the white circle of the reception desk, Dahlia calls out to tell us that the associates are already in Conference Room A.

  Six associates are seated at one end of the long, oval table in Conference Room A, leaving the two seats at the very end free for Max and me. I slide my tablet into the slot designated for it and plug into the USB so we can talk about bonuses without putting anything up on the big screen where potentially envious not-associates might see it.

  Sinise from accounting has taken the spot at the head of the table and waits while Max pours himself a cup of coffee before beginning.

  Of course, Max and I already knew that last year was a banner year for HST. The three equity partners—Max, myself, and Great North LLC—have all done exceedingly well. Max will be able to not only pay his three ex-wives, but also make a down payment on a fourth.

  I push my hair back while looking at Sinise’s rundown of allocations on my tablet… What is that smell?

  The door is shut tight, so it’s coming from inside. It’s not the coffee or croissants or carrion or cologne. Maybe the lox is off?

  “Don’t you agree, Elijah?” asks Max.

  “Absolutely.”

  Smells like rancid tallow. I try to pinpoint it, but then Max turns to me, and I know it’s my turn to discuss the clients we’re courting. I know it like the back of my hand, since the we is really me. I scratch the corner of my eye, and the scent of rotting raccoon is almost overwhelming.

  I stare down at my hands. I usually scrub them thoroughly after each Iron Moon, but I realize that I only washed them carelessly, and bits of raccoon—which was a delicious late-Moon snack two days ago—stink to high heaven under my human fingernails.

  The humans are staring at me. Can they smell it?

  “Elijah?” Max prompts. “You were saying?”

  No, of course they can’t. They’re just waiting for me to tell them about all the rich people who will pay us retainers to represent their interests so we can pay out big bonuses this time next year.

  Pressing my hands between my thighs, I hurry through the rest of my presentation, desperate to get to the bathroom.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Max says once the associates are gone. I shove my hands into my pockets. “What are you going to do with it?”

  I don’t know. The Pack pays for whatever expenses aren’t covered by the firm. I don’t know what they do with the rest. I have no money. I have only the facade of wealth.

  “I don’t have any real plans.”

  “I’m going to be honest with you. You’ve seemed off your game for a while now. You work hard, Elijah, and there is no one who knows how to reel in the clients like you do. But you’ve got to be on and be focused. You should do something. Travel. Buy a boat, for Chrissake. My brother-in-law over at Morgan got a boat a few years ago. Swears by it.”

  Lori, Max’s assistant, knocks softly at the door, and Max waves her in.

  “Mr. Sorensson, your eleven o’clock is here?”

  “What eleven o’clock?” I always block out the entire morning for associates’ meetings.

  “Tony Marks apparently—”

  “Oh right,” Max says. “I’ve got this, Lori. Just send her to Mr. Sorensson’s office.”

  “Sorry about that,” he says, pouring himself one more cup of coffee before walking through the door propped against my foot. “I meant to tell you about this before you went Upstate, but it slipped my mind. Our great friend and client Tony Marks is very fond of his gardener, even though he lost him when he lost Southampton to Susannah. Now, apparently, the gardener’s niece has found herself with some kind of legal problem. If what Tony says is true, it should take no time, so just take care of it, will you? Pro bono, of course. Neither gardener nor niece have any money. And, Elijah? Be as charming as you want, but keep your clothes on. Hard to credit from a man on his third alimony, but still, I’d appreciate it.”

  “You really need a divorce lawyer who can stand up to women,” I say, starting for the southeast corner of HST.

  Turning toward the southwest, Max shakes his head. “What I really need is a zipper that can stand up to women.”

  Chapter 4

  Whoever this pro bono woman is, she will just have to wait. I dip into the men’s room and lock the door. By the time I come out, the beds of my fingernails are red and my hands smell like Ajax.

  “Mr. Sorensson.” Sinise from accounting scurries into step beside me. I sniff my fingers again just to be sure. “That was a super presentation. But you always do such super presentations.” It wasn’t a super presentation. It was raccoon-tallow-distracted bullshittery. But then Sinise from accounting puts her hand on my arm and bends her leg behind her, leaning slightly to fix a strap of her shoe. When she stands back up, she shakes her head, tossing her long, oddly burgundy hair first left, then right.

  So.

  It has nothing to do with the
quality of my presentation and everything to do with indicating that she is receptive.

  My assistant, Janine, quickly insinuates herself between us, her back to Sinise. She tells me that a client is waiting and unnecessarily adjusts my tie, thereby marking me. Telling Sinise that I am already fucking her.

  Having defended her cunnan-riht, Janine points with her chin toward my office and the client Tony Marks sent who is waiting there. I can only see her from behind. Her thick, black hair hangs down wildly, like flames pointing to the curve of an ass like a Japanese pear. Her strong, slim legs are encased in jeans, one leg of which is caught in the top of a pair of mud-spattered hiking boots.

  Janine has returned to her office, which is really a windowless interior cubicle across the hall from my own. She has her hand on her mouse and her eyes concentrated on the screen. Unlike Sinise, this woman poses no threat. When she turns around, I see why. She is not beautiful in the way Janine recognizes. She does not have the tight symmetry that every cosmetic surgeon and every patient of one aspires to. She has a long nose in a face that is broad and soft below high cheekbones. Strong chin. Her mouth is wide and straight and unsmiling.

  She is probably four inches taller and eight years older than Janine, and since she is not like Janine, Janine not only doesn’t see her as competition, but doesn’t see her at all.

  This woman doesn’t flick her hair or coyly lower her eyes with a half smile. She doesn’t angle her hips or finger her collarbone or bite her lower lip. She is contained, quiet, still. And when I take a step closer, she smells nothing like carrion and everything like cold, damp earth.

  “Elijah Sorensson,” I say, holding out my hand. Her hand has cropped nails and no ornament. Calluses in the grip between thumb and forefinger.

  She sizes me up quickly with eyes the color of ironwood and just as unyielding.

  “Thea Villalobos,” she says, and it takes me a moment to get my breath back.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Thea,” she says slowly, “Villalobos.”

  Wolves laugh about the madness and mutability of men. About how they are prey to the sudden whims of fate and their own emotional instability. From my jaded and indifferent perch, I have laughed about it too. Laughed about Max and his sudden passions.

  But now, confronted by this woman with an ass like a Japanese pear, hair like night, eyes like ironwood, skin the color of golden rye, the ground shifts and topples me into a rotation around her.

  Thea Villalobos. Goddess of the City of Wolves.

  “Elijah Sorensson,” I repeat, stalling while I try to remember what Maxim had said about her. Tony Marks’s something. Daughter? No, that wasn’t it. She’d have money if she were Tony Marks’s daughter.

  “Have a seat?”

  I hit my toe on the corner of my desk and stumble into my chair, the Titan. That’s what my chair is officially called. The Titan.

  I discovered it after spending four years at college, three years at law school, two years clerking for Judge Baski, and two more years at Halvors & Trianoff crammed into tiny, human-size chairs. Then when I became partner, my assistant at the time—Barbara, pubic hair waxed into an arrow as though most men she’d had were too drunk to know where to aim—suggested the Titan.

  Ever since then, each new piece of furniture has been upgraded, even the two chairs facing across from my big desk. Having clients sit with their feet dangling loose above the floor helps whether I need to intimidate or impress. And everyone who comes into my office has to be intimidated or impressed.

  Thea Villalobos shrugs off her backpack and pulls out a file and a flash drive before settling into the corner of one arm of the chair, her knee propped against the other. I want to see her do it again. I want to see that economy of movement, deliberate and smooth.

  “I think you’ll find everything you need here. I didn’t want to waste your time,” she says, “but my uncle felt that a letter from a firm like yours would send a stronger message than something downloaded from LawDepot.”

  As I take the manila folder and flash drive, she settles back almost motionless. Almost but not quite. Her ring finger gently pulses against the upholstered back of the big chair. There is, I think, a restrained sensuality in Thea Villalobos, and I feel that long-lost prickling in my thighs, and my Pavlovian part stands up and remembers.

  Leaning over my desk and her file allows me to adjust the suddenly awkward side tuck. My mind is only half there as I look over the papers she’s typed up.

  Thea Villalobos is an environmental conservation officer living in Buttfuck, New York. Robert Liebling, lunatic, is suing her for springing the body grip traps he’d set on his land but right across the border from the wilderness she patrols. He set them again, and Thea tripped them again. The third time, he took video and decided to sue her for trespass. As she points out, by the time he’d taken the date-stamped video, trapping season was over.

  “You’d done it before though? During trapping season.”

  “Maybe.” She watches me eject the flash drive. “But his case against me is based entirely on that video.”

  “It would still be useful to know the history.”

  She says nothing.

  “You do know that everything you say here is privileged?”

  “It’s not germane, and I don’t think you would understand.”

  I follow her unyielding eyes to the two shelves of my bookcase that are empty of books and filled with photographs of me with various high-profile clients. The head of the United American Energy Commission, the board of the Northeastern Developers Association, the CEO of Consolidated Information. A line of men, none of whom will ever make it into Us or People or InStyle and must make do, instead, with ruling the world.

  “I am not my clients,” I say.

  She leans back, pulling an errant strand of hair away from her forehead. When she bends forward again, she sits closer to my desk.

  “Have you ever seen an animal in a body grip trap?”

  I shake my head. Hunters come during the Iron Moon, but we’ve only had one man set a trap on our land. Within minutes, it was marked so heavily with wolf urine that no animal would go near it until the Iron Moon was over, and John had the opposable thumb he needed to trip it. And once she had the words she needed, Josi, the 3rd Echelon’s lawyer, took care of the silly little human.

  “They say they’re humane, but they’re not,” she says, fingering the flash drive. “I’ve released animals when I can, but mostly you just have to kill them.

  “Liebling claimed he was a trapper. That he needed the money and had the right to trap furbearers on his land. Furbearers. Like they’re nothing but the keratin on their backs. It’d be like reducing everything you were to ‘hairbearer.’” She leans back into the corner of the chair. “See, I knew a man like you would think it was funny.”

  “No, not funny. Not funny at all. I agree with you completely. It’s just the part about ‘hairbearer.’ I can think of a few men who would say that was an apt description of me.”

  “Bald men?” she asks, a cool half smile hovering around her lips.

  “Mostly.”

  “Anyway, Liebling claims he’s a trapper, but he doesn’t have a license. I took pictures of the skins he’s taken. They’re shredded and unsalable. It’s just so much pain and waste. So yes, I triggered those traps, and yes, I will do it again.”

  I like this woman.

  “You don’t like him much, do you?”

  “No, he’s a shit.”

  It’s one of the things you learn about humans early on. They’re always hedging their bets. Always putting things in the conditional, always making concessions. Leaving their options open.

  Thea doesn’t, which makes me like her even more.

  I tap the edges of the papers she’s given me, as though to even them up.

  “Unfortunately,” I lie
, “there are complications you haven’t accounted for here.”

  She doesn’t say anything at first. Then she pulls out a pen.

  “What kinds of complications?”

  “He claims to be a farmer, so he doesn’t need a license to trap on his land.”

  “He’s no farmer. I put some stills on the flash drive. Every month for five months during spring and summer of last year when he first brought up this ‘farmer’ idea. He put some plants in old plaster buckets that never got big enough to identify before they died.”

  “I really am happy to do this for you, Ms. Villalobos—”

  “Thea.”

  “Thea. I’m just saying it may take a little longer than we originally thought.”

  “And I’m saying I’d rather take care of it myself.”

  “It’s all pro bono. Won’t cost you a thing. We owe it to your… To Tony Marks.”

  Her ironwood eyes focus on mine. It is all I can do not to look away. “My uncle’s employer’s ex-husband?”

  “He’s a big client. Look, you live in Arietta? We have an office in Albany, and I have another important client up near Plattsburgh that I visit…frequently. I could meet you in town and—”

  She laughs at that. The sound is deep and throaty and untamed, and I really want to hear it again.

  Everything I knew about Arietta came from a road sign on one of my more meandering drives home for Iron Moon. Turns out that Arietta is 330 square miles with a population of 304. Her physical address is a set of coordinates. Her mailing address is a PO box near Piseco Lake over forty-five minutes away.

  But she agrees to meet me at the HST offices in Albany. Next week. I’ll have something drafted for her by then.

  She pulls on her coat. Her eyes go to my photographs again before she tosses her backpack over one shoulder. Then she slides her left hand in her jeans pocket, her anorak caught behind her forearm, and takes my proffered hand with a smooth slide of her palm against mine.