The Defense: A Novel

by Steve Cavanagh

  I thought I could hear Victor snoring again, louder than before.

  Turning over the FBI card in my fingers, I thought about my conversation with Volchek that morning in the limo.

  Benny is well protected and well hidden. Even my contacts can’t find him.

  The phrase “my contacts” made sense to me now.

  Volchek had a rogue FBI agent in his pocket, someone on the inside. And whoever that agent was, he couldn’t locate Benny. I couldn’t trust anyone. If the mob could buy a federal agent, they could buy a hundred New York cops. Peering through the keyhole again, I made sure Victor remained asleep on the couch. It didn’t look like Arturas would return tonight; he said he would come get me in the morning. I put my coat on.

  It was 9:10 p.m.

  Time to escape.

  I moved quietly to the sash window. The windowpane misted with my breath as I opened the latch locking the lower pane. I put my hands on the frame, shifted my body underneath, and pushed.

  The window didn’t move.

  Not even an inch.

  I checked and made sure all latches and locks were open. I tried again. It didn’t budge. The poor light didn’t help, so I felt around the frame with my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the join. The window must have been painted shut about twenty years ago, and nobody had dared open it since. Patting my pockets, I listened for the jingle of my keys and heard nothing. I was going to use the sharp edge of my key to cut the paint. Checking my pockets, I realized my keys were gone. At that moment I didn’t know if I’d dropped the keys somewhere or if Arturas had taken them, but I didn’t have time to think about it. Instead I took out my pen and ran the point around the frame. When it had run its course, a ball of hard paint covered the tip, and dried, rubbery ribbons of the stuff fell around the window ledge like streamers.

  I got up onto the large windowsill and started to push. It was noisy. I couldn’t help it. A tearing, cracking sound came from the paint, and a dry, satisfying groan escaped from the frame as it separated from its mate and the window opened to a cacophony of traffic, music, and the hum of New York City. It had stopped raining. Night court was in full swing, and I could see, below me, a line of taxis stretching from my side of the building and then turning right toward the front entrance. Monday nights can be slow, but there’s always business around the arraignment court. Anybody who posts bail after nine invariably needs a ride.

  I closed the window a little to drown out the worst of the noise. I didn’t want Victor to hear. Hunkering down on the balls of my feet, I took four steps sideways and began edging myself out onto the ledge, tucking my head into my chest to get below the windowpane. My head came up on the outside of the window, and my eyes shut of their own volition. I forced my eyes open and then immediately regretted it. I knelt on a three-foot-wide ledge, nineteen floors up. An old stink came off the thick green moss and the ancient bird droppings that covered the masonry. It felt slippery. To my right—a dead end: an impassable outcrop for the elevator. Left was my only option. I had to move down a floor, get to the right window, and just hope Harry remained a creature of habit.

  Closing my eyes again, I pictured an internal map of the building and tried to plot a route from the outside. The courthouse stood alone, surrounded on the south and west sides by a small park. I stood on the east side of the building. Below me was Little Portland Street, which led to Chambers Street and the front entrance of the courthouse at the north side of the building. Harry’s room was on this side of the building, the east side, but not on this floor, and there was an even bigger problem. There was something on this side of the building that blocked my way; something that was probably around thirty feet tall. The top third of the obstacle came onto my level. The head, the arms, the sword—they would be difficult to get around, but not impossible.

  Before I got to my destination, I had to climb down the gray lady.

  Slowly, both hands gripping either side of the brick slab window arch, I levered myself to a standing position and started freaking out. I’d always experienced the same weird sensation with heights; didn’t matter if I was fifty or five hundred feet from the ground, it always felt worse when my head was close to a ceiling. If I was ten feet off the ground on a balcony where I could see a ceiling in my horizon view, I would freak. Give me a limitless sky and I’d be fine. I could never work out why.

  Standing in the arch, my head inches from the roof of the granite recess, I felt like I was about to lose it. I clung to the wall, my fingernails biting and breaking for grip as I fought for air. The piercing cold wasn’t helping, and the wind whipped my coat around me. Every breath felt fierce. The car horns and engines, bus air brakes and cab doors closing beneath me were a constant reminder that life existed nineteen floors below me and that I was nowhere close to being safe.

  I blew out all my disabling nerves in a series of quick exhalations and took a step forward. Even as I did it, my brain screamed at me—What the hell are you doing? I didn’t care. I held to an image of Amy in my mind’s eye, my image of my Amy, her hair in my hand as she blew out all those birthday candles before we compared our new watches. The ledge narrowed beyond the window’s recess. It was maybe two and a half feet wide. I stared with amazement at my right foot as it moved forward and steadied, ready for my left to join it.

  I’d never tried to hold on to something with my face before. I hugged the side of the building as my left foot shimmied farther and my fingers began shaking from the death grip on the brickwork gaps. I moved again.

  Ten minutes later, I stood five feet from the Lady.

  The Lady was familiar. Most people would recognize her figure. A woman blindfolded, wrapped in a toga, sword in one hand and scales in the other. Both arms raised parallel to the floor, balancing mercy with retribution just as she balances her hands. She is blindfolded to symbolize her indifference, her blindness, to race, color, or creed.

  Yeah, right.

  The Lady is known as Justitia: a bastardized version of Greek and Roman gods of justice. She’s not always blindfolded. The Lady that sits on top of the Old Bailey in London wears no blindfold. Scholars say the blindfold is superfluous because the figure is female and therefore must be impartial. They obviously never tried a case in front of Judge Pike.

  My feet shuffled forward again, but almost imperceptibly this time. It felt agonizingly slow. My brows furrowed, and I felt a quickening heat in my brain and chest. Welcome anger; welcome fresh adrenaline. The rush took me another two feet, and I stretched out a hand to grasp the sword hilt. I wasn’t able to reach it. I couldn’t move any farther—no more ledge. Everything in my mind and body screamed at me to hold on to the wall, but I had to reach for the sword, for Amy. My right foot took my weight, and I raised my other foot for balance.

  A dull, rumbling crack came from beneath me. My weight shifted, dropped, and I jumped.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  My right hand caught the sword. My left slipped over her arm and I swung my legs onto the granite folds of the toga, both feet scrambling wildly for purchase.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” I repeated.

  My arms shook violently. Looking over the statue’s shoulder, I saw a wide alcove behind the Lady on the lower floor. I could go over the arms or try to slide underneath. Letting my feet find a firm hold, I then adjusted my grip to my left hand, ready to take the weight. Against all my natural instincts, I let my body swing out before sweeping my legs underneath the arms of the Lady. As soon as my feet hit the apex of the swing, I let go.

  I landed on the alcove ledge on the eighteenth floor. A violent beating of wings and squawking welcomed me, and I grabbed the statue again and pulled my face close to the granite as the city crows protested at my invasion of their resting place.

  Adrenaline surges usually don’t bother me. I’m trained to use them. When you stand up in a room in front of hundreds of people and all eyes are upon you, you feel a huge adrenaline surge. You’re not human if you don’t. Everything slows. A second’s
pause feels like a three-minute nightmare when the juice is flowing through your system. That’s what it’s supposed to do. A slow-motion moment that allows you time to fight or flee. It quickens your reactions and completely distorts your sense of time and space. Every sense stands on high alert, and every reaction becomes sharpened to a razor’s edge.

  I forced my system down a few gears. Let my engine cool and looked up at the path I’d taken to the statue. The ledge I’d leaped from was almost gone. The brick had all but disintegrated. I checked the street. There was nobody lying on the ground, looking back at me. The rubble had hit the pavement. No one got hurt. Thankfully, I was in New York and real New Yorkers never look up. I leaned against the cold brick and looked up at the back of the Lady. She was part of the game. Lawyers are often asked how they can represent someone they know to be guilty. I’d been asked that question many times, and I’d always given the same answer—we don’t. In reality, we operated just like the US military operated for years in relation to gay personnel—don’t ask, don’t tell. I never represented anyone I knew to be guilty because I never asked any of my clients if they were guilty. I never asked because there was always the terrible possibility that they might just tell you the truth. The truth has no place in a courtroom. The only thing that matters is what the prosecution can prove. If I met a client facing criminal charges, I told them what the cops or the prosecution thought they could prove and asked them what they thought about that. This leads them into their own little performance. If they wanted to say the cops were right, they fessed up. If they wanted to dance, they told me they were innocent. What they all understood was that if they told me they were guilty but that they wanted to fight the case anyway, I could no longer represent them. That was the game.

  Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  Eleven months ago, I found out that playing the game costs lives, and I’d decided that I never wanted to play the game again.

  My heartbeat came back under control, and I looked at the route I was about to take: another ledge—just as narrow, just as treacherous.

  The sounds of the city still pulled at me, and just at that moment I heard something familiar. I checked the street below and saw a few cars moving swiftly along. I didn’t see many people. I moved closer to the exposed ledge and tested it with a tentative foot, putting more and more weight on it until I was reasonably sure it was safe. I stepped out and heard it again—a drumbeat, a voice; I knew both as well as I knew my own name. The band were the Rolling Stones; the song was “Satisfaction.” It was distant and muted but unmistakable.

  I knew the song, I knew the band, and I knew the record owner. The music gave me the final boost I desperately needed, and holding to the side of the building, I moved out and kept moving. Keith Richards’s guitar sounded better and better the farther I got out. It didn’t take me long to see a welcoming glow from a window maybe five feet away.

  My pace quickened.

  Reaching for the window, I hunkered down again and tried to pry it open. Locked. The scene inside the room looked almost cozy. A record player in the corner belted out my siren. A lamp on the desk sent a warm pillar of light through a neighboring whiskey bottle, which in turn threw bright golden sprites onto the floorboards. An elderly black man wearing a red pullover sat at a desk, drunk or asleep or both, his chin resting on his chest. His white hair stood to attention, as if straining to catch the bass lines from the music before transferring their magic directly into his brain.

  I knocked on the window.

  Nothing.

  I knocked again, loudly this time.

  He was definitely drunk and asleep.

  I knocked a third time. The window almost fell in, and His Honor, Superior Judge Harry Ford, woke up, looked around the room nervously for a second, then put his head back down for another snooze. I hit the window yet again, and this time he could orient the direction of sound. He looked straight at me, his mouth open, and I heard a muffled scream before his legs lifted and he tumbled backward off his chair, ass over tit. He got up in a rage, his face contorted in fury. He must have thought I was on a drunken escapade. The window opened.

  “I have a damn good mind to call the cops or push you off this goddamn building, you crazy son of a bitch.”

  My mood changed because I had to tell him. My amusement at his drunken shenanigans passed, and I felt the weight of my predicament and the plastic explosive on my back.

  “Harry, I’m in trouble. Big trouble. They’ve got Amy.”

  “Who’s got Amy?”

  “The Russian mob.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I pulled the window shut to keep out the freezing wind. Harry knocked the needle on the record player, abruptly cutting off Mick in full flow. Turning from the window to look at Harry, I still felt jacked up on adrenaline. His anger seemed to be subsiding into a thoughtful stare.

  “I need a drink,” we said simultaneously.

  He poured three fingers into a dirty glass and held it out to me. It was my glass. It hadn’t been used since the last time I was here, the night before I went into rehab. The liquor felt warm and soothing. I told myself that I needed it. That I wasn’t starting back down that road, that this was just a fix to calm my system. Harry found his own glass under his chair. He poured a big one and sipped at it with both hands, then righted his old swivel chair and sat down with a practiced sigh.

  “What the hell’s going on, Eddie?”

  Another sip of bourbon and I laid it all out. Everything that had happened that day from the moment Arturas put a gun to my back in the bathroom of Ted’s Diner.

  Harry just listened. He didn’t interrupt; he knew better. Get the full story out, then pick at it later.

  When I finished, he looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “What in God’s name are you doing here? Call the cops.”

  He picked up the phone and pressed nine for an outside line. I hung up his call.

  “I can’t go to the cops. These guys have a fed on their payroll, and that means they sure as hell have a few cops, too. If I call, I can’t be sure that I won’t get one of their men.”

  “But I know cops—I’ll call Phil Jefferson.”

  “This is my daughter’s life we’re talking about. I’m not gambling it on the honesty of a cop. And I don’t care who he knows—not even you. The system doesn’t work; you know that. And I have no proof. I’m the one holding the bomb; even if I found an honest cop, they’d probably arrest me instead of the Russians. Even if the cops or the FBI believed me, which I doubt, it only takes a second for Volchek to make a call and my daughter is dead. One thing I’ve learned today: I shouldn’t ignore my instincts. My gut tells me that I have to handle this my way—at least for now.”

  Harry put the phone down. His eyes darted around the room, and I saw the skin on his face pull tight; his chest rose and fell quickly.

  “Is Amy okay?”

  “They told her that they were a security team, working for me, that I got sent a death threat and that I’m being cautious. I think she bought that initially. When I talked to her, I was pretty sure that she didn’t believe that story anymore. She knows, Harry. She knows she’s been kidnapped. I have to get her out.”

  Harry drained his glass and winced with the hit. The wooden legs of his old swivel chair creaked as he reached for the bottle.

  “What about Christine?” said Harry.

  “She thinks Amy is in Long Island on a three-day field trip. As far as I know, she is oblivious to all of this. But you know Christine. I don’t want her melting down and calling the cops. So I’m not going to tell her anything.”

  “You have to call the police.”

  “If I call the cops, they’ll kill Amy. I told you I can’t go to the police; they’ve bought a fed. If they can do that, they can buy an entire precinct.”

  “How do you know they’ve got a fed on their payroll?”

  “I told you I found a card in one of their wallets. I lifted a wallet from one of them in
the limousine. It’s an FBI card. It looks genuine. There’s a phone number on the back.”

  “You stole a wallet?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re surprised. You know where I’m from.”

  “What I’m wondering is if you ever left.”

  He bowed his head and sighed. He was probably right; I hadn’t left my old self behind. I was still on a con, but instead of insurance companies, I’d been hustling juries.

  I took another drink and stretched my neck and back. The ledge maneuvers had finally put my cervical spine into a chronic spasm. The alcohol would help, but just for now.

  “Is there a name on the card?”

  “No.”

  “Could be the Russian flipped, too. Maybe he’s got the card to call the FBI.”

  “No. This guy hasn’t been flipped. He looks like one of the meanest sons of bitches I ever saw. Picked me up like a doll. No. Doesn’t make sense for him to have the card if he’s a snitch. Not unless he’s the stupidest informant on the planet, who carries around his handlers’ contact number on an FBI business card. Somehow I don’t think so. He made no attempt to hide it. The number on the card is for an employee. That employee is probably in the FBI. I can’t see another reason for a number to be on the card, but I’m open to suggestions.”

  He had none.

  “I need you take a look at the device, see if you can disarm it.”

  “I haven’t done anything like that in a long time, Eddie,” he said. As he spoke, I thought I could see a shadow move across his features, but maybe it was just his movement in the half-light. Harry had been among the first African Americans in Vietnam to reach the rank of captain. He’d led a team of tunnel rats, guys who fought the VC underground, in the dark. He did three tours, never talked about his experiences, and had a bunch of medals that he never showed anyone. That was Harry.

  I slipped off the jacket, reversed it, set it on Harry’s desk, and opened the seam. My knowledge of explosives was zero.