Panorama

by Steve Kistulentz

  Chadley poured her some coffee and handed it over. He turned the sound on as the anchor asked the panel, “The more pressing question is this: just how likely are more indictments?”

  “Very likely,” answered Chadley. “Bordering on inevitable.”

  The screen cut to file footage of executives being led into the United States courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue, the sandy-colored stone edifice that Cadence remembered from every other Washington scandal. Chadley tapped her on the arm with the remote control. “That’s my boss. My boss’s boss, anyway.” United States marshals escorted a man in his late fifties—black suit, no tie or belt, hands cuffed in front of him but the cuffs hidden beneath a raincoat—through the courthouse doors.

  Cadence wasn’t surprised. Her bosses had long considered dumping Chadley’s company as their auditors, a decision that would be made above her pay grade, something she did not worry about. She did manage, however, to keep up with the narrative in the papers, Chadley’s firm under constant heat, growing questions regarding the practices of offshore subsidiaries, the tax treatment of preferred stock, an excess of deferred executive compensation.

  Chadley had stylish three-button suits and dress shirts with their elongated, European collars. But he was what, twenty-six? and she knew it to be a costume. It was hard for Cadence to believe that at the heart of Chadley’s career was anything resembling conviction. In her quieter moments, Cadence often wished that she was married to some absolute beliefs that required her full attention; she wanted a vocation, not a career. She did not want to be one of the zombified salarymen she saw emerging, hobbitlike, out of the subway tunnels each morning. She did not want to be an interchangeable part. Her career was what it was, a job, one that provided for her, gave her an ample safety net, allowed her to send money home to her father, fulfill this sense of duty that grew in her as she got older. But she could turn the job off at night. All she required then was peace.

  With Chadley, she could see the end game. Her view of his future felt clairvoyant, his path the inevitable one that meant he’d bail out of consulting, take the LSAT, attend law school, followed by a few years of backbreaking associate’s work in a white-glove law firm, billing his two-thousand-plus hours, then a hasty stab at marriage and a move to Bethesda or North Arlington, a pair of children in quick succession. Nearly everyone who had disappeared from her social life went down the same path. But Chadley didn’t have the ability to view himself with brutal objectivity, and Cadence could not provide it for him. Sooner or later, something might jar him enough to provide a massive dose of self-awareness, but that would be a problem for the next girl, or the one after the next.

  Or maybe that jolt was already on its way. His Chicago project was going poorly. Chadley’s company was supposed to be auditing the books of the Department of Aviation, the massive bureaucracy that ran O’Hare Airport, trying to find a few hundred million dollars that had slipped between the sofa cushions. No one could pin down an exact number. But the newspapers had dredged up evidence of people skipping off to St. Barts for executive retreats; machines the airport bought from Cadence’s company either didn’t work or sat uninstalled, unpacked from their shipping crates, in a distant hangar. The news this New Year’s Day reported indictments and a congressional investigation, pressure on the airport authority to save money across the board. Everyone knew the firings were coming. Chadley might survive the turmoil of the Chicago project with his job intact, but she doubted it.

  Chadley was an auditor, and at work, his only responsibility was deciding between competing realities—spreadsheets versus corporate reports. He spent his days poring over boxes of financial documents; finding the bad seed of exaggeration meant days of entertainment. How little he understood the real world of middle management, memoranda, and mortgages he was assigned to disturb and uproot. Chadley often called Cadence to talk about the mild malfeasance he had uncovered, business lunches at strip clubs, gambling markers covered with a corporate MasterCard, executives with expense-account girlfriends tucked into suites at the InterContinental, the Four Seasons, or the Drake. He’d clearly been left out of the larger machinations of the firm. Now the audit of Chadley’s Chicago project had already claimed careers—two transfers and four retirements—before anyone opened a box of paperwork.

  Chadley spoke over the report, which showed B-roll of office buildings and cartons of documents in a federal courthouse. “We’re disappearing a division at a time. Every time I’m back in DC, more cubicles get dismantled. The receptionist left on maternity leave, and they replaced her with one of those automated systems: If you’d like a company directory, press two now.”

  Cadence thought of the carnage as a disaster movie, red circles on a map, spreading and overlapping, tracking the growing reach of the epidemic. The broadcast report moved on to an unfortunate videotape of one of the firm’s senior partners telling a room full of stockholders in some client company how his stock options were more profitable than cocaine, for chrissakes. The news networks loved to show the tape over and over, an emblem of runaway corporate greed, a visual that translated to television better than a five-thousand-dollar shower curtain or a wine cellar paid for by stockholders. The conversation that morning was punctuated by a repeat of the video Cadence had already seen, the same partner doing the perp walk into a federal courthouse.

  Cadence kept expecting Chadley to change the channel, but he didn’t. Finally, he said, “I’m in trouble at work.”

  “The firm’s going under. No one will blame you if you’re one of the rats that jump ship. Maybe you should get your résumé together, talk to a headhunter.”

  “Not that kind of trouble.”

  “What, then?”

  “Someone,” he announced gravely, “has been auditing the auditors. Which means I’m fucked.”

  She knew that if she waited him out, she would get the rest of the story.

  “When I started, right out of school, everyone was on the same gravy train, you know? We got performance bonuses, holiday bonuses. On one project, the lead auditors got to take their whole team to the Cayman Islands for a month to finish up a one-week job. Last year, people on the Chicago project got a Christmas bonus in an envelope, cash. No one said where it came from. Just an envelope, understand?”

  Cadence thought of her long-dead grandmother in northeastern Pennsylvania, her uncertain English, the immigrant way she punctuated every sentence by asking, Do you understand?

  Chadley reached under the bed for his briefcase, extracted an expandable folder, pulled out a spreadsheet. “By my own calculations, I’m into the firm for something like eleven thousand dollars. The attorneys told us on Friday that the key to avoiding prosecution is restitution.”

  “That’s quite a chunk of change. What for?”

  Chadley ruffled some receipts, looked at the list. “All things that used to be copacetic. Steakhouses. Bar tabs. Upgrades to business class. Tickets to this and that. Laundry. You know how we used to choose the wine for dinner? We’d order the third-most expensive bottle on the list. Room service, and”—he averted his eyes—“in-room movies.”

  Cadence gave him a wide smile. “Don’t you know? Movie titles do not appear on your room bill,” she said, in the kind of voice announcers save for the fine print of car advertisements.

  “I just don’t have it,” he said, and it took Cadence a minute to realize he was talking about the money.

  Chadley exhaled, somewhere between a sigh and a deflation, and Cadence interpreted his silence as an admission: He was going to be fired. Everyone on the Chicago project was going to be fired. The guys at the top were likely headed to a country-club prison; the guys just beneath them were plotting their bloodless coups, and the guys beneath them were the scapegoats, the endpoint of the avalanche that was going to smother Chadley and his burgeoning career.

  Cadence could see Chadley struggling with whether or not he could ask her for help. And she debated whether the easiest path out, out of this Chicago hotel roo
m and out of this relationship with this boy, was simply to write him a check. Would he even have the balls to ask?

  Chadley said, “I can’t watch,” and ran through the channels, past college football, country-music videos, and a pair of cooking shows, before settling on a different news talk show.

  The anchorman said, “This afternoon, we’ll tackle the issue of free speech in America’s public schools. Does the right to speak your mind end at the schoolhouse door? Our guests, Congressman Sammy Bickley, Republican of California, and Richard MacMurray, attorney for the Students’ Committee Against Censorship.”

  After the theme music faded out, the anchorman described the kids as eighteen-year-olds James Terrance Scott and Riley Wayne Kiddings, using the three-name construction news writers reserved for serial killers and presidential assassins.

  Cadence immediately grabbed for the remote, but Chadley played keep-away.

  Whenever she saw Richard on television, she expected him to rise to his usual theatrics. But today he seemed calm, measured. She watched him say, “Parody, satire, sarcasm, and biting humor might be unpleasant. But they enjoy total constitutional protection. The real issue here is political, that a superintendent with thin skin doesn’t like either the manner or the substance of what these young men have to say.”

  The anchorman recited the teenagers’ names off the prompter again before holding up a copy of the offending student publication and pretending to read from it, asking, “Isn’t it counterproductive for these young men to compare that same superintendent to Joseph Goebbels?”

  “I don’t think that was their message at all. We have very few absolute freedoms in this country, but one of those is an absolute freedom of the press. These young men used their own time, their own initiative, to put out a newspaper that was parody, a bit caustic, perhaps, but entirely factually correct. And that meets, to the letter of the law, our definition of protected speech.”

  Cadence held her hand out for the remote. “Why are we listening to this guy? He sounds a little off.”

  Chadley held it away, and Cadence receded to her side of the bed. “It smells like sex in here,” Chadley said through a smile. “Sex, cigarettes, and cheesecake.”

  He pulled a cigarette from a crumpled soft pack on the bedside table. “That guy doesn’t sound off.” He pointed at the TV with a twitch of his head. “It’s those kids he’s talking about. Probably walking around the halls showing off their new piercings.”

  “It’s the inalienable right of every teenager to feel alienated.” Cadence pinched the cigarette from Chadley’s hand, took a drag, handed it back. “Trouble in the land of Presbyterians. Shocking. But can we change the channel now, please?”

  “Nothing much else to watch. Unless you’ve developed a sudden passion for college football.”

  “Let’s watch the Weather Channel. The hotel information. Pull up your bill on the TV and see how much damage we’ve done. Anything but Richard.”

  “Richard? You know this guy?”

  Cadence moved to the chair in the room’s corner, cleared off her clothes. She grabbed a dirty T-shirt to cover herself. Every difference between them suggested fundamental ways they were incompatible, even the clothes they’d worn yesterday working out together in the hotel fitness center. Her T-shirts advertised charity events, race walks to cure breast cancer, or 5K runs to fight AIDS. Chadley’s were freebies promoting light beer, bar crawls, and a brown liqueur that tasted like cough syrup, which Chadley referred to as a “gateway drug.”

  Cadence felt she was sitting in a hotel room with the very definition of extended adolescence. She used to think that she was envious that Richard came to her with a past that she would never be able to truly inhabit. He had a certain worldly authority. But there, looking across the bed at Chadley, with his hairless back and the upper arms that he shaved, she knew she’d been wrong. She’d run her hands over the stubble on his triceps and think, What a fool—not just Richard, but herself too. Chadley was a boy who had made only a boy’s mistakes.

  The Richard she was watching on television came across as unflappable. He wasn’t just comfortable in his skin, he inhabited it with an undeniable confidence. It wouldn’t bother him to see one of Cadence’s ex-boyfriends on television. She’d never known him to lose his composure, not on television and not on the phone with attorneys and producers and editorial boards and the other random public people that populated his contacts, and certainly not with her. He could change the oil in his own car, break apart a fifty-year-old faucet to replace its cartridge and washer, and pair a bottle of wine both reasonable and right for the occasion with almost any of the whimsical foods that she’d chosen to order.

  She sat fidgeting with her hair and decided to come clean. “He’s the lawyer I told you about. The guy I was seeing.” She wondered if seeing Richard on television had changed the preconceptions Chadley must have had. Lawyers by definition existed as older, well groomed, wealthy. Richard looked that way on television.

  Chadley said, “‘Seeing.’ As in ‘dated.’ As in the past tense?” A disembodied voice coming from the bathroom, his tone flat and matter-of-fact, until it cracked and the end of his sentence rose like a question.

  “We’re not going to have this conversation now,” Cadence said.

  “Just when are we going to have it? One of those nights when I call at two in the morning and you don’t answer? Or when I get off a plane to find a message that says you can’t see me Saturday night, but maybe we can squeeze in brunch Sunday morning?”

  “I’m not sure we’re ever going to have that conversation. What’s the point? We’ve had a good thing here, but that’s just what it is. A thing.” Cadence gathered clothes from the floor, more from the foot of the bed. She was proud of herself for resisting the urge to use the word temporary.

  “And what do you have with him? Is that a thing?”

  “A complicated thing. I don’t have to explain it.”

  “It is complicated, or it was complicated?”

  Chadley moved back to the bed and attempted to rub Cadence’s shoulders. Cadence shook off his touch and went to the closet and began depositing her clothes in an overnight bag. “He’s been in the past tense for about two months. That’s how long it’s been since I’ve seen him. I called him one night at two in the morning and hung up. I’m just not sure that he isn’t in the present tense, or the future tense too. It’s complicated.”

  Chadley lowered his head, sulking. “I guess that means it is, as opposed to it was.”

  “I’m heading to the airport. We can share a cab if you want,” she said as she zippered her bag shut. “You sound more like a fucking lawyer than he does.”

  30

  THE NETWORK cut to a tease for the next game, a sportscaster inviting viewers to the granddaddy of them all. When they came back from commercial, the anchor read a one-minute summary of the underground newspaper and its aftermath. “Richard MacMurray, I’m asking: what’s a fair punishment for these problem students?”

  Richard’s media training had taught him to reject the premise of the question. Somehow, when politicians did it, people got irritated, but anyone who hadn’t stood for election could get away with it routinely. He stuck to his talking points. “The word punishment suggests that these boys did something wrong when they didn’t. They’re exactly the kind of students you want in honors journalism. Their heroes are Murrow and Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein. But it doesn’t help anyone when the principal, who is white, goes on the local news and calls two African American high school seniors uppity. Any reasonable person knows that at best, that’s a poor choice of words, and at worst, it’s a code word, a slur.”

  The congressman sat forward. “This is the same argument he gives anytime he’s wrong. Anyone who doesn’t want to sanction pornography is suddenly a Nazi. And let’s be clear. What these kids put out is pornography. But I should have expected that, since your guest here makes his living defending the indefensible.”

  And tha
t’s when Richard knew he had the congressman; he’d made it personal, and with Richard, the argument was always about a theology of freedom, the right of a true American to be left alone, especially by assholes. “I love the fact that a member of Congress thinks that the First Amendment is indefensible. You took an oath to defend that right, Congressman Bickley. To defend the entire Constitution, not just the parts you like that week. Those Founding Fathers you are so fond of quoting had enough wisdom to know that we didn’t need a Ministry of Propaganda. The right to speak freely doesn’t end once you pull into the school parking lot,” Richard said.

  Then the stage manager jumped forward and gave Richard both hands up, a stop sign; he moved so abruptly that Richard and the congressman both reflexively checked the monitor to see if he was in the shot.

  The anchor set it up. “We’re getting word of a breaking story out of Dallas. For more on that, we’ll go to headquarters in New York.”

  A technician materialized in front of Richard, unclipped his microphone and battery pack.

  From FBN News World Headquarters in New York.

  Two words: Special report.

  The monitors filled with the two-word graphic that even now in Richard MacMurray evoked irrational memories of childhood terror—in his short life, dead popes, dead presidents, celebrities dead in car crashes, millionaire philanthropists missing in their hot air balloons, assassinations and near misses, Three Mile Island, blindfolded hostages being paraded around the embassy compound, the sinking of an overcrowded ferry three-quarters of a world away, volcanoes that awakened after decades of percolating slumber, tornadoes that took aim at Walmarts and trailer parks, the sixty-plus-car pileup on a fog-shrouded interstate, car bombings in Gaza, the springtime Mississippi creeping malevolently past its banks, that one summer when so many young blond girls disappeared into the teeth of evil, and now, according to the chatter in Richard’s earpiece, the sudden disappearance from radar of a commercial flight. Special report. The two words triggered in Richard an immediate reaction: fear.