Foxcatcher

by William H Hallahan

  Same black suit. Same inquisitor’s eyes.

  “I must apologize for following you. Perhaps observing is a better word.”

  Brewer put the shot glass down and picked up his newspaper. He turned to go.

  “Come, Mr. Brewer. I wish merely to talk. … I’m sorry to have upset you. But I did want you to find out for yourself about your partner, Marvel. It was your last piece of hope, don’t you see? I needed to wait until you lost it. You understand?”

  “No.”

  The man sat down slowly on the stool next to Brewer. “I’m the person who got you out of prison. Do you understand that?”

  At the man’s suggestion they moved to a booth. He carried Brewer’s newspaper for him.

  “What are you drinking?” Brewer asked him. He knew the answer before he heard it.

  “Nothing. I won’t stay long.”

  “Muslim?”

  “How perceptive of you, Mr. Brewer.” He smiled a tight smile.

  “Why did you get me out?”

  “I must tell you that I got you at bargain rates. The art of the bribe is not practiced with a high degree of finesse in your country, Mr. Brewer.”

  “Why did you get me out?”

  “I wasn’t sure it was such a wise move until now. But here I see considerable intelligence, Mr. Brewer. And a few other desirable characteristics. Like your anger. Very useful. In fact, I’m praising myself on my choice. I have an enticing offer to make to you.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yes. My name is Rooley Attashah. I’m from Iran.”

  “Let me assess your condition for you, Mr. Brewer. You’ve been betrayed by your country, put on trial for a crime you didn’t commit, sent to jail wrongfully, sentenced to an excessive term, had your good name besmirched, your career destroyed. You are now unemployed and unemployable, with no friends, no money, no family, your life in ruins, with the bleakest possible future. You are an outcast in your own country. Neither dead nor alive. Is that an accurate inventory?”

  Brewer shrugged indifference.

  “You are not blessed with many options, I would say, Mr. Brewer. Surely it is time for you to reexamine all your loyalties to discover who merits them and who doesn’t.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “A few things are all I need,” said Attashah. “A few small things.”

  “You pay the equivalent of three Mercedes in bribes and you want just a few small things?”

  Attashah frowned at the newspaper, reading Brewer’s handwritten ad, then tapped it with his surgical forefinger. “Ah! Precisely what I want.”

  Brewer nodded. “I know what you want, Attashah. Military parts. For Iran. Let me guess: American surveillance equipment. You want to eavesdrop on your neighbors.”

  Attashah turned his right palm up. “Ah. You are too quick, Mr. Brewer.”

  “But I’m not crazy.”

  Attashah leaned forward on his folded arms. “But you do need to get back into the game, is it not so? You need to get a stake. Because it will take much time and much money to find the culprits who framed you and to clear your name.” Attashah waited for a reaction from Brewer. But Brewer never blinked.

  Attashah tapped the tabletop with his index finger, a minister in his pulpit. “Who will help you, Mr. Brewer? No one. No one in the whole world. You are alone and helpless. You can do nothing without money. But—I can give you that money. I can give you the means of finding your enemies, clearing your name, and restoring your life.”

  Attashah waited again for a reaction. He sighed in exasperation. “Mr. Brewer, in my land, letting your enemies flourish while you languish is a disgrace.”

  “Marvelous people, the Iranians.”

  “Upon reflection, Mr. Brewer, you will discover I am offering you the only option you have.” Attashah stood up. “Well—I see I’ve approached you too soon. You are not ready to strike a bargain. Yet.”

  He leaned over the table of the booth and with a black felt-tip pen wrote a phone number on a very small and white square piece of paper taken from a pocket pad. His index finger then pushed the little scrap across the table slowly to Brewer as though it were a rattrap liable to crush his fingertip.

  “Call me. When you’re ready. I can make you rich. Rich beyond your wildest dreams.” He leaned closer and tapped the newspaper again. “I am the only one answering your classified ad, Mr. Brewer. No reasonable offer refused.”

  For a long time after Attashah had left, Brewer sat looking at the small square of paper. He’d been put back into the pot to cook a little longer.

  Attashah had read him like the label on a beer can. With shrewd insight he’d pushed every secret button, touched every hidden nerve, called out every reason why—exploring another man’s soul with the hot, dancing eyes of a fanatic.

  Brewer had seen those eyes before. Every one in his trade had: the terrorist.

  The terrorist standing on top of an embassy in Beirut, holding a pistol to the head of a young woman—an American file clerk—and demanding something impossible, the release of PLO prisoners, was it? Or jailed Libyan bomb throwers? Eventually frustrated, his demands unmet, in front of five hundred people, holding the weeping girl in his brutal embrace, the terrorist pulled the trigger. With one shot, he killed a person he had never seen before and whose name at the moment of her murder he didn’t know.

  Terrorist’s eyes. Attashah’s eyes. Here comes the great troublemaker of the world: the true believer.

  The undertaker’s man, come for the body.

  Attashah had actually brought him a measure of joy. Brewer realized he wasn’t going to be shot from a dark doorway after all. At least not right away. And he was out of prison—free to make his own moves. He could turn his attention to getting on with his life.

  But what he sat and thought about was Attashah’s offer, and all the compelling reasons Attashah had given him. In the end, though, he decided to try to do it his own way.

  For starters, he would get a job. Any job. Nothing thrilling. But a job to pay the rent, to feed himself and give him the time he needed to vindicate himself.

  He read the want ads again. Busboy. Dishwasher. Gasoline station attendant. Night orderly. Bartender.

  Bartender.

  Roarke, the owner of the Tipperary Pub, had taken to Brewer.

  Several times he had talked about his saloon-owner’s problems: three sons and none of them wanting anything to do with owning an Irish pub, a brother-in-law wanting to be a bartender only, with a weekly paycheck and no headaches. And Roarke himself wanting to sell the place and retire.

  “I’m looking for work,” Brewer announced that afternoon.

  “Oh, that’s wise. What line of country might that be?”

  “Tending bar.”

  “Oh. Good choice. Myself, I like a bartender who’s not too gregarious, don’t you see? A good listener is what I’m referring to. This place doesn’t have the clientele that take very readily to the new kind of bartender you get from these bartending schools these days. You know what I mean—very young men with beards and girls with tight-fitting blouses. What’s wanted here is the older bartender who’s seen his share of life—if you get my drift. One who would eventually take an interest in the business, don’t you see?”

  “Someone who would eventually like to own an Irish pub.”

  “Exactly.”

  Roarke served the eleven o’clock crowd, retirees heading for a racetrack somewhere. As he worked, he would cast an appraising glance at Brewer now and again.

  He made up his mind. He said to Brewer: “My brother-in-law will be off visiting Ireland for a few weeks. Seeing his Da and Ma in Cork. You get my drift? It’d be only for a few weeks—but he’s usually First Broom, you see? He sweeps out the place first thing in the morning, polishes up the glasses, stores the ice and such, and takes care of the dog patrol. You know, dog patrol. The early-morning drinkers come to get a hair of—ah, you see. Well now, it ain’t all that much but it is a way to learn
the business from the bottom up, don’t you see?”

  Brewer nodded. He saw.

  “I’ll let you know when.” Roarke set up a free beer.

  Later, when Brewer left, Attashah stepped from a parked car and entered the bar. He drank a glass of club soda and had a nice chat with Roarke.

  Brewer spent the rest of the afternoon checking out various marginal jobs in Manhattan. Just in case. Amazingly enough, he was turned down for busboy, a job category jealously guarded by Puerto Ricans. The gasoline pumping job was up near Harlem, in a station that had been robbed at gunpoint seven times in six months.

  This was going to take more scratching than he’d thought. Late in the afternoon he went back to the Tipperary Pub.

  Roarke barely spoke to him, stayed at the other end of the bar talking to an old man who fulminated against Eamon de Valera for having visited the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences on the announced death of Adolph Hitler.

  “The most unforgivable thing that perverse old idiot ever did!”

  Brewer had a difficult time catching Roarke’s eye for another beer.

  Roarke served him quickly. “It fell through,” he said hastily to Brewer. “The whole deal. You get my drift?”

  And that was the way it was going to be: Attashah going around after him, queering every job he would get. Attashah had invested three Mercedes in Brewer and then reduced his options to two. Smuggle or starve.

  When I am the hammer I will strike. When I am the anvil I will bear.

  Brewer reached in his pocket for some coins and walked to the phone. Don’t get mad, Charlie. Get even. He dialed Attashah’s phone number.

  “That offer still open?”

  Brewer was trying for the third time to fit everything into the box. On the wrapping paper he’d printed in block letters Clivedell Rine’s name and prison address.

  This would be the first package Rine had ever received in prison, and Brewer grinned, imagining the expression on Rine’s face. But he had to admit there was more stuff there than he could get into the box. He was going to have to leave something out.

  Brewer heard a light tapping on his hotel room door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Madeline Hale.”

  When he opened the door she said, “Don’t you return phone calls?”

  “You’re a long way from Washington.”

  “May I come in? Or shall we talk in the hallway?”

  “Testy, testy.”

  “Yes, quite, Mr. Brewer.”

  She glanced around the room as she entered, noting the document and the pad on the table. It appeared to be an inventory list from which he had been transcribing selected items. He removed the papers.

  She said, “I’ve brought back your file, including your power of attorney.”

  He nodded at her. “You could have mailed it to me.”

  “No. I need your signature on several of these. And there’s something else that can’t be handled by mail. Thank you for inviting me to sit down.”

  Brewer removed the papers from one chair for her and seated himself in another. He waited for her to speak.

  “When I first met you,” she began, “I asked you if you were guilty. And you said, ‘More or less.’ Those were your exact words as I noted them. And I believed you.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “But you weren’t guilty, were you?”

  “More or less.”

  “But what does that mean? I thought it meant, ‘Yes, I’m guilty with extenuating circumstances.’ ”

  Brewer shrugged. “We’re all guilty of something.”

  “But you weren’t guilty of selling guns, were you?”

  “I have a lot of work to do, Mrs. Hale.”

  “You’re not going to dismiss me that easily, Mr. Brewer. You and I formed a relationship when I took your case. And you misled me. Now I want this straightened out. Our relationship is not ended yet.”

  “It’s all over,” Brewer said. “The trial is history.”

  “No, no. It continues. It always continues. Because of the trial, you went to prison. Because of prison, your career is ruined. Because your career is ruined, you have limited options. Because you have limited options, you are liable to do something that can ruin you completely. And I participated in that sequence, albeit unwittingly.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to do something that will ruin me completely?”

  “Because,” she said, “in your world there are only cops and robbers. And you can no longer be a cop.”

  “That’s pretty simplistic.”

  “I’ve seen it happen too many times, Mr. Brewer. Now, I’m asking you again—were you really selling guns from the back of that car for your own gain? Are you guilty of that crime, yes or no?”

  Brewer sighed. “I’m satisfied that you did as well as any lawyer could have. No recriminations. No regrets. I can handle it from here.”

  “Well, I have recriminations. I want a rematch.”

  “Mrs. Hale. What will it take to have you leave here?”

  “The truth.”

  “Some other time, maybe.”

  “I conducted your trial on the basis that you were guilty. I took the strongest defensive position I could muster to minimize your sentence. And you absolutely refused to cooperate. You insisted on a plea of not guilty, which involved a trial and infuriated the judge. I felt, and still feel, you could have gotten a far lesser sentence if you’d changed your plea. Do you understand that?”

  Brewer sighed again.

  “And now, Mr. Brewer, I have a nagging suspicion that you were innocent.”

  Brewer shrugged at her in silence.

  “Over the years,” she said, “as a trial lawyer I’ve defended many a guilty person who claimed to be innocent. But I have never handled an innocent person who claimed to be guilty.”

  She waited for a reply. “No answer?” she asked. “If you are innocent, then I would have conducted a different trial. I might have gotten you acquitted.”

  “No. You never had a chance. Nothing you could have done would have changed the outcome one whit.”

  “Explain that, please.”

  “When pros set out to do a job on you,” Brewer answered, “you get trapped, wrapped, and delivered with a big red bow. The job gets done and it stays done.”

  “Then you are saying you were framed by professionals? You were innocent?”

  “Believe me, it doesn’t matter a bit.”

  “It does to me.” She pointed at the inventory document in his lap. “Before you make a fatal turning in your life, I want to make an offer. If I reopen your case and find that you were truly framed, and if as a result of that you are restored to your career and your job—if I can do that, will you stop doing what I think you’re doing here?”

  “You think I’m doing something nefarious?”

  “How about answering my question?”

  “My name cleared and my old job back? Sure. I would certainly drop what I am now planning to do.”

  “Okay. Then I think we have a deal. Are you innocent?”

  “More or less.”

  “Oh, dear God in heaven. Explain that to me. Now. Please.”

  “It’s called relativism. And, as the ministers love to point out, relativism makes sinners of us all.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Salami tactics, Mrs. Hale. Life doesn’t take your soul all in one go. It does it a slice at a time. Like salami. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  Brewer looked down at the document in his lap. “You know, I have a lot to do and I’m desperately short of time.”

  “Don’t stop. Tell me about relativism.”

  “I can give you just a couple more minutes. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Brewer pitched the document and the pad onto the bed. “When I was a young agent, just starting out, I was very naïve. I believed that the Feds were good guys and the arms dealers were the bad guys.
So I was very careful about obeying the law.

  “For example, I never never put a phone tap in position until I had the paper from the judge. Then one day, because of an urgent situation, I put a tap in while waiting for the judge to sign the papers—which he did. I had done something legally illegal. I bent the law a little. Okay so far?”

  “Go on.”

  “Next time I put on a tap before I had the papers, the judge refused to sign them. So I took the tap off. But the next time a judge refused to sign the papers, I left the tap on because the judge was clearly an idiot with a political motive. A few days later, sure enough, another judge did sign the papers. Later I put taps on even before the papers had been drawn. After that I often just put the tap on and let my conscience be my guide. See? I went from legally illegal to illegally legal.”

  “Those are weasel words,” she said.

  “Yes. They are, aren’t they? Next I started putting taps on as a service to others agents. Those taps picked up a lot of information—helped stop crimes and helped put criminals in jail. Okay so far?”

  “Go on.”

  “Then I was given a reward here and there. Now I was putting taps in for money but only if I felt the tap was justified. Finally I stopped asking for justification. The world of politics was too corrupt for me to sort out. Some judges would sign a paper other judges wouldn’t. There was no rhyme or reason. Legal merit didn’t seem to have anything to do with it. So my conscience had to be my guide. Then I saw that everyone was guilty. Everyone deserved to be tapped. See? A slice at a time. I lost myself a slice at a time. From there it was easier and easier. I eventually committed every crime in the book, from breaking and entering to bribery and blackmail to assault, mayhem, and even murder. Right and wrong became relative terms. They had no real meaning to me anymore. Until I was arrested. And that changed everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you ever been arrested and locked in a jail cell?”

  Madeline Hale shook her head. “No.”

  Brewer said, “When you’re put into a cell, even innocent people feel guilty. All kinds of feelings of guilt come to the surface. I knew that I belonged in prison for many of the things I’d done as an agent. And when you walked into my cell, I told you the truth. I’d sold arms a number of times. Mainly to entrap people. But sometimes I never bothered to turn in the money I made on the deal. Do you hear what I’m saying? I’m guilty of a string of crimes that would knock your hat off. And I can’t even say I did them all for my country.”