Nathan winces at the door. Is he going in? Must he go in? It seems he must.
At the sight of Nathan, the lobby man Jorge-a mere allusion to security in his toy soldier's uniform complete with gold shoulder boards-looks stricken. Nathan knows he's not looking his best. Today of all days he must make an impression.
"Que pasa."
"Que pasa."
"Un momentito, senor," Jorge suggests, finger raised as if testing the wind. "Con permiso-"
But there is court. The judge won't mind his relaxed attire. East Hampton in the offing-if anyone will understand, it will be a judge. And he is late, he is always late. But the question is, How late? He must hurry.
And that deposition to be taken uptown later -or after later? – Isabel had said so. There must also be preparations for the Riverside Drive case. Milton will be upstairs fielding calls. And now-it strikes him gravely-they have no secretary. Busy, busy, busy. -
"Hasta la vista, Jorge," Nathan says, giving a little wave.
The twenty-second-floor hallway, usually bustling at this hour, is deserted, though anything but silent. It echoes with ticking: his watch, his heart, the heels of his shoes, his conscience, impatient fingernails on some desk, the one thousand clocks of this building tracking appointments kept, appointments lost.
He stands. Has he sat? It seems he is always falling and having to get up. Now he slows. Someone, it appears, has left the door to his office open at the end of the hall. The yellow light of the reception area spills into the hallway, splashing up the opposite wall. Behind him the elevator doors clatter open and pause. No one emerges. Then no one still.
Nathan whirls. "Isabel, why is the door-?" He stops himself. The reception desk, cheap plastic veneer, sits unmanned. But the waiting room, as quiet as the hall, crawls with life. Ruth and Schreck, changed since last night into blue-black court attire; the traffic lawyer wearing below his droopy mustache a gray leisure suit and loafers, ready to field his 1-800 calls about fender benders and lawsuits for untimely deaths; and slippery Chang in his double-breasted Armani and wing tips, surrounded like a pop star by his four young secretaries, a small mercenary army. Before them stand four New York County sheriffs, like troopers in their Smokey the Bear hats and striped trousers; as if, having taken the wrong exit off the thruway, here they are to ask directions. The guests hold their breath. A sheriff steps forward, parting the claws of his handcuffs: "Nathan Stein?"
Nathan recognizes the voice from the movies; the formality that authority seems to require of itself. Then he recalls the dozens of scenes from the films of his clients' lives. How many times has he himself stood beside a lone, doomed figure before the bench, always on the right, always the right.
Nathan shuffles to the right. Maddeningly, black dots do-si-do before his eyes. "Isn't it a little early?" he asks. He feels a giddy drunk coming on.
The three other sheriffs step forward.
"Don't say a thing," Ruth instructs from the rear.
Nathan looks at her, slightly amused. Then at Schreck, grimly, and says, as to Judas: "Do what you're here to do." One arm then the other is seized and pinned behind him. "I told Errol Santos everything I know."
Ruth is gripping his arm. "No, Nathan-"
"My father?"
"He's on his way."
Nathan faces the sheriffs: "Don't you know who my lawyer is? Don't you know who my father is?"
One of the sheriffs addresses the silent crowd: "This is Stein?"
"That's him," Schreck says quickly.
Nathan nods his appreciation. "Thank you, Oliver."
"He doesn't feel well," Ruth warns them.
Schreck looks at his watch and mumbles, "Milton said he'd be in at ten."
Pimples of sweat pop to the surface of Nathan's face. "Then he's not on his way?"
"Hang in there," Schreck says. He makes a consoling fist indicating some vague fraternal bond.
"Oliver, I saw the damned billboard. And Maria's will. Were you going to tell me-?"
"You have the right to remain silent-"
"I know this part. Somebody, Baron is in the car. He'll be hungry.
"We'll take care of the dog," Schreck says, a comment vaguely menacing.
The traffic lawyer, hiding his eyes, walks away shaking his head, his loafers zipping across the gray industrial carpet.
Nathan staggers forward, but the doorway fills, blocking the way. Already with the handkerchief blotting the back of his neck, the crescents of hair around the ears dark with damp. "Well well," Krivit says.
Ruth points at him. "Not a word."
An ironic smirk crosses Krivit's face. "What did he do?"
It is a good question. It hasn't crossed Nathan's mind to ask. Though these are sheriffs, not police officers; that limits the possibilities. This can't be about Isabel. Nathan looks up with genuine interest. "What did I-?"
"Nothing," Ruth blurts before Nathan can finish asking. "You pissed on a judge. It was the tax returns."
Nathan wants to laugh. "This is for that? Judge Acevedo actually called my bluff?" He'd like to say, Good for her, but thinks it imprudent.
Krivit eyes Nathan. "Contempt of court?" he says archly. "Now that's rich."
Contrite, Nathan shrugs, "Ask my lawyer," and raises his head to the room full of them, of which, suddenly, he is no member.
Krivit lowers a brow. "Did you finish?"
"Did he finish what?" Schreck asks.
"Be quiet," Ruth snaps.
Krivit squints at Schreck. "What do you mean what? You know what. Where the hell is it?"
Nathan nods at the little drama unfolding before him. Schreck knows about the writ; he said so. Of course Ruth knows that Schreck knows. They all know everything. Even the little rat, Krivit.
He hears in his ears again the pledge he'd made to himself early this morning that despite Claire he would have Amparo's cousin released. A slam dunk at redemption if there ever was one: call the A.D.A., finesse the girl's charges, tug lightly on the string or two still left him, pay the $500 himself if he has to. He can still work a deal. Consider the baby, he'd have begun, as with everything, he would have begun so well-
"I hope this won't take long. I have to be in court," he says, then spins, remembering Regina Nunez's file. "I need something in my office."
The sheriffs murmur and look uncertain, then stand aside and follow Nathan toward the back of the suite, past the mahogany-lined rooms, Milton's with the cases of law books and journals and diplomas fixed haphazardly, like fieldstones over the walls, and the glass-topped desk with the view of rolling sky, into which Milton and Nathan separately stared while seeding secretaries and clients' wives and their girlfriends past and present and their sisters and selected members-females, all but one-of the building maintenance crew. And the time when Milton kept an office full of clients waiting for an hour and a half. One impatient client stood and marched toward the door and flung it open, revealing for all to see a woman spread among the depositions and pen sets on Milton's desk, her skirt hiked, her legs splayed, Milton kneeling below and between, his head nodding-
Nathan stands at the threshold to his own office. The sheriffs are behind him and Ruth and Schreck behind them, all wondering, Nathan is sure, what it is he could possibly need.
"What is the charge?" he asks again, trying to narrow his search: himself or Regina Nunez, he's already forgotten who he's supposed to help. But he answers before they can, with a nod, "Contempt," and steps in.
Negotiating the crowded floor, he looks about. No credentials here. His diplomas peek out from behind cracked glass amid towers of paper and newsprint climbing the walls to the ceiling. CDs in staggered columns, collapsed like his mail across the bookless shelves. A clearing in the woods for the gleaming stereo. Nathan's desk is buried beneath the scatter of books and year-old magazines and styrofoam cups. Atop it all a laptop, still on, possibly for days, seems to be in charge. Piled in the office's corners the empty boxes for the stereo, the computer, the new phone, old phone, c
offeemaker, other appliances long gone, and just empty boxes whose duty-coming/going, in/out?-remains a mystery. The overwhelmed file cabinet and its three tiers of manila folders hangs open. A room with no chronology. No order. No language. Only the now, the tick of time occupied by this moment's breath, gone already with the exhalation into a container of everything before. A blind distant past housed here in this mausoleum of lives tried and pled, of briefs and writs begun past deadline, set down for the morning paper and forgotten and left unfiled to mulch beneath the compost of new paper, new briefs, obsolete news.
"Mr. Stein-?"
He looks about. As he had, standing last week at the open door to the Church of the Immaculate Conception on Fordham Road. Serena had begged him to come to mass. Purge and be purified. Be cured. Inside, the acrid sweetness of incense hung in the air. Pausing by a plastic seashell filled with foggy water, he peered down the long aislle through the halfdark where a chipped and sallow Christ hung spotlit and suspended from invisible wires over the altar, not unlike a trapeze artist. Oblivious beneath his spiked crown. Pierced palms and extruded ribs drained by the wounds freshly repainted with lipstick. Ankles crossed and riveted, the toes curled in, which Nathan thought a nice touch, feminine. Mater Dolorosa hanging stage left. Serena eased Nathan-it was not one of his best days-into a pew halfway down. Four figures slumped against the dimness of the nave, the light upon their shoulders and heads making of them silhouettes, targets, contestants, saints. Before him a wooden container missing the Bible it once offered up. A long felt bench stretching aisle to aisle, bleached and dimpled in evenly spaced pairs, as if the nexus of the spirit were the connection between knee joint and floor. Feeling the thousand hours he'd spent in his synagogue in Ozone Park, the sin-riven and unrepentant target of Rabbi Jupiter's pearls of wisdom, the virtues of a virgin's pregnancy were not lost on him.
Serena in leather pants and a gauzy blouse entered the confessional. He heard her crying. A dark figure in dark robes slipped through the wooden locker's curtains and the slide shot back and instantly there was a faint murmuring, as if from an old endless ramble never interrupted. Nathan kept his watchful eye on the statuary, expecting the worst. The stained glass of the windows deadened by the day's hazy overcast. Random panels replaced with murky plexiglass. Here and there, a saint was pierced and lit in cobalt blue and a diluted orange among the pews. The distant hiss of traffic on the Grand Concourse. In four or five months, during the quiet of a Sunday mass, Nathan knew the pagan roar from Yankee Stadium would inspire the lines of little Christian boys in white fitted frocks to near riot and the material ghosts slumped in the nave to titters.
In the confessional Serena's admissions became a singsong chant, and Nathan, having seen it before, saw her then: eyes glued with tears, hands twitchy, her pouched lips puckered and waving at the air to let out the stumbling flood, failing to keep up with the list of her transgressions: the lines of coke; the unmade phone calls to a grandmother left in San Juan like an old plant too dusty to clean; her obsessions with the gringo out in the pews, the accelerant to an already aimless life. Meanwhile, in Nathan's ears, the church-building murmured with tales of misdemeanors and fratricide and a shepherd in search of his flock and women sentenced to eternal damnation and a ram slaughtered and disemboweled and offered up to an unrepentant and hungry Lord. No respecter of persons. Nathan's grief at what he had done. These evil-doing and sex-crazed vagabonds. Good men gone to seed, bringing on the great storm. A drowned race of perilous incurables. Six-hundred-year-old Noah captaining his floating zoo. And that was only Genesis.
A hand shook Nathan gently. He had been sleeping. He looked up into a wan and featureless face, very like that of his clients, a man in powder-blue jumpsuit and clerical collar. Serena close behind him, clutching her sequined handbag as though it contained the ashes of her incinerated misdeeds.
The priest, in Puerto Rican accent: "Are you waiting to confess?"
Nathan slowly pushed himself off the bench. A shadow off to the side scuttled for the deeper dark. A string of whoops from a passing fire engine approached, whined by, and bent into the distance. Movement above, in the lightless rafters, the flutter of birds.
No.
Serena threw the priest a knowing and resigned look.
"I'm tired," Nathan said.
"Nathan," Serena begged.
The priest tilted his head, confused. "Excuse me?"
"I'd just fallen asleep."
Nathan sidestepped into the aisle, his hand raised protectively to his forehead. "Maybe tomorrow," he murmured.
Serena's voice raised to a shriek, a little girl on the run, a tearful drizzle. "Nathan, just say sorry!"
The priest was waiting. Was he? Am I, am I? "Of course," Nathan replied. "I'm sorry."
" Stein?
"Nathan?"
Ruth stands before him, her face bunched with concern. Nathan feels the brick of cash in his inside blazer pocket and, lifting his head, closes his eyes. Milton will reel him back in. Hours from now he’ll be out. Another forty-eight, and, offshore, the sunlight will snake its way through and he will inspect the changeless shapes of the sky and study the thunder of surf. He will drink tequila while standing ankle-deep in white sand.
"Ready to go?" the sheriff asks.
Nathan blinks, afraid of the answer. "Where?"
10 A. M.
An hour passes as the hours will pass here. In this concrete room the iron door clanks shut the wrong way. The holding cell murmurs with the hyperintensity of men who are not yet the state's wards, prisoners only of the moment, still with lives to lose. Nathan receives sidelong glances from jailers he's known for years, men he's paid off for a variety of client services, women, food, extra minutes. Now his pockets hang down along his legs like socks. His shoes, stripped of their laces, flop like slippers. He clutches his blazer to his chest like a life preserver. A high naked bulb dangles from the ceiling, directing the light nowhere.
He hangs on the bars and peers out. Someone in an orange jumpsuit is coming backward down the hallway dragging a plastic bucket on wheels by a mop submerged in brown sludge. Across the hall, in another cell, a darker corner sputters in laughter. Nathan catches the eye of the man there, a shawl over his shoulders, his face darkly greased, the eyes and mouth whited out like a miner's. "Don't look at me," he says.
Nathan turns and finds himself admired by a man cradling himself in his reedy arms, a horse whinny leaping from his lips, as if identifying him as either potential prey or long-lost kindred spirit. Nathan rolls his blazer and curls on the only spot left him, a square of concrete slab beside an unflushed porcelain bowl half filled with liquid shit. Pale winter light falls through the welded iron windows. He can see upside down the crown of Yankee Stadium; the belly of a plane vanishing, crashing the wrong way into the clouds. He shuts his eyes to sleep, but on the back of his lids sees mirrored there his own pale stare.
"What are you?"
Nathan raises his head to a huge black man seated against the wall, his legs stretched before him. His neck spreads like armored wings to the nubs of his shoulders.
"Same as you," Nathan says.
"I don't believe so." He looks at Nathan's shoes. He looks at the bites and scratches on Nathan's arms. They are beginning to stink. "What did you do, yell at your wife?"
"I'm not married."
"I'm not married either. Not after this morning. I just killed her. Her and her boyfriend. Ice pick, man." He brings down his arm once, slowly, to demonstrate. "Daily News said I'm tomorrow's page one."
"Impressive."
The black man shrugs. "But I don't know anymore since that fucker came in." He aims his finger like a rifle across the room. "Dude did the same thing, but he used an ax."
Like a child lost in a parade Nathan peers through the crooks of elbows and crotches at the man who was scrutinizing him. A beacon of peaceful madness in the hubbub. His lips are waving, his head twitching, as if in animated conversation.
Nathan turns back to t
he double murderer. Hands pillowy and worn like leather mitts, like tools. "Maybe you shouldn't admit things so freely."
"It's what I did."
"The beauty of things," Nathan replies, eyes fluttering closed for an instant, as if awaiting a symphony's fateful moment. "It doesn't matter what you actually do. It's what you say."
A small smile creases the face. "You aren't a lawyer, are you?"
Nathan shrugs.
"Shoot. Legal counsel." He slaps Nathan's shoulder. Others have overheard and squint uncertainty in Nathan's direction. "I'm going to need a lawyer."
"I can't help you."
"You'll get out. What did you do, anyway?"
Nathan sees no reason to hold back. In here, a sort of homecoming. He's with his kind. Anyway, he's with what he knows.
"Pissed off a judge."
"Hell. How did you do it?"
"She wanted to see my taxes."
"Why didn't you give the judge your taxes?"
Nathan shrugs. "I never file them."
The man laughs. "My kind of lawyer."
Nathan can't resist. It comes to him as easy as breath. "Then one thing."
"What's that?"
"The best angle, the best and most successful defense."Tell me."
"The irrelevance of your guilt in a court of law."
The double murderer, smiling goofily, waves his hands before his eyes. "Shoot."
Nathan blinks through his grin at his new friend, superimposing upon him images of a man and woman lying in a briny pool of blood and vomit on a ragged carpet, the man's leg twitching, an ice pick quivering like a flag planted for God and country in the woman's heaving chest. The black sits, knees up against the wall, humming at the ceiling. As though beneath a tree on a hot summer's day, not a care in the world. Glad to be rid of her, glad to lighten the load. My successes, Nathan knows, are society's failures.
A young kid grasps the bars of the window, hauling himself up, his arms shivering with the strain. All he can see is the same wedge of sky with the same plane as Nathan. Feet anchored against the wall, he heaves himself up higher and he freezes. Nathan can tell he's caught the same slice of Yankee Stadium, maybe a glimpse of tarpaulined field. Beyond that the low rubble of East Harlem, which the kid beams at as if he's spotted a beach, a woman spreading out a towel and stripping off blouse and skirt in the wavy gas of heat. Her arms raised, pinning back her hair-
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