Pardon the Ravens

by Alan Hruska

  “So what is it?”

  “You don’t know half what there is to know about me.”

  “So you’ll tell me when I get there.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow,” she says. “Maybe late.”

  “Why not today? If you’re worried about the key, I can call the super.”

  “No, no. It’s just… today, I’ve got to see if I can track down any of my stuff. And tomorrow… there’s one more thing I’ve got to do.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Sarah arcs her swing cautiously between the seawall behind her and the foot of a long hill. Phil, gently pushing, encourages his daughter to go higher. She stares out, with large, brown, questioning eyes, toward the main house of the estate, to its side lawn. She sees Vito playing with his dog, Friday. He’s lucky to have a dog, she thinks. She’s not allowed to have one. She’s told when she’s older, maybe. She bets her mommy would let her have a dog. Her eyes fix on a figure, just coming from the house, who Sarah thinks may be her mom. She can’t be sure. She’s been imagining her mother everywhere and is always disappointed.

  Carrie, catching sight of her daughter, begins to run. Sarah flies off the swing with a shriek and runs toward her. “Mommy!” the child yells. The two hug each other, kiss, then hold on for dear life. Phil observes the scene with a seigneurial expresssion before crossing over to take charge of it.

  “Rehab looks good on you, sweetheart,” he says. “Took a lot of guts, what you did.”

  Carrie pulls back. “You know?”

  “I keep tabs. What do you think? I’m not interested?”

  “Third rehab in two years.” Her tone is self-lacerating.

  “Whatever it takes.” He smiles. The man can be charming.

  “Go play, honey,” Carrie says softly to her daughter. “I’ll be right there.” But Sarah, who has captured Carrie’s leg, is not inclined to let go of it.

  “Go on, sweetie,” says Phil, his voice sharp. “It’s okay. Go play with the dog.”

  Sarah obeys—too quickly, thinks Carrie. She watches her daughter, whose walk up the hill seems mechanical, then, unconsciously, slips into a little-girl role herself. “I can’t be separated from her any longer, Phil. It’s not human. We at least have to share her.”

  Phil, nodding as if in agreement, says, “Come. Let’s go up to the house and talk about it. We’ll get Nanny to come down.”

  Carrie looks back at the house she had once lived in with this man. Phil, reading fear in her look, laughs reassuringly. “Beautiful place. Still. Right?”

  It’s not how she remembers it.

  “Come on,” he says. “Don’t be ridiculous. You want to work something out, or not?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  As Alec arrives from Milwaukee, mid-afternoon, a chubby receptionist leaps up from her chair. “Judge Braddock says you’re to see him as soon as you get here.” She rearranges a plaid skirt which got twisted from long sitting, and her pale eyes glisten with the importance of her message.

  Alec casts an eye at his luggage.

  “He said,” the receptionist quotes, “‘Don’t even let him drop his bags off in his office.’” Her expression is apologetic.

  In the secretarial compound next to Judge Braddock’s corner suite, Madge Harlan, who has worked for the judge her entire adult life, holds up a cautionary finger. A plain-faced woman in her fifties, she scorns hair dye, makeup, or pretense of any sort. “You look like shit,” she says to Alec, her eyes conducting a head-to-toe appraisal. “He’s on the phone.”

  “I’ll wait,” says Alec, dropping his bags by a chair near her desk.

  “It’s personal, his conversation.” A touch of disapproval. “May take a while.”

  “Want to give him a note I’m here?”

  She gives Alec a look, as if to say, You can’t be serious. Then she says, “You’re working on the U.S. Safety case, right?”

  “Right,” he says, settling in the chair.

  “You know….” She lowers her voice. “A lot of the service staff here have their savings tied up in U.S. Safety stock.”

  “What? How did that happen?”

  “Some guy… a broker… came through here a few years ago. Friend of one of the partners. It was a new public offering. Seemed safe.”

  “Why?” asks Alec, having a hard time believing this.

  She grimaces in self-reproach. “The name. U.S. Safety. The guy.” Same grimace. “I know. World-class stupid. Couple of people bought, and it kind of spread. Getting in on IPOs, in those days… it just looked good. Sort of thing you read about, people getting rich on new stock offerings, but not an opportunity for service staff, usually. And the firm said it was okay—almost a perk.” She looks away. “I cashed in my savings bonds.”

  “Jesus!” Alec says.

  “Yeah.”

  “The stock price has already halved,” says Alec. “We lose this case… it’ll go to zero.”

  “I know. So don’t lose.” She glances at the light extinguishing on the phone. “He’s off. You may go in now.”

  Ben Braddock stands at his desk with the New York Law Journal spread out before him. As Alec walks in, he hears the telephone ringing behind him, then the intercom buzzing on Braddock’s desk. Miss Harlan’s voice on the squawk box says, “Judge Kelly, calling from Washington.”

  “I’ll call him back,” says Braddock. Then, not looking up, “You remember that Mexican divorce we got for Nelson?”

  “Rockefeller?” Alec says.

  “No. The Lord High Admiral of the fucking fleet. Of course, Rockefeller. You leave your brains in Milwaukee?”

  “Probably.”

  “Some shit-for-brains judge, in a case defended by Louis Nizer, has just invalidated all Mexican divorces. Can you beat that?” He stares hard at Alec, as if this might be somehow Alec’s fault. “I think I’ll call the little prick.”

  “The judge?”

  “No. What the hell would I want to talk to that asshole for? He’s already published his opinion. Nizer! We gotta be damn sure that little prick appeals.”

  Braddock, getting a dial tone on his squawk box, dials the number himself.

  “Mr. Nizer’s office,” croons a woman’s voice in a tone meant to conjure up images of client heaven.

  “Put him on,” commands Ben Braddock.

  “Judge Braddock?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Put him on.”

  “You do know, Judge, that Mr. Nizer doesn’t simply take calls. If there is something you’d like to discuss with him, he asks that you write it in a memorandum to him, and he’ll call you when he can.”

  Braddock reflects for a moment. “Fine system,” he says to the box, giving Alec a wink. “Wonder, ma’am, if I might dictate a brief message to you, and then you could show it to Mr. Nizer when he has a spare moment?”

  “Well,” she says, uncertainly. “I suppose that might be all right.”

  “Excellent! Ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have your pad in front of you?”

  “I do.”

  “Dear Louis,” says Ben. “Kiss my ass!”

  He disconnects and holds his watch up to Alec. “What do you think? Two minutes, max?”

  Frank Macalister walks in. “We got news,” he says.

  Braddock motions him to wait. The judge looks at Alec. Mac looks questioningly at both of them. The phone rings, and Braddock picks it up on the box. Shrieking out of it is a voice Mac recognizes, “Ben! I didn’t know it was you!”

  “It’s okay, Louis. I’ve got important people in here now. Have to call you back.” He hangs up with a laugh and turns to Mac.

  “Was that Nizer?” asks Mac, joining in the laugh.

  “Who else? What’s the news?”

  “That German bastard,” Mac says.

  “Shilling.”

  “Who else?” Mac says, mimicking Braddock’s growl.

  Braddock says to Alec, “Those two guys! Like John Wayne vs. Erich von Stroheim.” He swings back to Macalister
. “The war’s over, Mac. We won. And Shilling was here. He was on our side.”

  “You love the guy?”

  “I don’t hate him ’cause I think he’s a Nazi.”

  “Great.”

  “I hate him ’cause I think he’s a prick. And what’s he done now? Pull off a settlement with the East Coast banks?”

  “Five-hundred-million,” says Mac.

  Braddock thinks for a moment. “I’m not sure I like that.”

  “Caps the damages in the stockholder suit. U.S. Safety can’t be liable to Rosenkranz’s clients for anything more than it pays out in settlement to the banks.”

  “Yeah, but!” Braddock says. “Big fucking but!”

  “No jury’s likely to award one point two billion dollars in damages,” Mac observes. “Five hundred million? That they might do.”

  Braddock looks at Alec. “You understand this?”

  “It’s pretty clear,” says Alec.

  “And either award would bankrupt the company, as well as the directors. So!” Braddock takes in both men with his glance. “Your job, young fellows, has just gotten a bit more challenging.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Carrie arrives at Alec’s door with her right cheek twice the size of her left, and her right eye purpled like a hunk of raw liver.

  “My God!” he says. “Who the hell did this?”

  “You ain’t seen nothing.” She stumbles into the apartment and drags herself into the bedroom. “I need to lie down,” she says. “I stood all the way here on the subway.”

  She pulls off her dress and flops face down on the bed, in nothing but her panties. Her slender back and the backs of her legs are ridged like a bike track: crisscrossed welts of angry subcutaneous tissue. “I think we should go to the hospital,” Alec says hoarsely.

  “No point. He’s a professional. It’s the one thing he’s good at. Beating people up. Maximum pain—and humiliation—without permanent injury.”

  “Your husband.”

  She plunges her head into the pillow.

  “Why?” Alec asks, dropping to the edge of the bed.

  “When I checked into the hospital, I gave them your name. As the person to call, in case. Bad mistake.”

  “This is jealousy?”

  She twists her head around. “No-oo. A warning, more like.”

  “Not to see me?”

  “Not to talk to you. About… the things I’ve already talked to you about.”

  “The checks? Aaron Weinfeld? Whitman Poole?”

  “Yeah.”

  Alec rises from the bed. “All right, let’s get the son-of-a-bitch.”

  “What’re you gonna do? Whack him with a subpoena?”

  “Put the goon in prison.”

  “You don’t stop a guy like Phil with court papers. Or police. Or prisons. He’s got a fucking army.” She lays her head once more on the pillow. “And he’s got my daughter. Sarah. I need her back.” Carrie begins to cry.

  Alec goes to hold her, gently, around the shoulders, his mind working it out. “The U.S. Attorney’s office,” he says, “has been after this guy—and this mob—for years. You’ve got the evidence that can put him away. Maybe permanently.”

  Carrie sits up. “You in for that, Alec?”

  “What do you think?” he says, throwing his hands out. “I’m going to push you to nail him, then leave you alone? Let you disappear into witness protection, while I stay here pretending I had nothing to do with it?”

  “It’d be smarter,” she says.

  “I’ll call Ray Sancerre, the U.S. Attorney, in the morning.”

  “No,” she says, thinking rapidly. “Not yet.”

  “If we’re going to do it, why wait?”

  “In about three weeks, Phil goes to Europe. He won’t take Sarah.”

  Alec senses where this is going and gives a look of warning.

  “He doesn’t have legal custody,” she says. “He never bothered. And I’ve as much right to her as he does.”

  “Just grab her?” says Alec. “Why not? If Phil’s own army’s not big enough, every mafioso in the country can help him hunt us down.”

  “We’ve got three weeks before he goes. Three weeks to live like normal people.”

  “Before becoming target practice for the mob.”

  “Before whatever,” she says.

  FORTY

  Carrie’s things, salvaged or new, migrate into Alec’s apartment. Pastel cotton things, outer and under. Skirts and sweaters and capri pants. Arrid, Maybelline, Tampax, Halo, Gleem, Adorn, and Chanel. It’s like a flowering in his cabinets and closets. Indeed, in Alec himself. For two weeks she’s been clean, seems at peace with herself and with him. She travels to meetings in the “rooms” twice a day, and to gym or dance classes at the Y. On evenings when Alec’s at home, he studies her as she reads, her legs folded under, her sharp knees jutting out, white to the bone, her head bent down, torso curled, strands of hair drifting over her forehead. All this close observation deepens his feelings but does little to explain them.

  He watches her at rest, her books and clothes about. He watches her stretch out lean, incurving her spine like a yawning cat, reach, stride, stand in thought for an arrested moment. He watches her watching him.

  Contentment in routine, he thinks. Waking each other up, making the bed, cooking meals, washing dishes. People can live entirely on this level, moving instinctively like lizards from need to need, sunning themselves, pleasuring, using routine like rocks. Yet everyone’s taunted by biological facts. Peel open the cranium, he thinks, a computer works away powered by organic batteries, with nucleotides in the cells reproducing themselves presumptuously without our awareness or consent. There’s more that drives the rest, he thinks; there simply aren’t any useful names for it.

  When they are quiet with each other, as when he watches her read, or when they lie still in bed not yet asleep, Alec feels it, the idea about her he’s waiting for. But, like a bear, he’s cautious before crossing the clearing, before entering the dark hole in his brain where it will fit.

  One night, Carrie asks about Alec’s parents.

  “My mother’s dead,” he says. “My dad…”

  She coaxes the thought out with a look.

  “We don’t have much of a relationship,” he says.

  They lie side-by-side in bed. At this angle her hip bone is her largest vertical protrusion.

  “What was your mother like?”

  “Absent,” Alec says.

  “She abandoned you?”

  “That was his version.”

  “Your dad’s? And you’ve no idea? How old were you?”

  “Nine. Maybe just ten.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Pneumonia. Probably brought on by cirrhosis of the liver.”

  “You know this?”

  “I saw the records.”

  “You went looking for her. Did you find her?”

  “Only the records.”

  “Wow. Jesus. What’s the problem with you and your dad?”

  “Having nothing in common.”

  She gives Alec a look.

  “I go out there,” he says. “We have a beer. We have nothing to say to each other. We watch a ballgame. I leave. As soon as I can. Because my impression is, he wants me to leave.”

  “He doesn’t say that?”

  “No. The opposite. He acts hurt.”

  “Maybe it’s not an act.”

  “Believe me.”

  “Is he angry at you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Something to do with your mom, maybe.”

  “Could be. We were close, I remember that. They weren’t.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Reads. Anything. The older the better. Histories, poetry, plays.”

  “I mean, for a living?”

  “A union guy for years, an organizer. Almost always away. I lived with relatives after mom died, I barely saw him. Now he’s with a small firm doing house security systems.”
<
br />   “And before your mom died,” Carrie says, “he was away, she was drinking?”

  “You got the picture.”

  “So you were taking care of your mom.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “A nine-, ten-year-old kid. Waiting for someone to take care of him. You see some connection in all this to us?”

  “The problem,” he says, “with easy insights—”

  “Is that they’re often very insightful.”

  “Not in this case,” he says.

  “Like we go deeper,” she says, lifting up and peering down on him.

  “I would hope.”

  “Like this—” she laughs, grasping his bare thigh—“unbelievably physical, hot-brained reaction of two otherwise sensible people?”

  “Like that.”

  “Hmm,” she says, settling back. “I know about that.”

  “And this calm, which is lovely.”

  “Before all hell breaks loose.”

  “Hell,” he says, “is what we’re putting behind us.”

  FORTY-ONE

  A law office late at night is neither raucous nor quiet. People there don’t wish to be there. They tend not to gab or visit or laugh—they just finish what they must and leave. So the sound level is low. It consists mainly of a barely discernable hum, audible only to dogs and young lawyers.

  Alec is working with his door closed. When his phone rings, he expects Carrie to be calling and picks up.

  “Hello.”

  “This Alec Brno?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m the guy whose wife you’re fucking.”

  Alec allows the phone to drift away a bit, as the terror of this call goes through him like a spear.

  “Be stupid to hang up,” Phil says.

  Alec says nothing.

  “What?” says Phil. “You don’t like my calling you at the office? You rather I call you at home? Or maybe drop by? I could do that. That little basement you live in.”

  Is this really happening?

  “Cat got your tongue, asshole?”

  “You want to beat me up, Phil? Is that it? Or is it only women you like punching in the face?”

  “What’s going on here, Alec? You’ve convinced yourself you’re in love with her?”