The Laws of our Fathers kc-4

by Scott Turow

  So here was lumpen America, everybody I felt better than. The women paraded by in their Capri pants and stiff hairdos. East met West here, North and South. There were probably two thousand people in the casino and they all felt great. After nine months in Damon, California, these Americans – the people Nixon had been talking to while he ignored me – seemed as strange as creatures from another planet. Big-bellied guys with belt buckles the size of my fist and slick dudes from LA in Nehru jackets. Painted women of a kind I had not seen for months on the streets of Damon – models or showgirls or high-priced hookers – glided by in long gowns. With my hair well past my shoulders, and my outfit of sandals and standard-issue denim, jeans and jacket, I was the odd duck now. Not that anyone cared to notice. They were given over to their own intense preoccupations. That was the worst part. Here they were, Americans with permission. And what was it they craved? Not guns and bombs, not race wars or killing in the jungles. Just cheap thrills and lounge acts – they wanted to see Elvis in their best duds and get a chance to risk more than they could really afford. It was June, I speculated suddenly, who'd thought of Vegas, who'd been here in the past and who privately enjoyed the recollection of it like some forsworn perversion.

  At the side of the room, the lights glimmered on the domes of the chafing dishes of an enormous buffet piled with pink and yellow foods. It was cordoned off by the loops of a red velvet rope, strung between shining stainless-steel standards. Hunger came upon me with the intensity of lust. I watched some good-sized cowpoke, wobbling on the hob heels of his boots, fill a plate and I followed, but a security man in a maroon coat eyed me narrowly and I backed off with a lingering sniff, feeling like some Dickensian waif.

  Across the casino, I finally caught sight of Michael. He was loitering nervously, walking here and back about one of the plaster pillars, which was dressed up with climbing circles of vine. The bank of cashier's cages, done in the heavy brass of old-fashioned banks, waited just beyond him. When he saw me, Michael did his best, as we had been instructed, to remain circumspect. Give the FBI no clues. I was perhaps 200 feet away. I nodded once. He waited a few more seconds and then pushed off toward the windows. He seemed to have chosen the one he wanted to approach in advance. I couldn't imagine how he'd made that selection – a lucky number? Or had he actually assessed which teller seemed the most casual or worn down by the hour?

  I tried not to stare, shifting location every now and then to preserve my sight line, and glancing about occasionally to be certain no one was watching me or Michael. I was near a crap table, where an enormous fellow with lizard boots and a rhinestone bolo on his string tie was having a spell of good luck. The pit boss came by to ask him to take his cowboy hat off the table, while a stout woman in a rayon dress a bit too tight for her bulk stood silently beside him, her dyed high heels swinging from her finger. Looking back to Michael, I could see a dark-haired woman nodding to him through the brass bars. Then he reached back for his wallet.

  I knew it would be a wait. The signal could be going out right now. If the Bureau was poised, she would have had to do no more than meet somebody's eye. And there were watchers anyway: pit bosses and bouncers; guys who, according to legend, looked down from portholes above with shotguns to make sure no employees surrendered to the temptation of grand theft. I prepared myself to push off, to walk at no particular speed back to the Chevy. June had warned me: Just go. They would take care of the rest. But I felt no special peril. It was as anonymous as watching an event in a large stadium. In the interval, Michael turned away from the cage and peered into the smoke of the casino, catching my eye for an instant and heaving an enormous breath for my benefit. Beside me, a great cry went up again. The Texan at the crap table had made his point.

  When I looked back a moment later, Michael had left the cage. I was afraid he'd been refused, but I saw then he was cradling two stacks of chips in his large hand. At the side of the casino he passed into a men's room labeled satyrs in gilt. In there, he would enter a stall and pour the chips into an envelope preaddressed to the San Francisco post office box, already affixed with the postage and Special Delivery stickers. If the FBI was going to intercept him, Eddgar had predicted it would be in this interval. The money, Eddgar said, would be important to the government. But Michael was out in a moment, the manila envelope now beneath his arm.

  According to June, the FBI tail would not be conducted as in a thirties movie – one dumb s.o.b. riding along the curb as Michael walked away. They would use a number of cars, passing him up, lagging far behind, crossing directions. My assignment was countersurveillance. Memorize license plates. Watch. Michael's job was to find a mailbox. He would be walking south. There was to be no contact of any kind between us until we were certain he was safe. I circled out of the parking lot and saw him walking calmly in the thick evening foot traffic of the strip, where couples lingered. Beneath the marquee of one of the hotels, a man with his wallet in his hand counted what was left, while his wife beside him refused to look. Michael disappeared into another hotel. I drove around the block, and when I caught sight of him again, he was still ambling peacefully, the envelope now gone. Tomorrow, the money would be in San Francisco. Cleveland would make bail. Hobie would be safe. I would be safe. We could recover from what we had done in the name of freedom.

  At moments, Michael on foot made better progress than I did in the heavy traffic. Eventually though, as we moved farther north, it loosened up and I pushed on ahead. I'd seen nothing that merited alarm. Not one car had reappeared. None of the pedestrians, whom I'd scrutinized repeatedly, were noteworthy. There were a lot of powder-blue suits and white shoes, a striking prevalence of the new miracle fiber, polyester, but no one who seemed to have the markings of the FBI. At the Eden's Garden Spa Motel, I parked in the rear and edged back to Las Vegas Boulevard to watch Michael make his approach. There was a faced slate retaining wall that bounded the property and I sat atop it, checking the scene. We were well past the point of any danger. I wanted to tell Michael to knock it off, but he walked past me without glancing my way. 'In the back on the right,' I told him. 'Key's under the mat.'

  He walked down the long drive, and in a moment the Bel Air appeared beside me. He nodded to me vaguely and pulled into the traffic. No cars had followed him in. There was a man walking a German shepherd who'd watched the dog lift his leg on a parking sign, but he was gone now and never returned to sight. If anyone was on Michael, they could not let him just drive away. Ten minutes later, he pulled back in. We both knew now that we were okay.

  I met him in back. Floodlights from the third-story roof illuminated the lot. The night was still. He hugged me then, a rare effusiveness but no surprise under the circumstances. He was leaner and harder than I might have imagined, and smelled of several days' sweat. It occurred to me that he had learned something from the more outgoing styles of Lucy and Sonny and Hobie and me. He'd had his own breakthroughs.

  'God, oh mighty,' I said. 'You okay?'

  'Little shaky.'

  The motel reservation had been made in Michael's name. By June's rules, it was my job to claim the room.

  'This is so stupid,' I said. He nodded sadly as I left, but was still without any apparent inclination to disobey.

  The motel room was inexpensive – $19 a night. In those days the casinos underwrote the room charges, even at a place like Eden's Spa. I stood in line, waiting my turn at the reception desk, too exhausted to feel much yet in the way of relief. I remembered Lucy driving the desert. Questions I'd never bothered with now surged at me. What if she got lost? What if the FBI had some bulletin out about my car? I realized again that I would never understand these few hours in my life.

  The motel was a poor compromise between the hobbled architectural imagination of the fifties and Las Vegas's Italianate excess. A tree – a fully leafed deciduous variety – grew in the lobby. It mashed itself against the ceiling, three floors above. At its base, various igneous rocks had been piled in a grotto arrangement through which recirculate
d water splashed. From across the room, I could spot goldfish, swishing their tails to remain still in the current, and coins, black against the concrete. Two weary guys, businessmen by the looks of them, with the lost, dejected appearance of men on the road, were seated on a round circular sofa that circumscribed the tree, absorbed in conversation and pointing to the fish.

  A group of New Yorkers emerged from the adjoining lounge and entered the lobby like a brass band. They were determined to have a grand time, calling each other's names at top volume. 'Paulie. Joey. Joanie. Lookit here.' Showy clothes and the reek of department store fragrances. They were making sly jokes -about sex, no doubt, from the way the women screamed together and smacked their manicures on the men's arms. I'd seen Vikki Carr's name in lights as we drove in, and all of them were gabbling about her by first name, as if they knew her, which I tended to doubt. Each man had the dimensions of a freezer and the women, no matter how sturdily built, wore skirts cut far up their thighs. Americans, I thought again. There was, after all, a lot I wasn't going to miss. One of the men, in a persimmon-colored jacket, was carrying a highball glass, which he left on the corner of one of the unoccupied reception counters as he went out the door.

  When I got to the head of the line, I gave Michael's name. 'Okay,' the receptionist said. She walked away and returned with a painfully thin man in a sport coat, who had thick glasses and a sloppy mustache. He made a slight gesture toward someone behind me.

  When I looked back, the two men by the fountain seemed to snap awake. In a crystalline moment, I watched them cross the carpeting, knowing that this was precisely what I had envisioned back at the Roman Coin. One fellow reached inside his pocket and I could read the words on his lips even before he spoke: FBI.

  They were still thirty feet away. I held up one finger, asking for a second, and slid off, walking deliberately to the doors, faster than I should have but still not in full flight. They waited until I pushed through the glass vestibule and reached the parking lot. I flew. It was a few seconds before I heard a voice crying out, 'Stop! You there, son. Stop.' Amazingly, I had gained as much as fifty yards on them. I tore back through the parking lot to where I'd left the car. Michael would be waiting. I was going to be all right. I forced myself to remain cool. We had enough time.

  When I got to the space where we'd parked, the car was gone. I was briefly too shocked to move. Then after a panicked instant, I realized I must have turned myself around. With the agent still yelling behind me, I headed for the other side of the building. I ran in my sandals. When I came around the rear corner, there was a wall where five or six cars were parked. A high cyclone fence adjoined the desert.

  'Stop him!' the agent yelled this time. 'FBI. Stop him!' He seemed farther behind than before. Apparently he had lost me when I surged around the building.

  'Who? Dis one?' I heard. Suddenly, through the night, someone was reaching for me, standing now in the breach between a Ford and a car nearby. It was one of the New Yorkers.

  'Tony, be careful,' a woman called. He came to me through the night, his group nearby. The woman's bleached hair glowed under the parking-lot lights.

  'Where you going, bud?' Tony asked me. He was wearing a sand-colored leisure suit and a shirt marked by colored shapes like lightning bolts.

  'Tony, for Godsake,' the woman yelled, 'he might have a gun.' I heard her as she turned to speak to her friends. 'Always on the job,' she said.

  'This don't god no gun,' Tony said. 'Come on here. This gentleman back here wants to have a word with you. Whatsa matter?' he said. 'You don't like to talk wit the FBI?'

  I said nothing. I made no move. The time – the few precious seconds I had unconsciously counted – whittled away while this man and I stared at each other. He had a massive face with walrus jowls, set with a confidence that was not particularly malevolent. It simply said, I am a man and you are not. I have been alive long enough to know what to do here and you do not. I was immobilized by the sheer force of his experience. I had been caught. Busted. I was completely bewildered by the thought. The agent arrived then, blowing hard.

  'You are one dumb son of a bitch. Do you know that's how people get shot? Do you know what kind of trouble you can get yourself in?' He shoved my shoulder roughly. 'Lie down on the ground. Lie down there. Go on, damn it all'

  He ran his hands along my legs, inside and out, as I was prostrate on the asphalt with its strange worldly scent. He pulled Michael's wallet from my pocket and tugged on my hair.

  'What am I supposed to call you? "Jesus?" You smell bad,' he said to me. I'd bathed last night. I remembered June. I was not going to say anything. They told me to get up.

  I had been caught, I kept thinking. I realized I had walked into a new plane, another reality. Each instant now would be a piece of fresh time. One of them pushed me from behind and they walked me toward the front of the motel, leading tne along by the shirt collar. Tony introduced himself to the agent. From the Two Two One in Newark.

  'You know Jack Burk? In the RA in West Orange?'

  'Jack? Jack was in my class in Quantico.'

  'No shit? He's my brother-in-law.'

  'How do you like that? How is old Jack?'

  'Pig in shit, that one. He god Hoover's picture on the wall next to the Sacred Heart.'

  The second agent watched us coming, looking out the window of a blue Ford Fairlane with black-walled tires. He'd turned the dome light on inside the car. He wore a straw fedora and let his arm dangle out the open window, an unfiltered cigarette, which he idly raised to his mouth on occasion, between his fingers. He was parked in the front of the motel, blocking the driveway. He'd been waiting for me, of course. I'd never had a chance. The one who'd caught up to me introduced Tony, and the two agents fawned over him for a while. A siren keened down the strip.

  'Cavalry's on the way,' the second agent said. 'Tammy's 10 – I'd half the county.'

  'Oh brother,' said the agent who held me.

  'You take him in. I'll stay to explain. Fourteen's coming. You sure you got who you want?'

  The agent flipped open the wallet he'd taken from my pocket.

  'Michael Frain,' he said.

  'He's the one.'

  The agent grabbed me by the collar again and jerked me around to face him for the first time.

  'We been looking for you, Michael,' he said.

  DECEMBER 12, 1995

  Sonny

  Tuesday morning status call. Open house in the chamber of horrors. I've had perhaps two hours' sleep. My blood is hot tar; wakefulness at instants feels like an out-of-body experience. And I have lost that convenient armor on my emotions. Words and events strike straight at my viscera with nothing in between. I'm in no condition for the sad procession taking place before me.

  The courtroom teems. Clients and families huddle with attorneys. Cops and PAs, probation officers, the State Defenders, all the felony court regulars greet each other in the corridors and the adjacent lawyers' and witness rooms. They agree on dates for the next appearance or talk out the plea deals, by which most of these cases are finally resolved. Annie polices the spectators' rows, directs defendants to the front, points out the lawyers or court personnel they need to see, while Marietta goes on crying out case numbers, passing up files, and reminding me why they're on the call – for arraignment or guilty plea, status report or ruling on motions. Her memory is phenomenal, her notes precise. This guy was supposed to bring in proof of employment; that lady has to make a urine drop this week, per prior order of Judge Simone.

  Some of the morning's crimes have a touch of bathos. One hapless schmo paid a policewoman posing as a hooker $50 to suck her toes. When she badged him, he begged her, tear-struck, to take $400 to let him go. Wired to avoid entrapment claims, she had no choice but to charge the bribery. But for the most part we wallow in sadness.

  'You're old for this line of work,' the transport deputy says, muscling a white-whiskered defendant, a drunk or junkie by the depleted looks of him, out of the lockup toward the bench. He i
s charged with armed robbery: razor to the throat.

  'Don't I know,' the defendant answers and arrives before me with a wistful look.

  Scanning his rap sheet and its cryptic notations – nine convictions by my count – I do the math. 'How many days ago, Mr Johnson, were you released from the penitentiary?'

  There is no type that has not arrived before me: a senior vice-president of First Kindle arrested in the North End for scoring smack. A seventy-two-year-old grandmother, a valued employee for forty-four years at a garden store, who began a few months ago, for reasons no one can explain, to jigger the receipts, making off with almost $32,000. Often, I imagine, if I remain here long enough, every creature that rode with Noah will appear, charged with something.

  But usually when I lift my eyes it's a young black man who's there, his story, told in his bail or pre-sentence report, numbingly the same – poverty, violence, a shattered fatherless family, little schooling, nobody to care. There is often a special sulkiness that grips them when they face the bench to find another woman. Women have been trying to tame them all their lives, at home, in school, mothers and caseworkers and truant officers whose remonstrations and example never answered the one question that seems to be boiling away in so many: What's this thing they call a man, does he have a peaceful, rightful place in this world? I want to lecture occasionally. 'There was no father in my home, either. I understand, I do.'