Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  He starts moving on top of John G., shifting things around. John tries to resist, but the knife tightens on his Adam’s apple.

  “Come on, bitch, I ain’t gonna hurt you none.”

  The knife pulls back against John G.’s carotid artery like a bit in a horse’s mouth.

  “See, they think I got the virus,” Larry says softly. “You know how I’m saying? Like I might be what they call HIV-positive.”

  John tells himself that the kid is lying and just trying to frighten him, but then he remembers the fear he saw in Larry’s eyes downstairs.

  “So I don’t give a fuck,” Larry says, trying to pull down John’s pants and force his way in. “I’m gonna die anyway. So now I’m gonna put my virus right into you.”

  John rocks from side to side, trying to throw him off. Every cell and muscle in his body is crying out, protesting what’s about to happen. Everything that he is depends on keeping himself intact. Until tonight, he’d thought he had no pride left. But just as he realizes there’s still something there, he loses it.

  “Lord have mercy on the faggots,” Larry says afterward. “If I got the virus now, so do you. It’s just like that Clint Eastwood movie, man: the question you gotta ask yourself is, Do I feel lucky?”

  He laughs to himself as he gets up and walks away.

  And for the next few minutes, the only thing John G. hears is the sound of his own mind breaking.

  Watch the closing doors. The train goes plunging down.

  7

  The table in the conference room of Bracken, Williams & Sayon is made from wood that’s over ten thousand years old, Todd Bracken III once told Jake. The original tree hailed from a Tasmanian mountainside, where Jake supposed a brontosaurus might have once taken a leak on it. It had survived fire, termites, atmospheric changes, and the death of most surrounding vegetation before it was shipped to the States, bleached blond, and sold by a custom retail outlet in Delaware for $50,000. Jake taps it twice waiting for Todd to come to the next point in the partners’ meeting.

  “The partnership retreat,” says Todd, wiping a swatch of thinning blond hair off his broad forehead. “I was thinking Miami this year. Boca Raton was so . . .”

  He draws back his lips, trying to find the right word, and slips his tongue over his tiny teeth. He crosses his legs, letting an English leather shoe sole hang lazily above the table top.

  “So...”

  Mike Sayon, eating walnuts with his plump fingers, and Charlie Dorian, the high-strung head of the litigation department, lean forward, ready to laugh at anything the founding partner’s son might say.

  “So ...” Todd’s long, manicured hands stroke the air. “So . . . I don’t know . . . suntan oil and Judith Krantz. So Five Towns ...”

  Mike Sayon and Charlie Dorian chuckle appreciatively.

  “So parvenu,” Mike adds helpfully, struggling with a silver nutcracker.

  Spoken like a true self-hating Jew, thinks Jake.

  “Exactly,” says Todd with a bonded smile. “Exactly.”

  “I was thinking we should talk about making Kelly Lager a partner,” Jake interrupts.

  A silence falls over the room. It’s as if he’s just belched loudly.

  Charlie Dorian, gray haired, red faced, and constantly plucking at his left eyebrow, picks up the ball.

  “I thought we weren’t going to be discussing candidates for another three weeks.”

  “I wanted to put him on the morning line now,” Jake insists. “The guy’s probably the best technical lawyer we have at the firm. He’s forgotten more case law than any of us will ever know. And he writes a brief so sharp you could cut your hands on it.”

  Todd Bracken gets up and walks over to the window, watching the midtown Manhattan buildings glisten like glazed fingers reaching for the sun. As everyone in the room knows, Kelly Lager, a thirty-seven-year-old diabetic with psoriasis and four lovely children, has been doing most of Todd’s paperwork since Todd’s father died and left him in charge in the eighties.

  “He’s been turned down three years in a row and I think he belongs in the winner’s circle,” Jake goes on. “Besides, the guy’s got a name like a beer company. What else do you want from him?”

  Mike breaks open a nut, and bits of shell fall down the front of his jacket. “It’s just a matter of simple economics, Jake,” he says. “We can’t justify making more partners at our current level of growth. We’re down twenty-three percent from this quarter last year.”

  Jake casts a skeptical eye at the Milton Avery painting on the wall. “That twenty-three percent was from the Wyatt-Campbell litigation last year,” he says. “That was my case. So let’s not kid ourselves. Your associates make partner every other year. Why not Kelly?”

  Charlie starts tearing more furiously at his eyebrow. Mike goes to work on breaking open another walnut and the cracking shell makes a sound like tiny firecrackers going off. And Todd Bracken remains over by the window, arms crossed like a petulant tennis star disputing a line judge’s call.

  “I think,” says Todd, “what we’re talking about is a matter of style.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” Jake asks.

  Todd shoots a look that goes from Mike to Charlie before ending in a smirk. “I don’t think Kelly has ever been what we’d consider a Bracken, Williams lawyer.”

  Of course, that never stopped Todd from signing his name on Kelly’s briefs.

  “So what’s your problem with him, Todd?”

  “Well, frankly. . . ” Todd glances over his shoulder, as if a window washer might be listening. “The man smells.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, he actually has a foul odor. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”

  For a moment, Jake is so stunned that he can’t think of anything to say.

  “My secretary and I call him the Stench.” Todd lifts his chin slightly, offering a glimpse of the arrogant little boy who probably once staked a claim on other children’s toys in the sandbox.

  “You’re telling me you’re going to deny him partner because you don’t like the way he smells?” Jake puts his hands on top of his head. “Put a fragrance tree around his neck, for Chrissake. What’s the big deal?”

  Todd makes a small tutting sound, as if he’s despairing of ever teaching Jake the secret language the rest of them understand by instinct. “It’s not just the way he smells. It’s his entire presentation. Part of being a good lawyer has to do with intangibles. Good judgment. Useful contacts. Ask yourself. Is this someone you want to spend the next few years with? Honestly. Do you want Kelly meeting with clients? Coming to your house for dinner?”

  “Why not?” asks Jake, growing testy.

  “Because he doesn’t fit in.”

  “Fit in what?” Jake feels his eyeballs start to roll back and his knuckles begin to itch. “Is there some mold the rest of us ought to know about?”

  “ ‘If you have to be told, don’t ask,’ “ says Mike, putting down the nutcracker and mimicking what old man Bracken used to say.

  But Todd’s father was a sententious old hypocrite who would lecture junior associates about ethics while screwing his secretaries and playing golf with judges.

  “All right, Jake, let’s lay it on the line,” says Todd. “I hadn’t wanted to bring it up so early but you’ve probably heard the rumors that we’ve been discussing a merger with Greer, Allan.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  Greer, Allan. The for-Wasps. Every one of their lawyers looks like he walked out of a Land’s End catalog. And hardly one of them could find the jury box in a courtroom. Still their revenues were above $100 million last year.

  “Well, the rumors are true,” says Todd.

  Of course, all rumors are true.

  “They already have over two hundred lawyers at their firm and fifty-five of them are partners.” Todd rubs the fingers of his right hand together. “The last thing we ought to be doing when they’re about to go over our books is adding another partner. Especia
lly one who doesn’t fit the mold.”

  “So do I fit the mold?” asks Jake, his voice sharpening with the rise toward conflict. After all, he’s the only lawyer in the room who went to Hofstra, not Harvard.

  “Well, truthfully, Jake, the last time I walked past your office I felt like I was going through a subway station,” says Todd.

  “What’re you talking about? The music?” Jake wonders if Todd’s complaining because he likes to blast Mott the Hoople and the MC 5 while he’s writing briefs.

  “No, I meant the people sitting outside. They looked like a couple of common criminal defendants.”

  “They are common defendants. The Ramirez brothers. They have a combined IQ of about seventy. They like to rob the same restaurants they eat in. They figure if the food’s good enough, there’ll be money in the register.”

  “So you’re representing a couple of stickup men?”

  “Actually, they’re up on a double homicide at the moment. It’s a bullshit case. I sent everybody a memo on it.”

  Taking them on is a gesture of fond remembrance for Jake’s old days at Legal Aid. He loved the rough-and-tumble of criminal defense work. He had no stomach for being a prosecutor: one summer internship with the Queens DA was enough to convince him he wasn’t cut out to be a white knight. He liked getting down in the gutter, at least at first: toughing it out with judges, going toe-to-toe with the ADAs, and yes, even mixing it up with the clients. Shootings, stabbings, senseless acts of passion. Every day was a soap opera. Jake used to jump out of bed in the morning. But the need to make a living and support his family beckoned, and then there was the case of Enrique, the vicious moronic crack dealer who beat his two-year-old son to death because he wouldn’t stop crying. Jake made him take twenty-five to life upstate, and then quit Legal Aid. Everyone had the right to competent defense counsel, he reasoned, but it didn’t always have to be him.

  So after a cup of coffee with a small midtown outfit, he became the first former Legal Aid lawyer ever to join this stiff-necked firm. He started representing white-collar criminals: tax dodgers, inside traders, insurance company defrauders, and various cold-blooded bankers and corporate accountants who never had to listen to their victims scream. To his surprise, he found he was good at it. Clients liked his smarts and street-fighter attitude. He began to diversify, handling contracts and real estate deals. After a couple of years, New York magazine called, wanting to include him in a cover story about the ten toughest lawyers in the city. Fifteen months later, the Times gave him a profile of his own in the D section. Soon he was making enough money to go into debt; he borrowed cash to buy the town house so he could sock away a few thousand a year in zero-coupon bonds for Alex’s college education fund. Without meaning to, he’d become a kind of rising star.

  But he keeps the MC 5 and the Ramirez brothers around just to assure himself he hasn’t completely sold out.

  “Well, I don’t appreciate you ramming these people down our throats,” Todd says with a click of phlegm.

  “And I don’t appreciate you not discussing this merger with any of us,” Jake snaps back.

  “The Greer, Allan people are very sensitive about who they represent.”

  “Listen, Todd.” Jake feels something like a diving bell slowly lowering itself into the pit of his stomach. “Out of seventy lawyers here, I’ve brought in five percent of this firm’s business last year. Including the Anderson real estate group, ABT cable systems, and Bob Berger over at BBH. Hakeem Turner alone paid us a quarter of a million dollars to defend him in all his cases. So don’t tell me who I can represent.”

  “Most of the clients you just mentioned probably would’ve come over because of the firm’s reputation before you arrived.” Todd comes back to his seat as if he’s rushing the net to return a backhand. “And they’d probably stay with us if you decided to leave.”

  “You want to put that theory to the test?” Jake says, loosening up his shoulders like he’s getting ready for a brawl.

  Mike Sayon, his jacket almost completely covered in broken walnut shell, looks at Charlie Dorian. Charlie looks at Todd. Todd looks back at Mike with a smile like a tight belt on a fat man’s waist. And all at once, Jake realizes he’s never felt comfortable around these men. For ten years, he’s been laughing at their vaguely anti-Semitic jokes. Emulating their pretentious faux-English style of dressing with the Savile Row shirts and the bench-made shoes. Enduring their loud, frustrated wives at those endless, boring $500-a-plate charity balls to support the historic preservation of some damp footpath in New Canaan, Connecticut. Putting up with their practice of billing some destitute old widow seven or eight times what she owes to settle her late husband’s estate while some tax-evading corporate client haggles over every cup of coffee and phone call on the expense account.

  And doing all of it fourteen to eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, while his son was growing up and his wife was struggling to raise the boy and start a career of her own.

  The voice in Jake’s head says quietly but firmly: No more.

  But before he can say the words out loud, the intercom box on the table buzzes.

  “Mr. Schiff,” says a secretary’s voice. “Your wife is on line four. She says a strange man has been following her and she needs to speak to you immediately.”

  Jake looks up at Todd and nods. “To be continued.”

  “My breath is bated,” says Todd.

  8

  Three hours earlier.

  A playground on the corner of Seventy-seventh Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Broken pieces of sun in the tree branches. A boy and a girl on a seesaw. A redheaded child in denim overalls climbing a pyramid of logs. John G. stands behind the brick bathroom house, smoking crack from a glass pipette. The rock goes snap, crackle, pop in the bowl and a dragon of smoke rises toward the sky.

  The past is the present and the present is the past.

  He’s stopped taking his Haldol since that night at the shelter. For the past week, he’s been out on the street 24-7, scavenging for crack money wherever he can find it. Things have changed. His beard is getting mangy and there’s lice in his hair. His skin is rough and scabby. The purplish bruise on his right elbow won’t heal. And the fence in his mind that used to keep his thoughts ordered and separate has come down. Now ideas and memories are jumping back and forth like frolicsome sheep.

  The past is the present and the present is the past. I was in a dark wood and I lost my way.

  From behind the bathroom house, he watches a group of children crawl into a tunnel made of tires, and all of a sudden, he’s back on the floor of his daughter’s room, playing with the trains he gave her for her sixth birthday.

  Who’s God? Shar asks, pushing Thomas the Tank Engine along a wooden track.

  God made everything, he tells her.

  God took my mother from me.

  God made me suffer. God made me lonely. God made me cry. God made me put needles in my arm.

  Then God gave me you, to make up for it.

  Having Shar in his life was like holding a sunbeam in his hand. Somehow he knew it couldn’t last. The love he felt for the child was unbearable. He knew he wasn’t meant to be this happy. Sometimes he thanked God for her, other times he cursed him because he knew he would lose her. Six years old. She was like an angel sent to earth, to make sense of his senseless life.

  Did God make the trains? she asks.

  I guess he did.

  Did God make you a conductor?

  I’m a motorman, sweetie.

  Oh right. Did he make you a motorman?

  I suppose he did.

  Why?

  I don’t know.

  I know. She throws her warm little arms around him. Everybody has to do something, Daddy.

  When she was taken from him, it was like the sun was blotted out.

  Then he’s back in the playground. A small girl in a green jumper runs up to him, stops, and raises her huge liquid brown eyes to him.

  “Hello, baby. Where you b
een?”

  He stoops to pick her up. His heart is so full that it hurts. His little girl has come back. Forgive me, daughter, I have sinned. He starts to put his arms around her.

  But then he sees this isn’t Shar. This is a stranger’s little girl. She doesn’t even have blond hair. Her nanny, a hard-faced Irish number in stonewashed jeans and Nikes, pushes him aside and scoops her up. Looks over her shoulder. Shame on you, ya filthy bum. Trying to touch the children. Shame. Shame. Shame.

  He backs away, wondering who has stolen his life. He wants to lash out and hurt someone the way he’s been hurt. But who? Who’s responsible?

  In his mind’s eye, he’s back in the hospital corridor, with the cops waiting to talk to him. He sees the poster on the wall: BABIES ARE GOD’S WAY OF EXPRESSING HIS OPINION THAT THE WORLD SHOULD GO ON. But why should the world go on? They know it’s his fault.

  The doctor comes out and looks at him with baggy eyes.

  I’m sorry, Mr. Gates, we lost her.

  He cries out in pain. God is punishing him.

  His scream echoes across the asphalt playground and stops the children’s playing. Soon a cop car arrives.

  What’s the problem here?

  No problem, officer. I’m just enjoying the sun.

  All right then, just move along. You’re making the children nervous.

  Keep moving. Keep moving. The pain and guilt are more than he can handle alone. Someone else must be responsible.

  He leaves the playground and starts to cross Amsterdam Avenue against the light. A blue Gran Fury comes hurtling toward him and for a second he thinks about stepping into its path. Come on. Kill me.

  But then he looks up and sees Shar waving to him from across the street. The pale little hands. The flapping blond hair. That helpless toothless smile. This time he will save her.

  Wait for me, baby. I don’t want to lose you.

  As he steps off the curb, the car goes sweeping by and she’s gone again. Like the wind of Christ. Stations of the cross—stations of the IRT. Watch the closing doors. Forgive me, daughter. I do heartily detest my sins and fear the loss of heaven.