Round Robin

by Joseph Flynn

  “He was terrified. He was livid. He almost foamed at the mouth. The sweet, gentle guy I knew had disappeared and he was replaced by an absolute madman.” Robin licked her lips and looked away from Manfred. “For just one moment I was absolutely panic-stricken that he was going to beat me up and cause a miscarriage.”

  “Did he?” Manfred asked grimly.

  Robin looked back at him. She could clearly see that Manfred was angry, very angry, that he would be perfectly willing to visit a terrible retribution upon a man he’d never met for something that had happened twenty years ago.

  “No. It was like someone flipped a switch in his head. All the anger, the ranting and raving, the stomping around the room stopped in a flash. He hugged me. He held me. He took me to bed and we made love.

  “That was the first time I stayed the whole night with him. In the morning he apologized and said he’d been so upset because he didn’t want to jeopardize the plans he had for us. Having a baby would be expensive, it could ruin everything. He just wanted me to think about that. Then he left me there and went off to work.”

  “And you thought you could make him change his mind.”

  Robin nodded absently.

  “He kept making love to me.”

  “He kept using you.” Knowing the sooner he grew bored, Manfred thought, the better for him.

  “He kept talking about our future.”

  “He kept lying.”

  “I was sure he’d come to love the baby as much as I did.”

  “He was incapable of love.”

  “He’d have to marry me soon because I’d start showing.”

  “He’d have to make his escape before it was too late.”

  In a voice devoid of all emotion and inflection, Robin said, “I was almost four months pregnant, I’d been feeling my baby move inside me for weeks, when Phil gave me the ultimatum. Keep the baby or keep him. I couldn’t have both. If I chose him, he’d pay for the abortion and he promised we’d have all the kids I wanted when the time was right.”

  Robin shook her head gravely, still not believing the decision she’d made.

  “I won’t judge what any other woman does with her life, but I wanted my baby. I loved it. The idea that I could end my baby’s life was more horrible than I could imagine. I wanted to ask my parents for help, I wanted to ask Nancy. But how could I when I’d kept everything secret from them? I was too ashamed to go to the people who meant the most to me.

  “The people who should have meant the most. But right then I couldn’t get past the thought that Phil was going to leave me. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t. We loved each other. He was my baby’s father. We had to be together. We just had to — but he kept hammering me. ‘Make the choice, me or the kid. Me or the kid, make the choice. Choose goddamnit!’”

  Tears fell from Robin’s eyes.

  “I let him take me to an abortion clinic, and he was there with me, and he paid the fee ... and that was the last time I saw him. You talked to Jeri, so you can probably guess the rest.”

  “He got her pregnant, too,” Manfred said.

  Robin nodded.

  “He was seeing her the whole time he was seeing you.”

  Robin nodded.

  “And he chose her over you.”

  “Couldn’t very well support two families on a donut-shop salary, could he? Not when he had to steal from his employer to support his lifestyle.”

  “How did he make your friend ask you to go out with him?”

  “She was helping him steal. He blackmailed her; she told me the last time I ever talked to her. ‘Get me a date with Robin,’ he said, ‘or I lay the whole thing off on you.’ But, at the time, Jeri was very angry with me. She thought the whole thing had been my fault. After all, she’d told me to go out with Phil just one time.”

  “Then when she became pregnant,” Manfred said, “she used the blackmail threat against him. ‘Marry me or we’ll see who the police believe.’”

  Robin nodded once more. Her eyes were glazed with a pain that wouldn’t go away.

  “So for people like them I killed the baby I loved so much ... and when I finally told my parents I wrecked their marriage because my dad supported me and my mom condemned me. And me, hypocrite that I am, I took my dad’s support and accepted my mom’s estrangement, but I condemned myself, too.”

  Drained, Robin wiped the tears away and looked at Manfred.

  “So now you know. You still want to stick around?”

  “Ja,” he said.

  Robin called the hospital to ask about her father and Manfred looked in on Bianca again. Both of their loved ones were resting quietly. Robin and Manfred moved to the living room and sat opposite each other. The baking strudel filled the apartment with its heavenly aroma. After a lengthy, contemplative silence, Manfred spoke.

  He asked, “Do you have any religion?”

  Robin looked at him bleakly.

  “I believe in God. For quite a while, I didn’t, but then I realized I was making a mistake. I needed God ... if I was going to have someone to punish me after I died.”

  “I was raised to be an atheist,” Manfred said. “That was the official doctrine of any good East German. For most of my life I accepted without question that religion was just a pack of superstitions. That changed in prison. In my second year, I came to ask myself how I knew that I would ever be free again, how I knew that one day I would see my daughter again. And I did know both these things. But how? The only answer I could come up with was faith.”

  “In yourself?”

  He nodded.

  “At first. I knew I was strong, stronger than most. But I was not stupid. I knew my physical strength was nothing compared to the bars and walls and guns that confined me. And my sentence was indeterminate; that was part of my punishment. The state could have held me until I died and then kept my bones until they turned to dust. So, faith strictly in myself would have been nothing more than egomania. But I knew I was not mad, either. That meant that, without realizing it at first, I had to believe in some force far greater than any man or woman. Something that transcends the might of nations.”

  “You found God in a Communist prison?”

  “Brother Damian told me you find God when you need Him most. Wherever you are. I concluded that atheism was just another lie that I’d been fed. Because I knew I would be free, I knew I would see my daughter again ... and in due time my faith was rewarded.”

  “There’s no bringing my baby back,” Robin said. “No matter how much faith I have.”

  “No, not here. But if you can believe in punishment after death, why not redemption? Why not reunion?”

  The first shading of pre-dawn gray crept in through the ground-level window.

  Manfred continued, “If you think God cannot forgive you, why not ask Him? Maybe you are the only one who cannot forgive you.”

  Robin stared at Manfred a moment and then got up.

  “I think I’d like to spend a little time alone now. I’m going up to my park.”

  Robin sat on a park bench, among her beloved plantings, in the one place that she’d found solace over the years. But now there was no comfort, only fear. Fear that she would be a fool to think that even God could forgive her for what she had done. Fear that she might be struck down for just having the effrontery to ask for forgiveness. But her greatest fear of all was that if she didn’t ask, she would be forfeiting the last opportunity she’d ever have to know peace.

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to ask for outright forgiveness. Instead, she asked only for a sign that someday she might be shown mercy.

  An hour later, because there was nothing else to do, Robin decided to go to work. Because he had the strudel to deliver, Manfred drove her. Because there was nobody else to watch her, Bianca came along, too.

  Chapter 31

  Tone Morello got the goods on Robin early that same morning.

  He received a report from Aubrey Tannis that was sent by Special Messenger, a courier service
that specialized in making its deliveries regardless of circumstances. In Tone’s case, the damn guy had managed to slip past his building’s doorman and bang on Tone’s door at 5:55 a.m. This was the earliest Tone had to drag himself out of bed since he’d been an altar boy. Half asleep, holding the handgun he kept in his nightstand, he stumbled to the door fantasizing about the coverage he’d get for killing a crazed home-invader.

  It never occurred to him that home-invaders rarely knock, and he might have found himself up on a manslaughter charge if the courier hadn’t casually disarmed him, smacked him across the kisser, and told him to sign on line fourteen. Tone scratched out his signature. With that accomplished, he was given his gumshoe’s report and had his handgun returned, minus its ammunition.

  Now, Tone was awake enough to think about filing criminal charges against — and suing — the SOB who’d clipped him. But as soon as he sat down with the report he forgot about all that and focused on what lay before him.

  Tannis had left him a note.

  The gumshoe had written: This concludes our business, now and forever.

  Amen, Tone thought. As if he cared. Just so long as the dirt was there. He opened the report and quickly read the low-down on his nemesis, Round Robin Phinney.

  It was essentially the same story that Robin had told Manfred, albeit from Jeri Whitman’s point of view, which omitted her own penchant for theft and made Robin look like she’d tried to steal her best friend’s boyfriend, for which she had paid a lamentably high price.

  So now Tone knew why Robin hated men.

  She’d been screwed by one, both literally and figuratively.

  It was too bad about the kid and all, but who could she blame but herself? A good Catholic, Tone didn’t hold with abortion. That’s why he was very demanding that all his ladies always show him their birth control pills or pop in their bush-beanies before any action got underway. Of course, the Pope forbade the use of contraceptives, too, but, hey, you could take that church stuff only so far.

  The way Tone saw it, if Robin wanted to beat herself up for what she did, fine. If she wanted to take out her gripe on the world at large, that was also okay. But when she came after him, who’d never touched her and never would, well, then she had to expect payback.

  And Tone was sure he had enough here to do just that.

  The report concluded with a name and a phone number.

  That little creep Tannis knew how to follow through, Tone thought, at least you could say that for him.

  Tone made the call.

  “Yeah,” he said, “is this Phil Leeds?”

  Tone listened a minute.

  “Hey, I’m awake, you could be awake — if you want to make a quick hundred bucks.”

  Tone smiled.

  “That’s better. Now, listen. My name’s Tone Morello ... Yeah, the sports guy. What do I want? I want you to have breakfast with me.”

  In an hour, he told Leeds.

  At Screaming Mimi’s.

  Iggy Gross was running on adrenaline so pure that if he could have bottled it nobody would ever bother with cocaine or speed. It had kept him up all night rehearsing in front of a mirror. He knew that nothing less than the future of his career was on the line. He had to get this Phinney broad or he was finished.

  The buzz had gone coast to coast. Word was — in every market where his show was syndicated — that he was wussing out, backing down and hiding from some fat chick who sliced cold cuts for a living. The pressure on him to hit back, do it fast, and generally nuke this broad had been excruciating.

  So he’d quickly gathered an all-star team of the baddest, nastiest, funniest comedy writers on earth and had them write material for him. Razor sharp put-downs. Crushing slams. Acid-in-your-eyes insults. Then ... then he had them insult him. And when one did, he’d turn to another for a comeback. All this material was recorded and transcribed and Iggy sat down and feverishly committed all the permutations of vituperation to memory.

  He practiced, practiced, practiced.

  Rehearsed until he would have dropped, had it not been for the million volts of electricity crackling inside him.

  Now, he was ready.

  And he was going in alone.

  He would not make that dumbass Tone Morello’s mistake.

  Nobody important would be there watching him or recording him if he bombed.

  But Iggy felt good.

  He felt mean.

  He had a stainless steel hard-on.

  He slammed out of his penthouse apartment and he had so much juice in him he ran down 30 flights of stairs to the parking garage.

  And just in case everything went right ... Iggy had a micro-recorder hidden on him.

  David Solomonovich’s mentor-session at the university was canceled that morning. The grad student he was tutoring in particle physics couldn’t make it; the guy had blown out his knee while cross-country skiing in Grant Park. David would have reamed his twenty-three-year-old protégé if he’d hurt himself doing something dumb like alpine skiing. But cross-country had a benefit-to-risk ratio that even David had to concede was compelling, assuming you didn’t catch your ski in a bicycle tire some cretin had abandoned under the snow.

  Not one to be at loose ends, he decided to go into his father’s lab, where he’d either continue his work on achieving superconductivity at room temperature — or continue to illustrate what was rapidly becoming a manuscript-length series of erotic drawings inspired by Bianca’s tales of bordello bacchanalia.

  David realized, of course, that it was perfectly normal for a male his age, caught in that first tsunami of testosterone, to fantasize grandly about women and all their mysteries, and he was doing his usual thorough, cohesive and compelling job of it. He had no doubt that with a little further organization and the addition of a narrative thread he could market his drawings as a book.

  He was also sure that he would not. They would never see the light of day. Not while his parents were still alive. Well, maybe when he was older and he found just the right girlfriend he would show them to her. The thought of acting out the scenes he’d drawn made his heart race.

  Which was just the problem.

  He was letting his adolescent hormones distract him from serious work.

  He knew just the person, though, to give him a cold, bracing dose of reality.

  Even though he’d have to put up with the hurly-burly of the breakfast crowd, David headed off to Mimi’s to see Robin.

  Chapter 32

  “Sweetheart,” Mimi asked, “should you even be here?”

  Robin had just told Mimi about her father. The deli had yet to open.

  “It’s where I want to be.”

  Mimi nodded and squeezed Robin’s hands.

  “You let me know just as soon as it’s okay to visit your father. Stanley and I will be right over to see him. Meanwhile, I’ll keep an eye on things today. Make sure it’s nice and quiet around here for you. As much as possible, anyway.”

  Mimi looked over to Manfred sitting at a table with Bianca.

  “I want you to keep an eye on Robin.”

  “I will,” he said.

  Bianca looked up from the piece of her father’s strudel she was working on.

  “Me, too.”

  “You, you munchkin,” Mimi said, “sitting there eating all the strudel your daddy made for me, I ought to put you to work.”

  Bianca had already been told that because of Herr Phinney’s illness she would not be working with Nancy today.

  So she told Mimi, “I could use a new job.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I am serious,” Bianca said, putting on a very serious face.

  Mimi looked at Manfred and raised an eyebrow.

  “I could use some help with her today. I have classes later.”

  Robin said, “Let her work behind the counter. She’ll be safe back there with me.”

  “Would you like that, Bianca?” Mimi asked.

  Bianca nodded decisively.

 
Then she confided to Robin, “I like to watch the way you herunterputzen everyone.”

  “Yeah, I’m good at that,” Robin said, knowing just what she meant. “How about you serve the strudel?”

  Bianca nodded and smiled.

  “But no filching anymore.”

  The smile faded abruptly.

  “Very well. But then I shall want more pay.”

  Robin looked from Manfred to Mimi.

  “I think she’s going to fit right in around here.”

  With a gunfighter’s gleam in his eye, Iggy Gross strode through the front door of Screaming Mimi’s Deli not ten seconds after it opened for business.

  There were no other customers present, but Manfred was enjoying a leisurely second cup of coffee before departing for school. He had no idea who Iggy was, but he didn’t like the look on his face or the way he marched directly toward Robin. He knew what went on at Mimi’s but this was not the time, to his mind, for anyone to be giving Robin grief. He started to rise from his chair. He didn’t even get upright before Robin curtly gestured for him to sit back down.

  He did, but he didn’t like it. He glowered.

  Mimi had seen Iggy enter, too, but she’d also seen the by-play between Robin and Manfred, and she knew she wouldn’t be allowed to interfere either.

  Manny Tavares and Judy Kuykendahl locked on to what they were sure would be an epic encounter. A busboy who spotted Iggy — and knew just who he was — hissed to the dishwashers in back. They quickly appeared in the doorway from the kitchen, grinning like carrion, sure that one way or another they were about to feast.

  Iggy stopped at the counter directly in front of Robin. Man, he was ready. He was jazzed. He was ... not even going to let it bother him that this broad was bigger than him. And what was a kid doing there? Sitting on a stool, just behind and off to one side of the fat broad, sucking a lollipop for God’s sake. A lot of Iggy’s material was X-rated. If it got around he used that kind of stuff in front of a little kid — a girl no less — it might backfire on him. He started talking about pussy and such, it might get him busted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor or some such crap.