A Private Sorcery (6 page)

“The belt that goes with it, not the sash I sometimes wear with it?” “The belt.”

I tell the stewardess that she's not feeling well, and they let me take her to her seat and promise to escort her off the plane in Atlanta and deliver her to Marc. She closes her eyes as soon as she sits down. I lean over to peck her cheek.

Her lids rise and I see a look of terror. “Marc will meet me, won't he?”

I pet her shoulder. “Yes, dear.”

I
T'S TEN-THIRTY WHEN
I enter the city through the Holland Tunnel. I park the car at Astor Place and walk south, debating what to do with the next three and a half hours until we're supposed to meet Morton. What I'm debating is whether to go, despite Morton's advice to the contrary, to your preliminary hearing.

I raise my hand and a cab veers toward me. Decided.

At the courthouse entrance, I ask a guard where the courtrooms are. “Information booth end of lobby,” he says without moving a muscle.

I point to the long queue. “I just need to know the floor.” “Information booth end of lobby.”

It takes twenty minutes to reach the head of the line, after which I wait another five while a huge girl with crimson lips and hoop earrings moves papers from one pile to another. She hoists herself from her stool to get her purse, and I watch while she unwraps a hard candy.

“Spell that again,” she says when I give your name.

Slowly, she runs a finger down a column of names, stopping at yours. At ours. She writes a number on a paper and hands it to me. “Second floor.”

I take the elevator to the second floor, push open a heavy door to a cavernous room with wooden pews. I sit in back and slouch so my face is obstructed by the man in front of me. I spot you immediately, your black hair curling over the collar of a tweed jacket. Last year, I'd noticed a few wiry white strands over your ears. They were coiled tightly like cartoon character hair and I'd had the urge to yank them out, as if with their disappearance I could arrest time, wrest you from the mechanism that rotates beneath both our lives, leading you to walk at precisely the same fifteen months I did, marching you forward to a head of gray at the same forty-two that both my father and I lost the black color of ours.

You're in the front row with a dozen or so other people, all seated in pairs. The lawyers are showered and freshly shaved; like you, the defendants
are in clothes they appear to have slept in overnight. Everyone's whispering, the voices gathering into a drone that seems to be gaining velocity. There's an ominous feel in the overheated room: a mixture of deceit and despair and cynicism and, underneath it all, fear.

Two lawyers are arguing about the parole status of a kid with a shaved head. He's dressed in a camouflage outfit and enormous black boots. An armed policeman stands beside him. When the kid lowers his head, I can see something that looks like a swastika but with an extra leg or two tattooed on his albumen scalp. My mouth tastes like copper pennies, and I am suddenly very scared for you.

They've moved on to another case, something about the fraudulent sale of public telephones to restaurants. The defendant is a man my age. He's sweating profusely. His collar is too tight and the judge keeps glancing at him, afraid, it seems, that he'll have a coronary right here in her courtroom. “Does your client need a recess?” she asks his lawyer. The lawyer confers with the sweating man. My mind drifts—an afternoon some sixty years ago, sitting at my Uncle Jack's dining room table, doing my homework. I could see across West End Avenue to the opposite building. An animal was crawling on one of the window ledges. At first I thought it was a pigeon. Then I thought it was a kitten that had climbed outside. Suddenly, the animal dropped from the ledge. It passed through the square of sky I could see from my chair. I rushed to the window to look below, but there were people on the sidewalk and cars going north and south and I'd been unable to detect anything.

I hear your name being called. You sit in the same chair as the boy with the swastika on his scalp and the guy who looked like he was having a heart attack. The same armed police officer stands beside you. Morton is dressed in a brown suit, hair slicked back from his face. That confidence we invest in strangers on whom we need to depend dissolves and I stare at this simian-shaped man, jumping now from place to place with a yellow pad in hand. You look paler and thinner than the last time I saw you. I count back eight weeks to the day I handed you my credit card. Your eyes and nose appear to be running, and I think I can see the tremor in your hands. Despite Morton's reassurances that the
jail doctors will stay on top of detoxing you from the barbiturates, I'm afraid that your fine brain is going to seize.

The other lawyer, the federal prosecutor, has the appearance of someone who has resigned himself to being fat. When he stands, his sport coat hikes over the waistband of his pants, elasticized in back. He reads the charges in a singsong voice: conspiracy to commit burglary, conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. He clears his throat. “In addition, we have been advised by representatives of the State of New York that they will be independently pursuing their own investigation through the Manhattan district attorney's office and will be presenting a case to a state's grand jury to secure an indictment of Mr. Dubinsky on manslaughter charges.”

“What?” Morton says. “The weapon was never employed.”

“The pharmacist, Mrs. Kim Sun, miscarried from the shock of the experience.”

Morton stands. The back of his neck is red. “What's going on here?” “The miscarriage just took place this weekend. Mrs. Sun's gynecologist is prepared to testify to this court that the pregnancy was well established prior to the burglary and that the trauma of the event was a precipitating factor.”

The judge looks over at you. You are staring at the federal prosecutor. She beckons for the two lawyers to approach her. Afterwards, Morton goes to talk with you. The room is getting hotter and hotter, and I can hear the heat blasting in the radiators under windows the guards have pushed open. The judge bangs her gavel and Morton addresses her. “Your Honor, I would like, despite this new information which I do not believe further incriminates my client, to request that my client be released on his own recognizance. He is an employed physician. His wife, father and brother are also professionals. He has strong roots in the community and poses no risk to the court to fail to appear throughout these proceedings.”

The judge writes some notes. Then she turns to the federal prosecutor. He twists in his seat to look at you as if to accentuate your utter depravity. “We are recommending no bail option. The defendant is an
active substance abuser. As the court may recall, we have data showing the extremely high percentage of nonappearances by substance abusers. Moreover”—here, the federal prosecutor raises his hands, as though to ward off a pending attack—“the government believes that the defendant is at particularly high risk to flee the jurisdiction of this court. The individual suspected to be his coconspirator, Mr. Reed Michaelson, has, we believe, already fled to the Canary Islands. Mr.—excuse me, Dr. Dubinsky is undoubtedly aware that his career as a physician is severely threatened by these proceedings and may well be motivated to join Mr. Michaelson wherever he may be.”

Morton bangs the table where the federal prosecutor has spread his papers. Coffee from a styrofoam cup sloshes onto the surface. “This is garbage. No one informed us of this information.”

“Counselor,” the judge says. “I must request that you maintain decorum in my courtroom.”

Morton leans over you. You shake your head, and then I see you starting to turn. I duck as though picking up a dropped piece of paper. The drone filters down to the floor. Crouched over, I make my way to the door.

M
ORTON'S HANDS ARE
frozen in fists, fighter's fists with the thumb pressed on top of the forefinger. Rena sits motionless. She's wearing pleated black pants with gold knots in her earlobes and a pale green jacket. Her face looks fragile and bony, all cheekbones and eye sockets. Her lips are parted as if she needs extra air.

Morton has told us the bail decision. “Two hundred and fifty thousand, no noncash alternative.” He explains that this is because of Michaelson's disappearance. He doesn't say anything about the pharmacist having miscarried and the second-degree manslaughter charge, and I don't know if this is because he doesn't see this as the relevant factor or if this is so serious he doesn't want to break it to us now.

“What does that mean?” Rena asks.

“Usually they accept ten percent cash and the rest of the bail as a
note—a commitment from the bail bondsman to pay if your boy skips town. With no noncash alternative, it's got to be all cash. That means you're going to have to come up with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. No notes.”

Rena looks at me. “How would we do that?”

“Assuming you don't keep that kind of dough sitting in the bank and you don't have a cousin who's a banker waiting to put that kind of loan through for you, the only way it can be done is with a bail bondsman who might take a risk on you for a hefty charge. I've got one guy in mind, Charlie Green, but he's not someone I play games with. If I tell him he can put money on my man, he counts on me to mean that one hundred and fifty percent.”

Morton squirms in his seat. He stretches a rubber band between his forefingers and snaps at it with his thumbs.

“Fatso, the feds' prosecutor, is right. Your boy's a risk. He's strung out. He's got the means to get out of here. Sticking around is not going to look so good. When Green asks me what I think, I'm going to have to say so.”

“That will nix it from the start, won't it?” I say.

Morton leans back in his chair. He looks over the door frame at a hoop mounted there. Your brother has the same thing in his office, this club of men for whom twelve was the apex of pleasure. When he loses a case, he can cover the floor with wads of paper tossed through the hoop. “These guys make money by purchasing risk. Green makes his own decisions. Sometimes he does these things as a gamble. Sometimes he'll do it if he can structure the deal so he wins no matter what. Nothing lost by giving him a try.”

C
HARLIE
G
REEN MOVES
his fingers in and out. He's a tall man with thick black hair receding at the temples and a nose with a prominent bump. Last year's calendar is taped to the wall, and there's a stained coffeemaker on top of the file cabinet. In the background is the rumble of what sounds like a police radio. Rena has taken off her jacket, the curve of her breasts and her narrow waist now revealed through her
blouse. She seems more alert, and I can't help wondering if she's taken off her jacket on purpose.

“Do you own your apartment?” Green asks her.

“No, we rent.”

“Car, boat, stocks, bonds, artwork, jewelry, anything of significant value?”

“We each have an IRA. Saul has his stereo and record collection. We have a few paintings, pieces we bought from a young artist, nothing that we could get any real money for.”

“How about you, Pops?”

I freeze. No one has ever called me Pops. An old, horrid feeling surfaces from when I was a kid and someone would yell
Hey, Jewboy
and I would die a thousand deaths, afraid to fight, humiliated to just walk by, praying they would think I hadn't heard.

“I own my house. An IRA. Some stocks and bonds.”

“Car?”

“A Honda Accord. My deceased father-in-law's Mercedes-Benz.” “What's the house valued at?”

“I couldn't say. We've never had it appraised.”

“Three hundred grand?”

“More. At least four.”

“What year's the Benz?”

“1962.”

Green jots numbers on his desk blotter pad. He rubs the bump on his nose, which looks from this angle like it's been broken.

“How much you got liquid?”

I add in my head. Bank accounts. Credit lines. “Maybe thirty-seven thousand.”

“You put the house up as collateral and the first twenty-five K, I'll post the bond.”

I think about it. So, if you skip town, I've sold my house for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. No. Wrong. If you skip town, I've sold my house for zero dollars since there won't be any money or any house.

Rena touches my arm. “We should talk about this.” She looks at the
clock on Green's desk. It's nearly four-thirty. “How late are you here?” she asks Green.

“Sweetheart, this ain't a nine-to-five business. I'm here when I'm here. Could be eleven tonight. Could be three in the morning.”

“I'll need to discuss this with my wife,” I say. “The house is in her name, too.”

“You talk about it with whoever you want, Pops. You can talk about it with the mayor, as far as I'm concerned. Only, those are my conditions and you might as well know, I don't negotiate. I go with my first instinct, and it's a superstition of mine not to tamper with that.”

R
ENA SUGGESTS
I
STAY
over rather than drive back and forth again from New Jersey. I accept, letting myself entertain the idea that she'd prefer not to be alone, a delusion that fades in the face of her careful politeness beneath which I can see what a strain she finds even simple conversation, how inconceivable it is to her that I or, I suppose at this point, anyone, might be a comfort to her.

We walk in silence. She pulls a beret out of her coat pocket and stuffs her hair inside. The sky is muddy, neither black nor blue, and there's a messy half-moon hanging low. The temperature has risen as it does on those days when nightfall draws a curtain on the wind. When we get to Franklin Street, she says, “I guess we should get the subway here.” On the platform, a toothless woman in a flowered skirt is singing in Portuguese. During the chorus, she claps her hands and moves in small circles, first one direction, then the other. She shifts from side to side and I remember when you were first learning to walk how, when you heard music, a record I was playing or a phrase on television, you would stop and stare as if trying to find the instrument. Planting your feet wide apart, you'd sway back and forth.