Saving Grace (23 page)

“If I’m wrong, I’ll apologize. Take a shower.”

“What are you saying? You think I’m wired, is that it?”

“No,
paisano.
It’s just that I had this strange feeling even before we walked in here that you weren’t going to shower.”

“You’re saying I’m wired, you prick.”

“I’m saying you stink, Michael. If your best friend can’t tell you, who can?”

“Get out of my way.” When Michael tried to shoulder him aside, Jonathan grabbed his shirt with both hands and ripped downward. The shirt tore apart and dropped down to his hips. Both men stared at the small transmitter taped to Michael’s chest.

Like a drowning man, Jonathan saw his life flash before him: a montage of scenes from Columbia, law school, county jails in the deep south, fights, picket lines, demonstrations, more fights, rallies...
 
Michael was in every frame, always at his side, more faithful than a wife. Michael was no outsider; Michael lived inside him. This betrayal came from within.

“Oh, God.” He sighed with a bitterness deeper than tears, beyond anger.

“Fuck you, man.” Tears mingled with sweat on Michael’s face. “What do you know? What the fuck do you know?”

“I know I wouldn’t have done it to you.”

“Yeah, you’re so self-righteous—wait till you stand in my shoes.”

There was a sharp knock on the locker-room door. The knob rattled but did not turn; Jonathan had locked the door. “What’s going on?” a man’s voice yelled.

“Get stuffed,” Michael shouted back. He ripped the transmitter off his chest, ground it underfoot, and grasped Jonathan’s shoulders. “Lebenthal’s talking and now Barnaby’s dug up Tortelli. They’ve got us by the balls,
paisano,
we are fucking screwed. You tell me—what was I supposed to do?”

“You’re supposed to be a man.”

Michael flinched. “That’s what I’m doing. I’m sorry, Jonathan, but we’re not kids anymore. My first responsibility is to my family.”

“I could buy that, if you weren’t doing it at my family’s expense.”

“They promised me you wouldn’t be hurt. All they wanted was enough to turn you. You’ve got to come in, Jonathan, before it’s too late. The buck don’t stop with us, and they know it. Buscaglio’s seeing stars on her dressing-room door.”

“What did they give you?” Jonathan croaked. “What did they buy you with, Michael?”

“That’s not the way it went down.”

“Don’t bullshit me, man. You sign a pact with the devil, you damn well better learn to call a spade a spade.” He tottered over to a bench and sat hunched over, rocking back and forth like an old man saying Kaddish. This rocking motion, which seemed to well up from the deep desolation within him, evoked a visceral memory of Lily in a rocking chair, staring with frozen eyes at a bunch of yellow roses.

“I thought I knew you,” Jonathan murmured, so softly he might have been talking to himself. “I thought if there was one person on earth I knew, it was you.”

Outside the locker room the commotion was growing louder. Men were yelling back and forth, and someone was working on the lock with a screwdriver.
 
Michael opened his bag, slipped on a clean shirt, and stood for a moment with his hand on the knob, looking back. But, finding nothing to say, he unlocked the door and went out.

16

“HE COMES INTO THE ROOM,” Grandma says, “you walk out. He sits at the table, you get up. He talks, you don’t listen. This is how you treat your own father, who loves you and cares for you all your life?”

“It’s better that way, Grandma,” I tell her.

“Better than what?” she cries, throwing up her hands. “He’s your father, but he’s my son, and I won’t sit quiet and watch you hurt him.”

She can’t understand that it would hurt him much more if I spoke. He understands; he knows this is my way of protecting him. Because I know he’s guilty. He told me so himself. Not with words, but with his eyes. When I said, “Make the others come forward, make them tell the truth,” his thought was, “God forbid.” I saw this. He knows I saw it.

I don’t want to lie to him and I don’t want him to lie to me. Any more lies would kill us for sure.

But I feel sorry for Clara. These days she wanders around the house mumbling to herself like an old lady. She’s dying to go down the drive and tear into those reporters, but she won’t go against my father’s orders. As far as she’s concerned, it’s all an anti-Semitic plot. I tried to explain to her about conspiracy and influence peddling, but she refuses to understand. “So he helped his friends,” she said, “so what’s the big deal? The Italians don’t help the Italians? The Irish don’t help the Irish?”

“But they’re claiming he did it for money,” I said.

“So what, you want he should work for free? You want we should live like your friend Mr. Barnaby No-name, with the cock-a-roaches and the rats and the drunkards and dope peddlers?”

Then she tells me, “Honor thy father,” like Moses proclaiming the law. As if I didn’t want to, as if I wouldn’t give anything to believe in him again.

Last night I overheard him telling Mom what Michael Kavin did. I think he was crying. I sniveled some myself. The man’s my fucking godfather. But then, Lucas is Paul’s. You can’t trust anybody.

Which doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be called to account. I’ve been thinking a lot about Barnaby, a pig in sheep’s clothing if ever there was one. I know it, Needlewoman knows it, but you can tell by the way all those newscasters and reporters genuflect when they mention his name that he’s got them snowed. My brain says sit back and shut up, because God knows I’ve done enough harm already. But my heart says, “Kill. Kill.”

It’s not just vengeance, though I admit that’s a factor. The point is, I know Barnaby. I know what he is. And thanks to Needlewoman, I know I can hurt him. So it follows that if I don’t, if I sit back and do nothing, I am responsible for every dirty, rotten thing he goes on to do.

Tomorrow I’ll drive into the city.

* * *

“ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things.’ “

“ ‘Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings; and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings,’ “ concluded Lily.

Christopher Leeds beamed at her.

“Great,” Jonathan groused. “I’m dying and my lawyer recites Lewis Carroll.” He wasn’t complaining, just showing that he too knew his English lit. Since Michael’s betrayal, Jonathan’s embarrassment about using Leeds had burnt off like a rocket stage, propelling them all forward.

They sat, the three of them, on the deck overlooking the bay, sipping iced tea flavored with mint from Lily’s garden. Christopher Leeds in his Hampton mode was a portly Tom Wolfe-ish figure, formally attired in a white linen suit, pink shirt, panama hat, and white ducks. He and his wife were spending the month of August with Leeds’s sister, who, it emerged, lived year-round in Sag Harbor. This surprised Jonathan, who could hardly conceive of Leeds’s having had parents, much less siblings, but it was certainly convenient: for Jonathan had taken to spending more and more time at the summer house, not to seek comfort in the bosom of his family, but to spare himself the mortification of ostracism.

Jonathan had dreaded telling Leeds about Michael’s treachery. The least he expected was an “I-told-you-so;” but in his worst fantasies, the ones that showed up at three in the morning, the lawyer threw up his hands and resigned the case. In reality, Leeds’s response was unfeigned sympathy and pain. His face grew luminous with grief; he pressed Jonathan’s hand in consolation and said, as if of a death in the family, “I’m so sorry.” At that moment, Jonathan felt his liking for the man turn to love.

Now, however, Christopher Leeds had resumed his lawyerly persona. Pudgy hands laced over his knee, he said, “Ms. Buscaglio telephoned me.”

Jonathan said, “What did she want?”

“You must understand that this was an opening move on their part, a preliminary tender, if you will. We could certainly do better, if you choose to pursue this option. She offered to drop some counts if you agree to plead guilty to extortion, influence peddling, and racketeering, provide full information and cooperation to investigators, and testify about all your ‘illegal activities and coconspirators.’ “

“Drop some counts—that’s all?”

“That’s all she offered.”

Jonathan laughed. “In other words, they want me to betray my friends, destroy my reputation, ruin my career, and disgrace my family: and all that is not even worth immunity.”

“Correct. From what I could gather, immunity’s not on the table.”

“What did you say?”

“That I would pass on the message.” Leeds’s face gave no hint of opinion or expectation.

“Tell Buscaglio and Lucas to go fuck themselves.”

“Would you mind if I put that into my own words?”

“Suit yourself.”

Lily was sitting with her hands pressed tighdy between her knees. “Jonathan,” she said, “have you thought it through?”

He turned to her, his face a dusky rose. “There’s nothing to think about. I’d rather rot in jail for life than plead guilty to something I didn’t do.”

“Of course you realize that fighting these charges will be cosdy,” Leeds said neutrally.

“You’re saying that guilty or innocent, I’m fucked either way. Thank you; that point had occurred to me.”

“I should also point out that pursuing this discussion with the U.S. attorney’s office, even to an unsuccessful conclusion, would almost certainly yield useful information about their case, which otherwise will be withheld until discovery.”

“It’s copping out, Christopher. It’s admitting that their charges have some legitimacy. Besides,” Jonathan said irritably, “I’m not going to do to anyone what Michael did to me. That’s not what I’m about.”

“You don’t have to decide immediately.”

“The decision is made. We fight.” Jonathan looked at Lily. She reached over and clasped his hand.

“All right, then,” Christopher Leeds said, breaking out his boyish smile. “We fight. Jonathan, there is much to do. Might I suggest that we leave this delightful but distracting setting and immure ourselves in your study?”

Lily understood this, correctly, as a dismissal. To Jonathan’s relief, his lately unpredictable wife rose, smiled pleasantly, and said, “I’ll let you get down to it, then. Shout when you’re ready for sustenance.”

“The first thing you have to understand,” Jonathan said when she had gone, “is that there are two sets of rules: the written ones and the real ones. It is perfectly possible to commit some minor technical violations of the former while adhering strictly to the latter. I am a man of principle, and the first principle of politics is to get results. Wealth in itself means nothing to me; but in our society, wealth
is
power. That’s reality, and in order to function effectively, I must live within that reality.”

Christopher Leeds sighed. Given a choice, he would have skipped the philosophizing and gone right to the nitty-gritty; but there never was a choice. God created the world with a word, and thereafter man imitated him. Jonathan would have been mortified to know that he was following the pattern of all Leeds’s clients, albeit more eloquently than most: fashioning a context in which every misdeed had its sufficient justification and from every act of seeming venality there emerged, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, an act of altruism.

“They accuse me of influence peddling,” Jonathan said. “What does that mean? Patronage is the oil in the political machine; nothing works without it. The real moral issue isn’t if you use it, it’s how.”

Leeds said, “They will claim, presumably, that you used these political appointees to benefit your law clients, and thereby yourself.”

“They can say what they like. I’ll stand on my record of appointments. I’ve appointed more blacks and Hispanics than any other politician in this city. And I don’t sponsor incompetents. Loyalty counts, okay, but if a man can’t do the job, I won’t protect him. Anyone who knows me—”

“But the jury doesn’t know you. And as someone who’s been at this for a while, I must warn you that just because the law mandates a presumption of innocence, that doesn’t mean the jury will afford it. I don’t care what they say in
voir dire;
some of those jurors are going to come into court with the attitude that if you weren’t guilty, you wouldn’t have been charged.”

“All I’m saying is I have a record to stand on. My law clients are practically all minority-owned businesses. I’m proud of what I’ve done for them.”

“Which is what, precisely? And how did they pay you? Do you own stock in any of the companies?” Leeds took a file from his briefcase and opened it on Jonathan’s desk. Inside were neatly clipped copies of Barnaby’s two articles, sections of which had been highlighted in yellow. Jonathan’s nose twitched disdainfully, as if Leeds had just spread fresh manure over his desk.

“I’m told that Barnaby is very close to Buscaglio,” Leeds said. “We have to assume that whatever he’s got, she has as well. Let’s begin with Rencorp.”

“I don’t want to talk about Rencorp.”