Saving Grace (30 page)

“How does everything end up being my fault?” he asked. “You hide your symptoms, then blame me for not discovering them. At work I run a clean shop, I play by the rules, I tolerate no cheating, no shoddiness, no discrimination; and suddenly in mid-game they change the rules and claim I cheated. In my life I never cheated.”

“You cheated on me,” Lily observed.

Her words tugged on his soaring indignation like an anchor, bringing him up short. Jonathan saw Michael, standing in the locker room with his shirt in tatters and a black bug clinging to his chest like a leech. He saw himself facing Lily with an armful of yellow roses.
 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve always been sorry. I never did a dumber thing.”

“You know,” Lily said, “Martha Kavin was right. I
am
an ostrich.”

He sat on the bed beside her and took her hand, which quivered in his like a wounded bird. “You’re not yourself. Neither am I. I hardly know who I am anymore. Jonah, maybe, in the belly of the whale. It feels as if my life has risen up and swallowed me. I can’t get out. And I keep wondering: Why don’t they know me? What have I done that’s so terrible? Am I really such a monster?”

“We’re neither of us monsters,” Lily said, but she didn’t sound sure. The phone rang. Jonathan picked it up. “Yes?”

It was Christopher Leed.
 
“Jonathan,” he said, “we’ve got a problem.”

21

CAN THEY DO THAT?” JONATHAN ASKED.

 
“The short answer is, it’s been done and upheld all the way up the line.”

“They have no right. There’s such a thing as presumption of innocence.”

“That statement presumes rather more innocence than I would expect in a fellow attorney,” Christopher Leeds said with a smile. “The rationale is that they’re not confiscating your assets, they’re protecting them.”

“I just can’t believe it of Lucas.”

“I’ve been expecting it ever since we refused to enter into negotiations. It’s the logical next step: they’re turning up the heat.”

“Is it possible Buscaglio did it on her own? After all, he removed himself from the case.”

“No,” Leeds said. “As U.S. attorney, he had to sign off on the motion.”

Jonathan sighed deeply. Through owlish spectacles Christopher Leeds regarded his client worriedly. Jonathan seemed unusually slow on the uptake today, more than a little distracted. Leeds hoped nothing was wrong at home. So often, in these cases, something was; and not necessarily because the family lacked loyalty. Crises like Jonathan’s invariably widened preexisting familial fault lines, precipitating events: a breakup that might have been coming five years down the line accelerates; fledglings leap from the nest on untried wings.

After a while Jonathan asked, “Can you stop them?” and Leeds replied, “I’m sure as hell going to try,” which, though uttered in the mildest of tones, was the first profanity Jonathan had ever heard from his monkish lips. “I said I expected it; I didn’t say I condone it. In my book, it’s dirty pool.”

There was a knock on the door and Leeds’s secretary, Rachel Brown, walked in. She was a young black woman, quite beautiful, with whom Jonathan had chatted earlier while waiting for Leeds. She was working her way through law school, which she attended five nights a week. She had told him that she came from Eastborough and named one of the poorer projects.

“Tough place to grow up,” Jonathan had said sympathetically.

“It got better,” she said, “after you came up.”

He gave her a look of startled gratitude.

The young woman nodded. “My mother still lives there. I know what the people think. We know who our friends are, and it don’t... it doesn’t always go by color.”

Entering the office now, Rachel flashed him a smile. She stepped behind Leeds’s desk, bent, and spoke softly.

Leeds excused himself and followed her out of the office. Left alone, Jonathan occupied himself by surveying the books on Leeds’s shelves, which, surprisingly, contained relatively few legal tomes but a preponderance of fiction. Good fiction, too, and eclectic—the collection of a serious and unapologetically idiosyncratic reader. Lesser- known works of classic writers rubbed elbows with contemporary masters. Gaddis, Coover, Percy, Carver, Gordimer; genre fiction, too, but top-of-the-line: Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem, Peter Dickenson, Sayers, and an enviable stash of Damon Runyons. Some were books Jonathan himself owned, and meeting them here was like discovering that he and Christopher Leeds had close friends in common. Others he’d meant to read but hadn’t gotten around to. If I go to jail, he thought to himself, I’ll have time to read; maybe Christopher will lend me some books.

The sickly laugh he tacked onto the end didn’t obscure the fact that somehow, the unthinkable had become thinkable.

If I go to jail.

It was possible. Lily was right: anything
could
happen. When twelve strangers had the power to send him to prison, his fate was no longer in his hands.

Had it ever been?

Jonathan had lived his life like a high-flier suspended over a safety net, only to discover at the age of forty-eight that there was no net and never had been. Nothing to catch you if you fell, no bottom to the hole, no up, no down, no cause, no effect. Things happened; that was all. People acted as if the world were a rational place, as if the laws of physics were paradigms of an underlying moral order, but really it was just whistling in the dark. Jonathan longed for a rational explanation of his travails, but so long as he’d held fast to his innocence, nothing that had happened in the past two months made sense. His iliad of unearned woes had torn great rents in the camouflage, through which gaped the void: a chaotic world in which anything at all was possible.

When Leeds returned, Jonathan complimented him on his taste in fiction.

The lawyer beamed fondly at his books. “Yes indeed. My professional literature.” He smoothed the perimeter of hair that surrounded his baldness like an empty corral. Jonathan waited, head cocked, for an explanation or punch line. Reluctantly, because he was a private man who liked to observe boundaries, Leeds explained: “Trial lawyers, you know, are basically storytellers. Each case has certain givens, evidence, witnesses—the particulars vary, of course—around which the prosecution and defense weave their tales, competing for the jury’s belief. The better story wins; it’s as simple as that.”

“Where’s the justice in that?”

“There is none. Litigation is not about justice, nor is it, strictly speaking, about truth. It’s about good, plausible storytelling. Alternate visions of reality. Fiction.”

“I never took you for a cynic.”

“That’s not cynical. I’ve always believed that fiction, good fiction that is, is a reasonable vehicle for truth. But of course there are limitations. One can’t just fantasize wildly. ‘Aliens made me do it’ is not going to wash with the jury, unless one’s trying for insanity.”

“I noticed you have science fiction on your shelves.”

“For fun,” Leeds whispered behind his hand.

Jonathan smiled. “What story will you make of me?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I’m beginning to feel that in this instance, our best defense is offense.”

“Specifically?”

“Shift the focus from the accused to the accusers. A hoary old tactic, but sometimes it works, especially in political trials where the jury is predisposed to the possibility of prosecutorial vindictiveness.”

Vindictiveness, Jonathan thought, was precisely the word. Though Michael’s betrayal had been a crushing disappointment, it could at least be said to have occurred under the gun. But no one held a gun to Lucas’ head. Lucas could have nipped this in the bud. Instead, incomprehensibly, he had let it escalate until the damage was irreversible.

Leeds stood up. He clasped his hands behind his back and proclaimed: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we will demonstrate that in the execution of both his public and his private affairs, my client, Jonathan Fleishman, never strayed outside the norms of the municipal marketplace; that he therefore had no reason to believe he was engaged in any illegality; and that, in fact, no illegality occurred. We will also show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the charges against my client were politically conceived and maliciously prosecuted.”

Jonathan applauded. “Bravo. Bravo.” The phrase “municipal marketplace” at once pleased and worried him. It conjured an image of a gigantic, bustling department store whose registers rang incessantly with a brisk trade in sinecures, contracts, leases, subsidies, seats on commissions, and appointments to boards. A not altogether inaccurate image, he thought, but risky.

Leeds sat. “Most of their case, what I’ve gathered of it, is weak. Your ties to those companies are not easy to document, and not, in and of themselves, illegal. They need to prove you exerted undue influence, and that is difficult to do; the facts lend themselves to many interpretations. The worm in our apple, Jonathan, is Vito Tortelli.”

All the air went out of Jonathan. He slumped in his seat.

“If he tells the same story under oath that he told that
Probe
reporter...” Leeds paused tactfully.

Jonathan gnawed the inside of his cheek. He didn’t want to talk about Vito Tortelli, but Leeds had to ask. Finally he said, “I have no reason to suppose Tortelli will change his story.”

Christopher Leeds lowered his eyes, centered a pad on his desk. “The difficulty, you see, is that if the jury believes that you accepted a cash-stuffed envelope from Tortelli in a men’s room, not only does that taint their image of you, it also implies consciousness of guilt.”

“Tortelli blames me for losing his place. He’s got a chip this big on his shoulder. I’ve seen you work. You’ll tear him to shreds.”

“But Kavin was there too, he says, and we know they’ve got Kavin...
 
and then there’s Solly Lebenthal.”

“So what are you advising me, Christopher—I should go fall on my sword?”

“God forbid!”

Leeds looked so shocked that Jonathan felt compelled to reassure him: “Just a manner of speech, my friend.”

“We’ll know more next week, when they present their motion to freeze your assets. I told you, Jonathan. I intend to fight them tooth and nail on this issue. Win or lose, it will cost them. They’ll have to wheel out their big guns. If they’ve got Kavin and Lebenthal corroborating Tortelli, we should hear about it then.”

Altogether they talked for several hours, and Jonathan met the other lawyers in the firm who would be assisting in his defense. In the intervals, when they were alone, Jonathan felt Leeds looking at him expectantly. He had no idea what Leeds wanted and, in his misery over Lily, shunted the matter aside, until suddenly it came to him that Leeds wanted him to explain about Tortelli. He hadn’t asked for an explanation—he wouldn’t—but wasn’t that a gleam of disappointment Jonathan saw in those magnified eyes?

Perhaps it was the fact that Jonathan had grown up without a father and Christopher Leeds, though only ten or a dozen years his senior, was an inherently avuncular figure, or perhaps it was some quality in the man himself—but Jonathan found himself distressed at the thought of Leeds’s disapproval. He wanted to explain, but how could he explain to Leeds what he could not explain to himself? The Tortelli fiasco was something he had buried long ago, had nearly forgotten until that bastard Barnaby came along and dug up the corpse. What had happened was not Jonathan’s fault, but his innocence could be demonstrated only in a context outsiders might regard as corrupt.

He needed for Leeds to understand that there was politics, and there was realpolitik, and each had its own ethic. In the realm of realpolitik, Jonathan played by the Queensberry rules. He might, to use the vulgar phrase, pay off a fellow politician, but never a judge. The minority companies he took under his wing were the real thing, not shells set up to sop up the gravy. He never knowingly dealt with the Mafia or anyone connected to drugs.

Jonathan Fleishman was, in short, a man of moderation, a reasonable man. It was Tortelli who had stepped way out of line.

But when he thought of explaining all this to Christopher Leeds, Jonathan for the first time came close to regretting his choice of attorney. Perhaps he would have been better off with someone of his own persuasion, a political lawyer who knew the way the system worked without needing everything spelled out, who would understand that what happened to the printer was his own damn fault.

What, after all, had they asked of Tortelli? Only that he do what people do if they expect to get business from the city. These things were understood, accepted, no cause for resentment among reasonable men. There were tactful means of handling such matters, with discretion and deniability for all sides.

Considering their opportunities, no one could say he and Michael were greedy. They never approached anyone who didn’t stand to make big bucks off the city. They were fair and businesslike: no strong- arm stuff, no threats; the stick implied, the carrot tangible. Tortelli would have been a millionaire by now if he’d played along. Why hadn’t he? Jonathan told himself Tortelli was just too small-scale greedy to see the big picture, but he suspected that Tortelli’s mistake lay in taking the thing personally, failing to realize that this was just the way the system worked. It costs money to make money.