'No, sir. That's where it went. Where it is now is anybody's guess. The beauty of bank secrecy is that it ends the trail. You can send the money anywhere from Pico. It could be back here, frankly. If it was in the right municipal bonds, he wouldn't even have to pay taxes.'
'Right,' Pagnucci quickly said. He took this setback, like most things, in silence, but his precise, mannerly good looks clouded with vexation.
'And who's going to do the looking?' I asked. ‘I don't know many private investigators I'd trust with this one.'
'No, no,' said Wash. 'No one outside the family. We weren't thinking of a private investigator.' He was looking somewhat hopefully at me. I actually laughed when I finally got it.
'Wash, I know more about writing traffic tickets than how to find Bert. Call Missing Persons.'
'He trusts you, Mack,' Wash told me. 'You're his friend.'
'Bert has no friends.'
'He'd respect your opinion. Especially about his prospects of escaping without prosecution. Bert's childish. We all know that. And peculiar. With a familiar face, he'd consider this in a new light.'
Anybody who's survived for more than two decades in a law firm or a police department knows better than to say no to the boss. Around here it's team play — yes, sir, and salute smartly. No way I could refuse. But there was a reason I was going to law school at night while I was on the street. I was never one of these lamebrains who thought cop work was glamorous. Kicking doors in, running down dark alleys — that stuff tended to terrify me, especially afterwards when I got to thinking about what I'd done.
‘I have a hearing Wednesday,' I said. This took them all back for a moment. No one, apparently, had considered the prospect that I might be working. 'Bar Admissions and Discipline still wants to punch Toots Nuccio's ticket.'
There was a moment's byplay as Wash proposed alternatives — a continuance, perhaps, or allowing another G amp; G lawyer to handle the case; there were, after all, 130 attorneys here. Martin, the head of litigation, eventually suggested I find another partner to join me at the hearing, someone who could take over down the road if need be. Even with that settled, I was still resisting.
'Guys, this doesn't make sense. I'm never going to find Bert. And you'll only make them angrier at TN once they realize we waited to tell them.'
'Not so,' said Wash. 'Not so. We needed time to gather facts so that we could advise them. You'll prepare a report, Mack,' he said, 'something we can hand them. Dictate it as you go along. After all, this is a significant matter. Something that can badly embarrass them, as well as us. They'll understand. We'll say you'll take no more than two weeks.' He looked to Martin and Carl for verification.
I repeated that there was no place to look.
'Why don't you ask those thugs down at the steam bath where he likes to hang out?' Pagnucci asked. Talking to Carl is often even less satisfying than his silence. He is stubbornly, subtly, but inalterably contrary. Pagnucci regards agreement as a failure of his solemn obligation to exercise critical intelligence. There is always a probing question, a sly jest, a suggested alternative, always a way for him to put an ax to your tree. The guy is more than half a foot shorter than me and makes me feel no bigger than a flea.
'Mack, you would be the savior of this firm,' said Wash. 'Imagine if it did work out. Our gratitude would be' — Wash waved — 'unspeakable.'
It all looked perfect from their side. I'm a burnt-out case. No big clients. Gun-shy about trials since I stopped drinking. A fucked-up wreck with the chance to secure my position. And all of this coming up at the most opportune time. The firm was in its annual hysteria with the approaching conclusion of our fiscal year on January 31. All the partners were busy choking overdue fees out of our clients and positioning themselves for February 2, a week and a half from now, when the profits would be divided.
I considered Wash, wondering how I ever ended up working for anybody in a bow tie.
'I say the same thing to you I've said to Martin and Carl,' Wash told me. 'It's ours, this place, our lives as lawyers are here. What do we lose if we take a couple of weeks trying to save it?'
With that, the three were silent. If nothing else, I had their attention. In high school I used to play baseball. I'm big — six three — and never a lightweight. I have good eye-hand, I could hit the ball a long way, but I'm slow, what people call lumbering when they're trying to be polite, and the coaches had to find someplace to play me, which turned out to be the outfield. I've never been the guy you'd want on your team. If I wasn't batting, I wasn't really in the game. Three hundred feet away from home plate you can forget. The wind comes up; you smell the grass, the perfume from some girl in the stands. A wrapper kicks across the field, followed by a ghost of dust. You check the sun, falling, even with all the yelling to keep you awake, into a kind of trance state, a piece of meditation or dreams. And then, somehow, you feel the eyes of everybody in the park suddenly shifted toward you — the pitcher looking back, the batter, the people in the stands, somebody someplace has yelled your name. It's all coming to you, this dark circle hoving through the sky, changing size, just the way you've seen it at night when you're asleep. I had that feeling now, of having been betrayed by my dreams.
Fear, as usual, was my only real excuse.
'Listen, guys. This was carefully planned. By Mr Litiplex or Kamin or whoever. Bert's three sheets to the wind with his sails nowhere in sight. And even if I do find him, by some miracle, what do you think happens when he opens the door and sees that he's been tracked down by one of his partners, who undoubtedly is going to speak to him about going to prison? What do you think he'll do?'
'He'll talk to you, Mack.'
'He'll shoot me, Wash. If he's got any sense.'
Bereft of a response, Wash looked on with limpid blue eyes and a guttering soul — an aging white man. Martin, a step ahead as ever, smiled in his subtle way because he knew I'd agreed.
Pagnucci as usual said nothing.
II
Privately, my partners would tell you I'm a troubled individual. Wash and Martin are polite enough to murmur some fainthearted denial as they read this, but, guys, we all know the truth. I am, I admit, kind of a wreck from all directions — overweight even by the standards of big men who seem to get some latitude, gimpy on rainy days because I ruined my knee while I was a copper, jumping off a fence to chase some bum who never was worth catching. My skin, from two decades of drinking hard, has got that reddened look, as if someone took a Brillo pad to my forehead and my cheeks. Worse is what goes on inside. I have a sad heart, stomped on, fevered and corrupted, and a brain that boils at night in a ferment of awful dreams. I hear like far-off music the harsh voices of my mother and my former wife, both of them tough Irishwomen who knew that the tongue, for the right occasion, can be made an instrument of pain.
But now I was excited. After the Committee broke, I lit out from the Needle for the Russian Bath, eager and actually somewhat jealous of Bert. Imagine! I thought as I bounced along in the taxi taking me west. Just imagine. A guy who worked down the hall. A foul ball. Now he was off roistering with a stolen fortune while I was still landlocked in my squalid little life.
Reading this, my partners probably are squinting. What kind of jealous? they say. What envy? Fellas, let's not kid ourselves, especially at 4:00 a.m. It is the hour of the wolf, quiet as doom, and I, the usual insomniac mess, am murmuring into my Dictaphone, whispering in fact, in case my nosy teenaged son actually returns from his night of reprobate activity. When I finish, I'll hide the tape in the strongbox beneath my bed. That way, in the event of second thoughts, I can drop the cassette into the trash.
Before I began dictating the cover memo, I actually figured I would do it just as Wash requested. A report. Something anesthetized and lawyerly, prose in a strait-jacket, and many footnotes. But you know me — as the song goes, I've done it my way. Say what you like, this is quite a role. I talk, you listen. I know. You don't. I tell you what I want — when I want. I discuss you like the furniture, or address you now and then by name. Martin, you are smiling in spite of yourself. Wash, you are wondering how Martin will react. Carl, you'd like it all in no more than
