going to be a slaughterhouse for the lower-level partners like me, since Pagnucci would not allow the top tier to be stinted. As we'd moved cheerfully between offices, the air was already growing fraught. Brushy ran off with her phone messages — one triumph behind her, a world of possible triumphs ahead. I lingered by Lucinda's work station. There was, as usual, not much doing for me.
'Same guy's been calling,' she told me. 'Keeps asking when you'll be back in town.' She had described these calls to me this morning, saying they had started yesterday.
'Any name?'
'Just hangs up.'
Brushy and Lena and Carl were the only people who'd known I was leaving. I hadn't even told Lyle much more than the fact that I might not be home for a night or two.
As near as she could recall, Lucinda said, it sounded like the same man who'd phoned the office on Friday morning before Pigeyes nabbed me out on the street. That fit. Gino or someone from his crew had probably been keeping an eye on the house, maybe even tailed me to the airport, and was trying to figure out where I was now. If Gino was good to his word, he was toting a subpoena for me.
Or, I thought, it could be Bert. If he'd spoken to Lyle first, he might have figured I was gone. But Lucinda surely would have recognized the voice. Maybe he had Orleans calling for him?
Lucinda watched me with her usual brimming expression. A stout, handsome, dark-skinned woman, Lucinda keeps her own counsel, but it bruises her heart to work up close to such a living mess. She is a great pro — my salvation, as loyal to me as to Brushy, even though everybody in the place understands that I am the underbill and Brush the big star. Lucinda keeps plugging. A picture of her husband, Lester, and their three kids was at the corner of her desk. They were all posed around the youngest, Reggie, at his high-school graduation.
'Oh my God!' I said then, when it hit me. 'Oh my God, Orleans.' I actually ran the first few steps before I looked back to tell Lucinda I was on my way to Accounting.
Down there, it was chaos. The place was like a campaign headquarters on election night, with computer terminals clicking and adding machines spilling tape and a lot of people running around full of purpose or desperation. Because of the IRS, everything collected had to be booked today. A number of secretaries and messengers were in line to process the booty of fees finally bludgeoned out of clients. Money — collecting it, counting it, making it — thickened the atmosphere the same way gunpowder and blood embitter the air of battle.
Behind her clear white desk, Glyndora started out of her chair the instant she saw me, her intent manifest to avoid any further intimate
'Glyn,' I said, blocking her way. 'Whatever happened to the photo of your son? Didn't you keep it right here?' The picture had been on her desk for years, and on the credenza in her home, a fine-looking lad in his mortarboard and graduation gown. 'Remind me,' I told her. 'What's his name? Orleans, right? Not Gaines, though. Carries his dad's last name, doesn't he?' I'd remembered now where I'd seen Kam Roberts.
Junoesque, Glyndora confronted me in silence, a beautiful totem, her dark face tight in anger. But it was like a closet where you couldn't quite squeeze the door shut because of everything packed inside. There was an edge of something unwanted, beseeching, that undermined her expression and riled her, no doubt worse than anything which I'd said.
'I don't want to hurt anybody,' I said to her quietly, and she allowed me to lead her out to the hall. It seemed a bit of a haven, away from the urgent clamor.
'Have Orleans get a message to Bert,' I told her. 'I need to see him. Face-to-face. In Kindle. ASAP. All Bert has to do is name the time and place. Tell him I have to sort things out with him. Ask him to call me here tomorrow.'
She didn't answer. Man, those were eyes she had, black and infernal, sizing me up, her mind flopping about furiously behind them. It didn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what caused all the legendary squabbling in the hallways between Bert and Glyndora, throwing things and calling names. Stay away from my boy. This wasn't a scene that pleased her, her boss and her lad in the mode of the ancient Greeks. She was probably glad Bert was on the run.
'Glyndora, I know a lot now. About your son. And I've got that memo you bootlegged to Martin, which, you notice, I'm not even asking about. I'm going to try not to hurt anyone. But you've got to get that message to Bert. You're gonna have to trust me.'
I might as well have asked her for a pot of gold. She despised the position she was in — the weakling, the wanter, the one to say please. Worst of all, she felt something I knew like the back of my hand, as familiar to me as darkness and light, which Glyndora as an act of will had simply abolished from her existence: she was scared. She gummed her lips into her mouth to control herself, then turned to look down the hall where there was nothing to see.
'Please.' I said it. It was the least I could do. She shook her head, the mass of dark hair, not so much in answer as dismay, and, still without speaking a word, went back to counting our money.
C. A Word for the Big Guy
Near five I phoned home, rousing Lyle from a sound sleep. He reported that he'd been getting the same strange calls as Lucinda: 'Mack there, when's he back?' He did not recognize the voice. 'Did you tell him?'
'Fuck no, Dad, I know better than that.' His pride and his assumptions, the whole tone of his response, struck me in the desperate total way only Lyle could. It was so clear where he was frozen — the latchkey kid of thirteen whose mommy had warned him about strangers. My boy. Listening to him, I felt for a moment I might simply expire from the pain. It eased a bit as he carried on about the Chevy, which he'd retrieved from the pound with two flats. One hundred eighty-five bucks it cost, plus the ticket, and he wanted the money back. He made the point a number of times.
I've come home again with Brushy tonight. We had takeout Italian, fancy stuff, rigatoni with goat cheese and obscure antipasti, which we consumed between screws. I won't say how I ate my tiramisu. About an hour ago, as we were drowsing, her back to me, saved from drowning in my arms, Brushy said, 'If I ask, you'll tell me, right?'
'Ask what?'
'You know. What's going on. With the money. Bert. The whole thing. Right? You know, attorney-client. But you'll tell me.'
‘I think you don't want to know. I think your life is better without this kind of news.'
'And I accept that,' she said. 'I do. I know you're right. I trust you. But if I decide, if I really have to know, for whatever reason, you'll tell me. Right?'
My eyes were wide in the dark. 'Right.'
So that's how it is. My warped little dreams, private so long, are now hurling themselves through my life with volcanic force. Perhaps the sheer peril made my lovemaking with Brushy vigorous and prolonged. She sleeps as she's slept the previous nights, in the comforted grip of her own improbable fantasies, immobile almost, but I am desolate and awake in the dark, chasing away goblins and spooks, out here in her living room now, whispering again into my Dictaphone.
So you ponder, U You: What is he up to, this guy, Mack Malloy? Believe me, I ask myself the same thing. The apartment is surrounded by the odd silences of winter — the windows closed tight, the heat whispering, the cold keeping idle souls from the street. Since I actually committed this stunt, robbing TN blind and preparing to blame it on somebody else, my ma's barking accusatory voice seems to be with me wherever I go. She regarded herself as devout, one of the Pope's own Catholics, her life whirling like a pinwheel where the Church was at the very center, but her religious thought seemed to dwell mostly on the devil, who was regularly invoked, particularly whenever she was remonstrating with me.
But it wasn't the devil that made me do it. All in all, I think I'm just sick of my life. It seemed like such a terrific idea. But it was
So who is this for? Why bother talking? Elaine always had the same hope. 'Mack, you won't die without a priest at your side.' Probably right. I'm a short-odds player. But maybe this is the first act of contrition, part of the process that the Church these days calls reconciliation, where your heart, unburdened, rises to God. What do I
