'It's my life too.'
I hated this moment. But I'd always known it was coming. One of the problems about settling for Mr Not- Quite-Good-Enough is a sense of peril about accepting his guidance. With my eyes closed I ruminated, then I grabbed my briefcase and looked into its dark, disordered depths. Balled deposit slips rested in the bottom, along with fragments of papers, and paper clips; stick-on notes adhered to the sides. I pulled out one of the photocopies of the signature form I'd made up last night. I laid it down on the rattan table. Litiplex, Ltd. Jake Eiger, line I.
'Don't ask how Pindling got it. We don't want to know.'
She studied the document with a hand on her forehead as the weight of the tangible evidence bore down on her visibly. I got her cigarettes and we shared one, the odor of the smoke filling up the little room. I cracked the sliding window a bit and the curtains flowed around her like spirits.
'Jake?' she asked.
That's what it says.'
'You've known about this all along, haven't you? That's why you were so peeved with Jake.' I think I winced when she said that. Even with alarm bells clanging, she was listening for good news about me.
'I've known a lot,' I told her.
'Like what?'
I was just sailing here, no charted course. I didn't have the will to resist her and the lying made me feel childishly eager to cry. In my briefcase I found the memo I'd pulled from Martin's drawer. As she read, she picked a fleck of tobacco off her tongue. Her expression was flat, intense. She was being a lawyer.
'I don't understand,' she said. 'This isn't from Pindling. This memo.'
'Martin.'
'Martin!'
I told her the story, some of it anyway, about finding the memo, chugging over to the Club Belvedere. I was moved by her pain. As she often told me, Brushy liked these people. Martin. Wash. Her partners. The firm. These were her colleagues, who admired her abilities, who trusted her years ago with the things that mattered to them, who applauded her many triumphs and had received her assistance with a gratitude that was often intense. She knew she'd survive. She had clients, a growing reputation. That was not her worry. The point was commitment, allegiance, shared enterprise. She was devastated.
'They were setting up Bert? Right? To take the blame for Jake. Isn't that how this looks?'
That's how it looks.'
'God,' she said, and raked a hand through her hair. I opened the sliding door for an instant to crush out my cigarette on the small cement balcony, and the cold briefly forced its way into the room. The sun was out but seemed to offer no heat, as if it were just posed in the clear sky for decoration. Brushy asked me how Bert fit in and I told her his story and why I'd gone to see Toots. Her mind, though, remained on the Committee.
'Oh, it's so stupid. Stu-pid,' she said. 'Is this all of them?'
'Couldn't say. Martin obviously. Pagnucci doesn't seem to be in it. Wash — well, I told you what his attitude was.'
'Martin,' she said again. The Great Oz. She'd taken a seat on the bed, clutching her coat. I'd be willing to bet she wasn't wearing a stitch underneath — not that either of us would be pursuing that prospect in our present mood.
'What are you going to do with all of this, Mack?'
I shrugged. I'd lit another cigarette.
'I'll probably do the right thing.'
She watched me, assessing, wondering what that might mean. Then she shook herself in a lonesome spasm of disbelief.
'Something,' she said. 'I mean Jake. Why? It doesn't make sense. He makes money. His father is rich. Why do this?'
I leaned over the bed. I peered in her eyes.
'Because that's how he is.' The sheer viciousness gripped me and she looked on as if it were some kind of spectacle. She didn't care that I was saying I told you so. And she wasn't afraid. She held me at a distance, marveling.
'You're going to blackmail him, aren't you?'
It was the weirdest fucking thing. I felt like I'd been kicked. My mouth hung open and my heart felt hard as a fist and filled with intense physical pain. The humiliation ran like an acid to my eyes.
'Kidding,' she said.
'Bullshit.'
I walked around the bed and picked up my coat.
'Mack.' She reached for me. 'I don't care what you do.'
'You don't mean that. Don't even ask me to believe it. I know who you are and so do you.' Looking into my case, I realized I'd left the papers on the table. I waved them at her as I picked them up. I was hating myself for having said anything.
'Attorney-client,' I remarked to remind her she was ears only, that I was the only one with options, the right to act. Then I went down the shabby hallway to the elevator. I punched at the button, calling the car, and leaned against the wall, hollowed out and hopeless, certain that I would never understand the first thing about myself.
XXVII
A. Up to His Neck in Sand
'This is distressing,' said Carl. Those were the first words from him in a number of minutes. He had read the memo, then looked over the photocopy of the International Bank signature form. When he asked me about Pindling, I used the same words as Lagodis.
'A real snake charmer,' I said. 'You call him, he won't even know my name. I had to pay him in cash.' I'd show the charge on my golden credit card if I ever needed to prove that.
We were at the airport in the TN Executive Lounge, in a tiny conference room just big enough for a small table of black granite surrounded by four chairs. There was a telephone between us, as well as an insulated thermos of coffee which neither of us had touched.
Last night I had told Carl it was urgent. He didn't seem especially surprised to hear from me. It fit both his view of what he did and himself to receive emergency phone calls after midnight. It probably happened a lot, some young genius noticing a snafu in an offering circular three hours before they were going into the market. There was the usual deliberative pause when I asked Pagnucci to catch an earlier plane, leave himself time before Groundhog night. I promised to meet him at the gate. It was almost one now.
Carl looked at the papers a second and then a third time. His mind was moving at a phenomenal pace, trying to absorb everything, but I could tell from his deliberation that he was having trouble figuring it all out, especially the next move. He compared Jake's handwriting, first on the signature card, then on the old letter I'd given him as an example, and minutely shook his head.
'And what is it you propose?' he asked me at last.
'We'll call one of the nice ladies outside in the service center to make copies of all this. The originals I hold.'
'Yes?' He watched me alertly.
'You phone Krzysinski right now. Tell him you have to see him at once. Highest priority. Then you take these documents to him. Say you're proceeding on behalf of G amp; G. You express appropriate emotions. Horror. Regret. Disclosure of course is the only avenue.'
'And I do so without advising Martin or Wash?'
