Part 7 (2/2)

I straightened myself up. I had a pretty good yuk thinking about Lyle getting in here with his buddies south of midnight and taking a whiff. I'd bet a lot of money he wouldn't know who to blame. He'd sit here trying to recall who'd hurled night before last. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.d had left worse for me. Still, I opened all the windows and threw the floor mat on the street. I shoved the radio back into the fragile plastic membrane of the dashboard. I thought about that little thief running all over the North End in the cold, searching for a hose. He'd smell like something when he got to school. Yep, I was feeling mean and humorous. I gathered myself together and slid across the seat behind the wheel, and only then noticed the absence against my hip. I began to swear.

The G.o.dd.a.m.n kid had got my wallet.

XI. EVERYTHING IS JAKE.

A. Your Investigator Gets Interrupted If Bert Kamin was dead, then who had the money?

This question struck me suddenly as I stood before a mirror at Dr Goodbody's, where I'd come to clean up before heading on to the office. A shower and shave had not done much for my condition. I still had the shadowy look of some creep on a wanted poster and my headache made me recollect those cavemen who used to open vents in their skulls. I phoned Lucinda to say where I was, asking her to make the calls to cancel and replace my credit cards. Then I found a lonesome corner in the locker room to figure things out. Who had the money? Martin had said that the banker he talked to in Pico had hinted that the account where the checks went was Bert's. But that was hardly authoritative.

A refuge, even a phony one, is where you find it, and I was irritated when the attendant told me I had a call. One of the things I hate worst about the world of business at the end of the century is this instant-access c.r.a.p: faxes and mobile phones and all those eager-beaver, happy delivery people from f.u.c.king Federal Excess. Compet.i.tion in the big-bucks world has made privacy a thing of the past. I expected Martin, Mr Impatience, who likes to call you with his latest brilliant idea on a case from some airplane at eleven o'clock at night as he's bounding off to Bangladesh. But it wasn't him.

'Mack?' Jake Eiger spoke. 'I'd like to see you ASAP.'

'Sure. Let me get hold of Martin or Wash.'

'Better the two of us,' said Jake. 'Why don't you come up here? I want to give you heads-up on something. About our situation.' He cleared his throat in a vaguely meaningful way, so I suspected at once what was coming. The powers-that-be at TN had reviewed this fiasco - Bert and the money - and concluded there was a certain large law firm they could do without. Cancel the search party and pack your bags. I was going to get to give my partners the news as a 'leak'.

It had been some time since Jake and I had sat down man-to-man. They became uncomfortable meetings after my divorce from his cousin - and Jake's decision to stop directing TN cases to me. We never speak about either subject. The unmentionable, in fact, is more or less the bedrock of our relations.h.i.+p.

As usual, a long story. Jake was not an especially good student; I've always suspected he got into law school on his father's pull. He's bright enough - downright wily at times - but he has trouble putting thoughts on paper. A whiz at multiple choice but gridlock when he was writing essays. His own term was 'cryptophobic', but I think in today's lingo we'd say learning-disabled.

I had been at BAD about a year when Jake invited me to lunch. I thought it was some kind of family obligation -one of Nora's aunts hopping his keester about buy Mack a meal and give him some advice, maybe he'll amount to something. But I could tell he was uneasy. We were at some snazzy rooftop place and Jake squinted in the sun. The wind flapped the fringe of the umbrella overhead.

'Nice view,' he said.

We both were drinking. He was unhappy too. Jake's handsomeness has always had room only for boyish easiness. The worry was like a painted sign.

'So,' I asked, 'what?' There had to be something. We did not have a real social relations.h.i.+p.

'Bar exam,' he said.

I didn't understand at first. I thought it was one of those clever, stylish remarks he made that was beyond me, rich-kid talk. He was just starting his third year at G & G, Wash's favorite flunky, three years out of law school, with one year spent clerking for a judge, and the bar ordinarily would have been long behind him. I ordered lunch. You could see Trappers Park from there and we talked awhile about the team.

'I should get out there,' Jake said. 'Haven't had much chance.'

'Busy? Lots of deals?'

'Bar exam,' he said again. 'I just took it for the third time.' And he looked from the distance to me, the level sincere agonized way he probably took in the ladies he wanted to lay. I did not need a guidebook to know I was being compromised.

'Three strikes and you're out,' he said. Three failures and you had to wait five years to take the test again. I knew the rules. I was one of the guys who made them. 'The firm has to fire me,' he said. 'My old man'll die. Die.' His career as a lawyer would, practically speaking, be over, but no doubt for Jake his father would be the worst part.

While I was growing up, Jake's dad was a colleague of Toots's in the City Council and a considerable figure. Invested with the medieval powers typically exerted by a councilman in DuSable, Eiger pere lived in our close-knit Catholic village like a prince among the folk. June 18, 1964, the day I turned twenty-one, my father took me to Councilman Eiger to ask him to find me a place on the police force. I'd had a couple of years of college by then and was sort of supporting myself selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door; I had bombed out around the art department and was a kind of bookstore beatnik, your average troubled youth, an Irish lad still at home with his ma, absolutely mystified about which way to go in life. The Force at least would get me off ground zero and keep me out of the service too, not something I said out loud to anybody, and no left-wing politics involved either, just a pit stop on the life track I didn't want to make, never one to enjoy taking orders from anybody. Three years later I wrecked my knee and had a free shot at law school, no draft, no Nam to trouble me, and went, mostly to be in school again, another of those funny accidental ways things just happen in a life.

Sitting there in the ward office, which looked like a bas.e.m.e.nt rec room decorated with maps and political posters from past campaigns and four of those clunky old-style telephones, big and black and heavy enough to be murder weapons, absorbing most of the s.p.a.ce on his desk, Councilman Eiger a.s.sured me that my police application would get every consideration. You had to love him, a man so richly endowed with power and so generous about its use. He was the kind of pol you could understand, whose lines of loyalty were long inscribed and well known: first himself, then his family, then his friends. He was not against law or principle. They were just not operative elements. I was a cadet in a previously selected entering cla.s.s at the Academy within three weeks. Now his son was sitting in front of me, and even though Jake denied his father was aware of anything, the message was the same. I owed. I owed the family. You knew his old man would see it just that way.

I made my one and only stab at rect.i.tude.

'Jake, I think we ought to talk about something else.'

'Sure.' He looked into his drink. 'I took the test last week. There was a question - I fouled up so badly - a civil-procedure question, you know, revising a divorce decree, and I wrote this ream about matrimonial law.' He shook his head. Poor old handsome Jake was about to cry. And then he did. A grown man almost, sobbing like a kid into his gin and tonic. 'Hey, you know, I'm sorry.' He straightened himself up. We ate in absolute silence for about ten minutes, then he said he was sorry again and walked away from the table.

One of the peculiar things you learn in life is that what makes Great Inst.i.tutions great is the stuff people attach to them, not their actual operation, which is often purely prosaic. The scoring of the bar exam was like that. We sent the bluebooks out to ten graders around the state, one for each question. The booklets came back UPS, thousands of stacks, piled up no more ceremoniously than rubbish. The secretaries sorted them for days, then added each individual's totals, and the staff attorneys checked the arithmetic. Those were the results. Seventy pa.s.sed, 69 failed. Jake was at 66 when I found his stack on another a.s.sistant administrator's desk the night I decided to go hunting for it. The guy who graded Jake's civil-procedure answer had given Jake three out of a possible ten. A 3 and an 8 of course can look a lot alike, even if you don't have a gift for forgery. I wasn't taking any risk; no one would ever know. Not counting me, of course.

Still, you wonder, why'd I do it? Not because of Jake, G.o.d knows, not even because my old man and my ma'd have been ashamed to think I wouldn't look after a friend. No, I suppose I was thinking of Woodhull and his minion, who confused ethics with ego, those judgmental prigs, my colleagues, one more team I didn't want to play on, one more group I would not allow to claim my soul. Same reason I did it to Pigeyes, then lied, unwilling to play for either side.

Jake took me out to lunch the week after the results were mailed. He was pleased as a puppy. He s...o...b..red all over me and I wouldn't say a thing. I congratulated him when he told me that he pa.s.sed. I shook his hand.

'You think I'm going to forget this, but I won't,' he said.

'No comprendo. Thank yourself. You took the test.'

'Don't give me that bull.'

'Hey, Jake. Practice makes perfect. You pa.s.sed. Okay? Give us both a break.'

'You're all right. You know, after my performance last time -1 got sick. I thought to myself, A cop, for Chrissake. You talk like that to a guy who was a cop.'

His look said everything. Us pals. Us guys. That smug fraternity thing Jake over the years has never lost. His life now is country-club golf courses and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around behind the back of his third wife, but there, twenty-one years before, I could see I'd restored the central faith of his life: we were special people who could outwit harm if we stuck with each other. I wanted to spit in his eye.

'Forget it, Jake,' I said. 'Everything.'

'Never,' he answered.

And I knew it was a curse.

B. Your Investigator Visits Herbert Hoover's America Waiting for Jake, I sat in reception on 44, TN's Executive Level, feeling inferior. There is a jazzed-up air of self-importance here that routinely deflates me. Someday someone will explain to me why this system of ours that is supposed to glorify diversity and individual choice becomes instead the vehicle by which everybody ends up choosing the same thing. With its airlines, banks, and hotels, TN did business last year with two out of every three Americans who make more than 50 g's. Many of those folks think of TN as nothing better than a kind of flying bus, but in a ma.s.s society it turns out that even a trivial connection to twenty-five million lives, especially prominent ones, imbues an inst.i.tution with an extraordinary aura of grandiosity and power.

Jake's secretary steered me back and His Handsomeness rose to make me welcome. The office is so vast that when I walked in he actually waved. Once we were alone, Jake sat on the corner of his desk, one foot on the rich carpet. You could not help thinking it was a pose he'd seen in some ad in a magazine. He had his jacket on. His hair was perfectly combed. To fill air time, Jake usually likes to talk to me about the old neighborhood, guys from high school, our place among the generations. But today he came to the point directly. As I'd feared, he had Bert on his mind.

'Look, old chum, I have to admit I'm playing catch-up. What in G.o.d's name is going on down there?'

'I wish I could tell you, Jake.'

'And you,' he went on. 'You're not helping much. I understand you went to see Neucriss.' Word travels fast.

'He was on the phone to me before your elevator had reached the ground floor,' said Jake, 'wanting to know what was wrong. Can I ask what in the world you were doing?'

'Hey,' I said amiably. I never offend Jake. I had all those years watching my old man kiss the fire captain's ring. 'You know, I'm playing hunches. We can't figure what the h.e.l.l Litiplex is. Maybe the plaintiffs know. I didn't realize that Martin had already tried the same thing with Peter.'

Jake took that in levelly. He was a.s.sessing me. 'Yes, but he had. And when you showed up, you really began ringing bells. We can't have this kind of fumbling.'

Neucriss, on the phone, had obviously had a great time: These klutzes you employ at three hundred an hour. Get a load of this. Two of them busy forwarding the mail. Ho, ho, ho. Jake had felt the needle and I was paying the price.

'Look, Mack, my friend, let's review the bidding.' Jake is a master of these phrases, the corporate idiom, one more style he is on top of. It softens the edges, but he's still as ham-fisted as his father and I knew him well enough to see that no matter how fas.h.i.+onably, he was about to be coa.r.s.e. 'He' - Jake pointed to the door of the chairman's adjoining suite; he had lowered his voice - 'the Polish gentleman next door. He likes me, he doesn't like me. Who knows day to day? Let's a.s.sume he's not president of the fan club. All right? Let's say he thinks I use the wrong lawyers and I pay too much to the ones I choose. All a.s.sumed. But he's going to put up with me. Do you know why?'

'The board?'

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