Though he can hardly bear to think about it himself. The virus. The bruise that won’t heal. The disease spreading through his body. Some people are made of wood.
“I think you need to come back to the clinic and talk about this,” she says. “We can help you there.”
“But why can’t you help me here?”
A half hour later, Jake is on the phone in his office, trying to calm Dana down.
“I told him the sidewalk wasn’t the appropriate place for a
consultation, but he kept following me,” she says, talking at twice her normal speed.
“Was he abusive?”
“No, not at all. Just very insistent. He seems to think there’s some connection between us. I don’t know what happened. He wasn’t like this before.”
“So where’s he now?” asks Jake, trying to picture the scene as he stands at his window.
New York spreads out before him. The clouds like cartoon thought balloons over Wall Street. Jersey on the right, Queens on the left. The old bridges linking the land masses together like long intricate bracelets. And the hundreds of taxicabs crawling along the grids in between like yellow ladybugs. It all seems so controlled and peaceful from up here that it’s hard to imagine disorder anywhere in the city.
“He’s outside.”
“Outside where?”
“He’s outside our house, Jake.” She makes it plain for him. “He’s on our front steps. He followed me all the way home.”
9
At around quarter past six, Jake gets out of a cab and finds John Gates standing in front of his town house, holding a plywood board with a rusty nail sticking out of it.
“How’s it going?”
“Can’t find my keys,” Gates says calmly, patting the pockets of his blue MTA jacket with his free hand.
It’s close to eighty degrees and the sun is still up, casting long shadows over the front steps and the Romanesque archway. Jake sees Dana peeking out from behind the curtains in one of the bay windows.
“You live here or something?” he asks Gates, who’s now using the free hand to scratch himself like a dog with fleas.
“One-three-five-five Bailey Avenue. That’s my address.”
Jake glances at the numbers painted in gold over his front door. “That says five-three-five West Seventy-sixth Street.”
Gates squints at the numbers and stops scratching. “Somebody must have changed it.”
Oh boy, thinks Jake. Mr. Crazy Rambling Smelly Homeless Guy. At least he’s not menacing anybody with his two-by-four. Yet.
“That’s my doctor in there,” Gates points the board at Dana in the window. “I have some papers I have to give her.”
“Oh yeah?”
“And she has my little girl in there,” Gates says, his face hawkish and creased in concern.
A white Project Return van pulls up to the curb. Two outreach workers climb out and stand around like actors on a movie set without any lines.
“Who farted?” John G. says.
The guys stare at each other. Dana comes out of the house wearing a blue sleeveless dress with large white dots on it. John G. puts his arms out like Christ on the cross. The whole scene would be funny if it weren’t so embarrassing. Neighbors are leaning out of their windows to gawk. The stocky light-haired guy who’s been renovating apartments across the street stands by his red Dodge van, watching.
“What’s up, guy?” asks one of the outreach workers, a young man with a hoodlum’s short haircut and the sound of Bay Ridge in his voice.
“That man stole my wife,” says John G., pointing the board at Jake. “He took her away. Now he’s living with her. Doing the nasty in my bed.”
Dana takes her husband’s arm. The two outreach workers look at them, like they’re wondering if this could be true.
“I was the one who called,” Dana says. “I think this gentleman needs help.”
“Yeah, come on, buddy.” The one from Bay Ridge points at the board in John G.’s right hand. “You wanna go to the hospital?”
John G. holds the board between his legs and starts pushing his ears forward like Dumbo the elephant, muttering, “Kiss me! Kiss me!”
“No, really,” says Bay Ridge. “I think you’d be comfortable. You’d like it there.”
“Kiss my ears!”
The outreach workers look at each other again.
“So what emergency room are you going to take him to?” Jake asks the second worker, a bulky guy with a weightlifter’s body and a tiny head.
“Parkside.”
“Why don’t you take him downtown to where my wife works?”
The bulky guy stares right through Jake. “Parkside needs the money. They’re looking to keep their beds filled.”
“I’m not going to any goddamn hospital,” John G. interrupts.
The bulky one sighs. “All right, let’s just take him to the shelter then,” he tells Bay Ridge.
John G. suddenly takes the board from between his legs and holds it up defensively. “I’m not going to a city shelter!”
“Why not?” asks Bay Ridge.
“Because I’ve been in a city shelter!” John G. hits the sidewalk with the board and the nail. “I’ve slept in a city shelter! I have had a bad experience with the city shelter system! They’ve deprived me of my definition of what it means to be a man!”
His voice echoes down the block and out into Riverside Park.
The Bay Ridge guy turns to Jake. “Well, we can’t force him to go anywhere, you know.”
“What about getting a mental health removal order?”
John G. abruptly drops the board and lets it clatter to the sidewalk.
Bay Ridge shrugs. “Well now he’s not really bothering anybody.”
“It’s for his own good.”
“Mr. Defense Lawyer.” Dana lets go of her husband’s arm.
As she moves away, Jake stares at the space where she was just standing, wondering what he did wrong.
She moves toward John G. cautiously. “John, are you all right?”
Gates looks at the dots on her dress as if he’s hypnotized. Jake feels a knot of tension in his gut. It’s not just the potential for danger here; it’s like watching his wife dance with someone else.
“You know, I’m really very worried about you,” she says to John in a warm calming voice. “I really think you need to be in the hospital. It’s not safe for you out here.”
“You’re damn straight it’s not safe,” John G. says, his cracked-out eyes shifting back and forth. “They got all kinds of shit going on. Parasites. Radio signals jamming everything. They got you all confused about who you are. They even got me messed up. Every time I try to think about how it was with us, I keep hearing, ‘Pass de dutchie on de left-hand side, pass de dutchie on de left-hand side.’ “ He swivels his hips as he sings in a Jamaican accent.
Jake looks across the street and sees the stocky guy by the red Dodge van shaking his head in disgust. As if he’s wondering why
none of the guys are taking charge of the situation. Goaded, Jake starts to move between Dana and Gates, but his wife waves him away.
“Look.” Jake turns back to the outreach workers. “Isn’t there any way we can just get him out of here?”
“Yeah, come on, guy,” says the bulky one, flexing his arms and moving toward Gates as if he’s about to heave him across his shoulder. “You’re bein’ a nuisance to these nice people.”
“Okay-okay-okay, I’m going.” John G. throws up his hands. “But I just wanna say one more thing to her.”
He stares at Dana like he’s looking at the sun. “You can’t get rid of me just like that. A-right?”
“Okay, that’s enough.” Jake finally succeeds in getting between them.
“I’m serious.” John G. keeps looking over Jake’s shoulder at Dana, still trying to reach her. “We’re all connected, you know. Just like New York Telephone.”
The two outreach workers come over to stand on either side of him, just in case he needs to be restrained.
“Just gimme one more second!” John G. tries to wave them off. “It’s random displacement of molecules. What you do has an effect on me.”
He points a righteous finger at Dana. Jake tries to push it away.
“I’m telling you.” John G. drops the finger, but he stands his ground. “I know it’s true. Like I know Horace Clarke struck out that time because I opened a window, just like I know a little girl got hit by a truck because maybe you sneezed.” He looks around wildly, grinding his teeth. “And you know what connects us? It’s the memory of love. All right?”
The two outreach workers have now joined Jake in standing between John G. and Dana. They’re like a sandlot football team making a goal-line stand.
“You can fuck me in the ass and you can put electrodes in my brain and parasites in my body!” John G. shouts. “But you can’t kill the memory of love. That’s the most powerful virus in the world, girl.” He turns and starts to storm off toward the park. “And they haven’t invented the vaccine that can wipe it out yet!”
10
Two days later, Jake finds himself deep in enemy territory. He is deposing a man named Noel Wolf in a book-lined conference room at the Greer, Allan law offices on Wall Street. Intimations of Waspdom surround him. Plush red leather furniture; portraits of the founding partners staring down like angry gods; a replica of the Bill of Rights on the wall, as if the original document had been signed at this very address.
“Before the break, we were starting to discuss the board’s vote to sell Starrett-Smith Communications,” he says, organizing his papers.
“Yes, that’s right,” says Wolf’s lawyer, a Greer, Allan preppie named Russell Sloan, who looks ever so slightly like young John F. Kennedy. “Except you had all the facts wrong.”
“Russell, I don’t need you to correct me, I know where I am.”
Just a little jab to straighten him out. The good thing about these depositions is that there usually isn’t a judge present. It’s like having the teacher out of the classroom.
Jake turns back to Noel Wolf, a sixtyish investment banker with fleecy white hair and the face of a lion made soft and feminine by the pampered life.
“Sir, did you in fact tell my client, Mr. Berger, the vote was coming up imminently before he went away?”
“All the board members were sent letters,” says Wolf, letting
his left arm hang limp while keeping his right arm crooked and his fist closed.
“Yes or no, sir.”
“Yes I did. I sent him a letter.”
“Bullshit,” mutters Jake’s client, Bob Berger, sitting beside him. “Absolute fuckin’ bullshit.”
Battling Bob. The roughest-spoken real estate developer in New York and Jake’s first major client with Bracken, Williams. He’s a low-down kind of father figure to Jake, encouraging him to cut corners and knock heads. Today, he’s shown up without a tie just to piss off prissy old Noel Wolf, who stands accused of going behind Bob’s back to convince the other board members to sell Starrett-Smith, a large television and publishing outfit with seven thousand employees on both coasts. Hence, Bob is suing Noel for breach of contract.
“Mr. Schiff, please admonish your client to keep his invective to himself,” says Russell Sloan, who’s clearly a little out of his depth in this type of case. He’s just a hardworking securities litigator. The kind who stays up all night doing paperwork and then endears himself to the senior partners by falling down a flight of stairs in exhaustion.
Jake ignores him. “So why is it, if you sent out letters, that you can’t produce a copy of the one you sent my client?”
“Don’t answer that,” Russell Sloan tells Wolf.
“Well, what’s the problem? You had a secretary type up the letters on a computer at the office. Right?”
Not even a cautious nod from Wolf. Just a sidelong glance at his lawyer. He’s lying.
Jake laces his knuckles together over his right knee. “So most computer systems keep a record of what time and date something was entered.” He pauses to let that sink in. “Therefore you ought to have a record.”
Something in Russell Sloan’s smooth pale face flinches, and Jake knows he may have just given the young lawyer his first real wrinkle.
“Don’t answer that either,” he tells Wolf, who sits there batting his eyes. “Interoffice communication is privileged.”
“No, it’s not,” says Jake, hearing Bob Berger grunt with approval near his ear. “You don’t know the rules of evidence, but I’ll get back to that. First I’d like to know who authorized you to begin discussions about selling the company to Leonard-Stanley.”
Before his lawyer can shut him up again, Noel Wolf uncrooks his right arm and starts holding forth as if he’s regaling a table full of guests at his country house.
“I don’t need authorization to talk to Jim Leonard, he’s one of my oldest friends,” he says. “We have dinner together all the time with our wives.”
“How nice. But how is it that you ended up talking to him about selling Starrett-Smith?”
“The iron was hot. Starrett was coming off its best year ever. Two of the television shows they produced were in the top ten and the magazine group was showing a profit for the first time in nine years. Now was the time to sell.”
Jake presses forward like a boxer seeing an opponent drop his guard. “But Mr. Leonard has never run a successful business of his own. All he does is buy other companies, break them up, and sell off the assets. Did you consider the fact that you’d be putting more than seven thousand people out of work?”
Noel Wolf raises his chin like a hunting rifle. “It’s called the pursuit of happiness, Mr. Schiff. Not the grant of happiness or the right to happiness. Life is a race and it goes to the swift. If any of those people who used to work for Starrett-Smith have a problem, let them go start their own companies. My responsibility is to my shareholders.”
“And lining your own pockets, you gonif,” Bob Berger snorts.
“I move to have that remark stricken from the record,” says Russell, flaring his nostrils at the female court reporter present. “You have absolutely no evidence to support that accusation.”
Though Jake would bet it’s true.
“Whatever,” he says. “I’m more interested in hearing what qualifies Mr. Wolf to make a decision about who to sell the company to without including my client in his discussions with the board.”
“I’ve run an investment firm on this street for more than forty years,” Wolf says, drawing himself up indignantly.