Present value, p.32
Present Value, page 32
“Now you’ve violated the terms of bail, you and the mystery babe who is not a hooker apparently destroyed the judge’s hotel room, I dunno, what the hell am I supposed to do with you? You’re probably looking at some time now.”
Fritz nodded, still staring out through the majestic sweep of glass. Another plane took off. He thought of flying away, or sailing away, or even zipping up his coat and walking away. Right outside the window were people getting away. But he wasn’t going anywhere without handcuffs on, he knew that now. When you fall, it’s usually your own fault.
“I understand,” he said.
“Fritzie, can I ask you one more thing? I know it doesn’t matter anymore, but I keep thinking about the case—you know, the real case, before you pulled your boner in New York. It wasn’t Greene, Jellicoe, or any of those guys who did the short trade. I was wrong about that, wasn’t I?”
Fritz remained silent, staring out the window.
“I figured out that I had that wrong. That’s why you hired me, isn’t it? You were about to walk out of my office that day, and then you realized I was sniffing down the wrong trail, so you said, okay, I’ll go with this guy.”
Pearl could see Fritz was listening. He could see it in his eyes, although his expression remained blank.
“Remember I said your stunt was very high school?” Pearl’s eyes were narrow and twinkling.
“Let’s go upstairs and get this over with,” said Fritz.
Pearl shrugged. Hey, the guy had paid his fee in advance. He was an adult and could do as he liked. Whaddayagonna do?
As they walked to the elevator, Pearl said, “I gotta tell you one thing, Fritzie.”
“Yes?”
“You’re a mensch. Dumb, maybe, but a mensch.”
THE PROCEEDINGS would prove a great disappointment to the press in the gallery, for there was to be no more of the high comedy they had come to expect of this case. There would be no dialogue, no one-liners, no defendant chiming in with funny stuff. The judge was businesslike and frosty; the plea was accepted with antiseptic formality. The prosecutor made a short proffer, the judge raced through the rote questions, and bang: $115,000 in restitution, a $1 million fine, and a year and a day.
“A year and a day, a huge break,” Pearl whispered. “You can get forty-seven days off for good time. She sentences you to a year, one day less, you gotta serve the whole thing. You know what, she must like you.”
The other break was the location. Before they led Fritz away, Pearl added that the federal penal camp in Deer Path, Pennsylvania, was as good as it got.
“Club Fed,” he explained.
But there was no public banter that cold January morning; there were no lawyers hired and fired, no give and take. There was no wife to storm out of the room—Brubaker’s wife didn’t even show up, the press noticed. As for Brubaker, he didn’t say much at all, not until it was almost over. Neither did the judge, and neither did the prosecutor, and neither did Pearl. They all sent him to jail as quickly and coldly and efficiently as you could imagine.
The only human moment came right at the end, and it flashed by in a couple of seconds. Ker-chick! the cuffs went on. Just then Chandler looked at Fritz with something that might have been compassion, the angry compassion of a parent for a particularly wayward child.
“Mr. Brubaker, you need to get ahold of yourself,” she said.
He nodded. “Your Honor, I appreciate that. I agree completely.”
27 HE MAKES ME
DOWN TO LIE
FEBRUARY HAD COME, and a pall hung over the gray lands in the Playtime Tower. The cubes stood empty, their cloth walls picked clean of photos and cartoons and calendars and kindergarten finger paintings. Many of the offices were dark, too. The layoffs had swept like plague through the fourth floor, decimating cube and office dwellers alike, leaving behind dark computer screens, unplugged phones, and desks empty of everything except paper clips and dead ballpoint pens and old Advil bottles that rattled when you opened the drawers. When fluorescent lights began to flicker in the corridors, no one replaced the bulbs. They flickered for a while and then died, and then other lights began to flicker. Boxes of files lined the halls, the lower courses crushed, the higher courses leaning crazily, and as the lights failed, the box walls grew more forbidding. In offices and conference rooms, papers still lay on tables where they’d been abandoned in midmeeting, like the lunch bowls at Pompeii that hadn’t been cleared away before the volcano erupted. The framed corporate mission statements hanging in the elevator lobby acquired a thin coating of dust.
Outside, the tower itself was dingier. Dirty snow lingered in the flower beds; trash blew against the brickwork and gathered in mean little piles. Exhaust particulate washed south through the air from Route 128, as it always had. But now there were no window cleaners. The windows slowly darkened with grime.
From the lonely spaces below the ninth floor, where the retention bonuses had not percolated, morale had fled. When the layoffs came at New Year’s, only the management people on nine were spared. Some of the other floors had lost half or more of the employees, and a silent resignation hung about these spaces. The cubescape was still inhabited, but only in the way that ruins are always inhabited, with here and there a survivor picking through the box courses, looking for something. Occasional lamps shone where one of the silent rearguard worked over the bankruptcy crisis of the day: the schedule or affidavit that must be filed tomorrow, the projection that the suits needed for the creditors’ meeting on Tuesday. But no one stopped at a cube to chat; no conversation echoed from the lobby. It was so quiet that whenever one of the management people came down from nine, the lonely cube dwellers still eking out an existence on four would start at the sound of the elevator bell, then listen to the footsteps off the elevator.
Those few who remained avoided eye contact.
Luce was one of these. Here among the ruins, Fritz’s assistant had survived, holed up in the cube across from his old office. She worked for three managers now, including Frank Pitts, who still stalked his morning lap around the office, investigating which employees weren’t getting in early, even after he’d laid half of them off. Through that winter, Luce waited mutely for Pitts and two other managers to call with assignments. She dug through the box piles to find what they’d lost; with grim efficiency, she delivered the financial summaries they asked for. By February the new reality of bankruptcy had settled on the suits as something they could live with, but it had not settled on Luce. She declined their pleasantries, their jocular efforts at gallows humor. Her face was dutiful, blank, hardened. The one point of honor she reserved to herself was this: she would not be their friend. She would do what they said and no more.
Those boxes along the south wall could be organized better in all this empty cube space, Luce knew. Arthur was still down in support services: she could hit him up for a few lightbulbs. In the old days she’d have done jobs like these without waiting for someone to ask, but now there didn’t seem any point. She wasn’t going to invest any more life in this place. Pitts and the rest of them didn’t deserve it. So Luce waited for the phone to ring and studied the want ads and Internet job sites.
In her desk Luce kept the newspaper articles about Fritz: his arrest, his arraignment, his testimony in the Senate, his conviction. For some reason she’d clipped these from The Boston Globe and saved them in a manila file. She hadn’t known quite what to do with his things: she’d put the photos and bric-a-brac into boxes, which she’d stacked in her cube. On top of them was his sail bag, still holding his gym clothes.
On a cold February afternoon she was going through the classifieds. From time to time she looked over at Fritz’s darkened office. Had he really done what the suits on nine kept saying? He’d pleaded guilty to it, but cynical instinct is a Bostonian’s birthright, and Luce was Boston born and bred. Her bet was that the guys who gave themselves bonuses and then fired half the company must have had something to do with this, too. Maybe they’d all been in it together, the stock business. You couldn’t tell about anybody.
Whatever the reason, Fritz was gone, and she had to forget about him and find the next job. Luce shivered, rubbed her arms, crossed herself instinctively. She could swear they had cut back on the heating. It was always cold in the afternoons. She checked her watch. Four-fifteen: forty-five minutes to go. Before, she’d been the kind of person who couldn’t find enough minutes in the day; now she’d become a clock watcher. She looked again at a want ad. “Office administrator needed for start-up,” it said. “Tremendous growth opportunity!” Sketchy, she thought. But she put a red circle around it anyway. She had to get out of Playtime. The place felt too much like death.
THREE HUNDRED MILES to the south, death stalked Nell Hasty’s ground-floor guest room as well, where the old bed presser made his last visit. They would have kept the senator at Walter Reed indefinitely, but he couldn’t take the quiet of it, the brusque professionalism of the nurses, their appalling and blank disinterested youth. Also, he couldn’t get a goddamn drink. Just their look in the morning when they came around with the meds told him that he was nothing to them, a senator they’d never heard of from a state they didn’t care about. From the first, Oldcastle had a terrible fear that he’d die there among people silent and stiffly courteous, people who never knew about Old Number 31. He would die among strangers who would stay by his bedside up until the moment of his death, unless that came after shift change. So in his final triumphant act of will on this earth, Jack Oldcastle roused himself to a semiprone position, coughed up sputum, roared at the attending physician, and got himself the hell out of there.
Nell took him to Georgetown one last time.
For years it had seemed like his belly had been getting tighter. Bigger, but also tighter, more swollen. Something was haywire in the intestines. Since the summer he’d been passing more gas than a New Orleans pipeline. This wasn’t just the steak dinners. The goddamn plumbing had sprung lots of fluid leaks, the doctors said, and it was too far gone to patch. The diagnosis was grim: ruptured duodenum, sclerosis of the liver, pancreatitis, and partial renal failure. Translation: a massive plumbing breakdown.
How bad was it? Bad enough that each of his kids made a visit to Walter Reed before Oldcastle abandoned it for Nell’s. First Dolores came and fussed with the nurses. Didn’t they have any Saint-John’s-wort? His feet were cold, did he need another blanket? She’d get it, preferably from the linen closet a quarter mile down the hospital corridor. Did somebody need to find the nurse? She’d rush after one. Oldcastle could tell that she was looking for an excuse to get the hell out of the room. God, he thought, how old and matronly his firstborn had become! It was a relief when she had to leave. The kids had games and recitals on the weekend, she explained, but she said she’d be back soon. His grandchildren—Jesus, he wasn’t sure he could remember their names.
On the day she departed, Butch arrived. He didn’t fuss or fetch, he just sat silently in the chair in the corner of the room for a long, awkward day. That was even worse, for Chrissakes. Like having the undertaker himself show up, smiling coldly at you and checking his watch. Then Butch left and John Jr. came. It was at this point that Oldcastle realized they had divided him up—divided up the bedside watch so that they wouldn’t, God forbid, all have to be together. John Jr. actually spent the night, but he spent most of it on his cell phone.
Once he’d reached Nell’s, he slipped quickly, and now it wasn’t so much shakes as terrible fevers that left him delirious for hours at a time. Soon he couldn’t get out of bed. He tossed and trembled and kept pulling the catheter out and pissing himself. Nell had to put a rubber sheet on the daybed, but it was too late, and soon after that, the mattress started to stink.
Fat as his body remained, his features seemed to sharpen as the end came on. His nasal bone began to stand out like a hatchet, and his cheekbones popped out of his face. “Gimme a drink, a drink, for Chrissakes!” he cried out, then slipped into mumbling something incoherent. Delirium came on. “My glass! A glass!” he yelled. “Overflowing, Chrissakes! My glass, goddammit, my glass! Make me lie down. Lie down! I’ll—”
The night nurse shrugged at Nell. There was nothing to be done now.
“In the green pasture!” he shouted. And then: “Where’s my staff?”
Nell wondered if she should call Ralph Moldy.
“Staff,” he mumbled, “staff, rod and staff . . .”
The last time Nell saw Old Number 31 alive came just before midnight on February 11. The nurse had gone off to get some sleep, but Nell woke and thought she’d better go downstairs and check on him. When she looked into the guest room, he was tossing and turning. The light was off, but a full moon was shining in the window, and she could clearly see in the pale light the dangling hose of the catheter. Suddenly, Oldcastle began clutching at his sheet, picking at the hem, then holding up his fingertips and staring at them with an unearthly smile. He shouted out Lancaster’s name, and then his voice trailed off. Nell sat near him in the chair by the foot of the daybed. The old hulk grew calmer and settled some. And then it was quiet, and Nell nodded off.
Sometime after one, she awakened. The moon shone through the window, illuminating one fat leg poking out of the sheet at a crazy angle. She touched his foot. It was cold.
Only later would Nell wonder whether Oldcastle’s last delirious snatches had come to him, via some indirect and improbable route, from the Twenty-third Psalm.
28 ARMA LINDAMQUE CANO
IT WAS the letter that did it. Having some drone in human resources send Linda a letter like that? Lacking even the decency to sign it themselves? First she raged, but when Linda LeBrecque’s rage cooled, it hardened into steel. Linda unholstered her cell phone and called the loyal aide-de-camp who had always acted as her chief quartermaster. If they wanted war, war it would be.
“Linda, where have you been?” Richard demanded. “And what is this awfulness I’m reading in the papers about Hunky-Boy?”
Richard manned Linda’s armory, and Hunky-Boy was his pet name for Fritz, whom he’d met only once, on a Saturday when Linda had dragged Fritz into the Armani boutique on Newbury Street to pick up a suit. Richard had Linda’s numbers (all of them) on his speed dial, and he regularly phoned her with breathless news about recent arrivals. Linda was one of Richard’s annuities: in a good year she might amount to 3 percent of his revenues.
“Richard,” Linda said, “things are pretty bad. I’m working through some difficult issues right now.”
“I read.”
“He’s gone insane. I mean, absolutely insane. I don’t even know him anymore. Richard, I’m married to a prisoner in a federal prison, okay?”
“Oh, darling . . .”
“My husband has a number. He’s a con, Richard. Right now the father of my children is an inmate at a place called FPC Deer Path. FPC, Richard, do you know what that stands for?”
A pause. “I’m thinking it’s not ‘First Presbyterian Church.’ ”
“Federal penal camp.”
Another pause. “Interesting.”
“Richard, please, no jokes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m at my limit. I get a letter a day from him, full of philosophy.”
“Linda, I’m speechless.” (This was a figurative expression. Richard was never without speech.)
“But I’m not calling you about that. I’ve got a bigger problem now. I have two children, as you know, who are totally dependent on me, their father being a felon. My law firm is trying to throw me out. I’m going to have to go in and confront them.”
Richard digested this bulletin. “It sounds very dangerous,” he said. “Linda, listen to me. You need to go shopping.”
TWO HOURS LATER Linda was downtown, in the back of Armani, mapping out the objective of her planned assault. Richard was a tall, slim fellow in his early thirties, about whom everything, from his short hair to his trimmed beard to his suit, was aggressively neat. He had an angular face accented with slim rectangular glasses. His navy suit was neatly pressed, as was the silky aquamarine T-shirt he wore underneath. His shoes were shined. There was the subtlest suggestion of aftershave when Richard leaned down to buss Linda. It was his usual cheek-bussing embrace, followed by a gentle scolding about not calling him or coming to see him in positively ages.
Linda expanded on the tale of horrors.
“But why are they being so bitchy?”
“Because they think they can get away with it.”
Richard nodded. He well knew about people being bitchy because they thought they could get away with it. He was a little bitchy himself sometimes, when he thought he could get away with it, but that was another story. Richard understood the mission. His jaw was set and determined: he was all business, a Patroclus girding up his Achilles for the climactic contest before the battlements of Ilium. It was a wonder to see how he sprang into action, whisking suits from the back and spreading them out on the couch. “All right, I’m thinking navy for the suit, spring is coming, it’s almost March, but you know? This isn’t bad, it’s just come in. I sold one to Dianne Purcell at Daley and Hoar, she’s such a witch. Here, give me your arm.” He began nipping and tucking. She tried it on, and Richard stepped back to consider her in the mirror.
“It’s nice,” she said.
The words hit Richard as though fired from a cannon. “Oh, God! What am I thinking? What is wrong with Richard’s little brain today, people?” (There were no people in the boutique other than Linda; Richard asked the question rhetorically.) “Richard missed his mocha triple shot, and the brain simply is not working! Navy, for a meeting like this!” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Linda, I have been wasting your time. I cannot permit you to buy that suit. Please take it off your body at once! I’m covering my eyes.”
