Scott Turow - Personal injuries

Yet she'd never regretted the Bureau. She could lecture you until the next Flood about what was wrong, all the dumb acronyms that made them sound as if they were speaking in tongues, or the callous way women were treated. At Quantico, during training, she had the highest firearms scores in three years; the instructors would take her over to FATS-Firearms Automated Training System, where the guns fired laser beams, not bullets-and marvel at her reaction times. But they wouldn't let her come out there as a full-time instructor because somebody was convinced women couldn't handle.45s. She was lucky if every eighteen months she got to teach a two-week in-service, a training session for cops or other federal agents, most of whom were there for a boondoggle.

But being the Bureau meant being the best. They told you that at Quantico, so loudly and so often it seemed to echo from the rolling hills. And it was true. There was McManis, and Alf and Amari and Shirley Nagle to prove it. And her too. She believed every word about mission and duty. She lived it and liked it and liked herself for doing a good job right. And they'd get Brendan. Together. The FBI.

"That's fine with me," Feaver said when she repeated that prediction. "You put Brendan behind bars, I'll take photos and frame them. I won't feel bad for a minute. I mean, maybe I should. The guy's always treated me like gold. On account of Mort, and his ma, and my ma. I'm in Brendan's in crowd. Which is why Sennett thinks I'll have such a good shot at putting a knife in his back." He shook his head again over his current life's work of betrayal. She gave him the line, the shopworn agent's special, for whatever comfort it offered.

"He'd do it to you, Robbie. Don't worry."

"Brendan? Never. Sennett came to Brendan's doorstep,, a moth can't beat its wings as fast as he'd have told Stan to hit the road. Brendan kneels to no man. That's like a credo. I can say a lot of bad stuff about Brendan, but these tables would never turn."

"So what do you have against him?"

Robbie screwed up his face the way he did when he thought she was being difficult. But after a second he seemed to yield to her point.

"Meeting Brendan the first time," he told her, "you'd say he's charming. Likable. Poised. Humorous. Especially if you've got any power. Reporters, politicians, celebrities, anybody who can do him some good, he'll bark like a seal if he thinks it'll make you beholden. But when you get down through the layers, Brendan is an absolute fuck-hole of a human being. Here, this'll tell you something. I mentioned Constanza, didn't I?"

Tuohey's secretary. Evon remembered.

"To this day, she's sitting right outside his office. Beautiful little lady. But listen how Brendan got his mitts on her. All this time, twenty-some years now, Constanza's married. Constanza had better English than her husband, Miguel. She made it through secretarial school, but Miguel, you know, he's a busboy and, after all that time working around all the liquor he can steal, he's also a drunk. The world beats him and he beats Constanza. And she's pouring out her woes to her boss, of course, Judge Brendan. He's touching her bruises and pretty soon other parts, but you know, Constanza is a Catholic girl of great virtue, Miguel is the hand God dealt her, she can't be bad with Brendan and look her husband in the eye at night.

"Brendan, naturally, acts very understanding with all of this. `Well, we'll just have to make Mike a better man. He needs a fresh start, a new job, a chance to feel some pride in himself.' And Brendan gets him into the jail as a fry cook, standing behind the griddle suddenly, not carrying the slops. Miguel is muy contento. And then bad news for Miguel. He's been riffed. All the Department of Corrections can offer him is a transfer downstate to Rudyard. `Oh, but that's three hundred feefty miles from mi familia.'A pity, they say. Of course, there's a three-thousand-dollar raise, and a travel allowance. A travel allowance for a fry cook, right? Needless to mention, when Miguel gets there, he finds that his two off days are Monday and Thursday. He can go home maybe once a month. And never seems to notice his side of the bed is still warm. To this dayhe's the head of Food Services by now in the penitentiary, and, by magic, they keep extending his retirement datewhenever he sees Brendan, he actually kisses his hand. And Brendan, the fuck-" Robbie stopped to shoot the finger at a hard-looking fellow in a pickup who'd cut off the Mercedes. "Goddamn Brendan lets him. How can you not hate a guy like that? Whenever Miguel comes by chambers to pick up Constanza, Brendan's number one thrill is to call her in for a little late dictation and get her to honk his horn while her hubby's on the other side of the wall."

"Oh, Lord."

"Yeah," he said. "And you think your sex life's strange." Robbie was just talking, but the remark hit her hard. She was afraid from the start that he'd put her down. "My sex life's not strange." She eyed him severely. "Then you're the only one," he said. "Sex is always strange. Whether it's Brendan-strange or me-strange or you strange, it's strange."

She hadn't heard this theory yet.

"I mean, this is the most private, inner thing in life, isn't it?" he asked her. "It comes out just a little bit differently in each of us, like a fingerprint. Who you do what with. And your fantasies. And what part you like best. And what you're thinking. It's unique. That's why it's intimate. That's why it's magic."

She had once been at a sex club in San Francisco where she'd watched one woman fuck another with a dildo strapped to the crown of a leather hood on her head. There hadn't been much magic in that. Not for her. But it was no business of his.

He took her silence to mean she required convincing.

"Here's what I'm saying," he said. "I picked up a woman one night. Well, `picked up.' I wouldn't say picked up. She works in the clerk's office. I've known her forever. Single gal. Joyce-Well, forget her name, but you know, I like her. Anyway, we're both pretty toasted. And we get to her place, she says, Sit down. And she takes out this photo album. Said she took the pictures herself. And they're of her. She's doing a sort of striptease for the camera. More than a tease. Very explicit. I don't know if she sent this in to Collected Kinks of America. But she was ramping up to show it to somebody. And it was me. And you know, if I was a jerk, I could have laughed. But I was fascinated. And very touched. And also really turned on. Even though I wouldn't exactly say she showed to advantage. She had pretty legs, but just about zip on top and, you know, the camera, it can be pretty harsh. But she was sharing it with me. Her strange little secret. Which was cool." He peeked her way to see how, she'd received this. "So," he concluded, "you ought to ease up on yourself."

"Myself? How'd I get into this?"

"Don't give me that. I got you figured now."

She laughed and, as soon as she'd done it, felt a tremor.

"Laugh all you like," he said. "I know why you always wanna talk about it."

"You're the one always talking about it."

"But you wanna listen."

"A-gain?"

"It's true."

"The hell."

"You can't," he told her.

"Can't?" She felt a stab of apprehension. "Can't what?" `Be like that. Or at least what you think I am. Free. You can't be like that." He squared around to face her at a stoplight next to a shopping mall, teeming in the early hours of the evening. "I mean, I don't know if your thing is girls or boys or lightning bugs, but whatever it is-you can't. Not the way you'd like. Maybe you can't come. Or maybe you're too frozen up, inhibited, whatever you call it, to actually get it on with anybody. Or maybe you've gotten tanked and gone out for anything that comes your way and there's still a whole big country of pleasure you know you can't get to. But it's something like that. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I know I'm not."