Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

Marlene sat on the hard and shiny seat and reflected upon how dull trials were, if you were not a principal player. It was always a wonder to her why the media had seized on this slow-motion institution as the symbol of dramatic tension-the wizardry of cutting, perhaps, otherwise “legal thriller” would be another oxymoron. Batting for the People was a guy named Motile, a senior rackets ADA, and on D. was, of course, Marvin P. Kronsky. Kronsky was having a bad day, but the smile on his broad, perfectly shaved face was intact, and his voice as he objected had the even resonance of an oboe in low register. The source of the bad day was up there on top of the presidium, a lumpy, chinless, Brillo-fringed head bobbing above the expanse of black serge like the noggin of a hand puppet. Paine was batting down Kronsky’s objections to the line of questioning, which, as far as Marlene could see, were perfectly legit. The testimony was hearsay, and did not fall into any of the numerous exceptions to the hearsay rule. Of course, she had not been in a courtroom for several years. Maybe the law had changed, and the exception had broadened. In any case, the witness was more or less allowed to spin out his inculpatory tale. On cross, Kronsky brought out that the witness was as much a slimeball as his client, and then they broke for lunch.

Marlene walked down the hallway to Judge Paine’s office, identified herself to the secretary there, and shortly Judge Paine himself appeared, still robed, to greet her. He gave her a big smile and, after a glance at her face, addressed his remarks to her nipples.

How nice to see you again, we don’t get many attorneys as gorgeous as you (taking her arm, the backs of the fingers pressing against tit), sit down in that chair and I’ll sit here (unspoken: so I can look up your skirt), did you hear the one about. . (a mildly dirty joke), and the rest of the usual prelims with this kind of asshole. Marlene was used to it, knew the routine, smiled and giggled at the right times. Jesus, she thought, it was like working with a hot wire and a pithed frog, and after a good deal of this they got down to the reason she had come.

Gerald Fein? Oh, of course he remembered Gerald Fein. Marlene watched him closely as he spun what must have been a familiar tale. He really was an ugly little fuck, she thought, and this must have colored his life. People trust the handsome more than they do the ugly, she recalled, and it must have been. . what? Excruciating? To be working with a couple of slick, good-looking men like Jerry and Bernie. He told the story well, and Marlene entertained the thought that he’d been tipped to expect her.

“Judge, tell me one thing,” she interjected at a pause. “I have not been able to find anyone else besides you who recalls Jerry Fein being despondent in the days before the event. How do you explain that?”

The genial smile lost some of its temperature. “I don’t have to explain it, Marlene. This isn’t an interrogation. I’m telling you what happened as a courtesy, so that you won’t go down any wrong paths. Jerry was severely depressed about the loss of the appeal. He didn’t want to go on. I tried to cheer him up, but it was, obviously, not enough. I’ve always felt guilty about that. Maybe if I’d said something else-”

“Well, it really wouldn’t have mattered what you said, if he was killed. If the suicide was phony.”

“There’s absolutely no evidence for that,” Paine said sharply. The smile was but a ghost of its former self.

“Actually, there is, and I have some of it, and I hope to gather more,” said Marlene, lying for effect.

The smile was dead and buried, replaced by a look honed to be terrifying if one was a prisoner awaiting sentencing. “You know, Marlene, if you poke a stick into a hornet’s nest, you’re liable to get stung.”

“Oh, God, that’s good!” said Marlene brightly, flipping up a fresh page in her steno pad. “I have to write that down. To whom shall I attribute it? The Honorable H. I. Paine, distinguished jurist, or Heshy Panofsky, the payoff man for the Mob?”

Paine went white around the eyes and lips, the lips pressing into an almost invisible line. He pressed a button on his desk. Five seconds later, a side door opened and a uniformed guard appeared.

“Out,” said Judge Paine, “and remember, there are laws against spreading slander.”

The house was in Elmhurst on one of the short, anonymous streets that lie between Queens Boulevard and Corona Avenue, a two-story wooden structure painted light green, with an unkempt, slanting yard out front surrounded by a low chain-link fence. The houses on this street had been built in the twenties for big Catholic families escaping from the tenements of Manhattan, and they all had more or less the same plan: big front parlor, seldom used, big kitchen in the back, narrow hallways, lots of small bedrooms, one bath on the second floor, a toilet near the kitchen. Now the block was full of big Asian families, although a few of the houses contained truly remarkable numbers of people whose only relationship was that they all hailed from Quang Ngai province or were all semi-serfs of the same sweatshop, or had no connection at all except that they were all single men trying to make it in Meiguo , the Beautiful Country.

This was the case in the house Lucy and Tran now entered (the heavy glass-paned door opened to Tran’s knock by a surprised young Vietnamese) and moved through from warm sunlight into shadows scented with the cuisine of Southeast Asia: mint, fermented fish, chilies, coriander, the wet, heavy odor of boiling noodles.

Four men were in the front room, playing cards around a folding table, while a large television showed a silent soap opera. They looked up when they saw the two newcomers, and one of them stood to greet them. Lucy recognized him from the raid on the Vo brothers in Manhattan: Sonny Thu, the dai lo of this crew, and one of Freddie Phat’s main men. He was large for a Vietnamese and wore his hair in a rooster crest in the front and long in the back; two thin wisps of hair grew from either side of his wide mouth, lending an animal look to his hard face. They all had hard faces, thought Lucy, although none of them could have been over twenty-five. They were all people whose childhoods had been shattered by the American war, and Lucy found it hard to imagine them as cherished moon-faced little Asian babies. Being an Asian from this class is a rough lot, but Chinese and Vietnamese babies, especially male babies, live in the closest thing to paradise this earth affords. Contemplating the sort of lives that had converted those semi-divine infants into these terrible-looking men made her inexpressibly sad.

Tran was speaking to Thu in low tones over to one side of the room. Discussing what to do with me, she thought, and she found herself irritated. Once again, nothing normal for Lucy. In a loud voice she said, in Vietnamese, “I have to use the toilet. Where is it?”

One of the card players giggled humorlessly. Thu told her where it was, and she walked out of the room.

“I thought I would find you here,” she said.

Cowboy looked up from the cluttered sink, where he was scrubbing out a pan. He turned and wiped his hands on a towel. “What are you doing here?” he asked. He seemed startled to see her, and nervous.

“I am hiding from the villains, like you.”

“I’m not hiding, I’m a prisoner,” he said with dignity.

“Excuse me. Are you well treated?”

He shrugged and said, “I wash pots and sweep and scrub toilets. They don’t beat me.” His eyes slid away from her. He mumbled to the laden sink.

“What did you say?”

In a louder, defiant voice he snarled, “What do you care?”

He was agitated and upset, and seeing him thus gave Lucy an odd feeling of power. It was rather like it was with Warren Wang, and very unlike how she behaved with the teenage boys who hung out with her male cousins, or most of the boys in middle school, and she wondered why. Was it that they were Asian? No, she decided; it was her, she was different, she felt different and behaved differently, and it was because of. . the situation, yeah, that, she thought, but really it was that with both boys the situation-mystery with a lurking danger-allowed her to slide out of freak hideous Lucy into being someone else, into one of those personas her reading had supplied, like crisp dresses just back from the cleaners, hanging in plastic in a closet, ready to wear. Or more than one, as now, as she added to the mix of Kim and Claudine the exquisitely sensitive and long-suffering Kieu.