Chuck Logan - The Big Law

And he said, “Is that you, Caren?”

The silence stretched out a few more seconds and then a clear chiseled voice, pitched between surprise, pique and command assurance, stated with great emphasis: “ What ?”

The connection from Tuzla was like right next door.

“Jesus, Nina?” he blurted.

“Check me if I’m wrong, but you did say Caren-as in wife number one?”

Broker’s explanation sounded lame. All true, honest, but lame. “That’s right. She called and left a message on the machine. I thought you were her calling again.”

“Hmmm,” observed Nina eloquently.

“Yes, I agree,” said Broker. Then he waited to see if she would take it further. When she didn’t, he asked, “How are you?”

“Fair. How’s baby?”

“Every day she looks more and more like Winston Churchill.”

“I miss that fat little kid, I really do.”

“I know you do.”

“Okay, look, it’s five in the morning here. I’ve been on patrol for six days and I’m beat. Thing is, I weaseled a leave over Christmas. I’m attending a conference stateside…”

“What kind of conference?”

“Sorry.”

He understood. Not a secure line. The meeting proba THE BIG LAW/41

bly dealt with NATO ratcheting up the pressure on nabbing war criminals. It had been in the news.

“How long can you get away?” he asked.

“I’ll come in Christmas Eve and leave on the twenty-eighth.

Best I can do.”

“Sounds great.”

“Broker, you spent a mint on that house and we still don’t have a computer. E-mail would be a lot easier for me here than finding telephone time.”

Broker frowned. “I hate computers. Bad enough I have the TV. Besides, I like hearing your voice.”

“Gawd. I married an analog cavefish. Caren, huh?” she needled.

“Knock it off,” he protested.

“Kiss Winston for me. See you. Love.”

The connection ended. Broker hung up the phone and sat down in the chair next to the table. He leaned forward, rested his elbows among the mounds of infant clothing. Mild rebuke knocked the idle kinks out of his thoughts. Foolish, daydream-ing about Caren Angland and her social turmoil when Nina had been soldiering in the snow.

He carried the folded clothes to Kit’s room, crept in and piled them on her dresser. On the way out, he checked her, bathed in the soft night-light. Definitely Churchill, painted by Rubens. Carefully, he pulled the door shut behind him.

Tom had not been given a house key. Ida showed him where she kept one hidden for emergencies, under a flowerpot to the side of the house, next to the garage. But he thought it best to knock. The door of her bungalow in the quiet neighborhood of Highland Park swung open. She wore a long-sleeved pearl sweater that buttoned to the throat. A long, slim gray wool skirt reached down over leather boots.

Her naturally wavy shoulder-length auburn hair was rep-licated in her thick arched eyebrows. The eyebrows framed intelligent brown eyes set wide over smooth cheekbones. A narrow slightly crooked nose. And then-the generous lips teed up on that chin she got from the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz .

With a firm grasp on the curious power of her physical presence, Ida Rain disdained wearing all but the barest touches of makeup on her unlined face.

How long could she go on like this. Renouncing age. One more brutal Minnesota winter. Two. Eventually she’d crash on the far side of forty, snowflakes would stick to the corners of her eyes and crack into crow’s-feet. She’d shed smiles and store hurt between the pages of her heart like pressed nettles.

But tonight her husky voice, like her hair, was gorgeous.

An editor to the core, she cut straight to the nut graph: “You didn’t really have battery trouble today.”

Tom grinned and spread his hands.

“You’re on to something, aren’t you?” She reached over and lifted his left hand and inspected it with a cool thumb and forefinger. “And you went out to celebrate.” She rubbed the tips of his fingers and came away with a light gray metal talc. She dropped his hand. It was her way of letting him know she’d suspected, and had now confirmed, that he’d been to the casino. The residue of the coin tray. He resented her knowing smile and cocked eyebrow. He’d forgotten to wash his hands.

“Sally, in the library, told me you snuck a file out of the building. Keith Angland. The bigmouthed cop. I talked to Wanger, and he said you were asking questions about him.

This has something to do with the federal building, doesn’t it?”

“What makes you think that?” he toyed.

“The timing.”

News was their inky Spanish fly. Curiosity itched in her voice. “You’re off your beat,” she probed.

“Just checking something out,” he said tightly.

She waited for more, and when she saw that it wasn’t forthcoming, said, “You’ll tell me first.”

“Of course.”

She nodded and with a brief knowing smile allowed a be-guiling tease to swing in her voice. “Just watch your step, Danny.”

They laughed at the same time, which they took as a good omen.

“I won. Get your coat. We’re going out to eat tonight. I’m buying,” said Tom.

Danny .

Going down for the third time, Tom had felt someone firmly take his hand. Ida. Quietly, they dated. Ida suggested that he try writing fiction to diffuse his funk about being transferred down to the burbs. Writing a novel was every reporter’s daydream, so he dusted his off and put a few more hours into two chapters about a private eye who had been a reporter. He gave his PI the name Danny Storey. Ida liked the character’s name but critiqued his story line as improbable and convo-luted. After a few discussions the two rough chapters disappeared into the desk drawer in her study in the four-season porch off the living room and were forgotten .

Except in her bedroom in the dark .

Calling him Danny was her foreplay spoof in bed. For all her powers of observation, she had no idea how deeply the name goaded him or how severely he had come to hate the boundaries of his life. How he resented needing her to keep his job .

Later, after dinner, after they returned to her house, she undressed in the ritual darkness. It was also in this darkness she moved her damn pistol around, like a pea under a shell-from her purse to the bed table drawer, sometimes even under her pillow. He waited and thought: she was the face of realism. Hold on to realism and it will save you from desperation. You will make do.

After you were with Ida awhile you lost your bearings.

Was she extremely beautiful or disfigured? Certainly she was old-fashioned, a Freudian machination straight from a Hitchcock film. Stylishly repressed, precise; the best-dressed woman in the office.

But in the dark…

Like a guerrilla army, she owned the night. Her queen-size bed rustled with satin sheets, the air was moist and humidified, there were lotions, knowing fingers. She’d evoked in Tom something his pallid ex-wife of twelve years could never comprehend. Something called good sex.

Then Tom and Ida had joined hands and skipped over the slim, but unforgettable, margin that separated good sex from great sex.

“Can’t we leave the light on?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I want to see you do things. In the dresser mirror.”

“No lights,” said Ida.

“Never?”

“Not tonight. Sometime, maybe.”

“When?”

“When you tell me what you’ve got going.”

“No. Oh.” Yes . Some light, faint slivers, eked through cracks in doors, glowworms of moonlight noodled between the drapes and windowsills. Just enough to make her out, subtle and expert. Silky smooth white muscle, rising. Tongue out. Red Joker’s grin.