Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'I like your stories,' she said, nestled against me.

Here we were again, like that cry lost in the fog: I want to be with you; I can't. I had no understanding of what tethered her inside herself, only that she was straining against it, and that, however faintly, I was not completely without hope.

'Twenty-five years from now you may feel real bad about this.'

‘I feel real bad now.' She took a deep breath. 'Call me as soon as you're safe. You promise?' 'For sure.'

‘I want to know just where you are.'

'In case you change your mind?'

She smiled faintly.

'It's not too late,' I said.

‘I know.' It was the closest she had been yet.

'I'll be waiting.' I walked on that observation. I had my movie dream that I'd hear her racing up from behind. But she didn't. Not yet. I turned to check, to wave. The best I got was that she lingered amid the garbage cans in a patch of sun, and tapped the spot over her heart.

At 10 a.m. precisely, we placed the call to my father's office. The terror that raveled his voice was extraordinary. I realized again how close it lurked beneath the surface of his life. 'Oh my God, Seth.'

'Dad, I'm all right. Really, I'm all right.' 'Where are you?'

‘I can't tell you. They're right here. It's been a little wild.'

'Okay, that's enough,' June said, beside me, loud enough to be heard. The motel room was dismal, clean but otherwise on its last legs. It must originally have been war construction, a barracks perhaps. The walls were clad at half-height in plastic sandalwood-colored paneling, presumably to hide the gouges. June had drawn the heavy green drapes.

"They understand that they have the wrong guy,' I told my father. 'I mean, they do now. I finally got them to take me over to the library this morning. I showed them Bernard Weissman in Who's Who. And your biography in American Economists. It took a while to find something that had your son's name.'

'They have let you go?'

'Not exactly.'

'Okay,' said June. 'So he's alive. He's breathing. He's fine.' She'd grabbed the phone. Her voice was hoarsened in a way that nearly made me laugh. After all her talk of Drama School, I had expected an inspired performance – something Method, wholly unique. Instead, she seemed simply to have borrowed the manner of the gritty radio dramas – The Shadow or Johnny Dollar – which were still on the air when I was a boy. But she'd correctly calculated the effect. This was, after all, real life, where the overdone suggested someone sinisterly bent beyond normal restraint. My father was terrified.

'Who is this?' he cried. I was poised, not far from the earpiece.

'This is me. This is the Dark Revolution. This is the voice of the truth. Okay? Next time I call, I'm going to tell you what you can do to make us let him go. First thing, you have to listen to the rules. And obey the rules. Rule One: No phone calls over one minute. And your minute is up right now. Bye-bye.'

After she'd clapped down the phone, my father must have sat in his office for some time, perhaps checking his own pulse until he could re-establish his normally orderly thoughts. Perhaps he stared at his coarse, pallid face reflected on the glass of one of his diplomas or citations. Certainly, as always, he talked to himself. The world, he thought, had ceased being a reasoning place. People roamed like beasts, seized by unpredictable emotion, giving vent to wretched fantasy. Waking or sleeping – daylight was the only membrane that separated him now from the turbulence of dreams.

But a fragment of him must have been contented and serene. He had spent so many years preparing himself. He had always known he would see it all again.

June called back in fifteen minutes to tell him they wanted ransom. 'You have money. You can pay.'

‘I am a university professor. I am a poor man.' I heard that cunning tone I'd listened to at store counters a thousand times, as he criticized quality, the price, hoping for some edge with which to bargain. With a bitter smile, I had predicted exactly what he would do. And even so, something in me crumbled. There was no hope. 'What am I to pay? How? You understand. I am not that Weissman.' He went on that way another instant before she interrupted.

'You want to know where your son is now? You have any neighbors with a dog? That's where your son is. He has a dog's choke collar around his throat. It's attached to the fucking wall. His hands are manacled. So are his feet. He sits when we say, he stands when we say. He gets to pee every four hours. Maybe we'll let him go next year. Maybe the year after. I don't care. Dog food's cheap. Do you understand me? Now it's your choice. If that's what you want, you just have to say it. That's Rule Number Two. You tell me what you want. Do you want that? You want us to treat your son like some mangy, flea-ridden, shedding, dogshit-shitting dog we'll do that. You just say. Is that what you'd like? I want to hear you say that. Come on. Follow the rules.'

I had never heard my father cry before. He emitted a stifled wheeze, then his voice shattered. I bent over completely and covered my head.

'I want $20,000. That's all. Just twenty. We went into this figuring $2 million. It's fucked up, okay, but we have expenses. This whole fucked-up operation wasn't cheap. We have mouths to feed. We have a lot of people who are a lot of disappointed. Okay? And we need time to make some nice new plans. Now either you help us with that or we won't be helping you. Okay? That's a rule too. Dig?'

He was crying too hard to answer.

'No police, FBI, kiddie cops. Pinkertons. No one. Okay? We set the conditions,' said June. She nodded as she held the receiver in the wan light of the cheap lamp. I had sunk to one of the beds and could no longer hear him. 'You pay this sum and he's free. Subject to conditions: We don't get caught. This never happened. That's how it goes. I don't trust you, you don't trust me. So we set the conditions.'

What conditions? he must have asked.

'Next call.' June smacked down the phone. She closed her eyes to grab hold of herself, to find her real life, before she looked down at me.

'It's going fine,' she said.

Sonny

The home in which Nikki and I live is a narrow, rehabbed greystone in University Park. The contractor carved a garage out of the cellar and laid a downsloping drive that floods in the winter thaw. Beneath the limestone ledges of the tall double-hung windows of the upper floors, wrought-iron flower boxes hold fall geraniums, now withered in their terra-cotta pots. Charlie and I paid too much for this place and I will never get what I need if we sell, a step I often contemplate. The suburbs on the East Bank, with their stable, well-funded public schools, and quiet tree-lined streets, seem tempting. At least a quarter of the families of the children who started in Nikki's nursery-school program are gone to that safer world, but whenever I contemplate the move, I hear Zora. "The suburbs!' she used to exclaim. 'Better a lobotomy.'

This morning, Saturday, is crowded. Nikki demands a pancake breakfast and then time with her cartoons. I have to get the car into the shop; it's leaking oil again, a shimmering, gunmetal puddle on the garage floor. Walking home from Boyce's Repair, both of us are grumpy. I fret about how to handle the working woman's travail of Saturday grocery shopping without a car, while Nikki fears we'll miss Sam, Charlie's son by his first marriage, who is coming by to take his little sister to the Drees Center for a production of The Princess and the Pea.

I often say that I had more anxiety about parting from Sam than Charlie. From infancy, Sam was with us every weekend. He is a special kid, even more so to me, because he proved to be the one human being on earth who finally reassured me I would check out okay as a mother. Sam's own mom, Rebecca, is high-strung and still scorns me a decade later as a homewrecker. Once Charlie left, I was positive she'd never allow Sam back into my home. But Sam tolerated no change. He calls Nikki at least once each week and bikes over from his mother's house, a few blocks away, most Saturday afternoons. He lets himself in, sits while I run errands. He makes them snacks. They play at the computer. I find them, both agape before the screen, Nikki seated on one of his knees.