Steven Womack - By Blood Written

Steinberg waved his hand at him. “Don’t be silly. You can’t beat extradition. The only way you could get around it is if you can prove you’re not Michael Schiftmann, or at least not the Michael Schiftmann they’re looking for.”

“You mean I should just let them take me?” Michael yelled.

Steinberg looked up at him with a completely calm, blank look on his face. “My friend, you’re going to be extradited, you’re going to be arrested, you’re going to be booked, and then you’re going to be arraigned. You’re going to smile for the cameras, look professional and calm, and you’re going to behave yourself and control your temper. And you’re going to let me and Wesley Talmadge take it from there.”

“Wesley Talmadge?” Michael asked. “Who the hell is Wesley Talmadge?”

“The best criminal defense lawyer in the state of Tennessee and one of the best in the country. He was a student of mine at NYU thirty years ago. I spoke with him this morning and he’s agreed to take your case.”

“So what’s next?” Michael asked, deflated.

“You’re going to go home and pack. In addition to the usual underwear and toothbrush, you’re going to need to pack two other things.”

“What?” Michael asked.

“First, carry that fancy checkbook with you. You’re going to need it. Second, take your passport.”

“My passport? Why my passport?”

“Because,” Steinberg said, folding his hands in front of him, the fingers interlaced, “the judge is going to want you to surrender it if he grants you bail.”

Taylor looked up, and for the first time, saw real fear in Michael’s face.

“If?” he asked, his voice low.

Steinberg nodded. “If …”

Thursday morning, Manhattan

Time seemed to accelerate after the Monday morning press conference. Taylor found herself withdrawing, still numb, the touch of her fingers on the skin of her cheek foreign and strange. It seemed as if in a matter of only a few short hours, she had looked around to discover that the world had gone into a spin. So this , she thought, is what free fall feels like .

In short order, Michael had a conference call with the lawyer in Nashville and overnighted a cashier’s check to him.

Then Abe Steinberg sent him to Macguire and Madison over on Fifth Avenue, which was the top public relations firm in Manhattan, which meant it was one of the top public relations firms in the country.

Taylor went back to work and tried to focus as-within a seventy-two-hour period-the man she loved and was going to marry and to whom her whole future was attached wrote checks totaling a quarter-million dollars just to begin his defense against the insane notion that he was a murderer.

She felt as if the world were falling apart. She sat at the cluttered desk in her office staring at the manuscripts in front of her, the pink telephone message slips she couldn’t bear to read, the growing roster of unread and unanswered e-mails.

Michael, she thought, had yet to really deal with this.

He had yet to confide in her what was going on inside him, what this felt like. He was, instead, totally immersed in what became a series of tasks that lay in front of him, many of them having nothing to do with the charges against him.

While Wesley Talmadge in Nashville negotiated the terms of Michael’s surrender to the police, Michael was faxing instructions to the solicitor in London about the closing on the flat. Taylor had asked him, practically begged him, not to go ahead with the sale, but he had stubbornly told her that he wasn’t going to let a bunch of ignorant fools stop him from moving ahead with his life.

He reviewed a series of foreign-rights contracts and signed them. He met with the PR firm by himself, a meeting that went on almost all afternoon Wednesday. For the time being, he avoided interviews, but he answered correspondence and returned calls. He stayed up until all hours of the night, unable to slow down, unable to relax, as Taylor, exhausted and drained, fell asleep upstairs, alone.

They ate meals together, but were mostly silent. They had even stopped touching each other. Michael seemed distracted, his mind on other things beside sex. And Taylor found herself not wanting to be touched, by Michael or anyone else.

This felt awful, every bit of it, every moment of it. She was adrift, in ways she had never been adrift before.

“Are you going to go with me?” Michael asked, out of the blue, that Thursday night.

“Where?” she asked, looking up from her plate of untouched food.

“I was just telling you,” he said. “Weren’t you listening?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, dear. I was-I was someplace else, I guess.”

Michael sighed and looked away from her. “I’m going to be someplace else, too, and very soon. And my question was whether or not you were going to go with me.”

“Okay, tell me again. What did Abe say?”

“I’m supposed to book a flight into Nashville for Monday morning and be at the police station by noon. The lawyer in Nashville negotiated an arrangement where I wouldn’t have to report before then. If I’d gone tomorrow, I’d have had to spend the weekend in jail before a bond hearing. This way, I’ll go before a judge maybe even Monday afternoon.”

“And they’ll let you make bail, right?”

“Talmadge seems to think it’ll work out, that I’ll only have to spend a few hours in booking.”

“And then we can come home, right?”

Michael smiled, then leaned over and took her hand.

“We’ll be on the next plane out. Trust me. I’m not going to spend a minute longer there than we have to.”

Taylor let Michael hold her limp hand. He squeezed it, then with the thumb of his hand he rubbed her palm. She stared down at the two hands together as if they were separate from their bodies, two detached objects on the table in front of them doing a strange and unreal dance.

She looked up at him. “How long will it be before the trial begins? How long will we have to wait this out, to get some sort of resolution?”

“Abe says it could take months. A lot depends on what happens during discovery. If their evidence is weak and circumstantial, which it will be because I’m innocent, then we’ll push to go to trial quickly. They could stall, but for only so long.”

She looked away. “This is going to cost a fortune, isn’t it?

All that money you made, that money you worked so hard for. It’s all going to be gone.”

He shrugged. “I’ve been broke before. Have most of my life, in fact. The thing about money is, you can always make more.”

“Let’s hope so,” she said, her voice flat. “No one knows how your readers are going to react to this.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “one can always make the case that in my business, the kinds of books I write, a little notori-ety never hurt anybody. Who knows? When this is over, the books may sell better than ever.”

She looked down, suddenly feeling very tired and heavy.

“That’s assuming you’re around to write them,” she said, in a voice strained by the weight on her chest.

“Hey, hey, what’s that?” He reached out, touched her chin, and raised her head to face him. “Let’s not bring any negative energy in here, okay? This is going to work out. I promise. I’ll beat this. We’ll beat this. As long as we stay together.”

Taylor felt the tips of his fingers on her chin like someone touching her with the handle of a wooden spoon. They didn’t feel like flesh, like people touching. Nothing felt like people touching.

“Trust me, this will be fine. I promise.”

Taylor slept all weekend, the phone unplugged, the television and computer off. Michael stayed in, reluctant to go out in case there were any other reporters still stalking the building. The initial rush of publicity had died down, like a storm surge that had broken over the banks, done its dam-age, and then receded back into the ocean.