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Richard Greener: The Knowland Retribution

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Richard Greener The Knowland Retribution

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“Off the rack?” asked the old black man sitting at one of Billy’s tables, the square, chronically creaky one nearest the front. “I don’t think so!”

He was short and thin like an old broom handle. He wore a close-cut white beard and had almost no hair under a pink baseball cap sporting the red bulldozer logo of a construction company on St. Thomas. His small, delicate, deeply creased face always seemed to be smiling, and maybe it was. The smile showed a full set of wonderfully large and strong-looking yellow teeth. Ike had to sit near the front because he smoked cigarettes one after another and Billy hated smoke. That particular dislike struck Walter as a singular disadvantage for a man who owned a bar. But there it was.

“Tailor made,” said Walter.

Ike nodded contentedly. “New York or Hong Kong? I’ll say Hong Kong. They make a lot of suits over there in Asia.” Ike nodded again, this time definitively.

“Italy.” Walter told him.

“Italy?” Ike half-whispered, half in agreement, half not. “What you think, Billy?”

Billy Smith wasn’t his real name-William Mantkowski was-but the locals laughed at that jumble of sounds and divided it into five parts, with witty pauses between each and prolonged laughter at the end. After a month on St. John, William Mantkowski rechristened himself Billy Smith. He bought a bar called Frogman’s and, once in charge, changed absolutely nothing except the name on the sign out front. No one on St. John asks a white man where his money comes from. That was eleven years ago. Walter had been a regular at Frogman’s, and, like the furniture, stayed.

“New York,” said Billy, leaning back on the other side of the bar opposite Walter at the far end. His skinny, ostrich-skinned elbows rested on the faded gray formica liquor shelf behind him. He stood there, tall and bone-white, almost as white, it seemed to Walter, as his ugly rugby shirt, shaking his head like he had some great wisdom he was about to impart. “Italian tailor, maybe, but the suits are from New York. Where exactly, who knows. But New York.” He meant that he couldn’t specify where in Manhattan this New York tailor tailored. He jutted his thick, black-stubbled jaw.

“They all from New York?” Ike squinted as he pursued the investigation, absently blowing smoke from his mouth into his nose.

“Ike, that shit will kill you,” Billy growled. “Yeah, they’re all from New York, and the suits too. Right Walter?”

Walter shook his head. “Made in Italy.”

“Hong Kong,” mumbled Ike.

“Write it up, Billy,” said Walter, confirming closure.

Billy shambled to the center of the bar, grabbed a blue chalk stub from beside the fifty-year-old cash register, and carefully printed several more words onto the four-foot-square rimless blackboard propped against the streaked and pitted mirror. They were: “New York/Hong Kong/Italy.” He was confident New York would garner the most votes.

“Walter, you know the problem with New York?”

“No, Ike, what’s the problem with New York?”

“Too big,” the old man said gravely. “Too damn big.”

In that instant Walter’s thoughts alighted again on Tom Maloney and the substantial possibility that by bedtime he’d have in hand just the type of assignment he liked best-one involving excellent money and minimal human interest-which caused him to surprise his friends with a sweetly incongruous smile. “And too fucking cold in the winter,” he said.

Atlanta

“Sorry, no time,” said Leonard Martin.

Nina turned to him, disappointed.

“Harvey just called. He wants me there. You know he wouldn’t bother me if he didn’t have a reason.”

Nina’s frown stayed put. He knew what she was thinking and took her unspoken point. “He’s not imagining things. It’s a difficult deal. He spoke with the client last night. The old man’s in a mood.”

She gave him the smirk that never changed, narrowing her left eye-clear and hazel-bright as ever-bunching up the smooth, curved lips that still held their exquisite shape. Through it all, he’d loved her skepticism.

“Did Harvey tell you that?”

“Not in so many words. He hates to admit he can’t handle it. But he said he’d like me there. And I bet that’s what it is. But you make the decision. I can have breakfast with you and the kids, and I’d really love to do it. But if something goes wrong with this big ol’ deal, and something or other falls through the cracks, and it’s all ’cause an old client’s gout is making him act difficult…”

She turned to the bowl of batter she’d been fixing. They’d had a good night, the first in a while. She was feeling happy and too unsure to risk his eyes going distant. “Then get your big ass to wherever you’re going.” She turned her head back for a kiss and said, “I’ll tell the boys you’re making millions to build a basketball court behind their house.”

“I’ll do it, too,” said Leonard Martin, “and don’t you think I won’t.”

His daughter pulled into the drive as he closed the front door behind him. The boys poured out of the van.

“Where you going, Grandpa? Ain’t you having breakfast?” Mark, the eight-year-old, grabbed him around the waist. Mark’s younger brother Scott hung back. Scott was thinner, quiet as an infant, reserved and grave as a child-very much his father’s child, and far more deeply affected when his father moved out. Leonard told his grandson he had to skip breakfast and added, loud enough for Ellie to hear, “Tell your mom not to pay much attention to anything your nana might say about basketball courts.”

“See you later, Daddy. We’re going to go shopping. Why don’t you come home for lunch?” She kissed his cheek and gave his belly a pat. He stood in the driveway, listening as the three of them bustled inside.

It was eight forty-five on a beautiful Thursday morning in June. From the driveway he could see bright sunlight pouring into the high kitchen windows. The still, cool air shifted gently. The doors to the back deck were open and he imagined the air slipping through the house and into the kitchen, bringing with it the sounds around him, the early morning bird calls, the voices of golfers already on the second fairway not thirty yards from the house.

And they had a fine breakfast without him. Nina and Ellie threw apple chunks into the scratch batter in the bowl, and they heaped each plate with Georgia’s Own pork sausage, honey-sweet and dripping with country flavor, grilled on an open skillet, filling the house with the scent of heaven itself. The boys gulped milk and the women sipped cappuccino from the coffee machine Leonard forced his wife to buy on the last day of their last trip to Milan. Harvey Daniels had been right. This client was in a mood. It wasn’t that the deal would go bad. They were all too committed for that. But when any client starts picking at legal language, delay was in the cards. He did it to satisfy some inner need, very likely to make whatever his ailment behave, and nine times out of ten it was mistaken for conscientious representation.

The firm of Stevenson, Daniels, Martin, had long ago learned that client whims meant time lost sprinting in circles. They’d also discovered the remedy: Leonard’s patented, “Fuck with us Jim or John or Joan and it all goes down the crapper” speech, delivered in a corner, in a serious, menacing tone, but always accompanied by a semi-friendly poke or elbow-squeeze.

Harvey had tried it once. The client took offense and nit-picked all the more fiercely. None of them ever considered Nick Stevenson for the role. This time the ploy worked especially well; Jim allowed that Honest to God he had no serious problems. The papers got signed and another developer staked his claim to fifty more acres of doomed Georgia pine.

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