Linda Fairstein - Likely To Die

I immediately spotted Commander Creavey’s substantial figure as he stood to wave us into the room, where he had held empty seats on both sides for Mike and me to join him. He rose and bellowed to the polite diners after he kissed me on the cheek and embraced Mike with a few sound slaps on the back. “This ‘ere is Alexandra Cooper. Top of the line in America. She prosecutes rapists, wife beaters, child abusers-all that type of bloke. I don’t advise you to trifle with her while she’s here. And this is Commander Michael Chapman. I’ve promoted him a few notches, but that’s because over ’ere-with what ‘e knows-’e’d be running the show. Be no need for me.

“Sit and enjoy your lunch. There’ll be time to mix with all these fine gents this evening.”

Chapman and Creavey jumped right into discussing each other’s work and catching up with “on-the-job” events since they had last had the opportunity to talk at a session in New York. I played with my salad as I looked around the room to see whether I recognized any familiar faces. I knew from the list that Battaglia had passed along to me that most of the speakers and panelists were from the United Kingdom and Western Europe and it was quite clear that diversity was not an element in selecting voices to speak about the future of society as we neared the millennium.

The sixty-something, blue-rinse matron with painfully pink skin sitting on my other side began to chat me up, introducing herself as Winifred Bartlett, wife of the Home Secretary.

“And what is it exactly that your husband is going to be speaking about at the conference, dear?” she inquired, pausing between bites of her smoked salmon as she eyed me through cataract-dimmed lenses.

“Actually,I am the one who’ll be speaking this afternoon. I’m not married. Michael is my colleague, not my husband.”

“How refreshing, Alice,” came the cheerful response. “Commander Creavey wasn’t joking, then? Do you really deal with all those dreadful crimes yourself?”

“Yes, I do. Fascinating work, Mrs. Bartlett, and enormously satisfying.”

“We don’t have so many of those kind of problems in Britain. Not enough work for you here, dear, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps that used to be the case, but I understand there’s been quite an increase in reporting of rapes all over the U.K. ”

Now she was considering that perhaps she didn’t need me as a distraction from her meal. Every ounce of her concentration returned to the plate. “Can’t imagine that’s so. My husband used to be a Crown Prosecutor. Embezzlement, insurance frauds, the occasional murder. Nothing as unsavory as your work. You should get yourself a husband, Alice, and leave this disgusting business to Creavey and his ilk. It’s nasty for a girl. No wonder you’re unmarried.”

I hadn’t been there long enough to answer as I would have liked to and held my tongue as I reminded myself I was standing in Battaglia’s shoes for forty-eight hours.

John Creavey caught me back up in the tale he was spinning about how his men had foiled a Colombian drug cartel scam downriver at Tilbury until the waiters arrived with the sweet trolley and coffee to end the luncheon recess.

“Nice to have met you, Mrs. Bartlett,” I lied.

“Pleasure.” So did she.

We followed the well-mannered group as they sauntered from the Pavilion back toward the Churchill Boardroom. Thirty or so stiff-looking men queued near the entry to the conference area and fifteen or twenty of the ladies paired off in the opposite direction. Lord Windlethorne stood at the head of the table and introduced himself as I moved past him to look for my seat. I guessed him to be in his late fifties, lean and angular, with the features and dark coloring of Gregory Peck cum Oxford don.

He welcomed me and pointed to my name plate at the table. I was docked two places away, between Professore Vittorio Vicario of the University of Milan and Monsieur Jean-Jacques Carnet of the Institut de la Paix in Paris. Vicario bowed his head in greeting and Carnet smiled, giving me the once-over and an“Enchanté.”

“Mr. Chapman,” Windlethorne told Mike as he entered after me. “We’ve only enough seats at the table for the speakers. Behind each one there’s a chair, as you can see. Those are for the spouses-or, shall I say, significant others-of the participants.

“Most of the wives were here this morning. Actually, they’re heading off now on a coach tour-famous gardens, Windsor Castle, a trip on the Thames. Perhaps you’d rather-”

“Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

I glanced around the room. The head of Australia ’s Probation Services was the only other woman at the table. The chair behind her was empty. The spouse seats were almost completely deserted except for one backing up an older French Minister of Justice, whose trophy wife or mistress sat dutifully in place, and that of the Danish criminologist, whose barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend stroked the back of his head as we waited for everyone to settle down.

Chapman growled into my ear. “You really owe me for this one. Everybody’s treating me like I’m some useless appendage you’ve brought along to carry your luggage.”

“Personally, I think you should have taken the garden tour with the significant others. You would have found someone to hit on in that group.”

“Don’t throw yourself at Windlethorne too quick, Blondie. I know how you fall for that kind of sensitive-looking specimen.”

I looked up to the head of the table. Lord W. was chewing on the end of his wire-rimmed glasses as he debated some weighty issue with a pudgy German who kept punctuating his comments with jabs in the air. I blushed when Windlethorne caught me looking and smiled back at me. Mike was right, he was exactly my type.

Lord Windlethorne invited everyone to take his or her seat and called the afternoon assembly to order by introducing me formally to the politicians and academics who had presented papers or would be joining my panel for the rest of the day. He then proceeded to call on speakers in the order they were listed in the program.

One of the Swiss finance ministers began the session with a forty-five-minute discourse on the problems of financial frauds and the Internet. He detailed instances of multimillion-dollar swindles that had been attempted in recent months and outlined a plan for combating technological hoaxes in the next century.

The concentration then moved to interpersonal violence. Twenty-minute time slots had been allocated for each of the four speakers-the Australian woman who talked about her country’s novel techniques for handling teen offenders; the pudgy German, a sociologist who studied European ethnic violence of the last fifty years, predicting and projecting trends; Creavey’s analysis of terrorist tactics and how to combat them; and my slightly doctored version of Battaglia’s remarks about the prospect for America’s future-crime and punishment.

Lord Windlethorne lit his pipe and opened the floor to statements from everyone present. Like many Europeans, these professionals seemed most interested in the problems of urban America, which had to this point in time seemed so extraordinarily unlike their own.

“What aboutyour specialty, Miss Cooper?” Professore Vicario asked, “Do you think it has much, how do you say in English, relevance to our population here in Europe?”

I had made only a short reference to the issue of sexual violence in my formal remarks but was delighted to get it on the table during the question-and-answer period. “As progressive as you all tend to be on a variety of topics, you’re light-years behind on this one. One need only consider the terrible cases of child abuse in Belgium last year-the pedophile rings that involved government officials-to understand how widespread the phenomenon is. And you’ll forgive me,professore, but your magnificent country still has some of the most archaic laws concerning spousal abuse that one can imagine in this day and age.