Scott Turow - Pleading Guilty

'Archie ain't bent, for one thing.'

'You're the one who told me, Pigeyes. About Archie. Rocket up his ass? Remember?'

'No. You told me. I said, What if. I said, Give, and you said, Has this guy got an elastic asshole? and I said, What if. This mutt Archie, I know the story of his life and his mother's life. He's straight. He don't got nothing but dingleberries back there, same as you and me. So it's a crock. That whole routine. Just so you know.'

Just so I knew. The other one, his young bootlicker, Dewey, he was taken in. Not Gino.

'I'm not following.'

'What else is new?'

'Are we done here or what?' I asked.

'Are we done, you and me done, is that what we're asking?'

'I mean Bert.'

'Fuck 'em.'

Nothing but fuzz on my screen. I did not understand. Which was just what he wanted.

'So what is this? Favor done, favor owed?' I thought maybe with the big collar on Jake, he was calling the score even.

He laughed, he roared. There was a phenomenal clanking wallop in my ear when he banged the phone on something hard.

'You done me enough favors. When you're miserable in hell, suffering your sins and thinking it can't get no worse, you look behind you and I'll be there. Payback time with me and you ain't gonna end, Malloy. Just so you know. I'm telling you, you're dirty somewhere. I said that from the git-go and I still say so. You're covering your ass, same as you were doing with Goodlookin. So stay tuned. Same time. Same fuckin station.' He slammed the phone again and this time it went dead. Maybe he'd hung up. Maybe he'd broken it.

But he'd done what he wanted. I sat in that tight little space and broke a sweat. This time I was really scared.

B. Closing the Circle

In the elevator, on the way down, Martin announced his resignation. I suppose he was forewarning Wash and Pagnucci. He seemed to regard his statement as dramatic, but it fell flat. This group had already been through too much, and as Martin had acknowledged before, there was not much left now to resign from. Brushy, a good kid to the last, started to talk to him anyway about changing his mind.

When the elevator doors parted, back on 37, Bert was standing there. He was dressed in supposed formal wear — a leather coat as a dinner jacket and four days' growth. He looked like a rock star. I guess Orleans was picking his clothes. He remained in the elevator doorway confronting us all in an auspicious posture, sneaking a glance to see who was inside. A lot had gone on since we'd last seen him here, and there was an instant so still it could have been suspended animation.

Martin, in particular, seemed undone by the sight of Bert, finally bereft of all his survivor's aplomb, that intense belief in his own powers which ordinarily sustains him. He stared a bit, then shook his head. Finally, he took note of the last diamond stud, still in his fingers. He seemed to weigh it. I think he had some impulse to throw it again, but in the end he simply paused to insert it in his shirt.

'Well,' he said presently, 'some of us have an appointment at the Club Belvedere.' It was time to worry about the future. For the person of importance, the moment never waits. Martin was going to read the firm its epitaph. He was good at that kind of thing. When we'd buried Leotis Griswell last year, Martin had made the eulogy, the usual funeral folderol, stuff he did not fully believe about how Leotis was a lawyer's lawyer who knew that the law in the end is not a business but is about values, about the kinds of judgments that were not meant to be bought and sold. The law, as Leotis saw it, said Martin, is a reflection of our common will, meant to regulate society and commerce, and not vice versa. God knows what Martin would tell the partners tonight. Maybe just goodbye.

Wash, Carl, Brushy all followed him, going off to get their coats. I tarried with Bert but gave Brushy a palsy little wink as she departed. She responded with a blistering look over her bare shoulder, the motive for which eluded me entirely. Here we go again. Fuck did I do? She said, coolly, that she had a call to make and would wait in her office to walk over with me.

Standing with Bert, I could tell he was shook up to be back. He was near the windows behind the receptionist's desk, facing the glass where his reflection loomed, vague and incomplete, like an image on water. He looked bleak.

'I wish I'd done it,' he said to me, out of nowhere.

'Done what?'

'Stolen the money.'

I recoiled a bit and gripped his arm to quiet him. But I could see his problem. He had a future again suddenly. His high times and adventures were over. He'd been out there on the edge, mad with love, crazy from danger. Now, if he liked, he could go right down to his office and answer interrogatories. He had lived for a while with all those neat shows playing in his head. Gangsters and athletes — his honey and him doing weird stuff in the moonlit artichoke fields, being covered and chilled by fog in the perfect still nights. Never mind that it was mad. It was his. Poor him. Poor us. Dragged to sea in our little boats by the tide of these irresistible private scenes and crashing come daylight on the rocks. But who can turn back?

'Somebody beat you to it,' I told him. He laughed at that. Eventually, he asked if I was coming to the Belvedere, but I sent him along on his own.

A. Brushy Isn't

I went home. A man in a tuxedo boarding a plane would grab too much attention. And although I distrusted the sentiment, I wanted a word with my boy. It was time for the get-tough speech: Hey, I know you think your life is grim. But so is everyone else's. We're all grinning in spite of the pain. Some do better than others. And most do better than I have. I hope in time you grow up to join that majority.

For Lyle, this talk figured to be largely beside the point, but I could feel I'd made a final effort. Upstairs at home, I found him asleep, knocked cold by some intoxicant.

'Hey, Lyle.' I touched his shoulder, sharp-boned and bitten by ugly acne marks. I shook him some time before he seemed to come to.

'Dad?' He couldn't see straight.

'Yes, son,' I said quietly, 'it's me.'

He froze there on his back, trying to focus something, his eyes or his mind or his spirit. He gave up quickly.

'Shit,' he said distinctly and rolled back so that his face went down into the pillow with the lost despairing weight of a felled tree. I understood Lyle's problems. As he saw it, his parents owed him apologies. His old man was a souse. His mother pretended all his young life to be something she only later told him she wasn't. Having found no adults to admire, he'd decided not to become a grown-up at all. In strict privacy, I couldn't even quarrel with his logic. But what's the further agenda? Granted, all of it, guilty as accused, but you tell me how to repay the debts of history. I touched the tangles of his long dirty hair but quickly thought better of that and went off to pack.

I had been at it about twenty minutes when the front door chimes jingled. I was feeling cautious and glanced down through the bedroom window that overlooked the stoop. Brushy was there in her sequins, no coat, stomping one patent-leather pump on the concrete and casting occasional foggy breaths behind her as she looked to the taxi which waited in the street. Once I hadn't shown in her office, she must have checked at the Belvedere, then called a hasty search party of one.

I opened the various locks and bolts I've mounted on the front door to shield me from the Bogey Man and his captain in arms, Mr S/D. We stood with the glass of the storm door between us. Brushy's long white gloves were wrapped about her, and the flesh of her upper arms, where the daily workouts had never quite slackened the softness, was mottled and goose-bumped from the cold.