I had just left the front door of my apartment building the next morning, heading for the Market Street subway to take me to the courthouse, my body still suffused with the soft elation of relief, when the rear window of a parked car exploded in front of my face.
25
IT WAS A HATCHBACK, Japanese I think, and I was just in front of it when the rear window shattered into a constellation of diamonds that hung in the air for a brilliant incandescent second before falling. It was such a startlingly pretty sight that I didn’t move, just stared at the now jagged opening yawning from the back of the car and the sparkles spinning on the pitted asphalt. Then I saw someone across the street pointing down an alley and a man in front of me dropping to the ground, like a soldier under ambush, and I realized that the window hadn’t spontaneously exploded of its own accord but had been shot out in front of me. That’s when I dropped to the ground too.
There were no more shots. There were the sounds of footfalls and a car stopping suddenly and more footfalls and people shouting, but no more shots. By the time I had picked myself off the sidewalk a crowd had formed and a policeman was coming over to look at the damage and to ask his questions. There was a group of us now, the man I had seen hit the ground, the man who had seen someone run away and had been pointing across the street, an old woman from my building, out for a morning walk with her purebred dachshund, the dachshund barking rabidly, the woman laughing wildly. I had seen nothing but the explosion of the window and so I wasn’t much help, but the officer took down my name and address just the same.
“What do you think it was?” asked the pointer.
“Probably just some random shooting,” said the cop, a peach-fuzzed kid with a holster and an attitude, trying to speak over the dachshund’s barks. “Happens all the time.”
“In Beirut maybe,” said a passerby.
The dachshund growled into my crotch.
“Quiet, Oscar,” said the dog woman, no longer laughing, giving her dog a tug on the leash. The dog sniffed my ankle and growled again.
“Maybe someone was trying to damage the car?” said another man in a tan raincoat.
“That’s possible,” said the officer, who for the first time took note of the car’s license plate. “Anyone know who owns this vehicle?”
No one knew, so he called in the license plate on the portable radio attached to his belt.
“All right now,” he said as he was waiting for a response. “I have your names. Let’s get on our way.”
I left, and took some comfort in the officer’s nonchalance, but not too much. I stepped quickly to the subway. I took a seat in the corner of the first car and hid myself behind a newspaper. Back on the street I was careful to stay within the bosom of the crowd on my way to the metal detectors in the lobby of the Federal Courthouse. And all the time I couldn’t help but carry with me, along with briefcase and raincoat, the suspicion that the shot had not been random or aimed at the car, but fired at me. Oh yes, I was not completely blind. I could feel the danger rising about me, from the threatening Chuckie Lamb, from the paranoid Norvel Goodwin, from my new and fervent relationship with Veronica, from Jimmy if he ever found out about the two of us, from Prescott and the power he could use to break me, from the poker playing gangsters with murder in their eyes and full houses in their hands, from the shadowy Raffaello.
This I knew about myself: I was not the most courageous of men. I was comfortable with that fact. I left the heroics to those who were paid for it, policemen, Brinks guards, inside linebackers, paparazzi. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to the law, I guess. By its very nature the law is a hedge, boom or bust, mergers or bankruptcies, there is always work. And so the shot had only confirmed for me the decision of the night before, confirmed it in a way that was more than intellectual, in a way that was visceral. And whether the bullet was aimed at me or not was no matter; I had learned the lesson of the lead. Whatever was to come, whatever humiliation, whatever ugliness, whatever betrayal, I would do nothing to stop it. My instructions were to follow along, and follow along I would. Whatever you want, Mr. Prescott, sir, you can count on me.
Outside the courtroom that morning I was talking to Beth about my opening statement when we were approached by one of the Talbott, Kittredge coterie working with Prescott. It was the blond bland man with the perfect nose who had sneered at Morris the day before. His name was Bert or Bart, something harsh and efficient. I knew nothing about him, really, didn’t know whether he had a family, a child, whether he read poetry or Proust, whether he felt deeply for the disadvantaged or whether the pains in the world had turned his viewpoint cynical and his humor wry. But what I did know was that he held a Harvard law degree and I didn’t, that he had the job I wanted, that he owned the future of which I had dreamed, and for all of that I hated him.
“Bill asked me to give you this,” he said, reaching into his shiny silver case and pulling out a sheet of paper with a few lines printed out in bold capital letters.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s your opening,” he said.
“We prepared an opening,” Beth told him, her voice showing incredulity at his nervy assumption that we weren’t ready.
After the poker game I had spent most of the night practicing my delivery of a lengthy and blistering attack on the government’s case against Concannon. It had been written primarily by Beth, so I knew it was quality. Beth’s opening highlighted the gaps in the case against Concannon: There were no tapes capturing Concannon’s voice, no pieces of physical evidence directly involving him in any of the transactions, no photographs showing him with Ruffing or Bissonette. The case against Concannon would depend solely on the testimony of Ruffing and certain financial records from CUP, and Beth had laid out a viciously effective argument against Ruffing’s credibility. I understood that I would be following Prescott’s lead in every sense, but I still expected that I would be saying at least something of my own to the jurors.
“We’re sure that it’s a fine argument,” said Bert or Bart. “But what we want you to do is to give the opening we have prepared for you.”
“Who wrote it?” asked Beth, grabbing the paper from my hand.
“I did,” he said, his chest puffing out slightly. “Bill looked it over, discussed it with the jury expert, made a few changes, and decided you should go with it.”
“Is that what he decided?” I said.
“That’s what we decided.”
“I think we’ll stay with what we worked up already,” said Beth.
“I was told you were with the program, Vic,” he said to me, ignoring Beth. “That you wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“What’s your name?” Beth asked.
“Brett Farber. Brett with two t’s.”
“Well, Brett with two t’s,” she said. “The only program we’re with is our client’s and as best I can tell, from a quick look through this little statement of yours, it’s a piece of shit.”
Brett didn’t pull back from the attack like I would have. Instead he brought out his sneer and leaned into me until I could smell the coffee in his breath and he said, “Shit or not, Vic, your client approved it and it is what you are going to give.”
Before Beth could reply he had turned on his heels and was gone.
Fucking Brett with two t’s, I thought as I watched his back disappear into the courtroom. Maybe there was a reason other than luck that he was an up-and-comer with Talbott, Kittredge and I was not.
“Such a pleasant young boy,” said Beth. “His mother must be so proud. So tell me, Victor, how does it feel to have assholes like William Prescott and Brett with two t’s as your colleagues?”