Jack Reynolds loved the Brayton. He loved any place that whispered of wealth and status. Whispered was the right word. It did no good to shout about these things. To shout would be vulgar. Men of real power did not shout. They didn’t have to. The same was true of buildings. The Brayton was old money, not nouveau riche. It had no need to prove itself.
He was different from the hotel in that way. He’d been proving himself all his life.
Reynolds entered the rendezvous court, which had once been a library and still offered the hushed atmosphere appropriate to a bookish sanctuary. At a small table in an out-of-the-way corner he ordered black coffee. His security people weren’t with him, but across the room he saw Kip Stenzel reading the latest Newsweek. Stenzel had outfitted him with a radio transmitter the size of the deck of cards, and Reynolds now reached into his pocket and switched it on, saying quietly, “Testing.”
At the far table, Stenzel discreetly tapped his earlobe. He was receiving.
It never hurt to have a second pair of ears at a meeting. And Stenzel could be trusted to keep quiet about whatever Abby Sinclair had learned.
The coffee arrived. Reynolds took a sip and leaned back in his chair. As always when he found himself in a place like this, he couldn’t resist the inrush of contrasting memories from his boyhood. The gray sludge that leaked from the tap in the kitchen sink, which the landlord refused to repair-and now the porcelain mug of Kona coffee, imported from Hawaii and fresh ground in the kitchen. The blare of jungle music from car stereos-and now the Chopin etude playing on hidden speakers. The stink of urine in the stairwell-and now the hint of cinnamon from a scented candle in his table’s centerpiece.
Those were superficial differences. What really mattered was the change in atmosphere, of the very air around him. Growing up, he had been hardly able to breathe-and not only because of the waves of body odor rising from the bums who slept on the stairs, or the stifling confines of the bedroom he shared with two younger brothers. Even in the open air, his lungs had been tight, frozen. He’d been choking, suffocating, every breath constricted by furious despair. At some point in his childhood he heard the expression “trapped in poverty,” and he knew immediately that it named his predicament. He was trapped in the barrio. No exit. No hope.
There were three great turning points in his life. The first came at age ten, when he was ambushed after school by a trio of Mexicans. They were older and bigger than he was, and they took turns pummeling him, pounding him in the face and belly. He could still see the blur of their fists, taste his own sweat, feel the burn of nausea with each new smack in the gut.
But he wouldn’t go down. He took the punishment without surrender. Once or twice he fell on one knee, but always he was back on his feet in time to accept the next blow, and the next.
Two of his attackers backed off, exhausted, leaving only the ringleader still throwing punches and screaming, “Cry!” His broad Aztec face was twisted in fury, his mouth dangling loops of spittle. “Cry, asshole! Lemme see you cry!”
Jack did not cry. He waited until the bully faltered, worn out by the punishment he’d inflicted, and then with some unknown reserve of strength Jack launched a piledriver at the bastard’s jaw. He heard a crack of bone. The Mexican collapsed, blood in his mouth, eyes wild with pain. The other two fled, shouting curses. Jack stood over his fallen aggressor, then kicked him twice in the ribs and walked away. As it turned out, the punch had broken the bully’s jaw, which had to be wired up, his meals fed to him through a straw.
That day he learned his anger could serve a purpose. He could feed off its heat and use it as a weapon. It made him stronger. Other fights followed. Sometimes he was the loser. Most times he was not. But he never backed away, and he never went down easy-and when beaten, he never forgot.
The second turning point came when he was thirteen. A friend of his, who’d been rescued from a beating by Jack’s intervention, invited him on what he described as “a goof.” A goof, as it turned out, was a crime-the robbery of a convenience mart. Jack’s job was to watch for police. He did okay, and got a small share of the money. Other goofs followed. Nothing too serious-no one ever got hurt in any major way, and he avoided arrest, though sometimes narrowly. His activities brought him new respect. He began to realize that the other kids, the ones who never broke the law, were wary of him. They feared him. He liked that.
This was his second lesson. He could scare people. And their fear, properly exploited, would make them do all kinds of useful things. They would empty their pockets for him. They would follow his orders. The girls found him dangerous and intriguing. He lost his virginity at fourteen in the girls’ locker room, where a blond sophomore had brought him for a quick introduction to the mysteries of sex.
Learning to make others fear him had made him a man.
The next year, at fifteen, came the third turning point. Until then, he had known that there were other people somewhere who had money and the freedom it bought, but he’d imagined no way of joining them. Suddenly he was big enough, agile enough, to compete in sports, and he saw his way out. Years later he attended a college lecture on a corrupt Tammany Hall politico who, the professor said, responded to criticism with the unapologetic defense, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” The class had laughed. Reynolds hadn’t. He’d understood the Tammany Hall man perfectly. A man’s life was nothing but opportunities seized-or missed.
Football was Jack’s opportunity. He devoted himself to it with a zealot’s passion. Football became his theology, and the ratty field hemmed in by tiers of wooden benches was his church. He pumped iron and ran miles and studied playbooks.
He learned something about himself through football. He learned that he was a stubborn son of a bitch. Once he set his mind on something, he would not be denied. He aimed to win the quarterback position, to make himself the star of the team, and he succeeded.
On the gridiron he learned another lesson. There was no worse fate than failure. Nothing could ease the ache of losing, and nothing was more unacceptable than the sour taste of humiliation at the hands of a stronger or more resilient adversary. He played to win, and usually he did win, often in last-minute comebacks that kept the school talking for days.
But the real victory he aimed for was his ticket out of town. In his senior year he got it. He received a full athletic scholarship to Chico State. He was the first member of his family to attend college. His parents frankly did not know what to make of this development, whether to be pleased or appalled. His father had assumed Jack would join him at the canning factory after graduation. Instead Jack stuffed the few possessions he needed into a backpack and set off on his motorcycle to drive five hundred miles to rural northern California. Fields of crops replaced shotgun flats. The main streets were lined with variety emporiums and feed shops, not liquor stores and strip clubs.
He’d gotten out of the barrio. And he’d done it himself, owing no one, asking for no favors, waiting on no lucky breaks.
In his speeches, which were always crafted by his staffers because he was no good with words, he sometimes used the language of victimhood. It was what his constituents wanted to hear. They liked blaming their problems on the rich, the elite, the system. He talked the talk, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t a victim, because he had chosen not to be. Anyone could make the same choice. Most weren’t willing to pay the tab.
He’d never been deluded enough to think he could make it as a pro on the football field. He decided on a law degree instead. The law was a means of control. Those who understood it, who could take advantage of its complexities and ambiguities, would always have an edge on those who couldn’t. Control meant power. Power meant freedom. Freedom meant a permanent escape from the barrio streets.