«The grande general has hemorrhoids in his mouth.»
«That h’ain’t nice to say,» D-Two rebutted, joining his companion as he closed the door and put his indescribable break-and-entry tool back into his pocket. «Where’s the heneral and the liddle fella?»
«What … who? Oh, they went to dinner. Why don’t you join them?»
«’Cause he tol’ us to be back here in one hour and we are good soldados!»
«Oh … yes, well, I can’t comment on that because my office was not the instrument of instruction.»
«Wad chu saying?» asked D-One, squinting, looking at the attorney as one might a deformed Paramecium under a microscope.
«What?… Hey, look, guys, I’m kind of involved here, and you’re right, I don’t take anything that’s happened personally. Believe me, I’ve been where you’re at.»
«Wad does dat mean?» D-One said.
«Well, Mac’s a pretty strong person; he can be very convincing.»
«Wad’s a ‘mac’? A piece of meat can talk?»
«No, that’s his name. MacKenzie—I call him Mac, for short.»
«He not short, man,» said Desi-Two. «He one big gringo.»
«That’s part of it, I guess.» Sam blinked several times and leaned back in the swivel chair, arching his neck as if to briefly relieve the pressure he felt. «Big, tough, rough, and all-powerful—and he makes men like you and me march to his cymbals when we should know better… You two, you’re street smart, and me, I’m law smart, and still he beats us down.»
«He don’ beat nobody!» said D-One emphatically.
«I didn’t mean literally—»
«I don’ give a shit how you mean it, man, he makes me and my amigo here feel better, so wadda you say about that?»
«I can’t think of a thing.»
«We talked while we ate the rotten tacos made by some blond-haired gringo down the street,» added D-Two, «and we both say the same thing. The loco man’s h’okay!»
«Yes, I know,» said Devereaux wearily, focusing his eyes back on the pages in front of him. «You really like him, that’s fine.»
«Where does he come from, man?» asked Desi the First.
«Come from?… How the hell do I know? The army, where else?»
Desis One and Two exchanged glances. The former spoke, addressing his companion. «Like we saw in the window with the pretty pictures, right, man?»
«Get the name spelled out good,» said D-Two.
«H’okay.» Desi the First turned back to the preoccupied attorney. «You, Señor Sam, do like my fren’ says.»
«Do what?»
«Write out the grande heneral’s name.»
«What for?»
«’Cause if you don’, man, your fingers h’ain’t gonna work so good.»
«Delighted to oblige,» said Devereaux quickly, picking up a pencil and tearing off a page from his legal pad. «There you are,» he added, writing down Hawkins’s name and rank. «I’m afraid I don’t have an address or a telephone number, but later on you might check the penal institutions.»
«You talkin’ dirty about the grande heneral?» asked Desi the Second suspiciously. «Why you don’ like him? Why you run h’away and yell at him and try to fight him, huh?»
«Because I was a bad person, a terrible person,» cried Sam plaintively, his hands outstretched in supplication. «He was so good to me—you saw how nice he talks to me—and I was so selfish! I’ll never forgive myself, but I’ve seen the error of my ways and I’m trying to make it up to him by doing this work he wants me to do—needs me to do… I’m going to church tomorrow morning to ask God to forgive me for being so awful to a great man.»
«Hey, Señor Sam,» said Desi-Two, God’s forgiveness in his voice, «nobody’s all a time perfect, you know? Jesus, He unnerstand dat, right?»
«You can bet your beads on it,» replied Devereaux under his breath. «There’s a nun I know who’s got to stretch even His compassion.»
«Wad chu say, man?»
«I said the well-known compassion of nuns beads in on what you say—that’s an American expression meaning you’re right.»
«Dat’s cool,» interrupted Desi the First, «but me and Desi-Two got some heavy t’inkin’ to do, so we gonna vamos an’ accept the word of a religious man that the grande heneral is h’okay like we say.»
«I’m afraid I don’t understand.»
«The grande heneral owes us dinero—»
«Money, you mean?»
«Dat’s wad I mean, gringo, an’ we wanna trust him, but we gotta be positivo, you know? So you tell the grande heneral dat we’ll be back here tomorrow for our dinero, h’okay?»
«Okay, but why don’t you wait for him—outside, of course?»
«’Cause, like I say, we gotta t’ink and talk … an’ also we gotta know we can trust him.»
«To be perfectly frank, I don’t understand you.»
«You don’ have to. Jus’ tell him what I say, h’okay?»
«Sure.»
«Come on, amigo,» said Desi-One, extending his left wrist beyond his sleeve, revealing the three wristwatches. «I tell ya, ya can’ trust nobody no more! Dis lousy Rolex is a phony!»
With these cryptic words, Desi the First and Desi the Second left the suite, both waving cordially to Sam as they closed the door. Devereaux shook his head, sipped his brandy, and returned to the sheaves of papers on the desk.
Dawn broke over the eastern skyline of Boston, Massachusetts, to the extreme annoyance of Jennifer Redwing, who had forgotten to pull the window drapes. The harsh rays of the early sun penetrated her eyelids and woke her up… Forgotten, hell, she had been too damned tired to think of them when she staggered in from the airport at two in the morning. Four hours of sleep was not enough even with her energy, but circumstances precluded staying in bed. She got up, partially closed the drapes, turned on the bedside lamp and scanned the room-service menu, finding what she hoped she would find: twenty-four-hour availability. She picked up the phone, ordered a Continental breakfast and thought about the day ahead.
Everything came down to short-circuiting a son-of-a-bitch former general, MacKenzie Hawkins, and whoever the scum were behind him. And she would short-circuit them, blast them into the electrified legal grids, no matter what it took, no matter the avenues of legal deceit she had always abhorred. Today was different. Although forever grateful to her tribe and her people—that gratitude acknowledged by her overseeing their investments and contributing a third of her income to their accounts—she was furious that outsiders would attempt to take advantage of the tribe’s admittedly checkered history and naïveté solely for profit. Her little brother, Charlie, was right, although he misinterpreted her anger. She wouldn’t merely «ream» him out, she was going to ream all of them out—right out of their unconscionably corrupt ballpark!
Breakfast arrived, and with it a degree of calm. She had to concentrate. All she had was a telephone number and an address in Weston. It wasn’t much, but it was a beginning. Why didn’t the hours pass faster? Damn, she wanted to get started!
It was five-thirty in the morning and Sam Devereaux, his eyes close to bleeding, had finished the Wopotami brief and made thirty-seven pages of notes on his legal pad.
Oh, God, he had to rest, if only to find some sense of perspective, if there was any in the whole insane mess! His head was bursting with hundreds of relevant and irrelevant facts, definitions, conclusions, and contradictions. Only a period of calm would restore his oft-praised faculties of reason and analysis, which at the moment were so diminished he doubted he could handle kindergarten recess, much less talk Sanford somebody-or-other out of beating him up when they were both six years old during one of those periods on the playground. He wondered whatever happened to that outsized bully; he undoubtedly ended up a general in the army, or a terrorist. Not unlike «Madman» Mac Hawkins, who was currently asleep in the hotel suite’s guest bedroom, and who was responsible for bringing two-hundred-odd pages of unmitigated disaster to the attention of Aaron Pinkus and Samuel Lansing Devereaux, who now conceded that he would never wear the judicial robes—except perhaps as a last wish before being shot in the cellars of the Pentagon by the combined orders of the President, the Department of Defense, the CIA, the DIA, and the Daughters of the American Revolution. And Aaron—poor Aaron! He not only had to face Shirley-with-the-freeze-dried-bouffant over a little matter of a missed art show, but he, too, had read Mac’s brief, in itself a veritable invitation to oblivion.