«Abraham has truly deserted me,» whispered the foremost lawyer of Boston, Massachusetts.
«I heard that, Commander!» shouted MacKenzie Hawkins. «He may have, but as sure as leopards have spots, I haven’t! We’ll face the fire together, turn it on ’em, and blow ’em away, old buddy!»
«Is it possible,» asked Aaron Pinkus softly, glancing at the Hawk, «that I have been presented with the human form of my own personal dybbuk?»
14
Sunrise Jennifer Redwing quietly shut the bedroom door and walked to the writing desk in the sitting room of the Ritz-Carlton suite arranged by Aaron Pinkus. «Your mother’s asleep,» she said as she pulled the chair away and sat down facing Devereaux on the couch. «At last,» she added, firmly crossing her legs and glaring at Sam.
«I don’t suppose it would do any good to tell you that my mother isn’t always tanked.»
«If I were a mother, Samuel Devereaux, and I had learned about my son what she’s learned about you during the last several days, I wouldn’t draw a sober breath for the next five years!»
«Isn’t that a little severe, Counselor?»
«Only if you chose to immolate yourself on the stage of the San Francisco Cow Palace, all proceeds going for the benefit of mothers driven to cuckooville by their offspring.»
«She told you quite a bit then,» said Sam, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the lovely lady’s positively unfriendly gaze.
«Only bits and pieces at the house, but for the past half hour, I’ve listened to a compendium of horrors—that’s when you may have heard me locking the door as she instructed me to do… Underworld killers on a golf course, English traitors, Nazis on chicken farms, Arabs roasting goats’ testicles in the desert—and my God, kidnapping the Pope! You made allusions to this mad general scouring intelligence files to raise forty million dollars—but nothing like this! Jesus Christ, the Pope! I can’t believe it … she must have got that wrong.»
«They’re not actually one and the same, you know. Christ and the Pope, I mean. Remember, I’m Anglican, although I can’t specifically recall when I last went to church. Early teens, I think—»
«I don’t give a damn whether you’re Anglican or a moon drop from a Tibetan zodiac, you are certifiable, Counselor! You have no right walking the streets, much less—much, much less—being an officer of the court!»
«You’re hostile,» observed Devereaux.
«I’ve gone completely out of my mind! You make my maximum-nut brother Charlie look like Oliver Wendell Holmes!»
«I’ll bet we’d get along.»
«Oh, sure, I can see it now. Redwing and Devereaux—»
«Devereaux and Redwing,» interrupted Sam. «I’m older and more experienced.»
«—the law firm that set all manner of jurisprudence back to the Stone Age!»
«Probably a lot clearer then,» said Sam, nodding. «They couldn’t chip out all those codicillary phrases on the rocks.»
«Be serious, you idiot!»
«An idiot I’m not, Red. A playwright once said that there comes a time when there’s nothing left to do but scream. I’m simply substituting an ironic chuckle for a shriek.»
«You’re referring to Anouilh, and he also said ‘bearer of life, give light,’ and I substitute ‘law’ for ‘life’—which for a few moments in your house I thought you believed, too. We must give light, Sam.»
«You know about Anouilh? I thought I was the only person I knew who—»
«He was never a practicing attorney in Paris,» interrupted Jennifer, «but he loved the law—especially the language of the law—and he turned a great deal of it into poetry.»
«You scare me, Indian lady.»
«I hope so. We’ve got a very scary problem on the docket, Counselor.»
«I don’t mean Mac’s megamess, although you’re right, it’s scary as hell. But somehow—don’t ask me how—I think we’ll muddle through, at least with our lives if not our sanity intact.»
«I’m glad you’re so confident,» observed Redwing. «I’m not, on either point.»
«‘Confident’ is the wrong word, Red. Let’s say I’m fatalistic because the fates will probably be on our side if for no other reason than the combine of Aaron Pinkus and MacKenzie Hawkins, two of the most resourceful men I’ve ever known, are running interference for us. And if I’m called off the bench, I’m not exactly inadequate myself.»
«Then you’ve lost me. What were you talking about?»
«You, lady… In the space of a few hours, from a crazy moment in an elevator to this hotel suite, we’ve gone through quite a bit.»
«That may be the understatement of your professional career,» Redwing broke in quickly, quietly, her eyes still glaring.
«I know, I know, but something happened—»
«Has it really?»
«To me,» completed Sam. «I’ve watched you in what the psychology boys would probably call moments of extreme stress, and I like what I saw, respect what I saw. You can learn an awful lot about a person under those kinds of circumstances… You can discover wonderful things, beautiful things.»
«This is getting a little saccharine, Mr. Devereaux,» said Jennifer, «and I’m very sure it’s not the time for it.»
«But it is the time, don’t you see? If I don’t say it now when I feel it so strongly, I might not say it later. It may just slip away and I don’t want that to happen.»
«Why? Because the memory of—what was it your mother said?—oh, yes, the ‘eternal love of his life,’ some benevolent nun who ran away with the Pope, has come back to you? That’s only another crooked house on a crooked mile in cuckooville!»
«That’s part of what I’m saying,» insisted Sam. «Because that memory’s fading, I can feel it, sense it. Only last night I wanted to kill Mac for even mentioning her name, but now it doesn’t matter, at least I don’t think it does. I look at you and I can’t see her face any more, and that tells me something pretty goddamned important.»
«Are you telling me there actually was such a person?»
«Yes.»
«Counselor, I’ve got to be in the middle of a horror movie that has exhausted my popcorn, half of it sticking to a gum-laden floor.»
«Welcome to the world of MacKenzie Hawkins, Counselor. And don’t get up from your seat, because if the greasy popcorn doesn’t make you slip down on your ass, you’ll lose your shoes to the gum… Why do you think your brother beat feet? Why do you think I did everything within the power of the very powerful Aaron Pinkus to avoid getting mixed up with the mad Hawk again?»
«Because it is total madness,» answered the bronze-skinned Aphrodite, her eyes softening. «Yet your brilliant Mr. Pinkus—and I concede that brilliance, because I know something about him—has not cut off the mad general. He’s apparently in constant touch with him, working with him, when we both know he could sever the relationship with one call to Washington, exonerating himself from any association whatsoever by simply stating that he never sought it… And you, I watched you on the phone in the car; you were beside yourself with anxiety, no matter your feeble disclaimers. Why, Counselor? What hold does this creature have on you, on both of you?»