Capitol Reflections (2 page)
Stopping at a light, Marci raised her head and beheld the Brooklyn Bridge spanning the waters of the East River in its turn-of-the-century majesty. Beautiful, she thought. Absolutely spectacular. She wished she could stop and muse over its architecture, its intricacies, its history—even speculate on the lives of the people who built it and those who died in the attempt. Not now, though. She had a client to send home, happy and content, to apartment 5B. The bench trial that morning had been short and sweet. Marci clearly demonstrated that Anh’s landlord was selling the property after years of neglecting various building codes, not to mention the fact that he broke any number of clauses in Ms. Nguyen’s lease. The judge would summarily render his verdict and Marci would be back in her corner office with its commanding view of the city. Within two hours, she would be ready to see at least three more clients before surrendering to the close of another business day and meet with Gwen and Jack Maulder for dinner.
Caught up in her thoughts, she barely noticed the man in a rumpled suit heading straight for her. He was dark-complected, with black, oily hair combed straight back above an unfashionably early five o’clock shadow. He smiled, revealing nicotine stains on his uneven teeth. He planted himself squarely in Marci’s path.
“So,” he whispered into Marci’s ear, “are you ready for me to show you the night of your life?”
Marci stopped dead in her tracks.
“Fazio, if you had the equipment to back up your offer, I might actually get outraged enough to complain to the Bar Association about your pathetic desperation to lose your virginity. Last I heard, however, people couldn’t find your package with tweezers.” Marci smiled sweetly, as if she’d just complimented his tie. “Go find more slumlords to defend. And for God’s sake, try topping off your Chinese food with some Altoids. You reek.”
“Is that any way to speak to a colleague in the world’s second oldest profession?” asked Joseph Fazio, attorney-at-law.
“As I see it, Counselor, you only joined the second oldest profession in order to represent relatives who have the dubious distinction of belonging to the world’s first oldest.” Marci was pleased with the comeback; that double-latte had her firing on twelve cylinders. She stepped aside and strode intrepidly up the courthouse steps and through the main entrance, hoping to lose Fazio. She always felt the desire to take a shower after speaking with him.
“Loosen up, Counselor,” urged Fazio, who unfortunately thought Marci was interested in continuing their exchange. “You’re obviously not getting any, and I’m just offering to help you with that problem. I’ll even buy dinner.”
Marci pivoted sharply. “If you want to help me, tell your slumlord to fix up his building. Oh, right, he can’t because he’s too busy trying to figure out a way to stay out of jail at the moment. Otherwise—”
“Yes, yes,” Fazio interrupted. “Otherwise, I should go fuck myself while you simultaneously defend the poor and keep corporate criminals safe over at Denniger, Sachman.”
“I would never suggest an anatomic impossibility. That’s just your filthy mind at work.” Smiling coldly, Marci continued toward the nearest open elevator, turned, and watched Joseph Fazio stop abruptly, unable to push his considerable girth into the small cubicle.
“Next car,” she called our cheerily as the doors slid closed.
Marci stepped from the elevator directly into a wall of heat and humidity on the third floor. The building engineer was supervising workmen crawling through access panels in the ceiling, and it was obvious that the air conditioning wasn’t combating the eighty-degree temperature in the hallway. Marci silently cursed the city councilman who had shepherded the air conditioning contract through the process and the unknown relative of the councilman from whom it had been procured.
She opened the door of the first courtroom on the right, noticing Fazio once again hot on her tail. The sight of the frail Vietnamese woman sitting at the back of the room immediately renewed her sympathy. Anh looked nervous and she wore the same housecoat she’d worn when she first encountered Marci.
“They’ll probably call our case in a few minutes,” Marci whispered reassuringly as she slipped into a seat next to Anh and lightly touched her forearm. “Looks like another case is dragging a bit. Don’t worry.”
Fazio sat down with his client, a man in his fifties, on the opposite side of the courtroom a few rows ahead. The disheveled tenement owner was wearing wrinkled navy-colored pants, a faded herringbone jacket, and workman’s shoes. Looking over his shoulder, he scowled at Anh and then began whispering something to Fazio.
The courtroom was even warmer and stuffier than the hallway. Marci was beginning to perspire. She took a tissue from her purse to wipe beads of moisture from her forehead. The heat notwithstanding, her senses were still attuned to everything around her. She was able to follow two conversations being held in low tones far back in the room, as well as the more audible exchange between a lawyer and the judge.
I guess this is the true meaning of multi-tasking
, she said to herself, immodestly in awe of her own ability to follow the threads of so many simultaneous situations. Then, as she wiped her forehead again, she inhaled deeply. Something more than air seemed to escape from her when she exhaled. Suddenly, without warning, she felt drained.
, she said to herself, immodestly in awe of her own ability to follow the threads of so many simultaneous situations. Then, as she wiped her forehead again, she inhaled deeply. Something more than air seemed to escape from her when she exhaled. Suddenly, without warning, she felt drained.
“Nguyen versus Lazlow,” a voice rang out. “Step forward and be heard.”
Marci took another deep breath, trying to regain her spark. She looked up and saw that the bailiff was staring at her. She started, suddenly aware that she had lost track of time. That never happened. She chided herself for the lapse, wondering if she should have gotten another shot of espresso with her latte.
No time to think about that now. She took Anh by the hand and led her to the front of the courtroom. The bailiff read the case number while the judge casually shuffled papers.
“Very well,” Judge Walter T. Jacobs declared, finally looking over glasses resting on the tip of his nose. “I’ve considered the testimony from this morning and I’m prepared to put this issue to rest. Does anyone have anything else to say?” His tone was that of a man who had little interest in what he was doing, someone who listened to dozens of petty disputes every day while his mind was on the putting green, gauging how far to the left a six-footer would break.
Marci smiled very slightly as the phrase “turnstile justice” floated through her mind.
You’re in, you’re out, slam bam, thank you, ma’am
, she thought.
Next case. Hi everyone! Welcome to the show!
You’re in, you’re out, slam bam, thank you, ma’am
, she thought.
Next case. Hi everyone! Welcome to the show!
If that was the way things were, Marci believed the little guy—or gal, as the case might be—deserved to win one once in a while. And there was something in the judge’s eyes when he looked at Lazlow. Jacobs seemed repelled by the man, as though Lazlow got on an airplane seat next to him with a runny nose and a hacking cough.
“Yes, your honor,” Marci said, reaching for a paper in her briefcase. “There’s one final document that—”
Marci’s hand began to shake, the paper making a thin, high-pitched rattling sound. She was perspiring heavily now.
“Are you okay, Ms. Newman?” inquired Judge Jacobs.
Marci wasn’t okay. Her eyes rolled up beneath her eyelids. She tried to speak, but her tongue seemed to have a mind of its own. The fingers of her right hand began to rhythmically pull at the silver chain around her neck, as if it were too tight and prevented her from breathing. A heart-shaped pendant, a Christmas gift from Gwen, dangled from the chain as Marci tugged hard on the small silver links.
Seconds later, she fell to the parquetry of the courtroom floor, her arms and legs moving spasmodically like those of a marionette whose strings are being pulled by a sadistic, unseen puppeteer.
2
Marci slipped in and out of consciousness on the way to Bellevue, only occasionally managing to pry open her eyes to look at whatever appeared directly above her head—a hand, the head of a male paramedic, and IV tubing coiled in an overhead storage rack. Something—she guessed Valium—had broken her seizure, but she could only keep her awareness focused for seconds at a time, and even then reality was a series of unrelated slides in an out-of-focus carousel projector. Just when one image began to make sense, she would start to slip away again, alternating between memory and reality. Pictures of herself on the beach swam through her brain as she spiraled into unconsciousness.
Now, overlapping voices clamored for attention. Multiple conversations—the kind she’d always been able to decipher—scrambled together. She was being rushed through a corridor on a gurney, and the overhead fluorescent lights were blinding. Doctors and nurses seemed to float about her in the awful luminescence, and either their speech was garbled or they were speaking in tongues. The fuzzy outline of a head appeared and asked if she knew her name, but Marci was too tired to answer.
Got to hang in, she thought. Keep your head in the game.
Gwen Maulder was relaxing with her husband Jack at the bar of The River Café, waiting to be seated. She was drinking a glass of Chardonnay, happy to get away from work early. This was one of those rare trips when her workload, Jack’s traveling schedule, and her best friend’s day planner all meshed. The subdued lighting over the bar created a lovely ambience of both peace and elegance. It was a good feeling. Gwen wished she could get Marci to understand that. Careers didn’t need to own your life. You could have it all if you performed the balancing act perfectly. She glanced over at Jack and smiled at him softly. No—career didn’t need to own your life.
Gwen was in town to review current stats with people at the New York FDA office. She could have done this via download back at her computer in Rockville, Maryland, but she always relished a chance to see Marci. Gwen’s deceased father, Dr. Fitz McBean, had been an old-style family practitioner who put great emphasis on personal contact with people. Indeed, Gwen took over her dad’s practice when he died, but found she couldn’t run it alone. No one wanted to make house calls like Fitz, and using a minimal office staff to deal with HMOs had become oppressive. (“It’s not managed care,” Fitz had remarked. “It’s mangled care.”) So Gwen decided to use her considerable diagnostic skills in a different venue at a time in history when the federal government needed real doctors, not bureaucrats, to take the pulse of the nation’s health. Terrorism, anthrax, flu, AIDS—these factors and so many more demanded that competent physicians assess health concerns from a broader, more comprehensive perspective. So here she was in New York City, a public health official, a division chief in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service. Yet, she was still very much the daughter of Fitz McBean, only two generations removed from making house calls in a horse and buggy.
And she couldn’t wait to see Marci.
The conversation at the bar revolved around medicine, politics, movies, and a mutual friend whom, both Maulders were convinced, was having an affair with a decadent artist in SoHo, a man named Ernesto—no last name. She and Jack were laughing one moment, challenging each other at another, and ruminating the next. She loved that she could do that with him.
Just as she loved the energy required to fill her role at the FDA. Every new drug carried with it the risk of unintended consequences, complications not detected in the pre-market testing. One-in-a-thousand atypical responses just don’t show up that often when only a few thousand patients at most are tested before drug release. Constant diligence—and the patience to withstand endless bureaucratic meetings—could be draining. Fortunately, Chardonnay and soft lighting could be so restorative.
Gwen was having a harder-than-usual time relaxing, however. Marci had not been her usual self on the phone this morning, and Gwen felt a little on edge waiting for Marci to show up and explain why.
“I really need some quiet time with you, more than just a long bathroom break at dinner,” she had said. Gwen tried to pry the subject out of her and managed only to ascertain that it had nothing to do with a current romance, Marci wouldn’t talk about it over the phone, and that it had her somewhat unnerved.
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