Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 04 - BOY ON TRIAL - A Legal Thriller (6 page)

“And I risked a lot to win Iphigenia.”

“three hundred euros isn’t even five hundred dollars.”

His head went up, an animal scenting danger. “You know the exchange rate?”

“Just guessing.”

“Nineteen hundred bucks, and you own a rare jungle animal.”

“Why don’t we play something for her?” I said.

“Play something?”

“A game.”

“Like… gamble?” He blinked. “Are you kidding? You been hanging out at Jewish golf clubs? You want to risk your whole stash? “

“Why not?”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“You won her in a poker game, didn’t you?”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

I can ask “why?” and “why not?” ten times in a row and drive anyone mad.

“I can’t do it to you,” he said, patting my cheek in the manner of favorite uncles and mafia dons.

“You’re scared that an eleven-year-old kid can beat you at something?”

His black eyes narrowed. “I don’t want to take advantage. You’re my nephew. What game did you have in mind?”

I opened the door to my closet. My life stared back at me. Pretty messy in there.

“You name it,” I said.

Uncle Bernie offered a monologue on the skill and luck involved in chess, checkers, parcheesi, Monopoly, gin rummy and pinochle, seven-card stud and Texas hold ‘em poker, rejecting them all for one reason or another. Then he said, “Is that a backgammon board I see in the corner? Over there by your old Leggo?”

“Yeah, but I just learned how to play. Aunt Grace gave it to me and forgot to teach me. I’m not even sure how to set up the men. I get confused about which direction to move them.”

“Me, too. So we’re even.”

He didn’t dare look me in the eyes.

I asked, “Do you call them men, or pieces, or checkers?”

“I don’t know.” Uncle Bernie shrugged. “Two out of three games. Your nineteen hundred against Iphigenia.”

“Well…”

“Are you chicken?”

The directions on how to play were still in the box. Uncle Bernie read them aloud for the benefit of both of us. I let him arrange the checkers on the board.

I left blots all over the place, so that he hit me a couple of times — “Billy, don’t you think that was just a wee bit careless? Haw, haw, haw” — but he barked like a seal on the wrong end of the harpoon when I came back in off the bar and starting hitting his own blots, and before he knew it I had a six-point prime that he couldn’t fight his way past. I won that game. His eyes narrowed again; he began to sweat. I thought of throwing him a game but decided that would be a mistake. I won the second game. “Beginner’s luck,” I explained.

He glared at me. “You scheming runt. You knew how to open. You played a back game like a pro.”

I felt that old sting of guilt that always makes you do things you shouldn’t do.

“I won her,” I said. “But I’ll give you nine hundred dollars cash if you tell me how to take care of her.”

“It’s a deal,” Uncle Bernie said. “Pygmy Green Rhesus monkeys pick up a human virus, like a common cold, they go into a kind of paralysis. In Florence I caught the grippe. She went into spasms. I had to find a vet to give her a Vitamin B-complex shot. In half a minute she was good as new.”

The next day, in Village Hardware, I bought a bird cage for her to live in. Then Uncle Bernie took me and Simon to lunch at a deli on Main Street. He ordered tongue on rye and a cream soda. Simon had a hamburger swimming in ketchup, and a double-thick chocolate malted. I said to the waitress: “I’d like a cottage cheese sandwich on whole wheat, with sprouts, arugula, and sliced tomatoes. And a sour pickle. And a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”

Uncle Bernie stared at me. “What’s the matter with corned beef and hot pastrami?”

“I don’t eat meat. I saw this special on late-night TV, how they butcher animals. They have to kill one cow every ten seconds, so if they fall behind they cut them up while they’re still alive. The Mexican guys in this slaughterhouse in Nebraska clean out vats of blood. The hydrogen sulfide fumes make them vomit. Five guys died.”

“Anything else?” the waitress asked.

“Can I have a side order of anchovies?”

Uncle Bernie said, “Billy, if you knew how those poor fish get skinned before they get shoved into the tin, you’d never eat one again.”

I ordered them and ate them. No matter what your principles, you can always find reasons to do the things you want to do. I knew that even then.

Uncle Bernie went off to the city to battle his way past the primes of the art world. I thought my mom might give me a hard time about owning a monkey, but she decided that it would be good for me to have a pet. I once had a poodle who got run over by a Sears delivery truck, and when I was nine we had a one-eyed cat named Cyclops, but he ran away because Simon tied Heineken beer cans to his tail.

My mom said, “If you’ll take the monkey for a rabies booster shot immediately, and keep her cage clean, you can keep her.”

What I didn’t tell her and my dad was that whenever they weren’t home, and that was most of the time, Iphigenia had the run of the house. She liked to search for bugs in the Persian carpets and sleep in table lamps close to a hot bulb, and when I did my homework she perched on my head and groomed me. She was showing her affection for me by cleaning out my lice. She weighed twelve ounces so I hardly felt her weight. She had miniature humanlike fingers, as long and as thick and as dark as the part of my dad’s eyeglasses that go over his ears. She poked nonstop, and sometimes my eyes glazed and I fell asleep over algebra problems while she scratched away in a desperate search for what was never there.

I soon figured out when she needed to pee and I would put her in the cage above a tub of cat litter. In the crapping mode she dumped hard pea-sized pellets in the corners of rooms. The pellets didn’t smell and were easy to get rid of.

Simon hated her, but he was out all the time with other teen-aged thugs in black leather windbreakers. Iphigenia showed her teeth if Simon came within three feet of her. One evening he swatted her with a rolled-up copy of
The New Yorker
— she scampered out of the den and hid under the living room sofa. When I called Simon a sadistic motherfucker, he grabbed
Vogue
and hit me twice on the side of the head.

Iphigenia stayed under the sofa for two hours and I could get her out only by offering her a piece of hard candy.

The next morning, when I unlocked her cage, she flew straight into Simon’s room like a thirteen-ounce greenish-brown missile launched from a silo. Simon was still half asleep. Iphigenia leaped up on his pillow and bit him on the nose. Her teeth were tiny but they were sharp.

Inez had to drive Simon to the doctor. Luckily I’d kept my promise and taken Iphigenia to the vet for her rabies booster shot.

Which brings me to the subject of her diet and the beginning of my career.

Iphigenia ate fruit and insects. She liked to catch moths and crunch them in her jaws like popcorn. But most of all, starting with the day Simon swatted her, she enjoyed hard candy. She seemed to have a gut made of steel. She was always trying to get me to go halfies with her, and one day when I teased her with a cherry Life-Saver and then popped it into my mouth, she jumped on top of my head, reached down with her little claws, pried my lips apart like she was a diamond hunter and had found the mother lode, then poked inside next to my tongue, grabbed the Life-Saver with her claws and hauled it out. Her starred eyes blazed with pleasure.

On Labor Day Weekend my parents had a dinner party. I was in my room watching a Marx Brothers video, with Iphigenia grooming me for lice, when my mom knocked on my door. She was decked out in black silk pants and a low-cut gold blouse that showed more of her than anyone ever saw at Modern Age.

“Wow, Mom.”

She glowed at me. “Darling, we’ve been telling our friends about Iphigenia. They’d like to meet her. Just make sure she doesn’t jump on anybody. Some of these people might freak out.”

When I brought her out, perched on my shoulder but still in my grip, my parents’ friends oohed and aahed. My mom said, “Billy, show them what she does. This is so cute,” she confided to the dinner table.

I dug a cherry sourball out of my pocket and popped it behind my tongue. Iphigenia went into her act. Of course for her it wasn’t an act — it was hunting and gathering. If I kept my jaws shut she yanked even harder and sometimes hissed, but it was a playful hiss, a kind of language that she and I spoke, not the kind of raging threat she directed toward my brother.

This evening she held my nose with one chilly hand to force me to open my mouth. Everyone laughed.

One of my father’s guests was a client named Max Russo, the head of a Manhattan advertising agency. Max had lips the color and texture of fresh wet liver. I disliked him and I couldn’t tell you why, except maybe it was because he always wore black, plus a lot of flashy gold bracelets and gold chains.

Max said, “Billy, will it do that all the time?”

“Mr. Russo, Iphigenia is a she.”

“Excuse me.” He made a fancy little bow, and his chains jingled. “Will
she
do that all the time?”

“Yes.”

“With any flavor?”

“She likes cherry best.”

“Would she do it with anyone, or just with you?”

“Do you want to try, Mr. Russo?”

He thought it over, and said, “No.”

The following week my dad called me from his office on East 56th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. He explained that Max Russo and a few people from his agency wanted to see Iphigenia eat a hard candy out of my mouth a second time. Would I oblige?

“I guess so.”

Max Russo and his gang drove out to Long Island in a black Cadillac stretch limo and watched while Iphigenia did her diving act for three different flavors of Life-savers. An underling filmed it with a Sony Handi-Cam.

Iphigenia and I were then invited to the city, and the humungous limo picked us up at eight o’clock in the morning. When we arrived in the office on Madison Avenue, a dozen people had gathered in a conference room with a long mahogany table and leather chairs. My dad was there, too. Max Russo wore a black outfit that made him look like the hit man in
Godfather Part II,
the one who tries to suffocate the old Jewish mobster with a pillow, and gets shot.

Max licked his liver lips. “Billy, we’re developing a new marketing campaign for a hard candy called Fruities. Isn’t that a great name?”

“It’s okay.”

He seemed nervous, as if monkey snacking history might not repeat itself. Harris Garth, the young marketing director of the food company that owned Fruities, was one of the people watching.

But Iphigenia and I went through our act with the same result. Harris Garth smiled, and his gang of kiss-asses applauded and cheered. Everybody fawned over me.

Afterwards my dad and I went to his law firm, which occupied the fortieth and forty-first floor of a modern steel-and-glass building, so that from my dad’s corner office you could look out over most of downtown Manhattan. Drawings by Georgia O’Keefe hung on the walls, and my dad sat behind a teakwood desk that seemed to stretch halfway to Battery Park. He asked me what I thought about doing the commercial for Fruities.

“Will I have to say stupid things, Dad?”

“Probably.”

“Stuff like, ‘Fruities is better than Life-Savers and better than the sourballs you buy in a big bag for ninety-nine cents at Wal-Mart.’?”

“The implication will be there. That’s why they’re going to pay you, Billy.”

“To lie?”

“To make a statement that might or might not be true but that sounds reasonable. Lawyers do it all the time.”

“Max Russo is a creep.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I feel it in my bones.”

“Be specific, Billy.”

“I think he’d cheat you if he had a way to do it. He’s insincere. Superficial.”

“He’s very good at what he does.”

“I don’t think I want to do it with him,” I said.

My dad looked surprised. “Max’s group has put quite a bit of time and effort into this project so far.”

“Is that a good reason for me to work with people I don’t like? And to do something that’s against my principles?”

He blinked, and his intelligent face, the eyes now blue as steel, went through several changes of expression, as if he were solving complex mathematical equations and at the same time outlining a college course on ethics. At the end of it he said, “No, son, it’s a bad reason. And I’ll tell them tomorrow that it’s not going to happen.”

So it looked as if Iphigenia wasn’t going to make me rich.

But if my dad had been clairvoyant, that monkey would have been on her way to a zoo the next day.

Chapter 7

“I’m flying to Washington this morning,” my mom said, consulting her Palm Pilot. “A meet with congresswomen who are going up against Big Tobacco. And a client offered your dad a ticket today to the World Series game at Yankee Stadium. Isn’t that fabulous? Inez has the day off — she’s visiting her brother in Great Neck. Will you be all right on your own, Billy?”

“Fine,” I said, barely able to contain my joy.