Poles Apart (23 page)

The vegetables were just the appetizers, as it were. The gang of thugs then charged across the street and the hand-to-hand combat began. I saw Little Bo-Peep swinging her shepherd’s crook at one leather-jacketed youth, while Amelia Earhart lowered her goggles over her eyes and started kicking anyone who came near her. Brawn was in the middle of the melee subduing about six opponents at once. Lewis was trying to separate two groups of combatants. The police were wading in with billy clubs a-swinging, but they were vastly outnumbered.

I looked for Megan Cook in the riot and finally located her in the middle of the road, inching around various battles and trying to make it back to the door. But the smoke bomb was still spewing its eponymous contents just in front of the main entrance. She looked scared and still carried her arms up around her head, frantically turning one way, then the other. Without thinking about it, I flew out my front door and dashed down the stairs to my separate entrance. I carefully pushed open my door and there stood Megan Cook having made her way back at least as far as the sidewalk in front of
XY
. I waved to her from my open door.

“Megan! This way!” I shouted above the din. “You’ll be safe in here.”

I held open the door and motioned. She didn’t even hesitate but ran past me and up the carpeted stairs. I slammed the door,
making sure the lock engaged, and followed her up. When I entered my apartment, she was standing just inside the door, still hugging herself and looking very anxious. Her charcoal-grey business suit was smeared with the aromatic entrails of various vegetables. Her hair, no longer tied back, flew madly off in all directions about her shoulders. Overall, she looked as if she’d just escaped from the middle of a violent confrontation with plenty of smoke and compostable organic missiles. I stood in the kitchen, giving her space as she started to calm down.

“Who are you? Have we met? Do you work for Bennington?” she asked, her eyes wide.

Maybe she hadn’t yet started to calm down.

“Hello. I’m Everett Kane, freelance riot chaperone at your service,” I said, hoping to break the ice.

She looked puzzled. No ice was broken.

“Um, just kidding. And no I don’t work for
XY
. I just live above it. This is my apartment,” I explained calmly, keeping my distance from her. “I just saw from my window that things were getting a little out of hand down there, and that you didn’t seem to be too comfortable in the middle of a chaotic clash of protestors.”

“But how did you know my name?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “You called me Megan.”

“Ah. Good question. Well, you see, I was home last night when you spoke to the reporters outside, and you said your name when you introduced yourself – which I understand is common practice when introducing oneself,” I fumbled. “Anyway, I’m pretty
good at remembering names. Um, I’m friends with Lewis Small and Shawna Hawkins, who both work downstairs, if that eases your mind. I was just trying to help,” I added, in my most trustworthy voice.

She seemed to accept what I was saying and that being in a stranger’s apartment high above a riot was somewhat preferable to being back on the street in the middle of it.

“Okay. I guess that kind of fits together,” she replied. “Well, thanks. It was insane out there.”

I just nodded.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“A mickey of vodka with a tequila chaser would be a start, right about now,” she said.

“Sorry, no vodka. But I do have beer.”

“I’ll take one, maybe even two. Thank you.”

By this stage she was no longer gripping herself but had wandered over to the window to see that the mayhem was still in full bloom down below. I handed her a beer I’d poured it into a glass that at least looked semi-clean. Then I stepped back again.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Cheers,” I said, raising my beer, still in the bottle. “If you like, I can walk you down my fire escape into the side alley and then in the loading-bay doors of the club.”

As I said that, I glanced out my kitchen window and saw that the riot had now spilled into the alley. One pair of protestors was exchanging blows on the bottom step of my fire escape.

“Check that,” I said. “That route is, um, not yet available. I guess you’d better sit tight here for a while. I’m sure the police will send reinforcements soon.”

I maintained a fair distance between us in case she was nervous about being here in, you know, a strange man’s apartment. She sat down on the couch while I half-sat, half-leaned on the kitchen table.

“Thanks for helping me out. I haven’t been to too many riots,” she said with a weak smile that still warmed up the room.

“No worries,” I replied. “It looked pretty tense from up here.”

“This is not exactly what I signed up for,” she said.

“Is Mason Bennington downstairs right now?”

“No. He had meetings in New York, but wanted someone here to monitor the so-called community unrest.”

“And you drew the short straw?”

She nodded.

“I seem to be drawing the short straw quite often lately.” She sighed.

“Really, how so?” I asked.

“Never mind. It’s fine,” she replied.

“No, no. Go on. I’m interested,” I said, sneaking a peek out the window again. “It looks like we’ve got some time to kill until the coast is clear.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just that I’m a junior lawyer. It’s my first year
of practice. I really shouldn’t be out on my own, acting as a media spokesperson for my client. It’s obvious to me I’m not ready for that, and I can’t figure out why it’s not obvious to my bosses.”

“I thought junior lawyers always drew the short straws.”

“Well, we do. But that usually means I’m locked in the law library catacombs every day, spelunking for precedents and citations,” she replied. “Not dodging smoke bombs and facing a phalanx of microphones.”

“Wow. That’s quite impressive,” I said.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know too many people who could correctly use both ‘spelunking’ and ‘phalanx’ in the same comment.”

“You like words,” she observed, nodding.

“Yes, I like words,” I agreed. “I’m a freelance writer. Words are what I do.”

“I like words, too.”

“Clearly.”

“Anyway, that aside, I shouldn’t be out on my own, dealing with reporters and speaking for the client. That’s what a partner should be doing, not a first-year associate.”

“What firm are you with again?”

“Mackenzie Martin, in Washington.”

I grabbed my iPad and Googled the firm.

“What are you doing?”

“Just a little quick research.”

I scanned the website, reviewing the “history of the firm” page and the listing of partners.

“Sounds like a respected shop,” I said. “Been around since 1905. Small to mid-sized well-established, blue-chip firm.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she replied.

“Forty lawyers. Twelve partners,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Just a stab in the dark here,” I started, with caution. “I see that only one of the partners is a woman.”

“I know, I know. But they’ve committed to fast-tracking some of the other senior associates so that there’ll be more balance in the coming years.”

“Does the woman partner work on the
XY
file?” I asked.

“No. She’s a trademark and copyright lawyer. That’s not what we need on the Bennington account.”

“So is the senior partner on the file really busy and has to delegate all this stuff to you because he’s got too much on his plate?”

Her wheels were turning, now.

“No. I wouldn’t say so. He’s still taking long Washington lunches,” she said. “He just explains it by claiming he’s giving me a prime opportunity to gain a ton of experience in a very short time.”

“Right. By any chance, are you the only, um, woman lawyer working on the Bennington file?”

This could go south in a hurry. She tilted her head and looked up to the ceiling.

I was about to say something else, but she held her hand up to stop me as she thought a bit more. I left her in silence. She stood up and walked to the other side of the room, her back to me. After a brief pause, she turned to face me.

“Okay, smart guy. So you’re suggesting that I’m all of sudden being asked to punch above my weight on this file because it looks better in public to have a youngish woman defending Mason Bennington? That the ‘optics’ are a lot better than having an old white-haired white man lawyer standing next to the infamous founder of a chain of classy strip clubs. Is that where you’re going with this?”

“I’m not going anywhere with this,” I said, stepping back with my hands raised in surrender. “I was just trying to help you, um, draw some conclusions on the question you, yourself, posed about the kind of work you’ve been assigned lately, you know, by your old white-haired white man lawyer boss.”

She looked at me, hard.

“What’s going on here?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I said. “Nothing. I was just making polite conversation to pass the time until it’s safe to venture downstairs. That’s it.”

She didn’t say anything for a while. But she sat back down and took a few long draws on her beer.

“So what kind of freelance writer are you?”

“A struggling one, I guess you could say,” I admitted. “I write for some rather obscure trade magazines that are well-read by
a devoted but tiny audience. I wanted to do more serious, hard-hitting journalism, you know, for major news outlets, but I’ve just never been able to break into that as a freelancer, or land a full-time reporting gig. Newspapers, as you might have heard, are struggling. Jobs are scarce.”

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Everett Kane.”

“How did you come to live upstairs from, you know, what’s going on down below?”

“I had no idea what was going on down below when I took the apartment a few weeks ago. It was just a construction site then. Not sure I’d have taken it if I’d known. On the other hand, it is a great apartment. I really like it.”

“It’s not bad,” she agreed, turning her head to take it all in.

Her wandering gaze stopped in the kitchen and she stared for quite a long time at the big nut and bolt protruding from my kitchen floor.

“Don’t ask,” I preempted.

I looked outside to see more police than protestors. Two police vans were being loaded, apparently one for each side of the riot. I saw Little Bo-Peep and Amelia Earhart handcuffed together, stepping into the back of one, while several young hoodlums, their wrists secured in plastic tie-wraps, were stepping up into the other. It was all over but the paperwork at the station.

A few minutes later I walked Megan Cook down the stairs.

“Are you staying in town long?” I asked on the landing.

“I’m giving the wait staff a briefing in the morning on recent changes to the liquor code in Florida, but then I’m on my way back to
DC.”

I pushed open the door.

“There you are, Miss Cook!” said Lewis pacing about the sidewalk. “I’ve been worried. I thought we lost you. Mr. B would not have been happy with me if I’d lost his star lawyer!”

Lewis was smiling in relief.

“Sorry, Lewis. It got a little wild there and Mr. Kane, here, came to my rescue. We’ve been waiting it out, upstairs.”

“Hey, mucho thanks, Ever-man,” Lewis said, pumping my hand.

Lewis took her arm and headed through the big wooden doors as they opened.

“See you around, sometime,” I said.

She looked back, smiled, and nodded.

“Thanks for saving me, and for the career counselling,” she said. “I owe you one.”

I nodded once, waved, and headed back up to my apartment. I sat down and after gathering some stats and other information that were readily available online, I wrote a new blog post, my feet massaged by the big vibrating nut below the kitchen table. The words came fast and free. I wrote about women in the workplace. I hit Publish.

The email arrived the next morning at 9:34.