The Unnamed (17 page)

Tim waited for his order with great anticipation. He was much hungrier than he thought, and this was something he had wanted a long time. There were entire walks whose source of bitterness was not the pain, nor the mystery, nor the ruination, but the simple fact of passing a vendor’s cart as it issued the agonizing aroma of unattainable meat. Walking hungry with no way of stopping played tricks on the mind, as those who die in deserts know when they mistake sand for water. He had fixed for hours on images of charred shanks turning on a spit over a flickering fire and of tearing hocks of roasted meat directly from the bone, blisters of blood sizzling on the surface of the skin. There was nothing civilized about him then. Just the instinct, primordial and naked, for food and fire.

The woman handed him the tightly foiled sandwich with a ration of napkins, and he realized he had no patience for taking it back to the office. He stood against a brick wall and, out of the way of foot traffic, tore away the foil at one end. The sandwich was hot as ore in his hand. His first bite of meat and juice and yogurt sauce and onions and diced pickles nearly made the deprivation of such a thing worth it. The sandy pita was a full-bodied pleasure. He took large bites that forced him to chew dramatically. He was eating the steam itself.

He ordered a second kebab and walked over to the courtyard on the avenue side of the street. There he sat on a smooth roseate ledge that sloped gently toward the sidewalk and watched the other lunchgoers who sat eating around a decommissioned fountain among the tall buildings. As he ate he overheard two men talking. He had passed them on his way to sitting down. They were just on the other side of the ledge from him, reclining against the wall. They were homeless, or lived in a shelter or in the tunnels, and they each had a bottle in a bag within arm’s reach. One of them owned a wheelbarrow, which had been pushed sideways against the wall, out of the way. It was rounded over with clothes and plastic bags, partially bungeed with a blue tarp. Tim stopped chewing to listen. They were speaking English, but he could not understand what they were saying. He got only the tone of complaint. He understood that the speaker had been wronged in some way, and that the injustice was more than just a minor slight. But as for the words themselves…

“They corset cheese to blanket trinket for the whole nine. Bungle commons lack the motherfucker to razz Mahoney. Talk, knickers! Almost osmosis for the whole nine. Make snow, eye gone ain’t four daze Don.”

“Uh-huh,” said the second man.

“And sheer traps ton elevate the chord dim. Eyes roaring make a leap sight socket.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sheeeeee-it,” said the first man.

Then they fell into silence.

On the day he set the motion on Mike Kronish’s desk, he found himself in Bryant Park at lunchtime. He walked up to a kiosk where he purchased a turkey wrap and then made his way toward one of the green tables laid out in the shade. Under his feet, he sensed the final crunch of fallen leaves. He was mistaken—it was the opposite season for turning leaves—but he was too preoccupied to notice. He had but one thing on his mind: had Kronish seen the motion, and if so, what did he think?

He sat down, brushing off the table a languid-moving bee, and unsealed the sandwich from its plastic-wrap cocoon. He kept his eye on the BlackBerry. The day had acquired an edge of cold, but there were still plenty of people about, as if defiance could force spring to act appropriately. He paid no attention to their conversations. From the first bite of his sandwich to the last, he ate mechanically and without pleasure. The ache in his jaw told him he had finished. The duty of lunch had been acquitted. Shortly after, as if his stare at the mute BlackBerry all at once exerted an actual force in the world, Mike Kronish called. He recognized the number lit up on-screen and his heart began to flutter. His heart had done the same nearly twenty-five years earlier when, as a junior associate, a call from a senior partner, no matter how insignificant, was a mortal quest to prove one’s competence. He answered reluctantly in a voice he did not recognize. “Hello?”

“What’s this you put on my desk, Tim?”

“Who is this? Mike?”

“This motion for summary judgment. You write this motion?”

“Did you see that? I left that on your desk.”

“Who wrote it?”

“I did.”

“What for?”

“Oh, because, did you read it?”

“What would I do that for?”

“What for?”

“Who in their right mind would submit a motion for summary judgment in Keibler?”

“Because the strategy.”

“What strategy?”

“I’ve been following the case, Mike. I know it back and front. We both know sooner or later.”

“What do we both know?”

“Sooner or later, you’d want a motion for summary judgment in Keibler and there’s nobody can write that motion like I can.”

“First of all,” said Kronish. He paused to clear his throat. “One, perhaps you don’t know Keibler like you think you know Keibler. Keibler comes down to credibility disputes, and no judge is going to grant summary judgment when there’s a credibility dispute. Two, if you know Keibler, you know the Ellison deposition, and if you know Ellison then you know no, no motion for summary judgment. Three, Second Circuit last year heard Horvath, which is Keibler if you switch the Swiss concern for an Israeli, and the Second Circuit said no, in such cases, never summary judgment.”

“I forgot about Ellison,” he said.

“And Horvath?”

He had never heard of Horvath. He must have been out of commission when the Second Circuit decided Horvath. “I forgot about Horvath,” he said.

“Just switch the nationalities with Horvath and you get Keibler, and now there’s precedent not to grant summary judgment in such cases. So what strategy are you talking about?”

“I was thinking there were differences between the two.”

“Four, you don’t work on my team, Tim. You do and you don’t, you understand?”

“Mike,” he said.

“You hear what I’m saying, Tim?”

“Am I going to be a staff attorney for the rest of my life if I stay at Troyer, Mike? Or is there some way that I could get my old job back? I’d like to get my old job back, Mike. I’m healthy again. I’ve got credentials, I’ve got experience. I just want to know it’s something possible.”

Kronish’s silence on the other end was a torment.

“You say you know Keibler, is that right?”

“Back and front, Mike.”

“Not if you’re writing a motion for summary judgment you don’t,” he said. “Let’s stick to the game plan, Tim, okay?”

He sat for a long time at the flimsy green table in Bryant Park. He wasn’t disappointed. The more he thought about it, the more he was relieved. He recalled the old bodhisattva he’d seen years ago who had warned him against too much focus on the incoming message. He had given over his entire morning to waiting for word from Mike Kronish about a motion he’d never meant to show anyone, whose purity was now compromised. A morning of utter anxiety, stealing right from under him the pleasures of the day. His anxiety had taken him out of the world when one of the things he was trying not to forget, as the memory of his time in the room faded and his old ambitions and preoccupations reasserted themselves, was how to remain in the world. Giving that motion to Kronish and awaiting word of his benediction by way of the BlackBerry had thrust him into the ether of anticipation, a cyberstate where time passed unattended and the world, so long denied during his recurrence, was discarded for the dubious reward of a phone call or email that couldn’t arrive soon enough and would deliver only grief when it did. He had to have resolve. He couldn’t let himself get bogged down again. Jane was coming home tomorrow. She needed his help. How could he give her the attention she deserved if Kronish had called and made him a partner on the spot? He’d be checking his BlackBerry five hundred times a day. What kind of life was that?

As these thoughts came over him, he started paying attention for the first time that day. The wind had picked up and he suddenly felt his frostbitten nerves start to ring in their sheaths like cold bells. The neutered sun cast shadows and just as quickly took them away. My God, he thought, it was already half past one.

He stood and began to walk, once again crunching his way through dead leaves, but now, his attention restored, he saw his error. They weren’t leaves at all but rather a thin blanket of dead bees. He lifted his feet as if to avoid stepping on them, but they were everywhere. They thinned out only when he reached the street. He looked back in amazement—at the hundreds, the thousands of delicate brown and yellow carapaces. In a city of odd sights, it took the prize.

Not long after his return to Troyer and on the heels of inviting Frank to dinner, he visited R.H. in prison. It was the one thing he wanted to do least and the most pressing of all the business that had awaited his recovery. It did not go well.

The prisoner, stripped of suit and tie and looking old beyond his years, did not speak. For the longest time R.H. simply remained silent behind the wire-reinforced glass that separated them. He wore an orange jumpsuit with short sleeves. Tim saw the hair on his arms, prominent swirls of gray hair that had been covered over by bespoke suits for all the years he had known him. This small laying-bare pierced his heart. Another noticeable change had taken hold of the hair on R.H.’s head. The dye had washed out, leaving the hair a dull gray. It wavered thin and airy like a loose clump of field pollen. With a regal reluctance R.H. picked up the phone. He held it to his ear and stared at Tim with a kind of catatonic intent, sitting forward and saying nothing. Tim began to speak. Trying to interpret how his words were being received, he was not encouraged. Was R.H. angry at him past reclamation, or was he simply traumatized by his circumstances beyond the niceties of human interaction? He found he had no choice but to put the question out of mind and persevere, knowing that such perseverance was itself a kind of penance.

He admitted that Jane was not ill and never had been. He had lied about her sickness to cover up his own. He had fallen ill just prior to the trial, and the instinct that came naturally to him as a man too proud for his own good was to cover it up. Cover up all hint of weakness, cover it up or he was finished. Essentially, though it was not the first time he had struggled with this particular illness, he was scared out of his wits: scared of failing R.H. at a dire moment, yes, but most of all, scared of losing control over his professional life. Scared for himself first, R.H. second. It was important for him to admit that now.

“I had an option,” he said, as R.H. bore two clean holes through the glass with his silent and inscrutable stare, holes that at any moment might begin to smoke. “I could have recused myself from the start and thrown all my efforts into helping Mike Kronish take over the case. Would that have gotten you an acquittal? I don’t know. Could I have gotten you an acquittal if I had stayed healthy? There was a time when I thought I knew the answer to that. But the truth is, I don’t know. I have learned to have less conviction.”

He believed that R.H. was innocent of killing his wife, but the man on the other side of the glass, almost waxlike in his stillness, staring at him with cold, flinty eyes,
that
man seemed capable of killing.

“You had him,” he said.

“What?”

R.H.’s head did not move. “You had him.”

“Had who?”

“The man who killed Evelyn,” he said. “You had him.”

“Are you talking about the man with the knife?”

“You had him.”

“Do we really know,” he said, “can we say with absolute certainty that that man is the one who killed her?”

“You had him and you let him go. He was right there in front of you and you let him go.”

“At the time, R.H., I didn’t know—”

“The one guy who could have exonerated me,” he said. “You let him walk away.”

“I think maybe you’re putting too much faith in—”

“You should have grabbed him,” he interrupted with a rising voice. “Why didn’t you grab the son of a bitch? He’s the only one who knows who did it.
He
did it! And you let him slip through your goddamn fingers! Why couldn’t you grab him?”

R.H. didn’t seem to give a damn for his confession of lies and failures. He blamed Tim for one thing and one thing only. Now it was like an obsession that he had been waiting years to unleash. Tim could hear him just as well through the glass as through the phone.

“Answer me!”

“I think you might be overplaying that man’s role. No one knows for certain that he killed her.”

“He had the murder weapon.”

“It may have been the murder weapon.”

“May have been? May have been?”

His loud voice attracted the attention of the guard standing against the wall. “How could you let him go? How could you walk away? He was my one hope! And you let him go!” He stood up. He screamed into the phone, “You let him go!” He began to beat the glass with the phone. “You let him go!” The guard rushed over.
Thump!
“You let him go!”
Thump thump!
The guard grabbed him from behind and lifted him into the air. The chair went flying as the old man kicked out his legs. One of the kicks landed on the glass. He hung on to the phone as long as he could, until the cord snapped and he and the guard went sailing. “You had him!” he cried through the partition. He threw the phone at the glass as the guard dragged him out of the room. His cries grew more muffled. “You had him! You had him! You had him! You had him!”

When did she go from someone who liked a glass of wine with dinner to the woman with the lights blazing at four a.m.? Trying to do the bills totally blasted. Her nice quiet life had been stalked from behind by alcohol. Who would have guessed? If you were predisposed, or had the gene, or lacked some inner resource, you had to be vigilant or you went down. Four in the morning and she was digging through her purse for a Newport. What was that? She was not that woman. But she was. Oldest story there is, total cliché. Except when it’s your life. When it’s your life it’s not a cliché, it’s real life, real everyday life, just drunk. It came up from behind her and knocked her to her knees. She never expected it, but that’s what happened, it came up from behind. Being a drunk was simple. It was an accident you caught sight of in the rearview mirror, and the car you saw was your own. The intersection where the accident happened, it was the very one you were approaching. When you turned from the mirror to the road in front of you—BAM! you got hit again. And then, once again, you were looking back at it. She was supposed to be on guard her whole life against alcohol? Who knew.