A Changed Man (41 page)

But the queasiness stops instantly when he finds Chloe waiting for him outside school. She leaves the kids she’s talking to and comes over to Danny and, with everyone watching, hooks her arm over his shoulder. Her arm feels smooth and warm and smells like lemonade.

“What’s going on?” Danny asks.

“You’re famous,” Chloe tells him. “Everyone’s saying you were on
Chandler
and you, like, helped save this Holocaust victim from a Nazi.”

“Really?” Danny needs to sound neutral.

“Everyone’s saying you ran up and helped warn everybody—”

Where did that part come from? Danny shuts his eyes and counts to ten as he fights the urge to tell her the truth. The kids will find out sooner or later, and his fifteen minutes of fame will be over. No more fans lined up to watch him arrive, no more Chloe’s arm around his shoulder.

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” Danny says. He and Chloe crack up.

Danny and Chloe sweep into school, and the student body makes way. In homeroom, he gets a note asking him to show up third period in Mr. Armstrong’s office. Don’t they know he’s a hero? They can’t torture him now. They’ll have a schoolwide prison riot.

Naturally, Graber and Armstrong know.

“We’re so proud of you,” says Armstrong. “It’s such an honor for the school.”

Like Chloe, they seem to think that Danny helped protect Meyer Maslow with his courage and quick thinking. Maybe that’s what people want to believe. Danny’s not going to correct them. He’ll let them go on thinking it for as long as it takes for them to forget that anyone ever said the word
suspension.
They’re not going to change their minds and resuspend him when the truth comes out.

“Isn’t it amazing,” says Armstrong, “when someone changes so completely.” Does he mean Vincent or Danny? “And when so many good things happen as a result.”

“Like what?” says Danny. “What good things?”

“Like your mom speaking at graduation.”

Danny will pay for his rescue. Somehow his mother will shame him. She’ll get goopy and sentimental. She’ll say something about
him.
Or she’ll rattle on and make no sense, like she does when she’s nervous. Everyone will be wanting to laugh and desperately trying not to.

Danny won’t let that happen. He’ll make Mom go over every word. Line by line, sentence by sentence, he’ll do damage control in advance.

Mrs. Graber’s mouth is moving. “And what’s also exciting is that your mom has promised that Mr. Nolan will attend and say a few words to the graduates.”

No one has informed them that Vincent has disappeared. Mr. Nolan has stepped away from his desk. Can I take a message? Maybe he will show up, after all. Maybe Mom has some ace up her sleeve that she’s not revealing yet.

“I thought juniors don’t come to graduation,” Danny mumbles. “Usually there isn’t room. They’re glad if we don’t take up extra seats—” He can tell this isn’t flying.

“Danny,” says David Armstrong. “We know you’ll want to be there, to support and celebrate your mother’s achievements. Plus we can’t help thinking that, after that paper you wrote, you’d be one of the students who would benefit most from hearing what your mother and Vincent Nolan have to say.” Armstrong can’t resist one last dig at the Hitler essay.

Okay. Let’s see how much they want a graduation speaker. “So what about my paper? What’s the deal with that?”

Graber and Armstrong look at each other. Neither hypocrite wants to touch this. Armstrong’s the boss, so Graber gets to deliver the news. “Both of us read it over. And you know…we began to think that maybe we’d misread it. In fact, you made some intriguing points….”

“So, like, what grade do I get?”

Mrs. Graber glances at Armstrong again. “We were thinking a B-minus.”

“I need a B to pass,” Danny says.

Graber and Armstrong exchange one last look.

“It’ll count as a B,” Armstrong says.

I
N THE
J
EAN
M
OULIN
C
ONFERENCE
R
OOM
, Meyer thinks of its
namesake, a hero of the French Resistance, a brave man at a time when courage meant something besides keeping a poker face while Elliot Green lectures you on the liability issues likely to arise from the mayhem that erupted on
Chandler. Mayhem
is a lawyer word.
Aggravated mayhem.
Elliot warns them about how dire the situation could be if Raymond sues and some nutcase rightwing group fronts him the cash for a hotshot attorney.
Dire
is another legal term, which translates roughly as
money.
All their hard work will be for nothing. Which is dire, all right.

Everyone’s looking at Meyer. Depending on him to be brave. Hasn’t he been brave enough? He’s survived Hitler, lost his family, nearly died five times. He’s worked like a dog, written three books, lived seventy years on the planet so he can sit here and be read the riot act by some ambulance chaser. Meyer reminds himself that Elliot cares about the foundation. What happened isn’t Elliot’s fault. Elliot’s trying to help.

Elliot says, “Get me up to speed here. Has anyone heard from our friend Mr. Nolan?”

“No one’s seen him since the show,” says Roberta. It’s been Roberta’s job to put everyone off when the press calls for Vincent. And it turns out that Roberta is better at her job than anyone suspected. God knows what she’s telling people. But for the moment it’s working.

“Thank you, Roberta,” says Elliot. “That much I know. I hate to say those four little words:
I told you so.
I warned you people the night of the benefit dinner. Though I guess by then it was too late. I should have brought it up after that first night I met Nolan at Meyer’s. Frankly, I took one look at your pal, and I knew the guy was trouble. Hell, I’ve done public defender work. And you, Meyer, you with your famous understanding of human nature, why didn’t you see this coming? The guy’s a wild card. A psycho. It was just a matter of time before he lost it and beat the crap out of someone.”

“Just for the record,” Meyer says wearily, “Vincent didn’t lose it. He was defending me. Or anyway, so he thought.”

Elliot sighs. “We all know what happened. Vincent continued whaling on his cousin for a good while after it was clear that you were not in danger. It won’t take Clarence Darrow to make a jury see that, especially if they subpoena the complete footage and not the sanitized crap they aired after the producers decided they weren’t
Geraldo
and were taking the high road.”

“Excuse me,” says Roberta. “But down here in the trenches, we’re thrilled with the ‘sanitized crap.’ Elliot, do you know what this would have done to the foundation if they’d shown it unedited? If our donors saw what really happened? And just in case you’re curious, Meyer’s book hit eighty-four on Amazon right after the program aired.”

She’s right. Had Chandler shown the whole fight, it would have been quite a challenge for Bonnie to raise money for the One Heart program. Even now, there’s a strong chance that Laura Ticknor might hear gossip. To say nothing of what will happen if Vincent is gone for good.

Meyer just wishes Roberta hadn’t mentioned his book. He’d wanted the sales, the attention. But the price they’ve paid has given him yet more reason to be ashamed of his petty ambition. He should have known that Vincent’s appearance on
Chandler
might lead to a dangerous brush with his past. He should have known? He
did
know. Meyer let it happen.

“Well, I stand corrected,” Elliot says. “What’s a broken jaw compared to a best-seller?” Roberta’s the object of Elliot’s spite, but Meyer is caught in the crossfire. So this is what Meyer’s come to—taking instruction disguised as legal advice from a moral midget.

Meyer says, “Elliot, please. I don’t have the time or patience, at my age, to be reprimanded by a…malpractice attorney.”

Elliot sucks in his breath. Meyer wishes he hadn’t said that. Elliot’s working for them for free. And now if Raymond sues, they might not even have an attorney. In one sentence, Meyer has undermined Elliot’s purpose, which is to prove he’s not a lawyer joke, but a man of principle and conscience.

“Look, Meyer. I understand that having the guy come at you must have been pretty unnerving, especially considering your age, your experience. What you went through. I’m sure it brought back memories you’d rather not recall. But that was then, this is now.
Now
is the fact that your Nazi pal broke the guy’s nose and jawbone. Now is a suit potentially big enough to take down the foundation.”

If Meyer lets this go any further, things might get uglier until Elliot
does
walk out and leave them to their own devices. Meyer, Bonnie, and Roberta stare down at their pencils and pads, pretending to take notes, anything to avoid eye contact with Elliot or one another.

There’s no point consulting Bonnie. She’s been a basket case since
Chandler.
She’s frantic about Vincent. Everybody is. But it’s Bonnie who jumps highest whenever the phone rings. It’s beginning to seem likely that Irene was right about the two of them being somehow…involved. Why would Bonnie get into something like that? Maybe it’s true that, after all, women think with their hormones.

Bonnie has instructed the front desk that if Vincent calls and asks for her, Anita should ring through, no matter what. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here. She’d be in her office, hovering over her phone.

“Nobody’s heard from him?” Bonnie asks. No one bothers to answer.

It seems that Chandler interrogated his entire staff without finding out how Vincent slipped through security and out of the studio. And nobody has any idea how, by the time Bonnie and her sons got home, Vincent could have beaten them back to Bonnie’s house, picked up his belongings, and left, removing every trace of himself, as if he were never there. Could he have hired a taxi? Where did he go from Bonnie’s? The police—they aren’t idiots—are refusing to treat this as a missing persons case. Unless Raymond presses charges, which is the last thing they want, the cops won’t even try to look for Vincent.

Vincent’s vanishing act is easier for Meyer to comprehend than it must be for the others. Meyer understands disappearance. He owes his survival to how good he got at slipping through the cracks. So he has to respect Vincent for that, no matter how much trouble it causes, no matter how immature and self-involved and irresponsible Vincent’s being, no matter how inconvenient and damaging it is for the foundation.

Meyer misses Vincent. He wishes he were here now. If he were, Meyer would give him hell for resorting to violence. But someone had to step in. Raymond was coming toward him. He wishes Vincent had stopped short of breaking his cousin’s jaw.

Meyer’s surprised to see that he’s drawn a doodle on his pad, a childish sketch of an ear. A hieroglyphic message from his unconscious: He needs to get his hearing checked! Because he can only process fragments of what Elliot’s saying, thin peaks of anxiety and aggression surfacing through the steady stream of caution, catastrophe, and complaint.

“Contusion…lacerations…” Elliot sees, in his crystal ball, a magical army of personal injury lawyers about to rise up, each one promising a fortune to Raymond and his wife. Already there have been threats to sue
Chandler,
the network, Brotherhood Watch. The sharks beginning to circle them are hungry and energetic.

Maybe the reason Meyer can’t hear is that he doesn’t want to hear Elliot repeating, “As your attorney, I feel that I should warn you that this could get expensive.”

Meaning what? Legal fees? Is some lawyer planning to buy another BMW suing a nonprofit foundation, or defending it from a punk Nazi claiming that a lumpy nose and broken jaw will spoil his handsome face and compromise his ability to make a living? No one
made
this guy come on
Chandler
and threaten Meyer.

Finally Meyer rouses himself. “They haven’t got a case. Millions of people saw the guy go after me. Vincent was protecting me. A reformed skinhead saving a Holocaust survivor from his Nazi attacker. Come on. My God, Elliot, you’d think something like that would be an open-and-shut case. A case
anyone
could win.”

After a silence Elliot says, “Right. Well…we plan to start reviewing the tapes soon. Because I know that’s what you
saw,
Meyer. And we plan to argue that’s what Vincent saw. But it’s not at all clear. The question is how close Raymond was to you, whether he meant to harm you. And then the minor related matter of whether shredding the guy’s face was excessive. And Vincent disappearing doesn’t exactly help our case.”

Meyer knows beyond a doubt that Raymond intended to hit him. Only Meyer saw the look that Raymond meant especially for him. If only Vincent had waited till everyone saw what Meyer saw. If only he’d put his cousin in a headlock instead of beating him senseless in the time it took security to run over and pull them apart. Where the hell
was
security? Drinking rum in the Green Room. The same poison they’d plied Meyer and Vincent with. Maybe Vincent drank too much. Meyer hadn’t noticed. He’d been planning what he would say if Chandler asked about his book.

“All right. Let’s take it one step at a time.” Elliot’s all business again, moving right along through his competent, professional, anal-retentive agenda. “I think we need to establish how much you guys knew about Vincent’s background. His history. Exactly when you learned what and where and when.”

“Like what?” Roberta says warily. No wonder Roberta’s worried. She’s got the biggest mouth. If Roberta knew anything, she’s already shared it with the press.

“Let’s start with tossing the old lady in the pool. The history of violence. The anger management class.”

“All news to me,” says Roberta.

Meyer winces and shakes his head. Why does no one understand? The old lady must have provoked him. Anyway, according to what Vincent said on
Chandler
—and even after all that’s happened, Meyer believes him—the woman is alive and well and perhaps a better person for the lesson Vincent taught her about how not to treat the pool guy. Vincent rescued her right away. And if that’s the worst thing he’s ever done, how does that stack up against the money he’s raised, the publicity he’s gotten, the good work he’s done for Brotherhood Watch? The good work he would have kept doing if this…incident hadn’t happened. Meyer should have listened to the instinct warning him that going on
Chandler
was a bad idea.

“Bonnie would have known about it. She knows Vincent best.” Meyer means it as a compliment. Bonnie got closest to Vincent. She’s given most of herself. So why does she look as if he’s slapped her? Bonnie must think he’s accusing her of not having been awake, of falling down on the job. Or of getting too close to Vincent. That’s a possibility, too.

“I never heard about the pool incident until
Chandler.
” Bonnie sounds a little dreamy. Tranquilized, perhaps. “Are we sure it happened?”

“It happened,” Elliot says. “I tracked down Nolan’s former employer, who put me onto a Mrs. Regina Browner. No charges were ever filed. He wrote her some cockamamie letter about an allergy to chlorine, and she went for it. But look, it’s good you didn’t know, Bonnie. The less you all knew, the better. I mean, if you ask me, you should have had a record of every time the guy raised his arm and said Heil Hitler. But now that this has happened, it looks better if you didn’t know. Which, I gather, you didn’t. Right?”

“Right,” says Bonnie.

“He’s an unstable guy,” Elliot says. “That much should have been clear.”

“Is there more we didn’t know?” asks Bonnie.

“Not that I’m aware of. For now,” says Elliot. “Just what Raymond mentioned on
Chandler.
The money, the drugs, the truck, the old lady.” He holds up his palm. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know if you knew more. No one needs to hear about it.”

“What kind of lawyerly ethics are those, Elliot?” says Meyer. “Are you telling us to lie?”

“Of course not,” Elliot says. “I’ve got my career to consider. You think I want to get disbarred because you let some skinhead sell you a bill of goods? I’m not counseling you to lie. You just don’t have to say everything.”

“Which is lying.” Why is Meyer debating Elliot?

“Which is being smart.” Let Elliot have the last word. It’s part of Meyer’s penance. But what is he repenting for? For devoting his life to peace, for saving innocent people? For never relaxing, for working himself to the bone, when he could have done nothing? He could have done other things. Years ago he turned down an endowed chair at Brandeis. They offered him a fortune for teaching three months a year.

“Look,” says Elliot. “Let’s talk about ends instead of means. Let’s say it comes down to our feeding someone to the wolves. And let’s say that someone is Nolan.”

“Feeding someone to the wolves to save ourselves is not what our work is about.” Meyer hates how preachy he sounds, but he needs to be clear.

Elliot pauses to acknowledge that Meyer has spoken, but he doesn’t seem to have listened. “So the important question is: Do we cut our Nazi friend loose? Do we let him take the heat? Or do we jeopardize the work and the financial health—the survival, maybe—of the entire foundation? We don’t have to decide right now. But let’s agree it could happen.”

Meyer’s problem isn’t Elliot. Meyer’s problem is slippage. His problem is what he is doing with the rest of his one and only life. People are being imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs, and Meyer is sitting on his behind and discussing theoreticals with shysters like Elliot.

Thinking of prison reminds him of something he read this morning, a news release in the stack of papers he’d found on his desk. The story concerned a Turkish jail where there are now nineteen Kurdish leaders in custody, men and women, young and old….

So fine, let Elliot drone on. At the end of the day Meyer’s real work will be finding a way to free those nineteen prisoners. Which means what? Raising money, making phone calls, hosting dinners. A cycle of wasted hours and days and, if he’s lucky, years. Which brings him full circle back to Elliot and this room.