Hardscrabble Road (36 page)

If there was more to the sentence, he didn’t catch the words. The secretary looked embarrassed. Kate looked amused.

“Who is that?” she asked him. “That doesn’t sound like your regular run of client.”

“That’s Ellen Harrigan, Drew Harrigan’s widow. And she isn’t the regular run of client; at the moment she isn’t a client at
all. It’s her husband we represented. Although I suppose we’ll get stuck with her.”

“Why?”

“Because if you’re going to do work for the Republican Party, then you’ve got to accommodate its friends, and Drew Harrigan
was a great friend of the Republican Party.”

“Drew Harrigan is dead.”

“His wife knows how to make herself heard. Listen, Kate, I’m sorry for this. I’m sorry for the noise. I’m sorry for the circumstances.
Let me have the dining room send up some lunch and we’ll try to talk and avoid the background noise.”

“I don’t need lunch,” Kate said. “But I was thinking. Can the dining room still do tea, real tea, the right way? I could use
a pot of Earl Grey tea.”

“I can get you that.” He flipped on the intercom and asked the assistant to have the dining room send up a large pot of Earl
Grey and a club sandwich with mineral water, and then turned back to Kate. It was odd seeing her here, in person. He’d spent
decades watching her on the evening news, pro bono defense attorney in this case, head of the Justice Project in that one,
a movement lawyer, a Clarence Darrow of the social justice wars. He hadn’t expected her to look just the way she had on the
day she walked out on him. He knew she no longer wore the good wool tweed suits she used to
buy at Lord & Taylor and Bonwit Teller. He knew she hadn’t switched to Brooks Brothers like the women who were now partners
in his firm. She’d changed her hair. She had a good cut, but none of the elaborate curl and comb that had been de rigueur
for the wives of the men who were candidates for partnership when they had both been young. The problem was, she very much
looked the way he remembered her looking. She had a remarkable face. On the most elementary level, it didn’t change.

“You look good,” he said. “You always look younger than I expect you to.”

“Well, that’s good, I suppose. You look miserable. Is that because of our friend the canary down the hall?”

“Sort of. It’s a new world, you know. I don’t think I’ve caught up to it.”

“Is Mrs. Harrigan going to continue with her accusations against Sherman Markey?”

“I don’t know,” Neil said. “I suppose she might. She’s desperate to deflect suspicion from herself. That’s what today has
been about. She gave a press conference. Did you know about that?”

“I saw it.”

“We set it up for her.” Neil sighed. “We’ve got to do these things. It’s some kind of Faustian bargain—no, whatever is the
opposite of a Faustian bargain. Faust got knowledge and wisdom out of his bargain with the devil. We only got power. And it’s
an attenuated sort of power. It means being completely and utterly helpless when it comes to the most important things.”

“It’s useful to have, though. Power.”

“Of course it is. And I’d rather have the mess we have than be back in the sixties and stuck with the Democrats. Franklin
Delano Roosevelt nearly ruined everything that was good about this country. But it’s as if we turned a corner somewhere. It’s
as if there isn’t room for civilization anymore. It’s all pork rinds and NASCAR and kitsch religion.”

“Well, you know the word ‘kitsch.’ You wouldn’t have, thirty years ago.”

There was a knock on the door, and Neil yelled for whoever it was to come in. It was the waiter from the dining room, bringing
a tray, just like room service in the best kind of hotel. The teapot was made of silver and as large as a samovar. There were
no tea bags in sight.

Neil waited until the waiter had set everything out on the desk—his club sandwich, his mineral water—and then positioned the
cart near Kate, so that she’d have a place to put her tea. Then he waited while the waiter went out the door and closed it
again. He had no idea why he had waited at all. He had nothing to say to Kate that couldn’t be heard by everybody in the office,
and most people out.

“I always wondered how you were surviving in the new Republican Party,” Kate said. “It didn’t seem like your kind of thing,
really.”

“I don’t know what being a conservative means if it doesn’t mean preserving standards, standing up for classical music against
the onslaught of cheap popular noise, standing up for Henry James and Jane Austen against ungrammatical techno-thrillers and
children’s books about boy wizards who ride broomsticks. It’s almost impossible to find a classical music station on the radio
anymore, and do you know why? Because of the things we did, because of deregulation. So we spend a lot of energy fending off
the people in our own party who want to do away with public broadcasting, because here we are, with conservatives in charge,
and without public broadcasting we can’t get conservative art and conservative values on the airwaves.”

“For goodness sake, Neil. You people have spent two decades telling the whole country that classical music is liberal art
and liberal values and everybody who listens to it is a stuck-up snob who wants to destroy the American way of life. What
did you expect to happen?”

“I didn’t expect to spend two decades telling the country that people who listen to classical music are snobs. Not to put
too fine a point on it, I thought that was what liberals did. Think that classical music was for snobs, I mean.”

“Well, it’s like you said. It’s a different world.”

“I know it is. I hold out in the hope that there will come a day when we’ll have so much power, we’ll be so thoroughly entrenched,
that we won’t have to pander to those people anymore. We’ll be able to come right out and be what we are. In the meantime,
I’m comforted by the fact that it’s still our money. The party strategy people can’t go too far in that direction, or we yank
the money.”

“The question is, are you going to yank the accusation that Sherman Markey supplied Drew Harrigan with those pills?”

“I don’t know,” Neil said. “I don’t know what the canary wants to do, and I don’t know how much of what’s about to happen
we’re in control of. The police aren’t going to stop looking at Markey just because we’re no longer interested in him.”

“No, but it’s likely they’d stop looking at him if you people stopped contending he’d done the deed. Drew Harrigan’s dead,
Neil. And you know as well as I do that Sherman Markey is in no shape to do all the things Harrigan says he did. Or any of
them.”

“Is? Does that mean you’ve found him?”

“Sorry,” Kate said. “Is or was. No, we haven’t found him. And yes, I do know that that means he might be dead. My concern
is with what happens if he isn’t.”

“And what happens?”

“He gets handed a murder charge,” Kate said. She looked up from her tea, to the door. “She’s an idiot, obviously. And she’s
tacky, and stupid, and
all the other things Republicans like you can’t stand. But she’s also very well connected, and she’s rich, and she’s just
gone on television and behaved like Joe McCarthy naming names in the United States Senate to take the heat off herself on
the subject of the very same murder. I don’t trust you. Not any of you. And I don’t want Sherman arrested for murder.”

“Even if he committed it?”

The cup and saucer they had given Kate for her tea were from the antique Royal Doulton set. The cup was sized for someone
who took tea seriously, not as a ladies’ modest substitution for coffee. Kate put the cup into the saucer and sat back.

“Have you ever met Sherman Markey?”

“No,” Neil said. “I’ve seen him on the news. I saw him when he was arrested.”

“He was probably being walked through a bunch of people with his hands behind his back. I haven’t met Sherman Markey either,
but my intern has, and he’s adamant. The man’s hands shake. He’s a longtime drunk. His hands might as well have palsy. From
everything I’ve heard on the news, Drew Harrigan was murdered because somebody dumped out the insides of his prescription
painkillers and refilled them with arsenic. Never mind the fact that with everything I’ve heard about Sherman, he’d be incapable
of getting little pills like that open and shut again. If he tried to fill them with arsenic, he’d get the stuff all over
himself and he’d be dead before he could deliver the load. Sherman Markey didn’t kill Drew Harrigan.”

“Do you think Ellen Harrigan did?”

“I think that I don’t want Ellen Harrigan to get off the hook by plugging it into a sick old homeless man whose only crime
so far was to have done a few chores around Drew Harrigan’s co-op. I don’t want you to use him to help her.”

“Do you really think we’d try to pin a murder on an innocent person just to placate someone like Ellen Harrigan?”

“I think that one thing hasn’t changed since I walked out on you, Neil. I think that the primary business of this place and
all the places like it is to look after the interests of the boys in the club. And the girls. I think you’ll do what you need
to do to make sure your people are untouched, just the way you always have. Thanks for the tea. It’s damned near impossible
to get decent tea in the United States. They don’t know how to make it.”

“Is that what you’re going to do? Walk out on me again? I thought we were talking.”

“We’ve said what we need to say,” Kate said. “And besides, the canary is shrieking again. Lord, doesn’t that woman have a
vocal register anywhere within the range of ordinary human hearing?”

Kate was out of her chair. The cup and saucer were back on the cart. She got her briefcase off the floor—Good God, Neil thought,
I didn’t even see her bring that in—and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.

“It really was good to see you, Neil. And it’s oddly comforting to realize that you really haven’t changed.”

Then she was gone, and Neil was sitting by himself in the big, high-ceilinged room, listening to Ellen Harrigan’s voice keening
and scratching in the distance. If it was up to him, he would get rid of her. He wouldn’t even consider taking her on as a
client. If it was up to him, he’d get rid of all of them, the business people who’d gotten rich in the last thirty years dealing
cars or oil or everything in the world at bargain basement prices, the owners of the chains and the superstores and the fast-food
places, the people who never went to college and were proud of it, or who went and had no use for any of the things they were
supposed to learn there except maybe for accounting. He’d dump the hard-eyed women with their treacly stories about Good Families
and Daily Miracles and Traditional Values. He’d dump the fat, soft pastors from Southern churches who wanted to sue the Library
of Congress for carrying copies of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, and their fat, soft wives with their endless
tales about the joys of washing dishes and cleaning out closets for the sake of their families. He’d get rid of all the fat
people altogether, all of them, every single one of those people who ate too much bad food and covered it up with polyester
and rayon from Wal-Mart and J. C. Penney. He’d make white Christian music illegal and Touched by an Angel unconstitutional.
He’d do something, but he would not represent Ellen Harrigan for any reason at all.

Of course, life being what it was, he would represent Ellen Harrigan, and he’d go down the hall and calm her down himself
when he was finally finished with his sandwich.

T
here were now copies
of Ellen Harrigan’s list everywhere. The media had them, photocopied by Neil Savage’s office and distributed at the press
conference Gregor thought he ought to have seen coming. The police and the District Attorney’s Office had them, photocopied
by Rob Benedetti and sent around only after it became clear how far Ellen Harrigan was willing to go. Gregor Demarkian had
several, he didn’t know why. People kept putting the list into his hands, as if it were desperately important that he, above
all people, should know who was on it. The problem was, he didn’t know even now that he knew. Some of the names were familiar,
like that of Neil Savage himself, an inclusion that made Gregor wonder if Savage had read the damned thing before letting
Mrs. Harrigan pass it out to half of creation. Most of the names meant nothing at all to him. Who was Alison Standish? The
address and phone number next to her name were of an office on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, which was going
to make the administration over there as happy as that snowball in hell. People kept urging him to look the thing over, but
he had. He had. He’d sat in the waiting room outside Rob Benedetti’s office now for three hours, studying the list and thinking
that the thing he wanted most was to get out and have some lunch. He would have had more autonomy if he was being held on
a charge. At least in that case, he would have had the right to an attorney, the right to habeas corpus, and the right to
appear before a judge.

What he really wanted was not lunch, but lunch with Tibor, in a quiet place, where they could talk. Tibor might or might not
have seen the list— whether he watched the news on any given day depended on what else was going on on that day, and he found
a lot of things more interesting than the news—but he would most certainly recognize at least one name on it, and it would
interest him. It interested Gregor, too. What did not interest him was sitting in this chair, holding this list, watching
television from a set screwed
nto the waiting room’s ceiling, and wondering what the hell Rob Benedetti was doing now.

He rummaged around in his clothes and got out the little cell phone Bennis had given him. There was a large part of his brain
that believed that nobody could hear him speak through a phone whose body came down barely to his chin when he held it in
his ear, but he persevered. It had always worked before. Tibor picked up on the other end, and Gregor tried to whisper.

“Tibor? What are you doing right now?”

Gregor half expected Tibor to shout and demand that somebody, somewhere, speak, but it didn’t happen. Tibor just said, “Krekor.
I have been hearing about you on the news. Where are you and what are you doing?”