Hardscrabble Road (5 page)

“Good evening, Miss Hallworth,” he said, handing her the coat he hadn’t bothered to put on. Miss Hallworth was black, but
he didn’t mind her. He really wasn’t a candidate for a white sheet. “Is Marian in the office?”

“She’s waiting for you in the conference room.”

Miss Hallworth was taking his coat to the walk-in cedar closet where all the partners’ coats were kept, and only the partners’
coats. The nun this afternoon had had a long wool cloak, like something out of a medieval drama. He couldn’t remember what
she’d done with it when she’d sat down. He
wondered what Drew Harrigan would have done about her if they’d had to meet face-to-face. It gave him a shameful feeling of
triumphant glee just to imagine it. Drew Harrigan wasn’t the most secure person on the face of the earth. He was especially
insecure about his intelligence, which was meager. That nun would have ripped him up one side and down the other.

The problem was, Drew probably wouldn’t have minded it. Neil let himself into the conference room. Marian Fuller was sitting
in one of the chairs along the side of the table, tapping on a laptop.

“Come in and sit down,” she said. “I’m not being serious. I’m on the Internet.”

“I didn’t know you could get on the Internet in the conference room.”

“You can get on the Internet anywhere in these offices. Even the bathrooms. Don’t ask me. It was Grayson Barden’s idea. Bringing
the firm into the twenty-first century.”

“The twenty-first century seems to be starting with an ice age. I think it’s below zero out there.”

“It’s minus eleven,” Marian said. “So, what did you think? How was Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation?”

Neil dropped his briefcase on the table and dropped into a chair. “She reminded me of somebody, I’m not sure who. She was
bright as hell.”

“She didn’t remind you of someone, Neil, you know her. At least in passing. Her name used to be Susan Titus Alderman. She
was within a week of a partnership at Coatley, Amis when she decided to enter the convent.”

“Are you serious? A Catholic at Coatley?”

“She wasn’t a Catholic when they hired her. She’s Evan Alderman’s daughter.”

Neil sat up a little straighter. “That’s who she reminded me of, Evan. And not just in the way she looks. She has that same
style of argumentation. She’s very good.”

“She’s supposed to be. I meant to tell you about it before you left this morning, but I was late getting in and you went out
early. It didn’t matter much, though, did it? It wasn’t an adversarial situation. You’re both on the same side.”

“We both want the monastery to be able to sell the property, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I meant, yes,” Marian said. “Although you know, I’m getting a little nervous about the buyer. You don’t suppose
that Drew could be so stupid as to try to be buying the property himself? Behind our backs, I mean.”

“Drew is stupid enough for anything and you know it.”

“We’re using the word differently,” Marian said patiently. “He’s stupid, yes, in that academic sense that matters so much
to people like us, but he’s
shrewd, too. He’s got a good eye for what’s best for him. What worries me is that he’s greedy, too, and greed gets in the
way of judgment far too often. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have jobs.”

“Well,” Neil said, “that’s true enough. But the isolation in rehab is real. He has to stay incommunicado for sixty days. He’s
got forty more of them left. He can’t be communicating with lawyers trying to buy the property we’re trying to sell for him
any more than he can be communicating with us. If he got caught at it, they’d kick him out the door. And then the legal problems
would land on his head.”

“They’re going to land anyway.”

“I know. He knows. But time matters.”

“True,” Marian said. “Of course, in a way, that almost makes it worse. It’s not that hot a property. Who would want to buy
it?”

“Maybe somebody who wants to help out the nuns without letting it go public that he’s contributing to the Archdiocese,” Neil
said. “The scandals have made a lot of people unhappy to have a public connection.”

“This is one and a half million dollars we’re talking about. People don’t lay out one and a half million dollars anonymously.
And there’s only so anonymous it can be. Whoever it is is going to have to file tax forms, I don’t know what else. Why the
anonymity?”

“Presumably because there’s something about the sale we might not like.”

“Exactly.”

Neil looked away. He liked Philadelphia in the winter. He liked the bleakness of it, the darkly clouded skies, the cold. He
thought there was something stronger and finer about people who could live through that without having to run off to someplace
southern and sunny, a happyface place without mind and without soul. Mostly without mind, he thought. That was why he hated
Drew Harrigan. Drew Harrigan stood for all the crap he had to put up with these days, the alliances he had to make to be allowed
to exist in his own country at all.

“Neil?” Marian said.

“Nothing,” Neil said. “I was thinking about the Republican Party.”

“Why?”

“Drew Harrigan,” Neil said. “The new face of the Republican Party. Pork rinds and stock car races. Don’t you just get sick
of all those people sometimes, the local yokel, we’re all small-town folks people? The religious people.”

“I don’t think Drew Harrigan is religious.”

“I don’t either. But he’s part of it. Part of this whole movement to see intelligence and erudition and cultivation as—I don’t
know what.”

“The hallmark of the liberal Democrat?”

“FDR has a lot to answer for,” Neil said. Then he shook his head hard, as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. I’m behaving like an
idiot. It’s been a long day.”

“Because of the nun?”

“The nun was all right. She really is very bright. It was a nice change from Drew.”

“Drew’s in rehab. You’ve got a respite. But I think we should take this seriously, Neil. I don’t like the fact that the buyer
is anonymous, and so anonymous that we can’t even trace the lines of influence. I don’t like it that he’s got a law firm from
Wilmington, and one we don’t do business with.”

“It could be a her,” Neil said. “Maybe it’s a woman. Maybe Drew put Ellen up to it.”

“If he did, he’s a dead man,” Marian said, “which he may be no matter what, but that would tear it. Have you talked to Ellen?”

“A couple of times.”

“And?”

“She didn’t say anything in particular. The last time she really thought anything through was when she decided to go out for
cheerleader instead of drum majorette in high school. She cries a lot. She’s convinced there’s a conspiracy to bring Drew
down—”

“Drew’s convinced of that,” Marian said quickly. “And I don’t think it’s completely out of the question. You’ve got to wonder
why there’s this level of fuss—”

“No, you don’t,” Neil said. “The man was caught with a Tupperware container full of illegally acquired prescription drugs
on the seat beside him in the car, while he was driving erratically—assuming we’d like a polite word for it—and then he damn
near threatened to blow the cop’s head off when he was asked to get out of the car. There’s a point at which even the most
accommodating district attorney has his hands tied. Or forced, as the case may be. We ought to be grateful that Drew didn’t
actually have the gun to carry out the threat, or we might be going to a funeral right now.”

“There were no guns,” Marian said.

Neil sighed. “I don’t understand how these people live like that,” he said. “The … confusion of it, I suppose. The constant
upheavals. Drunk and stoned and fighting and I don’t know what. He’s no different than any of the rest of them.”

“We need to do something about the buyer,” Marian said. “We need to find out who that is. We need to cover our asses, not
to put too fine a point on it.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know,” Neil said. “I’ll go back to work on it in the morning. We’ve tried all the usual things. I’ll see if there’s
something we haven’t thought of before. Not that it really matters at the moment anyway, since the Justice Project has the
injunction and the monastery can’t sell the property anyway. Has it ever occurred to you that our lives would be a lot easier
if Sherman Markey was just dead?”

“Going to get a gun and start trolling all the SROs and homeless shelters in Philadelphia?”

“No. But it’s true. Without Markey making a fuss, nobody would care about the property. Nobody would care about the buyer.
This whole thing would disappear in a few weeks. The DA doesn’t want to prosecute Drew. It’s going to be a pain and a half.
He’d be more than happy to agree to a plea bargain on pretty good terms, if nobody was watching. Markey’s making everybody
watch.”

“It was Drew’s idea to stick Markey with the procurement charge.”

“I know.”

“And Markey wasn’t procuring anything for anybody.”

“I know that, too. So does the DA. Drew’s an idiot and an ass. But we knew that already.”

Marian turned off her computer and folded it up. “Maybe you ought to go home and get some rest. Go out and have a drink first,
if you need to. Get some Johnny Walker Blue.”

“If I start drinking Johnny Walker Blue, you’re going to have to start paying my mortgage. Do you wonder who it is that Drew’s
shielding? Who got him the drugs?”

“No,” Marian said. “It’s not my business to wonder. It’s not yours, either.”

“No, it isn’t. And I suppose it could be Ellen. Of course, she’s got the same problem as Sherman Markey. She’s a brain-dead
ditz. And she’s not exactly retiring. She’d walk into a drugstore wearing four-inch heels and thirty thousand dollars’ worth
of chinchilla and they’d be talking about it for months afterwards.”

“Go home,” Marian said. “It doesn’t matter who got him the drugs. It doesn’t matter that he’s an idiot. He’s sitting in rehab
and he can stay there for the moment.”

“He’d better stay there.”

“Exactly. Go home.”

“If you were going to murder Sherman Markey, the thing to do would be to poison his booze. It wouldn’t even be hard. You’d
just doctor a bottle and hand it to him, and he’d take it and drink it. Nobody can think his way out of a paper bag these
days. It’s incredible.”

“I’m going to go home,” Marian said. “Imagine me sitting in front of my fireplace with the cat on my lap, reading P. D. James.
Imagine yourself doing the same.”

“Emerson,” Neil said. “That’s what I’m reading. Ralph Waldo Emerson. He couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag, either.”

Marian tucked the laptop under her arm and left. Neil looked back up out the window. It was not, he thought, about money.
Drew was richer than he was by several magnitudes, and he doubted that Drew’s family had had any less than his own when they
were both growing up. It was not about money but about commitment, and most important, about commitment to those things that
made civilization—what? That made civilization civilization. That made civilization possible. There was no civilization at
all in a world full of people who were proud of their ignorance, who wore their willful stupidity as a mark of honor, who
used the words “educated” and “intellectual” as epithets more worthy of scorn than pederasty or treason. It was not about
money. It was not even about “Americanism.” It was about the life of the mind.

He got up and looked around. The conference room was the same as he remembered it from his father’s time. There was good mahogany
paneling on the walls. There was good oak flooring underfoot. The Persian carpets had been cleaned a month or so ago, but
they hadn’t been replaced in fifty years.

Maybe he was wrong to think of the difference in the terms he did. Maybe he was so quick to recoil at the excesses of Drew
Harrigan and his followers that he missed the good in them. Maybe the world had not been better and finer and more honorable
when he was a boy—but it had been more uncompromisingly respectful of intelligence and achievement, and it had not been so
enamored of the populist skew. He was sick of the jokes of people who could only laugh at what they did because they didn’t
understand it. He was sick of the kind of religion that pressed relentlessly to compress all life into the intellectual provincialism
of the sort of small towns that had once made Sinclair Lewis despair. His America was not the America of creationism and WWJD
bracelets any more than it was the America of bodegas and barrios. There were days when he wanted to torch the entire city
of Philadelphia just to see what would rise from the ashes.

He wouldn’t do it, because he was scared to death, deep down, that what would rise would be a rap band and a Bible-believing
Christian.

He had to go home. Marian was right. It had been a long day, a long week, a long month, a long year, and he had gotten to
that point in the day when killing somebody felt like a rational response to the conditions he was forced to live under.

It wouldn’t do him any good to murder Sherman Markey—but he was right about the fact that everybody he knew would be better
off if Sherman Markey showed up dead.

T
o Ellen O’Bannion Harrigan,
life often seemed like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces missing—or like the English classes she had been required
to take in high school, where the teacher and all the other students had been part of a joke she had not been let into, and
kept claiming to see Meaning and Symbolism and Complexity in poems Ellen knew made no sense. There was a lot of that second
thing going around in the world at large, as far as Ellen could see. Even the people who worked in Drew’s office liked to
talk about Iconography and Semiotics and the Politics of Meaning, which Ellen had finally figured out was the idea that people
voted in order to make sure their lives Meant Something in the long run. She had no idea what it was people were supposed
to want their lives to Mean.

Right now, what Ellen knew was that she wanted the city of Philadelphia to do something about the homeless people. This was
the fourth little knot of them she had seen in the ride back from the dentist’s office, huddled together over the steam grates
that were set into the sidewalk every block in the middle of the city. There were two women and two men. They were all impossibly
dirty.