Refuge (7 page)

Richard’s partners were no more enthusiastic about Svritsky. At a meeting a few weeks earlier, Igshaan Solomons had raised the possibility of bad publicity in the media. He had been solemn and patronising, treating Richard as if he were ill-versed in the subtleties of modern legal practice. It was particularly problematic at a time when the other partners were trying to attract a higher level of corporate clients, Igshaan had argued, looking to Selwyn Mullins for approval. Selwyn was the firm’s senior partner and a founding member; like an aged warhorse, he had the experience and scars of a lifetime of legal skirmishes. He typically sat at the head of the conference table at each board meeting while he listened to his children squabble. But Selwyn battled to appreciate the importance of new strategies and the ever-shifting nature of corporate priorities. Communications and PR, internet capability, empowerment imperatives, political correctness – these were concepts that he found difficult to take seriously, and he had Richard’s deepest empathy.

‘These days, all respectable businesses need a good criminal lawyer,’ Richard had quipped, raising his eyebrows at Candice Reeves, hoping for a smile. She stared back at him dubiously.

‘Just don’t let anyone from Quantal hear you say that, okay?’ Igshaan had shot back, looking across to David Keefer and Selwyn meaningfully, as if only he was sensitive to the black-empowerment issues at stake for the firm.

‘Perhaps we should have a back door for my second-class citizens so that they won’t rub shoulders with the elite like Quantal,’ Richard had responded hotly, in a less gracious allusion to the past. Igshaan had glowered, but let the comment go.

Quantal Investments (Proprietary) Limited was a private black-empowerment company. With a prominent struggle activist at the helm, the company had powerful trade union contacts and had established itself on a range of lucrative fronts, rapidly becoming one of the largest private conglomerates. It was now ready to be floated as a public company on the stock exchange. It would be a glittering move, resplendent with political backing and struggle credentials – a flagship of activism in the financial sector, the minister of finance had proclaimed in anticipation. For Richard’s firm, the publicity and sheer revenue from being the listing attorneys firm would be significant; the long-term possibilities for the firm should it secure Quantal’s patronage were immeasurable. It remained the firm’s single most important prospect. Igshaan supposedly had a connection to Quantal’s CEO, which had secured him his position at Richard’s firm in the first place. It was a tenuous contact, but one that he unfailingly brought up in conversation. Nevertheless, Igshaan and David had been tasked with securing the firm’s position with Quantal. The fact that Richard had not been asked was both a relief and a slight, an indication of the firm’s lack of faith in his contemporary sensitivities.

The attempt to woo Quantal had inevitably given rise to lengthy and uncomfortable discussions about whether the firm was black enough, with contorted references to Igshaan’s undefined racial categorisation. Ultimately, it had been decided to headhunt a black partner for the firm (‘A real black,’ Selwyn had blithely muttered in the debate), offering a generous package and immediate full-partner status. The post had been advertised and applications were trickling in. Igshaan advised the partners that Quantal’s CEO had himself acknowledged the wisdom of the move, indicating that, with the right partner, the firm would be viewed as a competitive bidder. He had almost salivated when telling the partners the good news.

But an association with a Russian mobster, if publicised, could discourage applicants and might even scare off Quantal. The dramatic corruption trials had left a pious aftertaste in the media, and a mere suggestion of unsavoury collusion could be enough to poison the public’s view. Yet, the financial benefits could not be ignored, even by Igshaan. Svritsky was a paying client who brought a significant income to the firm, both personally and through his myriad underworld contacts. He provided cash flow for the firm, and Richard’s monthly income targets were both high and paid up. With the closure of their conveyancing department and the birth of dedicated paralegal tax and labour firms, litigious clients who paid their bills were highly valuable.

So the partners endured Svritsky’s presence on their books. But the meeting had verbalised a long-held suspicion on Richard’s part, namely that his partners viewed his criminal practice with disdain and that it would be tolerated only for as long as it continued to generate adequate fees. There was an underlying sense that criminal law was not true law, that it was the poorer cousin to important legal disputes in the fields of commercial and administrative law. Real law played out in the halls of the High Court, before judges and counsel, bedecked in robes and bibs, while criminal law eked out a living in the sordid corridors of the district courts. His partners never asked him about his cases, never congratulated him on any successes and raised the subject of his side of the practice only when the firm’s name was mentioned in the newspapers in connection with some disreputable matter.

Richard had felt it all along, but in the beginning this disregard had not worried him. He had felt exhilarated by the seedy contest that marked a criminal trial. The stakes were always high; the public was interested in the sensational details; the mob often bayed for blood. He had felt like a warrior, an armour-clad gladiator stepping into the open ring, each time facing the monolithic state machinery. Victory had felt personal then. And easy. An astute lawyer facing an under-resourced investigation and uninterested prosecution could exploit the inevitable shortcomings in procedure and gaps in evidence. He had used phrases like ‘where the rubber meets the road’ and ‘the dirty work of justice’ when explaining his work to friends. He saw himself as performing the work that others were too scared to take on. It was he who had disdainfully dismissed commercial law as being manufactured and over-intellectualised.

More recently, though, he had started to tire of the courtroom confrontation and the relentless, self-preserving versions offered up by his clients. The victories felt less grand and universal, and rather more hollow. One of his clients had come to him seeking advice on an employment dismissal, and Richard had impulsively decided on a foray into labour law. His appearance in the labour court had not been a triumph. He had omitted to make an essential procedural averment while preparing his papers. The application was postponed in order to give him time to remedy the defect, and he had been forced to ask Candice, the associate partner who headed their small labour unit, for her assistance. Sensing his humiliation, she did not raise the issue at any partners’ meetings and discreetly took over the file. Richard shuddered at the memory.

The traffic had started to move along more easily, as cars peeled off the side ramps that took them down residential roads. The road curved around onto the greener slopes bordering the southern suburbs, where the streets were lined with pines, pin oaks and plane trees. He picked up the pace, but still felt unsettled. After consulting with Svritsky, he had met with a juvenile client and his mother. The police had stopped the boy and his friends in a car. Under his seat, they had found a variety of drugs: some rolled dagga cigarettes, a straw of flavoured tik, a tight corner of hash and some low-grade Ecstasy tablets. ‘Hash!’ Richard had joked lightly at his first meeting with the boy: ‘What are you? A throwback from the seventies?’ He regretted his flippancy now; they had made representations to the prosecuting authority based on the age of the boy and the relatively small quantity of drugs, but they were turned down. Richard should not have been surprised, as the escalation of the drug problem in schools had forced the prosecuting authority to clamp down on young offenders.

‘Why can’t they catch the real criminals and just leave our children alone?’ the boy’s mother had whined, rubbing the Lexus badge on her key ring. ‘They were just having some fun.’

Richard had initially found the woman quite attractive, with her flouncy tops and lipsticked mouth. He had charmed her in the beginning, earnestly listening to her every complaint, taking meticulous notes and telling her thrilling anecdotes from the courtroom. But her son was a sullen, acne-riddled child who refused to answer Richard’s questions with more than a grunt or a shrug. He sat slouched in the chair, picking at the skin on his knuckles and bouncing one knee up and down. His mother’s incessant demands slowly worked on Richard’s nerves until her blouses seemed cheap and her lipstick tacky. Now she just left him feeling impatient and he wished that he could get rid of the entire matter.

A sleek BMW convertible, top down, glided alongside him. He glanced across at the driver, her curled blonde hair bouncing in the breeze, protected from the brunt of the eastern wind by the long windscreen. She had one hand on the wheel and held a sleek cellphone against her ear with the other while she stared ahead. Her fixed air of determination reminded him of Amanda. The driver was considerably prettier than his wife though, he thought sadly.

Beautiful women, in his experience, started out as inherently desirable and then slowly hardened over time, losing their mystique as they became critical towards their lovers. As their warmth faded, so their looks seemed to be sucked inwardly into a dry interior, becoming increasingly emaciated and hollow. Richard was drawn to unfamiliar women in a way that was quite different from his appreciation of men. He found women’s obvious foibles and even their aesthetic oddities endearing in the beginning, while he had none of the same patience for men. He was wary of men, he supposed, aware of the unspoken jealousies and insecurities that gnawed at them and followed them around like dirty shadows. Yet his lasting friendships were all with men. He had become close to some of Amanda’s friends, had enjoyed a risqué warmth with some of his colleagues’ wives and had charmed his female clients. But the allure tarnished and he would soon distance himself, holding their neediness at bay, watching their pained eyes cool and turn to acrimony.

Richard was, he felt, a person who would always be at risk of having an affair; it would be momentary, he imagined, a sudden attraction that was passionately fulfilled and then spent, lasting no longer than a week or two. He expected an overwhelming and irresistible infatuation with a mysterious woman who demanded his full attention, who feasted on him ravenously and then broke away, satiated. Yet, to his surprise and sometimes regret, he had been faithful to Amanda throughout their marriage, save for a single encounter. His only lapse had been unmemorable and utterly without mystery. She was a temporary typist whom Selwyn had employed while his own secretary had been on honeymoon. She had bounced into the office like a golden retriever, floppy and untoned beneath a mass of hair, bangles and large dangling earrings. Richard had been in the middle of a tense fraud trial and had hardly noticed her until the office party a few weeks after her arrival. She had drunk too much and had danced loosely with all the men in the office before focusing her moody eyes on Richard towards the very end of the evening. He had downed the better part of half a bottle of ordinary whisky; when she had gripped his wrist with moist fingers and murmured something suggestive into his ear, it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. The sex had been frantic and was over in less than a minute. He had pushed her onto the table in one of the consultation rooms and hauled himself drunkenly on top of her. It had been like diving onto bags of warm milk. Her alcoholic breath had been hot and unpleasant in his face as he pulled down her panties and wriggled out of his trousers. Her damp thighs were greasy as he plunged away, groaning woozily and coming within a few seconds. A week later she had left the firm, without either one of them having mentioned the evening again. The encounter had been so bereft of emotional warmth that he had not felt guilty; it seemed no more significant than if he had masturbated before leaving for home.

Sometimes he wondered whether his loyalty to Amanda was due not so much to his moral probity but to his fear of rejection. Or the anxiety that his virility would be found wanting. The terror of impotence lurked in his mind. Like any other man, he suffered from bouts of wretched performance, fatigue and stress sapping him of his will and focus. But each isolated incident felt like a carnal ambush, a deliberate erosion of his confidence in his libido, no matter how irregular or how otherwise robust his accomplishments in bed. Even his fantasies were plagued by unbidden thoughts of failure, images of taunts and retributive sulkiness. The narrative of his fictional liaisons, risking his marriage and reputation only to be incapable of satisfying either himself or the object of his desire, left him feeling depressed.

Sex with Amanda tended to be undemanding. They chose comfortable positions, kept petting and foreplay to a minimum and moved from arousal to climax to book-reading with seamless ease. He had tried to talk to her about it, starting to stumble over an explanation of his needs. But looking up at her he had sensed the word ‘pervert’ on her mind, her frown deepening with mistrust. On the occasions that his endeavours in bed let him down, Amanda would neutralise the situation. ‘Stressful time in the office?’ she’d ask, before turning over to reach for her latest plumped-up novel. There was something dismissive lurking within her swift acceptance. The ease with which she turned away suggested that she anticipated little else. Or did not really care. Familiarity made sex as much a domestic chore as washing up; if it did not need to be completed, then there was little to be mourned.

He longed for both the physical and emotional excitement of their first few years together. She had been the first woman with whom he had had a serious relationship. Before her there had been a series of groping trysts that had ended within weeks, or days, with tearful hugs and unheeded promises of friendship. His girlfriends had tended to be younger than him, bowed by his intellect and roguish good looks, and he quickly bored of their tittering acquiescence. He was unprepared for the assertive personality of Amanda. She had challenged him at a student council meeting at university, openly expressing her misgivings about his contentions, but without resorting to personal slights. He was immediately scared and captivated by her. His witty responses and charming winks fell unnoticed at her feet while her scathingly clear arguments undermined his position in front of the student committee members.