Pleading Guilty Read online

  ‘I still don't understand how you think you'll find Bert.'

  Pagnucci touched the checks. I didn't understand at first. He was tapping the endorsement. 'Pico?'

  'Have you ever been down there?'

  I'd first been to Pico when I was assigned to Financial Crimes more than twenty years ago - sky of blue, round and perfect as a cereal bowl above the Mayan Mountains; vast beaches long and lovely as a suntanned flank. Most of the folks around here are down there often. TN was one of the first to despoil the coast, erecting three spectacular resorts. But I hadn't taken the trip in years. I told Carl that.

  'You think that's where Bert is?'

  'That's where his money is,' Pagnucci said.

  'No, sir. That's where it went. Where it is now is anybody's guess. The beauty of bank secrecy is that it ends the trail. You can send the money anywhere from Pico. It could be back here, frankly. If it was in the right municipal bonds, he wouldn't even have to pay taxes.'

  'Right,' Pagnucci quickly said. He took this setback, like most things, in silence, but his precise, mannerly good looks clouded with vexation.

  'And who's going to do the looking?' I asked. ‘I don't know many private investigators I'd trust with this one.'

  'No, no,' said Wash. 'No one outside the family. We weren't thinking of a private investigator.' He was looking somewhat hopefully at me. I actually laughed when I finally got it.

  'Wash, I know more about writing traffic tickets than how to find Bert. Call Missing Persons.'

  'He trusts you, Mack,' Wash told me. 'You're his friend.'

  'Bert has no friends.'

  'He'd respect your opinion. Especially about his prospects of escaping without prosecution. Bert's childish. We all know that. And peculiar. With a familiar face, he'd consider this in a new light.'

  Anybody who's survived for more than two decades in a law firm or a police department knows better than to say no to the boss. Around here it's team play - yes, sir, and salute smartly. No way I could refuse. But there was a reason I was going to law school at night while I was on the street. I was never one of these lamebrains who thought cop work was glamorous. Kicking doors in, running down dark alleys - that stuff tended to terrify me, especially afterwards when I got to thinking about what I'd done.

  ‘I have a hearing Wednesday,' I said. This took them all back for a moment. No one, apparently, had considered the prospect that I might be working. 'Bar Admissions and Discipline still wants to punch Toots Nuccio's ticket.'

  There was a moment's byplay as Wash proposed alternatives - a continuance, perhaps, or allowing another G & G lawyer to handle the case; there were, after all, 130 attorneys here. Martin, the head of litigation, eventually suggested I find another partner to join me at the hearing, someone who could take over down the road if need be. Even with that settled, I was still resisting.

  'Guys, this doesn't make sense. I'm never going to find Bert. And you'll only make them angrier at TN once they realize we waited to tell them.'

  'Not so,' said Wash. 'Not so. We needed time to gather facts so that we could advise them. You'll prepare a report, Mack,' he said, 'something we can hand them. Dictate it as you go along. After all, this is a significant matter. Something that can badly embarrass them, as well as us. They'll understand. We'll say you'll take no more than two weeks.' He looked to Martin and Carl for verification.

  I repeated that there was no place to look.

  'Why don't you ask those thugs down at the steam bath where he likes to hang out?' Pagnucci asked. Talking to Carl is often even less satisfying than his silence. He is stubbornly, subtly, but inalterably contrary. Pagnucci regards agreement as a failure of his solemn obligation to exercise critical intelligence. There is always a probing question, a sly jest, a suggested alternative, always a way for him to put an ax to your tree. The guy is more than half a foot shorter than me and makes me feel no bigger than a flea.

  'Mack, you would be the savior of this firm,' said Wash. 'Imagine if it did work out. Our gratitude would be' -Wash waved - 'unspeakable.'

  It all looked perfect from their side. I'm a burnt-out case. No big clients. Gun-shy about trials since I stopped drinking. A fucked-up wreck with the chance to secure my position. And all of this coming up at the most opportune time. The firm was in its annual hysteria with the approaching conclusion of our fiscal year on January 31. All the partners were busy choking overdue fees out of our clients and positioning themselves for February 2, a week and a half from now, when the profits would be divided.

  I considered Wash, wondering how I ever ended up working for anybody in a bow tie.

  'I say the same thing to you I've said to Martin and Carl,' Wash told me. 'It's ours, this place, our lives as lawyers are here. What do we lose if we take a couple of weeks trying to save it?'

  With that, the three were silent. If nothing else, I had their attention. In high school I used to play baseball. I'm big - six three - and never a lightweight. I have good eye-hand, I could hit the ball a long way, but I'm slow, what people call lumbering when they're trying to be polite, and the coaches had to find someplace to play me, which turned out to be the outfield. I've never been the guy you'd want on your team. If I wasn't batting, I wasn't really in the game. Three hundred feet away from home plate you can forget. The wind comes up; you smell the grass, the perfume from some girl in the stands. A wrapper kicks across the field, followed by a ghost of dust. You check the sun, falling, even with all the yelling to keep you awake, into a kind of trance state, a piece of meditation or dreams. And then, somehow, you feel the eyes of everybody in the park suddenly shifted toward you - the pitcher looking back, the batter, the people in the stands, somebody someplace has yelled your name. It's all coming to you, this dark circle hoving through the sky, changing size, just the way you've seen it at night when you're asleep. I had that feeling now, of having been betrayed by my dreams.

  Fear, as usual, was my only real excuse.

  'Listen, guys. This was carefully planned. By Mr Litiplex or Kamin or whoever. Bert's three sheets to the wind with his sails nowhere in sight. And even if I do find him, by some miracle, what do you think happens when he opens the door and sees that he's been tracked down by one of his partners, who undoubtedly is going to speak to him about going to prison? What do you think he'll do?'

  'He'll talk to you, Mack.'

  'He'll shoot me, Wash. If he's got any sense.'

  Bereft of a response, Wash looked on with limpid blue eyes and a guttering soul - an aging white man. Martin, a step ahead as ever, smiled in his subtle way because he knew I'd agreed.

  Pagnucci as usual said nothing.

  II. MY REACTION

  Privately, my partners would tell you I'm a troubled individual. Wash and Martin are polite enough to murmur some fainthearted denial as they read this, but, guys, we all know the truth. I am, I admit, kind of a wreck from all directions - overweight even by the standards of big men who seem to get some latitude, gimpy on rainy days because I ruined my knee while I was a copper, jumping off a fence to chase some bum who never was worth catching. My skin, from two decades of drinking hard, has got that reddened look, as if someone took a Brillo pad to my forehead and my cheeks. Worse is what goes on inside. I have a sad heart, stomped on, fevered and corrupted, and a brain that boils at night in a ferment of awful dreams. I hear like far-off music the harsh voices of my mother and my former wife, both of them tough Irishwomen who knew that the tongue, for the right occasion, can be made an instrument of pain.

  But now I was excited. After the Committee broke, I lit out from the Needle for the Russian Bath, eager and actually somewhat jealous of Bert. Imagine! I thought as I bounced along in the taxi taking me west. Just imagine. A guy who worked down the hall. A foul ball. Now he was off roistering with a stolen fortune while I was still landlocked in my squalid little life.

  Reading this, my partners probably are squinting. What kind of jealous? they say. What envy? Fellas, let's not kid ourselves, especially at 4:00
a.m. It is the hour of the wolf, quiet as doom, and I, the usual insomniac mess, am murmuring into my Dictaphone, whispering in fact, in case my nosy teenaged son actually returns from his night of reprobate activity. When I finish, I'll hide the tape in the strongbox beneath my bed. That way, in the event of second thoughts, I can drop the cassette into the trash.

  Before I began dictating the cover memo, I actually figured I would do it just as Wash requested. A report. Something anesthetized and lawyerly, prose in a strait-jacket, and many footnotes. But you know me - as the song goes, I've done it my way. Say what you like, this is quite a role. I talk, you listen. I know. You don't. I tell you what I want - when I want. I discuss you like the furniture, or address you now and then by name. Martin, you are smiling in spite of yourself. Wash, you are wondering how Martin will react. Carl, you'd like it all in no more than three sentences and are bristling already.

  The bottom line, then: I didn't find Bert this afternoon. I tried. The cab got me to the right place and I stood outside the Bath, looking over the run-down commercial street, one of DuSable's many played-out neighborhoods, with the gritty restaurants and taverns, storefronts and tenements, windows dulled by dust. The brick buildings are permanently darkened from the years when this city burned coal. The masonry seemed to gather weight against the sky, which had been galvanized by winter, heavy-bellied clouds, gray and lusterless as zinc.

  I actually grew up not far from here on the West End of the city, near the Callison Street Bridge, a phenomenal structure of enormous brownish stones and concrete filigree, designed, I believe, by H. H. Richardson himself. A mighty thing, it cast a shadow for blocks over our gloomy little Irish village, a neighborhood really, but a place as closed off as if there were a drawbridge and walls. The dads were all firemen, like my father, or policemen or public-payroll hacks or guys who worked in factories. A tavern on every corner and two lovely large churches, St Joe's and St Viator's, where the parish, to my ma's constant regret, was half Italian. Lace curtains. Rosary beads. Until I was twelve, I did not know a kid who went to public school. My mother named me for John McCormack, the famous Irish tenor, whose sad ballads and perfect diction left her trembling over the sadness of life and the forlorn hope of love.

  'Seedy' is not the word for the Russian Bath; better 'prehistoric'. Inside, the place was vintage Joe McCarthy -exposed pipes overhead, with the greenish lacquered walls darkened by oil and soot, and split by an old mahogany chair rail. The motif here was Land That Time Forgot, where was and would-be were the same, an Ur region of male voices, intense heat, and swinging dicks. Time would wear it down but ne'er destroy it: the sort of atmosphere that the Irish perpetuate in every bar. I paid fourteen dollars to an immigrant Russian behind a cage, who gave me a towel, a sheet, a locker key, and a pair of rubber shoes I purchased as an afterthought to shield my tootsies. The narrow corridor back was lined with photos in cheap black frames, all the great ones - sports stars, opera singers, politicians, and gangsters, a few of whom fit in more than one of these categories. In the locker room where I undressed, the carpet was the gray of dead fish and smelled of chlorine and mildew.

  This Russian Bath is a notorious spot in Kindle County. I'd never set foot inside before, but when I was working Financial Crimes, the FBI always had somebody sitting on a surveillance here. Pols, union types, various heavy-browed heavyweights like to take a meet in this place to talk their dirty business, because even the Feebies can't hide a transmitter under a wet sheet. Bert is down here, relishing the unsavory atmosphere, whenever he can break free - lunchtime, after work, even for an hour after court when he's in trial.

  Inside his head, Bert seems to live in his own Boys Town. Most of my partners are men and women with fancy degrees - Harvard, Yale, and Easton - intellectuals for a few minutes in their lives, the types who keep The New York Review of Books in business, reading all those carping articles to put themselves to sleep. But Bert is sort of the way people figure me, smart but basic. He'd been law review at the U, and before that an Air Force Academy grad and a combat pilot in Nam in the last desperate year of war, but the events of his later life don't seem to penetrate. He's caught up in the fantasies that preoccupied him at age eleven. Bert thinks it's nifty to hang out with guys who hint about hits and scores, who can give you the line on tomorrow's game before they've seen the papers. What these fellas are actually doing, I suspect, is the same thing as Bert - talking trash and feeling dangerous. After their steam bath, they sit around card tables in the locker room in their sheets, eating pickled herring served at a little stand-up bar and telling each other stories about scores they've settled, jerks that they've set straight. For a grown-up, this sort of macho make-believe is silly. For a guy whose daytime life is devoted to making the world safe for airlines, banks, and insurance companies, it is, frankly, delusional.

  The bath was down the stairs and I held tight to the rail, full of the usual doubts about exactly what I was up to, including going someplace I didn't know without my clothes on, but it proved to be a spot of well-worn grace, full of steam and smoke, a breath of heat that rushed to meet you. The men sat about, young guys shamelessly naked, with their dongs hanging out, and older fellas, fat and withered, who'd slopped a sheet across their middles or slung it toga-like over their shoulders.

  The bath was a wood construction, not your light color like a sauna that reminds you of Scandinavian furniture, but dark planks, blackened by moisture. A large room rising fifteen feet or more, its scent was like a wet forest floor. Tiers of planked benches stepped up in ranks on all sides and in the center was the old iron oven, jacketed in cement, indomitable and somehow insolent, like a 300-pound mother-in-law. At night the fires burned there, scalding the rocks that sit within the oven's belly, a brood of dinosaur eggs, granite boulders scraped from the bottoms of the Great Lakes, now scarred white from the heat.

  Every now and then some brave veteran struggled to his feet with a heavy, indigenous grunt and shoved a pitcher of hot water in there. The oven sizzled and spit back in fury; the steam rose at once. The higher up you sat, the more you felt, so that even after a few minutes at the third level you could feel your noggin cooking. Sitting, steaming, the men spoke episodically, talking gruff half-sentences to one another, then stood and poured a bucket of icy water, drained from flowing spigots in the boards, over their heads. Watching this routine, I wondered how many guys the paramedics have carried out. Occasionally someone lay down on the benches and another fella, in a bizarre ceremony, soaped him from head to toe, front and back, with callus sponges and sheaves of oak leaves frothing heavy soap.

  These days, of course, a bunch of naked men rubbing each other leads to a thought or two, and frankly, exactly what gives with Bert is not a matter I'd put money on. But these guys looked pretty convincing - big-bellied old-world types, fellas like Bert who've been coming here since they were kids, ethnics with a capital E. Slavs. Jews. Russians. Mexicans. People steeped in peasant pleasures, their allegiance to the past in their sweat.

  From time to time I could catch the sideward glances. Many gay blades, I suspected, had to be stomped into recognizing that Kindle County isn't San Francisco. This crowd looked like they made fast judgments about newcomers.

  'Friend of Bert Kamin's,' I muttered, trying to explain myself to a solid old lump who sat in his sheet across from me. His graying hair was soapy and deviled up, going off in three or four different directions so he looked mostly like a hood ornament. 'He's always talked about it. Had to give it a try.'

  The fella made a sound. 'Who's that?' he asked.

  'Bert,' I said.

  'Oh, Bert,' he said. 'What's with him? Big trial or some-thin? Where all's he gone to?'

  I took a beat with that. I had figured that would be my line. I could feel the heat now, agitating my blood and drying my nostrils, and I moved down a level. Where does a fellow go with five and a half million dollars? I wondered. What are the logical alternatives? Plastic surgery? The jungles of Brazil? Or just a small town
where nobody you'd know would ever appear? You'd think it's easy, but try the question on yourself. Personally, I figured I'd favor a simple agenda. Swim a lot. Read good books. Play some golf. Find one of those women looking for a fellow who's honest and true.

  'Maybe he's got someplace with Archie and them,' said the old lump. 'I ain't seen him too much neither.'

  'Archie?'

  'Don't you know Archie? He's a character for you. Got a big position. Whosiewhasit. Whadda they call it. Hey. Lucien. Whatta you call what Archie does with that insurance company?' He addressed a guy sitting near the oven, a man who looked more or less like him, with a sloping belly and fleshy breasts pink from the heat.

  'Actuary,' answered Lucien.

  'There you go,' said the guy, sending suds flying as he gestured. He went on talking about Archie. He was here every day, the guy said. Clockwork. Five o'clock. Him and Bert always together, two professional fellas.

  ‘I bet that's where-all he's gone, Bert. Hey, Lucien. Bert and Archie, they together or what?'

  This time Lucien moved. 'Who's asking?'

  'This guy.'

  I made some demurrer that they both ignored.

  'Name of?' asked Lucien, and squinted in the steam. He'd come in without his glasses and he stepped down to get a better look at me, clearly sizing me up, one of these guys too old to apologize anymore for anything. I gave my name and offered a hand, which Lucien limply grabbed backhanded, his right paw holding fast to the bedsheet around his middle. He took a breath or two through his open mouth, red as a pomegranate.

  'You lookin for Kam Roberts, too?' he asked finally.

  Kam Roberts. Robert Kamin. I was sure it was a joke.

  'Yeah,' I said, and brought out some blarney smile. 'Yeah, Kam Roberts,' I repeated. Don't ask me why I do these things - I'm always pretending to know more than I do. Since I was a naughty kid, I've been like that, faking one thing or another; there are so many selves rollicking around in here and it is a harmful indulgence for a man often out of control. I had the thought that 'Kam Roberts' was like the secret password, I could ask a few more questions once I'd said it, but something, the peculiarity of the name or my odd tone of enthusiasm, seemed to deaden the air in the room.