A Private Sorcery Read online

  “I just came from seeing Saul.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s struggling with the detox. Sometimes it’s just as well for them to have something else to think about.”

  “Can we visit him?”

  “Well, we’ll have to talk about that. Right now, he says he doesn’t want any visitors. You don’t have too many rights inside, but you can refuse visitors.”

  A silence falls and for a split second I think maybe the line has gone dead. I jump in. “It’s me, Leonard,” I say. “I’m on the extension. Why is that?”

  “He says he feels too awful.”

  “Physically or mentally?”

  “He didn’t say. I’d guess both.”

  Rena stays quiet for the rest of the phone call. I talk with Morton about what will happen next. He tells us that they’ve set the state prosecutor’s presentation of the manslaughter case against you before the grand jury for the ninth of March. I count days on my fingers: nineteen. Neither you nor Morton is permitted to attend.

  “I’ll stop by to see him every day,” Morton says. “Depending on how the evidence shakes out, we’ll most likely keep the not-guilty plea, which means we’ll then have to prepare for trial.” He sniffs. He’s a sniffer, one of those people always fighting some kind of upper respiratory thing. I wonder if like Green he, too, had a broken nose. “Don’t worry about this not wanting visitors thing. It’ll pass. A lot of them feel that way for the first week or so.”

  Rena and I convene in the living room. We go over the conversation. We’re not talking about anything, just talking to ward off a tide of emptiness.

  At the door, I hug her loosely. There’s a little heave in her chest. I tighten my grip and she stays still that second longer that transforms what was ceremonial into something else. Quickly, she straightens and her face rearranges itself.

  It takes over an hour to walk to Penn Station, by the end of which I’ve decided that your wife’s eyes were, indeed, damp. The idea that as much of a strain as my presence was for her, she might feel worse once I left, hadn’t occurred to me any more than it probably had to her. Standing at a bank of phones, I call her. I reach your machine with your voice, then stumble over sentences about how she should call me if there’s anything she needs, even just to talk. I purchase my ticket and board the train.

  On the ticket stub, I write a shopping list. Milk, fruit, stamps. I cannot think of anything else to buy. I cannot imagine what I will do once I get back to the house.

  Sometime after Newark, I doze off. When I wake, you are in my mind’s eye: a crescent moon on a thin mattress on the floor of your cell. Your eyes are open and there are water bugs and I worry that you are cold. That old feeling from when you and Marc were babies and I would spend the nights in and out of my bed going to lift one or the other of you crying from your crib. That anxious sleepy look on your face as you stood clutching the bars. Maybe that’s it. The bars. Are you clutching the bars?

  I WRITE YOU EVERY DAY. Long, struggling letters, some of which I know better than to mail. After a week, I see that they could be titled like country-and-western songs: How Could I Have Failed to See Your Pain, What Have You Done to Yourself, What Have I Done to You, You Must Be Strong: The Travails of Life Are the Iron in the Steel (this one I don’t send), I Will Stand by You Through Thick and Thin.

  You don’t respond. Morton reassures me that you’re receiving the letters, that you’re doing well with the barbiturate detox and that you’ve told him to tell me you will write when you feel able. I don’t believe you’ve sent such a message, particularly in the middle of the night when I lie in the dark, my routine now shattered so that like your mother I am up until three and asleep half the morning.

  In the middle of your second week in jail, Morton calls to tell me that the grand jury date has been changed to Friday, March 13.

  “Great. Friday the thirteenth.”

  Morton doesn’t respond. As always, I am surprised that other people are not superstitious the way I am, that they don’t walk around saying touch wood and reaching down to tap the leg of a chair. Superstition has always struck me as not what it seems, not a belief in magic, but rather a belief that it is beneficial to be on guard. If you worry about even implying something might go well, you’re less likely to overlook that your wings are attached with beeswax that will melt in the sun.

  I hear Morton swallow. “There’s something else. If they return an indictment, which they’re going to do ninety-nine percent chance, I’m going to recommend he enter a guilty plea.”

  “A guilty plea?”

  “Most of them, by this time, are so eager to get out, they’d sell their mother. Saul, though, doesn’t have the heart to defend himself. But even if he did, I’d still say it’s the way we got to go. These guys have a rocksolid case. It’s like telling a terminal cancer patient to plan for a cruise next winter. Don’t make any sense.”

  I don’t like the analogy. Morton senses this immediately. He’s careless in certain ways, and then can turn around and be exquisitely perceptive.

  “Okay, bad metaphor, simile, whatever the hell you call it, but you get the point. If we give them a guilty, we can work on cutting a deal: they drop the state’s manslaughter two, we take burglary and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. Judges go a lot lighter on a guilty plea than a guilty verdict at trial.”

  “If he pleads guilty, what happens after that?”

  “He stays where he is another couple of weeks while they do the presentencing investigation. That’s the report the federal probation department writes recommending sentencing parameters to the judge. They’d probably interview you, Rena, some people from the hospital. We’d have a good chance of painting him as a good guy gone astray. Then there’s another hearing when the sentencing is done.”

  Hearing probation, my hopes soar. “You mean he might get probation?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Leonard.” It’s the first time he’s used my name. “That’s just the department that does the report. These are federal charges, and they have mandatory minimums.”

  I didn’t touch wood. All along, I’ve been putting one foot in front of another by focusing on how this is temporary: until the trial, until you got out to do public service or a drug rehabilitation program or something. Suspension of your license. Anything other than staying where you are.

  “What sort of minimums?” My voice is almost a groan.

  “With these charges, we’re talking forty-eight months with fifty-some days off a year for good behavior.”

  I put the phone down on the desk and cradle my face in my hands. I can hear Morton talking and talking and then my name, Leonard, Leonard.

  Forty-eight months.

  There’s silence, then the high-pitched screech of a receiver off the hook, then a woman’s whine, over and over, If you’d like to make a call, please hang up.

  Four years.

  4 Rena

  She senses Leonard’s caution, the care he takes not to call her more than every few days. An outsider might say that it’s impossible to tell from which of them the distance originates—whether he’s stepped back and she has in that inchoate way people gauge closeness and distance shifted in kind or vice versa—but she knows it’s her. Mostly they talk about the case, the newest updates they’ve each received from Morton.

  When she calls Morton today, he suggests that a certain amount hinges on whether they can apprehend Reed. If so, Morton says, they might let Saul cut a deal by supplying information on Reed.

  “Do you think he’d do that?” she asks.

  “Hard to say. Every day’s a different story the first month with them. On the one hand, Saul tells me this Reed character sacrificed him—left knowing Saul would get caught. Then he turns around and says it’s irrelevant, he still did what he did.”

  A disturbing protectiveness toward Reed surfaces in Rena at Morton’s reference to him as this character, disturbing because to anyone looking at Saul and Reed together, as she do
es often in the one photo she has of the two of them, Reed seems so clearly in control. It’s one of those photographs composed by convention: a stranger walks over to two people taking pictures of each other and says, “I’ll snap you guys together,” and one guy throws an arm across the other and both mug smiles for the camera. They’re in a box at Madison Square Garden and it’s Reed’s arm over Saul—a thick, muscular arm sheathed in the sleeve of an expensive-looking black suit. Blond hair frames a face as perfectly chiseled as a Greek statue.

  Still, she thinks Saul is wrong. Although she’s hardly seen Reed these past ten years, really only a few times after she and Saul had bumped into him at the Whitney, it’s inconceivable to her that Reed, who believed in the karma of everyday life, who’d taken her camping in the Sierras, taught her the Eagle Scout method for making a fire, carting out not only his own garbage but litter collected along the trail, had left knowing Saul would get caught.

  WHEN LEONARD COMES to visit, it’s clear that his goal is to try and figure out Reed. It strikes her as unseemly to make Leonard fish. She shows him the photograph.

  “I’d pictured beady eyes, a little goatee. Not a California All-American boy.”

  “That’s exactly what he was. His father owned an engineering firm in Palo Alto, made a lot of money in the sixties and seventies on radar systems for airplanes.” Spook stuff, he’d called it, none of it used for any good. He’d taken the football scholarship at Stanford, he told her, even though he’d already lost interest in the game, rather than coming east to Harvard, where there would have been no sports scholarship, because he hadn’t wanted to take his father’s dirty money.

  “You said he had a drug problem back when he was your roommate?”

  “Before. Basically marijuana, some hallucinogens. He’d dropped out of Stanford and was working for a moving company, smoking pot every day with the guys on the truck. Then he got busted with some marijuana he’d brought down to the city from Mendocino. His mother was devastated. He’d been her golden child. Star athlete, president of the student council, the most popular girls for his girlfriends. His father got the charges dropped in exchange for his going to a drug clinic.”

  She sees Leonard’s consternation. Despite Klara, Leonard had managed to bump along through his boys’ teenage years with Marc a beerguzzling frat boy and Saul never even touching coffee.

  “By the time I met Reed, he was on a macrobiotic diet. He drank wheat grass juice and ate mostly Japanese food. His friends called him Seaweed. That’s why it was so hard for me, at first, to believe he’d gotten back into drugs.”

  Leonard holds the picture close to his face. “Why did he come to New York?”

  “To finish college. His parents hated New York, but Columbia was the only place he’d go. It was the same year I started Yale. He was the only person I knew from California, and I sort of clung to him. I’d come down on weekends, and he’d take me around.”

  She knows Leonard must be thinking that Reed was a boyfriend. That it would be hard for Leonard, knowing her now, to imagine how Reed, with his exotic girlfriends and ease everywhere, had seemed back then out of her league.

  “After he graduated, he bought a van he drove to Peru. We lost touch. It was just luck”—she pauses on this word—“bumping into him that day at the Whitney. He’d gone to law school and got a job working for a top firm. He hated it, said it was like hazing, seventy hours a week working on some glitch involving the intersection of American and French tax law.”

  Leonard hands the photo back to Rena. She can see on his face that he’s wondering if she’s holding something back. If so, it’s more about Saul than Reed: how, to Saul, Reed had seemed like a benign version of Marc. A breath of fresh air in the claustrophobia of medicine, someone who didn’t regard Hispanics as poor people who are more inconvenient than other poor people because they don’t speak English and have their own healing practices. As for her relationship with Reed, Saul had commented on it only once. It saddened him, he said, that Reed, not he, had known her as a girl—as a girl, Saul’s euphemism for when her life was scrappy and sordid, every corner filled with shame.

  MORTON GIVES HER the lowdown he’s heard from the lawyer for Reed’s girlfriend, Bria, a twenty-three-year-old Brazilian divorcée with platinum hair and a Spanish passport that lists her address as her family’s compound in the Tenerife district of the Canary Islands: that Reed quit his job in lieu of being fired, that he’d been doing what Morton called “some private work for a Eurotrash crowd.”

  Bria, Morton says, is the one who was busted at Kennedy three days before Saul’s arrest. “Dumb,” Morton says over the phone. “Telling the customs agent the stuffed panda she was carrying was a Valentine’s Day present for her mother. Too cute. The agents get suspicious with cute. Especially the female ones.”

  What the agent on the four-to-twelve shift saw before her was a girl with white hair dark at the roots, an armful of silver bracelets and a purple suede jacket. Her nostrils looked raw. Slitting the lining of the Louis Vuitton suitcases, the agent found a pharmacy of pills.

  “That, too, the Vuitton, was dumb. The sharp smugglers know you’re better off with Amelia Earhart.”

  With her one phone call, Bria called her lawyer—Reed. When no lawyer arrived, the Treasury guys realized the call had been a tip-off. By then, Reed was on a plane from Hartford to Madrid. Bria waited forty-eight hours before telling them she’d been headed to Tenerife to greet a package Reed had mailed there a few days before—just enough time, DEA agents suspected, for Reed to get the package and disappear.

  “That’s why,” Morton says, “they did Saul’s arrest with so much pyro technics. Usually, this kind of thing, with a professional involved, would be a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five job. Lots of times they would even have a voluntary surrender, the suspect bringing himself in with his attorney for the booking. They were pissed that Reed had left the country, that this dumb chick had been stringing them along.”

  The way Bria’s lawyer tells it, when Saul asked Reed to sell him some Quaaludes, some Valium, anything to help him sleep now that Arlen, the doctor who’d been treating Saul, was holding his triplicate prescription pads, Reed refused. Saul had gone then to Bobby, someone he’d met through Reed. Bobby brought him to Fabio, a guy from Washington Heights, one of the new breed of Dominican dealers who don’t use drugs themselves but keep a neighborhood and select downtown trade.

  With Fabio, Saul has told Morton, it was the same story as before Saul had gone to Arlen; unable to sleep, Saul took Fabio’s barbs, little pink pills made in a bootleg lab outside Santa Fe. When they left him groggy, he asked Fabio for something to help with that. Fabio gave Saul a vial of cocaine. He rolled a hundred-dollar bill to show Saul how to inhale. The first vial was on Fabio. After that, it was ninety dollars a gram. By December, Saul owed Fabio over three thousand dollars. Fabio refused to give Saul anything more until he settled his tab. It was only then, Bria’s lawyer says, that Saul had gone back to Reed. Begging this time.

  Bria’s lawyer concedes that it was Reed who came up with the hospital pharmacy robbery scheme, but he adds that it was Reed’s attempt to help Saul get out of hock with Fabio. Fabio supplied the robber, a guy who worked as a night security guard in a midtown office building. Fabio took his cut immediately—a quarter of the take in exchange for wiping clean Saul’s tab. The rest went to Reed, who gave Saul a small personal stash, just enough to detox himself. Reed mailed three-fourths of his share to Bria’s address in Tenerife; she was to bring the rest in the Louis Vuitton.

  Bria, her lawyer claims, did all this out of love. She believed, he claims, that once Reed cleared his debts he’d clean up and they would get married and buy a starter Tudor in Westchester and he’d go back to working as a lawyer and she’d have a baby and stay home baking cookies and sewing curtains.

  “Why don’t you tell the DA what Bria’s lawyer told you about Fabio and the other guy?” Rena asks Morton. “Wouldn’t that help things for Saul?”

/>   “Can’t. Forget about what is and isn’t admissible, though we got to assume some of this story is being fed to us. We all rely on each other to try and piece things together.”

  “Couldn’t Saul do it himself? Tell the police what he knows about them?”

  “He could, but he won’t. Even if he were in the frame of mind where he’d be looking to offload some of the blame, he’d be too scared about what those characters would do to retaliate.”

  Saul’s job, Bria’s lawyer says, was to provide a typed list of the generic and commercial names of the drugs worth taking, a map showing where the pharmacy is in the basement corridor and the dates when Kim Sun, the barely five-foot pharmacist, would be working the night shift.

  No one had known that Kim Sun was nine weeks pregnant.

  No one had known that after the burglar handed Kim Sun the list of drugs Saul had typed—codeine, Darvon, Nembutal, Seconal, phenobarbital, Tuinal, Dalmane, Valium, Librium, Demerol, Dilaudid, Percodan, benzadrine, dexadrine, methedrine, Ritalin, Ativan, cough medication—and she filled the duffel bag, he would say, “My old lady, she gets cramps with her monthly. What do you got for that?”

  Kim Sun was so frightened, her voice was inaudible.

  The burglar, thinking Kim Sun was tooling with him, pointed his gun at her head.

  “Midol,” she croaked before passing out.

  THE DAY AFTER the grand jury returns an indictment, Saul writes her for the first time. She can visit. If she wants. Would she bring him books? His father has promised to mail Freud’s Standard Edition. Could she bring Eros and Civilization, Ulysses, Anna Karenina? He encloses a little drawing like the ones he used to leave on her pillow: a stick figure with a headful of ringlets and two shopping bags overflowing with books approaching a wrought-iron gate. Men in striped pajamas stick big noses through the spaces in the fence.

  If she wants. That first day, in Morton’s office, when he’d still been in her mind’s eye naked and scared, surrounded by boots and guns, then she’d wanted. But now, a month later, there’s only dread at the thought of sitting face to face. A carnage of her neglect and his deceit.