7
Over my orange juice and coffee I missed the recriminations that should follow adultery. The house was empty, except for Clara, the housekeeper, who was middle-aged, white, moderately anti-Semitic and consistently disapproving of me. Nor was she given to long speeches or confidences. When I asked her where my wife was, she said:
“Out.”
“Where?”
“I have no idea.”
I drank my coffee and stared through glass panels to the swimming pool. Then I got in my Cadillac and drove to the office. Like a chosen few in America, I live the good life.
Millicent Patience Cooper was unruffled and unchanged, without rings under her eyes, and she registered neither delight nor regret. She sat at her desk, going through Senator Bellman’s file.
“Is he still our client?” she asked me.
“What does he pay us now?”
“He’s up to twenty-five thousand annually.”
“Raise it to thirty thousand and bill him. If he pays the bill, he’s still our client.”
“He was the top of the list at twenty-five. Why don’t you dump the louse? You can afford it.”
That was the first evidence of our sharing a pair of sheets. She would not have said that yesterday.
“I like the money too much,” I told her. “When you finish whatever you’re doing, come into my office. We have a new client. And by the way, send Anne over to the public library and tell her to find a book called Law and Civilization by Andrew Capestone. It was published in 1957 by Crimm and Lowe.”
“Who is Andrew Capestone?”
“Our new client.”
“Oh?”
So it was done, and as I went into my office and sat down at my desk, I created a conversation with the psychiatrist who had taken six hundred dollars for a dozen visits when I first learned that my wife was being what is euphemistically called unfaithful. He had helped me very little then but more during the ensuing years simply by appearing in my mind whenever I decided to have a conversation with myself. I always had him begin the conversation by his asking why. “My wife.” “That doesn’t hold up.” “The senator.” “That doesn’t hold up either.” “Myself. I make the image. What’s there in the beginning is meaningless. I can take a drifter off the street or a corpse in the pathology room of the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception—and it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference.”
I was opening my mail when Millie appeared, pad in hand, her pale blue linen dress uncreased, her manner unruffled, and seated herself in the chair next to my desk.
“Do you know,” I said to her, “you never enter this room without that damn pad.”
“You didn’t mind it yesterday.”
“I had three hours of sleep. How much did you have?”
“About six. Who is our new client?”
“Capestone, Andrew. You pronounce it Kapston, spell it Capestone.”
She wrote in her pad.
“Age?”
“Forty-seven, I imagine. We can check it with Who’s Who.”
“Current Who’s Who?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly, wondering whether he had actually made Who’s Who. “He’s been hiding his light under a bushel. Try 1957 or 1958.”
“What do we charge him?”
“Five thousand.”
“Oh?” She raised a brow.
“He’s an old classmate of mine. Harvard. He’s not rich.”
“Where do I bill him?”
“Here.”
“You’re not getting through to me, Mr. Brody.”
“I’m Mr. Brody again?”
“During business hours.”
“This will be his reference address.”
“Where does he live?”
“I closed my eyes for a moment, and then I replied, At this moment he’s somewhere in Rhodesia.”
“Al!” She stared at me for a long moment. “When did he become our client?”
“You took his call yesterday morning.”
“I know that,” Millie said. “Was he calling from Rhodesia?”
“No, my dear. He was calling from the Los Angeles airport. I spent an hour with him before he boarded his plane for New York. From there he went on to Rhodesia. He landed in Rhodesia two hours ago, and by now he is in the clear and we can move. Which is why I mentioned nothing to you yesterday.”
“What do you mean by ‘in the clear’?”
“Have you ever heard of the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation?”
“I don’t know. It sounds like the name of a dozen committees I hear about these days.”
“Well, to put its history in a nutshell, it’s an African group, formed by a hundred black intellectuals and professionals in South Africa. Its program is nonviolent liberation, but still it’s very sub rosa. Now they’ve sent a delegation to Rhodesia to meet with a similar committee there, and they consider it very important, very critical to the situation in that part of Africa, and they asked Capestone to join them as an adviser. Concerning law and colonialism, he’s probably the best legal mind in America, and while no one knows precisely what will come out of the meeting, he desperately wants support built for himself in America. Until now he has despised publicity and avoided it. Now he needs it.”
“Is this a public meeting?”
“Very damn secret. When he lands at Salisbury, he disappears, possibly for two weeks.”
“And meanwhile we create his image in America.”
“Precisely.”
“Al …”
“What bugs you?” I asked her.
“I don’t know.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “What’s his family like? Where are they?”
“No family. A total loner.”
“Married?”
“And divorced. She doesn’t enter into the picture.”
“Talking of pictures, what have you got?”
“Nothing yet. Telephone the Stamford Sentinel in Connecticut. They should have some in their files. Also his publishers.”
“That goes back quite a while, doesn’t it? If we want him as a child prodigy, why don’t we go to your college yearbook?”
“I never thought of that. Good idea.”
“Come off it. What do you want a kid’s picture for?”
“We might use it.”
“All right, Mr. Brody—we might use it.”
“And will you have dinner with me again tonight?”
Before she could answer, there was a knock on the door, and Anne Jones, Millie’s secretary, entered and placed a library-bound book on my desk. “There it is,” she said. “Law and Civilization. I never knew the two went together.”
Millie was looking at her, as if she were seeing her as a black woman for the first time. “Anne, did you ever hear of the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation?”
“Hear of it? I have been on a dozen of them.”
“This one’s in South Africa.”
“They have their own problems,” said Anne.