‘And what about the other three victims, Lilly, Monika and Pauline, Betga’s other three plaintiffs?’ Jessica asked. ‘Their experiences weren’t as bad as Carla’s but they were still pretty bad.’
‘Betga said that if Carla settles, the other three will too.’
‘Are they all in touch with each other?’ Maserov indicated that he didn’t know with a slight movement of his hands and a gentle shrug of his shoulders. Somehow his not knowing this and his not pretending to know lifted Maserov even more, just slightly, in Jessica’s estimation.
They’d had dinner together and then had gone to Jessica’s local haunt, the Ghost of Alfred Felton, the cocktail bar at the Espy, to toast Carla’s agreeing to settle. The bartenders there were famously egoless, an attribute in a bartender, waiter or any other man that suited Jessica perfectly. They were allies, not predators. But for all that, when Jessica left the bar that evening, the place she and Maserov had gone to toast Carla’s agreeing to settle, one bartender couldn’t help but notice the regard his favourite late-night corporate regular had shown Maserov, not through any conversation, which amidst the crushed and shaken ice he could not hear, but through her body language and proximity to Maserov.
He might well have been one of the famously egoless bartenders but Jessica’s fondness for Maserov shook him and left him ever-so-slightly depressed. And that she was always so friendly and didn’t act as though she was aware of the power of her beauty only made it worse for this man who, for a moment, hated Maserov as much as Hamilton now did.
The side street outside the cocktail bar was quiet but for the faraway sounds of Gogol’s distant relatives girding and ungirding their threadbare overcoats, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, in the uneven, potholed seaside laneways that waited for social archaeologists who had not yet been born. It was cold but at least it was no longer raining.
‘So tomorrow you’ll go to Malcolm Torrent to get the authority to offer, what, five hundred or even six hundred thousand for Carla?’ Jessica asked Maserov.
‘Yep, tomorrow’s the big day.’
‘Have you checked that he’ll be in?’
‘Yep, no getting out of it.’
‘Are you nervous?’
‘I’ll tell you honestly, I’m nervous every time I speak to him.’
‘But he listens to you. It’s always gone well with him.’
‘Yeah, that’s true. When I started this I was winging it just for myself, just trying to buy time to figure out what to do when they got rid of me, what to do with my life. But now I’m . . . involved.’
‘Involved?’
‘Emotionally involved.’
‘You’re emotionally involved?’ Jessica said, edging imperceptibly closer to him.
‘Yes, I haven’t used the time to secure any options, to find work, when Freely Savage gets rid of me. I’ve just been working with Betga and you and getting emotionally involved.’
‘I think it’s great that you can say this, that a man can feel comfortable admitting that he’s become . . . emotionally involved.’
‘Well, only a heartless shit could know what happened to these women and not become emotionally involved in the outcome.’
‘Oh . . . you mean emotionally involved in the cases.’
‘Yeah, what did you think I . . .?’
Jessica turned her head to one side so that her face was pointed away from him. She was surprised to feel the fingers of one of his hands combing the hair on the side that was turned away. Maserov was surprised to be combing. But emboldened by gin and absinthe and the sudden increase in the force of the wind, he turned her face back to his, leaned in and slightly down to kiss her.
It wasn’t a tentative kiss or one whose intent could be the subject of plausible deniability at any later time. He found the smallest space between her lips and used all the power of his longing to let her know how much he wanted her and when she responded as though hungry for him there was nothing but the wind to stop them kissing for several minutes.
‘Should I . . .?’ Maserov asked. Jessica was hoping he was asking if he should come home with her but instead his next word was ‘go’. She tried to hide her disappointment.
‘Oh . . . I guess. It’s late.’
‘Yeah.’
They stood there in the street alternately looking at each other and away and then back again. She was wondering now why he hadn’t continued kissing her, if he was going to start again and whether she had made a fool of herself by so obviously wanting him to once he had started. He was wondering if he had made a fool of himself, or worse, somehow taken the first albeit tiny step on the road towards behaving like Mike Mercer. He was thinking about the kiss, the first one he’d had in a long time. It was the first time he had kissed a woman who wasn’t Eleanor since he had started dating Eleanor all those years ago. He was wondering if he had just been unfaithful to his wife and maybe even to his children. And he was wondering if they were going to kiss again before they got into their respective cars.
‘So tomorrow you’ll go to Malcolm Torrent to get the authority to offer,’ she said, starting the whole thing all over again and returning to the assault as though it was all about that.
‘Yeah, but first I have to go back to Freely Savage to satisfy HR’s quota of fool’s errands, wild-goose chases and the like.’
‘Why do you still have to do this shit?’
‘I figure it’s easier to quickly do whatever bullshit they want me to do than to deal with the consequences of Hamilton finding out I’m not doing it.’
‘So . . . I’ll see you in the morning?’ Jessica asked tentatively before adding, ‘Or the afternoon, whenever. Let me know what Mr Torrent says.’
‘Of course. You’ll be the first person I tell.’
‘Don’t be nervous,’ she said. ‘Remember, he tends to listen to you and, frankly, you being the person on the other side is the best thing that’s happened to Carla since the assault. So . . . I don’t know if that came out right. You know what I mean.’
‘You mean she’s lucky there’s such a lousy lawyer on the other side.’
‘I mean she’s lucky to find a man with so much integrity on the other side. Good luck.’ With that she leaned in and gave him a peck on the cheek and, when she had returned to her pre-peck position, he pulled her back and began kissing her passionately just as he had a few minutes earlier. Jessica returned the fervour and neither was at all embarrassed, not in the street and not as they lay in their respective beds thinking of it all through the night.