Nothing Rep had seen in walking through Cold Coast Productions’ south Milwaukee facility prepared him for the conference room. Rep and Sue Key had entered the down-at-the-heels, red-brick building through a heavy metal door with mustard-colored paint chipping off of it. They had walked behind a crew-cut guy in a short-sleeved white shirt across a bleakly lit shop floor where an ancient web press commanded the attention of five older men—men whose faces immediately told Rep that he was on the wrong side of one of those us/them lines that guys in suits can’t cross. Through another metal door, this one with a frosted glass window, up five flights of echoing metal stairs, through one more metal door, like the first two except for a pebbled steel surface and a fresher paint job. Past a warren of empty cubicles, over threadbare industrial gray carpeting to the conference room’s double doors—wood, finally.
“In there,” the guy said. “I’ll let Mr. Levitan know you’re here.”
Past the doorway lay a different world, as if the rust-belt exterior were a reverse Potemkin Village. Rich odors of wax and old leather replaced the lubricant and burned metal smells permeating the floor below. Three tiers of bookshelves lined two of the walls. A polished mahogany table and leather chairs sat on parquet flooring.
The spine of a book a yard or so from Rep’s face said The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill. Next book: The River War, by Winston Churchill. Hmm. His eyes ranged one shelf over. World Crisis in four volumes, by Winston Churchill. Marlborough, His Life and Times, by Winston Churchill. The Second World War in six volumes, by Winston Churchill. History of the English Speaking Peoples in four volumes, by Winston Churchill. The Last Lion, by William Manchester, about Winston Churchill. Pelham’s biography of Winston Churchill. Severance’s biography of Winston Churchill. The eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert and Randolph Churchill. Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955, by Paul Addison. The Young Churchill, by Celia Sandys. Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War, by Warren Kimball.
“Miss Key, Mr. Pennyworth?” a gravelly baritone boomed from the doorway. “I’m Max Levitan. Welcome to Cold Coast Productions.”
Levitan looked to Rep like he was just under six feet tall, and he had to be sixty years old. He wore a blue poplin work shirt, a pair of khaki slacks, and a baseball cap—blue with a red bill and a plain block M on the front—that Rep didn’t recognize at first. After three or four seconds, it clicked. Braves. Not Atlanta. The Milwaukee Braves. A cap from some forty years in the past.
Levitan’s handshake wasn’t quite a bone-crusher, but Rep would still remember it when he went to bed that night. He felt odd lumps of scar tissue here and there, and at least one bone that he suspected had knit in a rough-and-ready way after a break.
They sat down. The moment Rep had been dreading approached. The great client let-down.
Melissa’s pop-culture jetsam and professorial deconstruction had produced a settlement of Sue Key’s claim. Rep needed only two business days to put a little lawyerly spin on the stuff, shine it up a bit, and make a deal. He thought he could have bluffed Cold Coast out of a bit more money, but clients get the last word on those decisions. When he’d told Key that Cold Coast’s offer included a personal, face-to-face apology from the CEO himself, her thrilled squeal had signaled the end of negotiations. Now she was about to hear a hollow, pro forma recitation of suit-speak that would never measure up to her stratospheric emotional expectations.
Levitan took off the Braves cap and cleared his throat.
“First of all, Miss Key, on behalf of Cold Coast Productions and myself personally, I want to express my deepest apology for this error in judgment.” His eyes held hers and his head leaned in her direction as his expression appealed for understanding. “It should not have happened, and it will not happen again. To you or to anybody else. I give you my promise on that. I have had an unambiguous discussion with the person who doctored that photograph, and believe you me, there is no room for any future misunderstanding on this point.”
“Thank you,” Key said, bowing her head and fiddling with the top button on her pink sweater.
“As chief executive officer of Cold Coast Productions, I accept personal responsibility for this foul-up,” Levitan continued. Rep sensed that he’d changed “screw-up” to “foul-up” at the last second to avoid offending Key. “I want to be sure the corrective measures we have taken meet with your complete satisfaction.”
Opening a maroon leather portfolio that he’d carried into the room, he took out a compact disk and an eleven-by-fourteen inch white envelope and handed them to Key.
“The disk contains the original picture and all of the alterations that were made. In the envelope you’ll find the print-proofs of the calendar page where your picture appears, and all the tear-sheets we could trace. I have no reason to believe that there are any more copies of that photograph anywhere in my company’s files.”
“Thank you,” Key said again, her voice now church-pew quiet.
Levitan now took out six sheets of bond, stapled in the upper left-hand corner, and a letter-sized envelope. He turned toward Rep.
“This is the agreement that you sent over, which I have signed,” he said, “including my written apology, and the certification that we have pulped all copies of the calendar that we could retrieve.”
“Good,” Rep said.
“And, of course, the check.”
“Right.” Five thousand dollars. Not exactly King of Torts money, but enough to cover the charges he’d booked plus a modest write-up, keep the bean-counters back in Indianapolis quiet, and bulk up Sue Key’s savings account. Rep got the precious documents securely in his mitts.
“I very much appreciate your coming by so that we could bring appropriate closure to this unfortunate situation,” Levitan said. “If you have half an hour or so, I’d be happy to show you around our facilities here.”
“That would be wonderful,” Key said, “but there’s a transcript I need to get out by tomorrow morning.”
“In that case,” he said, rising, “I hope that we meet again soon under happier circumstances. I’ll show you out.”
“The library in that conference room is very impressive,” Rep said when they were back on the metal steps. “It must have two hundred fifty volumes.”
“Three hundred five,” Levitan said.
“Are all of them by or about Winston Churchill?” Rep asked.
“Yes, but with a footnote. All but one are by or about Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British statesman. There’s one Civil War story in there by an American novelist who also happened to be named Winston Churchill. I bought it by mistake, and it was such a laugh I decided to keep it.”
“That’s pretty single-minded,” Rep said.
“Winston Churchill was the greatest man to live in the twentieth century,” Levitan said. “He was the last English-speaking politician who was remotely interesting for anything he did outside of politics. Once I really knew Churchill’s life, I couldn’t work up much interest in anybody else’s. Would you call that pathologically obsessive?”
“Not unless I were paid to,” Rep said.
“Now, there’s a guy I know has over a thousand books about Adolf Hitler. That’s obsession. I mean, Hitler lost.”
They had reached the bottom of the stairs. Rep noticed that, despite the speech, Levitan wasn’t panting. They went back across the shop floor fringe, drawing the same wary/disgusted glances from the men working there. Levitan propped the door open with his shoulder as Rep and Key stepped outside. Instead of going back inside immediately he just stood there, as if reluctant to give up the Edenic lake breeze gently ruffling tufts of steel wool colored hair that showed under the edge of his baseball cap.
“You’re new to Milwaukee, aren’t you?” he said to Rep.
“Been here less than two months.”
“This is a blue-collar town with blue-collar memories. Those guys in there used to be heroes. They’re not anymore, but it’s not their fault. They held up their end of the deal. They didn’t turn the mightiest industrial machine on Earth into the rust belt. That was done by guys in suits.”
Levitan stepped back inside and with metallic finality the door snapped shut behind him.
“Where’s your car?” Rep asked his client.
“I took the bus over.”
“Can I give you a ride back to your office?”
“Actually, could you take me to my flat over on College? I do most of my proofing and corrections there.”
“How do I get there?” Rep asked as they slid into his Sable.
“Start by going west on KK.” She caught Rep’s blank look and grinned. “That’s right, you just said you haven’t been here long. KK is Kinnikinnick. Just turn left at the stop sign and we’ll take it from there.”
The trip took almost fifteen minutes, as they rolled past bungalows with life-size statutes of the Blessed Virgin in front, squat, six-unit apartment buildings, and postcard-sized lawns being worked by septuagenarians sweating through white tee-shirts and placidly puffing fat cigars. It seemed shorter to Rep because Key spent most of the quarter-hour telling him what a fabulous lawyer he was and how thrilled she felt and how if she ever had to put a legal dream-team together, he’d definitely be the captain.
She finally directed him to the curb in front of an upper/lower duplex whose covered-porch design screamed pre-World War II. It was trim and neat, though, with its wood frame freshly painted and a pale yellow stone foundation that Rep would remember when he later heard the term “Cream City Brick.”
He didn’t have long to savor these reveries. Before he had the ignition off, the unmistakably stentorian roar of a Harley Sportster motorcycle split the languid air. The cycle had just rounded the corner ahead of them. It growled down the block, skimmed elegantly across the street, and squealed to a stop fender to fender with Rep’s Sable. The helmetless rider shook longish, coal-black hair away from his face, disclosing Asian features and almond-colored skin. Frowning in puzzled concentration, he stared through Rep’s windshield for several seconds before his dark eyes flashed with recognition.
“Sis,” the biker yelled then, “we got a problem.”
Safe bet, Rep thought; for strapped to the storage compartment lid behind the bike’s saddle he saw a calf-brown scabbard with a rifle butt sticking out of it.