Like many he-men, Schorr was disgusted by talk of real women’s real bodies-he was out of the kitchen before I finished speaking. I went into the bathroom, switched on my diver’s lamp and climbed up onto the toilet seat to undo the window locks. There was an extra bolt in the window for security, but that was to keep outsiders away: the key was on a hook next to the frame.
The bottom sash was stuck through years of disuse; flushing the toilet a couple of times covered the sound I made forcing it open. The alarm would definitely go off now, but since it rang in Lebold, Arnoff’s office, and they already had their dogsbody on the scene, I hoped they’d think the deputies had tripped it looking around on the upper floors. I took a quick look out: the window faced south, toward the road. The deputies were searching the north.
Back in the kitchen, Yosano was fiddling with a handheld, trying to play some game by the computer’s backlight. I didn’t know how long Benjamin
could keep quiet in that oven; I needed some strategy for getting the lawyer out of the kitchen.
“They interrupt your private life to bring you over here tonight?” I asked.
He nodded. “But I’m only on call one week a month. And usually we don’t have such dramatic crises: usually it’s just a client wanting to change a will, or being lonely in the night.”
“Did Mr. Taverner call you in out of loneliness?”
He continued fiddling with the keys; the computer binged every time he made a score. “Oh, yes. And like many of the old ones, he thought of me as a servant. Oh, they all think the lawyers are their servants, but being a Japanese-American, I’m like a gardener in their eyes. They need to pee, I’m supposed to help them with their bottles and bedpans.”
“Sounds horrible. Surely you could get a less demeaning job.”
He shrugged. “The money is incredible. And some of it’s interesting: we work for such powerful people, you’re sort of part of history sometimes. Like these papers that Taverner had, it’s been so long since Mr. Arnoff’s done dayto-day work with the clients, he probably wouldn’t know about them, but Taverner was a lonely old guy. He’d tap that locked drawer and say he knew people in New York who’d pay ten million bucks to get their hands on them.”
I thought of Benjamin in the oven, but I couldn’t miss this chance to ask Yosano what was in the papers.
“I never saw them.” The computer made a derisive sound to let him know he’d bombed. “But he used to say they’d make the Hollywood Ten look like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and it was a shame he was a man of honor who gave his word not to divulge them.”
“Didn’t you wish he’d show them to you?”
“Oh, sure,” Yosano said. “But we’re his executors, I knew I’d see them sooner or later. And then, you always wonder if it really is going to be such a big deal. It’s human, when you get that old, to hope you’ve done something so big the rest of us will never forget you, but a lot of the time it’s something no one cares about anymore.”
I was about to argue that someone cared, or Marcus Whitby wouldn’t have drowned outside the room we were standing in, when a gunshot ripped open the night.
CHAPTER 28
When you hear a.45, you never think it was a backfire or a firecracker. Yosano and I froze, and then he ran through the swinging door to the front of the house.
As soon as the door swung shut, I opened the oven.
“Come with me. Don’t ask questions, and don’t speak,” I told Benjamin. He was giving off the sweet sickly sweat of fear, and he couldn’t stand, he’d been lying doubled up so long. I slung him over my shoulder, firemanstyle, and humped to the bathroom double time. He was clutching his book still, and it dug into my sore shoulder. He was fifteen or sixteen, but such a skinny kid it wasn’t as hard a ride as I’d feared.
Inside the bathroom, I set him down and worked on his legs. He was still shying away from my touch, but fear and cold had made him numb; he didn’t resist. As soon as he could stand, I turned off my headlamp, opened the window and looked out. We could hear the excited yelling from the front of the house, but we were clear here in the back.
“I’m going to give you a boost up to this window” I spoke in the flat, tongueless speech you learn in prison because it doesn’t carry far. “You slide through, you drop to the ground. You lie flat on your stomach and wait for me. Got it?”
I felt rather than saw him nod. I gave him a boost up to the sill and helped him wriggle his legs through. As he twisted, he dropped his book. He cried out.
I stuck up my hand and covered his mouth. “I’ll hand it to you. Get through and get down.”
When he seemed unwilling to leave without it, I pushed him. He clung briefly to the sill, and then fell. He didn’t cry out again, so I assumed he’d landed without breaking anything. I climbed up on the toilet seat, dropped his book through the opening and hoisted myself onto the sill. The stab of pain between my shoulders was so intense I had to hold back my own cry.
I sat for a few seconds, gathering my breath, then began the hard job of wriggling through the window-a grown woman’s hips are wider than a skinny adolescent’s. When a second shot reechoed, it startled me so that I landed in a heap almost on top of Benjamin. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I lay gagging for air, trying not to make any noise.
We were at the southeast corner of the mansion. We could hear excited shouts as the puppies and Schorr tried to figure out where their prey had fallen. They had shot at… a raccoon or a deer. They had not shot-notan ardent teenage girl running through the fields to protect her protege.
I wanted to dash to the back, what are you morons doing, you machodrunk fools, shooting at shadows and children? I grabbed the grass in front of me, tying myself to the ground here. If I joined the hunt, I’d leave the boy here where he would be found, arrested, if not shot. And Schorr was jumpy enough to arrest me or even shoot me if I showed my face.
“What they doing?” Benjamin cried in an undervoice.
“They shot at something. Probably a raccoon, an animal. As soon as they figure that out, they’ll be looking for me, so let’s move.”
“Animal? You think not-” he thought better of finishing the sentence. “Come on,” I said roughly. “We’re going. We are going to go straight across the lawn here. The house will keep the people in back from seeing us. When we get to that tall grass, we are going to go through it. You will stay right behind me, got it?”
He stumbled to his feet. We couldn’t go fast. He could barely walk, and certainly not run. Cold, hunger, confusion, far from home in a country
that wanted to put him in prison for being-what? If he was a terrorist, I’d deal with that down the road, but if he was just a kid in the wrong place at a time when fear was holding the horse’s reins in America, I needed to deal with that, too.
We were halfway across the lawn when two more squad cars squealed up the drive, lights flashing. I turned to Benjamin and pulled him smartly to the ground, lying flat next to him until the cars were at the house. Lifting my head, I watched the side of the house we were facing. They hadn’t found the open bathroom window yet: all the action was in the fields and gardens at the back.
“Let’s go. Hands and knees. You go forward, I’ll keep an eye out.”
The work gloves shielded my hands from the stickers growing in the untended lawn, but Benjamin didn’t have any protection. When I saw him unable to put his hands down, I stripped the gloves off and forced them onto his hands. “Move. It’s our only chance, while they’re doing what they’re doing.”