Jacklin gazed down at the Potomac. In the sodden, gray morning, the river looked lifeless, dead. He thought of the dinner planned that evening, the care and preparation expended to ensure that it was the event of a lifetime. Not to mention the expense. Truffles. Caviar. Peter Duchin’s big band was setting them back a hundred thousand dollars alone. Word that one of Jefferson’s companies was due to declare Chapter 11 would be a fly in the soup. A goddamned hairy Texas horsefly! Jacklin tightened his hand into a fist. He’d be damned if Hugh Fitzgerald would single-handedly shut down Triton.
“I’m due to testify on the bill later this morning,” he said with a glance over his shoulder. “I’ll have a word with the senator afterward, and see if I can’t convince him to recommend its passage.”
“Fitzgerald? Good luck, J. J. The man’s left of Gandhi.”
“I know. I know,” said Jacklin, with a wave of the hand. “But the senator and I go way back. Just a matter of having him reconsider his career options. He’s seventy-four years old, after all. Time he did something else with his life.”
“And if he doesn’t?” De Valmont yanked out his silk pocket square and began to carefully refold it.
“I’m sure we can find a way to convince him. Either with a carrot or a stick.”
De Valmont nodded, but his eyes said he wasn’t convinced.
Jacklin returned to the center of his office and sat down in his Princeton chair. It wouldn’t be easy, he admitted, but it could be done. It was no coincidence that many of the senior partners at Jefferson had served in high government positions. Some called it access capitalism. J. J. Jacklin preferred “good business.”
“Gentlemen,” he called to his partners. “Shall we get down to brass tacks?”
21
Thomas Bolden sat in the back of the taxi, his cheek pressed to the cold metal door frame. Traffic moved in fits and spurts. The sky had hardened to a steely gray, the clouds fused into a solid, darkening wall. The taxi came to a halt. Pedestrians hurried along the wet sidewalks, one eye for the sky wondering when the hesitant snowflakes would yield to the real McCoy.
Bolden glanced at his lap. His right hand trembled as if palsied. Stop, he ordered it silently, but the shaking didn’t lessen. He took a breath and placed his left hand on top of it, then stared back out the window.
Until now, it had all been a terrible mistake. The mugging, his abduction and interrogation, the botched attempt to kill him. He’d been willing to consign all of it to the trash. Guilfoyle had the wrong man. It was that simple. Yet, as they drove up Fifth Avenue, his eyes aching in their sockets, his trousers stained with cooking grease and yesterday’s veal piccata, he realized that he’d been wrong. It didn’t matter if he could forgive and forget. They would not.
“They” had followed him into his workplace.
“They” had gotten to Diana Chambers.
“They” had killed Sol Weiss.
It didn’t matter that he had no knowledge of “Crown” or a man named Bobby Stillman. The fact that he knew of them was enough.
“They” would not go away. Not now, Bolden told himself. Not ever.
He thought of Jenny.
If Diana Chambers was fair game, she might be next.
“Driver,” he said, tapping his knuckles on the Plexiglas screen that divided the cab. “Take me to Fourteenth Street and Broadway. The Kraft School. There’s a twenty in it if you can make it in ten minutes.”
22
Of course, they couldn’t stop talking about the mugging.
“Calm down, you guys,” said Jennifer Dance. She sat on the front of her desk, legs dangling. “One at a time. Remember, once someone else starts talking, keep your thoughts to yourself until they’ve finished.”
“Yo, Miss Dance.” A tall, fleshy Hispanic boy with a crew cut and a green tear tattooed at the corner of his eye stood up.
“Yes, Hector, go ahead.” Then, to the rest of the class: “It’s Hector’s turn. Everyone give him your attention.”
“Yeah, like shut up,” added Hector with real venom, casting his eyes around him. “So, Miss Dance, like I’m wondering, if it was this razor-sharp knife, why didn’t it cut right through your arm? I mean, like deep, like you guttin’ a cat or somethin’.” He shot his buddy a glance. “Ten stitches, man. I could do better than that.”
“Thank you for your comment, Hector, but I think I’ve already answered that. I don’t know why he didn’t hurt me worse. Just lucky, I guess.”
“ ‘Cuz you good-lookin’,” a voice rumbled from the back of the room. “Them boys wanted to slam yo’ ass.”
Jenny stood and walked briskly down the aisle. It was a normal-size classroom, one student per desk, blackboards running the length of each wall, map cartridges she’d never even thought of using, hanging behind her desk. She stopped in front of a hulking young man seated in the last row.
“That’s enough, Maurice,” she said firmly.
Maurice Gates shrugged his massive shoulders and dropped his eyes to the floor as if he didn’t know what the big deal was about. He was a huge kid, well over six feet, at least 220 pounds, braided gold necklace hanging outside his football jersey (in defiance of school rules against jewelry), his baseball cap turned halfway to the back.
“Jes’ the truth,” he said. “You a good-lookin’ woman. Wanted to get him some gash. ‘At’s all. Know’d you’d like it, so he didn’t want to mess you up real bad.”
“Stand up,” said Jenny.
Maurice looked up at her with sleepy eyes.
“Stand up,” she repeated, softer this time. The classroom was all about control. Lose your temper and you’d already lost the battle.
“Yes, ma’am.” Maurice rose to his feet with enough moans and grimaces to do Job proud.
“Mr. Gates,” she said, “women are not bitches. They are not ‘ho’s,’ or ‘gashes.’ Is that clear? We, females, do not live in a constant state of arousal. And if we did, we wouldn’t require the attentions of a crude, chauvinistic musclehead like yourself.”
“You go, girl,” said one of the students in the back row.
Maurice shifted on his feet, his face a blank, as Jenny continued. “You have been in my class for two weeks now,” she said, standing toe-to-toe with him. “At least once a day, I have asked you to refrain from using offensive language. If I can’t teach you algebra in this classroom, I would, at least, like to teach you respect. Next time I have to waste a second of the class’s time keeping your butt in line-one second-I’ll have you kicked out of school.” She delivered the last part on her tiptoes, her mouth a few inches from Mr. Maurice Gates’s ear. “Your attendance here is a condition of your release from Rikers. So unless you want a ticket right back there, you’ll sit down, shut up, and keep your comments about the superior sex to yourself.”
Jenny stared into the boy’s eyes, seeing hate flare in the way his eyelids twitched, sensing his anger at being humiliated in front of his classmates. The kids called him Mo-fo, and they used the words with all due deference. Make no mistake, he was an angry, volatile young man. His case files pretty much came out and said that he’d been a player in several unsolved homicides. But Jenny couldn’t worry about that. She had a class to teach. Order to keep. She owed the kids that much. “Sit down,” she said.
For a second or two, Maurice Gates remained standing. Finally, he bunched his shoulders and sat.
The hush in the classroom lasted ten seconds.
“We were discussing what an appropriate punishment might be for mugging someone,” Jenny said, retaking her place at the head of the class. “Remember, I got my watch back. All I got was a little cut and very scared.”
“You popped one of ’em, too.”
“Yes, I did,” said Jenny, adding a little swagger to her step. “A right hook.” A few of her knuckles were swollen and painful to the touch.