The Juror Read online

  “Yes.”

  Henri starts to chuckle.

  “You’re comparing anchovies,” Juliet says, “to some part of the female anatomy that you know absolutely nothing about? Is that it?”

  “But that’s why I love anchovies,” says Oliver. “They’re all I’ve got.”

  “You’re so disgusting,” says Juliet.

  “They’re all I can access,” says Oliver.

  “Access this,” says Juliet. She picks up an anchovy in her long fingers and flings it at him. It lands on his cheek and sticks there. Henri barks out a laugh.

  Then Jesse cries out, “Food fight!” which reminds Juliet that she’s dealing with a pair of adolescent boys here and this could get quickly out of hand. She says, “No no no no. Not now. Not here. Sorry.”

  Oliver smiles mildly. The perfect gentleman. He peels the anchovy off his cheek and eats it.

  Everyone laughs, even Annie. But Annie laughs only because the others do. She’s not listening to the chatter. Her eyes are focused somewhere else—at a high spot on one wall. Then they flick over to another wall. Juliet watching her, wondering what she’s looking for.

  Does she think that man is listening? Is she still frightened of that bastard?

  “Hey you,” she says sharply. “Annie.”

  “What?”

  “This is a celebration. You’re free. Up from slavery. It’s over. Eat.”

  ANNIE at eleven the next morning, steps into her studio for the first time since the night she invited him in here, and it’s like going back to some childhood place, some place she’d forgotten mattered so much.

  Used to be an artist.

  But her Grope Boxes look dull, dun, inert. They look like the crates they are.

  She stands before the piece she’d been working on when all this started. Second-Grade Passion for a TV Lion. Or so it says, in her own handwriting on a note pinned to the wall. But she has no memory of calling it that. Now the name seems blithely postmodern, frivolous. Not like her at all.

  Well OK, I’ll find some other name.

  The important thing is to get back to work, get back into rhythm.

  The covering-box itself has been hoisted high to reveal the piece’s innards as they rest on her worktable. Annie flips a switch to start the little motor. She passes her hand between a pair of whirring rotors and lets the hundreds of satin snakes slap at her. She reaches up farther and gets gusts of hot muggy air from the steam machine. Like the breath of a panting animal.

  Right, OK. Clever.

  But what else? Wasn’t there supposed to be something else?

  She casts her gaze around and spots the piece of soft deep-pile fur she found at a thrift shop. The mane, yes. The lion needs a mane.

  She remembers that on the day she met the Teacher she had been about to attach the lion’s mane.

  She disengages the pawl on the winch, and lowers the covering-box carefully to the worktable. Upends it. Sets the fur inside it, finds some screws and a Phillips screwdriver, and begins to affix the fur to the inside of the box. After a few minutes of this work, after a few of the screws are in, she starts to relax a little—and then that memory comes back to her. Oliver’s on his bike and she’s in that car and the car is bearing down on him and she’s trying to get out of her skin—

  She grits her teeth. She squeezes the handle of the Phillips as hard as she can and the plastic fluting digs into her skin.

  She waits, and after a minute the box comes into focus again.

  This box.

  What the hell is she doing?

  This mane she’s lining this box with? This fuzzy sweet sentimental… what is this?

  Is this really the kind of art she used to make? Was it all like this?

  Warmhearted precious bric-a-brac?

  This isn’t going to work.

  She shuts her eyes again.

  She stands there, rocking on her heels, and then she starts pacing, back and forth in the small space with her head down, eyes on the paint-splattered wood slats, and she doesn’t know what she’s looking for but after a long time it finds her. An image. Of a house. A homey farmhouse with samplers and lace doilies and calico curtains and lovely burnished antique furniture.

  But the walls are lined with shards of glass.

  Thousands of twisted razor-sharp pieces of glass, growing from the inside walls like thorns. Walk carefully. If you stray to the left or to the right you’ll cut yourself.

  If you stumble you’ll kill yourself.

  And there’s some churning sound, the cadence of an immense machine for crushing, as you pass through the rooms.

  Is this a new piece?

  But you could never make this, Annie.

  Where in the world could you come up with a farmhouse? And all those shards of glass? Someone will stumble, someone will be cut. Someone will sue. Even if you could find a way to make this piece, you could never show this piece.

  But who gives a damn? she thinks. I’ll make it for myself.

  She sits on the floor. She stretches out on her back and stares up at the ceiling. A staircase? Yes, there will be a staircase up to a dark bedroom. Wait, no. No, nothing will be dark. Every window must be spotlessly clean so the sun can come pouring in. Everything must be neat, all organized by some finicky spirit. But a garden of glass shards will grow out of the goose-down quilt on the bed, and there will be homemade glass shards in the oven, and—

  The telephone rings.

  She lets it.

  After four rings the machine picks up, and in a moment she hears Inez, her dealer:

  “Hey babe. When are you going to call me? I’ve got to talk to you. Zach Lyde gave me a call. Told me he wants a piece he saw up at your studio. He says it’s called, urn, Second-Grade Passion for a TV Lion? Says he’ll pay twelve for it—do we have a deal? Says he’d like to know immediately—he’s having dinner with one of his Asian friends and he wants to be able to offer it. My god, did you charm the pants off him, or what? Twelve thousand, Jesus. Call me! Where are you? What is going on!”

  Annie slams her screwdriver into the floor beside her.

  She thinks, What if I don’t answer the summons, what if I don’t do anything?

  But then I’d be simply waiting and waiting for his chastisement, wouldn’t I? And what good would that do?

  She rises. She fetches her jacket.

  She gets in the Subaru and backs it out of the drive.

  As she heads toward the village of Pharaoh, she looks in her rear-view mirror and notices a car pulling onto Seminary Lane behind her. A green sedan, two passengers. Two men.

  But she bears down on the pedal, and it’s easy to lose them, and in a minute she forgets them.

  At Pharaoh Drugs she uses the pay phone. She calls Maretti’s Restaurant in Larchmont. Maretti tells her about a stretch of abandoned railroad right-of-way near Mahopac. She’s expected there in half an hour.

  When she gets back into her car and pulls onto Ratner Avenue, the green sedan gets behind her again.

  So she takes a right at Bullet Hill Road just to see what the green sedan will do.

  It stays behind her.

  She slows way down. Slows to a crawl. Fifteen miles an hour, what do you think, gentlemen? You want to come up close so I can see your faces?

  Abruptly the car behind her turns into a driveway. Annie roars off.

  Oh thank you, Teacher, I appreciate your attentiveness, but you needn’t have bothered. I am coming to you. You called, I’m coming. In this as in all things I obey you, my beloved Teacher.

  THE TEACHER stands inside the ruined relic of a boxcar and watches as Annie hurries along on the old half-buried ties to meet him. He loves to watch this: her blurry beauty coming out of the mist toward him. Her fury. She seems to be having a hard time reining in her gait to match the cadence of the ties. Even the steam she’s breathing: it’s on account of the bitter cold, of course, but it adds to her dragon mien.

  At last she holds up and looks around her.


  She sees him waiting for her in the boxcar’s open door.

  “Annie. Come up,” he says. He reaches out his hand to help her into the car. But she stays where she is.

  “Why do you want me?” she asks him.

  “So I can thank you. Also so I can sing your praises.”

  She has no reply to that.

  “I listened to you in that jury room,” he says. “The way you spoke to them—your power took my breath away. And you, I think you were equally astonished. I think you’ve just found out what you’re capable of. I think that soon you’re going to be ruling the art world.”

  He crouches, lays his palms flat on the boxcar’s wood floor, swings out and drops lightly to the ground.

  She says, “What do you want?”

  “I want you to know I believe in you. In your fierce talent. I’ll stand behind you.”

  “Don’t,” she says.

  “As much as I can help your career, I will.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You remember when I said this would change your work, this would make you stronger? Has it done that yet, Annie?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Ariel, thou shalt be as free as mountain winds.”

  “And get your bastards to stop following me.”

  He wonders what that means.

  She says, “We made a deal. I did my part. Now get out of my life.”

  “Who’s following you?”

  “Your two mules or whatever you call them, why the hell are they following me?”

  “Two men? What do they look like?”

  He can hear the impatience surfacing in his own voice. The sudden concern—and Annie picks up on it too.

  “Wait,” she says. “Those two men. Those two men.”

  “Not mine.”

  “They have to be.”

  “You’re certain they were following you?”

  “Well, I thought… I don’t know.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I slowed down. Sort of challenged them. They pulled off.”

  “What make of car?”

  “How would I know? Just a plain car. Green. Boxy. Are you playing with me? They’re really not yours?”

  “Annie, why would I have you followed now?” He steps up close to her and sets his hands on her shoulders. He studies her eyes. “Perhaps you only imagined—?”

  “Let go of me,” she says.

  She can’t get much threat into those huge soft eyes of hers, but he sees her trying, and he grins. “OK,” he says, and he takes his hands off her.

  “The police?” she asks. “You think it’s the police? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? But how would they, how could they know about—”

  “You tell me, Annie.” And then when she has no answer he prompts: “Perhaps Oliver.”

  “No.” She’s firm on that. “If he had told anyone, I’d know it.”

  “Your friend Juliet, then?”

  That one grabs her, as he had expected it would. He knows about Juliet? He watches her trying to regain her composure.

  “Annie?”

  She’s still searching. “I don’t, I don’t—Juliet would never have put my son in danger.”

  “She told you to go running to the judge. That wasn’t putting him in danger?”

  “But I went along with that. And after I gave up on that idea, I made her promise to stay out of it. She said she would, she promised. She swore to me.”

  He tells her, “Right now, Annie, right now Louie Boffano is on top of the world. If we bring him down from there… you cannot conceive of how much that will anger him.”

  “Maybe they weren’t following me. Maybe it was—”

  “If you see them again, I want to know it.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to know right away.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to know everything.”

  “All right.”

  “If you need to find me, call Maretti. Tell him where you’ll be. I’ll have Eddie pick you up. OK?”

  “Yes.”

  He reaches up and with his fingertips he touches the silky hair of her temple.

  “Who will protect you?” he asks her.

  “You will,” she says.

  “And why will I protect you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because I can’t possibly let anything happen to you now.” He places his full palm against her cheek, and leaves it there long enough to feel her warmth. “We’ve come too far together.”

  FRANKIE takes his girlfriend Molly to Louie Boffano’s Emancipation Party. They drive down to Louie’s spread, which looks like a Virginia plantation on the south side of Staten Island. A long smooth driveway that curves up to the house like a question mark. Then some jockey takes the car—the new Viper—and Frankie goes sweeping up the marble steps with Molly on his arm. She looks god damn flawless. Wearing the Lacroix gown that he bought her today. Frankie himself doesn’t look quite so perfect. His right cheek is bandaged and his right eye is still swollen. But the eye patch is dashing. The Oxxford tux is brand new and dazzling white, the shoes are Luciano Barbera. He’s in a good mood, he’s having a good time.

  And he keeps having a good time right up until he’s in the middle of a jitterbug with Molly and suddenly he looks up and Louie is standing right there. With his bodyguard Archangelo by his side. Of course Frankie quits dancing right away. Louie asks Molly, “Mind if we borrow your beau for a minute?”

  But it isn’t a question.

  Louie’s already got his hand on Frankie’s back just below the neck, and he’s steering him through the crowd. Archangelo on the other side of him.

  Under the huge chandelier and through the big sculpture gallery full of naked women and angels with little wee-wees. Down some stairs and their steps echoing. The way footsteps do in prison, Frankie thinks.

  Then out into the garden, into the chilly misty evening. Despite the chill, every inch of Frankie is covered with sweat. They’re moving so briskly, the three of them, and they’re saying nothing. Frankie wonders if maybe there isn’t something he should say in his defense.

  I ought to at least try to talk them out of it.

  He says to Louie, “I mean I know how I fucked up the other night when I let that prick Sure-Knack get away, I’m really sorry, Louie, but shit, I was trying to, trying, to do the best I, I mean the best I could…”

  He looks over. Louie’s not even listening. He keeps up the pressure on Frankie’s back.

  Past the pool, past a row of shrubs all pruned to the shape of the Virgin Mary. Trees, a tennis court. Sort of a thicket with a path cutting through it, and here Louie makes a sign to Archangelo and he drops back.

  Frankie and Louie arrive at a small clearing.

  The Teacher is sitting on a wrought-iron bench.

  “Hello, Frankie,” says the Teacher.

  Says Louie, “Frankie was just telling me about the incident from the other night. About how sorry he is for what went down.”

  The Teacher shakes his head, slowly.

  Louie takes a seat on the bench beside the Teacher. He leans back. He takes out a cigar and lights it. “Do you have a problem with what went down?” Louie asks the Teacher. “Do you have a problem with Frankie?”

  “Yes I do,” says the Teacher. “My problem is that he’s too quick, too sharp, far too loyal for the work he’s doing.”

  “So what are we gonna do about it?”

  “I think you’d better make him into a captain, Louie,” he says, and he grins, and presently Frankie realizes that his jaw is hanging wide open like he’s brain-damaged, and he shuts it.

  ANNIE is just back from the Laundromat, opening the trunk of the Subaru to get her basket of laundry, when she hears a car crunch on the drive behind her.

  Two doors open at once. Two official visitors, their ID cases tumbling out of their palms.

  “Annie Laird? I’m Investigator Carew of the New York State Troopers. This is In
vestigator Beard.”

  She’s still got the basket of laundry in her arms. She looks toward the street. Investigator Beard sees her doing it, and he glances that way himself.

  Says Investigator Carew, “We’d like to ask you some—”

  Again she cuts him off. “Not here.”

  She turns and puts the laundry basket back into the trunk. “You want to ask me questions, we’ll go to your office. We’ll go right now.”

  She slams the trunk shut.

  “Our office is in White Plains, ma’am.”

  She walks right past him to the rear door on his sedan. She says it again. “Now.”

  That seems to suit the investigators. Carew holds the door open for her.

  An hour later, she’s sitting in the antiseptic windowless office of inquisition, before a square desk. Carew and Beard on the other side of it. There’s a painting on the wall to her left. Hazy hillside. Below this painting is a brass-colored plastic plate that reads “Summer Birches.” That’s nice, how thoughtful of them to provide me with this happy smudge of Art.

  The wall opposite has a darkened sheet of glass. Annie supposes it’s a one-way mirror. But why are you hiding, whoever you are? Does the Dread Juror frighten you? Come out, come out, you weasely cowards.

  Investigator Carew is grilling her. “Roger Boyle?”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “The name means nothing to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “The Caruso Hotel?”

  “Where we stayed. The jurors.”

  “You remember the room you were in?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “You recall it had a balcony?”

  “Hmm-hm.” Get to it, she thinks.

  “On Friday night you stood on that balcony and had a conversation with someone on the balcony of the next room. You remember that?”

  “No.”

  He sighs. “Ms. Laird. It’s not the sort of thing that happens every day, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “An eyewitness saw you.”

  “Maybe saw my roommate.”

  “No, Ms. Laird. The witness says he saw the same woman that he saw at the Mapougue Reservoir.”

  “What’s that?”

  “October 17. You were sitting on the rocks by the reservoir, you were talking to a man. Remember?”