The Magician (11 page)

“I’ll be right there,” said Thomassy.

Jane looked petulant. Thomassy shrugged. Even a quick one wouldn’t work now. His mind was racing in other directions.

“Make up for it next Tuesday,” he said, buttoning his shirt.

He pulled down the sheet and gave her a darting kiss on her belly. He didn’t know why she liked that, but she did.

“Please get dressed fast, honey,” he said. “I’ve got to make time.” He
never
left a woman alone in the apartment.

He watched her drive off and waved before he got into his own car and headed for Urek’s.

Urek, on his way home, stopped off in the kraut girl’s place. She was surprised to see him. “What do you want?”

He couldn’t tell her what had just happened. Or how excited he was.

“Well?”

He tried to make his shoulder shrug casual.

“You look all…something. Where you been?”

He was thinking of what he might say.

“Never mind,” she said.

“Look,” Urek said, “I gotta talk.”

“What about?” she said, not really curious.

“I just did somethin’.”

“You rob someone?”

“No.”

“What are you so worked up about?”

“Jesus, I gotta talk to somebody.”

“How about your mother?” she said, a skin of derision over her voice.

“Yeah,” he said, “sure.”

“Well, okay, talk to me.” She locked the door of her room, then sat down in front of the vanity mirror. He watched her run a comb slowly through her blonde hair. He liked it when they were alone. When the gang took her on, Urek usually went first, so he didn’t get the kick they did before they took her on.

“I really gotta talk to somebody,” he said.

“It’s your dime.”

“Cantcha even turn around?”

“How can I comb my hair if I turn around? I can hear you.”

He touched her hair.

“Well, you’re getting real romantic,” she said.

“I just thought your hair looked, you know, nice.”

She turned to face him. “You ever talk to a priest?”

“You mean in the box. Sure. It’s no good. Whatever I tell him, he always makes me say the same fucking thing. I could tell him I killed my mother and father and half the town and he’d say, say ten Hail Marys. I can talk to myself for all the good it does.”

“Come here.”

Urek took one step toward her. Sitting, she was able to put her hands around his waist, then laid her cheek against him. She could hear his heart, the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump.

“Hey, you’re alive,” she said, letting her hand drop and just brush the front of his pants.

“Whadya do that for?”

She laughed.

“Say,” he said, “are you really a nympho? Some of the guys say…”

He thought she was going to make him get out. Instead she said, “Your mother and father, they don’t like it when they do it, do they?”

“I never thought about it.”

“You had to. Everybody does. You think any of the old people
like
to do it?”

“How would I know?”

“You ever watch them?”

“What do you think I am?”

“I do. I got a way. It’s what gave me the idea before.”

“Before what?”

“Before I ever did anything with anybody. Everybody’s mother and father does it.
I
enjoy it, I like it, don’t you like it?”

He wished she would stop talking now.

“You and your guys think you know something when you know that I do it. That’s like thinking the President doesn’t do it. It’s stupid.”

He was so touchy. She hadn’t meant to get him angry. She unbuttoned her blouse. He watched her.

“You know something?” she said, as she unhooked her bra. “You never once kissed me.”

“You mean on them?”

“On the mouth, stupid.”

He had never kissed any girl on the mouth.

When he didn’t move, she moved to him, and put her arms around his neck and brought his face down to her and held her lips against his tightly closed lips.

“Do that again,” she said, “only relax.”

His head was in a roar. He could feel the needling in his groin, the signal, but couldn’t connect the idea of kissing lips and a feeling half his body away.

“Do it to me,” she said.

He looked blank.

“What I’m doing to you.”

Their mouths met, and despite the slaver and terrified thoughts in his head, he felt himself stiffening with an urgency, the need to rush.

She slipped off her shoes, unwrapped her skirt, let it drop, and stepped out of it. She took her half-slip off.

“You don’t have to take everything off,” said Urek.

She took her socks off, and then stepped out of her white panties; the hair where her legs met was dark, not blonde like her long hair.

“Arencha going to turn the light off?” he said.

She shrugged her shoulders and turned the switch. It merely dimmed the light, one of those three-way bulbs now at its lowest setting. Then, completely naked, she sat down in front of her dressing table again, and again combed her hair. He could have killed her.

“You afraid of catching cold?” she said, turning. “Take your clothes off.”

He got down to his shorts and socks, then stood adamant.

“Take your socks off.”

He took off first one, then the other.

“The rest, too,” she said. “Want some help?”

He wasn’t going to have any girl undressing him. He let his shorts drop to the floor, the hairiness of his body now wholly exposed to her view.

“Well,” she said at his preparedness.

He gestured toward the bed.

“What’s your hurry?”

She came closer to him, and he gestured toward the bed again.

Her hands were on him, stroking, and he tried now with force at her shoulders, to push her to the bed, but it was suddenly too late, and like an idiot he stood there, coming in spasms.

The kraut was frightened at his anger. He didn’t say anything. She put her arms around him, it seemed to him tenderly, and sat him down on the
edge of the bed. She kissed the side of his neck, then his cheek, and then his closed mouth.

He motioned for her to turn the light completely off, which she did, so that she would not see him, but when he lay down, his face in the pillow, she could hear him smothering the shame of his sobs.

Chapter 12

On the open road in daylight, when Thomassy was relaxed, he drove with his left elbow on the window or on the armrest, his right hand lightly on the wheel, feeling the responsiveness of the car as he had once the controls of a light plane when he took a few flying lessons. But when tense, he clutched the wheel with both hands, apprehensive about oncoming traffic, each car a new threat, worrying about the brakes’ sudden failure or a tie rod going, the auto out of control and veering him, trapped in his seat belt, toward a yard-wide tree. Tonight Thomassy drove through the night with both perspiring palms on the wheel, all the way to the Urek house.

His most frequent fantasy while driving was of himself cross-examining a witness. Other lawyers he knew dreamed of being admitted to practice before the Supreme Court—perhaps just once. That was not Thomassy’s aim, though he didn’t doubt for a moment that he could get there if he wanted to. In front of the high court he couldn’t cross-examine in the way that intoxicated him, setting up the witness for a laugh from the jury and spectators, even at his own expense, so that the momentarily relaxed witness, enjoying the sudden release of tension, perhaps even joining in the laughter, would be suddenly faced by the most crucial question Thomassy had to ask of him. The witness, chilled in mid-laugh, would have to compose himself,
think
to answer the shocker, and it was the pause that Thomassy went for most. Because when a man took too much time in framing an answer, the jury thought he was lying. Or making it up. Or partly. And Thomassy would turn from the hesitation, and stroll to the jury and say, “Please take all the time you need to think of your answer,” which the jury always understood to mean
Take all the time you need to make up your lie.
How Thomassy loved that, the director of a play played just once, the other lawyer rehearsing the actor only to have Thomassy produce a stage wait, a silence that damned.

Sometimes Thomassy would find himself imagining a crime not yet committed, the criminal being chased and caught and brought to trial, to be defended by him, as if
that
were the purpose of the crime in the first place. If, he was thinking, a sudden hazard caused him to carom into a yard-wide tree, would anyone be guilty or innocent of his death, which would seem so pointless otherwise? He laughed at—and relished—the absurdity of his fantasies. He saw the police car in front of the Urek house. Paul Urek was in front of the doorway arguing with the two cops.

“The boy isn’t home,” he was saying. “There’s Mr. Thomassy.”

Both cops turned.

“What’s up?” Thomassy asked them.

“Just want to see for ourselves. He won’t let us in the door.”

“You got a warrant?”

The cop squirmed. “It’ll take an hour to get one this time of night.”

“Get one,” said Thomassy.

“We’ll have to wake the judge up.”

“Wake him up.”

“All we want to know is if the kid’s in there.”

“Mr. Urek told you he wasn’t.”

“Well, that proves he was over at the hospital.”

“Proves nothing. If you want to play lawyer, go to law school. Meanwhile, go get a warrant.
That’s
the law.”

Thomassy knew he had gotten the cop sore, but he liked getting people with authority sore. The cop went off to get the warrant, leaving the other one in front of the house.

“I see you have a doorman now,” said Thomassy to Paul Urek as they closed the door behind them.

Urek walked home not on sidewalks but down the middle of each successive street, too late for traffic now, but hoping a car would swing around a corner suddenly, giving him a chance to sidestep out of death’s way like a bullfighter, then laugh at the frightened driver.

No car came.

From a block away he could see his own house ablaze with light on the darkened street. He began to trot, hoping that his absence hadn’t been discovered, that he could get up the drainpipe as he had so many times in the past. He saw the cop in front of the house just in time.

He stopped, caught his breath.

The cop in front of the door, a car—Thomassy’s car—in front of the house.

Run? Where to?

Into the bushes, over a hedge, quietly, then close to the house he could hear his father’s voice and Thomassy’s voice, arguing. Up the drainpipe? They wouldn’t hear him because of the noise they were making. But the cop would hear him.

Around the back, he lifted the metal cellar door, glad it wasn’t kept locked. He slipped down the stairs to the cellar, carefully lowering the metal door so it wouldn’t bang shut. He came up through the kitchen and into the living room. His father, his mother, and Thomassy all stopped talking.

He followed his father’s right hand as it reared back and came around in a half-circle, the palm open, smashing into the side of his face. He felt the pain jab up into the top of his head, and the thought flashed through his mind that he should pack a case and go off with the kraut somewhere.

“You’re a shit,” his father said.

Urek looked to his mother, hoping for something.

“I’m dropping the case,” said Thomassy.

Urek felt a family alarm, his, his father’s, his mother’s. Without Thomassy they were unprotected.

“Please, Mr. Thomassy.” His mother was finally speaking.

“Be a sport,” the father fumbled. “I’ll see the kid behaves.”

“Yeah,” said Urek.

“You shut up,” said his father.

“You know what he’s done now?” said Thomassy quietly.

Clearly they didn’t.

“He tried to kill the other kid in the hospital.”

“He what?”

“He cut the tube going down the boy’s throat.”

Thomassy took the father’s arm before he could strike again. “Hold it!”

The father subsided, a gray bag collapsed of wind. Thomassy let his arm go and turned to Urek.

“You were in enough trouble already. What the hell did you do it for?”

All three waited for an answer.

He had no answer he could articulate.

Paul Urek, feeling no strength in his arms, slipped his belt from his pants, folded it in two, and then swung the folded strap against the boy’s upraised arm again and again and again, Urek yelling, “Cut it out!” but defending himself only with his arms, the mother crying out, and finally Thomassy shouting, “For Christ’s sake, stop!” The puffing man no longer swung his rage against his son. He turned to Thomassy, saying, “Please, please, you got to handle this case, maybe he should get out of school and get a job, or enlist, or go to a nut house, maybe that’s where,” and then at the very top of his strident voice,
“I don’t know what to do!”