The Hazards of Good Fortune Read online

  Axel videotaped the rehearsal with his phone, and the performers watched themselves, pulsing from exertion. Noah suggested adding another piece of business to the scene. Axel liked the idea and offered an adjustment. Aviva felt Imani’s hand on her shoulder. She looked over and saw the smile on Imani’s face as the antics of the group animated the small screen. Here she was with her three peers from the far, and to Aviva more meaningful, side of the social scale, and she felt like one of them. Not entirely, of course, because some gorges could never be fully bridged, but their connection was close enough.

  “You shouldn’t go to Israel,” Axel said to Aviva. “Your presence there is an endorsement of the government’s policies.” She sat on a mattress on the floor of his small, bare-walled room. They were drinking herbal tea from cracked cups. The rehearsal had ended an hour earlier, and they had gone back to the ramshackle off-campus house he shared with Noah and several other Tate undergraduates. Axel sat cross-legged on the scuffed floor with a copy of the script. Next to him was a ratty bookshelf choked with paperbacks—novels, history, politics. There was no other furniture in the room, which felt not unlike the cell of a bookish monk. They had been working on the script, trying to incorporate the best of the improvisational material, and Axel’s comment was a non-sequitur. “I wasn’t going to say anything because I want to respect your agency, but if you go you’re endorsing the policies of the Israeli government.”

  “Okay, so to follow your logic, no one should have visited America during the Iraq war?”

  “That would’ve been cool,” he said.

  “They have an oppressive government in Sudan, but you never talk about that,” she said. “Or Zimbabwe, or—”

  Cutting her off, Axel said, “Those are Africans subjugating Africans. Sucks, but not my fight.”

  “Why isn’t that your fight?”

  She waited for his answer.

  During freshman year, Aviva and Axel had slept together several times, but now they were more like siblings. She held him in high regard, as much because of his biography as his intelligence. His family had been living in Wisconsin less than six months when Axel’s father died of a heart attack at forty-four. Rather than return to Europe, his mother elected to remain in America. He was raised on a diet of Karl Marx and John Lennon, and as a child accompanied his surviving parent to conferences in places like Cuba, where he learned how to roll a cigar from a man who fought in the revolution, and Algeria where a former member of the PLO taught him to shoot a semiautomatic rifle. So he claimed. It was impossible to verify any of his stories, but he told them with conviction. When Axel was eighteen, he matriculated at Tate College on a full scholarship. That much was true.

  Despite having read more widely than most of his classmates, and having had a far wider range of experience (again: he claimed), whether from boredom, delayed onset of mourning his father, or just the belief that radicals did not need college degrees—no one could say—he stopped attending classes. By the end of second semester sophomore year, Axel had flunked out. He rode a bus to Sacramento and spent time as a migrant laborer (once more: he claimed), following the harvest from California, to Oregon where he hooked up with a group of animal rights activists with whom he may or may not have participated in the pig liberation about which he was so fond of talking. He filled several journals (Aviva had seen them) with handwritten observations because one day the world would be interested in how he had spent his early years. Eventually, he wandered back to the upstate town of Schuylkill in an old pickup truck he swore he won in a card game.

  “Why isn’t it your fight?” she repeated.

  “Do me a favor and read this.” Axel pulled a paperback from the shelf and tossed it to Aviva. The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon. The cover was beat-up, several pages folded back. She flipped through it and noticed the heavy underlining and extensive marginalia. “It tells you everything you need to know.”

  “Is this as dense as that Edward Said book you lent me?”

  “The Orientalists? Yeah, kinda.”

  “I only got through half of that.”

  “These aren’t novels, Aviva. They’re not meant to entertain you.”

  Earlier in their friendship, because of her background, which stood in such sharp contrast to Axel’s, Aviva felt that she was constantly in danger of failing some unspoken test. But her confidence had grown since freshman year. She accepted that he did not want to answer the question she posed.

  “Let’s get back to the script,” she said.

  “So, you’re gonna go legitimize the Zionists?”

  For all of his intellectual curiosity, Axel’s politics did not allow for complexity. Unlike him, Aviva knew when to stop arguing.

  “We need to finish up here,” she said. “I still have to pack for the trip.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  John Eagle had been dead for one day. Angry community groups, the police union, and the media expected face time with the district attorney. Christine Lupo intended to hold all of them off until her plan crystallized. No one running for office in the current racial climate could afford to improvise, and she was intent on gaming out all possibilities to avoid mistakes.

  While she sat at her desk in the early morning quiet cogitating on this, the report from Kronos Cyber Security arrived in her email. It revealed a series of calls her husband made to a young woman, and further research showed visits to a “love nest” in Battery Park City, several of which had taken place on days he had told his wife he was out of town on business. Although the tangible evidence only confirmed what Christine had suspected, the news hit like a death in the family. She may have prepared for the impact, but the reality was brutal. A wave of grief flushed through her. She was insensate, conscious only of pure emotion. This brief fugue eventually subsided and, although she was not religious, she crossed herself because this is what her parents did when something terrible happened. From her purse, she removed an iPod, cued La Boheme, placed it in the dock on the credenza behind her desk, and let Puccini’s music coax her down from the ceiling.

  She considered taking the rest of the day off but that would be to give in, and she had not ascended to her current station by capitulating to personal feelings. She regarded the framed picture of their children on her desk. What was she going to tell them? That their father had cheated on her? Her daughter was a sensitive kid, her son prone to sullenness. Neither would take it well.

  Briefly, she wept but chose to believe her reaction had more to do with her husband’s stupidity than sorrow that her marriage was about to end. When was the last time they had shared a confidence? They slept with their bodies as far away from each other as possible. Who knew when they last had sex? She did not have the self-abnegation gene that would allow her to overlook his behavior in the interest of her political career. Divorced politicians were as common as pigeons so what was one more? She might even gain the support of women who would find inspiration in her resilience. A red anger lit her. The Lupos were going to a restaurant this evening for their weekly “date night.” Now, she was looking forward to it.

  Ibrahim Muhammad had called the office multiple times since yesterday and had identified himself as the imam at the mosque attended by the shooting victim. He was demanding a meeting with the district attorney to discuss the case. She tried to concentrate on the Puccini playing softly in the background.

  Uscio nel mezzo, altro a sinistra.

  “He insists on meeting with you,” her assistant informed her. She was standing in front of her boss’s desk, prepared to flinch. Kelly preferred not to talk to the DA when opera was playing in the office because she knew it was often palliative and she was reluctant to interrupt treatment.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “He’s coming in at noon?” Kelly said, her voice rising at the end of the sentence.

  “Are you asking me? Is that a question?”

 
“No,” Kelly said. “He’s coming in at noon. Today.”

  “Why did you set that meeting without discussing it with me?”

  “You told me to take more initiative if I want to get promoted.”

  “This is not what I meant, Kelly,” Christine said with less than infinite patience. “I was thinking more along the lines of you getting my case files better organized without my having to remind you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kelly said. “What do you want me to do?”

  What indeed? In a situation like this, it was standard for someone from the DA’s office to meet with religious leaders. But she had no idea who Imam Ibrahim Muhammad was. Were he a prominent cleric, that would be a different order of business. But she had never heard of him. Why should she take time out of her packed schedule to meet with some obscure holy man?

  “You don’t hand out meetings with the district attorney like they’re after dinner mints,” Christine admonished her assistant. “Tell him he’s welcome to meet with one of the assistant DAs.”

  Kelly said she would take care of it. Then she informed her boss that her 8:30 meeting was waiting in the conference room.

  “How long have they been sitting there?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  As Christine walked briskly past her subordinate, she vowed that when she ascended to the office of governor, Kelly would not accompany her to Albany.

  The White Plains Police Benevolent Association represented all police officers below the rank of chief employed by the City of White Plains. Their elected leader was a forty-two-year old pit bull of a Sergeant named Brian O’Rourke. He wore his uniform with a sidearm in a holster on his hip. A full head of jet-black hair slicked straight back and small, ratlike eyes that said I take shit from no one. This morning O’Rourke and three uniformed associates were seated in the DA’s conference room across the table from Christine. O’Rourke’s multiethnic coalition of fellow officers, Irish-American, Asian-American, and African-American, were all roughly their leader’s age. Christine’s second-in-command—Lou Pagano, an ADA for nearly a decade—sat to her right, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. He was in his late thirties, but sunken eyes and a harried look made him appear older.

  “What you need to understand, Ms. Lupo,” O’Rourke said, his voice raspy and insinuating, “is that Officer Plesko acted according to police procedure and to even think about convening a grand jury to hear evidence would be a slap in the face not just to the officer but to the entire department.”

  Christine suspected he used the prefix Ms. because it was required. And so he put a little spin on it, one that said I’m calling you Ms. Lupo but I won’t pretend it’s not some brainless, politically correct nonsense. As if the societal changes wrought by the 1960s had never happened. She had known men like O’Rourke her entire life, attended the same Catholic schools, saw them at mass on Christmas and Easter. Pugnacious, tradition-bound, and often bigoted, changing times had forced them to submerge that third quality in the interest of career advancement. She couldn’t stand him. He and his wingmen had been hammering her for nearly an hour, O’Rourke doing most of the heavy hitting. He talked in the manner of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, forcefully and with great certitude. He interrupted and harangued. Typical alpha male.

  The meeting had begun pleasantly enough—greetings, handshakes, how do you like your coffee? But as soon as the district attorney had introduced the topic of the grand jury, the mood darkened. No one had touched the assortment of pastries displayed on the table.

  “I understand your feelings, Sergeant O’Rourke,” the DA said, “but I don’t see that I have a choice.”

  “Don’t have a choice?” O’Rourke spitting words like pellets. “All due respect, you’re the DA, and you can do whatever the hell you want.”

  Christine took a deep breath and waited. What troubled her about the tenor of this meeting was that she was known as indisputably pro-police. Did she have to explain the particular nature of the current situation again? She wanted to ask the African-American officer to enlighten O’Rourke. Wanted to say, Don’t you know this case is racially charged? Are you not aware of what just happened down in Florida with that Trayvon Martin kid? Do you have any idea what it’s going to look like if we bypass the grand jury system? She glanced at the black cop, a thickset man with a mustache and soft brown eyes. His face was impassive. No help would come from that pension-protecting corner.

  “A citizen was killed by a police officer,” the DA said to O’Rourke as if she was explaining the whys and wherefores to a golden retriever. “The grand jury’s job is to hear the evidence. If the officer is blameless, there won’t be an indictment but to not let the system function is a dereliction of duty on the part of my office.” She took a sip of her cold coffee. It was time to bring this confab to a close. “So, thank you, gentlemen for coming in.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” O’Rourke said and held up his hand. “Not so fast.”

  “You’ve been here nearly an hour,” Lou Pagano interjected.

  “Am I talking to you?” O’Rourke said. This was a standard bullyboy tactic. O’Rourke trafficked in intimidation. But Pagano was the son of a New York City transit cop and had spent his entire career around police officers. He wasn’t intimidated and was careful not to react. He looked at his boss. The DA met her colleague’s gaze and indicated she would take care of it.

  “What you need to understand, Sergeant O’Rourke—”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Lupo, but what you need to understand,” the cop interrupted, his voice rising, “again, all due respect, is that anything can happen in a grand jury room, and we all know anything can happen at a trial, am I right?” Here he turned to his fellow officers for confirmation and together they sagely nodded. “When a prosecutor can’t convict a wife-killing scumbag just because he was on a television show, we all know the system is broken. Let’s not mince words.”

  “No,” the DA said, patience vanishing. “Let’s not. You listen to me. I have been courteously hearing you out, and for the last twenty minutes, you’ve been saying the same thing ten different ways. I’ve got another meeting waiting. A meeting that’s at least as important as this one, all due respect.” She wielded all due respect the way he employed Ms., like a weapon. “So, let’s see if we can—”

  O’Rourke interjected, “Ms. Lupo—”

  Again with the Ms.

  “Excuse me,” she barked. Christine Lupo had had it. O’Rourke’s eyebrows rose, and his head rolled back as if from the physical force of her will. Having gotten his attention, she proceeded in a more measured tone. “I understand that Russell Plesko seems to be a first-rate officer and appreciate the support he’s getting from the union. I commend that. Now, I’m aware of your concerns regarding the legal system and will take them under advisement. Mr. Pagano is the number two person in this office, and he will interview Officer Plesko himself.” Pagano puffed up at this and looked at O’Rourke, who did not meet his gaze.

  The DA continued, “He’ll talk to all the witnesses and report to me. At that point, having done due diligence, I’ll decide how to proceed.”

  O’Rourke said, “Mind if I ask you a question, Ms. Lupo?”

  If this guy says Ms one more time, she thought, and said, “Fine. Then we need to wrap up.”

  “Is this gonna be your last government job?”

  “How is my employment situation relevant to the conversation?”

  “Just that people talk, and I’ve heard things. There’s chatter you want to be governor.”

  This was true, but if O’Rourke was hinting at some below the radar quid pro quo, he was an even bigger jackass than she suspected. Here was Pagano, and O’Rourke’s water carriers. Did he think she was going to engage in this kind of negotiation with an audience?

  “I appreciate your interest in my career, but I’m not getting into hypotheticals.”

  “
Union support still matters.”

  She knew she should end this right now but wanted to see whether O’Rourke would hang himself. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I’m not a quid pro quo guy.” He said the words. She was surprised he knew what they meant. “But you should do the right thing.”

  “Are you done, Sergeant?”

  “Russell Plesko gets indicted,” O’Rourke said, “and what kind of message does that send to the young people who might want to join the police? Their government doesn’t stand behind them?” He pushed away from the table indicating the show was over. “That’s gonna be on you.”

  Christine stood up, and Lou Pagano followed suit. The cops rose. O’Rourke stared down at the DA. He was over six feet tall, but the five foot six DA regarded him the way an ax-wielding lumberjack looks at a tree.

  “Thanks for coming in,” she said.

  There was requisite handshaking, except for Lou Pagano who made a point of snubbing O’Rourke, and then Christine and her deputy left the room.

  The pair walked past a row of desks staffed by department secretaries stationed in front of offices manned by their ADA bosses. When they were out of earshot, the District Attorney of Westchester County turned to Lou Pagano and as twelve years of parochial school indoctrination burst its tightly bound ropes, demurely said, “Fuck that Irish cocksucker.” She laughed loudly then caught herself and looked around to make sure no one had overheard.

  Back at her desk, the DA tried to medicate herself with more Puccini but found she could not concentrate. The daunting prospect of having to tell the children their parents were splitting up, the logistical nightmare of divorce, that overbearing cop who had hardly bothered to dress up his threats, all of it was upsetting. She needed a cigarette. Christine had quit smoking during the nineties, so this was more of a surprise than the revelations about her husband. Walking down the hall where the ADAs worked, she stepped into Vere Olmstead’s office.