Absent Friends

You might have thought, given the staggering nature, the breathtaking scale, of the crime of September 11, that criminals of lesser ambition, weaker imagination, would have paused in their pursuits, even if only from embarrassment. And for the first week or so, they had. A week when the muggers, stickup artists, con men, drug dealers, and gangbangers gave New York's stunned citizens and exhausted cops breathing room.

Then the Mayor—in the New Normal, everyone's hero, which, according to Phil, showed you how far this really was from normal—the Mayor told New Yorkers to do their patriotic duty: live their lives, get back to work.

And the city found out that crooks were as patriotic as anyone else.

For Phil, that meant new clients, new interviews, and new bullshit stories to get past: I can't help you if you're going to jerk me around. And the old clients still needed him to stand up with them at their arraignments, their bail hearings, their days in court.

The Tribune story hadn't changed this, not yet. The people Phil defended were criminals. (Aloud, Phil would have insisted on “persons charged with criminal activity.”) If the odor of improper, possibly illegal, behavior swirled around their lawyer, in their minds that only made him more likely to understand. Those of his clients who even knew, who even read the papers. Most of them were hypnotized by their own troubles. Their minds were locked on the desolation of the futures they faced the way you'd stare into a bloodred sunrise, unable to take your eyes off the storm clouds massing.

So until it came to the ethics investigation, the disciplinary committee review—and it would, oh yes; already there were conversations that stopped when he walked into a room, invitations to go get a beer that he didn't have to duck because they'd stopped coming—Phil could stay busy. His clients, as before, would be desperately glad to see him, though what he was able to offer them was, compared to their hopes, a leaf in a windstorm. Until the Feds called, or the State, whichever won the fight over who got to try to take Phil Constantine down—and they would have called already, if everyone on that side wasn't scrambling, madly searching tips and phone taps they'd ignored for years to see if they should have seen this coming, if they could see anything else coming now—Phil's life could go on, no different and completely changed, like everything else.

And if he found himself now, on occasion and without warning, seized with an urge to grab a client's collar and shout, “That's it? After all this, this is still who you are and what you want?” he roped himself back under control each time, and just went on. He wasn't really sure who it was that he wanted to shout at.

Phil had been caught in the cloud on September 11, running like hell with everyone else.

His eyes burned, his lungs were crazy for air. A woman next to him staggered, so he reached for her, caught her, forced her to keep going, warm blood seeping onto his arm from a slash down her back as he pulled her along, later carried her. Somewhere, someone in a uniform took her from him, bore her off someplace while someone else pressed an oxygen mask to his face. He breathed and breathed, and when he could speak, he asked about the woman, but no one knew.

And all the time he was running, coughing and choking and seeing nothing but thick dust, no sense of direction, no up or down, all the time he was hearing screams and sirens and shouts, a clanging like a thousand railroad cars crashing off the tracks, and, in all that, explosions like gunfire that were bodies and parts of bodies hitting the ground, all that time, in Phil's mind, were his clients: skinny little José, down two strikes but he just had to try to peddle that one last goddamn bag of grass, though Phil had warned him, warned him; Mrs. Johnson, whose five children still hadn't been told she'd shot her husband's girlfriend and then her husband; that kid he called Ben, though the kid had given four different names already. Phil saw them all, locked in cells down here, in the middle of this swirling, roaring ruin and death, knowing they were trapped, knowing they would die.

They didn't. The towers fell in, not over; the devastation, as bad as it was, was not as bad as it could have been. Acknowledging this truth, as Phil did later, did not make him share the Pollyanna optimism of the friend who had voiced it. As far as Phil knew, it was always true. Nothing was ever as bad as it could have been.

And damn little was as good, either.

So the day would be busy, and complicated in ways Phil wasn't sure about yet by the death of that bastard Harry Randall. He needed to call Sally and Kevin; probably he should've called Sally last night, when he heard. Well, not probably: should have and didn't. What reason? Choose one.