“None of us are. But we suffer nonetheless. Until we reach that condition Oscar reached a few years ago.”
“You mean … fully blue and smooth?”
Mazie’s smile was beatific, a curve of pure grace. She had an aura of perfect calm and great strength. Her uncommonly direct gaze suggested that she had once stared down Death himself and no longer feared what she might see in other eyes.
Later, I would learn from Mrs. Fischer that Mazie had been an attorney in a major Manhattan law firm when Kipp had been an equities trader. After the video of the senator had been posted on YouTube, clearing Kipp and implicating the former politician in the theft of investors’ money, their wobbling world seemed to have been returned to its proper angle of rotation.
But then the worse thing happened. A senior partner in Mazie’s firm introduced her to two new clients, Mr. Reasoner and Mr. Power, businessmen who had a complaint against a major competitor, involving patent infringement, which seemed an easy case for a litigator of her talents. Because the clients were wary to the point of paranoia, the first meeting with them took place in a soundproof conference room. After introductions but before the meeting began, the senior partner excused himself “for just a moment,” without explanation. As Mr. Reasoner took a seat at the table and opened his briefcase, Mr. Power crossed the room to have a closer look at a bronze sculpture with which he professed to be quite taken, and as he passed behind Mazie, she felt something sting the back of her neck.
When she regained consciousness, her wrists were bound to the arms of a chair. A rubber ball had been placed in her mouth, and her lips had been firmly sealed with duct tape. For a grueling hour, the two men discussed in loving detail their favorite methods of torture, and while they talked, they took turns pinching shut her nose, inducing suffocation panic before letting her breathe again. They made certain she understood that if she wasn’t safe in the luxurious offices of this prestigious law firm, she would be safe nowhere. If she couldn’t trust a senior partner—or perhaps any senior partner, or anyone at all—in the firm where she had worked for eleven years, she could trust no one anywhere.
This was payback, they said, for what Kipp did to the senator, who still had more loyal and powerful friends than could be easily counted. Kipp was innocent, yes, but that didn’t matter. The only purpose of the innocent was to be used, like cattle, by those who despised innocence. Oh, maybe the meek will inherit the earth, but not now, not until the end of time. Now the meek, the innocent, had to learn to take what was dealt to them and endure it.
Reasoner and Power, obviously not their names, said they would not mark her this time, because the punishment that she and Kipp had earned wasn’t to be administered in a single visit. Days or weeks, perhaps even months from now, they would surprise her again, four of them instead of two, and they would brutally rape her until they were satiated. After that, they might give her several months, maybe a full year, in which to anticipate their third visit. No one can be vigilant 24/7 for an extended period of time, and no bodyguards she might hire could be trusted, because the majority of people were easily corrupted. On their third visit, they would torture her, blind her, visit upon her a measure of brain damage that would ensure her permanent disability, but they would not kill her. Kipp’s punishment was to bear the guilt that would only grow as he saw her emotionally, physically, and intellectually degraded.
Finished with her, they took the duct tape off her mouth, untied her wrists from the arms of the chair, and allowed her to remove the rubber ball from her mouth. Reasoner placed the ball, the tape, and the cord in his briefcase. The two men said, “Have a nice day,” and left the conference room. Mazie remained seated for several minutes, telling herself that she was waiting for the senior partner to return and babble out some excuse, perhaps tearfully, about why he had been unable to warn or to protect her. The truth was, she felt too weak to stand. She would never be given an excuse. She was done here. They would already have some reason for firing her, supported by reams of forged documentation. The firm occupied Floors 34 through 37, and when at last Mazie left that conference room, she found the entire thirty-sixth floor deserted. The hush was so eerie that it would not have been hard to believe that the city in all its boroughs had been depopulated. But when the elevator doors opened at the lobby, the bustle and bark of humanity returned, and she had to pass through it. In the street, the braying of car horns and engines and brakes and people overwhelmed her, oppressed her.
For a while, she leaned on a lamppost, head hung, expecting to vomit in the gutter. When she didn’t, she went home to Kipp. They had significant financial resources, in fact millions, and the expertise to move them around often enough and cleverly enough to leave a trail that eventually withered away. They made plans that very afternoon, not merely plans to vanish into new identities and hide, although that was part of it, but also to fight back, and not merely against the senator and Mazie’s former law firm but, wherever an opportunity presented itself, against any aspect of the vigorously metastasizing corruption that was a terminal cancer in this ever more dangerous postmodern world.