Double Tap

CHAPTER SEVEN

“That can’t be Paul Madriani?” If you can visualize a smiling face, round as a cherub’s, Asian and with freckles, it would belong to Nathan Kwan.

I am walking at a good clip, halfway through the rotunda on the way back to my car, when I see him.

“Nathan?”

“By God, it is you.” He is all smiles, five-foot-seven and trim as the day I last saw him more than a decade ago. The only change is a little more gray at the temples so that he now looks the part of the seasoned statesman.

“Jeez, where have you been?” he says. “I haven’t seen you in so long, I thought you were dead.” He glides toward me across an acre of marble, hand outstretched. When he reaches me, he grabs my hand and drops his briefcase, his other arm going around my shoulder. “God, it’s been such a long time,”

“It has. What are you doing here?”

“Business. What else?” He is wearing power pinstripes, a three-piece suit, and is carrying a thin leather portfolio that is now propped against his left ankle on the floor. He has always been the dapper dresser with the right accents.

“I’ll bet you didn’t recognize me. A face from your forgotten past,” he says.

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

“How have you been?”

“I’m fine.” He’s still shaking my hand, engulfing me with the kind of radiance I remember from our earliest days together. Nathan may be shorter than I am, but he is one of those people who stands tall on the ladder of social dominance. He can overwhelm you in any setting with a kind of affable assault on the senses.

“And you?”

“I can’t complain. Actually I could, but it wouldn’t do any good,” he laughs. “What ever happened to you? I turn around and you’re gone.” This is how he describes ten years without seeing each other.

“I moved down here. My partner and I opened an office.” I try to bring the conversation down a few hundred decibels.

“You know, somebody told me that a year or so ago. But I didn’t believe them. I couldn’t believe you’d ever leave Capital City. But then I saw something in the paper on the plane on the way down. You’re involved in the case: what’s her name. .” He lowers his voice, suddenly realizing. “Here. .”

“Madelyn Chapman.”

“That’s the one-” he begins.

“Yeah, I am,” I say, cutting him off before he can get further into it, given the fact that we are both standing in her former headquarters where all the walls have ears.

“What brings you down here?” I change the subject.

Nathan is a lawyer I once practiced with in the DA’s office in Capital City. That was more than twenty years ago. I have not seen or heard from him for more than a decade, though from the familiarity in his voice you would think that I had just stepped out for coffee. I once considered him an intimate, but that was before his rise to office, when all things political consumed him. Nathan is a member of the state legislature: after four terms in the assembly, he now sits in the senate, representing the old neighborhood where I once lived in Capital City.

“Actually I get down here quite a bit, at least the last six months or so. Legislative business.

“I’m surprised they actually let you in here. You are defending the guy-”

“They may not be letting me in again,” I tell him. “Right now they’re probably reading our lips off one of the security cameras. And if my parking pass expired, they probably towed my car.”

He laughs.

“What does the legislature have going on that brings you here?”

“Nothing as exciting as you do-at least, I hope not. Some redistricting stuff. Nothing major. What do you know about the company?” he says. “Maybe you could give me insights.”

“Just what I hear. The computer gurus to government. What I read in the papers. Defense Department contracts.”

“That’s what I heard. I came down last month for my first meeting with them and I’m still trying to catch up. Seems they’re the only game in town these days. You put out RFPs, bids for software, and nobody else shows up.” Nathan chairs one of the legislative committees doing business. “They used to come to us. Now Muhammad has to go to the mountain. Actually I don’t mind. Gets me out of the capitol. Place is the dregs these days. Not like you remember it, I’m sure.”

“To tell you the truth, I never spent much time there.”

“The turnover is awful. Friends are mostly gone,” he says. Most of Nathan’s friends-liberals from the old school, people who acted with a modest amount of reason before the partisans took over and started rolling live ordnance across the aisles in the capitol-are now gone, tapped out by term limits, unable to run for reelection. Some have migrated into lobbying jobs so that they can stay in Capital City, where they have put down roots. Others have drifted back to their old stomping grounds in the districts they once represented in hopes of cashing in political chits for jobs. Two I know have taken seats as L.A. County supervisors and now preside over domains that dwarf their old legislative districts. Nathan himself is getting close, probably in his final term. I have seen press reports that he is nibbling around the edges, sniffing for a seat in Congress whose previous occupant passed away a few months ago. The only problem being that Nathan doesn’t live in the district.

“Like I say, it’s good to get away. The weather down here this time of year has the Valley all beat to hell. I usually stay over. Got a place with a suite on the cove in the Village. What are you doing tonight? Maybe we can get together for dinner.”

“I’d love to but I can’t. A school program tonight with my daughter.”

We drift toward the door. Nathan seems to be headed in my direction.

“As I remember it you never cared much for the fog up north. Always hot for the sunshine. And your tan is looking better than I remember it.”

“That’s not San Diego. That’s the Caribbean,” he says.

“Don’t tell me you guys still go to Jamaica in the interim! I heard the Rules Committee made you folks clean up that act.” I am talking about the midterm follies when lobbyists take their legislative friends outside the country to violate all the reporting laws, and where bribery can be served straight up without the diluting fizz of campaign contributions.

“Well, at least you haven’t lost total contact with the real world.” What Nathan means is Capital City, the center of the western political universe. “There was really nothing going on. I don’t know where the public gets all this misinformation,” he says.

“Probably from the federal grand jury indictments,” I tell him.

“Yeah, well, that was bad,” he says, referring to the shrimp scam, an FBI sting operation that went undercover a few years ago and didn’t come up for air until they’d snagged four legislators and a small army of lobbyists. “I could never understand it,” he remarks, shaking his head.

“What, that bribery was alive and well in the capitol?”

“That they would sell themselves for so little. I like to think I’m worth more than a thousand bucks.” Nathan laughs. “Not that I condone what they did, you understand.”

“Of course not. You would have asked for more.”

“Absolutely not.” Nathan gives me one of his most imperious looks. “I would have had my legislative assistant ask for more. And I would have hired nothing but ex-felons. That way if they tried to roll over on me, they would have had no credibility. I may not have your legal skills, but I did learn a few things as a prosecutor.” He smiles.

“You’re right. You’re smarter than your friends.”

“Those people were the exception, not the rule. Most of the members in the capitol are honest people,” he asserts, climbing on the stump. I have heard it before. How you never sell your vote. How money in the form of donations come election time just assures access. It doesn’t buy your vote. This particular line hasn’t changed in thirty years. Nathan heard it from the second generation, the people who called money “the mother’s milk of politics” and suckled at the nipple until their lips turned blue. I often wonder which greasy political scientist from which university came up with it. But when some lobbyist has his hand up your rectum and he’s pulling all the right levers, it’s difficult to tell exactly where this right of entry begins and ends.

I look at my watch. “Listen, it’s good to see you but I’ve got to run. Stop by the office sometime.” I peel a business card from my wallet and hand it to him.

“You sure you can’t do dinner tonight?”

“No. Wish I could.”

He takes the business card and shifts the leather portfolio to his other arm so he can keep his left hand on my shoulder as we walk, like I’m leading the blind. Nathan is one of those people who can never talk to you unless he has at least one hand on you, invading your private space. I used to watch him do this outside of court with opposing counsel. I came to the conclusion that it was an acquired social tool, like LBJ thumping other pols in the chest with his finger when he talked to them. There is something subconscious and discomforting in its effect. I often wondered how many people were forced to cop pleas by their lawyers and ended up in state prison because Nathan hadn’t used mouthwash that morning.

He shakes his head as he’s holding me back with his hand on my shoulder. “Jeez, where does all the time go? And I suppose you don’t own a telephone to call a friend, tell him that you’re picking up sticks and leaving town?” To Nathan all telephones work in only one direction: incoming to Kwan.

“I didn’t know I had to ask permission before leaving.”

“You don’t have to apologize. Just get your ass back up north.” He laughs. With anyone else you might resent it, but Nathan has a gift, a kind of Asian blarney-Chinese father and Irish mother-that allows him to roll back the clock with impunity.

“How’s Nikki and your daughter. .” He finally drops the hand from my shoulder, snapping his fingers lightly as we walk, struggling for Sarah’s name. “Don’t tell me, I’ll get it.”

“Sarah,” I say.

“That’s right. I remember. A cute little girl,” he says.

“She’ll be eighteen in three months.”

“No!”

“And off to college in the fall.”

“I don’t believe it. And that gorgeous wife of yours. .” We keep walking. “The only woman I knew who took pity on your bachelor friend. I remember,” he says. “She must have had me over for dinner every Tuesday night for a year.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“You weren’t there,” he says.

We both laugh.

“I just have to see Nikki. I owe you guys a dinner or two.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, but Nikki passed away.”

He stops in mid-stride, a half-smile on his face like he’s waiting for the punch line to a bad joke. Then he realizes that I’m not kidding. Suddenly a dour expression falls over his face. He is flushed all the way to the ears. “No.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. When did it happen?”

“Almost nine years ago.”

This seems to stagger him: that Nikki has been dead this long, that he has without guarding himself stepped on this land mine, knocks him off stride. “I didn’t realize. Nobody told me.”

“Cancer. She was sick for quite a while.”

“That explains why I didn’t see you. Jeez, I’m sorry. Must have been hard. Difficult on your daughter. On Sarah.”

“It was. They were close.”

“Why didn’t you call and let me know?”

“What could I say? There was nothing anyone could do.”

“I could have been there,” he says. “I’m sorry.” It is one of the few times I have seen Nathan at a loss for words. We walk in silence for a couple of seconds as we move toward the door. “We have to get together,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Talk about old times.”

“I’d like that.”

We finally make it to the door.

“Listen, I’ll give you a call. Next time I’m in town. We’ll do dinner. On me.”

“You got it.”

I shake his hand. He gives me a hug, something I hadn’t expected, his portfolio digging in my back. Then I turn and head for my car. Knowing Nathan-and life being what it is-unless he gets arrested on a felony, it is not likely that I will see him again, in this life or the next.