The Side of the Angels by Christina Bartolomeo, Kyoko Watanabe Page A

like it. Who doesn’t get a kick out of looking at rich people’s homes? No facility rental costs, either. Our Wendy comes through in the clutch again.”
    â€œI realize that she gets on your nerves, but you know you’re lousy at the adorable stuff, Nicky, and she always nails it.”
    â€œYou’re right. Wendy’s great. She’s great. She really is.”
    There, I had done my good deed for the day. So what if Wendy would just as soon throw herself into planning a book-
burning
bash, if that had been what the client wanted? So what if her enthusiasm was undiscriminating and her mind a shallow turquoise pool with goldfish darting and pennies winking? She gave her all, and she was, in her own way, irreplaceable.
    â€œRon,” I said, “I’ve worked three strikes with you, but I’ve never worked a strike on my own before. I’d say I have the potential to really screw up.”
    â€œYou can do it. It’s your sort of thing. Storming the barricades. Fighting the good fight.”
    â€œGoing down with the ship.”
    â€œThey can’t be much worse off than they are already, so nothing you do can hurt them any,” said Ron.
    â€œGee, thanks. I feel better now.”
    The elevator, bouncing on its frayed cables, carried us up to Wein-gould’s office. Its inspection notice was three years out of date. Wasn’t there someone in the city government in charge of these things? Whowas I kidding? In this city, it had been cause for prolonged celebration when the murder rate finally dropped below New York’s.
    As Ron adjusted his pocket square and assumed the entirely misleading air of competence and alertness with which he greeted clients, I had a feeling of impending doom that, as it turned out, was entirely accurate.

4
    W EINGOULD was on the phone when we walked in, but he motioned us to the couch and waved an ink-stained hand to indicate that he’d be with us in a minute. Unlike many of our clients, Wein-gould tried to keep his appointments on schedule. Unfortunately, he agonized over the simplest decision, and it slowed him down. Like a doctor, he was always lagging behind by midafternoon.
    The couch, as usual, was stacked with folders, contracts, and the yellow legal pads he scrawled ideas on and then forgot about. We cleared space enough to sit, Ron barely refraining from dusting the crumbly leather before it made contact with the seat of his pants.
    Weingould’s long-suffering secretary, Mary Bridget, handed us “Proud to Be Union” mugs of acrid coffee and a paper cup full of packets of lightener mixed in with a few venerable sugar cubes. What seemed from its aroma to be soy sauce stained the bottom of this cup, which was clearly the receptacle for condiments of all kinds. I decided to take my coffee black for a change.
    Weingould was wrapping things up.
    â€œOkay, Bill, let me make sure I’ve got this. You’re saying they can’t get the phone list ready until the twentieth. We’re paying them twenty goddamn thousand dollars for a quickie poll and they can’t do better than that? They can’t make it the eighteenth? We wait much longer, the Teamsters’ll be in there handing out free windbreakers and then we’re really screwed…. Okay, okay. Tell them if they can manage the eighteenth, we’d appreciate it…. Okay, just do your best. I’ve got a meeting now, but you tell them from me the eighteenth would make all the difference. God Almighty, I’m sending this guy’s kids to college with what I pay him, he could move his butt for a change….Okay. Okay…. Yeah, I know it’s a long shot…. Okay, I’ll speak to you when I speak to you.”
    This was a typical scene. Weingould, a victim of the age of office technology, lacked focus, and I had never entered his office for an appointment without sitting through the tail end of his frantic, pacing phone calls. He loved