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Interview with Ian Rose

Once he was a bit more calm, Ian Rose decided that the only option to overcoming his torment of doubts and shooing away the ghosts was to screw his courage to the sticking place, deal with the irreversible fact of his son’s death, and begin to investigate the not very clear circumstances surrounding it.
I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do it,
he thought,
and they’ll put me in an asylum—and who’ll take care of the dogs then?
That’s why at eight o’clock in the morning the following Wednesday, he was ordering orange juice, a cappuccino, pancakes with maple syrup, and fried eggs with sausage at the Lyric Diner, Cleve’s favorite breakfast spot in New York, a fifties-style bar and grill on Third Avenue and Twenty-Second Street.

“You’ll see, Pa,” Cleve had assured him the first time he took him there. “Here they only take six minutes to serve all the bad cholesterol you want.”

It was true: service did not take a second longer, six minutes exactly to bring everything to the table. Cleve timed them to show his father, and on top of that they were as efficient as they were sullen, something Ian Rose appreciated, because he disliked nothing more than that self-interested, syrupy kindness prevalent throughout the city. But not at the Lyric; there no one greeted you with a phony smile or said good-bye with a gelid “have a nice day.” The boys of the Lyric screamed from your table to the kitchen: “Blind eyes!” for poached eggs, “Drop them!” for eggs over easy, or “Shatter them!” for scrambled.

This time Rose was alone and not very hungry, so he only ate a quarter of the mountain of food they brought him, then pushed his plates aside and brought out pen and paper to make notes about what he’d have to ask Pro Bono, María Paz’s attorney, in a few hours. Right away he felt as if the rude wait staff of the Lyric were sending disproving glances his way, not happy that he had turned the table into a desk. Because just as speedily as they served you, they rushed you out, with the last bite still in your mouth, so the next diner could be accommodated. Rose gathered his belongings without having written anything, because aside from the obvious he really didn’t know what to ask the lawyer; and besides, how much could he ask in ten minutes, which is what he had been granted for the meeting, not a lot of time, enough for a hello and good-bye and that’s it. After leaving the Lyric, he walked to the Strand, where they often had Cleve’s graphic novels, and he went in to see if they had any. He found a bunch of them in a remote corner of the store, marked down from $12.00 to $3.50, and he felt a stab in his chest. He put them all in his cart and walked to the cashier. There were fifteen of them and he was going to buy them all. He’d take them and keep them in the house because it had pained him to see them so marked down, almost given away. He felt it was an unmerited degradation, a premature push toward oblivion.

“Excellent!” the cashier told Rose when he saw all the copies of the same book. He was young and slight as a tadpole, with a red-and-black hankie tied around his neck and a small dragon tattooed on his arm. “I see you too are a fan of the
Suicide Poet . . .
”

“Are you?” Rose murmured, and his eyes watered.

“Of course. Bedside reading! And believe me, I’m not the only one. They’re going to be disappointed when they see we’re out of copies.”

“Then I’ll take only two,” Rose said. “Keep the rest; I don’t want to be a hog.”

He walked up Broadway with the two books under his arm and headed to Union Square, where he got on the subway that would take him to the lawyer’s office in Brooklyn Heights. In María Paz’s manuscript the man’s first and last name had been mentioned, although here he appears only by his pseudonym, Pro Bono, because as far as I can tell, everyone in this story has something to hide and I’d rather not reveal their true names. María Paz alluded to the fact that her defense attorney was retired, and judging by the fascination bordering on love with which she referred to him, at first Ian Rose had imagined the lawyer to be the old legalistic type with Don Juan airs, with a toupee to hide his baldness, a pair of shiny black shoes à la Fred Astaire, and strong men’s cologne to hide the acrid smell of old age.

“Not even close, Mr. Rose,” Ming, Cleve’s editor and friend, who had done Ian Rose the favor of setting up the meeting, had corrected him. “This lawyer is famous. World famous even. He’s not some schmuck.”

Ming, who had known about Pro Bono before all of this, had added to his knowledge by digging a little deeper here and there. Through Ming, Rose found out that in his glory days, Pro Bono had been the Sardinian heavyweight in global litigation over water rights, acting as defender of local communities against the multinational corporations that sought to commercialize natural resources. He had successfully blocked several multimillion mega-projects to privatize water supplies in places such as Bolivia, Australia, and Pakistan, and also at home, in California and Ohio. And it hadn’t been a little quarrel: Pro Bono had made a specialty of kicking some serious thugs in the ass, so much so that once, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, there had been an attempt on his life for going around as a spokesperson of a huge mobilization of indigenous women who would not let the water be taken from their ancient wells because the multinational banks felt like privatizing them as a condition of debt renegotiations.

“Well, well,” Rose said to Ming, “so I’m going to meet with the champion of the world’s hungry.”

As might be expected, not everything about the lawyer had been altruistic, because the fights he had won had also brought him significant wealth. So he had retired at seventy-five; tired of his philanthropic adventures and his pockets full, and facing a life of rose gardening, he had opted to take on lesser cases pro bono, that is, to defend people such as María Paz, who could not afford a private attorney, for nothing.

“That’s your man,” Ming said. “Unmistakable, as you will see, because of his physical appearance.”

“Why?”

“A little issue. Well, a particularity, but rather obvious.”

“Is he blind? Because he deserves a medal of merit if on top of everything he’s blind.”

“No, not that.”

“Deaf-mute? Lame? Cleft lip?”

“Hunchback.”

Hunchback. The word itself was taboo and therefore unmentionable. An only child, pampered and protected by his parents, Pro Bono himself had not been aware of the implications of his deformity until he was six, when he started school and others began to point at him. But even at that age he showed resources with which to defend himself. One day, he grew sick of another kid who pushed him to the end of his rope calling him a camel.

“Don’t call me a camel, you moron, don’t you know a camel has two humps, not one?” Pro Bono screamed at him, pushing him to the ground.

The fact that he was intelligent and came from a traditional rich East Coast family shielded him against any complex he may have developed about being lesser than. As a teenager, the fact that his defect was taboo became a motivation to openly flaunt it. He never avoided looking at himself in the mirror; on the contrary, he stood before a double mirror to make his peace with that strange, almost mythological body that had been his lot. He repeated the word “hunchback” to himself until owning it and knowing it was human, and also all the degrading insults—hunchbacked, camel, retard, hunchy, dromedary, humpbacked, humpy—and in removing their thorns, he neutralized the degradation they carried. He also repeated the euphemisms that were meant to sidestep his true condition—invalid, special, disabled—because he knew that if anything could harm him more than the deformity itself it was the misleading silence and the pious metaphors. Through books, he had developed a certain pride in the uniqueness of being a part of the family that included Victor Hugo’s hunchback Quasimodo, Hawthorne’s Aminadab, and Dickens’s Daniel Quilp. He was pleased that Homer had singled out Tiresias, endowing him with a hump, as did Shakespeare with Caliban from
The Tempest
and with Richard III. Literature had wanted to present all of these first cousins, his brothers, as hunchbacked and deviant, making their physical condition a manifestation of their spiritual defects. But this wasn’t the case. Pro Bono knew them very well and saw them otherwise, feeling affection for all of them, understanding their motivations, and from the time he was an adolescent he had set his mind to come to their defense and those of their like, clearing their names, making it evident once and for all that a hunchback need not be one of the miserable ones.

For María Paz, who didn’t yet have a defense attorney, Pro Bono’s physical appearance hadn’t been a big deal. Not having a defense attorney under the critical circumstances in which she found herself was like going to war without an army or arms, not knowing who her enemy was, or what she was accused of, and worse yet, not quite knowing exactly what she had become involved in. Caught up in the hubbub of the courtroom’s waiting room, María Paz hadn’t even heard her name when they called her over the loudspeaker to appear at the bench, and she was alerted only because another detainee, who had heard it, ran over to her to tell her it was her turn. Once before the judge, she could not understand what they were asking her; in her head the words sounded hollow, as if all her English had been forgotten in one swoop, and she answered whatever came into her head. Her nerves were killing her; she mumbled, contradicted herself. And slowly dug a deeper and deeper hole, incriminating herself until there was no way out. And just at that moment, as if fallen from the sky, Pro Bono, the renowned veteran attorney, an expert in the arts and tricks of the trade, appeared and took over the messy case that seemed lost from the start: the Colombian woman accused of seducing and then murdering the American ex-cop.

“Take it easy, baby, I’ll take care of you” was the first thing Pro Bono had told María Paz that day, putting his arm around her and giving her a brief squeeze on the shoulder, just long enough so that she felt the warmth of another human being; she took that spontaneous gesture as a blessing, letting her know that she wasn’t alone. Amid the noise and confusion of the courtroom, those few words, the words everyone wants to hear in the middle of one’s troubles, miraculously reached her ears: “I’ll take care of you.” A generous and powerful offer, especially under these circumstances, coming from a stranger who was asking for nothing in return, a man of odd appearance but decidedly respectable, very elegant in his own peculiar way, someone who smelled clean and refined amid the thick stench of chaos. He was one of those skinny men with big bones and an angular face, an old-fashioned aristocrat with traces of vices long abandoned and a certain attractiveness battered by the years, and enormous, intense yellow-hazel eyes like a heron. A hunchback, yes, that too, an old gentleman bent over by the burden of his hunch, an individual painfully reduced in stature. But what María Paz noticed on that first meeting was that he came to her aid like a gentleman, conveying a sense of calm and self-confidence that inspired in her a rare sensation of relief, as if suddenly the weight that she also bore on her back was lifted.

Ian Rose had wanted to make it to Pro Bono’s on time, so as not to waste any part of his quota of minutes, and at 12:20 p.m. he was seated on a fine Chippendale chair upholstered in bottle-green velour in the middle of a waiting room of the office that took up a whole floor of a flawlessly remodeled Brooklyn Heights doorman building. The office had been furnished with heavy mahogany furniture, Persian rugs on the parquet floor, a vase of fresh roses at the entrance, and a ruling equestrian motif, evident in ashtrays, curtains, pillows, and various other objects. It was one of those places made up to appear British and that seemed to smell of wood and leather, but in reality didn’t smell of anything. More aptly, it was an old-school den of scheming lawyers through and through, with over sixty years of experience litigating criminal cases in New York and other cities around the world, very high profile, “assertive and aggressive,” known for its ethical and professional conduct, with a confirmed reputation for knowing the law backward and forward, fully understanding the penal system, and promising little but delivering much. The firm was known by three names, the first of which was Pro Bono, the principal and oldest partner. Although he had retired, his younger partners were still making use of his prestigious name and had allowed him to continue to use his old office, the most spacious one and the only one with a full view of the Brooklyn Bridge. Ming had told Rose that Pro Bono had an apartment in the same building on the lower floor, where he stayed when it got too late to drive back to his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he lived with his wife.
It’s really something
, Rose thought,
that there are people like that.

While he waited, Rose began to read one of the copies of
The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita
.
Damn, my boy was talented,
he thought, and once more big tears welled up in his eyes that he quickly dried with the sleeve of his coat.

“I’ve become an old crybaby, Cleve,” he said aloud, but he was alone in the waiting room and no one heard him.

He waited for twenty minutes, twice as long as he had been promised for the meeting, and he imagined that this lawyer must be a phony, who would’ve thought? As if Rose didn’t know that he was retired with nothing to do but cross his arms and sit on his ass in the office.

“I’m Ian Rose,” he introduced himself when he finally met the man.

“I know, Mr. Rose,” Pro Bono replied, impressing on his words a certain tone that Rose didn’t quite get. “You’ve come to see me about María Paz, the Colombian girl. Look, my friend, don’t waste your time with this. She’s fine. As fine as can be, if you get my drift; and in any case there’s not much you can do for her.”

“I just want to know if it’s true that she killed her husband,” Rose asked.

“I’m sorry,” Pro Bono said, but Rose sensed that he wasn’t. “But I can’t divulge that information.”

Apparently, the charm of that lawyer who had been so kind to María Paz would not be on display for Rose. Ming had warned him that it was very likely that the lawyer would not be willing to break attorney-client confidentiality for a stranger. That was understandable, but there was an aggressive streak about him that Rose couldn’t quite figure out.