Beggars in Spain

Leisha hugged herself, gazing in delight at the screen, smiling. She called the New York Times and asked who had written the editorial. The receptionist, cordial when she answered the phone, grew brusque. The Times was not releasing that information, “prior to internal investigation.”

It could not dampen her mood. She whirled around the apartment, after days of sitting at her desk or screen. Delight demanded physical action. She washed dishes, picked up books. There were gaps in the furniture patterns where Richard had taken pieces that belonged to him; a little quieter now, she moved the furniture to close the gaps.

Susan Melling called to tell her about the Times editorial; they talked warmly for a few minutes. When Susan hung up, the phone rang again.

“Leisha? Your voice still sounds the same. This is Stewart Sutter.”

“Stewart.” She had not seen him for four years. Their romance had lasted two years and then dissolved, not from any painful issue so much as from the press of both their studies. Standing by the comm-terminal, hearing his voice, Leisha suddenly felt again his hands on her breasts in the cramped dormitory bed: All those years before she had found a good use for a bed. The phantom hands became Richard’s hands, and a sudden pain pierced her.

“Listen,” Stewart said, “I’m calling because there’s some information I think you should know. You take your bar exams next week, right? And then you have a tentative job with Morehouse, Ke

“How do you know all that, Stewart?”

“Men’s room gossip. Well, not as bad as that. But the New York legal community — that part of it, anyway — is smaller than you think. And you’re a pretty visible figure.”

“Yes,” Leisha said neutrally.

“Nobody has the slightest doubt you’ll be called to the bar. But there is some doubt about the job with Morehouse, Ke

“Thank you,” Leisha said. “Stew… why do you care if I get it or not? Why should it matter to you?”

There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then Stewart said, very low, “We’re not all noodle heads out here, Leisha. Justice does still matter to some of us. So does achievement.”

Light rose in her, a bubble of buoyant light.

Stewart said, “You have a lot of support here for that stupid zoning fight over Sanctuary, too. You might not realize that, but you do. What the Parks Commission crowd is trying to pull is… but they’re just being used as fronts. You know that. Anyway, when it gets as far as the courts, you’ll have all the help you need.”

“Sanctuary isn’t my doing. At all.”

“No? Well, I meant the plural you.”

“Thank you. I mean that. How are you doing?”

“Fine. I’m a daddy now.”

“Really! Boy or girl?”

“Girl. A beautiful little bitch named Justine, drives me crazy. I’d like you to meet my wife sometime, Leisha.”

“I’d like that,” Leisha said.

She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.

It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society — Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred. She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because the beggars were not. Yes. But it would hold.

She believed that.

She did.

SEVEN

LEISHA TOOK HER bar exams in July. They did not seem hard to her. Afterward three classmates, two men and a woman, made a fakely casual point of talking to Leisha until she had climbed safely into a taxi whose driver obviously did not recognize her, or stop signs. The three were all Sleepers. A pair of undergraduates, clean shaven blond men with the long faces and pointless arrogance of rich stupidity, eyed Leisha and sneered. Leisha’s female classmate sneered back.

Leisha had a flight to Chicago the next morning. Alice was going to join her there. They had to clean out the big house on the lake, dispose of Roger’s personal property, put the house on the market. Leisha had had no time to do it earlier.

She remembered her father in the conservatory, wearing an ancient flat-topped hat he had picked up somewhere, potting orchids and jasmine and passion flowers.

When the doorbell rang she was startled; she almost never had visitors. Eagerly, she turned on the outside camera — maybe it was Jonathan or Martha, back in Boston to surprise her, to celebrate — why hadn’t she thought before about some sort of celebration?

Richard stood gazing up at the camera. He had been crying.

She tore open the door. Richard made no move to come in. Leisha saw that what the camera had registered as grief was actually something else: tears of rage.

“Tony’s dead.”

Leisha put out her hand, blindly. Richard didn’t take it.

“They killed him in prison. Not the authorities — the other prisoners. In the recreation yard. Murderers, rapists, looters, scum of the earth — and they thought they had the right to kill him because he was different.”

Now Richard did grab her arm, so hard that something, some bone, shifted beneath the flesh and pressed on a nerve. “Not just different — better. Because he was better, because we all are, we goddamn just don’t stand up and shout it out of some misplaced feeling for their feelings… God!”

Leisha pulled her arm free and rubbed it, numb, staring at Richard’s contorted face.

“They beat him to death with a lead pipe. No one even knows how they got a lead pipe. They beat him on the back of the head and then they rolled him over and—”

“Don’t!” Leisha said. It came out a whimper.

Richard looked at her. Despite his shouting, his violent grip on her arm, Leisha had the confused impression that this was the first time he had actually seen her. She went on rubbing her arm, staring at him in terror.

He said quietly, “I’ve come to take you to Sanctuary, Leisha. Dan Jenkins and Vernon Bulriss are in the car outside. The three of us will carry you out, if necessary. But you’re coming. You see that, don’t you? You’re not safe here, with your high profile and your spectacular looks. You’re a natural target if anyone is. Do we have to force you? Or do you finally see for yourself that we have no choice — the bastards have left us no choice — except Sanctuary?”

Leisha closed her eyes. Tony, at fourteen, at the beach. Tony, his eyes ferocious and shining, the first to reach out his hand for the glass of interleukin-1. Beggars in Spain.

“I’ll come.”

She had never known such anger. It scared her, coming in bouts throughout the long night, receding but always returning again. Richard held her in his arms, sitting with their backs against the wall of her library, and his holding made no difference at all. In the living room Dan and Vernon talked in low voices.

Sometimes the anger erupted in shouting, and Leisha heard herself and thought, I don’t know you. Sometimes it became crying, sometimes talking about Tony, about all of them. Neither the shouting nor the crying nor the talking eased her at all.

Pla