All of his adult life, Broker despised and avoided working routines. Most of his sixteen years as a cop he’d spent undercover, preferring the solitary risks over paperwork and a predictable schedule.
Lone wolf, they called him. Misfit.
As he removed gobs of clean baby clothes from the drier and stuffed them into a plastic hamper, he mused that his life resembled the baby socks he held in his hand: turned inside out.
Patiently, he hauled the basket into the kitchen, wiped down the table and began to fold the clothes. His muscular hands were thick-veined, knuckle prominent, turned on a lathe of heavy labor. Of physical shock. They dipped into the laundry basket like the jaws of a steam shovel, extracted a tiny white Onesie undergarment and gently smoothed it on the table.
Old habits from the army; get out the wrinkles, make uniform folds. Precise little stacks. Socks, sleepers, Onesies, miniature pastel T-shirts: all lined up like a toy vision of peace.
Friends urged him to take on a housekeeper/nanny when his folks went on vacation. But he insisted on doing all the cooking and cleaning himself. After two weeks solo in babyland he was amazed at the sheer volume of work his sixty-five-year-old mother had put into taking care of Kit.
Going on week four, he began to accumulate low-grade resentments. Every itty-bitty sock he turned into its mate was another tiny contention against Nina, who had left him alone with a child.
Because she insisted on pursuing her career.
Soon he’d have to build a whole new wall of shelves to house his hoarded arguments. Petty. Broker caught himself.
Like his curiosity about Caren’s odd phone message. Keith was in trouble. Well-good.
He did not take malicious pleasure in others’ troubles; but Broker was not surprised that Keith Angland had stepped into it. News traveled the cop grapevine.
Keith’s famous control-freak thermostat went haywire after he was passed over for the second time on the promotion exam for captain. His sour grapes took the form of racial slurs hurled at the new police chief.
So Broker could imagine the depth of Caren’s agony; Keith had become a loose cannon. Probably the mayor had ex-punged them from his Christmas party short list.
Still, he was curious. And she had sounded overwrought on the phone message. Too embarrassed, maybe, to talk to her circle of friends, most of whom were police wives.
So call good-old, regular baby-changing Broker in his new life up in the north woods. Broker, never a womanizer, was too steady and old to draw any romantic inferences from the call. She probably wanted him to lobby old colleagues on Keith’s behalf.
Of course, he decided not to pursue it-but-if she called again and actually spoke to him, he would give a good listen.
It was just that he had trouble taking Caren seriously after she married an ambition-driven bastard like Angland.
He folded a pink T-shirt with Pooh Bear on it and placed it on top of the T-shirt stack. With his palms, he plumped the edges of the shirts so they made an even line.
As he reached for a Polarfleece jumper, he did admit to a small amount of satisfaction that Caren would turn to him.
Vindication, maybe.
In the middle of this thought, the phone rang. He reached over, plucked it off the wall mount, and when no one said anything for the first few seconds, he thought, uh-huh, her again, working up the spit to finally make actual contact.
And he said, “Is that you, Caren?”
The silence stretched out a few more seconds and then a clear chiseled voice, pitched between surprise, pique and command assurance, stated with great emphasis: “What?”
The connection from Tuzla was like right next door.
“Jesus, Nina?” he blurted.
“Check me if I’m wrong, but you did say Caren-as in wife number one?”
Broker’s explanation sounded lame. All true, honest, but lame. “That’s right. She called and left a message on the machine. I thought you were her calling again.”
“Hmmm,” observed Nina eloquently.
“Yes, I agree,” said Broker. Then he waited to see if she would take it further. When she didn’t, he asked, “How are you?”
“Fair. How’s baby?”
“Every day she looks more and more like Winston Churchill.”
“I miss that fat little kid, I really do.”
“I know you do.”
“Okay, look, it’s five in the morning here. I’ve been on patrol for six days and I’m beat. Thing is, I weaseled a leave over Christmas. I’m attending a conference stateside…”
“What kind of conference?”
“Sorry.”
He understood. Not a secure line. The meeting proba THE BIG LAW/41
bly dealt with NATO ratcheting up the pressure on nabbing war criminals. It had been in the news.
“How long can you get away?” he asked.
“I’ll come in Christmas Eve and leave on the twenty-eighth.
Best I can do.”
“Sounds great.”
“Broker, you spent a mint on that house and we still don’t have a computer. E-mail would be a lot easier for me here than finding telephone time.”
Broker frowned. “I hate computers. Bad enough I have the TV. Besides, I like hearing your voice.”
“Gawd. I married an analog cavefish. Caren, huh?” she needled.
“Knock it off,” he protested.
“Kiss Winston for me. See you. Love.”
The connection ended. Broker hung up the phone and sat down in the chair next to the table. He leaned forward, rested his elbows among the mounds of infant clothing. Mild rebuke knocked the idle kinks out of his thoughts. Foolish, daydream-ing about Caren Angland and her social turmoil when Nina had been soldiering in the snow.
He carried the folded clothes to Kit’s room, crept in and piled them on her dresser. On the way out, he checked her, bathed in the soft night-light. Definitely Churchill, painted by Rubens. Carefully, he pulled the door shut behind him.