The Mongol Reply Read online

  The Mongol Reply

  Benjamin M. Schutz

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  DEDICATION

  In memory of my mother

  Rhoda K. Schutz (1926–2002)

  All the leaves are gone—

  Forever there will be a

  Tiger in Paris.

  And with heartfelt thanks to

  “Swifty” Myers, Jr. and his

  Lazarus Literary Agency.

  It’s great to be alive.

  PROLOGUE

  The rocking chair creaked rhythmically, rising in pitch as he rode it forward and then falling away with him. He clung to that sound, an anchor outside the storm in his head. He listened carefully. The sound was always the same. He would settle for that. Let everything stay the same. He looked out the window. No one had come yet. But they would. He would hear them before he saw them, drowning out the rocker, ending this respite.

  The breeze caressed his face. He had opened the window to hear better. So he wouldn’t be surprised. He didn’t want to be surprised anymore.

  He stroked the head pressed into his shoulder and rocked on, awaiting the announcement that once again his life had changed beyond return.

  ROPER: So Now you’d give the Devil benefit of Law!

  MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the Law to get after the Devil?

  ROPER: I’d cut down every Law in England to do that!

  MORE: Oh? And when the last Law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the Laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with Laws from coast to coast—man’s Laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of Law, for my own safety’s sake.

  Robert Bolt

  A Man for All Seasons

  Act 1

  CHAPTER ONE

  Morgan Reece took a seat on the Metro facing the door. After the morning rush hour, the trains from Vienna to D.C. were empty. He took the chapter he was working on out of his briefcase, flipped to the last page he’d edited and began to read. The car would be pretty empty until it went underground in East Falls Church and began to burrow under Arlington towards the Potomac. By Foggy Bottom it would be packed, and he’d have to quit working. Thirty minutes in, thirty minutes out. An hour’s worth of work on the paper beat fighting the traffic on I-66, he thought.

  At each stop, Reece looked up at the doors for a moment to see who was coming aboard and, satisfied that his life would not be enriched or endangered, went back to work. By the Court House stop, Reece was sharing his seat with a construction worker who alternated one unlaced work boot over the other while he glanced nervously up and down the car. Reece leaned a bit away from the man and slid his papers towards one end of the briefcase. At least he could still stretch out his legs. As soon as someone took the seat perpendicular to him, that would end. He decided he’d stop work then and just count the stops and watch the faces.

  A pair of ankle boots and leggings slid in and Reece withdrew to let them get settled. When they stayed tucked back along the edge of their seat, he reclaimed his position. He glanced up and saw hands shuffling papers in a lap. The woman had very short brown hair that stuck straight out like the first feathers on a baby bird. She was looking down at her papers while she rearranged their order. She had a long neck, Reece thought, like a Modigliani, and found himself surprised that he’d noticed.

  Reece returned to the section on children’s drawings as indicators of sexual abuse and how they compared with their use of anatomically detailed dolls. The train slammed to a halt and Reece’s papers spilled over the end of his briefcase and littered the floor of the car.

  “Shit.” He muttered and bent forward to pick them up before the standing passengers adjusted themselves back into place and stood on them. Bending down, he saw something dark out of the corner of his eye and pulled back just before butting heads with the short-haired woman.

  “Sorry,” she said and then slid off the chair and nimbly squatted down to scoop up her papers from the floor.

  Reece waited for her to finish, but when she was done, she twisted around to pick up his papers and handed them to him.

  “Here,” she said, and took her seat as the car began to move.

  “Thanks.” Reece smiled briefly, but she was looking down and shuffling the pages in her lap.

  Reece tapped the edges of his papers on his briefcase and began to check the numbers. The car slowed, then stopped and the conductor called out “Rosslyn.” The young woman stood up, adjusted her waist pack and strode out of the car. Reece glanced up for a moment, decided that indeed her neck was long, but not too long, and went back to his paper.

  Satisfied that the pages were all there, he slipped them back into his briefcase and crossed under the Potomac into Washington D.C.

  CHAPTER TWO

  High above the steel worm that Morgan Reece rode, above the street-side scramble, in the pastel and Muzak calm on the sixteenth floor of the Hungerford Tower, two men met to preserve family values.

  “I want that bitch dead,” Tom Tully said.

  “I don’t think we can help you with that, Mr. Tully, we’re just divorce lawyers,” Albert Olen Garfield said.

  “That’s not what I’ve heard. A friend of mine, he calls you ‘Agent Orange.’ He says your shadow can kill. That’s what I want.” The big man jabbed his finger into space to emphasize his point. “I want that bitch to beg for death. I want her left with nothing, absolutely fucking nothing. Do her like these guys would.”

  Tom “The Bomb” Tully, special teams coach of the Virginia Squires and one-time scourge of NFL wide receivers, quarterbacks, runners, anyone unwary or unprotected, rapped a lumpy knuckle against the glass that covered Albert Garfield’s copy of the letter from Subutai to Genghis Khan concerning his visit to the Persians.

  Contemptuous of the barbarians, the Persians had taken the Khan’s gifts, killed his emissaries and not once looked to the east. Subutai and 50,000 horsemen rode in reply. Stopping briefly in his pursuit of the Shah, (whom he would ultimately catch, and, before decapitating, pour molten silver into his eyes, ears, nose and throat), Subutai wrote this:

  We have come to Persia. Where we found them we killed them all, man, woman and child. Villages we burn, towns we raze. We have sown salt in their fields, fouled their rivers, slaughtered their sheep, cattle and chickens, burned their crops, leveled their forests. There is a great shrieking before us and an even greater silence behind. Rejoice, the birds have all left Persia for there is nowhere to roost.

  Twenty-five years after first reading that letter, Albert Garfield was still thrilled by each word. Ornately framed, it hung on the wall near the chair for prospective clients. Every once in a while one of them would invoke the Mongol reply and Albert imagined himself on horseback leading the hordes between the shrieking and the silence.

  “Mr. Tully, is there any particular reason that you’d like us to visit all this misery on your wife?”

  “Goddamn right there is. Somebody else is irrigating her trench, that’s why! Nobody does that to me. Nobody.” Tully shook his head in disbelief.

  Ten years past his prime, he was still an impressive specimen. Six-feet-one and two hundred and five pounds, bow-legged, a wedge for a torso and arms down to his knees. All this commanded by a goateed skull with gun port eyes.

  “This somebody who’s ‘irrigating’ your wife, does he have a name?”

  “If he did, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be needing a defense attorney.”

  “How do you know your wife’s having an affair?”

  “I caught the bitch, that’s how. I came back
early from a practice and saw her playing tonsil hockey out in front of the house.”

  “Did you approach her?”

  “No. I was in my car at the end of the block. They didn’t see me. I hung back waiting to see if the bastard was going to come into my house. Boy, did I want that. Please Lord, please let him come into my house and do this. Boom.” Tully slammed a fist into a palm. “One dead motherfucker. No, two dead motherfuckers.”

  “Was the man driving his own car?”

  “I guess. I decided not to get too close. I’d seen all that I needed to anyway. I let him drive off.”

  “Did you get a license tag?”

  “No. It was a Toyota though, a Camry maybe, burgundy color.”

  “Have you talked about this with your wife?”

  “No. I thought about going in, grabbing her by the throat and tossing her out the door. You want your dicking elsewhere, then park your sorry ass elsewhere. Then I decided her not knowing that I know was a good thing. Allow me to do it right, set her up, get on her blindside and tee off on her. I’m gonna go right through her, just like I did Conway. Boom. Lights out.”

  Cisco Conway, the Eagles wideout, had been tackled by the cornerback, who had both of Conway’s legs around the ankles. He was trying to hop free when “The Bomb” exploded after a twenty-five-yard cross-field dash. He hit him chest high, helmet and forearm. Conway snapped over like a slinky. His head slammed into the turf and shuddered inside his helmet like a recoiling springboard. After two years in a coma, Cisco Conway died.

  “And that’s what you’d like our help with?”

  “Yeah. I want to blow this bitch right out of the water. I don’t want her to see it coming. From what I hear, you do that better than anyone else around.”

  Garfield smiled, “We’ll take your case, Mr. Tully.” He came around his desk, hand extended, and shook Tully’s. “I’m going to ask you to fill out a questionnaire now and leave a retainer with us.” Tully was steered towards the door.

  “How much?” Tully asked anxiously.

  “Ten thousand dollars. Is that a problem?”

  “Uh, no. I can cover that.” Tully patted the breast of his jacket and removed an envelope. Garfield saw a thick wad of hundreds.

  “Good. After we look at this initial information we’ll be able to plan your strategy. One other thing, if we’re going to use adultery as the grounds for divorce, you can’t sleep with her. Once you’ve found out about it, that can be construed as forgiveness.”

  “No problem there. The bitch won’t let me anywhere near her. My money’s good enough for her, but not me.”

  “Don’t do anything differently. Treat her just as you always have. We don’t want her to have any idea about what we have in store for her. Okay?”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “Good. Looks like you came to the right place after all, Mr. Tully.” Garfield clapped him on the shoulder and pulled the door open.

  As Tully stepped through the doorway, Garfield said, “Why settle for dead though? We can do so much more.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Why are we here this morning, Mr. Garfield?”

  “Your Honor, we have a motion for emergency removal and exclusion from the marital residence and temporary custody of the minor children of my client, Mr. Thomas Tully.”

  Judge Harold Kenniston frowned at Albert Garfield. Such a motion was hardly ever granted in an ex parte hearing.

  “And why should I grant this motion, Mr. Garfield?”

  “Because my client fears for his safety and the safety of his children. We come before the court with an affidavit signed by my client, that his wife threatened to do a …” Garfield leaned down and flipped through the papers on the table before him. “Here it is, to do a ‘Manassas’ on him.”

  “A what?”

  “A ‘Manassas,’ Your Honor. It is, I believe, a term of art among women these days. It means to cut off a man’s penis while he sleeps, in retaliation for an imagined injury.”

  “And when did this occur?”

  “Last night, Your Honor. My client was terrified. He spent the night in his bedroom with the door locked and barricaded. When he thought his wife had gone to sleep, he called me and I told him I would come right into court to get protection for him and his children.”

  “So that’s why this hearing is an emergency. Why isn’t Mrs. Tully here to respond to this?”

  “We couldn’t locate her to tell her of this hearing.”

  “You couldn’t locate her?” Kenniston scowled at this development.

  “Yes, Your Honor. She apparently left the house early this morning and Mr. Tully doesn’t know where she went.”

  “Did she pack her clothes? Has she left the family?”

  “No, Your Honor, we don’t believe that’s the case. We just don’t know why or where she’s gone, or when she’ll be back.”

  “Has Mrs. Tully ever attempted to ‘do a Manassas’ or any other kind of bodily harm to her husband?”

  “We have the children’s nanny here who will testify to a fight between Mr. and Mrs. Tully where she attempted to scratch his face and kicked him.”

  “Mr. Garfield, you’re going to have to do better than that. An affidavit alleging a threat, signed by one of the parties, and a fight where she ‘attempted to scratch his face.’ I am not moved.”

  “Your Honor, we have a number of other witnesses prepared to testify in this matter.”

  “Mr. Garfield, this is an emergency hearing and you have a number of witnesses ready to appear? When were they contacted?”

  “Last night and this morning, Your Honor. Their availability attests to the seriousness of the matter and the long build-up of Mrs. Tully’s profound emotional problems. Mr. Tully has sought help from friends, family and professionals to try to salvage his marriage and family. It wasn’t until this last event that he sought legal protection. Your Honor, you will hear about her extensive psychiatric history.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Garfield, are you proposing to put on expert testimony?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Dr. Stanley Pecorino is here today. He has evaluated the children and is ready to opine on …”

  “Wait just a minute, has he seen their mother?”

  “No, Your Honor, but …”

  “But nothing, Mr. Garfield. If you think that Dr. Pecorino is going to come into my court and tell me that these children should live with their father when he’s never even seen their mother, you are sadly mistaken.”

  “Of course not, Your Honor.” Garfield absorbed and redirected this assault on his battle plan. “Dr. Pecorino is here to give testimony about the children’s perception of their mother. About the caretaking deficits that exist based upon their play in his office.”

  “Is he going to testify about her mental health?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “And how does he propose to do that? What is his foundation going to be?”

  “Well, the children’s play, his interviews with them and the history he was given by their father.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “I am telling you, Mr. Garfield, that I will not give such testimony much weight at all. I am still not inclined to grant your motion. Who are your other witnesses?”

  Garfield was watching his carefully choreographed blitzkrieg turn into a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That was the problem with the system, he thought. You never knew what judge you’d get. Why couldn’t he have drawn “Sleepy” Duncan, a man with no respect for the law or the facts? Good old Sleepy ruled entirely on his biases, carefully concealed under the comforter of judicial discretion. Old Sleepy would have heard all this and issued a bench warrant for Serena Tully’s involuntary commitment. No, he had to get that prick Kenniston, Mr. Continuing Education.

  “We have Mrs. Tully’s sister, Amber McKinley, here, Your Honor. She will testify to her sister’s long history of mental illness and her deteriorating marital state.”


  “All right, Mr. Garfield, let me hear what she has to say.”

  Amber McKinley looked like a third generation Xerox copy of her sister and that fact dominated their relationship. The crisp clean lines of Serena’s features, the fragile perfection of their proportions, was almost duplicated, but not quite. The taut jaw line was smudged and rounded. The nose a tad broader. The eyes a shade less blue. Being not quite beautiful was a blow she had never recovered from. Her sister’s existence was a daily reminder.

  After she was sworn in Albert Garfield asked, “Were you contacted by your brother-in-law Thomas Tully yesterday evening?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “What was the substance of the conversation?”

  “He called to tell me what my sister had threatened to do. He was real upset. He asked me if she’d ever acted like this before.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, she never threatened to cut off a man’s penis before. Not that I know of. But she’d done other things.” Amber stopped, unaccustomed to being asked what she knew or having anyone listen to her answer. Garfield led her on.

  “What other things, Mrs. McKinley?”

  “Well, there were the suicides. Not suicides actually, but attempts.”

  “Tell us about these.”

  “The first one was, let me see, she was in high school. Her boyfriend broke up with her. He was never really that serious about her, anyway. She took a bunch of pills. Our dad found her and took her to the hospital. She had to have her stomach pumped. Mom and Dad wanted her to go to therapy. She went but the doctor said she didn’t talk about anything, so he put her on pills. Antidepressants, but they didn’t help. She got fat and that made her more depressed. So she stopped taking them. Then she started taking diet pills and doing that thing, eating and then throwing up, until she lost the weight. It was pretty awful. I remember Mom finding plastic bags of vomit hidden in her room when she couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough. We tried to get her to talk to our minister but she wouldn’t do that either. Nothing much helped until she went away to junior college. Then she got discovered by this modeling agency and things seemed to straighten out for a while. She was happy for a few years. But, you know, she didn’t really make it as a model. I mean she worked as a model, she made pretty good money, but she didn’t make it really big, the way she wanted to. I don’t really know why, neither did she. I mean my sister’s really beautiful. You should see her, Your Honor.”