I barely glimpsed his daughter during that time, though I’d sometimes hear her and Erin puttering around in the basement. The little grin on Erin’s face during Julia’s fateful phone message had struck me as faintly malicious, and I wondered whether she was amusing herself in some devious way, turning Alicia against her father. That’s unfair perhaps, possibly even a bit crass, but I know that among the many kinds of pain Marco was experiencing during those days was a sense that his daughter might indeed turn against him, with or without her lover’s connivance.
He was in bad shape again, worse than before. With Sauer, he’d conducted his own defense, which at least gave him something to focus his energies on. Now, having effectively handed matters over to his father, he’d succumbed to a restless, powerless inertia. A manifestation of this was an uncharacteristically crude, even brutal, cynicism. He wasn’t someone who monitored his own speech very closely, at the best of times. On the plus side, this gave his more generous sentiments, when he expressed them, a refreshing air of sincerity. But it also exposed his less worthy impulses. At times he could sound pettily angry or mean-spirited.
“I’m beginning to think it’s all just a land grab,” he said at one low moment. “Land grab, power grab, money grab, all this public accusation stuff . . . Yes, people get assaulted, and they deserve justice, but this isn’t about justice. It isn’t about mindless imitation either—I was wrong about that. It’s about business, plunder. Well, fair enough, we all want our share, and I’m sure I’ve had more than mine. But let’s not pretend this public shaming rigmarole has anything to do with justice or civil rights. I mean, am I seriously expected to feel a burning solidarity with those reporters, so-called, at Fox News, cashing in on having been treated like bunny girls all those years? Let them grab their millions in payback, and good luck to them. I’m all for it. But don’t tell me it has anything to do with righting wrongs, or healing wounds. It’s business! Pure and simple.”
“But Julia isn’t demanding money, is she?” I said.
“True. Not yet. Not from me. But I’m sure if this memoir of hers comes out, she’ll find some way of leveraging it. It’ll be her official certificate of victimhood, which is money in the bank, as you know. It’s like what a cab medallion used to be.”
“You really think it’s just money motivating her?”
“Why else would she put all this effort into a lie? She’s been broke for years, and now suddenly she realizes she has a nice, juicy, privileged, straight, white male she can take down. I’m a bounty-hunting opportunity, is what I am. A scalp. So are you, by the way, so watch out.”