A/N: Robert Angevin and his wife and son are original characters of mine from an unpublished novel. They were getting bored waiting for me to re-write them, so I decided to give them a supporting role here. They have been renamed for this appearance. I considered using Matt Murdock, AKA Daredevil for Joviana's lawyer, but I decided it just wouldn't work, given Victor's (not entirely undeserved) reputation. He wouldn't take the job willingly, and would perform only reluctantly if coerced.
Victor's motives in recommending Robert Angevin as my lawyer were suspect the moment I saw him. Not because he looked about seventeen years old at first glance, which he did—that was because he had very light, thick hair and was on the short side of medium height—but because he had brought along an infant in a snuggly sling.
"His name's Hugo, after my wife's late father," Angevin explained, stroking the baby's flaming red hair. "A charmer, isn't he?" The father was blond and blue-eyed, with the look of a warrior angel from a Renaissance painting; the son had bright red hair and brown eyes, and was a little cherub. He looked so much like his father I almost expected to see him in a miniature business suit.
"He's adorable, but you knew that already. Do you bring him along to all your meetings with your clients, or was this just for my benefit?" I asked.
"Only when the client is female." He grinned. "Ella—my wife—is at a medical conference out of town. Actually, two of her cousins are staying with us while they go to college, and they help out with child care, so I could have left him at home. The real reason I brought him was to underscore to your husband that I had accommodated him on a moment's notice at some inconvenience and would expect to be compensated accordingly." he confided. "Now, how can I serve you?"
Victor had sent him an instant message requesting his presence, and Angevin had arrived before I was finished getting dressed.
"It's a long story." I began.
"They usually are." he said. "Before you get into it, I have to say I am glad you're your husband absented himself from this conference. I am here at his request, but not as his representative. I am here as your lawyer—not his—not Latveria's—but yours. Anything you say will be held as strictly confidential, whether or not you choose to retain me or I choose to represent you. You can speak to me freely."
"Thank you…" I explained about how I had wanted to drop off the face of the earth, and what I was escaping from. I gave him the details about how I became Joviana Florescu, and my desire to keep my former life a secret. I told him about my mother and her condition, about Galina Florescu, whose heart I was wary of breaking, about not wanting to admit to Susan, Janet and Jen that I had made up the story of how Victor and I had met when 'I' was suffering with leukemia, and that I had told the same story to Sixty Minutes. I covered my need to see to it my mother got the help she needed, my suspicion that I would be identified, and I wrapped it all up by then telling him about the items I had hidden in my grandmother's attic, and that I needed them desperately.
"Whew!" he whistled, when I was done. "Fortunately, I enjoy a challenge."
"Is it hopeless?" I asked.
"No, not at all—at least, not the parts that have to do with keeping your former life a secret. I will need access to all the information you mentioned—the police reports, school records, and such—both for your old life and your new."
"You shall have them." I told him.
"That's great. I will, should the occasion arise, go to Pennsylvania and deal with your mother, her lawyer and her family. I will explain to them that it is to their best advantage that you should not be the long-lost daughter." He
"I don't want to pay them to shut up and go away—once you start paying someone for their silence, it never ends."
"I agree. There will be no payment of extortion. I will reason with them." His little boy was gnawing on a bright plastic toy, and suddenly threw it across the room. "
What, is no one paying any attention to you?" he addressed the baby. "Would you like to hold him?" he asked me, standing up. A clever man indeed--he had seen me looking at Hugo. "He's teething, so he does bite—but not very hard, and he's had all his shots."
"I'm not used to holding babies," I confessed as he lifted his son out of the sling and handed him to me.
"It's not that difficult," he promised me. "Plus, he's past the stage where you have to support his head at all times. Just put your arm like so and--." I had my arms full of baby. I hadn't held a baby since before my mother divorced, when she was still on speaking terms with her family, and that had been a new baby cousin, Uncle Peter's—or was it Uncle Timothy's?—newborn daughter.
"This is something I don't often share with people—especially not new clients— but this has a bearing on your situation. Hugo here was genetic risky. Any child Ella and I might have would be at risk of getting some bad alleles from us." Angevin looked at me with sympathy and kindness. "You see, I had this brother who was much older than I am. He's dead now, but while he was alive, he was a terrible womanizer. Had been since he was in high school. He had several illegitimate children that no one in our family knew about.
"I mentioned that this little guy—don't eat her blouse, now!" Hugo had a grip on my blouse, and was gumming it. He looked up at me with eyes like rootbeer candies, and gurgled. "I said he was named for my wife's late father. So he was, but Hugo senior was her adoptive father. We found out—after we'd fallen in love and gotten engaged—that Ella's genetic father was my brother Edward. Naturally, it was a terrible shock to us."
"So I should imagine! But you stayed together and got married anyway? Isn't that—?"
"Illegal? That's why we now have Australian citizenship. It's legal for an uncle to marry a niece down there."
"I was going to say, incest. And creepy."
"There are varying degrees of incest. Ours isn't in the first degree—that's parent-child, brother-sister. Those are frowned on everywhere. We're in the second degree, along with first cousins. And for the creepy factor—We had no idea we were related any more than any two other random single people would be. It isn't as if I was molesting her when she was a child—we met as consenting adults, complete strangers to each other. It did take a lot of soul-searching, but why should our hearts be broken just because my late brother was an asshole? Yes, conceiving him was a risk, but everything in life is a risk. Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk. Crossing the street with him in his snuggy is a risk. You only get one life, after all."
"As far as you know." I corrected him. "How did you handle the genetic aspect of it?"
"My wife went in for testing nearly every day to be sure he was developing normally. They ran every test known to science and probably came up with a few new ones while they were at it. But as you can see, he turned out fine. He's even advanced for his age."
I was sure every parent says, or at least thinks that. "Thank you, Mr. Angevin."
"Call me Robert, please. Now—about those documents in your grandmother's attic. Might a discreet burglary take care of the matter? I ask purely for the purposes of information as of course I would never violate the law in such a manner." The twinkle in his eye said otherwise.
"I am afraid not. You see, there are several tons of papers stored in that attic—old newspapers, magazines, books—you name it. I hid them in the manner of Poe's Purloined Letter—no one would find them unless they knew exactly what they were looking for—and the nature of the information in them is so sensitive that I dare not trust anyone with that knowledge. It is as volatile as nitroglycerine. I would scarcely even trust Victor to review them without being there to interpret what is in them for him."
He whistled again. "That bad, huh? Perhaps I can arrange to buy the house and its contents through a third party…"
"I fear my mother might not be rational enough to see the advantage of selling. To her it would be the place she has lived for ten years—a place she knows, a place she feels relatively safe."
"Still…." He pondered. We discussed strategy (and babies) for another quarter of an hour before Hugo got fretful and his father took him back. "I will take my leave of you now, but we'll be seeing each other in a few days." Robert Angevin assured me.
"We will?" I asked.
"Yes. Ella and I have genuine gilt edged wedding invitations to your wedding. Perhaps I should have mentioned that Victor and I took a course together in college—Cinema in the Silent Era, It was a distribution requirement. We both sat in the back and radiated hostility, which was our common ground…"
That was interesting, but I couldn't see any signs of it in the grown man before me. He was happy, well-adjusted—altogether too nice and sweet a man to be a lawyer, let alone the sort of lawyer I required. What was Victor thinking?
I found out not long afterward, when Jen called to get my email address. I was trying to get everything together for our trip back to Latveria when the call came in. "Good morning…" We chatted briefly, and before hanging up, I tossed in, as an afterthought. "Jen, do you know, or know of, a lawyer named Robert Angevin?"
"The Prince of Sharkness? You better believe it. He's notorious. Why?"
"He's coming to the wedding, along with his wife. Why is he notorious?"
"He's reduced opposing attorneys to breaking down in tears in the bathroom—hardened attorneys who have been in practice longer than he's been alive—and I'm talking about men. I heard he sold a client down the river because he had proof the man was guilty, but insisted on pleading innocent—and you just don't do that! Why is he invited?"
"He and Victor have known each other since college." I felt better about having Angevin on my side now. He might be able to cope with my mother's family after all.
"Somehow that doesn't surprise me. His wife is nice, I hear—she comes from this big winemaking family in Italy, but she became a doctor."
We exchanged a few other pleasantries and hung up. Not five minutes later, I got a call from Janet. "How tall are you, exactly?" she demanded immediately.
"Five-eleven in your measurements. Why do you want to know?"
"Five-eleven…Because I'm going to send you a whole rack of clothes. My designs, of course. It won't cost you a penny, either."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because it's just too perfect! Do you realize that in only three short days, you and I are going to have the exact same initials? J. V. D. Janet Van Dyne—Joviana Von Doom. You may be the only other woman in the world who can wear my signature print and have it be a perfect monogram! Plus, I'm just a little bitty thing. You have that height and those marvelous supermodel legs. Anything I put on you will work."
"Janet, I don't want to reject you, but I am not a model and I don't want to do advertisements or endorsements."
"That's fine with me. Hang on to that attitude—indifference drives them mad. Like Greta Garbo and her 'I vant to be alone.' With your accent—even though it's a bit different than hers—you've got that mysterious cachet about you. No, all I want you to do is come to my next showing, the one at the Guggenheim. It's in eight weeks. I'm going to put you front and center—two seats. You can bring whoever you like—although I have to say I can't see Victor at a fashion show."
Neither could I. I would probably bring Galina, provided the house of cards that was my life hadn't come tumbling down by then. "I'll bring my mother. She's very chic. Why do you think my presence will help your business any? I'm not known for anything but who I'm marrying."
"That's enough! Darling—," her voice took on fake tones, "right now you are the most fascinating woman in the world. You're going to be big. Much more than TomKat. Much, much bigger than Brangelina. You're marring Victor Von Doom!"
"Bigger than who and who? And yes, I had noticed who I was marrying."
"Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are TomKat, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie make Brangelina. You don't get out of Latveria much, do you, sweetie?"
"Happily, no. All right, Janet. I will, if I possibly can, come to your fashion show. But I insist on paying for any of the clothing I might choose to keep, and I'm not going to promise to wear only your pieces. My mother and I have been going to our dressmaker for years now, and I don't want to hurt her feelings. She's become a friend."
"Oh, you don't have to pay. I'll never miss them." chirped Janet.
"I insist."
"If you must…" After a few more minutes, I got off the phone, just in time for a call from Sue.
"Good morning," she said. "I gave Jen and Janet your number. I hope that was okay."
"It's perfectly all right. I talked to both of them already. Janet wants me to go to her next show…She is most tenacious when she wants something, is she not?"
"Like a bulldog. I mean in a nice way, of course. I just saw something in the paper—it says you're flying the Washington Shakespeare Theatre company over to do 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' as part of the festivities?"
"That's right." I replied.
"Ooo—I can see some trouble there. I love Shakespeare, and Reed's no problem—if he's bored he just does quantum physics in his head—but Ben and Johnny might have trouble sitting through the whole play."
"It's lovely, though—and if they perform it as they did onstage, there is a wet T-shirt and dress scene."
"That might not be enough. I'll get the DVD of the movie they did with Michelle Pfeiffer as the Fairy Queen and make them watch it—they'll get more out of it if they're briefed ahead of time." she decided. "Before I hang up, Reed has something he wants to say to you…"
That was the real reason she was calling! I waited while she put down the phone and went to get her husband. I could hear them quite clearly as she said, with meaning, "Reed." Only it came out more like 'Reeeeeed'. She went up and down an octave in there.
"Why do I have to do this now? Can't it wait three days when we're at the wedding?" he asked, testily.
"No, it can't. Reed, you promised."
"All, right, all right." I heard him pick up the phone, and guessed that he had simply stretched out his arm for it, all the way across the room. "Ms. Florescu?" he said, sounding harassed.
"Yes. Good morning, Doctor Richards."
"Good morning, I would like to add my best wishes for your happiness and Victor's. I hope you will forget I ever offered any objections, because I have no reason to suppose that Victor will be anything but a good husband to you, other than my own suppositions which are based on memories that are nearly twenty years old. I hope that you will be very happy together." It sounded rehearsed.
"Thank you, Doctor Richards."
"You're welcome, Ms. Florescu."
"Are you going to tell me what those memories are, Doctor Richards?"
"No, Ms. Florescu, I am not." That was the end of the conversation.
"You are rather late, my dear—not that we are on any agenda. Did something happen that delayed you?" asked Victor, when I finally made my way down to meet him at the aircraft.
"Only the entire world calling to talk to me." I replied. "Let's go home."