"TUROW, SCOTT - THE BURDEN OF PROOF" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turrow Scott)

There was indeed a powerful determinant in a memory from the patient's
childhood: it referred to the death of a little brother, which the
mother laid to the father's negligence, and which led to serious
quarrels with threats of separation between the parents. The continued
course of my patient's life, as well as the therapeutic success,
confirmed my analysis.

SIGMUND FREUD,

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life

PART ONE

They had been married for thirty-one years, and the following spring,
full of resolve and a measure of hope, he would marry again. But that
day, on a late afternoon near the end of March, Mr. Alejandro Stern had
returned home and, with his attache case and garment bag still in hand,
called out somewhat absently from the front entry for Clam, his wife. He
was fifty-six years old, stout and' bald, and never particularly
good-looking, and he found himself in a mood of intense preoccupation.

For two days he had been in Chicago that city of rough souls on behalf
of his most difficult client. Dixon Hartnell was callous,
self-centered, and generally full of his lawyers' advice; worst of all,
representing him was a permanent engagement. Dixon was Stern's
brother-in-law, married to Silvia, his sister, Stern's sole living
immediate relation and the enduring object of his affections. For
Dixon, of course, his feelings were hardly as pure. In the early years,
when Stern's practice mounted to little more than the decorous hustling
of clients in the hallways of the misdemeanor courts, serving Dixon's
unpredictable needs had paid Stern's rent. Now it was one of those
imponderable duties, darkly rooted in the hard soil of Stern's own sense
of filial and professional obligation.

It was also steady work. The proprietor of a vast commodity-futures
trading empire, a brokerage house he had named, in youth, Maison Dixon,
and a series of interlocked subsidiaries, all called MD-this and -that,
Dixon was routinely in trouble. Exchange officials, federal regulators,
the IRS--they'd all had Dixon's number for years. Stern stood up for
him in these scrapes.

But the present order of business was of greater concern. A federal
grand jury sitting here in Kindle County had been issuing subpoenas out
of town to select MD clients. Word of these subpoenas, served by the
usual grim-faced minions of the FBI, had been trailing back to MD for a
week now, and Stern, at the conclusion of his most recent trial, had
flown at once to Chicago to meet privately with the attorneys
representing two of these customers to review the records the government
required from them. The lawyers reported that the Assistant United