"The Laws of our Fathers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Turow Scott)

SEPTEMBER 12, 1995

Sonny

Her Honor, Judge Sonia Klonsky, enters her chambers, burdened with packages and the teeming, solitary feelings of the lunch hour, and finds two police officers in the outer office usually occupied by her minute clerk, Marietta Raines. Both large men, the cops linger over a yellow legal pad, drafting an affidavit to support an arrest warrant. The white one, Lubitsch, is a self-conscious prototype, a body builder who has turned himself into a human landscape, with mountainous shoulders and a neck like a tree stump. He has removed his sport jacket and seated himself at Marietta's desk. As he writes, his partner, Wells, makes sounds over Lubitsch's shoulder to show whether or not he agrees.

Passing by, the judge glances at the face sheet of the warrant which they have already completed for her approval. From the two brown paper sacks she carries, the aromas of a household arise, bread and produce and cardboard, items gathered as she rushed store to store among the little Italian shops that persist on these depleted streets near the Kindle County Central Courthouse. Lunch is the most important hour of the day for Sonny, the only time she is without direct responsibilities to others. She must retrieve Nikki from day care by 5:00, and then begins the hours of feeding, bathing, talking, mothering – her truest labor, in Sonny's mind. Now, with the bags still in her arms, she remains vaguely conscious of six summer nectarines she picked by hand whose cool flawless skin and sensuous cleft woke her unpredictably – comically – to some semblance of longing.

The warrant is for one DeLeel Love, residing at Apartment 9G, 5327 Grace Street, DuSable. On Saturday, September 10, according to the warrant, 'Defendant did commit the offense of deviate sexual assault against one Zunita Collins, aged twelve, a minor, in that he engaged in the unconsented and offensive touching of said Zunita Collins's breasts, buttocks, and vagina.' Wells points to the defendant's name.

'Guess he's just love all the time,' he says. A stout man, Wells smiles too broadly. He has dark, venous gums and snaggle teeth. Lubitsch continues writing, which means he has heard the remark before.

The last time Wells was in here, a month or two ago, he talked to Sonny at length about his son who was competing in the Special Olympics. But the crime – the projects – has brought something rougher to the surface. There are some cops who remind Sonny of her Uncle Moosh, in whose home she lived for extended periods throughout her childhood, men who seem to be the calm center of the world, quietly and confidently sorting good from bad with the cheerful conviction that it is somehow worth the effort. But neither Wells nor Lubitsch is like that. For them you can see that each case, each crime is personal, riling contentious feelings.

In this, of course, they are more like Sonny than she would prefer. In her prior job as a prosecutor, an advocate, it seemed natural to feel this intense connection to every case, to the world's need to punish, to be for the victims and their right to receive whatever poor amends they could. Coming to the bench, she welcomed the prospect of more distance, but instead, she frequently finds herself not merely touched by cases but, in ways that puzzle her, still deeply involved. Occasionally, she is gripped by the anguish of the victims. But most often – too often for comfort – it is the accused, the defendants, poor and always somehow wretched, who remind her in the most secret and fragmentary ways of herself.

The judge lifts a hand to the cops, letting them resume work on their warrant. They are amiable regulars here, particularly welcome because few other persons around this courthouse seem to fully trust her. Most of the clerks, the deputies, the PAs and judges regard Sonny as a foreigner, a former federal prosecutor who was one of a half-dozen lawyers of established integrity recruited to the state court bench by a Reform Commission created in the wake of the latest bribery scandal, which enveloped four different courtrooms. Sonny suspects that after only two years on the bench, she is regarded by her colleagues as unqualified to be sitting on felonies, a plum – and demanding – assignment. Certainly she is unwanted here amid people who have been entrusted with each other's secrets for years.

In the interior office of the chambers, the deputy sheriff assigned to the courtroom, Annie Chung, is arranging the array of multicolored paperwork that resulted from the tumultuous status call which Sonny holds each Tuesday morning. At the sight of the judge, Annie rises to relieve her of her packages, taking an instant to peer discreetly into one. Annie has begun night classes at college. She dreams of law school and, Sonny is sure, envisions herself someday in the flowing black raiment of a judge, on the bench, empowered and obeyed. To these hopes there is a heartsore quality, since Annie a few months ago married a sleek, wealthy boy from Hong Kong, far more traditional than she is. At times Sonny sees Annie staring at the wedding and engagement rings on her left hand, admiring them in the light, but with the startled, immobilized air of some discontent she cannot yet name.

'Reporters called,' Annie says. 'What about?'

'You god a new case, up for initial appearance at 2:00. Ordell Trent. A.k.a. Hardcore.' She has a distinct Chinese accent that softens the r's to the point that they are indistinct. Aw-dell. Hahd-caw. 'Murder in the First Degree.'

'You caught that one, Judge?' Lubitsch has come to absorb the light in the doorway. 'We had that goof in the station this morning. Big-time Saint. That's the one I was tellin you about?' He is speaking to Wells. 'Where we got to get over to General? Judge, that case's a doozy.'

Sonny shakes her head. Her dark hair is abundant and, as has been the case since college, is worn free to her shoulders. There is now more than a little grey, which in this job is thought to add distinction.

'Fred, come on. Don't backdoor me. I'll hear it from the P A in court.'

'Yeah, okay,' he says, 'but it's a doozy.'

'It's a doozy,' Sonny says and restrains, in the name of amity, a motion to Annie to close the door. She has taken her chair behind an enormous mahogany desk, which, with its tiered edges, reminds her of a steamship. From the tall old mullioned windows behind her, a grand view of the back reaches of DuSable city recedes. On her desk is a Lucite gavel, three feet long, given to her by her colleagues when she left the United States Attorney's Office. In jest, they had it inscribed Ms Justice Klonsky. There are also pictures of two children, her daughter, Nikki, almost six, and Sam, a knock-kneed boy past twelve, whom she helped raise during the years she was married to his father. Sonny left that man, Charlie, almost three years ago.

'It was on the radio last week,' says Annie. 'Those damn gangbangers or somethin. Some kind of drive-by shooting? And this lady god in the way. A white lady.'

'White?' says Sonny. 'Where in the world did this happen?'

Annie reads from the complaint in the court file, prepared by the PAs in Felony Review: 6:30 a.m. September 7. Grace Street again.

'What was she doing at Grace Street?' Sonny asks. 'Maybe she's with Probation? Children's Services? Somethin like that.'

'At that hour?' Sonny motions for the complaint. Reminded, she calls out to the officers to be sure they notified Children's Services about Zunita Collins.

'Already got her,' Lubitsch answers.

'Got who?' asks Marietta, coming through the door. Returning from lunch, she is still wearing sunglasses and carries a package of her own. Without a word, the two cops rise at once to make way. Marietta Raines is proprietary about every aspect of this courtroom, where she has been the clerk – and procedural ruler – for almost two decades. She throws her purse and packages inside her desk and immediately reads the pages the officers have drawn for the judge's approval.

'Lord!' says Marietta, shaking her head over Zunita Collins. ‘I don't wanna hear about nobody had a better weekend than me.' In a heavy-footed way, Marietta moves into the inner chambers, feigning to remain oblique to the dark look the judge has passed her. With barely a rearward glance, Marietta throws the inner door closed on the two cops still howling over her remark. She has on a long bunchy cotton skirt, summer wear that will outlast the season in this overheated building. Despite their nine months together, Sonny is still not certain whether the woolly Afro Marietta wears is a wig. Rather than further confront her clerk -always a challenge – the judge returns to the murder complaint Annie handed her, the one naming the gangbanger Hardcore.

'Oh my God,' says Sonny. 'My God. "June Eddgar"? I know June Eddgar. She's the one who was killed? My God. Her son's a probation officer, isn't he? Nile Eddgar? Remember when he was in here I told you I knew his family?'

Marietta, already familiar with the murder case, nods and with a flawless memory recalls the matter on which Nile appeared last

May. Nile, as Sonny remembers that appearance, was tall and poorly groomed; he wore a funky goatee and was far too fidgety to meet her eye. He gave no sign he might have any memory of her from so long ago.

'Oh God,' Sonny says again. 'June Eddgar. Do I have to disqualify myself?'

'What for?' asks Marietta. 'She your girlfriend or somethin? How'd you know her in the first place, Judge? You-all from the same neighborhood?'

'No, no, it was in California. We lived in the same apartment building with the Eddgars. My boyfriend and I. He used to babysit for Nile. This is years ago. Twenty, at least. More. God, what a weird coincidence.' She shivers somewhat. It always takes her an instant to recognize what has gripped her so fiercely. Death. Dying. A dozen years ago, she had cancer of the breast, and anything that whispers about her own mortality can seize her with panic. 'Nile's father's here, isn't he? In the state legislature? Is that right?'

'State senator.' Marietta, who is beholden to her councilman for her job, goes to all the dinners, knows every party figure. 'District 39. Far Kindle, Greenwood Counties. Some kind of college professor seem like. And he got some funny name.'

'Loyell Eddgar,' says Sonny, and all three women laugh. Names, around here, are a never-ending subject. African names, Hispanic names, gang names. Aliases by the dozen. 'People just call him Eddgar. At least they used to. I think he was teaching at Easton at one point. That's how he ended up back here. He'd gone there before. When I knew him – in California? – he was a Maoist. God, those were crazy times,' adds Sonny and for a moment is held by the turmoil, the conflict of those years. It seems so far away and yet, like so much of life, underlies everything she is doing, like the soil from which all that's planted blooms. And now he's a state senator. 'Wow,' is what she wants to say. Lexicon of that bygone era. Wow. There have been some changes in her lifetime.

'I think June and he split up a long time ago,' Sonny adds. 'As far as I knew, she didn't even live around here.' The details have not really stuck. Her mind is porous when it comes to gossip. She will often make terrible gaffes.

'And which boyfriend is it you was living with?' asks Marietta. 'The one who writes the column now?'

Yet another dark look passes from the judge to her clerk, a plump brown woman of middle years who, as ever, makes a determined effort to pay no mind. Within the chambers, when there are no outsiders, there is an odd intimacy among the three women, especially when the conversation turns away from the law to home, men, children – the female realm with its mysterious equality. Yet Marietta knows no proper bounds. The way she puts it! As if Sonny had submitted a curriculum vitae of her love life. 1969-70: Seth Weissman, a. k. a. Michael Frain. 1970-72: various gentlemen of the Philippines. 1972-75: long dry spell. 1977-1992: Charles Brace. In truth this is information that Marietta has cobbled together with her own insistent curiosity, which Sonny always feels somewhat powerless to turn aside. Marietta has a husband of sorts, Raymen, but they have their troubles. For Marietta, therefore, this is the question of her life: What happens to love?

'What guy who writes the column?' Annie asks.

'Now haven't you heard that? Judge here used to live with that fella – what's his name, Judge?'

'Marietta, that was in the dark ages. I was a child.'

But the usual look of appreciation for Sonny's accomplishments has already come across Annie's tiny face.

'He's in the Tribune,' Marietta says. 'How'd you call it, what he writes, Judge?'

'Lifestyle, I suppose. The sixties survivor point of view.'

'Right. You know how funny people can be in what they do.'

‘I think the column is called "The Survivor's Guide." Michael Frain,' says Sonny. 'He writes under the name of Michael Frain. He's syndicated,' she adds and then feels that she's fallen into

Marietta's trap and is actually boasting about this boy who came and went from her life before Noah set to sea.

'Oh, I read that,' says Annie. 'He make me laugh. He was your boyfriend?'

'Momentarily. But his name isn't really Michael Frain. It's Seth Weissman. Michael Frain is a pen name. The whole thing is somewhat confusing. We knew somebody named Michael Frain at that point. He lived in the building, too.'

'With Nile Eddgar and them?'

'Right. Nile and Eddgar and June in one apartment. Seth and me in another. And then Michael Frain. Other people, too, obviously.'

'Sounds like some commune,'says Marietta, and Sonny cannot contain herself, she laughs aloud. Sometimes Marietta might just as well say it: You white folks are strictly crazy. Yet there was some aspect of happy communalism in those years – young, before the walls were up, the boundaries drawn. Seth's best friend, who was in law school, was always in their apartment, Hobie something, a big, funny guy, black, a wild character.

Annie has looked up from the files and studies the judge, trying to comprehend all of this – the names, the relations. She has delicate looks, her eyes smallish against a broad flange of cheek. Sonny repeats herself.

'Michael wasn't my boyfriend. My boyfriend's name was Seth. He's the one who writes the column. But the pen name he uses is Michael Frain.'

Marietta, with a big-city look of mistrust, finally speaks the lingering question. 'So what happened to Michael Frain?'

‘I haven't the foggiest,' says Sonny. 'God's truth. Seth and I were past tense by then.' Not that she hasn't wondered. A sudden stab of curiosity sometimes reaches her when she sees the name, the picture at the heading of the column. How did Seth become Michael? Where did Michael go? The questions, even now, make her uneasy.

This talk of Seth, of newspapers, brings Sonny's mind again to June Eddgar and the murder. There will be reporters in the courtroom. A white lady murdered in a drive-by. Mother of a probation officer. A prominent politician's ex. Lubitsch is right. It's a doozy.

'I'd love to keep this case,' she says to Marietta. It's not really the attention that excites her. Since all new judges face a yes-no retention vote six years after appointment, the accepted wisdom is to avoid publicity, so that the voters will have no reason to reject you. It's more the past that seems somehow alluring. The unexcavated remains of her own existence. Something back there, perhaps merely her youth, inspires curiosity, the vaguest thrill to think of the distances she's moved.

'Keep it,' Marietta answers. 'Chief Judge don't like you to transfer cases anyway.' The judges – lawyers, pols, bureaucrats by training – are often schemers, inclined to dump demanding or controversial cases on colleagues with less clout. As a result, the Chief, Brendan Tuohey, has erected strict rules. The mere thought of Tuohey and his edicts makes Sonny uneasy. Raised without a father at home, she inevitably finds men of a certain age formidable. And Tuohey, a crafty pol whose probity has long been open to question, has never cared for Sonny or the Reform Commission that forced her into his domain. To her face, he is unfailingly polite, even courtly, but Sandy Stern, Sonny's old friend and occasional mentor, has gone so far as to suggest that Tuohey placed her in the Criminal Division, in spite of her limited judicial experience – a year in the matrimonial division, a few months in the criminal branch courts – in the hope she would fail.

'Well, I have to put something on the record. About knowing June. When's this case up for the bond hearing? Now?'

It's nearly 2:00. There will be no bail, of course. The gang defendants are invariably on probation or parole, and bond, under the law, is not permitted. Sonny asks about Hardcore's probation status and Annie sets off to the outer office to get the answer from Marietta's computer console. Marietta continues racking the files from the morning call on a stainless-steel cart for transport back to the clerk's office.

'Hardcore has himself a probation officer.' Lubitsch, having thrown open the door a bit too forcefully, is on the threshold, with Annie beside him. Beaming, virtually luminous with secret knowledge, the policeman engages in a stage pause until Sonny beckons with a hand.

'Nile Eddgar,' says Lubitsch. 'He's Hardcore's probation officer.'

In the corridor outside, between the chambers and the courtrooms, somebody important enough to be disdainful of the peace happens by whistling.

'This gangbanger killed his probation officer's mother in a drive-by?' Sonny asks. 'That's a coincidence?'

'That's no coincidence. And no drive-by. Maybe the Saints want to make it look that way. This was a contract killing.'

The portent of this is bad: A street gang taking deliberate aim on a probation officer's family. A new battlefront opened in the war on the streets.

'Want to know the rest?' asks Lubitsch, still glowing.

'I'll hear it in court, Fred. I'm going to do your warrant after my motions.'

'Whatever you say, Judge,' he answers, but cannot restrain one more disbelieving toss of his head. He says yet again, 'It's a doozy.'

Sonny grabs the black robe from the coat tree behind her desk and zips it halfway. With a certain processional formality, Marietta and Annie hasten before her down the hall into the courtroom. A double doozy. Everyone will want a piece of this case. The Mayor will be on TV, sticking up for law enforcement. An atmosphere of brooding anger will penetrate the courtroom. Sonny, who has not yet endured the storm of a controversial case, becomes conscious somewhere at her center of the troubled qualms of fear.

In the corridor, Marietta's fine alto arrives, so round with pride you would think it's her own name she is singing out. 'The Honorable Sonia Klonsky,' she can be heard crying, 'judge presiding.'

*

Two p.m. bond call. Black men in manacles. The Chief Judge, Brendan Tuohey, sets bail according to a pre-established scale on all cases on which the grand jury returns an indictment. But under state law when a defendant is arrested on the basis of a prosecutor's complaint, he is entitled to a bond hearing before the assigned trial judge. Sonny regards it as one of her saddest duties to deliver the crushing news most of these young men receive, that their liberty, like some item checked at the door, is lost and unlikely soon to be retrieved.

April, Eliot said, is the cruelest month. But if he was looking for the cruelest place, he should have come here, to the Superior Court of Kindle County. A kind of barbarity seems to blow in with the defendants from the bad neighborhoods and mean streets, a grim devastation, a slaughterhouse reek. Here are freely traded the secrets no one wants to hear. At one point last month, there were four different trials ongoing involving mothers or fathers who had murdered their children. This morning Sonny arraigned six gang members who surrounded a recalcitrant twelve-year-old in a housing project stairwell and beat him with a pipe until the brain matter was literally oozing from his skull. These tales of astonishing brutality, of stabbings and rapes, of shootings and stickups, of the inevitable 'crime of the day,' so heinous that, like certain forms of pornography, it seems beyond normal imagining – these are routine, routine, routine, and their meanness is matched only by the system of which she is standard-bearer and emblem, whose clandestine rationale too often seems to Sonny to be to capture, judge, and warehouse the very poor. Every month or so, preparing for a status call, she will go back to the lockup, looking for Annie or the transport deputy, and confront, through the bars, the day's load of prisoners, twelve or fourteen young men. You would expect them to rise up and revolt, but most are quiet, shifting about, smoking their cigarettes. If they dare to look her way at all it is without defiance or, often, hope. They have been humiliated. Tamed.

On the bench, though, sorrow is seldom the predominant emotion. In this atmosphere of loathing and fear she labors on, trying to impose reason where, generally speaking, impulse and emotion have held sway. Murder is the marquee business of this courtroom – gangbangers killing gangbangers; men killing men. They use guns mostly – also knives, bats, razor blades, automobiles, crowbars, and, in one celebrated case, an anvil. The young people kill each other for reasons that are often incomprehensible: because somebody was signifying on the wrong corner; because a jacket was torn. In nine months, she has mastered all the terminology: 'ride-by' (shooting on the move); 'drive-up' (firing from a stop); 'drive-through' (the car is the weapon); 'chase-aways' (the enemy flees). The older folks also live in a world from which anger and desperation emanate, as tangible as heat. Yes, men still kill each other over dice games, drugs, and, naturally, who was coveting whose girl. What can you say about a loaded gun in the hand of a spurned and drunken man? On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

Now the courtroom lingers in the somnolent air of the afternoon. This morning, during the weekly status call, the courtroom and corridor teemed with all the urgent antagonists, the defense lawyers, the cops and prosecutors, the aggravated citizen witnesses, the deputies sullenly transporting the defendants, and those defendants' beleaguered, woebegone women. But now there is a melancholy stillness. Outside the open doors at the rear of the courtroom, a custodian mops the halls in the yellowing light.

Marietta hammers the gavel sharply, and the lawyers and reporters and sheriff's deputies slowly gather themselves to their feet, as Sonny climbs up the four stairs beside the bench, a clean-lined oak affair of faux-Bauhaus design. The senior judges sit in stately palaces in the main building on the third and fourth floors, vast chambers that bespeak the same architectural strategies as cathedrals – the individual dwarfed by the majesty of marble columns and gilt-framed portraiture, by the rococo gewgaws of carved walnut and ceilings vaulting two and a half stories above. These courtrooms in the Central Courthouse Annex were built in the eighties, when DC poured what money there was into law enforcement. The room strikes a clanging note of late-century efficiency – bang for the buck. For Sonny, the courtroom feels as intimate as her living room, but like certain children, its glory is not obvious to outsiders. It is a pie-shaped room, broadening back from the bench, rickety public construction, the plasterboard gouged in places, the meal-colored carpet already tearing away in hairy chunks. The jury box and witness stand repeat the stark lines of the bench. Weirdest is the track lighting, reminiscent of a motel lounge, which is positioned over the major players -judge, witness, attorneys – leaving dim spots throughout the windowless courtroom where the lawyers, the bailiff, the clerks tend to retreat in relaxed instants, like actors offstage.

In the wake of the shooting death of a matrimonial court judge several years ago, these courtrooms have been built with a wall of bulletproof glass in front of the spectators' sections. The sound of justice being done is piped back there by way of microphones which seem to pick up the heavy breath of everyone – defendants, lawyers, Sonny herself – in the intervals between words. She looks out there every day, toward the friends, the relatives edging forward on their seats to catch some sight, some news about their loved one in jail overalls. In warning to them, Marietta has taped a hand-lettered sign to their side of the glass: No eating no drinking no visiting In the Lockup Or the Courtroom

Now the dozen reporters who are present resume the leather barrel chairs in the jury box, where they have placed themselves to ensure that they can hear. The amplification system to the region beyond the glass often conks out, and the angled walls make the acoustics unpredictable. The journalists are mostly the hangdog beat reporters, but two of the pretty faces of local TV are present. Stanley Rosenberg, the little ferret from Channel 5, in a $500 blazer – and ratty blue jeans that the camera will not see – scurries to a seat next to a sketch artist he has brought along. In this courthouse, where the judges are elected, the press is inevitably accommodated, especially in the afternoon, when the reporters are all on deadline. Marietta calls first the case about the murder of June Eddgar. 'People versus Ordell Trent!' From the lockup, the defendant, a.k.a. Hardcore, is brought into the courtroom in his blue jumpsuit, handcuffs, and ankle chains. With mild alarm, Sonny recognizes the lawyer who comes to stand beside him, Jackson Aires. Aires has fought these wars so long he comes up firing out of instinct – one of those guys who talks the trash he knows his clients want to hear, albeit in a somewhat inanimate fashion, with no real body language to his lament. A worn-out-looking black man of mid-tone complexion, with a pomp of age-whitened African hair, Aires wears an old burgundy sport coat and scuffed bucks. With reporters here, he will put on a hell of a show, demanding bail for his client.

The lawyers state their names and Sonny makes her record: she knew the Eddgar family twenty-five years ago but has had no contact with any of them since, save Nile Eddgar, who may have appeared as a probation officer in this courtroom once. Tommy Molto, deputy supervisor in Homicide, a smallish dumpy-looking lifer who rose close to the top of the PA's Office a few administrations back, only to slide back down in the shadow of some disremembered scandal, has appeared for the state, filling in on the initial appearance.

'Mr Aires, or Mr Molto, if either of you feel the slightest reservation, I'll be happy to return this case to the Chief Judge for reassignment.'

Aires just shakes his head. 'No problem, Judge.' Molto repeats the same words. She knew the Prosecuting Attorney's Office would have no objection. They have 106 cases in this courtroom. They will have between 98 and 112 cases on her docket every day of the year. They are not about to question her impartiality. Not on the record. The only cavil she will hear, if there is one, will come in the corridors, through the grapevine.

Sonny recites the charges in the complaint. Hardcore looks on alertly. The defendants are usually fazed or anxious, lost to arcana of the courtroom. But Hardcore, burly, dark, with thick eyes, maintains himself with dignity. He knows what is occurring. Innocently, as if she did not know she was sounding a battle alarum, Sonny asks, 'Mr Aires, do you have a motion?' Long-limbed, still lithe-appearing, Jackson Aires uncrosses his arms and edges closer to his microphone that angles up from the oak podium before the bench. To Jackson Aires the criminal law really has no categories, only colors, white and black. He can play the game, talk your talk, cite the precedents, but with no evident belief they control, or even contribute to, the result. To him, every rule, every procedure is simply one more device to delay, by other means, the emancipation of the slaves. Now he looks disconsolately at the rug.

'No motion, Judge.'

There is a decided change, a pulse in the atmosphere. The two lawyers look up at her like collared hounds, hoping for understanding. They wish to say no more in front of the reporters, many of whom nonetheless seem to have gleaned the significance of Aires's remark. Stanley Rosenberg, Sonny notes, has slipped over two seats toward Stew Dubinsky from the Tribune. Stanley's smooth coiffure holds a spot of courtroom light as he bobs his head, absorbing Dubinsky's interpretation.

'Perhaps counsel should approach,' says Sonny. She waves away Suzanne, the court reporter, and meets the lawyers, remaining on the lowest step beside the bench. 'What's the deal?' she whispers. ‘I take it the defendant has made an arrangement with the People?'

Aires looks to Molto. Molto says, 'That's correct, Judge. We've worked something out. If the court approves.' His Adam's apple does a turn beneath the second chin. He is badly pockmarked. 'We're still checking the details, Judge,' Molto whispers. 'There's a lot to investigate. But if the defendant's story holds, we've agreed to twenty years, Judge.'

'On the shooter?' She has raised her voice more than she would like. With day-for-day good time, Hardcore will be out of the penitentiary in a decade. 'On this case? With a sheet? He's only doing ten inside?'

'He's not the trigger, Judge. And he's giving us someone else. He was just the broker, Mr Aires's client. There was someone else who got him to do it.'

"The Mayor?'

The two lawyers both laugh, a peculiar outbreak of sound in the courtroom where everyone else is silent in hopes of getting an idea of what is transpiring beside the bench. When she became a judge, Sonny found she had grown much funnier. In the interval, she ponders what Molto is saying. Hardcore has flipped, turned state' s evidence, which the gangbangers seldom do. It's an interesting development.

'Look,' she says, 'when you can talk about the case, you call me. This is going to require some discussion.' Sonny is visited by her recurring suspicion: they are setting her up. Somebody is -the cops, the prosecutors, the Chief Judge Brendan Tuohey. They are hoping she'll make a noteworthy mistake, so they can run her out of the building. She gathers her robes, ready again to ascend, then thinks to ask if Molto plans to indict Hardcore and his co-defendant together. Molto nods. It will be her case. She will preside at trial, if the threat of Hardcore's testimony does not persuade whoever engineered the murder to plead guilty. Molto speaks up to detain her.

'Judge,' he says. His voice has dropped to the very edge of audibility. Even his lips are self-consciously stiffened to defeat the most intrepid of the reporters. 'Judge. Just so you know. It's Nile Eddgar. It's no problem for the People. But so you know. Given what you said.'

An empty second passes among the three.

'Wait.' She's come down the last stair. 'Wait. I'm playing catch-up. Let's not be cryptic, Tommy. You're telling me Mr Aires's client, whatever, Hardcore, that he's going to testify that his probation officer, Nile Eddgar, conspired with him to plan this killing of Mr Eddgar's mother?'

Molto looks at length across his shoulder to the reporters before he answers. 'More or less,' he says. The two lawyers face her without expression, awaiting whatever will come next. Sonny labors an instant with the turmoil. 'We haven't picked him up yet,' Molto says. 'We'll probably get a warrant tomorrow.' It's a secret, he's telling her. She nods two or three times, numbed.

After the call, she finds Wells and Lubitsch loitering in the inner office. They've placed the draft on her desk, but Lubitsch winds his head back around toward the courtroom as soon as she appears.

'Average American family, right?' he asks her. 'Apple pie, hot dogs, and Chevrolet, right?' This gloating, the usual cop smugness – us and them – is rankling to Sonny. Only yesterday, Fred Lubitsch would have called Nile a player on his side. With a bare inspection, she signs the warrant and lets the officers go.

Marietta slinks in about an hour later, having wheeled the morning files across to the main building. She is curious, naturally, about the goings-on at sidebar and utters a startled, dyspeptic groan upon learning of Molto's news about Nile, but shows little other emotion. Marietta has been around.

'Should I take myself off the case now?' Sonny asks.

'Cause you knew these folks twenty-five years ago? Hell, who they gonna give the case to, Judge? Everybody else sitting in the Criminal Division knows Nile Eddgar better than you now. You're the junior here, Judge. The other judges? They've all had Nile before them a bunch of times, worked with him, believed his testimony under oath. We've only had him in here but once. And plenty of these judges know the father, too. He ran for controller a couple years back, didn't he? He was at all the dinners. Sides, Judge. A case like this? Nobody's gonna be happy to see it turn up on their calendar.'

Race. That's what she means. The great unmentionable. That's what the case will be about. Black against white. On the street. On the witness stand. In the jury room as well. With the press holding up its magnifying glass throughout. Her colleagues will be convinced that politics, not scruples, led her to dump it. There will be narrow looks in the corridors, colder shoulders. Tuohey, surely, will call.

'I'd like to hear it. Really. Who wouldn't be intrigued to see what's happened to people decades later? But it feels so – close.' She pauses, waging battle with her own fierce propriety. Is she afraid of something, she wonders suddenly.

'Hell, Judge,' says Marietta. 'This here's bound to be a jury trial anyway. Defense lawyer's gonna wag his finger and say how this gangster can't be believed, when he's puttin all the blame on someone else. We – all seen that a thousand times. Won't be anything for you to decide, except the sentence. Why don't you wait and see, Judge? See what the parties say? Spell it out for them. Like you done today. If it don't bother none of them, no reason it oughta bother you.'

She's still wavering, but the truth is that Nile won't want her on this case. She saw too much of his family, especially his father. Eddgar in those years was dangerous, cunning, a zealot who some claimed had even sponsored murders. Like father, like son. That's the thought Nile will be afraid of. With a wave, Sonny closes the discussion.

'We'll do it your way, Marietta. See what the defendant says. It was twenty-five years ago.'

'Sure,' says Marietta, and then seemingly takes a second to review in her own mind the twisted, long-attenuated connections Sonny has explained. She turns, then turns back with a vague smile, fixed on a predictable thought. 'So your boyfriend went off and got rich and famous and you was young and dumb and let him go?'

'I suppose.' Sonny laughs. Marietta has long intimated that Sonny has poor instincts for romance, hinting frequently that the judge has not properly renewed her social life.

'And you don't never hear from him or nothing?'

'Not in twenty-five years. We had a strange parting.' She smiles a bit, consoling Marietta, if not herself, then catches sight of the clock. 'Shit!' She is late for Nikki.

' Shit,' she says again and flies about the chamber stuffing papers she must study overnight into her briefcase. She runs down the hall, cursing herself, and feeling a lurking foreboding, as if this lapse with Nikki is symptomatic of a larger error. Dashing across the windowed gangway that connects the Annex to the main courthouse, she wonders again if she is doing something wrong, capitulating to whatever it is – the titillating yen for foregone things and the hope of being master over what once was daunting

– that comes with thoughts of the Eddgars and that period in her life. So often in this job there is never a correct decision. Far more frequently than she imagined when she was a law student, or even a practitioner, she chooses, as a judge, the alternative that seems, not right, but simply less wrong. And in some ways, this sense of being maladjusted, in the wrong place, has been a hallmark of her life. She often feels, like those people who believe in astrology, that her life has been driven by mysterious celestial forces. In earlier years, she came and went from things with alarming briskness, leaving men with little warning, passing through three different graduate programs and half a dozen jobs before she landed in law school.

Even now, she is not certain the bench is really right for her. It was an honor, and a convenient exit from the US Attorney's Office, where she had begun to repeat herself. At the most pragmatic level, becoming a judge met the desperate need of a single mother to control her working hours and, almost as important, kept her in the law. She had tired of the battle hymn of practice, the race going always to the aggressive and the shrewd. It had brought out the Sonny she least liked, the child always secretly wounded, and, as she explained to herself in the most secret way, had forced her to accept the world according to men. After Nikki – after Charlie – she wanted to have a working life that depended not on slick maneuvering and sly positions, but which was anchored instead by kindness, which had some feeling connection to what surged through her when she held her child, the emotions she knew, knew were truly the best, the lightest things in life. But is the serious-looking dark-haired woman of fading looks, the Sonny she envisions up on the bench, this person scolding and sentencing the vicious and the woe-torn, is that her?

She is alone now, racing along in the strange night world of the central courthouse, with its empty corridors and isolated, purposeful habitues: bail bondsmen, police officers. Her high heels resound along the marble. At this hour, arrests are processed here from across the city. A broad young Hispanic woman in a bold ill-fitting print camps with a far-off look on one of the granite benches positioned just outside the bank of metal detectors. She embraces a child of three or four, who faces her, asleep, black ringlets dampened to one side of her face. They are always here: mothers, babies, families exhausted by trouble, waiting in the wasted hope their men will be bailed, acquitted, somehow freed.

Racing by, Sonny smiles in fleeting communion. Stirred by this momentary connection, she finds urgent visions of Nikki beckoning to her again. She foresees the humbling scene which is waiting, Nikki a straggler at Jackie's, and Sonny apologizing, vowing nevermore, even as Jackie insists it's not a problem. It is the sight of Nikki herself that will be worst: already in her coat and backpack, wiping her nose on her coat sleeve, gripping Sonny's hand by the fingers and urging her to suspend apologies and to leave; that little life, ragged with the toil of her own day and the worry of a prolonged separation. Within Sonny, there is always the same recriminating thought: How many times did Zora do this to her? How many thousand? It is startling to find how near at hand the pain remains, still fully memorized, how clear the recollection of the occasions when her mother was gone. Gone to meetings. Gone to organize. Gone to touch someone else with all those grand important yearnings: for freedom. For dignity.

So this is who she is, Her Honor, Judge Sonia Klonsky. The sheer momentum of her passions has her dashing a few steps down the street toward her car. The night has entered that moment of magic dwindling light when the sky almost clamors with drama and perspective drains, so that the buildings, figures, trees, the small circling birds, the Center City looming beyond, seem to stand on top of one another in the reduced proportions of a diorama. Neon promises glow cheaply in the storefronts of the tatty bond emporia across the street: 'Bail. Fast. E-Z terms.' Gripped by the heartsore cycles of her life, any life, the vexing complications of this case, and the perpetual anguish that seeps like a pollutant into the air around the courthouse, she rushes on. She rushes with high feeling and a sudden silvery fragment of happiness lacing her heart. She is thinking of her child.