Reversible Errors (38 page)

"Move to strike as nonresponsive," said Muriel. "Answer the question. Do you know anything that will help identify the man who said he would kill Luisa Remardi?"

"Its my question," said Arthur. "I'll withdraw it." He had no idea what he was doing, except instinctively pulling as hard as he could against Muriel.

"I'll re-pose it," said Muriel.

"It's not your turn," said Arthur. "And we just agreed to adjourn."

"Let's finish," said Muriel. Through the brief byplay, she had never removed her eyes from Genevieve, who seemed powerless to do anything other than stare back, notwithstanding a leakage of tears.

"You didn't ask if I knew him," she said to Muriel. "You asked if he gave his name. And he didn't. But I'd seen him before. Around the airport. And I know his name now." She turned then to Arthur, and in the utter gravity of Mrs. Carriere's large brown eyes, he suddenly comprehended the meaning of her warning glances and the depth of his foolishness.

"It was your client," she said to him. "Mr. Gandolph. He's the man who said he was going to kill Luisa." .
Decision

Chapter
25

june 29, 2001

He Did It

Arthur did his best to escape from the Sterns' overdone offices alone, but Muriel and Larry arrived while he was still awaiting the elevator, and in neutered silence the three stood in front of the crafted brass doors. Muriel eventually said something about filing a motion to dismiss in the Court of Appeals, but Arthur did not have the stuff to respond, or even to listen. He let them go down ahead of him when the first car arrived.

A few minutes later, he reached the entry to the lowers, where a fan of steel and glass swelling overhead offered protection from a sudden summer downpour. Arthur peered out, then walked into the rain, traveling more than a block before he noticed he was getting wet. He ducked into the doorway of another Center City building and then, after a moment in which he once more fell into agitated reflection, started through the storm again. He had to get back to the office. He had to tell Pamela. It occurred to him, in time, that he was hungry and weary and needed to pee. Yet as he was pelted, all he could hold in mind was Mrs. Carriere's final answer. Your client. Mr. Gandolph. He chewed her words down to a vile, indigestible remnant, until he felt obliged to accept the obvious and find dry ground. Then in a few minutes, he was hurtling forward again, walking out of desperation, as if, in another location, her testimony might mean something else.

By now, Rommy existed in his mind solely as a woebegone innocent-and more important, he himself as the valiant champion of a just and miraculous cause. If Rommy was guilty, then Arthurs world was different and gloomier, a place he had grown convinced he was no longer required to inhabit. Life again would be only hard work and duty.

Eventually, he found himself in front of Morton's. Desperate by now, he stepped in, intending to look for the mens room, but once through the doors he thought of Gillian, inspired by a peripheral impression of her fox-colored hair. Approaching the cosmetics counter, he saw no sign of her. He was sure it had been an illusion when she suddenly reared up before him, after replacing stock in the drawers below.

"Arthur." Gillian stepped back with a long hand lying over her collar.

"He did it," said Arthur. "I thought you should know. Muriel will leak it to everybody. You'll hear soon. But he did it." "Who did?"

"My client. Rommy. He's guilty."

Gillian emerged through a small hatchway in the counter. She took Arthur by the elbow, as she might a wandering child.

"What do you mean, 'He's guilty'?"

Arthur described the deposition. "I can't figure any of it out right now," he said. "I feel like my brain's been in the microwave or something. Where's the washroom?"

She called to a colleague that she was taking her break, then steered him along, offering to hold on to his briefcase. Down the escalator was a coffee bar where she would wait for him.

A few minutes later, hoping to calm himself, Arthur took stock in front of the mirror over the bathroom sinks. His hair had more or less washed off his head and, under the intense fluorescents, looked lik
e a
n ink spill. His gray suit was soaked black across the shoulders. No wonder Gillian had jumped at the sight of him. He looked like a homeless person rolled out of a gutter.

Outside, he briefly phoned Pamela, assuring her that the news was every bit as bad as it sounded, then rode the escalator down to the small coffee bar Mortons had recently opened in the basement as yet another lure to keep customers in the store. The effort was working well today. Although lunch was long over, most of the small white tables were occupied by ladies waiting out the rainstorm, with their shopping bags beside their knees.

A few feet ahead, Gillian sat with her back to him, finishing a cigarette. If nothing else, the sight of her removed him somewhat from the shock of Mrs. Carriere. In spite of his growing chill, and his current confusion, Gillian, as a figure, continued to inspire in him both excitement and hunger. But he could not pretend she had not achieved some of what she intended with her revelations the last time he saw her. It was the vision of a demonized teenager, applying cigarettes to her flesh, which had haunted him. He could see her, very pale and thin, pushing the ember against the sensitive region inside her arm, and all along maintaining a solemn face despite the pain and the hideous pungency of her own smoking flesh.

Returning now, that image stopped Arthur in his tracks. He knew himself as a person of endless unsatisfied dreams. But overlaying the creature in perpetual adolescence was the man he had become in his thirties, neither a child nor a fool, someone who had begun to learn from his mistakes instead of repeating them to the point of infinity, someone who now could not only curb his yearnings but even leave them behind. In the last week and a half when he took a reprieve from work in the office to stare at the river, he had thought often of Gillian. Yes his heart swelled, yes he analyzed his conversations with her until they no longer remained intact in his memory, having grown jumbled with the sly interjections he imagined from himself thanks to the high-rewing motor of his fantasies. But then his pulse slowed with a sense of the true risks facing him. He knew longing well, but he was less schooled in heartbreak.

His divorce had been devastating. But he had married Marjya largely because she would have him. She was very pretty. And certainly bright. And Arthur was unrelievedly horny. But he did not live one of the forty or so days they spent together feeling he understood the first thing about her. He could not get her to close the door to the john, or to take pleasure in most American food. Who could have told him how hard it was to explain yourself to someone who'd grown up without a television set, who had only a vague idea of who Richard Nixon was, let alone Farrah Fawcett or Rubik's Cube? Every instant was a surprise-especially the final one when she said she was leaving him for a countryman, a tile fitter no less.

How could she just abandon him, he asked, their life?

'Ziss?' she replied. 'Ziss is nossink.'

That had been bad. But Gillian, as someone he aspired to in such an exalted way, no matter how foolishly, posed a danger far beyond what Marjya had wrought. In this world, he had next to nothing. But there was his Self-his fragile soul. A person as smashed and compromised as Gillian, a person who had been so conquered by her devils she could succumb to drunkenness and criminality and incestuous love and God knows what else-someone like that was as unpredictable as Susan. He had told Gillian he was not frightened of her. That had been dashing-and foolhardy. Afterwards, he had realized it was not wholly true. In the late afternoons, when he turned from his desk and let his mind escape on the scales of orange light on the river, the thought of Gillian also brought a cool realization of the way love could become a catastrophe.

Standing still in the store basement, he thought it all through one more time. Then he continued ahead. He could only be himself, which meant pursuing the chance, no matter how slight, to be with someone he dreamed of, to vault the unconquerable distance between what lived only in his mind and what actually was. Like food and health and shelter, everyone, he believed, was entitled to that.

while arthur was gone, Gillian sat at the little white table and went through several cigarettes. Recently, she had been holding to less than a pack a day, but by now it had become a virtual certainty tha
t h
er encounters with Arthur would shake her. The disruptions often seemed worthwhile in their way, but she still needed to be fortified by nicotine. She'd quit smoking in law school, and started again only at Hazelden, where she was hospitalized while she kicked. At the NarcAnon meetings there, everyone seemed to have a cigarette between their fingers. She knew she'd traded one addiction for another, the new one nearly as lethal, and less fun, but such were the terms of a life to be lived one day at a time.

Turning around, she caught sight of Arthur wandering back, very much lost in himself. She had something important to say to him and did not even wait for him to sit down.

"You shouldn't give up, Arthur."

His mouth drooped open as he sank to a seat.

"I have no right to give you advice," she said. "But let me. You've done too much good work. If there's one undiscovered witness, then there may be others."

Initially, as she'd awaited Arthur, she had felt troubled for his sake. After visiting Arthur in his home, after meeting Susan, after listening to his adoring accounts of his father, she wished for the light of something wonderful to shine on Arthur, because, quite simply, he deserved it. Losing Gandolph's case would be an undeserved blow.

But what brought her face-to-face with the Gillian who was so frequently a shock to herself was her own fierce disappointment at Arthur's news. Everyone who had made a life in the criminal courts knew that defendants generally deserved their punishment. But as she'd sat smoking without interruption, the ash deepening in the little foil tray on the table, she had gradually-and calmly-recognized that she had wanted Rommy Gandolph to go free. She had wanted her judgment of him to be, like so many other judgments of that period, recognized as an error. And reversed. For today she finally understood: she equated a new life for Rommy Gandolph with her own renaissance. And she had depended on Arthur, that paragon of sincerity, as her knight errant. Because that was Arthur. Dependable. And virtuous. Perhaps what was most startling was that she was unprepared to let go. She felt no duty to explain her motives, but she remained determined to revive him.

"The problem," he said, "is I believed Genevieve. She really didn't want to say it."

"And you believed Erno, too. Do you think now that he was lying?" He did not appear to have considered that. "You need time, Arthur. To talk to your client. And Erno." "Right."

"Don't give up." She reached forward and clasped both of his hands. She smiled this time and, a bit childishly, he seemed to reflect her encouragement. He nodded, then bundled his arms against his body. He was freezing to death, he said, and needed to get home to change. She had no trouble believing that; his hands had been like marble.

"Forgive me, Arthur, but looking at you, I wonder if you can keep your mind on the road. Am I being too much of a granny?"

"Probably not. I'll take a taxi."

"You'll be lucky to find one in the rain. Where's your car? I could drive. I've been practicing a bit with Duffy's station wagon. And I have my lunch and dinner hours coming."

Arthur appeared muddled. From a house phone, she called Ralph, her boss, who told her to take her time. He expected little trade in light of the storm.

"Come along, Arthur," she said. "Worrying about your fine automobile in my hands will keep your mind off your troubles."

Arthur's monthly space was half a block down, which they reached through a series of basement arcades connecting the buildings. The lot was under one of the newer skyscrapers, and exited onto Lower River, a parkway that ran beneath River Drive above. Newcomers to the city could never make sense of the road, and Gillian, who hadn't been down here in a decade, was not much better off. Lower River had been designed to move trucks off the Center City streets, allowing them access to the loading docks of the big buildings. It worked well for that purpose, but the roadway was tortuous and the environment surreal. Sulfur lights glowed down here twenty-four hours a day, and over the years, the homeless had made this their chief refuge. The wilted cartons and soiled, spring-shot mattresses where they slept were piled into the recesses between the concrete buttresses supporting
River Drive. Rain dribbled down between the seams in the street overhead, while grimy men in ragged clothes loitered between the roadside pillars, looking, at best, like creatures from Les Miserables, if not The Gates of Hell

In the car, Arthur remained focused on today's catastrophe.

"Do you feel vindicated?" he asked.

"Not at all, Arthur," she said with some vehemence. "In no way."

"Really? After the beating you've taken in the papers, I thought you'd be bitter."

"In that case it was courageous of you to come and tell me this yourself. Frankly, I'd rather thought I'd heard the last from you, Arthur."

Gillian drove with the hesitance of the elderly, jiggling the wheel and braking too often, watching the shining pavement in the same fixed way she would a minefield. Nonetheless, when they coasted to a light, she permitted herself a sideward glance. In Arthur's present state of mind, it seemed to take him a while to understand she was alluding to what she'd told him about her brother in their last conversation.