The Laws of Gravity (20 page)

Doing the Job to the Best of Your Ability

All of Sol’s efforts to bring the cousins to some agreement had fallen on deaf ears. In fact Ari Wiesenthal, the defendant, kept his hands literally over his ears or cupped over his eyes all during the first meetings. Flannery raised his bushy eyebrows at the judge as if to say, “This is what we’ve got,” but the judge persisted. Whatever the law might dictate, there was no logical reason to deny this woman some amount of the cord blood. It was highly unlikely to be contaminated in the process, unlikely even that she would need all that had been stored. But there was something impenetrable about Ari Wiesenthal, as if he had retreated into some private walled-off space, a private logic of his own.

“I’m protecting my family,” he kept saying. “Family first.” Wasn’t his cousin also family? the judge wondered. He saw no obvious enmity between the two. They sat mirroring each other, arms identically folded, their legs crossed and facing. But families are like icebergs—only a fraction shows above the surface. “I have rights under the law, too,” Ari insisted.

Katrina Turock glowered. That high-heeled foot bounced impatiently, like the smart kid in the class having to listen to someone else’s boring homework assignment read aloud.

“Why don’t you ask the
plaintiff
to reconsider her selfish position?” she said, jerking her head toward Nicole. “This case is going to judgment. Despite our best efforts. Over our protests. If you were hoping for some happy family reconciliation scene here, you’re going to be disappointed.”

The judge was disappointed but not really surprised. For every rare instance where a family situation resolved peaceably outside the law, there were three where each side stubbornly held its ground. He was used to this, if saddened by what it said about humanity—and about family. Sol was by now resigned to human nature as he found it. Only in someone as young as Iris could you hope for purity.

What did surprise him was DeNunzio’s reaction to his calling off the press. DeNunzio phoned his chambers that same afternoon. Disappointment appeared to be the word of the day.

“Disturbed and disappointed,” DeNunzio said in his quiet, sibilant voice. He sounded, looked, and behaved a good deal like the most powerful man then on the US Supreme Court. Sol had a flash of intuition that one day DeNunzio himself might become part of that august body. DeNunzio was only in his fifties, he was well connected, and he was a politico. Somehow the idea made Sol shudder.

“To lose an opportunity to bring attention to the work we do here…” DeNunzio said. “It is unusual to shut out the media so absolutely—on what basis?” he added.

“There’s a child involved,” Sol said shortly.

“There are ways to protect the interests of children without it seeming as if the Supreme Court of Nassau County has something to hide. The OCA is surprised. Pescatori is surprised. I must say, it puts me in an awkward position.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Sol said.

DeNunzio sighed, a sound that traveled clearly through the receiver. “You may be making more trouble for yourself than it’s worth,” he said. It was almost but not exactly a threat.

Sol said nothing.

“Well, good luck with it,” DeNunzio said in his soft voice, and then hung up.

Flannery was less subtle. “Why? Why? You deserve this attention and approbation,” Flannery said. “We all do. We labor in silence. Anonymously. All the briefs, the
ratio decidendi
, judicial opinions carefully worked out and written—no one reads them. Not a word. Stones down a well. Unless the media brings the world’s attention to bear upon the case. Of course a trial with a jury would create more attention, but even so—”

“I am not,” the judge said icily, “looking for attention.”

“That’s right,” Myra said. “You know what it would be like around here, the press swarming up our asses day in and day out? Pardon my French,” she added.

“It would be invigorating!” Flannery said. “Lively.” He appealed to Myra. “Tell me, wouldn’t you like to see your face on TV?”

“Flannery,” Myra said, “I don’t even like to see my face in the mirror.”

Being barred from the courtroom did not keep the media’s attention entirely away from the case. The local papers kept up a running commentary on Judge Richter’s advanced age: he was, they said, scheduled to have retired that December and had barred the press from this important case to hide his disabilities as an adjudicator. They played up the human interest aspect, milking it for all it was worth. Nicole’s photos showed her as a young beauty, or as someone so thin and haggard it was amazing she hadn’t yet expired. They ran the same photo of Ari Wiesenthal each time, a picture in which he seemed to be snarling. There were plenty of glamour shots of Katrina Turock and one or two thumbnail photos of Sol himself, looking ancient and palsied. Sarah assured her husband, “You don’t look like that. Not even first thing in the morning.”

“The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on,” Sol said. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, he reminded himself. His one commitment had been to uphold the law, to be the most informed and unbiased judge possible. This case was his last, and his worst. He dreamed about it, brooded about it, felt helpless in the face of it. Logic, philosophical inclination, precedent, led him in one direction, and one direction alone. He knew that; his clerk Flannery knew it; he sometimes suspected that everyone involved knew. But still, he felt himself pulled elsewhere. The impulse to rescue. It was unfathomable at his age. A mystery. It did not help, this uncanny resemblance between the plaintiff and his own red-haired daughter. Even her last name, Greene, reminded him of his own long-lost grandfather, the one-armed tailor, Nathan Greenplotz.

“Is there anything that might allow us to consider the merits of her case?” he asked his attorney, Ned, in private. Ned was young, but bright and diligent. Flannery appeared at just that moment, of course, carrying a large pile of briefs that he dropped onto the table with a thunk.

Before Ned could answer, Flannery piped up. “You know there isn’t. That’s the beauty of the case! It’s airtight.”

“How about the duty to rescue? Ned—what about the letter?”

Again Flannery jumped in. “A letter is not a contract. What if someone signed a contract to chop off his own leg and then changed his mind? This is not a
contractual
issue. Justice can punish a man for behaving illegally. It cannot force a man to do the right thing.”

“Then what is the point of it?” Ned asked, unexpectedly. He seldom entered into theoretical disputes; he never got between the judge and his chief clerk in one of their arguments. “Justice should be more than a matter of punishment.”

“Justice
is
more than a matter of punishment!” Flannery cried. “The law prevents antisocial behaviors. It creates a structure of acceptable and unacceptable rules. And, in case you never got past fifth-grade civics class, the judiciary balances out the powers of the executive and legislative branches.”

“I got past the fifth grade,” Ned said mildly. He never bragged about the Stanford degree. Sol doubted if anyone else in his court even knew about it.

Flannery turned his attention back to the judge. “You’ll get your feet back under you. I haven’t worked for you all these years without learning how you operate. But you can’t become a humanist at the expense of being a great legal mind.”

“I have never been a great legal mind,” Sol said. “I’m someone who’s done his job to the best of his ability.”

“But Your Honor—” Flannery sputtered.

Sol held up his hand to stop him. “And the best of my ability was never anything to write home about. Go find yourself another hero, Flannery. It’s hard enough just being a human being. I wish I’d had more practice at it.”

That afternoon Sol drove the crowded expressway inch by inch, and then hazarded the fantastically crowded and gnarled twisting back streets of Brooklyn to visit his last remaining inmate at the Brooklyn Federal Detention Center. He himself, twenty years earlier, had sentenced her. She was in for capital crimes, or she’d have been away from Brooklyn Federal long ago. As it was, she was an anomaly in an aging federal prison that was most often used as a holding tank.

By the time he arrived at the prison it was already pitch-dark in the early winter night. The only hint of brightness came from the colored lights strung on houses and apartments, reindeer with flashing red noses, traffic lights going from green to yellow to red in an endless circle. He could barely remember when Long Island was a place one could actually drive from one end to the other—the potato farms of his early marriage were long gone; even back then, cars and trucks were beginning to swell each of the veins that ran the length and breadth of this fish-shaped island. Parkways filled, new ones sprang up like weeds. These, too, came to a standstill, and still more farmland, more greenery, was torn away. More cars spilled into it and stalled in traffic. Eventually Long Island would turn into one enormous, overtaxed parking lot.

Once inside Brooklyn Federal he relaxed. The ritual of unburdening began at once, the shedding of keys, penknives, loose change, the handing over of one’s identity, emptying of pockets. It reminded Sol of going to the synagogue mikvah, where he’d gone to take the ritual bath before his marriage to Sarah. One entered the mikvah as stripped of adornment, as naked
and unburdened, as a newborn. So too would he leave it, when the Burial Society came to wrap his body in white linen.

He gave over his belt, and removed his winter shoes for inspection before he was permitted entry. He sat without a wallet, without even a pencil. Sometimes he brought paperback books in a see-through bag, which were duly inspected and stamped. Today he had brought a candy bar and a self-help book for the woman—a volume Sarah had chosen. He could not bear to come empty-handed. It was a Jewish rule of visiting: Never go anywhere without some dessert wrapped up in a box with string. Neither the boxed treat nor the string was permitted here.

His inmate in Brooklyn was Naveen Abou. She’d been barely out of her teens when he judged her case. A devout Muslim, she had strapped bombs across her body and headed into Times Square the day she turned eighteen, ready to greet Allah in glory. She had stopped at a fabric store, paused to finger the silks as a last gesture of affection for the things of this world—“I was saying good-bye with my fingertips,” she told the judge later—when her coat opened and the manager called the cops. Even then, she was obedient. She sat down on a hard chair and waited for them to arrest her. She could have blown up the manager and the store, but “it was a little shop,” she explained, “with only one man and his daughter working in it. That would have been murder, not jihad.”

Her transformation inside Brooklyn Federal had been gradual and steady. First she gave up the name she had taken in her fiercer days, Mujahid, “freedom fighter.” She called herself Naveen, Pakistani for “new.” There
had always been something childlike about her; she stood barely over five feet tall, and spoke with a lisp. It seemed as if she tried to use the letter
s
more than any other. “So you thee, Tholomon,” was how she began many sentences. She used his name repeatedly, affectionately. And she loved “thweets,” so he brought candy each time he visited. Naveen remained a devout Muslim, but now she focused on other aspects of Islam—on generosity toward others, for instance, and charity, festivals where people brought food for the poor. She talked about obedience, diligence; her greatest treasure was the leather-bound copy of the Koran she kept on a high shelf in her room. Her second-most-treasured book was Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People
.