Scott Turow - The Burden of Proof

"Bon appetit," and began to laugh again.

He started to eat in spite of her.

"That's right," she said. "Don't let it get cold."

"It happens to be good. And I am quite hungry."

"You must be." She broke down one more time. She tried, with a few false starts, to control herself. *'Are you.sure you will not try some?" He lifted his fork in a perfect deadpan, and set her off once more. This time he laughed himself for quite some time.

She told him he was a good sport.

"I am accustomed," Stern told her. "My daughter in New York lectures me about meat. She has ruined a number of meals."

"What's her name?"

Stern told her.

"Marta. That's beautiful. I'm thinking about names all the time now It seems so important. The first thing. And I don't want my child to feel that I've done what my mother did to me."

"You do not care for Sonia?"

"I hated it as a child. My mother was this very heavy lefty? A big-deal labor type, until her union threw out the Commies. I was named for a Russian revolutionary killed in the revolt of 1905 and I resented being somebody else's symbol. I wanted to be called Sonny. Which threw my mother into a rage. She thought I was being anti-feminist. Then I got to be forty years old and a lawyer, and all of a sudden I wanted a name that would sound professional. So I'm Sonia in the office. And my old friends still call me Sonny." She laughed at herself. "That's a little like what you do. You say Alejandro in court, but you introduce yourself as Sandy."

Stern smiled in an allusive way, reflecting his own inscrutability, but he was flattered to think he had been so closely observed. It was natural really, he told himself, for her to keep watch on a likely adversary.

"My mother was an obliging sort. She called us by different names, depending on the locale. I had a Yiddish name. A Spanish name. And, of course, she desperately wanted me to fit in here. Even at the age of thirteen, I could recognize that it was not an optimal period for Alejandros in the U.S. I suppose you may take my using Sandy as a sign of weakness on my part." This was very much as he thought of it-that he had yielded. His mother was a powerful person in her home. He seldom spoke of her but she was still with him every day, with her dark shrewd eyes, her teeming social ambitions, and her desperate pained hope that his father would somehow become the man she had envisioned instead of the poor wounded thing he was. Stern tended to remember her as she appeared on the nights she and his father went to the opera. The rich gown made a somewhat opulent display of her large proportions; her reddish hair was held in place by a diamond-studded comb, and her entire figure appeared gripped by her fierce determination to be seen, and remembered. He had always known that every fiber of strength in him derived from her.

"So how did you settle on Marta?" Klonsky asked. "Was it a better world for Alejandros by then?"

"She is named for my mother," said Stern. He laughed at that and shared a look with her, the complexities of these facts seemingly lost on neither of them. Then he lifted his fork. "Last bite," said Stern.

She covered her mouth amid a muffled retching sound and Stern played along.

"I'll have you know, young woman, this is the best breakfast I've had for days." For effect, he rang the tines of the fork against the dish, but the remark, intended in jest, somehow carried a forlorn suggestion of his personal plight. Ms. Klonsky gave him a sideways look, sweet and sad and lingering, and Stern suddenly was deeply embarrassed.

He had disciplined himself to avoid this approach to anyone: Pity me.

Feel for me. He looked down once more at his plate.

"You were going to tell me what you wished with Margy," he said. He heard her sigh. But when he looked up, she had folded her hands and gathered herself.

She corrected him: "You were going to ask some questions. ' ' "I thought you might tell me about the Wunderkind account."

"The number's on the subpoena."

"Why is it, Sonia, that this account is of such interest?"

She shook her head firmly. "No can do, Sandy."

"You expect me to bring this woman to the grand jury without any idea what she may be venturing into?"

"I've told you, she's not a subject. I'll be happy to put that in writing. If she tells us the truth, she has nothing to worry about. You know the drill, Sandy." 'But the secretiveness-"

".Doctor's orders," she said. "That's how we're doing it."

She was speaking again of Sennett. Stern, despite himself, made a sound. This had seemed from the inception to,be too significant a matter for an inexperienced Assistant. Now he could see quite clearly that Stan Sennett was behind the scenes, pulling the strings, pumping the levers, palpitating at the thought of a case that would get his name in The Wall Street Journal and bring a moment of disquiet to that den of thieves in the Exchange, as he saw them; with,their granite palace along the river.

Sennett was a wiry, humorless little man, with the narrow, bird-boned physique of a runner. He was married to a probate lawyer named Nora, an ascetic type with a fixed jaw. Stern always imagined the two of them in a home with no dust and little furniture, eating carefully and going out for weekend runs. Stan had started out as the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney in Kindle County under Ray Horgan, but he had gotten a yen for California and joined the Justice Department in San Diego. As the choice for U.S.

Attorney he had been roundly welcomed-Stan was intelligent, experienced, and more or less independent of the mayor and his dark cabal.

It was, however, one of the sad facts of political reform everywhere that incorruptibility was not the sole attribute Of good government.

Sennett was the kind of grim bureaucrat, a person of strong discipline and limited vision and courage, who seemed to turn up too often in prosecutors' Offices. Everybody's chief deputy, he never quite seemed to believe he had assumed the mantle himself.

In Stern's judgment, he had a dangerous mixtue of attributes for a man in power: he was vain glorious and insecure, quick to make judgments that were not always correct, and entirely 'beyond persuasion once he had done so. When you sat with him, presenting a problem, pleading for mercy or simply trying to make a point, his small shining eyes would follow you while his expression remained forbidding. 'No,' he. would say the instant you had finished a ten-minute presentation. 'No can do." Few words of explanation, little warmth. No argument. He would stand and shake your hand and see you to the door.

Now he was using Klonsky as his cat's-paw. That was for appearances, but the fact was, this was his case. Stern wondered if Klonsky knew how quickly he would push her aside when the lights of the videocams filled the room. In the meantime, a dark, high-density fluid of regret poured through Stern, the stuff of gloom. Sennett would b.e dogged in the hunt; Dixon, whatever his evasive maneuvers, was in for a long, bloody fight. Lost in these reflections, Stern geached forward and picked up the check.

"Oh, no," she said. As they walked to the door, Klonsky insisted on paying her share. Stern eventually recognized that this was a point of propriety and took two dollars from her. Duke, with his fried-up hair, received their money and bade them, with heavy accent, to return.

Outside, he shook her hand and told her that Margy and he would see her the following Tuesday. She faced him with what was already becoming a familiar look of ambiguity and regret.

"Thank you for asking me. I enjoyed our conversation."

"As well." He made a brief, cutaway bow, Mr. Alejan-dro Stern, the foreign gentleman. She smiled at that and, with her heavy files slung across her body, went off toward the new federal building down the block. Pigeons with their shining gray heads arose fluttering in her path, and a rash of underground air, breathed up through a grate in the walk, raffled her skirt. As he watched her go, it came to him again, an intimation clear as the arrival of spring, that he was alone. The usual affairs of the day, the courthouse, his children-they did not seem to do. Like nausea or hunger, a deep-sprang bodily response, the sense of his own un-connectedness overcame him, just as it did certain mornings, and to his surprise he stood for some time watching the figure of Sonia Klonsky whittled by distance and the phenomenon of aging vision, until she was no longer distinct amid the dark forms on the street.