Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“He’s not a child either. He’s sixteen. Ashley was never like this.”

“Maybe because Ashley’s not a boy.”

“Jake’s not a boy anymore, Dunc; he’s a man.”

“No,” Duncan said.

“And it’s time for him to start acting like a man. Like a responsible adult.”

“If you had your way, every inch of that kid’s life would be planned, no spontaneity, everything scheduled.”

“That’s not fair, Dunc, and you know it. I just don’t want him looking around when he’s twenty-two, a college graduate on the job market, wishing he’d made better choices with his life.”

There was a long pause. She could see Duncan slowly turning red. “What?” she said.

“God damn it, Juliana, you know better!” he shouted. “You’ve read the fine print! We don’t even know if he’s going to see twenty-two!”

And Juliana was stunned. They stared at each other. There were tears in his eyes and in hers too.

“Don’t say that,” she said.

He shook his head, the words choking in his throat, for a long while before he began speaking again, in a low voice. He said, “I knew a kid in college who thought he’d beaten Hodgkin’s and died of a relapse before he graduated.”

“ No , Dunc. He’s in remission .”

“Yeah, the kid’s parents paid for a commemorative bench in the college” — his voice broke — “courtyard.”

She was shaking her head. Her throat hurt. She was thinking, No. No. No.

She remembered the lines that Duncan had wanted to feature in Jake’s birth announcement. It was a passage from a nineteenth-century Russian thinker, Alexander Herzen.

We think the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.

She’d objected. It was too somber, too pretentious, she said. Duncan gave in. But the words were meaningful to him, and from time to time they came back to her too. Its purpose is to play.

“We both know a recurrence is possible,” he said. “We’ve read the medical cautions, over and over. It could come back at any time.”

“It won’t.”

She was in denial, she knew it — she told herself Jake had been cured. To her it felt like a betrayal even to entertain the possibility that it might come back.

Duncan was blinking back tears, almost furiously. “These years — these years — these months — this now — these could end up being the entirety of his time on this planet,” Duncan said. “Right now. I want him to love his life, to make the most of it. To get everything out of life. You remember when Jake was in the crisis, and he was shaking and seizing and convulsing, and I held him in the hospital bed, and I told him things would be better after it was over? It’ll be behind us, I told him. And then — no more bad days, is what I said, right?”

She nodded. She remembered Duncan repeating that: No more bad days .

She could still smell the hospital room, that medicinal odor, hear the low buzz of the unwatched TV set mounted on the ceiling, its meaningless chatter flowing like hot water through a radiator. The fluorescent-hued gelatin dessert cups. Jake’s ashy lips and poisoned, jaundiced flesh.

“No more bad days,” Duncan said hoarsely.

And for an instant that memory flooded her brain again. She was looking at their sun-drenched backyard, watching ten-year-old Jake marching around the yard, imitating his father imitating Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, chanting, “O Captain! My Captain!”

Her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly her cell phone rang, jolting her. She looked at it, glanced at the number. Didn’t recognize it.

She picked it up, said hello.

“Your Honor, my name is Alex Venkovsky. I, uh, got your name from a mutual friend.”

“Okay,” she said warily. She had no idea who it was.

“He might have mentioned I work for the government?”

“Right,” she said. This had to be the guy from Treasury, from FinCEN Special Collections. “Nice to hear from you.”

“Tomorrow seems to be a day of opportunity,” he said.

“I think so.”

“How early in the morning can I meet you? There’s some toys I wanted to show you.”

They arranged to meet in the morning. He was taking the earliest flight out of Dulles, at zero dark hundred. She didn’t have to give him her address. He already knew it. “I’ll be at your house at five o’clock,” he said.

Another call was coming in. She took it. This number she recognized: Nazarov, the mafiya guy.

She said hello.

“Your Honor,” Nazarov said, “I think we are all set. If you are really so sure this is what you want.”

“I need to find the file Hersh left for me,” Juliana told Duncan later. “I didn’t have time to look for it in my lobby this morning. And it may have something important in it.”

“No,” Duncan said. “You’re exhausted — we both are — and we have a big day ahead of us. You need to be sharp.”

“You’re right.” Juliana realized there was no use arguing with Duncan, that neither was going to budge. But she needed that file.

She waited until he’d fallen asleep. Then she scrawled a note, telling him where she’d gone, in case he got up before she was back.

She parked in the underground parking garage across the street from the courthouse. Finding a space there was no problem at this time of night.

The courthouse was closed, but her ID allowed her to enter after hours. She greeted the security guard, Rodrigo, by name.

“Very late for you, Judge,” Rodrigo said.

“No rest for the wicked,” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

She took the elevator to the ninth floor. It was dark, and her footsteps echoed.

A security guard walked by. She tensed. Not someone she knew. She kept going down the hall to her lobby. She unlocked the door and switched on the light.

She remembered Hersh’s words, when he first came to her office: I could pick that lock inside of a minute and a half .

Might he have left his file for her here, in her office?

Maybe, maybe not. He’d said he might bring it by. But at the same time, he was less than impressed by the security in the courthouse. Her office was easy to get into, too easy.

She looked around, looked at her desk, the side table heaped with paper, all the usual places. But nothing that looked like it could be Hersh’s file.

As she scanned the room, she was hyperaware of the noises around her, of passing footsteps, someone coughing as he or she walked by. Her nerves were taut.

Then a thought occurred to her. You a big Trollope fan?

He’d been showing off when he picked her book safe right off the shelf. But neither one of them had said anything aloud about it being a hiding place. So perhaps...

She looked at the bookcase where Barchester Towers was shelved.

It was gone.

What the hell? She winced as she thought of her favorite pearl earrings and the pile of cash, almost five hundred dollars. Well, she had bigger things to worry about.

Then she found the book safe on the shelf below. Someone had moved it.

Maybe a signal?

She pulled the book off the shelf and opened it. Inside the compartment, in addition to the cash and the earrings, were a couple of folded pages and a small USB stick.

Hersh’s file.

Juliana unfolded the papers and realized quickly she was looking at a bank transaction. Multiple transactions. Wire transfers. Between the Russian Commercial Bank of Cyprus, a subsidiary of the VTB bank of Russia, and Mayfair Paragon.