"Once you cut Rommy loose, the first thing Arthur does is file a big civil suit"all this stuff about d.i.c.kerman and Collins, that will come out in discovery."

"There won't be discovery, Larry. They wouldn't take the chance of letting Squirrel be deposed"he could say anything. That case will settle quick and dirty."

"Right after the primary."

In his imagination, she no longer retained any dimension. She calculated and did not feel. But she nodded in response. She was who she was. And it wasn't always pretty. She wondered if it was worth telling him how large her ache for him would be. There were going to be horrible nights. But she would stay busy. The worst times would probably be years from now.

Yesterday, she had prayed fervently in church. She had thanked G.o.d for her blessings. A meaningful life. Talmadge's grandchild. No one got everything. She did not have love, but that was probably because she wanted it less than some other people. Still, she felt dizzy again as she came to her feet. She wanted terribly at this instant to crawl against him. But loneliness was what she had chosen. Larry was hunched forward with his mouth against the heel of his palm, clearly colored by rage. When he thought about her, she knew, it was always going to be as the woman who had ruined his life.

"I have to go see John Leonidis," she said. "I told him I'd meet him at Paradise."

"Back to the scene of the crime," said Larry.

"Right."

"Don't ask me to cover you on this. With him. Or the Force. I won't, Muriel. I'm going to tell the truth about you to anyone who asks."

Her enemy. His truth. She looked at him one last time and then turned to flag down a taxi.

She cried quietly for half the trip to the restaurant. Then in the last few miles, she began to think about what she would say to John. She was going to tell him everything, all the details. He was not the kind to blab and if he did, so be it. Instead, she tried to imagine something to console him. John Leonidis had waited a decade for a death to make up for the crime against his father. Even if she could convince him that Erno alone had killed his father, which she herself accepted as a certainty"even then, John would be roiled and miserable at the thought that Erdai had left life on his own terms. At the end of the day, after a decade of trying murder cases and communing with the victims' families, Muriel was convinced that most of the survivors in some remote segment of their consciousness"the primeval part that was scared of the dark and loud noises"a.s.sumed that when the right person died, the one who deserved to be removed from the planet, when that occurred their lost loved one would come back to life. That was the pathetic logic of revenge, learned in the playpen, and of the sacrificial altar, where we attempted to trade life for life.

She'd seen three executions now, as a supervisor. At the first, the father of the victim, a mother of two who'd been shot down at a Stop-N-Go gas mart, came away embittered, angry that what had been held out as a balm had only made him feel worse. But the two later families claimed that they'd gotten something from it"an end point, a sense of an awful equilibrium being restored to the world, the peace of mind that at least no one else would suffer again from this dead b.a.s.t.a.r.d as they had. But hurting as she did at the moment, she could not really remember why inflicting more harm would make life on earth better for anyone.

Muriel pulled aside the heavy gla.s.s door at Paradise, with a clear recollection of how she had felt in the raw summer heat when she had entered with Larry a decade ago, the cool air suddenly embracing her bare legs, which were still tingling from her activities with Larry an hour before. That was gone. He was gone. She faced that again. Perhaps it was the thought of Larry, and his dedication to what she now took as a fiction, but her mind pa.s.sed briefly to Rommy Gandolph. In a dreamlike moment, she saw Squirrel as if in a cartoon, beneath a pale light in a dripping dungeon. Her inclination was to laugh, but somehow the light she envisioned, like a small porch lamp, was actually the first point of radiance of her increasing pain. It would take decades, the rest of her life, to contend with what they had done to him and the reasons why.

As always, John received her warmly. He hugged her, then took her back to the office which had once been his father's. Gus's photographs remained in the same spots on the walls.

"This isn't good news, is it?" he asked. He'd seen the papers over the weekend about Gillian. Aires's phrase, "the Junkie Judge," had proved a headline writer's fave.

"I don't know, John. I don't know what to call it."

As he listened to her, he bit again and again at his thumbnail, to the point that Muriel feared she would see blood. She could barely prevent herself from trying to stop him. Yet she had no place telling him how to face all of this. He was, as ever, loyal. The conclusiveness of the fingerprint and blood evidence was plain to him, and he was more willing than she expected to accept her judgment that Gandolph had no role in the killings. Whether she deserved it or not, John, like so many others, had faith in her as a lawyer. The only consolation he wanted was what she had antic.i.p.ated.

"Would you have gone for death on this guy? On Erdai? If he told and all, but he got the miracle cure and didn't die?"

"We'd have tried, John."

"You wouldn't have gotten it?"

"Probably not."

"Because he's white?"

Even now, her steady impulse was to say no. Jurors judged the gravity of these crimes by the value of the lives lost. In that calculus, like so many others, race and social status became indistinguishable. They would have cared mightily that Erno's victims were hard-working family people. But the counterweight was their a.s.sessment of the killer and their color in itself mattered little.

"In the end, juries only give death to people they think are dangerous and completely worthless. It would make a difference that Erno did one good thing," she said to John. "He wouldn't let an innocent man die in his place. Maybe two. He cared about his nephew." Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood. It might also have proved significant that Muriel understood his pa.s.sion.

"What sense is that?" asked John. "Honestly. Does any of this make sense? Everybody's just as dead. My father and Luisa and Judson. That guy Erno was a s.h.i.t from what you're telling me. A murderer. A liar. A liar under oath. A thief. He was sc.u.m. Twice as bad as anybody ever thought Gandolph was. And he'd have lived?"

There was no arguing with that. Erno was as bent as they came.

"That's how it is in death cases, John. It's so extreme"the crime, the stakes, everybody's feelings. You try to make rules and somehow none of them stick, or even make sense."

She had brought a transcript of Collins's interview. John turned a few pages, then handed it back.

"It's done," he said and with those words sighed enormously. "At least we'll have that. It's done."

At the door, she apologized to him again for her own role in making this so prolonged, so torturous, but he would hear none of it.

"Never for a second," he said with the same fierceness with which he'd decried the senselessness of the law, "is anybody going to tell me that you weren't doing your best. You and Larry. Tommy. All of you. Never."

He hugged her with the same energy he had when she came in, then went to find a bandage for his thumb.

Outside, she stopped to look back at the restaurant where ten years ago three persons had met a hideous death. Muriel would never see this simple, low building, its compound-brown bricks and large windows, without being scoured by some of the terror that Luisa and Paul and Gus had each experienced in their last moments. Standing here, she revisited once more the unbearable instant when each of them realized that this life that we all love beyond anything else was about to conclude at the whim of another human being, an ending where the sustaining forces of both reason and humanity proved worthless.

Inside, John had repeated something he often said"that to this day he still saw the blood on the floor. Yet John had not closed Paradise. The restaurant was Gus's monument, home to his spirit. A bright place on a dark night. A warm place on a cold day. Food for the hungry. Company for the lonely. Life abounding in a site where humans strived, like Gus, to be each other's friends.

She would return.

Chapter 42.

August 30, 2001 The Release THE CLOTHING IN which Rommy Gandolph had been tried and in which he'd been committed to the prison system had been mislaid long ago. Perhaps they didn't bother saving the apparel of the Yellow Men. Just outside the town of Rudyard, Arthur and Pamela drove into the lot of a Kmart and bought three pairs of wash pants and a few shirts for Rommy. Then they continued their happy journey south.

By the time they reached Rudyard, there was already a significant encampment of news vans in the parking lot. The Reverend Dr. Blythe was conducting a press conference. As always, he was accompanied by a cast of thousands. Arthur never understood where all the people around Blythe came from"some were staffers at his church, a few provided security, but the affiliations of the rest were an absolute mystery. The cohort of at least thirty included a half brother of Rommy's whom Arthur had never known to exist until last week, when the papers began to speculate about a civil suit. Blythe's entire legion was ebullient, relishing both the occasion and the fact that by dint of numbers and press attention they had taken over a portion of the prison grounds.

Apparently Blythe had carried a portable stage"a tall pallet and a podium"in the trunk of the stretch limousine in which he had traveled and which was parked at a distance, out of sight of the cameras. Blythe had been good enough to call to congratulate Arthur after Muriel filed her motion to dismiss Rommy's case, but he'd heard nothing from the Reverend or his staff since. Naturally, though, Arthur was not surprised to see Blythe here. With his glimmering bald head and large white mustache, Blythe looked entirely avuncular until he started speaking. Approaching, Arthur heard him bemoaning the injustice of a system in which drug-addict judges sentenced innocent black men to die. He had a point, Arthur figured, but it was funny how it looked from up close.

As some of the reporters surged toward Arthur, the Reverend invited him up to the podium. Blythe shook Arthur's hand robustly and patted his back and told him again he had done well. It was from Blythe, in their final conversation, that Arthur had heard that the state had taken a statement from Erno's nephew, and that Muriel was simply covering herself by blaming Gillian. Jackson Aires, who insisted on keeping the secret for his client's sake, had stowed Collins back in Atlanta and refused to confirm what Arthur suspected Jackson had privately shared with Blythe. Aires confined himself to a single detail. 'Your man didn't do it. Wasn't there. Rest of it doesn't matter anyway. h.e.l.luva job, Raven. Never thought you had much prospect as a defense lawyer, but I seem to have been wrong. h.e.l.luva job.'

The truth about Collins might yet emerge in the civil case, especially if the state was obstinate about settling. On the drive back to the city today, Arthur hoped to talk to Rommy about filing the lawsuit. Yesterday, Arthur had informed Ray Horgan that he expected to handle Rommy's civil case and leave the firm.

In the guardhouse, Arthur and Pamela handed over a pair of pants and a shirt to the lieutenant on duty, who wouldn't accept the clothing.

"The ones out there, Reverend Blight, they brought a suit. Five hundred bucks if it's a dollar, too." The lieutenant, who was white, glanced circ.u.mspectly in each direction, thinking better only now that he'd heard himself.

In a moment, Blythe arrived. Accompanying him was an impressive-looking man, tall and handsome, splendidly dressed, an African American whom Arthur recognized from somewhere. Not from town, Arthur knew that much. Another hero was all Arthur could recall, perhaps an athlete.

The lieutenant lifted his phone, and in a few minutes the Warden, Henry Marker, appeared. Also black, he warmed noticeably to Blythe and invited the entire party to accompany him. Inside the first gate, they turned in a direction Arthur and Pamela had not gone before and entered the separate orange-brick administration building. There were the same locks and guards, but here the purpose was to keep inmates out, not in.

On the second floor. Marker showed them into his office, large but spare. Before the Warden's desk, in a suit and tie, Romeo Gandolph sat slumped and fidgeting. He jumped up when the group entered, predictably puzzled about what he was supposed to do next. His hair had been shaped by someone and when he spread his hands in welcome, Arthur noticed that Rommy at last was free of manacles. Despite himself, Arthur, who had cried a great deal in the last week, began weeping again, and found Pamela in the same state. In the meantime, Blythe fell upon Rommy with a huge embrace.

The Warden had several papers for Rommy to sign. Arthur and Pamela reviewed them while Blythe took Rommy to the other side of the room. Arthur heard them praying, then some high-spirited conversation. After Rommy scrawled his name on the doc.u.ments, they were all ready to go. Marker walked them to the front gate. The buzzer sounded, and the Warden, like a butler, stood aside to open the door. As he did so, Blythe wiggled past Arthur and Pamela and was beside Rommy as the daylight fell upon him.

The camera people as always were lawless, shouting and jostling. Blythe held Rommy's elbow and steered him to the podium in the parking lot. He invited Arthur and Pamela up, giving them places in the second row behind Rommy and himself. Pamela had prepared a brief statement for Rommy, which he held in his hand, but Blythe took it from him and handed over a different sheet. Rommy started to read, then looked around helplessly. The half brother, now at his side, p.r.o.nounced a few of the words. It occurred to Arthur for the first time to wonder how many rehearsals had been required before Rommy read the videotaped confession prepared for him a decade ago. For a moment, as he stood there, not knowing what to expect, the utter monstrousness of what had happened to Rommy Gandolph stormed over Arthur"that and the supreme satisfaction of knowing that Pamela and he had commanded the power of the law for Rommy's benefit, that the law had made right what it first had made wrong. No matter how fuddled he became at the end of his days, Arthur, at this instant, believed he would remember he'd done this.

Gandolph by now had given up on the statement. The stampede of reporters and technicians through the gravel parking lot had raised a haze of bitter dust and Rommy was blinking furiously and rubbing his eyes.

"I can't say much 'cept thanks to everybody here," said Rommy.

Reporters kept shouting the same questions"what did it feel like to be out, what were his plans. Rommy said he'd like a good steak. Blythe announced plans for a celebration at his church. The conference broke up.

As Gandolph jumped down from the riser, Arthur pushed forward to reach him. On the phone, they had agreed that Rommy would drive back up to Kindle County with them. Arthur had been scouting out job prospects for Rommy. And there was also the lawsuit to discuss. But Rommy held back when Arthur pointed him toward the rear lot.

"I was kinda goin with them-all," said Rommy. If he was aware that he was disappointing Arthur, he gave no sign. But his face was wrinkled by curiosity. "What ride you got?"

Arthur smiled a bit and gave the brand and the model. Rommy seemed to search the parking lot, but his eyes lit on the stretch.

"Naw. I'm sone ride with them." he said. His expression remained mobile and uncertain. Blythe's security people were holding several reporters at bay. "I want to thank you-all for what you done, I truly do." He offered his hand then. It was, Arthur realized, the first time he had ever touched Rommy Gandolph. His hand was oddly calloused and narrow enough to be a child's. Gandolph pawed around in front of Pamela, who leaned over to hug him.

"Tole you you should've hitched up with me," he said. "I'm gone get me a wife pretty as you, only black. I'm gone be rich now, too. Get me some stock." At that point the handsome man who had accompanied Blythe inside came to reclaim Rommy. In his company, Rommy Gandolph turned away and never looked back at either of his lawyers.

They were in Arthur's sedan on the way out of Rudyard when Pamela told Arthur who the man was"Miller Douglas, a noted civil rights lawyer from New York. No doubt now who was going to handle Rommy's civil case. Rommy would sign the retainer agreement in the limo"if he hadn't done it in the Warden's Office already. Arthur pulled his car to the graveled shoulder of the road to come to terms with the news.

"This is terrible," he said. Pamela, still young enough to be remote from the business side of law, shrugged, unsurprised.

"Don't you think he's got the right lawyer?" she asked. "Our firm doesn't even do civil rights cases."

Arthur, who had never much bothered with that consideration, continued to suffer the ironies. Rommy was free. Arthur was not. Horgan would probably laugh when he took Arthur back, but there would be costs for years to come. At least Ray had asked him to reconsider. 'Generally speaking, Arthur,' he'd said, 'you may find that there's a bit of a drought before your next innocent client. A decade or two.' Arthur took a second to ponder how he might package this for Ray, then gave up. As a disappointment, Rommy's choice of a new lawyer still took second place. Despite the maelstrom surrounding Rommy's release, the ceaseless phone calls from reporters, the exultation in the law firm, where Arthur now found he had many supporters, there was one misery, one low point where his spirit inevitably rolled to rest, as it did again now.

Gillian. My Gillian, my Gillian, he thought, and yet again began to cry. Muriel had done a masterful job of vilifying her. Two days into it, the Tribune had actually gotten hold of Gillian's FBI mug shot, taken when she was arrested in 1993, running it on the front page along with a report of several thousand words on Gillian's drug taking, gleaned from sources as diverse as drug agents, defense lawyers, and addicts on the street. The story of the Junkie Judge had even reached many of the national news outlets, especially the ones that usually traded in celebrity gossip. Only a few stories mentioned that Gillian was sober either when she had been sentenced or now.

As Rommy's lawyer, it would have been improper for Arthur to call Gillian to console her. And he was far too hurt to do that anyway. As he could best recall, she had not even apologized. Perhaps, he told himself, if she had made some effort to express her regret for so deceiving him, perhaps then there might have been some path through the incredible thicket of conflicting obligations to his client. For days, he reviewed his voice messages every half hour and even left the office at lunch on Monday to check his mail at home. Perhaps his rebukes had been too stern, especially the parting shot he'd immediately regretted about her 'case history.' Possibly, she was held back by the imperatives of the legal situation. Most likely, she had simply given up, now that her prophecies of doom had come true. Three nights ago, amid stormy dreams, he awoke with a cold fear that she had returned to drink. Then, in a minute, he remembered that drink was not the problem. By now his fantasies had turned gruesome, dim images of Gillian on rain-soaked streets disappearing in dark entry ways doing G.o.d knows what.

When they reached the city, Arthur parked near the IBM Building, but he hesitated as Pamela and he were about to enter. It suddenly struck him that he was no longer Rommy Gandolph's lawyer. Despite his disappointment about the civil case and the disappearance of the fortune which, being his father's son, he'd never truly believed would come to him, he experienced in this instant a sensation of clean release. He'd shouldered an enormous burden, staggered under it at times, but carried it to the end, and for many reasons was ent.i.tled to be relieved.

In front of the revolving doors of the office building, Arthur kissed Pamela's cheek and told her she was a great lawyer. Then, in a state of dread and antic.i.p.ation, he marched the four long blocks to Morton's. Gillian was not at the counter. Argentina, her colleague, leaned across the gla.s.s case, careful not to touch it and leave prints. She told Arthur quietly that Gillian had not been in all week, neither here nor the Nearing store.

"The reporters are goons," she whispered. "I think Gil quit."

"Quit?"

"That's what somebody said. They don't expect her back. Supposedly, she's leaving town."

As he walked back down Grand, with its magnificent shops and tall buildings, Arthur considered his options. He had absolutely no experience as a strategist in matters of the heart, and even now, he was too hurt to be certain what he wanted. But he was, after all, himself. Arthur Raven was a master of neither subtlety nor style. He knew only how to go forward at a steady pace.

At least one person in Duffy Muldawer's house was delighted to see him. Spying Arthur through the window of the side door, Duffy lit up, even while he was fiddling with the chain.

"Arthur!" the old man cried out and threw one arm around him, as Arthur moved into the tiny entry. He didn't let go of Arthur's hand and clearly would have relished the chance to hear the details of the last week, engaging in the fraternal joy of defenders who had rare occasion to celebrate. But Arthur's eyes had already fallen on Gillian, who in response to Duffy's noise had appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Apparently, she'd been cleaning and was dressed in casual attire Arthur would have bet she did not even own, her thin pale legs emerging from a beaten pair of shorts. A T-shirt was rolled up at the sleeves. She was wearing rubber gloves and"a first in Arthur's experience with her"hadn't bothered with makeup. Behind her, he saw a suitcase.

"It's over," he said. "He's out."

Gillian said congratulations and stared up in the weak light of the short stairwell, then set a foot on the bottom step. Somewhere along, Duffy had had the good sense to disappear.

"May I hug you?" she asked.

When perhaps a full minute pa.s.sed, they let go of one another and sat on the stairs. She held fast to his hand. Gillian, who never cried, had cried, and Arthur, ever tearful, had merely savored the intense pleasure of having her close to him again. Sitting, he discovered he had an astonishing erection. Gillian, too, felt desire, but at the core of his embrace she had experienced a sense of consolation pure enough to be brotherly. Neither of them had any idea what would happen now.

"Are you okay?" he asked at last.

She threw up her hands futilely. "Not stoned, if that's what you're worried about. Duffy's seen to that."

"You're leaving?"

"I have to, Arthur. Patti Chong, a woman I knew in law school, has agreed to hire me as a paralegal in her firm in Milwaukee. Do research. Perhaps, in time, if all goes well, as you suggested, I could reapply to the bar. But I have to get out of here." She shook her head. "Even I finally feel that I've taken enough, Arthur. I had to send Duffy to the store for me yesterday to pick up a prescription. That picture!" She wrenched her eyes closed at the thought. Taken when Gillian was at her lowest point, sleepless most nights and ravaged by despair, the photo in the paper made her a bleary hag. Her hair looked wild. And of course her eyes were dead.

"I'd have appreciated a call," he said. "It would have been terrible if I came around here eventually and just found out you were gone."

"I couldn't, Arthur. I couldn't ask you for sympathy when every lash I took benefited Rommy. Besides," she said, "I was much too ashamed. Too afraid of your reaction. And too confused. I can't stay here, Arthur, and I knew you'd never go."

"I can't leave," he said. "My sister."

"Of course," she answered.

He was glad he had said it, because in him something opened like a gate. What he had told her was not true. He could leave. The people at the Franz Center would help Susan cope. His mother might finally find a way to be useful. And if all else failed, he would move Susan up there. The firm even had an office in Milwaukee. That could work. It could all work. Even the two of them. The best and most impregnable part of him, which always hoped, was again in charge.

"I don't know why I do things, Arthur," she said to him. "I've been trying to understand myself for years"I think I'm getting better, but I have a long way to go. But I really believe I was trying to protect myself. It's been as bad as I thought it would be, too. You have to admit that."

"It would have been easier with someone standing by you, Gillian."

"It couldn't have been you, Arthur. That was part of the problem."

To him that sounded like an excuse and she could read that in his expression. But she was clear on this much.

"I know what it feels like to want to hurt someone, Arthur. I know that very well. I swear my purpose wasn't to cause you pain."

"I believe that."

"Do you?"

"I'm sure you were far more interested in hurting yourself."

"Now you sound like Duffy."

"I'm serious. You keep undermining yourself. It's really remarkable."

"Please, Arthur. I can't handle any more a.n.a.lysis of my character. It's not the kind of thing I want to take on alone. This has been very, very hard, Arthur, this period. There have been some white-knuckle evenings around here. I had forgotten what it felt like to yearn for intoxication."

Arthur considered that. Then he continued.

"I want to be with you, Gillian. Leave with you. Live with you. Love you. I want that. But you have to see how hard you've worked at destroying yourself. So you don't do that to us again. If you can promise that you see that and will wrestle with it for both our sakes""

"Please, Arthur. I'm neither dumb nor blind. I know exactly what kind of bleak Quixotic quest I'm on, rising so I can fall. But it's hopeless, Arthur."