“That’s interesting,” I murmur, still trying to get a read on her, on this conversation. Where is he? is all I want to ask. Where’s Brett?
“Interesting?” Julia says. “Sure, it’s interesting, but that’s not the point. I’m answering your question from downstairs. How can we pass sentence on someone who might be innocent?” She glares at me through the thickness of her glasses. “Wasn’t that your question?”
“Sort of.”
“No, it was, that’s what you asked. Don’t backtrack. He didn’t do it, by the way.”
She thrusts out her chin, waiting for astonishment, anger, argument. And in fact I am a little astonished; I can see him clearly, the shivering nervous defendant, barely out of his teens, hands bound, waiting for the punishment of the mob.
But I hold my peace, I just raise my eyebrows, go, “Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Really. I set him up.”
She’s pushing, she’s feeling me out, and I know exactly why. She thinks that she hates me and she wants to make sure. I come to her tainted by my association with Martha, with “the wife,” and Julia Stone would therefore prefer to tell me to fuck off back to copland or wherever I came from. I therefore need to play it slow, hang back, save my questions until I think there’s a chance she’ll answer them.
“All I meant is that the kid deserved to be treated fairly,” I say. “I didn’t say he was innocent.”
“Oh, he’s not innocent,” says Julia, “he’s just not a thief. He’s a rapist. Okay? Don’t ask how I know, because I know what goes on here. I know. And I want him out of my community. But if I had him brought up for rape, then Jonathan—the vice to the vice? Remember him?”
I nod. Piggy eyes, flushed face, the sneer of a spoiled child.
“Jonathan would demand a hanging. Not because he gives two shits about violence against women. Because he wants to hang someone. I know he does. And once the hangings start—” She shakes her head, seeing the future. “Forget it.”
I rub my forehead, finding the queer little divot in my temple, remembering when Cortez assaulted me in the elevator. Seems like a million years ago, a different lifetime. Julia is looking out over the campus again, brow furrowed, hands moving while she talks.
“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?”
Julia flicks her gaze at me.
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
“No,” she says. “There isn’t one.”
Her passion, her confidence—I can see clearly how these qualities must have sung out to Brett Cavatone, whom I have come to see as quiet, quick-minded and intense, a philosopher in the thick tough body of a policeman. How, I wonder fleetingly, did he and Martha Milano end up together in the first place? How long did it take before he knew he had married the wrong sort of woman?
“We have this opportunity,” Julia says. “We’ve struck this elusive balance between safety and personal liberty. This balance always gets fucked up, but now there’s no time for it to get fucked up. We just have to keep the Jacobin shit at bay, keep from tipping over into Lord of the Flies for seventy-four more days.” She’s talking faster and faster, the words rattling along like train cars. “This is literally a unique opportunity in the history of civilization, and the preservation of public order trumps the specific form of justice doled out to one individual. Right?”
“Right,” I say.
“Yes. Right. Is she paying you?” She turns to me, crosses her arms. “The wife?”
“No.”
“So why are you doing it?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and give her a quick little half smile. “Although people do keep asking me that.”
“I’ll bet.” And then she smiles back, just the tiniest secret hint of a smile. There’s a small gap between her front teeth, like a rascally ten-year-old.
“You thought before that I had been sent to kill him. Why would someone be trying to kill him?”
The smile disappears. “Why the fuck should I tell you?”
“Are you in love with him?”
“Love is a bourgeois construct,” Julia says immediately, but nevertheless she turns away from me, gazes out over the rooftops and treetops of the transformed campus. I wait, allow her a moment alone with whatever memories she’s replaying. And then I gently push forward, talking softly, telling her the story she already knows.
“Brett arrested you a couple years ago, in Rumney, but you gave him an earful from the bars of the holding cell. You made him see the justice of your cause, and he came to respect you. You talked him out of testifying. You developed feelings for each other.”
Julia gives me a quick sour look at the word feelings, and I nod in acknowledgment of the fact that feelings are a bourgeois construct, but I keep going.
“But he wouldn’t leave his wife. That wasn’t in his character. So at the end of the summer you went back to school, and he left the state troopers and moved to Concord, and that was that.”
She’s not saying anything, she’s not even looking at me now. Her eyes are fixed on her campus, her people: the exercisers, the movie watchers, the undulating swarms on the central quad. But neither is she interrupting, neither is she saying no. I keep talking, just a guy in a suit on a rooftop telling a story on a summer’s day.
“But then the asteroid comes along. The countdown begins, and it changes everything. You think, well, maybe now. Maybe now Brett and I get our shot. You wrote him letters, told him all about the Free Republic and what you had accomplished here. You told him he should come and play chess and hang out with you until the end.”
Now Julia raises a single finger, still staring straight ahead. “One letter. A couple months ago.”
“Okay,” I say. “One letter. And then yesterday, suddenly, he shows up.”
I can picture the scene, Brett Cavatone slipping into the back of that crowded noisy auditorium as I had, and suddenly Julia spots him from her chair on the stage. Her jaw drops, her commanding pose of leadership wavers momentarily like a blurry TV signal as Brett smiles up at her, self-contained and formidable and affectionate. “He tells you he’s here now, there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with you.”
“No,” says Julia abruptly.
“No?”
At last she turns away from the rail and looks at me straight on, lips pursed with emotion, and I don’t care if love is a bourgeois construct or not, I’ve seen love once or twice before and this is the face of a woman in love. She loves him and bitterly regrets what she says next.
“No, he did not come because there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with me. He came for guns.”
“He came for—” I blink. “What?”
Julia laughs then, once, a harsh bark, as I stare at her, open-mouthed with bafflement.
“Come on,” she says, and flings open the trapdoor to the stairwell. “Let’s take a walk.”
Jeremy Canliss was right. Brett had a woman on his mind. But it was neither lust nor love that brought him to the University of New Hampshire to find Julia Stone; it was the lure of the weapons she had proudly described to him in that one letter, a couple months back.