“Ex. Ah. Relationships, right? Very sad. The ex-husband. Doleful, cast out, carrying faded memories like old files. Always something of a tragic figure. Although so, too, can husbands be. A husband, too, can be tragic.”
Paige, whether out of fealty to me or desire to stay on target, presses on. “Your honor, we need to know who, if anyone, might have known about this affair. Your honor?”
He keeps his eyes just on me. “Let’s not do this,” says the judge. His face changes for a moment, the eyes fraternal, downturned, and then back to their focus. And he says—just softly, just calmly, just to me—“Listen. This is not worth it. Do you understand?”
I want to take his offer.
It feels as if I am on a cliff’s edge, toddling toward the side, and this man is holding out a hand to keep me from tumbling, and I want to reach out to accept his hand but I can’t. I won’t.
Because Ms. Paige is doing as I have told her, she is hitching her natural powers to her hunches, making decisions on the fly, swimming in the powerful wake of her instincts.
And because the powerful have no more right than the powerless to hoard their share of the truth. Because the Basic Law guarantees us all the same access to what is real, and the same protection from what is not.
So I cross my arms over my chest, lean back in the wooden chair, and stare flatly back. “Answer the question, your honor.”
“Very well,” he says, and turns his gaze slowly from me to her. “Nobody else knew.”
“Nobody knew, or nobody knew that you know of?”
“Why, Ms. Speculator,” he says. “If there was someone who knew of it, and I didn’t know if they knew or not, then how would I know?”
He laughs without humor, and Paige blinks—no, more than blinks. Squeezes her eyes shut for half a second, and then opens them again, and they are altered—seeing more clearly, keenly, the way I saw them seeing at Crane’s apartment. She’s got something. She’s caught something.
I stare at her in astonishment for a second and then I look to the floor, hiding the sting of envy. It costs her nothing. Her body does not rack and her eyes do not water. It costs her nothing.
“Your honor,” she says sharply, eyes open now, trained dead on the judge. “Is there physical evidence of this affair?”
I watch the judge. His mouth becomes small. A button. “Yes.”
“Is there physical evidence of this affair in this room with us right now?”
He does not answer. Paige’s eyes open, and we both watch him rise slowly, turn his back on us, and retreat to his bar cart.
When he speaks it is again to me only. “Mr. Speculator?” he says quietly, the same between-us-men appeal that he must know by now will not work. I offer him no help. I wait for Paige.
“Your honor,” she says, boring in, unflinching, unrelenting. “Do you keep a Night Book?”
He does not answer. The room gets quiet and stays that way, one moment of silence and then another, Judge Sampson looking up at a point behind our heads, and it is so quiet that it’s as if the judge has got some version of the courtroom’s noise canceling device in his chambers. But no. It’s just silence, and it ends when Sampson rises and makes himself busy at his bar cart, uncorking a new bottle, selecting the right size crystal tumbler. He needs something stronger, I guess. He pours but does not yet drink.
“Yes,” he says at last. “I do.”
“Precision, sir.”
“I keep one.”
“For the Record, sir. You keep one what?”
“I keep a Night Book.”
Before he can say anything else, before he can dodge or duck any further, I say, “We are going to need to see that.”
Judge Sampson raises the glass, but still doesn’t drink from it, sets it right back down and then grins, a cold and crocodile grin.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says, and then again, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll read it to you.”
I look at Paige and she at me. “No, sir,” I say. “We will take it with us, and return it to you at the completion of our inquiries.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Speculator,” he says. “Allow me.” His eyes shine, his grin widens, and I don’t know what to make of his sudden shift in attitude. Anxiety flutters to life in my guts like a wind-ruffled banner.
I’ve never understood what it is that makes a certain kind of person keep a Night Book. Catch that. Correct it: I understand it, but I would never fucking do it.
On the surface, of course, the impulse is a good and golden one, doctrinaire and State-minded, a laudable individual service provided to our great collective effort. The Night Book writer commits himself to recording not only the flat facts and surface realities of life, the kinds of visible truths that are collected by captures and recorded all day long in Day Books, but to go further, to go all the way, to put on paper all the underlying truths of life, those that move beneath the skin. The Night Book writer records his thoughts, his dreams, his instincts and urges. He puts his private life on his secret pages.
After all, they’ll tell you, everything that happens belongs to the State, and a thought is just an event that happens in your head.
And unlike a Day Book, a Night Book only reaches the Record when its author is dead and it passes into the Permanent Record with all the rest of life’s artifacts. Or, let’s say, when a pair of Speculators barge into your office, chasing an anomalous death that happens to intersect with your existence, and they sense the presence of your Night Book and reach for it and pull it out like a loose tooth.
The judge’s Book is indeed right here in the office with him, hidden in a wall safe behind his official portrait, and before we can object, he has it open on his desk: a slim volume, handsomely appointed. He pulls out reading glasses and adjusts them on his nose and sets in.
“Sir,” I say, one last time. “We will take the book away with us.”
“Oh, I know,” he says, flipping the book open. “But first I’m going to read.” And his finger falls on a particular page, and he begins.
“‘It was the sort of party one is dying to leave until a moment arrives and one never wants to go home.’” Sampson pauses and looks up. “Oh, that’s rather nice. I had forgotten I wrote that. Very nice, indeed.”
That’s the other thing a Night Book does, of course: it gives a vain person like the judge ample opportunity to indulge that vanity, all under the guise of supreme service to the State.
Judge Sampson licks his lips and finds his place. “‘We had been introduced at the very threshold of the evening, one among the usual roundelay of how-do-you-dos. If I suspected in that moment that she would be added to my collection, I suspected it without suspecting that I suspected it. I suspected it in my heart alone, or in some other, lower precinct.’”
He pauses again, looks up over the rim of his glasses at Paige. “‘Collection’ is rather crass. I apologize.”
Paige is looking at me. She mouths “Tester?” And I do not answer. Knowledge is alive in me; moving; welling up. Sampson with his crocodile mouth carries on: “‘I had promised myself therefore not to leave before she did, and my patience was at last rewarded.’” He pauses, looks up, and sees that he has our attention. I cannot move. I am not moving. “‘We two indeed were among the last to leave, lingering in the doorway between parlor and kitchen, engaged in a very long conversation about nothing at all. Her husband, it seems, had lost patience and retreated, alone.’”