He switched on his coffeepot, spread The New York Times on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.
He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.
— G’morning, old boy.
Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers. Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Watergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off-color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong hole this time, but it whizzed past Pollack, who had a small piece of cream cheese on the front of his black robe and some white spittle coming from his mouth. Aerial assault. Soderberg sat back in his chair. He was about to mention the stray breakfast when he heard Pollack mention a balancing bar and a tightrope, and the penny dropped.
— Say again?
The man Pollack was talking about had actually walked between the towers. Not only that, but he had lain down on the wire. He had hopped. He had danced. He had virtually run across from one side to the other.
Soderberg spun in the chair, a decisive quarter-turn, and yanked open the blinds and tried looking across the expanse. He caught the edge of the north tower, but the rest of the view was obstructed.
— You missed him, said Pollack. He just finished.
— Official, was it?
— Excuse me?
— Sanctioned? Advertised?
—’Course not. The fellow broke in during the night. Strung his wire across and walked. We watched him from the top floor. The security guards told us.
— He broke into the World Trade Center?
— A looney, I’d say. Wouldn’t you? Take him off to Bellevue.
— How did he get the wire across?
— No idea.
— Arrested? Was he arrested?
— Sure, said Pollack with a chuckle.
— What precinct?
— First, old boy. Wonder who’ll get him?
— I’m on arraignment today.
— Lucky you, said Pollack. Criminal trespass.
— Reckless endangerment.
— Self-aggrandization, said Pollack with a wink.
— That’ll brighten the day.
— Get the flashbulbs going.
— Takes some gumption.
Soderberg wasn’t quite sure if the word gumption was another phrase for balls or for stupidity. Pollack gave him a wink and a senatorial wave, closed the door with a sharp snap.
— Balls, said Soderberg to the closed door.
But it would indeed brighten the day, he thought. The summer had been so hot and serious and full of death and betrayal and stabbings, and he needed a little entertainment.
There were only two arraignment courts and so Soderberg had a fifty percent chance of landing the case. It would have to come through on time. It was possible that they could shove the tightrope walker swiftly through the system — if they found it newsworthy enough, they could do anything they wanted. They could have him squared away in a matter of hours. Fingerprinted, interviewed, Albany-ed, and away. Brought in on a misdemeanor charge. Perhaps him and some accomplices. Which made him think: How the hell had the walker gotten the cable from one side to the other? Surely the tightrope was a piece of steel? How did he toss it across? Couldn’t be made of rope, surely? Rope would never hold a man that distance. How then did he get it from one side to the other? Helicopter? Crane? Through the windows somehow? Did he drop the tightrope down and then drag it up the other side? It gave Soderberg a shiver of pleasure. Every now and then there was a good case that would come along and add a jolt to the day. A little spice. Something that could be talked about in the backrooms of the city. But what if he didn’t get the case? What if it went across the hall? Perhaps he could even have a word with the D.A. and the court clerks, strictly on the sly, of course. There was a system of favors in place in the courts. Pass me the tightrope walker and I’ll owe you one.
He propped his feet on the desk and drank his coffee and pondered the pulse of the day with the prospect of an arraignment that wasn’t, for once, dealing with pure drudge.
Most days, he had to admit, were dire. In came the tide, out they went again. They left their detritus behind. He didn’t mind using the word scum anymore. There was a time when he wouldn’t have dared. But that’s what they mostly were and it pained him to admit it. Scum. A dirty tide coming in on the shores and leaving behind its syringes and plastic wrappers and bloody shirts and condoms and snotty-nosed children. He dealt with the worst of the worst. Most people thought that he lived in some sort of mahogany heaven, that it was a highfalutin job, a powerful career, but the true fact of the matter was that, beyond reputation, it didn’t amount to much at all. It landed the odd good table in a fancy restaurant, and it pleased Claire’s family no end. At parties people perked up. They straightened their shoulders around him. Talked differently. It wasn’t much of a perk, but it was better than nothing. Every now and then there was a chance for promotion, to go upstairs to the Supreme Court, but it hadn’t come his way yet. In the end so much of it was just mundanity. A bureaucratic babysitting.
At Yale, when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that. A condition of youth, your own importance. The mark you’d make upon the world. But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. You go home to your good wife and you calm her nerves. You sit down and compliment the cutlery. You thank your lucky stars for her inheritance. You smoke a fine cigar and you hope for an occasional roll in the silk sheets. You buy her a nice piece of jewelry at DeNatale’s and you kiss her in the elevator because she still looks beautiful, and well preserved, despite the years rolling by, she really does. You kiss her good-bye and you go downtown every day and you soon figure out that your grief isn’t half the grief that everyone else has. You mourn your dead son and you wake up in the middle of the night with your wife weeping beside you and you go to the kitchen, where you make yourself a cheese sandwich and you think, Well, at least it’s a cheese sandwich on Park Avenue, it could be worse, you could have ended up far worse: your reward, a sigh of relief.
The lawyers knew the truth. The court clerks too. And the other judges, of course. Centre Street was a shithouse. They actually called it that: the shithouse. If they met one another at official functions. How was the shithouse today, Earl? I left my briefcase in the shithouse. They had even made it into a verb: Are you shithousing it tomorrow, Thomas? He hated admitting it even to himself, but it was the truth. He thought of himself as being on a ladder, a well-dressed man on a ladder, a man of privilege and style and learning, in a dark robe, in the house of justice, using his bare hands to pull the rotting leaves and the twigs from the shithouse gutters.