“Didn’t you have arguments this morning?” Patrice asks. “How were they?”
“Lackluster in most cases. But we just heard Warnovits. The high school rape case?”
“The one on the news? Were the attorneys good?”
“Not especially, but I was sitting with Nathan Koll, who planted a roadside bomb for the lawyers. Now I’ve got to go to conference and watch him wrap his arms around himself so he can pat his own back. I’m due now.”
“Then go ahead, George. I’ll call if I fail the Geiger counter.”
Clicking off, he peers from the window into the canyon of U.S. 843 that separates the Central Branch Courthouse from the Center City, and beyond that to the downtown towers, stolid monuments to capital. Summer is coming, a season of ripeness and promise, but the feeling in his own soul remains autumnal. George is off his stride and knows it. Revered as calm and poised, he is lately more likely to become unsettled, as he has been by Warnovits. He has occasionally turned snappish with his staff and has grown uncharacteristically absentminded. About ten days ago, he lost his cell phone-who knows where? He noticed it was gone on his way back from a Bar Association luncheon he’d attended with several of his colleagues. He had Dineesha ransack his chambers while his clerks called all over the Center City. For the moment, he is using Patrice’s spare.
Some might think that it is #1 getting on his nerves. That probably hasn’t helped, but this moodiness predates the first e-mail George received from his anonymous tormentor. Instead his unease correlates more clearly with the time of Patrice’s diagnosis. He is convinced in every fiber that his wife is not going to die. The doctors have done everything short of issue guarantees. Her chances approach nineteen in twenty, and even those odds take no account of the robust good health in which she otherwise remains-lean, athletic, tanned, still beautiful.
Yet as George’s friend Harrison Oakey has put it, serious illness at this age is like the lights flashing in the theater lobby. If life is a three-act play, then the curtain has gone up on the finale. After John Ban-ion had read #1’s message saying ‘You’ll die,’ the judge had tried to settle his clerk with humor while they awaited Marina. ‘This guy has no future in journalism,’ George told him, ‘because that’s not breaking news.’
Still, irony gets you only so far. The facts settle hard. And with them comes an inevitable calculation of pluses and minuses. George tends to be unsparing, even harsh, in his self-assessments. Husband. Father. Lawyer. Judge. These days, he seems to be keeping a cool eye on the scoreboard.
4
Nathan Koll is a formidable, if ponderous, intellect with the academic equivalent of a five-star general’s chestful of medals: first in every class with Latinate honors, Order of the Coif, law review, blah blah blah. Real fucking smart. George always wonders how Koll sees himself. Probably as lawyers are in the ideal, a tower of icy reason. But Nathan is in fact as eccentric as a street person. For one thing, he does not bathe. Inhaling the body odor is like dragging a tree saw through your nose. Sharing the tiny robing room with him, where the judges don their long black gowns before arguments, is a much-lamented ordeal. His fingernails are grimy, and his wavy black hair is pasted to his forehead.
George has long viewed Nathan’s unwillingness to surrender even to soap and water as a function of his noticeable paranoid streak, in which the man’s fierce commitment to winning every argument may be a way to prove to himself that he is safe from everyone. Not that Nathan would ever admit to a personal stake. He never says, ‘I want,’ ‘I believe,’ ‘I need,’ nor will he acknowledge that anybody else might have any pride or attachment to his position. Everything is presented merely as a matter of ruthless logic, often with the traces of a snigger betraying itself at the corners of his lips.
Off the bench, Koll keeps himself remote as a survivalist and refuses to give anyone, even his own staff, either his home address or phone. He can be reached only by BlackBerry. He has a wife, a beaten-down-looking Asian woman. George has met her twice but has yet to hear her speak.
Nathan sits by interim appointment of the state Supreme Court, filling the remaining term in a seat being cut for budgetary reasons after 2008. He accepted the job sure it would propel him to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago after John Kerry’s election. Given present realities, Nathan would like to retain this position indefinitely, but there’s little chance of that. No vacancies are anticipated for years on the court. More to the point, Koll would find a complete absence of support among the judges, whom he has irritated to a person, George included. Judge Mason no longer cares that Koll and he often end up on the same side of issues or that Koll is a uniquely able ally, artful in using cost-benefit analysis to the detriment of conservatives, who tend to respond as if he has broken into their toolshed. Nathan regards himself as the uninhibited protector of the oppressed, but this is so small a portion of the bizarre parade that is his everyday performance on the bench that it is a virtual lie by omission.
Now George braces himself as he enters the conference chambers beside the appellate courtroom. Like everything else in the old courthouse, the room has a classical finish and looks a bit like a private dining room in a men’s club, right down to the baubled chandelier. To protect the privacy of these deliberations, there are no windows, and even the law clerks who will do the first drafts of the opinions are excluded so the judges may speak freely, without the need to save face in the presence of juniors.
The other member of the morning panel, Summerset Purfoyle, is seated with Nathan at the Chippendale conference table, long enough to allow all twenty members of the appellate court to confer in the rare case when they sit together en banc. With Koll here, Summer has taken a chair a good ten feet away, and George follows suit on the opposite side.
As the senior judge on the panel, George presides and calls the cases for discussion in the order they were heard this morning. Usually the work of the court is divided evenly between civil and criminal matters and, more pointedly, justice at the American extremes, for the very rich and for the very poor. As a rule, civil appeals make sense only when the financial or personal stakes are high, because the appellant has to post a bond guaranteeing that the trial court winner will be paid, then foot the bill for an attorney to comb the record looking for mistakes.
On the criminal side, the matters reflect the realities of the courtrooms downstairs, where the defendants are overwhelmingly poor young males, represented by state-paid counsel. In nine cases out of ten, the decision of the appellate court will be the last real chance for men sentenced to significant prison terms. The state Supreme Court rarely grants further review in criminal matters. George’s job is not to rejudge these cases for the jury. But he takes with a solemnity approaching religious commitment his obligation to be able to say, all things considered, that the defendant was convicted fairly.
The three judges move through the civil cases argued in advance of Warnovits without much debate. The first two, a child custody dispute and a fight over air rights between two corporations, are affirmances; the third, a $9 million personal-injury verdict against a furnace manufacturer, must be set aside because the trial judge, a lunkhead named Myron Spiro, whom the appellate court often reverses, disallowed a lawful defense. As presiding judge, George has the right to decide who will author the court’s opinions in these cases, but his practice is to await volunteers, and Nathan, predictably, says he’s willing to do all three. Koll writes like the wind, seldom needing much help from his clerks, and it is sometimes an irresistible temptation to let him do most of the work. But Summer wants the custody case, and Nathan defers on that, taking the other two. Privately, George is delighted that Koll will handle the reversal of the furnace verdict, because Nathan will not resist subjecting Spiro to the ridicule he deserves.