Allegiance (49 page)

“Owen Roberts changed his mind.”

“He did not do so willingly. The Anti-Federalists lost in 1789, and we lost
again in 1935. We are only tinkering at the margins now. But we helped you, yes.”

“By drafting the other clerks?

He nods.

“And did you think what you were doing to them? Are they dead now?”

The Judge sits down in his leather chair. He gazes at the fireplace. I think he is looking for something to handle, but there is no fire now and he would look silly poking at the ashes. “I don't know,” he says at last, and sips his drink. “But if they are, they saved someone else's life. Perhaps yours. Men die in war, Cash. The harvest is taken in, and neither you nor I can stop it. There are graves that must be filled. Will you stand here and tell me you'd rather be in one of them?”

I ignore the question. “So you thought I'd help you? Join your society?”

The Judge looks at me and I can almost see his mind working, trying to guess how much I know. His voice is careful. “I thought your views were sound.”

“Is that all? I have been thinking, Judge. I have been remembering. In 1935 Suzanne was worried. Worried about money, I realize that now.” I hear her voice again, shivering in my arms under the trees.
You'll take care of me.
“But you are doing quite well these days.”

“Everyone is doing better. Suzanne was a child then. What did she know?”

“She knew a certain railroad had gone bankrupt. She knew what you talked of at night. Her father, whom she loved. In 1935, you knew you had lost at the Court. Did you think of another use for the men you put there? Did you decide you should at least make some money?”

The Judge is gathering himself. “No one makes money, my boy. Wealth is not created ex nihilo. The Crash taught us that, if nothing else.” He is a voice of wisdom now, speaking from the ages. “It must come from somewhere. Like anything else, it must be taken from someone. How did you take your money? That is the question.”

“And you thought I'd help you take some? Tell you how the cases were coming out? All that talk about my high purpose. How special I was, what great things lay before me. While you sent me to Washington for your own ends.”

His face flickers and he turns away. One more secret gone. When he looks up his expression is earnest. “No, Cash,” he says. “Did I ever ask you anything? Did anyone? I put you there to protect you. To keep you safe.”

“Of course.” I remember the doctor's smile. “You fixed my physical first, I suppose. And then when I wanted to volunteer, you needed a little more.” I am running the tally in my head. Two clerks taken to make room for me with Black. Gene Gressman and John Hall killed in my stead. Bill Fitch falling from the sky and his dad taking a razor into the car. “I never wanted to be safe.”

The sharpness in my voice surprises him. “What, then?”

“I wanted to be good.”

He smiles, as though recognizing a problem he can solve. “You are good, Cash. Never doubt that.”

“Am I? Or am I just the right sort of guy?”

The Judge shakes his head, waving the question off. “The others tried to recruit you, but that was never the point. What I did was for you. It was all for you.”

“All of it,” I say, and I can see the phrase worries him. “Everything you did.”

His hands go back to the decanter, still steady. “A drink,” he says again, as though offering treatment for a hurt I am too proud to admit. I shake my head. “The Farmer chose his name well,” I say. “He was a farmer, after a fashion.” The Judge nods, puzzled at the change in direction. “You did, too.”

He nods again. “Brutus was a judge.”

“Robert Yates was a judge,” I say, “who took the name Brutus to write against the Constitution. I'm sure that pleased you. But it is not what I meant. It is not why the name suits you.”

“Why, then?”

“Who was Brutus?” I ask. “Brutus was a killer, who stabbed his friend in the back. You gave the order, didn't you?”

Again there is a flicker across his face. “What do you mean?”

“You mentioned graves, Judge. They have been on my mind. Did you go to John Hall's funeral?”

For a moment he is silent, so still he seems removed from time. “So, Cash,” he says. The different look is settling on his face, as though the light in the
room has changed. “There are doors we can open but never close again. Are you sure this is what you want to talk about?”

“Did you console his parents? Smile a sad smile for lightfoot lads?” The Judge says nothing. “Did you shake his father's hand?”

“I never meant for this to happen, Cash. I never said to kill anyone. I told them to do what was necessary.”

“To be as reasonable as they could.”

He looks at me blankly. I think. It is possible, I suppose, that the decision to kill came about somehow through the conspiracy itself, that authority diffused itself among them so that the choice cannot be laid at the feet of any one man. The Judge thought he ordered one thing, and his minions heard something else. “You had no idea it might happen?”

“I didn't know it was John Hall.” The words are slow, as though each weighs an untold amount, as though each is brought forth with enormous effort. “I heard only that you had a source in the War Department. Of course I suffered when I learned who it was. I cried like a child. I would not have hurt him. He ate at my table. More times than you know, perhaps.”

I let that pass. “That explains it? You didn't know it was Hall.”

“But you did,” the Judge says. He is bestirring himself; he thinks he sees an opening. “Did you never think you might be putting him at risk? I warned you not to stay in Washington. I said it was dangerous. John Hall paid for that. He is dead because you did not listen.”

“He is dead because you killed him.” The Judge says nothing. I cannot stand still for this. I pace; I look at the spines of books on the wall. “And Gene Gressman. I suppose that was easier. You knew he was no one.”

The Judge looks down again. His voice is sad. “There was no choice, Cash. He was on the point of discovering us.”

“Gene was nowhere near you,” I say. “He thought Felix Frankfurter was behind it all.”

“In a way, he was. It was that speech—”

“Shut up.” I have never raised my voice to him before. I am not sure anyone has, not since he became the Judge. Suzanne perhaps, but she is different. I look at him and I remember how he first put a racquet in my hand and showed me how to spread my fingers along the grip for control. My father
rode and golfed and went to Merion for the dinners, and it was the Judge who gave me that racquet and told me the grip was firm but not tight, like an honest handshake. I sit down. “You could have just stopped. You didn't need the money anymore. There was no need to kill him. He wouldn't have figured out it was you.”

The Judge shrugs. “I did not know what he thought, only what I heard. You told Suzanne he was looking into cert grants. You told her he thought it was about the business cases. Philip Haynes went through his papers. The names were there. He would have figured it out.”

“So that's my fault too?”

“It is not a matter of fault. Gene Gressman had to be stopped. We could not be found out.”

“And after he was killed, I suppose that became even more urgent.”

He is silent, and I can see it is true. More to cover up with each act. Necessity breeds necessity; death begets death. “That is how it is, Cash,” the Judge says at last. His tone shifts. There is still a plea there, but now also a hint of superiority. He is telling me the hard truth. This is what lies behind the girls in their gloves and white dresses, this dark world you do not wish to acknowledge. This is what holds up the waxed dance floor. “Our safety depends on the suffering of others. Yes, Cash, even their deaths.”

“So it was for your safety? You feared what? Jail? Disgrace?”

“At first it was for Suzanne. I do not expect this to move you. But you may understand how love drives us to do what we must.”

“I don't understand killing people for money.”

“Money,” says the Judge. His voice is darker now. “You think it is nothing. You think I have sullied my hands, as you never would. Well, we are born in blood and destined for dirt. Our beginning and our end. Is it a wonder they mark the middle too? That is humanity. You cannot escape it.” He pauses and looks away from me. “Except for those born late, after a fortune is made. They do not have to think about where it came from. They do not see the dirt.”

“I've seen dirt, Judge,” I say. My hands are balling themselves to fists. “I have lain under floorboards while the boots of your men shook it down onto my face. You have shown me the dirt.”

He is silent. “I never told them to hurt you,” he says at last, and the voice is soft as the ocean after a storm. “Miller did all that on his own.”

“He would have killed me, though. I expected it. I lay in the ground expecting to die. So that you could trade your worthless stock for land.”

“That is not how I wanted it. You know that, don't you Cash?” He looks at me intently. “What I did was for Suzanne at first. And then for you.”

“You were making money for me?”

“No, Cash. Concealing it, that was for you.” The Judge is holding his glass in both hands, resting it on his knees and looking down. “Because I care about you, about your opinion. It was not prosecution that I feared. Discovery, yes. But by you, not the police. I sent you to Washington to keep you safe, so that you could come back to us. To Suzanne, to me. I knew you would.”

“You knew I would come back.”

“Eventually. You are one of us.”

He nods, but I am not seeing him anymore. I am remembering a crowd of people, a tide of cars. “Unless there was something to keep me in Washington, I suppose. Investigating Gene's death, for instance. Ironic, that, but a temporary setback. And then there was Clara. What did you think of her?”

“Clara?” His voice is all confused innocence.

“Clara Watson,” I say. “Did you send that man after her?”

“Of course not.” He parts his lips and raises his eyebrows. That is where Suzanne gets the expression, I guess. “Miss Wasserman is no concern of mine. Nor yours. It's not too late, Cash. You can still come home.”

Is it the expression, or the name, or the suggestion itself? I do not know, but something throws a switch inside me. The Judge's voice fades out of my consciousness, replaced by a single thought. No one knows I am here, not even Clara. No one has seen my car, heard of my hasty drive up. There is a poker by the fireplace, heavy enough to drop a man with a single blow. I could reach it in one step, take it in a grip that is firm but not tight. One more step to the red leather chair and the man who sits there. He is slow now, gone to fat, and the strength of Merion is in my limbs. The door is ten feet away, the path blocked by a couch. He would never make it.

“I have come home, Judge,” I say. “You have brought me back.” And for the first time there is a flicker of regret across his face, a trace of fear. He has
brought me back, but I am not what I was. Black wings beat, clawed hands grasp. He has brought death to his door.

There is a buzzing in my ears, a roaring pulse of blood. I can see nothing but the fireplace now, surrounded by a field of black.

I hear the Judge step toward me. “Are you well, Cash?” I turn my face up and something in my eyes stops him. He takes a slow pace back. It is what Miller saw in Tule Lake. I hear Harry Nakamura's voice in my mind.
You would not have struck him
. Well, I think, perhaps now I know better.

The Judge stands motionless in the middle of his library, the robe falling from his shoulders in supple folds. Everything seems rotten to me. The evenings with him in this room, holding forth on Coke and Blackstone before the fire, the cold, clean mornings of Northeast Harbor, with fog on the water and in the trees. The rushing is in my ears again and my tongue is thick in my mouth. There are white streaks starting on his face, below the eyes. “Yes, Judge,” I say. “I am quite well. I am only thinking that I could kill you now.”

“No, Cash,” says the Judge. His voice is suddenly hoarse. “No, my boy. That's not what you mean.”

“It is,” I say. “I am wondering if that would not be the best course. If that is not what you have taught me.”

The white on his face is spreading. The skin seems tighter. His Adam's apple works up and down in his throat as though knowledge is choking him.

He is looking into my eyes and seeing what Miller saw. He thinks I will do it. That much I can tell. But perhaps for men like them the eyes of other people are only mirrors, and they see what is in themselves and not in us.

It is a comforting thought, but I can feel an itching in my palm that wrought iron would soothe.

“I want you to understand that,” I say. “Whatever happens, I want you to know that I'm thinking about killing you, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

He takes a shallow breath and licks his lips. His eyes shift from side to side. Soon he will try to run, and I know that if he does, I will not let him leave the room.

Then there's a noise from outside, the spurt of gravel under tires as a car makes a hasty stop. And then there are light footsteps in the hall and Suzanne
puts a hand on the doorframe to stop her progress and begins an excuse for the lateness of the hour. There is something about Tom, and a movie, and a car. And then she sees me, and her words tumble over each other and come to a halt, and the light flush fades from her cheeks and comes back a deeper red.

“Cash,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“Go upstairs, Suzanne,” the Judge says. She looks from him to me and back again, confusion on her face. “Go upstairs,” he says again, and she hears something in his voice and steps to his side.