Continuation

I

The appointment had been scheduled under another name three weeks earlier. The confirmation arrived by email at three forty-two in the afternoon. The clerk who processed it had no reason to remember doing so. The stated purpose concerned a matter of procurement review and required approximately ten minutes of Gerald Harlow’s time. The supporting documents were genuine but the concern they described was not.

I printed the confirmation and placed it inside my case. Beneath it the file. Beneath that were other materials.

Outside, a spring storm had lowered itself over the town with the patience of all things that have been a long time coming. Rain threatened but was withheld. The morning light was silver and gold, the light that makes the ordinary appear to have been wept over. A child on the courthouse steps held a red balloon and watched it strain against the wind without letting go. From the curb I could see City Hall at the end of the square, its face composed, its greying columns wet. Near the north entrance the marble had been worn smooth by forty years of attorneys cutting the corner. The stone remembered the path even when the attorneys were gone.

I sat on a bench across from it and opened my notebook.

II

Let me tell you what Gerald Harlow was before I tell you what I did about it.

Gerald Harlow had served on the county council for fourteen years. He was a man of unremarkable intelligence and extraordinary patience, which in the administration of corruption is a superior combination.

Harlow long chaired the public safety committee. He was a devoted husband, a contributor to the Methodist building fund, and a man who had redirected two million dollars in county contracts to companies owned by his associates over eleven years. He did so with the confidence of someone who had correctly assessed the system’s appetite for inconvenient revelations.

I watched him for three years before I understood what I was watching.

I watched him for another two before I understood that he had been watching me as well.

I have always taken notes. Names, dates, remarks made in hallways. Most of what makes the world is wrongly thought unimportant.

My title before exile was Public Defender. A republic reveals its nature not by how it treats the innocent but by how it treats the accused who enjoy no public sympathy. My trade was to stand beside the least among the least, the ones the gallery has already convicted. I was found among thieves and addicts, pathetic men who had struck their wives and wept for it, and boys whose crimes were mostly stupid panic. I stood beside them because the law required it and because I believed the law was worth requiring things of people.

In winter the building held heat longer than it should. Evenings, when the corridors had emptied, you could walk the length of the second floor without a coat and feel the warmth the stone had kept since morning.

A coffee cart arrived at six each morning. The woman who ran it never learned names but never forgot an order. She was gone one Monday and replaced by another on Tuesday. Nothing marked the change. The orders remained the same.

Darnell ran courthouse security and kept peppermints in his desk drawer and offered them to nervous witnesses before hearings without being asked. I liked him and how he knew everyone who passed through the building. He remembered you.

III

There was a time when my arrival altered the disposition of a room.

For many years I had occupied a chair at the end of the table in the coordination room on the third floor of the courthouse. Eight people, sometimes ten. Questions of procedure, jurisdiction, and precedent. Younger attorneys did not speak on certain matters until I had spoken. In practice judges who ruled against my recommendations did so only with thoughtful explanation, which is its own form of acknowledgment.

I loved it.

There was a night in February at the Elks Lodge on Garrison Street when I spoke without notes. The room was full. When I finished, a man who had opposed my candidacy shook my hand and did not meet my eyes. Near the back wall Harlow stood and smiled at me as a problem already solved.

I had announced my candidacy for county attorney four days earlier.

My opponent was Alan Pierce, who had managed Harlow’s last reelection and whose chief qualification appeared to be his willingness to continue the arrangement. I was told repeatedly I was winning.

It was on a Wednesday evening in early April that I accepted thirty pages of sealed records from a clerk I had cultivated for two months. The file documented Harlow’s committee work over seven years. I mailed copies to seven journalists, four elected officials, and the state oversight board under a false return address.

I told myself I was serving the public.

I was also breaking the law.

Harlow called me the afternoon the story ran. He was cordial and sounded as if he was arranging furniture in a room he already owned. The investigation opened six weeks after the election. My disbarment was permanent and Pierce settled in well.

I submitted the full file to the state oversight board and requested a formal investigation. Four years later they issued their findings. They confirmed every finding in my notebooks. Two council members duly resigned. Harlow expressed disappointment in his colleagues and was reelected with sixty percent of the vote. He sent a note to the paper expressing gratitude for the community’s continued trust.

He is currently in that office.

IV

Patience is a sedative.

I held it through the disbarment and the form acknowledgments and the redacted records that arrived fourteen months after my requests, page after page of rectangles where the accountability had been. I held it through the oversight board’s findings. I held it through Harlow’s reelection.

I held it until a Tuesday evening in my kitchen with the redacted pages on the counter, and set it down.

Among the files from those years was a note in my own hand on yellow legal paper.

Facts survive judgment.

I set the note aside.

V

I will not catalog the preparations.

They took months and are a matter of record in a jurisdiction that has already rendered its verdict on them. A verdict I expected and to which I have no objection. I broke the law when I mailed the records and broke it again in that office and I have never claimed otherwise, which distinguishes me from Gerald Harlow.

The chair at the end of the table. The warmth in the top floor corridor. The boy who walked out because I spent eleven weeks on his timeline. I returned to these things often during the last eight months. I simply did, if only to confirm them gone.

I had filed sixty pages. I had petitioned and appealed and corresponded. The oversight board had confirmed and the council members had resigned and Harlow had expressed disappointment and been reelected and sent his note and remained, and the building had processed all of it and continued, and I was a disbarred attorney on a bench across the square, and Harlow was at his desk reviewing the agenda for Thursday’s committee meeting, and this was the situation, and I had decided what to do about it.

He is currently in his office.

VI

The courthouse clock struck five and the sound moved across the square in resonant blows. Clerks and staff emerged from the building consulting their telephones, their attention already distributed among the evening’s obligations.

Near the fountain a young couple emerged from the licensing office. The woman carried a document against her coat. They hurried toward a car in the rain. Their names would enter the system that held mine, kept with identical care and identical indifference.

Through the glass doors the night custodian moved methodically through the lobby with his cart and his yellow bucket. He stopped at intervals to wring the mop. The floors would not be clean when he finished. They would merely be cleaner, and this was sufficient.

I rose from the bench.

I adjusted my tie and looked at my reflection in the darkened window of the dispatch office. The man who regarded me from the glass appeared older than I remembered. I found the impression satisfactory and turned toward City Hall.

The rain gathered upon my glasses as I crossed the square. The building stood before me white and severe, its columns darkened by rain, its bronze seal above the entrance. Incorporated 1891.

At the foot of the steps I paused.

The marble near the north entrance was worn smooth where the attorneys had cut the corner for forty years. I had cut that corner myself. The stone had kept the record of it long after the county had expunged mine.

Through the glass I could see Darnell at his desk, a paperback in his hands. When he looked up he smiled and raised one hand. The greeting of a man who remembered another man from better years and was glad to see him.

I opened the door.

The warmth of the lobby met me, and I was reminded I had been outside long enough to have forgotten what the courthouse atmosphere felt like. The elevator button was worn to a dull circle by a generation of fingers that had pressed it without thinking. I pressed it now.

The corridor on the fourth floor smelled of paper, polished wood, and the institutional cleaner the county had used for as long as I could remember. I walked it past the coordination room and the chair that was no longer mine without comment or commemoration.

The building was exactly as I had left it.

This was grief.

I saw his office was at the end of the hall with the light on.

VII

Harlow was at his desk when I entered, the agenda before him. He looked up and said my name. Surprised by my presence he stammered nonsense for a while. He was fluent in the language of reasonable men, and the language had always served him.

I allowed a moment of silence when he finished before announcing:

you will not get to continue.

I opened the case.

The first shot struck him in the shoulder and spun him from the chair. The second and third were more precise. He was dead before the door opened. I sat in his chair and set the weapon beside the agenda and waited.

Hurried footsteps approached from the corridor shortly thereafter.

VIII

The trial lasted nine days.

The judge delivered a life sentence with the gravity judges bring to inevitable proceedings.

Harlow’s obituary ran twelve column inches. His years of service documented, honorable legacy cemented. The flag flew at half-staff for one day.

Pierce called for healing.

Gerald Harlow did not continue.

I have found this, on balance, sufficient.