"He jumped bail?" I ask. "He fled?"
Harnason went to a riverboat casino and used a high-limit credit card to buy twenty-five thousand dollars in chips, which he promptly cashed to grubstake his flight. With a two-week head start, he is probably far outside the country.
"The papers don't have it yet," George tells me. "But they will soon. I wanted you to be prepared when the reporters call." The public doesn't know a thing about what supreme court justices do. But they will understand I let a convicted murderer loose who will now be at large forever, one more bogeyman to dread. Koll will bludgeon me with Harnason's name. I wonder vaguely if I have actually given the jerk a chance.
But that is not what paralyzes me when George finally leaves me alone behind my large desk. I have known for the seven weeks I have seen Anna that disaster was looming. But I hadn't seen its shape. I was willing to chance hurting the people closest to me. But no matter how ironic, I am stunned to realize that I have assisted in a serious violation of the law. Harnason played me so well. The election is the least of my concerns. With the wrong prosecutor-and Tommy Molto is certainly the wrong prosecutor-I could end up in jail.
I need a lawyer. I am too disoriented and full of self-reproaches to figure any of this out myself. There is only one choice: Sandy Stern, who represented me twenty-one years ago.
"Oh, Judge," says Vondra, Sandy's assistant. "He's been out of the office, a little under the weather, but I know he would want to talk to you. Let me see if he can take the call."
It is several minutes before he is on the line.
"Rusty." His voice is frayed and weak, alarmingly so. When I ask what's wrong, he says, "A bad laryngitis," and turns the conversation back to me. I do not bother with
pleasantries.
"Sandy, I need help. I'm ashamed to say I've done something stupid."
I await the ocean of rebukes. Stern is fully entitled: After I gave you another chance, another life.
"Ah, Rusty," he says. His breath seems labored. "That is what keeps me in business."
Stern's doctor has ordered him not to talk for two weeks and thus not to come into the office. I prefer to wait for him rather than seek advice from anyone I would trust even a fraction less. After forty-eight hours pass, I recover my balance somewhat. The news of Harnason's flight has broken. The police have run all leads and found no trace of his whereabouts. Koll has howled about my misjudgments, but the controversy is relegated to a two-inch item at the bottom of the local news page because the general election is so far away. Ironically, Koll would have scored far larger if he'd remained in the primary.
I have no idea how the mess with Harnason will play out, if Sandy will advise me to make a clean breast of the matter with the court or keep my peace. But my soul is at rest on one thing: I must stop seeing Anna. Having had a taste of ruin again, I cannot tolerate any more danger.
Three days later, I arrive early in the lobby of the Hotel Dulcimer, to be sure I intercept her before she goes up to the room. From my untimely appearance, she knows something is awry, but I draw her toward one of the columns and whisper, "We have to stop, Anna."
I watch her face crumple. "Let's go upstairs," she says impatiently. If I say no, I know she will be unable to keep herself from making a scene here.
She cries bitterly as soon as the door is closed and takes a seat on an armchair, still in the light raincoat she wore in today's storm.
"I've tried to imagine," she says. "I've tried to imagine this so many times. What was I going to feel like when you said this? And I just couldn't. I just couldn't, and I can't believe it now."
I have decided in advance not to explain about Harnason. I said nothing at the time of the incident, and no matter how paradoxical, I'm certain the same woman who encouraged my illicit passions would be crushed to think I could behave as a judge with such blatant impropriety. Instead, I say simply, "It's time. I know it's time. It's only going to get harder."
"Rusty," she says.
"I'm right, Anna. You know that."
To my surprise, she nods. She herself has been coming to terms. Eight weeks, I think. That will be the final duration of my flight from sanity.
"You have to hold me again," she says.
She is in my arms for a long time as we stand just inside the door. It is a bookend of our first moments together. But we hardly need the reminder. The bodies have their own momentum. We are both quick to finish, knowing perhaps we are on stolen time.
Dressed again and at the door, she clings to me once.
"Do we have to stop seeing each other?"
"No," I say. "But let's give it a little while."
Once she's gone, I lie there a long, long time. More than an hour. The rest of my life, dark and doomed, has started.
I would say there is no coping with the loss, but that is untrue. I walk through my life like an amputee who feels the phantom pain of the missing limb, my heart bursting with longing and my mind telling me, in perhaps the saddest note of all, this too will pass. Never again, I think. The curse has now come true. Never again.
After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable-so young, so much a citizen of a different era-that it is hard to feel fully deprived. And no matter what the course with Harnason, this part of the tale will remain untold. Barbara will not know. Nat will not know. I have avoided the worst.
I wonder all the time. Is it Anna I miss? Or love?
Two weeks after our last meeting at the Dulcimer, Anna shows up in chambers. I recognize her voice from my desk, where I am working, and hear her tell my secretary that she was in the building to file a brief and just wanted to drop by. She lights up when she sees me in my doorway and breezes into the inner chambers uninvited, just another former clerk who's happened by to pay respects, something that occurs all the time.
She is gay, joking loudly with Joyce about the fact they are each wearing the same boots, until I close the door. Then she slumps and drops her face into her hands.
I can feel my heart thumping. She is so lovely. She's in a gray suit, nicely tailored, whose feel I recall as clearly as if my hand were on it now.
"I've met somebody," she says quietly once she looks up. "He actually lives in my building. I've seen him a hundred times and just started talking to him ten days ago."
"Lawyer?" My voice too is very low.
"No." She gives her head a determined shake, as if to suggest she'd never be that stupid. "He's in business. Investments. Divorced. A little older. I like him. I slept with him last night."
I manage not to flinch.
"I hated it," she says. "Hated myself. I mean, I tell myself there are people like you and me in everybody's life, people who can't stay forever but who matter immensely at the moment. I think if you've led an open and honest life, there will be those people. Don't you think that?"
I have friends who believe all relationships really fall under this heading-good only for a while. But I nod solemnly.
"I'm trying everything, Rusty."
"We each need time," I say.
She shakes her lovely hair about. It's been cut in the last two weeks, turned under a bit.
"I'll always be waiting for you to say you want me back."
"I'll always want you back," I answer. "But you'll never hear me say it." She smiles a trifle as she gathers in the deliberate absurdity of my last remark.
"Why are you so determined?" she asks.
"Because we reached the logical conclusion. There is no happy ending. Nothing happier. And I'm beginning to come to terms."
"And what terms are those, Rusty?"
"That I don't have the right to live twice. Nobody does. I made my choices. It would disrespect the life I've lived to throw all that over. And I have to show some gratitude to whatever force allowed me to skate across the thinnest ice and make it. I mean, I've told you over and over, Barbara cannot know. Cannot."