“Do you need a doctor?” Martin said, concerned.
“Don’t worry, prick,” Smerdnakov said. “I’m not the one in the hospital. Two poor niggers got their heads smashed in.”
“We’ll have you put in isolation,” Martin said. “That way you’ll be safe until the trial.”
“No way,” the Russian said. “If they try to fuck me again, I’ll kill them. Want to know something about me?”
Martin looked at him blankly.
“I’m fucking crazy. I’m completely insane.” He began to cackle again, and the cackling rose to a maniacal sort of laugh.
Martin cringed inwardly. All at once he could imagine Smerdnakov murdering innocent children, tearing the heart out of someone and eating it, but he pushed these unproductive thoughts out of his mind. Better to think of the emotional vacancy and sociological conditions that produced the cruelty, the violence. Suddenly he saw a stark room, filth on the floor, so cold that breath steamed in the air. A young boy, naked, is tied to a metal chair. A man in the green and red uniform of the old Soviet police enters, takes off his coat, rolls up his sleeves, removes his thick leather belt, all without uttering a single word. The boy begins to wail before the first blow hits the flesh of his back. The cold of course makes it worse...
Martin passed a hand across his brow as if to banish such cruelties from his imagination. He knew one thing for certain: injustice in the past could only be expiated by justice now.
“Listen to me, Alexei,” he said, his voice serious. “We’ve only got three days till the trial. I don’t want anything to happen to you in the meantime, okay? So stay out of fights: don’t do anything stupid. I think we’ve got a decent case here if you’ll just work with me.”
The Russian was surprised for the briefest instant. He glanced out the narrow window, glanced back.
“Why the hell do you care what happens to me?” he said at last.
“It’s very simple,” Martin said patiently. “I’m your lawyer.”
They spent the next two hours going over last details for the trial. Smerdnakov’s attitude puzzled Martin. For someone who might be facing life in prison, or worse, he seemed utterly detached from the consequences.
Martin tried to describe this detachment to Dahlia later, as they lay together in bed. The case had brought them closer, though Martin couldn’t exactly say why. He had hardly spent a night in his own apartment in the last three weeks.
“I keep getting the feeling that the man’s playing a game,” Martin said, “and that I’m a fool for going along with it.”
“You’re only a fool if you’re putting in all this work to save his ass and you believe him to be guilty,” Dahlia said. “If you think he’s innocent, then it’s worth it.”
Martin rolled over and put a hand against the tender skin at the side of her neck. “My career has been a joke until now,” he said quietly. “Everyone knows that, especially the guys at the office. I’m staking everything on Alexei’s innocence. Whatever else he may have done, I know he did not commit this crime.”
Dahlia was moved by the emotion in Martin’s words. For once she didn’t come back with a wisecrack or an ironic comment. She took him in her arms and they made love very tenderly and it lasted a long time. Afterward Martin lay awake in the dark as Dahlia slept. He couldn’t sleep, but not from anxiety or fear. He wanted to savor the moment: he felt exalted; he felt loved.
The morning of the trial was clear and cold for late October. In forty-eight hours the temperature had dropped nearly fifty degrees from the low eighties to the mid-thirties. Such drastic changes are common in the capital, where the seasons can pass one to the other over the course of a single night. Martin awoke shivering at 5:25 A.M. of the digital clock and couldn’t get back to sleep. He dragged his overcoat out of the closet, threw it over his shoulders, and walked the apartment until dawn. He could feel the lid lowering, the pressure increasing. He sat on the couch to go over some last notes; then he fell asleep and woke up with just forty-five minutes to shower, shave, and make it to the courtroom.
He performed his ablutions in a dead panic, shaved, dressed without wounding himself too badly, and, as luck would have it, caught a cab for Judiciary Square right at his front door. But he was stopped on the steps of the D.C. Superior Court by a reporter and a camera crew from News Channel 8. The reporter, a fresh-faced young Chinese woman, successfully blocked his passage. The camera operators were burly, squat, hairy men wearing battery-pack bandoliers around their thick chests like Mexican revolutionaries. Out of breath, Martin could barely speak.
“Please,” he gasped. “I’m really late.”
The video camera was whirring. He could see the reflection of his head, bigger than life on the face of the assistant peering into the monitor.
“Kate Chu, Channel Eight news,” the reporter said, jabbing the microphone at his nose. “What’s your assessment of Mr. Smerdnakov’s chances for acquittal?”
“No comment,” Martin said because he had heard other people say this on TV, and he lunged past her up the steps beneath the scaffolding and into the building.
The D.C. Superior Court, circa 1902, had been declared a historic landmark and was still undergoing a slow, painstaking renovation after two years of costly work. Space restrictions at the Moultrie Center forced its use now before completion, and the ornate interior presented a confusion of workers and plastic sheeting. The upper floors were as yet incomplete, their windows open to the elements; yellow police tape closed off the great staircase. Historic courtroom number one, however, had been finished just days before; the Smerdnakov case would be the first to use it since the trial of University of Maryland basketball star Bhijaz Dalkin for possession of crack cocaine. The interior of this room was beautiful, all polished wood and brass fixtures, and smelled of new paint and industrial glues. The carpet, done in a design that repeated the great seal of the District of Columbia against a green background, felt incongruously lush beneath Martin’s feet as he stepped through the heavy bronze-faced doors.
He hurried up the long central aisle toward the bench just as Judge Yvonne Deal was taking her seat. At seventy-two she was a prominent and respected member of the District’s black aristocracy. A former friend of Martin Luther King’s, she had marched on the Freedom Trail, been attacked by dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, teargassed in Selma. Martin knew her tough-as-nails reputation, her history of severity in sentencing violent criminals. Today her enveloping dark robes were set off by an outrageous curly silver wig. A pair of Emmanuelle Khanh eyeglasses with huge gold frames made her look like a wizened, intelligent insect.
“Glad you could make it, counselor,” she said, when Martin took his place at the defense table. “If you keep us waiting again. I’ll find you in contempt, understand?”
Not a good way to start any trial. Martin apologized, muttered something about being stuck in traffic, and fumbled to open his briefcase. The first thing he saw was the top sheet of his legal pad, now completely covered in doodles of all description. He glanced over at Smerdnakov. The Russian was wearing the same mauve Armani suit he had been wearing the night of the murder, matched rather ridiculously with one of Martin’s own conservative lawyer-stripe ties. Smerdnakov’s own tie, a gaudy hand-painted number, had been confiscated as People’s Exhibit Number One.
“Courage,” Martin whispered.
The Russian glared as if he had just been insulted. “You are an asshole,” he said, loud enough to be heard by spectators in the front row of the gallery. Then he turned his impassive gaze toward the newly cleaned stained glass window behind the judge’s bench, a brilliant green, yellow, and red rosette portraying George Washington dressed in a toga ascending into heaven.