It was impossible not to notice, as Sethi thanked the judge for his consideration and resumed his seat at the table, that the lawyers for the state were smirking and shaking their heads. Alkaitis was making careful notes in a legal pad. Sethi and his two junior sidekick lawyers were conferring and shuffling papers in order to avoid looking at anyone, especially not at the state. The state was rising from the prosecution table, the state was buttoning its suit jacket, the state was beginning, with barely disguised contempt, to rip holes in the timeline that the defense had laid out. It was curious, the state noted, that the Ponzi scheme was supposed to have begun around the time of the dot-com crash, when one of Alkaitis’s employees—a Harvey Alexander—had confessed to participating in a scheme that had begun in the late seventies. Olivia’s mind wandered. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d given up her apartment and moved in with Monica, and the bed in Monica’s guest room was uncomfortable. Was there any point, actually, in staying to listen to more of this?
But Olivia stayed till the end. The sentence, when it came, was like something from a fairy tale: there once was a man locked away in a castle for one hundred and seventy years.
The intake of breath in the courtroom was audible. A hundred and seventy years, someone repeated nearby. A soft whistle. Some muted cheers. Olivia sat very still and felt absolutely nothing.
* * *
—
She’d set out before dawn with a sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anticlimax. She was slow leaving the courthouse and went unnoticed when she finally straggled out. She didn’t mind her cloak of invisibility, in this instance. She wasn’t feeling very well. There’d been a time when a New York City heat wave wouldn’t have bothered her, but that time had passed. The media were clustered around other investors. “Look, it’s just, it changes nothing,” she heard the dentist say. He was right, she supposed. Jonathan was going to prison forever, but Olivia still lived in her sister’s guest bedroom. She made her way uptown through the furnace of the subway system and observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted. When she’d boarded the downtown train that morning she’d had the thought that she was witnessing history, but would history remember Jonathan Alkaitis? Just another empty suit in a time of collapse and dissipation, architect of an embarrassingly unsophisticated scheme that had run for a while and then imploded. The heat was too much. The subway was crowded. When she finally emerged into the Upper East Side, a few blocks from her sister’s apartment, she had to walk very slowly so as not to faint. A man walking in the opposite direction almost walked into her; he frowned as he stepped out of the way at the last minute, as if she were entirely at fault.
“This is academic,” the judge had said, “but I’m required for technical reasons to impose a period of supervised release following your sentence.” Idea for a ghost story: there once was a man who remained under supervised release for three years following the end of his 170-year prison term. Idea for a ghost story: there once was a woman who drifted unseen through the city of New York until she faded into the crowds and the heat.
12
THE COUNTERLIFE
There’s a morning in FCI Florence Medium 1 when Alkaitis steps out into the yard and sees a flash of color in the crowd. It’s red, but that’s impossible. Red isn’t allowed here. Not just red, but a red power suit, of the kind he hasn’t seen on a woman since the early nineties, mid-nineties at the latest, fire-engine red with extremely padded shoulders. The woman wearing it seems to move too quickly; in a few steps she has somehow crossed the yard and is standing near him, staring.
“Madame Bertolli,” he says quietly, trying to steady his voice.
“You say something?” a nearby guy asks.
“No, nothing.” Yvette Bertolli obviously isn’t here, because that would be impossible and no one else seems to have noticed her. Nonetheless, here she is. She begins a slow circle of the yard, sometimes flickering slightly. She looks much younger than she was the last time