Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,118
way downtown. The driver was a sullen black man blaring music through the speakers. A smell of marijuana in the cab. Sickening, really, the way you couldn’t get a clean, decent ride anymore. Rastafarian music from the eight-track. The driver dropped him off at the rear of 100 Centre Street. He walked past the D.A.’s office, stopped at the locked metal-framed door on the side, an entrance only the judges used, their one concession, designed so they wouldn’t have to mix with the visitors at the front. It wasn’t so much a furtive doorway, or even a privileged thing. They needed their own entrance, just in case some idiot decided to take matters into his own hands. Still, it brightened him: a secret passage into the house of justice.
At the door he took a quick look over his shoulder. In the upper reaches of the next-door building he noticed a few people leaning out of the windows, looking westward, pointing, but he ignored them, assumed it was a car crash or another morning altercation. He unlocked the metal door. If only he had turned around, paid attention, he might have been able to go upstairs and see it all unfolding in the distance. But he keyed himself in, pressed the button for the elevator, waited for the door to accordion open, and went up to the fourth floor.
In the corridor he stepped along in his plain black everyday shoes. The dark walls with a deep fungal smell. The squeak of his shoes sounded out in the quiet. The place had the summer blues. His office was a high-ceilinged room at the far end of the corridor. When he had first become a judge he’d had to share chambers in a grimy little box not fit for a shoeshine boy. He’d been astounded how he and his fellows were treated. There were mouse droppings in the drawers of his desk. The walls desperately in need of paint. Cockroaches would perch and twitter on the edge of the windowsill, as if they too just wanted to get out. But five years had gone by and he’d been shunted around from office to office. His was a more stately chambers now, and he was treated with a modicum more respect. Mahogany desk. Cut-glass inkwell. Framed photos of Claire and Joshua by the sea in Florida. A magnetized bar that held his paper clips. The Stars and Stripes on a standing pole behind him, by the window, so that sometimes it fluttered in the breeze. It wasn’t the world’s fanciest office, but it sufficed. Besides, he wasn’t a man to make frivolous complaints: he kept that powder dry in case he’d need it at other times.
Claire had bought him a brand-new swivel chair, a leather number with deep pouchy patterns, and he liked the moment, first thing every morning, when he sat and spun. On his shelves there were rows and rows of books. The Appellate Division Reports, the Court of Appeals Reports, the New York Supplements. All of Wallace Stevens, signed and arranged in a special row. The Yale yearbook. On the east wall, the duplicates of his degrees. And the New Yorker cartoon neatly framed by the doorway—Moses on the mountain with the Ten Commandments, with two lawyers peeping over the crowd: We’re in luck, Sam, not a word about retrospectivity.
He switched on his coffeepot, spread The New York Times on the desk, shook out a few packets of creamer. Sirens outside. Always sirens: they were the shadow facts of his day.
He was halfway through the business section when the door creaked open and another shiny head peeped itself around. It was hardly fair, but justice was largely balding. It wasn’t just a trend, but a fact. Together they were a team of shiny boys. It had been a phantom torment from the early days, all of them slowly receding: not many follicles among the oracles.
—G’morning, old boy.
Judge Pollack’s wide face was flushed. His eyes were like small shining metal grommets. Something of the hammerhead about him. He was blabbering about a guy who had strung himself between the towers. Soderberg thought at first it was a suicide, a jump off a rope suspended to a crane or some such thing. All he did was nod, turn the paper, all Watergate, and where’s the little Dutch boy when you need him? He made an off-color crack about G. Gordon Liddy putting his finger in the wrong hole this time, but it whizzed