Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,121

judge of the Supreme Court of New York, and then, who knows—from there anything was still possible. A lot of the promotions had stalled when the city started to go bankrupt, but he didn’t mind, he would surf it out. He was a man who believed in the absolute of the law. He would be able to weigh and dissect and ponder and make a change, give something back to the city where he’d been born. He always felt that he had skirted the city’s edges and now he would take a pay cut and be at its core. The law was fundamental to how it was imparted and to what degree it could contain the excesses of human folly. He believed in the notion that even when laws were written down they ought not to remain unaltered. The law was work. It was there to be sifted. He was interested not just in the meaning of what could be, but also what ought to be. He would be at the coal face. One of the important miners of the morality of the city. The Honorable Solomon Soderberg.

Even the name rang right. Perhaps he had been used as judicial fodder, a balancing of the books, but he didn’t mind too much; the good would outweigh the bad. He’d be rabbinical, wise, caring. Besides, every lawyer had a judge inside him.

He had walked in, his very first day, with his heart on fire. Through the front entrance. He wanted to savor it. He’d bought a brand-new suit from a swanky tailor on Madison Avenue. A Gucci tie. Tassels on his shoes. He approached the building in a great swell of anticipation. Etched outside the wide gold-colored doors were the words THE PEOPLE ARE THE FOUNDATION OF POWER. He stood a moment and breathed it all in. Inside, in the lobby, there was a blur of movement. Pimps and reporters and ambulance chasers. Men in purple platform shoes. Women dragging their children behind them. Bums sleeping in the window alcoves. He could feel his heart sink with each step. It seemed for just a moment that the building could still have the aura—the high ceilings, the old wooden balustrades, the marble floor—but the more he walked around the more his spirit sank. The courtrooms were even worse than he remembered. He shuffled around, dazed and disheartened. The corridor walls were graffitied. Men sat smoking in the back of the courtrooms. Deals were going down in the bathrooms. Prosecutors had holes in their suits. Crooked cops roamed about, looking for kickbacks. Kids were doing complicated handshakes. Fathers sat with smacked-out daughters. Mothers wept over their long-haired sons. On the courtroom doors, the fancy red leather pouching was slit. Attorneys went by with battered attaché cases. He ghosted past them all, took the elevator upstairs, then pulled up a chair at his new desk. There was a piece of dried chewing gum underneath the desk drawer.

Still and all, he said to himself, still and all, he would soon have it all sorted out. He could handle it. He could turn things around.

He announced his intentions in chambers one afternoon, at a retirement party for Kemmerer. A snicker went around the room. So sayeth Solomon, said one sad sack. Slice the baby, boys. Great hilarity and the tinkling of glasses. The other judges told him he’d get used to it eventually, that he’d see the light and it’d still be in a tunnel. The greatest part of the law was the wisdom of toleration. One had to accept the fools. It came with the territory. Every now and then the blinkers had to be lowered. He had to learn to lose. That was the price of success. Try it, they said. Buck the

system, Soderberg, and you’ll be eating pizza in the Bronx. Be careful. Play the game. Stick with us. And if he thought Manhattan was bad, he should go up to where the real fires were raging, to American Hanoi itself, at the end of the 4 train, where the very worst of the city played itself out every day.

He refused to believe them for many months, but slowly it dawned on him that they were correct—he was caught, he was just a part of the system, and the word was appropriate, a part of the Parts.

So many of the charges were just whisked away. The kids pleaded out, or he gave them time served, just so he could clear the backlog. He had