The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel - By Hector Tobar Page 0,193
that they expected the worst and were immovable once they latched on to the idea that the DA’s plea offers were the ploy of English-speaking grifters. Thinking of all of this, Ian Goller slipped into a depression, because Araceli’s surrender was the only path to victory in the case.
Maybe he should just go hit the waves and cuddle with the moving water and its shifting shapes, with its power to lift a man and make him fly.
Assistant District Attorney Goller was in the parking lot, opening the trunk of his car and confirming the presence of his wet suit and mini board in the back when his phone beeped with another text message: his investigator was following the defendant from the parking lot and was wondering whether to continue surveillance.
No, the assistant district attorney wrote back.
He saw The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez more clearly now. It was unusual to be burdened at this relatively late stage with so many bad facts: the parents caught in contradictions, the paper trail of their lies, and the older boy and his elaborate fantasies. In the name of efficiency they usually tossed unwinnables like this one out the door. And yet there was still the march of institutional logic, the overwhelming likelihood the judge would order the defendant to stand trial, adding the passage of time to the equation. It would be four months, at least, until the trial: that kind of time often worked wonders, since it brought into play the predilection of defendants to muck up their lives. The defendant might run afoul of the law while free on bail, allowing her to be arrested on another, unrelated charge. Or they might get their deal. If none of those things happened, there would always be another illegal immigrant to arrest and try in another high-profile case, eventually, inevitably. The math suggested it would happen again soon, though it was hard to imagine a case as perfect and full of possibility as two handsome boys spirited away by their humorless Mexican nanny.
Ian Goller had closed the trunk of his car and was contemplating the best route to the sea when his phone chattered again with the announcement of another text message.
Araceli did not notice the assistant district attorney as she left the courtroom and entered a hallway filled with people in sagging, end-of-the-summer day clothes. She walked a step behind Ruthy Bacalan, who was talking into a cell phone, and then into a long corridor where a man and a woman were walking toward them, backs and heels first—after a moment, Araceli saw they were two photographers aiming lenses at a subject, walking backward as the subject walked toward them, as if walking backward were the most natural thing in the world.
The smart-stepping photographers tangoed in reverse past Araceli and Ruthy and suddenly the two women were alone with the subject, a sapphire-eyed man with a light, sun-kissed complexion and a wheat-field of hair that looked as if it had been born on van Gogh’s palette on one of the painter’s sunnier mornings. He was an A-list movie star, internationally recognized and swooned over, and he was in the courthouse to testify at and savor the trial of an annoying paparazzo. The sight of the A-list star caused both Ruthy Bacalan and Araceli to stop in the center of the hallway to admire him. Suddenly he spotted Araceli and stopped his advance down the hallway.
“Hey, I know you,” he said to Araceli. He reached out, shook her hand, and said, “I’ve been following your case.”
“¿De veras?”
“I have.” He smiled, spectacularly, and then added, “And I just want to say, good luck to you, señorita,” in a voice that seemed a conscious imitation of Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant or some other star of a bygone age, and in a moment he was bygone too, headed down the hallway to Department 186B to witness the sentencing of a man who would hound the beautiful people of Laguna Beach, Brentwood, and Bel Air no longer.
“Wow,” Ruthy said, with a hand at her chest.
“Sí, wow,” Araceli agreed.
He left them in a trance as they followed the hallway to the door and the concrete plaza outside and its long-shadowed brightness. None of the distracted newspeople standing in the center of the plaza had noticed that Araceli was walking among them. Five of them were gathered in a semicircle, talking to one another and contemplating the black slabs they held in their raised palms, as Hamlet had