Judgment

71

Fifty Braintree Ridge Park was a generic red-brick office building in a generic office park in the suburbs of Boston, surrounded by plenty of parking and a lot of hulking round pruned bushes. Juliana took an elevator to the fourth floor. She walked past the radio station and the marketing company until she came to an office suite at the end of the hall. The door was marked THE NAZAROV COMPANIES.

She thought: A criminal enterprise hiding in plain sight. She tried the door, but it was locked. She found a button on the door frame and pressed it and the door buzzed open.

She entered a reception area that was utterly barren, just a couple of squared-off couches and chairs. No magazines. No TV. No framed maps or prints. Not even a receptionist’s desk. She stood for a minute, looking around, and finally decided to sit on one of the couches.

She was waiting for Dmitry Nazarov, a man she knew to be in the higher reaches of the Russian mafia in America, the mafiya. He’d once appeared before her in her courtroom, six years earlier, when she was still new at judging. A Russian-American owner of parking lots had been charged with bribery of a state official. Dmitry Nazarov was the parking lot kingpin of Boston.

When she imagined the Russian mafiya, she imagined scary-looking guys with large and exotic tattoos. Not the slump-shouldered man in a polyester bowling shirt who had been on trial. His attorney had been able to show that prosecutors had withheld something exculpatory: a statement of a witness that was inconsistent with his trial testimony. Juliana had no choice but to dismiss the charges. A Brady violation, it was called. Nazarov walked out of the courtroom a free man.

And as he walked out, he shouted, “Thank you, Your Honor! Thank you!” He put his hands together as if praying. “Anything I can do for you, ever, anytime, I will do.” At the courtroom door he stopped and turned around, a stocky man in a black bowling shirt. He shouted, gesticulating with his hands, “Anything I can ever do for you, you have only to ask!”

But locating Dmitry Nazarov six years later hadn’t been easy. Turns out that mafiya kingpins don’t have websites. Eventually she located an address for the Nazarov Companies in Braintree and a phone number that rang and rang and was never answered.

Now she waited, uneasily, occasionally looking at her phone. Six minutes went by before someone appeared, a guy in his early twenties with a bodybuilder’s physique, wearing a gray suit, open collar, no tie. He approached Juliana and said, like a haughty salesman, “Yes?”

Juliana fixed the man with her “objection overruled” stare. “I’m here to see Mr. Nazarov.”

“Who?”

“Dmitry Nazarov. Tell him it’s Judge Juliana Brody. He knows who I am.”

The young guy stared malevolently. After a while he turned and left.

He emerged about two minutes later, and now he was fawning. “Please to come with me, Your Honor,” he said with an awkward smile. “Mr. Nazarov is very happy to see you.”

He led her along a corridor and then down a hall that ended in a set of double swinging doors that opened into a large, raw space — a big open area with bare concrete floors, steel girders, and a lot of exposed pipes. It looked as though they’d just stopped building the interior. Standing at a steel desk in the middle of the space was a stocky man wearing a black-and-white bowling shirt.

Dmitry Nazarov was wagging his index finger at someone, a young Asian woman with chunky glasses. “No, you see, we bring these two lots together, with the entrances on these two blocks, here and here, and triple the revenue! Crunch the numbers, you see!” He looked up, pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and he saw her. His face shone. He suddenly extended his hands in the air, like a papal benediction. As he came toward her, he said, “Your Honor, it is my honor!” He laughed, delighted to have cracked a sort of joke. “A jurist of your eminence. To what do I owe this great pleasure?”

The woman with the chunky glasses left the room. Juliana sat in a chair next to Nazarov’s desk and said, “You once told me that—”

“Yes, that wish to be granted. Of course. I swore this on my babushka’s grave. Anything that’s within my power.” He placed a palm on his chest. “Is a burden to carry a debt. A relief, always, to pay it off. Tell me, Your Honor, what can I do?” He was beaming, like a child who’d just been given a puppy.

When she told him, his smile became a rictus of horror. He looked, Juliana thought, like a child whose puppy had just been run over.

She turned her Lexus left onto Granite Street and looped around to 93 North, the artery that went straight through Boston, thirteen miles of highway. Four lanes of traffic headed north. Traffic was light. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun.

She glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if she noticed anyone, any vehicle that seemed to be following. She saw a white car behind her, a Dodge, that she thought she’d seen in the Braintree office park. She saw the car’s snout, its aggressive grille.

It was traveling a little close.

Then the white Dodge changed lanes and came up on her left, far too close. She accelerated, and the white Dodge accelerated, and then she felt a heavy thud, heard a sickening metallic crunch.

The Dodge had crashed into her.

In panic mode now, she swerved away, to the right, setting off car horns, nearly colliding with a blue Toyota. But the Dodge had moved lanes and was immediately on her left, again, and moving in closer.

She accelerated even faster, and now the Dodge had pulled up even with her, on her left, and far too close. She swerved her SUV one more lane, into the rightmost lane, but the white Dodge followed her over.

The car was trying to force her off the road.

Another loud crunch. The Dodge had driven right into her again. She swung the wheel hard right, away, into the breakdown lane, and the Dodge was on her again, and she spun harder to the right. With a shrieking of steel, she’d smashed into the steel guardrails, sparks flying, and she slammed on the brakes. A loud squeal and car horns blaring all around, and she came to an abrupt stop.

The white Dodge sped away.

She keyed off the ignition, sat there, breathing hard, trying to steady her heart rate.

Then a beat-up red pickup truck pulled up ahead of her and also came to a stop, its emergency lights flashing. A large guy with long blond hair and a big potbelly, in his thirties or early forties, got out, wearing an old Carhartt work jacket and a “Make America Great Again” hat. He came over to her.

“Hey, lady, you okay?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” She was out of breath.

“Looked like that guy cut you off. I saw that! I mean, what the hell?”

“Unbelievable.” She was jittery with adrenaline, which had now flooded her system. Her heart juddered, and her face felt hot.

“You want me to call the cops? Call you an ambulance?”

Shaking her head, she said, “Don’t bother. No need.” The last thing she wanted was to be entangled with the police. She knew there was damage to the vehicle, but from where she sat she couldn’t really get a sense of how bad it was. Not without getting out of the car. Which she didn’t want to do, not in the middle of traffic where there was no shoulder and cars passing by all the time now.

“But thank you so much,” she said.

After another minute or so she’d calmed down enough to start the car back up, and she was on her way home.