The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Robert Girardi The Defenestration of Aba Sid

From A Vaudeville of Devils

Martin Wexler woke up one morning last September with a slight hangover and the vague certainty that something was wrong. Dull blue light slatted through the Venetian blinds over the windows fronting Massachusetts Avenue. He heard the thump and gurgle of water running from upstairs apartments, toilets flushing, keys scraping in locks down the hall, all the normal sounds of life stirring for another day in the world. The digital clock on the microwave in the kitchenette on the other side of his efficiency glowed 7:32 A.M. in square amber numbers. He was due in court in just under two hours.

Martin sat up, reached for his glasses on the night table, cluttered with pennies, crumpled scraps of paper, broken mechanical pencils, unread briefs, bits of food, and other junk. He got out of bed, showered, put in his contacts, shaved. He put on a pale blue button-down, somewhat wrinkled from its third wearing since the dry cleaners; a red and yellow striped tie with faint soup stains on the third band of color; and his second-best navy blue suit, just now going a little sheeny on the seat of the pants. He checked himself in the mirror; he looked presentable enough. He fell healthy. Everything was fine. But the something wrong would not let him go; it had its teeth in him and was biting down hard.

Not until he was halfway through his breakfast of stale Cocoa Puffs did he remember what was bothering him: as of today, he was the most incompetent attorney in the Public Defender’s Service of the District of Columbia. The former most incompetent attorney, a scattered woman named Genevieve Claibourne, had been fired the previous afternoon. Marlin thought about Genevieve as he walked down Massachusetts to the Metrobus stop. He had always liked her. She was a petite, loud redhead from Dallas with a wry sense of humor, not unaware of her own limitations. A diehard Cowboys fan, which is a tough thing to be in any Washington office. Like everyone, like Martin himself, she had started out with vague ideals about defending the poor and innocent and ended up bewildered by the utter brutality of modern urban life.

He was a little late getting to the bus stop this morning and so wailed alone in the heavy stillness directly following the end of rush hour. The wind off the river stank of a chemical he couldn’t identify. He bought the Washington Post from the usual blue machine but suddenly didn’t feel like reading. He folded the bulky paper under his arm and watched the G2 making its laborious ascension from the tunnel under Scott Circle in a cloud of dark exhaust.

You had to be a drunk or insane or you had to do many stupid things in a row to get fired from the PDS, or you had to — as in Genevieve’s case — do one stupid thing that gets picked up by the news media. That was plain bad luck. Martin thought. In any organization incompetence, even of the most blatant variety, was often tolerated for years. He wasn’t a good lawyer, everyone knew that. He didn’t have a mind for details, or he didn’t apply himself; he couldn’t decide which. Without Genevieve around, his own errors would stand out that much more glaringly. He could already feel the heat, like an ant squirming beneath a magnifying glass.

Martin’s second case of the morning involved a young black man who called himself Ibn Btu Abdullah but whose real name was Tarnell Edwards. He was accused of stealing dogs from the yards of million-dollar homes in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Upper Northwest and had been apprehended on elegant Newark Street in the act of stuffing a toy poodle into an old knapsack that also contained two marijuana blunts in a cut-down Pringles can — which accounted for an additional possession charge. Tarnell was a likable, dark-complected, dreadlocked youth just two weeks past his eighteenth birthday. He seemed surprised when Martin told him he would be tried as an adult in criminal court.

“I thought that was twenty-one or something,” Tarnell said.

“People take dognapping very seriously in this town,” Martin said. “I’ll be straight with you, Tarnell. You could be facing time in Lorton.”

Tarnell folded his hands like the Catholic school boy he had once been, looked out the narrow gun slit window of the holding cell, saw nothing there but wire mesh and empty sky, and looked back again. He tried to speak; emotion choked his voice. He slumped back in his chair and rubbed his eyes with his fingers.

“Fucking shit!” he managed finally. “They’re going to fuck me up for one mothafucking dog?”

“Thirty-five dogs have disappeared in Upper Northwest over the last few months,” Martin said, trying to sound reasonable. “The police want to blame them all on you. If you were acting with accomplices, if anyone else was involved, I need to know now. I’m your lawyer, remember?”

Tarnell was silent for a whole minute, thinking. Martin could almost see the wheels working, the improbabilities flashing up one by one, only to be shot down, exploding like skeet in midair. Finally Tarnell sighed.

“OK,” he said. “A couple of these brothers I know, they’ve got pit bulls, right? They fight them on Saturday night in this place in Anacostia, and people come from all over and a lot of money goes down. So, it’s like, the brothers they don’t want their fighters going soft during the week, so they like to keep them sharp on other dogs, like training, like a boxer or something. So they give one hundred dollars or two hundred dollars a dog depending on how big he is and fifty dollars for cats. I never done it before, but I needed the money, so I get on the Metro—” He stopped talking when he saw the expression on Marlin’s face.

“What happens to the dogs?” Martin said.

Tarnell gave him a blank look.

“If we could arrange to have some of those dogs returned to their owners, it might help our case.”

“They messed up, man,” Tarnell said at last. “Nothing left. Meat.”

Martin shuddered. He remembered seeing a piece on the news about an old woman whose bichon frise had been stolen from her front porch one afternoon. The dog was her only companion, had been with her seventeen years, ever since before her husband died. Martin remembered the woman crying and holding up a little red collar studded with rhinestones. It was all she had left of both her husband and the dog.

“This does not look good,” he said, shaking his head. “You were caught with a dog in your bag; they’re going to get a conviction on the basis of that evidence. I might be able to work a deal, but you’re going to have to give the cops everything. The names of the buyers. The men with the pit bulls.”

“They’ll kill me,” Tarnell said, and his eyes got big and scared. “I give you their names, I’m dead. These are some rough boys, you dig?”

“I’m really sorry,” Martin said, and he stood up and got his papers together and stuffed them into his briefcase. “You think it over, but I don’t see any other way.”

“It’s only dogs,” Tarnell said. “Not like they killing people.”

Martin turned to the door. “It’s other people’s dogs, Tarnell,” he said.

“That’s not what this is about,” Tarnell said, and there was bitterness in his voice. “It’s white people’s dogs! White people, they love their dogs more than they love their kids. Up there in Cleveland Park, they got those big beautiful houses, huge stretch of green out front with all them flowers and you know what? Where are the kids? No kids playing in the streets in the yards, nothing. I say that’s bullshit! I say fuck ’em and fuck their dogs too!”

Martin pressed the security buzzer for the guard to open the door. He shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other and turned back for a moment.

“Remember not to say that to the judge, Tarnell,” he said. Then the door opened, and he stepped out into the long corridor full of cages.

Later that afternoon Genevieve Claibourne came up to the PDS offices in the Moultrie Center to clean out her desk. Tayloe, the department head, carrying a large cardboard box with the solemnity of someone bearing a funerary urn, escorted her through the labyrinth of cubicles. His dark face was impassive; his eves set straight ahead. He spoke to Genevieve for a while in a low, serious voice, then left her alone in her cubicle, which was next to Martin’s. Martin heard her slamming drawers and sniffling a little, and he poked his head around the dusty burlap-covered divider to see how she was doing.

“How are you doing?” he said.

Genevieve looked up from where she was sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of legal documents and other papers.

“Terrible,” she said. “What the hell do you think?” She was wearing grass-stained tennis shoes and old jeans and a white turtleneck, today’s uniform for the unemployed. Tears had smudged the mascara around her eyes.

Martin didn’t know what to say. He felt embarrassed for her but also thankful that he wasn’t the one cleaning out his desk. “I know how you feel,” he said finally. Then he thought of something. “You going to be around for a while?”

Genevieve made a helpless gesture at the surrounding piles of papers.

“I could use a drink after work,” Marlin said. “How about ii?”

Genevieve smiled through her tears, and Martin got up and tried to enlist some of the other attorneys for a happy hour to soften her departure. It wasn’t easy. Most people don’t like to associate themselves with failure. In the end he managed to convince only Jacobs and Burn, two attorneys on the low end of the pecking order without much seniority and with nothing to lose.

At six they went over to the D.C. Bar, a dingy basement establishment on 4th Street popular with the attorneys and investigators of Judiciary Square only because of its proximity. It was the sort of place where the Christmas decorations never came down and they had Bud and Bud Light on tap and Michelob and Michelob Light in the bottle. From the shoulder-high window, the terra-cotta frieze of the Grand Army of the Republic — soldiers, sailors, generals on horseback, mules, cannon, caissons, wagons — could be seen winding its way around the old Pension Building across the street toward a glorious victory just beyond the next cornice.

After two rounds of Bud, Burn insisted on a round of shots. He was not yet thirty, blond, big-shouldered and muscular. He had been an avid surfer during his years at the Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles. Four shot glasses of cheap Pepe López tequila were poured before anyone could protest. The bartender handed over a plate of brown lime wedges and a saltshaker. Burn took a lime wedge between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, salted his skin just above the wrist, and held up the shot glass in a toast with the other.

“Here’s to getting fired,” he said.

Genevieve frowned, but she followed Burn’s lead and downed her shot just the same. A few minutes later she and Burn did another, and then she sighed and laid her head against Burn’s shoulder.

“Why don’t we all go over to Arribé after this and dance with the Eurotrash?” she said to everyone, though she was really just talking to Burn.

Martin barely sipped his tequila. He would be thirty-five next month; the hard stuff sat uneasily in his stomach these days. Jacobs pushed his shot aside untouched. He was in his late forties, with a wife and two kids neatly ensconced in a split-level with a well-trimmed lawn out in Gaithersburg. Being a lawyer was a second career for him. He had been a salesman of heating and air-conditioning systems for twenty years before finally deciding to go to law school.

“Getting too old for tequila,” Jacobs said.

Martin nodded. “Me too.” But both of them had already drunk just enough beer to loosen their inhibitions.

“Failing to file a continuance can happen to anyone,” Jacobs said in a voice he thought only Martin could hear. “It could happen to me or you. But the newspaper thing was bad. Those bastards in the press! That poor little kid’s face all over the front page.”

“I was thinking exactly the same thing earlier,” Martin said.

Genevieve lifted her head from Burn’s shoulder and spun toward them on her barstool. “How do you think I feel?” she almost shouted, her bottom lip trembling. For a moment it looked as if she were going to break into tears.

“Just try to forget about it,” Burn said, and patted her consolingly on the arm. “It’s not you, honey; it’s just the way things are.”

She put her elbows on the bar and put her head in her hands. She was more than a little drunk now. “Everything is so goddamned serious these days,” she said to her empty glass. “One little mistake.”

“You want my opinion,” Burn said. “You were overextended, spread thin.”

“No different from everyone else,” Genevieve said in a glum voice. “Some can deal; others can’t. I guess I couldn’t deal without messing up.” Then she looked up and spun the barstool again in Marlin’s direction. “You’re next,” she said in a voice that held the grim resonance of prophecy. “You better be careful, Wexler! I’ve seen some of your filings. They’re a mess.”

No one could think of anything to say after that. Genevieve went off to Arribé with Burn, Jacobs caught the Red Line to Shady Grove, and Martin walked over to the Metrobus stop on C Street with unfinished work under his arm as always. Perhaps, as Burn said, Genevieve had spread herself too thin. Maybe the answer was as simple as that. She had been dividing her time between her PDS work and the half dozen cases left over from a defunct private practice in which she had specialized — rather ineptly — in representing the interests of children in custody matters. The facts of Genevieve’s last case were now well known no everyone in the service:

The child involved in the custody dispute, five-year-old Lashandra Shawntell Williams, had been living with her father, twenty-year-old Dontel Alonso Williams, in a dilapidated row house at T and Todd Streets, Northeast, on a block presided over by a gang of murderous African-American youths known as the Todd Street Posse. Dontel did no work, collected no unemployment checks, yet always seemed to have plenty of cash on hand. Lashandra’s mother, Elisa-Marie Cunningham, had disappeared under questionable circumstances in 1997; the child’s maternal grandmother, Mrs. Bernice Cunningham of Oxon Hills, Maryland, had been trying to gain custody ever since her daughter’s disappearance.

At the hearing before Judge Marcus Cooper in June, Bernice Cunningham’s request for custody had been denied, mostly because Dontel had showed up exactly on time, wearing a nice silver-gray Hugo Boss suit and six-hundred-dollar lizardskin loafers. Mrs. Cunningham got one look at the suit and the fancy shoes and that afternoon filed a motion for reconsideration, suggesting in her statement that Mr. Williams lived off the profits of a criminal enterprise. A second hearing date was set, and investigators were assigned to the case. An investigation like that takes time. It had been up to Genevieve to file a continuance to provide this time and to coordinate with investigators. Juggling seventeen other cases of varying degrees of complexity, she had forgotten about the case entirely.

Then, in August, members of the Todd Street Posse pulled up at the curb in front of Dontel Williams’s house in a purple Humvee decorated with gold trim and blue neon belly lights like the Goodyear blimp. Dontel Williams sat on the couch in the living room, oblivious, watching Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast on the cartoon network, comfortably high from a mixture of marijuana and Martell as his daughter played with a broken electronic toy on the floor at his feet. In the next few seconds seventy-five rounds of ammunition from various pieces of military ordnance poured through the living-room window. A single bullet shattered the little girl’s skull; she was pronounced dead by paramedics arriving at the scene. Possessed of the kind of luck available only to the irresponsible bastards of the world, Dontel survived the attack without a scratch.

At twilight every evening the branches of a large magnolia just outside the window adjacent to Martin’s cubicle filled up with thousands of dark birds. They squawked and chattered noisily for an hour before swirling off again in a great fluttering cloud as the light drained from the sky in the west. They were not as small as sparrows or as large as crows. Grackles perhaps or rooks; he had always meant to look them up in a bird book at the library. But it didn’t matter what they were called. He was amused by the thought that they seemed to be gossiping about each other, like idlers in a Parisian café. It gave him pleasure to pause from his work and watch them there, black feathery shadows hopping about in the green shadows of the thick leaves.

Now Martin leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, and stared out the window in the last moments before the birds swept off to the horizon. He didn’t hear the portentous knocking on the metal edge of the burlap divider, didn’t realize that Tayloe stood at the threshold of his cubicle, waiting.

“You with us, Wex?” Tayloe said at last.

Martin started and almost fell out of his swivel chair. “Hey, Winston, I didn’t see you there!”

Tayloe advanced into the cubicle, frowning. He was a light-skinned black man originally from Trinidad, and the lilt of the islands lingered around his voice like fading perfume. He carried under his arm a large Pendaflex file, which he deposited with a heavy thump on Martin’s desk. As if in response to this, the birds in the magnolia tree took wing in a single instant and flew off into the descending night.

“There they go,” Martin said.

Tayloe raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Clear your desk,” he said. “I’ve reassigned all your other cases. This is what you’re working on next.”

Martin stared down at the Pendaflex file, which was long and black and thick and reminded him vaguely of a coffin. His heart sank. He’d been feeling tired lately, discouraged. His energies weren’t up to a challenge just now.

“You ever hear of Alexei Smerdnakov?” Tayloe said.

Martin shook his head.

“What about Aba Sid?”

“No.”

“What do you know about the Russian Mafia?”

Martin shrugged. “Not much.”

Tayloe tapped the file with his knuckle. “Then you’ve got some reading to do. And you better read carefully. This one’s a homicide.”

Martin blinked once. “You’re kidding.” He’d never done a homicide before, Tayloe had never let him. He’d only done small-time stuff: dognappings, prostitution, domestic battery. He didn’t blame anyone for these paltry assignments; his record in court was abysmal. He’d lost nearly 80 percent of the cases that made it to trial. He was on a particularly bad streak right now: the last six verdicts had gone to the prosecution. Anxiety rose to Martin’s throat, and he could hardly swallow.

Tayloe allowed himself a humorless smile. “It’s time you earn your keep, my friend.” He gave Martin a hard squeeze on the shoulder and disappeared around the burlap divider.

For long minutes afterward, Martin stared down at the bulging Pendaflex, loath to turn the brown cover and lay bare the sad and terrible history concealed within.

In the Soviet Union during the bad old days of the Communist regime, the most common method of birth control for women was abortion. Condoms, diaphragms, the pill, sponges, IUDs, spermicidal cream, and the rest all were products of the decadent West and available only on the black market. Anya Sobakevich, the woman who gave birth to Alexei Smerdnakov, underwent thirty abortions over a twenty-year period. Alexei, her third pregnancy (by a Captain Smerdnakov of the uniformed division of the KGB), was the only one she allowed to come to term, perhaps because she was under some illusion that the captain planned to marry her. When it became apparent that he had no such plans, she abandoned the child without a qualm on the doorstep of the Chermashyna People’s Orphanage in Moscow.

Captain Smerdnakov was purged from the ranks for ideological reasons shortly after this incident and finished his days on a gulag in Siberia; Anya Sobakevich died of alcohol poisoning many years later, a month after undergoing her final abortion. The fate that awaited little Alexei, though just as dire as either of these, was far more subtle:

In the nursery of the Chermashyna Orphanage, he was hardly ever touched by the nurses and only held for a minute or two at feeding time. Many less hardy infants died from this fundamental neglect, but not Alexei. He was tough from the beginning, a large baby with big hands and big feet and a thick head of black hair. As soon as his teeth came in, he began to bite. When he learned to walk, he also learned to kick and punch. At five years old he strangled a litter of kittens the headmistress was raising for the younger children to play with. When he was eight, for no reason at all, he pummeled an eight-year-old classmate senseless and hung him by the neck with a bit of rope from a pipe in the basement. The classmate was cut down just in time by the boiler engineer.

Alexei was then transferred to a juvenile correction facility in the Ukraine, where at ten he stabbed a teacher in the leg with a compass point Finally, as a teenager, for the brutal assault and robbery of a party member in good standing, he was sentenced to the same work camp in Siberia where his father had died years before. There his true education began. There his skin was gradually covered with a series of crude tattoos: a penis with wings; two women going down on each other; alligators; heroin poppies; detailed portraits of Lenin and Marx, one on each buttock respectively. There he learned to cheat at cards and use the weak for personal gain. There he killed his first man, with a shovel blow to the back of the head. This hapless victim was a fellow inmate whom Alexei rather liked. Their argument had flared up over nothing, the last two cigarettes in a stale pack of Sputniks.

In those days the Siberian gulags bore the same relationship to Russian organized crime syndicates that farm team baseball bears to the major leagues in the United States. At the age of twenty-one, Alexei was released and made his way to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, where a place already awaited him in the Grushnensky Syndicate. Vladivostok was a wide-open city then, a haven for the various corruptions of both East and West. Alexei started out as a bodyguard and common thug and quickly became known in the criminal underworld for his ability to kill a man with his bare hands. His favorite method was to seize the victim’s hair from behind, jam a knee in the small of the back, and jerk down with great force, snapping the spine as easily as popping the head off a shrimp.

Alexei was by now a large man, six feet three, 285 pounds. At twenty-five his black hair hung long and glossy to his shoulders; his eyes showed an utterly dark black, devoid of any light. He was not bad-looking in a thick-necked, brutal sort of way. And as it turned out, he possessed another valuable talent besides barehanded spine snapping: he was a natural at running whores.

Alexei’s bosses at the Grushnensky Syndicate recognized his potential and quickly put him in charge of a small stable of three young Korean whores. His character encompassed just the right combination of sensuality and utter cruelty needed for such work. The whores feared him for his sudden rages but loved him with equal fierceness in the way that such women love the men who exploit them. They did not cheat him, they were loyal, and with whores loyalty is the highest virtue. Four years later Alexei was the syndicate’s chief pimp in Vladivostok, controlling hundreds, mostly Korean girls under the age of seventeen. It was from one of his favorites that Alexei Smerdnakov acquired the nickname Aba Sid, though the reference — probably Russian sexual slang — is obscure.

A single Polaroid snapshot exists of him from this period. Alexei is standing naked and grinning like the devil in the big room of his apartment on Sudokhodny Street. His pale skin makes a stark contrast with the dark black scrawl of his tattoos; his penis, semierect, nuzzles his thigh like a grazing animal. On the wall behind him is a large velvet painting of a woman making love to a black panther. The beast’s claws are dug into the flesh of the woman’s breasts, but the expression on her face is sheer ecstasy. The whore who took the snapshot, a sixteen-year-old Korean girl named Kim Sung Kim, was found with her throat cut by police two weeks later in a pile of restaurant rubbish.

Directly following this grisly discovery, for reasons unknown, Alexei Smerdnakov left everything behind in Vladivostok and emigrated illegally to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. There he eventually claimed political asylum and became a citizen of the United States.

The central cell block had its own peculiar smell, which Martin hated — a stale, vaguely urinous odor, but urine mixed with booze and unwashed flesh and antiseptic fumes and laced with other less palpable odors: fear, cruelty, ignorance, despair. At one time or another over 50 percent of the black male residents of the District age seventeen to thirty-five passed through its scarred metal doors, sat on the plastic benches in the limbo of the holding cells, cigaretteless, pants drooping, no laces in their shoes, waiting for lawyers or bail bondsmen or a friend with cash, or waiting for no one at all.

At 7:30 A.M. on Tuesday Martin showed his badge and driver’s license to the guard at the front entrance, passed through the metal detector, signed in, and turned left into the long corridor that led to the consultation rooms. Halfway down, he passed a burly Hispanic man coming in the opposite direction. Martin was always oblivious at that hour of the morning, his higher brain functions still muzzy with sleep, and he brushed against the man’s shoulder without noticing. The man instantly spun around and caught him from behind with an arm around the throat. Martin squawked, helpless; it was a choke hold, illegal in many jurisdictions across the country. He couldn’t cry out because he couldn’t take a breath. For a moment panic blurred his vision.

“Federal marshal!” the man shouted in his ear. “You under arrest!” Then, just as Martin realized who it was, the arm fell away and the hallway filled with booming laughter.

“God damn it, Caesar!” Martin turned around, rubbing his throat. “That’s not funny!”

But it was funny, and Caesar Martinez couldn’t stop laughing. “You should see your face, you poor SOB.” He doubled over and slapped his thigh, and at last Martin joined him for a reluctant chuckle.

A few years ago, when Caesar was an investigator with PDS, the two men had worked together on a scandalous case involving a prostitution outcall service staffed with Georgetown University coeds. Martin’s client at the time had been a pretty young senior from a solid middle-class Boston Irish family, who in her spare time specialized in bondage and rough sex for three hundred dollars an hour. A powerful member of the United States Senate had been one of her regular clients. Caesar uncovered this tasty bit of information during a series of exhaustive interrogations of the other young call girl/coeds — all of whom at one time or another had tied the senator spread-eagled to a bed frame in the rumpus room of his Capitol Hill town house and penetrated him anally with a black dildo he kept in a velvet box for that purpose. In light of this information, the case against Martin’s coed was quickly plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, and she was able to graduate on time and with honors.

Caesar finally stopped laughing and squeezed Martin’s hand in a firm grip.

“How the fuck you doing, Wex?” he said.

“Busy,” Martin said. “How are the feds treating you?”

“Got a health plan, good benefits,” Caesar said. “I get my teeth fixed for free plus I get Columbus Day off. Better than that old freelance shit with the PDS.”

The two of them talked for a few minutes about their lives. Caesar had come over from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift of ’81 with nothing, unable to speak a word of English. Now he had eight years on his pension, a town house in Alexandria, a modest cabin cruiser docked on the Anacostia, and an attractive twenty-four-year-old wife expecting their first child. He was doing better than Martin these days.

“What about you?” Caesar said. “You still seeing that Dahlia chick?”

Martin shrugged. “Off and on,” he said. “No commitments, nothing like that.”

“Hey, man, keep it up!” Caesar said. “Once you walk up that aisle, they got you by the cojones!” The two men laughed. Martin shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other; he was on his way to see a client in the lockup, he said.

“Anything interesting?” Caesar asked.

Martin hesitated. “Yeah,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a homicide.”

Caesar whistled. “That’s not your thing at all,” he said.

Martin nodded. “You’re right about that,” he said, and he leaned close. “Tell me something. Who do you recommend in the office now? I have a feeling I’m going to need a really good investigator.”

Caesar thought for a moment. “Gotta be McGuin,” he said. “He’s great, the best. Don’t matter how strange he looks. The man’s always busy, booked up months in advance, but for you I’ll put in a good word.”

“Thanks a lot,” Marlin said, and the two shook hands again and parted.

Martin took his place on the hard plastic chair in the soundproof booth and opened his briefcase on the counter. The door was ajar in the corresponding booth on the other side of the thick Plexiglas, and he saw wavy shapes moving around in the big room over there like fish in a fishbowl. Finally a darkness blotted out the light. A huge man wearing the rough overalls of the D.C. Department of Corrections squeezed into the booth and with difficulty reached behind himself to close the door. Childishly drawn tattoos scrawled down the man’s arms to his wrists and up his neck to his chin.

For half a second Martin stared. The man filled the booth almost completely. He could have been a professional athlete except for his disturbing black eyes, which looked at once too intelligent and completely devoid of human sentiment, and his hands, which looked clumsy, pig-knuckled. His black hair, streaked with white, was cut close to his head; his thick sideburns were neatly trimmed into sharp points.

Martin heard the big man’s chair creak. He crossed his arms and sat back, waiting for Martin to say something. This behavior was surprising. Usually prisoners couldn’t wait to talk, to rush out with their story before he’d even introduced himself. Martin tapped his pencil nervously on the counter and glanced down at his yellow pad, the first page half covered with doodles. He never wrote anything important on the thing; it was a prop, an aide-memoire. Doodling was something like a vocation to him, one of his few genuine talents.

“You Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov?” Martin asked finally.

The man nodded, expressionless.

“I don’t know if you realize it, but you’ve been charged with first-degree murder in the death of” — he checked his page of doodles — “Katerina Volovnaya. Since it has been determined that you are unable to provide representation, the District of Columbia has—”

“You going to get me out of here, asshole?” Smerdnakov smashed his fist down on his half of the counter, and Martin felt the vibration through the glass. “This place stinks like horse-shit!” Smerdnakov spoke English with a Russian accent tinged with Brooklyn. His eyebrows moved dramatically when he spoke.

“I’m afraid bail is going to be out of the question, considering the charges,” Martin said. “Also, your Russian background makes you a risk for flight”

Smerdnakov poked a thick finger against the glass. “I’m an American citizen,” he said angrily. “I demand right to liberty!”

“Being a citizen is not the point here,” Martin said. “You probably still have family in Russia. From the Districts point of view, you could decide to pay them a visit tomorrow. Then they’d never get you back for trial.”

Smerdnakov flashed an ugly smile. His teeth were white and square, with narrow gaps between them, the teeth of a giant, teeth made for crushing bones. When he breathed, the prison overalls stretched taut across his chest.

“I have no family in Russia,” he said. “I got no friends neither. I got friends in Brooklyn. I want to go back.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened in your own words?” Martin said. “We’ll start there.”

The Russian sighed. “Somebody killed my girlfriend, that’s what happened,” he said. “Now they try to blame it on me because of some things I did in Russia a long time ago.”

Martin nodded, waited for more. When Smerdnakov didn’t say anything else, Marlin said, “I’m on your side here, Mr. Smerdnakov. I’m your defense attorney. I’m going to need details. Everything you can remember.”

Smerdnakov brought his face close to the Plexiglas screen. Martin could almost feel his hot breath steaming through the small holes, clouding the booth.

“Nobody’s on my side but me,” the Russian said. “Defense, offense, you’re all fucking lawyers as far as I can see. Who’d you suck off this morning, the DA?”

Martin was offended by this language. He looked down at his pad, doodled a stick figure clown holding a balloon, looked up, and tried again.

“I can’t help if you don’t let me,” he said wearily. “Try to calm down, and tell me what happened.”

Smerdnakov leaned back again and crossed his arms. “Okay, asshole,” he said. “I tell you once. Me and my girlfriend come down here from Brooklyn for a little fun, you know. We meet some Russian guys at this bar — and the cops already ask me, I don’t fucking remember their names — and these guys say, ‘Hey, let’s go dancing, I know a fun place.’ So we go with them and we dance and we’re down in the YIP room of this fucking club and we’re dancing and having a good time. So I have a couple of beers, and I need to take a piss. I leave my Katinka with these guys, and when I come back from the bathroom, there she is lying on the floor, my necktie is twisted around her neck, and she’s completely dead. Then the cops come and they put the cuffs on me and they say I did it, that everyone saw me. That’s all I know. You want more, fuck you, you go find out yourself.”

Smerdnakov stood up abruptly and squeezed out of the booth. Martin sat there for a long minute. Then he gathered his things and went back to the Moultrie Center, his mind working on trying to find a way out from under this case. He caught Tayloe in the hallway, brown bag in hand, on his way to lunch.

“Can I talk to you?”

Tayloe rolled his eyes. “How about after lunch, Wex?”

“I’m having trouble with the Smerdnakov case,” he said. “The defendant is completely hostile.”

“I’ll give you five minutes,” he said, frowning.

They went across Indiana Avenue to the unkempt little park in the shadow of the Superior Court building. Tayloe was famous for his frugal ways. He packed his own lunch and ate it on the bench out here every day, weather permitting. The two of them settled down, and Martin waited as Tayloe carefully laid his napkin across his lap and unwrapped his sandwiches, always the same: one mayo, cheese, and cucumber on potato bread; one mustard, cheese, and tomato on rye. Today there was also a bottle of Evian water, a pear, and a small Ziploc of trail mix.

“I see no reason to pay seven or eight dollars for lunch every day for a sandwich I can make just as easily at home,” Tayloe said a bit defiantly. Then he took a bite of his cheese and cucumber sandwich, chewed carefully, and swallowed. “You’d be surprised how much that adds up to every year.”

“About the Smerdnakov case...” Martin began.

Tayloe held up his hand. “Just let me finish my first sandwich before we get to it.”

“Yes, of course.”

Tayloe ate with maddening slowness. He took small bites and chewed thirty-two times, each time. Martin looked around, feeling uncomfortable and tired. This little park was depressing. The bushes were ragged, the grass patchy and yellow-looking. A drunk slept unmoving on the bench on the other side of a bronze art deco nymph feeding a bronze doe. Gilding hung in peeling strips off the nymph’s bronze flanks, her arms covered with creeping green corrosion. Rickety-looking scaffolding rose up the brick side of the Superior Court building next door. Built in the neoclassical revival style popular at the turn of the century, this structure was apparently of some historical interest. They were doing a complete renovation. Many of the windows of the upper stories gaped open, covered only with thin plastic sheeting.

Tayloe swallowed the last bite of his sandwich, folded up his napkin, brushed crumbs from his lap.

“All right,” he said. “What is it?”

Martin explained the situation. Smerdnakov was completely hostile, uncooperative, he said. Maybe it was a personality thing, but it wasn’t working between them, and he didn’t feel comfortable handling his first homicide with an uncooperative defendant.

“... and so I’d like to withdraw from the case,” he concluded. “Maybe you could get somebody else. Reeve loves to do homicides.”

Tayloe nodded and took a bite of his pear. He chewed and swallowed, then dabbed at his mouth thoughtfully with half a napkin.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Do you think you’re a very good lawyer?”

Martin was taken aback by the question. He didn’t know what to say.

Tayloe nodded and squinted up at the sky. “I’ll answer that question for you,” he said. “Personally I like you, I think you’re a nice guy, but let’s be honest, you’re a terrible lawyer. You’ve lost your last six cases. In fact, you’re the worst lawyer in the department. Worse in your own way than Genevieve was. If you want to keep your job — and believe me, there’s enough evidence to fire you easily tomorrow — you will not withdraw from this case.”

Martin was stunned by the bluntness of these words. He didn’t know how to respond. Half of him wanted to punch Tayloe in the face; the other half wanted to get up, run away, find something else to do with the rest of his life.

“W-what, w-why do you—” he stuttered. Then he stopped himself and caught his breath. “Okay,” he said. “You think I’m a bad lawyer. That’s your prerogative. Why the hell would you want to keep a bad lawyer on a homicide case?” But as soon as he’d asked this question, he had the answer. He looked over at Tayloe, who was smiling at him in a curious way. The man had just finished eating his pear; all that was left was the gnawed stump in his hand.

Tarragon was a chic little restaurant in a strange neighborhood, a sort of no-man’s-land bordered by the warehouses and abandoned industrial buildings of New York Avenue on one side and the Whitworth Terrace housing project on the other. Limousines stood double-parked at the curb out front; the drivers smoked and chatted idly with each other, their backs to the darkness. Valets in red jackets scurried out into traffic to take car keys from men in good-looking dark suits and women in spangled dresses with stiff, sculptural hair. The chef, René Balogh, had been named chef of the year by a noted California culinary organization. Reservations had to be made far in advance, and Dahlia Spears was always very thorough. She had called in July for dinner in September.

Things being the way they were with the Smerdnakov case, Martin would have preferred to stay home tonight, but it was hard to say no to Dahlia. Now he sat glumly across from her at the prominently placed table she had specified, on a raised area at the back of the room overlooking the other diners. The furnishings, mostly big, faux-Gothic pieces, looked as if they had come out of the House of Usher. The floors of the restaurant were done in a highly polished black tile; Martin kept waiting for one of the waiters to slip, food flying. The only good thing about tonight was that Dahlia would pay. They had attended law school together at American, but she had graduated near the top of her class, gone the corporate route, and was now a junior partner with Abel, Nichols & Feinstein, a firm that specialized in patent law.

“... at that party after the Gold Cup last spring?” Dahlia was saying. “You remember? That’s where you met Camilla and Tony. Anyway, last week, Camilla picked up and went off to Okracoke with Tim Lane, even though supposedly they weren’t going to see each other again. Not after...”

Martin hardly knew what she was talking about. He was preoccupied, not in the mood for light conversation. Despite her intelligence, in conversation Dahlia often lapsed into mindless chatter. All she needed was an occasional “unh-hunh” or a nod of the head, and she could go on for hours. But now she reached over and rapped Martin on the knuckles with the handle of her butter knife. “Hey, you’re not listening!”

“Sorry,” Martin mumbled. “Just tired, I guess.”

Dahlia narrowed her eyes. “Jesus Christ, someone might think you work for a living,” she said. “That was one of the reasons you didn’t want to go into corporate, remember? So you wouldn’t have to pull eighty-hour weeks.”

“This new case,” Martin heard himself say. “It’s a real tough

“You want to tell me about it?” Dahlia put down the butter knife. “Maybe I can help.”

Suddenly there was concern in her voice. Martin looked up surprised and studied her face. Dahlia was an attractive, confident woman in her mid-thirties with the blunt, practical haircut so popular with lady lawyers. She always seemed busy, happy, wrapped up in her life. But now he saw something in her eyes, an uncertainty he hadn’t seen there before. Maybe she was not as happy as she pretended. She had recently gained about ten pounds, which showed as a softening of the chin. She was getting older, and she lived in a beautiful apartment in a beautiful neighborhood — but completely alone, without love or even a cat. She had been married briefly in the late eighties to a Virginia hunt country heir who turned out to be a drunken idiot. There had been other relationships since then, a few serious, but she always drifted back to Martin in the end. They had dated off and on during law school, then drifted apart; these days they were old friends who still shared a certain intimacy. Sometimes they slept together, sometimes not, depending on her moods and whether Martin was dating anyone else, which was rare.

Now Martin almost told her everything, but he fought the impulse. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The usual bullshit. I’ll tell you some other time.”

Dahlia shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, and turned away to scrutinize the wine list, and there followed a bit of an awkward silence until the appetizers came. After that they were occupied by the food, and Dahlia’s talent for chatter returned. She talked about a couple they both knew who were getting divorced — they had seemed so much in love; they’d had a baby; then the wife started sleeping around — she talked about the weather; she talked about a movie she had just seen, about her job, which was boring, about her mother, a well-known eccentric, who had decided to marry an Arab met while shooting craps at an Atlantic City casino.

“That’ll be husband number six or seven for Mom,” Dahlia said. “I forget which. I stopped going three marriages ago.” She ordered another bottle of wine, and Martin drank and found himself actually being diverted by her chatter, and for a few minutes he forgot all about Smerdnakov.

“See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said as they stood outside at the curb, dinner over, waiting for the valet to bring around her Saab. Then without warning, she reached her arm around his waist and leaned up and kissed him on the lips. Much to Martin’s surprise, they ended up going back to her apartment in the Broadmoor and making love. It had been about eight or nine months since their last encounter. He’d almost forgotten what to do, what she liked. Her breasts were improbably large for her narrow frame; he busied himself with them while he remembered the rest. Afterward they lay together in her big bed in the dark and watched the reflection of the headlights of the cars going up Connecticut Avenue toward the Maryland line.

“You want to tell me about it now?” Dahlia said softly, just when he thought she was asleep.

“That would be a breach of ethics,” he said. “Not supposed to discuss cases pending in a lady’s bedroom.”

“Don’t think of me as a lady, think of me as a lawyer,” she said, and Martin put his fingers over her lips and could feel her smile. He understood now, without knowing how he knew, that he stood on a kind of threshold with her.

“Okay,” he said at last. “It’s not a pretty story...” And he told her about Genevieve’s getting fired and about the Smerdnakov case and his conversation with Tayloe of the week before.

“Maybe Tayloe has a point,” he said. “Maybe I am a lousy lawyer. Maybe I’ve been lazy or stupid or both. But there’s one thing I believe in, and that’s, well—” He stopped abruptly. Suddenly he felt embarrassed.

Dahlia squirmed with impatience. “Come on, Martin. Don’t stop there. What is it?”

Martin cleared his throat. “Justice,” he said. “Don’t laugh. I believe in justice. I believe that people are innocent until proven guilty and all that crap. So Tayloe gives me a homicide case, my first homicide case, despite my record, despite everything. Why?”

Dahlia didn’t say anything.

“Because he wants me to lose,” Martin said quietly. “Because someone, maybe even the FBI, called Tayloe and said, ‘Listen, we know you’re the public defender and all that, but we think it would be great if you could help us lock up this Smerdnakov guy and throw away the key.’ And Tayloe said, ‘No problem, I’ll put my worst man on the case.’ And that would be me.”

They were silent awhile. A loud siren started up from the fire station next to the Uptown Theater; bare seconds later the ladder truck howled off into the night. From somewhere in the great building came a heavy thump and the faint echo of laughter. Dahlia pressed herself close. Martin fell her breasts pillowing out against his arm. Her lips were a half inch from his ear.

“You want to get them?” she whispered. “You want to really get them?” Martin gasped as she reached down and took hold of him between the legs. “Then here’s my advice, one word — win.”

Staring down at his shoes, unusual two-tone wingtips in an extremely high state of polish, McGuin shuffled his way through the labyrinth of the PDS and presented himself at Martin’s cubicle about noon. He sat with some difficulty on a stack of document boxes across from Martin’s desk and, without lifting his head, raised a hand in greeting.

“I really appreciate this,” Martin said.

“I’m only helping out as a favor to Caesar,” McGuin said to his shoes. “If the chief hears about me taking a case out of turn, he’ll have my ass.”

“Of course,” Martin said. “I’ll do whatever I can to expedite the process. I’ve got everything you need right here...” He fumbled with the mess of papers on his desk and knocked the Smerdnakov file onto the floor. Documents went sliding across the brown carpeting, worn slick by years of lawyers’ leather soles. “Shit. Excuse me.” He knell and tried to put the documents back in order. McGuin snorted impatiently, his head bobbing like an apple.

Martin glanced over at him with a sheepish smile. Just having the man around was disconcerting: McGuin suffered from a rare physical disability in which the vertebrae of his spine immediately below the skull were fused together, causing his head to face directly downward. In conversation he compensated by leaning back as far as possible and rolling his eyeballs toward the bridge of his nose; talking to him was like talking to a turtle. Ordinary movements were difficult, and he was always bumping into things. Still, McGuin was one of the best investigators who had ever worked with the department. Maybe because he was always looking at the floor, he caught little clues — faint scuff marks, bits of hair, tiny bloodstains on a stair landing — that other people missed.

Martin finally got the file together and tried to hand it off to the investigator. McGuin shook his head, a curious side-to-side movement that seemed to involve his whole torso.

“I don’t have time to read the whole damned file,” he said. “I want to know what you know.”

Disappointed, Martin carefully put the file back on his desk and summarized the police report as best he could.

On the night of September 5 the defendant, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, was seen entering Club Naked Party at 9th and F Streets downtown in the company of the victim, Katerina Volovnaya, and a group of unidentified foreign men, probably Russians. Once inside, the entire party proceeded downstairs to the club’s VIP room, where they danced and drank vodka and beer for approximately an hour and a half. According to witnesses in the club, Katerina danced with Smerdnakov. Then for some reason a loud argument ensued, and he left her on the dance floor and went by himself over to the bar. She proceeded to dance with several of the men in their party in a very provocative manner, finally pulling the front of her dress down to expose her breasts.

At this point, witnesses said, Smerdnakov became enraged. Allegedly he dragged Katerina by the hair to a dark corner of the VIP room, removed his necktie, twisted it around her neck, and pulled it tight. This happened quickly; so much force was used that her esophagus was crushed in a matter of seconds. Smerdnakov let the body drop where it was and went upstairs to continue his dancing. He was arrested in the crowd on the main dance floor when police arrived thirty minutes later. The Russians who had come in with the couple left hurriedly by a fire door immediately following the incident and had not yet been located. The actual strangulation was witnessed by patrons and employees of the club. Police had taken statements from several of these witnesses.

McGuin didn’t say anything for a few minutes after Martin had finished his account. With his head bent he appeared to be meditating. He was an Irishman and like most Irishmen, a drinker. Martin had heard that he drank Guinness through a straw. Finally McGuin reared back and rolled his eyes.

“Are you aware the grand jury has handed down a murder one indictment on this?”

“That means nothing,” Martin smiled weakly. “You know how it is: the grand jury could indict a ham sandwich if it wanted to.” “Manslaughter might be a possible plea,” McGuin said, ignoring the stale joke. “But most likely you’re looking at murder two. The guy dancing afterward is going to look bad to a jury. Maybe you can say he was so drunk he didn’t know. Something like that. How drunk was he?”

“Not very,” Martin said. “Apparently he only had two drinks the whole time and appeared sober. That’s according to the bartender. Of course he had been drinking before. He may have been a little drunk, yes. But he wasn’t incoherent.”

McGuin wagged his head up and down, and Martin couldn’t shake the idea that here was a turtle wearing nicely polished shoes. “How about an insanity plea?” McGuin said. “Any history of psychiatric treatment?”

Martin plucked a bit of lint off the cuff of his shirt. He was getting a little annoyed with this approach. “I didn’t ask you up here for legal advice,” he said. “I’m a lawyer, you know. My client insists he’s innocent — as in not guilty. He says he was in the bathroom taking a piss at the time of the murder.”

McGuin let out a short laugh like an exclamation. “Huh! That’s a good one!”

“Nevertheless, that is our position,” Martin said coldly. “We’ve got to find witnesses who saw him go into that bathroom. We’ve got to question the witnesses who say they saw him strangle Ms. Volovnaya. Mr. Smerdnakov thinks it was one of the men they came in with. He hardly knew them. They had met just a few hours before at a bar in Adams Morgan.”

McGuin shrugged, and his shoulders folded up like an accordion. “So you actually believe the man’s innocent?”

“I do,” Martin said.

“Let me tell you something.” McGuin shifted uncomfortably on the boxes. “Do you know anything about your client?”

“I know what’s in the police report,” Martin said quietly. “I know what he told me himself.”

“Well, let me fill you in. This Alexei Smerdnakov’s a well-known son of a bitch, member in good standing of the Russian mob. Everyone, the FBI, the DEA, they’ve been after him for years.”

“That’s none of my business,” Martin said. “I’m his defense attorney, not his conscience. I don’t care what Mr. Smerdnakov did last year or the year before that. I care only what happened on the night of September fifth. And that’s what I want you to find out.”

When McGuin was gone, following his shoes into the corridor, Martin leaned back in his chair and stared out at the thick-leaved magnolia tree stirring in the wind. The happy congregation of birds was hours away, at dusk. It was quite hot for early October, in the low eighties. The air-conditioning in the building produced only a faint, cool rattle; the windows did not open. Just now crowds of interested parties — criminals, cops, lawyers — moved up and down the sidewalk past the hot dog stands in front of the Moultrie Center all ready to tell their own version of the truth about some terrible incident to a half-attentive judge. Suddenly Martin felt overwhelmed. Across Indiana Avenue, the scaffolding of the Superior Court, empty of construction workers for the lunch hour, stood idle in the sun.

On January 10, 1984, two Grushnensky Syndicate soldiers met Alexei Smerdnakov at Kennedy Airport. He carried an overnight bag with a single change of clothes and twenty thousand dollars in cash in a money belt around his waist. Two Cuban cigars were wrapped in tissue paper in the inside breast pocket of his thin coat. He had come from Vladivostok just forty-eight hours before: he couldn’t speak a word of English. The soldiers introduced themselves by their gang aliases — Borodin and Kutuzov — put him into the passenger seat of a battered 1972 Ford LTD, and drove out to Brighton Beach, breaking every speed limit on the way as a matter of principle.

There, in the small back room of a Russian restaurant called the Kiev, they gave him a MAC-10 semiautomatic machine pistol with two banana clips of ammunition. Then they brought out three bottles of vodka and a carton of Marlboros and drank and smoked and waited for darkness. It was four in the afternoon. At ten-thirty that night, vodka bottles empty, carton half gone, sky over the Atlantic showing a frozen black, Borodin led Alexei out the back door of the Kiev into a blind alley that cut down the center of the block. Rats scuttled about in the garbage here, foraging for restaurant scraps. Halfway down, a rectangle of faint red glowed from a small window in a steel door. An extinguished Chinese lantern hung over the blackened lintel.

Borodin motioned for Alexei to wait in the shadows, then stepped up to the door and pressed a buzzer. A full minute later a red curtain inside drew back, and while light fell across his face. Borodin smiled into the light and nodded. The red curtain closed sharply, followed by the sound of dead bolts unlocking. In the moment before the door opened, Borodin said to Alexei, “It’s very simple. Kill them all,” and moved out of the way.

Alexei made no sign that he understood these instructions, but when the door swung out on its heavy hinges, he stepped forward, lowered his MAC-10, and began to shoot. The doorman, a fat Mongolian, let out a sharp grunt and fell back in a splatter of blood. Alexei stepped calmly over his body into the shallow entrance hall.

At the other end stood a door padded in red leather and decorated with Chinese characters painted in gold. He kicked it open to reveal an ornate red and gold room in which about fifteen Chinese men sat around felt-covered tables, gambling at mah-jongg. No one had heard the quick burst of gunfire; loud Chinese rock music blared from huge speakers chained to the ceiling. Smoke hung in a thick cloud beneath red-shaded lamps. In the hands of the gamblers the ivory mah-jongg tiles gleamed like fish scales in dirty water. Hundred-dollar bills, dull green against the vivid green felt of the tables, were stacked in neat piles at the gamblers’ elbows. Two bored young women, naked except for garter belts, stockings, and spike-heeled pumps, sat on stools against the far wall. One smoked a cigarette and read a women’s magazine; the other, head tilted to one side, mouth open, appeared to be dozing.

Poised on the threshold for a long beat, Alexei carefully chose his first targets. The gun felt heavy and warm in his hands. The muzzle velocity of a MAC-10 is such that a man standing in the middle of a crowd of people can begin firing and all of them will hit the ground dead or wounded before they can stop him. The woman reading the magazine saw Alexei first and began to scream. As her scream reached its highest octave, he squeezed the trigger. The gamblers scattered instantly. They were unarmed; according to club rules, weapons were always checked at the door. Some tried to dive beneath the tables; others ran for another exit at the far end of the room, which had been locked from the other side.

Alexei spent the first clip, knocked it out, loaded another. Blood showed as a dark stain against the red walls, soaked into the green and blue pattern of the Chinese carpet. Soon the room was a mess of splintered wood and gore. Most of the gamblers were dead after the first clip, but a few were still alive, moaning in the general heap of bodies. The woman with the magazine remained on her stool against the wall. She sobbed without making a sound. Alexei walked around the room, casually putting a single well-placed round into each victim’s skull. The woman with the magazine was last. When he reached her, he smiled and brought the muzzle against her forehead. She closed her eyes.

Just then Borodin rushed in from outside. He gasped and choked back a mouthful of vomit. He hadn’t been prepared for the extent of the carnage.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” he shouted. “Now!”

Alexei looked up. The emptiness in his blue eyes made Borodin shudder.

“No,” Alexei said. “Get out if you want. To do the job right, you’ve got to kill the head.” He squeezed the trigger and there was a small explosion and the girl with the magazine jerked back and fell over sideways. Then Alexei turned quickly and let loose a spray of bullets that nearly tore Borodin in half: he walked over just to be sure and put another round behind the man’s ear. When he was satisfied that everyone was dead, he collected all the bills from the floor that were not bloody or bullet-torn and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat, and he went out into the alley and down to the back room of the Kiev, where Kutuzov was waiting nervously, glass of vodka in hand.

“Where’s Borodin?” Kutuzov said.

Alexei leveled the gun at his side and began to fire.

Copper vats of fermenting beer blew steam and bubbled behind a floor-to-ceiling wall of tinted glass opposite the bar. Young men in surgical green medical scrubs, bandannas tied over their long hair, worked purposefully behind the glass. They measured hops and barley into capacious bins, checked the aspirators and temperature gauges, scribbled their observations on tearaway pads of blank newsprint. A chalkboard announced the work in progress in large letters: NOW BREWING MARAUDER BOCK.

The assistant United States attorney for the District of Columbia watched the brewers at work, increasingly annoyed. He stood waiting for Martin Wexler at the long mahogany bar at the National Star Brewing Company Bar & Grill at 12th and New York Avenue. Martin was already a half hour late. The AUSA was a tall, distinguished-looking black man named Malcolm Rossiter. Today he wore a dark blue Continental-cut suit; his shirt collar shone startlingly while in the pleasant dimness of the big room. His tie of pale blue silk with yellow squares probably cost a week of Martin’s salary. A well-trimmed mustache presided over his upper lip. He was a busy man; he didn’t have the time to be kept waiting. But he smiled and nodded a genial greeting as Martin stepped up to the bar out of breath, nearly forty-five minutes late.

“Sorry I’m so late,” Martin panted. “My bus broke down, and I couldn’t get a cab to stop. I had to jog all the way from Dupont Circle.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Rossiter said, and he sounded sincere. “I haven’t been here ten minutes. What can I get you?”

Martin glanced at the beer menu and picked an India pale ale, which came served in a tall, delicate glass that looked like a dessert flute. When he tasted it, he grimaced. It had the green, bitter taste of most microbrews.

“Something wrong?” Rossiter asked. A flute of bock sat flat and nearly untouched on the bar in front of him.

Martin shrugged. “These brew pubs are going up all over the place,” he said. “I just wish they’d learn how to make beer first. Think of the people who make Pilsner Urquell, or the Belgians. These are people who have been making beer for hundreds of years.” Beer was one of the few things that Martin had strong opinions about.

Rossiter nodded blandly. He hadn’t asked Martin to meet him at the National Star to discuss the quality of the beer. He checked his watch and pushed his flute of bock aside.

“I’ve got to catch a train,” he said, “so I’ll cut right to the chase. We need to talk about the Russian.”

Martin set his ale on the counter and wiped his mouth with his knuckles. “I think you should know something, sir,” he said quietly. “I am not prepared to compromise my position on this case.”

Suddenly Rossiter was very angry. “I’m here talking man to man with you,” he said, and he was almost shouting. “I’m not talking legal ethics. You got that?”

Surprised, Martin didn’t say anything.

“This Alexei Smerdnakov, he’s an animal, a public menace. He’s a murderer, a rapist, a pimp, a pornographer, a drug smuggler, and whatever else. He’s got an FBI file like a brick. You should know that; it’s sitting on your desk. You’ve read the damned thing!”

“No, I haven’t,” Martin said.

Rossiter’s mouth dropped. “Why the hell not?”

Martin took a long draft of his bitter ale. The stuff was too carbonated; it burned going down. “Somehow an FBI file appeared anonymously in my box two days ago, like magic,” Martin said. “I don’t need to tell you how irregular that is. Frankly I was shocked. The FBI doesn’t release files unless the person in question is dead. Well, my client is not dead, and I’m not going to read the damned thing. I don’t have the time. I’m too busy preparing my defense. Mr. Smerdnakov’s past has no bearing on this case.”

Rossiter shook his head. “You know something, man? You’re weird.”

Martin smiled. “Probably,” he said. “I’m a public defender.”

Rossiter frowned and picked up his flute of bock and drank off a half inch. “You’re right,” he said absently. “This stuff is nasty. I’ll take Budweiser any day.” Then he turned to Martin. “Do you know why this man is availing himself of the resources of the Public Defender’s Service in this matter?”

“For the usual reason, I suppose,” Martin said. “He needs representation and doesn’t have enough money to provide an attorney of his own.”

Rossiter laughed. “Wrong again, my friend! Smerdnakov is the head of the third-largest criminal syndicate in New York City, neck and neck with the Galliani family. He’s got a corporate headquarters in Brooklyn, another headquarters in Vladivostok, according to Interpol, and no one knows exactly how much he pulls in a year. The FBI estimates his profits run into the hundreds of millions. But the guy is one smart bastard. He’s got it rigged so on paper he makes nothing, he’s in debt. He’s using the PDS because he wants us to know he can shit on the law whenever he feels like it! Get what I’m saying now?”

Martin thought for a long second. “Not really,” he said.

Rossiter sighed. “How many witnesses testified to the grand jury that they saw this man strangle his girlfriend?”

“I don’t have access to that information,” Martin said quietly.

“Well, I’ll tell you, my friend! Nine witnesses saw him do it, and you know how many witnesses are going to come forward with their story when it comes time to testify in open court? None. Exactly zero. We won’t be able to find them! They’ll be dead or on permanent vacation in Mexico.”

“That’s bullshit,” Martin said. “You believe that, take them into protective custody.”

Rossiter threw a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “Protective custody costs a lot of money, and it’s hard to arrange. There’s a cheaper way.”

“What’s that?” Martin said.

Rossiter straightened his tie and picked up his briefcase. “You’re a well-known bungler,” he said under his breath. “Do everyone a favor. Bungle this one.”

Martin watched him go. Rossiter walked quickly out through the etched glass door and had barely raised his hand when a cab was there as if it had been waiting just around the corner all the time. Marlin turned back to his ale, which he drank down quickly. The aftertaste was very similar to cigarette ash. To kill it, he ordered himself a double shot of Irish whisky and sipped slowly as the bar filled up with the after-work crowd, bright, young self-assured men and women in expensive clothes. How did they do it, go through the world with such certainty? He recognized a few faces from Judiciary Square but turned away before he caught their eye. A defense lawyer has got to believe in the innocence of his client, he wanted to say to them. No matter what.

Police cars sat double-parked down the center line along Indiana Avenue. A TV news crew was interviewing someone on the front steps. The satellite dish of its communications van reached sixty feet toward the sky, swaying in the wind at the end of its telescoping antenna like the nest of a large bird in a tall tree.

Alexei Smerdnakov slumped at the bare table in one of the consultation rooms at the Moultrie Center, hands in the pockets of his prison overalls, thinking about cunts. There were all kinds out there, cunts like flowers, cunts like a closed fist, cunts like a bunch of oily rags, cunts dry as dust. The plastic folding chair sagged under his weight. A buzzer sounded, the security door opened, and Martin stepped in, briefcase in hand. The Russian looked up, neither interested nor uninterested.

“Alexei, how are you doing?” Martin said cheerily. He put his briefcase on the table, withdrew his legal pad and two cheap plastic pens, and sat down. This was the first time he’d been in the same room with the man without a sheet of Plexiglas between them, and the experience wasn’t entirely comfortable. Smerdnakov’s physical presence was that much more intimidating up close. The muscles in his forearms bulged like Popeye’s; the tattoos looked deeply incised, black scars against bleached skin.

The Russian grinned, showing his giant’s teeth. “You ask if I am enjoying prison?” he said.

“Yes, something like that.” Martin swallowed nervously. He had the feeling he was in the presence of a wild bull. Show the wrong color and the bull would charge.

“In Siberia they put me in the hole for two weeks,” Smerdnakov said. “You ever been in the hole?”

Martin shook his head.

“It was freezing cold, and I was naked. Also, there were many” — he paused, searching for the word — “lice. You fall asleep, and they are covering you, sucking your blood. That was hard time. This is like a holiday.”

“Glad to hear you’re taking it so well,” Marlin said.

“But there is one thing I’d like you to do for me.” The Russian leaned forward, plastic creaking. He brought his huge face close and whispered the word gravely: “Cigarettes.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” Martin said. “It’s against the law to smoke in public buildings in the District of Columbia. Plus, if the marshals catch me giving you a cigarette, my career is toast. You’re going to have to wait till you get out of here to light up.”

The Russian slammed his fist down on the table. Martin noticed there were Cyrillic letters tattooed on his knuckles. In an instant his face had become an evil mask.

“Get me a smoke, you crawling little bastard!”

Martin flinched, but he managed to hold the Russian’s eye. “Are you finished?” he said, his voice wavering a little. “Can we discuss your case now?”

Smerdnakov muttered something in his own language and sat back and crossed his arms. “Lawyers, they are the same assholes wherever you go,” he said, and he spit on the floor a half inch from Martin’s shoe.

Marlin took a breath and composed himself. “Let me explain something to you, Alexei,” he said. “I’ve already taken a load of crap on your behalf. There are people who really want to see you go down. I’m the only thing that stands between you and a murder rap.”

Smerdnakov appeared not to be paying attention. He studied the sliver of sky beyond the thick glass of the gun slit window.

“Alexei?”

The Russian looked back lazily.

“I want a confirmation one last time. I just want to make sure you’re still committed to pleading not guilty. Because it’s going to be a real fight, I want to warn you. And it’s risky. Right now we might be able to do a deal, go for murder two, even manslaughter—”

“I am an innocent man!” Smerdnakov roared. “No deals!”

“All right, fine...” Martin patted the air between them with his hand in a calming gesture. “I’m going to need some answers on a couple of important aspects of your story we haven’t covered yet. This is not going to be pleasant, but I think it’s necessary, okay?”

Smerdnakov studied his well-manicured fingernails and did not answer. The nail of the pinkie finger of his right hand was about an inch long. Martin wondered briefly how he managed to keep his nails so clean and unbroken; then he pushed the thought out of his mind. He took a deep breath.

“Before the murder you and Ms. Volovnaya were arguing. What was that about?”

“When she drinks vodka, my Katinka she acts like a whore,” Smerdnakov said. “So we are dancing together, and she is dancing like a whore for everyone to see her body. I tell her to stop, she says no...” He shrugged, and his voice trailed off.

Martin nodded and added a locomotive and a big-eyed fish to the doodles on his yellow pad. “Okay,” he said without looking up. “I want you to think about when you found her on the floor. Tell me exactly what happened.”

Smerdnakov thought for a minute. “I come out of the bathroom from taking a piss,” he said, “and it’s a long piss like a horse because I was drinking beer, not vodka, and I see quick enough that everyone is gone. Katinka and the men we came with, they are gone. I am very angry at first, and I think, The bitch! She has gone away with them! And then I look around and I see a body lying on the floor across the room and I know somehow it is her. I run over and take her in my arms, and she is stone dead. Someone has killed my Katinka while I was pissing!”

“What about the witnesses?” Martin said. “The bartender and the DJ and the busboy and the rest, who have told the police they saw you strangle Ms. Volovnaya? What do you say to them?”

Smerdnakov hit the table again, hard, this time with the flat of his hand. “I say they are fucking wrong!” he shouted. “They got the wrong guy!”

“Okay, calm down,” Martin said. “Think about it from the jury’s point of view. How could they get the wrong guy, all those people?”

Frowning, Smerdnakov leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Down in this club it is dark, and there is much cigarette smoke,” he said at last. “Maybe these people, they saw me when I was picking her up and holding her in my arms, I don’t know. But I did not kill her! Someone else did!”

“So here’s the big question,” Martin said, forcing himself to meet the Russian’s eyes again. “Who did it? Got any ideas?”

Smerdnakov scratched his cheekbone with one beautiful fingernail. “Must be one of the men we came in with,” he said. “I think then they were new friends, but maybe they were old enemies. In my work I have many enemies.”

Martin let this comment pass. He studied his page of doodles again, adding a very carefully drawn spoon.

“Okay, so you find your girlfriend dead,” he said in a voice as completely without inflection as he could make it. “You don’t call the police; you don’t call the hospital. You go back upstairs and you dance for another half hour until the police come because somebody else called them. How do you explain that?”

“I tell you,” Smerdnakov said, “if you give me a cigarette.”

Martin sighed. “First of all, I don’t smoke,” he said, “so I don’t have any cigarettes. Second, as I’ve told you before, it’s illegal to smoke in public buildings in the District of Columbia. We’re talking a five-hundred-dollar fine. Now if you’ll—”

“You Americans are a bunch of cocksuckers!” Smerdnakov interrupted. “In this country any kid can pick up a gun and shoot another kid and get a couple of years on probation. But smoking is illegal, a big crime!”

“Alexei,” Martin said patiently, “we were talking about the dancing.”

Smerdnakov threw up his hands. “It is the way we are in Russia,” he said. “Only a Russian would understand this. Many terrible things happen to us: wars, famine, communism. We are used to such terrible things. We can’t cry every time somebody dies, or we would never be able to breathe for the tears. Stalin he killed forty millions! So we must remain tough, hard. My sweet Katinka is dead. So what do I do, cry? Maybe inside, but not outside, no! In Russia, in the gulag, I see many people die, men, women, children. I know I can do nothing to bring my Katinka back, she is dead. So I go upstairs to dance and drink and forget. The police, everything else, they come soon enough, no matter what I will do.”

Smerdnakov withdrew into himself when he had finished this speech. He crossed his arms over his chest, and his eyes went slightly out of focus. But Martin was excited. He felt Alexei had just handed him the key to unlock this case. He jumped out of his chair and paced the small room twice. On his second pass he paused before the narrow window that gave out on the Superior Court building across the street. A bit of sun had pierced the low clouds, and the peeling bronze nymph in the garden over there seemed to glow in a pool of her own mysterious light.

Behind him now, Alexei stirred, cleared his throat. “Come on, asshole,” he said, but this time his voice was wheedling, cajoling. “Can’t you get me a cigarette?”

The next afternoon, perched on a concrete planter in Judiciary Square eating a banana, Martin saw a man coming through the lunchtime crowds with his head down, staring at the ground as if searching for something precious he had lost. It wasn’t until the man got closer that he realized it was McGuin. Somehow, without seeming to look ahead at all, McGuin was making straight for him. Martin wondered how McGuin managed such feats of navigation until he saw something glittering in the man’s right hand. A small square of mirror. But that didn’t make the skill involved in just getting from point A to point B any less impressive: it must be hard seeing the world as an upside-down reflection.

“Tried calling you all day,” McGuin said gruffly. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Out of the office mostly,” Martin said, taken aback. “What’s up?”

“Next time, check your messages,” McGuin said. “We’ve got a meeting in a half hour.”

Martin looked at his banana, slightly confused. “You mean, right now?”

The FBI Headquarters building is an ugly yellowish concrete pile that takes up the entire block bordered by 9th and 10th and D and E. With its rows of honeycomb windows, it always reminded Martin of an enormous hive in which the bees make no honey and are better left undisturbed.

“What’s this all about, McGuin?” Martin said, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the entrance on 10th.

“You’ll find out in a minute,” McGuin said, and pushed him through the automatic doors and into the narrow arch of the metal detector. This device went off and before he was allowed to pass, Martin was forced to remove his watch, his keys, and loose change and then undergo a frisking from a stern-faced guard with a device resembling an electronic fraternity paddle.

Inside, the long, bland corridors were suffused with a hush and a stale, waxy smell that Martin associated with church. He had been here twice before on other cases, and each time, for reasons he could not articulate, the place made his skin crawl. Perhaps it was because in a certain sense, everyone was a potential criminal to the FBI. Somewhere, locked away in a vault below street level, there still existed top secret surveillance files on thousands of innocent American citizens, including such people as Hemingway, Greta Garbo, John Updike, the creators of Howdy Doody, Jimi Hendrix, Vanna White.

Martin followed McGuin into the big steel elevator, heavy and slow as an armored car, and up to a conference room on the seventh floor. Chairs upholstered in beige vinyl stood empty around a long metal table topped with plastic wood. On the wall a framed picture of J. Edgar Hoover and another of the president. In one corner, beside the American flag, a coffeemaker steamed quietly.

“Help yourself to coffee,” McGuin said, settling himself at the table. “It was fresh this morning.”

“You seem just a little too comfortable around here,” Martin said, and he sat down in a chair at the far end of the table from McGuin.

The investigator’s lip curled. “What do you mean by that, Wexler?” he said.

“I mean an FBI file on Smerdnakov appeared on my desk last week. Any idea how it got there?”

“No,” McGuin said, and he didn’t say anything more.

The two of them sat in strained silence for ten minutes. The sound of traffic heading up Constitution toward the vanilla ice-cream-scoop dome of the Capitol did not penetrate the fortress-thick walls. Martin couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched by surveillance cameras, and he began to sweat imperceptibly. Finally the door opened and a man in a rumpled gray suit entered the room, carrying two thick files bound with large rubber bands. He was tall and gangly, of an indeterminate age between forty and sixty. His brown hair was parted over the bald spot on top of his head.

The man put the files on the table and came around to Martin’s chair. “Mr. Wexler?”

Martin stood up and they shook hands. The man introduced himself as Agent Walters and said he was acting deputy assistant chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Division.

“That must be an interesting job,” Martin said, “but I don’t get why you wanted me to come in today.”

Agent Walters exchanged glances with the top of McGuin’s head.

“Please, sit down,” he said to Martin.

Martin sat down again as Agent Walters settled himself in the chair directly across the conference table. He removed the large rubber bands from the first file, opened the cardboard cover, shuffled through some papers.

“I’ll just take a case at random,” he said, and picked out a Xeroxed page covered with typescript. He glanced at it, then fixed his eyes on the acoustic tile of the ceiling. “Several years ago New Jersey police found the torso of a young woman in a storm drain in Secaucus, New Jersey. Her legs were later discovered in Westchester, New York, in some bushes beside a tennis court, and her head turned up in Connecticut in the men’s bathroom at a rest stop on 95 North. There it was, face up, staring out of the steel toilet bowl. Pretty public place to leave a head, don’t you think? A troop of Cub Scouts from Pennsylvania pulled in that morning in a bus. The kid who found—”

“Excuse me!” Martin interrupted. “Do you mind telling me what all that has to do with me?”

Agent Walters removed his gaze from the ceiling and fixed it on the vicinity of Martin’s chin. His eyes were red-rimmed and mistrustful, a dull, muddy brown. The eyes of a man who had seen far too much of the world.

“They found parts of the woman’s body in three different states,” he said. “So we were called in. We put her back together, did a little detective work, and dug up her rap sheet. Tatiana Ostronsky, former prostitute, originally from Minsk, in those days Soviet Union, now Belarus. Busted for solicitation and possession a few times in the eighties. Busted in ’91 in a NYPD raid on a Grushnensky Syndicate brothel in Brighton Beach and” — he paused for effect — “former mistress of our friend Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov.”

Martin pushed his chair back and stood up. “I thought we were heading in that direction,” he said. “Not interested.” He looked over at McGuin, who appeared to be studying the reflection of his face in the glossy finish of the table. “And thanks for all your help with the case, McGuin.”

McGuin didn’t respond to this sarcasm.

Agent Walters followed Martin to the door and out into the corridor. “Try to understand who you’re dealing with, please,” he said. “The man’s probably the most bloodthirsty Russian national since Ivan the Terrible.”

They arrived at the steel elevator, and Martin pressed the button marked DOWN. The elevator came; the steel doors parted. Agent Walters was still at his side.

“We’ve made a copy of the complete file for you,” he said, sounding a little desperate. “It took my assistant a whole day. That stuff we sent over last week was just a fraction of what we’ve got. I’ll messenger the new stuff this afternoon.”

Martin stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby. “Don’t bother,” he said. “I’m not going to read it.”

Agent Walters put his hand against the rubber bumper and opened his mouth to say something more, but Martin shook his head.

“Even the devil himself has got the right to a fair trial,” he said.

Agent Walters stepped back and the steel doors of the elevator closed and Martin began the slow descent alone.

Immediately following what became known as the Mah-Jongg Massacre, Alexei Smerdnakov decided to disappear. They had brought him over as a hired gun; hired guns are used once and thrown away. But he had hit them before they hit him, and now no one in America knew his face. There are worlds within worlds in New York City; Alexei chose one nearby. He left the Kiev by the back door, walked a mile down Brooklyn Avenue through the drizzling cold, and turned left on 227th Street. There, two blocks from the sea, he found a run-down motel called the SurfSide, done up in fading fifties turquoise and dirty sca-foam white stucco. A hand-lettered sign in the window in Cyrillic characters announced RUSSIAN SPOKEN HERE — MONTHLY RATES.

Behind the front desk a twelve-year-old Estonian girl with a missing tooth took his money. He paid in advance for the whole month, and she pretended not to notice the spattering of blood on his clothes. She had dirty blond hair and knowing eyes and was rather pretty in a prepubescent slut sort of way. One false tooth and one more year, and she’ll he ready to work for me, Alexei thought. He signed his name as Aba Sid, gave a fictitious address in Vladivostok, and went up to a room on the third floor. He took off his shoes and coat and lay on the bed and fell asleep.

The SurfSide was not the sort of establishment to bother a sleeping man who had paid for the month, and when Alexei awoke, it was nearly midnight three days later. He showered, put on clean clothes, and set about counting his money. He had gathered an additional fifteen thousand dollars from the wreckage of the mah-jongg parlor, bringing his fortunes in America up to thirty-five thousand. An unambitious man will squander such a sum all at once on expensive booze, gambling, cheap women, and cocaine or, worse, gradually on the necessities of living. Alexei was not one of these. His ambition was boundless. He was also very lucky, which in criminal matters is more important than skill or foresight.

As it turned out, a drunken Bulgarian pimp known as Mitya, loosely connected with the Grushnensky Syndicate, ran a string of whores out of the second floor of the SurfSide. The whores were more or less evenly divided among Chinese, Russian, and Dominican women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-eight. The Dominicans worked the side streets down by the promenade at 187th; the Chinese received customers in six rooms set aside for their use on the second floor; the Russians acted as high-priced call girls with beepers and knockoff designer clothes and rented out for fifteen hundred dollars for the evening, just like escorts in Manhattan.

Alexei only gradually discovered these details. The first six months of his residence at the SurfSide he spent quietly learning English in evening classes offered at the Brighton Beach YMCA. When he could speak well enough to be understood, he applied for his citizenship as a political refugee, which in that era of the Reagan presidency was swiftly granted. Meanwhile, he also became intimate with one of the Russian whores working for Mitya, a twenty-five-year-old former beautician who called herself Lomi. Alexei knew how to manipulate prostitutes the way other men know engineering or investment banking. Soon Lomi was spending all her spare hours on her back in his room, working his cock for nothing.

But Alexei had another agenda besides getting laid. Together one dark evening Lomi and Alexei planned Mitya’s murder. It was a simple enough matter. Lomi enticed the unsuspecting procurer to an empty room at the motel with some Colombian pink flake she said had been given her by a grateful client. They snorted the blow, and Lomi undid Mitya’s trousers and was performing fellatio on him as Alexei entered the room and drew the blade of a sharpened kitchen knife across the man’s jugular. Afterward they had to clean up the blood, using mops and buckets of hot water, and the indoor-outdoor carpeting was completely ruined. The Bulgarian’s death didn’t make any more of an impact than this. The operation at the SurfSide continued uninterrupted, now with Alexei and Lomi in charge. Lomi managed the girls gently and with tact, as only a woman can, and Alexei handled the muscle and the money. Business prospered.

At last, a year later, Alexei received a summons to the Grushnensky Syndicate headquarters, on the thirty-seventh floor of the Taft Building on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn, two blocks from the neoclassical edifice of Borough Hall. The Russian Mafia in Brooklyn was not run as a family like the Italian Mafia — with all the arcane loyalties and heated betrayals of family life — but as a cold corporate entity. The three men at the top, known as the Directors of the Central Committee, based all decisions on sound business principles: on statistics and market share and profit and loss. These men were not gangsters but businessmen in sober three-piece suits with M.B.A.’s, wives, children, summer homes in the Hamptons.

Alexei presented himself at the appointed time and was ushered into a plush conference room by a polite middle-aged woman with a stenographer’s pad. She sat in a chair in the corner and prepared to take notes. The Directors of the Central Committee were seated at the far end of the conference table, going through sales figures from the previous quarter over a quick lunch of roast beef sandwiches and borscht, ordered from a nearby Russian deli. The floor-to-ceiling window behind them showed the tall buildings of downtown: behind these, in the distance, the graceful brownstones of Brooklyn Heights and the buttresses and black cables of the great bridge.

The directors were surprised. They had expected the Bulgarian, and they studied Alexei with some suspicion. For his part he recognized their weakness immediately: these were men who had never gotten blood on their hands. They had never shot someone point-blank between the eyes before breakfast, never bludgeoned a woman to death and gone happily into the next room and raped her thirteen-year-old daughter.

The first director cleared his throat. “Where’s the Bulgarian?” he said.

“The Bulgarian is dead,” Alexei said.

“What happened to him?” the second director said.

“I killed him.” Alexei drew a hand across his throat to indicate how.

The third director said nothing.

“Syndicate associates can only be terminated under direct orders from the Central Committee,” the second director said. “You had no such orders. Since—”

“And just who the hell are you anyway?” the first director interrupted angrily. “We’ve never even seen you before!”

“They call me Aba Sid,” Alexei said. “I came over from Vladivostok last year.”

The first director leaned both elbows on the table. “We can have you sent back there in a box, you know. Just like that,” and he snapped his fingers.

“Give us one reason we shouldn’t put a bullet in your brain right now,” the second director said.

Alexei shrugged. “Take a look at the books. I’ve doubled your profit in six months. You’re making twice as much with me as with the Bulgarian.”

There followed some fumbling with papers; then the appropriate sale charts were produced. The directors put their heads together and muttered to one another in low tones. Alexei heard the faint tap of the calculator, the scratch of pencil on paper. At last the first director raised his head.

“You’ve done quite well, it’s true,” he said. “But what guarantees do we have that you will continue to produce?”

“Trust me,” Alexei said, and he grinned ferociously, showing his square, healthy teeth.

The directors decided to trust him, and Alexei went back to the SurfSide with their blessing. This was a fatal mistake. They had forgotten that the first business of crime is crime, not business. And the weapon of crime is violence, not bottom-line economics. Within two months all three of the directors were dead, along with their wives and children, and the Grushnensky Syndicate was left with a vacuum at the top.

In the yearlong gang war that followed, nearly two hundred people were shot, burned, stabbed, or garroted, a quiet massacre barely reported in the media. Only one grisly case made the cover of the New York Post, when parts of a young woman’s dismembered body turned up in three states. The woman was later identified as a Russian prostitute named Tatiana Ostronsky, also known as Lomi. She had been the mistress of the man who eventually emerged victorious in the struggle for control of the Grushnensky Syndicate, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov.

Martin fired McGuin the day after their unscheduled visit to the FBI and hired an independent investigator out of the department’s discretionary fund. The new investigator, a hip, articulate young man, no older than thirty, worked part-time for Hilbrandt and Harding out of Bethesda, Maryland. With the other part of his time, he was finishing up a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy and religion of the ancient world at Catholic University.

He showed up for the preliminary interview at Martin’s cubicle on Thursday morning, wearing a black wool suit with narrow lapels, a black turtleneck, and round, green-lensed sunglasses. A shock of white hair stood straight up from his scalp. He looked more like a rock star from the New Wave era than either an investigator or a philosopher. He introduced himself as André Drelincourt and offered a damp handshake as pale as his skin.

“Is that French?” Marlin asked.

Drelincourt smiled. “French Canadian,” he said. “My father was from Quebec.”

Martin had his doubts at first, but Drelincourt proved a quick study. He reviewed the PD case file and the police report overnight and called Martin in the morning with a plan.

“The first thing we do,” he said, “is go down to that club and talk to some witnesses. I want you to come with me. Is that all right with you?”

“Sure,” Martin said, relieved that the investigation seemed to be moving forward at last.

“I’ll tell you why I want you along,” Drelincourt said. “Are these witnesses credible? I can tell you from experience that club people rarely are. Since their grand jury testimony, they’ve had a chance to mull over their statements to the police. Talk to them now, and you’ll get a good idea of what’s going to happen on the witness stand.”

Drelincourt picked Martin up in front of the Moultrie Center in a vintage black Mercedes 280 SE convertible with the top down. It was a bit battered, but the red leather of the seats and the walnut dash gleamed with a rich patina only the years can give.

“Nice ride,” Martin said.

Drelincourt brushed his finger against the ivory knobs of the Blaupunkt shortwave.

“Fifty percent of investigation work is image,” he said. “You’ve got to make an impression, intimidate people a little bit. I can’t tell you the confessions I’ve heard from people sitting right there, where you’re silting, in the front seat. Get them in the car, close the door, drive around the block, and boom, they start spilling their guts.”

Club Naked Party occupied a Victorian building on a decrepit block slated for demolition sometime in the early 2000s. Once it had been the national headquarters of the Young Christian Woman’s Temperance League. A granite crane gripping a cross in one claw and an oak leaf in the other, the ancient symbols of the movement, still decorated the facade, but this teetotaling bird was grimed over with the dirt of a century and half obscured by a marquee that announced two words, NAKED PARTY, in giant neon script.

Martin and Drelincourt went up the front steps and passed beneath both the marquee and the motto of the YCWTL, carved into the keystone — Sobriety, Chastity, Honor — and entered a place where these virtues had no meaning. Aziz and Munzi Jehassi, the Lebanese brothers who owned the club, had gutted the period interior to expose the beams and brick and ductwork. The dance floor was tiled in patterned vagina-pink rubber blocks; over the bar hung huge Technicolor paintings of naked men and women fingering their genitals. Now empty, the place smelled of spilled beer and last night’s cigarettes. A young woman in a torn white T-shirt cleaned up behind the bar.

Aziz Jehassi, a thickset man with a beard worthy of the Prophet himself, sat at a table in the corner, going over the receipts. His shiny suit reflected faint light from the high windows. He sprang up, receipts flying, as Martin and Drelincourt came across the dance floor. When they were close enough, he grabbed Martin’s hand and shook it vigorously. He was always ready to help the police, he said. Drelincourt stopped a few steps behind and crossed his arms, impassive as Joe Friday interrogating a hippie.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” Martin said. “I’m not the police. I’m with the Public Defender’s Service.”

Jehassi looked confused for a moment; then he nodded. “We are happy to help any representative of the District government,” he said. “Please, what may I get you?” He waved at the bar, and the three of them went over and sat down. After some discussion, two Cokes and a ginger ale were brought by the young woman in the torn T-shirt.

Jehassi’s dark eyes glittered nervously; a few beads of sweat appeared on his upper lip.

“We are most anxious to clear up this matter,” he said. “For such a thing to happen at my club...” He wagged his head sorrowfully and pulled at his long whiskers.

“It must have been quite a shock,” Martin said sympathetically. “We’d just like to talk to some of the witnesses, if you don’t mind.”

Jehassi turned to the young woman behind the bar. “Daisy, go get them from downstairs!” he ordered in a voice used to command.

Martin opened his briefcase and prepared to interview the witnesses at Jehassi’s table in the corner, hastily cleared of paperwork. There were now only four: the VIP room bouncer, who was an ex-Howard University football player named Jason Thompson; Arturo, the Guatemalan busboy; the DJ, a young black kid known as Funk Master Swank, whose real name was Charles Emerson; and Daisy, the barmaid. Three other witnesses had disappeared the week before; they had simply failed to show up for work, and now their phones were disconnected. And the two patrons who had witnessed the crime were also gone. According to Drelincourt’s sources at District police headquarters, they had left town without forwarding addresses.

The interviews went better than Martin could have hoped:

“It was dark as shit down there, and with the strobe lights going, I couldn’t see a damned thing,” Funk Master Swank said.

Arturo pretended that he spoke no English and showed Martin his green card.

“I work legal,” he said. “I pay the tax.”

“Why did you tell the police you saw Mr. Smerdnakov strangle Ms. Volovnaya if you now say you didn’t see what you said you saw?” Martin asked Thompson.

The ex-football player thought for a few minutes, something like panic blooming behind his dull eyes. “I made a mistake,” he said finally. “It must have been somebody else.”

Daisy, the barmaid, was the last to be interviewed. She was an anorexic-looking young woman, about twenty-six, her blond hair cut short and pulled back with a battered rhinestone barrette. Six earrings hung from one ear, five from the other, a ruby stud glittered in her nose, but she had excellent bone structure. She looked to Martin like a concentration camp survivor who had been accessorized by Gypsies. Still, he tried to avoid staring at her breasts, reduced by starvation but undeniably pert, pointing up at him from beneath her torn T-shirt. She would be quite beautiful if she gained a little weight and fixed herself up, Martin found himself thinking.

“Like, I didn’t see anything, man!” she said before Martin could speak. “Nothing at all!” She swiped her thin hand through the air for emphasis.

Martin nodded and consulted his usual padful of doodles. This was getting a bit ridiculous. He added a butterfly with one wing crushed.

“That’s not true,” he said when he looked up. He noticed now that her eyes were beautiful. “You saw something. It doesn’t have to go any further than this table. But I need to know.”

Daisy shot a sideways glance at Drelincourt who sat on the banquette at Martin’s right hand, observing discreetly from behind his green sunglasses.

Martin turned to the investigator. “Just a couple of minutes, André,” he said.

Drelincourt nodded and withdrew to the bar. Now the young woman leaned forward.

“I don’t appreciate lying,” she said. “I’m an honest person, that’s me, I’m a straightedger, okay? But I’m scared. I’ll tell you what I saw that night. I saw that Russian guy strangle a woman. First he hit her, and like, everyone was horrified. Then he dragged her by her hair, by her hair, man, over to the corner, and he’s like, shaking her and no one does anything. But this is the VIP room, okay? The customer’s always right because he’s paying a fortune to be down there, and he’s got to know somebody cool to get through the door in the first place. And you know, all sorts of weird things go on; it’s what puts the naked in Naked Party. I mean I’ve even seen two men fucking a girl, you know, at the same time on one of the couches, like, right in front of everybody.”

Martin was shocked. “You mean, rape?”

Daisy shook her head. “No, I mean the girl was really getting off. Like orgasming.”

“Oh.” Martin felt his face go red.

“So here’s the deal. The Russian bastard hits her again, and then he takes his tie out of his pocket and puts it around her neck, and this girl, she’s so terrified, she’s not even moving, she’s like hypnotized. Then he starts to twist. I can see her eyes pop out, her tongue. I scream for Thompson to do something, but by the time he gets there, the Russian bastard has moved off, and the girl is dead. Lying on the floor dead.”

Martin held up a police mug shot of Smerdnakov. “This is the man, you’re sure?”

Daisy nodded. “That’s the motherfucker,” she said. “He came in with a bunch of real hard-looking guys. Russian Mafia, if you ask me. We get them in here sometimes; they road-trip down from New York in rented limos to party, and they drink vodka all night until they’re stinking drunk. Big tippers, though, I’ve got to give them that.”

“What about these other Russians?” Martin said. “What did they look like?”

Daisy hesitated. “They were all big guys, tattooed,” she said. “Which makes me think they were mob types. But what are you really asking me, could I have made a mistake? Got the wrong guy?”

“It’s a consideration,” Martin said.

“No,” she said, tapping Smerdnakov’s photograph. “That’s him. I’ll tell you now, but I’m not going to say it in court, understand? I’ll look right at the motherfucker and I’ll say, ‘Never seen that guy before in my whole fucking life’.”

Martin was surprised by this frank admission. He slipped Smerdnakov’s picture back into his file, tucked the file into his briefcase. “Let me ask you something,” he said, looking away, a little spooked by the fear showing in her face. “Why are you so willing to perjure yourself?”

Daisy leaned across the table, hugging her elbows. “Because someone called me one night last week at like, three A.M. It was a foreign-sounding voice, a guy. If I didn’t keep my mouth shut, he said, I’d he raped repeatedly, then hacked to pieces and my pieces would be left in different states up and down the East Coast. That’s what the bastard said, they’ve done it before, he said. And the next day you know what I found?”

Martin was afraid to ask.

“Half of a rat stuffed into my mailbox in my building. The other half I found in my locker right downstairs here when I got to work.” Daisy stood up abruptly. “Anything else?”

“No, thanks,” Martin said, and he tried to smile. “You’ve been a big help.”

She was a tough girl, Martin saw now, but not nearly as tough as she pretended. Tears were shining in her eyes. She turned and walked away from him with a nice swaying hip motion that wasn’t practiced or false but as natural as an island girl. He watched her sway across the dance floor, pick up a dirty rag, and resume her work behind the bar.

In traffic, in Drelincourt’s Mercedes a half-hour later, Martin couldn’t think with the top down. There was something about this case he wasn’t getting; he still couldn’t quite figure the right line to take for the defense.

“Do you think you could put the top up for a bit?” Martin said. “It’s the glare.”

“You’re the boss,” Drelincourt said, and he pulled over to the curb, hopped out, and released the top. When it came up to the pegs, both of them took one of the chrome latch handles and pulled it closed. They sat there for a while, the Mercedes ticking over quietly, waiting for a break in the rush-hour traffic.

“I told you they were slippery characters,” Drelincourt said. “Club people. I should know, I used to play in a band called Solon. Ever hear of us?”

“No,” Martin said.

“We were among the best of the second rank. No recording contract but almost a couple of times, and a pretty good following at the colleges. We worked the circuit from Austin to Athens for a few years, and we worked the beaches. If I had a dollar for every time some club screwed us over...”

He pulled into traffic now and pointed the star on the grill up 13th toward Logan Circle. “That girl, Daisy, told me she’s being threatened,” Martin said. “I’m sure the others would tell me the same thing if...” He didn’t finish.

Drelincourt offered a shrug that impressed Martin as particularly Gallic. “This Smerdnakov, everyone’s heard of him, right?” he said.

“I hadn’t,” Martin said. “Until a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, yeah, one of the biggest operators in New York,” Drelincourt said. “Russian Mafia. Nasty character. You know that by now, I hope.”

“Whatever the man’s done in the past is none of my concern,” Martin said. “I just want to get to the bottom of what happened that night. Daisy said the other Russians were big guys with tattoos. Well, Smerdnakov is a big guy with a tattoo. Also, she said he took his tie out of his pocket when he strangled her. Why was his tie in his pocket?”

“He was dancing, right?” Drelincourt said. “Probably got sweaty and took it off.”

“Exactly,” Martin said, excited. “And it could be the tie fell out of his pocket — I mean, they dance pretty vigorously at those places, don’t they? — and then someone else got their hands on it. I think we could be looking at a criminal conspiracy here.”

Drelincourt smiled into the faint blue striations of the windshield glass. “I’ve got to hand it to you, you’re really trying to believe. You really think he’s innocent? I mean, look where he comes from.”

“Like I said, you can’t try the man’s whole life,” Martin said wearily. “You’ve got to take one crime at a time.”

Drelincourt was silent as they swung into the mess of cars going pell-mell around the circle.

“The courts are in sad shape these days,” Drelincourt said when he had picked up 13th Street again. “Overheated, flooded, bursting at the seams. Larceny, rape, homicide, fraud, drugs, grief, misery. You know what I think? I think we need the Inquisition back.”

“You mean, like in Spain?”

“That’s right,” Drelincourt said. “Catch crime at the root, where it starts. Here...” He tapped his black jacket over a spot closely approximating the heart.

Martin’s apartment seemed empty tonight. He paced the single messy room, stood rocking on his heels in the alcove that formed part of the turret, surrounded by windows overlooking the traffic on Massachusetts. There was plenty of work to do, but he couldn’t concentrate tonight. He kept thinking about the way Daisy the barmaid swung her hips away from him across the dance floor, and he thought of her small, sharp breasts, her thin, hungry look. Suddenly, he got a flash of her on her back, legs open, abandoning herself to pleasure. What was the word she had used. Orgasming.

Martin went straight to the phone and called Dahlia. She picked it up on the second ring, but her voice sounded hollow on the other end.

“What are you, on speakerphone?”

Dahlia laughed. “No, silly, I’m taking a bath.”

“In the tub?” Martin felt a pleasant swelling between his legs.

“That’s right, I’m soaping my luscious curves as we speak.”

“How would you like me to come over right now and scrub your back?” Martin said, and it surprised the both of them. Usually she was the one to make the first move.

Dahlia hesitated; then she laughed again. “Honey,” she said, her voice an octave lower, “you’re turning into a little wild thing lately. Must be the moon.”

“Something like that,” Martin said. “How about it?”

“All right then,” Dahlia said. “Get your butt over here before the water gets cold.”

They made love once in the tub — a painful process, during which Martin hit his forehead on the faucet — and in the bed afterward. Then Dahlia got hungry, and Martin crawled out from between the sheets and went into the kitchen to make popcorn. He stood stark naked in her perfect kitchen, waiting for the kernels to pop. His feet were cold against the floor of painted Mexican tiles. The whole place was spotless, done in a trendy southwestern motif that he found vaguely irksome. A maid came twice a week; it was impossible to sit on any of the furniture in the living room without messing the slipcovers and sending Dahlia on a tirade. Usually he found it extremely uncomfortable here and couldn’t wait to leave, but not tonight. Tonight it seemed like home.

He took the bowl of popcorn, buttered and salted and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, back to bed. They sat there eating, absently watching an old movie on AMC with the sound turned off. It was a World War II drama, set in Italy with William Holden playing a war-weary soldier and some woman Martin couldn’t identify playing a war-weary WAC. These characters seemed to lose each other, find each other, and lose each other again. It was hard to tell much more without sound.

“Better this way,” Dahlia said. “Then we can make up the plot ourselves.”

“Right,” Martin said. “It’s about two lawyers falling in love during World War Three.”

Dahlia frowned. “How’s the case going?” she said.

Martin told her. “The guy’s a gangster,” he concluded. “Involved in some pretty bad shit. But I still think he’s innocent of this murder. I think he really loved the woman who was killed; he just doesn’t show it like everyone else. If you ask me, he was set up by one or more of the other Russians there that night. They were probably gangsters too.”

“Russian gangsters,” Dahlia said, shaking her head. “That’s what gets me. They come over here to our country, we let them in, and they proceed to make life worse for everybody. It’s not just the Russian gangsters, it’s all the other gangsters from all over the world who just have to come to the good old U.S.A. to commit their crimes. You want my opinion?”

Martin sighed. “Everyone’s a social critic,” he said.

“It’s our Anglo-Saxon legal system. English common law. It only works for Anglo-Saxons. Everyone else abuses the fuck out of it. Who the hell came up with this innocent until proven guilty crap? Thomas Jefferson? They don’t do it that way in France, you know.”

“Wait till you’re arrested for something you didn’t do,” Martin said. “Then call me. I think you’ll change your mind.”

She ignored him. “Every nationality gets the legal system it deserves. The Russians lived under totalitarian regimes for centuries. You know what they did to gangsters in the old days under communism? Hell, they just took them out back and shot them.”

Martin filled his mouth with popcorn so as not to say anything to spoil the mood.

“It’s a good thing you’re a patent attorney,” he said when he had chewed and swallowed. “Dahlia Spears, hanging judge.”

She laughed. She didn’t understand the seriousness of his commitment to justice, despite everything, despite the sad state of the world, despite even his own incompetence. He hardly understood himself. He could not express it clearly with words. It was a quiet feeling of rightness, that was like light hitting water, that was like those summer afternoons spent with his great-aunt Hatch on the porch of her old place at Oxford on the Eastern Shore when he was a kid, and a strange bird — Aunt Hatch always said it was a parrot, blown by storms somehow from the jungles of South America — squawking in the quiet gloom of the box hedge.

Selecting a jury for the Alexei Smerdnakov trial, Martin was more careful than he’d been with any other case in his ten-year career with the Public Defender’s Service. The voir dire continued eight hours a day for three solid days, with many bench conferences and hasty lunches, broke for the weekend, and resumed again on Monday.

There is a science to composing the most sympathetic jury, many competing theories, experts, demographics, prejudices. Martin had only one criterion in mind, and it was this: neither the juror nor members of that juror’s immediate family could have been the victim of a violent crime, ever. In the District of Columbia, a city with the nation’s second-highest murder rate per capita (exceeded only by New Orleans), this criterion proved impossible to meet. The potential jurors, mostly black and poor, reported one after another that they had experienced shootings, stabbings, violent assaults, sometimes more than once, that they had been witness to fratricide, parricide, rape. Day after day Martin was confronted with the absurd and numbing toll of violence in urban America.

Finally, on Friday, the fourth day of jury selection, Martin accepted twelve jurors and two alternates, only five of whom had managed to escape the urban holocaust. These were the core, these were the ones on which he’d concentrate: three aging black church ladies, a twenty-one-year-old white college girl, and a Pakistani man who managed a service garage for taxicabs in Mount Pleasant. One of the church ladies, a recently retired missionary for the African Methodist Episcopal Church, had been stationed in Ghana for the last twenty-five years: the other two lived alone and were unmarried. Since statistically most violent crime occurs at home, perpetrated by one family member against another, these ladies had managed to avoid any life-threatening incidents by remaining single. The college girl was a Mormon from Scipio, Utah, a little town in the middle of that distant state where children played barefoot in the dirt streets on Saturday night and no one locked his door. The Pakistani, a naturalized citizen, barely spoke English. It was possible that he hadn’t entirely understood Martin’s questions during the examination period.

The other seven jurors — two unemployed black males; a Hispanic female who ran a housecleaning service; two senior citizens, both ex-career civil servants, both white; a Korean-American waitress; a young white male, marginally employed in office temporary work who described himself as “Writer” on his questionnaire — all had been brutalized at some time or another in the past, but not seriously and not in the last five years. This was the best Martin could do.

At the end of the day Martin felt drained. He had that dry taste at the back of his throat that can only be remedied by a cold beer. He took the elevator up to the fourth floor of the Moultrie Center and convinced Jacobs and Burn to join him for happy hour at the D.C. Bar. Because of the high-profile nature of the Smerdnakov case, Marlin’s status had improved somewhat around the office. His face had not yet appeared on the evening news or in the papers, but there was a feeling that it would. Even if he lost — the certain outcome, it was generally agreed — the case would probably help his career. Also, Martin was known to be working hard on this one, pursuing every angle to prove his client’s innocence.

“Wex is wasting his time if you ask me,” Burn said to Jacobs when Wexler left them together at the bar to use the bathroom. It was just after six-thirty, and the place was crowded with attorneys and paralegals from Judiciary Square. “I feel sorry for the bastard. The spotlight’s right on him now, and he’s going to melt like an ice cube.”

Jacobs grunted. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said.

“You’re shitting me,” Burn said. “Think what happened to Genevieve. Wex is going to be defending a monster, a public menace. If he weren’t such a fuckup, Tayloe wouldn’t have given the case to him in the first place. He’s going to lose big, and that’s just going to confirm his status as a legal idiot. Good for the community, I suppose. Bad for old Wex.”

“You could be right about that.”Jacobs nodded.

Always a quick urinator, Martin got back in time to catch the last part of these comments.

“Thanks for the confidence, guys,” he said as he stepped up to the bar.

Jacobs stared down into his mug of Bud Lite, embarrassed. Burn didn’t say anything.

“Sorry, Wex,” Burn said at last. “But you’re the first to admit what a crappy attorney you are.”

Wex straddled his stool again. He was silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat.

“Yes,” he said. “I was a crappy attorney, but not anymore. There’s something about this case. I feel I’m doing the best work of my life. What the hell can you say about a dognapper caught with a poodle in his knapsack or a prostitute caught fucking an underage kid in the back of a van in the school parking lot? That’s the usual fare for me. This is totally different.”

Jacobs looked up. “How so?”

Martin smiled. “You heard it here first. My client’s innocent.”

Jacobs and Burn exchanged uneasy glances.

“You don’t mean you really believe that?”Jacobs said.

“I do,” Martin said. “Or I’d withdraw from the case.”

“Like I was saying to Jake here,” Burn said, “the pressure’s driven you crazy. Go to Tayloe before it’s too late! Get on your knees and beg for your old cases back!” This was meant as a joke, but it came out wrong.

Martin put down a ten-dollar bill, more than enough to pay for his Budweiser, made his excuses, and left them sitting at the bar. Outside, the light was fading in the sky over the old Pension Building. The terra-cotta army, frozen in rank, changeless, resolute, marched lockstep along the pediment into the shadow of coming night.

A swollen red gash taped together with three paper stitches zigzagged up Smerdnakov’s forehead, making him look a little like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. A deep purple bruise extended across his left cheek. Martin’s first thought when he came into the consultation room was: That’s not going to look good in court, then he fell ashamed of himself.

“How did it happen?” he said as he sat down at the table.

“Got a cigarette, asshole?” Smerdnakov said, ignoring the question. It was his standard greeting.

Martin shook his head, “Not till this trial’s over,” he said. “When you get out of here, I’ll buy you a whole carton of Marlboros.”

“Prick,” the Russian said. “Fucking asshole! One day I’m going to rip your head off.”

“Great,” Martin said, unimpressed. “Better wait till after the trial. Why don’t you tell me about those?” He gestured toward the Russian’s battered face.

Smerdnakov shrugged. “Some niggers tried to fuck me up the ass,” he said. “In the shower. It’s not about love, you know; it’s about power.” He began to cackle like a madman.

“Do you need a doctor?” Martin said, concerned.

“Don’t worry, prick,” Smerdnakov said. “I’m not the one in the hospital. Two poor niggers got their heads smashed in.”

“We’ll have you put in isolation,” Martin said. “That way you’ll be safe until the trial.”

“No way,” the Russian said. “If they try to fuck me again, I’ll kill them. Want to know something about me?”

Martin looked at him blankly.

“I’m fucking crazy. I’m completely insane.” He began to cackle again, and the cackling rose to a maniacal sort of laugh.

Martin cringed inwardly. All at once he could imagine Smerdnakov murdering innocent children, tearing the heart out of someone and eating it, but he pushed these unproductive thoughts out of his mind. Better to think of the emotional vacancy and sociological conditions that produced the cruelty, the violence. Suddenly he saw a stark room, filth on the floor, so cold that breath steamed in the air. A young boy, naked, is tied to a metal chair. A man in the green and red uniform of the old Soviet police enters, takes off his coat, rolls up his sleeves, removes his thick leather belt, all without uttering a single word. The boy begins to wail before the first blow hits the flesh of his back. The cold of course makes it worse...

Martin passed a hand across his brow as if to banish such cruelties from his imagination. He knew one thing for certain: injustice in the past could only be expiated by justice now.

“Listen to me, Alexei,” he said, his voice serious. “We’ve only got three days till the trial. I don’t want anything to happen to you in the meantime, okay? So stay out of fights: don’t do anything stupid. I think we’ve got a decent case here if you’ll just work with me.”

The Russian was surprised for the briefest instant. He glanced out the narrow window, glanced back.

“Why the hell do you care what happens to me?” he said at last.

“It’s very simple,” Martin said patiently. “I’m your lawyer.”

They spent the next two hours going over last details for the trial. Smerdnakov’s attitude puzzled Martin. For someone who might be facing life in prison, or worse, he seemed utterly detached from the consequences.

Martin tried to describe this detachment to Dahlia later, as they lay together in bed. The case had brought them closer, though Martin couldn’t exactly say why. He had hardly spent a night in his own apartment in the last three weeks.

“I keep getting the feeling that the man’s playing a game,” Martin said, “and that I’m a fool for going along with it.”

“You’re only a fool if you’re putting in all this work to save his ass and you believe him to be guilty,” Dahlia said. “If you think he’s innocent, then it’s worth it.”

Martin rolled over and put a hand against the tender skin at the side of her neck. “My career has been a joke until now,” he said quietly. “Everyone knows that, especially the guys at the office. I’m staking everything on Alexei’s innocence. Whatever else he may have done, I know he did not commit this crime.”

Dahlia was moved by the emotion in Martin’s words. For once she didn’t come back with a wisecrack or an ironic comment. She took him in her arms and they made love very tenderly and it lasted a long time. Afterward Martin lay awake in the dark as Dahlia slept. He couldn’t sleep, but not from anxiety or fear. He wanted to savor the moment: he felt exalted; he felt loved.

The morning of the trial was clear and cold for late October. In forty-eight hours the temperature had dropped nearly fifty degrees from the low eighties to the mid-thirties. Such drastic changes are common in the capital, where the seasons can pass one to the other over the course of a single night. Martin awoke shivering at 5:25 A.M. of the digital clock and couldn’t get back to sleep. He dragged his overcoat out of the closet, threw it over his shoulders, and walked the apartment until dawn. He could feel the lid lowering, the pressure increasing. He sat on the couch to go over some last notes; then he fell asleep and woke up with just forty-five minutes to shower, shave, and make it to the courtroom.

He performed his ablutions in a dead panic, shaved, dressed without wounding himself too badly, and, as luck would have it, caught a cab for Judiciary Square right at his front door. But he was stopped on the steps of the D.C. Superior Court by a reporter and a camera crew from News Channel 8. The reporter, a fresh-faced young Chinese woman, successfully blocked his passage. The camera operators were burly, squat, hairy men wearing battery-pack bandoliers around their thick chests like Mexican revolutionaries. Out of breath, Martin could barely speak.

“Please,” he gasped. “I’m really late.”

The video camera was whirring. He could see the reflection of his head, bigger than life on the face of the assistant peering into the monitor.

“Kate Chu, Channel Eight news,” the reporter said, jabbing the microphone at his nose. “What’s your assessment of Mr. Smerdnakov’s chances for acquittal?”

“No comment,” Martin said because he had heard other people say this on TV, and he lunged past her up the steps beneath the scaffolding and into the building.

The D.C. Superior Court, circa 1902, had been declared a historic landmark and was still undergoing a slow, painstaking renovation after two years of costly work. Space restrictions at the Moultrie Center forced its use now before completion, and the ornate interior presented a confusion of workers and plastic sheeting. The upper floors were as yet incomplete, their windows open to the elements; yellow police tape closed off the great staircase. Historic courtroom number one, however, had been finished just days before; the Smerdnakov case would be the first to use it since the trial of University of Maryland basketball star Bhijaz Dalkin for possession of crack cocaine. The interior of this room was beautiful, all polished wood and brass fixtures, and smelled of new paint and industrial glues. The carpet, done in a design that repeated the great seal of the District of Columbia against a green background, felt incongruously lush beneath Martin’s feet as he stepped through the heavy bronze-faced doors.

He hurried up the long central aisle toward the bench just as Judge Yvonne Deal was taking her seat. At seventy-two she was a prominent and respected member of the District’s black aristocracy. A former friend of Martin Luther King’s, she had marched on the Freedom Trail, been attacked by dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, teargassed in Selma. Martin knew her tough-as-nails reputation, her history of severity in sentencing violent criminals. Today her enveloping dark robes were set off by an outrageous curly silver wig. A pair of Emmanuelle Khanh eyeglasses with huge gold frames made her look like a wizened, intelligent insect.

“Glad you could make it, counselor,” she said, when Martin took his place at the defense table. “If you keep us waiting again. I’ll find you in contempt, understand?”

Not a good way to start any trial. Martin apologized, muttered something about being stuck in traffic, and fumbled to open his briefcase. The first thing he saw was the top sheet of his legal pad, now completely covered in doodles of all description. He glanced over at Smerdnakov. The Russian was wearing the same mauve Armani suit he had been wearing the night of the murder, matched rather ridiculously with one of Martin’s own conservative lawyer-stripe ties. Smerdnakov’s own tie, a gaudy hand-painted number, had been confiscated as People’s Exhibit Number One.

“Courage,” Martin whispered.

The Russian glared as if he had just been insulted. “You are an asshole,” he said, loud enough to be heard by spectators in the front row of the gallery. Then he turned his impassive gaze toward the newly cleaned stained glass window behind the judge’s bench, a brilliant green, yellow, and red rosette portraying George Washington dressed in a toga ascending into heaven.

Martin took another moment to get his papers together and managed a glance at the prosecution table: representing the District of Columbia, Assistant United States Attorney Malcolm Rossiter, flanked by two bright-eyed young lawyers. The first, an attractive young blond woman wearing an impeccable blue suit; the second a thin young man with skin while as a sheet of Xerox paper. New faces to Martin; probably fresh out of Georgetown Law.

Judge Deal called the courtroom to order. The court reporter touched her fingertips to the keys of her machine, which made a quick ratcheting sound. The court clerk rose from his chair beside the judge’s bench. He was a paunchy, pink-faced man with black hair and sideburns and bore a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley in his fat period.

“Case number F-four-zero-four-five dash nine-nine, the United States versus Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, will come to order,” he intoned. “The charge is murder in the first degree.”

“Are the principals ready to proceed in this matter?” Judge Deal asked.

“The government is ready, Your Honor,” Rossiter said, rising from behind the prosecution table with a dignity Martin knew he would never be able to muster.

Martin stood and took a deep breath. “The defense is ready,” he said.

Judge Deal studied him critically for a beat through her bug glasses; then she looked down at the papers on her bench. “Does the plea of not guilty stand?”

“It docs, Your Honor,” Martin said.

At this a faint gasp went up from the gallery, now nearly full of journalists and other lawyers who had dropped by to hear the opening arguments.

“Order!” Judge Deal called out sharply; then she turned to the court clerk. “You may proceed with the swearing in of the jury.”

Martin watched carefully as the members of the jury stood in a body, raised their right hands, and repeated the oath. As they mumbled the familiar words, he studied their contrasting faces — black, white, tan, young, old, male, female, American, foreign — and he felt an emptiness in his gut where certainty should be. This wasn’t a jury; it was the Tower of Babel! How could such a disparate group reach a consensus on the innocence of his client? Why had he chosen them in the first place? He couldn’t remember now.

Then the jurors sat down again, and Judge Deal instructed the prosecution to proceed with opening statements. Rossiter proved to be a deliberate and repetitive speaker. He made his points forcefully and then made them again, almost exactly as he had made them the first time. The defendant, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, was a notorious gangster, a violent man whose activities were well known to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, he told the court. Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, the defendant, alias Aba Sid, was an infamous racketeer, well known to law enforcement officials.

Martin should have objected strenuously both times to this statement, but he did not. He was too busy watching his core jurors. One of the church ladies was already asleep. The other two seemed to be studying the ends of their noses. The Pakistani garage manager looked confused. Only the college girl — Marlin checked his jury sheet — Denise Wheeler, seemed to be paying attention. She sat forward, elbows on the railing, eyes fixed on the prosecutor. Every now and then, as Rossiter plodded along, she would look over at Smerdnakov, impassive and solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, sitting in his low-backed chair at Martin’s side.

The prosecution’s statement proceeded exactly as Martin had expected. Rossiter followed with a brief overview of the case. The United States would produce witnesses, he said, who had seen the defendant strangle Ms. Volovnaya at Club Naked Party. The United States was also in possession of the murder weapon, a necktie that witnesses would identify as belonging to the defendant, upon which had been found bits of skin and hair. DNA analysis proved the skin and hair had come from both the defendant and victim.

“... the United States intends to show much more than this!” Rossiter said, his voice ascending to a dull but forceful monotone. “We will show that not only did the defendant murder Ms. Volovnaya, but he fell absolutely no remorse after he had committed this heinous crime. For as she lay dead, murdered, on the floor, the defendant proceeded upstairs to continue his dancing. That’s right, he danced with joy, with abandon, until police arrived to place him under arrest for murder.”

When Rossiter sat down, an appreciative silence filled the courtroom. The gallery was now quite crowded. The only free seats were at the very back of the room. In position on an end seat directly behind the defense table, the sketch artist from the Washington Post had just brought out her pad and box of colored chalks.

“Mr. Wexler?” Judge Deal said. “Is the defense ready for opening statements?”

Martin nodded, stood, and approached the jury. He buttoned his jacket, unbuttoned it. He scratched the back of his head, crossed his arms, and appeared lost in thought. He’d practiced every gesture beforehand, first in his bathroom mirror, then with Dahlia as a coach.

“If I seem a little preoccupied this morning,” he said, “it’s because I am. I am preoccupied by this case! Never in all my years as a public defender have I seen a man who looks so guilty, who so readily fits the image we have of a guilty man, who—” He interrupted himself and swung toward Smerdnakov. “Look, what do you see? A thug, a bruiser, right? Look at his face! A known criminal, the prosecution says! But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this man is innocent of the crime he is accused of today! Indeed, here is a man devastated by the loss of a woman he dearly loved, a victim of circumstances beyond his control, a man set up by dastardly companions to take the fall for a crime he did not commit...”

Martin went on in this vein for some time. Two hours later, during the lunch recess, he couldn’t remember exactly what he had said, but he was certain of its effectiveness. He had watched his core jurors watching him. The church ladies had woken up; Denise Wheeler’s lips had parted in eagerness to hear every word; even the Pakistani had looked less dazed, all of them gripped by a tentative belief in the inherent goodness of mankind — and hence the innocence of the defendant — that at some point grips all jurors hearing a successful defense, that is as catching one to the other as the flu.

Over the course of the next three days the prosecution did its best to punch holes in the presumed innocence of Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov.

First, it brought out material witnesses — Aziz Jehassi among them — to establish the Russian’s presence at the club. Martin cross-examined Jehassi, who was extremely nervous on the stand. The club owner stuttered over his replies, his face flushed; great stains slowly appeared under the arms of his silk jacket.

“When my client and Ms. Volovnaya entered your club, were they alone or in the company of others?” Martin asked.

“No, no,” Jehassi said. “They were not alone. They were with a large party.”

“I see,” Martin said. “The members of this party, how would you describe them?”

Jehassi thought for a minute. “They were males,” he said. “Well dressed, big, strong-looking.”

“Russians?”

“Yes,” Jehassi said. “I think so.”

“Objection!” The blond woman who was Rossiter’s assistant rose out of her seat, a mechanical pencil in her right hand. “Calls for speculation.”

“Sustained,” Judge Deal said. “Rephrase, Mr. Wexler.”

Martin thought for a moment. “How would you describe the behavior of these men?”

Jehassi licked his lips. “They were very loud, rowdy. They drank a lot of vodka.”

“Were they speaking English?”

“No, not English.” Jehassi shook his head. “It sounded to me like Russian.”

The day after the Jehassi cross-examination, the prosecution trotted out its expert witnesses. Dr. Gopi Annan, pathologist, testified on the cause of death. Dr. Albert Weisel, a specialist in DNA analysis, testified that skin and hair samples on the tie matched skin and hair samples taken from both the defendant and the victim.

“The preponderance of epidermal and hair follicle samples is identical to similar samples scraped from the skin of the defendant,” Dr. Weisel said. “This would be consistent with the prosecution’s contention that the item of neckwear in possession of investigators had been worn by the defendant several times before the evening in question. Also, epidermal samples matching the victim’s DNA showed stresses consistent with extreme lateral pressure, or, if you will, blunt-force trauma to the esophageal region. In the layman’s term, strangulation.”

The jurors looked on blankly as Dr. Weisel concluded his testimony. Martin chose not to cross-examine. From experience, he knew that juries have a limited tolerance for aggressive cross-examinations. Attorneys who constantly question witnesses’ testimony are seen as bullies or worse. He had decided to save his aggressive behavior for the most damaging aspect of the trial, the presentation of the eyewitnesses.

On day three of the prosecution’s case, Martin girded himself for the onslaught of upstanding and credible men and women who would solemnly swear they had seen Alexei Smerdnakov strangle Katerina Volovnaya at Club Naked Party. To his great surprise, the first witness — usually the strongest for the prosecution — was a hard young woman named Bunny Celeste Williams, whom he immediately recognized as a former prostitute unsuccessfully defended by Jacobs on a corruption of minors charge a few years before. She had gone under another name in that case, but the change had not altered her dubious character. At best Bunny Celeste Williams was a barely credible witness for the other side; at worst she was a disaster. Martin couldn’t believe his good fortune. Their star witness was a convicted criminal, a woman who had once acted as a recruiter of underage girls for the sex trade and — if memory served him correctly — a recovering heroin addict.

Martin squirmed through Rossiter’s examination of this witness, trying to conceal his glee. He listened as Bunny described how she was sitting at the bar in the VIP room that night, waiting for a friend. How she had seen the defendant assault the victim, then drag her to a darkened corner of the club, where he then strangled her to death. Smerdnakov appeared nervous during this testimony, in marked contrast with his cool demeanor up to this point. Martin thought his lapse in composure odd but didn’t have time to consider the matter. When Bunny stepped down from the witness box, it was 11:45 A.M. Martin rose and asked Judge Deal for an early recess for lunch. He needed time to prepare his cross-examination, he said.

Judge Deal wagged her silver wig in Martin’s direction. “Are you sure it’s not because you’re itching to get your hands on a Big Mac and fries, Mr. Wexler?” she said, and there was a litter of laughter from the gallery.

Martin took this ribbing with good humor. “If I have time for an apple over the next hour and a half, Your Honor, I’ll be lucky,” he said. Judge Deal granted the recess, and Martin ran across the street to Jacobs’s cubicle. One arm in the sleeve of his suit jacket, Jacobs was preparing to head out for lunch.

“Gotta run,” he said, fitting his arm through the other sleeve. “Love to chat but—”

“Just two minutes of your time,” Martin said. “I need the case files for Bunny Celeste Williams. You remember her?”

“No,” Jacobs said.

“Sorry,” Martin said. “Her name wasn’t Bunny Celeste Williams in those days. She was the one they caught out at Marshall High—”

“Oh, yeah,” Jacobs interrupted, “that slut. What do you want with her?”

Martin smiled. “I’m looking for a hot date tonight.”

He read the files at Jacobs’s desk, the sordid details coming back to him.

Six years ago Ms. Williams had been arrested on the premises of John C. Marshall High School in Falls Church while attempting to recruit underage girls for what she said was a talent agency. The scheme was ancient, old as the hills. The girls were promised lucrative careers as fashion models and actresses and lured across the District line, where they were offered drugs and taken to wild parties. This highlife did not last long. Eventually hooked on powder or pills, grades foundering, misunderstood by their parents, these naive innocents ran away from home and embarked with gusto upon the long slide down to the gutter. They began by dancing naked at one of several seedy strip joints off Florida Avenue and ended up, scantily clad in the coldest weather, walking the streets near 12th and Mass for the profit of men with names like Johnny C. or Big Red.

Bunny Williams had been charged with a first-degree felony, which was then plea-bargained down by Jacobs to a misdemeanor. At the time Bunny had been addicted to heroin, a substance she blamed for her criminal behavior. The judge agreed. She was sentenced to an abbreviated term of imprisonment of eight months, consenting to enter an addiction treatment program in prison and to continue treatment after her release.

When the trial reconvened at one-thirty, Martin was ready. Bunny took the stand, looking confident. She wore a demure blue dress with white polka dots and a pair of spectator pumps. Her hair, dyed flaming red, was pinned up on the back of her head in a French twist. Her face, heavily lined beneath layers of thick makeup, was prematurely aged by drugs and late nights and a life ruled by a single maxim: just do whatever feels good right now and to hell with the consequences.

“Ms. Williams,” Martin said, approaching the stand, “do you know me?”

Bunny searched his face. “I don’t think so,” she said in a firm voice, but Martin thought he saw her lower lip tremble.

“Because I think I know you,” he said. “Or at least I know about you.”

Bunny nodded stupidly.

“Why don’t you tell the court about your felony conviction in 1993?” he said as casually as possible, and turned away to face the jury. Rossiter’s blond assistant frowned, tightening the grip on her mechanical pencil. Rossiter himself showed no expression beyond professional interest.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell,” Bunny said, her voice tremulous.

“What was the charge?” Martin said. “Let’s start with that.”

Bunny was silent. The thick makeup around her eyes was beginning to crack a little.

“Ms. Williams?” Martin said.

“Which charge?” she said in a voice he had to lean forward to hear. “There was more than one.”

“The one you were convicted for,” Martin said. “The charge that landed you in prison.”

“Solicitation of minors for the purposes of prostitution,” she said in one breath, and there was an audible exclamation of surprise from the jury. The church ladies shook their heads. Denise Wheeler removed her elbows from the railing and leaned back with a frown. The Pakistani appeared confused.

“But I don’t do them things no more,” Bunny Williams protested. “That was a long time ago.”

“Of course,” Martin said. “But let me ask you something else: are you still involved in the methadone treatment program for recovering heroin addicts?”

Bunny nodded, cheeks flushed beneath her makeup. She was beginning to get angry. “Once you’re involved in methadone treatment, you’re in for life,” she said tartly. “Addiction is a disease. Methadone is no different from kidney dialysis.”

“Please restrict your answers to yes or no unless I ask you to elaborate,” Martin said.

Bunny opened her mouth to speak; then she closed it again and pressed her lips together in a hard line.

Martin paced up and down before the witness box, hands behind his back, studying the carpeting, forehead furrowed in concentration, a pose that Dahlia had called “junior Clarence Darrow.” At last he stopped and looked Bunny Williams right in the eye.

“When you take methadone, does it produce a feeling of well-being?”

“You mean, a buzz?” she said.

“If you want, a buzz, a high,” Martin said.

Bunny thought for a moment. “Maybe a little,” she said. “It’s what I need just to keep me going, keep me normal, like everyone else.”

“And had you taken methadone on the day of the murder?”

Bunny nodded. “I went to the Farragut Clinic that afternoon,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of it.”

Martin felt his ears tingle. “And that night, in the VIP room of Naked Party, did you have anything to drink?”

Bunny hesitated. “I’m not sure,” she said.

“Yes or no,” Martin said.

“I had a gin and tonic,” Bunny said. “One lousy gin and tonic. And it cost enough, seven bucks!”

Martin stopped pacing and positioned himself so he faced both the woman in the witness box and the jury. “So the night in question, when you witnessed my client strangle Ms. Volovnaya in a dark corner of a dark room, you were taking methadone, which produces a high, and drinking, which, as I’m sure many of us here are aware, also produces a high, a disorientation of the senses. Is that correct?”

“Not like you mean it,” she said.

“Yes or no, Ms. Williams,” Martin said in a voice that held all the authority of legal procedure.

Bunny Williams hung her head. Angry tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Yes,” she said.

Later that evening, after the trial had adjourned for the day, Martin took the Red Line from Judiciary Square to Cleveland Park and walked up the long block from the Metro station to the Broadmoor. He was exhausted; his feet hurt; his briefcase felt like a lead weight in his hand. He let himself into the front door with the key Dahlia had given him, took the elevator to the eighth floor, and let himself into her apartment. The place was dark; Dahlia wasn’t home from work yet. Martin poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen, then collapsed on the couch with the local news on the television.

When Dahlia came home an hour later, she found him asleep there, snoring gently, one of the couch pillows balanced over his face. She managed to get him up, get the clothes off him, and get him into the tub in the pink bathroom. Then she disrobed and joined him in the warm water. It was the last moment of twilight. Traffic hummed along up Connecticut; a pleasant darkness lit by the yellow windows of the mansions descended over the neighborhood. Dahlia opened a jar of pink bath salts and dropped a handful in the water beneath the running tap. In less than a minute the suds threatened to engulf them both.

The water felt smooth as oil against Martin’s skin. This was the first bubble bath he’d had since he was a kid. He leaned back against the rim of the tub. Every muscle ached. For him, being in court was a physically exhausting process, like running the marathon or digging a trench. Dahlia faced him from the other end of the tub, the faucet perched like a parrot over her right shoulder. Her breasts seemed to float in the water, half hidden by the bubbles. He didn’t think he’d be able to make love to her tonight. He could barely summon the energy to wiggle his toes.

Dahlia had turned the lights out in the bathroom and put candles on saucers on the sink and the floor. A bottle of white wine and two glasses lay on ice in a Styrofoam cooler within arm’s reach. This wasn’t a celebration of anything, she said, just the halftime event.

“You’ve got the wine and woman right here,” she said, reaching down to pour a glass. “All you’ve got to do now is sing.”

“Please,” Martin croaked. “I can’t even whisper.”

“You just lie there, honey,” Dahlia said. “Soak it all out.”

Martin dozed off for a moment and woke himself up talking about the case: “... why they didn’t have any solid witness...”

“What’s that, honey?” Dahlia put her glass of wine on the floor.

Marlin rubbed his face with a damp washcloth and sat up. “There were supposed to be a dozen witnesses that saw Smerdnakov do the deed,” he said. “But this ex-hooker was all the prosecution could come up with. One single eyewitness, with a criminal record to boot. Something’s not right here.”

“Maybe you’re just too good for them,” Dahlia said. “Maybe Rossiter knew you’d chew them to pieces in the cross.”

“That can’t be true,” Martin said.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she said. “You’re a good lawyer and getting better every day.” She slid toward him through the bubbles. When she had wedged herself against him, Martin felt his energy returning.

“Still, it’s strange,” he murmured. “I really thought they had a tight case.”

“Who knows, maybe God’s talking to you right now,” Dahlia said. “Because you’re defending an innocent man.”

Martin smiled. “God doesn’t talk to lawyers,” he said.

“But whatever you do tomorrow, don’t give them what they think they’re going to get.” Her voice was serious now; her eyes showed deep concern. “Hit them with something new, something they haven’t seen. Astonish them.”

Martin thought about what he’d have to do to astonish Malcolm Rossiter, and he almost laughed. The man had seen every trick in the book in his fifteen years with the U.S. attorney’s office. Then, suddenly, he remembered a piece of advice out of first-year law: for half a semester he’d had a professor named Alden Clarke, a broken-down old southern drunk, who in the 1930s and 1940s had been one of the most famous trial lawyers in America. Clarke, at least eighty then, used to wear white Colonel Sanders suits gone yellow with age and black string ties more like a scribble on his shirtfront than a real tie. He was a relic from another era, a vanished South of dusty white courtrooms, fans pulling slowly overhead, last veterans of the Civil War, ancient as mummies, dozing in the sun on benches on the other side of the square.

Martin could remember the exact class session. Clarke had entered the auditorium twenty minutes late, his battered leather portefeuille under his arm, smelling faintly of bourbon. Upon attaining the podium, he’d fixed the class with one watery, jaundiced eye. “The law is complex,” he had said. “But juries are simple. Therefore, the best way with a jury is always the simplest.”

Martin hadn’t thought much of this plain advice at the time, but now it came back to him with the clarity of a revelation. What could be simpler than an innocent man protesting his innocence?

The prosecution rested. A cold winter light filtered through the stained glass rosette behind Judge Deal’s head. She was framed in the glow like a haloed saint in an icon, as stern and unyielding.

“Mr. Wexler, are you ready to present the case for the defense?” she said.

Martin rose to his feel unsteadily. His mouth fell dry; he seemed incapable of uttering a single word. Inexplicably his knees ached. Nonetheless, his voice came out clear and strong.

“I am ready, Your Honor,” he said.

Judge Deal blinked, wise as an owl. “Proceed,” she said.

Martin cleared his throat for theatrical effect and advanced to the center of the courtroom, halfway to the jury box, but no farther. It was as if he intended to present his case to a wider audience, to the world itself.

“I call to the stand” — he indicated the defense table with a dramatic sweeping gesture — “Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov!” For a long moment the Russian stared. He hadn’t expected this; no one had expected this. At the prosecution table Rossiter and his cohorts looked startled, then utterly relieved. This was the blunder they had been waiting for.

“Mr. Smerdnakov, you have been directed to testify,” Judge Deal said sternly.

The Russian heaved himself up and lumbered around the table toward the witness box. The courtroom was silent; his shoes creaked as he walked. The court clerk swore him in. Smerdnakov settled down with difficulty; his massive torso seemed to fill the entire box. Marlin looked up at him and saw disdain and anger in the Russian’s eyes.

“Alexei, did you kill Katerina Volovnaya?” he said.

“No,” the Russian said in a thick voice.

Martin nodded and clasped his hands behind his back. Shoulders hunched, he appeared lost in thought, troubled by the fate of nations, like Nixon on the eve of resignation.

“Why don’t you tell the court exactly what really happened that night?” he said, and he unclasped his hands and moved to a spot where he would be able to make eye contact with the jury.

“OK,” the Russian said. “You heard it from me before, but I tell again...” and he proceeded with his story, now so familiar to Martin: Smerdnakov had gone to the bathroom. When he had come back, his new friends had scattered, and his woman was dead. “I wanted to cry,” he said. “But I don’t know how to cry. My life has been very hard in old days of the Soviet Union. I look at her lying there on the floor and I think maybe she has drunk too much vodka, and I’m going to give her a piece of my mind when we get back to the hotel. Then I reach down to pick her up and I think to myself: My God, she’s dead! The woman I love is dead!”

Martin nodded, sympathetic. “And what did you do then?”

Smerdnakov stared at the floor. “Nothing,” he said. “I couldn’t do nothing. I knew she was dead. I figured the police would come soon enough, and I was very angry and very sad, and so I danced.”

“Wasn’t that behavior” — Martin chose his words carefully — “this dancing, a little unusual, given the circumstances?”

The Russian shook his head. “You must know what it is like where I am from. When somebody dies who you love, when there is no food to eat, when KGB is coming to get you and there’s no place to hide, we dance. Life is so hard we must dance to forget.”

Martin glanced over at the jury. He thought one of the church ladies might have a tear glittering in her eye.

“So this dancing, it’s a cultural thing?”

Smerdnakov looked puzzled; then he nodded. “Yes, it is my culture.”

Martin kept Smerdnakov on the stand for the next hour and a half. Through a carefully planned series of questions, he was able to touch on nearly every aspect of the case, concluding with the identity of the mysterious Russians who had accompanied Smerdnakov and Katerina to the club.

“So you didn’t know any of these men?”

“Never met them before in my life,” Smerdnakov said. “We were having a few drinks at the Rio Bar and we run into these other Russians. You know, this doesn’t happen too often and one of them is from Vladivostok, where I used to live, so we’re talking and I buy him a drink and he buys me a drink and then his friend says, ‘Hey, I know a place to dance.’ So we go to dance. It is only later I think that the one from Vladivostok is looking at my Katinka out of the corner of his eye, you know, like he really wants to sleep with her or something. I think what happens is I go away to the bathroom and he grabs her and tries to force her, you know, and she doesn’t want any of it, and then he gets pissed off like a real psychopath, and he kills her, just like that. When the police come, I give them this man’s description, but they say no, they have already caught the murderer and it is me.”

Martin carefully omitted questions regarding one very important point from his examination. When he released the witness to the prosecution for the cross, he sensed that Rossiter and his team could barely contain their excitement. They conferred for a quick moment before approaching the stand; the sound of their lowered voices was like the busy hum of a hive of bees, ready to swarm.

“Does the prosecution wish to examine this witness?” Judge Deal said.

“We do, Your Honor,” Rossiter said, and his blond assistant came forward, smoothing out her blue suit with her hands. Her name was Emily Blake, Martin had learned; she had graduated from Harvard Law the previous spring. Now she motioned to her young colleague, who brought a flat plastic tub marked evidence from under the table. She removed from the tub a large plastic bag containing a hand-painted psychedelic necktie and, holding it out like a piece of filthy laundry, approached the witness box.

“Mr. Smerdnakov, is this your tie?” she said.

Smerdnakov looked at it and nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Were you wearing this tie the night of the murder?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Are you aware that this tie has been identified by expert witnesses as the same one used to strangle Katerina Volovnaya?”

Smerdnakov’s expression darkened; then he nodded.

“I can’t hear you, Mr. Smerdnakov!” Emily Blake’s voice rose to an unpleasant shriek on the last word. Martin saw the Pakistani garage manager wince.

“Yes,” Smerdnakov said.

She replaced the bag in the evidence tub and turned to confront the Russian, hands on her hips like a shrewish wife.

“Tell me something else, Mr. Smerdnakov,” she said. “How did your tic come to find its way from around your neck to Ms. Volovnaya’s? Did it fly there on its own?”

The Russian sighed. “I have no idea,” he said. “I took it off earlier and put it down with my jacket.”

“I see,” Emily Blake said. “And why do you suppose a man would wear a tie out for the evening and then take it off?”

Martin tried to hide his smile behind the doodles of his legal pad. She had just broken one of the prime rules of trial law. Never ask a witness a question if you don’t already know the answer.

“I take off my coat and my tie because I was dancing and it was very hot in the club,” Smerdnakov said. “Ask anyone who saw me. I do not wear a coat and tie when I am dancing.”

Emily Blake looked abashed. It was obvious she didn’t know what to say next.

Judge Deal stared down at the young attorney through her bug glasses. Behind her silver head in the stained glass rosette Washington seemed to have paused on his way to heaven.

“Ms. Blake?” Judge Deal said. “Do you wish to proceed with this witness?”

Rossiter stood up hastily. “I’ll take it from here, if Your Honor pleases,” he said.

“Mr. Wexler?”Judge Deal said.

“I have no objection.” Martin shrugged, but he was surprised. Switching lawyers in the middle of a cross was bad form, almost never done, and made his own case look that much better.

Rossiter exchanged places with Emily Blake, who, somewhat red in the face, resumed her seat at the prosecution table. He now continued the cross-examination of Smerdnakov with vigor, but to no avail. He could not succeed in unnerving the Russian enough to discredit his version of events the night of the murder, and when Smerdnakov stepped down, Martin was sure the jury was solidly on the side of the defense. Martin then proceeded to call the remaining witnesses from the club. One by one, they were sworn in by the court clerk and testified that Smerdnakov was not the man they had seen strangling Ms. Volovnaya in the smoky darkness of the VIP room at Naked Party.

The most memorable testimony came from Daisy, the barmaid. For the occasion she wore a white thrift store beaded sweater, a pretty Betsey Johnson minidress, and her Sunday black Doc Martens boots, newly shined. A single pair of rhinestone teardrop earrings dangled from her ears. She sat straight-backed in the witness box, hands in her lap, and spoke in a clear voice when she answered Martin’s questions.

“Was there dancing in the VIP room?” He rested his hand comfortably on the railing. He appeared relaxed: he could have been in his own living room.

“There’s always dancing,” Daisy said.

“How many people were dancing, do you suppose?”

Daisy cocked her head, one earring bumping gently against the side of her throat. “About a hundred, I guess.”

“Did you observe the defendant dancing?” Martin’s voice took on a commanding pitch.

“Yes, I did,” Daisy said.

“And while he was dancing, was he wearing a necktie and suit jacket?”

Daisy shook her head. “No,” she said.

“Since there were a hundred people dancing that night,” Martin said, “how is it you can remember my client so clearly?”

“I remember because his shirt was hanging open down to his belly button,” Daisy said. “He looked like some seventies disco king. And his chest was really hairy. It was pretty gross.”

Somehow this was just the right detail. As Daisy stepped down, she flashed Martin a veiled look whose meaning was not readily apparent. But it didn’t matter now; he felt it in his bones. The case was over, and he had beaten one of the top prosecutors in the city. A single glance at his opponents confirmed everything: Rossiter and his assistants sat there, slumped in gloom, surrounded by the useless mess of their papers, defeated. The light out the stained glass window had grown dim with afternoon. Martin checked his watch; it was nearly five. Judge Deal rubbed her hands together as if she were trying to warm them.

“Given the lateness of the hour,” she said. “We will adjourn until tomorrow morning.” Then she flashed Martin an unexpected smile. “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, counselor.”

Martin took her advice, went home, threw himself in bed following the evening news, and fell asleep within five minutes. That night he slept soundly, and if he dreamed at all, dreamed only of darkness and silence.

The summation for the prosecution was made first thing the next morning by the young pale-faced lawyer, who as yet had not uttered a single word during the course of the trial. Rossiter, it appeared, had washed his hands of the case. Now that everything was lost, the second string would get a chance to play. But the pale lawyer proved to be the best of the three. He spoke in a courtly central Virginia accent directly to the jury, and he did his best to simplify. He was not patronizing them; he was merely explaining things in the clearest way he knew how. This case was open and shut, he said. Anyone could see that. The defendant, Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov, was a man with a history of violence, a fact that the defense had not even bothered to refute.

“I am aware that they have provided several witnesses to testify Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov was not the man seen murdering Ms. Volovnaya.” He stood very still before the jury box, his skin shining like marble. “But I ask you to consider his behavior directly following the murder. Think, use your common sense, people! I don’t care what country you’re from, if your girlfriend is murdered while you’re in the bathroom, your response is not going to be to go upstairs and dance some more until the police show up to arrest you! That’s crazy! That is the action of a sociopath who knows the system all too well and knows for whatever reason that he has a good chance of getting away with his crime. Why ruin a perfectly good evening of drinking and dancing just on account of one little old murder?”

This young lawyer was smart, capable, and polite. He concluded his comments with a rousing call for a guilty verdict, then thanked the judge and the jury for their patience and retreated to his seat at the prosecution table with all the gracious dignity of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

At last the defense was free to make its summation. Martin ostentatiously filled a glass of water, drank it down. He cracked his knuckles, jammed his hands in his pockets, and shambled over to the jury box. He fell like Henry Fonda playing the young Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln. In that film Abraham Lincoln, still a bumpkinly country lawyer, uses a detail gleaned from the Farmer’s Almanac to defend a man wrongfully accused of murder. Martin remembered this scene in some compartment of his mind as he began to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “I’m sure you’re all worn out by the events of the last two weeks. No doubt you’d like to finish up with this case, get home, and not have to worry about any of this ever again.” He saw the church ladies nod their heads at this. “So I will try to wrap up my remarks as quickly as possible...”

Martin reiterated the highlights of the defense: the prosecution’s version of the truth was built on questionable circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a single, dubious eyewitness, an ex-prostitute who had admitted to being high on drugs and alcohol at the time of the murder. According to witnesses, the murder weapon was not on the defendant’s person minutes before the murder... etc. Halfway through his presentation, he interrupted himself suddenly, took a deep breath, and passed a hand across his brow. Then he made eye contact with each member of the jury in turn.

“We have been talking about cold facts here so far,” he said. “But I’m going to forget the facts now, and I’m going to talk about feelings.” His voice softened. He was no longer a lawyer arguing a complicated legal case but just an average guy, worried about simple justice. “My client is a man numbed by grief, a man suffering from emotional shock. A man who has lost the woman he loved in a terrible crime, only to see himself accused of that same crime. We are all decent, God-fearing people here. We are fair people, but we are not miracle workers. We cannot restore to my client the life of the woman he loved. But we can give him back his own life; we can ransom it back from a prosecution too eager to find a criminal for every crime, whether the person they find is guilty or not Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Smerdnakov is innocent! Give his life back to him, let him go free!”

Martin turned away abruptly and walked back to the defense table. When he sat down, he realized he felt a little giddy. He tried to focus on the doodles on his pad and found he was suffering from a sort of tunnel vision brought about by his own eloquence. The doodles now seemed larger than life to him, giant, childish renderings of locomotives, sports cars, puppies, clowns, balloons, and odd, exaggerated mazelike patterns and geometric shapes. He hardly heard a word of Judge Deal’s instructions to the jury, barely saw them leave their box and exit through the door to the deliberation room. His own thoughts were jumbled, disorganized. He wanted to grab the hulking Russian beside him by the shoulders and shout, “I think we beat them!” But instead, he remained in his seat unmoving, dumb as a stone, staring into the haze of colored light from the stained glass window. Presently he realized Judge Deal herself was gone, where, he couldn’t exactly say.

“We got to take him now, sir.”

Martin looked up, startled. It was the court clerk accompanied by a U.S. marshal whom Martin recognized immediately, Caesar Martinez.

“Caesar,” Martin said, “you on this detail?”

Caesar nodded. “Asked for it special,” he said. “Heard you were burning up the courtroom. Had to get down here to see for myself.”

The court clerk held a pair of leg irons; a pair of handcuffs hung clipped to his belt. He stepped up and indicated that Smerdnakov should stand out of his chair.

“Is that strictly necessary?” Martin said.

“We got to put them on him, Wex,” Caesar said. “It’s the rules, you know that.”

Martin moved aside as the court clerk affixed the leg irons to Smerdnakov’s ankles and snapped the handcuffs around his wrists.

“We’re taking him upstairs to the holding cell,” Caesar said. “He’s going to be up there till the jury decides what they want to do with him or till closing time, whichever comes first. You coming?”

“Of course,” Martin said.

They went through the door at the left of the judge’s bench. The renovation of the building had not yet extended to the backstage portion of the courtroom; five-gallon tubs of paint and folded stepladders leaned against the wall in the room that would one day serve as the judge’s chambers. A scarred metal fire door was propped open on a hallway at the end of which a new elevator waited, its doors open. They went into the elevator, and the court clerk pressed four. It felt close inside, stifling. The faint reek of the Russian’s body odor mixed uneasily with the strong, sweet aroma of Caesar’s cologne.

“I got to tell you, Wex,” Caesar said now, “I heard that summation. Fucking great!”

“Thanks,” Martin said.

“I knew you could do it, man,” he said. “There’s a pool going at Moultrie, you hear about that? I mean everyone threw in some cash. Your pals from PDS, the investigators, everyone. I got to say, most of the money went against you. But I put fifty on your ass to win.”

Martin smiled. “How much did McGuin put up for the prosecution?”

“Guess I fucked up there,” Caesar shook his head. “Maybe that son of a bitch’s a little too tight with some people.”

“Yeah,” Martin said. “I found out the hard way.”

The elevator opened on a long corridor without carpeting or electrical fixtures, lined with offices in various states of completeness. The temporary holding cell was a bare room with a steel door and thick wire mesh over the window.

“Sorry there ain’t no chairs in here,” the court clerk said. “We don’t want nothing the prisoners can use as a weapon. The new cells downstairs got nice benches bolted to the floor. That’ll be up and running next month.”

“I’ll be right out here if you need me, champ,” Caesar said, and he went into the corridor with the court clerk, and the door was bolted, leaving Martin and Smerdnakov inside. It was the first time they’d been alone together since the beginning of the trial.

“Hey, asshole,” the Russian said. “Got a cigarette?”

Martin shook his head. “Just a couple more hours, Alexei,” he said. “Then you can smoke all you want on the outside.”

Smerdnakov crouched down against the rough cement of the wall. “This is fucking cruel and unusual punishment!” he said, and for the first time Martin thought he heard real distress in his voice. “I’ve got to wait here to find out whether I go to jail for the rest of my fucking life and I can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette?”

Martin looked down at Smerdnakov crouching there like a trapped animal and felt sorry for the man. He had endured so much in the last few months — the vicious murder of his girlfriend, his own arrest, humiliation, assault — and borne it all with absolute impassivity.

“You know, you’re right!” Martin said. “You should be able to smoke a cigarette if you want. This is ridiculous!” He turned and knocked on the door. The dead boll shot back immediately, and the door opened. Caesar stuck his head in.

“What can I do for you, counselor?”

Martin stepped out into the corridor. He looked around; the court clerk had gone. “Listen, Caesar,” he said in a low voice. “My man here needs a cigarette something fierce. You know what I’m saying?”

“Can’t do it,” Caesar said. “If they find out I let someone smoke up here, they’ll have my ass. One whiff of smoke, I get written up for disciplinary action, the whole nine yards.”

Martin put his hand on Caesar’s shoulder. “As a favor to me,” he said. “The poor bastard’s been through hell. You can’t let him have just one cigarette? Look at it this way, it’s your big chance to make up for McGuin.”

Caesar stood back and scratched the side of his nose, thinking. He glanced down the empty corridor and nodded. “All right, Wex,” he said. “I’ll tell you what...” He pushed the door open and gestured to the Russian. “Come on, man, cigarette break!”

Smerdnakov stood up, a dumb peasant smile on his face. Caesar led the way down the corridor, opening doors until he found an unfinished office with no glass in the windows. The thin torn sheet of plastic stapled over the empty frame billowed out in the wind. Through one of the larger tears, Marlin caught a glimpse of the peeling nymph, shivering in the garden four stories below.

Caesar reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a pack of Marlboro Reds and tossed them to the Russian. A book of matches was tucked into the cellophane. “I’ll give you two cigarettes’ worth,” he said. “You blow the smoke out the window, and if anyone asks you where you got the cigarette, I’m going to deny everything.” He grinned and closed the door behind them.

Smerdnakov sat down on the window ledge, his fingers trembling. He managed to get a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. He held the smoke in for as long as he could, then let it out with a deep, contented sigh. His disposition seemed to improve almost instantly. He held out the pack to Martin.

“Hey, asshole, want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke,” Martin said. “Stuff’ll kill you.” He still felt dazed from the trial. He couldn’t think of anything to say and scuffed the toe of his shoe along the rough cement floor. For once the Russian filled the silence.

“Listen,” he said. “You’re not a bad lawyer. You ever come to Brighton Beach, I might be able to fix you up with a job.”

“Oh?” Martin said idly. “What kind of job?”

“My organization needs good lawyers,” Smerdnakov said. “Good smart lawyers who know the score. With a little bit of muscle and a couple of good smart lawyers, you rule the world.”

“I’m not that smart,” Martin said. “You want the truth, my record slinks. It’s just that this time I had the luxury of defending an innocent man.”

The Russian gave him a blank look. Then he tipped his head back and began to laugh, and he laughed until tears came to his eyes. “You really think I’m innocent?” he said when he could speak. “I take it all back. You are a fucking idiot!”

Martin felt his heart drop into his stomach. “What are you telling me?” he said; then he stopped himself. “No, I don’t want to hear it, not a word!” He turned around twice, quick, spasmodic jerks, like a dog chasing its tail. Then he turned back to the Russian, unable to stop himself. “Are you telling me you killed your Katinka? You strangled her?”

Smerdnakov took another deep drag from his cigarette. Suddenly he was very serious. “Sure,” he said quietly. “What the fuck did you think?”

Martin was stunned. For ten full seconds he forgot to take the next breath. “Why?” he managed finally, and it came out halfway between a choke and a whimper.

Smerdnakov shrugged. “She pissed me off,” he said. “She was a stinking drunken whore. I told her not to drink no more. But she went up to the bar and got another vodka; then she started taking her clothes off in front of everyone.”

“Wait a minute.” Martin still couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You strangled her because she bought another drink?”

“You know the old Russian song ‘Volga Boatman’?” Smerdnakov said. “Very old song. Here, listen...” and he hummed a few bars.

Martin couldn’t speak. He wanted to run, scream.

“Like I tell you, things have always been very tough in Russia. They’re tough now, but in the old days they were really tough. The Volga boatmen, they were always fighting. Fighting the Tatars, the Poles, everybody, and they had to be really, really tough. So this one boatman, he is the toughest of them all; then he falls in love with a beautiful girl. Then one day he strangles her and throws her body in the river. You know why? Because she was making him too soft with her love. If you want to be tough, you can’t have a woman around for very long. So, if you want the truth, I started to like her a lot, my Katinka. She was same as me, from nothing and damned clever. So...” He took another drag of his cigarette.

“So you killed her,” Martin said in a whisper. Almost imperceptibly he moved a couple of steps forward.

The Russian nodded. “You did a real good job in there,” he said. “Especially with that fucking slut, that Bunny woman. For a few seconds I almost shit my pants. Who’s this bitch? I thought. My guys tell me they already took care of the witnesses. All of them. But that fucking nigger prosecutor was holding out. He found one stupid little slut to tell the truth.”

Martin watched Smerdnakov’s face. An expression of unconscious ferocity flickered across it like a shadow. He realized now that this man was irredeemably bad, that everything he had held as true about him — and about many other things as well — was a lie.

“They think they can protect her,” Smerdnakov was saying now. “The fucking idiots. When I get out of here, I’ll find that little slut and personally cut her throat. Then I’ll fuck her while she’s bleeding to death. I swear it.”

Martin didn’t think about what he did next. He lunged at Smerdnakov and hit him with both hands in the center of the chest and shoved with all his might. For a terrible moment the Russian teetered on the brink, his eyes rolling wildly. He fought, but cuffed and shackled, cigarette still smoking between his lips, he couldn’t maintain his balance. With a loud ripping sound, the thin plastic sheeting gave way under his bulk, and he fell over backward and plummeted headfirst to the hard concrete five stories below. Only in the last few feet of his descent did he let out a short, terrified cry. Martin heard the sound of his head splitting on the pavement and turned away. At that moment the door flung open, and Caesar sprang into the room.

“What’s going on here? Where’s the—” He stopped short when he saw Martin’s ashen face.

Martin’s lips felt cold. “He jumped. My client jumped.” It was the only thing he could think of to say.

Caesar let out an exclamation and ran to the window and looked down. A puddle of blood was spreading over the sidewalk. Two police officers were already sprinting across the park toward the body from the direction of Indiana Avenue.

“What do you mean, the motherfucker jumped?” Caesar shouted. “Why the fuck did he do that?”

For a second Martin couldn’t think. Then his mind began to work, creaking like a machine that hadn’t been used in years. “He confessed,” he said. “He confessed that he strangled that woman, and he said he couldn’t take the guilt anymore. He was out the window before I could stop him.”

Caesar stepped back, bewildered, rubbing his hands together. “Shit, man. Shit...” He didn’t know what to believe.

Downstairs, in the deliberation room, the church ladies knelt on the floor, joined hands, bowed their heads, and loudly called on Jesus. Denise Wheeler knelt beside them and folded her arms over her bosom to address the odd deity of the Mormon Church. The Pakistani garage manager spread his jacket across the new linoleum, lowered himself onto his hands and knees, consulted a pocket compass for the direction of Mecca, and whispered in Urdu a prayer to Allah, the Just and the Merciful. The other jurors bowed their heads out of respect or offered silent prayers of their own devising. One of the old men took out a rosary, rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands, and began murmuring the paternoster.

Twenty minutes passed this way. Then everyone was done praying, and Denise stood and smiled at the others. She had been selected foreman.

“We’ve done God’s work here today,” she said in a sweet voice. “We can all be proud of ourselves.”

“Amen,” the church ladies said in unison. The Pakistani frowned and said nothing.

Then Denise went out into the hallway to inform the court clerk that the jury had reached its verdict.