“Yes. And you didn’t know about that, so you sent a couple of thugs after me. And there was one other thing.” I have backed completely around the butcher-block table. Now Wainwright is in front of the sink. George Jackson, his leg just about ripped off, is still a shield between us.
“What thing?”
“Meadows. She started calling me Misha. Who could she have heard it from? Not Uncle Mal, he calls me Talcott. She could have heard Kimmer say it, but I doubt she would have been forward enough to pick a nickname only my wife used. I could only think of one person Meadows would know in D.C. who also called me Misha. You.”
Justice Wainwright nods, smiling distantly. “That’s very good. Yes. I will have to be more careful in the future.” He sighs. “So, it’s over, Misha. Give me the disk, and I’ll be on my way.” I glance at the kitchen door behind him. He sees me do it. “There’s nobody else, I’m afraid. Nobody is coming to rescue you. It’s just the two of us. So give me the disk. Please don’t make me ask again.”
Still I play for time. “What’s so important about the disk? What’s on it?”
“What’s on it? I’ll tell you what’s on it. Protection.”
“What kind of protection?”
“Oh, come, Misha, you have surely figured it out by now. You’re not the dunce you pretend to be. Names. Names of the people with interests in all those corporations, all those years. Cabinet secretaries. Yes. Senators. A governor or two. Some CEOs and prominent lawyers. A man who has such a disk in his possession can buy a good deal of protection.”
And then I see it. “Oh. Oh, no. You mean protection from Jack Ziegler. He still has his hooks in you, doesn’t he? Or his partners do? And they won’t let you stop, will they?”
“They won’t even let me retire from the Court. They’re so very demanding.” I say nothing. Even though I had nearly figured it out, the implicit confession has rocked me. “But your father was no better. When I asked him to share his hidden information, he just looked at me and told me I was a part of his arrangements. And if I didn’t stay away from him, everybody would know.”
“A year before he died,” I murmur, finally getting the point.
“What was that?”
“I, uh, was wondering what your cover story is for being on the Island.” A lie, but I suspect that any call upon his vanity will lead to a disquisition. He has to show me how smart he is. Before he kills me, that is.
“Really, Misha. Everybody wants me as a houseguest. Yes. Well. You made a few mistakes of your own. You were too deliberate, Misha; it was clear you were preparing to do something. I heard about the hurricane, and that you were coming up here anyway. Well. I realized what you were up to. I accepted a long-standing invitation. This afternoon, when the storm came, I went for a walk.” That crooked smile again. “I told my hosts I like storms. I am out walking at this very moment.” The wind blows the back door open, then snaps it closed again. And Wainwright no longer wants to reminisce. “All right, Misha, enough talk. Now, give me the disk.”
“No.”
“Don’t be silly, Misha.”
I find a surprising stubbornness. “My father didn’t leave it for you. He left it for me. I want to see what’s on it, and then I’ll decide what to do with it.”
Justice Wainwright fires a shot. There is no warning and his hand barely flickers. The bullet zips past my head as I duck, too late of course, and buries itself in the kitchen wall.
“I was a Marine, Misha. I know how to use this gun. Now, give me the disk.”
“It won’t do you any good. It’s useless. It’s been up in the heat too long. It’s all warped.”
“All the more reason for you to give it to me.” I shake my head. The Justice sighs. “Misha, look at it from my point of view. I can’t do this any more. I have been in bed with these people too long. I need to get out. I need that disk.” His eyes harden. “Your father refused to tell me where it was, but I can certainly get it from you.”
“My father refused,” I repeat. “Two years ago this October, right? That’s when you asked him to tell you where it was hidden?”
“Possibly. So? Have I made another mistake?”
“No, but…” But that’s what spooked the Judge, I am thinking. It was Wallace Wainwright-not Jack Ziegler, as I have assumed-who scared him so badly that he went to the Colonel to borrow a gun. And joined a shooting club to learn how to use it. Wainwright, tired and wanting to retire from the Court, went to see him, a year before he died, and tried to make him share the information he had hidden to protect himself from Jack Ziegler and his partners. The Judge refused, and Wainwright threatened him with exposure, which sent my father scurrying hat in hand to Mles Madison. A few months passed, nothing further happened, and my father put the gun away. Then, last September, a desperate Wainwright reappeared, and my desperate father went back to his gun club. I try to imagine these two judicial icons, one on the right and one on the left, jousting over the materials that now rest in this bear; battling because each wanted frantically to escape payment for a lifetime of corruption on the bench. “The gun,” I whisper. “Now I see.”
“What gun?”
“The Judge… obtained a gun. He was…” I thought the surprises were finished, and this one seems scarcely plausible. But it is the only explanation. Uncle Mal had it completely upside down. What my father told the Colonel was the literal truth: he wanted protection. But not, as Mariah imagines, from a would-be killer. He wanted protection from a blackmailer. On the screen of my mind, the last month of the Judge’s life unscrolls. When Wainwright reappeared, my father called Jack Ziegler, and the two of them had their secret dinner. It is so easy, now, to see what favor the Judge must have asked that led his old friend and chief tempter finally to refuse him. Seeing the humor in our string of errors, I manage a laugh.
“What’s funny, Misha?”
“I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Mr. Justice, but I think my father planned to kill you. Seriously. If you didn’t leave him alone, if you kept threatening to expose him. He bought a gun, and I think he planned to shoot you with it.”
Wainwright’s eyes darken. For a grim moment, he seems to be contemplating another way the story could have ended. Then his face twists in a snarl. “So now you know what kind of man your father really was. The great Judge Oliver Garland. You say he was prepared to murder me. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. He was a monster, Misha, a soulless, selfish, arrogant monster.” Outside, another tree splits in two, the crunch loud and sudden. The gun quivers as Wainwright glances around. Then his wrathful eyes are on me again. I see now why he hasn’t killed me yet. He wants the son to suffer first for the sins of the father. And it seems to be working. “Your father is the one who got me into this mess in the first place, Msha. He’s the one who got me started. So what do you think of that?”
I say nothing. I am no longer capable of surprise where the Judge is concerned. But it is easy to see how the Judge might have enticed him. The poor boy from Tennessee trailer trash makes good. A rich wife? Perhaps the fruits of two rich decades of taking bribes, laundered through his wife’s family. Something. Too sophisticated, I am sure, for me to figure out, but the result is the same: Wallace Wainwright, the great liberal, the man of the people, got rich from fixing cases.
At least, if motive matters, my father did it for love.
“He was like a devil, your father. You have no idea how persuasive he could be! And quite thoroughly corrupt. Is that cold enough for you? Taking his orders from Jack Ziegler. Voting the way he was told. Think about that, Misha. But he was so clever that nobody knew. And when he approached me, he was very cagey, he talked his way around to it slowly… Never mind. A love of money is the root of all evil, isn’t it? I wanted to do good and do well, and your father… exploited that.”
I am about to protest that my father never took money; and then I hold my tongue, for I see it as part of his evil genius that he kept this fact from Wallace Wainwright. I will never know just how the Judge seduced the future Justice, but I notice how Wainwright’s self-pitying diatribe has caught the cadence of Washington: he took the bribe, but it was all the fault of the briber.
Wallace Wainwright seems to realize how he sounds, for he calls a halt. “We have spent too much time on memory lane, Misha. Now, the disk, if you please. Just put it on the table.”
