Epilogue: Amicus

The Starlite Diner opened its doors at five in the morning on the day Linnea Calder got married, and the first customer through them was a woman in a black dress holding a garment bag.

"Booth six," said Dolores, without turning from the coffee machine.

"I haven't said anything."

"You've got the face you get when you've been crying in a cab." The old waitress came out from behind the counter with a pot in one hand and two mugs in the other, seventy-three now, with a pencil in her gray bun and the walk of a woman who had stood on tile for fifty years. She set the mugs down. She poured. She looked down at Greer for a long moment, at the garment bag laid across the vinyl seat, at the black dress, at the faint yellow shadow still lingering along her left wrist where the bone had knit. "You look nice."

"I look like a funeral."

"You look like a woman who's been told to wear black to a wedding and has decided to be magnificent about it." Dolores patted her shoulder. "She's coming at six. I saw her on the corner. She's got on a raincoat over a nightgown and sneakers. I told her it was bad luck. She said she'd take it up with the court."

Greer laughed. It came out wet.

"Is it going to be all right?" she said.

"Honey," said Dolores, "I've watched you two in this booth for fourteen years. It's been all right the whole time. It's just been taking its time."

She went away.

Greer sat with her hands round the mug. The diner was nearly empty: a trucker at the counter, a nurse in scrubs with her head on her arm, a mother with a sleeping toddler in a stroller. The neon in the window said OPEN in red. Outside, on Fourth Avenue, the sky was just beginning to turn from black to gray, and a street-sweeper went by with its brushes whirring, and the whole long avenue of closed shops and sleeping stoops lay quiet under a thin June mist.

She opened her notebook.

She did not write anything. She looked at the page. It was the last page of a stenographer's pad she'd been carrying since October, and it held only one line, underlined twice, in her own small furious hand.

DON'T CRY ON THE MAID OF HONOR SPEECH.

…

It had been a long eight months.

She'd tried, once or twice, to explain it to people who weren't there. She never got further than the second sentence. A man who ran the docks was arrested in a warehouse in Newark. A woman I love married him on paper and then didn't. It sounded like a bad movie. It sounded like something that happened to other people, in other cities, in a different sort of life.

But it had happened. She had the stitches to prove it.

Hollis Brannock had gone to trial in April, in the same marble courtroom in Brooklyn where Warren Calder had once been sentenced, and the jury had been out for ninety-one minutes. They had convicted him on every count. At the sentencing in May he had asked leave to address the court, and the judge had granted it, and he had risen in his gray cardigan and said, with his gentle, precise, rather bewildered courtesy, that he did not understand what all the fuss was about, and that he hoped he might have a cup of tea. He got life. Tobias Wick got forty years and a sheet of paper from the Bureau of Prisons that explained, in eleven paragraphs, why a defendant was not entitled to a gavel.

Cormac Ruddick had testified for two days.

Greer had sat in the gallery. She'd watched him walk to the stand, a big gray man in a borrowed suit, and take the oath in a hoarse unsteady voice, and then tell, in plain flat sentences, to a courtroom of strangers, every small thing he had sold. He had looked at no one. At the end, when the prosecutor sat down, he'd lifted his head, once, and looked across the well of the court to a man in the first row with a sling and a closed pale face. Anselm Varga had nodded. That was all. Two inches of a dark head.

They gave Ruddick time served and five years' probation. Greer had written a thousand words on it for the Dispatch, and cut them to four hundred, and still thought she'd said too much.

Maeve was in remission.

…

The door chimed.

She looked up, and there she was.

She stood in the entrance with the gray light behind her, in a beige raincoat belted over a flannel nightgown, canvas sneakers, and no stockings, her dark hair a catastrophe, her face scrubbed and pink and utterly without defense. She was thinner. She had gotten thinner since October. But there was color in her cheeks, and a kind of light behind her eyes that Greer hadn't seen since law school, and she was carrying, in one hand, a paper bag from the bakery on Sixty-Eighth Street, and in the other a very large and extremely battered umbrella.

"It's not raining," said Greer.

"It might."

"It's June."

"It's New York." Linnea came across the floor and slid into the opposite side of the booth, and put the umbrella on the seat, and the bag on the table, and sat there with her hands in her lap looking at her friend with an expression of vast, silly, luminous happiness. "I brought rugelach. I couldn't sleep."

"How long have you been up?"

"Since two."

"Doing what?"

"Reading the Rules of Professional Conduct." She giggled, helplessly. "I've got a quiz. It's Rule 1.8. Gifts from clients. Do you know I still can't decide whether a wedding is a gift or a conflict of interest?"

"Linn."

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine."

"I'm so fine I could scream." She pressed her palms against her cheeks. "I'm getting married in nine hours. In a garden. In Bay Ridge. With a dress. My father's going to walk me down the path, and he's going to cry, and Mrs. Tate has made a cake the size of a small car, and Judith Aldrich has been issued a corsage and is furious about it. And on Monday morning at nine o'clock he's going to walk into a federal prison camp in Otisville and I'm going to stand in the parking lot and wave."

Greer reached across the table and took her hand.

It was warm. It was cold. It was shaking, very slightly, and quite steady.

"Estoppel?" she said, softly.

It was the oldest joke between them. It was the oldest promise. A word in a diner at midnight, a year ago, in the worst week of both their lives: If you can't take it back, say it. And I'll come. No questions.

Linnea looked at her hand. Then she looked up, and her gray eyes were enormous and clear.

"Amicus," she said.

"You're sure?"

"I'm friend of the court." The corner of her mouth trembled. "I'm entirely all right. I've never been so all right in my life. I only wanted—" She stopped. She swallowed. "I wanted to say it here. In this booth. To you. Before I said it to anyone else."

"Say what?"

"Thank you."

Greer's throat closed.

"For what?" she managed.

"For the pen." Linnea laughed through tears. "For the pepper spray. For every phone call at three in the morning. For driving me home from the courthouse in a Corolla that sounded like a bag of wrenches. For the text." She drew a breath. "For sitting in that hospital with your wrist in a cast and telling me I was in love with a killer, and being right, and loving me anyway."

"I didn't say I loved you."

"You said you'd wear a black dress."

"That's different."

"It's the same." She squeezed Greer's fingers. "You're my best friend. You're the only person I've ever known who'd have said it to my face. I'd have been all alone with it, if you hadn't."

Greer wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist.

"You're ruining my makeup," she said.

"You aren't wearing any."

"I was going to."

"You can do it in the car."

"You're a terrible bride."

"I know." Linnea grinned. "It's why he picked me."

…

They ate the rugelach.

Dolores brought them eggs they hadn't ordered, scrambled and buttered, with a side of toast cut on the diagonal, and when Greer opened her mouth to protest she said only, "It's on the house. It's your wedding. Sit," and went away again. The sky outside went from gray to a pale and tender gold. The trucker paid and left. The nurse woke up, and blinked, and began to cry softly into her napkin for reasons of her own.

"Tell me something," said Linnea.

"Anything."

"The draft."

Greer set down her fork.

She had not meant to bring it up. She had been carrying it round for weeks, in the bottom of her bag, in a plain manila folder tied with string, and had told no one but the lawyer who held its second copy. It was the longest piece she'd ever written. Eleven thousand words. She had worked on it through the whole winter, in a rented room above a bait shop, every night after the Dispatch closed, until her eyes burned and her neck seized and the radiator knocked itself to pieces in the wall.

The title was The Man Who Counted.

It was about Anselm Varga. All of him. The boy with the umbrella. The man with the counter. The cranes, the ledgers, the long dark ruthless arithmetic of a life lived in the margin. Gate Three. Count Four. The eleven weeks of the strike. The Tidebook, which she had never read, but whose existence Stahl had confirmed to her one evening in March, over a very bad cup of tea, with a look on his face like a man laying a wreath.

It was a hard story. It was a true one. It was, she thought, the best thing she would ever write.

And she had never shown it to a soul.

"It's good," she said.

"I know."

"You don't. You haven't read it."

"I know you," said Linnea. "You wouldn't have written it otherwise." She took a sip of coffee. "What does it say?"

"It says he's guilty."

"He is."

"It says it plainly. It doesn't excuse anything. It says that a man killed two people, and bought off a witness, and spent twenty-four years running the most efficient criminal enterprise on the Eastern seaboard." Greer's voice tightened. "And it says he tore up his own contract. And gave away every dollar. And took a bullet. And pleaded guilty. And is going to prison on Monday with a clean shirt and a book."

"Both of those things."

"Both of them. In one story."

"That's what a profile is."

"It's what it's for." She leaned forward. "It's the whole thing, Linn. It's the best I've got. And the Dispatch will run it in September, if I give the word. Marty's already offered the front page."

Linnea was silent.

She looked out the window, at the thin golden light on Fourth Avenue, at a boy on a bicycle delivering papers. A pigeon landed on the rim of a trash can and stared in at them with beady disapproval. Her face was grave and very still.

"Will you?" she said at last.

"Will I what?"

"Give the word."

"I don't know." Greer pushed a crumb across the table. "I thought I'd ask you."

"No."

"No?"

"You shouldn't ask me." Linnea turned from the window. Her eyes were clear. "It's not mine. It's not his, either. It's yours. You wrote it. You're the only one who knows if it's true." She reached across the table and laid her hand over Greer's. "If it's true, run it. If it isn't, don't. I'll love you either way."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

"Linn, he'd—"

"He told me yesterday," said Linnea, "that he'd like you to run it."

Greer stared.

"He said that a man who has spent twenty-four years afraid of being seen has no business asking to be spared. He said: tell her to put the Tidebook in. All of it." Her voice shook. "He wanted me to say that. In case you wondered if you'd be doing him a kindness by leaving things out. He said it would be the opposite."

"He said that."

"He did."

"To you."

"He asks me things now." A sudden helpless tenderness crossed her face. "It's very annoying. I don't know what to do with it. He'll say, what would you rather, about a sandwich."

Greer began to laugh. It rose up out of her chest in a great wet whoop, and she put her napkin over her face and laughed into it until her ribs hurt, and across the table Linnea was laughing too, with her head thrown back and her hair in her eyes and her raincoat sliding off one shoulder.

The nurse looked up from her napkin. The mother woke her toddler, who looked at the two of them in blank astonishment and burst into delighted tears.

"Oh, God," said Greer, gasping. "Oh, God. I'm going to need so much concealer."

…

At half past seven they came out into the street.

The mist had burned off. The sky over Sunset Park was a deep clear cloudless blue, and the whole long avenue shone with the clean new gold of an early summer morning. The trees along the curb had come out in leaf. A man was hosing down the sidewalk in front of a bakery. A radio somewhere was playing a slow song with a trumpet in it. And down at the end of the avenue, between the rooftops, the great gray masts and cranes of the harbor rose against the light, small and sharp and perfect, like a drawing.

Greer stood on the pavement with her garment bag over her shoulder.

"The car's on Fifty-Eighth," she said. "I've got Judith's driver. He's very quiet."

"Good."

"He's been told to take us to Bay Ridge the long way."

"What's the long way?"

"Past Pier Nine." Greer looked at her. "I thought you might want to see it."

Linnea was silent.

She stood with her battered umbrella in one hand and the paper bag in the other, a dark-haired woman in a raincoat and nightgown and sneakers, with the sun full on her face. She looked at the harbor. She looked at it for a long time. And then she smiled, a slow, bright, tender smile, the smile of a woman who has walked a very long road and finally seen the house.

"Yes," she said. "I'd like that."

They started down the avenue.

A little way along, Linnea stopped and put her hand on Greer's arm. She was looking up at the sky, narrow-eyed, as though she had felt something there, a single drop, a breath of change in the air.

"What?" said Greer.

"Nothing." She shook her head, laughing. "I thought it might rain."

"It's not going to."

"I know."

"It's a clear day, Counselor."

"I know." Linnea opened the umbrella, anyway. She held it up over the two of them, a great black canopy against the blue, and drew Greer in under it, close, shoulder to shoulder, with the sun pouring down on the ribs and the faded silk. "I'd just like to be ready."

"For what?"

"For whatever comes."

She looked down the avenue, past the bakeries and the stoops and the sleeping cars, to where the cranes stood against the morning sky. A light wind lifted the hem of her raincoat.

"It always comes," she said. "That's the thing about the tide."

"And?"

"And I think I can stand it now."

They walked on together under the umbrella, two women in the sun, and the sound of their laughter went up the length of Fourth Avenue and was lost in the bright June air.