Prologue: Footnote Thirty-One

The Anchorage had been a grain warehouse once, and at night it still behaved like one. It ticked. It settled. The old iron frame took the cold off the harbor and gave it back as a long low groan, as if the building were remembering the weight of a hundred thousand bushels and wondering where they had gone.

Anselm Varga sat in the center of that sound with a document in his hands and did not move.

It was past eleven on a late September night in Red Hook. Below his office, the loading hall lay in darkness except for one work lamp, which lit a stretch of brick wall and the long brown line that ran across it at the height of a man's shoulder. The flood had left that line. He had never painted over it. People who visited the Anchorage for the first time asked whether it was a stain or a decoration, and he told them it was a record. The water had risen exactly that far and no farther, and the wall had kept the proof.

"Thirty-eight pages," said Emmerich Stahl.

He had not sat down. He never did at this hour. He stood by the window in his gray coat with a cup of tea going cold in one hand, looking at the cranes of the container terminal, which stood across the water like a herd of patient animals. Stahl had been a federal prosecutor for eleven years and a disbarred man for six, and he still held himself like someone about to address a jury.

"Defendant's Sentencing Memorandum," Anselm read. "United States of America versus Warren J. Calder."

"Public filing. Anyone can pull it."

"Anyone didn't."

"No." Stahl turned from the window. "I pulled it, because I pull everything with that man's name on it. I read the first six pages standing up in a clerk's office and the rest sitting down. I then read it again to see whether I had been charmed."

"Had you?"

"I had been outflanked. It is not the same thing."

Anselm said nothing. He turned the page.

The signature block sat at the end, the way it does in every pleading, a neat little tombstone for the work above it. Respectfully submitted. Judith R. Aldrich, Esq., Aldrich Penhallow LLP. And under it, smaller, in the position of a person who has done the real labor and been permitted to put her initials on it: On the brief: L. E. Calder, Esq., Junior Associate.

Calder. The defendant's daughter. She had written her own father's sentencing memorandum.

He had read the opening argument once, quickly, the way a man tests ice. Then he had gone back to page one and begun again, slowly, with a brass hand counter lying against his palm.

The counter was his father's. It was the size of a pocket watch and the color of old honey, with a steel thumb lever and four little wheels of numerals that had been rubbed nearly smooth. Istvan Varga had stood on the docks of Red Hook for twenty-two years clicking it once for every crate that passed under his hand. When he died, it was the only thing in his pockets that anyone thought to keep.

Anselm clicked it when he could not answer an argument.

It had not happened in years. He had assumed it was a habit that had died, like a childhood stutter. He sat now in the lamplight, reading a stranger's reasoning on causation and sentencing disparity and the statistical meaninglessness of a life term for a man with a bad heart, and the lever went down under his thumb. Once. Then again, at page nine. Then at page twelve, where she took the government's own expert and turned him around by the collar. Then at fourteen, and twenty, and twenty-three.

"You're counting," Stahl said quietly.

"Yes."

"How many?"

"Nine." Page thirty-three. Ten. "She isn't arguing with the government. She's arguing with the part of the government that believes it is already right."

By page thirty-six the counter read eleven. He had never reached eleven before. The wheels had a grain of rust in them, and it ground under his thumb like a small bone.

"Page thirty-one," said Stahl.

Anselm turned back to it.

It was a footnote. It sat at the bottom of an argument about the architecture of regulatory capture at the Port of New York, in the small, fussy type that lawyers use for the things they want to be found by the people who deserve to find them. It read:

Structures of this kind are neither novel nor, in themselves, unlawful. A freight-forwarding entity in one jurisdiction, an equipment-leasing entity in a second, and a charitable hiring trust in a third may each be perfectly sound. They become unlawful only when the third exists to be blamed for the first two.

He read it a long time.

Three companies. A forwarder in Delaware, a chassis lessor in New Jersey, a hiring trust whose board met twice a year in a church basement in Sunset Park. Anselm had built them over eleven years. He had paid three different firms to draw them so that no single lawyer would ever see the whole of it. No investigator had described that structure in any filing. No journalist had come near it. And here it was in a footnote, in a legal brief about a different man's crimes, written as a hypothetical by a woman who had presumably never heard his name.

"She doesn't mention me," he said.

"No."

"She doesn't mention anyone."

"She mentions a principle," said Stahl. "It happens to be yours. She worked it out from the discovery production, which means that someone handed her a heap of Port Authority audit trails and she looked at the shape of the heap." He set his cup on the sill. "I have spent six years trying to see that shape, Anselm. I did not see it until I was handed the footnote."

Outside, a tug sounded once on the harbor, long and flat, and was answered by nothing.

"Does she know who she was writing about?"

"I asked a woman at her firm, a secretary, a very talkative woman. She says Miss Calder knows the name Varga from her friend the reporter, who talks about you as other people talk about the weather. A thing that is coming. No. She does not know that she wrote about you."

"She knows she wrote it."

"She knows she wrote it," Stahl agreed. "And she knows it is true. She just does not know it is this true."

Anselm closed the memorandum and laid it on the desk. His hand, he noticed, was still holding the counter, and he opened his fingers one at a time, as if asking them to give back something they had stolen.

He had read the lives of three hundred people in the last year: harbor-masters, brokers, union men, magistrates, every person who might sell him or save him. He had read them for weakness and found it, always, within the hour. A debt. A daughter. A taste for something. What was strange about this woman was that he had read thirty-eight pages of her mind and found no weakness at all. Only a temper, held very carefully in a closed hand. And a conviction, bare as a nail, that the law was the one language in which nobody could lie.

He wanted, with a clarity that surprised him, to be in a room with that conviction.

"The father is going to be sentenced next week," Stahl said. "Brannock's people have been to see him twice. They want the notebook. If the old man cracks, the notebook goes to Port Newark, and then it is a different year for both of us."

"Then I will need to buy the paper on the Calder house before they do."

"That is the practical reason."

"Yes."

"And the other reason?"

Anselm looked at the brown line on the wall below, bright in the single lamp.

"Find everything there is on L. E. Calder," he said. "Where she was born. What she owes. Who she calls when she cannot sleep. And Emmerich."

"Yes?"

"Do not let her know that anyone is looking."