The Believers

  “Okay,” he said, handing the bottle back. “I’m good.”

  They went in through the glass doors of the Federal Courthouse and deposited their cell phones with a lady in a booth before joining the line at the security checkpoint. One of the uniformed men standing at the X-ray machine raised his arms in greeting. “Heeeey! Here he is! How ya doing, Mr. Litvinoff?”

  Joel stared at him in mock consternation. “What happened, Lew?” He took off his watch and placed it, along with his keys, in a plastic tray on the conveyor belt. “They didn’t get rid of you yet? I thought for sure they would have fired you by now.”

  Lew laughed heartily—a little more heartily than was strictly credible, it seemed to Joel. That was all right. Caring enough to fake mirth was its own sort of compliment. Joel passed through the metal detector and picked up his briefcase, keys, and watch on the other side.

  “A big one today, right?” Lew said.

  Joel shrugged. “They’re all big, Lew, they’re all big. I’ll see you later.”

  “All right, Mr. Litvinoff, take it easy.”

  In the elevator going up to the courtroom, Joel found himself pressed tightly against a young blonde. “Well!” He chuckled. “My lucky day.” The woman looked away disdainfully. He felt a moment’s befuddlement at the failure of his gallantry and then an urge to take the woman by the scruff of her neck and give her a good slap. But he pulled himself together and went on chatting to Kate in a loud, cheerful voice until they reached their floor.

  Joel’s cocounsel, Buchman, a pink-faced kid from Virginia, had already arrived in the courtroom. Joel nodded hello to the prosecution team and stopped to say a few words to the court stenographer, a nice old gargoyle called Helen. Then he sat down and chatted with Buchman. Soon the jury filed in, emanating the usual stagy solemnity of citizens fulfilling their civic duty. Joel put his elbows on the desk in front of him and cradled his chin in his hands. He was feeling old. The elevator woman’s rejection had bothered him. His head was throbbing. The long day’s work loomed before him like a cliff face.

  Hassani was brought up now from the holding cell, accompanied by three grimly corpulent guards. Joel stood up and stretched out his arms.

  “Assalamu alaikum!” A blush crept across Hassani’s solemn, bean-shaped face as he found himself enfolded in an enthusiastic bear hug. Joel, whose personal affections tended to follow his political sympathies and who rarely managed to get through a case without falling a little in love with his client, was famous for his public expressions of tenderness toward the men and women he represented.

  “You’re looking good, man!” he said, when at last he had released Hassani. “You’re looking good!” He rubbed at the circular impression that one of his suit buttons had left on Hassani’s cheek. The energy that he had expended on the hug had left him slightly dizzy, he realized. He sat down now and stared straight ahead, trying to regain his balance.

  Now, the court clerk entered and asked the people to please rise for the judge. As Joel heaved himself up, he heard a tiny noise in his head—a brittle, snapping sound like a dry branch being broken underfoot. At the same time, a blurry, dark margin appeared at the corner of his vision. He was just wondering whether he ought to sit down again when the room tipped on its side.

  No one reacted immediately when he fell to the floor. Several people would later admit that they had mistaken the collapse for one of his courtroom stunts. After a moment or two, however, things began to happen. The stenographer went over and took Joel’s pulse. Several journalists ran downstairs to put in calls to their newsrooms. Kate asked a policeman to radio for an ambulance. Hassani leaned over to Buchman and politely inquired about how he should proceed with finding a replacement lawyer.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Audrey was sitting in an airy, book-lined living room on Central Park West, drinking tea with her friend Jean Himmelfarb before setting off for her weekly stint of volunteer work at the Coalition for the Homeless. A construction crew had begun renovating Jean’s kitchen that morning, and the two women were having some trouble hearing one another over the tremendous banging coming from down the hall.

  “Of course,” Audrey was almost shouting as she held up a copy of the New York Post, “these fascists always love to characterize Joel’s position as outdated and irrelevant. They haven’t got any decent arguments, so they just try to marginalize him.”

  “Mmm.” Jean drew her feet up on to her chair and hugged her knees to her chest. She was a tall, ruddy-faced woman in her mid-sixties with a bouncy, tomboyish bearing that she tended to accentuate with jaunty hats. Today, much to Audrey’s disapproval, she was wearing a floppy orange newsboy cap that her great-niece had knitted for her. “Still,” she said, “you can understand why people are nervous about men like Hassani these days.”

  Audrey leaned forward. “Come again?”

  “I said it’s understandable that people are a bit nervous about terrorists and so on.”

  “What do you mean?” Audrey’s face took on an impatient expression. Jean was terribly unreliable when it came to politics. The first time they met, at an ANC fund-raiser thirty years ago, Audrey had been obliged to tell her off for making squeamish remarks about the “brutal tactics” of the PLO. She had been laboring ever since to correct some of Jean’s more egregious misconceptions about international affairs, but with minimal success. Jean meant well—her heart was basically in the right place—but left to her own devices, she was still inclined to take everything she read in the New York Times op-ed pages as gospel.

  “You do understand, don’t you,” Audrey said now, “that there’s a bloody witch hunt going on in this country at the moment?”

  “Oh, yes,” Jean nodded. “Yes, I do see that…but sometimes even witch hunts catch real witches, don’t they?”

  “‘Real witches’? My God, Jean! What do you want to do—start rounding up every brown-skinned man in America? Because that’s basically what this government is doing right now.”

  “No, well, of course that’s awful. But…I mean, what if your man Hassani really was intending to come back and start planting bombs in the name of Allah?”

  “Oh, don’t be daft,” Audrey said. “This whole Allah thing is a total red herring. Al-Qaeda is a political organization, not a religious one. People bang on about fundamentalist Islam and religious fanatics, but it’s obvious no one is inspired by bin Laden for religious reasons.”

  “Aren’t they?” Jean asked. “I mean, aren’t some of the al-Qaeda lot motivated by religion?” She was wishing, as she often did in these talks with Audrey, that she had bothered to read more about the subject under discussion. She was quite sure that Audrey was wrong about al-Qaeda—or, at the very least, not wholly right—but she could sense, even before she began, that her flummoxed protest was doomed. There was nothing wrong with being the one who always pointed out that things were more complex than supposed: it was a perfectly honorable and even necessary job. But it wasn’t what won you arguments.

  “Nooo, Jean,” Audrey said, shaking her head vehemently. “Absolutely not. The anger that motivates the suicide bombers is a political anger. A perfectly rational anger against the American hegemon.”

  Jean cupped her ear with her hand. “Against what, sorry?”

  “Against the American hegemon, Jean.”

  “Ah, yes.” Jean nodded. “But don’t they also hate us because we’re infidels?”

  “What?”

  “I was saying—I think there must be some religion involved.”

  Audrey rolled her eyes. Oh, dear, oh, dear. “That’s just what the Bush administration wants you to believe, Jean. ‘They hate our freedoms…this is a clash of civilizations…we’re bombing Afghanistan so that the dear little Afghan girls can have a chance to go to school.’ It’s all bollocks. They’re fighting us because we support Israel and every other shitty regime in the Middle East. And we’re fighting them because there’s a bloody great big oil pipeline that goes across Afghani
stan.”

  Jean was silent. She didn’t doubt that malfeasance and lies were involved in this Afghanistan business, but all the talk of oil pipelines and conspiracies—it was just a higher level of gossip, wasn’t it? How could Audrey possibly know?

  “Well,” she said, “but the Taliban was a pretty awful regime.”

  Audrey put down her teacup and gave a languorous stretch. “Sweetie,” she said, “the world is full of awful regimes.”

  Jean sighed. There were some people with a gift for conviction—a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, “I’m in: this is my position.” Audrey had it. All of the Litvinoffs had it, to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps. Jean had seen a film once, about a troop of French soldiers in World War I who were charged with getting a cannon to their fellow soldiers, trapped under enemy fire. For weeks, they carted the cannon around the countryside as their number slowly dwindled. Some were killed. Some deserted. Some collapsed from exhaustion. But no matter how desperate the situation became—even when it emerged that the cannon itself was probably defective—the captain of the group kept going forward, refusing to give up. Audrey’s attachment to her dogma was a bit like that, Jean thought. For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions, believing herself honor-bound to protect them against destruction at all costs. No new intelligence, no rational argument, could cause her to falter in her mission. Not even the cataclysmic events of the previous September had put her off stride for more than a couple of hours. By lunchtime on the day that the towers fell, when the rest of New York was still stumbling about in a daze, Audrey had already been celebrating the end of the myth of American exceptionalism and comparing the event to the American bombing of a Sudanese aspirin factory in 1998. The speed with which she had processed the catastrophe and assimilated it to her worldview had been formidable in its way, and at the same time, Jean felt, a little chilling.

  “Talking of religion,” she said now, hoping to change the subject, “how is Rosa? Is she still…?”

  Audrey’s expression darkened. “Oh, yeah,” she replied drearily, “still off dancing the hora. It’s all very gruesome.”

  Rosa was the Litvinoffs’ younger daughter. A little less than a year and a half ago, she had returned from a four-year sojourn in Cuba, announcing that her lifelong fealty to the cause of revolutionary socialism was at an end and that she no longer believed in political solutions to the world’s problems. Recently, she had delivered another, infinitely more shocking punch to the collective family jaw by informing them that she had begun attending services at an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side.

  “Does she talk about it a lot, then?” Jean asked. “The religion, I mean?”

  “Oh, no,” Audrey said. “She’s terribly smug about it all. She wouldn’t waste time sharing her thoughts with us heathens.” She gazed glumly out of the window. “Joel’s taken it very hard. He really thought she had grown up at last. He was even talking about paying for her to go back to law school. He’s convinced that she’s having some sort of breakdown.”

  Jean nodded sympathetically. “Well, perhaps she is a bit depressed. It might not be a bad idea for her to get some therapy—”

  “Oh, bollocks!” Audrey broke in. “Rosa’s not depressed. She only ever went to Cuba to show everyone how special and interesting she was. Now she’s tired of playing peasant, and she wants to see how much attention she can get by becoming Queen of the Matzoh.”

  “Well, but—”

  “Depressed!” Audrey went on indignantly. “She’s as happy as Larry, poncing about with her new Jewy friends. If she needs anything, Jean, it’s not therapy, it’s a good fuck.”

  “Oh, Audrey,” Jean said, flapping her hands in embarrassment.

  “I’m serious. I don’t think she’s been with a man since she’s been back. What’s that about? She’s always been a bit of a prude, Rosa. I think that’s why this religious business appeals to her. It’s all about repressing your sexual drives, isn’t it?”

  The last part of Audrey’s remark was drowned out by a drill starting up in the kitchen.

  “Oh, dear,” Jean said. “This noise is intolerable, isn’t it? Perhaps you should come back next week when they’ve finished the demolition.”

  Audrey shook her head. “No, I’m fine,” she said firmly. “A bit of noise doesn’t bother me.”

  Jean’s renovation was, as it happened, the principal reason for Audrey’s visit this morning. Lenny had recently been let go from his painting job in Williamsburg, and Audrey was hoping that she could persuade Jean to give him some work on her kitchen.

  “I wonder,” she said now, in a wondering tone of voice. “Lenny’s free at the moment. He could probably spare you a bit of time if you want to have him come and help out with your paintwork.”

  Jean nodded carefully. “That’s awfully nice of you, Audrey,” she said, “but I think Darius has it covered.”

  “But you know these guys always try to save money by putting some teenager on the paintwork. You really need a professional painter if you want the job done properly.”

  “Yes…”

  “Do you remember that beautiful work Lenny did on your country house? You loved that, Jean.”

  “Oh, I know, yes.” Jean blushed. The truth, as Audrey knew perfectly well, was that Lenny had never completed the job on her country house. Shortly after starting the work, he had had one of his relapses. The little he had accomplished before absconding had been so shoddily executed that Jean had had to pay to have it done over.

  “The thing is,” Jean said, “I don’t think Darius can take on someone else without going over his—you know—his estimate…”

  “Oh!” Audrey said. “Well! If it’s a question of money…” She stared moodily at Jean’s coffee table.

  Audrey always referred to Jean in an aggrieved tone as “an heiress.” She did not know exactly how much money Jean had inherited from her father’s pharmaceutical fortune; she had never made any effort to find out. To have nailed down the precise sum would have meant acknowledging that there were limits to Jean’s funds—that there were, in fact, some things that Jean could not afford. As it was, Audrey’s cloudy notion of her friend’s infinite, fairy-tale wealth allowed her to believe that everything that happened or did not happen in Jean’s life was a pure expression of Jean’s will, unimpeded by workaday considerations of expense. This, in turn, made possible the consoling conviction that Jean was miserly and “uncreative” with her money.

  There was a pause in the conversation now. Audrey, who was quite sure that any embarrassment arising from the silence was rightly Jean’s, sat back in her chair and waited.

  “Well,” Jean said at length. “Perhaps I could talk to Darius…”

  Audrey nodded wisely. “Oh, I think that’s a good idea, Jean. You really would be better off…”

  Somewhere in the depths of Audrey’s handbag, a cell phone began to ring. Jean took the opportunity to get up and take some of the tea things into the kitchen.

  When she returned, Audrey was barking into the phone. “What do you mean? How badly?”

  Jean looked at her in alarm.

  “All right,” Audrey said. “Give me the address.” She scribbled something down on the back of her checkbook. “I’m coming now.” She put the phone back in her bag. “I have to go,” she said. “Joel fainted in court. They’ve taken him to a hospital in Brooklyn.”

  “Oh, Audrey!” Jean said, clutching her forehead. “Is there anything I can do? Would you like me to come with you?”

  “No, no, don’t be silly.” As if to prove how unflustered she was, Audrey picked up her cup and drank back the remains of her tea before making her way out to the hall.

  “Will you call me when you find out how he is?” Jean asked, following her.

  “Yes, of course.” Audrey said.

  “Really, call me if you need anything. I’m here all day,” Jean handed
Audrey her coat and opened the door.

  Halfway to the elevator, Audrey stopped and turned around. “And you won’t forget about Lenny, will you?”

  Jean nodded emphatically. “No, of course not. I’ll speak to Darius about it today.”

  By insisting that the taxi make a couple of illegal left turns, Audrey managed to get to the Long Island Hospital in Cobble Hill in less than forty minutes. She found Kate, Joel’s paralegal, sitting alone in the ICU Family and Friends Lounge.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  Kate began diligently to describe what had taken place in the courtroom.

  “Yeah, all right, love,” Audrey interrupted, “I don’t need the police procedural. What do they say is wrong with him?”

  Kate put her hand to her mouth. “Oh! I thought you’d been told. They think he’s had a stroke—”

  “A stroke!”

  “Well, that’s what the ambulance men said. I haven’t spoken to anyone since. A doctor is meant to be coming to talk to us in a bit.”

  Audrey sat down in an armchair. The walls of the lounge had been painted with a special sponging technique to give the impression of fresco. Hanging above the sofa where Kate was sitting was a group of nautical prints: unmanned schooners on glassy seas. A low table in the corner of the room was piled high with back issues of American Business and American Baby. “Well, this is a real shit-hole, isn’t it?” Audrey remarked as she took out her phone.

  Kate pointed apologetically to a sign on the wall: “We Thank You for Not Using Cell Phones in the ICU.”

  “Oh, fucking hell.” Audrey paused, weighing whether to heed the prohibition, then stood up. “All right, I’m going downstairs. Look after my handbag while I’m gone, and come and get me if anything happens.”