LORIK
Justice, in this country, is a service industry, and I am very good at my job.
My client today is a congressman named Whitford with a round flushed face, tiny broken vessels across his nose and cheeks, the telltale sign of chronic heavy drinking, sweating through a suit that costs more than the jury makes in a year, charged with the kind of insider trading that could feed a small nation.
He is guilty. Spectacularly, documentably guilty. He is also going to walk, because he had the foresight three years ago to put me on retainer, and a man with me on retainer does not go to prison.
I rise for my closing the way I do everything in this room—unhurried, lethal, certain.
I walk the jury through reasonable doubt like I’m taking them on a tour of a house I designed. I make the government’s star witness look like a liar, which is easy, because he is one; I made sure of it.
“You testified, under oath, that you saw my client at the marina on the fourteenth,” I told their star witness this morning, in a soft, almost kind voice, the way you speak to a man right before the floor opens under him.
“Strange. Because I have the marina’s logs, the harbormaster, and four hundred dollars in fuel receipts, all of which put your boat in another state that week.
So which is it? Were you lying then, under oath?
Or are you lying now?” He picked one. They always pick one.
Twelve jurors watched a man’s credibility die in real time, and the prosecutor watched her case go into the ground with it.
I sat down and adjusted my cuffs and let the silence finish the work.
I find the twelve ordinary people in that box and I give each of them, one at a time, with my eyes, permission to go home and not think too hard about a rich man’s money.
It takes them ninety minutes to acquit. I’ve waited longer for coffee.
Whitford pumps my hand on the courthouse steps in front of the cameras, beaming, already telling the reporters about his faith in the system. “Kovaci, you magnificent bastard,” he says under his breath, still smiling for the lenses. “Name your bonus.”
“You’ll get my invoice.” I retrieve my hand before I have to feel his pulse any longer than necessary. “And a piece of advice that’s free. The next time you decide to be a criminal, Congressman, be a quieter one. I clean up loud messes. I’d rather not make a habit of yours.”
He laughs like I’ve said something charming. They always think I’m joking. It’s the great convenience of my life that the worst men alive cannot conceive of a man who holds them in contempt while saving their skin. It never occurs to them that I might despise the very hands I keep clean.
Here is the thing none of them know, the thing not even my own organization knows, the one way my dead brother and I will never be the same.
I don’t keep these men close for the money. I don’t need it. I keep them close because a man who launders the sins of the powerful learns where the powerful keep their bodies.
I sit in rooms where senators discuss what they bought and what they used it for as casually as other men discuss golf, and I smile, and I remember every name and every date and every shipment.
And then, quietly, in the cover of dark, before the worst of it can happen, I get there first. There are girls alive in this country tonight who will never know that the reason no one came for them is that their lawyer’s lawyer was already on his way.
It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that I’d want carved on a stone, and it’s the one thing I can never tell a living soul. Cas knows. That’s all. That’s the whole list.
I’m thinking about that, and God help me, about whether Brooklyn ate today. Whether Drini got the new shipment of bread, whether she’s still wearing my shirt and hating that she likes it, when a voice I’d know in my sleep slides up beside me on the steps like oil onto water.
“Counselor.”
Everything in me goes cold and still.
Senator Roland Vance is a handsome man in the way expensive old things are handsome.
Silver-templed, golf-tanned, a smile calibrated by decades of cameras.
He has a wing of a children’s hospital named after him in three states.
He sits on boards that decide who gets cared for and who gets quietly forgotten.
He has the kind of money and the kind of face that has never once, in sixty years, been told no.
He is also, of every client whose filth I have ever scrubbed, the one I most want to take apart with my hands.
Because Vance doesn’t trade in stocks. He trades in people.
He buys the kind of thing a man cannot legally buy, and he keeps them, and when he tires of them they are not seen again.
Twice now I have gotten to a girl the night before she was meant to become one of the not-seen, and twice I have stood in this man’s presence afterward and smiled while I imagined the specific sounds he’d make with my hands snuffing the life right out of him.
“Senator,” I say, and my voice is warm. It’s always warm. Warm is the uniform.
“Magnificent work in there. Truly.” He falls into step with me, easy, proprietary, a man who has never doubted his welcome anywhere.
“Whitford’s an idiot, but he’s our idiot.
It’s good to know the firewall holds.” He says our like I’m one of them.
I let him. “I’ll be needing your particular talents myself before the quarter’s out. A matter requiring discretion.”
“My talents are always available to my clients.”
“Mm.” He studies the cameras, the marble, and the morning, with the contentment of a man who owns all of it.
Then, lightly, as if it’s an afterthought and not the entire reason he crossed a courthouse plaza to walk beside me: “I hear congratulations are in order. The whole circuit’s buzzing.
Lorik Kovaci, of all the cold-blooded bachelors in this town, has gone and taken a wife. ”
The cold in me sharpens to a point.
“I have,” I say pleasantly.
“A Caputo girl, they’re saying. Italian stock, New York money.
Young.” He turns that calibrated smile on me, and for one second the thing that actually lives behind his eyes surfaces and looks at me.
Appetite, pure and patient and entirely without bottom.
“Very young, the rumor goes. You always did have exquisite taste, Counselor. I’ve been a connoisseur my whole life and I know it when I see it in another man. ”
I have killed people for less than the way he just said young.
I do not kill him on the courthouse steps.
I smile, because that is the job. Because the only thing standing between a dozen girls and pure evil is my ability to be charming to a monster on a Tuesday morning.
But something must show, some hairline crack in the warm, because his smile widens like he’s found it, like he’s been fishing and just felt the line go taut.
“I’m hosting a little thing Saturday,” Vance says.
“The foundation gala. Half the Senate, all the right money, very good for a man in your position to be seen at.” He pats my shoulder, and I let him keep the hand there only because removing it would tell him more than I want him to know.
My skin crawls and I force myself to ignore it.
“Bring her. Your bride. Let the town meet the woman who finally thawed the Albanian.” A beat, gentle as a blade going in.
“I confess I’m dying to see her for myself. ”
“I’m sure she’d be charmed,” I say.
He lets that sit, watching me hold still the way a man watches to see whether a lock will give.
“You know,” he muses, “I’ve spent a fortune acquiring things lesser men called unobtainable.
It’s the only sport that still interests me.
The acquiring.” He smiles again in that way that’s a breath, a pause, a statement.
“A feared man’s wife. Now that would be a trophy worth the trouble. Hypothetically.”
“Hypothetically,” I agree, and let him hear, just once, the thing that lives under the warm uniform. “And hypothetically, the last man who reached for something of mine is still being identified by his dental records.”
Vance laughs, delighted, as if I’ve confirmed something he only suspected. “Oh,” he says. “I do like you, Counselor.”
Senator Vance descends the steps into a waiting car, and I stand in the August sun outside a courthouse where I just set a guilty man free, and I understand with total clarity that I have made a mistake I don’t yet know the shape of.
I am a possessive man, and an obsessive one, but I have never in my life been a careless one—and the only thing that could make me careless is the woman in my house wearing nothing but my shirt.
I find Casimir at the curb, leaned against the car, reading something on his phone with the particular stillness that means he’s already watched the whole exchange on a long lens from across the plaza.
“Vance,” he says, not looking up. It isn’t a question.
“He wants me to bring Brooklyn Saturday.”
Now he looks up. “Then we don’t go.”
“We go.” I get in the car.
I’m already calculating, already laying the board out, already hating that the move I have to make runs straight through the one place I’ve never had a weakness before.
“If I refuse, he wonders why. A man like Vance doesn’t get curious about a thing without taking it apart to see how it works.
” I look out the window at the city I own pieces of, and for the first time in years I feel the specific, sickening vertigo of having something to lose.
“We bring her. We let him look. And we make very, very sure he understands that looking is the only thing he will ever get to do.”
“There’s something else.” Cas turns his phone so I can see the calendar he’s already pulled. “His ‘matter requiring discretion’ lands the same week as the gala. He never hands us two clean problems in a row.”
I take that in.
Somewhere in the next ten days there is a girl Vance has bought, and a night he means to use her, and a narrow window where I can get there first. And now he’s invited me and my wife to stand in his house and smile while I plan exactly that.
The job and the threat, wrapped in the same ribbon.
I’d admire it if it didn’t make my skin crawl.
“So we stay close,” I say. “We were always going to.”
Cas is quiet a moment. Then, carefully, in the voice he only uses when he’s telling me something I don’t want to hear: “He’s not a man who’s ever been told only, Lor.”
“No,” I agree, and watch the dome slide past, gray and enormous and rotten to its foundation. “He isn’t.”