The Book of Stone. Jonathan Papernick
Читать онлайн книгу.
lives may be at stake,” Zohar said, grabbing Stone by the shirt, his sour breath turning Stone’s stomach. “I need to know what is going on inside there.”
“This interrogation is over.” Stone tore himself from Zohar’s grip and sprinted up the street at a dead run.
Stone crossed under the BQE without checking for traffic, Zohar’s footsteps fast at his heels, pursuing him. This was his executioner, Stone thought. He would be the end of Stone, but Stone would never speak a word. He stumbled on a curb, righted himself, and continued to run, never looking back. All his organs and muscles and bones worked in tandem now, his nerves vibrating with the pure, uncut rush of adrenaline. The invincible fear was back with greater force than it had been in years. But, Stone thought, if he could just outrun Zohar, just shake him now, he would never again be haunted by anything.
The keys to his father’s red 1980 Thunderbird jangled in his pocket, and he knew what he had to do as he crossed silent Myrtle Avenue with its fried-chicken joints, check-cashing windows, and grim bodegas. He needed to drive, to drive, to drive, to get away, to put everything behind him, to drive and drive and drive and leave his past and everything he ever knew behind. This was not death, this was life, and he was rushing toward it in a breathless sprint. With a furious leap, he reached his father’s car, found the lock, tore the door open, and slid inside. Stone started the ignition and floored the gas, cutting across the sidewalk, nearly knocking over a battered mailbox. Yes, he thought, yes, breathing in his father’s smell on the soft upholstery, so magnetic, so powerful, so redolent with life he was overcome. As he turned right onto Washington Street, green ailanthus and sycamore trees flickering past, he saw in the rearview mirror the face of his father, his unforgiving eyes flashing through his half-moon glasses. He knew he was speeding. His father had never had a ticket in his entire life, and he was showing his displeasure now, but Stone could outrun anyone, didn’t his father know that?
On his right, he passed the abandoned Graham Home for Old Ladies, its windows shuttered like coins on the eyes of the dead, and the skeletal jungle gym in the empty playground. Stone pressed his foot on the gas, passed under the giant cruciform shadow bleeding from the roof of Christ: Light of the World Church, and raced through a red light at Lafayette.
His father was stuck in the mirror, and Stone needed to get him to stop hiding in the glass, certain he was going to step out and devour him whole. “Forgive me, forgive me,” Stone shouted.
The red neon hands of the clock atop the golden-domed Williamsburg Savings Bank tower read some hour that looked like a crooked V for victory, and he raced on, singing the Columbia fight song his father had taught him with his first words. He sang as he drove, crossing from neighborhood to neighborhood, lights off now, a knife cutting through the darkness. He had shaken Zohar but the Judge remained in the mirror, fragmented into a mosaic of expressions—joy, sadness, disappointment, fear, all mixed as one. He continued to sing “Roar, Lion, Roar!”—the fight song of his father’s alma mater, a school Stone had refused to attend just because. Davka, as his father would have said. And Stone sang and he sang and he sang but his father would not join him and would not go away until, finally, Stone wrenched the rearview mirror off the windshield and tossed it out the window.
Stone’s adrenaline had flamed out. No sense of victory buoyed him, just deep exhaustion. All he wanted to do was sleep, but he was lost. He drove in a fog of confusion until he could not drive anymore and he shut the car down, sprawled out across the front seats, and fell into a restless sleep.
WHEN HIS FATHER was selected to preside over the Court Street Riot trial, during Matthew’s junior year of high school, Matthew was unimpressed; his father’s accomplishments had long ceased to mean anything to him, serving only to draw the Judge farther away. He became even more silent and introspective, rarely uttering a word. He locked himself in his study for hours at a time and slept at his desk. Matthew thought his father was selfish, self-absorbed, and dull, his ceaseless immersion in legal texts and documents antithetical to life. As the trial came closer and protests became louder, calling for the Judge’s ouster, Matthew hid from reporters and sometimes stayed out all night with one of the girls impressed by his newfound celebrity. One girl asked Matthew whether the Judge would go easy on a landsman. Seeing his father on the nightly news, Matthew realized the Judge did not belong to him but to the state, the public, the media—he was his father in name only. It was ridiculous to think this man, larger than life and vibrant on television, was the same silent, moody pile of nerves who holed up in his study as if it were a defensive bunker. But, sometimes, Matthew missed his brooding presence at home, and he went to the Kings County Supreme Court building in downtown Brooklyn. The Honorable Walter J. Stone sat at the front of the courtroom beneath the engraved words: LET JUSTICE BE DONE THOUGH THE HEAVENS FALL, his half-moon glasses pushed down on his nose. He spoke with a firm tone, questioning both lawyers at length. This was the man Matthew knew, the man who had been absent around the house for so many months. He spoke with force and confidence and authority. Sitting there in the courtroom, Matthew arrived at the absurd realization that the Judge was father to all those people present—no wonder he had no time or tenderness for his son.
The defendant, Isaac Brilliant, was slim and wiry in his black suit, slouched in a chair beside his lawyer. Matthew did not remember the jury or the makeup of the spectators, but he did remember the exhausted New York Times reporter slumped next to him, doodling in his notebook, again and again, around the words that would constitute his lead paragraph in the next day’s paper. Quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes, the words read, “The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.”
Not long after, when the selection of jurors exploded into a full-scale controversy and the word jurymandering entered the New York lexicon, Matthew believed his father had gotten what he deserved for his cold arrogance in overriding the prosecution’s challenge to the defense’s jury choice. It was the first time in his life Matthew had seen his father wounded, battered by a world he strode through like a giant, brushing aside problems with ease. The Judge was questioned many times by the district attorney’s office, walking the humiliating media gauntlet, passing signs reading BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS and BASSAM DIDN’T ASK TO DIE as the clutch of TV cameras pressed in on him. The Judge was composed and stoic as he walked, but Matthew realized he had lost control of his personal narrative, his carefully constructed mystique smashed to pieces, when he heard the young television reporters begin each day’s coverage with, “. . . son of notorious gangster Julius Stone . . .” It was then that Matthew finally allowed himself to feel sympathy for his father. Papa Julius had laid this minefield long ago, and only now was the Judge forced to confront it.
A man and a woman from the district attorney’s office rang the Stones’ doorbell one night after dinner. They both showed their DA badges and asked Matthew to answer some simple questions. They related to the Judge’s character and were general questions he finessed with ease—he said nothing of substance. The thin, crane-like woman asked point-blank, “Did your father, Walter Stone, knowingly approve, as a member of the jury at the trial of Brilliant v. State of New York, a man he knew would not be able to fairly render a decision considering the facts presented to him?”
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“Is that your answer?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know,” Matthew said.
“Can you repeat that, please?” the man said, taking notes. “Did your father, Judge Walter Stone, knowingly approve—”
“I don’t know.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
The Judge walked in the front door as the pair from the DA’s office was leaving.
“What are you doing in my home?” the Judge said to the man, who was fiddling with his briefcase.
“Just asking a few questions. We’re leaving now, Judge Stone.”
He