Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (15 page)

A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.

“It’s not really relevant,” says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. “Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward.”

“Yup,” says the chair. “Bingo.”

The vice vice’s beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.

“But he has the right to know the charges against him,” I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes
over me. This really was idiotic, but I’m still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.

“He also has the right to face his accusers,” I say. “If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court.”

The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I’m not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don’t know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, R
ON LOVES
C
ELIA
, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.

“It’s not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence,” says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. “I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context.”

“But how can you pass sentence—”

“We don’t call it ‘passing sentence’—”

“—without a fair trial?”

“Excuse me?” says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. “Who are you?”

I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people—I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this
context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.

“Well?” says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, “I knew it.”

“What?” says the vice.

“I knew someone would be coming to find him.”

She stares at me from the table on the stage—arms crossed, glasses, pigtails—and I stare back at her.

“Excuse me?” The vice vice says, glaring and confused. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.

“I told him they would come for him. That’s what your kind do, right? You come for people.”

The low murmur of the room is beginning to bubble up again, people leaning across one another to whisper and nudge, people exchanging questioning expressions. I ignore them, keep my eyes locked on Julia Stone.

“Um, yes, point of order,” says the vice, while the vice vice stands stonily, arms crossed. “What are you talking about?”

“This man has entered our space on a false pretense,” says Julia, and points at me with one steady finger. “He’s not here to take part in our community; he’s here to infiltrate it. He is on a mission to hunt down another human being like a pig or a dog.”

Silence, then, the room suddenly alive with tension, everybody staring at me or at Julia or back and forth, me to her. I feel it again, the dread gut-level certainty that these people could kill me: that I might die here, in this room, and no one the wiser. And at the same time, nevertheless, I am feeling these wild waves of excitement, looking at the woman for whom Brett named a pizza, the woman who drew him from Concord and from his wife, the woman I went looking for and found. I want to take a picture of her and send it to Detective Culverson and say, “See? See?”

“You don’t understand where you are,” Julia tells me. “This is a new world. We have no room for police-style tactics here.”

“I’m not a policeman,” I say.

“Oh, yeah?” she says, “But you are police-style, aren’t you?”

“What is going on, Julia?” says the vice vice, and he takes an aggressive step toward her around the back of the table, and the vice rises to stop him with one hand pushed against his chest. “Whoa.”

Julia keeps her eyes on mine. “You’ll never kill him,” she says.

“Kill him?” I say. “No, I—his wife sent me.”

“His wife?”

She stands breathing for a second, taking this in, deciding what to do with it, while I’m thinking:
Kill him? Who would be coming to kill him?

“Sorry about this,” says Julia to her colleagues on the tribunal, and then turns to address the room. “I call for an extraordinary postponement. I need to speak to this man alone.”

“Oh, come on,” says the vice vice petulantly. “You just asked
for an extraordinary postponement yesterday.”

“Yes, well,” she says drily. “These are extraordinary times.”

Julia Stone steps down over the lip of the stage and motions for me to meet her at the door. As I pick my way over legs down the tiers, the kid with his hands tied sits down, confused, and the vice chair moves that the meeting advance to the question of public nudity. Everybody cheers and raises their hands, palms up.

The woman Brett loves, like the woman he married, is not beautiful, not in any conventional way. But where Martha Milano’s plainness is redeemed by a sweet radiant quality and warmth of spirit, Julia Stone’s small thin body and dark features are attractive in a whole other way. She doesn’t speak, she
pronounces
, talking fast with her black eyes flashing, each word charged with energy.

“There,” she says. “Those kids. On the roof. See?”

I look where she’s pointing, to a cluster of busy shapes atop one of the dorm buildings off in the distance. “Exercise machines. Maybe twelve people up there now. Sometimes we get thirty or thirty-five. Bikes, treadmills. This is an example. You join us here, you do what you want, as long as, A, your action does not interfere with the ability of others to do what
they
want, and B, whenever possible, your action offers some concrete benefit to the community.”

Julia pauses and stares at the air in front of her, as if scouring the words she has just said, satisfying herself of their soundness before plunging forward. We’re on the roof of Kingfisher Hall: steam pipes, a wilted rooftop garden, a weather-beaten sofa someone lugged up the concrete stairwell and out the trap door.

“We have a team of engineering postdocs who rigged those machines to capture the electricity generated in a central battery. So that, for example …” She swings her arm until she’s pointing at another building, much closer, where on the first floor the curtains are pulled shut tightly. “… 
those
people can watch movies. A French New Wave festival at present. Then they do Tarantino. And so on. They vote on it. There’s a committee.”

“That’s interesting,” I murmur, still trying to get a read on her, on this conversation.
Where is he?
is all I want to ask.
Where’s Brett?

“Interesting?” Julia says. “Sure, it’s
interesting
, but that’s not the
point
. I’m answering your question from downstairs. How can we pass sentence on someone who might be innocent?” She glares at me through the thickness of her glasses. “Wasn’t that your question?”

“Sort of.”

“No, it was, that’s what you asked. Don’t backtrack. He didn’t do it, by the way.”

She thrusts out her chin, waiting for astonishment, anger, argument. And in fact I am a little astonished; I can see him clearly, the shivering nervous defendant, barely out of his teens, hands bound, waiting for the punishment of the mob.

But I hold my peace, I just raise my eyebrows, go, “Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Really. I set him up.”

She’s pushing, she’s feeling me out, and I know exactly why. She thinks that she hates me and she wants to make sure. I come to her tainted by my association with Martha, with “the wife,” and Julia Stone would therefore prefer to tell me to fuck off back to copland or wherever I came from. I therefore need to play it slow, hang back, save my questions until I think there’s a chance she’ll answer them.

“All I meant is that the kid deserved to be treated fairly,” I say. “I didn’t say he was innocent.”

“Oh, he’s not
innocent
,” says Julia, “he’s just not a thief. He’s a rapist. Okay? Don’t ask how I know, because I know what goes on here. I
know
. And I want him out of my community. But if I had him brought up for rape, then Jonathan—the vice to the vice? Remember him?”

I nod. Piggy eyes, flushed face, the sneer of a spoiled child.

“Jonathan would demand a hanging. Not because he gives two shits about violence against women. Because he wants to hang someone. I know he does. And once the hangings start—” She shakes her head, seeing the future. “Forget it.”

I rub my forehead, finding the queer little divot in my temple, remembering when Cortez assaulted me in the elevator. Seems like a million years ago, a different lifetime. Julia is looking out over the campus again, brow furrowed, hands moving while she talks.

“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is
seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?”

Julia flicks her gaze at me.

“No,” I say. “I guess not.”

“No,” she says. “There isn’t one.”

Her passion, her confidence—I can see clearly how these qualities must have sung out to Brett Cavatone, whom I have come to see as quiet, quick-minded and intense, a philosopher in the thick tough body of a policeman. How, I wonder fleetingly, did he and Martha Milano end up together in the first place? How long did it take before he knew he had married the wrong sort of woman?

“We have this opportunity,” Julia says. “We’ve struck this elusive balance between safety and personal liberty. This balance
always
gets fucked up, but now there’s no
time
for it to get fucked up. We just have to keep the Jacobin shit at bay, keep from tipping over into
Lord of the Flies
for seventy-four more days.” She’s talking faster and faster, the words rattling along like train cars. “This is literally a unique opportunity in the history of civilization, and the preservation of public order trumps the specific form of justice doled out to one individual. Right?”

“Right,” I say.

“Yes. Right. Is she paying you?” She turns to me, crosses her arms. “The wife?”

“No.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and give her a quick little half smile.
“Although people do keep asking me that.”

“I’ll bet.” And then she smiles back, just the tiniest secret hint of a smile. There’s a small gap between her front teeth, like a rascally ten-year-old.

“You thought before that I had been sent to kill him. Why would someone be trying to kill him?”

The smile disappears. “Why the fuck should I tell you?”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Love is a bourgeois construct,” Julia says immediately, but nevertheless she turns away from me, gazes out over the rooftops and treetops of the transformed campus. I wait, allow her a moment alone with whatever memories she’s replaying. And then I gently push forward, talking softly, telling her the story she already knows.

“Brett arrested you a couple years ago, in Rumney, but you gave him an earful from the bars of the holding cell. You made him see the justice of your cause, and he came to respect you. You talked him out of testifying. You developed feelings for each other.”

Julia gives me a quick sour look at the word
feelings
, and I nod in acknowledgment of the fact that feelings are a bourgeois construct, but I keep going.

“But he wouldn’t leave his wife. That wasn’t in his character. So at the end of the summer you went back to school, and he left the state troopers and moved to Concord, and that was that.”

She’s not saying anything, she’s not even looking at me now. Her eyes are fixed on her campus, her people: the exercisers, the movie watchers, the undulating swarms on the central quad. But neither
is she interrupting, neither is she saying no. I keep talking, just a guy in a suit on a rooftop telling a story on a summer’s day.

“But then the asteroid comes along. The countdown begins, and it changes everything. You think, well, maybe
now
. Maybe now Brett and I get our shot. You wrote him letters, told him all about the Free Republic and what you had accomplished here. You told him he should come and play chess and hang out with you until the end.”

Now Julia raises a single finger, still staring straight ahead. “One letter. A couple months ago.”

“Okay,” I say. “One letter. And then yesterday, suddenly, he shows up.”

I can picture the scene, Brett Cavatone slipping into the back of that crowded noisy auditorium as I had, and suddenly Julia spots him from her chair on the stage. Her jaw drops, her commanding pose of leadership wavers momentarily like a blurry TV signal as Brett smiles up at her, self-contained and formidable and affectionate. “He tells you he’s here now, there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with you.”

“No,” says Julia abruptly.

“No?”

At last she turns away from the rail and looks at me straight on, lips pursed with emotion, and I don’t care if love is a bourgeois construct or not, I’ve seen love once or twice before and this is the face of a woman in love. She loves him and bitterly regrets what she says next.