Fighting Chance(2)
Somewhere out in the foyer, his bells were chiming. He asked himself if he looked “professional” this morning. He decided that he did not look like a homeless person, which was better than he did three out of seven days a week. Then he made his way out through the stacks of books and into the hall.
The hall was also full of stacks of books. So was the living room and the dining room, and the kitchen beyond that. So was the foyer. The books were of every possible kind and in almost every possible language. There were the works of the Church fathers in Greek. There was that old copy of the Summa in Latin that he’d brought with him. There were books on history in English, German, and French. There was Dostoyevsky in Russian and a complete set of the Harry Potter novels in the original English. There were books on art and books on music and books of literary criticism. There were even cookbooks, although Lida Arkmanian—she of the chinchilla coat—always said that giving Father Tibor a cookbook was like giving a mad bomber a guide to explosives.
In the foyer were the books he hadn’t read yet, and a small stack of books he’d tried to read but couldn’t make himself finish. On the top of that pile was something called Fifty Shades of Grey. It embarrassed him just to look at it.
The bells chimed again, and as they did, Tibor could hear giggling just beyond the door. He opened up to let in Donna Moradanyan Donahue and her small son. Her older one, Tommy, must already be out at the Ararat. If Donna didn’t hurry, one of the Melajian girls would stuff Tommy full of pastry and he’d be wired all day at school.
Donna wasn’t hurrying. She was decidedly young and decidedly healthy, and the small boy she had with her was positively ecstatic. Tibor tried to pick him up, but he raced away into the living room and could be heard squealing from there.
“He’s happy this morning,” Tibor said.
“He’s always happy,” Donna said.
She went into the living room and corralled the child, who let loose with another stream of giggles. Then she came back into the foyer and looked Tibor over from head to foot.
“There’s something wrong,” she said.
Tibor took his sweater off the brass coatrack that had been a gift from Bennis Hannaford Demarkian four Christmases ago. It was still warm this early in September, but he got cold easily. He got cold for the same reason he looked like a garden gnome.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Donna asked him. “You’re not getting sick or something?”
“I’m not getting sick or something,” Tibor said. “If we don’t hurry up, Tommy will be full of sugar.”
“Tommy’s with Russ,” she said absently, meaning her husband, but not Tommy’s father. She was still staring him up and down.
Then she opened the door to the hall and ushered the small boy out.
“I still say there’s something wrong,” she said.
Tibor didn’t waste his time arguing the point.
2
Judge Martha Handling didn’t like going into court early, and she didn’t like staying late. In fact, for the last five years, she hadn’t liked going into court at all. Actually, it was much worse than that. For the last five years, Martha hadn’t liked going much of anywhere.
This morning, she pulled her little Ford Focus into the parking space with her name on it behind the court building, cut the engine, and made herself take a deep breath. She knew it was ridiculous to get this upset about what everybody else took for granted, but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t even believe that everybody else took it for granted, no matter how often they said so. Back when she was in college—Bryn Mawr, class of 1976—she’d taken a sociology course on the history of law enforcement, and in that course she was introduced to a thing called the Panopticon.
The Panopticon was either a prison or a plan for a prison where the guards could keep constant and uninterrupted surveillance of everything the prisoners did. Martha couldn’t remember whether the prison had ever actually been built, but she did know that its principle had surely come to pass, and not just in prisons.
These days, the cameras were everywhere. They were in restaurants. They were in grocery stores. They were even pointed at the street here and there. Most of all, they were in the courthouse. They would have been in the dressing room she used to enrobe if she hadn’t had a complete nutcase fit and put a stop to it.
The problem, of course, was that she wasn’t sure she had put a stop to it. She didn’t like the people who worked for the City of Philadelphia these days. She didn’t like the people who worked for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, either. She wouldn’t put it past any of them to lie straight to her face and go on filming anyway.