by Scott Turow
“I drove back to Nearing. I mean, every second I was waiting for the cops to pull me over and put me in cuffs. But I got to a body shop on the other side of town and told the guy it was all super embarrassing. I was the big boss and had cracked up a company car because I wasn’t paying attention and hit a concrete barrier on the highway.”
“So if you had the car repaired, Lep, and Oscar thought little of you keeping it for a week, why bother stealing the signout forms?”
“By the time I brought the car back, I knew from Kiril that you were saying that the car that hit you had a PT decal in the rear window. I just wanted to be sure there was no record that I had one of the Malibus the day of the collision. I didn’t think Oscar would be sure one way or the other if there wasn’t a paper trail.
“Half the time when I return one of the Malibus normally, Oscar is out in his golf cart. So I just drop the keys on his desk and find the form and sign the car back in. The day I brought the car back from the shop, I drove by a couple of times until I could see Oscar out checking the parking lot. Then I just stood in his little hut and made like I was signing in, while I actually crumpled up every form for the week it happened.”
Lep, whose eyes have not risen from the floor for several minutes, reaches out and sips again. He stares at the glass at length before he resumes speaking.
“Sandy, my life has been chaos for five years now. I mean with Olga, I slipped, or fell, or gave in, whatever stupid word people put to that, but I cannot even remember what it was like to be me in 2013. Truly I cannot. I’m not sure I’ll ever do another piece of scientific work worth discussing. That kind of concentration is a thing of the past for me. I can barely add two plus two. There are days when I just go from one thing to another in my head and realize I’ve spent the whole day sitting in a chair and looking out the window. You know, Kiril—he can forget about anything, or pretend it’s not happening.”
“So I have noticed. Have you spoken to your father?”
Lep tosses his head minutely, his eyes closed, to indicate no.
“My father and I haven’t really had a conversation in more than three years.”
Stern does the math first, then asks, “Do I take it you had a disagreement about Olga?”
“I mean, she knew it was killing me. That was the point, right? She’d go flouncing by my door into Kiril’s office ten times a day. But finally, I figured I’d tell him the truth and ask him for a little mercy. Not even to stop seeing her. But get her out of the office. Give her some monster severance and get the whole thing out of my face.”
“He did not agree?”
Lep winces at the memory.
“He already knew about you and Olga, I take it?” Stern asks.
“I was surprised, but I guess she’d told him. He just shrugged that part off. But he looked at me and said, ‘If you’ve created a situation that you cannot tolerate, Lep, then perhaps you are the one who should think about leaving.’ And I knew what that was about really. When g-Livia went on the market in a few months, there was going to be a huge fanfare. All kinds of attention. And he would be just as happy to have me gone, so he could tell all the reporters how he’d basically done all this himself.”
“Even though you were the one who deserved the lion’s share of the credit.”
“Science is always collaboration, Sandy. It’s not like writing a poem. Kiril made real contributions.”
“But nowhere as large as yours, Lep.”
“You know, at least he could have said we did it together. But when Kiril tells the story, it’s like he’s the architect and I was the carpenter.”
There is, of course, considerable justice to what Lep did to his father. If Kiril wanted all the credit for g-Livia, then he also deserved all the blame for its problems.
“So that was the last time you and Kiril spoke, when you asked him to fire Olga?”
“I mean, the conversation went south, which was my fault in a way.”
“How so?”
“I don’t have his skill with people. I don’t. I know that.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I said to him, finally, ‘Don’t you understand she’s just trying to get even with me?’”
“Ah,” says Stern. “I take your point.”
“He just smirked at me and said, ‘On the contrary, Lep, she seems quite happy.’”
Stern cannot stifle a small sound. An ugly scene.
“My whole life,” says Lep, “I’ve never really understood my father. There’s a different Kiril inside my head, I guess. And that Kiril never shows up. But that moment, when I asked him for just a little empathy—that was the end. I mean, guilty isn’t even the word for how I’ve felt about what I was doing to him. Because lying, all that, it’s not me. But I never doubted he deserved it. I hugged him in front of the jury because Feld told me it would be a great touch.”
Lep drinks the rest of his water and heaves a great sigh.
“I want to ask you to forgive me, Sandy. Please forgive me.” Lep manages for the first time to actually bring his fair eyes to Stern’s, albeit not for long. He has the pink-eyed look of a rabbit.
Sonny, when she talks privately about sentencing, says she always gives convicted defendants credit when they say they’re sorry. Not that she thinks they mean it, in most cases. But at least, she says, it shows they know how to behave.
Yet in Lep’s case, Stern does not doubt his sincerity, or his self-analysis that his emotional life has descended to chaos. And if Innis is correct that it is Lep who made the most significant breakthroughs in the development of g-Livia—and a number of scientists at PT have hinted the same thing—then Stern feels obliged to give proper weight to that. Yes, Lep put Stern’s life in peril. But, in Lep’s better moments, he had a signal role keeping Stern here on earth.
“Are you talking to someone, Lep?”
Lep nods repeatedly, but it turns out that his apparent yes actually means no.
“I know I have to. I’ve gotten names. But I just don’t even know where I’d start. I can’t even imagine admitting all of this to someone else. I feel crazed just sitting here, realizing you know as much as you do. You’ve heard people say they feel like jumping out of their own skin?” He tries and fails again with another effort to meet Stern’s eyes.
Before Lep arrived, Stern had given some thought to whether he would go to the police, if Lep was insincere or dishonest. It would be a cruel thing to do to Donatella in her current circumstances. But a distraught mother is often in the back of the courtroom weeping when someone who deserves it is convicted. Yet the man in Stern’s living room seems to have been forthright—and responsible—and Stern made a commitment to his mother to consider her.
“Here are my terms,” he says to Lep. “I will keep this to myself, if you are taking concrete steps to get yourself under control. You can go to a shrink or go to jail. And not one or two visits. A genuine course of treatment. You will authorize whatever psychiatrist you choose to inform me every six months or so whether you are still attending your sessions.”
When they’d met, Helen had far more faith than Stern in the talking cure. But once they had decided to get married, he had spent quite a bit of time with someone, trying to get a perspective on Clara, her death, and his family, especially Peter. And it had helped. Not changed everything. But helped.
At any rate, the proposal he has made Lep is one that he has fervently wished a wise prosecutor had made to dozens of his clients over the years. Not all of them by any means—many were incorrigible and had repeated their behavior often enough that they deserved to spend time in the penitentiary, just to grant the rest of humanity a reprieve. But there were quite a few who felt enough shame to make genuine efforts to prevent a reoccurrence of their conduct. Punishment for its own sake, to make the victims feel better, had a purpose, too. But in this case, Stern does not require that. For almost sixty years now, he has stood before sentencing judges, preaching the need for second chances. He will
give one to Lep.
39. Returning
As Stern might have guessed, traveling with Pinky is not easy. Although it was done outside Stern’s presence, he knows that Marta—not in complete jest—informed her niece that Pinky will suffer the tortures of the Inquisition if anything happens to Stern on this trip. Marta, in fact, was initially fiercely opposed to this journey, even when Stern proposed taking Pinky as a companion. But Al approved, and Marta relented when her father said, ‘You must understand, Marta, what it would mean to me at this point in my life to see BA again.’ Pinky and he depart Christmas afternoon and will return December 30, back in time for the great New Year’s Eve finale at Stern & Stern.
The only other living creature toward whom Pinky has assumed a caretaking role is poor moth-eaten Gomer, so there is no subtlety or practice when she hovers over her grandfather. Seeing this, the flight attendants seem to assume Stern is utterly incompetent and speak to him as if he is a kindergartener. It is all that Stern can do to remain polite, and he is relieved that Al’s pills allow several hours of sleep during the night portion of the flight.
Meanwhile, Pinky remains herself. The trip takes roughly fifteen hours, including their layover in Dallas, and—beyond asking Stern every ten minutes if he’s all right—Pinky and he have few conversations of longer than three or four sentences. Instead, she sleeps or watches her tablet. It is only near the end of the second flight that Stern realizes she has not been viewing the same movie over and over, but rather a string of them, in which, again and again, some person with superpowers saves the world amid much crashing and intense bursts of light.
It goes without saying that Pinky is in no way like him. For instance, he has given up on trying to interest her in reading. Both of Marta’s boys, on the other hand, are often said to have completely channeled their grandfather, and he adores each of them as much as breath. And yet, enigmatically, if he were forced at gunpoint to answer the question—which he might not respond to even in those circumstances—he would say that he is closest with Pinky of all his grandchildren. This is not simply because of their recent living circumstances, but also because of the depth of their understanding of one another and the acceptance that goes with it. For the trillionth time in a long life, Stern wonders if he will ever fully comprehend love.
Looking out at BA as they speed in from the airport, he can feel the might of the place, almost as intensely as he experienced it as a child. On the outskirts, the architecture of the public housing is essentially Stalinist, big squares of concrete, but he is not surprised to find that within the city limits BA remains a place of great beauty and vibrancy, with its twelve-lane avenues, where the traffic moves at reckless speeds by free-for-all rules, and its grand old buildings whose graceful details like the huge arched windows and balconies over the streets are reminiscent of Paris or Madrid.
The travel agent booked them a place in Puerto Madero, the old harbor district that fell into disuse and recently has revived as an area of curving glass-and-steel skyscrapers beside the river. Their hotel, a reclaimed grain mill, is palatial. The furnishings in the lobby bar remind him of his office, and he snaps a photo that he texts to Marta—‘My taste explained’—but it is his mother he is soon thinking of. She would have looked through the doors and clucked that she did not own clothing fine enough for her even to dare to step into the lobby. Poor Mama, he thinks. She never got the chance to learn everything money cannot buy.
As soon as Stern has washed his face in his room, he texts Pinky, who is next door. Marta made them swear an oath to rest when they arrived, but Stern’s approach to jet lag is to get out in the daylight. When he offers to show Pinky where he grew up, she is enthusiastic.
Mysteriously, Stern’s Argentine Spanish became more accessible the moment the aircraft touched down here—that, Stern realizes, is the language he cannot make out in his dreams, where his mother, often conflated with Clara, mumbles. He directs the taxi driver to the Balvanera neighborhood, where the Sterns had moved when Alejandro was five. They came here from Entre Rios, a town of European refugees whom Stern’s father served as a physician. In his full beard and pince-nez, Papa had trod behind barefoot Indians to his clinic every morning, wearing his full-length white doctor’s coat despite the dust, as if he might not remember who he was without the respectful gestures of the townspeople prompted by the outfit. Even as a child, Stern could feel the full measure of his father’s anxieties. After the family was forced to flee from Germany in 1928, the man was like a piece of broken crystal glued back together. Seeking something more secure, Papa had relocated them here to BA, where his hopes were immediately disappointed. They were regarded as rubes, while his father’s noticeable insecurities made it difficult to attract patients and build a medical practice. There was never any money.
In this part of the city where the Stern family settled, the Jewish community might have numbered as many as 300,000. Even the gentiles referred to the adjoining neighborhood—where the Sterns moved eventually—as ‘Villa Kreplach’ instead of Villa Crespo. In some ways, their life was not markedly different than that of Stern’s American friends who had grown up in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side in Manhattan. There were three Yiddish dailies, kosher butcher shops and bakeries, tiny storefront synagogues. These were poor people—shopkeepers and factory workers, dockhands and meatpackers—who, as Mama put it, sold their labor to survive. But they accepted, as they had for centuries elsewhere, that in time there would be some grotesque outbreak of anti-Semitism, much as there had been a decade before when thugs, swinging tire irons and barrel staves, had roamed through the neighborhood breaking windows and skulls. During World War II, when Argentina was aligned with the Axis and there were giant Nazi rallies in Luna Park, his mother stored blankets and canned goods in a closet, preparing for the night they would be rounded up for the camps. Perón, whatever else could be said about him, was far more willing to accept the Jewish community. As a boy in the US, Stern had been the target of slurs, but never assumed, as he had during most of his upbringing in Argentina, that being a Jew left a question mark over his existence.
With Pinky, he walks two blocks, keeping up a brisk pace despite his cane and the heat. It is over 90 degrees American, as Stern would say, with close air and a sun intense enough to seem menacing. The little electrical device in his chest, whose spurts Stern believes he can feel occasionally despite the doctors’ denials, has dramatically increased his stamina.
The grubby neighborhood is less changed than Stern might have predicted. Many of the residents are now Peruvian immigrants, but the streets are still full of hole-in-the-wall tiendas whose doorways are crowded with upright bolts of colorful fabrics. He asks Pinky to stop in front of the Templo de Paso, the main Ashkenazic synagogue. Predictably, the gray building now looks half the size and one-tenth as grand as he saw it as a child. It is, in fact, a bit of an architectural hodgepodge with a large golden Jewish star high up beneath the arches on its facade—not to mention prominent security cameras, presumably added after the Iranian bombing of a Jewish community center near here twenty-five years ago.
It was from the temple, one Saturday night in 1944, that his family of origin—his mother, his father, his brother, his sister, and Stern—took their final stroll home together. Pinky looks over in alarm at Stern’s small gasp, as he is nearly knocked from his feet by the surge of love he feels for each of them, in memory.
“What, Pops?”
“I am remembering,” he says. “Mostly my brother.”
“Brother?” cries Pinky. “Get out of here. You and Aunt Silvia had a brother? Why didn’t I know that?”
A moment of despair takes hold of Stern. Too pained to touch the subject, he has apparently said little about Jacobo. Despite his recent calm about the prospect of death, the way even titanic figures like Jacobo can vanish from the memory of future generations desolates him.
“He was extraordinary,” says Stern, “destined for greatness. He wrote poems published in the newspapers.
He won contests for oratory. Year after year, he received the highest marks in every subject. And he was also quite a rogue—that was an important aspect of his character—always in the midst of one scrape or another. Filching fruit from a stand.” Stern stops briefly, struck for the first time in his life by the possibility that his attraction to the smartasses and schemers he has represented for decades began with his love for his brother. “For a period when he was sixteen, he would sneak out at night to keep company with the mother of one of his friends.”
Predictably, Pinky loves that detail and utters a lascivious laugh.
“He sounds like he was something else,” she says.
“That he was,” says Stern. “He was the child the world adored. Including my parents. Being the younger brother, I found his achievements a terrible burden—and the source of seething jealousy.”
Would Stern have been able to ascend to the same prominence if Jacobo had lived? Intuitively, he knows the answer is no. But even so, he feels the mammoth vacuum left for him by his brother’s loss.
“When did he die?” asks Pinky.
“1944. He was seventeen.”
“Jesus,” says his granddaughter, and asks how.
“He had fallen in with a crowd of rich Jewish kids. My mother was a terrible social climber and was thrilled at first, until she realized that under their influence he had become a passionate Zionist. He decided to go to Palestine to fight with the Haganah. My parents never had any control over him. Jacobo went up the gangway of the boat they were taking, tossing kisses. This was no more than a block from the hotel where we are staying, Pinky. We stood on the dock that Sunday, with my mother shrieking out loud that she would never see him again. And she did not. The US claimed that the ship was sunk by a Nazi U-boat, but the Germans blamed the Americans. I was sure my mother would die of her broken heart, but it was my father who was gone within six months.”