15.

“Now wait a minute.” The judge looks me over, up and down, quizzical, curious, pleased. “I know you. We’ve met—yes? Tell me. Where have we met?”

“I don’t think so. My name is Laszlo Ratesic. I’m a Speculator, your honor.”

“Oh, you needn’t tell me that. That, I can see. And what a rare treat it is, to have one of you mysterious bats come to roost in my courtroom.” He offers Aysa a smile. “One or two. No, but”—the welcoming, slightly puzzled smile returns—“I know I know you, though.” He wags a finger at me. “Well, that’s all right. Let's talk. It’ll come to me.”Judge Sampson settles back, fully at his ease. His chambers are as shabby as the courtroom, only darker, lined with thick carpeting and heavy curtains that cover the windows onto Grand Avenue, curtains so long the fabric pools along the floor. There are framed photographs, a tacky little Bear and Stars flag in a stand on the desk; there is a portable bar cart now docked snugly at the side of the desk, within the judge’s easy reach. The cart is not his only indulgence; there’s a small wall-mounted on the wall opposite the windows, and I wonder what sorts of themed streams Judge Sampson enjoys, after hours, when the last defendant has been dealt with.

There is something disorienting, something half anomalous, about a judge in chambers— especially a judge of the ANP. A man both small and large at once, still wearing his black robes but with his shirt collar unbuttoned beneath them and his tie loosened. An avatar of the State’s great power sitting with his ass half on and half off of his chintzy little desk, lifting his wry eyebrows, fetching a short glass from his bar cart and filling it with three ice cubes before popping the cork on a crystal decanter.

“Okay. So.” He enjoys a long sip of the drink and sets it down. “What can I do for you?”

I draw breath to speak and find that Ms. Paige, standing behind the chair where I’m sitting, has already begun.

“Why did you do it?”

The judge looks at her, eyebrows raised. “Why did I do what, exactly?”

“Send her away.”

Judge Sampson examines my partner with amusement. “You mean the poor woman in the courtroom? Just now? Today’s defendant?”

“Her name was Ms. Wells.”

“I know her name, young lady. I know all their names. I wonder what you think I am.”

I have craned all the way around, turned my large midsection as far as it will turn, trying to catch Ms. Paige’s eye and stop her from doing whatever it is she thinks she’s doing. What I told her was to wait, to watch and wait. That’s what I told her to do.

“I passed the sentence I did upon that particular defendant because it was what the facts required of me. Based on her history and current presentation, Ms. Wells showed no likelihood of reform. She would continue to commit daily, even hourly, assaults, on the Objectively So. She inhabits her own truth and is unable to step free from it. Such a person can not be allowed to continue inside the Golden State.”

“So you condemned her.”

“Her own mind condemned her. I only acknowledged that reality, on behalf of the State. If you think I enjoy making such decisions, you are incorrect.” But he smiles, and sips contentedly at his drink.

Paige is not satisfied. “You know what will happen to her out there.”

“No, young lady.” The judge sets the glass on the desk with a clink, a sharp and decisive sound like the gavel coming down. “I do not know. And you do not know. The fate of the exiled is unknown and unknowable, and any unconditional expression of that fate, any statement such as, for example, ‘You know what will happen to her out there,’ is by definition not true.”

We are in a moment now. Judge Sampson has just called Ms. Paige a liar, more or less, and he is not smiling any longer, and she for her part stands seething. What she wants to say is, Of course I know. Of course she knows what will happen to Ms. Wells, out there, over the wall, behind the curtain. But she can’t say it and she won’t say it and she wouldn’t and neither would I. She knows and we all know and it’s unknown and unknowable.

I raise one hand from my lap. This is supposed to be my show, after all.

“Hello. Excuse me. We’re going to move on.”

“Yeah,” says Aysa. “But—”

I look at her. “Ms. Paige,” I say. “We’re moving on. Okay?”

But Judge Sampson isn’t done. He tilts his head to one side, smiles with what looks like warmth.

“Have you,” he says to Ms. Paige, “perhaps lost someone to exile?”

“Yes,” she says, and he says “Ah,” and I recall her saying “Fuck my parents,” and the room fills with a brooding silence. I saw a lecture once, delivered by Our Acknowledged Expert on Geology and Geography, explaining how the Golden State, the whole thing, is built on movable plates, vast tracts that move, that push and scrape against other plates. The same is true inside Aysa Paige; the same is true inside me.

The judge takes a sip of his drink, licks his lips, and says, “Now. Please. What can I help you with?”

“We are working on a case, your honor,” I say. “A death.”

“A murder?”

“We don’t know what it is. It is a death. We are seeking the full and final truth of a recent death.”

“The death of whom?”

A mild playful tone accompanies the question, and I ignore it. I take out a picture of the dead man and lay it on the judge’s desk. He peers over the rim of his whiskey glass to inspect it.

“The gentleman’s name,” I say, “was Mose Crane.”

The judge sniffs, draws another sip. “If you’ll excuse an idiom, it rings no bell. Has he been in my courtroom?”

“No, sir. He died at your house. On your lawn.”

“Ah. The roofer. Yes. Tragic.” My interpretation of what he says is informed by the way he looks into his glass, by the tinkling of the ice. A man not moved by tragedy. “I had not understood that the authorities had discovered any anomalies in that situation.”

His tone is very smooth—very cool. I catch a ripple in the air, a minor distension. I look at Paige to see if she catches it too, but she’s looking straight ahead. I have a feeling she is out in the wilderness, with or without Mr. and Mrs. Paige.

“Whether the authorities had discovered one in the situation or not,” I say to Judge Sampson, “I believe you were aware there were anomalies.”

“I know there are anomalies,” he says. “I know, more than most, that such things exist.”

“I fear, sir, that your statement contains omissions,” I say, picking my words carefully.

“Well, let’s be serious, son,” he says. “All statements contain omissions.”

This is more or less the same thing that Captain Tester said to me, more or less the kind of thing people say all the time, as we slide through our lives like roller skaters, skirting and dodging around the hills and valleys of the truth, ducking under it at the last minute.

But Aysa isn’t having it. “No they don’t,” she says, her voice still hot.

“Ms. Paige?” I turn toward her again, twisting uncomfortably in the small wooden chair. “Do me a favor, would you?” But Judge Sampson isn’t ready to move on.

“This is interesting, now, isn’t it? Very interesting. What do you mean, exactly, young lady? Do you object to the statement that all statements contain omissions?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Oh, I think it is, Ms. Speculator,” he says. “Should we requisition the stretch? Ask for a playback?”

As ever when someone mentions the Record, I become conscious of it, of the captures glittering in the light fixtures, of the captures on the doorframe, all the truth of this moment entering history as it goes. Even so, I know what the judge is doing: he is moving sideways, away from the conversation, using my partner’s righteousness to duck away from my questions.

“Go ahead,” says Paige. “Requisition the stretch. We’ll watch it together. All I meant was, don’t try to pretend that you don’t know what we’re asking about.”

I sigh. I shake my head. She’s still too young to know what I knew coming in: that of course he would try to pretend. Of course he would go to any legal length not to answer questions. One day she will know what I have known for years: the extraordinary lengths people will go not to let certain truths pass their lips.

“We are trying to find out how a man died,” Paige says. “The truth is the most important thing. You have a piece of it, and you are going to hand it over. Now.”

“Young lady,” the judge says. “Imagine a stone.”

She blinks. “What?”

“A stone, dear.” He stands up. He goes so far as to reach into his pocket and come out with a closed fist, pretending, really pretending to be holding a stone. He then places it gently, the fake stone, at the center of his desk. “We place it here. And now we draw a ring around it. Okay? Like so.”

He does it, with one bony finger, turns his finger into a pen and traces a perfect circumference around his imaginary stone.

“And now the stone is a flat fact, and everything inside the circle is a relevant supporting fact. And when we are asked to provide context, to say everything we know about the stone, these are the things we say. Are you with me?”

She doesn’t answer. She stares at him.

“But now these facts have been introduced. All around this ring, these are relevancies. They support the foregoing; they are part of it. Seen another way, we have one truth. But if you now take this spot, here along the ring, and put a stone here—another ring can be drawn. You see? New relevancies, new relevant facts all along the new outskirts. And each of these spots could, in turn, be made into the center of the circle. And so the truth blossoms outward endlessly, and it is always—always—ultimately the speaker of truth who decides which pieces of it to label, in this case, relevant.”

I sigh. Enough of this.

“Your honor—”

But he’s not finished, and we’re in his house. His chambers. He speaks like a man in full control: of this room, of the State, of the whole universe. “Of course it’s easy for you all,” he continues.

Aysa’s expression sharpens. “Easy for—women?”

He smiles. “No. Speculators. You with your vaunted discernment. To simply see a lie, to know one when one is there. Black-and-white. You feel it. But for the rest of us? Who must make our own sorry way? We must make judgment calls.”

“Your honor,” I say. “We are here to ask you about Captain Elena Tester.”

He scowls, and his face clouds over. All of his charm, all of his wit, it was all dodging around this moment, which he knew was coming all along.

“What about her?”

“You know her?”

“I do.”

“How well do you know her?”

He sighs. The cloud passes; his insouciance recovers itself. “If you are here to ask if I am fucking Captain Elena Tester, then please. Please. Ask me if I am fucking Elena Tester.”

I wait. Raise my eyebrows. Well?

“Yes.” He raises both hands in slow synchronicity with the smile on his face. “I am fucking Elena Tester.”

He then arrives at the next step before Aysa can beat him there, and the calm of his voice now possesses something else. “And before you ask, I opted not to volunteer this information to you, for the same reason, I imagine, that Elena—that Captain Tester—chose not to volunteer it. Because it is private. Because all statements contain omissions.” He gestures to his imaginary ring of stones. “It is better for both Captain Tester and me that the flat fact of our connection not be splattered all over the Record like muddy paw prints by conversations like this one.”

“Well—” Aysa starts, but the judge marches on.

“And it is not relevant to your investigation.”

“And you made that judgment.”

“Yes, I did. I made a judgment.” He turns to me and winks. “I’m a judge.”

“Did anyone else know?” asks Ms. Paige, Day Book out, pen ready to press into the carbon. “About this affair? Anyone who might have been interested in extorting you, or the captain? Anyone—”

“I’ve got it.”

“What?”

He shuts his eyes tightly for a moment, and then pops them open, wags his finger at me. “Your wife is that girl, the one with the big personality. Yes? Captain Tester’s old buddy. Yes?”

“Silvie.”

He pats his hands on his lap in triumph, exultant. “Silvie! That’s your wife?”

Heat. Heat behind my eyes and on my cheeks. “Ex-wife.”

“Ex. Ah. Relationships, right? Very sad. The ex-husband. Doleful, cast out, carrying faded memories like old files. Always something of a tragic figure. Although so, too, can husbands be. A husband, too, can be tragic.”

Paige, whether out of fealty to me or desire to stay on target, presses on. “Your honor, we need to know who, if anyone, might have known about this affair. Your honor?”

He keeps his eyes just on me. “Let’s not do this,” says the judge. His face changes for a moment, the eyes fraternal, downturned, and then back to their focus. And he says—just softly, just calmly, just to me—“Listen. This is not worth it. Do you understand?”

I want to take his offer.

It feels as if I am on a cliff’s edge, toddling toward the side, and this man is holding out a hand to keep me from tumbling, and I want to reach out to accept his hand but I can’t. I won’t.

Because Ms. Paige is doing as I have told her, she is hitching her natural powers to her hunches, making decisions on the fly, swimming in the powerful wake of her instincts.

And because the powerful have no more right than the powerless to hoard their share of the truth. Because the Basic Law guarantees us all the same access to what is real, and the same protection from what is not.

So I cross my arms over my chest, lean back in the wooden chair, and stare flatly back. “Answer the question, your honor.”

“Very well,” he says, and turns his gaze slowly from me to her. “Nobody else knew.”

“Nobody knew, or nobody knew that you know of?”

“Why, Ms. Speculator,” he says. “If there was someone who knew of it, and I didn’t know if they knew or not, then how would I know?”

He laughs without humor, and Paige blinks—no, more than blinks. Squeezes her eyes shut for half a second, and then opens them again, and they are altered—seeing more clearly, keenly, the way I saw them seeing at Crane’s apartment. She’s got something. She’s caught something.

I stare at her in astonishment for a second and then I look to the floor, hiding the sting of envy. It costs her nothing. Her body does not rack and her eyes do not water. It costs her nothing.

“Your honor,” she says sharply, eyes open now, trained dead on the judge. “Is there physical evidence of this affair?”

I watch the judge. His mouth becomes small. A button. “Yes.”

“Is there physical evidence of this affair in this room with us right now?”

He does not answer. Paige’s eyes open, and we both watch him rise slowly, turn his back on us, and retreat to his bar cart.

When he speaks it is again to me only. “Mr. Speculator?” he says quietly, the same between-us-men appeal that he must know by now will not work. I offer him no help. I wait for Paige.

“Your honor,” she says, boring in, unflinching, unrelenting. “Do you keep a Night Book?”

He does not answer. The room gets quiet and stays that way, one moment of silence and then another, Judge Sampson looking up at a point behind our heads, and it is so quiet that it’s as if the judge has got some version of the courtroom’s noise canceling device in his chambers. But no. It’s just silence, and it ends when Sampson rises and makes himself busy at his bar cart, uncorking a new bottle, selecting the right size crystal tumbler. He needs something stronger, I guess. He pours but does not yet drink.

“Yes,” he says at last. “I do.”

“Precision, sir.”

“I keep one.”

“For the Record, sir. You keep one what?”

“I keep a Night Book.”

Before he can say anything else, before he can dodge or duck any further, I say, “We are going to need to see that.”

Judge Sampson raises the glass, but still doesn’t drink from it, sets it right back down and then grins, a cold and crocodile grin.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says, and then again, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll read it to you.”

I look at Paige and she at me. “No, sir,” I say. “We will take it with us, and return it to you at the completion of our inquiries.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr. Speculator,” he says. “Allow me.” His eyes shine, his grin widens, and I don’t know what to make of his sudden shift in attitude. Anxiety flutters to life in my guts like a wind-ruffled banner.

I’ve never understood what it is that makes a certain kind of person keep a Night Book. Catch that. Correct it: I understand it, but I would never fucking do it.

On the surface, of course, the impulse is a good and golden one, doctrinaire and State-minded, a laudable individual service provided to our great collective effort. The Night Book writer commits himself to recording not only the flat facts and surface realities of life, the kinds of visible truths that are collected by captures and recorded all day long in Day Books, but to go further, to go all the way, to put on paper all the underlying truths of life, those that move beneath the skin. The Night Book writer records his thoughts, his dreams, his instincts and urges. He puts his private life on his secret pages.

After all, they’ll tell you, everything that happens belongs to the State, and a thought is just an event that happens in your head.

And unlike a Day Book, a Night Book only reaches the Record when its author is dead and it passes into the Permanent Record with all the rest of life’s artifacts. Or, let’s say, when a pair of Speculators barge into your office, chasing an anomalous death that happens to intersect with your existence, and they sense the presence of your Night Book and reach for it and pull it out like a loose tooth.

The judge’s Book is indeed right here in the office with him, hidden in a wall safe behind his official portrait, and before we can object, he has it open on his desk: a slim volume, handsomely appointed. He pulls out reading glasses and adjusts them on his nose and sets in.

“Sir,” I say, one last time. “We will take the book away with us.”

“Oh, I know,” he says, flipping the book open. “But first I’m going to read.” And his finger falls on a particular page, and he begins.

“‘It was the sort of party one is dying to leave until a moment arrives and one never wants to go home.’” Sampson pauses and looks up. “Oh, that’s rather nice. I had forgotten I wrote that. Very nice, indeed.”

That’s the other thing a Night Book does, of course: it gives a vain person like the judge ample opportunity to indulge that vanity, all under the guise of supreme service to the State.

Judge Sampson licks his lips and finds his place. “‘We had been introduced at the very threshold of the evening, one among the usual roundelay of how-do-you-dos. If I suspected in that moment that she would be added to my collection, I suspected it without suspecting that I suspected it. I suspected it in my heart alone, or in some other, lower precinct.’”

He pauses again, looks up over the rim of his glasses at Paige. “‘Collection’ is rather crass. I apologize.”

Paige is looking at me. She mouths “Tester?” And I do not answer. Knowledge is alive in me; moving; welling up. Sampson with his crocodile mouth carries on: “‘I had promised myself therefore not to leave before she did, and my patience was at last rewarded.’” He pauses, looks up, and sees that he has our attention. I cannot move. I am not moving. “‘We two indeed were among the last to leave, lingering in the doorway between parlor and kitchen, engaged in a very long conversation about nothing at all. Her husband, it seems, had lost patience and retreated, alone.’”

“Husband?” says Ms. Paige. “Hold on. Captain Tester is a widow. Is this—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says the judge, looking up, finding my eyes. Looking not at Aysa, who interrupted him, but at me. “Is this not relevant to your ongoing investigation?”

He’s holding the book open with his palm, still looking at me. “Tell you what. I’ll skip ahead.”

“‘S. displayed her body in the doorway as if for my personal delectation, belied any dictums about the highest beauty being the product of the greatest delicacy. Her charm, the charm of S., was in her substance, her attractiveness a matter of superabundance and profusion. Tumbling yellow locks and a full flushed face, full lips parted around a red tongue, an admirable plumpness of breasts and of rear. Her body an inviting expanse, demanding circumnavigation.’”

“That’s enough,” Ms. Paige says, though it cannot be because she has realized what I have realized, that this is Silvie being conjured, Silvie that the judge is recalling with such rich pleasure. S. for Silvie. Silvie laughing at a suggestive joke, Silvie drifting as if by accident into his arms. The description is specific and precise, incontrovertible, slivers of weaponized truth. A husband, too, can be tragic.

“That’s enough,” says my partner again, but the judge does not stop, he reads on, sentences like wires that fall around Silvie and draw her into an empty bedroom. Lascivious, circling sentences that trace the lines of her body like fingertips.

I remember that damn party, somewhere in Silver Lake. Forty minutes in traffic to get there, the two of us sitting in stony silence all the way. I knew no one, wanted to meet no one. I left early, leaving Silvie to find a taxi home.

The judge remembers it too, he has it all written down, and he reads on, word after word: words that carefully unbutton the dress, words that reveal the pale wide flesh of belly and thighs, words that trace the silhouette shape of her waist, words that describe her hips and then clasp at the small of her back, traveling with the gauzy fuzz that climbs upward along her spine as it arches in abandonment.

I try to say something—I try to say “Stop,” I may even manage to say “Stop,” but he does not stop, he will not, his sentences gather steam and rhythm as he approaches the predictable climax of the paragraph, and then he is through, and he has made his monstrous point about the rings of truth, about context and omission: he has illustrated that no matter how much we know, there are parts of the story that are missing.

There are elements unknown and unknowable, whether we know it or not.

“Shall I go on?” he says, softly, daringly, wondering if I will take some dramatic action, smash into him with my fists, crash the crooked smile off his face.

“As I said earlier”—my voice is a coiled wire, my hands clutched into fists at my side—“we will take the book away and return it when we are through.”

“Very good.” He places the book on the desk, slides it toward me. “Enjoy.”

Paige reaches for the book as Judge Sampson drinks at last from the tumbler, grins sheepishly, opens his mouth, and vomits a long stream of blood, staggering forward and collapsing across the desk.

“What…” says Aysa, and I’m up from my chair, up and across the small room and catching him as he tumbles downward, forward, his eyes rolling back while blood is spurting and leaping out of his mouth, dark red mixed with yellow. He flings one hand out, grunting and snorting, and tries to steady himself on the desk, but he misses it entirely and goes toppling, headfirst, banging his forehead on its sharp wood corner. He’s dense in my arms and his front is covered with liquid, with the blood and bile that has exploded from his mouth. He passes, slippery, through my grip, shudders against my legs, and slams into the ground.

“What did you do?” I say to Judge Sampson, who is convulsing, his whole body shaking, his features swiftly going pale. I know what he did. I get down on the ground beside him and try to arrange him so that he’s sitting up, so he can’t choke on his vomit, but he’s dying before I can do anything. A second wash of blood and gore comes channeling up from his guts and rushes from his mouth.

Paige, somewhere in the corner of my vision, has thrown open the door of the chambers and is shouting to the bailiff posted outside.

“Call the regular police,” she tells him, and he shouts, “What did you do? What have you done?”

“Just call them!”

He is craning his neck to see past her, trying to see in, seeing me and the ruined body of the judge, the two of us like drunk lovers on the ground. “Your honor?” the bailiff says.

I’m covered in Judge Sampson's blood, my tie dangling over his spit-stained chin and cheeks.

“Call them!” shouts Paige.

  

The rest is a fog of red, of shapes rushing within it. A swell of noise from outside on Grand Avenue, a clatter of footfalls and shouts.

Me and Paige are outside chambers, instructed to wait by a regular policeman with his sleeves rolled up. We are seated on a hard-backed bench, side by side.

In my mind, the judge vomits blood and pinwheels down toward the carpet, and then again, and again. Reality cued and re-cued.

He is dying and he is in the kitchen at a party in Silver Lake, leaning in the doorframe after I have gone, and he’s sharing a joke with my wife. Ex-wife.

The courtroom has been emptied of litigants and lawyers, and they bustle about in the hallway, curious, reluctant to leave such excitement.

Ms. Paige has her Day Book out and she’s organizing her thoughts, trying to piece together what we have learned. I am slumped, hollow, staring straight ahead. There is a pane of frosted glass inset in the dead center of the chamber door, and I stare at the glass, finding abstracted patterns.

This is what the world is, I’m thinking as the busy incident aftermath rushes around me, police and ambulance personnel, archivists, and documentarians. One explosion after another, the Earth opening up again and again, sending out gouts of loose dirt, covering us up.

I am exhausted, but Aysa does not stop. She can’t. Aysa has her Day Book out and she has the judge’s blood-splattered Night Book out too, between us on the bench. Aysa has already apologized for letting herself be distracted by the verdict on Ms. Wells; apologized and then moved swiftly on. Aysa focuses on the work. Aysa carries on, puzzling through her notes undeterred and undeterrable.

This is even though she, like me, is speckled with blood, dark droplets crusting on her forehead and on her neck. Even though we sit but feet from where his body still lies, awaiting the attentions of the regular police, of the medical examiner, the record officers who are angling around with their captures and their mics, forging this remarkable event into history. The coroners who will, when it’s all over, bear him away.

Regular police keep arriving at the scene, and there are now multiple capture teams on-site. We are being filmed even now, in our extremity, both of us smeared in gore.

We’ve already been interviewed, of course, and we’ll be interviewed again.

We are pursuing an anomalous death.

The judge may or may not have had relevant information…

We may never know…

“Okay, so,” says Aysa, flipping through her notes, forward and back, forward and back. “Here is what I don’t get. So the man is married. Okay. So he’s—he’s unfaithful.” She glances at me, a fleeting embarrassed wince. “He has affairs. Multiple affairs. Okay. So—but—”

I finish the thought, my voice empty and toneless. “But so what? Right? So what?”

“Right!” She nods slowly, twice. “Exactly.” A new cluster of cops swoop by, officious, belts jangling with their radios, a couple of boom ops close behind them.

“So what was the big risk here?” says Aysa. “That maybe he would, what? Lose his job, right?”

I shrug. “Perhaps.”

“Maybe she would lose her job? Tester, I mean.”

I shrug again.

“But still, to—” She shakes her head. “To drink poison. Okay, the Specs are here, we’re asking questions. Bad luck, yes. A guy dies on his roof, we start rooting around, find out he’s a bad husband. But it’s kind of—”

“An overreaction.”

“Yes.” She snaps her fingers. “Exactly. It’s just…small.”

“Yeah. Also…” I press my knuckles into my eyes. Trying to wake up. “Also, the man had poison to hand.”

“Right!” says Aysa. “Right! So why? Why? Why is he that worried about his affair with Tester being discovered? Unless that’s not what he was worried about. Maybe that’s what Tester was worried about. Maybe Sampson was worried about something else.”

“Huh,” I say, and I feel her waiting for me to say more, but I don’t.

She is dying for it. She wants the two of us to sit here on this cold bench, shoulder to shoulder, and close our eyes and be borne away by speculation. She wants us to sit here in the illuminating darkness and churn through the maybe so’s, fill the courtroom air with possibilities, test each for soundness, jump off from this platform to the next one.

But I’m in no mood for it. I’m in a kitchen doorway in Silver Lake, bearing witness to my own mortification. I’m trapped inside the judge’s cruel crocodile smile, feeling the jaws of his revealed truth snap closed around my neck. His blood and viscera are on my coat.

I am contemplating a thousand things I thought I knew and never did know.

I am watching him pitch around in circles, blood from his mouth like a sudden exclamation. In my head, his hands are on Silvie's waist, just barely, the first time. Just the backs of his hands.

My personal and professional existence is built on the idea that everything can be known, that everything must be known, and now here I am, on a bench outside judge’s chambers, and I’m on a green glider in Mar Vista pierced by understanding that nothing can be known at all. Something has opened up inside me that never can be closed.

Aysa beside me lifts the judge’s Night Book. The cover is misted with blood, the pages are gummed together. Carefully she begins to unstick them, page by page.

In spite of myself, I am curious. I am interested.

“Is the rest of the Night Book like the part he read?”

She nods. “Yeah. Pretty much it is.”

She scans sections, murmurs a line or two aloud to me. It’s all lust. It’s all sex and the desire for sex, the delicate small observations and sudden fierce movements that are prelude, the altered locutions and idiosyncratic motions that define the event itself. There are Night Books that overflow with sedition, with epistemological heresy or criminal confession, but this, it seems, was the only form of proscribed detail the judge thought worthy of preserving; he took pride in the full truth of his ability as a seducer, and he felt that the Record, the complete archive of the truth of the world, would be incomplete if it did not include them. His personal history of conquest and debauch, organized by name. “Stole away with J after court.” “Brought L back to chambers for a frank discussion, which led down the hoped-for path.”

Aysa carefully peels the blood-gummed pages from each other, until she finds it—

“Here,” she says. She holds it up. “E. E for Elena?”

I shrug. I nod. “E for Elena.”

“Whoa.”

“What?”

She holds out the open book to me. My body is moving on its own, hand opening on its own. She puts the Night Book in my flat palms and I stare at the words, looking through eyes rimmed with blood. “Again I find myself with E,” it says at the top of the page, in the judge’s precise cursive—followed by nothing. Or, rather, followed by nothing that once was something.

After “Again I find myself with E,” there is inky blackness, lines and lines of it. Sentences that have been crossed out, blacked over, comprehensively redacted.

Aysa leans in eagerly, her knees jiggling with excitement, as I turn over pages. Two pages, three pages, four. Whatever happened between the judge and this Ms. E, it has been neatly and comprehensive excised from his Night Book.

What has the man made hidden, even in his book of hidden truths? Too secret to be told, even to himself?

Aysa, meanwhile, has returned to her own Day Book, and she is tapping it, nodding, glancing back and forth between the judge’s book and her own.

“It’s the same days,” she announces.

“What?” I close Sampson’s book, lift my fingers from its tacky hide.

“The date range, sir. Laszlo, the dates are the same.”

She holds up her Day Book, hands it to me so I can read the notes she made in Dolly Aster’s basement, and I two-step verify them in my own. The entry that begins “Again I find myself with E” falls exactly among Mose Crane’s missing days.

I breathe in and then out again. It’s like my blood froze when Sampson did what he did and now it is flowing again—not flowing but racing, rushing.

“Ms. Paige. Do you have your radio?”

“Of course.”

“Do me a favor, will you? Can you raise Alvaro?”

“Why?”

“Just raise him for me. Raise him.”

  

We’d driven in angry silence all the way to Silver Lake. That night. Silvie and me.

Forty minutes of cold silence because of some offhand idiot remark I’d made in our driveway, on the way to the car.

I’ve made my way outside now and I’m standing on the courthouse steps, blinking in the sunlight like a bear emerged from his cavern. I’m waiting for Aysa to raise Alvaro so our next step can be ratified. Meanwhile I’m smoking a cigarette and staring at the dirty steps and trying to move forward, to beat back the past. Gather my spirit and forge it into something strong.

Silvie was beautiful that night: a gold dress with small pearl buttons; earrings and heels; a ceramic butterfly clip lifting her hair into a crown. Silvie was in an expansive mood. She stopped me in the driveway, seized me by the elbow, and pointed at the sky.

The stars were just coming out, and she told me that they were diamonds.

“And you see those three—those ones there?” She was holding a bottle of red wine by its slender neck. I had the keys. “That’s a necklace. A pretty diamond necklace like the one you’ve never bought me.”

She laughed, making sure I knew she was joking, but I couldn’t even muster a smile.

“The stars are like diamonds,” I said.

Obviously she wasn’t lying; obviously she wasn’t purposefully misrepresenting the nature of the stars. She was enjoying the feeling of the twilight sky, the sturdy feeling of her hand on my arm. She was feeling good, feeling gentle, sharing a plain metaphor with her man. But something in me wasn’t in the mood. I had had a hard day at work, trudging through a world thrumming with lies. I was feeling small, miserable, literal.

“The stars. They’re not diamonds, Sil. They’re masses of hydrogen and helium, millions of miles wide and millions of miles away.”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “I know.”

She took her hand off my arm. We drove across town in silence. I left the party early and on my own.

Now Ms. Paige finds me, out on the street. She is holding up her radio. An archivist trails her, and a capturer trails the archivist, her capture bobbling on her shoulder. Ms. Paige holds up the radio. “I’ve got Alvaro.”

Paige watches me curiously while I talk to our boss.

“Quite a day you’re having, Laszlo.”

“Yeah.” I take the last long drag of my cigarette and stub it out. “I know. Listen. I need you to set something up for me.”

“What is it?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I don’t like anything. Might as well ask.”