Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (2 page)

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.

She had her cell phone out on the front passenger seat, where she could grab it in an emergency, and she had the other cell phone out, too—the one she bought at the kiosk in the King of Prussia Mall. That was not entirely satisfactory. Martha was sure there were security cameras all over the mall, including some trained on that kiosk. There could be a tape somewhere with a picture of her on it, buying that very cell phone.

Then there was the whole GPS tracking thing, or whatever it was. They could tell where a call had been made and where the person who received it had been. It didn’t matter how “untraceable” the phone was if it could in fact be traced to someplace you were known to be. That meant she couldn’t use it to call someone from home, and she could use it in the car only if she was moving. She could not use it while she was parked right here behind the courthouse, no matter how much she wanted to.

She stared at the prepaid phone for a bit and then reached over to put it into her bag. She would have used nothing but prepaid phones if she thought she could get away with it, but in the end, she’d decided that wouldn’t be a good idea. A woman in her position was expected to have a cell phone. She was expected to have an expensive one. That was how Martha had ended up with the iPhone 5, which she honestly felt was more annoying than functional.

Martha stuffed that phone into her bag, too, then picked up the bag and grabbed her briefcase. There were five security cameras in this lot. One was trained on the front gate. The rest were installed to make sure all parts of the lot could be seen at all times. She’d heard once that there was no such thing as a perfect surveillance system. Every system of security cameras had a blind spot.

If that was true, Martha had never been able to find one.

She got out of the car and locked it up behind her. She sent up a little fume of annoyance on the subject of John Henry Newman Jackman, the city’s mayor. In New York, Bloomberg and Giuliani had made the city nearly as safe as an upscale suburb, but Jackman was a first-class ass. He didn’t care if the city burned to the ground, so long as his base was happy.

And Martha knew exactly whom his base consisted of.

She went up the small flight of concrete steps to the courthouse’s back door. There was a security camera there, and she got out her little can of black spray paint. She aimed it at the camera lens far over her head. Then she double-checked it to make sure she’d gotten it all.

She put the can back in her bag and punched in her access code on the pad at the side of the door. Martha’s watch read 8:35. It was early for the courthouse, but it was not exactly early. Court wouldn’t get into gear until ten o’clock, but that was because the court system was also run by asses.

The security guard was already on duty, a uniformed policewoman with a gun on her hip and a strained expression. Martha saw her look of surprise and pretended she hadn’t.

“Is Celia in already?” she asked.

Martha had no idea if this was something the guard would know. Celia was her personal assistant, and came to work every morning by bus.

The policewoman started to say something. Martha sailed right past her. She didn’t really care if Celia was in or not.

She went down the back corridor that was painted such an awful shade of beige—vomit beige, she always thought of it. They brought the kids through that corridor when it was time for court. The idea was not to expose them to ridicule or publicity by bringing them up the sidewalk. Martha thought that was asinine.

Martha passed the door to the corridor that went to the courtrooms themselves and opened the thicker one that went to the offices. There were security cameras in these corridors, too, but she had spray-painted them last night, and she was pretty sure that security hadn’t managed to “fix” them yet. She took the can out and did the one closest to her door, just to be safe. Then she went on through.

Most of the offices were dark. One, her own, all the way at the end of the hall, was lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree.

“Celia?” Martha said.

Celia Markhall put her head out the door and made a little wave. “Good morning, Your Honor. I wasn’t expecting you for at least another hour. I’m afraid I’ve got things in a mess in here.”

Celia Markhall was the fifth assistant Martha had had in the past nine years, and she wasn’t any better than the rest of them. She was blond in the only way people can be blond when they’ve reached the age of fifty-six, and she was much too peppy.

Martha pushed past her into the outer office. There were paper files on the desks there, placed about in little stacks. She went past them without bothering to think about what they were for and into the inner office with its big mahogany desk and its antique wall clock. The antique wall clock was Martha’s own, brought from her home in Wayne.

There was nothing at all on her desk except the felt blotter. The blotter was there because she thought desks ought to have blotters. She could not have said why.

She put her briefcase and her bag on the desk and sat down. She looked at the dark screen of her computer. It sat on a little “workstation” shelf to her left. She suddenly felt enormously stupid about having come in this early at all.

“Your Honor?” Celia said. She looked like she was hovering. She was like a hummingbird.

“The first thing this morning is the Maldovanian case?”

Celia looked immediately uncomfortable. “It’s actually the second thing,” she said. “The docket says eleven o’clock, but you know how that goes. The scheduler did try to give you the greatest possible leeway, but the first thing up is that She’bor Washington girl, and you know—”

“Oh, Lord,” Martha said.

“Yes, well, the scheduler tried to give you enough time.”

“It’s not going to take time,” Martha said. “It’s going to take keeping my temper. We should all thank God on our knees that Cathy Laste is finally retired and off this court. God only knows what she thought she was doing. You can’t go easy on these kids. Half of them are sociopaths and half of them will end up that way if you don’t lock them up the first time. The Maldovanian kid is coming in at eleven, you said?”

“From lockup, yes. The way they do that, he’ll probably be in early.”

“I know the way they do that,” Martha said. “Is that priest going to come in?”

“Father Tibor Kasparian, yes,” Celia said. “I think—”

“I had a check run on his immigration status,” Martha said. “The kid’s illegal, there’s no reason why the priest shouldn’t be illegal. He isn’t, though. Came here years ago as a political refugee. Whatever that means. I notified Immigration about the kid, but you can bet your ass they won’t do a thing about it. They never do.”

“Yes,” Celia said. “Of course, he is only fifteen, and—”

“And he’s got friends in the city government,” Martha said. “I know. Our esteemed mayor. Our esteemed governor. And they’re not even on the same side. People don’t understand reality anymore. They don’t face up to it. You can’t just let these things go.”

“Yes,” Celia said again.

The woman looked stressed. Martha could tell. Martha wanted to throw something.

“Listen,” she said. “Get me all the stuff about She’bor Washington. I want to get through that as fast as I can. Maybe if I get through that, I can bring the Maldovanian kid in early and Father Tibor Kasparian won’t even be at the courthouse yet. God, how I want to get through with that before he ever gets here.”

“Yes,” Celia said again. “There is one other thing. The funeral service. For Stella Kolchak. It starts at eleven, and all the assistants will be off the floor. I think the best estimate for return is going to be about twelve thirty, because most of us will be going out to the cemetery. Of course, I won’t be going to the luncheon, you did say you need me here—”

“I do need you here,” Martha said. “I can’t believe I’m still dealing with Stella Kolchak. The woman was such a twit. And about as useful an assistant as a cheese Danish. That’s Cathy Laste for you. Nothing done right.”

“I do promise to be back as soon as I can,” Celia said. She looked like she was going to say something else, make some protest, but Martha knew she wouldn’t do it. She knew better by now.

Martha swung her chair until it faced the computer station and started to boot up.

3

Petrak Maldovanian was not having the worst day of his life. Not even close. He wasn’t even having the worst day of his life in America, which had occurred exactly a week ago. He was only having a kind of day he had never had before, and it was setting him off balance.

The day had actually started in a way he liked, with his American Government: Histories and Processes class at Philadelphia Community College. There were a lot of things wrong with Philadelphia Community College that people would tell you about if you gave them half a chance. It was situated in one of the worst parts of the city. That did not make the campus unsafe—the campus was well patrolled. It did make
getting
to the campus, or leaving it, something of an adventure. Petrak didn’t have a car, and he learned his first semester never to schedule a class or an appointment too late in the day. His American Government class started at eight in the morning and ended twenty minutes after nine.

Petrak didn’t mind the forced early-morning scheduling, because he loved the entire idea of the Philadelphia Community College and everything that went with it. If anybody had asked him what he thought the most important difference was between Armenia and the United States, he would have said the Philadelphia Community College and said it without hesitation. All the other things were either trivial or ambiguous. The level of government corruption was a lot lower, but there was still government corruption. The money was much more abundant, but Petrak didn’t have access to much of the money.

No, it was the Philadelphia Community College that was the shock—a place that offered a university education to anybody who walked through the door who had graduated from high school, and offered it at practically no money. In Armenia, you went to university if you passed the entrance exams, and practically nobody did.

Just after coming to America, Petrak had seen a clip of a speech President Obama made somewhere or other, saying that the country should make it a goal for every student to go to college. That was long before Petrak had even started at PCC. He knew nothing about American politics. After that, though, he’d always thought President Obama was okay.

He mostly thought that his American Government class was okay, too, but this morning he hadn’t been able to attend to it. He hadn’t heard half the lecture. His mind was on his brother, Stefan, and what was going to happen to Stefan today. And he was worried that the trouble Stefan was having was entirely his fault.