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She’s messed up, that’s all there is to it. Alice doesn’t need to look around. She can tell that her client is angry at her. There are days like this, when the craft of it isn’t enough. Or it’s the other way around. There’s too much craft. Too many sentences that have been said before. Too many overused words.
It all slips by, collapses in a heap and is forgotten. Even the juror with the red glasses, who was so assiduous, put down her pen while Alice was giving her closing argument. The others listened politely, they must have been thinking lawyers aren’t as good in real life as they are on TV. At one point, one of the associate judges nodded off, his chin slumped on his jabot.
Gerard’s been given twelve years. Exactly what the assistant district attorney asked for. All her work achieved nothing. Not a hint of lenience, to acknowledge at least that she had fought. That, thanks to her, her client looked less pathetic and despairing.
Sure, with his few strands of greasy hair stretched over his head, his little mustache, and his saggy body, it’s not easy to empathize with him, old Gerard.
Alice feels sorrier for Nicole, who crumpled instantly when the verdict was announced. She was already beating herself up for not doing enough for her brother.
“With Gerard, I’m all he has,” she’d said.
A sister’s love, or a mother’s, that’s often the only good thing that men like Gerard can offer up for their defense. Nicole had been so lost, so touching when she’d made her statement that Alice had counted on her to soften up the jury. In fact, the only time she thought she was pleading properly, that the things she said stood on their own two feet, was when she was talking about Nicole, about her super-sugary orange-blossom biscuits and the extra hours of cleaning work she put in to earn enough for her brother to buy cigarettes from the prison canteen.
She’d kept her eyes pinned on Geppetto then. Geppetto was the third juror, and she’d named him after the old man in Pinocchio because of his checked shirt, his woolen vest, and his drooping eyelids, which formed two little sloping roofs over his eyes. She’s been giving jurors nicknames for a long time. And she liked him from the start. She was sure he was moved by Nicole. Perhaps she was wrong. Or maybe Geppetto and the others wanted to make Gerard pay for this too, all the trouble he’s given his sister for so many years.
Twelve years. Sentences are always too long when you’re defending. But hey, a defendant who drinks too much, gets nasty when he drinks, beats his dog, and nearly killed his neighbor, firing at him one game night because his TV was too loud—you have to face the facts: nobody gives a damn. Even the journalist Lavoine didn’t stay till the end. Tomorrow Gerard’s life will fill just ten lines in the local pages.
He’s a great guy, Lavoine. Much funnier in real life than in his articles. He’s been coming here so long he knows all the lawyers’ tricks. And that includes Alice’s.
“So, my learned friend, will you be pleading for ‘the possibility of a tear in the eye of the law’ again?”
True, Alice does cite that expression from Les Misérables quite often. But it didn’t even occur to her with Gerard. Not that one, nor any other, for that matter. She could kick herself. She should have done better. She’ll do better if Gerard decides to appeal, she promises herself. She’ll go visit him in the penitentiary. She can make the most of it and do the rounds of her other clients. There are at least five she needs to ask to visit.
“The courtroom’s closing, ma’am,” the police officer tells her.
Alice stuffs her robe into her bag, gathers up the scattered pages of Gerard’s case file, and jerks her bag shut. The cobblestones outside gleam in the rain, clusters of leaves swirl in the chill wind, and Alice shivers. The jurors are lingering at the foot of the steps. The Gerard case was the last in the court sessions, they’re struggling to say goodbye to one another and return to their everyday lives. She pulls up her collar, hunches her head between her shoulders, and quickens her step. Geppetto looks disconsolate and gives her a discreet wave. He must have tried, she thinks.
The rain beats down harder and Alice is soaked when she steps through the door to her office. She drapes her robe over a hanger, the black fabric creased. It’s a pitiful thing too. The cathedral clock strikes six. It’s too early to call her daughter Louise, she’s bound to disturb her. And what would she tell her, anyway? She’s not going to burden a kid of twenty with something as ugly as this case. She makes herself a cup of tea, bites off two squares of dark chocolate, slips the bar into the drawer, opens it again, hesitates, then takes two more. She gave up fighting the extra pounds a few years ago. She likes her heavy, solid body just the way it is.
Through the three high windows in her office, she looks out at the naked branches of lime trees bowing in the wind while the glass-and-steel façade of the law courts in the far corner seems to taunt her. Alice takes the Gerard file from her bag and puts it away in the cabinet. A handwritten page slips out. It’s the first time anyone’s taken this much interest in him, anyone’s looked at him and listened to him. Apart from in his sister’s eyes, he’s just been this invisible man his whole life . . . It wasn’t so terrible, after all.
Naima, the practice secretary, knocks at the door.
“Your six fifteen is here.”
Alice had completely forgotten.
“Who is it?”
“A young woman.”
“You know you shouldn’t saddle me with meetings when I just finished in court.”
“She really made a thing about coming today. She wouldn’t say why.”
“Well, tell her I don’t have much time. Thirty minutes, tops.”