Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  She tried not to think about the much better story playing out at this very moment in Courtroom 5. By now, Abe Belinsky was probably on his fourth it-would-shock-the-conscience-of-the-community-Your-Honour diatribe. Belinsky was always good theatre and better copy. “Never in my thirty-six years of legal practice have I seen such a travesty of . . .” whatever.

  Today the travesty would be that his client, a slumlord slug named Tony Karakis, was up for murder when all he was really trying to do was burn down his own apartment building for the insurance. How was he supposed to know his ex-wife and her new lover would be inside in flagrante delicto, crisped, as it were, in the act of congress?

  Tony had conveniently—not to mention cheaply—provided his ex with an apartment in his tenement in lieu of spousal support. Abe would paint this as an act of incredible generosity to a woman he had earlier dissed as a “coked-up hooker” (without mentioning, of course, that Tony had been both her pimp and drug supplier, which was how they’d met in the first place). Not that Abe would ignore his client’s seamier side, of course, just in case some esteemed members of the jury might have already read about Tony’s exploits during one of his many previous court appearances for extortion, assault, living off the avails or even arson (this was not his first torch job).

  “I won’t pretend that my client is a model human being,” Abe would allow, stating the obvious, leaning his arms against the jury rail, making eye contact, honey-coating each word. “Who among us is?” But Tony Karakis had never, as Abe was quick to point out, been convicted of anything. “And, members of the jury, you must keep in your minds the indisputable fact that my client is not on trial for being a person you might not invite home for dinner. Tony Karakis is on trial for murder.” Pause. “And, my friends”—everyone was Abe’s friend, especially when he was in mid-harangue—“Tony Karakis is no murderer . . .”

  She could write that story without even being in the courtroom. Which is almost certainly how she would have to do it now. She’d have to ask Bonnie, Judge Adamson’s clerk, to let her listen to the tape over the lunch break so she could get Abe’s quotes exactly right. Another lost lunch hour. Not that she felt much like eating these days anyway. But still.

  She looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. It had been two hours since Michelle had called. “Oh good, I caught you,” she’d begun, as if Moira had been trying to escape. Michelle was Moira’s City Editor at the Daily Journal. “Got a call from a friend at the cop shop last night,” she’d explained confidentially. “Says they’re going to be charging some City accountant with scamming a million bucks. Morton wants it big for page three, right next to a reprint of last month’s story about property taxes going up. We’ll send a shooter to get his mug on the in-and-out. All we need from you is a little colour from inside. Head down, tears in his eyes, doleful look back at the wife, you know, the usual.” She paused for breath. “What was on your sked for today anyway?”

  “Karakis. Closing arguments.” Trying not let her frustration show.

  “Morton wants this one,” Michelle said, as if that trumped everything else. Maybe she really was sleeping with him. “Anyway, shouldn’t take long. You can do Karakis after the arraignment.”

  Michelle, of course, didn’t have a clue about the hoops Moira would have to jump through to do that. She had never covered courts, never covered anything except her rather largish ass, and that not completely. Which may have been why Morton . . . Stop it. Moira knew she wasn’t being fair. Michelle might not be sleeping with Morton. Perhaps she was just stupid. No, that wasn’t being fair either. The reality was that there just weren’t enough reporters any more. Michelle was too new and inexperienced to know that, or what the lack of warm bodies meant for those left in the field.

  When Moira started at the paper five years ago, there were two reporters covering courts full time, and they could always call the desk for help on a particularly busy day. Now, she was on her own; she had to handle the Provincial and Supreme Courts, criminal and civil cases, arraignments and sentencings—and woe to her if she missed a story one of the three Tribune court reporters had. The Tribune was the competition, the older, established broadsheet. The Daily Journal was the newcomer, the feisty tabloid that tried harder. It had been started back in the late seventies by a bunch of disgruntled Tribune editors, including her father. Even though they no longer owned the paper—they’d sold out to a businessman, who’d sold out to a chain, who’d sold out to a bigger chain—most were still working for the paper as editors, and they took it as a personal affront when the Tribune carried a story the Journal didn’t have.

  Moira did her best, but there were inevitably days like today when she was assigned to pursue some editor’s hot tip. She’d already discovered from her friend in the prothonotary’s office that the guy she was waiting to see arraigned this morning wasn’t an accountant—just a lowly bookkeeper—and he wasn’t being charged with making off with millions; it was a couple hundred grand at most. Still, she had to admit, it did sound like a good story.

  Another How-do-you-plead? Not her boy. She looked up at the bench and saw good old Justice Justice. How she hated to have to write his name in a story; the paper’s computerized spell-check system invariably choked on it as a double occurrence of the same word and helpfully tried to fix it by automatically eliminating one of them. That meant someone on the desk had to go in and manually override the system, provided, of course, a copy editor even noticed, which they seemed to do less and less. They were short-staffed too.

  The judge looked almost as bored as she felt. How had he managed to draw this short straw? she wondered. The Supremes—that’s what court reporters called the Supreme Court justices—weren’t supposed to preside at routine arraignments. But there was a big Provincial Court judges’ annual convention at the Digby Pines this weekend, and most of them were already at the resort, golfing probably. Those who weren’t in Digby—according to the clerk Moira had had coffee with that morning—were at home with a nasty flu. “God’s bowling ball just rolled right over them,” the clerk joked. Which was why Justice Justice had got the emergency call to handle this morning’s arraignments.

  Looking up at him on the bench, Moira found it difficult to imagine that Ward Justice had been handsome once. She’d seen proof in the tattered scrapbook of old newspaper clippings her father kept to remind himself—and her—of the journalist he’d once been. In those days, the judge had been a politician whose doings featured prominently in the news, or at least in the legislative stories her father wrote. Inevitably, the paper used the same studio-posed, black-and-white photo of Justice staring solemnly into the camera, his right hand beside his face, a lit cigarette held delicately in his fingers, smoke curling up and beyond the frame. When was the last time a politician had posed for a photographer with a cigarette in his hand? In her mind’s eye, Moira lined up the head-and-shoulders shot of the young politician side by side with the image of the old judge in front of her. His then-trendy Afro (his “Art Garfunkel ’do,” her father called it) was now close cropped and almost entirely white. And the young man’s piercing eyes and swarthy, angular good looks had long since disappeared, buried under a layer of fat-puffed, wrinkled skin, freckled here and there with splotchy, penny-sized liver spots.

  Moira brought her attention back to the flower she’d been sketching on the cover of her notepad. In her mind, the flower had magically morphed into a flying saucer because the ink from a few of the petals had fused together and made the flower look more like a spaceship. Maybe she should add a couple of stick spacemen to complete the—she felt a sudden wave of nausea bubble up. Thankfully, she hadn’t stopped at Tim’s this morning for a double-double and muffin. She hadn’t felt like eating all week.

  She put down her pen, stared up at the ceiling, waited for the feeling to pass. She was sure of it now. She would stop at SuperDrugs at lunch, pick up one of those test kits—Damn! She couldn’t. She had to spend her lunch h
our listening to the Abe reruns in the clerk’s office. Which meant she’d have to get the kit tonight on her way home from work.

  Moira wasn’t sure what she thought about the idea of having a baby. She knew she wanted to have children. But now? With Todd? What would Todd say? First: Great. Second: Now you can quit. It wasn’t that Todd didn’t want her to work; he just considered newspaper reporting beneath her dignity—and his. Which, of course, drove her father to distraction.

  Her father had never liked Todd, especially after he’d quit his law firm job (strike one: he was a lawyer) to become a real estate entrepreneur (strike two: he was a developer). Todd’s current project was cobbling together a high-profile, high-rise luxury condo apartment project on the Dartmouth waterfront. His plan was to sell the units at inflated prices to the multinational oil companies that were drilling for gas off the coast. The companies, in turn, would lease them to their up-and-coming young managers at deflated prices in order to entice them to relocate to Halifax for a few years of outpost seasoning. Moira’s father was dismissive. “You’d think Toddy owned the friggin’ view.”

  Their father-daughter lunches had become more frequent—and her father’s condemnation of her husband more virulent—since he’d left the paper himself with a buyout two years ago, one of a dozen senior employees eased out the door. Each new announcement that Todd had pre-sold yet another apartment seemed to make her father angrier. That Todd inevitably seemed to sell another one just after her’ father had been turned down for yet another job beneath his qualifications did not help matters.

  She hadn’t told her father she and Todd were trying to have a baby, or that Todd was pressuring her to quit her job at the paper. Strike three, game over. But the reality was she’d been thinking about quitting herself, maybe going to law school if she didn’t get pregnant, writing a novel if she did. Why did her father care so much whether she stayed at a paper he’d already left?

  Maybe she’d tell him over lunch next Wednesday, sugarcoat the quitting with the news about the baby. If indeed a baby was growing inside her. Something was certainly making her want to throw up.

  “Case number 1–4–5–7–5–3.” Finally. “Regina v. James Joseph Howe.” Howe stood ramrod straight, a six-foot-something rail of a young man, listening intently as the clerk read out the specifics of the allegations against him. Theft. Fraud. Breach of trust.

  Had he been named after Joseph Howe, the famous nineteenth-century Nova Scotia politician? Moira wondered. She was surprised to see he was black; though the courts were clogged with black defendants, few were ever charged with such white-collar crimes. She’d just assumed he’d be white because she knew he was a bookkeeper for the City. Perhaps it was time for a reality check on her own stereotypes.

  Speaking of stereotypes, she noticed that Uhuru Melesse was the young man’s lawyer. Surely, Howe could have done better. Moira had interviewed Melesse once for a Sunday feature she did on the importance of having a will. He’d had nothing interesting to say, but she’d included him in the piece anyway so the paper could use his photo. Morton had been keen to get the faces of black professionals into the Daily Journal ever since a Media Watch report had criticized the paper publicly for “reinforcing negative racist stereotypes of African Nova Scotians.” What Moira remembered most about Melesse was that he had never looked her in the eye; he’d stared straight at her breasts instead.

  She’d never seen Melesse do an actual trial. She wasn’t sure he had. When he did appear in a courtroom, it was usually just to enter a guilty plea on behalf of some poor schmuck who couldn’t afford to fight the case against him.

  “Is your client prepared to enter a plea, Mr. . . . Melesse?” Moira wondered if Justice Justice’s pause was deliberate; a lot of lawyers she knew sniggered about Melesse’s decision to change his name.

  “We are, Your Honour.”

  “How do you plead?”

  “My client wishes to plead not guilty but, with the court’s indulgence, I would ask leave to raise a couple of issues I think may be critical for the court to consider as we proceed.”

  Justice Justice lowered his head slightly and stared out resignedly over his reading glasses at the lawyer before him. “Indulged.”

  “Thank you, Your Honour. As this court is well aware, the question of reparations for African Americans victimized by slavery is already a matter for civil litigation in the United States,” Melesse began. He sounded almost wary about what he was getting ready to say. “I don’t mean to suggest that the case before you this morning is about slavery per se,” he added quickly. “It’s not . . . but the reality is that the unequal treatment of black people in this country is a . . . fact, a . . . matter of . . . public record . . .” To Moira, Melesse sounded like a stutterer trying unsuccessfully to maintain control of his tongue. “While there is as yet no case law in this country, Your Honour . . . it has certainly become an area for academic research among . . . some of our brightest young . . . African-Canadian legal scholars.” Melesse paused again, as if deciding to shift gears.

  “My client is a proud descendant of the community of Africville. As Your Honour well knows . . .” Melesse attempted to make eye contact with the judge, who was staring at his papers. “During the 1960s, the residents of that poor but proud . . . African-Canadian community were expropriated, driven from their homes without consultation, or fair and just compensation. My client believes that because the City of Halifax, the Province of Nova Scotia and, indeed, the country of Canada have all failed to right this wrong over the past forty years, that it was his right, his duty as a citizen, to correct this unfairness, to provide reparations to the victims of this historic injustice.”

  Moira flipped open her notebook, suddenly interested, and began to play note-making catch-up.

  “I’m not sure I follow, Counsel.” Justice Justice no longer seemed bored either, but he wasn’t eager to go where Melesse seemed bent on taking him. “I thought your client was charged with theft, fraud and breach of trust,” the judge noted, looking down and adding, with what Moira took to be more than a hint of sarcasm, “At least that’s what it says here.”

  “Begging your indulgence, Your Honour, I—”

  “You’re being indulged, Mr. Melesse. But don’t take advantage. Save your argument for the proper forum. This proceeding is neither the place nor the time for you to play to the press.”

  Moira looked around. She hadn’t noticed before, but the usually vacant spectator galleries behind her were now dotted with the painted faces of half a dozen recognizable, well-coiffed and groomed TV reporters. They rarely, if ever, darkened the corridors of the courthouse for less than a murder arraignment. Whoever had leaked word about Howe’s arraignment to the Dairy Journal had obviously been an equal-opportunity sieve.

  “But, if it please the court—”

  “It pleases the court that your client has pleaded not guilty,” Justice cut him off. What was he so agitated about all of a sudden? Moira wondered. “So let’s move on. Ms. Evans, do you have a recommendation with regard to bail?”

  “But—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Melesse, you’ll get your chance.”

  Elinor Evans, the usually bustlingly efficient Crown attorney, seemed as nonplussed by the judge’s sudden outburst as anyone. “Ah, yes, Your Honour . . .” She began riffling through her papers. “If you’ll give me a moment—”

  Justice was red in the face now. “You shouldn’t need a moment, Ms. Evans. I didn’t ask a complicated question.”

  “No, no sir, Your Honour, you didn’t. I apologize.” She gave up looking, decided to wing it. “Mr. Howe here is charged with a very serious offence, a crime that involves not only stealing money belonging to the taxpayers of the Halifax Regional Municipality but also with violating his sworn duty to his employer and to his fellow citizens. He is accused of taking . . .” She looked down at the papers on her desk, realized it was hopeless
, “a great deal of money. The police have not been able to account for the whereabouts of all those missing funds and they believe Mr. Howe may still have access to at least some of them. As a result, the Crown believes Mr. Howe may be a flight risk. We would ask that he be denied bail or, failing that—”

  “Mr. Melesse. Your turn.”

  Uhuru Melesse seemed to be struggling for words. “With respect, Your Honour, I don’t believe I was given a fair opportunity to raise the issue of—”

  “Hearing no objections to the Crown’s recommendation, bail is denied. Mr. Howe is remanded into custody until his next court appearance. That’s it for this morning, ladies and gentlemen.” With that, the judge bolted from his seat and stormed out the back door of the courtroom so quickly his startled clerk didn’t even have time for an “All rise . . .”

  For a moment no one spoke, then the room filled with a sudden, dam-bursting cacophony of confusion. What had just happened, and why? Moira didn’t know. Neither, judging by what the people around her were saying, did anyone else. Moira only knew that she now had a much more compelling story for tomorrow than Abe Belinsky and his predictable histrionics. Justice Justice was the story now. And, more to the point, since the judge wouldn’t be granting interviews, the story would be what Uhuru Melesse had to say about the judge’s behaviour. He was already making his way out of the courtroom into the camera lights, surrounded by a moving amoeba of journalists, thrusting their microphones and mini-disc recorders into his face, jostling each other, pushing for position, demanding he stop and talk to them. Moira hurried to catch up with them, felt another hot wave of nausea. Damn.