Night Watch by Linda Fairstein Page A

found a comfortable position, reclined my seat and covered myself with a blanket.
    Hurtling across the ocean miles above the earth gave me a surfeit of hours to think about my personal situation. When I was immersed in the work that I found so challenging and rewarding, itwas easy to put off analysis of my emotional state. Until this weekend, all my time spent with Luc was joyful and loving, and I often fantasized about leaving behind the high pressure of my prosecutorial position for more intimacy with him. Neither one of us had talked about marriage yet, but Joan had succeeded in delivering a shot across the bow of my unsteady ship.
    I was a natural for a life of public service because I had been encouraged by my parents to use the opportunities they’d bestowed on me to “give back” to others less fortunate. But it would have been more logical for me to have put down roots in the medical community from which they both came.
    My mother, Maude, was the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a dairy farm in New England and later moved to New York to study nursing. She had the skills and compassion of a superb RN, and that talent—along with the deep green eyes, winning smile, and great long legs—attracted the attention of my father.
    Benjamin Cooper—my father—was the son of Russian Jews who fled political oppression there, the first of their three boys to be born in America. It was during his medical internship that he fell in love with Maude, who converted to Judaism when she married him.
    He was a young cardiologist in private practice when he and a partner fashioned a half-inch piece of plastic tubing into a device that was adapted for use in almost every operation involving the aorta. The Cooper-Hoffman valve revolutionized cardiac surgery and changed the financial circumstances of our family. Unlike both my parents, my two older brothers and I were raised in the upscale Westchester suburb of Harrison. The trust fund they set up for each of us enabled my first-rate education at Wellesley College, where I majored in English literature before deciding that I wanted a legal career, which I prepared for at the University of Virginia School of Law.
    “Something to drink?” the attendant asked me as she passed through the cabin.
    “Just water.”
    “A newspaper?”
    “Yes, please.
Le Figaro
and also
Le Monde
.” I wanted to see how the French press—from the far right to the left—was reacting to the news of Gil-Darsin’s arrest.
    “I’ll be right back with
Le Figaro
. I just gave this gentleman the only copy of
Le Monde
I had left after first class devoured them
.”
    Now my seatmate looked up again. “The news is interesting today, no?” he said in heavily accented English. “You’re welcome to the paper when I’m finished.”
    I forced a smile. The last thing I wanted was to be a captive audience for a lecture from a Frenchman about MGD for seven hours of air travel. “Thanks. I’m hoping it will put me to sleep.”
    “You’re going home to a big scandal. You’ve heard?”
    “No. I haven’t followed the news. Just visiting friends.” I reached for my tote to take out sunglasses to make my unwillingness to engage more obvious.
    The man put the front page in my lap, patting the photograph of the perp walk. “Disgusting what you Americans do. This kind of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in France before someone’s convicted of a crime. You’ve ruined the career of a brilliant economist.”
    The attendant returned with a copy of
Le Figaro
and passed it over to me. Not surprisingly, the same photograph was displayed, with a caption calling for the WEB chief to step down immediately.
    “I heard you say on the phone—forgive me—that you know Paul Battaglia. That you work for him.”
    “You must have misheard me. I’ve got a friend in his office.”
    “He’s known all over Europe for his work. Sounds like a fine man. You should tell your friend to convince him that he must do the right