by D. W. Buffa
‘It’s true, isn’t it, Mr Trevelyn? Vincent Marlowe did not want the boy to die, and he was willing to give his own life to prevent it!’
Trevelyn shouted back,‘What he said, what he thought—how would I know what he really meant? He killed him, that’s all I know—stabbed him in the heart just the way I said he did. That isn’t something I’m ever likely to forget, the way the blood shot out, the way everyone was so desperate to get it.’
‘Including you!’
‘It was that or die!’
‘Answer my question, Mr Trevelyn!’
‘What question is that?’
‘He was willing to die in place of the boy?’
Trevelyn leaned forward, his forearm resting at an awkward angle on the leg that was still whole.‘You’re forgetting something,’ he said with a brutal grin.
‘Enlighten me.’
The grin cut deeper across Trevelyn’s mouth, twisting it into a vengeful scowl.‘You’re forgetting that he still did it. The boy is dead, isn’t he? And Marlowe, he’s still here. The boy is the one got killed, not him!’
‘But that was my next question, Mr Trevelyn. Perhaps now you’ll answer it. Why did the boy die? Why didn’t Marlowe take his place? Have you forgotten?’
The grin retreated. ‘I just told you,’ said Trevelyn as he sank back in the chair.‘All I know is what I saw. I don’t know what he was thinking.’
Darnell stared at him, incredulous.‘Are you saying—is it your sworn testimony…? No, never mind. Answer this: whether or not Marlowe offered to die in the boy’s place, why did he kill him? Why Marlowe and not someone else?’
Coolly belligerent, Trevelyn folded his arms together and turned his shoulder.
‘Marlowe was in charge. He decided.’
‘That seems odd, doesn’t it?’ Darnell waited until Trevelyn’s eyes came back to him. ‘Odd that after everyone, including you, decided someone had to die; odd that after everyone, including you, decided that it should be the boy—odd that, suddenly, Marlowe should be the one to decide who should kill him? Odder still, don’t you think, that he should employ this newfound power to choose himself? Is that what you would have done, Mr Trevelyn, if you had had that power: chosen yourself, instead of any of the others, to kill, to murder?’
‘No one wanted to! No one!’
‘Exactly Mr Trevelyn! Exactly! No one wanted to. There you all were, nearly dead, only one way to live and yet no one willing to do what had to be done. And so you chose the only person you could insist had that obligation, the responsibility to do everything necessary to save the rest of you: Marlowe, the captain, the only one who could not argue that it had to be someone else!’
‘And he did it! He killed him, he killed them all!’
‘Because he had to, because it was the only way you and the others could survive. But tell us again—how was the boy chosen? Why was he the first?’
‘He was sick, dying; he didn’t have much time left! I told you that! How many times do I have to tell you again?’
‘Until you tell the truth! He was dying, you say?’
‘Yes!’
‘Then why would Marlowe want to take his place? Why would he be willing to die if, no matter what he did, the boy was going to die anyway?’
‘You’re the one says that’s what Marlowe wanted.’
‘And I have a witness who confirms it, a witness who will testify that you knew it, too. Hugo Offenbach has a rather different story from the one you tell.’
Red with anger, Trevelyn nearly bolted from the chair. He held onto the arm of it to keep from falling forward.‘Offenbach? I wouldn’t wonder,’ he said, gesticulating wildly with his hand, his eyes gone crazy. ‘After what Marlowe did for him!’
Darnell hesitated, a thousand questions crowding incoherently in his brain. He had already broken at least a dozen times the lawyer’s rule against asking questions to which the answer is not already known. The rules were not made for a case like this.What harm could there be in doing it again?
‘And just what did Marlowe do for Hugo Offenbach that would make Mr Offenbach do anything but tell the truth?’
‘He took his name off, that’s what he did. He wouldn’t let him be included. Everyone else was part of it, but not the two of them, not Marlowe and Offenbach—they were safe.’
‘Safe? What do you mean? Took his name off what?’
‘The names of those who could be chosen; the ones who each time we needed to, would be killed.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘STOPTALKING,’ INSISTED SUMMER BLAINE IN THE practised voice of a physician. ‘I need to listen.’
Darnell laughed in protest, and then submitted.
‘Take a deep breath and hold it,’ she instructed, pressing the cold stethoscope against his skin. She moved it a little lower.‘Again.’
When she was done, she sat next to him on the sofa, wearing the same look of benevolent concern he had so often seen before.
‘Did they teach you that in medical school?’ he asked before she could speak.‘That warm, maternal look that makes the patient think that, whatever is wrong with him, the doctor can fix it?’ Darnell finished buttoning his shirt. He went over to the window of the Pacific Heights apartment where he had lived since the year he and his wife were married, and watched the sunlight penetrate the morning fog. The Golden Gate seemed to float inside a thick white cloud that rose up from the grey water of the bay. The bridge had almost come to measure his existence. There were not many people left who could remember when it was being built; fewer still who had been living here in San Francisco, watching while it was being finished. Nearly all the friends of his youth were gone now, but the bridge carried him back to a past that seemed all the more vivid as the future became less a question of the things he could still do than of the time he had left.
‘You have to take care of yourself,’ said Summer Blaine, kindly and without reproach for his repeated failures to follow her advice.
Darnell heard her words, or rather the sound they made, the sweet inflection of her voice. He heard the words, and behind them the hope, the wish, that he take those few precautions that might grant them the time to do some of the things they wanted. And behind the wish, he grasped the warnings in the half-worried looks and the soft, whispered reminders about his medication and the need for sleep. He did most of what she asked, or tried to, not because he believed it would make any great difference—he was too old to believe much in medicine or science—but because it was one of the few ways he had to indulge her need to feel useful.
‘I’m glad you were able to come in for the weekend. There are too many things going on with this trial for me to leave the city, but I know how much you have to do, and…’
‘When you said you couldn’t come home…’ She put the stethoscope back in the black bag and took out a syringe.
‘Do I really have to?’ he asked as she pushed up his sleeve and, with a cotton swab, briskly rubbed a spot of alcohol on his arm. She laughed as he grimaced, laughed as she called him a coward, laughed again when, with boyish defiance, he bravely admitted it.
‘I always hated that,’ he muttered, wincing at the way it stung. Glad it was over, he pulled down his shirt-sleeve. ‘And you promise that with just one injection a week I’ll have the virility of a twenty-year-old?’
‘We have a pill for that now.’
‘There seems to be a pill for everything now,’ he muttered to himself. His eyes narrowed into a shrewd, thoughtful stare.‘Except how to solve a moral dilemma.’
She knew he meant Marlowe and the trial. It was all he had thought about, all he had talked about, for months.
‘The papers say you were brilliant.’
‘I’ll tell you how brilliant I was. When I started the cross-examination of Aaron Trevelyn, the jury hated Marlowe; by the time I finished, the jury hated them both. I’m not sure that should be counted as much of an achievement.’
Darnell plopped down in an easy chair next to the fire
place. The living room was enormous. Three sets of French doors led out to a balcony with a view that stretched all around the bay. Persian rugs were scattered over the gleaming hardwood floor. A painting by Manet hung above the fireplace, a wedding gift from his wife’s mother. The carpets, the paintings, the furnishings —none of it had been changed, none of it had been moved, in the years since his wife’s death. The room had the shabby gentility of a happily remembered past.
‘It’s a strange business, the law.You remember that famous line of Dickens’s? “The law is an ass.” A more acute observation would have been, “The law is a fraud.” Aaron Trevelyn is the prosecution’s main witness, the only one of the six survivors who talked, the only one who told Roberts what he knew. Leave aside for the moment whether his testimony—what he said on direct— was accurate; leave aside all questions of bias and distortion.What was almost the first thing I did with him? How did I set about to raise questions in the mind of the jury about his honesty and credibility? I did what any young lawyer—or for that matter any third-year law student—would have done: impeach the witness out of his own mouth; have him say something you can then show to be a lie.’
With a distant look, Darnell shook his head.‘He lied about his divorce; he lied about child support. But all that means is that he has a legal debt that he has not paid. And from that everyone assumes he must be a liar and a cheat, someone dishonest. But what do we really know about him?’ Darnell looked at Summer, who had taken the chair opposite.‘What do we know about his wife? Did he come home one day and find her in bed with another man? Did she tell him that her children—the ones he now has a legal obligation to support—were fathered by someone else? There are a thousand reasons why he might have run off to Europe and tried to start a different life, but all the jury knows is that he has not done what a court said he had to do and that he tried to lie about it.’
‘You sound like you feel sorry for him—but, like you said, he’s the prosecution’s main witness.What choice did you have?’
‘There wasn’t any choice, I know that; no choice because everything is limited by the rules, which is why this case is so damn confounding.We are in a court of law, trying a case to a jury, bound by the rules of evidence, rules which allow me to show that Trevelyn lied but do not allow him to show why he might have had a good reason not to tell the truth.Which is another way of saying,’ cried Darnell as he sprang from the chair and, with a burst of energy, began to walk around the sunlit room,‘that he isn’t allowed to tell the truth, because whatever the law says, the truth sometimes has to conceal itself in a lie.’
Throwing open the French doors, Darnell listened to the sounds of the city drifting up from below. Somewhere out on the bay, out towards the Pacific, a steamship headed into the broken fog, its whistle blowing a mournful lament for the journey that lay ahead.
‘But do I feel sorry for Trevelyn? I feel sorry for them all, the living more than the dead. And not just the survivors—I feel sorry for all of us, everyone involved. This is a terrible case, even worse than I had imagined. I knew it the moment I saw the jurors’ eyes.’
With her legs curled under her, Summer Blaine lay her head back in the warm luxury of the overstuffed chair. She watched him with a languid gaze, marvelling at the sharp acuity of his mind and the way that, even now, at an age when most men would have been long since retired, this case had become his sole obsession. All their talk of an idle retirement was a sweet narcotic, a harmless lie that let them both pretend to want the kind of normal lives that would have bored them silly. She asked him questions, not because she had any great interest in the answer, though the answers were often interesting enough, but for the simple pleasure of listening to him talk. The voice that had seduced who knew how many juries, had long ago seduced her.
‘What about the juror’s eyes? What did you see in them? Something you had not seen before?’
He leaned against the open doors, watching as the Golden Gate became each minute more luminescent.
‘When I started out, all those years ago, juries were more easily shocked. In the first murder case I tried, the prosecution passed around photographs of the victim, a woman who had been shot.
She lay face down in a pool of blood. Several of the women on the jury had to force themselves to look; none of the jurors, man or woman, would look for very long. Those photographs were all in black and white; there was nothing that by today’s standards would be considered the least bit graphic. It was not just what they saw that they found shocking and offensive: it was the fact of death, the fact of death by violence that upset them. It was the very idea that a woman had been murdered that made some of them refuse even to look at the defendant until much later in the trial.
‘All that has changed. It is practically what we live for now: death, murder. It is not enough that someone dies; we have to see the way it happened, we clamour for all the gruesome details. Sex and violence—we’re a nation of voyeurs. That’s what I saw in the eyes of those twelve otherwise decent people sitting in that jury box: the descriptions of what happened out there, how those six survived, the stories of death and cannibalism—they’re mesmerised, entranced; they can’t get enough of it. That’s what I saw in their eyes: blood lust.’
Darnell turned from the Golden Gate and the fog that was dancing away back to Summer Blaine and the smile that, when he saw it, made him feel suddenly self-conscious.
‘I’m always trying this case, aren’t I? That must have sounded like a summation.’
‘No,’ she said with a laugh. ‘But you can’t stop now. Tell me what you’ve decided.’
‘Decided?’
‘Everything you ever see in a trial makes a difference in what you do. If I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned that. If the jury is enthralled with the story of what happened, if we’re all the voyeurs you think we are, you’re not just going to regret what we’ve become—you’re going to use it. How?’
He nodded with a kind of dutiful smile, as he often did when he heard her tell him what he really thought, and then teased her with his eyes.‘I have no idea,’ he admitted with a candour that was both abrupt and disarming. ‘No idea at all. I know a great deal more than when the trial started—mainly because of what Hugo Offenbach told me—but it isn’t enough. I’m still feeling my way, guessing at a lot of it.’
At the mention of Hugo Offenbach, Summer’s eyes flashed with curiosity. ‘What was he like … after everything that’s happened? Will he ever play again? The papers say he’s become a total recluse. He doesn’t go out anywhere; he doesn’t see anyone.’
‘Will he ever play again? In public? No, I don’t think so,’ said Darnell as he moved across the room to the chair where she sat waiting. He touched her forehead and felt better for the warmth. Then, driven by some restless urge, he began to walk around again.
‘Trevelyn has finished testifying. Now he’s going to get rich. Every publisher in New York wants his story: the cannibal with a clear conscience. A movie deal can’t be far away.’
‘A nation of voyeurs,’ said Summer Blaine, repeating Darnell’s earlier observation, agreeing with it.
‘Trevelyn feels the need to justify himself before the world. Offenbach knows he can’t. He may be the most remarkable man I’ve ever met,’ said Darnell, growing more intense.‘He’s grateful to Marlowe for saving his life, but he would have been more grateful had Marlowe left him for dead. He knows what Marlowe did and, more importantly, he understands why he did it. In his judgment, and it’s a judgment with which I cannot disagree, Marlowe is both tragic and heroic. He admires Marlowe’s strength of character, his will, his moral courage—all the things that made Marlowe think that whatever else he did, he had to save Offenbach’s life—but now Offenbach has to live with the shame of what he, Offenbach, did not want done.’
A look of irritation, directed not at Summer Blaine, but at himself, filled his eyes as he wandered aimlessly from one place to another until he suddenly stopped, looked straight at her and
threw up his hands. ‘Life is full of splendid ironies, isn’t it? Marlowe and Offenbach, the only two who were willing to die, the only two Marlowe made certain would not be killed.Yes, what Trevelyn said is true. Marlowe was willing to let all the others die, willing to kill them himself, but not the two of them: Offenbach because he is a genius, Marlowe because he was the only one who could save the others. That is what is so remarkable, so extraordinary. Offenbach understands it, understands Marlowe’s motive, but how am I supposed to convince a jury that what Marlowe did was right? It’s easier to make the case that Marlowe had to live. No one else could control that boat; no one else knew what to do. Trevelyn, the only other member of the crew, had a broken wrist and was in constant pain. No, Marlowe had to live: without him none of the others stood a chance. But Hugo Offenbach? He was an old man compared to the rest of them, frail and in ill health. He had just had a heart attack; he might have died at any minute. Even if he had been in perfect health, even if he had been twenty years younger, why should his life be spared? Why should his name have been kept off the list of those who might die so the others might live? Because Hugo Offenbach is a genius, the greatest violinist in the world. That was Marlowe’s reason. It is the one thing he seems proud of, the only thing that brings some light into his eyes—that he saved Hugo Offenbach and what Offenbach does for the world.’
Darnell shook his head in wonder. ‘Poor Marlowe. All the world will see is a criminal failure to treat everyone the same, equally entitled to the same chance. Marlowe has lived his life at sea; he never suffered the disadvantages of a formal education. All he sees is the gift that Offenbach brings, a gift so rare that only a coward or a fool would fail to do whatever he had to do to save it. I’m afraid all the jury will see is someone who thinks that some lives are more important than others.’
‘Offenbach knows this?’ asked Summer Blaine when Darnell fell into a long silence.
At first he did not hear her as he thought about what seemed a hopeless dilemma. He noticed that the last wisps of fog had vanished from around the Golden Gate and that the sounds from the street below seemed sharper.
