by D. W. Buffa
‘That’s an extremely thoughtful offer,’ said Darnell, ‘but it really isn’t necessary. What happened looked much worse than it was; I was never in any real danger.’ He looked at Roberts.‘I have a heart condition—nothing too serious; I’ve had it for years. Every once in a while it acts up a little. More annoying than anything, and damned inconvenient.’
Turning back to Maitland, he explained that, in any event, he had only one more witness to call.‘Maybe two, but not more than that. Monday is the only day I need. If Michael doesn’t call any witnesses on rebuttal, we can make our closing arguments on Tuesday and the case can go to the jury. There is no reason to abbreviate the sessions. Two more days and we’re through. And I can promise you,’ he said as he got to his feet, this time without bracing himself, ‘I won’t have any trouble doing that.’
Darnell looked Roberts right in the eye as he shook his hand with all his former strength. He turned to say goodbye to Maitland, but the judge put his hand on Roberts’s sleeve and told him that he was going to stay behind for a few more minutes.
‘We have at least two things in common,’ said Maitland when they were alone. ‘We’re both too damned old to be working, and we both lie about our health. I’ve had a heart attack; I know what it’s like. I know something else, too—I know you should be in the hospital, that you have no business being home. But you did it, got yourself out of there so you could convince everyone that you were all right to finish the trial.’
Maitland looked past Darnell to the grey sunlit bay and the bright-coloured Golden Gate and the thick, white clouds moving across the azure sky. It was one of those postcard days when everything is the way you have always remembered it, when you have the sense that San Francisco is the one place that never really changes, the one place that always stays the same.
‘Makes you want to live forever, doesn’t it?’ said Maitland in a voice filled with quiet nostalgia. He patted Darnell on the shoulder and looked straight at him. ‘I don’t want to try this case over from the beginning, especially if I have to do it with someone else handling the defence. But I’d rather do that than have you fall down dead in the middle of your summation. So don’t lie to me. How bad is it, and what kind of chance am I taking if I let you go on with this?’
‘Blockage of the artery, but now it’s clear. If I was going to die—’ he began.
Maitland cut him short.‘Don’t try that one with me. I’ve used it too often myself. That witness of yours, Samantha Wilcox— even if she is right, even if there is a reason for everything that happens, who knows what that reason is? Do you really believe that you were saved so that you could finish the trial? For all you know you were given one last chance to quit the trial before it killed you.’
The sunlight through the window slanted across Maitland’s face, shading and deepening the lines that creased his skin, the lines that helped make him seem a man of experience whose word you could trust. ‘You see the effect this trial has had? Nothing seems quite normal anymore. I’ve started to see everything in terms of the terrible, stark choices those wretched people had. Tell me the truth—this is just between you and me. If this were any other trial, if it were just a man on trial for the kind of murder we get every day, you would still be in the hospital doing everything the doctors said, wouldn’t you?’
‘I have to finish this; there isn’t any choice.’
‘Which is my point exactly. We have been sitting there, day after day, listening to what they all went through; to what Marlowe, rightly or wrongly, thought he had to do. And we start to measure ourselves by a standard so difficult that we are not even sure anyone should try to meet it. Marlowe was right; Marlowe was wrong … Whatever we may think about what he did, he has made cowards of us all—because we know, don’t we, if we are honest with ourselves, that faced with the same awful choices, we probably would not have had his courage. And so you are going back into court on Monday, even if it kills you, because if you don’t, you will think that instead of doing what you should have done, you thought only of yourself. And because I would like to think that I would do the same thing myself, I don’t seem to have much choice but to let you.’
As soon as Maitland left, Darnell sank into his chair, exhausted from the effort of disguising how weak he felt. Two more days in court and the trial would be over. He wondered if he could do it, and then, with a grim smile as Summer helped him to his feet, wondered if he could even make it into the next room and bed.
Darnell slept the rest of the afternoon and then, after a light dinner, slept until morning. For much of the day, he sat in the living room chair, watching with a listless eye the changing light outside. Caught by the simple truth of Homer Maitland’s words, he kept running them over in his mind. The sight of it—the sun on the Pacific, the light on the bridge—did make you want to live forever and, what Maitland had not said, made you think you could.
‘I have someone coming over tomorrow afternoon,’ he told Summer. ‘It won’t take but an hour, and I need to see her before the trial starts again.’
‘Her?’
‘Vincent Marlowe’s sister. She hired me to represent him, but she has not even once attended the trial. There are things I need to talk with her about, things which may decide the fate of her brother.’ Darnell looked worried and, more than worried, distressed.
‘You told me early on,’ said Summer, ‘when the trial had just started, that you did not think what Marlowe had done was right, however necessary it may have been. Have you changed your mind about that? Not that you think what he did was right, but that—how shall I say this?—that it was not quite as wrong?’
Darnell turned back to the window. The voice of Homer Maitland was still a whisper in his ear. ‘Days like this make you think you’ll never die,’ he said to Summer, staring at the bay.‘What Marlowe said about needing to have something worth dying for or there is no meaning to your life—that’s a brave thing to say, maybe braver than I believe.’
Darnell’s eyes gave up the light. He turned to Summer with a tired, bleak expression.‘I don’t know how wrong or right he was. All I know is that he’s been punished enough.’
Summer was not sure she understood. Darnell’s expression grew bleaker still. ‘Everyone will understand soon enough. The only way I can save him will destroy him.Which may be what he has wanted all along.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
DARNELL LOOKED AT THE EMPTY CHAIRS IN THE jury box, at the empty bench where the judge would sit, at the bailiff standing idly in the corner, at the quiet way the courtroom crowds were filling up the benches. The court reporter, a woman he might have walked right past on the sidewalk outside without remembering her face, a woman whose name he had not bothered to learn, was putting a thick roll of tape into the stenotype machine. He had spent most of his life in a courtroom, but seldom noticed the other people who spent most of their lives there as well. He was like an actor who had played the same role for so many years and in so many cities that, at the end, he had forgotten all the theatres and could remember only the play. And now, at the end of his career, he was looking at the courtroom the way he had the first time he had appeared as counsel for the defence, with the awestruck eyes of a young lawyer who wonders, as he tries to clear his throat, if he has not made a terrible mistake. He does not know the first thing about trying cases and he is sure that, five minutes into his opening statement, there won’t be a person on the jury who does not know him for the fraud he is.
Darnell had not thought about that first trial in years, but suddenly he remembered it as if nearly a half a century had vanished in a week. It did not seem possible that the beginning was really so long ago and that the end was now so close. Today and tomorrow, that was all the time he had left. And after that—what? A brief retirement, a gradual and irrevocable decline, a slow enfeeblement under death’s laughing eye? Two more days … He began to think it might have been better if Summer had not been there, and he had died in court. It was a moment’s self-pity—and,
worse, it gave him credit for bravery he did not have. He did not want to die, that was the truth of it; the real reason he wanted no part of retirement was what would follow after it.When he was in a trial there was work to be done, he had a reason to live—there was no time to think about death.Was that what Marlowe had understood? Is that what those poor desperate souls had grasped? That the only way death could win was if you thought the mere fact of your own existence more important than what you did with it?
Homer Maitland came into court and took his accustomed place on the bench. Darnell remembered what he had said about both of them being too old to keep working and knew it had been a lie, one of those civilised, polite half-truths we believe might be good advice for others but would never think to follow ourselves. Maitland on the bench looked indestructible; Maitland without a black judicial robe looked just like other tired men his age.
With a quick, cursory nod of his head, Maitland ordered the bailiff to bring in the jury.While he waited, he concentrated on a written motion submitted in one of the dozens of other cases he would be hearing over the next few weeks.
With the ordered steps of a practised choreography, the twelve jurors filed into the jury box, careful not to bump into each other, smiling when they did. Six men and six women, twelve common, ordinary people—but nothing like a representative cross-section of the community in which they lived; nothing like that jury of one’s peers of which the civics books speak so glowingly and no defendant ever sees. Darnell watched them as they settled into their chairs and prepared to listen to another day of testimony. They did not dress the way jurors did in that first case he tried, when the men wore coats and ties and the women all wore dresses. Now everyone wore what they wanted, and what they wanted was, for the most part, neither very fashionable nor very interesting. It also seemed to Darnell that that first jury had been more keen-witted and alert.
Darnell shook his head at his own stupidity. If he had learned anything, it was that you could never tell much about a jury from the way it looked. They would sit there, day after day, twelve blank, impenetrable faces; incapable, to all appearances, of registering an emotion. Then, at the end of it, after you had given up all hope that they had understood a word of what was said, they would come back with a verdict as good as, or better than, you could have done yourself. But there was something else that had begun to intrigue Darnell, something that every jury had in common, but which in this trial bore an eerie correspondence to what the jury was there to decide.
No one thought much about it when Darnell had occasion to point it out, but the jury, for all its flaws and imperfections, was the only truly democratic institution. No one was elected to a jury; the names were drawn at random. The same method by which the survivors of the Evangeline had decided who among them would be the next to die was used to choose the twelve people who would decide whether murder, even if required by necessity, should have been left to chance.
Darnell looked around the courtroom, wondering if he would ever see another one. For a brief, fleeting moment, he thought he knew what it must have been like, out there in that lifeboat, with a storm raging all around, or sitting stiff and crowded, the sea becalmed, drawing lots and then waiting to hear whether Marlowe might call your name.
‘Mr Darnell,’ said Maitland with a smile that welcomed him back, ‘are you ready to call your next witness?’
Quickly, and with energy, Darnell was on his feet, dispelling any doubts that he might not be back in form. His eyes darted from Maitland to the jury to let them know that what they were about to hear would be important, and perhaps decisive, for the case.
‘Your Honour, the defence recalls the defendant, Vincent Marlowe.’
He had not told Marlowe that he was going to bring him back as a witness. He wanted Marlowe to be surprised, and he wanted the jury to know it. He began with an apology. ‘Because of what happened in court last week, because the doctors, always overcautious, wanted me to rest, I was not able to tell you that I would need to ask more questions.’
Darnell stood at the front corner of the counsel table, smiling confidently as he looked Marlowe in the eye. Marlowe held himself with the same stoic reserve he had shown throughout the trial.
‘I want to ask you first about the testimony of some of the other witnesses. And though I think the answer is implicit from what you said on the stand before, to avoid any possible ambiguity on this point, let me ask you the question directly.Would you have sailed the Evangeline into the south Atlantic if Benjamin Whitfield had told you the truth? Would you have attempted to sail the Evangeline around Africa if he had told you that a crack had been found below the waterline, and that, though it had been repaired, the other welding seams had not been checked?’
‘No,’ replied Marlowe without a moment’s hesitation. ‘Not that I would have thought there was any great danger; more because it is always better, especially at sea, not to take half measures.’
‘Because, I take it, there is always some chance of the unexpected?’
‘Always,’ said Marlowe, with a defeated look. ‘Always.’
‘My next question has to do with what Cynthia Grimes told the court. Was her assumption correct? Did you, after telling her that the fact she was pregnant would not excuse her from taking her chances with the rest, do exactly that, make sure she was never chosen? Did you, deliberately and without telling any of the others, make sure that she never drew the fatal lot?’
Marlowe shook his head. ‘No, not exactly all of what you said is true. I talked to Mr Offenbach about it. I wanted to know what he thought we should do. We both knew that it was only a matter of time; we knew that we were all going to die out there. We decided that she, and the child she carried, should stay alive until the end.We had no reason for doing this; it was not because we thought there was still a chance a ship might come. It was a feeling—a feeling that we might as well all die at once and be done with it, than take the life of a child its mother wanted to save. That’s what it really was, I suppose: the belief that the rest of us could make our own decisions about dying so that someone else could live, but that we could not do that for a child who was not yet born; that the only one who could do that was the unborn child’s mother.’
‘Why didn’t you explain that to the others? Why didn’t you at least tell Ms Grimes?’
Marlowe rubbed his fingers back and forth across his lower jaw. His eyes narrowed as he turned his head to the side. ‘There weren’t that many who might have agreed with me.’ The glance he gave Darnell spoke the hope that he would not have to go any further to make his meaning clear.
‘One other question about the method that was used.You heard Mr Roberts ask why you did not ask for volunteers instead of leaving things to chance.Was it because this whole arrangement was actually based on voluntary consent? Because everyone agreed to do what the majority decided, and the majority decided that the fairest method was to have everyone draw lots?’ asked Darnell, so certain of the answer that he was thinking ahead to the next question.
‘No.’
Darnell was sure he had not heard him right. He swung his head from the jury box to the witness stand. ‘No? I don’t think I understand. Are you saying that the lottery was not based on the consent of all the others?’
‘No, I’m not saying that either,’ said Marlowe as he looked away from Darnell’s inquiring gaze.
‘Then what are you saying?’ insisted Darnell, certain that Marlowe was hiding something. ‘You have to answer: you’re under oath.’
‘You asked why I did not ask for volunteers.’
‘Yes, it’s the same question Mr Roberts put to Ms Grimes. I don’t quite see…?’
‘Ms Grimes doesn’t remember. She may not even have known. I did not ask any of the women.’
‘You mean…?’
‘I asked for volunteers. I asked if anyone was willing to die.’
‘And no one would?’
‘One only—Mr Offenbach. But I could not let him do it. I co
uld not let Mr Offenbach—you know the reasons already. So I asked again. I asked Trevelyn if he would do it, if he would volunteer, but Trevelyn refused.’
‘It was only then—after no one else would volunteer—that the other method was chosen?’ asked Darnell as he paced slowly in front of the counsel table, staring intently at the floor.
‘Yes.’
Darnell stood still. He twisted his head just far enough to catch Marlowe’s eye.‘But you made sure that the first person to die was not chosen by chance at all.You made certain that a fourteen-year-old boy would be the first one you had to kill. And you did that because you wanted to spare him from having to live through the awful things you knew were going to happen—is that correct?’
Marlowe’s eyes became bleak, remote.
Darnell did not press him.‘Yes, that was your testimony, as I’m sure the jury will remember. There are only a few more points I want to clarify. You said, if I remember correctly, that you first went to sea when you were only twelve—is that right?’
Marlowe seemed, if not to relax, to become less rigid. He looked at Darnell and nodded.‘Yes, I was twelve when I first went to sea.’
‘On a ship from Singapore, the captain someone who knew your father?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Grasping the edge of the counsel table behind him, Darnell stared down at the floor, wrestling with an inner dilemma. Finally, he looked up. ‘Your father died in an explosion, on a ship he was working on in Seattle. Your mother was left with only a small widow’s pension and there was your sister—a younger sister, if I remember right—still to raise. You went off to sea, willing and, I dare say, eager, to help in anyway you could!’
