by Allen Drury
“Not if growing criminal violence continues to provoke increasingly violent response from the citizenry,” the Chief, whose name was Duncan Elphinstone, said with some severity. “We can’t evade our clear duty, Wally, and you know it.”
“The trend isn’t going to stop unless we stop it,” Mary-Hannah McIntosh agreed with equal severity, inclining her close-cropped gray head to one side and peering over her pince-nez at Justice Flyte.
“Not if things continue the way they’re going in your state,” Moss Pomeroy remarked, half teasing her as he liked to do, but pointedly. She flared, as always, in defense of California.
“South Carolina shouldn’t talk! Things are getting rough down there, too.”
“Rough everywhere,” Raymond Ullstein observed of his own state with an unhappy air. “New York City continues to trail Los Angeles in violent crimes and violent deaths, but only just. Only just.”
“It’s all over the country,” Hughie Demsted agreed glumly. “Three hundred and seven murders in the District of Columbia already this year. Mostly involving my own people, too, God help us.”
“And the majority of them everywhere so God damned pointless,” Wally Flyte observed with a frustrated anger. “Just killing for killing’s sake. Ten dollars stolen here, and just for extra kicks they waste the victim. One car brushes another, quite accidentally, so they shoot each other down in the street. An old lady’s purse gets snatched, with no possible response from her, so they beat her head in and leave her dead in the gutter. A perfectly innocent dinner party steps out of a restaurant and three insane no-goods gun them down. Rape, robbery, murder, destruction—just for the hell of it. What in the hell is the matter with this crazy damned country, anyway?”
“Lack of adequate gun laws,” Justice McIntosh said promptly, seizing the chance to open one of her favorite topics.
“The pointless and inexcusable death penalty,” and “The lack of a sufficiently tough death penalty,” Justice Ullstein and Justice Pomeroy said together, each from his own point of view seizing upon their mutually favorite topic.
“I believe,” Duncan Elphinstone said, drawing up to its full and quite sufficient dignity his five-foot-four frame (which since childhood had inspired the nickname “The Elph,” mentally spelled “Elf” by all who used it), “that this Court must inevitably come to grips with the matter of ravenously proliferating, wantonly murderous crime, and very soon. We did indeed, as you so charitably put it, Wally, ‘sidestep’ it in the last two terms, but very soon we’ve got to meet it head-on. Or the country, as has sometimes happened in the past on some other issues on which the Court has dragged its feet, is going to take matters in its own hands. In fact, it’s starting to already. We’re right on the verge of revived Vigilante Committees, a real resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, the paraphernalia of ‘law and order’ about to be taken right out of our hands by a fed-up citizenry. Under the Constitution we’re the supreme law and order in this land, and I think we’d damned well better get to it.”
“You sound like Mr. Dooley, Dunc,” Rupert Hemmelsford remarked, but affectionately. “You want us to follow the ‘iliction returns.’”
“Part of our function,” The Elph reminded him, “is to head off the worst before it can happen. That function has never been more important than it is right now in the area of crime. You mentioned California, Moss. Look at California!”
“And I must admit, as Mary-Hannah says,” Justice Pomeroy said ruefully, “look at South Carolina too. Are you aware there’s a real, genuine move afoot in my state to revive flogging—on television? And hold executions—on television? And punish even the smallest of crimes—even if a guy feels he has to steal bread for his family, let’s say, because the economic situation is so bad right now—with an upgrading of penalties that would put it in the category of major crime? And the people are beginning to want this. All sorts of demagogues are trying to whip them up. It’s getting positively Islamic. Jesus! It scares the hell out of me. Even if”—and he winked at Ray Ullstein—“I do want the death penalty. Within reason, I want it. I’m not medieval.”
“It scares me, too,” Mary-Hannah said soberly. “What’s the name of your fellow down there?”
“Regard Stinnet,” Moss said, “pronounced Ree-gard. He’s state attorney general right now, but he wants to be governor—Senator—President, I suppose. The sky’s the limit with that boy.”
“We have a pretty busy one, too, you know,” she said. “I hate to admit it, but he’s on the same track. Also state attorney general, also a demagogue, also on his way to the stars—he thinks. Ted Phillips, our boy is.”
“They aren’t alone,” Justice Wallenberg observed. “It’s catching on all over the country right now.”
“People are just God damned fed up, that’s all,” Moss Pomeroy said. “You can’t blame ’em. The whole criminal justice system is getting out of whack—and not without some assistance from this Court in recent years, I might add. To be honest about it.”
“Well,” Clement Wallenberg said, “I wasn’t on it then—”
“Neither was I,” Moss said promptly. “Neither were most of us. But we’re the inheritors. It’s called ‘the continuity of the Court.’”
“But not necessarily ‘the consistency of the Court,’” Justice Ullstein suggested with one of his rare gleams of humor.
“That is another matter,” Justice Hemmelsford said, making the ineffable gesture that the AP’s reporter at the Court referred to as “blinking his eyebrows,” and peering about at them with his customary sly twinkle.
“They used to call slavery ‘the peculiar institution,’” Clem Wallenberg remarked, “but I swear if there’s any more peculiar institution than ours, I don’t know it.”
For a moment they were silent, contemplating the strange nature of the Supreme Court which, developing gradually over two centuries under first the actual, then the historical and legendary, tutelage of Chief Justice John Marshall, had given them so much power of so strange and tenuous, yet so persistent and generally unassailable a kind, over their country’s destinies.
“Well,” Duncan Elphinstone said, breaking the mood. “I expect we’d better get down to business and start voting on these appeals for certiorari. There’s already a case from Minnesota that’s pertinent to our discussion, but maybe we’d better take things in order. First comes Cincinnati Taxpayers v. Internal Revenue Service. What shall we do with that one?”
So for a couple of hours they discussed Cincinnati Taxpayers v. Internal Revenue Service and some fifty other cases, a few of which prompted as much as ten minutes of discussion, but most of which were voted up or down with none at all. When they adjourned for lunch, which they elected to take together today in the Justices’ cozy formal dining room on the second floor, the nagging topic with which they had begun came back again, complicated further by a rumor that had just come in to the press room downstairs on the first floor. As reported by the UPI, it said that the enigmatic gentleman in the White House was about to nominate, probably that very afternoon, someone to fill the current vacancy created by the retirement of Homer Dean and thus restore the Court to its full nine-member capacity.
Earle Holgren jogged slowly back down the winding road, assuring himself with a smug satisfaction that it was his ability to be casual and at ease with what he did, his characteristic of being visible but at the same time so ordinary as to be virtually unseen, that had made him so successful in the activities for which the unjust system really wanted to bring him in.
Thinking of these now as he trotted along, the sounds of Pomeroy Station at first faint then louder as he approached the plant again, he congratulated himself that he had never once failed to achieve his objective in the permanent war that he and a small handful of companions still waged against their country.
He had disappeared occasionally, without explanation to Janet or anyone. During the course of his absences four banks were robbed, seventeen people died in an airport bombing in Illinois, t
wenty-five more in the sinking of a ferry near Seattle, sixteen in a children’s parade in California. Travel was no problem, easy targets in a still-innocent, open society, were everywhere. He had by now become a very skillful expert in demolition. Along with buildings and people, he was still hoping to demolish the society. He was part of the growing mood of fear and uncertainty that fastened increasingly upon his countrymen, and proud of it.
The only thing that annoyed him considerably, he reflected as he swung down again past Pomeroy Station, gave its workers and guards a parting wave and jogged on by, was the fact that his type of protest now was not unique: much of its calculated impact was lost in the general tide of wanton crime. Violence was satisfying to those who felt they were doing it in some great social cause whose rationale only they were privileged to understand; but when robberies, rapes, molestations and wanton casual killings in public streets and private neighborhoods were becoming so prevalent, the statement seemed to be disregarded—quite disrespectfully, he felt—in the general public fear and agitation.
Everybody was getting into the act nowadays: killing for killing’s sake was becoming an American habit. He wondered wryly sometimes whether it was worth making a personal effort to bring the society down. It was being consumed quite adequately, many of his countrymen felt and he sometimes agreed, from within.
Yet there must still be room for someone to make the point he wished to make—whatever it was. His alienation from society had been so conventional in terms of the Sixties and early Seventies, so predictable in all its stages from the student protests to the breaking with his family, to his disappearance, to the underground conspiracies, to the robberies and bombings, all in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number, that he had to continue to play out the charade now and never yield to uncertainty. Otherwise his whole life’s meaning would be destroyed. He could not have endured this. He just had to go on, destructive and essentially mindless for all his intelligence and cleverness, repeating the past because there was no way for him, now, to find the future.
Of course he could not admit this. He was the future. He had a purpose, he had a goal—he destroyed society in order to save it—he knew the secret. He felt a complete contempt for the animalistic committers of animalistic murders who now befouled the land, the primitives who roamed the streets and slaughtered on a second’s sick impulse. He was infinitely better than they. He was Earle Holgren, guardian of a Cause. And after he had defended it at Pomeroy Station, there would no longer be doubt of it.
The target he had chosen this time was an obvious one, given his lifelong familiarity with the area and the fact that even now, after years of agitation, security at the nation’s atomic energy plants was still as lax and casual as ever.
He jogged on down the mountainside for another three miles until he came to the outskirts of the little village of Pomeroy Station, turned off the paved road onto a dirt lane, came presently to the modest cabin isolated among the pines. Janet was sitting idly in the sun, crooning some sort of rambling lullaby to John Lennon Peacechild, who was sleeping sprawled across her by now considerable lap.
“Have a good run?” she asked idly.
“Yes.”
“Go by the plant?”
“Don’t I always?”
“You really like that old plant,” she remarked, still in the same idle way.
“What makes you think so?” he demanded, suddenly sharp; probably not a good idea, but she was too dumb to notice.
“You’re always hanging around there.”
“I do not ‘hang around there,’” he said with a measured emphasis, “so forget it.”
“Okay, okay,” she said mildly. “Just noticing.”
“Don’t notice. People get hurt noticing.”
“Okay,” she said, finally sounding a little alarmed by his tone. “You don’t have to take my head off. What are you going to do now?”
“Study,” he said as he started into the cabin.
“You’re always studying,” she protested with a half-scornful laugh. “Anybody’d think you were going to be a lawyer, or something.”
“Maybe I will,” he tossed over his shoulder. “The world could stand a few good ones who believe in doing the right thing. There aren’t too many of that kind who really care for the people.”
“Lucky they have you,” she retorted dryly. He stopped dead, turned on his heel and came back to the doorway.
“Don’t be so God damned smart,” he snapped. “I tell you, people get hurt like that.”
“Just commenting,” she said, retreating into the kind of shrugging indifference she showed when he lost his temper: which was more often as the appointed day approached. “You’re getting awfully touchy, lately. Worried about something?”
“No, I’m not ‘worried about something’! What would I be worried about?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning to nurse John Lennon Peacechild, who had been awakened by his father’s angry tone and was beginning to cry. “And,” she added spitefully, “I don’t care.”
“Keep it that way,” he said and turned and went in, slamming the flimsy screen door behind him.
There was silence except for an occasional pleased gurgle from the baby.
Just get over the next couple of weeks, he told himself.
Don’t fly off the handle.
Don’t get her curious.
Just keep it cool.
Keep it cool.
It was the only way.
“It doesn’t say,” the Chief Justice remarked when he finished reading the wire-service copy his chief clerk had placed discreetly in his hand as they entered the dining room, “whom he has in mind as our new Associate. Or”—he smiled at Justice McIntosh—“what gender. Next thing we know, we may have to establish a ladies’ gym.”
“I wouldn’t mind the company,” she said, “but I don’t remember any speculation about a female appointee in the last few days. I think you men can continue to lord it over me.”
“That will be the day!” Hughie Demsted exclaimed with an amused shake of his handsome black head as they took their seats informally around the dining table. “I thought Archie Gilbert of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was the front-runner, Dunc.”
“Sue-Ann and I were at Henry Randall’s last night for dinner,” Justice Pomeroy said, naming the shrewd legal mind who was senior Senator from Virginia and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “and the guessing there seemed to center around Taylor Barbour. For what it’s worth.”
Rupert Hemmelsford, who had been chairman of Judiciary himself before his appointment to the Court, blinked his eyebrows and assumed the disapproving look he got when contemplating the highly intelligent, highly effective, much-publicized forty-six-year-old Secretary of Labor. “Henry’s a good weathervane,” he said, “but I’m not so sure I can work very well with Tay Barbour. I don’t anticipate he’ll have any trouble with Senate confirmation, though. I’d guess two days of hearings and confirmation by about seventy to twenty-six, wouldn’t you, Wally?”
“Higher than that,” Justice Flyte said with a calculation harking back to his own Senate days. “More like eighty to seventeen, I hear. Tay has some problems, but I don’t think they lie with the Senate.”
“Things are running down with that marriage,” Justice Wallenberg observed with characteristic bluntness. “It could affect his work as a Justice. It’s not unheard of, in Court history.”
“He’ll subordinate it to the Court,” Mary-Hannah suggested. “He won’t let anything disturb his work here.”
“You like him,” Rupert Hemmelsford said, his tone almost an accusation. She nodded briskly.
“Very much, Rupe. Shouldn’t I?”
Justice Hemmelsford sniffed. “You liberals always stick together.”
“And you conservatives don’t?” she inquired. “Anyway, you know this institution, Rupe. Today’s liberal is tomorrow’s conservative is next day’s liberal is next day’s conservative—yo
u know how it goes.”
“That’s one of the great things about us, isn’t it?” Hughie Demsted agreed with a grin. “Nobody can tie us down, not even our own past records. Once we come on this bench there’s not a soul on earth can control us or be absolutely sure what we’re going to do. That’s one of our great strengths—infinitely better to have us sitting up here a bunch of unpredictable independent mavericks than it would be if we were just a gang of puppets for some transient in the White House. Right?”
“He wouldn’t like to be referred to like that,” Rupe Hemmelsford said with a chuckle. “Like all of ’em, he’s got the idea he’s eternal. Whereas in reality”—he gave his sly grin—“we are. But you’re right, of course. It keeps him wonderin’ and hoppin’.”
“Which is all to the good for the country,” Hughie Demsted said triumphantly, settling back to take a sip of his coffee. “If not, Ray, the law.”
“The law has got to be consistent if it’s to mean anything,” Justice Ullstein insisted with his quiet stubbornness that often achieved more than another man’s flamboyant dramatics.
“We’re the law,” Moss Pomeroy said with his usual irreverent grin, “and we’re not consistent, half the time. So how can the law be?”
“It’s got to be,” Ray Ullstein said doggedly. “Or at least we’ve got to try to make it so. We’ve got to subordinate our personal feelings and problems, as we were saying about Tay Barbour earlier, to the needs of this Court.”
“Well,” Justice McIntosh said with some dryness, “we’re important, all right, but I don’t know that we’re all that keeps the country from drifting. There’s a whole complex of things—tradition, old habit, respect for and devotion to the Constitution, a basic respect for law and order among the great majority of our countrymen—”
“Who are about, as Dunc says, to take the law into their own hands and raise counter-hell with everything,” Wally Flyte remarked dryly.
