“I went back inside headquarters,” I said in a weak voice. “To … get rid of the rig, of course. I … put it in the big wardrobe … where they kept the extras.” The wardrobe was solid enough, still. I clung to it. “Then … I don’t know why I did … what I did then. There was a rule book there on a table … under an arrangement of pins and thread in the shape of a cross … they would know when you touched it. Something … made me. There was a list inside … all the members and officers. I read it. Then … I suppose I wanted to play a trick on them. Let them know, in a way, that I’d been there. And there were so many places to hide a thing … in that room. So … I took it up, pins, list and all … and I hid it. Then I ran home.”
Surely they must hear how false my tone was, how labored my story and breath. I forced out the remaining bit of truth I had. “I can’t explain—why I did it. But they would never look for it there. If the rats haven’t eaten it—it’s there yet.” Surely now, in a great, healthy, hawhaw burst of reality, they were about to put me down. Perhaps, in my way as Semple in his, I wanted the secret to snap like a pod. “I’m sorry.” I finished—or thought I had—with a quaver. “I can’t explain it … any better.”
Then I saw the phenomenon that I was never to forget, that taught me the trick of a lifetime to come. I had not yet learned fully what happens when men think in a group, together. Tender, protective, the line of faces on the right was nodding back at me, ready and eager to help me explain.
All were, that is, except Dobbin, who, as would shortly appear, had tricks of his own. At the moment he was intent on watching Lemon, who was trying to sneak to the door. But Lemon was not the man for creeping; an empty chair in his path tipped over and he kicked it away. At the door, he stopped to show his teeth at all of us, in a flexion of hate so pure that once again it must be envied by all less animal, not yet saints. He knew its object. Then he was gone.
“Catch—hold him, somebody!” The young clerk rose from his chair, “Isn’t anybody going to—!” Excitement had helped him forget his neighbor, Hake. Even Dobbin’s voice, compelling as it was, did not press him back in his seat.
“Let him go,” said Dobbin. “Seven years is a long time. Keep him out of mischief, maybe.” He was wrong there.
“I recommend we all go.” Anderson stood up also. “In a body. Then, if anything’s found, there’ll be no question.” I remembered him better now, the accent kin enough to this place to tolerate Mount’s company, the linen too clean to bear it for long.
“Go where, Mr. Anderson?” said Dobbin.
“Why—why down to the café, of course—isn’t that where he’ll—?”
“Is it?” Dobbin turned to me.
“No,” I said. “He knows where to go, of course—to the real headquarters. If the thing’s still there, it’ll be where I put it. High up, in one of those old spice drawers.” I kept my gaze on the table. On it, my hands moved together, as if not my own—and clasped. “That’s where he’ll go. To the old storeroom in the rear. The annex. The rear of Mr. Semple’s store.”
Two voices came almost together. Three.
“Wh-y, d-don’t I know you?” said Hannibal Fourchette, waking to the rise of voices. “Change you n-name, but I know you.”
“He lies!” The cry came straight at me. It was the first I had ever heard Nellis speak. “He was never—” He choked on it.
From the end of the line at the left, the third voice came, weary. “No he doesn’t,” said Charlson.
A wave of motion went toward Charlson, heads stretching forward toward him there in his corner. It passed over him; there was nothing to be got from that inward stare. Nor was there need.
Dobbin, ignoring all three, reached in his breast pocket and set a small, white pamphlet on the table.
I recognized it at once. The years had kept it strangely fresh, I thought, but I had been trained earlier than some to the mute survival of objects from one part of life to another. This one still had its power. In its presence Nellis made that move so often seen in the faithful toward the master—ready both to cling and accuse. Semple made none; perhaps this was in part a sign of what had made him master.
Dobbin’s hand—he was standing now—picked up the book and held it high. A loose paper fluttered from it. He replaced it and pushed the manual across to Hake. “The copy I promised you.” Behind him, Anderson and the young clerk, one after the other, slowly sat down.
Then he turned to me. “While Mr. Hake is checking—just one question.” As he stood there, momentarily taller than any of us, did the others hear, as I did, the sudden cooling of accent, like a shabby coat doffed? “Think back to that place—the annex, lumber-room, whatever you call it.” I had said lumber-room last night, not today, I thought. Once again his eyes probed mine, as if they would draw all my perceptions together, toward him. He spaced his words. “Did you see any signs of anyone recently having been held prisoner there? Earlier that day, perhaps?”
I knew what he meant at once, of course. The whole jury, heavy breathing, knew also. They would have got him as he came off the job. But there’d been no signs of such, no one but Johnny, who was still there for me, refusing to look straight at me. “There was all sorts of stuff there,” I said. “As much as an attic. There might have been—but …” In later years I would learn that a revenant’s facility may not stretch too far beyond.
“You’re sure? Nothing?”
“The big wardrobe was open, that’s right. I remember it creaking.”
Dobbin had already turned away, with a shrug, to look at the clock. “Ah. Well. A small point. No matter.” I realized that he had already made his point. “It’s five o’clock, gentlemen, and you’ve had no recess. But by your indulgence. By—yes, by five-thirty, Felix can open that door and you can all go home.” He had drawn the yellow telegram once more from his pocket. No one denied him.
“It’s all here.” Hake looked over the tops of the glasses he had put on to scan the manual. “Just about as the witness here quoted it. And more.”
“Then let’s wind it up, get it over with.” Dobbin spoke with an anger I at first thought assumed—the clever prosecutor chafing, in proper tempo, at his own delays. But if this was partially so, as he went on, it gathered an anger against history, toward whose evils he might not advance straight on but must stoop—a puritan’s anger against himself for being like other men—so mixed. “Let’s get on with it.” He glanced up at the men on the right. “You’ll have all the names you want, Mr. Davis. Mr. Hake, will you kindly read down the list of officers, as set forth categorically there. The witness, if he pleases, to identify each, if he knew him, by function and name.” He paused. “But first—” He put a hand on old Clarence Whitlock’s shoulder. “You’ve had no recess either. Now, Mr. Stallman here … isn’t it?—knows shorthand, I understand. Let him take over.” He watched while Whitlock, tremoring to a stop, handed the minutes over to the young clerk. “Careful with those minutes, Stallman. The judge has two federal men outside—to help Felix protect them.” He nodded to me. “Ready?”
This was where he had stopped me last night. (“Let the rest of it come out before them.”) I was ready—and still dangerously able, as they by now knew. It was the light in the room that had declined—and not the sun only. But I could still see the list, clear as even in my mind’s eye. It came to me then, with the names full in my mouth, that the moment of triumph is over a minute before it begins.
“Dobbin—wouldn’t you rather—?” Hake was reading to himself with distaste.
“No, no. A member of the jury.”
I rallied myself. “I can do the whole thing, if you like. From memory. Mr. Hake can monitor me.”
“Very good,” said Dobbin, a little too gravely. He is manipulating me, I felt at once, but there was no time to consider.
I began. “The Klexter,” I said. “According to the Manual, the Klexter is the outer guard of a Klan. He shall keep a diligent and faithful watch at the outer door.”
Hake was
the kind of reader who wetted a forefinger to turn a page. “Check,” he said. “Klexter.”
I checked too. There he was, second from the end, one of them, this tidy, senile relic, but surely not “they.” “According to the list I saw—Alec Frazer.” His mouth opened as I said it I went on.
“The Kligrapp. Recording secretary of the Klan, and custodian of the seal.”
“Check.”
His shoulder twitched just once, meek as a workhorse. “Clarence Whitlock.”
“The Klarogo,” I said. “He is the inner guard of the Klan, who shall permit only those to enter the Klavem who are qualified.”
“Check—Klarogo.”
“Felix Spetmore.”
Heads turned to the door, then back again, Dobbin’s with them. Rabbits, where there should have been tigers, they were thinking. Was this all?
No. To two sons I could present their absent fathers.
“The Klokard. He is the lecturer or instructor, and the Klan censor or critic.” His son was already nodding, to a rhythm I had not set.
“Check.”
“Hannibal Fourchette,” I said. “Senior.”
“Klaliff,” I said. “On the list combined with the office of Klabee, Treasurer, though not so in the manual. Vice President. Who shall preside over the Klonklave, in the absence of the Exalted Cyclops, and in his presence assist him.’” And who in his own absence, much excused by mercy to others, will send a son, a son and a car?
“Check.” Hake turned the page.
The clerk held up his hand to stay me—I had gone too fast. Young Rollins, young as he, had already shrunk in his seat before I looked at him. Surely this poor thing, as stunted at one end of life as Frazer at the other, is not “they” either. But I kept my eye on him, in order not to see the face, toward the center of the row, that would raise at the sound of this name. “Robert Rollins,” I said. In spite of myself, I had seen it. “Senior.”
I went on quickly, to give a father, still present, his son. “The Kladds are the conductors of the Klan. Who shall collect the countersign and password at the opening of a Klonklave.’ And I think—‘who shall be the custodians of its paraphernalia.’”
“Check. And check,” said Hake. He looked up, wondering why I had slowed. Indian hair, face as stolid—except for pocks on one side and age on the other, the two Kladds were very like. “Jack Lemon,” I said. “Senior and Junior.” But, even taken together, was this pair large enough to be “they”?
Hake turned another page. I followed him, to present a man to himself.
“The Kludd is the Chaplain of the Klan,” I said. “‘He shall perform the duties of his sacred office. And such other duties as may be required of him by the Kloran and his Exalted Cyclops.’”
And before I could give his name, Charlson Evans gave it, whispering one added word. “Yes.”
The silence, chill in the room, came from both sides. According to it, if one could ascribe evil singly, then he was the nearest. But there was one nearer. (And then at the end, at the very last: One.)
“The Night Hawk,” I said. The man up at your mother’s. The neighbor with the light. “‘He is the special courier of the Cyclops, who shall carry the Fiery Cross in the ceremony, and in all public exhibitions where same is used.’”
“Check.”
Back there in memory, Johnny pushed me aside and read the list for himself, his lips moving, his finger going down the page. The twelfth name, of a man who had died recently in the town, had had a line through it.
“Victor Miller’s name—the dead member—had been scratched out,” I said. “Another name had replaced it.” I leaned across the table to Hake. “That’s the list you have there, isn’t it.” I pointed toward the single sheet of paper Dobbin had tucked back in the manual. “You can see where.”
Nellis, hunched forward in his chair, had forgotten his master. With a cry, he stretched his long arm for the paper. I was there before him. I held it in my hand without reading it. “The Night Hawk.” I never said anything with more satisfaction. “Treacher Nellis.”
But Hake, head to one side, hairless brow knitted, had not checked me. I looked down at the paper I held. It was a slip identifying the pamphlet Hake held—bearing its catalogued number in the Library of Congress.
“I thought—” I said. Dobbin’s face had a warning lack of any expression whatsoever. “The corroborating evidence,” I said. “Without which—you said you wouldn’t even put me on the stand.” But already I knew what I thought. The law, in its way, fitted together not unlike a machine. This meant that men, in full sight of their fellows, could twist a screw here and there toward their own uses, as Dobbin never by word, only by gesture, had just done with the two pamphlets, one existent perhaps only in memory, one lying here. As I.
“Ah, yes,” said Dobbin. He walked around to my side of the table and in one seemingly gentle move slipped the paper from my hand to his, pressed me down into a chair. Turning to address the room, he kept a hand on my shoulder—paternal praise for a good witness. Actually, I could feel each separate finger. “This jury has no further function. That must be clear to all. A new panel? Frankly I don’t know myself—we must wait on the judge.” He sounded bewildered. From his fingers I knew otherwise. “We’re rather the victims of your coincidences, Mr. Anderson.” I could hear his smile. “But the law can’t—anticipate—them all.” Did he mean the witness as well? “And I know of no precedent for this one. No vote is possible, of course. The judge. We must wait on the judge.” His hand left my shoulder, came down on it again for emphasis. “Now. Ordinarily it would now be my task to summarize admissible evidence, advise you on whether you have enough for indictment, draw one up if you so ordered. I may tell you that, taking what you have heard here, along with word just received, you do of course have enough for a true bill—or a future jury does—on the most serious charge. But under the circumstances, I recommend that you adjourn.” He waited. “There is nothing further to keep you here, gentlemen.”
But there was, and it was more than curiosity on the one side, fear on the other. Certainly any man from the left side would have been free to get up and open the door, could have slunk out, like Lemon. Or they might have filed out in a body, to flee thereafter to their separate decisions. Something held them here, more powerful in the end than pamphlets whisked to them by legerdemain, witnesses self-conjured out of shadow. In after years, when despairing of self and kind, I often thought of it. These men on either side had not fled—they had waited to hear. It was the room that held them, old shell of the body politic, holding out to them all the fascinations of judgment by their kind, even that ultimate chance, the last one—that men, thinking in congress, might someday come to do so honestly. If the true church, as one was often told, persisted forever, no matter the venality of its practitioners, then this was the true court, which partook of a wafer that went round the world. Each of us, if able to say what held us, would have given some version of the same answer: this place, where the tongues of angels are still hoped for, this corner, poisoned with the possible and sweetened by it—this room.
“I’ll summarize it for you.” No one should have been surprised that it was Charlson who broke the silence; perhaps no one was. He rose slowly, in his great bulk a shakiness like Frazer’s, although he was not old, a weaving, though he never drank, that recalled Fourchette. Head thrust forward on his chest as if half severed, he stood there, coming to terms with that vibration—his interior monologue. Upright, he showed the full details of his size, the finger ring in diameter like the wrist of a small child.
“Murder,” he said. The voice was a reed still, but the manner, dealing every Sunday with like deeds, ennobled it—as did the word. Out of habit, the ring finger pointed, as if accusing, at Dobbin. “You have all the evidence needed to put ten men on trial for the murder of Lucius Asher—to show that he was abducted, held, driven through the backs as hostage and taken up to the dam, in whose rubble his burned body was later found. You lack on
ly one thing.” He paused, wheezing, but from habit too—where in that self-apostasizing bulk would one come to the kernel of him; where would he ever come to it? “You lack only the corroboration to two questions. When was he taken? And by whom? And I presume that the wire telling you this is what you have been holding in your hand.”
“Yes, it is, Mr. Evans.” Dobbin had long since released my shoulder. He was leaning back, one eyebrow scowled high, now at last watching the disorder that might be visited on the law and by it. “It’s an affidavit sworn to by two former clerks of the hiring office here, identifying a car and two men in it—one a dam employee, both known to the parties swearing—who picked up Lucius Asher when he came off the three o’clock shift that day. Half the shift saw the struggle, some of them forming an aisle through which Asher, who had been kicked in the groin, was carried to the car. The assailants made no attempt to conceal who they were, and were cheered by some of the crowd by name. Two federal clerks, neither now in Alabama, have so sworn.” He coughed. One could see the strain in him now; he was a man who, when tired, stood that much more stiffly. “And you’re right, Mr. Evans. That was about all that needed to be filled in. Only we shan’t need to put ten men on trial. Two will do.”
“‘Evans’ is it now, Neil?” the minister said lightly. “It was ‘Charlson’ years ago, even back as far as when you used to come to summer Sunday school.” He looked past Dobbin, past us all. “Years ago.”
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