The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  Darnell looked at the clock. How long had he been sitting here, listening in the quiet solitude of his mind to the echo of Holderlin’s eager, absent voice? - An hour? More than that? He shook himself, got up from the desk and walked about the room. He had to think. Tomorrow – this morning, just a few hours from now – he was going to have to stand in front of the jury and give the opening statement he had postponed. The prosecution had rested; it was time for the defense. Hillary Clark had called her last witness; it was his turn to give an outline of what the evidence would, or would not, prove after he had finished calling the witnesses for the defense.

  “The witnesses for the defense!” he muttered scornfully. There were no witnesses for the defense, no one who could put things in perspective the way Holderlin could have done. But Holderlin was right: Everything he said would be dismissed as the strange delusions of a harmless crank, a crazy academic who did not know the difference between legend and reality. And even though they laughed him out of court, there was still the danger of which Holderlin was acutely aware, that someone would decide to investigate matters for themselves and the city Holderlin had promised to protect would be revealed and destroyed. Darnell tried to tell himself that it was not his problem and that his only obligation was to do everything he could to save his client, whatever the consequences might be for other people. Would he do it, though, he wondered? – Give up an ancient civilization, force a man like Holderlin to betray his trust, to save the life of someone who, given the choice, would not want to be saved. Put that way, it was Adam’s decision, not his. Or was it? Would he let any other client decide that instead of doing everything to win, he would sacrifice himself to some larger cause? That was not what a trial was supposed to be.

  The questions kept going round and round in his brain, taunting him with the knowledge that the answers, if there were any, were all beyond his reach. And even if he could answer them, he knew it would not matter: Holderlin would not testify and there was nothing he could do to make him change his mind. That was what made Darnell feel so impotent: He knew the secret, the secret that would prove that Adam had not acted as a criminal, but it was a secret he could not use. His conscience had been easier when he still had ignorance as a guard.

  Darnell tried to concentrate on the task at hand. What was he going to tell the jury, what could he tell them when he could not think of anything he could prove? He had only one hope. Every time he stood in front of a jury something always happened. Things would start to make sense, an argument would start to form; words, slow and tentative at first, would begin to build on each other; sentences, short and abrupt, would gradually stretch into smooth, flowing prose; whole paragraphs would come rushing out in a single, eager breath. It was more than experience – there were not half a dozen lawyers in the country who could do this – it was his own practiced genius, as much a part of him as the color of his eyes. He took it for granted, the working assumption of what he did, like the belief of one who knows arithmetic that he can add two numbers without knowing in advance what they are going to be.

  Something always happened when he began to talk to a jury, but that did not mean that he did not go a little crazy when he tried to think about it in advance. That was the price he had to pay, the agonizing doubt, the struggle to see clearly how everything fit, the intense preparation, the sense that he would never get it right, his conscious mind a living hell; while all the time, working even while he slept, his unconscious mind was busy organizing everything into a speech that Darnell would not hear until he heard it with the jury.

  He tried to think of the witnesses he would call. Witnesses? Who did he have? Adam, of course; though what he would say, how far he would go to explain what he did and why it was not a crime, Darnell did not know. The girl, Alethia; but after what Holderlin had told him, he wondered if she would go any farther than Adam when it came to anything that might disclose the secret existence of the city, to say nothing of whether anyone would believe her if she did.

  “It’s hopeless,” Darnell told himself. He stood at the window, his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the street. Even now, at four o’clock in the morning, an occasional car could be seen, a taxi taking someone home from a late night adventure, a delivery truck making a morning delivery. Everyone had their own life, their own settled routine, part of a world they did not need to understand precisely because they had always been a part of it, born into it, raised in it, certain not just that it was the best of all possible worlds, but that it was the only world there was. Darnell found it curious that it had taken until now, when he was old enough to die any day, to start to wonder whether the world had ever been what it seemed. There was a strange irony that it was only when he had to confront his own mortality that he first began to doubt that there had ever been an act of creation, or for that matter, any beginning at all. There was a surprising comfort in that, the idea that he was part of a whole and that, while he would soon perish, the world would always continue. He felt a sudden kinship to Adam and the lost tribe of Atlantis, an attachment born of the certainty that they had could see clearly things he could only glimpse.

  Darnell stretched out on the sofa and, moments later, fell asleep still thinking about the case and what he would say to the jury. When he woke up, two hours later, it was as if he had only paused between two sentences, the last thing he remembered the first thing he heard.

  “Of course I have witnesses,” he said in a newly cheerful and rather knowing tone. “How stupid of me not to think of it.”

  The sound of his own voice, reminding him of what he had forgotten, one of the first lessons he had learned early in his career, kept him company while he pulled a fresh shirt out of the closet and began to change. He had all the witnesses he needed; the prosecution had provided them. He was going to call them all back, old witnesses, new for the defense, and ask them not so much about what they knew, but about what they did not know. By the time he left the office and started across town to court, he had almost convinced himself that it might even work.

  Darnell was not the only one who had spent most of the night pondering over the trial. Evelyn Pierce, as she was prompt to advise both attorneys, had been awake to “all hours, struggling with what to do about this case.”

  “What to do about this case?” asked Hillary Clark. She had not gotten over what had happened just yesterday, when the rape charge was dismissed. She did not like the judge and never had. Pierce tried to exercise too much control and did not allow enough discretion to the prosecution. Clark sat on the edge of her chair, ready to argue, ready to fight.

  Judge Pierce made an expansive gesture toward the law books on the shelves in her chambers.

  “There’s no law to cover this: applying the criminal law of one country against the citizen of another; there’s no -”

  “That issue has already been decided,” interjected Clark. “You decided it. The question was fully briefed on both sides. The government’s position was that the absence of a written law could not excuse what every civilized nation considers the most serious crimes anyone can commit: murder, rape and incest.”

  “Murder and incest, I think you mean to say,” remarked Darnell, staring at a point on the wall behind the judge.

  Clark ignored him; Judge Pierce ignored them both.

  “There is a difficulty in what we’re doing here, a precedent that might be set, that might have consequences far beyond anything we imagine.” She looked hard at Hillary Clark. “You couldn’t prosecute someone, a citizen of this country, for something that was not a crime when he did it. How is that any different than what we’re doing here?”

  Hillary Clark could not believe what she was hearing.

  “Because it’s murder, and I defy anyone to show me any place where murder hasn’t always been a crime, whether or not anyone bothered to write it down!”

  Darnell turned in his chair until he was looking straight at her.

  “First, what you call murder, the killing
of that newborn child, has not always and everywhere been considered murder. Second, even where something is called murder it hasn’t always and everywhere been a crime that was prosecuted. The family of the victim was allowed to extract a price – blood money – from the offender. The problem with this prosecution of yours is that you have no idea how the people on that island understood either what murder means or what should be done about it.”

  “The victim was an infant, Mr. Darnell. Do I need to remind you about that? If they don’t think that’s murder, then every one of them should have been indicted! We’re supposed to end barbarism, not support it!”

  “We’re supposed to…? Are you sure we any longer know the difference, Ms. Clark? You’ve seen the defendant. You heard the girl – your own witness – testify. Do you really believe they ended that child’s life because they didn’t think they were ready to become parents? - Because they didn’t want to give up their ‘lifestyle’? - They come from a place about which we know less than nothing, less that what we think we know, and you sit in judgment as if they were a couple of self-indulgent Hollywood truants. The only barbarism here, Ms. Clark, is what we’re doing.”

  “Your honor!” she protested. “This is outrageous. How anyone can think that the murder of a child, a child born of an incestuous relationship, could be -”

  “I didn’t bring you both in here for a shouting match,” said Judge Pierce, looking from one to the other. “I’m frankly not interested in what either one of you thinks about the moral dimensions of what the defendant did. What I want to know is whether there is some way this case can be resolved, some way to stop this before it goes to a verdict.”

  “We’ll drop the charge of incest if he pleads to murder,” said Clark with cold indifference.

  “A plea to manslaughter might be more reasonable,” suggested Judge Pierce. There was something so calm and reassuring, so conciliatory, in the way she said this that Hillary Clark began to hesitate. “He would still have to serve some time; it wouldn’t mean that he would go unpunished.”

  She had such an imposing manner, she was so persuasive in her blunt-spoken honesty, that even Hillary Clark, with all her prejudices and suspicions, teetered on the edge of agreeing that it would be the best way to bring things to a decent conclusion.

  “That isn’t something I could recommend to my client,” said Darnell in a somber, thoughtful voice. “Send him to prison, however long or short the sentence, you send him to his death. He couldn’t survive confinement; he wouldn’t allow it.”

  Caught by the significance of that last phrase, Judge Pierce searched his eyes, not because she doubted the meaning, but to measure how far that judgment went; whether, as she imagined, that the remarkable young man she had watched and wondered about all through the trial, had too proud a spirit to suffer himself to live for even a day caged like an animal, or whether he would, as some captured animals did, simply waste away.

  “Then any time in prison is unacceptable – you’d rather continue with the trial?”

  “There isn’t any choice, not just because of what I said, but because by the standard that ought to apply – the law of the place he lived – he isn’t guilty.”

  Hillary Clark thought he had misspoken.

  “The law of the place he lived? The only law they had was the kind of primitive custom you might expect among people that would do such things.”

  “Then you admit that what he did had a sanction: the custom – the unwritten law – that ruled their lives, a law that you decide should have been broken?”

  “A rule that would allow the murder of a child – you would call that law?”

  “One that, had you listened, has been followed in our own, western, ancient history. How could you now decide that this people, about whom the world knows next to nothing, should be punished for what they, for reasons of their own, consider right?”

  “I don’t pretend to know much about Roman history, but if I remember correctly, they brought law and order to the world two thousand years ago, which is all we’re now trying to do.”

  “And all this time I thought we were trying to bring freedom, to let everyone live the life they choose.”

  “A chance that new-born child will never have. Murder, Mr. Darnell, is never lawful.”

  “Death and murder, Ms. Clark, are entirely different things. I hope to make the jury understand that.”

  “Both of you are determined?” asked Judge Pierce. “There isn’t any room for compromise?”

  Darnell scratched his chin. He wanted a way out. The only thing that mattered was to keep Adam out of prison, to give him a way to return to the island.

  “We’re open to anything that doesn’t involve confinement in a prison here. If they drop the murder charge, he could plead to incest – if he was given probation and allowed to go back home.”

  “That’s impossible!” exclaimed Clark with a rude, dismissive glance. “We’d never do it.”

  Evelyn Pierce turned a cold, quizzical eye on the prosecutor and asked why. Clark professed to be astonished that she could even ask.

  “He can’t just walk away from murder.”

  Her gaze steady, penetrating and unrelenting, the judge continued to look at Clark.

  “Less than six months ago, in this courtroom, you agreed to a probationary sentence for a young girl, barely eighteen, who had abandoned her newborn baby in an alleyway, where it died. And now you say that this defendant can’t just walk away from murder? How is it you draw the distinction – because the one defendant was a woman and this one is a man?”

  Hillary Clark stared back a moment longer, but then gave it up and looked away.

  “The girl had been abused, raped by her step-father; she was desperate, didn’t know what she was doing. There wasn’t any point in punishing her any more than she had already been.” Clark straightened up. “But that isn’t the situation here. He wasn’t raped; his sister was – Yes, I know, the charge has been dismissed, but that is what he did: used his power and influence to get his way, and then, when the girl gets pregnant, takes the child and strangles it to death. So, yes, I’d say there was a distinction between the two cases, a very serious one.”

  With a heavy sigh, Judge Pierce turned up her palms and looked at Darnell.

  “It appears that you now get to put on your case. I assume you’ll want to start today with your opening statement, which I allowed you to defer. But after that, how many witnesses do you intend to call?”

  “Besides the defendant? – Everyone the prosecution called.”

  It was the unexpected move for which William Darnell had become famous, the one no one else would have thought of; the one that, even after they heard about it, most other lawyers would not understand. There had already been the chance to cross-examine every one the prosecution had called to testify – Why would you want to call them again, as witnesses for the defense?

  Evelyn Pierce did not have an answer, but she knew she would not have long to wait. An arched eyebrow, a smile that beneath its slightly jaundiced surface suggested a deep appreciation for the expert way he played the game, formed the silent, running commentary on this, his latest maneuver. She turned to Hillary Clark to see what she would say, but Clark was too incredulous to speak.

  “I would, however, like finally to have the chance to interview the girl, Alethia, before I call her as a witness for the defense,” continued Darnell.

  With a look that said that on this point there would be no argument, the judge told the prosecutor to arrange it. Clark said she would set up a time for an interview in her office.

  “In my office, if you don’t mind,” said Darnell with quiet firmness. “I would like to see her tomorrow after trial, and I would like to see her alone. I don’t interview witnesses in the presence of the prosecution.”

  “So long as it’s understood that she’s not to have any contact with the defendant, that he’s not to be there, that -”

  “I don’t agree to anything! You d
on’t put conditions on my right to see this witness, not after you did everything you could to make sure I wouldn’t have the chance!”

  “I won’t have a victim subject to intimidation,” she protested, turning to Judge Pierce.

  “I have the feeling, Mr. Darnell, that the defendant and the witness both want to see each other. Can you assure the court that…? No, I don’t need to ask you that. I’m sure you won’t let any intimidation take place.”

  “But, your Honor!”

  “Ms. Clark, the only improper influence I’ve seen in this case is what you did when you deliberately misled this same witness into believing that if she saw Mr. Darnell she could not see the defendant. It seems to me only fair that she now have the chance to see both of them if she so chooses!” A warning glance stopped Clark before she could protest again. “As there doesn’t seem to be anything else we need to discuss, I’ll see you both in court.”

  Ten minutes later, Evelyn Pierce, with her determined, square-shouldered walk, crossed the front of the courtroom to her accustomed place on the bench and, as she settled into her chair, ordered the bailiff to bring in the jury. She did not look at the courtroom crowd, waiting eager and expectant for what was going to happen next, when the defense finally had a chance to begin its case; she did not look at the two lawyers, occupied with last minute thought of their own; she watched instead the young defendant, with eyes full of bright curiosity, and yet, with seeming indifference to what the trial might mean for him. Adam caught her glance and flashed a smile of assurance, but, strangely, if she read it right, more for her than for him. It was as if he did not want her to worry, that whatever happened he would be all right.

  She felt a kind of relief, a sense of returning from a world she did not understand, when the jury entered and took their places. She greeted them with the cheerful, calm demeanor of a seasoned veteran of the bench, a judge who runs her courtroom with a firm and steady hand.

  “At the start of the trial, before the prosecution called its first witness, Ms. Clark gave an opening statement, a brief description of what the prosecution intended to prove. The opening statement of the prosecution is usually followed by one for the defense, but Mr. Darnell, as was his right, reserved his opening until the prosecution had finished putting on its case and it was his turn to put on the case for the defense. Before Mr. Darnell begins, I would give you the same caution I did before Ms. Clark began hers. The statements of the attorneys – and that means both their opening statement and their closing argument – are not evidence. They are only their opinions about what they believe the evidence introduced at trial proves or doesn’t prove.” She turned from the jury to Darnell who was just getting to his feet. “Mr. Darnell, if you’re ready.”