The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  “Does he?” the Doctor asked, surprised. “And how did you find that out?”

  “I asked him,” Marcus answered simply. “Got in to see him yesterday evening—told him I was a publisher from New York who wanted him to defend an anarchist who’s up for building bombs in New York. The last part of the story’s true, too—you remember Jochen Dietrich, Lucius? That idiot downtown who kept blowing up tenements because he couldn’t get his timing devices to work?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lucius said, recalling the name. “The Seventh Precinct boys picked him up just before we left town, didn’t they?”

  “That’s right,” Marcus answered, slowly running one of his big hands through his thick black hair and then rubbing his tired brown eyes. “Anyway, one of the Chicago cops I talked to said that Darrow’s got a soft spot for anarchists—fancies himself to be a bit of one, intellectually. So he agreed to see me.” Marcus shook his head and took a big drag off of his cigarette. “He’s a strange sort of character—not at all what you’d expect from a man who’s made a pretty decent living off the corporate payroll. He seems to have a careless attitude toward his appearance—clothes are slightly rumpled, hair’s cut rough and hangs in his face. But there’s something very self-conscious about it all—calculated, even. It’s like he’s trying to play the homespun hero, the plain prairie lawyer. His style of speaking’s the same: he’s got the outward manner of the lonely cynic, but he makes sure you can hear the heart of an idealistic romantic, too. Just how much of it’s genuine, or which parts, I certainly couldn’t tell you.” Marcus flipped a page in his notebook. “There’s some other minor details: he’s a baseball fanatic and an agnostic—”

  “Well, of course he’s an agnostic,” Mr. Picton said. “He’s a defense lawyer. There’s only room for one supreme savior in this world, and defense lawyers like to play that role themselves.”

  “Now, now, Rupert,” Mr. Moore scolded, “don’t be bitter.”

  “He likes Russian literature—poetry and philosophy, too,” Marcus went on. “He has a sort of salon of like-minded souls out there—reads aloud to them at their little gatherings. All in all, a very theatrical and very manipulative character, for all his talk about social justice. Even his own people say so. I talked to a woman who’s a partner in his firm—”

  “He’s got a woman in his firm?” Miss Howard said. “An actual partner?”

  “That’s right,” Marcus answered.

  “Just to show off to his suffragist friends?” Miss Howard continued. “Or does she actually do something?”

  “Actually, that’s the interesting part,” Marcus answered. “He’s not much of an advocate of women’s rights himself—doesn’t really consider them an ‘oppressed’ part of society. Not like, say, labor men or blacks.”

  “Well,” the Doctor said, “perhaps we’ll be spared the usual lectures on maternal sanctity, then.”

  “Oh, I think we will,” Marcus replied quickly. “But I think what he’ll come at us with instead will be more dangerous—much more dangerous.” Taking a pull off the flask, Marcus hissed and turned to our host. “Mr. Picton, how much of a history were you able to compile on Darrow?”

  “I found a piece on the Debs trial,” Mr. Picton answered with a shrug. “It mentioned his background with the railway, but there wasn’t much more than that.”

  “Nothing on the Prendergast case?” Marcus asked.

  “The Prendergast case?” Mr. Picton said, sitting bolt upright. “Great jumping cats, was he involved in that?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Marcus answered. “Heavily involved.”

  “Well, well, well,” Mr. Picton said. “I assume you remember the affair, Doctor.”

  The Doctor was already nodding gloomily. “Indeed. A more ludicrous example of perverting justice to please the public has rarely been seen.”

  Marcus laughed a bit. “Oddly enough, Doctor, that’s exactly how Darrow saw it.”

  Mr. Moore was trying hard to catch up, knocking a fist against his head. “Prendergast, Prendergast…” His face lit up. “Not the fellow who shot the mayor of Chicago?”

  “The same,” Marcus answered. “On the last day of the Exposition of 1893—the first assassination in the city’s history. Eugene Patrick Prendergast turned himself in, along with a four-dollar revolver, and claimed that he’d killed Mayor Carter Harrison because his honor hadn’t lived up to a pledge to put Prendergast in charge of building the city’s new elevated track lines. The claim was a fantasy, of course, and the man was obviously a lunatic. But, well, Harrison had been shot at the Exposition, which made for some very bad international press—”

  “And so the state of Illinois,” the Doctor continued bitterly, looking at those of us what didn’t already know the story, “decided to entrust the assessment of his sanity to the chief physician of the Cook County Jail—a man with no special training in mental pathologies. Yet even this handpicked flunky had absolutely no trouble declaring that Prendergast was a raging psychotic.”

  “Not that it mattered,” Mr. Picton finished. “Prendergast was quickly declared sane by a jury. He was sentenced to hang—and he did hang, didn’t he, Detective?”

  “There’s more to the story than that,” Marcus answered. “After the conclusion of the first trial, Darrow—whose personal opposition to the death penalty has always been almost fanatical—offered to help Prendergast’s lawyer try to get a new sanity hearing. This second proceeding began on January twentieth of ’94, and it was very revealing, especially for our purposes.” Flipping further through his notes, Marcus took another pull from the flask. “Darrow took the lead in arguing the defense’s case. And his tactics, according to several people who witnessed them, represented a whole new kind of lawyering. From the start, he shifted the focus off of Prendergast, and onto the jury: he told them that the prosecution was asking them to violate their sacred oath to weigh the case on its merits in order to satisfy society’s desire for revenge. Now, word had gotten around that Darrow was an expert at manipulating juries, so this group was at least somewhat ready for him. But it turned out that he knew they’d been prepared, and instead of crying foul he used that fact to his advantage. In his opening remarks he addressed the rumors that he was going to try to bamboozle them with a lot of technicalities and theatrics. He solemnly pledged that he wouldn’t, because if he tried such trickery and failed, he said, the responsibility—and that’s a key ploy in Darrow’s arguments, responsibility—for Prendergast’s death would rest with him. And he refused, he said, in his plainspoken, humble way, to assume such a moral burden. So he promised that he’d be perfectly straightforward in his arguments—and if the jury decided that his honest attempts weren’t good enough, the responsibility for sending a lunatic to his death would rest with them—not him.”

  “Clever,” Mr. Picton said, smiling slowly. “Very clever…”

  “And complete nonsense, of course,” Marcus added. “I mean, in reality he used every trick he could think of, during the trial. He wept—actually wept—over the dead mayor, and the cruelty of a world that could produce a creature like Prendergast, and he begged the jury to let their humanity prevail. And most importantly, so far as we’re concerned, he went after the prosecution team personally. He turned what was supposed to be the trial of an assassin into an eloquent, sarcastic—the man has wit, there’s no doubting that—and relentless examination of the motives of the state and its men in prosecuting lunatics, even murderous lunatics. Any unlucky soul the prosecutors called as a witness was badgered and tainted with whatever kind of suspicion Darrow could dream up, so that the questioning became about them and their beliefs, not about Prendergast. By arguing constantly in the negative, instead of advocating his client’s cause, he turned the whole trial topsy-turvy.”

  I turned to look at the Doctor, who was staring at the floor and pulling at the patch of hair under his lower lip. “But it didn’t work,” he said.

  “No, not in the end,” Marcus answered. “The jury withstood the pr
essure, and upheld the earlier sanity verdict. But the important thing is that he made a close race out of what looked like it was going to be the pure and simple railroading of a lunatic.”

  The Doctor sat back and sighed. “Unfortunate methods,” he judged quietly. “But I can’t say that I disapprove of his goal.”

  “Maybe not in that case,” Marcus said. “But if I’m right about what he’ll try to do here, you may feel differently, Doctor.”

  “Yes,” the Doctor answered with a small smile, “I suspect you’re right, Marcus.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lucius said. “What can he try to do here? I mean, he can certainly find forensics experts who’ll argue our findings, and maybe even personal acquaintances of Mrs. Hatch’s who’ll disagree with our interpretation of her motives. But what about Clara? How can he argue with an eyewitness?”

  “By attacking the man who’s behind the eyewitness,” Marcus said, still looking to the Doctor. “Or at least, the man he’ll paint as being behind her.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Picton said, “I begin to get your point, Detective. And we can’t depend on Clara’s testimony alone to fend off such an attack. Young children—especially if they’re as fragile as Clara—are not the most reliable witnesses. They’re too easy to bully or cajole. That’s why it’s been so important that the Doctor continue working with Clara—so that she can learn to provide detailed explanations of her story that won’t fall to pieces the first time the defense goes after her.”

  “The point is,” Marcus continued, “our roles will, in a very strange but potentially damaging way, be reversed in this trial: Darrow will be arguing the negative, knowing that no one wants to believe what we’re saying about Libby Hatch, and it will be up to us to advocate our cause. As you’ve surmised, Doctor, the man’s not going to come in with a lot of pious arguments about the sanctity of womanhood and maternity—he’s going to attack, not defend, and try to get us back on our heels before we know what’s happening. And the logical place to start any attack is at the weak point—which, in the public mind, I’m afraid, is—”

  “Me,” the Doctor finished for him.

  Refilling his pipe from a pouch in his pocket, Mr. Picton struck a match on his chair as the rest of us pondered that. “So!” he said, firing up his pipe and showing that enthusiasm in the face of trouble what was his best quality. “The question becomes, how do we defend against such a line of attack, and thereby preserve the integrity of Clara’s testimony?” Drawing hard on his pipe, Mr. Picton considered the matter for a moment. “I had hoped, as you know, to keep any discussion of psychological theory to a minimum in this case, Doctor. But if Darrow attacks with it, you must be prepared to strike back. In kind, and with the superior force which you, as an expert, possess!”

  The Doctor stood up, pacing slowly in what little free floor space the room offered. “It is not a position with which I am unfamiliar,” he said, rubbing his bad arm. “Though I confess that I hoped taking this case would mean that for once I’d be on the offensive. Perhaps that is destined never to happen.”

  “Oh, but it must happen!” Mr. Picton bellowed, gripping his pipe and swinging it through the air. “That’s just what I mean about you ‘striking back.’ I don’t want you to defend yourself from behind an intellectual barricade—I want to see you counterattack, on the open field of ideas, where the jury can see you! Draw blood from this man—first blood, if you can! To back you up, I’ll go over every shred of personal information about Darrow that Marcus has been able to assemble—and I won’t hesitate to use it. We are not going to let this trial get away from us.” Mr. Picton banged a fist on his desk, hard. “Darrow may represent some new breed of lawyer, but dammit all, we’ll match him trick for trick!”

  “Señor Doctor?” El Niño, who’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, got up to approach the Doctor with cautious respect. “This man—he is dangerous to you? You wish El Niño to kill him?”

  The statement, coming at the somewhat difficult moment it did, served admirably to break the thickening ice: after staring at the aborigine in amazement for a few seconds, we all began to laugh out loud, and the Doctor put his right arm around his small defender’s shoulders.

  “No, El Niño,” he said. “The man is not a danger in that way. He does not intend to injure me—physically.”

  “But if he is to interfere with finding baby Ana,” El Niño said, smiling at our laughter without really knowing what it was about, “then we should kill him, yes?”

  “I think,” Miss Howard said, getting up and moving over to the Doctor and the aborigine, “that this may be the moment to call a break for dinner. Let’s go, El Niño. On the way home I’ll try to explain to you why killing this man is not the best way to deal with the situation.” As she guided El Niño to the door, Miss Howard cocked her head. “Assuming, of course, that it really isn’t.”

  As the Isaacsons followed the other two out of the office, Mr. Moore, Cyrus, and I went up to the Doctor. “You going to be all right with all this, Laszlo?” Mr. Moore said.

  “It’s not myself I’m worried about,” the Doctor answered. “It’s Clara. This trial was already going to be excruciating for her—but now, to be targeted by a lawyer who uses the kind of tactics Marcus has told us about… Still,” he went on, throwing his hands up with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to make that much more certain that I prepare her adequately. As long as she doesn’t encounter her mother before giving testimony, I think she’ll have a fighting chance at coming through it well—or at least intact.”

  “What about it, Rupert?” Mr. Moore said to Mr. Picton, who was stuffing a batch of files into a soft leather briefcase to take home with him. “Is Judge Brown the type we can count on to post a reasonably high bail, in a case like this?”

  “I hate to try to predict anything about Judge Brown,” Mr. Picton answered. “But the brilliant Mr. Darrow is not yet here, and apparently someone has retained Irving W. Maxon to be Libby’s local counsel. Maxon’s quite good, and has a lot of connections down in the city, but I don’t think he’ll be able to win an argument for moderate bail on his own. Remember, though: if Vanderbilt is secretly bankrolling this thing, we can’t safely assume that any bail, however high, would be prohibitive. I’ll have to go for an out-and-out denial, and that’s never a certainty. And then there’s the question of the arraignment and the plea tomorrow.”

  “What about them, sir?” Cyrus asked, puzzled.

  “Well, Cyrus,” Mr. Picton answered, fastening his case and then looking up. “If Darrow should get here before the arraignment, there’s always the possibility that he’ll try to balance his personal books by entering another insanity plea—redress the wrong of the Prendergast case by getting Libby Hatch freed on the basis of mental incompetence, that sort of thing. Lawyers carry grudges like everyone else—maybe even more. I’m not worried about my end of the matter, so far as that goes—I have enough motives and scheming on Libby’s part to demonstrate cold premeditation. But it’s another area where he might go after you, Doctor. Can you successfully argue that a woman who has killed her own children can nonetheless be mentally sound?”

  The Doctor breathed deeply. “I should feel more confident, of course, if we’d discovered more details of her youth—on a hypothetical basis, it becomes much harder. Still, there are precedents—and as you say, Mr. Picton, the presence of cold, even clever, premeditation eliminates the possibility of any clearly demonstrable mental pathology, such as dementia praecox, or of any sufficiently severe brain trauma. To argue that she was mad, Darrow would have to return to the idea of ‘moral insanity’—the notion that a person can be morally but not intellectually deranged. It’s a concept that has been almost universally repudiated. Then, too, there’s always the chance that our diligent workers”—here he gave my hair a tousle—“will manage to find out more about the woman’s past before the trial begins.”

  “Well, then!” Mr. Picton said, snatching up his briefcase. “We have cause for ca
utious optimism. Particularly, I will say, when you consider our position at the moment: the woman’s in custody, she’s on her way here, and she’s going to stand trial. I confess that I wasn’t at all sure we’d ever get this far! So let’s not sink into pessimism—it’s bad for the appetite, and Mrs. Hastings will have been cooking all afternoon. Mustn’t disappoint her!”

  With our host continuing to encourage us, we wandered out into the hallway, there joining the others for the walk down the marble stairs to the first floor of the court house. Mr. Picton paused to make sure that the guard Henry had prepared one of the cells in the basement: Libby Hatch would be spending at least one night in jail, since her arraignment wasn’t scheduled to take place ’til the next day. The guard said that yes, one of the cells was ready, and then we all began to file outside for the walk down High Street.

  Just before passing through the front door, I stopped and looked around at the big stone chamber, what was lit up by the soft, straw-colored light of a July evening.

  “What is it, Stevie?” Mr. Picton said, noticing me pause.

  I shrugged. “Last time we’ll see it this quiet for a while, I guess,” I said. “Gonna be a lot of action after tomorrow.”

  “And, provided we can get bail denied,” Mr. Picton answered with a nod, “there’ll be a new tenant—for the next couple of weeks, at any rate. Henry won’t like that. None of the guards will, eh, Henry?” Mr. Picton smiled as he taunted the man. “You boys’ll actually have something to do for a change!”

  Chuckling to himself, Mr. Picton clamped his pipe in his mouth and headed outside; and just as I followed, I saw a gleam of resentment enter the guard’s eyes.

  We all talked and laughed a lot at dinner, though not much was said about the case. It was as if, knowing what was scheduled to happen later that night, we didn’t want to put a hex on things by acting as if Libby Hatch was already safely arrived and locked up in her cell. Mr. Moore went into a bit of a fit halfway through the meal when he realized the date: July 27th, which meant that he’d missed the opening day of the season at the Saratoga Racing Association. In an attempt to make him feel better, Miss Howard suggested a game of poker after dinner. This seemed to fill the bill not only for the purposes of getting Mr. Moore to stop whining, but also for taking our minds off of more pressing concerns.