Fling and Other Stories

by John Hersey

  Joel was astonished by this sudden kindness, and he wondered whether his having known the Italian word for “judge” and so having cast a bright light on the postal promotion may have marked a slight turning point in Alex Cherevoy’s attitude toward him. He thanked him for the favor. Then he read the report. It merely said:

  Complainant Geoffrey Alford called headquarters at 11:43 p.m. giving name and address of perpetrator. Officer Onofrio, Car 20, reported from perpetrator’s premises that the stolen article (dog, valued by complainant at five hundred dollars) was in perpetrator’s possession. Perpetrator arrested. Dog returned to complainant. Confirmation from complainant that he wished to press charges.

  That was all. Joel returned the paper to the clerk, who had stood by waiting for it. “Odd case,” Joel said.

  “Surprised?” the clerk said. “Where you been all your life? They’re all oddballs, from the word go. Every damn one of them.”

  * * *

  —

  In truth it might be said that they were. Here they came for arraignment, one by one. Behind Joel’s left shoulder was the door from the jail, through which the accused were led blinking into the bright light of the big room. Sometimes, in his easier moods, Joel thought of the Pit not as a tainted place of worship but as a theater. Across the room from where he sat was a low wooden fence with a clicking gate at the center, presided over by Sal Esposito, the bailiff, and beyond that were several rows of folding chairs for families and onlookers—the audience. At the heart of the court was a worn patch of floorboards—planks of a stage on which, as it seemed to Joel, farce and satire and burlesque and vaudeville routines wearily stretched themselves out day after day, each successive act reaching hopelessly for the unattainable relief that tragedy would have given.

  Here came the heavies. What faces!—ravaged, jaunty, dazed, defiant, disenchanted, raging, resigned. A man in his forties (“found intox,” on the list), whom Joel had seen here often before, clutching in his arms a stuffed cloth tiger nearly as tall as he, his constant companion and only comfort. Three weedlike, red-eyed minors in blue jeans—said to have been breakers and enterers. A natty type, accused of failure to support his wife and babies, in a whipcord bush jacket and knickers and smartly polished leather puttees. A woman booked as a whore, with a pokey-soiled wig and a hacking cough, badly in need of night’s more merciful light. An empty-faced teenager, held for possession of a controlled substance, with his mother, who was obviously played out to the very end of her kitchen string, on hand to stand up with him….

  Late in the morning Clerk Cherevoy stood and in tones of doom called out, “Case of Samson Honniger.”

  * * *

  —

  The duty policeman that morning was Tony Netto, whom Joel considered far and away the best of the city’s cops. He called all the young punks “dearie,” and he applied handcuffs as if he were a hairdresser patting curls. Joel had one day reflected that the female principle lodged in the male breast made for the purest kind of justice. There was no officer so naturally in tune with the Bill of Rights as Nelly Netto, as his colleagues called him, and there was none so brave. No Treehampstead policeman could dilly down a rampaging bull of a mugger with an erectile switchblade in a dark alley the way Officer Netto could.

  This time he had the accused on his arm, and the pair approached the bench like a bride and groom. Mr. Honniger looked brightly to left and right, taking everything in, smiling in turn at the clerk, at Joel Avered, at the stenographer, at the gaggle of court-watchers, and—most radiantly—at the judge. Had such an arrestee ever been seen? He was a white man. He had a full head of neatly brushed brown hair, grizzled at the temples. He wore a tweed jacket and gray flannel slacks, a shirt and a tie, and glistening brown loafers. He was obviously not the least outraged by what was happening to him.

  “Samson Honniger, sir,” Officer Netto said to the judge.

  The judge was old Whinman, known as “the Whiner,” famous for thinking that arraignment sessions—and prepositions—were wastes of everyone’s time. He rattled off to Mr. Honniger, with a speed that made the defendant shudder with incomprehension, his rights—be represented an attorney, remain silent, if indigent public defender. It was as if the pressure of the backlog of crimes on the court system had made of Judge Whinman’s larynx a kind of quick-operating trash compactor. He now said, “What we got here?”

  The clerk read the police report.

  “Breaking entering larceny,” the judge said. “Guilty not guilty?”

  “Not at all, Your Honor,” Mr. Honniger serenely said.

  “You had the damn dog your house,” the judge said.

  “The circumstances, sir, were not such that we could speak of either breaking and entering or theft. I promise you.”

  “You want jury trial, judge trial?”

  Mr. Honniger appeared to gaze into the depths of Judge Whinman’s eyes, searching out the jurist’s most private resources. Then, as if alarmed by what he saw, he took a step backward and hastily said, “Jury trial, if you please, sir.”

  “Remand trial. Felony charge. Bail a hundred.”

  That seemed to be the end of the matter. The clerk shouted the name of the next accused. Mr. Honniger looked shocked; he seemed to have counted on a much more impressive ceremony. Officer Netto took him by the hand and led him to the bail commissioner’s desk, off to the right of the bench, and left him there. Joel watched the two men murmuring and saw the commissioner fill out a form and then point over at him in the jury box, indicating to Mr. Honniger the only bondsman in sight. Not permitted to approach the bail commissioner’s desk, Joel stepped out of the jury box and waited for Mr. Honniger to come to him. Mr. Honniger handed him the form.

  Joel glanced at it and said, “You must be here next Thursday morning at ten o’clock. Do you promise to come?”

  “Oh, I look forward to it,” Mr. Honniger said.

  Joel told him that his bond had been set at one hundred dollars and that his bondsman’s fee would be seven dollars; all would be forfeited, of course, if Mr. Honniger failed to appear.

  “Fair enough,” Mr. Honniger said.

  “Are you good for that sum?”

  “I don’t happen to have that much on me.”

  “What can you put up?”

  “Let me see.” Mr. Honniger stepped into the jury box, sat down, bent forward, removed his shiny right shoe, took some bills from under an inner sole, counted out thirteen dollars, and offered them to Joel.

  “Are you good for the rest? Can I trust you?”

  Mr. Honniger had leaned over to put his shoe back on, so Joel could not see his face, but he heard him say, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  There was a long silence. “All right,” Joel finally said. “If you come next Thursday, you won’t have to pay the rest. You’d better be here.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  * * *

  —

  At a little after eleven-thirty the following Thursday morning, the clerk announced the Honniger case, but the defendant did not come forward.

  “Clerk call the bond,” Judge Whinman ordered.

  Alexander Cherevoy stood up and shouted, “Samson Honniger, appear in court or forfeit the bond in the amount of one hundred dollars.”

  Five seconds of silence. Then the judge: “What bondsman?”

  “Avered,” the clerk said.

  “Not again,” the judge vehemently said. “He here?”

  Joel stood up in the jury box. “Here, sir.”

  “How much he post?”

  “Thirteen dollars, Your Honor.”

  “How many times I warn you give too much credit?”

  “It was all he had, sir.”

  “Necktie tweed coat all he had?”

  “Yes, sir. Also, sir, the dog. The case interested me. Could we have a continuance, sir?�
�

  “Get him. One week today.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.”

  Joel had Samson Honniger’s address, 23A Elm Street, on his copy of the bail commissioner’s form, and as soon as court was recessed that afternoon he drove there. He rang the doorbell of the left half of a clapboarded double-occupancy house. Silence. He waited a long time, then rang again. Suddenly the door opened, and there stood Joel’s client in what appeared to be a silk dressing gown, with a Paisley design, over pale gray pajamas. His hair was neatly brushed.

  “Mr. Honniger,” Joel said. He always called his clients Mr., Mrs., or Miss, no matter how old or young, how rich or poor. Or, if not using the name, he would say “sir,” “ma’am,” or “miss.” He called a client’s home “your residence,” and he referred to the crimes they were accused of as “this unpleasantness they speak of” or “this little scrape we’re in.” He always shook hands with a client but never grasped the client’s hand with both of his, and otherwise never touched a client, never on the arm, never on the shoulder, never in the small of the back. “Mr. Honniger,” he now said, offering to shake hands. “You didn’t keep your promise to me.”

  Mr. Honniger’s handshake was vigorous. “Mr. Avered. I’m so glad to see you. Do come in. Please forgive my appearance. I was up very late last night.”

  Mr. Honniger led his guest into what he called his parlor—“Come into the parlor”—a small room that struck Joel as some sort of museum of oddities, or curio shop. Displayed on several tables—old-fashioned kitchen tables, with white enameled-metal tops—was an astonishing array of thingamabobs, doohickeys, knickknacks, gewgaws, and bits of flea-market bric-a-brac, arranged in rows and rows and rows. It took Joel’s mind only a split second to ask itself, with an inner gasp of surprise, whether Mr. Honniger had stolen every one of these objects—whether, indeed, Mr. Honniger had been up very late the night before acquiring some more of these objects.

  “Did I wake you up?” Joel asked.

  “It doesn’t matter at all,” Mr. Honniger agreeably said. “It was high time to rise and shine.”

  “And do I take it that the reason you broke your promise to me is that you slept all morning?”

  “My promise?…Oh my heavens, this was the morning I was supposed to be in court, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Honniger, it was. You’re very fortunate. The judge agreed to a postponement.”

  “I’m sure I owe that to your kindness.”

  “I did request it. I have begun to wonder why I did. Mr. Honniger, tell me something. Why did you steal the dog?”

  “I didn’t break and enter, Mr. Avered, nor did I steal the dog. The door was unlocked, and the dog came away with me.” “Came away with you?”

  “It was an affinity, Mr. Avered. Timothy understood me, and I understood Timothy. The moment we met. It was the strangest thing. His eyes reminded me of my grandmother’s. The moment I looked in those brown eyes, I would have sworn—if I believed in reincarnation—I’d have sworn that behind those eyes was the mind of my Granny Sciseau. My maternal grandmother gave me my start in—”

  “Please tell me about her another time,” Joel said. “This is a busy day for me. You’re telling me that you and this dog fell in love, and that he then simply insisted on going home with you?”

  “I suppose one might think of it that way. It was Timothy’s choice.”

  “How did you know the dog’s name?”

  “He was wearing a tag that said ‘Call me Timothy.’ ”

  “Did it ever cross your mind that the owners might miss Timothy?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. But Timothy doesn’t like them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Through the affinity I was speaking of.”

  “May I ask what kind of dog this is?”

  “He is a Labrador. And a fine one. You know, the wide forehead of the best of that breed. Big chest. Straight tail. A fine dog.”

  “He must be. The owners put a valuation on him that made this little indiscretion of yours a felony.”

  It suddenly occurred to Joel that there had not been any prior-record notices in Mr. Honniger’s court folder. “You’ve never been caught, sir,” Joel said.

  “I’m a careful man, Mr. Avered.”

  “But you were caught this time.”

  “I left a note for the owners. I didn’t want them to worry.”

  “You gave them your name and address?”

  “Of course. I had nothing to hide. As I say, this was Timothy’s choice.”

  “Mr. Honniger, you’re to appear next Thursday at ten. Kindly refrain from staying up late next Wednesday night.”

  “You’re unusually kind, Mr. Avered. I don’t want you to think I equate you with Timothy—with a dog, you know—but I might say I feel something like another affinity—”

  “You’re trying to get around me, Mr. Honniger. Just be there.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I shall be there with bells on.”

  But Joel left with a heavy conviction that Mr. Honniger would forfeit his bond—all thirteen dollars of it.

  * * *

  —

  And he did. On that next Thursday morning, Clerk Cherevoy once more called Samson Honniger’s bond, and once more the defendant failed to present himself.

  Joel Avered asked for a postponement.

  Judge Whinman said, “Again? Not your life.”

  And now Joel realized he was one of the actors out there on the worn boards of the Pit, and he knew the time had come for him to join the judge in recital of certain time-honored formulas, the beauty of which (even when crunched in Judge Whinman’s furiously hasty maw) seemed to him to help offset by a bit the pain of what had to be done.

  JUDGE: “State obligation bring defendant speedy trial.”

  BONDSMAN: “Yes, Your Honor. I conclude that the said principal intends to abscond. I pray that a mittimus be issued.”

  JUDGE: “Hereby direct proper officer or indifferent person forthwith arrest—what’s name?—Honniger—commit him jail until release due order law.”

  Alexander Cherevoy filled out the proper forms, and Joel Avered was thirteen dollars less poor than before.

  * * *

  —

  At eight-thirty that evening, Joel rang the doorbell of a Georgian brick house on St. Alban Terrace. His heart was pounding. He was going to do something he had never done before—assume a false identity. He had felt an overwhelming need to meet Mr. Honniger’s accuser. During the afternoon he had called a friend of his on the Treehampstead Journal to ask about Geoffrey Alford. His reporter friend had checked the paper’s morgue and called back to say that the guy was a manufacturer of frozen grape-flavored lollipops who had apparently kicked up quite a little storm of money in two decades with this business. There were three separate clippings about lawsuits he had brought, one over a property-line dispute with a neighbor, one against an auto repair shop, and one contesting a relative’s will. No, nothing about being a dog lover.

  Mr. Alford answered the ring. “Yes?” he said, admitting Joel to the house but blocking his way beyond the front hall.

  Joel introduced himself as the public defender assigned to Mr. Samson Honniger, whom Mr. Alford had alleged to have stolen his dog.

  “So?”

  Joel said he had come to see whether Mr. Alford intended to press his charge in court.

  “You damn right I do,” Mr. Alford said.

  Joel saw that Mr. Alford’s underjaw protruded—surely a genetic defect, but the fault had a characterological look about it—and he wore the facial expression of a man who had just made the mistake of tasting one of his Winepops, as his products were called. Joel saw bite sincerely written all over that face. “Timothy! Tim! Come! Come here!” Joel took a precautionary step backward.

  Then he heard a groan and th
e tinkle of a chain collar and dog tags, and around the corner from the living room came lumbering a Labrador retriever, wagging its tail slowly but with enough scope so that its whole torso, and even its head, weaved back and forth with messages to Joel Avered of helpless amiability—but did Joel, under the influence of what his client had said, imagine that he saw the dog give his master a quite nasty look as he passed by him? Joel had had a Lab once, and he recognized the noble broad forehead of the old line of the breed, and the good wide chest. But Timothy’s front legs were distinctly bowed, so he was shorter in front than in back, and at the outer bends of his forelegs he had the big callus pads of a being that slept away most of his days, his legs twitching and his tail thumping on the floor in unbearably sweet dreams of canned soybean meal and beef by-products.

  Mr. Alford said, “Can you imagine a pervert that would want to steal him?”

  Joel felt it his duty to say, “My client is not what I would call a pervert.”

  “The son of a bitch breaks in here—”

  “Forgive me, sir. He didn’t break in. He walked in. You should lock your doors.”

  “So he said in this goddamn note he leaves us. I never saw such a nerve.”

  “Did you keep the note, sir?”

  “I sure did.”

  “Might I see it?”

  “You stay right here,” Mr. Alford said, with his underjaw stuck out even farther than usual. He went off to fetch the note.

  Joel leaned over to pat Timothy, searching in his brown eyes for some signal from Mr. Honniger’s Grandmother Sciseau, but the dog wheeled away to the side of the hall, crashed to the floor with another groan, and was sound asleep before Mr. Alford returned. Here he now came, reaching out a piece of paper in his right hand. “Read that,” he said. “You won’t believe this guy.”

  Joel read:

  23A Elm Street,

  Treehampstead, Conn.

  Dear Host and Hostess: