Silas Timberman (33 page)

“No way to tell, Silas. Maybe a week, give or take a few days. Tomorrow, we'll make motions, start picking the jury. We might be through with it next Monday or Tuesday—but-who knows? As far as we know, they have only one real witness, Bob Allen. Even if they call Dave Cann to lay the basis for Allen's testimony, that won't take long. The hell with that, Silas! Let's not talk about it any more. How about a walk and a cup of coffee?”

It was better than sitting in the hotel room. They put on their hats and coats and went down into the brisk, biting January night. They turned up their collars, and plodded along the dark, dimly lit streets. It was still an hour and a half to midnight, yet the broad avenues were completely deserted, the long, white government buildings standing like ghostly sepulchers.

“This is a silent, lonesome city at night,” MacAllister observed. “It makes you feel that when the offices close, life goes away—no life of its own. Yet I think it has one of the highest per capita crime rates in the whole nation. It's an uneasy city. I don't feel good here.”

“Yet some of it is very beautiful.”

“I don't know. Fear shrinks beauty, and this place is full of fear. I used to think that nothing in the whole world could be as grand and fine as the memorial for Abe Lincoln, but I don't know now. I think it was Gandhi who once said that the Taj Mahal was built with the tears of the Indian people—and I never looked at a picture of it after that without thinking of what he said, and it wasn't beautiful any more. In almost any city, you feel something, the nature of it, the mood, the quality—call it what you will. But what do you feel here?”

“I don't know,” Silas said.

“Neither do I. Maybe in a week from now, we'll both be able to answer that question. Silas, it's a funny thing—but I feel good about you. I'm glad I'm in this. I'm glad I know you. It's done a lot for me. For one thing, I've cut out the drink for the duration of this trial. Afterwards—well, who the hell knows, but this has given me something to bite into. You know when I began to like you, Silas?”

It embarrassed Silas to have another man state flatly that he liked him. He had lived too long in a place where affection between men was never expressed. He didn't know what to answer, and simply shook his head.

“When you busted loose down here,” MacAllister went on. “When you wouldn't look at me—and I could almost hear you thinking, I'm going to fight these bastards—if I die for it, I'm going to fight them! My eyes opened, or maybe my heart opened. I had been watching a line of people crawl before those damned committees, crawl and whine how they hated the reds and how they never were and never had been, or were sorry that they were, because when they had been, they were young and foolish and please forgive them for ever thinking or dreaming or breathing, or wanting to do anything decent, or having a decent impulse or a decent thought, and how they hated the reds more than anyone hated them, and so on ad nauseum. And here's a quiet college prof, a skinny, long-headed, long-nosed guy with glasses, who looks mild enough to run if a dog barks—and he gives it back to them, straight and level and no holds barred. Ah, Jesus, that was good! And maybe the good Lord will forgive us, if for a thousand cowards and scoundrels, we produce one brave and honest man. Anyway, that's how I felt.”

“Thanks,” Silas managed to say. He felt very full, and there were no words he could think of to say how he felt.

“Well, there it is,” MacAllister said, pointing across the street they had come to—pointing to where a low building stood, dim and formless in the night, a great flight of stone steps—the hallmark of a public building in Washington—poking forward from its deep shadows.

“The courthouse?”

“Federal District Court, Silas. First time you've seen it?”

“I think so.”

They stood there in the night, looking at the dark, shadowed building.

* * *

Silas had come to realize that nothing except the fact is completely descriptive of the fact. Like many thoughtful people, he anticipated an experience and lived through it imaginatively before it happened; but nothing he anticipated was just like the trial itself: His own and long-standing picture of a courtroom portrayed a place of austere dignity and almost frozen calm—in which the scales of justice were delicately balanced and objectively observed; but the fact was immediately and apparently different. The Federal District Court gave the appearance of one of the busiest places in Washington, a building too small for the services required of it, swarming with activity, its corridors filled with curious spectators, inquisitive tourists, newspaper men, veniremen, FBI agents, police in plain clothes and police in uniform, lawyers, clients, bondsmen—a beehive of motley and diversified activity, in which the routine was hardly disturbed by a teacher from Clemington.

He sat in one of the spectator's seats in Judge Alvin Calent's courtroom, and watched the jury being chosen. Even now nothing happened as he had anticipated or would have imagined; and his thinking, molded by half-forgotten Hollywood films, and novels of various sorts read over the past twenty years, found little enough that was familiar. The courtroom had recently been given a fresh coat of light green paint; the Venetian blinds let in slatted trickles of sunshine; the judge yawned frequently as he rocked his big swivel chair behind his desk. The judge was a southerner, with a voice as soft as honey, a portly man with a round, fleshy face, a small nose, and the calmly aloof expression of a priest. A few newspaper men poked their heads in, but did not remain for this part of the proceedings. Two chunky, bored marshals sat slackly alongside of the two doors to the courtroom. The clerk picked his nose furtively and stared at the ceiling, and the stenographer sat with his pencil poised, a lean, half-starved whippet. MacAllister held a long, whispered consultation with the government attorney, a tall man of about thirty, whose name was Horace Ward, whose face was singularly devoid of expression, and who had the look, under his close-cropped hair, of a football player recently out of training; and then both of them continued their whispered consultation with the judge.

The jury panel was the area of hope, the plain people who would judge the evidence and find Silas guilty or not guilty; but there was nothing in their faces for him to read or bite into; and they sat as if there was total agreement among them that neither by expression nor by motion should they indicate the content of their human minds or their immortal souls. They were neatly dressed and pointedly minding their own business, men and women, neither the very young nor the very old, but aged from thirty to fifty, about one in five of them colored. All of them might have been trained to avoid Silas' eyes, to conceal from him any shred of hope, any dream or flight of fancy or deep passion for justice—or this might have been his imagination entirely, for when he asked MacAllister what the lawyer thought of the panel, MacAllister shrugged and said,

“You never know. The only thing you can put your finger on is that all except four are government employees and those four are probably related to government employees.”

“And the government is the prosecutor—”

“My dear Silas, the government is also the judge and the marshals at the door. Try to remember that this is a company town—one industry, one boss, government. Nothing particularly new in that. It just depends on what kind of a government you're dealing with, and where you yourself sit. As a matter of fact, suppose you sit at the table with me, and we'll do our little exercise in human nature together.”

There began to run through Silas' mind an annoying refrain, “Oh, I am the cook and the captain too, and the mate of the Nancy Brig, and the bo'sun tight and the midshipmite and the crew of the captain's gig.…”

* * *

“What is your occupation, sir?” asked MacAllister.

“Typesetter.”

“And where do you work?”

“At the Government Printing Office.”

“And how long have you worked there?”

“Eighteen years.”

“Are you married?”

“I am.”

“Does your wife work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Will you tell me where she works and what she does?”

“She is a filing clerk, employed by the Department of Commerce.”

“Have you any other relatives in government employment?”

“Yes, sir. Two daughters, one in the Commerce Department and one in the State Department. My sister works in the bindery of the Government Printing Office. You're not interested in more distant relatives, are you?”

“No, I'm not,” MacAllister sighed, and walked back to where Silas sat and leaned down to him and said, “Well, my friend, we have four challenges left, and I don't think it matters a tinker's damn.”

“This one,” Silas grinned ruefully, “he not only seems to work for the government, he seems to be the government.”

“Want me to knock him off?”

“I'd like to get to the Negro—the big, heavy-set one.”

“Let me talk to the judge again. It breaks up the day.”

MacAllister went up to the bench and the government attorney immediately joined him.

“What is it now, Mr. MacAllister?” the judge asked, patiently and courteously. The judge was courteous and polite. MacAllister had never dealt with such a polite judge.

“Simply the question of government employees, Your Honor. The entire panel is composed of government employees.”

“Not entirely, Mr. MacAllister.”

“We haven't come to an exception yet. It stands to reason that we cannot get unbiased judgment from people who work for the prosecution.”

“Come, come, Mr. MacAllister—you're not stating the case fairly at all. These people don't work for Mr. Ward. They work for the government of the United States, and I am sure they're as anxious to see justice rendered as if they worked in the corner grocery store. You're not intimating that there will not be a fair trial in my courtroom?”

“By no means, Your Honor.”

“What have you to say, Mr. Ward?”

“I resent the entire implication, Your Honor, that people are unable to render a fair verdict because they work for some government agency. I should think Mr. MacAllister would be conscious of the privilege attached to such work and the integrity required of people who do such work.”

“It is also required that they reside in the District of Columbia,” MacAllister said.

“What do you mean by that, Mr. MacAllister?”

“I mean that it is not a question of integrity, Your Honor, but a question of a community of government workers who depend on government work for their existence.”

“In other words, you are suggesting that reprisal would follow a verdict of not guilty. I find such a suggestion highly improper, Mr. MacAllister—highly improper, and I am rather shocked that you should voice it. Your client is accused of committing a crime in this district and he will be tried in this district, and he will be judged by a jury of his peers from this district.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

The examination of the jury panel went on. They called the Negro Silas had mentioned, and the government attorney said to him,

“Where are you employed?”

“I have my own business.”

“And what is your business?”

The Negro looked Mr. Ward up and down coolly, and said, “I am an undertaker.”

“Challenged for cause,” Mr. Ward said.

* * *

“What is this defendant, Mr. Silas Timberman, being charged with?” the government attorney asked the jury, beginning his opening remarks, taking his stance squarely and purposefully in front of the jury box, his face serious, his brow furrowed with the weight of the problem confronting him. “He is being charged with perjury, with deliberate falsification of statements under oath. Let me lay the scene for you and spell out the facts of the indictment in this case. On the 14th of November: of last year, a hearing of the Senate Committee on Internal Expenditures was held in the Senate Office Building, in Washington, D.C. I am sure you are aware that the privilege of investigation is a very ancient privilege, a very ancient function of the legislative branch of our government. Each of the Houses of Congress is sub-divided into a number of committees. These committees investigate various areas of our national life, so that they may gather proper information upon which to base the framing of new legislation. So deeply is this investigative role of committees imbedded in our legislative life, that one might say that without this function there could be no government as we know government.

“This particular hearing with which we are concerned was held to explore the manner in which certain privately endowed universities used government grants—grants which supported a number of varied efforts of such universities. Such an investigation would have as its ultimate purpose the gathering of information, either to support existing legislation and appropriations, or to revise both the legislation and the appropriations. And in the course of this investigation, Mr. Silas Timberman, the defendant, was called as a witness before the Senate Committee and asked to testify to certain facts.

“The indictment specifies two occasions when the witness, Mr. Timberman, gave answers in direct contradiction to testimony of a subsequent witness. When the facts were brought before a grand jury, it was decided to bring in an indictment for perjury against the present defendant, Mr. Timberman.

“Let me detail these two instances, so that you may be able to relate them to subsequent testimony at this trial. In the first case, a question was asked by Senator Brannigan, namely, and I quote from the record, ‘Are you a member of the Communist Party, Professor Timberman?' to which the defendant answered, ‘I am not a member of the Communist Party, Senator. I am not, and I never have been.'

“On this, holding it to be a false statement, the first count of the indictment was based. A little later in the hearing, the defendant was asked, again by Senator Brannigan, and again I am reading from the record of the hearing, ‘Do you attend communist meetings at Clemington, Professor?' And in answer to this, under oath as before, Mr. Timberman replied, ‘I do not attend communist meetings anywhere.'