The Paper Dragon (56 page)

"Tell me."

"Nothing," he said.

She nodded, a curious nod that was more like a shrug, and then she sat and crossed her legs, still waiting, knowing he would tell her when he was ready, and wondering if she wanted him to tell her, and remembering the way Hadad had kept referring to him as her boy friend. The internal revenue agent's name had been Ronny, and she'd been very fond of him. Even Gertie had liked him, but of course Gertie didn't know he was married and lived in Scarsdale with his wife and small son. She had not been to bed with a man since she and Ronny ended it in April. She felt no desire now, and yet she knew without question that she would go to bed with Jonah Willow tonight, and she wondered why.

"We were asked to defend a prisoner out there, that's all," Jonah said. "At San Quentin."

"I see."

"He'd killed one of the guards. Said the man had been harassing him."

"Had he?" she asked.

"Who knows? The guard was dead, so we certainly couldn't ask him. Smith maintained — that was his name, Orville Smith — said the guard had made things impossible for him from the moment he arrived. He was serving a life term, you see. He'd murdered his wife and daughter. Killed them with an axe." Jonah paused. "A California firm was handling the case, they called us in to see if we'd be interested. We… our firm… Raymond's and mine… had built a reputation by then and… there was a mandatory death penalty involved, you see, if Smith got convicted, that was the law."

"Did you take the case?"

"Well… it seemed to me, it seemed to me there
had
been provocation. After all, Smith was pretty much at this fellow's mercy, you know, and had to take his abuse and listen to his remarks. What finally caused him to crack, in fact, was a simple remark, that's all. Smith said the guard called him 'Lizzie' one day, after Lizzie Borden, and that was it. They were in the dining hall, and Smith grabbed his fork and went for the guard's throat and didn't quit until the man was dead. It took four other guards to pull him away, he was a powerful man, six-four, with arms like this."

"Did you take the case, Jonah?"

"I didn't even like the man, I couldn't possibly bring myself to like him and yet… I… I did feel he had been abused. I tried to explain this to Raymond, why I thought we should take the case. We were sitting on the porch of the guest cottage, Raymond and I, looking out at the rain and high illuminated walls of the prison, and Raymond very quietly suggested that maybe I was confusing my private life with my professional life. When I asked him what he meant, he said maybe I was equating the
actual
murder of a wife and child with what was only the
symbolic
murder of a wife and child. Now what's
that
supposed to mean, I said, and he said I'm talking about the divorce, and… and about Christie drinking he said,
Your
divorce. I'd been divorced that August, you see. Just two months before Raymond and I went to San Quentin together."

"I see."

"He'd always been very fond of Christie. My wife. My former wife."

"I see."

"So… so I could understand why he was disturbed about the divorce, and… and about Christie drinking and… and the things she was doing. He'd known her from… from when we were first married you see, when things were very different. But I couldn't understand what any of this had to do with defending Smith, so I… I tried to be very calm because Raymond was my closest friend and my partner… I… I very calmly explained that I didn't feel any guilt about the failure of my marriage, that Christie had made it virtually impossible to go on living with her, and that we'd both agreed divorce would be best for all parties concerned, including Amy. My daughter. I have a twelve-year-old daughter."

Sally nodded.

"Raymond just said, Sure, Jonah, sure, and then, all of a sudden, he said, I don't want to defend this man. So I… I asked him why he didn't want to defend him and he said because Smith is repulsive and rotten and obviously guilty, and I said, Wait a minute, and he said, No, you wait a minute, Jonah, defending that bastard would be contrary to everything I believe about law and justice.

"The rain was coming down, we sat on the porch in those big wicker chairs painted white by the prisoners, and I said, Raymond, you know this man's rights are in danger of being violated, and he said, Don't give me any more of
that
shit, Jonah, all you want is another newspaper headline. And… and then he… he told me I… was nothing but a self-seeking son of a bitch who had never really understood Christie, who had forced her to become what she was by totally ignoring her needs in my ruthless… he used that word, ruthless, he said… in my ruthless ambition to become the biggest and best-known lawyer in the history of the goddamn profession, that… that I was responsible for the divorce and for… for ruining a… a damn sweet lady."

Jonah's glass was empty.

He put it to his lips, discovered the brandy was gone, and then put the glass down on the table.

"I guess Smith was guilty, Sally, but… even if he
had
stabbed that officer in full view of God knows how many men, the thing wasn't premeditated, it wasn't malicious, it
couldn't
have been, it was a spur-of-the-moment act provoked by the guard. Raymond had… Raymond had no right to… to say the things he said to me.

"But they were said. They were out. And when people pass that certain line, wherever it may be…" His voice trailed. "There… there are things people say to each other that can never be retracted. Christie and I had said those things, we had hurled all the goddamn filthy words we could think of, we had accused, we had condemned, and it ended." He closed his eyes and sighed. "And then Raymond and I said all there was to say. And there was no going back." He looked up suddenly. "I keep losing partners."

"Maybe you don't need a partner, Jonah."

"Maybe not."

"Did you take the case?"

"Yes. I argued it with everything that was in me, just to prove, just to show Raymond that he was wrong, just to
win
it, and to show him. Mitigating circumstances, I said, provocation, your Honor, here was a man in bondage being tormented by his jailer. We could say, your Honor, we could almost say this security officer was a man seeking his own death, tormenting a convicted murderer. We could in a sense, your Honor, say this man was intent on committing suicide, your Honor, we could say he took his own life. And must we now take yet another life to justify the vagaries of this troubled mind, the labyrinthine motivation of a man intent on suicide? Must we do that, your Honor, to satisfy whatever primitive clamor for blood we recognize within ourselves? When it was all over, they sent him to the gas chamber. Period. I lost."

She suddenly knew why she would allow him to make love to her, knew it even before he said what he said next.

"I'm going to lose this one too, Sally."

"How do you know?"

"Driscoll is guilty."

"That doesn't mean you'll lose."

"Maybe I
want
to lose."

"Will that help?"

"He's guilty," Jonah said. "He sat in that courtroom today and constructed a totally plausible network of deceit, attempting to trace the workings of the mind, something Brackman couldn't
hope
to contradict. Iceman is coal man, and coal man is Colman, and Colman is death, and death is the iceman in
The Iceman Cometh
, expecting us to swallow a literary association test delivered with a straight face. Peter is a phallic reference, and Morley is a Negro he knew as a boy, renamed Christopher in honor of the novelist, and Major Catharine Astor is definitely
not
Constantine's major, and yet Driscoll knew the color of her hair and the minor incident of showing the colonel his medical record, but no this is not the basis for the letter-carrying scene. Nor was the 105th Division based on Constantine's. Then where
did
it come from? How in hell could he have hit upon those identical three digits, and why didn't he have a psychological explanation for
them
, too, the way he had for every other alleged similarity? He slipped the other day when we were having drinks together, he said, 'I won't explain that number,' and then he changed it to 'I can't explain it,' but he meant 'I
won't
,' goddamn it. And the reason he wouldn't is because the number stuck in his head, it remained in his head after he saw Constantine's play — he's been a theatergoer from the time he was twelve, he's probably seen every piece of garbage ever presented on the Broadway stage, he practically admitted as much to me in private. So how
could
he tell us where he got that number, when telling us would have sent the case straight up the chimney?

"He's a lying bastard, and a thief, and I'm defending him."

Sally put down her glass, rose, and walked to where he was standing. Very gently, she put her hands on his shoulders and lifted her face to be kissed. She thought how odd it was that men could talk about losing partners and losing cases and even losing wives, and never once realize what they had really lost. She kissed him and hoped that when he lost this case as well (because he was defending a guilty man he thought was James Driscoll and not himself) perhaps he would remember he had been to bed with her, the way the English teacher in Schenectady would always remember he had been to bed with her.

She knew suddenly that she would not be seeing much of Jonah Willow once the trial ended.

She knew this with certainty, and with sadness, and relief. There were far too many things he was still trying to forget, far too many ghosts in his life; she had no desire to become yet another one of them. She hoped only that he would remember her.

Once she had asked her mother to make believe she was a person, and her mother had said, No, Sally, that coat isn't right for you, take it off.

The rain stopped at midnight, just as they came out of the movie theater and into the street. They walked up Broadway together, Ebie's arm through his, watching the after-theater crowd, relishing the noise and the clamor of New York City, so unlike what they knew in Vermont. Under the marquee of the Astor, a crowd of people in formal wear stood laughing and chatting, trying to get taxis, boisterous and loud, obviously enjoying themselves. The women wore mink coats over flowing gowns of pale blue and lucid pink, corsages pinned to bodice or waist or — as with one pretty brunette in a lustrous dark fur — pinned to her hair, just above the ear. There was a holiday mood outside the hotel and in the lobby as well, where men in dinner jackets told dirty jokes to each other and women laughed raucously with them, and then remembered to blush. A man dressed as Santa Claus, drunk as a lord, came staggering toward the revolving doors, snapping his fingers in time to the music that came from some hidden ballroom. Ebie's face suddenly broke into a grin.

"Listen," she said.

"What is it?"

"Listen."

He could not place the tune. Violins carried it on the noisy lobby air, evoking a mood, frustratingly elusive.

"Come," she said, and suddenly took his hand.

They went through the lobby, searching out the source of the music, following the strains of the orchestra until at last they stood just outside the Rose Room, and nodded to each other like conspirators. She raised her arms, and Driscoll automatically took her hand and cradled her waist, and they began dancing silently in the corridor outside the ballroom.

He felt again the way he'd felt when they were young together, in love together, possessed of a confidence that was now alien to him. She was light in his arms, her feet skimmed over the polished floor. They danced past two old ladies in gloves and hats, who looked at them in wonder. The old ladies delighted him, their looks of astonishment, the way the one in the purple hat opened her eyes wide to express shock, outrage, surprise, wonder, bemusement, even a little touch of wickedness. He wanted to scoop up both old ladies, catch them both in his arms along with Ebie, and dance them down the corridor and out the side door and onto 44th Street and over to Sardi's and maybe clear to the Hudson River and across to Jersey and points west, all the way back to their homes in Albuquerque or Des Moines, and then on past California and across the Pacific to exotic Oriental places that would cause the lady in the purple hat to open her eyes wide again and drop her jaw in shock, outrage, surprise, wonder, bemusement, and wicked glee. He felt, when things were right, as they were now, the same happiness he had known in those years before he left for the Army.

Their feet no longer touched the ground, they seemed to float on air an inch above the floor of the corridor. One of the old ladies was laughing now, all the world loves a lover, a bellhop carrying a wreath of flowers danced out of their way as though he were part of a consuming ballet, the world would soon be dancing with them, people would come out into the streets dancing and singing and shouting their fool heads off because James Randolph Driscoll and Edna Belle Dearborn were in love.

Had
been in love, he thought.

As suddenly as they had begun dancing, they stopped.

October, he thought.

Out of breath, Ebie laughed and squeezed his hand.

1950, he thought.

He looked down at her and tried to remember what it had been like before then, and wondered how it could ever be that way again. They walked to the elevators in silence.

I got a medal in October of 1950, he thought, it was pinned right between my eyes, I've been wearing it ever since.

"Oh, my, that was fun," Ebie said.

They entered the waiting car. The doors closed. The elevator streaked up the shaft, cables whining and groaning.

I got my medal for being a nice guy and a fool, he thought, that's what they gave medals for back in those days.

I wrote all about my medal in a book called
The Paper Dragon
, perhaps you've read it, madam. It's about the Korean War, yes, and about this nice young man who is victimized by these horrible people who eventually cause his death, a symbolic death, madam, Oh yes, an
actual
death in the book, but really symbolic — I testified to that effect before the learned and honorable judge today. It is now a matter of record that the death of Lieutenant Alex Cooper, according to his creator (although such status is still in serious doubt), was intended as a symbolic death. If you're ever haggling over that one at a literary tea, just look up the trial record and you'll know the death was supposed to be symbolic. Yes, madam, my medal was delivered in the crisp October, it was a nice medal to receive. I wore it into battle when they came charging across the river, it gave me courage because I didn't give a damn anymore, you see. That's why medals are awarded, to give you courage.