by D. W. Buffa
‘Yes, none of us could have lived.’
‘So there was a necessity for what was done, wasn’t there? The choice that Mr Roberts put to you was false, wasn’t it? It was not a choice between a peaceable death and a violent one, it was the choice between the death of everyone and the life of as many as you could save. Because, again, whatever you may have thought about the chances of rescue, Mr Roberts is right—you could never really know. Isn’t that correct?’
‘Yes, I suppose.’
‘No, not suppose, Mr Marlowe. It is a fact. Now, Mr Roberts was at some pains to insist that, once again, the choice was between a peaceful and a violent death. My question is: was the death you inflicted violent in the way that word is normally understood? Let me explain. You testified—and others have as well—that these deaths, these necessary deaths, were of people who had agreed in advance that this was the thing that should be done. Is that correct?’
‘Yes, they had agreed.’
‘And they agreed that the one chosen each time would be chosen by chance—correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did any of them, after they were chosen, try to resist?’
Marlowe shook his head.‘No, they all died bravely.’
‘You testified that the second person chosen, the actress Helena Green, did not want to die like the boy, that she asked you to end her life another way?’
‘She had seen what happened when the knife went into the boy’s heart. The thought of it was more than she could bear. She didn’t want to half-undress, and she did not want to see the knife going in. I told her the fastest way would be the throat, and that she wouldn’t feel any pain. She had as much courage as any man I ever knew.’
‘She did not resist? She did not try to get away?’
‘No, she placed herself in front of me and lifted up her chin. She told me not to blame myself for what I had to do.’
‘And was that true of the others as well? They accepted, without complaint and without objection, that it was their turn to die?’
‘We were all so tired, all of us in so much pain, that for some of them—they seemed almost glad of it.’
‘In part, I take it, because they knew there was a purpose in their death; that because of them, the others would live?’
‘Yes, there is no mistake that they believed that, that they had that hope.’
‘And because they knew that the way each of them had been chosen—drawing lots—had left the decision in the hands of fate, or God?’
Marlowe nodded.‘And that was true for all of them, all except the boy,’ he said with a weary look in his eye.
Marlowe had made a mistake. Darnell gave him the chance to correct it.
‘Except the boy? But he was the first one chosen after you had all agreed to draw lots to decide.’
‘Yes,’ said Marlowe,‘but I made sure he was the first one taken, the first one to die.’
Darnell was staggered. His face turned ashen. ‘You mean you fixed the result? But why?’ he asked, then was struck by a thought. ‘Because he was dying anyway; because he was the closest one to death; because you hoped that his would be the only death—that before another life would be taken, you would all be saved. Was not that the reason?’
‘No, it was not because I thought he would be the only one who had to die. It was because I did not want him to be the last. I did not want him to have to live through the horror of what we were going to do. The others—they were all old enough to understand what we had to do and the reasons for it; but he was just a boy, barely fourteen … I could not allow it. It was too obscene. He was too young, too decent, for that.’
‘But other witnesses testified that when the boy’s name was drawn, you tried to take his place!’
‘When I was faced with it, having to end his life, I could not do it. I wouldn’t have, either, if he had not begged me, told me it was his part to help save the others. All of you can make what you want to out of the fact that, despite what I believed, we were rescued, the six of us who were left.You can argue that it made what we did excusable under the law because the only choice was that or death, but the day the White Rose came, the day they pulled us out of the sea, I knew that I could have saved him, saved the boy—but that I had murdered him instead. It doesn’t matter what the law says, I’m as guilty of murder as any murderer who ever lived.Worse, because I had the responsibility to keep him safe, and now he’s dead when he should be back home with a long full life ahead of him. I should not have listened to him—I should have trusted my first instinct and killed myself instead!’
Chapter Twenty-One
DARNELL HAD PROMISED SUMMER BLAINE THAT on Saturday he would neither talk nor think about the trial. He needed to clear his mind, to stop brooding on what, in any event, he could not control. It was, she insisted in that firm, friendly way she had, essential for his health. They would spend the day just being themselves.
‘But that is being myself,’ he protested with an amiable grin as she drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge.‘It’s what I’ve spent my life doing. That’s all there is to me; there isn’t anything else.’
‘That isn’t true and you know it.’
‘Isn’t it? I wonder. It’s certainly all I know.’
She glanced across at him, a look of pleasure in her eyes.‘You know me—and I think I know you.’
‘You ought to know me, the way you poke and prod me and run all those tests. Of course, you don’t think I’m just a lawyer; in your eyes I’m a patient, a guinea pig on which to test your latest theory, an entry in your book of failed experiments, the subject of the next groundbreaking article in the New England Journal of Medicine!’
‘We can control that now,’ she said with a mocking smile. ‘I can give you a prescription to keep you from getting quite so manic!’
The laughter in Darnell’s voice subsided; his smile became subdued. He looked across the bay to the rolling hills on the other side.‘I doubt it would be so easy to cure the sickness in Marlowe’s soul. In all my years, I’ve never had a client anything like him.’
Darnell remembered his promise, and with a silent glance told Summer that he had not meant to break it.‘Where are we going for lunch?’ he asked, patting her gently on the knee. ‘Sausalito?’
Summer drove into the village and made her way along the narrow, crowded street to a restaurant at the far end of a jetty that formed a breakwater for the marina. From a table in the corner with a view of San Francisco, they watched the sailboats race across the bay.
‘Do you mind if I ask you something about the trial?’ asked Summer rather tentatively halfway through lunch.
It was as if Darnell had been waiting for it, the chance to make the reply he had filed away for future use. A smile of cheerful triumph crossed his mouth.‘I wouldn’t mind at all, but my doctor won’t allow it.’
Summer rolled her eyes.‘You’ve never listened to her before.’
‘Are you sure you haven’t been sitting in court, watching Roberts?’ he asked with a wounded look. ‘That’s the kind of quick, lethal response he’s so good at giving. Of course you can ask me about the trial. You want to know what happened yesterday, when Marlowe said that the choice of the boy as the first victim had not been a matter of chance.’
‘Did you know?’ asked Summer in a quiet, thoughtful voice.
Slanting through the broken clouds, the sunlight caught the side of Darnell’s pale cheek and made him seem younger, and more rigorously healthy, than his years.
‘Did I know?’ he mused.‘No, but I should have. I was stunned when he said it; astonished, I suppose. It had never occurred to me that Marlowe would arrange it so that the boy would be the first to die. It’s what makes him different from anyone else I’ve defended, maybe anyone else I’ve known—the way that everything you find out about him is so much in keeping with his character.Whether or not you agree with something he’s done, it was never because there was any advantage in it for him; it was always because, as b
est he could understand his duty, it was what he had to do. He’s a kind of force of nature, everything about him is elemental; the way we all were, I imagine, before we became so civilised that we felt this constant need to question and analyse everything we do.’
Darnell looked out the window at the sailboats leaning hard against the wind. A faint smile flickered across his mouth. He shook his head and turned back to Summer.‘Everyone who heard him, everyone who was there in that courtroom—none of them would tell you that what Marlowe did was right. And yet, if they had to choose someone to be in charge when they were in trouble—if a ship they were on went down in a storm—every last one of them would choose him and not think twice about it.’
Summer shoved her plate aside and put her hands on the table. She studied them with a careful, experienced eye, like someone searching for the first sign of something wrong, the slight failure to function perfectly that announces the beginning of the end, the slow descent into incapacity when you can no longer do the work you were made to do. ‘Do you think that’s really true, that no one who was there in the courtroom believed what Marlowe did was right? Or only that none of them would ever say so? Because I get the feeling that it is one of those situations where we think we’re supposed to say one thing while what we feel is something quite different. If I had been in his situation, knowing what he knew about their chances, I could not say that I wouldn’t have done what he did: made certain that the boy died first.’
‘You may have been right,’ said Darnell with a rueful smile. ‘This case may kill me. Marlowe is right—Marlowe meant it— when he said there was nothing wrong with what they did, nothing wrong except that they lived. If they had all died and an empty boat had been found, and inside it was a journal Marlowe or one of the others had left giving an account of everything they had done—how they decided to die, each one in his turn, so the others could live a little longer—then we would all be paying tribute to Marlowe’s courage and the essential decency of making certain that at least the boy would not have to go through it. But instead, we look at Marlowe with almost as much contempt as he feels for himself. The boy did not have to die at all—he could be alive today! It might have all been different if Marlowe had not been so damnably well-educated.’
‘Well-educated? I thought he had barely gone to school. Didn’t he leave home to become a cabin boy when he was only twelve?’
‘I said well-educated, not well-schooled. Take all the years you and I went to school—grade school, high school, college, law school, medical school—add them all up and what have we got? You’re a fine doctor and I’m a passable attorney, but what in all those years were we really taught about the meaning of anything, including the things we were trained to do? We simply assumed that what we did was important. Everyone told us that, and we believed it. But Marlowe? Marlowe was on his own, alone in the world, seeing everything with his own eyes; seeing things as they were, instead of seeing things the way that years of other people’s teaching told him he should. He listened to what he heard, to the stories he was told on the ships he sailed; he heard the stories, some of them no doubt embellished and distorted, about the ships that were wrecked and the things that had happened, the things that men were driven to do, in order to survive.
‘But Marlowe was born with a mind more curious than most. He read everything he could about the sea. Everyone read Moby-Dick; but Marlowe read everything he could find about the Essex. Remember when I told you that the survivors lived on human flesh? In the days of sailing ships, before the telegraph, when the first anyone knew a ship had gone down was when it did not return to port, it was the unwritten custom of the sea. It was understood that the lives of some would have to be sacrificed so that the others could live. There was a rule, however; a rule that had to be followed, the only way to make it fair. No one could decide that someone else had to die—it had to be left to chance; they had to draw lots. Marlowe knew that, understood it, believed it was right. If he had not known that, he might have done what I know for certain Trevelyn, and not just Trevelyn, wanted. He would have decided who was closest to dying anyway and killed him first. But then none of those who died—including, perhaps more than any of them, the boy himself—would have been given the chance to die an honourable death. That is the question, really—whether I can make anyone see that.We don’t believe much in honour anymore.’
Summer Blaine placed her hand on top of Darnell’s. He smiled gently at her, acknowledging the comfort it gave him. There were times now when the memory of his wife seemed to merge with what he saw in Summer’s face, as if what he had felt for the one had continued on in the other. Instead of betraying the memory of the woman he had loved and buried, it seemed in some strange and unexpected way to enhance it.
‘This is no way to spend a Saturday afternoon, dwelling on something as grim as death.Why don’t you tell me what you did this week? How many children did you bring into the world—none of whom, we’ll hope, ever has to face Marlowe’s cruel dilemma?’
She wanted to know more about the trial, more about what he thought about Marlowe and what he had done, but she had the feeling that he was desperate for some distraction from what had become the almost intolerable burden of the trial. She knew he seldom slept during the week and that the weekends were not much different. That morning, when he got up, he seemed to show not just his age but something more alarming. Each movement betrayed a conscious effort, as if he were afraid he might lose his balance and fall. He claimed that he had not slept well, and that after a shower and a cup of coffee he would be as good as new. And he was, at least to all appearances—but she knew that what she had seen was not just fatigue. He had, in his own indirect way, admitted as much when he joked that she may have been right and that the trial might kill him. She knew it would not do any good to tell him that he had to take better care of himself, but she had to do something.
‘You haven’t been back to Napa since the trial started.’
He started to explain, but she stopped him with a look. ‘You won’t have time to, until the trial is over. I have a couple of weeks of vacation owing, and I thought it might be good to get away. I thought—’
‘You thought you might like to spend your vacation—which you haven’t taken, by the way, in years—here in the city? And as long as you are going to be here anyway, you could keep an eye on me, make sure I take my medicine and get some proper rest like the good, docile patient you know I want to be?’
It made her angry with herself that he could see right through her. Feeling frustrated and inept, she tossed her napkin at him and shrugged helplessly. ‘If you want to kill yourself, I suppose you have that right; but you might at least wait until the trial is over before you do it.You may not owe it to me to take decent care of yourself, but don’t you owe something to your client? Do you think he should have to go through a second trial, live through everything all over again, because his lawyer wouldn’t bother with stupid things like getting enough sleep, much less taking the medication his doctor prescribed, and died the day before the case was supposed to go to the jury?’
Darnell had never seen her angry and only seldom seen her upset. ‘I promise that won’t happen,’ he said, devastated by the tears she was fighting to hold back. ‘I promise I won’t die.’
‘You promise you won’t die!’ she exclaimed, laughing through the tears she tried to rub away with the back of her hand.‘I really think you believe that, that all you have to do is promise and it won’t happen.You’re just like Marlowe: you think the only thing that matters is what people believe. If they believe their death will allow someone else to live, they can die knowing their death has a meaning! If you believe you can’t die because the trial isn’t over, then you don’t have to do anything to prevent it! I wish I could share your belief, but you’ve got a heart condition, William Darnell, and that isn’t a question of what you believe or what you promise. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to live long enough to see what that ju
ry decides!’
‘I’m all right—really!’ he said with all the assurance he could. ‘And I do take all those pills you give me, and in the order in which I am supposed to. I have the names of all of them memorised.Would you like me to recite them?’
Wiping away the last fugitive tear, she fixed him with a physician’s sceptical stare. ‘Tell me the truth. Has anything happened? Have you felt any dizziness? Any loss of breath? Have you had any chest pains? Anything?’
He had already made the mistake of dismissing her offer to stay with him as not just unnecessary but as a kind of intrusion. His pride, his stupid insistence on his own independence, had hurt her. He had to tell her the truth. ‘The other day in court, I suddenly felt weak. Everything started to go black. But within a minute I was fine, and it hasn’t happened again. Just that one time,’ he said with a confident smile.
Summer reached across the table. He started to take her hand. She shook her head and held his wrist, counting to herself as she listened to his pulse.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said as he signalled to the waiter for the check. ‘We’ll watch the sailboats out on the bay and look across at the city. I’ve always thought it’s the best view there is of San Francisco. And then we’ll find a bench and you can tell me what you’re going to do this week at trial and I’ll tell you how much you’re going to like having me there, waiting for you when you come home each day from court, making certain you get all the right things to eat and plenty of sleep.’
‘In other words,’ said Darnell as he paid the waiter, ‘I should now consider myself under house arrest?’
Summer smiled. ‘I’ll try not to make it seem too much like prison.’
Outside the restaurant, Darnell took Summer by the hand. For a long time they walked in silence, listening to the wind snap the canvas sails of the boats that were close to shore and to the sounds of cheerful voices that echoed, dreamlike, from the shiny decks half hidden in the waves.