Flash and Filigree

by Terry Southern

  Once she had taken a de luxe tour of Hollywood that included having lunch at the Brown Derby, and the most impressive thing she had yet seen in her life was, in that already tomb-gray, the dark and isolate forms hunched silently over strange plates, and so sinister behind their smoked glass that the poor girl had failed to recognize a single soul.

  “That is the famous director, Buñuel,” the guide had said of one serious man who sat alone to eat and drink without once raising his eyes past a pair of glasses that were death black; and for a long time afterward Babs had felt, at the movies, an anticipation over the screen-credits, looking for the name, Buñuel. Later she began to regret that it had not been Hitchcock, or Cecil B. DeMille, she had seen at the Brown Derby. But she had never even for a moment, doubted the dangerous importance of the men in black glasses, nor above all, their right to wear them.

  So, standing at the Dispensary counter and seeing that Ralph Edwards, even now, had his dark glasses on, made her so cross she could have snatched them away and pinched his nose.

  “Hello,” he said, almost absently. He was just hanging up his jacket, although it had been fully ten minutes since Babs saw him enter the Clinic. And haying taken this tack, he forced her into changing her lines completely, though, even so, they had only been half-planned.

  “Oh, hello,” she said coolly, even as if she hadn’t expected to see him here, nor, certainly, could care less.

  For some reason this caused him to laugh, and when he came to the counter he was all boyish again and smiling. Below the dark glasses, his teeth were like pieces of beveled ivory. They were so straight and even they looked false, and the awareness that they were actually alive came as a very disturbing threat to the girl.

  “Where is Mr. Edwards?” she said, trying to recover, looking around the hall and then at her watch, which, without even having made it out, she began to wind, so tight that it almost burst then and there.

  “The pharmacist,” she added quickly, in a tone that would make it certain she did not wish a repetition of the young man’s last performance.

  “Do you like music?” he asked, undeceived, and suddenly bold in a matter-of-fact voice, still smiling, his head to one side. And he reached in his shirt pocket to take out what might have been two tickets to a school concert. But the truth was, that ever since his unexpected laugh, displeasure on the girl’s face had grown so fiercely that now, when she raised her head, she was so obviously near to tearful outrage that he hesitated, and asked, in real sympathy: “What’s the matter?” Whereas Babs, perhaps mistaking, or rightly taking, this for pity, said furiously, straight at where his eyes lay smoked in mystery behind the offensive glass, “Nothing’s the matter with ME! What’s the matter with YOU?” And so saying, she turned abruptly and, leaving Ralph Edwards agape at the counter, marched down the hall, no longer tearful, but shocked into numbness by the kind of profound surprise that can border on, but never quite touch, revelation: that is to say, that her memory now was not the image of the young man left agape at the counter, but rather of the sun-ambered blonde who still smiled easily from behind the cream-colored wheel of the yellow convertible.

  Chapter VII

  THE NEW LOS ANGELES County Records Building was constructed after a design by Raoul Krishna, which the artist made in 1936, when he was living in Salt Lake City. The original blueprint had been drawn up and entered for competition at the Texas Centennial, where, had it been placed, it would have become one of the permanent exposition buildings of the State Park Fair Grounds in Dallas. With its failure there, however, the artist revised the drawing, and where the main façade had originally been fashioned to meet the requirements of opening in wide descent onto the State Park Esplanade, introduced, instead, a level, domed cloister with eight converging approaches. And in this form, the plan was submitted, during the next few years, to various competitions in the United States and Europe, occasionally receiving some secondary acclaim. In 1940, it came to the attention of the first woman member of the Los Angeles Board of City Planning. An extremely active and popular person, the wife of an influential citizen, she was herself a patron of the arts and, in fact, so much so of this particular artist that she presented his plan to the Board. It was accepted in the summer of 1940 and, following one major alteration (where the original had called for a gigantic, self-supporting dome-roof—which, because of the earth tremors in the Los Angeles area, was held inadvisable—a more conventional type roof-structure was submitted) the work was begun, and the building completed on Christmas Eve Day of that year. It was an immense structure, made almost entirely of plaster-stone, and at a cost of about two million dollars.

  Dr. Eichner scarcely knew this building. Although he had passed it in his automobile a number of times, and, from being well-read, knew its history, civic functions and so forth, it was his habit to give almost no visual attention to things that were not immediately and vitally pertinent. Yet, it must be said, that once a thing did become pertinent, he had an amazing faculty for absorbing it wholly. A case in point was his behavior toward Music. When he went to the opera, for example, it was not without having first made himself closely familiar with the life of the composer and, so far as possible, the principal singers. And while he had no particular taste for music or drama, during the presentation he scrupulously followed a libretto and score, the margins of which he filled with comments about the performance, always in the language of its presentation. For this purpose, he had once learned Italian in six hours.

  Thus it was that on the eve of his convocation to the Grand Jury Hearing, he had spent the entire evening in the Public Library making himself knowledgeable of the Grand Jury process, points of law, the names, lives and personalities of the judges, prosecutors, and other city and county officials; scanning the back-issues of newspapers, periodicals, legal journals; devouring everything that might in any way relate to the situation.

  Before the evening was out, he had even familiarized himself with a plan of the County Records Building, and now, as he stood outside it, shading his eyes, at 10:20, precisely ten minutes before the scheduled convening of the Jury, he surveyed the whole with interest, mentally checking the accuracy of the detailed description he had previously read. Standing close, the building was a formless stretch of flat plastered white, without depth or surface quality except at the farthest end where one brief section was flung so abruptly against the sky it seemed to die away entirely, leaving only a texture, a sick glaze in the heat of noon. More than anything else the modern building resembled a huge uncertain mausoleum.

  In five minutes the Doctor walked half the frontal length of the building, retraced his steps to the cloistered dome and entered the main door, past which he was inside a great, octagonal reception room. The temperature here, like that in an air-conditioned cinema, was immediately refreshing. High above were countless thin panels of frosted skylight, meeting ice-white walls and, below the floor of green slate, an effect given point at the great room’s center by the location there of a booth structure, also octagonal, marked on each side Information, and made entirely of aluminum. Standing just inside the door, the Doctor examined the room at length. The surrounding walls held numbered glass doors, three to each of the eight sides, leading, as Dr. Eichner knew, to the various chambers of law, opening and closing in both directions, soundlessly.

  Having digested the scene, he went directly, as planned, to the Information Booth and, without a word, presented his convocation. The booth was occupied by a pale old man in a seersucker suit who was reading a pocket-book held flat before him on the metal counter. The old man looked first at the convocation, then at the Doctor with an air of annoyance, perhaps for his speechlessness since he in turn kept an exaggerated silence and, returning the convocation, simply pointed to a directional indicator, near one of the doors, marked, like the convocation, “16th District, 8th Sessions.” Dr. Eichner had not expected these directional indicators, apparently a recent innovation, as they had not been mentioned in the description
of the building; so, for the moment, he was taken aback.

  “Good!” he said then, receiving the convocation in his hand again and starting to leave; but he stopped short, as on an afterthought, and spoke out amiably to the old man who had already gone back to his book.

  “This is Judge Fisher’s Session, isn’t it?”

  “Judge Thornton Fisher?” said the other, raising his thin gray head. He looked at the Doctor cagily, as though suspecting a trap, and shook his head, a slow wag with eyes closed. “Not Judge Fisher,” he said flatly, but continued at once in a forgiving tone, “Judge Fisher is not here any more.” Unmistakably, there was finality and an irritating piety in his voice, and he might have returned straightaway to his reading, but Dr. Eichner was not to be put off.

  “Where is Judge Fisher then?” he asked abruptly. “If there’s been a change in 8th Sessions, why wasn’t public notice given? That’s customary, isn’t it?”

  The querulous edge in the Doctor’s voice was so genuine that the old man realized then he wasn’t being baited after all, and so, even closed the book to make the most of it, leaning forward across the aluminum, his white face livid now in sudden and almost obscene confidence.

  “Well, he’s dead,” he said in a soft whining effort to get some of the Doctor’s sympathy himself, and so saying, half-satisfied, sat back stiffly to hold his book in readiness and continue as matter-of-fact: “Day before yesterday. Or maybe it was Wednesday; it was Wednesday. Asphyxiation by carbon monoxide . . .”

  “Well, wasn’t public notice given?” asked the Doctor, impatient now that time was growing short.

  “It was in the papers,” replied the old man, frowning fixedly at the Doctor; and then suddenly, as though on pure impulse, he reached in his pocket and drew out a flat, limp-worn billfold. His movement was abrupt, but, once the billfold was out, he opened it with slow effort and, even more laboriously, unfolded the newspaper clipping he took from inside, at last spreading it flat on the counter before them both. The banner read:

  “TRAGEDY IN WOODLAWN”

  and beneath:

  “Custom Cadillac Is

  His Death-Chamber”

  “I know this banner,” said Dr. Eichner, almost challengingly. “There’s no indication here that . . .” He broke off then with a show of impatience and read the item in its entirety. It began: “Thornton K. Fisher, prominent civic leader and judge, resident of the fashionable Woodlawn district, was found late last evening, dead of asphyxiation, in his automobile.” The item continued at some length, describing the circumstances of the tragedy, the discovery of the body, and so on, concluding: “Friends and relations knew of no reason why Judge Fisher would have wanted to take his own life.”

  Dr. Eichner did not ordinarily read the newspapers, preferring rather to get the news in weekly retrospect, from the periodicals—for these organs treated events of a preceding week as an understandable sequence, and gave them discernible pattern. On the previous evening, however, in preparing for the hearing, he had scanned the last week’s daily papers, so as to be up to date. Apparently, the ambiguous banner for the Fisher tragedy had misled him into overlooking the substance of the item. Even so, he finished reading it now with a snort of contempt and flung the clipping, as though it were actually worthless, to one side. “Still no indication,” he said emphatically, “of a change in 8th Sessions! Who’s presiding now?”

  The old man gathered up the clipping ruefully, even ignoring the Doctor, who looked on amazed that the other could still imagine the clipping to be of any use. Suddenly, however, he was evidently so touched by the old man’s false scorn that he reached out his hand and laid it gently on his shoulder. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you. It was simply that the coverage in that item seemed so . . . so inadequate. I really . . .”

  “Judge Fisher was a good man,” said the other defiantly, as though he were wincing under the Doctor’s hand; and when he raised his eyes, there were actually tears there. “A good man,” he repeated, and it was evident that with the slightest encouragement he would cry wholeheartedly.

  “I’m sure of it,” said the Doctor, patting his shoulder. “I’m very sure of it. And I’m sorry.” Then, after a reasonable pause, he continued, “I must leave now. I have a Hearing in 8th Sessions.” He looked at his watch; it was 10:35. “I wonder if you could tell me who’s presiding now.”

  The old man had taken out his handkerchief and was blowing his nose. “Judge Lester,” he said indistinctly, and the Doctor, his head back slightly, eyes half closed in an attitude of concentration, recalled a dozen or so other names beginning with L. “Not Lessing?” he ventured at last, with a frown to express the doubt of it.

  “Judge Lessing? Judge Tom Lessing is in 18th District Criminal Courts,” said the old man indignantly, and immediately appeared to be warming toward the Doctor. “Judge Howard Lester,” he said, putting his handkerchief away now to sit bright-eyed, white hands folded tight and small.

  “I don’t know him then,” said the Doctor seriously. “What are his leanings?”

  “How’s that?” cried the old man.

  “I mean, what is his background?”

  “Judge Lester? He’s from out of state,” replied the old man expansively, “Arizona. Tucson, I believe. Tucson, Arizona. Did you say you have a Hearing? Today?”

  “Yes. But, just a moment—you say that Judge Lester is from Arizona? Isn’t that unusual, that he should be from out of state? This is a County matter, is it not?”

  “Not at all!” replied the old man knowingly. “Not-at-all. Judge Fisher was born in Vienna himself! An American citizen though. His mom and dad were both Americans. His dad—I knew Judge Fisher’s daddy—was with the State Department in Vienna. Mark Fisher! A grand old man! Markham R. Fisher.” He ended somewhat lamely, and it was obvious that he had really exaggerated how well he had known the elder Fisher.

  “I’m afraid you don’t understand,” said Dr. Eichner almost coldly. “What I’m referring to is Judge Lester’s County record, his past decisions.”

  The old man, perhaps only at a loss being told he did not understand, seemed taken aback. Then he tightened his clasped hands and said with a child-like haughtiness, “I’m afraid we don’t give out that type of information.”

  Dr. Eichner started to speak, but glanced at his watch instead. He was already ten minutes late for the Hearing. “I believe that’s my door there, isn’t it?” he asked in a more formal, friendly way, gesturing toward where the other had pointed before.

  “That’s right. At the end of the hall,” replied the old man gloomily.

  “Well, thanks for your trouble,” said the Doctor with a wave of his hand, “and good morning.”

  The other responded with a sulky nod, but as Dr. Eichner turned to move away, he called after him warmly: “It ain’t the Judge that matters at a Hearin’, it’s the Jury!” and he even gave him a smile of hope.

  “Yes, of course,” said the Doctor almost without hearing, for he had suddenly recalled the name, Lester, and seemed convinced now that it was a bad lookout all around.

  Chapter VIII

  WHEN DR. EICHNER reached 8th Sessions antechamber, he was more than ten minutes late, and the Hearing had already begun. He was admitted at once by a shabbily uniformed attendant who gave him a strange look as he quietly opened the courtroom door.

  Here was a small amphitheater of the kind in use in most European universities, arranged in circular rows of seats, rising tier upon tier, and falling back in ascension like the walls of a wooden bowl. The dominant impression was the room’s structure and the wooden-eye emptiness of the seats, the Jury taking a mere four rows of six seats each, besides which there were only present the Judge, Court Clerk, one or two minor attendants and a smattering of spectators, since these Hearings were, by and large, closed sessions. Above the top row of seats was a rim of sky-lights under the flat ceiling and, through the use of murals in concentrically graduated perspective, this had nearly th
e illusion of being vaulted.

  The room was in silence when the Doctor entered with the attendant, the process having apparently reached a stage where nothing more could be done without the presence of the principal party. The two went directly to the wooden stand placed in the center of the floor, just in front of the raised presidium where Judge Lester sat.

  All thin and silver outside his black robes, Judge Lester would have borne a strong resemblance to the actor, Lewis Stone, except that he wore heavy, shell-rimmed glasses.

  The attendant, addressing first the Judge, and then the Jury, which was seated in a body on the Judge’s left, twenty-four variously dressed men and women, all seemingly serious and middle-aged, announced the Dr. Eichner and indicated by a polite movement of his arm that he should take his place in the stand. The Doctor nodded gravely toward both Judge and Jury before stepping up into the low railed box.

  “I am very sorry to be late,” he said. “I was unexpectedly detained. I ask this Court’s indulgence.” Here, he almost imperceptibly lowered his head, as in apology to the Court. This gesture, which was not without a certain old world dignity, was immediately followed by a whispery stirring in the Grand Jury box.

  Judge Lester threw a look of caution toward that body and, softly clearing his throat, addressed Dr. Eichner.

  “The report of Police Officers Stockton and Fiske has been heard by this Jury—including your initial account of the accident—and finally, your statement before Captain Meyer as well. These are entered into Court Records and are, of course, available for your study. Naturally, it was desirable that you be present during this testimony, since whatever statement you may wish to make now could have perhaps been better arranged, more deliberately pertinent to the testimony already heard. However, that cannot be helped. So I will ask you now to describe in your own words how the—the accident occurred. As you may know, I am here solely in an advisory capacity to both the Jury and yourself as the principal party. You will therefore address your remarks to the Jury.”