by James Welch
“I object! This is beyond the bounds of propriety! For shame!”
But before the chief magistrate could admonish him, the advocate held up his hands and said, “I am finished with this witness. Thank you.”
René was surprisingly cheerful on the witness stand. After being scolded for waving at Charging Elk, he told of a normal, happy family, an honest family, and how the defendant had fit right in, had in fact become a second son to the little fishmonger. He worked hard in the fish stall, he only took a little wine with his meals, and he taught Réne s daughter how to draw a horse. In turn, his daughter and son gave the defendant lessons in proper French, not Provençal, as the government so ordered. Even after Charging Elk left the Soulases’ home, he came every Sunday and every holiday to dinner. He was a very generous man who brought them all presents. And as anyone could see, he had become a proper gentleman. “But you should have seen him as I first saw him in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show—a whooping, naked savage who scared the children half to death.” René laughed and lifted his arm toward Charging Elk, but remembered the scolding and snatched it back. “Forgive me, your graces,” he said.
Some in the balcony laughed, and the advocate sat down, satisfied with the personable little fishmonger’s portrayal of his client s character. The prosecutor then stood and blotted his forehead with a handkerchief. He smiled at René, a broad smile, as though he shared in the good humor that had broken the monotonous tension of the courtroom.
“You make me wish I had seen this Wild West show, monsieur. It would surely be preferable to sitting in a stuffy courtroom, bent on a sad duty.” The prosecutor wiped his upper lip with the handkerchief. His ruddy face had become splotchy in the heat. “And let me add that I respect your noble profession. To offer our citizens the fruits of the sea—I’m sure at very little profit to yourself—is certainly a high calling.”
“Thank you, your honor.”
The prosecutor laughed. “You give me too much authority, monsieur. I am a simple prosecutor, not worthy of such an appellation.” He glanced up at the magistrates, one of whom was actually smiling. “I appreciate your honesty in describing your family life. It is rare these days that such a generous family exists, what with all the trouble with the immigrants and socialists. To take in a total stranger—especially a savage given to war whoops and nakedness—is truly commendable.”
“Thank you.”
“You say that the defendant lived with you for two years—two idyllic years, if I understand correctly.”
“Yes.”
“And he was happy with your little family, he ate madame s excellent cooking, he played with the children, he enjoyed working in the fish stall and taking a little wine with his meals ...”
“Oh yes. He was quite happy in our home. He never took too much wine.”
“Then why do you suppose this happy—savage—insisted on moving out after only two years?”
René thought a moment. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“To a neighborhood that can only be termed a hellhole of North Africans and Turks, of thieves and cutthroats? To a shabby, dingy one-room flat in the worst neighborhood in all of Marseille?”
“I ask myself that, monsieur! I say, Why Le Panier? But Charging Elk—he is very happy here. He says the people remind him of his own.”
“Ah! He finds the true Frenchmen, the God-fearing natives of this soil, not to his liking?” The prosecutor had directed his question to the jury. There was not a dark face among them.
The hawk-faced advocate objected, and the chief magistrate agreed that the question was inflammatory. The prosecutor explained that he was merely trying to establish a pattern of behavior that began when the defendant left a fine French family and went to live in an area of the city where the morals of the inhabitants left much to be desired. The magistrate relented but warned the prosecutor to establish his pattern a little more objectively.
The solicitor thanked the court and went on. “Monsieur Soulas, you say the defendant—after he moved out—came to your house every Sunday to enjoy a pleasant dinner and a romp with the children. Is that correct?”
“Yes, of course. Although the children were a little too old to romp with. You understand how it is with children. They grow up.” René laughed, but it was a tentative laugh. “He especially enjoyed my dear wife’s dinners—he always ate two helpings of everything—and we would have a nice talk and often a stroll.”
“Never missed a Sunday?”
René again thought for a moment. He didn’t want to answer. He was under oath to God, an oath he took very seriously.
“Isn’t it true that he stopped coming to Sunday dinner some two months before the incident he is being tried for?”
“Because of his job. To work in a soap factory is very taxing. Often he was too tired.”
“I understand, monsieur. So he quit coming to Sunday dinner because his job made him tired.”
“Yes.”
“But not too tired to satisfy himself with the young prostitute every Saturday night. Doesn’t that strike you as an insult to your hospitality, Monsieur Soulas?”
René looked up to the balcony. He could just see Madeleine s shoulders and head above the balustrade. She sat rigidly with little expression, and René realized then that their lives would not be the same again. They would never again be so trusting.
“He is a man,” he said glumly.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Martin St-Cyr’s column, “La Vie de Marseille,” normally came out twice weekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays, but since the trial began it had appeared every day, under such headings as “A Strange Justice,” “The Forgotten Flag,” and “Innocent in the Dock?” He railed against a justice system that seemed to have been imported from Paris and had little to do with the values and traditions of the Marseillais. He wrote of the shameless trampling of the tricolore that had been proudly raised over the Bastille by bloody but unbowed peasants and workers. He accused politicians of failing in their duty to protect the citizenry by appointing to office mediocre men whose sole attribute was slavery to a corrupt system.
But he was at his most deadly in portraying Charging Elk as a victim of not only the district court but of the American and French governments. He noted that the only American to testify was an obscure solicitor who toiled in the bowels of the consulate and seemed not to have seen the light of day around the Old Port. He professed to know nothing of the Charging Elk affair, except that the American government was investigating. Meanwhile, the only official who knew anything about the affair, former vice-consul Franklin Bell, had been sent packing to America, far beyond the reach of the court.
As for the French government, it had become so enmeshed in its medieval bureaucracy that it had done absolutely nothing to help the poor savage find his way home four long years ago. This was a crime that needn’t have been committed; indeed, should never have occurred in anyone’s wildest imaginings. The savage, Charging Elk, should long have been back in America “riding gaily across the plains of his beloved Dakota, hunting and fishing with his comrades, or perhaps married to a comely squaw and settled into a productive life of raising papooses and corn. Who is to blame for the murder of Breteuil, the master planner of his own fate? And who is to blame for the inevitable execution of the savage? Consider, citizens of Marseille! Raise your voices!”
Charging Elk sat in the black police wagon, which was carrying him back to the jail in the Préfecture, and listened to the voices in the street. He had made this journey for three weeks now and it always depressed him. He would have to give up his suit for the gray prisoner’s uniform. He would be locked away in the small cell with the high window. And he would be fed the sour soup with the stringy green things and the dry bread which disintegrated into hard crumbs when he bit into it.
He knew the end was near. He could hear it in the voices in the courtroom; he could tell by the harshness in the red-robed judge’s voice as he constantly interrupted Charging Elk’
s advocate to scold him for one thing or another. During a break, his advocate climbed the small curving stairs to the prisoner’s dock to ask Charging Elk if he could think of anything to say that might be of help. He had a right to speak and would be asked to speak shortly. The advocate’s narrow face gleamed with a pasty glaze of sweat, and his eyes were hollow with frustration. Charging Elk could almost see through the skin to the bony structure of the advocate’s skull, and it disconcerted him. He felt as though he were looking into the face of his own impending death. He answered in a voice that was at once calm and unfamiliar. “I would like to say something to the big men,” he said, gesturing with his head to the front of the courtroom.
That had been the day before, but so far he hadn’t been asked to speak. Now he leaned forward and looked out one of the windows. There was one on each side of the wagon and they were barely twenty centimeters square. The first week of the trial, he had looked forward to the ride through the streets of Marseille. He saw familiar buildings, a few men and women in the streets, shop windows full of suits and dresses and cooking pans and maritime equipment, dogs, wagons and carriages, horses of all types, from smart matched sets of blacks or whites to lumbering beasts who pulled their burdens with their heads down and eyes closed. At first, these sights had excited him, but now he mostly dozed in the hot, nearly airless confinement of the rolling box.
Perhaps it was the voices that had entered his consciousness—he had almost never heard voices before, certainly none this loud and insistent—but he leaned forward to look out the window. And he saw several people lining the street. Some were well dressed but most seemed to be workers and even immigrants in shirtsleeves and suspenders, the women in shabby dresses and soiled aprons. Many of them carried umbrellas against the burning sun; most wore hats or bonnets; some were bareheaded. The voices seemed to be shouting the same thing, a kind of angry chant that he couldn’t make out. But he almost grasped what was happening. He had seen demonstrations several times before, and he thought the police wagon had been caught in the middle of a protest against higher taxes or low wages or some new restriction. But then he saw a placard raised above the heads of a knot of protesters, and his jaw dropped. He kneeled on the bench to get a better look, and there it was—his name, just as Mathias had taught him to draw it: CHARGING ELK LIBRE! He crossed the short distance to the other window, grazing his head on the low ceiling, but he didn’t notice. There were even more people on this side of the street, as it was in the shade. And he saw more placards, some with his name, others with other words that he did not know.
A young man in a collarless shirt and bright yellow straw cap broke loose from the crowd and ran alongside the wagon. He pointed at Charging Elk’s face, or that portion of his face that was visible, and shouted back at the crowd. Suddenly they too pointed and clapped and shouted his name and “Vive!” and “Libre!” The placards bobbed above their heads, and Charging Elk grew dizzy from trying to see so much through the little window. He lurched to the back when the wagon abruptly picked up speed, and by the time he got back to the window, there were only a few people in the street and no placards. And when the wagon turned into the service entrance to the Prefecture, he heard only a slight buzzing in his head and he knew he was in danger of passing out from the heat. Still, he had heard them—Vive!Libre! Charging Elk!—and he tried to think what it all might mean.
Martin St-Cyr had watched the demonstration with a great deal of satisfaction. Although there were only a few gendarmes present and no threat of violence, the anger and self-righteousness reminded him of his student days in Grenoble. The daily rallies and marches that took the students and workers from the university to Place St-André, to the Palais de Justice, came back to him with a fuzzy warmth that obscured the fear and panic he felt when the gendarmes waded into the crowd with their truncheons swinging. But he did remember looking out from the safety of the Palais and seeing his fellows stagger away, their hands holding their bloodied heads, or lying in the street, moaning and twitching. He was confident this demonstration (or, he hoped, series of demonstrations) wouldn’t come to that, but one could never be certain. The riots in Grenoble had started out with such boisterous but peaceable intentions.
St-Cyr’s columns had created a sensation in the streets. Everywhere he went, people were talking about the trial, and it was true that the great majority had the opinion that the Peau-Rouge was being tried for a crime that was not rightfully his own. The crime happened before the killing when the invert performed his nefarious act. And the girl, this Marie What s-her-name, should be locked up for her role in the deception. Too bad the savage hadn’t done her in too.
Although St-Cyr had been pleased at this reaction, nothing much was happening. The people stood in markets or sat in cafés and restaurants and talked about the scandal as though it were too exotic to be a part of their lives. He heard time and time again a man or a woman, with a knowing shrug, say, “But that is what happens down there,” meaning the waterfront with all of its foreigners and thugs and whorehouses and American bars, which was not the same Marseille they lived in.
Three days before the first demonstration, St-Cyr had decided to get involved in more than a journalistic way. The time was ripe to organize something that would shake the city fathers to their well-polished boots. Some months earlier he had interviewed three students from the Faculté des Sciences et Techniques who had led a series of demonstrations against the Centre Universitaire for firing a professor for his socialist views. The students’ fervor and his own column had not dissuaded the university from its intent, but St-Cyr had been impressed with the young anarchists. So he had tracked them down. They had been expelled from university for the rest of the year but they were popular troublemakers and still met at the Café Belfleur on Rue de Crimée, where he had interviewed them before. And they were more than interested in the cause of the savage, Charging Elk. They had led small demonstrations protesting the exploitation of the Algerians, but the persecution of “the vanishing American” (as St-Cyr himself termed the plight of the American Indian) was more than they could bear. They began immediately to make plans, to suggest names of the union leaders, the socialists, the radical Catholics, their university comrades, even immigrant leaders, who could use the rally to protest the treatment of immigrants in France. By the time St-Cyr caught a hansom cab back downtown, he was full of high hopes and more than a little impressed with his own behind-the-scene machinations.
And the protests had come off. The crowd increased day by day, from less than a hundred to six to eight hundred, which completely filled Place Montyon beside the Palais de Justice. The leaders took turns making speeches, not all of them protesting the injustice done to Charging Elk, but all containing the same object of protest: government. The French government, the American government, the government of Marseille and the Midi. Most speeches blasted the corrupt politicians who looked the other way or actually facilitated the exploitation of the workers and immigrants by business interests.
Songs were sung—Provençal songs about bravery, loyalty, and independence. At least twice a day “La Marseillaise” was sung in the proper fighting spirit of the Revolution. Even the great poet Frédéric Mistral gave a speech about the pride of the Provençal people and the necessity to speak their native tongue to ensure the survival of their culture. He ignored the plight of Charging Elk and the other immigrants. And in fact, while the crowd listened with patience and even awe, the small, white-haired poet seemed strangely out of place among the protesters. Nevertheless, St-Cyr made him the hero of his next day s column, portraying him as the fiery patron saint of the Félibrige, a movement to preserve the Provençal language and traditions against a “cold, grasping French government, which had on more than one occasion threatened him with silence . . . and still he sings the songs of the people, undaunted, fearless in the face of the puppet-politicians who would still the tongue of Provence’s—and yes, France’s—greatest poet by any desperate means possible.”
/> St-Cyr was not satisfied with this column. He had tried to associate the poet with the Indian, but it was next to impossible. The man sounded more like an academician than an activist. He apparently had no interest in the cause at hand and certainly no interest in playing to the crowd. But the crowd was there, and that was the important thing. With a few deft strokes of the pen, St-Cyr had made it seem that the poet was as outraged at the proceedings inside the courtroom as all the citizens of Marseille.
But things were not going well for Charging Elk and his advocate. After the first demonstration the chief magistrate had ordered the windows closed and the drapes drawn. And while the sounds were not completely muffled—for instance, “La Marseillaise” almost raised the spectators to their feet—the rest became a dull background noise, interrupted briefly by shouts and applause.
Of course, everybody in the courtroom knew what was going on. Except for the jurors, they read the newspapers every day. And when court adjourned for the day, the spectators rushed outside to stand among the demonstrators as they waited for the black police wagon to begin its journey back to the Préfecture. And when they saw it, they cheered as loudly as anyone. The jurors themselves were kept informed by the bailiff, who swore them to secrecy.
But the protests only seemed to make the magistrates irritable and seemingly anxious to get to the closing arguments. Charging Elk did get a chance to speak, but he made a poor job of it—at least in French. The advocate had coached him in the ready room, appealing to him to admit his guilt but explain that it was an impulsive act in response to the terrible act being committed on him. Above all, he said, ask for the court’s mercy.