Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment

by D. W. Buffa

  No one had ever asked me that before. I searched his eyes, wondering if it was just curiosity or if there was something else behind his question.

  “No, I haven’t. But, then, I only meet the ones who have been caught. Cesare Borgia, if I remember correctly, died in his bed.”

  Orsini’s eyes flared open and then narrowed down until he was looking at me from behind half-shut lids. “He was the unusual case, though I think not unique in this respect. I believe, Mr.

  Antonelli, that there are always three kinds of people: those who obey the law; those who break it and are punished; and those, like a Borgia, who follow a law all their own and try to impose it on others.” After a brief pause, he added, “By the way, the Borgias liked knives. They do their work in silence.”

  The lights dimmed and static noise ripped through the ballroom as someone switched on a microphone.

  If Jeffries had died in his sleep of natural causes, another judge would have been the most likely candidate to extol his virtues and ignore his vices in a public tribute. The manner of his death had brought him a posthumous fame, and instead of someone who had known him, the governor had seized on the chance to honor the memory of a man he was not certain he had ever actually met.

  William Jackson Collins had won election to a first term in a race so close that only after a recount was the result made official. Two years later nearly everyone thought he was unbeatable.

  He never told the truth and he did not seem to mind that even those who agreed with him thought he was a liar. He gave his word to anyone who asked for it and then, when he broke it, explained it all away with distinctions so difficult to follow that it was easier just to forget about it. Then he would do it all over again, and no matter how many times he had lied to you before, when he looked at you with those large round boyish eyes, you just knew that this time he was telling you the truth. Deep down, however, you would have been disappointed if he had, because every instinct told you that he had only lied to you in the first place because he could not bring himself to say anything that might lose you as a friend. Everyone who knew him expected him to seek higher office.

  When he rose to speak, Collins did what every politician does, the same ritual litany which, one way or the other, tells an audience how great they are and how glad he is to be there. I glanced at my watch, wishing he would speed it up. With a gracious, deferential smile, he nodded toward Jeffries’s widow, sitting three places down the dais, and made the obligatory remarks about her loss. By the earnest expression on his face it was a loss which had been felt by no one more than himself.

  I slipped my shirt cuff away from my watch, decided it must have stopped, and started to wind it before I remembered it was a quartz. When I looked up, Collins was staring down at the podium. The shy, bashful smile had dissolved. He raised his eyes and stood straight up. His head began to move slowly from side to side, taking in the crowd. He began to speak, stabbing the air for emphasis, his voice rising and falling in a mesmerizing staccato. The murder of Calvin Jeffries was more than the murder of a single human being, bad as that was. It was more than the murder of a distinguished judge. It was nothing less than the attempted murder of reason itself. The law was the anchor of civilization, the only thing that separated us from the worst kind of barbarism, the only thing that kept us safe and kept us free.

  The law protected us all, and we all had a moral obligation to protect the law.

  I looked around the ballroom. Every face was lifted toward Collins, every eye fixed on him, as he led them from one emotion to another, building on their excitement until they had to explode. At the end, when it was over, he stood there, a triumphant smile on his face, waving into the tumultuous darkness, the center of every thought and every feeling. He had given a speech about the law and about reason, and had for the moment deprived his audience of their senses. I watched the way he kept waving at the crowd as if he could not bear the thought of being left alone without them. Suddenly I remembered the last time I had seen eyes burn with so much fire. It was when I found Elliott Winston waiting for me, at the state hospital, locked in a catatonic gaze.

  The end of the governor’s speech was the end of the evening.

  As the house lights went on, the vast ballroom swarmed with noise. As I was saying goodbye to Harper, I glanced across at the podium where a crowd had gathered around the governor. Jeffries’s widow was standing at his side. I had forgotten about the letter. It was the only thing Elliott had asked me to do, and it was still sitting in the desk drawer where I had put it. I promised myself to take care of it first thing Monday morning.

  Lisa Laughlin touched my arm. “It was nice to see you, after all these years. By the way,” she added, as she turned to go, “Jennifer moved back a few months ago.” She said something else, but the crowd had swept her too far away and I could not hear what it was.

  Outside, a damp gray mist hung in the cool night air. A long line of limousines jammed the street in front of the hotel. Women in slinky evening gowns that trailed below their fashionable furs chattered with each other, or stood alone, distant and impassive, while they waited for their rides. Harried-looking men were waving their arms and yelling at their drivers, as if that would make things move faster. In the middle of it all, his head held high, a whistle firmly between his teeth, a man was holding up one hand to force cars to stop, while he used the other to wave the traffic through. Wearing a frayed, filthy brown coat, and tattered, moth-holed woolen gloves, his greasy hair flew in all directions as, obliv-ious of everything else, he listened intently to the voice inside his head telling him what to do.

  I stood at the edge of the sidewalk, the collar of my blue cash-mere topcoat pulled close to my throat, watching this strange apparition with its empty eyes and mechanical motions. Over and over again, the screeching whistle, the arm thrust out, the other arm moving underneath it in a wide sweeping curve. Had he been dressed in a police officer’s uniform, everyone would have done exactly as he ordered and been grateful he was there. Dressed as he was, they simply looked away, as if, in a parody of his own madness, by not seeing him he would somehow cease to exist.

  The cold cut through me like a knife. I stuffed my hands into the overcoat pockets and walked away. I had left my car in the garage at my office, a few blocks away. After I passed the courthouse, I cut diagonally across the narrow park on the other side.

  Reflected through the cold, dense air, the dim nighttime lights from the surrounding buildings covered it with an ash white haze.

  I felt a shooting pain in my left leg and had to stop. It had not bothered me for years, and now it seemed to bother me all the time. A few seconds later and the pain had gone. I tested the leg a few careful steps, and then, just as I started to resume my normal pace, I saw them, looming out of the mist just in front of me. Two men with matted gray hair and tangled gray beards, knit caps pulled down over their ears, one in front and one behind a metal shopping cart, both of them staring straight ahead, like the lookout and the pilot of a sailing ship gliding silently through the fog-shrouded sea, were stopped next to a trash can. Without a word, without a gesture, the one in back waited while the one in front lifted the lid and reached inside. He removed a single aluminum can, placed it on the concrete walkway, straightened up, pulled the cart forward, and stopped again. Without a word, without a glance, the other one, the shadow of the first, placed his foot on the can and crushed it flat. Bending down, he picked it up and placed it inside the basket. There was no wasted motion, no loss of time; they were the perfect expression of the soul-less efficiency that had, at the end, left these two lost survivors to wander through the city, searching for a few cents’ worth of waste. I watched them as they moved on to the next trash can, where they repeated the same silent motions. Then I lost them as they slipped away into the vast impenetrable night.

  I rode the elevator down to the underground garage where I had left my car. Harsh yellow overhead light illuminated the center pavement and projected the shadow of any
thing that moved on the cold concrete walls. With the smell of damp cement in my nostrils, I listened to my footsteps echo back at me, a sharp staccato noise. Or was it an echo? I stopped, stood still, listening to the echo fade away. Nothing. I took another step, and stopped again. There seemed to be a second sound, following close upon the first. I turned around, searching the distance behind me. There was no one there, at least no one I could see. I moved quickly to my car and locked it from the inside as I started the engine. I glanced in the rearview mirror and began to back out.

  As I put the car into drive, I glanced again into the mirror. Two wild malevolent eyes were staring at me. Someone was in the back seat, directly behind me. My head snapped around. It was empty. They were behind the car, not in it. I shoved my foot down on the accelerator, grabbed the wheel with both hands, and took one last look in the rearview mirror. There was nothing; the garage was empty. But someone had been there, I was sure of it.

  I had seen him with my own eyes.

  By the time I drove out onto the street, I was not sure what I had seen, and began to think I had just imagined the whole thing. The mind does strange things while the sun still sleeps.

  Ten

  _______

  It was nearly ten o’clock before I opened my eyes. For a few minutes I lay there wondering if I could fall back to sleep. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the bathroom. I stood in front of the toilet, staring down at the bowl, watching the ripples spread in the water until I was finished. Then I stepped into the shower and slowly changed the water temperature from hot to warm to as cold as I could stand it. When I was younger and drank too much, I did it to get sober; now I just did it to force myself to wake up.

  I threw on a dark blue T-shirt and a pair of jeans and walked barefoot to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. I was almost finished with the Sunday paper when the doorbell rang. No one had buzzed from the gate at the bottom of the drive, and I was not expecting anyone. Annoyed at the intrusion, I opened the door.

  “Yes?” I demanded irritably.

  A woman, tall, willowy, with black hair and wide sloping eyes, was standing in front of me. She was wearing a yellow dress, with a white sweater thrown around her shoulders. Her chin was tilted back at an angle, and a half-mocking smile played on her mouth.

  I knew that look and, though it must in some ways have changed in all the years that had passed, I knew that face.

  “Yes?” I asked again, starting to smile.

  “Have you forgotten me, Joey?” she said, teasing me with her eyes. She pronounced my name in a soft, low, lilting voice, as if she did not want to let go. It was the same way she had said it on her front porch, sometime after midnight about a hundred years before, when we were both just kids and I was in love with her the way I would never be in love with anyone again.

  We looked at each other, not quite certain what to say. Her gaze drifted away, and all her bright, shiny confidence seemed ready to turn and run. I put my arm around her waist and her arm encircled my neck, and for a minute we clung to each other.

  “I saw your sister last night, and she told me that …”

  “She called me late last night,” Jennifer explained as we stepped back from each other. “A friend of hers, someone she works with—

  Harper something—told her where you lived.”

  “Come in, come in,” I said, stepping aside.

  “How did you get through the gate?” I asked as she looked around the living room.

  “It was wide open.”

  Then I remembered. “I forgot to lock it last night when I got home.”

  It was a lie. I had not forgotten. I did not lock it because, afraid of what might be lurking in the shadows, I did not want to get out of the car. I had not seen her in years and I still did not want her to know that I was capable of courage only if I thought someone was watching.

  She walked around the living room as if she had been there before and was making certain that everything was still the way she remembered it. With her hand trailing behind her, barely touching the spines of the books that lined the shelves, she moved the length of the bookcase that covered one wall. When she reached the end, she looked back.

  “Remember I told you that you were too serious for me? You always knew exactly what you wanted to do. You always had such great plans. I didn’t think much beyond the next weekend.” She laughed, softly, and her mouth twisted down at the corners, tender and sad. “Maybe if I had been more like you, things would have been different.”

  As soon as she said it, she shook her head, embarrassed, and laughed again. “I didn’t come here to complain about my life.

  Honest. I came to ask if you’d like to go for a ride. Like old times,” she added.

  It would not have occurred to me to say no, but I felt somehow awkward and stupid, like someone who does not know quite how they are supposed to act. I could not know how much she had changed, and I could only wonder how different I was from the way she must have remembered me.

  “Where would you like to go?” I asked, sounding stiff and formal and every bit the pompous fool.

  She looked at me again with that same half-mocking smile, that look that had always told me that she knew more about me than I ever would myself.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No,” I admitted with a laugh. “Doesn’t matter at all.”

  I changed as quickly as I could into a pair of slacks and an ox-ford shirt. When I came back downstairs she had left the living room and found her way into the library. She was standing on her tiptoes, gazing up at a row of books on the top shelf bound in green and gold leather.

  “The collected works of Francis Bacon,” she said when she became aware of my presence. “Have you really read all of this?”

  I leaned against the door, my arms folded across my chest, and shook my head. “Not only have I not read them, they don’t really even belong to me. They were given to me, along with the house.

  A judge, the kindest, most intelligent man I ever knew, left it to me when he died. I think he thought I might be able to learn something.”

  She smiled at me from across the room. “And have you—

  learned anything?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Marry the first girl you fall in love with. Nothing is ever as good as that.”

  Outside, on the front steps of the porch, she let her eye wander across the green grass lawn and the flower gardens filled with azaleas and beyond that to a stand of fir trees at the fence.

  “Reminds me of that song,” she said, as she stood next to her car, her hand on the door. She wrinkled her nose and tossed her head. “The fool who lives on the hill.”

  “The old fool who lives on the hill,” I said as I climbed into her shiny black Porsche convertible.

  “Nice car,” I remarked with deliberate understatement.

  She reached into the console between the red leather seats and pulled out a pair of dark glasses. “Married badly, divorced well,”

  she remarked as she put them on.

  She started the engine, then turned to me, an innocent mischievous smile on her face, as she unfastened the ribbon with which she had tied her hair. “Ready?”

  Leaning against the passenger door, my arms folded loosely, I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  As soon as I said it, she ducked her head, jammed her foot down on the accelerator, and threw it into gear. I grabbed the side of the seat with one hand and braced myself against the dashboard with the other. The car hurtled down the drive and onto the street. Her long black hair was flying back around her face and over her shoulders, the wind whipping it into long twisted tangles. Her eyes were fastened on the road in front of her. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the gearshift knob. Darting in and out of traffic without bothering to signal or even to look, she left it to everyone else to get out of the way.

  Leaning toward her, I shouted above the whining roar of the engine, “You’re still the worst d
river I’ve ever seen!”

  She slid the dark glasses down to the tip of her nose and glanced across at me. “You forget,” she yelled back, “I used to drive like this!” Clutching the wheel with both hands, she closed her eyes and laughed as if it was the most fun she had had in years.

  I grabbed the wheel away from her and held it steady. The speedometer was edging past ninety. “I was only kidding. You were always a great driver.”

  “Remember the MG? British racing green? You didn’t mind the way I drove then.”

  “When I was eighteen I thought I’d live forever.” I started to laugh. “Of course in those days I thought forever meant forty-five at the outside.”

  “I liked that MG,” she said, looking straight ahead, her head held high. “It was safe.” She darted her eyes at me and then looked back at the road. “It didn’t have a back seat.”

  We drove to the coast and followed the highway south as it curved through dark forested headlands and high rocky cliffs beaten smooth by the sea. We crawled through oceanside towns, waiting at crosswalks for the tourists and day-trippers eager to see the huckster shops filled with candy and myrtlewood carvings or to visit the coffee shops and ice cream parlors on the other side of the street. The April sun beat down through the cloudless sky, drying against our skin the cool salt air. As we drove on, I closed my eyes and slouched down until my head was resting against the top of the seat. The breeze that blew by us had a chill to it, but the sun was warm on my face and I felt as drowsy as the boy I had once been, when I slept with a blanket pulled up under my chin while my feet stuck out the other end.

  We barely spoke. We had not even talked about where we were going. I could not count the number of times we had come here, to the coast, on a weekend day, stopping wherever we felt like it, and seldom the same place twice. We had always come in her car, and Jennifer always drove. She loved it and never got tired of it, the sheer, hypnotic thrill of taking a car high around a corner and then flat out through a straight stretch of road. I used to watch her, the constant, fluid motion of her hands and arms and wrists, the fixed determined look in her eyes, the way she laughed when she had taken the machine right to the edge of what it could do. In the shared silence of those day-long drives, I had felt closer to her than I had ever felt to anyone before, or ever felt again.