by Fritz Leiber
Altogether, however, it was a bad afternoon, and that night in my bedroom the face came again. I knew it was he, though the room was dark and I could not see him clearly. He had become so like as that to a material being!
“You have done well!” he began. “But, to make one small criticism, you must learn not to blush so easily. When your father commended your loyalty you reddened and stammered till, if you had not been among friends, suspicion might have been roused.”
“My confusion only lasted a moment,” I defended. Then I remembered. “You go!” I said. “What do I want of you and your criticisms or advice? You have brought me enough unhappiness. I am a sneak and a criminal, and all through you!”
“Ingratitude is the only real crime,” he retorted sententiously. “Always be grateful, and show it! You have brought unhappiness on yourself, and it is I who point the way out. So far you have followed my advice. Why turn on me now?”
“Liar!” I fairly hissed. “If you can read my thoughts, you know that I have planned otherwise than you would have me! I am doing as Nils wished without regard to you, and not for the sake of myself. And let me tell you this! If there arises the slightest prospect that my friend will not be cleared, I shall confess. Tomorrow will decide it. If things go badly for him at the inquest, my people will have to suffer. The shame and loss he is trying to save them from would be nothing, then, to the shame involved by silence!”
Had the face possessed shoulders, I know he would have shrugged them.
“You are wrong, but we need not discuss that. I tell you in advance that your friend will be held for willful murder. Did you know quite all that I know, you would not hope for a different indictment.”
The strings of my heart contracted. I passed a breathless moment of realization. Then:
“Tomorrow I confess!” I said finally.
“Tomorrow you will choose a lawyer for your friend, and begin the work which will surely achieve his release.”
“You do not know that! You have admitted that you are capable of mistakes.”
“Not in a case of this kind. I possess a wide knowledge of facts which enables me to be very sure that your friend will get his release. I am your unswerving ally. And remember that I have not only wisdom, but some power.”
“Oh, you are—leave me!” I cried aloud. “In God’s name, go!”
The faintly-seen oval of his smooth face faded, though more slowly than in the cell at the station-house.
I heard a soft swish of slippered feet in the hall. Someone rapped lightly and opened my door.
“Clay, dear,” said my mother, “did you call? Are you ill?”
“No. I had a bad dream and awoke crying out because of it.”
“One can’t wonder at that.” She came and sat on the edge of my bed. “Such an awful thing for you to be involved in! Please, dear son, keep to your own class after this. Trouble always, comes of mingling with queer Bohemian people who have no standards, or—or morals.”
“Nils Berquist has the highest standard of any man I know!” I was fiercely defensive.
There was a pause of silence. Then in the dark she leaned and kissed my forehead. “You are so like him!” she murmured.
I groaned. “If only that were true!”
“But you are. With those blue, clear eyes of his, that saw only beauty and love. He would never hear a word against a friend.”
“Mother! You meant that I am like—”
“Your uncle, yes. And in some strange way I feel sure that his guarding influence is really about us. Why, when I came into the room just now I had the queerest feeling—as if it were a room in a dream, or—no, I can’t convey the feeling in words. But the sense of his presence was in it. I do truly believe that he has returned to guard us in the midst of so much trouble. At least, it would be like him. Dear, faithful, loving, lovable Serapion!”
CHAPTER XV.
BAD DAYS.
But had my desired obsession, or familiar, or haunting ghost really desired to help, he might have warned me definitely of Sabina Cassel.
Alicia did not appear at the inquest. She was ill and under a physician’s care. Her semi-conscious state as reported by him prevented even the taking of a deposition.
I did not, however, stand alone as star witness before the coroner’s jury. Sabina Cassel, Mrs. Moore’s old colored “Mammy” whom she had brought north with her from Virginia, shared and rather more than shared the honors with me.
They had taken pains that Nils and I should not meet. He was kept rigorously incommunicado till the inquest, no one, save the police and the district attorney, having access to him. At the inquest I caught only a glimpse of him, when he was led out past where I awaited my turn before the jury. Involuntarily I sprang up, only to be caught by a constable’s hand, while Nils was hustled on out. As he went, he threw me a glance that was a burning, dictatorial command.
I obeyed it. I told the jury exactly that story which Nils’s letter had outlined for us both. There was tempered steel in Berquist. I could be sure that no long-drawn torment of inquisition could make him vary a hairs-breadth from the line he had set for us to follow.
In my testimony, which preceded Sabina’s, I explained what Nils had objected to my interest in spiritualism, fostered by a single previous visit to the Moores’ place. That he wished me to leave the house with him, and that Alicia also had seemed set against my remaining. That an argument ensued, at the height of which Moore became very angry and excited, shouted: “I’ll settle with you, once for all!” and came around the table toward Berquist.
“He grasped Berquist’s arm,” I said. “When my friend tried to free himself, Moore snatched the—the file from the table. I saw Berquist seize Moore’s wrist. They struggled a moment, and then Moore staggered away with his hands to his face. Then—he fell down. Berquist called to me, and—No, I had not tried to interfere. It all happened too quickly. There wasn’t time. After Berquist wrenched the file from Moore’s hand I don’t believe he struck at Moore. I think the file was driven into his eye by accident.”
That surmise, of course, was struck from the record; but I had said it, at least, and hoped it impressed the jury.
“Afterward, the—the sight of blood and the suddenness of it all turned me sick—no, my recollections were clear up to that time.”
And so forth. It was a straight story. I knew it agreed to a hair with Nils’s confession.
What I did not, could not know, was that it varied in one essential detail from an entirely different confession—a confession made by a person whom we had not considered as an even possible eyewitness, and whose very existence I, at least, had forgotten.
Given that a second eyewitness existed, one would have supposed that the disagreement would have been over the slayer’s identity. It was not. By a curious trick of fate, Sabina Cassel, Alicia’s old colored maid, did undoubtedly see me strike Moore down, and yet, not through such a supernormal illusion as caused me to kill Moore, but in a perfectly natural manner, she had confused Berquist’s identity with mine. She related as having been done by Berquist that which had been done by me.
In one detail only did Sabina’s testimony conflict with ours, but that was the kind of detail which would hang a man, if its truth were established.
She had seen me—Berquist by her own account—snatch the file from the table and strike Moore, and she had seen me do it on no further provocation than the laying of Moore’s hand on my arm.
The Fifth Presence was right when he foretold that Nils would be indicted.
And yet, though things had indeed gone ill for Nils at the inquest, I did not at once carry out my expressed intention and substitute myself for him as defendant.
I didn’t wish to die, nor spend years in prison. I wanted to live and have a decent, straight, pleasant future ahead, such as I
had been brought up to expect as a right. It seemed to me that just one way lay open. Though Nils was now entirely at my mercy, only his untrammeled acquittal would give me the moral freedom to keep silent. For that a first-class lawyer was a sine qua non.
Berquist was practically penniless, and the Barbour exchequer in not much better state. Here again, however, friendship came to the fore in a curiously impressive manner. For the sake of an old acquaintance and some ancient friendly claim that my father had on him, none other than Helidore Marx took Berquist’s case. I mean Helidore Marx, of Marx, Marx & Orlow, who could have termed himself Marx the Famous and not lied.
I remember my first interview with him after dad had—to me almost incredibly—persuaded him into alliance. My first impression was of a mild-looking, smallish man, with a scrubby mustache. He had hurt the top of his bald head in some way, so that it was crossed with a fair-sized hillock of adhesive plaster. I thought that added to his insignificant appearance; but he had the brightest, softly brown eyes I have ever seen, and after the first few minutes I was afraid of him.
I was afraid that I would tell him too much.
My confidence, however, proved not the easily uprooted kind of a common criminal, and for Nils the acquisition of this famous, insignificant looking lawyer gave me the only real hope of assurance I had through those bad days.
“Your friend,” Marx had said to me, “is a rather wonderful young man, Barbour. I can’t blame you for being troubled. He has the kind of intelligence that would make a legal genius of him, if he had turned his efforts in that direction. A wonderful intelligence—and all lost in a maze of impractical theorizing and the sort of dreams that can’t come true so long as men are men, and women are women, God help us all! He shan’t go to the chair, nor prison, either. He’s my man, my case, and—yes, I’ll say, my friend, though I don’t run to sudden enthusiasms. Leave Berquist to me!”
Evidently, Marx’s consultations with his “case” had not been kept within strictly professional bounds. I smiled involuntarily. I could picture that long dark face of Nils lighting to alert interest as he discovered that Marx was not merely the lawyer who might save him from martyrdom, but also a thinking man. He must have brought out a side of the little man that was kept carefully submerged at ordinary times. I am sure that few people had seen Helidore Marx inclined to dilatory wanderings in philosophy, such as Nils loved.
But I went out with a lighter heart and more optimism than I had carried in some time. Marx, with his “my man, my case—my friend!” had instilled a confidence which remained with me all that day.
I had returned to the bank, for though I walked in the Valley of the Shadow, while I could walk I must work.
So Mr. Terne had me back again, and it was a very good thing that I had Mr. Terne to go back to. Not many men would have put up with the abstracted attention my work received, nor patiently picked up the slack of details I let go by me.
His patience had a characteristic reason behind it, which I was sure of from the minute he told me about poor Van.
The latter, it seemed, had really gone the step too far with his father in the affair of Mr. Terne’s four hundred. Vansittart, Sr., would let no one speak of his son to him after that day. Everyone in the bank, however, knew that he had quarreled with him, disowned him, and that Van, in a fit of temper, had refused the offer of a last money settlement—a couple of thousand only, it was said—flung out of the Colossus, and walked off, leaving the gray roadster forlorn by the curb.
No one knew where Van had gone after that. He had simply vanished, saying no goodbyes, and taking nothing with him but the clothes he wore.
Mr. Terne felt guilty because it was his complaint which had caused the final rupture. He liked me, anyway, but having, as he believed, ruined Van he showed an added consideration for me which developed into an almost absurd tenderness for my feelings.
He needed that, if I was to be kept on the tracks at all those days. I was nervous as a cat, and ready to jump at the creak of a door.
Roberta would watch me with wide, troubled eyes, and because a question was in them I would grow irritable and fling off and leave her with almost brutal abruptness. And always she forgave me—till I came near wishing she would forgive less easily.
Cathy resented my new irritability with the merciless justice of a sister; mother endured my anxiety for Nils only because it proved I was like “dear Serapion,” and dad harped on his pride in me for “standing by” till I really dreaded to go near him.
As for the Fifth Presence, he remained detestably faithful. Several times I explained to him that if Nils were not cleared I intended to confess. When he only continued to smile, I ceased talking to him.
He still came, however, and on the very night before the trial opened, the last thing of which I was conscious, dropping asleep, was his smooth, persuasive, hateful, silent voice. As ever, it was expressing the platitudinous—and always subtly evil—advice to which habit had so accustomed me that it had grown very hard indeed to distinguish his speech from my thoughts!
CHAPTER XVI.
SABINA’S TESTIMONY.
When a murderer—for I named myself that—is called to confront across some thirty feet of courtroom the innocent man standing trial in his stead, he needs all his nerve and a bit more to keep steady under the questioning of even a friendly and considerate counsel.
In fact, I was strangely more afraid of Marx than of District Attorney Clemens. I might, however, spared myself there.
The impaneling of the jury had been a battle-royal between Marx and Clemens, at which I was not present, but which had roused the newspaper men to gloating anticipation of the real battle to follow.
Then Marx—dropped out!
I could hardly believe it when Orlow, his junior associate, met me on the first day of the trial, and broke the news. It proved lamentably true.
By Orlow’s account—he was a fat, clever little Russian, with an unmistakable nose and a tongue that would slip into betraying v’s and p’s—by his account Marx had finished with the talesmen against strict orders from his physician.
“A book hit his head,” explained Orlow. “That was in September. It dropped off a shelf, and the brass corner cut his head—oh, just a leetle bit! But he vas careless. Infection set in, and now there is necrosis of the bone in his skull. To think of it! Vith such prains inside! He will be operated now, and when I vent to see him this morning, he was insensible. And to think of it,” he added with melancholy and unconscious humor, “it vas the Compiled Statutes that may have ruined our Helidore Marx forever! Vell, we must just do as ve can vithout him.”
This was poor consolation. Had it not been for Marx, I told myself, I would never have left Nils Berquist go to trial. Should I allow it to go on now, with our best hope hors de combat?
The second Marx—Helidore’s brother—was in Europe, and Orlow, while brilliant in his fashion, was not a man to impress juries. His genius lay in the hunting out of technical refinements of law, ammunition, as it were, for the batteries which had brought rage to the heart of more than one district attorney.
When he arose presently in court and asked for a delay in proceedings, Clemens’s eye lighted. When Mr. Justice Ballington refused the request—a foregone conclusion, because Marx, admittedly, was in too serious a condition for the delay even to be measured—Clemens lowered his head suddenly. It might have been grief for his adversaries’ misfortune—or, again, it might not.
Where I sat with other witnesses, I was intensely conscious of an absurd, brilliantly-veiled little figure, two chairs behind me.
This was my first glimpse of Alicia, since the night of Berquist’s arrest. Though I knew Marx had been granted at least two interviews with her, me she had resolutely refused to receive.
Now I was relieved to find that her nearness brought no return of the supernormal influ
ence I had suffered before in her vicinity.
She sat stiffly upright, and did not glance once in my direction. Perhaps her “guides” had advised her to don that awful veil of protecting purple for this occasion; or she may have worn, it as a tribute to her husband’s memory. It certainly gave her a more unusual appearance than would a crepe blackness behind which a newly-made widow is wont to hide her grief.
At her side towered the large form of Sabina Cassel.
The trial opened.
One Dr. Frick appeared on the stand, and an elaborate incomprehensibility described in surgical terms the wound which had caused Moore’s death. I saw him handling a small, hideous object—gesturing with it to show exactly how it had been misused to a deadly purpose.
Then for several minutes I didn’t see anything more. Luckily all eyes in the courtroom were on either the doctor or the “murderer.” Nobody was watching me.
The doctor’s demonstration seemed to prove rather conclusively that my “accident” hypothesis was impossible. The file, he showed, could have been driven into the brain only by a direct hard blow.
Dr. Frick was allowed to stand down.
In establishing the offense, Clemens saw fit next to call Alicia herself.
As her mistress arose, Sabina’s massive bulk stirred uneasily, as if she would have followed her to the stand.
At the inquest, the old colored woman’s testimony had done more than cause Nils’s indictment for murder. It had made a public and very popular jest of Alicia’s claim to intercourse with “spirits.” But though, in the first flush, of excitement aver Moore’s death, Sabina had betrayed her, the woman was loyal to her mistress. When a murmur that was almost a titter swept the packed audience outside the rail, Sabina shook her head angrily, muttering to herself.