There’s a nasty smell about having to do it this way – at my age you hate to feel like a kid hiding himself away to read a dirty magazine – but I have no choice. There isn’t a soul on earth outside of the warden at state’s prison and a couple of picked guards there who know I’m the one pulling the switch at an execution, and I intend it to remain that way.
Oh, yes, my son knows now. Well, he’s difficult in some ways, but he’s no fool. If I wasn’t sure he would keep his mouth shut about what I told him, I wouldn’t have told it to him in the first place.
Have I learned anything from those books? At least enough to take a pride in what I’m doing for the state and the way I do it. As far back in history as you want to go there have always been executioners. The day that men first made laws to help keep peace among themselves was the day the first executioner was born. There have always been lawbreakers; there must always be a way of punishing them. It’s as simple as that.
The trouble is that nowadays there are too many people who don’t want it to be as simple as that. I’m no hypocrite, I’m not one of those narrow-minded fools who thinks that every time a man comes up with a generous impulse he’s some kind of crackpot. But he can be mistaken. I’d put most of the people who are against capital punishment in that class. They are fine, high-minded citizens who’ve never in their lives been close enough to a murderer or rapist to smell the evil in him. In fact, they’re so fine and high-minded that they can’t imagine anyone in the world not being like themselves. In that case, they say anybody who commits murder or rape is just a plain, ordinary human being who’s had a bad spell. He’s no criminal, they say, he’s just sick. He doesn’t need the electric chair; all he needs is a kindly old doctor to examine his head and straighten out the kinks in his brain.
In fact, they say there is no such thing as a criminal at all. There are only well people and sick people, and the ones who deserve all your worry and consideration are the sick ones. If they happen to murder or rape a few of the well ones now and then, why, just run for the doctor.
This is the argument from beginning to end, and I’d be the last one to deny that it’s built on honest charity and good intentions. But it’s a mistaken argument. It omits the one fact that matters. When anyone commits murder or rape he is no longer in the human race. A man has a human brain and a God-given soul to control his animal nature. When the animal in him takes control he’s not a human being any more. Then he has to be exterminated the way any animal must be if it goes wild in the middle of helpless people. And my duty is to be the exterminator.
It could be that people just don’t understand the meaning of the word duty any more. I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, God forbid, but when I was a boy things were more straightforward and clear-cut. You learned to tell right from wrong, you learned to do what had to be done, and you didn’t ask questions every step of the way. Or if you had to ask any questions, the ones that mattered were how and when.
Then along came psychology, along came the professors, and the main question was always why. Ask yourself why, why, why about everything you do, and you’ll end up doing nothing. Let a couple of generations go along that way, and you’ll finally have a breed of people who sit around in trees like monkeys, scratching their heads.
Does this sound far-fetched? Well, it isn’t. Life is a complicated thing to live. All his life a man finds himself facing one situation after another, and the way to handle them is to live by the rules. Ask yourself why once too often, and you can find yourself so tangled up that you go under. The show must go on. Why? Women and children first. Why? My country, right or wrong. Why? Never mind your duty. Just keep asking why until it’s too late to do anything about it.
Around the time I first started going to school my father gave me a dog, a collie pup named Rex. A few years later Rex suddenly became unfriendly, the way a dog will sometimes, and then vicious, and then one day he bit my mother when she reached down to pat him.
The day after that I saw my father leaving the house with his hunting gun and with Rex on a leash. It wasn’t the hunting season, so I knew what was going to happen to Rex and I knew why. But it’s forgivable in a boy to ask things that a man should be smart enough not to ask.
‘Where are you taking Rex?’ I asked my father. ‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘I’m taking him out back of town,’ my father said. ‘I’m going to shoot him.’
‘But why?’ I said, and that was when my father let me see that there is only one answer to such a question.
‘Because it has to be done,’ he said.
I never forgot that lesson. It came hard; for a while I hated my father for it, but as I grew up I came to see how right he was. We both knew why the dog had to be killed. Beyond that, all questions would lead nowhere. Why the dog had become vicious, why God had put a dog on earth to be killed this way – these are the questions that you can talk out to the end of time, and while you’re talking about them you still have a vicious dog on your hands.
It is strange to look back and realize now that when the business of the dog happened, and long before it and long after it, my father was an electrocutioner, and I never knew it. Nobody knew it, not even my mother. A few times a year my father would pack his bag and a few tools and go away for a couple of days, but that was all any of us knew. If you asked him where he was going he would simply say he had a job to do out of town. He was not a man you’d ever suspect of philandering or going off on a solitary drunk, so nobody gave it a second thought.
It worked the same way in my case. I found out how well it worked when I finally told my son what I had been doing on those jobs out of town, and that I had gotten the warden’s permission to take him on as an assistant and train him to handle the chair himself when I retired. I could tell from the way he took it that he was as thunderstruck at this as I had been thirty years before when my father had taken me into his confidence.
‘Electrocutioner?’ said my son. ‘An electrocutioner?’
‘Well, there’s no disgrace to it,’ I said. ‘And since it’s got to be done, and somebody has to do it, why not keep it in the family? If you knew anything about it, you’d know it’s a profession that’s often passed down in a family from generation to generation. What’s wrong with a good, sound tradition? If more people believed in tradition you wouldn’t have so many troubles in the world today.’
It was the kind of argument that would have been more than enough to convince me when I was his age. What I hadn’t taken into account was that my son wasn’t like me, much as I wanted him to be. He was a grown man in his own right, but a grown man who had never settled down to his responsibilities. I had always kept closing my eyes to that, I had always seen him the way I wanted to and not the way he was.
When he left college after a year, I said, all right, there are some people who aren’t made for college, I never went there, so what difference does it make. When he went out with one girl after another and could never make up his mind to marrying any of them, I said, well, he’s young, he’s sowing his wild oats, the time will come soon enough when he’s ready to take care of a home and family. When he sat daydreaming in the shop instead of tending to business I never made a fuss about it. I knew when he put his mind to it he was as good an electrician as you could ask for, and in these soft times people are allowed to do a lot more dreaming and a lot less working than they used to.
The truth was that the only thing that mattered to me was being his friend. For all his faults he was a fine-looking boy with a good mind. He wasn’t much for mixing with people, but if he wanted to he could win anyone over. And in the back of my mind all the while he was growing up was the thought that he was the only one who would learn my secret some day, and would share it with me, and make it easier to bear. I’m not secretive by nature. A man like me needs a thought like that to sustain him.
So when the time came to tell him he shook his head and said no. I felt that my legs had been kicked out from under
me. I argued with him and he still said no, and I lost my temper.
‘Are you against capital punishment?’ I asked him. ‘You don’t have to apologize if you are. I’d think all the more of you, if that’s your only reason.’
‘I don’t know if it is,’ he said.
‘Well, you ought to make up your mind one way or the other,’ I told him. ‘I’d hate to think you were like every other hypocrite around here who says it’s all right to condemn a man to the electric chair and all wrong to pull the switch.’
‘Do I have to be the one to pull it?’ he said. ‘Do you?’
‘Somebody has to do it. Somebody always has to do the dirty work for the rest of us. It’s not like the Old Testament days when everybody did it for himself. Do you know how they executed a man in those days? They laid him on the ground tied hand and foot, and everybody around had to heave rocks on him until he was crushed to death. They didn’t invite anybody to stand around and watch. You wouldn’t have had much choice then, would you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. And then because he was as smart as they come and knew how to turn your words against you, he said, ‘After all, I’m not without sin.’
‘Don’t talk like a child,’ I said. ‘You’re without the sin of murder on you or any kind of sin that calls for execution. And if you’re so sure the Bible has all the answers, you might remember that you’re supposed to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘in this case I’ll let you do the rendering.’
I knew then and there from the way he said it and the way he looked at me that it was no use trying to argue with him. The worst of it was knowing that we had somehow moved far apart from each other and would never really be close again. I should have had sense enough to let it go at that. I should have just told him to forget the whole thing and keep his mouth shut about it.
Maybe if I had ever considered the possibility of his saying no, I would have done it. But because I hadn’t considered any such possibility I was caught off balance, I was too much upset to think straight. I will admit it now. It was my own fault that I made an issue of things and led him to ask the one question he should never have asked.
‘I see,’ I told him. ‘It’s the same old story, isn’t it? Let somebody else do it. But if they pull your number out of a hat and you have to serve on a jury and send a man to the chair, that’s all right with you. At least, it’s all right as long as there’s somebody else to do the job that you and the judge and every decent citizen wants done. The shop is where you belong. You can be nice and cozy there, wiring up fixtures and ringing the cash register. I can handle my duties without your help.’
It hurt me to say it. I had never talked like that to him before, and it hurt. The strange thing was that he didn’t seem angry about it; he only looked at me, puzzled.
‘Is that all it is to you?’ he said. ‘A duty?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you get paid for it, don’t you?’
‘I get paid little enough for it.’
He kept looking at me that way. ‘Only a duty?’ he said, and never took his eyes off me. ‘But you enjoy it, don’t you?’
That was the question he asked.
You enjoy it, don’t you? You stand there looking through a peephole in the wall at the chair. In thirty years I have stood there more than a hundred times looking at that chair. The guards bring somebody in. Usually he is in a daze; sometimes he screams, throws himself around and fights. Sometimes it is a woman, and a woman can be as hard to handle as a man when she is led to the chair. Sooner or later, whoever it is is strapped down and the black hood is dropped over his head. Now your hand is on the switch.
The warden signals, and you pull the switch. The current hits the body like a tremendous rush of air suddenly filling it. The body leaps out of the chair with only the straps holding it back. The head jerks, and a curl of smoke comes from it. You release the switch and the body falls back again.
You do it once more, do it a third time to make sure. And whenever your hand presses the switch you can see in your mind what the current is doing to that body and what the face under the hood must look like.
Enjoy it?
That was the question my son asked me. That was what he said to me, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down in me that we all have.
Enjoy it?
But, my God, how could anyone not enjoy it?
The Crime of Ezechiele Coen
Before the disenchantment set in, Noah Freeman lived in a whirl of impressions. The chaotic traffic. The muddy Tiber. The Via Veneto out of Italian movies about la dolce vita. The Fountain of Trevi out of Hollywood. Castel Sant’-Angelo out of Tosca. Rome.
‘Rome?’ Pop had said. ‘But why Rome? Such a foreign place. And so far away.’
True. But to old Pop Freeman, even Rockland County, an hour from New York, was far away, and his two weeks of vacation there every summer an adventure. And, in fact, it was likely that Pop had not been too much surprised at his son’s decision to go journeying afar. After all, this was the son who was going to be a doctor – at the very least a teacher – and who had become, of all things, a policeman.
‘A policeman in the family,’ Pop would muse aloud now and then. ‘A detective with a gun in the family like on TV. My own son. What would Mama say if she ever knew, may she rest in peace?’
But, Noah had to admit, the old man had been right about one thing. Rome was far, far away, not only from New York, but also from the blood-quickening image of it instilled in young Noah Freeman when he was a schoolboy soaking himself in gaudy literature about Spartacus and Caesar and Nero. And the Pensione Alfiara, hidden away in an alley off Via Arenula, was hardly a place to quicken anyone’s blood. It took an ill wind to blow an occasional American tourist there. In Noah’s case, the ill wind was the cab driver who had picked him up at Fiumicino Airport and who happened to be Signora Alfiara’s brother-in-law.
It was made to order for disenchantment, the Pensione Alfiara. Granting that it offered bargain rates, its cuisine was monotonous, its service indifferent, its plumbing capricious, and its clientele, at least in early March, seemed to consist entirely of elderly, sad-eyed Italian villagers come to Rome to attend the deathbed of a dear friend. Aside from Signora Alfiara herself and the girl at the portiere’s desk, no one on the scene spoke English, so communication between Noah and his fellow boarders was restricted to nods and shrugs, well meant, but useless in relieving loneliness.
Its one marked asset was the girl at the portiere’s desk. She was tall and exquisite, one of the few really beautiful women Noah had yet encountered in Rome, because among other disillusionments was the discovery that Roman women are not the women one sees in Italian movies. And she lived behind her desk from early morning to late at night as if in a sad, self-contained world of her own, skillful at her accounts, polite, but remote and disinterested.
She intrigued him for more than the obvious reasons. The English she spoke was almost unaccented. If anything, it was of the clipped British variety which led him to wonder whether she might not be a Briton somehow washed up on this Roman shore. And at her throat on a fine gold chain was a Mogen David, a Star of David, announcing plainly enough that she was Jewish. The sight of that small, familiar ornament had startled him at first, then had emboldened him to make a friendly overture.
‘As a fellow Jew,’ he had said smilingly, ‘I was wondering if you—’ and she had cut in with chilling politeness, ‘Yes, you’ll find the synagogue on Lungotevere dei Cenci, a few blocks south. One of the landmarks of this part of Rome. Most interesting, of course’ – which was enough to send him off defeated.
After that, he regretfully put aside hopes of making her acquaintance and dutifully went his tourist way alone, the guidebook to Rome in his hand, the Italian phrase book in his pocket, trying to work up a sense of excitement at what he saw, and failing dismally at it. Partly, the weather was to blame – the damp, gray March weathe
r which promised no break in the clouds overhead. And partly, he knew, it was loneliness – the kind of feeling that made him painfully envious of the few groups of tourists he saw here and there, shepherded by an officious guide, but, at least, chattering happily to each other.
But most of all – and this was something he had to force himself to acknowledge – he was not a tourist, but a fugitive. And what he was trying to flee was Detective Noah Freeman, who, unfortunately, was always with him and always would be. To be one of those plump, self-satisfied, retired businessmen gaping at the dome of St Peter’s, that was one thing; to be Noah Freeman was quite another.
It was possible that Signora Alfiara, who had a pair of bright, knowing eyes buried in her pudding face, comprehended his state of mind and decided with maternal spirit to do something about it. Or it was possible that having learned his occupation she was honestly curious about him. Whatever the reason, Noah was deeply grateful the morning she sat down at the table where he was having the usual breakfast of hard roll, acid coffee, and watery marmalade, and explained that she had seen at the cinema stories about American detectives, but that he was the first she had ever met. Very interesting. And was life in America as the cinema showed it? So much shooting and beating and danger? Had he ever been shot at? Wounded, perhaps? What a way of life! It made her blood run cold to think of it.
The Signora was unprepossessing enough in her bloated shapelessness, her shabby dress and worn bedroom slippers; but, at least, she was someone to talk to, and they were a long time at breakfast settling the question of life in America. Before they left the table Noah asked about the girl at the portiere’s desk. Was she Italian? She didn’t sound like it when she spoke English.
The Specialty of the House Page 36