A giggle rises to my throat and I smother it. ‘You have copies of all this.’
‘Of course. We’ll meet once a week, generally on Fridays unless I’m in court, for a reporting and planning session. And file-copying.’
This time I can’t repress the giggle and I press the enter key to hide it. A sub-directory labelled Britain comes up on the screen and an entry marked Crown vs. Williams.
‘You know your way round the system?’
‘I manage.’
‘I only mastered it last month,’ he admits a little sheepishly, then rushes on, ‘So you’ll do it?’
‘I’ll sleep on it.’
‘We can have a one-week trial period if you like,’ he says as we go back down the stairs. ‘Start on Monday and let me know on Friday what you think.’
‘Sounds sensible.’ I turn to shake his hand. ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow.’
‘Here take these.’ He picks two books out of his shelves and hands them to me. ‘They may help you decide.’
‘Thank you.’ I glance at the top volume and notice his name on the cover. ‘So you’ve done this before.’
‘Never with quite so much difficulty.’
The streets are crowded with homebound traffic. It is almost dark. Maître Arnault has kept me for far longer than I imagined. Maître Arnault. Will I have to call him Maître, as Madame Duval does, if I work for him? Master. It rings so oddly in English. I have never called a man Master before. A giggle tickles my throat.
On impulse I turn into a café and find a quiet booth on the side, away from the terrace. I owe myself a drink. My first interview in years and I have been offered a job. With all his ostensible knowledge, the Maître thinks I am whom I seem - a successful, competent woman who has left one country for another and is looking for a change in focus. He probably thinks I have come here for a man. Men usually think they are the motive force for things. I shift uncomfortably in my seat and acknowledge they are only half wrong.
The wine is cool and dry, as dry and cool as the words on the page I randomly open of Maître Arnault’s book. ‘Justice is not morality,’ I read. ‘It has little to do with goodness and much with fairness.’ I am tantalized, and read on, but this terse conceptual prose takes more concentration than I can give it here. I am about to open the second book when a voice deflects me.
‘May we join you?’
I look up and see Maître Arnault. He is with an older man, comfortably grey-haired and a young blonde woman with a fresh, pert air.
‘Please.’ I gesture needlessly and wonder for a moment whether this might be his wife.
‘My colleague, Maître René Cournot, and Tanya Walker, who is with the firm on an internship. Maria d’Esté is considering coming to work with me on the women project.’
‘Great,’ Tanya Walker slides in opposite me. ‘I always thought you had to have a woman in on this.’ She embraces me generically, but her attention is all on Paul Arnault.
‘You don’t think Paul can handle the subject judiciously?’ René Cournot chuckles and sits down beside her.
‘Maybe judiciously,’ she looks a little peeved, ‘but not adequately or accurately from a woman’s point of view.
Tanya Walker has a distinct American accent and I have a distinct urge to flee. What if she recognizes me? No. I still my irrational fear. She is from the mid-west. I can hear it in her voice. It is too late in any event. Paul Arnault has sat down beside me and my escape route is blocked.
‘Yet I have defended quite a few women, I hope adequately and accurately. And at least successfully.’
‘That’s not the same.’ Tanya Walker is emphatic. ‘Women murder for different reasons than men. Men may kill sadistically for pleasure. Or retaliation. Or on contract. But women murder to survive. To write about them you have to feel in your body what it’s like to be a woman confronted day in day out by brutish, brutal, raping men who are twice as strong as you. Right?’
She looks to me for confirmation, but I refuse it. I do not know any brutal, raping, men. I have probably met fewer of them than Paul Arnault. So why should I be able to imagine that situation any better than he can?
‘I’m not sure,’ I say.
Tanya Walker gives me a withering look. I have let down the team.
‘Arguments from experience can be very limiting,’ Maître Arnault jumps in. His impatience is manifest. ‘You would deny me the right to defend anyone whose experience isn’t mine.’
‘Courts are not books.’ Tanya’s cheeks have grown pink. ‘Courts, the law, are male. The defence is men talking to men about women’s experience mistranslated into male terms,’ Tanya says with more conviction than I can bring to anything. ‘Just look at the way prison terms for killing husbands are twice as long as for killing wives.’
‘In the United States,’ René Cournot intervenes. ‘Do you remember when we went to court yesterday, all three judges were women, as was the prosecutor?’
‘An exception,’ Tanya says.
‘Not such a great exception in this country,’ Paul Arnault smiles at her with a glimmer of polite irritation and all at once I am on her side, filled with admiration for her youthful passion.
‘You should really have Tanya working with you.’ I turn to Paul.
‘Should I?’ He looks at me momentarily aghast.
‘I’m a lawyer, not a researcher,’ Tanya flings at me with such cutting vehemence that I am reminded of all the times in my life when my supposed sisters have struck out at me rather than at the man who in the given situation should have been the immediate object of their anger. As if they hated men in the general, but women in the particular.
‘Of course,’ I murmur. I do not really want to enter the fray and retrieve my position. But I feel the men’s tension, as vibrant as that of spectators awaiting gladiatorial combat in some antique forum. ‘I didn’t intend any disrespect.’
I hesitate. Tanya, I can see is fidgeting, uncertain whether I am going to kick back or lie back. She doesn’t know that neither is altogether my style.
‘I’m sorry. It’s sometimes so hard to imagine the difficulties another woman has had to scale to arrive at a superior position on the great ladder of success, how tightly that position has to be clung to,’ I say with deliberate circumspection.
Tanya looks as if she is about to respond, then changes her mind. Irony is not her forte.
‘Still, things have happily changed since Olympe de Gouges, haven’t they? You remember, she said that by closing the doors of employment, honour, and fortune to women, you compelled them to open those of crime.’
‘Olympe de Gouges?’ Tanya asks.
‘One of the feminists of our revolution,’ Paul supplies for her. ‘The one in 1789.’
‘She’s still right. For a lot of women,’ Tanya grumbles.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ I nod. ‘There isn’t much honour or fortune about in some quarters.’
‘You bet there isn’t,’ Tanya says jubilantly. ‘In the US, four million women a year are assaulted by their male partners. Four women a day are murdered by husbands or boyfriends. And a woman is raped every 1.3 seconds. No wonder women turn to crime.’
‘But isn’t it true that whatever impression the media give, women in fact kill very little?’ A blurb I once wrote for someone comes into my mind. I quote it verbatim. ‘Less than fifteen percent of all homicides in the US are committed by women. And of those, 93% are battered by their mates first.’
‘You know the States,’ Tanya says taken aback.
‘A little.’
‘Things add up somewhat differently here,’ Paul intervenes.
‘When were you there?’
‘Oh, a little while back.’ I reach for my bag. ‘I’m afraid I must go.’
In the mirror above the booth, Paul’s eyes meet mine as we rise. There is something so unexpected about this that it feels clandestine, as if there were something between us to hide.
‘Can I give you a lift home?’ he asks in a slightly st
rained voice. He has felt it too.
I shake my head. ‘I’ll ring tomorrow.’ I wave to the others.
‘You can drop me,’ Tanya says with a touch of petulance.
Paul catches up to me by the door of the café.. ‘Look, I’d almost forgotten. I’m in court tomorrow. A small case, but perhaps you’d like to come along and get a taste of things?’ He hands me a slip of paper with an address on it. ‘We start at one. Okay?’
‘I’ll try,’ I say.
-13-
The gold tipped railings of the Palais de Justice glisten like ancient spears in the sunlight. Two hard hatted policemen stand guard at the central gate and wave me away. There is no entry from here to those steep cumbersome stairs and imposing portals around which gowned figures cluster. Access to justice is not a simple matter. Rules must be gleaned, hidden doors found, checks and turnstiles mastered, before one can penetrate the inner sanctum.
At last I stand in the noisy hall of the Cour Correctionelle. Determined voices vie with each other and the clatter of heels on marble. The purposeful look honest. Those who stand around silently with confusion in their eyes take on a furtive air. I imagine I am amidst the latter. In the temple of guilt and innocence, I am inevitably one of the guilty. For the third time since I was turned away from the main gates, I wonder why I have come. I still have not made up my mind about the job.
In fact I know why I have come. I have come because of Beatrice.
Beatrice is back. I saw her this morning, while I was drinking my coffee. She lives in the apartment that was shuttered until now, on the third floor. In the soft light, her hair shone like a beacon above the fuzziness of her slightly flattened face. She was sitting at a table with another person, a smaller person I think, shadowy in the arch of the white curtain. I watched her still, certain movements as she lifted a tray of dishes from the table, receded into darkness, returned. A man must have come into the room, for the next thing I knew Beatrice was lifting her face to be kissed. I couldn’t make out the man’s features, but he was taller than her and after he had kissed Beatrice, he bent to hug the smaller person who must be their daughter.
I picked up the telephone then and dialled the number Beatrice had given me.
Her voice was soft, soothing. She was happy to hear from me, was sorry that she hadn’t taken my number or she would have rung me sooner. She wanted to get it down straightaway. I could see her pacing back and forth in front of the windows as she spoke. The telephone in her hand was cordless. As she repeated the number I gave her, I could even see her lips move. Then she looked up and I pounced out of sight, my heart bounding. I didn’t tell her I lived opposite. It is too soon. I gave her Steve’s address when she asked and she was delighted at that proximity. She quickly named a café on the Boulevard St. Germain where we could meet tomorrow afternoon.
Beatrice, I thought when I hung up, has a sense of purpose. She is candid. She wouldn’t play about and shilly shally over job offers. She would go where she was expected.
A policeman holds open the door of Courtroom 26 for me. He doesn’t ask me for reasons or for identification. There is nothing improper about my presence here. The public benches are full. Youths scribble in notebooks. Old men and women who look as if they have come for seats, shelter, entertainment, gaze towards the front of the chamber.
The make-up of the court is perplexing. My entire knowledge of these things is based on American court-room soaps and near antique re-runs of Perry Mason. Apart from the hush in the air and the presence of gowned figures, nothing here is familiar. On the raised bench at the front there are three people, two immaculately coifed women with an older man between them. They all wear what I take to be judge’s black robes, complete with lacy white ascots at the neck. So too, does a woman in a platform at the right. But it is the man in the centre who is speaking, his eyes darting from a thick file in front of him, to rest sternly on a tiny urchin of a woman who stands shuffling from foot to foot between two policemen in a raised box to my left.
‘Who is that?’ I whisper to the scribbling youth at my side and point to the man.
‘The President of the Tribunal?’ he asks. ‘Juge Jacques Delaroche. The Prosecutor is Madame Hamon,’ he fills in, pointing to the woman in the raised platform, ‘and Counsel for the Defence is Maître Paul Arnault.’ I follow the line of his hand and glimpse the back of Paul’s head. He is sitting at a table, below the accused, the tiny uncomfortable woman, who now murmurs something and the President asks her to speak up.
‘You came to Paris from Marseille in 1991 to seek employment, is that correct?’ the President intones, barely waiting for her squeaky ‘yes’, before he rushes on to say that the employment took on the form of inviting men to her room on an irregular basis.
‘Only my boyfriends, Monsieur le Président,’ the woman demurs.
The judge coughs and there are snickers from the public which he does nothing to contain. Nor does her defence counsel leap up to protest. I am rivetted, as much by the story which gradually unfolds, as by the sense that the judge here is behaving like a prosecutor, and what he is prosecuting seems to be a life, a character, rather than a specific crime which has yet to be broached. The life is a miserable narrative of an existence on the edge - prostitution, petty thievery, stints in prison, bad company. And then, at last, the substance of the present trial emerges.
‘On the night of October 12, police came to your room looking for your boyfriend, Moncef Harbi, of no fixed address?’
‘Yes,’ the woman replies in her faint, docile voice.
‘They found his clothes, if not him. They also found taped to the brackets of the ceiling light fixture six packets of heroin each containing two grams with a total street value of approximately FF96,000. You said to the police that you did not know of the existence of these packets?’
‘Yes,’ the woman suddenly rushes into adamant speech. ‘I didn’t know. How could I know. Look at me. I’m barely one metre fifty five. The ceiling is three metres up at least. Monsieur le Président,’ she adds for good measure.
‘There are such things as ladders in Belleville,’ the President mutters in his dry tones. He fixes her with his gaze. ‘You also said,’ he leafs through the thick file in front of him and reads, ‘“Moncef couldn’t have put it there. I would have known.” Yet you claimed not to have known of the existence in your wardrobe, a wardrobe one presumes you opened at least twice a day, of a shoebox which contained a quantity of syringes.’
‘I knew of the box. I just thought Moncef’s shoes were in it.’
There is tittering in the courtroom, but the judge pays no attention to it.
‘And you expect us to believe that, just as you expect us to believe that you had no idea where Monsieur Harbi, officially unemployed, found the money to pay your rent and buy you expensive presents? And believe that on the occasions when he asked you to deliver parcels for him and you received substantial sums in return for those parcels, you had no idea what the parcels contained?’
‘I didn’t open them. I didn’t open the envelopes with the money either.’
‘Yet Monsieur Harbi now tells us that not only did you know what was in the parcels, but that you also quite often designated the clients.’
The woman is silent for a moment. She pulls at the chain at her throat. Then she cries out, ‘He didn’t. You’re lying.’
Even from my distance I can see the Judge’s eyebrows arch dramatically.
‘I mean he’s lying, Monsieur le President.’
Her skin seems to have turned translucent. She looks as if she is about to faint. Indeed the judge tells her to sit down.
There is some shuffling of papers and then he begins again, telling the accused about her history of drug abuse, naming witnesses who do not appear but who appeared during the instruction, the investigation. At regular intervals she is asked to confirm or deny what he is telling us. At last, the woman my neighbour has designated as the prosecutor takes central stage, and with machine gun rapidi
ty sums up the case against the accused, whose eyes now are turned only to the ground.
I have the odd sense that I have been party not to a trial, but to an inquisition in which the accused’s guilt is a given from the start and all that we are waiting for in these proceedings is a confession, so that sentencing can take place.
A memory leaps into my mind. I am walking away from the grim stone frontage of the cathedral of Notre Dame towards the Palais de Justice. I am with my mother and someone else and I must be quite small for each of my hands is in one of theirs. But not that small, for the someone else who is a man is saying something about Jeanne d’Arc and the inquisition and I am listening because I admire Jeanne d’Arc who ran away from home to be a boy. Then the man talks about how once the Notre Dame had as its only neighbour on the Ile de la Cité, the palace of justice; and he says something I cannot follow about judges and priests vying with each other for power or sharing it.
Now the sense of his words suddenly hits me. There is more than a similarity between judicial authority and religious authority. There is an aping of forms. What else have I just witnessed but a contemporary replay of the inquisition? Why else all these robes, these ritualized postures and orders of procedure if not to make of the court as sacred a site as a church. I wonder at this. How necessary is it? What would happen if all the pomp and circumstance, the hush of ceremony, were removed? Naked, without its trappings, would the law crumble? It is merely human, after all. Yes, the trappings, the formal rites, are necessary to dignify the law, to raise it above the everyday.
Paul Arnault has at last stood up to speak. He, too, is gowned, the robe flowing round him as he paces for a moment, so that he seems bigger than I remember him, When he returns to his place beneath the accused, I catch a glimpse of his profile. He looks pensive, as if he is only now preparing his words. When his voice comes, it is both mellow and resonant. It has an authority which is only increased by its bursts of passion. I trust this voice. It is as I listen to it that I know with certainty I will work with him.
A Good Woman Page 11