Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Genre Fiction, #Political, #Contemporary Fiction
And so there would be left, as so often before in American history there had been left—the Court.
With a sudden start the Chief Justice drew himself up to his full seated dignity, spread his hands before him on the desk and stared straight ahead. He looked for a moment like the avenging angel himself—the avenging angel of the law.
“No!”
he said sharply aloud to the empty office,
“No!”
to John Marshall who looked down with a quietly challenging, show-me air.
“They will not do that! They will not override the law!”
He and his “little brood,” human like all the rest—troubled and imperfect like all the rest—having but few glimpses of certainty with which to navigate the storm—given the benefit of a little more knowledge of the law, but no more certainty of right than all the rest—would not permit it.
“The Court will stand firm!”
he said, still aloud.
“The Court will stand firm!”
His voice, deep and somber for so small a man, heavy, emphatic, implacable in righteousness, rang out in the silence. The big office echoed with it for a second, shocking him: he had not even realized he had spoken aloud. Embarrassment vanished as quickly as it came. No one had heard him in this late hour in the near-deserted building. And even if anyone had, what of it? He meant it—he meant it. And he, no less, he knew, than his associates, was afraid…
He thought, with a heavy sigh as he looked down at his veined and knobby hands—so small to share so tenuous yet so great a power as the Court possessed—that nothing that might happen in these next few weeks and months bearing upon the issue of crime and violence would be easy. The country was moving toward some explosive lancing of the boil, some disaster that would symbolize it, epitomize it and bring it to a head. Would that the people had one neck, Nero had said, that I might cut it off. Would that crime had one neck, the Chief thought, that the Court might cut it off. He was not normally a superstitious man or one given to much foreboding about the future, but he just had a feeling—he had a feeling. Something would bring it about. Something would do it.
On a sudden impulse, he reached for his private telephone and dialed the unlisted number his secretary had secured for him earlier in the afternoon. He felt a sudden need to discuss something happy with somebody.
“Good evening, Justice,” he said when the level, steady voice came over. “This is Duncan Elphinstone. It is my great pleasure to congratulate you and welcome you to the Court. We couldn’t be happier to have you aboard.”
***
Chapter 5
Now
what are you writing?” Janet demanded, although she told herself she really didn’t want to know. He was always so damned busy about something, she just liked to needle him now and then to see how close she could come to making him really mad. It was a little game she liked to play, never realizing, not being really a very bright girl, how far from a game it was for him; which was her mistake.
“None of your damned business,” he replied promptly, glowering up from the flimsy old portable typewriter and the scattered papers that covered his old wooden desk. “No!” he said sharply, covering them with his hands as she started to come toward him, dangling John Lennon Peacechild precariously from one hip. “They aren’t for you! Stay away!”
“Well, all
right,”
she said, suddenly sullen, sitting down on their one rickety old sofa, hauling the baby into her lap and staring at him resentfully. “I was just asking. And don’t tell me,” she added with a spiteful vigor before he could reply, “that people who ask questions get hurt. I know that’s your line and I don’t give a damn, do you hear me? I don’t give a damn.”
“You’d
better
give a damn,” he said tersely, abruptly taking up a sheet of paper and holding it close to the lamp. “How does this sound?”
And with great solemnity he read:
“Whereas we live in a corrupt capitalist society bereft of hope—”
“What’s ‘bereft’ mean?”
“Christ!”
he said. “It means there isn’t any. There isn’t any hope, stupid, get it? No hope!”
“There isn’t when you’re around,” she muttered. “That’s for sure.”
“What’s that?” he cried, half-rising as if to start toward her.
“What’s that?”
“You heard me, I expect,” she said, not flinching. “What other fancy words have you got? Is that all of it?”
“No, it isn’t all of it,” he said with heavy mimicry. “It goes on into a lot of stuff you wouldn’t understand, stupid.”
“And stop calling me stupid!” she cried with a sudden harshness. “Just because you went to college somewhere, I guess—”
“That’s right,” he said smugly. “I certainly did.” He scowled. “Damned worthless rich man’s playpen. Playpen for rich men’s kids! Worthless! Nothing!”
“You aren’t making much sense,” she observed coolly. “If you didn’t like it, why did you go there? Where was it, anyway?”
“You wouldn’t know,” he said. “I went there because my damned father went there and my grandfather before that and I was
expected
to.
Expected
to! I didn’t go there because I wanted to. I was
expected
to!”
“I’ll bet they’re real proud of you now,” she remarked.
“Real
proud.”
“They hate my guts,” he said complacently. “And I hate theirs. So we’re even. Or at least”—he scowled—“maybe we are or maybe we aren’t. Maybe we will be someday.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You don’t make sense.”
“Oh, I make sense,” he said, a curious half-crooning note in his voice. “Oh, yes, I make sense, all right. I make sense. You’ll see.
Everybody
will see.”
“With
that?”
she asked scornfully, pointing to the paper he still held in his hand, not even knowing it was there.
“It’s my Manifesto,” he said proudly, laying it carefully back on the desk. “They’ll hear about it when—” He stopped abruptly and gave her a piercing glance.
“When what? You’re nuts.”
“Oh, no.
Oh,
no!”
“You sound like it to me,” she said, shifting John Lennon Peacechild about to a more comfortable position. “You sound as though you’re about to fly right out that window, sometimes… You mean,” she went on idly, “that that little piece of paper is going to mean something to somebody? Is that all you mean?”
“I mean it will when I—” he blazed up. And stopped.
“Well,
what?”
she taunted.
“What
are you going to do?”
His eyes narrowed. A cautious curtain dropped.
“That’s all right, what I’m going to do. You just don’t worry about what I’m going to do. I didn’t say I was going to do
anything.”
“You’re certainly doing a lot of talking and posing and carrying-on lately for nothing, then,” she observed. “You’re as nervous as a damned cat. Way you’re acting, somebody’d think you were going to blow up the—the Statue of Liberty or something.”
“Who said I’m going to blow up anything?” he demanded, jumping up and advancing upon her so fiercely that this time she instinctively shielded John Lennon Peacechild with her shawl. “Who said that? Who said it?”
“Nobody said it!” she shouted. The baby began to cry. “
I
said it! So what?”
“Listen,” he said, seizing the shawl with an iron grip so that it almost choked her. “Don’t you ever say that to anybody else, you hear?” He shook the shawl savagely so that her head rocked back and forth. “You
hear?
Don’t you
ever
say that to anybody
again!
It isn’t true!
It isn’t true!
So knock it off!
Don’t even think it! Don’t even think it!”
“Take your hands off me!” she screamed, yanking the shawl away from her throat. “Take your hands off me, you crazy! Don’t you touch me like that again, ever, you hear!
Ever, ever, ever!
I don’t give a damn what you blow up! I don’t give a damn what you do! I don’t give a damn about anything! Just leave me and John Lennon Peacechild alone!” She sank back, huddled over the baby, and began to cry. “Just go back and write on your damned paper, if you want to!
I
don’t care!”
“Well,” he said triumphantly, turning his back upon her with a sudden frightening dismissal of interest, “I don’t care either, so that makes two of us… Now,” he said, taking up the paper again, holding it out in front of him, examining it with a critical but approving eye, “where was I? Oh, yes. ‘Whereas we live in a corrupt capitalist society bereft of hope and of the humanity, kindness and true compassion which decent people everywhere ought to show to one another—’”
“You
are
crazy,” she whispered, holding John Lennon Peacechild tight as his sobs gradually subsided. “You really
are crazy.”
So, too, possibly, was the attorney general of South Carolina, although probably no one would ever formally certify him as such. He was, after all, doin’ nothin’ more, he said, than jes’ respondin’ to the public will. And what could anybody say was crazy about
that?
Wasn’t that what a public official
ought
to do? Seemed that way to him, he said, and if a few people got hurt in the process, well, they’d asked for it, hadn’t they? And they’d hurt other people first, hadn’t they? So what did the damned crazies expect? He wasn’t a vengeful man, but society’s safety came first with him, and if the law wasn’t a help to society, then he guessed society had to help itself. That, as he conceived it, was his job and nobody, no, sir, not nobody, was tellin’ him he wasn’t right about it. The people liked it, didn’t they? He was gettin’ mail and telegrams and phone calls from as far away as California, wasn’t he? All over the country they were tellin’ him to go to it, boy, weren’t they? So what were those damned northern liberals and that damned human-rights bunch worryin’ about?
They
weren’t gettin’ hurt by the crazies. Wait until they were, and then see what they’d say about it! They’d holler a different tune then, he’d wager! He’d bet his bottom dollar they’d be glad he was leadin’ the country in the right direction then, by God!
Thus spoke, upon the right occasions, Regard Stinnet, a dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-minded, well-set-up thirty-six, just then concluding a mutually congratulatory conversation with his equally strong-minded think-alike, thirty-five-year-old Attorney General Ted Phillips of California. Like his opposite number across an uneasy continent, the attorney general of South Carolina did not, as he expressed it privately, “talk corn pone” to his intimates. It was only when he took to radio or television or got out in the back hollers that he really let fly with the redneck stuff. That was for the folks back home. Actually in his office—and sometimes, also, on the air, because a lot of high-class people lived in South Carolina, too—he was a well-dressed, well-groomed, soft-talking, highly intelligent graduate of The Citadel and Yale Law School who used perfectly good English and held his accent and his temper under reasonable control. Outwardly he could be, and often was, one of the mildest and most civilized men around. This of course made him doubly effective when he did let fly, and doubly dangerous to his state and country in a tense and difficult time.
He had his eyes on several places higher up the political ladder, and hoped by a combination of skillfully applied guile and bombast to get there. Moss Pomeroy, who knew exactly the game he was playing, might be his only obstacle; and he didn’t think Moss would be all that much of a problem. Moss was on the Court, and as Regard could tell from a shrewd analysis of some of his recent opinions, his national position was giving him the opportunity to see too many sides of too many things. Moss was beginning to have Doubts, of a kind that Regard always capitalized in his own mind. Regard did not have Doubts, and that gave him a great advantage. Regard was that type of demagogue who genuinely believes his own demagoguery. This made him an almost invulnerable politician for this particular moment in his nation’s history—a man of dynamic persuasion to a rapidly growing number of his countrymen—and a genuine danger to the lumbering processes of a democratic but now increasingly inadequate system of justice.
Whether he wooed them softly or shouted from the stump, whether they were rednecks or bluestockings, more and more were paying attention and expressing agreement. Crime and violence were bringing their inevitable reaction in an era in which the courts had made retribution increasingly uncertain and, when it was attempted, either impossible to achieve, ponderously slow or almost laughably (had laughter been possible) light.
Regard was convinced that in himself and his fellow avengers, crime and violence were about to meet their match. He knew as surely as he knew anything—because letters, telegrams, telephone calls and an increasing number of editorials, columns and commentaries were telling him so—that he was riding a rising tide of popular feeling. “The hour has come!” he solemnly assured his listeners on every possible occasion; and the man for the hour—or one of them, for they were becoming many—had arisen.
Already Regard had proposed, as Moss had reminded the Court this morning with disbelief and distaste—that a whole range of moderate crimes be punished by public flogging, and that the death penalty also be made public. Being a child of his time, he had quite inevitably and without a moment’s second thought proposed the logical next step: that these events be put on television. In prime time.
His proposals had been greeted with horror, outcry and scorn by human-rights organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union, the earnest, the idealistic, the decent, and the more staid and solid elements of the press and television itself.
And yet—and yet.
Even while they loudly protested and denounced, a secret, sneaking, awful but insistently tantalizing thought was beginning to creep into the minds of network executives and their advertisers.
What could possibly draw more viewers?
What could possibly assure an advertiser wider exposure and bring more money into network coffers?
DEATH IN PRIME TIME.
Deny it as they would, try to push back its horrid fascinations as they might, they knew it was a natural.
Greed, the ratchet wheel that turned far too many Americans in the closing years of a sick and savage century, was beginning to impose its own self-destructing logic in this area as well.
Surely many enterprising Romans must have advertised on the walls of the Coliseum.
It was not only for a worried Chief Justice in Washington that the ghost of Nero stirred.
It grinned, more kindly, on Regard Stinnet too.
“You know, Ted,” he had just told his fellow attorney general out in Sacramento, “I think you and I may be riding something a lot bigger than we realize. I mean, man, the people are
fed up!”
“All over the country,” Ted Phillips agreed.
“Got any vigilantes out there?”
“A few. The impulse is spreading.”
“You encouraging them?”
Ted uttered a dry little laugh.
“Officially I’m still expressing horror and repugnance at the whole idea. But how much pressure can a public servant take without yielding to the wishes of his people?”
“Exactly my point,” Regard Stinnet said promptly. “Exactly my point. Some of these do-gooders seem to think you and I are causing all this rumpus. They act as though the God damned criminals and terrorists have nothing to do with it. I haven’t started this parade. But,” he added with an equally knowing laugh, “I sure as hell don’t intend to let it go by without me, that’s for sure.”
“Me, either,” the attorney general of California concurred. “After all, it seems to be what the people want—and more and more of them seem to want it. It’s our job to channel it into areas as law-abiding as possible, but the movement is growing so fast that I don’t think we can stop it. God knows I’m against vigilantism—”
“Oh, me too!” Regard agreed fervently.
“—but if it’s going to go on anyway, to the point where it would take real police action to stop it—then what’s the choice?”
“The choice is,” Regard said crisply, “that you only have a limited police power anyway, right? And if you pull it off the criminals to go after the good people who only want to fight the criminals, then the criminals are going to get even worse than they are already, because the police and the law-abiding public will be busy fightin’ each other instead of fightin’ the criminals. Right?”
“Absolutely right,” Ted Phillips agreed.
“You meet yourself coming back on that argument,” Regard observed. “It’s a damn circle with no way out. What you’ve got to do is get the police power and the people movin’ in the same direction, and that’s what I’m tryin’ to do down here.”
“We’ve been hearing quite a bit about your ideas, lately. A lot of favorable comment.”