The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (38 page)

But Danny was not just yesterday’s news. He was a part of her personal life, insofar as she had one, and her sympathy and attention in him was constant and unfeigned. The interest she forced herself to show for a succession of strangers came naturally to her where Danny was concerned. That was the reason for her nervousness. Because he mattered to her, she was afraid of doing something wrong
and losing him, and that would hurt. She had never known anyone like him. She seldom let herself get close to anyone, and she did not trust herself in this unfamiliar territory of the heart.

While she waited for the long-distance operator to make the connection, she took deep breaths, willing herself to speak calmly. She had combed her hair and freshened her makeup—to place a phone call.

“H’lo.” Danny’s voice, a lilting baritone that always made her think of ballads, and whiskey, and a patchwork of Irish fields seen from a biplane.

“Hello there, Danny. It’s Rose. I’m still in the back of beyond, so I thought I’d pass the time by seeing what you’re up to.”

“Why, hello, Rose. How’s my intrepid lady journalist? You don’t know how much I’m wishing you were here.”

She bridled with pleasure. “Oh, Danny, I miss you, too! Did you get my letters? I’ve been writing—”

“Well, the thing is I haven’t been in town myself. I got a job just after you left. Looked like easy money for a quick trip, and the client was made of money, but for all the trouble it has landed me in, I wouldn’t do it again for a million dollars.”

Rose tightened her grip on the receiver. “Trouble, Danny?”

“I’ll say! I just had to use what they paid me up front to post my bail.”

“You were in jail? What did you do?” Not
what are you charged with
. What did you do? Because Rose knew that in Danny’s mind only his love of flying was clear and focused. Everything else—laws, morality, fair play, and obligations—might have been painted there by Monet, so vague and blurry were they. He seemed to consider anything that furthered his flying career or gave him pleasure as an acceptable course of action, and if these things were illegal, then he would try not to get caught. In anyone else, Rose would have deplored such fuzzy morality, but somehow, with Danny, it didn’t matter.

“Don’t take on, Rose, old girl. I didn’t kill anybody. I just did what I always do. Flew my plane someplace, picked up a shipment, and flew home.”

She closed her eyes, trying not to imagine the worst. “And this shipment, Danny. What was it? Booze is legal nowadays, so I guess that leaves drugs.”

“No, darlin’, nothing like that at all. This phone call must be burning up your hard-earned money as we speak. Couldn’t you just come back to New York and let me tell you the whole story over a pint at Sheridan’s?”

“Tell me now. Hang the expense.”

Danny sighed. “Well, if you must have it, Rose . . . There was a very well-heeled gentleman who had been living in Cuba, and he wanted to come back to New York in the worst way.”

“So why didn’t he book a cabin on an ocean liner, Danny?”

“Because he didn’t want to pass through customs, of course. The authorities were not keen on his setting foot in New York again. Well, they were, but only because they wanted to put him in jail the minute he got here. So some of his fellas got in touch with me and asked me if I would fly down to Havana, and collect the gentleman, and fly him home to Long Island. It was just a lark for me, and they offered me a thousand dollars plus expenses to do it. Now how could I turn that down, Rose?”

“Well, I wish you had. Who was this homesick man in Cuba? No, let me guess. An Italian gentleman with a lot of associates with shoulder holsters, and interests in, oh, gambling and speakeasies and call girls?”

“Well, if you put it that way.”

“I’ve always had a weakness for plain speaking, Danny. So, you flew to Cuba, picked up this Mafia person, and flew him back to Long Island?”

“Well, I did, and the trip went off just as smoothly as anybody
could ask for. Top-notch weather, not a bit of trouble in Havana, though I wish I could have stayed longer and had a look around. The plane was working a treat. I overhauled her from nose to tail before I left.”

Rose felt her eyes sting, and a tear etched a trail through her newly applied face powder. “Just skip to the part where you landed and got arrested, Danny.”

NORA FELT SHE COULD HAVE STOOD
in Cousin Araby’s parlor for the rest of the evening, just staring. There was a real glass chandelier, and a rug that covered the whole floor of the room, real carpet, not like the oval rag-braid rugs up home. The radio was a big fancy floor model Atwater Kent, and beside it was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Nora thought she could have stayed right there forever.

But as cordial as Cousin Araby had been, Nora knew she wasn’t really a guest and there were chores to be done. Potatoes to peel, biscuits to bake, and a dozen other chores that had to be done in order to put supper on the table for a house full of hungry lodgers. She followed Cousin Araby into the big kitchen, tied on an apron, and set to work.

Carl poked his head around the door. “I’m just going to call my newspaper and give them the day’s story. Nora, do you think you might want to run down to the jail after supper?”

Cousin Araby, who was standing over a skillet of fried chicken, looked up sharply. “To the jail? What do you want to take this child down there for?”

“They won’t let me in to see Erma Morton because I’m a reporter. You know her brother made a deal with those syndicate people. I was hoping Nora might take her a magazine to pass the time. They might let her in.”

Cousin Araby considered it. “Well, I daresay Erma Morton could
use something to take her mind off the trial. Even if she did it, you can’t help but feel sorry for her. There’s a few old
National Geographics
in the canterbury beside the sofa. You could take those along to her, but if you’re planning to carry Nora away after supper, you can get in here and help her with the washing up before you go. Fair is fair.”

Clearly Cousin Araby did not subscribe to the notion that menfolk were to be waited on hand and foot, at least not as it applied to eighteen-year-old cousins. Carl nodded assent, and, notebook in hand, he hurried into the front hall to telephone the newspaper. He had managed to make some notes to himself during the lackluster testimony of the afternoon session in court, and he had even made a stab at putting them into article form, an act of futility, since the rewrite man would change everything to suit himself anyhow.

After a few minutes’ delay, the long-distance operator connected him to the news room, and he had the rewrite man on the line.

“So it’s you, is it? Another riveting tale of the trial of the century over in Virginny?”

“To be honest, sir, and this is not for publication, the case seems pretty routine to me. If the defendant were homely or ten years older, the courtroom would be all but empty. As it is, the national reporters are having a field day with it.”

“And doing a better job than you. We see their columns, you know. They are managing to make this story into a classic tale of a persecuted heroine framed by her wicked and ignorant neighbors.”

“That’s all hogwash, sir.”

“Of course it is. But it’s worth reading, anyhow, which is more than can be said for these droning sermons you keep phoning in. Can’t you ginger it up any?”

“I report what I see, sir.”

“Well, judging from the disparity of the new stories, you’re not seeing what everybody else is. Where are all the colorful rustics and
hollow-cheeked pioneers that the New York papers’ accounts are so full of?”

“In the eye of the beholder.”

“Well, you have a point there,” grunted the rewrite man. “I’ve been reading the stories those buzzards are filing, and it occurs to me that there is no more vicious bigot than a city intellectual contemplating someone to whom he feels intellectually or morally superior.”

“I reckon they’re in clover down here, then. I wouldn’t write that trash if I could.”

“Well, I might be able to help you out a bit when I do the rewrite. You need to do something to keep up with the nationals. Just a word to the wise, mind you, but I happen to know that your editor isn’t happy.”

There was a pause while Carl fought back the urge to tell him that he had a real mountain psychic trying to find out the facts of the case, but Nora had been right. That story would only give the syndicate journalists more lurid and colorful material to use against Wise County, and the thought of what they would do to Nora in print made him shudder. If Nora found out anything he would have to find a way to use it without involving her.

Glancing at his notes, Carl narrated the day’s events.

There was a sigh on the other end of the line. “First big assignment for you, isn’t it? Well, I’ll do what I can to pull your chestnuts out of the fire, but you’d better show us something soon. Those nationals may be sewer rats, but they know how to sell papers.”

Before he could reply, the rewrite man hung up. Resisting the urge to hit the wall with his fist, Carl walked back to the parlor and began to pull old copies of
National Geographic
out of Cousin Araby’s mahogany canterbury.

STIFLING A YAWN,
Henry Jernigan tugged at his tie. Odd how exhausting it was just to sit in court all day, trying to pay attention to
droning voices. When he left the courthouse, it was just past five o’clock but already dark outside. He edged through the departing crowd, and hurried across the side street to the inn.

In the hotel lobby, the aroma of roasting chickens from the kitchen mingled with stale cigarette smoke. Henry found them equally unappetizing. He wanted to go up to his room and sleep straight through until morning, but he knew that if he did miss dinner, he would wake up hungry in the middle of the night. He would go upstairs and wash up, and then come back down for the evening meal whether he felt like it or not. Perhaps his companions could charm him out of his reverie.

Forcing himself to smile at the clerk when he collected the room key from the front desk, he trudged upstairs to his room, trying to think of a way to make a passable feature story out of a court session in which nothing happened. And nothing was going to happen, either. At least he wasn’t naïf enough to believe in the possibility of confessional outbursts from the witness stand or eleventh-hour witnesses. No, the trial would grind its way to some anticlimactic whimper of a verdict, with no one being any the wiser about what really happened. The jury would decide the fate of the defendant, based as ever on their best guess or their innate prejudices, but it was the task of the journalist to turn humdrum reality into a story that made sense, a story worth reading.

He yawned again, and jiggled the key into the lock. Pushing open the door to his room, he shrugged off his coat, thinking that he might, after all, have time to put his feet up for a few minutes before dragging himself back down again to face the unappetizing boiled chicken. But ten paces into the room, Henry froze.

Despite his orders to the contrary, a log fire was roaring in the stone fireplace, and a few feet away the hearth rug had caught alight with sparks and had just begun to blaze.

Henry screamed.

TOKYO, SEPTEMBER 1, 1923

The earthquake had struck at noon, and by early afternoon Henry thought that the crisis seemed to be over. By itself, an earthquake need not be a catastrophe. If you lived out in the country, then the earth would shake for a minute and you might run outside. You might even fall down. But then you got up and went on about your business.

Here, though, in a city with a million inhabitants and hundreds of complex new buildings that bore no resemblance to traditional Japanese architecture, the danger in an earthquake came in the aftermath, with broken pipes, and downed electrical wires, and falling masonry. And, of course, the fires. So, thinking back to the example of the insignificance of an earthquake in a rural area, people reasoned that the safest place to be in a large city was in a grassy open area, away from the hazards of metropolitan life. People flocked to the Imperial Palace Plaza, two square miles of greenery in front of the Emperor’s Palace. Residents of downtown, the Asakusa district, converged on Ueno Park, site of the city’s zoo and its art museum.

On the other side of the Sumida River, people in the Honjo and Fukugawa neighborhoods were directed to the open space near the river, former site of the Army Clothing Depot. The local chief of police had reached this logical conclusion about where to send people displaced by the disaster, and thousands had made their way to the open field, most of them calmly determined to make the best of it.

People brought clothes and possessions salvaged from their ruined houses. They brought blankets and baskets of food. By two o’clock the Army Clothing Depot field took on the air of a vast neighborhood picnic, as families sat together on their blankets, sharing a late lunch in the sunshine, and counting their blessings in having survived.

“You are safe now,” Henry told Ishi, knowing that this remark was tinged with his relief at having safely discharged the burden of caring for someone else’s child.