Books Burn Badly

The Mysterious Outsider

ON ONE OCCASION, just one, the judge lost his effigy’s composure, his immutable presence that paralysed so many defendants and only the odd mischief-maker would parody in a whisper, far away from the Palace of Justice, recalling that monumental slip-up, ‘Let the trial begin! Show the culprit in!’

The one time his face fell, and he couldn’t help thumping the palm of his left hand with his right fist like a mallet, was when the defendant in question, who was up on charges of ‘disorderly conduct’ and ‘being a public nuisance’, turned out to be someone who looked like his twin. An exact copy, as if out of a mould. His first impulse, having ordered him to stand up and give his name, was to demand an explanation. He felt a chill on seeing that they were exactly the same. Not even a marked difference in their clothes could detract from their awful similarity. He glanced at the people in the courtroom. No one seemed to have spotted what for the judge was a case of mistaken physiognomy. And it wasn’t that they were blind, since he himself agreed with the local saying to define the sort of character you find roaming around courthouses: gait of an ox, eyes of a fox, teeth of a wolf.

The defendant was very daring. He seemed to be imitating him. To be staring at him and in a way so that others wouldn’t notice, with tiny movements of his eyebrows and lips, to be constructing a caricature. He blinked and the defendant did the same. He winked and the defendant repeated the gesture.

‘Stop doing that!’

‘I can’t, your honour. I’ve got something in my eye.’

‘You should have thought about that.’

‘You don’t think about something in your eye, your honour,’ reasoned the defendant, surprised at having to explain such a basic law of nature to a judge.

He really was the spitting image.

While a female witness gave evidence, the defendant pulled out a book he had hidden under his shirt and started reading.

‘Behave!’ said the judge. ‘This isn’t a reading-room.’

The defendant was about to put the book away when the judge ordered it to be handed over. ‘My word, this looks interesting! The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu. I’ll have to read it. It’s been confiscated. . By the way, what were you before you turned up here?’

‘I was a judge, but I meted out justice.’

The outsider’s reply caused a wave of consternation to spread through the courtroom.

‘I sentence you to life in exile,’ pronounced the judge. ‘I don’t want to see you in Oklahoma again.’

From The Mysterious Outsider by John Black Eye, Far Off West series.