Death Sentence

32

She was asleep with one hand clutched in her hair. He eased out of the bed and padded into the bathroom. The tiles struck cold under his feet. He shut the door before he switched on the light. Washed and used her toothbrush and had a look at his Sunday-morning eyes in the medicine cabinet mirror. Things were breaking up: it was harder to keep a grip on them. In the mirror he was drawn, grey, blear; he felt jumpy.

He switched it off and went back into the bedroom. A little morning greyness filtered in through the closed slats of the blinds; he found his clothes and picked them up and carried them silently out to the living room, and shut the door behind him before he dressed. Laced up his shoes, got his coat from the hall closet and let himself out of her apartment.

He had trouble starting the car and when he put it in gear it stalled. He cursed aloud and finally willed it, chugging and bucking, into the street.

She’d wake up in an hour or two and she’d phone him to find out why he’d sneaked put before breakfast. He’d have to have an answer ready. He worked it out while he drove.

It was warmer than it had been in weeks and the pavements were going to slush. Passing cars threw up great filthy wakes around them like yachts at high speed. The sun was shining, a thin pale disc above the haze, but he had to keep the wipers on.

He put it in its garage slot and took the elevator up to the lobby, getting off there because he wanted to pick up yesterday’s mail; he hadn’t been home since Friday. He crossed to the mail room and put his key in the box. Bills and bulk-mail ads; nothing interesting; he dropped the ads in the trash bin and went back toward the elevators and that was when he saw the old man rising from the chair.

He was stunned. He stopped in his tracks.

“Good morning, Paul.” Harry Chisum was affable enough.

“How long have you been here?”

“Half an hour perhaps. I came by yesterday but you weren’t here.”

“Irene and I were doing the art museums.”

“Yes well I suspected you two were together. I didn’t want to trouble Irene with it. I wanted an opportunity to talk to you alone.” Chisum had a deerstalker and a walking stick in his hand; he wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and a bulky grey cashmere sweater under it; he looked younger than Paul had seen him before but his expression was grave.

“You could have phoned, saved yourself all that traveling back and forth.” Paul heard the ring of his own voice and resented it: it sounded hollow.

“It’s better this way. I didn’t want to — forewarn you.”

“Very mysterious.”

“Am I? Well why don’t we go up to your apartment.”

“Yes of course. I’m sorry...”

In the elevator he touched his thumb to the depressed plastic square and watched it light up. The old man tucked the walking stick under his arm. It was a slender stick of hardwood, gone completely black with antiquity; it had a head that appeared to be a chunk of ivory fixed to the stick with a bronze collar. It didn’t mesh with Chisum’s tweed and cashmere; it was the sort of thing you carried when you wore an opera cape. But the old man was indifferent to appearances.

“Well then, to what do I owe this honor?” It sounded weak and silly; he immediately regretted having uttered it.

“I think you know.” Chisum’s words had a dry rustle. The doors slid open; Paul led the way along the corridor, fumbling for keys.

He let the old man waddle in ahead of him; he shot the locks before he pocketed the keys and shrugged out of his coat. “I haven’t had breakfast yet. Join me?”

“Just coffee. I’ve eaten.” Chisum trailed him toward the kitchen and stood there with one shoulder propped against the jamb. He unbuttoned the jacket and let it hang back; his flannel trousers were pleated and cinched high and looked more than ever like a mailbag.

Paul busied himself with utensils. His hands rattled things. He tried to concentrate on it, to avoid looking at the old man. The silence became almost unbearable: finally he wheeled. “All right. What is it?”

“She’s dented your armor, hasn’t she. It’s taught you to be afraid, and that’s no good. Fear must be avoided like a whore with gonorrhea.”

“What are you talking about?” The pulse was thudding in his temples.

“Friday evening — that news report about the baker and his saleswomen. I was watching your face, Paul. I think that was the moment when the enormity of your error struck you fully for the first time. If I hadn’t been looking right at you at that moment I suppose I’d never have suspected. But the whole thing was written on your face. You’re not a very good actor — you’re a poor dissembler, really, I’m amazed you’ve been able to keep the secret this long.”

“I’m trying to be polite, Harry, but I’m getting a little impatient. I have the feeling I’ve just wandered into a one-act drama of the absurd by mistake.”

“There’s an old Japanese proverb: You can see another’s ass but not your own. But I think things started to fall apart for you the other night — or perhaps even earlier. You’ve been discovering yourself all over again, haven’t you. Irene has exposed things in your heart you’d forgotten existed. You could only prevail so long as you could convince yourself that no point of view other than that of your own prejudice existed. Your view of things took the form of a violent solipsism, and you had become the most dangerous of men — a man with an obsession. But there was no room in that structure for a relationship with any other human being. You were only safe as long as you could endure the fact that there was no one you wanted to confide in. You met Irene, and everything changed. The other day — those two boys at the playground, molesting the little girls. You couldn’t kill them, could you. You shot them, you’ve lamed one of them for life, but you couldn’t take their lives.”

“Now wait just a minute...”

“You’re the vigilante. I have no doubt of it.”

“You’re crazy. Stark raving—”

“Stop it, you’re wasting wind. Even if I were wrong it wouldn’t hurt you to listen to what I have to say. And if I’m right it may save your life.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Chisum shifted his stance: he leaned on the opposite side of the doorway. “The water’s boiling.”

The blood had drained from his head and a red haze clouded his view: he was afraid to move because he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t fall down.

The old man said, “The day you first met Irene at the criminal courthouse a man was released on bail from that very courtroom. A few hours later he was dead, shot by the vigilante. I’d known that all the time, but I only made the connection when I saw your face the other night after that news report. I’m not sure I can explain it more clearly than that. I simply knew. I saw it in your face — all of it.”

“You’re a lawyer. That’s hardly evidence. You’re barking up the wrong—”

“I’m not trying to pin anything on you. I’m not trying to trap you. But you may as well abandon these unconvincing protestations of innocence.”

“Why haven’t you gone to the police with these demented suspicions?”

“I have no intention of going to the police. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“If I’m the homicidal maniac you claim I am, you’re running a tremendous risk. Didn’t you think about that before you came here? If I’ve killed fifteen or twenty people what’s to prevent me from killing you?”

“You’ve persuaded yourself that there’s an important difference between you and your victims. You’ve never shot anyone who wasn’t guilty, in your view, of a terrible crime. I haven’t committed any crimes. Therefore you couldn’t possibly kill me and justify it to yourself.”

“You’ve got pat answers, haven’t you.” He was bitter. “You’re the most incredible character I’ve ever met. I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for you.” He felt stronger now but dulled, as if drugged: reality seemed to have receded to a point beyond arm’s length. He spooned instant coffee into two mugs and stirred the water in. “How do you take it?”

“Black,” Chisum said. “Just black, I’m in mourning — for that baker and his saleswomen, among others.” He reached for the mug and backed away through the doorway. “Why don’t we sit down?”

There was little choice but to follow him into the living room. Harry settled back on the couch carefully, balancing his coffee. Paul stood above him, watching with narrowed eyes.

“It is possible,” the old man intoned, “that God’s justice ordains that certain persons must die for the good of humanity. It’s possible, but the fallible human conception of justice is probably inadequate to decide who is to die and who is to survive. To put it another way, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that it was the great privilege of the American system that citizens were permitted to make retrievable mistakes. Clearly a man who’s been shot to death has no opportunity to retrieve his mistakes.”

“Do you want to trade quotations, Harry? I’ll give you Edmund Burke: ‘Wars are just to those to whom they are necessary.’”

“To kill a man because it’s ‘necessary’ isn’t the same thing as killing a man because it’s right. But you don’t make that distinction, do you. You’ve been obsessed with the idea of your own personal brand of star-chamber justice, where you alone are judge and jury.” Then Harry said overcasually, “At least you’re no longer pleading ignorance. I may take your remark as an indication that I’m correct in my conclusion?”

“It’s a wild guess, not a conclusion.”

The old man gave a gloomy sigh.

Then Paul said quietly, “To be willing to die, so that justice and honor may live — who said that, Harry?”

“Don Quixote, I believe. Are you indicating your willingness to die in the service of your cause?”

“Well your vigilante would certainly have to feel that way, wouldn’t he.” Paul carried his coffee to the dinette table and drew out a chair. When he sat down the envelopes in his inside jacket scraped his chest and he withdrew them and dropped them on the table. He found himself worrying about them: How much did they amount to? They were the kind of trivialities with which the mind protected itself in great stress; he recognized that. The old man was talking and he tried to focus on it but for a little while Harry’s words broke up in his mind and he only sat staring at the unopened envelopes.

“You began to see the enormity of it,” Harry was saying. “The bus driver, the baker and his saleswomen, the others who will surely follow — people who give up their lives because they’ve been ‘inspired’ by your example. In your single-handed way you’ve done a remarkable job of calling forth the night riders, Paul.”

Paul turned in the chair and watched him. Harry was leaning forward on his walking stick, both hands clasped over the knob, chin almost resting on hands. “After Irene it began to collapse for you. You must have been asking yourself, ‘What kind of a monster am I?’ You’ve begun to see how extremes can create and feed upon each other. You’ve been educating yourself, slowly, in what Victor Mastro and a great many others already know: vigilantes don’t solve any problems — they only create new ones.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed by your rhetoric? I’m tired. What’s the bottom line?”

“It’s time you quit. You tried an experiment, it didn’t work out — you found a drug that cures the disease but kills the patient. Too many side effects. You didn’t know that before, but you know it now. If you keep going, more innocent people will suffer. Things inside you will compel you to make mistakes until they find you and put you away; or you’ll get killed by one of your intended victims, the way it almost happened with that man with the machete, because you’ll get careless out of a subconscious need for punishment.”

“That’s ten-cent Freudianism.”

“It will be agony for you to live with your conscience either way. But if you give it up immediately, at least you’ll know you tried to correct your mistake as soon as you discovered it.”

The old man stood up, putting his weight on the walking stick as he rose. “I’m not telling you anything you haven’t told yourself. But it may help to have had me put it into words for you.”

Paul looked aimlessly away. He felt a forlorn emptiness. Harry wasn’t finished. “Vigilantism isn’t the only thing you’re going to have to give up.”

“No?”

“I’m talking about Irene.”

Rage pushed him out of the chair. “I’ve had about enough...” But his voice trailed off and the anger flowed out of him as if a drainplug had been pulled. He only stood and brooded at the old man.

“You’d never be able to tell her. It would build a wall between you. Every time she said something that reminded you of it, even remotely, it would drive you farther apart. You see how it has to end.”

“Good Christ,” he whispered.

“Consider it part of your penance.”

“Don’t be glib with me.”

“I’m not trying to patronize you, Paul. But there’s something in the ancient concept of justice. We usually end up making some kind of payment for our transgressions. It’s not a metaphysical thing, it’s something basic in nature — the balance of opposites, what the Orientals call yin and yang. You’re going to suffer, whatever happens. You may as well accept that. And there isn’t much point in forcing Irene to suffer with you.”

He couldn’t stand still. He shuffled to the window and drew the blinds; he stared without seeing and then he turned toward the old man. “You made a bet with Irene that the vigilante would retire.”

“Yes.”

“Now you’re trying to win your fifty dollars.”

“I always hate to lose a bet.” Harry picked up his deerstalker. “It’s on Irene’s account I came. I’m rather fond of her in my spinsterly fashion. I wanted to spare her some of the anguish, if I could.”

Harry smiled, surprisingly gentle. “Also, of course, I wanted to confirm my deductions.”

“And you think you have.”

“I know I have.”

“Then why not turn me in?”

“I gave it a good deal of thought.”

“And?”

“She’s told me what happened to your wife and daughter.”

“What’s that got to do with not turning me in?”

“If the same thing had happened to my wife and my daughter, I can’t be absolutely certain I wouldn’t have reacted the same way.”

“Is that sufficient grounds for you to withhold knowledge of a crime?”

“I’m breaking no law. You’ve admitted nothing to me in so many words. I’ve withheld no evidence — only the conclusions I’ve reached from observation.”

“You’re splitting hairs, aren’t you?”

“Are you trying to persuade me to turn you in?”

“I only want to be sure where you stand.”

“You’re in no danger from me. Not in the sense you mean.”

“In what sense, then?”

“If you go on killing you’ll destroy yourself. That’s the danger. You’ll destroy an incalculable number of innocent lives as well.”

“They’re destroyed every day by those animals in the streets.”

“Ah, yes, but that’s not the same thing — those aren’t your crimes.”

“They are if I stand by and let them happen.”

“Edmund Burke again, yes? ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ But Burke didn’t counsel people to commit murder, did he.”

Harry moved walrus-like to the door. He couldn’t get it open; Paul had to snap the locks for him. It brought him within a handbreadth of the old man. Harry’s eyes were kind. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

Then he was gone.

Paul shut the door and bolted the locks.