The Privilege, page 21
“What happened,” I asked, “what happened that made you stop walking?”
Alan Boe’s eyes flashed, then narrowed and drew inward as he went back to what he had heard and what he had seen.
“A scream, a shout, from a window, a woman’s voice. When I heard it, I stopped and looked around. For a moment I was not sure I had really heard anything, everything was so still, so silent, I thought it might have been my own imagination; but then I heard it again, a scream, a second shout. There were lights on in the building, the second floor; I knew, I was sure, that was where the screams had come from. Someone was in trouble. I started for the entrance - it was not more than twenty, or thirty, feet away. The doors were open and I started up the steps when a woman, a young woman, a woman in her twenties, came running down the stairs toward me. She bumped into me, and I grabbed her, tried to stop her, because I knew - or thought I knew - she was in trouble. She looked at me with frantic eyes, scared, terrified, I thought. ‘He’s up there,” she cried, tossing her head toward the floor above. ‘He tried to…and I….’ That is what she said, and then she shook free of me and ran off, and I ran up the stairs to see what had happened and I found him, Lucas Fairweather, laying on the floor, his head all bloody. He was dead.”
Boe looked at the jury, astonished, as it seemed, how easily, and how completely, he had been misled.
“Those few words she spoke to me, that look I thought was terror, when I found Lucas Fairweather laying dead on the floor I thought she had acted in self-defense I kept wondering how she had managed to get hold of that statue and hit him on the back of his skull with it while he was trying to attack her. It is what happens when you look at things, not with your own eyes, but through what others tell you.”
Eleanor McFarland would say what she had to say in her closing argument and I would say what I could in mine, but the verdict had already been decided. It had been decided five minutes after Alan Boe took the stand; it was probably decided even before that, before the jury had heard any witnesses at all, when he started asking the judge how she was going to conduct the trial and told everyone how much he was looking forward to the experience. They might have acquitted him even had they thought he was actually guilty of the murder of Lucas Fairweather in the belief that whatever Alan Boe did had to have had a justification, even if they could not quite see what it was. He inspired more than trust, loyalty; loyalty to what by his presence you understood was the best any of us, any human being, could ever be. I heard later that when the jury reached the jury room they all just looked at each other and shook their heads. The picked a foreman and having concluded their deliberations were back in court less than ten minutes after they had left.
Chapter Fourteen
Alan Boe was a free man, but I was still a prisoner, wondering what was going to happen next, what James Michael Redfield was planning in this strange conspiracy in which I had now twice been forced to play a part. A trial exposing the empty lives of the rich and privileged, a trial revealing the mindless hypocrisies of higher education, how many people was Redfield willing to have murdered, how many trials of innocent defendants, to accomplish whatever it was he was after? Serial killers murdered people because it gave them a sense of power, a feeling of importance; Redfield, if Alan Boe was right, wanted to change the way we lived; Redfield, if Alan Boe was right, was at war with modernity. But however brilliant Redfield might be, could he really believe that a trial, even a series of trials, could have anything like that kind of effect? Could he really believe that everyone would suddenly change their mind about getting rich because of what happened in the Friedrich trial; could he really believe that an American university, especially one dependent on public support, would go back to the l9th century teaching of the liberal arts because Lucas Fairweather had been murdered and Alan Boe had been put on trial?
“You don’t seem very pleased with how the trial turned out,” observed Giuseppe Gambarini, peering at me from across the table. “You can’t be disappointed with the verdict. Alan Boe is a free man, thanks to you.”
It brought me back to the present. We were having dinner, the four of us, in the same small Italian restaurant where we had dined together before.
“Alan Boe is a free man because of Alan Boe. He did everything; all I did was watch. And, yes, of course I’m pleased. I would have been devastated had the verdict gone the other way.”
Giuseppe kept talking to me, but his eyes were moving back and forth between his wife and Tangerine, who were carrying on a conversation of their own. With her low cut crimson dress and her radiant dark eyes, it did not matter what Sophia was saying. She could say everything important without ever speaking a line, or talk endlessly, the way she was doing now, when the words meant nothing and the look she gave you told you what she really meant to say.
“Enough!” cried Giuseppe, throwing up his hands in a gesture of mock despair. “I have trouble following one conversation, I cannot follow two.”
“Then you should quit talking,” suggested Sophia, a larcenous smile of studied indifference hovering over the half-circle of her wide full mouth. “And instead perhaps take lessons in how to listen.”
“If only I knew a good teacher,” he sighed, his eyes the bare whisper of a smile. “Or even someone who knows sometimes how to do it.”
“What is the point of listening to what I know you are going to say?”
“You think you know me that well?”
“Better,” she insisted with perfect confidence, “than you know yourself.”
“That is no great achievement,” he replied, briskly shaking his head. “I know nothing about myself. No,” he went on before she could object, “it’s true. I know nothing about myself; if I did, I wouldn’t always be so surprised at myself.”
Sophia, who had been leaning toward him, pulled back, her attention, all her attention, on him. They could have been sitting alone in a hotel room, for all either of them seemed aware that anyone else was there. He held her, entranced, bewitched, as it were, by the absolute certainty with which he announced what seemed to make no sense at all.
“Surprised that I ever had the arrogance to think that you, my dear Sophia, might ever want to be with me; surprised that I had the courage to ask. But, more than that,” he went on, turning now to Tangerine and me, “surprised whenever I start to put pen to paper and begin to hear the music playing that I have not yet composed. It is what I tried to explain when we were here before - the seemingly strange paradox that we do not think the thought, the thought thinks us. We say that a thought has ‘come to us.’ That means that the thought does not start with us. What could be more surprising than that? The other reason I say I don’t know myself, is that, quite frankly, I have never been too sure what it means. And I don’t quite know where it would stop.
“Where it would stop?” asked Tangerine, curious to know not just what Giuseppe Gasperini might mean, but why, unlike so many other people she knew, he thought it a question worth pursuing.
“Yes, where it would stop, because if you say I want to know who I am, the question has to be asked again: who is the ‘I’ who wants to know who I….You see where this is going. There is no end to it, an infinite regression, a note played once loudly that never stops echoing, if,” he added with a glance at Sophia, “you listen carefully enough.”
Turning back to me, he remarked, “If I understood him, that is what Alan Boe has been trying to teach: the meaning of that famous and completely misunderstood instruction to ‘know thyself.’ It does not mean know what you want, what you happen to desire - it means to know your place as a human being in the order of things.”
We sat there, talking and drinking, for more than an hour, and each time the waiter approached we either waved him off or ordered another bottle of wine. Somewhere the other side of sixty, he went about his business the way he would have had he been practicing on an empty table. His eyes followed his hands and his hands followed the same routine they had no doubt followed for years, decades, centuries if he did not stop to die; he was San Franciscan through and through, one of those blank-eyed waiters who, ready with a reply to any question, always gave it with all the jaded monotony of an answer given a thousand times before. On what was perhaps the fifth time he came up, when we were once again too caught up in our conversation to care about dinner, Sophia shook her head in response to his tired -voice inquiry about whether we might be ready to order.
As he started to walk away, he muttered something about how we might have just stayed in the bar. Giuseppe tore into him, a fast moving torrent of the Sicilian dialect of Italian that made the waiter go ashen-faced with astonishment and something very close to fear.
“Yes, yes, I’m very sorry. Please, I apologize,” said the waiter, his narrow, half-hooded eyes as wide open as they had perhaps ever been. “Take your time, take all the time you need. And, again, please - I meant no offense.”
And as quickly as that he was gone.
“You didn’t need to do that,” said Sophia, but with a look of such profound regard as left no question what she really thought.
“What did you say?” asked Tangerine, fascinated by how immediate, and how explosive, his reaction had been to this idle, if ill-mannered, remark of a hapless waiter.
“He’s Sicilian. I knew it first time I saw him, and I heard him speaking in Sicilian another time we were here. I probably shouldn’t have said what I did - but…you know, what I wouldn’t bother with if he had said it to me, when he said it to….”
Grasping his left shoulder with his right hand, he bent his head slightly to the side. He was amused, and I think a little proud of what he had done. It reminded him of what life was like, not here, in America, where everyone has forgotten formality and the way women were supposed to be treated, but in Sicily, where he lived, and where he had been raised.
“I told him that I had conducted orchestras all over the world, but that I lived and worked in Palermo and I remembered what he had obviously forgotten: what the word respect means to a Sicilian, that he should know what happens to someone who treats with discourtesy a Sicilian woman, and I told him that I was embarrassed, embarrassed to know that there was a Sicilian anywhere who had forgotten what it meant to be a man.”
“That would get you in a little trouble here,” remarked Tangerine, with a sideways glance at me. “ There isn’t supposed to be any difference between the sexes. We’re all supposed to pretend that there isn’t any real difference at all. You can’t be discourteous to a woman because she is a woman; you aren’t treating her as an equal unless the same thing you complain of what be just as discourteous if it were directed at a man. Woman, you have to remember, is no longer the weaker sex. And if you don’t believe that, you’re sexist, and if you’re sexist, nothing you have to say - about anything - could possibly be worth listening to.”
With a smile that grew broader with each word he heard her speak, Giuseppe Gambarini bounced his head from side to side, the silent sing-song chorus to the latest form of the world’s false wisdom.
“The carnival of the uninstructed, the manic certainty that denies there is a difference between men and women on the doubtful mathematical theory that where there is a difference equality cannot exist. It is like so-called modern music, Schoenberg and his imitators, this insistence that every note is equal to all the others, and that they should all be played, in some manner, the same number of times. What they forget, what they do not understand, is that it is the way notes fit together that determines whether there is a harmony or just noise. If you play a certain note only once in a great composition, something Bach or Mozart or Beethoven wrote, that note holds everything else together. Take it out, forget to play it, the piece is ruined. That is how equality should be measured, whether each note, whether each of us, man or woman, fits together in an ordered whole. Yes, yes, I know - I am a hopeless reactionary, a reader of old books and old music, someone who does not believe in the modern fixation on the equality of everything, no matter how bad the choice. I mean, think about it - if Rap and Mozart are both called music, if they are an equally valid choice - what better proof do you need that we have all gone, in that wonderfully accurate phrase, ‘start raving mad’? That is really at the heart of it: no one believes that there are objectively valid standards; everyone believes - or pretends to believe - that everyone has the right to choose whatever he or she wants: how to live, what to like, who they want to be, and because you grant that right, everything is up to the individual, and every choice is as good as any other. The question no one takes seriously, which is the very question every thoughtful person should take seriously, is whether any of that is true.”
Giuseppe had been looking at each of us, his gaze moving in a steady arc from one side to the other. Suddenly, as if he had just solved a puzzle, he stared at Tangerine, his eager, light-filled eyes full of knowing laughter.
“Antonelli is my witness. What happens whenever you walk into a room; what happened when you walked into this restaurant tonight? Everyone turned to look. It is what we do, all of us are drawn to what is most beautiful. I imagine there are people who resent this, who think it shows that sexism is still too deeply ingrained, that it has somehow to be eradicated. And then, when these same people are asked to appear on television they put on their make-up and their best clothes and talk as if the word ‘attractive’ had nothing to do with anything inherent in human nature.”
Sophia rolled her eyes and, pretending to suppress a grin, shrugged her shoulders.
“If that is true, if we are all so attracted to the beautiful the way everyone - at least every man with any life left in him - would be attracted to Tangerine, how do you explain why I am married to you? Or do you think the sexes are really that different?”
Her husband fixed her with a smile of perfect confidence. She did not look away; she did not want to. There was a kind of magic between them, a history of such extravagant dimensions that it was as if everything that had ever passed between them could be taken in, remembered, in a single, laughing glance.
“Perhaps it is because I make beautiful music, and not just in the concert hall.”
“They told you, then - that I always play your music in bed?”
“Yes,” he replied, still holding her close in that playful, antic stare. “Everyone of them - every member of the Italian army.”
“They’re no good at fighting,” she said, throwing up her chin as her eyes blazed delighted defiance. “Someone had to give them something to do.”
“So you see,” he said, turning to me, “I’m married to a music teacher, but, please notice, one who understands the difference between good and bad music. Now, tell us what is going to happen next.”
“Next?’ I asked, though I was reasonably certain what he wanted to know.
“Yes what happens next. Someone chose Alan Boe to stand trial for something he did not do; the same person, I assume, who was responsible for the Friedrich murder. You told us that - or rather, if I remember correctly - Tangerine told us that the night we were here, the night before the trial of Professor Boe was scheduled to start. I remember perfectly: ‘Two murders, two trials, both men innocent, the first one acquitted’ - and now both men acquitted - ‘and you’re the attorney in each.’ And I remember, what is more true now than it was then , that I said I thought you were ‘the central character in a drama still being written.’ What is going to happen next? Has the next chapter been written?”
“There isn’t going to be a next chapter,” insisted Tangerine. There was a bitter edge to her voice, and something unforgiving in her eyes. “There isn’t, is there?” she asked me, suddenly not quite so sure. “It’s stops now, doesn’t it? You can’t let him…!”
It was like asking a fly caught in a web for assurances that the spider would never weave another one. There was not anything I could do - there was not anything, so far as I could tell, anyone could do - to stop James Michael Redfield from doing a third, or a fourth, or a fifth time what he had now with complete success done twice before. The only choice I would have, if he did it again, had someone blamed for a murder he did not commit, was simply refuse to take the case and assume Redfield would not punish my refusal by actually allowing an innocent man or woman to be convicted. It seems a strange reliance on the basic decency of someone who had already committed, or caused to be committed, two murders.
“Tell me, what would you do if the person behind all this, the one who is writing this drama in which you have been forced to play a leading part, were caught? What would you do if
this same person who, once again, is really responsible, were charged with committing these crimes?”
“What would I do? I would….” I saw the look in his eyes and recognized the dilemma that would be created. “Would I represent him? Is that what you want to know? Would I be his lawyer, would I take his case to trial?”
I wondered. Would I defend James Michael Redfield after everything he had done? I honestly did not know. The temptation, of course, was to say that there were no circumstances under which I would do it, that it was the last thing I would ever do, but there was another question, which was how far would I go to learn the truth, not what he had done, or how he had done it - arranged things in the way he had so that two different murders would lead to the trial of two innocent men - but why? What purpose had he had, what had he been trying to accomplish? I had spent my life trying murder cases in courts of law. I had become familiar with what I had thought very possible kind of criminal behavior, but I had never known anyone like Redfield. He was, in his own way, as unusual, as unique, as Alan Boe was in his.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “It would depend.”
Tangerine did not want to believe it.
“You don’t know? You couldn’t really defend him after what he….”
