Death Sentence (20 page)

“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.

33

You play the cards you've been dealt.

He sat motionless, bolt upright, not stirring and not reckoning the passage of time.

The telephone.

It drove him to his feet in panic and alarm. He stared at the instrument while it rang. It went on ringing; he didn't move.

It would be Irene. He couldn't talk to her now. He waited, wincing. It rang an incalculable number of times before she gave up.

Afterward the silence was terrifying.

34

H
E PUT HIS CAR
in the spiral-ramp garage. It was nearly empty; the Loop was deserted on a Sunday; he walked to the shabby building and climbed the stairs, focusing on the chipped linoleum. Let himself into the office and sat behind the desk with his fist knotted. His face turned toward the filing cabinet where the guns were.

He had to think. It was imperative. But a paralyzing numbness had set in and he kept flashing on moments of terror that jumbled in his mind like falling bricks: bloody machete looming above him, striking forward; gunsights leveling on the purse-snatcher while the old Jew moved into range; staring eyes of the blind girl.