Chapter 20
Check Mate
Nothing happened for eleven seconds.
He counted them. He stood in the cold with his stiff white hands at his sides and the little bulb swinging, and he counted, as he had counted every hallway of his life. One. Two. Behind the door the room was perfectly quiet. There was no stenotype. There was no sobbing. There was only the soft hiss of an oxygen line, and the long dry tick of the courtroom clock, and, somewhere very far off, a sound like a man laughing.
Seven. Eight.
He had said it. He had said it loudly and properly and in order, as she had asked. He had thought it would feel like something. He had thought, when it was out, the building would answer. It did not. It lay in the air of the cell, and went cold.
Nine. Ten.
"The defendant," said a voice, "has no standing."
It was the old voice, from the speaker. But it had changed. It was hoarse, and flat, and very tired, and it did not seem to be speaking to him. It was the voice of a man at the end of a long night reading from a card.
"He has entered a plea. He has been sentenced. It is not open to him to make motions."
"I'm still a party," said Daniel.
"The record will show."
"The record will show that I made a motion. In open court. In a loud voice." He kept his face close to the grille. His breath fogged the metal. "It will show that you heard it. You've been telling me that for four days. For the record. You said every word we said would be kept."
"That is so."
"Then keep that."
There was no answer. Somewhere in the courtroom a chair creaked. He thought of the little black machine, and the long strip of paper curling out of it, and a pair of thin old hands that had never in thirty years left a mistake in a transcript.
Please, he thought.
Please. You're a man who can't leave it.
"I move that you recuse yourself," said Daniel, more quietly. "On the ground that you have a personal interest in the proceedings. You are the husband of Juror Nine. You are a witness to the events. You are, as you've said yourself, the person who arranged them. You could not sit in a case of your own. You could not sit in a case in which you had a, you've been wronged. It's the oldest rule there is." He took a breath. "I think you know it better than I do."
The speaker hissed.
"You've been calling yourself the court," said Daniel. "You took the chair. You read the charge. You passed a sentence. I took the plea in good faith, because it was all I had. But a man with your interest, who does that, he's not a judge. He's, I'm sorry. He's a party. And a party can't try his own case."
"Mr. Wells."
"Please enter it."
"I cannot enter it. It is absurd." The voice cracked. "It is a motion that is made in a real court, to a real judge. It has no standing in a room in an abandoned building."
"You made it a real court."
"I made it a form."
"It's the same."
"It is not."
"Then why did you build it?" said Daniel.
The silence that followed was longer than any that had gone before.
It was a strange thing. He could hear, through the thick steel and the passage and the bench, the faint far scrape of a chair. He could hear the click of a plastic tube. He could hear, with a clearness that made his skin crawl, a man weeping, very quietly, into his own sleeve. And then, from somewhere beyond that, a third voice, deep, slow, tentative, that he had last heard in a long tiled hall, saying a name.
"Mr. Hale."
It was Tom Rudd.
He was standing, Daniel thought, by the bench. His voice was thick and steady. It was the voice of a man who has stood at a great many doors. "Mr. Hale. I'd like to say a thing, if I may. I'm the bailiff."
"You are not a bailiff."
"I was. Twenty-two years. I stood at that door." A pause. "I never saw a judge refuse a motion that was properly put. Not once. They'd deny it. They'd say, the motion is without merit. But they'd hear it. They'd put it in the record. That's all the thing is. It's a right to be heard." He swallowed. "I think, sir, if you've a, if you've any respect for the, I think you ought to rule."
"Mr. Rudd."
"You taught me that," said Tom. "I mean the forms. You always said, at the end of a day. Mr. Rudd, we have not done our duty unless the record is clean."
There was no answer.
On the other side of the steel, the strip of paper had begun, very faintly, to run. It was a small dry whisper. It went on for a long time.
THE DEFENDANT: Your Honor, I move that you recuse yourself.
THE COURT:
It stopped.
It stopped for a long time. If Daniel could have seen it, if he could have stood in that high dim room under the great seal of the county, he would have seen a thin old man in a wheelchair, with his white head bowed over a machine, and his two long hands lying still upon the keys. He would have seen the tube slipped from the nose. He would have seen, at the foot of the bench, a big gray man on his knees, holding a girl in a blue shirt, and, against the wall, a little round dark stain, and the long untidy braid of black hair spread out on the boards.
He would have seen the old man look at her.
He did not move. He sat as he was, with his hands on the keys. And he looked at the girl for a very long time, in the cold gray light, with an expression that no stenographer in the world could have taken down. It was not hate, or grief, or even despair. It was simply the look of a man who has been very carefully building a clock for nine years, and has just heard it strike, and found that it was a thing he did not know how to read.
Ivy.
Margaret.
My dears.
He lifted his hands from the keys.
They shook. They shook so that the little black machine rattled on its stand. He put them together, in his lap, and held them very tight, like a boy at a prayer. He turned his face up. And in a small, clear, ruined voice, which was not the voice of the court and was not the voice of the wire, but only the voice of an old man called Walter, speaking to a room that had no one in it but the dead, he said:
"It is a rule."
"Yes," said Tom.
"It is a rule that I believe in."
"Yes, sir."
"I have believed in it all my life." He closed his eyes. "It is the thing I believe in more than any other. A man may not judge his own cause. It is the only, it is the whole of the law, Mr. Rudd. It is the only thing that keeps a court from being a, from being a." He opened them. "From being what I made."
"Yes."
"I did not think it would be used on me."
"No, sir."
"I did not think that a man would think of it."
"Miss Marsh thought of it," said Tom.
The old man did not answer.
"She was the defense lawyer. She's the one who gave it him." Tom's voice was steady. "She's dead, sir. She's in a vault. She did it of her own accord. She said it was the best exchange on the table."
"I know."
"I think she'd have liked it noted."
"Yes," said Walter Hale.
There was a very long breath.
"I think that she would."
It was seven forty-one when he spoke.
There was no sound of a gavel. It was a very small thing, afterward, to try to describe. The strip of paper ran, a few inches, and was still. The old man had put his hands once more upon the keys. They were steady. They had stopped shaking. He sat very upright, in the chair, and his face had a curious empty smoothness, like the face of a man who has finished his sums.
He typed it as he said it. It ran, in small dry capitals, on the paper strip, and he read it aloud, in a clear unhurried voice, the old voice, the one that had spoken to them from the walls.
"THE COURT: The defendant's motion is noted. The court finds that the defendant's motion is well taken."
He paused.
"The court finds that it has a personal interest in the proceedings. The court is the husband of Margaret Hale, who sat as Juror Nine. The court was a witness to the events before it." His voice was perfectly even. "The court was, in addition, the author of the proceedings. It is the finding of the court that it may not sit in a cause of its own."
"Your Honor," said Tom, hoarsely.
"The motion is granted."
The strip ran.
"The court recuses itself."
It was so quiet that Daniel heard it. He heard, in the Pen, through a foot of steel, the soft small click of a final key. It was the sound of a typed full stop.
"There being no judge, the court cannot sit." The voice went on. It was dry and clear and without emphasis. "It is the rule of this court, Rule Three, that adjournment is the only door. The court has found that it cannot continue. The court is therefore adjourned."
He took his hand from the machine.
"Seven forty-one," said Walter Hale. "Please note the time."
Nothing moved.
For one long second the whole of the building held its breath. There was not a sound, not the click of a clock, not the tick of a pipe. Then, deep in the walls, a long way down, there came a sound that Daniel had never heard before and would hear in his dreams for the rest of his life. It was a low, soft, enormous clatter, like a thousand small bolts drawing back. It rolled through the floors. It ran up the pipes. It went through the stone like the sigh of a very great animal, loosing its breath.
The latch of the Pen lifted.
It went up with a small bright snap. The door, which had swung to behind him, drifted a hand's breadth outward, on its own, on a rush of white vapor. A thin bar of gold light fell across the cold floor of the cell. It came from the courtroom. It came from a high window, under the roof, where the sun was rising on the city of Marlow, for the first time, on a Saturday morning in March.
He stood and looked at it.
He did not move. He could not. He stood in the cold with his useless hands and his bad foot, in front of an open door, and found that his knees would not take him. He heard from very far off, in some other part of the building, a sound of heavy doors opening, of a great many boots on stone, and a loud flat voice shouting, Police. Police. Everybody stay where you are.
Sosa, he thought.
She came.
He began to laugh.
It was a ridiculous thing. It was a cracked, thin, unlovely noise, with a sob inside it, and it echoed in the little steel room and went on and on. He leaned against the wall. He slid down it. He sat on the cold floor with his back against the metal and his legs stuck out in front of him, and laughed, and laughed, and the tears ran sideways into his ears. Beside him, on the bench, under a gray blanket, a small still shape with its socks on its feet lay undisturbed.
"Sorry, Ray," said Daniel. "Sorry. It's a, I think it's finished."
They found him there at ten to eight.
It was a policewoman, in a gray coat. She came through the doorway with a flashlight and a gun, fast, low, with a younger man behind her. She stopped. She had a broad, tired, patient face, and short graying hair, and she stood in the thin gold light with her weapon lowered and looked at the man on the floor.
"Mr. Wells," said Detective Sosa.
"Hello."
"Are you hurt?"
"My hands," said Daniel.
"Can you stand?"
"No."
"That's all right." She holstered the gun. She came into the cell, and knelt, and took his two stiff hands in her own, and looked at them, and her mouth went tight. "Ruiz. Get the medics. Tell them it's frostbite. Tell them to bring blankets. Tell them he's, he's got ribs, he's got a, tell them everything."
"Where's June?"
"She's outside. She's all right. She's with a, she's wrapped up in a coat. She's sitting on the steps, with a big man in a uniform, and she hasn't let go of his hand." Sosa's voice was gruff. "She came out the front at about half past seven. She walked up to me. She said, Detective Sosa? I'm June Wells. My dad's in the Pen. It's a cold room on the left." A pause. "She said, you'll want to hurry."
"That sounds like her."
"It does."
"She was, she did the hall. She worked out the hall."
"I heard." The detective did not smile. She did not look away from his face. "Mr. Wells. I'm going to ask you something, and I want you to think before you answer. I think you know what it is."
"Yes."
"You were on a jury."
"I was the foreman," said Daniel.
"I know. I checked."
"I'd like to tell you. All of it. I'd like to do it properly. I think it's going to take a long time."
"I've got all day."
"I'd like to say it on the record."
"We'll have a stenographer," said Detective Sosa, and put a blanket round his shoulders.
He got out on a stretcher.
It took four men and a good deal of swearing. They carried him through the narrow passage, past the bench, and the high oak room, and he saw it for the last time in the hard clean light of a dozen flashlights. It was a small, dusty, shabby room. It had a great plaster seal on the wall, and a rail, and a witness stand, and twelve empty chairs in a box. On the floor, at the foot of the bench, a dark stain had spread across the boards. Somebody had covered the thing beside it with a gray coat.
An old man sat in a wheelchair beside it.
He had not been moved. He sat upright, with his hands in his lap, in the middle of eleven men. A tube hung from his nose. He had taken off his glasses, and his eyes, without them, were very pale and blind. A young policeman was standing at his shoulder, awkwardly, with a pair of handcuffs, not knowing where to put them. He had not put them on.
"I wish to make a statement," said Walter Hale.
He said it to nobody. He said it, mildly, to the air. "I should like it entered that I am the sole author of these events. That the persons who took part in them did so under a duress of which I was the cause. That Mr. Wells, Mr. Rudd, Mr. Ross, and Miss Lowe, and Miss Marsh, and Mr. Dunn, and Mr. Pruitt." He stopped. "That I am very sorry. I do not suppose that it is of any use."
"Sir," said the young man, uncomfortably.
"And I should like the record to show," said Walter, in the same mild voice, "that the court adjourned at seven forty-one. And that it was done in the proper form."
The stretcher went past.
For a moment, as it passed, the old man turned his head. He could not have seen. But his blind pale face turned, with a kind of slow courtesy, toward the passing shape, and his lips moved.
"A very good move, Mr. Wells," said Walter Hale.
Daniel could not answer.
He lay on his back, with his hands in two white bundles on his chest, and the ceiling of the court going by overhead, and he thought of a small, hot, stuffy kitchen, nine years ago, and a woman's low voice on a tape. It was a very reasonable room.
"It was Helen's," he said, at last.
"Yes," said the old man. "I know. I should like to have met her."
Afterward, there was a good deal.
It went on for months. It went on, it sometimes seemed to him, for the rest of his life. There were doctors, who took off the third and fourth fingers of his left hand at the second joint, and said that he was a very lucky man. There were officers, with notebooks. There was a county attorney, a stout gray woman named Fox, who sat opposite him in a small windowless room for eleven hours, and wrote down all of it, and at the end of it took off her glasses and said nothing for a very long time. There was a hearing. There was a letter. There was a thick blue envelope that Walter Hale had addressed to the district attorney three years before, and that lay on the old man's bench when they found him, with its seal unbroken. Inside it were four hundred and nine pages. The first of them was a transcript. The last was a sheet of paper in a manila folder with a coffee ring on its cover.
They found the sheet in the third drawer of a cabinet, in a room that smelled of radiators, under four hundred yellow forms.
They found Helen at nine.
The vault door had swung wide at the moment of adjournment, on its great hinge, with a long soft groan, and nobody had known it. Tom went down in the end, with a young policeman and a flashlight, and the policeman stayed at the foot of the stair. Tom went on alone, along the cold passage, and stood in front of the open door for some time before he went through.
She was sitting against the wall of the vault, in her stocking feet, with her hands in her lap. Her glasses were pushed up on her forehead. She had a faint, dry, ironical look, like a woman who has been kept waiting by a rather slow clerk. The doctor said afterward that she had been dead for about half an hour. It was not the air. The vent had held. It was her lungs, which had never mended, and which had gone in the small hours, quietly, as the antibiotic wore off, with nobody to give her the next dose. She had not suffered much. She had gone to sleep.
Tom said that if the door had opened a little sooner. The doctor said that it would have made no difference. Tom said, No, sir, and thanked him, and went outside, and stood for a long time on the wet steps with his cap in his hand.
On the wall, at the height a seated woman could reach, someone had drawn a single word in the dust with a finger.
Louder.
He saw June in the hospital that night.
They had put her in the next room, because she would not be anywhere else. She sat on the edge of his bed in a pair of hospital pajamas that were too big for her, with her feet drawn up under her, and her braid rebraided. Somebody had washed her face. She looked very small and very clean and exhausted. She had a tray on her knees, a plastic one, with a chess set on it. It was a cheap travel set, with magnets in the pieces, that the night nurse had found in the children's ward.
"You're not going to eat?" said Daniel.
"I ate."
"What?"
"A sandwich. And a yogurt. And a, there was a lady with a cart." She did not look up. She was setting the pieces out in their rows, one at a time, with a small precise click. "Dad."
"Yes."
"Can I ask you a thing?"
"Anything."
"You said that."
"I did."
"It's a bad word," said June. She said it seriously, with her eyes on the board. "He said it. Mr. Hale. He said it's a thing people say when they don't know the price." She put a white pawn down. "I think I'd like it if we didn't say it. For a while."
"Okay."
"We could say, I'll tell you the truth. Even the bad part."
"I'd like that."
"Even when it costs." She looked up. Her gray eyes, in the lamplight, were steady and enormous and a good deal older than twelve. "That's the oath. Isn't it? The card. The whole truth, including the part that costs me."
"Yes."
"I think it's a good rule."
"It's a very good one."
"Do you still have the napkin?"
He looked down at the bedside locker. It was there, beside a plastic cup and a folded pin. It was a little crumpled square of white, soft as cloth, with a blue drawing on it. He picked it up with his right hand, awkwardly, in the crook of his thumb. He gave it to her.
She turned it over. She did not smile.
"It was a good napkin," she said.
"It was the best."
"I'd like to keep it."
"It's yours."
"I'm going to put it in the tin." She folded it, once, twice, and put it in the pocket of her pajamas. She was silent for a while. Then she said, in a very small voice, "I can't say the word, Dad. The lighthouse. I tried. I tried in the car. It, I keep seeing her."
"I know."
"She was nice. That's the thing. She was so nice." Her mouth trembled. "She held my hand. She said it'd be all right. And I thought, she's my friend. I thought, she's the one who, and she was the one who." She stopped. She pressed the back of her wrist to her eyes. "I didn't want her to die."
"No."
"I wanted her to say sorry."
"I think she did."
"She didn't. She said go in." June swallowed. "She said it to you. Not me."
"She said it to both of us," said Daniel. "She said it so that I'd go. And so that I'd tell you."
"Tell me what?"
"That she was braver than I was."
She did not answer. She sat still, with her wrist against her face. After a long time, she put out her hand, and laid it, small and cold and callused, on his bandaged one, and held it.
"I'm not going to be able to leave the light on," said Daniel.
"I know."
"I'll try."
"You don't have to."
"I'd like to."
"Then we'll do it together." She sniffed. "That's a new rule. You turn it on and I turn it off. And then it's, we've both."
"Okay."
"Okay."
They sat. After a while the night nurse put her head round the door, and went away again. Outside in the corridor, a trolley rattled. Through the high window, a long way down, a pale street was lit in orange squares. A bus went by.
"Dad?"
"Yes."
"Do you want to know how it works?"
"What?"
"What you did." She had turned her face to the board. "It's called checkmate. You think it's when the king dies. It isn't. The king never dies. That's the thing. It's when he's in check, and he's got no move." She picked up a small black king, and turned it in her fingers. "You've got three things you can do. You can run away. You can put something in the way. Or you can take the thing that's attacking you. And if you can't do any of them, that's it. It's over. It's called mate."
"I know."
"You don't."
"No," said Daniel. "I don't."
"So. Mr. Hale had all the rules. He wrote them. They were all his. There was a rule that said the court sits till there's a verdict. And a rule that said it's the only door. And he made himself the judge. And every one of the rules was a piece. They were all on his side." She set the black king down in the corner. "And then you said the one thing. And it, it was like a knight. It jumped over. It went over all of them. And it landed on the judge."
"On him."
"He was in check. He had to answer. And whatever he did, he lost. If he said no, he broke his own rule. If he ignored it, he left a mistake in the record. And if he said yes." She shrugged. "Then there was no court. He'd taken himself off the board."
"Every move he had was his own."
"That's mate," said June.
She put a white knight on the square in front of the king.
It was a small piece. It was a little curved horse's head, carved in cheap plastic, with a flat base. She set it there, very carefully, with the tip of one finger, and looked at it. Then she looked at him. Her face was serious, and pale, and tired. It was Anna's face, he thought. It had always been. He had never let himself see it.
"You don't have to learn," said June. "If you don't want."
"I think I do."
"It's a long way."
"I've got time," said Daniel.
She turned the board round. She did it with both hands, with a small scrape. She sat back, and put her chin on her fist, and her braid fell over her shoulder, and the lamp lit it. And with a quiet, grave, steady, patient expression, which he had seen on her face over a hundred Saturday breakfasts, she held out her hand.
"Okay," said his daughter. "Your move."