Evan Hunter
A Matter of Conviction
For my mother and father,
Marie and Charles
And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?
Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pygmy-self and the day of his god-self.
And that the cornerstone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.
One
The azaleas were dying.
Naturally, they would be dying, and he should have known better. A man born and bred in New York City could dig each hole to its properly specified depth, spread peat moss in it, lay the plant onto this rich brown cushion with loving care, keep it watered and spoonfed with vitamins — and the thing would die anyway for no other reason than that a city boy had planted it.
Or perhaps he was being overly sensitive. Perhaps the intense heat of the past few days had been responsible for the plants’ illness. If that were the case, the azaleas might just as well give up the ghost, because today was going to be another scorcher. He rose from his squatting position near the fading shrubs that lined the terrace, squinting into the distant harsh glare of the Hudson. Another bright, sticky day, he thought, and his tiny office came instantly to mind, and he glanced rapidly at his watch. He still had a few minutes, at least time for a cigarette before he began his trek to the subway.
He pulled the pack from his jacket pocket, tore off the cellophane top and shook a cigarette free. He was a tall man with a large-boned frame, his body padded with sinew that would never turn to fat. His hair was black, cropped close to his skull in a crew cut which subtracted five years from his age. At thirty-eight, he still managed to convey to juries the look of a young innocent about to prosecute a case only because it was in the best interest of the people. And, like a young boy, he could suddenly vent seemingly spontaneous fury on a witness, turning his testimony into a shambles under the gleaming truth-sword of the very young. This morning, as every morning, his blue eyes were pale after a night’s sleep. Later in the day they would regain their full color, quickly readable meters of the ebb and flow of energy within the man.
He pulled up one of the rattan chairs, maneuvered it so that it faced the river and the pure cloudless blue of the sky, and leisurely puffed on his cigarette. He turned when he heard the screen door clatter shut behind him.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way?” Karin asked.
“I have a few minutes,” he said.
She crossed the terrace lazily, stooping beside the potted geraniums, plucking a few dead leaves from each plant, and then walking to the huge stone bowl that served as an ash tray, dropping the leaves, and coming to where he sat. He watched her, wondering if all men were still delighted by their wives’ beauty after fourteen years of marriage. She had been only nineteen when he’d met her, and the hunger of a Germany in defeat had robbed her body of its rightful claim to flesh. She was still a slender woman, but slender with the glow of health now, thirty-five years old with the firm unsagging breasts of a young girl, an abdomen only faintly striated by childbirth years before. She pulled up a stool and caught his free hand with her own, bringing it to her cheek. Her long blond hair touched the back of his hand. She was wearing a short-sleeved white blouse and dungarees and he thought, How American she looks, and then realized how ridiculous he was being. Why, even her English, heavily accented when he had first met her in Berlin, had lost its guttural Teutonic bite, had become rounded and polished, a pebble worn smooth by contact.
“Jennie up yet?” he asked.
“It’s summertime,” Karin said logically. “Let her sleep.”
“I never see that girl,” he said. “My own daughter.”
“The prosecution exaggerates.”
“Possibly,” he answered. “But I get the feeling I’ll come home one night and find Jennie sitting at the dinner table with a young man she’ll introduce as her husband.”
“Hank, she’s only thirteen,” Karin said. She rose and walked to the edge of the terrace. “Look at the river. It’s going to be very hot today.”
He nodded. “You’re the only woman I know who doesn’t look like a truck driver when she puts on a pair of pants.”
“And how many other women do you know?”
“Thousands.” He smiled. “Intimately.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Wait until my memoirs are published.”
“There’s the excursion boat,” she said. “I wish we could go one day. Could we, Hank?”
“What?”
“The boat...” She paused and studied him. “I thought it might be fun.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.”
For a moment, a cloud had passed, fleeting, ephemeral, disturbing him with the puritanical fact that he had not been the first with Karin Brucker. Well, it was wartime, he told himself, what the hell. She’s my wife now, Mrs. Henry Bell, and I should be grateful that an incredible beauty like Karin chose me over the competition, but why the hell did there have to be competition, well, it was wartime, it was... and yet, Mary would not have.
Mary.
The name sprang into his mind full-blown, as if it had been waiting to leap from a dark corner of his memory. Mary O’Brien. Not any longer, of course. Married now. To whom? What was his name? If he had ever known, he had now forgotten. Besides, she would always be Mary O’Brien to him, untouched, pure... You can’t compare them, damnit! Karin lived in Germany, Karin was...
Suddenly he asked, “Do you love me?”
She turned to him, startled. She had not yet made up her face. There were laughter wrinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes, and her unpainted mouth parted in slight surprise and then, very softly, she said, “I love you, Hank,” with a note of wonder and chastisement in her voice and, in what seemed like embarrassment, she went into the house quickly. He could hear her moving noisily about in the kitchen.
Mary, he thought. God, what a long time ago.
He sighed and looked out at the Hudson, dizzily reflecting the early-morning sun. He rose then and went into the kitchen for his briefcase. Karin was picking up the breakfast dishes.
Without looking at him, she said, “About the boat ride, Hank.”
“Yes?”
“For it to be fun, it shouldn’t be on a Saturday or a Sunday.” She raised her eyes to meet his. “For it to be fun, Hank, you would have to take a day away from the office, sometime in the middle of the week.”
“Sure,” he said. He smiled and kissed her briefly. “Sure.”
He got off the subway at Chambers Street, emerging into the bright slanting heat of the city. He knew there was a subway stop closer to Leonard Street and the district attorney’s office, but he preferred the longer walk each morning. Rain or shine, he disembarked at Chambers and then walked toward City Hall, watching the change of geographical climate. It was almost as if the mayor’s shrine were the unofficial border station between the world of big business spreading out from Wall Street and the world of law which had its nucleus on Centre Street.
You walked through the park outside City Hall, and the pigeons pompously strolled like old men deep in thought, and the sunshine washed the painted green benches, and suddenly the towers of business were behind you and ahead lay the impressive gray structures of the law. They squatted together, these formidable buildings somehow smacking of ancient Rome, pillared, strong in their simplicity, their very architecture symbolizing the inevitable power of justice. He felt at home among the buildings of the law. Here, he felt, no matter what damn foolishness they wreaked at Bikini, no matter how many governments changed or severed heads, here was order, here was the true basis of man’s intercourse with his fellow man, here was the law — and here was justice.