Birds roosted on the upper ledges. A stars and stripes snapped in the breeze. As Legs brushed the wall with his shoulder, dust fell from the pillars.
The Pathé News cameraman noted the action and the consequence and asked Legs to come back and do it again. But, of course, Legs could not commit precisely the same act a second time, since every act enhanced or diminished him as well as the world around him. Yet it was that precise moment, that push, that almost imperceptible fall of dust, the cameraman wanted on film.
As the crowd moved into the courtroom the cameraman exercising a bit of creative enterprise, lifted Legs Diamond's coat and hat from the cloakroom. He dressed his slightly built assistant cameraman in the garments and sent him up the stairs to brush the wall for a repeat performance. The Pathé News cameraman then filmed it all. Inspecting the floor for a closeup, he discovered that the dust that fell was not dust at all, but pigeon shit.
In the crowded hallway of the courthouse, during a brief moment when no one was holding his arm, a youth Jack did not know separated himself from the mob and whispered, "You're gonna get it, Diamond, no matter what happens here. Wanna take it now?" Jack looked at the kid-maybe nineteen, maybe twenty-two, with a little fuzz on his lip and a bad haircut-and he laughed. The kid eased himself back into the crowd, and Jack, pulled by me toward the courtroom, lost sight of him.
"Kid was braggin'," Jack said, telling me about the threat. "He looked like a hundred-dollar pay killer. Too green to be in the big money." Jack shook his head in a way I took to be an amused recognition of his own lowly condition. They send punk kids after me.
But I also saw a spot of white on his lower lip, a spot of bloodlessness. He bit at the spot, again and again. The bite hardened his face, as if he were sucking the blood out of the point of his own fear, so that when the threat became tangible it would not bleed him into weakness. It struck me as a strange form of courage, but not as I knew it for myself: no intellectual girding, but rather a physiological act: a Jack Diamond of another day, recollected not by the brain but by the body, his back to a cave full of unexplored dangers of its own, staring out beyond a puny fire, waiting for the unspecified enemy who tonight, or tomorrow night, or the next, would throw a shadow across that indefensible hearth.
By eight o'clock on the evening of the first day of Jack's second Troy trial, both the prosecution and the defense attorneys had exhausted their peremptory challenges and the final juror was at last chosen. He was an auto mechanic who joined two farmers, a printer, an engineer, a mason, a lumber dealer, an electrical worker, two laborers, a merchant, and a plant foreman as the peers, the twelve-headed judge, of Legs Diamond. I had sought to relieve the maleness by accepting two female jurors, but Jack's appeal to women had been too widely documented for the prosecution to take such a risk, and both were challenged. The prosecution's chief trial counsel was a man named Clarence Knought, who wore a gray, hard-finish, three-button herringbone with vest, gray tie, watch chain, and rimless glasses. His thin lips, receding hairline, gaunt figure, and voice, which lacked modulation but gained relentless moral rectitude through its monotony, provided the jury with the living image of New York State integrity, American Puritanism, and the Columbian quest for perfect justice. He spoke for twenty minutes, outlining the case against Legs Diamond, whom he called Diamond. He recapitulated the kidnapping of Streeter and Bartlett in his opening summary, savoring the punching of Streeter, the death threats, the burning and the hanging, details which landed on the jurors' faces like flying cockroaches. The recapitulation set off an uncontrollable twitching in one juror's cheek, dilated just about every eye, wrinkled eyebrows, and dried up lips. Having filled the jurors with terror, Knought congratulated them.
"You are privileged," he told them. "You have the chance to rid this nation of one of its worst scourges. You have the chance to put behind bars this man Diamond, this figure of unmitigated evil, this conscienceless devil who has been arrested twenty-five times for every crime from simple assault to foul, vicious murder, whose association with the worst men of our time has been widely reported in the press and whose record of having cheated justice again and again is an appalling blot on our national image. Shall this nation be ruled by the rod? Shall this ogre of bestial behavior paralyze every decent man's heart? You twelve can end this travesty, put him in the penitentiary where he belongs."
Knought breathed fury, thumped the railing of the jury box with his fist, then walked to his chair and sat down in a cloud of legitimized wrath.
I rose slowly from my chair alongside Jack, this thought in my head as I did: O priggish stringbean, thank you for befouling my client with your excremental denunciation, with the ordurous funk of your morality, for you now give me the opportunity to wipe this beshitted countenance clean and show the human face beneath the fetid desecration. My image before the jury was calculatedly bumpkinish, my clothes workingman's best, aspiring to shabby genteel. I tweaked my bow tie and ran my fingers through my unruly head of hair, which I was told, seemed as gifted with wild statement as the brain it covered. The head was leonine, the mane controlled just this side of bushy frazzle. I wore an apple-red vest, high contrast to my baggy-kneed brown tweed suit. I tucked thumbs in vest and unleashed the major weapon of the defense-my voice-that timbre of significance, that resonant spume of the believer, that majestic chord of a man consecrated to the revelation of boilingly passionate truths. I said:
"I expect low blows from the prosecution's lawyers-all seven of them. Are you aware, my friends, that the state has seven lawyers climbing over one another in a frantic effort to railroad one frail man into jail? Yes, I expected their low blows, but never such base name calling as we have just heard-'figure of unmitigated evil,' 'conscienceless devil,' 'ogre of bestial behavior.' I would never have dreamed of telling you what I am about to tell if this champion of self-righteousness had not been so vitriolic a few moments ago, so full of acid and poison toward my client. But I will tell you now. I will tell you of the little old lady-no, I won't disguise her vocation, not now. A little old Catholic nun, she was, and she came to this courtroom less than an hour ago to talk with Jack Diamond, only a few steps from where you are seated. She didn't see him, for he was otherwise occupied. She saw me, however, and I will see to it that she gets her wish, for she came here for one reason only-to see the man who was once a boy at her knee. Jackie Diamond was the name she knew him by, a boy she described as one of the most devout Catholic children she has ever known. She sees that boy still in the face of the man you know as Legs Diamond, that mythical figure of unmitigated evil the prosecutor has invented. This woman had heard such cruel insults hurled before at the boy she knew. She had heard them for years. She had read them in the newspapers. But that little old woman, that creature of God Almighty's very own army, sat down in that room with me for five minutes and talked to me about Jackie Diamond's prayers, his prayers for his mother, a woman who died too early, about the Diamond home and family in Philadelphia. And when she was through with her reminiscing she told me precisely what she thought about all those accusations against the boy whose gaunt, troubled face she hardly recognized when she saw it across the room. 'They're all lies. Mr. Gorman,' she said to me, 'fiendish lies! Now that I have seen his face for myself I know those were lies, Mr. Gorman. I teach children, Mr. Gorman, and I have boys and girls in my charge who delight in drowning puppies and stabbing cats and watching them slowly perish, and I know evil when I see it in the eyes of a human being. I came here today to see for myself whether my memory had deceived me, whether I knew good when I saw it, whether I knew evil. I have now seen the eyes of Jack Diamond in this room and I am as certain as I am of God's love that whatever on earth that man may have done, he is not an evil man. I have verified this for myself, Mr. Gorman. I have verified it.' "