Evening of the Good Samaritan (63 page)

Redmond arranged that both he and the teacher ride downtown in the police van with the prisoner and his guards. It was one of the strangest rides in Covington’s experience: the half-light within the wagon illuminating faces beneath which the bodies were lost in a murky darkness, the springless seats; the dawn to be glimpsed beyond the barred windows, a dawn that gave light but defined none of the objects one expects to see in daylight, for the fog persisted though the sun was burning through it. He was taken back in memory to wartime Holland, the springless vans jolting along the shell-pocked roads. Even the light was such as he remembered, the sun obscured by the restless dust after the night’s bombardment.

No one in the police van spoke for a long time. The bell sometimes clanged and Tad would grin a little at the sound. It pleased Covington to see manifest some stirring of the boy’s imagination; no matter whether the grin was mocking or ironic.

And mocking it was, alas, for he jerked his head in the direction of the driver and said, purposely slurring his usually careful speech: “That’s doin’ his dooty.”

The policeman to whom he was manacled wrenched the boy’s wrist by giving a sudden twist to the chain between them. Tad winced, then cast him a venomous glance and said: “You son of a bitch.”

Covington, sitting opposite him, looked at his own hands. He had never heard Tad use language like it before. The night had wrought much change in him. Redmond, next to Covington, softly whistled a few phrases from something operatic.

“This is what they’re coddling in the universities of the country nowadays,” the policeman said, and leaning sidewise, he spat expertly between the bars of the back window.

Oh, yes. Tad would get on marvelously with the police.

There was not much time left. Covington tried to find a way to put his question that would not provoke some bitter, self-injurious retort from the boy. He had not yet acknowledged even the presence of the teacher. Finally he asked simply: “Is there anything you want me to do, Tad? To say to your mother when she gets here?”

The boy lifted his eyes, the wide dark blue eyes that met Covington’s frankly and then narrowed as he withdrew again into isolated misery. Covington had held his own gaze steady, trying to convey a little understanding at least. And a little was all he had, for such a hatred as this boy had cherished for Nathan Reiss was beyond the teacher’s reckoning. There was nothing in his own life by which he could relate to it.

Hogan turned his head away as though he would have hid his face if that were possible, and Covington saw the quick movement in the boy’s throat, the thrust of pain without tears, and he assumed that something of his unworded message had got across. He rode out the rest of the interminable journey in aching suspense himself. One of the cops said it was clearing up, and the other said he was glad because he had promised to take his kids to the zoo that afternoon. “If it don’t clear up,” he said, “I’ll have to take them to the Museum of Natural History. The dead zoo, my kid calls it. Ain’t that something, the dead zoo!”

Covington had been staring at the window. In the afterglow he could see nothing but striped patches of light wherever he tried to focus his vision. His sight was still bleared when the vehicle slowed down. That and the tires’ rubbing against the curb, indicated their arrival at the city prison. He laid his hand on the boy’s knee. “Anything, Tad?”

The boy shook his head, but murmured, “Thanks.”

The van door was opened from the outside, and then in the instant they stood all of them together, the men getting their legs steady beneath them, Tad said: “Mr. Covington, if you would tell my mother …” By his own choice, the boy left off the sentence there.

C
OVINGTON MET ASSISTANT DISTRICT
Attorney Reginald Tripp in his office at a little before noon. Redmond had told him he was likely to be called and advised him to be cooperative without volunteering anything, above all opinions. But with Mr. Tripp himself, Covington thought after a very few minutes in his company, fact and opinion were hardly distinguishable.

Tripp was a tough, but soft spoken man with the crisp manner of being able to get things done. He was well under fifty, and Covington had no doubt, ambitious. But then, one was always likely to think of a prosecutor as ambitious, and sharp. This fellow was sharper than most. And Covington realized just where he was trying to go very early in the interrogation.

“Did Hogan tell you why he was going into New York?”

“To have dinner with his stepfather.”

“Was there anything special about the occasion?” the lawyer asked.

“About their having dinner, not to my knowledge.”

“You didn’t know Doctor Reiss was in town for a testimonial luncheon?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

Tripp smiled a little and said casually: “Hogan didn’t think much of the Conference of Jewish Women, did he?”

“I don’t think I could answer that.”

“He called them a corny outfit,” Tripp said.

“I suppose,” Covington said, “I would say the same thing about most fraternal—or benevolent organizations.”

“Would you,” the lawyer murmured, and Covington realized he had volunteered an opinion.

“Have you ever heard him make any other anti-Semitic remarks?”

“That, sir, was not an anti-Semitic remark. Nor is the boy anti-Semitic.” Covington was not a quick-tempered man, but the lawyer had come very near to making him one then.

Tripp himself merely drew a line across the blank piece of paper before him as though striking a question. “In other words, professor, you don’t think that’s an issue in this case?”

“I do not.”

“Then let’s try and clear up a couple of thing if we can,” the lawyer said, and scratched his ear. “Ever have your ear go numb on you? Maybe I get it from the telephone … Schlaacht’s Restaurant. That’s as German as Hitler. As a matter of fact it was a Bundist hangout back in the thirties. What do you suppose persuaded Reiss, a Jewish refugee to have dinner there?” Covington did not answer. “Especially when he himself had had a reservation made at Jacques’.”

“From my knowledge of Hogan, I know that he would have preferred Jacques’,” the teacher said.

“You know, professor,” Tripp said, “according to you, the boy and his stepfather should have got along beautifully. But we both know that isn’t so, don’t we?”

“I know that Hogan did not like his stepfather,” Covington said coldly.

“What do you know about this character, Bergner?”

Covington was aware again of being led, the word “character” would be meant to disarm him. “Practically nothing,” Covington said. All he did know of Bergner was Tad’s contempt for him: “Nathan’s broom.”

“A friend of the family, would you say?”

“Probably a friend of Doctor Reiss’.”

“Not a likely confidant of the boy’s?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Covington said.

“And yet Hogan seems to have confided to him yesterday afternoon that he thought Nathan Reiss was responsible for his father’s death … In fact, Hogan himself admits saying it. And he goes further: he claims to have said it to Reiss—and that at dinner in a restaurant called Schlaacht’s—Reiss refused to deny it. You know, professor, it would take very little persuasion to get that boy to plead guilty, and I’m not at all sure it wouldn’t be in his own best interests.”

The lawyer raised his hand to forestall Covington’s protest. “Let me go over with you just for a few minutes the way it looks to this office right now:

“First there’s the matter of physical evidence and the findings of the medical examiner’s office. I assure you, everything in that is going to be checked out. Our job right now is looking to motive. We have to go back a ways for that, I think.

“Doctor Reiss came to this country, a refugee, in ‘39 or ’40, according to Bergner. He got out, we may assume, with enough money, enough of everything to take care of him until he was established. He was a man, shall we say, not ostensibly Jewish—despite his subsequent activities in this country. I say all of this because he shared a practice which probably wasn’t Jewish at all with Doctor Hogan at one time. He was affiliated with three hospitals at the time of his death. None of them is Jewish sponsored. His wife is not Jewish. All that is one side of the man. The other side is something else. He became active in the Zionist movement, he was honored yesterday by a Jewish organization. It’s my feeling, Mr. Covington, that a man does not survive handily where several million like him perished without carrying the burden of their martyrdom for the rest of his natural life. And it gets heavier all the time. Such a man, I propose, might literally beg for persecution. I mean he’d want it—like food, like sex, deeply, pathologically, trying to provoke people into it. I think you and I know enough of human nature to realize that if anybody asks for a beating, he’s going to find someone to give it to him.”

Covington sat, determined to hear the man out. He could not deny the ring of truth in the theory he was sounding: and Tad responded always where Nathan Reiss was concerned as though deliberately goaded into some new expression of hatred.

“And so we come to young Hogan: he grew up in the house with this strong-willed man, this—masochist. I don’t deny for a minute, Covington, that Reiss was a bastard where this boy was concerned. I shouldn’t be surprised if he deliberately turned him into an anti-Semite. That’s what I meant by saying it might be better for the boy to plead guilty: his lawyers could expose Reiss for what he was—and save the boy’s life.” Tripp leaned across his desk. “I’m not trying to shock you into anything, Covington. I assure you that if you were to read Bergner’s and the boy’s own testimony as to what he went through last night you would understand our line of reasoning.”

Covington said: “But he pleaded ‘not guilty’, Mr. Tripp.”

“I think he will change that plea … voluntarily. Because I think he’s proud of what he did.”

“I swear to God, sir, that boy is not anti-Semitic. No!” Covington pushed himself away from Tripp’s desk and got up. “No, sir. You’re wrong there and you’ve got to be wrong in the rest of it. Whatever happened last night, I tell you, Nathan Reiss did not, could not brainwash that boy. You’ve come closer doing that to me than ever he did to Hogan.”

“All right,” Tripp said placatingly. “I’m not going to argue it with you. There’s not much point, is there? Would you like some coffee?”

“No thanks.”

“Sure?” He picked up the phone and ordered two cartons of it sent up anyway.

Covington, given the moment’s respite, began to contemplate why the lawyer had put him through that gambit: he was hoping, Covington came to suspect, that the teacher might persuade the boy and his lawyers to change the plea: that was what he wanted. And realizing it, Covington suspected that the District Attorney did not actually have sufficient evidence on which to hold Hogan otherwise.

Covington’s whole line of reasoning must have shone in his face, for as soon as Tripp hung up the phone, he said: “He’s going to be arraigned soon, you know. And we’re going to charge him with first-degree murder … So if there’s any way in which you think you can help him, it ought to be now.”

“God knows, I want to,” Covington said.

The lawyer studied him for a moment. “Have you any idea why he should have wanted to telephone a woman named Madame Johanna Schwarzbach at twenty minutes to nine last night?”

“Why he should have wanted to, I don’t know,” Covington said slowly.

The lawyer sighed. “That makes two of you. He doesn’t seem to know either.”

“Have you asked Madame Schwarzbach?”

“Do you know her?”

“I know who she is,” Covington said.

“Then you know why I haven’t asked her. I’m waiting for the boss’ okay.”

There were some things, some people on whom the city of New York could wait apparently. Covington said: “She used to be Doctor Reiss’ mistress, Mr. Tripp. Perhaps that should enhance her privilege even more.”

Tripp was a few seconds before he spoke. Then: “Does young Hogan know that?”

Too late Covington turned his bitterness on himself. He answered truthfully: “That’s where I found it out.”

T
HAT SAME NOON CAME
for Martha as the train on which she rode pulled out of Albany, down along the widening Hudson River. The mist lay in patches sometimes severing a bright sky from a clouded landscape. Heaven and earth were never joined, she thought. She sat at the window of the compartment in much the same position as she had sat the night, not even having had the bed lowered. She moved her lips now and then, the habit of prayer no less strong than the need for it.

Nathan is dead, Nathan is dead, Nathan is dead. The words had long since set themselves to the rhythm of wheels on rails. And Marcus was dead. Longer dead, yet dead more recently. She allowed her head to bump against the window more and more violently as though the sound might go away with pain. God knew what violence she had tried to do his memory and herself in marrying Nathan Reiss. There are darkness within into which one cannot go even during the eclipse of day. The burden of that violence now lay on Tad, and the terror of it was he had in all the years of his precocity been trying to embrace it.

The porter brought her coffee. She could not drink it having a mouth of gall. She could only wait to be taken to one who could not come to meet her.

The afternoon tabloid was put aboard at Harmon. The train floor and seats were strewn with copies when at last she left the compartment as the train pulled into Grand Central Station. She tried not to look at them. But Tad’s face stared up at her, startled and angry as though it were himself that even she was treading on.

George Bergner met her at the station, unshaven, his eyes bloodshot. Nor was his speech coherent as he wobbled alongside her bumping into people with her suitcase. “I’ve made a reservation for you at the Imperial. The police. Nathan’s things are there. All night, all day, nothing but questions. I can go, they say now. I’m going.” In the ramp he put her into the first taxi. “I’m going home, Martha. The lawyers, they’ll do everything.”