Free Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment by D. W. Buffa Page B

fixing him with a withering stare, ‘because it would have hurt her beyond anything anyone could have done. But Gerald could have told me—would have told me—because why would he think it would hurt me?’
    “Goldman did not take his eyes off her, but his whole body tensed as he felt himself come under the watchful scrutiny of everyone in the courtroom. He tried to bury her answer beneath another question, but she was too quick for him.
    ” ‘I watched out for him. Gerald knew I wouldn’t let anything happen to him. And nothing did—not until they let him go live with my father!’
    “Goldman’s face was screwed up tighter than a drum. ‘You’d lie to protect your mother, wouldn’t you?’
    “It’s the question that never works, and I’ve heard it a thousand times.
    ” ‘I don’t have to,’ Amy calmly answered.”
    I stopped and looked around at the three men gathered at the table with me. Harper, who had been staring into his empty glass, glanced up. Micronitis tapped the crystal of his watch to remind Asa that they were already late. The old man paid no attention.
    He took his hands, which had been folded together under his chin, and spread them open, large, soft, and pink, like the smooth surface of a baby’s belly.
    “What happened then?” he asked in a quiet, sympathetic voice.
    Micronitis pulled his sleeve down over his watch and sank back into his chair.
    I could see it in my mind, feel it in my soul, all the pulse-pounding, heart-stopping rhetoric I threw at that jury of strangers, all those years ago, when I stopped doing the things that were expected and started doing what something deep inside my own conscience told me to do.
    “I quoted Euripides,” I said out loud, surprised when I heard myself say it. “During closing.”
    Micronitis blinked and then moved forward, resting his elbows on the table. The sullen worried look on his face was replaced with an expression of immediate interest.
    “What was the quote?” he asked, an eager, expectant smile on his small, pinched mouth.
    I remembered not only the quote, but whole sections of a closing argument that had taken nearly two hours. I had worked on it for days, written it out longhand, written it and rewritten it, read it over so often that it echoed in my brain when I tried to sleep; I read it and rehearsed it so many times that it lost all familiarity and began to seem like something I had never seen before. I was certain I would not remember a word of it when I stood up to give it, and determined that even if that happened I would not read anything from the written page, not in front of a jury and a crowded courtroom. No, this had to appear sponta-neous, something I believed in so much that the words came of their own accord. In a real sense, they did. When I began to talk to that jury I forgot all about what I had written, rehearsed, and tried to remember. I forgot it all, and did not forget a word. I had learned it so well that it had become a part of me, something that had gone deeper than my conscious mind. It now had all the force of passion.
    The passion was gone, and only the words were left. To repeat them now, without the fire, without the righteous belief in what they meant, seemed awkward and even embarrassing.
    Asa saw my hesitation. “Go ahead,” he urged. “You’ll be the only one who might laugh.”
    ” ‘Oh where is the noble fear of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness and none join—’ “
    Micronitis finished it for me. ” ‘And none join in fear of the Gods.’ Iphigeneia at Aulis. You really said that in court?” he asked, looking at me with a new respect.
    Dragging his finger back and forth across his lower lip, Asa studied me for a moment. “That was Antonelli’s secret,” he said, with that same shrewd look in his pale blue eyes. There was a wistful tone in his voice, the nostalgia of regret.