'Might as well ask for a winged chariot to carry us home.'
'They're very damn clever,' Scott continued, pivoting toward Tommy.
'This morning we had a piece of hard evidence.
Now we have nothing. Less than nothing. And poof!
There goes tomorrow morning's arguments, counselor. And right alongside any hope of delaying the trial.'
Tommy didn't at first reply. No sense in adding words to the simple truth.
'Actually,' Hugh was quick to interject, 'now you've got a problem. You told MacNamara about this theft?'
Tommy instantly saw where the onetime policeman was heading.
'Yes. Damn. And now we've got a board that doesn't show what we claimed it did. That hunk of useless wood is as dangerous now as any of the evidence the prosecution does have. We damn well can't hold it up and say it used to have Vic's blood on it. Nobody would believe that for a second.'
Tommy turned to Scott.
'Now we've got the board, and its presence in our possession turns us into a pair of liars.'
Hugh smiled.
'But they just still might believe you if you continue to say it was stolen.'
As he spoke, Hugh took the board and carefully propped it up against the edge of his bunk. Then, as his words dwindled into the air of the bunk room, he suddenly lifted his right leg and slammed it against the board. The savage kick splintered the board into two pieces. A second, equally hard kick turned it into kindling.
Tommy grimaced, shrugged, and said, 'The cooking stove is down the corridor.'
'Then I need to cook something,' Renaday replied. He gathered the chunks of wood in his arms and exited the room.
'I guess that board is still stolen,' Scott said.
'I wonder if the bastards who stole it in the first place thought ahead far enough.'
'I doubt they'd anticipate us destroying it,' Tommy replied.
He felt slightly uneasy at what they'd done. My first real case, he thought, and I destroy evidence. But before he had the chance to temporize about the morality of what they'd accomplished with two well-placed kicks, Lincoln Scott was speaking.
'Yeah. They were probably counting on us being honest and playing by the rules, because that's what we've been doing, right up to now. The problem is. Hart, no one else seems to be. Think about it: the carving on the door. Somebody knew that would bring me out of the room. Somebody knew I'd react the damn fool way I did, challenging everybody to a fight. K.KK and nigger. Like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And I fell for it, went dashing out front, ready to fight the whole damn camp if necessary. And, right as I'm making a fool out of myself, someone sneaks in here and lifts the only solid piece of evidence we've got. And then, as soon as my back was turned again, zip, they brought it back. But ruined as evidence. And worse, because with that board sitting in the corner, we're going to appear to MacNamara and the entire camp to be a pair of liars.'
Something frightening occurred to Tommy at that moment.
He slowly inhaled, staring across at Lincoln Scott, who was continuing to speak.
The black flier sighed deeply.
'Our expert barrister is suddenly removed. Our pathetic evidence is destroyed. All the lies make sense. All the truths seem nonsense.'
What Tommy saw, in that moment, was that slowly but surely they were being squeezed into a location where all that remained of their defense was Scott's denials. He suddenly saw that no matter how forceful they were, they were still exceedingly fragile. And any discrepancy, any inconsistency, might turn the strength of those denials into ammunition against him.
He started to say this, but stopped when he saw the stricken look on Lincoln Scott's face. It seemed to him, in that second, that much of
Scott's rage and frustration slid away from him, leaving behind nothing except a great, ineffable sadness.
Scott's shoulders slumped forward. He put a hand to his eyes, rubbing hard. Tommy looked across the small room at Scott and realized, in that precise second, why the black flier had greeted everyone with distance and standoffishness from his first minute in the captivity of Stalag Luft Thirteen. What he saw was that there is nothing more hurtful and lonely in the world than to be different and isolated, and that Scott's only defense against the jealousy and racism he knew would be waiting for him had been to fire his own anger first, like the fighter pilot he was.
Tommy realized that everything in the case was a trap. But the worst of the traps was the one Scott had inadvertently created for himself.
By not allowing anyone to know who he really was, he had made it easy for them to kill him. Because they would not care. No one knew about the wife, the child, waiting at home, nor did they know about the preacher father who urged him forward to advanced degrees or the mother who made him read the classics. Lincoln Scott had made it seem to all the other kriegies that he wasn't like them, when, in truth, he was no different, not in the slightest.
It must be a terrible thing. Tommy guessed, to believe that the nails and wood that you purchased yourself to build walls were now being used to fashion your own coffin.
'So, counselor, what's left? Not much, is there?'
Tommy didn't reply. He watched Scott put a hand to his forehead, as if in pain. When he pulled it away, he looked over at Tommy. There was anguish in his words, and Tommy abruptly realized how hard it must be for those who are accustomed to staring across the ring or through the sky and seeing their enemy clearly arrayed before them to be suddenly trying to fight against something as elusive and vaporous as the hatred Scott was now up against.
'Some people seem to be going to a whole lot of trouble just to make absolutely damn for certain sure that this poor old nigger gets shot.
And they sure as hell seem to have some damn fast timetable, too.'
Then without another word, Lincoln Scott threw himself down on his bunk, tossing his thick forearm over his eyes, blocking out the unrelenting light from the single overhead bulb. He remained in that position, motionless, not even looking up, when Hugh reentered the bunk room. He stayed that way, not moving, like a man on a slab, right to the moment that the Germans cut the electric power to the huts, plunging all three men into the usual complete darkness of prisoner-of-war camp.
It was nearly midnight by the luminous dial on the watch that Lydia had given him and Tommy found himself unable to sleep, filled with an unruly nervousness that was not dissimilar to the anxiety he felt on the eve of his first combat mission.
Within himself, he could sense some doubt, some fear, some frustration at the capriciousness of the world that had put him in this situation.
He sometimes thought that true bravery was merely acquiring the ability to act, to do what needed to be done, in the face of all these emotions that urged him to find someplace safer and hide. He listened to the light sounds of sleep coming from the two other men in the room, wondering for a moment why they were not equally energized and didn't find sleep equally elusive. He supposed there was resignation in Lincoln Scott's breathing, and acceptance in Hugh Renaday's.
He felt neither of these emotions.
What he thought was that nothing had gone right in the camp from the moment Fritz Number One found Trader Vic's body. The steady routine of camp life-critical to both captors and captured-had been disturbed profoundly, and promised to be further disrupted when the black airman's trial started in the morning.
He mentally chewed on this idea for a moment, but it only led him to more confusion. There seemed to him to be so many layers of hatred at work, and for an instant he felt despair at ever sorting all of them out. Who was hated the most?
