He had the sensation that he was observing a well-acted play being performed by experts, but using some strange and indecipherable language, so that while he could understand many of the actions, the overall thrust of the words eluded him. This, he considered, was a very strange reaction to have.
Then he slid this sensation into an internal compartment, for examination later, and he focused on the arrival of the first witness.
Chapter Twelve
The prosecution built their case against Scott steadily throughout the day, closely following the progression that Tommy had expected.
Bedford's overt racism, needling, taunting, accusations, and Deep South prejudice emerged in tale after tale from witness after witness. Set against that was the near-constant portrayal of Lincoln Scott as a man isolated, alone, enraged, being baited into a deadly action by the constancy of Trader Vic's derision.
The problem, as Tommy saw it, was that calling a man a nigger wasn't a crime. Nor was calling a man who had repeatedly put his own life on the line for white aircrews a nigger a crime, even if it should have been. What was a crime, was murder, and throughout the day, the tribunal, the German observers, and all the assembled kriegies of Stalag Luft Thirteen heard nothing from the witness stand except what they would all consider to be a perfectly reasonable motive for that desperate act of killing.
It made a sort of crazy deadly sense: Trader Vic was a thoughtless bastard, and Scott wasn't able to ignore it. Or get away from it. And so he killed the southerner before Bedford took the opportunity to turn his own virulent hatred into action and now Scott should die for that preemptive strike.
Tommy wondered whether this wasn't some variation on a plot that had already played itself out in dozens of forgotten rural courtrooms from Florida, through Georgia, into the Carolinas, across to Tennessee and Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. Anywhere the Stars and Bars continued to fly.
That it was happening in a Bavarian forest seemed to him to be as awful and as inexplicable as anything else.
At the defense table, he listened while another witness walked through the crowded courtroom to take his place at the stand.
The trial had stretched into the late afternoon, and Tommy scratched some notes on one of his precious sheets of paper, trying to prepare a cross-examination, thinking how compelling the prosecution's case was.
The vise that Scott was captured within was truly intractable: No matter how outrageous or evil Trader Vic's treatment of the Tuskegee airman had been, it still didn't amount to a justification for his killing. Instead, the situation played directly into the most subtle of fears felt by many of the white members of the air corps: that Lincoln Scott was somehow a threat to all of them, a threat to their futures, and a threat to their lives all because he unapologetically wore his difference on his skin.
Lincoln Scott, with all his intelligence, athleticism, and arrogance, had been turned into more of an enemy than the Germans manning the guard towers. Tommy believed this transformation was the crux of the prosecution, and he remained at a loss as to how to explode it. He knew he had to make Scott seem to be one of them. A simple kriegie. A POW. Suffering the same. Fearful of the same. Lonely and depressed and wondering if he would ever get home again, just the same as every other man in the camp.
The problem was. Tommy realized, that when he put Scott on the stand, the black flier would inevitably be himself: razor-sharp, muscular, and determined, uncompromising and tough.
Lincoln Scott would no more be willing to show himself to be as vulnerable as the rest of them than would some spy captured by the Gestapo. And Tommy thought there was little chance that any of the men craning to hear every word coming from the witness stand would understand that at Stalag Luft Thirteen they were all in their own unique ways alike. No better than any other man. No worse.
He had managed, he thought, some inroads. He made a point of bringing out from every witness that it was never Scott who initiated the tension between him and Vic. He also underscored, with every man who took the stand, that Scott got nothing special. No extra food. No extra privileges.
Nothing that made his life any better, and much, thanks to Vincent Bedford, that made his life far more miserable.
But while bringing this out might help, it still didn't attack the essence of the case. Sympathy was not doubt, and Tommy knew this.
Sympathy was also not a defense, especially for an innocent man. In fact, he understood that in some ways it made matters worse. Every kriegie in the camp had, at one time or another, wondered where his own breaking point might lie. Where all the fear and deprivation they faced daily would overcome whatever control they had. They'd all seen it, when men went wire-crazy and tried to blitz out, only to end up, if they were lucky, in the cooler or, if they were unlucky, in the burial ground behind Hut 113. What the prosecution was building slowly toward was finding Scott's breaking point.
In front of him. Colonel MacNamara was swearing in the witness. The man raised his hand and took an oath to tell the truth, just as he would in a regular courtroom. MacNamara, Tommy thought, was being a stickler for the details and trappings of authenticity. He wanted the proceedings to seem real and not some makeshift jury-rigged prisoner-of-war camp construction.
'State your name for the record,' MacNamara boomed, as if there were an official record, as the witness sat stiffly in the chair and Walker Townsend began to hover close by. The witness was one of the roommates. Murphy, the lieutenant from Springfield, Massachusetts, who had confronted Tommy in the corridor. One of the men making the most trouble over the past weeks. He was a slightly built man, in his early twenties, with a few leftover childhood freckles still playing on his cheeks. He had deep red hair, and he was missing a tooth, which he tried to cover up when he smiled, giving his face a lopsided appearance.
Tommy checked his notes. Lieutenant Murphy was in the middle of the list of witnesses Townsend had provided, but he was being called out of order. Threats and animosity between the deceased and the accused. No love lost, whatsoever. That was what Tommy saw in his notes. He knew, as well, that Murphy had been one of the men who'd seen him with the bloodstained board. But he suspected the lieutenant would lie about it, if he tried to ask him.
'This will be our final witness for the day,' MacNamara announced.
'Correct, captain?'
Walker Townsend nodded.
'Yes sir,' he replied. He had a small smile flitting across his lips.
The prosecutor hesitated, then had Murphy describe how he arrived at Stalag Luft Thirteen.
He also had the lieutenant provide a modicum of information about himself, blending the two, so that Murphy's story would seem to every man in the theater to be no different from his own.
As the witness began to speak. Tommy was not paying very close attention. He was still riveted by the idea that he knew that he was closer to the truth about how Trader Vic died, though the why still eluded all of them. The difficulty was how he was to get this alternate version out from the witness stand, and he remained at a loss as to how he could accomplish this. Scott was the one who'd accompanied him on the nocturnal visit to the site where he believed the killing had taken place. But Scott was the last person he wanted to tell that tale from the witness stand. It would appear self-serving and fantastic. It would seem as if Scott was merely lying to protect himself. Without the bloodstained board to back up his story, it would seem nothing more than a not particularly well concocted lie.
He felt almost sick. The truth is transparent. Lies have substance.
Tommy sighed, breathing in deeply, as Walker Townsend patiently continued to ask mundane background questions of Murphy, who answered every one with a quick eagerness.
I'm losing, he thought.
