Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [183]
Hughes-McNoughton tried his best to defuse the dumb and damning statement I had made about shooting Boogie through the heart, pointing out that I was a sarcastic guy, with a weakness for irony, and that my so-called confession was actually torn from the rock of my outrage. But, as he glanced at the jury and then at me, I could sense Hughes-McNoughton took me for a gone goose. Increasingly desperate, he fell back on a melodramatic ploy that would have been unworthy of even Perry Mason. “What if I told you,” he said, addressing the jury, “that I was now going to perform a little miracle? What if I now counted to five, and then Bernard Moscovitch walked right through those doors into the courtroom. One, two, three, four … FIVE!”
The jury sprang awake, all eyes on the doors, and I also wheeled about, just about spraining my neck, my heart thudding.
“You see,” said Hughes-McNoughton, “you all turned to look, because you all have more than reasonable doubt that there ever was a murder committed.”
The stunt backfired. The jury clearly resented being suckered, the victims of a cheap trick. Mario Begin, QC, could not restrain his glee. Compounding my distress, I caught a glimpse of Miriam, in the rear of the courtroom, seemingly about to faint.
Hughes-McNoughton paraded witnesses to my good character, unavailingly. Zack, less than sober, an obvious roué, cracked too many jokes. It would have helped if Serge Lacroix had not recently dyed his hair blond and worn a diamond earring. Leo Bishinsky should not have flown in from New York with an adoring bimbo half his age, who stood up and waved to him as he sat down in the witness-box. But if I was going to be hanged, it was the lovable Irv Nussbaum who was to blame. My pal Irv insisted on being sworn in on the Old Testament, wearing a yarmulke. He said I was a pillar of the community, a fund-raiser of fund-raisers, who had done more than his share for the Israel Bond Drive. He would be proud to call me his son.
Sliding in sweat, I felt I was now destined to join a long line of Jewish martyrs. Captain Dreyfus, languishing on Devil’s Island for years before he was not adjudged innocent, yet accepted a pardon. Menahem Mendel Beilis, victim of a blood libel in Kiev in 1911. Accused by the Black Hundreds of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old Christian boy, he endured two years in prison before he was acquitted. Leo Max Frank, son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, charged with the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl, tried and convicted, and lynched by a mob in Georgia in 1915. I passed the time making mental notes for my address to the court before I was to be sentenced. “I did not poison your wells,” it began, “and neither did I murder your babes in quest of blood for my Passover matzohs. If you prick Panofsky, does he not bleed? …”
And then, eureka, that unredeemed rapscallion Maître John Hughes-McNoughton did produce a miracle, calling his surprising last character witness to the stand. It was the good Bishop Sylvain Gaston Savard, then still a total stranger to me. The wee, twinkly, black-robed bishop pitter-pattered into the courtroom, beaming beneficently at the startled jury, three of whom immediately crossed themselves. In his ringed, manicured hands that noble churchman carried the leatherbound hagiography he had written in praise of his aunt, Sister Octavia, that anti-Semitic bitch. As I looked on amazed, but reduced to silence by a swift