The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [236]
“Me,” the Doctor finished for him.
Refilling his pipe from a pouch in his pocket, Mr. Picton struck a match on his chair as the rest of us pondered that. “So!” he said, firing up his pipe and showing that enthusiasm in the face of trouble what was his best quality. “The question becomes, how do we defend against such a line of attack, and thereby preserve the integrity of Clara’s testimony?” Drawing hard on his pipe, Mr. Picton considered the matter for a moment. “I had hoped, as you know, to keep any discussion of psychological theory to a minimum in this case, Doctor. But if Darrow attacks with it, you must be prepared to strike back. In kind, and with the superior force which you, as an expert, possess!”
The Doctor stood up, pacing slowly in what little free floor space the room offered. “It is not a position with which I am unfamiliar,” he said, rubbing his bad arm. “Though I confess that I hoped taking this case would mean that for once I’d be on the offensive. Perhaps that is destined never to happen.”
“Oh, but it must happen!” Mr. Picton bellowed, gripping his pipe and swinging it through the air. “That’s just what I mean about you ‘striking back.’ I don’t want you to defend yourself from behind an intellectual barricade—I want to see you counterattack, on the open field of ideas, where the jury can see you! Draw blood from this man—first blood, if you can! To back you up, I’ll go over every shred of personal information about Darrow that Marcus has been able to assemble—and I won’t hesitate to use it. We are not going to let this trial get away from us.” Mr. Picton banged a fist on his desk, hard. “Darrow may represent some new breed of lawyer, but dammit all, we’ll match him trick for trick!”
“Señor Doctor?” El Niño, who’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, got up to approach the Doctor with cautious respect. “This man—he is dangerous to you? You wish El Niño to kill him?”
The statement, coming at the somewhat difficult moment it did, served admirably to break the thickening ice: after staring at the aborigine in amazement for a few seconds, we all began to laugh out loud, and the Doctor put his right arm around his small defender’s shoulders.
“No, El Niño,” he said. “The man is not a danger in that way. He does not intend to injure me—physically.”
“But if he is to interfere with finding baby Ana,” El Niño said, smiling at our laughter without really knowing what it was about, “then we should kill him, yes?”
“I think,” Miss Howard said, getting up and moving over to the Doctor and the aborigine, “that this may be the moment to call a break for dinner. Let’s go, El Niño. On the way home I’ll try to explain to you why killing this man is not the best way to deal with the situation.” As she guided El Niño to the door, Miss Howard cocked her head. “Assuming, of course, that it really isn’t.”
As the Isaacsons followed the other two out of the office, Mr. Moore, Cyrus, and I went up to the Doctor. “You going to be all right with all this, Laszlo?” Mr. Moore said.
“It’s not myself I’m worried about,” the Doctor answered. “It’s Clara. This trial was already going to be excruciating for her—but now, to be targeted by a lawyer who uses the kind of tactics Marcus has told us about… Still,” he went on, throwing his hands up with a sigh. “I suppose I’ll just have to make that much more certain that I prepare her adequately. As long as she doesn’t encounter her mother before giving testimony, I think she’ll have a fighting chance at coming through it well—or at least intact.”
“What about it, Rupert?” Mr. Moore said to Mr. Picton, who was stuffing a batch of files into a soft leather briefcase to take home with him. “Is Judge Brown the type we can count on to post a reasonably high bail, in a case like this?”
“I hate to try to predict anything about Judge Brown,” Mr. Picton answered. “But the brilliant Mr. Darrow is not yet