‘Between guilt and innocence also,’ said Korrogly, thinking he might get a rise out of Lemos with this; but the gemcutter only stared at the table, brushed back his sandy forelock from his eyes.
‘Very well.’ Korrogly picked up his case from the floor. ‘I’ll assume you want me to go forward with the case as you’ve presented it.’
‘Mirielle,’ said Lemos. ‘Will you ask her to come and visit me?’
‘I will.’
‘Today . . . will you ask her today?’
‘I plan to see her this afternoon, and I’ll ask her. But according to the constables, she may not respond favorably to anything I ask on your behalf. She is apparently quite bereft.’
Lemos muttered something, and when Korrogly asked him to repeat it, he said, ‘Nothing.’
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
Lemos shook his head.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Korrogly; he started to tell Lemos to be of good cheer, but partly in recognition of the profundity of Lemos’ despair, partly due to his continuing sense of uneasiness, he thought better of it.
The gemcutter’s shop was in the Almintra quarter of Port Chantay, a section of the city bordering the ocean, touched yet not overwhelmed by decay and poverty. Dozens of shops were situated on the bottom floors of old peeling frame houses with witchy-looking peaked roofs and gables, and between them, Korrogly could see the houses of the wealthy ranging Ayler Point: airy mansions with wide verandahs and gilt roofs nestled among stands of thistle palms. The sea beyond the point was a smooth jade-colored expanse broken by creamy surf, seeming to carry out the theme of elegance stated by the mansions; on the other hand, the breakers that heaped foam upon the beaches of the Almintra quarter were fouled with seaweed and driftwood and offal. It must, he thought, be dismaying to the residents of the quarter, which not so long ago had been considered exclusive, to have this view of success and beauty, and then to turn back to their own lives and watch the rats scurrying in piles of vegetable litter, the ghost crabs scuttling in the sandy streets, the beggars, the increasing dilapidation of their homes. He wondered if this could have played a part in the murder; he could discern no opportunity for profit in the crime, but there was so much still hidden, and he did not want to blind himself to the existence of such a motive. He did not believe Lemos, yet he could not fully discredit the gemcutter’s story. That was the story’s virtue: its elusiveness, the way it played upon the superstitious nature of the citizenry, how it employed the vast subtlety of Griaule to spread confusion through the mind of whomever sought to judge it. The jury was going to have one hell of a time. And, he thought, so was he. He could not deny the challenge presented him; a case of this sort came along but rarely, and its materials, so aptly suited to the game of the law, to the lawyerly sleights-of-hand that had turned the law into a game, afforded him the opportunity of making a quick reputation. His inability to discredit Lemos’ story might be a product of his hope that the gemcutter was telling the truth, that precedent was indeed involved, for he was beginning to realize that he needed something spectacular, something unique and unsettling, to reawaken his old hopes and enthusiasms, to restore his sense of self-worth. For the nine years since his graduation from law school, he had devoted himself to his practice, achieving a small success, all that could be expected of someone who was the son of poor farmers; he had watched less skilled lawyers achieve greater success, and he had come to understand what he should have understood from the beginning: that the Law was subordinate to the unwritten laws of social status and blood relation. He was at the age of thirty-three an idealist whose ideals were foundering, yet whose fascination with the game remained undimmed, and this had left him open to a dangerous cynicism – dangerous in that it had produced in him a volatile mixture of old virtues and new half-understood compulsions. Lately the bubblings up of that mixture had tended to make him erratic, prone to wild swings of mood and sudden abandonments of hope and principle. He was, he thought, in much the same condition as the Almintra quarter: a working class neighborhood funded by solid values that had once looked forward to an upwardly mobile future, but that now aspired to be a slum.
