A Matter of Conviction

“And lastly, there is what the sob sisters would call the human-interest angle. We’re prosecuting this case in the interests of the people of this county. And do you know what the people see? The people see three strapping killers striding into a quiet street and stabbing to death a blind boy. A blind boy, Hank! Don’t you see the outrage here? Don’t you see the affront to decency? How can the streets be safe for anyone if a blind person, protected and sheltered by the unwritten laws of humanity ever since the beginning of time, can be brutally attacked and killed?”

“I see,” Hank said.

“Do you? Then you must also see that it’s essential for this office to prosecute this case with all the talent and energy it can muster. You’re our boy, Hank, and we’re going for the death penalty.”

“I still think—”

“No. Your request is officially refused. For God’s sake, Hank, a lot more than three boys is going on trial here. This office is going on trial.” Holmes paused. “And,” he said, “if you want to look at it in another light, maybe the whole damn city is going on trial.”

He stood on the deck of the ferry, and on his right he could see the high span, beautiful in its ugliness, of the Queensboro Bridge. Dead ahead, squatting on the water like a giant half-submerged whale, was Welfare Island. In the Youth House Annex there, a fifteen-year-old boy named Danny Di Pace was being held, awaiting trial for murder. They had not taken him to the Twelfth Street building because too many escapes, legend held, were successfully executed there.

A cool breeze blew off the East River, caressing the back of his neck, dissipating the dull heat of midsummer. Far off in the distance, pristine and cool, a delicate tracery against the shrieking raw blue of the sky, was the Triboro Bridge. He could remember when the bridge was being built. He could remember walking in the excavation site on 125th Street, a fourteen-year-old boy picking his way among the cinder block and concrete, the steel supporting rods, the freshly turned earth. The summer of 1934, and a young boy who visualized the bridge as a gateway to the treasures of the world. If you could cross that bridge, he had thought, you could get out of Harlem. There was purpose to the bridge, and meaning, and he had decided on that day, with the bulldozers and the steam shovels noisily pushing the land around him, that one day he would leave Harlem — and he would never return.

He did not know whether or not he hated the neighborhood.

But he had recognized with the clear vision of the very young that there were better things to be had from life. And he meant to have them.

One of those better things, he thought later, was Mary O’Brien.

He did not meet her until he was seventeen. Born into an Italian family, possessing a grandfather who — even on the brink of war with the Axis powers — proclaimed Italy as the cultural leader of the world and touted Mussolini as the savior of the Italian people, Hank had found it difficult at first to believe that he could fall in love with an Irish girl. Hadn’t he been told repeatedly by members of his family that the Irish were all drunkards? Hadn’t he been told by brothers of his street fraternity that all Irish girls were fast girls? Hadn’t most of the street fights taken place between the Italians and the Irish? How then could he possibly fall in love with a girl who was as Irish as her red hair?

She was fifteen when he met her. She didn’t wear lipstick then. He dated her on and off for a year before she allowed him to kiss her. Her mouth was a wondrous thing. He had kissed girls before, but he had never known the sweetness of a woman’s mouth until the day he kissed Mary O’Brien. And from that day on, he loved her.

His grandfather took a dim view of the situation.

“Why,” he asked in Italian, “must you go out with an Irish girl?”

And Hank had answered, “Because I love her, Grandpa,” and there was the ring of youthful authority in his voice. Loving her, he discovered her. And discovering her, he loved her more, until she became a part of his plans. When he left Harlem, Mary O’Brien would accompany him. He would carry her away, her red hair streaming over his shoulder, her rich laugh floating on the wind.

In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Hank, who was twenty-one at the time and in his senior year at N.Y.U., was called up almost instantly. They gave him a party at his grandfather’s house. And while the others ate lasagna — his mother’s specialty — and drank good red wine, his grandfather took him aside and put his tailor’s hands on Hank’s shoulders and said, in hesitant English, “You go to fly aeroplani?”

“Yes, Grandpa,” he said.

The old man nodded. At sixty-eight, he possessed a head of snow-white hair. His eyes were brown behind thick spectacles, the natural accouterments of a tailor who studied his stitches with meticulous care.

“You will bomb Italy?” he asked, and there was sadness in his eyes.