Norman flushed. ‘If this is about me being gay…’
Mr Ahmet laughed. ‘Please, Mr Price. In my homeland, we invented the fucking of goats. It was our national pastime. You cannot scandalize me, but this is the problem your father talked about, your perception that the world is against you. I will be honest with you, if I may. I went to see your show for myself, and what I believe is that all artists should know the story of others as much as their own. As legal counsel, this is what I am tasked with every day. Where are your sympathies for others, I ask you, Mr Price? I am not a critic, but you cannot dig half a hole. That is what I suspect you have been digging all these years! We must have the entire story Mr Price!’
The accusation had the sting of truth, the second time in a few days that Norman had been chastised for an apparent shortcoming, his lack of understanding of life around him.
‘Your father, I will tell you, was a friend. We discussed you often. If I may have your attention a moment, Mr Price, this might be of use to you in your writing. I might tell you about real discrimination. It will take but a moment.’
He didn’t wait for Norman’s permission.
‘My parents and I, we are immigrants. When we arrived first in Chicago, we found the Irish, the Italians and the Poles had it sewn up between them. The Irish and their famine, it is known the world over what they suffered, yet they held power like they had never known hardship. America was not what my parents had expected, but they had lived through the alternative. We left our country on the backs of donkeys, Mr Price. I swear it.’
Mr Ahmed crossed his heart. ‘By the time I got to high school, I was ambitious. I wanted to be a lawyer. My parents said, “Ahmet the lawyer, ridiculous!” They had their religion, their community. They kept to the old ways. They were Christians, a minority among minorities. They had endured Stalin and the purges. The Child of Prague visited our Chicago church for a week of devotionals when I was young not long after we were arrived in Chicago. I remember it still, the bitter cold, and yet we went for the absolution of our sins and prayed to a doll in an ermine coat. Such extravagance! The doll set in a gold tabernacle. Oh, to see it, Mr Price, this doll ferried cross-country in what I learned later was a school bus more commonly used to transport those with mental retardation.
‘My point, I am getting to it. I was ashamed of my heritage, Mr Price. Everybody wanted to touch the doll. This is how they gained access to heaven, and I thought, years later, when I was better educated, how I was all the more satisfied with Karl Marx’s explanation of the world. Alas, I became a high priest of a civil law. This is what my education did. It liberated me, but it also robbed me of a greater salvation, perhaps, but I am happy, Mr Price, in my own way. This is what counts, what the heart feels, is it not?’
Norman said, as though he was essential to the continuation of the story, in the way a listener is, ‘So you became a lawyer?’
Mr Ahmet nodded. ‘Yes… thank you for kindly listening. Yes, I became a lawyer, first a night court clerk and then, much, much later, Law School, at the prompting of a woman who supported me. I was in love, but there was a catch. The woman was divorced with two boys, a second-generation Romanian with hair black as coal, a stenographer at the county courthouse. She kept her hands in gloves like a pianist. “The Gypsy”, my parents called her when they saw her. The sacrifices they had made for me. I hid my education. I went on supporting my parents after my marriage. At forty-four, I was the oldest graduate. I was a laughing stock. I was the one laughing the loudest, Mr Price, I can tell you. I have no use for irony or any of the mechanisms of self-deception. I know what I was, and what I became.
‘My parents, they said again as they always did, “Ahmet the lawyer, ridiculous!” I was in a cap and gown and in a great amount of debt. All my parents wanted to know was what money I might have made if I had just worked and not studied and not married the gypsy. They were, of course, right, but money is not everything. Dignity and satisfaction count in ways that cannot be measured. They could not appreciate it. You stop learning, or your understanding of the world ends at a certain point. I was their son, and not their son. I became a married man, a husband, a father, and then a lawyer. My father, regrettably, he remained all his life a goat herder, or, more tragically, an ex-goat herder, and my mother, the wife of an ex-goat herder. It takes a generation perhaps. I believe this. They had found the courage to leave, but the language was a great obstacle. In the end, I broke free and had my own life. It is the same already with my sons, and now my grandsons. It begins with the music they listen to. That is how you know when life has passed you by.’
In this appraisal, there was a connected sense of why Mr Ahmet was here, that it connected to a view of parents, or it was the best Norman could assess. He simply waited.
*
It wasn’t established why so much information had been gathered in the box related to Walter’s suicide and his killing of his wife. There could be no case, and yet it was evident a great deal of time had been given to establishing a timeline related to Walter’s last day alive. The writing was all the same hand, a looping cursive. Norman understood in viewing it that this had been Mr Ahmet’s work alone.
Mr Ahmet set the glasses around his eyes again. He was more direct. He began with a review of Helen’s movements on the day of the accident, captured in still photographs by a series of street cameras. Both Helen and Walter’s cars were circled.
Mr Ahmet pointed. In a photograph, Helen’s car was in the turn lane. Then, she pulled out again. ‘You see, how she changed her mind.’
Helen, at that point, was ten minutes from her appointment. She had been charged for the no-show at the appointment. ‘Office policy,’ Mr Ahmet said, without looking up.
There was testimony, too, regarding what happened much later at the hospital. Mr Ahmet sifted through folders in the box. He produced a piece of paper. A nurse had spoken with Walter minutes before he went into Helen’s room. She described him as in deep shock. A security camera shot caught Walter buying coffee from a vending machine. Nothing indicated what would happen minutes later.
Mr Ahmet set the shot back with other photographs. He took out another folder. After the original trial and acquittal, the District Attorney’s office had continued following Walter and the others. There had been talk of money being spent extravagantly. Corruption was endemic. It was the order of business, how the city was organized. Extortion rackets were generally accepted.
Mr Ahmet leaned forward again. He said pointedly, ‘Nothing was linked directly to Walter, but it emerged that Helen had purchased a fur coat for over two thousand dollars. She had paid in cash.’
Mr Ahmet thumbed through the invoices. ‘The coat triggered a deeper inquiry, challenging the veracity of sworn testimony and alibis as provided by Walter and the other officers in the original case. The families of the two victims got the support of a bombastic community activist preacher who challenged the impartiality of the judiciary. A young district attorney with rising ambitions entered the picture. Suspicions were aroused about Walter. This was the underbelly of how the system worked. It was known and accepted, and then, of course, it wasn’t. Times change, Mr Price.’
Mr Ahmet stopped for a moment in the quiet assessment of the statement.