"Yes, I know that, Mr. Brackman. But while we're on this point, I'd like to ask another question. Neither you nor Mr. Willow have said a word about the differences between the play and the book, but it strikes me that there are tremendous dissimilarities, and I wonder now whether we shouldn't concern ourselves with these as well. I wonder, in fact, whether we are not dutybound to study these dissimilarities in trying to determine whether there was indeed any copying here."
"If your Honor please," Brackman said, "the plaintiff's b-b-b-burden would be to prove th-that the similarities, and not the dissimilarities, are so overwhelming that, your Honor, that there are enough of them to support a claim of plagiarism."
"Yes, but Mr. Willow admitted for the purposes of argument that even if all these alleged similarities were indeed copied, they would still add up to something too insignificant to be called plagiarism. Wasn't that his point?" "I believe that was his point," Brackman said. "Isn't that the point you made, Mr. Willow?" "It was one of my points, yes, your Honor." "Your Honor," Brackman said, "I do not believe any of these similarities are insignificant, nor do I believe someone can be guilty of just a little plagiarism, in much the same way a woman cannot possibly be just a little pregnant. How many of these similarities need we show before we recognize they cannot all be accidental? How else can we hope to prove plagiarism except by putting the works side by side and saying this corresponds to this, and that corresponds to that? Will the thief oblige us by admitting his theft? Of course not. So how else can we prove this theft, your Honor, except by comparing the works, by locating these seemingly unimportant and insignificant similarities, these so-called coincidences scattered throughout the work, and appearing far too often to be called coincidental? How else, your Honor? By inspecting what is dissimilar, as you have suggested? Would this support our claim? No, your Honor. It would only indicate that the work was not copied in its entirety, and that is not what we have claimed, nor is it what we have proved here in this Court. We have only proved that enough of it was copied to significantly deprive the plaintiff of his rights.
"Mr. Driscoll has claimed, your Honor has heard him testify, that the character Lieutenant Alex Cooper in The Paper Dragon is based upon himself, and yet when asked which specific incidents or events happened to him, James Driscoll, he was hard put to find any such events that were not common to both the book and the play. Lieutenant Cooper was idealistic, yes, but James Driscoll was not. Lieutenant Cooper was single, James Driscoll was not. Lieutenant Cooper had an affair with a nurse, James Driscoll did not. And all down the line, your Honor, we see this same disparity between what actually happened to James Driscoll and what happened to the officer supposedly based on himself. Did Mr. Driscoll ever have a man like Colman in his platoon? No. Was there a troublemaker in his platoon? No. Was there a homosexual? No. Was there a murder scheme? No. Was he ever the target of a planned murder? No. He claims first that the book is autobiographical, and then when pressed to tell us just how it is autobiographical, he can tell us only that he invented most of the incidents.
"I do not think I have to comment on the preposter-ousness of his Colman-iceman story, or the farfetched allusion to Eugene O'Neill's play, or Mr. Driscoll's* insistence that an obviously homosexual character in Catchpole was not at all homosexual and was not indeed the basis for the homosexual character in his book. We have Mr. Ralph Knowles's expert testimony — and was it not Mr. Genitori who said he was a highly respected and honored director? — we have his expert testimony that he did, in fact, combine two characters in the novel to form the single character of Colman in his film. And this, your Honor, is why James Driscoll insisted Colonel Peterson was not a homosexual, only because he knew very well that he had taken Peterson and Janus and combined them to form Colman, which process Knowles reversed in making his picture.
"And then, your Honor, we came to what I earlier called the thief's fingerprints and which I still maintain are the fingerprints of a thief, and I refer now to the labeling of the 105th Division."
A silence fell over the courtroom. In the silence, Driscoll heard the click of Ebie's handbag once again, and he turned to look at her and saw that she was straining forward in her seat now, leaning over at a sharp angle, her eyes on Brackman, her mouth drawn into a tight, narrow line.
"The 105th Division," Brackman repeated. "Here, your Honor, I do not think there can be any question whatever of coincidence. No one in this room would be willing to bet even fifty cents on correctly picking the same three digits in sequence, and yet that's exactly what Mr. Driscoll did, he picked three digits at random, one, oh, five, and they just happened to correspond with those same three digits in the play, even though the odds against this happening, as we saw, were a million to one. Now your Honor, that is too much to believe, and Mr. Driscoll knows it is too much to believe, and so he tells us he does not know how he hit upon those three digits, he honestly does not know how they happened to come to him, perhaps on the wings of a muse. Or more likely, your Honor, perhaps as the result of an error, the single error this thief made in his painstaking robbery. After the meticulous compilation of all his covering outlines and plots and maps, after the careful disguising of each and every character and event, here was the one mistake, here was the identifiable—"
Ebie rose.
She rose silently, with both hands tightly clutching her pocketbook, the knuckles white. It seemed for a moment as though she were simply going to leave the courtroom, as though she were unable to listen a moment longer to Brackman's accusations. But she did not move from where she stood in the jury box. She looked up at the judge. Brackman, seeing McIntyre's puzzled frown, stopped speaking and turned to face her.
"Your Honor," she said softly, "may I talk to Mr. Willow?"
Driscoll suddenly put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him curiously, as though unable to read the gesture, and then turned again to the judge and plaintively inquired, "Your Honor?"
There was, for perhaps thirty seconds, total silence in the courtroom. Brackman did not object, although he was in the middle of his summation and any such interruption was forbidden and in fact unthinkable. Willow made no motion to recess, even though his client's wife had just asked if she could talk to him. The silence was complete, a stunned silence that stifled all action. Like children turning to their father for guidance when one of their peers has unforgivably transgressed, the lawyers looked toward the bench at the front of the courtroom, where McIntyre squinted in consternation, silent himself.
At last he said, "This Court will recess for ten minutes."
They returned to the courtroom at four minutes past eleven. McIntyre called the three attorneys to the bench, where they stood ranged before him, Willow in the center, Brackman and Genitori on either side of him. He fussed about in his chair, making himself comfortable. Then he folded his arms flat on the bench top, leaned forward, and brusquely said, "All right, Mr. Willow, what's this all about?"
"Your Honor," Willow said, "I would like to make application to reopen the case."
"For what purpose?"
"To submit additional testimony."
"Mr. Brackman?"
"Your Honor," Brackman said, "any additional testimony from the defendant at this point, after I've almost completed my summation, could only be injurious to my case. I respectfully submit…"