He passed a document up to the bench, and silently the court examined
it.
The seconds were now creeping minutes. Normando's ceaseless mumbling
was like that of a man distraught by torture. A hand was used to
silence him. The spectators were upon their feet and bent forward in
attention; the cordon of officers closed in behind the accused as if to
throttle any act of desperation.
The judge passed the verdict down to the minute clerk, who read in a
clear, distinct, monotonous tone:
"Celso Fabbri, Frank Normando, mistrial. Salvatore di Marco, Frank
Garcia, Giordano Bolla"--the list of names seemed
interminable--"Gaspardo Cressi, Lorenzo Cardoni, Caesar Maruffi"--he
paused for an instant while time halted--"not guilty."
After the first moment of stunned stupefaction a murmur of angry
disapproval ran through the crowd; it was not loud, but hushed, as if
men doubted their senses and were seeking corroboration of their ears.
From the street below, as the judgment was flashed to the waiting
hundreds, came an echo, faint, unformed, like the first vague stir that
runs ahead of a tempest.
The shock of Norvin Blake's amazement in part blurred his memory of
that dramatic tableau, but certain details stood out clearly
afterwards. For one thing he heard Bernie Dreux giggling like an
overwrought woman, while through his hysteria ran a stream of shocking
curses He saw one of the jurors rise, yawn, and stretch himself, then
rub his bullet head, smiling meanwhile at the Cressi boy. He saw Caesar
Maruffi turn full to the room behind him and search for his own face.
When their eyes met, a light of devilish amusement lit the Sicilian's
visage; his lips parted and his white teeth gleamed, but it was no
smile, rather the nervous, rippling twitch that bares a wolf's fangs.
His color had come flooding back, too; victory suffused him with a
ruddy, purple congestion, almost apoplectic. Then heads came between
them; friends of the prisoners crowded forward with noisy
congratulations and outstretched palms; the rival attorneys were
shaking hands.
Blake found himself borne along by the eddying stream which set out of
the court-room and down into the sunlit street, where the curbs were
lined with uplifted faces. Dreux was close beside him, quite silent
now. A similar silence brooded over the whole procession which emerged
from the building like a funeral cortege. When the moments brought home
the truth to its members they felt, indeed, as if they came from a
house of death, for they had seen Justice murdered, and the chill was
in their hearts.
But there was something sinister in the hush which gagged that
multitude.
Many readers will doubtless recall, even now, the shock that went
through this country at the conclusion of the famous New Orleans Mafia
trial of twenty years ago. They will, perhaps, remember a general
feeling of surprise that an American jury would dare, in the face of
such popular feeling and such apparently overwhelming evidence, to
render a verdict of "not guilty." In some quarters the farcical outcome
of the trial was blamed upon Louisiana's peculiar legal code. But the
truth is our Northern cities had not at that time felt the power of
organized crime. New York, for instance, had not been shaken by an
interminable succession of dynamite outrages nor terrorized by bands of
Latin-born Apaches who live by violence and blackmail; therefore, the
tremendous difficulty of securing convictions was not appreciated as it
is to-day.
There was a universal suspicion that the last word concerning the New
Orleans affair had not been written, so what followed was not entirely
a surprise.