The Magician by Sol Stein Page A

laugh from the jury and spectators, even at his own expense, so that the momentarily relaxed witness, enjoying the sudden release of tension, perhaps even joining in the laughter, would be suddenly faced by the most crucial question Thomassy had to ask of him. The witness, chilled in mid-laugh, would have to compose himself, think to answer the shocker, and it was the pause that Thomassy went for most. Because when a man took too much time in framing an answer, the jury thought he was lying. Or making it up. Or partly. And Thomassy would turn from the hesitation, and stroll to the jury and say, “Please take all the time you need to think of your answer,” which the jury always understood to mean Take all the time you need to make up your lie. How Thomassy loved that, the director of a play played just once, the other lawyer rehearsing the actor only to have Thomassy produce a stage wait, a silence that damned.
    Sometimes Thomassy would find himself imagining a crime not yet committed, the criminal being chased and caught and brought to trial, to be defended by him, as if that were the purpose of the crime in the first place. If, he was thinking, a sudden hazard caused him to carom into a yard-wide tree, would anyone be guilty or innocent of his death, which would seem so pointless otherwise? He laughed at—and relished—the absurdity of his fantasies. He saw the police car in front of the Urek house. Paul Urek was in front of the doorway arguing with the two cops.
    “The boy isn’t home,” he was saying. “There’s Mr. Thomassy.”
    Both cops turned.
    “What’s up?” Thomassy asked them.
    “Just want to see for ourselves. He won’t let us in the door.”
    “You got a warrant?”
    The cop squirmed. “It’ll take an hour to get one this time of night.”
    “Get one,” said Thomassy.
    “We’ll have to wake the judge up.”
    “Wake him up.”
    “All we want to know is if the kid’s in there.”
    “Mr. Urek told you he wasn’t.”
    “Well, that proves he was over at the hospital.”
    “Proves nothing. If you want to play lawyer, go to law school. Meanwhile, go get a warrant. That’s the law.”
    Thomassy knew he had gotten the cop sore, but he liked getting people with authority sore. The cop went off to get the warrant, leaving the other one in front of the house.
    “I see you have a doorman now,” said Thomassy to Paul Urek as they closed the door behind them.
    Urek walked home not on sidewalks but down the middle of each successive street, too late for traffic now, but hoping a car would swing around a corner suddenly, giving him a chance to sidestep out of death’s way like a bullfighter, then laugh at the frightened driver.
    No car came.
    From a block away he could see his own house ablaze with light on the darkened street. He began to trot, hoping that his absence hadn’t been discovered, that he could get up the drainpipe as he had so many times in the past. He saw the cop in front of the house just in time.
    He stopped, caught his breath.
    The cop in front of the door, a car—Thomassy’s car—in front of the house.
    Run? Where to?
    Into the bushes, over a hedge, quietly, then close to the house he could hear his father’s voice and Thomassy’s voice, arguing. Up the drainpipe? They wouldn’t hear him because of the noise they were making. But the cop would hear him.
    Around the back, he lifted the metal cellar door, glad it wasn’t kept locked. He slipped down the stairs to the cellar, carefully lowering the metal door so it wouldn’t bang shut. He came up through the kitchen and into the living room. His father, his mother, and Thomassy all stopped talking.
    He followed his father’s right hand as it reared back and came around in a half-circle, the palm open, smashing into the side of his face. He felt the pain jab up into the top of his head, and the thought flashed through his mind that he should pack a case and go off with the kraut somewhere.
    “You’re a shit,” his