The Famous Mafioso Hired Me to Hear Him, and the Man in the Cell Is Not Who They Convicted novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Four Minutes

A guard's break leaves them four minutes alone, he asks what she was doing the night of the ferry bombing, flinches at the word brother and not the word bomb, and makes her promise to refuse him if he asks for something wrong.

On the second day, the guard on the left was called away for his break at ten past two.

I knew the schedule by then, because I read every room I worked in.

The lawyer went out with him to take a call about a filing.

The other guard stepped into the corridor to smoke a cigarette he was not allowed to smoke, and the glass door sealed behind him.

The red light on the camera went dark.

It was just me and the man in the chain, alone, for four minutes.

I did not move.

He lifted his hands.

HELLO, JOANNA DUNPHY.

He signed my name the way the court clerks said it.

Then he signed it again with a different hand shape, a J tapped twice against the cheek.

It was a name sign, the kind a Deaf community gives a child.

I had been given mine at six years old, on a folding chair at the Buffalo club, by a man with a white beard who had since died.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT, I signed.

He did not answer.

He leaned back as far as the chain let him, and the stiffness went out of his face.

Under it he looked ill.

His skin was gray, and a muscle jumped along his jaw.

He was turning his head slightly to the left, so that his right ear faced me.

I knew that turn.

My mother had done it for years before she would admit it.

YOU ARE LOSING YOUR HEARING, I signed.

HAVE LOST, he signed.

THE LEFT. THE RIGHT IS GOING.

He touched the pale scar on his forehead once.

SOMEBODY HIT ME WITH A PIPE.

THE WEEK I WENT IN.

NOBODY LOOKED.

The file said no known disability.

I had read that sentence in the car and thought nothing of it, because files lie by leaving things out.

LET ME GET YOU A DOCTOR, I signed.

He laughed.

It made no sound, and it only moved his shoulders, but it was a real laugh, and it changed his whole face.

NO AIDE. NO DOCTOR. NO HEARING AID.

THEY WOULD TAKE MY PRINTS.

THEY WOULD TAKE MY TEETH.

I did not understand that, so I filed it.

I filed every sentence a client said that I could not use yet.

His hands came down, and he looked at me for a long moment.

Then he lifted them again.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING THE NIGHT OF THE FERRY

I thought I had misread him.

I signed it back with a question on my face.

THE NIGHT IT BURNED, he signed.

NINETEEN YEARS AGO.

HOW OLD WERE YOU.

NINE, I signed.

I WAS IN A SCHOOL GYM.

THEY HAD A FIRE DRILL, AND THE PRINCIPAL WANTED SOMEONE TO TELL MY FATHER.

I WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO COULD.

His hands went still.

Something crossed his face, too fast for me to name.

YOU WERE NINE, he signed, AND YOU SIGNED A FIRE ALARM.

YES.

THAT IS GOOD.

That was all he signed.

I sat and watched a man convicted of killing forty-one people look at my hands as if I had shown him a photograph of his own front door.

I wanted to ask him why.

Instead I did what I do in a courtroom when a witness gives me something I did not expect.

I asked the next thing I could think of.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR BROTHER, I signed.

The question was not on the sheet.

I do not know why I asked it.

I think I wanted to see whether the man in front of me would match the one in my head.

His face did not change at all.

His hands changed.

They went rigid, and a tremor ran through the left one from the wrist to the fingertips.

He pulled them below the table, out of my sight.

He had not flinched at the word bomb, or the word ferry, or the name of a single dead person.

He had flinched at brother.

I said nothing.

I reached under the table, slowly, and laid my right hand flat over the back of his.

His hand was cold, like a tool left out overnight.

I held it still, and the tremor ran under my palm for a long breath, and then it slowed.

Then I felt something else.

I felt the hum of the table against his wrist, and the thin steady shiver of the building's ventilation.

I understood that he was trying to hear through his skin.

I leaned toward him and said aloud, low, "Can you feel that?"

He looked at my mouth.

I said it again, slower.

His lips moved as he read me.

YES, he signed with his free hand.

KEEP DOING IT.

I kept my hand where it was.

I spoke to him for a whole minute.

I told him the name of the road I had driven in on, and the color of the check I had been handed.

I told him my mother could not hear a doorbell.

He watched my mouth as though it were his own sentence being read out, and every so often a muscle in his shoulder let go.

When the guard's key turned in the lock he drew his hand out from under mine slowly, as if it cost him.

He lifted both hands one last time.

IF I ASK YOU FOR SOMETHING THEY WILL NOT LIKE, he signed.

WILL YOU REFUSE ME.

I looked at his face, at the scar and the gray at his temples and the eyes that had not left my hands in two days.

YES, I signed.

GOOD.

The door opened, the camera light came on, and he was a convict in a chain again.

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