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The trial of Salvador Carriscant was surprisingly short. Accused of the murder of Sieverance and of conspiracy to murder Ward and Braun, he was acquitted of the first charge and found guilty of the second. He was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment and was incarcerated in Bilibid prison. From his cell window he could see in the distance, on a clear day, the fading roof of the nipa barn where Pantaleon Quiroga had built his flying machine.
It had been Bobby's idea to introduce the second charge of conspiracy to murder, convinced as he was that the deaths of all three soldiers were co
Carriscant remembered the courtroom with the newly installed electric roof fans that kept breaking down. One minute a veritable breeze would be rustling the weighted papers on the lawyers' desks, the next there would be a sharp crack and a smell of burning and handkerchiefs would be applied to moist brows and slick, collar-chafed necks. A pause would be called while a nervous workman mounted a step-ladder to investigate the recalcitrant machinery. Eventually after seven interruptions in one day the judge called for the fans to be switched off, the windows were thrown as wide as possible and matters continued in the usual sweltering fug.
He remembered Bobby perjuring himself shamelessly in the witness box telling, with phenomenal recall of detail, how he had found the scalpel by the body of the murdered woman – 'a scalpel identified by the defendant himself as coming from his own stores at the San Jeronimo hospital'. He remembered too the daily mutter of speculation and fascinated curiosity that would arise as he entered the courtroom each morning, carried in, he felt, on a foaming susurrus of gossip, the public benches and the gallery packed with the craning, ogling faces of Manila 's expatriate bourgeoisie. The celebrated surgeon, Dr Carriscant, turned conspirator, assassin and clandestine insurrecto… Once, on the journey back to his cell at Bilibid, the police carriage had been obliged to make a detour through the back streets of Santa Cruz where the local indios, when they realised who was held inside, cheered him heartily on his way, children ru
Carriscant's lawyer, a young ilustrado called Felix de la Rama, was a young man of slight build and unimpressive demeanour with a long neck and prominent Adam's apple. Luckily, his voice was unusually deep-some special reverberating capacity in that laryngeal prominence, Carriscant fantasised. His voice emerged from his mouth as a fruity, sagacious baritone giving everything he said a considered, experienced air. Every observation, however inconsequential, seemed to have been brewed in gravitas and authority. It probably made the vital difference, Carriscant reflected. Upon such trifles hang our fates.
De la Rama doggedly hammered away at the implausibilities in the murder charge but in so doing rather neglected to expose the deficiencies in the second alleged offence. As the trial progressed all ma
De la Rama had been particularly effective when it came to diminishing the damage done by the discovery of the gauze mask. He did not deny that it might well have been brought to the Sieverance house by Carriscant himself- more than likely, in fact, as the defendant had been a regular visitor during Mrs Sieverance's convalescence. Furthermore, it had to be taken into account that Nurse Aslinger had been living in the same abode for several weeks; the piece of gauze was a very common medical item, and no one could say with any accuracy when it might have been introduced into the household.
Carriscant, or so he told me, sat impassively through the farcical proceedings simply counting the days off as they went by. He could not believe his luck that, in the huge fuss and scandal of his arrest and trial, Delphine Sieverance's 'death' had been virtually forgotten. What had happened was this: with Jepson Sieverance dead no one thought to claim or make arrangements for the coffined body lying in the San Jeronimo morgue. It was not until four days after Carriscant's arrest that Delphine's friend Mrs Oliver suddenly remembered and decided that someone should arrange a funeral. This was done discreetly and with great speed as the warm and humid weather had significantly accelerated the decomposition of the body. The funeral took place the next day and the body was buried at the Paco cemetery in a small ceremony attended by a few friends and, as a mark of respect, Mrs William Taft. Sieverance's body was embalmed and shipped home to his family where he was buried with full military honours.
Carriscant's explanation of this oversight was that it was due to Bobby's obsession. He was so convinced that Pantaleon Quiroga was the murderer of Ward and Braun that the only explanation of Sieverance's killing was that it had to have been carried out by an accomplice, and Salvador Carriscant regrettably fitted that bill. The last person seen with Sieverance had been Carriscant-talking outside the San Jeronimo. The gauze mask, the absence of an alibi and, to Bobby's mind, recollections of the testimony of the old man who claimed to have seen Carriscant out and about on the night of the Braun murder were sufficient to make the arrest. Any other route of investigation-such as the last murder not being co