It was 1:00 p.m. Jay La Roche and his guards were met by a barrage of cameras and microphones as he made his way up the steps of New York’s central criminal court building, his head held high, looking sneeringly at the blind statue of Justice as though confident that nothing could touch him.
It took only minutes for the charges to be read and less time for La Roche’s lawyer to get him off scot-free — the reason stunningly simple. Jay La Roche had been arrested under the Emergency Powers Act, which ended at midnight, Washington time, on the day of his arrest, and under which a suspect could be arrested without being Mirandized. But having been arrested at 11:40 p.m. Alaskan time meant that he had in fact been arrested at 3:40 a.m. Washington time, that is, three hours and forty minutes after the Washington deadline, thus rendering his arrest “technically” invalid, as he had not been Mirandized. That is, Jay La Roche had been arrested and not advised of his rights under a law that no longer was in force.
It was pandemonium in the courtroom, and even more flashbulbs and TV crews crowding the corridors than had been on the steps when La Roche had entered the building. As he exited a free man, he walked down the steps of the courthouse unhurriedly, pausing halfway so that his picture in his own tabloid would show him released beneath blindfolded Justice, who had shown impartiality under the law. He made a grave face about how he was of course innocent of the charges of trading with the enemy and he would have “much preferred” to have been cleared on other evidence but that in the “present political climate” during wartime he doubted that he could have received a fair trial.
Lana, still in shock, called Frank Shirer and as it was 1:30 p.m. in Dutch Harbor when she made the call, she woke him up at 10:30 at Lakenheath — all air crews having already turned in while waiting for a decision to come down as to whether or not they would be going on the China mission.
“Set free?” he asked Lana.
“Yes, absolutely—”
“I don’t believe it,” Frank said, and then made a remark about lawyers that all but turned Lana’s face red with embarrassment.
“I know,” she agreed. “I can’t believe it either.” She sighed. It was part pain, part resignation. “I suppose we were all naive in thinking they’d get him. The rich get richer and the poor—”
“The bastard!” Shirer cut in, his tone one of bitter resentment. It meant more than La Roche was free again. It meant that the divorce Lana had longed for — a divorce that would have been much easier to get if he’d been convicted— was now as far off as ever.
“I–I don’t know what to say, Frank. I—” He could tell she was crying. In the Dutch Harbor Hospital she’d seen some of the worst injuries of the war: melted skin where once there’d been a man’s face, a mangled stump of splintered bone and flesh that had once been a limb, and the smells— the vinegary stink of fear, the eye-watering stench of pus-filled gangrene. With all this she could cope, but the trapped feeling of being sealed in a marriage gone sour with no release in sight was too much.
“Hang on, honey,” Frank told her lamely. “We’ll beat it — Lana?”
“Yes,” she replied, but it was so desolate a response that he felt it in his gut and was left too with that desolate feeling that only a telephone can give in its awful illusion of nearness shattered by the reality of being so far apart, the feeling that teased you into thinking you could do something against the cold reality of knowing you could do nothing. In his pain he selfishly wished that she hadn’t called.
When he went back to his bunk he couldn’t sleep. The thought of her thousands of miles away in the wind-blown loneliness of Dutch Harbor, a speck in the vast darkness of the world, brought tears to his eyes, and with them the animal urge to be with her, to feel her warmth, to give her his, to be in her, to possess her so that he tossed and turned, nothing but the low moan of a channel storm blowing about the eaves of the Quonset hut for company and the gray dawn creeping.