“Well,” he said, “I know this, that I didn’t want to go to court. Young as I was, I knew what a disadvantage it would be for me to get mixed up in it. I wanted to be a musician, and whatever I might want, once I testified, I knew I’d find the way blocked. And it’s shadowed me ever since. They’ve pointed me out—Brini, the boy who testified for a murderer. In 1927 I told my story to Governor Fuller, and he said he believed me, but he never did anything about it. The day before they were executed I tried to see the governor again, but I couldn’t get past his secretary. I shouted at him, ‘If I lied, why don’t you arrest me for perjury?’ All he said was, if I was so brave why wasn’t I out picketing on the Common. I told him I’d been there the day before, and I asked to be locked up, but he just turned his back.” He set down his coffee cup. “I don’t suppose what I’ve been telling you helps you much. These are just my feelings. Those others, where we delivered the eels that morning, they didn’t want to testify either. They were all good Catholics and Vanzetti was an anarchist. But they’d bought the eels, they’d seen Vanzetti, and my father talked to them. They had respect for him, not fear but respect, so they went.” As we talked the lights of the suburban street began to wink out, and I could see it was time for me to go. “You’ll probably think of things you forgot to ask me,” he said at the door. “Just telephone me or come down, if there’s anything more you want to know. Any time.” Driving home, I thought over what Brini had told me. What had a respectable school principal to gain by lying? If he had had anything to hide, forty years after the event, he could simply have refused to see me. Yet if Brini was telling the truth, Vanzetti was innocent of the Bridgewater holdup. And if he was innocent of the first crime, it seemed to me he was most probably innocent of the second. But Brini knew. If he had told me the truth, Vanzetti was an innocent man. “I think you can sense whether a person is telling the truth or not,” I told a sergeant at the State Police headquarters a few days later. “You can judge a man by the sort of person he is, by the general impression he gives as much as by what he says. You can size him up, don’t you think?” The sergeant did not reply directly, but his laugh had a jeering ring. * * * * * For weeks I had been trying to get an interview with Michael Dray, Katzmann’s old law partner, but always, without quite turning me down, he had eluded me. Katzmann had been dead six years, but Dray still kept the firm’s name. After the trial Katzmann had never made any public comment on his great case. Nor since his death had his partner been less reticent.