Blameless in Abaddon (14 page)

“Darcy!” he called to his brother. “Darcy, something entirely splendid has happened!”

I should note that before entering His self-induced coma, our Creator had been well pleased with Lovett, granting him a sharp mind and a fit physique. Despite the odds—the claret, the meerschaum pipe, the sedentary life—Lovett was about to celebrate his seventy-fourth birthday. Some said his good health traced to his bank account, which had grown at an embarrassing rate since the Disney organization had turned the Saga of Sargassia into a series of animated features. Unlike the average Harvard professor, Lovett understood the mind of the child. He often joked that he himself had never stopped being one. The first Sargassia adaptation alone,
The Mermaid in the Maelstrom
, had so far brought him $17,439,860 in videocassette rentals and toy royalties, ten times more than he'd received from his lecture series on the Interfaith Network and all his books of Christian apologetics combined.

Which is not to say the Saga of Sargassia pandered to the marketplace or insulted its audience's intelligence. For the majority of readers, the cycle's central conceit—a vast floating island eternally plying uncharted seas, piloted by a mildly insane captain named Alexis Renardo and powered by trade winds pulling on the immense leaves of the island's indigenous gricklegrackle trees—resonated as deeply as a Greek myth. If there is justice in this world, when the history of modern fantasy is written, Sargassia will receive no less coverage than Wonderland, Oz, or Middle Earth.

“Darcy!”

At last Lovett's brother appeared, his walrus mustache damp with port, the stem of a wineglass pinched between his thumb and index finger.

“Listen to this.” Lovett held up Charles Braithwaite's second
Time
article. “There's a magistrate down in Pennsylvania who fancies himself another Job.”

Ever since his brother had apprised him of the Almighty's cryptic condition six years earlier, Lovett had been pondering the Corpus Dei. While ostensibly a troubling object, the Main Attraction at Celestial City USA would eventually—he'd concluded—do the Episcopal Church and the rest of Christendom more good than harm. By providing the world with an intimation of His infinite grandeur, God was saying, in essence, “I have shown you mountains and rainbows, sequoias and whales, and now I have even shown you My fleshly form—yet these wonders are as nothing,
nothing
, compared to what you will behold upon entering My everlasting Kingdom.” Which meant, of course, this so-called Job Society was woefully misguided in perceiving the Corpus Dei as an outlaw to be prosecuted. The body was an avatar to be venerated, or it was nothing at all.

“Fellow named Martin Candle, right?” said Darcy.

Lovett sipped his tea and nodded. “It's all too perfect, don't you think? For
decades
I've been wanting to get into a brawl like this.”

Darcy took a substantial swallow of port. “Read on. The brawl's been canceled. The World Court doesn't have the scratch.”

“How much do they need?”

“Eighty million dollars.”

A sly, Alexis Renardo-like smile spread across Lovett's face. “Listen carefully,” he said, steepling his fingers. “At your earliest convenience I want you to begin arranging the transfer of eighty million dollars from Sargassia, Incorporated, to the bank account of the United Nations.”

“If you don't mind my saying so, dear brother, this is an astonishingly ill-considered . . .” Darcy's sentence decayed into a succession of bemused chuckles. He finished his port, paused a beat, and sighed. “I'll ring up Crawford first thing Monday.”

Lovett rubbed his hands together as if lathering a bar of soap. “It's been a long while since I've had any fun, Darcy, and this is going to be
fun.
The final war, eh?” he said,
The Final War
being the tenth book in the Sargassia cycle. “I shall always be grateful to this Judge Martin Candle. Even as I cut him down . . . even as I grind his arguments to dust . . . does that sound terribly un-Christian?”

“Terribly.”

“Even as I destroy the man, I shall remain forever in his debt.”

 

As Martin left the noisy clutter of Park Avenue and entered the hushed vulgarity of Trump Tower, he couldn't help thinking of an earlier, equally outrageous skyscraper, the Tower of Babel on the Plain of Shinar. He still remembered the Sunday school lesson his father had wrought from that particular Bible story. After telling his students to transcribe their favorite psalms but to leave out every other word, Walter Candle next had them read the resulting nonsense aloud. The ruckus that followed, fifteen preadolescents gibbering at the tops of their voices, vividly dramatized the confusion that had reigned at Shinar after God handicapped humanity with a multiplicity of tongues.

Cancer clawing at his pelvis, a Roxanol tablet dissolving in his stomach, he limped across the atrium: a lurid space, agleam with bronze banisters and Breccia Perniche marble. His soul was buoyant with hope. Just when his fortunes had seemed at their lowest, he'd received a call from Gretchen Wilde, private secretary to Stuart Torvald, president of the International Court of Justice. At the moment the Court stood adjourned, Wilde explained, so that the judges might enjoy the holidays with their families. Could Martin meet with Dr. Torvald two days after Christmas to discuss an important new development in the proposed legal proceeding?

He stumbled onto the escalator and rose through the tiers of polyglot shops: Loewe's of Spain, Jourdain's of France, Beck's of Germany, Pineider's of Italy. His reflection glided by, caught in the polished copper panels—his hunched frame and pain-pinched face. He got off on Level E and took the elevator to the forty-second floor, eardrums tightening with the force of his ascent. Leaving the car, he knocked on the penthouse door, which opened to reveal a man so lean and elastic he might have just exited an El Greco painting. Piano music drifted into the hallway, a piece Martin recognized as one of Corinne's favorites, Gershwin's
An American in Paris.

“Justice Torvald?”

“Quite so,” the ICJ president replied, his aristocratic tones filtered through the unequalized pressure in Martin's ears. “Magistrate Candle?”

“At your service.” As the two men shook hands, Martin considered how the farthest ends of the judicial spectrum—the lowest and highest courts on the planet—were currently conjoined in this doorway.

Torvald ushered him into a sumptuous living room, its transparent far wall affording a breathtaking vista of midtown Manhattan. In the northeast corner a Scotch pine rose floor to ceiling, its branches hung with ornaments, tinsel descending in a silvery drizzle, the stand encircled by exactly the sorts of Christmas gifts one might assume were exchanged in such surroundings: a rope of pearls, a cashmere sweater, a pair of leather riding boots. For reasons not readily apparent, a battered attaché case sat incongruously amid the presents.

“Let me introduce a dear friend,” said Torvald, guiding Martin toward a baby grand piano at which sat a stumpy man with salt-and-pepper hair, a surplus chin, and a beard so short and dense it seemed painted onto his jaw. Three gold-framed photographs rested atop the piano, each disclosing a different smiling and successful looking young woman, doubtless the judge's daughters. “Irving Saperstein, professor emeritus at Princeton and chairman of the Committee for Complete Disclosure of the Corpus Dei. Irving's lost the Nobel Prize in neurophysiology more times than Richard Burton was deprived of the Oscar.”

“Goodness, Stu, I'd never heard
that
comparison.” Lifting his thick fingers from the keyboard, Saperstein stood up, bowed slightly, and shook Martin's hand.

“We've met before,” said Martin. “Orlando,” he added in response to Saperstein's scowl. “You tried to keep me from entering the Celestial City.”

“Did I succeed?”

“No.”

“You saw the Main Attraction, but your disease didn't go into remission, did it?”

“True enough.”

“So instead we've got
International
. . . tell him, Stu.” Torvald sauntered across the room, reached toward the Christmas tree, and retrieved from the stack of gifts a small golden mallet. “Christmas present from my wife,” he explained. “On Monday, June fifth, at ten o'clock in the morning, I shall slam this fourteen-karat gavel onto my bench in the Peace Palace, thus marking the start of
International 227
:
Job Society, et al., plaintiffs, versus Corpus Dei, Defendant.
”

Martin gasped so profoundly his clogged ears popped. “I thought you didn't have the funds.”

“A backer has appeared—an angel, as they say on Broadway,” Torvald explained. “Does the name G. F. Lovett mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“You've probably heard of the movies they made from his children's books.
The Mermaid in the Maelstrom . . . The Basilisk of Barbados
. . .”

“Oh, right, the Sargassia cycle. My landlady's kid used to collect the action figures.” Martin's heart raced madly. His breathing became short and shallow. Was he really hearing this?
International 227
:
Job Society versus Corpus Dei
—it was actually going to happen? “A sad story. The boy died.”

“I'm told the Saga of Sargassia is really some sort of Christian allegory, but it's still a lot of fun,” said Torvald.

“I was more into Oz,” said Saperstein.

“Me too,” said Martin. “I'll have to give Lovett a try.”

“Before the new year is out, we'll
all
be giving Lovett a try,” said Torvald. “Not the Sargassia books, certainly not the literary criticism—I mean the Christian apologetics.
God for Beginners
. . .
Sermons by Satan . . . The Conundrum of Suffering
. . .”

Torvald spent the next five minutes telling what he called “a characteristic anecdote” about Lovett, the time the professor had tried inducing Pope John XXIII to take up pipe smoking (“Our Lord treasured the things of this Earth, how else to account for all those references to mustard seeds and fig trees?”), but Martin heard only snippets. An angel had arrived! With eighty million dollars!

“Tomorrow I'm holding a press conference—downtown, at the UN—where Lovett's philanthropy will become public,” said Torvald. “I'll also be announcing that
International 227
will occur only after a court-appointed fact-finding team has ventured into His brain.” He presented Martin with a stare to shame the Barbados basilisk. “Let me lay my cards on the table. You and Lovett might be looking forward to this trial, but I am not. It has never been my ambition to supervise the persecution of God Almighty by a bunch of disgruntled
Times Book Review
eggheads. I have no wish to become the next Herod Antipas. Do you follow me, sir? I cannot endorse this project of yours. I find it impudent in the extreme.” He cupped a hand around Saperstein's shoulder. “What I
do
endorse is the Committee for Complete Disclosure. When Lovett came to me with his offer, I immediately saw a thrilling implication: I realized we could temporarily consign the body to people who can make far better use of it than the American Baptist Confederation ever will.”

“It's going to be the greatest scientific expedition of all time,” Saperstein asserted, sidling toward the Christmas tree. “The search for the source of the Nile writ on a cosmic scale. A journey into the ultimate terra incognita.”

“A lot of people think He's brain-dead,” Martin protested.

“Here's the deal,” said Saperstein, absently removing a velvet snowman from the tree. “The Baptists have always regarded their Main Attraction not as a comatose body but as a vessel God shed in the course of becoming pure spirit. Although the Holy Ghost periodically suffuses this vessel—hence its alleged healing powers—it is by no means synonymous with the Almighty. Ergo, when Stu told them the trial was contingent on the Corpus Dei's being alive, they agreed to a limited neurological biopsy. They were confident, you see, that the tissue would prove inert.”

“They let you enter His skull?” asked Martin, astounded.

“We didn't have to go that far. A probe of His eyeball proved adequate. Last Thursday we drilled into the left cornea, made our way through the vitreous humor, and excised a cell from the optic nerve. Back in the lab, the thing proved anything but inert.”

“Irving will be demonstrating its properties at tomorrow's press conference,” said Torvald.

“Sounds like the Baptists have shot themselves in the foot,” said Martin.

“I see now they were hoping to make hay with Irving's experiment. They wanted to use the neuron's presumed sterility to expose
International 227
as a show trial—politically motivated, not to be taken seriously.”

“But it
will
be taken seriously, right?” said Martin. “You'll retain the best lawyers, hire top-notch philosophers, extradite the Defendant, send me and my Jobians to The Hague. I want the court to hear what happened to my wife, how a runaway Irish setter—”

“Oh, you'll be telling us your story all right. In fact, you'll be telling us a great deal
more
than that.”

“More?”

Torvald rested the head of his gavel under his chin and smiled. “Lovett's donation arrives with three strings attached. First proviso: he himself gets to orchestrate the defense.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Second proviso: Martin Candle must take the stand as one of his witnesses.”

“As one of
his
witnesses?”

“Right.”

“He'll be getting an awfully hostile witness.”

“I'm sure he knows that. Third proviso: the case for the prosecution must be conceived and executed by you, sir—by you and you alone.”