Blameless in Abaddon (34 page)

 

Dear Mr. Candle:

Let me take this opportunity to wish you good fortune in the coming fight. I am anticipating many hours of reasoned theological debate. May the better man win!

Sincerely
,

Gregory Francis Lovett

 

P.S. Per stipulation number two, I still expect you to take the stand as a witness for the defense.

 

A series of short, sharp reports filled the parlor. Gunshots? wondered Martin. An assassination attempt on the scientists by an Eternity Enterprises stockholder? He glanced at the TV. The scientists were still talking. The reports persisted. Hobbling toward the door, he wrapped his fingers around the knob.

“Hold it!” cried Olaf, dashing into the parlor, Gunnar right behind.

Martin jerked away. As Olaf opened the door, Gunnar pressed his back against the adjacent wall and made ready to ambush the intruder.

Patricia stood in the jamb, a tattered canvas bag slung over her shoulder, her slim body clothed in the primary colors: yellow cotton jersey, blue denim slacks, red silk scarf. A twinge of concupiscence arose in Martin's embattled loins.

“Howdy, neighbor.”

“Neighbor?” he replied, staring dumbfounded at his visitor.

“I'm right down the hall, Suite 307. Hey, Martin, I just flew four thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Aren't you glad to see me?”

“You know this woman?” asked Olaf.

“Not as well as he thinks he does,” said Patricia.

“What are you doing in Holland?” Martin eased his aching pelvis onto the couch.

“I came for the light. I have a new commission, and I wanted to paint it under the same sun that inspired Vermeer.”

“More trading cards?”

“The Insect Insurrection.”
Settling down beside him, she pulled a rough sketch from her shoulder bag: a gigantic grasshopper feasting on a Burger King restaurant. “A bunch of greedy technocrats concoct the ultimate roach killer, and naturally it goes haywire, polluting the atmosphere and causing all the world's bugs to grow as big as helicopters.”

“It doesn't sound very plausible.”

“That's what I like about it.” Patricia closed her eyes. “Spina bifida is plausible.”

As Olaf and Gunnar sidled out of the parlor, Martin selected a plum from the fruit basket, grabbed his larger suitcase, and limped into the master bedroom. To his utter dismay, an immense mirror hung over the dresser. He shuddered. Whatever else he accomplished this summer, he would not achieve freedom from himself—he would not escape his bony cheeks and bloodshot eyes, his invalid's stoop and cheerleader's bust.

“I hear you and Randall showed each other a pretty good time last month,” he remarked as Patricia sauntered into the room.

“Pretty good,” she echoed evenly.

Setting down the suitcase, Martin thought he heard Noah's ax clank against his blow dryer. “Who broke it off?”

“Me.”

“Really? Why?”

“You know why.”

“Is it
romantic
loving a doomed man? Is that it? Walking corpses are glamorous?”

“Look who's talking about loving the dead.” Patricia approached the mirror and pressed her palm against the glass. She stepped away, leaving a ghostly handprint. “Martin, something's been bothering me.” The handprint dissolved. “Randall showed me your e-mail exchanges . . .”

He bit into his plum and frowned. “And . . .?”

“Don't you see what this stupid trial is doing to you?”

“What's it doing to me?”

“It's warping you.”

“Oh? How so?”

“‘Esther has scheduled some absolutely beautiful victims'—a direct quote from you. ‘Esther has scheduled some absolutely beautiful victims,'”

“I'm tired, Patricia.”

“‘Beautiful victims'? That's sick.”

“Really tired.”

“What does it profit a man if he wins
International 227
and loses his immortal soul?”

“Believe it or not, I have accorded this matter considerable thought.” He devoured the plum all the way to the stone. “I agree with you that things have reached an odd pass when victims start looking beautiful. Given the choice between winning my case and losing my soul . . . well, it's simply no contest.”

“I'm glad you see it that way.”

“Damnation would be a small price to pay for a ‘guilty' verdict.”

“Martin, you're impossible.”

A hammering sound wafted into the bedroom, the steady
thok-thok-thok
of the Lockheed 7000. He hobbled to the window and slammed it shut, sending crab spasms through his right shoulder and left femur.

“And another thing, all this cash you've been throwing around.” She set his suitcase on the bed and released both clasps, each assuming the attitude of a first-class erection. “It's not right that people should get paid so much money for airing their pain in public. You're supposed to be running a trial, not a talk show.”

“Witnesses receive money all the time.”

“The media will call them mercenaries. Your Jobians will end up hating themselves.”

“They
are
mercenaries.” He considered hurling the plum stone at her, then lobbed it into the wastebasket instead. “Is there any way I can convince you to drop the present topic? I find it distasteful.”

“I'll drop it if you'll let me inject you with one of these,” she said, removing a 2cc vial of Odradex.

“Nothing doing.”

“You're in pain.”

“That's why God invented Roxanol.”

“It hurts you to move—I can see it in your face. Maybe I should buy you a cane.”

“Please do. Lovett owns a Malacca walking stick. We can have a duel.”

Patricia sighed, replaced the vial, and absently extracted a Ziploc bag. “What the hell is
this?
”

“Mrs. Lot's right ear.”

“Looks like a chunk of salt.”

“Well, it is.”

In a gesture that seemed erotic even to Martin's ruined libido, she untied the red silk scarf from her throat and looped it around his neck. “You really believe you're at war, don't you?”

“Yes.”

“Then please accept this token. A knight should never go into battle unless he's wearing a lady's colors—right?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the lady wants her knight to win.”

“I don't want you to win, and I don't want you to lose.” Patricia pulled on the ends of the scarf, drawing his face toward hers. “I just want you around as long as possible.”

He smiled softly. “Remember that first time I came out to your house?” Extending his index finger, he slipped it under his silk shirt and rubbed the irritated skin above his Port-A-Cath valve. “How we sat on the rug in your studio and held each other for dear life?”

“Of course I remember.”

An emphatic silence suffused Suite 300. They pulled off their shoes, climbed into bed, and slid beneath the coverlet, Patricia's head resting on his chest, her nose pressed against the valve. Martin curled his arm around her neck. The gentle cadence of her breathing, so unlike the raucous pounding of the heart-lung machine, combined with the opiate rush of the Roxanol to soothe his jangled nerves.

She began to sob.

“Dear Patricia,” he whispered. “Dear, dear Patricia . . .”

“So plausible.”

“Plausible?”

“Spina bifida. A tortured child.”

“Yes. Plausible. Yes.”

“I miss him.”

He smoothed her raven hair with the flat of his hand. “Return your ticket, Patricia. I'm returning mine.”

“My ticket?”

“To the universe of unavenged suffering.”

“An appealing thought.”

“Do it.”

But instead of returning their tickets, they drifted off to sleep.

 

Seeing the Peace Palace for the first time that sunny Saturday morning, Martin decided it looked more suited to opera than theodicy. Corinthian columns rose along a rococo facade, collectively supporting an entablature carved with grapevines. Between each pair of columns a statue of a famous diplomat—Dag Hammarskjold, Raoul Wallenberg, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord—stared down at the tree-lined plaza below.

“It all goes back to 1899,” Pierre Ferrand explained to Martin and the bodyguards, “when Czar Nicholas II called a conference with the aim of halting the runaway European arms race. Everyone sat around in The Hague for two weeks—drinking wine, denouncing war, and dreaming up the Permanent Court of Arbitration, forerunner of today's ICJ. For many years the thing had no home, but then the rich American Andrew Carnegie stepped in with a generous donation. The Permanent Court didn't last, but the Peace Palace did.”

The plaza was jammed, a hurly-burly of locals, tourists, concessionaires, UN troops, Hans De Groot's police officers, and—most conspicuously—the world's news-gathering organizations, their cords and cables snaking across the flagstones. Technicians swarmed everywhere, setting up cameras, positioning satellite dishes, and hopping in and out of TV-control vans. Hidden behind his crepe mustache and dark glasses, Martin approached the nearest souvenir stand and proceeded to survey its wares. Half the items bore mottoes written in either Dutch, German, or French; the rest were inscribed in English. He saw pennants reading
TRIAL OF THE MILLENNIUM
, bumper stickers declaring
MY GOD IS INNOCENT AND I HOPE YOURS IS TOO
, and T-shirts emblazoned with likenesses of Stuart Torvald and G. F. Lovett.

For a mere eight guilders he obtained a hardcover souvenir program book called
The Story of International 227
. To his everlasting relief, the vendor seemed not to recognize him.

Although the trial wasn't scheduled to start for seventy-two hours, hundreds of people had collected on the Peace Palace steps. Martin, Ferrand, and the bodyguards ascended cautiously, trying to look inconspicuous as they picked their way through the crowd. Most of the bystanders hugged sleeping bags and bedrolls, apparently intending to spend the weekend and thereby increase their chances of being seated inside on Monday. The majority looked young and bohemian; they might have been rock fans waiting to buy Guns N' Roses tickets. On the evidence of their placards, the bystanders divided evenly into two antagonistic camps. For every
FREE THE AUTHOR OF FREE WILL
, there was a
PULL THE PLUG
NOW
. For every
GET A JOB, JOB SOCIETY
, there was a
KILL ONE MAN AND YOU ARE A MURDERER, KILL A BILLION AND YOU ARE GOD
.

Ferrand guided his charges through a bronze double door carved with the motto
FIAT LUX.
The four men lingered in the vestibule, a cavernous space appointed with medieval tapestries and Renaissance oils. “Shortly after the cornerstone was laid, Europe's leaders took time out from planning their military strategies to fill this atrium with priceless cultural treasures,” Ferrand reported with cheerful cynicism. “By the beginning of the Great War, the Peace Palace had become one of the finest art museums on the continent.”

A short journey down a marble hall, a brief ascent along a spiral staircase, and they were inside the main courtroom. The place was immense, a multileveled, oak-paneled conjunction of tables, benches, stands, docks, lecterns, galleries, translation booths, and—most strikingly—flags: three hundred at least, from every nation on Earth. TV technicians scurried about, setting up floodlights, testing microphones, dollying cameras into position. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling like bunches of crystalline bananas. Along the west wall six stained-glass Gothic windows stretched floor to ceiling, each depicting a magistrate whose decisions had reverberated with global import, including Francis Biddle of the Nuremberg Trials and John Dewey of the commission that vindicated Trotsky following his indictment by a Moscow kangaroo tribunal. For all its grandiosity, Martin felt entirely at home in this space. The Peace Palace courtroom, he realized, was nothing more than an elaborate version of his little hall of justice back in Abaddon.

He faced the judges' bench and limped down the aisle, his index finger sliding along a polished mahogany balustrade. More than ever he felt like a military commander—Napoleon himself, perhaps, reconnoitering the field on which thousands of troops would fight the next day. Where lay the high ground? On which hill should he amass his artillery? Reaching the bench, he did an about-face, fixed on Ferrand, and grinned.

“This will do.”

Their final stop was the prosecution wing, a suite of twenty offices surrounding a domed rotunda like spokes on a wheel. In the center stood the human skeleton, Randall Selkirk, clutching a briefcase and speaking earnestly with the Amazon of Trenton, Esther Clute. As Martin greeted his fellow Jobians, the irony of the situation curled his lips into a smile. To the Baptists, Jehovans, and other God fearers, the prosecution team was engaged in a byzantine and far-reaching conspiracy, when in fact its three members hardly knew each other.

“Your mustache is as phony as the disciplinary defense,” said Randall, shaking Martin's hand.

“It gets the job done.”

Esther explained that with the exceptions of Christopher Ransom, their amyotrophic-lateral-sclerosis victim, and Harry Elder, their cystic-fibrosis dad, the key sufferers were already in town. The first of their two expert witnesses—the cataclysmatician, Donald Carbone—would be arriving on Friday. The relevant dossiers were sitting in Martin's office, along with ten copies of the indictment itself.

Martin peeled off his mustache and scratched his itching upper lip. “Any breakthroughs from your Harvard kids?” he asked Randall.