Odyssey (30 page)

The trial took four and a half weeks. Every morning the couple appeared at the nondescript building on Lafayette and listened to witnesses being questioned and cross-examined: doormen and Red Rover limousine drivers; doctors Seth Offeran and Thomas Katz; nurses, waitresses, and some people whom Sovereign had never met.

A woman who lived in his neighborhood testified that Sovereign had changed his direction seemingly to avoid a dog that wasn’t on a chain. And then there was the paramedic who brought James to the hospital after Johnson had attacked him the first time.

“They told me that he was blind,” Rosa Lopez said. She had copper skin and plum-colored freckles. “But when I was reaching back and forth over his head for the oxygen mask, he swayed as if he was watchin’ what I was doing.”

Both sides had experts who did their best to negate the others’ claims. Testimony was long and tedious, repetitious and, often, needlessly specific—at least, that was what Sovereign thought.

The ex–HR manager wondered how such bland discussion could end up in prison sentences. There were people dying in wars, suffering from famine, and here he sat with a roomful of professionals asking questions like was sight associated with a sound, did he move his head every time, and how long ago did you witness this behavior?

“Why does a old man like you always have his dick so hard?” Toni complained
one afternoon when court had been let out early. They’d just finished with a room-service meal.

“Because I look at you and come alive,” Sovereign said.

“You been alive for fifty years.”

“I wish. But you know, I feel like I die every day in that fake courtroom. It’s like they bunged me up in a coffin and I’m lyin’ there waiting for the gravediggers to finish before they can lay me to rest.”

Toni grinned and shrugged off the one-piece ochre dress that Sovereign loved.

“You so funny,” she said. “Gimme that dick here.”

She reached out and tugged on him. He grunted and touched her cheek.

That was when the phone rang.

“You gonna answer it?” Toni asked.

“I’m kinda busy.”

“It might be about the trial.”

Toni held on to the erection while Sovereign answered.

“Hello,” he said, stifling a moan of satisfaction.

“Bro?”

“Eddie?” Sovereign stood up and away from the bed.

“Man, I cain’t leave you alone for a minute you ain’t wandered into some quicksand?”

“Where are you?”

“Downstairs.”

“Downstairs where?”

“Your hotel, baby. You know I always got the latest intelligence.”

He was sitting at far end of the dark bar. It was just after four in the afternoon, so there were few customers. Drum-Eddie James was wearing a shark-gray suit, yellow dress shirt replete with ruby cuff links, and black patent-leather shoes. He was talking to a young blond woman with dark garnet lips and gray-green eyes.

“JJ,” Drum-Eddie said as he stood away from the bar stool. “This here is … What’s your name again?”

“Carmen,” the twentysomething woman said. Her nostrils flared.

“Carmen, this is my brother—JJ. We got some business.”

“Okay,” Carmen said, a little reluctantly. “I’ll be sitting at that table over in the corner for a while.”

She touched his gray sleeve and moved away.

“You shouldn’t be here, Eddie,” Sovereign said when the young woman was out of earshot.

“I don’t think I ever been in a place I should’ve been in,” he replied. “Drink?”

“Cognac.”

“Bartender,” Eddie hailed, and when the redheaded man behind the bar looked up, “VSOP for my brother here—in a snifter.”

“Eddie, what are you doing here?”

“I heard that you got in all kindsa trouble for buyin’ my ticket, man.”

“The feds haven’t bothered me since that first day.”

“That’s ’cause I called ’em.”

“You what?”

“I met with this dude down in Havana, state department guy. I told him that I’d be happy to have an enlightening sit-down if they promised to take the weight off a’ you.”

The bartender put a very large snifter, with a good amount of brandy in it, down next to Sovereign’s elbow.

“I’m free of them?”

“Me too. Once we talked they said it was okay for me to come back to the U.S.”

“So you’re moving back?”

“Naw, man. I like it down in South America. I got wiggle room down there—wriggle room too.”

Blond Carmen was staring at the men from her seat in the corner; Sovereign could see her in the mirror behind the bar.

“What?” Eddie asked when the silence had spanned a minute.

“I don’t understand, man.”

“What?”

“Here you are crossin’ borders and makin’ deals with the federal government. You know where I’m hiding and got pretty girls waitin’ their turn. What is it you do that nobody else knows?”

Drum James sat up straight and crossed his legs. He brought the index finger of his left hand to his nose. Sovereign remembered then that his brother was ambidextrous.

“I figure it like this, Jimmy,” he said. “In this world you can either work for somebody else or do your own thing.”

“Like rob a bank?”

“Whatever. You just look at your options and pick the best one.”

“Everybody does that.”

“No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People take jobs they don’t want, stay in marriages they hate, pay taxes for things they don’t wanna do, and live among people they don’t like. They love their enemies and hate their friends, break their promises and forget about bein’ happy altogether.

“And if you don’t do those things you will find that people are drawn to you. If you livin’ free everybody wants a piece of it. That girl in the corner, federal government too. They don’t care about that bank. They know that the bank the biggest crook there is. They don’t care about drugs or communists or ten thousand poor people starving to death. They just want people like me in the mix. They don’t know why but they do anyway.”

“Do you know why, Eddie?”

“Sure.”

“Are you gonna tell me?”

“It’s like that Carmen in the corner,” the sand-colored man said. “She sees how free somebody is and that makes her feel how trapped she is, even if she don’t know it. She reach out for me, and I got a question.”

“What’s that?” Sovereign James asked his brother.

“ ‘Do you wanna get yourself free or get me caught in the trap you in?’ ”

“And what do you do, according to the answer she gives?”

“First,” Drum-Eddie James said, “I have to figure out if she’s lyin’.”

“About what?”

“That’s not the right question.”

“What is?” Sovereign James asked.

“The question is who she’s lyin’ to.”

“And who is that?”

“Either to me, herself, or both of us,” Eddie said, showing not the slightest bit of humor. “She might say she wanna get free and believe it but it’s still not true. She might be testin’ me, sayin’ she wants the trap, but really she wants me to pry her outta the situation she’s in. She might even be tellin’ me the truth, just not the way it sounds.”

“What does that mean?”

“She might wanna be free for the night and crawl back to her cage in the morning.”

“And when you figure it out,” Sovereign asked, “what do you do then?”

To Sovereign, Drum-Eddie’s smile was like the crack of dawn at the end of a stormy night.

“You might not be able to tell the difference from the outside,” Drum said. “You know it’s the human animal have all them questions and shit, but it’s the animal period that gets up in the bed.

“I do the same things but my intentions are different. If she’s lookin’ to be free I invite her down to Rio and mean it. If she wants to trap me I make the same invitation but never call back.”

“What about what you want, Eddie?”

“Me? I got everything I need, brother. Got it like the grippe.”

“And why are you here?”

“Just to see you, JJ. Just to see you.”

When Sovereign’s eyes met Drum-Eddie’s he wondered if they had ever looked at each other like that before: with love that was deeper than any words could accurately attend.

“I’ve missed you, Eddie.”

“I sent you a text that has all my permanent numbers. If you need me I’m always only half a second away.”

The bank robber got up and slapped his brother’s shoulder. He walked across the bar to where Carmen was waiting. When she stood Sovereign did too.

That night Sovereign rolled into a ball in the hotel bed. Toni curled around him, stroking his head and shoulders. He shivered now and then, causing the young woman to whisper, “Shhhh.”

“You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and think that maybe you missed something the day before?” he asked late into the night.

“Like what?” she asked.

“Maybe … maybe you said the wrong thing to somebody important, or maybe
they said something important to you but you didn’t get it at the time.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “You feel like that?”

“Every morning lately I wake up I feel like I missed my whole goddamned life.”

“The prosecution would like to present one more witness, Your Honor, before turning the case over for judgment.”

“And who is this witness?”

“Lemuel Johnson.”

“What?” Toni cried out.

The judge didn’t ask for order. Toni’s outcry echoed her own surprise.

“He regained consciousness,” Sutter continued, “two days ago, and the doctors say that he is strong enough to make a statement.”

“Your Honor,” Lena Altuna nearly shouted. “The prosecution has presented their witnesses. We were not informed.”

There was a window behind the judge. The glass was opaque green. Sovereign thought about the haze of light illuminating the room while hiding its sources. He felt Toni grabbing his forearm. There was a moth fluttering in the upper right-hand corner of the window frame.

“It’s okay,” he whispered.

“But, Ms. Altuna,” the judge was saying. “Mr. Johnson is the victim of the crime we’re judging here. He is the only witness, other than the defendants, who experienced the entire flow of events.”

“But he has an interest in keeping his role secret,” Altuna said. “And he might harbor anger at my client for fighting him.”