The Coming of Bright (17 page)

This note was all business. No mystical Chinese character in the red wax seal meaning
forbidden
. Instead, invitingly, an impression of the sun with its rays radiating straight outward, reminding her of the old Japanese flag before the fall of the empire. Her hands pried open the note, tearing the rays from the sun, an empire falling with barely a sound. Whimpering. T.S. Eliot would have understood.

Once you determine the password and gain entry to our meeting, you will be inducted into the Juris Club and be given your insignia. You must learn the order of rank and insignia of our members, and you must address each member according to his rank.

Rank and Insignia

Caesar—Radiant sun

Patrician—Golden statue

Consul—Eagle

Prefect—Obelisk

Praetor—Imperial chair (Sella curulis)

Centurion—Sword

Magister—Open book

Lictor—Ax

Plebeian—Bundle of wheat

Servus—Inscribed collar

Upon reading the note, Zora had an immediate blinding thought:

Servus? No fucking way
.

The lowest rank. A horror. An abomination. That word she knew.
Servus
. The Roman word for slave. And then there was the collar. At the discretion of his master, a slave in the Roman Empire could be fitted with an iron collar. Complete with various inscriptions that voided the self, gems of subjugation like
Servus sum
—“I am a slave.” Along with the name and address of the master in case the slave made a play for freedom.

There was no fucking way Zora was going to be called
Servus
—not now, not ever. The masculine ending of the word had nothing to do with it. Fuck the feminine form.
Serva
was equally unconscionable, unthinkable. If those fascist pricks at the Juris Club tried to call her either one, there would be a bloodbath of gladiatorial proportions. And if Victor was Caesar as she suspected, he would not be spared— the fate of Julius Caesar would be his fate. His last words on earth, sputtered in blood, would be
Et tu, Zora?

She was starting to get a much clearer picture of the Juris Club. It discouraged her and inspired her at the same time. Infuriated her, fired her up with zeal. The Club was obviously enamored of the sad old theme of blind naked power and male privilege,
white
male privilege. Not exactly shocking in the annals of American history, but among the top lawyers and judges in the country?

This went way beyond hunger for power, lust for money. This was evil. Whatever their agenda was, whatever twisted idealism they espoused, Zora was going to put her heel down. Viciously. Murderously if necessary.

And she had the means to do it, to bring about a revolution among the revolutionaries, from the inside out. She had access to their beloved Caesar. Very special access. Unless they were the orgiastic kind of fake Romans, she was the only one who had seen their Caesar naked. The only one whose leverage over him included the infliction of impotence.

She would prefer to use love instead. A woman they would dare call slave, whose own ancestors had been slaves, would bend their Caesar to her will, replace their idealism with hers, or bring their collective downfall trying. She would be their Hannibal, and Founders would be their Cannae.

First she needed that goddamn password. On the back of Victor’s note, she started working out anagrams of “peso.” Ten tries later, none of which made any sense, her mind wandered back to her Virgil days. Less than a year before. A span of time trebled through the distorting lens of memory, the sheer turmoil of intervening events.

Not her virgin days, although the two were not that far apart. Her virgin days had ended during her Virgil days—she and Kyle had been going together for about a year by then, celibate as a monk and a nun, when one evening he had swilled one glass of lonely wine too many and pounced. Fucked her—without romance, without passion, breath hot with Chardonnay. Yes, a college kid who drank Chardonnay. Such people do exist. The grape falls not far from the vine. He hurt her. A brute. She forgave him, that was her way, a romantic in the darkness, love trumped all, some would have called it rape, the law would have called it rape, she called it Kyle being drunk. Not himself.

She made sure it never happened again though, not that way, not like a brute, she told him what would happen, how he would suffer. And she meant it, he would have suffered, terribly. What she had done to Victor with her heel would have been a gentle overture to a greater justice. Kyle would have felt, inscribed in his flesh, deeply, beyond the power of flesh to heal itself, the true meaning of the
lex talionis
, the ancient Roman law of an eye for an eye. Zora believed in the law, she believed in the spirit of the law—she believed in justice more. And she was perfectly capable of meting out justice when the law would not, when the law hesitated, contemplated. She believed above all in symmetry, that justice had to be symmetrical to be just. Centered.

What drew her to Virgil was this conviction. Reading the
Aeneid
, she was struck by the invocation of higher justice, the equilibrium between choice and fate. The suicide of Dido, the proud queen spurned by Aeneas, he who cared more for empty piety than love, made her cry and made her rage. Had she the power of life over art, she would have jumped into the page and twisted Aeneas’s head from his body. Or killed him with the same sword, his sword, upon which Dido skewered herself in despair.

A beautiful double symmetry—once when she wielded the sword fresh with Dido’s blood, and then again when it passed through the very center of Aeneas’s chest. Mixing his lover’s blood with his own.

Zora had fallen in love with the
Aeneid
, memorizing dozens of lines. Not simply because the professor insisted on it, but also because she was seduced by them, by their wisdom. And one of those lines passed through her mind at that moment, a line about the thing she hated most about the law she loved. The immortal marriage of money and power.

Contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum finge deo
.

It meant:
Despise the power of wealth, gain the worth of a god
.

Zora did despise the power of wealth—and Victor had mocked her for it. The password was mocking her again.
Opes
. A word that meant money, riches, the root of power. Of course the Juris Club would have that as their fucking password, didn’t they believe in that as much as she believed in justice? Wasn’t that their definition of justice just as symmetry of wrong and right was hers?

She dreamed that night of bondage and death, of being collared and shackled in the inner sanctum of the Juris Club, of men calling her slave, abusing her flesh. And then of her breaking free and killing every single one of her tormentors.

She wielded in the dream a sacrificial knife, made entirely of ivory, that had been lying on an altar at the front of the room. The blood of the men splattered onto the altar, and she was satisfied that the place had finally been sanctified. She did not spare Victor—him she killed last, cutting his throat. As he died she kissed him passionately on the mouth, and whispered into his ear,
Contemnere opes, et te quoque . . .
He died before she could finish.

Sunday night, she showed up early, quarter to five, navigating her way to the head of Voltaire. The head had been shrouded in a plain black cloth. Voltaire had been blinded. Someone new was there at the door—a university police officer, gun holstered at his side. Zora wondered if the university would assign an officer to guard the Club’s dealings if they knew how the entire organization was covered in fascist shit. More than likely they’d assign two. In case protestors somehow showed up.

Without even having stepped through the door, Zora knew what she’d find inside. The makings of a second American Revolution. Sort of like the French Revolution in reverse—minus the guillotine. At least Zora
hoped
the Juris Club hadn’t included a revival of the guillotine in their glorious plans. She was certain what the end result of their revolution would be though: the haves ending up with everything and the have-nots with nothing. The strong completely destroying the weak.

She approached the officer, who bristled at her, barked at her.

“You can’t go in there. It’s a private meeting.”

She barked right back.

“Believe it or not, I’m here for the meeting. The password is
opes
. Now why don’t you let me in.”

Despite her demeaning tone, he softened up.

“Oh, you must be the lady the Judge was telling me about. Everyone else is already inside.”

He turned around, his body blocking the keypad on the door, typed in the correct numerical code. The door opened and her body whispered into the room. The officer closed the door behind her.

“Why the hell is
she
here?”

The voice was Vane’s, the vitriol of his look making the officer’s glare of moments before seem like seduction. About 20 men were sitting around a large three-sided grouping of tables in the shape of the
Arc de Triomphe.
They all wore black silk jackets that buttoned down the left side instead of the center. As if Gucci had gone into the business of making fencing lamés.

Zora was almost disappointed to see there was no altar at the front of the room as she had dreamed, nor any sacrificial knife lying about, ready to be applied to living skin and the liberation of blood. What did impress her was the phantasmagoria of tiles that ringed the room. Two-thirds of the way up the walls and about 3 feet from bottom to top. A brightly colored frieze of thousands upon thousands of mosaic tiles.

The frieze depicted a variety of Roman imperial and religious scenes. A taste of what she saw—for you, curious reader, to whet your appetite for lust and might and gore. A smiling soldier slicing into an enemy with his
gladius
; the emperor on a four-horse chariot, his head wreathed with laurel leaves; several bloody gladiatorial contests, some with animals, some without; a group of lictors carrying the fasces in front of a magistrate wrapped in a white robe; a bare-breasted nubile servant pouring wine for her patrician master, who lay comfortably on a
chaise longue
and reached lustfully for her legs; the Roman god Mithras killing an enormous bull; a gathering of the followers of Bacchus, drunk on wine, thrashing against each other, dismembering each other.

At the far end of the room, just below the frieze, was a large inscription set in white mosaic tiles on a black tile background:

Virtus legis, lex opis
.

The word
opes
again, this time in genitive form. The inscription meant,
The power of the law is the law of power.

The motto of the Juris Club.

Zora took all this in quickly, in a matter of seconds, before the resonance of Vane’s words shook her, before it registered that he was attacking
her
. His hostility would be her greeting, his anger her salutation.

She opened her mouth to answer, to introduce herself and feed the gathered throng some bullshit about how honored she was to be there.

Victor answered for her. Ever the gentleman.

“My fellow Blackcoats, this young lady is Zora Bright. One of my students. My very best students.”

Best in what sense, Zora wondered, academically or sexually? Probably both.

“I have personally invited her to join our group. I think she has a lot to offer.”

So Zora would be a Blackcoat. That was why they all wore that funny black coat that looked like a Gucci fencing jacket. To Zora the term was uncannily, and unforgivably, similar to a term she had learned about in college, in her World Civilizations class. The fascist Blackshirts in Mussolini’s Italy. You know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of fascism.

Victor stood from where he’d been sitting, in the middle of the table at the top of the horizontal arch. The most triumphant figure in a triumphant setting.

“Ms. Bright, please come up here.”

“No.”

It was Vane again, who now stood as well, looming up on Zora’s right at one of the side tables. He wore the insignia of a Magister, well below Victor’s rank of Caesar.

Zora could see the circular pins that each member bore on his chest, the icon that signified his rank. Victor was the leader of the entire Juris Club, of its vast skein of shadows, its network of thousands of members nationwide. If not across the globe. Some of the most powerful men on earth.

And she had bruised his testicles, the sanctified testicles of Caesar—not once, but twice!