Blameless in Abaddon (37 page)

“Do you ever pray while you're there?”

“All the time.”

“What do pray for?”

“I pray for God to help me find a way to forgive Him.”

“No further questions.”

Lovett began the cross-examination by asking Wanda Jo to describe her late husband. How did Billy dress? What were his favorite television programs? Did he have any hobbies?

The witness replied that Billy dressed like a slob, that he watched a lot of professional hockey on TV, and that he enjoyed launching toy rockets. “Once he sent up a gerbil and brought it back alive. His mom hated to see him running around with his rockets. She was afraid he'd start bleeding.”

“What else did your husband do for fun?”

“Whenever I picture Billy, I see him with his nose in a book. He collected all your Sargassia stories. He especially liked
The Boy, the Bear, and the Broom Closet
.”

“Mrs. Jenkins, do you ever feel Billy is still with you in some way?”

“With me?”

“Near you. Beside you. Watching over you.”

“Sometimes I hear his voice in my head. He had this wonderful scratchy voice.”

“Do you think maybe he's talking to you from Heaven?”

“No, sir, I don't think that.”

“Do you believe there's a Heaven?”

“No more than I believe there's an Island of Sargassia.”

“Another inspired selection,” Martin whispered, winking brightly at Esther.

“Thank you, Mrs. Jenkins,” said Lovett. “That will be all.”

 

After the lunch recess Martin continued parading his Jobians before the bench. Orin Bromwell: multiple sclerosis. Julia Schroeder: kidney failure. Peter Henshaw: AIDS. The next day the prosecution summoned a new set of victims. Writhing around in his wheelchair, Christopher Ransom spent the morning testifying to the horrors of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, his relentless awareness that he would soon possess “the mind of a man trapped in the body of a cabbage.” That afternoon, award-winning watercolorist Carolyn Meeshaw described “losing my vision for the Almighty's amusement” at the height of her career. Shifting roles from prosecutor to witness, Esther took the stand and recounted how “one of God's beloved roundworms” had ravaged her daughter's brain.

In cross-examining these assorted sufferers, Lovett adopted the same impassive demeanor he'd employed at the outset with Norma Bedloe and Wanda Jo Jenkins. He was polite, even a tad solicitous, but he still managed to insinuate their ordeals entailed harmonies of which they were only dimly aware.

Cancer consumed the rest of the week, the whole satanic spectrum, from brain to bowel, liver to lung, breast to prostate. “Lovett might have ontology on his side,” muttered Randall to his colleagues, “but we've got oncology.” Especially affecting was the testimony of Frank Latham, whose twenty-year-old sister had died of Hodgkin's disease after a decade of chemotherapeutic torture. “She got so many cards and letters, the mailman started joking he wanted a tip,” said Latham, voice cracking. “Everybody loved Elsa.” But Martin really struck pay dirt when he put Rosalind Kreuger on the stand. Fighting tears, Kreuger told how her youngest child, Mary Lou, had succumbed to acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age nine, despite a last-ditch bone-marrow transplant. More than anything else, Mary Lou loved swimming, and in her final days she kept asking for her very own pool. “The Make-A-Wish people came through, all right, but not the way she was hoping,” said Kreuger. “They bought her one of those big, round, above-the-ground pools. Mary Lou wanted a
real
pool—she wanted them to dig a hole in our yard and fill it with water. She tried to hide her disappointment, but I could still tell how she felt.”

Martin spent the weekend sitting beside Patricia on the couch in his hotel suite, poring over victim dossiers, the television tuned to CNN's cogent condensation of the Job Society's first week in court. In the middle of Christopher Ransom's autobiography, the network cut to a toothsome anchorman bearing the news that on Friday afternoon—shortly before midnight, Eastern Standard Time—people's witness Norma Bedloe of Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, had committed suicide in the company of three friends.

“Such a sad story,” said Olaf.

“I guess she had no other choice,” said Gunnar.

“A Jobian to the end,” said Martin. “You're a heroic woman, Norma.”

“You wouldn't call her heroic if she'd done it
before
she testified,” grunted Patricia, looking up from her sketch pad. The page displayed an immense stag beetle crushing a school bus between its pincers. “These poor people, they're nothing to you. They're pawns.”

“Patricia, that's not fair,” said Martin.

“You were practically drooling when Mary Lou Kreuger didn't get the right kind of swimming pool.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“I'm on your side, Martin. The problem is, I'm not sure
you
are.”

“I didn't
drool
.”

“You drooled,” said Olaf.

“You drooled,” said Gunnar.

When
International 227
resumed on Monday, Martin shifted the focus from pathology to other varieties of natural evil, a strategy he pursued through Tuesday morning. Eleven different Jobians told how their lives had been irrevocably altered by what Martin called “the mindless violence of Mother Earth.” Calvin Hatch was a retired auto mechanic who'd become subject to dreadful seizures after a flying hubcap struck his head during the hurricane that visited Xenia, Ohio, in 1974. Eugene West was a Hollywood screenwriter whose teenage brother had been speared through the chest by a
WATCH CHILDREN
sign during the great Los Angeles earthquake of 1994.

Nature's victims did not impress Lovett. Invited to crossexamine them, he sent his brother to the lectern instead. The resulting exchanges were perfunctory and unfocused. In most cases, Darcy merely had the witness repeat some inconsequential fact or other: the date of a certain avalanche, the duration of a particular hailstorm, the speed of a specific tornado.

After the Tuesday lunch break Esther took over at the front of the room, and by five
P.M.
on Wednesday she'd interviewed fourteen different Jobians who'd been either mutilated or bereaved by car crashes, handgun accidents, carpet-glue vapors, open elevator shafts, faulty drawbridges, and decrepit roller coasters, each such existential catastrophe featuring its own unique mix of poignancy and absurdity. June Weintraub recounted the deathbed agonies of her adolescent son, Aaron, whose Bigfoot costume had caught fire during a campfire skit in the Catskills. Marilyn Stonebury described standing outside Our Lady of the Angels Parochial School in Chicago with two dozen other parents on December 1, 1958, all of them listening to their dying children's screams as flames consumed the building. Hands protruding directly from his shoulders like a seal's flippers, forty-year-old Malcolm Beale told what it was like to go through life as one of Europe's eight thousand “Thalidomide babies.”

In cross-examining the existential victims Lovett managed to exude compassion while still holding his theological ground. The theme he developed was as straightforward as a geometry proof. Existential evil variously traces to human arrogance, negligence, and stupidity. The Defendant was not to blame.

On Thursday and Friday, Esther guided the tribunal across the vast, cratered continent of moral evil. Sheila Rabinowitz's twelve-year-old daughter had been raped and eviscerated by a serial killer in San Diego. Bruce Kadrey's preschool son had been pulverized during the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. On the final day of his Vietnam combat tour, Stanley Pallomar had stumbled into a booby-trapped howitzer round, losing both his legs, the fingers of his left hand, and large chunks of his chest. The war hero testified from his wheelchair, listing from side to side like Brandon Appleyard's Godzilla punching doll. Esther saved her most affecting moral witness for last: Xavier Mrugamba, a maimed Rwandan expatriate who'd miraculously survived the genocide of 1994 and now lived outside London. When the Hutu youth militia invaded his homestead near Kigali, Xavier had begged them not to dismember his family alive with machetes, and so the soldiers invited him to take his wife and two children into the backyard, bind their hands, and hurl them screaming down the latrine wells . . . which he did, whereupon the Hutus hacked off his arms and left him for dead.

Lovett declined to interview the victims of moral evil, and this time he didn't even send Darcy onto the field. Moral evil is an unavoidable consequence of human free will, ran Lovett's tacit argument. Leave our Client out of it.

Martin cast an anxious gaze toward the bench. None of the judges seemed particularly engaged in the matter at hand; they all looked as if they'd rather be reviewing the testimony in an international boundary dispute. Had this flood of melodrama offended them? Had they been put off by Norma Bedloe's baleful liver, June Weintraub's roasted son, Malcolm Beale's phocomelia, and Xavier Mrugamba's mutilation? Time to switch strategies, he decided. Time to stash the sufferers and hand the case over to the professionals.

 

From the photograph in the catalog of the Kroft Museum of Natural Disasters and Technological Catastrophes, Martin had concluded that Dr. Donald Carbone was tall, but the man now crossing the courtroom looked decidedly squat. Martin inspected the catalog photo, soon realizing his mistake: the shot had been taken at the museum itself, and the racing car alongside Carbone was a three-fifths-scale replica of the Mercedes-Benz that had spun lethally out of control during the 1955 Grand Prix.

What he lacked in stature, the sociologist affected in swagger. Settling behind the stand, he exuded a measure of vanity that Martin would have found insufferable in a witness for the defense. Upon being sworn in, Carbone magisterially informed the tribunal that he ran the Disaster Studies Department at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where he held the Poincare Chair in Applied Cataclysmics.

“Disaster studies,” said Martin as the crab locked a fighting claw around his left shoulder. “That's a relatively new field, correct?”

“At the risk of sounding immodest, I would have to say I invented it.”

Turning away from the lectern, Martin surreptitiously consumed two Roxanols. “Please tell the tribunal something about disaster studies.”

“Our argument is simple.” Carbone seized the witness-stand mike, pulling it level with his mouth. “By analyzing history's worst events through the emerging science of cataclysmics, researchers can learn how the human psyche functions under stress and also gain unique insights into nature's primary patterns.”

“Events such as . . .?”

“Plagues, famines, earthquakes, plane crashes, circus fires,” Carbone recited breezily, his voice rising and falling with incongruous musicality. “Stroll through our museum—I'm referring to the Kroft Museum of Natural Disasters and Technological Catastrophes—and you'll catch on right away.”

As the opium reached his cerebrum, forcing the crab to relax its grip, Martin gestured toward five heaps of bric-a-brac stacked against the west wall. It had taken Randall and Esther the entire weekend to haul the evidence into the Peace Palace and arrange it atop the exhibit table. “Dr. Carbone, do you recognize those artifacts over there?”

“They are all display items from the Kroft Museum.”

Limping toward the exhibits with the aid of his crocodile cane, Martin selected a three-foot-square blowup of a transmission electron-microscope photograph labeled people's exhibit
A-1
:
PASTEURELLA PESTIS
. The image suggested a population of dispossessed worms lying on a sidewalk following a rainstorm.

“What's this?” he asked, bearing the blowup to Carbone.

“The bacterium that causes bubonic plague, enlarged one thousand times. Normally that picture hangs in our Hall of Epidemics.”

Martin faced the Court TV camera and thrust the bacterium photo forward, making it register dramatically on the judges' personal monitors. Always lead with your ace, he thought, setting the photo beside the stand. “Your Honors, the prosecution is offering in evidence People's Exhibit A-1:
Pasteurella pestis
.”

“Does the defense have any objections to the admission of
Pasteurella pestis
?” Torvald asked Lovett.

“We do in principle, Your Honor, but we want Mr. Candle to enjoy the widest possible latitude in developing his case.”

“You may proceed, Mr. Candle,” said Torvald.

“Please tell the tribunal about the Plague.”

“Several notable outbreaks occurred before the fourteenth century, but when people talk about ‘the Plague,' they generally mean the great epidemic that began in 1347,” said Carbone animatedly. “Words fail, really. The stench of decaying bodies pervaded every major European city. Half the population of Florence died in six months. Fifty thousand corpses were thrown into one mass grave outside London. In southern France they ran out of burial space, so the Avignonese pope, Clement VI, had to consecrate the Rhone River.”

“One of the murals in your Hall of Epidemics depicts peasants hanging fifty dogs en masse,” said Martin, assuming the lectern.

“People got the mistaken idea that dogs harbored the infection, so the animals were systematically slaughtered. The strategy backfired—killing the dogs eliminated the main predator of the rats whose fleas really
did
carry the bacterium.”

“Another mural shows a band of penitents whipping themselves.”

“In 1350 Pope Clement organized a mass pilgrimage to Rome. He thought God might smile favorably on such a conspicuous display of faith, but the flagellants merely helped to spread the disease farther.”