Blameless in Abaddon (38 page)

“The Plague lasted almost four years, correct?”

“It finally petered out in 1351, after killing twenty-five million men, women, and children.”

“Did you say twenty-five million?”

“Twenty-five million.”

Martin cocked a sardonic eye toward the photo. “That wasn't the last humanity would hear from
Pasteurella pestis
, was it?”

“In 1664 London was a teeming metropolis of about five hundred thousand. By September of 1665 you could walk down the deserted streets at midday and see house after house boarded up and marked with a red cross.”

“Boarded up? Why?”

“The city officials were imprisoning stricken Londoners inside their own homes. Our plague diorama features one such doorway. You can still read the message over the painted cross. ‘Lord have mercy on us.'”

Martin returned to the exhibit table and retrieved an electron-microscope photo labeled people's exhibit a-2:
treponema
pallidum
.
Dozens of corkscrew-shaped pathogens filled the circular frame. “What have we here?” he asked, holding the image before the Court TV camera.

“The spirochete that causes syphilis.”

“A particularly virulent strain of syphilis rampaged through Europe in the late fifteenth century, correct?”

“The doctors had never seen anything like it. They had their patients drink snake blood, sometimes vulture broth mixed with sarsaparilla. One army surgeon was forced to amputate the genitalia of five thousand infected soldiers.”

Martin spent the rest of the day and all of the following morning filling the record with microbes from the Kroft Museum's maleficent zoo. The diphtheria bacterium. The cholera bacterium. The smallpox virus. The measles virus, still racking up an annual body count of 880,000. HIV, presently responsible for 550,000 deaths each year.
Plasmodium
, the malaria protozoan, currently occasioning 1,000,000 corpses per annum.

On Tuesday afternoon Randall took over the task of recording what he called “the biological weapons deployed by the Defendant in His relentless war on humanity.” People's Exhibit A-27 was a two-foot-long plastic model of the mosquito
Aëdes aegypti
, vector of the dreaded yellow fever virus. Holding the model in his lap like a pet, Carbone explained that from 1793 to 1798 yellow fever killed about 12,700 British soldiers in the French colony of Saint Domingue. Exhibit A-31 was a loaf of bread made from rye contaminated with ergot, a disease caused by the fungus
Claviceps purpurea.
In 1722 nearly 20,000 Russians died in excruciating pain after eating ergot-contaminated bread. Exhibit A-34 was a cloth face mask worn by a San Francisco dock worker during the great influenza epidemic of 1918–1919. The masks did no appreciable good, but the city fathers still made them mandatory. Worldwide death toll: 22,000,000.

On Wednesday morning Martin returned to the lectern, a piercingly familiar object now; he knew its every nick and whorl. He put aside the tiny universe of pathogens and began addressing the larger-than-life fact of planetary upheaval, leading the judges through the Chamber of Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions.

People's Exhibit B-1 was the fractured skull of a child who'd been crushed along with 20,000 other victims by the great Spartan earthquake of 464
B.C.
Exhibit B-9 was a smashed bell from a Byzantine church destroyed by the quake that leveled Antioch in
A.D.
526, killing 150,000 Christians. As the day wore on, Martin stepped up both the pace of his presentation and the audacity of his rhetoric, using Kroft artifacts to document how the Defendant had “inflicted His seismic wrath” on forty-eight separate population centers between 1456 and 1999. The great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which did so much to nurture Enlightenment skepticism concerning divine justice, slaughtered 75,000, including hundreds of worshipers gathered in the cathedrals for All Saints' Day services. The worst disaster in the history of Peru occurred on May 31, 1970, when a powerful quake shook the region around Chimbote. The debris, ash, and subsequent famine claimed 60,000 lives and orphaned 5,000 children. A survivor radioing for assistance moaned, “We have no medicine. No food. All night long, the women have cried and prayed. Some men were cursing, raising their fists to Heaven.”

“Raising their fists to Heaven?” said Martin.

“That's what the survivor reported,” said Carbone.

Martin passed the evening in the company of Patricia and his bodyguards, studying the Kroft Museum catalog while the others watched the day's highlights on CNN.

“You've got to ease up a bit,” said Patricia as she drew the wings on a giant dragonfly that appeared to be attempting sexual intercourse with a jetliner. “You're indulging in overkill.”

“God
indulges in overkill.
I
indulge in facts.”

“All those plagues and earthquakes—it's making people numb.”

“Your friend has a point,” said Olaf.

“If we didn't know you personally, we'd be tempted to change channels,” said Gunnar.

“Numb?” wailed Martin. “
Numb?
What about the diseases I
didn't
introduce? What about tuberculosis and typhus? What about Chagas's disease? Do you know how many people Chagas's disease kills each year? Seven hundred thousand! Whooping cough—three hundred and sixty thousand! Hepatitis B—two million!”

“The judges are bored,” said Patricia. “You can read it in their faces. Enough already with the earthquakes.”

“We're finished with the earthquakes.”

“Good.”

“Tomorrow we do the volcanoes.”

On Thursday morning Randall once again assumed the task of examining Carbone. He pointed toward People's Exhibit B-63, which appeared to be a plaster sculpture of a young boy. “What have we here?”

“A five-year-old victim of the Mount Vesuvius eruption that wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum in
A.D.
79,” Carbone replied merrily. “There are ninety-eight such figures in existence. Our museum owns sixteen. Many of Pompeii's citizens, you see, were buried alive in molten ash. After it hardened, their bodies decomposed, leaving natural molds behind. To get an object like that one, an archaeologist merely had to pour liquid plaster-of-Paris into the cavity, let it solidify, and chip away the ash.”

“So Exhibit B-63 isn't really a sculpture, is it?”

“No, Mr. Selkirk, it's a casting—a kind of three-dimensional photograph of a child dying in agony as hot gases sear his lungs.”

Thus began the cavalcade of volcanoes, twenty-five in all, for a total of over 3,000,000 victims—from the explosion that rocked the island of Thera in 1628
B.C.
to the vaporous geyser that shot out of Cameroon's Lake Nios in 1986 and subjected 2,000 villagers to a painful, choking death. As the interview progressed, Martin found himself scoring each eruption according to the number of corpses it created. A respectable 15,000 for Sicily's Mount Etna in 1169; a boffo 53,000 for Japan's Unsen in 1793; a pathetic 1,200 for the Philippines' Mayon in 1814; a solid 36,000 for Indonesia's Krakatoa in 1883; a disappointing 6,000 for Guatemala's Santa Maria in 1902. Particularly spectacular was the June 8, 1783, eruption of Iceland's Mount Laki, which killed 9,000 outright and obliterated the sun with ash, triggering a famine so intense that starving horses cannibalized one another and humans were reduced to eating rope. No less impressive was the explosion that tore apart Martinique's Mount Pelee on May 8, 1902, and sent a gigantic flaming gasball barreling through the capital city of Saint Pierre. Amazingly, many of Pelée's 35,000 victims were discovered with their clothes unburned. The superheated cloud had moved too quickly to ignite the material, though it did have time to vaporize the Martinicans' blood and make their brains explode.

After lunch, Esther took over the examination, inventorying the Transportation Tragedies Room. Exhibit C-11 was the smashed altimeter from a Venezuelan DC-9 that unexpectedly lost height on March 16, 1969, and hurtled into a Maracaibo suburb. All eighty-four passengers died, and a family of five sitting around the dinner table was annihilated when the plane plowed through their home. Exhibit C-13 was the rear door from the U.S. Air Force transport that left Saigon on April 4, 1975, filled with Vietnamese children, beneficiaries of a plan to rescue the war-torn country's orphans. After the door in question blew out, the plane crash-landed in a rice paddy. Fifty orphans strapped into the cargo hold were squashed on contact, while a hundred and twenty-two others eventually died of their injuries.

The next day, having placed twenty-four air disasters on the record, Esther spotlighted what she called “the Defendant's acquiescence to scores of maritime catastrophes.” Exhibit C-31 was a manacle recovered from the wreck of the
Sisters
, a British slave ship capsized by a gust of wind on May 17, 1787, during a voyage from Africa to Cuba. Four hundred and ninety-seven captive blacks were drowned, chained in their berths. Exhibit C-45 was a compass from the freighter
Mont Blanc
, which was cruising out of Halifax Harbor on December 6, 1917, its hold laden with TNT and benzine, when it rammed into the merchant ship
Imo
. The blast hurled the
Imo
onto dry land, leveled two square miles of the town, and left hundreds of children dead beneath the collapsed walls of their schools and orphanages.

Martin spent the lunch recess in his office, perusing the Kroft Museum catalog while talking on the phone with Patricia.

“How do you think it's going?”

“You really want to know?”

“Well, yes.”

“You're overplaying your orphans. First the Chimbóte quake, then that plane crash in Vietnam, then the Halifax Harbor explosion.”

“Too many orphans? You can't have too many orphans.”

“Too many orphans, Martin. You'd better cool it,”

That afternoon, Esther finally exhausted the Transportation Tragedies Room, filling the record with evidence from twenty-six famous railroad, automobile, and subway wrecks. Exhibit C-68 was the transmission from a Mercedes-Benz that skidded crazily during the Grand Prix at Le Mans on June 11, 1955, shooting over the dirt wall and landing on the crowd. Flying debris sliced through scores of victims and decapitated two children before their parents' eyes. Exhibit C-72 was a sign indicating Moorgate Station, a terminal of the London subway system. On February 28, 1975, a six-car train inexplicably accelerated as it neared the end of the Moorgate tunnel, smashing headlong into the wall. The impact killed forty-one passengers and telescoped the first fifteen seats into a two-foot mass of metal, flesh, and bone.

“At one time we exhibited the metal mass itself,” Carbone elaborated, “but that turned out to be a bad idea.”

“Too grisly?” asked Esther.

“Too tempting. Visitors were always breaking off little bits and taking them home as souvenirs.”

 

At 5:15
P.M.
, shortly after adjourning the tribunal for the weekend, Torvald guided Martin and Lovett into his private chambers in the lowest basement of the Peace Palace.

“What the hell do you think you're doing, Candle?” Torvald demanded in a tone of tenuously suppressed rage.

Martin glanced around the judge's quarters. Books lined the walls, giving the subterranean room the atmosphere of a bomb shelter for intellectuals. “What do I think I'm doing? I think I'm making the people's case, Your Honor.”

“You're making the whole world sick to its stomach,
that's
what you're doing. This Carbone person you dug up, I believe he's some sort of sadist. Have you noticed his smile? Damn it, Candle, this is a
family
show. Get me? Every evening, right in the middle of prime time, Court TV beams the day's events into fifteen million homes. Three thousand political-science teachers across America are having their students watch us as an assignment. Do you grasp what I'm saying? No more soldiers getting their peckers cut off! No more squashed orphans! No more beheaded children!”

“I wish you were less worried about offending bourgeois taste, Your Honor, and more concerned about justice.”

“That ghoul leaves the stand by Tuesday afternoon at the latest. Am I being clear?”

“Just because your friend's scientific expedition came to nothing, Dr. Torvald, you don't have to take it out on
me.
”

“Tuesday afternoon. Is that understood? Tuesday afternoon!”

“We've still got our fires to do. We've still got our famines.” Eyes ablaze with opium and frustration, Martin turned toward Lovett. “You told me you wanted a ‘good fight.'”

Lovett frowned thoughtfully, methodically tapping his Malacca walking stick against the floor as if transmitting Morse code. “Come, come, now, Your Honor,” he said at last. “Let's give the Devil his due.”

“You really think we should?” asked Torvald.

“Yes.”

“Your logic eludes me.”

“Assuming the Court finds my Client ‘not guilty,'” said Lovett, “the last thing we want is Mr. Candle telling the press that you and I squelched crucial evidence. This trial must solve the problem of evil once and for all—no loose ends!”

“How much more time were you planning to spend with Carbone?” Torvald asked Martin.

“Seven and a half days.”

“I'll let you have three and a half.”

“I need six at least.”

“All right,
four
and a half. Four and a half days, tops—and the minute anybody else loses his dick, I'm shutting you down on the spot!”

 

As the second week of Carbone's testimony unfolded, Martin gave the tribunal a whirlwind tour of the Fires and Explosions Wing. “During the past three centuries the Defendant has practiced His skills as an arsonist on a myriad of public buildings and private enterprises,” he said, an assertion he proceeded to document through twenty-two separate exhibits, including a melted school bell, a scorched circus pennant, a blackened baptismal font, a charred hotel register, a carbonized pair of opera glasses, and a blistered miner's hardhat. On the afternoon of January 9, 1927, hundreds of children were crowded into the Laurier Palace movie theater in Montreal to watch a festival of comedy shorts. Shortly after a Hal Roach two-reeler called
Get 'Em Young
flashed onto the screen, a fire broke out in the projection booth, and seventy-eight children were crushed in the resulting panic. “Would you please repeat the title of that film?” asked Martin, rolling his eyes heavenward.
“Get 'Em Young,”
replied Carbone. On July 6, 1944, a matinee performance of the Ringling Brothers Circus ended abruptly in Hartford when the main tent caught fire. Desperate parents trapped in the highest bleachers resorted to tossing their children onto the escaping mob below. One hundred and sixty-eight people perished that day, including many of the hurled youngsters. On August 9, 1965, a firestorm ripped through an underground Titan II missile silo near Searcy, Arkansas. Of the fifty-three civilian workers making repairs inside the silo, fifty-one were broiled alive. “If it hadn't been for God, I don't guess I'd ever gotten out,” said one of the two men who escaped.