Blameless in Abaddon (39 page)

Wednesday found Martin returning to the horrors of nature, frantically documenting “the Defendant's wanton deployment of hurricanes, tornadoes, deluges, blizzards, and killer fogs,” an investigation that continued through Thursday morning and ultimately embraced one hundred and six artifacts from the Storms and Floods Pavilion. On May 31, 1889, torrential rains inundated the valley around Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and at 3:10
P.M.
the Lake Conemaugh dam burst under the pressure, loosing 20,000,000 tons of water upon the city. An outlying stone bridge blocked much of the floating wreckage, creating a thirty-acre sanctuary to which scores of survivors flocked. At 6:00
P.M.
the heaven-sent island caught fire, incinerating two hundred people. On September 8, 1900, a record-breaking rainstorm descended upon Galveston, Texas. When the Catholic Orphanage Asylum began to crumble from the force of the flood, each nun tied eight babies to her waist and set out for dry land. The sisters' corpses were recovered with the drowned orphans still lashed in place. On September 16, 1928, a lethal hurricane struck West Palm Beach, Florida. In the swampy terrain around Lake Okeechobee, families fled the deluge by climbing trees, parents holding their children on their backs. Reaching the upper branches, the refugees were horrified to find that displaced water moccasins had sought shelter there as well. Hundreds of people who'd managed to survive the storm subsequently died of snake venom.

“I thought you were cooling your orphans,” said Patricia that night, pointing toward the Court TV replay.

“Cooling your orphans would be a really excellent idea,” said Olaf.

Martin set Dr. Tonia Braverman's dossier aside and looked Patricia in the eye. “Those orphans were tied to
nuns
.”

“What the hell difference does that make?” asked Patricia.

“If I have to explain it . . .”

“Torvald said no more orphans.”

“No more
squashed
orphans.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.”

“Cool the damn orphans,” said Olaf.

“For your own good,” said Gunnar.

“If you folks don't like it here in Holland,” said Martin, “you can always go home.”

Martin concluded the Carbone interview by madly covering forty-two relics from the Gallery of Droughts and Famines. People's Exhibit F-3 was a caldron of the type in which abducted children were cooked for food during the great famine that depopulated Egypt from 1199 to 1202, a result of low rainfall at the source of the Nile. Exhibit F-7 was a blighted potato of the sort that constituted the inedible Irish crop of 1845. In 1846 the plants blackened and withered once again. The sound of weeping echoed throughout the countryside as women stood sobbing in the stinking fields, knowing another year of hunger, cold, and cholera lay before them. By the time the crop recovered—in 1851—1,030,000 people were dead of starvation, disease, or exposure following eviction. The last Kroft Museum artifact Martin offered in evidence, Exhibit F-42, was one of the cloth scraps used to swaddle the hollow-eyed, swollen-bellied children who poured into the Ethiopian relief camps by the thousands from 1983 to 1988. The famine followed the worst drought in African history: whole rivers and lakes simply vanished. By the time the rains came, over 1,000,000 innocent victims lay dead.

“Dr. Carbone, I'm about to ask you the most important question of this entire interview.”

“I'm listening.”

“Can you name any occasions on which the Defendant acted to mitigate one of the tragedies commemorated in the Kroft Museum?”

“No, Mr. Candle, I cannot,” the witness replied firmly.

“Not a single instance of divine assistance?”

“Not one.”

Martin swabbed his sweaty brow with Patricia's red silk scarf. “On behalf of the entire prosecution team, Dr. Carbone, let me thank you for your meticulous and exhaustive testimony. We have no further questions.”

Torvald laid his palm against his wig, closing his fingers around the longest curl as if squeezing a bovine teat. “Professor Lovett, you may begin your cross-examination.”

Walking stick in hand, the defense counsel strutted up to the lectern wearing a gigantic Augustinian smile. In one continuous gesture he removed a gold watch from his suit coat, ascertained the hour, shut the lid, and deftly repocketed the timepiece.

“On the first day of your testimony, Dr. Carbone, you mentioned a pilgrimage organized by Pope Clement VI during the great fourteenth-century plague. Are you prepared to argue that, for Clement and his fellow bishops, my Client's role in the epidemic was that of a criminal?”

Carbone redistributed his weight from his left buttock to his right. “‘Criminal'? They wouldn't have used that word, no.”

“Even at the height of the Plague, people didn't blame God. They never put Him on trial, correct?”

“True enough.”

“Is there any evidence that Pope Clement questioned God's right to discipline sinners through penalties and tribulations?”

“Popes rarely question God's right to do anything.”

“Two weeks ago you also discussed the so-called great plague of London. Would you please explain the connection between this event and a disaster to which you did
not
testify—namely, the great fire of London that began on September 1, 1666?”

“You're asking about the relationship between . . .”

“The plague of 1665 and the fire of 1666.”

“Many historians believe the fire can be credited with ending the plague. The flames cleansed London of rats, their fleas, and the bacterium itself.”

“Do
you
believe the great fire of London ended the great plague of London?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How long did the London fire last?”

“Five days.”

“Five days? That's quite an inferno. Why do you suppose the prosecution never put it on the record?”

“I don't know.”

“How many Londoners perished in the 1666 fire?”

“There were eight documented deaths.”

“Did you say eight?”

“Correct.”

“Only eight people died in a five-day urban conflagration? That sounds like a miracle to me.”

“It probably didn't seem miraculous to the eight victims or the hundred thousand left homeless.”

“Let's double Carbone's salary,” whispered Randall to Martin.

“At one point you testified that between 1793 and 1798 yellow fever killed thousands of British soldiers in Saint Domingue,” said Lovett. “What were those soldiers doing in the colony to begin with?”

“Keeping the peace.”

“Keeping the peace . . . is that all? Weren't they in fact attempting to quell a slave rebellion?”

“The slaves were in revolt, yes.”

“Whose side do you believe the Defendant was on—the slaves' side or the British troops'?”

“Objection!” shouted Martin, rising. “The question calls for speculation by the witness.”

“Overruled,” said Torvald.

“I have no idea whose side the Defendant was on,” said Carbone. “I'm a sociologist, not a theologian.”

“Isn't it reasonable to suppose He was on the slaves' side?” asked Lovett.

“If I were God, and I wanted to communicate My low opinion of the slave trade, I would certainly select a more efficient medium than yellow fever.”

“But you aren't God.”

“True enough. Then again, neither are you.”

For the rest of the day and continuing until the Tuesday lunch recess, Lovett exploited the Carbone interview to develop three interconnected themes: the victims of history's worst natural disasters rarely held the Defendant responsible; the sufferers commonly believed they were being justly punished for their sins; and the tragedy in question could sometimes be interpreted as serving a greater good.

Ice water condensed in the pit of Martin's stomach. Were the judges buying this bald, audacious, and—he had to admit—ingenious attempt to discredit the Kroft Museum evidence? Hard to say. Their expressions were utterly opaque, as indecipherable as the mind, of Corinne's armadillo.

The prosecutors spent an entire afternoon redirecting their star witness. Prompted by Randall, Carbone theorized that the relative lack of Jobian indictments throughout history was really no mystery. (As long as God was presumably in power, His victims had nothing to gain by criticizing Him, and everything to lose.) Carbone went on to explain why sufferers have traditionally regarded their ordeals as fitting retribution. (The alternative interpretation—a malevolent Creator—is intolerable.) And while a few select disasters might indeed have contained hidden blessings, this was manifestly not true for the majority of horrors documented in the Kroft Museum.

On August 3, 2000, at 4:45
P.M.
, having given ninety-six solid hours of testimony, Dr. Donald Carbone, sociologist and cataclysmatician, was dismissed.

“That creepy little troll has singlehandedly won the war for us,” said Esther as the witness waddled out of the courtroom. “Everything we do from now on is icing on the cake.”

“I'm not so sure about that,” said Martin.

“Who can argue with the great influenza epidemic, for chrissakes?” said Randall. “Who can argue with the Johnstown flood? Who can argue with the Irish potato famine?”

“Counsel for the defense just did,” said Martin morosely, “and he hasn't even opened his case.”

 

The prosecution's second expert witness, Dr. Tonia Braverman, was as tall and willowy as her predecessor had been short and squat. While Braverman was Carbone's physical opposite, in the realm of ego she was—for better or worse—his twin. Curling her arm around the mike like a chanteuse performing a torch song, the historian explained that, besides “conceiving, founding, and directing” Brown University's Institute for Understanding Human Depravity, she was also the “associate producer, principal writer, and voice-over narrator” of an ill-fated public television series called
A History of Havoc: Three Thousand Years of War, Cruelty, and Injustice.
Completed two years earlier by the celebrated documentary filmmaker Bruce Kelvin, whose nine-hour chronicle of the Great Depression had won four Emmys,
A History of Havoc
had yet to run on PBS, although a VHS edition was currently available in stores throughout North America.

From the exhibit table Martin procured a boxed set of videocassettes, the lid swathed in blood red felt and stamped with gold letters. Slipping out the first tape, he held it before the witness. Braverman's poorly lit dossier photo had failed to do her justice. For all her pouches and wrinkles, she had obviously been attractive in her day, and Martin imagined her coming across to the
International 227
audience as a kind of gracefully aging talk-show hostess.

“Why was
A History of Havoc
never broadcast?”

“The whole matter is in litigation, and I'm not free to discuss the details. All I can say is, when the PBS executives previewed the series, they were horrified.”

Martin snapped his fingers, prompting Randall to stride down the aisle pushing a utility cart containing a television monitor and a VCR.

“In researching the historical dimension of the people's case, we were tempted to disregard moral evil and concentrate solely on what the insurance companies in their wisdom call ‘acts of God,'” Martin told the judges as Randall positioned the monitor before the Court TV camera. “Then we considered our predecessors. Job, you will recall, experienced moral evil in the form of the Sabaeans who murdered his herdsmen and stole his oxen. And, of course, the rabbis who tried the Defendant at Auschwitz were indicting Him for the depravity He allowed to flourish in Nazi Germany. May it please the tribunal: the prosecution is offering in evidence People's Exhibit G-1,
A History of Havoc
—an eleven-hour television series written by Tonia Braverman and directed by Bruce Kelvin.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Candle,” said Torvald. “Are you saying you expect us to sit here and watch a TV documentary about atrocities for the next two days?”

“Yes, Your Honor, I am,” said Martin, inserting the tape.

“This is a court of law, not Le Grand Guignol.”

“I'm aware of that, Your Honor.”

“How does the defense feel about the prosecution introducing this sort of sensationalistic material?” Torvald asked Lovett.

“The defense has nothing to hide.”

Martin pushed
PLAY.

Episode one, “The Altars of Antiquity,” began with an eight-minute teaser, and before it was over everybody knew exactly why PBS had declined to air the series. Through a montage of antique engravings intercut with staged shots, the prologue depicted the ghastly death by quartering of Robert François Damiens that occurred on March 2, 1757, in the Place de Grève. As the executioners split open Damiens's hips, Braverman asked, voice-over, “Why is
Homo sapiens
the only animal that tortures its own kind?”—the first in a string of sententious questions the historian would pose during the episode. “Why are we the only species that makes war on itself?” she continued from the monitor as the horses tore off Damiens's legs. The sociopolitical naivete of the series did not trouble Martin. With its factual accuracy and encyclopedic sweep,
Havoc
was exactly what the prosecution's case required. “Why do we call atrocities ‘inhuman' when in truth they constitute one of our most salient traits?”

The remaining one hundred and ten minutes of “The Altars of Antiquity” chronicled the period from the destruction of Nineveh in 612
B.C.
through the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in
A.D.
410. In an especially powerful sequence, Braverman and Kelvin dramatized the persecutions orchestrated by Nero in
A.D.
64. Blaming the Christians for the great fire of Rome, a conflagration he himself probably started, Nero subjected them to horrendous public executions. “While thousands cheered, believers of all ages were torn to pieces by hungry tigers and wild dogs in the city's open-air theaters,” narrated Braverman. “The emperor also loved to hold nocturnal chariot races in his private gardens, illuminating the spectacles by smearing Christians with pitch and setting them ablaze.” No less graphic was the filmmakers' restaging of the first-century Jewish revolt against Rome, which climaxed in
A.D.
73 when Titus, heir to the imperial throne, besieged Jerusalem with 80,000 men. After weeks of fighting around the outer walls, the Romans dislodged the city's defenders, who then took up new positions within the temple complex. As the Roman army stormed into the central court, the defenders stood shoulder to shoulder, certain that a miracle would spare them. Six thousand Jews died in the slaughter that followed.