Blameless in Abaddon (47 page)

“I
know
we've got more Skittles,” said Funkeldune.

“We don't,” said Schonspigel.

“Let me conclude by emphasizing that the events of this past summer are unique. Never before in the annals of arrogance, never in the history of hubris, has there been such a trial. Although we have all referred to God as ‘the Defendant,' Mr. Candle has conceded on the stand that our Creator is unlike any Entity ever indicted in a court of law. ‘Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness?' asks the Voice from the Whirlwind in Job 38:2. Be careful, Your Honors. Move slowly. Every star in the firmament is watching you. To render a ‘guilty' verdict in this case would be to claim for yourselves a quality of knowledge far beyond what mortal minds possess. Do not cloud God's design with ignorant words!”

“Doritos?” asked Funkeldune.

“Gone,” said Belphegor.

“And so we come to the end. The day after tomorrow I shall fly home to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I am scheduled to teach an undergraduate course on the medieval epic and a seminar on the
Mabinogion.
Several days into the semester a student will doubtless come running up to me, agog with word of your decision. I shall listen to this young person with bated breath . . . but no matter what the news—guilty or not, disconnection or status quo—two irrefutable facts will sustain me: I spoke truthfully in The Hague, and God's love reigns supreme, forever and ever, amen.”

“Don't tell me there's no more popcorn,” said Funkeldune.

“There's no more popcorn,” I said, aiming the remote control and obliterating the last live closeup of Gregory Francis Lovett that would ever appear on a television screen.

 

Although Martin had never been a father, he assumed that waiting for the World Court's decision in
International 227
was rather like anticipating the birth of a child. When will the creature come? Will it be healthy or sick, calm or colicky? The closest equivalent in his experience was the ordeal of sitting in Vaughn Poffley's TV room on Election Night, watching the local returns while nervously consuming beer and pretzels.

Three hours before his plane was scheduled to take off from the Amsterdam airport, Lovett appeared at the hospital smelling of aftershave lotion and bearing a fruit basket even lusher than the one he'd left in the Huize Bellevue two months earlier. To Martin's drugged sensorium, the fruit seemed at once surreal and erotic, like a snack Hieronymous Bosch might have packed for Little Red Riding Hood to take on her first
déjeuner sur l'herbe.
Patricia plucked a glistery apple from the basket and bit off a chunk. Martin selected a luscious green pear.

“Eat of your own free will,” said Lovett, smiling gently.

“Free will,” echoed Martin, struggling to overcome his Odradexian stupor. “Right.”

Lovett bent over the adjustable bed and squeezed Martin's hand. There was no electric buzz today, no jolt of psychic energy. “How're you feeling?”

“I highly recommend cancer. It's worth it just for the drugs.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Yes.”

“I'll pray for you.”

“I'd appreciate that.” This was not entirely untrue. “Take a banana. Take two. You and Darcy might get hungry on the train to Amsterdam.”

“I'm sorry I treated you harshly during your testimony.”

“All's fair in love and theodicy.”

Lovett snatched up a banana, pocketing it as he might a large ballpoint pen. He grabbed a second banana, started for the door, then turned toward Martin and flashed a lopsided grin. “They've started taking bets.”

“Bets?”

“In London they'll give you ten-to-one odds if you dare wager on a unanimous conviction.”

“Sounds like you've already won.”

“You know what you'd better do now, Professor?” said Patricia.

“What?”

“You'd better get out of here before I bounce this apple off your fucking head.”

Lovett fled.

The arrival of the deliberation phase dramatically rekindled flagging public interest in the Trial of the Millennium. All around the industrialized world, people talked of little else. During the first week following the judges' withdrawal, Western civilization's news-gathering apparatus did an admirable job of sating its audience's appetite for eschatological gossip—a feat the journalists accomplished despite the unavailability of the two principal players. Thanks to a cadre of personal servants supplemented by the Harvard campus police, Lovett managed to preserve his privacy, teaching poetry by day and sipping claret on Mount Auburn Street by night. Martin, meanwhile, remained holed up in Saint James Hospital, periodically issuing press releases to the effect that he was a mortally ill man incapable of giving a coherent interview.

Randall and Esther, by contrast, made themselves available to every television camera and radio mike that came their way. Whenever Martin surfed the channels, he saw his teammates' talking heads. Their promiscuity annoyed him. Didn't they understand the cosmic meaning of the war in which they'd just fought? If a Jobian crusade wasn't sacred, what was?

“Win or lose, we did what needed doing,” Randall informed a Court TV reporter.

“If only one judge ends up agreeing with us, we'll feel victorious,” Esther told CNN.

Equally eager for media exposure was the Sword of Jehovah Strike Force. Exploiting the human species's endless fascination with fanaticism, the TV reporters cast the organization in a sinister light, portraying them as hayseed zealots who at any moment could transmute into urban guerrillas. The more Martin saw of the Jehovans, the more he agreed with this assessment—particularly after a CNN interview with a West Virginia snake handler named Jasper Hooke.

“If them judges say He's guilty and then try to disconnect Him, I suspect we'll have to take action,” Hooke told the reporter.

“Are you implying there might be violence?”

“Let me put it like this.” Hooke patted his twelve-gauge shotgun. “If my people had been around on Good Friday two thousand years ago, them Romans never woulda got away with it.”

Both Captain Hans De Groot of The Hague Metropolitan Police and General Jacques Mazauric of the United Nations peacekeeping brigades assured everyone that order would prevail no matter what the tribunal decided. The media reacted skeptically: even if Scheveningen Harbor and its environs stayed quiet, disturbances might erupt elsewhere around the globe.

“Good heavens, aren't they
ever
going to make up their minds?” moaned Martin, flicking off the TV.

“Relax,” said Patricia. “Give them time. They'd never even
heard
of ontology till you came into their lives.”

While everyone on Earth except Torvald, his eight colleagues, and the ICJ usher was banned from the deliberation chambers, the courtroom itself remained open to the media. The two dozen journalists who staked out the place soon found their initiative rewarded. Twice a day, the usher would ascend from the bowels of the Peace Palace, remove an object from the exhibit table, and bear it away to the judges. “They're grappling with existential evil,” a CNN stringer told his audience after the tribunal asked to see a charred tent fragment from the 1961 Gran Circo Norte-Americano fire. “They're debating the hidden harmony solution,” concluded an
NBC Nightly News
reporter after the usher delivered Noah's ax to the chambers. “They're pondering the disciplinary defense,” a Court TV commentator announced after the judges requested Mrs. Lot's right ear.

When no other
International 227
story presented itself on a given day, the media resorted to covering the various sweepstakes that had emerged in the trial's wake. The biggest such game originated in London—the Royal Millennial Fortune Hunt, which quickly attracted sixteen million pounds to its trove by offering favorable odds on the entire matrix of possible outcomes: unanimous acquittal, split-decision acquittal, split-decision conviction, unanimous conviction with disconnection, unanimous conviction without disconnection. The hundred-million-franc Prix de Paris, by contrast, operated on a lottery principle. Winners would be randomly selected from among a subset of ticket holders who'd accurately predicted each judge's vote.

As the tribunal entered its third week of deliberations, Dr. Van der Meulen brought Martin a startling piece of news. They were planning to sign him out. According to the latest C-125 results, their patient had undergone a “quasi-remission.”

“Quasi-remission? What's that?”

“It's like a remission,” said Van der Meulen, “only we don't call it that, because it isn't. It's a quasi-remission. Keep taking the Odradex. With any sort of luck you'll be enjoying a
real
remission when they announce the verdict.”

The next day Martin left Saint James Hospital and moved back into the Huize Bellevue—a smaller suite this time, a single room in fact, as Lovett had understandably stopped paying the prosecution's bills. He dismissed Olaf and Gunnar, thanking them for their professional services and also for the unsolicited but often useful critiques they had accorded each of his daily performances in the Peace Palace.

“I must be honest with you—I'm playing the Royal Millennial Fortune Hunt,” Olaf admitted. “I've got two hundred guilders riding on a split-decision acquittal.”

“I've wagered three hundred on a unanimous acquittal,” Gunnar confessed. “If you'd made a stronger showing against Brother Sebastian, we might've hedged our bets.”

So intense were the side effects of the Odradex, Martin could no longer write postcards, read the newspaper, or carry on an intelligible conversation. Hour after hour he lay in bed, watching television and drinking
koffie verkeerd.
The trial received scant attention that week. Most of CNN's energies were going into an intertribal war in the Transvaal, while Court TV had elected to cover the case of a young mother accused of baking her preschool daughter's head into a mince pie and serving it to her exhusband.

“Moral evil,” noted Martin.

“Give it a rest,” said Patricia.

Then, on September 17, 2000—at ten
A.M.
—Pierre Ferrand called a press conference on the Peace Palace steps and told the reporters exactly what they wanted to hear. In twenty-four hours the International Court of Justice would reconvene, at which time the judges would reveal their decision.

“Are you feeling well enough to make the trip?” asked Patricia.

“I'm feeling well enough to prosecute God all over again,” Martin replied, though in truth the crab was back, devouring what remained of his pelvis.

 

Only after entering the Peace Palace courtroom for the last time did Martin realize how profoundly he was going to miss it. He had spent some of the most meaningful hours of his life among these mahogany balustrades and stained-glass judges. Apart from the Lovett brothers' conspicuous absence, the place looked the same as always. The exhibit table was still jammed with artifacts from the Kroft Museum and relics from the divine cranium. Martin fixed on the plaster casting of the young Vesuvius victim—the Roman boy and Patricia's son, he figured, had died at about the same age—then shifted his gaze to the notorious door from the Vietnam-orphan plane crash. At last his eyes alighted on Noah's ax, its chopping edge gleaming like the razor-sharp guillotine blade featured in Braverman and Kelvin's treatment of the French Revolution.

“All rise,” said the usher in a voice so solemn he might have been a Judgment Day angel commanding the saved to ascend.

Everyone stood up.

One by one, the red-robed, white-wigged judges filed in, each as stiff, sour, and expressionless as an Easter Island statue. Tucked under Torvald's arm was a stack of fan-folded computer paper.

“Resume your places,” said the usher.

Everyone sat down.

Torvald took out a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses, put them on, and set the computer printout on the bench before him. He cleared his throat. He scowled. “I shall begin by revealing that you will hear no minority opinion this morning.” The judge stared straight into the Court TV camera. “We are of one mind concerning the Defendant's guilt or lack thereof.”

“‘Guilt or lack there of,' not ‘guilt or innocence,'” muttered Randall. “That's a good sign.”

“Maybe,” said Martin, eating a Roxanol.

“This summer the tribunal heard arguments for and against five different theories of evil,” Torvald read. “Despite the thoughtful testimonies of Rabbi Bernard Kaplan and Dr. Eleanor Swann, we found ourselves quickly discounting the so-called hidden harmony, disciplinary, and eschatological defenses.”

“Good for you,” mumbled Randall.

“The ontological and the free will defenses, by contrast, detained us for six days running . . .”

“Uh-oh,” said Esther.

“Shit,” said Randall.

“. . . after which we decided that they, too, fail to solve the problem of pain. Anyone wishing to know how we reached these conclusions can consult the forthcoming edited transcript of our deliberations, scheduled to appear in English as a mass-market paperback from Bantam Books and in French from J'ai Lu.”

“Did you hear that?” gasped Randall. “Did you
hear
that?”

“He's throwing them out!” shouted Esther. “Every last one!”

Joy flooded through Martin's ruined bones. He resolved that, assuming things continued going against God and Lovett, he and Patricia would take the express train to Amsterdam that night and patronize the priciest restaurant they could find.

“So where does this leave us?” said Torvald. “After many hours of wearying discussion and withering debate, we decided that
International 227
boils down to a single question. Once the Defendant set the universe in motion, should He have impressed His will directly on its workings for the sake of reducing His creatures' pain?”