Lawyers in Hell (10 page)

“Vous,” the Cardinal’s man said – the respectful pronoun, this time, then at a renewed scream from his men, spun around and started to run.  “Idiotes!  Chut!  Tenez!  Tenez-vous!”

Damn the roses.  Niccolo turned and ran for the house, but Julius was already on his way out into a sudden spate of rain, armed with a pistol, with Mus, Scaevola and Sargon’s two Scorpion Guards – that was two M-16’s and a pair of tall spears; and behind them came Augustus’ German Guard, howling like wolves, invoking one-eyed Wotan and waving their Gewehr 98’s at the lightning above.

Niccolo simply wiped the mud off his hands and nicely opened the garden gate, as the French rallied and began to chase the imp back in Tiberius’ direction.

Rifle fire stitched the water.  The Germans and Sargon’s Scorpion Guards waded out after the retreating imp.

Julius and his bodyguards stopped at water’s edge, watched for a moment, then walked back through the villa gate.

“I think that’s handled,” Julius said.  “Was he appropriately polite, the Cardinal’s man, Niccolo?  I noticed a little waving of hands.”

“He had to have things explained, m’lord.”

“You might write the incident up,” Julius said.  “In case.”

Niccolo bowed.  Smiled at Julius, despite a raindrop making a slow path down the side of his nose, and another down his opposite temple.

He so appreciated little chances like that, to advance himself in the household, to become – perhaps – essential.  Essential was good.

Essential was always good, where it came to princes.

Revolutionary Justice

by

Leo Champion

“You’re a damn failure, Guevara,” said the man who’d kicked open the door to the shanty where the rebel leaders slept.  “You failed as a doctor, you’ve failed as a revolutionary and you couldn’t even die well.”

Slowly, Guevara looked up.  “Who in hell are you?”  Che Guevera took a final swig from his beer and threw the empty at the pile on the floor, where it hit a full bottle.  The full bottle exploded with a punctuating bang, showering the shack with foam and glass.

“William Walker.”  Walker ignored the bang and the spray.  “Get your ass up and listen for three seconds.”

A hairy man in a filthy tie-dyed shirt sat upright on his cot, pawing shards of glass from his beard.  None of his snoring compatriots so much as moved.  “Who does pint-size, here, think he is, boss?”

“Yeah,” echoed Guevara.  “Who do you think you are, Walker?”

“Ask the Hondurans.  Ask the Nicaraguans.”  Walker’s eyes scorned the shanty, jabbing disgust at empty bottles and empty souls passed out on furniture or on the floor.  Rusty, half-assembled, hell-made AK-47s were nearly buried under rum-stained leaflets on a coffee table.  “Ask the Sonorans or ask a Vanderbilt.  Who I was, and who I am, doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you’re no longer in charge of the revolution, you over-the-hill sot.”

“Wha’ the?” the hairy man asked.  “You tryin’ to take us over?”

“This
bunch of losers?”  Walker gave a harsh laugh.  “Who’d want you?  What I said is that you’re no longer in charge of this so-called revolution.  Now I’ve said what I came for.”  Walker turned on his booted heel and left.

The man in the tie-dyed shirt turned slowly to Guevara.  “Wha’s
that
all about?”

“I don’t know,” said Guevara.  “But I guess it means we got a problem.  Americans.  Again.”  Guevara spat a phlegmy chunk so heavy it landed on his steel-toed boot.

*

Why can’t we ever meet somewhere classy
?  Walker wondered, clattering down the rickety stairs into the basement of a factory built to be abandoned.

Tiny.  Mid-thirtyish.  Slicked-sideways hair and a humming-bird’s intensity.  With a flickering pen-light, he picked his way through broken girders and pooled filth.

“Yo, who that?” someone asked from shadows.

“Walker.”

“Yeah, come on.”  Something rustled.  Something thunked.  “Yo, it’s Walker!”

He was escorted into a dim room.  Around a table covered in maps and notepads, several damned souls craned their necks, making sure he was who he claimed.  A red-tinged lantern swung slightly on its ceiling chain:  back and forth, back and forth.

“How’d Che react?” asked Saul Alinsky, darling of American leftist reform in the third quarter of the twentieth century.

“Does our committee really care?” Walker retorted.

“Give him a little respect,” said Alinsky.  “He was something in his time, you know.”

“Was he, much?” asked Eric Blair, also known as George Orwell, who didn’t think anybody was ‘much.’

“He did kill a lot of people,” Maximilian Robespierre said.

“He was a melodramatic failure in life,” said Walker.  “He’s equally pathetic in afterlife.  Didn’t understand what was happening.”

Noise from the outside.  In came a crew-cut black man with a billy-goat tuft on his chin, carefully shutting the door behind him.

“Ah, Patrice.  What did Bolivar say?”

Lumumba shrugged.  “Wasn’t interested.  Didn’t even hear me out.  Said he was sick of being badgered by people wanting him to lead them to freedom.”

“Who said anything about leadership?” asked Walker.

“Who said anything about freedom?” asked Blair.

*

“What went wrong?” Guevara asked, blinking, outside his shack.  The baleful glow of Paradise above couldn’t dispel the miasma over the camp’s rusted vehicles, half-built shanties and listing tents.  Guevara’s head hurt and, he badly wanted a drink already.  When he couldn’t manage to be a wet drunk, he was a dry drunk.  Alcohol was unpredictable in perdition and it tasted like … hell.  But he kept trying to get drunk enough not to care….

“You fucked up. 
Good
.  You deserve it,” said Giuseppe Garibaldi, fair-haired boy of the Italian revolutionary Carbonari in life.

“It?  You mean I deserve him?  Walker?  Gringo swaggers in and says – screw you; we, the whitest – the best and the brightest – will take it from here?”

“I
said
, you damn well deserve it,” his old friend interrupted.  “In life we were
expected
to drink, get morose, go all poetic.  But this is afterlife and drunks in hell get drunk on water, or can’t get drunk at all.  You’re an old dog and the ones who want revolution are right to want new tricks.  Not because of that ‘effectiveness’ drivel – define ‘winning,’ in
hell!
 – but because nobody in their right mind is going to die for a self-pitying ass.”

Defensively:  “I haven’t been asking them to die.”

“And you don’t see anything wrong with that?  The revolution hasn’t drifted away from you:
you’ve
abandoned
it
.  You’ve been in a stupor over that bitch, Tania, for
how
long now?  Get over it all:  the whore; being doomed to hell where the booze is full of glass and sand and shit – or
I’m
going to find new associates.”

“You say – you think
I’ve
abandoned the revolution?” Guevara said.

“Done anything revolutionary lately? 
Tried
to do anything besides slouching between irrelevant camps in the middle of netherworld nowhere?”

“Don’t make this about me.  I was your compadre yesterday, and a thousand days before that, and you weren’t complaining.  Now this little
cabrone
walks right in and says his gang’s taking over.  So
I’m
to blame –?”

Garibaldi bitch-slapped him, open-handed, back and forth.  “I.” 
Slap
.  “Did.” 
Slap.
  “Tell.” 
Slap.
  “You.”

Hard enough that Guevara staggered, his face blazing, stinging, going numb while his eyes teared.

“You
didn’t,”
Guevara snarled.

Garibaldi raised his hand for another round of blows.  “Che, you wouldn’t listen, didn’t care. 
Now
you want this revolution back, because someone else wants it?  Fine.  You want to lead?  Fine.  If you’re serious.  But I need to know:  do you want to be just another unshaven loser in a beret, or do you really want justice and glory?”

Guevara nodded once.  “Justice.  Revolutionary justice.  Above all else.  You?”

“All the fucking time.  Let’s start by doing something about these upstarts.  This isn’t going up against Satan and his Fallen Angels, or even the Devil’s Children.  Walker’s guys are only power-hungry pussies.  No better than us.  Take this.”

Tentatively, Guevara accepted the fragmentation grenade that Garibaldi held out.  It felt cold and unfamiliar, heavier than he remembered.  How long since he’d lobbed one?  Too long.

Since forever.  Time was the enemy in hell:  eternal penance wore you out, tore you up, filed you down to a quivering nub:  fucking up was the way of the afterlife.

“Now throw that grenade in there, fearless leader.”  Garibaldi pointed to an open trailer nearby. 
“Do
some damned thing, so you know you’re alive and we know you’ve got your
cojones
back.”  Garibaldi waved again at Guevara’s personal supply trailer:  pocked aluminum; its tires sunk into waterlogged ground.

“Man – but
every
thing’s in there.  All the best rum in hell’s in there.”

Guevera caressed the grenade’s pineapple-curves.  The right weapon.  For destruction.  For power and anger and conflict and
significance.

“That’s the
point,
Che.  Ready?”

Followers were gathering; whispers rattled on the still, fetid air.  Garibaldi’s men, neat in mottled green jungle fatigues, with their feathered hats and clean bolt-action rifles, kept the crowd respectful.

I used to have troops like that
, he thought. 
Before –

He fingered the ring around the pin, then – in a wave of anger – yanked it off and hurled the grenade into the trailer, hard.  The grenade hit the mildewed carpet and bounced, then rolled out of sight.

One of Garibaldi’s men swung the door closed.  The grenade exploded inside, the trailer’s aluminum walls bulging and prickling with its shrapnel.  Guevara thought he could hear glass breaking.

“Viva Guevara!” Garibaldi shouted, raising both fists.

“Up the Revolution!” Garibaldi’s troops shouted.  “Viva Guevara!”

“We’ll stick this revolution right up Satan’s ass,” Guevara thundered in a voice he hadn’t used since he’d had motorcycles.  Maybe he’d get another motorcycle, roar across hell’s blasted wastes….

Guevara grinned at Garibaldi, looked across the crowd, and raised his own fists.

“Viva Guevara!”

*

Walker picked his way down a cobbled street, through a dockside neighborhood where it always seemed to be night.  There’d been flooding in New Hell recently, and thick puddles of foul water still blocked the road in places.  Something with gleaming eyes and sharp teeth scurried away and glared at him from a clogged drain.

Here and there came noise from taverns; not as much as there’d been before the floods and the plague.  People were scared; the rumors, always thick, were at high tide now.

Walker didn’t believe the rumors, himself.  He hadn’t been here too long – a certain firing squad in Trujillo was still a painful memory – but he’d learned that Satan was the undisputed ruler of the modern hells.

So, why revolution?  Why bother?  Everyone here had already lost the most important battle – for ownership of their eternal souls.  Rumor said hell was changing for the worse.  Could hell get worse? 

Perhaps hell would change, perhaps it wouldn’t.  But … revolution.  Struggle.  Overthrow.  For the joy of it:  to fight a good fight; something a man like Walker could battle and try to win.  Even if Mithridates had failed and men like Caesar were afraid to risk….

A foursome of tipsy medievals came by, singing a war song in Occitan:  ‘old dead,’ the moderns called them.  Walker gave them extra room as they passed but one of them glared at him anyway.  Likely, from Walker’s suit and gun-belt, they mistook him for Authority.

He wasn’t.  Yet.

Walker turned onto a street along the docks.  Things splashed and hissed in furious, dark water.  A grey-haired woman in robes and a tricorne leaned against one of the big steel bollards, absorbed in a deck of cards:  dealing herself a hand, studying it, reshuffling the cards.

More diviners out, too.

He’d never believed in anything but his own ability.  Brilliant – a lot of people thought they were, but he’d proven
he
was. 
Summa cum laude
graduate of the University of Nashville at fourteen; medical doctor at nineteen.  He’d co-owned a newspaper, practiced both medicine and law, and fought three duels by the time he was twenty-five.

The year 1848, though, had decided the course of his life.  He’d been studying medicine in Europe during that year of revolutions – in Heidelberg where Germany’s first parliament had been organized, and then in Paris as the Second Republic tottered into existence.  The violence, the excitement, the
importance
of those events had given him a direction.

His first foray had led him into the Mexican state of Baja California.  There, with forty-five men, he had captured the state capital of La Paz and created the Republic of Lower California.  The Mexican Army had moved against him too fast, with too much force, and he’d eventually been driven back into California, where the Federal government had charged him with conducting an illegal war.  That was the era of Manifest Destiny.  His patriotic intentions had been clear:  a jury had taken all of eight minutes to acquit him.

“Yo, Mister?”  An emaciated, shirtless, one-eyed man lurched out of an alley, bare chest covered in slashes and half-healed scabs.  “Cut your palm, Mister?  Cut your palm and tell you ’bout the days to come?”

Walker’s hand moved to his gun.

“No.”

“Dark days coming, Mister.  Dark days coming for all souls.  You know your fortune through it, Mister?”

“I create my fortune,” Walker told the freak, and increased his pace.

Something big howled or screamed, way out in the thrashing dark ocean.  The scream reechoed from the waterfront buildings.

Two years after his Mexican adventure, he’d found another opportunity in a civil war between the two political parties of Nicaragua.  Walker had set sail from San Francisco with fifty-eight men to join the Democratic side.  More had joined him on arrival.

The American press had named his small army ‘the Immortals.’  They weren’t, yet a quick series of battles led to his taking the national capital and, before long, setting himself up as president.

In six months, Walker’s government was recognized as legitimate by the United States.  In eight, double-crossing robber barons got that legitimacy withdrawn.  Costa Rica declared war on him, repelling his invasion at Santa Rosa and eventually besieging his capital at Grenada.  His men had burned that ancient capital to the ground during their retreat and evacuation, and once again he’d found himself Stateside.

Failure:  if you survive failure, you learn from it and try again.  Four times, Walker tried returning to Nicaragua.  On his fourth attempt, the captain of a British warship handed him over to the Honduran government.

He’d really thought he’d meet his end – on a humid, overcast September day before a firing squad: 
Listo …
a blindfold sticky on his face … 
Objetivo …
ropes chafing his wrists as he desperately tried to think of
anything
to save himself … 
Fuego
, and the crackle of musketry.