Salvation Boulevard (2 page)

“Tell me your names,” Manny said. He's got lots of voices. This one sounded like George Patton on a bad day. “I want names and numbers. Give me some badge numbers.”

“We don't answer to you.”

“Why don't we all back off, guys,” Lee said.

“Back way the hell off,” Manny said. “I want to talk to my client. I want the privacy to which he and I are entitled. And I want your assurances this room is not wired. And believe me, if I have any cause to do so, I will see to it that I ask you again under oath. Now, let me talk to my client.”

“Come on,” I said, trying to lift the kid up. He didn't want to let go. “Come on, you have to sit down and tell us what's going on.”

The words belonged to the dead man. His name was Nathaniel MacLeod. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of the Southwest, the largest institution of higher learning in the state, the largest between Texas and California, for that matter.

A bullet had gone through his head. It had entered his right temple and exited near the nexus of the left temporal, parietal, and frontal bones.

The words, which became, in effect, his final words, were on the opening page of a manuscript found in front of him, leaning against his computer screen, the foot of the page stopped by the keyboard.

A gun had been found on the floor beside the chair, where it would naturally have fallen from his right hand if he had shot himself. It was a relatively rare and unusual gun, and it was owned by MacLeod. The stippling and powder burns around the entry wound indicated that the barrel had been held against his head when the shot was fired.

In short, it looked like a self-inflicted wound, and when he was first found, the police called it a suicide.

A dead white man is not quite as exciting as a missing white girl, but it's big enough. Especially an educated, upper-middle-class white man, not a piece of white trash shot up in a raid on a meth lab. It got a lot of local and regional coverage. The news shows brought in all sorts of commentators to puff out the story: psychologists, suicide counselors, student counselors, spokespersons from the university. Because of the God-and-atheism angle, they brought in religious figures too. Pastor Paul Plowright, who runs the biggest church in the state, got the most air time.

“Is anyone surprised,” Pastor Plowright asked the anchor of WSVX's six o'clock news, “that an atheist committed suicide?

“The despair an atheist must feel is unimaginable to a believer. The emptiness, the hollowness inside. And, of course, atheists have no moral center. To them everything is relative, anything is allowed, so why not commit suicide? They don't understand that life is sacred. Theirs is a culture of death; ours is a culture of life.”

The anchor asked him, “What about his statement that it's easy to disprove the existence of God?”

Pastor Plowright smiled gently. Viewers could see he was restraining his contempt out of respect for the dead. “Unbelievers have been saying that for thousands of years. And they convince no one.”

“What about this book of his?”

“Bob, how can you disprove something that exists?”

Plowright was far less restrained in his Sunday sermon and in his television and radio broadcasts. The manuscript, he said, was proof positive that there is a war against Christianity. The front lines are at our so-called great universities. The academic elites are Satan's storm troopers.

 

The student newspaper, the
USW Clarion Call
, said MacLeod had been very popular with his students, that he'd been politically active, especially in the search for peace in the Middle East and most recently in the fight against the privatization of the state-owned university's $5.3 billion endowment fund.

It also published the rest of that first page, including this:

It was as if there were a debate going on between a dead man and a live one.

They themselves would have called it something more than a debate, a battle for souls.

It's natural to assume that a living man has all the advantages over a dead man. But this certainly hasn't been the case since the invention
of the written word. Nathaniel MacLeod hadn't done very well against the Bible, a book far older than his own, its authors long dead. How would Pastor Paul Plowright fare against Professor MacLeod's pages?

Absolutely, the opening round went to Plowright.

But then the police suddenly announced that MacLeod's death had not been a suicide. It had been a murder. A suspect had been arrested.

Manny was the Goldfarb of Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb, one of the three biggest law offices in the city. The largest was owned by a New York firm, with branches in Los Angeles, Houston, and Washington, D.C. GGW&G was said to be the most profitable. They rolled over billable hours like an electric meter counting watts. Most of their work was corporate. Manny did crime because he had a taste for it.

“So, who do you have?” I asked.

“Ahmad Nazami,” he said.

“Manny,” I said, “you're not normally the saint of lost causes.”

“Do you have a problem working on it?”

“Why should I?”

“I know you're a member of Plowright's cathedral, and he's been on a tear about it, and sometimes people get funny around religion and God.”

“Manny, Sunday I give to God, Saturday I give to my wife, five days a week, I belong to Mr. Green.”

“That's what I wanted to hear,” he said.

“Is what I hear in the news true?” I asked him.

“Is what you hear in the news ever true? Come on, it's been wakeup time for ten years now. Whaddaya mean ‘is what I hear in the news true?'”

“I mean I hear it's a slam dunk for the prosecution. That the suspect confessed. I also hear that he's a foreign kid, no money, some kind of Islamist, that it's a terrorist thing, won't even happen in court, national security and all that, he's going to be whisked away to one of those tribunals.”

Manny slammed his fist down on the desk. He was wearing a shirt that cost $300, $350. A $150 tie, wide and straight, pimp my neck. The jacket of his $2,400 suit hung over the back of his chair. The view out his window made it the priciest real estate in the city. Manny loved money, and Manny made money. But here he was, slamming his fist down on the desk so hard his coffee mug took a little hop and clack. “Not if I can fuckin' help it.”

The way he looked at me, I was afraid that he was going to ask me to cut my rate or even work for nothing. Grantham, Glume, Wattly, and Goldfarb was one of the places that I always walked into happy because it was one of the few law firms where, pardon the expression, they never tried to Jew me down. “This isn't some pro bono thing?” I asked. The problem was that if Manny asked me to cut my rate or throw him a freebie, I would. He was a good client, and you have to do extras for a good client, like your favorite breakfast place gives you free refills. But on top of that, because we were friends.

“You know what, Carl, it wouldn't hurt you to work for the good once in a while. Wouldn't hurt me either. It wouldn't hurt at all.”

“Pro bono, Manny?” I asked in disbelief.

He turned his back on me and gimped over to the window. He tries to cover it up with his clothes and a lift in one shoe, but his left leg is crooked, skinny, scarred, and shorter than the right. He looked out on the river and the city that had grown along its banks, every year growing richer and growing faster.

Whatever he saw there, he said, “You gotta believe in something.”

“Yes,” I said neutrally. Maybe he was going to spin some argument about giving back. About tithing, in a secular way.

“A man has a
right
to confront his accusers.” He said it fiercely, like a losing lawyer in front of a hanging judge. “He has a
right
to see
the evidence on which he is charged. He has a
right
to a trial. A
right
to a defense.”

“He's a terrorist,” I said, shrugging it off. “A Muslim terrorist. He blew a guy away.”

“Get the fuck out of here!” he snapped.

“Fine,” I said, rising.

“Wait,” he said.

“What's going on, Manny?”

“You always think it can't happen here, right? Alright, maybe they do it in Afghanistan, Iraq: there's a sweep, they pick up Ali and Abdul, and they throw 'em in Abu Ghraib. Or grab some guy, funny name and mustache at the border, and put him on a plane to Syria.

“The kid's an American. As American as my parents were, damn it. His parents sent him over here nine, ten years ago, escaping the ayatollahs and the Pasdaran. He's over here on his own, trying hard. Learned to speak English like he was born here. Applied for citizenship and just got it a few months ago. He's at the university on a hardship scholarship. Plus, he works. He's an okay student. So what are we doing here? Tribunals? Secret trials? Come on, Carl, is there anything you believe in?”

“Yes, Manny, there are things I believe in. I believe in God Almighty, that Jesus Christ is my personal savior, and in truth, justice, and the American way. But you're not being real clear about what you're doing and what you want, which is unlike you. You're a lawyer, Mr. Goldfarb, one of the best, and usually you're very, very good at saying exactly what you mean.”

“Alright, Carl, here's what I'm saying. First of all, there's money.”

“All you had to do was say so.”

“Second of all,” he said, holding up his hand, telling me to wait, “there's pressure. You're right, they want to take this kid away and disappear him. Take him to Guantánamo or rendition him or something. There's big pressure. So, I gotta ask you, are you prepared to stand up to it?” He pointed an accusing finger at me and said in
quotes, “‘Working to free terrorists!' ‘Working against America!'—whatever the hell they're going to say. They'll even say ‘traitor!'”

“As long as they don't call me a Liberal,” I said, trying to lighten this up.

“Well, they might,” Manny said. “They might do more.”

“You don't make it sound real attractive.”

“I promise you this at least: if you get charged with anything, this firm will defend you. At no cost to you. You have my word on it.”

“Now you're scaring me. Maybe I should take a pass.”

“Carl, wait.”

“What?”

“Meet the kid. Talk to him. Tell me what you think. Will you do that?”

“Sure, alright. When?”

“Now. Come out to the prison with me.”

I nodded.

He took the fancy suit jacket off the back of his chair and slipped it on. It was a beautiful piece of tailoring.

“I got a question for you,” I said. A capital crime, a slam dunk, an Arab killing an American—before it was done this would be a sevenfigure defense bill. “Who's putting up the big bucks for his defense?”

“You know what, Carl,” he said, charging past me with his funny swinging gait and leading the way out to the long, carpeted hall, “we're gonna have fun with this one. They're gonna throw everything they have at it. It'll be a dog fight—there'll be press conferences, demonstrations, and death threats. It's gonna be a blast.”

So, there we were, up at the state penitentiary. I got Ahmad settled down enough to speak coherently so Manny could interview him. “Yes, yes, of course, I knew Professor MacLeod. I took a class from him,” Ahmad said. “Nate was a good guy.”

“Nate? You were on a first name basis?”

“Yes, I am, we are, we all are, with most of the professors, except maybe in the large lecture classes.”

“So, how close were you with him?”

“He was a professor,” Ahmad said, trying hard to be normal about it. “He was the kind who liked to talk to his students. He was accessible.”

“You ever talk with him privately?”

“I don't know, maybe, maybe once or twice. In his office.”

“About what?”

“Course material. Stuff from his classes.”

“What was he teaching?”