Salvation Boulevard (30 page)

But she came back, and in the third class, things changed.

The subject was the problem of evil: if God is good, all knowing, all powerful, and the creator of all things, how can there be evil in the world? It's a very old question, going back at least to Epicurus, around 300 BC. There is a whole subcategory of theology, called theodicy, that is still attempting to deal with it twenty-three hundred years later.

MacLeod was presenting his own version, which was colorful, and had a little twist at the end.

A man is sitting beside a pool, enjoying his cigar and a mojito. A woman and her child are nearby. A stone falls out of the sky and
knocks the woman out. Unattended, the child falls into the pool. It's only three feet deep, so it would be easy for the man to get up and rescue the toddler, but he sits by and watches the child drown. When the woman wakes up, she finds her baby dead. She screams and weeps. She yells at the man smoking his cigar, “Why didn't you save my baby?” The man tells her she should be grateful for this great chance to experience grief and loss. Furthermore, she should love and adore him for giving her that opportunity.

Then MacLeod asked the class if they thought the man's actions were evil. Everyone had to agree that they were, but the metaphor was obvious, and one student spoke up. “That's true for a man,” he said, “but not for God. God moves in mysterious ways, and we can't understand the mind of God.”

“Fine,” MacLeod said. “Let's accept that for the moment.

“Here's the question, the real question. We all agree that the man was evil. How is it that we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than we hold God?”

Ahmad, who was peeking at the mystery girl, saw that the question had reached in and caught her like a hook. After class, she approached MacLeod and spoke with him.

From then on, she would join their professor after almost every class, sometimes alone, but usually with two, three, or four other students. When they talked about the subject of religion and philosophy, she seemed very involved. Not just in an intellectual way, but in a very emotional way. Her academic background was very spotty. MacLeod constantly said, oh you must read this, you must read that, and soon started bringing her books and essays to read.

But she never talked about her private life. She fended off personal questions and avoided any social involvements. Ahmad had tried, several times, to get her to join him for coffee, a movie, or a campus event. Others did too. “We're going to the concert at Farrell Hall tonight. It's free. Wanna come?” She always said no.

In class, she continued to sit in the back and rarely spoke, as if she felt she didn't really belong there and was afraid of being found out.

I asked him if he thought she and MacLeod had a sexual relationship. He said no very definitely. I said it sounded as if she clung onto his every word. How could he be so certain of it?

One day after class, Ahmad told me, she had approached MacLeod and clearly asked to speak to him alone. Nate excused himself from the other students and went off with her. Ahmad followed them to a campus coffee bar. He sat where he could see them, but not so close that he could hear what they said. Nina, the name he knew Nicole by, seemed distressed, near to tears. And very uncomfortable to be so upset in public.

They got up and left.

Ahmad, curious or jealous or some combination of the two, continued to follow them. They went to MacLeod's office. After they entered and closed the door behind them, he stood outside in the hallway and tried to listen. There was a lot he couldn't hear. Also, when people came by, he had to move away from the door and pretend he was waiting for an appointment. From what he managed to make out, it seemed that she was crying over a man she'd been having a relationship with, who was older and married. Nate had opened her eyes to how wrong it all was, how deluded she'd been. She said some other things, very softly, murmuring, maybe embarrassed.

MacLeod replied, sounding formal and professorial, that she was an adult and could have any kind of relationship that she wanted, but that she could also leave any relationship if she wanted. She was very emotional, and there was a lot about how she used to think it was right and special, even holy, but now she was angry, and she thought it was all lies.

Her voice grew soft, sweet, and murmuring, but too soft for Ahmad to make out any of her words.

Then he was able to hear MacLeod say, fairly clearly, “No, no. You're my special angel, but moving from him to me is the same thing with different labels on it. It's giving your body to show what a good follower you are. You need to figure yourself out a different way.”

I didn't necessarily accept Ahmad's assessment that the relationship between Nathaniel and Nicole had remained so chaste. Desire persists; temptation bides its time and waits for an open door. Such things have a way of moving on.

The department chairman, Arthur Webster-Woad, arrived at that point with one of the other professors, and they stopped in the hall, talking about new hires and the squash league. They babbled on forever. Ahmad couldn't keep up his pretense and had to leave.

Every time Ahmad mentioned her, you could tell by his tone of voice that he still dreamed about her. And he didn't even know her real name.

 

I was excited. Nicole was no longer just a girl who had been in the choir at CTM and audited a philosophy class at USW. She was a young woman having an affair with an older man.

My immediate assumption was that it was Plowright. But maybe it was someone close to him, maybe the money man with the hundreds of millions to invest in the City of God. She was trying to leave him, or had left him, and the church too.

It was an explosive combination.

She might decide to leave in a glorious blaze of scandal. One that would tear Paul Plowright out of his Pulpit of Glory and Wealth and drag him down to the Hall of Shame, one more hypocrite hanging alongside Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and Jim Bakker for the secular world to mock.

Dante, of course, saw things differently. “See that? He's diggin' himself in deeper. Now there's the confession, plus the apostrophe thing,” he said, meaning apostasy. “And now there's a babe. Come on, let's close the deal.”

“What do you mean?” Ahmad asked.

“The plea,” Dante said. “Time to cop the plea.”

Ahmad looked to me. I said to Dante, “You don't understand. You just grabbed the brass ring. This thing, it's gonna be a circus. The state's case is a disaster. They'll be sending in the clowns, and you get to be the ringmaster. When it's over, you'll be the white Johnnie Cochran.” Dante looked completely underwhelmed. The extent of his ambition at this point was to get outside and have a smoke. So, I tried to appeal to his sense of financial well-being. “No more taking the state's thirty-five an hour. You'll be billing three hundred fifty, four hundred, maybe even New York prices. The top guys there are billing over a thousand an hour.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, like I had predicted that a snowstorm would close the Panama Canal. Then he said to Ahmad, “Kid, take the deal.”

“Dante,” I said, “he didn't do it.”

Mulvaney looked at me like that was the stupidest thing I'd said yet. He knew—and I should know—that short of having hundreds of
thousands of dollars for a Manny Goldfarb, backed by a team of associates, jury-selection consultants, unlimited money for investigators, and hired experts, once someone was this deep inside the criminal justice system, innocent was no longer one of the options on the table. He said, “The state's payin' me to dispense all my years of wisdom and experience in fifteen minutes. He's already got almost two hours, not countin' the travel. You hear what I'm saying.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “You don't have to do anything. Give me a week, a couple more likely, and I'll have it all wrapped up for you. Gift wrapped, ribbon on it. All you have to do is walk it into court and unwrap it.”

“I told ya.”

“Told me what?”

“The deal.”

“What about the deal?”

“It's a special, today only.”

“You didn't tell me that.”

“Yeah, I did.”

He hadn't. But it wasn't worth arguing about. “Why?” I asked him.

“How do I know? They didn't say. The DA's mind moves in mysterious ways. Who the fuck cares? It's a one-day offer.”

“It's bullshit,” I said. Ahmad's eyes went back and forth, watching us play ping-pong with his life.

“So, you want to tell him to bet on you and your gift wrapping?”

“What charge?” I asked him. What would it be if Ahmad didn't take the deal.

“Cap murder.”

“They can't do cap murder on this.”

“Sure they can. Terrorism.”

“How can it be terrorism? I mean, come on.”

“He's an A-rab with a funny name. Trust me, a funny name can fuck up your whole life.”

“This sucks, Dante,” I said.

“It always sucks, Carl. It's never good. Except, like I said, this deal, this deal is golden.” He turned to Ahmad, “Golden. Take it. Listen to me, kid. I'm your attorney. I'm appointed because I got experience and wisdom. I know what's what. Just fuckin' take it.”

Ahmad looked at me. “Do I have to?” he asked.

“You know what,” I said. “If you did it, it's a great deal. If you didn't . . . ”

“I didn't. I swear.”

“They always do,” Dante said.

“It's up to you,” I said to Ahmad. “Your lawyer works for you. If you don't want the deal, you say no.”

“I'm insisting,” Dante said, furious and adamant. “For his own good.”

I looked at the court-appointed lawyer, sweating in the clothes that just didn't fit right, a button popping over his belly and his belly hanging over his belt. It was hard to imagine him abusing anything but pork chops, layer cake, and tobacco, but he'd been in rehab two times that I knew of. That's okay—lots of good and capable people have. But Dante couldn't even get his addictions right. Hooked on cocaine the first time and meth the second time, he'd still gained weight. I could find him an eyewitness that saw someone else kill MacLeod, and he would still screw it up.

I looked at Ahmad, a skinny college kid, and tried to imagine him surviving even five years inside, holding up a second-hand Koran as a shield, trying to pass for a Black Muslim.

That prick MacLeod had his hook in me too. What was I going to do, sit by the pool, and say it was God's will that sent Ahmad this porky archetype of ineptitude to be his lawyer and let the boy drown?

“For that matter,” I said to Ahmad, doing something I've never done before, something totally unprofessional, “if you don't like your attorney, you can dismiss him.”

“No, he can't. Not a court-appointed. You can't go shopping when you're taking charity,” Dante said furiously.

“Would you help me find another lawyer, Mr. Vanderveer?” Ahmad asked. His tone was very polite, almost formal, but quietly determined. He had this one small chance to put his destiny back in his own hands, and he wanted to take it.

“I can try,” I said, wondering where I would go.

“You cock-sucking son of a bitch,” Dante yelled at me. “I bring you in, you're supposed to help me out.” This one time, he was completely right. “When I tell the legal fraternity that you steal clients out from under their lawyers, you'll never work in this town again.”

“I would appreciate that,” Ahmad said.

“I'll try to find someone good.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I am depending on you. For my life.” Neither begging, nor pleading, he made it a simple statement of fact in that polite way he had, standing straight, filled with courage and dignity.

“You back-stabbing prick,” Dante said to me. “When he gets the needle, Carl, it's on you. It's all on you.”

Hello walls.

The loneliness hit me like a stone.

I told myself angrily that I had no right to that much maudlin, country music self-pity. Compare the motel room walls to the walls within walls within walls of Nazami's cell. Plasterboard walls to concrete and bars and a double-thick palisade, curlicues of razor wire, and rifle towers. The annoying sound of a too-loud TV next door, to the cries of rape and hate and the weeping of guilt seeping down penitentiary halls.

Then I realized what the emptiness all around me in the stale air, on the blank TV screen, and in my heart was. Jesus had left me. Or I had left Him.

I needed to talk to someone. I picked up the phone to call Gwen, dialed, then hung up before it rang. It couldn't be that. How could faith fall away so quickly and just be gone on the puzzle of a paradox? A twenty-three-hundred-year-old paradox. Why was there no answer to it?

As if by themselves, my fingers went to the phone and hit redial.

“It's me,” I said when she answered.

We both said, “I miss you,” at the same time.

“I want to come home,” I said.

“Why don't you?”

“I did something . . . I don't know . . . . ” I was stumbling, trying to figure out how to explain it to her. “I did something today that I shouldn't have done.”

“What?” she asked, guard up. “That woman?”

“No. About Nazami. He got a terrible lawyer, just like I thought, and the lawyer told him to take a deal, and I told him not to.”

“Why? Why are you doing this, Carl?”

“I don't know if I understand it myself,” I said. “I admit that. Listen . . . . ”