Salvation Boulevard (8 page)

“I think she was auditing the course.”

“Shouldn't there be some kind of record?”

“Of course there should be. And she should have been paying too. But I don't think she was. I think it was an unofficial audit. And if a professor unofficially approves an unofficial auditor, then we ignore it.”

“So there was a girl called ‘N.'—we don't actually know her name, first or last—taking his course, one of his courses?”

“Yes, I think. Just the one. Religion and Philosophy 342.”

“The same as Ahmad?”

“Yes.”

“So, he should know her?”

“More than know her, I should think,” Esther said. “The few times I saw them together, the way he was looking at her . . . . ”

“So he liked her, and she liked Nate, is that it?”

“Oh dear, what have I said?”

Troopers were lined up in front of the courthouse. They wore helmets and shields and had their game faces on. The city had their SWAT teams deployed, plus regular officers guarding the flanks of the building and plainclothes people in the crowd. There were camera crews from the three network affiliates and two of the independents, plus national crews from CNN, Fox News, and Al-Jazeera.

The troopers were trying to keep the different camps of demonstrators separated. One side wanted a regular trial, in the state court, open to the public. Most of them were visibly liberal types, from the university, the Unitarian Church, and the bookstores. On another day, they'd be lined up to see the new Michael Moore movie or rallying to save a failing health food store. Their signs read, “No Torture,” “No Gitmos Here,” “Fight the Fascists.”

We have some Muslims around. I expected to see at least a few of them out there, but there were none. Keeping their heads down.

The other side was mostly clean-cut types, the kind of people who also showed up at pro-life demonstrations, with a sprinkling of longhaired country music patriots. Their signs read, “Save Civilization, Send Him to Gitmo,” “Stop Islamo-Facism,” “The War We Have to Win,” and “First, Kill All the Lawyers.”

The two sides snarled at each other and hurled epithets.

The first physical incident was an attack on the Al-Jazeera news team. A group charged them and grabbed the camera, which they smashed on the ground. They piled on top of the cameraman, and someone tried to shove the broken parts of the camera into his mouth, screaming “Eat this, you rag-head animal. Eat this!” He suffered a concussion, a torn lip, and a broken tooth. And half of his ear was either torn or bitten off. They also attacked the reporter, grabbing him by his tie and his jacket. He was very lucky. It was a clip-on tie, and it came right off. The reporter pulled himself free of his jacket and scrambled along the sidewalk to safety behind the troopers.

Things were settling down when Manny and I drove up in his Mercedes. Suddenly things came flying from the crowd, fruit and stones and who knows what—bam, splat, bam—they hit the hood and the roof.

“The motherfuckers! My car, my beautiful car!”

Clang. Sploosh. Bam. Eggs, apples, and tomatoes along with the rocks. We're a modern city. Our streets are paved. There are no loose stones lying about on River Street between Fourth and Fifth. Nor is there a handy farmer's market. The crowd had come with supplies. This had been preplanned.

The police didn't seem to be doing anything about it. Bop, thwop, crack!

“Motherfucking police aren't doing anything about it,” Manny yelled.

We seemed to be safe inside the vehicle. But I wouldn't want to be the one getting the bill from the body shop. Almost every panel was taking a hit. The damage was certain to be in five figures. And no matter how good the body shop that did the repairs would be, Manny's baby would never be a virgin again. She would be tarnished forever, and Manny was practically in tears.

“It's just a car,” I said inanely.

“Just a car? Just a car? Do you want a lecture on German engineering? Do you want a lecture on what one hundred and forty thousand dollars looks like when it's pure and unsullied? Do you? Do you?”

Blotz! An egg hit the window and smeared itself all over the glass. “Come on, Manny, let's pull out of here and go around the side.”

“No, no, fuck this.” He pulled up to the curb. “Fuck this, and fuck them all.”

“Manny, don't. It's dangerous out there.”

He wasn't listening. He flung the door open, and he jumped out and stood facing the crowd as if the stones were just drizzling rain. He smiled at them. An apple and a tomato whizzed by, then a rock cracked one of his windows, and he didn't flinch. Like I said, Manny was one of those guys who figured life had granted him immunity.

I couldn't stay huddled inside, damn him. So I jumped out and ran around to protect him. I got between him and the rock throwers and said, “Come on,” and tried to drag him toward the courthouse. He pushed me away and tried to climb up on the hood of the Mercedes, but his bad leg wasn't working.

“Help me,” he yelled.

“Let's get out of here before we get hurt.”

“Carl, get me up.”

I'd seen his leg once. I had to bring him some papers, and I caught up with him at his golf club. He was in the locker room changing.

He'd been shot up in Vietnam. There were scars from about mid-thigh to ankle. Some from the original shrapnel, the rest from the operations afterward. The upper and lower parts were not in a straight line, and there was a slight extra angle beneath his knee. He saw me looking and said, “What the hell, I'm lucky they didn't amputate. They wanted to, but I said I'm a lawyer, and if you cut that off, I'll sue.”

It looked like it still hurt and would die ten years before the rest of him did.

I gave him a boost onto the hood. Then he put his hands on my head and shoulders so he could shove himself up into standing position.

When he was upright, he yelled at the crowd, “I stand here before you . . . . ” Then he turned to the cameras. “I stand here before you not to defend a terrorist. I am not here to defend a terrorist. I'm here to defend you.”

A couple of stones and some fruit came out of the crowd. He watched them come, bracing himself in case something hit him, but they missed, and he watched them go by.

“This is America. If this were an Islamo-Fascist state, I couldn't be here. If this were Nazi Europe, I couldn't be here. If this were still King George's colony, I couldn't be here. But this is America, and I have to be here.” Things had stopped flying, and the crowd was even growing quiet.

“If lawyers stop showing up to defend even the indefensible, to make sure we've got the right man, then it's not America anymore,” he said. “I'm not upset about you being here. I'm glad you're here. I want to thank you for being here. Thank you, thank you all, for being here to witness the fact that just as no man is above the law, no man is beneath it.”

He was done, and he reached for me and said, “Help me down.”

I did, and we walked past the troopers. The crowd on one side applauded him, and the crowd that had tried to stone him was silent. He smiled all the way up the courthouse steps. At the top, I looked back, and from that height, I could see all of their faces. There was Gwen, among those who had thrown the stones.

 

I stepped through the doors a moment after Manny. He dropped his smile like he was dropping an empty bottle in the trash, and he said, “What fucking bullshit.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember September 30, 2006? Do you, Carl?”

“Can't say that I do.”

“It was the day that our president signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law, a bill that overturned the Constitution. Right down to its socks and underwear. Call somebody a terrorist, even an American citizen, like Ahmad Nazami, and he can, under the law, be taken off the streets or out of his own bedroom, like Ahmad was, and hauled off to a secret place.

“They can do it to people who don't have Arab names too. They can do it to you”—he poked me in the chest—“with your ‘we were here even before the English' Dutch name. They can do it to me. And that same fucking law says that we don't have the right to come into this court and challenge it. You don't even get a chance to say, Hey you got the wrong guy. You were supposed to arrest Manfred Goldfarb, not Emmanuel Goldfarb. Let alone have a trial and make them prove I actually did something.

“So, come on, my friend.” He put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Let us do our best, just in case these are the last days of the Republic.”

 

Arraignments are simple.

The judge reads the charges to the defendant. He asks the defendant if he has a lawyer. If he needs one and can't afford it, they assign one. Then he asks for a plea. The attorney answers guilty, not guilty, or, very infrequently, nolo contendere, no contest.

Then the judge sets a court date for sentencing if the plea is guilty, for trial if it is not guilty.

Judicial appointments in our state are for life. So our chief judge, the Honorable Darren Spoon, in his wisdom, uses the arraignment court as a place to put judges like Frederick Olsen Watkins, who is a drunk.

Watkins naturally does not think of himself as a drunk, or even as someone with a drinking problem, because he never has a drink before noon. As a result, there are two Watkins: the morning one and the afternoon one. The morning one is rather irritable, even cranky. He wants attorneys to speak softly but very clearly. He wants things to move briskly. And he utters his own statements with a cottonmouth sound and drinks constantly from a glass of water, which, in the morning, actually is water and nothing but water. We know this because many people have bet on it over the years and so, intermittently, the pitcher is taken during the lunch recess and tested in front of witnesses.

After lunch is, of course, a different matter, and entirely unpredictable. Courthouse legend has it that if he has two drinks, he's friendly and affable; if he has three, he's somewhat emotional; coming back from four drinks, the emotions grow larger, verging on the operatic; if he has five drinks, he's asleep by three.

It was the afternoon, and we had Watkins.

We also had the DA's most aggressive assistant, if not his best, Danny DeStefano. Tightly muscled and tightly wound, he bounced on the balls of his feet, convincing juries that he was working hard, hard, hard to personally rid their streets of crime and protect them, and the faster they decided to put this creep away, the faster he could get to the next one, thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury and madam forewoman.

Danny had company—another lawyer who looked vaguely familiar from years ago. If memory served, he'd been in private practice but not particularly distinguished. I would have guessed that he was a new hire from the DA's office, but he looked too old and was being way too self-important.

Prisoners are almost always transported with shackles on. Nothing personal. It's safer that way. They're taken to a holding cell, and their shackles are removed before they're brought in front of the judge.

But Ahmad had not been given that courtesy. He came in with all his chains on. He had to do the humble shuffle, moving his feet no more than six inches at a time. His chains rattled softly with each step or gesture.

They had done something else, something I had never seen before. They'd put black-out goggles on him. He was effectively blind.

He was guarded by four sheriffs with automatic rifles, one of whom had to hold him by the arm to guide him.

Watkins looked up like he was seeing a dreaded apparition. And he wasn't the only one.

“Who's this?” he asked, sounding bewildered, which was peculiar since everyone in the state knew who was in his courtroom that afternoon.

DeStefano stood up and said, “That's Ahmad Nazami.”

The man with DeStefano stood up too and said, “I'm from the Justice Department.”

Watkins turned his head toward the prosecutor's table with a heavy, ponderous motion, as if his thick, gray, swept-back hair held the weight of a centurion's iron helmet, and said, “That's federal, isn't it?”

“Yes, sir. I'm representing Homeland Security.”

“This is a state court,” the judge said.

“Yes, sir. I'm aware of that.”

“So, sit down,” the judge said.

“Your Honor,” DeStefano said.

“Yes, Mr. DeStefano. It's always good to see
you.
What brings you to our courtroom today?”

“This prisoner, Ahmad Nazami. We would like to remand him to federal custody.”

Manny was on his feet. “Objection!”

“My, my, my. Emmanuel Goldfarb
and
ADA Daniel DeStefano in my court together. And so . . . operatic. Tell me, Mr. Goldfarb, to what do you object?”

“My client—”

“This man?” He looked at Ahmad, who was moving his head around the way blind people do. There was snot dripping from his nose, and he couldn't wipe it, so he was making sniffling noises as he tried to suck it back in.

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought so, though we haven't been properly introduced yet.”

“He's charged with an ordinary state crime, and he belongs in this court and should be tried in this court's jurisdiction. I cite—”

“Don't cite.” The judge turned to his clerk. “What's he charged with?”

His clerk indicated with as subtle a gesture as was possible in the circumstances that Watkins had the list of defendants and charges directly in front of him.

“Oh . . . murder. Murder's not federal. We do that right here at home. Yes, indeed.”