Shalimar the Clown (52 page)

The case of the
People
v.
Noman Sher Noman
came to trial six months later at the Los Angeles County Superior Court at the San Fernando Valley Government Center in Van Nuys, before Judge Stanley Weissberg, who had been on the bench in the Simi Valley Rodney King trial, when the four LAPD officers were acquitted, precipitating the riots. He was a mild, professorial man in his middle fifties and seemed unshaken by the Simi Valley experience. Because of the heightened atmosphere created by the events in Lower Manhattan the security at the courthouse was unprecedented. Shalimar the clown arrived and left each day, shackled and chained, in a white armored van surrounded by a police operation reminiscent of a presidential motorcade. Roadblocks, motorcycle outriders, police snipers on the rooftops, an eleven-vehicle procession. “We don’t want a Jack Ruby situation here,” the city’s new chief of police, Willie Williams, told the press. What would he compare the operation to in terms of its scale, a reporter asked him. He replied with a straight face, “It’s what we’d do for Arafat.”

The court had initially summoned five hundred people for jury duty. To ensure a fair trial all five hundred had been asked to complete a hundred-page questionnaire, and on the basis of these questionnaires and the usual courtroom challenges twelve jurors and six alternates had been empaneled. Four men and eight women would try the case of Shalimar the clown. Their average age was thirty-nine. Tillerman had wanted a young jury with a female bias. He considered himself a student of human nature, and was certainly a barroom philosopher of the usual, disenchanted variety. It was his view that the young, believing themselves immortal, had less respect for human life and so were less likely to be vengeful toward a killer. And after all—this was the reasoning behind loading the jury with women—Shalimar the clown was a highly attractive man, and had a tragic tale of heartbreak and betrayal to recount. The crime of passion was not a legal category in California, in spite of which such extenuating circumstances could only help the defense.

The thirtysomething prosecutors, Janet Mientkiewicz and Larry Tanizaki, looked like baby-faced innocents next to the much older, more corpulent, worldly-wise Tillerman, but they were hardened lawyers who were determined to get their man. Tanizaki had privately expressed some doubts about the death penalty, knowing that many jurors didn’t like imposing it, but Mientkiewicz bolstered his resolve. “If this isn’t a hanging offense, nothing is,” she said on the steps of the courtroom on the day of the pretrial hearing. Tanizaki and Mientkiewicz’s greatest concern was that the defense might try to deny the crime. Strangely, even though the murder of Maximilian Ophuls had taken place on a bright, sunny L.A. day, there were no eyewitnesses. It was as if the whole street had turned its back on the event, just as the inmates of the MCJ had done on the night of the revenge killing. The prosecution had the fingerprinted knife, the bloodstained clothes, the motive, the opportunity and the evidence of Mr. Khadaffy Andang, who was cooperating fully with the state. They did not have a witness to the crime. However, William Tillerman informed them at the pretrial hearing that his client would not deny responsibility for the death of Ambassador Ophuls; but he added that if the charge were not reduced from murder in the first degree, then a not-guilty plea would have to be entered. “My client is a severely disturbed man,” he averred. What was he suffering from, Judge Weissberg wanted to know. “The effects,” Tillerman solemnly replied, “of witchcraft.”

A woman, my mother, died for the crime of leaving you, Kashmira wrote. A man, my father, died for taking her in. You murdered two human beings because of your egotism your amazing egotism that valued your honor more highly than their lives. You bathed your honor in their blood but you did not wash it clean it’s bloody now. You wanted to wipe them out but you failed, you killed nobody. Here I stand. I am my mother and my father I am Maximilian Ophuls and Boonyi Kaul. You achieved nothing. They are not dead not gone not forgotten. They live on in me.

Can you feel me inside you mister assassin mister joker? At night when you close your eyes do you see me there? At night who is it that stops you sleeping and if you do sleep who stabs at you until you awake? Are you screaming mister killer? Are you screaming mister clown? Don’t call me your stepdaughter I’m not your stepdaughter I am my father’s daughter and my mother’s child and if I’m inside you then so are they. My mother whom you butchered torments you now and my slaughtered father too. I am Maximilian Ophuls and Boonyi Kaul and you are nothing, less than nothing. I crush you beneath my heel.

Early in 1993 she tried briefly to go back to work, her friends had urged her to restart her life, and for a time she had traveled up and down US-101, south to San Diego where the route began in Presidio Park and north as far as the Sonoma Mission, past the concrete bells hanging from their hook-shaped posts that marked the route of the old trail taken by Fray Junipero Serra in the 1770s, looking for the stories she wanted to tell in her projected documentary
Camino Real.
But her heart hadn’t been in it and she abandoned the project after a few weeks. The underwear model got in touch and asked her to go out to dinner, which, under pressure from her girlfriends, she agreed to do, but even though he brought her flowers and wore a blazer and tie and took her to Spago and told her she was prettier than any of the movie actresses and tried not to talk about himself, she didn’t make it to the end of the meal, she made her apologies—“I’m not fit for human company right now”—and fled.

She decided that the time had come to move out of her apartment, and returned to the big house on Mulholland Drive to live with her father’s ghost. Olga Simeonovna, whose daughters had returned, moving into one of the building’s many vacant apartments, gave Kashmira a loud, honkingly tearful farewell and promised she would “make it up there into the lap of luxury” whenever she could. In the lap of luxury Kashmira lived an increasingly reclusive life. The domestic staff was familiar with its duties and the household ran itself, there was food on the table three times a day and clean sheets on the beds twice a week. The heavily armed security specialists from the Jerome risk-consulting company went about their business silently and reported daily to the firm’s operations executive vice-president. The day shift concentrated on the front and rear gates in the perimeter wall and the larger night-shift detachment patrolled the grounds with the aid of night-vision goggles and roving searchlights that made the house look like a movie theater on the night of a red-carpet première. It was not required of Kashmira to give them orders. They, on the other hand, instructed her: in the use of the armored panic room—actually the immensely long and mostly empty walk-in closet, built to accommodate a movie star’s wardrobe, in which she kept her few, inadequately glamorous, clothes—and in the importance, should there be a “breach,” of not trying to take on the intruder herself. “Don’t be a heroine, ma’am,” the Jerome guy said. “Lock yourself in here and leave it to us to do what it takes.” There had recently been a scandal at Jerome. One of their top men had seduced two extremely wealthy women, both Jerome clients, one in London, one in New York. He gave both of them the same private love-name, “Rabbit,” as in “Jessica,” to minimize the risk of a pillow-talk slipup. But in the end he was caught out, and the discovery of his affair with the two Jessica Rabbits had led to lawsuits that badly damaged the firm’s reputation as well as its profitability, and led to the introduction of draconian new rules of engagement that forbade the specialists from speaking to their “principals” at all except on professional business, and then always in the company of a third party. Kashmira had no problem with this. Detachment was what she wanted. On one occasion, when she asked a Jerome operative for a pair of night-vision goggles, “just for fun,” he gave them to her surreptitiously, guiltily, like a boy meeting a girl for a secret assignation. “This’ll just be between us, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m not even supposed to look in your general direction unless I have to take down a bad guy standing behind you.”

Sometimes in the middle of the night she awoke to the sound of a man’s voice singing a woman’s song and it took her a few moments to realize that she was listening to a memory. In an enchanted garden a man who loved her sang a melodious
lol.
Habba Khatoon’s original name was Zoon, which meant the moon. She lived four hundred years ago in a village called Chandrahar amid saffron fields and chinar trees. One day Yusuf Shah Chak the future ruler of Kashmir heard Zoon singing as he passed by and fell in love and when they married she changed her name. In 1579 the emperor Akbar ordered Yusuf Shah to come to Delhi and when Yusuf got there he was arrested and jailed.
Come and enter my door, my jewel,
Habba Khatoon sang, alone in Kashmir,
why have you forsaken the path to my house? My youth is in bloom,
she sang,
this is your garden, come and enjoy it. The shock of your desertion has come as a blow to me, O cruel one, I continue to nurse the pain.
Yuvraj, she thought. Forgive me. I’m in a kind of prison too.

She swam in the pool, exercised in the private gym, worked out at home with a new personal trainer even though she knew it would hurt her friend the egg donor who had trained her for years, and played tennis on her own court, three times a week, with a visiting pro. When she did leave the premises it was to fight or shoot. Her body grew leaner and harder by the month, its spare tautness a testament to her relentless regimen, her rich woman’s monasticism, and to the growing strength of her self-denying will. After a day’s archery or boxing or martial arts, or a trip out of town to Saltzman’s shooting range, she came home and retired wordlessly to her private wing, where she wrote her letters and thought her thoughts and kept herself to herself while the attack dogs on their leashes sniffed the air for trouble and the searchlights searched and the men in night-vision goggles roamed the property. She no longer lived in America. She lived in a combat zone.

The server carrying the subpoena summoning her to appear in the trial of her father’s murderer as a hostile witness for the defense was intercepted at the gate to the property and then escorted to her quarters by Frank, the same Jerome operative who had given her the night-vision goggles. “This came, ma’am.” It had to be some sort of practical joke, she thought, but it wasn’t, her letters were coming home to roost, they were important exhibits in William Tillerman’s case, and he wanted to question her about them. Tillerman had come up with a therapist named E. Prentiss Shaw who had developed a diagnostic tool for use with suspected brainwashing victims. The tool was a checklist that amounted to a form of psychological profiling. It was well known that Hamas chiefs in the Mideast used psychological profiling when selecting candidates for martyrdom. This was the age we lived in, Tillerman argued in court, an age in which our invisible foes understood that not everyone could be a suicide bomber, not everyone could be an assassin. Psychology was all-important. Character was destiny. Certain personality types were more suggestible than others, could be shaped by external forces and aimed like weapons by their masters against whatever targets were deemed worthy of attack. The Shaw profiling tool identified Shalimar the clown as a malleable personality of this type. Shalimar the clown screamed at night in his cell because he believed himself bewitched, Tillerman said. The defense presented as evidence over five hundred letters written by Ms. India a.k.a. Kashmira Ophuls to the accused, letters which clearly stated her intent to invade his thoughts and torment him while asleep. One of the known associates of Ms. Ophuls, a woman of Soviet origins, actually was a self-described witch and member of the Wicca organization, as the testimony of a former fellow-resident of the apartment building on Kings Road, Mr. Khadaffy Andang, would confirm. “Is it the contention of the defense, Mr. Tillerman,” Judge Weissberg interrupted, lowering his spectacles, “that sorcery exists?”

William Tillerman lowered his spectacles right back at the judge. “Sir, it is not,” he replied. “But it is of no importance what you or I may believe here in this courtroom. What is important is that my client believes it. I beg the court’s indulgence for what may seem like grandstanding, but this speaks to my client’s extreme vulnerability to external manipulation. The defense will call witnesses from the intelligence community who will report on my client’s presence over many years at various locations known to us as schools of terrorism, brainwashing centers, and it is our contention that in the matter of Ambassador Maximilian Ophuls my client ceased to be in command of his actions. His free will was subverted by mind-control techniques, verbal, mechanical and chemical, which gravely undermined his personality and turned him into a missile, aimed at a single human heart, which just happened to be the heart of this country’s most distinguished counterterrorism ambassador. A Manchurian Candidate, if you will, a death zombie, programmed to kill. The defense will argue that the assassination may have been triggered by an unknown “sorcerer” or “puppet master” who has not been apprehended. After thorough conditioning the trigger moment would not even require the puppet and the puppet master to meet. The command could be given on the telephone, the conditioned response could be activated by the use of a commonplace word such as, oh, I don’t know,
banana,
or
solitaire.
I am not sure, sir, if Your Honor and the members of the jury are familiar with the thirty-year-old movie to which I allude. If not, a video screening could easily be arranged.”

“Far be it from this court, Mr. Tillerman,” Judge Weissberg said sternly, “to accuse you of trying to make a grandstand play. And yes: I saw the movie, and I have no doubt that the jury gets your point. However, this is murder one, Mr. Tillerman. We will not be going to the pictures in my courtroom.”

In the days that followed Tillerman’s opening remarks the entire country was captured by his “sorcerer’s” or “Manchurian” defense of Shalimar the clown. The classic movie was screened on network television, and plans for a remake were announced. The Twin Towers bombers, the suicidists of Palestine, and now the terrifying possibility that mind-controlled human automata were walking amongst us, ready to commit murder whenever a voice on the phone said
banana
or
solitaire . . .
it all made the new, senseless kind of sense, Tillerman could see it in the jury’s eyes, and all the way through the prosecution’s case he found assistance for his own. Yes, the accused was a terrorist, the prosecution said. Yes, he had been in some remote, scary places where bad people gathered to plot dark deeds. Under a number of work-names he had been involved for many years in the perpetration of such acts. On this occasion, however, the prosecution argued, the probability was that he had been flying solo, because of the seduction by the victim of the accused’s beloved wife. When Janet Mientkiewicz proposed this, the vengeful husband theory, she actually saw the jury’s eyes glazing over, and understood that the plainness of the truth was suffering by comparison with Tillerman’s paranoid scenario, which was so perfectly attuned to the mood of the moment that the jury wanted it to be true, wanted it while not wanting it, believing that the world was now as Tillerman said it was while wishing it were not. “We may be screwed here,” she confided to Tanizaki one night. He shook his head. “Trust in the law and do your job,” he told her. “This isn’t
Perry Mason.
We’re not on TV.” “Oh yes we are,” she said, “but thanks for stiffening my spine.”