The media had made him a monster, the incarnation of evil. The deepest fears and dreads of the world were projected onto his empty soul.
He reached out, taking hold of Donna’s hand. She returned the squeeze, though with stiff fingers – a kind of rictus dread. Her eyes were focused on the current witness. The trial was withering Donna. It was drawing the life out of her. It was as though the seat that held her was an inquisitor’s rack, and with every question, she was being slowly, mercilessly, pulled apart. One such inquisitor was the FBI profiler giving expert testimony even now. His fundamental argument had been and would continue to be thus: I’ve sent plenty of his kind away, so trust me to lock up this one, too.
“Fully capable, yes… One inmate had told me the key to faking a mental illness was to do it all the time, even when you think nobody is watching… Yes… I’ve known quite a few who knew of it and read it… DSM- IV, now…Yes, that’s right… Edmund Kemper had read the Diagnostic Statistical Manual III cover-to-cover and said they’d have to put in a special entry for him in DSM-IV, since none of it covered him… That would be purely conjecture… It’s easy enough to come by. I’d bet fifty bucks there’s a copy of it in this courthouse…
Yes… A good library would have it, too.”
Azra hadn’t been listening closely enough to catch Counselor Franklin’s questions, but then the man turned toward him. “You examined Mr Doe when?”
“Three days ago, only three hours after I got in from Quantico.”
“So, after the second week of trial?”
“Yes.”
“And he told you he believed he was a fallen angel?”
“Yes.”
“Was your impression that he was lying?”
“Objection,” interrupted Counselor Barnett without standing or looking up. “Leading.”
“I’ll rephrase,” said Franklin, nodding an apology to the judge. “What was your impression of this story?”
“Objection.”
“All right, did you think he believed what he was saying?”
The witness said, “That’s, perhaps, a misleading question.”
Judge Devlin looked at him through her reading glasses, and her eyes looked like big black crescents on her face. “Answer it.”
“Yes. He seemed to believe what he was saying.”
“But, correct me if I’m wrong: psychopaths are expert liars.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” said Barnett wearily. “The district attorney has just put the word ‘psychopath’ in the mouth of the witness.”
“Sustained.”
Mr Franklin gave the defender a smoldering stare.
“All right, let’s cut to it. From your experience as a profiler with the FBI, do you think Mr Doe is a psychopath?”
“Absolutely. A classic case.”
“Do you think he knows right from wrong?”
“Absolutely. He is well organized and methodical.”
“Do you think he is a – let me get the wording right from the psychiatrist – ‘paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder?’”
“I think he would like to be.”
The crowd laughed at that.
“You think he’s lying?”
“Objection. Leading.”
“Sustained.”
“All right, in your own words, what do you think?”
“I’d sooner believe a story from Berkowitz’s dog than one from him. Yes, I think he’s lying.”
There wasn’t desert here. It was hot but not dry. It was sultry.
He had been out of the body bag before the plane landed. He had put an empty boot in the bag so it would seem there was someone in it – not much of someone, but enough to keep people from looking inside. Then he put on a flight suit and waited until landing and hid behind a crate until the breach ramp of the Hercules cargo plane was open and then stepped onto the ramp like he was ground crew coming to help unload. He helped unload. There were some of those bags that had less than a boot in them. He could see where he was – a military base. Planes all around and tarmac and fences with rolls of barbed wire on top. The bags were going into a truck. After that, they’d be going into the ground or up into the air. The men that had loaded the bodies climbed into the truck. He climbed up into the back. When somebody shouted at him, he just said, “They told me I had to dig.” They let him ride in the back with the bags. It was dark soon, and when the truck slowed down to straddle a dead coyote in the road, he slid from the bumper and was standing there as the brake lights went off and the tail lights dragged away, red, behind the truck and left him in the dark.
After being dead for three days, he ate his first meal. Raw coyote tastes like life.
The trial was an endless torment. Questions coursed through Azra like X-rays. At first, his flesh was insensible to the onslaught, but now every tissue was red and swollen, every sinew stood out clear against bone. The jury, the judge, the public had probed and mapped each neuron of his mind. Their eyes, their ears, their opinions blazed over him all day every day. And when the day was done, it was back into darkness. A thin sliver of light coming around a stale crust of bread. Miserable. Hopeless, except for that vision of Donna, the ticklish delight of his own body, the hot ecstasy, the moment of ignominious discovery. “Put your pecker away…” It was the type and substance of human experience.
For these creatures – that man in the preacher’s suit and this woman dressed like some voodoo mambo, and this friend wasting away beside him, with him – for all of them, existence was like this: beginning and ending and forever mired in desire and despair. It was like this for Azra, now, too. He was human. He couldn’t escape it. He was human and had to live. It was not a choice between divinity or mortality. It was a choice between living or dying. And he chose to live. There would be lies and trickery, of course – compromise and madness, cheating and stealing – but he would do whatever it would take to live. To live, and to cling to humanity, to this one woman. I spent so long arranging the deaths of mortals, but I didn’t understand them in the slightest. Not until I loved one. Not until I became one.
I stutter-step through the dimly lit hallway that leads from the trial room to the holding cells. One officer walks ahead of me. He is thin and old and long of face. He looks constantly disappointed. The one behind me is muscular and silent. He steps on the heel of my wing-tip shoe and flattens it behind my foot. He hadn’t meant to, and I will be back to my cell soon enough. I can fix it there. We turn a corner. There is a bright flash. Everything is spots for a moment. Then I am pushed to the floor and someone kneels on my back. It’s the thin man. My hands are crunched beneath my chest.
The other cop has leaped past me to tackle someone in a side passage. There are the dull thuds of elbows and heads against cinder block. I look sideways but can’t see much because of the corner.
“Hey! Hey, easy! This is an expensive camera.”
“It’ll be an expensive piece of junk if you don’t lie still. How the hell’d you get in here?”
“I dropped a couple fifties back here, and they let me come look for them. Ah, here they are. You’d better take them as evidence.”
“Get up,” growled the cop. “Get up and get the hell out. Fucking reporters.”
“Give me a fifty, and I’ll give you a quote,” I say to the reporter.
The cop on my back leans his knee into me, but even so, a crumpled bill rolls around the corner to me. The cop snatches it up.
“Well,” says the reporter, “give.”
“He took my money.”
“Henry, for God sakes, give it,” hisses the other guard.
“We could all be put up for this.”
Henry brusquely rolls me over and rams the money into my crushed fingers. “There, you murdering fuck, you happy?”