“She led me along good. But now I know better.” Since metempsy-chosing to the Heavenly Exalted Plane, Gaston Tenebrae had learned of Marya Quinsana’s simultaneous relationship with Mikal Margolis. “She was playing us off, one against the other; me, Mikal and her brother Morton; playing us off just for the fun of it. She enjoyed manipulating people. Mikal Margolis, well, he was always a headstrong boy and never really made it in love: having me to contend with was too much for him.” Suspicious, Mikal Margolis had followed Marya Quinsana and Gaston Tenebrae and spied upon their lovemaking. It was then that the trembling started. In the surgery he would shudder with repressed rage and drop instruments and spill things. The tension built until he could feel the blood seething around his bones like the ocean breaking upon rocks until something old and foul like a black ulcer burst inside him. He found Gaston Tenebrae walking home from a tryst along the side of the railroad line.
“Then he picked up a short piece of rail, about half a metre long, that was lying beside the track and smashed me on the side of the neck with it. Severed my spine at once. Killed me instantly.”
The ghost concluded its evidence here and was wheeled away. Justice Dunne delivered his summing up and after begging them to please be objective about what they had seen and heard, gave leave for the jury to retire and consider its verdict. The jury retired to the Bethlehem Ares Railroad/Hotel, now reduced to seven jurors. Unseen by any, Morton Quinsana had slipped away during the final testimony.
At fourteen minutes of fourteen the jury returned.
“How do you find the accused, guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” said Rael Mandella.
“And that is the verdict of you all?”
“It is.”
The judge acquitted Mr. Stalin. There was cheering and clapping. Louie Gallacelli was carried shoulder-high from the Court of Piepowder and paraded all around the town so that every goat, chicken and llama might see what a fine lawyer Desolation Road had produced. Genevieve Tenebrae took her daughter and went to ask Ed Gallacelli for her husband’s ghost.
“The time-dependent set of persona engrams stored holographically in the local spatial-stress matrix?” said engineer Ed. “Sure.” Genevieve Tenebrae took the time winder and the tiny bubble containing her late husband home, put them on the shelf, and nagged the ghost for its unfaithfulness for twelve years.
Justice Dunne returned to his disrobing carriage and had his personal servant, an eight-year-old sloe-eyed Xanthian girl, apply soothing, lotion to his piles.
Mr. Stalin was joyously reunited with wife and blubbering adolescent son, whose nose had generated a stream of shining goo all through the trial. Celebrating with roast turkey and peapod wine that night, the Stalins’ buoyant mood was shattered when four armed men dressed in black and gold leather smashed the door in with rifle butts.
“Joseph Mencke Stalin?” the leader asked.
Wife and son pointed simultaneously to husband and father. The man who had spoken held out a piece of paper.
“This is your bill for services rendered by the Bethlehem Ares Corporation Legal Services Division, incorporating hire of courtroom, court charges, hire of court personnel for two days, wages for same, use of power and light, use of papers, file reference charges, prosecution fees, recorder’s fees, judge’s fees, comestibles, including sundries, including meals, pile ointment, and claret, justice’s servant’s fees, arrival and departure fees for the locomotive, insurance of same, hire of same, interrogation fees, acquittal fees, jury tax and replacement of one judicial gaveclass="underline" total, 3548 New Dollars twenty-eight centavos.” The Stalins gaped like ducks in a thunderstorm.
“But I’ve paid. I’ve paid Louie Gallacelli his twenty-five dollars,” stammered Mr. Stalin.
“Normally all court fees are paid by the guilty party,” said the sergeantat-arms. “However, the guilty party having absconded, the charges, under sub-section 37, paragraph 16 of the Legal Charges Deferment Act (Regional and Sub-Contractee Courts) all pass to the defendant, as the legal next-toguilty party. However, the Company being generous to those of limited means, will accept payment in either cash or kind and will issue you, upon your request, with a court order for the restitution of payment from Mr. Mikal Margolis, the actual guilty party.”
“But we’ve no money,” pleaded Mrs. Stalin.
“Cash or kind,” said the sergeant-at-arms, already quartering the room with his bailiff’s eyes. His gaze rested on Johnny Stalin, a forkful of turkey frozen between plate and open mouth. “He’ll do.” The three armed sequestrators marched down into the dining room and lifted Johnny Stalin bodily from his chair, fork still in hand. The sergeant-at-arms scribbled something on his clipboard.
“Sign here and here,” he said to Mr. Stalin.
“Right. That…” he continued, ripping a pink form off at its perforations, “is one certificate for the indenture of your son against incurred court charges liable to the Court of Piepowder, for an indefinite amount of time no less than twenty years and no greater than sixty. And this"-he slapped a piece of blue paper into Mr. Stalin’s hand-"is your receipt.”
Shrieking and blubbering like a stuck pig, Johnny Stalin, aged 8%, was marched out of his house, up the alley and onto the train. With an earshattering roar of power the locomotive fired up its fusion engines and drew away from Desolation Road. The Court of Piepowder was never seen again.
Morton Quinsana returned to the empty office. He took all his dental tools, his dental books, his dental coats, his dental chair, and made a pile of them in the middle of the office and set fire to them. When it had died to ashes, he took a piece of hemp rope from a cupboard, made a strong noose, and hanged himself in the name of love from the roofbeam. His feet pendulumed through the pile of ashes and fused metal and drew little grey trails across the floor.
26
For a year now it had been the same all day every day: how unfaithful he had been to her, how she had loved only him, only him, always and only, never a thought crossed her mind of another man, no, never, not once in all those years, not ever, and while she was sitting at home worshipping him in the temple of her heart, what had he been doing, oh, yes, you know only too well; yes, that, with that jade of a woman, that scarlet woman of bad parentage (may her womb rot within her and her breasts wither like dry eggplants) and he had earned no better than he deserved, yes, justice had been done, for the betrayal of a wife as adoring as she and what had he done, what had he done; shamed her before the whole town, yes the whole town, where she could no longer hold up her head in dignity or pride again, where she must hide from the people who said of her as she passed by “there she goes, there, look at her, the woman whose husband cheated on her and who never knew"; well, now everyone knew thanks to him, thanks to the goodness of his heart, his wonderful lofty intentions getting that Stalin man off the hook, his own rival and enemy, no less, he had given plenty of thought for rivals and enemies, yes, but was there ever a single thought for poor devoted wives, the kind who love with a love incomparable, and what had he done with all that love, eh? what had he done?: only squandered it on some cheap bawd who was not nagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnag from rising to set the fire at dawn until she went to bed at sunset, and he saw how the nagging had made her ugly in body and soul and he hated her for it, hated the maliciousness that made her nag nag nag him for eternity in the bosom of the Panarch, he hated her and so he decided to punish her, so one day he whistled and called to his daughter until she put down the book and pushed her face against the blue bubble and he said to her, “Arnie daughter, have you ever wondered where you came from?” and Arnie replied, lips brushing the blue forcefield, “You mean sex and all that?” to which he said, “Oh, no, I mean, you, personally, because, Arnie, I’m not your daddy,” and then he told her what he had learned from his brush with the Panarchical Omniscience of how a woman had stolen a baby from a childless old woman and how that woman wanted that baby more than anything else in the visible or invisible world and enfolded and nurtured and birthed that baby as if it were her own, and after he had told her all this he said, “Go look in the mirror, Arnie, and ask yourself, do you really look like a Tenebrae, or do you look like a Mandella, for that is what you are; Rael’s sister, Limaal and Taasmin’s aunt,” and when she went to the mirror in her room and he heard her sobbing, he was much pleased, for he had sown the seeds of his wife’s destruction in the girl who was not and never had been his daughter’s heart and such was his malignant glee that he turned little cartwheels of delight in his shimmering blue bubble.