Luas said nothing about the change in my appearance when I opened the door. He only smiled-that knowing grandfather’s smile of his, the way he smiled at me when I arrived in Shemaya, as if to say: Yes, my daughter, you have suffered, and it is difficult, but I would only make it worse by noticing. I offered him a seat on the porch, too embarrassed to let him in and see how run down I had allowed the house to become.
“I’d pull the switch again,” I said, in the graveled, quivering voice of an old woman, weak but defiant. “Until there was nothing left of him but ash.”
The dark anvil of the thundercloud crossed the sky. I imagined how it would feel to be pulled hot from a fire and hammered against its flank.
“Nero Claudius committed suicide,” Luas said, his face pinching into a wince while his hands groped through his pockets to find matches for his pipe. “Unlike Mr. Bowles, he cheated the world of its opportunity for justice.”
“Yes,” I said, “but did it hurt when he had you decapitated? I didn’t die right away. I can still feel the bullets tearing through my body.”
“You’ve got me there,” Luas said. “I didn’t feel a thing when the blade came down.” He struck a match, and it flared bright orange in the shadows.
“So God has a sense of humor after all,” I said. “Satan is a lawyer and carries a briefcase. What did we do to deserve all this?”
The white smoke from Luas’ pipe bubbled over the sides, too weak to rise into the wind. “I did cheer when they stoned Saint Stephen to death,” Luas said, “so I guess I had it coming. But this isn’t hell, Brek. The Urartu Chamber must be certain of our fidelity and self control. If we are impartial when presenting the souls we most despise, then the Chamber can be certain we will present all postulants with dispassion. Our motives must be pure when we enter the Chamber-we can show no favoritism or emotion. The judgment is Yahweh’s; He alone determines how Otto Bowles and Nero Claudius spend eternity.”
A blue bolt of lightning flashed across the valley, followed by a loud clap of thunder. A doe and her fawn, tiptoeing through the band of deep white snow covering the meadow, lifted their ears toward the sky, confused by the sound of thunder on such a cold day in their part of Shemaya.
Oh, take care, I wished the doe with all my heart, one mother to another. It’s not safe here. They’re after your baby, and they’re after you. Trust no one. Assume nothing. Run. Run!
“Did you know that the word justice appears more than one hundred times in the books of the Old Testament, but only four times in all of the New Testament?” Luas asked.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“The Messiah tried to do away with justice,” Luas said. “He claimed love is the only law, and when we’re wronged, we should not seek justice against our enemies but turn the other cheek instead. It came as no surprise, of course, that he died a victim of injustice, crucified by his own words.”
“That’s why Jews make the best lawyers,” I said. “That’s not a bigoted comment, by the way; it’s a matter of theology and philosophy.”
“As a Jewish lawyer myself,” Luas said, “I completely agree. In fact, I did everything I could to bring the Messiah’s supporters to justice; but then one day I found myself blinded by his ideas, I don’t know how it happened. In the darkness, I convinced myself he was right. Oh, it was quite a conversion: I started preaching this to the people and criticizing them for appealing to the law courts.”
“You misled a lot of people,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” Luas agreed. “I first realized that when I met Elymas. He was a stubborn old Jew like me, thirsty for justice. When he opposed me, I couldn’t just turn the other cheek. I blinded him just as I had been blinded-he still carries a grudge about it even though I’ve apologized a thousand times. I went back to the old law of an eye for an eye, Brek, and I can’t tell you how good it felt. But by that point, the rabbis worried that I was becoming too dangerous and had gone too far, so they convinced the Romans to imprison me as an enemy of the state, just as they did with Jesus. I wasn’t about to give up without a fight the way he did; I demanded my right to a trial as a Roman citizen. When it looked like I couldn’t get a fair trial, I appealed to Nero Claudius. He had a good reputation in those days; nobody knew he would turn out to be such a sadistic killer. You know the rest. Nero and I meet again here every day in the afterlife. And so we happily find that even mighty emperors are brought to justice. Jesus was wrong. Justice is the only law, not love, and justice exists only when the law courts and the lawyers thrive. The Urartu Chamber is the final proof of that. The Messiah was entitled to make at least one mistake.”
The storm clouds cleared, revealing four moons in the nighttime sky: a quarter moon, a half moon, a three-quarter moon and a full moon, each set against the constellations appropriate to its season, hashing the sky into astronomical gibberish. The air cooled and I wrapped one of Nana’s shawls closer around me for warmth. Bats flickered above the trees after insects, and in the distance I could hear a great horned owl and a whippoorwill, and the bark of a lonely dog-the sounds I’d heard many nights on that porch as a child.
“Ott Bowles can speak for himself in the Chamber,” I said. “He made his choices. He doesn’t need a lawyer.”
Luas tapped his pipe against the banister to empty it of ash. “Perhaps so,” he said, “but it is justice that needs our help in the Chamber, Brek, not Ott Bowles. Presenters supply the distance that makes justice possible for the accused and the Accuser, the created and the Creator. We are the many colors in the promise of the rainbow as it fades into the horizon of eternity.”
“I am the Accuser, Luas,” I said. “There’s no need for a trial because I’ve already found him guilty. It’s time for justice to be served.”
35
I’m waiting for a clerk to come to the counter of the convenience store and holding Sarah in my arm. She’s getting fussy and heavy, and I’m getting impatient.
“Hello? Hello…?”
“Just a minute…,” a female voice calls from the stockroom.
The clerk finally pushes through the double-hinged doors, a young woman in her early twenties, overweight, with too much makeup and a too tight shirt. Flicking back her hair, she apologizes for the delay. She smiles at Sarah, extending two thick fingers and tugging at her tiny hand.
“How old are you?” she asks.
I lean in close to Sarah like a ventriloquist. “Say, I’m ten months.”
“What a big girl,” the clerk says. “I’ve got two little boys, one and three; they’d sure love to meet a little girl as pretty as you. What’s your name, honey?”
“Sarah,” I answer for her again.
“Hey there, Sarah. Sara Smile. That’s one of my favorite songs. You’re a cutie.”
The clerk releases Sarah’s hand and touches her nose; Sarah responds by reaching out and touching the clerk’s nose, making us all laugh. I give Sarah a squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. The clerk pulls the milk toward the register.
“Will that be all today?”
“That’s it.”
“Bag?”
“No, thanks.”
I pay and we walk back out to the car, picking up where we left off with the song that’s been playing on the cassette: “It’s almost six-twenty, says Teddy Bear, mama’s coming home now, she’s almost right there. Hot tea and bees honey, for mama and her baby…” Sarah allows me to buckle her into her car seat without fussing.
It’s a cool autumn night, already dark at 6:30. We pass a couple of other cars heading in the opposite direction on the way home, but otherwise the road is empty until a single car appears in my rearview mirror and begins following us. Coming around a bend and picking up speed on a slight downgrade, we reach a long, deserted stretch of road with corn and hay fields on both sides; the high-beam headlights of the car behind us start flashing and bursts from a red strobe light fill my rearview mirror, hurting my eyes. The red light comes from low on the windshield; I can tell it’s an unmarked patrol car. Bo had warned me he’d seen a speed trap on this stretch of road, and I was being careful to stay below the posted speed limit. Bringing to bear my expensive legal training, I’m already planning my defense as I pull off onto the berm. The officer couldn’t have clocked me with radar while following me from behind, so he must be relying on his speedometer. I decide to request a copy of the speedometer certification from the police officer at the trial-if they have them, they’re usually expired, and it’s an easy way to get out of a ticket if you know to ask. Even if I did go over the speed limit, it couldn’t have been for long; they have to record it for at least a full one-tenth of a mile; I’ll come back tomorrow and measure the distance from the bend in the road to the point where he started flashing to pull me over, which looks like less than a tenth of a mile to me.