“Your Honor,” he said, “I’m Alexander Main, and I wish to go bail for these two.”
“There is no question of bail, Mr. Main,” the judge said gently.
“There’s always a question of bail, Your Honor,” he said respectfully. “I appreciate that in the circumstances the bond will necessarily be a high one, but whatever it is I will pay it. I think I can assure the Court, too, that whatever date is fixed upon for the prisoners’ appearance they will be here.”
“There is no question of bail, Mr. Main.”
“Your Honor,” he pleaded, “look at these men. They aren’t master criminals. They’re ordinary. They’re banal men. The state hasn’t argued in its charges that they’ve conspired with others to do this thing, or that they acted as agents, or even that they had contacts with or commitments from known fences in their misadventure. Fortunately, no one was killed or even hurt in their abortive attempt. Also, all the property’s been recovered; it’s been checked against the catalogs and it’s all there. Luckily, those pieces which were damaged were the least valuable pieces in the tomb, and I’ve been given to understand that even these are subject to restoration. I’m told that the cloth-of-gold is even now being dry-cleaned.” He paused. “In short, sir,” he said slyly, “I think that all we’re faced with here is a case of a couple of second-story blokes in under their heads.”
The spectators laughed appreciatively at the Phoenician’s joke. Even the judge smiled, but when he banged his gavel to restore order all he did was repeat that there was no question of bail.
Main was undeterred. He demanded an explanation of the fair man. He asked if under Egyptian law tomb robbers were excluded from bail.
A guard moved toward him, but the judge waved him off. “Under Egyptian law, no,” he said.
“Are there precedents, then, for such an exclusion?”
“There are no precedents, Mr. Main, because until last night no tomb robbers had ever been apprehended.” Now the judge paused. “But since we’re on the subject of precedents I would remind you that no precedent ever had a precedent, and that all precedents arise from the oily rags and scraps of tinder condition, law’s and experience’s spontaneous combustion.”
The Phoenician didn’t wait for the implication of this to register with the crowd. “Does the State have evidence that Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp have been linked with other tomb robberies?” he asked crisply.
“None that has been presented to us.”
His next question was dangerous, for he knew the true state of affairs. Hoping that the Egyptians didn’t, however, he decided to ask it. “Are these men wanted for other offenses?”
“Not to our knowledge.”
“Well then, may we not assume that this is a first offense and that the case is much as I presented it and these two much as I described them — amateurs whose ambitions exceeded their capabilities? I don’t mean to prejudice the prosecution’s case. Indeed, as the police report states, I was there, an eyewitness. I saw it all and fully expect to be subpoenaed by the prosecution to give my evidence. I intend to go even further.” He looked around the hearing room, at the judge, the spectators, and finally directly at Oyp and Glyp themselves. “I shall this day present myself to the police, voluntarily to assist them in their inquiries. I shall do this,” he pronounced softly, “but under sworn testimony I shall also feel compelled to reveal what is already known to your investigators — that these two did not even bother to bring the proper equipment with them, that they had few tools and those they had massively inadequate to their undertaking. Where was their block and tackle? Where were their drills and blasting caps?
“In view of all this — their amateur status, their faulty preparation and makeshift maneuver, the fact that it was a first offense, that no one was physically harmed, that the suspects were unarmed, that they did not resist arrest, the failure of the State to establish agency or even to locate possible receivers, and the fact that the actual damage they caused to property in dollars and cents (I’m reasoning that the artisans who will be responsible for restoring the objets d’art are slaves) barely manages to meet the legal definition of felony, and finally the all-important admission by the court that there is nothing in either Egyptian statute or custom which would justify the withholding of bond in this case — in view of all this, I respectfully request that the court fix an appropriate bond forthwith.”
The judge glared at him, but when he spoke he was as soft-spoken as before. “Mr. Main,” he said patiently, “have you any idea of what bail, if I should agree to set it, would have to be in this case?”
“I have already indicated that I understand it would be high.”
“Yes. It would.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“Will you? Whatever the omissions in our law, there is a statute that is relatively specific in these circumstances.”
“Your Honor?”
“I will give you the exact wording of the statute…Here, this is the pertinent language, I think…blah blah de dum blah de dum…Oh, yes: ‘that the forfeiture be equivalent in value to the value of the intended theft.’ ”
The Phoenician whistled.
“Ignoring the worth of the treasures that were undisturbed in the tomb and fixing a value only on those objects found on the prisoners’ persons or waiting to be picked up by them in the antechamber, that would come to — well, I haven’t the exact figures, but I should think in the neighborhood of, oh, say twenty billion dollars. That’s just a ball park estimate.”
“I’ll raise it,” Main rasped. He didn’t see how but he would. People were in debt to him for favors — the nigger, Billy Basket (who only this morning had fallen all over him trying to thank him for going his bond), that other one, the guy who worked in his cousin’s car wash. It would only be for a short while. He would stay with Oyp and Glyp. He would hire an army to stay with them. It was true that the Mafia was down on him right now, but there were others, retired guards and nightwatchmen in Cincinnati who would help him baby-sit the two of them. Oyp’s and Glyp’s freedom would be nominal only, but it was necessary that he buy it for them. “I’ll raise it,” he repeated.
“Has it occurred to you that your fees alone would cost Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp two thousand million dollars? That such a figure might be prohibitive for them?”
“There’s two of them,” Main shouted, “it’s only a thousand million apiece!”
“The police report lists them as indigents,” the judge said calmly.
The Phoenician glared at the two. Tinhorns, he thought. Cheap no god fucking damn good chiselers, lousy pikers. He swallowed hard. “A personal favor,” he said. “It’s on the cuff. I waive my fee.”
“There is no question of bail,” the judge said.
“Why?” Main demanded. “Nothing in the statutes prevents it.”
“There are laws and there are laws,” the judge said, “crimes and crimes. Degrees of guilt like figures on thermometers. There are acts which so far exceed the permissible that to define them in statutes would be to register them in the imagination. And we’re talking now of legislators who would have to write these laws, who would subject them to discussion and argument, with all its qualification and demurrer and contingency. We’re talking of what would, ideally, occur to the best of men. To acknowledge that the best of men, thinking ideally and plotting academically, platonically and picturesquely, could conceive of these actions, would be to admit that ordinary men, with none of the superior man’s built-in checks and balances of the heart and mind, could do the same, opening up the unthinkable to refinements, twists, debasing the depraved and declining the corrupt like a verb wheel of evil, some irregularized grammar of the monstrous that would turn the unspeakable into only a sort of French. And what of men who are not ordinary? Who live below the timberline of grace? What of bad men? What of the vicious, of villains, the ugly customer and the mad-dog killer? What of them? What perversions of the senators’ only abstract paradigm of evil would they be capable of? What argot and babble and moral solecism and sheer bone-breaking noise? What’s unthinkable requires no legislation, eschews statute and repudiates law. There’s no question of bail.”