The two men approached without speaking, their silence alone menacing.
“Good evening,” Jerome said in Creole. “Perhaps you gentlemen would like to take some fresh mangoes home?”
Still, neither man spoke. Instead, one grabbed Jerome by the shirt collar, throwing him to the ground, while the other dumped the fruit from the cart. Jerome’s bowels constricted in terror as the man in sunglasses held up both camera and computer.
Still wordless, the man who had tossed Jerome to the ground produced a pistol of some sort and placed it next to Jerome’s head, motioning him to stand. The gun pressing against his temple, Jerome was marched to the car and shoved inside.
As the car drove away, Jerome’s fear was tinted with sadness that neither he, Louisa or little Jerome would ever have a chance to become wealthy in America.
Richard Russell Federal Building
75 Spring Street, Atlanta
The next afternoon
The Reverend Bishop Groom had been delighted at the half-million-dollar bail, an amount he could raise without the assistance of a bondsman. Lang guessed the equity in the preacher’s palatial home in the foothills of the northern Georgia mountains would more than cover the sum set by the federal magistrate.
Arriving at the elevators outside the courtroom, the usual cadre of television and press personalities surrounded Lang, the reverend and the long-suffering woman who was his wife. Lang had never actually heard her speak, but she held her husband’s hand, smiling dutifully at the TV cameras. In an age of trial by media, appearances counted.
“When will the case go to trial?”
“Is there any chance of a plea bargain?”
“Reverend, has attendance fallen off at your church?”
Lang sensed the reverend was about to reply and stepped in front of him, preempting the camera’s lens. Letting the accused make an unrehearsed statement to a voracious press was often a prelude to additional questions and disaster. “As those of you who were in the courtroom know, trial is set for early June. We intend to be ready to rebut all charges.”
The standard, vanilla bravado.
A woman with blinding white teeth and a shag pageboy too blonde to be believable shoved a microphone into the reverend’s face. “There are a number of women in your church who claim you had sex with them. What is your response?”
Lang swatted the microphone away like an annoying insect. “As far as we know, the government has made no such allegations.” He none too gently pushed his client toward an open elevator. “That’s all the comments we have.”
As the door hissed shut, the reverend dropped his wife’s hand, stuffing his own in his pocket. “I don’t understand why you insist I not talk to the press. I speak to thousands of people both on the air and in person every week.”
“True, but you control the sound bites. The media is in the entertainment, not the news, business. If editing a statement makes a story more interesting than what the person actually said, provides a better story line, how far are you willing to trust Eye Witness News at Six?”
The reverend had no response.
At basement level, Lang exited the building two stories below a viaduct spanning what had once been neighboring rail stations. Where dozens of railroads had converged to make Atlanta the transportation hub of the South, parking lots now flourished. Long before Lang had come to the city, the Southern Railway’s fanciful Moorish marvel, the Terminal Station, had been replaced by the unimaginative federal building he had just left. Lang had seen the pictures of the old building with its pair of unmatched minarets poking into a skyline that no longer existed.
Atlanta had a passion for the new over the old, a choice that had destroyed more landmarks than the railroad station. Lang supposed the trend had begun with Sherman, known locally as a Yankee a little too careless with fire or the first proponent of urban renewal.
In fact, Lang knew of a single building that had survived the 1864 burning: the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Francis’s church. The story, perhaps apocryphal, was that Sherman had ordered the city put to the torch, including its churches. A company of New Yorkers, recent Irish immigrants, had arrived to do the job when the current priest by the name of O’Day had appeared on the steps to deliver a graphic depiction of the fate of the souls of anyone who dared desecrate his church. Fearing hellfire more than the ire of their officers, the men in blue slunk away to falsely report the completion of their mission.
Lang always smiled at the tale, but this time it reminded him of the priest’s remarks about Saint Mark’s tomb. He checked his watch. A few minutes after 3:00.
A limousine appeared and its driver dashed from his seat to open a rear door.
“Can we drop you somewhere?” the reverend asked as his driver helped Mrs. Groom into the car.
Lang shook his head. “Thanks, but no. Remember, no press conferences, no words to anyone regarding this case.”
“I understand” were the last words the Reverend Bishop Groom spoke before he also disappeared into the interior of the limo.
It was one of those Atlanta winter days that promised, often falsely, an early spring. Knowing that the next week could as easily produce one of the region’s ice storms, Lang had decided to walk the approximate mile from his office to the federal building. He could return with a detour of only a few blocks if he went easterly along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive past the county courthouse to the church. He reached for his cell phone before deciding the walk would do him good whether or not Francis was in or out tending his flock.
As had become habit in the last few days, he stopped, this time to put his briefcase down and rest a shoe on a parked car’s bumper while he pretended to tie it. The gesture gave him an opportunity to check his surroundings. As far as he could tell, everyone he could see was either coming from or going to the building behind him. None of them looked Asian. Of course, there were any number of places on the viaduct where an unseen observer would have a view of the “railroad gulch,” as the area was locally if less than poetically known.
The buildings in this part of town were predominantly occupied by fast-food franchises, discount electronics shops and down-at-the-heels clothing stores. There was a welcome dearth of the beggars, bums and self-appointed “guides” that populated the greener pastures of the hotel and office districts. By and large, Lang had the sidewalks to himself.
He passed the Fulton County Administrative Building, a modern tower that had been designed to hold an oasis of flowing water and stately palm trees in its lobby. The twenty-foot trees had been installed at great expense, only to die both because no one had bothered to consult the county arborist as to the proper care and planting of the root system, and leakage of the pond around which they had been planted. Additionally, the clock in the modernistic tower displayed a perpetual 3:45 and inclement weather outside the building meant an archipelago of buckets inside to catch the offerings of a leaky roof. After the finger-pointing and accusations died down, the county’s elected leaders admitted the cost of construction of the building had so far exceeded budget that there remained no funds to fix the problems other than removing the dead tress and filling in the pool.
Lang crossed Pryor Street, walked along the northern side of the county-court complex and waited for the light to change so he might cross Central Avenue. The church was on the far corner. By now, Lang was surrounded by briefcase-toting lawyers, jurors discharged for the day, uniformed deputies and such other personnel as had business at the courthouse. He saw one or two Asian-looking men and women, none of whom paid him any attention.
Across the street, Lang passed the main entrance, opting for a side door into the complex that he knew led to the church’s offices. He walked down a short hallway plastered with children’s crayon drawings and a bulletin board heavy with notes and messages Lang suspected no one read.