“What do you mean?” Joost said.
“Mother died in Los Angeles after succumbing to promyelocytic leukemia. And another thing, no one in our family was shot.”
“It’s fiction,” Joost said. “A dramatization of the exodus of your people from Ethiopia.”
“Abe just told me that after the car hit Father, he was thinking he could have saved him, but he was paralyzed with fright. The boy in this story tries to save his mother, but he’s helpless. All he can do is watch her die,” Ras said. “It’s fiction, but it’s Abe’s truth. Can you see? This is his problem. Writing is a crutch. He’s using it as an escape, to deal with his grief, turning his back on all of the people he’ll be able to help when he’s a doctor.”
“He’s not going to be a doctor. Not for all the money in the world.”
“You don’t understand,” Ras said. “Abe has a responsibility, a moral obligation to use his gifts. He’s too young and he’s suffering too much grief to see that now. If he doesn’t go back to med school by the time he sees this, it’ll be too late.”
Ras scooped up more pages. A few minutes later, he said, “He’s got a dead guy telling the story. What’s that about?”
“There are multiple dead narrators in his novel. It conveys an uncanny feeling, as if death were a state of mind,” Joost said. “But that’s a story-telling technique. It’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?” Ras said.
“Will this story be told? If Abe doesn’t tell it, who will?”
Up from Oppression lay on the table beside Teresa’s charts. The cold air numbed Ras’s throat. “After Abe finishes medical school he’ll have his whole life to tell this story,” he said.
Ras took his father’s raincoat from the entryway closet, walked out of the apartment, and crossed the street. He covered the old man still lying on the bench, soaked and shivering. Then he called for an ambulance and sat beside him; rain falling in sheets; thunder growing louder; lightning flashing brighter, illuminating an afternoon sky darkening into the deep purple of the dead of night.
The Unveiling
Ras dozes in the Prius in front of the police station. The flooded street is the Red Sea about to part; a tap tap on his window is a sign from G-d. But it’s only a cop decked out in raingear, telling him he must move his car. He remembers the literary term: pathetic fallacy.
Twenty miles south on Woodlawn Avenue, a quiet residential street in Venice, Mrs. Angelico takes her eight-year-old son, Sal, and her Rottweiler, Prince, out for a walk in the rain.
Three-quarters of a mile up the road Sergei Sergeievich Pakoslav – twenty, muscular, five-ten, wavy-black hair greased back Elvis Presley style – turns his Chevy Nova – a rusting machine belching bilious smoke – onto Woodlawn Avenue. The discordant screams of Nirvana singing “Rape Me” blare over the souped-up sound system.
Sergei’s brother, Stas – eighteen, five-four, head shaved, stubble on his chin, rotting teeth – rides shotgun. He wears a gold chain with a Coptic crucifix. Stas – trying to quit coke cold turkey and it isn’t going well – has a chalky substance around his mouth, stains of catsup and coffee on his shirt. Intermittently, his jaws clench. His nose drips. He sweats profusely in the cold, wet air.
“Les’ score a couple whores, some crack. Then we go straight,” Stas says.
“That’s dope,” Sergei says.
Stas spies Mrs. Angelico’s red scarf and says, “That babushka’s loaded. Les’ take her back to her place, see what’s she’s got.”
Sergei pulls the Nova to the curb and the brothers get out of their car. Prince growls. Stas doesn’t see Prince. He sees a dragon on a leash and hears a thunderous roar. He holds his hands over his ears. “It’s breathin’ fire!”
“It’s a dog,” Sergei says. “Shoot it.”
Five months later, Ras sits alone in his apartment in Silver Lake, not knowing what to do and not wanting to do anything. It’s unusual for him to sit still, not move, quiet his mind. He misses Father and Abe.
His boards are behind him and they went well. His residency is over and he’s just beginning to adjust to normal sleep cycles. He’s weighing an invitation from Percival to join his practice. The offer comes with a lucrative research grant. He’s been offered a tenure-track teaching post at UCLA. He’s considering an assignment from Doctors Without Borders. He’s joined a gym, even gone once. And he’s been volunteering at the Venice Free Clinic a few days a week. Yet with not very much to do, he’s come to understand the meaning of the term “dead tired.” When every second of his life was claimed, his energy was boundless. Now every day he wants to go back to sleep a few hours after waking up.
Outside it’s crisp and windy. Save for the occasional sound of a passing car or passersby chatting on the sidewalk below his balcony, it’s quiet. He thinks back, as he often does, to the lineups. The most recent one was at the police station in Venice where Salvador Angelico identified Stas Sergeievich Pakoslav. Stas was charged with the first-degree murder of Mrs. Angelico and is now residing in the L.A. County jail awaiting trial. The earlier lineup was the one at the police station in Van Nuys.
In Van Nuys, the cop who told Ras to move his car moved on but Ras remained parked on Sylmar Avenue. Forty minutes later, the rain abating, Abe and Joost walked down the steps in front of the station. Abe’s head hung low and Ras couldn’t see his face. Joost looked grim and mouthed, it was her.
Abe got in the back seat and in the rearview Ras could see he’d been crying.
Abe said, “You were right. It wasn’t just Father she killed.”
Ras tried talking to Abe on the drive home, wanting to know how the police apprehended the woman, what she looked like, what would happen next. Joost answered all of his questions. Abe didn’t say another word and now wasn’t speaking to Ras again. With the hit-and-run driver also behind bars, the closure hasn’t produced the justice Ras had hoped for— Abe seeing the folly of abandoning medicine.
When Ras complained to Joost that Abe wouldn’t answer his calls, Joost asked if Ras was ready to give Abe his inheritance. Ras countered, “It’s just two more semesters. Why can’t you see that?”
Joost said, “He won’t go back to med school. He’s finished his novel about the exodus of the Ethiopian Jews. He’s looking for a publisher.”
The night before Father had been run down by the hit-and-run driver, Ras and Father had spoken of Abe’s genius. Then they’d said good night. The next night he was sitting Shiva. Almost a year. Where has it gone? The acceleration of the speed of life was daunting. And what if Abe wouldn’t even speak to him at the unveiling?
On the coffee table is a copy of Father’s magnum opus, Up From Oppression. On the cover is a photo of the gates of Auschwitz with the slogan, Arbeit Mach Frei. In the last chapter, Father observed that Hitler hadn’t known about the Ethiopian Jews, the Lost Tribe of Dan. Neither did the rest of the Western world. The Ethiopian Jews were His safety net for Judaism.
Father’s final project was chronicling the tribe from its founding by the Queen of Sheba until the first exodus from Ethiopia in the 1970s. Is Abe in his own way continuing this work?
Then it comes to Ras, the point of the game on the way to the lineup. He picks up the phone and calls Abe. When there’s no answer he drives to Abe’s apartment, rings the doorbell. Then he rings again. He’s about to ring a third time when Abe opens the door.
“Hey, Ras.”
“I get it now,” Ras says. “The genocide game.”
“Yeah?”
“You’re saving more Inuits than I’m saving cancer patients.”
“I don’t know about that. I haven’t saved anyone yet. You want to come in?”
Ras lingers on the doorstep. “Joost says you’ve finished your novel. May I read it?”
“Sure,” Abe says. “I’ll bring it over in the morning.”
Ras embraces Abe. This time the tears are in his eyes. “I’m working at the Venice Free Clinic in the morning,” he says. “Can you meet
me there at noon? I’ll take you to lunch.”
During the drive home, Ras wonders if reading Abe’s book will influence his view of the injustice of Abe’s decision to abandon medicine; unease settles into his bulky frame.
At home, he walks out onto his balcony. Wind has blown the smog out to sea. Across the universe a shooting star threads the heavens; discomfort seeps deeper into his bones. He sees infinitely into the past yet he sees no beginning. He sees infinitely into the future, yet he sees no end. He sees no escape until he sees what Moses saw: justice for his people. And he sees what Nietzsche saw: freedom from the eternal return. He sees his own injustice: his refusal to release Abe’s inheritance. He sees reconciliation with his brother. He feels light on his feet.
Late the next morning, in the Venice Free Clinic, a toy Koala bear clipped to his stethoscope, as a George Harrison tune, “Here Comes the Sun,” pipes softly through the PA system, Ras steps into an examination room to see his last patient.
He nods to Mr. Angelico and says, “How are you, Sal?”
“I’m still eight,” the boy answers.
“Let’s look at that arm,” Ras says. He redresses the wound. “It’s healing nicely.”
“Dr. Ras? Is Mommy in heaven?”
Ras sits on the examining table next to Sal. Posters of Roald Dahl book jackets – The Witches, Revolting Rhymes, Dirty Beasts, and James and the Giant Peach – hang on the walls. “That’s something you should talk to your priest about,” Ras says.
“She’s in heaven with Prince.” Sal says. “Prince died trying to save mommy.”
Ras says, “I have a present for you.” He pokes his head out the door. “Claire? We’re ready.”
A nurse, holding a Rottweiler puppy, walks in.
“For me?” Sal says, playing with the puppy on the floor. “Can I name him Prince?”
“Salvador?” says Mr. Angelico, tears welling in his eyes. “What do you say to Dr. Demeke?”
The puppy crouches on his haunches, barks at Sal, then scampers away. Sal lunges.
“Watch out for your arm,” Ras says.
The puppy reverses field, jumps on Sal, licks his face.
Sal says, “Thank you, Dr. Ras.”
A woman’s voice over the intercom. “Dr. Demeke? Your brother’s here.”
Sal picks up the puppy by his front paws.
“Hold him like this,” Ras says, taking the dog, supporting his hind legs.
There’s a disturbance in the lobby, angry words and Abe’s voice, strident, “Calm down, brother.” Then a crash, shattered glass. Oh, Lord, not the grandfather clock.
Ras hurries to the lobby, where splintered mahogany and shards of leaded-beveled glass are strewn. A thin wisp of a young man wearing platform shoes waves a gun. The man chews frantically on something and swaggers. Bulging veins pulse on his neck. The puppy, tail between his legs, urinates.
“Doctor,” the receptionist says, her voice aquiver, “this gentleman says G-d sent him.”
“What do you want, brother?” Abe says to the young man.
Stop stalling!” the man screams. He swings the gun, pointing it at Abe, then at the receptionist, then at Ras, then at the receptionist: a whirligig blur of flashing midnight-blue steel, a farrago of menace and motion— amplified by the receptionist’s shrieks.
The gunman whirls toward the ear-piercing cries. “Shut Up!”
Abe lunges.
The gun fires, and fires again and again and again.
Part V Merchants of Justice
So the heart be right, it is no
matter which way the head lieth.
Sir Walter Raleigh before his execution
in the Tower of London.
Ismael
Like a locomotive on the loose, Aurora– holding legal papers – engines into Estella’s office on the third floor of the headquarters of the United States Attorney on 4th Street in Miami. With a double take, she stops in her tracks, surprised by the new residents: two agitated canaries in a cage gilded by the afternoon light. Aurora gives Estella a look that says, we should talk. The document she’s holding appears to be a state-court order, but Estella can’t see the caption.
Aurora, chief of the Economic Crimes Section of the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, rarely descends to the boiler rooms where her minions – more than one hundred less-senior Assistant United States Attorneys – pitch the coal that powers the wheels of justice. Perhaps Aurora’s arrival is a show of deference. After all, this is only Estella’s second week back at work since she was raped. Or maybe the visit is merely an expression of Aurora’s Southern charm like her stylish attire chosen to complement the figure she works hard to maintain or the sweet, exotic perfumes she favors, fragrances exuding powerful pheromones to beguile male prey.
Estella, one of Aurora’s senior lieutenants, riveted by Aurora’s new outfit: a coral silk blouse under a Pauline Trigére emerald-green silk suit jacket, is on the phone, listening to Henry Holland Smythe-Russell IV, Esq., defense counsel for the scions of storied money. Everything in her office is arranged meticulously. A vase with a freshly cut rose sits atop her credenza near an 8 x 10 framed photo of her twenty-year-old son, Andrew, in a fighting stance, wearing a black belt around a white taekwondo competition uniform.
She moves her mouse. Her screensaver – Osceola in ceremonial headdress, his face streaked with red war paint, a rifle held over his head, a blue-and-white checkered sash worn over one shoulder, a red-and-tan shirt tied at his waist, falling like a skirt to his mid thighs, buckskin pants, frozen forever in the frenzied step of a war dance – fades to azure wallpaper patterned with logos of the Department of Justice and an Instant Message from Aurora – can u come up?
Estella plays with the phone cord, raises an eyebrow. She should tell Smythe-Russell that she’ll call him back, but Aurora’s unexpected visit triggers a remembrance of van Keet, the rapist, who by now is probably playing ping pong or watching HBO in hi-definition at a low-security federal correctional complex.
In too-vivid detail she remembers struggling with van Keet, her teeth fracturing, her jawbone cracking, the feel of her anus tearing, blood on her legs, oozing from her head. These injuries, that pain, are trivial in comparison to van Keet’s odious allegation that he was sent by Andrew to rape her, the insult of the slander paling in the light of a court order enjoining her from speaking to her son – incarcerated and charged with aiding and abetting van Keet to rape her – to protect his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
A taste of sour rage rises from her throat with the onset of a headache that won’t be ameliorated by knowing that before he is released from prison, van Keet will need extensive dental work and won’t be able to sit without pain courtesy of a hostile prison environment organized by Aurora.
Estella writes on the legal pad: talking to s-r.
Her canaries chirp excitedly.
Smythe-Russell represents Ismael Erasmus, the defendant in a case Aurora wants settled immediately. To this end, Aurora has secured a court order freezing Ismael’s assets in U.S. bank accounts, and with the cooperation of The Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, has frozen his Caribbean-invested funds.
But the case won’t settle soon because someone other than Ismael is paying Symthe-Russell’s fees at an hourly rate that exceeds the monthly payment on her new Mercedes SL convertible. Smythe-Russell will exhaust his retainer, typically $250,000, before he’ll get serious about settlement. Like it or not, it’s the way the game is played. Smythe-Russell won’t want whoever is paying his fee to think that getting Ismael a favorable result was easy.
Aurora writes on Estella’s legal pad: cute birds, nice touch. See me ASAP. Then she departs as swiftly as she entered, the legal papers still in her hand.
Aurora was probably bringing her an assignment to work with the State Attorney on a joint prosecution. The additional work wouldn’t be all bad. It’s not as if she has a personal life, anyway. And then she realizes w
ith amusement that she didn’t hear a word Smythe-Russell said during her interlude with Aurora.
A ccording to the FBI report on Estella’s desk, Ismael Erasmus is a twenty-one-year-old citizen of Sierra Leone. At age nine he was sent to school in London. By age fourteen he was a graduate studying theoretical mathematics at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.
When he was fifteen, Ismael returned to Sierra Leone and joined the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel organization with the sole objective of exploiting the Sierra Leone diamond mines. RUF soldiers amputated the hands of men, women, and children in the villages to induce mass fear, subdue the local populace, and reduce resistance. Able-bodied men who were spared mutilation were forced into slave labor in the diamond mines.
Ismael became the driver for RUF General Osman Kallon, now the Sierra Leone Minister of Justice and Ismael’s sponsor for a student visa in the United States.
On his way to Florida, where he would pursue post-doctoral studies in astrophysics at the University of Miami, Ismael visited a friend in London, Saad Dalramy, who’d been approached by agents of the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone, promising him anonymity in exchange for information and threatening to leak word back in Freetown that he was cooperating if, in fact, he didn’t.
In Florida, Ismael made cash deposits in U.S. bank accounts totaling $993,000, eventually investing most of the proceeds in a Cayman Islands hedge fund. The cash came from the sale of diamonds. It was then that he received news that Saad’s severed hands had been dumped on the west lawns of the Cathedral of Canterbury.
As the time for Ismael to renew his student visa drew near, he filed a petition for political asylum, appending e-mails from Kallon ordering him to return home to “assist in the investigation of subversives in London.” In her report, Special Agent Andrea Vega, in charge of the investigation, agreed that if Ismael were to return to Sierra Leone, he would be tortured and killed.
The Speed of Life Page 20