Donny had tried to find those same guards. They were ghosts. Like they had never even existed. Employment records expunged.
“How did you find them?” asked Donny.
“I asked the right people,” said Joyce.
“Did you have him killed too?”
She made a sour face. “Of course I didn’t have him killed. I’m like you, Donny. I don’t believe in the death penalty. I just don’t volunteer to help real murderers evade it. And if you’re wondering why he would go help arrest his little rich white honey—yes, don’t look so surprised, of course I know—the reason is it was a fucking rescue operation, you fool. Her father, your friend, was keeping her prisoner.”
“So I heard. Not sure I buy it.”
“Well, it’s true. Now she is free. And with her fortune, she is going to help us free the whole fucking world.”
Donny stared at her there, sitting on her porch, happily ripping the duct tape from his eyes. He could see she believed every word she said. He also had one other question coming into his head. But Patricia had come back now, standing on the porch with a gun instead of a pen this time, giving Donny the look that said, It’s time for you to go.
38
The archivists of New Orleans did have two functioning copy machines. They would not, however, let Donny use them, saying the resource was too precious to their work and saved for the most important files. Nor would they let Donny check any of the materials out, saying he was not trustworthy. But when they confirmed he was staying at the Library, a lodging operated by people known to the Council, they offered to send files there. He didn’t believe them, until he got back to the place and when he went to the desk the clerk on duty told him they had three file boxes set up in a carrel for him. Donny expressed his appreciation, but the truth was that all Donny wanted to do after seeing Joyce was find an expeditious way to self-medicate and worry about work in the morning.
The Library was one of the main lodgings for guests of the new government, and it stayed pretty full. Donny figured the only reason he got a room was so they could keep an eye on him. And when he got to his room, he saw that someone had been looking through the files he left out on the little desk, and made little attempt to hide the fact, and he doubted it was the housekeeping staff.
In the evenings at the Library, after enjoying the bounteous meals of real food on offer in the mess, people hung out in the common areas. New Orleans still had a nightlife of sorts, but nothing like before, so visitors mostly had to come up with their own entertainment. When Donny went back down thinking he could sit in a comfortable chair and have just one drink and a quick dinner before returning to his prep for the day to come, he found the lobby had been taken over by the international association of hydrological engineers. They weren’t an official association—just a dozen experts in the field from around the world who were excited to help out with this experiment in learning how to coexist with a massive river that had burst its banks and would never go back. Volunteers, basically, given room and board, interesting work, a small stipend, and the joy of being part of the project. An equal mix of men and women, nice but kind of dorky. So he tried sitting there for a while devouring his meatless muffuletta while they shared a bottle of bespoke Bywater absinthe and quickly got to work on driving Donny crazy with a guitar and melodica duo playing folk songs of the world. When they started playing the Wade Camacho songs, and really getting into it, Donny decided it was time to go into the actual library part of the Library and get to work.
They had his three boxes of files on loan set up there at one of the old library tables. First, he pulled out the notes he had made while looking over the files with the researchers that afternoon.
The notes were mostly jottings of ideas that came into his head as he reviewed the files. Potentially exculpatory factual nuggets, ideas for alternative theories and creative defenses, possible counterclaims. The problem was, the law this court was enforcing was so upside down in its premises that it was hard to know where to even start. In essence, it was retroactively criminalizing things that had always been legal. The underlying idea wasn’t really that different than the wrongful-death claims Donny was pursuing in the Harrison case. Except that it was totally different, because the deaths it was treating as wrongful were the deaths of trees and animals, not people. And the only way to argue with the idea that cutting down an old tree is murder is to point out that it is not and never has been under any law known to Donny. Things that exist in nature do not have rights, and if you want to change that, fine, but you can only do so prospectively. A perfectly reasonable argument. This wasn’t about reason, though. And it wasn’t really about the past. It was about the future. About the future the current generation was supposed to have, a future of general environmental health, something it was reasonable to argue they have a right to. About how that future had been stolen, by people who razed the past. Long past the tolling of any statute of limitations, but very recently in the measure of geological time. And about how some people had gotten rich from that theft of the future, enjoying a decadent and pampered present while the rest of the world suffered—and was likely to suffer even more as the long-reaching consequences cascaded.
It was hard enough to prepare for a hearing in a kangaroo court, one whose rules you had no familiarity with. It was even harder when you realized you really were on the wrong side of the case. Donny had helped whiteboard the idea, but he never expected them to take it this seriously—any real judge would throw it out without so much as a hearing. But Percy and her colleagues and clients were right about the merits, at least in terms of real moral justice. And they were prosecutor, judge, and jury. They knew it, too, just as they knew they were tearing up centuries of precedent to make a radical new law codifying that justice. It was then that Donny decided there wasn’t much point in preparing an actual defense. The best strategy would be to plead mercy, warn of imminent danger, and try to work out a deal. Maybe Percy would help him with that, but somehow he didn’t think there was much of a chance. If Heather really wasn’t a true prisoner, maybe it wouldn’t matter—if he could figure out a way to persuade her.
So he didn’t even open the boxes. Instead, he decided to take the remains of his drink and see what other kind of reading the library had.
The shelving system did not follow any of the established methods. No Library of Congress numbers or Dewey decimals. No decimals at all. It was more intuitive. Books grouped together by subject matter, mostly, and sometimes by size, or color. Donny looked at the oversized shelves. A photo book about the long wars of his youth, when the General was in charge. Intense black-and-white shots of marines in their fallout suits going in to the Iranian blast zone to clear out the remnants of the “outlaw state.” Jungle fighters working the border between Costa Rica and Panama, policing the US colony at Chiriquí, with fetishes on their machetes and fangs and tails and maybe even human ears around their necks. And then the fire patrols who went into Brazil to clear the rebels from the jungles with napalm, mortar, and man traps, followed by the military merchant companies who cleared the rain forest with Titan Jelly, chainsaws, bulldozers and fire, destroying the habitat of a lot more than the neo-nationalist nomads of ODA they were fighting, and paving the way for the accelerated warming of the atmosphere that followed.
When he put that away he found the older books. Dusty classics, some of them actual classics, including a three-volume re-compilation of the Greek myths by Hugh de Lavis, an English writer whose short novel about love in the trenches of the Somme Donny had read in college. He pulled up the entry on Demeter, thinking maybe there would be something there in the legends of the harvest that he could use to embellish his begging in the morning. And there was some of that, but then he got distracted reading about the wrath of Poseidon, stories that seemed equally applicable to storm-ruined New Orleans.
He went back to the boxes, trying to find the file that he remembered. Files, more accurately, a trove of binders that had been stolen by the
outlaw archivists from Donny’s old law firm, Barker & Eames. Donny had requested it more out of curiosity than any sense that it would help his case—wondering what kinds of deals his former colleagues were up to these days, and thinking he might find something in there on Lou, who was now one of the firm’s senior partners.
It took him a while, but he found it. He worked his way through the merger agreements and the NDAs and the tender offers and the private-placement memoranda, and after a while he thought maybe it was a dumb idea after all.
Until he found the stock-purchase agreement.
It was only six months old, from late the year before. The buyer was a company called New Bourbon Investments LP, which Donny had never heard of. But the seller was AMR. And what they were selling was a majority stake in the company. With all of its assets, and all of its liabilities.
The most interesting thing was, when you flipped to the back, to where they always put the address to mail notices and lawsuits, the address for the buyer was the same as the address of Lecker’s office.
Donny kept digging, looking for more AMR material, but everything else was what he had meant to pull—material on Promethean Resources. And none of that seemed worth his time anymore. Or didn’t, until he found a file containing a five-year-old demand letter from Miles, asserting a different claim than the one Donny had been chasing in the case Miles bequeathed him. It was addressed to both Promethean and Tripto Labs, as affiliated companies. It accused them of violating the labor laws and the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibitions on involuntary servitude. His clients, Miles said, were John and Jane Doe detainees who had been prohibited from organizing their fellow farm laborers. The letter referenced a draft of a lawsuit that was attached, but the attachment wasn’t in the file. And it was dated just a couple of weeks before his death.
Donny copied the text of the letter longhand, on a separate page from his notes about the stock-purchase agreement. And then he tried to think of the fastest way to get back to his office after the hearing.
The engineers were still partying in the lobby when Donny got up from his work, and he decided to join them, thinking maybe a little bit of Bacchus would help him process it all. It was a good while and no small quantity of absinthe later that Donny was singing the vocals to the song he had persuaded the Croatian civil engineer named Dr. Elena to play on her guitar: “Thirteen Tortuga Suite,” from the second solo album by Electric Hephaestus bass player Rodney Jobson. Donny wasn’t sure exactly what the song was about, especially since it was in three totally different parts, but it was something like being a homeless stowaway who finds paradise only to get evicted in the most brutal way. One of those eccentric hits with some staying power, enough that three of the crew knew the song and Donny had them joining in. Who knew absinthe could make you ebullient. But then Donny found himself crying, in the part where it’s hard to tell but it seems the narrator of the song is dead, and then Donny started laughing as he remembered how much Miles hated folk music by white people, especially Rodney Jobson.
That’s when Donny spied Marianne Abboud standing there in the hallway, watching them and smiling.
39
“Hello, Mr. Kimoe,” she said.
“Chief Inspector Abboud,” said Donny.
“Marianne,” she said. “I’m off-duty.”
“Donny.”
“You are quite an enthusiastic singer,” said Marianne.
“Usually I have the good sense to only do that in the privacy of my own shower.”
“I am sure that is even better. I love this song. My flatmate had the record in college.”
“It’s an acquired taste. My roommate sold my copy so I’d stop playing it.”
“Well, it’s better this way anyway.”
“I don’t know,” said Donny. “Whenever I sing in public I usually get in trouble. This is the first time it will have gotten me arrested by Interpol.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I left my handcuffs upstairs in my room.”
Donny considered asking where that was, but he was too busy admiring how confidently she expressed the lines around her eyes when she smiled.
“And I’m not here to arrest you,” she added. “Your story checked out.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Donny, acting like he was joking.
“I would like to ask what you are doing here, though,” she said.
“I have a hearing tomorrow. Different case than the one you were at. Trying to get the Council to free a prisoner. The daughter of an old friend.”
“I see,” she said, with sudden gravity on her face. “The Tributary. Good luck with that.”
“Thanks,” said Donny. “I don’t think the odds are so good. That’s why I decided to join the band when I should be cramming.”
“I thought maybe you would say you were here looking for Mr. Harrison.”
“I kind of hoped that was how it would work out,” said Donny. “But every source I’ve talked to has me convinced it’s true. He’s dead.”
“That is what we have concluded as well. So we are going up the chain, to see if we can find who organized the operation.”
“Still chasing the same basic theory, then?”
“Absolutely. We have a source.”
“May I ask who?”
“You may ask, but I cannot tell.”
“Too bad,” said Donny.
“Maybe we should just have a drink instead,” she said. “I am tired of working too.”
“Okay,” said Donny. He wanted to look at his watch, but not as much as he wanted to talk to the chief inspector and see what other questions she had.
Forty-five minutes later, after the engineers had sensibly gone to bed, Donny and the chief inspector were into their second drink and laughing hard trading notes on their favorite bad album covers of their youth. It started when Donny discovered the shelf they had there in one of the alcoves off the lobby, a little music room that had a bin of old records, a ton of cassettes, and the means to play both. Chief Inspector Abboud produced a joint from her purse, to Donny’s immense surprise. She seemed slightly embarrassed at first, or maybe just wary of letting down her prosecutorial guise so completely, but Donny encouraged her, even as the atrophied but still dutiful part of his brain that was mindful of his ethical duties as a lawyer reminded him of what was coming in the morning. It had rarely stopped him before, though, and soon they were lit up, and Marianne was rummaging through the tapes until she found one she liked better than what was playing and popped it in. Traumfunk’s Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. Marianne did not even know that the album was a soundtrack. In her defense, the movie was made in East Germany. Donny gave her something approaching a free-verse synopsis of the plot, which involved a coed crew of astronauts with burnt-orange bell-bottomed uniforms traveling in a ship made from mixed-up plastic model parts to a mirror Earth in which cats have evolved to be the most intelligent species and dominate the planet. Marianne said that sounds like a place I would like to visit, and Donny said just as long as you’re not mistaken for a big bird like the first human who stepped off the ship.
They talked about their work, about the mileage you put on the engine of the soul dealing with the dead and the caged, no matter which side of the courtroom you are on. Marianne said do you think the reason we all always talk about the past is because there’s no more future? Donny said there’s no question about it, but at least there’s a right now for us to live in, which he thought was pretty clever until he could see her slyly laughing, like a cat that prefers to play with its toys at the end of a string. So he changed gears, and talked about his hearing the next day, about the theory behind the case, and what it would be like if you could really build a new legal system in which trees and cats and every other living thing had rights on parity with our own. Marianne said that only gets you so far, that the only way you can really fix this mess is if everyone can find their own way back to the grove. Donny asked what she meant by that and she said why don’t you look
it up. He said I would if I could get a signal on my damn phone. That’s when she laughed at him for the first time, grabbed his phone, said she had the same model, and showed him how to change the setting from the US standard to Open 7.
When she did that, his phone pinged with the sound of electric popcorn, alerting him that he had twenty-seven new messages. That’s when he finally looked at his watch.
It’s okay, said Marianne. Maybe we can talk some more tomorrow.
Donny started to say how there won’t be a tomorrow, but decided to leave it, even though he had lost the right-now.
And he definitely didn’t want to tell her that what he was about to do was go back to his room alone and call his grandma.
40
Percy had cut her teeth defending young black men in the criminal courts of Houston, helping juries see each of her clients as the embodiment of all the black men whose bodies were shackled and cut down or strung up over the dark centuries of American history. Donny saw her make a closing argument once in a felony murder case that somehow managed to get you to envision every one of those lives in your head, to briefly glimpse the quantum of feeling and dignity destroyed through a violence that you knew could never be sated unless you radically changed the whole architecture of the society. That morning before the Tributary, she did the same thing. But instead of black bodies, she talked about big trees. And she was really good at it. Because to her, it was all connected.
You could see it on the faces of the jurors. All 501 of them.
That probably wasn’t an accurate count, but it could have been. The jury comprised any members of the community who wanted to participate. They filled the courtroom and the gallery that morning, sitting wherever they chose, many of them sitting right there on the floor near Donny. The litigants did not have designated spots, but Donny had arrived early enough to grab a chair, on which he set his briefcase while he stood behind it, hands on the frame.
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