Just Revenge

by Alan M. Dershowitz

  Without a word, Danielle entered the shack, untied Prandus, and watched his body fall to the floor, motionless.

  She picked up the rope, wiped away the fingerprints, and retrieved the suicide note, leaving behind the dead body.

  Max and Danielle walked silently out of the shack without turning back and drove away. Max’s work was complete. His revenge was accomplished.

  All that remained was to tell Abe Ringel what he had done and ask for his counsel.

  Part V

  Apprehension

  Chapter 28

  FINDING THE BODY

  Exactly three hours after Marcelus Prandus died, Paul Prandus and Freddy Burns burst through the door of the hunting shack. An anonymous caller had phoned Paul Prandus and told him where his father was. Paul and Freddy raced across the state.

  They found Marcelus Prandus lying on the floor, his eyes wide open, his face an ashen blue, his mouth contorted, his tongue bleeding.

  Paul ran to his father, calling, “Papa, Papa!” He took the old man’s head in his hands and shook it. “Wake up, Papa, wake up!” But it was obvious he was dead. Paul began to cry and then to pound the floor.

  Freddy looked around for clues. At first he saw nothing. Then he noticed that the TV was on, its blue screen suggesting that a videotape was still in the machine. Whoever had been there had not removed the tape. Freddy quickly pressed the play button. The image of young Marc skipping to school appeared on the screen.

  “Paul, look at the TV,” Freddy said.

  As Paul looked up from his father’s corpse, he saw his son being struck by a car and hurled through the air. “Oh, no! Oh, my God, no,” Paul gasped, running toward the TV set. He watched as his son’s body hit the ground and bounced. Finally it lay motionless as the crossing guard ran toward the mangled body of the eight-year-old child. Paul became hysterical. “Marc, Marc . . . oh, my God!”

  Freddy grabbed for his cell phone and dialed Paul’s home number. Paul’s wife answered.

  “Where’s Marc?”

  “Freddy, is that you? Is everything okay?”

  “Where’s Marc? I need to know.”

  “He’s in school.”

  “How did he get there?”

  “Is everything okay? You’re frightening me. He walked, like he always does.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “His school uniform. Why?”

  “What’s the number of the school?”

  “It’s 555-8824. Tell me, is Marc okay? Did anything happen?”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  Freddy dialed the number, but Paul grabbed the cell phone from him. A nun answered, “Sancta Maria School.”

  Paul’s voice shook as he spoke. “This is Paul Prandus. Did my son make it to school today?”

  “I’ll check, Mr. Prandus,” the nun replied.

  As Paul and Freddy waited, Freddy looked back at the TV screen. He saw Paul’s brother, Peter, along with Peter’s daughter, being shot to death. Then he saw Paul—the very same Paul who was standing two feet away from him—being immolated in his burning car.

  “Paul, look!” Freddy shouted. “It’s a fake. The whole thing is a fake.”

  Paul tried to listen to the nun at the other end of the phone line. Over Freddy’s yelling, the nun assured him that Marc was playing at recess and seemed fine.

  Paul insisted that the nun get Marc to the phone. While Paul waited, Freddy rewound the tape to show Paul the video of his own death. Paul watched in shock as he saw himself walking out of the police station. That was real. He had been there to give them a missing persons report on his father. But the explosion never happened. The video was a fake.

  “Hi, Daddy. Is everything okay? You never call me at school.” The voice at the other end of the phone was Marc’s.

  “Thank God, Marc, you’re okay. I’ll explain later. Please call Mom and tell her you’re okay. Thanks.”

  Paul and Freddy rewound the tape and watched it through from the beginning. Paul phoned his brother and confirmed that everyone was fine.

  The perversity of what had been done to his father was beginning to sink in. Paul didn’t have to imagine what his father must have been put through; he himself had just experienced it—if only for a few moments. Nothing could be worse than seeing your own son, or grandson, being killed before your very eyes, while you watch helplessly, unable to do anything. It was the worst form of torture, worse than any physical pain.

  Paul had then experienced the relief of learning that his son, whom he thought dead, was actually alive. Nothing could be better. To Paul it was like a resurrection, a rebirth. In a matter of minutes he had visited hell and heaven. Now he was back on earth, looking at the body of his dead father.

  Marcelus Prandus had experienced only the horror of seeing his loved ones killed. He had never learned that they were actually alive. He had not experienced the rebirth, the resurrection. He had been to hell, never to return.

  “Your father died of poisoning, Paul, probably cyanide,” Freddy said as he examined the body.

  Paul was hardly listening. The veins on his neck bulged. His face was red with anger. His entire body strained against his suit. He cursed—confused, broken half curses in an uncontrolled burst. Then he threatened: “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch who did this.”

  “Paul, come here, you’ve got to look at this,” Freddy said, ignoring Paul’s ravings and threats and holding up the right hand of the dead man.

  Paul knelt next to his father’s body and looked at the rigid thumb of his father’s hand as Freddy touched his own forefinger to it and then tasted the powdery substance he had lifted from the dead man’s thumb. “Cyanide,” Freddy announced. “Smell it. It smells like bitter almonds.”

  “What are you telling me?” Paul demanded.

  “It was self-administered. He took the cyanide himself. It was suicide, Paul. At least in form. Your father took the pill in his own fingers and swallowed it.”

  “No way. Not Papa. He didn’t believe in suicide. Ordered us not to turn off any machines. Papa believed in miracles. God would decide when his time had come. People who commit suicide go to hell. Not my papa. He wouldn’t have,” Paul insisted, his voice rising.

  “That’s why I said it was suicide in form only. Whoever did this probably made him take that pill.”

  “No one could have made him. What did they do—hold a gun to his head? He would have fought back, resisted. No one could have forced him to take that pill.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t physical force,” said Freddy. “It may have been psychological coercion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whoever did this is a manipulative monster. He convinced your father that he had actually killed your whole family. He made it impossible for your father to endure the suffering. The only way he could end it was—”

  “That’s why Papa took the poison,” Paul interrupted. “He couldn’t bear to remain alive knowing we had all been killed. I can understand that, I saw the video of Marc. What a horrible way to die.” Paul put his head in his hands. “I’ll kill whoever did this. I’ll break his fucking neck.”

  “If you’re right, then your father was murdered. By making him believe he killed your family, he murdered your dad. You’re not going to have to kill him. The state will punish him—if we can find him.”

  “If they don’t, I will. This bastard can’t be allowed to get away with what he did.”

  Chapter 29

  MAX’S RETURN

  “Max, you’re back! Thank God. Rendi and I were worried sick,” Abe cried, ushering his friend into the living room. “You look disheveled. Your shoes are full of mud. Where have you been?” he demanded. Without waiting for an answer, he continued, “I hope you haven’t done anything stupid.”

  “I have done something terrible, at least in terms of the law,” Max said as he wiped his shoes and walked into Abe’s home. Max was alone, having dropped Danielle at her house.

  “What are you ta
lking about? What did you do?”

  “Can I talk to you as my lawyer?”

  “Of course. Sit down.”

  “I killed Marcelus Prandus.”

  “Oh, shit, no,” Abe said, the color draining from his face. “Why did you do such a stupid thing? He wasn’t worth it. Now you’re going to go to prison.”

  “I had no choice,” Max replied with a stoic look. “It was either him or me. If he had gotten away with what he did to my family, I think I would have killed myself.”

  “A novel claim of self-defense, but I’m afraid it won’t work,” Abe said, shifting to his lawyer’s mode. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Well actually, Prandus killed himself.”

  “That’s good. Go on.”

  “But I fooled him into doing it.”

  “What are you talking about? Stop with the riddles. Give it to me straight if you want me to help you.”

  “All right, I’ll start at the beginning, but I need one assurance.”

  “Whatever you need. What is it?”

  “Someone else helped me. I need to know that if I tell you about that person, you will not tell the authorities.”

  “I can’t tell the authorities anything you tell me—about yourself or anyone else—unless it involves a future crime.”

  “This is about the past.”

  “Fine. Then you have my assurance. Go ahead.”

  “When I found out about Sarah Chava, I wanted to kill Marcelus Prandus’s entire family.”

  “Holy shit, Max. You didn’t kill anyone else, did you?”

  “No, but I wanted to.”

  “Wanting to is not a crime. I’ve wanted to kill about a dozen prosecutors and judges, not to mention Joe Campbell.”

  “I told Danielle Grant what I wanted to do.”

  “Who is Danielle Grant?”

  “A colleague of mine at the divinity school.”

  “Another professor! Harvard’s going to have a crimson shit fit.”

  “She did nothing wrong. Only I am to blame. It was my decision. She actually talked me out of killing the entire Prandus family.”

  “You never could have done it. What are we talking about there? Kids?”

  “I almost killed Prandus’s eight-year-old grandson.”

  “What do you mean, ‘almost killed’? Did you do any more than just think about it?”

  “I drove my car to where he was crossing the street and aimed it at him.”

  “Tell me you didn’t hit him,” Abe implored. “Please?”

  “It was the morning after you told me about Sarah Chava. I drove to Salem and parked near the point where I had once before rehearsed killing Marc Prandus. My actions seemed almost automatic, as if programmed by some computer. At precisely the time he had earlier appeared, Marc Prandus materialized out of the morning fog. He was alone, with his baseball glove and ball. I pressed down on the accelerator and aimed the car at the child as he was crossing the intersection.”

  “Oh, my God, Max.”

  “It all happened so quickly, like in a dream. But it is crystal clear to me now.”

  “What? What’s clear to you? Tell me.”

  “As the car lurched toward Marcelus Prandus’s grandchild, my mind returned to the Ponary Woods. The two scenes merged. The woods of Ponary and the crossing in Salem, Massachusetts, became one as I pressed on the accelerator. In my mind’s eye, I was about to kill Marcelus Prandus before Prandus could shoot my family. Then the blurred image in my mind became clearer. Suddenly it was I who was Marcelus Prandus. Little Marc Prandus was my son, Efraim. I tried to push these images out of my mind as my foot pressed the accelerator toward the floor.”

  “Did the kid see the car coming toward him?”

  “Yes, he did. I could see a look of panic come deep from within his eyes. The child could do nothing. I could no longer control my leg. The accelerator was on the floor. The images refused to go away. I was an instant away from becoming Marcelus Prandus, killer of an innocent child. Prandus killed children because of who their ancestors were. I, too, was killing a child because of who his ancestor was.”

  Max stopped, put his head in his hands, and began to sob. Then he looked up and continued. “Abe, I was about to engage in what the Nazis called Sippenhaft—punishment of kin. A voice in my head screamed, No!

  “I now understood—by my own standards of justice—how wrong it was to take revenge against Marcelus Prandus by murdering his grandchild. It could not be allowed to end that way.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “The only thing I could. I jerked the steering wheel sharply to the right, crashing my Volvo into a barrier. The air bag exploded in my face. I drove away before anyone could get my license number and somehow made it home, where I fell into a semiconscious stupor.”

  “Okay. So you couldn’t kill the kid. That doesn’t surprise me. How did you get Prandus to kill himself? I need to know all the details.”

  “The next morning Danielle Grant arrived at my house, and I told her that I was going to kill the entire Prandus family. She told me she had a better idea. She began by explaining that the object is to punish Marcelus Prandus for killing my family without killing his family. Then she said something I will never forget.” Max paused and then continued. “She said that the ‘children must be killed, but they must not die.’ ”

  “What the hell does that mean? It sounds like gibberish.”

  “That is what I thought at first. I told her it was impossible, but she insisted that she could show me that it was possible. The next day, she took me to an exhibit by a video artist named Bill Viola at the Contemporary Art Museum. Danielle showed me a video of a man being consumed by fire. He wasn’t actually being burned, but it was completely realistic. Viola did it by some kind of morphing or computer trick. I confess to not understanding it, but it looked completely realistic. Danielle then took me to her studio—she also dabbles in computer video art—and she showed me a video she herself had prepared.”

  “It sounds like she was pretty deeply involved in planning whatever it is you did. Why?”

  “It is complicated, Abe. She was a victim, too. She understood my need for revenge.”

  “Okay. That’s not important now. What is important is what you both did. Tell me what kind of a video she showed you.”

  “It was like a cartoon. Very rough. She had stayed up all night putting it together. She called it a storyboard. She had drawn an old man looking out a window as a child crosses the street and is hit by a car.”

  “How the hell did she find out about your accident?”

  “She told me it didn’t take much to figure that one out, especially after she saw my dented car.”

  “What else was on her video?”

  “Some people are shot or blown up until everyone lies dead in front of the old man. The old man’s smile turns to a gasp as he realizes that his entire family has just been slaughtered before his eyes. The storyboard ends with the old man tearing at his hair and shrieking like a man who has just suffered the greatest loss imaginable.”

  “Yeah, but that was a cartoon. Nobody but another cartoon character would be fooled by a cartoon.”

  “Danielle told me that with the right video footage of the Prandus family, she could make it look like a Bill Viola finished product.”

  “Wouldn’t Prandus know that the video had been faked?”

  “Prandus’s generation—my generation—knows nothing about this newfangled stuff. She assured me that he would be fooled by it—if we took the next step.”

  “What step is that? I don’t think I’m going to like this,” Abe said, pacing around the room.

  “We would have to kidnap Prandus and keep him away from phones, newspapers, and TV sets,” Max replied with the enthusiasm of an inventor.

  “Why couldn’t you just hold him for a while, show him the video, let him suffer, and then release him?”

  “No, no, Abe. That would have been worse than doing nothing at all. If he wer
e to learn that his family was still alive, he would die joyously, with an even greater appreciation of his family and their life. He would have defeated me—again. I could not let that happen.”

  “Wouldn’t Prandus realize that a man like you could never murder an entire family of innocent people?”

  “No, that is the beauty of the plan. It came naturally to him to believe that I could do to his family exactly what he did to mine. He had to believe that all men were capable of doing what he did. That’s how he lived with himself. Had he been a just man, he might have understood that I could never do what he did—though I actually came close to doing it. He was not a just man. He did not think like a just man.”

  Abe paced around the room, deep in thought. Then he stopped and looked at Max. “I don’t know what to say, Max. The friend part of me is in absolute awe over what you managed to pull off. They say that justice must be seen to be done. Well, Marcelus Prandus saw it done, even though it was only virtual justice.”

  “There was nothing virtual about it in Prandus’s mind. It was the most real thing he ever saw,” Max said.

  Abe shook his head. “The lawyer part of me is scared out of my wits that you and that Danielle woman are going to prison for a long time. How did Danielle come up with such an incredible plan?”

  “She found it in Maimonides—the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher. She called it the ‘Maimonidean solution.’ ”

  “Maimonides knew about videos?”

  “No, but he knew more about the Bible than anyone in his generation. He wrote brilliant commentaries, including one on the Book of Job. Do you remember the story of Job?”

  “Only that God allows Satan to test Job by killing all of his children.”

  “Right. And Maimonides argued in his commentary that God could not have actually allowed Satan to kill Job’s innocent children in order to test Job. That would have been unjust.”

  “The story says he did just that,” Abe interjected.

  “Yes, but Maimonides interprets the story in an interesting way. He says that God only allowed Satan to make the children disappear—Satan put them in a cave—so that Job would believe they had been killed. They were actually still alive. God wanted to see how Job would react to learning that his children had died. God didn’t actually allow Satan to kill them. When Job passed the test, his children reappeared.”