Lawyers in Hell

by Morris, Janet

  Benet was at the camera, under the hood, fiddling.

  Roger asked, “General Benet, are you ready?”

  “Almost,” replied That Fucking Benet. “This is not the same model of camera I trained on. However, I have focus, I think. And flash powder.”

  Benet fumbled with the plate, reached back under the hood, and slid stuff around. He poured a measure of powder over what looked like a long match, and held it aloft.

  “You may proceed, Howard,” Benet told Roger.

  Mathew Brady shut his eyes and started praying: “Our Father, who art in heaven...”

  Prayer to heaven: both touching and ridiculous. Praying to those Above could do no good here, under the rufous vault of hell.

  Tears filled Roger’s eyes.

  Brady stopped praying only when McCarthy made dismissive noises: “Great act.”

  Roger raised the sword. Its keen edge glittered in the baleful light of Paradise.

  He must ensure his swing was true: drop his arm; snapped his wrist; and the blade should cut cleanly through Brady’s neck.

  Benet pulled the lens cap and tugged the string that ignited the powder. The flash lit the landscape and stinking sulphur filled the air.

  Roger dropped his arm convulsively, making sure to keep his eyes open, and snapped his wrist.

  The saber cut between Brady’s skull and two protruding vertebrae at his shoulders, shearing through cleanly, and struck the rock underneath.

  McCarthy snapped, “Damn you, Howard, don’t nick that sword.”

  Staring at the crimson fountain splashing out of Brady’s neck, Roger decided he’d had enough.

  He’d accept a court-martial. First, he had to earn one.

  Roger turned and thrust, as he’d learned in fencing class at Harvard, long ago. The saber didn’t respond like a foil but, with no opposing blade, it worked well enough.

  The way the smug little McCarthy grunted and convulsed as the saber pierced his guts was most satisfying. A half turn to the right caused McCarthy’s eyes to bug out and dropped the little commie-hunter to his knees.

  Seeing McCarthy kneeling there made any pending punishment worth the price.

  Roger withdrew his blade, raised the saber again, and swung a second time.

  McCarthy’s head tumbled onto the rocks.

  Roger stepped back to await further hellish torment. Instead, That Fucking Benet said, “Brilliant, Mister Howard. What could be more honest than monomaniacal purpose? But please do me one favor.”

  Roger’s brain spun as he tried to parse the unexpected praise. “Yes, sir?”

  “Please clean my sword. Thoroughly.”

  Check and Mate

  by

  Bradley H. Sinor

  “For God’s sake, John, please stop and sit down!” said Lieserl Einstein to John Adams. Wearing a bright red and yellow Hawaiian shirt, the former American president paced back and forth before his secretary like a cartoon lion in a cage.

  Before John Adams could say or do anything in response, thunder rumbled throughout his small office on the Acme Building’s twelfth floor in one of New Hell’s low-rent neighborhoods.

  For a few seconds everything shook, knocking half the contents of Adam’s desk onto the floor. He had to grab the corner of his high-backed chair to keep from falling.

  A few seconds later, the rumbling and tremors stopped, leaving the mess surrounding Adams as the only indication that the event had not been illusory.

  “Madam, please don’t use the ‘G’ word. I can do without the thunder and the shaking building. Haven’t you learned by now there are some words that you really shouldn’t say? After all, we are in hell.”

  “Sorry, but sometimes, Mister Adams, your infernal pacing drives me crazy,” Lieserl replied.

  Adams scoffed. Pacing was the way he organized his thoughts; it had been his habit since he was a young boy. Sitting quietly was no part of his nature; a fact he had long since accepted.

  A tall woman, thin and dark-haired, Lieserl hadn’t grabbed anything to keep her balance. When the walls and floor stopped shaking, she swept a bit of plaster from her tweed skirt, brushed a few loose hairs back into place, looked around the room and shook her head. “I hope you’re not expecting me to straighten up,” she said. “Even if I do, you’ll have it trashed again within a fortnight.”

  According to Lieserl, most lawyers’ offices were disorderly at the best of times. Adams had to admit, looking around at the tumbled piles of law books, papers and empty fast-food containers, that Lieserl was probably right.

  If his long-suffering wife, Abigail, saw this office, Adams was certain that she’d give him a thorough tongue-lashing. But she couldn’t: Abigail wasn’t among hell’s residents. That fact gave him some solace, although he missed her terribly.

  “Are you sure, Madam Lieserl, that you were not sitting in Congress in the summer of ’Seventy-six? With your attitude you would have been right at home,” Adams told his secretary.

  He went to the sideboard where the coffee pot remained untouched, picked up an insulated mug and filled it with three fingers of tasteless brown liquid.

  “Ja, ja … I’m sure your beloved Declaration of Independence would have had an entirely different tone had you allowed women to participate,” she said.

  “I’m sure it would have,” he said, stone still, stifling his inclination to march back and forth before his desk. “So what did you come in here for?”

  “To go over your schedule with you.” Lieserl set down her steno book and pulled out her small hellpad, rapidly riffling through several screens.

  “Very well.” Adams nodded and finished his coffee in a two quick swallows. Thankfully, it had not hardened to a solid in his cup: on some days, his coffee set like mortar, but not on others; the problem was, you didn’t know until the cup was in your hand.

  One lesson he’d learned since awakening on the Undertaker’s table was not to be daunted by small torments. Unpredictable food and drink were minor annoyances in New Hell’s array of punishments befitting the sinners. Another lesson was that keeping to a schedule was part of making a living as a lawyer, whether the lawyer was a soul damned in hell or in the land of the living. Since completing his obligatory internship at the Hall of Injustice and opening his own office, Adams had developed a solo practice substantial enough that several of the bigger firms in New Hell had offered him partner status. He had declined each in turn.

  Lieserl began his morning update: “We received word that your meeting with Mister James regarding the train robbery charges has been postponed. You still need to prepare a brief on the suit between Fine and Howard. And also you had a call from Mister Marx wanting to know if you would visit him and his brothers next Moansday.”

  Adams reached down and pawed through the litter on the floor until he found his long-stemmed pipe, apparently undamaged. He cleaned the bowl, refilled it from a tobacco pouch pulled from his desk drawer, and then struck a match across the bottom of his shoe.

  “All right,” said Adams, once the tobacco was burning. “Set up an appointment with Jesse for the first of the week. Let Harpo know that I will be happy to visit with him and his brothers: they always have the best contraband. As for the Howard versus Fine matter, that can wait. I do need you to double check when Cardozo is lecturing at the Hall of Injustice. I need to attend.”

  Lieserl rolled her eyes. “Given that you’ve cleared your day’s schedule, as usual, will you have time to talk to a potential client?”

  Adams looked down at his red and yellow Hawaiian shirt. It was relatively unwrinkled, though stained just below the pocket. Definitely not the garb in which to meet a new client.

  “Please tell me that this isn’t another pro-bono case that those pencil pushers over at the Hall of Injustice parcel out with no rhyme or reason.”

  “Nein,” Lieserl said. “This gentleman carried a letter of introduction from a Captain Thomas Preston.”

  Thomas Preston: a name that Adams had not heard in a
very long time. Adams had defended Preston and his men in the matter that history and the propagandists of the Colonies called “the Boston Massacre.” Winning the soldiers’ acquittal on charges of murder had been one of Adam’s proudest moments, not just personally, but for the legal system of the emerging nation.

  Lieserl passed an envelope to Adams. Inside was a single sheet of letter paper on which were a half-dozen lines written in a formal and accomplished hand:

  My Dear Mr. Adams:

  I hope this finds you doing well. I would like to present my friend Aleister Crowley, and beg the favor of your consideration of taking on his case. While Aleister and I have disagreed on many things during the several years I have known him, he has become a trusted friend, although I will warn you to be wary should you face him across a chess board.

  I remain, sir,

  Thomas Preston, Captain, the army of King George III (ret.)

  “So, what do you know of this Crowley fellow, Lieserl? The name is vaguely familiar, but I cannot place it.” Still holding Preston’s letter, Adams walked over to his office window with its view of the roof and buildings nearby, staring out at New Hell’s urban dinginess and wishing for the green cleanliness of life in Braintree. “Tell me about him.”

  “Aleister Crowley? An infamous charlatan, an occultist – self-proclaimed as the ‘wickedest man in the world’ and the ‘Beast Six Six Six.’ He formed the Thelemite church and founded the Abbey of Thelema. He was a man of immoral desire, a racist and a spy for the British government. A writer of demoniacal pretensions, a self-proclaimed master of the black arts. Even in Switzerland, he was one not talked about in polite company. Notorious, not quite in the same way you were, Mister Adams. He claimed to be the devil made human or something like that. Friends of my adopted mother talked about him also being a well-known mountain climber. More than that, I don’t recall,” she said.

  “Thank you, Lieserl. You are a font of knowledge. Please bring the gentleman in.”

  Adams tried to imagine why Preston would have recommended this client to him and how such a person as Lieserl described might look. Dissolute? Greasy? Sadistic? Mad? No use in theorizing without evidence.

  The man who walked in his office door fit none of his expectations. Crowley appeared young, like a man in his mid-twenties. He wore a neatly-tailored Edwardian-style suit and nervously twisted a heavy signet ring, covered in what appeared to be Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Clean. Elegant. Aristocratic. Even were he none of these, John Adams could condemn no damned soul for their sartorial choices: when he was not due to appear in court or had no social obligations, he wore his Hawaiian print shirts. “Please be seated, Mister Crowley,” said Adams.”

  “Thank you, no sir,” said Crowley. “Let us ask no trivial favors from the lords of hell.”

  “Very well,” nodded Adams as Lieserl slipped quietly from the office. “Tell me what brings you here. I’m hoping this has nothing to do with your ‘church.’ I prefer to stick to legal issues rather than spiritual ones.”

  “Of course, sir, and you are known as a man who gets directly to the point. I’ve always approved of that attitude,” said Crowley. “Are you familiar with the Demon’s Gambit chess club?”

  While Adams had always enjoyed a good game of chess, he had never pursued it competitively. Most of the chess clubs he had been familiar with during his life had been nothing more than fronts for political debating societies.

  “I may have heard mention of such a club. May I make the assumption that you are a member?”

  “Indeed. The Demon’s Gambit is hell’s premier chess club; it boasts one of underworld’s the largest libraries on the subject,” said Crowley. “I come to you today concerning events following a recent tournament that the club hosted. I won that tournament without a terrific amount of difficulty, as I have won a number of Demon’s Gambit tournaments. A few days ago I received a private, and anonymous, message via DisgraceBook accusing me of cheating during the tournament and suggesting I resign from the club or face disgrace.”

  Adams arched an eyebrow at his potential client. In his long life he had heard of card cheats, billiards cheats, business cheats and spousal cheats, but never chess cheats

  “How does one cheat at chess, Mister Crowley?”

  “It is a question that I have been racking my brain to answer, as well,” Crowley said. “I have no idea, and I’m the one who is being accused of cheating. I thought perhaps it was some sort of joke and tried to track down the person who had sent the message. But I could not identify the sender of the message, even after enlisting the services of the two best computer specialists I could find. I even consulted Awaiss.”

  “And this ‘Awaiss’ is?” asked Adams.

  Crowley let out a sigh. “A … demon. I once thought he was an angelic collaborator on my book Liber AL vel Legis, ‘The Book of the Law,’ but since my arrival in hell I have learned otherwise. Awaiss refused to help, saying it is up to me,” chuckled Crowley. “Since this whole matter began I have ranged between moments of utter rage and extreme frustration. The only way I can imagine one cheating at chess would be through the use of magic. However, if I were to use magic to influence the games and were caught, I would be expelled as per the club bylaws, which I helped to draft.”

  If there was one thing that Adams had learned in politics both before and after the American Revolution, it was how to read people. Understand their feelings on something and you are that much closer to understanding their motivations. Here was the man who had called himself the wickedest man in the world and the Beast 666, and he was afraid of being expelled from his chess club.

  “I must ask the obvious question,” said Adams.

  “Let me anticipate you, Mister Adams, and tell you, on my honor, that I did not cheat. Although it took all my strength to keep from it,” said Crowley.

  “You first said that you have no idea how to cheat at chess except through the use of magic. Now you say it took all your strength to keep you from it. So you do know how to cheat at chess using magical or occult means, is that it?”

  “Three times during the tournament I felt a compulsion to cast a spell that would cause my opponent to be confused. It would have been a minor compulsion, an easy spell, but I fought off the urge and do not know its origin,” said Crowley. “But, one would deem such a spell cast on one’s opponent to be cheating at chess.”

  “Have there been additional incidents … incidents of the compulsion to cheat?” Adams asked. “Are you now saying that you may be guilty in theory and practice of cheating at chess through magic at various times and someone else knows it?”

  “Incidents? Not of my being subject to a compulsion to cheat, no; nor have I used magic to gain an advantage over an opponent. But I have found broken chess pieces, a knight and a pawn, in places in my home where they could not have been and where no one but me enters. Each chess piece was jaggedly broken in two. Then, this morning, I found this when I went for a walk.” Crowley produced a chess piece, a black king, wrapped in his handkerchief, broken in two pieces with a note saying, ‘Cheat again and this is what will happen to you.’

  “I’d say someone was trying to frighten you,” said Adams. “But why seek out a lawyer? I can deal with matters legal, but not investigative. Investigation is an activity which I do not undertake. I can refer you to an excellent agency down the street, run by my friend, Dashiell Hammett.”

  Crowley shook his head. He had a determined look, the sort that Adams remembered seeing on Ben Franklin’s face from time to time. This Crowley had a plan and was determined to follow it through.

  “I was once told that the best way to deal with a blackmailer is to go public. My club is sponsoring a major chess tournament in a few days. Many dignitaries will be present, not just my fellow members. I would like you present as my attorney and as a witness to the fact that I will not cheat. If anyone should accuse me of cheating, I want you ready to file suit against them at once,” said Crowley.


  Adams began to laugh. Crowley’s request was just so bizarre that it intrigued him. He had always savored a challenge, whether in court or politics.

  “Very well, Mister Crowley, I cannot promise you that I will be successful, but I can promise you will have my best efforts,” he told the magician.

  *

  The huge cast-iron clock above the bar struck nine as Adams stood in the doorway and surveyed the current crop of customers.

  For a watering hole merely three blocks from the Hall of Injustice and frequented by lawyers, the Hellegality Bar was small and intimate.

  Operated by a man known in life as Big Bill Jansen, the place made Adams nostalgic for several taverns he’d frequented in Philadelphia and Boston. Real work got done in places like this. He and Jefferson had engaged in spirited debates in such taverns.

  A dozen acquaintances sat at tables and at the bar, nursing undrinkable concoctions, nostalgic for pretzels and beer, hell’s unobtanium. The Hellegality offered poor substitutes for either.

  “Well, if it isn’t the world renowned Mister A,” said Jansen from behind the bar. “Started any riots lately?”

  “William, William, how often must I remind you, it was my cousin Samuel who was the rabble-rouser? I just used his bravado to the advantage of my country.” Adams smiled.

  He had this same conversation with Jansen every time he visited here. “I’ll have a stout, William. Would Walter Gibson, the pulp writer, be here this evening?” The stout was sour, the beer was stale, and the food here could crack your teeth with one bite.

  Jansen drew Adams his drink, stale when it hit the air. “You’ll find him over in the corner, giving a couple of new arrivals lessons in the finer points of cards.”

  Adams sighted the table that Jansen had indicated. Two men in military fatigues, probably from one of Caesar’s legions, sat opposite a third man, his back to the wall.

  This third man, Walter Gibson, was the dealer: curly-haired, with a forever babyish face. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. On the table between the dealer and the two soldiers were three cards, face down, that he moved around and around after having held up the Queen of Hearts for their perusal. When he was finished, the three cards were in the center of the table.