The spectators laughed appreciatively at the Phoenician’s joke. Even the judge smiled, but when he banged his gavel to restore order all he did was repeat that there was no question of bail.
Main was undeterred. He demanded an explanation of the fair man. He asked if under Egyptian law tomb robbers were excluded from bail.
A guard moved toward him, but the judge waved him off. “Under Egyptian law, no,” he said.
“Are there precedents, then, for such an exclusion?”
“There are no precedents, Mr. Main, because until last night no tomb robbers had ever been apprehended.” Now the judge paused. “But since we’re on the subject of precedents I would remind you that no precedent ever had a precedent, and that all precedents arise from the oily rags and scraps of tinder condition, law’s and experience’s spontaneous combustion.”
The Phoenician didn’t wait for the implication of this to register with the crowd. “Does the State have evidence that Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp have been linked with other tomb robberies?” he asked crisply.
“None that has been presented to us.”
His next question was dangerous, for he knew the true state of affairs. Hoping that the Egyptians didn’t, however, he decided to ask it. “Are these men wanted for other offenses?”
“Not to our knowledge.”
“Well then, may we not assume that this is a first offense and that the case is much as I presented it and these two much as I described them—amateurs whose ambitions exceeded their capabilities? I don’t mean to prejudice the prosecution’s case. Indeed, as the police report states, I was there, an eyewitness. I saw it all and fully expect to be subpoenaed by the prosecution to give my evidence. I intend to go even further.” He looked around the hearing room, at the judge, the spectators, and finally directly at Oyp and Glyp themselves. “I shall this day present myself to the police, voluntarily to assist them in their inquiries. I shall do this,” he pronounced softly, “but under sworn testimony I shall also feel compelled to reveal what is already known to your investigators—that these two did not even bother to bring the proper equipment with them, that they had few tools and those they had massively inadequate to their undertaking. Where was their block and tackle? Where were their drills and blasting caps?
“In view of all this—their amateur status, their faulty preparation and makeshift maneuver, the fact that it was a first offense, that no one was physically harmed, that the suspects were unarmed, that they did not resist arrest, the failure of the State to establish agency or even to locate possible receivers, and the fact that the actual damage they caused to property in dollars and cents (I’m reasoning that the artisans who will be responsible for restoring the objets d’art are slaves) barely manages to meet the legal definition of felony, and finally the all-important admission by the court that there is nothing in either Egyptian statute or custom which would justify the withholding of bond in this case—in view of all this, I respectfully request that the court fix an appropriate bond forthwith.”
The judge glared at him, but when he spoke he was as soft-spoken as before. “Mr. Main,” he said patiently, “have you any idea of what bail, if I should agree to set it, would have to be in this case?”
“I have already indicated that I understand it would be high.”
“Yes. It would.”
“I’ll pay it.”
“Will you? Whatever the omissions in our law, there is a statute that is relatively specific in these circumstances.”
“Your Honor?”
“I will give you the exact wording of the statute…Here, this is the pertinent language, I think…blah blah de dum blah de dum…Oh, yes: ‘that the forfeiture be equivalent in value to the value of the intended theft.’ ”
The Phoenician whistled.
“Ignoring the worth of the treasures that were undisturbed in the tomb and fixing a value only on those objects found on the prisoners’ persons or waiting to be picked up by them in the antechamber, that would come to—well, I haven’t the exact figures, but I should think in the neighborhood of, oh, say twenty billion dollars. That’s just a ball park estimate.”
“I’ll raise it,” Main rasped. He didn’t see how but he would. People were in debt to him for favors—the nigger, Billy Basket (who only this morning had fallen all over him trying to thank him for going his bond), that other one, the guy who worked in his cousin’s car wash. It would only be for a short while. He would stay with Oyp and Glyp. He would hire an army to stay with them. It was true that the Mafia was down on him right now, but there were others, retired guards and nightwatchmen in Cincinnati who would help him baby-sit the two of them. Oyp’s and Glyp’s freedom would be nominal only, but it was necessary that he buy it for them. “I’ll raise it,” he repeated.
“Has it occurred to you that your fees alone would cost Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp two thousand million dollars? That such a figure might be prohibitive for them?”
“There’s two of them,” Main shouted, “it’s only a thousand million apiece!”
“The police report lists them as indigents,” the judge said calmly.
The Phoenician glared at the two. Tinhorns, he thought. Cheap no god fucking damn good chiselers, lousy pikers. He swallowed hard. “A personal favor,” he said. “It’s on the cuff. I waive my fee.”
“There is no question of bail,” the judge said.
“Why?” Main demanded. “Nothing in the statutes prevents it.”
“There are laws and there are laws,” the judge said, “crimes and crimes. Degrees of guilt like figures on thermometers. There are acts which so far exceed the permissible that to define them in statutes would be to register them in the imagination. And we’re talking now of legislators who would have to write these laws, who would subject them to discussion and argument, with all its qualification and demurrer and contingency. We’re talking of what would, ideally, occur to the best of men. To acknowledge that the best of men, thinking ideally and plotting academically, platonically and picturesquely, could conceive of these actions, would be to admit that ordinary men, with none of the superior man’s built-in checks and balances of the heart and mind, could do the same, opening up the unthinkable to refinements, twists, debasing the depraved and declining the corrupt like a verb wheel of evil, some irregularized grammar of the monstrous that would turn the unspeakable into only a sort of French. And what of men who are not ordinary? Who live below the timberline of grace? What of bad men? What of the vicious, of villains, the ugly customer and the mad-dog killer? What of them? What perversions of the senators’ only abstract paradigm of evil would they be capable of? What argot and babble and moral solecism and sheer bone-breaking noise? What’s unthinkable requires no legislation, eschews statute and repudiates law. There’s no question of bail.”
“Ostriches,” Main shouted. “You’re ostriches. You bury your Pharaohs in the sand with their eggs.”
“How can the unthinkable be defined?” the judge asked sincerely.
“Unthinkable? What’s unthinkable? How many Pharaohs have died? Fifty? A hundred? Their tombs are like slums. Everywhere busted windows and the plumbing ripped out to get cash to buy dope. Everywhere the rats nibble the masterpieces for the lead in the paint. The doors are broke down and the stairs are missing, the furniture’s askew and what’s too heavy to carry gets broken up. And every generation the neighborhood changing and every dynasty the desert a little less safe at night. Good God, there aren’t any playgrounds, kids play wall ball on the Pyramids, write Fuck on the Sphinx. What’s unthinkable? Bond these men. What’s unthinkable?”
“For a crime like theirs?” the judge growled. “Not just breakers and enterers but ghouls, and not just ghouls but ghouls against the state, and not just ghouls against the state but ghouls against God. Handling His things, picking and choosing among His leftovers like junkmen. Derelicts who’ve never seen the inside of a museum assigning value to God’s wardrobe and effects, fingering His empty garments, trying them on. ‘Take th
is, not that, these, not those. How do you think I look in this, Oyp?’ ‘Not bad, Glyp. Rakish, in fact.’ Oyp had Pharaoh’s heart in his pocket.”
“I told you, Oyp!” Glyp shouted. “I told you not to do that!”
“They siphoned His juices like there was gas rationing. They wiped it up from the floor using His cloth-of-gold as if it was toilet paper. They slashed bandages and let in air, diluting the natron. A dozen embalmers worked an entire season preparing His soil, polishing His seed to last an eternity. They divoted His course with their knives and crowbars and banged His sarcophagus like boys do drums.”
Yes, thinks Main, what a bond this would make! What a feather in my cap!
“They set His platform on fire and tilted it like cheats at pinball. They clumsied His corpse and sat on His throne like Weathermen in an occupied boardroom. They used his Double familiarly and snatched His crook and filched His flail. And not just ghouls against God who goosed and grab-assed above their station, but who stoppered His cycle, who condemned God not even to Hell but to nothingness, who exiled Him, annihilating His soul and sending it to graze in no man’s land beyond the twelve-mile limit. Bond them? Bond them?”
“There’s something else,” the Phoenician says. “There’s something else, though.”
“Please,” the judge says, “there can be no bail in this case.”
“They’re wanted in another state.”
“Please?”
“They’re wanted in Ohio.” He produces the warrant which he always carries and hands it to a bailiff who brings it to the bench.
The judge examines it. “There can be no bond,” he says.
“They’re fugitives,” Main shouts. “I’ve been hunting them for years.”
“No bond.”
“They got away from me. They’re the only ones who ever did.”
“No bond. Bond is refused.” ,
“It couldn’t happen again,” Main pleads.
“Bond is refused!” The judge bangs his gavel, and the Phoenician knows the hearing is over. Then the judge makes an astonishing statement. He instructs the guards to release the prisoners. If there are crimes, he says, that are so unthinkable that no laws can proscribe them, then they must be of such magnitude that no punishment can redress them. Oyp and Glyp were free to go.
The Phoenician trembled. The fugitives were fugitives still, fugitives once from his scrutiny and control, then from his intercession, and now from earth itself. Fugitives from the bullying freedom he needed to give them who till now could stand between the law and its violators, having that power vouchsafed to him, the power to middleman, to doodle people’s destiny; the power, like a natural right, to put killers back on the streets and return the lunatics to their neighborhoods; the good power to loose the terrible, to grant freedom where he felt it was due, more magisterial than a king, controlling the sluices and locks of ordinary life, adjusting at whim the levels and proportions of guilt to innocence, poisoning the streets with possibility. But Oyp and Glyp were fugitives from fugitiveness itself, and because they were, there were limits to his power and his own precious freedom.
He groaned in his bed, chewed a piece of his pillowcase, twisted in his smooth hotel sheets, moaned, objected, knew helplessness, awoke and was embarrassed to discover that his dream was not just a dream but a wet dream. And sure enough, when he switched on his bedside lamp and looked, there was his cobra cock and, still spilling from it, the white sweet venom of his come.
He did not speculate about the dream’s meaning. He’d lived with its meaning for years, since his hair had thinned and his belly bloomed, since his legs had begun to go and his reflexes climb down from true, since his aches and since his pains and his BM’s became irregular and he could see into the stream of his weakened piss. Not that death held any particular horror for him, nor the cessation of his personality seem an offense against Nature. Indeed, he might quite welcome that. He was sick of his slick contempt, his ability to win which had never left him, his knack of topping the other guy. It took a dream to beat him, and even then he was the dreamer, the judge no more than dummy to his ventriloquist. But the other thing, the other thing. Curiosity was killing the cat. Oyp and Glyp were his only failures, but Oyp and Glyp in life were as they had been in his dream: punks, losers. Their collective bond—this was something which surprised him whenever he remembered it, or contemplated one of those expensive safaris which would take him across the country or out of it when a rumor ripened and fell his way—had been less than eleven hundred dollars. Not masterminds, not arch criminals, just ordinary car thieves. Probably they were already dead, or living through an anonymity that was as close to death as one could come. Split up by now almost certainly, gone their separate sordid ways. Perhaps in some Mexican or Central American jail, too poor or too guilty to obtain lawyers, more sinned against than sinning and, because they were dim, without the mother wit to enlist the help of their embassy, thinking, We’re wanted men anyway, why jump out of the frying pan into the fire? Best to stay here, rot for the twenty to thirty years these greasers gave us than get ourselves extradited, go back, make all that fuss, be locked up in Ohio or maybe even some Federal pen because we jumped bail. Doesn’t that bring the Feds into it? Shit, we’re warm enough here, don’t even speak the lingo, which is an advantage since nobody kicks us around too much because we don’t understand.
He’d spent five times what he’d lost on them already. And put in how many weeks of sleep dreaming of them?
But now his dreams—this dream—had turned, exalting them. Why, they were exalted! Mystery. Mystery. The reason he was a bondsman. The meaning of his life. The way he came to terms with what engined it. Mystery. Why he lived with the cops and the robbers. Why he bothered to eat with his bondsmen colleagues in Covington. Why he was a regular around City Hall, the municipal courts, the Federal halls of justice, on a first-name basis not just with the small-time hoods and criminals of passion but with their families as well, their partners and girl friends. Crime was the single mystery he could get close to. Did he know astronomy? Had he the brains for the higher mathematics or the physics of even thirty or forty years ago? Could he read Spanish or follow a score? Did he know history or even what the symptoms of his own body signified? Could he write a prescription or mix paint?
And it was not true what he told his clients: that their guilt or innocence did not matter to him and that his only consideration was whether they would run or stay put. It mattered very much, almost as much as his power to free them. All that did not matter was the verdict, but in his own mind he always reached a verdict, and he was certain that by virtue of his unique relationship it was at least as accurate as the law’s. Mystery. Mystery kept him going and curiosity killed him. His limited detective heart made him a Cincinnatian, kept him in this city of exactly the right size. And still he bit off more than he could chew, a tapeworm working in his brains. Mystery.
He showered, washing the scum from his long old balls, dried himself with distaste on the already damp towels, disposed of his pajamas in the wastebasket, dressed. Only then, when he was strapping on his watch, did he see the time: it was only eleven o’clock. He picked up his room key, went down in the elevator and left it wordlessly with the night man at the desk.
Hungry, he went into the coffee shop and ordered soup, a ham sandwich, coffee, melon. (What did they taste like? Mystery.) The dream had moved him forcibly. He had already forgotten Oyp and Glyp, as he forgot all clients once he was finished with them. They weren’t in it anymore. It was their crime: that was what exalted them, freed them from him, that he couldn’t get out of his mind. Why couldn’t he, who dreamed the crime, dream the success of his plea to the judge? Mystery. (Did he know the chemistry of even fifty years ago, classics, the future? He didn’t even know natural history; without the cards by the specimens in the cases in the museum he could not have told you about the teeth which so fascinated him.) Now a dream precipitated his actions, forced his hand, gave him hunches in the dark
like a numbers player.
He paid up and cleared out, turning down the doorman who offered to get a taxi for him. “I’ve had my taxi ride today,” he said. “Where’s the bus stop?” Though he knew, of course, knew the routes and times of the last buses, knew the city inside out, knew all the fixed, specific mystery of Cincinnati, Ohio.
He took a Vliet Avenue bus to Rosendale and transferred to the Koch-Demaret which took him up Glad Boulevard and by the park, then past Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati whose tall twin buildings, Physics and Chemistry, faced each other like upended keys. The bus entered a narrow wedge of ghetto. Three blacks in big hats whose wide brims flopped down over their eyes stood down from the curb and waved at a request stop. The Phoenician knew the driver would not stop for them. He wondered how it would work out, what crises and bloodlettings were still to take place, and tried to imagine what assassinations of which leaders yet unborn would have to be endured, and conjured issues, slogans and even men as meaningless and dissociative as scores in a vacuum. He thought in headlines of distant centuries: TRENT REPUDIATES GENNIS, CALLS FOR AMORTIZATION OF EPICENTER. INDIANA WIPPENITES STARCH SCARVES, MARCH ON STATEHOUSE. MERPEN PLEADS HUNDRED AND SEVENTH. REMEMBER NEBRASKA!
But even these were built on analogue. He was depressed by language, the finite slang of his century. SHOTCHKA QUENTZ VISARBLEMENTHS. He needed new endings, new punctuation, a different grammar. There would be people, and they would believe things he could not even imagine. There would be two sides to every question. Trent would be right and Gennis would be right, though in its lifetime the public would never know the whole story. Amortization of the epicenter would be only a short-term solution to whatever problem it had been created to solve. A stopgap, at best only a first halting step. And it was all very well to remember Nebraska, but a time would come when it would be best to forget old wounds. There would be different holidays, epic festivals celebrating heroes who would not be born for a thousand years yet. And in all the countries in the world, on all the calendars the dates of their births would be in red! What would they have pulled off? What drugs were coming? What soups and styles, and how would the center line on the highway be made when the paint mines dried up and the pigments rationed? Or legislated against, green outlawed and blue controversial and orange repealed?
Searches & Seizures Page 12