“You’re claiming that Mr. James was blind at the time of the fight?” Judge Lowell said.
“Not neurologically but neurotically, yes, at least …” Altuna hesitated. “At least, he was blind at the onset of Johnson’s attack.”
“It’s hard for the court to recognize that a blind man of your client’s age and profession could do such damage to a healthy young man armed with a truncheon.”
“It is on this question that our case hinges,” Altuna said. “When Lemuel Johnson attacked Sovereign James, Toni Loam screamed. We have aural witnesses to that event. Hearing a woman whom he had great affection for cry out in such a manner brought Mr. James, literally, to his senses. His sight returned at the moment of greatest need. My client was under physical attack by Johnson and shocked by the return of his vision. In his confusion he lashed out at an enemy. And even though he overreacted, we maintain that he was not in control of his actions and should therefore be seen as innocent in the eyes of the law.”
Judge Lowell laced her hands, bringing the middle knuckle of her right index finger to her lips. From this pose she considered the case.
“The district attorney’s office,” piped up the second of the two prosecutors, “is willing to save time and expense by allowing summary judgment on the facts given. Attempted murder in the first degree seems a plausible verdict.”
“Ms. Altuna?” the judge asked.
“No,” Lena said. “We believe that the evidential discovery will bear out our claim. It is too much to ask the court, or anyone, to believe my clients’ claims on just their testimony. No. We need a full trial to prove our case.”
“I agree,” said the judge. “Mr. Atwell?”
The second prosecutor, a white man, said, “Yes, Your Honor?”
“Any requests about bail?”
“Seeing that the defendant, Mr. James, failed to appear at the first trial date, we believe that he should be remanded. We’ll accept a hundred thousand dollars’ bail on Miss Loam.”
“Mr. James was detained by federal authorities on suspicion, nothing else,” Altuna said. “And he was arrested at LaGuardia Airport on the day before his trial date. The only call he was allowed, he made to me, asking that I tell the court about his situation.”
“He left the state,” Alva Sutter said.
“No one told him not to,” Altuna replied. “A man is innocent until proven guilty.”
That night in their hotel room Toni Loam and Sovereign James had sex again and again without condoms or any other form of birth control. They hadn’t talked about the trial or the low bail set by Judge Lowell. They hadn’t worried about conviction. Sex was the only thing they were interested in.
They fucked and then had room service, fucked and fell asleep. They woke up and rolled around with such abandon that they fell off the bed laughing and fucking.
It wasn’t until three thirty that morning that they woke up and started to talk.
“I don’t know, Sovy,” Toni said.
“You don’t know what?” He kissed her left shoulder and she shuddered.
“How did we get here?”
“This hotel?”
“Standin’ trial, and you got the government on you too. Lem is in the hospital and might not ever wake up. And here we are fuckin’ our brains out like we don’t have a care in the world.”
“Better that than worrying about things we can’t change. The government doesn’t know where I am right now, and we have a good chance of being found innocent.”
“But I’m not innocent,” Toni said. “I brought Lem up there. And ’cause you came in one or the other of you was gonna get killed. That’s on me.”
Sovereign could hear the pain in her voice, see it in her face and hand gestures.
“But what if you were Lem’s father?” he asked.
“What you mean?”
“Wouldn’t his father tell him that he had no business up in my house? Wouldn’t he tell him that it was a coward who’d attack a blind man with a club?”
“Maybe.”
“And me,” Sovereign continued. “I’m the one who beat him. I was blind and then blinded by rage, but still, I didn’t have to punish him like that.”
“But you did.”
“We all did something wrong, Toni. We all did. Not one of us is innocent. We should have known better. We will the next time.”
Sovereign looked over at the girl. She was asleep just that quickly.
The trial took four and a half weeks. Every morning the couple appeared at the nondescript building on Lafayette and listened to witnesses being questioned and cross-examined: doormen and Red Rover limousine drivers; doctors Seth Offeran and Thomas Katz; nurses, waitresses, and some people whom Sovereign had never met.
A woman who lived in his neighborhood testified that Sovereign had changed his direction seemingly to avoid a dog that wasn’t on a chain. And then there was the paramedic who brought James to the hospital after Johnson had attacked him the first time.
“They told me that he was blind,” Rosa Lopez said. She had copper skin and plum-colored freckles. “But when I was reaching back and forth over his head for the oxygen mask, he swayed as if he was watchin’ what I was doing.”
Both sides had experts who did their best to negate the others’ claims. Testimony was long and tedious, repetitious and, often, needlessly specific—at least, that was what Sovereign thought.
The ex–HR manager wondered how such bland discussion could end up in prison sentences. There were people dying in wars, suffering from famine, and here he sat with a roomful of professionals asking questions like was sight associated with a sound, did he move his head every time, and how long ago did you witness this behavior?
“Why does a old man like you always have his dick so hard?” Toni complained one afternoon when court had been let out early. They’d just finished with a room-service meal.
“Because I look at you and come alive,” Sovereign said.
“You been alive for fifty years.”
“I wish. But you know, I feel like I die every day in that fake courtroom. It’s like they bunged me up in a coffin and I’m lyin’ there waiting for the gravediggers to finish before they can lay me to rest.”
Toni grinned and shrugged off the one-piece ochre dress that Sovereign loved.
“You so funny,” she said. “Gimme that dick here.”
She reached out and tugged on him. He grunted and touched her cheek.
That was when the phone rang.
“You gonna answer it?” Toni asked.
“I’m kinda busy.”
“It might be about the trial.”
Toni held on to the erection while Sovereign answered.
“Hello,” he said, stifling a moan of satisfaction.
“Bro?”
“Eddie?” Sovereign stood up and away from the bed.
“Man, I cain’t leave you alone for a minute you ain’t wandered into some quicksand?”
“Where are you?”
“Downstairs.”
“Downstairs where?”
“Your hotel, baby. You know I always got the latest intelligence.”
He was sitting at far end of the dark bar. It was just after four in the afternoon, so there were few customers. Drum-Eddie James was wearing a shark-gray suit, yellow dress shirt replete with ruby cuff links, and black patent-leather shoes. He was talking to a young blond woman with dark garnet lips and gray-green eyes.
“JJ,” Drum-Eddie said as he stood away from the bar stool. “This here is … What’s your name again?”
“Carmen,” the twentysomething woman said. Her nostrils flared.
“Carmen, this is my brother—JJ. We got some business.”
“Okay,” Carmen said, a little reluctantly. “I’ll be sitting at that table over in the corner for a while.”
She touched his gray sleeve and moved away.
“You shouldn’t be here, Eddie,” Sovereign said when the young woman was out of earshot.
“I don’t think I ever been in a place I should’ve been in,” he replied. “Drink?”
“Cognac.”
“Bartender,” Eddie hailed, and when the redheaded man behind the bar looked up, “VSOP for my brother here—in a snifter.”
“Eddie, what are you doing here?”
“I heard that you got in all kindsa trouble for buyin’ my ticket, man.”
“The feds haven’t bothered me since that first day.”
“That’s ’cause I called ’em.”
“You what?”
“I met with this dude down in Havana, state department guy. I told him that I’d be happy to have an enlightening sit-down if they promised to take the weight off a’ you.”
The bartender put a very large snifter, with a good amount of brandy in it, down next to Sovereign’s elbow.
“I’m free of them?”
“Me too. Once we talked they said it was okay for me to come back to the U.S.”
“So you’re moving back?”
“Naw, man. I like it down in South America. I got wiggle room down there—wriggle room too.”
Blond Carmen was staring at the men from her seat in the corner; Sovereign could see her in the mirror behind the bar.
“What?” Eddie asked when the silence had spanned a minute.
“I don’t understand, man.”
“What?”
“Here you are crossin’ borders and makin’ deals with the federal government. You know where I’m hiding and got pretty girls waitin’ their turn. What is it you do that nobody else knows?”
Drum James sat up straight and crossed his legs. He brought the index finger of his left hand to his nose. Sovereign remembered then that his brother was ambidextrous.
“I figure it like this, Jimmy,” he said. “In this world you can either work for somebody else or do your own thing.”
“Like rob a bank?”
“Whatever. You just look at your options and pick the best one.”
“Everybody does that.”
“No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. People take jobs they don’t want, stay in marriages they hate, pay taxes for things they don’t wanna do, and live among people they don’t like. They love their enemies and hate their friends, break their promises and forget about bein’ happy altogether.
“And if you don’t do those things you will find that people are drawn to you. If you livin’ free everybody wants a piece of it. That girl in the corner, federal government too. They don’t care about that bank. They know that the bank the biggest crook there is. They don’t care about drugs or communists or ten thousand poor people starving to death. They just want people like me in the mix. They don’t know why but they do anyway.”
“Do you know why, Eddie?”
“Sure.”
“Are you gonna tell me?”
“It’s like that Carmen in the corner,” the sand-colored man said. “She sees how free somebody is and that makes her feel how trapped she is, even if she don’t know it. She reach out for me, and I got a question.”
“What’s that?” Sovereign James asked his brother.
“ ‘Do you wanna get yourself free or get me caught in the trap you in?’ ”
“And what do you do, according to the answer she gives?”
“First,” Drum-Eddie James said, “I have to figure out if she’s lyin’.”
“About what?”
“That’s not the right question.”
“What is?” Sovereign James asked.
“The question is who she’s lyin’ to.”
“And who is that?”
“Either to me, herself, or both of us,” Eddie said, showing not the slightest bit of humor. “She might say she wanna get free and believe it but it’s still not true. She might be testin’ me, sayin’ she wants the trap, but really she wants me to pry her outta the situation she’s in. She might even be tellin’ me the truth, just not the way it sounds.”
“What does that mean?”
“She might wanna be free for the night and crawl back to her cage in the morning.”
“And when you figure it out,” Sovereign asked, “what do you do then?”
To Sovereign, Drum-Eddie’s smile was like the crack of dawn at the end of a stormy night.
“You might not be able to tell the difference from the outside,” Drum said. “You know it’s the human animal have all them questions and shit, but it’s the animal period that gets up in the bed.
“I do the same things but my intentions are different. If she’s lookin’ to be free I invite her down to Rio and mean it. If she wants to trap me I make the same invitation but never call back.”
“What about what you want, Eddie?”
“Me? I got everything I need, brother. Got it like the grippe.”
“And why are you here?”
“Just to see you, JJ. Just to see you.”
When Sovereign’s eyes met Drum-Eddie’s he wondered if they had ever looked at each other like that before: with love that was deeper than any words could accurately attend.
“I’ve missed you, Eddie.”
“I sent you a text that has all my permanent numbers. If you need me I’m always only half a second away.”
The bank robber got up and slapped his brother’s shoulder. He walked across the bar to where Carmen was waiting. When she stood Sovereign did too.
That night Sovereign rolled into a ball in the hotel bed. Toni curled around him, stroking his head and shoulders. He shivered now and then, causing the young woman to whisper, “Shhhh.”
“You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and think that maybe you missed something the day before?” he asked late into the night.
“Like what?” she asked.
“Maybe … maybe you said the wrong thing to somebody important, or maybe they said something important to you but you didn’t get it at the time.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “You feel like that?”
“Every morning lately I wake up I feel like I missed my whole goddamned life.”
“The prosecution would like to present one more witness, Your Honor, before turning the case over for judgment.”
“And who is this witness?”
“Lemuel Johnson.”
“What?” Toni cried out.
The judge didn’t ask for order. Toni’s outcry echoed her own surprise.
“He regained consciousness,” Sutter continued, “two days ago, and the doctors say that he is strong enough to make a statement.”
“Your Honor,” Lena Altuna nearly shouted. “The prosecution has presented their witnesses. We were not informed.”
There was a window behind the judge. The glass was opaque green. Sovereign thought about the haze of light illuminating the room while hiding its sources. He felt Toni grabbing his forearm. There was a moth fluttering in the upper right-hand corner of the window frame.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
“But, Ms. Altuna,” the judge was saying. “Mr. Johnson is the victim of the crime we’re judging here. He is the only witness, other than the defendants, who experienced the entire flow of events.”
“But he has an interest in keeping his role secret,” Altuna said. “And he might harbor anger at my client for fighting him.”
“I will try my best to keep an open mind, Counselor,” Judge Lowell said. “Mr. Sutter.”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“When can you have Mr. Johnson in court?”
“This afternoon at two.”
“Then we are adjourned until two.”
“Maybe we should run,” Toni suggested at a tapioca tea bar in Chinatown. “You know Lem is gonna want to get some payback for you kickin’ his ass like that. And if they told him that we’re together he’ll wanna get me too.”
“There’s a cigar box in my suitcase in the closet at the hotel,” Sovereign replied. “I got about eighteen thousand dollars in there. You could take it and run. I’ll tell the court you
got sick with fear or something.”
“Where you get that money from?”
“Remember when my brother came by the other day?”
“Yeah?”
“He told me that the government is off me, that I could go home whenever I want. I went straight to the bank and cleaned out one of my CDs.”
“Let’s take that money and run.”
“I can’t.”
“You gonna go back?”
“I have to.”
“Why? Why can’t you and me run together?”
“Because I’m not my brother.”
There was a plain walnut chair to the right of Judge Lowell’s makeshift bench. This seat was for witnesses. When the court had been reconvened, at two-oh-seven, the door opened and everyone looked.
Lemuel Johnson had no marks from the beating on his face but he’d lost at least twenty pounds and moved slowly, as if his joints were stiff.
“Oh no,” Toni whispered.
The youngish man limped, without help from the uniformed nurse who followed him, until he had reached the seat. He put out his left hand and steadied himself on the judge’s bench before lowering himself into the witness chair.
The nurse was ecru skinned and voluptuous, forty-something and stern.
Sovereign found that he approved of Lemuel’s guardian.
“State your name for the court,” Alva Sutter said to the final witness.
“Lemuel Fister Johnson.”
“Do you promise to tell the truth here today?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
Sovereign was taken by the use of the word promise. There was so much meaning to the word used; in this case it was like a child’s fearful request.
“Tell us what happened on the day of the attack,” Alva said.
“I met Toni when she was thirteen and I was twenty-four,” he said.
“I’m asking about the attack, Mr. Johnson,” Alva said.
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