The Hazards of Good Fortune

by Seth Greenland

  “Juries are unpredictable.”

  They barely talked for the remainder of the ride to White Plains. The Bronx River Parkway was greening, the maples, elms, and oaks of his childhood. Jay had barely been out of his apartment and savored the glorious day as if nature provided it for his delectation.

  When they arrived at the courthouse, Jay was relieved to see no one was staking it out, and he was able to walk into the building unmolested. They passed through the metal detector, signed in, rode the elevator up. A secretary brought them back to the offices of the district attorney.

  Jay and Doomer sat across the table in the conference room discussing the team’s chances in the playoffs after the shellacking in Chicago when Christine Lupo arrived followed by Lou Pagano. Introductions were brief. No one shook hands. Lupo and Pagano sat across from Jay and Doomer. The DA thanked them for coming. She seemed like a reasonable woman. A little cold, but that was to be expected.

  “I gather you know my cousin Franklin,” was Jay’s opener.

  “I do,” she said. “He’s an entertaining guy.”

  “Get him to do his impression of Sydney Greenstreet for you.”

  “I will.” There was a pause, then: “Mr. Doomer,” done with the preliminaries, “my office wants to sound out your client on the possibility of a plea deal.”

  “My client is open to that,” the lawyer said. “What do you have in mind?”

  Jay held his breath. He had worked it out. A seven-year sentence meant getting out in half the time. He could do that.

  Lupo said: “We’re willing to drop the murder charge,” Jay looked at Doomer, who did not break eye contact with the district attorney, “if your client agrees to a twenty-year sentence.”

  Twenty years? Jay could not believe what he had heard. Two decades? He would be nearly eighty when he was released! Even if a judge reduced the sentence for good behavior, it would be at least a decade, and that was assuming he survived confinement. His state of mind must have been apparent because he felt Doomer’s palm rest on his forearm.

  “Twenty years seems excessive for what my client has consistently maintained was an accident.”

  “We’re confident we can get a jury to convict,” Pagano said. “With these charges, he’s looking at a life sentence.”

  Jay stared at the public officials. He was usually able to handle people like this with the Gladstone bluff and bluster. But he had nothing to bargain with, no threats to make.

  “Twenty years?” He could barely get the words out.

  “Let’s look at this objectively,” Doomer said to the DA. “My client has a record of philanthropy, leadership, and general civic virtue that is unimpeachable. We won’t be the only ones taking a risk if this goes to trial.”

  Having berated himself so extensively, Jay occasionally lost sight of his accomplishments. He was cheered by his lawyer’s words.

  The DA informed them that this was a chance her office was willing to take.

  “We have a motive,” Lou Pagano said. “No one disputes the basic facts that Mr. Gladstone, in a jealous rage, struck the victim with a deadly weapon.”

  Doomer rumbled, “Prosecutorial overreach.”

  “We believe we can win this case,” Lupo said, her voice flecked with steel.

  Jay gazed out the window. Cirrus clouds floated over White Plains. A small plane buzzed north over the Bronx River, nature and the city going about their business. Patterns too byzantine to be decoded shifting and resolving, subsuming individuals into the larger matrix, human agency an illusion. Jay turned toward the DA.

  “If I accept the offer, how long would I have to serve?”

  She said: “With time off for good behavior, probably about twelve years.”

  A dozen years in some vile penitentiary surrounded by rapists and murderers? They would regard him like a mouth-watering veal shank, his pelt a trophy. Jay heard Doomer ask when they needed an answer.

  “By the end of the week,” Christine Lupo said. “Mr. Gladstone will surrender to the authorities on that day at a location to be determined and begin serving his sentence immediately. In the meantime, my office will announce the murder charges.”

  “Given the possibility of a plea bargain,” Doomer said, “is that necessary?”

  Christine Lupo considered this. “Mr. Gladstone is being charged with murder, so it is my responsibility to enter it into the public record.”

  “My client has significant business holdings,” Doomer said. “He’ll need several months to make custodial arrangements before he begins serving his sentence, assuming we don’t go to trial.”

  Christine Lupo said, “If he chooses not to go to trial, your client has until a week from Friday to get his affairs in order.”

  On the ride back to Manhattan, the sky pressed down, and the trees leaned in. As the car skirted Scarsdale, a flock of starlings formed a shroud. The self-assurance Jay had managed to feign earlier had evaporated and been replaced by nausea. His skin felt clammy. It was clear that the DA relished the idea of a trial. The publicity would be career making, and to her, the possibility that she might lose was worth the gamble. But the risk of a trial for Jay was exponentially greater. In the current climate, he was simply too unsympathetic a defendant. No jury was going to acquit. They would make him an example. Too many years were people repressed, their aspirations ignored, their hopes derailed. The new world would devour the old, and its dawn demanded human sacrifice. The conclusion of the national spectacle called for society to throw Jay Gladstone into the volcano.

  He could flee, but was taking flight a realistic option? Where could he go? Anyplace he was willing to live had an extradition treaty with the United States and would render his time there nerve-wracking and brief.

  Tokyo: Tick-tock.

  Barcelona: Tick-tock.

  London: Tick-tock. Boom.

  He laughed mirthlessly to himself upon the realization that he was reviewing a list of vacation destinations. Flight was not a holiday. He could change his identity, but he wasn’t exactly anonymous, so how long would that ruse last? And the heir of an international real estate fortune reduced to pretending to be someone else did not sound like a noble path. So that left where? Cuba where the Castro brothers would have to agree to his presence? South America where he would have to go into hiding like an ex-Nazi in Argentina? The options were all unacceptable.

  When Christine Lupo announced the murder charges, Internet comment threads filled with dark assessments of Jay’s situation, the majority of them disagreeing with his own. He would never be convicted. He would somehow buy off the jury. The trial would be a sham because no one like Jay Gladstone ever serves time for anything. The idea that Jay would escape punishment gained purchase. He could only hope the predictions of his enemies might prove accurate.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  The days since his brother’s funeral were brutal for Trey. Dag’s business managers were organizing his estate, and they informed Trey that the house was going on the market. He, Lourawls, and Babatunde were given a month to find somewhere else to live. Dag’s wife was due to receive half of what he owned and most of what remained would go to his children. Trey received a small annuity. It was enough to live on, but not in the style to which he had become accustomed as his brother’s right hand. Without Dag, the gravitational pull that kept the planets in orbit vanished. Lourawls went back to Houston to work for his cousin’s construction business. Babatunde planned to move to Los Angeles and resume his career as a personal trainer. A cop in South Carolina had killed a black man during a traffic stop and Imam Ibrahim Muhammad, who had been such a regular presence at the hospital and in the days leading up to the funeral, traveled there to offer his assistance.

  Trey was alone. In the morning, he put on gym clothes and worked out for hours at a time. He drank water and ate cereal. He took Biggie for walks in the neighborhood. Tried to
pray the requisite five times a day but that turned out to be harder than he had imagined. He forgot his prayer rug, or neglected to set the timer meant to remind him to face Mecca. He visited a mosque in Jersey City a few times and was welcomed there but realized he preferred the fellowship of a team to that of a religious institution, and with Dag’s passing that was what he found himself missing. And he was angry about it. He had planned to spend his life at Dag’s side and now that this had been denied him his bitterness began to metastasize. When Biggie lingered to sniff something under a bush, Trey yanked his chain so hard the dog yelped. On Palisades Parkway, when another driver cut him off, Trey floored the gas pedal and nearly rammed the other car before he stopped himself.

  The day Babatunde left for California, Trey went to a fast food burger joint for lunch. The teenager behind the counter messed up his order, and Trey exploded. He threw the food at the quaking kid and was about to hit him with the tray when he realized what he was doing and apologized. Trey left the restaurant without his food, sat in his car, and cried. There in the parking lot, he became concerned with his mental stability. He thought about seeing a doctor but what would a doctor do but prescribe some drug and his new religion forbade that.

  Later, he put on boxing gloves to work out with a speed bag but after five strenuous minutes realized he did not want to be pounding a speed bag. He wanted to be hitting a human being, and the human being he wanted to be hitting was a rich-ass motherfucker named Jay Gladstone. The man who had killed his brother hung around training camp the year Trey tried to make the team. He acted friendly to some of the players but never said a word to Trey. Because of this, Trey saw the owner’s hand in his fate. Ever since being cut right before the first regular season game, he had loathed him.

  Jay Gladstone’s current predicament was a boon to Trey. He hoped the courts would do their job and send him away forever but realized that was unlikely. Men like Gladstone never got what they deserved. Trey could not depend on the court system to avenge Dag. He would have to do it himself. But how could he possibly justify this behavior? He searched for answers in the Quran Ibrahim Muhammad had given him and discovered that Muslims, like Jews, adhered to the Old Testament dictum of “an eye for an eye.” That was all the validation he needed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Although Aviva was no longer sharing a bed with Imani, their theater project kept them in proximity, and this did not improve Aviva’s mood, especially when her former girlfriend began to flirt with Axel. In their discussions of the radical milieu, his opinions became more strident. Assassinations engaged in by political extremists were a favorite topic, and Axel wondered why those tactics almost never made their way to America. Aviva listened as he expounded on his fascination with the bombing campaigns the American left engaged in during the latter half of the twentieth century, notably the Mad Bomber who terrorized New York City in the late sixties and the Weathermen cell that accidentally blew up a townhouse in Greenwich Village.

  It turned out that making a bomb was remarkably easy. Axel found a target he pressed on the others: The statue of the Pilgrim Father in Central Park. On the east side of the park between 72nd and 73rd Streets at the base of Pilgrim Hill, the musket-toting bronze figure represented both the northern European rape of the land and the ongoing subjection of non-white peoples and so was a textbook symbol. Because all they were going to blow up was a statue, he tried to sell the idea that the whole operation would be a lark. It didn’t involve acquiring anything as exotic as Semtex or C4; the ingredients were readily available in local stores.

  Axel asked each of the group to visit a different retail location to obtain nails, gunpowder, electrical wire, a timing device, and a pressure cooker. Mindful of the Weathermen who blew themselves up, they became sticklers for safety. Axel determined that before their action it was necessary to do a test and so the woods near the school were designated Alamogordo. But upon further reflection, the group collectively decided an explosion in the woods might still attract unwanted attention. He suggested they purchase a kayak from a local sporting goods store, pack the device into it, and launch it on the river. The current would sweep the craft downriver, and the detonation would take place at a safe distance. If they did it in the middle of the night, the chances of anyone observing them, or of an innocent person getting hurt, were minimal. Aviva, Noah, and Imani believed the action in the woods would be the extent of their pyrotechnics. No one thought Axel would blow up a statue in Central Park.

  At midnight, Axel and Noah picked up Aviva and Imani. They parked on a dark road near the river. Axel led the way with a small flashlight. Aviva carried the inflatable kayak, Noah and Imani the nonexplosive ingredients. Axel was in charge of the gunpowder. Darkness had swallowed most of the moon, but the inky sky was devoid of clouds, and ghostly light illuminated their path. The only sounds were their footfalls. In a clearing near the riverbank, Axel assembled the bomb while the other three took turns blowing air into the kayak.

  Noah’s cheeks popped out like a squirrel’s as he emptied his lungs into the mouthpiece. After exhausting his capacity and passing the kayak to Imani, he said to Aviva, “What do you think your father would say if he could see you right now?”

  Why were they so obsessed with her father? Was it a means of marginalizing her, of their letting it be known she would never truly be one of them?

  “I don’t know, Noah. What do you think?”

  “I think he’d shit himself,” Noah said.

  “Because we’re testing a bomb?” Aviva asked.

  “Because you’re in the woods with two black people,” Imani said, her laughter mingling with Noah’s.

  Axel told them to stop joking around and finish the job. Five minutes later, they had inflated the craft. Shivering against the chill, they placed the kayak in the river, Noah holding on to the stern to keep it from floating away in the swift current. Axel set the timer and nestled the pressure cooker in the well. He gave the signal, and Noah released his grip. The kayak immediately began to float south, picking up speed. Aviva noticed the satisfied grin on Axel’s face. Noah was bouncing on the balls of his feet. Imani had her hands on her hips and wore a questioning expression as if she were having second thoughts. Aviva watched the kayak’s progress, pleased that they had the foresight to do a test run. She remembered that her father had always taught her to be thorough when performing a task. When the kayak was no more than a hundred yards away, its movement ceased.

  “Shit,” Axel said. “It must have caught on a log or something.”

  The explosion was sudden and concussive. The fireball that enveloped the kayak rose twenty feet above the water and illuminated the river in a vivid glow. And then Aviva heard Noah scream and curse. Axel shone his flashlight on Noah. Blood streaked his neck. Cut with a piece of flying shrapnel. Imani looked like she might faint.

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” Noah shouted.

  “Hold still,” Aviva ordered.

  She looked at the wound and was able to determine it was not deep. “You’re going to be okay,” she said, trying to convince herself that her friend could avoid a hospital visit.

  “Fuck,” Noah said, bloody fingers pressed to the side of his head.

  The next morning Aviva got a text from Imani during her gender studies seminar. Could they meet up later?

  In the cafeteria, students were eating seitan burgers, chatting about the merits of different weed strains, contemplating Indonesian poetry on the screens of their e-readers. Obscure indie rock trickled from hidden speakers. Aviva looked around the room. Nearly to a person, these students supported radical change, yet how many of them were prepared to do anything about it? She spotted Imani, waiting for her at a table. Aviva sat across from her.

  “I’m out,” Imani said. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

  “Why?”

  “For starters, Noah nearly got killed.”

  “He’s fine.”
r />   “What are we going to accomplish by blowing up a statue of some pilgrim dude?”

  “It sends an anti-racist message.” When Imani laughed, she said, “What?”

  “Would you listen to yourself?”

  “It’s just a statue,” Aviva said. “No one gets hurt.”

  “What if they catch us?”

  “In the middle of the night?”

  Imani shook her head, took a sip of coffee. Aviva waited. The idea that she was the one advocating for direct action against America’s history of racism and not Imani made her uneasy.

  Imani said, “The revolution came and went, and we missed it.”

  “But it’s such an ideal symbol of white dominion.”

  “You gotta work out your daddy issues some other way.”

  That blow hit her hard. Aviva felt herself starting to answer, but she didn’t want to fight with Imani. Outside the window, a white kid dressed entirely in hemp threw a Frisbee to a Labradoodle with a red bandana tied around his neck.

  “That’s what you think this is?”

  “Hey, we all got our shit,” Imani said.

  Aviva fought the impulse to get up and leave. As she shifted in her chair and looked away from Imani a rush of blood coursed through her ears and the sounds of students’ voices, music playing, the scraping of chairs, grew muffled. She floated out of the room like a Chagall fiddler, over the campus and east toward her childhood home and recalled an adolescent afternoon when her father tried for what turned out to be the last time to coax her on to the 20’ x 20’ asphalt basketball court he had built for her. There was the transparent fiberglass backboard, and her father held a new ball.

  “Won’t you even try?” he said.

  “I hate this game.”

  The look on his face that day made her realize for the first time that she had the ability to inflict pain on the colossus in whose rumbling steps she walked.

  She heard Imani say: “I got into grad school last week.”