A Messiah of the Last Days

by C. J. Driver

  “All right,” I answered; somewhere in the back of my mind there were the pages of a book turning over in my mind, and a name was there, and a place, and … was there a siege? And a cage with a body in it? It must have been at school. Something I had forgotten about but which stuck somewhere, until Bob’s ironic and serious voice brought it back. But wait a while. “All right, Bob. Thanks for your time. I may need you if I plead insanity for him.” There’s some kind of hurry in my mind, an urgency to escape.

  “I’ll be there; it’s your decision—I’m only a psychiatrist. But you will think carefully, won’t you?”

  “I’ll think of nothing else.” I was already on my way down the pavement.

  “Good-bye,” he called out, but I did not have time to turn and call back to him.

  Jan of Leyden. Called Beukelsz, or Bockelszoon and, most commonly, Bockelson. Jan Bockelson. That was it. Came from … no I couldn’t remember. But went to Leyden. No, came from Leyden and went to … Munster? Yes, that was it. And set up there with … what were they called? The Anabaptists; yes, that was them. That business of re-baptism and the new names. Matthys was one of them, and he said he was Elijah. Yes—like Hartle renamed Elisha. Oh, my God, of course; it must have been there all the time. I’ve known it all the time. That was what I thought was the dream coming back when Peale told me I had to defend John or no one would. It was the Anti-Christ who ruled them, and they were going to kill the legions of Satan, and set up a new City after the Apocalypse—the City of God on God’s earth. As promised by St. John in Revelations. With fire and sword at first, or machine-guns and hand-grenades … and then …

  I suppose all the passers-by thought I was off my head, a middle-aged man in a grey suit standing in the middle of a Hampstead pavement, staring back at the pages of some book he had picked up in a school library and had then forgotton for years though he held it still somewhere in his mind. One nice old lady in a fur-coat even stopped and said,

  “Are you all right, young man?”

  “Oh, yes, missus, I’m fine.” It was the old voice too, my father’s voice, the one that had been there before grammar school and the law. But I began walking again. I would have to get to a library to check that I remembered properly; and then I’d buy a couple of books and take them home, and get the whole thing clear in my mind again. But it was all there really, so clear now. No wonder Bob had said to me, “I think you could use it either way, for your defence, or for mine.” Of course I could use it either way. Hadn’t Bockelson of Leyden been a religious maniac, with delusions of grandeur and a belief that he was above mortal morality? That was what the book said. But perhaps there was another way of reading it; perhaps it was John’s City after all, the City of the Millennium; and of course Bockelson had been a socialist of a kind, and a visionary preacher, and a military leader. And weren’t there quite a few heroes of our time who, if you put them back in the Middle Ages and got a nicely conservative professor to describe them, would appear in his book as raging lunatics, men who lived by the sword and without morality? The Free Spirit after all. Who put that label on them? They themselves, or the archbishops and the secret police?

  I found a library easily enough and began my search for better evidence than the shaky memory of school history classes and a three-quarters forgotten school-book; there was not much there, but I used an index or two and a bibliography to get a list of other books. Some of these I managed to find in a bookshop on my way to Victoria; the others I got Alison to order from the local library for me. The rest of my week’s leave I read and read, almost without stopping for meals or sleep; some of what I read gave me back clearly what I had known at school—the Ranters, the Levellers, the Anabaptists, the Pope and Emperor and Anti-Christ, early socialism and experiments in anarchism, the heresies of the Middle Ages. Some was new: the flagellants and the pauperes, the Amaurians and the Taborites, Suso, Matthys, John Ball, Joseph Salmon, Hoffman, Munzter. And again and again Jan Bockelson of Leyden, later of Munster. The illegitimate son of a serf and a village mayor; a tailor and failed merchant; the beautiful, the eloquent, the producer and actor; the fanatic and hypocrite; the sensualist and puritan; the soldier and God’s true servant; the terrorist and politician; betrayed, captured, led about on a chain like a performing bear; executed by torture and his body hung in a cage from a church-tower; the Messiah of the Last Days, the one true and veritable Messiah.

  It was all so clear, and yet in one sense it made no difference at all. I still had to find a defence. How could I take the history of the Middle Ages into court with me? Could I read the jury extracts from the life of Jan of Leyden? And then relate those extracts to modern times, to the present history of England? Oh, I could use it to prove John was mad; didn’t the books say Jan of Leyden was a megolomaniac? A schizophrenic even? Hadn’t John told the congregation he was God? Hadn’t he acted God for my benefit? And played a most Godly role when he shot Caister? Oh, I could show he was mad all right. I had enough to prove him mad fifteen times over.

  But I wasn’t going to any more. Henderson had won. It might be true, both actually and legally, that John Buckleson was mad; but I wasn’t going to be the one who said so. Because to do so would be to do the dirt on history, to deny there was any chance of getting that perfected City John believed in and I dreamed of, to deny the one dream which made any sense of the world I lived in.

  No, I would tell the court the whole story, from the beginning. I wouldn’t say too much at first; I would let the prosecution build up its case—I would question the prosecution witnesses not about facts, but about ideas—I would break Austell on the wheel of the City—and then I would put John in the witness box, John with both his public and his private voice. And I’d ask him everything; about his home, his adoption, his schooling, his breakdown, Jan of Leyden, literature, sit-ins, Berkeley, Mexico, town-planning, the Free People, bombs, grenades, machine-guns, revolution and, most of all, the City. Never once would I suggest he was mad, or treat any idea of his as less than perfect. And at the end they might send him to gaol for thirty years for killing poor Andrew Caister and plotting an adventure in Parliament Square. But no pretence, no deception; simply the whole story of a Messiah of the Last Days.

  You could walk in the open fields in safety now; even the judicial crow with his claws and beak which thirty years would sharpen could not see in all that light.

  PART IV

  13

  Up to the fourth day of the trial everything went almost exactly as I had planned. I had let the prosecution make all the running—the other defence counsel had done their best to transfer the blame on to John, and I think they were as puzzled as the prosecution at my apparent passivity while the case against John was built up, brick by careful brick, witness by damaging witness. Inspector Williams had been in the box nearly the whole of the second day, and I had barely questioned him about Caister and the business of placing police informers in lawful organisations; indeed, after the second day, Archie Ames—appearing for Lester—had attacked me in the robing room for not backing his attempt to show that Caister was an agent provocateur.

  “What the hell are you doing, Tom?” he raged. “All those bloody stupid questions to Williams about that idiotic speech of Buckleson’s at the Freedom Congress thing; all we got out of that was that Williams was a nice chap who thought Buckleson wasn’t as much of a fool as some think. What the hell are you up to?”

  “Give me time, Archie,” I said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “You’re making it bloody difficult for us, acting on your own like this. Your chap might as well have pleaded guilty for all the fight you’re putting up.”

  “Do you remember telling me at the second remand you were going to transfer as much of the shit on to Buckleson as you could?”

  “He’s not even real enough at the moment to transfer anything to.” That was Shirley’s barrister; I think he fancied himself as a patron of the plastic arts, because he kept stressing what a fine sculptress she was.
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  “And what’s your client think of your defence?” sneered Archie at me; he was really very angry, I suppose because he is clever enough to realise I had something I was holding back for later in the trial—he probably thought it was some legal technicality.

  “We’ve discussed it,” I said sweetly, and left.

  *

  We had too, though not in great detail. I had simply told John that when I put him in the witness box I wanted him to hold nothing back at all; he was to answer all my questions as fully and openly as he could.

  “All right,” he said. “But can’t I have even just one or two very little lies?” Now he knew he would be in the box himself and would get a chance to say what he had to he was happier than I had seen him for months.

  “No, not even one half-truth. Everything open and clear and complete; no holding back, no dressing up. In good, straight language—no jargon, no pop talk, none of that.”

  “You know I can’t anyway.”

  “Yes, I know; that’s one of the things we’ve got to hold on to.”

  “But what’s your line, Tom? What defence are you going to have?”

  “I’m going to play the truth-game on you, John, like you played the God-game on me.”

  “Does that still rankle?”

  “No, not any more. But you must come with me where I take you, even if you don’t always understand where we’re going.”

  John nodded. “Do you still regret taking the brief—for my defence I mean?”

  “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  “No regrets?”

  “Some puzzlement still, but no regrets.”

  *

  On the third day the prosecution put Austell in the witness box, and I began to open up a bit. The poor little bastard was completely broken, anyway; every time I asked him a question he looked down towards the prosecutor and the police to see how he should answer it. They hadn’t even left him that little bit, and he didn’t come across well for either side. I got him to say why he had joined the Free People in the first place, and I pushed him hard to explain what made him like and respect John, and why he had joined the raid on the arms depot, and what he had thought when Caister came into the garage, and what he had felt when they shot him. He had been carefully coached for all that, and I didn’t get much. But then I took him back to the ideas, and to the City, and by the time I had finished asking him if he thought there would still be a place for him in the world, the jury knew he was a poor snivelling little mouse whom the police had poisoned with a small dose of fear.

  On the morning of the fourth day there were the forensic people from the Yard, and the arms dealer, and the man who had been in charge of the Reading R.A.F. depot; at 12.45 the prosecution rested its case, and I was ready to begin. Old Mr. Justice Full-Flesh looked down his judicial nose at me and said,

  “Well, Mr. Grace, what do you intend?”

  I looked at the clock and said, “Well, My Lord, I am planning to put my client in the witness box on his own behalf.”

  “Presumably he will be there some time, will he not?” Full-Flesh was obviously looking forward to his lunch that day.

  “I have quite a bit I wish to establish, My Lord.”

  Full-Flesh smiled. “Very well, Mr. Grace; I think we might therefore take this opportunity to adjourn for lunch. The court will sit again at fifteen minutes past two.”

  With that he rose, the court rose, he bowed, we bowed, the clerk walked Full-Flesh out, spoke to the jury, and I turned to John Buckleson in the dock just behind me. The trial had been going long enough now for the dock-officers guarding the prisoners to be a little more relaxed, and they didn’t hurry them down to the cells immediately.

  “Could you give me a moment or two with my client, officer?” I said to the man with John, and he nodded.

  “Thanks,” I said, and John leaned over the dock to me. He was looking very tired; the morning had been hard work for all of us, and the waiting was always bad for prisoners.

  “You look tired,” I said.

  He nodded, then asked, “How did it go this morning, do you think?”

  “Nothing unexpected. Try to rest over the lunch-hour; this afternoon may be vital.”

  “Will I be in all afternoon?”

  “And most of tomorrow, and maybe the next day too,” I smiled at him.

  I didn’t notice James Bowland coming into the court; I suppose he must have been up in the gallery all morning, and when the adjournment came he slipped downstairs and into the court proper. It must have been easy enough, because there were people going out and the court ushers can’t really tell who is meant to come in anyway. John saw him first as he came along the row of benches on which I was standing to talk to John.

  “Hello, Jiminy,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.” There was a strange smile on his face; afterwards I understood that look.

  I still didn’t think of any danger to John when I turned to tell Bowland he wasn’t allowed in the court and saw him fumbling in the pocket of the raincoat he wore over the uniform of the Free People. Then the pistol was in his hand, and he was right up to us, and he fired four shots, from a range of about a yard, one into John’s chest, one past his head—it scarred the roof of the court-room—and then two into his face. Four shots he fired, and I did not move. He was shouting something as he fired, and I did not hear. I did not even realise he was shooting John, or that in his crazy rage he might have shot me just as well; indeed, I turned to John to see what he was going to do, and it was only then, when I saw he had disappeared, fallen backwards behind the railing of the dock, that I realised what Bowland had done.

  There were other people there, of course, or I might have taken the next four bullets myself. Archie caught Bowland from behind and pulled his right arm upwards into the air so that he fired the fifth bullet straight into the roof, and then a dock-officer vaulted over the edge of the dock and grabbed the pistol, and other people came in from behind Bowland and knocked him down and held him. I didn’t see any more then, because I was round the dock and in its gate and kneeling next to John; the policewoman had his head cradled in her lap, and there was blood on her coat and her blouse, and John’s face was white and bloody. There were people shouting out all around us, and trying to get into the dock, and there were people calling for a doctor, and Bowland was screaming obscenities about the law and Buckleson and England, and then Williams was there, and he was in charge.

  “He’s dead,” I said, but I spoke so quietly neither he nor anyone else could have heard me in all that noise.

  *

  I suppose Williams himself must have called the ambulance; whoever it was, it was there within five minutes, and Williams rode with us in it to the hospital. Someone had brought Tella to me, and we sat next to the stretcher watching while Williams helped the ambulance-man with oxygen and bandages, and the siren howled us through the traffic with the counterpoint of the police-car’s other howl as it led us to the hospital.

  I don’t know what we would have done without Williams. It was he who found us somewhere to wait while the surgeons tried to save John; it was he who brought a doctor to give Tella a sedative when she collapsed into hysteria; it was he who made me drink a cup of tea he procured from the nurses; it was he who, at five past two, brought in a policewoman to look after Tella and put me in a police-car and drove me back to court. I was still in my gown but somewhere in the confusion I had lost my wig; apparently I said I wouldn’t go into court without it, and it was Williams who borrowed one for me. He sat next to me in court and, when the time came for me to stand up to tell the court what had happened, it was he who nudged me to my feet; and when I tried to speak and found I couldn’t, it was he who got to his feet next to me and explained to the judge what had happened. Again, after the adjournment, he took me back to the hospital and, when Alison arrived an hour later, I found out it was Williams who had phoned her to come.

  At seven the doctors told us John had a chance of surviving, though his br
ain was probably irreparably damaged. Henderson was there by then too, and he took Tella away to his own home; I suppose it was Henderson who phoned Tella’s father in Johannesburg, because he came the next day and took Tella away with him.

  Alison and I waited until eleven, because the doctor said there might be some chance of more news. But at eleven they said we should go home and they would phone us if there was any change. Williams was still there himself; I suppose it was because I was going home myself that I suddenly remembered the Henderson parents.

  “Have you let Buckleson’s parents know?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Mrs. Henderson’s coming tomorrow; I told her there was no point in coming before.”

  “You knew about them, did you?” I suppose I had forgotten that Mrs. Henderson herself had told me the police had visited her when they were searching for John.

  “Yes, Mr. Grace, we knew.”

  “I suppose you know where John took the name ‘Buckleson’ from too,” I said bitterly.

  “Yes. Even policemen can read, Mr. Grace.”

  “But …” I started to say. I suppose I was going to say, “But why didn’t you use your information?” It didn’t matter any more; it was ‘But nothing’ really, and there wasn’t any point in saying that. I shook hands with Williams and said, “Thanks for all you’ve done, Inspector.”

  “And thanks for phoning me,” said Alison at my elbow.

  “My job, Mrs. Grace.”

  “Bit more than your job too, Inspector,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I had nothing personal against John Buckleson—or should I call him Richard Henderson now?” How I loathe that cry of ‘nothing personal’; had Williams so soon forgotten what he had said to me?