Dance of Death

by John Case

  “Why was he in jail, anyway?” Burke asked. “Couldn’t he make bail?”

  “He was arrested on the weekend, and I don’t think they arraigned him until Monday afternoon. He had a public defender at that point, and I think he was trying to arrange a loan, using his condo as collateral. But it took a few days and … Maddox happened. It was bad luck. Like I said.”

  “You also said he was easy pickings,” Burke reminded her.

  “Right. Maddox set him up. I can imagine how it went down. If you listen to the tape, there’s no context for anything. All of a sudden, Jack says, ‘Sozio,’ like it’s a revelation. And the conversation isn’t continuous. There are all these gaps. I had an expert witness examine the tape, and he suggested Maddox was manipulating the microphone. But we couldn’t prove it. And in the end, the jury didn’t buy it.”

  “Did you call Wilson to the stand?”

  She hesitated. “I did, and it was a mistake. Jack was … he’s very charismatic, one on one. Handsome as hell. But on the witness stand? I wanted a victim up there, but what I got instead was John Galt!”

  “The Ayn Rand thing,” Burke said.

  “You know about that!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it wasn’t helpful,” Apple told him.

  “I’m surprised you let him talk about that –”

  “I didn’t! I cut him off as soon as he got started. But the prosecutor picked up on it, and jump-started the whole thing all over again on cross. And he just hung himself. He actually told the jury that it didn’t have a right to judge him because they weren’t his peers.” She paused. “This did not go over well.”

  Burke laughed. “Meanwhile –”

  “Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep the jury focused on the throwaway Indian boy who was left on a doorstep in a cardboard box. You know, he didn’t even know who he was named for until he was ten years old. I mean, he looked Indian, but he had no idea what tribe he was or anything like that. That’s when he got a foster mother who finally did some mothering. She helped him find out who he was, and where he’d come from.”

  “When you say he was named for someone,” Burke asked, “who are we talking about? Who’s ‘Jack Wilson’?”

  “The Paiute. You never heard of him? He was famous! Invented the Ghost Dance. You should put that in your story. He lived in Nevada way back when.”

  “‘Jack Wilson’ doesn’t sound like an Indian name,” Burke said.

  “That was his white name – the name of the family he grew up with. His native name was ‘Wovoka.’”

  “Like the company,” Burke said. “Wilson’s company.”

  “That’s right! I’d forgotten that.”

  The connection had been there all along. Burke had seen it in a list of Google cites, but he hadn’t paid attention. It seemed irrelevant. Jack Wilson … the Ghost Dance … He thought it was a coincidence, if he thought about it at all. But there was that woman, the one in Belgrade – Tooti! She’d said something about Wilson dancing. And Ceplak, talking about Wilson’s last day with him: Time to dance.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Burke said.

  Apple chuckled ruefully. “I think we’ve probably talked enough. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “What was the invention? The invention that started it all?”

  The lawyer laughed. “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Or does that date me?”

  “It’s pretty important for the story,” Burke told her. “I mean, it’s at the heart of everything.”

  “I suppose it is,” she replied, “but that’s why they call it the Invention Secrecy Act.”

  “I’m not trying to find out how it works, or anything. I’m just curious – the readers are going to be curious – about what it is.”

  “Well …”

  “I’m guessing it’s some kind of weapon. I mean, for the government to seize it like that, it would have to be.”

  The lawyer sighed. Finally, she said, “Can we go off the record here?”

  Thirty-three

  Nevada | June 5, 2005

  A ROAD TRIP.

  In a few weeks, such a thing would no longer be possible, so Wilson resolved to take his time as he drove east. He wanted to savor every last moment: the subtle changes in the land, the search for decent road food, even the chance to gripe about the weather and the price of fuel with waitresses and other strangers. It would have been fun to drive cross-country with Irina, he thought, show her the diverse beauty of the country, just meander west and take it all in.

  Not possible, of course. After June 22, the pleasures of this kind of driving – of any kind of driving, really – would come to an end. The intricate web of highways and roads and streets that knitted the country together would, in an instant, be useless. Virtually every vehicle on the road would come to a stop. Their engines would sputter and die. And they would never start again.

  Vintage cars and a few diesels, like the ones back at the B-Lazy-B would still be capable of travel, but their range would be limited by the dead cars littering the roads.

  Even if the occasional old car could get around, most of the fuel would be trapped underground in tanks, inaccessible without the electricity needed to work the pumps.

  Bicycles would become quite valuable.

  Although he’d modified the suspension, and created a sort of gimballed cocoon for the weapon, he winced as the Escalade shuddered over the rough road from the ranch to Juniper. He felt better when he hit Route 225.

  Now that the road was smoother, he tapped the dashboard controls to select the Russian language CD. When it came on, he spoke out loud at the prompts, mimicking the recorded voice.

  Thank you: Spashiba

  You’re welcome: Pajalsta

  Sorry: Izvinche (to strangers); Izvinit (to friends)

  As well as making this effort to learn Irina’s language, he’d purchased more than a hundred books in the Russian – everything from dictionaries to poetry to classics, contemporary fiction, and children’s books. He’d bought an array of DVDs, as well, along with several icons, a samovar, and sets of matryoshka dolls for their children. He didn’t want Irina to feel cut off from her culture.

  After an hour or so, he switched off the language CD. Time for some music. He used to sing aloud in Florence all the time because music was one of the things he missed the most. It was amazing how many tunes he knew just as fragments. And locked up in solitary, that could drive you crazy if you let it, the way the rest of a tune stayed out of reach, closed off in some neuronal backwater. In the beginning, it maddened him that there was no way to fill in the blanks. It wasn’t as if he could go online and download the song or go out and buy the CD to satisfy his curiosity.

  So he went crazy buying CDs after he got back from Africa. He filled in all those blanks and more. The B-Lazy-B had a catalog of more than three thousand CDs – and a state-of-the-art sound system. It was an eclectic selection – he couldn’t be sure how his tastes might change as time went on.

  The Escalade had a pretty good sound system, too. By the time he reached the Utah border, he was rapping along with Eminem.

  “Oops, there goes gravity.”

  Thirty-four

  Dublin | June 5, 2005

  “IT WASN’T A weapon, at all,” Jill Apple told Burke. “It was a battery.”

  Burke thought he’d misheard. “Sorry …?”

  “He found a way to make a better battery. A lightweight, long-lived battery.”

  “You’re kidding,” Burke said.

  “I’m not. These things made the Energizer Bunny look like a fruit fly.”

  Burke laughed.

  “You can imagine how excited Jack and his partner were,” Jill said.

  “What partner?” Burke asked.

  “He had a partner. Eli something … Salzberg! They went to grad school together. I think Eli was getting an MBA. Very smooth. He was putting together the venture-capital meetings, when Jack got the letter.”r />
  “From?”

  “The patent office. DOD decided the application should be secret. So that was that. No patent. They offered compensation – I think they came up with $150,000.”

  “And how much was it worth … actually?”

  “Eli thought he could get twenty-five million for a ten percent equity interest. That’s what they were asking.”

  “Jesus! So what did they do?”

  “They came to me,” Jill told him. “And we took it to court,” Jill replied. “But no ever wins these kinds of appeals. The hearings are closed, and the government doesn’t have to justify itself. They just say it’s in the national interest and that’s that.”

  “No wonder he’s pissed,” Burke said.

  “It’s eminent domain applied to intellectual property. If the government wants to put a highway through your living room, all it has to do is assert the public interest. And it’s the same with patents. The Invention Secrecy Act (it’s 35 U.S.C. 17, if you want to look it up) goes back to the cold war.”

  “So how many patents have they seized?” Burke wondered.

  “Something like ten thousand.”

  Burke laughed in disbelief. “It’s like the X-Files!”

  “Well, yeah, it is!” the lawyer replied. “There are all kinds of rumors – indestructible tires, nonaddictive opiates … Jack’s mistake was trying to make an end run around the Pentagon. That’s what got him arrested.”

  “And that’s when he ran into Maddox.”

  “Right.” There was a quavering noise on the line. “Can you hang on?”

  “Sure.”

  She came right back. “Listen, I’m supposed to be in court in ten minutes –”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I –”

  “You know, you really ought to talk to Eli!”

  “I’d love to. You got a number for him?”

  “No, but he won’t be hard to find. He was on Bloomberg the other day, talking about Argentina. He’s got some big job with the World Bank. I think he’s based in Washington.”

  Taking his laptop into the kitchen, Burke set it on the table, and prepared dinner for himself. Uninterested in cooking, he’d taken to “freebasing” ramen. This involved crushing the noodles in a baggie, and sprinkling them with the powder in the seasoning packet. The noodles would then be thoroughly shaken in the bag, after which they would be ready to eat. Uncooked, the ramen had the same texture as the crusher-run at the bottom of a bag of Cheetos.

  Sitting down to his laptop, with the ramen to his left and a bottle of Jameson’s to his right, Burke went online to see what he could learn about Wilson’s namesake and his people.

  The Indian messiah, Wovoka, arrived on the scene after more than fifty years of serial catastrophe and genocide. In 1830, the tribes of the east had been driven west by the Indian Removal Act. This forced migration, infamous as the Trail of Tears, confined the tribes to “Indian Territory” in what is now a part of Oklahoma. As the frontier moved west, the tribes of the Plains and the Great Basin found themselves incarcerated in open-air prisons called reservations, where they survived in a fever dream of alcohol, desperation, and disease. Nomads who had once survived – and thrived – by hunting and foraging now found themselves on unfamiliar ground, with many of their customs and religious rites forbidden by law. The desperation that resulted was compounded by a succession of “renegotiated” treaties that amounted to land grabs. Finally, the Indian tragedy verged on cataclysm when the government cut back on its deliveries of rice and wheat in the midst of a withering drought. Simply put, the Trail of Tears delivered the Indians to what they called the Starving Time.

  Enter Wovoka.

  It was said that he came from a family of shamans, and maybe he did. But what was certain was that he grew up on a Nevada ranch owned by a man named David Wilson, who called the boy “Jack” and gave him his own last name. In about 1889, Wovoka began to speak of a vision he’d received.

  I bring you word from your fathers, the ghosts, that they are now marching to join you, led by the Messiah who came once to live on earth with the white man, but was cast out and killed by them.

  In Wovoka’s vision, the white man would be driven from the Indians’ lands. The earth would be restored to abundance and plenty, and the Indians’ ancestors would return to live among them.

  Wovoka preached that new land was being prepared. It would arrive from the west in the spring of 1891. The new land would cover the old land “to the depth of five times the height of a man.” In the meantime, the tribes must live in peace with themselves and the white man. Just before the new land arrived, the earth would tremble and shake, but the Indians should not be afraid. Death, disease, and the white man would vanish. The new lands would be covered with sweet grass and running water and trees, and herds of buffalo and ponies will stray over it, that my red children may eat and drink, hunt and rejoice.

  But Wovoka’s revelation wasn’t only descriptive. It commanded the tribes to dance in a particular way at particular intervals. This would help to bring about the end, and the new beginning that would follow.

  Almost every website used the same expression. The movement spread “like wildfire.” It was an apt simile, Burke thought. Just as forest fires jumped from one stand of trees to the next, the ghost dance religion leaped from one tribe to another. Indian leaders (among them, the Sioux’s Red Cloud and the Lakota’s Kicking Bear) traveled enormous distances to visit Wovoka in western Nevada.

  Even as the message spread, it changed (as “messages” are wont to do). The new land would roll in just as Wovoka promised. But it would not just push the white man out. It would bury him.

  As reports of their impending demise began to circulate, whites decided that a revolution was in the works. The “ghost dance,” they told themselves, was actually a “war dance.” The Indian vermin were planning to murder them all in their beds.

  Then … Wounded Knee. Winter of 1890. Sitting Bull, an advocate of the Ghost Dance and the most renowned of all Sioux chieftains, had just been assassinated by government agents. Fearing an insurrection, the 7th Cavalry (General Custer’s old regiment) was sent to arrest Indian “agitators” in South Dakota. To escape arrest, a band of Lakota made their way by night through the Badlands. Their aim was to find shelter and protection on the Pine Ridge reservation.

  The army tracked them, and forced the Lakota to the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Lakota displayed a white flag, signaling their surrender. While the Indians’ leaders were being interrogated, the order was issued to confiscate the Indians’ weapons. According to contemporary accounts, some of the Indians began singing Ghost Dance songs. A medicine man threw a handful of dirt in the air, which some of the soldiers (drunk) imagined to be a signal. A gun went off, and though the shot hit no one, the cavalry opened fire en masse. Four Hotchkiss cannons, positioned on a hill overlooking the encampment, each capable of firing fifty explosive rounds a minute, loosed a murderous barrage.

  Hundreds of Lakota – men, women, and children were blown to pieces. Some came forward with their hands raised, only to be executed where they stood. Still others were hunted down in the woods, or froze to death escaping the soldiers.

  In the end, the army lost twenty-nine of its own men, almost all victims of “friendly” cross fire. Congress doled out twenty Medals of Honor to soldiers who’d taken part in the massacre.

  Burke drained his whiskey, poured another, and drank deep. He knew a little about Wounded Knee. Knew where it was, anyway. In 1973, a couple hundred Indian activists occupied the village to publicize a long list of grievances, including corruption on the reservation, racial discrimination, and the sale of Indian lands to developers.

  The FBI and National Guard repeated the past by laying siege to the town, cutting off its electricity and water. Gun battles broke out and, for seventy-one days, a war raged, with the American Indian Movement and its followers massively outgunned. According to some reports, more than five million round
s were fired into the village. For their part, AIM fighters had two automatic weapons, which they used to great effect, running from one location to the next, firing short bursts that made it seem as if their numbers (and firepower) were much greater.

  It was inevitable that they would lose the battle, and they did. But just as certainly, they won the war. The siege at Wounded Knee created a renaissance of interest in Native American traditions, while casting a cold light on the federal government’s malignant neglect of the reservations and those who lived on them.

  Incredibly, despite the millions of rounds that were fired, only two of the fighters at Wounded Knee were killed. One of them was a kid from Nelson County, Virginia, where Burke himself had been raised. People used to talk about it when he was growing up. Frank Clearwater, they said. Died fighting.

  Burke got to his feet, stiff from sitting in the same place for so long. He was thinking about the day Jack Wilson had knocked on his door in Dublin. They’d shaken hands, and Wilson had introduced himself as Francisco d’Anconia. Burke thought he was talking to a businessman, but now he saw how wrong he’d been. Jack Wilson wasn’t a man at all. Not in his own eyes, anyway. He was a tidal wave of new land, looming toward his enemies.

  Thirty-five

  Dublin | June 5, 2005

  “SALZBERG.”

  There was a TV in the background. Burke could hear it, the unmistakable white noise of Americans cheering.

  “Yeah, hi, it’s Mike Burke – I got your number from Jill Apple – you know, Jack Wilson’s lawyer.” Burke affected the chipper voice of a journalist who (1) expected everyone to recognize his name, and (2) was “just doing his job,” cold-calling someone he hoped would be a source. “I’m doing a story on the Invention Secrecy Act –”

  “For …?”

  “Harper’s,” Burke replied, panicking for a moment because he always confused the magazine with the Atlantic, and didn’t remember what he’d told Jill Apple.