Stung

by William Deverell

  I can’t, won’t accept that twist in the plot.

  Madam Justice Colleen Donahue, already scowling, enters energetically from the wings. Severely cut grey hair, squat, dense, muscular, like a wrestler. A perky nose that twitches right and left, like a bunny’s, as she looks us over in the prisoners’ box. Her expression turns to disappointment as she sees no fangs or devil’s horns. Doc wears a tie. So does Ivor, his trademark bow tie. Rockin’ Ray has pulled his hair into a neat ponytail. He looks a little dozy, though.

  Khan makes his promised pitch for the journalists outside, with a barb at us defendants “who doubtless will join me in welcoming the press given their penchant for eagerly basking in media attention.”

  Nancy punches back: “My learned friend’s shyness, on the other hand, is legendary. I assume we’re appearing on a pretrial motion, so I have no objection to this court being open to the public. But first may I voice a complaint that this hearing was brought on with unprecedented abruptness. As a result, Mr. Beauchamp could not be here.”

  Donahue twitches her bunny nose. “And why is Mr. Beauchamp not here?” A strong, deep voice, as muscular as her build. I think I remember her now, from before she was a judge, punditting on the tube, clever and sardonic.

  Nancy says, “Because he was on a plane to Berlin yesterday, when notice of this hearing went out.”

  Khan responds. “I had no role in setting the matter down for today, and learned counsel knows that.”

  Donahue’s expressive nostrils widen. “I set the date, sua sponte. You may wish to regard that as crisis intervention. A jury trial is six weeks away from being on top of us, and it’s scheduled for a full month, and there has been no pretrial hearing and no preliminary issues have been raised, argued, or resolved. I don’t know why that’s so, but I don’t want anyone bringing any last-minute motions that will delay this trial.”

  Khan rises. “M’Lady, with respect, the Crown made several overtures to my learned friends to suggest a pretrial date. Each was answered with unfulfilled promises to get back to us.”

  I figure Nancy would prefer to postpone things until Arthur shows up, but she confidently announces she’s ready to answer any of the judge’s concerns. I’m learning about trial lawyers. You can’t ever come across as timid or unprepared.

  The judge puts everything on pause, directing a court officer to open the door for the public. She makes a spirited speech of welcome, particularly aimed at journalists — she’s not shy about buttering them up.

  Once everyone has settled in, she surveys the press rows, and begins in a stern, teacherly tone: “Please understand that though this is a formal court appearance a publication ban is in effect until the trial has concluded. I will meet with counsel afterwards for a conventional pretrial hearing that ought to have occurred months ago.” Her decibels rising sharply. This lady is either profoundly irritated or acting out for the media. “And yet, somehow, inconceivably, by some back-door means, without the court having been consulted, a trial date of May thirteenth, barely forty days from now, has shown up on the court calendar.”

  In what sounds like a rehearsed duet, Nancy and Azra Khan express regrets at a slip-up. A month-long drug conspiracy had got postponed. Counsel had arranged with the court registry “to fill the hole in the court calendar with the case at bar.” Regrettably, due to “administrative oversight,” Her Ladyship was not informed immediately.

  Proving, I guess, that the machinery of the justice system is as well oiled as any bureaucracy.

  Madam Justice Donahue accepts their grovelling apologies, then launches into a roll-call thing, right out of kindergarten, turning first to Doc, asking if he understands the charges and how he intends to plead, and when Nancy interrupts and says she’ll talk for us Donahue snaps that this is her courtroom and she’ll do it her way. Nancy rolls her eyes theatrically. The presence of the press has amped up the vibe in here.

  We all respond, calmly and clearly, yes, we understand, yes, we plan to plead not guilty. Rockin’ Ray is almost too calm, spacy, his voice vaguely haunted.

  Judge Donahue then explains we’ll be asked to make our pleas formally on May 13. I wonder if that’s it, we’re done, like a pain-free trip to the dentist, then Donahue asks the prosecutor: “The manslaughter charge against the accused Wozniak, how is it alleged the death came about?”

  She’s been looking at Ray, who is still zoned out, returning a wide-eyed zombie stare. I worry that he’s off the wagon, in breach of his bail conditions.

  Khan explains about Archie Gooch’s collapse outside the Sarnia plant, then being in a coma for four and a half months before expiring. “The Crown avers that Mr. Wozniak deliberately committed an assault as defined in Code Section 265 in that he threatened to apply force to Mr. Gooch while pursuing him with a weapon. That led directly to the coma and ultimately to heart failure.”

  A snort of laughter from the gallery has Donahue looking about in vain for the culprit.

  Nancy jumps in: “Evidence will show Gooch had enough Oxycodone in him to addict a herd of elephants.”

  “Counsel, I didn’t ask you to comment, but since you’re up, please correct me if I’m wrong — I understand the defence seeks to raise a necessity defence.”

  “We are quite excited over it, M’Lady. We have engaged several expert witnesses, many from afar, and Mr. Khan is responding in kind.”

  “Only out of an abundance of caution,” says Khan. “We maintain my friends are reaching for the moon for a defence not available in law.”

  The judge then says she wants another hearing, a full day, in open court (with a nod to the press), to test the admissibility “of this extremely rare and difficult defence.” She makes a face, wrinkling up her nose, as if smelling something putrid. “I will ask counsel to agree on a date that is also suitable for Mr. Beauchamp. It must be well in advance of May thirteenth, to allow counsel, if necessary, to change course — we don’t want experts flying in from all over the world if, ah . . .”

  Her Ladyship stalls, her nose keeping beat to the sound of snores from the prisoners’ box. It’s Ray, and he is asleep, though leaning on Okie Joe, who nudges him awake.

  A titter of laughter is a trite phrase I adore, and that’s what runs through the courtroom, amplifying the judge’s irritation at Wozniak. She complains to Nancy: “He was staring at the wall like a dead man. I need to know if he’s on a prohibited substance.”

  Ray seems to snap to attention. “I’m clean, ma’am, Your Honour. I sometimes fall asleep when I’m in prayerful meditation.”

  The judge doesn’t seem to have an answer for that, and waits while Khan consults with his junior. Khan then explains that Wozniak has honoured all his bail conditions and has consistently passed regular tests for alcohol and drugs.

  Donahue ponders that, and sneaks a glance at the media — whose smiles warn her they may depict this hearing as a scene from a Broadway comedy. She decides to cut it short, announces, “Counsel will meet me in chambers,” and rises without a further word. Miss Pucket calls, “Order in court.”

  I wait while the room empties, watching Nancy head off with the prosecutors for their pretrial. I wouldn’t mind talking to her about what just went down, especially the judge’s snide view of the necessity defence, but she makes hand signals telling me not to wait — she’ll be joining Khan for lunch.

  To talk about what?

  * * *

  We’re dim summing in Chinatown, all seven of us, joking, speculating, lingering over cheung fun, as we wait for Nancy to get back to us. I feel sorry for her — she’s taken on extra burdens in Beauchamp’s absence.

  I can’t help but express a niggling worry she could offer a plea bargain, and they go, “No, no way, not Nancy.” But she has to be dispirited by the naked hostility she got from the judge and her bad vibes about the necessity defence.

  “Anyway,” says Lucy, “the Crown doesn’t do
deals with terrorists.” Khan, on the escalator: The Crown has zero interest in backroom deals with anyone.

  So there’s this frisson of paranoia in the Smiling Dragon Restaurant when Nancy finally phones in. Doc listens. His eyebrows go up. Now a wry smile. He puts her on hold.

  “Mr. Khan was only bluffing — he does deal with terrorists. If each of us agrees to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy, all other charges will be dropped. Including Ray’s manslaughter. Nancy wants to know our instructions.”

  We all groan and boo.

  “LOL,” says Lucy.

  I go: “Does she recommend that?”

  “The offer came from the other side. She just listened.”

  Everyone joins in a vigorous rejection, except Ray, who stares into space.

  Lucy throws her fortune cookie at him. He comes awake. “Unpossible,” he says.

  Chapter 16: Arthur

  1

  Wednesday, April 3

  Arthur wakes up dazed, disoriented, his inner clock still on Pacific Time. But on arrival in Berlin he’d set his watch to local time, and it reads a quarter to six, so he has slept fourteen hours. Through his fourth-storey window he can see strips of rosy cloud, the promise of a vibrant sunrise.

  He’d needed that long sleep — it had been a murderous flight, fifteen hours including time spent in airports. It was mid-afternoon when Arthur checked into this hotel, the Französische, near the opera house, in the city’s cultural heart. He’d had a bite to eat and headed directly to bed. But somehow, despite his restorative sleep, he still feels fagged.

  He rises quickly, hurries through his ablutions. He has decided on a brisk, cold walk before breakfast, to get his benumbed legs working again. He will have time to visit a couple of museums before joining Dieter Hoff tonight for dinner, when, hopefully, Arthur will persuade him not to chicken out.

  He’s a little astonished at the bustle on the streets at six a.m. Are Berliners so fond of work that they get to their desks and shops before the roosters crow? That must be, because many of the shops are already open. Oddly, here is a tavern, loud with laughter and music.

  Now the sky turns dark. Arthur feels prickles; something evil and portentous is occurring. He’s afraid he has suffered some kind of stroke, an aneurism that has altered his perception, caused a time warp.

  As he watches a procession of formally dressed musicians, all bearing instruments, disappear into the Opernhaus for a performance of Rigoletto, he speculates that he has been propelled into future time. Finally it descends on him that it’s still Wednesday, and it’s six ten p.m. He had slept not fourteen hours but two.

  He lacerates himself mercilessly as he makes his way back to his hotel, to his room, to his bed. You are Rigoletto, you are the clown. Your brain cells have calcified. You belong in a care facility, not a courtroom. You pose a menace to your clients.

  Or maybe it’s because he’s still rattled over having been so sorely tempted into sin by Taba Jones. You’re having trouble concentrating. I can help you with that. The invitee at war with himself, Good Arthur versus Bad Arthur, his conscience versus his cock, and even though the good guy won there’s no escaping the fact he’d practically asked for it: the warm fire and warmed brandy, his obvious ogling, his tented pants.

  The most guilt-provoking facet of Taba’s near fellatery was its aftermath: mere minutes later, in the shower, enjoying a great, shuddering, spouting orgasm while evoking her receiving him. However, the upside was that he regained his ability to concentrate — spectacularly, in that he absorbed all those forbidding precedents, opinions, and scientific studies in ten days. And as he focussed on the plight of bees, and the knock-on effect of planetary disaster, his private concerns faded for a while.

  But they bloomed again when Margaret, on Sunday, called to chat, mostly about Arthur, his health, his stress level, her worries about the rigours of an overseas flight in economy class — which in fact turned out to be an ordeal beyond imagining. But this had already been an expensive defence, and it was mostly funded by small donors. Arthur’s conscience refused to fly business class.

  “Why does he have to see you?” she’d asked. “How arrogant of him to demand you come to him. After Selwyn did his best.”

  “He’ll be more comfortable with me. Selwyn, frankly, has not mastered the art of putting strangers at ease.”

  Her call had come just as Arthur concluded yet another week of reading, absorbing, collating, working out how Chemican’s vast environmental threat should be presented to the jury, how it would be best understood, how to get maximum impact. So his head was full of that, and he wasn’t tuned in when she mentioned she’d be in Toronto for some kind of LGBTQ event, and that they should get together. If she specified a date, he didn’t catch it. He would call her this Saturday, before his return flight, to confirm time and place.

  So far, in the weeks since Taba’s visit, he hasn’t found the courage to mention it to Margaret. Or even that she was in the neighbourhood with her door-to-door petition. But why should he have raised a matter of such microscopic importance? When Margaret asked, on Sunday, “So what’s the latest gossip?” Arthur turned the topic to the futile hunt for Tigger. But he’ll have to give her the bowdlerized version of how Taba popped in before she returns to Garibaldi and hears it from the neighbours.

  Such thoughts tumble through his head until sleep finally comes.

  2

  Thursday, April 4

  Again Arthur wakes up at twilight, but this time on the real Thursday morning, at six-forty hours. Just to make sure, as a sanity check, he hurries to his window: a few joggers and cyclists, a delivery truck — Berlin is yawning awake.

  He rises, ravenous, and as he readies for the day he pores over a map of the Mitte. Arthur has only two more days here, so he will be a busy tourist. But he hasn’t had a nourishing meal since his travels began, so his first stop will be the hotel restaurant.

  He last visited Berlin before the Holocaust Memorial was completed; it will warrant a brief morning stroll and some sombre reflections about the extraordinary evils that humans are capable of. He must also try to stop by Humboldt University, where he once gave a lecture and where Dieter Hoff teaches doctoral students. This evening they are to meet at a Turkish restaurant the scientist favours. On the phone, he sounded pleasant and engaging, eager to meet the famous advocate. Flattered, Arthur replied just as effusively.

  In the hotel restaurant, while piling into his eggs and sausages, he remembers to turn up his phone, muted and ignored since he was first airborne.

  He puzzles over a voice message from Nancy Faulk about Justice Donahue signalling, at a pretrial hearing, that she threatens to torpedo the necessity defence before the jury gets sworn. Azra Khan, emboldened, “offered to put us out of our misery.”

  No fuller explanation by email. Arthur’s callback must wait; it’s the middle of the night in Toronto.

  His phone nags at him to check his text messages, a medium he has yet to master, and he finally locates worrisome information from Solara Lang: Tigger has killed a deer near Centre Road, only a mile from Blunder Bay and not far from Evergreen Estates. Residents there “are freaking.” Stefan is doing night watch with Ulysses.

  Arthur suspects the deer was one of those semi-tame ones that folks in that small subdivision attract by spoiling them with handouts. In any event, by venturing to the populated south, Tigger has grown bolder. And more dangerous, particularly to himself. Locals with hunting rifles won’t wait much longer for Conservation Officers to find and deport it.

  It would be a tragedy if that rare and magnificent wild creature were to be killed. Arthur needs to do his business here quickly and get back.

  * * *

  As he wanders about the maze-like lanes of the Holocaust Memorial he feels an ominous vibration in the area of his heart. He fears this is it, the big one, the stress of travel has killed him. But it’s his phon
e, in the breast pocket of his suit. He fumbles it free, and is greeted rudely: “The great man deigns to answer! I’ll try to make this brief.”

  Arthur grows glummer by the second as Nancy fills him in: Justice Colleen Donahue’s snap pretrial hearing, her apparent distaste for the necessity defence, her order that its legitimacy be tested at a second hearing — it’s set for eleven days from now, Monday, April 15. “She wants to cut us off at the pass, Arthur. She won’t allow necessity to be whispered to the jury. It’s the new n-word.”

  Arthur’s in shock. That would strip their clients of their only defence. Everything they’ve invested would be wasted, all the mental toil, the travel, the costs, this mission to Berlin. The trial would be all but a formality, convictions all but mandatory.

  “Khan left that courtroom smelling blood. He’ll take a plea to conspiracy, no offer of leniency. The Seven voted unanimously to tell him to fuck himself.”

  “Justice Donahue: Did she do any criminal work as a lawyer?”

  “Oh, yes, five years as a Crown, to get her training, then getting the big bucks as an insurance litigator, leg-off claims, screwing widows, the usual.”

  Arthur heaves a shuddering sigh. “Is there any way we can get this judge moved from the case?”

  “Not short of a drive-by shooting, and even then no one will pry this trial from her cold, dead hands. Did I tell you she was vain? The Guardian was in court. Le Monde. She made sure they got notice.”

  Arthur thinks aloud. “Then that’s our edge. If she forestalls our only defence, they’ll quickly head back to their newsrooms in London and Paris. She will lose the limelight she apparently prizes. We have to do our subtle worst to persuade her not to lose a chance to referee a historic debate among renowned scientists.”