Lawyers in Hell (38 page)

Henry would adapt to living with his disfigurements.  Roger would get used to looking at him  Eventually.  But not quite yet.  Guiltily, Roger dropped his eyes and busied himself with his gear.

Everyone was preparing for the next phase of their mission.  They carried the necessary legal codes with them, in those brutal ALICE packs.  Roger reached for his, safe in a lockbox with sharp corners, then bound in an accordion file, sealed with a Perdition Seal that burst into flames when he released it so he could access the several binders within.

Each of them carried two hundred pounds of documentation.  All documents must be accounted for, because those were their only references:  the infernalnet was, of course, unreliable, even if they could get signal out here.

Pages were always out of order.  Any file might contain any page, and the pages were differently printed and spaced, so it was hard to tell which followed which.  It was an administrative nightmare.

Suddenly, McCarthy screamed like a girl and kept screaming:  “Nooooo!  Eeeaaaaeeiii!”

They all stared at Tail-dragger Joe.  Had McCarthy melted down again?  On McCarthy’s pants were telltale stains of wetness at the crotch.  Wonderful.

“Sir?” someone asked.  “Captain?”

McCarthy hummed or cursed to himself and nobody else spoke or moved for far too long.

Finally, Benet stepped over and lifted the cover letter from the dirt floor of the makeshift headquarters.  Smoothing out the wrinkles caused by McCarthy clutching it like a doll, Benet read aloud:  “‘The operative legal code of the day is that of the USSR, nineteen sixty-five.’”

McCarthy was curled on the ground, whimpering, “Commies … commies … commies ….”

While Benet alternated between cajoling and kicking the worthless old radical, Roger sorted his papers, leaving appropriate gaps where pages were missing.

Crooked-legged Horace and Rehnquist, CLAP’s paralegal, came around to sort, stack and box.  Boxing was necessary to keep the papers in order, but the boxes were held together with duct tape that had degraded in this dusty, gritty hell of hells.  Horace and Rehnquist did the best they could.

Roger snuck his phone behind his raised knees.  Perhaps there might be some brief infernalnet connectivity.  Worth a shot.  He slid out the keyboard and pulled up DisgraceBook, on the off-chance of connecting.  He recognized no names.  He had fifty invites for dates with succubi, Insecurity Service surveys, and suggestions of souls to bedevil.  He clicked on the first one of those.

The page came up on his screen, where a grizzled old man leapt naked out of a bathtub.  Hurling enough invective to merit notice even in hell, the nude senior snagged an old Garand rifle from the corner and rasped, “Get off my page!”

Roger shut off the phone.

Quiet persisted until a relief platoon of infantry arrived to assist with insecurity.  They remained outside for the most part.  He avoided meeting them, but caught a glimpse of them when their lieutenant came in to talk to Benet.

Among the New Dead, infantrymen spent the afterlife getting shot up.  One – with dark, curly hair and a Greek accent – was horrifically scarred.  Appalling injuries were part of this hell.  Roger wondered if he’d eventually end up looking like the Greek.  He tried not to be disgusted by the poor guy and waited for lunch.

As always this year, lunch was a stiff stick of jerky and a piece of dry bread.  So was breakfast and dinner.  He sighed as he chewed slowly, wondering when the menu would change, and to what.  Last year they’d had only raw tuna, past its peak.  One ate because nerves and habits compelled it –
if
you could:  Some guys in hell had no stomachs; some had no anuses.  Some starved to death, becoming more and more helpless and easy prey in the process….

“Howard, wake up,” someone snapped, too loud.

Roger jerked upright.  He’d been napping against the wall, and now had a crick in his neck.

McCarthy glowered at him and moved on.

“Yes, sir,” Roger said to his back.

Next to him, mashed-up Henry said, “Get ready.”

Roger knew what Henry meant.  He turned away, trying not to look at Henry’s twisted face.  Poor bastard.

Get ready – to work.
  Hell might have too many lawyers, but none were in residence here.  The locals wanted their grievances heard.  And CLAP would hear every one, rendering injustice as best they could.

Crooked-legged Horace started a roster, so the locals could lodge their complaints and seek resolution.

The good part was that the shooting had stopped.  The bad part was the cases ranged from sad to bizarre to disquieting.

McCarthy grabbed the first dozen and read them off.  Then…

“Next we have a classless action lawsuit by the remaining eight lives of a hell-kitten for attempted genocide of mice; suit brought by said tabby hell-kitten (striped-winged variety) called Lucky, who wanted to grow up.  Countersuit by one ‘Sneaky,’ the desert hell-fox, who determined that Lucky’s life number three will be the tastiest and he, Sneaky, has been unfairly deprived of it.  Howard, can you handle this?”

“Yes, sir.  I can.”  You knew you were in hell when you were a lawyer defending litigious animals badmouthing one another.

McCarthy read on:  “A Mohammed (… why is every third male in hell named Mohammed? …) alleges that a prostitute did
not
give him, and I quote, ‘a poetically succulent release,’ and
did
give him several nasty diseases.  She says because, in hell, orgasm …” McCarthy hesitated over the word, “… is commonly unattainable, and the diseases were the weekly special, she’s innocent:  she only provides a service.  Summers?”

“I can do that, sir,” Summers mumbled through smashed lips.

“A certain ... former … presidential candidate, Democratic (presumably a Communist), insists an election wasn’t run fairly.  Regulatory Statutes of Unfairness say that elections in hell are supposed to be rigged.  I’ll take that one.”

Roger felt sorry for everyone in that case.  McCarthy would rant.

Benet said, “In here are our primary mission orders.”

You could hear a feather drop as he ripped open the package.  These were never good.  A flash and a nauseating whiff of sulfur attested to its authenticity.

Benet scanned them, sighed in relief and read aloud:  “We are to bring back the head of the most honest man in hell for deposition.”

“It’s a trap!” McCarthy scoffed.  “An honest man in hell?”

Roger muttered, “Certainly neither of you.”  Nor himself, but he was honest enough to admit it.

Horace said, “Evil and dishonesty don’t have to go together.  The only hurt I caused was some fractional percentage of shortage to the IRS.  It benefited my clients.  Not evil, but dishonest.”

“Who are we going to find here who’s evil but honest?  Peter the Great?  Julius Caesar?  Those Greeks from that famous battle?”

Horace said, “I can get on the infernalnet and see who’s around here.”

“Do that.  You young kids know how that stuff works.”

“Yes, sir; we do,” Horace agreed, though he’d been fifty at the time of his death.  “Young” in this case meant “more current.”

*

The next morning, in a red-painted mud-brick hall, domed and spired, Roger conducted his trial as barrister for the tabby hell-kitten named Lucky, using the legal code of the UK, 1923, complete to powdered wig.  Standard procedure, most days but, today, the minor demon serving as judge was glorying in his role.

“Your Dishonor, we –” 
Zap!
  Lightning singed Roger’s butt.  “Your Dishonor, we object –” 
Zap!
 
Zap!
  “My Lord Judge, we propose  –”

Zap!  Zap!  Zap!

At noon, the code switched to that of King Kamehameha of Hawaii.  Roger steeled himself for horrors to come.  The Hawaiian death penalty was even more terrifying when you knew you
couldn’t
die from it.

Mercifully, he was able to argue the stripe-winged hell-kitten’s case well enough for the case to be dismissed before the Kamehameha rules kicked in.  He doubted that poor little Lucky would really enjoy his victory, since after his eight more legally-mandated lives came and went, the hell-kitten would face innumerable lives with no legal protections:  the restraining order against the fox would lapse.

And the smiling desert hell-fox would be waiting.

*

That evening, back in CLAP’s compound, now wired and sandbagged, they chewed their jerky and discussed their mission.

Benet said, “Satan wants the head of the most honest man in hell.  By specifying head, should I assume he wants this head
sans
body?”

“I believe we must, son,” Sergeant Thurmond drawled in his scratchy voice; ancient skin wrinkled around his beady eyes.  “I always take His Satanic Majesty at His word.”

“The next question is:  who’s the most honest man in hell?  Accepting that ‘good,’ ‘honest’ and even ‘kind’ don’t necessarily overlap, who would meet the criterion of ‘honest’?”

Roger thought about that.  Nearly every damned soul in hell thought he was doomed unjustly to eternal torment; they sinned and died and sinned more and died again; the damned dead never learned; new sinners arrived constantly.  Everybody in hell lied constantly, if only to himself.  So could there even be a soul in this backwater of New Hell who was honest?

Crooked-legged Horace said, “I have it:  Gandhi.”

Roger tried to smile but smirked instead.  “Gandhi.  Of course.”

McCarthy muttered, “That skinny little Communist bastard.”

Roger didn’t think Gandhi qualified as a communist.  The father of
ahimsa
(nonviolence) as a political strategy, yes.  Liberal, certainly.  Pacifist, mostly.  Of course, McCarthy accused everyone of being a communist.

Benet said, “I have only once heard that name.  Who was he; what’s he about now?”

Roger said, “In India, Gandhi pioneered
satyagraha
, which means resisting tyranny with passive disobedience.  He led his people to civil independence from the British.  Nonviolent.  Persuasive.  Unassailably consistent in his beliefs.”

Benet snorted, but said, “He certainly sounds promising.  Where do we find him?”

Horace answered:  “I believe he’s right downtown, protesting something.”

Hardly surprising.

The day turned cold; its chill bit Roger’s lungs.  They met no resistance on their way ‘downtown.’  Factions abounded in Kabum; after their landing the day before, they were just one more clutch of damned souls among the doomed from everywhere.  Distant battles raged, as residents of hell fought over metaphors or territory or eye-color or infernal affiliation:  men made hell familiar, and war was familiar to every soul from every era.

They walked downtown.  Roger preferred the blisters from his boots to yesterday’s parachuting and pogo-sticking.  Streets here were convoluted and narrow and, as usual, their maps were wrong.  So they walked in the general direction of downtown, among mud-brick facades and teetering high rises with blown-out glass, guided by eye and ear and instinct to where the damned were congregating.

They found an open plaza surrounding a parliament building:  in it was a flagpole; on the pole flapped a tattered flag showing a black devil dancing on a red mountaintop:  the symbol of Ashcanistan.

Only the flag was familiar.  Roger had never before served in Kabum.  They’d not been briefed for this foray.  On the whole, the town felt ancient, but then there were the gutted high-rises … stupidity from every age, chockablock on the streets.

A protest was ongoing, involving thousands upon thousands, old and new, in the costumes of human history.  CLAP went unremarked and unchallenged, despite weapons, as they patrolled the perimeter looking for their witness:  nonviolent demonstration or not, sarrisophori and demons and bedawi and ifrits and kaffirs and modern soldiers prowled among the throng:  helmets with horsehair crests and metal wings and slitted visors and horns and feathers and spikes and chinstraps and faceshields and MOP re-breathers turned to them and away again.  Kindred souls.

“I see him,” McCarthy said.  “At the base of the steps.  A scrawny little weasel, sanctimonious in his cowardice.”

Gandhi was wearing homespun, despite the day’s chill.  From old photographs, Roger recognized some of Gandhi’s dedicated disciples.  Ahead, people squeezed toward demon guards.  Closer to Gandhi, his followers were organized in ranks, climbing low stairs in formation.

“Very much like communists,” McCarthy commented.

“Or soldiers,” Roger threw out.  McCarthy’s paranoia and obsession was really irritating to him.

As marchers reached the top, demons on risers flanking the podium held up pokers that flashed orange-hot and stabbed the leading wave of demonstrators.  Screaming, the damned protesters thrashed and rolled down the steps.  Some got to their feet and stumbled toward the rear of the line, to repeat the process.  Others crawled away.

“What the hell is this?” Benet asked.

“It’s called ‘passive resistance.’  They seek to overwhelm the demons without fighting.”

“Does that work?”

“Only against a civilized enemy worried about public opinion.”

“Isn’t it rather ridiculous?  You’d think he’d learn.”

So are single-shot rifles against repeaters, you jackass
.  “It did work against the British in India.  His proposal to use
satyagraha
against the Nazis in World War Two was never tested.”

Benet said, “So I’d suspect.  Well, let’s see if he’s our man.”

Sobs from the non-violent seared by pokers sounded, strangely disturbing.

McCarthy said, “Roger, you seem to know something about this man.  Introduce us, on the double.”

“Yes, sir.”  Probably a good idea.  Benet knew virtually nothing about Gandhi or his time.  McCarthy had the manners of a pig.  Even a simple, reasonable request came out of McCarthy’s mouth sounding pompous.

Surprised by his own calm, Roger led the way.  He hadn’t yet died in hell, though he’d suffered numerous indignities.  He sighed.  There was going to be a first time.  Maybe today.