Blameless in Abaddon (40 page)

After lunch the prosecution played episode two, “The Great Darkness,” covering the period from 476 to 1453. The late twelfth century found Richard the Lionhearted leading the Third Crusade in Palestine. When the vanquished defenders of Acre refused to pay any tribute money until 3,000 prisoners were released as promised, the Christians responded uncharitably. “On the afternoon of August 20, 1191, the captive soldiers were marched onto a plain in full view of the defeated Islamic army,” narrated Braverman. “Richard gave the order, and the Crusaders systematically murdered the Muslims with swords and lances.” Seventeen years later the Pope was again preaching a crusade, this time against fellow Christians: the Albigensians of southern France. The most famous line to come out of the Albigensian Crusade was spoken when a mercenary army led by northern French barons entered Beziers, a city populated by both Catholics and heretics. In the middle of the bloodbath, a Catholic soldier asked how he might tell the Albigensians from the faithful. “Kill them all,” his superior commanded him. “God will know His own.”

Later that afternoon Martin had the tribunal watch “Impalers, Inquisitors, and Insurrectionists,” Braverman and Kelvin's version of the Renaissance, beginning with the reign of Vlad II Dracula, prince of Wallachia. A typical day in Vlad's life occurred on April 2, 1459, when he entered Brasov with his troops and for no particular reason ordered all the townspeople impaled on wooden stakes. As his career progressed, Vlad had the objects of his paranoia variously skinned alive, hacked to pieces, and disemboweled, but impalement remained his signature depravity. “To make the process totally excruciating, the prince demanded that each stake traverse its victim vertically and that its point be rounded and oiled.” Compared with their account of Vlad the Impaler, the filmmakers' treatment of the Spanish Inquisition seemed tasteful and restrained. The enterprise began in 1478, when King Ferdinand obtained a papal bull permitting him to hire professional torturers to counteract the supposed nefarious activities of Jews,
conversos
, Muslims, and heretics throughout his country. Friar Tomas de Torquemada became the first Grand Inquisitor. “His techniques for eliciting confessions were generally unimaginative—shredding his victims' flesh on the rack, desocketing their arms via the
garrucha
—but he got the job done.” Throughout episode three Kelvin cut to snippets from the witch craze that infected western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The phenomenon started officially in 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull empowering Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, two respected theologians and experienced torturers, to travel across the continent diagnosing “the disease of heresy” and punishing its practitioners. “The number of accused witches burned at the stake following the bull of 1484 is unknown, but many historians favor a figure approaching seven hundred and fifty thousand.”

“It's too much,” said Patricia that evening, gesturing toward the Court TV replay. “We get it, okay? History is written in blood. You don't have to show us any more.”

“Listen to your friend,” said Olaf.

“I'm going to place every last second of
A History of Havoc
on the record,” Martin insisted, glancing up from Harry Elder's dossier. “Every last second!”

“Let me guess,” said Patricia. “You're about to shovel the Third Reich down our throats and—what else?—Bosnia, right?”

“I didn't invent the twentieth century.”

“Neither did God.”

“The point is debatable. That's why I came to Holland.”

The following morning Martin played episode four, “The Teeth of Reason,” which charted the evolution of iniquity from the Protestant secession through the horrors of the French Revolution and the subsequent carnage of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1524 Germany erupted in chaos when the downtrodden peasants, fired by the spirit of the Reformation, turned on their ruling princes. The imperial army responded with great efficiency, surrounding the rebels completely on May 15, 1525. “Just as the peasants were about to give up, a rainbow appeared, convincing them they enjoyed divine protection,” narrated Braverman. “When they refused to surrender, the government troops butchered them to the last man.” Forty-seven years later an equally terrible bloodbath occurred when France's Catholic king, Charles IX, permitted his zealous supporters to attack the Protestant Huguenots, who were allegedly plotting against him. On the night of Saint Bartholomew's Eve, August 23, the royalists locked the gates of Paris and painted crosses on the Huguenots' doors. The following morning Charles's troops began dragging the branded families from their homes and slicing them apart with swords. Protestant children were thrown screaming into the Seine. The massacre ended only after tens of thousands had been killed.

Episode five, “Progress toward Perdition,” catalogued the various moral evils that infected the optimistic and industrious nineteenth century, including the slaughter of countless Native Americans, the War Between the States, and the grisly demise of the Paris Commune during Bloody Week. The year 1865 brought the notorious Fort Pillow Massacre, in which three hundred captured Union soldiers, mostly black, were shot to death by a Confederate general who was later elected a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Eleven years later came the so-called Bulgarian Horrors, perpetrated by Turkish irregulars, the Bashi-Bazouks, as they sacked the ostensibly rebellious town of Batak, continuing their assault even after realizing the defenders were mostly women and children. The Turks split apart the Bulgarians' skulls and decapitated the lucky ones outright. Pregnant women enjoyed no protection. The Bashi-Bazouks ripped open their wombs with bayonets, leaving both mother and fetus to die in the mud.

That afternoon the judges watched the climactic episode, “The Loom of Ruin,” which packed into its hundred-and-eighty-minute running time the whole dreadful saga of the twentieth century. Among the events covered in the first hour was the 1916 German offensive against the Allied fortress of Verdun. For ten successive months, both armies endured relentless barrages of bullets, artillery shells, and poison-gas canisters. “When the shooting finally stopped,” said Braverman over a tracking shot displaying heaps of slaughtered infantrymen, “the lines remained essentially unchanged, and more than a million soldiers were dead or wounded.” Equally gruesome was the filmmakers' presentation of the horrors surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution, including the 20,000,000 Russians killed by influenza and starvation between 1914 and 1924 and the 100,000 butchered by the Reds during the civil war of 1918 to 1922. The second hour of “The Loom of Ruin” focused on the evils accruing to World War Two, including the Holocaust that consumed nearly half of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. At Auschwitz, the Nazis were eventually herding up to 6,000 victims a day into chambers marked
BATHS AND DISINFECTING
and releasing poison gas into the air. “As the panicked prisoners stampeded over one another, their corpses became piled to the ceiling,” narrated Braverman. On August 6, 1945, the American B-29
Enola Gay
dropped the atomic bomb called Little Boy on Hiroshima, Japan, instantly killing 75,000 civilians. Survivors ran screaming through the streets, their scorched skin hanging from their bodies in black strips. “In the days that followed, radiation sickness tortured thousands with nausea, fever, and uncontrolled bleeding. Pregnant women gave birth to malformed babies, and the leukemia rate soared.” The final hour catalogued the barbarities of the postwar years, from the Soviet Army's brutal repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising through the epic feud still smoldering among Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. Particularly memorable was the on-camera testimony of a Cambodian refugee, Kim Nu, who told how she and her family had just sat down to dinner on a hot summer evening in 1976 when machine-gun bullets blew apart the door and tore off her grandmother's face. As Kim and her baby brother looked on, Communist soldiers entered the hut, kicked their father to death, and shot their mother between the eyes. “Such attacks characterized the process through which Pol Pot consolidated his power after defeating the Lon Nol government,” narrated Braverman. “By the time the Vietnamese toppled Pol Pot's regime, an estimated three million Cambodians had been murdered outright by the Khmer Rouge or died in disease-ridden concentration camps.”

Martin shut off the TV, secretly ate a painkiller, and steadied himself on the lectern.

“Three million Cambodians?”

“Three million.”

“Dr. Braverman, I must now ask you a crucial question. Thinking back on all the atrocities you've documented here—the crusades and the massacres, the impalings and the gassings—can you identify a single instance in which the Defendant intervened on the victims' behalf?”

“There were many cases in which people
expected
divine assistance. The sack of Jerusalem, the German peasants' war . . .”

“But is there any evidence He
did
intervene?”

“None that I know of.”

“Zero evidence?”

“Zero.”

“Thank you, Dr. Braverman.”

Invited to cross-examine the witness, Lovett predictably kept it short. The subject, after all, was moral evil, a regrettable but unavoidable by-product of human free will.

“Dr. Braverman, do you really believe the Defendant never entered history with the aim of relieving His creatures' pain?”

“That is my conclusion, yes.”

“Have you ever read the Gospel According to Saint Matthew?”

“I've scanned parts of it.”

“When was the last time you ‘scanned' Saint Matthew?”

“Three years ago. We were hoping to include Christ's crucifixion in episode one, but we couldn't get an angle on it.”

“Is there by any chance a New Testament in your hotel room?”

“I don't know.”

“May I make a suggestion? When you return to the Huize Bellevue tonight, go to the front desk. A Revised English Bible will be waiting for you, placed there by my brother. It's yours to keep. Take it to bed with you. Read the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. It can't do you any harm, and you might even learn something. I have no further questions.”

 

The following morning Martin stood before the bench, raised himself to the fullest height his friable hips permitted, discreetly swallowed two Roxanols, and solemnly addressed the judges. “The great Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz once remarked, ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million are statistics.'” He cleared his throat and fixed on Torvald. “Von Clausewitz was wrong, Your Honors. A million deaths are a million tragedies. The people call Harry Elder.”

Martin's cleanup sufferer was cherubic and sprightly, the sort of smiling, open-faced man from whom you'd be happy to buy a used car. He approached the stand wearing a blue polyester suit at least two sizes too small and clutching a stuffed ape dressed in a tuxedo.

“What do you do for a living?” Martin asked Harry after the witness had given his oath.

“I manage a Kay-Bee toy store in the town where I live—New Castle, Delaware.”

“What's that in your hand?”

“My son's favorite stuffed animal.”

“A gorilla?”

“Orangutan, actually. His name's Ozzie.”

“Please tell the tribunal about your son.”

Harry adjusted the orangutan's cummerbund. “Right from the beginning, Duncan was a sickly sort of kid—colds, earaches, diarrhea. First Dr. Wendell said it was normal, then he said it was asthma, then he gave Duncan a test for cystic fibrosis. It came back positive.”

“Cystic fibrosis is caused by a mutated gene, correct?”

“That's right.”

“What does this gene do?”

“It manufactures huge amounts of mucus that turn your child's lungs into breeding grounds for bacteria. It also wrecks his pancreas, so he has to take enzyme pills before he can digest his food. My wife and I are both carriers, but we didn't know that until Duncan got diagnosed.”

“When a husband and wife are both carriers, will their offspring inevitably get CF?”

“No. Our first child, Emily, she's just fine.”

“Go on.”

“A few hours after we got the news, Janet and I crept into Duncan's room while he slept. ‘We're sorry,' we kept telling him, over and over. He was only two years old. ‘We're so sorry . . .'”

Undoubtedly the worst aspect of cystic fibrosis, Harry explained, was the way it required you to torture your own child. To dislodge the mucus, Harry had to place Duncan on a sloped board twice a day and beat him with a cupped hand on his back, chest, and sides, all the while ordering him to cough. “It's over!” Duncan would start screaming halfway through. “It's over, Daddy, it's over!”

“Eventually Duncan figured out that not every child in the world gets pounded on,” said Harry. “He kept asking me, ‘Will I have to do this after I'm all grown up?'”

“What did you say?”

Harry blanched. “I told him there'd be no more poundings after he was . . . all grown up.”

Every six months, Duncan needed to spend ten days in New Castle Children's Clinic, where he received antibiotics intravenously to combat the pseudomonas and other bacteria attacking his lungs. In Harry's view the only advantage of these hospitalizations was that somebody else had to beat his son.

Duncan's condition remained stable for four years. Then, on the day after his sixth birthday, his left lung collapsed, and the doctors had to insert a tube in his chest and pump up the deflated organ.

“He was terribly ill from then on—arthritis, pneumonia, weak heart, liver problems—but he kept on being himself, eager to play with his sister, happy in his own way. The twelfth time he entered the hospital, I promised him we'd all go to New York City after he got out. He'd always wanted to see
Cats
.”