James Grippando - A King's ransom

It was hard to tell where it had come from-Matthew could have sworn it was below him. Confused, he hurried ahead to the base of the narrow pass. He looked back and saw Jan, the Swede, and he was immediately concerned. The order of descent had been Matthew, the Japanese man, and then Jan.

Behind Jan was Nisho, the Japanese woman. She was hysterical. One of the guerrillas grabbed her and carried her down the rest of the way. Two other guerrillas were at the cliff’s edge. Matthew hurried over and looked down into the ravine.

The Japanese man lay dead, facedown, his body smashed on the rocks near the river a hundred feet below. The wife was screaming inconsolably. Grief was what Matthew thought at first, but she was swinging wildly and cursing in Japanese, seemingly more angry than anguished. One guerrilla wasn’t enough to control her. Two others finally came over to subdue her.

Joaquin was last on the scene, having doubled back from his lead position. “ ?Que paso? ” What happened?

Jan answered quickly, “ ?El americano le empujo! ”

Nisho was still screaming wildly, and Matthew wasn’t sure if he’d heard Jan quite right. “I pushed him?” he said, incredulous.

Two guerrillas grabbed him. “No, no!” said Matthew.

“ Si, si, ” said Jan. “ ?Matthew le empujo! ”

Matthew locked eyes with the Swede. In a flash, that earlier nervous talk of Joaquin’s having more prisoners than he could handle came back to Matthew, and he realized what Jan had done: Some prisoners needed to be eliminated, and Jan had made sure that he wouldn’t be one of them.

The crying widow was fighting to break free of the guerrillas’ grasp, trying to crawl on her hands and knees to the cliff’s edge to see or perhaps join her fallen husband. The guerrillas restrained her to the point of exhaustion, but the wailing continued.

Joaquin had fire in his eyes as he walked up to Matthew and, without warning, delivered a monstrous sucker punch to the solar plexus. Matthew doubled over, sucking air, but the guerrillas held him up, forcing him to stand on his own two feet.

“He’s lying,” said Matthew, barely able to speak.

“ You’re lying,” said Joaquin. He grabbed Matthew by the hair and yanked him straight up to the standing position. “And don’t think you won’t pay for this.”

He unleashed another blow to the same spot. Matthew went down onto his knees, gasping for air. Another guerrilla kicked him from behind, an army boot directly into his left kidney, which sent him sprawling face first into the dirt.

Matthew coiled into the fetal position to fend off any further blows. He could hardly breathe, and the dizziness was making it almost impossible to see. Mustering all his remaining strength, he managed to turn his sights on the Swede, but his fellow captive just looked away. Jan had been saying it for days, though Matthew hadn’t wanted to believe him. Now he knew it was true.

They were becoming their own Pitcairn Island. It was every man for himself.

The Miami-Dade County courthouse was practically ancient by Miami standards, an imposing stone tower and distinctive bump on the city’s modern skyline. My first visit had been on a field trip in middle school, though it wasn’t the massive fluted columns or tiered granite steps that had impressed me so much I’d decided to become a lawyer. It was the unbridled energy, the almost perpetual state of confusion.

On Tuesday morning it was abuzz with the usual chaos. From every direction swarms of people converged on the main entrance, squeezed through the metal detectors, and then raced across the lobby for a spot on a slow-moving elevator that would eventually land them before one of twenty-three judges on fifteen floors. It was a nonstop stream of lawyers and litigants, witnesses and jurors, court employees and members of the media. Thrown into the mix were the venerable retirees who had nothing better to do than pack a liverwurst sandwich into a paper sack and head over to Flagler Street to enjoy the real-life version of The People’s Court. They were like unofficial court historians, capable of rattling off stories about the giants in Miami’s trial bar the way baseball fans knew the legends of the sport. For them, trial was theater, at times the theater of the absurd, and the longest-running show around was right here in this old building. A few could even wax nostalgic about the old days when the courthouse also served as the stockade, well before my time. Criminal cases were no longer heard here. These days the docket was strictly civil.

“Civil.” That wasn’t exactly the word that came to mind as I braced for the sight of Duncan Fitz as opposing counsel.

The hearing was scheduled for 9:00 A.M. before Judge Korvan, roughly sixteen hours after I’d been served with the papers. I was well aware of the old adage that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and I’d considered asking the judge to postpone the hearing. But searching for a lawyer and then bringing him up to speed on the facts would only have delayed matters. My father needed someone to get before a judge and plead the family’s case as quickly as possible, and I knew the case better than anyone. At least for round one, I was on my own.

I was the last to arrive at Judge Korvan’s chambers. Duncan Fitz and his New York partner, Maggie Johans, were seated on the battered plaid couch in the waiting room. They probably would have shaken my hand if I’d offered it, the hypocrites.

Maggie wasn’t a trial lawyer, so I assumed she was here not in her capacity as Cool Cash partner but as an officer of Quality Insurance. She’d brought down a pair of sharp litigators from the New York office to assist Duncan, a man and a woman I’d never met. Unlike my peers in the Miami office, they’d have no personal reservations about filleting me like a flounder. No one had bothered with introductions, but I knew from their engraved leather trial bags that they were seasoned litigators. Trial bags were badges of honor at my firm, the more beat up and battle-scarred, the better. Litigators at Cool Cash took their image seriously. Unlike corporate lawyers, health-care lawyers, antitrust lawyers, and so on, lawyers who specialized in litigation were never called litigation lawyers. They were “litigators,” a term that connoted more fighting than lawyering and that, quite appropriately, even sounded a little like “gladiator.” When business dealings went sour, nobody ever threatened to call in the real estate department. If lawyers were sharks-a joke I heard far too often, being the son of a fisherman-then litigators were the great whites.

“The judge will see you now,” announced her secretary.

The hearing would be held in chambers, rather than the main courtroom, which wasn’t unusual when a judge intended to hear only argument from counsel with no live testimony from witnesses. There was no stone-faced bailiff, no high mahogany bench from which the judge presided. The intimacy of a proceeding in chambers, however, did not mean informality. The judge wore the same black robe and the lawyers were just as respectful as in open court. Her carved antique desk was at the far end of the chambers, positioned so that the judge’s back was to the window. A table extended from the front of her desk to create a T-shaped seating arrangement. The lawyers sat on opposite sides of the table, the plaintiff to the judge’s left, the defendant to the right. The court reporter was off to the side, near the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

“Good morning,” Judge Korvan said in an amicable tone. She reminded me a little of my grandmother before the Alzheimer’s, except that the smile seemed less genuine. Judge Theresa Korvan was a twenty-year veteran on the bench, who’d seen it all and had a reputation for smiling pleasantly no matter what she was doing, whether bidding you good morning or citing you for contempt.