Steve Martini - Shadow of Power

“Keep it down,” comes a booming voice from a sheriff’s sergeant at the back of the room, and a quiet chill settles over the audience.

Up front, a door at our side of the room opens just a crack. Through the small mesh-wired window in the door, I can see part of the head and shoulder of a uniformed deputy. He looks out at the crowd, checking everything one last time. Finally the door opens all the way. Out come two big deputies, more beef from the guard detail at the jail. Behind them, almost lost in their shadow, walks Carl Arnsberg, his head down, arms at his sides. He is wearing a new suit, his dark hair clipped short and parted on the left, slick and clean. He looks as if he’s been polished using a high-speed buffer. Even his perennial five o’clock shadow is gone.

There are some hushed, muffled whispers in the audience as people point at Carl.

Herman, who delivered Carl’s suit to the jail, whispers out of the side of his mouth, “Think ah used too much makeup.”

I get a glimpse between the deputies. Arnsberg’s face has a kind of white, bloodless look about it, like maybe a mortician got hold of him.

As they frog-march him toward our counsel table, suddenly the silence in the room is punctured by a loud shout: “Fucking fascist!” I turn my head to see a guy standing in the third row behind Tuchio’s table, looking wild-eyed at Carl. The guy scrambles over the row of seats in front of him, stepping on people as he goes. He hurdles the next two rows. Before any of the cops can reach him, he runs over the bailiff standing at the gate and through the railing.

He is two strides from Arnsberg when I lash out with one hand. I catch just a piece of his blue T-shirt as he blasts by me. Everything after that is lost in a blur of motion. Somehow this is launched off the top of our table like a rocket out of a silo. It nails the guy in the side just above the diaphragm. You can hear the breath go out of him like a crushed bellows as he is driven into the floor by something that looks like an SUV wearing a suit. Herman bounces on him once, then comes up straddling the guy like a cowboy on a steer.

Two of the guards from Carl’s contingent pile on. They cuff the man. He’s lying facedown on the floor, dazed, probably wondering who put him in the Super Bowl without a jersey or a number. The cops don’t even bother to pick him up. They just slide him, belly down, across the floor like a hockey puck and through the door to the lockup.

The other two guards, the ones who were chaperoning Arnsberg, are busy dusting off Herman, checking to see if he’s okay.

A phalanx of deputies has now formed, strung out along the bar railing so that no one else in the audience has a chance of going upstage.

Out in the gallery, the crowd is milling. Up out of their seats like jack out of his box, their voices elevated, gestures animated. Give them a few glasses to hold and it could be a party. “Did you see that?” This is followed by the occasional instant mental playback, all with hand gestures for color. “Who is that guy?” “Must be a cop.”

If I told them that Herman was Superman’s African brother, half of them would believe me. How else could a mountain move that fast? Mixed in with the free radicals, some wearing black T-shirts as a show of solidarity, there are a good number of regular courthouse-goers here, retired folk who spend their days watching trials because it’s better than the three hundred channels on cable. Where else can you see real bullet holes in the wall? Live theater, the best ticket in town, it’s free, and getting better now that they’ve brought contact sports inside.

From the corner of my eye, I see Sandra Arnsberg, Carl’s mother, standing on her tiptoes trying to see her son through the forest of uniforms in front of her.

I motion to her that I will get him.

In the rush of adrenaline, everybody but her has forgotten about Arnsberg. He is left standing by himself off to one side like some abandoned urchin. The guards talking to Herman cast an occasional glance his way just to make sure he doesn’t walk off. Where would he go with a wall of guards at the railing?

I walk over to him. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he says. “What was that all about?” Evidently Carl hasn’t seen the action out on the street.

“Just some crazy,” I tell him.

“Yeah. Guy’s nuts.” Carl looks over his shoulder at the door to the lockup where they dragged the guy, probably wondering if he has to go out that way when we’re done.

“I thought you were supposed to come to the jail this morning?”

“I was.” I tell him about the D.A. dropping a ton of paper on us at the last minute.

This seems to unnerve him.

“Anything bad?” he says. “What? What did they send? Why so much at the last minute?” Carl doesn’t understand a lot of this. Any little wrinkle tends to send him into panic.

“It’s okay. It’s material we’ve been trying to get for some time. Printouts from Scarborough’s computers.”

“Oh.”

I take him by the arm, walk him to the counsel table, where we sit.

He smiles, then waves at his mom through a crack between the cops.

“They told me I can’t have any exercise time in the dayroom anymore. Something about not enough staff,” he says.

Carl has been doing twenty-three hours a day in solitary since they arrested him. Now he’ll be doing twenty-four. The sheriff has had to segregate him at the jail because they know they can’t protect him. With the media hype, Carl has become the ultimate symbol in the great cause of every jail and prison in the country, the war of the races. The Aryan Nation would claim him as their own, force him to join whether he wanted to or not, and kill him if he refused. To the Black Brotherhood, he’s a dead man walking, top priority to be shanked in the shower or have his throat cut in the yard at the first opportunity. If they could do this in the middle of the trial, it would send a message-the only one that counts when you’re behind bars: “Don’t fuck with us.”

“Quiet!!!” Suddenly the booming voice of the sergeant at the back door again. “Everybody sit down.” The festivities out in the audience are over. As if somebody had pulled the plug in a game of musical chairs, there is a dash for seats. Within seconds the noise level drops.

Herman comes back to the table. On the way by, he slaps out a quick if low rendition of the brothers’ handshake with Carl-crossed palms, cupped fingers, and a light slap.

“Hey, man, you’re gettin’ better,” he says. Herman has been doing this ever since Carl’s first week in jail, after they broke the ice on information from the kid, leads that Herman had to run down with the leather of his shoes.

As Diggs sits, Carl leans over. “I owe ya, man.”

Herman shakes it off. “You owe me nothing.”

“No. No. I mean it. You nailed that guy,” says Carl.

“If I didn’t, the cops would have.”

“Yeah, but you did it.”

“Now let’s see if I can get outta bed in the morning, and after that I’ll have to see if I can move.” He laughs it off.

I know that Herman is taking heat. He has received some ugly phone calls, wrong numbers to “Uncle Tom.” Some hip artist did graffiti on his car. I’ve told him that there is no dishonor in begging off on this case. It’s one thing for a lawyer to take on a controversial cause. If John Adams was right, even the devil deserves a defense. I’ve told him that there are other investigators who can step in. Herman would be busy full-time just doing the other cases in our office.

To all of this Herman has said no. Part of this is the man’s nature. No one is going to tell him what case he can or cannot work. He is not a joiner of clubs-social, political, or otherwise. He is not afraid of anything that walks on two legs and could probably thrash most that walk on four. If you’re counting on group dynamics to change his mind, be advised that organized intimidation, whether racial or political, is much more likely to fuse his backbone into titanium than turn it to jelly.