Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

At the front of the courtroom, a lawyer in a gray suit sat at the defendant’s table and examined the evidence against his client, spinning the cylinder of what appeared to be a Smith & Wesson Detective Special, cocking back the hammer and taking aim, for an empty, meditative moment, at the elevated bench from which, according to the agenda out front, Mr. Justice Shaik Daud Hadi Ponusammy would momentarily preside.

Except for Storm, the lawyer had the courtroom to himself. He aimed the pistol at the court secretary’s empty desk, in particular at the sign on it reading DI–LARANG MEROKOK. He pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped.

Lunch was over. Storm heard footfalls echoing through the building. He stood up and went to a window with a view down into the driveway, where a blue van was arriving now from Pudu Prison. Lettering on its flank read POLIS RAJA DI MALAYSIA. Among the half dozen Chinese and Malay prisoners he could easily pick out the false Canadian Benęt, his face looking white and small in the van’s back window.

Storm took his seat again. A few people had scattered themselves among the pews by now, a half dozen reporters and a couple of spectators. The court’s secretary came, and one security guard; and then Benét’s barrister, Ahmed Ismail, entered the courtroom. He looked soft and favored, with the big, wet eyes of a child, arranging his papers before him in the shadow of the judge’s looming bench. Very plush purple curtains covering the rear wall gave the courtroom the air of an old theater, and for a moment Ismail looked like a schoolboy, absurdly dressed in a black three-piece suit, coming to see a movie.

A staircase led up from the lower floor directly into the prisoner’s box in the middle of the Old High Court, so that climbing it the accused, Lau, a Chinese boy looking around himself wildly, suddenly surfaced in the midst of his dilemma.

All stood for the entering Mr. Justice Ponusammy, who positioned himself behind a large ceremonial mace that rested on his desk. The prisoner leaned on the railing of his box, supporting himself with both bound hands.

All were seated.

They ran the court in English. The prisoner’s lawyer explained his client didn’t speak it and would use an interpreter. The boy had been convicted of dealing in firearms and of possessing a large quantity of ammunition. The judge went over the submissions, the precedents, and all the rest. The small man interpreting for the prisoner seemed nervous, sitting on his wooden chair beside the barrister and jiggling both his knees violently. When the judge addressed him he jumped up, and the prisoner also rose, though nobody had asked him to.

On hearing of his arrest, the Chinese boy’s mother had killed herself by swallowing insecticide. “He does not yet know,” his lawyer told the judge in English. The Chinese boy stood there oblivious. His interpreter failed to translate. “He will soon know, and that will perhaps be his biggest punishment.”

Justice Ponusammy never once looked at the prisoner. He gave him six years and six strokes of the rattan cane, and three more years for the ammunition.

During the break, while they waited for the prisoner Benęt to be brought up, Storm went forward and approached the lawyer Ismail. “My name is Storm.”

“Mr. Storm. Yes.”

“Your client. Benęt.”

“Yes.”

“Is he coming up?”

“Yes, in five minutes’ time.”

“Can you give him a message for me? A message from Storm?”

“I think I can, yes.”

“Tell Benęt I’m completely capable of everything he fears.”

“Tell him I’ll be at the prison tomorrow. Tell him it’s Mr. Storm.” “Is it a metaphor?” “Tell him.” When Storm had found his seat again in the back, the lawyer was still

watching him.

Ismail turned away as his client Benęt trudged up the stairwell from below them with his hands cuffed before him. He was in fact, and as Storm had believed, William Sands.

Like the previous prisoner, Sands supported himself on the railing of the prisoner’s box as the judge entered and everyone stood up.

Sands still wore the short hair, and the mustache —no longer silly or affected, but long and derelict and grandiose, accentuating his sadness. His cheeks needed a shave. He wore a shabby blue sweater against the chill of central air-conditioning and seemed to be feeling somewhere between sulky and comatose. He was skinny and hollow-eyed and looked like he might even have a soul.

As soon as they’d all seated themselves again, the prisoner resumed his mindless down-staring. His head hanging. Really motionless. Slumped. Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma.

For three-fourths of an hour the judge read words from a stack of documents, going over all the ins and outs, deliberating aloud to himself, from the sound of things. The Chinese youngster just sentenced had run guns for William French Benęt; so had many others. The judge went over the list of counts on which Benęt had been found guilty here. He referred to the prisoner as “a major dealer in illegal arms; a scourge on our lives; a trafficker in our very blood.”

Storm realized the back pew was the wrong place. Nothing prevented him from getting up and sidling along the rows until he sat right behind the prisoner.

Sands turned around at the disturbance. Saw Storm. Recognized him. Turned away.

The judge looked small behind his gigantic desk. He called the prisoner “an imposter and a psychopath.” He ordered the prisoner to rise and sentenced him to be bound with rope, flayed with a cane, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.

They had the Old High Court tricked out like a state capitol. But two blocks away was Little India, where Storm had taken a room. He walked upright through crowds kowtowing at his feet in the streets while public address systems screeched the Islamic afternoon prayers. Wild streetside commerce: a soothsayer lying on the asphalt on his back with a black kerchief covering his face, mumbling predictions. His partner chanted over a collection of rust-colored human bones, including a cranium, arranged on a red scarf around a white hen’s egg. They were peddling tiny charms made out of gold foil from “555” cigarette packs and dirty string. The partner lifts the lid on a box, a six-foot cobra rises up, flaring its hood. He backs the cobra down with one of the powerful charms, dangling it in front of the reptile’s hissing face. A man nearby displays a pile, a good five pounds, of teeth he’s yanked successfully. They’re all here from the demented corners of the Far East with their straw mats and immortality pills. Various elixirs for enlarging the human penis; also, for the same purpose, a somewhat frightening-looking device of belts and rings. And photo albums showing cases that have responded. Herbs, unguents. Concoctions of every sort. Medicinal roots preserved in glass jugs, floating like amputations.

He entered a small clothing store. Its atmosphere almost unbreathable with incense. Impossible to move in here without rubbing against the silk, the rugs. Outside, the mosque still shrieking. The Hindu women standing still and looking at him. Beautiful. Three of them. One stared hard and must have been the mother.

“I’m here to see Rajik.”

“Mister is waiting,” she said.

“Through here?”

“Yes. Again. Like yesterday.” Yesterday? Her fantastically lovely face, and a deep coldness behind it. He hadn’t seen her yesterday.

He passed through a curtain of painted beads, through its depiction of the god Krishna among bathing virgins at a waterfall, and into darkness.

“Come there … It’s fine … Just here.”

“I can’t see.”

“Wait for your eyes.”

Storm moved with care toward Mr. Rajik’s voice and sat on a cushion on a stool.