Authors: Unknown
‘Really? Speaking of travel, may I ask how you got here?’
The maharishi’s clear brow furrowed in puzzlement.
‘How I got here?’
‘Yes, how you came to America?’
‘I do not understand’
‘It’s a simple enough question. You certainly didn’t make the trip by telepathic means’
‘No. I was flown in an aircraft.’
‘Precisely.’ Scott Velie thumbed down his page of notes. ‘Air India, to be exact. Flight Seventeen, departed Calcutta the evening of December 23, arrived Kennedy Airport on the following afternoon at three thirty-five, which was the day before Christmas. Round-trip first-class passage in the amount of two thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight dollars and fourteen cents was paid from a special legal account in the defendant’s name at Chase Manhattan Bank, as were all your personal expenses during the past month, which to this date, Including your one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar-a-day suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, come to the tidy figure of six thousand, three hundred, and fifty dollars, or thereabouts.’ Velie lifted his eyes from his notes and fixed the witness with a cynical smile. ‘That’s quite a heap of living for a man who’s turned away from the gross and fleshly tendencies of the material world, wouldn’t you say?’
Brice Mark jumped to his feet, shocked to discover that Elliot Hoover’s bank records had been subpoenaed by the DA’s office.
‘Your Honour, I object to this spurious, argumentative, and demeaning attack against the character of the witness. It has never been a secret that the defence paid for the Reverend up at the judge in the disoriented manner of a man just awakened from a sound sleep.
‘You must answer the question,’ the judge snapped.
‘The question?’ the maharishi repeated in a seeming daze.
The judge turned impatiently to the clerk. ‘Read the question again!’
‘ “And were you given that cheque in exchange for your testimony?” ‘
As the full significance of the question, barbed as it was with insult and innuendo, was finally absorbed by the maharishi, his eyes became deeply aggrieved, and his face tautened with rancour, hurt, and hostility. In one sudden motion, he rose from the witness stand and proceeded to stalk floatingly out of the courtroom.
There was a collective gasp from the audience. Judge Langley had trouble finding his voice and, jerking up to his feet, finally shouted after the departing witness, ‘Stop! You have not been dismissed! Guard! Restrain that man! Seize him and return him to the witness stand!’
The maharishi was now through the gate railing and moving swiftly up the aisle towards the exit when the door guard sprinted towards him and collected his feather-light body in a powerful hug (later telling a reporter that it felt as if he were grabbing a bag of loose bones).
At the first wince of pain on the maharishi’s face, Elliot Hoover jumped up from his seat and bounded to the old Hindu’s rescue, clearing the railing in a sprightly jump, and, seizing the guard by the carotid artery, quickly separated the two men.
Bill, standing and watching with a helpless grin of amazement, felt a quick stab of pity for the guard, who immediately sank to the floor in a daze.
Judge Langley banged furiously with his gavel. ‘Order!’ he shouted. ‘This is a court of justice! Guards, restrain the defendant !’
The two burly officers needed no admonition from the bench to join the fray and zeroed in on Hoover from opposite directions with their pistols drawn.
The reporters were all on their feet, as were the jurors - Mr Fitzgerald, shaking his head in disbelief; Mrs Carbone, hand at mouth, weeping in anguish and emotion, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’; Mr Potash’s ferocious metallic laughter rising above the din of insanity in peal after peal of mindless merriment.
It was at this juncture of the pandemonium that Brice Mack, seated at the defence table, lowered his head into his hands in an effort to blot out the spectre of his own ignominious defeat. What had been planned as a tasteful inquiry into the aesthetics and religion of a far-flung people had turned, instead, into a rough-and-tumble street brawl. How any jury would ever be brought back to a sober frame of mind after a debacle of this magnitude was a deep and impenetrable mystery to him, one he couldn’t even bear to think of.
‘I want handcuffs on the defendant!’ the grating voice of Judge Langley cut through the darkness of Brice Mack’s despair. ‘Return the witness to the stand and see that he doesn’t leave it until he’s excused!’
The clinking of metal handcuffs added its note to the general commotion.
‘Order!’ The judge’s voice cracked with hysteria. ‘There will be order in the court or I will clear the courtroom! The spectators will be silent!’
Drawing his hands slowly from his face, the first sight to assail Mack was his client, sitting beside him in an attitude of stoic resignation, his left wrist cuffed to the chair arm, and a dishevelled guard hovering vigilantly over him. Turning his gaze to the maharishi, Mack found the lean and stately form of the holy man hunched deeply into the witness chair, peering forlornly forth from a ball of rumpled saffron cloth. Two policemen stood threateningly on either side of the hapless Hindu’s chair.
‘Mr Mack,’ growled Judge Langley, huffing and puffing as if he had just run a race, ‘I am going to hold you responsible for the actions of your witness and your client. If you cannot control them, not only will I have them bound and strapped to their chairs, but I will hold you in contempt of court. Is that understood?’
The whipped-dog expression on the young lawyer’s face was committed to the artist’s pad as he meekly replied, ‘Yes, Your Honour.’
‘Mr Velie,’ Judge Langley continued in a strident, no-nonsense voice, ‘you will ask your question of the witness.’ ‘
Scott Velie, who had been seated throughout most of the tumult and enjoying it, took his time in rising and then stood waiting for absolute silence before measuredly addressing the bench.
‘Your Honour,’ he said, ‘I withdraw the question.’ And, fixing the witness with a look of monumental disdain, he added, ‘I have no further questions to ask the Reverend Pradesh!’
The courtroom sighed and recessed for lunch.
Brice Mack sat hunched over the platter of barbecued pork ribs, maintaining a sulky silence while his teeth tore at the fatty flesh, ripping cartilage from bone in quick, cruel bites. The need to tear into something, to rip and mutilate and deform was hard upon him, and Fred Hudson, the only member of the ‘team’ to have joined him at the long table at Pinetta’s this bitter hour -having quickly gauged the boss’s manic mood - kept a wary and respectful distance between them.
Greasily sucking at a bone, Mack quietly observed Hudson and the empty chairs across and between them with eyes void of expression. He knew where the two lawyers were - still screwing around in the library, picking and scratching about in the books for precedential straws to grasp at, which at this point would be thoroughly useless. Professor Ahmanson, he knew, had gone to Washington Heights to collect James Beardsley Hancock, their next witness. Mack felt a small comfort that he’d had the foresight to order a limousine to cart the old boy down to the courthouse to ensure his getting there on time. One more foul-up at this point, and Langley would throw the book at him. He was itching to do it.
Only Brennigan was unaccountable for. His last contact with the Irish sot was on Friday, just after the lunch recess, when he showed up with half a bag on and whispered to Mack that he was on to something. ‘Something,’ he had cryptically added, ‘that’ll loosen Velie’s bowels, me boy.’
Slowly chewing and swallowing the crispy, pungent pork, the young lawyer’s thoughts veered back to James Beardsley Hancock, his last bright hope on a dismal and threatening horizon. Hoover’s adamant refusal to allow Marion Worthman to take the stand in his behalf had been reinforced by the Pradesh fiasco. Now only Hancock was left to lend his expertise to their case, a fact which not only failed to discourage Brice Mack, but sent an odd surge of renewed optimism coursing through him.
Having met and interviewed the old man on six separate occasions, Mack had finally come to know and truly to believe that James Beardsley Hancock would make an imposing study on the witness stand. At times, his look was Olympian; at others, Lincolnesque. His head could have graced a Roman coin or a Yankee postage stamp. His bearing transmitted respect; his leather-hard face and eagle-bright eyes conveyed honour, truth, and a fearsome integrity. In the courtroom he would seem to belong where the judge was sitting.
Recalling bits and pieces of their first meeting in the graceful sun room of Hancock’s house overlooking the Hudson River always had a tranquillizing effect on Brice Mack. It was a house that was bristling with historic markers and was reputed to have quartered George Washington and his staff during the Battle of Harlem Heights on the several occasions when his headquarters at Jumel Mansion was under British fire.
Mack had brought to that visit the inflexible mind of a sceptic in an attempt to test the old man’s power of persuasion on a jury and was shocked to find himself, after an hour’s worth of niggling questions and patient answers, completely taken in by Hancock’s soft-spoken scholarship, plied with the most delicate of trowels, speaking neither up nor down to his guest, but capturing and keeping the spark of interest at a constant flash point. Mack not only was enraptured, but refused to believe that the morning had long gone and that they had talked clear through the lunch hour.
Reflecting back on the substance of that first meeting, the lawyer attempted to reconstruct those points in Hancock’s talk that had so beguiled him. Instead of belabouring the issue of reincarnation with a scholar’s cudgel, the wise old man had made a game of it, accepting Mack’s scepticism and doubts and, on a number of occasions, seeming himself to be confounded, allowing Mack to help him with the answers.
At one point Mack had asked Hancock about proofs of reincarnation and whether or not he could cite specific examples to substantiate the concept that the soul had lived through many lifetimes. The old man gave the question serious thought before speaking.
‘It’s never happened to me, unfortunately, but many people have told me of experiencing fragmentary recollections of former lives - moments of sudden recognition of people or places they had never met or been to before and that yet seemed familiar to them.’
Brice Mack had remembered several such events in his own lifetime and told Hancock how once, when he was a child, he had been sent to a free summer camp up in the Adirondacks and, one day, had become separated from his group during a woodland hike. Hopelessly lost, he had been forced to spend the night in this totally alien environment. He remembered how he had wandered, in tears, through the darkness until sleep overcame him and how, with the coming of dawn, he had awakened cold, frightened, and hungry to a sight that immediately calmed his fears and restored his confidence. It was the sight of a rocky stream vaguely seen through a density of trees, but so familiar a sight as to seem an old friend to him. He was stunned by his firsthand knowledge of the place and was able to describe every rock, rill, and overhanging branch to himself, knowing for certain that somehow he had witnessed the same scene before and not in a picture or a painting, for the very atmosphere, scented with pine pitch and morning dew, was also a distinctly remembered smell.
‘Yes, yes.’ The old man chuckled in delight. ‘You no doubt witnessed a scene that awakened memories of a past lying far back in the misty ages of a former lifetime. I am sure, too, that you were able to draw on that former experience to help you retrace your steps to safety?’
‘That’s the strangest part of all,’ admitted Mack. ‘At that point the whole woodland seemed familiar to me, and I was able to find my way back to camp without any trouble.’
After a moment’s sober reflection the old man had continued with a question: ‘Tell me, Brice, was your childhood a happy one?’
‘Well’ - the attorney grinned - ‘we were poor.’
‘Were your parents gifted or unique in any way?’
Brice shrugged. ‘Not especially. They weren’t intellectuals, if that’s what you mean. They came from a long line of peasants and were honest, hardworking people.’
‘The salt of the earth,’ added Hancock with undoubted sincerity. ‘Isn’t it strange how often we see evidences of the “prodigy,” the “youthful genius” springing from such humble soil? Children possessing tastes, talents, predispositions, qualities that seem to spring from a deeper, richer loam than those of heredity and environment?’
Mack had felt himself blush. ‘Well,’ he allowed, ‘I’m no genius.’
‘And yet how certainly you seemed to gravitate towards a degree of intellectual achievement that neither heredity nor environment can account for. Reincarnationists would say that your work in this life had been preordained by the mental demands of a former life.’
It was at this point in their conversation, Brice Mack recalled, that they had been interrupted by Hancock’s housekeeper, a sprightly lady who seemed every bit as old as Hancock. It was time for his pills, four of them, placed on a freshly pressed linen napkin on a pewter tray alongside a crystal carafe of water and a glass. After she replenished Mack’s coffee cup and left the room with the tray, Mack was reminded of another case that he thought might interest Hancock.
It concerned the six-year-old son of a friend of his, a man he had known since childhood. Neither his friend nor his friend’s wife possessed any particular artistic qualities to set them apart from the normal run of people, yet the boy, at age five, one day sat at a piano and began to play with a skill that was amazing, while he had never had a lesson.
‘And what of Pascal,’ trilled the old man in a burst of un-contained joy, ‘who, at the age of twelve, mastered the greater part of plane geometry without instruction, drawing on the floor of his room all the figures in the First Book of Euclid? And Mozart, executing a sonata on the pianoforte with four-year-old fingers and composing an opera at the age of eight? And Rembrandt, drawing with masterly power before he could read? Can you doubt that these “old souls” came to earth with remarkable powers acquired in a former existence?’