Читать книгу City of Sins - Daniel Blake - Страница 10

The jury were coming back in today; Marie was certain of it. And that meant she could leave nothing to chance.

She took six white candles, stood them in a tray of holy water, and lit them. Then she took twelve sage leaves, wrote the name of one of the apostles (with Paul standing in for Judas) on each leaf, and slipped six into one shoe and six into the other. This was so the jury would decide in her favor.

She dabbed court lotion on her neck and wrists, just as she’d done every day during the trial. She’d made the lotion herself, by mixing together oils of cinnamon, calendula, frankincense and carnation, and adding a piece of devil’s shoestring and a slice of galangal root all mixed together. This was to influence the judge and jury.

Finally, she took a white bowl piled with dirt. The dirt she’d gathered herself, with her right hand, from the graves of nine children in the St Louis Number One cemetery. She placed the bowl on her altar, facing east, between three white candles. Then she added three teaspoons of sugar and three of sulfur, recited the 35th psalm, asked the spirits to come with all their power to help her, and smeared the dust on the inside of her kaftan. This was so the court would do as she wished.

She was ready.

The sidewalk outside the courthouse was packed: crowds four or five deep, pressing against hastily erected barriers and watched by police officers who shifted uneasily from foot to foot in the oppressive heat. The gathering felt more like a street party than a demonstration. People passed food to each other, creased their faces in laughter. Marie wasn’t the only one convinced she’d be acquitted, clearly.

The trial had lasted only a week. Marie’s defense had been simple: Ortiz had killed himself. The ‘problem’ she’d referred to on the surveillance tape was his carrying a gun: she’d seen it on his waistband as he’d shifted position. Then he’d brought the gun out and, before she’d even been able to react, he’d shot himself. As to why he’d done so, she had no idea: but then the burden of that proof wasn’t on her, was it?

She’d brought in witnesses who testified that she funded many amenities in the Lower Ninth. Folks got in trouble with their finances, she helped them out. Folks got beaten up by the police, she helped them out. She pointed out that she’d never been convicted of anything in her life, not so much as a traffic offense, and yet the Bureau were bugging her like she was bin Laden or John Gotti or someone.

She was representing herself, she said, so the jury – most of them people of color like herself, just trying to make their way in a world stacked against them – could see what she was really like. No smart-ass lawyer twisting her words for her. The other side could do that all they liked, but not her, not Marie Laveau, no sir.

It had been pure theater. And now it was time for the curtain call.

The courtroom itself was so full it seemed almost to bulge. People fanned their faces and tried to stay as still as possible: the ageing municipal aircon system was nowhere near up to coping with a couple of hundred excited metabolisms.

An expectant murmur fluttered off the walls as the jury took their seats.

Judge Amos Katash, who looked like the older brother of Michelangelo’s Sistine God and was clearly relishing every moment of this performance, shuffled some papers and cleared his throat. ‘Would the foreman please stand.’

A gray-haired woman with reading glasses on a chain round her neck got to her feet, glancing at Marie as she did so.

In the gallery, Selma closed her eyes. Like every cop, she knew the old adage about the foreman never looking at the defendant if they’re guilty – and as Selma had maintained right from the start, Marie was as guilty as anyone she’d ever come across.

‘Have you reached a decision?’ Katash asked the foreman.

‘Yes.’

‘And is the decision the decision of you all?’

‘Yes.’

‘In the matter of the State of Louisiana versus Marie Laveau, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of the murder of Balthazar Ortiz?’

‘Not guilty.’

Pandemonium in the courtroom; a dissonant vortex of triumphant whoops, frantic applause, tears and outraged shouts. Marie smiled and waved daintily, as though she were on the red carpet at the Kodak Theater. Selma pinched her nose between thumb and middle finger as she shook her head in disbelief.