SAMPLE CHAPTERS

Prologue

Roy Johansen was handed down to posterity his elegant stature, his analytical acuteness and his tendency not to waver at crucial moments, these three endowments appearing since an early age.

He had an incisive, quick-motioned, self-sufficient manner, and was forever asking questions with a keen desire for an intelligent reply, for a coherent, logically-connected explanation. He would ponder about many transcendental themes and more particularly about the meaning of life—what is our purpose in life, is there a purpose at all, why do we die and what happens after death? Ever since his childhood, Roy was looked upon, even by boys older than him, as one whose superior logic could unquestionably be trusted in all cases to deliver better answers.

His brilliance shinned in so many ways, but what most stood out was his ability to debunk and trash the ideas of even the most intelligent people. A precocious child who, by the age of four could talk glibly, with even weightiness, of Socrates and Newton and Curie; who jumped ahead several years in school, and who, by his mid-teens, had gained access to a prestigious university, seemed destined to one day rule the world.

He was endowed with a steely discipline and only once, for a couple of years, in his early college years, he became an inveterate joiner of clubs and a connoisseur of good wines. With a healthy and athletic lifestyle, he looked younger than what his birth certificate asserted and although in his mid-thirties, he had one of those perpetually mid-twenties faces.

Roy Johansen was a muscular but thin and handsome man with a marathoner´s build and a long-distance calm that belied the hustle that got him to a stardom level in his profession. He was a man with well-defined and dry features. Everything in his form, from his vivacious, energetic regard to his quiet, measured gait, presented a contrast with average people. Deliberate in speech, with a penetrating gaze and an elegant pace, Roy always took center stage.

The son and grandson of academically-brilliant persons—a fact he was always careful to mention—Roy spoke at times slowly, in a cadence as regular as a furrowed field and at times as fast as a livestock auctioneer. He spoke in that lucid way in which Ivy League professors speak and with patronizing intonations which are proper to a man who has gotten accustomed to winning debates.

He swam through life until he reached that fateful point of change where, at the age of thirty-four, he suddenly found himself caught in what some may call a devilish predicament from which he has never since become disentangled.

The Trial

The late afternoon sun slanted down on the wide street, throwing into gleaming luster the maple trees that swayed lightly with the soft northern wind. As the sun was setting in a confused mass of deep purplish red behind edifices and skyscrapers, the warmth of the June day was ebbing into a faint but balmy chill.

Brimming with people and hot, the atmosphere in the Nassau County District Courtroom of New York seethed. Not so much because of the sizzling temperature in the inadequately ventilated chamber, but because of the inordinate amount of people—journalists, law students and lay people—who harbored strong opinions about the case. The place was packed with bodies and faces, so compact that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies.

A couple of faces did nonetheless stand out. On the furthest away row of seats from the judge´s bench, in the left corner of the chamber, was a man in his forties, a university professor, Dr. Carlo Sabi, from the University of Geneva, Switzerland and on the same back row, but on the opposite corner, Randy Wilson, an inconspicuous young man from New York who ran through life without a compass and with just one insipid and platitudinous goal in life. The two did not stand out for the brightness of their clothes or their stall stature, but because the case was supposed to be of no interest to them. However, they were there. The two men, in the clothes that so characterized them, sat very bolt upright in the straight chestnut-colored hard bench of the visitor´s gallery.

The court building, with its high-tech tooling and age-old architecture, exuded an unusual fusion of ancient and modern worlds that awed many and disgusted others. Not far from there, a similar sighting with centuries-old apartment buildings, dating back to the mid nineteenth century with their original crown molding and iron-railed balconies, coexisted alongside shiny new skyscrapers.

Having been all seats taken, many people had to stand, but none seemed bothered by that. In the hall next to the courtroom and in the adjacent street the situation looked very similar, with an expectant crowd that was eagerly awaiting the outcome of the trial.

On the sidewalk in front of the main entrance of the three-story courthouse, clouds, hard driven high up, occasionally flashed shadows over the sidewalks and streets; the breeze close to earth frisked with the vestiges of spring, chasing dust out of corners and across streets and against trees, bidding them vanish  to make way for a new season.

A crowd had also formed on the entrance of the courthouse and the figures were clustered in an irregular form in front of the large building, whose original beauty had been degraded with time, but recently smartened up with a coat of paint, and heightened with imposing trees on its flanks.

A young and attractive female journalist stood with a microphone in her hand while a television camera pointed at her. As she waited for the start signal from the director, she drummed her fingers on the microphone while her eyes fell on a group of passing teenagers. A pair of eighteen-year-olds, loping past her, halted and stared at her with a curious intentness—a curiosity that stemmed from the numerous times they had seen her on TV. They had come steadily on, straight through the broad footway without slackening pace, hoping to get an autograph from her, but when they were close enough, they shied up and did not ask for her priced signature.

“Here on the street we are registering 22 degrees but inside the courtroom the thermometer is already hitting 30,” said the short-haired brunette in her high pitched-voice once her boss gave her the go-signal. “However, there is another reason why the heat is on. The content of this trial is explosive, and it is that which has attracted such a throng. The hearings have been dragging on for two months and every day in court has been transmitted to the entire world by television. As most people know by now, the main participants are Mona Yalow and Pete Anderson. Ms. Yalow is the aggrieved party and she is suing Mr. Anderson with the help of her lawyer, the well-known Roy Johansen.”

Mona, a beautiful twenty-two year old blond psychologist, who had sailed through life and had never experienced a day of tears, had seen her happy existence truncated by someone whom she had once liked and trusted. She had been wronged, she had been hurt, was furious and was determined to win, which is why she had hired Roy despite the exorbitant amounts he charged. She was a uniquely attractive woman, a real traffic-stopper. Of medium stature, pearly skin and well built, her fine forehead slanted gently up to where her hair surged into lovelocks and waves and curliness of ash blonde and gold. The eldest in her family and a neat, long-waist, animated young lady, who had always conducted herself with propriety, she was on that day not animated and lively, but stern and hard. She was a person, of fine and delicate grace, and it was precisely that attractiveness which had driven Pete Anderson to aggress her.

Pete, a thirty one year old short-haired architect, who would one day inherit the high-powered business his grandfather had founded, had also hired an expensive attorney. With a tall stature, long of bone and hard of muscle, with a pale face and deep auburn hair, his eyes merry and arrogant, his body clothed in a gray Armani suit, he was as sure of himself as his imperious father and overbearing grandfather. Pete was, and all who knew his family agreed, his father´s very image in feature, body, entrepreneurialism, intellect and the abusive way in which they treated others.

Sitting next to her attorney, Mona rested pensively while tapping nervously with a pen at her purse and, to her left, on the other side of the large courtroom, Pete, who sported a triumphant and bumptious grin and was also accompanied by his legal counsel. Alone, in the tall brown wooden desk, the judge—a graying brunette—sat behind her desk with unreadable eyes and an expressionless face. She twisted the gold ring on her finger and tried to ease the overwhelming pressure coming from the press and the crowd while the twelve-member jury, sitting all in their assigned chairs, looked intermittently at the judge and the rest of the chamber. Two of the women in the jury—both in their forties—looked at the gracious and comely form of Roy that was so skillfully accentuated by his well-matched custom-made clothes. A smile of pleasure passed across their face, and seemed about to linger there.

Roy´s clothes, indeed, displayed an artist´s infinite attention to detail. He had long ago understood that wining in court, depended as much in knowing the law and arguing effectively, as on his looks and those of his clients, the tone of his voice, and other apparently superfluous matters.

Like his client, Roy was also physically stunning. Fine light blond hair, closely-trimmed and slicked back, engraved a straight hairline along a symmetric, red-cheeked face with blue eyes that his mother always claimed darkened like a cloud whenever he was angry. His short and well-styled hair, accentuated his dark blond thin eyebrows. Good orthodontics had bred a sincere smile that juries had found persuasive through more than ten years of practice. Physically, Roy was an imposing figure, but also a very good lawyer. He was the type of lawyer that when bare-knuckled bargaining didn´t get the deal done, he would sue and he would always win.

Dressed formally, everybody seemed composed and orderly. Aside from a very soft chattering coming from the lawyers and their clients, the only other sound that could be heard was the cool northeast air letting out a low moan as it swirled through the city and pierced through an open window. It was the final day of deliberations and both parties were tense.

Sporting an elegant blue navy suit, a white shirt and a red tie, Roy Johansen stood up to make his concluding remarks.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said confidently in his booming baritone voice while looking intermittently at the judge and at jury.

Roy at times talked slowly and softly (when the circumstances demanded it) and at times forcefully and fast. At the court, he would usually start softly and soon he would be delivering a brawny and bullnecked fast-paced discourse that would resemble that of a spellbinding orator, but on that day he was starting strong. Some people who had heard him speak on several occasions even said he most often sounded like an amalgam of John F. Kennedy and Adolph Hitler. Often, he would get carried away by his own eloquence and would speak for a very long time, putting people in a sort of trance and would only stop until the judge would put an end to it.

“This is a case that nobody had thought of bringing to court just a few years ago,” he said, and, drawing a substantial amount of air into the broad box of his chest, went up to the area next to the jury with the customary brisk step of his large feet, which so easily carried his full body, raised attention and clanged loudly. “However, we are in the twenty-first century and the coming of the new millennium has conveyed a novel atmosphere of rationality. This new era demands that we adopt a more consistent view of the world. It requires that we examine any claim on its merits, independent of its apparent absurdity. So long as an idea is scientifically substantiated we must bend before it even if it destroys our most cherished beliefs.”

Roy paused for a couple of seconds, while putting both hands in his pant pockets and glared out the window into the bright blue sky. He then looked at the portly, curly-haired judge who leaned back in her cushioned wide chair, and then looked at the jury and added, “Mona Yalow has suffered irreparable physical and psychological damage and her good name has been besmirched by the insufferable familiarity of Mr. Pete Anderson. We are thus demanding from this court that justice be rendered and that my client receives in compensation ten million dollars for the physical and psychological damages caused by Mr. Anderson’s neglectful and irresponsible behavior.”

A spellbinding orator, with a compelling eloquence, Roy´s arguments were filled with such strong logic and such pointed consistency that he had never lost a case. He would always disarm, fast and furious, the ideas of his opponents, so that whatever resistance they might raise were too quick and insubstantial for the force of his suasions. With only thirty-four years, the blond attorney was already a legend in the profession, having won cases even before finishing college.

He had completed his studies in half the normal amount of time, having already studied medicine before going to law school. With his photographic memory—eidetic memory actually—he had accumulated vast amounts of information, permitting him to go into the tiny details of just about any subject. However, that was not his most impressive feat. His most outstanding asset was the ability to uncover the causality of any given phenomenon. Where others saw chaos in the mass of information, he saw rational order; where others concluded wrongly, he concluded rightly. A third-generation intellectual with perspicacious lavender eyes, a wide smile and a strange birth mark right behind his left ear, the man was on a league of his own.

When Lars Johansen—a reputed brain surgeon from Sweden—married Laura O’Brien—an American marine biology professor from Columbia University—everybody predicted they would have smart kids. However, nobody ever imagined that their only son would be that acute and spiked. Roy’s upbringing further contributed to enhancing his mental abilities. Growing up in Sweden, Germany and France, attending high school in the U.S., studying medicine in Japan, and law at Harvard, he developed a better understanding of the complicated world in which he lived. Then, he went to work for one of the best law firms in New York and, after a few years, opened up his own practice. A polyglot by nature and by the circumstances of his life, Roy spoke six languages fluently: Swedish, German, French, Japanese, Spanish and English. Roy Johansen inherited from his parents every positive trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him even more outstanding then them.

Having experienced a happy childhood, no sadness attached to him; he loved its memories: any of it he remembered seemed swamped by calm, gleaming sunlight. His youth had passed in renaissance glory; a tutelage measured by the number of people he could debunk and trounce in a debate; a culture rich in science and technology, barren of all trite ideas.

As he stood in the courtroom, it seemed to him as if a few rays from his childhood reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave a further sparkle to his good job and his elegant lifestyle. His childhood, youth and adulthood had been wondrous, his many assets facilitating everything, and his vast knowledge gave him a self-confidence which made itself felt whether he intended it or not.

However, many people found him arrogant, and several in the jury saw things that way. On top of that, Pete—a millionaire belonging to a well-regarded New York family—had hired a top lawyer who pleaded his case very convincingly.

That lawyer, a sixty year old, who had a shock of white hair atop a deeply tanned face, had an unlined shrewd physiognomy and his hard little brown eyes were young with unworried youthfulness of one who had never faced defeat in the courtroom. The man had indeed an ace up his sleeve every time he was in court. He was a sawed-off, in your face, thump-your-chest ballbuster who always got what he wanted. He was the kind that would make his fellow colleagues fidget in offices and courtrooms, a guy that would make his opponents tremble in fear. The lawyer was as Portuguese a face as could be found in the length and breadth of the homeland he had left so long ago—round, mild colored, short nosed, wide mouthed and belligerent. The man stood up and adjusted his neon-green tie as he prepared to launch his arguments.

“The reason why no court in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world has ever granted validity to the claim presented by the opposing party is because it is a perversion of the law,” said Pete’s attorney, a fairly-dressed and balding fellow. “There are limits to what people can demand from a court, and this case is way over that boundary.”

The small lawyer, smaller even than average-size women, was so heavy of barrel and thick of neck that his feature, when seated, led strangers to think him a midget. He was a man easily dismissed by women and most other people also considered him unworthy of a second glance. However, his physical insignificance, his smallness and his unappealing countenance was something he had long ago learned to turn into a weapon. The lawyer then went on to elaborate extensively on the matter of the trial.

The Portuguese-American systemically tried to provoke Mona, the witnesses that Roy had selected to support his case, and Roy himself in order to make them stumble over their own words. At a given point, Pete´s lawyer slightly pushed a piece of paper that fell off the edge of the desk where he and his client were seated and seesawed lazily down through the mechanically purified air and landed on the tile, close to where Mona was seated. The paper, with a drawing that depicted what she had gone through with Pete and which exaggerated the situation, was an attempt to provoke Mona, to make her uneasy, to make her lose control. Roy had coached her lengthily over such antics and fortunately for her, she did not react as the opposing part had hoped.

Behind a small desk and sitting very upright in her dour dark clothes, was the middle-aged courtroom reporter writing down everything the lawyers and everybody else said in her black transcription machine, the fast clicking of her keys like the sound of speeding train wheels.

Roy belonged to a profession inordinately energetic and pugnacious, even turbulent, prone to putting ones foot in your own mouth, yet he had never done that. He was one of those lawyers who constantly drew down public applause, and despite the excitement he aroused on other people, he never lost the cool tranquility of a clear head that was needed to win a case. He seldom lost his temper; much more seldom indulged in dangerous indignation at errors; but he scolded beyond the necessary here and there, and occasionally he expostulated needlessly.

When Pete’s lawyer finished, the judge instructed the jury to deliberate over the case and, four hours later, the twelve-person body came out from their secluded room. One of its members, a sixty-something of burly bearing and noble port, richly attired with a ruddy face, balding and somewhat freckled, stood up as everybody listened attentively.

“Your honor, we have come to a unanimous decision,” said the man.

The man handed over a folded sheet to the tall and thin mustachioed bailiff, who took it to the judge. The judge unfolded it, set it down on the glossy walnut plane of her large desk, overlapped her neat little hands on the desk and looked directly at the interested parts, but more so at Pete´s lawyer—a balding man in a banker´s suit and a disquieting neon-green tie.

“May the parties rise,” affirmed the graying brunette after having glanced at the paper. She had a small, petulant mouth and ample hair over a small forehead. Her posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of her tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the mechanicalness of a bureaucrat. The graying brunette, since her childhood, had wanted to be a judge, being one of those girls that instead of asking her parents for a Barbie playhouse for her birthday, had asked for a miniature courthouse. Since her childhood she had that affliction of hard morality and strictness, of legal obsessiveness, of being the embodiment of Themis—the Greek goddess of justice. She was the exact opposite of the two lawyers standing in front of her, who would literally say or do anything to win a case.

The two lawyers and their clients immediately did as instructed and all stared tensely at the woman in black robes. Pete´s hands were clenched tightly, working against each other, sweating. He had been assured that he would get away with what he did, but there was nonetheless, some doubt and some fear. He looked at his lawyer for comment, but the man just flashed his public relations smile, large and blatantly toothy.

“The members of the jury find Pete Anderson fully liable for the physical and psychological injuries suffered by Mona Yalow. The jury thus grants validity to the demand for financial reparation, obliging Mr. Anderson to pay the sum of eight million dollars.”

A roar instantly erupted in the courtroom and Roy allowed himself a triumphalist smile. His mouth stretched into a grin, but his face remained composed.  Standing up in excitement, Mona hugged him while Pete thumped the table furiously with his fist. Pete´s lawyer, on the other hand, looked crestfallen and embarrassed, for he had assured to everybody who knew him well, that he would win as he had always done.

A few minutes later the press outside the building was abuzz, commenting on the outcome of the trial.

“Roy Johansen has done it again,” said the pretty brown-haired journalist, in a tone in which, through propriety and fairness, one could discern sympathy and admiration for Roy. “He has not just won another case, thus keeping an unblemished and undefeated record, but he has set a new precedent in American legislation and pushed the tort system of reparations to new heights. According to legal experts, this case could open the door to a totally new dimension of civil claims, which could end by radically changing the judicial system. This is the man who five years ago won the first case in history against the food industry. He convinced the court that his three thousand clients had become obese during childhood and developed diabetes as a result of misleading information on labels about the calorie and sugar content of their products. The compensation award was one of the largest in history. This is also the man who three years ago persuaded a jury that his client had become impotent as a result of his regular consumption of cigarettes, and Philipo Tobacco had to pay millions in reparations. Now, he has successfully pleaded to a dozen people something even more bizarre. This case was so out of the ordinary that nobody would have thought it worthy of a judicial deliberation just a year ago. Mr. Johansen is an attorney who is constantly defending people on matters that seem preposterous and unlikely to be admitted in court. However, he systematically manages not just to convince the juries that they are normal plaintiffs, but also that they should decide in his favor. It is a mystery how he does it, but the fact is that he is probably the most outstanding lawyer that has ever walked the Earth.”

The Firm

Provoking no emotion, a modern, glassy and shinning 100-story building stood in the midst of a jungle of cement and steel. It charmed not, but neither did it repel, although for many, it was imposing. It was a building of blending tints; by day light and pastel and at dusk—darker, a lot darker.

On the eighty-eighth floor of that building—a floor almost identical to the previous ten, which belonged to the same company—on a rectangular large office luxuriated with cedar paneling, hardwood floors, expensive paintings, and a paper-thin 70-inch TV, two smartly-dressed men watched the news from their comfortable wide leather chairs and heard about the outcome of the trial.

In one of the walls of the large and sumptuous office, hanged numerous large photos of the firm´s past presidents, framed and glazed and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted, with the green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves from the many plants that decorated and provided oxygen in that rarefied corporate atmosphere. Sunlight was lying in great pools on the beige floor and the soft rugs, throwing dancing beams, which were watched for hours on the cream distempered walls. The place oozed sophistication and professionalism, being one of the best law firms in New York. Besuited types with crisp, initialed shirts totted thick law books under their arms and snazzy-clad women, wrapped in expensive coats also kept their hands busy with thick books dealing with legal precedents.

The two men had humble origins, being the sons of small farmers—one from Montana, the other from Iowa. They now wore more fashionable clothes than they had worn in their childhood, and any little rusticity of carriage or pronunciation which they had brought from their small towns, was so quickly and completely lost since going into college and then working in New York, that it was before long impossible to detect that they had not been born and bred among a well-educated house. They were both successful lawyers, self-made men, men who had broken from the limited strictures of their small towns and the small mentality that prevailed in those places and had blossomed in the big city.

Despite the brand new building housing their firm and the sumptuous room on which they sat and the many successes both had attained, there was an air of grimness in both of them. The day had begun like so many others: on the porch of their stately houses, smoking a cigar, sipping a cup of coffee stiffened with grade-A honey, but by the end of it, it had turned less pleasant.

“I hate to admit it, but that sonofabitch Roy Johansen is probably the best in the world,” snarled one of them more resentfully and animatedly than usual, and with that showing especially clearly in the wrinkles that formed around his forehead—something coarse and obnoxious. The man was of quite a tall stature, and filled an average arm-chair with a solid bulk, which on that day was ostentatiously clad in a fine business suit of blue serge. He had a squared, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey goatee, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. “I once had a case that was a sure win because all the evidence played in our favor, and Roy somehow convinced the jury that my client deserved to lose. We lost. I bet that bastard could even outsmart the Devil.”

As he talked, the man stood up from his seat and turned to the window, leaning his forehead against the glass and staring unobservantly at the horizon. The building stood on the edge of the city, and from its northern side—where the two men sat—the eye dropped to a block full of used cars and then kilometers of emerald pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a northward line of sleek hills. It was a picturesque view, but the man wasn´t viewing it.

The other man pushed a button in the TV control and the picture flashed off with the unnerving suddenness of lightning. He shot his colleague an equally frustrated look, a look of resentment, but also of envy and covetousness. Amok also stood up and after taking just a few steps paused in front of a large fish tank—a fish tank his wife had recently bought—watching the turquoise water lapping at the edges, the liquid nets of sun wobbling in the periwinkle depths, delaying for a moment his response, trying to not sound small-minded and envious.

“I know,” groaned Amok while caressing his well-shaved chin as he took a seat on an overstuffed living room chair wearing one of his many dark suits, and trying owlishly to get the sense from what he had just seen on TV. “I have heard of lawyers who refused to take a case once they found out that the other party was being represented by Johansen.” Amok was a stalky, shapely fellow of forty-eight, with a clean-cut, incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide forehead; short, dark-brown hair and a balding crown on the top of his head.

As the two sat alone, absently gazing into the now darkened large screen, the silence of the room was shattered by a knock on the door of Amok´s office.

“Come in,” said Amok, a man who in the past few weeks had been afflicted by insomnia, so that his days were spent in weariness and lassitude, and in a bad mood. His health troubles were being made worse by Roy´s triumph—a lawyer who had defeated him twice in court and had put an end to his aspirations of becoming President of the firm.

“Your ten o´clock appointment is here,” said the chubby and red-cheeked woman who entered the room and worked as his personal secretary.

“Remind me who am I seeing?”

“Raluca and Razvan Antonescu,” said the secretary as the door stood ajar, allowing Amok to see, several meters away, in the waiting room, two extremely elderly persons—a man and a woman—both dressed very elegantly, both wearing a gold bracelet on their left wrist, both looking like a hundred years-old, and sitting tightly together.

Still fuming, the other lawyer walked slowly out of his friend´s office to his adjacent and large oak-paneled office.

The Lawyer and the Priest

Two days after the trial, Roy’s relatives, friends and colleagues organized a surprise party for him. Taking place at his cousin’s house—a grand residence with large silver-maple trees situated on a hill in the outskirts of the city—about two hundred people arrived. The house, designed by an architect reputed for her originality and right next to the beach, was beautiful like no other. Embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, it was a reflection of the whole northeastern region of the country—a region reputed for its grand colonial houses and its majestic late nineteenth century mansions. The house´s gardens, well-tended, symmetric, elegant, were full of life and smells. There were dragonflies zigzagging among the cattails and a grassy smell sharpened by pine sap. There were also wisteria vines blooming on wooden trellis on both sides of the grand house, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry rich dusty sound.

The house stood on the edge of a well-off neighborhood, where large mansions lined well-shaped streets shaded by gracious oak trees. A once-sleepy town of tumbleweed and spit-and-sawdust bars had transformed in the post-World War II years into a squeaky-clean and polished place. It was a place where the newly rich liked to live. The houses, modern and neatly ordered, seemed out of place in the vast green landscape of forests that surrounded the neighborhood outside the big city; making them look as weightless and impertinent, as foolishly misplaced as a great many bright new gold rings in the hand of a person.

The mansion was long and wide, with an equally long and wide parking lot for visitors, and the automobiles of the guests were wide and gleaming in the colors of candy and ice cream, seeming to cringe at each splatter of mud as they drove apologetically on the roads. The large automobiles, all or almost all SUVs or limousines—a long bright valley of stainless steel, plate glass and colored plastic—had made their way up the highway and then through the winding country road, and the main goal of making all that trajectory, was to chat and take a photo with Roy.

It was the sort of abode that most people dreamed of, but not Roy. He preferred the benefits of a modern edifice (the 24/7 security, the 24/7 guaranteed flow of electricity and hot water, the many recreational facilities). Nevertheless, his cousin´s house was something that even Roy admired: spacious and bright, with stucco arches and floors tiled in Venetian mosaics, and glass doors leading to wraparound balconies that were much admired by most people and in particular women.

A charismatic individual, Roy loved pressing the flesh due to his political ambitions, so he massaged the crowd and shook hands with everybody. Stalking a grand ball room (that was the heart of the mansion), kissing babies and alternating between whispered jokes, a ten-minute-speech and roars of applause, Roy exchanged a few words with dozens of people, and although most realized they would never get to talk lengthily with him, as they would have desired, they were grateful for the few seconds they were granted. His words, even the faintest ramifications from them, had become somewhat of Yoda-like eternal truths, until whatever he said released a burst of philosophical reflections and deep admiration. The men in the grand ball room, with their arms folded, balanced on the edges of their seats and the women with their hands on their laps, occasionally made little whispers to the person beside them and always clapping very energetically.

Every one of the invited guests had arrived and several of them even brought friends. His success and theatrical antics at the courthouse was so unusual and eye-catching, that he had become a big time celebrity. On one occasion, as he went to deliver a speech on a boring legal subject at a conference in Chicago, a huge and unexpected amount of people appeared. The people, mostly lawyers, endured wind-driven snow and biting rain, forming a column of umbrellas and plastic ponchos that stretched over hundreds of meters of sidewalk as they waited in line to buy a ticket. Yes, Roy was almost at parity with big-time movie and music celebrities.

After much small talk, he became tired and searched for a place to sit. Choosing a large round table where his father, several of his surgeon colleagues and his uncle—a Catholic priest—had settled down, Roy grabbed a glass of wine and took a seat.

Summer had come early that year, with sun-splashed days, with temperatures rising occasionally to Saharan levels and ample frothing of pink peach blossoms. Outside, the temperature was hot, but softened by a fresh sea wind, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the gray sandy beaches to a reddish-gray hue.

“I bet that Roy could even win a case against the Devil,” said Karen—a long-haired, green-eyed fifty-something neurosurgeon—while grinning mildly.

Karen Attenborough was an extraordinary MD and an extraordinary mother, with a pugnacious personality, highlighted with a tendency to provoke, to incite heated debates. The dark-haired and casually-dressed neurosurgeon had recently gone through an acrimonious divorce and wanted to distract her mind with other subjects. The restrained smile that constantly played on her pale face, though it did not suit her outworn middle-aged features, expressed the coquettish attitude of long gone days, of days of adolescent ebullience, when her face had looked as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the roses that adorned her garden. Now that she was again single, that attitude sprung involuntarily every so and then. She was not especially pious, a church-rummage type of faith—the kind that needs patching up every so-and-then and the type that spends months without setting foot on a religious building. Because her ex-husband was a pious man, a man who had almost taken away her daughters, she somehow felt the desire to provoke the priest, to lash at him, erroneously thinking that somehow, her ex-husband would also get lashed.

Karen looked at the priest and asked him with a slightly mocking tone, “Father, do you think that Roy could outsmart Satan and talk his way out of Hell?”

The priest just sneered mildly, his face turning hard and rigid, and did not respond. The priest—a once brown-haired, sixty-something and medium-sized individual—was not amused by such a comment that suggested disbelief in the Catholic Church’s claims concerning sin and punishment. He was a man of few words, a man who would file such comments away in a mental Rolodex for later consideration—when he had thought it through and would be more likely to be diplomatic in his response.

“In principal, I could never outwit him because he is supposed to possess powers that are well beyond those of any human being,” said the casually dressed Roy as he glanced to his right to find Karen´s eyes staring at him. “But even if the Devil could be somehow outgunned, it would still be impossible to escape from the inferno.”

“Why is that?” smiled Karen derisively, certain that the story about Heaven and Hell was just a fairy tale that religions had invented.

“Because Hell can only exist with the consent of God, and he is as pleased in having it as the Governor of New York is in having prisons. Therefore, even if somebody could somehow outsmart the Prince of Darkness, the Almighty would come out as a lawyer of last resort and debunk that person’s arguments. Since God is wiser than the Devil, and there is nobody brighter than God, then His triumph would be assured.”

“It is that sort of reasoning that has made your son invincible,” grinned Karen while glancing at Roy’s father, who was sitting next to her.

She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail and it was held by a small ribbon of the same salmon color as her dress and the stylish pumps on her small feet. Karen was fifty-four, hair still long and defiantly pretty, with growing amounts of gray; with some overweight, but still curvaceous. She still had a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm. She at times dressed like a hippie—baggy and worn-out jeans, a man´s cotton shirt, and Asian slippers and at times like a coquettish teen, with a tight blouse, a mini skirt and high heels. For many, including many of her colleagues, when Karen dressed like a teenager she made a tragic sight, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to her knees in the tar, standing imperious and proud, but not looking cool. She was a well-balanced person despite the numerous ups and downs in her life and had no personal bitterness or resentments about life—twice married and twice divorced, her sprightly stoicism had each time deepened. Although she dumped her first husband—a womanizer who hit on everything that had a pulse and a skirt—she had fought tooth and nail the separation efforts of her second husband—a respected local politician and the son of a Nobel Prize winner. She wielded her married name—that of her second husband—with a sure sense of self-possession and much pride.

“Nevertheless, that is a scholastic debate because there is nothing which suggests that God exists,” added Roy.

“Son, you shouldn’t talk in such a way about something that is sacred to billions of people,” growled the priest sharply, his brows pulled together over his incensed eyes.

The priest was sixty-nine and his crisp curly hair was silver white, and his grandfatherly face and hard blue eyes sprouted unworried trust of one who had never doubted his faith or taxed his brain with problems more abstract than how to best obey the mandates of the Vatican. His thickset torso was supported by long sturdy legs, always incased in the finest leather shoes procurable and always modestly planted close together like a pious man of cloth. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal encomium of their existence. The flesh of his face was pale and soft and it had just turned paler because of Roy´s words.

“With all due respect, Uncle Leo, but if you are alive it is because of pharmaceuticals, chemically-treated water, electricity, medical equipment, transport vehicles, processed food, tractors and thousands of other goods that embody technology, and not because of God.”

“That is not true,” countered the priest irately, but his anger was barely noticeable. A circumspect man, well in control of his emotions, the man of cloth seldom let anybody know his indignation. Leo Johansen seemed incapable of any but a very heartfelt manner of speaking, and would often conclude his remarks with a little shake of the head that caused his cheeks to wag. Contrary to many priests who liked to crack jokes, Leo Johansen was as serious as Vatican men come.

“Look at everything around you,” argued the blond lawyer as a cool, sweet breath of summer whispered through an open window and caressed the faces of those at the table. “All the ample food at this party, for example, is the result of farm and food processing technology. The refrigerator, where it can be so efficiently stored, is a discovery of the 1920s. Look at your clothes. They are the typical black garments of a priest, but they are made of synthetic fiber derived from oil. It is technology and not God that has provided for all those things.”

“You must recognize, Father, that what Roy is saying are undeniable facts,” uttered Karen, who was clearly enjoying the lawyer’s discourse. Having recently gone through a rancorous court battle over custody of her children, which had left her very stressed, she was eager to use the social gathering as an opportunity to forget about her woes. She was not the only who had been strained by the acrimonious legal proceedings. Her two teenage girls had also gotten caught up in the ebb and flow of their parents´ tensions and the convoluted ups and downs of court hearings and had become emotionally distraught, which had depressed Karen further.

Whirling through the air, that lovely summer afternoon, in the wide room of the opulent house, was a pleasant smell of strawberry-scented floor cleaner that went deep into everybody´s noses as the warm sunlight fell gently upon the rug. Outside, perceivable from where Roy and the MDs were seating, a gull, working to gain altitude, hung struggling in the blue sky like a sketched white letter M. It was a crisp, sun-splashed Sunday that enlivened further the party, but for some, not even that turned it into a fun afternoon.

“Every achievement of humanity is the doing of science and technology, which results from logical thinking,” continued the good looking lawyer. “Rationality, however, is something that religions are not endowed with. They are full of inconsistencies and contradictions. That is why they have always opposed science.”

“Which inconsistencies are you talking about?” asked the priest defiantly, as someone who is certain that there are no weak points in his beliefs.

A few white locks hung about the priest´s ears, his shoulders were bent and his knees feeble, but he was still fit and much respected, not just because of his humanitarian work, but also because of his art work. Since his youth at the seminar, he had begun to paint and he had not stopped ever since, drawing those paintings every time more attractive, more real, more impacting to the human eye. The drawings, which were always of landscapes, were so unaffectedly painstaking that they might have passed for the work of some good early master. Some of his works had sold for six digit figures, but he turned all of his earnings to the church, which he trusted to use it for the good of humanity. The priest was a man whose only activity outside the church was glancing at art, having visited hundreds of museums and art exhibitions, always finding his way to those places, where the works of art—those, at least, which were pleasing to him—threw him into genteel paroxysms of admiration.

Everybody at the table had an alcoholic beverage of some sort, in a vase of some sort: a high ball glass, a Collins glass, a beer mug, a cocktail glass, a brandy snifter glass, a wine glass or a champagne flute. Everybody except the priest, who was drinking coffee in a handsome old bone china cup with a riveted handle. Back and forth over the large metallic gray table a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the trees outside. It was a little windy but the temperature inside the house and even outside was warm and pleasant.

A member of the Jesuit order and a pious man, Leo Johansen had dedicated all of his life to serve the poor. He had educated hundreds of children in Asia, supervised numerous rural clinics in Latin America and acted as a mediator among warring parties in Africa, having done it all with great zeal. Adhering always stringently to the numerous demands of his confessional, he had led a life of abstinence and hard work. He was a true believer, a true man of the cloth, which is why he resented it so much when somebody spoke badly of his creed. There was something vital and earthy and sincere about him that appealed to the bulk of people who had met him, but Roy—his nephew, who knew him since infancy—was not impressed. Roy didn´t believe his uncle was a devious person who used the church to satisfy his vile cravings, but he thought that the whole idea of religion was BS. He thought that all religions were BS.

“The Bible is illustrative of the convoluted ideas that impregnate all religions, for it has countless passages that don’t make any sense,” said Roy—always with a composed expression and a serene voice. “There are parts, for example, that recount how Jesus, while traveling the land, found a crowd of hungry and thirsty people. Moved by their suffering, he produced food and wine out of thin air for all.”

“And what is the problem with that?” asked the priest sourly, his thick, long arms making wide gestures of indignation—a first in more than a year, for such a calm man. The priest was a man deliberate in speech, with a slight limp resulting from a brutal encounter he had experienced with armed men deep in the jungles of Congo. It was one of the many times that his mediating efforts had made him come face to face with violent-prone men and a direct consequence of having made gestures of indignation to what he found in the province of North Kivu. Tens of thousands of women had been raped and brutalized by one of the warring parties and at a given point he lashed verbally at the perpetrators.

“Well, for starters, there is no way of verifying if that is true. But even if it really took place, the issue is: why did Jesus only supply them with food once? People cannot live on one meal alone, and in those times everybody was literally dying of hunger. In those times, the whole population of the Middle East and the rest of the world suffered from hunger and starvation.”

“Hmm. Indeed, a very perspicacious observation,” said Karen while fiddling with her pony tail.

“Had Jesus really wanted to help those people, he would have provided them with ample comestibles for a whole lifetime,” added Roy, speaking with a tranquil sophistication. “The scientists of the twenty-first century have done that, and they are not God. The fact that the founder of Christianity didn’t even come close to matching the achievements of the scientists of today clearly reveals that the Bible is just a fairy tale.”

“Watch what you are saying,” snapped the priest indignantly as his face struggled and gasped while raising his voice. “That is blasphemy.”

Hard as granite, the priest´s face had turned reddish as he seethed with anger and his head throbbed like it was going to explode. He had always had a visceral dislike for atheists. Since his early days, when he studied Christianity at the seminar, Leo had learned to hold his tongue and to turn his features into an apathetic mask so that no one could ever read his thoughts. Although usually in control of his emotions, on that day the priest was starting to lose his cool. It was like the time he had encountered armed Hutu militias in the deep jungles of eastern Congo, when a strong shudder had gone through his skin and bones, rising from deep under and he had lost his calmness. That loss of calmness had cost him dearly.

“Oh, come on, Father,” said Karen while lightly simpering. “Be a good sportsman and let the kid talk. I agree that his language is a little irreverent, but he has a point.”

“Calm down, Leo,” said Roy’s father apologetically, an unflappable individual who was the same age of his religious brother. “You are a man of principle, and we all respect that.”

Tall and lanky, well groomed and with gray-specked blonde hair, Lars Johansen was a multifaceted individual. Not just a brilliant surgeon and a savvy businessman, he was also an effective fund-raiser for the numerous philanthropic causes of his religious brother. He was sixty-nine—just like his twin brother Leo—an ash blonde with a patrician kind of elegance that no amount of dislike for him could distort, and he moved with the dignified appearance of a Prime Minister. His well-cut hairdo, straight hair and wide-eyed gaze made him look younger than he was. Lars Johansen had what his female colleagues referred to as an scholarly allure—wisps of gray in his thick parted hair, inquisitive eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a high school teen.

The priest’s ruddy face rapidly started to regain its natural color and his breathing settled. His eyes were wide and questioning and had a squared face, unremarkable except for that look of punctilious attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.

“There are other parts in which Jesus encountered people afflicted with terrible diseases, such as leprosy and blindness,” continued Roy. “He said a few kind words, touched them and they were immediately cured. In those times, epidemics of all sorts, such as smallpox, chickenpox, cholera, typhus, measles, bubonic plague, influenza and tuberculosis, were constantly ravaging the population, and as much as half of all the people in any given country would usually die in one fast go. Jesus never addressed the problem of epidemics, which was the main health concern of the time. Had he really possessed divine powers, he would have not just eliminated the epidemics but also all other health issues, and would have done it for all of humanity, and not just a few individuals.”

It was a windy July afternoon when the sky is blue, blue Crayola, the trees are green, lustfully green and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender. There was much to enjoy and admire of the weather and raw nature next to the house, but nobody at the table was paying attention. With tempers rapidly rising, some loosened their ties while others drank liquor, sodas or coffee to appear less tense. Religion—always a controversial subject and probably the most controversial of all—had driven everybody at the table to a higher level of interest in the debate and to a higher level of tension. On the defensive, the priest wiped the sweat on his forehead and felt a lump in his throat that was nearly strangling him. Another man, an obese fellow—also at the table—glared at Roy, accusing him with his eyes.

The chubby man—also a surgeon, but contrary to Roy and Karen, a religious man and increasingly irritated by Roy’s words—decided that he would no longer sit idly while his faith got attacked. The fifty-something, light-haired evangelical Texan with reddish cheeks and sporting a kempt beard and an outsized hat, decided to go on the attack. Wearing also cowboy boots, a red-white-black flannel shirt and jeans, George Komorowsky seemed to be the quintessential Lone Star guy, but his tightly-cropped brown beard flecked with gray, drove also people to think he was a ship captain.

“That argument doesn’t make any sense,” he blurted out.

“Of course it makes sense,” retorted the lawyer. “Why couldn’t Jesus have snapped his fingers and, voila, everything cured? Why couldn’t he have provided the medical technology to put an end to at least the worst diseases? The scientists of today have done that and they are not gods.”

“Yeah. Why couldn’t he have done that?” asked Karen, who as usual was not wearing any makeup—a woman convinced that men should value her for her academic and professional merits, and a woman who wrongly believed she could still walk around in her natural self, like during her teens, and still look fantastic.

The priest poured out a teacupful from the exotically-shaped silver-colored coffee pot on the table, nerved himself for a shock, and swigged it down like a dose of medicine. The lump in the priest´s throat was still there, having actually grown in size and inhibiting him from uttering a word, so Roy went on.

“The fact is that two thousand years ago in Palestine, life expectancy was just eighteen years of age, and infant mortality was about six hundred for every one thousand live births. That is a big difference from what we have today. At present, people in developed countries live to eighty years and only five children out of a thousand die within their first year.”

“Wow. Was it really that bad?” gasped Karen, whose eyes were wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation after many years of battles with colleagues, hospital bureaucrats, an abusive husband and rebellious children. They were intelligent eyes, but eyes that had lost the sparkle of youthful ambition and hope they once had.

“Yes, and it is also a historical fact that the coming of Jesus changed absolutely nothing about those wretched living conditions. Those people continued to die by the droves.”

“I presume that with the other religions it is the same thing,” said Karen, increasingly thrilled by the subject.

“That’s right. At the moment Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and all the others were founded no observable improvement in the lives of the people that received the new gospel was registered by the historians of the time. Centuries later, and there was still no progress.”

“The teachings of Jesus and the Bible have an unquestionable moral value that has served society well over the millennia,” interjected the priest, as he finally untied the knot that blocked his throat, his glasses glinting soberly around the room.

“That is right,” added the chubby Texan, his nostrils full of the smell of food coming from the kitchen, which was the only thing keeping him from leaving the party. “Without those rules of conduct, society would have not been able to function because everyday life would have degenerated into chaos.”

The Texan was a large, burly man with a thick neck and a coarse, tough but also humorous face, which at times looked gentle but most of the time did not. There was something in him that reminded some people of a character from a comedy movie and others of a character from a frightening chainsaw massacre movie. He was a pale, emasculate and unimportant structure, with no real mental force or depth, and was fond of conversations dealing with food, cars and horses.

“If religion had not existed, societies would have anyway developed laws to organize everyday life, just as it is done today,” countered Roy.

“That is right,” added Karen, withdrawing a cigarette from her mouth with refined fingers on which she was aware she still wore her marriage ring. “At present laws are created by the tons and they are not based on religion. Society not just functions well, but actually much better than in Biblical times.”

A medical doctor, a neurosurgeon even, Karen was well aware of the dangers of cigarettes and she never lighted one, nor did she like being near people who smoked, but she liked pretending she smoked and liked to play around with the small, cylindrical white object.

“But the fact remains that for thousands of years nobody else was creating laws,” retorted the priest, with hands over his crossed legs and looking composed, but his muscles tightening with every minute that passed. “Back then, it was religion which created all the laws and it was the one that saved society from chaos.”

“Leo is correct,” interjected Roy´s father. “Nobody else was doing it back then.”

“Oh, that is just nonsense,” said Roy as he zipped from his glass of red wine.

“You are being rude and disrespectful to the priest,” growled the Texan as he resettled his thick-framed black glasses. “Why don’t we change the subject?”

The Texan had a trick of resettling his spectacles on his nose which was singularly disarming—in some indefinable way, singularly pleasant. Some people were moved sympathetically by the impractical and materially unfit disposition of the chubby Texan, whose weak blue eyes and rather flabby but poorly clothed figure bespoke more of fashion failure than anything else. However, George was not a failure—not financially and not professionally.

“You know what, that doesn’t sound very original,” said Roy. “That’s what the Church has always done. Throughout the centuries, every time religious ideas were tested against the scientific evidence, they did not pass the test, and when that happened, clergymen tried to bury the information and eliminate the free thinkers.”

“That’s true,” said Karen, as she turned and scanned the room, her eyes falling to the only object in the entire house that seemed delightful to her taste—a meter-tall Chinese white vase with a dozen yellow roses. “In past times people were even burned at the stake for expressing rational ideas. Fortunately, we no longer live in the Dark Ages and ideologues no longer tell us what to think. I want to continue hearing about this subject. It’s getting more interesting by the minute.”

“I would also like to listen to some more of that,” interjected the only other woman at the table—a mild-mannered anesthesiologist from London with a red blouse and a red skirt. The middle-aged blonde seemed always to have a pleasant smile on her lips—largely resulting from her four children, which she considered her greatest asset. With her bobbed hair, luminous gray eyes and pale skin, she looked perfectly charming. Catherine was a competent British doctor who had done her specialization in the United States and had married an American. She was the type of person who understood everything at first glance and was able to express her thoughts in the form in which they arrived to her at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning. She was very spontaneous, vivacious, and very extroverted. While holding the youngest of her sons in her arms—a two year old boy who was sound asleep—she had listened attentively to the discussion.

“The incoherence of religions is endless, and it gets revealed in a multiplicity of ways,” said Roy as he pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. Roy was somewhat slump-shouldered and he was constantly trying to improve his pose. “Scientists have always been seen by the clergy as the enemy, but scientists never had as their goal to damage the Church, and most were actually Christians, Jews or belonged to some other creed. However, in their desire to explain the world logically, they ended up colliding with religions.”

In the far distance a helicopter glided down over the trees, hovered for an instant like a hummingbird, and dashed away again with a arching flight. Roy had to live from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every one of his moves and acts were of interest to the press. It was almost surely a TV helicopter trying to snoop on him, but the conversation had become so intense, that he barely took notice of it. Normally, he would have closed the curtains or proposed to go somewhere else in the house that was less exposed to the view of outsiders, but he had also been sucked into the discussion, so deep that he had lowered his guard against the bold paparazzi.

“Could you elaborate on that,” said Catherine in her usual British accent as she chewed her upper lip and caressed the head of her son.

“Yes, of course. According to the science of anthropology, the apparition of the human species is the result of evolution and not of divine creation. Anthropologists can very convincingly demonstrate that our species made its apparition about 200,000 years ago. They can also show that humans evolved from more primitive beings called hominids, and the first of their kind appeared about six million years ago.”

“Don’t lecture us,” snarled the fat Texan in his light woolen cowboy shirt, buttoned at the neck—more irritated by the lack of food on the table than by Roy´s arguments. George, a native of Houston whose family had made a fortune with oil, had a wife and two loving daughters. Known for being a straight talker and for having a pompous style, he was also well known for his habit of gulping lots of steaks in an uncivilized way.

“Don’t pay attention to him,” said Catherine with a stark and uncompromising severity. “Go on.”

At that moment her son woke up and the child yawned and remained wrapped in her mother´s arms listening with infantile pleasure, as pat as pat could be, to a person playing piano in the adjacent large chandelier and glass room.

Composed, with unreadable eyes, and an expressionless face, Roy went on.

“The science of biology can prove beyond any doubt that hominids evolved from primates, and these from other less developed species. There has been a constant process of evolution for the last 3.7 billion years since the first unicellular organism appeared. These disciplines clearly reveal that there is not a need for a creating God to justify the existence of humans or the vast diversity of plants and animals on this planet.”

“The Church has for some time distanced itself from a literal interpretation of the Bible and has concluded that what the sacred scriptures really mean is that God created life and from then on it evolved,” stated the priest vehemently as he shuffled his feet uneasily.

“That sounds consistent,” uttered George, whose hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the low quality foam he always used. “And besides, science is just as ensnared with dead ends. That is why several university professors have dumped evolutionary theory. They claim that there are too many things about life on this planet that academic textbooks cannot elucidate and suggest that a possible explanation is a creating God.”

“That is pseudo-science,” affirmed Karen while looking at her colleague with contempt and making propitiatory grimaces. “Those are not real scientists. They are jokers and don’t even account for one percent of academics.”