looked up at Emil Stavros. “I think the people have established the foundation to allow the evidence to go to the jury, and I will allow it. We’ll let the jury decide how much weight to give these expert witnesses, but Mr. Anderson, if I were you, I’d find some good ones of my own.”
Court was adjourned. Emil Stavros was handcuffed and led away with a look of hatred back at Karp and Guma. “You’ll pay for this, Karp,” he shouted just before he disappeared through the security door that led him back down and through the tunnel to the Tombs.
“Whew!” Anderson said to the other defense attorneys. “I need a drink. How about we reconvene at Restaurant 222 on West Seventy-ninth?”
The celebrity attorneys left the courtroom laughing and arranging golf dates. “What do you think?” Detective Fairbrother asked as Karp and Guma gathered their papers at the prosecution table.
“I think Mr. Anderson mostly just wanted to see how our experts performed in a courtroom,” Guma answered. “How about you, Butch? Butch?”
Karp heard his name being called but he was thinking about Kane’s face turning blue with his hands around the man’s neck. He tried to kill my kids!
20
The throbbing pulse of the drums rolling across the high plains desert from the pueblo dictated the pace and nature of Marlene’s sleep. Even the people in her dreams danced like Indians with stylized tribal masks of carved wood and feathers.
Despite the disguises, she knew who was behind the masks. Kane’s demonic mask seemed to shift, his body a formless smoke, as he pursued Lucy, who wore a Corn Maiden mask and was dressed in a fringed white doeskin dress and knee-high white doeskin boots.
Butch danced after them in a Great Horned Owl mask that Jojola had once shown her, which was used by the tribe’s warrior clan, while David Grale stamped along behind him wearing the gray-brown, mud-covered mask of a water spirit. Swirling around all of them was a woman, or the shadow of a woman in black whose raven mask covered only the top part of her face; Marlene assumed from the mole on her cheek that she was Samira Azzam.
Moving in and out of the assemblage, John Jojola soared and screeched like the golden eagle he represented. Eagles, Marlene thought in her dream, John believes that they carry prayers to the Creator. The sight of the Indian police chief filled her with such an overwhelming sadness that she cried out in her sleep. Hearing her, he turned and winked before flapping his great wings and rising above the dancers, circling up and up until he was lost in the sun.
Then Vladimir Karchovski appeared in the middle of the dancers. He was not dressed differently than he would have been for any of his summertime walks along the Brighton Beach boardwalk, just the usual linen suit and black beret. He gazed fondly at Marlene as he did whenever she came to visit, and held up a piece of paper.
Before she could reach out and take it, however, a shadow passed between them and stole the note. Marlene realized that the shadow was Azzam, who began trilling in the way of Arab women who have lost their men, circling the old man like a-
“-vulture, not a raven,” Marlene said aloud as she sat up in the dark of the room of the mission house where she was staying on the Taos reservation.
She got out of bed and walked over to the door leading to the Spanish-style courtyard outside her room. The stars overhead shone brilliantly-not the weary specks of light she was used to in the East, but three- dimensional bodies of light that had substance and dimension. “Billions and billions of stars,” she said as she entered the courtyard and sat down in a hanging chair next to a large clump of lilac bushes. The fragrance of the tiny lavender flowers permeated the predawn morning.
The drums from the pueblo were growing louder and seemed to be trying to match the syncopation of her heart…or maybe it’s my heart trying to keep the beat. Holding her breath to listen, she heard the far-off high- pitched keening and chanted songs as the people of the Taos Pueblo mourned the death of their police chief and warrior John Jojola. A coyote’s howl joined in the grieving from a bluff near the house.
She would have liked to have attended the funeral. But it was a private ceremony, part of the sacred rituals that the Taos Indians had kept secret from all outsiders ever since the Spanish conquistadores arrived in 1540.
The pueblo was thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, and its people had been one of the only tribes that had not been forced from their lands by other Indians or whites. The seven pueblos in the Rio Grande Valley, of which Taos was the best known, even spoke a unique language, Tewa. They didn’t teach the language to anyone else. However, Marlene’s daughter, Lucy, a language savant, had a passing knowledge of it from listening to conversations as she helped out at the Catholic mission on the Taos reservation.
Even allowing Marlene to stay in a house on the reservation’s Catholic mission grounds was a breach in tradition while the reservation’s borders were closed to outsiders, as they were now. When she was dropped off at the house, she’d been told, politely, that she was to remain in the house until someone from the tribe arrived to escort her to the memorial service in the morning, now only a few hours away.
Closing the reservation to everyone except the Red Willow People, as the Taos people were known, wasn’t unusual. It happened several times during the year for special ceremonies, as well as for most of the winter. About fifty families, including Jojola and his son, lived year-round in the actual pueblo-an apartment-like complex as high as five stories made of adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, that had been there for perhaps as long as a thousand years. Most of the rest of the tribe’s population of nearly two thousand lived in houses and trailers scattered around the reservation. During the winter and on festival days, many of the families living outside moved into their ancestral homes in the pueblo to touch base as a people and pass on their extensive oral history to their children and grandchildren. The ceremonies and dances performed in those times were for themselves, not the tourists with their cameras.
The reservation was also closed sometimes during times of community trauma, or to discuss matters important to the future of the Taos people, or to mourn the passing of a leader like Jojola. At the word from the tribal council, police officers wearing the traditional black skirts over their pants maintained roadblocks at the reservation entrances and patrolled the roads to keep the curious and un-invited away.
Marlene knew that decision to let her stay she owed to the legacy of Jojola, and the thought of her friend’s death brought tears to her eyes again. He’d once told her that he didn’t fear death because it represented only the passing of his spirit from one world into the next. But it wasn’t a world she could enter, not without leaving her family, and she missed her friend. The lethal rage she felt toward Kane, the old street justice anger at injustice and the evil of men who perpetrated it-an anger she’d tried to leave in the past with Jojola’s help-threatened to blind her at a time she needed to stay levelheaded to protect her family.
The morning after Jojola’s death, she’d flown to Albuquerque where she was met by a Taos County sheriff’s deputy who drove her to the town of Taos. She’d insisted on going straight to the hospital where she found Lucy sitting in a chair asleep with her head on Ned’s chest.
Ned had been wide awake but trying not to disturb her daughter.
The young man blushed.
Ned was now turning a dangerous shade of bright red, which only got worse when Marlene kissed him on the cheek.
Lucy burst into tears.
