“Yes, but I told you, I was very disturbed. I was very emotional. I was . . . I wasn’t worried about him. I was worried Simon had gotten the arrangement wrong, and that everything would spiral . . . out of control. I was worried Joe would find out and all hell would break loose.”
“You knew the defendant, Simon Heywood, did not have permission from the boy’s mother to take him home from school, didn’t you?”
“No, that’s not right.”
“Why did you tell the police you thought the boy’s parents might be worried about him if you also thought his mother had given Simon permission to take him from school?”
“I shouldn’t have. I told you, I acted out of emotion. I acted out of . . . jealousy. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Are you now telling the court that you lied to the police about your concern for the child’s parents and that it was simply out of malice to the defendant that you had him arrested?”
“Yes. I was angry with him. I knew Anna wouldn’t bail him out, and I thought it would break them up if he saw her for what she was. I didn’t think it would go this far. I just didn’t think. I don’t know whether you’ve ever made a mistake, an enormous mistake, because you were angry, because you were hurt, because you felt rejected by someone you thought you needed. You have to imagine being in my position, Your Worship,” Angelique said, turning to the magistrate. “Really, sir, everything I said to the police, even the contradictions, especially the contradictions, can all be understood by someone, anyone, with enough . . . empathy.”
16. Gina had stressed repeatedly that in criminal matters the burden of proof was always on the prosecution. Now Angelique had introduced the burden of empathy, and she had put it squarely on the magistrate. It had been quite a performance. Even Gina had to concede that my young, untutored friend had set things up for me at the trial. At the very least she had provided Gina with enough inconsistent statements to ensure that, if I was to be convicted at the trial, it wouldn’t be through her testimony. What I hadn’t understood from her cross-examination was why Henshaw was asking her questions about her knowledge of Joe Geraghty’s financial state. Gina explained.
“One of the charges you’re facing, what is called a Section 63A kidnapping as opposed to a common-law kidnapping, has, as one of its requisite elements, the intent to demand a ransom.”
“But I didn’t demand any ransom. Even the police don’t say I demanded a ransom.”
“No. They don’t, but they don’t have to. They just have to prove that you took Sam with the intention of demanding a ransom for him. It doesn’t matter whether you, in fact, got around to making any demand.”
“That’s crazy. How can they possibly prove that?”
“I don’t think they can. The best they can do is to establish that you knew that Geraghty had money. That’s why Henshaw asked Angela all those questions about Joe’s car, where he worked, that sort of thing. I’m going to try to get that charge knocked out. I’ll be arguing that they don’t have the evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you intended to demand a ransom. There just isn’t enough on that one for a properly instructed jury to convict.”
“Can we win that one?”
“We really should be able to.”
“Hell, we’ve got to win something.”
“Actually, Simon, in the current climate, we don’t.”
The next prosecution witness was neither unfavorable nor hostile, at least not to the prosecution.
“We had arranged . . . my wife and I had agreed that I was to leave work early that Friday and pick him up from school. She normally . . . It was usually part of her routine to pick up our son from school and take him home or to swimming lessons or to wherever he had to go. But on this particular day I was supposed to do it because she had a work commitment. She was going away, for a seminar, I think it was.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, I left work early and drove to my son’s school. I parked the car and got out. There was hardly anyone around. I couldn’t see him. I went looking for him. I must have gone into every classroom in the school. I mean . . . I didn’t go into them. Most of them were locked. I mean . . . I looked into every classroom I could for him. I went to the bike sheds. I must have covered every inch of the place looking for him. There were a few kids, older kids, hanging around. I asked them if they’d seen him. I remember I described him. They hadn’t. I went to the administration building. I ran around the school grounds calling out his name . . . Could I maybe get a glass of water, please?”
Joe Geraghty was a well-built man. I had never seen him before nor had he ever seen me. We looked at each other. This was the man who had paid Angel so diligently. This was the man Anna had chosen to marry. I had no business bringing his private life into the open, no business even bringing it before his wife. I looked at him in the witness box while he lost his son all over again, while he admitted to his weekly arrangement with Angelique and then later, while he struggled with Gina’s questions concerning the health of his marriage. But he looked most vulnerable, most bewildered, when he spoke about the failure of his son to be where he was supposed to be and about the bogus message for him at work advising him to pick his son up from school later than originally arranged. He talked of his panic, and that’s when he almost broke down. When he talked of being taken for a ride, taken for a sucker, a sap, he grew angry, angrier than was good for their case. It made it easier to imagine disharmony within the marriage. Gina would have briefed him better than that had he been her witness.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.
All night I imagined her. Eyes open, lying on my cot in the dark, she was in my mind like a melody not entirely remembered. You remember loving the song but, if the truth be told, you don’t really remember exactly how it goes. I waited for the sun to rise on what was not her first chance to rid me of the mess I had made for myself. Nothing the corrective services officers could do could get to me. The waiting had made me, at least temporarily, invulnerable. I had long stopped doubting that what I had done was crazy. And yet, because I was tempted to interpret the stupid old bracelet she was wearing while she took the oath to tell every last bit of the truth as some kind of omen, the real truth was that I still was not completely well. Otherwise I would not have held out the hope that fluttered like a butterfly inside me.
“We went out . . . that is . . . he was my boyfriend when I was a university student, a serious boyfriend. We were together for a couple of years but then I lost touch with him. I didn’t even know he was a teacher until that business with the schoolboy—”
“Objection!” Gina interrupted. “I ask my learned friend to confine the witness to his question.” I had not thought Anna meant me any harm by this. But I fought the memory of Alex’s characterization of a theist as someone for whom there is no test God can fail.
“No, definitely not. We hadn’t been in touch at all since the relationship ended. I was not romantically or in any way involved with him when he . . . took my son. He didn’t have my permission. He couldn’t have had it. We hadn’t been in contact for ten years or so.”
“Do you know why the defendant took your son?”
“Objection! Calls for speculation other than that of an expert.”
“I have absolutely no idea . . . absolutely none.” That was the only time she looked at me.
17. Gina managed to persuade the magistrate to dismiss two of the charges against me, the stalking and the section 63A kidnapping charge, the charge that I intended to demand a ransom notwithstanding that I never actually got around to it. She argued that there was no evidence upon which a reasonable jury, properly instructed, could conclude an intention to demand a ransom. But the prosecution was successful with respect to the other charges. I was to be presented for trial as soon as there was a spot open for me on the court calendar.
 
; Things died down for a while, for months, months that I experienced as years. The press reported that I had been committed for trial, that the accused had once had a love affair with the kidnapped boy’s mother, that the kidnapped boy’s father had been a regular client of the prostitute jilted by the accused, and that no other children had been reported missing lately. Alex stayed in touch with Angel. He told her I wasn’t angry with her anymore but, on my lawyer’s advice, I still couldn’t see her. He promised to act as a go-between and to keep her abreast of all that was happening to me and to the case. Then, a little later still, came school vacation time and Gina took her children away somewhere for two weeks. Alex’s estranged wife took his two children away somewhere else for two and a half weeks.
It was around this time that I was informed by Legal Aid, who had been paying for my defense up until then, paying both Gina and her instructing solicitor, that a problem had arisen with respect to funding. The problem was mine, not theirs, although its origins were no doubt systemic, part of society’s enchantment with a barbarism that those under its influence euphemistically called “efficiency.” The gist of it, as far as I was concerned, was that Legal Aid had decided, subsequent to the committal hearing, that they would continue to fund me but only on the condition that I plead guilty. As long as Anna maintained that I did not have her permission to take Sam, Legal Aid considered funding my defense, if I pleaded “not guilty” at the trial, tantamount to a waste of its limited funds, throwing good money after bad. They were only going to pay Gina to represent me if I pleaded “guilty.” Then she would be paid to get me the lightest possible sentence.
Gina was away, and we couldn’t contact her. I was devastated when it sank in. Alex tried to convince me that we would figure something out, that I would be all right. But he stopped short of saying that Gina would represent me if I couldn’t get funding. I didn’t know how close they were. He never volunteered anything about their relationship, and he didn’t seem to welcome being asked. Whatever our friendship meant to him, it had to be wearing thin. I had become a bottomless pit of need and, for all his attempts to implicate my parents and the times we were living through, we both knew that with the one desperate, impetuous act of stupidity, I had really brought it all on myself. Why should Gina defend me for nothing? She had children to support.
Alex told me to delay my despair at least until Gina got back. We would figure something out, he promised me. As he talked to me about the possibility of one or both of us approaching my father for money again, I began to contemplate the ultimate fallback option, the one we all have. But could I really go through with it? And how would I go about it? It occurred to me that I might have to enlist some assistance. The Turk would do it. He would help me. He understood. But for him to get to me we would need Mr. Greer to turn a blind eye. We would need to have something to offer him in return. Alex didn’t suspect the road my thoughts had taken, but he knew I’d turned off. While waiting for Gina’s children to return to school he told me how upset Angelique was after he apprised her of my problem with Legal Aid, so much so that it got her working at a scheme to fund my defense. She claimed she would have $30,000 within a few weeks. I had to smile when he told me this. She didn’t tell him how she was going to get it; she just made him promise to tell me that she was working on it and that I would be all right. I would not be forced to plead “guilty.”
I was a man of more than average intelligence seasoned by years of wide and considered reading, a man of not unpleasing visage and of some awareness of the mighty winds and faint breezes that move the world, a man sensitive both to the plight of the many and to that of the man in his shirtsleeves ambling through the leaves in the city park during his lunch hour, desperately trying to keep his own tepid inconsequence at bay with every short and timid breath. I had really wanted nothing more in life than to help this small man and perhaps thereby to make the world a slightly better place. But instead, I have, as if by careful planning, visited upon myself first a virtual state of confinement in a small apartment without even the means to pay for the rent, and then an actual state of solitary confinement inside a maximum-security prison without the means to pay for my own defense. Dostoyevsky was right. Money is coined liberty and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom.
By accepting the lower scale of fees offered by Legal Aid, Gina had been discounting her usual fee all along, not that accepting a high-profile, perhaps career-making, kidnapping case required all that much selflessness. But now with Legal Aid threatening to withdraw its funding if I pleaded “not guilty,” I could not expect Gina to keep fighting for me. The children she wanted to protect were not an abstraction, not the children of the world. They were hers. She had to feed them. She had to take them away for school vacations. She had to make up for whatever it was that had led their father and her to separate. Just because Alex had adopted the cause of my well-being with a passion and madness that rivaled my own didn’t mean she had to. Nor did it mean he would ever ask her to.
It was as a consequence of my long-standing reliance on Alex that it felt completely unnatural to plan the last stage of my decline and fall without consulting him. As strange as it sounds, the decision to bypass him took more courage than the decision to kill myself, an enterprise I was confident my fellow prisoners would not be so cruel as to not assist me with.
I was figuring it all out. My conviction would confirm what I had long suspected—that I was just not cut out for the business of living at a time like this, a time when wondering, caring, dreaming . . . they were just not selling, they were uncool, unhip, not sexy, past their expiration date, and I was going to have to go down with them, all the way down, stopping at all stations via the tabloids, my parents’ shame, and my little orgasms of mental instability. Some other time maybe. My life had been worth a try, a good idea at the time, in principle, but ultimately a waste of breath. It had all gone way too far off track.
I found myself frequenting an inchoate state between sleep and wake in which dream and fantasy took turns to grapple with dying. I would see myself speeding on an elevated freeway, and in trying to get ahead of the traffic, losing control of the car and plummeting through the barrier into a desertlike ravine, my frustration and anger when I couldn’t get a break on the rest of the traffic giving way first to fear and panic as the car sailed into the air, and finally, just before hitting the ground, to “Oh, well.” Oh, well.
A means to the end would always be near at hand if I wanted it badly enough. I’d heard of a man inside who had stabbed himself to death with his eyeglasses. My eyesight was too good for that. I would need the help of a sympathetic killer. I thought again of the Turk.
In one of my two-hour stints out of my cell I sounded him out about helping me should I need him to. We were in the exercise yard. It was noisy and crowded with prisoners kicking a soccer ball around. We were being watched. There was no time for small talk.
“If I want to die, will you help me?” I whispered.
“Hey, Fuck!” he greeted me. “How do you do? You look like shit.”
“Nazim, if I want to die, will you help me?”
The more Alex became aware of the unrelenting flatness of my affect the more he insisted that we talk about it. Perhaps he suspected what he would have called my “suicidal ideation.” That would certainly have explained his exhilaration when he came to see me in the visit center.
“I have great news, Simon.”
Gina was back. They had finally spoken directly to each other after a couple of days of missed calls and phone messages. When he told her about Legal Aid withdrawing funding unless I pleaded guilty she had laughed.
“They can’t do that, and they know it. Why didn’t somebody call the solicitor?”
It was a good question. I had not thought to check the regulations governing Legal Aid funding with the instructing solicitor. It had all seemed so hopeless. I took a while to understand precisely what Alex was telling me. Gina subsequently explained it bett
er and more fully, but that afternoon there was no stopping Alex Klima.
“She said they can’t do it. They have to fund you whether you plead guilty or not guilty.”
“Why?”
“It’s because of a case, some case, a decision of the High Court called . . . What did she say? . . . Dietrich. She called it Dietrich. She said she’ll have to make a Dietrich application for you.”
“How long will that take?”
“I asked her that too. A week to two weeks. She said she’ll visit you in two days’ time. She’s in court before that.”
“Dietrich,” Gina later explained, “stood for the proposition that an accused person has a right to a fair trial in accordance with law. And, in the absence of exceptional circumstances, an indigent person charged with a serious offense who, through no fault on his part, cannot obtain legal representation will be taken by an appellate court to have been denied a fair trial in accordance with law by virtue of the absence of legal representation alone. I will make an application pursuant to the Crimes Act, and the court will order Legal Aid to fund your defense.”
Somewhere in his personal journal Alex would have noted that he was not going to have to test Gina, not then anyway. And I in my journal? “Thursday: I gag on the stench of the disinfectant they use here, again.”
18.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.
“You can’t ask someone to feel more. It’s pointless,” Alex had once said to me.
“No,” I had agreed, “you can only beg her.”
The first time I hugged her properly, really held her, really squeezed her tight within my arms, I felt an incredible release unlike anything I had ever known. That’s how it started, the addiction. Where the release is great enough it can capture you and imprison you. Everything will always be more or less surreal after that. Even her leaving was surreal. Why did she leave all of a sudden?