12 Men Born of Woman
They were milling around the coffee urns, rather than sitting where pens, white paper, glasses and jugs of water had been immaculately placed so that there was exactly two feet between each juror. Twelve leather-padded, leather-backed chairs had been arranged at a round table, as if we were King Arthur and his knights, but people seemed to prefer to stand, talking to each other in the vicinity of the stainless steel hives containing that brown nectar which men like me preferred to honey. And we were all men. I have written people but there were no women. It was an all-male jury.
‘Guilty as hell,’ said the chubby man in the large check suit. I wanted to tell him that if he wanted to look slimmer, he should try a narrow stripe pattern. Or even plain. ‘Can’t be anything else.’ He took a long sip of his coffee and obviously burnt his tongue, because he made a face and stuck the tip of that organ through his teeth.
The chap he was speaking to was not much leaner but he was a more sensible dresser, in a blue sweater and jeans.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied in a cultured voice, the kind of accent which one heard at county fairs. ‘I thought that’s what we were here to discuss. I mean, what about this cloning thing? Do you think there’s anything in it?’
He was talking about the case for the defence. Let me tell you the story first and then you’ll soon be up to speed, even if you’re a little lost at present.
You must remember the case? Four men went out on a yacht to do some sea fishing. It was a very expensive boat, owned by a millionaire’s son, who was not actually on board at the time of the incident. He had loaned it to a politician friend of his, who had in turn invited three companions to join him. One was an important civil servant, the second a well-known Mafia head, and the third the gangster’s bodyguard who it seemed he never went anywhere without. What they were all doing on the yacht can be only surmised, but since the story broke the civil servant has resigned and the politician is leaving the country after the trial is over. They all said they were simply keen fishermen. Ha, say I and many others.
The mobster’s name was Freddie Lazarus. I say was. He’s now dead. He originated in some South American country, no one is quite sure where. But it’s his bodyguard who’s on trial, for murder he’s accused of committing on board the yacht. No, no, he didn’t kill his boss, some Eastern European rivals did that, awhile after this particular murder. The man the bodyguard murdered is still a mystery, a complete unknown, having no identification on him whatsoever at the time, and whose prints, dental records and DNA are unregistered anywhere. Various media agencies, publishing his picture, have not received any satisfactory replies. No one seems to know who he is or where he’s come from. It was as if he’d crawled out of the sea.
How did he get on board, this victim of Mickey Kyle, the hoodlum who hacked him to death?
The prosecutors tried to assert that the man must have been on board when the yacht set out. Yet two independent ‘valets’ from a boat cleaning firm, who were on the yacht right up until it left the harbour, and maintained there was no one else on board. All four passengers and crew – evidence was forthcoming from Lazarus before he was gunned down in a night club – staunchly maintained that they also searched the boat thoroughly before setting out, fearing eavesdroppers and spies. This could be a bunch of lies of course, but their stories were consistent.
So, if not there at the outset, he must have got on board sometime during the trip out to sea. Helicopter? A fast vessel of some kind? Submarine? No evidence has come to light to support any idea that he was transported to the boat by another craft.
Did he swim there and climb on board while they were distracted by their ‘meeting’?
No answers have been forthcoming, not to anyone’s satisfaction. I and the other jurors in this room have so far been kept apart. The trial has thus far been conducted in conference mode on a closed TV network, to protect the judge and jury, and prosecuting counsel, from harassment. There have been threats against our lives, which I’m sure would have been carried out, had our names not been kept secret. We don’t know each other. Until we were locked in this room, just an hour ago, we’d never met. Kyle has ‘goodfellow’ friends, naturally, who’ll stop at very little to influence the outcome.
So far as I know we’re anonymous. I hope it stays that way.
An obviously very nervous little man in Cuban heeled boots came and stood by me.
‘What about this theory, eh? You understand it?’
‘I don’t think anyone understands it,’ I replied.
‘No, what I mean is, I haven’t the foggiest about it. How does it help the defence? Y’know, what’s in it for Kyle? After all, he’s admitted he took a chopper from the galley and split the guy’s skull with it. Hacked off his arms and legs – and’ he gulped for breath, ‘his head, and chucked the lot with the torso overboard, hoping for the sharks to do the biz. There’s not much defence against that sort of confession, is there? I mean, he did it, he said he did it. How’s this theory goin’ to change that?’
I remember the sky was a cobalt blue (Kyle was no ignoramus, he was an educated thug: he had majored in art) which made me think a storm was coming. We’d already been out there four hours and the sea began to grow dark along the edge of the horizon. A fresh wind sprang up. It really did look like dirty weather was on the way. Then I saw him, sneaking around the stern of the boat. An intruder. An intruder who’d managed to board us without been heard or seen. How sinister was that? It appeared to me, though I was mistaken, he had a weapon in his hand. I was in the galley at the time. Cooking. I like to cook. I specialise in oriental dishes. Anyway, I grabbed the nearest piece of cutlery – it just happened to be a chopper – and went out to confront the guy. He raised his hand, the one with the weapon – which turned out to be a small fish, bait we were using – and I struck him down. It was self defence. I thought he was going to stab me. A stranger’s hand going up, a flash of silver? In my profession if you don’t act quickly, decisively, you end up dead. I split his skull.
There were five jurors huddled together in one corner of the room and a lively debate was going on between them. I wanted to hear what they had to say. They looked a little brighter than this little twerp. It would have restored a little of my faith in justice to hear an intelligent conversation going on, about the real issues behind this murder. If murder it was. The short man had raised one of the key points. Was it indeed murder?
‘What they’re saying,’ I told him, my eyes still on the group of five, ‘is that if he was a clone, he wasn’t in the strict sense a human being. Our laws are there to protect people . . .’
‘Life, surely? To protect life? Kyle took a life.’
I was being patient as hell. ‘A cockroach has life.’
‘Ah, I see what you mean.’ There was a pause. ‘But he was a man, not an animal.’
‘You have to look at the definition of what constitutes a man. If he was a clone, he was not born of woman. Does a true man have to be born of woman? you have to ask yourself. If the answer’s yes, then you can’t call a clone a man.’ I hesitated, knowing I was getting into deeper water. ‘Especially the kind of clone the defence are putting forward.’
‘Oh yeah, what did they call it? S.R.C.?’
‘R.S.C. – Random Spontaneous Cloning.’
‘Several people go into a confined space and more come out – in this case four men in and five men out.’
I nodded. ‘Exactly. The fifth man has been accidentally cloned from the four birthright men. No one’s sure of the science yet, but they talk of electro-genetic fields producing a rapid cell creation. They say it’s happened at several large gatherings: night clubs, parties, even in elevators and offices. In all cases they have been single-sex gatherings: all men or all women. The clone looks like none of the makers because he or she is an amalgam of all of them. Yet the clone has knowledge of their memories, skills and habits: a vessel for their collected attributes and faults.’
The little man licked his lips. ‘That would make him very clever. It’s not clever to get murdered. You have to be very stupid to do that.’
‘If he’s a new creature it’ll take time for him to learn that there’s danger all around him. When men first arrived in New Zealand the birds came right up to them and looked them in the eyes. See if they do it today, now they’ve learned what predators we are. The next clone that comes along will be more cautious, will have more of a sense of self-preservation.’
‘How come? How?’
‘Who knows? But creatures learn from the history of their kind. It’s passed on somehow. One of the mysteries of life. Well,’ I started to walk away, ‘we need to talk to others.’
His eyes darted round the room and back again.
‘Hey, hey – don’t go yet – answer me this – how does something like this happen? I mean, it sounds like hocus-pocus – creating a man out of thin air. I can’t think they’re serious. It’s just another get-out clause for the criminal elements in our society, isn’t it?’
‘It could be. Or it’s a new phenomenon created some say by overstimulation of the body tissues – constant use of new artificial drugs and medication – combined with a change in atmospherics. Even a slight alteration in the layers that protect our planet from the sun’s rays affect us a great deal. Static electricity increases in quantity and power. Other waves and rays increase or decrease in value. Anything that upsets the balance interferes with the natural laws of physics as we know them will have consequences we won’t have experienced before now.’
‘Wow, you talk like a scientist. Are you a scientist?’ he stuck his hand forward to be shaken. ‘My name’s Archie by the way.’
‘We’re not supposed to give names,’ I reminded him, ignoring the hand. ‘Look, I’m no scientist. I just read magazines. I haven’t really any idea what all that stuff really means – like you, I can only guess. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is a get-out clause. Kyle is using it, isn’t he? It’s the basis of his defence. He’s saying he killed the guy, but it wasn’t murder because his victim wasn’t a real man, he was some accident of nature, a freak of physics.’ I took a long draught of coffee. It smelled better than it tasted. ‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To decide whether to accept that as the truth, or whether we think it’s just a load of crap.’
‘I thought he was advocating self-defence.’
‘Listen, buddy,’ I said, growing tired him, ‘if you’re up on a murder charge you don’t just have one line of defence, you have several – it helps to confuse the jury.’ I didn’t add that it had certainly confused this little squirt, which wasn’t difficult since he had brains the consistency of mushy peas. ‘Go and ask some of the others. You’ll get a better overall picture.’
I turned away from him and put my coffee down so that I could take off my jacket which was uncomfortable. Once I was in my shirt-sleeves I rolled them up: the sleeves were a little too long. ‘Archie’ had gone and was chatting to three men who had the look of startled deer. One of them managed to extricate himself straight away and he came over to me, flicking his thumb back at those who were left and rolling his eyes.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It took me a lot longer to get away than you.’
The man, a bulky guy who had a truck driver’s nose, spoke to me with in unnerving Liverpudlian accents.
‘What’s your decision? We’ve all seen the evidence now. What do you think?’
‘Me? I think Kyle is lying. I think the whole four of them are liars. I think the fifth man was killed because he knew too much.’
He nodded slowly. ‘That’s a good reason for killing a man, if you’ve got something desperate to hide.’
‘How did number five gain his knowledge, though – that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Was he indeed a randomly spontaneously produced and arrived with intrinsic knowledge intact – or was he simply a spy who’d hidden himself on board and had heard all?’
‘I agree with you, and I go with the second one. I think he hid in one of the nooks and crannies of the boat before it left harbour. He heard what he wanted to hear and was then discovered by the four conspirators. They hacked him to death and chucked the bits to the fishes, hoping no more would come it. The head being washed up on the beach was their undoing, along with the bloodstains on the yacht. Case closed.’
‘You could be right.’
‘I know I’m damn well right. R.S.C.? Bollocks. Utter bollocks. Pseudo science, my friend, from crapland.’
‘Well, there’ve been a number of other reported cases, some say from reliable sources.’
‘Crap. Rumours. Myth. Apocryphal tales. Tabloid press sensational junk. Daily Shite news. Of course the rags love stories like that. It’s bread, butter and meat on the table to them. Take it from me, they ain’t real, my friend. They’re a load of bollocks.’
‘So you said.’
The noise level in the room had increased as conversations began to get heated in various corners. Men had removed their suit jackets, like me, and had claimed one of the twelve chairs by hanging it on the back. Smoking was not allowed and several jurors, obvious smokers, were getting agitated and irritable without their cigarettes. One man was gloomily staring out of the window, lost in domestic thoughts by the look of him, no doubt wondering when he was going to get out of this zoo cage.
Suddenly a tall guy in hornrimmed glasses and wearing a black blazer with grey flannels clapped his hands for attention.
‘Gentlemen. I think we’re all gentlemen here, aren’t we? Can we please sit down now. We’ve had time to chat. Let’s get down to the serious business of reaching a decision . . .’
‘Who made you chief?’ cried a belligerent from the back of the room. ‘I don’t remember signing anything.’
One or two people laughed.
‘The judge,’ growled the man in the blazer, ‘that’s who. I’m the Jury Foreman.’
‘Well, I wish they’d tell me,’ grumbled the other man. ‘Everything’s a bloody mystery. No names, no pack drill. I’m fuckin’ fed up with playing secret fuckin’ games.’
‘Could we keep the language down?’ muttered the foreman, pulling back his chair. ‘You might regret it when they show this to your family on the box. This is all being recorded you know. They can hear everything we say outside.’
I hadn’t remembered that. It was true. We could be seen and heard on a closed network. We were being watched and judged too. There was little privacy in this world. If you wanted privacy you hired a yacht.
‘Just going to take a leak,’ I said, heading towards the toilets at the end of the room. ‘Won’t be a couple of minutes.’
There was someone in the toilets. A pale young man in a dark suit. He didn’t look well and was splashing water on his face. Looking at me in the mirror in front of him, he said, ‘Late night. Had too much.’
I nodded in an understanding way and went to the end of the room where suits, shirts and other clothes were hanging from coathangers on hooks. We had been told to bring spare clothes, in case we were up here all night. The judge had told us the decision must be unanimous and therefore we were stuck in the hotel room until we came to an agreement. I rifled through some pockets and eventually found a black spectacles’ case. ‘Forget my head next,’ I said, showing it to the young man. Then I went the end washbasin, nearest the door. I washed my hands, wet my hair and smoothed it down a little, then moved for the doorway.
‘What’s going on out there?’ asked the young man.
‘Oh – yes, sorry. We’re gathering at the table. But no rush. You’ve got a few minutes yet.’
‘Thanks.’ He leaned over his washbasin and I wondered if he was going to be sick.
I joined the others.
We all took our seats, or rather the seats that were available. I saw next to the nervy little man who called himself Archie and picked up pens and paper. What we were supposed to do with the writing materials I had no idea. A secret ballot? Surely we had to have the courage of our convictions. We had to say openly what we thought. Guilty or not guilty. Simple as that. No fussing around with bits of paper.
‘Now,’ said the foreman, knitting his hands together in front of him, ‘we’re all seated. We should all have reached a decision. Is there anyone who wants to discuss it further?’
Seven hands went up.
‘Oh Christ,’ muttered the man who’d been looking out of the window. ‘Here we go. Take-out meals, bloody in-house showers. I want to get home to my family . . .’
The foreman ignored him, but asked, ‘All right if I take the decisions of those who have no further doubts? The five who’re left?’
There didn’t seem to be any objections to this, so he started with a man three down to my right.
‘Guilty as hell. Murder.’
‘We don’t need any superlatives,’ replied the foreman, pointing at the next man. ‘You?’
‘Guilty of manslaughter.’
‘Oh, come on!’ muttered a guy over the other side of the table. ‘What? Are you blind and deaf?’
‘You?’ asked the foreman, ignoring the interruptions and pointing to me. ‘Your decision?’
I hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Guilty.’
‘Of?’
Again I hesitated, then said in a firm tone, ‘Murder.’
At that very moment the young man came out of the toilet at the far end of the room. I turned and whispered in Archie’s ear. Archie gave a startled gasp and gripped my arm with claw-like fingers.
The young man approached with my black glasses’ case in his hand. He had seen that I’d left it behind on the washbasin and was no doubt bringing it to me.
There was an electrified silence as we observed his progress over the hotel’s thick carpet towards us. His tie had been loosened and hung down below an unbuttoned collar, but he was still wearing his jacket. He seemed preoccupied, looking down at his feet. We all gave one last quick stare around the table, checking that all twelve seats were occupied, before some of us shifted uneasily. Everyone knew there was only supposed to be 12 men in the room. There were now 13. The door had been locked behind us and there were no other entrances or exits. People were asking themselves, was this one of Kyle’s killers, come to threaten us? Or worse?
‘Who the hell are you?’ cried the foreman, leaping to his feet. ‘How did you get in? Through the toilet window?’
Archie now found his voice and pointed, shouting, ‘He’s got a gun!’
The next thing that happened was the door burst open and and two armed police cop came in. They aimed their weapons.
‘Stay where you are!’ yelled one of the cops. ‘Don’t move. Keep your hands out in front of you. Drop that!’
‘This?’ replied the intruder, wildly, holding forth the black glasses’ case. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘Don’t move. I warn you. Drop it! Drop it!’
Some of us now fell to the floor, lying flat. Others confused the situation by starting for the doorway. There was rapid movement everywhere. The policeman looked uncertain. I could see the gun in his hand shaking a little. He too looked quite young. His target wisely remained still, but others were darting behind him, dashing for the toilet to be out of the firing line. There was hysteria in the air, which was very unsettling. Finally the jury foreman cried out in a shrill accusing voice, ‘He hasn’t dropped it. He’s still got it!’
‘Heck, I only went to the bog . . . I’m one of the jurors . . . I think I’ve got . . .’
His right hand went towards one of his pockets. That rapid movement was fatal. The policeman fired twice in quick succession, striking his victim high in the chest. The wounded man staggered backwards, blood bubbling from his sternum. He coughed once, twice, three times, then fell to his knees. Finally he pitched forward on his face and lay there, jerking spasmodically. Within a few minutes he was completely unmoving. His left hand still clutched the case. The cop, white-faced and looking ill, moved forward to remove the glasses’ case from the dead man’s hand. He stared at it, bemused for a few moments, then opened it and found a pair of sunglasses inside. Then, with panic in his eyes, he felt for his victim’s pulse. Clearly, from his expression, there was nothing.
He yelled back hoarsely through the open doorway.
‘For Christ sake call a bloody ambulance.’
‘Already done,’ murmured the other cop, placing a sympathetic hand on his partner’s shoulder. ‘On its way.’
‘You thought it was a weapon, didn’t you, Dave?’ said the shooter. ‘It looked like one.’
His friend shrugged, averting his eyes. ‘I dunno. Maybe. I’m not sure.’
‘You bastard,’ said the shooter. ‘You bastard, Dave.’
Dave looked very uncomfortable and refused to look his partner in the eye.
‘No, Mike, I’m just not sure.’
More police arrived, one or two of them quite senior in rank. We were questioned exhaustively. Statements were taken from everyone in the room, and from those who had been viewing proceedings on the monitor screens. Many were still convinced the dead man was indeed an assassin sent by Kyle, though that hardly made sense at all, since even if he wiped out all twelve of us there would be another trial and another jury appointed. Common sense wafts away in the heat of the moment though. It’s only when there’s time for calm reflection that rational thinking returns and proper assessments are made.
Once the doctor had declared the policeman’s victim officially dead there were photographs taken of the corpse. Then the body was taken away. The black glasses’ case was put in a plastic bag and went with the dead man. The policeman who’d fired his weapon had been quickly whisked away, shaking his head and protesting that any cop in his position would have done the same, forgetting that his partner had refrained from firing.
When the police had taken statements from us, we were allowed to go home. I was followed down the stairs by the little man, Archie, who was still badly shaken.
‘I’m never going on another jury,’ he said. ‘I swear if they try to make me I’ll just – well, they can do what they like to me. It looked like a gun, didn’t it? You thought it was a gun, didn’t you? We nearly died in there. He might have had a machine pistol of some kind. He could have mowed the lot of us down. I’m never going near a courtroom again. They can do what they like to me . . .’
I let him rattle on. He was harmless enough. We both hit the street at the same time and he said, ‘Share a cab?’
‘No, no thanks. I’ll get my own.’
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Here’s one. You take it.’
I got in and closed the door behind me.
‘Where to, sir?’ asked the driver.
I leaned forward, opening my mouth, then suddenly realised that none of the twelve addresses in my head was of any use to me.