“They have no claim here,” said the city attorney. “We could go on at length about the stated facts in this case. Yes, Mr. Ruiz is dead. Yes, his death occurred during an altercation with Officer Carmichael. The defense accepts those facts, but we reject the nature of the suit. The fact remains, the City and County of Denver cannot be held liable under sovereign immunity. You cannot,” he said, “sue the king.”
The city attorney continued before he was interrupted by his own cough, his voice wilting under the sounds. When he finished, the judge called David, who stood elegantly, buttoning the bottom of his suit and sliding his hands through his hair.
“Your Honor,” he said, “on behalf of Plaintiff Ruiz, we reject the basis of this motion. The defense claims the city cannot be held responsible, but with all due respect what will suing some drunk cop do? We all know Mr. Carmichael has nothing to his name but a lengthy record of excessive beatings, an abhorrence that the city knows of and has done nothing about. Mr. Carmichael chased my client’s brother, clubbed him unconscious, and threw his body from a metal bridge into an empty freight car. In the killing of Estevan Ruiz, Mr. Carmichael has denied an entire family food and shelter, for they relied upon the young man’s wages to care for them all. When an officer decides to murder a member of the community, it is not one life snuffed out. It is a web of consequences—one killing damages a thousand lives.”
Luz had never heard David’s voice used in such a way. He was turned slightly and Luz could see the outline of his face, a calmness over his jaw, illuminated like that of a performer onstage.
“Counselor,” said the judge, “as impassioned as your plea is, the simple fact remains, there is no claim to be settled here. I’ll make my ruling in a written statement by the week’s end. Court adjourned.”
David spun around slowly, an almost visible halo of anger rising around him. He neatly pushed his papers into his briefcase and looked to Luz. “We have another stop,” he said, ushering her out of the courtroom.
* * *
—
The streets were packed with midday crowds, young men selling newspapers, factory workers moving through lunch counters, bankers stepping into automobiles. David walked briskly along Seventeenth Street, his jaw clenched as he glanced at Luz, his coat and shoes the same gray as the clouds. It was cold. Their breath formed fog. The air smelled of manure and dead cattle.
David’s eyes seemed heavy with consideration. Luz hadn’t learned to read his expressions the way she could with Lizette and Diego. With Maria Josie, she never fully learned. Some people were like that.
“As you might have guessed,” said David, stopping at an intersection, “that did not go well.” He pointed across the street to a slanted building that resembled a public gym, only smaller. Above the entrance, as if impaled on iron rods, were the letters KQEZ glowing in pink. “I have a small favor to ask.”
* * *
—
The radio station was down a set of crunched granite stairs capped in metal, through a dim hallway, past a bathroom with the door open to the toilet, and in an oblong room with a smaller room of glass built into a corner. As they stepped forward, Luz realized a man was sitting inside the glass room, a single lamp beside him on a wide green desk with an enormous radio with many nobs and wires and lights. The man wore headphones over his frizzy hair. He was seated cross-legged, calmly grasping a chrome microphone in his left hand. From where Luz stood, it almost looked as though the man was arching a bow, sending arrows into the air. It was only upon hearing him that Luz realized it was Leon Jacob, a man whose voice she’d heard a hundred times but whose face she’d never seen.
The papers are calling it a hero snake. You hear me right, ladies and gentlemen. The snake is not a sandwich but a Hercules, our very own FDR in a reptile no less. And for those citizens of Denver who say “But where are our Baby Face Nelsons and John Dillingers and pretty Bonnies and poor Clydes?” Well we have ’em in the fallen of this story. An unlucky bank robber with an unremarkable name, stopped in the act by a vigilante rattlesnake. Someone come get your pet.
David knocked on the glass. Leon ignored him for several seconds until David fished from his briefcase a piece of paper, which he held to the glass and knocked once more. Leon looked, this time removing his headphones. He stood and opened the door.
“Don’t tease me,” he said. “Thought she was afraid to read it on the air.”
“She is, but remember Celia said we could always get someone else.” David waved to Luz. “Now we have someone else.”
Leon gazed at her. “Comrade?”
David said, “My new secretary, Luz.”
“Lightbringer,” said Leon. “How do you do?”
Luz shook his hand. He was shorter than she had expected, and when she glanced down Luz realized that Leon had only one leg, the other ending below the knee, his dark green trousers tied in a knot. Everyone knew Leon had been a radioman in the war. He was blasted with machine-gun fire emerging from the trenches. “Injustice is suffering,” Leon sometimes said on the radio, and Luz figured he knew a lot about that.
“When do you want to do it?” he asked David.
“Now, on the three o’clock. Encourage people to show up to the next protest, outside the capitol.”
Leon clicked his tongue. He removed his circular glasses from his face and blew on them before wiping the lenses on his woolen shirt. “All right,” he said. “That might work.” He returned to the glass room, letting Luz and David know he’d signal them when he was ready for her.
Luz took a seat beside David in the larger room on an old sofa with several red wine stains. The subterranean windows were small squares close to the ceiling, a slice of afternoon light falling into the basement. Lizette and Alfonso sometimes made fun of Leon, said he was an idealist, out of touch with reality, but a lot of people from a lot of different neighborhoods had started listening. To people like Leon, a new world was possible, a city where the poor weren’t evicted or made to line up for hours for cold soup, where women weren’t forced to sell their bodies for cow’s milk and men weren’t killed on factory floors. Maybe, in some ways, Luz agreed with people like Leon. Still, she was nervous to read the note on the radio, but David assured her they wouldn’t use her name or mention anything about her at all.
“Like borrowing,” he said. “We are borrowing your voice to help people.”
Luz nodded, gripping the statement from Celia in her hands, both the original and the version she had typed in English.
“Think of him like Diego,” said David.
Leon waved from inside the glass room, signaling for Luz. David patted the top of her hand before Luz entered the chilly space. Leon was perched beside the radio knobs, lights glistening over his glasses. He showed Luz how to flip on the mic, turn down the sound in her headphones, where she should speak and how loudly. Leon examined the document, turned it over from Spanish to English, reading through each side.
“After you finish reading the statement in English,” he said, “I’ll let listeners know where to march tomorrow, and when I’m done I’ll bring you back on to read the note again, but this time in Spanish. Can you do that?”