“Father Bryce, that would be?”
Mr. Wells nodded.
“And Bryce has declined to do so?”
Mr. Wells shook his head. “No. Not directly, at least. There seems to be some question as to whether Father Bryce can be reached at all. Mr. Wiley has only been able to speak with his assistant, a retired priest living at the rectory, Father Cogling. It seems that Father Cogling has categorically refused to allow the deceased to be buried from St. Bernardine’s. First, he intimated that Mr. Anker might have committed suicide, but Wiley assured him that the coroner had firmly discounted that possibility. There’s no doubt that Mr. Anker was murdered. Then Father Cogling declared that Mr. Anker had led an openly sinful life and had appeared in public protests outside of various churches in the Twin Cities. Mr. Wiley naturally refused to be led into an argument on such matters and kept trying to contact Father Bryce. Wiley even went to the eleven o’clock service on Sunday, when Bryce usually conducts the Mass, but it had been taken over by another priest, and there was no explanation for Bryce’s absence. Mr. Wiley is certain that Cogling doesn’t have the authority to deny the deceased burial from St. Bernardine’s—he doesn’t even have the standing of assistant pastor—but he doesn’t wish to make unnecessary trouble. And since we’ve had to postpone the date of the funeral in any case, and since Mr. Wiley knew you would soon be here, he hoped you’d be able to straighten the matter out, seeing that you’re a priest yourself.”
“It sounds like you need a private investigator more than a priest,” Father Mabbley commented.
Mr. Wells responded with a mirthless laugh and a reproachful glance.
“I should like to have a chance to talk with Mr. Wiley before I take any initiatives myself. I thought he’d be meeting me here.”
“Unfortunately, he’s had to appear at a court hearing concerning the release of Mr. Anker’s corpse. It seems there was an anonymous phone call to the coroner’s office suggesting that Mr. Anker may have had AIDS. If that was the case, some other arrangement will have to be made for his interment.”
“And why is that?” Father Mabbley demanded.
“For one thing, our embalmer can’t be expected to put himself at extraordinary risk.”
“And who is your embalmer?”
Mr. Wells cast down his eyes and made no reply.
“Let me understand you better. If Mr. Anker’s corpse tests HIV-positive, you will not handle his funeral arrangements?”
“That is the policy at McCarron’s. Yes, Father.”
Father Mabbley could match the man’s prissy smile with one of his own, thinking ahead to the moment he would have the satisfaction of telling him what his policy would be with regard to McCarron’s. But he would not do that now, he would wait till the man had heard from the coroner as to Bing’s HIV status and then, when Mr. Wells had graciously agreed to admit Bing into his funeral parlor, Father Mabbley would be able to tell him to stuff it. Or, in this case, not to.
“Well,” said Father Mabbley, “it sounds like I have some telephoning to do. Do you suppose I could borrow your office?”
Mr. Wells ushered Father Mabbley not to an office but to a small alcove at the far end of the corridor, where there was a love seat, a telephone, and a small gilt-framed reproduction of a Raphael cherub.
His first phone call was to Reese Wiley’s law office, where Wiley’s secretary told him that Mr. Wiley would be on his way to McCarron’s within the hour and asked would he please wait for him there. Then, after getting the number from Information, he called St. Bernardine’s rectory and got an answering machine. “Hello,” said a voice he recognized as Father Bryce’s, “and thank you for calling. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number and a brief message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Meanwhile, why not get in touch with God—and say a prayer for me while you’re talking with Him. We all need each other’s prayers. God bless.”
He waited for the beep, and then, as per the machine’s suggestion, said a Hail Mary, adding, when he was done, “That’s for you, Father.” He knew he was being petty, but with an answering machine it’s hard to resist such impulses. One has the illusion, as when one throws darts at a newspaper photo, that one is zapping an inanimate object, not a real person.
He made himself say a string of Hail Marys, both as a penance and as a way of composing himself, and then he dialed Alexis Clareson’s number at the diocese Chancery. Even though it was supposed to be his direct line, there was someone running interference for Alexis, and then even a second gatekeeper. Alexis was now the vicar-general, so it was not to be wondered at that he should make himself ritually unavailable. At last he did pick up and purred into the receiver: “Mab? Is that you? Here, in Minneapolis?”
“C’est moi, Alex, yes, indeed. Just off the plane, all bleary-eyed and ill-tempered, so I should probably have waited to call.”
“But you wanted to use me. Right?”
“You’re a mind reader, Alex.”
“No, it’s the price I pay for temporal power. I am here to be used, cher ami. Even by my oldest and dearest friends. I remember so well: We shared the same tubes of Clearasil. Go ahead, use me.”
“I’ve three favors to ask. First, do you know a funeral home that doesn’t discriminate by HIV status? Second, could you find out who’s tending the store at St. Bernardine’s?”
“Father Bryce is the pastor there,” Alexis said.
“But I’m also told he can’t be reached, and the other priest who’s there with him—”
“That would be Wilfrid Cogling.”
“That’s the name. Cogling has refused to let a friend of mine be buried from the church. And as I’ve been appointed to be my friend’s executor…”
“I like to be asked a favor I can so easily grant. Wilfrid is an old toad and has no authority to make such decisions, and I would find a deep personal satisfaction in telling him where to get off. As to the matter of embalming someone who’s died of AIDS, one or two of the local funeral homes have made things difficult. Is it McCarron’s?”
“Yes. And my friend didn’t have AIDS and wasn’t HIV-positive.”
“But it’s become a point of honor not to give McCarron’s the job? Bravo, I quite agree. I would suggest Schinder’s Memorial Gardens. It’ll cost a bit more, but it’s a lot classier, if that matters.”
“My friend certainly would have wanted to exit in style.”
“What was the third favor?” Alexis asked.
“I need to pick your brain. Perhaps even your personnel files.”
“Concerning?”
“The pastor of St. Bernardine’s. Patrick Bryce.”
“Oh dear. What has he done?”
“It’s something you wouldn’t want me to discuss with you, Alex.”
“I hope it’s nothing serious, but I suppose it is. And I won’t ask any more. Hear No Evil is the motto here at the Chancery these days. It’s virtually carved on the lintel. I’ll take Bryce’s file home with me tonight, and you’re welcome to come by and look at it. Come to dinner tomorrow night, if you can combine business with pleasure. It will be a buffet with three or four strange casseroles and a few familiar faces. Familiar to me, anyhow, but I think you’ll recognize one or two of the faces. Not mine, perhaps. I’ve gone on gaining weight. What else is one to do in a wheelchair except eat?”
“No need to apologize, Alex. Some of the greatest men in the Church were Xtra-Large. John the Twenty-third. Alexander the Sixth.”
“The Borgia pope, yes, I know, whom even Raphael couldn’t make look anything but a pig. Will I see you?”
“I hope so.”
“And if you should come upon something that I really ought to know—shred it, will you?”
Father Mabbley laughed, and gave his word.
21
Silvanus had come to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that he was not in hell, and this for three reasons. Primus: The sun rose each morning and cast its light up
on a world that was not infernal in a subterranean sense. True, there were teeming hordes of people here, as one might expect to be the case in hell, but few were conspicuously in torment. Indeed, they lived amid unimaginable luxuries and pomp, not unlike the riches of Babylon, whose fall was foreseen by the apostle John, when he wrote: Alas, alas, that great city that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!
Secundus: Contrary to his first impression, there were no demons here but only men—sinful men, maybe, with great powers of sorcery, but all mortal men of flesh and blood, like the Bishop himself. For a while he had suspected that the illuminated figures that appeared upon the dark glass of Delilah’s Trinitron might be demons, but having pondered them for many hours, he now believed that though they were very often grotesque, indecent, and unnatural, they were not actually alive, but only simulacra, the work of cunning artificers, like the image of the Beast that John writes of, that was given breath and the power of speech, so that all men would worship it. The Trinitron (the very name a mockery of the Triune God) revealed not a single beast but a whole menagerie of unclean spirits: some lustful, like the voluptuous Astrud Gilberto or the preening incubus Marky Mark; some warlike, like Popeye the Sailor Man or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; some wooing evil like a bride, like the two Moors, Geraldo and Oprah; and still others, kindlier, nameless beings, who appeared in intervals as brief as flashes of lightning to promise relief from various forms of suffering—headaches, stomach upset, hemorrhoidal distress. All of these creatures were illusory, all of them. They seemed to live when one manipulated the Trinitron a certain way; with another motion they ceased to exist. Silvanus found it difficult, now that Delilah was dead and no longer a spur to his lust, to do anything but marvel at these shadowy allegories and try to decipher them. His hope was that if he studied the Trinitron closely, it would reveal to him the nature of this new world and, possibly, the means by which he might escape from it.
But then, in the middle of The Flintstones, unable to fathom its allegories, which seemed of a sudden inane and infantile, he became bewildered, disgusted, and despairing, as though all the sins of all the phantasmal figures swirling on the glass of the Trinitron had boiled up inside him. He darkened the Trinitron, and, to be doubly sure its simulacra would be stilled, he removed the small flexible pipe by which the Trinitron’s sorceries (and myriad others no less marvelous) were accomplished. Delilah had shown him where the pipe connected to other pipes hidden within the walls of her little house. “You got to plug in the cord, dummy!” she’d explained, whipping his bare thigh with the end of the cord, which was tipped with metal like a scourge, which, at first, he’d supposed it was.
Now she was dead, and that was Tertius, for hell like heaven is eternal. One cannot die again in hell and thereby escape its torments. And Delilah assuredly was dead. In the hot air of the little house, her body had begun to stink, and her body, once so very limp, had become rigid. A great quantity of blood had soaked into her bed linens and the mattress beneath, and now that blood had dried and darkened. He had killed her, but not by cutting off her right breast. That had been done after he had strangled her, in the hope, that by himself performing the act that had caused him such distress when first he’d seen it done by the Legate’s torturer, he might undo the sorcery that had transported him into this nightmarish otherworld, this neither earth nor hell. For it had been at that moment, witnessing the interrogation of the heretical Marquesia de Gaillac, that he had been translated into this other realm. It had seemed somehow congruent that he subject Delilah, who so much resembled the Marquesia, to the same chastisement. A futile experiment. So far from undoing the original enchantment, he had only been inflamed with the fires of a further lust, and in his drunkenness he had yielded to the temptress’s final, posthumous seduction and ravished her mutilated and bleeding corpse—an act that now, his passion spent, seemed inconceivably vile. What had he become? What had this woman’s sorceries made of him?
Silvanus was no stranger to the sins of the flesh. Often enough in his youth, and in maturity as well, he had yielded to his carnal nature. He was human, after all. A tonsure does not change the essence of a man. But never, never had he acted upon his desires as he had done under Delilah’s insatiable incitements. When he had sinned heretofore, it had been done in a manner suited to the act, hastily, in darkness, and when he had spent himself, he’d felt repugnance and remorse. With Delilah one act had followed on another, with a lust that was unremitting and that became, finally, its own punishment. She it had been who’d urged him to tighten his hands about her throat, such moments as their mouths were not united in an unholy kiss. Even now, remembering the moment of his supreme penetration, he was possessed by lust. The woman’s very corpse seduced him!
And yet this was not hell. Rather, it was the time foretold by the apostle John, the reign of the Antichrist. Once Silvanus had realized that, the world about him and his own place in it began to make sense. The indelible mark that had been placed upon his flesh, the tattoo that Delilah had praised and anointed with a comforting balm—what else could it be but the Mark of the Beast? Not everyone in this world bore such a mark as yet, but Delilah had assured him that the day was fast approaching when all young men and many women would be tattooed, and she had said he was, by virtue of his tattoo, a warrior in the vanguard of this New Age’s army.
Delilah had understood that she was living in the last days and even possessed her own copy of the Holy Scriptures (not in the Vulgate but translated into her own barbaric tongue) and a book of commentaries on the prophecies of Ezekiel, Daniel, and John, The Late Great Planet Earth, by Hal Lindsey. Silvanus had never been a skilled reader, and though he possessed the gift of tongues and could speak this alien language, he read it, as he read Latin, haltingly and with difficulty. Even so, he was able to learn much from Lindsey’s commentary. For instance, when Ezekiel wrote:
The flaming flame shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall be burned therein. And all flesh shall see that I the Lord have kindled it: it shall not be quenched.
the prophet was describing the arsenals of the Antichrist, which were stockpiled with weapons of inconceivable deadliness, thousands upon thousands of “thermonuclear missiles,” each one capable of leveling an entire city with all its inhabitants. Apparently, those who read this book (millions, by the book’s self-proclamation) believed that they would be exempt from the horrors of Armageddon. They could not see what was so very plain to Silvanus: that they were all minions of the Antichrist—and bore his mark upon their souls, as Silvanus bore it on his flesh. They could not smell the reek of his dominion in the air. They could not hear it in the obscene incantations that issued from the Trinitron. They were as blind to their own damnation as the heretics whom Silvanus had heard singing the blasphemous praises of their false god even as they were marched to the pyres of their execution.
Silvanus knew himself to be a sinner, so he was not utterly amazed to find himself translated into the realm of the Antichrist. All the prayers and litanies and Masses, the indulgences he’d accrued, the sacred relics and vestments and vessels—none of these had power to blot away the stain of his sins. And if he was not in hell, that was no matter, for surely he was accursed. But did that mean, as he’d first supposed, that all sins were permitted here and all virtue reckoned sin? Even Delilah had had some compunctions about the public display of lust, for when he had tried to engage her in sexual congress at the Limbo Bar and Grill on that first memorable night, she had restrained him. “Later, Damon, you demon!” she’d told him as he tried to enter her. “We can’t fuck on top of the fucking bar, for Christ’s sake!” So there were limits and decorums even here. A woman might display her breasts; she might blaspheme; she might enact sexual congress with an unseen incubus and call it “dancing.” But yet she would not publicly perform the act she solicited, for some little residue of shame and decency remained to her even in her deprav
ed condition.
Silvanus inferred from this that her killing, though she had urged him to it, would not be lightly regarded by whatever authorities interested themselves in such matters. In this the Trinitron concurred. One of its most recurrent themes was murder, usually of temptresses like Delilah, and the discovery and pursuit of their murderers by the police and other interested parties. Often, the murderer seemed to be regarded with approbation. He was shown to be virile, prosperous, well-spoken, and meriting respect, but for all that he was judged to be, at last, a guilty wretch, whom the police would shoot down with what Silvanus surmised to be a form of thermonuclear missile, for their weapons had the same wonderful and instantaneous efficacy. These scenes of murder and retribution seemed to be more accurate representations of the world that Silvanus had glimpsed beyond the confines of Delilah’s little house than many other things revealed by the Trinitron, but were they, even so, to be trusted? Was not the Trinitron the voice and mirror of the Antichrist? Could anything he witnessed by its agency be accepted at face value? The claims made for Total or Preparation H? For Pepsi-Cola and Miller Lite?
To these questions Silvanus had no answer.
Meanwhile, Delilah’s corpse was decaying in the summer heat.
22
The angels were getting on Father Mabbley’s nerves. They were nice enough angels in their way—angels, one might say, of the upper middle class. He could identify a few. Two had to be Botticellis, another an El Greco. The one in the corner, with purplish wings, might be a Titian, but he wasn’t sure. They were none of them simpering or insipid or otherwise tawdry, but having them grouped together in a single room tended to make the very idea of the angelic a little suspect, as though they were part of some con game that would have simple souls believe that the afterlife was the ultimate children’s playground. And that was unfortunate, if one wished to believe in angels, as Father Mabbley did. Admittedly, the angels he believed in were of a fiercer sort, like Rilke’s angels, demonic and terrible, in the Italian sense of terribilità. One admired them, but feared them, equally. Lucifer, after all, was an angel.
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 18