by Anne Rice
“I’ll call Mom,” said Reuben, “but I won’t tell her where we are.”
Jim didn’t answer.
“Mom, listen to me,” Reuben said into the phone. “I’m with Jim and I’ll call you as soon as I can.” He cut the call off at once.
Jim sat there, holding the briefcase, as he had on the park bench, staring at the gilded fireplace screen as if there were a fire in the grate when there was not.
Reuben settled into a gold velvet armchair to his left.
“I can’t imagine what you’re feeling,” he said, “to have something like this happen to a friend. Mom said you told the police everything you know, that they said they can’t do a thing.”
Jim didn’t respond.
“Do you have any idea who’s responsible? Mom said something about a drug dealer that you knew.”
Jim didn’t answer.
“Look, I know you don’t want to tell me. You don’t want me rushing in and making a meal out of the culprit. I get that. I’m here as your brother. Will it help to talk about what happened to your friend?”
“He wasn’t a friend,” said Jim in that same dull expressionless voice. “I didn’t even like him.”
Reuben didn’t know what to say. Then, “Well, I figure that’s confusing at a time like this, too.”
No response.
“I want to call Dad and tell him I’m with you,” Reuben said and he went into the bedroom on the right. It was as lavish as the parlor with an elaborately dressed king-size bed and a curved couch beneath the window. Surely Jim would be comfortable in these digs if he could persuade him to stay.
As soon as Phil answered, Reuben brought him up to speed. This was bad. He would go get Jim’s things from the apartment and stay with him tonight, if only Jim would allow. “He’s in shock,” said Reuben. “It’s like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I’m not leaving him.”
“I talked to your mother. She’s in a rage that I’m not coming down there, and I’m giving her ridiculous excuses just like I’ve done all my life for not doing what she wants. Call me back later, no matter what.”
Reuben found Jim seated on the couch still, but he’d laid the briefcase beside him on the sofa.
When he asked about getting Jim’s things, Jim looked up again as if waking from a dream. “I don’t want you to go over there,” he said.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ve got a suitcase with me. I always overpack. I’ve got everything you need.” He went on talking, because he felt somehow this was better than not talking, reflecting on what this shock might have meant to Jim, this happening in his parish. And he said from his heart that he was so sorry, so very sorry about what happened to the young priest.
When the doorbell rang, it was room service with a tray of fruit and cheese—the usual fare in such suites—from the manager of the hotel. And yes, they’d bring him a pot of coffee, too, right away.
Reuben set the food down on the coffee table.
“Is it a long time since you’ve eaten?”
No response.
Finally, Reuben fell silent, as much from not knowing what to do as respect for the fact that this was what Jim might want.
When the coffee came, Jim did accept a cup of it and drank it though it was very hot.
Then slowly Jim’s eyes moved to Reuben and he stared at Reuben for a very long time, looking him over in a slow, casual way, almost the way children look people over, without self-consciousness or apology.
“You know,” said Reuben, “if you do have any idea who did this …” He let the words trail off.
“I know exactly who did it,” said Jim. His voice was low and a little stronger than before. “I was the intended victim. And by now they know they failed.”
The hair stood up on Reuben’s neck. The old pringling began, and that inevitable heat in his face.
“They called him Father Golding the entire time they were beating him and carving him up,” said Jim, his voice darker with the first hint of rage. “He told me that as they put him in the ambulance. He never told them they had the wrong man.”
Reuben waited. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Are you?” asked Jim, his voice stronger and more clear. “I’m glad.”
Reuben was stunned, but he concealed it as he concealed the heat crawling under his skin.
Jim opened the briefcase and slipped out his laptop, and opened it on his knees, hitting a few keys, and apparently watching it connect with the Wi-Fi network of the hotel.
He set it down on the coffee table and turned it so that Reuben could see the screen.
A bright-colored photo of a young blond-haired man with sunglasses covering his eyes, and a San Francisco Chronicle headline: NEW PATRON OF THE ARTS IN TOWN.
Reuben swallowed, forcing the prickling to stop, to wait. “This is the guy,” he said.
“Fulton Blankenship,” said Jim. He slipped a folded piece of paper out of his jacket and gave it to Reuben. “This is his address. You know the area, Alamo Square.” He turned the computer, hit a couple of keys, and then turned it so Reuben could see it again. Big Victorian house, spectacularly painted, very impressive, something of a landmark, one of the witches’ cap Victorians they use in films whenever they can.
“Yeah, I know that house,” said Reuben. “I know exactly where it is.”
“This is what went down,” said Jim. “He’s a dealer, and his product is what they call Super Bo on the street, a mixture of cough syrup laced with every kind of junk drugs imaginable, selling for nothing at first and now for more than just about any other drug the kids can get. Highly concentrated. A test tube of it doctors a sixteen-ounce bottle of soda, sending kids to the moon after a mouthful. Perfect rape drug in larger doses, too. They’re coming in from the suburbs to buy it on Leavenworth and he’s signing up dealers just as fast as he can. About fifteen percent of those who OD on it die from it, and another five percent end up in a coma. Not a single one of those has ever woken up.”
He paused but Reuben knew better than to say a word.
“About two months ago,” Jim went on, “I started working hard on these local distributers, trying to get anybody to cop to who he was and what he was doing. Kids were dying!” Jim stopped because his voice had broken, and it took him a second or two to go on. “I was up and down Leavenworth every night. Last week, one of the boys comes to me, Blankenship’s lover, he says, sixteen, a runaway, a hustler, a junkie, who’d been living with Blankenship in that Victorian house. I stashed the kid in a suite in the Hilton, oh, nothing as fancy as this, but I charged it to Mom, Mom pays for my extras, and he was on the twenty-third floor and I thought he was safe.”
Again, Jim stopped, clearly on the edge of tears. His lips were working overtime and then he began again.
“The kid’s name was Jeff. He was on e-pills and Super Bo but he wanted to get clean. And I was all over the police and the DEA trying to get them to work with him, get him some protection, take his statements, put a cop on the hotel room door. But he was too druggy, too unreliable for them. ‘Get him clean,’ they said, ‘and then we’ll have enough for a warrant. Right now the kid’s a mess.’ Well, the boss’s men got to him yesterday afternoon. He was stabbed some twenty-two times. I told him not to call anybody—.” Jim’s voice broke again. “I told him!”
He stopped, and put his curled fingers against his mouth for a second, and then started again.
“When I got the call from the hotel, I went out the door immediately. And that’s when they came for me, and they got the priest staying in my apartment, a know-nothing innocent guy from Minneapolis on a layover on his way to Hawaii. A young innocent guy who wanted to see my parish, my ministry! A priest I hardly knew.”
“I see,” said Reuben. The heat in his face was unbearable and the pringling had become a fact of life. But he held the change at bay as he waited, marveling quietly that sheer rage and anticipation could bring it on as was happening now. He was marveling too at what was happening, at what this had d
one to his brother. His brother’s face, his brother’s tears were breaking his heart.
“There’s more,” said Jim, gesturing with one finger. “I’ve met the son of a bitch. I’ve been to that house. Right after the kid came to me, Blankenship’s lackeys forced me into a car and brought me there to meet with the man himself. They took me to the fourth floor of that house. That’s where he lives, this, this little tinhorn Scarface, this latter-day Pablo Escobar, this little rat-faced Al Capone with his big dreams. He’s so paranoid he’s backed himself into a fourth-floor apartment up there with one entrance and only a handful of lackeys admitted to the house. He sits there pouring cognac for me and offering me Cuban cigars. He offers me a million-dollar donation for my church, a million dollars, he has it right there in a suitcase, and he says we can be partners, him and me, just tell him where Jeff is. He wants to talk to Jeff, make up with him, bring Jeff back, get Jeff clean.” He broke off again, eyes dancing back and forth as he looked around the room, obviously struggling for calm.
“I didn’t challenge the little monster. I sat there listening, breathing that revolting cigar smoke as he talks about Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad and how he’s the new Nucky Thompson, and San Francisco is becoming again the Barbary Coast. San Francisco’s much more beautiful than Atlantic City ever was, he says. He’s wearing wingtip shoes like Nucky Thompson. He has a closet full of beautiful colored shirts with white collars. He gives twenty-five cents out of every dollar to charity, he says, right off the top. We have a future together, he says, him and me. He’d finance a rehab clinic and shelter at the church and I can run it any way I like. This million dollars is only the beginning. His heart goes out to his customers, he says. Someday soon they’ll make a movie about us, him and me, and this Delancey Street–style shelter that I’m opening with his money. If he didn’t sell to the rabble, somebody else would, he says. I know that, don’t I? he asks me. He doesn’t want anybody to be hurt, least of all Jeff. Where was Jeff? He wants to get Jeff clean, send him to an Eastern school. Jeff’s got artistic talent, I might not know. I got up and left.”
“I hear you.”
“I walked out of there and I walked all the way back home. And the next morning they tell me about an anonymous million-dollar donation to St. Francis at Gubbio earmarked for the rehab and shelter. It’s in the damned bank!”
He shook his head. The tears were thick in his eyes, a glaze.
“I didn’t dare go see Jeff after that. I called him, every day, twice a day. Lie low. Do not call anybody. Do not go out. And he verified just what I thought. There aren’t five people allowed in that Victorian house. Paranoia trumps greed and the desire for personal service. Three hardbitten henchmen do everything, and then there’s Fulton—except for the lab work in the basement. The Super Bo concentrate is thrown together down there by a team that works by day without a master formula; it’s whatever GHB, oxycontin, scopolamine they’ve got coming in. It’s poison! And they’re producing staggering quantities, everything going out on dollies to ‘perfume’ trucks. That’s the cover. A perfume company. The street distributers mix it with soda pop and sell out the same day they’re supplied.”
“I’m getting the picture,” said Reuben.
“You realize what might happen?” Jim asked. “If I were to go home? You realize what these monsters might do to anybody they found in the way if they came looking for me?”
“I realize,” said Reuben.
“And I can’t get a cop car to sit outside the house!”
Reuben nodded. “I’m getting the whole picture, as I said.”
“I warned Mom. I told her to hire a private security guard. I don’t know whether she listened to me or not.”
“I’m getting it, all right.”
“They’re crazy, suicidal, Blankenship and this bunch. They’re as dangerous as rabid dogs.”
“So it seems,” said Reuben under his breath.
Once more Jim gestured for attention with his finger.
“I Google-mapped the place,” said Jim. “There’s no vehicle access, not in front and not in back. The perfume trucks have to stop in the street. There’s a tiny backyard.”
Reuben nodded. “I understand.”
“I’m glad you do,” said Jim with a bitter smile. “But how can you do it, how can you get him without bringing the whole world out to hunt for the Man Wolf again?”
“Easily,” said Reuben. “But you leave that to me.”
“I don’t see how—?”
“Leave it to me,” said Reuben again, a little more firmly, yet quietly. “You don’t have to think about any of it a moment longer. I have others to help me think about it. Go in there and take a shower. I’ll order us some dinner. By the time you get out the food will be here, and we’ll have figured it out to the last detail.”
Jim sat there quietly reflecting for a moment and then he nodded. His eyes were like glass with their tears, flashing in the light. He looked at Reuben and he smiled bitterly, his mouth quivering just for an instant, and then he rose and left the room.
Reuben went to the windows.
The rain was coming down a little heavier now, but the view of the park below and the great pale mass of Grace Cathedral opposite was impressive as always, though something about the neo-Gothic façade of the church deeply disturbed Reuben and caused a pain in his heart. It stirred memories in him unexpectedly, not memories of this church so much as so many others that were like it, churches in which he’d prayed all over the world. A deep sense of grief was taking hold of him. He swallowed it down as he’d swallowed the change that had so wanted to break loose.
When Felix answered the phone, Reuben discovered for a split second that he couldn’t talk. That pain deepened and then he heard his own voice, low, and unnatural to him, slowly unfolding the whole story to Felix, his eyes fixed firmly on the distant towers of the cathedral, so reminiscent of Reims, Noyon, Nantes.
“I was thinking I’d get you a couple of suites here,” said Reuben, “that is, if you’re willing …”
“You let me book them,” said Felix. “And of course we are willing. Don’t you realize this is Twelfth Night? This is the Carnival season now until Lent. It will be our Twelfth Night feast.”
“But secrecy, the question of secrecy.”
“Dear boy, there are ten of us,” said Felix. “And Phil and Laura have never tasted human flesh. There won’t be a morsel left.”
Reuben smiled in spite of himself, in spite of the pain in his heart, in spite of the great dark outline of the cathedral against the western sky. It was dusk now, and quite suddenly, unexpectedly, the decorative lights of the huge cathedral were switched on, gloriously illuminating the entire façade. It was startling, the ghost of the church now solid and wondrously alive with its twin towers and softly glowing rose window.
“Are you there?” asked Felix.
“Yes, I’m here,” said Reuben. “And that’s what I was thinking,” said Reuben. “Eat every last bite and lick the plates clean.”
Silence.
The room was dark. He ought to turn on a few lights, he thought. But he didn’t move. Distantly, he could hear a terrible sound, the sound of his brother Jim weeping.
The door of the bedroom was open.
There came the scent of innocence, the scent of innocent suffering.
He moved soundlessly to the door.
Jim, dressed in the soft white hotel terry-cloth robe, knelt beside the bed, his head bowed, his hands clasped in prayer, his shoulders shaking with his sobs.
Reuben moved away, and back to the window and the comforting sight of the beautifully illuminated cathedral.
28
IT WAS PLANNED in advance. They dressed in black sweatshirts and sweatpants, carrying the black ski masks in their pockets. Easy enough to slip out of the three vehicles and approach the Victorian house through the back alleys. Margon reminded the younger ones before it began: “You’re stronger in human form now than you ever were; climbing fences,
breaking down doors, you’ll find that easy even before the change.” Who knew what the getaway might entail?
Frank, the ever impressive Frank, with his movie star looks and voice, was chosen to knock on the front door and charm his way in. Hurling aside a confused and protesting lackey, he’d gone straight to open the back door, and the wolves were inside within seconds.
Phil had morphed as soon as the others began morphing, emerging a powerful brown Man Wolf as eager to kill as Laura. The place reeked of evil. The stench had soaked into the very beams and boards. The horrified lackeys raved, snarled like animals themselves, the hatred lusciously seductive and finally irresistible.
Margon gave Laura and Phil each a desperate protesting victim—to dispatch on their own. A third inhabitant, a sleeper on the second floor, leapt from his bed with knife in hand. He slashed over and over at Stuart, who embraced him before crushing his skull.
Merciful kills these, swift. But the feasting had been slow, scrumptious. The flesh had been so warm, so salty, so delicious, with a playful jockeying for the choicest “cuts.” Reuben’s body felt like an engine, his paws and temples throbbing, his tongue lapping, of its own accord it seemed, at gushing blood.
There were only four in all, and the first three were devoured almost completely, with bloody garments and shoes pushed into garbage sacks while the unsuspecting leader paced and ranted and sang along with his deafening music in the attic above.
Up the stairs they went to take the kingpin all together. “Man Wolves! And so many of you!” he screamed in frenzied delight.
He begged, pleaded, tried to buy his life. He raved about what he might do for this world if only they’d spare him. Out of a hole in the wall he produced bundles and bundles of cash. “Take it!” he cried. “And there’s more where that came from. Listen, I know you defend the innocent. I know who you are. I am innocent. You are looking at innocence! You are listening to innocence. We can work together, you and me! I’m no enemy of the innocent!” It was Phil who tore out his throat.
Reuben watched in silence as Phil and Laura fed on the remains. He felt a subtle pride in their perfect instincts, their easy power. A subtle peace descended on them.