King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

He paused, ruminating.

  “Pissed me some,” he said, “and that’s why I wasn’t in a hurry to come out here when you called. Which don’t excuse a damn thing. Or give me any clue about what the Sam Hill to do now.”

  The doctor turned to give me another eyeballing. Quicker this time, but just as wary.

  “Could get her back to the hospital,” he said. “They could hook her up to monitors and get her electrolytes balanced again and maybe get another headshrinker to talk to her, but damn if I think it would be any more help than the last time.”

  Neither did I.

  “The alternative?”

  “My prodding and poking didn’t wake her,” he said. “So I figure she’s good for quite a few more hours what with the exhaustion and everything else. When she wakes, it would be better if it was in familiar surroundings.”

  “And not alone in the house.”

  “And not alone, for sure. That’s a very sick woman in there, and she needs someone with her to take care. You say she’s got a brother? First I’d heard of that, so I’d judge they weren’t real close. Still, if he was concerned enough to send you, then maybe he’d be the one.”

  So I told him about Dom.

  “Well, then,” he said when I was through, “that leaves damn little choice.”

  “Neighbors?”

  He shook his head. “Angela had a few women friends hereabouts,” he said. “But what with one thing and another, I don’t see any of them coming over here for twenty-four-hour nursing duty—which is what she needs.”

  “Professionals?”

  Another head-shake. “Not this far out. There’d have to be three nurses—L.V.N.’s at least—and there’s always a shortage. No.”

  “Well, then?”

  The old eyes didn’t change.

  “If you’re such an all-fired good friend of the brother as you claim,” he said, “and don’t have to be somewhere in a hurry . . . ”

  Of course. What else? Not as if I hadn’t seen it coming. But I’d really hoped he might have something better to offer.

  “What if I turn out to be another Gideon Goode?” I said.

  The thin old shoulders squared and took on a much younger set. “In that case,” he said with a sincerity that could not be doubted, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the local idiots went ahead and cleaned your clock. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I was to help ’em.”

  The doctor left a list of useful foodstuffs—thick soups, eggnog, buttered toast, cream cheese—plus a box of tranquilizers and his phone number.

  “Get as much of the rich stuff down her as you can,” he said. “Use the tranquilizers when she has more of the hallucinations, and she will at first; expect it and don’t be too alarmed. And call me if things really get out of hand.”

  I took the list and the box and let him out the front door. “Still seems like a lot of trust for a stranger,” I said.

  He grinned sourly. “Must be the black suit,” he said.

  I told him what he could do with the suit and he said it probably wouldn’t fit, what with all the other items he’d been asked to put there over the years, but seemed pleased enough all the same, and I closed the door on what might have been a friendly wave as he turned out of the driveway.

  All right, then . . .

  Angela Palermo was sleeping again when I peeked in on her, so it seemed to be a good time to take full inventory—particularly in light of something the doctor had said.

  The shrine was in the first room I tried, in what I took to be a newer wing of the house, and I stood looking at it for a long time.

  The doctor’s words, and what little I knew or had heard of Gideon Goode, had prepared me for something unusual. But not for the contents of that room.

  It had been gutted.

  Not just bereft of the usual bedroom furniture, carpeting, and wall ornamentation, but stripped—no light switches, plugs, or ceiling bracket; the spot where a window must surely have given light and ventilation carefully closed up and plastered—and painted a flat nonreflecting black that left the eye no choice but to focus on the snowy whiteness of the little altar arranged against the far wall.

  At first glance, it reminded me a little of a wayside shrine or a somewhat undersize side altar in a chapel with megalomaniacal dreams. There was a thin silver ankh—the ancient Egyptian symbol of Aten, the sun god, adopted in a later millennium as the love totem of pagan sun worshipers in the United States.

  But there the familiarity ended.

  And the sanity.

  The altar cloth was black, like the surrounding room, and the ankh cross stood at the apex of a pyramid that rose from a wide flame-blackened bowl.

  Fire has always been a part of the Judeo-Christian worship service. The lighting of candles symbolizes the beginning of worship in many faiths; their extinguishing, its end. But the thing before me was from an older tradition, one I’d read about but never expected to encounter in the real world. Even in California.

  The fire bowl was not empty.

  Close inspection showed that it had been cleverly and unobtrusively piped for gas, and I saw what appeared to be a ceramic cover for the chamber in a niche at the base of the altar. It was also fitted with small ringbolts set in the sides, with chains of proper length to bind a sacrificial animal in a tight crisscross pattern. I noted, not quite irrelevantly, that it hadn’t been cleaned in a while; there were still a few scraps—bone ends and unidentifiable bits of wire—in the very bottom.

  Baal and Moloch and Dagon had reigned from altars like that one.

  Small animals had been brought there as offering, sacrificed to the flames in propitiation of a deity I didn’t know and didn’t want to. Burned to a fine and obscene ash of piety, as incense to worshipers and testimony to their zeal. Burned alive.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  If the knowing charlatan seeks only material wealth, he must even so take care that his followers survive. And prosper.

  A tithe of nothing is still nothing.

  EIGHT

  Small town grapevines work fast.

  Angela’s marathon napping left me free to make a quick trip to the little country liquor and antique store, and the atmosphere there was a whole climatic zone warmer than on my first visit. The woman behind the counter who hadn’t recognized Angela’s name that time had suffered a miraculous recovery of memory and offered to have her son deliver whatever groceries I needed in the future.

  “Just phone,” she said.

  I thanked her and hefted the milk, eggs, and butter out to my rented Subaru. This time the car was as I’d left it, no unfamiliar faces in the driver’s seat or even waiting outside.

  Just as well. It was getting to be a longish day, and I didn’t really feel like a return bout with Lafcadeo Tailliafero (pronounced “Tolliver”) or any of his friends.

  But I still couldn’t help wondering what the doctor had said.

  And to whom.

  Angela was awake again when I got back, but she hadn’t stirred from the bed and I decided the doctor must have given her one of the tranquilizers.

  Or maybe it was something else.

  Human beings are a peculiar combination of strength and weakness, capable of absorbing the most horrendous physical and emotional punishment when directly challenged, but fragile to the touch a moment after the pressure is removed.

  The pseudo-aggressive wino who had met me at the door of her home had been coping with problems she could hardly understand, much less solve. Just getting up each day must have been a major undertaking.

  But now the world had changed. I was someone to trust. Her brother had said so, and the fact that she hadn’t actually heard the words from Dom himself—or that I had arrived wearing a uniform she had come to hate and fear—counted less than the need to shed the load, if only for a little while. She was inert, dependent, and biddable.

  Which was an improvement. But not as much as she thought. Ask anyone who’s met me across a poker table.
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  I am just not that trustworthy.

  She swallowed the over-sugared eggnog I made and munched the heavily buttered toast. But balked at the soup.

  “Please,” she said.

  Angela had used part of the time I was out of the house to shower and change clothes. She was sitting up in bed now, wearing a shapeless flannel nightgown that buttoned to the throat and smiling prettily in an effort to fend off the steaming bowl of clam chowder I had uncanned and heated.

  But the smile did not go as far north as the frightened eyes.

  And the wa was still frozen with terror.

  “You need the calories,” I argued.

  “I’m fine.”

  “The doctor—”

  “—said to feed me. Not stuff me.”

  “He said treat you like the anorexia case you resemble.”

  “And I bet you counted every single rib when I opened the door. Right?”

  The allusion surprised me. I hadn’t expected her to have any memory at all of my arrival. Or of the costume in which she had been receiving visitors. But it was probably a good sign.

  “The ribs,” I nodded. “And the appendix scar and even the old football injury.”

  That finally got a full-scale reaction.

  “I don’t have an appendix scar!”

  “Well . . . stretch marks, then.”

  “I don’t have stretch marks, God damn you!”

  She was right about that. Even the primary effects of wine poisoning and malnutrition had not erased the fine-drawn perfection of the body I had carried in from the doorstep. Difficult to believe she had a teenage daughter. Far more important, however, was her reaction to my clumsy needling. Rage beats apathy all hollow.

  I grinned at her.

  And got what might have been the ghost of a smile in return.

  “Anyway,” she said after a moment, “I’m not going to eat that soup. What is it—cream of elephant?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I can still smell the peanuts on its breath.”

  It was a lousy joke. And contrived. But the laugh it got from me was in no way fraudulent.

  Recovery had set in.

  I made myself at home in the bedroom across the hall from hers. Got up several times during the night to see that she was all right.

  And at 4:00 a.m. found her bed empty.

  I went back into my own room and struggled into trousers and shoes, anticipating another Battle of the Bottle. But she was warming the clam chowder she had rejected earlier, and offered me half of the result.

  “Thought you said it looked like cream of elephant,” I teased.

  “I was mistaken.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “No footprints in the cheesecake.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “Could have been walking on tiptoe,” I said.

  “Hadn’t thought of that . . . ”

  Her eyes smiled with the rest of her face this time, and then turned shy, skittering away from me to concentrate on the warming process. I took the kettle off the back burner of the stove and filled it without comment.

  “Coffee beans in the freezer,” she said when I had it back on the stove with a fire under it. “If you want instant I think there is some in the cupboard, but the tap water’s from our own well and it makes a wonderful brew if you grind the beans just before . . . ”

  She trailed off, looking away from me again, and I let her do it, hoping she would work things out for herself while I got the beans and put them through the newfangled gears of the old-fashioned mill sitting on the far side of the stove.

  No coffee pot in sight, however, and I stood still trying to look properly nonplussed until she came to life again and showed me where the Melitta drip maker was stored. I thanked her and was about to pour the hot, but not boiling, water over the grounds when she took the kettle from my hand and nudged me gently in the direction of the kitchen table.

  “Set,” she said in a fair approximation of the age-old country formula and accent. “Make a long arm, and I’ll fetch the vittles.”

  “Thankee kinely, ma’am,” I said. And did as I was bid.

  The coffee she set before me a moment or two later was as advertised, rich and savory—with an extra touch I hadn’t expected. A childhood that included long visits to the Mississippi Delta country of the South had given me a taste for chicory not shared by many in this new age of wonders.

  Angela saw the little smile of recognition I permitted myself. And returned it, albeit still hesitantly.

  “The beans are specially treated during roasting,” she said. “Pete—that was my—oh! Yes. You know who Pete was . . . ”

  “Dom told me.”

  “Yes . . . well. Pete had relatives in New Orleans, and I guess that’s where he got to liking the taste. And then passed it on to me.”

  I nodded. “With me,” I said, “it was one of the people my parents hired to take care of me before they were killed. She liked the stuff and I used to sneak sips out of her cup, mostly because she kept saying it was going to stunt my growth and make me crazy.”

  “Well, it didn’t. Did it?”

  “You should have seen the rest of my family—all worked for the circus, doubling for the stilt man.”

  Her turn to nod. “I was thinking of the other part . . . ”

  My turn to grin. But the strangeness was still there between us, and it continued through the next few silent minutes while I sipped the excellent coffee and she spooned the reheated soup.

  Her face was bare, but not at all naked in the harsh ceiling light of the room, and I noticed, not for the first time, that its coloring even in the wake of what must have been a wine binge of at least a week’s duration was still high enough to need little or no makeup.

  Its most prominent ornament was the high-bridged nose, a feature I fancy to the point of wondering sometimes whether the interest is entirely healthy, and I found myself wondering if the daughter had inherited it.

  Which brought me back to the business at hand.

  “Dom said your daughter’s name is Maria Theresa,” I said.

  It was an attempt at shock therapy. The girl’s absence and the fact that neither the doctor nor anyone in Glen Ellen had mentioned her told me most of what I needed to know. But I wanted to hear it from Angela. And the tactic was almost too successful.

  The spoon that had been dipping chowder paused halfway to the bowl and hung trembling for a long moment before dropping unnoticed to the floor. The mouth opened and closed silently once—and then widened to a sound that was not words but something more basic, the elemental howl of fear and loss and desolation that reverberates back through the countless millennia to the dim origins of homo erectus. Aboriginal widows know its tones, and Medea gave it voice as she fled to Athens.

  I took her hand and held it tightly, a closeness and comfort that allowed her to wail bereavement to its end.

  It took a long time.

  But when it was done the emotions had run their course—at least for the moment—and some basic kind of contact had been established without which communication must necessarily have remained stilted and incomplete. We had shared a time of grief. Now she was ready to talk about it.

  “He came to the door one Monday morning,” she said, “wearing a worn-out suit of preacher black and telling me he’d been Pete’s friend in prison. He was pleasant and respectful and kind of lost, and I let him in because . . . oh, I don’t know . . . maybe because I wanted to hear about how it had been for Pete, locked up all those years, and maybe because I always wondered if it was somehow my fault that my husband did the things that ate up the best part of his life. Maybe I was looking for someone to make me pay for my sins and Gideon looked like the right man. Anyway, if I was, you’d have to say I picked the right person for the job.

  “We came in here, to the kitchen, and I made him some coffee—that same chicory kind you seem to like—and he was very quiet and respectful and told me he’d been a minister when
he was a little boy and had lost his way for a while when he grew up but found it again there in prison and had begun his ministry again among the other prisoners. Including Pete.

  “He said my husband, who was raised Catholic like me and who I knew for a fact hadn’t been inside a church except at Christmas or maybe for a wedding since the day he wore his confirmation suit, had been one of his first converts. A charter member of the Temple of the Eternal Flame.

  “Well, I’d never heard of that and I said so, but it just made him smile and he said of course I hadn’t because he was its founder and he’d only just been released from prison. But all that would change now.

  “And then he reached over and put his hand on me . . . on my breast . . . and just held it there, smiling at me. I jumped away and told him to stop it, but he put his hand back there and kept smiling and then he began to pray, still looking into my eyes and—I don’t know—it was like all of a sudden my mind was some kind of little animal, running around inside my head and looking for ways out and not finding them, and the words went on and on and both his hands were on me and then he was unbuttoning my dress . . . ”

  She stopped talking for a moment, her eyes wide and faraway, as though waiting for someone to explain what had happened.

  I could have told her. It’s a form of rape—“seduction” is too bland a word—that has been common to witch doctors and shamans throughout the whole sorry history of mankind’s scrutiny of the inscrutable.

  But explanations don’t help, and she probably wouldn’t have believed me. And that wasn’t what she needed right then, anyway. We sat together in the growing light of morning. Waiting for the sun to drive away the predators that lurk in shadow. Waiting to see the shape of the world born again.

  Later, I heard more of it. A bare outline. No fill-in details needed. Gideon was a kind of sexual athlete, crude and forceful; she had fought him after the first time, her mind now fully awake to the situation and its menace, but he had been patient and determined and by the time sixteen-year-old Maria Theresa Palermo returned from school, the thing was done.

  The girl had been startled by the new member of the household, perhaps a little resentful at first. But that had disappeared as Gideon led them both into the tortured and torturing labyrinth he called the “new revelation of heaven and hell.”