by Ted Thackrey
It was his insistence that I was still inside the building, with Gideon, that finally brought search teams, first to the penthouse and at last to the basement.
Accounts of Gideon’s death varied.
In the hours before the exact cause of the apparent wave of madness at the hotel had been pinned down, he and I were both assumed to be among its victims. But a guard appeared outside my door on the second morning of my stay in the hospital, and I learned that an examination of his body had led investigators from the district attorney’s office to consider filing murder charges against me.
But the guard was gone when I woke up the next day, after copies of a letter from Gideon arrived by mail at the offices of all the newspaper and television stations in town.
He damned them all and summoned them before the throne of Satan.
He offered amnesty, however, to those who printed, without editing, his valedictory to a world that he and his followers would be leaving “in a single outpouring of the elemental fire in which this earth was first created.”
The document, several pages in length, recounted the travail of Gideon’s early life as a préadolescent television evangelist, his subsequent discovery of the over lordship of Lucifer Almighty, the encounter while in federal prison with Dr. Immanuel Flax—yet another refugee from persecutions of the mindless—and the recognition of common cause that brought the lunatic researcher to place his chemical expertise at the disposal of Gideon and his flock.
No mention of the late Sergeant Pete Palermo.
Or the sergeant’s wife and daughter—which was just as well, because at the moment neither of them was in any condition to answer questions or offer explanations.
Maria Theresa’s physical condition, I discovered through an unsubtle blend of threats and bribery to which doctors are more susceptible than you might imagine, was excellent. But she had gone catatonic after arrival at the hospital, and psychological damage from the dose of acid she had ingested was still under evaluation.
Angela, however, was another kind of problem entirely.
Blood tests had shown no indication of LSD, but she had been given a massive intravenous dose of some tranquilizer which had left her in a kind of half-world state that was beginning to look more and more like long-term coma.
I bullied and flimflammed my way past the nurse-dragon at her door for long enough to see for myself.
The perfect skin was drawn tight across the cheekbones again, and I could see renewed signs of the anorexic gauntness I had noted on our first meeting. Doctors and nurses assured me that her respiration, heartbeat, and brain wave were all in good order, but that she could not possibly know I was in the room. As soon as I was officially released, however, I took a room at a motel nearby and spent as much of every night and day as they would permit camped beside her bed.
And on the eighth morning, her eyes opened.
They didn’t know me at first and they didn’t know the room and didn’t understand how she had come to be there. But they stayed open and began to focus on moving objects, and finally produced a smile that reached as far south as the corners of her mouth when I told her another of the elephant jokes she always seemed to like.
The one about what you get when you cross an elephant with the Easter Bunny.
Suleiman stopped in for a visit a couple of days later.
The deep color of his face and hands seemed to have faded; there was stubble on the top and sides of his head, and when I asked him about it he shrugged diffidently and said he had decided to rejoin the legit world.
I didn’t understand and asked him what that had to do with letting his skin turn white again, and he managed a lackluster sort of smile to accompany the explanation. He had decided to get out of the diamond business—and that meant the facade of Suleiman was no longer a commercial necessity.
He was going to be Shlomo VanDamm again. And try to take care of his sister.
Perdita Soames had seemed to accept the death of Gideon and her husband with quiet fortitude, and a psychologist brought in at Suleiman’s request had given her a clean bill of health. But she hadn’t needed any chemical encouragement to try to start a potentially catastrophic fire at the casino, and Suleiman had known her too long to imagine that she would recover so easily. He was taking her back to Amsterdam.
I wished him Godspeed.
And felt lonelier when he was gone.
Another visitor was a New York lawyer named Luigi Tartaglia.
“Call me Louie,” he said with an easy smile compounded from equal parts of Lawrenceville, Harvard Law, and Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily.
I called him Louis and asked his business.
“My employer, Mr. Francis Barcelli,” he said, the smile still in place, “is Mrs. Angela Palermo’s uncle. Her father’s half-brother. He has asked me to make an investigation of her circumstances. In his behalf.”
I recognized the name and understood why he was here.
“Tell your don,” I said in the kind of voice I would have used to check a pair of tens, “that his niece is in good physical condition, is improving daily, and has no plans either to call upon his resources or to discuss their familial relationship in public.”
If the answer surprised or annoyed him, he covered it well.
“That’s good to know,” he said evenly. “But all the same, Mr. Barcelli is anxious to hear if Mrs. Palermo needs anything. Money—anything at all.”
I thought for a moment of asking him where the hell his employer, Mr. Francis Barcelli, had been in the years when Angela was trying to survive and raise her daughter without a husband or money or friends, and I thought of telling him to take his briefcase and his polished manners and his hoodlum employer and shove them all where the sun never shines.
But I didn’t and after a while he went away, relying, he said, on my discretion to let him know if there was anything—anything at all—that Mr. Barcelli could do.
I thought for a minute or two of telling Angela about the offer.
But I didn’t do that, either.
My hands were bandaged too tightly to drive, so I had planned to charter a plane to fly her back to Sonoma County as soon as she was released from the hospital.
But she rented a car on her own initiative and drove us back along the coastal route through San Luis Obispo and Big Sur and the Monterey Peninsula while I gradually learned to relax in the passenger seat and enjoy the scenery in a way I’d never had a chance to do before.
We made planned overnight stops at various motels—including a truly memorable one in San Luis where I woke to find myself face-to-face with a stuffed buffalo—and booked separate rooms, but usually spent the night together because she was still subject to dreams that left her trembling and sweating and weeping with a terror that only human nearness and comforting could force back into the shadows.
Holding and consolation were all we had to offer each other, however.
We had not been lovers since our visit to the Temple of the Eternal Flame, and I wasn’t sure we ever would be again. She did not brood and she was not morose, but there was a quietness that had not been there before and a deadness of spirit and a slight but perceptible awkwardness when we made unexpected physical contact during the daylight hours.
And I hadn’t been able to tell her about my own nightmares.
The human mechanism is always in a delicate state of balance, and it is not easy to remember how precarious that equilibrium can be until it is upset, whether by the emotions or the wonders of modern chemistry.
Master Masuda’s basic training in ogawa techniques had saved me from the more permanent effects of the various mind-altering potions that had been poured into my system, but I found that I still had a far wider emotional swing than I wanted, and while the prolonged minor chord of musical pseudo-sound came less frequently, it was as often as not the overture to brief but impressive horror plays in which the walls would grow doors again and the doors would open to show me the shiny, slippery things that
lived behind them.
The worst were the ones with Gideon’s face, that slavered and made chittering noises when they tried to bite.
We got back to Glen Ellen in midsummer and made an immediate visit to the mental hospital just outside town. Terry had been transferred there two days earlier.
Angela went in alone to see her child, while I talked to a doctor who had gone over the girl’s records and examined her after she was admitted. He was guarded and wary of discussing the case with a nonmember of the family, but a call to Dr. Jeremiah Cates in Glen Ellen seemed to ease his mind somewhat, and he told me he was optimistic about the chances of full recovery.
“At the moment,” he admitted, “she’s still spending most of her time in a kind of catatonic daze. But the lucid periods are getting longer, and from what I could make of the police investigators’ reports coming out of South Bay City, she got off a lot luckier than most.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
The final count for the Temple of the Eternal Flame had been 68 deaths, 208 more or less permanent cases of acid-induced psychosis, against a dozen or so who seemed to have come through it all relatively undamaged.
Rough odds; hopeful prognosis.
But still just a little hard to remember later in the day, when I was trying to think of something to do or say that would ease the lost, hurting hopelessness that stared out at me from Angela’s eyes after she’d spent an hour trying to communicate with the waxen effigy that was her only child.
That was the night of the storm.
They are rare in the summers of the wine country, but the damage they can do to a ripening crop is sometimes measurable in the millions. You can wind up in the raisin business.
But the one that woke me from the first peaceful sleep I’d had in almost a month was both more and less than its preliminary sound effects seemed to promise.
A little rain fell; local television reporters said it varied from a trace in most locations to almost a tenth of an inch elsewhere.
All agreed, however, that the wind and thunder and lightning were something between impressive and terrifying, with the acrid reek of ozone thrown in for cumshaw.
The first nearby crack of thunder brought me to my feet, alert and startled, from the chair where I had been dozing, and I went into Angela’s room to see if it had awakened her, too. But she hadn’t been asleep. Dark, haunted circles beneath her eyes told me she had been sitting where I found her, bolt upright in the center of the bed, and that the shade-play she had been watching in her mind was still unfinished.
I don’t think she had noticed the lightning at all.
My entrance had broken the spell, however, and another explosion—so close that the flash and sound were virtually as one—brought her to her feet. And into my arms.
There were no words, and I will probably never be really sure exactly what had stood between us or what had taken it away. But it didn’t seem to matter then, and it still doesn’t, and the first kiss was warm and yielding and imperative and left no doubt, and a little later I carried her from the room where she had been fighting the demons of darkness and into my own bed and we were still there the next morning, after the storm was gone, and stayed there until the sun was high.
Vintage came a little later than usual that year, and I learned more about the wine-making business than I had ever expected to know and exercised the new-grown skin on my hands in the work of picking the grapes and watched with appreciation and wonder as my lady took charge of what looked like a small army of workers, selecting and pressing and judging and checking the must and monitoring the temperature in the ripening tanks and listening to the sound of the wine working, and racking and waiting and listening again.
The days were busy and the nights were warm, and toward the end there was a special sweetness because we knew our time together was growing short and the coming of autumn would be the end of it.
But before that time came, we had another visitor.
Not Luigi Tartaglia again, but a smile and manner that had been tooled to most of the same specifications, right down to the clean fingernails and bone-polished briefcase.
He said his name was Dick Barnett and he had come from the Washington office of the Drug Enforcement Administration to see Mrs. Angela Palermo. Right now.
I said she was busy.
He said he had other appointments.
I suggested he keep them.
He shifted his feet and settled his hips for what shaped up as a right cross that would have cost me at least a couple of front teeth if it had landed.
I stood still and measured him for a hook-kick that would leave him singing soprano for the next six months.
And then he laughed.
“You must be the one they call Preacher,” he said.
It broke the tension and gave us both space to back down, but there was still a little residue of stiffness as I admitted it was, indeed, the name most people used in referring to me, and almost went back to full alert again when he said in that case he didn’t need to talk to Mrs. Palermo after all, because his business was really with both of us and I could pass on the message if that was how I wanted it.
I said that would be fine.
“All right, then,” he said. “The message is informal, but it comes from the head of my section and it’s this: We’re satisfied that some of the money from the late Peter Palermo’s drug operations is still outstanding—missing and unaccounted for—but we are equally satisfied that Mrs. Palermo doesn’t have it and doesn’t know where it is.”
That was worth knowing, and I thanked him kindly for sharing the thought with me. But he wasn’t done.
“We are also,” he continued, “formally altering the status of the investigation from active to inactive, and I am directed to inform you personally but again informally that this action was taken at the request of one Mr. Francis Barcelli, sometime businessman and philanthropist, whose relations with the DEA are—for the moment, at least—absolutely beyond reproach.”
He paused to let it all sink in, and I was glad he did that, because it stretched the parameters of my world all out of shape and left me staring at him with a face that was as blank as the mind behind it.
And that gave him his second laugh of the day.
“Yeah,” he said, “you and me both. But that’s the message I was told to deliver, and I have delivered it. And now I think I will get back in my car and drive over to Sonoma and drink some wine and get busy forgetting that I came here today. Unless, of course, you happen to know where the Palermo loot is hidden and would like to let me in on it . . .?”
I stood still and let him go, and I guess he took that for a negative on his last question. But I felt a little guilty about it, then and later.
Because the hell of it was, I did know.
AMEN
THIRTY-FOUR
A week later there was a party in celebration of the successful harvest.
Angela poured some of the zinfandel blush she had bottled the year before and served a ton or so of Italo-Sicilian hors d’œuvres for what looked like the entire indigenous population of Glen Ellen and environs, while I did my best to keep out of the way and look friendly.
The last guests hung around until after midnight, and when they were finally gone I helped the hostess clear up the worst of the mess and then suggested that we have a glass of wine ourselves.
I think it surprised her a little.
Neither one of us had done any drinking at the party, and there had been a kind of unspoken agreement to avoid alcohol in any form ever since we returned from southern California. Nonetheless, she fell in with the plan readily enough and prepared to do violence to another of the ice-chilled bottles of zinfandel still waiting in a tub out on the patio.
But I said I had a different vintage in mind.
The camouflaged door to the wine cellar was fully stocked with food again, but she helped me unload it without protest and followed as I led the way down the old wooden stai
rs and offered no comment when I asked her to point out the wine that Pete Palermo had bottled just after he got home from Vietnam.
It was a red, dusty and unlabeled except for the year marked in white grease pencil.
I set one bottle squarely on the rough plank table in the center of the room, took care to avoid any unnecessary disturbance of the contents as I twisted a professional-looking curl of steel into the top, drew the cork with a single even-handed motion, and handed the result to her for critical examination.
An uncut diamond was attached to the cork by a black substance that looked like sealing wax.
Angela held it in her hand for a long, silent minute and then put it down on the table beside the bottle and looked at the tall rack where it had waited for a decade and a half. Her expression was unreadable, but I could guess at the kind of pictures that were running on fast forward through the part of the mind where human beings live and where defense mechanisms are seldom if ever effective.
Sergeant Pietro Palermo . . .
The Reverend Gideon Goode . . .
Maria Theresa Palermo . . .
The Temple of the Eternal Flame . . .
Death and loneliness and pain and fear and insanity and murder, all tied to the contents of a few old bottles of red wine.
“How long have you known?” she asked.
“Not too long,” I said. “I should have figured it out the first day I sorted through the bills in your wall safe; the one for fifty dollars’ worth of sealing wax was staring right up at me. But I missed it, and the thing had to percolate for weeks before it finally surfaced.”
“The sealing wax . . . could have been for the wine.”
“No chance. Even I knew better than that. And I was sure of it after talking to Suleiman, but by then I had other things to think about.”