by Mark Wheaton
“They killed Naomi,” Michael shot back. “I need to see Oscar.”
Helen gasped. Naomi, Michael’s assistant turned girlfriend Naomi? The one who the kids muted their enthusiasm about to avoid hurting her feelings?
“Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry,” Helen said, kneeling beside him. “She was killed?”
“She was driven off the road late last night,” Michael said, practically spitting mad. “Cops say it was a single-car accident. That there’s nothing on the traffic cameras, no marks on the car from another vehicle, no witnesses. But she went through a highway guardrail. You know how fast you’d have to be going to punch through that? Someone must’ve hit her. Otherwise, she would’ve had to pull three lanes over, turn, and almost race straight for it, like on purpose. It couldn’t have been an accident.”
Though she wasn’t in love with Michael anymore and hadn’t been for some time, Helen hated seeing him like this. He’d suffered an agonizing loss and, being a man who uncovered conspiracies for a living, couldn’t help but look for one here.
“What’s Oscar got to do with it?” she asked quietly.
“It’s his territory. Echo Park. He’ll know something.”
Helen straightened, perturbed. “If you think Oscar murdered your girlfriend, at least be man enough to knock on his door and tell him that yourself.”
When Michael looked up at her, his eyes betrayed pain rather than anger. “Not like he’d talk to me without your say-so. It’s why I came here first.”
Helen realized this was probably true. That Michael picked up on this, having only met Oscar once, was the surprise.
“I’ll call him,” she said. “But he’s not going to know anything about it. I promise you that.”
“Thank you,” Michael said, slumping back down.
“And I’ll call you a cab. Go to the bathroom and clean yourself up.”
Michael seemed ready to reply, but Helen had already turned to stalk back toward the showroom. She was praying Oscar wouldn’t make a liar out of her.
As he made the drive from St. Augustine’s to Bishop Osorio’s apartment in East LA, Luis tried to remember the last time he’d seen his father, but couldn’t. It wasn’t that the memory was particularly troubling and something he’d repressed. On the contrary, it was probably something so inconsequential, so meaningless, that he hadn’t known to mark it at the time. There’d been no final confrontation with thrown dishes and slamming doors. No ultimatums. No unforgivable last act.
The best Luis could piece it together, his father went to work one day, came home that night, went to work the next day, then didn’t come home. Rather than call the police or go looking for him, Luis’s mother had done nothing. He’d come back a couple of nights later, then vanished again. Same for a weekend. Then nothing. Sure, Luis had seen him a few times after that, a former tenant picking up something he’d left in the garage, but there was no interaction.
It hadn’t been some great dramatic withdrawal, a final fight followed by the old man storming out on his wife and children, never to be seen again. Nor was it the proverbial “going out of the house for cigarettes, never to return” mystery either.
Though his absence put the family’s financial burden squarely on his mother Sandra’s shoulders, it relieved other stresses. The old man had been a drunk and a depressive. Without this in her life, Sandra’s physical appearance changed dramatically. She lost weight, her smile came easier, she didn’t look as drawn or tired. She also became more outgoing, making friends with neighbors and other parents at Luis’s school. Before, these kinds of interactions would inevitably be marred when she’d have to introduce people to her husband. She was free of this now and happy.
That said, she never showed any interest in dating, despite Luis figuring she had her share of would-be suitors. Her independence had been hard-won, and she was going to hold on to it.
When she died, Luis was already well on his way to the priesthood and had accepted being an orphan. He never expected to see his father again and doubted Sebastian even knew he was back in Los Angeles, much less that he’d become a priest.
So as he sat outside Bishop Osorio’s modest Silver Lake duplex, having skipped midmorning Mass, he tried to imagine what had brought together the man who’d given him life and the one who’d given him his vocation. Maybe it was simple. His father was dying and looking to make amends. Luis tried to force himself to care but couldn’t. The old man had been a ghost to him for so long that his physical death felt like an afterthought.
Resigning himself to whatever lay inside, Luis climbed out of the car and went up to knock on Osorio’s front door.
“Welcome,” Father Belbenoit said, opening the door wide. “Please come in. The bishop is in his parlor.”
“My father?” Luis asked.
“Will be along shortly. The bishop thought he might sit with you first.”
Luis hadn’t anticipated any alone time with Bishop Osorio but simply nodded. Father Belbenoit led him down a narrow, musty hallway to a small first-floor room off the duplex’s staircase. The floor was covered with overlapping Persian rugs, upon which sat an assortment of old hardwood furniture. On the walls were enough crucifixes of various origins and designs to fill a museum, as well as framed photographs of Osorio through the years, including several at the Vatican alongside multiple pontiffs. There were also medallions, the one closest to Luis reading The American Cardinals Dinner, The Catholic University of America, April 19, 1996, Los Angeles, California, and featuring the engraved signatures of eight cardinals on the back, led by the former Los Angeles archbishop.
Even cardinals get souvenirs, Luis guessed.
In the midst of all this, shrunken onto the sofa in a long violet cassock and matching three-peaked biretta, with a breviary open on his lap, was the aged form of Bishop Emeritus Osorio. He raised the book and smiled at Luis. “I was told that when you went ‘undercover’ to those factory farms you took a Bible with you, not a breviary,” Osorio said. “Is it not a priest’s duty to pray the Divine Office no matter where he is? It then occurred to me you might not have one, so I wished for you to have mine.”
Luis took the proffered book and nodded. “As you say, I was undercover. A man with a Bible isn’t necessarily a priest. A man with a breviary most certainly is.”
To Luis’s surprise, his answer seemed to delight the bishop, as if he were a child who’d somehow managed to win a rook off a grandmaster in chess.
“That’s what Pastor Whillans liked about you so much,” Osorio said, smiling. “Even when your answer goes counter to doctrine, you voice it anyway. It’s your church now I suppose, so you can do what you wish. But you’ll pardon us dinosaurs if we aren’t a bit mystified even on our way out the door.”
“I meant no disrespect, Your Excellency,” Luis said. “Thank you for the gift.”
“You’re very welcome,” Osorio said.
But Luis realized something about the exchange bothered him. “Who told you I took a Bible?”
“Your driver I think,” Osorio replied. “Oscar de Icaza. He is a friend.”
Oscar de Icaza? A friend to the Bishop Emeritus?
It beggared belief that Luis’s childhood friend and onetime criminal compatriot turned minor gangster palled around with an aged bishop. But how else could he have known?
“But we’re here to speak of another of our mutual acquaintances, aren’t we?” Osorio said, indicating for Luis to sit in one of the chairs. “Sebastian Chavez has been a recipient of the church’s charity for many years. Unfortunately, in recent years I’ve become increasingly worried that my intervention on his behalf has only enabled him in his negative choices. Did you know that he is a master carpenter? And I mean that in the union’s terms, not as a mere adjective.”
It rang a distant bell, but Luis shook his head anyway.
“In a perfect world he should have no trouble finding work,” Osorio continued. “But his alcoholism prevents it. So instead he sells himself and his labor pie
cemeal in the parking lots of hardware stores and near job sites. When sober, he can drive any nail in three strikes. Tap-tap-tap.” Osorio rapped his knuckles on the sofa’s armrest for emphasis. “He sets the rhythm for the entire project, and any contractor thinks it his lucky day. But once he’s amassed a day or two’s pay in his pocket, Sebastian returns to the bottle, and the contractor wonders what happened. A cliché, no?”
Yes, Luis silently agreed. But one shared, he realized, by any number of my own congregants who bear the pain of years of manual labor throughout their bodies.
“He gets fired, sometimes he gets blacklisted, and when he hits rock bottom, he comes to Sacré Cœur,” Osorio said. “Or at least he did when I was there. The current parish pastor, Father Struxness, had quite enough of him and told Sebastian not to come back unless it was to attend AA meetings. So he washed up on my doorstep. Against my better judgment and out of a sense of loyalty to your family, I wrote him a check. I wouldn’t see him for a month, and then he’d return with the same story, often in the middle of the night. This cycle repeated. By the time you arrived in Los Angeles last year, however, I hadn’t seen him for months. I saw no reason to bring it up. But then a few weeks ago he returned out of the blue. This time he didn’t ask for money. He wanted to thank me. He’d attended the meetings, done the hard work, and was finally determined to turn his life around. Also he’d found God. It was only then that I told him of your presence in the diocese.”
It was a lot to take in. The first half firmly squared with Luis’s perception of his father. He had no idea what to make of the coda. Was this another trick? A way of eliciting sympathy from an old bishop that made it easier to extract a check?
“What does he want from me?” Luis asked.
“Ask him yourself,” Osorio said, indicating the doorway.
Luis turned. Father Belbenoit ushered the gaunt figure of a man who looked like a decades-older version of Sebastian Chavez into the room. He had the appearance of someone who’d recently lost a lot of weight, but in muscle mass as well as fat. His shirt collar was stretched and sunken, as if what once pushed it to its limits had deflated. His face was that of a man who’d spent far more years of his life outdoors than in, for better or ill. His hands were leathered and tough, more like work gloves than appendages. All of this was familiar.
What was different was the light in his eyes. Luis didn’t remember seeing that before. His eyes looked hopeful, even optimistic. They seemed to warm as they took him in.
“I am looking for those things that make a positive life, Father,” Sebastian said, answering Luis’s question. “But if you have nothing to say to me, I will understand absolutely.”
Luis stared at this man, his only blood relative, and nodded.
“Good,” Luis said, then exited the room.
As he climbed behind the wheel of his parish car a moment later, Luis snuck a glance back to Osorio’s front door. No one had followed. Unsure if he’d wanted anyone to, Luis keyed the ignition, reversed down the driveway, and returned to his parish.
IV
It was too beautiful a Sunday morning to give it away to banking, Gennady thought.
Yelena had let him sleep in, given his late night with Oris, and was downstairs playing with the baby. Their daughter amused herself with drawing after drawing of her latest obsession, princesses and unicorns. He had plenty of work to do but nothing that couldn’t wait a few hours.
“Nina? Did you hear the whales singing this morning?” he asked his daughter after coming downstairs. “They want you to come play with them.”
Nina stared at her daddy with wide eyes. “The whales sang to you?”
“They did. They said your name, mommy’s name, even Aleksey’s name. They’re waiting for us.”
They packed plenty of snacks, diapers, wipes, and blankets and made their way to the marina in Yelena’s hybrid SUV. Ten minutes later they were on the water headed west toward Catalina in their cabin cruiser, the Nina.
Gennady didn’t know if they’d see anything but didn’t care. Yelena and Nina loved the ocean as much as he did, and the bumpy ride always put Aleksey right to sleep. He hoped a nap meant he’d be awake should they see any whales, though he wasn’t sure a baby that young would even know what to make of them.
“If you see anything, what do you say?” Gennady called to Nina, who stood at the prow in a life jacket almost larger than she was.
“Whale ho!”
They’d only been out forty-five minutes when they came across three fin whales. They were quite large, easily sixty feet, and spouted a number of times before going back under to feed in the channel’s deep underwater canyons.
“You know how you can tell where a whale is about to surface?” Gennady explained. “You watch the water for signs of turquoise. Means something is coming up from underneath.”
Nina watched the waves with twice as much intensity. Gennady angled the Nina north. They were soon rewarded with the sighting of a humpback. The ridges and bumps on its fins differentiated it from its larger, smoother cousin.
“Whale ho!” Nina shouted, pointing to a ring of turquoise as the humpback surfaced again. It spouted, then arched its back and raised its tail out of the water.
Yelena took out snacks for Nina and breast-fed the newly awoken Aleksey as Gennady let the current decide the boat’s direction. Spinner dolphins cycled out of the water a few dozen yards away, delighting his daughter. He had decided to head back when three more whales appeared alongside them. They were much smaller than the fin whales and their bodies heavily barnacled.
“Barnacles mean gray whales,” he told Nina, shutting off the engine and allowing the boat to drift after them. “Probably two males and a female.”
They watched them for a few minutes longer, but the grays were quickly out of sight. Gennady turned the engine back on and headed to the marina.
There was no real cell signal on the water, another thing Gennady liked about a morning jog out onto the Pacific. But as they neared the harbor, he felt his two phones buzz and chime in unison.
He took the first from his pocket and saw a text from their next-door neighbor: You okay? Saw the police.
A shiver ran through his body as he listened to the accumulated voice mails while guiding the boat into the marina. He didn’t want to alarm his family, but he was practically shaking as he tied up at their berth.
“What’s going on?” Yelena asked, Aleksey having fallen asleep again on the way back.
Gennady played for her a voice mail left by the police.
“This is Officer Ron Lamott, LAPD, Pacific Division,” a male voice said, all business. “We had a report of a break-in to your residence at Grand Canal and Court E. We’re here now, and there are signs of forced entry.”
Yelena nodded, and they ran their valuables through a mental list. They didn’t have any art and Yelena didn’t wear much jewelry. Tech-wise, they had Gennady’s multiple laptops and iPads, the television, and so on, but there wasn’t much. They kept no cash at the house. They’d come from Russia with their entire lives packed into two suitcases, but their families hadn’t any antiques or heirlooms regardless.
Everything burned during the Siege, Gennady’s grandmother was fond of saying, having endured it as a girl. She wore the experience as a badge of honor, as did many Petersburgers.
“Anything broken in the house is insured anyway,” Gennady said as they buckled the kids into the SUV. “We should be fine.”
But he knew that wasn’t necessarily the case. While it was true that they had no more or less than any of their affluent neighbors—well, likely less—whoever hit their house could have targeted him for things that insurance wouldn’t cover, like information. Gennady wasn’t careless with his client records, but the thought worried him nonetheless.
“Is Mara home today?” Gennady asked, referring to Yelena’s partner in her catering group. “You may need to take the children over.”
Gennady waited for Yelena’s eyes to tell
him that the reality of this was sinking in, that her sense of security had been irreparably damaged. She knew of his parallel careers, naturally, but they never went into great detail about either. When instead of faltering she held up her phone and showed him that she’d already texted her, he was relieved.
They made the short drive home, parked, and were trudging to the house when they saw the gathering of neighbors and uniformed officers milling around on the sidewalk. The neighbor who’d texted Gennady, a deeply tanned former tech specialist named Terry, spotted Gennady and signaled the cops.
“The homeowner,” Gennady saw him say. His name in absentia.
“I’m Officer Lamott,” one of the officers said, introducing himself. “We entered the premises after receiving the call from your neighbor, Mr. Belknap. Judging from the security footage, we believe it might have been some sort of prank or even gang initiation.”
Officer Lamott and his partner, Officer Atterbury, led Gennady into the house as another neighbor Gennady barely knew, an older woman named Mrs. Pamatmat, ushered Yelena and his children to her house to wait.
“Do you know if you set your alarm when you left this morning?”
I did, Gennady thought.
“I doubt it,” Gennady said. “We were only going for a little while.”
Officer Lamott nodded in commiseration. “Well, the damage seems to have been superficial, however extensive.”
Gennady wandered around the downstairs, seeing that the home invaders had slashed all the pillows and seat cushions on all of the chairs and sofas. They slashed at the drapes and smashed all the glass in sight, except for the windows.
Which might’ve been heard outside.
When he walked into the kitchen, it was more of the same. The glass in the cabinet doors was shattered, as were dishes, vases, measuring cups, and drinking glasses. The knives had been removed from the knife block and were nowhere to be seen. The lower cabinet doors had all been kicked in. Yelena’s large mixer had been raised from the counter and thrown down onto the hardwood floor with such force that it had cracked right through. It appeared that someone had tried to pull the refrigerator out of its nook and dash it to the floor as well but hadn’t gotten very far.