by Mark Wheaton
Helen didn’t lower the gun but did turn to Oscar after a few more seconds. He held her gaze, then reached out his hand to take the gun. She wouldn’t loosen her grip at first, but he kept her looking at him, and she finally let go. He placed the gun in a drawer in the nightstand, then wrapped his arms around her.
“He’s gone,” Oscar said. “We made a deal. He’s gone.”
Helen stiffened, turning to him with eyes afire. “You made a deal with him? I thought you’d killed him. But instead you’ve invited him into our lives? What the hell have you done?”
She pushed Oscar away and climbed out of the bed, making her way to the bathroom.
“Helen!” Oscar shouted, hurrying after her.
She closed and locked the bathroom door behind her. Oscar knocked but heard nothing except more tears. He considered knocking the door down but knew how little that would accomplish.
“Pancakes!” one of the kids, Marlo this time, called from the living room.
“One second!” Oscar bellowed before turning back to the door. “Helen. We have to talk about this.”
But the soft crying had given way to real sobs. Oscar listened for a moment longer, then headed back to the kitchen.
Michael woke up the next morning to a number of waiting texts, voice- and e-mails. He sifted through them until he found the only one that mattered, a reply to his photo of the page from Archipenko’s files.
It read simply, Oh good. You’re up.
As he was trying to figure out what this meant, he heard a sound from the kitchen. He swiveled around on the sofa to see a woman in either her late forties or early fifties trying to work his coffee maker.
“Um, hi?” Michael said.
“Ah, I have to add water,” the woman said. “Couldn’t read what was right in front of me.”
Michael got his feet and realized how unsteady he was. He caught himself on the sofa’s armrest.
“Careful there.”
Michael realized who she must be. “Where’s Jeremiah?” he asked.
“Reassigned,” the woman said, turning to extend her hand. “I’m Special Agent Joyce Lampman.”
“Can I see some identification?” Michael asked.
Lampman indicated the kitchen table. Her badge, a business card, and a letter from the Bureau were laid out on it. He skimmed the letter, from someone he’d liaised with at the FBI’s Los Angeles bureau at some time or another, which told him that Joyce was a solid citizen.
As he contemplated whether it was a forgery, Michael heard quiet footsteps coming up behind him. He turned as a man who looked as if he’d stepped out of the cage at an MMA match came up behind him. Even the fellow’s chin looked like something he could beat a man to death with.
“We didn’t have time to take Doug for a walk this morning, so he’s full of nervous energy,” Lampman explained without menace. “Besides, you seem to have a bit of a target painted on your back these days. Doesn’t hurt to bring backup.”
“You always break into people’s houses?”
“When they don’t answer the door or their phone for ten minutes when we come calling. Now, if we’re wasting our time here, let us know, and we’ll leave. If not, maybe you can tell us what’s on your mind.”
“I sent the FBI that note because I was hoping you’d be useful to me,” Michael said. “I’ve come across something major. Only, my own office doesn’t believe it and got shut down by the government. I turned to you because I was hoping you might have a work-around.”
Lampman considered this for a moment, then started the coffee machine. It ground the beans, then poured her a perfect eight-ounce cup.
“Nice toy,” she said.
“Bought it for my ex-wife, but she never used it, so I brought it here,” Michael said. “Who has Sittenfeld?”
“CIA,” Lampman said, then took a sip of the coffee. “He’s not only outside of our grasp, he’s outside our jurisdiction.”
“They took him out of the country?” Michael asked, incredulous.
“They did, also to keep him out of harm’s way should his old partners surface looking to silence him. We’ve been onto him for a lot longer than your late girlfriend. Only, we knew enough to stay off his radar. I’m sorry for your loss by the way.”
“Why CIA?” Michael asked.
“Well, it turns out that our Mr. Sittenfeld and his bank didn’t just launder money coming into the country, he also laundered it going out.”
“What do you mean?”
“When CIA needed to, say, send a few million dollars of black budget appropriations money in ‘logistical support’ to rebels in Syria or an opposition candidate’s dirty tricks campaign in Ecuador, they couldn’t write a check for what some might construe as an act of war. So they used Sittenfeld to move money out of the country. Still want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes?”
IX
Luis pointed to an image of the solar system on the chalkboard. “You’ve probably all heard that it wasn’t until 1992 that Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church admitted that the earth revolved around the sun, but that’s not entirely true. It took that long to say that it was wrong about condemning Galileo for saying so.”
There were a couple of smirks from Luis’s students. Luis shrugged.
“The church is not infallible,” Luis said. “Not to quote the loyal opposition, but the Dalai Lama XIV suggests that if scientific advances proved elements of Buddhism wrong, it’d be Buddhism they’d have to change, not science. But what’s important for you to know is that the church did at least consider the theory of a heliocentric galaxy when it was first proposed by Galileo. One of my favorite parables relates to this. Galileo was friends with a cardinal of the church, Robert Bellarmine, who was a professor of theology at the Jesuits’ Roman College. Galileo was a very outspoken individual and told anyone who would listen that his telescopes and astronomical observations proved that the earth was in motion around the sun. Pope Paul V told Bellarmine to warn Galileo to stop preaching apostasy. Emphasis on preaching. He could believe anything he wanted. He simply couldn’t try to convince others. Did Galileo listen? No. He kept right at it, until he was finally arrested and brought before the Inquisition.”
The classroom smelled blood. Now he had their attention.
“Galileo brought with him his telescope and charts. He pointed the lens to the stars and said that if they only looked, they would see. The stars remained fixed in position. It was the earth that moved. But the cardinals refused. It was easier to put their heads in the sand. But then Robert Bellarmine, well into his seventies, rose to his feet and walked to the telescope.”
Luis paused. He tried to remember when he last had the whole class this rapt.
“Bellarmine closed one eye and looked through the lens. He stared for a long moment, then finally pulled away and shook his head. He hadn’t seen what Galileo said he’d see. Galileo was later forced to submit to house arrest, and his works were banned. The cardinals breathed a sigh of relief. But Bellarmine wasn’t being willful. He’d grown blind in his old age, too blind to see.”
Luis turned back to the chalkboard and tapped the sun.
“Sometimes people look away and reveal themselves as so lacking in their own faith that they fear something on the other end of a telescope will shatter it,” Luis said. “But sometimes we look right at it but are too blind to see. Which is worse?”
Fearing a trick, the students didn’t have an immediate answer but seemed suitably intrigued to think about it for the rest of the day. Luis had been pondering it since the moment he’d dropped off Michael the night before. The bell rang, and Luis dismissed the class, happy to have an off period.
The answer should be simple. The priests who chose not to look did so of their own free will. That Bellarmine was too blind was God’s doing. But when Luis thought of it in terms of his brother, the young would-be priest who rose to look, and how it cost him his life, he wondered if it was so simple.
Pastor Whillans had told
him the story, this after saying all he needed to know of man could be found in Joyce’s Ulysses, and told Luis there wasn’t an easy answer. At the time Luis hadn’t believed him. Now he was beginning to.
What obsessed him the most about his brother’s e-mails to Charles Sittenfeld was the maturity of the voice. Nicolas came off as a much older man, a sign of how much his involvement with the church had matured him. But Nicolas hadn’t even had a bank account, to Luis’s knowledge, much less any reason to contact Sittenfeld. The only thing Luis could think of was that it had something to do with Sacré Coeur’s finances, but even that didn’t make sense.
But from what Luis could glean about Sittenfeld from Michael and the files, the imprisoned banker had been well on his way into upper management at the time of the correspondence. He was already too high up in the corporate structure to be handling some minor account issue for the church.
He had to put it to Osorio.
By the time he’d finished the evening Mass and conferenced with the other priests, it was dark. Luis had called Father Belbenoit to say he was coming and was told that Osorio had been in poor health that day.
“But your visit may cheer him regardless,” the priest had said.
Luis would’ve gone even if Osorio was on his deathbed.
As the other priests filed to the rectory, Luis retrieved the keys to the ’84 Caprice and headed east of downtown. As he drove, memories of his brother flooded back to him. At first they were the familiar ones. The two of them at play in their small backyard. The first time they’d been allowed to walk to school together without their mother.
A surprising one also returned to him. It was of when Nicolas first invited him to pray. Nicolas had become a choirboy at age eight and was newly absorbed by his position. Being only six at the time, Luis had readily accepted the invitation.
“Now close your eyes and listen for God,” Nicolas had said.
“I thought he was supposed to listen for me,” Luis had replied.
“You don’t ask for things. You can’t make God do stuff. You put your faith in him and ask for his guidance in what is troubling you.”
“Why can’t I ask him for things?” Luis had asked. “He’s God. He makes things happen.”
“The Bible tells us not to put Christ to the test,” Nicolas had chided. “That is not why we are here on earth.”
Luis recalled this when he later came across the scripture Nicolas alluded to—1 Corinthians 10:9. He’d done as his brother suggested. He knelt. He prayed, or at least tried to. He’d listened for God. He remembered hearing many things that he would later understand to be his mind answering for itself. He also remembered feeling silly.
“Nothing happened,” Luis had said. “Did he talk to you?”
“No,” Nicolas admitted. “But I asked him to guide you into a better understanding of him. To let you feel his presence.”
Luis then remembered the last time Nicolas asked him to pray with him. He’d scoffed, accused his brother of wanting to play dress up, and had walked away. Though this had been Luis’s response for months, Nicolas would be gunned down less than a week later. Luis almost had to pull the car over as he recalled this agonizing memory. Knowing now what Nicolas might’ve been dealing with, he wished he’d said something different. Anything to open a door.
There was nothing he wouldn’t give to pray with his brother one more time.
Luis was comporting himself when his cell phone rang. It was his father. He considered not answering but knew that would only invite more calls.
“Hey, Luis,” Sebastian said. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Work around the church,” Luis lied. “Preparing for Sunday.”
There was a silence. “No you’re not,” Sebastian said, his voice wavering, as if unhappy to call his son out for lying. “I know that you’re not. I know where you’re going. God told me. He’s worried about you. He thinks you shouldn’t.”
Luis closed his eyes. This was not what he needed to hear right now.
“Dad, God doesn’t say that to people.”
“He did to me,” Sebastian insisted. “He knows you’re going to see Bishop Osorio.”
Luis was surprised, then remembered that he’d told his father that he would speak to Osorio about Nicolas. Still, to play this God card so blatantly felt crazy.
“Have you been drinking?” Luis asked.
Sebastian said nothing for a moment. “I can’t believe you asked me that, Son.”
“Why? You’ve been back in my life for a few days after being absent for years. I have your word that you’ve stopped, but listen to yourself. You sound delirious.”
“Is that what you tell your parishioners when they hear answers to prayer?”
“I have learned over much time what is delusion and what is divine,” Luis said. “That’s not what’s happening, Dad. You don’t sound well.”
“I am not well!” Sebastian said. “How can anyone be well when their Lord gives them such a direct warning? I didn’t go to work today I was so troubled. I stayed in prayer throughout the day. I ate nothing! I drank nothing!”
And there it was. This was the crazy person Osorio had needed Luis to dispense with. Though his words weren’t slurred, Luis recognized this version of Sebastian. The paranoid one. The unhappy one. It was all coming back. Only now he was an adult and didn’t have his mother to run interference for him.
“All right, Dad,” Luis said. “You should probably get some sleep. I will come over there in about an hour and we’ll talk about it. All right?”
“Are you still going to Osorio’s?”
“Yes, Dad. I have some new information. I’ll share it with you tonight. Okay?”
“Not okay! Don’t go over there!”
Luis hung up. The phone rang again, and Luis sent it straight to voice mail. When it rang a third time, he turned off the ringer and tossed the phone aside.
He was off the highway a few minutes later, nearing Osorio’s Silver Lake house. It occurred to him that he’d been over here twice lately—once to meet his father on Sunday night, the next time to deliver Michael home. The idea of Michael Story and Bishop Osorio living only a couple of miles from each other was so strange, until he realized how quickly the area was being gentrified.
Soon there would be no more Osorios and four times as many Storys.
Chavez Ravine all over again.
Though the lights were off in Osorio’s duplex, his bright-white Cadillac was parked out front. He checked the clock. It was barely eight o’clock. He could be over to his father’s apartment before ten and hopefully back to St. Augustine’s by midnight, giving himself at least five hours of sleep.
God, why hast thou forsaken me? he thought, only half-serious.
Luis locked up the Caprice and headed to the front door. He knocked, but no one answered. He tried a second time and heard movement from upstairs.
It was followed by a strangled cry.
Luis grabbed the door handle, but it was locked. He raised a foot and gave the door a couple of swift kicks. It held fast.
My kingdom for a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver.
He ran around the side of the house and found the back door locked as well. With no other choice, he picked up two stones from the garden, threw one through the back window, then chipped aside the remaining glass with the other.
“I’m calling 911!” a voice called through the night.
“Do it!” Luis yelled back, taking as much of the priest out of his voice as he could.
He climbed inside, finding himself in the kitchen, but saw no one. Hearing something on the second floor, he raced to the stairs, not knowing if he’d be met by a volley of punches or bullets. When he reached the landing, however, he found only the prone form of Father Belbenoit stretched on the floor. Luis turned him over and saw an inch-wide wound cut across his torso. It looked like a bloody sash.
Belbenoit angled his head to meet Luis’s gaze and indicated a closed bedroom door. “
Eduardo,” he whispered.
Luis pushed the door open with his foot. On the bed was Bishop Osorio, clearly dead, his bedsheets stained with blood. Luis couldn’t tell where he’d been wounded but doubted it mattered.
Belbenoit grabbed Luis’s arm and pointed down the back stairs. “They . . . escaped . . .”
“I can’t leave you like this,” Luis said. “You’re dying.”
“Pray for me later,” Belbenoit said, his voice barely audible now. “I’ll take my chances with God.”
Luis nodded, lowered Belbenoit to the carpet, leaving him to God without delivering last rites, and raced back down the stairs. He reached for his phone, only to remember he’d tossed it aside in the car and hadn’t retrieved it.
Brilliant.
When he was back on the street, the night was silent save for the sound of distant traffic. He looked up and down the block but saw no movement. He took off running in one direction, hoping the arriving police would see his Roman collar and not shoot him on sight for fleeing a double homicide. He’d barely gone ten feet when he heard the muffled sound of a truck engine roaring to life a block up from Osorio’s street. He ran to the nearest intersection and dashed up the cross street as fast as he could.
The good thing about growing up not far from here was that he knew the streets. When he reached the next intersection, he went over the area in his mind. Left ended in a dead end, while going right the street would wind all the way down the hill. He ran in that direction long enough to see a black Bronco, taillights dimmed, blowing a stop sign as it wove back toward the highway.
Bingo.
The other good thing about knowing the streets was that Luis remembered where there were pedestrian stairs between houses. The truck would have to stay on the roads, but Luis could cut all the way down the hill to Sunset Boulevard below, likely beating the truck. He wouldn’t be able to stop it, but he would see where it was going and maybe even get a look at those inside. If he was really lucky and they were really stupid, he might catch a glimpse of the license plate.