Rabid

by T K Kenyon

  If she left with Joe, he would demand they talk.

  Instead, she was alone with the Jesuit who knew things about her that she hated, and she hated his knowing them, and she wanted to run outside into the warm rain alone.

  Dante lifted the half-full pitcher of pilsner. “I began the paperwork for the Dominicans.”

  Leila nodded.

  Dante ran his hands through his hair, combing it back with his fingers, an unconsciously sexy move that called attention to the wavy hair that skimmed his earlobes. He probably wasn’t aware.

  “He should be in the Alps within a week.” The priest sipped his dark beer and one of his eyebrows tipped down. “I suppose it is what they deserve.” Dante turned his mug so the handle faced his other hand. “Well, it is not my problem. My job is to counsel the children and gather the evidence. The men are none of my concern.”

  “Aren’t you just keeping them someplace, so they wouldn’t mess with kids anymore?” She didn’t like the way he was talking.

  The priest rotated his mug in his hands again. He didn’t usually display nervous tics like that. “That monastery isn’t a very nice place.”

  Worry worked itself into a knot in her chest. “How so?”

  Dante’s head bobbed side to side. Sort of. “The Dominicans are a severe sect. The Dominicans ran the CDF, back in the bad old days of the Inquisition. I’m a Jesuit, so I’m an outsider, but I’m their shrink so they tolerate me.” He smiled. “They know I don’t have political aspirations, so I am harmless.”

  “Hmmm,” Leila said. “More harmlessness.”

  “Yes, indeed.” He chuckled and pressed a hand against the side of his face, embarrassed. “Harmless. My poker tell.”

  “But the Dominicans?”

  Dante sat back, uncomfortable, and rotated his glass between his palms again. “Sometimes I think the men would be better off in an American prison, even though sometimes pedophiles are murdered there by other inmates.” Dante scratched his eyebrow. “The Dominicans have harsh ideas about curing pedophiles. They believe that abusing children is sin, not a disease or a crime, which is the Vatican’s official position, too, and the Dominican brothers are dedicated to stamping out sin. They are industrious about it.” Dante frowned. “There have been suicides.”

  Leila’s hand held the beer glass halfway to her mouth when his word suicides slipped in her ear and lodged in her throat like a sideways tortilla chip. She reversed the beer’s direction and it slopped on her knuckles as the mug thumped the table.

  Dante wiped the corner of his mouth with a bar napkin and continued, “I shouldn’t be talking like this. I say more than I should, sometimes. It’s being away from fellow Jesuits, living alone in the rectory, no family near. It is not like this in Roma. I begin to understand how some priests take companionship anywhere they find it, or at least how they are undiscovered for so long. Not that that excuses them. Not at all.”

  The worry knot writhed and tightened. “Why would they commit suicide?” Leila asked.

  Dante stared at his beer. “The Dominicans’ ideas of sin and redemption can be harsh.”

  Leila’s breath fluttered near her throat. “Like, what, torture?”

  “I don’t think the Dominicans lay a hand on them. It’s penance. It’s not how I would run a treatment facility, but they did not ask for my opinion. They utilize solitary contemplation, all day, all night, for weeks, if necessary.” Dante said.

  “Solitary confinement?” What had she done?

  Dante leaned over his beer, crouching. “They expect the men to be heartily sorry for offending God. They make sure the men are heartily sorry.”

  Leila’s heartbeat sped. “I thought it was just a place to keep them away from kids.”

  The pool-playing thug broke the rack, the pool balls clattered, and the horde guffawed.

  Dante shook his head. “It’s more like the camp the Americans housed terrorist prisoners in, Guantanamo Bay, but with overtones of conversion. Perhaps ‘re-education’ is a better word.”

  “The Vatican can’t just toss people in a,” she struggled to think of a term that was strong enough, “a concentration camp.”

  “We are a government and a country and a corporation,” Dante said. “The US has camps like this. Many governments do. It should not be shocking that the Vatican does, too.”

  Hysteria, real hysteria, narrowed her vision.

  The black-clothed Jesuit across the table leaned back in his seat and frowned as if he had mentioned that the Church was engaged in minor accounting indiscretions.

  “Sean just won’t go. He’s too smart for that. He won’t go.”

  “Then they’ll convince him. They are very persuasive. He will probably go willingly. If he does not,” Dante shrugged, “we just throw them on a Vatican plane and take them. The IEA is getting quite good at that. We enlisted the Mossad to work with us on logistics.” Dante shook his head. “One of the men who engineered the Eichmann kidnapping in Argentina has been helping us coordinate. Isn’t that ironic, considering we gave Eichmann the passport to get to Argentina in the first place?”

  “You’re kidnapping them and taking them to concentration camps?”

  “Lower your voice.” He turned his palms up on the bar table, begging holding. “There is only one place. After what that man did to you, what would you think is a just punishment?”

  “Not this.” Leila’s voice rose. “I thought you were just going to put him some place where he can’t get at other girls, not some sort of Catholic Auschwitz.”

  “It is not like the Shoah.” Dante glanced at the oblivious horde playing pool next to them, reached into his suit coat, removed his wallet, threw a twenty on the graffitied table and stood. “It is entirely different. Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Elsewhere.” He unfurled his fingers toward her. She took his warm, smooth hand and scooted out of the booth. He held onto her fingers and asked, “Your apartment?”

  She shook away his hand. “My apartment is being dismantled. I don’t even have chairs.”

  His brows twitched. “Why is that?”

  “I’m moving to New York this weekend.”

  “You’re leaving?” His eyes expanded and his chin swiveled as if watching something rotate very fast.

  “I’m depositing my thesis on Friday. My postdoc starts in two weeks. I waited to defend until right before I testified so I wouldn’t have to come back.”

  “I didn’t know.” His fingertips touched his forehead and inched back into his hair. “We could sit in my car.”

  “No.” Leila stepped back. She didn’t sit with priests in cars in remote, dark spots, behind mini-malls, in the parking lots of city parks.

  “My church is close.”

  “I’ll drive myself.” She walked away. She watched the cobbled pedestrian mall sidewalk and rain-fed grout rivulets under her boots.

  If he was lurking back there, watching her ass jiggle or staring mournfully, she couldn’t go to the church, and she needed to know what was going on.

  Sean needed to know.

  ~~~~~

  Dante paced the church’s center aisle, glancing at the wooden icon hanging on the cross where the long arms of the sanctuary crossed the nave. Backlights bounced from the rear wall of the church behind the icon in a fair approximation of a divine nimbus, and a cruciform shadow quadrisected the pews.

  She was not coming. Almost half an hour had passed.

  He paced to the communion rail, pivoted, and walked toward the doors. If she did not show up in five minutes, he would go to her apartment. He tossed his tiny cell phone in the air and caught it behind his back.

  The rear doors opened.

  Leila, a black-clothed sylph, trickled in.

  He strode through the church toward her. “You told me the truth about the priest, yes?”

  “Yes.” She stared at her feet.

  He reached where she stood. “Then he should go to the Dominicans.”

  She clasped her
hands together in front of her chest. Her elbows clenched tight to her sides, vulnerable. “I can’t do that to him. He was my lover for five years.”

  That word, lover, that she had denied existed for her two nights ago, rolled between them.

  The things that pedophile must have told her when she was ten years old, in the fifth grade, until she was fifteen. “No, that man was an abuser, not your lover.”

  Her contralto voice was tiny in the wood and plaster of the church. “I love him.”

  His grip tightened around the pew. “He is a demon incarnate. I analyzed these men, treated them, medicated them, even exorcised them. Their souls are forfeit or twisted. No devil possesses them but they are legion among us. I think, I believe, that they are not sinners, but they are evil. Evil is the only word strong enough to describe the way they disregard the damage they inflict.”

  Leila whipped her head sideways, dodging those words. Her hair swung sideways. “You’re rationalizing to make them less than human so you can treat them however you want. Hitler demonized people, stripped them of their humanity so he could kill them.”

  “Ah, the Hitler card,” Dante countered. “Reductio ad nazium. When something offends you and yet you have no answer for it, compare it to one of Hitler’s policies.”

  “They’re human beings. They’re not evil. It’s a disease. Or a predilection. Or a misdirection.”

  “You’ve obviously read the literature. You know there is no cure for pedophilia.”

  Leila’s voice rose, speaking over his. “Or something they have to work through to become fully human.”

  “That’s Nietzsche, that there is no sin but only selves needing to reach the fullness of themselves. It’s a lie. It is impossible to reach fullness for oneself while destroying other human beings.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve read Nietzsche.” Her angry voice tore through the church.

  “We read him in seminary. The professors consider it a vaccination against atheism.”

  “Didn’t work for you, did it?”

  “It was too late for me.” He rubbed the oiled wood of the pew.

  “You can’t kidnap him.” Her voice cracked like an adolescent boy’s. Her hand dipped into her purse. “Sean’s not going to be ‘heartily sorry,’ no matter what you do to him.”

  He wanted to wrap his arms around her because she was hunched over, her arms and elbows clamped, protecting her torso from incoming body blows, but if he approached her, she might run. She might attack. Dante didn’t want to restrain her hands. Holding her fists would connote when she resisted that terrible man, Sean, when he had held her down and raped her.

  Sometimes, Leila had said, Father Sean had laughed at her ineffectual attempts to defend her body from him, but he grew angry at resistance, and he enjoyed being angry at her.

  Angry was worse.

  Submission was less violent.

  Dante said, “Sometimes, force must be used in the service of truth.”

  The Inquisition’s own words, utilized for centuries, soured on his tongue.

  He paced faster. “They must be locked up, forever, every one of them. They are like rabid dogs or starving lions. They cannot stop themselves, especially the primary pedophiles, the ones who prefer children under thirteen and for whom gender is less important than age. They will offend again. They will rape children every chance they get. There is no cure or treatment or penance for it.”

  Leila shot back at him, “You don’t believe in free will. How very Calvinist of you.”

  “Calvin thought that some souls are predestined to go to Hell. His theories do not apply to psychosexual behavior or psychopaths.”

  “Bullshit. You’re a drug dealer of opium for the masses and you don’t even sample your own wares.”

  He shook his head, but she was right. “Nietzsche, Calvin, and Marx. No wonder you left the Church.”

  “And Jim Jones. You guys are drinking your own Kool-Aid. ”

  Dante grabbed the back of the pew and squeezed it hard. “I grew up under John Paul the Second, who was a mystic, but most men in the Vatican are not like him. Vatican politics and how far they rise and what they control and who is in their influence comprise their whole lives. They have nothing else. These pedophiles threaten the Curia and the Church. They will do anything to protect themselves.” And he was in it too deeply to leave.

  “You can’t have Sean! You can’t take him to a place like that just to save your own hides.”

  Frustration rose. This Sean was just another psychopathic, narcissistic pedophile. Dante had seen too many of them to be sympathetic. “Why are you trying to protect him?”

  “I loved him. He was my lover for five years. How can you ask such things?” Her voice choked. “You must never have loved anyone in your whole life.”

  Ridiculously, horribly true. Dante’s breath caught under his rib cage. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Define ‘love.’”

  She whipped her head around and glared. Tears smeared her dark irises. Her wet cheekbones shone silver. Her hand dipped into her purse, and she blocked her body by holding her purse in front of her, a classic defensive posture. “It’s like God. You either feel it or you don’t. I loved Sean, and I love science because it fills the void God left when He deserted the world. Any divine spark behind creation wouldn’t want to be worshipped. It would want to be understood. Love is being understood at a cellular level. I understand the universe, the stars, and the world and people and cells and viruses and DNA and atoms and quarks and strings, and It understands me back. Science knows the mind of God.”

  Wonder dropped his jaw. “You aren’t an atheist.”

  “Sure I am. If there is a God, since there isn’t a God, I want to understand creation.”

  Dante’s heart tumbled under his palm pressed against his chest. “You’ve read Newman.”

  “Yeah, and you’ve been reading that other Catholic anti-Semite, Hitler.” Her breath caught in a sob when she inhaled.

  “They aren’t death camps,” he said. “Hitler was trying to kill people. The Dominicans are trying to convert them.”

  “So it’s like Dachau rather than Auschwitz.”

  “I’ve told you, it’s more complicated than that.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  She pulled the blued-steel gun out of her purse.

  Ah, he had not seen the last of that gun. His heartbeat raced counterpoint to his mortality.

  Disturbing associations of that gun with her body curving around him lapped his mind.

  The gun’s deep barrel stretched away from him toward infinity. His hands unwove themselves and splayed in front of his chest, as if he had the ecclesiastical authority to ward off bullets. “Leila, don’t.”

  Leila held the gun straight out in front of her, her shoulders and arms forming a triangle with her hands and the gun at the apex. Her voice rasped. “I want you to write a letter to the Vatican and tell them to leave Sean alone. Tell them I lied. Tell them I’m a psychopath. I don’t care what you say, just call them off.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that you had lied?”

  “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  He nodded. No one could make up such horrors.

  A tear fell on her cheek. The gun quivered in her shaking hands. She squinted her eyes shut and more tears dripped from her eyelashes. She bowed her head over her outstretched arms.

  “How did he manipulate you so?” Even though he knew.

  “Stop it. Just stop all the psychobabble and write the goddamned letter.”

  “My computer is in the library, over there.” He pointed to the door camouflaged in the rightward wall of the church just before one long arm of the cruciform shadow.

  “Let’s go.” She bobbed the gun muzzle toward the door.

  Going to a secluded location with an armed woman might seem foolhardy, but as a priest, he was vow-bound. She was his poisoned communion wine, and he brought the proverbial chalice to his lips.

  Ah, her l
ips, her lips on his, and his lips flushed sensitive, remembering.

  She said, “Tell me what they’re going to do, how they’re going to look for him.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m holding a gun, Dante. The first rule of guns is that you don’t point a gun at something unless you intend to destroy it. Tell me how they’re going to kidnap him.” Her footfalls clacked on the wood floor behind him.

  “They will talk to him first, try to convince him to go willingly.”

  “It won’t work. Sean won’t go. He’ll know.”

  “A van will pull up beside him. Someone strong will grab him and throw him in. He will be sedated. His Church superior will be informed that he was transferred and will not call the police. Someone else will pack his belongings. They will hold him in a safe house, then put him on a Vatican plane for Roma. From there, vans. With priests, it is easier than you think. No one asks questions. When Nicolai and Samual both disappeared from OLPH, a few people asked questions, and I said they were transferred. No one reported anything. Nicolai went willingly after Father Domingo discussed it with him. Samual tried to hide from us and was picked up.”

  He turned his doorknob and pushed open the door of the library. It was still swollen from the humidity and opened with a loud crack. “After you?”

  She hesitated and watched the door as if something might leap out at her. Her arms holding the gun drooped. “You go first.”

  He walked inside and sat down in his computer chair. He crossed his legs, resting one ankle on his other knee, an unstable position for lunging.

  She followed him into the library and kicked the door closed. It stuck against the frame, and she pushed it with one hand, not enough to latch the mechanism but enough to keep it from creaking open. Her other slim hand held the gun, which listed away from him toward the books.

  He touched the laptop’s switch, and it whirred and clicked.

  He asked, “Is there something specific you want me to tell them?”

  “Just tell them to leave him alone.”

  Dante started the word processor and typed a letter to the Vatican detailing the unreliability of the original witness and the recent recanting of her testimony. He concluded that, in the absence of other substantiation, the file should be placed on indefinite hold. He printed the letter and swiveled in the office chair to hold it out. “Is this what you want?”