by David Mark
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” mutters Salvatore, beyond the wrought-iron grille. “It has been eleven months and two weeks since my last confession.”
“Confess your sins and feel God’s love,” replies Father Whelan, and his whisper sounds pained.
“I’ve had impure thoughts,” says Salvatore, sounding bored. “Had a fucking lot of them.”
“Have you acted on these thoughts, my son?” asks Whelan, and already knows what is to come.
“She was pretty. Tits like melons. She shoved them in my face like they were for sale. I thought the school uniform was for show, like she was a dancer or something. She looked older than her age.”
Whelan closes his eyes. He has heard much worse. He is already full to bursting with the horrors for which he has become a repository. He knows he should ask Salvatore to unburden himself further—to give details and to vouchsafe his true and sincere regret. But Whelan has learned that Pugliesca’s men do not come for him to save their souls. They come because Pugliesca tells them to. All they want is a blessing and an amen.
“This girl,” asks Whelan cautiously. “Is she . . . harmed?”
“Couldn’t say, Father,” sighs Sal. “I told Dad about it. It’s taken care of.”
“Her family,” says Whelan. “There will be those desperate for answers.”
“Better they never find them, eh, Father? I don’t think she had the kind of family to worry about. She was sitting on a bench at the bus stop, looking lost. I was just friendly with her. Gave her some money for food. She knew what I was buying. I didn’t mean for what happened to happen.”
“Where did you leave her?” asks Whelan, and his voice is little more than a breath.
“Fuck should I know?” asks Sal sharply. “Woods somewhere. She’d have made her way back to the city when she got herself together. Few leaves in her hair and a bruise or two but she had more money in her pocket than she did when I found her. I only told Dad because the fucking feds are watching so close. You hear about Henry? Got lifted for supplying drugs, the dumb Irish fuck. That’s why they’re never made, y’know? You got to be Sicilian. Got to be pure.”
Across the grille, Whelan finds his throat closing. His mind is filling with pictures of a young, bewildered girl, brutalized, tormented, and abandoned.
“Are you truly sorry for your sins?” asks Whelan, and he feels a tear trickle down into his collar. He has stopped trying to reconcile himself to the good that he did through his pact with Pugliesca. The closure of the Staten Island facility, the salvation of Peter Molony, the bright new dawn for Tony Blank . . .
“Dad says I have to be,” says Sal petulantly.
Whelan screws up his eyes and drops his head. “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of your Son, you have reconciled the world to yourself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins. Through the ministry of the Church, may God grant you pardon and peace. And I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
“Amen,” says Sal breezily. “We done? Stinks in here.”
Whelan hears the neighboring door open. He angrily swats away a tear as he pushes open his own door and steps back into the church.
In the central aisle, Salvatore is standing with his legs apart, hands in his pockets. He is looking past Father Whelan, past the entrance to the vestry and sacristy, toward the great double doors. Ali is standing there, pretty, dark-skinned, and plump. She wears her school blazer over a tight white blouse. She is looking at Father Whelan nervously.
“I brought the sauce that Mama promised,” she says in her pleasant, accented voice. “Mama said you hadn’t eaten anything. Asked me to bring you a plate.”
Her voice echoes in the great empty space. Salvatore looks at her as if she is a character in a nursery tale, skipping through the woods with a basket over her arm.
“That’s fine, Ali,” says Father Whelan. “I’m just with some associates. Could you leave it there and thank your mother for me?”
“No rush, Ali,” says Salvatore. He has pulled out his cigarettes and is making a great show of lighting one. “I’m hungry myself. You got enough for all of us?”
Whelan turns to Sal. “You’ve been absolved,” he hisses. “Go on. I have work . . .”
Salvatore licks his lips. Then he nods.
“I’ll tell Tony you were asking after him,” he says with a wink. “He’s proving a good boy, like you promised. Reads his Bible. Draws his pictures. Sometimes he comes into the city and helps Dad and me with little bits of work. He’s stronger than he looks. Knows how to dig.”
Whelan stares at the younger man and wishes him dead. Wishes them all dead. He feels no reason to bless himself for the sin of his desire.
“Your father said he would take care of him. Keep him away from influences.”
“And he does, Father. He keeps him away from you.”
Whelan reaches out and rests his weight on the hard, warm wood of the pew. The men file out past him, making halfhearted signs of the cross. He stares at the floor. He wants to lie down on the cool flagstones and puddle into the ground. When he finally drags his eyes upward, he is alone in the church.
TWENTY-TWO
The Penitent has not taken his medicine in more than a week. It has been many years since he last endeavored to live his life without the complex cocktail of prescription pills that have helped him become the person that he allows the world to see. This time, he is unsure whether the absence of drugs has had any effect upon him. He feels weak and dizzy and there is a sound in his head like the far-off jingling of keys, but he is aware that he has lost a lot of blood and has barely eaten or drunk for many days. Perhaps the strange colors and shapes in his vision are a direct result of the physical abuses visited upon his body, and not a resurgence of the condition that left him unsure of what was real and what was not. It is taking an effort of will to differentiate between the various men he has taught himself to be. This morning, while ordering a coffee and bagel, he saw tiny scampering beetles erupt from beneath the fingernails of the waitress who served him. She acted as though there was nothing there, even as the tiny dots flooded over her fingers and wrist and scurried over her dark skin. He recoiled in his chair as if struck, tearing open the wounds on his back. A wave of nausea engulfed him and he vomited all over the yellow floor of the diner, spattering the girl’s legs and shoes with a mixture of bile and blood. He stumbled into the snow, reeking of foulness and tasting his own rotting insides. And then his head made a noise like an airplane taking off and he was back in the restaurant, sipping ice water, talking to the waitress about the book she had been reading and listening to her thoughts on what she planned to do when she graduated.
Here, now, the Penitent cannot be sure that he is talking with the right voice. He can hear himself and the conversation he is having with the man who has made him rich, but he knows that the words could be an auditory hallucination, masking the true conversation taking place beneath.
He listens, like an eavesdropper, to the words he is muttering into the telephone.
“There may be hope. If he wakes, the surgeon doubts he will ever be the man he was and his memory may be so incapacitated as to be harmless. He takes comfort in the words. I wish only that it had not been so. I know this is my doing. I was tempted. I went against your instructions and it cost us all something too dear to calculate. I know your pain equals my own. Believe me, I fought to stop this. But I was weak. It was beaten from my disloyal lips. My consciousness floated above as he tore the truth from my bleeding body. We had no choice. You had no choice. With the Lord’s help we can make his sacrifice a thing of beauty. Forgive me . . .”
The Penitent hears someone begin to cough and is surprised to feel wetness upon his own chin. Has the man sprayed blood and phlegm upon him? Or were the words his own? He feels faint as he
considers the question. Feels himself falling, tumbling through floor after floor of his own insides like an angel tumbling from heaven; watching the perfect lights of paradise grow faint and the heat of hell begin to cook the tenderized meat upon his back.
He forces himself to stand and realizes he is already upright. There is a candle, burning inches from his face. People are looking at him. He can feel a cool breeze upon his face. He looks at the stone floor and the multicolored lights that shimmer like goldfish upon its hardness. And he sees the blood, the blood he dripped and knelt in as he stooped to take the body of Christ into his mouth.
“Are you hurt, my son?”
And he is falling again, falling for real, tumbling over backward to clatter onto the blood-speckled stone, his stench erupting in his nostrils.
The last thing he sees before the blackness takes him is the faceless child. He sees that tiny, shriveled entity encased in darkness and lace, sucking on the brown nipple of its dead mother in that place of cobwebs, dirt, and rose petals. He sees the child, and sees what he has become.
When he awakes, the Penitent is still sitting in the chair at the foot of Brishen Ayres’s bed. He is still holding his Bible and stroking the soft leather of its spine. The room smells of flowers and surgical wipes. He can taste red wine and there is a crumb of Communion wafer wedged into one of his back molars.
He removes it with his tongue and swallows it, body and soul.
TWENTY-THREE
Orange juice,” says Alto, turning to the bartender. He has his NYPD shield in his right hand, in case the cocktail virtuoso thinks about making him wait. The badge has the desired effect and the elaborately mustachioed bartender pauses in his twirling of a silver shaker long enough to pour a good-sized glug of freshly squeezed orange juice into a tall glass. He adds two straws, a spray of mint, and a paper umbrella, places the creation on a plastic tray, and brings it over to where Alto has slumped down in the chair opposite McAvoy.
“On the house,” says the bartender, smiling. He reveals teeth that are no strangers to hand-rolled cigarettes.
“Kind of you,” says Alto.
“And you, sir? Another?”
McAvoy looks at his coconut shell, and for a moment it makes him think of a hollowed-out skull. He is unaccustomed to such grisly imaginings and shakes the thought away before he visibly shudders. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“I love your accent,” says the bartender, taking the empty shell. “I went to Edinburgh once. Wonderful city, though it’s all uphill. What is it they call New Year? Hogmanay? Best party of my life . . .”
McAvoy feels a sudden urge to take the man’s face in his fist and close his mouth. He wants him to go away. Wants to shake Alto by the ankles until everything he knows comes tumbling out of his mouth like coins from a pocket.
“Really? I went to university there for a while. Beautiful city and very welcoming. Do you think you’ll go back?”
McAvoy hears himself speaking and hates himself more with every word. Just once, he would like to find the strength of character to be rude. Alto comes to his rescue. “We’ll catch up later, sir. For now, my friend and I need some privacy.”
The bartender gives a nod. He understands. He’s seen it all before. He walks away without another word.
“Why do you indulge them?” asks Alto, removing the flamboyant additions to his drink and dropping them on the tabletop. “It’s okay to tell people to fuck off.”
“Courtesy,” says McAvoy without thinking about it. “Manners. Basic niceness. I don’t like being rude. Boarding school put the varnish on the lessons of my father.”
“You’ll never get any peace.”
“Okay, I’ll be rude now. What the fuck is going on?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The files Trish is going through. That’s some proper police work. People have investigated Molony before and you’ve given them to a virtual stranger. And why aren’t you raiding Molony’s house? How did you get me a sit-down with the leader of the Mob? I might be a stranger but I didn’t come down the river on a water biscuit, my friend. Who’s got their hands on my steering wheel?”
Alto looks as though he is about to protest, then stops himself. He removes his glasses and polishes them on his napkin. When he puts them back on, his eyes look crisp and clear.
“I haven’t been totally honest,” says Alto, and gives in to a laugh at the level of understatement. “Where do I begin, Aector? You know I have a connection to the Italians, that much I’ve been honest about. But, look, this business works on favors. And when I was in Homicide, Pugliesca and Savoca were good friends to have. We were concerned about who was killing street dealers. We were preoccupied with innocent people getting caught up in the fallout from organized crime. We had a sort of arrangement . . .”
“A deal?”
“Not a deal,” says Alto defensively. “Not for money or anything like that. But when they could, the Italians slipped us a name or two. They helped make sure that bad people got put away. They didn’t inform, never gave evidence, but they were useful.”
“And in return you turned a blind eye,” says McAvoy quietly.
Alto shakes his head. “You don’t get it,” he says. “Making a case stick—it’s years of manpower. It’s wiretaps and warrants and so much money you could weep. You don’t turn a blind eye—you just prioritize differently. And that’s what I did at Homicide South. The feds were responsible for bringing down the Mob and I was just a detective who had some good contacts. Hell, I was invited to mobsters’ weddings and baptisms. And you hear things. If people get drunk enough and relaxed enough, they talk. And that’s when I heard about the man who helped them hide their money. Some lawyer. Some ex-priest who’d sold his soul to the Mob. That was it, I swear to you, but when I left Homicide I had no reason not to rock the boat and I did a little digging. Hugh, too. We thought he would be a good collar. Everybody loves taking down a lawyer, don’t they? We unearthed something that we didn’t know what to do with. Seminary records, psychiatric reports, medical files. We got down a few layers and found a name.” Alto looks McAvoy in the face. “I got warned off. It was subtle, nothing you could point to and call a threat, but I would get home and my wife would tell me she had heard noises, or that she felt she’d been followed on her drive to work. Files saved on my computer just vanished. I started getting all the shittiest jobs. Detectives I’d never met before were suddenly getting partnered up with me and they had accounts at racetracks and bars all over the city where there was always good credit for a man with a badge. I started drinking. I drank a lot. And after that I didn’t care much about a lawyer who was helping the Mob hide their cash because my wife had left me and I was a drunk who nobody listened to anyway. It took me a long time to get myself together and then suddenly I’ve got you in front of me with stories about dead Irishmen and devious priests. I used you for Murray Ellison. I got the collar that mattered. So I wanted to repay you by helping out, and as soon as I did any digging I found the arrows pointing to Peter Molony. The same Peter Molony who had almost undone me when I first started digging. I didn’t know whether to tell Hugh or Pugliesca or the feds. So I’ve done nothing. I’ve bumbled along, hoping you would do it all for me, and I’ve sent everything I’ve got to your boss because she seems strong enough to make the decisions I can’t.”
Alto’s shoulders slump. His lips become a tight line.
“She will,” says McAvoy quietly. “So will I. And if you ask me honestly, I couldn’t tell you whether I think you’ve done good or bad. But I know that there’s a way to do something important, and I think you want to help me.”
Alto looks at him. Manages a flash of a smile.
“You need to pick up Molony,” says McAvoy decisively.
Alto shakes his head. He sits back in his chair. “Forget that a moment. Listen to me, Aector. I’m going to tell you something and I’m going to trust you to
do nothing stupid with the information, okay? I think we know where Valentine is.”
McAvoy spreads his hands. His skin is prickling. He feels as though it is snowing inside the bar, as if everything has turned and switched and he is sitting in the middle of the street at a metal table, chatting with a friend in the face of onrushing traffic.
“Tell me.”
“He was never there,” says Alto, sighing. “Cairo, I mean. Never with Brishen and Shay at the scene of the attack.”
McAvoy cocks his head. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands so just sits on them, like a schoolboy frightened of getting into trouble for picking his nose.
“The man we picked up,” says Alto. “His name is Zav. He’s Chechen. A soldier for Sergey Volotov. The Chechens and the Ukrainians are all part of the same lovely party at the moment. Things are peaceful out at Brighton Beach. We don’t even know what to call most of the motherfuckers who run that part of town. Just think of it as Russian Mob, and you’ll get halfway there. Anyway, this afternoon Zav succeeded in chewing through the arm of a friend with whom he had been tortured in a Brooklyn basement. Zav was also the passenger in the car that picked you up last night. The description he gave of his captor matches what Polina said—an older Italian male with poor teeth and bad skin. He shot Zav full of holes and asked him a lot of questions about the night Shay was killed. Zav held out for a time but eventually he broke. And now Zav can’t go back to Volotov. So he’s come to us. The feds have arrived and I don’t think I’m going to get a chance to talk to him again. But I had him alone for long enough to ask about that night. He’s holding back until he gets the right deal from the feds but he’s in a fragile state and he responded to a bit of pressure.”