by SUZAN STILL
“I ended up doin’ time in San Quentin, twenty-five to life. But I got lucky. The California prison system was over-crowded, and the federal court said they had to let twenty thousand people go. I don’t know how it happened, but my number got pulled, and I was out on the street again, after only doin’ seven years. So now, I’m thirty-four years old and mean as hell. I knew it was just a matter of time before I got slammed for somethin’ else, so I broke parole and ran to Dallas. And that’s where I met Father Keat and my life got changed.”
Lone-R glanced at Father Keat, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Lone-R turned his eyes to Calypso. “I guess he’ll tell you about that.” He turned and walked back to the door. The relief guard returned to his chair and everyone looked expectantly at Father Keat. Rather than explain, however, Father Keat called for another testimony.
“I’ll talk.” A hand went up in the middle of the assembly.
Father Keat nodded saying, “Go ahead.”
A short, elderly man threaded his way past the others and came to stand before them. Calypso studied him closely, finding it hard to believe that he, too, was a killer. He had the inoffensive face of a grandpa, a balding head fringed in gray hair, and glasses. His robe looked like a black barrel, giving evidence of a stout body beneath. He cleared his throat and began in a gravelly voice.
“My name’s Tito, but everyone calls me The Knife. I grew up in Chicago, South Side, Back of the Yards. My father was a tailor from Armenia. He married my mother when she was fresh off the boat. He was fifty-three and she was sixteen. That’s how they did things in those days.
“It was a tough neighborhood. As I kid, I had to fight to survive. I was small, so I bought me a knife.
“One day in front of the barber shop, this kid twice my size starts pushing me around, threatening to pull my gizzard out through my mouth. So I take my knife and I stick him right in the gut. Well, I must of hit an artery, ‘cause the guy falls to the ground, bleeding like a broken hydrant, and in a few seconds, he’s dead.
“I’m in shock. I’m just a kid. I don’t even have the sense to run. I hear a siren coming and I’m just standing there, staring at this guy lying on the sidewalk in a puddle of blood, and I’m still holding the knife.
“All of a sudden, I feel this big hand come down on the back of my neck and somebody drags me into the barber shop. Whoever it is has got a death grip on my neck. He pushes me right through the shop, out the back door, into an alley. I’m thinking, oh shit, my time is up.
“The guy’s got a car parked back in the alley, and he’s got a driver. He says to the driver, Open the door! And when he does, the guy throws me into the backseat and says, Let’s get outta here. The driver pulls out fast and away we go, with the guy holding my head down so nobody sees me through the window.
“Well, long story short, turns out I’d connected with Big Joe Gratz, one of the biggest mobsters in Chicago. He tells me, You got sand, kid, and he says he wants to train me to be a hit man. Well, hell. What have I got to lose? So he puts me in with these really tough guys and they teach me all they know. And for over twenty years, I do Big Joe’s dirty work, even when he’s spending time in the slammer.
“But then, one day…”
“That’s enough for now, Knife,” Father Keat cut in. “We’ll hear the rest later.” He looked at the group. “Next?”
One by one, the men came forward, stood with hands clasped over their black cassocks, looked straight ahead, and told the most ghastly stories of mayhem and murder. There were thieves, pimps and assassins, interrogators, drug dealers and gun runners, each one with a nickname evoking his trade. Some of the worst were Latin American soldiers trained in counter-insurgency at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. They told their stories of the torture of innocent campesinos with the bland confidence lent a twice-told tale, sometimes with a hint of pride, sometimes with the barest breath of shame.
Calypso’s attention was riveted to each. She studied their faces with their stress lines, scars and baggy eyes, their thinning hair, their powerful hands. As the stories went on, she began to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of their cumulative crimes, the weight of which seemed to be filling the room and snuffing the light from the windows. To her surprise, it wasn’t disgust that filled her but a ragged sort of compassion for these lives so marred and mangled by violence and crime.
At last, Father Keat announced that they would break for lunch. Calypso was escorted back to her room, where a tray was waiting for her.
“It’s nice to see they sometimes alternate rice and beans with beans and rice,” she said acidly.
She plopped down on the mattress, pulled her legs into lotus posture, then balanced the tray on her thighs. Maybe, she thought as she chewed the tasteless mess, instead of killing her they might let her bring some inspiration to their kitchen as their cook.
§
After lunch the stories went on. Calypso began to differentiate the lesser from the greater offenders against the human race. Mere murder of rival drug soldiers began to seem petty, compared to wholesale slaughter of innocents by agency of airplane, helicopter and automatic weapons or through sadistic torture. Initially, she felt nauseous, listening to the gruesome details of death and destruction. Later, as the afternoon wore on and each man came forward to tell his tale, she became numb.
Finally, the ordeal was over, with no apparent verdict having been accomplished in her own case. She was led back to her original room, with its low wooden bed, primitive table, and chair. A fire was lit and extra wood brought. A tray of food arrived, featuring the same monotonous rice and beans.
As she chewed morosely, she thought of Hill, wondering where he was salted away in this pile of stone. She could hear his voice, in sardonic mode, saying, “Too bad Pedro’s not with us. He could shuck and jive in assassin, and maybe win us our freedom.” She smiled, despite herself.
She was so enervated by the day and its revelations that she scarcely ate. The sun had barely sunk behind the cliffs when she lay on the bed, pulled the woolen blanket over her, and fell into exhausted sleep.
§
In the depths of the night, Calypso suddenly found herself standing in a barren stone hallway before a pair of elevator doors. She could hear the mechanism of the lift rumbling, feel the slight tremor of it rising up her legs from the floor. It was cold and she shivered as she waited under a bare bulb that shed sickly yellow light.
The grinding of the elevator ceased and after a pause, the doors parted. Calypso peered into an interior that seemed to hold shadow and nothing more. Then with a slight rustle, as of dry leaves shifting, a figure appeared from the darkness. It was tall, thin, and all in black, and she thought it must be one of her captors. Her eyes swept up the long, inky garment to the face. Then she gasped and froze, too paralyzed with fear even to scream.
The face, hooded in black, was fleshless. There were no eyes, only gaping sockets were eyes should have been. Nevertheless, Calypso had the distinct impression that she was under intense scrutiny. The two black holes were leveled at her like twin barrels of a shotgun.
Mesmerized, Calypso could not tear her eyes away from them. Her mouth went dry; her heart hammered. Her thoughts were gelatinous, unstable, amorphous. She could not move, but remained captive of the vacant but intense stare, as hypnotic and lethal as a cobra’s.
Despite the figure’s similarity to the Grim Reaper, Calypso began to discern that it was female. What was more, this was no mere mortal, but a divinity: La Flaca, “The Skinny Lady,” la Señora de las Sombras, “Lady of the Shadows,” Santa Muerte, “Saint Death”—she went by many names among the poor and disenfranchised of Mexico, who venerated her and invoked her against violent death, especially by gunshot.
Death Herself had come to call, and Calypso had the impression that this visit was in response to the day’s litany of Ghostly crimes and in defense of their victims. Punchily, she realized that some sort of respect must be paid to so august a visitor.
She tried to speak, but her mouth was frozen in a rictus of terror. Gathering her will, exerting maximal effort, she tried again, and achieved a ragged hiss of air. At last, contorting her face in sheer determination, through clenched teeth and shuddering lips, she managed a rasping whisper.
“Bl-bl-bless you, Mother.”
Before her startled eyes, the terrible faceless face began to morph. From within the skull, a hazy mass pushed outward and began, layer upon layer, to solidify, first into muscles crisscrossing, and finally into flesh. In the place of the hideous skull, a ravishingly beautiful face appeared, of an angel, of a goddess. Calypso, unable to fathom its loveliness and delicacy, gazed upon it with wonder and delight.
The figure made the smallest movement with its hand, that moments before had hung down only bones of la Huesuda, “the Bony Lady,” but now was long fingered and graceful. Santísima Muerte, “Most Holy Death,” raised Her fingers in a gesture of blessing. Calypso felt hot, stinging energy shower over her like sparks blown from a fire. She stood encompassed in the fiery breath of la Dama Poderosa, “the Powerful Lady,” entranced.
The doors of the elevator began to close and the car to descend. Calypso’s awed gaze followed, as it sank from view. Her last glimpse was of the sweet face, smiling up at her from floor level, as the doors closed completely.
§
The ponderous grinding of the inner mechanism recommenced; the floor shook. Calypso’s eyes burst open, her breath coming in wrenching gasps, heart racing so fast it felt like it would explode. A tremendous flash of brilliant white light was followed by an enormous bomb blast of sound. She screamed and ducked, shielding her head with her arms.
It was her first realization that paralysis was gone. She could move. She could speak. She lay trembling, attempting to locate herself in time and space. Another flash of painfully bright light illuminated plastered stone and the looming mantel of her room.
Lightning! Followed by thunder. Calypso took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. Storm. It was only a passing storm. Her entire body shuddered uncontrollably, as her rational mind explained that she had just had a nightmare, brought on by violent weather.
Her deep heart, however, where la Señora de las Sombras now communed, insisted that something mighty and terrible had shown itself, offering its naked awfulness, and asking something of her in return: respect, homage, recognition of her own fate.
Having given it, Calypso received a blessing. In the final transformation of the epiphany, Her robes had turned from black to white, a color symbolizing purity and protection from negative energy. The Goddess, showing the beneficent side of Her nature, had smiled upon her.
Calypso began to relax. Knot by knot, her muscles released the terror. She rode the wail of wind and hammer of rain like a boat with reefed sails. Somehow, she would survive—or, if she did not, Santa Muerte would offer her kind sanctuary.
§
She could not return to sleep. The twin terrors of encountering the phantom of Death, and the terrible lacuna where knowledge of Javier’s and Hill’s fates should be, kept her staring at the ceiling, where firelight and lightning alternately lapped and bolted. She fingered the locket beneath her sweater, angry that it had failed her. She was tempted to take it off and stow it in her backpack, but some nagging inconsistency kept her from it.
Could the dream be a gift from the locket? If so, what was its message? Her brain was too seared from the experience to puzzle it out. She returned instead to the story of the locket itself. How Blanche de Muret had undergone imprisonment, just as Calypso was enduring it now, in not unpleasant circumstances that yet held menace of pain and death. She realized that her captor Lone-R, and Caspar, King of Nubia, had become entwined in her mind so that, against better judgment, she trusted the man.
She lay entangled in these maddening allusions like a swimmer trapped in a kelp bed. Long streamers of thought wrapped around her, tugging, impeding progress. She remembered a friend’s description of his terror, fighting the grasping kelp while scuba diving off the California coast. He’d said the only way to release himself was to stop fighting. To relax. To glide through the long, waving sea forest without resistance.
Calypso willed herself to stop thinking and rethinking her situation. To simply float with the current of her thoughts, which was wafting her always backward, to the story of the locket. The storm was passing over, moving on. She watched the lightning illuminate the far cliffs, transforming them into a blank white screen where memory could be projected, the story replayed.
8
Blanche de Muret’s Story Continues
Allia kept me in her private apartment for a week and tended me as lovingly as a mother. Gradually and gently, she told me the circumstances of Godfrey’s enslavement and death. These details, at least, gave my heart some peace.
He had been purchased by a noble family of great spiritual elevation, who had treated him kindly during his brief passage through their household. Sadly, his little heart must have been broken, for he soon contracted a fever and was gone before a month had passed. During that time he was treated as one of their own children would be, with a doctor’s attention and delicate victuals, in a clean and sun-filled room. This simple account gave my grieving heart some small solace.
At times, during the week I spent with her, Allia would speak to me of the mysterious community into which I had quite literally fallen and of their history and beliefs. At other times, she simply held me against her bosom while I wept, or exhausted from weeping, collapsed against her strength like a sack of barley grain leaning against a wall.
At those times, I could feel a strange, wild energy exuding from her. At first, this force alarmed me, but I soon realized that in its presence I was revivified and healed, and I came to crave these times of closeness with her. Truly, I began to understand all that King Caspar had told me regarding Allia’s curative powers.
When I asked her about this, however, Allia was evasive. She would smooth my brow with a gentle stroke, smile into my eyes, and change the subject. Perhaps she felt it inappropriate to speak of the gifts granted her by God.
During the hours that Allia left me alone to rest, I was kept amused by the community of workers surrounding me. Painted onto the plaster with which the cave walls had been coated, they yet seemed to breathe and jostle by the light of the oil lamps. Their colors were rich and their postures vital and realized with great charm, so that they seemed painted but yesterday. Allia informed me, however, that they were of great antiquity.
“These are works from very long ago,” she told me. “The ancient leaders of our people, the pharaohs, knew that their lives would continue on the other side of the passage we call death. So they had their tombs outfitted with all the necessities of everyday life—tools, food, weapons, furniture. Even servants in miniature, going about their daily chores. And these scenes were painted to keep memory of the world of men fresh.”
“Are we in a tomb then?” I asked in alarm, for this was a morbid notion and sent me into a panic. Quite suddenly, the great weight of earth pendant above us seemed ineluctably beginning to descend.
“Yes,” Allia said. “This was one of the many chambers of the tomb of one of the earliest pharaohs. You needn’t look so worried, though. It will not be yours. I can see quite clearly that your end will not come in Egypt but in your home country, and many, many years hence.”
“I do not understand, at all, why you and the others are doing this!” I cried with pique. For suddenly the entire adventure seemed too arduous and mysterious. As a sign of its own healing, one might suppose, my mind demanded answers.
“Then, perhaps today is the day for me to explain to you what this community you have fallen into is all about,” Allia said with a twinkle, not the least put off by my outburst. “You have recovered from your injuries and your shock sufficiently to grasp what I am about to tell you, I think.
“But you must understand that this is all a great secret. Nothing can be conveyed to yo
u without your absolute promise, sealed in your honor and that of your family, to keep everything I tell you secret for now. Later, when you return to your own country, it will be imposed upon you to tell some of it and this you can do without compromising our safety. We will discuss those matters later. For now, I need your promise to hold what I tell you in profoundest confidence.”
Of course, I made a solemn and sacred vow to her, to keep her confidence. In part, I confess, I was motivated by an urgent need to know more about my circumstances. But even more, I was deeply desirous of the safety of these good people who had nurtured me after my escape from the house of Ali Abu’l-Hasan. Nothing could induce me to endanger any one of them, I assured Allia from my heart.
“Very well then,” she said, after I had sworn my oath. “I will tell you now about this community and why we are so secretive. Have a bit of this food before we begin. And a little tea.” She handed me a cup fashioned with wondrous delicacy. “I want you to be strong and alert, for what I am about to tell you is long and complex. I want my student awake for her history lesson!”
I smiled at her teasing and broke a large piece of bread for myself. For, in truth, more than my appetite for information was stimulated. After weeks of wan energy, I felt myself rebounding, hungering, and restless for action. I chewed my food with exaggeration and returned her humor, saying around a wad of bread and cheese in my cheek, “I vow to you to stuff myself, if you will only begin!”
Allia smiled, arranged her skirt about her legs in an artful way, and commenced.
§
Allia’s Story
As you know, Allia began, this community lives underground in a cave. What you do not know is why we choose so odd and difficult an existence or even how we effect this lifestyle. How we get food. How we do not fall ill without exposure to fresh air and sunshine. All this and more I will convey to you today.