“We have been noticin’ more than a few arrests.”
Jordan groaned. “So the mayor’s on a clean-up drive. Happens every couple of years. What do you want from me?”
“So how come you all can spare men to bust my people and the none of you can find old Straight Arrow Nicholas?”
They were almost at the elevators.
“Come off it, Zero. What do you want from my life?”
Zero laughed in Jordan’s ear. “Fairness. Let’s say equal liberty for equal graft.”
“I don’t set the going rates.”
“So you say.”
Jordan was facing the closed elevator. “I’m riding this thing alone.”
“Course you are.” Zero pushed the button. “You know, we’ve never been sure if there is a Mr. Who speaking through you, or if it’s just yourself playin’ yo-yo. Now, one way to learn would be to off you.”
“You’re too smart to shoot a cop.”
The elevator door slid open.
“Good night, Zero.”
Jordan stepped inside the elevator. He heard a small, sharp click. He realized his mistake. Zero had been holding a switchblade. Not a gun. But it was too late. The blade entered Jordan’s back. He groaned, choked, and started to fall forward.
Zero grabbed the detective and held him the few moments it took for the man to die. Zero had known just where to shove the knife so death would be quick and the blood would rush forward and up through Jordan’s mouth, preventing a final scream.
The elevator door began to close. Zero leaned against it. Once Jordan was dead, he dropped the corpse into the car and pressed the Hold button.
Zero stripped off his long raccoon coat. Beneath it he wore cheap coveralls. From the pockets he took plastic gloves and plastic boots to protect his suede shoes.
He entered the elevator and went to work. He quickly, brutally, slashed the body. He was careful not to step in the pooling blood. He was sorry the need for hurry prevented him from lingering. He dipped a gloved hand into a pool and in huge red letters scrawled on a wall—GOD.
FOURTEEN
The official word from the department was that Detective Simon Jordan had been murdered by a person or persons unknown. Enough nonofficial people saw and talked about the bloody word on the elevator wall to create widening interest in the “Voice of God” murders. Rumors began to flood the city. That there had been other murders the police were covering up. That Peter Nicholas had been silenced. Rumors feed on themselves. By the time of Jordan’s funeral, the police had begun to ready themselves for a possible citywide panic.
There was a bit of the circus in Jordan’s funeral. Hundreds of people who could not have known the man turned out to mourn him. There were TV cameras. There were reporters from the largest daily to the smallest monthly magazine. In the midst of the services a bedraggled, bearded man stood and held up a placard reading: THERE’S STILL TIME, BROTHER. There were groups passing out leaflets and soliciting money; there was a group giving money away. There were pigtailed representatives from Hare Krishna, scraggly-haired Jesus freaks, and a group of clean-cut, dulled-eyed youths rumored to be from Reverend Moon.
The minister who conducted the services did nothing to help squelch the growing panic.
“Lord, we do not understand why you have chosen to inflict this upon your children. If there is an answer—if there is a reason—will you reveal it to us before there is more suffering?”
Deputy Commissioner Hendriks realized the services were near an end. Hoping to avoid a confrontation with the press, he began to squeeze his way through the crowd. He suddenly found himself face to face with Peter Nicholas.
Hendriks whispered, “You’ve some nerve coming here.”
Nicholas whispered back, “This isn’t like the others.”
“You’re sick, Nicholas. You need help.”
“Jordan’s murder is not like the others.”
“Not one was like any other one. But you have gone and damn near got this city in a panic.”
“It is needed. The people need to examine their faith.”
Hendriks fought against raising his voice. “You come with me now,” he rasped between clenched teeth. “Maybe we can put an end to this madness.”
“I am going to get whoever killed Jordan.”
The mourners started singing a hymn. Their noise allowed Hendriks to speak more loudly, but the singers also began to move back and forth, back and forth, and Hendriks and Nicholas were continually jostled together.
“You’re no longer a cop, Nicholas. You’ll get nobody.”
“Jordan’s killer used God’s name. I can’t allow that.”
“You come now or I’ll have you arrested. There are cops all around you.”
“Also the press. You don’t want a scene.”
“Have you no responsibility for what you’re doing?”
Nicholas began to move back into the crowd.
“Where are you going, Nicholas?”
“To wait.”
“What?”
“To wait,” Nicholas was lost in the crowd. His final words were called above the singing mourners: “To wait for Him.”
FIFTEEN
Not all New Yorkers bought the “Voice of God” stories. The majority, in fact, did not. But in a city of eight million people that small percentage known as the fringe is enough to set a panic into motion. That ten percent of fools and paranoids, zealots who will promote anything that touches upon their tangential beliefs, the walking, wounded neurotics who during the best of times are barely able to get out of bed in the mornings and make it to work, the street thugs who use fear as a means of gaining power over the uneducated and the miseducated.
The killings that followed the murder of Detective Simon Jordan were not uncommon for a large metropolis. A teenaged boy in Brooklyn Heights shot his father following an argument at the dinner table. An unemployed laborer in Spanish Harlem took an ax to his wife and her lover when he found them in bed together. A young woman suffering postnatal depression threw her baby, then herself off a tenement roof in Little Italy. A taxi driver raped and killed a passenger and left her body on a Central Park bench. Such deaths occur with such frequency that often they don’t even make the papers. But ten percent of the population saw the “Voice of God” behind these deaths. And rumors feed upon themselves. Within three weeks the city was crippled. And the panic spread to New Jersey and Connecticut.
Vast numbers of people stayed home from their jobs. The sick calls at such essential services as the post office and sanitation department became so heavy that the governor was said to be considering sending in the National Guard.
Parents kept their children indoors.
Beaches, parks, and recreation areas were all but deserted. Movie and legitimate theaters were virtually empty.
The department of public health reported a record number of mental breakdowns and suicides.
Curiously, the crime rate dropped by 14 percent. The police department tried to emphasize this low rate in hopes of curtailing the panic. Most of the public, though, refused to believe the department’s statistics.
At the same time, churches, synagogues, and other places of worship were mobbed in what clergymen described as the largest religious revival in the history of America.
And on every Broadway street corner there could be found a ragtag man, itching from lice and filth, an American flag in his hand and a Bible under his arm. Such men had never been an uncommon sight at Manhattan intersections, but now people were listening to them.
“The Bible has written that the world will perish in flames! The time is now! The human race has sinned mightily and it must be destroyed. There is no redemption! No salvation!”
Emile Lukas eagerly greeted each day’s latest rumor. The madness he believed inherent in man was showing itself. Privately, Lukas thought that soon the religious revival would flip-flop, that those he termed the Disciples of Rot would see the folly of their prayers and hymns, and in an attempt
to maintain Life would rip down the churches of their God of Death. But he kept a middle line with his columns. Egging people on but always referring to the “Voice of God” as being the theory of an obsessed cop. And he ended each article with the question all the city was asking:
“Where is Peter Nicholas?”
Nicholas still lived in the cheap hotel. He did little except listen to the police band on his radio. Sometimes when he stepped out for a bite to eat he would pick up a newspaper, which he read front page to back less for information than as a means of filling time. He listened to the comings and goings of the prostitutes and he stared long hours out the window at the gaudy splash of the street. Often he neglected to turn on a light, either sitting in the single chair or lying back on the bed, his only illumination coming from the gold glow of the radio dial and the neon that spilled in from outside.
He knew the department had an all-points bulletin out for his arrest. He didn’t consider himself to be hiding out. He was waiting.
The mirror attached to the room’s old dresser was cracked and bits of its silvering had chipped away. Whenever he looked into the mirror, which he often caught himself doing, he saw a distorted image of himself. He shaved in front of the cracked mirror, using an electric shaver because the community bathroom down the hall was a place he avoided. For a time he applied makeup to his face before going out, as he feared his scars would make him too easily recognizable. About a week after Jordan’s funeral, he noticed an odd thing. The scars were beginning to disappear. By the end of three weeks his features were nearly as unmarked as they had been before Bernard Phillips’ wife had attacked him.
He now thought of Bernard Phillips as him. And he waited.
He began grooming himself more carefully. He bathed each day. But not in the community bathroom. Each morning he would fill a basin with warm water and stand naked before the mirror and sponge-bathe. As he dressed, he always wondered if today would be the day.
A bottle of brandy was kept on the dresser, but rarely did he take a drink. That short period when he’d depended on liquor for sleep and peace had passed. Too, he knew he must keep himself alert and ready.
He waited.
His gun, shield, and all identification were kept in the top drawer of the dresser. He went out with only a few dollars in his pockets, believing that if an officer should stop him he might be able to get away with pretending to be a derelict. Once, though, he took the gun with him to hold up a liquor store because he’d run out of cash.
He waited.
Casey sometimes ran through his thoughts. And Martha. He had come to think of the years he’d shared with Martha as not really a sharing. But with Casey—well, maybe when this was all over. He knew he couldn’t risk contacting her at this point.
He waited.
It was a lonely time. But he felt at peace and never questioned his wait.
One evening a woman’s screams and the noises of a struggle caused him to rush into the corridor. The black prostitute with the purple hair and blind eye was being slapped around by her customer. The john was a big, bullish man, his head stuck onto his shoulders like a mushroom cap, and his hands nearly as large as the face he was slapping.
Nicholas reacted more violently than he ever had in his life.
He grabbed the john by the hair and the belt. He pulled the man from the woman as easily as he would have lifted the tab off a can of beer. He smashed the man’s head into the wall. The huge man slumped to the floor like silly putty. Nicholas took another handful of hair and yanked the man up. He hit the man solid and felt the soft cartilage of a nose crush under his fist. He hit again, this time pushing soft lips into teeth. He dropped the man. As the man started crawling away, Nicholas sent him sprawling with a hard kick.
Despite the noise, no other doors opened along the corridor.
Nicholas watched the man crawl around the corner of the L-shaped corridor. Nicholas was only vaguely aware of the hooker thanking him, and praising him with the gushy, saccharine words of her trade. He trembled as he realized the violence he had used on the john.
“Sugar, you are just too much.”
Nicholas mumbled something to her. He started to pass her and return to his room, but she thrust her purse into his hands.
“Be a dear, sugar. Hold a sec.”
She examined herself in the mirror of a small compact, her one good eye squinting at her image, pushing the frazzled purple hair into place and touching up a rouge spot that didn’t match her black skin to the bruises the john had given her. She spoke with forced indignity as if this had been the first time she’d found herself roughed up.
“That bug-headed fruit. Nobody’s gettin’ laid because of this here God scare an’ I gotta get stuck with King Kong. I mean sugar, you are a lifesaver, an absolute lifesaver. Why, honey! You got the shaky-wakey’s. Don’t tell me ole King Kong did that to you?”
“I’ve never beaten anybody that brutally.”
She reached into the purse he still held and pulled out a lipstick.
“Such a dear. Maybe’s I can do a little somethin’ for you.”
The lipstick had a faintly greenish tinge. Nicholas watched her apply it. His legs felt weak, and nausea wormed through his stomach. He looked at her blind eye, at the pale and viscous pupil, with a horrid fascination.
“Now doan be gettin’ all flustered, sugar. What you did oughta entitle you to somethin’.”
“No, I have to . . .”
“Strictly freebie. Shit! I ain’t gonna be able to hustle nobody tonight anyway. You’d think people’d want some pussy with all the God scare shit, but no way. I’ll give you a good time.”
She reached into the purse again, and found a tissue which she used to blot her freshly painted lips. Once more she fluffed her purple hair. She cocked her head in what she must have thought a provocative pose and smiled, showing him the black gums of her bad teeth.
“You’re sooo cute. You used to have all them scars an’ now you’re just so pretty. How comes you sit in that room of yours so all the time? You waitin’ for a man?”
Something slid through him, like a very mild electric shock, no stronger than the effect of rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way.
He said, “I’m waiting.”
“You got a big connection comin’ in?”
He knew she was talking about drugs, but he nodded in answer.
She took back her purse, grabbed his arm, gave him another smile.
“Ooooh, honey, you got a muscle on you. I just bet you could make so many girls happy. Why I bet you could handle the meanest dude in town.”
And he grinned. He knew she was going to tell him something he needed to know.
“Who is the meanest dude in town?”
“Zero.”
“Has a chauffeur-driven Continental?”
“Tha’s him. A pimp pusher Mafia creep. He ’n Hitler be brothers if Zero weren’t black. Controls all uptown and this here part o’ West Side. He ain’t my pimp. ’Cept he makes me an’ all the single girls pay out pertection. You maybe noticed, sugar, I only got one eye left. I wants to keep it.”
“How do I find him?”
“You just ask around the street. He’ll find you. Only he ain’t around these days. Trouble is, when he gets back he is goin’ to be wantin’ bread for all the time he was away.”
“Where did he go?”
She giggled. “Now, sugar! You think he tells me?”
“Why did he split?”
“Now jus’ why should I be givin’ you all this inside dish?”
“Because I can help you.”
“I never could resist a pretty man. Well, now, you know all this God scare bit? Zero’s responsible for the whole scene. The other guy. That cop Nicholas whose name is always in the paper. I got a friend who knows for a stone fact Nicholas is locked up in the nut ward. He’s just a nutty cop. Zero, so’s I hear it, was lookin’ to off some other fat cop an’ he used the God bit as a means.”
“Thanks f
or the information.”
“What say we get down to topics an’ trade some of this sweet pussy of mine for some of your good strong pertection?”
Nicholas shook his head no.
“I’ll take care of this Zero for you. But, sweetheart, a lady like you is always going to have a Zero.”
“Ain’t it the fuckin’ truth.”
In the conference room of the third largest bank in the country, twelve wealthy and influential men had come together. The one who chaired the meeting—he was also chairman of the board of directors of the bank—was named Kirkland. He led them in prayer before opening their discussion.
“Gentlemen, it has always been speculated what would happen if Jesus Christ ever returned to earth.”
A man named Richards spoke: “I am firmly convinced that the person we have each been in touch with is all he claims to be.”
Kirkland stated, “I’m inclined to agree. But what does he want from us?”
The one named Hastings said, “For the moment, only our faith.”
Hirsch, the only man who seemed to have any doubts, said, “But why does he have to precipitate such a bloodbath?”
Logan answered, “The Lord has always disciplined his people through fear and destruction. Take for instance, the flood and Noah and the Ark. Or Sodom and Gomorrah. Or the Egyptians. He had to rain fire and pestilence on the Egyptians before the Jews were allowed to leave their bondage.”
Hirsch remained doubtful. “I wonder if the cost isn’t too high. I don’t know whether I’m a man who should be a part of this.”
Kirkland frowned. “If you try to betray him, Hirsch, none of us will be able to answer for your safety.”
For a moment there was much tension in the room. Then Logan spoke: “Gentlemen, we must be reasonable. Certainly a little time will give us the answers we don’t yet have. As for now, he’s made only one request of us. That policeman. Nicholas. He seems to threaten him. He wishes us to convince this man to join us.”
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