The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  “Bathsheba gave birth to a boy, who quickly fell ill,” my husband continued. Through round, tortoise-shell glasses, he peered through the shafts of church-light the color of my old hymnal. He looked out over the congregants, above our sons and me, in search of Vivian Roberts.

  I knew that because I knew my husband. Typical of him to reach out to a parishioner in need. Poor Vivian Roberts, whose own spouse of thirty years recently left her for a much younger woman—his secretary, according to reports. Vivian, who, after services, waited at the back of the line so that Nathan could take her hands in his and ask about her wellbeing, about the state of her children, and about whether he could be of any help. “May the Lord give you strength,” he blessed her.

  Here’s another reason why I loved our church. While others bent God to their own preferences, remade Him in their own mortal image, we stood stalwart. Not every human weakness was sanctified, not every deviation affirmed. Adulterer, philanderer—there is no good word for a man who violates his vows. Betrayal still means disbelief, according to the Reverend Dr. Philpot. Infidelity breeds infidels.

  Each Sunday after receiving Nathan’s blessing, Vivian Roberts would be surrounded on the lawn. Person after kind-hearted person approached and hugged her, invited her for brunch. I embraced her, too. Plain, buck-toothed Vivian, in a worsted dress that her mother probably wore, reveled in the solace. Visibly, she glowed.

  “King David prayed for that baby,” preached Nathan Philpot. “He wept and fasted for days. In the end, though, his prayers went unanswered. The infant’s death, he understood, was God’s punishment for faithlessness. For his iniquity. Poor, broken David.”

  The congregation grew hushed, ashamed for the ancient Israelite but moved by Nathan’s sympathy for him. For even sinners deserve our mercy, he always said, and to be welcomed back to the fold. Yet Vivian Robert’s ex was not welcomed. Whatever-his-name-was never dared to soil our sacred space, not since his transgression, and even if he did, certainly he’d be shunned.

  Nathan paused to remove and wipe his glasses, revealing the full gentleness of his eyes, stained-glass blue and backlit. His lifted a glass of water and sipped. I couldn’t help but notice his fingers, long and delicate yet steadfast—a scholar’s fingers, a saint’s. Those same fingers swept sandy strands from his forehead and then spread out firmly on the pulpit.

  “The Lord in his infinite grace forgave David. He forgave Bathsheba, too. And the two of them went on to wed and have another son, Solomon, author of the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, the wisest king of all.”

  I glanced over at our sons. Timothy had his father’s tender manner, his pale but luminous complexion, and his caring for all things alive. Abandoned chicks, stray kittens, and puppies—Lord, the creatures I’d find under his bed. And Luke, studious Luke, knew Scripture better than any of us. God willing, he will make an inspiring pastor.

  Back then, the two teenaged boys were, like me, content just to admire their father. And I was proud of them as well, the products of that early time in our marriage when I stared at Nathan with more urgent feelings. Those times passed, though. Quoting Corinthians, Nathan explained why we must no longer indulge. Our purpose on earth is to gain redemption not approval, he reminded me, to seek, however painfully, the truth.

  “King Solomon who never once cheated on his wife because, friends, he had a thousand of them!”

  The congregation laughed, uneasily at first and then uproariously. Their minister’s razor-sharp humor, another reason for the church’s popularity, could slice them at any moment. I laughed, too, and clapped my hands with delight. I was clapping still when Nathan’s voice changed suddenly, grew whispery and still.

  “Solomon who, according to Matthew chapter 1, verse 6, was the direct forefather of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

  Someone somewhere shouted “Amen!” A visitor from another church, I supposed, where they do such things.

  But Nathan just smiled and repeated, “Amen, indeed, for when asked whether a woman caught in adultery should be put to death, Jesus says, ‘may he who is without guilt cast the first stone.’”

  He stopped again and removed his glasses, not to clean them this time but to lay them flat on the pulpit. He stared at the half-emptied glass of water but left it unsipped. His point, I think, was meant for Vivian Roberts or, rather, for Vivian’s ex. Yet then his gaze rose above the heads of his wife and children and beyond where Vivian usually sat. It fixed on the church’s farthest reaches, on a person I imagined recoiling there.

  “I come here today to lay down a stone. A stone that I have carried all my life but which I can no longer bear. Before you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, I place that rock.”

  The congregation, even the church itself, went silent, so much so that I thought I heard its old foundations creak. No one understood what the Reverend Philpot was talking about or what that rock could be. My feelings were also confused. Anxiety mixed with curiosity and fear as I awaited my husband’s next words.

  “When growing up in a little farming town and, later, at seminary, there were words that the boys used to joke about. Fairy, fag, queer. My worst nightmare was that someday those same words would be flung at me. Hell, with all of its fires and agonies, was preferable, I believed.

  “But today, finally, I am putting that nightmare to rest. Today, from this pulpit in this, our hallowed church, I am declaring that I can no longer lead a double life. I can no longer lie. Seeking redemption, I must publicly confess that I, your pastor, am gay.”

  Nathan, still squinting at the rear of the church, nodded at someone and smiled. Then he gazed down at us. “My family will always remain my family,” he said, “cherished and beloved. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any embarrassment or pain. My only hope is that you can find it in your hearts to accept me as I now confess myself to be.” Benevolently, he beamed at the congregation. “Forgive me, all, of you, if, by coming out in this way, I have let you down or caused you distress. Have faith in the Lord and have mercy, I beg you, on me.”

  No one stirred. No one even breathed, it felt. The organ which, at the end of sermons, traditionally thundered “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” stood mute. In the church-light, even the dust-motes hung motionless.

  Later, I tried to remember who among the worshipers—Carl Wathney, perhaps—was the first to stand up in his pew. Who was the first to stride solemnly up to the pulpit? Soon, though, everyone ascended, even Luke and Timothy, beguiled.

  They surrounded Nathan and locked him in their arms. They stroked his robe, his hair, his hands, and shed real tears of acceptance. The organ erupted into Bach.

  Only I remained seated. Alone, uncomforted, clutching the old hymnal to my throat. No one approached to salve my humiliation, to commiserate with a woman betrayed. Vivian Roberts walked past me without notice. She embraced my husband, praised his courage, and wished him the Lord’s strength.

  The World of

  Antonia Flechette

  There were women who abhorred looking at themselves in the mirror each day, but she wasn’t one of them. From the morning’s first long study to the casual glances thereafter, the reflection deeply pleased and often elated her. The stately straight nose slightly cleft at the tip, and the cheeks that peeled away from it like Alpine saddles. The whorls of mahogany hair whisked aside by a back-wave of sculptured nails. The sapphire eyes, the slender neck often likened to a swan’s. But the clincher, she knew, was the mouth, red and pulpy as tropical fruit. That was the beauty that her audiences adored and desperate lovers craved. And it kept the paparazzi trailing her, like the pair in the street below.

  Dexterously, she applied her makeup. The base that she didn’t need but that her agent claimed muted flashbulbs. The liner and mascara in which the jewels of her pupils were set. The lips needed nothing but a dab of Vaseline. That alone sufficed to raise sighs as she passed, striding in her sequined Givenchy to the ball, in the mauve Brenton hat that shadowed all but her mouth. Posing for photographs, stretching
out fingers to her fans, she laughed and twirled La Pelegrina pearls that Enrico had bought her in Venice.

  “Povero Enrico,” she thought, one pallid hand on the wheel of his Spitfire and the other ineffectually pumping his lighter as they meandered the Amalfi Coast. Her laugher whisked off by the sea gusts that buoyed her hair behind the convertible. Poor Enrico, said to be Europe’s hottest director, with his ivory cigarette holder and shoulders draped in sharkskin, that ridiculous pencil moustache and fedora. A competent-enough lovemaker when he wasn’t in love but hopelessly self-conscious once he was. And how couldn’t he be, favored to look at, to touch, and, when the whim induced her, to possess that daydream of millions, the idol, Antonia Flechette?

  For Enrico knew that he was merely the latest in a procession of men, stunning, savvy, and rich, fated to be followed by others. A single dot on a lovers’ line rumored to include Stony McClean, swashbuckling stuntman both on and off set, and Jesse Calhoun, who’d shot more Injuns in Hollywood than all the real cowboys on the range. Oil moguls, bankers, and underworld figures, a Latin American president or two—all stepped up for their fleeting turn and, even if heartbroken, left grateful. For just to be briefly in the bed of the starlet slated to surpass Hepburn and Monroe, to lay their head on breasts that billowingly defied all lingerie, and to inhale the ambrosia of her sheets, was invariably blessing enough.

  Detaching herself from the mirror momentarily, she peered out of the windows and down at the street. Her palm waved gracefully, side-to-side, in the manner of Monaco’s princess. The paparazzi hoisted their cameras. Little better than guttersnipes, their sole hope was to get a shot of Antonia as she appeared in those matinee posters, in a tattered dress exposing a thigh and her head thrust back in passion. Or a glittery profile such as often appeared in Vogue or Look or one of those tell-all rags. But scant chance of snapping that, Antonia knew, through the twin tablet-shaped windows. At best they’d catch a chin or jawline, framed within the Ten Commandments.

  It wasn’t always like this, Antonia recalled as she dabbled Joy by Patou on her throat. A miracle, in fact, that it ever could happen at all, remembering the ramshackle house she grew up in, the drug-peddling brothers, her mother a shipwreck in a bottle. Yet it was the daughter, Henrietta, who was the curse of the Arowitcz family, the disgrace, at least according to her father.

  An air force man, a sergeant in charge of bombs, he frequently pummeled her. Not drunk, just kickass mean and furious at the luckless life Henrietta mirrored. No beauty, then, but beauty’s opposite: barrel-chested, plump, with formless features that seemed stuck to her face like mudballs. And defenseless against the blows he landed on her, the open hand or uncinched belt doubled into a strop that raised bright red streaks across her backside. She screamed, she howled, but no one heard her—not her brothers out pushing dope or her mother well into her second fifth. “Daddy,” she begged him, “Daddy,” she asked, “why?” But the answer was always identical. Another slap, a few more strappings, his face a contorted welt.

  Her only relief was the movies. A double feature for fifty cents, an afternoon spent far from pain in the company of Kim Novak and Eva Marie Saint. Or, for a dime, the latest issues of Confidential and Photoplay to be pored over in her room, devoured, until the pounding on the door resumed. Until the bomb sergeant burst in and once again unleashed.

  Finally, she decided to flee. In her hand-me-down housedress, with little more than a toothbrush in her pocket, she snuck out of that house one late summer night and vanished—so she imagined it—with the fireflies. The rest was a story of rebirth, excruciating as all births are, but also triumphant. The ruthless dieting, the laboring on her wardrobe and posture. She waitressed and cooked, modeled and bit-acted, as well as other odd-jobs never to be mentioned, but made enough money to remake herself. And then the break, a supporting role in a Roman extravaganza with the legendary Robert Sitwell as Caesar. The film put her name on every marquee and all the critics’ lips, her body in Sitwell’s bedroom. The studios took numbers to sign her.

  But Antonia did not like to think back to that and did her best to keep it her secret. As far as her fans were concerned, she was born to the Flechettes of Canada, renowned for their sable furs, raised in Manhattan but at home in the Marais, in Belgravia and the Riviera as well. She was always as she saw herself in the mirror today—crystal-eyed, juicy-mouthed, a confection, a dream, a goddess peeled off the screen and worshipped.

  A final glimpse. Pinching the lapels of her serge Nina Ricci jacket, retrieving her matching Gucci bag, Antonia smiled at herself and preened. Enrico would be waiting for her, chain-smoking in his Triumph and worried that she wouldn’t show up, that she’d left him for another director or heartthrob. That’s the way she liked to preserve them, uncertain, watching and longing as she leapt carefree across the gilded stones of her life.

  Perhaps she would keep him idling still while she posed for the two paparazzi. Why not give them the break even a deadbeat deserved? She waved again through the twin windows and turned on the gem-studded heels that made her already-majestic legs look monumental. That’s when the juggernaut struck.

  “Holy shit,” one of the sewer workers hollered.

  The second, chest-deep in a manhole, sounded louder. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ! Did you see that?”

  She hadn’t, clearly. The cement truck struck her full-on, without the faintest chance of survival. Now she lay in the middle of the street, in a torn, faded housedress, a frumpy old lady with steel wool for hair and a face no less disfigured by death.

  A cell phone lit up the hole. “I’m calling 911. See if she’s got any ID.”

  Searching her pockets produced a card from some outpatient service. “Too much blood, I can’t read it,” the worker complained. “Henrietta, something.”

  “Then see what she’s pointing at. Up there.”

  The dead woman was indeed pointing, smiling open-mawed at the top floor of a nearby tenement. Identical to all the others on the block except for a strange pair of windows. Vaguely bullet-shaped, sepulchral, the panes were thickly dusted. Still, squinting, the worker thought he saw something—a shadow, a ghost—but only for an instant. “My imagination,” he said out loud to the rising acclaim of sirens.

  The Curio Cabinet

  My cell phone rings on Monday night at 9:30, right as I’m admiring my collection. Scowling, I close the curio cabinet and turn down the recording of Macbeth—to my mind, Verdi’s best. The dispatcher, when I answer, briefly describes the victim and provides me with an address.

  Grabbing my jacket—it’s already chilly outside—I head for the door. But, typically, Punchau, my Inca Orchid, runs barking after me. I pause to rustle the chestnut crest of hair between her ears and assure her, with some confidence, that papa will be back soon. Only then do I hustle out the door and down three flights of dimly lit stairs to the granite front steps and the cobbled street in Inwood.

  The working-class neighborhood’s quiet this time of night. Dominican music faintly throbs. A whiff of that weird Cuban Chinese food. I get into the unmarked car and turn west from Staff Street onto Dyckman, past Fort Tryon and onto the Hudson Parkway. Lights flashing, I head south.

  Not far, to 103rd and Broadway, just above a bodega and the subway stop. Three precinct vehicles are already parked there, and the area’s taped off. A pair of plainclothesmen loiter outside. One greets me, “Hey, Birdman, how’s flying?” insolently using my nickname. Another laughs, “Great tan you got there. Been fishing?”

  “No,” I reply, “basking in your fucking light,” and push by them. Up two stories and into one of those Upper West Side apartments—long, narrow corridor leading to closet-like rooms—that used to be called a tenement and now rents for more than my pay. I haven’t even reached the scene and I can already smell it. Death. Sudden, brutal death.

  And, sure enough, fixed in the forensic lights, frozen in the photographer’s flashes, the body. The coroner updates me but shouldn’t waste his breath. I can see it all for
myself. Plump woman in her late forties, early fifties, stripped and pushed face-down onto the dining room floor. Perhaps violated—the autopsy will tell—but unquestionably stabbed multiple times in the back, neck, and buttocks. She lies with her face to the side and her arms flailed outward, making blood-angels.

  “Some job, huh Birdman?” a fat, balding detective sighs while he chews. He holds out a handful of peanuts. “Hungry?” he asks and nearly makes me leap.

  “Very funny, Desabbato,” I gasp. “You know where to shove those nuts.”

  Other detectives scour the apartment, gathering filaments with tweezers and depositing them into sealed plastic bags. But the chances they’ll find anything are nil. This makes six homicides in our district in the last year alone, all of them unsolved and seemingly unrelated. Different victims, surroundings, modes of murder—except for one similarity. There’s no DNA evidence, no finger or footprints, no threads or even a random human hair. No sign, even, of forced entry. The perpetrator’s too cautious, and too familiar with police work. Though I’m probably the only one on the force to admit it, the killer we’re after is serial.

  I look at my watch—10:14—and pull on elastic gloves. I don’t bother with the body and the dingy furniture around it, but instead slip into the kitchen. There’s a wooden knife rack on the counter and I pull out the biggest blade. Sure enough, bloody. I bag the weapon, pass it to a sergeant, and move on to the refrigerator.

  One can learn a lot from a refrigerator. Whether the victim was a vegetarian, for example, or an alcoholic. But the interior doesn’t interest me as much as the exterior which, thanks to magnets, tells me volumes.

  That’s how I discover the dead woman’s name, Freida Adams, and her occasional need for chiropody. There’s a monthly staff meeting where Freida worked, in the social services division of St. John’s Cathedral, and a charity bake sale in the park. Not many Adams’s sending Aunt Freida Christmas cards or family photos, though, and she apparently traveled alone. And Freida liked to travel. To Charleston and Sedona, Hialeah and New Orleans. Each destination has its own magnet, many shaped like the state or island, each enameled with coconut trees and beaches, racehorses and jazz bands. Freida prided herself on those magnets, arranging them on the freezer door in a rectangle so neat I could clearly see that one of them—vaguely fist-shaped—was missing.