The cab ride over to St. Albans took her into areas of the city not meant for tourist consumption. She saw the degradation and desolation that was part of any urban community.
All of London this morning, like Jessica herself, had been seeking answers, not only to the current rash of killings. Londoners, and Jessica, wanted spiritual answers that might in some way help them to cope with the hideousness and horror that human beings perpetrated in this world. She also felt a need to find some personal and spiritual guide here in the City, where she felt somewhat disconnected as the newcomer. Perhaps Luc Sante might be that guide, like the old shaman she had met in Hawaii several years ago, the one to whom she had gifted her cane so as to begin to walk on her own two feet after having been maimed by a brutal serial killer. Now she hurried to see another shaman with a cane, seeking answers. It felt right, like a circle, like his French grandmother's saying, fin de siecle, full-circle.
Paying the cabby and standing in the threatening world that seemed to come in around her here, she again noticed the worn, gray stone gargoyles atop little St. Albans Cathedral, each blended in with its surroundings, camouflaged against the gray granite niches they inhabited. Their eyes stared cold and vacant. Their talons and teeth bared against evil, for as evil as they appeared, their ferocious demeanor portended a far worse evil, that which gargoyles historically did battle with-Satan himself. At least that was one theory set forth for the existence of the stone dogs atop cathedrals across the globe. Another said that each gargoyle represented some hideous aspect of human nature, and that this aspect had been overwhelmed and overcome by the church that struggled against the beast within mankind, finally displaying the beast in its true demeanor and ugly passions as an abject lesson to all who stare at its countenance.
She recalled Luc Sante's young, good-looking protdge, Father Martin Strand, and how he had referred to Luc Sante's psychiatric practice as the work of a “trick cyclist,” and this made her smile anew. The two of them, old shaman and new, each in the robes of the church, seemed to have a strong bond and a fine working relationship.
When entering, Luc Sante was bellowing out, “I see no damnable reason whatsoever that I should move my practice from St. Albans simply because I am retiring from the pulpit!”
Jessica could not see with whom he tiraded, but she heard the high-pitched voice of the secretary reply, “You do not, Sire Luc Sante, own St. Albans. It belongs to the church, and if the church wants you out, then you're out! Simple as that. Are you looking for an order of eviction or excommunication, Father?”
“Hmmmph!” he blew out air. “You sdll have fight left in you, you sweet old darlin', don't you? Write to the Pope, if necessary. My patients will need me whether I am ministering the gospel or not!”
Jessica tried to make herself apparent. Clearing her throat, she stepped through the open door, calling out, “Dr. Luc Sante. I've made it back to St. Albans.”
“Jessica, can you imagine it?” He waved a letter overhead, one which had been mangled. “Apparently, some fool somewhere has complained of my using church property to do my psychiatric practice! And now, with my retirement looming, they're ordering me entirely out! Like last week's garbage, like stale fish! Out! Out on the street! Do I look as if I can afford an office on Picadilly Lane or Fleet Street? Besides, all my long history of files are housed here. The work is also done here, under the same roof where I have for so many years administered the sacraments to this congregation. By God, it's my being a Jesuit priest, it is. Some discriminating old bast-”
“Careful of your tongue, Father!” warned old Miss Eeadna. Jessica noticed that the lovely painting of the parish in the wood had been taken down from behind Father Luc Sante's desk. It lay now against his desk at Jessica's knees, apparently removed by Miss Eeadna, who had also begun boxing up books, in a befuddled effort to help out. She held a few of his precious books in her hands now. Jessica noticed that the parish painting had a metal emblem inscribed “Gloucester Parish.”
Luc Sante settled somewhat at the sound of Miss Eeadna's shaky voice, but he continued pacing and speaking. “And apparently the church is somehow made embarrassed by me, by my good works… Getting bad PR flack, as you Americans say.”
“I'm sorry they're giving you grief over it, Dr. Luc Sante,” she put in sincerely.
“I bloody intend to battle.”
The old secretary gasped at his cursing, and crossed herself. “And here in St. Albans,” she muttered and quaked.
“I see no reason why the church can't allow me the luxury of low overhead. And besides,” he continued, “people come more readily to my psychiatric practice for their spiritual needs than their intellectual needs. Wouldn't you agree?” he asked Jessica. “And it's convenient to the area people. Most of my clients live in the shadow of St. Albans. Don't you see the logic of it, Dr. Coran?”
“Yes, in fact, I do.” She felt somewhat unnerved by him, as though he had seen the emotional turmoil she had had brewing within her for so many years, and as if he were speaking about this and not his usual clientele at all.
Still, she genuinely liked the old minister. Not knowing why, she felt he, and his insights into her, were strangely comforting. Similar again to the ancient seer she'd met once in Hawaii who had “foretold” her future so accurately. Luc Sante didn't slow his pacing or his verbosity. “People find comfort in the aroma and aura of an old cathedral like St. Albans. It is a place to heal, and how many places are there left in this world to heal?”
Finally, he calmed when his ancient secretary promised to type a letter addressed to the Cardinal. She said, “I won't bother the Pope with such trifling problems, but those Cardinals, they haven't a great deal to do anyway.”
“And the Bishop. Write my old friend the Bishop, but before you become involved in the letter,” countered Luc Sante, “please, Miss Eeadna, bring in that tea and crumpets for my guest and me, in my inner office, please.”
“Yes, sir, as you like, but I may not get that letter finished by quitting time.”
“That will do. Miss Eeadna… Janet.”
Over tea and crumpets, nestled in Luc Sante's luxurious old office, surrounded by lamps and leather and warm browns of every hue, Jessica felt encircled by books that had enlightened a life. Jessica finally found the opening to ask him directly, “Dr. Luc Sante, what is your personal take on the crucifixion killings?”
“My personal takel Ahh, you Americans and your American English. You mean, what is my personal viewpoint, my feelings and thoughts on the matter?”
“You must have formulated some personal feelings about the killings, the mimicry of Christ's death each victim is put through.”
He pursed his lips, tapped a toe, shuffled a bit in his seat, and finally said, “Engaging case, really. Impassioned killer, well acquainted with the nature of evil.”
“So close to it that he, or they, have become it, you mean?”
“Excellent, yes.”
'Tell me more, please. Go on, Doctor.”
Instead of replying to this, he asked her how her trip to England had been thus far. Intentionally, the old man held her at bay, as if testing just how sincerely she wanted information from so old a warrior on a battlefield that had decimated so many before him. Jessica held the image and wondered what kept him so firmly on that field, how he kept his armor in one piece, how he kept his footing amid the gore and gruel and horror of it all: all he saw as both minister and psychotherapist; all he had chronicled of depression, mania, madness, murder, and mayhem done in the name of Christ and God and church as it filtered through twisted minds. Still, like a gothic warrior with shield and sword in hand, stood the white-bearded, white-headed old soldier. How? She wondered if she could be so strong at his age.
He repeated his first question and added, “So, how do you find England? London in particular?”
She sensed she had to play his game. “Is the weather always so… dreary?”
Luc Sante laughed heartily. “No, not always, but w
hen C. S. Lewis depicted hell, he described it as a gray British Midlands city.” He again laughed and added, “A terrible dreariness indeed.”
Jessica knew of the theory that weather patterns-especially weather that sits atop a region for long periods of time, as when the sun fails to show for three and four weeks at a time-caused depression, irritability, some forms of physical illness, and some forms of violence, generally domestic violence.
“Are you saying that whoever did these killings is perhaps bored with life as it is, bored with the prevailing winds?”
“Perhaps. More importantly, evil takes as many disguises as a Shakespearean villain, so…”
“So, I'm to draw my own conclusions…”
“Despite their pretense, the evil among us are the most insane of all. Evil is the ultimate disease. The stage upon which evil struts, my dear Dr. Coran, may be as brilliantly lit as, say, your Las Vegas with all its pretense and glitter and tasteless neon lights, all designed to hide C. S. Lewis's depiction-the very same terrible dreariness that is our lives.”
“I'm not sure I follow what this has to do with-”
He pushed on. “Imagine a hell in which people mindlessly and forever yank at your one-armed bandits forever and ever and ever and ever on, all below the colored spotlights of a Siegfried and Roy production, while their children, infants to teenagers, mill about the casinos at two and three in the morning, sleeping in the lobbies, waiting for Mommy's and Daddy's addictions to abate.”
“That would indeed be hell.”
Miss Eeadna entered with tea and crumpets laid out on a silver tray. She silently and expertly served them, accepting Jessica's thank-you with a curt nod and smile before leaving, a ghostlike figure, Jessica thought.
After sipping her tea, Jessica asked, “So, you've been to Vegas?”
“I had the questionable pleasure, yes.”
“I came away with sickening feelings myself.”
“As I said, evil comes to all lands, in all lives in one form or fashion or another. To deny evil is to deny breath, life, beauty, its opposites.”
“Are you saying that Satan is crucifying people here in London?”
“In the broadest possible interpretation… yes. And if not he, then Christ.”
“Christ? Really?”
“There is a war going on in cosmic spheres of which we have no control or understanding.”
“Ahhh, I see, and Satan oft masquerades as Christ, does he?”
“You've read my book closely. Was it not Satan disguised as Christ who prodded the Grand Inquisitor to create the infamous Inquisition? Was not Hitler a guise for Satan purporting to be the voice of God?”
“And, of course, he can take the form of a serial killer,” she added. “One who thinks himself doing the work of Christ?”
“Precisely.” He settled back in his chair with his tea and took several long sips, the steam rising to his eyes.
“Evil is grandiose,” she muttered, tasting of the pastry in her hand, watching helplessly as the sugar-dust sprayed her lap.
“It, evil that is, likes to think so; it likes to think big.”
Jessica had long believed that evil and Satanic behavior originated within mankind alongside superstition, fear, ignorance, cruelty, and the like, and not from some supernatural force. Father Luc Sante apparently believed in a living, breathing Satan that infused evil into humanity. Perhaps the two nouons were not mutually exclusive.
Father Luc Sante, his eyes going to one side, his body language telling of fatigue, added, “But most times, it fails, and it embodies or insinuates itself into quite ordinary people in quite ordinary circumstances as well. So ordinary, in fact, that it goes by unnodced and unheralded. Not all evildoers can be a Hitler, certainly no assassin has reached his level.”
“So evil comes on many planes?”
“Yes. You have read the book, haven't you?”
She smiled. “Approximately two-thirds through.”
“I'm impressed. Most people don't get that far! But getdng back to your question, you want to ask this: Are serial killers manifestations of him, of Satan? Are spree killers him? Are mass murderers, bombers like your McVeigh and your Unabomber, are they manifestations of the same it-the Evil One?”
“Yes, good question.”
“Aren't serial killers just that in the end, little men with little identities, whom no one thought to fear, whom no one recognized as pure and primal evil? Aren't they Satan gone undetected among us? And yet they display all the signs of the Evil Thing which so oft comes on little cat's feet, silent in the night, not so loud or grand a thing as a Ghengis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or Hitler.”
“I can't argue with you there,” replied Jessica, thinking how true Father Luc Sante's words were. Quoting from Luc Sante's book, she said, “ 'And what are we to do with evil when their masquerade of sanity is so damnably successful, their destructiveness so… so…”
“
“Bloody normal,” he finished for her.
“Exactly.”
“They take on the roles society provides-the evil elves of Satan become the fathers, the mothers, the providers, the loving caretakers for the world to be lulled into a sense of faith in them before they strike. Like the faith we all put in a uniformed security guard, and yet half a dozen killers in as many years have worked at one time or another as security guards.”
She thought of the helpful young security guard at Scotland Yard that morning. The thought he might be the Crucifier as well as anyone flitted through her mind. “So, relating this to the Crucifier…?” she asked.
He stopped to again sip at his tea, the tinkling of the chinaware a counterpoint to their conversation. “Whoever is doing these killings, he's grown up as a twisted soul, but also as a well-trusted soul. Mark my words…”
She gulped her tea, thinking deeply about what his words entailed. A twisted monster whom the community at large believed in, put their faith in, trusted wholly and completely. “What do we do then, Father?”
He sighed heavily, putting his tea and half finished crumpet aside, the noise he now made a staccato aberration of the earlier tinkling sounds. “First we must stop buying into the masquerade, allowing ourselves to be so easily deceived by the pretense. Question is, can we do that?”
She raised her shoulders. “Can we?”
“Will we ever learn to detect the pretense of the cunning and clever? Of the evil among us?”
“In your book, if I've interpreted correctly,” she began, “you're of the opinion that although evil is antilife, it is itself a form of life.”
“Precisely. A form of life that must itself be destroyed, but in the destroying of that life”-and here he held up an accusatory finger-”evil though it may be, we destroy something of ourselves in the destroying of it.”
She bit her lower lip and then replied, “I've heard that argument.”
“As someone who has taken life, don't you agree?”
“I don't kill for sport.”
“No, only as your means of livelihood?”
She grimaced.
“I don't mean to pick on you, Jessica, but don't we all temper our own evil with words of justification, even denial? Society does so when it executes one of its members. And for the brief moment the switch is thrown, and people feel safe, insanely so, in their homes at night. When in fact, in your country and this, a minuscule percentage of death-row inmates are actually put to death, and most men on death-row are far safer there than in the neighborhoods where they once lived.”
She had to nod in agreement to this fact. “And if we sane intellectuals can justify a killing… If we can justify a killing, it makes it all right in our soul of souls. Apparently, that is what the fellow this morning's newspapers are calling the Crude Crucifier has done.”
“Crude now is he?” Luc Sante smiled.
For Jessica, Luc Sante's words on the nature of evil brought back images of the fiery end of the madman she'd chased just the year before, a maniac who had h
ad frequent conversations with Satan. Jessica told Luc Sante the story, finishing with, “Satan was his justification for murder,” she explained. “Satan spoke to him, told him to kill nine people, the ninth was supposed to be me.”
“Apparently he missed his mark.”
All of the conversation led to a supposition in Jessica's mind, one which she now shared with Luc Sante. “Okay, suppose our killer here in London is hearing voices, too, but not Satan's voice. No… Rather, he's hearing Christ's voice. What if he's following some prescription laid down by the voice in his head, and the voice is that of Christ so far as he is concerned?”
“Imagine the power of such a voice if one believed wholly in it,” replied Luc Sante when a knock preceded young Martin Strand's peeking through the door, asking if Father Luc Sante would excuse his rudeness. “I have those books you wanted, sir.” Strand stepped through and put four books on the old man's desk. “Is there anything else I can get you before I leave?”
“Why don't we ask Strand?” Luc Sante replied to Jessica. “Strand, sit a moment. Listen to this.”
Strand was then subjected to Father Luc Sante's wilting scrutiny. “Martin, my boy,” the older priest began, “do you suppose that this killer who is crucifying people in our city, do you suppose that he may be listening to some prescriptions from God or Christ? Or that he thinks himself Christ, and is in an effort to decipher how to reinvigorate himself in order to make a second appearance before us all, to create his own Second Coming?” Luc Sante laughed at his own irreligious remarks, while Strand rocked a bit nervously in his leather chair, feeling doubly awkward at the old minister's words.
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