*
It was a grim scene that confronted Hope. Hawkshaw’s house had been savagely ransacked. It was as though a tornado had entered through the front door and departed out the back - and had brought with it a door jimmy.
Hope could see the devastation plainly enough from the porch but no clues as to whether this was the kind of tornado that carried a badge or perhaps was kin of the Young brothers. Better to have a gun in hand before attempting to investigate that particular question any the more deeply. Hope had held back one gun in reserve: an M191 that he had buried in a biscuit tin beside a large tulip tree in a back corner of the garden. He sprung over the porch railing, landing clumsily in a bed of Azaleas and dug up the gun like he were pulling weeds. He chastened himself against being too quick on the trigger. Although he didn’t know too many cops with the energy to tear apart a house the way this one had, there was still always a possibility, and unless they had a gun to Hawkshaw’s head he didn’t want to start taking shots at them. With nothing concrete to tie him to bank robberies or shoot outs, there was a chance of talking his way out of trouble. Not that the perpetrators of this mess seemed in any particular mood for a chat.
Hope edged cautiously into the house. He found that nothing was as it had been. Chairs and tables were upturned, cupboards stripped of their shelves and all the contents dumped unceremoniously on the floors. Hope’s room had received particular attention. More demolished than ransacked, the bed was now just pieces of timber and his suitcase was in strips smaller than what it had been packing. And it seemed what they had been looking for had started off being big and gotten smaller and smaller until it was something like a pin - Hope supposed life had a knack of being like that. He checked every room until satisfied there was no one left in the house and then he turned his attention to any traces of blood, anything to indicate a struggle with something other than the furniture. A careful sweep of each room revealed nothing. So, there was a chance the raiders had not gotten Hawkshaw. Hope lifted the phone to find the number he had directed her to still under it. The scrap of paper had shifted slightly from where he had left it - the number may have been called or a draft might have got to it. He tried to place a call to it himself and let it ring while he considered what to do next. Hawkshaw might have made it away or she might have been taken. Did Hope regret giving her his real name? It made walking away less easy. But he had decided when he had told her that this time he would not be walking away.
He salvaged some clean clothes from the floor and changed into them stiff and sore. His shoulder wound ached most, though was wrapped too tightly to still be bleeding. He set about clearing the dining table: somewhere to sit and wait on the off-chance Hawkshaw might return. There was a clock ticking somewhere in amongst the wreckage on the floor: it was the sound of time passing and it was slow and mournful. Hope sought it out with his boot heel and stomped through the face. It was only then he took his seat.
31. ‘There is no herding a wolf.’
Hawkshaw’s bed had escaped the onslaught that decimated Hope’s own mattress; Hope slept there. He longed all the while for her to be there, to slip in between the sheets beside him, smelling fresh from a bath and silky smooth in a sheer night dress. There were moments in the darkness he was sure her breath was against his cheek. Each time he reached out for her, however, he found himself alone still within the hollow shell of Hawkshaw’s home. The dawn came along like quick drying cement to confirm the fact.
He had slept restlessly: the revolver that had started under his pillow was now wrapped in sheets around his ankles. He unwound himself and climbed onto his feet; he dressed in a loosely tailored black suit and assembled in its pockets his revolver, ammunition and money. He would breakfast at one of the diners in town and see what he could learn. People were always more generous with their confidences early in the morning, the pervading opinion seemingly being that gangsters were not out of bed earlier than midday. And in a small town like Sacksville tongues would likely be clucking. If Hawkshaw had been arrested by the police, her fellow locals would be talking about it. And if her name was not being mentioned, that would also be significant. Then it would be time to question the town’s resident gangsters: they might be the type that slept late, but they would be seeing a respectable hour this morning.
Hope splashed water onto his face to freshen himself up and only gave up when he had lost the sensation for it. He left the house with large strides, embarking on the walk into town with a nervous excitement that reminded him of his march toward the ring to face Hammer Coller; the feeling was much sharper now, however, for this fight was more real - and the more real a fight, the less rules there were. The stiffness in his muscles from the day before was not going away, but today felt like a day he would either win or lose. He made good time out onto the road to town. He wanted to hurry the journey along by catching a ride and turned sharply with the first car that came his way. It was a Ford sedan tearing along the road, seemingly edging his way. And he had not even made a gesture. Instead, in fact, he put his hand in his pocket with the M1911 pistol and waited. The car stopped with a squeal of brakes and a spray of dust. The driver leaned out the window. ‘You’d better get in, George.’
Hope’s eyes widened. It was Detective Warren Longworry. The detective was wearing his customary black suit and was gripping the steering wheel in tan leather driving gloves. The rings around his eyes suggested he had not slept in a while. He had not been shaving either. The eyes themselves, however, were wildly alive. A man with an agenda. A man to be reckoned with.
Hope walked around to the passenger side.
Longworry snarled as he got it. ‘Where were you going?’
‘Breakfast.’
‘Breakfast?’ Longworry stamped on the accelerator like he was squashing a bug. The car responded with speed. What soon came to interest Hope most was how well Longworry seemed to know the roads: he was leaning into bends before they had even presented themselves. And the roads he turned into only ever got narrower.
‘Were you looking for me?’ Hope finally murmured.
‘Would I be in tick and flea county for anything else?’ Longworry added on an afterthought, ‘Perhaps, you’re more concerned with who we’ve found rather than who we’re looking for. You must be pretty sweet on that girl to have charged in on the Young brothers like that.’ He glared Hope’s way. ‘One of the brothers managed to live long enough without his stomach to tell us a few things. He didn’t have a name but he gave a description.’ He glanced out of the road and was back with Hope. ‘He was accurate enough that you would not want to go walking out there.’ He scrunched up his face disdainfully. ‘When a mug like that is dying, he thinks the whole world becomes his priest, ready to absolve him. The fact is I would have shot him myself if the hole in him hadn’t been so big the bullet would have just passed straight through.’
Hope glared suspiciously. ‘Are you saying you were in town before he had even described me?’
‘I might be saying that,’ replied Longworry, chewing the words with his back molars. ‘Just wait till I make this turn.’
He made the turn in an eruption of dust and pulled into a gate-less driveway just beyond the corner. The driveway was long and all but lost to the overgrown weeds. It didn’t matter to Longworry, who only had eyes for the barn at the end of it. He tooted the horn in a flurry. The barn door swung open as though it were on fresh oil. The rest of the Buster and the Treatment stepped out brandishing shotguns. They were pointing them at Hope in his passenger seat and Longworry drove close so that they were all but poking him in the eyes.
‘I’ve been looking for you longer than you might think,’ said Longworry. ‘And this is my lucky day.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Hope intensely. ‘Pointing guns at me has never been lucky in the past.’
His door was opened for him and he was manhandled out and into the barn. No one was using his name now. He had become just another mug who would find out the hard way ho
w the Buster and the Treatment had earned their name.
He was stripped of his jacket and gun and forced into an old wooden chair; the five cops were out with their handcuffs and were pushing at each other to get at Hope’s limbs. By the time they were done, Hope was held fast.
‘No volts in this chair,’ snapped Stevens as he stepped back. ‘That day is still coming.’
The barn was dark, decrepit and musty. Most the light seemed to be coming up from the gaps in the floorboards, which were invitingly wide enough for the chair to be burrowing into them in its own attempted escape.
Their hands having emptied of shotguns and handcuffs, the Buster and the Treatment stood over Hope. Their gazes were disdainful.
‘This joint hasn’t been used since the bootlegging days,’ said Longworry levelly. ‘A couple of Germans, thought back then whiskey was a refined way of saying poison. They made a fine drop too. Compared with a lot of the motor oils being labelled as whiskey at any rate. They didn’t last very long all the same. The danger is not in making something but in trying to sell it. Keep that in mind when you start on with stories about being a gentleman and not a bandit. Anyway, it won’t stop the boys beating you up. They’ve been waiting too long for the opportunity. If you find yourself tiring of the taste of your own teeth, you might try telling them where you’ve stashed your criminal earnings. The boys are only human, after all.’
Longworry stepped away and signaled to his men and the beating upon Hope began. The fists struck in cool, precise, bone-crunchingly powerful blows. Hope kept himself calm and his body supple. In torture it was monks not soldiers that best served as inspiration. Not that what was being dished out was so bad. It was hurting him and it might even be hurting the hands of the cops laying into him, but Hope got the feeling they were being relatively gentle. Tenderising him and nothing more. And when Longworry whistled for pause, the strikers were not exactly having to pull each other away. Nonetheless, Hope’s face was left throbbing and bleeding and he was sucking on his bloody lip like it were a lozenge.
‘Was that good for you?’ murmured Longworry stepping back to the front. ‘I’ve seen the boys hit harder. Maybe you’ve tired them out with all those juicy targets you’ve been gifting us with through your tips. The boys have developed hard calluses on their knuckles from all the softening up they have been doing.’
Hope spat out a mouthful of blood. ‘Whatever you say, partner.’
‘Partner? You bring that up? That’s the part I find particularly distasteful. Why did I have to embrace you as a partner to get to this? Well, the truth will never be borne out in a classroom, so here’s your chance.’ Longworry chuckled menacingly. ‘Actually, we want you to hear this whether you would like to or not. Why else the handcuffs? We didn’t need them to beat the crap out of you. Getting someone to listen is a lot harder.’
Hope tugged on the handcuffs as though in a despairing effort to either snap them or the chair. ‘I’d rather the beating.’
Longworry backhanded him hard across the face. ‘You’ve been robbing banks a good fifteen years, but by the time I had put together enough pieces to finally be certain it was you, you had already made yourself enough money that you could pass yourself off as a gentleman.’ He grabbed Hope by the hair and shook him. ‘A member of exclusive clubs and philanthropic societies and the possessor of powerful friends.’ His grip tightened as though about to rip out a chunk of hair; he desisted, however, and wiped his hand repulsively on Hope’s shirt. ‘So, you’re the reason I got demoted to a desk for two years. Buried alive under paperwork. But I couldn’t let it go even then. A bank robber I can’t pin to his crimes is still a bank robber I should lock away. For every crime sheet I had to type up I thought how I could pin it on you. I even approached the chief with some of my better ideas. Not that he would have anything to do with it. He insisted a man like me didn’t have the capital to reproach a gentleman of New York. I wanted to put him down for that but I let it slide. That was tough. You continued robbing banks across America to support your lavish lifestyle and I was left languishing in the HQ basement. You had won. But the New York Police Department has its own form of a gentleman’s club - it takes the form of a poker table - and I used to take great pleasure in blowing a weekly wage that I took no pleasure in earning, and that was where I made my own friend in high places - someone willing to listen.’ He smirked. ‘It was, if you haven’t guessed, Assistant District Attorney Errol Jones. He was intrigued about you. He was the only officer of the law who would entertain the possibility I was right about you. He befriended you at the club to get a closer look at you. That convinced him only further. He thought it a worthy endeavor to try and get the better of you. So, he made things happen. He took my ideas and developed them into a masterpiece. The way a true gentleman of New York can. And now the tide has come in and you have lost. It’s your turn to wallow in a dark basement room. Yours will come with steel bars and you’ll be there much longer than was I.’
Hope fought to maintain his cool exterior, but he was rattled. Was he the bank robber Longworry had been gunning for when mistakenly setting upon Salviati? Jones’s revelations in the Hippodrome dressing room had not seemed so close to home at the time. A prostitute named Annabel running through the mayor’s office for his benefit did not ring any sort of bells. The only possibility that came to mind was that Alice Fontaine had somehow been watching his back. She was one of his few true friends and also one of the few people he didn’t dare to second guess. But he doubted as a guardian angel she would be so perverse. Still, putting someone into the mayor’s office to safeguard her own interests was certainly conceivable. Someone with the capacity to tear a swath through hearts was also possible. She moved in those kinds of circles. And what of Jones? Could he have really been such a two-faced schemer that he would warn of plots he himself had instigated? Was he someone else capable of anything?
‘Alright,’ said Hope, keen to know more. ‘What is this great plot of yours?’
Longworry lit a cigarette and took his time enjoying it. He stubbed it out on Hope’s cheek. Hope did not blink.
‘To take you down,’ Longworry began, ‘I would not only need to get myself reinstated to active duty but also to raise my name to a status even higher than yours. There was only one way to achieve this.’ He laughed, wanting Hope to catch on for himself. ‘Devious, wouldn’t you say? Using you to lure the criminals that would go on my arrest sheet. Or to put it another way, those criminals you brought to us were building me up so I could go after the biggest criminal of all. And so here we are. I’m reinstated, on the front pages of the papers, making speeches at banquets, being urged to run for public office. All because of what you did for me.’ He laughed again. ‘It’s earned for me a name worthy of bringing you in. So, fuck the evidence.’ He punched Hope hard across the jaw. ‘That’s what these bruises are for. A bit of window dressing. We can at least make you look like a criminal. Before you’re healed you’ll be sitting in front of a jury and they sure as hell won’t buy your gentleman act with you looking like this. You going to claim police brutality? Detective Longworry, the star of the New York Police Department isn’t like that.’ He flicked Hope’s ear. ‘It’s over for you.’
Hope stared out ahead as though struggling to come to terms with Longworry’s revelations.
‘What was in it for him?’ he gnarled bitterly.
‘For Jones?’ Longworry grinned. ‘Betrayal hurts more than a beating, doesn’t it? I think there are a number of reasons Jones has done this to you. I was not impertinent enough to ask directly, so this is only speculation. One reason, as I figure it, is to set up his future career. Now he has the toughest squad in New York on his side - handy for occasions when heads require butting. He’s got me off that desk and I owe him big time.’ He scratched his head thoughtfully. ‘There are other reasons I would put money on. For example, although he puffed cigars with you, I suspect your money was too new for his liking. He is old society and he would view ge
ntlemen clubs a birthright in need of defending from upstarts. In other words, old fashioned snobbery was at play.
‘Yet another reason would be to prove once again his genius. He will not brag, but this example of planning mastery will emerge slowly overtime, as it suits him, and will be embellished as he sees fit, and his reputation will be enhanced. Put simply, any self-perceived genius is only fun when it is acknowledged by others.’
Longworry lit up another cigarette and after a couple of puffs which were little more than flirtations he held it up towards Hope’s face, letting him squirm over whether this too would become an object of torture.
‘The reason I like best, however, came to light at the Belmont Stakes. I was there with Errol Jones and Charles Porter, guests of the New York Riders Association and we were drinking plenty of their champagne. Maybe too much. Porter got sore when he lost a bet and snapped that he at least won the only bet that really mattered. The way Jones’s mood darkened with the comment didn’t go unnoticed. It prompted me to do a little digging the next day and what I found was very interesting indeed. It turns out Porter married Jones’s high school sweetheart. Porter, the richer, more handsome suitor, was too good a catch to pass up on. And Jones was even invited to the wedding. All he could do was sit there and take it too, for to do anything else would have been to acknowledge his loss. But now, after so many years, here is his chance for revenge. You see, once Oregon Prime’s public hero number one in fact turns out to be nothing more than a lowlife bank robber, whose face has been used as a punching bag and an ashtray, the company will be finished. Its shares price will be as watery as its paint. It will be a laughing stock.’
Longworry sucked in a mouthful of smoke from his cigarette and tossed it away. ‘It would indicate a man who goes to breathtaking extremes. Willing to wait, unwilling to forgive. So poisonous his veins must be pumping like the New York sewers. The way he’s got you in his little game, this isn’t checkmate, it is deathmate.’
Hope remained impassive during the rant. And he looked Longworry coldly in the eyes once it was done. ‘It seems like a trap intended for one. Is that the way it is?’
Longworry smirked. ‘Relax. If you are referring to your girlfriend, she is nothing to us. In fact, having a beautiful woman such as Miss Hawkshaw alongside you in a courtroom would likely sway the judge and jury away from frying you. We wouldn’t want that. So, she is free to run as far from this hick town as she can and bed as many admirers as her wafer thin conscience will permit. If you were gentleman enough to confide in her where your money was stashed, she might even do it in style, associate with a higher class of man. That would be of some comfort while you languish in prison, surely.’
‘You’re full of shit.’ said Hope. ‘If you had managed to take her into custody, you would have made sure a judge and jury did not find her so attractive. And she has a past you would have filled newspapers with.’
‘That habit of hers of butchering her lovers? I suppose there would be a headline in that. It’s fortunate she did not procure that particular act on you. It would not have suited our purpose at all.’ Longworry slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I sense she practised other acts. I trust she was worth the money.’
‘I gave her one month’s board. And if you want to talk to her about it, you’ll have to wait awhile. I told her to take a holiday and make it long.’
Longworry kicked him viciously in the ankle. ‘A limp for the court. I’ll have to decide whether or not to make it permanent. With each agonising step you take to the electric chair you will be reminded of me. Sounds nasty, doesn’t it? Sorry, were you saying something?’ He kicked him again and held the chair as Hope heaved in it. ‘This will be your holiday right here. We’ll be staying two or three days, waiting for your wounds to look old and lived in. I’ll call a press conference for the end of the week and tell the papers it’s in regards to the most sensational bust of my career. They’ll whip themselves into a frenzy of anticipation. They’ll camp out a day in advance to be the first to learn the identity of the mystery criminal I’ll unveil for them. And they won’t be disappointed. The Oregon Prime man turning out to be a hardened bank robber. It’ll make for great copy.’
‘Better put it in the comic strips so cops like you can follow it.’
Longworry glared at him loathingly, his left eye twitching with the putrid emotion; he forced his attention away to his charges; ‘I’ve worked too hard for this to have the payday pulled out from under me, which is what will happen if one of you clowns smashes in his brains on account of that mouth of his. And that’s exactly what I can see happening. So, while I’m gone I want him gagged. Anyone mess with the gag, they’ll answer to me.’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Linde.
Longworry sighed. ‘What you’re really asking me is am I going anywhere near a liquor store. The answer is no. I’m going to make some calls. The one thing these glamorous lodgings lacks is a telephone. You want a drink, then sniff round for it. Our old bootlegging friends would have stashed plenty away around the premises and its guaranteed to taste every bit as potent as on the day it was distilled. And just remember there is a grand homecoming in the offing that you won’t want to be methanol-blinded for.’
He turned to Hope and snickered. ‘Did you guess what your gag is going to consist of?’ He pulled from his jacket pocket the handkerchief Hope had used as a mask on countless occasions; he dangled it tauntingly between two pincers around Hope’s face: even on its black fabric, the blood and grime of its turbulent existence were visible.
‘Our dogs sniffed it out of your tree,’ he gnarled as he brutally set about applying the gag. ‘Call it pathos. The thing you used to conceal your identity during all your devilish deeds in banks will now stop you pleading your innocence as your long awaited meeting with justice looms large.’
He pulled the knot so tight Hope felt that his tongue was being crushed against the back of his throat - he convulsed in an instinctive bid to free himself.
‘I know it hurts,’ said Longworry. ‘No one said captivity was a ball. Holding that tongue of yours still will at least keep you in one piece. Even at the best of times, when my boys see someone tied to a chair, all they want to do is start the punching. Best then not to draw attention to yourself.’
Satisfied with the knot’s integrity he back-handed his prisoner in a departing gesture. Then he eyed each member of his unit in turn. ‘The keys to the great city of New York will soon be in our pockets. The real keys. Just hold it together until I get back.’
He glanced at Hope one more time, as though pinching himself that this was really happening, that he really had his man. He slid open the barn door and was gone.
Hope and the remainder of the Buster and the Treatment continued to eye each other off long after Longworry’s Ford had roared away towards Sacksville.
It was Stevens that broke the silence, his soft tone in stark contrast to Longworry’s grandiose manner. ‘Not all of us approve the extent to which Longworry is taking this,’ he said. ‘I suppose he considers that desk you chained him to a couple of years a form of torture and he is just paying you back in kind.’ He shook his head. ‘But our revenge could be complete without this. We have already used you to retrieve our positions and enhance our status. And all we need now to ensure those headlines that spell the demise of Oregon Prime is a corpse. Shot while attempting to escape. It would have the same effect as a bruised and sorry suspect in handcuffs. And we could easily trump up a witness or two to implicate you in the hold ups. Longworry has got his name back, after all. He could use it to prosecute the case.’
He gazed at his colleagues, trying to gage their reaction to his assertions; their eyes, however, were already starting to drift away in the hope a cache of liquor was as easy to find as Longworry had suggested.
Steven’s tone remained sympathetic as he continued to address the immobilised prisoner. ‘I was the rifleman stalking you in the forest. I could have ended it there. Cou
ld have put you down with any shot. And if I had been the captain, that’s how it would have gone down. But Longworry thought he could head you into his car, have you skip into his trap like a fool. To your credit you showed there is no herding a wolf. Sure in the end he got you walking right into his trap. That can’t feel good. But I saw the woman you were running with. I was the one who told Longworry how beautiful she was. I told him she was too beautiful for a prosecuting attorney to know what to do with. That was the first favour I did you. The second will be to loosen your gag. Not remove it. I don’t need to hear you thanking me.’
He slipped behind Hope more like he was going to slit his throat than loosen a knot; if Hope had been allowed to get a word in during this act of benevolence, or even during the interrogation itself, he might have given the Buster and the Treatment his own talk and the subject might have been on the different forms of assistance the world could afford.
32. ‘There’s only so much you can forget and still keep your mind.’
Father Cuebas had chosen for him his name. He had buried one Alistair that morning and had liked the idea of giving life to another that same afternoon.
The hospital had sent the boy to him because having saved his life there was not much more they could do. The savage beating had wiped clean his memory. His home might have been across the street or on the other side of New York or perhaps there was no home at all. Whichever it might have been, it did not matter: there was no going back.
Father Cuebas would have preferred to have imparted more than just a name. A room, a job, even an education. Alistair, however, chose the navy for those things. He kept the name nonetheless and added to it Plonker for no other reason than the navy’s paperwork required a family name to go with its rank. Alistair still visited Cuebas on occasion, usually when he was in trouble, but never for advice and certainly not for confession. They drank tea made from herbs freshly picked from the presbytery garden. Alistair would sip his tea slowly, ask questions about the trials and tribulations of the parish. He would listen attentively but not have much to say himself. On this particular occasion, however, it was different. ‘I’ve got to go inland again,’ he instigated.
Father Cuebas stared a long moment. ‘Why would you do that?’
‘A friend in trouble.’
Father Cuebas sighed. ‘The Lord might truly be a savior if it weren’t for all those friends.’ He handed over one of his freshly brewed teas and walked from the stove out the back door and across the sunny garden to its edge where he turned and leaned back against the wooden fence - it was an acknowledgment of his seventy years that he even deigned to lean, for he had forever acted as though taking the weight off one’s feet during daylight hours was somehow referred to in the seven deadly sins. He gazed down at his vegetable patch with a furrowed brow.
‘You’re not an evil man, Alistair,’ he said. ‘God talks to you and you listen. You hear Him in the waves beating against the shore and you see him in the sunset’s horizon. It calms your restless spirit. It gives you peace on this earth.’ He shook his head remorsefully. ‘It pains me to remind you that the Almighty does not talk to you through your fellow man. I will not be so bold as to speculate on the reasons. The results are merely there to be seen. You react to others like a match to gasoline. Both of those items have purposes that serve our society well and yet as a mixture it is as though hell itself has risen forth. It is the way it is and I must ask you, therefore, to consider whether a friend is really worth the risk of such catastrophe?’
Alistair shrugged. ‘The day I was beaten till I could not remember my mother, my father or a single person who had spent a moment with me, I would like to think it had come about in the aid of a friend.’
‘I would like to think so too, but, if you recall, you did not get booted out of the navy for assisting a friend. It was for a prostitute and a ham sandwich.’
‘It was more complicated than that.’
Father Cuebas replied knowingly, ‘There’s nothing more complicated than a human being falling apart. It’s the devil’s own jigsaw puzzle. And he is begging you to play.’
Alistair noticed a blackbird perched in one of the lower branches of the birch tree that was providing much of the garden’s shade. The blackbird was skipping up and down, every bit as restless as himself, the young man underneath; and then it flew off. Alistair was left contemplating what it would be like having the calmness of the Father. It would no doubt require getting old, collecting years like thistles on the feet until eventually pain began to defeat the steps.
‘Remember when you first took me in you gave me an old mailbag and you told me to put in it the letters I wrote to all the people I wanted to remember? Do you remember that?’
Cuebas nodded.
‘Well, I’m taking it along with me and it’s holding a letter I wrote to the friend I’m going to help. And there’s a letter I’ve written to you.’
Father Cuebas slurped his tea noisily and sucked in his chin. ‘I daresay it is not a letter of confession as you do not tend to plan that far ahead.’
‘It’s addressed to whoever may find me broken, destitute and deranged and requests that I am returned here to the one person that will know what the picture in this jigsaw puzzle should look like.’
The old priest ran his fingernails through his bristling white beard. He looked sad and his voice was forlorn as he said, ‘You had better stamp your letter with a prayer.’
‘You have taught me many. Thank you.’
‘I wonder if I have taught you enough to take you all the way to Heaven.’ Father Cuebas scoured the garden for some relief from his disappointed thoughts.
Alistair tried to look the disappointment in the eye. ‘I know you consider me a thoughtless, wayward student who has not retained even a fraction of the lessons taught. A student who could not recall a single prayer you have striven to impart, even on pains of eternal damnation. I know I have given you no reason to consider otherwise. But I want to assure you it is precisely at the point when death’s shadow has consumed me that all you have told me returns in a flood of light. The icy touch of death is replaced by exaltation and joy. Dancing on a cliff’s edge, whistling a prayer, it is a good feeling.’ He took the priest’s hand and bowed his head. ‘I understand it is not God talking to me at such moments, but at least it is you.’
He marched away in the direction of his old Hudson coupe parked up against the presbyteries’ white picket fence.
Father Cuebas was too dumbfounded to call him back. He considered Alistair the son he was not entitled to have and he had never felt so useless.
Death of the Extremophile Page 44