“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 had 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.
“Strand is confused by the question,” attacked Luc Sante. “Still, he buckles to it, tackles it, grapples with it up here.” He pointed to his head. “As he might a question of theology. Quite serious young man. Right, Martin?”
Strand returned to his feet so as to tower over the old man. He rocked a bit on his feet, then began pacing and finally erupted with, “Well, if we attempt to understand the killing mind—”
“There you're already wrong, man.” Luc Sante verbally shook his protege. “We're all carrying about in our pea-brained heads the killing mind. It's not something apart from you, Strand. That you must attempt to understand from afar. Look in the bloody mirror. Part of our makeup, our nature. Strand . ..” He lost his concentration, showing further signs of the fatigue and pain in his joints, but he didn't want to give up the floor any more than the office, his ministering, or his psychiatric pracdce. Hence his cutting of poor Strand left and right and back again. “We must,” Luc Sante started anew, “we must ask after his motivations, his rationalizations. If they are religious in nature, then perhaps it is a religion of one and taken to extreme, as history has shown us: Evil can evolve from too zealous a nature, and as anyone knows a Christ complex is too zealous.”
“I think it's time for you to retire for today. Father,” Strand said to him, emphasizing the word “retire” ever so slightly, but enough to pinch the old man's ego. “Strand did not help me to write my book,” he countered. “Can you tell?” he asked Jessica. Then back to Strand, he directed a new barb. 'Too bad, Strand. Such a book attracts lovely young ladies here to my lair, someone as beautiful as Dr. Coran, here, at St. Albans. See what you miss?”
“Father, I truly feel you've overtaxed yourself, today,” Strand said. “Won't you rest before dinner?”
Luc Sante laughed a light laugh. It sounded like resolve escaping him. But he ignored Strand's request and the hand the younger man presented him. Instead the old man turned to Jessica again. “Well, to return to your earlier question, Dr. Coran—or was it my question? Ahh, either way, if we do-gooders kill evil people, do we not ourselves become evil in doing so? And so by definition killers ourselves?”
“Evil is in the eye of the beholder,” she countered. “When McVeigh was given the death sentence, some called it justice, others called it a gross evil.”
“And where did you stand on the issue?” Strand asked her.
“On the side of the children McVeigh wantonly murdered, on the side of justice served. I've seen too many serial killers and mass murderers on death row and in asylums where they are treated like celebrities to wish to see another situation like Richard Speck occur. Actually execution is too easy, too good for McVeigh's kind. He should be maimed and allowed to slowly die in agony, as did many of his victims in the rubble of the explosion he set off. A bombing like that, to me, is the most cowardly act of all.” Strand's voice rose in reaction to this. “But if our only way to deal with evil is to destroy it, then we end up destroying ourselves—spiritually if not physically. And isn't that where you are at this moment in time, Dr. Coran? Wondering what particle of soul you've been able to salvage over the years of your career?”
She bit back her lower lip, contemplating Strand's incisive words and the sharpness of his characterization of her. She also saw that Luc Sante's half smile said that he agreed with his junior partner. Did Luc Sante mean to hurt her as much as Strand's words did? she wondered.
She then spoke to the room, her whiskey voice filling it. “Sometimes, I fear that I've overstepped ... That is stepped over the line ... I mean that who we are becomes who we were, what we've said and done, where we've been and how we've gotten there, and how we've acted and reacted becomes us.”
“That the current self is an amalgam of our past selves, perhaps?” asked Luc Sante.
“To destroy evil necessitates a destruction of self, of ego,” added Strand. “That much I've learned in the ministry and from Father Luc Sante. No, I didn't help him to write his book, but I have read it more than once.”
“Yes,” she agreed with the two ministers, “destroying a man, even a maniac like Mad Matthew Matisak and some of the others I've killed, yes, it chips away at the block of one's humanity. That's without a doubt.” She thought about Jim Parry, the life she would never have with him, about children she would never have, about a home she would never know.
“Well, I have much to do tonight. Bingo night, you know, and the Houghton sisters are at it again. Must go play referee,” said Strand, smiling before he disappeared the way he'd come, hardly conscious of what his words had done to Jessica.
Luc Sante took Jessica's hand in his, squeezing warmly, and said, “You are essentially a good person, Dr. Coran.”
“Thank you.”
“I dole out no absolution to anyone. Despite what the church says, I don't believe in that sort of nonsense. But I am here, if ever you wish to talk, for to kill another human being does, as you say, chip away at all mankind's care and concern for the essential nobility and quality of existence. Still, certain evil out there cannot be ignored, either. Father Strand and others, myself included, we all sleep better at night thanks to the fearlessness of people like yourself. Fear is our first weapon against evil, courage our second, instinct our final defense. And you ... you must trust to your instincts.”
“Even blindly so?”
“ is better than no instinct.”
“Well said, sir.”
“Still, in killing the evil that climbed from the primordial muck with us, we are likely to take down the innocent with the guilty.”
“So, you believe our killer or killers here in London are at war with Satan on this ground, here?” She pointed to her own head.
“Precisely. Doing battle, grappling with our most ancient enemy in an attempt to resurrect the Son, Satan's greatest nemesis. Your killer fixates on the victim, sees the mark not of Cain on the forehead but that of Christ in the eyes, or some such manner, and then proceeds from there in his attempt to resurrect the Chosen One to walk anew among us. But, of course, he keeps missing his mark, and the resurrection hasn't happened. Until it does, he will, I fear, go on killing.”
“In the name of God.”
“And the Son.”
“Theology student perhaps?”
“Who knows, but since the so-called true millennium is upon us, your killer likely believes this is the time of the Second Coming. He damned well wants to be a big part of it, hasten it along, just as others want to be a part of the biggest millennium party that will be thrown.”
“Some kind of twisted thinking. How did you arrive at it?”
“Confessionals.”
“Confessionals?”
“As I've said, I've had a great deal of experience in confessionals both in the booth and in my psychiatric practice, in this office.”
“But you said you didn't believe in granting absolution.”
“I don't. I merely hear confessions.”
“But if you listen to confessions, you must... must say something to your parishioners.”
“All right, I tell them I absolve them, but I don't believe it. I don't believe I have that power. I don't believe any man has, no matter the robes he wears. Absolution must come from within one's own heart, not from some formalized church ritual. I know, it's a wonder I haven't long ago been defrocked. I have had my disguises throughout my life as well, Jessica.”
“What about your psychiatric patients? They seek a sort of absolution, too, don't they?”
“It's called absolut—vodka—there.” He again laughed. “Seriously, though, one in every twenty or so patients I see, or confessions I hear, are nowadays about some grand-new beginning. Lately, concern and fear center around the doomsday prophets and soothsayers of the final end, Armageddon, all balled up with the new millennium. The fact that Armageddon or Apocalypse did not occur when the bell tolled on New Year, 2000, has only fueled the belief in the year 2001 as that of the final judgment, the final flood if you will.”
She easily agreed. “Fear ... Fear of the end, not hope for the beginning is typical of human nature, unfortunately.”
“Not unlike every mental breakdown, every divorce situation, every loss of a loved one I've handled in my psychiatric practice, for instance.”
“And such fears fuel phobias and manic depression, insomnia, and psychosis, as well as psychotic behavior, especially religious psychosis, right?” she asked. “I think you've answered that one yourself.” Luc Sante took her chinaware from her and stacked it on the tray left by his secretary, called out through the door left ajar by Strand, but no answer returned. “Where the deuce is that woman?” he asked Jessica.
“It's well past five. I think she may have gone home for the day, Father.”
“What time is it?”
The bells of St. Albans answered the old man as if on cue, ringing six times. Luc Sante grumbled about his secretary and Strand, “Both long gone by this time, having had enough of the old man's stubbornness,” he spoke of himself in the third person.
Ignoring his obvious fatigue, Luc Sante now walked Jessica down the huge back corridors of St. Albans Cathedral. The ancient marble hallways clicked with the rhythm of Jessica's heels to counterpoint Luc Sante's more subtle step. To Jessica's right, the length of the otherwise dark corridor ran with beautiful stained-glass windows; but the images, relying as they did on sunlight, had grown dull, faded, hidden within the blotted colors as darkness had come to the world outside.
Luc Sante grumbled about the lost beauty of the panes, saying, “The new buildings all round us now blot out the sun more and earlier. I used to close up, make this walk, and fill my soul here in this corridor, replenished by the resplendent artwork you see there now in the darkness. All things bow to progress as they call it. Change, I suppose.”
Jessica felt a sudden sadness for the old, wise man's loss, and she felt a sudden amazement at how much time had flown by while in Luc Sante's presence. This fact decided for her that she genuinely liked and admired the old scholarly Jesuit shaman. His appearance and crustiness reminded her of a later-day George Bernard Shaw. With his knowing hand grasping mankind about the throat to check for a pulse, Father and Dr. Jerrard Luc Sante found just cause for cynicism, despair, and hope all in the same breath and heartbeat.
All these thoughts flooded her mind as they continued down the seemingly endless corridor. The thoughts continued at the great oak doors—the entrance to the cathedral. Like Shaw, she felt Luc Sante a voice in the wasteland—T. S. (Thomas Steams) Eliot's Waste Land, yes, but Eliot's wasteland had only become cluttered with more disaffection, more disenfranchisement of the human soul, more searing, jagged-edged alienation or other modem ailment since his poem had been written in 1922. And all of the ugliness of alienation of the soul had been eclipsed by an enormity of fear too great for the collective soul of man to bare up under.
Yes, an eclipsing fear in the late 1990s created a wasteland of the soul that mankind had never known before. Mankind collectively stood on the brink of the coming new millennium and teetered there, one foot in the abyss on a slippery slope that led to the end of a particularly black and empty hole, unless ... Unless mankind and womankind turned the emptiness inside out, examined it, and came to terms with it. Unless people began to heed their own spiritual voices as had Luc Sante and others like him.
Jessica admired the old man's juggling his dual roles as priest and psychotherapist, his abilities in both fields, and his intellect and calculation that told all who came within his sphere that religion and science sipped from the same vast ocean-sized teacup of the unknown, and that both fields of human endeavor had much to offer the human psyche, and that both could and should cohabit down here on Earth together. The two, religion and science, did not negate one another; the two were necessary for understanding of the human spirit.
Luc Sante turned to Jessica, facing her now at the entranceway to the corridor, the streetlights filtering in through the windowed doors, bathing him in a green glow. Jessica stared into his warm, glowing, and rich blue eyes which spoke along with his voice. “In order to survive to the next level of evolution, mankind and womankind must not only stare deeply into the abyss that is ourselves, our human nature, our souls, my dear. But we also must fully accept and understand our most hideous aspect, our ugliest gargoyles, that we are indeed the beast we fear most, for we are the beast of our own nightmares and our own making. As unpleasant as it is. Well, you of all people understand the wisdom of it. But beware the beast, for it is busy, at this moment, calculating the most advantageous instant it can take hold of you and tear you from the slippery edge you stand on.”
“Then you concede that Satan is of our own making, and not a separate entity from man himself?” she asked.
“I concede nothing of the kind. I tell you it, he—whatever you wish to call evil and the maker of violence—is both within us and without us. No less than the love of Christ is within us and without us.”
Jessica felt a startled recognition at his words. She wondered if this shaman were a mind reader, or simply quite clever and cunning at picking up nonverbal cues. Still, she could not fathom it. How does he know that I have spent a good deal of my life on that brink, looking over the edge of a slippery slope, wondering these exact thoughts. It must be a lifetime of working with troubled people, she concluded.
Jessica momentarily thought of the few truly close
friends she had in this life: Donna LeMonte, who had seen her through psychotherapy and had become one of her closest friends along with psychic FBI agent Kim Desinor. There remained her friend and boss Eriq Santiva, and her associate in the M.E.'s office, John Thorpe. She had few contacts outside her work, and whenever she did, the relationship seldom survived for long. That had been the case with James Parry, although she'd managed to hold on to James, and he to her, for six years. Some kind of record. She wanted to add Luc Sante to her list of intimate friends.
It was no coincidence that her best friends were in law enforcement. Even the men she chose to love were in law enforcement. She knew from experience that to ask anyone, who had not been there, to delve so deeply into the rings of hell with her, was asking too much.
After calling for a cab, Jessica shook Luc Sante's hand. Each of them knew that the other had indeed stared into the eyes of Satan and had come away from the experience scarred. Somewhere, somehow, someday she would get the story out of him.
She sensed, with the lingering handshake, that he again knew what thoughts ran fleetingly through her mind.
“Your help, Father, has been invaluable.”
“Bit premature to say so, Doctor.”
“It will prove invaluable then, I am certain.”
“Thank you for the compliment, and good night. I see the cab you called for is here. Go with God.” He waved her off, and then the huge oak doors closed. She felt like Dorothy being put out of Oz.
When she had taken a few steps from the cathedral she felt some innate voice tell her to stop, turn, and stare, as if someone were at the door, watching her. She looked for Luc Sante's fatherly eyes to be upon her, but he had vanished within. She felt a bit foolish, imagining what she looked like standing on the steps, retreating from the gothic old place like a “Pauline in Peril” character depicted on the cover of a raggedy little paperback book. She needed only to bite her knuckles to complete the image.
“Well, to hell with that,” she muttered and consciously felt for the bulge of her Smith & Wesson in her shoulder holster. She dismissed her moment of uneasiness. Just being foolish to feel a buzz of intuition telling her that a healthy fear of this place and time might just save her life. Just being foolish, yet the same buzz of fear had saved her life on more than one occasion, and she'd learned to listen to the gift of instinct over the years.
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