by Lee Child
“Sofia came to me. She was standing at the foot of my bed, and she glowed, as though she were made of light beams. And I felt a sense of utter peace and joy come over me like I had never felt before.”
“Wow. Did she say anything?”
“No. She just smiled at me. And I knew that she was an angel, and that she was there because God had sent her to comfort me. Suddenly I saw the meaning of Sofia’s death: I was being called by God to comfort those in need, people who had experienced the kind of anguish I had. I knew that if I answered the call, this sense of complete peace might be mine again someday.”
“So you became a priest?”
“The next day I applied to seminary school, and I was accepted.”
“And Sofia? Have you seen her again?”
“No. But sometimes I have a sense that she’s nearby.”
Lee raised a hand to signal the waiter for another round. Aleks took a deep breath. It was now or never.
“I, uh, don’t suppose I could ask you a hypothetical question?”
“What is it?”
Is even that acceptable? Aleks wondered. If he told his friend the story of the mysterious confession as a hypothetical, would that violate the seal of the confessional?
He had never been faced with a dilemma like this before.
“You won’t mention this conversation to anyone, will you?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
Aleks looked around the pub to see if anyone was listening in. Luckily, Monday evening was the thinnest time at the popular watering hole. There were a few people in the back room, but only two other tables in the front room were occupied, one by a young couple too interested in each other to be eavesdropping. Sitting at the other table were half a dozen corporate types who looked as if they had been boozing ever since leaving work. Their jackets were slung on the backs of their chairs, their shirtsleeves rolled up, and their shiny faces were flushed from alcohol. Bursts of boisterous laughter erupted from their table from time to time.
He leaned in and spoke in a low voice.
“If one of your patients confessed to committing a terrible crime, would you report it to the police?”
“What kind of crime?”
Aleks looked down at his hands, which were trembling.
“Murder.”
Lee Campbell sat back, obviously nonplussed. It was clear he knew that the question was not hypothetical for Aleks. Lee shook his head.
“If I had taken a vow to respect the seal of the confessional, no, I wouldn’t.”
“Even if it meant a murderer would go free?”
“Yes.”
Aleks stared out the window; it was raining harder. He watched the pink mimosa blossoms fall under the cascading droplets, fluttering softly before surrendering to the pavement.
Lee Campbell leaned forward, resting his elbows on the ancient oak table.
“Is there any chance — in this hypothetical scenario — that this person is making up the entire thing just to screw with the priest’s head?”
“I’m afraid not.”
The waiter shot an inquiring look in their direction, and Aleks nodded, though he knew all the amber ale in the world couldn’t fill the gnawing hole in his heart. He stared out the window at the soggy puddle of pink petals on the sidewalk, and knew it was going to be a very long night.
AT HOME IN bed later, he watched car headlights flickering across the walls of his room, unable to sleep, tormented by the unwelcome knowledge locked inside his heart. Finally he arose and thumbed through his volume of the collected works of Jakob Böhme. His eyes fell on a passage from Threefold Life of Man: Man, Böhme said, “cannot see the whole of God’s One,” and “it follows that a part of it is hidden from him.” In order to reach God, Böhme claimed, man had to go through hell itself.
These ideas, which had been little more than an intellectual puzzle to him when he was a philosophy student, now struck him as deeply personal. He felt as if Böhme were talking directly to him and that the key to solving his dilemma lay in Böhme’s words, if only he could dig deep enough to uncover the wisdom there. Perched on the side of his bed, he turned the pages, searching desperately for something to help him. One quote in particular gave him some cause for hope: “What now seems hard to you, you will later learn to love the most.”
Finally exhausted, he fell into a fitful sleep sometime before dawn. His dreams swarmed with disquieting images of masked murderers stalking their victims inside the stern marble interiors of churches, their steps echoing against the unforgiving floors. He followed them down endless corridors, but they always remained ahead of him, just out of sight. Finally he turned down one hallway to see his sister standing there gazing at him. She was glowing, as in his vision years before, but her large brown eyes were searching, beseeching him — to do what?
He awoke in a sweat, the book still in his lap, unable to shake the feeling that she wanted something from him. His eyes fell on the passage on the open page: “The anguished work of the creature in this time is an opening and a generation of divine power by which God’s power becomes moving and working.” He sensed the words had a deeper meaning for him, but he didn’t know what they were.
Later that morning, after a quick breakfast, Father Milichuk dragged himself to St. George and took his usual place in the confessional. His hours were rigid: He was at his post every weekday morning from ten o’clock until noon. He had a wicked hangover, and that combined with his lack of sleep had put him in a foggy state of surreal, dreamlike consciousness.
It felt even more like a dream when the door to the adjoining booth creaked open. He slid open the wooden cover of the metal grate between the two sides in order to listen and was stunned by what he heard.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
It was the same voice Aleks had heard the day before. More weary, perhaps, and more wary — but the same. There was no mistaking it.
He tried to speak, but no words came out. Finally, he croaked out a response. “B-bless you, my son.”
Jagged rays of light sliced through his field of vision, interrupting his sight — the familiar aura telling him another migraine was on the way. He pressed a hand to his forehead; he could feel the blood vessel in his head throbbing through his fingertips.
“What do you have to confess?” Aleks longed to peer through the metal grate separating them so he could see the man’s face, but he could hardly bear to keep his eyes open. Pain sliced through his head, and he stifled a groan.
“I have committed another mortal sin.”
“What is it, my son?”
“I have killed again.”
Father Milichuk’s intestines turned to ice. Cold sweat spurted onto his forehead, and he fought to control the buzzing in his ears.
To his horror, the man continued. “Not only that, Father, but I enjoy it. I like killing. Even now I’m thinking of the next time I can go kill again.”
“My s-son,” he said, hearing his voice shake, “you need help. Please — please tell the authorities what you have done.”
The man laughed softly. “That’s not likely to happen, Father. I’m not going to tell anyone else what I’ve done, and certainly not the police.”
“Then why are you telling me?” Milichuk cried, his voice ragged.
“I enjoy talking about it. And my secret is safe with you.” There was a pause, and then he said, “It is safe with you, isn’t it?”
When Father Milichuk spoke, it was the voice of a dead man.
“Yes. It’s safe with me.”
“Good,” the man said. “I would hate to be the cause of your breaking your solemn vows to God.” His tone was mild, but Aleks sensed the threat lurking beneath it.
The man went on to tell him the details of his crime. He preyed on prostitutes, he said, the unfortunate women who prowled Tenth Avenue near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Some were runaways whose families had no idea where they were; some were transvestites; and others we
re strung out on drugs, trying to earn enough money for their next fix. The man owned a nice car, and it was no problem getting them inside. Once there, the women were his prisoners; he could do what he liked with them. When he described just what that was, Father Milichuk’s stomach lurched and churned. The throbbing in his head crescendoed, and he vomited.
“Oh dear,” the man said as the sour smell rose to engulf them. “I’m sorry. I’d better go so you can get cleaned up. I’ll come back again soon — maybe even tomorrow.”
Before Aleks could respond, he heard the door latch click open and then the sound of retreating footsteps.
But this time something inside him rebelled. He whipped out his handkerchief and wiped his mouth, then stuffed the hankie back into his pocket. With trembling hands, he ripped off his soiled cassock. Dropping it to the ground, he threw open the door to the confessional and charged out into the church.
He dashed down the aisle just as the man reached the front of the church. Not noticing his pursuer, the man pulled open the heavy front door. Daylight streamed into the foyer, and he was briefly silhouetted in a blinding halo of sunlight. Shielding his eyes as pain shot through his cranium, Father Milichuk staggered after him, following him out into the street, where the man headed west, toward Third Avenue.
To his relief, the man didn’t look behind him as he rounded the corner to join the parade of people on the avenue. Aleks put his head down and shoved his hands into his pockets, losing himself in the crowd, just another pedestrian in New York. All the while he kept an eye on his quarry, following half a block behind as he headed for the Astor Place subway station. As before, the man was dressed in dark clothing — a straight black raincoat over gray slacks. His head was bare, with curly brown hair and a tiny bald spot in the back. Aleks focused on the bald spot, following it through the thick weave of bodies. As Aleks walked, Jakob Böhme’s words echoed through his aching head. God’s power . . . moving and working . . .
He followed his quarry past the Cooper Union Building to Astor Place, where people were lined up in front of the pumpkin-colored Mud Coffee truck, waiting for their caffeine fixes. The man took the stairs down to the uptown-subway track. Aleks hung back, head lowered, blending in with the crowd, keeping an eye on that bald spot. The jagged interruption in his vision narrowed his line of sight, and he held on to the railing as he stumbled down the steps, heart pounding.
Joining the swarm of people on the platform, he could see the man in the black raincoat ahead of him, peering down the track in the direction the uptown train would be coming from. Aleks slowed his pace, then strolled toward him in a deliberately casual manner. He stopped in front of a map of the subway and pretended to study it, glancing up from time to time to see if the man had moved. But he still stood in his spot, waiting patiently for the local train. Aleks stared at the map, the colored grid of the subway lines dancing in front of his eyes as he fought to focus, trying to control the blinding pain in his head.
There was a faint rumble from the tunnel, and a shaft of yellow light spilled across the tiled wall of the track. The train was arriving.
The crowd surged forward, a great mindless beast driven by force of instinct and habit. The priest saw his chance. After quickly slipping into the mosaic of bodies, he pushed through to the front until he was just behind the yellow warning line. Glancing out of the corner of his eye, he saw he was only two people away from the man with the bald spot. The rumble of the train was louder now, the wall awash with the headlights of the oncoming train.
It was now or never. God’s power . . . moving and working . . .
Aleks weaved quickly between the people separating him and his prey until he stood directly behind the man with the bald spot. He was slightly taller than the priest, and smelled of Old Spice. Aleks leaned forward and whispered into his ear.
“Thy will be done.”
Before the man could turn around, Aleks gave him a quick, hard shove in the small of his back. He watched as the man lurched forward, his hands clawing uselessly at the air, watched as he fell onto the tracks. The train was upon him before anyone could react.
There was a roar in the priest’s head, and the sound of a woman screaming. The crowd recoiled, and a man yelled, “Someone call nine-one-one!” A young student standing next to him covered his eyes, and his girlfriend began to cry.
In the pandemonium that followed, nobody was in charge. Aleks fully expected to be apprehended, but no one seemed to know exactly what had happened. Everyone looked dazed, except for a man in a business suit who whipped out his cell phone and dashed up the steps two at a time. The priest followed him, gripping the railing to steady himself. To his surprise, no one came after him. He staggered out onto the street and sucked up a lungful of fresh air.
Out on Astor Place, there was a disquieting atmosphere of normalcy. Taxis shot up Lafayette Street, careening around the curve in the road where it turned into Fourth Avenue. The orange Mud Coffee truck still sat at the curb, dispersing the aroma of French roast into the surrounding air. With a final glance behind him, Aleks walked quickly toward the Cooper Union building, then cut through the small park in the back.
His cell phone rang. Panic tightened his throat; he thought wildly that the police had found him. To his relief, the caller ID read Lee Campbell. He pressed the Talk button with trembling fingers.
“Hello?”
“I’m just calling to see if you’re okay.”
Aleks hesitated. Above him, a moody gray cloud slid across the sky, obscuring the sun. A pigeon pecked at a few scraps of bread on the pavement, then cocked its head and gazed up at him with its bright orange eye.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking.”
His friend seemed unconvinced. “Look, I have some time later today if you want to get together.”
“I have something I have to do, but maybe I’ll call you later.”
“Please do, all right?”
“Sure, thanks,” Aleks said, and snapped the phone closed.
He headed east, toward the river. It was a quick ten-minute walk to Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on Third Street. He had been there several times, though not for some years now. He did not know the current pastor or any of his staff.
The front door was open, and his footsteps clicked a stark echo as he strode down the aisle to the back of the church. The air smelled of incense and lilies, and he was reminded that Easter was only a few weeks away.
He stepped into the confessional and closed the door behind him. Welcoming the dim lighting, he leaned back in the narrow cubicle. He could hear the sound of gentle snoring, then the rustling of the priest’s garments as the man awoke.
Father Milichuk leaned forward, his face nearly touching the grate between them. He took a deep breath, relief coursing through his veins like holy water.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
EVEN A BLIND MAN
BY DARRELL JAMES
The Greyhound arrived in Atlanta, midafternoon, swinging into the terminal on Forsythe Street to let off passengers. A hiss of air brakes, a mechanical unfolding of accordion doors — it marked the end of the journey for Earl Lilly. Three days in the seat from LA, his dog, Melon, curled up at his feet.
He’d come on a mission, the way he thought of it. A copy of his granddaughter’s last letter stuffed into his breast pocket. What had happened to her? And why the sudden cry for help? He had crossed the country to find out.
Earl waited until all the other passengers had disembarked, then called to his dog. “Up!” was all he had to say. And Melon — a cocker-terrier mix — came wearily to his feet and nosed his way out from between the seats.
The bus driver was waiting impatiently, one hand on the lever, wanting to close the doors against the August swelter. He eyed Earl in the rearview mirror.
Earl took his good-natured time. He strung his camera around his neck and centered it just so, adjusted his dark glasses on his nose for comfort, gathered his carry-on bag, smo
othed the front of his poplin jacket, and moved up the aisle toward the exit. He was making something of a show of it. And why not? He was seventy years old and a black man back in the South.
Melon followed, brushing at Earl’s pants cuff.
As they reached the exit, Earl turned to the driver, keeping his gaze off and distantly focused. He pushed his dark glasses higher on his nose, giving the man his best Ray Charles sway-and-grin. “Thank you so much for the ride,” he said.
The driver studied him with a puzzled look on his face. “You don’t mind my asking . . . if you’re blind, how do you use the camera to take pictures?”
“I let the dog take ’em,” Earl said in a polite tone. Then he turned, leaving the driver to ponder that image, and stepped down off the bus. “Jump!” he said. And Melon made his leap of faith to the ground.
See, it was the dog that was blind, not Earl.
Earl led the way through the wash of hot diesel exhaust, across the bus paddock, to the street, where a row of taxicabs sat parked at the curb. The first two cars in the queue were manned by Middle Eastern drivers. They stood outside the vehicles, chatting near the sign that read TAXIS ONLY. They seemed wholly indifferent to his approach, indifferent to the possibility of a fare. At a third taxi, a black woman had already prepared the passenger door for arrival.
Now she was calling to Earl’s dog, “Here, boy! Bring your daddy right on in. Let Loretta give you fine gentlemen a ride.”
Earl crossed past the two Middle Easterners, who found need to voice objection now. Loretta flipped them off and waved Earl and his dog on over.
The idea that Earl was blind and that Melon was his service dog was a ruse they played routinely. It got them onto public transportation together and into the bars along Vermont Street back in LA. And so far, it had won them a few courtesies here in the South. Few seemed to question it. The dark glasses also served to shade Earl’s aging eyes from the light. They were both getting old, he and Melon. They depended on each other for their respective advantages.
Earl folded himself into the backseat, saying, “Up,” for Melon to join him. The dog found his place on the seat, and they both settled in for the ride.