For a brief moment he considered driving off the cliff to his left.
“Even the criminal cannot pass judgment,” Frank whispered from somewhere in the car.
He reached the Seabreeze City limits at four forty-five in the morning. It was still shy of five a.m. when he rolled to a stop on the unpaved parking lot.
The iron-strapped ebony wood doors opened when he placed his thumb on the tiny crystal plate that operated the sophisticated locking system.
The overhead lights came on as he walked down the narrow aisle between the simple pews, through to the back door, and out into the yard. He strode up to Frank’s rectory, intending to walk right in, but before he got there the door swung inward and Frank was standing there fully dressed in his signature black.
“Come on in, Brother Ecks. I’ve been expecting you.”
And it was true. There were two chairs facing each other before an iron candelabra set with more than a dozen wax sticks burning intensely. Frank used candles that burned brighter than normal tapers. They were more like small torches.
“Have a seat,” the self-proclaimed minister offered.
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Do so anyway, Brother Rule.”
Xavier obeyed even though he promised himself that he would resist the man who had sent him out to break his oath.
“Soto called,” Frank said as he seated himself. “He told me about a subterranean killing field, one man sorely wounded, and another man dead.”
“The white man’s not dead?”
“Not yet.”
“I lashed out at them as if I had never spent one Sunday in this church,” Xavier said.
Frank allowed these words their own space. He did not dispute or deny the Parishioner’s claim.
Light began to break upon the ocean from the eastern sky.
For a moment Xavier shivered uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his face and he found it hard to maintain his balance on the chair. He leaned forward, putting his elbows upon his knees and his face in his palms. As the light grew so did his despair. This was one of those few emotional moments that surpassed the violence in his heart and mind. This anger, this hostility he knew was not an aspect of the war that surrounded his upbringing. His cousin had become a practical nurse and his brother, Warren, was an accountant in Montclair, New Jersey.
“Ecks,” Frank said at last.
Xavier raised his head and teetered in the chair.
“Tell me what happened,” the minister said. “All of it.”
By the time the declaration was over Xavier was sitting up again. He neither shivered nor cried. But he felt empty, directionless.
“The sun is up” were the first words Frank uttered after Xavier’s story. “Let’s take a walk down to the beach.”
The path from the church down to the seashore was a gentle sloping trail through succulent plants and hardy grasses. There were small blue and white flowers here and there and huge white boulders that made Xavier think of superior beings so advanced that they could afford to ignore us, finally outlasting the passage of man.
“You brought your friend back to his home and told him to follow his own mind,” Frank said as they walked north on the hard-packed sand.
“Yes.”
“You only protected yourself from men who would have certainly murdered you and him.”
“If you want to look at it that way.”
“That’s the only way, Brother Rule. The only way. You’ve taken up this cause for a good reason. You weren’t looking for trouble, not really.”
“Sedra is dead because I kicked the hornets’ nest.”
“She’s dead because she lived a life dealing in slaves, suffering, and murder.”
“But if I hadn’t gone there …”
“Somebody else would have gone. Benol was dead set on this course.”
“Do you believe Benol?”
“I believe that she abducted three babies. I believe that she will lead you to those lives that were stolen.”
“But is she an innocent or at least a penitent?”
“I don’t know,” Father Frank admitted.
“Then why send anyone to follow her lead?”
“Have I ever told you what I think men are, Ecks?”
A seagull cried, and Xavier’s heart quailed one of the few times when life was not on the line.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Earth,” the minister intoned, “is a multitiered plane of existence. For the animals and plants it is, for the most part, an Eden of extraordinary beauty and wonder. For these beings life is one continuous story with no beginning or end.
“But for humanity this life is hell. We were once, I believe, angels existing in some higher dimension. We faltered in our duties or our faith and were thrown down here among others like us to experience the anarchy that a failure of duty causes. We don’t remember where we’re from or what we did to bring us here, but here we are—up to our necks in blood and shit, torture and death.
“We cannot escape the reality foisted upon us by whatever powers there are … maybe something without sentience—like fate. Maybe our consciousness is just some ephemeral biotic that we must experience before returning to the unconscious unity that once embraced us—I don’t know. What I do know is that we must act. We have to work for what we think is good. We will stumble and fall and take many wrong turns on this journey. But we have to keep on getting back up and searching for our bearings. We must try to do right in a world where everything is wrong.”
They walked for two hours after that. Xavier wanted to respond; he wanted to ask about the details of his minister’s complex faith. But the words remained unformed—inarticulate.
When they finally climbed back up to the rectory the small table was set out with two bowls of steaming porridge and cups filled with hot coffee for Xavier and black tea for Frank.
“So you’re telling me that anything a man does is forgiven if he does it trying to do what’s right,” Xavier said when they sat down to the repast.
“I’m saying that we are unforgivable but still we have to press on.”
He ordered waffles and crisp bacon at a seaside hotel restaurant where Pico Boulevard meets the ocean. He liked the coffee there and also watching passersby through the windows who were drawn to the shore.
For nearly an hour he went over the minister’s private sermon, wondering whether it was all a Bible story or if Frank actually believed that humanity was the definition and the real manifestation of hell. This question seemed very important to him, more so than the dead and dying left in his wake.
“More coffee?” a young woman asked.
She looked to be in her twenties if you didn’t notice the thin lines around her eyes. Her hair was natural blond with dyed blue highlights and her skin was pale copper.
“What’s your name?” Xavier asked.
“Benicia.”
“From Brazil?”
“Rio.” She smiled for him.
“Coffee’d be nice, Benicia.”
The notepaper in the money clip had Sedra’s address scrawled across it. There was no signature or printing on the small sheet, but when holding it up to the sunlight Xavier could see the watermark: The Federal Hotel.
“Have you been to my country?” Benicia asked as she poured his coffee from a white ceramic thermos.
“Yeah.” He smiled. “Friend of mine had a place down on the water outside Bahia.”
When her eyes widened Xavier could see the woman’s irises were green and gold.
“It is so beautiful there,” she said.
“And real,” he agreed.
Three days after he left Bahia his friend down there had been killed. Word was that it was the police. They had come to the seaside condo looking for Rule.
“Too bad I don’t speak Portuguese,” he added. “I think you can’t really get to know a Brazilian woman without speaking her tongue.”
The copper of Benicia’s skin deepened and she h
urried away.
“Federal Hotel,” the proper man’s voice on the phone said. “How can I direct your call?”
“Concierge, please.”
“Concierge, yes, sir.”
The phone rang once and another courteous man’s voice said, “Federal Hotel. How can I help you?”
Benicia put Xavier’s bill down in front of him while at the same time removing his silverware and empty plate.
“This is Mr. Gonzalez from Fleet Florist,” Xavier Rule said. “We’re supposed to deliver a bouquet of sweetheart roses to a Ms. Doris Milne.”
“Yes?”
“It’s what we like to call a time-sensitive anniversary. She and the man who is sending the roses, Lawrence O’Kate, met at three forty-six a year ago. He wants them delivered at exactly that time. Can you do that?”
“Let me see,” the practiced voice said. “Milne … Yes. Of course we can. When will you be delivering the flowers?”
“Just after noon. But please don’t tell her. Mr. O’Kate wants it to be a surprise.”
“It’ll be our pleasure.”
The inflated bill had the waitress’s name and phone number written across the bottom. Benicia Torres.
Xavier’s disquiet receded between the private talk with Frank, the beautiful Brazilian, and having a purpose. He bought thirty small roses and wrote a note on the card. After that he went home and donned a dark blue coverall jumpsuit with the name Fleet Florist embroidered over the left-side pocket in yellow thread. It was one of the many tools he’d collected from garage sales in preparation for unexpected eventualities. He delivered the bouquet at one twenty-nine, went to his Edsel, and took off the overalls to reveal a yellow suit and olive shirt, and then went over to MacArthur Park, where he sat watching young (and not so young) lovers, brash teenagers, and retirees taking it all in like breaths of fresh air through an oxygen mask.
“Ecks?” Winter said answering his phone.
“How you doin’, kid?”
“Can’t sleep.”
“It’ll come. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“That’ll come too, Win. There’s no rush.”
“They say on the news that the guy with the crowbar in his chest is expected to live.”
“Good for him.”
“But won’t he tell about you?” Winter Johnson asked.
“Probably not. He’s got enough trouble.”
“They didn’t say anything about the vault downstairs,” Winter was saying.
“No. I don’t expect they would. You shouldn’t say anything about it either, Win. Even if you turn me in, you should say that I went downstairs alone.”
“But then why didn’t I run?”
“Maybe you did,” Xavier postulated. “Maybe you stayed until I went downstairs and then you ran. That way you wouldn’t even have been there when I had the shoot-out. You could say that you were afraid that I’d kill you.”
“You wouldn’t, though, right, Ecks?”
“No, I would not.”
Xavier had brought with him the first of a condensed three-volume set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At their last scheduled private meeting Father Frank had suggested that he read for two hours every day on top of his correspondence college studies. On Sundays, when he remembered, he perused one of the major religious texts, but on other days he read history, sometimes philosophy. Most of what he read he did not understand, but Frank had said that it didn’t matter, that understanding was more like a surprise than a goal you could see or predict.
“Just keep on reading,” Frank had said, “and the truth will come up on you from the night side of your mind.”
At six forty-five Xavier went to a small coffee shop across the street from the park. Doris Milne was sitting at a table in the window wearing a tan dress that might have been made from canvas. Her bag was Crayola blue and her shoes maroon. She was a pretty woman, Xavier thought again, somewhere in her late twenties.
He went up to the counter and bought a double espresso before going to her small table. She hadn’t seen him come in.
“Hello,” he said, and she flinched.
“Mr. Noland.”
“Can I sit down?”
“You can do whatever you want,” she said. “You made that quite clear.”
Xavier smiled and pulled up a chair. He sat down and looked at her a moment or two.
“You’re very pretty,” he said.
“Sex? Is that what you want?”
The question surprised him, enlightenment coming with the mild shock.
“No. I mean—yes, I am a man, and the kind of man who likes to have sex—but not from you. What I need from you is information.”
“Or you turn me over to the police.”
“I might give them your name.”
“And if I do what you want?”
“Depending on what you say, I’ll leave you alone. I might even give you a name—one that you could use.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I know that you killed Sedra. Probably bashed her in the head with the same baseball bat you tried to brain me with.”
The statement hit the girl like a slap across the face. Upon recovering she looked around the small café. There was no one right next to them, but Xavier agreed with her unspoken caution.
“Let’s go to a bench in the park,” he offered.
It was late spring and the sky held on to the light of day. They sat side by side on a red bench, their paper cups in hand. She sipped her chai latte, looking nervous. A muscular young white man zipped up on a unicycle and moved back and forth, trying to get Dodo’s attention. It was only when Ecks looked directly at him that he decided the flirtation might not have been worth the exertion.
As the unicyclist moved on, Doris Milne began to speak.
“That house is the only home I’ve ever known,” she said. “Sedra raised me there. She told me that she had found me abandoned on the front porch and decided out of the goodness of her heart to take me in. I was her niece and hand servant. Later I became her accomplice.”
“She bought you.”
“Probably. I used to beg her to tell me who my parents were, but sometimes she’d say that they didn’t love me and now and then she said that they died.”
“Did Brayton Starmon bring you to her?”
“I don’t know. I asked him one night but he wouldn’t say.”
“You knew him?”
“He brought babies for me to play with. I used to think that we were an adoption service, like you said. Until …”
The unicyclist whizzed up and then off again like a hummingbird wondering whether a spider’s web still blocked entrée to a flower filled with nectar.
“Until what?” Ecks asked.
A policeman stopped to look at the odd pair on the red bench.
Doris wasn’t actually crying but there was pain in her face, and her thin frame seemed contorted with agony.
“There was this tiny little baby boy that Brayton brought to the house. He was so cute and loving.”
The policeman walked on.
“I called him Little Mr. Smith,” she said. “He was fine at first but then he got sick. There was something wrong with him. I told Aunt Sedra that we should take him to a doctor but she said that he just needed a little medicine and rest. He suffered for about a week and then one day Auntie came to my room and told me that he was dead. She said that I should bury him in the vault downstairs.
“But when I went to the nursery I could see the mark on his head. She had killed him … I knew it. I knew it even before I saw him.”
“How old were you?” Xavier asked.
“I don’t know, maybe five, six. I buried Little Mr. Smith and prayed for him every day since then. I don’t pray for the other ones, because I didn’t name them after that. I just fed them and changed their diapers like Auntie wanted. It’s like she said, ‘Love is only the bait for pain.’ ”
“Y
ou knew what she was up to,” Xavier said after a long silence.
Doris nodded.
“Why’d she keep you?”
“She said it was because she loved me.” There was a hint of hope in her voice.
“But you knew what was happening. There’s more than one body in that vault downstairs.”
“I used to ask her when she was going to retire so that we could move someplace where we wouldn’t have to do adoptions anymore. She would say that we couldn’t do that until I got a passport.”
“You could have called the police,” Xavier suggested.
“She kept the phone locked up.”
“There’s a lot of pay phones in the world.”
“I never left the house alone, except when Auntie took me someplace.”
“You didn’t go to school?”
Doris shook her head and Xavier wondered about the nickname—Dodo.
“You don’t know how to read?” he asked.
“No.”
“Then how did you know to meet me here?”
“I had the nice man at the desk, Mr. Connors, tell me what your note card said.”
We have to talk, Dodo, the note read. I don’t want to tell anyone else about you and your aunt but we have to talk. Meet me at the Bean Grinders coffee shop at 6:30 if you want to keep the authorities out of this.
It was definitely a threat but there were no damning details. Maybe Mr. Connors would keep it quiet.
“But you knew what you were doing was wrong. I mean, even if you couldn’t read there was radio and the TV.”
“Auntie didn’t believe in the boob tube and she only had a record player. I learned how to sew and color.”
Xavier thought a moment more. He was trying to wrap his mind around a lifelong prisoner who had no way to imagine herself free.
“How did you know about the hotel?”
“Auntie would take me there sometimes to have sex with men,” she said simply. “They would bring me gifts and I would do the things Auntie taught me.”
“Damn,” the New York gangster said. “Goddamn.”
“Is that what you want?” Doris asked.
“What?”
“Sex? Auntie said that all men want is sex. That’s why they give girls gifts and kisses. They don’t care about the heart, only the sex.”
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