Dies Irae

by Ruby Spinell

  “Did your mother quit her job?” He silenced a little ripple of guilt at thus pumping a son about his mother, for, of course, Zeke had been the one to call.

  “No, she’s keeping three days of proof-reading and taken on more freelance. Guess she wants to write more and wants to be out of the city to do it. She took the house off rentals. Is going to ride the Central Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. What have you heard from Becca, the Bean Counter?”

  Eli shook his head at Zeke’s slaughter of his sister’s lovely name. “Rebecca is doing just fine. She left a numbers theory book here before dashing off to Boston for a conference. She’s thinking of going back to school.”

  “Decided she doesn’t want to be a numbers cruncher … awesome!” Eli held his tongue.

  A dark grey was building up to the north, the wind illustrating again where he needed to apply fresh glazing compound to the windows. He always felt more harried when the earth darkened.

  Zeke was still talking. “How about supper one of these nights?”

  “Yes, de …” Eli made his response quick from long experience, but ‘finitely’ was spoken to a hum. He smiled to himself. Yes! Awesome.

  The phone, laid back down, immediately rang again. Without altering the position of his feet, knees bent, back straight, he picked it up.

  “Eli? Manny here.” Bozeman was as succinct as usual. “Two Eurasian, Eli. Four Asiatic. Gotta go.” Again the hum. Not American, not Indoeuropean, but Asiatic. How could he be sure? Was he ever wrong? As precise a man as Emmanuel Bozeman?

  From the Chuckchi Peninsula almost touching Alaska … down under through Japan to the Sundas above Australia … north and east through Arabia and Turkey … north again along the Urals … all of this was, if he remembered correctly, Asia. One does not search an area that large for individuals with missing appendages. If only they had come from Westchester, New York.

  Shifting weight onto one foot, knees bent, he flipped the Rolodex, then poked several buttons.

  “Marion? Eli Janah. I’d appreciate time to talk with you. I don’t know yet, but I might be dealing with some kind of ritualistic occult.” His voice became apologetic, “I know they encouraged attendance, but both dates came at crucial times. I couldn’t leave. I’m certainly no authority on cults. Please?” He could be very persuasive; it made no difference, men or women. They made a firm date for the following Friday to discuss the normal nut and the satanic crazy over lunch.

  A minute and a half is a longtime to hold a phone listening to it ring. The voice that answered was not Sister Damian’s. It high trebled along in some alpine meadow sticky on the felsenmeer. The brittle cool kept the honey crystallized, it did not drip or run.

  “I’ll have to ask Reverend Mother, Detective. We’re very busy here today. Will you hold?” Silence. No muzak. No classical Liszt like he had piped to him from Roosevelt the day Mother died. “Detective Janah?” Little crystals of honey broke off, “Mother says you may speak with Sister Damian at three.” He thanked the voice and put the phone down.

  Increasingly, dark clouds hurried overhead as he drove, the grey settling heavy around the car until, meeting up with Bert Hamill Parkway—tortuous as it was—he shot off on what he knew to be a quicker route, snow imminent.

  A dark cross against a glowering wash came in view briefly as he swung off at exit nine. It reappeared, reigning high above a triple tier of rambling red brick. Each window in the building had been frosted at least half of the way up. Around this Edwardian castle, completely obscuring the first floor, was a ten-foot black fence extending to the right as far as he could see. Evidently, it enclosed a substantial piece of grounds, and to the left it ran on until it fitted snugly against the main entrance.

  This approach from the rear gave one an impressive view of the wall. Yet, all walls can be scaled. He took in the residential nature of the ranch style houses; and the monastery’s enclosed garden. The developer had placed the streets like the spokes of a wheel, and Eli wondered if the monastery was indeed the hub of a not seedy, but definitely lower middle-class community.

  A stretch limo angled over to the few parking spaces before the chapel, so he continued on, finally finding a place on the street.

  Three figures in clerical black were descending the steps as he approached. The beefy older man in the center looked up briefly, sizing him up, and then resumed talking, making very emphatic gestures with broad pink hands. The men on either side, one a middle-aged man with a pronounced stoop, the other a thin young man in glasses, never looked up.

  “We can give you a lift, Father.” The limo driver opened the door. “It’s not far, Your Reverence, I’ll walk.” The broad-shouldered cleric shrugged and climbed inside, the younger man with the glasses following. A powerful engine purred.

  Now, the eyes were on him, from the privacy of the dark, tinted glass: his age, size, condition, the slightly worn pinstripe with the matching vest, down to the new shine he’d given his shoes, all catalogued.

  “Do you consider what has happened a sacrilege?” Eli asked.

  There were dark circles under Sister Damian’s eyes. She spoke very softly at first. “Elegi et sanctificavi locum istum, ut sit.” Then her voice gained strength. “Ibi nomen meum, et permaneant oculi mei, et cor meum ibi cunctis diebus.” She translated for him, “For I have chosen and I have sanctified this place, that my name may be there forever, and my eyes and my heart may remain there perpetually.”

  He had known as soon as she reached ‘sanctified,’ “Second Chronicles, chapter seven, verse sixteen.”

  “You know your Old Testament, Detective Janah.”

  “I’m not that familiar with the Latin.”

  “Well, when you recite the Divine Office every day it will become a second tongue.” Again, there was that glint in her eyes.

  “It is an astute question,” said the nun. “His Reverence Bishop Danley just left. We had a purification and reconsecration ceremony.” She gave a little laugh, “I think it was mainly for the laity. Visitors to the chapel, and of course the turn, have increased tremendously, everyone peering for blood stains. The local paper did not play the morbid aspects up, but they did not exactly leave them out either. Sensationalism, news … you know … always wins in the end. Donations are up.” Eli could feel her weariness through the intervening metal.

  “Sister,” he repeated, “do you feel this was a sacrilegious gesture?”

  There was a long silence. “I feel it was a trust.”

  Poseidon farting fathoms under water … a low rumbling broke the silence. His stomach growling, he shifted his lanky frame quickly, pretending he was searching for a handkerchief. He had not eaten.

  Sister Damian, rising as if she had left a faucet running in a stopped-up sink, excused herself, “I will quickly return.” She left him and the old fart rolling boulders about the deep of the barren rooms. They weren’t even warm, he thought. Wonder what kind of heating arrangement is installed in a big old place like this, must be drafty as hell. He never thought of hell alongside heat. It was cold; biting, congealing, bitter cold.

  Heavy snowflakes whirled behind the clear upper panes of the windows as if caught in conflict. Between the building and the cloister fence they rose and fell like Kaballah angels ministering to the Sephiroth up and down the line of worlds. Those ascending rose more forcefully. He was intrigued by this. “There is a good probability Eliaphus, you have the mind,” and at this point he would emphasize by pounding his heart; the little red shawl tassels leapt. “You have the heart. Your father tells you this in all seriousness.”

  Papa. Ahh. What do you think now? Talmud. Kaballah. Law. Criminal Justice. Where was the thread? A rabbi … it would have pleased you.

  The door from the cloister into the speak swung inward, an uncontrolled arc hitting the wall. Sister Damian backed in, arms encircling a huge, oval tray, veils and habit all lop and flurry of heavy wool. She swept the tray onto a round, black table, then leaning forward to the bars, bent low and pulled th
e handle on a deep wooden drawer some dark brown strands streaked with grey had escaped the white band across her forehead; they clung damply to the flushed porcelain of her forehead above little beads of perspiration. All was motion as she turned repeatedly, emptying the contents of the tray into the drawer.

  “Now Detective Janah, if you’ll kindly open that card table standing in the corner by the window, open it by your chair, you can lay these few things out. I don’t know where my mind was.”

  The rich, hot smell of fresh coffee filled the barren speakroom. Eli picked up the hot coffee pot with the pads provided, leaving one pad underneath when he placed it on the table. He put a lovely, thick, white pitcher of cream beside a large, white mug. Bent again to a great platter of sandwiches: inch-thick homemade bread, chicken, lettuce, and cheese.

  He couldn’t remember later if he demurred before this largesse. It wouldn’t be like him, he loved food too much. He did persuade her to have a cup of coffee with him. He could not with any equanimity sit there eating while she simply watched. The sandwiches were not the size you might envision females biting into; they were huge. He could find no fault with that at the moment and wondered where she learned to make decent sandwiches.

  “Sister, this is really very kind of you. I am hungry. Tell me though, why you? Why did someone cut off hands and feet and leave them at your door?”

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

  “It would help me if you could tell me about your work.”

  She rotated the white mug against the palm of her left hand thoughtfully, then looked up smiling. “Well … we consider ourselves a fairly modern community, combining the contemplative life with the active. We are a contemplative congregation in that we spend long hours in silent prayer and chanting, and, we recite the Divine Office as priests do. You can do nothing, you know, for your fellow man unless your own house is in order.” She gave him a long searching look.

  “When I say we try to be a community for a modern time, I will try to explain what I mean. We feel that people lose something sequestered interminably within these walls. Call it challenge, call it upheaval. They lose what they shouldn’t, and they don’t lose what they should. For every three years we spend cloistered from the world, we spend a year actively engaged in outside work.

  “Over the years the active component has changed. We live in very turbulent times. Years ago for example, it may not have been common knowledge outside the church, but since it is no longer a large issue I can tell you, there were many alcoholic priests. We opened and ran homes for these men; you might call them hostels.

  “Theirs was a truly superhuman task. More often than not, especially in some of our northern parishes, they were completely isolated, without human warmth and backup. Quite often they had no deep life of prayer. Insufficient emphasis was put on it during their seminary days. Then, they did not have it to fall back on in time of stress. We ran six houses here in New York.

  “When the country got itself involved in the Korean ‘conflict,’ a trickle of people began seeking asylum. It began imperceptibly. We put them in with the fathers who were drying out at the hostels.” She smiled, remembering. “There was no place else to put them. Some of the fathers stayed on.” She gave a throaty laugh that brought a madcap devilishness to her eyes. “They became involved in a broad kind of social work. Many said it kept them off the drink better than AA.

  “Well … the Korean conflict resolved, so to speak …” She hesitated, gathering her thoughts. “The trickle grew to a flood. Viet Nam catapulted us into the East. Before we had time to plan, we had Vietnamese children arriving in groups of six and eight. All that air traffic over Laos! Laotians joined the flood in the late sixties. Such shattered bodies!”

  Eli ate in silence for a longtime. When he had completely finished a second thick sandwich, he picked up the still hot coffee pot, put it into the drawer and pushed it forward.

  “Sister, warm up your coffee.” She looked at him distractedly. “Coffee,” he said again. She did what he suggested, and he sat in silence while she drank.

  She seemed to have gathered herself up. “Many groups stepped forward with help for the children. The Protestant churches were marvelous, Bishops Relief …, well, you know as well as I what has happened in Cambodia. What the Khmer Rouge have done to their own is …” She was at a loss to find words for the massacre of one million Cambodians. “By then we had very well established lines of transport. We have a few dozen Cambodian families re-established across the state, a dozen in the parish. I’m afraid it was merely a drop in the bucket.”

  He felt exhausted and realized he was sitting on the edge of his chair, straining forward as she spoke.

  “We now have nine houses outside engaged in work, and we always seem to have the numbers necessary to staff them while keeping the powerhouse going here.”

  “Sister, do you have enemies?”

  “The enemy within.” He heard it distinctly, but when he asked her to repeat what she had said she looked sheepish. “There are always forces at work pulling and tugging. We get a few crank calls every month warning us Armageddon is upon us. Now and then someone scales the fence, usually a youth on a dare. Twice though, sisters have been molested; we no longer use the garden after dark. People sometimes disagree, say we should stay in the monastery and say our prayers. Some of our own feel that way. People tend to become zealots when they cannot find a door out of their own limited selves. There are many zealots in the world, Detective.

  “While our country was actively involved fighting in Asia, some of the neighborhood had missing sons, dead sons and daughters. It was difficult for them to watch us care for, help, and heal Asian children.” She stopped.

  How can you know another soul, Eli wondered, except via some kind of correspondence, something shared. He knew this woman; he could see the center of her being. This was not good sex or the shared exhilaration of birthing a child. This was not fighting side by side, nor being wounded together. All these were familiar to him. He had spoken to her twice. Yet something wrestled between them. He thought of Jacob struggling with the angel. He fought well did he not? What did the contest prove? Eli didn’t remember.

  They did not glance at each other as he shuffled the plates through the drawer and she piled them on the tray. When he did look up to say good-bye she stood quite erect, her eyes calm, and it seemed she looked a little bit amused.

  Chapter Four

  Yesterday’s snow is a thin coverlet-cloud being drawn off eastward. Frost advancing deeper into the earth, the ash bends casting a darker shade of green through the jade bulblets by the window.

  There is a barely perceptible shifting of weight in the man at the center of the room. His right arm, hand in a soft curve, follows the drop in weight to the foot. Simultaneously … slowly … the left knee follows the left arm upwards.

  ‘Golden cock stands on left leg’ holds for long effortless moments, flows onward, every part of the lean sinewy frame a study in synergism. Control of the active by means of the quiet.

  Weight shifts. The torso drifts counterclockwise, the limbs clockwise. A heel touches bare wood. An arm folds, a palm falls open and one curves downward. A long, slow kick toes the northwest wind.

  He told me he began studying karate on Mott St. between Prince and Spring. A young detective and his partner, giving chase to a pair of hoods from Little Italy, encountering the usual clog of deliveries on Houston, then Mulberry, were nevertheless advancing on what, though not upper family, was definitely tangential offshoot.

  Eastward on Prince, turning south onto Mott, they sprinted in youthful abandon, just about to touch tail when an Asian woman stumbled screaming from a Chinese laundry, quite ferociously howling at the threshold stage of childbirth. Now all police officers are given basic classroom training in emergency birth, but this is no preparation.

  Those who have had even one experiential meeting with this threshold will tell you that a woman is madly crazed to find a human arm
to cling to while the gates of life open those last few crucial centimetres and the baby begins its descent. Brief sometimes. Always overwhelming. They had no familiarity with the dialect; it was not necessary. To their chagrin, the faces on the street remained impassive.

  In the instantaneous decision-making so characteristic of youths of noble lineage, he and his partner bent to the woman and watched the thugs race southeast. But as the partner ran to the laundry for a phone, quickly surmising that he could run faster, and the woman, her belly heaving mountains beneath the thin summer frock, clung to Eli, he looked off somewhat ruefully down the street.

  One man leapt between the moving cars to join the other in front of drab, brown, old St. Pat’s. He watched a thin figure detach itself from the front entranceway. A silhouette against the rising heat, it set about dancing on the hot pavement.

  An arm pushed forward while a leg shot out. A curved palm caught an Italian nose. Eli heard the crush of cartilage over the panting of the woman in his arms. A foot flashing unmercifully high caught the second. It happened so fast. Effortless, it looked like a dance.

  The woman screamed louder than before. She dug her nails deep in his left arm. There was a great liquid gush. His right hand held a wizened, bloody thing with an erect penis and swollen balls. Wanting to laugh out loud, he caught himself. Becoming thoughtful, he held the baby in two hands. As the woman loosed his left, he looped the cord over his wrist and handed him carefully up to his mother. Her eyes declared him beautiful.

  He looked up to see a Chinese gentleman with jet black hair prop one of the thugs on a pile of turds by a hydrant. The other he put against the first’s back. Taking a roll of what looked like salt water tackle from his pocket, he bound them there, bowed deeply in Eli’s direction, turned and walked away.