Dies Irae

by Ruby Spinell

  Bath was as interested in the ancient counting device as Eli’s unkempt state. A change was in the wind. For months the abacus rested in the drawer. When it came forth and Eli sat fingering the beads like a senile nun, it did not mean change was upcoming that very day, but it sure was imminent.

  So, Walt Bathesday was sitting quietly waiting.

  “Tried to reach you last night,” Bath said.

  “Had to go to the City.”

  He couldn’t translate the expression on his face, couldn’t see it. So he wasn’t with her. The locker room tab had it that Eli and Marion Rasille were a sudden twosome. A hot twosome. Bath hoped it was true; Ms. Rasille was quite a looker. And Eli, well, he had dropped ten years.

  “Had coffee at Mom’s when I got back, then came here.”

  “I checked out Maysenrod,” Bath said. “Got his fingers in more pies than you’d find at a pie-eating contest. Old guy, he’s been around. Over eighty now. He was a colonel in Special Forces back when Arthur Danley was in Korea. Money! Lots of it! He doesn’t deal the big D, but I’d say he comes right close. He will sell to developing nations anything they need to get developed. They need it, he’s got it.”

  “Munitions?”

  “Yup.”

  Eli moved another bead. “I trailed Danley last night.”

  “You trailed the bishop?”

  “He drove a car registered to Maysenrod. Went into a house owned by Maysenrod. A house by the way, that is under some very elite surveillance.” Eli took a deep breath. “His Reverence did not act like a bishop.”

  There was a long silence. “You look godawful.”

  “Thanks.” Eli did not look particularly stung.

  “Maybe this will help you feel better. Our contact in Laos tells us that an elderly female, a staunch Party member, was buried last week without a hand. Since she hasn’t had a hand for two years and no one knows how she lost it, it wasn’t considered momentous. The lady was not liked. Everyone on both sides was glad she had finally passed away. She was 78.

  “Our Laotian also had a kernel of interest. He says twenty years ago some CIA types and a priest made a flying leap through their country looking for a downed flyer. There was a lot of fire power in the group, that’s how he remembers it. The guy in charge was a tough bastard and the priest, a tall, thin, nervous type. He heard they never found him, the pilot.

  One last nugget.” You could see Bath savoring this morsel. “A couple of months ago in Southwest Cambodia, a local Khmer Rouge leader’s brother, thirty-three years old, crafty little zealot, turned up missing a foot. He disappeared for a day and a half. They thought he had a woman stashed somewhere. When his comrades found him he was laughing his head off. Coked-out. He told them a bad dream about the CIA. They think he stepped on a mine, but that wouldn’t explain the fact that his stump was bandaged all neat and clean.”

  Eli forced air through his lips. “Good work!” He was grinning. They watched John Fay amble toward them, hands thrust deep in his pockets, with his frequent hangdog look. He was having trouble with Nancy. They shook their heads.

  When he sat down, Bath growled at him, “Why in blazes don’t you marry her!”

  Fay looked sheepish and scowled. They brought him up to date and watched the eyebrows go up, the alert expression return. Bath, watching the transformation, swore anew he was never going to get too involved with any woman. They were good for maybe one or two things. Best to take them home then, where they belonged, leave a guy his peace.

  “John, I need a door to door around Hilary’s. You may have to go farther. Let’s see if anyone saw Elias leave the rectory that Tuesday. We’ve got to find them.”

  Eli was musing to himself then, “So, old clawhand lived at least two years after she stopped breathing and was given that shot of epinephrine. Find out where she was living when she lost the hand. Can we place Elias there during his yearly visit?

  “We have to know exactly where Elias went this year. Can we fit him with the loss of the henchman’s foot? On second thought,” he glanced at the wall clock, “I could see to the good father this morning.”

  “You should go home and go to bed.”

  “Later. Things are changing. You have to keep on the movement with change, or the resulting dilemma is incomprehensible.” He stood up, and standing, his dishevelment looked like dilemma enough. The abacus disappeared into the desk drawer.

  Unawareness of one’s feet is the mark of shoes that fit. Unawareness of right and wrong is the mark of a mind at ease. Father Elias’ shoes fit, Eli thought, watching the priest walk away. Often people blurt out the truth. It hasn’t a thing to do with whether you are doing a good job tightening the rope. Their guilt gets to them; they need to confess.

  Elias was not riddled with guilt. He was going back to the rectory to build a second kitchen cabinet. Cool as cold celery, he told Eli where he was in Southwestern Cambodia eight weeks ago and then, if that was all, he had work to do, turned and walked away.

  After talking with Father Elias, he had rung the monastery door bell on impulse and asked for Sister Damian. “It’s me, myself,” her cheerful, low voice answered at the turn. They could talk as long as he didn’t mind being interrupted. She would have to answer the phone and buzzer when they rang.

  They met in the speakroom. “I was searching through the archives for information,” she gestured toward the photos, “and came across those.” She shuddered, remembering. “We passed them through community just as we did when they initially came in the mails. No one said a word. You know war is hell,” she finished lamely, “but you don’t really know. We have accumulated this collection over a period of twenty years.

  “Each one arrived with a heartbreaking appeal for prayers, usually for a POW or someone missing in action. As I said, we looked at them again after recreation last night. I am sure they’ve burned fresh into each sister’s soul.

  Eli felt calmer sitting there than he had in twenty-four hours. Her brow was smooth. A dimple laughed in her cheek when he teased her about the “it’s me, myself.”

  “I was glad to hear your voice. Father Elias had just left. We talked.” The look she gave him was both expressionless and hopeful.

  “Sister, I’d like to keep these for awhile if I may?” “Of course.” He was beginning to look like the dime novel detective, Sister Damian thought. “Detective, you look like you could use some coffee.”

  “If I drink any more I’ll twang.”

  She laughed. “Tough night?”

  “Wasn’t easy Sister.”

  “Tea then.”

  He sat looking at the pictures while she was off making it; they were not nice viewing.

  Sister Damian leafed through the clippings in a makeshift scrapbook when she returned. “Maybe you should have these as well … No … I can’t do that, maybe you could, well, go through them? You see I’ve promised them to someone who is going to be writing about our congregation.” Damian said, almost talking to herself, “I was dubious about the article, but it has been a help to go through these again. They throw some light.”

  “Do you recognize anyone in the photos, Sister?”

  She seemed to have pondered this already. “I would say, cautiously, no. Pain disfigures though, enormously. Something about …” She faltered. “Those cages were ghastly!” She swallowed hard. “A fleeting forgotten recognition, Detective, gone before it came. I don’t know, it was puzzling to me. I may have internalized the torture, seen myself.”

  “Where does it shine, Sister?”

  “What?”

  “The light.”

  “Oh. Well, on our order, this community of sisters. And on the changes that have taken place. A provocative dilemma comes in the guise of a one-legged man.” She leaned forward and touched the grillwork as if assuring herself of its reality. “He always had the other leg, you know, he just never used it.”

  “You’re particularly enigmatic this morning, Sister.”

  “Am I? Well, I only meant that … I
’ve been spending a lot of time in the basement. Oh Lord!” She started chuckling. The laughter made her rock back and forth. As she rocked, the laughter increased in volume. At this point, she looked up at Detective Eli Janah and pointed her finger at him. “You look godawful!”

  “I do, don’t I?” Eli Janah’s face broke into a ripple of laugh lines, and he threw back his head and howled.

  In between gasps, she said, “You look the way they describe detectives in murder mysteries. See, this may be one of your real selves that has just out.” A growl of laughter shook him. She continued, “I like the other one, don’t get me wrong. But I thought he was kinda neat.”

  “Too neat for a detective?” His eyes were teasing.

  “No, I guess not.” She smiled at him. He caught the glitter in her eyes of the unshed tears, the tears that had turned to laughter.

  “Well!” There was a business-as-usual shade to her chin although the smile refused to leave. “If you’re in the mood and ye have the time, you’re quite welcome to stay and look through this stuff. I brought four crates up from the basement. They’ll not fit in the drawer; I’ll pass them out at the turn.”

  Eli, realizing that things were going well with very little planning on his part, agreed. There was a bench in the room, and he carried the crates in from the front turn and lay them side by side on this. Taking off his suit jacket, rolling up his sleeves, he pulled the table and chair within easy reach and began sorting the ingredients of the wooden boxes.

  Sister Damian left to answer the front doorbell. He caught something about a key to the chapel. Then a phone rang and there were voices and the whole thing washed out like background noise along with bells and a half hours chanting from the sisters’ wing of the chapel.

  What he had before him within two hours was evidence of a large scale operation in Southeast Asia. An operation of this size could hide any number of things. The late Monsignor O’Reilly had been fundamental to its functioning.

  Lists of contacts, schedules for airlifting, ferry-boat captains, money paid out from donations and special collections, national health officials, housing representatives, immigration officials, Red Cross, philanthropic organizations. The names of hundreds of children, age, origin, place of disembarkment, whether or not there were siblings or other members of the family in the States. All was written in a neat woman’s hand.

  At noon he sat back and listened to the bells in the tower ring the three and three and three and did not know it was the Angelus.

  No Sephiroth rose and fell between the wet, dark monastery and the wall of the enclosure. The tree that represents the dynamic underlying reality of the world of sense was being slowly surface-coated, a habit of cloaking in the way of hemlock and pine. Turgid rain hit the windows and froze. The tops of the cloister garden gradually faded from view.

  He hadn’t heard Sister Damian. Leaning back against the door, she stood very still watching him from her side of the speakroom. “I suspect I’ll not be seeing much of you from now on, Detective Janah.” Eli felt warmth and calm wash over him.

  “I suspect not, Sister.”

  He pointed to the piles of papers and books before him. “This has been very helpful. May I make a suggestion?”

  “Of course.”

  “Put it away. Better still, burn it. Whatever you do, don’t make it accessible to the public just yet. You say someone is writing about the Congregation? If I were you, I would refrain from extending him this material.”

  “Her.”

  “No matter.”

  Eli didn’t for one moment think that the sisters knew of covert operations within the confines of their charity. Sister Damian gave him a long, hard look. “Maybe that’s why the Lord sent you this morning, Detective. I’ll do what you advise.” He never asked her which piece of advice she chose for her course of action. “I came in to see if you would also like something to eat?”

  “Thanks.” he shook his head in the negative and patted his flat abdomen. “Notice how quiet it is.”

  The long, relaxed figure of the recumbent man. The tall erect nun in her grey habit. Frozen in place. Sleet fitting itself into the window mosaic made the only sound. An artist with an eye to angles and planes, would see the exact amount of rotation required to bring one figure into coincidence with the other. The frank grey eyes of the nun and the eyes of the soon-to-be Inspector held their common knowledge lightly.

  John Fay was waiting outside Eli’s apartment in his car.

  “Coming up?”

  Fay nodded. “Just for a few minutes though. Nancy and I are going for the license this afternoon.”

  Eli grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “Way to go, man! Two people who make each other as miserable as you two have some fate to work out.”

  Fay, sitting at the kitchen table, said no to coffee. “Jittery enough.” But he was smiling. “I had a real stroke of luck this morning. Kinda take it as an omen. The muffler fell off my wreck on Pine Street, I was dragging the tail pipe. To make a long story short, I clattered into Clancy’s Garage to have him wire it up until I can get time to take it in. He doesn’t think much of guys who misuse their cars.

  “St. Hilary’s has a sedan, an ’84 black Chevy. It had a couple of teeth missing on the fly wheel. Made a hell of a noise but it usually caught … if you cranked the starter enough. Clancy asked them not to use it, and he tabled all other jobs to get it in the bay on the eighth.

  “Well, he was out with the tow, retrieving old Mrs. Jacobs from a ditch when he saw Father Elias drive that car in the direction of the Annunciation at one-thirty on the seventh. He was pissed. Unnecessary abuse of a car, he calls it. He never said anything to the fathers, but he charged them extra for the work.”

  “He’s sure it was Father Elias?”

  “Positive.”

  Eliaphus Daniel Janah let the hot water beat on his head and shoulders. Five seconds after throwing himself on his bed, he was asleep.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The moment of combustion is pure silence. Eli’s face was expressionless. Absorbed, he reached out and rearranged the photographs. There were nineteen. He had been examining them with diligence since he woke.

  Reverently, he laid one photo beside another and then another beside that … then another … until he had a separate grouping of seven on his left. Carefully, he went over the remaining eleven with the magnifying glass. Who had taken them?

  If forgetting is absolute solace and absolute injustice as Kundera says, then someone holding a camera decided there was to be no forgetting. They passed judgment.

  He held one closer to the light. The young GI’s face was almost washed out in the blaze of uncamouflaged pain. In fact, his entire naked body glowed with a pallid light. The old woman sawing away on him couldn’t have been more delineated if she had been in a line-up; you could clearly make out the mole on her lip. The Mark 4 survival knife that cut through the man’s body part was distinctly identifiable. The hand that stretched his flesh for the serrated edge, looked like the claw of an eagle.

  In another, a small Asian, barely more than a boy, kicked a pulpy mass. Only when he had identified the small, round hanging object as an eye, waiting like an egg for the next thrust of the boot, did he realize the mass had been a man’s face.

  In eleven of the photographs, the camera sight focused on the torturer. Despite the baggy pajamas, two were definitely female. He was looking at a picture of ‘clawhand’ in her mid or late sixties.

  He had not been positive that the seven he had placed to one side were of one and the same man. At least initially. At first, only two surprised him with their likenesses.

  A young uniformed American was being hoisted above a crowd of angry villagers in a four-foot square cage. He must have been very tall, his knees were jutting up on either side of his face.

  The second was a close-up of his face. The photo looked like a picture of Father Elias.

  In the third photograph, the man’s face had altered appreciably.
He had been stripped naked. Two men were jabbing him with long poles. He hung above them in a kind of village square. He seemed to be trying to avoid the thrusts, but there was no place he could go. Eli winced at the position of one of the poles. The face of the man puncturing the caged man’s rectum was very clear.

  There were four more photos, three of him still caged. There was a definite time sequence. But Eli could not tell how many years had intervened between the caging of the captured, downed flyer and the picture of the emaciated skeleton that did not bother to look through the bars of the cage.

  The resemblance to Father Elias had faded. Only the broad brow and a hint at the corner of the eyes retained a slight familial likeness.

  What hair he had was white and was distributed in a most unusual pattern across his head. It took Eli some minutes before he realized it must have been pulled out in clumps. There was a far-away vacant stare in the eyes of the life form in the cage as if the soul had spirited the mind away.

  The legs, imprisoned for so long in their scrunched-up position, looked like gnarled tree limbs.

  The last picture was a puzzle until Eli got his bearings. A naked human form, skin taut over a gaunt skull, lay on its back on the bare dirt like an upended beetle, the limbs grotesquely twisted like antlers in the air.

  Eli glanced out the window. A drop in temperature had changed the icy drizzle to flakes floating lazily in the street light. He knew what Sister Damian had known when she suggested he borrow the photographs. He knew why.

  It gave him no satisfaction. The pervasive dis-ease that he did feel finally drove him away from the table into the practice room. Spreading the mats on the bare floor, he stripped and quickly worked up a sweat. Toweling himself, he did not leave the room.

  Sitting on the mat wrapped up in the oversized towel, he thought of the I Ching’s insistence on change … of paying attention to transitions.

  He had followed a wire, found it was faulty. Now it was his job; no, his duty, to see it was re-placed. It did not matter that that particular wire began to look like the soundest part of the system. No, that did not matter at all.