Ghost Country

by Sara Paretsky

  “Sh-sh.” Jacqui took one of Madeleine’s agitated hands and held it firmly. “No one wants to go out tonight, honey. We’re going to stay here and sleep. But, Brother Rafe, maybe you could tone down talk about blood: it upsets Sister Madeleine here.”

  Brother Rafe narrowed his eyes: he is the only one in charge here. During the day tames the wild futures markets; at night tames the wild homeless women. Then presumably goes home to rule his children. The one who’s here tonight looking white and terrified just at Jacqui’s simple intervention. There’s someone who could benefit from some therapy, but suppose it’s pointless to suggest it.

  Rafe decided to let Jacqui’s challenge rest—maybe a little afraid of what Madeleine might do if he stirred her up too much. Instead grabbed M’s hands and started to pray for her healing, but she didn’t want to be touched uninvited, expecially by a man. She backed off, started to cry. Before I could jump in Nanette took her to one side, talked her down, while Rafe asked all the women to pray for their sister, that her demons might be cast out.

  Guess he saw he was losing authority, so he quickly turned to a Bible lesson, out of First Samuel, where Hannah is praying for a son:

  And Eli said to her, “How long will you be drunken? Put away your wine from you,” But Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman sorely troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the lord.”

  Lowrie wanted women to discuss the verse, to show them that God does not want women to drink. When I was growing up, Mom hated that passage, always read at High Holy Day services. Why are these women praying for sons, she would snarl at Dad and me on the way home. I’d give both of you for a daughter and throw in the dog as a bonus.

  Felt a horrible helplessness as Lowrie directed and dissected Samuel. Of course it would be better if these women didn’t drink or use drugs, but it seems so manipulative to take one passage out of context and use it to hammer on the homeless. Why not take up Isaiah instead. Not knowledgeable about the Bible myself—haven’t even been to services since last Yom Kippur with Lily before coming west to school—but looked up “homelessness” in a Bible dictionary at the hospital library this afternoon, and Isaiah says God wants us to take the homeless poor into our houses! What would happen if I brought that up here at the church?

  Couldn’t get into a pissing contest with Lowrie on the Bible, although he kept looking at me off and on as if daring me to challenge him. Hate the feeling of voicelessness, or castration maybe it is, from not standing up to bullies, to Hanaper or Abraham Stonds, now Lowrie.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t endure his platitudes a second longer, and the women were shifting restlessly in their seats, some of them automatically whispering “thank you, Lord, yes, Lord,” a newcomer showed up.

  The group in the activities room could hear Patsy Wanachs, the shelter director, talking to a woman outside the door, and then the newcomer’s rich voice, slurred from drink.

  “Bible study? How quaint. No, no, I wouldn’t dare inarupt praying women. The leader is a Bible expert? Then must ask his perfesh—professional opinion about something,’

  Luisa Montcrief appeared in the doorway of the meeting room, Patsy Wanachs at her elbow. “Brother Rafe? I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is a newcomer, Luisa Montcrief. She says she wants to sit in on your session, but I’ve warned her that she isn’t allowed to create a disturbance.”

  “Everyone who is striving for understanding is welcome here. Come in, Sister—Luisa, is it?—and sit down.”

  Luisa was dressed as a parody of a diva, in a black silk suit whose skirt had slit up one seam, black stockings that were a mass of ladders, and a gold blouse soiled with food and a dried trail of vomit. She lurched on her way in, and Hector saw that the bottom of one of her high heels had broken off. Alcohol had flushed her cheeks and brought an angry glitter to her eyes.

  She swept over to Rafe Lowrie. “You in charge here? King Ahashuerus with his docile harem? You’re an expert on the Bible, I understand.”

  Lowrie smiled. “Not an expert. Someone struggling to comprehend it along with the other seekers in the room. Cynthia, get Sister Luisa into a seat and give her a Bible so she can follow along in First Samuel. We’re discussing alcohol and women; you would benefit greatly from the text.”

  “Ah, yes. Alcohol and the Bible.”

  Luisa was very drunk; she almost fell when she leaned over the table to pick up one of the cheaply bound Bibles the church had donated to the shelter. She spoke more clearly than most people would at her stage of drunkenness—after years on the stage good diction was automatic—but Hector thought Lowrie was underestimating how close she was to blacking out. She lurched to a chair, lost her balance and fell to the floor.

  “The Bible and drunks, yes. Do not look upon the wine when it is red. Isn’t that in there someplace? You should stick to chardonnay.” She rocked with laughter.

  “Sister Luisa!” Lowrie snapped. “Get up from the floor and sit in a chair. If you can’t listen with respect to what we’re trying to do here, get out.”

  Luisa cast him a reproachful look but climbed to her feet and managed to perch on one of the folding chairs. “I respect what you’re saying. Alcohol and the Bible. Lot’s daughters, getting him drunk so he could commit incest with impurity. Not impurity. Im—what’s the word I mean? Anyway, he wouldn’t get punished. He gets to do what he wants without getting punished. That’s a beautiful story. If you’re a man and in the Bible you get to do what you want and they make you a saint, but if you’re a woman they banish you. Isn’t that right, Mr. Preacher?”

  Some of the women shifted uneasily, but one said, “She’s telling it, Jesus.”

  “Cynthia, what are you doing just chewing on your hair? Get over there and quiet this woman down,” Lowrie commanded.

  His daughter, flushed with misery, stumbled over to Luisa. “We’re not doing Genesis tonight. Let’s look at what’s in Samuel. It’s an interesting book, too, don’t you think?”

  Luisa let Cynthia open the Bible to the relevant passage, but her outburst had upset the other women. One named Caroline, who’d been thumbing through her Bible looking up Lot, cried out, “Here it is, here’s the place she’s talking about, where Sodom and Gomorrah get destroyed, and oh my, look, first Lot was going to throw his daughters to the mob. Let the mob rape his own daughters just to keep them from attacking his house. Then he rapes them himself, pretending he’s drunk and doesn’t know what he’s doing. How do you like that? What kind of Bible lesson is that?”

  “And Jezebel.” Madeleine stood up in her agitation. “They fed Jezebel to the dogs. Her blood splashed on the wall and they didn’t care. The Mother of God weeps tears of blood, Her blood comes out of the wall, but nobody cares.”

  She started to cry. “I have to go back, I’ve left Her too long. The Holy Mother will think I’m like all the others, that I don’t care what happens to Her.”

  Hector sprang to his feet and followed her from the room. “Madeleine, the Holy Mother knows you love Her day and night. And if She loves you, She wants the best for you. Isn’t the best for you right now to let me take you to the hospital for a rest?”

  ’I’m not going, you can’t make me leave Her. I never should have left Her tonight.”

  “Then let me give you another injection,” Hector urged. “It will make you calmer.”

  “I don’t want a shot, when you gave me that shot I couldn’t hear Her so well. It made Her angry, that I was trying to turn away from Her.”

  Jacqui and Nanette came into the hallway. “Madeleine, you can’t go back out there tonight. It’s dark, it’s too dangerous for you and we want to stay here to rest. You know there’s a bed here for you tonight. You could even take a shower. Stay here with us.”

  Madeleine wrenched her hand from Nanette’s and ran down the hall and out the door. Hector started after her.

  “What are you going to do?” Jacqui demanded. “You can’t make her come back. Yo
u can’t force her to go to the hospital if she doesn’t want to, even assuming they’d let her have a bed, which the word on Midwest Hospital is, most definitely not. It’s only a mile and a half to that wall: she’ll make it.”

  “I’ve had enough of Brother Rafe’s preaching, although that drunk who just showed up is making the place more interesting,” Nanette said. “Only I don’t like watching Patsy Wanachs throw people out, and that’s what’s going to happen next. I’m going to get me a cup of coffee. You want one, Doctor?”

  Under the shelter’s rules, beds were available from ten o’clock until six the next morning. Until Bible study finished, no one could watch TV, because the class was held in the shelter’s activities room, where television, art projects, and such games as the church didn’t think involved gambling took place. If someone didn’t care for Bible study, her only choice was not to come to the shelter until ten—when all the beds might already be allotted—or to sit in the refectory with a cup of coffee under the gaze of a bored volunteer, assigned to make sure the women didn’t ransack the pantry.

  Hector went back to the doorway of the activities room. Caroline, who’d found the passage where Lot slept with his daughters, was arguing with Rafe about the meaning of the passage he’d selected from First Samuel.

  “It doesn’t say women shouldn’t drink, only that this priest, this Eli, thought Hannah was drunk.”

  “But we know if the word is in the Bible it is the true word of God, and a guide for us,” Rafe said. “And it’s clear that God, through Eli, is condemning drunkenness in women very specifically.”

  “But drunkenness in men is all right.” Luisa, who’d been lolling on her chair, picking at the threads in her stockings, sat up. “When Shahwerwus—Shawer—Hasherus sent for Vashti you’d better believe he’d been drinking, yes, sir, golden goblets for the king. But she gets sent away and is condemned forever for not wanting to go to this drunk. Is this right, should she have to let him fuck her when he’s drunk? It’s not fair. Are you saying it’s fair, you holy roller, whatever your name is, for kings to get drunk, but women can’t?”

  Lowrie’s smile became fixed with the glue of anger. “The Bible is the just word of God. But it is never right for anyone to get drunk, least of all for you to show up here drunk and disrupt this class. If you cannot be—”

  “Who’s saying I’m drunk?” Luisa was on her feet, swaying. “It’s that bitch Cesarini, isn’t it, jealous because they wouldn’t let her sing Fenena in Covent Garden—”

  Patsy Wanachs shoved her way past Hector into the room. “Luisa! Come with me.”

  The shelter director grabbed Luisa’s hand and yanked her into the hall. “I suggested that you might not be ready for Bible study, but you insisted you wanted to attend, that you wouldn’t disrupt the meeting. Now look what’s happened: Madeleine Carter leaving the shelter in hysterics, everyone in the room in an uproar, all because of you.

  “We have rules here, as I told you when you came in. One is against drunkenness, two is against creating a disturbance. You’ve violated both of those. If you want to stay tonight you will sit quietly in the refectory until we can give you a bed. But if you ever return here in a drunken condition you will not be admitted. Do I make myself clear?”

  “As a broken windowpane, my good woman.” Luisa’s disdain was hampered by her slurred consonants and her unsteady legs, but she followed the director down the hall to the refectory.

  Hector decided he, too, had heard all he could take of Brother Rafe’s preaching. He made his way past the homeless women drifting into the shelter, some with shopping carts, most with all their belongings slung over their backs in plastic bags.

  He sat in his car for a long time. A man came to the gate at one point and became furious at being denied admission. He stormed around and swore, threw a bottle at the fence, stomped down the street, then came back and tried to muscle his way through the gate in company with some of the entering women. One of the volunteers came out. Hector thought her very brave, to confront the man in person, but whatever she said was effective: he left the gate and took up observation across the street.

  After Hector had been sitting for half an hour, Luisa lurched out. She was singing, in a very loud voice, “Sempre libera,” Violetta’s first-act aria from La Traviata.

  10

  Down for the Count

  HARRIET FIRST LEARNED about the woman at the wall the day Mrs. Ephers had her heart attack. That’s why she didn’t bring her usual energy to the problem. The senior partners at Scandon and Atter couldn’t believe it when the president of the Hotel Pleiades complained to them: Harriet had always given both clients and firm what they wanted in the past; no one could believe she wasn’t doing it now.

  “I E-mailed Harriet as soon as I heard about the situation,” the hotel president told his superiors in the Olympus Hotel Group during one of those endless meetings corporations convene to avoid action and assign blame. ”Apparently the garage people had a complaint earlier, got operations involved. They had the cops remove the woman once, but when she reappeared, Brian Cassidy at the garage thought corporate had decided she could stay as long as she kept a low profile. But that night …”

  That night Luisa got thrown out of Hagar’s House for breaking up the Bible study class. She leaned against the gate, muttering to herself, but when a man walked by, said, what’s a fox like you doing out here alone? looks like you could use some company, she flagged a cab. In the dark the driver could see her imperious hand and the outlines of her expensive suit, not the torn and dirty details.

  When the cab dropped her at Michigan and Wacker the driver was furious to discover she had no money. Leaving his car where he stopped—blocking two lanes of traffic—he jumped out to chase her. A horrible screech of metal on metal made him turn around: a bus had ripped off his open door.

  A policeman strolled over from the far corner, demanding to know what the hell the driver meant, leaving his cab in the middle of the road. By the time he explained he’d been stiffed, Luisa had disappeared underground.

  Those two homeless women had been very kind in their way. The diva clutched the railing to keep from tripping on the stairs. Philistines, not recognizing Violetta’s great aria when Luisa started to sing it in the refectory, but sympathetic with her plight when that bitch who gave herself airs because she had a title objected to Luisa’s impromptu concert. How pathetic people were in their neediness. Why should Luisa bow and scrape to a director of a homeless shelter, when her own name had been on dressing rooms in Milan and London? But when that idiot, that Warlocks or whoever she was, forced Luisa to leave, the two homeless women followed her to the door. The black one wrote down directions to a makeshift shelter they sometimes used on Underground Wacker.

  A canceled engagement, was that it? Harry and Karen not home, was that it? For some reason she was in Chicago without a place to stay. She’d had a room, some wretched hovel that Harry shoved her into, always jealous of her, she couldn’t even remember why, it went back so far into their childhood, and then something went wrong with the room. She was locked out, the ugly man at the desk demanding money for her to stay on. She explained that she never handled money, her manager did that, gave him Leo’s number in New York, but he refused to call. Said he wasn’t going to rack up a long-distance bill that she couldn’t pay, but when she got her social security check on Tuesday she could come back, pay up, he’d hang on to her clothes until then. As if she would ever darken his doorstep again!

  After that, she couldn’t remember what happened. Needing a drink to steady her, not true that she was a drunk as that prissass Bible thumper was saying tonight, obviously listening to the gossip Cesarini and Donatelli were spreading about her, doesn’t make you a drunk just because you want a little brandy when some oily Brown Shirt locks you out of your own room.

  Finding a man who would part with some cash … No, cunt, I didn’t pay to hear you sing, spread your legs, she must have seen that in a movie someplace, that hadn
’t happened to her, but she got the price of a quart. The woman at the liquor store was so rude, had to see her money before she’d even bring a bottle down from the shelf. Fat with three hairs on her chin, shave before you touch my bottle, Luisa said, I don’t want to catch lice from you, and the woman so hostile, you’re lucky I don’t touch you over the head with this bottle, you drunken whore.

  Chicago was a horrible city. Why had she come back here? Harry sold her beautiful little apartment in Campania, just because her account at Banco di Roma was the teeniest bit overdrawn, and she told the manager her brother was rich, he’d take care of the problem. And then Harry showed up in Italy, bellowing, not helpful at all. He was like all men, greedy, wanting money more than anything, how terrible for Becca to be growing up with a father like that, And now here was this revolting taxi driver swearing at her. “My good man, it’s been your privilege to carry the world’s greatest soprano in your car. It is something you can tell your grandchildren, if any woman would ever come close enough to your ugly body to allow you to procreate.” And then he was chasing her down the street.

  She had to laugh when the door came off his cab, serve him right for swearing at her. When the cop came over, she should have gone and explained why the man deserved to be arrested…. But some survival instinct made her scuttle underground instead. When she got to the bottom of the stairs she was supposed to go straight ahead along Wacker, then turn right at the second roadway. The black woman had written it all down for her on a napkin, so kind, even in Chicago you could still find enormous love for opera among the common people. Not like in Copenhagen or Berlin, of course, but heartening when the world seemed bent on burying her alive.

  Turning into the second entryway she stopped, rage flooding her brain. A woman was waiting for her. Humiliating her. A mock stage set for Otello. Candles lit, a portrait of the Madonna between them, the woman kneeling before the portrait in ecstasy, no doubt singing “Ave Maria, nell’ora della morte.”