“Can bone be a relic?”
The old priest was silent so long I feared he’d fallen asleep.
“You still alive in there?” I asked.
“This doesn’t sound like part of your confession.”
“Maybe it’s part of my penance,” I said.
The yellow palm of the old priest’s hand flashed across the vent as he made the sign of the cross. “You must demonstrate your good faith before God,” he said. “That will be your penance. To begin to demonstrate your good faith, you must pray.”
I said, “Okay.”
The priest hole flashed shut. I felt like I sometimes do in the movies, when I don’t know if the film has really ended yet or one last bit remains to be played. When the priest didn’t speak again for a minute or so I stood and stepped out of the confessional.
“You want to talk to a man named Gregory Cherubin,” the old priest said from behind the curtain. “He’ll tell you what you need to know about relics.”
My parole officer was leaning against the hood of her brown Chevy sedan when I stepped out of the church. She didn’t bother to nod or look at me as I approached, the tip of her blue pen flicking as she reviewed a case file from behind sunglasses impenetrable to the outside eye. “Since when did you get religion?” she asked.
“What makes you think I’ve got religion?”
“Calling to meet here, a church, of all places. Just don’t think it scores any points with me. Every other con in prison claims to have found God but that doesn’t mean we should let them out onto the streets again.” Her eyes slit a glance above the rims of her shades. She wanted to make sure I was paying attention. “I’m agnostic, myself. After what I’ve seen, it’s hard to believe whatever planned things has much intelligence.”
“I like churches,” I said. “Maybe I’d do all right in a convent if it wasn’t for the parts about sin and belief. The solitary life, you know, it suits me. Those little rooms they give the nuns, it wouldn’t bother me at all.”
A distressed bark sounded behind me. I glanced over to the Rott, locked in the car. I nodded to Graves, walked over to let him out. I don’t think he shared my acceptance of solitude in small places.
“I talked to Detective Dougan.” Graves snapped shut the case file. “He suspects you may have violated the terms of your parole by withholding evidence. Normally, a charge like this is difficult to prove but the evidence you withheld pertained to a murder investigation. He’s not disposed to be merciful.”
“Will I have enough time to find a place for my dog?”
It took her a moment to get what I was asking.
“He’s not against copping you, not for now,” she said. “And no, when I come for you, you won’t have time to do more than wave good-bye to your dog. Maybe that will encourage you to be a little more responsible.”
I straddled the Rott’s back, something he liked me to do as long as I didn’t sit on him. Cop was parolese for continue on parole. She meant that Dougan wasn’t demanding that parole be revoked, not yet.
“Let’s review the situation.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glanced up to the sky, as though calculating sums. “In the past two weeks you’ve filed a police report for assault—”
“That wasn’t my fault,” I said.
She tipped her head in my direction, and even though I couldn’t see her eyes through the optical camouflage, I knew she was glaring at me. She made me wait a good ten seconds before she continued. “You filed another police report when your sister kited one of your checks, and that same sister was murdered after following a tip meant for you. Then someone torches your apartment while you’re in it. Last of all, a young girl you’re following, a potential witness you didn’t bother to tell Detective Dougan about until the last possible moment, is murdered right in front of you.” She flashed five fingers for five charges and asked, “Is that everything?”
That was everything I’d confessed to and I wasn’t going to admit anything additional, not just then, when the hole I’d already dug was too deep to crawl out of. “I think that’s all,” I said.
She let me wait another ten seconds while I supposedly thought about the error of my ways. “What does this tell you?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t go to Vegas because my luck isn’t running too good?”
She held up the forefinger on her opposite hand. “Oh, almost forgot, six, you don’t have a place of residence, as required by your parole agreement. I could refuse to cop you right now, do you know that? I could take this to a judge tomorrow and get your parole revoked. You are involved in five separate criminal investigations. Five! Are you trying to set some kind of record?”
I said, “No, ma’am.”
“Where are you going to live?”
I glanced back at my Cadillac.
“No way,” she said. “You need a fixed address. I’ll give you seventy-two hours to settle somewhere. If you don’t have a place lined up by then, you’ll need to register with a flophouse.” She reached out to give the Rott a pat, a smile cutting through her icy expression like a blowtorch. “One that accepts dogs.”
Thirty
GREGORY CHERUBIN greeted me that afternoon outside UCLA’s Bunche Hall, easily picking me out among the students clustered below the steps, most of them dressed in the casual California style sold by stores like the Gap and J. Crew. I guess I didn’t look too much like a UCLA student; the closest I came to wearing an earth tone was the paving stone below my boots.
He carried a black briefcase in one hand and a blue sport coat slung over his back on the hook of his forefinger. His pale arms stubbed from a short-sleeved white shirt, top unbuttoned to reveal the collar of a white T-shirt. I’d caught him by appointment after a lecture on Catholicism to students of comparative religion. He seemed to wear his hair whichever way the wind blew it, wispy red strands spraying from a case of male pattern baldness that gave him a natural tonsure. He clenched the briefcase between his elbow and ribs to shake hands. His handshake lingered without being cloying and he measured me with eyes that seemed to combine priest with cop.
“You’ve seen Father Morales today?” Cherubin asked. “How does he look?”
“Old,” I said.
“He always looks that way,” he said. “I don’t know why he referred you to me but I’m happy to help.”
We got something warm to drink at a student café across the lawn and found a free table in the mild February sun. The students around us chatted and studied at tables piled high with books. They seemed happy. I’d managed two years of junior college while working forty hours a week. I always wanted to go back to school, never made the chance for myself. Cherubin sipped at a cup of herbal tea, asked, “Are you interested in first-, second-, or third-class relics?”
“I’m mostly interested in bones,” I said.
“Bones are first-class relics, a category that also includes hair, fingernails, anything that formed the corporal body of a saint. Plus pieces of the Passion.”
“What’s that?”
“The Passion?”
I nodded.
“You’re not even Christian?” He sounded surprised.
“My religious education is a little thin.”
“No matter. Father Morales must have sent you to me for a reason.” He cleared his throat and glanced at his watch. “The Passion refers to the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Most commonly, pieces of the cross on which he was crucified, called the True Cross, are considered first-class relics.”
“Are there a lot of those?”
“Probably enough to build Noah’s ark several times over.” His smile was brief and severe. “That’s why Father Morales mentioned my name. I research the provenance of relics, trying to prove the genuine and expose the frauds.”
My time in prison had exposed me to two types of cons serving time on fraud, the pro and the prankster. “There’s money in this? Or do people do it just to prove they can?”
“People have been selling relics since the death of Chr
ist. Fakes have been around just as long. St. Augustine wrote in the fourth century about swindlers impersonating monks to sell spurious relics.” He raised the cardboard cup to his lips and sipped, his glance wandering to the surrounding students as he measured what he wanted to say next. “I’m sure a few well-intentioned believers have created fakes with the intention of inspiring the faithful and many have been gullible in their certainty that a set of otherwise anonymous bones found near an ancient church are the bones of a saint. But the overwhelming majority of the time it’s about money. The Church has fought the sale of all relics, even genuine ones, since the reign of Theodosius. It’s part of the canon law against the sins of simony.”
I started to feel like I do in this dream I have every now and then, of finding myself back in high school, taking the final exam of a class I forgot to attend. I felt the side pocket of my camera bag for a pad and pen. “Simony? How do you spell it?”
My ignorance must have been obvious, from the lost sheen of my eyes if nothing else. Cherubin took pity, spelling it out for me, his tone indulgent. “Simony is the purchase of the spiritual with temporal things, such as the purchase of relics. A relic is considered an object with spiritual value, particularly first-class relics.”
“What I don’t understand is, why? What’s the purpose in worshipping an old bone?”
“First, the Church expressly forbids the worship of ‘old bones,’ which are more appropriately called first-class relics when discussing the remains of a saint.” He held up a single, warning forefinger. “Non colimus, non adoramus; honoramus. We do not worship. We do not adore. Instead, we venerate or honor the relics of the saint as part of our adoration of God. If I told you that people have been healed by touching a garment worn by a saint, or by kissing a fragment of bone from the body of a saint, would you believe me?”
That seemed like a trick question so I thought carefully before I answered. “I’d like to believe it but I’d have to wonder about the mental state of the person getting healed, whether or not it was all in their head.”
“If the crippled can walk, does it really matter?” He slapped the table, a gesture of impatience, and stared at me as though he might make me understand by the force of will as much as reason. “If healing the spirit heals the legs, are the legs any less healed?”
“Fair enough,” I admitted.
“Catholic doctrine states that inanimate things can be instruments of divine power, though they are not in themselves divine. That’s why we honor but do not worship relics, which would be idolatry. But when something becomes the instrument through which God works His will, people sometimes mistake the instrument—the relic—for the cause, which is God. This results in people putting the cart before the horse, so to speak.” He smiled, pleased with this explanation as though the use of a common metaphor had just occurred to him and made the whole more readily understandable.
“Are Catholics the only ones who venerate relics?”
“The veneration of relics probably extends back to the days of the Stone Age. Almost every culture has one variant or another. The body of Buddha was supposedly divided into relics. The Greeks honored the bones of their heroes. Ancestor worship in several cultures involves the veneration of bones or ashes.”
“Do people ever wear a relic, say, as a necklace or pendant?”
“That was one of the abuses.” He nodded as though I’d finally given him a correct answer. “Because secular jewelry was forbidden at times during the Middle Ages, the rich would encase a small relic in gold and decorate it with precious stones, making it a reliquary, and wear that.”
“Have you ever heard of someone making reliquaries from the bones of a movie star or celebrity?”
Cherubin’s skin flushed to the tips of his ears, which glowed such a violent red they seemed about to ignite in flame. “Someone came to me with similar questions about relics a couple months ago. A dealer in movie memorabilia. He’d run across something someone claimed was the relic of a movie star. Wanted to know what I thought of it.” He waved the back of his hand through the space between us as though dispelling a wasp. “I told him I thought it was sacrilege.”
“Why would somebody wear something like that?”
“Probably from the belief that the relic has magical properties. That it will work miracles.” His eyebrows contracted sharply. “Black miracles, I’d say.”
“Black miracles?” I’d never heard the phrase before, but it reminded me of something Vulch had said. “Does that have anything to do with the dark arts?”
“Whoever blasphemes the Church—and making reliquaries from the bones of movie stars is blasphemy—is a practitioner of the dark arts, whether consciously or not.” The look he gave me, his brow furrowed and the frown lines around his mouth deeply scored, served as warning that this was a subject of dire importance to him. “The person responsible is either a Satanist, purposely perverting the rituals of Catholicism, or a renegade.”
“A renegade what?” I asked.
“Priest,” he said. “Every now and then a priest goes bad. The Church will only rarely disown one of her sons. But sometimes, a priest rejects the Church, not just to lead a pleasantly temporal life but to fight for the other side.” His finger inscribed a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn onto the tabletop. “A renegade.”
Thirty-One
THE SHELVES that lined the walls of Mad Mack’s Movie Memorabilia spilled over with the detritus of thousands of film and television productions, some famous and others known only to aficionados, but each having created a series of artifacts that fans and collectors considered indispensable to their well-being, such as a vintage Han Solo and Chewbacca plastic 7-Eleven Star Wars cup or a genuine gorilla soldier vest and matching ammo strap from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Costumes took up two entire walls, each item wrapped in clear plastic and marked with a tag describing which star, starlet, starling, or stunt double wore what, or, in the case of a swatch of Spock’s uniform from the original Star Trek television show, framed behind glass with a certificate of authenticity, testifying to its impeccable value as a collectible.
The remaining wall and aisle displays were packed with scripts, press kits given to members of the media—who promptly sold them—and props that ranged from the keys to the Aston Martin driven by James Bond in Thunderball—not the car itself, just the keys—to a prop gun stolen from the unforgettable Stallone starrer Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Near the top of the ceiling, where the shelves could stretch no higher without imminent danger of toppling, signed photographs of stars dating back to the silent-film days crammed every available inch of wall space. The sensory effect of so much memorabilia of questionable cultural importance packed so tightly together was like entering an archaeological exhibit organized by a ragpicker.
Mad Mack presided over the shop from behind a sales counter piled shoulder-high with products that he hadn’t yet bothered to squeeze onto the shelves. He kept an eye on customers through an archer-sized notch cleared beside the cash register. As I was his only customer, that eye was free to wander over the pages of Variety. “You Max Perlstein?” I asked him.
“Was last time I looked at my driver’s license.” Long gray hair spiraled from his head like smoke. His eyes, shielded at the corners by thick, black-plastic-framed eyeglasses, didn’t stray from the page, as though he’d sized me up as a nonbuyer from the moment I walked through the door.
I poked my head into the gap beside the cash register, said, “Gregory Cherubin said you might know something about people who collect the bones of dead celebrities.”
The Variety turned to an oblique angle and he rubbed his right hand across the chest of his red-checked shirt. “Are you buying or selling?”
“Neither. I’m asking.”
Mad Mack swiveled the stool to get a direct look at me, the glance of his blue-gray and bloodshot eyes both wary and curious. By the way I was dressed, the flicker of his eyes said, I looked more like a seller. “I still need to know who you are, why
you’re interested.”
“I’m a freelance photographer for Scandal Times, the gossip tabloid,” I said. “Might be good publicity for you.”
“You wanna show me some ID?”
I dug the press credential from the side of my camera bag and placed it on the counter. He craned his neck to read the print and to check the photo against the original, took a moment to rummage beneath the counter, then slapped the previous week’s issue of Scandal Times next to the cash register. “Lucky for you, I’m a fan.” He plucked a felt-tip marker from a Toy Story II commemorative cup and presented it to me like a knife, blunt end over his forearm. “Would you mind signing this one?”
It took me a moment to realize he wanted me to sign his copy of Scandal Times. Nobody had ever asked me to sign anything except checks and my parole-release agreement. I took the pen and swirled my signature over the front page, said, “I doubt this will make it worth anything more than the price of the paper.”
“If it’s got a signature, it’s collectible.” He wrapped the issue in protective plastic. “You said Cherubin sent you?”
I nodded, said, “A couple days ago I met this girl, this young actress, and she was wearing something around her neck that looked like bone. Told me it was the penis bone of a dolphin.”
“I don’t collect those,” Mad Mack said. “But if you want a life-sized plaster replica of John Holmes’s private parts, cast from the original himself, I can get you that.”
“I don’t think she was telling me the strict truth,” I said. “I suspect it was another kind of bone, maybe stolen from the grave of James Dean. Would you know anything about that?”
“James Dean, you said?” His eyebrows shot above his eyeglass rims. He was impressed. “Not directly, no. But I know things like that are for sale to the right people at the right price.” He inserted the paper into a previously invisible gap in the clutter atop the desk and waved toward the aisles behind me. “Just about anything connected to the movie business is collectible. You want Jerry Lewis’s little red hat from The Bellboy, well, I got it on the shelves here. You want something a little more risqué, two shelves down from the hat you’ll find the athletic supporter worn by Nick Nolte during the filming of North Dallas Forty. But some things just aren’t meant to be collected, in my opinion, and the bones of film greats are one of them.” He ducked his head below the counter and was gone for a good thirty seconds before reappearing with a small white box. “This little sucker cost me five grand.”
Digging James Dean Page 21