Wages of Sin

by Penelope Williamson

  “And his name is Cinnamon, Daddy. 'Cause that's his color.”

  Rourke held the picture up with his good hand, pretending to look at it so that they wouldn't see the tears in his eyes.

  He wasn't supposed to have many visitors, but they kept coming.

  Paulie first, his black cassock cinched tight around his waist as if he were fortifying himself with it. The color high in his round Irish face.

  “I gave you the last rites,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “When I asked you if you were sorry for your sins, you laughed in my face.”

  Rourke laughed now, too. “Hey, come on. I was out of my head.”

  Paulie made a little hunh sound, but then he did his version of a smile, crinkling his eyes, twisting one corner of his mouth.

  “I'm going to take your advice,” he said.

  “Oh, God…”

  “You said some things are worth the sacrifices you've got to make to have them. So I've decided to go on a spiritual retreat, to see if I can find my way back to being a priest.”

  As Rourke listened while Paulie told him about the retreat, he watched his brother's face, and although he wasn't sure why it would be so, there was something in Paulie that reminded him of Mercedes Bloom.

  It's in the eyes, he thought. The marble eyes.

  Sean Daly came by and told him about Gilly.

  “She was in really bad shape when they brought her in, but she's gonna make it. What that son of a bitch did to her…”

  “You were right about her,” Rourke said. “About her being a tough little fighter.”

  “Yeah.”

  Daly's face got hard-looking, but Rourke knew he was only stiffening up against the intensity of what he was feeling. “There aren't any words,” he said. “Hell, there aren't any deeds that would repay you for what you did. You saved my Gilly, my baby…”

  Rourke felt his face stiffen up against this own feelings. “She saved me. She could have crawled out of that place while Bloom was…occupied with me. Instead she took him on. She did you proud, Mr. Daly.”

  “Sean. Call me Sean.” He swallowed, and his face was like a rock. “I just want you to know…You ever have it in mind that you want to be chief someday, just say the word and I'll use up every bit of juice I got to make it happen.”

  Fio sneaked in some booze and they drank it while they rehashed what had happened, laughing as Rourke told him about how Bloom just wouldn't shut up.

  “He was one crazy fucker, I'm telling you,” Fio said.

  Fio, it turned out, had been cruising the streets, looking for Bloom's cab when he had remembered about the hot car farm and had gotten the same hunch that Rourke had had. He'd come shrieking up to the place in a squad car, siren blaring, just as a naked Gilly had run out into Chartres Street, screaming that a man was inside the garage bleeding to death.

  Fio didn't mention anything, though, about how he had found Bloom's corpse with the makeshift garrote around his neck, and Rourke didn't mention that he'd come to for a moment when Fio had been carrying him out of the garage.

  Rourke thought that he was coming to care for his partner a lot, but he didn't know how to tell him that, so he said instead, “Did you ever get a new hat?”

  On Rourke's first day back on the job, Garrison Hughes of The Movies brought by the photographs that he had taken of all the harlequins at the Saenger Theatre's masquerade ball. Even though he hadn't needed the snapshots after all, Rourke gave him the hundred bucks and a story, because a deal was a deal and he liked Hughes.

  Rourke was ninety percent convinced that Otis Bloom had been Romeo. The Ghoul, who was a fount of arcane knowledge, had taken a look at the puncture wound in Remy's arm, listened to her description of the weapon, and declared that in his opinion it was a bleeding knife. They hadn't found any bleeding knives in Bloom's house, but they had found a book on medicinal bleeding. And there was what he'd said in the garage, Romeo's words, talking about Remy looking scared and about how he could take her anytime, anywhere. And the bedroom that Otis Bloom had shared with his daughter—it had been papered with movie posters and photographs of Remy Lelourie.

  Except, except, except…If Bloom had been counting on Rourke to find his Mercedes for him, then why would he have shot at him from a hotel roof and blown up his car?

  So Rourke was only ninety percent sure that Bloom was Romeo, and he thought that the other ten percent that was doubt would be keeping him scared for a long time to come.

  He looked through the photographs because he'd paid for them, but they didn't contain any startling revelations. The harlequins were all with Bright Lights Studios, except for a Charity Hospital doctor and the nurse who was his mistress.

  Rourke tossed the photographs into the box with the rest of the case file on the crucifixion killing and marked it closed. He was about to tape it up, when he opened it again and took out Father Pat's notebook.

  Who are you?

  He wondered how much closer he was to knowing the truth behind that question than he had been on the night he had walked into that abandoned macaroni factory and seen Father Pat hanging from a crossbeam with the nails through his wrists. Who had he been, this priest who was no priest? This woman who was not a woman?

  In some ways Father Pat had been an extraordinary individual. Compassionate, brave beyond measure, profound. And yet now and forever after, when Rourke thought of the priest it would be with a melancholia of disappointment.

  For Father Pat, along with the rest of New Orleans, had watched Titus Dupre get condemned to the electric chair for a murder he hadn't done. The rest of New Orleans, though, could be forgiven some for their ignorance, but the priest could not. He…she…must have had strong suspicions that the real killer was Otis Bloom, and yet he…she…had kept silent. Because to speak would have exposed everything, and for Father Pat, preserving the real purpose of the Catholic Ladies Social had been more important than a colored boy's life.

  And so in a way it all came back to the one question that Rourke had most wanted answered: What had been in the heart of the person who had been born Patrice LaPage that had led her to become a priest? Had she been a murderer looking for absolution? Or a saint looking for sanctuary?

  Some mysteries, he supposed, were destined to remain forever mysterious. Especially those that lived in the human heart.

  That Saturday the Cutlass crew did their final shoot, and Rourke decided at the last moment that he would go watch it.

  It wasn't the last scene in the movie—they didn't film in sequence. It was, in fact, a scene from early in the story, before the heroine has turned pirate, when she still has her innocence, although she is about to lose it. In the scene she is at her debutante ball, when her brother arrives to tell her that the boy she has loved the whole of her life has been lost at sea.

  The scarred cameraman, Jeremy Doyle, had told Rourke all this while he went about his business of loading film and checking light readings with his meters.

  To Rourke the set had the look of controlled chaos. The director threw his script into the air and shouted that the lighting was all wrong. “I want at least two more inkies set up. We're going to do a close-up of her face.”

  Max Leeland, the studio boss, who had been standing off to the side and scowling, said, “The critics don't like close-ups.”

  “Fuck the critics, and fuck their mothers, too,” Peter Kohl said, but he sounded cheerful.

  The studio boss looked over at Jeremy Doyle, who shrugged and said, “The camera loves her from any angle.”

  They brought in more incandescent lamps.

  The studio boss said, “I don't like what she's got on. Where're the tits?” But everybody ignored him.

  Remy stood on her mark in the middle of what Rourke was taking on faith would look like a ballroom on the screen. She looked bored. Then someone turned on a bank of lights and it must have been a cue, because Rourke saw her start to come alive from within like a blossom unfolding.

  Th
e director walked by the cameraman and said under his breath, “Jere…Come in tight on her face, then fade out.”

  And then someone said, “They're ready on set…And roll 'em. Action.”

  Doyle cranked the camera as a young man, dressed in knee britches and a flowing blue shirt and wearing a sword, walked into the ballroom and up to the girl standing alone and lonely in the middle of it. He paused in place for the moment when the title card would tell the audience the terrible news of the shipwreck, and then he gestured wildly, enacting the tragedy for the girl and the cameras.

  The girl stood in utter stillness, taking the blow, and all life drained out her face, leaving only desolation. And then in an instant, it seemed, she was a girl no longer, but a woman whose heart had passed through hell and come out of it again as nothing but ash.

  “Cut,” Kohl said softly.

  For a moment there was stunned silence and then the people on the set all began to applaud.

  That evening they took a walk after supper, and he watched her face passing in and out of the sunlight and shadows. The banquette still had a glow from the day's sun, and the river breeze smelled of bananas and her hair.

  “You're looking at me, Day,” she said, “as if you don't know me.”

  And he said, “What I saw on the set today…I know you can't stop being Remy Lelourie without something in your soul dying.”

  She linked her arm through his and leaned into him so that her head rested on his shoulder. “I have been thinking of how I can make the contract be so that I only make one or two films a year.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence, arms around each other's waist, hips bumping from time to time, Rourke feeling light-headed with happiness.

  They walked by a drugstore that had a sign in its window advertising its fountain's ice cream cones, and he thought of the girl who had found a ring in her chocolate scoop, and he almost proposed to Remy Lelourie right then and there, but then he thought, No, later, later…Don't get greedy.

  Christmas came and it got so cold the water froze in the pipes and Fio bitched that when it got cold in New Orleans, the cold went so deep into you that it ate at your bones.

  A present turned up under the tree for Mrs. O'Reilly from Katie, and Rourke shuddered to think what was in it. But when Mrs. O—showing the courage of a real trouper—opened it on Christmas morning it turned out to be a pair of red mittens.

  “Your present,” Remy said, “is outside.”

  She took him by the hand and led him out through the courtyard, down the carriageway, and onto Conti Street.

  It was yellow. It was even the same model and year. And it was in better condition because it had never been shot at.

  Two weeks later he drove her to Union Station in the Stutz Bearcat roadster that she had given him.

  They stood on the platform getting jostled apart by the crowd while the train belched clouds of steam over their heads.

  “You'll fly out in a few weeks?” she said.

  “With bells on.”

  “You'll like California.”

  “No, I won't,” he said. He was only partly kidding. He was a New Orleans boy down to the bone, but he supposed he could bear the place for the couple of weeks a year he went out there to be with Remy while she was making her movies.

  He got on the train with her, went into her private Pullman cabin, shut the door, and kissed her long and deep. And they said all the things that lovers say when the parting is hard but not bitter, and the reunion already promises to be sweet.

  He got off at the conductor's warning, and then stood on the platform, watching her face in the window as the train pulled out of the station.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  It was a private car, but he knew she wouldn't care.

  He pushed open the door and lounged against the jamb, bracing himself against the rocking of the train. “Do you mind if I join you?” he said.

  She turned from the window, and he watched the emotions cross her face like the passing of the seasons, and then she laughed, threading the hair back off her face with her fingers. God, he loved it when she did that thing with her hair.

  “I didn't know you were in New Orleans,” she said.

  Romeo smiled.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  I must confess to having taken a few minor liberties with history during the telling of this story. I've delayed the grand opening of the Saenger Theatre by some six months in order that Remy Lelourie could be the guest of honor. And if Remy had really existed, her vampire movie would have been the first of its kind to play in American theaters. (The 1922 German Nosferatu did not get its U.S. release until 1929.) The St. Francis of Assisi Academy for Girls, the town of Paris, Louisiana, and Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church on Coliseum Square are wholly figments of my imagination. And finally, while the electric chair was first used in New York in 1890, Louisiana never gave the “humanity” of electrocution in the chair a test run prior to its adoption in 1940, when it replaced hanging as the state's official form of execution.