by Harker Moore
The years blurred after that. A graduate degree in philosophy from Loyola University had prepared him for little but teaching. His secret life and all its dangers remained. From time to time he dated, but no other woman was Kaitlyn. They became his excuse for having sex with men. He would loathe the women who were less than Kaitlyn, rather than loathe himself.
Finally there was the Church, actively recruiting priests, since vocations from God had been increasingly falling on deaf ears among the faithful. It seemed to be the solution for the sterility of his life. Let the Church take Katie’s place.
Why did you become a priest?
To save my immortal soul.
That was the plan, though not very well thought out. For surely he had known that in the seminaries there were others like himself. So the Church had not saved him, providing him instead with rationalizations. His little clique of seminarians had been very good at that. Justifying with technical arguments, and ecclesiastical dancing upon the head of a pin, that having sex among themselves did not constitute an actual violation of their vows.
He had allowed the arguments to seduce him, and had gotten along quite well. And then after the seminary, he had quit the affairs cold turkey. He had been so proud of that. Chaste at last. Faithful to his vows. The photographs had been harmless. An outlet.
And maybe that was just one more rationalization.
A sound, bitter, escaped his mouth. Walsh had warned him against agreeing to the lineup. But in his arrogance he had insisted. Get it over with. Enjoy their stupid faces when he passed with flying colors. He was innocent, after all. How could he have guessed that one of those nameless boys he’d photographed could be linked to one of the victims, or that he’d be falsely identified as being in some bar with another?
And still it might have come to nothing without that locket. How had the Mancuso girl’s necklace turned up in the rectory basement? It seemed that he was being framed. By God, if not the killer.
He looked at the clock. Edward Walsh had called and left a message. He was coming here tonight, and soon. Coming to tie down the details for him to turn himself in.
He hadn’t been allowed to attend the Mancuso girl’s funeral today, nor Father Kellog’s services at St. Patrick. There was still some talk of a defense, but the message was clear. The Church was giving him up. He’d run out of places to hide. He unbuckled the belt at his waist and drew it out full length. Then he looked down at the note he’d let fall to the bed. I’m sorry. He’d let stand what he had written. Let them make of it what they would.
Like this, they had not come together for too many nights. Together in their marriage bed, so completely as one, the great wedding quilt, a curling wave of silk and fine thread, rolled at their feet. The past weeks, too, rolled away, deep inside of her, out of memory’s reach, where they could do no harm.
Her husband rested now in her arms, listening to the thrumming of her heart, counting beats, measuring rhythms. Hanae breathed his moist smell. The feel of his hair, cool and dense against her fingers. He sighed, a happy noise, like a small boy’s. A sound too long absent from her ears. He moved his mouth to her breast, suckling lightly. She slipped a finger between his lips to feel the warm rough of his tongue. Only moments before he had poured himself full inside of her.
He rubbed his hand now over her abdomen. A small tremor shot through her, and she wondered if at last he would take notice that his wife had grown fleshy. He did not.
He lifted his head. “You are cold, my wife?” he asked quietly, and moved to unfurl their wedding quilt, gathering it snugly around them. “Better?”
“You spoil me.” She whispered against the side of his throat.
“No, Hanae, I do not spoil you. I have not been such a good husband.”
She wanted to speak, but let the silence stand.
“This case has taken me away from you and that is not good.” He turned her under him. She could feel his warm breath, his dark eyes on her. “I love you, Hanae.” He kissed her softly.
“Watashi mo,” she answered.
He rolled onto his back, pulling her close, surprising her with his words. “I know you want a child. And it would be good for you.”
She wanted to ask would it not also be good for him.
“I am afraid … ,” he whispered into her hair.
“Afraid, my husband?” She rose up on her side.
“Of the evil in the world.”
“Good cannot exist without evil,” she said.
“But this job lets me see too much.” His voice was almost angry. “I don’t know if I want our child to come into such a world.”
“This little girl’s death stays with you.”
“Yes.” This time there was only sadness in his voice.
She lay back next to him, wishing for a better world. For her husband not to be afraid. That he would want this new life she carried. Her heart had already made a place for their child. Now she must pray that in her husband’s heart there would also be a place.
“Jimmy …”
The ringing caused him to jump. He rolled over to pick up his cell phone from the bedside table. She heard him flip up the receiver. “Lieutenant Sakura.”
She placed her hand against his back.
“When?” he asked.
She could feel the muscles tensing along his spine.
“I’ll meet you there.” He was already moving, his legs swinging off the bed. “I have to go, Hanae,” he said. “The priest we were going to arrest is dead. Apparently a suicide.”
She brought her lips to the soft curve of his back. “I am sorry, Husband.”
She could hear him move into the bath, the shower running, then the water in the sink, the brush against his teeth.
“Go to sleep,” he said softly, coming back into the room, his soap-sweet smell reaching her.
She heard the hangers click against the metal rod in the closet, the crisp sound of his shirt, the swoosh of his trousers, the slap of his belt. Then the jingling sounds as he filled his pockets.
He bent and kissed her. “Aishiteru yo.”
He padded almost soundlessly across the tatami in his stocking feet. His shoes waiting in the genkan.
The outside door opened and closed. The sounds of his key in the lock.
Gently she exhaled, listening to the absolute stillness of the room. Then slowly, very slowly, she allowed herself to cry.
Asleep in the bed, Darius breathed in real time, but his consciousness was in dream time. He moved disembodied through lives half remembered, a ghost-snake slipping its skin. Whispers followed like footsteps. Words of the medicine man tickled his ear. An echo that thrummed with the blood in his veins. A truth that prickled his skin like the old fears, to halt the clicking sideshow.
In dream time he saw himself with fresh eyes, a boy upon a mountain, stripped down to breechcloth and moccasins, a small knife tucked against his hard young belly. He sniffed the air. Inside the heat he could smell the coming of autumn. Yet he did not trust his senses, hungry as they were for an end to summer and o-kee-pa.
Unlike the others, he would not give over his body to o-kee-pa. He would not hang in the lodge, suspended from rawhide ropes, hooks driven into his flesh with buffalo skulls tied to his feet, dangling until the spirits came. He would find his own way, he told himself, while cursing his weakness.
Listening with the boy’s ears, Darius heard the chirr of an insect, saw it skitter beneath the rock, a black smudge against red. His brown fingers slid into the fissure, pinching the hard armor, plucking out the small, struggling thing. Twice the hot sun had risen and set, and no food had passed his lips. Yet even as he opened his mouth, his white teeth cracking the tough shell, his ears feeding on the sound, he cursed his weakness.
He understood that he was without whole mind, for he had not slept these two days, the sharp rocks between his toes and pebbles under his back had kept him awake. Sometime during the night, the skin between the first and second toe of his left foot had broke
n. Using clay and some of his own saliva, he’d fashioned a putty to staunch the bleeding, cursing his weakness.
Now in the high heat of the third day, the torn flesh throbbed. The sore would keep him from making a perfect dance when the moon rose again. He tried the song he would sing, but his throat was rust.
From the beginning he knew his body was his only possession. It was the only thing he could give. Yet his weaknesses defied this understanding. He looked down at his dusty feet, slowly loosening the hard paste between his toes. His dark eyes sought the ground. The sharp edge of a stone glinted. He reached, placing the rock between the first and second toe of his left foot. He squeezed until he drew new blood. The spirits must see he offered his flesh freely.
Still, the spirits hid from him on the third day, and once more he cursed himself for his weakness. He lay rolling upon the hard earth, his mind gone, wishing for the shade of a cottonwood tree. Then behind his eyes he saw the giant clouds split open the sky and the great wheel of sun spin, spiraling in upon itself, fire falling in straight paths from its great heart. He cried out only once, and when he came back to himself, the sun lay upon his chest, its fiery tongues branding him.
Darius jolted awake, his vision fading to ash. Beside him, curled like a child in her sleep, Willie dreamed on, untroubled.
He got up and moved naked and sweating from the bed to the uncurtained window. He’d been dreaming again, one of those nightmares that clung to near-consciousness like a virus. He struck a match, lighting the last of his cigarettes.
The first exhalation diffused his reflection into a ghost in the glass so that only the hot orange globe of the cigarette could clearly be discerned burning at his side. Slowly the image resolved, and he began to perceive the beveled outline of his flesh, looming larger, denser. Brighter than in life, his emerging form made a blinding contrast against the black slab of night.
CHAPTER
19
In the red environment of the darkroom, the man worked efficiently, despite the strangeness in perception that was an effect of the drug he had taken. He forced himself to concentrate, removing the nascent print from the enlarger, placing it in the tray. The blank white rectangle, floating near the surface, appeared bloody in the light. He pushed it under with the tongs, held it until the image took hold, blooming outward from its center like a flower. He did not fight his sorrow, which the drug painted as a violet shift in the air. He let it fill him, let it flow like dark music, like the grief he had felt over the loss of his wife.
He lifted the print from the fixative, rinsed it, and hung it with the others. The woman in his photos pulsed with life, the corporeal life of blood and flesh. Despite the lies that stood like a wall between them, she had touched him on some level that was yet human. Even with the LSD filling the receptors in his brain, he had to force himself to perceive in her Zavebe. That essence he had always known from before there was before or after. Known in that eternal now from which they both stood banned.
That was the real sorrow. He. Zavebe. All of the Fallen trapped in an eternity of what the Buddhists called maya. The illusion of matter. The seductive lie of warmth and happiness … and love. Warmth that grew cold. Love that died. Happiness fading to a sorrow that had no end. Over and over. Forever.
If not for the paramedics resuscitating his body after the accident, his own cycle of death and rebirth would yet remain unbroken, the memory of his true identity locked in the decomposing brain of what had been his human self. He could not waste this chance he’d been given. He was the only hope for the Fallen to regain what they had lost.
Which was why Kellog couldn’t matter. Why the ghost of that girl in his bedroom couldn’t matter. Nor, he reminded himself, should the other, the unfinished child.
He had always planned that Zavebe should be his last in New York. It was clearly time to move on. L.A. was the logical choice. “Los Angeles,” he said the name aloud, letting the drug inflate and color the words. Los Angeles… city of angels.
The influence of the drug persisted, intensifying into a sensation of split time. He finished in the darkroom and went to fix himself a sandwich, sitting down in front of the television, which was blaring out commercials for insurance and soap. But he was also in the tunnel, reliving the fact of his death. All of it, here, now, then, complete and coexistent. The woman on the television chattering about whiter than white socks. Marian moving ahead of him, silhouetted in the light. And the moment of awakening that he could never quite encompass or hold. Only its pale reflection. And only when the drug was at its zenith.
He flipped to a local channel. As promotional spots since yesterday had promised, there was live coverage of today’s police press conference. A bit of an anticlimax, since it was obvious from everything that had already appeared in the media that the dead priest was to be the anointed scapegoat. He felt bad about Thomas Graff, the second of his unintended victims. Another of God’s little jokes.
He looked at the clock. The event was late getting started. The TV screen showed a still-empty podium, the fringes of a waiting crowd. He set down his unfinished sandwich. On the screen the shot had widened. He saw James Sakura emerge at the edge of the frame, ready to ascend to the stage. A dark-haired woman had walked out behind him, and merging with the crowd, someone else.
He was not prepared. A brilliance uncontained within the pixels of the screen poured like living phosphor from the set. He was off the sofa, moving to the light, bathed in the force of its radiance. On his knees, inches from the image, he tried to see, to penetrate to the human face that lay behind the aura. It was not possible.
No matter. It changed everything.
“Samyaza.” He whispered the holy name, placing his lips in reverence against the fiercely glowing figure that lingered for a moment on the screen.
Pig in a suit. That’s what Zoe thought Chief of Detectives Lincoln McCauley looked like today. His tiny porcine eyes all full of self-congratulation, if still wary. Whistling in the dark. If pork could whistle. He was up there now at the podium, patting himself on the back, taking the credit that “the terror was over.” He should try for a job writing headlines.
She shot a quick look at Johnny, standing in the background with Sakura and other members of the task force on the stage. She’d caught him glancing her way early on, and pretended not to notice, preening in her turquoise suit that was going to shoot great on TV.
Television. That was her goal, the reason she’d held back from the paper on that little gem she’d picked up from the Mancuso girl. For all the high energy in this room today, what had come to be called the “Death Angel” story was basically dead. As dead as Thomas Graff. Oh, the media were all full of his being ID’d in the lineup and the dramatic discovery of the locket in the rectory basement. And everybody was digging for backstory on the Gil Avery connection. But it was really all over but the shouting. Unless another body turned up. Or little Zoe managed to shake things.
Which was just what little Zoe had in mind. A couple of appearances on cable had picked up some good feedback, but unless this story got new legs, unless the terror wasn’t over, she would no longer be such a hot commodity.
On the stage McCauley had finished his statement. He was turning over the podium to Lieutenant James Sakura. The lieutenant would answer their questions.
Sakura looked less than thrilled. In fact, he didn’t look a whole lot better than he had the other day in his office. Did he know the sharks were circling? Did he suspect that they had the wrong man? She felt a little sorry she was about to make things worse, tossing in the red meat at feeding time.
She raised her hand, but he went to the Times, courting the respectable papers.
“How specific was the suicide note?” Henry Jacobs wanted to know, echoing the rumors that they’d all heard, that Graff’s supposed confession had been very vague indeed.
“The note is just one piece of the evidence against Father Graff.” Sakura did a side step. “And his suicide, one might have to conc
lude, is as viable an expression of his guilt as anything he might have written.”
The next questions went to local TV. The reporters nibbling at the edges, pulling at threads—loose ends that were intriguing, but nothing that seriously threatened to unravel the picture of Graff as the killer. Like a tennis match. Serve and volley. Sakura more than holding his own.
“Ms. Kahn …” He recognized her.
She stood. She’d made sure to get an end seat so that the pool camera in the aisle could get a good angle. She had thought a lot about her question, how to phrase it for the greatest impact, to sow the most doubt. She remembered to look elegantly grave. This was going out on cable.
“Lieutenant Sakura,” she began, “I think it’s fair to say that your most damning piece of evidence against Father Graff, the only real physical evidence that points to his committing any of these murders, is the necklace that was found in the rectory basement.”
She saw him tense, thought for a moment that he might confirm the hypothesis in her statement, but he avoided that trap at least. She went on speaking, conscious of the camera zooming in, of all the eyes in the room.
“Chief McCauley confirmed for us today”—pin it on the pig if she could—“that the necklace found in the rectory was Lucia Mancuso’s.” She stared at Sakura. “But that’s wrong.”
She had thought her bald statement might have elicited an audible reaction from the gathering. It was better than that. Dead silence.
“Wrong, Ms. Kahn?” This time Sakura walked into her opening, fatalism in his eyes. It almost seemed that he relished this.
She took a breath. Forgive me, Celia. “Lucia Mancuso never wore that necklace,” she said. “It belongs to her sister. It was the sister who lost the necklace in the rectory basement. She told me so herself.”
Now the crowd breathed and murmured. Everybody making notes.
Sakura was cool. “We’ll follow up on that.” He smiled at her. “But it is, as you yourself suggested, only one piece of the case against Father Graff. We’re still waiting for other evidence from that basement, including DNA.”