City of the Absent

by Robert W. Walker

  And so she went down to Cook County the following late afternoon, not to watch Dr. Fenger operate, and not to learn her craft, but to tail Shanks and Gwinn, and to hope that their paths would again cross those of the strange couple whom she feared had killed Dodge not so much for his money or material things, but for his body and organs, his head and brain.

  She timed it well, getting to County just as Shanks and Gwinn stepped off duty. The two had gotten paid, and just as she suspected, they went on a spending and drinking binge. She tried to keep up without their noticing.

  It turned into a whirlwind of travel across Chicago’s underbelly and through Chicago’s darkest holes, from Hair Trigger Block to Chinatown; however, despite her tenacity, Jane did not once encounter the odd pair she sought.

  Meanwhile, with each ale that Dr. James Phineas Tewes consumed, Jane Francis Tewes felt an increasing personal and bodily risk, finding herself balking at the bawdy house where Shanks and Gwinn ended up. She’d had to struggle the harder as the evening wore on to set aside that portion of her brain sending an insistent code to herself that screamed: not another alcoholic drink!

  Three A.M. came and went, the clock ticking on to 3:05…and Ransom dozing…then three-ten and Ransom opening one eye to see…then three-fifteen, at which time both eyes shot open wide as the doorbell rang. The thing sounded like a two-alarm at the firehouse.

  In his nightshirt, gun in hand, Ransom inched toward the door, fully expecting that Nathan Kohler and Pinkerton, having decided that collecting dirt on him had proved a slow process with few results, had devised an assassination plot instead, using Hake as their decoy.

  As he came within inches of the curtained doorway, he saw the silhouette in shadow not of a tall, lanky Hake but of a small boy.

  The boy snitch, Samuel, rang his bell again. For half a second Ransom wondered if the men aligned against him had gotten the boy to come in on their side and were using him. Samuel’s disheveled and even beaten appearance might attest to this onerous suspicion. Were they using the boy? Would Ransom feel the scorching fire of a bullet ripping through him the moment he opened the door to Samuel? But Sam had grit, and he honored his friendships. It didn’t fit.

  Ransom tore open the door in a show of defiance to the blackness all round. “Samuel? You alone? It’s after three in the morning.”

  “I need your…your help,” the boy weakly said.

  The boy had been beaten, his clothes strewn about him as if he’d hastily dressed, there were blood spatters here and there, and his nose was caked with dried blood. Through the curtain, Alaistair’d had an inkling of the boy’s distress, still, he was stunned to see just how shaken and beaten was this boy standing on his doorstep.

  “What’s happened to you, son?”

  “I—I—I—ahhh…”

  Looking about for any movement in and around the street, Ransom hustled Sam inside his dark home, which to the boy, he knew, must look like a cave dwelling built into a mountainside. It was a first floor flat, a rental, but Ransom had made it his own, surrounding himself with leather, wood, and books. “Sam…what’re you doing here, and what’s happened?” he repeated to the silent little fellow.

  “I got beat good.”

  “I can see that much! Well, we’ll get you fixed up!” He had been dozing when Sam rang his bell, but the sight of the boy cleared his head. Half listening still for Hake’s three knocks at his window, which likely were not coming, Ransom imagined two things: One, he was out twenty dollars for nothing, and two, his young snitch had gotten into a street fight he’d lost.

  “He beat me good this time, but I got ’im back, I did.”

  “Sam, who did this?”

  “Father.”

  “Father? You told me you had no family.”

  “He’s not any father of mine! Not—Not no more.”

  “And what’s his name?” Ransom worked to gather warm water, soap, and a hot washcloth. He was soon cleaning the boy’s wounds as he spoke—wounds that ranged from red welts, blue bruising, a black eye, and a missing front tooth, along with a nasty red choker. “Where’s he live? Where can I find him?” He began pacing before Samuel. “Where can I find him?” repeated Ransom, agitated, moving about the darkness like a cave-dwelling creature. He grumbled while looking for his clothes, shoes, and cane, and he realized only now that Sam was reluctant to say any more. “Sam, at the very least, this creep needs a good talking to!”

  “You’ll kill him.”

  “No, I won’t kill him. Where’s he live?”

  “St. Peter’s.”

  Ransom froze. “The church? My church?” While Alastair had not been inside St. Peter’s since he was Sam’s age, he still considered it his church. He’d been a choirboy before he tired of the pomp and circumstance.

  “He’s a—a—a priest at the church,” stuttered Sam, “a-a-and he’s a bad man.”

  “Why…why would he beat you, Sam?”

  “He thought he could do to me what he’s done to Tommie, Jonas, and some other boys.”

  “Done what? Tell me!”

  “He wanted me…that is…wanted me—”

  “Spit it out, Sam, like a man!”

  “But I ain’t no man!” he cried out.

  Ransom pulled the boy into him, hugging him. “Whatever it is, we can deal with it together then, Sam…Sam?”

  “The bastard…he wanted to put his…his thing in my mouth. At first, he just wanted to rub it against me, then for me to hold it, and next…well.”

  “I get the picture, Sam, and you’re right, this priest is a bastard.”

  “Tol’ ’im I’d be damned in Hell before I would!”

  “That how he put it to you? That your everlasting soul was at stake?”

  “Said…said it was a good, holy act I’d be doing.”

  “Sin-ofabitch! Sin-ofabitch!”

  “Said it was a sign of good penance to do anything—anything—to make a priest’s hard life better.”

  “Said that, did he?”

  “Said a boy’s gotta do whatever a priest tells ’im, he says.”

  “Bastard.”

  “I put up a fight.”

  “Good for you, Sam!”

  “Hit him with a big cross.”

  “Really?” Ransom lightly laughed.

  “Pulled it off his wall and smacked ’im good! Bloodied his head, I did.”

  “Good, Sam.”

  “Bloodied his head with it, I did,” Sam repeated, relishing the moment.

  “Hold on! He had you in his private quarters?”

  “That’s where he’s done other boys; that’s where he gets ya.”

  “Calls himself a priest,” muttered Ransom. “Look, why were you there to begin with?”

  “Not for what he wanted! They give us boys free soup and bread.”

  “No such thing as a free lunch, Sam. You’ll learn that in time.”

  “It was for acting as a choirboy, he told me.”

  “Choirboy, huh? That’s what he called it? Acting as a choirboy?”

  “He never said a bad word ever.”

  Euphemisms, Ransom thought. The degenerate wraps himself in religious euphemisms. “Father Frank, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah…how’d you know? Oh, yeah, you’re a detective. Think I wanna be an inspector some day, sir. Father Frank. What’ll you do to him, sir?”

  “What do you think I oughta do, Sam? Say the word.”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. I guess…whatever comes to you, I s’pose.”

  “Good, I’m glad we can agree on that.”

  Ransom gave the boy a towel, a huge new bar of Nelson’s fragrant soap, and Eddy’s shampoo, and pointed out the indoor shower, but Sam stood gaping, not knowing how to work the controls, having never seen indoor plumbing before. So Alastair demonstrated, turning on the shower and flushing the toilet. Both actions made the battered boy gleefully laugh, and this reaction hurt his injured eye and cheek where the man of God had hit him. Ransom then left Sam to his privacy.
>
  Soon, when Sam came out of his shower wrapped in the towel, Ransom saw his face for the first time without any smudges or grime. He hadn’t any idea how handsome the little fellow was until that moment.

  Outrage over what’d happened to “his boy” sent a red cloud of anger coursing through Alastair’s head, and he feared one of his major headaches might follow. The red he could feel, even smell, where it sat behind his eyes, smoldering like a fiery dye racing through his brain, but he struggled to remain calm for the boy’s sake. “Bet you’re hungry,” he said, as he thought: How could some sick priest—an adult sworn to the work of the Lord—take advantage of so innocent a face or person?

  “I truly am starved,” replied Sam, seemingly unaware of the battle raging within Ransom. “But I don’t expect no charity. I’ll work it off. I’ll find word on that murdered Pinkerton agent lady for you.”

  “Good man, Sam.”

  Ransom went about feeding the boy bread and a leftover stew. The whole while, his mind turned over the event that had chased Samuel to him. In fact, molesting a child sexually was the one crime he had terrible difficulty understanding. He could not fathom it. While he could place himself into the shoes of a desperate man who breaks and enters, a thief who robs at gunpoint, a train robber, bank robber, a murderer even, he simply could not do the same with what Dr. Fenger called the “lowest form of life, below that of the grave robber, the man who robbed a child of his or her innocence.” Nor a mother or father who kills their own off-spring, or raises their children as criminal vermin or murderers. Often out of a deep evil seed embedded in some undiscovered island of the human mind. And too often, these child molesters and child killers were found in the end hugging a Bible or other religious tract, like Father Frank Jurgen.

  Fenger had hinted that Shanks and Gwinn had both been raised in a horrible manner and were abused as children years before they found one another and gained some modicum of love from one another. Ransom had joked at the notion, saying, “I guess even toads can feel love in some perverted form.”

  Fenger had lost his temper with him, shouting, “The two take care of one another, watch one another’s backs, give one another moral support and love, Rance, perhaps something you can’t understand. Most married couples don’t do near that much for one another these days!” It was Christian’s final word on why he’d gone so far out of his way to help the two reformed resurrection men.

  Samuel ate heartily and the stew disappeared in huge gulps, as though it were some exotic food he’d never before tasted. “Minds me of rabbit stew my mum made when I was a little kid,” the nine-year-old finally said, mopping up the last vestige of stew with his bread.

  Ransom asked, “Whatever became of your ma and your da, Sam?” His mind kept rolling over the notion of this damnable priest blackening the good name of the church he still thought of as his. The man disgraced his robes over a driving need to demonstrate complete domination over a weaker person—not unlike an animal in a cage that must dominate all the others sharing that space. Ransom could find some thimble full of understanding for all the deviants and perverts he’d known, but not for the man who crossed the sexual line with a child. Try as he might, he could never get a reasonable explanation out of such a man, and he could not, as a result, understand the mental chaos, the sexual confusion, or the demoralized heart. Ransom simply could not fathom a being who could ruin a child for a handful of euphoria. It was all just so disgusting for him to contemplate that even attempting to understand it proved painful.

  His final conclusion was one any farmer would do with a perverted animal on the farm—castration. Then throw such perverts into prisons and asylums without their jewels, and by all means keep them away from children. One such fiend had told Ransom during an interrogation that “a child has no idea whatsoever the power it holds over me, Inspector.”

  “Power over you? A child?”

  “The child…how it attracts me…like a childhood memory of a place I love.”

  “You mean a child attracts you like a moth to flame?” Ransom had asked the degenerate.

  “Yes, although the flame has no intention of harming the moth, and you got it backwards, Inspector.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m the one destroyed. The child is the flame that ignites me, and I the moth burning and out of control.”

  “So it’s the child’s fault you attack her?”

  “She attacks me! With her being, with her flame that I must have.”

  “So she’s at fault, not you?”

  “Yes!”

  “For being a child…for being childish?”

  “Yes, damn you! Yes! Now you’ve got it right.”

  “So we should let you go as the injured party?”

  “Yes, Inspector, yes.”

  Ransom only knew it as a horrid and putrid crime. A crime to make every man ashamed of his species. A crime that no one wanted to think about it, much less speak of, and so it remained a buried crime. Even when such a crime reached the courts, judges were quick to close down their chambers and deal with it behind closed doors. As obviously the church—his church—had done.

  “Get some sleep, Sam,” he told the boy. “Use the settee.”

  “What about Father Jurgen?”

  “I’ll pay him a visit, Sam. You don’t have to go back there.”

  “Really? Thanks, Mr. Ransom.” Sam ran across the room and curled up beneath the wool blanket that Ransom had laid out for him, his head hitting the pillow, his eyes closing.

  He looked the epitome of the wounded angel. The whole scenario recalled to Ransom’s mind a painting he’d once viewed at the Chicago Art Institute of a wounded angel being found in a heap by a pair of grimy-faced children.

  CHAPTER 27

  Ransom dressed, leaving tie and collar off, grabbing his cane and pacing bearlike before a snoring Sam. Once he felt certain that Sam was out for the night and that Hake was a no-show, he left.

  Outside, the street was deserted save for the vermin and the homeless. He yanked his coat collar up against the chill night air as a stray dog overturned someone’s trash can. As he walked, his cane beating to his step, Alastair imagined that Frederick Hake was a slacker and a liar, and the information he supposedly had a fiction as well. He imagined he’d been taken for twenty bucks, enough for Hake to put down a useful bet on a horse or to get into a crap-shooting game.

  “You’d think I’d’ve learned by now,” he muttered against a brash, Chicago wind coming against him. The good news was the unlikelihood of a dossier on him sitting somewhere in Pinkerton’s office. Still, it would explain why Bill Pinkerton had been so jumpy and nervous when he appeared at his desk.

  He’d have to give it more thought; he’d have to run Hake down as he had so often run down Bosch. Find him in one of his lairs or his favorite gambling den. At the moment, however, to hell with Hake, and Pinkerton, and Kohler. He had an evil as sin priest to deal with.

  Alastair moved swiftly for a man his size, cutting through familiar gangways and backyards to half his trip and time. Sunup wouldn’t help in the business he had in mind.

  It galled him that he was forced into this—on such an unholy errand to the church that he’d once called his second home, where he meant to bash this man’s teeth down his throat or do worse harm. It galled him in so many ways, not the least being that St. Pete’s was and had always been the one place in the city where he thought Sam and his generation safe. A refuge, it was supposed to be a place of comfort where angels held one out of the storm called the human condition long enough for respite and relief. But due to this priest, this special, magical place failed to keep the storm out for Sam, and God alone knew how many others his age.

  Ransom knew St. Peter’s well, and he knew what the young priest, Jurgen, looked like. It was now just a matter of finding him and “laying on of hands.”

  Alastair traversed the distance in short order, as St. Peter’s was not far from his residence. While unsure precisely how he would
handle the matter, he felt his anger rising with each step that took him closer to Father O’Bannion’s cathedral. Soon the spiraling pinnacles of the place came into view. All the pomp and circumstance, all the marble blocks, all the stone statues and gargoyles amid the turrets of this place, every symbol down to the wafer and the wine, all took a major pounding due to this hypocrite priest Jurgen. A priest unable to resist a prurient urge to touch and be touched by some angelic child. A priest who’d tonight madly beaten Sam when the boy refused the adult’s deviant lies and advances.

  The huge double doors of the church, some fourteen feet high, had enormous knobs and locks, but the church was never locked. Its doors were always open to the needy, and Ransom always felt this place a sanctuary to the homeless and children like Samuel. Now this.

  A hundred different scenarios played out in his head. Who outside himself would believe Samuel? If he arrested the priest in proper style, Father Jurgen’d be released immediately, and all would be turned on him, instead, as some sort of villainous atheist to do such a thing; yes, it would become twisted and turned on him and Sam. And Samuel would be unable to prove it didn’t happen another way entirely. That perhaps Samuel solicited the behavior himself. Worse yet, the thing could easily become a kind of twisted fodder for Chief Kohler to destroy Alastair’s reputation by putting forth witnesses to say the boy had been beaten and attacked in his home tonight, and most certainly not in the house of God.

  So how do I proceed? Alastair asked himself as he pushed through the door and stepped into the huge pew-filled church. Blinded by the brightly lit backdrop of the pulpit flanked on either side by Mary and Child, and by Jesus on the Cross, Ransom realized this was too public for what he contemplated; he began backpedaling out as a feeling of panic and claustrophobia enveloped him here in the huge, open room filled with stained-glass offerings of scenes from the lives of the saints. The claustrophobia took on the feel of a dark huge beast creeping over him just below his skin. His heart rate had increased, a cold sweat lathered his brow and neck, his scalp felt afire with ants, and his perspiring palms wrapped tighter about his cane. He couldn’t do what he’d come to do. Not here, not in this place. Not even to Father Franklin Jurgen.