Vespers

by Tom Piccirilli

  I slid the knife into Muller’s left eye, felt the resistance of his socket bone, and rammed through. He bayed one last note of laughter, then stiffened and fell backwards, yanking himself off the blade point as he dropped away into the gutter. Jessie let loose with a growl. The others cried and backed away, some turned and ran. Some went to their knees and clasped their hands in prayer.

  Jessie jumped for me, faster than he should be considering how much muscle mass he’d lost. His arms and legs were spindly, his clothes settling oddly on his newly wiry frame. I swung the knife around and shoved it through his left ear into his brain and by instinct I twisted hard. Jessie whispered, “Tommy Flowers, I can see the spires of hell.”

  “I’ve seen them too.”

  The blade stuck. No matter how I tried to wrench it free I couldn’t get it loose. Every time I tugged Jessie grunted. His eyes fluttered and his mouth worked crazily like he was reciting passages from the Koran as fast as he could. His tongue unfurled and curled back up, over and over. I kicked his feet out from under him, jammed my foot down on his temple, and jerked the knife clear. I cleaned it on his shirt and stuck it back into its scabbard.

  I’d just killed two men in front of the wall surrounding the Ganooch’s mansion, out in broad daylight. No mob formed around me. No cops came rushing up. The sirens continued to blare and whoop distantly. The ash descended over Brooklyn and was swept east over Long Island by a rugged breeze.

  I was a fool. Perhaps I had a death wish. I never should’ve left the compound. If I had to go I should’ve let the boys drive me. But I wanted to be out in the action, the same way I wanted to go to Iraq rather than sit behind bars. The weight of my weapons was reassuring but they wouldn’t be enough in a few hours or a couple days time.

  I wandered the streets. They were the same as they had been twenty years ago, with the same privately owned shops standing side by side. There were still fruit carts on the corner, empty and overturned now.

  Nicky and Don Guiseppe had refused to let the corporate sinkholes lay any claim to roughly four square blocks of the neighborhood. In this age that was considered a minor miracle. I wondered what had happened to Mr. and Mrs. Iacobuzio, the grocers, Vinny the T, and Bobby Sabia, and his brother, Jocko. And Paulie the Lemon Squeeze, and Eddie the Ear. And Mrs. Aspetta, ninety-two and hosing off the sidewalk in front of her furniture shop every morning except for this past week.

  I turned the corner and could see the church in the distance. To one end of the block was the rectory and the seminary, and to the other was St. Anne’s, the Catholic school I’d graduated from. Across the street was the convent.

  I put a little more step in my stride and cut through the alleys and turned the corner of the schoolyard where kids were staggering around the playground. Sister Christina May was out there trying to gather them up, her habit flapping in the breeze. She had two nubs of her fingers bound tightly with bloody bandages.

  I glanced up at the fourth floor of the convent.

  There was one nun who spooked everyone in Brooklyn. The priests, the archdiocese, the Mother Superior, the rest of the sisters. Maybe even the Pope for all I knew. In another time they would’ve burned her at the stake or put her away in a mental institution. But as things stood we had somehow entered a more devout yet solemn age of reason, so they left her mostly alone on the fourth floor in a suite of small rooms filled with crucifixes and pictures of the blessed heart.

  I walked into the building. The convent had its hardened troops too, same as any syndicate family. An elderly sister I recalled being a geometry teacher when I was a kid had taken up station at the front desk. She was coughing and spitting into a black cloth. I stepped up and gave her my warmest smile. She returned it, her gray teeth covered with phlegm. She reached for my hand and took it in a powerful grip.

  “Hello, I’m Sister Maeve. How may I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Sister Abigail,” I said.

  Her face closed up like a fist, with a not so subtle spark of fear flashing in her eyes, just the way I knew it would happen. “Sister Abigail doesn’t receive visitors.”

  “She’ll receive me.”

  “No, I’m afraid you don’t understand. You see, she–”

  “I understand perfectly.”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Her nephew.”

  “Oh.” She turned away from me and I wondered if she might cross herself. She didn’t. “It’s you. Thomas. I remember you now.”

  A strange fluttering laughter floated in towards us. A child’s crazed laughter. That kid, whoever he was, was a maniac. I reached into my jacket and unsnapped my holster for a smoother draw.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She picked up the phone but I knew my aunt didn’t have a phone in her room. Sister Maeve was calling the Mother Superior, who had once taught physics classes. She was a realist. She was sharp and hard and occasionally brutal. Anyone running a convent in Brooklyn would have to be. She’d made her deals with the devil before.

  “Please take a seat. Someone will be with you directly.”

  “You need to lock these doors.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You need to call all the sisters inside and lock and blockade these doors.”

  “I’ll… I’ll ask.”

  I sat and stared at the Catholic iconography all around, the tortured faces, the twisted bodies, the loving eyes. They were the same as the ones in my aunt’s room. Martyrs glared at me from every corner. They looked no less angry than any of my trainers, my commanding officers, my wiseguy pals. No kinder than any insurgent, no gentler than anyone with a bomb strapped to his chest.

  When I was sixteen I saw my aunt flail across the kitchen floor struck down by the worst fever to ever afflict her. I’d just gotten out of reform school and was still a little shell-shocked about the scheming nature of sexual predators. And my own capacity for violence. Behind the reformatory fences I’d graduated from mischief-maker to cold-blooded criminal. There was blood on my hands for the first time.

  An older boy nicknamed Bronc had been after me for weeks and had finally made a move one night by paying off two guards with his own sexual favors. That was an eye-opener too. Johnny was dormed in a separate residency building, but we met up in the yard every afternoon where he gave me his rundown of his conflicts, and I gave him mine. Mine were more worrisome, especially to me.

  I needed a weapon. The usual amount of second-rate shanks and were available, but I was working on something else. The landline was no longer in use and the phone wire had been painted over about twenty times over the years. It was only a slight bulge seen along the edge of the floorboards and I managed to pull about two feet of it free from the wall.

  Bronc knew little about stealth but a lot about style and building a reputation, even if it was only the cred of a homosexual rapist. When the guards drifted outside to grab a smoke I knew we were on our way. I laid in my bunk waiting for Bronc to skim from the shadows. But he had other ideas. He announced his presence and woke the whole dorm. I think he might have made some extra cash by selling tickets to the event to some of the other perverts.

  The lights came on. Whatever happened was going to be out in the open and on show for forty other kids. That taught me something too about doing your business with an audience. About holding their attention with fear and expectation.

  Bronc presented himself naked and fully aroused. He spoke my name almost gently. In a strange fashion I suspected he thought he was actually preparing to make love. Perhaps it was the only way he could express his love.

  But none of that mattered when he put his hand to the back of my head. I slid around him as if I were going to dominate him. It made him chuckle. I learned something else. Some people want to be victimized by their own presumed prey. I looped the garrotte I’d made from the phone wire and two toilet roll spindles around his neck and held on for life while he bucked and tried to throw me.

  The wire wasn’t sharp. I could
n’t saw through his throat with it. But after a few minutes of pulling the cord as tightly as I could I managed to do such damage to his windpipe that his oxygen-deprived brain shut down and he fell into a coma. The rest of the dorm remained silent through the entire episode.

  Afterwards, he and I both fighting for air, I dragged him down the aisle of bunk beds and dumped him near the locked residency door.

  I shut the lights.

  I spoke to the others in the dark. “You cunts who paid got your money’s worth, right?”

  In the morning he was gone. Probably dead, possibly dispatched by the guards he paid off with his decadence.

  When I got home, my aunt reached out to hug me. The second she touched me she let out a noise just as ugly as the one Bronc had made while I strangled him. I watched her eyes roll back in her head and listened to her speak in tongues and thrash across the floor. Every time I tried to go for the phone an ancient voice full of desert dust told me to stay where I was. I stayed. She twisted and contorted and howled like a dog. Her eyes and ears bled. When it was over, I called an ambulance and she was in the hospital for a week of tests that never showed a damn thing and couldn’t be paid for anyway.

  The day she was released she became a nun, devoted herself to God, and became someone else’s problem. I was sixteen and went to work for Don Guiseppe that afternoon. Five years later I was his number one torpedo.

  It was time for vespers, the evening prayers at mass, but the church, like the rest of things, had begun to break down. Rituals would be delayed, missed, or given up altogether. Some of the nuns who’d spent the last few days at the Ganooch house came wandering in, their habits dirty, covered with puke, blood, and city grit. Their eyes were dark smudges of awakening horror and dread.

  A door slammed somewhere deep in the building and the echo snapped off the corridor walls and thrummed in my chest. Severe sounding footsteps followed. I knew the rhythm of that gait anywhere.

  It took a full minute before Mother Superior turned a corner and, without expression, approached me. Sister Maeve ducked her head and pretended to be busy with paperwork.

  “Stop that,” Mother Superior hissed sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” Sister Maeve said. “He says we should blockade the doors.”

  “No. We have to remain a haven for whomever asks. Go check the school. See if Sisters Anne and Cathleen need any help taking care of the children.”

  Sister Maeve nodded and quickly scuttled off. She retreated down the hall and I heard a door open, but I had a feeling she was just going to fake going outside. She wasn’t alone at a desk stamping empty pages for no reason. She was smart. She was going to do her best to live through this thing.

  Mother Superior didn’t offer her hand and I didn’t offer mine. We had a long and complex relationship. She used to beat the hell out of me with a yardstick. She used to keep me after school explaining I was smart enough to go to college and get far away from Brooklyn. She first suggested I join the army before we stepped foot in Afghanistan. I sensed that she’d always wanted me dead.

  She would come to me at the Ganooch’s compound when the church ran into its various travails with the media. I had gotten reporters to retract stories. I had gotten witnesses in cases against priests to alter their testimonies. When a Chinese street gang was trying to establish a foothold in our area and set up distribution near the school, getting kids hooked and starting them off as runners, she put in a call to me. I got in touch with the triads, who cleared up the problem without anyone else having to get directly involved.

  When the church threw street fairs, benefits or she needed cash rounded up for the Mother Cabrini Feast, she’d put me to work.

  Mother Superior would never admit it, but she needed me, on occasion.

  Her face was stern and craggy. If I’d ever seen her smile I didn’t remember it. She met my gaze directly and said, “Walk with me.”

  I did. We wandered the halls seemingly without direction. Every hall felt the same, every room showing no real personality besides the church’s own. A thousand Christ’s, ten thousand crosses, St. Francis calling the animals, and more animals and more animals. I didn’t understand how any of them shouldered the weight of two thousand years of blind dogma and history. I didn’t know how any of it would help a single person out there going insane and dying on the streets in this epidemic.

  “Niko?” she asked.

  “Dead.”

  “Is anyone else in the house infected?”

  “No.”

  “Do what you have to do to keep it that way.”

  “You know I will.”

  “Yes,” she intoned, “I know.”

  Nicky had been another lost cause, but one she’d loved nonetheless. His charm could work magic even on her firm and dour disposition. Her resolve almost faltered. She took a deep breath and ground her teeth together until her jaw muscles bunched.

  “How bad has it gotten on the streets?” she asked.

  “Bad.”

  I didn’t have to say anything more. She crossed herself, something I’d never seen her do before.

  “Your aunt has been worse of late.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No,” Mother Superior said, keeping her stride, “not so far as the doctors can tell. But her nightmares have returned. The visions. She sometimes shrieks in the middle of the night. She’s watched after constantly by Sister Katherine and Sister Ruth Joyce. She whispers, although we can’t understand what she’s saying. No, it isn’t this new… plague.”

  She spit out the last word. I could understand why. If we were all going to die, it would be nice to know what from at least. But the ancient word was just as good as any. Call it the Black Death, it sounded better than Altar Boy Bite Syndrome anyway.

  “You should have sent her up to the Bronx psych center when you had the chance,” I said. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about her now.”

  “You know I couldn’t do that. She’s not crazy.”

  I grunted. “She might as well be. Everybody else is going insane.”

  She wagged her head as if an insect had crawled into her ear. “She spoke your name this morning.”

  “Does it really matter?” I asked. “Now?”

  “I’d like you to see her.”

  “Why?”

  She tried to respond but her words were drowned out by screaming from outside. We both walked to the nearest window and looked down at the courtyard. A croup of pre-teen kids had backed one of the young priests up against a brick wall where we used to play handball. He had a Bible in one hand held out in front of him as if it might ward off the sick children. They grinned at him. They laughed at him. His jacket hung on him in tatters. They raked at his belly, legs, chest, and face. He was bleeding from a hundred scratches. I couldn’t tell if he’d been bitten yet. I didn’t know if it mattered. The children clapped and skipped around him. He went to his knees. I opened the window and shouted, “Run, you asshole!”

  He didn’t. He kept pleading with them. He kept praying. Mother Superior shouted, “Father Simmons, run! Now!”

  Still, he didn’t get up. This is why we’d never win the war in the desert. This is why it would go on for ten thousand years. They’d been taught to die on their feet, and we’d been taught to die on our knees.

  The children kept tearing at him. A few nipped at his hands, his ears, his shoulders. He’d closed his eyes and continued with his prayers. Some priests were tough bastards, some were pansy pricks. He was a prick.

  The kids turned and looked up at the window. They waved to Mother Superior. It was a hell of a game.

  I drew the Browning.

  I put one through the priest’s head.

  He flopped back against the wall and bled across the asphalt playground. The kids watched him bleed out for a moment, then spun and ran around the building out of sight.

  I shut the window and locked it. I turned and Mother Superior caught me with a right cross on the chin. Blood filled my mouth.
I spit it on the floor.

  “He was dead already.”

  She glared at me. If she had a gun of her own I knew she would’ve iced my ass. Instead, she balled her fists even tighter like she was going to swing on me again. I waited for it. She panted in her rage. I thought she must’ve been hell in bed before she became a nun. Finally she relaxed her hands and placed them back in her pockets.

  ”Time is short,” she said. “We have to hurry.”

  “My aunt’s had visions of this,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Round up whoever you can. Bar the doors.”

  “I can’t do that. The ill have to be able to–”

  “Fuck that. This thing is out of control. Nobody’s going to help anytime soon. If the army or the National Guard ever comes through it’ll only be to burn the bodies and bury the ashes. You’ve got to start thinking about yourself.”

  She stalked up the hall. I followed. We were both here for dark reasons. I didn’t come around to bring cookies or flowers. I didn’t show up for the neighborhood church basketball games or the street feasts or talent shows and choir rehearsals. I came when I was called, and I was never called for any sweet pretext.

  We reached the south staircase. I put my hand on the gray railing and could feel all the years of convent secrets and pain trapped like muted cries. I snatched my hand back like I’d been burned.

  “Do you still have fevers?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Revelations?”

  I paused. “Yes.”

  “Have you dreamed of this day?”

  “I’m not certain. This day or one like it.”

  She turned her austere features from me, possibly out of courtesy. She had questions. Everyone had questions. She had more to say, but didn’t know how to say it. I wondered if she was going to ask me to kill her so she could avoid what she knew was going to happen in a week or a month or a year.