Vespers

by Tom Piccirilli

  “How do you know for certain?” I asked.

  His jaw hung slackly, then tightened into a grimace. “My dreams.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I think it does.” He steeled himself to reveal more. “And there’s something else–”

  “You’re gay and were having a homosexual romance with Nicky.”

  He fell back into his chair. He couldn’t bring his eyes to mine. “You knew.”

  “I knew.”

  “You never told anyone.”

  I shrugged. “What do I care?”

  “The others, if they ever found out… if the don ever discovered–”

  “That doesn’t matter now.”

  He reached down towards the table. I didn’t know if he was going for the bottle or the Bible. He didn’t seem to know either. His hand wavered and finally he slumped back and began to cry. “No, it doesn’t.” He recovered almost instantly and regained most of his composure. “You knew I might be infected.”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on you.”

  “Are you a cop?” he asked. “Since you rejoined the family I’ve had the feeling you might be an undercover cop. Or a fed.”

  I appreciated perceptive men, especially when they showed me my own faults. I wasn’t quite as slick as I thought I was. If Portman had a hunch I might be undercover, who else might have felt it? Johnny Tormino?

  “CIA,” I said. “They recruited me over there to tear the Ganooch’s empire down.”

  “They won’t tear something like this down. They just want to turn it to their own ends.”

  “Right.”

  “You must hate him to have agreed.”

  “I do.”

  He didn’t ask why. It wouldn’t have made any difference. He probably hated the Ganooch as much as I did. Always living in fear of what might happen if anybody found out his sexual identity. Having to hide his love for Niko or have his throat cut for it.

  “I noticed something when I woke this morning,” Portman said.

  “What?”

  The smile played in his face, twisting his lips like softened solder. “Don’t you see?”Dim sunlight streamed in from the open window, the harsh breeze carrying with it the smell of the ocean and the stink of burning corpses. The cloying acrid odor of the dead outside the gates, the unclean infected.

  His lower jaw dropped and the corners of his mouth opened too far, his skin tearing. The ripped creases grew inch by inch as the laughter boiled up from his belly, his chest, his throat. It worked itself free from his body like a child eager to be set free from the womb. “Tommy Flowers, the rivers of blood are flowing from the saints and the martyrs.”

  “Try to hold on, Portman. Say it out loud. Explain what’s going on inside you.”

  Clear fluid leaked down his chin. “There is no explaining! My soul is writhing!” His giggle was hellish, but the expression that crossed his face was as joyous as a mad penitent flaying his own flesh with a cat-o’-nine-tails. “That’s what the virus does, Tommy Flowers. It let’s us join together in the grand communion. The last sacrament, the heavenly host. The divine Eucharist. The seraph walk among us.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Portman.”

  “Yes, you do. You do!”

  “My soul is in the endless city guarded by the seraph. I can feel God’s fist on it.” His breathing came in ragged gasps now, the terror and ecstasy flooding his eyes. “It’s… it’s crying. My soul cries. Niko’s soul cries. Niko! Niko!”

  I remembered an image that had been passed to me by my mother’s seizure. A strange black bug in a jar.

  I took him by the shoulders and gave him a tremendous shake, hoping it might snap him back into himself for a moment longer. He turned his teeth towards me. He leered and the laughter rose like vomit. I shook him again. It did nothing but rattle him a little more loose. “You can fight,” I told him. “You can hold on, Portman.”

  He wasn’t in pain, unless it was the savage agony of bliss. He might not even be dying. But the full horror of having a soul touched by God was slowly inflicting a terrible knowledge on him. It was something that no one should be aware of. I was slowly watching him lose himself, his past, his mind, his identity, flowing into an infinite sea. I imagined the seraph with their wings extended, arching across the cliff tops of heaven and hell.

  Portman’s smiled insanely at me and couldn’t even find his voice anymore. A newborn’s gurgle escaped him. He fell to the floor and crawled towards me. He said my name over and over. I backed away. His mouth fell open even farther. His huge teeth flashed at me. He lunged for me.

  I spun and flipped him over my right hip. Portman folded up in mid-air and hit the far wall with an explosive force. Infection was left smeared across the paint. He got to his feet again. He said, “Tommy Flowers, come to our assistance, make haste to help us.”

  I did my best. As he charged at me again I snapped my forearm across his sternum. He froze and I chopped him in the throat. His body crumpled inch by inch and he fell against the coffee table. The Bible hit the floor at my feet. I glanced down at the page expecting some passage to clarify all matters. I couldn’t find it. Portman rose slowly and I turned and got behind him. I placed him firmly in a headlock, aware of the snapping teeth, the roving tongue. I twisted his head to one side and then back again and broke his neck. The sound of bone snapping was loud as a rifle shot. It took him another ten seconds to die, and all the while I had to listen to that laughter.

  I knew how to cover up a murder scene. Morale was low enough, I didn’t need anyone thinking the plague was loose inside our complex. I had to make things look right for the rest of the troops. I set the scene to appear as if Portman had gotten drunk in his despair, tried to sober up in the shower, and taken a tumble through the glass stall. That would explain the marks on his face. I used a shard of glass to make sure it would play. I left his corpse and headed back to the main house.

  No one would miss Portman for the next few hours. Everybody already had too much on their minds. I returned to the main house and listened to the wails erupting on the top floor.

  “Shit.”

  Grandma Ganucci only settled down when she was cooking food. I rushed up the stairs to her bedroom and glanced around at all the faces packed in there. Ma, some of the boys, they stood around uncomfortable as hell, watching the old lady going fucking nuts. Dr. Beltrando, who was nearly as old as her, with stick thin arms and legs and a pretty obvious hunch, was trying to give her some pills but she sped away from him, weaving from one person to the next.

  The young priest, Macdonald, was doing his best to keep up with her, trying to calm her down, imploring her, “Mrs. Ganucci, please, God has a beautiful master plan for us all.” He couldn’t have been ordained more than a month ago. He was practically still an altar boy. He had pretty effeminate features and artfully mussed blonde curls that ringed his head and sank to his shoulders. He looked the way I always imagined Satan, the first and most beautiful angel, would look.

  But priests could never comfort Sicilians. They only made us more crazy.

  The seraph walk among us.

  “Please, dear, listen to me–”

  She whirled away from him, lowered her shoulder like a rugby player, and came on at me. If I was a little slower she would’ve clipped me and broken my hip. I got my arms around her and said, “Grandma, listen to me. The men are hungry. I want you to make Niko’s favorite for them.”

  She stared at me as if she didn’t know me, and then recognition seeped into her face. “Pasta fasulli?”

  “Yes. Make a big pot of pasta fasulli.”

  Her transformation was even spookier than the one the biters went through. She went from anguish and utter heartbreak to being a sweet happy granny in a second and a half. I’d seen men break down that fast, but I’d never seen them piece themselves back together so quickly.

  Grandma put her hand over my heart and said, “I was thinking the same thing. Niko liked it w
ith a lot of pepper. You think the men will care for it that way?”

  “I think they will. I like it that way too.”

  “And with a hint of onion, Tommaso?”

  I tried to smile disarmingly, but a smile no loner meant the same thing to me as it did three days ago. “Of course.”

  “Okay then.”

  She left the room and moved off down the hall with an air of happiness, almost like she wanted to hum to herself but couldn’t decide on any particular song.

  Ma said, “She’s been cooking all morning. Enough for an army. Your men can’t eat it all and it’ll just go to waste. Shouldn’t we be conserving our provisions?”

  “Yes, we should. But anything is better than listening to that.”

  Father Macdonald put a hand to his chin and stroked the hint of peach fuzz there. His body retained tension and I got a sense that his heart might stop if anyone so much as put a finger on him. Like most men who’d given his life to the church he seemed to both relish and abhor the great tasks sets forward by heaven. He had the heavy air of someone searching an indescribable depth in hopes of finding the perfect answer to an untenable question. He clutched his Bible and glanced at the cover as if to make sure he was holding onto the right book.

  Ma Ganucci said, “We’re going to hold a memorial for Niko in the garden this afternoon.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I told her.

  “Why not? If we’re trapped at our home and can’t hold his funeral in the cemetery, at least we can do something to my son.” She turned and watched the ash streak the window, knowing some of it was probably Nicky’s consumed corpse, assuming the crematoriums or the people working the fire-pits had the time to burn him. Otherwise he was rotting somewhere on a slab or a gurney or in the back of a hearse. “Father Macdonald has a small ceremony prepared.”

  “The ash is falling thicker now. It’s getting hard to breathe outside.”

  The pretty priest stepped towards me like he wanted to shake my hand. For some reason he made me anxious, and I almost backed a step away before I realized what I was doing. He said, “The sermon will only consist of two brief passages from the New Testament and a short hymn. And a few words from Niko’s loved ones. No more than a half hour, I expect. It’s a meager mass for him, but I can understand your wanting to be cautious, Mr. Flowers.”

  “We need our rituals to handle grief, Tommy,” Ma said, still staring out the window. “That’s what they’re there for, at least some of them. Maybe you don’t understand that, being who you are.”

  “And who am I?”

  She did me the kindness of not answering. I didn’t really want to know what she thought of me. I was her husband’s left hand. I was the number one torpedo. I was a traitor to the family. I did my duty in the service of my country. I was a soldier, spy, torturer. I was the tortured. I was a man of faith, even if I didn’t always want to be.

  I headed for the door. Father Macdonald put his hand out in a gesture of solace. I waited for his fingers to touch the side of my face. The distance between us seemed insurmountable. I thought, with crystalline clarity, that if his flesh met my flesh I’d kill him. I wondered if he and Nicky had been fucking. I wondered if he and Portman had been fucking. I thought DiMeo might be right after all, and this was limbo. I wondered if the pretty priest was Satan himself sent to install me as a general in the armies of hell.

  He let his arm fall back to his side, and I left.

  I made my rounds and checked in with the Ganooch. He was in his office, alone and brooding at his desk, a little drunk on wine already. He was wearing an unsnapped shoulder holster. In his right hand he held on to a S&W .45. It surprised me. I’d never seen him with a weapon before. He was too smart for that. He had manpower to do his dirty work. I’d never heard of him icing anybody with his own hands.

  I wondered if this was going to be it. If he turned the gun a half inch to the left he’d have me lined up in his sights. I wanted it to happen. It might give me the last half-inch of motivation I needed to finish the job. I’d been dreaming of snapping his neck, but after doing that to Portman this morning, it didn’t stand out anymore as the way to murder the don.

  I stood in his door eyeing him, waiting for him to notice me. As he became aware of my presence, he didn’t show any reaction besides a stiffening brow.

  “Where’s Cole?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe the phones are dying. He won’t answer. Have someone fetch him.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re holding a memorial for Nicky this afternoon.”

  “In the garden.”

  “Yeah. Cole should there.”

  He said it with just enough emotional significance that I thought he might know about Nicky and Portman’s affair. He seemed a touch angry but not about the idea of his dead son having been gay. Maybe the Ganooch was a little more evolved than I gave him credit for, despite his having blown up my parents.

  My fists tightened until my knuckles cracked.

  He finally looked up. He took another sip from his half-full glass of wine. “Something on your mind?” he asked.

  “A lot,” I said. “How about you?”

  It took a few moments to get his chin nodding, and then it went on for a few seconds too long. With some obvious effort he forced himself to focus.

  “I’ve been thinking about going to church,” he said. “I don’t like that kid priest very much. I want to talk to Father LaMana or Father Bianchi. The Mother Superior. Someone I trust. I feel that very strongly, Tommaso. You think… might it be possible…?”

  “To take a quick trip to the church?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “No. There don’t seem to be as many biters on the street at the moment, but that doesn’t mean they’re not lurking. Waiting for a chance to get in. And there’s no guarantee anyone is still at St. Anne’s. Or even alive.”

  “Except your aunt,” he said. “Even the devil can’t take a saint to hell at the end of days, can he?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t think he was being serious, but I could’ve been wrong. The Ganooch sounded as if the length and breadth and depth of his sins was beginning to scare him, like watching a black tide rolling in, the waves growing higher and higher. Maybe this was his way of showing guilt. Maybe he was just fucking with me.

  I thought about smashing the bottle of wine and ramming the jagged edges into the don’s face. It seemed a little like overkill, even for me, but it might be appropriate. You needed to make bolder statements at the end of the world, just to get anybody to listen to your message. Maybe that’s why, if the disease really had been sent by God, if Satan and the seraph walked among us, God had chosen to kill off the human race in such a dramatic way.

  Having the Ganooch’s hot blood spurting against my skin might be the way it was fated to go down. Perhaps that was the way he and I would join together in our grand communion. It might prove to be my last sacrament, my divine Eucharist.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re sweating. You feverish?”

  “No.”

  “Have some wine.”

  He poured me a glass. The nearly empty bottle stood at my left hand, the way I stood at the don’s left hand. I drank the wine down in one gulp and forced myself not to wipe my brow.

  “You and Gina, you’re quite a team together. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”

  “You have a problem with that?” I asked.

  “No. I think it’s a good thing. She needs someone like you to look after her and protect her.”

  “I’ll go get Portman.”

  I left the office with my stomach turning sour. I found a few of the guys in the kitchen eating a couple of pounds of the baked lasagna that Grandma had made earlier. She was at the stove cooking a giant pot of pasta fasulli. My stomach kept tumbling. I sent one of the troops, a legbreaker named Winslow with size twenty-seven-inch neck and a f
ace like pounded clay, out to the cottage. I walked him outside and watched as he lumbered across the estate toward Portman’s place like a broken mule giving party rides to spoiled children.

  I kept guard at the front gate. I kept waiting for the biters to come crashing through the fence, pouring over the wall. I kept an eye out for Nolan. I was interested in whatever he had to say. The biters shambled in the street and over the sidewalks in a kind of mimicry of the way life had been just a few days ago. They looked up at the cameras, supremely aware that somebody was keeping watch on them. They threw back their heads and their hideous smiles coiled across their faces. The lilting laughter broke from them like their own infection. They said our names. They called on the don. They beckoned for Gina. They clamored for Father Macdonald, Doctor Beltrando, Ma and Grandma, and some of the others. I waited my turn.

  A half hour later Winslow returned. He walked slowly against the fall of ash, his thick body breaking the smoky clouds into even smaller swirls of darkness, until he saw and picked up his stride. He stepped into the security booth and wiped grit from his face.

  “Cole’s dead,” Winslow said.

  “How’d it happen?” I asked.

  “Looks like he was drunk and slipped and fell in the bathtub. Neck’s broken, face is cut up from shattering the shower door. I don’t think it was, you know… the disease, the virus… whatever it is.”

  “Get two other men and bury him out behind the groundskeeper’s shed.”

  Winslow’s near-shapeless features gnarled into an abstract impression of puzzlement. “But why don’t we tell the don and uh, then maybe we hold this vigil for both of them, you know, Cole and Nicky. That would be the right thing, wouldn’t it?”

  “Winslow, how about if you let me run things for the time being?”

  “Okay. Right, Tommy.”

  I wondered if Portman’s soul was still writhing, wherever it was. How deep would they have to plant him behind the shed for him to stay at rest?