Vespers

by Tom Piccirilli

  Winslow took over my shift at the booth. I continued my rounds and found Johnny and his legbreakers playing poker in the day room of our quarters. They still bet cheap. They still cared about money. None of them seemed to understand what was really happening. When Johnny saw me standing and watching he started to mouth off in that usual way he found so amusing.

  “Look who it is. The guy who says there’s no payroll anymore.” He took a handful of money and threw it at my feet. “There’s always a payroll. There’s always been a payroll.”

  I thought of the biters calling to the Ganooch, lecturing him on the moneychangers in the church.

  Johnny was drunk. Johnny was going to be drunk for the rest of his life, however it might be. Maybe only minutes. That’s the way he was going to handle things from here on out. I knew he wanted to go for his gun. I knew he wanted to try me. He glanced at my hands. He checked the slight bulges under my specially tailored suit to see if could tell what I was carrying, with which hand I might draw. I knew he couldn’t. I was equally fast with both. Would I go for my hip, the small of my back, my right shoulder holster, or the left? His boys were unsure of what to do. Both of them were bruised and cut from our little fracas yesterday. They thought they should muscle me out of loyalty to Johnny. But they understood I was the left hand of the Ganooch now. They realized I’d kill them as soon as look at them. They knew I could do it. They had no names. They didn’t deserve names. They hardly registered as men. So they kept playing cards. They continued betting stiffly. They lived on in the supreme knowledge that they couldn’t hurt me, but I could hurt them badly. In everything else of worth, they were ignorant.

  “Clean yourself up, Johnny,” I said. “We’re holding a vigil for Nicky in the garden.”

  “I know that. You think I don’t know that? Niko was my best friend. He visited me every other Friday for eight years while I was in the stir. Where the hell were you?”

  “Iraq. Afghanistan. Kuwait.”

  He seemed genuinely hurt by my response, but it was probably just the alcohol softening his features. “You shouldn’t have gone. You should’ve marched inside the pen with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were friends,” he hissed. “We were partners.”

  “You had a choice to make, and so did I.”

  “You chose wrong, Tommy.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  That seemed to appease him a little. He looked as sincere and earnest as he possibly could. A lot of men had died buying into his pretenses, but I could feel it down deep that he was telling the truth. He really was hurt that I hadn’t followed him into the joint.

  Despite being part of the Ganucci crew and having friends inside with him, with his abrasive personality he must’ve had a hard time of it in the bin. He was as tough as they come, but he was a mouth. He pushed buttons. He needed to be around people. I bet they kept him in the hole for weeks or months at a time. He never talked about prison with me, but I was certain he had his scars like I had mine.

  His boys were cowed. They understood that guns might blaze any second. They kept dealing cards and tossing cash into the pot, but they’d be ready to overturn the table the minute anyone flashed any hardware. They had no heart. They weren’t as loyal as Johnny might think.

  “You shouldn’t have cockblocked my promotion,” Johnny said.

  “I didn’t. There are bigger stakes on the line.”

  “You don’t get to decide that for me or the family.”

  “Don’t you have any idea what’s really going on?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  I turned on the TV. Half the channels were emergency broadcast signals. The others featured newscasters trying to offer the latest information about military intervention and the safest place to run. The word LIVE stood out in bold letters on the screen, but the timecode showed that all the reports were at least twelve hours old. I pointed that all out to him.

  Johnny said, “So?”

  Arguing was worthless. Johnny was either in denial or just too greedy to let go of the old world. It didn’t matter to me which. I was through talking.

  I left. I didn’t think Johnny was irrational enough to shoot me in the back. He was someone who liked to look into the eyes of the men he killed, even if those men were tied to a table with a vice tightened around their skulls. Still, I listened very closely to any sound he made. I threw my entire concentration behind me, shutting out the sound of my own footsteps, the TV, the chips falling on the table, even Johnny’s heavy breathing. I waited in the depths of my own mind for my oldest friend in the world to kill me. A part of me wanted it to happen. A part of me would never let it happen.

  I walked down the hall to my bedroom. I wanted another shower but I knew I shouldn’t waste the water. The lights flickered. We might not have them for much longer. I thought of Renning safely away in some underground bunker with Viv and hundreds of other women, safe and planning on repopulating the world like a child of Noah.

  I washed my face. I wondered if Nicky and Portman were together in a better place. I stared into the mirror thinking of every leaked secret biohazard or fanatical attack plan I’d ever heard from any of my prisoners. I stared until I nearly went blind.

  Gina came to my room, looking beautiful and bruised, her eyes with a little more steel in them than usual. She wore a tight black dress and a black hat with a veil, and she was smart enough to have an umbrella to help keep the falling clouds of ash off.

  She said, “Will you escort me?”

  “Of course.”

  She fell into my arms and the veil made her look like a siren trapped in a fisherman’s net. I could picture her naked and salt-dappled, sunning herself on the shore of the Mediterranean leading sailors to their doom.

  “What can I do to help my family?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing you can do. They’re strong. You know that. They’ll draw together and pull through. Even Grandma. She’s hysterical right now but she’s used to being hysterical.”

  “Not like this.”

  “No, none of us has been through this before. But we’ll make it.”

  “Only because we have you.”

  Johnny found us there, my hands on her shoulders in a half-embrace. He hit me with a smarmy grin that he’d go to his grave with.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  Gina and I left the building and joined the procession as they filed out into the garden. She opened the umbrella. The servants held theirs open over Ma and Grandma. The black sky fell and awful odor on the wind added to the overall mood of misery. At least the biters at the gate were quiet. I was thankful but I wondered about their silence. Gina turned to the fence and began to cry. I couldn’t be sure if it was for her brother or for Nolan. A surge of jealousy moved through my belly.

  If Nicky had died a month ago we’d be in church and the place would be filled to capacity and mourners were lined up out onto the street, several square blocks worth. The feds would be taking photos and video of everybody. Wiseguys from the Chi mob, the west coast syndicate, the Dixie mafia, the Ozark gangs, and the bamboo triangle would all be paying their respects. The Ganooch’s business associations were far-reaching.

  It seemed like the entire neighborhood was here anyway. Maybe because so many of them were dead. Their ghosts crowded in with us. I could feel the diseased, alert and in hiding beyond the wall. You could barely hear a thing over all the weeping as the crowd moved into the depths of the now black garden. Doctor Beltrando, skinny and frail, appeared to be terrified, like he thought someone might hold him personally responsible for all that happened and take out their rage on him. It might happen yet.

  I told Falco to get a rake and try to clean the roses, tulips, lilies, azaleas, and exotic plants up a little. He ran off, came back, and did his best. It didn’t help much.

  Every man not on security detail was there. Most of them were haggard. Nobody had been sleeping much. Grandma’s heavy foods weren’t doing an
yone’s digestion any favors. They’d been boozing too much. They looked towards the plumes of smoke and fire igniting Manhattan and I could see them wanting to run. And we’d only been stuck together a couple of days.

  I thought of the soldiers I’d stood beside in the sands of the Middle East. Men I’d trusted with my life, and men who’d trusted me with theirs. It taught me what a sham what syndicate loyalty actually was. No wiseguy would ever put his life on the line for another. Half the time they were flipping and turning rat or were lured away by other families into betraying their own. They’d kill their own cousins, their own brothers, if there was a nickel to be made.

  Father Macdonald presided over the vigil and catalogued all of Nicky’s many good deeds. All the money he’d donated to the hospitals, the schools, the university library, the homeless shelters, drug rehab clinics, mother church. All of it was true, but not the whole truth. It wasn’t any man’s whole truth. Tears ran down Father Macdonald’s face too. I wondered if it was because the Ganooch wouldn’t let him leave no matter how much he asked. Or if he was afraid he’d be cast out, no matter how much he begged.

  The pretty priest glanced from face to face as if marking each of us. When he got to me I held his gaze and tried to see if this was the devil himself. The flakes of ash in his hair somehow added to his beauty. His voice was almost as angelic as the rest of him. He led us in a hymn and everyone joined in but me.

  The biters were roused by the music. I heard our names being hissed. I looked up into the haze of the dark day and could almost make out the circling form of the angel of death himself up there, spiraling tighter and tighter, flying lower, arms outstretched to grab another of us.

  Falco kept trying to clear the flowers but they were mostly wilted anyway. Gina took my left wrist and dug her nails in. I liked the feel of her raking my flesh. Grandma Ganucci’s body twitched with grief. I supposed she was seeing an open grave and Nicky’s body being lowered into it. Her calf muscles throbbed as if she might take a header down onto the coffin. She took a three step flying run for a grave that wasn’t there.

  I caught her in mid-flight around her waist and she struggled with me like a wild horse. Nobody else helped. Johnny’s body shook slightly with repressed laughter. He showed me his teeth.

  I led Grandma back to the ring of her family, where she almost fell over again. The don went to his knees and wrapped his arms around her and buried the side of his face in her lap. After a moment, Gina did the same.

  Ma looked embarrassed by the histrionics. She looked at me like I was the only one she could trust in the world even though she hated my guts.

  Macdonald continued on with the hymn despite it all. It went on and on until it felt like it would never end, the same way that torturer’s asking questioned never stopped. I reached for my knife, drew it from its sheathe under my jacket, and pressed the point into the thickness of my lower back muscles. I prodded without drawing blood. Then I slid it in an eighth of an inch and felt a slowly spreading spot of wetness. Then a quarter of an inch. The blood dripped down the back of my trousers. The black cloth hid the blood. I met Macdonald’s eyes again. Whether he was Satan or Michael or Azreal or just a punk kid girlish priest, I thought I would have to kill him if he didn’t quit with the hymn in the next five seconds. I counted down. I stabbed myself more deeply.

  The instant I got to zero he finished. He crossed himself. Gina and the Ganooch stood. They did the same. Everyone else did too, except for me. I slid my blade back into its scabbard. The family headed back to the main house. The security patrols came in and a new shift went out. The remaining men returned to our quarters. Johnny rubbed shoulders with me. He touched my ass and came away with a hand streaked in blood.

  He said, “Nolan wants to talk to you.”

  I went to the gate. I climbed up onto the limo’s fender, stood on the hood, and faced the fencing. I heard a distant moan and then a shrill scream. It gave me hope. Someone was still alive out there. He might be dead in a minute, but he was still alive for now. I drew my pistol. Dozens of biters jammed their hands and faces through the spear shafts. They fell over one another. They tripped over themselves. They glanced up at the sky the same way that I had, as if seeing a circling shadow breaking through the ragged, massive clouds. They guffawed and whispered. They spoke in the languages of the desert tribes.

  “Tommy Flowers, heaven takes precautions against the conceit of man.”

  “Tommy Flowers, the pillars of the universe stand on backs of the four horsemen.”

  “Tommy Flowers, your good deeds are as dirty rags before the grand altar of God.”

  I called, “Nolan?”

  The other shambling biters parted and I spotted Nolan’s moustache hanging above his mutilated mouth. He’d lost at least forty pounds in just the past couple of days. The disease was biting him too, eating him from the inside out. Seeing me set him off on a laughing jag. He pointed at me, standing on the car, and went to his knees below me howling and roaring with sick laughter. I thought of him on top of Gina and my gun hand twitched. I tried to angle my line of sight out of the fence and down the street towards the church. He stuck his arm through the spears and reached for me.

  I jumped down and got to within six inches of him of his outstretched hand.

  “Forget about the wife?” I asked.

  “Tommy Flowers, the brides of Christ wait in the lonely towers of the inferno.”

  I checked his eyes. He seemed to be somehow both immediate and alert and as far away from me as anyone ever has been. His consciousness was present millisecond to millisecond, but between those spaces in time he was on the other side of the sun being told the answers to all the mysteries of life and death.

  “Nolan,” I said, “what do you want?”

  The question struck him so heavily that his face went passive. It cleared of all madness and his mouth shut and his gaze hit me sharply enough to throw sparks. His tongue inched out and ran around his lips and he cleared his throat as if he was going to speak in front of an audience that had paid a thousand bucks a plate. I waited. He did too. The biters who were spread all around the area moved together towards the gate like dogs being called to the food bowl. I met them there as their hands came for me. Their mouths worked my name.

  “Tommy Flowers, she isn’t yours.”

  I cocked my head at him. “Who are we talking about here? Gina?” I looked closer trying to see love or jealousy in his expression. “You hot because I’m with her in here and you’re out there? Can you still feel resentment? Do you covet?”

  “Tommy Flowers, you have fallen from grace and man has fallen with you.”

  “Old news. Tell me something I don’t know. Did you love her, Nolan? Did you love Gina or were you just fucking her because your new wife didn’t know what she was doing in bed yet?”

  “Tommy Flowers, you will kneel before–”

  “I don’t kneel before anyone or anything. Screw off, Nolan. Go nibble on somebody else. Get away from here or I’ll put one through your head.”

  “Tommy Flowers,” he said, “why did you do this to us?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Tommy Flowers, why did you do this to us?”

  “Tommy Flowers, why did you–”

  I stood their as their voices joined together into an ocean of piteous, powerful, prayerful crying that drowned out everything inside and outside of myself. It went on for hours and I listened to it all until the pretty priest came and climbed over the limo and took me by the wrist and pulled me away. I looked into his face prepared to ask him if he was God or Lucifer, but he turned away and marched back into the main house. Around me, a dozen members of the crew watched me suspiciously as if they wanted to check me for a wire. The capos stood lined up. They wanted to move against me. It had nothing to do with anything. One captain always wanted to move against another until they had it all. I still had my gun in my hand. No one said anything. No one tried anything. No one made a move. No one would bury me
behind the shed this evening.

  In the middle of the night I awoke on fire.

  I burned so badly that I rolled off the bed and onto the floor, trying to pat out flames that weren’t there. I could feel steam rising off my body even if I couldn’t see it. I felt as if I had swallowed flaming coals. I couldn’t shout for help. I couldn’t even scream. I remembered being in a dark cell with electrodes hooked to an old car battery attached to my nuts. This was worse.

  I tried getting to the shower and seeing if I could put the fire out, but as I crawled across the floor I saw a pair of beautiful legs standing before me, waiting. A foot lifted and was brought to my mouth, determined that I kiss it. When I didn’t, I got a kick to the face and fell over onto my back swallowing moans that stuck in my throat.

  I looked up and she stood over me, a goddess come to demand worship and sacrifice.

  She was the iconic beautiful blonde of every man’s life. She exuded carnality. She knew what would set me on fire, the way to smile, pose, turn her chin, sip at the air.

  In the world I’d always gone for the slim, brunette, dark Mediterranean types, but this wasn’t the world. This was fever, and in fever she had everything I wanted or needed. My belly squirmed as stomach acid boiled. My heart charred.

  It was only partly about lust. The flesh is weak. It burns. It needs. It cries in the night. Like the soul, it thrashes.

  But I am stone. And if you’re stone as I am stone then it can be controlled. Pain can be compartmentalized, fought, beaten down. Desire can be stashed, hidden, folded, locked away.

  A growl escaped my throat. I was the Ganooch’s number one torpedo. I was the torturer. I scared my Army trainers, my CIA teachers. I was cool. I was ice. I did what other men could not bring themselves to do. I didn’t break. I didn’t bend. I didn’t rattle. I didn’t beg.

  But everything that made me who I was seemed to diminish in her presence. It was a dirty trick. This was human chemistry. It was what made me a man, the need beyond control, the draw of that inexplicable compulsion, that magic.