A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  I picked up the bottle and smelled it. I set it back down and clinked a fingernail on the bottle neck. “You trying to go back inside?”

  “That’s probably where I’ll end up anyway. Next time down, I’m looking at ‘the bitch.’ ”

  “Habitual offender?”

  “I’ve been working on it since I was seventeen. That’s the year I got turned out.”

  “You were raped?”

  “For starters. Look at it this way. Adonis Balangie isn’t his father or grandfather. Mr. Mark is trying to work a truce. So maybe he looks at me as some kind of window into the Balangie family. What’s the harm in that? Bottom line, I ain’t done nothing wrong.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Can I ask you another question?”

  He touched at his nose and sniffed. “If I don’t got to answer it.”

  “We’re sitting in front of a fan, but you’ve got a tic in your eye, and there’s perspiration on your upper lip.”

  “Something happened at Mr. Mark’s place I cain’t put together.” He looked again at the bar. “Somebody ought to shut up them women.”

  “Tell me what happened, Marcel.”

  “A tree limb went down on the power line a few nights ago. I went into the main house to he’p Mr. Mark light some candles. While we were walking around in the dark, he says to me, ‘Bet you never thought you’d meet Pluto before your time.’ ”

  He waited for me to respond. I kept my eyes on his and didn’t speak. He cleared his throat. “I axed him if he was talking about Mickey Mouse’s dog. He laughed his head off. Not in a nice way. I felt stupid and didn’t know what to say.”

  “Yeah, that’s a bit strange,” I said.

  “I looked up who Pluto was. The Roman god of the underworld.”

  “Maybe Shondell was just making a joke.”

  “That ain’t all that happened. Mr. Mark’s candles melted down. I went to the Walmart and bought some more. When I got back to the house, it was still raining and lightning. He didn’t answer the door, even when I banged. I went around the side and looked through the French doors. The power was still out, and the inside of the house was black. He was sitting at his desk in front of his computer. There wasn’t no battery power, no generator backup, nothing like that anywhere near his desk.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Lights were flashing in his face. But there wasn’t any source. Just big blades of yellow light all over his face.” He squeezed at his stomach, then drank from the bottle. “I think I got an ulcer. Jesus Christ, Dave, don’t just sit there. How do you explain that?”

  “It was probably a flash of lightning reflecting off a surface on Shondell’s desk.”

  He jabbed his finger in the air, shaking it for emphasis. “That’s right! That’s probably what it was! You got it, man!” He hit me in the chest. “You’re a smart man, you.”

  But his description of Shondell’s face during the storm made me think of a figure in the works of Dante and Milton. His name meant “the light bringer.” The name was Lucifer.

  Chapter Nine

  I’VE ALWAYS BELIEVED that normalcy is highly overrated and not to be confused with virtue. With that in mind, I can say in a charitable way that Father Julian Hebert (pronounced a-bear) was the most eccentric Catholic priest I’ve ever known. He went by his first name and never wore a Roman collar or a black suit, and he encouraged people to call him by his first name and not his title, which was hard for most Cajuns to do. He was socially tone-deaf and often a disaster at public gatherings. Last and most important, he had no filter between his brain and his vocal cords.

  His mother was Irish and his father hard-core coon-ass. Clete Purcel called him “Goody Two-shoes Meets Chuck Norris.” With his incongruous athletic physique and short blond hair and egg-shaped face and baby-blue eyes and complexion that resembled the skin of a pinkish-white balloon, he floated around the community and anchored himself in various venues where, without speaking a word, he made everyone either uncomfortable, puzzled, afraid, or willing to throttle him. These venues included dog- and cockfights, drive-through daiquiri windows, cage fights, strip bars, porn theaters, and casinos that gave free drinks around the clock to pensioners and functionally illiterate people who often lost everything they owned.

  On a national Sunday-morning television show, when the other guests were discussing homosexual, bisexual, transgender, lesbian, and restroom issues as though there were no other terms for human beings and no other noteworthy subjects on earth, Julian said, “How about we just drop it? Who cares how people use their equipment? In your world, I’d probably have to introduce myself as a premature ejaculator. At least if I had a love life. Anyway, give it an effing break, will you?”

  Whenever the bishop sent him a letter of reprimand or correction, Father Julian would report back that he had taken care of the problem. He always told the truth. He took care of the problem by dropping the letter in the wastebasket, not even bothering to wad it up.

  He went bowling by himself at three A.M. in an all-night bowling alley in Lafayette and line-danced at a nightclub. He gave most of his money away and was arrested twice at Fort Benning in the protest against the School of the Americas. His tiny church down the bayou was the poorest in the diocese, and his parishioners were mostly people of color. The only toilet in the building was always stopping up with either roots or mud that seeped into the drainpipe whenever it rained. But Julian never lost faith and was beloved by his parishioners. His greatest oddity was his similarity to Clete Purcel. He recognized virtue in others but did not see it in himself.

  The morning after I spoke to Marcel LaForchette, I drove to Jeanerette and parked by Father Julian’s cottage and knocked on the door. The sky was blue, a crusty sliver of moon still visible above the trees, the sugarcane bending in the fields. Down by the bayou was a cemetery with crypts that were green with lichen and scattered down the slope like huge decayed teeth. I wanted to wander by the water and let go of all my troubles and try to remember the admonition that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. I wanted to throw bread crumbs on the edge of the lily pads and watch the bream and sunfish rise to the surface like wobbling green and gold air sacs of sunshine. I wanted these simple pleasures and a world free of death, a place where evil men do not break in and steal. Maybe that was the world Father Julian sought, too, I thought. Maybe that’s why I was a cop. If so, both of us were probably headed for a huge disappointment.

  You might wonder why I sought out the counsel of an iconoclast like Julian Hebert. There were several reasons. He was originally from New Iberia and knew Marcel LaForchette, but he had also known the Balangie family in New Orleans and supposedly attended Pietro Balangie on his deathbed. In fact, there was a legend about it. Julian congratulated the old man for owning up to his sins, then said, “There’s one other thing we should think about, Pietro. Maybe you can reach out to a few of your enemies and ask their forgiveness.”

  “I can’t do that, Father,” Pietro said.

  “Why not?” Julian asked.

  “I killed them all,” Pietro replied.

  But I’d heard the same story told about Frank Costello, so maybe this was another urban legend lending a degree of humor to the evil that can dwell in the human heart. Regardless, my recount is probably an attempt to hide the real reason for my visit to Julian’s cottage. I was still bothered by Marcel LaForchette’s tale about the power outage at Mark Shondell’s house. I may have had other things on my mind as well, namely, the wife of Adonis Balangie.

  Julian and I took a stroll by the graveyard. He was wearing Levi’s and sandals with white socks and a T-shirt that had been washed from purple to lavender, with Mike the Tiger’s head emblazoned on the front.

  “Marcel saw lights flashing on Mark Shondell’s face?” he asked.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Marcel is a superstitious man.”

  “Why would Shondell make a joke about a pagan god? Marcel
thought he was talking about Mickey Mouse’s dog.”

  An alligator gar was rolling among the lily pads, its armored back slick and serpentine, sliding down into the root system where the bream hid. “Who knows why Mark Shondell does anything?” Julian said.

  “You’re not a fan?”

  His blue irises were the size of nickels. He picked up a pecan that was still in the husk and tossed it at the gar. “I think you should stay away from Shondell.”

  “Do you know something about him that I don’t?”

  “I also think you should get your badge back,” he replied.

  “You can’t talk to me about him on a personal basis? He confided something to you in the confessional?”

  “That’s a laugh.”

  I had told him only part of the story about the Shondells and the Balangies, and I didn’t know if I should say more. Why burden a good man with a problem neither of us could solve? Anyway, he beat me to it. “What’s really on your mind, Dave?”

  I told him about Isolde being used as a pawn by Adonis and Penelope Balangie.

  “They gave away their daughter?” he said.

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “Have you reported this?”

  “There’s nothing to report. There’s no evidence of a crime.”

  “Does Adonis Balangie know?”

  “He’s behind it,” I said.

  “What about Penelope?”

  “I’m not sure. She’s hard to read.”

  He was looking at the trees across the bayou. His eyes cut to mine. “In what way?”

  “She came to see me in New Iberia. She said she wanted help.”

  “You believed her?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He stared at the water. The gar was gone. The wind was cold and damp and gusting on the bayou’s surface, shriveling it like old skin. “She’s a beautiful woman.”

  “I noticed.”

  “They’re murderous people, Dave.”

  “The Balangies?”

  “They claim to be descendants of Giordano Di Betto. Maybe they are. But Giordano Di Betto was not a killer. He was a victim, tortured and burned alive.”

  “Why would Penelope Balangie give her daughter to a lecherous man like Shondell?”

  “That’s the question she’ll use to draw you into her life.”

  “Say again?”

  “When you went to her house with Clete Purcel, did she make an appearance with a rosary?”

  I stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “Yep, that’s Penelope,” he said. “Be careful what you touch, Dave. Roses have thorns.”

  * * *

  I WENT HOME. I wanted my badge back. In Louisiana the most powerful people in the parish are the sheriff and the tax accessor. If you’re smart, you treat the former with caution and send a Christmas card to the latter. At the time the events I describe took place, the sheriff’s department was involved in a disputed election that in effect had crippled the department, and my career rested in the hands of Internal Affairs, headed by Carroll LeBlanc, a former vice cop in New Orleans and an enemy of Clete Purcel.

  Vice cops, male and female, have their own culture, one that is raw, depraved, and predatory. Many of the players are closet degenerates. Narcs and Treasury agents take enormous risks. Down on the border, they can suffer the fate of the damned if they fall into the wrong hands. Controlling the sex trade and human trafficking is another matter. Some undercover cops who work sex stings are mean to the bone and take a sadistic pleasure in their work. They set up drunks outside bars and gays in restrooms and ensure that the story makes the newspaper and the six o’clock news. Shorter version, they ruin careers and break up families. I knew one female vice cop who loved her role as a hooker and always made the same statement to the john when she busted him in the hotel room: “You came here to get fucked. Congratulations.”

  LeBlanc had thick facial skin, like pork rind, and recessed dark eyes that could be attentive one moment and then listless or vaguely lascivious. There was a string of black moles under his left eye, like cinders that had blown from a fire. To my knowledge, he had never married. His interest in others was fleeting, as was his concentration. His sanctuary lay in his computer and his file drawers. He dressed like a bookie or a horse tout or a sharper in a card game. But there was nothing of Damon Runyon in Carroll LeBlanc. He was as nasty as they came.

  We were in the old office in the courthouse. Through the window, I could see the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery. A freight train was creaking down the tracks, wobbling on the rails that traversed New Iberia’s old red-light district. LeBlanc had stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles and opened a manila folder and propped it on his crotch. He glanced up and followed my line of sight out the window. His shirt was an immaculate white, his blue silk necktie draped on his stomach. “What are you looking at?”

  “It’s funny how whorehouses and graveyards seem to go together,” I said. “Sometimes I wonder if South Louisiana isn’t a giant necropolis.”

  “A what?”

  I shrugged off my own comment; I regretted cluttering up the conversation. He was reviewing the charges that had cost me my badge. He made a sucking sound with his teeth. “Without authorization, you took Purcel to a crime scene on the St. Martin Parish line?”

  “I needed his help,” I said.

  “The St. Martin cops say Purcel left his shit-prints all over it.”

  “He did six weeks in their stockade,” I said. “They have a long memory.”

  “Maybe so. But I got to go with what’s in the file. There’s another problem here. You hid a confidential informant at your house. A black woman. There was a warrant on her.”

  “A federal judge was going to expose her and confine her to a halfway house. Remember what happened to Barry Seal?”

  “You weren’t dipping your wick, were you?”

  “I’m going to forget you said that, Carroll.”

  “So the federal court system is your enemy?” he said.

  “Are you going to cut me some slack or not?”

  “I thought you told everybody you were done with the department.”

  “You know about those guys who got stuffed in a barrel?” I said.

  “Down in Vermilion?”

  “They braced me on the bayou.”

  “From what I hear, Clete Purcel might have been mixed up in this.”

  “That’s a lie, and you know it.”

  “A cop who killed a federal witness and was a hump for the Mob in Reno and Vegas? Yeah, I can’t imagine him going astray.”

  LeBlanc closed the folder and placed it on his desk. His jaw went slack, the way an old man’s does when his thought processes take him into blind alleys. He scratched the row of moles that seemed to leak from his eye. “I can recommend you for temporary reinstatement until we get our administrative problems straightened out. In other words, you’ll be on probation and treated as such. You will also report to me, no one else. You copy?”

  I stared into space.

  “You got a bug up your ass about something?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I asked if you copy.”

  “I’m extremely copacetic with everything you’ve said, Carroll. I appreciate your oversight. Thanks for being here.”

  I could see an incisor whitening his lip. He waited for me to leave, but I didn’t. I let my eyes stay on his. “What?” he said.

  “I think there may be an instance of human trafficking going on in Iberia Parish.”

  “You’re talking about illegal immigrants?”

  “I’m talking about Mark Shondell.”

  He tossed my IA folder on the desk. “I knew it. You can’t keep your nose out of trouble.”

  “Call the home of Adonis Balangie and ask him where his stepdaughter is.”

  “You know the feeling I have about you, Robo?”

  “No clue.”

  “You think your shit doesn’t stink. You never had to work vice. You
never had to clean AIDS puke off your clothes. You never had to let a perv go for your joint.”

  “I didn’t know that went with the job. AIDS puke?”

  “Get out of my office.”

  “Nice to be back working with you, Carroll. Keep fighting the good fight.”

  Through the ceiling, I heard a toilet flush, the water powering through the drain pipe, shaking the walls.

  * * *

  I HAD PROMISED CLETE Purcel that one day I would tell him why I’d visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen. It was the same reason I’d visited my priest friend Julian Hebert. I wanted to know the origins of human cruelty. Please notice I did not say “evil.” The latter is a generic term; the former is not. Evil can encompass addiction, greed, sloth, bad sexual behavior or just imperfection, and all the other doodah that goes along with the cardinal sins, depending on who the speaker is. Cruelty is different. It has no limits and no bottom. Often it has no motivation. It’s usually fiendish and more often is done collectively than by individuals.

  In the year 1600, at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Age of Reason, Giordano Di Betto was stripped naked and hanged upside down over a fire with his lips pinned together so he couldn’t speak or scream. Jump forward 365 years to an Asian country where I called in Puff the Magic Dragon on a ville after the enemy trapped us in a rice paddy and let loose with RPGs and a captured blooker and a fifty-caliber with tracer rounds just before bagging ass into the jungle.

  I still remember the sparks twisting into the evening sky, the glow of the hooches, the screams of children. I tell myself I had no alternative. Am I telling the truth? To this day, I hate people who assure me I did nothing wrong. I hate them most for their sophistry and the hand they place on my shoulder as they talk about things of which they have no understanding. And finally, I hate myself.

  I’m really saying I visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen and Father Julian in Jeanerette to prove I’m not guilty of the behavior I have seen in others. But I know the level of rage I took with me to Southeast Asia, and I know the number of men I killed as surrogates for the man who cuckolded my father and destroyed my family. I would fire all eight rounds in my .45 auto at an Asian man’s face as though I were sleepwalking. Sometimes I had to be shaken awake by my sergeant when it was over. I received several medals for wounds and acts of bravery and felt I deserved none of them. The only true symbols of my war experience were malaria and scar tissue from jungle ulcers and the abiding conviction that the Beast had left his imprint on me.