A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Carroll LeBlanc was crying.

  “Nothing to say, Dave?” Shondell said.

  “It looks like a junk pile that your average pervert would probably appreciate,” I said.

  “I think you’ll change your tune.” Shondell looked at the brazen bull and grinned. “That’s a hint.”

  “Here’s one thing that won’t change, Shondell,” I said. “No matter what happens to us, you’ll remain the same. You’re trash, your family is trash, and your ancestors were trash. I think God keeps a few people like you around to remind the white race we’ve got some serious problems. I heard the Shondells worked as pubic-latrine cleaners for Robespierre during the Reign of Terror. Is that true?”

  Maybe it was the light or my imagination, but the creases in his face seemed to deepen, with an effect like soil erosion, the blood leaving his lips. He exuded an odor that smelled like an unchanged bandage. There were whiskers showing above his collar, the way they do when an old man cannot shave adequately.

  Then he seemed to collect himself. “A young woman awaits me now,” he said. “After a nap and a shower and a fine breakfast, I’ll return, and we’ll continue our talk. General Mendoza will be accompanying me.”

  “Mr. Shondell, you promised you’d get my daughter into a hospital,” Carroll said.

  “Oh, yes,” Shondell said. “Thank you for reminding me. A lovely girl.”

  * * *

  WE WERE TAKEN back to the compartment where we had woken up, the ligatures on our wrists. Bell locked us in. We sat on the deck in the white bareness of the compartment, hands bound behind us, the engines humming through the bulkhead. I was reminded of the play No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre. The characters find themselves in a windowless room and discover they are not only dead but in hell.

  “Hey, you guys, I know this won’t mean much, but I’m sorry I sold you out,” Carroll said.

  Neither Clete nor I could bring ourselves to look at him.

  “Y’all hear me?” he said.

  “Yeah, we heard you,” Clete said. “That means you don’t need to say any more.”

  “We saw all their faces,” Carroll said.

  “Yeah,” Clete said.

  “That means we got no chance, huh?” Carroll said.

  “No one is putting the glide on you, LeBlanc,” Clete said. “Now shut up.”

  “I don’t want to go out like this,” Carroll said. “With you guys hating me. My daughter never had a mother. I tried my best. I didn’t think all this would happen.”

  “I’m going to come over there and kick the shit out of you,” Clete said.

  “Listen to me, Carroll,” I said. “You owned up. You’re genuinely sorry. We accept that. Now we’re going to do everything we can to get out of here. Shondell has a weakness.”

  “What?” Carroll said.

  “He’s vain and afraid,” Clete said. “He knows what’s waiting for him down the track.”

  “What’s waiting for him?” Carroll said.

  “Probably everything he’s done to other people,” Clete said.

  “Yeah?” Carroll said. “What good does that do us?”

  Clete struggled to his feet. “There is no us. There is me and there is Dave. Then there is you. There is no us. Do you have that straight, you pinhead?”

  It would have been funny in any other circumstances. But we were inside a nightmare, perhaps an atavistic memory of real events passed down through the eons, like dreams of falling or burning or being buried alive. We had no place to hide, no mother to wake us, no descent from the heavens by a winged spirit with a shining broadsword.

  Then we got a visitor I didn’t expect.

  * * *

  ADONIS STEPPED INTO the compartment and shut the hatch behind him. He wore floppy white slacks and a purple corduroy shirt with a chain and cross around his neck, as though affecting a man of leisure who was at peace with both heaven and earth. His hair was freshly barbered, lightly oiled and combed back on the sides. If a mirror had been available, I’m sure he would have been looking at his reflection.

  He carried a small tin box in his palms as though it were a sacred object. It was painted with purple roses and green vines. “Hello, fellows,” he said.

  “Lose the guise, Adonis,” Clete said. “You’re working with that perv.”

  “I’m the only person on this yacht who will tell you the truth about your situation. I’m also the only one who might help you.”

  “Help yourself by dropping the dime on the perv while you have time,” Clete said.

  Adonis turned toward me. Considering the circumstances, his lidless eyes and swarthy good looks and calm demeanor were impressive and not to be taken lightly. However, if I hadn’t known better, I would have believed that Shakespeare had Adonis in mind when he said the prince of darkness was always a gentleman.

  “You realize you will not leave this place?” he said.

  “So?” I said.

  “I can make your ordeal easier, or I can end it now.”

  He opened the tin box. It contained a syringe and two glass ampoules of liquid.

  “I think I’ll pass,” I said.

  He ticked one fingernail on the box. “This is as good as it’s going to get.”

  “You’re offering us a hotshot?” Clete said.

  “Morphine,” Adonis said.

  “What are you giving up in exchange for Isolde?” I said.

  “Almost everything we have.”

  “How do you know a greaseball is lying?” Clete said. “His lips are moving.”

  “Clete’s right, Adonis. You’re a bum. I think you’re about to become Shondell’s silent partner.”

  “Penelope loves you,” he said. “If she goes to the authorities, her daughter will be killed. Any power I have cannot stop Mark Shondell.”

  “He’s not of this earth?” I said.

  “That’s right,” Adonis replied.

  “Wonder why he hauled butt when I shot at him,” Clete said.

  “You shot at Mark?”

  “You got to do something for kicks.”

  “The three of you are going to die a horrible death,” Adonis said. “Take the morphine.”

  “If we go through trial by ordeal, that’s the way it is,” I said. “Now get out of here. You’re stinking up the compartment.”

  I was surprised at his reaction, because I had not expected one. He blinked, and his lips parted as a child’s might if an adult pinched his cheek and shamed him in public.

  “Something else you can take with you,” Clete said. “I hear Gideon Richetti wants to do me a solid. Guess what that means for you, dick-wipe.”

  * * *

  LATER SOMEONE TURNED off the overhead light, and immediately, the compartment was plunged into darkness. I lost track of time. An hour could have been a day, and a day could have been an hour. I wasn’t sure when I was awake or when I was dreaming. After a while the two states of mind became interchangeable, one no more rational or irrational than the other. I tried to think of the sun bursting on the horizon, splintering the blue sky with a gold radiance that reached into infinity. I also envisioned a full moon rising with the wispy, cold fragility of a communion wafer.

  Whatever my fate was, I wanted it over. I wished I had not witnessed the executions in the Red Hat House at Angola. I don’t know how the condemned men didn’t go mad anticipating a death that by anyone’s measure is grotesque and cruel. Long ago I came to believe that these criminals were far braver men than I. Now I was confirmed in that belief. I had spoken with bravado to Adonis. But my words did not reflect what I felt. My breath was rank, my armpits reeking with a vinegar-like stench, my hair damp with sweat, even though the compartment was frigid.

  We were given a bucket to use as a latrine. Carroll LeBlanc soiled himself. Clete snored. We felt like animals. Then, inside a deep sleep, I heard Clete call my name.

  “What’s the haps, Cletus?” I said.

  “I dreamed you and I were at an LSU–Ole Miss game. It was raining do
wn whiskey. We stomped Ole Miss’s ass.”

  “Fuck these guys, Clete.”

  “You got it, big mon. We’ve got to get our hands on a weapon.”

  The hatch opened and Bell stepped into the compartment. “If you got to relieve yourselves, now’s the time,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  ASIDE FROM BELL, our escorts wore zip-front silver overalls and goggles and plastic covers on their hair and plastic booties on their shoes and latex on their hands; they looked more like space aliens than medieval torturers.

  I know the presence of men like these in our tale might test the limits of one’s credulity. But let me tell you of my first visit to Angola Prison. I have never told this to others because my account, if believed at all, would change nothing in the system, do no good for the victims, and depress people of goodwill who want to believe in their government, their media, and their fellow man. Since then I have never doubted that there are people in our midst, significant numbers of them, who would have worked at Auschwitz in the time it took to sign their names on the job application.

  Angola was a convict-lease prison founded during Reconstruction by an odious man named Samuel James. Under his tutelage, thousands of convicts, mostly black, died of sickness, malnutrition, and physical abuse. The favorite instrument was the Black Betty. More than one hundred convicts still lie in the levee along the Mississippi River. In the second half of the twentieth century, inmates were put in narrow, perpendicular iron sweatboxes set in concrete in the middle of summer, with no space to sit down, a bucket between their legs. One man was kept there nineteen days. His body was molded to the shape of the box.

  While I was a visitor, a convict who fell out on work detail was placed on an anthill. A convict who sassed a gun bull was taken to the hole and whipped with a three-foot chunk of garden hose; the man who beat him called the process “making a Christian out of a nigger.”

  What kind of men were these? Uneducated peckerwoods with a jaw full of Red Man? That’s not even close. Sexual nightmares and psychopaths and the cruelest people on earth? Don’t doubt it for a minute.

  Just before we reached the compartment where Shondell kept his collectibles, Clete leaned close to Carroll LeBlanc. “It’s never as bad as you think,” he said. “You fucked up, but you did it for your daughter. Streak and I don’t hold it against you.”

  That was Clete Purcel.

  The hatch was closed. Bell looked at his watch.

  “How much is Shondell paying you for this?” I said.

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he said.

  “What’s to get?” I said. “You have a black soul. I hope you enjoy your shuffleboard retirement in St. Petersburg before you cash in.”

  “I’m already on the other side,” he replied.

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I’m already across the Big Divide. You’re sure a dumb son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

  I heard feet walking fast behind us. “Sorry I’m late,” Shondell said. He was wearing a suit and tie. “Please forgive me if I don’t stay around for all the festivities. I have some business to do, but I’ll have everything on film and I can look at it later. Ready to get started?”

  He opened the hatch. At first I couldn’t see clearly past the hatchway. But obviously, Shondell was stunned. I stepped sideways so I could see past him. The inside of the compartment had been torn apart, the chains and leather padding ripped from the bulkheads, the machines of torment thrown about like toys, the oak levers snapped off, the steel shafts doubled over, the cogged wheels twisted out of shape, the Brazen Bull pulled inside out.

  “Must be the maid’s day off,” Clete said.

  Shondell’s face looked maniacal. “Secure the yacht,” he said to Bell.

  “We’re at sea, sir,” Bell said. “We’re secured already.”

  “Get Adonis Balangie down here.”

  “Yes, sir. Should I tell him about this?”

  “I told you to get him down here. So go do it.”

  Shondell’s rage and indignation were feigned. I’ve seen fear in men’s faces when the 105s were coming in short, and I’ve seen the desperation in the eyes of men who knew the dust-off wasn’t coming and the Great Shade was about to pass over their faces; but I had never seen terror greater than I saw in Shondell’s eyes during that moment. It was my belief then, and my belief now, that he saw the future and was terrified and would have traded his soul to avoid it.

  Unfortunately for him, he had probably bartered away his soul many years ago.

  * * *

  BELL TOOK US back to our compartment. He didn’t turn out the light. “This doesn’t change anything. You guys know that, don’t you?”

  Surprisingly, Carroll LeBlanc spoke up. “Adonis Balangie wanted to cut us a break. I want to take him up on it. I can’t go through this shit again.”

  “What break?” Bell said.

  “A break. What do you care?” Carroll said. “Show some mercy.”

  Bell closed and locked down the hatch.

  “What are you doing, Carroll?” I said.

  “You said we needed a weapon,” he replied.

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Adonis opened the hatch and stepped into the compartment. One of the men in silver overalls stayed outside. Adonis was wearing a light overcoat, damp with sea spray. “What’s this about a break?”

  Clete and I lowered our heads. Our hands were still bound behind us.

  “You said you’d shoot us up,” Carroll said. “I got no illusions. I’d like to take you up on that.”

  “You’re not out for the Medal of Honor?” Adonis said.

  “Don’t make fun of the guy, Adonis,” I said.

  He reached into his coat pocket and removed the tin box that contained the syringe and the ampoules of morphine.

  “Before you give him that, can you answer a question?” I said.

  “What’s the question?”

  “I don’t get this stuff about a black sail and a white sail.”

  “If this deal is worked out and most of what we own is transferred to a bank in Malta, Isolde will be on her way to us in a boat with white sails. If not, the sails will be black.”

  “Why not use a radio?” Clete said.

  “Because other people can pull the transmission out of the air,” Adonis said. “Because Mark Shondell likes to pretend he’s a man for the ages.”

  Clete’s green eyes were half-lidded, his shoulders humped; he resembled a contemporary Quasimodo brought down from the bell tower. But as always, Clete’s externals were misleading, his intelligence and complexity silently at work in a gargantuan body he had spent a lifetime abusing with weed, pills, cigarettes, trough-loads of deep-fried food, and oceans of booze. Put more simply, Clete Purcel was the human equivalent of an M-1 tank plowing through a stucco building.

  I could see his upper arms expanding like a firehose swelling with pressurized water. In the corner of my eye, I saw him twisting the ligatures on his wrists, working them over the heels of his hands, ignoring the broken vessels and torn flesh, blood slipping off the ends of his fingers, all of this with his eyes straight ahead, like a brain-dead man gazing at empty space.

  Suddenly, his hands were free. He clamped one on Adonis’s mouth and the other on the back of his neck and drove his skull into the bulkhead, then dropped him to the deck as though he were a rag doll. He opened the tin box and removed the syringe. It was already loaded.

  “Hey, guy out there!” he called through the hatchway. “Balangie is having a seizure! Get him out of here! We got enough problems!”

  The man in overalls came through the hatch. “Seizure?”

  Clete hooked his arm under the man’s chin and peeled it back, then jabbed the needle into the carotid and plunged down the piston with his thumb. “How you like it, shit breath?”

  The man’s mouth fell open and his eyes rolled. Clete eased him to the deck and went through his pockets. He found a box cutter but no firearm. He
sliced the ligatures on my wrists, then Carroll’s.

  “We’ve got to get a gun,” he said.

  I went through Adonis’s pockets while Clete stood by the hatchway. “Nothing,” I said.

  “Got any idea what time of day it is?” Clete said.

  “No,” I said.

  Clete chewed his lip. “You call it, Streak.”

  “When we were up the passageway, I thought I could feel the screws behind us,” I said. “If there’s an armory, it’s probably aft.”

  “What about these two guys?” he said.

  “What about them?” I said.

  “What if they wake up?”

  I knew what he was thinking. “Lock them in and leave them alone.”

  “Okie-dokie, big mon,” he replied. “How you feeling, LeBlanc?”

  “No matter how this comes out, I think you’re a righteous dude, Purcel,” he said.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” Clete said.

  * * *

  I SUSPECTED WE WERE two decks down. We walked in the direction opposite the torture compartment and could hear the screws turning louder and louder under the hull. We found no armory, only a refrigerator unit and two compartments full of canned goods and a ladder at the end of the passageway. I went up first. As I got to the top, I saw a man twenty yards away, his back to me. He was dressed like a ship’s officer and seemed to be guarding the entrance to a cabin. I ducked down below the level of the deck.

  What? Clete mouthed.

  Bogey at twelve o’clock, I answered.

  He hooked his hand in the back of my belt and tugged gently, then squeezed past me up the ladder, the syringe clenched in his right hand. He paused briefly, then sprang down the passageway, garroted the sentinel, and jabbed him in the throat with the needle. I motioned for Carroll to follow me.

  Clete opened the hatch to the cabin the ship’s officer had been guarding. Father Julian was sitting on one bunk and Leslie Rosenberg on another. Elizabeth lay on a third. The word “angelic” would probably apply to Elizabeth, with her blue eyes and golden hair, but I don’t like to think in those terms. We dragged the unconscious sentinel inside the cabin and closed the hatch behind him.