A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  “Y’all doin’ all right?” I said.

  “What the fuck does it look like?” Leslie said.

  “You know how to say it, Leslie,” I replied. “How about you, Julian?”

  “I think Leslie put it well,” he replied. The purple and yellow bruises and lesions and burns patterned on his face by Delmer Pickins were still there, but he actually managed to laugh. I take back my comment about the use of words such as “angelic.” I think there are people who have auras that could light the darkest dungeon on earth.

  “No one saw y’all kidnapped?” I said. “You didn’t get a message out?”

  “You think we’d be here now?” Leslie said.

  “Bingo!” Carroll said. He was squatted down next to the ship’s officer. He held up a .25-caliber semi-auto, then eased back the slide to confirm that a round was in the chamber. He felt in the officer’s other coat pocket and found two spare magazines, both loaded.

  “How many people are on board?” Clete said.

  “We were blindfolded,” Leslie said.

  “Why does Shondell want y’all?” he said.

  “Tell him,” Julian said.

  “He believes I’m growing in power,” she said. “He thinks I’m working in concert with Father Julian to ruin his name.”

  “How are you going to acquire more power?” I said.

  “I’ve already explained that, but you refused to hear,” she said.

  “Don’t start that stuff again,” Clete said. “We keep it simple. We take it to them with tongs. Right, Dave?”

  But Clete was fooling himself. He knew we had little control of our fate. And he did not want to accept that we were dealing with preternatural forces.

  “There’s something we haven’t told y’all,” I said. “About Shondell’s collectibles.”

  “What collectibles?” Julian said.

  “Instruments of torture,” I said. “He was about to put us through the grinder. Except someone tore his machinery apart—someone who could twist iron wheels like licorice.”

  Leslie looked into Clete’s face. “Do you remember me, Mr. Purcel?”

  “What, from the Quarter?” he said.

  “During your torment in the Keys. I saved you.”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “No thanks, no help wanted, no more green monsters in my life or archangels flying around.”

  Leslie sat down by her daughter and stroked her hair. “If you can be kind to Gideon, you will change American history.”

  “I don’t want any of that crap,” Clete said. “I’m going to cool out as many of these guys as I can and worry about the other stuff later on. Like after I’ve been dead a few hundred years.”

  Carroll had gone into the head. He came back out, his face white. “There’s a porthole in there. Take a look.”

  “What is it?” Clete said.

  “See for yourself,” Carroll said. “I don’t want to believe in stuff like this. My head is coming off my shoulders. It’s some kind of mind-fuck. Sorry, Father.”

  “I think I’ll survive,” Julian said. He went into the head, then came back out, pinching the bridge of his nose and widening his eyes, as though arranging words in his head before he spoke them. He looked at Clete. “Did you kill someone today?”

  “No,” Clete said. “I ran Adonis’s head into the bulkhead and put a hypodermic needle in a guy’s neck.”

  “The man you injected, what was he wearing?”

  “Silver overalls.”

  “He’s tied to the mast of Gideon’s prison ship. His entrails have been pulled out.”

  “I didn’t do anything like that,” Clete said.

  “I didn’t say you did,” Julian replied.

  “What time of day is it out there?” Clete asked.

  “You tell me,” Julian said. “The sky is purple and green and full of electricity.”

  “Dave, we’ve got to make a move,” Clete said.

  Just then the yacht pitched, then seemed to mount a swell and dip forward and slip down a deep trough. It smacked bottom with such force that it jarred out teeth and splashed seawater through the porthole in the head.

  “Come on, Dave, don’t just stand there,” Clete said.

  I looked at Leslie and her daughter. I had the feeling I would never see them again.

  “Do you hear me, Dave?” Clete said.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “What about me?” Carroll said.

  “Give me the piece and stay here,” Clete said.

  “I’m not up to it?” Carroll said.

  “It’s me that green bastard is after,” Clete said. “You may be the guy who has to get everybody home, Carroll. Do us a solid.”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Carroll said, handing the .25 semi-auto and spare magazines to Clete. “Yeah, we’re gonna get through this. Right? Somebody knows we’re here. We just got to hold on.”

  Have you ever seen someone rolled up in an embryonic ball at the bottom of a foxhole, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his forearms clamped on his ears, while an artillery barrage marches through his position? That’s what Carroll LeBlanc made me think of.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  CLETE AND I went into the passageway. The yacht pitched again, almost knocking both of us down. The only time I had been in seas this violent was during Hurricane Audrey in 1957, when I was on board a drilling rig. As then, I felt as though we were inside a maelstrom, one in which the physical laws of the universe had been suspended. I heard dishware crashing, furniture turning over. I felt a wave hit the gunwale and the side of a hull with the density and power of wet cement.

  Behind me, someone opened the hatch on the cabin and stepped outside. It was Leslie.

  “What is it?” I said.

  She moved close to me so Clete couldn’t hear. “Maybe I’ll see you in another time.”

  I looked up and down the passageway. We were totally vulnerable. “Leslie, this isn’t the time for it.”

  “I know.” Paradoxically, she stood on the tops of my shoes and put her arms around me and pressed her chest and head against me. I could feel her heart beating and her breath on my skin.

  “You’re a good man,” she said. “So is Clete. No evil can ever destroy you.”

  Then she was gone. She didn’t walk away. She was just gone.

  “Dave, don’t just stand there,” Clete said. “Haul ass.”

  “I was talking to Leslie.”

  “Leslie? There’s nobody else here. Come on, big mon. We’ve got to get out of Crazy Town.”

  * * *

  THE ELECTRIC LIGHTS began flittering as we worked our way forward. Then they went out altogether and came back on. Two popped, the glass tinkling on the deck. A tall figure came down the ladder from the main deck. He was wearing flip-flops, his face in shadow, his hands tanned, his midnight-blue silk shirt unbuttoned on his chest and stomach, his tight white bell-bottoms hanging below his navel. He looked high.

  “What are you doing here, Johnny?” I said.

  “Trying to save you from getting killed,” he replied. “I saw you on the surveillance camera.”

  “Who else saw us?” Clete said.

  “Nobody,” he said. “It’s chaos up there. Half of the electrical system is down. Uncle Mark is going apeshit.”

  “You don’t look like you’re about to lose the love of your life,” I said.

  “My uncle shot me up.”

  “You let him?” Clete said.

  “I was asleep. That tin box Adonis had, those were my works. I put a hotshot in there. I was gonna use it on myself if I didn’t get Isolde back.”

  Clete looked at me. If Johnny was telling the truth, Clete had jabbed the hotshot into the neck of the man in the silver overalls and killed him. “What’s going on with the green monster out there?” Clete said.

  “He wants to talk with you,” Johnny said.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Clete said.

  “He said it over our radio. Just before it went dead.”

>   “Can you get us some heavy firepower?” I said.

  “Bell has all that stuff,” Johnny said.

  “Where does he store it?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not being helpful,” Clete said. “You’ve got to get out a Mayday.”

  “There’s some kind of shield around the yacht,” Johnny said.

  Clete looked at me again, then at Johnny. “Go back down the passageway to the cabin where Father Julian is and stay there.”

  “No.”

  “No?” I said.

  “Isolde is on her way here,” Johnny said.

  “From where?” I said.

  “Another ship. I’m going now. I don’t like the way y’all are talking to me.”

  “Then hoof it, kid,” Clete said.

  Johnny went back up the ladder. He glanced back once, his face twisted with either hurt or anger, before disappearing.

  “Think he’ll rat us out?” Clete said.

  “Let’s get on the starboard side,” I said. “At least he won’t know our whereabouts.”

  “I got to face this guy Gideon, Dave. That doesn’t sit easy.”

  “Let him come to you.”

  “My stomach is flopping,” he said. “Jesus Christ, we did it this time, didn’t we?”

  * * *

  WE FOUND A ladder to the top deck on the starboard side of the yacht. The air was cold, clouds of fog as white as cotton scudding across the water, the morning sun just breaking on the horizon, its rosy hue dissolving inside the fog. Flying fish skimmed the waves like bronze darts.

  “Got any idea how far from shore we are?” I said.

  “I don’t hear any buoys,” Clete said. “There’s no sand in the waves.”

  “I wish I had a coat.”

  “Dave, if I don’t come back from this, kill Shondell.”

  “You’ll piss on his grave.”

  He started to say something, then looked past me into the fog. “Oh, shit,” he said.

  The prison galleon was no more than forty feet away, rising with the swells, the planks in the hull and gunwales and the quarterdeck bright with spray. Then it drifted closer, perhaps ten feet from the railing on the yacht, the oars receding inside the loopholes. Gideon Richetti descended from the quarterdeck. I didn’t say “walked,” he descended. He was wearing a long overcoat made of leather, the collar up, a floppy hat on his head. But he was not the same creature I had seen before. His scales were hardly visible, his face lean rather than triangular in shape. I wondered if I was looking at the same man.

  “I want to speak to you, Mr. Purcel,” he said.

  The voice, however, was the same; it echoed, or rumbled, as though trapped in a stone cistern.

  “You’ll speak to us both, Mr. Richetti,” I said.

  “Stay out of it, Dave,” Clete said.

  “That’s a very good suggestion,” Gideon said.

  “Say what you got to say,” Clete said. “Yeah, I’m talking to you. You hung me upside down and were going to boil my brains in my skull. You were a loser four hundred years ago, and you’re a loser now.”

  “I wish to ask your forgiveness.”

  “FTS on that, Jack,” Clete replied.

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Fuck. That. Shit. You burned Leslie Rosenberg to death. You know where that puts you? With the Nazis. I’ve got a picture in my wallet I’d like to show you. A Jewish mother and her kids going to the ovens. Were you there?”

  “I’m sorry for all the suffering I imposed on other people, Mr. Purcel. If you can’t forgive me, then don’t. But I had to try.”

  “Clete?” I said.

  “Shut up, Dave.”

  “You forgave LeBlanc.”

  “Hey,” Clete said to Gideon. “Why’d you tie a dead guy to the mast and tear out his guts?”

  “I was angry. He was going to torture you and your friends to death. Sometimes I lose control.”

  “Sometimes?” Clete said.

  Gideon was silent. I could hear waves hitting against both vessels, and feel the deck rising and falling under my feet. “Do it, Clete,” I said.

  “I don’t usually listen to Dave’s advice, but I owe him a solid or two,” he said. “You reading me on this? Look at me. I’m talking to you, asshole.”

  “There’s a sailboat in the distance,” Gideon said.

  “Screw the sailboat,” Clete said. “I forgive you. That means get out of our lives. Freshen up, take a shower, get yourself some breath mints and industrial-strength deodorant, haunt a house, find a girlfriend who’s not choosy, get your ashes hauled, but leave us the fuck alone.”

  “You have to stop Mark Shondell,” Gideon said. “He is about to bring a great evil upon the earth.”

  The clouds of fog billowed across the deck, as cold as ice water, so white and thick I could not see my hands. I clenched Clete’s upper arm to make sure he was there. It was as hard as a chunk of curb stone. “Can you see anything?” I said.

  “No, nothing,” he replied.

  I wiped my face with my hand. It was as slick as rainwater. “Where’s the sun?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The fog broke into dirty wisps, like smoke from a garbage incinerator. I could see the water now. It was dark green and streaked with froth and lapping against the hull. As the fog thinned, I thought I saw baitfish in the waves or perhaps seaweed or flotsam from a wreck. Then I saw pieces of cloth, what looked like sweaters and stocking caps and primitive tunics made of coarse wool, shoes that were hardly more than leather wrapped around the foot, glimpses of bone and a hank of hair, faces that were as gray as soaked parchment, arms and naked legs and bloated stomachs roiling with a wave, then sinking into the depths.

  “What happened to the galleon?” I said.

  Clete shook his head. “I need a drink. I’d settle for a quart of gasoline.” Then he looked at me blankly, as though reviewing a video in his head.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The storage compartment down below. One of them had emergency flares and two gasoline cans in it.”

  I heard footsteps approaching us. Clete took the .25 semi-auto from his pocket.

  “It’s me. Johnny,” a voice said. “Everything is down. The whole electrical system. Even the batteries are dead. Did you guys see anything?”

  Neither of us answered, because neither of us trusted Johnny anymore. I had also lost faith in Penelope. Perhaps they were simply people who represented an idea or a cause that was greater than themselves, and as for all surrogates, the burden was greater than they could bear. I wanted also to believe that Penelope was not married to Adonis, and I wanted to believe this namely because, even with all my faults, I had never slept with another man’s wife.

  What was the shorter truth? The woman I wanted with me was Leslie Rosenberg, and I knew that she and her daughter, Elizabeth, whose blue eyes were like looking into the face of God, were about to be taken from me forever.

  I looked down at the flotsam in the water. I had no doubt it contained the clothing and shoes and remains of people who lived hundreds of years ago. “Did you see that down there?” I said to Johnny.

  “Yeah, Gideon turned his rowers loose,” he replied. “That’s what he’s supposed to do.”

  “Would you explain that, please?” I said.

  “He’s a revelator. He makes people reveal who they are. Then they’re free. Leslie changed, too. She became an angel.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more theology from Johnny Shondell.

  “Sooner or later Shondell is going to search the ship,” Clete said. “Are you our friend or foe, Johnny?”

  “I got to get Isolde back,” he said.

  “Get out of my sight,” Clete said.

  Chapter Forty

  WHEN JOHNNY WAS gone, we worked our way back to the storage compartments. We found a case of wine and poured out three bottles and refilled them with gasoline and recorked the necks, then taped cotton pa
ds from a first-aid kit to the bottoms and wet the pads with gas and put the bottles in a duffel bag with four emergency flares.

  I suspect our behavior seemed grandiose. We were certainly outnumbered and outgunned. We were also physically exhausted and emotionally burnt out, the way you feel coming off a three-day whiskey drunk, lights flickering behind your eyelids, a bilious taste in your mouth, a clammy smell like a field mortuary on your skin. I tried to keep in mind the admonition of Stonewall Jackson I quoted earlier: Always mystify, mislead, and surprise.

  I also believed we had another weapon on our side: Shondell was a bully, and like all bullies, he was probably a coward. The electrical system was still down, and the ship surrounded by fog, which gave us an appreciable degree of cover. The downside: We could not be certain of our environment. We seemed to be in a vortex, one similar to the eye of a storm. Even though the sun had risen, the skies were dark again, the waves filled with the same black luminosity I had seen when I stood on the dock by the amusement pier, wondering if Homer was still with us, his sirens winking at us, lifting their wet hair off their breasts, guiding us onto the rocks.

  The truth is, I wanted the world to be enchanted, hung with mysteries and flights of the imagination. Why? Because with that belief, we become subsumed by creation and a participant in it, a living particle inside infinity. We abide in the presence of Charlemagne’s knights jingling up the road to Roncesvalles; we flee mediocrity and predictability, and we delight in the rising and setting of the sun and no longer fear death because indeed the earth abideth forever. I wanted Gideon to be real; I wanted to hear the clash of shields and Arthur pulling his sword from the rock and see Guinevere waiting on the parapet of the castle in the dawn, shrouded with a golden nimbus.

  Why not? It beats dining out at Chuck E. Cheese.

  * * *

  WE SOAKED THE compartment with gasoline, and Clete lit a piece of paper and set the deck ablaze with his Zippo. In minutes flames were curling outside the hatch, flattening on the passageway ceiling. We worked our way forward again and started a fire among Shondell’s collection of torture instruments. The padding on the bulkheads burst alight and, in the heat, seemed to blacken and split instantly into lesions. The smoke was thick and black and noxious, like the odor that comes from the stack on a rendering plant.