A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Clete gagged. “What is that?”

  “Blood,” I said.

  “Shondell is going down for the count, right? We’re agreed on that?”

  “We don’t know the politician he’s working for, the rich-kid gutter rat.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Clete said. “Shondell is joining the Hallelujah Chorus? We’re copacetic on that?”

  “What do I know?”

  “Don’t get in my way, Streak.”

  Twice we encountered Shondell’s employees or acolytes, all of them carrying either flashlights or fire extinguishers. Only one had a firearm. Clete threw him overboard before he could use it, cracked another man’s skull against the bulkhead, and caused the others to melt back into the darkness. I began to feel there were different levels of people who worked for Mark Shondell. Louisiana’s economy is based on the oil industry. If you’re in, you’re fine. If you’re out, you might have to close one eye. Babylon might be a real fling with Beat-My-Daddy Slack, but you don’t have a lot of selections when you’re in the mop-and-pail brigade. It’s hard to be proud of your spendolies when you’re working in a porn shop or in a drive-through daiquiri window.

  I thought I saw women in the shadows, perhaps the prostitutes I believed were on board the tugboat anchored by Shondell’s stilt house. Shondell was the light inside the lantern. The candle moths swirling around him would always be there, and if they were singed and killed by his flame, others would replace them. Bell was one of them, although more intelligent and experienced in the ways of the underworld. There must have been others on board like him, but we didn’t know where they were. Rats abandon sinking ships. I hoped that was the case.

  Clete opened the valve on a propane tank in a compartment behind the galley, flung an emergency flare inside, and locked down the hatch. The aftermath of the explosion sounded like a junkyard falling off a truck.

  Up ahead I could see flashlights inside the bridge, the beams crisscrossing and bouncing off the panoramic windows and consoles and panel monitors and chart tables and myriad dials that had been rendered inoperable by a force outside the yacht. The sky was now sealed with purplish-black clouds, except in the south, where a vaporous green ribbon of light stretched across the horizon and a solitary boat was pitching toward the yacht, its white sails swollen with wind.

  Then I saw Johnny coming toward us, below the bridge, his clothes sculpted against his body, his hands held up as though he were trying to stop traffic on a street. “Don’t go up there, Mr. Dave,” he said. “Y’all don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “How many people are up there?” Clete said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Y’all and Gideon are messing up the deal.”

  “Messing up what deal?” Clete said.

  “Isolde is on her way. Everything is set up. Gideon shut down the power. Fire is coming out of the portholes on the stern. Uncle Mark is backing out of the deal.”

  “How many guns are up there, Johnny?” I said.

  “That’s all you got on your mind?” he said.

  “Where’s Bell?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Belowdecks, maybe.”

  “Does he still have the Kalashnikov?”

  “The what?” he said.

  “The AK-47,” I said.

  “You’re going to get Isolde killed.”

  “We are?” Clete said, touching his chest. “I feel like flinging you over the rail, Johnny.”

  “Then do it,” Johnny said. “If I lose Isolde, I lose everything.”

  “Where’s Penelope?” I said.

  “On the bridge,” he said. “With Adonis.”

  I rested my hand on his shoulder. “Take care of Father Julian and Leslie and Elizabeth and Detective LeBlanc. We’ll do everything we can to protect Isolde.”

  “I already went down there,” he said. “Leslie and her daughter are gone. So is that LeBlanc guy. Father Julian is real sick.”

  “Leslie is gone?” I said.

  “Yeah, what did I just say?”

  “You’re really starting to piss me off, Johnny,” Clete said. “How would you like me to dribble your head on the deck?”

  “I said she’s gone. Maybe with Gideon. Now Gideon is screwing up everything, and y’all are doing everything you can to help him.”

  “Get lost,” Clete said, and shoved him in the back.

  “Don’t do that,” Johnny said.

  Clete shoved him again, this time along the rail. “I’ll count to three, then you’re going over the rail.”

  “Fuck you, Mr. Clete.”

  “ ‘Fuck you, Mr. Clete’? I just love that,” Clete said. “I’m about to knock you down.”

  “Johnny, there are lifeboats on both sides of the ship,” I said. “Get one ready and put Father Julian in it. We’re not going to let your uncle destroy us.”

  “What are you going to do about Gideon?” he said.

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said.

  “Sell that when Uncle Mark’s yacht blows up and Isolde is dead,” he said.

  * * *

  IN JOHNNY’S WAY, he was right. In my vanity, I had thought I could find the origins of human cruelty. The upshot was the discovery of a time dimension that perhaps existed simultaneously with our own. I knew no more about the nature of man than when I’d visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen, a man who turned out to be my half brother and who killed himself in my living room. In my search for the origins of human cruelty, I had come to the same dead end as the psychiatrists who look into the heart of darkness and are so frightened they thank God for the clinical term “pathological,” because it allows them to cleanse the images planted in their minds by the patients they tried to cure.

  What’s the lesson? That’s another easy one: Don’t be taken in by bullshit from people who have no idea what evil is about.

  * * *

  JOHNNY LEFT US, perhaps to launch a lifeboat, perhaps to help Father Julian, perhaps to betray us. Clete and I had few choices. We had the .25 semi-auto and the duffel bag and the Molotov cocktails and the emergency flares. We could try to take the bridge or launch a lifeboat with Johnny and Julian. If we chose the latter without putting Shondell out of business, we would probably be machine-gunned in the water. Clete seemed to read my mind. “Worried about Penelope?”

  “What do you think?”

  “She dealt the play.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Make up your mind, Dave. We don’t have much time.”

  “If we had the AK—”

  “We don’t.”

  My throat was dry, my face small and tight in the wind. “Light it up.”

  Inside my head, as though watching a movie, I saw a young United States Army second lieutenant talking into a radio, an Asian village and rice paddy in the background, tracer rounds streaking out of the hooches, flying like segments of yellow-and-red neon above the paddy.

  “You’re sure?” Clete said.

  I lifted a Molotov cocktail from the bag. The bottle felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Give me your Zippo.”

  Clete ran his hand down my arm and pulled the bottle from me. “You won’t be able to live with yourself, Streak.”

  “Watch,” I said. I took the bottle back.

  But my bravado was soon upstaged. I heard a sound behind me and turned around. I did not know where Carroll LeBlanc had come from other than the darkness. But his sudden reappearance was not the issue. His expression was lunatical, inhuman, his eyes devoid of conscience or reason, his clothes slick with blood, one hand clenched on a dripping butcher knife. “I do’ed it, Robo. I mean I piled up those motherfuckers all over the place, with their guts in their laps, like Gideon. It actually gave me a hard-on. What’s happening, Purcel? You don’t look too good.”

  Then he laughed until he was hardly able to breathe or stand, his mouth a round black hole, as though he had accidentally swallowed a spirit hidden inside the wind.

  * * *

  I CLIMBED THE
LADDER to the bridge with Clete behind me. I stopped while he flicked the Zippo and held the flame to the cotton pad on the bottom of the wine bottle. Then I tossed it through a side window on the bridge and watched it break on a hard surface and fill the bridge with light. I threw the remaining two bottles into the flames.

  I took no pride in what I did. Nor did I want to see the images that danced before my eyes. I had replicated a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The flames looked liquid, the players made of wax, frozen in time and space as though carved out of the heat, the surprise in their faces like that of children. Was I filled with pity? Did I abhor the incubus in me that could set afire his fellow creatures? I cannot answer any of these questions. I wanted to be a million miles away.

  “Get down!” Clete said.

  “What?”

  “Bell!” he said.

  As fast as the bottles had exploded, the flames had shrunk into strips of fire that were rapidly dying for want of fuel. Oh, yes, the damage was there. I saw two burned men crawl from the hatch, and one man shivering with pain and shock, his teeth chattering, and Mark Shondell in a corner, his hair curled from the heat, his face misshapen and painted with blisters, part of his lip gone, probably bitten off. I saw Penelope in the background, on the deck, under a raincoat. Adonis was gone. But Bell was not.

  He opened up with the AK-47, blowing out glass, whanging rounds all over the superstructure. Clete jerked me back down the ladder, firing blindly at Bell, his eyes wide with adrenalin, as though he were looking into an artic wind.

  Bell stopped shooting and ducked below the bridge window, but I knew we were in trouble. He had the high ground and we didn’t. He also possessed the best infantry assault rifle in the world. And Mark Shondell, the brains behind Bell and his fellow troglodytes, was still alive. Curds of black smoke were rising from the stern, and the gallery was burning with such ferocity that the portholes on two adjacent compartments were filled with yellow flame that was as bright as a searchlight.

  In the distance I could see the sailboat pitching in the waves, throwing ropes of foam over the deck. The white sails had been taken from the masts and replaced with black ones.

  “Look what you did, Mr. Dave,” a voice said behind me.

  It was Johnny. He had his arm around Father Julian. Carroll LeBlanc was staring at them with an idiotic grin.

  “Shut up, kid,” Clete said.

  “Black sails mean she’s dead,” Johnny said. “I can’t believe we’ve done this.”

  He had said “we,” not “you.” But that was poor consolation. Clete was right. I would find no solace for my part in what we had done.

  Know why war sucks? We usually kill the wrong people.

  Chapter Forty-one

  CLETE PULLED ME aside. He had taken Carroll’s butcher knife from him. He put a fresh magazine in the semi-auto and pulled and released the slide and clicked on the safety and placed the gun in my hand. “I got to get to Bell. You keep him busy until I can get behind him.”

  “That’s a bad idea,” I said.

  “No arguments, big mon.”

  “Where’s Adonis?” I said.

  “Who cares?”

  “He’s a survivor,” I said. “He’ll cut a deal. Maybe he can get us some serious weapons.”

  “Adonis may also be rallying the troops. I can’t believe I ever stood up for that guy. Come on, we got to put it in gear. Hey, I got one for you.”

  “What?”

  “Know what Ambrose Bierce called a pacifist?”

  “Wrong time for it, Cletus.”

  “A dead Quaker.” He hit me on the arm. “Stomp ass and take names, noble mon. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”

  Then he was gone.

  The only other time I had ever been in such close proximity to a murderous enemy was in Vietnam. We got into night-trail firefights when Sir Charles was no more than five feet from us. Oddly, we had come to respect Sir Charles and his ability to live inside the greenery of a rain forest and suddenly materialize out of the mists, his uniform little more than black pajamas, his sandals cut from an automobile tire, his day’s ration a rice ball tied inside a sash around his hips.

  Sir Charles could be incredibly cruel, as the VC demonstrated in the capture of Hué when they buried alive both civilians and prisoners of war. But Sir Charles was brave and had a cause, one that he saw as noble. Mark Shondell could lay no such claim. He sought revenge on others for his own failure, and helped inculcate racial hatred and fear in the electorate to divide us against ourselves. I had known his kind all my life. Except Shondell was not an ordinary man. Marcel LaForchette believed Shondell may have been in league with diabolical powers. I don’t know if there is any such thing. But I do believe there are people in our midst who wish to make a graveyard of the world, and their motivation may be no more complex than that of an angry child flinging scat because he was left with regularity in a dirty diaper.

  The ribbon of green light on the southern horizon was creeping higher into the sky, the waves subsiding, the sailboat rising and falling with the rhythm of a rocking horse. I felt a drop of rain on the back of my neck, like a reminder of the earth’s resilience. Then I looked at Father Julian and felt the same sense about him. There are those among us who can walk through cannon smoke and grin about it while everyone else is going insane. That was Father Julian Hebert.

  We were in the lee of the superstructure of which the bridge was part, but not at an angle where Bell could fire upon us. “How you doin’, Julian?” I said.

  “Not bad,” he replied.

  “You’re not a very good liar.”

  “I’ll practice.”

  “I’ve got to entertain Bell,” I said. “I hope to come back. If I don’t, try to get on board a lifeboat. Penelope is on the bridge. Maybe she can go with you.”

  “You still have feelings for her?”

  “None that are good.”

  “Who’s the liar?” he said. But at least he smiled.

  * * *

  I WENT UP THE ladder. The bridge windows were broken, the jagged and burnt frames like empty eye sockets against the watery greenish band of light in the south. I saw no sign of Bell. He had told Clete he was in the First Cav. I suspected he was telling the truth. He didn’t silhouette, he didn’t give away his position; he made no sound at all.

  “Dave Robicheaux here, Mr. Bell,” I said.

  No answer.

  “Is Penelope okay?”

  “Go away, Dave,” she said.

  “Mr. Bell, how about we drink mash and talk trash? You can drink the mash, I’ll talk the trash.” I had the semi-auto in my right hand. “Hey, I’m lonely out here,” I said.

  No response.

  “You doing all right, Mr. Shondell?” I said.

  The entire yacht was quiet. The sailboat was closer, its black sails taut with wind, flecked with foam. I thought I could see someone in the wheelhouse. I also thought I saw a swimmer knifing through the waves, headed for the sailboat. I wiped my eyes and looked again. The swimmer had no flotation equipment, wore no shoes, and took long, even strokes, twisting his head sideways to breathe, like a long-distance pro. I couldn’t see the swimmer’s face, but I was almost certain I was looking at Adonis Balangie.

  I was crouched on the ladder, just below the bridge. “Hey, Mr. Bell!” I said. “You were in the First Cav? That’s righteous, brother. Central Highlands, right? I was there. Came home alive in ’65. Sorry for the incoming. Let’s start over.”

  Still no response. Bell was hard-core, the kind of cynic who concludes he’s going to hell the day he’s born.

  “Did you hear me, Mr. Bell?”

  “Yeah, I got the message. Come on in. Have some coffee.”

  If he wasn’t a cop now, he had probably been one in the past. He knew what waited for him if he got locked up in a mainline joint. A cop in the shower is a bar of soap; on the yard, he can be shanked in the time it takes for a guard to turn his back; in the mess hall, his food is a cuspidor. In a joi
nt like Angola, multiply everything I said by ten. But I thought I’d give it a try anyway.

  “I can guarantee you friend-of-the-court status,” I lied. “Maximum bounce, three to five. With luck, fifteen months. You can do it on your hands.”

  “No kidding?” he said. “Come a little closer. My hearing aid isn’t working.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you guys can get a Mayday out, we’ll have the chopper on the way.”

  “Can’t hear you, sweetheart.”

  A bucket lay on its side between the ladder and the bridge. I picked it up and threw it across the deck. Bell tilted the Kalashnikov out the window and began firing, the ejected shells bouncing on the console and the deck. He had jungle-clipped a second thirty-round magazine to the one inserted in the magazine well. With a flick of his wrist, he could reverse an empty magazine and replace it with a fresh one and be back on rock and roll in less than three seconds.

  Then I saw Clete’s silhouette looming behind him.

  Bell had just eased off the trigger and was probably trying to see if he had ricocheted a couple of rounds into me. For just a second I looked straight into his face. He seemed to realize he had blown it and that Clete was standing behind him. I even thought I saw him smile as he would at a fellow traveler, one who poses as a servant of the people or the nation but secretly knows he’s a mercenary. Any way you cut it, I think he knew he was about to do the Big Exit and was trying to sign off with a measure of good cheer, perhaps with a few words such as “Way to go, laddie. Kiss the ladies for me and pour a toddy in my coffin.”

  A bit romantic? Yeah, probably. But watching a violent death can eat your lunch, particularly when you’re a participant.