A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Clete formed his left arm into a hook and wrapped it under Bell’s chin and jerked back his head, curving the butcher knife into his heart. Bell’s lips pursed silently like the mouth of a fish out of water. It should have been over. Bell went straight down, his arms flopping at his sides, the Kalashnikov dropping out of view. I heard the steel butt strike the deck. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself running into the bridge, finding Penelope all right, looking at Clete with relief, convinced we were about to reenter the rational world and flee forever the web in which we had entangled ourselves, not unlike Stephen Crane’s soldier returning from the war and rediscovering the beauty in a buttermilk sky and green pastures blooming with wildflowers.

  Alas, there is always the canker in the rose, the shaved dice in the cup, the loss of the nail in a horse’s shoe that brings down a kingdom. Clete could not believe his eyes. The Kalashnikov bounced once off the deck and landed in the lap of Mark Shondell.

  “Oh, my, isn’t this a gift?” he said. “Thank you so much, Mr. Purcel.”

  Clete barely got through the hatch before Shondell lifted the muzzle and opened up.

  * * *

  THE FIRE WAS spreading through the ship. I could see other people on the stern, but I didn’t know if they were crew members or prostitutes or Shondell’s goons. If the latter, I suspected they were calculating the risk of deserting Shondell by going over the side or getting into a firefight on the bridge. The half-clothed body parts of the two private investigators stuffed in an oil barrel and dropped in Vermilion Bay had been a reminder of Shondell’s policy regarding employee disloyalty or failure. Someone had tried to launch a lifeboat but had made a mess of the pulleys and tipped the boat over. Two people were trying to hold on to the sides. They wore life jackets and one of them may have been the man Clete threw overboard. If the yacht went down, the hull or the screws might take them with it.

  Then I saw three men working their way forward. They stayed in the lee of the superstructure and were crouched in the manner of infantry approaching an objective. We were running out of time, and I saw no solutions to our problems. Johnny and Father Julian and Carroll LeBlanc and Clete and I were huddled in the shadows perhaps twenty yards aft of the bridge. We were a sorry-looking bunch, I’m sure. My system could no longer produce adrenalin, and Clete was in the same shape. We were hungry and cold and probably on the edge of physical and nervous collapse, unable to think clearly or distinguish the tricks of the mind from Gideon’s supernatural manifestations and the very real possibility that we were about to die.

  Johnny was sitting on the deck, his knees pulled up before him, his head down.

  Clete shook him gently by the shoulder. “Get out of it, kid. Slip the punch and swallow your blood. Don’t let your enemy know you’re hurt.”

  “Isolde is dead,” Johnny said.

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “These things have happened before, Mr. Dave,” he said. “My uncle always wins. I have to stop him.”

  “What are you doing, Johnny?” Father Julian asked.

  “Getting up,” Johnny said. “Ending this.”

  “Your uncle is going to kill anyone who comes through that hatch,” Clete said.

  “That’s the point,” Johnny said. “Then you can shoot him.”

  Julian stepped in front of him. “It’s time I have a talk with your uncle.”

  “No, he hates you, Father,” Johnny said.

  “Then I must have done something right in my life,” Julian said. He looked at me. “Keep Johnny here, Dave.”

  I knew we had only minutes, if that. Shondell’s people would soon have us surrounded. Julian was about to give his life so I could get a clear shot at Shondell. Arguing with him would not change his mind. If I didn’t act, his sacrifice would be for nothing. “I’ll be behind you,” I said.

  But I had forgotten about Carroll LeBlanc. “Give me back the knife,” he said to Clete.

  “What for?” Clete said.

  “It’s my knife.”

  I looked at Clete and shook my head. But he ignored me. “It’s LeBlanc’s decision,” he said. He let Carroll take the knife from his hand.

  Carroll grinned at me, his face sweaty and bloodless, looking like a deathly ill man burning with fever, the string of moles below his eye as dry as baked dirt. “Let’s do it, Robo.”

  He went up the ladder, his grin like a half-moon slit in a muskmelon. Clete and I went behind him. I had the .25 semi-auto in my right hand. Then Carroll turned briefly and stared into my face. “Sorry I let you guys down. I hope this makes it right.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. Then I stumbled. The semi-auto caught on the rail and fell from my hand and tumbled into the darkness.

  Carroll never faltered. He went through the hatch and took a burst from the Kalashnikov in the chest and the face. Shondell was sitting down, his back propped against the console; his mouth resembled a horizontal keyhole where he had bitten off half of his upper lip, exposing his teeth. Carroll went down on his face and I knew I was next. I saw the glee in Shondell’s eyes as he raised the muzzle of his weapon. I had no defense, no moat or castle behind which to hide. This time it was for real: In two seconds I would be spaghetti on the bulkhead, and Clete would catch the next burst and tumble on top of me, and the weapon that couldn’t get us in Vietnam would have gotten even at last.

  But that’s not what happened. Shondell pulled the trigger and the firing pin snapped on a dud. I had never seen a man look so surprised and so afraid. In the corner of my eye, I saw Penelope getting to her feet. “Run, Dave,” she said.

  I didn’t have time. Clete almost knocked me down. He kicked the Kalashnikov from Shondell’s hands and pulled him to his feet and slammed his face on a glass-covered chart table. I had not seen the emergency flare he was carrying in his side pocket, but there it was. He tore off the cap and banged the striker on the tip. There was a spark, then the flare was aflame, hissing like a snake. Clete shoved it over Shondell’s teeth and down his throat.

  I tried to pull Clete away from Shondell but to no avail. I knew he had gone back in time and was walking with the Jewish woman and her three daughters to a gas chamber at Auschwitz. I stepped back and did not try to intervene.

  He grabbed Shondell by the neck and began beating his head on the chart table. The glass did not break, but Shondell’s head did. It broke the way a flower pot full of dirt does, and then it came apart, a sanguine mist rising from Shondell’s hair. Clete couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. He knotted the neck of Shondell’s shirt and coat in his fists and hammered the remnants of Shondell’s head against the edge of the glass until Clete’s hands slipped loose and Shondell slid to the deck, his neck a stump.

  Clete stared down at Shondell’s body as though he did not know where it had come from. Penelope was pressed against the bulkhead, her skin and purple dress freckled with blood and brain matter. There was no fear in her face, only dismay and perhaps disappointment.

  “What did you expect, Penelope?” I said. “Where did you think this would end?”

  “Look!” she said, pointing at the sailboat as it crossed in front of the yacht. “There’s Isolde on the deck with Adonis. If you had just listened to me and waited.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Miss Penelope?” Clete said.

  “What?”

  “Do you know where I could put together a pitcher of Jack on shaved ice with a few mint leaves on top and a lime slice or two? I’d be in your debt.”

  Small hailstones began clicking on the ceiling of the bridge, then grew in size and volume and velocity until they were bouncing like Ping-Pong balls all over our ship, their cool white purity shutting out the world, chastening the wind, denting the waves and swells, creating an operatic clanging of ice and steel that Beethoven’s Fifth couldn’t match.

  But it wasn’t over. I’ll try to explain. See, it’s got everything to do with Clete Purcel. As Clete would say, I’ll give you the straight gen, Ben. I wouldn’t give you a shuck, Chuck.
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  Epilogue

  HERE’S THE MINUTIAE of the situation, although Clete and Father Julian and I don’t wish to visit it anymore, and when we go out for dinner, we talk about the world that others see and live in and pretend their vision of things is the correct one.

  Johnny fired up the pontoon plane anchored at the stilt house and flew himself and Isolde into Mexico, and for many years their music was a doorway into the past for those of us who wanted to hold on to what was best in our youthful days. Penelope and Adonis grew prematurely old, as though they had outlived their time. I saw her on occasion at the racetrack in New Orleans or in a restaurant in the Quarter, and she was always polite and demure, but for just a second her eyes would linger on mine and her face would become warm and contemplative, and whether imaginary or not, I would smell her perfume, even feel it wrapping around me, like the heavy odor of magnolia on a cool spring night, and I would hear a warning bell at a train crossing and make an excuse and get out of New Orleans as quickly as I could.

  But this is not what I wanted to tell you about. I have learned little in life, acquired no wisdom, and given up dealing with the great mysteries. Stonewall Jackson talked about mystifying the enemy. I’ve got news for the general. You don’t need to mystify anyone. On balance, our best thinking has been a disaster from birth to the grave.

  What happened to Shondell’s yacht? We don’t know. It disappeared, with his body and the bodies of his employees. I saw it go under from the deck of the sailboat, the keel rolling out of the waves, black smoke gushing from the portholes and open hatches. Maybe it slipped off the continental shelf. Why not? There’s a German submarine down there, its crew still on board. Maybe Mark Shondell found the company he deserved.

  But let’s look again at the larger story. Leslie and her daughter also disappeared, probably forever, at least in tangible form. However, I see her and Elizabeth with Gideon in my sleep. I even feel her fingers touch my brow, and I know I’m not alone. Clete says he saw them inside a white fog off Key West. He takes the tale a step farther. He says Gideon has come twice in the early A.M to his apartment on St. Ann Street, like a brother-in-arms who cannot let go of shared memories.

  Clete has always been a closet bibliophile. For years, in a small room overlooking his courtyard, he stored hundreds of paperback books he bought in secondhand stores and yard sales, most of them about American history and the War Between the States. He read and reread James Street’s Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote.

  He also loved to visit Civil War battlefields. Not long ago Clete was visiting a site near the place where Grant had begun his Wilderness Campaign, which would eventually culminate at Appomattox Courthouse. Coincidentally, that same weekend, a collection of neo-Nazis and Klansmen had assembled in a city park, supposedly to oppose the removal of Confederate statuary. In a torchlight march, they chanted an anti-Semitic mantra of hatred and paranoia and carried the battle flag of Robert Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia next to Hitler’s swastika. The next day one of their members plowed his car into a crowd, injuring many and killing a young woman.

  Clete left town, sickened by what he saw.

  Late at night, back in New Orleans in the midst of an electric storm, Clete said Gideon sat down with him at the back of a poolroom. But he no longer resembled the reptilian figure who had haunted our lives. He was clean-shaven and clear-skinned and dressed in a corduroy coat and work pants and suspenders and a floppy hat an Italian vineyard owner might wear.

  “The man Shondell served is in your midst, Mr. Purcel,” Gideon said. “But you should not worry about him. He will be destroyed by his own machinations.”

  “Who’s the guy?” Clete asked.

  “You already know.”

  “I don’t want to believe that. I don’t want to hear it, either.”

  Gideon squeezed Clete’s arm. “Arrivederci.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more of the story. I had already put aside the unhappiness of the past and no longer wanted to probe the shadows of the heart or the evil that men do. It was time to lay down my sword and shield and study war no more. It’s odd, but just at dawn the other day, I saw a narrow boat with a hand-carved dragon’s head on the bow floating down Bayou Teche. On the boat I saw a woman reclining on her side, smiling at me, her lips parting, pulling me once again into the mists of ancient Avalon. Her hair was golden, her skin as pale as milk, a necklace of flowers hung on her breasts, and this is what she said:

  May the road rise up to meet you.

  May the wind be always at your back.

  May the sun shine warm upon your face,

  the rains fall soft upon your fields, and until we meet again,

  may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

  Acknowledgments

  A writer’s life can be a grand one, but the success she or he experiences involves many other people, most of whom receive little or no credit for their contributions to the work of the writer. In my case, I owe a debt to large numbers of people who have been at my side in one fashion or another for the many years I have been a published writer.

  The meek and humble reference librarians are at the top of the list. I’m convinced that if Western civilization collapses, the reference librarian will be there to save us from ourselves. Book vendors are in the same category. So are the book reps at the publishing company. So are the publicists and editors and copyreaders who go beyond duty and call to get it right. If a writer can say his or her life has been a grand one, as mine has, the debt is enormous, and it would take hours to thank all the people who have been so loyal to both me and my work.

  I wish to thank my daughter Pamala and my wife, Pearl, for their encouragement and editorial suggestions, and for all the marketing help given to me by Erin Mitchell. My thanks go also to my publishers, Carolyn Reidy and Jonathan Karp, and also Richard Rhorer and Stephen Bedford and Elizabeth Breeden and Sarah Lieberman and Jonathan Evans and all the other fine people at Simon & Schuster, particularly my editor, Sean Manning, and his team, Lake Bunkley and Tzipora Baitch, and also Jackie Seow, whose book jackets are always engaging and in some lovely way encapsulating of the book, and artworks in themselves.

  A special thanks to E. Beth Thomas, who is one of the best copy and literary editors I’ve ever worked with.

  Also, my undying appreciation to Philip and Mary and Anne-Lise Spitzer and Kim Lombardini and Lukas Ortiz and the Spitzer Agency.

  Thanks to my children, Jim, Andree, Pamala, and Alafair, for being there.

  And lastly, thanks to all my readers. You’re a grand bunch, and it’s an honor to be among you.

  More from this Series

  The New Iberia Blues

  Robicheaux

  Cadillac Jukebox

  Burning Angel

  More from the Author

  The Jealous Kind

  House of the Rising Sun

  About the Author

  James Lee Burke is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-eight novels and two short story collections, which combined have sold more than eleven million copies internationally. He has been honored with the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, twice won the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Fiction. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

  JamesLeeBurke.com

  SimonandSchuster.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/James-Lee-Burke

  @simonbooks

  ALSO BY JAMES LEE BURKE

  DAVE ROBICHEAUX NOVELS

  The New Iberia Blues

  Robicheaux

  Light of the World

  Creole Belle

  The Glass Rainbow

  Swan Peak

  The Tin Roof Blowdown

  Pegasus Descending

  Crusader’s Cross

  Last Car to Elysian Fields

>   Jolie Blon’s Bounce

  Purple Cane Road

  Sunset Limited

  Cadillac Jukebox

  Burning Angel

  Dixie City Jam

  In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead

  A Stained White Radiance

  A Morning for Flamingos

  Black Cherry Blues

  Heaven’s Prisoners

  The Neon Rain

  THE HOLLAND NOVELS

  The Jealous Kind

  House of the Rising Sun

  Wayfaring Stranger

  Feast Day of Fools

  Rain Gods

  In the Moon of Red Ponies

  Bitterroot

  Heartwood

  Cimarron Rose

  Lay Down My Sword and Shield

  OTHER FICTION

  Jesus Out to Sea

  White Doves at Morning

  The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  The Convict and Other Stories

  Two for Texas

  To the Bright and Shining Sun

  Half of Paradise

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.