“Alright,” said Gabriel, clapping his hands together, “you go warm up – and then shadow-boxing. Three rounds. And what is our focus?”
“Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals,” finished Bianca.
“That’s right, champ.” He threw it in to see the grin spread across her face. “Let’s get to work!” He turned around. “Darrell – feet, look at your feet. You aren’t painting a wall, son, you’re boxing.”
Darrell looked down and then up again, giving Gabriel a big thumbs up. He then repositioned his feet and went back to losing on points with the speed bag. The kid had plenty of enthusiasm. They were due a sit-down; he’d been having trouble at home which had resulted in him sleeping rough a couple of times. Gabriel tried to make a mental note. As he walked by, he took the framed article down off the wall and stepped out the door into the brisk afternoon. Though brisk didn’t do it justice; it was below freezing the last time he’d checked. His brown Franciscan robes were comfortable but not the best for the cold.
“Father Gabriel!”
He turned to see Rosario, hands on hips, her face all scrunched up in a picture of outrage. “I caught these two vandals looking at the wall outside the gym, all suspicious.”
Gabriel smiled and moved towards her, in the forlorn hope that this might result in her lowering her voice. Standing beside her were Trey and Emilio, looking truly terrified in the way that only teenage boys can when faced with a tornado of outraged middle-aged female.
“Ah, Rosario, I was just coming to see you. I forgot to tell you: the boys and I had an idea last night and they’re going to do a little work for me.”
“But they do that vandalism. I seen ’em about the place.”
Father Gabriel put his hand on the shoulder of Emilio, who despite the temperature had a full-on case of the terror sweats. Rosario could have that effect on a boy – or, indeed, a grown man.
“Yes, the boys expressed their art in some places without asking permission first” – he gave them a stern look – “and we had a long talk about that. But this time, they are doing a commissioned piece for the church, as have many of the world’s greatest artists throughout history. Michelangelo—”
“They ain’t no Michelangelos.”
Gabriel smiled. “Now, Rosario, art moves on and the boys have talent, when it is applied in the right areas.”
That statement had the bonus of also being true. Primarily it was Emilio – or OAB, aka the One-Armed Bandit, to give him his full street tag – who was the artist. Trey was his assistant in these matters, or so Trey had explained to Gabriel in one of their long heart-to-hearts. Despite his handicap of only having one arm of much use, Emilio had an undeniable artistic flair. If Gabriel had a rule, it was to find the spark and fan it into a flame, then all you could do was hope that it was strong enough to stay lit when real life came to inevitably rain on the kid’s parade. This was Emilio’s spark.
“I don’t know art,” continued Rosario, “but that kinda thing ain’t it.”
“Respectfully, Rosario, I disagree. This wall here is looking pretty grim; I think it could do with something special.”
“No gang nonsense!”
He nodded in agreement. “Don’t worry, I have agreed a specific brief with my artists.”
The boys both nodded in insistent agreement. This was technically true. They had decided it last night when he’d taken the kids out for pizza, while Bianca had been in the restroom. Neither of the boys were gang affiliated either. Emilio, in the unspoken rules of the jungle, seemed to get a pass due to his arm and stammer. Trey… Trey’s situation was far more complicated.
“Well, I suppose…” Rosario gave the boys the kind of look people normally saved for unexploded ordnance. “But I’ll be watching you!”
This was as close as Gabriel ever came to getting agreement out of Rosario on anything. Technically, as the parish’s one and only priest since Father Martin had retired, he had final say on things such as this, but nobody, least of all Rosario, acknowledged that. She was the queen bee and woe betide anyone who crossed her. He had gotten better with dealing with her over time. It helped to realise that her heart was always in the right place, even if her nose could often be where it didn’t strictly belong.
“I was just coming to get you. There’s a phone call for you in the office.”
“Could you take a message?”
“It’s a man from the diocese. He says it’s important. The man was very insistent.”
“OK.”
That was probably bad news, but at least he’d got her off the subject of the boys. He could sense them physically relax now that they were out of the path of the Rosario Express.
She looked down and Gabriel’s heart sank.
“What you doing with that picture, Father?”
And now it was heading straight for him.
“I, um…” He glanced around, trying to find an escape route. Trey and Emilio gave him looks of sincere sympathy, having just been where he now found himself. “I just, I… I’m worried somebody will knock it off the wall in there.” He’d previously convinced her out of hanging it in the actual church on religious grounds, but he couldn’t stretch that to cover the gym, much as he’d like to. “Maybe we could hang it in the office?”
That morning, he had been to visit the middle school, and he’d a rather stilted discussion with the kids about the importance of always telling the truth. In truth, it was a little more nuanced than that. This lie was necessary – possibly life-saving.
Rosario gave the kind of frown that was more than just lips – she threw her whole face into it. It was really quite something. “I think it should be where everyone can see it.”
“I just think, when we’re in the office working, it’s the best place for it.”
Rosario’s face brightened. “We could get two of them? I got a dozen copies of the paper.”
Gabriel’s heart sank, and then he snatched at the only lifeline he could see. “This person is still on the phone waiting?”
“Yes, but—”
“Thank you.”
He turned and headed for the back of the church, resisting the urge to break into a run.
The office was a cramped little storeroom they’d converted. It had a filing cabinet and one and a half desks. Gabriel had the half. He placed the framed article on it, sat down in his squeaky chair and picked up the receiver that sat atop a pile of bills he needed to get to soon.
“Hello, Father de Marcos speaking.”
“Hi, Gabriel, it’s Phillip.”
“Oh, Phil, hey! Sorry, I didn’t know it was you. Did you hear? One of our boxers won the state championship last night. They say she might go to the Olympics – wouldn’t that be something?”
“Gabe…”
Gabriel’s heart sank as his mind registered the tone of voice, his breath catching.
“What is it, Phil?”
“I’m sorry, it’s… it’s Bishop Ramirez. He’s… he’s dead.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry. I know you two were close. I only heard this morning. We got an email from the diocese of São Paulo. It will make the news soon. I thought you should hear it from me.”
“Right. OK.” Gabriel stared at the tabletop in front of him, the wood pockmarked and uneven from years of use. He thought of Bishop Ramirez and how he had saved him, given him his chance in life. “May God have mercy on his soul.”
He was lost in thought for a few seconds as his mind filled with memories of his mentor. He had meant to find the time to call him. How long had it been? Amidst the recollections, he was dimly aware of an alarm bell ringing in his own mind. The death of a bishop in Brazil would not normally make the news, unless…
“How did he die?”
There was a pause before Phillip spoke. “They found him in his room this morning. He’d been… he’d been shot in the head.”
“Oh.”
Gabriel looked at the framed article again, at himself staring bac
k. He’d told them he didn’t like having his picture taken.
Chapter Seven
“I spy with my little eye…”
Bunny stopped talking as he noticed the thumping noise coming from the front seat of the cab. Smithy was headbutting the steering wheel repeatedly.
“Are ye alright there, Smithy?”
“No. No, I’m not.”
Smithy liked Bunny – he did, he really liked Bunny. If you’d asked him to list the people he liked seven days ago, Bunny would definitely have been on that list.
Bunny was his friend.
Bunny was his friend.
Bunny was his friend.
The problem was that over the last seven days he had spent an average of seventeen hours and thirty-six minutes a day in Bunny’s company. He was now ready to kill Bunny.
The first couple of days had been alright. The downside of Bunny’s current soup kick was that he was a frequent and robust passer of wind. The temperature had struggled to get above freezing all week and the cab’s air con was poor at the best of times. Being trapped in the company of Bunny McGarry’s ass was nobody’s best of times. So, there was that. They had also run out of conversation. In hindsight, that should have been predictable. Neither man was big on talking about their past, so they didn’t have an awful lot of anecdotes they could swap. And, possibly most importantly, Smithy hadn’t realised just how mind-numbingly boring surveillance work was. Father Gabriel was a machine. The man barely seemed to sleep but what he did do was work. And work. And work. He also had a schedule which he stuck to religiously, no pun intended. This made him tedious to follow. That and the fact that there wasn’t a great deal of following to do, as he hardly went anywhere. They’d followed him to the hospital a couple of times, where they’d figured out he was visiting local gang kids. He had also spent a couple of evenings dropping in on old or otherwise infirmed parishioners in the nearby projects. Coopersville, if the press was to be believed, was one of the most dangerous areas in New York, yet Father Gabriel de Marcos walked through it as if he were untouchable. Everyone seemed to know him, and those who didn’t stayed well out of his way.
In seven days, there hadn’t been even the slightest hint of a nun. What there had been were a couple of terse exchanges in the cab. Smithy was a man who liked his own space, and he guessed Bunny was too. If their confinement together in this vehicle went on much longer, something would be said that couldn’t be unsaid. Nerves were frayed. Part of the problem was that neither of them could leave. Smithy had to be in the cab as he was the only one who could drive it because of the modifications. Sure, you could take the extensions on the pedals off and remove the custom seat, but by the time you’d done that, whoever you were trying to follow would be out of sight. So, Smithy couldn’t leave the cab. And for reasons he seemed unwilling to explain, Bunny wouldn’t leave the cab. He sat slouched down in the back seat, his face obscured from view by a baseball cap. When queried, he’d explained that he didn’t want the priest to catch a glimpse of him, as that would give the game away. The only time he’d looked up was so that he could engage in a game of I Spy, one in which he fundamentally misunderstood the rules. That had been yesterday, and it had by far been the ugliest of clashes in what was an already tense week. Not that everyone felt that way. The third member of the team, Diller, had no such problems. He took the early shift, cycling out to watch the padre from just after 6am every day. Any concerns about Diller in his current role had long since been dismissed. In hindsight, they’d been ridiculous to begin with. He had grown up in Hunts Point, an area as bad as Coopersville, and he had survived there. It was quite something to watch. He managed to disappear in plain sight almost effortlessly. Any time a local noticed him and engaged him in conversation, they left smiling, like they’d just caught up with an old friend. Only Jackson Diller could be a young black man standing in the middle of some of the most contentious gang territory in New York and make himself nobody’s concern.
So, between them – Smithy and Bunny in the cab and Diller on his bicycle or on foot – they had the priest well covered. They’d accounted for everything, except for the possibility that Smithy would find himself one particularly soupy fart away from beating Bunny McGarry to death with his own flask.
“Are you seriously still upset about the last game of I Spy?”
Smithy tried to count to five in his head. “I just… Let’s talk about something else.”
The incident had occurred when Bunny spied something beginning with O. Smithy had spent nearly two hours on it. He had been determined to get it. Finally, he had given in. Oxygen. It had been goddamned oxygen!
Smithy had lost his shit. You could not see oxygen. It was invisible. It was part of the air. In the Bronx, probably not that much of the air, but still. If oxygen was allowed, then so should be the chemical make-up of whatever was in glass or asphalt or that weird dude who stood on the corner talking loudly to nobody. Of course, it might have been the case that he was standing there talking to the oxygen. Readiness to react be damned – after that incident, Smithy had gone for a walk around the block.
“Alright,” said Bunny, “we won’t play it again so.”
“Good idea.”
“I was just—”
Bunny interrupted himself, hunkering down further in the back seat as two guys, one black and one Hispanic, walked by. They had got the occasional long look from the locals – cabs didn’t spend a great deal of time in Coopersville, and they were even less likely to stop, but enough passed through on their way to somewhere else that their presence wasn’t overly noticeable. They changed spots regularly to various locations on the block to minimise suspicion too. Still, as the two guys walked by, Bunny ducked right down.
“OK,” said Smithy, “enough is enough. You’re going to tell me what happened.”
“What?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me. Those two dudes – one of them had his arm in a sling and the other had a bandage on his head. On the one time you visited this area prior to this week, did you get into a fight or something?” Smithy watched Bunny’s reaction in the driver’s mirror. “You did, didn’t you? Unbelievable!”
“Alright there, Judgey McJudgeface, wind your neck in.”
“Wind my what?”
“Never mind.”
“Wait a second. The money you’re using to pay us – where did that come from?”
Smithy watched as the two men crossed the street further down the block. “Oh my god, did you rob drug dealers?”
“No, I didn’t. I mean, technically…”
Smithy shook his head. “You are unbelievable.”
“If you must know, they tried to rob me! I just defended myself.”
Smithy nodded. “And the money?”
“Well, I mean, ’tis just common sense. If somebody tries to rob you, you taking what they have on them – that’s not robbing, that’s a valuable lesson.”
“Right. And who are these guys?”
“I didn’t get their names. I was a bit busy.”
“I don’t mean their names. This place is New York’s version of South-Central LA, so I imagine they’re in a gang.”
“Oh right, that – yeah. They called themselves the… the something diablos. The Red Devils.”
Smithy shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
“That’s what I said. That must be a registered trademark. They’re asking for trouble.”
“What are you talking about? Did you even read those articles I printed out for you?” Smithy had done some research the night after he’d met Bunny in the Porterhouse and agreed to help him. He had found the article about Father Gabriel’s boxing club that had been in the Times a couple of weeks ago, and he had discovered an academic paper some NYU postgrad student had written on Coopersville’s gang problem and how nothing had been done about it. The New Bloods, the C-Boys and Los Diablos Rojos were the three main gangs and they ran the place. Drugs, prostitution, protection. Everything. A young man in Coopersville had a
twenty-five per cent chance of being involved in a violent shooting by the age of nineteen and that figure was just based on confirmed incidents. Police called it a war zone. The paper was a couple of years old now, but it presented the New Bloods as the biggest and baddest of the gangs. Weirdly, if one were to look for an upside, it was that the gangs had evolved to be remarkably diverse – location trumping ethnicity. They were almost entirely male though, the barrier of gender remaining intact.
I Have Sinned Page 6