I Have Sinned

by Caimh McDonnell

  “Move and you’re dead,” said Bunny.

  He swore under his breath as the intruder spun around, barely dodging backwards in time to avoid the slashing blade, which picked up the faintest of glints from the red light as it ripped through the air.

  Bunny lifted his weapon – a length of pipe – to shield himself. Experience had taught him that if you couldn’t have a gun, it paid to have something that would feel a lot like a gun when jabbed into somebody’s back. Of course, that approach assumed that the person you were jabbing with it wasn’t suicidal. If it really had been a gun, this individual would now have the kind of ventilation that typically proved fatal to the human body.

  Bunny moved backwards as quickly as he could, his attacker advancing with the blade in an alarmingly efficient manner. With nothing but a pipe, a string vest and a pair of boxer shorts for protection, he was suddenly feeling all kinds of naked.

  Bunny swung the pipe at the knife held in his attacker’s right hand, only to find it out of range as the heel of the intruder’s left hand drove a blow into his solar plexus. Bunny sidestepped and a flash of pain bloomed in his upper left arm. The blade, which had been aimed at his chest, had struck his arm instead. He really hated knives, especially when the person who had one of them wasn’t him.

  He directed a kick at the area where his assailant’s testicles would typically be found, but a boot met his naked foot. His yowl of pain was cut short by his other leg being swept from under him as he landed messily on the hard stone floor.

  Before Bunny could swing his legs around in a desperate attempt to level his opponent and even the odds, the balaclava-clad figure crumpled to the ground beside him.

  Bunny looked up to see Father Gabriel standing over him.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Father Gabriel flicked the light switch on and looked down at Bunny. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  “What am I doing? Ye fecking ingrate, I was saving you from getting assassinated! If it wasn’t for me, you’d…”

  Bunny stopped talking as he looked toward Father Gabriel’s bed and noticed that he still appeared to be asleep in it.

  “You’re shitting me?!”

  “I was handling the situation,” said Gabriel. “You did not need to interfere. You could’ve been killed. Look – you’re bleeding.”

  Bunny looked at his left arm, down which blood was flowing from a wound a few inches below his shoulder. “Ah, ’tis just a scratch.” He looked at the floor. “Feck it though, I’m going to have to mop this place again.”

  Bunny took off the string vest he was wearing and awkwardly wrapped it around the wound to make an improvised bandage.

  The figure at Gabriel’s feet stirred slightly.

  “Come on,” he said, “help me tie our visitor up and then we can deal with your arm properly.”

  Gabriel pulled some cord from the storage cupboard and together they tied the new arrival to the broken cast-iron radiator, stretching his arms out wide to make escape impossible. Only then did Bunny pull off the balaclava. “Jesus.”

  “Language,” said Father Gabriel, almost on automatic.

  “But he’s like…” Bunny looked down at the assailant, who minutes before had been endeavouring to stab him through the heart. He was clean-shaven, Caucasian and… “He can’t be more than – what? Seventeen?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I would imagine so.”

  “Flipping heck,” said Bunny, trying to not further annoy Gabriel. “In the last couple of days I’ve been stabbed by a teenage boy and punched out by a teenage girl. I think I might be losing my edge.”

  “If it is any consolation, this boy is not exactly a typical teenager.”

  “D’ye know him?”

  “No, but I know what he is.” Gabriel finished patting him down and then stood up. “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “All he had on him was this knife.” The priest held up the article in question. “A Strider with a four-inch drop-point, flat-ground, tiger-striped blade of CPM S30V steel.”

  “A what now?” asked Bunny.

  “That means that this is his initiation.”

  “Alright,” said Bunny, “that is it. Either you explain what in the hell is going on or I’m calling the police. This is insane.”

  Gabriel ran his hand across his brow. “Yes. I suppose it is time.”

  Bunny followed Gabriel up to the office. The church at night had an otherworldly quality to it, the pad of their bare feet oddly loud in the silence. Bunny felt his body shake, whether from the cold, the adrenalin or both, it was impossible to say. He sat at Rosario’s desk and Gabriel pulled the first aid kit off the wall. Bunny watched him expertly disinfect, stitch and then bandage his wound. The cut wasn’t too deep and looked much worse than it actually was. Bunny resisted the urge to ask questions. The priest had said he would come clean, and it made sense to let him get to the truth in his own time.

  The arm properly bandaged, Gabriel leaned back on the desk, still holding a roll of medical tape in his hands.

  Bunny watched the priest’s eyes dart around, as if trying to find the point at which to start. Finally, he sighed. “The boy downstairs, he is part of an organisation that doesn’t have a name, although its members refer to it as ‘the family’. Do you remember the meeting I had yesterday, with the supposed gentleman from Wall Street?”

  Bunny nodded.

  “That was just a pretence. His way of getting to me. He goes by the name of Abraham and he is the head of the family. He set up the family I don’t know how long ago, but if I was to guess, I would imagine maybe thirty years. The system is simple: he finds children, typically around the ten- to twelve-year-old range, and he ‘adopts’ them.”

  “He steals kids?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “No. These children, they are not the kind that anyone misses. He takes them, educates them and then trains them.”

  “Does…?” Bunny stopped, unsure what question he wanted to ask.

  Gabriel lowered his eyes. “No. The children are well treated, at least in the sense that they are well fed, looked after and safe. He used to operate out of a base in Panama – a large villa where around twenty people could comfortably live. The operation also worked out of the Philippines for a time, as well as a brief stint in Somalia. That did not end well.”

  “How did…?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “A local warlord saw a rich man living with children and assumed an easy target. That proved to be a very costly assumption on his part.”

  “Jesus.”

  Gabriel looked down at his hands as he continued. “The children receive a good education. I would imagine that the boy downstairs can speak and write several languages.”

  “That’s not all they’re taught though, is it?” said Bunny, remembering how well the kid had wielded his knife.

  “No,” agreed Gabriel. “They also receive extensive combat training. Weapons, unarmed combat, survival – you name it. Abraham places a great emphasis on melee weapons. As odd as it might sound, he does not like guns.”

  The priest went quiet again.

  “You keep saying ‘they’,” said Bunny.

  “Yes,” agreed Gabriel. He took a deep breath and looked at Bunny. “You are only the second person I have ever told about this.”

  “You were one of these kids?”

  The priest just nodded.

  “Jesus,” said Bunny. This time, Gabriel let the blasphemy slide.

  “I was eleven, I think.”

  “You think?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I was an orphan from a favela in Rio de Janeiro, living on the streets. My mother was… I didn’t know her. Birthday parties weren’t a big thing. I was alone early, relying on my wits and, occasionally, the kindness of strangers and… It was, let us say, not a nice place to live.”

  Bunny let that go by without prying further.

  “The police arrested me, not for the first time. A man had been attempting to take… advan
tage of me…” The words came out in measured beats, as if each one came at a cost. “I had fought back.” Gabriel gave a bitter smile. “All you need to know of that world is summed up by the fact that I was the one who was arrested.”

  Bunny noticed his own hands had formed into tight fists and the fingers were digging painfully into his palms. He relaxed his grip.

  “The police put me in an interview room and a couple of minutes later they led in this man. He looked European, but he spoke Portuguese with no accent. He smelled nice. It is strange that I remember that, but I do. He was clean and smelled nice. I suppose that was maybe unusual in my world.”

  “Abraham?” asked Bunny.

  “Abraham,” confirmed Gabriel. “At first, I thought… Well, you can imagine.”

  Bunny nodded.

  “A beating. Maybe much worse. I was prepared, tensed to defend myself. Surveying the room, looking for my options, for a means of escape.

  “He looked at me and smiled. I’ll always remember the first words he spoke to me: ‘So, what are you thinking? Try to take me down fast and then get to that window?’ There was a small window up near the ceiling. I watched him and then shook my head. I said, ‘The glass is too thick. I’d kick the ventilation fan out of the far wall, try that way.’ He nodded and sat down, then he took out a cigarette case and lit one. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I would try the fan too. My name is Abraham. It is nice to meet you.’

  “I said nothing. I was looking at him, waiting. He just sat there, smoking his cigarette. Then he asked, so casually, ‘Do you want to kill him?’ I asked who and he just laughed and said, ‘You know who.’ I remember thinking it might be a trap, but then I thought what do I care? I was already in so much trouble – a little more didn’t matter. You see, the man – the man in question, the man I had… injured…”

  Bunny nodded.

  “He had been an important man. I was in all kinds of trouble. So I said yes, I wanted to kill him.”

  Gabriel gave a sad smile.

  “Then Abraham picked up his cigarette case and put it back in his pocket and said, ‘How would you like three meals a day, your own bed every night and nobody to ever touch you like that again?’ I shook my head. I didn’t believe those things existed, not for someone like me. He laughed. ‘OK, how about this,’ he said, ‘three meals a day, your own bed and nobody will ever touch you again, plus, one day, you will get to kill that man.’”

  Gabriel shrugged his shoulders. “To a boy who, right there and then, would have taken a quick death… I thought, why not? I did not believe it when Abraham called the officer back in, gave him a wad of money and then held the door open for me. Even as I followed Abraham out of the station, I was looking for a way out. He led me to a yard where a van was parked. Inside it were three boys, all a couple of years older than me. In hindsight, it made sense. How do you get a child in that situation to trust you? Put him with other children who seem healthy and happy. One of the boys handed me a drink and a sandwich and welcomed me to the family.”

  “Jesus,” said Bunny, puffing out his cheeks.

  Gabriel nodded. “We flew out of Rio on a military plane and then I reached the compound in Panama. There was me and another new recruit.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bunny. “Is this guy trying to build his own private army?”

  “Oh, nothing so grand. Abraham has no political or ideological affiliation. However, if you have the money and you want someone discreetly and professionally killed, his is the number you call. He is a one-stop shop for all your killing needs. A source of untraceable death, just a phone call away. Of course, you don’t actually call him; there are intermediaries. Businesses, governments, various criminal organisations – they will all occasionally find themselves in need of an efficient and deniable instrument of death. It is easy in this world to find someone who will kill for you. What you are paying Abraham for is invisibility and efficiency. It will not fail, and if it does, it will never come back to you, because the person doing the job has no idea who they are working for. You could try to find Abraham, but the family are very good at staying disappeared. And even if you did… Well, as the few relatives a certain Somali warlord has left will tell you, that would come at the most terrible cost.”

  “But they’re children,” said Bunny.

  “No, the children are just the trainees. Abraham likes kids because they can be moulded. He prides himself on creating warriors in some ancient tradition – although he’s really taking ideas from many places and fitting them into his own ‘warrior code’. I trained every day in numerous weapons. It became my life. After a few months, it seemed it was all I had ever known. And honestly,” he said with a shrug, “it was fun. All children like to play at being soldiers. We were trained in systema, a martial art developed by the Russians, plus lerdrit, which is the Thai version, not to mention knife fighting, marksmanship, wilderness survival, as well as every weapon under the sun. That is not an exaggeration. Abraham collects melee weapons from all over the world.

  “It was better than the life any of us had known before. There was an order to it. There was ‘the seven’ – they were the older members who had graduated. They had their own rooms at the villa and they would occasionally disappear with Abraham to go on missions. Sometimes they would not come back. We would have a meal in their honour and then Abraham would announce who was to be the next potential graduate, ready for their final examination.”

  “The initiation?” said Bunny.

  Gabriel nodded. “We all wanted it so much.”

  “And you didn’t question it?” Bunny winced; the question had come out wrong. “I don’t mean it like…”

  Gabriel waved his protestations away. “Honestly, no. We did not discuss where we had come from that much, but you quickly learned that you were in a safe place. Most of the kids were African, Southeast Asian or South American. There were a few from Eastern Europe too. In hindsight, he was building a stable. A face that would fit any situation. The one thing we had in common was that we had come from somewhere a lot worse. If you misbehaved, you were punished – but in the middle of a jungle, where would you run to? And honestly, you didn’t want to. All any child wants is safety and family, and we had that.”

  “Fair enough,” said Bunny.

  “I was chosen for my initiation – my graduation ceremony, if you will – at fifteen. Apparently I was the youngest ever.” Gabriel looked embarrassed. “I was never very big, but I was good with a blade and I was a very accurate shot. I also was the one who could fence the best against Abraham. I mean, I never won, but he enjoyed sparring with me the most.” The priest looked suddenly embarrassed, like he had revealed something he didn’t want to. He straightened his back. “Initiations,” he said, “follow a ritual. You are given only a knife” – Gabriel took the knife he had taken from the boy downstairs out of his pocket and held it up – “and then you are told who you have to go and kill. If you fail” – his voice dropped to a whisper – “you are dead.”

  “Holy fuck!”

  Gabriel nodded. “It didn’t even seem strange. To us, if you failed to do what you had been trained for, you might as well be dead. That was our world and Abraham was the leader, father, demigod in it. All any of us wanted to do was make him proud.”

  “So, what happened on yours?” asked Bunny.

  “I killed a man. The man whose death I had been promised all those years before. I would like to tell you that a part of me was appalled. Horrified at what I had become. Honestly? I enjoyed it. I was good at it. Abraham made killers, and he called me his greatest success. The others were jealous. I was our father’s favourite. All the most challenging missions came to me.”

  Gabriel’s eyes were damp now, his face wet with tears. He turned to Bunny. “Ask the question.”

  Bunny didn’t know what to say.

  Gabriel looked away again. “Eighteen. In my life, I have killed eighteen people. Don’t ask me their names; to my shame, I don’t know them.”
/>   “You were…” started Bunny.

  “What?”

  “You were… he made you into that.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I still had a choice. God gave us free will. I have blood on my hands.”

  He looked down at the knife he held.

  “But—” said Bunny, only to be silenced by Gabriel raising his hand.

  “Respectfully, Mr McGarry, I have not come to you for absolution. I am telling you what you need to know, seeing as you insist on being involved.”

  “Alright.”

  “Which brings us to how I got here. To give you the brief version, not unlike our young friend downstairs, I was sent to kill a priest. A simple job for someone of my expertise. And do you know what the man did? As he kneeled before me, waiting to die?” Gabriel turned around to look at Bunny again. “He forgave me.” Gabriel nodded. “As stupid as it sounds, the man forgave me and then he offered to hear my confession. Father Ramirez – a simple Mexican priest who had upset some cartel or other. I don’t know. I have run that night through so many times in my mind. Clearly, somewhere within me, deep down, I knew what I was doing was wrong. What I had become was… a monster. And somehow, this man had seen past that to the broken little boy within. I tried to turn the gun upon myself, but he wrestled it from me.” Father Gabriel leaned across and straightened the pile of bills in his in tray. “The next day, the priest told a tale of a man who had come to kill him, who had slipped from a balcony and fallen into the sea, onto the rocks below. They never recovered the body. A man who never existed ceased to exist, and Father Ramirez sent me to live with some Franciscan monks in Venezuela.”

  “So,” said Bunny, “you’re not actually a priest?”

  Gabriel gave a sad smile. “No, I am. I spent two years there, talking to the brothers, learning from them. Then I joined the seminary and became a priest after five more years.”