Sins of the Fathers

by John Richmond



  By the same author

  The Devil May Care

  Captain Ninja

  Sins of the Fathers

  A novel

  by

  JOHN RICHMOND

  Published By

  John R. Richmond

  Johnrollinrichmond@hotmail.com

  First Published 2006

  Copyright © John Richmond, 2005

  All rights reserved

  without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Any attempt to imitate (steal, plagiarize—I’m looking at you Ms. Coulter) the contents of this book will be considered poor sportsmanship and all around lousy manners.

  Any resemblance to the lives of any persons, either or living or dead (especially dead), is coincidental. As I am a broke-ass writer, I am currently without funds so a lawsuit would be a waste of your time anyway.

  This last little paragraph is just to make

  sure this section of text comes

  out looking like a circle.

  For my demons.

  Stay in your cages

  ONE

  RUBY SLID THROUGH the happy hour yammer, her short skirt ringing from hip to hip. The table by the door, known at the Five Rabbits as the “reading corner,” had acquired a patron. It was too small to accommodate more than one person and so invariably attracted a single customer with a book or a bag of private thoughts. The waitress dodged around a couple of gents well on their way to being very happy this happy hour and stopped.

  The man at the “reading corner” had his face buried in a large, leather bound book. His hair was a little too long, chestnut with a wave just shy of a curl. Really the kind of hair that most people have to pay for, but the waitress had the idea that his didn’t come from a bottle. She glanced at his eyes, dark and moving as they ticked off the words. For a second she didn’t hear the pub bustle, didn’t smell the smoke or the yeasty reek of the kegs behind the bar.

  He felt her eyes and looked up.

  “Good book?” she shouted over the noise.

  He didn’t smile back, and caught her noticing the square inch of white just below his Adam’s apple. “The good book,” he said, his voice penetrating but well below a shout. She just looked at him, nothing moving behind her baby blues. He remembered how he could be and reminded himself what he was supposed to be, this evening. Just another priest out for a pint after evening Mass. He summoned a smile, the one he used in airports and pubs. “I’ve been in the service of the Lord for,” he checked his watch, “well over a decade and I still don’t get half of it.”

  “Half of what?”

  “The book.”

  She looked down at his bible, back at him, shook it off. “What’ll it be tonight, Father?”

  “Pint of the black, please.”

  She winked and smiled before flouncing away. He watched the crowd absorb her, or rather watched her ass. It was worth the watching, even if she didn’t seem to be worth much else. At least she hadn’t asked about his accent. It’d been a while since he had used the Irish lilt, and he had worried that it wouldn’t pass the test of native ears. Just another padre out for a pint was all he was, sure and begorah and all that lucky charms bullshit. But she hadn’t noticed, or if she had, she didn’t care which equaled the same for his purposes.

  He opened his book, and sighed, letting his mind fall back into the cadence of the narrative, careful not to let the leather book jacket slip off. It was one thing to pretend to be a practicing priest for the sake of the task at hand, it was quite another to have to actually read the Bible yet again. He wondered what his waitress would think if she knew he was just up to the part in The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge where the author trips so hard on peyote tea he believes his head has sprouted crow’s wings. Probably nothing; she didn’t seem the type to read much. Come to think of it, she didn’t seem the type to read.

  After scanning a few more pages, just enough to allow time to pour the proverbial Perfect Pint, he sensed her motion back through the crowd. They had some new fangled tap for that now, a gizmo that could fill a glass with Guinness in thirty seconds instead of the several minutes a satisfactory head required the old fashioned way. He hoped this place hadn’t caught up with the times as he caught sight of his waitress. Some things were better left to the old ways.

  Ruby negotiated a couple of red-faced debaters—arguing, he was sure, over something far more important than the football match flickering on the TV bolted to the wall above them—slipping past them with professional grace, a dark pillar of beer balanced atop her tray. The debaters spared her a slaver and went back to their discussion. He watched all of this over the rim of his book, through the screen of his eyelashes, and glanced up just as she set down his drink.

  “That’s four euro and twenty, Father.”

  He tried not to show much of his pain. Vow of poverty, indeed. “Thank you, dear.”

  He sipped, watched her ass pendulum away, and allowed himself to fall back into the disguised book. It wasn’t as if the Bible were uninteresting. He’d just gleaned all the insight he ever would from that particular interpretation of the God Thing. Reading the damn book over and over would bring him no closer to the answers he sought. He knew priests who did that: finished the last page in Revelations only to close the book and open it again at Genesis, as if the repetition were like some sort of prolonged Christian Om. There were answers in the Bible, plenty of them, but he found it lacking, unfinished. There was more to the God Thing than John 3:16 and so he spent what free time he had attempting to fill in the holes left by his traditional Euro-centric teachings.

  He had read everything from the Hebrew Cabal to the Tao Te Ching. He’d even assimilated enough Arabic to make his halting way through the Quran after learning that to truly appreciate its message one must read it in the language in which it was written. (To be fair, he’d taken the Arabic hypno-immersion course for an entirely different purpose, but it had come in handy when his search had led to the pages of Muhammad’s teachings.) In the end, it had held about as much truth as the rest of them.

  He looked up.

  One of the blustering debaters, a man in his middle forties, heavy glasses and bad taste in suits, clapped his companion on the shoulder and reeled off into the crowd. The priest picked up his pint and took a gulp—smoke, coffee, cream—capturing the man in the half circle of his beer glass as he stumbled through the churning mass of tobacco fumes, limbs and clothes. He let the man get about halfway to the W.C., before he clunked his glass back onto the table and followed. The priest allowed some urgency in his step and jostlings as he elbowed through the other patrons. He just needed to baptize the porcelain like anyone else who might have put away a cocktail or two. He arrived at the bathroom behind the man in the glasses and bad suit. The door swung shut behind him, muting the bar noise. Save for the two of them, the room was empty, just two urinals, a doorless stall and a cracked window.

  Glasses fumbled his zipper and weaved over to a urinal. In his present state, the going required a bit more concentration than normal. The priest took advantage of this and removed a small triangle of rubber from his hip pocket, the kind of simple doorstop one could purchase at any hardware store, as he had only a few hours ago. He stooped and wedged it under the door. He straightened, his feet a little farther apart, his chin lowered. As the sound of Glass
es’s urine flowed over the porcelain, the priest flowed over the floor.

  He stood a pace behind the man, listening to him grunt and sigh as the water left and the pressure abated. After what felt like at least a full minute, Glasses gave a shake, another, and the priest heard the teeth of his zipper intermesh. Glasses turned around and started.

  “Ah, Father!” he said, his breath a miasma of scotch and pipe tobacco. “You scared the life outta’ me.” Suspicion creased his brow. “Whadya’ mean standin’ there like that?”

  The priest took a moment to record every detail of the man’s face down to the last broken capillary and black pore. There was no question. “Doctor Connolly,” he said.

  Glasses took a step back, moistening the back of his pants on the urinal. “I’m sorry, Father, you have me at a loss. Do we know each other?”

  The priest looked down and rocked back on his heels. He stuck his hands in his hip pockets, just here to have a conversation, really. He tilted his head and looked back at Dr. Connolly. “You know the saying, God loves a drunk?”

  Connolly said nothing. His lips were dry, parted.

  The priest took his hands out of his pockets. In his left he held a stun gun, in his right a hooked linoleum knife. The two men looked into each other’s eyes. Outside in the din, someone broke a glass. Connolly’s pupils dilated.

  The priest whispered, “It’s a lie.” and struck like a two-headed snake.

  It was over in a moment. The gouts of dark jugular blood did not even flow in earnest until the body hit the floor. Careful not to get any on the cuffs of his pants, the priest stepped over the already cooling Dr. Connolly and made for the window. Like everything else about this pub, he already knew it led into a deserted back alley.

  Only a few minutes after he’d gotten up from the “reading corner”, the priest slipped back through the front door and sat back down. No one noticed as he took a sip from his glass and re-opened his book.

  Within a paragraph, he became aware of a change in tone at the back of the pub near the W.C. Someone was trying to force the door. He paid no mind and continued to read. After a short time, he finished his Guinness, dropped his money on the table, and walked out. The first scream ricocheted into the street a few minutes later.

  He walked several blocks before stopping at a pay phone. Without inserting any coins he dialed a long chain of numbers into the keypad and waited. Tires hissed past on the pavement, shoes clicked and clocked. He looked up and noted the clear air and slow rotation of stars. He pretended to have a conversation, nothing too hammy, just talking, but the receiver was silent save for an occasional, far away beep. After exactly three minutes, a voice came over the line, mechanical and flat, as if filtered through a machine.

  “Pronto?”

  “Jesus Christ goes to an inn.” the priest said. “He walks up to the inn keeper, hands him three nails, and asks, ‘Can you put me up for the night?’”

  “He has been martyred?”

  “All we have to do is tally up the miracles.”

  “Bene. Come home.”

  The line clicked and a dial tone droned. The priest hung up and stepped away from the phone. He had an open-ended ticket and there were four departing flights before morning. There was time to walk and he needed to.

  Something was wrong. Not with this operation. All that remained was to fly home, kiss the ring and debrief the boss; but his stomach was tight, jumpy. He dipped into a chemist’s for a pack of cigarettes and stood on the corner smoking, watching the lights of passing traffic bleed and smear.

  Sirens blared a few streets away, echoing off the close buildings and dopplering around corners. They sounded so different on this side of the ocean. He’d been a European for how long now? Fucking forever, and he still couldn’t get used to the sirens. He liked them, the steady up down, up down two-tone was somehow classier than American sirens. When he had left Detroit ten years ago they still made that wrow, wrow, wrow noise. Now, it was all weird high tech bleeps and bloops. At least, they still had simple sirens over here. Everything else was changing, Americanizing, but they still had those classy sirens. He finished his smoke and crushed it under his shoe. There was a drop of something dark on the toe.

  A cold wind picked up and hissed around the corner. Passers-by hunched up their shoulders and moved a little quicker. Father John Calvin, a member of a very special, very ancient order, squinted into the gritty wind and put his hands in his pockets. The wind pushed the heavy bangs off his forehead and then, for the strangest moment, he seemed to go deaf. Silence fell like a curtain and engulfed the scene. The only sound was his own heart beat, heavy and alone. He listened to its thuds—one pairing, two—and began to wonder what was happening. Was this a stroke or some kind of seizure? But just as suddenly as it muted, the street noise rushed back in. He craned his neck and stared up into the spaces between the stars.

  Hell was that?

  John Calvin had seen many strange things, done many strange things in his life, but this momentary hood of silence, as if his head had suddenly plunged into a still pool, was a new one on him. Every event has its own essence, and if you trust your mental tongue and can shut off your shouting mind long enough, you can taste that signature. While the sudden silence was original in his experience, the taste of the event was not. Father John Calvin closed his eyes and drew a deep breath in through his nose. Car exhaust, a woman’s vanilla perfume, his own deodorant, the stars themselves. He opened his eyes and looked down the empty street. Striped autumn oaks bent over the pavement, rows of dead soldiers. A white plastic bag fluttered down the road like a ghost in a tunnel.

  Something was coming.