All The Bells on Earth (3 page)

“What do you want?” Father Mahoney asked finally. His voice shook. The man stood among the trampled shells, hunched over, his breath wheezing in his throat. “We haven’t got much money,” the priest said, “not in the church. The offering …”

The man pulled a short piece of nylon cord from his coat, made a loop in the end of it, grabbed Mahoney’s wrist, and settled the loop over it, drawing it tight, yanking his other hand around and tying them both to the chair. Then he took a cloth bag from his pants pocket and pulled it over Mahoney’s head. The bag stank, as if something dead had been stored in it, and Mahoney closed his eyes, the idea of praying only now coming to him through the haze of fear and bewilderment.

For uncounted seconds he listened to the man walking back and forth in the room, as if he were pacing, uttering an odd chanting noise that was almost idiotic, the meaningless demonic gibbering of a man who had given up all claim to humanity. There was the sound of the blackjack thudding against something wooden, then a loud grunt followed by the crash of heavy furniture toppling—the carved cabinet that held the Host and sacramental wine. Bottles broke against the floor, and Mahoney could smell the spilled wine.

Abruptly he found himself thinking that, thank God, the Host wasn’t blessed, but then it struck him that the idea was almost foolish; he was thinking almost like the man in the goat mask—that God, somehow, could be damaged by this kind of pathetic vandalism.

Almost immediately there was another thump and the clank of something metallic falling to the floor. The chalice? It was gold; no doubt he’d steal it. There was a racket of sound: the hand-bells falling, the clanking roll of the censer, then the scrape of hangers on wooden rods—the vestments being yanked out of the wardrobe. A fold of cloth settled over his head—probably an altar boy’s gown. He opened his mouth, sucking in air. The layers of cloth made it difficult to breathe, and he wondered suddenly if the man meant to kill him. The idea of suffocation terrified him, and he tore his mind away from the thought, forcing himself to visualize the picture in the stained glass of the windows.

Dimly he heard repeated blows of the blackjack and of glass breaking, and it came to him that the man was destroying the windows too, hammering the leaded joints apart, breaking out the glass. Surely he was making enough noise so that someone on the street would hear. But it was late, and the church and its buildings took up the entire square block….

Father Mahoney stood up, the chair legs coming up off the floor. He hunched away from the desk, bending his head to his chest to dislodge the cloth bag. “Stop!” he yelled. “In the name of God … !” He yanked at the ropes that bound his wrists, jerking up and down, full of fury now.

There was a silence, and then the sound of ragged breathing again, coming from somewhere behind him. Father Mahoney tensed, waiting for the blow, for the man to hit him with the blackjack. The hair on his neck crept, and he imagined the intruder standing behind him, the goat mask regarding him now, the blackjack upraised….

And then the sacristy door banged shut. He heard footsteps pounding across the tiles of the nave. The noise faded away, leaving the night silent again but for the sound of the rain.

G
EORGE
N
ELSON SAT IN
his law office on the Plaza, waiting uneasily for the arrival of a business associate—Murray LeRoy. Through the window he could see the Plaza fountain and the small wooden nativity scene next to it. A lamp in the grass cast light on the nativity scene as a discouragement to vandals, but the light apparently hadn’t done its job, because the packing-crate manger was kicked to pieces, its palm frond roof scattered into the street, and the plaster of Paris figures knocked over and broken. It was almost ironic: Nelson himself represented a citizens’ group opposed to the display of nativity scenes on public property—the suit against the city was still pending—and here someone had come along in the night and done the job single-handedly.

He picked up the phone and dialed LeRoy’s number. Nothing. LeRoy was already out, already on his way. There were only a couple of hours left before the arrival of Nelson’s secretary, and before then he wanted to be finished with LeRoy. There were a number of reasons for cutting LeRoy loose forever. Mostly it was because LeRoy was a little unsteady these days.

In fact, if his behavior yesterday morning was any indication, the man was positively cracking up, and that was a dangerous thing. He had looked like he’d slept in his clothes, and he hadn’t shaved for days. He was half drunk, too, at nine in the morning, and his head shook with some kind of palsy that had made Nelson want to slap him. Six months ago the man didn’t drink except at weddings, and then he didn’t enjoy it and was always willing to say so in a loud voice. Nelson knew that there had been good reasons for LeRoy to keep his personal life private, but he had the public persona of some kind of scowling Calvinist missionary, and that’s what made his downhill slide so strange—he was making it so damned obvious. The thought wasn’t comforting.

Nelson had no idea exactly what he’d do about it in the end, but this morning he intended to try to buy the man out. That was the simplest route—something he should have done two or three months ago when LeRoy first started to crack. He wondered suddenly if the business with the nativity scene had been LeRoy’s doing. It would certainly fit the pattern. If the man were arrested again, he’d probably babble like the nut he’d become.

He heard a sound then, like the laughter of cartoon devils. “Murray?” He stood up out of his chair, listening. He opened his desk drawer and slipped his hand in, sliding the loaded .38 to the front. Then he saw a glow beyond the window curtains, and he realized that what he heard now no longer sounded like laughter. There was a crackling, almost like fat sizzling on a griddle, and at that moment he smelled the burning. There was something sulphurous about it, something that nearly choked him even though the windows were shut and locked.

Abruptly it dawned on him that the building might be on fire, that LeRoy had torched it. Thank God the man had become an incompetent fool! He slammed shut the desk drawer and hurried out into the foyer, opening the coat closet and pulling out the fire extinguisher. In a second he had unlocked the door and was out on the sidewalk, yanking the little plastic cotter key out of the lever of the extinguisher. The streets were empty. He slowed down, fully expecting to find LeRoy himself squatting in the flowerbed and dressed up like a clown or a little girl. He angled out toward the street and peered into the alley, which was lit up now with flames.

At first it looked like someone must have dumped burning trashbags onto the pavement. The heat was intense and glowing with a corona of white haze that obscured the burning figure, whatever it was. The fire flickered, rising and falling as if something were literally breathing life into it. The effect was almost hallucinatory, and for a moment he seemed to be looking into the mouth of a burning, circular pit. He heard what sounded like voices, like human cries, and a sulphurous reek drifted skyward like a mass of whirling black shadows.

Clearly it wasn’t trashbags. A big dog? The burning thing had a face like an ugly damned goat. He saw then that there were shoes at the other end of it. A man! He pointed the nozzle of the extinguisher in the general direction of the body and squeezed the lever. White dust sputtered out of it, but it was as if a whirlwind encompassed the burning body, and the chemicals blew away uselessly in the air. The flames didn’t diminish; shouting at them would do as much good. He tried to get closer, but gave it up; there was no way that he intended to have his hair singed off over this. He pointed the extinguisher into the air and blew the rest of the contents in the direction of the flaming body, knowing it was pointless—no one could live through such a thing anyway—but wanting to make damn well sure that the extinguisher was empty when the investigators had a look at it.

There was something about the shoes…. He looked closely at them, recognizing them with a start of surprise—loafers, white, with tasseled laces.

God, it was Murray LeRoy! Someone must have dumped gasoline over him and lit a match. One of the shoes ignited just then, with an audible hiss, and Nelson backed away, turning around and heading up the sidewalk again, hurrying toward the door to the office, swept with relief and fear both.

This certainly solved the problem with LeRoy. He wouldn’t be babbling to anyone now. But who had done this? In his mind Nelson ran through his list of enemies. Its being done outside his office, in the early morning like this, that was the bad thing. LeRoy must have talked to someone, said something. God, but to whom? Nelson and his associates were involved in a lot of shaky dealings, but nothing that would warrant something like this.

Inside he locked the door before punching 911 into the phone and reporting the incident. He sat down then at his desk, taking out the .38. If someone wanted LeRoy dead this badly, there was no reason to think they wouldn’t want him dead, too. But who, damn it? Argyle? He was capable of it. It dawned on him just then that perhaps there were other explanations. The city didn’t have any real gang problems, but there’d been several incidents in the past couple of years of homeless people being mugged, and he seemed to remember something about a man set on fire somewhere—probably Santa Ana. Who could say how long LeRoy had been in the alley? No doubt he was drunk as a judge and was easy prey for a gang of sadistic skinheads who happened to be out joyriding.

And then there was the possibility that LeRoy had simply gone to Hell.

He pushed the idea out of his mind. There were flashing lights outside the window now—a paramedics truck. He returned the gun to the drawer and went out, carrying the fire extinguisher. The fire was already out except for a weird flickering on the surface of the asphalt itself. The paramedics stood looking at the body, or what was left of it—only a heap of gray ash and charred fragments of bone. One of the shoes sat on the ground, strangely intact, but the other was gone.

“You called this in?”

“What?” Nelson looked up at the paramedic. He realized that he’d been gaping at the shoe with its ridiculous tassel. There was an ankle bone thrust up out of it, charred in half, and he wondered suddenly if there was still flesh on the foot. The idea made him sick, and he turned away and looked across at the Plaza, at the big grinning Santa Claus waving at the traffic coming up Glassell Street.

“Was it you that called, sir?”

He turned back, pulling himself together. “Yes. I tried to put the fire out, but this didn’t seem to do any good.”

“Probably too much heat,” the paramedic said. “If there’s enough heat it can blow this stuff right back at you. It’s like spraying a hose into the wind. You did what you could.”

Another truck pulled up, followed by a squad car, and in a moment the alley was full of investigators taking pictures and searching the ground, talking in undertones, their voices full of disbelief. There was a flurry of raindrops, and in moments the rain was coming down hard. Four firemen unfolded a tarp, trying in vain to keep LeRoy’s ashes dry while a plainclothes investigator hastily swept it all into a black metal dustpan that he emptied into a plastic sack. Nelson saw that there was a dime in among the ashes, and something else that might have been a tooth.

Without warning, rainwater sluiced out of the drainpipes on either side of the alley and flooded out onto the asphalt. A fireman attempted to dam it up with a yellow slicker, but it was no use: the water washed the alley clean, and within two minutes there was no trace of Murray LeRoy left in the world except the heap of ashes and teeth and bone that lay with the godawful white shoe in the bottom of the plastic sack.

T
HERE WAS THE SOUND
of thunder somewhere far off, like a door closing on the season, and in the direction of the distant ocean the sky was the color of wet slate. The wind gusted now, carrying on it the first deep notes of the bells from the tower at St. Anthony’s on Chapman Avenue a block away, and for a moment Walt thought that the sound of the bells was a remnant of the thunder, echoing through remote canyons in the clouds.

Raindrops pattered down onto the concrete walk, and he ducked into the garden shed that stood beneath the canopy of an enormous avocado tree in the back corner of the yard. There was something lonesome in the rain this winter afternoon, in the smell of wet leaves and the low sound of thunder that mingled with the weather-muffled ringing of the bells.

They rang every afternoon during the month of December—something that Walt, happily, had never really gotten used to even though he and Ivy had lived in the neighborhood for upwards of twelve years. Hearing them was always a pleasant surprise, like coming around a corner and suddenly seeing a cherry tree or a hawthorne in blossom.

Abruptly he remembered that Ivy’s aunt and uncle were due shortly—maybe even later this afternoon—and thinking about it took some of the magic out of the afternoon. They were on the last leg of their trip from the east. For a couple of weeks they’d been driving out from Michigan in a motor home, fully self-contained—toilet, refrigerator, awning, the whole works. They’d bought it last year with dividends from Uncle Henry’s stocks and bonds. The idea was to spend the winter in California—specifically in Walt and Ivy’s driveway, which, Walt had to admit, was better than them staying on the foldout couch in the den like last year.

“It’s an Ex
ec
utive,” Uncle Henry had said to him over the phone, leaning heavily on the second syllable, and it had taken Walt most of the rest of the conversation to figure out what he meant, that it was the brand name of the motor home. He had tried to imagine the kind of vehicle it was, what it must look like, given its name—a desk in the back, maybe, with a Rolodex on it, and a swivel chair and file cabinet—an outfit suitable for a man of business. Last night Aunt Jinx had called from Kingman, from a pay phone in the parking lot of the Alpha Beta Market where they were spending the night.