Benighted (39 page)

I think he just offered me a bareback baby.

“Really?” I say. He isn’t looking at my face. I stare hard at the ceiling, and keep hold of the medal. The thought runs through my head—the medal, he’s seen me clutching it all the time. He must think I pray to St. Giles, make him my saint, make a point of being a bareback. He must think I’d want a bareback baby.

Something comes together in my head.

It may be that the saint just helped me, it may be that I’ve just witnessed divine intervention. Because what he’s offered me is as illegal as hell.

“Quietly, of course,” he’s saying, “and for a consideration. Obviously, there has to be discretion…”

He’s asking me not to talk about it, he’s talking about a secret business set-up. He puts me on my feet, takes me over to an X-ray machine.

Soon, it will sink in. I’ll understand what’s happened. All I can feel now is wild, empty. I have to go somewhere quiet and think about this. But the only thing in my mind now is the medal, that he saw me holding it and he told me something. Divine intervention, bringing me to the verge of understanding everything that’s happened. I stand before a screen and wait for the click of the X-ray, wait for the light to go through me.

FORTY

“S
ue,” I say, “it’s Lola Galley.”

There’s a brief silence. “Hello, Lola.” Her voice is limp, without inflection.

“Listen, I wanted to ask you something.” She doesn’t respond. “How’s the baby?”

“Nearly due.” She knows that isn’t what I wanted to ask.

“Listen, could you tell me the name of your doctor?”

“My primary?”

“No, your gynecologist, the one you’re seeing for the baby.”

“Dr. Marshall,” she says.

There’s a pain deep in the pit of my stomach, I’m holding myself tense. “Dr. Marshall? Is he your regular doctor?”

“I saw him when I had Julio,” she says. She sounds tired.

“Oh.” Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve got some sort of brain fever, I’m dreaming up solutions. Marshall. It’s such a respectable name.

Then something nags at my mind, it’s a moment of puzzlement before I put my finger on what’s bothering me. “Didn’t DORLA fix you up with a doctor?” I meant, after Johnny died. DORLA sometimes looks after widows, for a while.

“I’d just made a change,” she says. This conversation is tiresome for her. “I didn’t want to change again.”

“A change?”

“After Johnny lost his hand.” She says it flat, without a tremor. “They found me a doctor then, but then I went back to my old one.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know, Johnny thought it was a good idea.” I’m pulling her through bad memories, she doesn’t want to be talking about this.

“Who were you with before?”

“A Dr. Parkinson,” she says. The name doesn’t mean much to her; he’s just the man she went to see. There’s no pause or drama in the way she says it.

There’s an acrid taste in my mouth. I uncross my legs, cross them again. “You saw him at the start?”

“Yeah.” There’s a shrug in her voice, this isn’t interesting to her, but she can’t face making me leave her alone.

“Did he—what do you think of him? I mean, how come you changed?”

“He seemed okay.” There are spaces in between her answers. I can hear the voices of her children in the background. “Why? Are you looking for a gynecologist?”

She isn’t lying, I think. She doesn’t sound like she’s lying. He didn’t make her the offer he made me. “No, I—Sue, I’m sorry about this. Did Johnny ever say anything about him?”

“Just that he thought we should go back to Dr. Marshall.” I notice the “we,” even talking about her own body she says “we.” It must have been a good marriage.

“Didn’t you talk it over?”

I’ve pushed it too far. “He’d just lost his hand.” There’s an edge to her voice, a rising note. “He’d seen a lot of doctors. He wanted me to go to a different one, that was fine with me. They put you in stirrups, you can’t tell one from another anyway.”

It’s almost hope, what I hear in that last sentence. Though she’s telling me to go to hell, there’s a trace of her old vitality, it’s a crude and offhand remark almost like a joke. She used to be funny, when Johnny was with her.

“I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything. Her children talk in the background, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

After the examination, I walked out with my coat wrapped around me, my head ducked against the still air. Soon I can go home, I told myself, this will be over soon and then I can go home. I went back into the church. Father Dominic wasn’t there. Other people were wandering to and fro, so I headed straight for the Aegidian shrine and knelt down, to make sure I’d be left alone. I was shaking, I was sick, I stared at the picture of the saint but I couldn’t find a word to say to him. Some candles were burning before it, but there weren’t enough candles in the world to light for my Ann. The church was quiet but I didn’t hear it, sounds raged in my ears, and I felt blazing, wicked, unforgivable. Take your pain to God, the nuns would have said. I felt a kind of desperation, a need for there to be some force for goodness, something absolute, something right, and that I longed harder and harder for faith the worse the world became.

I am angry,
I told the saint. I couldn’t think of any other words. I said it over and over again, until there was nothing in me but those words,
I am angry, I am angry, I am angry.

Creches. Separate schools. Moon nights, nights we think about more than the people they affect ever need to. Scars, teeth at your throat, blood soaking into the grass. DORLA, day after day until you’re too old to work, trapped in a gray building with people like you on the inside and words spray-painted on the outside. Bareback. Fucking skins. Every insult and wound and violation the world can throw at you, from the day you’re born wrong till the day you die used up and battered beyond repair.

That elegant, highly trained man put his hands in me and offered to force on my child the same life sentence that fell on me.

Supposing he made the same offer to Johnny, I ask St. Giles. What would Johnny have done then?

Johnny had lyco children and he loved them. Their lives were better than his, or they were while he was alive taking care of them. He wouldn’t have wanted his baby imprisoned in bareback flesh.

Would Johnny have exposed him? Threatened to? If it came out, Parkinson would lose his license, I’m sure of that, maybe even go to prison. Nobody’s allowed to damage babies at birth, and that’s what he offered. I take a breath, kneel back on my ankles, grip my hands together. It would look like prayer at a distance. The saint rests easy in his portrait, cradling a deer in his arms, calm and tender.

Make me calm, God, I say. Make me calm, so I can think about this. I came back to the church to think, after I called Sue. The DORLA building closed around me till I could barely breathe, but here, I can stand it. Make me calm, God.

Johnny didn’t expose him. Parkinson is still working away, so Johnny can’t have exposed him. But maybe he threatened to. It could be he needed money, after he lost his hand and got demoted and had to feed his children on a cripple’s pay; it could be he wanted money for silence. Guilt plucks at my insides as I think that, accusing a dead man. But maybe he was driven to it. Maybe not: Johnny played inside the rules. If he did, he would have been worried, miserable, wondering what to do. Where should he go, who should he tell?

I remember the last time I saw him. It seemed like he wanted to tell me something. I wish hard enough to hurt that he’d told me, but it’s no good wishing now.

Parkinson is mutilating babies. This I know. Parkinson was involved in Seligmann escaping, that I believe. Why would he do that?

They can’t have been friends; I can’t imagine Parkinson as a prowler, not that kind of prowler. And Seligmann hates barebacks, Parkinson’s creating them; they can’t be on the same side.

I feel my mind tangle like a drawerful of string, and I say again, make me calm, God. Supposing Seligmann and Parkinson didn’t know each other well, that Parkinson helped him escape not because they were friends, but because it benefited him somehow. It seems likelier. How would Parkinson benefit?

“Excuse me, miss.” A voice comes from behind me and I startle, rise up on my knees. It’s a moment before I remember that “Excuse me, miss” is not the beginnings of a threat.

A man in faded jeans stands behind me. “We need to do some work in here.” He indicates the shrine, the wax-crusted candle stand, the bank of flowers underneath the icon, the lilies shriveled at the edges, dripping petals and fragments down onto the floor below. “Would you mind moving for about half an hour? I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right,” I say quickly, not thinking about it, and stand up, look around me for somewhere else to go. There’s another alcove on the other side of the church, a painting of the Virgin in it, a great swirl of blue cloth around a pale, teary-eyed, expressionless face. I head for it, wondering whether this was some kind of sign.

Kneeling before the Virgin, I take another deep breath, trying to clear my mind. I play over another piece of music Paul made me listen to, Pergolesi, I think:
stabat mater dolorosa, iuxta crucem lacrimosa, dum pendebat filius.
The mother of sorrows stands beside the cross of tears where her son hangs. I repeat the words in my head, steadying myself with the repetition, the precise Latinate vowels.
Stabat mater dolorosa.

The tearful eyes distract me. The perfect holy mother, weeping for the world.

I close my eyes. How did Parkinson benefit? What happened, what was the result of letting Seligmann go?

We went looking for him all over creation, we arrested innocent people and charged them with murder, the murders that Seligmann committed. Would Parkinson want a man he was helping to—

There’s an assumption I’ve been making all along. It comes on me from nowhere, stands before me, quiet and certain. I said, the murders that Seligmann committed. Why should I assume he committed both of them?

Because he escaped, because Nate died, because they both died from silver bullets. Who makes silver bullets? I can’t see Parkinson bothering to make one himself. Seligmann might, but it would be an awkward business. Who makes silver bullets?

We do.

Supposing Johnny went to meet Parkinson, to talk or accuse or threaten. He would have been wary, Johnny, he would have been meeting a man with power and an unknown will, a man with a terrible secret. Supposing he was nervous, that he didn’t feel safe. It’s a feeling I’ve been living with cheek to cheek for months. What did I do when I felt so afraid?

I took a gun from the stores. It’s still in my bag; I’ve been carrying it so long I’d almost forgotten about it. I took a gun. It wasn’t even difficult. It wasn’t difficult for me, it wouldn’t have been difficult for Johnny. There would have been two silver bullets in it. And if he put it down, or if Parkinson took it away from him, there would have been no need to forge silver bullets. They would have been right there. No symbolism, no insult. They were in the weapon in his hand.

And once he’d killed Johnny, he would have been stuck with it. A government-issue, controlled-supply silver gun, which, for all he knew, Johnny might have checked out like a library book with a serial number and a promise to return it tomorrow. If anyone found him with it, that was the end. But how to get rid of it?

Parkinson is intelligent. He’s educated. Years of training to use his mind would send it into overdrive when he tried to plan, make him see the dangers and pitfalls of everything he did. But then, suddenly, into his hospital comes a man with injuries, a man with a grudge against DORLA, and a man who needed help to escape. A man who might dispose of the gun for him, if Parkinson distracted security for him. A perfect chance. Divine intervention.

Only Seligmann had a grudge, and a gun, and suddenly he was free to do as he wished. A silver gun. The man I saw, the man I injured, could never have resisted the temptation.

Parkinson let Seligmann go, and Seligmann killed Nate. A silver bullet. We decided that Seligmann killed Johnny, too. It gave us the perfect suspect. The perfect scapegoat, too, because we were never, ever going to give Seligmann a fair trial. We would have railroaded him to hell if we could have managed it.

The scent of fresh lilies drifts across the church, heady and beautiful. There are still flowers in the world.

This is my theory: Parkinson killed Johnny with a gun Johnny took from the stores. To take our minds off Johnny, he let Seligmann go and, whether to dispose of or to use, he gave Seligmann that gun, and Seligmann shot Nate. He didn’t help David, he let his arm rot untreated, but he gave Seligmann a gun.

I haven’t the first fragment of evidence.

There’s only one possibility left: that Parkinson is hiding Seligmann, that he’s in too deep to let him get caught. If he is, I can find him, and then we’ll know. If he just let him go, then the murders will not be solved, not by any means I can think of. But if that happens, I’m still bringing Parkinson down. I’ll go to Hugo, I’ll go to the police, the medical council, the newspapers, I’ll chain myself to his door if I have to, but I’m going to bring him down. I feel the fury rise in me again, and I know I can do all of this, I can and I will.

Opening my eyes, I look again at the Virgin. Despite the tears, her face is peaceful, uplifted, sanctified. I want justice, I tell her, not vengeance, I want justice. I know, though, that I’m wrought through with rage, that I’m murderous with fury, that I am not sanctified. I want goodness, I want the glory of God, but I’m angry enough to kill. Find room in your heart for a sinner, I say, and weep for my sins along with the rest. I’ll fly to your forgiveness, I want to be forgiven, but first I have to fight.