Bless the Child (33 page)

D
evlin tapped the notebook he held in his hand, absentmindedly, with a pen. There were the beginnings of patterns here . . . but the implications of the patterns were too big to be plausible.

The names Cheri had given them were a revelation—a senator, the lead singer of a famous rock group, the executive vice president of a TV network, a Superior Court judge, and a big-time fashion designer—and all of them beginning to show linkages that stretched the limits of simple probability. The more he dug, the more their tendrils intersected. Very interesting.

There was far too much intersecting for coincidence, and on too large a scale. Devlin had divided Cheri’s list of names with Garibaldi. If Gino’s group of well-knowns showed even a fraction of coincidences in the notebook he held in his hands, they were on to something big.

Too big, in fact, for the Sixth Precinct detective squad to handle, unless some very specific local tie-in should emerge. And far too rife with important names for the Captain to want to get mixed up in such potential problems. Big names had big lawyers who made their living keeping their clients free from the kinds of taint he was speculating on.

Speculation,
Damnit!
That was the problem. This was all still speculation and April 30th was just around the corner.

Devlin snapped the notebook shut and forced himself to pay attention to the other work on his desk. This Maggie thing was still unofficial, and he had his regular job to do. He’d have to keep this all in perspective . . .
“Shit!”
he said aloud. “Who do you think you’re kidding, Devlin?”

He pushed the other papers on his desk away with an emphatic shove, picked up the notebook with the Maggie notes in it, and left his office in search of Garibaldi.

“What I got, Lieutenant, is a snitch who says he knows where they get the tattoos,” Garibaldi said with a grin. “Place on Christopher. The guy’s a real
‘artiste,’
says my snitch. Specializes in the weird and unusual. You want a peacock tattooed on your pecker, this guy’s your man.”

Devlin winced. “Don’t even say it out loud.”

“Yeah, well it may not ring your bells but evidently this guy’s handiwork is world-renowned in the biker and S&M set. The snitch says he’d be the one Maa Kheru would go to. Wanna see what he has to say for himself?”

Devlin nodded affirmatively. “What’ve we got to squeeze him with?”

“A couple of old drug busts and some larceny. Typical penny-ante stuff. Nothing major. Nothing recent. Except maybe one thing. It seems he’s a closet herbalist. He stocks all kinds of eye-of-newt stuff and prescribes it to his clients—with a few psychedelic mushrooms and other hallucinogenics thrown in. And maybe a little blow on occasion, for special customers.”

The tattoo parlor was semi-clean and seedy. The tiny waiting area was littered with titles like
Wet Teenagers
and
Pussy Galore.

“This guy could use some
National Geographics,”
Garibaldi observed, leafing through the pile. “Here’s a great title,
Love with Little Boys.”
He laid it down, like it smelled of week-old fish.

Devlin parted the curtain that partitioned off the inner room. A nearly nude man reclined n a barber chair. Two thirds of his massive body was covered by tattoos of an unimaginable intricacy.

“We’ll have to take a break for today, Rudi,” the pencil-thin man, who was holding the tattoo needle, said without looking up at the visitors. He finished the claw of a gorgon-like creature that adorned the man’s left thigh, with meticulous precision. Then, he put down the needle and stood up. Rudi beat a hasty retreat.

“Police, I take it?” he said, before they’d identified themselves. “I’m Jake. I don’t want any trouble. What do you want?”

“Is this a design of yours?” Devlin asked, handing him Cheri’s drawing. The tattoo artist barely glanced at it.

“If I could see the tattoo itself I might remember—I can recognize my own work, after all. But this? Do you know how many tattoos I do in a year, Lieutenant?” He shrugged his bony shoulders dismissively.

“Do you
know
how many jerks I put in the slammer every year because they give me a lot of crap?” Garibaldi said, moving in close. “Let’s just see what we’ve got right here in this little emporium of yours. We got dispensing medicine without a license, we got kiddy-porn magazines, we got sanitary code violations, we got suspicion of drug possession—”

“Wait just a goddamn minute!” Jake sputtered. “I got no drugs here. What do you guys want from me?”

“We want to know what you know about this tattoo,” Devlin said quietly. His quiet sounded more dangerous than Garibaldi’s threats.

“It’s part of an ancient symbol,” Jake said quickly. “It has to do with eternal life, and the ability to manipulate matter. You know, like magic. There are word glyphs that go with it. The words are in Enochion, a magical language from the Middle Ages. I don’ know what they mean.”

“So, who gets this tattoo?”

“Different people. Not my regular customers . . .” He seemed about to say more, but didn’t.

“If they’re not your regulars, who are they?” Devlin pressed. “Do they just walk in off the street? What do they look like? Do they pay with credit cards?”

“Look,” Jake said agitatedly. “I don’t want any trouble here, understand? All I know is they send a limo for me, and it takes me somewhere. I don’t know where.”

“Why not?”

“Because they put this blindfold thing—like a black hood—over my head, till we get there. All’s I know is, it’s a big house, kinda spooky, in the country, near the water. They take me to a room. I do whatever they want, sometimes one, sometimes half a dozen. They pay cash, twice my regular fee, and then they drop me off again.”

“And you never asked who they are, or why they do it that way?” Devlin pressed skeptically.

“Why should I want to know what they’re into? Look, there’s a lot goes on in this world, you don’t need to know. Right? Like, I got this dominatrix broad, uptown, who sends all her johns to me. You wouldn’t want to know what she wants tattooed where, on those guys. And there’s cults, and clubs, and bikers, and who knows what . . . like, in this line of work you don’t usually get to practice on the mayor and the City Council, you what I mean?”

Devlin and Garibaldi exchanged looks.

“Why do they come to you?”

“Hey, fellas! Like Michelangelo was to ceilings, Jake is to the human torso. You wanna see my portfolio?”

“Are any of these symbols in there?”

Jake shook his head. “They wouldn’t let me bring my camera. I asked. It’s intricate work doing all that ancient lettering.”

“Okay,” Garibaldi said, handing him a calling card. “You get another request from the guys with the limo, you call me at this number. Got it?”

“Why should I? I haven’t committed any crime! I wouldn’t want to lose their business . . . these guys are good customers.”

Devlin’s eyebrows rose inquisitively. “How good? How many of these things do you do a year?”

“Maybe a hundred or more of the regular ones, and another twenty-five of the specials.”

“What do you mean specials?”

“The ones with the Tree of Life imposed on the Ankh.”

“What does that mean, do you know?”

Jake shrugged. “I don’t know what it means, but the ones who get it seem real proud of themselves. And they’re always the ones who look rich and relaxed. You know like they run the show.”

“And the other hundred—what do they look like?”

Jakes rodent-like face wrinkled in concentration. “Ordinary, I’d say. Like you and me.”

Devlin smiled inwardly at Garibaldi’s look of distaste at the suggestion they bore any resemblance to Jake.

“Listen,” Devlin said with authority. “You call me, when they call you, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

“How?”

“I’ll stay up nights thinking of ways to keep you out of jail,” Devlin said. “Trust me.” He smiled as he said it.

“Tell me we don’t look like that little rat-faced fucker,” Garibaldi said as they hit the street.

“That little rat-faced fucker could identify every member of Maa Kheru if he got squeezed hard enough.”

“He’d have to live long enough first, Lieutenant. They’ll stick his tattoo needle where the sun don’t shine, if they find out we’re on his case.”

J
ames and Peter walked beneath the canopy of building trees that flanked the river. Peter’s hands were plunged deep in his overcoat pockets, his shoulders hunched against the early spring wind, and against the adversity that buffeted him. The walk afforded privacy. And he needed that. He needed James’s council badly; his clarity and good-heartedness. He was beginning to feel shredded by the what-ifs of his relationship with Maggie, and the what-ifs of his priesthood. There was nowhere else to turn.

“All my life, James,” he said with great seriousness, “I’ve been possessed by a desperate need to know God. A kind of Augustinian restlessness . . .”

“‘Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee, O Lord,’”
the large man quoted, his eyes merry. “I’d call that an excellent credential for your chosen field of endeavor.”

Peter smiled wanly. “You know my history, James. You’ve always understood the complexity of my dilemma. I’d seen Christ outside the Church as well as in. I’d seen Him in the laboring laity, and in Eastern mystics, in the exquisite mind-numbing beauty of the world! And there I was, head to head with Christ’s Church—surely, we could not both be right.

“But I couldn’t
know,
for certain, could I, James? Because there’s a Christ within a Christ within a Christ, and He’s a goddamn onion of a Christ! And which part of the onion owns me? And why are the layers never in sync? Was I losing my faith, or making a greater act of faith than any I had ever known?” Peter shook his head, the momentum of remembered passions, momentarily obscuring the present dilemma.

“But now I find myself in an entirely new crisis of faith . . . and I’m struggling to square it with all I’ve been forced to learn.”

“And this Maggie of yours . . . is she the crisis?” James prompted.

Peter nodded, avoiding the other priest’s eyes. “You know, if I’m honest with myself, she touched me, even years ago, when first we met. For years after that weekend at Fordham, I remembered her exuberance and her goodness . . . she was the only clear, sure wind-bell, I think.

“But now . . . she’s taken on other dimensions for me, James, that I keep trying to quantify. She’s smart, and she’s real. I admire her courage. She’s been tempered by life and has come burnished from the flames. I suppose I could come up with half a hundred reasons to parade before you, and none of them would have anything to do with how I
feel.
” He shrugged, unable to explain. “In some inexplicable way, I believe she and I are comrades on our spiritual journey, but I can conceive no way for that to be other than rationalization on my part.”

“I, too, am aware of the spirit-link between you, Peter’ it is apparent in everything you tell me of her,” James said, surprising Peter with his acquiescence. “In my country, civilization is but a thin veneer—the inner grain is primitive, visceral. There are magnetic attractions sometimes . . . hard to understand, harder to escape.” There was no judgment in his words, just observation.

“She makes me long for things I’ve never truly missed before, James,” Peter rushed on, confused. “The human pleasures that eluded me . . . touch, love, family, all the mundane blessings I chose to renounce without ever understanding their enormity. All I have willingly denied myself, I now long for. And I need to know why this should be so, as much as I need to know how to deal with the longing.”

“Perhaps, she makes you human, Peter. Perhaps she brings the body into balance, where only the mind has held sway for a lifetime. One cannot really offer to God that which is unimportant to him, and consider it a worthy sacrifice. Perhaps, God has chosen to show you the value of your gift Him, before asking you one last time if you choose to give it.”

Peter, troubled, pondered what James had said, before speaking again. “I’ve lost my way . . . somehow. I find myself with desires and regrets . . . questioning everything . . . unable, or unwilling, to pull away from that which threatens me.” He shrugged helplessly.

“I fear I’m seduced by my own humanity as much as by my feelings for Maggie. I’m not a boy to be led astray by hormones, James. I’m too old to be seduced merely by the expectation of mad raptures.

“It seems to me that in loving her, in striving to save Cody, I’m not turning from God, but toward him. I see my feelings for her, not as a descent into the carnal and material mire, but as the blithest expression of all that is best in God’s creation. Oh James,
James,
I’m on dangerous ground here! When a man begins to think of potential sin as a paean to God, he’s in very treacherous waters.”

“But you’re right in thinking love the best expression of God on earth, Peter. You must remember, however, that the test lies in how you navigate these waters, not in your mistaking the magnitude of the tide. And, when all is said and done, my friend, who among us is so firm he cannot be seduced?”

“Was I wrong in my battles with the Church, James? Was I deceived by the Adversary and my own pride? Am I deceived
now
in my perceptions of my place in the scheme of Maggie’s dilemma? I keep remembering, the Devil himself can quote Scripture for his own purpose.

“Am I not to be permitted one single sin of the flesh?
I ask myself that in the darkness.” Peter confessed desperately. “Can I not sin like any other man and be forgiven? Am I never to know love—even for one infinitesimal moment—and if I do not, can I then truly love God? Are there some things you can learn
only
by risking sin?” The anguish in Peter’s voice seemed to hover on the air between the two men for several moments.

“Only you can answer that question, Peter,” James replied slowly, knowing full well the truth. “Some men eat apples with impunity . . . for Adam, a heavy price was exacted. And, perhaps, my friend, you must be careful to avoid Augustine’s prayer, ‘O Lord, give me chastity and continency, but not just now.’”

Peter stared at James for a long instant, then turned away and let his gaze drift past the slate-gray river, toward infinity.

“Will you meet her, James?” he asked, without turning around.

“I would like that very much, Peter. Very much, indeed.”