Thomas M. Disch (18 page)

“Easy with those fingernails,” Wolf told her.

“Sure,” she said. “If you let me have the needle a minute instead.”

“That’s my job, beautiful.”

“Aw, come on. I’ll just put a little heart right here on the end of it.

Come on.”

“She’s got a real sense of humor, don’t she?” the tattooist said to Father Bryce.

The priest replied with a noncommittal grunt, and the tattooing continued, complicated now by Delilah’s inputs. Wolf regarded her casual tweaks and squeezes with an indulgent half-attention, the way a parent keeps half an eye on an infant crawling about on a rug. How Father Bryce regarded her, Clay could only imagine. Wolf had done a lot of work on her, great sweeping curves of flowers and serpents twining up her bare legs and wreathing around her midriff and over her shoulders. There were even tendrils of the design encroaching past the leafy collar circling her neck, like a vine that is always exploring, testing, reaching out. Delilah’s hands were like her own tattoos in that way, restless with a slow-motion inquisitiveness.

Father Bryce endured it without protest until she began to scratch at the hairs of his false mustache with one of her false fingernails, at which point he lifted his hand, signaling a break, and Wolf took his foot off the tattoo gun’s on/off switch. “I think I’ll have some of that whiskey after all.”

“Whatever you say, Damon.” Wolf handed him the uncapped but still untasted pint bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and Father Bryce tilted his head forward to meet the neck of the bottle. Even so, some of the liquor spilled down the side of his mouth. He took a second swallow and then, with a sigh, relaxed.

The tattooing continued for a few more minutes, and then Wolf handed the tattoo gun to Delilah, stood up, and turned to face the peephole through which Clay was watching. “He’s out. And down for the count. No need for you to be holed up in the can.”

Clay got down from the plank he’d been standing on, which was spread across the cracked tank of a defunct toilet. As soon as he was out of the closet-sized bathroom, he lit a cigarette. He’d had one smoke in there just as the tattooing session had started, almost an hour ago, and the air had got so smoky he’d almost had a coughing fit.

He went over to the barber chair that served Wolf as a drafting table and took a closer look at Father Bryce’s tattoo. The outline had been completed at the first session, and now Wolf was darkening the wreathing clouds of smoke that defined the recesses of the Satanic face, the eye sockets, cheekbones, and open mouth.

“It’s starting to look three-D,” Clay commented.

“It’s gettin’ there,” Wolf agreed. “I’m surprised the flicker lasted as long as he did tonight. When the work is concentrated in a single area, the pain is more intense than when the outline is laid in. I thought he might go through the whole session without asking for a drink.”

“You going to let me use the needle on him or not?” Delilah wanted to know.

“What difference does it make if he’s out cold?”

Delilah gave an impatient shake of her tangled black hair, as though Wolf’s words had been a fly bothering her. “I just want to put my mark on him.

The same as you. Okay?”

Wolf turned to Clay. “You mind?”

“On his cock?” Clay asked her.

She grinned, offering a full view of her dental problems.

“Sure, why not. As long as that won’t wake him up.”

“No problem,” said Wolf. “Just with what he’s got in him now, he probably won’t come around till early morning. And if you need longer, I’ll just administer some more of the same medicine.”

Clay went over to the chair where the priest’s clothes lay in a heap. He got a ring of keys from the right-hand pocket.

“I should be back inside of three hours. Don’t let Delilah get carried away, okay? And, urn, what I was asking about earlier?”

Wolf went to a decrepit filing cabinet, unlocked the top drawer, took out a brown paper bag, and handed it to Clay.

Clay hefted the bag with satisfaction. There was something in just the weight of a gun that was like shooting up. You could feel it moving through your bloodstream, effecting changes. It was like walking through an empty house and turning on the lights each time you entered another room.

“The clip’s already in it?”

Wolf nodded.

“Well, see you later.”

The priest’s car was parked along the curb a block north of Knightriders Kustom Ink.

On the floor of the car behind the driver’s seat was the priest’s suit coat, folded up on top of an Adidas bag. His pants and a shirt with a built-in Roman collar were inside the bag. He must have had to drive to the tattoo parlor directly from some official business that had required him to be in uniform.

Just for the hell of it, Clay tried on the whole getup. The pants were a little baggy, but the jacket was a good fit. He checked out the effect of the collar in the rearview mirror. He looked genuinely holy. The gun fit comfortably into the inside breast pocket of the jacket.

Finding Calumet Avenue wasn’t that easy, even having checked the map in advance. He took the wrong exit off 35W and had to detour several blocks to find an overpass that would let him get to the other side of the thruway.

The house he was looking for turned out to be on the corner. A garage with a driveway connecting to the side street. One car was already parked in the driveway, but there was room for Clay to park beside it.

No lights on anywhere in the house, and the back door unlocked. Could anything be easier?

There were ways in which walking through a dark house you had no right to be in was more exciting than armed robbery or even rape. In those situations you had to be able to react so fast there was no chance to savor what you were up to. But this was like being in a movie. Each dark, indefinite shape posed a separate riddle. From the back door there was a short flight of steps up to the kitchen, which had a vague cabbagey stink of home cooking.

Then a right turn into the dining room, with its ceremonial Sunday-dinner table, and on the table a centerpiece of dried flowers, all gray and ghostly in the light that seeped though sheer lacy curtains from the streetlamp at the corner. For a faggot, this Bing Anker seemed to have some very traditional family values. If you thought about it, Clay would have done better getting rid of the priest, who was a total shithead, instead of this Anker guy, who sounded pretty harmless. But it was not Clay’s job to think about such things.

His job was to do what his handler told him.

He figured the guy must be asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms, so when he went through the living room, heading straight for the stairway, he almost didn’t notice the body slumped sideways on the couch. But the moment he did notice it, he realized that someone had done his job for him.

Clay turned on one of a pair of end table lamps, and then thought to draw the drapes. As he turned away from the living room window, he saw himself in the mirror mounted over the sofa: a priest who’d arrived to deliver the last rites. He made a little sign of the cross at the mirror and furrowed his brow. Very priestly, he thought. The uniform suited him.

Then he checked out the corpse. There’d been two shots, one a little above the heart, the other through the gut. The gut shot had soaked the guy’s jeans and the cushion of the sofa. He must have died right away, because all the blood was concentrated right where he was sitting. The blood on his jeans was dry, but the cushion was still slightly damp. Clay was no forensic expert, but he figured the guy had been shot three or four hours ago.

Surprise: Father Bryce was not entirely the dink he had thought. Because who else could it have been? He must have come here on his way to Knightriders.

Maybe it was the tattoo. Maybe it was changing him.

Clay would have to phone his handler to acquaint him with the altered situation, but not from the phone here in the house. He switched off the lamp and retraced his steps to the back door. Just as he was about to get into Father Bryce’s car, a dog walker appeared in the alley behind the garage.

“Good evening, Father,” said the dog walker.

“Good evening,” Clay answered as he got into the car. Inside the car, he almost had to laugh out loud at the weird good luck that had led him to put on the priest’s uniform. It was dark by the garage. The woman walking the dog had seen a man in a Roman collar getting into a black Lincoln. If the woman thought to tell the police about it, that’s all she’d be able to tell them.

It really was as though God were looking after him. There was no
reason
he’d changed into the priest’s clothes. He just liked trying on different kinds of costumes, and this was one kind he’d never tried on before.

Just to be on the safe side, he changed back into his own clothes before he returned to the thruway. No one saw him. Everything was going to be okay.

Even so, as he drove back to Little Canada, he felt edgier and more strung out than he would have been if he’d made the hit himself.

XVI

The whirring he had thought, as he woke, to be the sound of the tattoo gun was, in fact, the buzzing of many bees. He was outdoors, on his back, looking up through branches of white blossoms at an overcast sky. When he tried to shoo away the bees that hovered inches above his face, he found his arm encumbered by a kind of thick blanket or cloak. And on the middle finger of his right hand was a ring with a preposterously large green stone.

He thought: It’s happened again. The pain of the tattooing had tipped him back into this other world.

A garden this time. Fruit trees in blossom, but the day so cloudy the petals seemed to have no radiance. Nor perfume, for the air was rank with the smell of composted waste. Father Bryce had stood in for a convalescing pastor, briefly, in a town near the Iowa border that suffered, when the wind was from the wrong direction, from a similar stench, which had been generated by a fertilizer factory. The garden abutted a meagerly windowed building built of massive blocks of cut stone, and it was enclosed on the other three sides by a high wall of the same cyclopean stonework. A large, lichen-crusted calvary formed the centerpiece of the garden. The figure of the crucified Christ was almost ludicrously primitive, goggle-eyed and eagle-beaked, like some African ceremonial mask.

He was not alone in this garden. A monkish figure fidgeted in the recessed doorway of the building, glancing toward Father Bryce and then averting his glance, like an anxious waiter in a restaurant with few customers. It was the same fat little priest he’d struck, and screamed at, in his earlier dream. But he was also, Father Bryce realized now, a metamorphosed version of the tattooist, Wolf.

Alert to Father Bryce’s glance, the fat priest took a few hesitant steps forward and asked, with a reverent cringe, “Are you recovered, Your Grace?” He spoke in a language that Father Bryce could not identify—not Latin, not Italian, not French, but with a flavor of each— though he was able to take in the sense of it without difficulty.

To reply was difficult until he stopped trying to think of the particular words he meant to say and aimed simply for a certain tone of voice, one that might elicit an explanation of his situation without betraying his entire estrangement, the fact that he had no notion who he was or what was expected of him. He found the tone, and the words came: “I am still… a bit confused.”

“Naturally, Your Grace. You are unaccustomed to the close air, and the fetor, of the crypt. Not to mention having to witness those things being done.

If one is not used to the methods that must be used in interrogation, the sight can be unsettling. Even though one understands that those being put to the question have brought on their own sufferings by the sin of heresy, one feels an instinctual compassion. A revulsion, such as one might feel in a slaughterhouse if one were not schooled in the work of butchering. You will recall that I advised against your accompanying the Legate into the interrogation cells. He is inured to these things. You might even say it is his trade.”

“And the Legate… where is he now?”

“Still below, Your Grace. Examining the woman.”

Your Grace. He was always Your Grace, which implied the rank of bishop or archbishop. The coarse, scratchy robe in which he was dressed (it was the source of the stench) would seem to contradict such a high self-estimate. But then there was this extraordinary ring. He looked at the stone intently, but knowing nothing of the craft of jewelry, he could not tell if it was a genuine emerald or… whatever. Of course, in dreams bishops and beggars are all one.

“Would Your Grace care for a cup of water? Perhaps a sip of red wine, as a tonic?”

“Some wine, yes.”

While the fat priest went to fetch the wine, Father Bryce pushed himself—with a flash of pain in the small of his back—up into a sitting position, resting his shoulder against the knobbed bole of a fruit tree. A few petals fluttered down from the branches above to settle on the rough fabric of his robe. He fingered the robe’s stiff, dirt-encrusted sleeve. His fingernails were grimed, and the skin about the knuckles was cracked and caked with dirt.

He was filthy, in the way that some derelicts become filthy, as though his flesh, unbathed for months, had made an insectile exoskeleton, a mortar compounded of dirt and its own exudate, not to be removed except by surgery.