VC03 - Mortal Grace (49 page)

The bartender was polishing the cash register. Except for him and Sandy and Eff, the Sea Shell was deserted.

Eff signaled the bartender for another diet soda. “And a tequila sunrise for my friend.”

“Tell me about this job.” Beneath his floppy dark bangs, Sandy was sweating bullets and birdshit.

Eff could see he’d taken some of that killer Ecstasy that had been hitting the streets lately. “It’s an acting job.”

“I can’t. Something’s wrong with my dick. It hurts when I come.”

“Not that kind of acting.” Eff smiled. “This guy’s a priest. You pretend to be a repentant sinner getting confession and communion.”

The bartender brought their drinks and took Eff’s empty. Eff and Sandy clinked.

“I haven’t been to church in a long time.” Sandy radiated a nervousness that was almost electric. “I don’t remember all that getting up and getting down and crossing stuff.”

“Tell him you used to know but you’re too stoned to remember.” Eff handed him a neatly rolled joint. “Smoke it in the men’s room.”

When Sandy came back there was a goofy smile on his face and an easy float to his walk.

“Let’s see your tongue,” Eff said.

Sandy opened his mouth.

Eff dropped a pink pill onto his tongue and handed him a fresh tequila sunrise.

Sandy swallowed. “What was that?”

The guy did not possess the smarts of a flea.

“Just to be sure you stay mellow.” Eff pushed up from his chair. “Come on, time to move. It’s getting late.”

“Fuck it!” Eff screamed. “You’ve gone past it!” The driver stamped on the brakes. The taxi veered to the right and slammed to a stop. A shuddering vibration slid through Sandy and made him feel sick and dizzy. He tried to hold images and sounds in focus.

Eff thrust a fistful of singles at the driver. “Learn English, asshole!”

Sandy stood on a quiet tree-lined sidewalk. Above the slanting roofs, a nearby steeple made a thread of fire in the setting sun.

Eff steered him up the block and into a service alley.

Trash cans were lined up with collars of black plastic bags neatly visible under the lids.

Eff pushed Sandy up three wooden steps to a porch. Their footsteps echoed clumsily on the hollow planking.

Eff pushed a doorbell.

In the distance, an ambulance siren howled.

It was two minutes before the door opened. A priest stood in the doorway, dressed to celebrate Mass.

“Come on in, Sandy.” The priest smiled, and his whole face glowed. “Eff has told me a lot about you.”

The gold-embroidered vestments formed a sort of whispering waterfall. There was no fixed point for Sandy to focus on.

“This is my body, which I gave for you.” The priest made a sign of the cross.

Sandy’s vision held the image like a series of time-frozen overlapping stills, and the cross looped into a cloverleaf.

A wafer levitated from a napkin placed across a silver plate.

Sandy opened his mouth to receive it.

The priest placed it instead in his hands.

“Whoops.” Sandy heard himself, and it was like another person giggling. “My mistake.” He knew he was screwing up, too eager to do it right and too goofy when he did it wrong.

What the hell was that pink pill?
he wondered.
I’ve never been like this before.

Instinct told him to get up off his knees. He used the altar railing to push himself to standing. Wobbling, he turned from the altar.

Above a sea of empty pews, the church was a dark cavern. The door at the end of the aisle seemed a million uncrossable light-years away, like a star glimpsed through the wrong end of a telescope.

Hands held him. He floated forward through the wash of darkness. Beyond the door, moonlight fell on a rising sun. The sun had a face, and the face was smiling. Beneath it, white lettering on the side of a blue van spelled
GOD LOVES YOU—SO DO I.

He floated up, and now they were driving along a street dotted with trees.

“Tell me, my son, how long have you been a runaway?”

“A few years,” Sandy heard himself answer. No giggle this time. He was doing better, getting a grip on it.

“How long have you been taking dope?”

“A few years.”

“When you let drugs take you to the bottom level of society, you break your parents’ hearts. You steal from them, betray them.” The head of the man on the seat beside him was not so much turned as aimed. The voice could have been talking for a moment or an hour. “You take your girlfriend into shooting galleries and trade her body for dope and you know it’s not right.”

“Right,” Sandy said.

The van passed through gates and into a garage.

“Tell me, my son, how long have you been prostituting yourself?”

“Fuck, I don’t know….”
Tell the sucker what he wants to hear.
“Years.”

Hands helped Sandy float out of the van and up a flight of stairs. Here there was a wall of lettering to focus on:

Bring me young sinners.

Suffer the little children to come unto me.

He who dies with forgiveness of sins…wins!

A wave of nausea took him. “I need the bathroom.”

“Right in there.”

He knelt at the toilet and tried to vomit. Empty retchings racked him till his ribs ached. Nothing came up.
It’s that pill, I know it’s that pink pill.
He staggered back into the other room.

On a bureau, incense burned in a small copper bowl. The place reeked.

A voice suddenly coaxed behind his left ear: “The peace of God?” It was like a drug dealer’s whisper in the street, offering something forbidden but delicious.

Sandy turned. “Sure, why the hell not?”

In that last instant his vision had an ice-water clarity. The arm of a white robe flew through space, blazing with gold trim.

SIXTY-TWO

B
ONNIE SAT BOLT UPRIGHT,
suddenly wide awake.

The blackness of the bedroom flowed around her, full of tiny silences. A slit of light peeked through the blinds. It seemed to be pulsating.

A sound brushed the air—a kind of squealing—muffled, distant.

She recognized what had awakened her: the cry of brakes. Or was it a human cry?

She held her breath, listening.

Outside the closed window, faint above the hum of the air conditioner, glass broke. A numbness climbed the back of her neck.

She pushed up from the bed. Sluggish legs carried her around the ridged, straight-backed Victorian armchair. She pushed up a slat of the blinds and stared out.

Across the way, one of the rectory windows winked.

That’s just a streetlight
, she told herself.
There’s nobody in the rectory
—
if anyone had broken in the burglar alarm would have gone off.

She waited. The rectory windows stared back at her like eyes with nothing alive behind them. There was only the deserted street, the shimmering gray vault of the New York night.

The light winked again, on the ground story, in the rector’s window.

Down in the street, brakes yelped. A metallic blue Toyota van lurched to a stop, wheels shrieking against the pavement. A man in a security guard’s uniform jumped out and crossed to the rectory door.

She let the blind fall back. She yanked a raincoat from the closet and buttoned it on the way down to the street.

The guard was shining his flashlight through one of the windows. A walkie-talkie was sputtering on his hip.

“It’s my fault.” Bonnie caught her breath. “I forgot to reset the alarm.”

Smoky eyes studied her from beneath slitted lids. “When was that?” He had a deep southern accent, like a white sheriff.

“Just a little while ago.”

“This
is
New York City. These
are
the nineties.” A bright finger of light moved across brownstone and bay windows and up to gables and dormers. “Let’s make sure these windows haven’t been forced.”

She unlocked the door. Something cool and faintly stale drifted out. Tiny red lights were dancing on the alarm box. She punched in the code.

“Want me to take a look around?” He stood on the doorstep, smiling at her strangely.

“No. Thank you. It was my fault. I’m sorry.”

She could feel him wondering about her.

“Sign here.” He held out a metal clipboard.

She signed.

He touched a hand to his cap.

She closed the door, and she could hear him outside, speaking into his walkie-talkie. A moment later the van drove away.

Her eye scanned the dimness. She breathed through half-parted lips.

Deep inside the house, something made a scratching sound. Halfway down the corridor, the door to Father Joe’s study was ajar.

She moved toward it. The lamp threw a soft splash of light across the desk top. The file cabinet was open and Father Joe stood feeling through the files.

He’d lost a terrible amount of weight in the hospital.

He was an orderly file keeper, and she could see what he was doing: his left thumb was in the
B
section of the top drawer, and his right forefinger was counting off the letters of the alphabet. He carefully tugged out the
M
folder.

Now he turned toward the desk. He seemed to orient himself by the light. It broke her heart to see how he moved with an old man’s caution. He tested every step with a slow, sweeping outstretched hand before committing himself.

The plane of his hand was an inch higher than the back of the chair. He bumped into it and muttered and shoved it impatiently out of the way.

He found the desk and opened the folder. He held a page under the lamp. First he bent down and brought his eyes close to the page, and then he stood up and brought the page close to his eyes. He tried different focal lengths—far, medium—and finally he sighed in frustration.

She’d never in her life heard him sigh like that. Exasperated. Almost giving in to rage.

Almost, but not quite.

“Dear Lord, help your foul-tempered servant.”

He stood there silently. She could feel him calming himself, centering himself.

He turned once more, orienting himself this time by the desk at his back. He walked in a slow, straight line to the wall. His hand struck the paneling. He felt to the right, as far as the mantelpiece.

He crouched down at the fireplace. He felt for the andiron and the brass cup of long decorator matches. He struck a match and moved it back and forth in front of his eyes.

He opened the folder and held the first sheet to the flame. When it had caught, he groped under the log and found a piece of kindling.

He held the paper to the thin strip of wood until the wood was lit. He laid the kindling under the log. He balled the next sheet and fed it to the fire.

“Joe,” she said.

He went on with his work, unsurprised. “Hello, Bonnie.”

“You should be in the hospital.”

“I have to burn these.”

“What are they?”

“Records of my discussions with Martin Barth and anyone else whose initials are
M.B.
I wish I could be more exact in my blitzkrieg, but I can’t.”

Her head suddenly ached so heavily that it seemed filled with lead.

“By the way, I’m really much better at getting around than I seem. I’ve just been in bed so long my legs are weak.”

“I can’t let you burn those papers.”

He turned. Despite the weight loss and the hospital pallor, he had a look of sinewy determination. “Anything a parishioner tells me in confidence remains confidential. I don’t care what the law says.”

“Is there something you’re hiding?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“The point is, I’m not an agent of the state. These papers could be shopping lists and the police still would have no right to see them. I won’t ask you to agree with me; I won’t even ask you to help me destroy them. But please, my dear, don’t try to stop me.”

“Have you heard anything from Father Joe?” Cardozo asked.

“He hasn’t called.” There was something hesitant, almost jittery in Bonnie’s voice. It could have been a bad connection.

“Let me know if he does.” Cardozo hung up and sat drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk.

“Bad news?” Ellie stepped into the cubicle carrying a stack of fresh-looking files. Today she was wearing a dress with bold, splashy orange-on-gray patterns like graffiti on a wall.

“No news.”

“Sometimes that can be just as bad.”

“Worse. What are those?”

“Results of the 2-High canvass.”

“Anything turn up?”

“Zilch.” She looked at the desk, then at him. Without a word, she cleared a space in the paper chaos and thunked the DD5s down. “Beirut couldn’t be any worse than Highland Road. I don’t see how those old people survive.”

Cardozo leafed through the stack. Something flagged his attention, some subliminal shadow of a missed possibility. He leafed back through the stack and stopped at a list of tenants in one of the buildings. “You and Sam interviewed a woman called Delphillea Huttington?”

Ellie nodded. “She was an old sweetie.”

“I wonder if that could be a typo.” He lifted the phone and dialed the number. A woman answered. “Hello, Mrs. Huttington—or is it Mrs. Huffington?”

“The name is Huffington.”

“I’m looking for a young man who goes by the name of Eff Huffington?”

“Well, my grandson Francis sometimes uses the nickname Eff.”

“I sent your grandson a letter at your house. Did he ever get it?”

At the word
grandson
, Ellie turned around.

“Oh, yes, Father.” The woman’s voice became friendly. “It’s so nice to visit with you at last, even if it’s only on the phone.”

“Nice to visit with you, Mrs. Huffington.”

“Eff got your letter yesterday. He said he was going to take care of it right away. I’ll tell him you called. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him.”

“How can I get in touch with Eff? It’s urgent.”

“Lord, I wish I knew. He never has an address. The only time I see him is when he gets in touch with me.”