Where the Dark Streets Go (7 page)

Brogan drank his coffee. “They’ve a nice little place on Tenth Street. You’ll be surprised. Or maybe you won’t. They’re nice girls.”

“You said that.”

“I know. But you won’t believe me till you meet them.” He picked up the bottle, crumpling the paper at the neck, and brandished it. “Tally-ho!”

McMahon did not even know if Brogan was married. He did not want to know. He followed him as though the bottle was a pipe and Brogan the piper. And then as they walked, his the careful walk of the man who knows he is drunk and has to take care of the drunkard in him, he began to say to himself, “Jesus help me, Jesus and Mary, help me. Jesus, Mary and Joseph….Only Joseph can help you.” He felt the sweat cold on his brow, on his back, beneath his armpits. As they turned the corner of Sixth Avenue, he heard the rumble of the subway. Students were going down the steps, books under their arms, and the gray of their faces telling of long days’ work and nights spent in the classroom.

“Good night, Brogan.” He heard a part of himself saying it, and it was almost as though another part of him was surprised. “My apologies to the ladies.”

Brogan stood—with the air of a man balancing himself on the top of the world, so that again a part of McMahon wanted to go on with him—and studied the priest for seriousness, for whether or not he wanted to be persuaded. Then he shrugged. “Okay. No hard feelings, Father?”

Father.

“No hard feelings,” McMahon said, but he could not bring himself to a false thanksgiving.

T
HE FIRST THING MCMAHON
thought of when he awakened in the morning was that walk to the subway entrance. Only Joseph can help you. He had never said that before. He sat on the side of the bed, his aching head in his hands, and castigated himself. There were times when he had called on a litany of saints to get him home safely, and once he had pictured himself—or dreamed it—carted home on the back of St. Christopher. On the floor at his feet was his breviary. He had managed his office, just the words, but he had managed it, and he had slept in his own bed. He would have to manage now, for he could not break his fast with an aspirin. He dreaded the first sip of wine at the altar. God forgive me. Lord, I am not worthy….He showered and shaved and saw, whether he wanted to or not, the bloodshot eyes of a priest in the mirror. I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth: the new liturgy had taken that from him, but he never entered the sanctuary that the words did not pass through his mind: to God who gives joy to my youth. Youth and joy. He was forty years old and the devil was hard on his tracks. And there was Muller again, with the dark spittle on his lips:
Do you believe in him, horns, tail and all?
I believe in evil. Deliver us from evil. Amen, amen, amen.

“Well, Joseph, you’ve made
The New York Times
as well as the
Daily News
.” The monsignor was walking through the hall with a cup of coffee in his hand, the papers under his arm, when McMahon went down. The old man was an early riser. He had said the first Mass. The smell of coffee carried through the house, coffee and burnt bacon. The monsignor stopped at the office door and looked back at him. “Don’t you want the papers?”

“Not till later, thank you.”

“You spent the ten by the looks of you.”

“Most of it.”

“Did you have a good time at least?”

He thought of the youngsters and the fire truck, and the beads now lying on his bedside table like a rosary. “A fine time,” he said. Then, remembering Phelan: “How did I make
The Times
?”

“Finding the victim.”

“Ah, of course.” He cleared his throat.

“You’ll be in fine voice for the nuptial Mass,” the old man said dryly.

McMahon had forgotten the wedding, and he had promised a final rehearsal after the eight o’clock Mass. At ten there was a funeral which Purdy would take. He was fonder of funerals than he was of weddings. But so was McMahon, to admit the truth. Or would have been that morning.

“They’ll give us a good lunch at Costello’s after the reception,” the old man said. “But I hope to God they serve French champagne. The sweet stuff turns my stomach.”

McMahon went out the side door and across the cement yard to the sacristy. He knelt on the prie-dieux near the sanctuary while Father Gonzales finished the seven-thirty Mass, which was in Spanish. Suppose it had been Gonzales whom Carlos had run into? Gonzales who knew nothing of Mrs. Phelan and her marital problems, whom Brogan would never have asked to go on the town with him. Or even going, Gonzales might not have been able to identify Phelan even if he wanted to. It was that which stuck in his craw. But there were more things than that in his craw. If it had not been Muller it would have been something else. What is it about, Lord? I shall try to be silent and hear.

He said his own Mass with no more than twenty or thirty people in the church, and most of them there for the wedding rehearsal. The lector read in Spanish and in English. When the priest raised his hand in the final blessing, he noticed the girl rise and leave the church by the side door. He noticed her because she left without genuflecting. He spoke to the wedding party from the altar to say he would be out in a few minutes.

He was removing the chasuble when the girl he had seen leave the church came into the sacristy. She was tall and quite thin, with heavy black hair down to her shoulders and large dark eyes.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you Father McMahon?”

“I am.”

The eyes were not furtive, but she was uneasy. “Am I not allowed to come in here?” she said.

“Why not?” And trying to put her at ease, “We’ve no secrets.”

A little smile. She wore no makeup. But she was not as young as he had thought at first.

He waited before removing the white alb. “Do you want to talk? I’m afraid I have a wedding party out there for a practice run, but it won’t take long.”

“I’ll go,” she said, and put out her hand as though to guide her turn back to the door. Then she shoved the hand into the pocket of her skirt. “Just tell me, what was he like, the man you found?”

“Are you Mim?”

Her head shot up, the lips parted and the eyes grew even wider than before. The face froze in his memory, for almost the instant he said the name she whirled around and was gone. He went to the door after her and called out. But she was running between the sunlight and shadow down the long passageway with all her might. He went out, vestments and all, but by the time he reached the street she was nowhere in sight. The restless groom was pacing the church steps. McMahon did not question him, and he conducted the rehearsal as he was, the white alb billowing out as he strode up and down the aisle.

The visitation haunted him all day, the face as vivid as a Rouault saint—if Rouault had ever painted saints. Between the funeral and wedding Masses, he went to see Mrs. Morales and explained to her and the other women on the stoop that the funeral arrangement was not possible.

The women talked among themselves in Spanish too rapid for his limping understanding of it. Mrs. Morales conducted the council with her hairbrush with which she had been grooming her older daughter’s hair. Anita translated for him: “My mother will bake the cake and put out candles, Father. She wants to know, will you come tonight and say the prayers for the dead?”

“After nine,” he said. “After confessions.”

A woman in curlers—he remembered her from the stoop the day before—gave a toss of her head to the apartment windows alongside. “Father, he’s back.”

He knew she referred to Phelan, but why tell him? It was the same woman who had suggested to him that Carlos’ mother was not home very often. A purveyor of mischief, Mrs. Vargas, no doubt.

“Good,” he said and left quickly.

After the wedding Mass—he excused himself from the luncheon—he spent a half hour on the next month’s calendar of parish activities, then an hour on music, feeling all the while that it should have been the other way around. Then having a few minutes before religious instruction, he took the musical score to
The Bells
into the choir loft and tried it on the pipe organ. The old church fairly vibrated. He pulled out stops that set free voices in the organ that might never have been sounded before in all its years of muted trebling beneath a spinster’s hands. Then to the instructions: for baptized Protestants entering matrimony with Catholics, eager promises and runaway eyes. It was like stamping passports and letting the luggage go. On the subject of birth control, Father? No problem at all to celibates: the words went through his head even as he repeated the church doctrine as lately redefined by the Holy Father.

Miss Lalor made him a special tea and brought it up to his room on a tray, little sandwiches made up of the fish left from the supper he had not come home to the night before, and the pudding from lunch, but with fresh custard, all done daintily. The thing he was forever forgetting about Miss Lalor was that after her tempers, if you didn’t appease them, she came round on a courtship of her own.

“I sent your other suit to the cleaners, Father. You got something muckety on it.”

“Thank you.”

“It struck me afterwards, if you’d wore it yesterday maybe you were saving it for the police?”

“No.”

She lingered in the doorway, wanting to talk about the murder, but unsure of a safe way in. “Wasn’t it nice, them mentioning in the papers that you’re the director of the Girls’ Choir?”

“Nice?” he said, scowling.

“I suppose you’re right. There isn’t anything they wouldn’t turn to publicity nowadays. Eat something, Father. You’re losing too much weight.”

He said nothing, wanting her squat, corseted, lavender-scented presence removed from his doorway.

“Do you want the door closed, Father?”

“Please.”

Alone, he conjured again the girl’s face. He was trying, he told himself, to compare it with his memory of the dead man’s, and there was not any comparison to be made except in his own sense of bereavement at losing both of them so soon. In all the city, and she had fled into the heart of Manhattan, where would you go to look for a dark-haired, dark-eyed girl named Mim? The Duminy Bar? He had thought of going there, but that was Priscilla Phelan’s territory and he did not want to tread on that. Besides, if the girl had known him there, she would not have needed to come to McMahon to inquire what the dead man looked like. She had lost track of him and she had known him by another name, McMahon felt sure. Muller—Mahler: was that the association that had brought her? He felt no incumbence to go to the police. She had not identified the victim, only to herself. Of one thing he was sure: he would not again be used as Brogan had used him, and if he never saw Brogan again, so much the better.

A half hour later he went back to see Rosenberg. The pawnbroker was glad to see him, but he shook his head. “Ach, Father, for me writing is like trying to take fleas from a dog. As soon as I think I have one it disappears into another part of the anatomy. But I will keep trying.”

“Perhaps we should talk,” McMahon said.

“Nothing would give me more pleasure, but on Saturday afternoon I am busy like no other day in the week. You know how the old song goes. Nobody who can raise a buck wants to be broke on Saturday night.”

Even as he spoke a well-dressed young man came into the shop, removing and winding his watch. Rosenberg asked the priest to wait. McMahon watched the transaction from the back of the shop, the gestures, the expressions. He did not hear the words, but the ceremony was as ancient as the charge of usury against the Jews. Another customer came in, this one in a Mexican serape. He reclaimed his guitar with a kind of shamefaced emotion, like someone getting his brother out of jail. Rosenberg, before handing it over to the boy, ran his own fingers over the strings. You see, he seemed to be saying, it had been in good hands.

He came back and entered both transactions in his ledger. He took off his glasses.

“Just one question today,” McMahon said. “Did he ever speak of a girl, Mim, Min, something like that?”

“Many girls but not often by name. Nana Marie. I remember that one. I liked that name, Nana Marie.”

Nim for short, McMahon thought. He wanted to be careful not to start the old man’s thoughts in flight from whatever his association might be. It was a pleasant memory, whatever it was. Then very quietly the priest started: “Where were they together? What kind of neighborhood—or what were they doing?”

“Making love, I should think. Excuse me, Father.”

“I’d think so too,” he encouraged, “but where?”

“There would be a Greek church and it would be a poor neighborhood, for he loved poverty as much as honor. To him poverty was the only honor. No, that is not right. It is the climate of honor. God protect me! If only I could write it down and get it straight.” He struck his temples with his fists.

“It will come, my friend. It will come. Perhaps we can help one another.”

“I will not do this for the police, Father. Honor will not be confused with justice, not by Abel Rosenberg. Where in this world is justice, will you tell me that? And if there is a world in which there is justice, tell me why there is none in this? God is just, you will say, and I will say that is because man is not.”

McMahon smiled. “I have said nothing, my friend. If I had, I’d have said, God is merciful, and that would have upset you even more.”

“Pah! Mercy. Excuse me again. But it was the police who spoke of justice. They were here. I told them about the books. Now they will check the stores for their inventories. Let them. Nothing will be missing except the man himself.”

“The Greek church,” McMahon prompted gently.

“Very old—in a forgotten place, forgotten people: he said that. Beautiful old…” He made an elongated shape with his hands.

“Icons?” McMahon suggested.

He shook his head. “The delicate chains from the rafters to hold the candle bowls, beautiful in the dark of night. He was a janitor. There’s an old-fashioned word for you, a janitor. He would not call himself a building superintendent, not my friend Gust.”

“Not a man to pretend to greatness,” McMahon said.