Pinn did not adore him. He raised one skeletal hand and pointed a bony finger at the priest: “You make me sick, you self-righteous son of a bitch.”
Evidently Father Tom had decided to weather this outrageous verbal assault without response.
As he paced, Pinn chopped at the air with the sharp edge of one hand, as though struggling—with considerable frustration—to sculpt his words into a truth that the priest could understand. “We’re not taking any more of your crap, no more of your interference. I’m not going to threaten to kick your teeth out myself, though I’d sure as hell enjoy doing it. Never liked to dance, you know, but I’d sure like to dance on your stupid face. But no threats like before, no, not this time, not ever again. I’m not even going to threaten to send them after you, because I think that would actually appeal to you. Father Eliot the martyr, suffering for God. Oh, you’d like that—wouldn’t you?—being a martyr, suffering such a rotten death without complaint.”
Father Tom stood with his head bowed, his eyes downcast, his arms straight at his sides, as though waiting patiently for this storm to pass.
The priest’s passivity inflamed Pinn. The mortician made a sharp-knuckled fist of his right hand and pounded it into the palm of his left, as if he needed to hear the hard snap of flesh on flesh, and now his voice was as rich with scorn as with fury. “You’d wake up some night, and they’d be all over you, or maybe they’d take you by surprise in the bell tower or in the sacristy when you’re kneeling at the prie-dieu, and you’d surrender yourself to them in ecstasy, in a sick ecstasy, reveling in the pain, suffering for your God—that’s the way you’d see it—suffering for your dead God, suffering your way straight into Heaven. You dumb bastard. You hopeless retard. You’d even pray for them, pray your heart out for them as they tore you to pieces. Wouldn’t you, priest?”
To all of this, the chubby priest responded with lowered eyes and mute endurance.
Keeping my own silence required effort. I had questions for Jesse Pinn. Lots of questions.
Here, however, there was no crematory fire to which I could hold his feet to force answers out of him.
Pinn stopped pacing and loomed over Father Tom. “No more threats against you, priest. No point to it. Just gives you a thrill to think of suffering for the Lord. So this is what’ll happen if you don’t stay out of our way—we’ll waste your sister. Pretty Laura.”
Father Tom raised his head and met Pinn’s eyes, but still he said nothing.
“I’ll kill her myself,” Pinn promised. “With this gun.”
He withdrew a pistol from inside his suit coat, evidently from a shoulder holster. Even at a distance and in this poor light, I could see that the barrel was unusually long.
Defensively, I put my hand into my jacket pocket, on the butt of the Glock.
“Let her go,” said the priest.
“We’ll never let her go. She’s too…interesting. Fact is,” Pinn said, “before I kill Laura, I’ll rape her. She’s still a good-looking woman, even if she’s getting strange.”
Laura Eliot, who had been a friend and colleague of my mother’s, was indeed a lovely woman. Although I hadn’t seen her in a year, her face came readily to mind. Supposedly, she had obtained employment in San Diego when Ashdon eliminated her position. Dad and I had received a letter from Laura, and we’d been disappointed that she hadn’t come around to say good-bye in person. Evidently that was a cover story and she was still in the area, being held against her will.
Finding his voice at last, Father Tom said, “God help you.”
“I don’t need help,” Pinn said. “When I jam the gun in her mouth, just before I pull the trigger, I’ll tell her that her brother says he’ll see her soon, see her soon in Hell, and then I’ll blow her brains out.”
“God help me.”
“What did you say, priest?” Pinn inquired mockingly.
Father Tom didn’t answer.
“Did you say, ‘God help me’?” Pinn taunted. “‘God help me’? Not very damn likely. After all, you aren’t one of His anymore, are you?”
This curious statement caused Father Tom to lean back against the wall and cover his face with his hands. He might have been weeping; I couldn’t be sure.
“Picture your lovely sister’s face,” said Pinn. “Now picture her bone structure twisting, distorting, and the top of her skull blowing out.”
He fired the pistol at the ceiling. The barrel was long because it was fitted with a sound suppressor, and instead of a loud report, there was nothing but a noise like a fist hitting a pillow.
In the same instant and with a hard clang, the bullet struck the rectangular metal shade of the lamp suspended directly above the mortician. The fluorescent tube didn’t shatter, but the lamp swung wildly on its long chains; an icy blade of light like a harvesting scythe cut bright arcs through the room.
In the rhythmic sweep of light, though Pinn himself did not at first move, his scarecrow shadow leaped at other shadows that flapped like blackbirds. Then he holstered the pistol under his coat.
As the chains of the swinging light fixture torqued, the links twisted against one another with enough friction to cause an eerie ringing, as if lizard-eyed altar boys in blood-soaked cassocks and surplices were ringing the unmelodious bells of a satanic mass.
The shrill music and the capering shadows seemed to excite Jesse Pinn. An inhuman cry issued from him, primitive and psychotic, a caterwaul of the sort that sometimes wakes you in the night and leaves you wondering about the species of origin. As that spittle-rich sound sprayed from his lips, he hammered his fists into the priest’s midsection, two hard punches.
Quickly stepping out from behind the lute-playing angel, I tried to draw the Glock, but it caught on the lining of my jacket pocket.
As Father Tom doubled over from the two blows, Pinn locked his hands and clubbed them against the back of the priest’s neck.
Father Tom dropped to the floor, and I finally ripped the pistol out of my pocket.
Pinn kicked the priest in the ribs.
I raised the Glock, aimed at Pinn’s back, and engaged the laser sighting. As the mortal red dot appeared between his shoulder blades, I was about to say enough, but the mortician relented and stepped away from the priest.
I kept my silence, but to Father Tom, Pinn said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. If you can’t be part of the future, then get the hell out of the way.”
That sounded like a parting line. I switched off the laser sighting and retreated behind the angel just as the undertaker turned away from Father Tom. He didn’t see me.
To the singing of the chains, Jesse Pinn walked back the way he had come, and the jittery sound seemed to issue not from overhead but from within him, as though locusts were swarming in his blood. His shadow repeatedly darted ahead of him and then leaped behind until he passed beyond the arcing sword of light from the swinging fixture, became one with the darkness, and rounded the corner into the other arm of the L-shaped room.
I returned the Glock to my jacket pocket.
From the cover of the dysfunctional crèche, I watched Father Tom Eliot. He was lying at the foot of the stairs, in the fetal position, curled around his pain.
I considered going to him to determine if he was seriously hurt, and to learn what I could about the circumstances that lay behind the confrontation I had just witnessed, but I was reluctant to reveal myself. I stayed where I was.
Any enemy of Jesse Pinn’s should be an ally of mine—but I could not be certain of Father Tom’s goodwill. Although adversaries, the priest and the mortician were players in some mysterious underworld of which I had been utterly unaware until this very night, so each of them had more in common with the other than with me. I could easily imagine that, at the sight of me, Father Tom would scream for Jesse Pinn, and that the undertaker would fly back, black suit flapping, with the inhuman caterwaul vibrating between his thin lips.
Besides, Pinn and his crew evidently were holding the priest’s sister somewhere. Possession of her gave them a lever and fulcrum with which to move Father Tom, while I had no leverage whatsoever.
The chilling music of the torquing chains gradually faded, and the sword of light described a steadily diminishing arc.
Without a protest, without even an involuntary groan, the priest drew himself to his knees, gathered himself to his feet. He was not able to stand fully erect. Hunched like an ape and no longer comic in any aspect of face or body, with one hand on the railing, he began to pull himself laboriously up the steep, creaking steps toward the church above.
When at last he reached the top, he would switch off the lights, and I would be left here below in a darkness that even St. Bernadette herself, miracle worker of Lourdes, would find daunting. Time to go.
Before retracing my path through the life-size figures of the crèche, I raised my eyes for the first time to the painted eyes of the lute-playing angel in front of me—and thought I saw a blue to match my own. I studied the rest of the lacquered-plaster features and, although the light was weak, I was sure that this angel and I shared a face.
This resemblance paralyzed me with confusion, and I struggled to understand how this Christopher Snow angel could have been here waiting for me. I have rarely seen my own face in brightness, but I know its reflection from the mirrors of my dimly lit rooms, and this was a similar light. This was unquestionably me: beatific as I am not, idealized, but me.
Since my experience in the hospital garage, every incident and object seemed to have significance. No longer could I entertain the possibility of coincidence. Everywhere I looked, the world oozed uncanniness.
This was, of course, the route to madness: viewing all of life as one elaborate conspiracy conducted by elite manipulators who see all and know all. The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut. Cosmically speaking, we are barely able to tie our shoes. If there is, indeed, some secret order to the universe, it is not of our doing, and we are probably not even capable of apprehending it.
The priest was a third of the way up the stairs.
Stupefied, I studied the angel.
Many nights during the Christmas season, year after year, I had cycled along the street on which St. Bernadette’s stood. The crèche had been arranged on the front lawn of the church, each figure in its proper place, none of the gift-bearing magi posing as a proctologist to camels—and this angel had not been there. Or I hadn’t realized that it was there. The likely explanation, of course, was that the display was too brightly lighted for me to risk admiring it; the Christopher Snow angel had been part of the scene, but I had always turned my face from it, squinted my eyes.
The priest was halfway up the stairs and climbing faster.
Then I remembered that Angela Ferryman had attended Mass at St. Bernadette’s. Undoubtedly, considering her dollmaking, she had been prevailed upon to lend her talent to the making of the crèche.
End of mystery.
I still couldn’t understand why she would have assigned my face to an angel. If my features belonged anywhere in the manger scene, they should have been on the donkey. Clearly, her opinion of me had been higher than I warranted.
Unwanted, an image of Angela rose in my mind’s eye: Angela as I had last seen her on the bathroom floor, her eyes fixed on some last sight farther away than Andromeda, head tilted backward into the toilet bowl, throat slashed.
Suddenly I was certain that I had missed an important detail when I’d found her poor torn body. Repulsed by the gouts of blood, gripped by grief, in a state of shock and fear, I had avoided looking long at her—just as, for years, I had avoided looking at the figures in the brightly lighted crèche outside the church. I had seen a vital clue, but it had not registered consciously. Now my subconscious taunted me with it.
As Father Tom reached the top of the steps, he broke into sobs. He sat on the landing and wept inconsolably.
I could not hold fast to a mental image of Angela’s face. Later there would be time to confront and, reluctantly, explore that Grand Guignol memory.
From angel to camel to magi to Joseph to donkey to Holy Virgin to lamb to Lamb, I wove silently through the crèche, then past file cabinets and boxes of supplies, into the shorter and narrower space where little was stored, and onward toward the door of the utilities room.
The sounds of the priest’s anguish resonated off the concrete walls, fading until they were like the cries of some haunting entity barely able to make itself heard through the cold barrier between this world and the next.
Grimly, I recalled my father’s wrenching grief in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital, on the night of my mother’s death.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I keep my own anguish private. When one of those wild cries threatens to arise, I bite hard until I chew the energy out of it and swallow it unspoken.
In my sleep I grind my teeth—no surprise—until I wake some nights with aching jaws. Perhaps I am fearful of giving voice in dreams to sentiments I choose not to express when awake.
On the way out of the church basement, I expected the undertaker—waxy and pale, with eyes like day-old blood blisters—to drop on me from above or to soar out of the shadows around my feet or to spring like an evil jack-in-the-box from a furnace door. He was not waiting anywhere along my route.
Outside, Orson came to me from among the tombstones, where he had hidden from Pinn. Judging by the dog’s demeanor, the mortician was gone.
He stared at me with great curiosity—or I imagined that he did—and I said, “I don’t really know what happened in there. I don’t know what it meant.”
He appeared dubious. He has a gift for looking dubious: the blunt face, the unwavering eyes.
“Truly,” I insisted.
With Orson padding at my side, I returned to my bicycle. The granite angel guarding my transportation did not resemble me in the least.
The fretful wind had again subsided into a caressing breeze, and the oaks stood silent.
A shifting filigree of clouds was silver across the silver moon.
A large flock of chimney swifts swooped down from the church roof and alighted in the trees, and a few nightingales returned, too, as though the cemetery had not been sanctified until Pinn had departed it.
Holding my bike by the handlebars, I pondered the ranks of tombstones and said: “‘…the dark grew solid around them, finally changing to earth.’ That’s Louise Glück, a great poet.”