Funny. She frowned as strands of his white hair tickled her cheek. I don't remember giving him those.
Then he turned her face to one side, and used them on her.
John Keller's room in the rectory's living quarters resembled a stark, claustrophobic prison cell. It contained a bed, a night table, and one postage stamp of a window, the glass panes painted black for privacy. An old wooden cross nailed to the wall above the bed was the only decoration. His order permitted no personal possessions, so the tiny closet contained nothing but John's suits and high-mass vestments.
It had been hard to give up what Alexandra and the Kellers had given him over the years—the street kid inside him craved money, or what could be traded for it—but John had rid himself of everything. He had gone into the seminary passionately believing what his mentor had told him: Christ is all you will ever need.
All he had besides Christ were his few clothes and this room, lit by a bare, fifteen-watt bulb screwed into a center ceiling fixture. Enough light to see and move around without banging into furniture. Not enough to see clearly or waste electricity. Not enough to remove the shadows waiting to swallow him.
John didn't mind, except at night. Under his pillow was a small but strong-beamed flashlight, and most nights, he slept with his hand curled around it. He needed it for the worst moments, when he jerked out of sleep, sure he felt a groping hand or the cold press of a blade. He'd hidden his fear from everyone, and only Audra had known how bad it was. She had been the one to understand that he wasn't afraid of the dark, but of what came out of it. She had given him his first flashlight.
You turn it on and look around the room whenever you want, John Patrick. Then you say this prayer: 'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless this bed I sleep upon. Mary, Mother, guiding light, keep me safe throughout the night.'
Toward dawn on the fifth day after his sister had disappeared, John lay dreaming. Not of Alexandra, or the bleak years before the Kellers had taken them in.
In his dream John again walked through the Raul Pompéia, searching for Maria.
Being reassigned from the village to the urban parish hadn't bothered him; he had made little headway with the shy, reclusive natives of the rain forest and hoped to do better in the slums. For a time, he had, especially when he was given charge over the dozen street orphans cared for by the mission. True, they were more eager for food at mealtimes than the Gospel he read. Rome had not been built in a day, and neither was a good Christian soul. He could affirm that from personal experience.
No, everything had been going well—superbly, in fact—until the day eleven-year-old Maria disappeared.
At first, the other children refused to tell John where the little girl had gone. When he wheedled the truth out of them, he was appalled. Maria wasn't an orphan, but the youngest daughter upon whom a large and mainly penniless family depended. For her family, who were now starving, she had chosen to return to her former profession. She would be all right, the orphans assured him. There were plenty of cruising motorists and tourists who had the thirty centavos it took to buy an hour with a menina do doce.
"Hei, padre."
John turned toward the voice, although it wasn't Maria's. Neither was the face. This lost soul was at least ten years older, not a little girl at all, although she had the same underfed scrawniness and wet-black eyes as John's missing charge. She was chewing gum with a slow, mechanical motion of her narrow jaw. The sweat-stained shirt open to the waist bared a V of bony sternum and the outer contours of slightly deflated breasts. Her miniskirt was skintight at the hips; a parenthesis of air appeared between her emaciated thighs.
Father.
Recognizing the type, and the intent, John changed direction. The voice called out again on a waft of mint-scented breath. "Falaram-me de você."
I've heard of you.
John had made no secret that he was looking for Maria, but he didn't know how anyone here would have heard of him. The mission was over three miles away, in a part of the slums where there was less risk of getting one's throat cut. The inhabitants of the Raul Pompêia did not attend mass.
Fear that Maria was already working the streets—here, in this hellhole—drove him to the alcove. "Que disse?"
"You American, yeah?" Brown, soiled fingers curled around the plain pewter crucifix John wore and gave it several obscene pumps.
Father Keller.
John gently extracted his cross. It wasn't this young woman's fault that she had been trained from birth to entice a man, or that she didn't understand the sanctity of the priesthood. "I'm looking for a ten-year-old girl named Maria. She ran away from the mission. Compreende?"
Black, soulless eyes flashed up. "No Maria." She slid her matchstick arms around his waist and locked her hands at the curve of his spine. Her smile was as joyless as the mechanic grind of her narrow hips into his. "Me."
He tried to thrust her away, as he had every night he dreamed of her. "I'm a priest. I'm a priest."
"I like priest." She clung to him, and her voice changed. "Please, Father… please…"
"Father, please!"Someone shook him out of the nightmare.
"What?" John sat straight up and nearly struck Mrs. Murphy in the face with the flashlight.
The older woman reeled back. "Sure and I'm sorry, Father, but you have to wake up now. Himself is here, and waiting on you."
John automatically hauled the sheet up over his shoulder and rolled over to face the wall and conceal his morning erection. "Who is, Mrs. Murphy?"
"His Grace, the archbishop. He's come to see you personal, Father." She made it sound like an audience with the pope.
"I'll be there in ten minutes."
John stripped out of his nightshirt and used a wad of tissue to wipe the night sweat from his chest and armpits. His penis, still engorged and stiff, bobbed to his movements like a conductor's baton. One unpleasant side effect of celibacy was getting erections that often lasted for hours.
Viagra had nothing on the priesthood.
If Mrs. Murphy hadn't woken him, John probably would have ejaculated in his sleep, and there would have been the linens to deal with again. Another trip to the coin Laundromat around the corner, where John went after bad nights to wash the semen stains from his sheets. He told himself it was to preserve Mrs. Murphy's delicate sensibilities, but in truth it was self-assigned penance. Each time he went there, people stared with accusing eyes or whispered behind his back. He sometimes wondered if they could smell the sin on his bed linens as he came through the door.
I am not worthy, Father.
He was hard as granite, though, thanks to Mrs. Murphy and the interrupted dream, and no amount of concentration could make his erection subside. The monks at the seminary, all Franciscans of the First Order, had instructed him not to touch or even to think of touching himself.
Only the briefest touches, only to urinate, only to bathe.
Self-stimulation violated the vow of chastity, and it was an everlastingly sinful act to spill his seed through masturbation. A man's semen was to be produced only inside the vagina of a woman, to serve the purpose for which God had created it: to impregnate her. Since a priest was celibate, he had no legitimate reason to encourage that sort of production.
On the other hand, one did not sport a boner during an audience with the bishop.
In a few days, it won't matter. When John took hold of his shaft, his testicles tightened, as if shrinking from his own touch. A certain acid amusement tinged his bleak mood. At least I still have good Catholic balls.
Hei, padre… hei, padre… hei, padre…
John ignored the guilt and the memories, and began to work his fist methodically and rapidly. Like the candy girl from Rio, he took no joy in the act, and his eyes never left the wooden cross on the wall.
Father, forgive me.
Chapter Six
Alex usually never remembered her dreams, but she hoped she'd hang on to some of this one.
Tapered candles burned steadily over a gourmet feast laid out on a long table. The ivory lace under the silver platters and heavy bone china place settings was cobweb fine; the nice-looking people seated could have been models or actors. Someone was playing a harp, the sound of which always reminded her of wind chimes and waterfalls.
She looked around, trying to spot someone or something familiar, but it all seemed new to her eyes. Where am I? Le Meridien's ballroom?
None of the guests were eating, but maybe the host had yet to appear. A chair stood empty at the head of the table. Of course one couldn't chow down if the guy footing the bill hadn't heard the dinner bell. Alex's foster mother, Audra Keller, had ragged her and John on things like that. You don't pick up a fork until everyone is seated and has said grace, sweetheart. It isn't polite.
For years Alex had wondered who "Grace" was and why they had to say her name. She had never connected the word with the little singsong prayers Audra had taught her and John to say before they were allowed to eat.
Of course, Audra had never picked scraps out of a trash can, or watched her big brother bully a bag lunch out of a kid on the way to school. She had never eaten newspaper to keep from passing out from the shakes, or suffered the gnawing emptiness that never completely went away. Audra had been born, lived, and died a rich lady. Alex had been young enough to adjust to having enough to eat fairly fast, but it had taken the Kellers months to convince ten-year-old John to stop squirreling food away in his room.
Alex wasn't dressed for dinner. Why she had come here in her bloodstained surgical scrubs, she couldn't say. She wasn't even sure why she was sitting on the beautiful table in front of the empty chair. She shifted and felt something round and hard parked under her butt. She rooted for a minute and then realized that she was sitting on the host's place setting.
My ass on a plate. Couple of nurses over in OR would pay good money to see this. She was about to hoist herself off when a weasel with pale fur leaped up onto the empty chair. It stood straight up on its hind legs and stared at her with its polished peppercorn eyes. Alex regarded it with the same enthusiasm she would its human cousin, the personal-injury attorney. What do you want, you little egg sucker?