Resolved kac-15 Page 12

  One thing they didn't ever talk about was the connection between them, which was that Raney had saved her life the time that a devil cult had kidnapped her, and she had saved Balducci's by shooting the first man she had ever killed, one shot through the head, from a bad angle in poor light. Only the first of many. No, Marlene, keep away from that line. Let's listen to the words of the priest. Let's think about eternal life, that life has a purpose, that God exists, and loves us. Marlene still believes God exists, although she is no longer sure that the Church as now constituted is His official spokesperson. She acknowledges the flames of hell, and hopes that there is a purgatory. She figures she will spend about 187,000 years there, unless her daughter's prayers get her out. She was not kidding when she told her husband about thinking suicidal thoughts. Now she balances in her mind different degrees of catastrophe. Do they still plant suicides in unhallowed ground? She would like a nice funeral like this one. She imagines Karp and the kids at the graveside, then imagines another graveside, with her standing there in black and Karp or one of the kids, or maybe all three or them, in boxes, and it's her fault. Which picture is your favorite?

  Switch that off, we don't need that right now. Standing on one side is Raney, stiff-faced, not a weeper. On his other flank is Nora, Mrs. Raney, a pale Irish beauty, actually from the Republic, an immigrant nurse, and on her other flank in her stroller is plump little Meghan, aged two. Marlene steals a look at Nora. She's the weeper, dabbing at her eyes, her cute little Irish nose getting red at the edges. Marlene has only just met Nora, has never been invited out to the bridal bower in Woodmere. It's still hard for her to think of wild Jim Raney all settled down and domestic. No more flirting with Marlene at any rate, which they'd done a good deal of, and some occasional light necking, back when. Maybe that's why she hasn't been out to Woodmere. Her dirty secret, pathetic nonaffairs with a string of guys, mainly boyish Irishmen, irresponsible, hard drinkers, antithetical to her hubby. Not much energy left for that nowadays, maybe she should do it, that might be a way out, to convince herself she was In Love with an irresponsible lunk who'd beat her as she so richly deserved, unlike Karp, who just took it and took it. Hideous, really to be loved like that when one was such a destructive piece of shit.

  The funeral moves into its final act: the family and friends are tossing bits of soil into the grave, crouching on the obscenely green artificial grass rugs that cover the raw earth, wielding a chromed trowel. Marlene doesn't toss. Instead she stands by the baby and watches Jim and Nora do so. The baby is sleeping, a pink doll. Could Raney even imagine placing this one in danger for the sake of some imagined general good? No.

  There is a wake at the house in Rego Park afterward, a lot of retired cops getting drunk. Marlene has a glass of wine and makes her excuses. She gets out on Woodhaven Boulevard going north and here comes a life decision, rarely so clear-cut as now, with the freeway ramps and signs looming just ahead. East on the Long Island Expressway, back to the dog farm, or west on the same thoroughfare, taking it to the 278 turnoff and down to the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, and… what? A little more torment? A slide back into the life they had before, some time in the city, and then having the boys at the farm for the summer, with Karp coming out for weekends? She rolls under the railway bridge and she's in the wrong lane for the eastbound. She's about to change lanes, when a truck appears on her right, she slows, horns honk, she sighs, and lets the traffic ease her into the ramp that leads back to the city. She wishes all her decisions might be like that, from now on, settled by mere fate, like a scrap of litter driven by the hot breeze of the roadway. She tells herself it's just a day or so, a week. It can't hurt. Besides, she's dying to stroll down Mulberry Street again and shop Italian.

  ***

  Lucy's appointment was uptown and on the other side of the isle of Manhattan, and it was hot and it was the rush hour and she was oddly exhausted, so she took a cab rather than the subway and a crosstown bus. She glanced at the driver's ID, waited for a stop at a light, and then said, "How are you today, Mr. Saadi?" in perfect Palestinian Arabic. It was one of the small pleasures of taking a cab, but one she did not allow herself too often. The driver's head whipped around. They almost always did this, even when rolling, which was why she had waited for a stop. She had more than once narrowly avoided accidents; New York's cabdrivers are not used to being addressed in their native tongues by American girls. Then the usual: She was not a Palestinian? Surely she was, or could not speak the language so well. Sometimes Lucy omitted the linguistic-freak explanation and let the cabbies imagine a life for her, a family. She got invitations to dinner this way, in Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Farsi, Gujarati, and Spanish, and quite often proposals of marriage, on behalf of a son, a cousin, the cabbie himself.

  She had to break Mr. Saadi's heart, but tipped him lavishly to make up for it and left the cab. She was at Fifty-Seventh and First Avenue, where the archdiocese of New York has its seat. She was not going to the archdiocese proper, the huge and imposing structure at 1011 First Avenue, but a few buildings north of it, an undistinguished office brick faced with the kind of shiny white material used in tunnels and public lavatories. She ascended to the tenth floor and walked through a glass door that was inscribed in gold lettering. The Lucia Foundation.

  Lucy breezed by the receptionist with a smile and a wave. Although officially a limb of the cardinal archbishop's domain, the Lucia was very much a family affair. Her mother had founded it upon ill-gotten stock market gains and named it after her great-grandmother, a woman of strong feelings, courage, and deranged mind. Pazza Lucia, as she was known by Ciampi family historians, was a scion of the di Messina, a noble house of Palermo. She'd run off with a gardener laddie around 1890, the dad had sent men to clip the gardener laddie and bring the daughter home, and Pazza Lucia had, according to the Ciampi family historians, stood in a doorway with her lover's blood all over her nightgown and blown the assassins to hell with a shotgun. Then an exciting escape to New York, with the cops and assorted Sicilian cutthroats at her heels, and a marriage to Paolo Ciampi, also of Palermo, but from a lot lower down in the social order. From this liaison the Ciampi clan, numbering now in the hundreds, had sprung. Here and there in this line- which produced mainly respectable artisans and their wives, and latterly a sprinkling in the more stable professions- appeared a flash of zany fire, when the old ladies in black would mutter marrone! and tell the old story again. Thus the ladies in black explained Marlene's exploits.

  There was a portrait of Lucia di Messina hanging just outside the director's office. It was not a good portrait, being cooked up from a faded sepia photo, but it looked enough like Lucy's mother, especially around the eyes, to give Lucy a little chill.

  She knocked, heard a hail, and walked through the door. The executive director of the Lucia Foundation was Father Michael J. Dugan, a Jesuit in bad odor with the Society of Jesus, which was nearly enough by itself to recommend him to Marlene when she decided to give umpteen millions to the Church. Putting Dugan in charge had been a condition of the gift, and so he was elevated from second seat in a collapsing parish to his current post, where he was tasked with dispensing money at levels sufficient to immensely improve his standing with the hierarchy. He was also the closest thing Lucy Karp had to a spiritual advisor.

  Dugan came around from behind his desk- a board on filing cabinets- and embraced her, kissing her loudly on the cheek.

  "Are you still allowed to do that?" she asked.

  Dugan laughed. He was a stocky man of around sixty, with a thick head of black hair and a knobby, pleasant face. His eyes were blue, intelligent, and marked with pain, although she noticed when she pulled back to look at him that there was less of that than heretofore.

  "I don't know," he said, "but why should you be the only Catholic in the country to remain unfondled by a priest?"

  She sat in a canvas director's chair. All the furniture in the place was cheap, classic, and functional. He took a couple of canned drinks from a small refrigerator
and gave an Orangina to her.

  "You're looking sprightlier," she said. "Not so borne down. Surprising, given what's going on. I heard some of you guys are afraid to wear clericals on the streets."

  "So I hear. It's funny, I was a flannel shirt guy for years, but since these sex stories started to break, I'm practically always in a collar. A natural contrarian: you say tomato, I say to mah to. That or showing the flag as the ship goes down."

  "Is it?"

  "I wish I knew. It's certainly the biggest thing to hit the Church in my lifetime, maybe not even excepting Vatican Two. It's 1517 again and the same kind of idiots are still in charge, and they may make the same kind of mistake. Their problem is that in this country there's no Church at all without the women, and the women are more steamed about this than they were about the Pill. If they bolt…" He waggled a hand. "But you didn't come here to talk about the future of the one, holy, Catholic, and Apostolic."

  "No, I came by unannounced to see how you're spending the foundation's money. I am a trustee, you know."

  "You want to see the books?"

  "No, I trust you. Isn't that why they call them trustees?"

  The priest laughed. He had a nice one, and Lucy recalled that when he was working in the hardscrabble parish, he hadn't laughed all that much. He really does like being in charge of something big, she thought. Yet again she wondered what had gotten him into so much trouble. Definitely not diddling altar boys. He said, "I saw a nice white stretch limo in the latest issue of Corrupt Charities Today. I might just pick one up."

  "As long as you take the poor for a ride, Father."

  A somewhat less enthusiastic laugh here. "Merciless! How's your mom. Speaking of contrarians."

  Lucy hesitated, sucked it in, and resigned herself. "Speaking of merciless contrarians. She's back home. For a funeral, she says. Strictly temporary. She thinks she's toxic, cursed of God, a danger to her family."

  "And what do you think?"

  "She's suffering. Which is good, actually. If she was just breezing along with what she's got on her conscience, I could hardly bear to look at her. On the other hand, she won't change. She won't really repent, won't really just accept she's a lawyer of a certain age with two boys to raise, and get a job and act normal, and, I don't know, have a life. Everything has to be an opera with her. Guns, knives, danger, corpses strewn around the stage. She'd rather be in dramatic self-exile than say, 'Hey, I had a past like everyone else, and screwed up big time, and I learned my lesson.' I pray for her, but…"

  "Yes, but," said the priest. "The great 'but' of God." They both thought about this in silence for a moment, making one of the infinity of little surrenders that religious people make in the course of daily life, and then Dugan asked brightly, "And you? How have you been keeping? You're looking pretty good, which suggests you're still in love."

  "She blushes to admit it," said Lucy.

  "How's the boyfriend?"

  "The boyfriend is in Boston, far enough away so that I don't get into trouble. We exchange steamy e-mails. Thus my miserable body remains intact while my heart is all loaded up with foul lusts. I wonder if it's worth it, sometimes. Every time I see him I say to myself, Oh, hell, why not? Let's just dive into bed and cohabit along with the rest of the adult and preadult population of the country."

  "Why don't you?"

  "Oh, thank you! Is that official advice from the magisterium now? You're supposed to say, 'Sex is a sacrament of marriage, my child.' "

  "Sex is a sacrament of marriage, my child." In a pontifical tone.

  She laughed. "Yeah, right. The way it's supposed to work is first you get sexually mature, then you fall in love, then you get married and have kids. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Only now it's sixteen, seventeen, and thirty-two, and no one is going to stay chaste that long except saints or the not interested, and I'm neither."

  "So you came all the way up here to bitch and moan about your steaming loins? Re-read Augustine." He mimed, shouting out to a crowded shop: "Next!"

  "Actually, I consider it an act of charity. Priests used to spend half their time listening to the sexual agonies of the young, and since the young no longer have sexual agonies to relate, you all must have a big titillation deficit. I think it's an issue for the Curia."

  Dugan raised his eyes to heaven. "See! This is what it's come to. Mocked in my own office by a snip of a girl. How long, oh Lord?"

  They both chuckled, the chuckles died down, Dugan's face grew sober, and they made eye contact at a deeper level than they had before. A subtle change occurred in the atmosphere of the room, as if the two of them had suddenly entered a sacred space.

  "And…?" he said quietly.

  "I think I've met a demon," she said.

  "Uh-huh. Who's the afflicted?"

  "A guy down at Holy Redeemer. He calls himself Larry Larsen, but I doubt that's his real name. He just breathes lies. And he seems to want to get close to me, I mean personally. He's always asking me questions about my life, about my folks, friends… the other day he was pumping me about Tran."

  "That's interesting."

  "Why?"

  "Because there are probably people who'd like to know where Tran is, and it's probably common knowledge in some circles that you were as close to him as anyone."

  "He's not a cop," she declared. "I guess he could be a bounty hunter, but he doesn't even seem organized enough for that. Asking about Tran is just making conversation. He's curious about the family, too. I figure him for a low-level grifter who got possessed pretty early. There's not much left of him now. The problem is he has a little girl. I'm concerned."

  "You could contact the authorities."

  "Yeah, and what do I tell them? Beelzebub is squatting in one of their parolees? The guy is perfectly presentable- good looking, sexy, well-spoken. But he has absolutely no idea of how he appears to a person with any spiritual discernment. Of course, that probably hasn't been a problem in his life, given the modern world. The nuns go out of their way to avoid him without being able to come right out and say what it is. They're not supposed to think stuff like that. They've been taught to use psychological language like everyone else."

  "How sure are you?"

  "Oh, it's the real deal all right. The thing is pretty brazen. It's almost like we're having a conversation while the poor schmuck is running his little scam on me, all oblivious. What do you think I should do?"

  The priest sat back in his canvas chair, making it creak. He tented his hands in front of his face and considered his reply. This was not the first time that the fifteenth century had intruded into his life through the medium of the Karp women. The mother definitely belonged in a viperous ducal court in the Italy of that era and the daughter should have been having visions in a convent and making miracles for the peasantry. He knew that Lucy had been having visitations from Saint Teresa of Avila since age seven, so it was only a matter of time before other sorts of spirits came calling. Few men are as inoculated against superstition as old-style Jesuits (more so, oddly enough, than actual materialists), but Dugan did not dare to dismiss Lucy's report.

  "I take it your guy would not take kindly to an attempt at exorcism?"

  Lucy snorted. "No, he thinks the demon is him now. It's way too late for that."

  "Is he apt to be violent?"

  "Not that I've actually witnessed. But when you cross him, or don't do what he wants, you can practically see the flames shoot from his eyes. I'd say he'd be violent if he thought he could get away with it."

  "Then you ought to bail out. Don't mess with him."

  She grinned and said, "Oh, you don't think I'm up to handling one little demon?"

  The priest didn't smile now. "No. I think you very well might be able to 'handle' him. And how proud you'll be of it."

  "Uh-oh."

  "Right. You're already so stuffed with pride that you think the rules don't apply to you, and the ones you do keep you keep with such heroic virtue that it's nearly as toxic as sin. Do you honestly thin
k that a self-respecting demon wouldn't prefer you to some loser? Don't you understand that professional exorcists go through elaborate training to prevent just that from happening?"

  Lucy dropped her eyes and bobbed her head impatiently. "Okay, right, you made your point. What about the child?" She tried to keep her voice even, but it quivered a little.

  He pushed a pad across the desk. "Write her name down and anything you know about her. I'll check her out through my cookie-baker contacts. Meanwhile, keep out of this guy's way."

  "He's not going to be like that. I think he's fixated on me. And I'm damned if I'm going to let him chase me away from Holy Redeemer's."

  "Yes, you would say that," sighed Father Dugan. "I suppose I'll just have to rally whatever pathetic forces God has left and see what can be done."

  8

  After Felix's finger had healed enough, Rashid began to send him on errands again. He drove a pickup truck lettered with the name of a firm he had never heard of, and his destinations were scattered throughout the city and the surrounding suburban counties. Once he drove almost to New Paltz to pick up a load of fertilizer. Most of the time, he dropped his deliveries off at Haskell's Plumbing and Heating in Long Island City. Some of the items, small bottles or cardboard boxes, he took to the house in Queens and gave directly to Rashid. The Arab now treated him like a dog, and Felix pretended to be a changed and more doglike man. No more wise-ass remarks, no more funny tricks. Felix was a competent actor and the role seemed to convince. There were no further problems. He drove, he picked up, he delivered.