7
DON’T GET UP, I’LL LET MYSELF OUT
Maybe you’ve been in the sneezer. So maybe you know what it’s like when the prowl car boys get bored and decide you’ll make a fine little pigeon, powerless but smart enough not to kick up a fuss. And maybe you know what it’s like when the brass sees your shiner and he knows the score but you feed him a line about taking a tumble on the curb while you were jammed to the gills. And he’s looking you in the eye and he knows you’re not on the level but the buttons are there looking innocent as altar boys and all you can do is smile and nod and thank him for the hospitality. But he doesn’t like the look of your nose so he asks the wrecking crew to unstraighten it for you.
That’s what it’s like when METATRON gets hot under the collar. It’s no picnic.
The difference is that when the buttons call it a night and pack up the rubber hoses they don’t leave your consciousness spread across a thousand little stains on the walls and floor. Your mind doesn’t disperse into a hundred million fireflies, each crumb of your existence reduced to a feeble glow trapped in a barrel of amber. You go back to your cot and sleep it off. You don’t have to reassemble yourself from bits and pieces of carbon and hemoglobin and nucleic acid and vitreous humor. So after the godlight faded it took a while to rebind the more esoteric pages from the book of my long and fascinating life.
I’d tell you I came to, except there was no “to” at which to come. The Pleroma was still without form and void. But so was my Magisterium. Like a snowball in a potter’s kiln, it had melted, sublimated, steamed away until the furnace heat of METATRON’s rage had cracked the component molecules, stripped the atoms, prised the baryons apart, sintered the underlying concepts. The Voice of God had taken a fire hose to the blackboard. Clean slate.
Joes and janes all over the Pleroma were having the same experience. Not a single Magisterium left standing. The Pleroma had become a featureless infinite-dimensional expanse; the homogeneous superposition of uncountable maybes. It’s like that when METATRON goes on a tear. Been a spell since the last time, though. I’d have to check the calendar, but I’d wager the sun hadn’t yet been making helium the last time around.
Sure it hurts when METATRON does its thing, but that’s beside the point. The pain is a side effect. And besides, it’s not pain as the monkeys would understand it. METATRON doesn’t brandish a willow switch when it takes us behind the shed. No. To beings accustomed to shaping reality with the merest thoughts and whims, there is no greater punishment—no greater chastisement—than the revocation of willpower. The erasure of our personal imprints upon the universe. (How would you feel if you were billions of years old with nothing to show for it after all that time? People skip school reunions for less.) So that’s what I found after putting myself together. The Choir’s collective Magisteria had been stripped away, leaving nothing but a bare bones Pleroma.
And the MOC, of course. Always the MOC.
That’s the long version leading to what happened next. Short version? I had to rebuild my apartment from the quarks up before I could have the luxury of waking up with the worst hangover since the discovery of alcohol.
So I did. And then I passed out again.
Sometime later I rolled out of bed while a vengeful mariachi band tested the acoustics inside my skull. My options were an ice pick behind the eyes or two aspirin and a glass of water. I opted for the latter. The bathroom was closer and besides which I hadn’t an ice pick handy because I don’t take my rye on the rocks. So I chewed a couple of tablets and chased them with enough water to drown a fish. The mariachis fired their trumpet player and found somebody who knew how to stay on beat. Those kids had promise.
By the time I wobbled to the kitchen and got the percolator going I felt halfway human. Which should tell you just how bad it was. The Voice of God really takes it out of a person. And my pals the Cherubim took pride in their work; I still had the marks to prove it. But the bacon grease was popping along and I’d just cracked a couple eggs into it when the phone rang. It didn’t take a green label shamus to finger the caller.
What’s a guy to do? She had a habit of flinging herself into trouble. It seemed that no matter how hard I tried to drill just the tiniest bit of common sense into Molly’s head, she was having none of it. Stubborn as a mule, that cluck. I told her to stay buttoned, so what did she do? Apparently she made a beeline for METATRON to poke it in the all-seeing eye. And now that things had gone sour she was calling me again.
Dames.
I took a steadying breath and reminded myself I carried some of the blame for this flop. After failing to find somebody suitably passive, as I’d been strong-armed to do, I compounded the mistake with my eagerness to put some distance between us. Maybe—maybe—I cut a few corners when reading her the headlines.
So it wasn’t without sympathy when I contemplated the hole she’d dug for herself. The Choir would lay this at her feet sooner than later. She was the new kid, and this mess had her fingerprints all over it. She was in trouble.
But so was I, no thanks to her.
So I decided to let flametop simmer. Couldn’t give her the cold shoulder forever; I’d have to tell her about the Trumpet and what I found at Gabby’s place. Plus, if I wanted to get through this mess with my skin intact, I needed to know what kind of stunt she’d pulled to arouse METATRON. But that conversation could wait until I wasn’t full of no coffee.
It takes some effort to get on the bad side of the Voice. Far as I knew, it took a major violation of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency. Something you couldn’t hide under a fresh coat of paint. Like making thermodynamics nonlocal, or putting a dent in causality. I tried to figure how she might have pulled that stunt, but the sums came up short.
Meanwhile the phone kept ringing, and I kept not answering it. It rang while I ate. It rang while I rinsed the dishes in the sink. It rang while I had a second cup of joe, lit a pill, smoked it, and emptied the percolator. It rang while I glanced over the chess problem arranged on the board under the window; it rang while the mariachis ensured today wouldn’t be the day I found that elegant mate in seven. It rang while I scraped my face. It rang while I donned a clean shirt and collar. It rang while I slipped out and locked the door. I could hear its ring echoing through my digs when I plucked a hair from my head and stuck it high in the door frame where any casual thieves weren’t likely to spot it.
Figured it was only a matter of time before they tossed my place, too. I could try to keep my distance from Molly, but the hard boys already had us together. I’d told them as much. Careful, Bayliss, you’re getting soft.
Gabby had been keeping an eye on Molly, but I couldn’t get my arms around that one. Not yet. He’d also put the bee on a priest, though, and I figured that was gravy. I’d drop in on the guy, brace him a little bit. If he clammed up I’d play the miracle card and turn his communion wine into communion water. That one’s always a big hit with the godly types.
I pulled the priest’s memory fragment from my wallet. Thing of beauty, the way Gabriel had lifted it; damn thing was still going strong on its short little loop. I let it unfold around me until I sank into that vast empty space behind the eyes that the monkeys call, with no small amount of self-delusion, their subconscious.
Father Vincent Santorelli’s flock liked him because he was a product of the same Chicago neighborhood. His family had been there for generations going back to the time of speakeasies and tommy guns. His brother was a firefighter. He’d given the Last Rites to his very own mother, not five blocks from the church where he’d given the homily every week for the past ten years. He coached Little League games in the summer, worked with a local youth choir, and donated the rest of his spare time to act as a chaplain at the army hospital up near Oak Park. A real pillar of the community. But the kid thing gave me pause. When I first sensed that pride in overcoming temptation, and the hidden guilty secret, I figured I knew where this was headed. Figured it wouldn’t take much digging to find a history of trying to make it with the altar boys. I’d seen this story too many times to expect anything else. But I was wrong.
Near as I could tell, Father Vince was the real deal. The man wouldn’t hurt a child if you pressed an iron to his temple. He considered himself a failure because he struggled to find loving forgiveness in his heart for the creeps who did like the little boys. His recent brush with temptation had involved the wife in an estranged marriage he’d been trying to counsel. Nice figure, gentle words, a hand on the knee. He reacted the way any red-blooded man would. As propositions went, it was about as chaste as you could imagine, but he berated himself for it. Some guys need to loosen up.
Santorelli was solid. Didn’t agree with his choice where the lonely frail was concerned, but that was between him and his conscience. I liked him.
But something had him wound tighter than a moneylender on a bank holiday. I sank deeper, feeling around for a thread of awareness that might have swirled through the back of Santorelli’s mind while he laid a communion wafer on a fat pale tongue and tried not to recoil from the stench of an abscessed tooth. A lingering worry like that usually finds room to fester at the edges of the subconscious; that’s why it lingers.
Took a bit of digging because the loop was just a few seconds long. It’s tricky getting your fingers on something that slippery. But then I found it. And you could have knocked me over with one swipe of the racing forms.
Santorelli was worked up over a bit of simony.
The Plenary Indulgence predated the Middle Ages, in one form or another, but the Catholics had resurrected it at the turn of the millennium. A piece of paper with the power to bleach the stain of sin from a man’s soul. A Get-Out-Of-Purgatory-Free card, certified (in theory) by the pope himself. Say a few Our Fathers, do a few rosaries and a few good deeds, donate a bit to the ol’ church coffers, and that roll in the hay with the hotcha babysitter gets expunged from the scroll on Saint Peter’s desk. Got her pregnant, jack? What’s that about an abortion? Better buy the triple pack.
As rackets went, it was a thing of beauty. The monkey who dreamed up this one back in the day must have been so bent he tied his shoes with his tongue. But this had been business as usual for decades. They’d revisited the Indulgence racket long before Santorelli had taken his vows. So what was his angle?
That detail was too complex, tied in with too many other things, for me to pull it from a few seconds of memory. Even one lifted as cleanly as Gabriel had done. If I wanted the rest, I’d have to speak with the good father in person. But now at least I had a bead on why Gabby had been shadowing the priest.
Santorelli heard confessions on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Figured it was the perfect time to pay him a visit. The poor lug didn’t get much traffic, but I still bet he’d be happy for a break from the usual litany. Most monkeys share a few things in common, chief among them impure thoughts and a tendency to spit on the golden rule. After ten years of listening to that twice a week he’d be more than ready for a little grace from yours truly. Sure, I was rusty, but so what? This guy was a believer. A real hard case. He’d eat it up with a spoon. And he seemed a solid sort. We’d be fast pals, him and me.
So when a congregant coughed and Santorelli glanced toward the narthex, I rode the slipstream of his gaze from the memory fragment into the flickering shadows near the votive candles. Then I skipped ahead from that blustery December morning to the present, a few days after flametop squiffed it. Felt like a few years at most, but that was a guess because the good father hadn’t been giving thought to the calendar when Gabby lifted the memory fragment.
The church smelled like incense, candle wax, cheap wine, and old people. In prouder times, the joint had boasted an imitation pipe organ; its reverberations were etched in the atmosphere. The arches and stonework gave the place decent acoustics. (The monkeys had done their best, but compared to the Pleroma it still sounded like two cats fighting over last night’s blue plate trout special.) Somebody had fixed the broken window. Sunlight cast prison-shadows from the grille over the replacement glass. Other windows depicted the stations of the cross; dust motes swirled in the cross fire between the Stripping of Garments and the Crucifixion. A fresco behind the altar depicted some joe who looked like the model for the Shroud of Turin as envisioned by a Hollywood focus group. The jasper was attended by a flock of little angels, none of them remotely correct. If the scene up there hadn’t been so repressed, with everybody clothed and nobody grinding anything, I might have fingered the artist for a penitente.
It was quiet as a nun’s boudoir. But for an old bat in the rear pew who mumbled while she fingered her beads, the place was deserted. So much the better. I lit a candle for flametop and dropped a few beans in the donation box. Then I crossed the nave heading for the confessionals. My footsteps shattered the reverent silence. The old bird gave me the evil eye until I doffed my hat. Some bluehairs know how to make a decent guy feel like a creep.
A pair of confessionals sat in the wings of the transept, a bit behind the altar, but in plain view of an electroplated crucifix. I figured this was accidentally on purpose. Maybe the theory was nothing got people’s tongues wagging like the sight of a little torture. Silly monkeys. A bottle of hooch was the quickest way to a man’s heart or a roundheel’s sheets. That had been the case since the invention of hooch.
A mugg wearing a leather jacket over a shirt that might have been respectable a dozen Easters ago tiptoed from a confessional. He wore clunky boots, but he stepped more quietly than me. Just about jumped out of his skin when he saw me waiting. He gave me a quick, jerky nod as he passed. His eyes were a little red and a lot unfocused. He reminded me of whatshisname. Molly’s brother.
He moved stiffly. The jacket rode a little too high on his shoulders. The breeze of his passing gave me a whiff of wet iron and fresh antiseptic. I wondered what fresh wounds lay beneath the leather.
“Hey, mac. The father in?”
He spun around. “What’s that?”
“Santorelli. He on the clock or were you just sawing logs in there?”
“Oh.” He looked around. “Nah. He stepped out. I think he went to the can. I dropped my wallet. Just went back to grab it.” He held it up where I could see. It was one of those old black leather things with the chain; the clasp on the chain had slipped open. Then he jammed the thing back into his trousers, winced, and rubbed his shoulder.
“You don’t say? What’s the going rate for coveting an ox these days? If it’s more than a double sawbuck I’ll have to roll someone in the parking lot.”
The penitente frowned. “What?”
“Been a while since I’ve been to confession.” I pointed at the pocket with the dangling chain. “Guess times have changed. Didn’t used to pay up front.”
“I’m not paying nothing to nobody. The father gave me a card. For some guys I should talk to.” Reflections of stained glass melted together in his wet eyes. Yeah. Definitely reminded me of whatshisface. Though he might have gotten piffled just to deal with the pain from his recent surgery. Maybe he wasn’t a hard case.
But maybe he was. I nodded, like I’d been down those same mean streets. “Counselor?”
“Up yours,” he said. “I’m not an alkie.” Off he went, no longer caring about the noise. I didn’t shush him. The bird with the rosary would cut the twerp down to size with one frown.
Santorelli still hadn’t shown. I hate waiting. I lit a pill. Drawing deep, I tipped my head back, and jetted the smoke at a window depicting a newly beheaded Saint John. The poor lug looked surprised. Like he’d been minding his own business, making no trouble for nobody, when the axman came calling.
I gave him a sympathetic shrug. “You and me both, pal. You and me both.”
I’d waited about half a cigarette and was looking for an ashtray when another old bag came squeaking into the transept on a pair of denim tennis shoes. She wore a thin gold necklace over her sweatshirt. Built like a cannonball but without the personality. You know the type.
“Sir!” she hissed. “This is a church!”
“Yeah, but don’t worry. It’s my day off.”
“There is no smoking in a church.”
“That’s queer. Play your cards wrong and it’s nothing but smoke and flame forever and ever amen. Ain’t that so, sister?”
“You are smoking. There is no smoking in a church!” I had never heard anybody pack so much self-righteousness into a stage whisper.
“All right, all right. Don’t flip your wig.” If it had been handy, I would’ve doused my pill in the little birdbath full of water. But that was back by the front door. So I ground the butt under my heel. “Say, is Father Santorelli still in the can? It’s worth some cabbage if you send somebody after him. I don’t have all day.”
She blinked. “The father,” she said, “is performing the Sacrament of Reconciliation.” It started as a hiss and ended just below a shriek. She had all the emotional range of a teakettle.
“If you say so, doll.” By that point I figured she was about an inch from calling the bulls. That would have soured the father on me, and I wasn’t up for using my shine on Santorelli if I could avoid it. Between METATRON and my pals the Cherubim, I was feeling about as spry as a geriatric transplant patient. So I made nice by picking the butt from the floor and sticking it in my pocket. She spared time for one last harrumph before squeaking off to wherever they store the busybodies. I pictured watery fruit punch in paper cups and a coffee urn so old it might have belonged to Pontius Pilate before he swore off the stuff because it made him edgy.
Still no sign of Santorelli. I wandered around until I found the biffy. He wasn’t there. I checked the frails’ side, too, just in case. No soap.
I returned to the confessional. The door where ratface had emerged hung slightly ajar. I bent my ear but came up empty. Not a whisper. So unless another sinner had slipped in while I was in the can, and Santorelli was doing his thing telepathically, he had to be waiting for another sad sack to come along and play the fiddle for him.
I looked at the door again, then to the window. Saint John gave me a little shrug of encouragement. Bad influence, that one.
I slipped into the confessional, latched the door behind me. “Forgive me, father, for I’ve never done this before. And I’ve been sinning since before Adam’s first birthday.” I took the silence as a prompt to continue. “But I’m in a jam and hoping you’ll lend a guy a hand.”
Then I put a sock in it, waiting for him to say something. He didn’t. That’s when I noticed the way something on the other side cast a heavy shadow on the screen between us. I listened to the silence again, and caught what I’d missed before: no heartbeat.
Oh, Bayliss. You’re a fine lollipop.
I slipped out again, checked for stray eyes, then reentered the priest’s side. My shoe sent a handful of beads skittering into the church. A few more rolled under the sole of my shoe, like pranksters poised to trip me. But I couldn’t kick them away and I couldn’t bend down to pick them up. It was cramped in there on account of the stiff.
Santorelli’s face had gone the color of an early sunrise, and his peepers looked like they were trying to make a break for it. A line of small round indentations stippled his throat just above the dog collar. Somebody had tried to perforate his neck with a rosary. He looked more put out than Saint John’s haberdasher.
I fished out a handkerchief and closed his eyes. Took a bit of digging before I found the lids. They’d beat a hasty retreat into his skull.
Chemistry and biology had taken him beyond anything I could do. Beyond anything any of us could do short of taking an ax to the Mantle of Ontological Consistency, but I figured METATRON had been riled up plenty already. Dead men don’t dance, they don’t answer questions, and they don’t finger their killers. So says the MOC.
Somebody had Santorelli rubbed. Would this lead back to Gabriel and the Pleroma? Or was this sheer bad luck, a private little tiff purely among the monkeys? Maybe the padre had made it with that lonely housewife after all.
Yeah. Fat chance, Bayliss.
It isn’t so easy, rifling a dead man’s pockets. The father kept slumping forward on his little bench and I kept shoving him back, like a coed fending off a drunken suitor. Hard to do it quietly. I managed to search him, but it was a bust. He didn’t have a single thin dime on him. All I found was a tiny plastic case, the kind the monkeys use for storing contact lenses and an earbud, but that was empty. His canals were clean, and I knew from my close acquaintance with his peepers that he wasn’t wearing lenses. I wondered what secrets were stored in their cache.
There was nothing to tell me whether he’d made enemies here on Earth, and twice as much nothing to tell me why Gabriel had been keeping tabs on him.
Dead priest. Dead end.
I felt a powerful need for fresh air. I slipped out again and used the handkerchief to close the door gently behind me. Let somebody else find Santorelli. His groupies would start missing him long before the smell gave him away. I looked up at Saint John again and put a finger over my lips.
There was nobody to stop or question me on the way out. The church was deserted. The kid had legged it. So had the bird working the rosary. I cupped a hand in the birdbath and wet my gills with some holy water. Then I flicked a few droplets into the air; they became the vanguard of a steady rain within my Magisterium.
The downpour made streams of the gutters, rushing cataracts of the storm drains. By the time I made the door to my building, the brim of my hat released a little waterfall each time I tipped my head. I was soaked to the bone. Good. It fit my mood.
The hair in the door frame hadn’t moved. Which meant that either nobody had come by to toss the place, or that somebody had and they were throwing punches well above my weight class. Hard to say. The boys with the flaming faces didn’t have much of a track record for subtlety. I was too bushed to get twisted up over it.
I tossed my hat on a hook behind the door. My coat squelched when I draped it over a hanger. In the kitchen I poured myself a stiff one. Then I returned to the living room. The leaden sky outside the window turned the chessboard a mottled gray. I settled in the chair alongside the board and pulled out a pipe. Don’t know how many times I packed and unpacked the bowl while frowning at the puzzle.
Gabriel’s murder. The Jericho Trumpet. A dead priest. Plenary Indulgences. Molly. This board had too many pieces, and I didn’t know the rules.
The phone rang again. Like it had been all day. By now flametop was probably doing figure eights. I sighed. Couldn’t avoid her forever. But I also couldn’t swallow the thought of dealing with her right then; it gave me indigestion.
I unplugged the phone and stuck it in the cupboard. Nuts to her. But while in the kitchen I took the opportunity to refill my glass. Somebody had emptied it when my back was turned. (Charming little neighborhood you’ve built for yourself, Bayliss.) My tonsils drowned under the taste of fire and oak. I lit a match on my thumbnail, and puffed until smoke glazed my sinuses with the aroma of cherrywood.
I moved a knight. Moved it back. I smoked and drank and stared at the chessboard while rivulets of holy water traced nonsense patterns on soot-smeared windowpanes.