I glanced at the outside door, where Orson peered in at me, one ear at attention and the other at ease.
Beyond the inner door was a long, narrow, largely empty room. Only a few of the overhead lights were aglow, suspended on chains between exposed water pipes and heating ducts, but I didn’t remove my sunglasses.
At the end, this chamber proved to be part of an L-shaped space, and the next length, which opened to the right, was longer and wider than the first, although still dimly lighted. This second section was used as a storeroom, and seeking the voices, I crept past boxes of supplies, decorations for various holidays and celebrations, and file cabinets full of church records. Everywhere shadows gathered like convocations of robed and cowled monks, and I removed my sunglasses.
The voices grew louder as I proceeded, but the acoustics were terrible, and I still couldn’t discern any words. Although he was not shouting, Pinn was angry, which I deduced from a low menace in his voice. The other man sounded as though he was trying to placate the undertaker.
A complete life-size crèche was arrayed across half the width of the room: not merely Joseph and the Holy Virgin at a cradle with the Christ child, but also the entire manger scene with wise men, camels, donkeys, lambs, and heralding angels. The stable was made of lumber, and the bales of hay were real; the people and animals were plaster over chicken wire and lath, their clothes and features painted by a gifted artist, protected by a waterproof lacquer that gave them a supernatural glow even in this poor light. Judging by the tools, paint, and other supplies at the periphery of the collection, repairs were being made, after which the crèche would be put under drop cloths until next Christmas.
Beginning to make out scattered words of Pinn’s conversation with the unknown man, I moved among the figures, some of which were taller than I am. The scene was disorienting because none of the elements was staged for display; none was in its proper relationship to the others. One of the wise men stood with his face in the bell of an angel’s raised trumpet, and Joseph appeared to be engaged in a conversation with a camel. Baby Jesus lay unattended in His cradle, which stood on a bale of hay to one side. Mary sat with a beatific smile and an adoring gaze, but the object of her attention, rather than being her holy child, was a galvanized bucket. Another wise man seemed to be looking up a camel’s butt.
I wended through this disorganized crèche, and near the end of it, I used a lute-playing angel for cover. I was in shadows, but peering past the curve of a half-furled wing, I saw Jesse Pinn in the light about twenty feet away, hectoring another man near the stairs that led up to the main floor of the church.
“You’ve been warned,” Pinn said, raising his voice until it was almost a snarl. “How many
times
have you been warned?”
At first I could not see the other man, who was blocked by Pinn. He spoke quietly, evenly, and I could not hear what he said.
The undertaker reacted in disgust and began to pace agitatedly, combing one hand through his disarranged hair.
Now I saw that the second man was Father Tom Eliot, rector of St. Bernadette’s.
“You fool, you stupid shit,” Pinn said furiously, bitterly. “You prattling, God-gushing
moron.”
Father Tom was five feet eight, plump, with the expressive and rubbery face of a natural-born comedian. Although I wasn’t a member of his—or any—church, I’d spoken with him on several occasions, and he seemed to be a singularly good-natured man with a self-deprecating sense of humor and an almost childlike enthusiasm for life. I had no trouble understanding why his parishioners adored him.
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.