Parishioner (14 page)

Her eyes were darker amber. She grimaced sadly.

“No,” she said. “I am the matron of the plant. I keep it running. That’s my job, my only penance.”

“And what is your sin?” Xavier asked the question almost innocently, without force or even the expectation of being answered.

The large face turned down and somehow in on itself. The dark beads of her eyes went cold.

“In the old country my father was a drunkard and my mother had too many children. She died and during a famine when I was not yet a woman it was up to me to make sure that my younger brothers and sisters survived.…”

In a rush of intuition Xavier understood that part of Hope’s self-imposed punishment was to confess her sin whenever asked. It was why she never left the church. It was her iron maiden to bear..

“… I lured a boy into a trap I’d made. I killed him and skinned his body. I cut him into pieces and brought him home to feed my starving family. I did that fourteen times.”

Xavier sighed and then stood. He wanted to apologize to the woman, but even that, he realized, would be another burden.

She squared her shoulders and adjusted the loose, full-length black uniform that she always wore. They peered into each other’s eyes and accepted the pain they both felt.

“Ecks!” a man’s voice commanded.

The shout seemed to fit the situation. There would be no easy egress from the cannibal child-memory.

Captain Guillermo Soto was striding down between the pews on a collision course with the Harlem hard man.

“Guilly. How’d you know I was here?”

“I called Clyde.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I’m placing you under arrest,” the LA cop exclaimed. He reached out to clamp his big hand on Xavier’s steel-banded left forearm.

This was a mistake.

Pivoting from his hip, Xavier pulled the larger man off balance. At the same time Ecks sent out a straight right fist that knocked the big cop flat on his back on the flagstone floor.

But Guillermo Soto was not a soft man. He bounced from the floor with a .357 Magnum in his left hand.

In his mind Xavier had already kicked the right-hand bench at Soto, was already crouching to his left and pulling the throwing knife he kept in a sheath on his right shin. In
Xavier’s mind Soto was almost already dead.…

“Stop!” Father Frank called from the doorway behind the Speaker’s Spot.

Sister Hope stood there passively, understanding that she, at that moment, could not stay the foolish men.

“I can’t stop, Frank!” Soto shouted. “This is my prisoner.”

“This is sanctuary,” Frank replied.

Xavier stood up straight.

Soto lowered his high-powered pistol.

“There’s a woman dead, Frank,” the LA cop said. “A man too, and one critically wounded. There’s a girl missing and a basement filled with the skeletons of children.”

“There was a truck left out in the Arizona sun with sixteen dead workers in it,” Frank said. “There was a shoot-out in Chihuahua where women and children were caught in the cross fire.”

A shudder ran through Soto.

Xavier squelched the desire to kill the man.

“It’s my job,” Captain Soto said.

“I’m speaking to your faith.”

“Did you kill them, Ecks?” Soto asked.

“I shot the one guy and threw the crowbar into the other one’s chest. But they were getting ready to kill me and burn down the house. I think they wanted to remove Sedra’s body, maybe the skeletons too.”

“What about the girl?”

“She was gone when I got there.”

“Where is she now?”

“You have all the answers you need, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Brother Ecks is blameless.”

“You aren’t the law, Frank.”

“I am within these walls.”

“I have a life, man,” Guillermo said, “and a duty.”

“A life maintained by Hope and Ecks and the rest of us.”

Guillermo Soto tucked his gun into a holster on his hip while staring at Xavier.

Sister Hope turned away and left through the exit door.

Frank watched both men with a wary and yet somehow world-weary eye.

“Are you telling me everything, Ecks?” Soto said.

“I told you enough.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“Free at last.”

The big Mexican’s eyes narrowed. He seemed about to ask something else but swallowed the words.

Turning to Frank he said, “I got a job to do. You can’t blackmail me or browbeat me or talk me down. I will find out what happened, and those that are guilty will pay. It doesn’t matter if you turn me over too. I will do what’s right.”

“I would never betray your trust, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Your confessions among us are sacrosanct.”

“Even if these crimes were committed by members, Frank,” Soto uttered through clenched teeth. “You’ve said more than once that you are not here to protect us if we stray.”

“Just so,” the minister said.

Another shiver went through the big cop’s frame and he turned on his heel, strode up the aisle and out of the church.

Xavier was still thinking about the young girl who killed and gutted children so that her brothers and sisters could survive. For a moment he was nearly overcome by the feelings of empathy and impotence.

“You will have to take her out of here,” Frank said.

“Who?” Xavier asked; he was still thinking of the cannibal.

“Doris. Guillermo might turn his work over to an associate and they could very well get a warrant.”

“That would destroy the church,” Xavier said, the sheathed knife in his mind.

“I doubt if it will come to that. But better be safe. Brother Soto may be having a crisis of faith.”

“What will you do?” Xavier asked, trying to shake the knife out of his thoughts.

“Pray for him. Maybe pray with him. He doesn’t like you and so it is easy for him to believe the worst.”

“I hear that.”

“Find Hope and tell her to bring you out of here through the Revelation Road. Take the girl somewhere where Soto won’t find her. Leave the church and its safety up to me.”

Sister Hope was kneeling in the corner of a doorless white stone room carved out of the inner wall of the courtyard. He suspected that she was praying for the spirits of eaten children.

“Hope,” he said softly.

She stood up automaton-like and turned her huge head and face toward him.

“Yes, Brother?”

“Frank told me to ask you to get Ms. Milne and show us the way out down something called the Revelation Road.”

“Certainly.”

Hope walked across the yard with measured steps and climbed a rough-hewn ladder up to the second tier of the fortress wall. Then she disappeared within the catacomb inside.

Xavier sat at one of the outside tables and wondered about the inevitability of a violent death.

He had always been a fighter. Ambidextrous, naturally strong, and bathed in the hormonal chemistry of rage—he had never backed down and rarely lost a contest. This state of being for him was natural, like rats in an alley or the sun chasing after the moon. He didn’t realize that he was an evil man until the day that he and Frank sat and talked in that dark bar. He wasn’t able to remember most of the words that passed between them. All he knew was that he’d follow Frank anywhere. Right after that initial meeting Frank took Xavier up to Seabreeze City to spend three weeks in a solitary fourth-floor room that faced the ocean. Food and drink were brought for him at regular intervals and there was a bathroom down the corridor.

He met with Frank every Wednesday and Saturday and sat on the back pew at the services on Sunday. He attended the Expressions but was asked not to speak or comment.

He was instructed in how to pray by giving life to the Spirit rather than asking for boons, apologizing for being human, or thanking the Infinite for being.

He disliked Guillermo but still considered him a brother. They were all on the same page
of damnation and they all worked hard to dispel the stench of their lives.

Soto might have shot him in the main hall; or Ecks might have killed the cop. But these actions were not from hatred, not hatred of each other. And even if they despised each other they were still brothers—even in conflict.

Xavier smiled and shook his head.

Always give yourself enough time to reflect
, Frank had said on more than one occasion.
The Infinite always takes the right step. We are like the Infinite, only infants that are, ever so carefully, experimenting with first attempts at walking
.

“Mr. Noland?”

Doris Milne was wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots that came down just below her knees. The neckline was high and the sleeves short. Her pumps were medium gray and she carried a small pink suitcase that Xavier did not remember bringing.

“Where’d you get the bag?” Ecks asked.

“Sister Hope gave it to me. I didn’t have anything the right size.”

Hope was standing there behind the girl.

We are all sinners
, Frank said at some point in every sermon. Xavier understood this claim more and more each day.

Inside Frank’s antechamber, behind an antique African tapestry depicting an early European settlement somewhere on the Ivory Coast, was a doorway that Xavier had not seen before. The tapestry was composed like a rude painting, with some people made from white cloth and others rendered in red. Frank had explained that the red people were the whites whose skin flushed under the strong African sun.

“And the white ones are black like me,” Ecks had said.

“Amen, Brother.”

The doorway led to a ladder that carried the trio down forty feet or so to a wide tunnel that had
been excavated and reinforced decades before.

“Bootleggers once used this route to move their liquor and guns,” Hope said.

“You mean this wasn’t always a church?” Xavier asked.

“It was always a house of worship,” she replied. “Sometimes their intentions had gone astray.”

The tunnel went on for nearly a mile until they came to another ladder. At the top was a door that was disguised from the outside as a stone slab. They exited into a cave where the smell of the ocean was strong.

Outside, from behind a stand of coastal mugwort brush they came to a parking lot not twenty feet from the sand beach. The lot was made for eight or nine cars but there was only one vehicle there—a dark green 1961 Cadillac with its stubby fins and heavy white shark form.

“This is the minister’s private automobile, brother,” Hope said. “He asks everyone who borrows it not to dent it—if possible.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s only a car,” Hope said.

Knowing her past, Xavier thought that he understood what she meant.