Parishioner (4 page)

Xavier had no television, BlackBerry, or electronic music player. He had a laptop computer that was mostly used for correspondence courses, a cell phone that could do a few tricks, and two custom-made Afghani handguns that could slip into any pocket and fire fourteen shots.

His license read,
Egbert Noland
, and there was a passport under the name Ryan Adonitello. He most often went by Ecks but never explained when asked where the nickname came from.

At Frank’s behest Ecks had enrolled in the Southern Minnesota Correspondence University studying religion and literature. He spent the first year online getting his GED, realized that he liked doing homework, and continued his studies with no clear intention of getting a degree.

He read books in his spare time, perused the
LA
and
New York Times
most mornings after delivering papers. Afternoons he meditated for an hour and then walked three miles to the YMCA, where he exercised, swam, and then worked out in the boxing gym.

That was his schedule six days a week, but on Sundays he limited himself to delivering newspapers, driving his Edsel up north to church, and then sitting on his straight-backed hardwood chair to think about the things he had done wrong. This he found much easier than forgetting.

That particular Sunday he thought about a group of young thugs who called themselves the Easties. This gang wanted to take over the
girls
down around the Meatpacking District and make them hand over Xavier’s percentage.

The Easties didn’t come from the Lower East Side, or East New York, and the girls of the Meatpacking District weren’t really girls. But Xavier and his main man Swan killed Tommy Tom and Juju Bean on a side street that smelled of rotting meat. The executions occurred at three in the morning so that all the late-night sex workers down there could see who was in charge.

Juju Bean had called for his mother, before Swan, on Xavier’s order, had cut his throat.

“Mother!” he shouted—not
Mama
or
Mom
.

Ecks sat at his multipurpose kitchen table wondering what the execution of Juju Bean had to do with Benol. After an hour or so of trying to get the incongruous puzzle pieces into some proximity, he shook his head and went about his Sabbath routine.

Sunday dinner was cornflakes and skim milk followed by a can of sardines in virgin olive oil topped with slices of raw onion and sweet balsamic vinegar. He ate slowly while paging through LA’s and New York’s Sunday papers.

Xavier saw the manila folder sliding under his door but he didn’t go to see whether it was Benol through the viewer in the wall. Neither did he retrieve the file immediately. Instead he thought, once again, about Juju’s blood under his bone-colored shoes and Tommy Tom’s brains coming out of the bullet hole over his left eye.

Neither he nor Swan was ever even questioned about those murders. The authorities were
relieved that the Easties, who were a threat to civilians, had been kept at bay by the more conservative and predictable duo.

The knock at the door, maybe forty-five minutes after the folder slid through, was a surprise. Xavier went to the wall eighteen inches to the right of the door and removed a paper calendar hanging there. Behind the calendar was a small screen connected to an invisible electric eye over the door.

She was wearing a little black dress.

“Hey, Ire,” Ecks said upon opening the door. He looked both ways but the dim hallway was empty.

“Can I come in?” she asked. In her left hand she carried a small, test tube–like vase that contained a single iris.

“Is this a visit?”

When she didn’t answer he stepped aside and she walked past, going directly to his yellow table and placing the vase and its purple flower dead center.

The table was set under the window that looked down on the dark alley. The sun had gone down but the sky was aglow with electric light shining from tall buildings just out of sight.

Iridia and Xavier sat across from each other. He had served her sour mash whiskey and taken a Mexican beer for himself.

“Are you doing a job for Frank?” she asked. “One of his special jobs?”

“That’s a question you’d do better to ask him.”

“I work for him now and then,” she said. “I’ve gone as far as Hong Kong and Mumbai.”

Xavier sipped his beer and sniffed. He was bothered by her visiting so soon after his memories of murder. The scent of one seemed to rub off on the other.

“I’ve never seen you not wearing robes,” he said.

“You only know me as a church lady.”

“I’ve seen you outside church.”

Iridia smiled and let her head lean to the right as Father Frank often did.

“Why haven’t you asked to have sex with me, Ecks?”

“You got Chapman.”

“That has nothing to do with us.”

“Us?”

“The congregation,” she said, “is like a hill clan. No matter what we do or how far we go, we always know the special smell of our sweat.”

Again Ecks was reminded of the odor of rotted meat and the dead men.

“What are you doing here, Ire?”

“You were waiting for me after the service.”

“I wanted your opinion. You gave it to me.”

“You wanted more than that.”

“You got Chapman.”

Iridia smiled and reached across the table to touch his dark killer’s hand. He remained still. She stood and moved over to sit on his lap.

“You need this, Ecks,” she said. “You need this if you’re going out to work for Frank for the first time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She kissed his lips lightly.

“You’re fairly new to the congregation,” she whispered. “Frank’s sermons are only the beginning. We are his Bible and he studies us like a religious scholar analyzing scriptures. But it’s not just that. When he sends us out it’s not only for the obvious. He’s also teaching us something, folding our pasts up into who we are becoming.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Ire.”

“The first man I destroyed,” she said, undoing one button and slipping her hand in against the skin of his chest, “was a billionaire from Oregon. He was young and very innocent. When I was through with him he had killed a man in Seattle, and it took a big bite out of his father’s fortune to keep him from going to prison.

“When Father Frank sent me to Hong Kong I had no idea that my first victim now traded in sex slaves. His demolition, as Frank says, had been complete, and it was my job to destroy
him again.”

“You saved the women,” Xavier said.

“And children,” she added, “from a monster that I created.”

She gave Xavier’s erect nipple a hard pinch.

“So you’re telling me you believe we’re Frank’s living scriptures?” he managed to say.

“Come fuck me, Ecks, and I’ll tell you more.”

“I don’t want to have to hurt Chapman,” he said. This his last line of defense.

“I gave him some of my special tea. He won’t wake until morning. By that time I’ll be sleeping peacefully by his side.”

When Xavier woke at three in the morning she was already gone, but the words she’d shed in his ear were still there—loud and clear.

She told him about the missions Frank had orchestrated and the tolls paid by his parishioners.

“So you think that I’m connected to Benol in some way?” Xavier asked in between their second and third ruts.

“Not necessarily,” she cooed. “Sometimes the missions are metaphors for the missionaries.”

Iridia knew how to get a man excited and keep him that way. In the dark of morning, while Xavier drove his truck down to pick up his young paper delivery staff, he still felt the physical sensations.

“Why didn’t anybody else tell me about this?” he asked her as they drifted on the aftermath of passion, leaving the border of obsession.

“Less humility and more humiliation keeps us quiet. Frank doesn’t give you a mission until he thinks you’re ready to face yourself. The Sunday sermons are like boot camp. But when he sends you out on a job, that’s a one-man war. And when a soldier comes home from battle she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Forty-seven hundred newspapers filled the canvas-covered back of Xavier’s oversize pickup truck. Inside Damien, Carlo, and Angelique folded and wrapped, threw and carried the papers and special insert advertisements up and down the blocks of Xavier’s district. The kids were all fifteen years old, making thirty dollars a day. They worked from approximately four forty-five until eight fifteen, seven days a week.

After dropping them off at their school, Xavier went to Lon’s Diner on Grand for breakfast and the first reading of Benol Richards’s file.

He read the seven sheets of legal-size yellow, lined pages from front to back. There were no surprises: the names of the victims and their parents, the private detective, Lou Baer-Bond, and the places where the crimes occurred.

The parents of the kidnapped boys were the Van Dams, the Tarvos, and the Charleses.

While he read he remembered Iridia in his bed. There was a scent to her that he knew like his own sweat.

“Did Frank send you here?” he asked just before sleep.

“He didn’t tell me or ask me to come,” she said. “But whether he sent me or not I can’t say.”

“I don’t think you should come here anymore after this,” Xavier said.

“I don’t think I’ll need to.”