The Acolyte (19 page)

The record keeper returned. Her eyes fell to my notebook, lying open next to the microfiche reader. Different spellings of the same name were written in block letters:

T
OM SWIFT, THOM SWIFT, TOM SWYFT.

“That’s who you’re searching for?”

“You know him?” I said, surprised.

“He’s not anyone you can really know. I can find him for you, though.”

My hand shot out, fingers tightening on her wrist. “You know where he is?”

“You’re . . . you’re hurting me.”

I eased off. Massaging her wrist, she said, “Follow me.”

She led me to a set of stairs that terminated at yet another corridor. The room I found myself in next was larger. I followed her down rows she navigated seemingly without need of sight. Her fingers roamed over book spines, alighting softly before moving on.

“Here,” she said. “I knew we had one.”

The book she handed me was titled
Tom Swift and His Motorcycle
, by Victor Appleton. The cover was badly faded but I could make out an illustration of a boy puttering down a country lane on an old-fashioned motorbike. He was wearing jackboots and a crested leather hat; from what little I could remember of their uniforms, he appeared to be a . . .

“He wasn’t a Nazi.” Unnervingly, the clerk had read my mind. “He was a boy adventurer, an inventor, a genius based on . . .” She searched her memory banks for a name. “. . . Thomas Edison. My older brother read all his books. I was too young and a girl—girls read Nancy Drew—and besides, Tom Swift always relied on a Jewish boy to help him out of scrapes. I didn’t like that.”

“Thank you,” I said to her, and left.

The Damascus Towers

Stakeout.

I’d met Tom Swift only once, in the company of Angela Doe. If the thread wasn’t particularly long at least there was an end to grab hold of.

Doe had returned to her fourth-floor apartment near Nazareth Park. I took a room at the motel across the way with clean sightlines into her place. For three days I drank rotgut joe and spied on the woman I loved. I could not deny that my snooping was based at least partially on jealousy. But it wasn’t my sole motivation. People were dead and it was still my responsibility to discover who’d killed them. Tom Swift was as likely a candidate as any.

A dangerous man. Amid all the patsies and stiffs and losers I’d come in contact with in the line of duty there had been but a few truly dangerous men. Those ones you recognized right off: something in the voice, the eyes, the viperlike way they moved.

At quarter past eleven on the third night, a van rolled up. A man exited the passenger side and crossed the sidewalk. He did not push the buzzer. He had a key.

Angela’s kitchen light went on. I socked a pair of binoculars to my eyes and thumbed the focus wheel. Angela and Tom Swift. The two of them smiling, Swift touching her shoulder, Angela’s cheeks colouring, Swift tossing his head back in laughter.

They sat. I stewed. At some point Angela guided him to the front door.

I hustled to an unmarked prowl car in the motel lot and caught the van as it pulled away from the curb. I didn’t radio for backup—none to be had, not that I trusted.

The van meandered for twenty minutes before cutting off Mount of Beatitudes into one of the tony suburbs ringing the SuperChurch. It pulled up at a stop sign. A few people approached. Some looked like they might own homes around there; others looked to have crawled from cardboard shanties.

The van’s rear door swung open and the people vanished inside. When it opened again, those same people exited the van and went away down the street. Nobody appeared to be carrying anything, so what were they receiving—drugs? Benedictions?

The van hit three more neighbourhoods: Jewtown, Little Baghdad, Preacher’s Row. I surveilled from afar, idling in the darkness of smashed streetlights. I counted each person entering the van: forty-three in total. They went into the van, a few minutes passed, then they got out of the van and walked away. They fit no known demographic.

It was past midnight when the van rounded down a cracked two-block stretch of tarmac leading to the Damascus Towers. The Towers had been built decades ago to house the previous Prophet, an ex-monsignor. But, seeking to distance himself from the old Monsignor and all tokens of his regime, The Prophet had ordered the Damascus Towers shut down. They remained standing, if barely. Scavengers had gutted the insides, tearing out the marble counter-tops and brass fixtures and ivory carpeting. After the easy meat was gone, the most industrious foragers had ripped out the doors and window glass and copper plumbing pipes and teak floorboards.

Like any creature with its guts yanked out, the Towers had basically collapsed into themselves. All that remained was a pair of yawning fire-gutted skeletons, upper stories crumbled on weird angles. They resembled decayed tusks poking at the sky.

I popped the trunk and grabbed a flashlight. I had my pistol and badge but otherwise bore no trace of office; in my three-day-old clothes and beaten night watch jacket, I passed for a fair facsimile of the wrecks who called this area home.

I picked a path across the shattered cobblestones, my intention being to pass between the towers to the rear parking lot where I was certain I’d find the van. This course took me past the courtyard fountain; a knee-high stone tub presided over by a headless statue of the old Monsignor. That the head had been hacked off was old news—but now a carved pumpkin had been perched atop the stained marble stump.

Two figures huddled on the street side of the fence. One struck a match while his partner cupped his hands round the glowing matchstick and touched his cigarette to the flame. Had they scissored in behind to cut me off? Or were they only a couple of rummies? I pulled my pistol from its shoulder rig and made my way between the towers. What had once been a series of manicured terraces were now risers of brittle grass littered with cracked stone flowerpots. My gaze trailed up the western face of the left tower: bricks scorched by old fires, yawning window frames consuming the cloud-filtered moonlight. Thunder rumbled nearby, filling my mouth with a dry ozone taste.

The van was parked on the decline of a loading ramp that led into the far tower. Its doors flung wide, interior empty. After checking it on the off-chance its keys had been left in the ignition—no dice—I hugged the wall leading down the ramp.

It emptied into an underground parking garage. Skids of canned food were stacked along the walls; was Swift gearing up for Doomsday? Rats skittered across sewage pipes overhead. I could hear voices or music coming from somewhere.

My shoulder brushed something. I dropped the flashlight. It spun on the concrete floor, illuminating the garage in a revolving fan. More canned food, a few cars, words scrawled on the walls that passed too quickly to read . . .

. . . and directly in front of me, a man.

I levelled my pistol. “Don’t move.”

He did not—not a muscle. I picked the flashlight up and shone it at his face.

Wasn’t a man at all, but an effigy of our Prophet. Arms and legs made out of wheat chaff bundled with baling twine, jutting at perpendicular angles from one of the vanilla suits favoured by the Heaven-Sent Hero. Its clay face was an eerie replica of The Prophet’s own, except the features were outsized and cartoonish. The sculptor gouged deep thumb-holes in place of eyes: they were stuffed full of rancid meat. Scrawled on the wall behind it:

MAY YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

“That’s not for your eyes.”

I turned toward the sound of the voice, my pistol coming round with me. It was engulfed by a hand so large it felt more of a paw—my mind snagged upon the scene outside Zoila’s Nail Salon, those officers who looked to have been torn apart by a gorilla. I brought my free hand up in a desperate bid to smash this monster’s face only to have it glance off a freakish expanse of chest. Next, something crashed against my skull and every ounce of light drained out of the world.

A Polite Conversation

“
Well, I don’t care if it rains or freezes,

Long as I got my plastic Jesus,

Sittin’ on the dashboard of my car . . .”
 

It was dark, wherever I was now, though an ambient glow came from somewhere. My skull felt cracked open, some of its contents leaking down the back of my neck.

“
Comes in colours, pink and pleasant,
Glows in the dark ’cause it’s iridescent
Take it with you when you travel far . . .
”

My guess was that I was in an abandoned unit in the Damascus Towers. A hurricane lamp hung from a ceiling nail. Wind howled through the empty windows. I was lashed to a chair at ankles and wrists.

“
Go get yourself a sweet Madonna dressed in rhinestones,
Sittin’ on a pedestal of abalone shell.
Goin’ ninety, I ain’t wary ’cause I’ve got the Virgin Mary,
Assurin’ me that I won’t go to Hell.
”

The singer sat at the edge of the lamplight. I’d heard his voice before. Tom Swift plucked a few more chords on his instrument: a milk box ukulele with a yardstick fret and fish line strings. The photo of the missing boy on the milk carton was familiar.

“Have you ever heard this song, Jonah?” he asked. “It’s called ‘Plastic Jesus.’”

“No,” I told him. “Never.”

“It’s from a film,” he said. “
Cool Hand Luke
. Ever seen it?”

“That’s a banned work.”

“Why so?”

“It valorizes disobedience of authority. It may cause people to . . .”

“Question their masters?”

I nodded tiredly.

“How many times have you seen
The Passion of the Christ
?”

Every Republican Follower was expected to watch that film yearly; it’d been playing in its own downtown theatre since before I was born.

“Thirty-five times.”

“Thirty-
five
times and you’ve never seen
Cool Hand Luke
.”

Tom Swift shook his head as if to say this, in a nutshell, was the real problem with the world. He asked if my head hurt. I asked him what the hell he wanted.

“Oh, the usual: peace for all mankind, an end to hunger, your Prophet’s head on a stick.” He held out his hands, wrists touching. “Want to cuff me, Jonah? I’m a heathen sinner.”

“I wouldn’t bother with cuffs. I’d shoot you.”

He frowned. “That’s no way to treat your host, is it? I should be asking what it is you want, Jonah, seeing as it was you doing the following.”

I switched gears. “What’s with the fake name? Tom Swift, some dried-up boy genius.”

He offered a polite golf-clap. “Nice sleuthing. But you didn’t answer my question—why were you following me?”

I said, “What happened in New Beersheba?”

“What did you
hear
happened in New Beersheba?”

“It’s a black hole. No information coming out.”

Water dripped, dripped, dripped down my neck.

“Do you love her—Angela?” The tilt of Swift’s head indicated that my answer would be of purely abstract or scientific interest. “I can see why you would. She’s intrinsically loveable.”

I jerked my body towards him. My aggressive move prompted a pillar—or what I’d mistaken as a pillar, huge and fixed as it had been—to step forward and place a hand on my shoulder. The hand was the size of a cast iron skillet. The man it connected to had the fridge-like dimensions to match.

Swift made a soothing motion. “I’m sure our friend was only stretching his limbs, Porter. That’s all you were doing, Jonah, yes?”

Lamplight curved the underside of the monster’s face. I recognized it as the face from the sketch composite by Tibor Goldberg—the fairy-tale giant who’d placed a call from the payphone outside his record shop.
Freakish
was the word Tibor had chosen. No hyperbole in that choice. Measured ear-to-ear, his head must’ve spanned a foot.

Swift waved the man-mountain off. “Acromegaly,” he said. “Gigantism, in layman’s terms. Big as a house, isn’t he?”