The Acolyte (30 page)

“Calculated risk,” I said. “You guys are holding it together well.”

“Always someone was oppressing us. We’re still here—and will be, when you and your people are just bones.”

“I’m looking for someone to perform an abortion.”

“Right to the point, huh? And you thought who better to consult than Tibor Goldberg, the unscrupulous Jew, uh?”

I showed him my palms. “You could sit there all day ragging me and what? It’s gonna change anything? Wish it were so.”

“Do you?” He seemed genuinely curious. “Thing is, you weren’t one of the really bad ones. In that way, you’re nearly human. The bitch of it is, I’m left to wonder if it’s laudable—you could’ve been a bastard, same as your partner—or worse, because you knew how bad it was but didn’t lift a finger to change a thing.”

“Can you help or not? Because if insults are all you’ve got, I’ve got plenty of those in escrow all over what’s left of this city.”

“Give me your badge.”

I dug into my trousers and handed him the badge. It meant nothing to me now. He buffed it on his vest, clipped it askew to his pocket.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and disappeared up to his room. He returned ten minutes later.

“Tonight,” he told me. “No payment. He just wants a favour.”

“What sort of favour?”

“He’ll discuss that beforehand. You agree, it’s done. If not . . .” He shrugged. “509 Makht Avenue. Eleven o’clock.”

I said: “There is no such place.”

“There is now. Used to be Zundel Avenue.”

Secrets and Lies

Deacon Hollis’s house was the smallest on his court. A split-level California rambler, redbrick covered with adobe that, in the moonlight, resembled undercooked meatloaf. Frail light burned in the window. I knocked. The curtains parted. A shape moved in the direction of the door, which opened a crack. “That you, Murtag?”

“It is, sir.”

Hollis’s house was rathskeller dim. This proved fortunate, as it prevented Hollis from catching the dread that flickered across my face at the sight of him.

“Didn’t know it was you, lad. Must be going blind.” He launched into song: “Mi-iii-y eyes a-a-har dim, I can-
not
see; I have not got my specs with m
e
. . .”

“If I may say so, sir, it’s not your eyes. You’re shitfaced.”

“Always said you were a top rank investigator.” He chortled. “Very little gets by you.”

I trailed him into the front room. His home stunk: the shuttered stink of unstinting habitation. A pair of loungers sat before the window; Hollis took one but when I went to sit in the other he uttered a grunt of objection.

“Where my wife used to sit. Take the sofa, wouldn’t you please? Glad you’ve come, lad. You and I could use a little chinwag in these, the last days before doomsday.”

I sat on the sofa. “I can’t help notice what you’re wearing.”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“A scapular, isn’t it?”

“Green, for Saint Mary.”

He fingered the simple Catholic charm: illustrated cards affixed to felt backing and strung round his neck on a loop of string. One card: Virgin Mary holding a dove. The other: a dagger-pierced heart encircled by the words,
Immaculate Heart of Mary Pray for Us Now
and at the Hour of Our Deaths
. I also spotted his Republican rosary wrapped round the neck of a bottle beside his feet.

“I’ve kept them hidden under a floorboard all these years,” he said. “A bottle of good Irish whiskey and my Catholic school scapular. My wife, God rest her, she never understood—why risk your safety for cardboard, string, and a dusty bottle of booze? I told her I’m the head of the Acolytes”—thumping his chest with his fist—“who in blazes would dare check my floorboards?”

“You’re not Irish Catholic. You’re a Follower of the Republican faith.”

He took off the scapular and handed it to me. “Made it myself, in the basement of Our Lady of Lourdes. Couldn’t have been older than five. I’ve been to many a masquerade, son, but the face under the mask has never changed.”

I handed it back. He poured me a respectable measure of whiskey, the rosary clinking against my glass. It tasted like peat moss and burned its way down.

“Do you dream, laddie?”

“I’ve had them.”

“Taciturn! Admirable trait. Lately I’ve been dreaming. I say dreaming but I mean daydreaming, musing,” he said, “about souls. I’ve come to wonder if everyone is born with one. I don’t mean down religious lines—no, merely the idea that some people aren’t given souls. What is it that animates us if not the soul? But sometimes you come across a person and in him sense a lack of human capacity. The standard measures of tenderness or mercy.”

He took a long pull from the bottle and shook like a wet dog.

“Isn’t it possible the angels are overtaxed? Possible a soul here or there gets waylaid? So a child is born inhuman—an oversight of Heaven. Say that child was a boy and that boy is now a man. Say that man has come to believe himself soulless.” He ran a finger round the rim of the bottle, trailed it down his throat as if dabbing aftershave. “Tell me, then—what fear need such a man have of any place called Hell?”

“What made you call me, sir?”

“Taciturn. Beautiful.” He tottered up. “Come in the kitchen.”

On the table: a bullet reloader and six standard issue centre-fire bullets lined up next to Hollis’s service revolver. A picture frame with the glass removed. The shape of a star there in the sun-faded velveteen.

“I moulded it into slugs,” he told me. “My Star of Gilead. Made of pewter, turns out. The cheapest, softest metal on earth! There were fake gemstones on the five points, too; when I melted it down, they melted, too. They weren’t even glass.”

“Can I ask why?”

“They’re coming for me,” he said, then after pausing: “The Quints. They’re not exactly human, are they?”

“That’s a fair assessment.”

He chuckled mordantly. “A werewolf, silver. Vampires, a stake.” He turned a bullet over in the candlelight. “Every monster can die. Just need the right tool. What do you think?”

I said nothing.

“Exeter,” he went on, “was Episcopalian—sad bastards are born useless. A lot of times I wanted to stick a knife in him myself. But the way they did it: head sacked like a common heathen, blade poked through his neck like a Christmas goose . . . we had a deal. That business with Exeter was a deal breaker.”

“Who had a deal—you and Exeter?”

He shook his head. “We were complicit in it, but the deal was brokered outside. Head office. Dispatches came from Kingdom City. Right from the tippy-top.”

“What dispatches?” I said, confused. “What did they say?”

“The bombings, lad.” He took another pull, his eyes charting me. “We knew they were coming.”

“You mean . . .” I couldn’t grasp what he was saying. “The Divine Council orchestrated them?”

He shrugged. “Knew about them, at bare minimum.”

“Who else knew?”

“All I can say for sure is Exeter. Our task was to provide the illusion of an investigation. Exeter did a good job—canvassing all home and garden centres for fertilizer purchases?” A stiff laugh. “What wasted effort!”

“Did you know who was behind it?”

“I only knew who wasn’t and made sure our focus stayed on them.”

“What about the targets and times? Did you know Eve was going to be . . . did you send Doe and I to The Manger knowing what would happen?”

“I didn’t know,” he said. “But if you’re asking had I have known, would I have sent you anyway—yes, I may have. I won’t apologize. You’re told what you need to be told, you don’t go seeking answers above your station. That goes for me, too.”

“How was this smokescreen supposed to benefit you?”

“Exeter and I discussed that—in fact, it marked our sole civil conversation. After the rubble cleared, we felt a reward should be in order. It’s too late now. Lad, you asked me who knew the bombings were coming. That’s only half the question you need to ask.

“Okay, so who didn’t know?”

Hollis said nothing, just watched me.

I said: “The Prophet.”

“And Bingo was his name-
o
.”

I’d heard enough. I left him then, walked out to the car. Hollis followed me out. Thunderheads gathered in the western sky.

“Have you ever had the feeling of a rope around your neck, lad?” He checked each cartridge in his revolver, snapped the chamber shut. “I’m going to tell you—when that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your arse.”

He leaned on the hood of my car, not quite ready to let me leave.

“I killed that farm girl.”

I knew who he was talking about immediately. The girl in the Mormon farmhouse off RR #7. Young patrolman Hollis responding to a 533:
Failure to Conform
. For which he’d been awarded the Star of Gilead for conspicuous gallantry.

“Cut that wee girl’s throat. Found her tangled there in the razor wire . . . I damn near cut her head off. Entirely too much adrenaline. You get into a killing like that, this haze, this reddish curtain, it falls over your vision; all you’ve got in your nostrils is the smell of blood.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Hollis’s tongue protruded a half-inch between his teeth. He bit and chewed at it restlessly.

“What I’m saying is that if I’m evil—and yes, I am—I should not have to bear the brunt of that evil, its kindling in me, all by myself. Do we not live in a world that allows it, at times rewards it? So I’m a touch inhuman. Maybe I was born so. But the monsters coming for me, they’re inhuman, too. That’s why I can kill them. Like parries like. What do you think? Can I kill them?”

“I don’t really care.”

He heaved up off the hood. “Go on, hero, save who you can. May God save the rest.”

“And you? Who’ll save you?”

He touched his lips to his scapula
r
.

“I’m a bog-trotting black Irish bastard. I’ll save my own damned self.”

Point of No Return

Rain began to bucket down as I drove away from Hollis’s house. A few fat drops splashing the windshield became a steady drum. The feel of lightning inside of me, electrifying my bones, yet not one bolt cracked the sky.

I ticked over Hollis’s revelations. They had
known
. Couldn’t have found two more willing pawns than Exeter and Hollis: one a bureaucrat, the other a brute. Both soulless. The two of them had run the old end-around on The Prophet, compromised the safety of the city.

Headlights came up in the rearview mirror: dazzling brights that had me shielding my eyes. The car ran up tight on my bumper and slingshotted past; in the driving rain I couldn’t catch sight of the driver or even the make. Slashing in front of me, now only a pair of taillights rounding the bend not far from the Kiketown checkpoint.

I motored into the ghetto at a crawl, my nerves stretched tight as fiddle strings.

I parked down an alley and cut the engine. Rain poured off shop awnings and out of downspouts. I slogged up a narrow stairwell to a locked door. My knock went unanswered. I felt along the top of the doorframe and found a key.

To say the apartment was sparely furnished was an overstatement. Halogens gave it the ambience of a lizard’s terrarium. All the light touched was a military-style bed wrapped in thin plastic in the centre of the main room. Beside it was a filing cabinet stocked with gauze packets and medical tape. Beside that was the machine.

The kitchen. Drawers and cupboards empty. A pump-bottle of Medina antiseptic soap beside the sink. I walked into the bathroom. A plastic stool at the far end of the tub. A reddish tinge to the enamel.

Main room again. The machine . . . Powder-coated steel frame, squat and boxy like some primitive robot. Dials, knobs, pressure gauges. Set on rusted casters. A big red “on” switch. Manufactured by ASCO Apothecaries Co. Electric-Manual Suction Unit. Two clear jars, vacuum caps screwed on top. A trio of tubes: one linking the jars, one screwed to the unit, the last dangling free.

She wasn’t going to do this. I couldn’t let her, could I? We’d have to talk. I couldn’t stand the thought of her strapped to this terrible thing, tubes snaking into her, the life inside of her taken away in such a cold, clinical fashion.