The Schwarzschild Radius (13 page)

hanks for taking the time, Father,” said Detective McKenna, flipping open his notebook.

“Certainly. Have a seat, Detective,” said Massey, settling in his office chair.

“Thanks, but I already sit too much. When we initially spoke, you’d mentioned Olivia had worked here for an unusually long time as a counselor. About a year.”

“Eleven months.”

“And that she had left about four months ago.”

The priest said nothing.

“Is that correct, Father?”

“Yes.”

“There’s been a disturbing development. Olivia seems to have left here and gone to work in a―I guess you’d call it a sex emporium. A kind of strip joint downtown. From counselor to stripper. I see a lot of odd things in my business, but that one stands out.” Massey didn’t seem disturbed. Not a lot of rapport skills, this one.

“Well, I see a lot of odd things in my business too, Detective. And I know that very young people are extremely malleable. They’re still at the age when they can have an epiphany that changes their lives, sometimes for good. Sometimes not.” Massey locked eye-contact with McKenna.

“You had a unique chance to observe her in the eleven months before she started stripping. Did anything happen that might have caused her to change like that? Did she confide any problems to you?”

“Detective, it’s an effort for me to make time for you, much less our counselors. My job here is to manage Transcendence House and raise money, a lot of it. I rarely get time to chit-chat with anyone here, though I personally interview all the counselors and guests. So I’m afraid I wasn’t aware of any issues.”

“But during your yearly retreat, you do have more time to interact, am I right?”

The priest didn’t miss a beat.

“The purpose of the retreat is reflection and spiritual renewal. I would have
less
time to interact.”

“You’re a busy man, Father.”

“Anything else, Detective?”

“Actually, there is something else.” McKenna took his time flipping to the right page in his notebook. He held up a photo. “Recognize this girl?”

Massey’s eyes narrowed. “No. No, I don’t.”

“She was a guest at Transcendence House two years ago. And she stayed for about two months. She goes by Sonia or Hannah, and she works in the same strip club as Olivia. Isn’t that odd?”

achel didn’t know what she was going to say when she walked through the entrance of the Pleasure Palace.

As she approached the building, her breathing became short and quick. Incense from Nation of Islam street vendors clashed with pork-filled Sabrette hot dogs sold by infidels. Outside a nude bar, a Catholic nun gave out pocket Bibles and spoke in an amplified voice over Sodom.

Rachel walked through the door of the sex emporium unchallenged. There were three platformed cash registers that were reminiscent of guard towers.

At the entrance, one paid for tokens, which allowed entry into one of the forty peep booths on the first floor. The walls were lined with porno DVDs, inflatable dolls, and sex toys. The dolls were packaged in cardboard boxes with cellophane windows. Their mouths were frozen in an extruded yawn that seemed even more artificial as it contrasted with the photo of the beautiful woman on the box.

A neon sign at the bottom of the staircase said,
LIVE GIRLS UPSTAIRS
. The corollary of that, of course, was DEAD GIRLS DOWNSTAIRS.

“Miss, can I see some ID, please,” said a big, pony-tailed Hispanic guy who came up behind her.

She took out her new driver’s license and held it up.

“Anything I can help you with?”

“Just looking.”

“You lookin’ for a job, the man’s upstairs.”

“No. Thanks.”

She walked toward the back where there was moaning and groaning coming from the movies in the peep booths that sounded more like human suffering than ecstasy. There was nothing down here but customers. She climbed the stairs.

The girls were dressed in lingerie and standing outside their booths. Some were beautiful enough to beg the question―what were they doing here? The prettier ones wore Brazilian tangas which left little to the imagination. Several could be overweight housewives. None of them fit Detective McKenna’s description of Sonia.

Men were in and out in three minutes, often still adjusting their pants as they made their exit. The lunch crowd was coming in―execs, yuppies, construction workers. Rachel hovered in front of a rack of sex toys, inspecting dildos and vibrators in their plastic packaging while watching the girls. It was dimly lit, affording just the right amount of anonymity. She stayed until she saw every girl come out of her booth. No Sonia. She realized she was the only girl in this place who wasn’t a sex worker, and all eyes were on her as she made her way down the stairs.

When she fled through the door, the eyes of passing men fell on her as though she were naked.

She needed someplace clean―a holy place―badly.

She put her hair up and changed back into sneakers. The A train took her to 190
^th
and Overlook Terrace. From there, she took the Number Four bus to Fort Tryon Park, The Cloisters.

During a visit here long ago, she had caught a whiff of frankincense that had bonded with the cold, beautiful stones into an other-worldly structure that could exist only in memory. Through the years, she had not wanted to ruin that, and so never returned. The Cloisters were a sum that she kept in reserve for a time of need.

The entire structure of the Cloisters was brought here, stone by stone from Spain and France, yet it looked as native to the landscape as an outcropping of bedrock.

It consisted of architecture and art of several eras, arranged in roughly chronological order. Step through a portal and four-hundred years have elapsed. Gregorian chants played through evenly spaced speakers arranged along the courtyards, giving the effect of walking in a procession of friars.

Rachel entered the sepulchral monument of an ancient family. Adorning the caskets were effigies of knights in full armor, bearing shields pitted by time.

The great oak doors of the Langon Chapel were over twelve feet high and encased in iron strappings that lent them strength. Rachel marveled at the infinite array of cuts and gouges, attesting to the centuries of knife pommels, hammered edicts, and battering rams it had withstood. She raised two fingers, caliper-like, to measure its thickness.

“Excuse me, don’t touch.”

The guard had been watching her all along as she hovered too closely to the doors. Instantly, the serenity of the place was gone and she felt unclean. Don’t touch. The very words implied that the inanimate was exalted above the living. This was, after all, a museum, not a house of worship.

Rachel went on to see the tapestries and the glass-work from the gothic era, but the rebuke stayed with her and nothing was enjoyable after that. But she wasn’t quite ready to go home yet.

She called her best friend, Joules Kaplan, catching him before he left the city. He commuted to Cooper Union and usually left the city by three.

When she came up to him in Bryant Park, he was wearing earphones. She could hear the Kyrie of the Bach B-Minor Mass―remote and feeble to her, crystalline and palpable to him, like so many things they tried to share since they were three.

He was refining his paper on the Schwarzschild Radius. Rachel sat opposite him and spun his notes around. She had the unique privilege of free access to his innermost chicken scratches, which she felt would one day make history. She was about to tell him that, once, but in her new-found wisdom, she kept the compliment to herself.

The notes contained diagrams of event horizons and ring singularities. There was some text, but most of it was in tensor calculus and partial differential equations.

She never knew anyone who could do so many things simultaneously so well. As a high school freshman, he had published a paper on game theory in the Review of Mathematics. As a sophomore, he had designed a dexterity experiment that was conducted by an astronaut on a Space Shuttle spacewalk, one of ten experiments selected from the nation’s high schools. Then there was his second place in the Intel―a little paper he had put together in four months concerning the Schwarzschild Radius. He could take up, contribute to, and discard entire fields at will.