A Separate Country (26 page)

Rintrah had gone on down the street without knowing I’d stopped, and when he saw what had happened, he came rolling back up the street on his bandy legs, shook his fist, and roared at the whores.

“This here is a good man and you ain’t getting in his way. I’ll make sure of that, don’t you cross me. He got himself a woman, damned if he don’t.”

His voice was deep and loud, and it shook me until I was awake again. The ladies he was shouting at flicked their tongues at him, but they did quit shouting at me and turned their eyes up the street. I reckon they were looking for what else the street would bring their way. Rintrah took me by my elbow. His hard, sharp hand was painful and I told him so. He didn’t speak until we’d gone down the block a ways, and then he let me go.

He lived in a large white house four blocks away, close in on the street, approached through a small arbor woven with trumpet vine. Gargoyles smiled brightly from the brick above tall windows. We let ourselves in at the back, the courtyard entrance. Behind us water trickled slowly from the mouth of a lion, down the brick wall, and across the slate. Parakeets twittered from a twisted fig at the center. It was cool back there, the sun hid behind roof tiles.

We sat in a room overlooking the courtyard on the second floor. There were no rugs, no mirrors, no tables, no paintings, just two wooden chairs on a wooden floor newly swept. The walls bore nothing but a perfect coat of whitewash in which there was no variation or error. The sun threw no shadows. All was uniform, spare, and perfect. I removed my hat and saw that my shirt had begun to dry.

Rintrah brought a pot of tea and two white cups. He set them on the broad windowsill near our elbows. He said nothing, just pointed at the tea, and I drank. He climbed quickly into his chair, swinging himself up and flexing powerful shoulders.

The tea was bitter and chalky, but it calmed me.

“What have you been doing?” Rintrah’s mouth moved slowly. “Why did you come find me?”

I had been destroying, fighting, routing the past and the future. I had been defeated by the present. I was at a standoff. I had beaten a retreat. I had nearly crushed Rintrah, an old friend of Anna Marie’s and my new confidant. I had made myself free for the moment. I had been doing one hell of a lot, but at the moment I had nothing to do and no desire to do it.

I told him what had happened. I told him I was on the run. He swung his legs against the bottom rung of the gray oak chair. Then I told him I
wasn’t
on the run, that I had done the honorable thing by tearing up the office and beating my partner, and that I would have been well within my rights to cut his head off. I told him I would have me jailed for dishonorable conduct had I been in charge of me. I told him my head hurt. He squeezed his eyes and popped them open again and again. He looked irritated.

“Drink the tea,” he said.

I did as I was told. I calmed, my heart slowed. I slumped in the chair and balanced my cup on my stomach. Rintrah did the same. We stared at each other for many minutes. Occasionally I studied the baseboard and noticed that someone must have scrubbed at the joint with a needle or a very fine wire. There was no mortar of dust and hair and dirt that always collected in such places after moppings.

“Thank you, Rintrah.”

“You frighten me, General. I reckon you’re not well. You’re not yourself. Breaking up businesses don’t usually involve the cracking of skulls. You know this.”

“Yes.”

“Something has taken your head.”

“Yes.”

“Fever.”

“No.”

“Yes, a fever.”

I felt very sleepy. Rintrah put his teacup on the windowsill and hurried out of the room. I threw the bitter drink down, hoping to stave off sleep.

I woke several times, a few seconds at a time. I lay on a pallet made of old wool blankets. Rintrah must have dragged me into the corner, the strong little bastard.

Later, I don’t know when, I woke and through the scrim of just-parted eyelids I saw that the poisoner, that damned dwarf—I had been drugged!—had pulled a small table into the room where he wrote furiously on blue paper. He scribbled and crumpled, scribbled and crumpled. He swore at the paper, and at the ceiling. Paper piled up around him, and only occasionally would a page make it to the blotter and into the small collection of pages he finally stuffed in an envelope.

Again I awoke and watched him swinging my cane like a club, round and round, vicious and untiring.

Again I awoke and he stood over me, still as a rock. All I could see were his shoes, shined and gleaming. I looked dead in the reflection and dared not look up.

The last time I awoke I saw that he had made a pallet for himself in the corner diagonally across the long room, an identical pallet to mine. There he lay with his back to me, facing the wall.
Where was his bedroom?
I thought.
Does he have a bed? What is this place?

The priest who sat at my foot smiled when my eyes finally focused on him.

“Father Mike,” I said.

He never looked much like a priest. He was a childhood friend of Anna Marie’s, though we rarely saw him. He was someone Anna Marie had known but almost never talked about, someone I thought she had outgrown. In the priest’s case, I had always assumed he was insane, a suitable explanation for avoiding him, in my mind. He looked like a mason or a carpenter, sun-browned like an old vine. His boots were heavy and caked with mud and he had unbuttoned his shirt down his chest. Such a chest. Broad and sowed with black hair so thick he appeared, in the candlelight, to be disappearing into the darkness through a hole in his center. A beard like a wire brush, a head wrapped in a nimbus of sweaty, stabbing locks. The little poisoner asleep in the other corner needed my attention, a boot on his throat perhaps, and I rolled over to see about getting to my feet. Father Mike wouldn’t be ignored.

“Want to kill him, do ya?”

“Hadn’t thought about it.”

“Maybe he needs killing. Some do, you know.”

What day was it
? I thought. The battering I’d given Felix seemed as distant as the mistiest memories of my boyhood. Another life. It was dark, no moon. Mike’s eyes shot gold sparks in the candlelight. He looked amused, like there was something funny about me. This made him look more the priest. That is, smug.

“Don’t know about killing.”

“Go on, John, kill him. Look at him, he’s an abomination. If
that
was made in God’s image, the rest of us are doomed. Kill it. He poisoned you. Go on.”

I hesitated. One thing in his favor, he talked like no priest I’d ever known. Those men had been mainly simpering tea-sippers and natives of the righteous salons owned by the rich and the generous and the lonely. This priest, Father Mike, would not have been welcome in such places. He wouldn’t have matched the drapery.

The other reason I hesitated was that my leg had disappeared.

“Where is my leg?”

“Ah, yeah, don’t know about that.”

“Liar.”

“That’s no way to talk to the man who’s been tending you through your illness.”

“What illness?”

“Some would say that the Devil had taken you, and although that is a favorite explanation among my colleagues, I don’t generally subscribe to it unless I see horns and fire and that sort of thing. I think you’re just mad, crazy like a damned mumblestumbler.”

“Give me my leg back.”

He tugged at his beard and split it into two spikes.
Who looked the Devil now?

“I’m not lying when I say I don’t know where Rintrah put it. Can’t say it wasn’t smart of him. But don’t worry about that now. Hop on over there and kill the runt. Drag yourself if you have to.”

He was scheming me, and I wasn’t going to fall for it. Didn’t know the scheme, but I could see it, anyway, in that smug smile. I was sensitive to schemes now, wasn’t going to be taken again. That was my intention.

“Think I’ll leave him alone for the moment,
Father
.”

“Aye, a shame, John. Another day.”

He stood up. A huge man, hands like knobs of oak. He walked to the head of my pallet, dipped a rag into a basin I hadn’t noticed, squeezed it, and placed it softly on my forehead. Water ran into my eye and it stung. He mopped that up with a dry cloth. I blinked. His fingers were gentle, and I was soothed against my will.

“You made quite a mess back at that office of yours. I don’t think you’ll be welcome back there soon.”

I wondered who had told him. Rintrah, obviously. Can’t keep secrets, had to remember that.

“Why did you go there?”

“I wanted your partners… are they
Arobin
and Felix?
Alcibiades?
I didn’t catch it. Charming, though. Felix needed a change of clothes. Blood on his shirt and so on.”

“Why,” I growled to reiterate, “did you poke into my business?”

He nodded his head and began braiding his beard.

“Yes, yes, forgive me. The first reason is that Rintrah asked me to go over there. He told me your situation, and his answer to every trouble is to call for the priest, meaning me. It’s been that way for many long and irritating years. The second reason is that it seemed amusing and I welcomed the diversion from my regular duties.”

“What use is a priest?” The cloth felt very good on my head. I counted the boards in the ceiling, not a single one gapped or bowed. I wondered how Rintrah reached up there.

“I’ll assume you’re asking what use I might have been in this particular case, and not generally.”

“Hmmm.” I felt myself falling asleep again. He changed the cloth and I noticed that he knelt on his knees upon the bare floor, which must have been painful for a man his size.

“I thought it would be an amusement to tell Messieurs Felix and Alain… I hope I have that right… to tell them that you would not be calling the constabulary to report them for attacking you and vandalizing the office. I told them, in the considered opinion of a priest of great size and belligerence, that they might begin to make peace with their Maker by clearing out, not returning, and keeping their own counsel in these matters. I believe I told them, specifically, to get runnin’ and gag themselves, or I’d gag them for good.”

“Why would they listen to you?” Silly question, I just wanted to hear the answer in his own words.

“Sometimes I wonder, really, why anyone listens to me. It is because I am a priest, of course, and this is a town in awe of its priests, but really, what does that say about the state of our Church? It seems an impoverishment to me, this willingness of the herd to follow their shepherds without question, as if we had secret knowledge. I’ve found this tendency very convenient in my work though.”

“And what is that work? I’ve meant to ask. Don’t see you in church much. Don’t have a church, right?” Why, I thought, should I be the only humiliated one?

“I minister to the dying. It’s my specialty.”

“And this includes acting as a thug?”

“No, no. As I said, that was just for fun. And I wanted to see what damage a one-legged man could do. Very impressive, I should say. However, if you miss those two so much, it’s not too late to invite them back! Shall I go find them?”

He knew the answer to that question, and he also wanted to hear me say it. He smiled. I felt around me, hoping my leg had merely been misplaced. I could use it to club him and escape. He was a strange man, getting bigger and more bearish by the minute. He made me anxious.
Why had he helped me?

“No, I suppose it’s best we all parted ways.”

“Mr. Alcée… that’s his name!… said something about a stolen ledger.”

“I don’t know what that might be.”

He pulled the very ledger from the floor beside his chair.

“Not this then? Because this makes very interesting reading. Had I been the poor, stupid sap buggered in these pages, debit by debit by debit, I might have broken a neck or two.”

I drew myself up until I could sit. Father Mike, odd he may be, was an equal. I wanted him to see me full. Or as full as I could be at that moment, missing my leg and wrestling around among the blankets.

“And you a priest? Breaking necks.”

“Still a man, though I’m better than most at confessing my sins.”

He left the room for a few minutes, taking the candle with him. Rintrah wheezed in the corner, a black lump in the faintest starlight. My anger had passed. All that remained was curiosity and emptiness. I had no more expectations.

Father Mike returned with a cup of water and a jigger of whiskey. He stood over me while I drank, and he was still there when I slumped back down into black, dead sleep.

In the morning Rintrah had gone and Father Mike sat in his chair, great head slumped over his chest and cushioned by the thick chaos of his beard.

My leg lay beside me. It had been sanded and cleaned. I strapped it on and stood. Flights of small brown birds dipped past the closest window, tall and narrow and so clear I thought the birds might fly into the room and alight on our shoulders. I still did not know precisely where I was, I couldn’t remember all the turns Rintrah and I had made to get to the house. The room faced the courtyard, and into the distance all I could see were roofs broken periodically by the tops of trees drifting slowly back and forth, and drifts of gray streaking the sky above wash fires.

I felt strong. I
was
strong. I
am
strong. Lord, I thought, I could stomp out there through the puddles of morning dew in the cobbles, past the wrapping vines concealing a hundred years behind thick and twisting arms, and through the city. I could beat and break my own path, straight and wide, no wall or alley or fence able to withstand me. This is what the city needed, a man to put the bulwarks in order, to clean the trenches and dig them afresh. How many men had been lost in those streets, tripped up, swallowed in blind passageways, disappeared through unmarked doorways?

How could that house be so clean, and why would anyone care so much?

“You’re up, lad, and clomping about like a draft horse. Reckon you’re feeling better.”

Father Mike had arisen and folded my blankets without making a noise. I stood tall on my feet and still I had to look up at him.