Box Nine (44 page)

This is the kind of vile scum Todorov wants to bring into the Church.

To save.

Speer wants to place firm hands on the priest's shoulders and explain slowly, “There is nothing to save. This is basic theology. Look at the faces. Look at the features. Animals. Beasts of the earth. And as such, they have no souls.”

Speer puts his hand in his coat pocket, touches the canister, finds two loose Excedrin, pulls them out, and puts them in his mouth. The headache is probably too far gone now, but he dry-swallows the caplets anyway.

Todorov isn't a stupid man. Why can't he see the simple fact that following the fringe, following after the aberration, will always lead down a blind alley? The only explanation for the priest's actions is the sin of vanity, the vice of raging ego. Pride will always make the brain lie to the soul. Todorov wants to be a shepherd so badly he's tending to a flock of serpents.

Speer looks up and sees fewer people exiting the cathedral. He glances to his watch and sees confessions are just about over, so he gets out of the car, crosses the street, and enters through the enormous, castlelike front doors.

He stands in the doorway for a moment and lets his eyes adjust to the dimness. He moves to a small table set next to the St. Vincent de Paul Society collection boxes and picks up a mimeographed flier. It takes him a second to realize it's written in Spanish.

He walks through a second set of double swinging doors into the main body of the cathedral. He slides into the last pew, kneels, folds his hands in prayer, and starts to take inventory. To his left is an elderly couple kneeling in a pew next to the confessional booth. And far to the front, up at the altar, is a large-bodied nun in a reformed habit, folding fresh white linen cloths. Speer scans the whole scene again.

He grew up in churches like this one. Smaller versions, but always built of heavy stone, like the cathedral, always ornate rather than quaint, with long aisles and cold, shadowy choir lofts, and a dark, smoky tinge to the walls where the heating system would push dust and grime upward year after year. Places where every word echoed and threatened to end up unintelligible.

Speer grew up dreaming of overseeing a place like this, four or five curates under his domain, maybe a crowded school staffed by classic disciplinarian nuns, enormous May Processions spilling out into the streets, and local politicians sniffing around each year for a vague endorsement. Three months in the seminary severed any hopes of fulfilling that dream. He found the core dogma of the institution had been subverted. And he knew that once that happens, the cancers of compromise and rationalization spread like an unbroken line of oil fires down the landscape.

Speer left the seminary and signed on with the FBI.

The nun on the altar folds and smooths her last piece of linen and exits into the sacristy. A few moments later the older couple finish praying their penance simultaneously, slide out of the pew, and leave. And Speer is alone with the priest.

There's the sound of a cough and then Todorov appears from the sacristy, a set of keys in his hand, ready to lock up the church now that all the Masses are done.

Speer gives a hesitant voice and says, “Are you leaving, Father?”

Todorov squints down toward the rear of the church, then smiles and says, “Can I help you with something?”

He starts down the aisle toward Speer, and Speer moves his head around sheepishly and motions with one hand toward the confessional booth.

The priest pauses. “Do you want to …” He trails off and mimics the motion with his keys.

“If it's not too much trouble,” Speer says.

“Not at all.”

Speer waits and allows the priest to enter the box, then moves out of his pew, steps in the adjoining booth, and pulls the heavy curtain closed behind him. He goes down on the cushioned kneeler, waits a beat, and then hears that old sound, that childhood sound of the miniature door, the sliding panel being pushed open to reveal the shadowed face of the priest, in profile, his ear turned to the penitent, obscured behind a heavy mesh.

The sound and the sight take Speer back for a moment, catch him off guard.

Fr. Todorov says, “Go ahead, my brother.”

And Speer instinctively begins speaking in a low, rote voice. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been—”

Another pause and then an improvisation. “—an awfully long time since my last confession and these are my sins.”

He stops. Todorov gives him a good ten seconds, then says, “It's all right, son. Remember why we're here. God has infinite forgiveness.”

“You truly believe that, Father?”

Speer can almost see the priest smile on the other side of the mesh. “With all my heart, my friend. That's the root of all my faith.”

“But you've made a very broad statement, Father.”

“How is that?”

“What I mean is, is forgiveness the same as redemption?”

“I'm not sure I'm—”

“I'm speaking about the unconverted, Father. I'm talking about those outside the Faith. I'm asking you, can they be redeemed?”

“Are you trying to tell me you're not Catholic? Is that—”

“Excuse me, Father, but, in this day and age, what would you mean by Catholic?”

Now Todorov pauses, backs away from the confessional screen, seems to put a hand up to his face.

“Well, very simply, were you ever baptized in the Catholic Church?”

“Is that necessary, Father?”

“Necessary? I'm not sure … I'm not sure we're on the same track here. Did you want to make a confession?”

“It's just that I've been following your work, Father. You've been in the
Spy
quite a bit lately. And I'm just wondering what it is you tell the heathens—”

Now Todorov interrupts, his tone turning sharp, his torso leaning back to the screen. “Heathens?”

“The gang boys. The Tonton Loas. The Angkor Hyenas. The Granada Street Popes.”

“I'm not sure we're in the right place to—”

“Of course you're right, Father. It's just that your work, what I've read about, the things I've heard—it's all caused me to rethink certain … Well, it has relevance to my confession, you see.”

The priest is curious now, maybe on the verge of being flattered. “Go on.”

“It's just that, Father, the things I've done … It's very difficult to … I'm very ashamed …”

Todorov is in his element now. His voice turns professional, a brother to his radio voice. “God's brought you here today for a reason, don't you think? We can't change the past, my friend, but we can repent. That's why you're here. There are things you want to tell me, yes?”

“Yes, there are, Father.”

“Yes, there are. Now, you take a deep breath and you let the Spirit move you.”

“It's very difficult, Father—”

“God will give you the strength. Tell me your story:”

Speer begins to whisper in a voice too soft to be heard. Todorov says, “If you could just speak up a bit, my friend.”

Speer sees the priest lean his ear toward the screen. The buck knife comes up and slashes the mesh diagonally. Speer's free fist flies through the opening, catches the priest in the eye, breaks open skin. His hand grabs hold of Todorov's throat and pulls the priest's head through, into the penitents' booth. Before the priest can scream, Speer has a full arm around his neck and the blade to his throat.

“I'll have your tongue on the floor before you can make a fucking sound.”

The priest starts to let out small, panicky gasps that immediately evolve into a wet gurgle.

“I want you to know what you've done. I want you to realize what your actions have brought you. I hope God can have more mercy on you than I.”

Speer brings the knife down, pockets it, and draws from his jacket a small silver metal cylinder about the size of a hip flask. He holds it up in front of the priest's face, actually touches the man's forehead with it like some kind of quick anointing.

“This is benzine.”

He brings the canister up to his mouth, grips the cap with his teeth, unscrews the top, and spits the cap to the floor.

“The Nigerians used to be crazy for this stuff a while back. Warring tribes used to pour it over their captives. Made for an unbelievable sight. A man on fire with this shit—it isn't like he just burns. This is like rocket fuel, okay? You explode.”

Todorov makes a single frantic pull backward, a seizure-like move of absolute panic. Speer tightens his grip on the neck and begins to pour the benzine over the top of the priest's head.

“Just like baptism, Father.”

He empties the canister and drops it.

“Coincidentally, you know who's big on benzine death these days? That's right. Your own little Hyenas, there. The little Cambodian fuckers. It'll look like you and the Hyenas had a disagreement. But that was bound to happen.”

Speer gets ready, takes a breath, then lets another punch fly, connects at the bridge of the priest's nose, hears the bone break. At the same time he releases his hold and Todorov's head shoots backward, back into the confessor's booth.

In a single, graceful motion, Speer swings out of the confessional, grabs his Zippo lighter from his jacket, thumbs up a flame, and tosses the lighter in on top of Todorov. There's an explosive sound of air popping, a gustlike rush of noise that increases in volume and chokes out any scream as the priest's body tumbles sideways out into the church, immediately unrecognizable, a crumbling tower of blue-green flame, an inferno of dizzying incineration of flesh, hair, fabric, and then, in seconds, bone, calcium, muscle, and marrow. It's like staring into the corner of a canvas that depicts the lowest and most brutal level of hell, blown up into a close-up and made animate. Todorov's body stops moving. The curtain of the confessional is transformed into blue flames. The worn carpeting starts to burn below the pile of imploding cleric. The wood of the confessional booth catches. It's a species of burning, a breed of fire that most people never get a chance to see.

But Speer is already in his car and pulling onto Harrington Street, a new Torquemada in a Ford sedan, a rush playing through his body like a pure bolt of speed, as if the glands of some raging god have been planted at the base of his spine. And a small buzz starts up in his ear like a brilliant insect, congratulating him on his step over the line, on his entry into the world of action.

2.

Wireless, despite its name, did not set out to become a meeting place for the city's radio freaks, though its owners, Mr. Ferrie and Mr. Most, were both longtime broadcast buffs. They'd met locally, over at Jonas University, and spent four years together, locked inside the college station, restaging a lot of the pretelevision radio gags that had been popular in their parents' era: d.j.'s on the air a week without sleep, ridiculous and endless fake interviews, “Louie, Louie” played for forty-eight hours nonstop.

They took the inevitable step over the line when, a week after the Kent State killings, they ran a mock
War of the Worlds
-type all-day news report concerning the seizure of the campus by fatigue-clad CIA commandos reporting solely to Spiro Agnew, and the subsequent courtyard execution, relayed in graphic blood-spurting detail, of the student newspaper editor, the women's collective coordinator, and two-thirds of the philosophy department.

The dean's office was not amused. Ferrie and Most were suspended for the balance of their final semester and never bothered going back for their degrees. With time on their hands and few employment prospects, they borrowed money from their parents and purchased a condemned 1920s lunch car that was oddly attached to a condemned former factory.

Their hope was to round up some hands-off investors and turn the place into Quinsigamond's first cutting-edge, independent, underground radio station. The first prospective financiers didn't stay long after it was revealed that the station would program, in Feme's own words, “dramatic readings from the works of Herbert Marcuse—right alongside only the purest R&B.” Furthermore, they'd accept no commercial advertising. At this point one possible investor, an uncle of Most's back in Newark, shook his head, confused, and asked, “No advertising? Where do I get my return?”

Ferrie and Most shook their heads back at him and said in unison, both their voices rising in pitch to accent the word's last syllable, “Return?”

As the uncle threw them out of his home, Ferrie made an improvised pitch that they'd sell their blood on a regular basis.

Instead, they scrapped the radio station idea and reopened the diner as a diner. They cleaned the lunch car and fashioned enough Mickey Mouse repairs to placate the licensing board and, surprisingly, during the first month of operation, found they'd stumbled into the right market—blue plate specials for a blue-collar town. Neither was an expert chef, but they borrowed family recipes for meat loaf and chili and turned a modest and, at the time, somewhat embarrassing profit the first year.

Ferrie shocked himself by realizing he had a facility for business. Most uncovered a latent flair for design. They reinvested continually, eventually bought the ruined factory building grafted to their rear. They expanded, renovated the dim mill that had spun a century's worth of machine parts from the sweat of immigrant labor. By the late seventies, the partners drifted onto the dangerous precipice of late-night hipness, and became nightclub mavens. They scored a liquor license, contracted live bands, sculpted a hazy-neon backstreet motif, suspended huge, original, local artwork on the now-chic exposed-brick walls. And Wireless became a certified hot spot.

Today, people pulling into the crushed-stone parking lot at 10
P.M.,
letting their headlights play off the unique structure gleaming deep-colored light and literally humming with an electric buzz, have a tendency to indulge in hindsight and state, “The place couldn't miss.” But Ferrie and Most would be the first to tell anyone their fortunes rose on the uncontrolled tides of luck and weird social fads.