City of the Absent (18 page)

“How so?”

“I'm the one destroyed. The child is the flame that ignites me, and I the moth burning and out of control.”

“So it's the child's fault you attack her?”

“She attacks me! With her being, with her flame that I must have.”

“So she's at fault, not you?”

“Yes!”

“For being a child…for being childish?”

“Yes, damn you! Yes! Now you've got it right.”

“So we should let you go as the injured party?”

“Yes, Inspector, yes.”

Ransom only knew it as a horrid and putrid crime. A
crime to make every man ashamed of his species. A crime that no one wanted to think about it, much less speak of, and so it remained a
buried
crime. Even when such a crime reached the courts, judges were quick to close down their chambers and deal with it behind closed doors. As obviously the church—his church—had done.

“Get some sleep, Sam,” he told the boy. “Use the settee.”

“What about Father Jurgen?”

“I'll pay him a visit, Sam. You don't have to go back there.”

“Really? Thanks, Mr. Ransom.” Sam ran across the room and curled up beneath the wool blanket that Ransom had laid out for him, his head hitting the pillow, his eyes closing.

He looked the epitome of the wounded angel. The whole scenario recalled to Ransom's mind a painting he'd once viewed at the Chicago Art Institute of a wounded angel being found in a heap by a pair of grimy-faced children.

Ransom dressed, leaving tie and collar off, grabbing
his cane and pacing bearlike before a snoring Sam. Once he felt certain that Sam was out for the night and that Hake was a no-show, he left.

Outside, the street was deserted save for the vermin and the homeless. He yanked his coat collar up against the chill night air as a stray dog overturned someone's trash can. As he walked, his cane beating to his step, Alastair imagined that Frederick Hake was a slacker and a liar, and the information he supposedly had a fiction as well. He imagined he'd been taken for twenty bucks, enough for Hake to put down a useful bet on a horse or to get into a crap-shooting game.

“You'd think I'd've learned by now,” he muttered against a brash, Chicago wind coming against him. The good news was the unlikelihood of a dossier on him sitting somewhere in Pinkerton's office. Still, it would explain why Bill Pinkerton had been so jumpy and nervous when he appeared at his desk.

He'd have to give it more thought; he'd have to run Hake down as he had so often run down Bosch. Find him in one of
his lairs or his favorite gambling den. At the moment, however, to hell with Hake, and Pinkerton, and Kohler. He had an evil as sin priest to deal with.

Alastair moved swiftly for a man his size, cutting through familiar gangways and backyards to half his trip and time. Sunup wouldn't help in the business he had in mind.

It galled him that he was forced into this—on such an unholy errand to the church that he'd once called his second home, where he meant to bash this man's teeth down his throat or do worse harm. It galled him in so many ways, not the least being that St. Pete's was and had always been the one place in the city where he thought Sam and his generation safe. A refuge, it was supposed to be a place of comfort where angels held one out of the storm called the human condition long enough for respite and relief. But due to this priest, this special, magical place failed to keep the storm out for Sam, and God alone knew how many others his age.

Ransom knew St. Peter's well, and he knew what the young priest, Jurgen, looked like. It was now just a matter of finding him and “laying on of hands.”

Alastair traversed the distance in short order, as St. Peter's was not far from his residence. While unsure precisely how he would handle the matter, he felt his anger rising with each step that took him closer to Father O'Bannion's cathedral. Soon the spiraling pinnacles of the place came into view. All the pomp and circumstance, all the marble blocks, all the stone statues and gargoyles amid the turrets of this place, every symbol down to the wafer and the wine, all took a major pounding due to this hypocrite priest Jurgen. A priest unable to resist a prurient urge to touch and be touched by some angelic child. A priest who'd tonight madly beaten Sam when the boy refused the adult's deviant lies and advances.

The huge double doors of the church, some fourteen feet high, had enormous knobs and locks, but the church was never locked. Its doors were always open to the needy, and Ransom always felt this place a sanctuary to the homeless and children like Samuel. Now this.

A hundred different scenarios played out in his head. Who outside himself would believe Samuel? If he arrested the priest in proper style, Father Jurgen'd be released immediately, and all would be turned on him, instead, as some sort of villainous atheist to do such a thing; yes, it would become twisted and turned on him and Sam. And Samuel would be unable to prove it didn't happen another way entirely. That perhaps Samuel solicited the behavior himself. Worse yet, the thing could easily become a kind of twisted fodder for Chief Kohler to destroy Alastair's reputation by putting forth witnesses to say the boy had been beaten and attacked in his home tonight, and most certainly
not
in the house of God.

So how do I proceed?
Alastair asked himself as he pushed through the door and stepped into the huge pew-filled church. Blinded by the brightly lit backdrop of the pulpit flanked on either side by Mary and Child, and by Jesus on the Cross, Ransom realized this was too public for what he contemplated; he began backpedaling out as a feeling of panic and claustrophobia enveloped him here in the huge, open room filled with stained-glass offerings of scenes from the lives of the saints. The claustrophobia took on the feel of a dark huge beast creeping over him just below his skin. His heart rate had increased, a cold sweat lathered his brow and neck, his scalp felt afire with ants, and his perspiring palms wrapped tighter about his cane. He couldn't do what he'd come to do. Not here, not in this place. Not even to Father Franklin Jurgen.

Ransom had made one stop on his way here, and that was at his friend Philo's home, disturbing Philo from a deep slumber.

“Do you still have possession of those farm implements that Montgomery Ward had you photographing for their new catalog?” he'd asked Philo.

“They refused the return post, expecting me to pay for it!”

“So you have them back?”

“I do, but why? And what's got you in such heats?”

“I want those castrating scissors they use on horses. Do you have them?”

“Rance, what in the world have you in mind? And are you
sure
about this?”

“Fool, it's not for me!”

“A horse, then?” he asked.

“No, not a horse.”

“You mean to…to castrate a man? God, Rance, isn't your reputation already beyond repair?”

“No one'll ever know it was me. When I'm through with this bastard priest, he won't be talking to anyone.”

“Priest!”

“He's molested Sam.”

“Nooo!
A man of the cloth, sworn to abstinence?”

“A man of the lie more so than the cloth. Now where are those bloody pinchers?”

“Are you sure, Alastair, that this is how you want to proceed? This gets out, it could end your career.”

“Where're the damn pinchers?” Ransom pushed past his friend, who stood in his nightshirt.

“All right, all right. But they must never ever be traced back here, you understand?”

“Not by me.”

And now Ransom was standing in the church foyer, one hand on his cane, the other fingering the horse-neutering pliers held beneath his great coat. In fact, he cut his finger on the razor sharp edge.

He'd never felt comfortable in the house of God, not as a child and certainly no longer. What made him think he could take out his revenge for Sam on Father Jurgen here, now, tonight, in such a place? Perhaps Philo was right; perhaps it'd be too cruel and inhumane to butcher a man this way? Not even be sure to go through with it, he thought when footfalls interrupted him.

“Can I help you, my son?” called out an old priest who looked as if he'd torn himself from a hoary grave, his white hair wispy and lifting with the wind from the door that Ransom held open.

The thing sitting on Ransom's chest—like some dark in
cubus of nightmare—made it difficult to speak, but he croaked out his lie. “Sorry, Father O'Bannion. I just stepped in to throw off a fellow I'm tailing.”

Ransom made the mistake of meeting the old man's incisive, cutting glare. “Is that right now? Using the Church to further your career? It'd be a headline if it got out, Alastair.”

Ransom instantly knew he was caught in a lie. Damn the priest.

O'Bannion was an institution in Chicago, a priest with the reputation that made Irish priests uncomplicated and complex at once. He had been a boxer few men could defeat in the ring, and a minister no one doubted. A big and tall man in his prime, he looked to be what a child imagined God to look like, and Alastair had never known him to be without a gray beard. He had ministered to the poor in this parish for over fifty years with little or nothing to work with and even less reward.

Despite all odds, Father O had somehow kept a soup kitchen open. He had begun a school in an adjoining building whose owners he'd convinced to donate to the church. He personally kept the books, somehow keeping it all revolving in the air like a trick cyclist with multiple plates on the end of countless thin rods.

“Are you sure, Alastair?” probed O'Bannion.

“Sure…sure, yes, I'm sure.”

“I could always tell when you lied, even as a boy.”

“All right, I came to have a talk with—
ahhh
…”

“Father Jurgen, I suspect.”

“Then you know what happened with Samuel, the boy?”

“I've heard Father Jurgen's side of it.”

Ransom snorted, his hidden hand tightening around the pinchers. “And I'm sure it's a fine rationalization, too.”

“Father Jurgen was to take over here. He's made a series of…let's say bad choices.”

“I'll say he has.”

“And his punishment is already great.”

“Great enough that he won't harm another child?”

“That is my estimation.”

“Then you didn't fall for his rationalizing this away?”

The priest led Alastair toward the altar and the candles. “I've been concerned about Father Jurgen's,
ahhh
…”

“Activities?” Ransom supplied a neutral word for it.

“Activities, yes?” Not even the tough-talking old bird of a priest could find words for this kind of crime. No one wanted to acknowledge that such things existed in the world, in nature, in society, in the things men conceived of, and certainly not the churches or the schools. Ransom's neutral word fed right into the
faux
politeness.

The two men stood before the candles, and Father O lit one, saying, “We should pray for Father Jurgen…will you light a candle for him?”

The old chess player had outmaneuvered Alastair. He could not light a candle without giving away what he hid beneath his coat. Ransom ignored the question, saying, “Then these activities have been going on for how long, Father O?” The old priest happily allowed people to refer to him as Father O as an endearment.

“For…let's say, some time, but the offense has only recently come to my attention through a series of unfortunate events.”

“I see. Then why not turn me loose on him?”

“I've already taken him to great task, Alastair.”

“Great task? How? With words?”

“In my younger days, I'd have made him get in the ring with me, and I'd've bloodied him good before he got out,” said O'Bannion.

“That could be arranged with me opposite Jurgen.”

“Perhaps it could.”

“But it'd hardly be enough punishment.”

“I certainly understand your rage and anger, Alastair. Had to find my own center of calm myself. But at my age, I fear that climbing into the ring against a younger man would only flatten me!” O'Bannion laughed at his own remark, but a glint of nervous electricity fired in his eye. “Let it go, Alastair. The Church deals with its own, dirty laundry and all. We don't any of us want a scandal. A thing like this spread across the headlines—”

“By God, put me in the ring with 'im!”

O'Bannion took hold of his arm. “I can't have 'im killed, now can I?” The old priest tried smoothing it over with a smile and a hand on Alastair's back.

“Just point out his room to me, then!”

“You won't find him here.”

“Where, then? Don't tell me you've castrated him down at the butcher shop.”

O'Bannion laughed again. “No…no, he's been
transferred
. No longer my worry, and no concern of yours, son.”

“Transferred?”

“Sent to another parish.”

“Another parish? Where he can attack other small boys?”

“Hold on!”

“What kind of punishment is that?”

“His new parish is in Greenland.” He said it as if the word “Greenland” meant the last word on the subject.

“But he's still in robes? Still dealing with children?”

“He's been reprimanded, and he has shown how contrite and horrified he is at his own behavior. Something you should perhaps try sometime, Alastair.”

Ransom turned and rushed back up the aisle for the door, believing the old priest as to Jurgen's having already vacated St. Peter's.

O'Bannion rushed after him, moving surprisingly fast for his age to close the distance between them, wishing the conversation to remain muffled. “I can assure you—”

“Assure me?” interrupted the cop, turning on the priest. “The man's obviously ballyhooed you, old man! Damn you! What about the children in that parish in Greenland?”

“Franklin has sought out help and received counsel.”

“What help? What counsel?” Alastair's words dripped with contempt.

“My counsel, and God's counsel, Alastair! Do you think
your
counsel is above God's or mine?”

“Sure…sure, the
weasel-snake-creep
spouts off apologies to you and to God, but not a word to Sam or his other victims, yet Jurgen's somehow the better for it?”

“He's a changed man, much better.”

“You arranged for this transfer?”

“I did.”

“And this parish in Greenland? Will Jurgen be head man there?”

“He is, yes, and that responsibility will curtail any future offenses, you see. A heavy responsibility can cure a man of such ills.”

Ransom pulled away. “He's molested boys here, and—and you're sending him someplace where no one knows him or what he is capable of do—”

“In order for him to begin anew! We must help heal Father Jurgen.”

“Heal him! What about Sam?”

“The boy is young, and children are capable of remarkable strength.”

“You rewarded the guy! Gave him his own parish, a place where he is in charge. Would you put the devil in charge?”

“Hold your tongue, man!”

“You don't give a drunk the keys to the liquor cabinet!”

“I tell you the demon has been exorcised from Father Jurgen!”