God Told Me To (19 page)

“Lieutenant Phillips concerning Miss Mullen. Correct?”

“That’s right.”

“Whatever you want, you won’t learn much. She’s not all there in the head.”

“Can you tell me anything about her?”

“Senile. Stays in her room. Doesn’t mingle.”

“Any family.”

“Has nobody but us. Do you want me to have an attendant bring her down?”

“I’d rather see her in the privacy of her room.”

“Very well. But I can’t leave the desk to escort you. Take the elevator behind you. 3-M. We’re not responsible for the condition of her room.”

Miss Mullen’s room was tiny. The moment Nicholas opened her door he was hit with a sweet lavender scent that drenched the air. The linens on her unmade bed were dirty. The floor needed sweeping. She was sitting in a wooden rocking chair staring out a window. A rough, brown blanket was wrapped around her, a small throw rug covered her lap. Her hair was thin and gray and stringy. She didn’t turn as Nicholas entered her room, but her crackling voice immediately said, “Quick. Close the door. Before a draft comes.”

Nicholas closed the door.

“I’m cold. I want more heat.”

He came around the side of her chair and looked at her. He shuddered. Something about her features was broken, as if her face had once been torn apart and clumsily put back together. She was bone-skinny. Her sunken cheeks were chalked with heavy powder. Her mouth was partially open and a strand of spittle ran down her chin. Under her chin there was a round damp spot on the brown blanket. Standing near her, Nicholas realized the cheap lavender scent was meant to mask an odor of urine.

“Miss Mullen, I’m a police officer. I hope you’ll be able to give me some information.”

A strangled rattle rose from her throat. “You must be having the wrong party.”

“This concerns something that happened a long time ago. Thirty-eight years.”

She cackled, rattled. She wiped her spittled chin with a skeleton hand, seemed to forget him for a few moments, and in that time the spittle reappeared.

“Who are you? Are you here about the heat.”

She was sitting on the room’s only chair. Nicholas crouched at the side of the rocker to put himself at eye level with her. He spoke slowly, gently, in a manner he hoped wouldn’t disturb.

“In October of 1938. Something terrible happened to you.”

“Speak up.”

“In October of 1938.”

“I won’t tell about if again. Nobody believes me.”

“I will.”

“Are you a new doctor?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“You want to hear about it so you can laugh at me. Like all the others.”

“I won’t laugh, Miss Mullen.”

“I’m cold. Will you send more heat if I tell?”

“Yes.”

“No, you won’t,” she cackled. “Nobody’s ever believed me. I told it when it happened. Told it over again and over. Police, doctors, my priest. They all laughed. They said it never happened. I got to thinking it never happened. Only it did and I was right. My parents didn’t believe. I lived with them. My father. He used to tease me about becoming a spinster. This time he struck me and called me worse. They sent me to an aunt in Pennsylvania. So the neighbors wouldn’t see me. Only I came back and had the baby. Queens Hospital. Nineteen and thirty-nine. I wanted to take the baby and show all them who laughed. They still wouldn’t have believed me.”

She lapsed into silence. Her head lolled to the side.

Nicholas prodded, “Miss Mullen, how did it happen.”

She snapped up her head, wiped her chin.

“My father called me a whore. He wouldn’t let me come home. I was never a whore.”

“Yes, Miss Mullen. How did it happen?”

“We lived way out in Flushing. I worked a night shift. I was a long-distance operator for the phone company. When I got off the bus I had to walk a long ways. Things weren’t so built up like now. Ohhh. It was a terrible light. Yellow and all over me. I didn’t know where I was. I couldn’t move. They carried me somewhere. It was a thing. A shiny metal thing. My legs were held apart and I lost all my clothes and the thing came at me from a big ball of light. It went up inside me and wasn’t cold.”

Her skinny body began to shiver. Nicholas thought to comfort her, but she shrunk from his touch.

“The thing made me have the baby. I swore to my father in Jesus’ name I hadn’t been with a man. I never have done that, never. I was always good, and after I had the baby no man wanted me. The Church took the baby and told me they would find it a good home.”

“They did, Miss Mullen.”

“The priests wouldn’t believe me. Nobody. I have nightmares still. The terrible light and the thing going inside me. I still get so scared sometimes.”

The rug across her lap became wet with a large stain. Urine spilled down her legs and puddled the floor. She seemed unaware of what she’d done.

“You’re not a priest. A priest would get me more heat. You just want to laugh like the rest of them.”

He could not bear to spend another moment with her.

That night, fear dragged him down, washed over him, swallowed him. He saw a woman swept by blinding yellow light. A swirl of copper and gold. High-pitched laughter. The rats swarmed over him. The woman naked. Her legs spread apart. A metal tube violated her. Cackling laughter. Crazed. Icy. A baby cried. Huge panes of stained glass shattered. Rats shrieked. A child rolled from the arms of a woman of stone. The metal dripping red pulled from the woman. The smell of dust, lavender, burning wax. He felt his skin turn blue.

NINETEEN

He was living in the subways now. A fine hiding place for a man on the run with no place to go. He rode the trains to the ends of the lines and back again, from White Plains Road in the Bronx to Brooklyn’s Far Rockaway to Queens’ Hillside Avenue. He changed trains often. The lunch counters and shops in the underground malls of the larger terminals provided him what he needed in food and clothing.

He knew it would all be over soon. But before he again confronted
him,
he wanted the man named Zero.

He would emerge from the subway tunnels at midnight to walk those midtown blocks of Eighth Avenue known as the Minnesota Strip. Blocks which Dante would have assigned a special place in Hell; blocks populated by pushers, junkies, teenaged prostitutes, motorcycle gangs, pimps, panhandlers, where glaring flickering marquees announced pornographic movies and flanked adult book stores, massage parlors, the steamed windows of pizza parlors and sandwich shops, the curtained windows of gypsy fortune tellers, saloon windows framed in plastic wood, barred windows of pawnshops. He would walk here. Noise pounded him. Barkers hawking the theaters, hookers fighting with one another for a particular doorway, cars, buses, jukeboxes blasting through saloon entrances, panhandlers pleading for the price of a cup of coffee, a glass of wine, a fix of heroin. He walked and passed the word that he wanted Zero.

And one night two men stepped out of a doorway, and without a word he nodded and went with them, rode with them to a pool hall in Harlem.

The tall black man playing a private game of pool glanced up from the table as his men led Nicholas through the door. He completed his shot. Cursed when not all the balls ran into their pockets. He threw his cue on the green felt.

“Heard a whitey was seekin’ me. No way thought it Mr. Peter Nicholas. Such a surprise caused me to miss my shot.”

Nicholas stared at the black man.

“What’s the why, Nicholas?”

“You killed Jordan.”

The inverted
V
of Zero’s mustache flattened into a dark scar above his lip as he smiled. “That homicide was the work of the ‘Voice of God.’ ”

“You used the name of God. I can’t allow that.”

“And what do you propose to do about it?”

The now familiar electricity charged Nicholas. He stared at Zero and said, “You’re going to do it.”

Zero pulled a knife from his pocket. He pressed the spring release. The blade snapped out and reflected light. Zero removed his glasses. Twisted the knife so that it bounced reflections and said, “Pretty, ain’t it.”

“Look at me, Zero.”

The two henchmen each took hold of Nicholas.

“Lot of folks will be right happy to learn you are dead and gone, Mr. Nicholas.”

“Look at me.”

Reflections bounced from the knife.

“I always look at who I’m about to carve.”

“Do what you have to do, Zero.”

The black man stood directly in front of Nicholas. He raised his knife. The inverted
V
returned to his upper lip as his smile vanished. There was a slight hesitation. Then he plunged the knife into the heart of one of those holding Nicholas. The stabbed man was gasping his final breath as Zero plunged the knife into the other.

Zero stood back. He examined his bloody knife. He wiped the blade with his fingers until the light bounced off it again. He looked at Nicholas, his eyes seeking approval. Once more he raised his knife. Smiled, but this smile didn’t make a scar appear. Instead, it gave an innocence to his features. Then, he sliced his throat.

TWENTY

The dial tone hummed. He dropped the dime into the coin slot. Seven times the dial whirred as he spun the digits of her number.

“Hello?”

“Casey. It’s me.”

“Peter! Where . . .?”

“We can’t talk long. I know your phone must be tapped.”

“Are you all right? Where are . . .?”

“I’ve found out who I am. Better this way than if we had stayed together. I’m sorry. Sorry about Martha, too. I’m a stranger. Like
him,
I’m a stranger.”

“Please tell me where you are.”

“I’m the only one who can stop
him.
He’ll come to me because
he
knows I’m
his
only threat. He’ll send someone and I’ll win, Casey. But I’ll always be a stranger.”

“Peter, you’re not making sense.”

“You know how I said I felt close to God, closer than to people? Well, it wasn’t God, wasn’t Jesus.”

“I want to help you. Where can I find . . . ?”

“It was something else, Casey. Something I’m part of. That something has to die.”

“Stop it! You’re talking like you’re not human.”

“It’s why I was repelled by the idea of having kids. Why I’ve never been able to love you the way you deserve.”

Her voice shook with sobs as she said his name.

She had been sobbing for most of their brief conversation.

“I wish it was different, Casey. Good-bye.”

TWENTY-ONE

8:15
A.M.
Grand Central Station. The underground tracks that handle the shuttle runs between Grand Central and Times Square. The morning rush hour. Crowded with those who must reach the other side of Manhattan for their jobs, their schools. A jammed, crushing, impatient crowd.

Nicholas stood at the edge of the platform, leaned out over the track, and pretended to scan the dark tunnel for an approaching train. He felt the presence of the man behind him. The roar of a train came from the tunnel. Nicholas leaned farther out from the platform. Just as the man pushed at his back, Nicholas moved and the man fell forward onto the tracks.

Screams and shouts rose from those near enough to see the man fall. The brakes of the train screeched as it pulled into the station. White light from the headlight bleached the man. He raised his arms, as if surrendering to the death bearing down upon him. Nicholas grabbed an arm and pulled the man to safety.

The man had been so near death that the screeching train caught one of his shoes by the heel and took the shoe as it rolled past and braked to a halt.

The crowd saw that the man was rescued and unhurt. The doors of the train slid open and the crowd pushed in, while those passengers who had ridden from the West Side pushed out.

Nicholas carried the limp weight that was the body of the man who had tried to kill him. Carried it to a place of relative quiet.

Nicholas said, “Who are you?”

The man’s eyes blinked like they were full of cinders, and he made the gurgling sounds of a baby. He wasn’t young, but he wore the face of a boy about to be punished.

“Are you one of the twelve?” Nicholas asked.

The man bobbed his head up and down, up and down.

“I tried. Tried my best. But Hirsch did no better, did he?”

Nicholas reached inside the man’s jacket and found a wallet. He looked at the identification.

“Logan. Is that your name?”

He bobbed and blinked, and brought his hands together over his chest.

“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

Nicholas slapped him, and ground his heel into the foot that had lost a shoe.

“Where is
he,
Mr. Logan?”

“My home.”

“Take me there.”

“I can’t tell
him
I’ve failed. It’s all
he
’s ever asked of me.”

“He
already knows you’ve failed, Mr. Logan. Now you’re serving me.”

Logan’s elegant brownstone home was located in a wealthy and exclusive part of the city, exactly the reverse of the last place Nicholas had confronted
him.

Logan was babbling hysterically by the time they entered his front door. He had cut his shoeless foot on both broken glass and lit cigarette ends. The injured foot left a trail of blood on the thick carpet which he led Nicholas across. They came to the kitchen. Logan pointed a wavering arm at another door.

“Downstairs. The furnace room.
He
likes it there.
He
never comes upstairs.”

“He
stays in hiding?”

“He
doesn’t have to come out.
He
doesn’t have to speak to us anymore.
He
can make us know
his
wishes. Every day
he
becomes more powerful, stronger.”

“Why the furnace room?”

“Ever since you and
he
met, cold bothers
him.”

“Your work is over, Mr. Logan.”

Logan blinked and bobbed, bobbed and blinked. He waited until Nicholas left the kitchen. He limped to a cabinet which was beneath the sink and found a can of Drano. He pried off the lid with a coffee spoon. He ate half of the can before dying.