Parishioner

There is a stone chapel on the outskirts of Seabreeze City, a small town that is situated between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. This church has no denomination and is not recognized as a religious institution by any but the ninety-six members of the congregation-them, Father Frank, and his personal staff. The church is made from limestone and stands like a white scar on a green hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The weather is mostly fair and still, as if Time had paused there to appreciate a perfect moment of rest.

This nameless house of worship comprises a large room with long, plain, sun-filled windows and eight rows of simple hardwood benches separated by a slender aisle.

That Sunday, Father Frank, wearing all black as usual, stood before ninety-three souls of the ninety-six parishioners. There was no pulpit or even a podium from which his sermon was given, just a round circle of light-colored stones.

“My words here this Sunday morning are a miracle,” the tall, willowy white man said. “You, hearing these words and making some kind of sense from them, are a roomful of miracles. The spider that is dying in a crevice far above our heads is the same as my words and your understanding. Existence itself is mind-blowing, inscrutable, and, in the end, beyond our ability to comprehend. That’s what a miracle is-something beyond comprehension.…”

With his hands clenched together and his eyes tightly shut, Xavier Rule lowered his head even further, allowing the words, as much as possible, to become his mind.

“… We have no choice but to exist as miracles among the uncountable wonders of creation, our brothers, ourselves. Every breath and vision, love and fear, and yes, every sin we commit is something extraordinary.”

Upon hearing this pronouncement Rule released his prayer grip and raised his head to look at Frank. The minister’s hair was stark white and coarse. This mane stood up and to the side like a crop of sun-bleached, windblown hay.

Frank had also shifted his attention. He was looking toward the back of the chapel.

Xavier turned around to see a young-seeming caramel-colored woman in a satiny blue dress with a white, dovelike hat perched at the side of her head. The hem of the dress came down to her ankles, hugging her generous form. Her lips were red and her eyes hopeful.

“We are all sinners here,” Father Frank intoned, bringing Xavier’s attention back to him. “All of us. We have dragged ourselves from every gutter, back alley, and addiction this world has to offer.”

“Amen!” someone, probably Yin Li, affirmed.

“Many of you,” Father Frank said, “have broken each and every one of the Ten Commandments, and you’ve done more than that. You have been, and I have been, the enemy of the potential of creation. We were the slag after divine creation, the maggots on the flesh of slaughtered innocents. But even our sins, our wayward steps, are part of a greater plan. Each of you has found your way to this sanctuary. And here, inside the shelter of pure faith, you have discovered the hope for forgiveness.

“Man cannot judge you. Woman cannot judge you. Even the victims of your crimes cannot, in the end, demand retribution. Our evil is ours alone to bear.…”

The feeling of tears welled up in Xavier Rule’s eyes, and once more he was amazed by the power Father Frank held over him.

“… Do not believe,” Frank continued, “that even you can demand payment for your crimes, that even you can understand what marvels might arise from your actions. Among you there are prostitutes, assassins, gangsters, and worse, much worse.…” Frank bowed his pale mane for a moment, quivered, and then looked up again. “But no matter the evil, no matter the disease that festers in our mortal bodies, we must press onward toward the light. None of us can wallow in self-pity, because the greatest sin is giving up.”

“Preach,” Lana Antonio proclaimed.

Frank gazed around the room with empathy. Xavier wondered, not for the first time, at the preacher’s power to move and hold that room of lost souls. He glanced toward the back and saw that the caramel-colored woman had taken a seat in the last row, to the right.

“We have a guest today,” Father Frank said, also looking at the visitor. “We will call her Miss Jones.”

“Welcome, Miss Jones,” ninety-three voices said.

Among the speakers there was represented almost every race and all the continents: men and women who had, against impossible odds, escaped their destinies and sloughed off their disgraces to look inward and out through Frank’s eyes.

“We will break up into our prearranged groups and go down to the cells to perform the Expressions,” Frank said. “After that, supper will be served in the yard.”

Frank turned from the congregation and passed through a doorless doorway behind the Speaker’s Circle.

Xavier grimaced and took the lavender-colored envelope from his pocket.

On Saturday afternoons the members of the congregation called in to a special number to say whether or not they were coming to service. Once Frank got this information he wrote a note card telling each member which cell to report to and what subject he thought he or she might like to broach. Thrice a year Frank met individually with members of the no-name church, discussing in blunt terms the nature of their sins and hopes for their deliverance.

At their first meeting Xavier had told the self-ordained minister about crimes committed from Harlem to East New York.

“I have beaten, raped, and murdered my brothers and sisters,” he said when he and Frank were introduced at a Skid Row dive in downtown Los Angeles. “When I was fourteen I mutilated a girl for laughing at me.”

He didn’t know why he confessed like that. A woman named Pinky had introduced them. Pinky was dark skinned, not dark chocolate like Xavier, but deep brown like cured mahogany.

“I want you to meet a friend’a mines,” she said after a night of cheap wine and debauchery.

Xavier had already considered killing Pinky, because he didn’t remember what he’d said the night before. And then he met the white-haired white man and his life changed course as if by some preordained plan.

The note cards would have a number between one and sixteen and a short sentence or two. These suggestions were often odd, sometimes on the head, and usually revealing.

What did you use to wash the blood from your hands after beating someone? was once suggested. How did you heal the cuts and bruises on your knuckles?

What is the saddest thing you’ve ever seen? a line one day read.

Have you ever forgiven a sin against you?

List the first names of the people you’ve killed or tried to kill.

Sometimes Xavier found that he could not follow the advice or answer the question, but he always tried. And he listened when his fellow parishioners spoke, hearing them and trying to understand why they would do the things they did. Arsonists and serial killers were the hardest for him to comprehend. Luckily there were only three people who fell under these categories-at least, only three he’d met.

Xavier opened the lavender envelope and unfolded the white greeting card.

See me in the rectory in one hour.

Xavier, called Ecks by members of the congregation and friends, went out through the back entrance of the church and sat on a big gray stone amid the shrubbery and sandy soil. He stared down at the highway and the water beyond practicing the Meditation of Forgetfulness-an exercise that each member of the congregation was taught at the beginning of his or her tenure. The idea was to look upon any landscape and see what was before you with no past and no future. There was supposed to be only a now.

In three years Ecks had not mastered this method of contemplation. Always in the background there were grunts and cries, words of anger, and the sense of a journey or path in anything he saw.

When he complained to his sponsor, the thief Sarah Jones, she said, “Frank says that the attempt to forget is all we can hope for.”

“But isn’t forgetting just like denying your sins?” Ecks asked Sarah.

“No,” she said. “It is the attempt to eradicate the foul long enough to realize a hope for change.”

The rectory was a smaller version of the church behind the high white stone walls that also surrounded the yard where the congregation supped after Expressions. The door was wooden, painted scarlet, with a brass knob and no bell or knocker.

This door was always unlocked but no one ever went there without an invitation, so Xavier pushed it open and walked straight in.

There was a huge, shatterproof window on the wall opposite the entrance; through this portal bright sunlight shone. There was no desk or sofa only a plain maple table and a single mattress, covered by a military blanket, on the floor under the window. Across from the simple bedding stood a dull metal rack that held a dozen pine folding chairs.

Frank had set out three chairs. He and the caramel-colored woman sat in two of the seats, while a third sat empty, waiting for Xavier.

“Brother Noland,” Father Frank hailed.

This greeting told Xavier Rule that his true identity was not to be shared with Frank’s guest.

“Sir.”

“This is Benol Richards.”

She smiled and nodded. The first thing Xavier noticed about her was that she was older than she seemed at a distance-around forty, more or less.

Xavier crossed the room and lowered onto the empty folding chair.

“Ms. Richards,” he said.

“You can call me Benol,” she said, “or even Bennie.”

“Odd name.”

“My mother made it up. She told me that it came to her in a dream, and since my father wasn’t around she decided to call me that.”

“What had your father wanted to call you?” Xavier asked.

Both Frank and Benol smiled.

“No one has ever asked me that,” she said.

“Benol has come to us for redemption,” Frank said.

Xavier turned to his pastor, an immediate question etched on his dark and brutal face. There was a gash under his right cheekbone that looked like a canyon across an onyx plain.

Father Frank was missing two front teeth, one upper and one lower. These gaps were presented with his grin.

“Benol,” Frank said.

“Yes?”

“Would you please step outside for a little while? If you sit at one of the stone tables someone will come out to feed you.”

“But I thought this man could help me.”

“I said that I would ask him, but we have to speak privately before he can decide.”

Despite her age Benol exuded a youthful beauty: brash, or maybe fearless in some way-like an adolescent. Xavier could see all this. She didn’t like the idea of being pushed out, but there was no gainsaying Frank’s words in his own house.

She nodded at the self-ordained cleric, glanced at Xavier, paused a moment before rising, then walked slowly toward and finally out of the unlocked door.

“Whoa,” Xavier said when she was gone.

“Beautiful woman,” Frank added.

“Yeah,” the Parishioner agreed. “Like an adder or rattlesnake.”

“She liked you.”

“Hawks like rabbits. Cats like soft sand.”

“Mr. Rule,” Frank said.

Xavier realized that he was still staring at the scarlet door and turned back to the minister.

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you think of her beyond the threat?”

“I thought that you told me that we don’t deal in redemption here.”

“She is asking for redemption,” Frank said easily. “I didn’t offer it.”

“You never mention the Lord’s name in your sermons,” Xavier said.

In between the three private meetings a year, the Harlem gangster was hungry for knowledge about the man and his words. He didn’t care about Benol Richards-not yet.

For a moment it seemed as if Frank would not answer, but then he raised his eyebrows and sighed.

“Words are divine but they are also traps,” he said. “Rabbit and snake, good and evil. These are mere cages for things we know precious little about. Either we feel heat or pain, or glimpse a fleeting shadow, detect a scent coming from some unknown corner. We use words to capture meaning, but the Infinite will not be trapped or captured, seen or smelled. It defies our senses and values. It cannot be imprisoned, incarcerated, or otherwise locked up inside our minds-it can’t be locked out either.”

“People have been using the word God since before they could write,” Xavier argued softly.

“And look at the world,” Frank said, showing his missing teeth again. “Dynamite is a great tool. It can move mountains, but you don’t put it in the hands of children. The truth will set you free; everyone knows that, but try as they might the right words rarely come out.”

“But-”

“Xavier,” Frank said, “are you going to require a sermon of me for this meeting?”

“No, sir.” Xavier lowered his head and smiled.

“You come here of your own free will.”

“I do.”

“You pay nothing, are asked for nothing, are never judged.”

“No, sir, I do not and am not.”

“And all I want from you now is the answer to a question.”

“I understand.”

“Benol Richards was referred to me by a friend in Miami,” Frank said. “Benol’s mother died when she was eight and then, for years, she was thrown from one foster home to another. She was an angry child and so never fit in.

“When she was twelve, an uncle found her and brought her to live with him and his wife in Southern California. They ran a nursery out of their home and took in small children and infants.”

At this point Frank stopped and stared at his parishioner.

Xavier, for his part, looked up.

“A few years later she kidnapped and sold three babies,” Frank continued. “Took them for her boyfriend and then ran with him up to San Francisco. He left her when the money was gone, and she spiraled back down to Florida.

“All of that is true. She says that she had a sudden awakening in my friend’s mission down in Miami. She confessed her crimes and came up to California to find the people she harmed. She’s gathered as much information as she could and called my friend to ask if she could help. Theodora in turn called me. I met with Benol on Wednesday and now I’m speaking to you.”

“I deliver newspapers now, Father Frank.”

“Print,” the clergyman replied with laserlike emphasis. “Not blank pages. Not false promises. You deliver people an attempt at truth. You are a part of that attempt.”

“I wake up at three in the morning, pick up the kids that work for me, and then go down in a truck to the distribution center to wrap and then deliver. I go to bed at seven after dinner I cook on a hot plate.”

The two men stared at each other for nearly a minute.

Finally Frank spoke. “Will you go out for me and tell Benol that we cannot help her?”

“You could ask somebody else to help.”

“I asked you.”

“But she came to you.”

“And I brought you in.”

“It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been out of the Life, Frank. I don’t know what’ll happen if I get into some nasty shit out there.”

“This building is not a refuge, Xavier,” Father Frank said softly. “It is a trajectory from one kind of life to another.”

“I know that. I know I got to prove to myself that I don’t have to be what I was. But I feel like I need a little more time.”

“Fine,” the minister intoned. “Tell Benol that.”

“Okay,” Xavier said. “I’ll tell her.”

Frank smiled and held out a hand.

After shaking, Xavier stood up. He glimpsed the ocean out of the picture window and smiled.

“It’s a spectacular sight, no?” Frank commented.

“It is.”

“I love it because the waves and sky are always in motion, always changing. But even if they were to freeze into one gesture there aren’t enough lifetimes for a single man to see it all. There’s joy in our limitations, Xavier. We, all of us, only do what we can.”

The members of the congregation had completed their Expressions and were now seated at the twelve white-stone tables, on white-stone benches, eating barbecue and potato salad, corn on the cob and broccoli.

There were ribs and fish, burgers and chicken coming from the kitchens, carried by four silent men and women who wore saffron robes.

Benol was seated at a table talking to Iridia Gallo, a woman of East Indian and Mexican descent. Iridia too was near forty, also well preserved. She had been running cons on rich men around the world since she was sixteen. She left behind her a trail of murders and suicides, jail terms and uncounted broken hearts. Her understanding of human nature was deft and merciless.

If a man wanted to bleed for me I let him bleed, she once said in cell fourteen during Expressions. If he felt unworthy I relieved him of the burden of grace.

Now she lived in a mountain aerie raising long-haired sheep and looking after the grandchildren of a man she’d destroyed. She had a young lover named Colt Chapman and washed his feet every night before leading him to their bed.

“Hello, Ecks,” Iridia said. “Have a seat.”

Han Burkholter, the baby-faced bank robber, shifted over to make room for Xavier. Han had a deep tan and wore bright-colored beach shorts with a purple T-shirt. Iridia dressed in wraparound robes of silk that were composed of two sheets, one sea green and the other a buttery yellow. Xavier’s church wear was, as always, a black suit and a red shirt, black tie, and blunt-toed black leather shoes.

He nodded to the bank robber and stepped in next to Iridia, one body away from Benol.

“How’s it going?” Iridia asked.

“You lookin’ good today, Sister Ire.”

“Yes,” she said, never one for false modesty.

“How’s Chapman?”

“He’s taking taxidermy classes down in LA.”

“That’s strange.”

“Chapman likes to hunt … animals,” she said with a sharp smile. “I was talking to your friend. She seems very nice.”

Benol was staring at the man she knew as Noland; he could feel the intensity of her gaze.

“I’m sorry, Ire, but I have to talk to Ms. Jones for a few minutes.”

Xavier rose and Benol did too. He led her away from the gathering to a stairway carved into the thick white wall. Together they climbed to the top of the rampart, fenced in by a seven-foot clear plastic barrier that overlooked the ocean.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Xavier said when they were standing next to the glasslike wall. “I’m a newspaper deliveryman nowadays. I don’t know how to do what you and Frank want.”

He expected some disappointment in her mien, at least that. But Benol simply looked at him, listening closely to his words even after they had been spoken. There were two freckles under her right eye, and her skin up close looked like blended rose and yellow-gold. Her irises were medium brown but deep, and her hair was curly with two dreads, one on the left side above the ear and another coming down the front on the right. These worry braids made Xavier think that Richards didn’t always wear her Sunday dress.

“Do you have children?” Benol asked after long consideration.

Xavier winced and immediately regretted it, like a boxer having just shown a weak spot in an early round.

He considered answering but worried that he was outmatched.

“You could at least talk to me,” Benol said.

“I can’t do it.”

“Do you have a child?”

Her name was Dorothy and she came from a respected Harlem clan. She had light brown skin with dark golden hair and eyes that were the color of walnut shell. Xavier met her at a party where he had delivered the cocaine. They fell into a passion that they both hoped would deliver them. But after the baby, Roderick, was born they went into different orbits contained within the same four walls.

He couldn’t remember the name of the woman he had spent the night with. Maybe he never knew her name. But when Dorothy confronted him the next morning, he beat her with an electric cord-that memory was etched on his mind: the welts on her light skin, the emptiness of their apartment when he returned after three nights of drinking and whoring.

The past is gone, Father Frank said at least once a month. You can’t let go because it is already gone. You have to look forward, for an opening that will allow the illusion of the past to fade.

“You’re no newspaper boy, Mr. Rule,” Benol said when he failed to answer her question. “I need help and Father Frank brought me to you.”

Not for the first time Xavier regretted his conversion to the white stone church on the hill. Before Frank and the assembly of sinners he was his own man for better and worse. No one ever defied his wishes except by force. And even then they could break his bones but not his will. They could lock him in a dark cell, refuse him water or a toilet, but Xavier had always hung tough and been his own man. Always.

“Tell me about your crime, Ms. Richards.”

“You can call me Bennie,” she said. “All my friends do.”

“We aren’t friends yet.”

She accepted the rebuke with a slight nod.

“I was living at my uncle Clay Berber’s house in Pasadena,” she said, falling right into a story that had been told many times. “His wife, Rose, ran a child-care center there. I was fifteen, in high school, and I guess I was a little wild.”

“You guess?”

“I was. You know we did drugs and had sex a lot. I went to adult parties because I looked old enough for the men there. That’s where I met Brayton.”

“Who’s that?”

“Frank didn’t tell you anything about me?” she asked.

“I want to hear it from you.”

“He was a thief and the lover of this older lady-Beatrix Darvonia. I met him at a party my girlfriend brought me to, and he told me all about how he was a burglar. He said that he only went with Beatrix to meet her rich Pasadena friends and rob them. He said that she even knew about it but that he was so good to her in the bed that she didn’t know how to stop.”

“And what about you?” Xavier asked.

“I didn’t wanna stop either. Brayton would bring me right up in Beatrix’s house and sleep with me in the guest room. And sometimes he’d take me out on his burglaries. I loved him like Mary Magdalene loved Jesus. His hair was black with this shock of white right over his forehead.”

The sneer on Benol’s face held a passion that Xavier could feel.

“And what did he offer you?”

The amber-colored woman’s body shook involuntarily and she was brought back to the rampart.

“He said that the greatest theft was stealing babies and selling them on the black market. He said that all kindsa people wanted to buy children for all kindsa reasons. He said that if I could help him steal a child from my aunt and uncle, we could be rich and live in a town house in San Francisco.”

“I didn’t know that there was such a high price on black babies.”

“My aunt and uncle are white,” she said. “They’re on my stepfather’s side of the family. Brayton chose the children because they were all blonds with blue eyes.”

“So you stole three babies for him?”

“He did it. He came over one afternoon in a lemon van when my aunt left the kids with me and we drove over to this house in Culver City and gave them to an old woman. She paid us forty-two thousand dollars.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“Brayton told me that the woman had rich clients,” Benol said, suddenly defensive.

“Do you remember the address?”

“That was twenty-three years ago.”

“What do you remember about the house?” Xavier asked.

Crooks make the best detectives, he had once told Father Frank. We have no police department, no nine-one-one. If something gets stolen or a loved one is attacked we have to solve the crime, track down the culprit, and arrive at our own justice. At that moment, with Benol Richards on the rampart, he regretted this claim.

“It was big and brown, two stories or maybe three, with a green yard that wrapped around both streets,” Benol said. “It was right there on a corner that had all four stoplights hanging together at the middle of the intersection. I remember that.”

“What was Brayton’s last name?”

“He called himself Starmon, Brayton Starmon, but his real name was Welch. I know because one night when he was sleeping I looked in a waterproof pouch he kept in this sack that he always had close by. He had his birth certificate in there and a picture of his mother, Martha Welch.”

Xavier turned his back to the ocean and leaned against the plastic barrier. In the courtyard below he could see the villains he prayed with. They were talking and eating, drinking and meditating. Father Frank moved among them giving good tidings and asking after their lives. Xavier thought the church was like a prison that worked on the honor system. You were free to repent, but always as an inmate serving a life sentence, with Father Frank as both warden and confessor.

“Have you tried to find him?” Xavier asked.

“I tried the Internet and then hired this private detective,” she said, and then shrugged. “No Brayton anywhere.”

“You sure the woman was in Culver City? The one you sold the babies to.”

“Brayton did it.”

“Did you let him into your uncle’s house?”

She glared.

“Did you?”

She nodded ever so slightly.

“Did you go with him in the yellow van carrying at least one baby in your arms?”

“I was fifteen.”

“Are you sure the woman was in Culver City?” Xavier asked again.

“Yes. I don’t remember the street name, but it was on a corner and the cross street was called a boulevard.”

“See? Confession is not only good for the soul; it also helps your memory. Do you remember the old woman’s name?”

“Sedra, Bray called her Sedra.”

Hearing the endearment, the shortened form of Brayton’s name, Xavier had the sudden urge to slap the woman.

Whenever you feel the inclination to revert to your old ways, Frank had once advised the assembly, try to remember that there is a reason-and reason is the answer.

“Sedra what?”

“He never used her last name.”

Xavier had once kidnapped a child, a young girl who was the daughter of a competitor from East New York. This man, Lolly Centrell, controlled a distribution house that Rule wanted and so he took Lolly’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Bridgette, and let it be known that she would suffer before he killed her if Lolly didn’t pass control over to him.

Even now in this reverie Ecks didn’t know whether he would have hurt the girl or not. He didn’t have to worry, though. When Lolly refused to deal, Bridgette’s mother shot him in the head, solving Xavier’s problem and freeing Bridgette.

“What did you do after you sold the children?” Xavier asked.

“Bray took me to San Francisco and we lived in this house in the city that looked down on the bay. He took me to dinner and out dancing every night and showed me that I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was like to love a man. He would talk to me while we made love and it nearly drove me out of my mind.”

“And then?”

“Four, five months later he just didn’t come home. We were running low on money and he started burgling again. He went out one night to break into this camera store and didn’t come back.

“He’d been asking me to get a job at a day-care center. He said that we could grab some more children and sell them to Sedra. But even way back then I felt guilty about what I had done. I couldn’t even imagine doing it again.”

Benol was looking out over the ocean, grimacing at her semitransparent reflection in the clear plastic barrier.

“How do you live?” Xavier asked.

“You mean because of what I did?”

“No. How do you pay the rent?”

“I work.”

“At what?”

“I’m a receptionist for a talent company in Santa Monica.”

“How much they pay you for that?”

“Why?”

“Are you going to answer me or do I walk away right here, right now?”

“Thirteen dollars an hour,” she said. “That and overtime. I’m just doing it until I find those boys.”

“And why would you want to do that?”

“Because it was wrong.”

“It’s been wrong for twenty-three years. Why look for them now?”

“I came to stay at Theodora Martino’s shelter in South Miami. She had a storefront church and a shelter. One night I … I went to her office and told her what I’d done. She didn’t judge me or anything like that. She just said that I had to make amends. After a while I realized that she was right, that the only thing that mattered was to … to try and make up for what I did. I came here to put things right. I still know the names of the parents. I owe them something. When the detective didn’t work out, I called Theodora. That’s when she told me about Father Frank.”

Xavier wondered about the caramel woman in the blue dress-about her worry dreads and sudden repentance. The truth was rarely as neat as it seemed in words. But who was he to say? Frank was his spiritual guide and therefore had to be trusted.

“I want you to write down everything that you’ve done and that has to do with those children,” he said. “Brayton’s names, anything about this Sedra woman, the detective you hired … everything. Bring them to my place in LA.” He brought out an eel-skin wallet and produced a simple business card. “That’s my address and phone. I need it all before tomorrow morning. I go to sleep very early, so you don’t have to knock; just slide it under the door.”

“I don’t really want to write it down. I mean …”

“You trust this Theodora?”

“Yes.”

“And does she trust Frank?”

“Completely.”

“I will destroy the file when I’m through with it. You got my word on that.”

Xavier drove a restored Ford Edsel. It was salmon pink and lime green, edged in chrome. He leaned against the front hood in the parking lot and waited until Iridia came out. She saw him standing there and walked his way, her yellow and green silk robes hissing like the scale-over-scale rub of a coiling snake.

“Ecks,” she said, approaching him demurely.

“Ire.”

“Did you want something?”

“What did you think of Ms. Richards?” Xavier Rule asked.

She gazed into his eyes. Her skin was the color of red earth that had been lovingly smoothed and then burnished to a medium glow. Xavier knew that the longer he looked at her the more beautiful she would become-like some dispassionate Hindu deity that would take your soul from reflex without the slightest enmity. Over her shoulder he could see a fire red pickup truck pulling into the parking lot.

“She was guarded,” Iridia Gallo said. “If it was the old days I’d either let her alone or make sure that she was on my side.”

“She on the con?”

“Some of us are always working,” Iridia said with a brilliant smile. “It’s like being an alcoholic or under a nature bequeathed by God.”

The truck pulled up next to Xavier’s fancy two-toned-and-chrome car. A tall white man with big muscles under a red-and-cream-checkered shirt leaped out from the driver’s side.

Xavier and Iridia ignored him.

“You believe in God?” Xavier asked. His voice was neutral but there was sharpness to his eye.

“I didn’t before I met Frank.”

“You think Frank believes in God?”

“It doesn’t matter what he believes in.”

The powerful young man walked up and put his arm around the woman.

“Hey, Ecks,” Colt Chapman said.

“Why not?” Xavier asked Iridia.

“Niagara Falls doesn’t believe in electricity but those dynamos run twenty-four hours a day.”

“Chapman,” Xavier said in greeting. “Just getting a professional reading from your girlfriend.”

“We’re engaged,” the russet-haired white man said, trying his best to make the words sound like a threat.

Xavier smiled and said, “Congratulations.”

“Come on, baby,” Iridia said. “Let me take you home and rub your feet.”

“It’s only four,” Chapman said, his tanned face turning from the dark gangster.

“It was a good sermon,” the courtesan replied.

She climbed into the driver’s side and over to the passenger’s seat. Her young lover followed, proving somehow the words of destiny that Father Frank drummed into the congregation week in and week out.

After the unlikely pair had driven off, Xavier wondered whether he should go back into the church and search out the pastor. He considered this action for long minutes, finally realizing that if Frank wanted to tell him something more, he would. The minister was not shy or half-assed.

Xavier lived in a small studio on Flower Street between Olympic and Ninth. The building was old and brown, seven stories, and out of place like an octogenarian that had outlived her family and now made do living among strangers. The elevator had stopped working years before but he didn’t mind. He liked the walk up to the top floor and didn’t know any of his neighbors. He had a hot plate and an aluminum sink, linoleum floors and a small window with a view of the alley where his thirty-year-old, wood-paneled delivery truck was parked. The door that led to his utility toilet, with its jury-rigged shower stall, was opposite his single bed.

Xavier had no television, BlackBerry, or electronic music player. He had a laptop computer that was mostly used for correspondence courses, a cell phone that could do a few tricks, and two custom-made Afghani handguns that could slip into any pocket and fire fourteen shots.

His license read, Egbert Noland, and there was a passport under the name Ryan Adonitello. He most often went by Ecks but never explained when asked where the nickname came from.

At Frank’s behest Ecks had enrolled in the Southern Minnesota Correspondence University studying religion and literature. He spent the first year online getting his GED, realized that he liked doing homework, and continued his studies with no clear intention of getting a degree.

He read books in his spare time, perused the LA and New York Times most mornings after delivering papers. Afternoons he meditated for an hour and then walked three miles to the YMCA, where he exercised, swam, and then worked out in the boxing gym.

That was his schedule six days a week, but on Sundays he limited himself to delivering newspapers, driving his Edsel up north to church, and then sitting on his straight-backed hardwood chair to think about the things he had done wrong. This he found much easier than forgetting.

That particular Sunday he thought about a group of young thugs who called themselves the Easties. This gang wanted to take over the girls down around the Meatpacking District and make them hand over Xavier’s percentage.

The Easties didn’t come from the Lower East Side, or East New York, and the girls of the Meatpacking District weren’t really girls. But Xavier and his main man Swan killed Tommy Tom and Juju Bean on a side street that smelled of rotting meat. The executions occurred at three in the morning so that all the late-night sex workers down there could see who was in charge.

Juju Bean had called for his mother, before Swan, on Xavier’s order, had cut his throat.

“Mother!” he shouted-not Mama or Mom.

Ecks sat at his multipurpose kitchen table wondering what the execution of Juju Bean had to do with Benol. After an hour or so of trying to get the incongruous puzzle pieces into some proximity, he shook his head and went about his Sabbath routine.

Sunday dinner was cornflakes and skim milk followed by a can of sardines in virgin olive oil topped with slices of raw onion and sweet balsamic vinegar. He ate slowly while paging through LA’s and New York’s Sunday papers.

Xavier saw the manila folder sliding under his door but he didn’t go to see whether it was Benol through the viewer in the wall. Neither did he retrieve the file immediately. Instead he thought, once again, about Juju’s blood under his bone-colored shoes and Tommy Tom’s brains coming out of the bullet hole over his left eye.

Neither he nor Swan was ever even questioned about those murders. The authorities were relieved that the Easties, who were a threat to civilians, had been kept at bay by the more conservative and predictable duo.

The knock at the door, maybe forty-five minutes after the folder slid through, was a surprise. Xavier went to the wall eighteen inches to the right of the door and removed a paper calendar hanging there. Behind the calendar was a small screen connected to an invisible electric eye over the door.

She was wearing a little black dress.

“Hey, Ire,” Ecks said upon opening the door. He looked both ways but the dim hallway was empty.

“Can I come in?” she asked. In her left hand she carried a small, test tube-like vase that contained a single iris.

“Is this a visit?”

When she didn’t answer he stepped aside and she walked past, going directly to his yellow table and placing the vase and its purple flower dead center.

The table was set under the window that looked down on the dark alley. The sun had gone down but the sky was aglow with electric light shining from tall buildings just out of sight.

Iridia and Xavier sat across from each other. He had served her sour mash whiskey and taken a Mexican beer for himself.

“Are you doing a job for Frank?” she asked. “One of his special jobs?”

“That’s a question you’d do better to ask him.”

“I work for him now and then,” she said. “I’ve gone as far as Hong Kong and Mumbai.”

Xavier sipped his beer and sniffed. He was bothered by her visiting so soon after his memories of murder. The scent of one seemed to rub off on the other.

“I’ve never seen you not wearing robes,” he said.

“You only know me as a church lady.”

“I’ve seen you outside church.”

Iridia smiled and let her head lean to the right as Father Frank often did.

“Why haven’t you asked to have sex with me, Ecks?”

“You got Chapman.”

“That has nothing to do with us.”

“Us?”

“The congregation,” she said, “is like a hill clan. No matter what we do or how far we go, we always know the special smell of our sweat.”

Again Ecks was reminded of the odor of rotted meat and the dead men.

“What are you doing here, Ire?”

“You were waiting for me after the service.”

“I wanted your opinion. You gave it to me.”

“You wanted more than that.”

“You got Chapman.”

Iridia smiled and reached across the table to touch his dark killer’s hand. He remained still. She stood and moved over to sit on his lap.

“You need this, Ecks,” she said. “You need this if you’re going out to work for Frank for the first time.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She kissed his lips lightly.

“You’re fairly new to the congregation,” she whispered. “Frank’s sermons are only the beginning. We are his Bible and he studies us like a religious scholar analyzing scriptures. But it’s not just that. When he sends us out it’s not only for the obvious. He’s also teaching us something, folding our pasts up into who we are becoming.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Ire.”

“The first man I destroyed,” she said, undoing one button and slipping her hand in against the skin of his chest, “was a billionaire from Oregon. He was young and very innocent. When I was through with him he had killed a man in Seattle, and it took a big bite out of his father’s fortune to keep him from going to prison.

“When Father Frank sent me to Hong Kong I had no idea that my first victim now traded in sex slaves. His demolition, as Frank says, had been complete, and it was my job to destroy him again.”

“You saved the women,” Xavier said.

“And children,” she added, “from a monster that I created.”

She gave Xavier’s erect nipple a hard pinch.

“So you’re telling me you believe we’re Frank’s living scriptures?” he managed to say.

“Come fuck me, Ecks, and I’ll tell you more.”

“I don’t want to have to hurt Chapman,” he said. This his last line of defense.

“I gave him some of my special tea. He won’t wake until morning. By that time I’ll be sleeping peacefully by his side.”

When Xavier woke at three in the morning she was already gone, but the words she’d shed in his ear were still there-loud and clear.

She told him about the missions Frank had orchestrated and the tolls paid by his parishioners.

“So you think that I’m connected to Benol in some way?” Xavier asked in between their second and third ruts.

“Not necessarily,” she cooed. “Sometimes the missions are metaphors for the missionaries.”

Iridia knew how to get a man excited and keep him that way. In the dark of morning, while Xavier drove his truck down to pick up his young paper delivery staff, he still felt the physical sensations.

“Why didn’t anybody else tell me about this?” he asked her as they drifted on the aftermath of passion, leaving the border of obsession.

“Less humility and more humiliation keeps us quiet. Frank doesn’t give you a mission until he thinks you’re ready to face yourself. The Sunday sermons are like boot camp. But when he sends you out on a job, that’s a one-man war. And when a soldier comes home from battle she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Forty-seven hundred newspapers filled the canvas-covered back of Xavier’s oversize pickup truck. Inside Damien, Carlo, and Angelique folded and wrapped, threw and carried the papers and special insert advertisements up and down the blocks of Xavier’s district. The kids were all fifteen years old, making thirty dollars a day. They worked from approximately four forty-five until eight fifteen, seven days a week.

After dropping them off at their school, Xavier went to Lon’s Diner on Grand for breakfast and the first reading of Benol Richards’s file.

He read the seven sheets of legal-size yellow, lined pages from front to back. There were no surprises: the names of the victims and their parents, the private detective, Lou Baer-Bond, and the places where the crimes occurred.

The parents of the kidnapped boys were the Van Dams, the Tarvos, and the Charleses.

While he read he remembered Iridia in his bed. There was a scent to her that he knew like his own sweat.

“Did Frank send you here?” he asked just before sleep.

“He didn’t tell me or ask me to come,” she said. “But whether he sent me or not I can’t say.”

“I don’t think you should come here anymore after this,” Xavier said.

“I don’t think I’ll need to.”

Lou Baer-Bond’s office was on Olympic a little east of La Brea. It was the last office down a drab hall on the third floor above a D-Right Drugstore.

Ecks stopped at the door. Black lettering painted on the opaque, wire-laced glass read, Lou Baer-Bond, Discreet Private Investigations. Rule wondered at the use of the word discreet. It rhymed with sweet but had the feeling of decay to it.

After a moment of empty contemplation he knocked.

“Come on in,” a medium tenor called.

It was a janitor’s closet with a desk instead of a sink, and a dirty window in place of a pegboard. Not enough room for a couple to practice a two-step waltz under a ceiling that was a foot too low for Xavier’s comfort.

Behind the desk sat a white man who was in the process of turning gray. His hair was salt-and-pepper, and any élan that he was born with had drained out of his face and hands. Maybe fifty, maybe more, he looked up through light blue eyes wondering about the black man with the deep gash under his right cheekbone.

“Yes?”

“You the man on the door?”

“Can I help you?”

“I come here for my cousin,” Ecks said, falling into the speech pattern of an earlier life.

“Why couldn’t he come himself?” Lou asked. His suit was loose and also gray but darker and more solid than his skin and eyes. This brought to Xavier’s mind a ghost trying hard to pass for human.

“Can I sit?”

“You plan to stay awhile?”

“Benol Richards,” Xavier said, positioning the visitor’s chair.

The seat was made from curved chrome piping around a stained red cushion. Rule was wearing a light lime suit and a chocolate brown shirt. He worried that the chair might impart some of its soil to his trousers but sat anyway.

“That’s over,” Lou Baer-Bond said, maybe just a bit too quickly.

Looking around the desktop, Xavier noted a pink ashtray in the form of a nude woman with its six crushed-out cigarette butts and a burned-out book of matches, a paper plate with a half-eaten chili-cheese dog, fries, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol standing guard from the rear.

“She didn’t believe that you gave her absolutely everything you had and wanted me to come by and get it.”

“Get what?”

“Benol said that you told her that you didn’t find anything about Brayton.”

“Yes. That’s what I said. That’s the truth.”

The discreet truth, Xavier thought.

“Understand me,” the Parishioner said. “I’m not blaming you. Maybe Bennie wasn’t completely truthful for her part.”

“What’s your name?” the detective asked.

“Noland.”

“Noland what?”

“Egbert Noland, but I go by my last name.”

“And you say you’re Miss Richards’s cousin?”

“Second cousin, once removed.”

“How’d you get that crack under your eye, Noland?” Baer-Bond asked.

Xavier wondered whether he was trying to show that he was a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a scary-looking black man crowded into the janitor’s closet-with the door closed.

“Brayton stole Benol’s car,” Xavier said. “She’s kind of a free spirit, you know. Moves around a lot. So the car is sometimes her bedroom, sometimes her safe-deposit box.”

Xavier didn’t think that Lou meant to raise his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He might not even have been aware that he had done so.

“She looked pretty solid,” the detective said.

“Her car looks like a car.”

“What are we talking about here, Egbert?”

“I don’t know, Lou. That depends on what you got to say.”

“Maybe,” the detective said. “Maybe Brayton has disposed of the vehicle. Maybe he’s cracked the safe.”

“There’s a trick to the hiding place,” Xavier said, “and if he got rid of the car we’d like to know where he did that, and to whom it went.”

“Whom? You’ve read a book, Mr. Noland.”

“Yeah. Studied my letters in downtime. Now … do you have anything to say to me?”

“I’ve already told your cousin …”

Xavier stood up, pushing the red chair away with the backs of his knees.

“But …” Baer-Bond said hastily. “But I might have abbreviated my report. Who’s to say that I didn’t come across a guy who knew a guy who heard something somewhere? Not enough to give as fact but more like a whisper or a hint.”

“And why would you keep Benol in the dark when she was paying you?”

“The lead didn’t go anywhere. I told your cousin that if she wanted to put me on a retainer I’d nose around. But I think she thought I was trying to play her. So she paid me my three hundred and I put the whole thing out of my mind.”

Xavier was beginning to have fun. He liked sparring with the gray man behind the dented pine desk. It almost felt social.

The Parishioner repositioned the chair, sat down again.

“Okay, Lou, here’s what it is. Benol has had her car stolen by this Brayton guy. There’s some money involved.”

“I don’t remember the particulars of the case off the top of my head,” the fleshy detective said. “There’s not much room in here, and so when I finish with a job I file it in my garage.”

“You could look it over after work,” Ecks suggested.

“And why would I bother?”

“If you can prove to me that you have a lead on him, and if you give me that lead, I will pay you six hundred dollars and you can buy more cigarettes and chili dogs.”

“What kind of lead?”

“You know better than I do, man. Here’s my card. Call me if you think of something.”

Xavier gave the PI a special card imprinted only with his cell phone number.

“There’s no name on this card.”

“You know my name already.”

“I don’t think I’ll have anything for you.”

“If you do there’s six hundred dollars in it.”

The detective pursed his lips, again probably unconsciously.

Marilee Pepper worked the sixth-floor research center at the main branch of the LA Public Library. Sixty years old, she was at the zenith of her abilities by Xavier’s estimation. Tall, six one, and white like antique ivory, she was all the way gray and serious about her work. Xavier had met her while researching jobs in the Los Angeles labor market. That was when he had just arrived in LA; seventy-two hours or so after he and Swan had slaughtered Marquis Bertrand.

“Hello, Mr. Noland,” Marilee said. She even smiled, a little.

“Ms. Pepper.”

“It’s such a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Every day is beautiful in paradise.”

They always shared the same words of greeting. It was like the delivery of passwords under cover of darkness during a bloody civil war.

“How can I help you?” the librarian asked.

Xavier didn’t know exactly where the schematics were stored or how to read them if he had. But Ms. Pepper could call up the right blueprints and maps that would reveal the corner where, twenty-three years ago, there was a suspended stoplight that worked at the intersection of two streets, at least one of which was a boulevard, in Culver City.

“How’s Mr. Matthews?” Xavier asked, while Ms. Pepper studied the computer screen on the desk before her.

The severe librarian had a soft spot.

“He had to have an operation.”

“What was wrong?”

“A growth in his abdomen. They said that the only way to tell if it was benign or not was to get it out.”

“How did he do?” the once heartless gangster asked.

Remember kindness and repeat it, Father Frank had preached. It doesn’t matter if it feels unnatural or forced. Goodness sets its own table.

“He’s doing just fine. For the first week he tried like heck to scratch off the bandages but I’d hold him and we finally made it through. It was my first vacation from work in thirty-one years.”

“That calico has nine lives and you are every one.”

Marilee Pepper looked up gratefully. Her hard, white, and oval face was brightened by the glow of the computer screen and sentiment.

“There are four possible intersections,” she said. “Twenty-three years ago four-way signals were in some use. I’ll print out the cross streets.”

“I really appreciate this, Ms. Pepper.”

“As do I,” she replied.

Ecks tried two of the intersections before pulling up to the curb on Lancaster Avenue where it met Kasidis Boulevard.

There was no individual house standing on the corner of the first two cross streets. If the baby trafficker’s home had been at any one of those intersections it was now rubble underneath an ugly, rectangular apartment building.

He sat in his car by the curb wondering about architecture and the way planners named streets in Los Angeles County. Avenue and boulevard were big names for such small side streets. He couldn’t quite make out why there was a stoplight there at all. It must have been, he thought, management for the larger streets and people taking shortcuts through the neighborhood. Or maybe a child had been run over and a neighborhood group had pressured the local political machine.

There was very little traffic at that time of day: little traffic, three gaudy apartment buildings, and a solitary house the lawn of which arched from one avenue onto the other boulevard.

The stucco apartment buildings had all been built in the last twenty-three years; Xavier was pretty sure of that. They were cheap but not yet dilapidated, like so much of LA that was not Hollywood, Beverly Hills, or one of the other neighborhoods colonized by the rich and the pretenders to wealth.

The one house was older but dark blue, not brown as Benol had remembered. However, paint was inexpensive and its reapplication necessary under the constant glare of sunlight on the Southern California desert landscape.

Twenty-three years. What was he doing there? Why had Father Frank set him on this path?

The rapping on his window testified to his distraction. Back in the day, in Harlem, no one could have come up on him unawares like that.

The white policeman had tapped the glass with his nightstick.

Xavier smiled out of reflex as the cop moved his hand and fingers in a circular motion, indicating that he wanted the window to come down. The displaced Harlemite complied.

“Afternoon, Officer.”

“Step out of the car, please.”

The pistol was in a hidden pouch under the driver’s seat, and so Xavier felt comfortable getting up and out of his vintage car. To the left stood the young policeman’s partner, a milk chocolate black man with steady eyes and no hint of humor.

“License,” the white cop said.

They stopped him because he was a black man sitting in a parked car at an intersection where he obviously did not belong. Once he emerged there was even more fuel for their suspicions-much more. The brown shirt and lime suit were bad enough, but his shoes were the color of mottled grapefruits-there were very few professions that wore this uniform, and most of those were illegal.

Xavier handed over his California license and smiled.

The black cop scowled while the white one read.

Rule noticed that there was an angry pimple on the left side of the white policeman’s neck. Half the diameter of a dime, it had a yellowish eye that seemed about to explode.

“What are you doing here, Mr. Noland?”

“Deacon.”

“Say what?”

“Deacon Noland of the Interfaith Church of Redemption.” He plucked a blue business card from his breast pocket and handed it to the policeman.

All ninety-six parishioners were deacons. They were given cards with the private line of the church across the bottom. During business hours, and at most other times, there was a secretary named Clyde Pewtersworth who would happily answer any questions about the cardholder.

Xavier smiled. The only legal profession that allowed him to dress like he did in the old days was deacon. He could see that thought come up in the policeman’s eyes.

“What are you doing here … sir?”

“On a mission. One of our members’ father is sick and he’s been asking for his sister-a Miss Sedra Martin. He remembered that she lived in a house at this crossroads here. I’ve come to see if I could find her and let her know about her brother’s condition.”

“Seabreeze City,” the policeman said. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

“Small town just a little north of Ventura.”

He was racking up points against the impromptu investigation. A deacon from up north named Egbert. This was all he needed-almost.

“Why were you sitting in your car?” the cop asked, handing back the card.

“I just drove up, Officer. The information I had was that there was a house on every corner and that Ms. Martin lived in a brown one. As you can see, the only house here is blue. When I saw what I was faced with I took a moment out to pray that a brown home had been painted blue. I find that prayer often helps.”

The policeman moved half a step to his left and put his hand on the front hood of the classic car. Xavier stopped himself from smiling. He knew that the hood would be warm, proving his story with no real proof.

The cop stared a moment more. No self-respecting law enforcement officer trusted a man in greenish yellow shoes, but the pieces seemed to fit.

“Sorry for the trouble, Deacon Noland. You have a nice day now.”

Crossing the street as the black-and-white cruiser drove off, Xavier thought about Benol. She was the kind of woman he would bed, but only in a hotel. She’d go through the drawers, closets, and elsewhere if she had the run of his home. And at her place he would have felt vulnerable to attack. A woman like that, he thought, could never be trusted.

On the other hand, he knew that if he had the opportunity to be with her that he would take that chance.

As he walked up the stairs of the front porch, he asked himself again why he was there.

The woman who answered the doorbell was younger than Sedra had been when she bought and sold blond children two decades before. She was slight and blond herself, dark blond with green eyes. She was no more than five feet and probably didn’t top a hundred pounds. Her white skin was healthy, not like Lou Baer-Bond’s doughy hide. She smiled at Xavier.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for a woman named Sedra,” Xavier said easily, feeling once again the seductive seeming honesty of California.

“Sedra Landcombe?”

“That’s her.”

“What do you want with her?”

“I’m here for my cousin, Benol Richards. Twenty-three years ago she had some business dealings with Ms. Landcombe and a man named Welch. She-my cousin, that is-is looking for Welch and thinks that Ms. Landcombe might help.”

“What kind of business?” Even the young woman’s frown seemed friendly and inviting.

“I’m not completely sure. This Welch guy did the actual transactions. It might have been work for some kind of adoption agency.”

The frown deepened.

“And your name is?”

“Noland, Egbert Noland.”

“Why does your cousin want to speak to this man?”

“That’s a private matter that she hasn’t shared with me,” he lied. “But she’s a good woman. I can’t imagine that it’s anything too unpleasant.”

“Why didn’t she come herself?”

“Why are you asking so many questions?” Xavier said.

“Oh … excuse me. I don’t mean to be rude. My name is Doris Milne. I’m Sedra’s niece.”

“Benol is down in Miami. She called me from there and I agreed to look.”

“Come in, Mr. Noland.” Doris took a step backward, allowing Xavier to enter the foyer of the old house.

The walls were painted rose and the floor paved with golden tiles. There was a large healthy fern growing in one corner looming over a generously stuffed carmine chair.

“Have a seat, Mr. Noland,” Sedra Landcombe’s niece offered. “I’ll go see if my aunt can speak to you.”

An angry spasm wrenched through Xavier’s chest, reminding him again that he was a violent man, a killer without much remorse and less reason. He had often felt that it was this immediate willingness to fight and brutalize, more than any other trait, that made him a success in the old neighborhoods.

He reached out and touched the young woman’s shoulder. She turned her head to regard him.

“Thank you,” he said. “Make sure to tell her that it’s about someone involved in the adoption service.”

She smiled and went through a double-wide doorway toward her human-trafficker aunt.

Sitting up straight with his hands on his knees, Xavier went through his memory for the proper sermon.

We all have desires, inclinations, and compulsions, Frank had once lectured. This is our animal side, our innocence. But once we make these urges into reality we find that we are cast out. Why? Because we are animals but we are also human beings. These feelings that rise up in us are like the growl of a lion. We want and we take. But if you stand back a moment, if you learn to control the animal appetite in you, then the kingdom will open up and you will find deliverance.

Frank never mentioned God or his relatives. He talked about concepts and consequences-every now and then offering a religious metaphor.

Xavier didn’t understand what Frank had done to him on that late Wednesday morning in the dark bar where he had, only minutes before, considered murdering a woman over something he might have confessed to.

My name is Frank, he’d said, and I think I can help you.…

“Mr. Noland?”

Xavier didn’t want to break away from the reverie. He enjoyed remembering, counting the moments that led to a completely unexpected deliverance.

“Yes?” Xavier said.

“My aunt will see you in the yard.”

Doris Milne led Xavier through a sunken living room that was furnished with gaudy golden-colored wood and blue fabric furniture. The floor was wooly brown shag surrounded by walls hung with more than a dozen oils depicting differing types of flowers. There were rose, cactus blooms, and bird-of-paradise-pansies, poppies, and a spray of purple orchids that seemed as if it might sway if a breeze came along.

There was the feeling of corruption coming from every innocent detail of this large parlor. The Parishioner didn’t know whether this was because of the story he was given by Benol or a sixth sense he’d developed in a long career of bad men and women plying their trades without concern or remorse.

On the other side of the semisubmerged living room was a step up to a long sliding glass window. The transparent door was open, leading out to a brick-laid patio surrounded by tall cedars and set upon by dappled sunlight and shade bisected by bark and leaf.

In a metal chair that had been painted pink sat a small, elderly woman in a jade-and-wheat-colored dress. Her feet didn’t go all the way to the bricks. On the pink metal table next to her was a tall, slender glass filled with a bright green liquid that Xavier was sure had a high alcoholic content.

Hatless, her hair had been ruthlessly dyed an impossible black. Her face was neither round, oval, nor heart-shaped, but rather like a box with the corners smoothed by age. She was eighty, maybe more. Her dark eyes had all the awareness of a long life spent traveling on a one-lane highway with no exits and no end in sight.

“This is Mr. Noland,” Doris Milne said with bland deference.

The elderly white lady made an expression that was intended to be a smile.

“Hello, Mr. Knowles,” she said, gesturing at another metal chair on the opposite side from her. This seat was painted turquoise.

As Xavier moved forward Doris asked, “Can I get you something to drink, Mr. Noland?”

“What’s in the glass?”

“Lime rickey,” Sedra said with a real smile.

“I’ll take one of those if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Sedra said for her niece. “Go make up another pitcher, hon. Use the good gin.”

And so Xavier sat under the shifting template of shadows and sun as Doris went off to mix the alcohol and Kool-Aid.

The predators gazed lazily across the expanse of the table both of them deeply honest and still insincere.

“You told Dodo that you were here about somebody named Ben?” Sedra asked.

“Benol. That’s a woman’s name.”

“Oh.”

“Do you remember her?”

“No. No. And I think I’d remember such a unique name.”

“She and her boyfriend, Brayton Starmon, sold you three blond male babies for forty-two thousand dollars twenty-three years ago.”

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

“I said that I’m working for John and Minnie Van Dam,” Xavier replied, using names from Benol’s confession. “They hired me to find their son, Michael, who was kidnapped from a private child-care home by Benol and Brayton.”

His voice was the hammer while the words were nails. Sedra gave almost no inkling of the pain or fear he inflicted, but Ecks was not fooled.

When the old woman’s left eye fluttered Xavier was sure of at least one part of his client’s story.

At that moment the cell phone in his breast pocket throbbed. A few seconds later Doris came out carrying a silver tray on which stood a large, sweaty tumbler filled with bright green fluid.

“Are you two getting along?” the niece asked.

“Like pigs in slop,” Xavier said.

“Excuse me?”

“Everything’s fine, Dodo,” Sedra said. “Leave us alone, would you, dear?”

“Are you okay?” Doris asked.

“Fine. Fine. I just want to speak privately to Mr. Knowles.”

“Noland,” Xavier corrected.

“Yes,” Sedra agreed.

“I’ll be in the den knitting,” Doris said, but she didn’t move.

“Go on,” her aunt urged. “I’ll be just fine.”

Niece and aunt exchanged glances.

Xavier took a sip of the green cocktail to show that he wasn’t bothered by their concern. The drink was sweet, tart, and very strong.

As he put the glass down on the table Doris was leaving once more and Sedra tried to smile again.

“I don’t know who you are,” the spinster said, “but I will not be threatened in my own house.”

“I’m looking for the boy,” Xavier said easily. “I don’t care about you or Benol or anybody else. The Van Dams hired me to do the work that the police failed to do.”

He considered taking another sip but decided against it. Drinking had its place but that wasn’t in the middle of a showdown between villains.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sedra said in a metered tone that seemed to be saying, or at least meaning, something else.

“All I have to do is give the police what I have,” he said. “Just give them your name and let the pieces fall where they will.”

Sedra opened her mouth but no words came out. A confused look came over her face. This artificial expression, added to the sound of a deep bass gong going off in Xavier’s head, tipped him to the unspoken narrative of his predicament.

He stood up suddenly and turned. Doris was standing there with a Louisville Slugger grasped in both hands.

“Hit him!” Sedra yelled.

Another deep vibration detonated behind Xavier’s eyes. He knew that he couldn’t avoid the young woman’s bat for too long and so he went on the offensive.

The bat arced down, glancing off the left side of his head.

“Hit him!” Sedra was screaming.

He was aiming for her jaw, but Xavier’s fist hit Doris over the heart. She grunted in a decidedly unfeminine manner and fell on her bottom.

When Xavier was stepping over her she grabbed at his ankle. If he hadn’t taken that sip her grip wouldn’t have fazed him. As it was he tripped, pulling away from her and staggering forward. He would have tumbled to the bricks if there weren’t a house there to catch his fall.

Sedra was screaming without words now and the living room seemed even more menacing as he plunged ahead. He made it to the foyer and out the front door.

Ecks felt clumsy. It was as if his body had somehow duplicated itself while neglecting to double the motor skills. He’d become two men with four legs but still could move only one foot at a time.

“That wasn’t just no knockout powder,” the Ecks running behind himself said. “That girl was trying to kill us with that drink.”

The Parishioner almost turned around to catch a glimpse of himself muttering.

“Run, fool!” the voice shouted, strangely echoing the desperation in Sedra’s screams.

By then Xavier was in the front yard and on his way to the sidewalk. He knew that his car was somewhere near, but this intelligence was useless to him. He started running in one direction with all the strength his four spaghetti legs could muster. The world before his eyes was reduced to snatches of scenes like blurry snapshots taken from a speeding car-through a tinted window.

He was running, almost falling, going straight ahead, away from people who were trying to destroy him. Xavier didn’t bother with any logic more complex than this. He didn’t worry about arrest or the discovery of his past. There was no later if he didn’t run right now.

There arose a sound like music, like jazz … no, a car’s horn. There was a red light overhead, a hard shove, then someone, not Sedra or the other him, shouting. At that point gravity decided to take over and he fell, landing on his shoulder, then rolling up into the air. Before he came down again, the burden of consciousness had lifted with something akin to sleep taking its place.

He woke up choking from a noxious gas that filled his sinuses.

The burning odor shot up his nose like a venomous snake writhing in and biting the inside of his head.

“What the fuck?” He rose up on a hospital bed flanked by two men and a woman.

She was a nurse, probably Korean, young, her hard black eyes disapproving. The Hispanic police captain in full uniform loomed from behind her, searching Xavier’s eyes for awareness and subterfuge. Next to the cop stood a short white man with very long fingers, dressed in a too blue suit.

Shaking his head in an attempt to dislodge the nasal viper, Xavier still had the wherewithal to wonder where his clothes were. He shopped for suits sometimes for months before he found just the right one. He was hoping that the accident hadn’t ripped the cloth too badly.

“I want to say again, Dr. Mendel, that this is not proper procedure,” the Korean nurse said in perfect California English.

“This is a special circumstance,” the policeman murmured. Ecks knew that this man rarely raised his voice.

Across the room a thin man with a manicured mustache and a thick mat of brown hair was sitting up in his hospital bed to watch the altercation.

A television set was on, tuned to a nostalgia channel playing a repeat episode of I Dream of Jeannie.

Xavier grunted. His head felt like a balloon filled with opposing gases.

“It’s quite all right, Nurse Kwan,” the white man in the blue suit said. “There’s no permanent damage and the police need information.”

“The use of smelling salts went out with leeches, Doctor,” the nurse insisted.

“If you believe that we’ve acted inappropriately, make a report,” the policeman said as he put a hand on her shoulder, pushing her gently from the vicinity of the bed.

“What are you doing?” Nurse Kwan protested.

“This is a witness to a crime,” the captain said patiently. “We have to ask him a few questions.”

“I have to check his blood pressure and vitals before-”

“This is an urgent matter, Nurse. I will not hesitate to restrain and even arrest you.”

These words cut through the professionalism of the young woman’s mind-set. She understood being restrained and arrested and knew that the protection of her white uniform did not extend nearly that far.

As she exited the room, little Dr. Mendel began pulling the yellowy nylon curtains around the hospital bed. Once they were blocked from view of the three other patients in the room, both men pulled up chairs to Xavier’s bedside.

For his part the newspaper delivery man had made it to a sitting position.

“What were you doing out there, Ecks?” the captain asked softly.

“How you doin’, Guilly?” Xavier replied. “Lance.”

Guillermo Soto and Lawrence Mendel were parishioners like Xavier. The policeman had smuggled Mexican and Guatemalan laborers across any border they paid for, and Mendel performed illegal medical procedures on political prisoners around the world.

Both men had left scores of dead bodies in their wake, but they had been granted sanctuary under the protection of Father Frank. The one rule of their church was to refrain from passing judgment on one another. So Xavier didn’t judge the men-but he didn’t like them either.

“Pewtersworth called,” Mendel said. “When the police got to you after that car ran you down they found the church card and called in. Clyde P. contacted us and we came. What’s going on?”

Xavier focused on Soto, the lesser evil, in his eyes.

“There’s a house on the corner of Kasidis and Lancaster. Anything from that?”

“A witness said he might have seen you running from there. When the police rang the bell nobody answered. It didn’t look like a break-in, so they left it alone.”

“Nobody came to the door?”

“No. Did you break in?”

“Any bones broken, Doc?” Xavier asked Mendel.

“Some bruising and swelling, that’s about it.”

“A car hit me?”

“Not head-on. It was driving past and you ran into the side. Bounced you like a rubber ball. If you weren’t drunk it might have been worse.”

“Where are my clothes?”

“Folded on the bench at the foot of the bed,” Soto said. “What were you doing there, Ecks?”

“Nothing to break my oath.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“It’ll have to be.”

Soto was in his midforties, though he looked older. He was hale and powerful but that didn’t bother Rule. He was never afraid of force-only failure.

“Are you working for Frank?” Dr. Mendel asked.

“What I’m doin’ is what I’m doin’, Doc. Don’t crowd me.”

“I could have you arrested,” Guillermo Soto suggested. “All I’d have to do is stand aside.”

“That’s your business,” Xavier said. “I can’t tell you what to do.”

“Are you going to cause me trouble?” the cop asked.

“I been in trouble since before I was born, Guilly. So much that people stay outta my way so rocks don’t fall out from the sky on their heads.”

The policeman stood. He had glistening tawny skin and deep, dark eyes. In contrast Mendel was a dry white color, like alabaster on a desert landscape. The white man had blue eyes that, Xavier knew from Expressions, had seen acres of innocent, unwilling blood.

“Take care of yourself, Ecks,” the doctor said.

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“What are you doing?” Nurse Kwan said to Xavier’s back minutes later.

He was standing at the foot of his bed trying his best to put his pants on without toppling to the floor.

He stopped and sat on the bench to rest.

“I’m going out for pizza. You want some?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Noland, but you can’t leave until you have been released.”

“This is America, honey. Here every man is free. Woman too.”

“The doctor on duty has to sign you out before I can let you go.”

“Watch me.”

Feeling stronger with something to push against, Xavier Rule stood, pulling up his pants with the same motion. There was some dirt on his suit but no tears that he could tell. Xavier not only loved his clothes but felt loyalty toward them. He’d hire a tailor to work for days to save a suit he cherished.

Nurse Kwan left. While the other patients watched he donned his chocolate shirt and lime jacket, cranberry socks and grapefruit shoes. He had just stood from tying his laces when two orderlies came in, followed by the nurse. The men were both white. One was dirty blond while the other sported a healthy brunette mop. They seemed able enough, one a bit taller and the other somewhat shorter than Xavier’s five-ten.

“Gentlemen,” Xavier greeted. “What time do you have?”

“Time for you to get back in the bed,” the taller blond said.

“If I didn’t get in the bed for a cute nurse, why would I do it for you?”

“We’re not jokin’ with you, dude,” the other orderly said in a no-nonsense tone.

Almost effortlessly Xavier reached down and broke a fifteen-inch wooden leg off the bench that had held his clothes, showing his would-be jailers that he had powerful, practiced hands.

As the bench teetered and fell he said, “Then let’s not play around.”

At the admittance office on the first floor he requested his property. When they asked him for his discharge papers he told them to call Nurse Kwan in the emergency admitting ward.

A dozen minutes later he was on the street waiting for a car that he’d called.

It was late in the afternoon and Xavier didn’t know whether he was going to vomit or experience cardiac arrest, but he stood there patiently happy to be above the ground and out of the penal system, away from the carnage he had thought was human routine.

The fifty-seven, plum-colored Pontiac sidled up to the curb and Winter Johnson leaned toward the passenger’s window.

“Hey, Ecks. Where you goin’, man?”

Winter was somewhere in his thirties and more yellow than brown. He was slight and wiry, friendly to a fault. He had been attacked by a man on Flower Street just a few blocks from Xavier’s apartment. The man was easily twice Winter’s size and had assaulted Johnson because he took exception to the way the chauffeur had glanced at his girl. The young woman in question had a siren’s figure and wore a close-fitting red dress that was shorter than it was tight.

Winter hadn’t said anything to the woman, only swiveled his head as she sashayed by.

All Xavier had to do was pull the blustery boyfriend off of Winter and shove him a few feet into a brick wall. That ended the fight and began the first true friendship in the Harlemite’s new life.

“Hey, Win,” Xavier said as he dropped into the seat next to the driver. “Thanks for getting me.”

“I had another pickup but I told the dispatcher that my brother was in the hospital.”

“You don’t have to lie for me, man.”

“That was no lie.”

“How’s it goin’, Win?” Xavier asked his friend on the ride from the midtown hospital back to Culver City.

“Met a girl named Cindy on Monday last,” the young man said with a smile. “Took her to dinner, a movie, and then a dance from Tuesday through Thursday. She works in a department store and is taking fashion classes at Santa Monica College. She came over Friday night. I made her pancakes the next morning.”

He stopped talking as they entered the on-ramp to the freeway.

“And?” Xavier asked after a few minutes of silence.

“And what?”

“What happened with Cindy?”

“Oh. That was a real nice week. Her kisses tasted like bottled water and she had this wiggle when I hugged her that made me go wild. But don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t only sex. One night there, before we even got to the bed, we talked until the sun came up. I don’t even remember what we said. It was just … just … perfect.”

Winter was an able driver. He weaved through the six lanes of heavy traffic as if his Pontiac were the only car on the road. He was smiling again, remembering.

“How’d it go with Cindy on Saturday afternoon?” the hard man from back east asked softly.

“She got a call on her cell phone. You know I hate them damn things. Makes it like you can’t evah get away from nuthin’. I got one but I turn it off when I’m with company. Anyway … she went out on the porch and talked about fifteen minutes or so. When she came back she asked could she plug it in. Talk so hot and heavy that she ran outta juice, I guess. She didn’t smile no more after that. When I asked her if she wanted to get some dinner she said that she had to go home. I thought maybe we could try some day next week and she said, ‘We’ll see.’ ”

“Who was on the phone with her?”

“The week before we met her boyfriend of two years said that he needed some space. Space’s name was Laurel Timmons. Cindy met me and I made her forget Braxton. But then Laurel flitted off and Braxton wanted Cindy back. She said that time with me was great but when she heard his voice she knew she couldn’t stay away. I drove her home and that was that.”

“So why you still smiling, Win?”

“Me?” he said, seemingly unaware of his own happiness. “I guess it’s because I had the best week that girl could give. I had her wiggle and peck, her dreams about a future. That was enough for me and more than Braxton could ever have. And just when I was beginnin’ to feel kinda desolate you called me up and said you needed some help. Man, I figure that if the almighty Ecks needs help then I ain’t got nuthin’ to complain about.”

Ecks sat back in his seat and they remained quiet for the rest of the ride.

Twenty minutes later Winter pulled his classic car up behind the Edsel and parked.

Snorting, Xavier glanced over at the house where he almost died.

Winter said nothing.

“I’m going to make a call,” Xavier said. “Could you wait a few minutes?”

“As many as you need.”

The phone rang nine times before he answered.

“Church services, Clyde Pewtersworth speaking.”

“Hey, Clyde, Xavier Rule here.”

“Mr. Rule.”

The congregation used real names with the church staff; that, Father Frank said, was a matter of trust.

“How come you put Guilly and Lance on me, man? You know what they’re like.”

“You needed help and they were available.” Clyde was not loquacious. He said what was necessary, rarely a syllable more.

“Who told you you could even call them?” Xavier asked.

The momentary silence made Xavier smile. It was rare to get a leg up over the switchboard operator.

“Frank told me to help you in any way possible.”

“Really?”

“What do you need, Mr. Rule?”

“I might need a lawyer before this night is through. Cylla Pride in town?”

Another pause on the other end of the line.

“What shall I tell her the charges are to be?”

“Nothing nearly as bad as what she’s done. Just breaking and entering, maybe some burglary if I see something shiny.”

“Call me if you have a problem,” Clyde said. “I’ll make sure you two are connected.”

“You go on, Win,” Xavier said, standing in the street next to his friend’s car.

“At least try and start your car first.”

“No. I’m gonna stay around here for a while.”

“For what?”

“Business.”

“Let me help you, brother.”

“This is no car wash, Win. This is what the bastards on Wall Street call ‘outside the box.’ ”

“I know. I knew that when you threw that dude up against the wall and put your forearm across his throat. I saw in his eyes the kinda business you in. But you know, brother, I’m California born and raised. We follow the sun out here … wherever it go.”

“Okay. It’s your funeral. First let me get a couple of things from my car.”

The front porch was partially hidden by vines of pink roses grown over crosshatched wooden trellises. Xavier knocked and then rang. When there was no answer the duo moved to the left, broke through the hidden side trellis, and went down to a path that led around the side of the house.

The brick patio was dark but the Parishioner could feel his way around.

“Here.” Xavier handed his friend one of six pairs of latex gloves he took from the hallway outside of his hospital room. “Put these on.”

Using the tiny hand-pressure flashlight on his key chain, Xavier could see that the sliding glass door was closed. After a couple of little shoves he knew that it was locked. He then took the twelve-inch tire iron he retrieved from the car and wedged it in the lock mechanism of the door.

“Hold up, Ecks,” Winter said. “They probably got an alarm system on a nice house like this one here.”

“No, brother.” Xavier savored the short phrase a moment and then continued. “We in my neighborhood now. People like me and the folks live here don’t have alarm systems. We use semiautomatics and dynamite, Dobermans and ice hooks-but never no alarms.”

Xavier wrenched the short, thick tire iron and the lock cracked. The door didn’t come open because there were two other places where internal bolts had been thrown. He loosened them up and the glass door, which didn’t fracture at all, slid open.

Upon entering the sunken living room, Xavier sought out a wall switch that turned on the overhead chandelier. It was a gaudy light fixture made from amber-colored crystals and real amber beads.

“Hey, man!” Winter complained.

“What?”

“People might see that light from the street.”

“So?”

“What if they told somebody they were out of town or somethin’?”

“They don’t know their neighbors.”

“Are these friends’a yours?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then how you know who they know?”

“Like I said, Win, we in my neck’a the woods. I understand these people like a California surfer knows his wave.”

They went from room to room of the two-story home, Xavier looking for anything suspicious and Winter just gazing around nervously.

The freezer in the kitchen was filled with TV dinners, and the refrigerator held nothing but condiments and a moldy loaf of white bread.

The back porch was stacked with cardboard boxes that were empty and seemed to be quite old, covered with dust and inhabited by spiders.

They found a tiny bedroom next to the porch. It was spare, almost a cell. There was a single-mattress bed and a simple oak bureau with three drawers. There were no clothes in the closet or the drawers. The only trash in the blue plastic wastebasket was an empty tampon carton. This single clue told Ecks that this room had recently been tenanted by Doris Milne. There were no pictures on the night table or hanging from the wall. There were no holes from nails that might have been used to hold frames, nor any blemishes or discolorations from posters a young woman could have taped up.

In contrast, Sedra’s bedroom took up at least half of the second floor. It was carpeted with real animal hide, probably deer, and contained a bed that was at least a hundred inches in width covered by a fire-engine red silk down comforter. The drapes went from ceiling to floor and were velvet, the color of gold, if gold could rot.

The wall-wide closet was stuffed with hanging dresses and coats, pantsuits and scarves from over the decades. Perpendicular to the closet stood a highly wrought, curved chest of drawers covered by an ivory veneer. Xavier pulled out each of the eighteen drawers, dumped whatever was in them on the hide floor, and checked all the sides for possible secrets. Two-thirds of the way through his thorough search he found a red fabric-bound journal taped to the back of a drawer that had been filled with staples, a stapler, dried-out rubber bands, and large rolls of black electrical wiring tape.

The journal was the size of a mass-market paperback book, at least a hundred and fifty pages. The paper was of a higher quality-acid free and heavy. Two-thirds of these pages were covered with minuscule writing. Most of the scribbling did not comprise normal lettering but character symbols like punctuation, dollar signs, and mathematical indicators. These symbols appeared without spaces. Sometimes a character would be half-size on the upper portion of where a full-size representation might be. Nearly the entire book was filled with this meaningless jabber, about forty lines to a side. No breaks, spaces, or paragraphs appeared anywhere. Now and again there was a change in the tone of the ink, but it was always blue. If Sedra and her niece hadn’t tried to murder him he might have thought that this was the meaningless, obsessive scribbling of a madwoman.

He pocketed the journal and continued his way through the drawers.

“Hey, Ecks,” Win said.

He was standing in the doorway. Xavier hadn’t even realized that the young man had wandered off.

“What?”

“You got to come see somethin’, man.”

In a pantry off the kitchen was a door. This door opened upon a down stairway.

“A basement,” Xavier said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“How long you been in LA, Ecks?”

“A few years.”

“Not long enough to learn that nobody has a basement or cellar out here.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The huge green metal door at the foot of the stairs seemed to be built for some kind of giant. To call the locks that held it shut padlocks would be like calling Fort Knox a safe. They were huge, ugly things made from metal, specially designed to be unbreakable.

“What the fuck you think they got in there, man?” Winter asked.

“The answers to all my questions. Probably something neither one of us wants to know.”

“I’ont think you got to worry about it, brother. ’Cause unless you got some kinda key to them locks we not gettin’ on the other side’a that mothahfuckah there.” There was more than a little relief in the driver’s tone.

The basement light was weak but good enough for Xavier to see.

“You need to go, Winter?”

“No. Why you ask me that?”

“Because I intend to break down this door and get on the other side. I sure do.”

“How? You friends with Batman or sumpin’?”

“Neighborhood I come from Batman stayed away.”

Xavier hefted his miniature tire iron and rubbed it thoroughly with a rag from the floor while studying the door closely.

“This ain’t no glass door, Ecks.”

“But you see, Win. The door got hinges.”

“Shit, man. Them things look like they frets on a battleship.”

“Sure do,” Xavier said with a nod. “But the outer edge is anchored in concrete, not steel. All I got to do is pull the outside of the hinges out the wall.”

“What about the locks?”

“They’re anchored in concrete too.”

It took a little under three hours, but Xavier, with some help from Winter Johnson, wrenched the hinges from their moorings and levered the five-hundred-pound door from its frame. It hit the floor with a mighty crash, but no toes were broken and the sound was swallowed by the earth.

The smells of fresh soil, with a hint of rotting flesh, wafted from the shadowy underground chamber.

The interior was dark, and Xavier hesitated to use his little flashlight.

“What’s that smell?” the professional chauffeur asked.

“Death.”

“What?”

“Listen, man,” Xavier said. “I let you come this far-to get your feet wet. I know you’re scared. You’d be a fool not to be. But maybe right now you should listen to that shiver in your heart. ’Cause you know, Win, this shit here is about to get bad.”

Winter’s eyes were light brown and small like their owner. He squinted at Xavier and his shoulders quivered.

“In for a penny,” the driver said, “in for a pound.”

This phrase was like the flip of a switch in the ex-gangster’s nervous system. The violence, as always, was most evident as a sensation in Xavier’s forearms. His jaw clenched, clamping down on the evil smile that wanted out. He turned abruptly, entering the tomblike vault, guided by the little plastic flash.

The chamber was largish, fifteen feet deep and twenty wide.

Toward the far end of the unfinished space, lying on a short mound of moist soil, was Sedra Landcombe. There was a pale blue slip over her withered flesh and a bloody gash on the left side of her head. The force of the blow had caused the eyeball on that side to come out of its socket, falling down the side of her face and hanging next to her left ear.

“Oh, shit!” Winter cried.

Xavier knelt close to the body, looking for anything that might tell her story. But she was dead and bereft of any signature, jewelry, or sigil. Probably murdered in another room, Xavier mused, most likely the master bedroom. Xavier thought that Dodo had hit her aunt with the bludgeon, maybe more than once, dragged her down to the family tomb, and then gone back upstairs to wash up any blood.

“Oh, fuck, no,” Winter whined.

He was standing at the door holding a small dark and lightweight stone in his hand.

“No,” he moaned.

“What is it?”

“A baby’s skull, man. A baby’s little head.”

Winter dropped the stone and fell to his knees.

Xavier went to the area of the tomb that his friend had come from and saw various bones both jumbled and arranged. Most remnants belonged to children and babies, but there were at least three adult skulls in the mix. Xavier poked at the bones with his tire iron but he didn’t touch them, not even with gloves on.

The bruise on his side, from the car accident, suddenly flared. This was the only indication he had of some kind of feeling of vulnerability. His minister had sent him into slaughter and he, in turn, had brought along an innocent friend.

“What we gonna do, Ecks?”

“We get our ass outta here, Win.”

At the top of the stairs, still in the pantry that contained the door leading to the basement, Xavier had a premonition. There was something wrong-a feeling on the air.

“Ecks-” Winter began.

Rule put up a hand and moved in front of his friend. With a further gesture of the same hand he imparted that the driver should stay where he was.

The pain in his side disappeared as Xavier Rule, aka Egbert Noland, moved quietly through the kitchen and into the living room.

The two men wore dark clothes. One was white and the other, an ecru-colored man, probably hailed from below the southern border; either he did or his ancestors had.

Xavier surprised them. They were carrying large duffel bags and weren’t expecting to come across anyone. But these men were professionals and so they dropped their bags and reached for things inside their clothes.

The violence in Xavier’s forearms went into action without volition. With his left hand he threw the crowbar like an underhand javelin, and before it had punctured the white man’s chest he was firing with the specially made Afghani pistol. The gun made little noise and no flash. Both men fell to the ground, decimated by the ambidextrous stone-cold killer.

“What happened?” Winter said. He ran into the room upon hearing the coughing of the whispering gun.

Xavier hurried to the men he’d defeated. The white man had managed to get a pistol in his hand, but Xavier slapped it away. The other man had four bullets in him, head and chest.

“Stay back!” Xavier said to Winter. “Don’t let him see you.”

Then the church deacon searched the bodies and bags of his sudden enemies. The duffel bags contained shovels and spades, kerosene and a black plastic body bag. The Hispanic man had two keys in his pocket, held together by a piece of string. Xavier would have bet that they were a fit for the front door and the underground tomb. The white man had a money clip in his pants pocket. There were a few bills and a slip of paper held fast by the silver clamp.

“Help me,” the white man wheezed.

Xavier might have considered killing him if Winter were not a witness.

“I’m dying,” the man with the crowbar protruding from the middle of his chest said.

Xavier searched the man’s pockets, found nothing but a cheap cell phone. He stood up, watched closely by the dying white man, turned his back, and went to the kitchen.

“We’re going to leave now,” he said to his shivering friend. “When we go through the living room keep your back to the one still alive. Don’t turn to look, and keep your hand up over your face so he don’t see you in any glass.”

On the way to the street Xavier told his friend to meet him at an all-night club on Pico west of Sepulveda.

“It’s behind the taco stand in the little minimall on the northwest side of the street. You don’t have to knock. Somebody’ll come out to meet you. Tell him you there for Ecks and he’ll let you in.”

Xavier drove in the opposite direction from his friend. A block away he entered a call on the phone he lifted from the dying man. The call was answered almost immediately by Clyde Pewtersworth.

“Church services.”

“Don’t you sleep, Clyde?”

“I try.”

“Connect me to Soto.”

There were three clicks, a spate of silence, and then a phone ringing. There were at least a dozen rings before a groggy voice answered, “Que?”

“That house? The one they saw me coming from? It’s a killing field, but one of the bodies is still breathing.”

Xavier disconnected the call and threw the phone from the car window. Then he did a U-turn in the middle of the street and drove his Edsel toward the no-name, after-hours nightclub.

On the way, following the speed limit like a teenager taking his first driving test, he remembered:

Swan was tall and hefty, not nearly as black as Ecks. He got in a fight over a woman outside the Chilean’s Bar on East 143rd and then got carried away. His opponent died when Swan twisted his neck after knocking him unconscious. The police had no choice but to put him under arrest. Swan got word to Betty Rynn that a young churchgoer, George Napier, had witnessed the slaughter and offered to bear witness in the trial. Everybody else at the Chilean’s knew better than to have seen anything. But George put his faith in God, and Betty told Ecks to have a talk with the young man.

No one was supposed to know that George was a state witness. No one would have if it weren’t for one of Swan’s relatives who worked for the district attorney’s office.

Napier had a girlfriend named Lena. He was in the habit of spending time with her at her parents’ house off Flatbush in Brooklyn.

Ecks meant to talk to the young man, to scare him. He wanted to show him that he would never be safe or secret again. Maybe if Lena’s kisses weren’t so sweet and George had left at ten instead of twelve forty-five, maybe then Ecks wouldn’t have had time to think and the opportunity to kill rather than scare.

Those hours he spent waiting in the shadows he worried that the young zealot might get stupid and try to implicate him too. There was no one on the street or sidewalk when George came strolling out. He walked right past Xavier’s hidey-hole. His eye came out of its socket too. He died and Xavier went to fuck Betty Rynn, Swan’s girlfriend, as payment for getting her man out of a jam.

“You give me this right here,” Ecks told Betty, “and I promise your old man be outta jail by the end of the week.”

She gave it to him good. So much so that he suspected she liked him more than she ever let on.

Ecks parked down the block from the nameless West Los Angeles minimall. The street was empty and his suit barely soiled. He had almost been murdered, struck down by a moving car, killed one man, and maybe another. There was a witness who knew his name, his address. He was three years out from the rat-infested harbor that had been his life but now he could see his past looming on the horizon-and there were sinister shadows moving along the shore.

Shirley’s Den was a pink stucco bunker hidden by buildings on all sides. It had a drab green door, no windows, and no external lights. Regulars knew to stand at the door and wait. Newcomers were met by a man whom Xavier knew only as Sentry. Sentry was a big brown man who asked strangers what they were doing on his property. He stayed in a side shack monitoring the door, opening it for regulars and their guests-shooing away the rest.

Sentry opened the door for Ecks and he walked through wondering what he should do next. He had money and a fake passport. He knew some Spanish and had connections in Cartagena, Colombia.

Shirley’s Den was a large room, bright and tinted green. There were fifteen triangular shiny red tables and a large gray-and-green marble bar. Jazz, always jazz-representing every decade and style-played on the lifelike-sounding speakers. That night it was Sidney Bechet barking out “Bechet’s Fantasy,” giving Louis Armstrong a run for his money, if not his genius.

There were maybe a dozen customers in twos and threes scattered about the emerald-and-scarlet room. Winter Johnson was sitting in a corner looking like a rich man’s dog left out in the cold for the first time in his pampered life.

“Hello, Ecks,” a woman said. She was half the way through her forty-first year, auburn haired, plain faced and yet somehow provocative.

Shirley Henn was from Montreal originally. At the age of seventeen she met a French Canadian named Robert, who spelled his name phonetically-Robair. Robair and Shirley spent six weeks touring the American South, robbing pawnshops, banks, convenience stores, and anyplace else that could stack two dollar bills together. They killed nine people. They did. Shirley had been initiated in weapons, liquor, and sex by her adoptive stepfather-Jacques “Jack” Henn. She fired as many shots as Robair did and was probably a bit more accurate.

Shirley loved Robair like moths loved flame. She clung to his skinny side and often shivered when he said her name. That six weeks felt as if it were an entire lifetime.

Shirley and Robair began to have differences when they invaded an upscale cabin in the Tennessee woods where a wealthy Houston family took their summer vacations. She didn’t mind when they shot the father or even when Robair forced the mother and teenage daughter to do a striptease before killing them. It was when Robair got into the family liquor cabinet and decided to take the four-year-old son in the backyard to use for target practice that Shirley spoke up.

“Don’t do that, Robert,” she’d said. Even then she realized, when calling him Robert, that the love affair had foundered.

They were standing on the back porch of the summer home. Arabella Marquette and her daughter, Fawn, lay naked and dead in the kitchen just behind them. The acned, twenty-one-year-old Robair gave Shirley a petulant frown as he simultaneously shot the little boy at his side.

Shirley raised her own pistol and shot her man in the center of his forehead. His lips formed a tight O. He didn’t lose his footing until he was already dead.

The weight of that condensed six-week lifetime settled on Shirley and she found in her heart that she could not deny one thing that she had done or that had been done to her.

“I sit in my home,” she said in an Expressions session that Xavier had attended, “and think about going back to Montreal and killing my stepfather. He’s old now and living in a retirement home. I’ve bought six tickets over the years. But every time I think about going I remember that look on Robair’s face when I shot him. He’d only talked big before he met me. He wanted to be evil but I was the one who allowed him to, who empowered him. And when I killed him there was no relief-not in me and not in the world we scarred.”

“Hey, Shirley,” Xavier said. “How you doin’, honey? Gettin’ any sleep?”

“I have a new barmaid,” Shirley said. “She’s not gay and neither am I.”

“Yeah? You don’t say.”

“But I told her about my sleep problems and she offered to lie in the bed with me, next to me. She’s a runaway and many times she goes out with her boyfriends. But on those nights she lies there by me I sleep like I did when I was child before my mother remarried.”

Xavier heard the words and the echoes they set off in the spree killer’s heart. He knew not to comment on her therapy and so said, “Thanks for lettin’ my friend in.”

“He looks scared.”

“He should.”

When Xavier pulled out the green straight-backed chair at Winter’s table the young man leaped to his feet.

“Just me,” Xavier said.

The words did not seem to have a calming effect on the youth, but he did sit down again.

“What we gonna do, Ecks?”

Xavier was a practiced killer but he rarely planned his crimes. He killed when he had to or when the opportunity arose and it seemed like the proper move.

At one time he would have probably killed Winter. It just made sense to tie up loose ends.

“That’s up to you, Win,” he said.

“Me?”

“Those men had guns, son. They would have killed us both and then burned the house down around our bodies. The way I see it, it was self-defense plain and simple. But the law could have different ideas. And I got a history, so they might not bring me down on this, but there are other warrants, in other places.”

“What about that man with the tire iron in his chest?”

“I used his phone to call the cops. They might get there in time to save him.”

Winter clasped his hands and then ripped them apart.

“What should I do?” he pleaded.

“If the guilt is too much for you, you can call the cops. Tell ’em that I made you come with me and that you waited to tell them because you were afraid I’d kill you. Give me a heads-up and I’ll be gone before they get to my door.”

“I can’t just turn you in like that, Ecks.”

“Maybe not, but if somebody saw your license plate or something, and the cops come up on you, then tell ’em that you drove me to my car, that I forced you. Don’t lie for me but for yourself, kid. Understand?”

“What was goin’ on in there?” Winter asked then.

“I’m on a job,” the Parishioner said. “I’m looking for three boys went missing twenty-three years ago.”

“You think that was them in the basement?”

“Maybe so. Maybe. I got a lead or two and so I’ll see. But right now you order a few shots of cognac and drink ’em down. After that I’ll give you a ride home and you sleep on what you should do.”

After dropping an inebriated and distraught Winter Johnson at his apartment on Crest Drive, Xavier drove down to the beach using surface streets.

On the way he took out his cell phone and entered a number.

“Yeah?” a gravelly voice answered midway through the second ring.

“I need you to take my route for the rest of the week, Bud,” Xavier said.

“Starting when?”

“In the morning.”

“Okay,” the voice said. “You all right?”

“Canned peaches and sour cream.”

At the ocean he veered right, heading up the Pacific Coast Highway. A twenty-four-hour jazz station was playing early Thelonius Monk for no particular reason. The complex rhythms reminded the killer of his late-night Harlem apartment home after the beatings and turmoil subsided, when peace reigned in the living room and the record player cooed with trumpets, saxophones, and piano. His mother had cried herself to sleep by then and the old man was passed out, or nearly so. Xavier would sit in the doorway to the bedroom he shared with his brother and cousin, listening to the music and the silence.

It was a quarter to three in the morning and the road was fairly empty. His forearms no longer ached for violence.

Ecks is an ambidextrous mothahfuckah. He can kill a man with either hand, mocha-colored Swan used to say about his friend. He’s the Sugar Ray Robinson of the street.

He’d never counted the number of lives he’d taken until Father Frank had him confess at Expressions: twenty-two if the white man died, twenty-nine if you held him accountable for the times he’d been an accomplice.

For a brief moment he considered driving off the cliff to his left.

“Even the criminal cannot pass judgment,” Frank whispered from somewhere in the car.

He reached the Seabreeze City limits at four forty-five in the morning. It was still shy of five a.m. when he rolled to a stop on the unpaved parking lot.

The iron-strapped ebony wood doors opened when he placed his thumb on the tiny crystal plate that operated the sophisticated locking system.

The overhead lights came on as he walked down the narrow aisle between the simple pews, through to the back door, and out into the yard. He strode up to Frank’s rectory, intending to walk right in, but before he got there the door swung inward and Frank was standing there fully dressed in his signature black.

“Come on in, Brother Ecks. I’ve been expecting you.”

And it was true. There were two chairs facing each other before an iron candelabra set with more than a dozen wax sticks burning intensely. Frank used candles that burned brighter than normal tapers. They were more like small torches.

“Have a seat,” the self-proclaimed minister offered.

“I don’t want to sit.”

“Do so anyway, Brother Rule.”

Xavier obeyed even though he promised himself that he would resist the man who had sent him out to break his oath.

“Soto called,” Frank said as he seated himself. “He told me about a subterranean killing field, one man sorely wounded, and another man dead.”

“The white man’s not dead?”

“Not yet.”

“I lashed out at them as if I had never spent one Sunday in this church,” Xavier said.

Frank allowed these words their own space. He did not dispute or deny the Parishioner’s claim.

Light began to break upon the ocean from the eastern sky.

For a moment Xavier shivered uncontrollably. Tears streamed down his face and he found it hard to maintain his balance on the chair. He leaned forward, putting his elbows upon his knees and his face in his palms. As the light grew so did his despair. This was one of those few emotional moments that surpassed the violence in his heart and mind. This anger, this hostility he knew was not an aspect of the war that surrounded his upbringing. His cousin had become a practical nurse and his brother, Warren, was an accountant in Montclair, New Jersey.

“Ecks,” Frank said at last.

Xavier raised his head and teetered in the chair.

“Tell me what happened,” the minister said. “All of it.”

By the time the declaration was over Xavier was sitting up again. He neither shivered nor cried. But he felt empty, directionless.

“The sun is up” were the first words Frank uttered after Xavier’s story. “Let’s take a walk down to the beach.”

The path from the church down to the seashore was a gentle sloping trail through succulent plants and hardy grasses. There were small blue and white flowers here and there and huge white boulders that made Xavier think of superior beings so advanced that they could afford to ignore us, finally outlasting the passage of man.

“You brought your friend back to his home and told him to follow his own mind,” Frank said as they walked north on the hard-packed sand.

“Yes.”

“You only protected yourself from men who would have certainly murdered you and him.”

“If you want to look at it that way.”

“That’s the only way, Brother Rule. The only way. You’ve taken up this cause for a good reason. You weren’t looking for trouble, not really.”

“Sedra is dead because I kicked the hornets’ nest.”

“She’s dead because she lived a life dealing in slaves, suffering, and murder.”

“But if I hadn’t gone there …”

“Somebody else would have gone. Benol was dead set on this course.”

“Do you believe Benol?”

“I believe that she abducted three babies. I believe that she will lead you to those lives that were stolen.”

“But is she an innocent or at least a penitent?”

“I don’t know,” Father Frank admitted.

“Then why send anyone to follow her lead?”

“Have I ever told you what I think men are, Ecks?”

A seagull cried, and Xavier’s heart quailed one of the few times when life was not on the line.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Earth,” the minister intoned, “is a multitiered plane of existence. For the animals and plants it is, for the most part, an Eden of extraordinary beauty and wonder. For these beings life is one continuous story with no beginning or end.

“But for humanity this life is hell. We were once, I believe, angels existing in some higher dimension. We faltered in our duties or our faith and were thrown down here among others like us to experience the anarchy that a failure of duty causes. We don’t remember where we’re from or what we did to bring us here, but here we are-up to our necks in blood and shit, torture and death.

“We cannot escape the reality foisted upon us by whatever powers there are … maybe something without sentience-like fate. Maybe our consciousness is just some ephemeral biotic that we must experience before returning to the unconscious unity that once embraced us-I don’t know. What I do know is that we must act. We have to work for what we think is good. We will stumble and fall and take many wrong turns on this journey. But we have to keep on getting back up and searching for our bearings. We must try to do right in a world where everything is wrong.”

They walked for two hours after that. Xavier wanted to respond; he wanted to ask about the details of his minister’s complex faith. But the words remained unformed-inarticulate.

When they finally climbed back up to the rectory the small table was set out with two bowls of steaming porridge and cups filled with hot coffee for Xavier and black tea for Frank.

“So you’re telling me that anything a man does is forgiven if he does it trying to do what’s right,” Xavier said when they sat down to the repast.

“I’m saying that we are unforgivable but still we have to press on.”

He ordered waffles and crisp bacon at a seaside hotel restaurant where Pico Boulevard meets the ocean. He liked the coffee there and also watching passersby through the windows who were drawn to the shore.

For nearly an hour he went over the minister’s private sermon, wondering whether it was all a Bible story or if Frank actually believed that humanity was the definition and the real manifestation of hell. This question seemed very important to him, more so than the dead and dying left in his wake.

“More coffee?” a young woman asked.

She looked to be in her twenties if you didn’t notice the thin lines around her eyes. Her hair was natural blond with dyed blue highlights and her skin was pale copper.

“What’s your name?” Xavier asked.

“Benicia.”

“From Brazil?”

“Rio.” She smiled for him.

“Coffee’d be nice, Benicia.”

The notepaper in the money clip had Sedra’s address scrawled across it. There was no signature or printing on the small sheet, but when holding it up to the sunlight Xavier could see the watermark: The Federal Hotel.

“Have you been to my country?” Benicia asked as she poured his coffee from a white ceramic thermos.

“Yeah.” He smiled. “Friend of mine had a place down on the water outside Bahia.”

When her eyes widened Xavier could see the woman’s irises were green and gold.

“It is so beautiful there,” she said.

“And real,” he agreed.

Three days after he left Bahia his friend down there had been killed. Word was that it was the police. They had come to the seaside condo looking for Rule.

“Too bad I don’t speak Portuguese,” he added. “I think you can’t really get to know a Brazilian woman without speaking her tongue.”

The copper of Benicia’s skin deepened and she hurried away.

“Federal Hotel,” the proper man’s voice on the phone said. “How can I direct your call?”

“Concierge, please.”

“Concierge, yes, sir.”

The phone rang once and another courteous man’s voice said, “Federal Hotel. How can I help you?”

Benicia put Xavier’s bill down in front of him while at the same time removing his silverware and empty plate.

“This is Mr. Gonzalez from Fleet Florist,” Xavier Rule said. “We’re supposed to deliver a bouquet of sweetheart roses to a Ms. Doris Milne.”

“Yes?”

“It’s what we like to call a time-sensitive anniversary. She and the man who is sending the roses, Lawrence O’Kate, met at three forty-six a year ago. He wants them delivered at exactly that time. Can you do that?”

“Let me see,” the practiced voice said. “Milne … Yes. Of course we can. When will you be delivering the flowers?”

“Just after noon. But please don’t tell her. Mr. O’Kate wants it to be a surprise.”

“It’ll be our pleasure.”

The inflated bill had the waitress’s name and phone number written across the bottom. Benicia Torres.

Xavier’s disquiet receded between the private talk with Frank, the beautiful Brazilian, and having a purpose. He bought thirty small roses and wrote a note on the card. After that he went home and donned a dark blue coverall jumpsuit with the name Fleet Florist embroidered over the left-side pocket in yellow thread. It was one of the many tools he’d collected from garage sales in preparation for unexpected eventualities. He delivered the bouquet at one twenty-nine, went to his Edsel, and took off the overalls to reveal a yellow suit and olive shirt, and then went over to MacArthur Park, where he sat watching young (and not so young) lovers, brash teenagers, and retirees taking it all in like breaths of fresh air through an oxygen mask.

“Ecks?” Winter said answering his phone.

“How you doin’, kid?”

“Can’t sleep.”

“It’ll come. Don’t worry.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“That’ll come too, Win. There’s no rush.”

“They say on the news that the guy with the crowbar in his chest is expected to live.”

“Good for him.”

“But won’t he tell about you?” Winter Johnson asked.

“Probably not. He’s got enough trouble.”

“They didn’t say anything about the vault downstairs,” Winter was saying.

“No. I don’t expect they would. You shouldn’t say anything about it either, Win. Even if you turn me in, you should say that I went downstairs alone.”

“But then why didn’t I run?”

“Maybe you did,” Xavier postulated. “Maybe you stayed until I went downstairs and then you ran. That way you wouldn’t even have been there when I had the shoot-out. You could say that you were afraid that I’d kill you.”

“You wouldn’t, though, right, Ecks?”

“No, I would not.”

Xavier had brought with him the first of a condensed three-volume set of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. At their last scheduled private meeting Father Frank had suggested that he read for two hours every day on top of his correspondence college studies. On Sundays, when he remembered, he perused one of the major religious texts, but on other days he read history, sometimes philosophy. Most of what he read he did not understand, but Frank had said that it didn’t matter, that understanding was more like a surprise than a goal you could see or predict.

“Just keep on reading,” Frank had said, “and the truth will come up on you from the night side of your mind.”

At six forty-five Xavier went to a small coffee shop across the street from the park. Doris Milne was sitting at a table in the window wearing a tan dress that might have been made from canvas. Her bag was Crayola blue and her shoes maroon. She was a pretty woman, Xavier thought again, somewhere in her late twenties.

He went up to the counter and bought a double espresso before going to her small table. She hadn’t seen him come in.

“Hello,” he said, and she flinched.

“Mr. Noland.”

“Can I sit down?”

“You can do whatever you want,” she said. “You made that quite clear.”

Xavier smiled and pulled up a chair. He sat down and looked at her a moment or two.

“You’re very pretty,” he said.

“Sex? Is that what you want?”

The question surprised him, enlightenment coming with the mild shock.

“No. I mean-yes, I am a man, and the kind of man who likes to have sex-but not from you. What I need from you is information.”

“Or you turn me over to the police.”

“I might give them your name.”

“And if I do what you want?”

“Depending on what you say, I’ll leave you alone. I might even give you a name-one that you could use.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I know that you killed Sedra. Probably bashed her in the head with the same baseball bat you tried to brain me with.”

The statement hit the girl like a slap across the face. Upon recovering she looked around the small café. There was no one right next to them, but Xavier agreed with her unspoken caution.

“Let’s go to a bench in the park,” he offered.

It was late spring and the sky held on to the light of day. They sat side by side on a red bench, their paper cups in hand. She sipped her chai latte, looking nervous. A muscular young white man zipped up on a unicycle and moved back and forth, trying to get Dodo’s attention. It was only when Ecks looked directly at him that he decided the flirtation might not have been worth the exertion.

As the unicyclist moved on, Doris Milne began to speak.

“That house is the only home I’ve ever known,” she said. “Sedra raised me there. She told me that she had found me abandoned on the front porch and decided out of the goodness of her heart to take me in. I was her niece and hand servant. Later I became her accomplice.”

“She bought you.”

“Probably. I used to beg her to tell me who my parents were, but sometimes she’d say that they didn’t love me and now and then she said that they died.”

“Did Brayton Starmon bring you to her?”

“I don’t know. I asked him one night but he wouldn’t say.”

“You knew him?”

“He brought babies for me to play with. I used to think that we were an adoption service, like you said. Until …”

The unicyclist whizzed up and then off again like a hummingbird wondering whether a spider’s web still blocked entrée to a flower filled with nectar.

“Until what?” Ecks asked.

A policeman stopped to look at the odd pair on the red bench.

Doris wasn’t actually crying but there was pain in her face, and her thin frame seemed contorted with agony.

“There was this tiny little baby boy that Brayton brought to the house. He was so cute and loving.”

The policeman walked on.

“I called him Little Mr. Smith,” she said. “He was fine at first but then he got sick. There was something wrong with him. I told Aunt Sedra that we should take him to a doctor but she said that he just needed a little medicine and rest. He suffered for about a week and then one day Auntie came to my room and told me that he was dead. She said that I should bury him in the vault downstairs.

“But when I went to the nursery I could see the mark on his head. She had killed him … I knew it. I knew it even before I saw him.”

“How old were you?” Xavier asked.

“I don’t know, maybe five, six. I buried Little Mr. Smith and prayed for him every day since then. I don’t pray for the other ones, because I didn’t name them after that. I just fed them and changed their diapers like Auntie wanted. It’s like she said, ‘Love is only the bait for pain.’ ”

“You knew what she was up to,” Xavier said after a long silence.

Doris nodded.

“Why’d she keep you?”

“She said it was because she loved me.” There was a hint of hope in her voice.

“But you knew what was happening. There’s more than one body in that vault downstairs.”

“I used to ask her when she was going to retire so that we could move someplace where we wouldn’t have to do adoptions anymore. She would say that we couldn’t do that until I got a passport.”

“You could have called the police,” Xavier suggested.

“She kept the phone locked up.”

“There’s a lot of pay phones in the world.”

“I never left the house alone, except when Auntie took me someplace.”

“You didn’t go to school?”

Doris shook her head and Xavier wondered about the nickname-Dodo.

“You don’t know how to read?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then how did you know to meet me here?”

“I had the nice man at the desk, Mr. Connors, tell me what your note card said.”

We have to talk, Dodo, the note read. I don’t want to tell anyone else about you and your aunt but we have to talk. Meet me at the Bean Grinders coffee shop at 6:30 if you want to keep the authorities out of this.

It was definitely a threat but there were no damning details. Maybe Mr. Connors would keep it quiet.

“But you knew what you were doing was wrong. I mean, even if you couldn’t read there was radio and the TV.”

“Auntie didn’t believe in the boob tube and she only had a record player. I learned how to sew and color.”

Xavier thought a moment more. He was trying to wrap his mind around a lifelong prisoner who had no way to imagine herself free.

“How did you know about the hotel?”

“Auntie would take me there sometimes to have sex with men,” she said simply. “They would bring me gifts and I would do the things Auntie taught me.”

“Damn,” the New York gangster said. “Goddamn.”

“Is that what you want?” Doris asked.

“What?”

“Sex? Auntie said that all men want is sex. That’s why they give girls gifts and kisses. They don’t care about the heart, only the sex.”

“Did you love your aunt?”

If Xavier had been watching Doris from afar he might have thought a sudden chill breeze had kicked up. The girl began to shiver. Her small hands clenched and her eyes filled with tears that refused to fall. Her left heel was pumping up and down.

He watched her go through this pantomime for two minutes or more before reaching out and taking her two fists into his left hand. Instantly she stopped shaking. She gasped, holding that breath like a practiced swimmer.

When she exhaled the words came out, gushing like waters from a dam.

“I could always tell from the tone of Auntie’s voice what she meant. The words didn’t always mean the same thing, but it was the sound of her voice that told me the story.

“If she said, ‘Let’s go have dinner at the Federal,’ it could be that she just wanted to go out. Sometimes I could tell that she wanted the company. But it might mean that there was a man who wanted to have sex with me. It was always the sound of her voice and not the words she said.

“After you got away …” Doris stopped talking for a moment. She looked up from her hands clasped in his. “We were going to kill you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Xavier said. “I got that idea.”

“You don’t care?”

“That’s what creatures do,” he said.

“After you got away Auntie said that it was bad. She said that you could hurt us and we had to move. I lived my whole life in that house and she said we would leave it behind. She told me to gather my gifts from the men and that she would pack her clothes. She said that I should bring everything down to the vault so that we could hide it in there until things died down and we could send people in to get our stuff.

“But I could tell by the sound of her words that she meant to kill me down there in the vault. There was always a sound that she had. It was the same sound when she told me that Little Mr. Smith was dead, or when we planned to kill the men that Brayton needed to get rid of.

“I told her I’d go down to my room, but instead I got the bat and snuck up into her bedroom. She was still in her slip. She didn’t hear me because her hearing was bad …”

“You don’t have to go on, baby,” Xavier said. “I know what you did.”

“I did love her. She was the only person I ever really knew. I broke the lock on her phone and called the taxi company to come bring me to the hotel. She has-had-an account with the Federal. All I had to do was say that she’d be coming that afternoon. She had already sent her travel bureau on ahead.”

Doris tried to pull her hands away but Xavier held on tight. She bowed her head until it was resting against his shoulder. It was only then that the tears fell from her eyes onto their hands.

She panted and made small animal sounds that Xavier interpreted as despair. He put his right hand on her shoulder and she moved to hug him. It was a fierce embrace, beyond innocence or love. There was strength in her arms-the strength to knock an old woman’s eye right out of its socket.

Xavier let her hold him. He’d walked past many tragedies in his life: dead men and women, sometimes children. He’d sold drugs to addicts who had death in their eyes, and women to men who had no love for women.

“She was going to kill you,” he whispered. “You didn’t have a choice.”

“I loved her,” Doris said.

“I know you did.”

“She loved me.”

“No. Never.”

Doris squeezed his neck hard enough to feel uncomfortable, but Xavier didn’t push her away. He held her close and even, somewhat reluctantly, kissed her cheek.

“I need to show you something, Dodo,” he said after the great long hug.

“What?” she asked, wiping her face against his yellow suit.

He took out the little red journal and showed it to her.

“That’s Auntie Sedra’s book,” she said.

“What does it mean?”

“Whenever we took in an orphan or sent one out she would sit down at the dining room table and write in it.”

“Did you ever ask her what it was she was writing?”

“She said that she was telling the little babies’ stories. You know, where they came from and where they were going-and when.”

“But you can’t read it?”

“I can’t read. I can sign my name and write Auntie’s name. I know some numbers but that’s all. I used to listen to stories on the record player at night. And I can recite a hundred poems that Auntie taught me.”

“You can?”

“Yes.”

“What poems do you know?”

“I know ‘The Raven’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Doris Milne sat up straight with posture most modern young people never learned. She recited the poem with muted but still dramatic inflection while staring at a point midway in the darkening sky. Passersby turned their heads at the recitation and two older women actually stopped to listen.

Xavier was thinking that the woman-child brought him back to some old time when there was no radio or TV or movie theater. He wondered what was going on in Sedra’s mind when she kept Doris. Was the girl her whore or her daughter, her hand servant or adoptive blood?

When the poem was over the older women walked on and Doris was smiling, satisfied.

“We have to get you someplace safe,” Xavier said.

“Yes,” she agreed.

“I know somewhere out of the city. I could take you there right now.”

“I need to get my things.”

“The hotel might not be safe anymore.”

“I’ve stayed there many times.”

“But Mr. Connors read my note,” Ecks offered. “He might have called the police.”

“I told him that I knew you and that things would be fine,” she said. “Aunt Sedra let him have sex with me sometimes in the summers when we went to the hotel so I could swim.”

“Did you like sex with Mr. Connors?”

“He used to bring me porcelain dolls,” she said. “And he never made me hurt.”

“Used to? You don’t have sex with him anymore?”

“He likes young girls,” she said, as if talking about someone who preferred plum jelly to clotted cream.

The rooms in which Doris and Sedra usually stayed looked down on Wilshire Boulevard not far from downtown. The hotel was old but retrofit for modernity, chic and at the same time stuck-up. All the employees of the Federal had stared at Xavier as Doris led him through the constricted lobby toward the elevators.

“Good evening, Ms. Milne,” a white man in a gold suit said from behind the concierge’s desk.

“Hi, Mr. Connors.”

“You okay?”

“Oh, yes. Everything is fine.”

There was a suitcase on the made bed of the second bedroom in the suite. In the larger room there stood an old Chinese chest with doors lined with shallow drawers. The doors were set on hinges that swung open to reveal a closet filled with the dead woman’s clothes.

“Did you bring this with you?” Xavier asked.

“No. Auntie Sedra always sends it the morning before we come. That’s part of the reason I knew she was going to kill me.”

“Why?”

“Because every time before she had me put my suitcase in the closet space. She told me to pack but she didn’t put my bag in with her clothes.”

Each drawer had a brass keyhole in the center, and every one was locked.

“You got keys for these?” Ecks asked.

“Aunt Sedra always kept them hid.”

Twenty-seven drawers of cheap wood. Xavier smashed them one at a time while Doris went about repacking her suitcase.

Sedra was very organized, like most sociopaths Rule had been acquainted with. There was a drawer filled with platinum jewelry, also ones for gold and silver settings too; a drawer brimming with unset jewels and then separate ones for ruby, emerald, and diamond rings. And there was money: euros, dollars, bearer bonds, and gold coins. In the twenty-fourth drawer there was a folded piece of parchment that was the key to the journal’s code system:!-a, @-b, #-c.… At the bottom of the legend was a line of letters that stood for punctuation marks.

“I think Auntie would have wanted me to have that money and stuff,” the girl said to Xavier.

“I thought you said she wanted to kill you?”

“But that was only because I might get her in trouble,” Doris said simply. “It doesn’t mean she didn’t love me.”

“Maybe she would have wanted you to have the money,” Xavier agreed. “But I think we’ll hold on to it for a while until we work out all the details of the murders and kidnappings. Maybe later on somebody can use it to help the people she harmed.”

Doris didn’t respond to his statements and accusations. She just looked at him brimming with California innocence.

Leaving the wrecked bureau behind, Xavier and Doris drove up the dark coast in silence.

After talking to Doris for more than an hour, Frank decided to ensconce her in the small room on the north side of the church encampment. Sister Hope, Frank’s stalwart number two at the church, took the girl off for food, a bath, and a night’s sleep.

“You were right to bring her here, Brother Ecks,” Frank said.

“She might have been there when Benol and her partner brought the three boys in. She’s the right age. I didn’t have the heart to interrogate her that far yet.”

“Do you want Sister Hope to ask?”

“No. No, I’ll do it tomorrow. But could you get Clyde to decode the contents of this journal using this.” He handed the red book and parchment page to the minister.

“Will you be going home?”

“I was hoping you’d let me sleep on one of the pews tonight.”

“That’s a hard bed.”

“I’ve always wanted to do that, Frank. Sleep in the room with no one else around.”

Frank smiled and then nodded.

Xavier slept on the front pew to the right of the Speakers’ Spot. He lay on his back, hands crossed over his chest like an undertaker’s approximation of eternal sleep. There was a half-moon peering in from the westernmost southern window. The lunar glow was peaceful, but it was the silence that made Ecks smile in his sleep: a hush so complete that it felt imposed by some greater being, some outer force too large to enter the church in its entirety. There was no electric hum or water flowing through wall-bound pipes, no cars from the road or distant music.

Even asleep Xavier reveled in the quiet. In that room slumber was a blessing, silence a sanctity, and breath the consecration and proof of the sermons Father Frank espoused.

“Brother Ecks.”

Xavier was aware in a separate, unconscious place in his mind that he had a role in life. His heart and mind, muscle, and even his rage were indentured to a fate beyond his control. He had not killed the white man with the crowbar in his chest. He allowed Winter Johnson to decide his own fate. Almost every step he had ever taken was the wrong step, and still he was there on this bench-a pawn of something possibly divine and definitely unknowable.

“Brother Ecks.” He felt a hand on his shoulder.

Xavier Rule had been born, he thought, with the potential for purpose. He could have turned away. He could have strangled Pinky in her sleep and never met Frank. He had lost hope, but hope had not forgotten him.

He opened his eyes to see Sister Hope leaning over him on the pew. She wasn’t smiling, but she never smiled. Her face was twice the size you’d expect. It dwarfed her head, which, in turn, seemed too large for her slender form. Her skin was the color of bright amber, and she had met menopause and conquered its storm like the conquistadors on ships bound for a new world.

“Hope,” he said.

“People may start coming in soon for morning meditations,” she said. “They don’t always come, but we would like to keep the room hospitable for them if they do arrive.”

“I’ve never seen you at Expressions,” Ecks said.

Her eyes were darker amber. She grimaced sadly.

“No,” she said. “I am the matron of the plant. I keep it running. That’s my job, my only penance.”

“And what is your sin?” Xavier asked the question almost innocently, without force or even the expectation of being answered.

The large face turned down and somehow in on itself. The dark beads of her eyes went cold.

“In the old country my father was a drunkard and my mother had too many children. She died and during a famine when I was not yet a woman it was up to me to make sure that my younger brothers and sisters survived.…”

In a rush of intuition Xavier understood that part of Hope’s self-imposed punishment was to confess her sin whenever asked. It was why she never left the church. It was her iron maiden to bear..

“… I lured a boy into a trap I’d made. I killed him and skinned his body. I cut him into pieces and brought him home to feed my starving family. I did that fourteen times.”

Xavier sighed and then stood. He wanted to apologize to the woman, but even that, he realized, would be another burden.

She squared her shoulders and adjusted the loose, full-length black uniform that she always wore. They peered into each other’s eyes and accepted the pain they both felt.

“Ecks!” a man’s voice commanded.

The shout seemed to fit the situation. There would be no easy egress from the cannibal child-memory.

Captain Guillermo Soto was striding down between the pews on a collision course with the Harlem hard man.

“Guilly. How’d you know I was here?”

“I called Clyde.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I’m placing you under arrest,” the LA cop exclaimed. He reached out to clamp his big hand on Xavier’s steel-banded left forearm.

This was a mistake.

Pivoting from his hip, Xavier pulled the larger man off balance. At the same time Ecks sent out a straight right fist that knocked the big cop flat on his back on the flagstone floor.

But Guillermo Soto was not a soft man. He bounced from the floor with a.357 Magnum in his left hand.

In his mind Xavier had already kicked the right-hand bench at Soto, was already crouching to his left and pulling the throwing knife he kept in a sheath on his right shin. In Xavier’s mind Soto was almost already dead.…

“Stop!” Father Frank called from the doorway behind the Speaker’s Spot.

Sister Hope stood there passively, understanding that she, at that moment, could not stay the foolish men.

“I can’t stop, Frank!” Soto shouted. “This is my prisoner.”

“This is sanctuary,” Frank replied.

Xavier stood up straight.

Soto lowered his high-powered pistol.

“There’s a woman dead, Frank,” the LA cop said. “A man too, and one critically wounded. There’s a girl missing and a basement filled with the skeletons of children.”

“There was a truck left out in the Arizona sun with sixteen dead workers in it,” Frank said. “There was a shoot-out in Chihuahua where women and children were caught in the cross fire.”

A shudder ran through Soto.

Xavier squelched the desire to kill the man.

“It’s my job,” Captain Soto said.

“I’m speaking to your faith.”

“Did you kill them, Ecks?” Soto asked.

“I shot the one guy and threw the crowbar into the other one’s chest. But they were getting ready to kill me and burn down the house. I think they wanted to remove Sedra’s body, maybe the skeletons too.”

“What about the girl?”

“She was gone when I got there.”

“Where is she now?”

“You have all the answers you need, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Brother Ecks is blameless.”

“You aren’t the law, Frank.”

“I am within these walls.”

“I have a life, man,” Guillermo said, “and a duty.”

“A life maintained by Hope and Ecks and the rest of us.”

Guillermo Soto tucked his gun into a holster on his hip while staring at Xavier.

Sister Hope turned away and left through the exit door.

Frank watched both men with a wary and yet somehow world-weary eye.

“Are you telling me everything, Ecks?” Soto said.

“I told you enough.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“Free at last.”

The big Mexican’s eyes narrowed. He seemed about to ask something else but swallowed the words.

Turning to Frank he said, “I got a job to do. You can’t blackmail me or browbeat me or talk me down. I will find out what happened, and those that are guilty will pay. It doesn’t matter if you turn me over too. I will do what’s right.”

“I would never betray your trust, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Your confessions among us are sacrosanct.”

“Even if these crimes were committed by members, Frank,” Soto uttered through clenched teeth. “You’ve said more than once that you are not here to protect us if we stray.”

“Just so,” the minister said.

Another shiver went through the big cop’s frame and he turned on his heel, strode up the aisle and out of the church.

Xavier was still thinking about the young girl who killed and gutted children so that her brothers and sisters could survive. For a moment he was nearly overcome by the feelings of empathy and impotence.

“You will have to take her out of here,” Frank said.

“Who?” Xavier asked; he was still thinking of the cannibal.

“Doris. Guillermo might turn his work over to an associate and they could very well get a warrant.”

“That would destroy the church,” Xavier said, the sheathed knife in his mind.

“I doubt if it will come to that. But better be safe. Brother Soto may be having a crisis of faith.”

“What will you do?” Xavier asked, trying to shake the knife out of his thoughts.

“Pray for him. Maybe pray with him. He doesn’t like you and so it is easy for him to believe the worst.”

“I hear that.”

“Find Hope and tell her to bring you out of here through the Revelation Road. Take the girl somewhere where Soto won’t find her. Leave the church and its safety up to me.”

Sister Hope was kneeling in the corner of a doorless white stone room carved out of the inner wall of the courtyard. He suspected that she was praying for the spirits of eaten children.

“Hope,” he said softly.

She stood up automaton-like and turned her huge head and face toward him.

“Yes, Brother?”

“Frank told me to ask you to get Ms. Milne and show us the way out down something called the Revelation Road.”

“Certainly.”

Hope walked across the yard with measured steps and climbed a rough-hewn ladder up to the second tier of the fortress wall. Then she disappeared within the catacomb inside.

Xavier sat at one of the outside tables and wondered about the inevitability of a violent death.

He had always been a fighter. Ambidextrous, naturally strong, and bathed in the hormonal chemistry of rage-he had never backed down and rarely lost a contest. This state of being for him was natural, like rats in an alley or the sun chasing after the moon. He didn’t realize that he was an evil man until the day that he and Frank sat and talked in that dark bar. He wasn’t able to remember most of the words that passed between them. All he knew was that he’d follow Frank anywhere. Right after that initial meeting Frank took Xavier up to Seabreeze City to spend three weeks in a solitary fourth-floor room that faced the ocean. Food and drink were brought for him at regular intervals and there was a bathroom down the corridor.

He met with Frank every Wednesday and Saturday and sat on the back pew at the services on Sunday. He attended the Expressions but was asked not to speak or comment.

He was instructed in how to pray by giving life to the Spirit rather than asking for boons, apologizing for being human, or thanking the Infinite for being.

He disliked Guillermo but still considered him a brother. They were all on the same page of damnation and they all worked hard to dispel the stench of their lives.

Soto might have shot him in the main hall; or Ecks might have killed the cop. But these actions were not from hatred, not hatred of each other. And even if they despised each other they were still brothers-even in conflict.

Xavier smiled and shook his head.

Always give yourself enough time to reflect, Frank had said on more than one occasion. The Infinite always takes the right step. We are like the Infinite, only infants that are, ever so carefully, experimenting with first attempts at walking.

“Mr. Noland?”

Doris Milne was wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots that came down just below her knees. The neckline was high and the sleeves short. Her pumps were medium gray and she carried a small pink suitcase that Xavier did not remember bringing.

“Where’d you get the bag?” Ecks asked.

“Sister Hope gave it to me. I didn’t have anything the right size.”

Hope was standing there behind the girl.

We are all sinners, Frank said at some point in every sermon. Xavier understood this claim more and more each day.

Inside Frank’s antechamber, behind an antique African tapestry depicting an early European settlement somewhere on the Ivory Coast, was a doorway that Xavier had not seen before. The tapestry was composed like a rude painting, with some people made from white cloth and others rendered in red. Frank had explained that the red people were the whites whose skin flushed under the strong African sun.

“And the white ones are black like me,” Ecks had said.

“Amen, Brother.”

The doorway led to a ladder that carried the trio down forty feet or so to a wide tunnel that had been excavated and reinforced decades before.

“Bootleggers once used this route to move their liquor and guns,” Hope said.

“You mean this wasn’t always a church?” Xavier asked.

“It was always a house of worship,” she replied. “Sometimes their intentions had gone astray.”

The tunnel went on for nearly a mile until they came to another ladder. At the top was a door that was disguised from the outside as a stone slab. They exited into a cave where the smell of the ocean was strong.

Outside, from behind a stand of coastal mugwort brush they came to a parking lot not twenty feet from the sand beach. The lot was made for eight or nine cars but there was only one vehicle there-a dark green 1961 Cadillac with its stubby fins and heavy white shark form.

“This is the minister’s private automobile, brother,” Hope said. “He asks everyone who borrows it not to dent it-if possible.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s only a car,” Hope said.

Knowing her past, Xavier thought that he understood what she meant.

“So,” Xavier said as he drove the Fleetwood in heavy morning traffic down the coast highway, “how did those two thugs know to come to the house?”

“What?”

“Come on now, Doris. Two men came to the Culver City house to remove evidence and burn the place down. They even had a plastic body bag with them.”

“Did you kill them?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“I … I knew somebody was coming but I didn’t call them.”

“You knew that they’d get rid of your aunt’s body.”

“She called them. She told me that they were going to do scorched earth on the house.”

“What about the body bag?”

“Isn’t that obvious? That was meant for me.”

“The note came from your hotel.”

“Auntie had a whole stack of that stationery. If you have the note you can see that it’s in her hand. Anyway, I don’t know how to write.”

“So you figured they’d take Sedra out with the bones. That way there’d be no evidence against you.”

“I didn’t know what would happen, not exactly. It was her plan.”

“But her death was definitely first-degree, premeditated murder.”

This time Doris merely nodded.

“You’re a very dangerous woman, Ms. Milne. And, you know, coming from me that’s saying something.”

“I did what I had to do,” she said in an odd tone.

“Did your aunt Sedra used to say that?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“How many of the children buried in the vault did you kill?” Xavier asked.

“None.”

“You sure?”

“I helped Sedra kill the two men and a woman, but the children were either sick or they got in trouble. One came to us with a broken arm and Sedra told me to kill her but I said no.”

“And what about the adults?”

“She’d tell me to drug them, then use the bat.”

“How old were you?”

“I was thirteen when we killed Mr. Moulton.”

“Who was he?”

“Him and Brayton used to bring babies together every few months or so, but then Mr. Moulton wanted to bring us kids on his own. He didn’t know that Brayton had a deal with the people Sedra used to find the kids’ homes. When Mr. Moulton brought us his first kid without Brayton, Sedra told him that they’d celebrate the new arrangement with a glass of wine. She told me that when he started talking funny, I should run out and hit him with the bat or he’d kill us all.”

“Why did you kill Sedra?”

“Because she was going to kill me. Because she said we were going to go away but I knew I didn’t have a passport and she had always said that she couldn’t take me anywhere without a passport.”

“Do you feel guilty about killing her?”

Doris turned her head to regard her new acquaintance.

“No,” she said. “I’m scared to be alone. I don’t have a passport or anything.”

“Had you been thinking about killing Sedra before yesterday?”

“I thought about it. I thought that if she ever tried to kill me or anything that I’d have my bat. I used to practice hitting a tree in the backyard sometimes, and if she ever asked me why I’d just say that I wanted to be ready if she needed me to use it again.”

“Why did you worry about her hurting you? You said you thought she loved you.”

“When she’d drink she’d tell me she had done terrible things. She never said what exactly. She said that if I ever knew what she’d done, she’d have to kill me so that I would never say. She said that because I was an accomplice in what we did to those people she didn’t have to worry about that, but the other things …”

For a time after that they sat in silence. Doris turned away, then rolled down her window, allowing the smell of the sea to rush in. Unexpectedly the odor calmed Xavier. He hadn’t realized that he was getting riled listening to the crazy logic of the young woman’s life-not until the atmosphere of salt and sea wrapped around him.

Taking in long breaths, Xavier felt a wolfish smile form on his lips. This, he knew, was a kind of anticipation, the way he felt before he and Swan would go out and transact business.

“You bruised my chest,” Doris said, looking out her open window.

“Huh?”

“When you hit me at the house.”

“I was trying to break your jaw.”

“Are you going to have sex with me?”

“What?”

“Sex.”

“You keep asking me that,” he said.

“Men always want to have sex. Aunt Sedra told me so.”

“She also said that your parents were dead and that they didn’t want you back.”

“So?”

“She lied. Everything was a lie. That house, the adoptions, you needing a passport … Everything she told you was untrue. So if you want to know the truth, just think of what Sedra told you and the opposite is the right answer.”

Doris turned in her seat, bringing her left thigh up to lie flat on the emerald cushion. The skin flashed white beneath the green of her hem.

“I’m not wearing my panties.”

“Oh?”

“And I shaved my pussy so there’s only a razor line of hair pointing down at the clit. The hairs fan out like a feather.”

Suddenly Xavier yanked the steering wheel to the right. The Cadillac jerked and Doris yelped. Two cars behind honked long and loud but Ecks paid them no heed. He pulled off onto a slender shoulder perched twenty feet or so above the beach.

He turned like she had, pulling his right knee up, revealing a portion of his sheathed knife.

“Listen here, girl. You need to understand something. Most men are walking down the street not thinkin’ nuthin’ special. Pizza they ate last night. The ache in their gut. Maybe they’re worried that they’re gonna get fired or found out. They see a young thing like you and they might think, ‘Hey, she’s pretty,’ and walk on. But you come up and start talkin’ about your panties, pussy, and clit and they will get a hard-on. They will. But not ’cause they want sex-it’s because you want them to want to have sex. That’s what your aunt taught you. She taught you how to be a whore.

“Whores make men want to have sex and then they get paid for givin’ it. Whores do that. The only woman I want to have sex with wants to have sex with me. If she don’t want it, I don’t want it. You understand that? It’s not a trade-off but a give-off.”

It was then that Xavier realized that Doris was trembling. He had lost his temper again. He had crossed the line that Father Frank had drawn for all the parishioners of his church.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting back against the Fleetwood’s door.

“A-a-about what?”

“I just got mad there. Instead of makin’ me want sex you got me mad. Pretty young woman like you should be all nervous about what’s under your dress and in a man’s pants. It should make you giggle and blush.”

Xavier turned back to the steering wheel, looked over his left shoulder, and pulled out into the crowded highway. A car or two honked briefly but there was no collision.

A few minutes later she said, “Sometimes Sedra made me be with men that hit me.”

“Do you remember Brayton bringing you three blond baby boys?” he replied.

“Yes.”

“You do?”

“It was a few weeks after Little Mr. Smith died. I remember that they were so cute, but I wouldn’t give them names because of how hurt I was over the baby dying.”

“What happened to the boys?”

“People came and took them.”

“All three together?”

“No. They each went with someone different.”

“Do you remember anything about the people they went with?”

“Can I come stay with you if I promise not to talk about sex?”

“What?”

“Hope said that you were taking me someplace to hide while you found out what to do about Aunt Sedra and the house.”

“No, baby. I mean … yeah, I am gonna take you someplace, but you can’t be with me. All the women stay with me got their panties on … at least at first. No, you can’t stay with me.”

“I have underwear in my bag.”

“Do you remember anything about who took those boys?”

“There was a nice couple. I think their name was Brown, something like that,” she said. “If I promise to be good can I stay with you?”

“No.”

“I don’t remember hardly anything else. I think one of the boys was taken by a man. He smelled like perfume and had a light suit. I remember all three boys were wrapped in these blue-and-brown-checkered blankets.”

“That’s good enough for now. It was a long time ago.”

“I really want to stay with you.”

“I know. But you don’t have much experience. You’d want to stay anywhere after Sedra’s. Where I’m going to take you is the perfect place for you to begin to learn all the things you don’t know.”

The Hammer and Nail hardware store was on Santa Monica Boulevard in the middle of West Hollywood. Xavier found a parking place down the street and carried Doris’s pink suitcase as they walked in the front door.

“Hey, sailor,” a recorded male voice said suggestively when they set off the electric eye.

It was a normal hardware store dealing in metal fittings, power tools, and screws and nails of all types and sizes.

On the left side of the spacious room was the sales counter. Behind this stood a tall, powerfully built pink man whose lips were thick and roughly in the shape of a heart.

“Ecks,” the man said.

“George,” Xavier Rule replied.

“Who’s your friend?”

“This is Charlotte.” It was a name they agreed on a few minutes before parking. “Frank needs for her to lie low for a few days. And you shouldn’t tell anybody-especially no one from the congregation.”

“Okay. And you know she’ll certainly be safe in my house.”

“Charlotte, this is George Ben,” Xavier said. “You two have a lot in common-you both like men.”

“Girl, you look too cute in those polka dots,” George said, and for the first time Doris smiled without a self-conscious look in her eye.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Forgive her if she doesn’t know how to act, George. She’s led a very, very sheltered life.”

“In the closet, huh?” the big pink man said.

“Under a trapdoor at the back of the old coats,” Xavier said, “with a padlock on either side.”

“Don’t you worry, Charlotte. You and I will be best girlfriends.”

Doris’s eyes creased and Xavier had one of his rare laughs. He turned to leave but Doris grabbed at his sleeve.

“George has my phone number,” the gangster said. “If you need something you can call me anytime.”

“I’ve never slept anywhere but Sedra’s house and the Federal,” she said.

“There’s a whole new world out there. And one thing’s for sure-no one will hurt you with George Ben on your side.”

“That’s a fact,” George said.

Doris looked between the two men, released Xavier’s sleeve tentatively, and brought her hands together.

“If you call me I’ll come,” Xavier promised before walking out the front door.

“Hey, sailor,” the recorded voice said.

Xavier liked Frank’s dark green Fleetwood almost as much as he did his pink, sea green, and chrome Edsel. Old classic cars delighted him. The only things he felt unambivalent passion for were gaudy clothes, fighting, and classic cars. He had tried to change but even that late morning, climbing over the mountain through the canyon, he found himself luxuriating in the driver’s seat and wanting to resurrect Sedra so that he could slap her face.

Down the canyon road, then a short jaunt on the freeway and Xavier found himself in Pasadena. It wasn’t long before he parked in front of a big house that looked like a miniature baronial estate on Galleon Drive.

Upon getting out of the car he paid momentary obeisance to the lovely eighty-two-degree Southern California day. The sky was blue and the fat palm tree in the Berbers’ front yard seemed lively enough to pull its shallow roots out of the soil and do a jig.

The lawn was so green that it looked painted, and the flat-faced violet flowers that grew on vines clinging to the trellis of the front porch gave the vague impression of laughing faces.

Southern California didn’t seem to be on the same planet that New York City inhabited. The days were longer and the nights shorter. People smiled more and cared less. And in Los Angeles there was more of a chance of you disappearing with no one noticing that you were gone-or remembering that you’d been there at all.

Xavier walked up the six white steps to the wide porch and advanced on the closed door.

“Can I help you?” a voice to his right said.

Ecks turned but all he saw were two wicker chairs facing the flowering trellis. They were old, weather-worn chairs fitted with faded cushions.… Slowly a shape came into view; an elderly man was seated in the nearest straw throne. He was so thin and wan that he blended into the washed-out fabric like a chameleon might subtly come to resemble branch and leaf.

“Mr. Berber?”

“Yes?”

The man leaned forward, coming fully into being before Xavier’s eyes. He had an oblong head, which was bald and marked by two liver spots. His glasses had perfectly round lenses way too large for his face, and his waxen smile had forgotten the humor that spawned it.

“My name is Arlen, Arlen Johns,” Xavier said. “I’m a deacon of the Interfaith Church of Redemption.”

The vapid smile broadened slightly, gaining no sincerity at all.

“A deacon?”

“I’ve come here on a church mission,” Xavier said. “You are Clay Berber, are you not?”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit with you for a few moments?”

Berber was probably in his late sixties, but he might have been eighty by the way he held himself. The older man seemed to consider Xavier’s request in earnest, weighing all of the consequences of the pending decision.

“What is it that you want, Mr.…?”

“Johns.”

“What is it that you want, Mr. Johns?”

“Can I sit down?”

Once again the old skull cogitated. After deep consideration it nodded its assent.

Xavier lowered himself into the far seat, taking on, in his heart, the role of a church deacon.

He returned the old man’s cold smile.

“A woman came to us through an intermediary,” Xavier said. “Her name is Charlotte Moran.”

Maintaining his vagueness, Clay Berber nodded.

“She lived at the home of a woman named Sedra Landcombe twenty years and more ago,” Xavier continued. “While she was there she remembers that one night a man named Brayton Starmon brought three blond baby boys to Sedra’s home and left them there. In the days that followed people came to take the children. Money changed hands.”

The meaningless smile evaporated.

“Charlotte didn’t remember much, but she told us that she believed the children were wrapped in blue-and-brown-checkered blankets.”

“We got a deal on those covers,” Clay said. “Rose bought them from the main distributor in Tarzana.”

“Our church researcher found out that twenty-three years ago you had three babies kidnapped from a nursery you ran out of your home.”

“God knows we didn’t need the money,” the old man said to the flowering vine. “I was a machinist at McDonnell Douglas and made more than enough. But Rose just wanted something to do. She loved children. She loved Benol, but that child was a bad seed, bad seed.”

“Do you think that those babies Charlotte saw were the ones stolen from your house?” Xavier asked.

“Why haven’t you gone to the police, Mr. Johns?” The dreamy distance of his bearing was suddenly gone.

“We didn’t have any kind of corroboration, Mr. Berber. It was just a young woman talking about a child’s spotty memory. But now that you have identified those blankets we can go to the police. We can get them to track down this Sedra Landcombe.”

Clay was trembling in his chair.

“It’s getting cold out here,” he said, shocked not by the weather but by memories he’d rather have gone undisturbed.

“Is your wife still alive, sir?”

“What?”

“Your wife. Is she still alive?”

“Alive?”

“Yes.”

“She’s alive,” he said, as if the state were somehow conditional.

“May I speak with her?”

“Speak? To Rose?”

“Yes. I’d like to know if she remembers anything else.”

“It was my fault, Mr. Johns. I brought Benol into this house. She was the one kidnapped those boys. My younger brother married her mother when Bennie was only two. As soon as his lust was satisfied Edward left Benol’s mother. When his ex-wife died my brother was already a drunk. I took the girl in when the foster care services of Miami reached out to me. Worst mistake I ever made in my life. It was my fault that those children were stolen. Mine alone.”

“I’m a Christian,” Xavier said-it wasn’t really a lie. “I cast no stones or blame. I merely want to be of service.”

“You want to talk to Rose?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“You won’t get anything out of her.”

“I won’t lose anything either.”

Clay Berber smiled with real humor. The phrase, or maybe its simple structure, reminded him of a happier time.

“Well … help me up then.”

The house was open and barren. The first room they passed through contained only a gold-colored stuffed chair against a scarred wall that was sheathed in dulled, peeling wallpaper. The next room was larger, with no rugs on the dusty oak floor and a sofa sitting in the middle of the otherwise vacant space. The faint smell of garbage wafted through a doorway that probably led to the kitchen.

In the middle of the back wall of the living room was a black door that opened onto the shaggy overgrown yard.

The grounds behind the Berber home seemed to Rule like the edge of some vast wilderness. A giant blue pine loomed over the house and front portion of the backyard. Tall grasses moved in the afternoon breeze, seeming to have almost animal mobility. Tropical-looking flowers with purple petals and triplet yellow stamens hung from a vine from which also depended the occasional egg-shaped golden fruit. These vines served as covering for the high redwood fencing. Unkempt, man-size bushes and overgrown weeds vied for space among the outer shadows of the tree. Down a path of white stone disks Clay led Xavier through this wasteland and to the other side, where a weeping willow sat behind a self-generated curtain of light green leaves.

There came the faint sound of a human voice from behind the blind of branches and tiny, razorlike leaves. It was the sound of continual meaningless mumbling. This voice was hoarse from overuse. Maybe a woman.

Clay stopped at the swaying barrier. He brought his left hand to his chin.

Xavier waited for the old man to build up courage. He was in no rush.

Finally Berber brought his hands together like a swimmer or a praying penitent and parted the hanging branches. Xavier followed him through, into shadows.

The soil underneath the willow was barren for lack of sunlight. It was cooler under there, and empty except for an old stocky white woman in an ankle-long colorless bag of a dress sitting on a wooden crate and talking, talking, talking.

“Ooo de bal into seem it been,” she said grinning happily. “Popo tom is far long at ti ti remo pie.”

She sat spread-legged on the low fruit crate talking and gesticulating, living in a world removed.

“She sleeps on the couch in the living room and comes out here every morning,” Clay said. “I bring her water and tuna fish sandwiches, sometimes tomato soup.”

Xavier noticed the water bottle standing beside the wooden seat. Next to that was a large leather purse with big looping handles.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Berber,” the highly specialized deacon said. “How are you today?”

The woman stopped babbling and seemed to notice the men for the first time.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Yes,” Xavier replied, “hello.”

She grinned broadly, showing her few remaining stumpy yellow teeth.

“Ooo ti do my.”

“He came to ask about those boys,” Clay Berber said. “The ones that Benol kidnapped.”

The snarl that came into Rose Berber’s face caused a physical reaction in Xavier, just as if he had encountered a feral beast in the backyard jungle. It was then that he noticed the odor of urine mixed in with the stronger scents of plant and soil.

Rose made her interpretation of a muffled roar and stood up.

Clay took a step backward.

“Why don’t you let me talk to Mrs. Berber alone for a moment?” Xavier said to the hapless husband.

“You heard her,” the old man answered. “She can’t talk at all.”

“Sometimes the words aren’t in the mouth and ear,” Xavier said, quoting from one of Father Frank’s sermons. “Sometimes hearts and minds communicate.”

Xavier hadn’t known exactly what Frank meant until meeting Rose Berber. But Clay understood immediately.

“I’ll just be a few feet away,” Clay said to his wife and their visitor.

When he passed through the wall of willow leaves Rose sat down on her crate again.

Xavier approached her and she looked up at him-her eyes filled with wonder. There was no fear there at all.

“Ooo ti.”

Xavier crouched down, bringing his head a few inches below hers and about a foot away. She took in a breath of anticipation and held it for a moment or two. When she exhaled the stagnant gust broke across Xavier’s face, but he didn’t flinch or move away. He’d been in New York’s filthiest back alleys and in the company of dead bodies and their gases. He’d smelled the rot of crack dens and heroin addicts’ beds. He’d breathed in the blood of his enemies.

“Can I look in your bag, Rose?”

“Abara abba.”

“No,” he said patiently, “in your bag.”

He gestured toward the openmouthed leather sack with its big arching handles. It had once been brown but had faded and whitened until it was mouse colored, tawny, and cracked.

“Hello?” Rose Berber said.

“Bag?”

“Ooo la la?”

“Oui oui.”

Rose grinned at some faint memory of language. Xavier touched the nearest handle of her bag and she froze. He touched her hardened, weathered hand and she grabbed his thumb with the strength of a powerful infant.

Using his free hand Xavier reached into the bag, grabbed onto the papers inside, and secreted them under his jacket. All of this was driven by intuition. He felt the old woman’s secrets, smelled them on her dress and in the dirt around her crate.

He stood up quickly, pulling his thumb from her grasp.

“Osh barning, barning,” she lamented, and Xavier wondered if maybe there was some kind of sublime meaning to her nonsense.

He didn’t ponder this riddle but walked out of the tree room into the wilderness yard where Clay Berber waited.

“I told you she couldn’t talk,” the old man said.

“She does nothing but talk, brother. What you meant to say is that we don’t understand.”

While walking down the front pathway from the Berber residence, Xavier felt like he used to when leaving the scene of a crime he’d just committed; furtive and vulnerable, angry and even a little bit giddy.

Clay was standing on the topmost white step of his home, watching as Xavier unlocked the door of the Fleetwood.

At that moment a tortured scream came from behind the house. Clay turned and, hobbling in the pantomime of a run, headed through the front door. Xavier slid behind the steering wheel, turned the key, and drove off before his crime could be discovered and avenged.

On the rooftop parking lot three blocks from his Flower Street apartment, Xavier brought out the thick tattered sheaf of papers he stole from the wilderness woman and her sad, fading husband. There were newspaper and magazine articles about the kidnappings. There was a picture of Benol at the age of twelve or thirteen that looked something like her-but not enough for an ID. There was a letter from a police detective, Simon Lowe, stating that, though the investigation would never be closed, the police had come to a dead end in finding their niece or the babies she’d taken.

Xavier sifted through the articles, reading a bit of one and then passing on to another. He already knew the names of the children’s parents; Benol’s document had provided all that. He thought that he knew more than anything Rose Berber could have collected until a postcard dropped from the stack onto the seat next to him.

There was an alligator attacking a blue heron on the photo face. The bird was just rising up from a lake, its whitish blue-gray wings struggling against the air. The alligator had clamped onto its left claw, however, and was pulling the beautiful bird down into murky green darkness.

On the other side of the card the postal stamp said Tampa, Florida, and was dated February 9, 1993-five years after the kidnappings.

C, I need some money. Not too much. Just enough to pay rent and groceries for two months. $856. B

The card was most probably addressed to Clay Berber but what was the threat? Benol had moved to Florida; she admitted that herself. “B” had signed the postcard.

Xavier walked the long way ’round to his apartment building, considering what the postcard meant. The papers felt hot in his hand and so when he passed the neighborhood post office he went in and sent an express mail package, containing the papers he stole, to Father Frank and Sister Hope. He sent everything but the postcard.

That done, he headed for his building, thinking that this would be a nice evening for peppermint schnapps and Charles Dickens.

He took the stairs two at a time while recalling the old days, when he was often going up or down the back way to keep out of sight from the cops. Technically he was still on the run, but he didn’t see his life like that anymore. Now he was a new man in a new life, far removed, invisible, and free-to serve.

He stopped at his own door, a sixth or maybe seventh sense warning him of something, something.

But Ecks was not the kind of criminal who was controlled by fear. He felt the pangs of terror, lived under the reign of threat, but he only ever took a step backward so that he could attack from a better position; that fact, as his alcoholic father often said, was both his creed and his breed.

So when he opened the door and saw the big man sitting at his yellow table, he felt mild surprise but not fear. The men in suits flanking the inside of his front door were no revelation either. He didn’t back up because he could hear the footsteps behind him in the hallway.

Xavier walked into the center of the small room and stared.

“Mr. Noland?” the seated man, who was obviously in charge, asked. He had an accent: French, not French Canadian.

Xavier had never met a French cop before.

“And you are?”

“Detective Andre Tourneau.” He wore a darkish tan trench coat with buttoned flaps on the shoulders and a sash hanging down to the floor. He was a big man but not necessarily fat. Ecks wondered at the violence that might reside behind his small green eyes.

“Cops?” Xavier asked, moving his head to take in all of his company.

“Have a seat, Mr. Noland,” Tourneau offered. It was almost as if the apartment were Tourneau’s office and Xavier was the unwilling guest.

Ecks lowered himself onto one of his hardwood chairs and leaned back onto the two back legs. A glance out the window told him that his Edsel had been returned, parked as it was behind his newspaper delivery truck.

Xavier then peered at his surprise visitor. He would have called himself a white man, though his skin was light olive. His hair was like a weathered brown roof atop a country cottage. Tourneau was in his fifties but exuded the vitality of an animal in the wild. Either he had good genes or he paid close attention to his physical health.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Tourneau asked.

“To give me a citizenship award of some kind?”

“You were seen running-staggering, actually-from a home in Culver City yesterday. The next day that domicile was found to be a crime scene.”

“Oh? And who is the criminal?”

Tourneau smiled.

Xavier took a look at the four standing cops who were now crowding his small studio. They were all suited, tall, and of almost every race the city had to offer.

The Rainbow Squad, Ecks thought, and then he smiled at the phrase.

“Something funny?” Tourneau asked.

“No,” Ecks said to the cop. “I went to Mrs. Landcombe’s house to ask her about a friend of mine, an Albert Timmerman, who lived in Seaside. Albert knew her in his younger days. When he was dying he asked me to tell her about his passing. All he remembered was her first name and the corner where her house was. I went there and she offered me a drink. The next thing I knew the room was spinning and someone tried to hit me with a baseball bat. I ran out the door, down a long street, and smack-dab into a moving car.”

“Did Timmerman die?”

“Yes. Heart attack. He’s buried in the graveyard in Seaside. That’s a little town just north of Seabreeze City.”

The detective stared for a moment, two. He was digesting the information, moving it around behind his beady eyes like puzzle pieces that had multiple resolutions-but only one true answer.

“Why didn’t you give this information to Captain Soto?” Tourneau asked.

“At first I didn’t remember. I didn’t know anything when I woke up in that hospital bed. Not a damn thing. The blow to the head added to whatever drugs they gave me. It’s only been coming back in snatches.”

“Maybe you decided to go back to Mrs. Landcombe’s home and confront her,” Tourneau offered.

“Look, man,” Ecks said with an edge to his voice. “I’m not gonna argue with you or suppose this or that. I didn’t go back to that house or commit any kinda crime. You wanna arrest me and take me to jail … okay, I’ll go. I’m not gonna fight you either.”

“That’s a good decision,” Tourneau said, and Ecks realized that he was facing someone who was very much like him-violent and proud.

Xavier held out his hands, palms up and steady, saying, “Handcuffs?”

He stared into the detective’s green beads, letting him know that in a dark alley, with no one else around, the fight would be on.

“How did a high-ranking captain like Soto get your case?” the displaced Frenchman asked.

“Say what?” Xavier put his dark hands on the bright yellow table, palms down.

“You understand.”

“I understand the question, but I have no idea what happened after that car hit me. I woke up and your brother in blue was standin’ over me. I sure in hell didn’t call him, and I have no idea how the LAPD dispatches its police.”

“Why did Landcombe try to kill you?”

“I don’t know that she did. Maybe she just wanted to knock me out.”

“This isn’t your first police interview, is it, Mr. Noland?”

“Black men talk to cops all the time, Detective. I don’t know what it’s like in the country you come from, but here in America there’s a great intimacy between black men and officers of the law, not much friendliness but close, still and all.”

Tourneau raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide for a moment. The possibility for normal-size eyes was a surprise to Ecks.

“You haven’t asked about the crime committed at Landcombe’s home,” the Frenchman noted.

“I don’t care. I’m finished with that woman.”

“Did you see a young woman there? White, blond?”

“No. Must have been somebody, though, because I was lookin’ at Sedra when the baseball bat hit me.”

“How did you know it was a bat?”

“I grabbed the suckah and pulled it away from my attacker. You know I got a hard head, man. I ran for the door with the bat in my hand and dropped it before goin’ outside, or maybe I let it go on the lawn-I really don’t remember. Either way, I didn’t get a good look at who hit me. And if I did I forgot. But you could understand that.”

The policeman smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He sat back and laced his hands together, elbows placed at a wide angle on the table. After assuming this pose he pursed his lips.

“You have no verifiable explanation for your visit to Landcombe’s home,” he said. “This Albert Timmerman is dead. So is Sedra Landcombe.”

“Oh? How’d she die?”

“Bludgeon, maybe a baseball bat. It was quite gruesome.”

“Got my fingerprints on it? Is that why you’re here?”

The detective smiled again, enjoying the back-and-forth.

“Are you busy right now, Mr. Noland?”

“Just talkin’ to you and your friends.”

“Would you like to accompany us to a place where we can settle this issue?”

“What issue?”

“We know you were at the Landcombe residence once,” he said. “Some of my associates think you may have been there at yet another time.”

“What kind of place?” Xavier asked.

“A place of goodwill.” Tourneau smiled again. Ecks liked this smile.

“Sure. Why not?”

He rose from the chair and the two business-suited cops, one black and the other Asian, who were standing at the inside of the door came up quickly, each grabbing an arm.

Ecks held his arms down straight and stiff so that the men had great difficulty trying to get his wrists close enough together for the handcuffs. After a moment of strain Tourneau’s smile broadened.

“Release your arms,” the black cop warned.

“Let him alone, Mr. Jason,” Tourneau said. “After all, he’s not under arrest. Not yet.”

Elfin Incorporated was a medium-size medical building on Robertson Boulevard, a few blocks north of Wilshire. The five policemen and Xavier Rule walked in near four in the afternoon. The small elderly woman behind the round, clear plastic reception desk was disturbed by men so many and so big.

“C-can I help you?” she asked.

“Dr. Topaz, if you please,” Tourneau said.

“Can I tell him what it’s about?”

“Police business.”

“And you are?” she asked.

This last question caught Rule’s attention. The woman was bothered by the men but had more connection to her job than to her fears. She was what was now called African-American, with skin the color of faded ten-carat gold.

“Detective Andre Tourneau,” the cop said, unperturbed.

The receptionist hesitated a moment and then picked up the phone. She cupped a hand around the receiver, mumbled something, listened, mumbled a bit more, and then looked up.

“Room four-oh-four, fourth floor,” she said.

Xavier wondered if she could say that four times fast.

The hallway was pink and gray, with no ornament, and lined with closed doors. The floor was carpeted. There was no chemical smell on the air. This was a livable domicile not designed for serious illness or big brutal men in pretend civilized wear. If the doors could speak, Xavier mused, they would have politely asked the mob to leave.

But there they were, walking toward room number four-oh-four.

This door was ajar.

The Hispanic cop pushed it open.

It was a nice large room with one bed and a window looking out into the western sky. A buxom nurse in her forties was seated in a chair where she could personally monitor the IV drip and the various electronic screens gauging the patient’s biological functions. The nurse was white with handsome features that once must have been beautiful.

A tall East Indian man in a white smock was standing next to the bed. He smiled at the police. Tourneau smiled back.

“Dr. Topaz,” the detective said.

“Sir.”

“How is the patient today?”

At that moment Xavier noticed the purple iris in the tube-shaped vase on the patient’s nightstand.

The man in the hospital bed was the one he’d impaled with the crowbar. His eyes were partly open.

“I just wanted Mr. Mathers to see if he recognized my friend Mr. Noland.”

Ecks felt a hand on his shoulder moving him forward into the bright swath of sunlight coming in through the window.

Mathers looked up with some difficulty.

Xavier was still looking at the flower.

“Who’s this?” the wounded man whispered.

“You don’t recognize this man?” Tourneau asked.

Mathers shook his head no.

“Are you sure?”

“He’s still very weak,” the nurse said. She had risen from her chair and migrated to the bedside.

“You don’t have to worry about this man,” Tourneau went on, ignoring the nurse. “We have him in our custody.”

Xavier smiled. Dr. Topaz frowned, looking into the semiretired criminal’s eyes.

“I don’t know him,” Mathers said. He took a deep breath through his mouth and exhaled through his nostrils.

“Doctor,” the nurse complained.

“Is that all, Detective?” Topaz said.

“Has anyone inquired about the patient?” Tourneau replied.

“A friend of his sister came. She left this flower.”

“What was her name?”

“She called herself Constance Ravell,” the Indian doctor said, “but she was from my part of the world-at least her ancestors were.”

“Did you hear what they said?” the policeman asked the nurse.

“He asked for a few moments alone.”

“I understood that he would have someone with him at all times.”

“This is a hospital, Detective,” the nurse said. “Not a prison.”

Xavier glanced at Mathers. The crook looked him straight in the eye.

He wasn’t one of Father Frank’s though. Ecks wondered what Iridia had said to the man.

Tourneau watched the men as they silently agreed upon mutual silence.

“Who was she?” Tourneau asked Xavier.

“Obviously a sophisticated woman with refined tastes,” Ecks said softly. “Somebody who will come when she’s needed by the sick and the needy.”

The look on the policeman’s face was one of wonder. He had embarked on one kind of journey but suddenly found himself facing a detour sign.

“Thank you, Doctor,” the policeman said. “I guess I was wrong about Mr. Noland.”

Outside on Robertson the cops stood around Xavier. He wondered whether they would beat him right out there in public.

“We don’t have the time to take you home, Mr. Noland,” Tourneau said. “We have multiple murders to solve.”

“Hey,” Ecks said easily, “I understand. You got an important job to do. I know how to take the bus to any stop in the city. I got one’a those transit maps in my wallet.”

The cop smiled and then grinned.

“But you could tell me something,” Ecks added.

“What is that, Mr. Noland?”

“How did a Frenchman ever become an LA cop?”

“My father was French,” he said. “My mother American. When my father died my mother left Nice to come home to California. I was sixteen and I was crazy about girls and police movies. The girls liked my French accent and the police liked my test scores.”

“Takes all kinds, I guess,” Ecks said.

The plum-colored Pontiac pulled up to the curb about half an hour after that. Winter Johnson was behind the wheel. There were bags under his eyes and the weight of deep thought hanging around him like black curtains over an old-time horse-drawn hearse.

“I didn’t ask the company to send you, Win,” Xavier said as he climbed into the seat next to his friend.

“No. But the dispatcher knows I drive you. He called me at home. I was takin’ me a sick day-to think.”