A Private Cathedral

Chapter Thirty-eight

Aside from bell, our escorts wore zip-front silver overalls and goggles and plastic covers on their hair and plastic booties on their shoes and latex on their hands; they looked more like space aliens than medieval torturers.

I know the presence of men like these in our tale might test the limits of one’s credulity. But let me tell you of my first visit to Angola Prison. I have never told this to others because my account, if believed at all, would change nothing in the system, do no good for the victims, and depress people of goodwill who want to believe in their government, their media, and their fellow man. Since then I have never doubted that there are people in our midst, significant numbers of them, who would have worked at Auschwitz in the time it took to sign their names on the job application.

Angola was a convict-lease prison founded during Reconstruction by an odious man named Samuel James. Under his tutelage, thousands of convicts, mostly black, died of sickness, malnutrition, and physical abuse. The favorite instrument was the Black Betty. More than one hundred convicts still lie in the levee along the Mississippi River. In the second half of the twentieth century, inmates were put in narrow, perpendicular iron sweatboxes set in concrete in the middle of summer, with no space to sit down, a bucket between their legs. One man was kept there nineteen days. His body was molded to the shape of the box.

While I was a visitor, a convict who fell out on work detail was placed on an anthill. A convict who sassed a gun bull was taken to the hole and whipped with a three-foot chunk of garden hose; the man who beat him called the process “making a Christian out of a nigger.”

What kind of men were these? Uneducated peckerwoods with a jaw full of Red Man? That’s not even close. Sexual nightmares and psychopaths and the cruelest people on earth? Don’t doubt it for a minute.

Just before we reached the compartment where Shondell kept his collectibles, Clete leaned close to Carroll LeBlanc. “It’s never as bad as you think,” he said. “You fucked up, but you did it for your daughter. Streak and I don’t hold it against you.”

That was Clete Purcel.

The hatch was closed. Bell looked at his watch.

“How much is Shondell paying you for this?” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you?” he said.

“What’s to get?” I said. “You have a black soul. I hope you enjoy your shuffleboard retirement in St. Petersburg before you cash in.”

“I’m already on the other side,” he replied.

“I didn’t catch that.”

“I’m already across the Big Divide. You’re sure a dumb son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

I heard feet walking fast behind us. “Sorry I’m late,” Shondell said. He was wearing a suit and tie. “Please forgive me if I don’t stay around for all the festivities. I have some business to do, but I’ll have everything on film and I can look at it later. Ready to get started?”

He opened the hatch. At first I couldn’t see clearly past the hatchway. But obviously, Shondell was stunned. I stepped sideways so I could see past him. The inside of the compartment had been torn apart, the chains and leather padding ripped from the bulkheads, the machines of torment thrown about like toys, the oak levers snapped off, the steel shafts doubled over, the cogged wheels twisted out of shape, the Brazen Bull pulled inside out.

“Must be the maid’s day off,” Clete said.

Shondell’s face looked maniacal. “Secure the yacht,” he said to Bell.

“We’re at sea, sir,” Bell said. “We’re secured already.”

“Get Adonis Balangie down here.”

“Yes, sir. Should I tell him about this?”

“I told you to get him down here. So go do it.”

Shondell’s rage and indignation were feigned. I’ve seen fear in men’s faces when the 105s were coming in short, and I’ve seen the desperation in the eyes of men who knew the dust-off wasn’t coming and the Great Shade was about to pass over their faces; but I had never seen terror greater than I saw in Shondell’s eyes during that moment. It was my belief then, and my belief now, that he saw the future and was terrified and would have traded his soul to avoid it.

Unfortunately for him, he had probably bartered away his soul many years ago.

Bell took us back to our compartment. He didn’t turn out the light. “This doesn’t change anything. You guys know that, don’t you?”

Surprisingly, Carroll LeBlanc spoke up. “Adonis Balangie wanted to cut us a break. I want to take him up on it. I can’t go through this shit again.”

“What break?” Bell said.

“A break. What do you care?” Carroll said. “Show some mercy.”

Bell closed and locked down the hatch.

“What are you doing, Carroll?” I said.

“You said we needed a weapon,” he replied.

Fifteen minutes later, Adonis opened the hatch and stepped into the compartment. One of the men in silver overalls stayed outside. Adonis was wearing a light overcoat, damp with sea spray. “What’s this about a break?”

Clete and I lowered our heads. Our hands were still bound behind us.

“You said you’d shoot us up,” Carroll said. “I got no illusions. I’d like to take you up on that.”

“You’re not out for the Medal of Honor?” Adonis said.

“Don’t make fun of the guy, Adonis,” I said.

He reached into his coat pocket and removed the tin box that contained the syringe and the ampoules of morphine.

“Before you give him that, can you answer a question?” I said.

“What’s the question?”

“I don’t get this stuff about a black sail and a white sail.”

“If this deal is worked out and most of what we own is transferred to a bank in Malta, Isolde will be on her way to us in a boat with white sails. If not, the sails will be black.”

“Why not use a radio?” Clete said.

“Because other people can pull the transmission out of the air,” Adonis said. “Because Mark Shondell likes to pretend he’s a man for the ages.”

Clete’s green eyes were half-lidded, his shoulders humped; he resembled a contemporary Quasimodo brought down from the bell tower. But as always, Clete’s externals were misleading, his intelligence and complexity silently at work in a gargantuan body he had spent a lifetime abusing with weed, pills, cigarettes, trough-loads of deep-fried food, and oceans of booze. Put more simply, Clete Purcel was the human equivalent of an M-1 tank plowing through a stucco building.

I could see his upper arms expanding like a firehose swelling with pressurized water. In the corner of my eye, I saw him twisting the ligatures on his wrists, working them over the heels of his hands, ignoring the broken vessels and torn flesh, blood slipping off the ends of his fingers, all of this with his eyes straight ahead, like a brain-dead man gazing at empty space.

Suddenly, his hands were free. He clamped one on Adonis’s mouth and the other on the back of his neck and drove his skull into the bulkhead, then dropped him to the deck as though he were a rag doll. He opened the tin box and removed the syringe. It was already loaded.

“Hey, guy out there!” he called through the hatchway. “Balangie is having a seizure! Get him out of here! We got enough problems!”

The man in overalls came through the hatch. “Seizure?”

Clete hooked his arm under the man’s chin and peeled it back, then jabbed the needle into the carotid and plunged down the piston with his thumb. “How you like it, shit breath?”

The man’s mouth fell open and his eyes rolled. Clete eased him to the deck and went through his pockets. He found a box cutter but no firearm. He sliced the ligatures on my wrists, then Carroll’s.

“We’ve got to get a gun,” he said.

I went through Adonis’s pockets while Clete stood by the hatchway. “Nothing,” I said.

“Got any idea what time of day it is?” Clete said.

“No,” I said.

Clete chewed his lip. “You call it, Streak.”

“When we were up the passageway, I thought I could feel the screws behind us,” I said. “If there’s an armory, it’s probably aft.”

“What about these two guys?” he said.

“What about them?” I said.

“What if they wake up?”

I knew what he was thinking. “Lock them in and leave them alone.”

“Okie-dokie, big mon,” he replied. “How you feeling, LeBlanc?”

“No matter how this comes out, I think you’re a righteous dude, Purcel,” he said.

“Don’t tell anybody,” Clete said.

I suspected we were two decks down. We walked in the direction opposite the torture compartment and could hear the screws turning louder and louder under the hull. We found no armory, only a refrigerator unit and two compartments full of canned goods and a ladder at the end of the passageway. I went up first. As I got to the top, I saw a man twenty yards away, his back to me. He was dressed like a ship’s officer and seemed to be guarding the entrance to a cabin. I ducked down below the level of the deck.

What? Clete mouthed.

Bogey at twelve o’clock, I answered.

He hooked his hand in the back of my belt and tugged gently, then squeezed past me up the ladder, the syringe clenched in his right hand. He paused briefly, then sprang down the passageway, garroted the sentinel, and jabbed him in the throat with the needle. I motioned for Carroll to follow me.

Clete opened the hatch to the cabin the ship’s officer had been guarding. Father Julian was sitting on one bunk and Leslie Rosenberg on another. Elizabeth lay on a third. The word “angelic” would probably apply to Elizabeth, with her blue eyes and golden hair, but I don’t like to think in those terms. We dragged the unconscious sentinel inside the cabin and closed the hatch behind him.

“Y’all doin’ all right?” I said.

“What the fuck does it look like?” Leslie said.

“You know how to say it, Leslie,” I replied. “How about you, Julian?”

“I think Leslie put it well,” he replied. The purple and yellow bruises and lesions and burns patterned on his face by Delmer Pickins were still there, but he actually managed to laugh. I take back my comment about the use of words such as “angelic.” I think there are people who have auras that could light the darkest dungeon on earth.

“No one saw y’all kidnapped?” I said. “You didn’t get a message out?”

“You think we’d be here now?” Leslie said.

“Bingo!” Carroll said. He was squatted down next to the ship’s officer. He held up a .25-caliber semi-auto, then eased back the slide to confirm that a round was in the chamber. He felt in the officer’s other coat pocket and found two spare magazines, both loaded.

“How many people are on board?” Clete said.

“We were blindfolded,” Leslie said.

“Why does Shondell want y’all?” he said.

“Tell him,” Julian said.

“He believes I’m growing in power,” she said. “He thinks I’m working in concert with Father Julian to ruin his name.”

“How are you going to acquire more power?” I said.

“I’ve already explained that, but you refused to hear,” she said.

“Don’t start that stuff again,” Clete said. “We keep it simple. We take it to them with tongs. Right, Dave?”

But Clete was fooling himself. He knew we had little control of our fate. And he did not want to accept that we were dealing with preternatural forces.

“There’s something we haven’t told y’all,” I said. “About Shondell’s collectibles.”

“What collectibles?” Julian said.

“Instruments of torture,” I said. “He was about to put us through the grinder. Except someone tore his machinery apart — someone who could twist iron wheels like licorice.”

Leslie looked into Clete’s face. “Do you remember me, Mr. Purcel?”

“What, from the Quarter?” he said.

“During your torment in the Keys. I saved you.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “No thanks, no help wanted, no more green monsters in my life or archangels flying around.”

Leslie sat down by her daughter and stroked her hair. “If you can be kind to Gideon, you will change American history.”

“I don’t want any of that crap,” Clete said. “I’m going to cool out as many of these guys as I can and worry about the other stuff later on. Like after I’ve been dead a few hundred years.”

Carroll had gone into the head. He came back out, his face white. “There’s a porthole in there. Take a look.”

“What is it?” Clete said.

“See for yourself,” Carroll said. “I don’t want to believe in stuff like this. My head is coming off my shoulders. It’s some kind of mind-fuck. Sorry, Father.”

“I think I’ll survive,” Julian said. He went into the head, then came back out, pinching the bridge of his nose and widening his eyes, as though arranging words in his head before he spoke them. He looked at Clete. “Did you kill someone today?”

“No,” Clete said. “I ran Adonis’s head into the bulkhead and put a hypodermic needle in a guy’s neck.”

“The man you injected, what was he wearing?”

“Silver overalls.”

“He’s tied to the mast of Gideon’s prison ship. His entrails have been pulled out.”

“I didn’t do anything like that,” Clete said.

“I didn’t say you did,” Julian replied.

“What time of day is it out there?” Clete asked.

“You tell me,” Julian said. “The sky is purple and green and full of electricity.”

“Dave, we’ve got to make a move,” Clete said.

Just then the yacht pitched, then seemed to mount a swell and dip forward and slip down a deep trough. It smacked bottom with such force that it jarred out teeth and splashed seawater through the porthole in the head.

“Come on, Dave, don’t just stand there,” Clete said.

I looked at Leslie and her daughter. I had the feeling I would never see them again.

“Do you hear me, Dave?” Clete said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“What about me?” Carroll said.

“Give me the piece and stay here,” Clete said.

“I’m not up to it?” Carroll said.

“It’s me that green bastard is after,” Clete said. “You may be the guy who has to get everybody home, Carroll. Do us a solid.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Carroll said, handing the .25 semi-auto and spare magazines to Clete. “Yeah, we’re gonna get through this. Right? Somebody knows we’re here. We just got to hold on.”

Have you ever seen someone rolled up in an embryonic ball at the bottom of a foxhole, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his forearms clamped on his ears, while an artillery barrage marches through his position? That’s what Carroll LeBlanc made me think of.