A Private Cathedral

Chapter Forty

When Johnny was gone, we worked our way back to the storage compartments. We found a case of wine and poured out three bottles and refilled them with gasoline and recorked the necks, then taped cotton pads from a first-aid kit to the bottoms and wet the pads with gas and put the bottles in a duffel bag with four emergency flares.

I suspect our behavior seemed grandiose. We were certainly outnumbered and outgunned. We were also physically exhausted and emotionally burnt out, the way you feel coming off a three-day whiskey drunk, lights flickering behind your eyelids, a bilious taste in your mouth, a clammy smell like a field mortuary on your skin. I tried to keep in mind the admonition of Stonewall Jackson I quoted earlier: Always mystify, mislead, and surprise.

I also believed we had another weapon on our side: Shondell was a bully, and like all bullies, he was probably a coward. The electrical system was still down, and the ship surrounded by fog, which gave us an appreciable degree of cover. The downside: We could not be certain of our environment. We seemed to be in a vortex, one similar to the eye of a storm. Even though the sun had risen, the skies were dark again, the waves filled with the same black luminosity I had seen when I stood on the dock by the amusement pier, wondering if Homer was still with us, his sirens winking at us, lifting their wet hair off their breasts, guiding us onto the rocks.

The truth is, I wanted the world to be enchanted, hung with mysteries and flights of the imagination. Why? Because with that belief, we become subsumed by creation and a participant in it, a living particle inside infinity. We abide in the presence of Charlemagne’s knights jingling up the road to Roncesvalles; we flee mediocrity and predictability, and we delight in the rising and setting of the sun and no longer fear death because indeed the earth abideth forever. I wanted Gideon to be real; I wanted to hear the clash of shields and Arthur pulling his sword from the rock and see Guinevere waiting on the parapet of the castle in the dawn, shrouded with a golden nimbus.

Why not? It beats dining out at Chuck E. Cheese.

We soaked the compartment with gasoline, and Clete lit a piece of paper and set the deck ablaze with his Zippo. In minutes flames were curling outside the hatch, flattening on the passageway ceiling. We worked our way forward again and started a fire among Shondell’s collection of torture instruments. The padding on the bulkheads burst alight and, in the heat, seemed to blacken and split instantly into lesions. The smoke was thick and black and noxious, like the odor that comes from the stack on a rendering plant.

Clete gagged. “What is that?”

“Blood,” I said.

“Shondell is going down for the count, right? We’re agreed on that?”

“We don’t know the politician he’s working for, the rich-kid gutter rat.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Clete said. “Shondell is joining the Hallelujah Chorus? We’re copacetic on that?”

“What do I know?”

“Don’t get in my way, Streak.”

Twice we encountered Shondell’s employees or acolytes, all of them carrying either flashlights or fire extinguishers. Only one had a firearm. Clete threw him overboard before he could use it, cracked another man’s skull against the bulkhead, and caused the others to melt back into the darkness. I began to feel there were different levels of people who worked for Mark Shondell. Louisiana’s economy is based on the oil industry. If you’re in, you’re fine. If you’re out, you might have to close one eye. Babylon might be a real fling with Beat-My-Daddy Slack, but you don’t have a lot of selections when you’re in the mop-and-pail brigade. It’s hard to be proud of your spendolies when you’re working in a porn shop or in a drive-through daiquiri window.

I thought I saw women in the shadows, perhaps the prostitutes I believed were on board the tugboat anchored by Shondell’s stilt house. Shondell was the light inside the lantern. The candle moths swirling around him would always be there, and if they were singed and killed by his flame, others would replace them. Bell was one of them, although more intelligent and experienced in the ways of the underworld. There must have been others on board like him, but we didn’t know where they were. Rats abandon sinking ships. I hoped that was the case.

Clete opened the valve on a propane tank in a compartment behind the galley, flung an emergency flare inside, and locked down the hatch. The aftermath of the explosion sounded like a junkyard falling off a truck.

Up ahead I could see flashlights inside the bridge, the beams crisscrossing and bouncing off the panoramic windows and consoles and panel monitors and chart tables and myriad dials that had been rendered inoperable by a force outside the yacht. The sky was now sealed with purplish-black clouds, except in the south, where a vaporous green ribbon of light stretched across the horizon and a solitary boat was pitching toward the yacht, its white sails swollen with wind.

Then I saw Johnny coming toward us, below the bridge, his clothes sculpted against his body, his hands held up as though he were trying to stop traffic on a street. “Don’t go up there, Mr. Dave,” he said. “Y’all don’t know what you’re doing.”

“How many people are up there?” Clete said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Y’all and Gideon are messing up the deal.”

“Messing up what deal?” Clete said.

“Isolde is on her way. Everything is set up. Gideon shut down the power. Fire is coming out of the portholes on the stern. Uncle Mark is backing out of the deal.”

“How many guns are up there, Johnny?” I said.

“That’s all you got on your mind?” he said.

“Where’s Bell?” I said.

“I don’t know. Belowdecks, maybe.”

“Does he still have the Kalashnikov?”

“The what?” he said.

“The AK-47,” I said.

“You’re going to get Isolde killed.”

“We are?” Clete said, touching his chest. “I feel like flinging you over the rail, Johnny.”

“Then do it,” Johnny said. “If I lose Isolde, I lose everything.”

“Where’s Penelope?” I said.

“On the bridge,” he said. “With Adonis.”

I rested my hand on his shoulder. “Take care of Father Julian and Leslie and Elizabeth and Detective LeBlanc. We’ll do everything we can to protect Isolde.”

“I already went down there,” he said. “Leslie and her daughter are gone. So is that LeBlanc guy. Father Julian is real sick.”

“Leslie is gone?” I said.

“Yeah, what did I just say?”

“You’re really starting to piss me off, Johnny,” Clete said. “How would you like me to dribble your head on the deck?”

“I said she’s gone. Maybe with Gideon. Now Gideon is screwing up everything, and y’all are doing everything you can to help him.”

“Get lost,” Clete said, and shoved him in the back.

“Don’t do that,” Johnny said.

Clete shoved him again, this time along the rail. “I’ll count to three, then you’re going over the rail.”

“Fuck you, Mr. Clete.”

“ ‘Fuck you, Mr. Clete’? I just love that,” Clete said. “I’m about to knock you down.”

“Johnny, there are lifeboats on both sides of the ship,” I said. “Get one ready and put Father Julian in it. We’re not going to let your uncle destroy us.”

“What are you going to do about Gideon?” he said.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said.

“Sell that when Uncle Mark’s yacht blows up and Isolde is dead,” he said.

In Johnny’s way, he was right. In my vanity, I had thought I could find the origins of human cruelty. The upshot was the discovery of a time dimension that perhaps existed simultaneously with our own. I knew no more about the nature of man than when I’d visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen, a man who turned out to be my half brother and who killed himself in my living room. In my search for the origins of human cruelty, I had come to the same dead end as the psychiatrists who look into the heart of darkness and are so frightened they thank God for the clinical term “pathological,” because it allows them to cleanse the images planted in their minds by the patients they tried to cure.

What’s the lesson? That’s another easy one: Don’t be taken in by bullshit from people who have no idea what evil is about.

Johnny left us, perhaps to launch a lifeboat, perhaps to help Father Julian, perhaps to betray us. Clete and I had few choices. We had the .25 semi-auto and the duffel bag and the Molotov cocktails and the emergency flares. We could try to take the bridge or launch a lifeboat with Johnny and Julian. If we chose the latter without putting Shondell out of business, we would probably be machine-gunned in the water. Clete seemed to read my mind. “Worried about Penelope?”

“What do you think?”

“She dealt the play.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Make up your mind, Dave. We don’t have much time.”

“If we had the AK—”

“We don’t.”

My throat was dry, my face small and tight in the wind. “Light it up.”

Inside my head, as though watching a movie, I saw a young United States Army second lieutenant talking into a radio, an Asian village and rice paddy in the background, tracer rounds streaking out of the hooches, flying like segments of yellow-and-red neon above the paddy.

“You’re sure?” Clete said.

I lifted a Molotov cocktail from the bag. The bottle felt cold and heavy in my hand. “Give me your Zippo.”

Clete ran his hand down my arm and pulled the bottle from me. “You won’t be able to live with yourself, Streak.”

“Watch,” I said. I took the bottle back.

But my bravado was soon upstaged. I heard a sound behind me and turned around. I did not know where Carroll LeBlanc had come from other than the darkness. But his sudden reappearance was not the issue. His expression was lunatical, inhuman, his eyes devoid of conscience or reason, his clothes slick with blood, one hand clenched on a dripping butcher knife. “I do’ed it, Robo. I mean I piled up those motherfuckers all over the place, with their guts in their laps, like Gideon. It actually gave me a hard-on. What’s happening, Purcel? You don’t look too good.”

Then he laughed until he was hardly able to breathe or stand, his mouth a round black hole, as though he had accidentally swallowed a spirit hidden inside the wind.

I climbed the ladder to the bridge with Clete behind me. I stopped while he flicked the Zippo and held the flame to the cotton pad on the bottom of the wine bottle. Then I tossed it through a side window on the bridge and watched it break on a hard surface and fill the bridge with light. I threw the remaining two bottles into the flames.

I took no pride in what I did. Nor did I want to see the images that danced before my eyes. I had replicated a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The flames looked liquid, the players made of wax, frozen in time and space as though carved out of the heat, the surprise in their faces like that of children. Was I filled with pity? Did I abhor the incubus in me that could set afire his fellow creatures? I cannot answer any of these questions. I wanted to be a million miles away.

“Get down!” Clete said.

“What?”

“Bell!” he said.

As fast as the bottles had exploded, the flames had shrunk into strips of fire that were rapidly dying for want of fuel. Oh, yes, the damage was there. I saw two burned men crawl from the hatch, and one man shivering with pain and shock, his teeth chattering, and Mark Shondell in a corner, his hair curled from the heat, his face misshapen and painted with blisters, part of his lip gone, probably bitten off. I saw Penelope in the background, on the deck, under a raincoat. Adonis was gone. But Bell was not.

He opened up with the AK-47, blowing out glass, whanging rounds all over the superstructure. Clete jerked me back down the ladder, firing blindly at Bell, his eyes wide with adrenalin, as though he were looking into an artic wind.

Bell stopped shooting and ducked below the bridge window, but I knew we were in trouble. He had the high ground and we didn’t. He also possessed the best infantry assault rifle in the world. And Mark Shondell, the brains behind Bell and his fellow troglodytes, was still alive. Curds of black smoke were rising from the stern, and the gallery was burning with such ferocity that the portholes on two adjacent compartments were filled with yellow flame that was as bright as a searchlight.

In the distance I could see the sailboat pitching in the waves, throwing ropes of foam over the deck. The white sails had been taken from the masts and replaced with black ones.

“Look what you did, Mr. Dave,” a voice said behind me.

It was Johnny. He had his arm around Father Julian. Carroll LeBlanc was staring at them with an idiotic grin.

“Shut up, kid,” Clete said.

“Black sails mean she’s dead,” Johnny said. “I can’t believe we’ve done this.”

He had said “we,” not “you.” But that was poor consolation. Clete was right. I would find no solace for my part in what we had done.

Know why war sucks? We usually kill the wrong people.