Michelangelo_s Notebook

46

The false priest moved through the cluttered rooms of the dank, verminous-looking apartment on Ludlow Street, far below the trendy stores and salons that lined the narrow one-lane thorough-fare above Delancey. As he examined the pitiful rooms, he carried the Beretta at his side. Rooting through the old woman’s apartment in Queens had led him here, but the place was empty. There were only terrible ghosts and memories left behind. The floor was covered with stained and cracked linoleum that might have been blue once. The ceiling sagged in seams and lumps, threatening to split open like overripe fruit. With each step, shining roaches scuttled greasily toward the open baseboards and silverfish fled under the scraps of old carpeting that lay here and there.

It was, without a doubt, the horrible den of a madman. The crumbling plaster and ancient floral wallpaper were covered with newspaper clippings, drawings, pictures from magazines, annotated maps, scrawled letters in script so small it could barely be read, reproductions of paintings and here and there the broken pieces of plaster or plastic saints and angels, glued, tacked, nailed or simply placed in niches dug with spoons into the soft spongy walls themselves. It was a museum dedicated to the insane meanderings of an obsessed heart, the obsession impossible to penetrate or analyze except that it concerned the old war and people who had taken part in it, artists, art and the deaths of a hundred nobodies in a score of countries and most of all the life and times of a single hawk-nosed man in steel spectacles wearing the robes and mitred headpiece of a pope. The man from Rome had lost his faith long ago and sometimes found himself agreeing with the cynics that man had been placed on the earth to do no more than eat, fornicate and excrete but being here he knew there was something else: this man had been created to prove that hell existed. This place was a petri dish meant to provide a culture of the damned.

There were more rooms than he would have expected, as though perhaps two or maybe even three of the decrepit tenement apartments had been joined together. The only thing new in the place was the metal-clad front door and the locks that guarded it, easily picked. The kitchen lay in the middle of the apartment in the old-fashioned style with a pass-through into the small, dark parlor beyond. It was a horror, the chipped enamel sink resting on its own plumbing, open without cabinetry, stacked with crusted plastic plates and bowls and cups, a jar of grape jelly open and moldy on the counter along with a box of cornflakes, a soured pint carton of milk and a half-empty mug of coffee. A choked twist of old-fashioned flypaper hung from the overhead light fixture. Reaching up with thumb and forefinger the false priest tried the dangling pull cord but nothing happened.

He went into the parlor. An old rag rug, brown and curling at one side. A drawing in ink directly on the left wall: Christ on a cloud above a grotesque Calvary below and words beneath the triple crucifixion: