The Iscariot Agenda

CHAPTER TEN

The Entertainment Capital of the World always lived up to its billing. Lights and glitter, hotels built as facsimiles to Paris, Monte Carlo, Hollywood and Egypt, others to Mandalay, New York City, and to the Greatest Show on Earth, the carnival setting of Circus Circus.

However, where there is light there is darkness. Just beyond the downtown section of The Experience on Freemont, and less than a mile away, were homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Sidewalks were cluttered with makeshift shelters, the homeless, and individuals in need of psychotropic medications. Gutters were filled with trash and refuse, the surrounding buildings old and empty, like the people who surrounded them. In the background the skyline of downtown Las Vegas can be seen, such as the towers of Lady Luck, the Golden Nugget and Union Plaza.

On Owens Street a man exits from a soup kitchen whose walls are covered with gangland graffiti and heads east towards the Boulevard. He is wearing a moth-eaten overcoat, and though it’s unbearably hot, he wears it because it’s his prized possession. He wears fingerless gloves and grease-stained pants. His hair is long, matted, and in a wild tangle. And his face hangs with the looseness of a rubber mask that has yellowed with the sickness of a dying liver. To look at him no one would have guessed that he was once one of the deadliest warriors to have walked the planet.

Instead, Ian McMullen was now a vagrant in the twilight of his life.

After reaching the Boulevard, he turned toward the downtown area to secure a spot to panhandle enough change to buy a bottle of cheap wine.

After passing the streets of Washington and Bonanza with downtown in sight, McMullen could feel something that had long been latent, that feeling an animal gets when sensing great danger.

Stopping, and then turning, his body having arched to the shape of a question mark over time, McMullen took in the non-descript faces of tourists and locals, probing micro-expressions that may give them away as somebody on a potential hunt.

Scanning and appraising for that give-away tic, he cited nothing but people laughing and smiling, people lumped together in this city where sin reigns and morality nothing more than an afterthought.

McMullen chortled in self-chastisement. Not only was he aging exponentially, but he was becoming paranoid.

Standing in the crossway where Freemont and the Boulevard meet, with the sun having settled and the Vegas lights as dazzling as Paris along the Seine, McMullen began his nightly ritual by holding his hand out imploringly. “Please, can anyone spare change for a veteran… Change for a vet… Any amount will help.” And then he would recite it all over again, word per word, same pitch and tempo.

But for the most part, Ian McMullen was hardly noticed.

“Please, can anyone spare change for a veteran… Change for a vet… Any amount will help.”

While halfway through his chant a man slapped a bill into McMullen’s gloved hand. “For a few moments of your time,” he told him. And then the man curled McMullen’s fingers over the money, hiding the amount of its denomination. “All I ask — if you’ll grant me the privilege — is a few moments of your time.”

McMullen withdrew his hand and opened his fingers. Inside was a crumpled fifty dollar bill.

McMullen quickly evaluated the man who was rugged in appearance with strong features that were rawboned and angular. Around the neckline of the man’s shirt was the pristine white collar worn by the clergy.

“And what can I do you?” He placed the fifty into the side pocket of his overcoat.

“Please,” said the clergy, “I have a parish on Fourth Street. Can we talk there?”

“I’m no trick, man.”

The cleric smiled. “It’s not like that.”

“It better not be.”

The cleric gestured his hand in the direction for McMullen to take. “Please.”

Both men began to walk.

“So, what is this about since it’s worth fifty dollars of your hard-earned money, Father?”

“Insight,” he said.

“Insight? That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Well, Father, you’re in luck. Today I have a special. Fifty dollars for all the insight you want.”

The cleric smiled. “Then let’s begin with why you have chosen to live like you do.”

The Irishman hesitated, as if searching for the proper words. Then, “It’s not as much as a way of choice as it is fate,” he finally said.

“So you’re a fatalist?”

“I believe a man creates his own fate by the actions of his past. And sometimes a man has entrenched himself so deeply that no matter what, he can never dig himself out.”

“I see. So what you’re saying is that you’re so deeply entrenched, that hope and salvation is well beyond your reach.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

They walked slowly towards Fourth Street, a quiet moment passing between them.

“May I then ask why you gave up the right to seek redemption — to better yourself?”

McMullen shrugged. “I’m not a good person.”

The cleric stopped. “Why do you say that?”

The one-time assassin stared him directly in the eyes. “If somebody says that they wished they could turn the clock back and do it all over again, then they haven’t lived life the right way. A day doesn’t go by without me wishing I could do it all over again.”

“But isn’t life full of struggles?”

“True. But my life, Father, jumped the shark years ago.”

“Jumped the shark?”

“It’s a term that means that something has lost its way and no matter how hard you try, there’s no real way back.”

“So you’re lost?”

“For some time now — yes.”

“You do know that confession is good for the soul, don’t you? It opens the doorway to redemption.”

“Yeah, well, even God turns away those who don’t care or give a damn.” He faced the clergyman. “I’ve done horrible things, Father. So horrible that God Himself would send me to Hell on a first-class ticket without so much as to look at me.”

“Nobody is that far gone.”

“Really.” The vagrant stepped closer to the priest, the stench of his body rising off him like a battery of heat lifting off the pavement on a hot summer day. “I killed people, Father. I killed innocent people because they were in the way. And I did so without impunity. And you want to know something else?”

The clergyman stood idle.

“I liked it,” he said. “I liked it a lot.”

The priest raised his hand slowly, gesturing to McMullen to continue the walk.

“What? No comment.”

The priest sighed. “Even people who kill do not choose to live like this.”

“I told you, it’s not so much of a choice as it is fate.”

“So you have no remorse? None at all?”

McMullen faltered with a hitch in his step. “I did in time,” he finally said. “And I found my salvation in a bottle. I still do.”

“Alcohol is no substitute for God.”

“It is for me.” He stopped once again, looking at the priest. “It got to the point when I saw the faces of those I killed, the terror in their eyes, the sobs of their pleading; it ate away at me like cancer. Mind you now that I always liked my booze, but it came to a point when becoming addled with alcohol washed away the images, made it OK for me to get buy.” He began walking. “And that’s why nobody wants to give a lush like me a job or an opportunity. Nobody wants to hire somebody who can’t make it through the day without imbibing. I’m simply trading the demon of alcohol for the demon of my conscience.”

The parish sat on the corner of Bridger and Fourth. Yards away an alley separated the church from a defunct wedding chapel.

“The alleyway will take us to the back door,” said the priest.

“How much insight do you want?”

The clergyman remained silent as they made their way to the rear of the parish, which was gated.

“I’m afraid I don’t have a key,” said the priest.

“Then I guess we’re done.”

“Actually, we’re not,” he said. From a back pocket the clergyman pulled out a silver cylinder and held it up in display. “A man who truly feels repentance for the things he’s done gives him the right for redemption.”

The pick shot upward and outward.

“What are you doing?”

The priest moved closer. “I’m going to give you the opportunity to meet God and to ask Him for salvation.”

“Are you nuts? You’re a priest!”

“Actually, I’m not.”

And as promised, he gave McMullen the opportunity to ask God for the chance to enter His Kingdom of Light and Loving Spirits.