Vespers

VI

Willis did not get back to the house on Lane until almost eight o'clock that Saturday He called her name the moment he stepped into entry foyer.

There was no answer.

"Honey?" he called. "I'm home.”

And again there was no answer. He was policeman, trained to expect the unexpected.

was, moreover, a policeman who had lived onmth thin edge of anticipation from the moment he' committed himself to Marilyn Hollis. The wor he'd heard on the telephone this past Thursday nigl!

suddenly popped into his mind Perd6neme, sen and just as suddenly he was alarmed.

"Marilyn!" he shouted, and went tearing up t.l'm. stairs two at a time, made a sharp right turn on t landing and was starting up the stepsi:n second-floor the third floor when he heard her voice coming fro somewhere down the corridor.

"In here, Hal.”

She was in the kitchen. Sitting at the butcher block table, the stainless steel ovens, refrigerator and range forming a grey metallic curtain behind her.

She was holding a dish towel to her nose. The towel bulged with angles.

There was an empty ice cube tray on the table.

"I fell," she said.

Hand holding the dish towel to her nose, eyes wide above it and flanking it, flesh under the eyes already discolored.

"Down the stairs," she said. "I think I broke my nose.”

"Well, Jesus, did you call the... ?”

“It just happened a few minutes ago," she said.

I'll call him," he said, and went immediately to the phone.

"I don't think they can do anything for a broken nose," she said. "I think it has to heal by itself.”

"They can set it," he said, and began searching through their personal directory on the counter under the wall phone. Rubenstein, the doctor's name was Rubenstein. Willis realized all at once that he was irrationally irritated; the way a parent might become irritated when a child did something that threatened its own well-being. He was relieved that Marilyn had not hurt herself more badly, but annoyed that she had hurt herself at all.

"How'd you manage to fall down the goddamn stairs?" he said, shaking his head.

"I tripped," she said.

"Isn't his number in this thing?" he asked impatiently.

"Try D," she said. "For doctor.”

More annoyed now, he turned to the D section the directory, and scanned through a dozen name: and numbers in Marilyn's handwriting before he found a listing for Rubenstein, Marvin, Dr. He dialed the number. It rang four times and then a woman picked up. The doctor's answering service. advised Willis that the doctor was out of town several days and asked if she should notify hi standby, a Dr. Gerald Peters. Somewhat curtl' Willis said, "Never mind," and hung the phone bac on the wall cradle.

"Come on," he said, "we're going to th hospital.”

"I really don't think...”

“Marilyn, please," he said.

He hurried her out of the house and into the He debated hitting the hammer, decided against Use the siren on a personal matter, the would take a fit. The nearest hospital Morehouse General on Culver and North Third, inside the precinct's western boundary. He there as if he were responding to a 1013, on the accelerator, ignoring traffic signals unless changing light posed a danger to another and then made a sharp right turn on Third, wheeled the car squealing up the driveway to the Emergency Room.

This was Saturday night.

Only eighteen minutes past eight, in fact, but the weekend had already begun in earnest, and the E.R. resembled an army field station. Two black cops with identifying 87 insignia on their uniform collars were struggling to keep apart a pair of lookalike white goons who had done a very good job of cutting each other to ribbons. Their T-shirts, once white, now clung in tatters to bloody streamers of flesh.

One of the men had opened the other's face from his right temple down to his jaw. The other man had slashed through the first guy's bulging biceps and forearm all the way down to the wrist. The men were still screaming at each other, their hands cuffed behind their backs, shoulder-butting the cops trying to keep them separated.

A resident physician who looked Indian and undoubtedly was in this city, there were more Indian interns than in the entire state of Rajasthan kept saying over and over again, quite patiently, "Do you wish medical treatment, or do you wish to behave foolishly?" The two goons ignored this running commentary because they had already behaved foolishly, had probably been behaving foolishly all their lives, and weren't about to stop behaving foolishly now, just because a foreigner was Sounding reasonable. So they kept bleeding all over the E.R. while the two sweating black cops struggled with a pair of enraged men twice their size and tried to keep their uniforms clean, and a saintly nurse patiently stood by with cotton swabs, a bottle of antiseptic, and a roll of bandages and tried to keep her uniform clean, and an excitable orderly circled warily, trying to mop the goddamn floor as blood spattered everywhere on the air.

Elsewhere in the room, sitting on the bench, or crowding the nurse's station, or standing about in various stages of distress and discomfort, Willis saw and registered with dismay: A twelve-year-old Hispanic girl whose was torn open to reveal a training bra and budding breasts. Blood was streaming down inside of her right leg. Willis figured she'd raped.

A forty-year-old white man being supported yet another police officer and yet another resident, who were maneuvering him toward one the cubicles so that the doctor could examine wh looked to Willis like a gunshot wound through left shoulder.

A black teenager sitting on the bench with o high-topped sneaker off and in his hands. His ri foot was swollen to the size of a melon. figured him for a non-crime victim, but in precinct you never could tell.

There were also... There was Marilyn, period.

"Excuse me, doctor," Willis said, red-headed resident standing at the nurse's station studying a chart glanced up as though wondering who had had the unspeakable audacity to raise his voice here in the temple. On his face, there was the haughtily scornful, one-eyebrow-raised look of a person who knew without question that his calling was godly. It was a look that managed to mingle distaste with dismissal, as though its wearer had already singled out and was now ready to punish whoever had dared fart in his immediate presence.

But Willis's woman had a broken nose.

Unintimidated, he flashed the tin, announced his own godly calling "Detective Harold Willis" and then slapped the leather case shut as though he were throwing down a glove. "I'm investigating a homicide, this woman needs immediate medical attention.”

What a homicide had to do with this woman's broken nose in a single glance, he was able to make this diagnosis the red-headed resident couldn't possibly imagine. But the look on the detective's face said that the matter was extremely urgent, the matter was in fact positively critical, and there would be hell to pay if this woman's broken nose resulted in a bungled homicide investigation.

So the resident ignored all the other people clamoring for attention in that Saturday night purgatory and immediately tended to the blonde Woman's needs, determining (as he'd known at anyway) that the nose was in fact broken, and giving her an immediate shot for the pain, and then setting the nose, and dressing it with plaster (such a beautiful face, too) and writing a prescription for a pain-killer should she have difficulty getting through the night. Only then did he ask her how this had happened, and Marilyn told him unhesitatingly that she'd tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs.

This was when Willis fully realized something he had only partially known from the moment he'd found her in the kitchen with the ice pack to her nose.

Marilyn was lying.

"But why did you lie to them?" Sally Farnes asked.

This was eight-thirty P.M. The two of them sitting on the little balcony outside their living room looking out at the lights of the Saturday night and the splendor of the sky overhead. Sunset stained the western horizon an hour and a half They had eaten an early dinner and then had their coffee out here onto the balcony, the brilliant show of color that had beer/their treat these past several weeks. Tonight's had not been at all disappointing, a kale display of reds and oranges and purples and blues culminating in a dazzle of stars across an intensely black sky.

"I didn't lie," he said.

"I would say that allowing them to think you the priest had settled all your differences...”

"Which we did," Farnes said.

Sally rolled her eyes heavenward.

She was a big woman with brown hair, full-breasted and wide across the hips, a woman who had ironically chosen to remain childless while equipped with a body seemingly designed for childbearing. In a nation where being thin and staying young were the twin aspirations of every woman past the age of puberty, Sally Farnes at the age of forty-three thumbed her nose at all the models in Vogue and called herself voluptuous, even though she was really twenty pounds overweight according to all the charts.

She had always been a trifle overweight, even when she was a teenager, but she'd never looked fat, she'd merely looked zafiig .- a term she understood even then to mean voluptuous because a Jewish boy who later became class valedictorian told her so while he was feeling her up in the back seat of his father's Oldsmobile. Actually, the boy had been thinking of the word wollfistig, which indeed did mean voluptuous, whereas zaftig merely meant juicy. In any case, Sally had looked both voluptuous and juicy, and pleasantly plump besides, with a glint in her blue eyes that promised a sexiness wanton enough to arouse the desires of a great many pimply-faced young men.

She still looked supremely desirable. Even sitting alone here in the dark on her own balcony with her Own husband, her legs were crossed in a provocative manner, and the three top buttons of her blouse were undone.

There was a thin sheen of perspiration over her upper lip. She was wondering if her husband had killed Father Michael.

"You know you had a fight with him," she said.

"No, no," he said.

"Yes, yes. You went there on Easter Sunday...”

"Yes, and we shook hands and made up.”

"Arthur, that is not what you told me. You told e... '' "Never mind what I told you," Farnes said. "We shook hands and made up is what I'm telling you now.”

“Why are you lying?" she asked.

"Let me explain something to you," he said.

"Those detectives...”

"You shouldn't have lied to them. You shouldn't be lying to me now.”

"If you don't mind," he said, "you asked me question.”

"All right," she said.

"Do you want an answer, or do you want to interrupting?”

“I said all right.”

"Those detectives came to see me because a was killed, do you understand that? A priest. Do know who runs the police department in this city?”

"Who?”

"The Catholic Church. And if the church tells cops to find whoever killed that priest, the cops are going to find him.”

"That still doesn't...”

“That's right, interrupt again," Farnes said.

In the light spilling onto the balcony from the living room inside, his eyes met hers. There was something fierce and unyielding in those eyes.

She could remember the last time she'd challenged him.

She wondered again if he'd killed Father Michael.

"Catching the real killer isn't important to them," he said. "The only thing that matters is catching a killer, any killer. They came to the store trying to make a big deal out of my differences with Father Michael. Was I supposed to tell them we'd had an argument on Easter Sunday? No way. We shook hands and made up.”

"But that's not what you did.”

"That is what we did. Period.”

From the street far below, the sounds of traffic filtered up. Distant, unreal somehow, the honking horns and ambulance sirens sounding like canned background sweetening for a daytime soap. They sat listening to the murmur of the city. The wingtip lights of an airplane blinked across the sky. She wondered if she should push this further. She did not want him to lose his temper. She knew what could happen if he lost his temper.

"You see," she said, as gently as she could, "I just think it was stupid to lie about something so insignificant.”

"You must stop saying that, Sally. That I lied.”

"Because certainly," she said, still gently, still calmly, "the police weren't about to think that a silly argument...”

"But that's exactly what they were thinking.

That's exactly why they came to the store. Waving that damn letter I'd written! Finding something threatening in every paragraph! So what was I supposed to say? What did you want me to say, Sally? That the letter was only the beginning? That we had a violent argument shortly after I'd written it? Is that what you wanted me to say?”

"All I know is that policemen can tell when someone is lying.”

"Nonsense.”

"It's true. They have a sixth sense. And if think you were lying about Father Michael...”

let the sentence trail.

"Yes?" he said.

"Nothing.”

"No, tell me. If they think I was lying Father Michael, then what?”

"Then they may start looking for other things.”

"What other things?”

"You know what things," she said.

Hawes was learning a few things about Krissie He learned, to begin with, that she'd come to this from a little town in Minnesota...

"I love it here," she said. "Do you love it here?”

"Sometimes.”

"Have you ever been to Minnesota?”

“Never," he said.

"Cold," she said.

I'll bet.”

"Everybody runs inside during the winter. You can freeze to death out there in the snow and ice, you know. So they all run to the bunkers and lock up behind them and wait till springtime before they show their faces again. It's a sort of siege mentality.”

It seemed odd to be talking about the dead of winter when everywhere around them springtime was very much in evidence. They had come out of the restaurant at a little after ten, and it was now almost ten-thirty and they were walking idly up Hall Avenue toward the Tower Building on Midway. On nights like tonight, it was impossible to believe that anyone ever got mugged in this city. Men and women strolled together hand in hand, glancing into brightly lighted store windows, buying pretzels or hot dogs or ice cream or yogurt or souvlaki or sausages from the bazaar of peddlers' carts on almost every corner, browsing the several bookstores that would be open till midnight, checking out the sidewalk wares of the nighttime street merchants, stopping to listen to a black tenor saxophonist playing a soulful rendition of Birth of the Blues, the fat mellow notes floating out of the bell of his golden horn and soaring upward on the balmy air. It was a night for lovers.

They were not yet lovers, Hawes and Krissie, and perhaps they'd never be. But they were learning each other. This was the difficult time. You met someone, and you liked what you saw, and then you hoped that what you learned about him or her would make sense, would mysteriously jibe with whatever person you happened to be at this particular stage of yo life. The way Hawes figured it, everything on where you were and who you were at any time. If he'd met Krissie a year ago, he'd have too occupied with Annie Rawles to have and pursued any other relationship. Five years ten years ago, he found it difficult to which women had figured largely in his life at given time. Once there had been another Krissie well, Christine, actually, close but no ci Christine Maxwell. Who'd owned a be Hadn't she? May was the month for Or forgetting.

"How'd you happen to start working uptown?" asked.

"There was an ad in the paper," she said. "I looking for something part time and the job at church sounded better than waitressing.”

"Why part time?”

"Well, because I have classes, you know, and I have to make rounds...”

Oh, Jesus, he thought, an actress.

"What kind of classes?" he asked hopefully.

"Acting, voice, dance...”

Of course, he thought.

"And I work out three times a week at the gym...”

Certainly, he thought.

"So the job at the church is just to keep me going, you know...”

"Uh-huh," he said out loud.

"Till I get a part in something...”

"Right, a part," he said.

Every actress he'd ever met in his life had been a totally egotistical, thoroughly self-centered airhead looking for a part in something.

"Which is why I came here, of course," she said.

"I mean, we've got the Guthrie out there and all, but that's still regional theater, isn't it?”

"I guess you could call it that," Hawes said.

"Yes, well, it is, actually," Krissie said.

He had once dated an actress who was working in a little theater downtown in a musical revue called Goofballs written by a man who reviewed books while he was learning to become Stephen Sondheim.

If he reviewed books as well as he wrote musical revues, the writers of the world were in serious trouble. The actress's name was Holly Tree, and she SWORE this was her real name even though her driver's license (which Hawes ... big detective that he was - happened to peek at while she was still asleep naked in his apartment the morning after they'd met) read Marie Trenotte, which he later learned meant Three Nights, the Trenotte not the Marie. Three nights was the exact amount of time she spent with him before moving on to bigger better things, like the reviewer who had the show.

He had known another actress who'd been with a heroin dealer he'd arrested this was cocaine and then crack became the drugs of and who told him she was up for the part of a cop on Hill Street and would he mind very much she moved in with him while her man was away she could do some firsthand research, who she know was dealing drugs anyway. Her name Alyce (with a y) Chambers and she was a red-head who mentioned that if they had children their hair would be red since both parents had red hair, did he ever notice that a lot actresses and especially strippers had who were cops? He had never noticed. She did get the part on Hill Street. Nor any other part ever tried out for, it was that son of a bitch in she informed Hawes, pulling strings from all the upstate. In all the while she lived with him, she once talked about anything but herself. He began: feel like a mirror.

Then one day she met a man with a Santa beard and twinkling blue eyes and a diamond ring the size of Antigua and he told her he producing a little show out in Los Angeles and cared to accompany him out there she could with him temporarily at a little house he owned on the beach at Malibu... not the Colony, but close to it... just south of it, in fact.., closer to Santa Monica, in fact.., if that's what she would like to do. She moved out the very next day. She still sent Hawes a card every Christmas, but somehow she seemed to think his name was Corry Hawes.

And he'd known another actress who washed out her panties in... "Penny for your thoughts," Krissie said.

"I was just thinking how nice, an actress," Hawes said.

"Actually," she said, "it's not very nice at all.”

He braced himself for an Actress Atrocity Story.

Producer asking her to strip for a nude scene in a film that turns out to be a porn flick. Actor soul-kissing her while they're auditioning together for a theaterful of potential back... "In fact," she said, and her voice caught, "I'm beginning to think I'm not so hot, you know what I me an?”

He looked at her, surprised.

"No," he said. "What do you mean?”

"Not such a good actress, you know?" she said, and smiled somewhat pallidly. "No talent, you know?”

He kept looking at her.

"But I don't want to spend the rest of the night talking about me," she said, and took his hand. "Tell rne how you got into police work.”

She had tried to get the blood stains out of the carpet, but Willis was a cop and he could spot a worked-over stain from a mile away. She similarly tried to soak the blood out of th monogrammed hand towel from the master bedroom, a much more difficult job in that it was white whereas the carpet was a Persian with lots red in it. She'd used Clorox on the towel and had taken it downstairs to the washing machine the kitchen on the second floor, thrown it in with lot of other towels, but the stain was still just visible, blood was tough. He'd known who'd worked for days trying to get blood stains of a wooden knife handle or even the blade of hatchet, witness Lizzie Borden, whom he had known personally. Blood was blood. Blood told.

And now, so did Marilyn.

It was five minutes past eleven, i Saturday night was still with them.

Across town and downtown, Cotton Hawes w about to ask Krissie if she'd care to stop by his for a nightcap.

Closer to home, at the Church of the Bomless on Ninth and North End, Schuyler Lutherson fastening a black silk cord about the waist of black cotton robe, rehearsing aloud the words Introit which he would say at the beginning of midnight mass.

She told Willis about the first approach the two men had made.

Ramon Castaneda and Carlos Ortega.

"They gave you their names?" he said.

"Not then," she said. "This afternoon." She told him everything that had happened here in this bedroom this afternoon. Everything. He had found the window they'd jimmied on the third floor, and now he listened intently, his heart beating wildly, she could have been killed. But no, he agreed with her, they could not kill her if they expected to get money from her, you can't collect from someone who's dead.

"Give them what they want," he said at once.

"Get rid of them.”

"How?" she said.

"Sell the house, I don't care how. Get the money and give it to them, send them back to Argentina.”

"In a minute, right? Put a house worth seven-fifty on the market, and hope to sell it in a minute.”

"Then borrow against it. Mortgage it to the hilt.

Liquidate whatever other assets you have, call your broker...”

"There isn't that much, Hal.”

"You left Buenos Aires with two million dollars!”

"I put five hundred of that down on the house, and spent another three hundred furnishing it. I made Some bad investments, a gold-mining operation in Papua New Guinea, an electronics firm in Dallas, some big loans to friends who never paid me back...”

"All right, how much can you raise?”

"If I sold off all the stock I have, let's say four, five hundred. Plus whatever I can get on a second mortgage. Unless somebody buys the house tomorrow. Even so...”

“Maybe they'll settle for that," Willis said.

"I don't think so.”

"Because if not...”

She looked at him.

"I can't let anything happen to you," he said. love you too much.”

The worshippers had been informed that the before tonight's mass would begin at and so they had begun assembling in the old church at twenty past the hour. It was written in sacred Black Book that all church business perforce be concluded before the hour of midni when it was further ordained that the Introit be said and the mass begun. On most oc there was scant church business to discuss. Toni there was the matter of who, if anyone, in congregation had painted the sign of Baphomet the murdered priest's gate.

The assemblage numbered some fift, people... If divisible by two, impure... among whom were the nine who would preside over and participate in the ritual of the mass... If divisible by three, sublime.

The remaining forty-two were worshippers who had been told that the mass tonight would be more expressive of the joys of Satanism than had the more solemn Mass of the Expulsion earlier this week. But in contradiction to the announced purpose of the celebration tonight, the clothing they wore appeared conservative if not austere, the hues black or grey or dun for an overall appearance of unrelieved drabness, the cut angular and restrictive for an almost uniform look of severity.

It was only when one looked more closely... A man standing at the rear of the church seemed to be wearing a long leather blacksmith's apron over black leather trousers. But when he turned in profile to greet a newcomer, it became evident that the trousers were in fact high boots and that between the tops of those boots and the hem of the apron there was naked flesh and nascent tumescence.

Through summise, surprise.

A redheaded woman sat with her legs crossed on the aisle some three rows back from the altar, her auburn tresses caught and contained in a heavy black snood that added to them the seeming weight of mourning. She was wearing as well a black silk , tailored grey slacks, and high-topped, laced, leather shoes. But when she uncrossed her legs to lean forward and whisper something to a man on the row ahead of her, it became apparent that the slacks were crotchless and that beneath them she wore nothing. The revealed thatch of her fiery red pubic hair and lipstick-tinted nether lips were in direct contrast to the trapped hair on her head and the plainness of her unpainted mouth.

Throughout that vaulted holy place, then, were unexpected... Through ignorance, knowledge... glimpses of the flesh these celebrants wt here tonight to honor. In Satan's name. they discreetly and posed ingenuously. Speaking whispers as befitted the sanctity of the Lord'!

meeting place, candid eyes met and held, neither roamed nor wavered, expressions never indicated that a promised later offering to Satan now being shown in fleeting preview: A woman's severe black gown, cut high on neck and low on the ankle with a cutout circle size of a quarter exposing the nipple of her left painted a red as deep as blood... A black man's grey homespun trousers, with a long-sleeved black shirt and a han hood, his penis thrusting through an opening in trousers and held in an upright position by the white ribbons wrapped around it and tied about waist... An exquisitely beautiful Chinese woman a loosely crocheted black dress, pale diamonds flesh showing everywhere except where tightly woven patches of black covered her Venus mound and breasts... Through concealment, revealment.

In many respects, this socializing before the mass began was not too very different in tone or appearance from the little parties and gatherings occurring all over the city tonight. Except that here in this group, among these people openly worshipping the Devil, there was in the reverse order of their beliefs an honesty of intent that Schuyler Lutherson considered less hypocritical. Coming through the black curtains at the rear of the church now, he reflected solemnly upon the fervor of those who spoke most righteously for any God they claimed to admire be it Jesus, Muhammed, Buddha or Zeus and wondered if these people might not find a better home here at the Church of the Bornless One. Because it seemed to him that those who most vehemently denounced the sinful actions of unbelievers were those who most vigorously and secretly pursued those actions. And those who defended their religions against the imagined onslaughts of infidels were those who, in the very name of whichever god they professed to serve, most often vilified the sacred teachings of that god.

Come to Satan, Schuyler thought, and made the sign of the goat in greeting, and then went directly to the living altar and faced her, and passed his tongue over the forefinger and middle finger of his left hand, the Devil's hand, wetting his fingers, and then ran both fingers slick and wet over the lips of Coral's vagina, from my lips to thy lips, and said in Latin, "By your leave, most beloved Lord, I beseech thee,” which was a plea upon Satan's own altar for the Unborn One to please remain patient yet a moment longer while this tiresome church business was attended to.

The worshippers fell silent as Schuyler stepped forward. Immediately behind him was the living altar, Coral, with her legs spread and bent at the knees, bare feet flat on the velvet-covered arms at her sides, clutching in each hand phallic-shaped candelabra in which was as-yet-unlighted black candle. The beginning of mass would be signaled by the lighting of candles, followed by the recitation of first the and then the Invocation. For now, the deacon sub-deacons stood ranked behind the altar readiness.

The four acolytes (four tonight rather than customary two, in that this was a special following the high holy Feast of the Exp stood seriously and solemnly in boy-girl pairs either side of the altar. Two eight-year-old girls, of whom was tall for her age, a boy who was eight, and another who was nine, all of barefooted and wearing silken black tunics which they were naked. Coral's long blonde cascaded over the pointed end of the trapezoid, almost touching the cold stone floor.

Without preamble, Schuyler said, "The death of this priest is troublesome. It may bring unwanted, unneeded visitors to the church. It may lead to suspicion of our order, and possible harassment, see, from the police. Or perhaps even more serious measures from them, I don't know, I don't care.

What I'm asking tonight is for anyone here among us, if he or she is responsible for painting an inverted pentagram on the gate of St. Catherine's church, to come up here and say you did it. If you did it, then you know who you are, and I want you to come forward and explain why you did it. So we can straighten this out.”

There was silence out there in the congregation.

Hesitation.

And then a blond giant of a man rose and stepped out into the aisle. He was in his early twenties, weathered and suntanned and muscular and lean, wearing a pair of faded grey jeans and a T-shirt tie-dyed in varying swirls of black, black headband and black leather sandals. In further keeping with the tone and stated purpose of the mass tonight, a black leather thong was tied tightly around his left thigh some three inches below his crotch. No one so much as glanced at the thong, no one seemed to notice that it held fastened against the man's leg... Through bondage, freedom... a penis enormous by any standards, course by the fabric of his jeans... Through disguise, discovery... but clearly discernible in massive outline.

"I did it," he said. "I painted the priest's "Come on up," Schuyler said in afriel manner, but he was scowling. Perhaps because, himself was blond and considerably handsome so was the young man, and he may have felt constituted a threat to his leadership. Or sensed, even before the young man reached the of the church, and even though he'd only heard speak eight short words, that here in the the Bornless One was yet another of Mends, too damn many of whom had been to the services here in recent weeks.

"Tell us your name," Schuyler said, pleasantly But something seemed coiled within "Andrew Hobbs," the young man said. "I coming here in March.”

Something Southern in his speech. The lilt. intonation. Something else as well. A more lilt.

"Jeremy Sachs introduced me here.”

Sachs. Jeremy Sachs. Schuyler s memory for an image to connect with the face. A character trait. A verbal tic. Nothing "Yes?" he said.

"Yes.”

"And the gate?”

"I did it," he said.

Through confession, condemnation.

"Why?”

"Because of her.”

"Who?”

Was it possible, then, that he was not one of Dorothy's friends? And yet the look of him, and the cleverness of the thong, the understatement of it. But he hadn't yet said "her" name. And among those ho roamed Oz, the female pronoun was often substituted for the... "Her," Hobbs said.

"My mother.”

Ah, then. Were we still on the yellow brick road? . "What about her?”

Schuyler asked.

They often nursed long-term grievances against "She went to him.”

"Went to who?”

"The priest. And told him.”

"Told him what?”

If only this wasn't so much like pulling teeth.

"That I've been coming here. That Jeremy took here. That we've been doing.., things here.”

Jeremy. Sachs. And now the name took on visual sions, Jeremy Sachs, a squat, rather looking young white homosexual'm without one of Dorothy's friends, a longtime traveler the Munchkins'm who'd declared fealty to Devil by reversing his own natural preferences going down helter-skelter and willy-nilly on every naked snatch offered to Satan within the: sacrosanct walls.

Schuyler could not recall seeing his young friend at any of the masses before tonight, but there was wholesale confusion and resulta obscurity.

In any case, here he was now, the friend of a friend of Dorothy, perhaps himself, who had just now confessed defiling dead priest's gate because of his goddamn All mothers should be forced to suck a horse's Schuyler thought. Including my own.

"But why did you paint the gate?" he asked.

"As a statement," Hobbs said.

Schuyler nodded. So what this was, it was a case of someone telling his Mama to keep out life. Completely understandable. This was someone with any hard feelings for the priest. bad intentions here at all. Just somebody makin personal family statement. But nonetheless... "The statement you have to make now," said, "is to the police. To let them know you paint that pentagram as any kind of warning anything. This priest was killed, see, and we want his murder connected to this church in any So what I suggest you do is leave here right minute, see, and go home and change clothes...”

"What's wrong with my clothes?" Hobbs "Nothing," Schuyler said. "In fact, what wearing is well-suited...”

He didn't know he was making a pun.

"... to the ceremony tonight. But it might be misunderstood by the police, see, so go put on something that'll make 'em think you work in a bank.”

“I do work in a bank," Hobbs said.

There was laughter in the assemblage. Laughter of relief, perhaps. This wasn't going to be as bad as it had appeared at first. Young homosexual here had argued with his mother, had gone off in a snit, and in defiance had painted the sign of his religious belief on the enemy's gate. He'd explain all this to the police and they'd understand, and send him on his way, and everyone could go right on practicing his chosen religion in freedom again, this was a wonderful country, the U.S. of A. It was four minutes to midnight.

Hobbs asked where the nearest police station was, and from where he was standing behind the living altar, Stanley Garcia who had been there early yesterday morning gave him directions to the 87th Precinct. Hobbs asked if he could come back here for the mass after he'd talked to the police, but Schuyler pointed out that the doors would be locked at the stroke of midnight, which in fact was now only three minutes away, so perhaps Hobbs had better get moving. Hobbs appeared to be sulking as he left the church. One of the worshippers closed and bolted the door behind him, and then dropped the heavy wooden crossbar into place, in effect double-locking the doors.

It was a minute to midnight.

The church was expectantly silent.

The red-head in the grey slacks sat with her knees pressed closely together, her head bent.

"It is the hour," Schuyler said, and signaled to hi sub-deacons to come forward and light the candles.

The sub-deacons tonight were two nineteen-y girls who looked like sisters but who weren't cousins. Both brunettes with brown eyes, they wearing the customary black robes of the naked beneath them, for it was ritual that consecration of the altar by the minister, sub-deacons (traditionally female) would then turn and in sequence be consecrated by the Solemnly and silently, the girls whose were Heather and Patrice went to the altar, in reverence before her, and then parted, one to the left, the other to the right, where Coral's clutched the thick phallic candelabra. sputtering, they lighted both black candles, and went behind the altar to where Stanley Garcia with an oxidized and blackened brass censer in hand. The girls lighted the incense, and accepted the thuribles from Stanley. Swinging on the ends of their short black chains, sweetened with incense first the altar and surrounding apsidal chapters and then went up center aisle to spread the cloying scent throu Ce entire church. They returned then to stand flanking theft deacon.

It was time for the Introit.

The word itself derived from the Middle English word for "entrance,” from the Old French introit from the Latin introitus. It was pronounced not in the French manner but rather to rhyme with ln-blao -It," as many in the congregation were fond of explaining. In Christian churches, the introit was in fact an entrance, the beginning as such of the proper, and it consisted either of a psalm verse, an antiphon, or the Gloria Patri.

In the true church of the Devil, however, the introit was a short and personal opening dialogue intended as a despoliation of innocence and an introduction to the Devil, who would be invoked more seriously later tonight. The ritual blasphemy that Schuyler and the four child acolytes were about to perform was, in essence, a rude dismissal of Jesus and an acknowledgment of Satan Daemon est Deus Inversus: The Devil is the other side of God.

Schuyler nodded to his deacon.

Stanley rang the heavy bell nine times, three times facing south and the altar, and then kept turning counterclockwise to ring the bell twice at each remaining cardinal point of the compass.

The air now purified, Schuyler went to stand in the open angle formed by the naked legs of the altar.

Facing the assemblage, he lifted both arms, and a the sign of the goat with the fingers of both hands. At this signal the four acolytes came to face him, a boy and a girl on each side.

In Latin, Schuyler said, "In nomine magni dei nostri Satanas...”

In the name of our great god Satan... "... we stand before thy living altar.”

And in their piping voices, the acolytes responded in unison and in Latin, "We beseech assistance, oh Lord, save us from the wicked.”

"To our Lord who created the earth and the heavens, the night and the day, the darkness and light," Schuyler intoned, "to our Infernal Lord causes us to exult...”

"Oh Lord, deliver us from unjustness," children chanted.

"Lord Satan, hearken to our voices," Schu' said. "Demonstrate to us thy terrible power...”

"And give to us of thy immeasurable largess.”

"Dominus Infernus vobiscum," Schuyler "The Infernal Lord be with you.”

And the children responded, "Et tecum. And with you.”

And the assemblage rose to its feet and s tumultuously and victoriously, "All hail Satan, hail Satan!”

Detective Meyer Meyer was in the sq only by trying up on chance to catch half reports that were already weeks late. when a blond young man wearing a dark pencil-stripe suit materialized on the other side of the wooden rail divider to the squadroom.

"Excuse me," he said.

"Yes?" Meyer said, looking up from his typewriter.

"I'm looking for whoever's investigating the priest murder. Sergeant downstairs told me there might be somebody in the squadroom.”

"Not on the priest case," Meyer said, and thought Never turn away a volunteer. "Come in, please," he said, "I'm Detective Meyer. Maybe I can help you.”

Hobbs opened the gate and walked into the room.

Judging from the way he looked it over, he'd never before been inside a police station. He shook hands with Meyer, accepted the chair he offered, introduced himself, and then said, "I'm the one who painted that garden gate.”

Which, as it turned out, was the opening gun in a salvo aimed at Hobbs's mother, who to hear him tell it - was the cause of all his miseries.

Not only was she responsible for his homosexuality... "I'm gay, you know," he said.

"Wouldn't have guessed," Meyer said.

"Yes," he said, "Which of course is Abby’s fault, dressing me up in little girl's dresses and forcing me to wear my hair in a long blonde pageboy...”

At which point Meyer, while still wondering about the garden gate, was treated to the recitation of a childhood atrocity story no more horrifying than most atrocity stories he'd heard except that it had resulted in what Hobbs described as a human being "not moving left, not moving right" a great homosexuals knew Sondheim Lyrics by heart.

Hobbs kept referring to his beloved mother "Abby," sarcastically spitting out the word as thou they were great good buddies whereas he hadn't se her since she'd moved to Calm's Point six ago, and neither knew nor cared to know her address or telephone number. It was clear that despised her and blamed her exclusively for current life-style, which incidentally include, worshipping the Devil. So, naturally, he had an inverted pentagram on St. Catherine's gate.

"... to let her know I'd worship wherever I well please," he said. "It had nothing to do with priest.”

"Then why'd you pick his gate?" Meyer asked.

"To make a point," Hobbs said.

"What was the point?" Meyer asked. "I be missing it.”

"The point was she went to this priest complained about me going to Bornless...”

"Bornless?”

"The Church of the Bornless One, when she no right to do so. And incidentally, he had no n either, preaching about our church to congregation. No one was telling his con.

which church they should go to. Nobody at Bomless was running around saying Jesus is a menace, which by the way, he is, but we keep that to ourselves .”

"But Father Michael wasn't keeping his beliefs to himself, is that what you’re saying?”

"Only in passing, don't get me wrong. I had nothing at all against Father Michael. Though I must tell you, after Abby went bleating to him, he gave a few hot little sermons denouncing the Devil-worshippers up the block.., well, four blocks away, actually, but close enough if you're wetting your pants worried that Satan's going to come burn down your shitty little church.”

“So what you did," Meyer said, "was paint the Devil's sign...”

"Yes.”

"On the priest's garden gate...”

"Yes.”

"But not as a warning to the priest.”

"No.”

"Then why?”

"To let Abby know she should keep her big mouth shut.”

"I see. And now you want us to understand you didn't paint that gate in malice.”

"Correct. And I didn't kill that priest, either.”

“Who said you did?”

"Nobody.”

"Then why are you here?”

"Because Schuyler doesn't want you guys harassing us over this thing. He thought it'd be good...”

"Schuyler?”

"Schuyler Lutherson, who runs Bornless.”

“I see," Meyer said. He was thinking he'd have tell either Carella or Hawes about this pleasant morning chat, because perhaps one or the other them might wish to ask Schuyler Lutherson why was so worried about police harassment.

"Thanks for stopping by," he said. appreciate your candor.”

Hobbs wondered if he meant it.

Sitting on the third row of benches, the redhead the grey tailored slacks watched the children as rushed to escort Stanley to the altar, hurrying on each side of him as he approached with a cushioned on a black velvet pillow. Schu, grasped the sword by its silk-tasseled handle. red-head's legs parted slightly. The children back at the altar again. Schuyler raised the over his head, turned suddenly to point it at hanging sign of Baphomet, and shouted in a hoarse with emotion, "Bornless One, I invoke "Thou who didst create the universe," assemblage chanted.

"Thou who didst create the earth and heavens...”

"The darkness and the light...”

"Thou who didst create the seed and the fruit," Schuyler said, and on cue two of the acolytes the tall eight-year-old girl and the shorter eight-year-old boy stepped forward and faced each other.

Holding the handle of the sword in one hand and the tip in the other, Schuyler lowered it horizontally over their heads. The red-head in the tailored grey slacks leaned forward expectantly.

In a high piping voice, the little boy said, "Behold! My staff is erect!" and lifted his tunic to show his limp little penis.

And the little girl responded, "Behold! My fruit drips nectar!" and raised her tunic to show her small hairless pudendum.

"My poison shall erupt and engulf!" the little boy said.

"My venom shall enclose and erode!" the little girl said.

"My lust is insatiable!" the little boy said.

"My thirst is unquenchable!" the little girl said.

"Behold the children of Satan," Schuyler said .softly and reverentially.

Symbolically, he gently touched the tip of the Sword first to the boy's genitals and then to the girl's.

He returned the sword to the pillow. Stanley carded it back to where the two nineteen-year-old sub-deacons were waiting for him, the hems of their robes fastened above their waists, their hands resting on their naked flanks, palms turned outward toward the congregation.

The red-head on the third row placed her hands on her thighs and opened her legs a trifle wider.

Schuyler approached the altar.

"In thy name, oh Bornless One," he said, "I offer myself unto the altar of thy power and thy will.”

He threw up his robe.

"Glory to God," he said, "may all hail Satan.

Glory to Satan," he said, "whom we love and cherish. All hail Satan," he said, "we sing glory to thy name. All praise Satan," he said, "we sing honor to thy name. All bless Satan," he said, and positioned himself at the joining of the altar, "we adore thee, Great Lord, we thank thee, Infernal Lord, we cry unto thee, all hail Satan, all hail Satan, all Satan.”

As he thrust himself onto and into the altar, gong sounded three times and the assembla chanted in unison and in Latin, "Ave Satanas, Satanas, ave Satanas.t'' The red-head on the third row spread her leg wide.

The mass was beginning in earnest.