Word Made Flesh

13

They dump Gilrein on the corner of Dunot Boulevard. They don’t bother to stop the car, just slow to a roll, throw open the back door, and heave him into the street, where he lies motionless until the Bamberg turns the corner. He anticipates a gunshot, though there’s no logic to his expectation. If the meatboys were going to kill him, they would have done it elsewhere and lost the body in the Benchley River or up at Gomi Scrap & Salvage.

Gilrein manages to get up on all fours, then slowly climbs to his feet. He needs to get to a hospital, to get the sutures removed and his mouth checked out. He tries to remember if this is Dr. Z’s night at the free clinic. Dr. Z is the favored physician of every cop in town, known for his willingness to lose paperwork and his liberal attitude regarding the keys to the clinic pharmacy. Gilrein is fairly sure that the doc will handle this odd emergency with the speed and discretion it deserves, even though the patient is no longer on the job.

He moves to the curbstone and sits down for a minute to think. He hangs his head, stares down at the gutter between his knees, breathes through the nose and touches his lips, pulls his fingers away immediately at the sting and draws a fresh run of blood. He takes a handkerchief from a pocket and presses it over his mouth.

When he looks up, he realizes that the building opposite him is 33 Dunot, one of the oldest precinct houses in Quinsigamond, officially closed down for years now, but still owned and maintained by the city. There’s a light glowing somewhere on the first floor and through one of the narrow front windows that bows out toward the sidewalk, Gilrein can see that he’s being watched.

The figure behind the window suddenly stands and begins to signal to Gilrein, motioning for him to come inside. And Gilrein understands, in spite of his wounds and the cumulative effects of the past twenty-four hours, that August Kroger had him dumped here on purpose, a message, a vivid little epistle for the proprietor of the Dunot Precinct House.

He gets up and starts to cross the street, staring at the details of the building and remembering all the hours he spent idling in the car outside, waiting for his wife to finally exit her office and join him, never telling him very much about the events of her shift. And never once confiding anything revelatory about her shift commander, her boss and mentor, the man behind the window now waving slowly out at Gilrein, Emil Lacazze.

There was a time when there appeared to be no case that Inspector Lacazze could not unravel using his Methodology. During his first season of total autonomy he began to accumulate successes like a mad and compulsive collector. Word started to spread through Bangkok Park, horrible, whispered fables about the voodoo cop, the mojo bull, the dark priest with his candle and his mirror, his sweet wine and terrifying eyes, and, worst of all, his voice, this noise that came out of his throat in a bark and jumped inside of you, broke into your head, found a way inside your brain no matter what you did and repeated word after word after word until you were ready to chew your own arms out of the cuffs and run into the night, screaming like the devil had his hands around your heart.

Because of her proximity to Lacazze, Ceil couldn’t help picking up her own, somewhat smaller reputation as the mysterious woman behind the black-magic lawman, a Cassandra with gun and badge whose scrubbed beauty only made her more of an enigma. The Grenada Street Popes called her La Bruja Blanca, while the Tonton Loas christened her La Putain du Prêtre. And, though Gilrein never knew it, even Willy Loftus’s Castlebar Road Boys spent more than one drunken sunrise both fantasizing and fearing an imagined Q & A session with the Rose of Dunot. At the height of Lacazze’s ascendance, the neighborhood mayors began to debate, first separately and then in tandem, whether this new force of nature eroding their landscapes of graft and vice shouldn’t perhaps be either co-opted or eliminated. As always, the first choice was to send in a shooter or two. How hard could this guy be to whack, living all alone down in this empty station house, insultingly over the rim of their mutual borders?

Peker the Turk, in his usual showboat manner, offered to shoulder the contract personally. Paco Iguaran and Willy Loftus disagreed, both seeing the possibility of enormous and diverse profits if the Inspector could be negotiated into retiring from the department and consulting for the other side.

Ultimately, however, the debate proved moot. Within a year of commandeering the precinct house and establishing the Eschatology Squad, Inspector Lacazze came to dance with the entity that would not only prove his equal, but when all was said and done, confirm its superiority.

Lacazze welcomes Gilrein as if they were old friends who’ve been separated too long by cruel circumstance. He actually greets the taxi driver in the doorway with a weak bear hug, then steps backward, keeping the hands on Gilrein’s shoulders, inspecting Kroger’s handiwork on the lips with a shake of the head and the sad but not really surprised tsking sound of a disappointed schoolteacher.

The Inspector steers Gilrein by the elbow, moving him through the squad room, a little too fast past Ceil’s old desk, and into Lacazze’s office, the Methodology chamber. The room is dim and stale, musty and outrageously cluttered. But this isn’t what strikes Gilrein as he’s eased down into position atop the shoe-fitting stool. It’s the simple fact of seeing it all in person, witnessing what, until now, he’d only imagined based on bits and pieces pulled from conversations with his wife. All of the components he’d amassed are present — the blackboard, the stacks of notes held down by wooden apple paperweights, the liturgical candle and the chalice on the desk, the fun-house mirror on the far wall — but none of the chamber’s furnishings match up to their imagined corollaries. Everything’s off at least a little, larger or smaller or in a different place.

Even the Inspector’s voice, mumbling as he rummages in a bottom desk drawer, has a different timber to it. These words—miserable bastards … where did I put it—have a higher pitch, a different rhythm to the prosody, than Gilrein had ever allowed for.

But when Lacazze straightens up, holding a straight razor and a pair of tweezers, all of Gilrein’s comparisons vanish. And as the ex-priest approaches the ex-cop holding the instruments out as if they were sacramental material, Gilrein starts to wonder if his visit to August Kroger was only a prelude to an even worse experience.

To this day, no one can tell you much of substance about the Tung. The Spy has always enjoyed classifying them as terrorists, but this implies a traditionally political agenda. It is probably more useful to simply label them anarchists of their own peculiar bent. It is unclear whether they emigrated to the city from elsewhere or were born natives, brewed in that murky cauldron of the Canal Zone where the brutal thuggery of Bangkok Park meets the philosophical abstractions of the intellectual underworld. Federal Intelligence had nothing on them, had never even heard of the name before, but promised to open a file at once. The usual known associates of the various fringe subcultures were mute on this new animal and Lacazze thought their silence was born of ignorance rather than fear. It appeared as though the Tung had sprung fresh and whole from the rectum of the city, without heritage or history, a virgin beast that would make up its destiny as it went along.

The stated goal of the Tung, however, was easily and bluntly understood — the eradication of all written (what they insisted on calling artificial) language. The final “linguistic solipsists,” as Lacazze came to define them, the Tung believed that written language completely and totally determined reality. Consequently, the act of “mass-producing texts” was the ultimate imperialistic action. And as such, of course, had to be stopped at any and all costs. Toward this end they announced a reign of terror upon “the metaphors of the graphic state,” trumpeting plans to bomb printing plants, newspaper offices, publishing houses, and various other pawns of the “scripted world.”

Because of their absolute aversion to written language, all of this propaganda was delivered to the police and the media by way of unsuspecting messengers, usually children of the streets, the tinkers and travelers, the gypsy kids and abandoned urchins from the Bangkok area, promised food and trinkets if they could memorize a speech and spit it back to the “ink-drugged pigs of aggression.” Questioning the children proved futile. They were all so ragged and hungry and intent on completing their job that they could supply nothing of value regarding their employers.

Chief Bendix was inclined to believe this Tung was one more prank from the artistes of Rimbaud Way, the half-baked product of some new phalanx of performance artists or conceptual philosophers/comedians. Inspector Lacazze disagreed and the task of hunting down and — if they existed and were an actual threat — destroying the Tung was naturally dumped in his lap. It seemed like the kind of chore he was born into the world to perform. And he did put all of his efforts into the assignment. The department’s urban assault squad and tactical support units were put at his disposal, just in case. But Lacazze made it clear from the start that Ceil would be his point man.

The seriousness of the Tung’s threats was confirmed when a Spy columnist named Harrison, arriving back to his desk after a bourbon and pretzel lunch at the Valhalla, discovered a ticking shoebox, wrapped in brown paper and conspicuously void of any address, sitting atop his computer monitor. The bomb squad disarmed a plastique cocktail that could have blown the scribe and most the city room out of the Spy building and over the City Hall common in an amalgamated cloud of shared bone and ash.

From that moment on, anyone with any connection to establishments that trafficked in printing, from corner photocopying shops to the chain bookstores, was flinching in his sleep. A member of the board of directors of the public library phoned Bendix at midnight to ask if he should take that long-planned trip to the Continent. The Chief said, “Absolutely,” and left the phone off the hook. The patriarch of a local ink and stamp mill indignantly announced his intention of hiring private security, but sent his kids to the country home just the same. And Inspector Lacazze, with Ceil at his side, ventured out of the Dunot precinct and started haunting the Canal-Bangkok border, silently wondering how you go about interrogating a suspect that you can’t seem to find.

Lacazze was able to score a lucky break when a Tung messenger, an eight-year-old Romanian refugee with a cleft palate — the anarchists’ definition of humor, he supposed — was unable to repeat his assigned speech to the police, but did manage to give a detailed if agonized description of his employer to a sketch artist.

The rendering didn’t ring any bells at the station, but Lacazze and company took it to the streets. It was actually Ceil who secured an ID from the junkie desk clerk of the Hotel Adrianople. For a palmed baggie of Burmese smack, the weasel remembered renting a weekly to the guy in the picture. And from there information began to fall like dominoes. They picked up names and descriptions and locations, ran them all down and came up with a Moscow-born lounge singer named Sonia Gorinski, currently booked in a two-week engagement at the Yusupov Garden Room. They took Gorinski down in the middle of her second set to the catcalls of an audience drunk on generic vodka and bad romance. They drove the suspect through every red light in the Zone and locked her up with Lacazze in the interrogation chamber at Dunot.

The woman was a tougher nut than anyone who’d yet graced the shoe-fitting stool. Lacazze didn’t start to sweat until a full twelve hours had gone by and Sonia G hadn’t provided him with a pitcherful of spit. Even when she did respond to the word association, the Inspector could tell her answers were carefully chosen and not at all pertinent to the hidden vault of her subconscious. He couldn’t find the rhythm that had always come so easily, couldn’t establish the natural vibration of dominance and control that used to roll out of his throat effortlessly. It was as if the power of his personality, of his very presence, that had come to live in this room and permeate the air with the force of his will, had suddenly and inexplicably begun to dissipate and vent itself through the cracks in the wall.

Ceil paced the squad room, trying not to hear the desperate noises of approaching failure from inside the interrogation chamber, keeping Bendix’s front men at bay. At one point she heard glass break and was shaken by the Inspector howling, top of his lungs, “Illumination! The word is illumination! Answer me, goddamn you!”

For thirty hours the session continued until, with Bendix on his way to call the whole thing off, Lacazze emerged from the chamber for a glass of water, looking like a man ready to recline on his deathbed. And in that moment, watching Lacazze lean against the watercooler, too exhausted to stand erect, swallowing his last hit of crank and splashing at his already moist eyes, Ceil snapped and walked passed her incredulous boss into the Methodology chamber, locking the door behind her. No one has any idea what caused this breech of procedure. Ceil herself didn’t know if it was the imminent failure of her mentor or the suddenly uncertain future of her Dunot precinct sanctuary — or maybe it was just a simple lack of sleep and too much bad coffee. But as Lacazze pounded on the wall of the interrogation room, screaming, “You’ll ruin everything,” Ceil pulled her Colt Python from a hip holster, grabbed a shocked Sonia Gorinski by her slender throat, forced the barrel of the gun past Gorinski’s teeth and, in a level but adamant voice, promised the singer she had crooned her final cabaret if she didn’t speak quickly and honestly.

In minutes, Ceil emerged from Lacazze’s office, unable to look at the Inspector but holding out to him, with fingers stained by spilled ink, a piece of scrap paper with the words written in angry, nib-snapping block letters.

KAPERNAUM PRINTING & BINDING

ROME AVENUE

written in angry, nib-snapping block letters.

“Don’t worry, young man,” Lacazze says as Gilrein pulls away from the extended razor, “on my Antarctic mission I was the closest thing the village had to a medic. I picked up quite a bit of experience.”

Gilrein braces himself by grabbing the chrome tubing that rims the stool. The Inspector goes to work like an emergency room pro, slicing each minute track of suture without nicking the lips, using the tweezer to pull the fiber back through the soft tissue, releasing the mouth back into its functional state.

And though there’s a sense of burning that refuses to stop increasing, it isn’t quite a matter of pain anymore. Gilrein feels distanced somehow from his corporal self, as if this sudden and unplanned proximity to the place that was once his wife’s secret world, the womb in which she and her mentor worked the linguistic equivalent of alchemical reactions, had pushed him outside of his own skin, had made him a ghost to the flesh of reality.

He feels as if he’s sitting in a place of death. The precinct house is a mausoleum, like the Kapernaum mill. It has no electricity. No heat. No running water. And yet Lacazze continues to live here. The way a ghost would. Walking through empty rooms, floors littered, completely covered, with papers that no longer matter, hearing and disregarding the rats in the walls.

“We’re going to have to control this bleeding,” the Inspector says, in his ghost voice, this cross between Popeye the Sailor and John the Baptist on his last day in the desert. This is the sound that captivated Ceil? This is the noise that kept her entranced, prevented her from giving herself up to her husband?

This vibration, croaking, “I have a special balm that should help.”

Ceil sent a waiting EMT into the chamber to uncuff and tend to an unconscious Sonia Gorinski, then followed the Inspector outside and into the back of Bendix’s sedan. They led a convoy of prowl cars and two tactical vans south to the far side of the city, off the secondary road and into one of the zoning board’s no-man’s-lands that was part rural farm tract and part aborted industrial park.

Ceil hadn’t gotten much for her efforts. She couldn’t tell them the size of the Tung or the names of its leaders or what kind of firepower they might be holding. All she had was that for the past two or three weeks, the Tung had been holing up in the old Kapernaum mill and that Gorinski was to have rendezvoused with them tonight.

Ceil was uncomfortable with the information. The Tung using an abandoned bindery as their crib was too beautifully ironic for such a self-righteous crew. But the Dunot precinct autonomy was on the line, so she volunteered to play advance scout and enter the factory in the guise of the revolutionary torch singer. Then she kept her mouth shut through the rest of the sirenless race to the end of Rome Avenue.

The Kapernaum plant had been out of business for over a decade and perpetually for sale since the day the owners shut the doors. According to the various brokers who had handled the property, its main problem was location. Miles from civilization, it sat like a forgotten brick crypt in a clearing beyond the birch forest that served, in the warm weather months, as a little-used campground.

Bendix radioed for his forces to halt and fan at the tree line. Tactical went to work and organized the prowl bulls into support units, threading teams through the woods until they’d secured a perimeter around the factory.

On the jog to the building’s main entrance, with her Python drawn and pointing skyward, her movement announced by leaf crunch and lit by a close-to-full moon, Ceil tried to focus and push away the question of the last time she’d called Gilrein.

Lacazze kept watch over her through a night-vision scope and when she reached the mill doors, he gave word to start closing in the circle. The plan was a little too straightforward. The Inspector, still shaken from his encounter with the lounge singer, warned that these were full-blown pros inside the bindery, fanatics with training and the best weaponry of all — a willingness to die for a cause. For the first time in years, Bendix disagreed with the former Jesuit. The Chief still made the Tung for one more pack of ego-crazed, Canal Zone, boho smart-asses who’d gone around the bend sniffing psychotropic poppers along with their street theories. He made it clear that the last thing he needed was a firefight and a federal inquiry into why his SWAT boys unloaded a year’s worth of rhino bullets picking off a clique of untenured philosophy professors and a handful of their groupie undergrads. “Can you imagine the press nightmare?” he said. “I’d be seeing flash-bulbs for the rest of my short career.”

Ceil rang the visitor’s bell four short chimes, as Gorinski had instructed, then backed around the corner and sited on the doors ready for an ambush. In a few minutes, a young man, who in shadow resembled Farley Granger, poked his head out one of the doors and whispered, “Sonia?”

She flew at him, took him to the ground with her gun to his throat and a hand over his wet mouth. If this moron was their advance security, the Tung was even more bush league than Bendix had predicted. She turned her greeter over to the four shooters who’d advanced from the tree line and made her way inside and down to the basement, where Gorinski had promised the group would be gathering.

She found them in a cellar storage vault, all of them seated around a picnic table, slightly reminiscent of some Last Supper portrait if that scene had taken place in a fallout shelter and been commemorated on a black velvet canvas. But instead of tearing at unleavened bread and passing a clay jug of wine, the Tung was in the process of mass-assembling pipe bombs.

No one will ever know definitively whether what followed was accident or intention. Gilrein has always imagined a shaft of light, though he can’t name its source, cutting across Ceil’s face as she pressed her body against a brick support column and edged her face around its corner. He fantasizes that his wife made eye contact with one of the terrorists, perhaps the insane but charismatic leader later identified as a retired linguistics professor from MIT who’d taken to calling himself Blind Homer. Gilrein imagines that the look that passed between them lingered for a brittle, elongated second before their mutual screams — Ceil stepping into shooter’s stance, weapon extended, trained on the one who spotted her, shouting out, identifying herself as police officer and instructing immediate compliance. And Blind Homer simply yelling, the shock of discovery triggering his larynx into nonsensical alarm and his hands into a terminal mistake.

Did Ceil know the entire cellar chamber, packed to capacity with all brand of accelerants and explosives, including some percentage of imported plastique, was about to be detonated? Was she aware, even for a millisecond, that everything around her, the entire shadowy but stable physical existence that encapsulated her, was about to dissolve and be replaced, in the drawing of a single breath, into her own ground zero, a liquid and shifting world of immense, unthinkable noise and heat and absolute disruption, a plane of antistability, a dimension where skin and bone and even language have no analogous meaning?

Gilrein would like to believe she did not know. There are many nights when he would give the balance of his life just for the certainty that the explosion caught his wife unaware. That Ceil was dead before she knew she was about to die. But he can’t achieve this certainty. In fact, it’s as if his desire for it brings the opposite result, as if the more he yearns for Ceil’s ignorance in the moment before her demise, the more he has to believe that his wife saw the end coming plainly and clearly and without any illusions.

The entire rear of the Kapernaum factory blew outward and collapsed. The roof came down. Glass fragmented into razor-thin shards and the concussion carried them like pollen through the woods. Some of the perimeter cops reported seeing the fabled black-and-orange mushroom cloud, but most were too busy rolling and tucking and covering their skulls with their arms. A hash of debris made of splintered brick and metal and wood was thrown a hundred yards beyond the mill and the roar of the holocaust shattered the eardrums of some of the closest survivors.

The accuracy of the final pathology reports has always been disputed, but lacking a better count, the department files will always report eighteen casualties: thirteen Tung, some of whom will always remain unidentified, and five police officers — Ceil and her back-up unit.

As in most incendiary deaths, the descriptions of Ceil’s remains are best left on the loop of magnetic tape that spooled around, almost noiselessly, in the autopsy room of the county morgue and recorded the dispassionate and clinical words of the city’s coroner. Gilrein had no need to ask questions when he signed the release form for his wife’s dental records.

He was given the leave of absence that evolved into his resignation. He was picked up, not quite catatonic, but surely within the extended family of that diagnosis, by Frankie and Anna Loftus and brought to Wormland Farm, another voiceless body sculpted from the seemingly limitless insanity this world easily and endlessly provides.

The story of the Tung was disseminated briefly beyond the Quinsigamond borders, picked up by several major wire services, but its carnage and senselessness quotient was defeated in just a matter of days by reports of a new and imaginative “genocidal incident” from the heart of a religious war halfway around the globe. Something about children being fed to their initially unknowing and hunger-mad parents.

As for Inspector Lacazze, he instantly but quietly lost his reputation, his funding, and his untouchable status in the moment that the first of the Tung’s pipe bombs ignited. No more prisoners were exposed to the Methodology on Dunot Boulevard, and the word went out to the city utilities that they could terminate service to the old precinct house at their convenience.

The Inspector throws the last bloody fragments of suture over his shoulder. Some of them stick to the wall.

Gilrein pulls his lips in, feels himself start to tremble. Lacazze moves to a corner of the room, roots in a pile of trash, eventually withdraws a small, labelless glass jar. He comes back to the shoe-fitting stool, gets down slowly on one knee, and unscrews the jar, filling the office with the smell of sulphur and garlic. He dips two fingers into a chunky gray paste, extracts a generous amount and begins to smear it into his patient’s lips, stopping at one point to dip his thumb into his mouth, collect a cover of spittle and mix it with the muddy balm.

“It absorbs very quickly,” Lacazze says, “but we’re going to need some ice. Let me know when you feel up to walking.”