HOLY TERROR
The Destroyer #19
Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir
For Donna,
always there for us.
CHAPTER ONE
Many things are holy, but few of them holy men—House of Sinanju
WHEN THE REVEREND TITUS POWELL saw the bodies being loaded on ox carts in the outskirts of Calcutta, he asked himself if he were willing to die.
More specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a white girl?
Even more specifically, was he willing to give up his life for a rich white girl whose father, just two decades ago, had made Reverend Powell ask himself the identical question over the value of a cup of coffee. He remembered it clearly. You don’t forget facing death.
“Ain’t no one stopping y’all from drinking that cup of coffee, Reverend. But they ain’t gonna be no one stopping them from hanging y’all from the big elm at Withers Creek neither.”
Those had been the words of Elton Snowy, owner of Snowy’s Pharmacy, Snowy’s Mill, Snowy’s Drive-in, and Snowy’s Farm, in Jason, Georgia. Mr. Snowy, who was a Jason on his mother’s side, had stood with the Silex still bubbling at the lunch counter in his pharmacy, with the young Reverend Mr. Powell sitting in front of an empty coffee cup and a crowd of jeering white youths behind him.
“I’ll take cream and sugar,” Reverend Powell had said, and he saw the two dark barrels of a shotgun stuck in his face. On the triggers down the barrels was one fat pink finger. The nail was grimy. The nail, the finger, the hand, and the gun belonged to the saw mill foreman who, everyone in Jason knew, was the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan.
“One barrel or two with your coffee, nigger?” asked the foreman.
Reverend Powell heard the laughter behind him, saw Snowy hold the pot over the cup, smelled the aroma of fresh-ground coffee, and knew if he lived he would never drink coffee again.
“I said one barrel or two, nigger?” repeated the saw mill foreman.
“Get that outa here,” yelled Snowy. “There’ll be no shooting in this pharmacy.”
“You gonna serve a nigger?”
“You ain’t messing up this place with that double barrel.”
“And you ain’t gonna serve no nigger.”
“Hey, Mr. Snowy,” came an out-of-breath voice from the door of the drugstore. “It’s a girl.”
“If you think I’m gonna allow bloodshed in here the day my wife gives me a daughter, you’re out of your cotton-pickin’ head there,” said Snowy. “Put that double barrel away, and let’s all go to my place for a little real refreshment. I’m closing the pharmacy.”
“All” of course did not include Reverend Powell. But in the general joy, he did get his cup of coffee, with no barrels.
“Just for this occasion,” said the saw mill foreman, pointing the shotgun at the cup. “It ain’t gonna be no regular thing.”
But the South was changing all over, and it did become a regular thing for the blacks in Jason to eat at the same counters and to go to the same movie theaters and to drink from the same fountains, and twenty years later, if anyone asked whether a black, least of all the Reverend Mr. Powell of Mt. Hope Baptist Church, could get a cup of coffee at Snowy’s, a resident of Jason would have looked at the questioner as if he should be committed to an insane asylum.
Now, as the ox cart creaked by him on a foreign road in India, Reverend Powell remembered that long-ago day in Jason. He could see bodies dangling limbs from the cart in a looseness no living person could duplicate. Bellies swelled forward but ribs protruded, cheeks sunk beneath vacant eyes staring out into eternity, never to blink again.
The road smelled of human excrement, and the morning had no coolness to it, just a smothering heat that would become unbearable when the sun rose to its full powers. Reverend Powell felt his seersucker suit sticking to him as it had even yesterday, but so filthy had been the hotel the night before that he had not dared change it. He leaned against the gray 1947 Packard with the new coat of paint, a car that would have been junked back in Jason, and looked at the driver, a brown-skinned man with Caucasian features. The driver had stopped for a large gray cow with a dangling, fleshy throat. Just minutes before he had refused to stop for a baby crying in the street, because it was what he called “an untouchable.” Cows were sacred in India. Bugs were sacred in India. Everything was sacred in India, thought Reverend Powell—everything but human life.
Instead of waiting in the car’s greasy back seat for the cow to pass, Reverend Powell had gotten out, and when he saw the ox cart of bodies go by, he knew he had to make a decision: go on, to what he felt now would be his death, or go back to Jason.
He still had several hundred miles along roads like these to reach Patna at the foot of the Vindhya Mountain Range, Patna on the Ganges up from Calcutta. Famine was upon the land despite gifts of American grain that rotted in warehouses of Calcutta and Bombay and Sholapur, despite even more grain that reached the people. Despite the most aid America ever gave any country it had not been at war with, India was still collecting its starved dead in ox carts while its sanctimonious ministers in New Delhi, who presumed to preach morality to the world, lavished money on atomic bombs.
Reverend Powell said a little prayer and steadied himself. The cow had to move soon, and he must decide whether to go on up the road to Patna or go back to the airport and return to where he could breathe the fresh air of the piney woods or share a mess of catfish with his family or cry out his love of God before his congregation in the neat white church set off on the grassy slope by the old Snowy Mill.
He felt that his life hinged on the decision he made, but just last week, it had not seemed all that terminal. Difficult, yes; terminal, no. He had regarded it all as an exercise in turning the other cheek.
“Reverend,” Elton Snowy had said back in Jason exactly seven days before, “you gotta help me. I think maybe you’re the only one who can. I got a letter here from Joleen. I think she’s been, well, sort of kidnapped. Sort of.”
“Joleen. Little Joleen. Why, she’s such a lovely girl. A real Christian, if I may say so, Mr. Snowy.”
“Yes sirree, a lovely girl, a lovely girl,” said Snowy. Reverend Powell could see red rings around Snowy’s eyes, as if the richest man in Jason had been crying.
“I need your help, Reverend. I know Joleen used to sneak down to your section of town and do social work and all. And I know you and your people liked her.”
“She is a lovely girl, Mr. Snowy. Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Myself, I haven’t drunk any for twenty years.”
“No, thank you kindly,” said Snowy and pushed a worn letter at Reverend Powell. “Read this please. It’s from Joleen to her ma.”
Reverend Powell read the letter, and he was confused. It seemed like a pleasant enough message from a girl who had found happiness and communion with a divine force. What confused Powell was the reference to her father’s good civil rights work, but that it was nothing compared to the work of the Blissful Master she had found there in Patna, India.
“If only your very close friend, Reverend Powell, could see the complete happiness of the Divine Bliss Mission here in Patna,” the letter read, “I would be eternally grateful. For the sake of Jason, he should see it right away.”
The printing on the letter said, “The Divine Bliss Mission,” and according to its letterhead, it had offices in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and London. Its home was Patna, India. A picture of a fat-faced teenage boy was engraved at the top of the letter. A fuchsia halo surrounded his head.
“I see your daughter has done what the Lord hath failed to wrought,” said Mr. Powell pleasantly. “She has made me your close friend.”
“It’s a code, Reverend. She’s in trou
ble. I’m not sure what kind of trouble, but she’s in trouble. She thinks you’re the only man who can save her. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because those Indias are colored folk too. She’s a good girl, Reverend. I know she’s not your flock, but…but…” Elton Snowy turned away. “Please don’t visit the sins of the father on the daughter.”
“Why don’t you go to one of these Divine Bliss Missions and ask about her yourself?”
“I did. I hired people. I hired lots of people. Two went to India. They never came back. They joined that little…that little Blissful Master.”
“I see,” said Reverend Powell. “Well, I remember the day Joleen was born. I was having a cup of coffee at the time.”
“I’m not asking for myself. And if anything should happen, your family will be well provided for. You have my word on that.”
“A passable nice offer, Mr. Snowy. But I know my family will be taken care of. Because if I go to find Joleen, you’re going to deposit $50,000 in my lawyer’s escrow account.”
“I’ll give it to you now, Reverend. Cash. I can get you that in cash.”
“I don’t want your money. I want security for my family if I should not be here to provide for them.”
“Perhaps insurance. I could arrange a hundred thousand dollar policy, Reverend, and…”
“My lawyer’s escrow account. If I should die, my family will be provided for. I’d rather not have to repeat myself, if you please, Mr. Snowy.”
“Certainly. Certainly. You’re a real Christian.”
So now he was looking for Mr. Snowy’s Joleen, and if it were a good deed, then certainly he should be able to trust in the Lord. If he had faith, both he and Mr. Snowy’s daughter would be back in Jason by month’s end. He would return Mr. Snowy’s money, and perhaps it would give that acquisitive man a chance for the glory of charity. The church sure could use a fine new air conditioning system.
If he had faith. But it was so hard to have faith in the face of death.
The cow looked around condescendingly, then plodded off along the dusty road, following the cart, which, if the cow had been hamburger the day before, would not now be full on its way to the body dumps.
“To Patna. On to Patna,” said Reverend Titus Powell of Jason’s Mt. Hope Baptist Church.
“I thought you might go back, you know,” said the driver in a clipped British accent. “Most do when they see the carts.”
“I thought about it.”
“I hope you won’t think less of India because of it. Really, almost all of them are untouchables and make no real contribution to the true grandeur that is India, don’t you think?”
“I see men who died for want of food.”
“Patna is a strange place for an African American,” said the driver. “Are you going to see a holy man?”
“Perhaps.”
“Patna is the home of holy men, ha-ha-ha,” said the driver. “They know the government won’t touch them there because of the prophecy. They’re as important as the sacred cow there.”
“What prophecy?” asked Reverend Mr. Powell.
“Oh, it’s an old one. We have more prophecies than there is mud in the Ganges. This one, however, is believed by more than would care to admit, ha-ha-ha.”
“You were talking about the prophecy.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. Indeed. If a holy man, a true holy man, is harmed in Patna, then there will be the rumbling of the ground, and thunder from the east. Even the British believed it. In their reign there was an earthquake in Patna, and they looked high and low for a holy man. But all the wealthy, powerful holy men were well and in fine spirits. Then they found that the lowliest fakir, who lived at the foot of the mountains, had been robbed of one meal. His last meal. And soon after, the Japanese invaded. Then, again, a holy man had been doused in sweet oils and set aflame because the concubine of a maharajah had said he had a beautiful spirit. And the Mongols invaded after that. Ever since, every enterprising holy order has had at least one home in Patna. The government respects them, yes, indeed.”
“Do you know anything about the Divine Bliss Mission, Incorporated?”
“Oh, one of those American ones. Yes, very successful.”
“Have you heard of the Blissful Master?”
“Blissful Master?”
Reverend Powell pulled Joleen’s letter from his jacket. “His Indian name is Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor.”
“The Dor lad, of course. Of course. If you can read and write English well, there is always work with him. And if you can…” The driver did not finish, and no matter how Powell pressed him, he would not answer what other sort of person could always find employment with the Dor lad.
Patna, like the rest of the famine areas of India, cleared away its dead in carts. An impatient Rolls-Royce dashed by them, and Powell’s driver commented that it was a government minister on his way to Calcutta for an important conference on imperialist American atrocities, such as its failure to refinance a liberation library in Berkeley, California.
“It will be a good speech,” said the driver. “I read where he is going to label the library closing for what it is—a genocidal racist repressive atrocity.” The 1947 Packard took a little bump, and Reverend Powell’s heart sank. The driver had not missed the little brown-skinned baby. Perhaps the child was better off.
· · ·
“Well, here you are,” said the driver, pulling up to a heavy wooden gate reinforced with large steel bolts, rising almost two stories into the air and flanked by white cement walls. It looked like a prison.
“Is this the Divine Bliss Mission? It looks like a fortress.”
“To the Western mind, that which it does not understand is foreboding,” said the driver. “It sees its own evil behind every obscurity. We do not have men with spears like your Pope.”
Reverend Powell tried to explain that he was a Baptist, and therefore the Pope was not his spiritual leader, and anyway the Swiss Guards in the Vatican were only ornamental attractions with no intention of using any weapon. The driver seemed to understand all this until he was tipped, and, then, with a cheerio and a tally ho, he was off with a cry that the Papacy was a tool of the Central Intelligence Agency and all that rot.
Reverend Powell cried out after him that he wanted the driver to wait for the return trip, but he thought he heard only laughter from the coughing, sputtering 1947 Packard.
When Powell turned back to the door of the mission, he saw it had been opened. A pink-robed Indian priest, standing in the doorway, smiled. He had a silver streak painted down his forehead.
“Welcome, Reverend Powell. We have been expecting you, lo these many days.”
Reverend Powell entered. He could not see people closing the high heavy wood and metal door, yet it moved slowly shut with a moan of its mass.
A splendid pink palace rose from the center of the courtyard, the Vindhya range looming snow-capped behind it in the distance. Shimmering reflections of colored glass played upon the pink, and at the center point of the palace, a crowning dome of golden brilliance forced the reverend to turn away his eyes.
“Uncle Titus, Uncle Titus. You’re here. Wowee.” It was a young woman’s voice. It sounded like Joleen, but it came from a running maiden with very dark eyes and the cloppy run of sandaled feet. Her face was wrapped in pink linen, and a silver streak bisected her forehead. As she drew near, she said, “I guess I shouldn’t say wowee anymore.”
“Joleen. Is that you?”
“You didn’t recognize me, I’ve changed so much, right?”
“Your eyes.”
“Oh, the bliss perception.” She took the strong, tired hands of Reverend Powell, maneuvered the worn wicker suitcase out of his grip, and with a short clap got the robed priest to run to them and pick up the valise.
“It looks like some sort of charcoal makeup over the eyelids,” said Reverend Powell. He felt her nails play on his palm and instinctively withdrew his hand. She laughed.
“The eye makeup is only the ext
ernal. You see the makeup with your eyes. But you do not see what goes on beneath my eyes, the eyes that swim under lakes of pure tingle.”
“Tingle?” asked Powell. Was she trying to communicate in code? Was the eye makeup a narcotic? Was she bugged? This was all strange to Reverend Powell.
“The feeling behind my eyes. We were created to enjoy our bodies, not suffer with them. The Blissful Master, all praise be his name, has taught us to free ourselves. Tingle is part of the freedom.”
“Yes, we got your letter—your father, my good friend, and I.”
“Oh, that. All praise be the name of the Blissful Master. Praise be his infinite name and infinite being. He is wondrous in his life, and his life is our proof. Praise the blissful masterful life.”
“Joleen, child, is there some place where we can talk in privacy?”
“Nothing is private from him who knows everything.”
“I see. Then perhaps you would care to return with me tonight or as soon as possible, to spread the good word to Jason,” said Reverend Powell, scanning the walls. Standing along them were robed, turbaned men with unholy machine guns and bandoliers. The courtyard floor was delicate inlaid gold and red tile. Reverend Powell could hear the clod of his rough leather shoes as he walked with the girl who had been Joleen Snowy into the building under the golden dome. Inside, the Oriental splendor disappeared with a gust of cold air. He was walking on linoleum, with hidden air conditioning chilling him, and indirect lighting proving restful, if strange, to his eyes. It was good to be cold and dry, away from the hot, dusty death of the roads of India, away from the brown mud of the Ganges and the reek of human waste in body and in discharge.
Clear water bubbled from a clean chrome fountain. Set against a clear white Formica wall was a red man-high soda machine.
“The Blissful Master believes that is holy which is made holy,” said Joleen. “He believes we are here to be happy and when we are not, it is because we have poisoned ourselves in our minds. Don’t be shocked by the modern heart of this palace. It is another proof of the Blissful Master’s truth. Do you want a soda?”
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