by Declan Finn
“This should only take a few minutes,” Gus interrupted again. “They never last much longer than that.”
James pondered how this visit could possibly involve the stamina of the store or its owners. But James followed Gus out the door and diagonally across the street.
The statues and the candles in the windows were … tacky, really. It was over-the-top, beat you over the head Catholic kitsch in such bright colors that it would make even the most ardent Catholic a little twitchy, and thinking about grabbing the nearest hammer.
Though “Doctor James” himself had plenty of experience with Catholic kitsch, what with a full bore Catholic education, and a maddened spinster Aunt who devoted her life to filling her dwindling space with as many pious tchachkis as possible-- he’d never seen anything like this.
There was something wrong about it, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. It was like somebody took one of those wedding cake churches from his childhood and rearranged it to a different logic-- reading it as code for something else. The walls in the front were brightly painted-- what you could see of them.
In the unlit rear, they hosted saintly banners, cascades of fake flower vines, hanks of beads in a rainbow of colors and rosaries pinned to the walls like butterflies in a drunken collector’s cork. He shivered as they walked past the sugar skulls in the windows, only to discover a whole display leering at him accusingly. As usual the glassed in areas needed a scrub, but the display the nicely dressed plaster behemoths in the front were immaculate. Dust hung in the air but didn’t touch the white and vivid fabrics. The air was an overwhelming assortment of burned and unburned incense and a lemony floral scent that clung to the fabrics and the displays.
At least the glass was clear enough to let in rays of dusty sunlight into front areas. Past the window displays where a few neatly arranged tables with a few unillustrated magazines in a flavor of Spanish he didn’t recognize, pretty stones and kit bags containing rabbits feet and bundles his eyes shied away from.
The walls further inside had no windows, so after fist five feet, the friendly shafts of light gave way to a darker, dustier and a more crowded venue. The narrow shelves in deep layers almost to the ceiling were stacked and heaped with objects both familiar and mysterious. Most of which he recognized, some of which –like the bundles of herbs and ritual objects near the shelves and racks of incense-- he didn’t want to examine too closely.
The shelves inside were even worse. It was one part statue shop, one part knick-knacks, and third part candles. The narrow space was deep and the two isles in between the walls of chackis and boxes of bundles were made with four foot tall, narrow cubes of boxed candles, with more candles stacked on top. Nearly all of them were of the novena type, but some had saints, including a “Saint Death” which had his own display up front. James had never heard of that saint in his life.
Gus stepped into the darkness first. He peered around and said, in his voice for reaching the back of the church without a microphone, he boomed, “As you can see, this is a great market for Santaria supplies.”
James blinked as he and Gus suddenly became the center of attention for everyone in the store. He was still mostly blinded by the sunlight, but he felt the shadows move and heard little muted exclamations of shock.
“As you can see,” Gus continued, “These saints you see are the aliases or covers for old African deities once they were transported to the Caribbean.”
James swallowed. Apparently, his role here was going to be as the straight man. As blatant and as obvious as a Hope and Crosby routine, he asked, “You mean voodoo?”
“I do not,” Gus corrected, “although once syncretism starts, it is difficult to keep the original combination pure. Once you blend French Catholicism with African animism, as they do in Haiti, there is nothing to stop you from adding an unlimited number of other bits and pieces which appeal to you. Let’s see what I can remember.”
James sighed audibly, but Father Sadowski would not be denied. He pointed, cigar in hand. “First, there’s candle magic. Blue candles burning for protection and success, even if it causes your rival’s death. Green drives off people and spirits, while brown draws money and people. Pink is for love, red for victory, and yellow for dollars. Only the white candles are remotely Christian because they burn for peace, for weddings, and to uncross those who are hexed.”
At least one of the patrons dropped a colored candle back on the shelf with an audible thump and charged for the door, slipping past James and Gus.
Gus pleasantly bellowed his greeting to her retreating form, with a “See you on Sunday, Agatha!”
James started to understand what Gus meant by the store owners “lasting” when he arrived. “And the statues of saints?” James prompted.
“The Orishas. Spirits or gods. They are most clearly stolen from Catholicism. It isn’t hard to see how St. Michael the Archangel with his flaming sword became Ogun, the god they worship in order to conquer.”
Gus pointed again. He had to raise his arm to let a family of three slip under the arm. “Or how Joseph with the baby Jesus in his arms is for those who want to get a job?”
Gus shrugged. “After all, it isn’t much of a change for a good Catholic to call on Anthony of Padua for helping in finding lost objects, and then look at the cultist who sees Anthony as the patron of good luck, Elegua, the Orisha of the crossroads. Which is why suddenly Anthony might be stuck near a snake or two-- even if he’s not Moses.”
James sidestepped a cadre of little old ladies who were trying to melt into the tiles as they walked past them.
Gus continued, uninterrupted. “I won’t even speculate on how Mary Magdalen became the patroness of those seeking luck in love, but there is a grim symbolism in using the Sacred Heart statuary as a protection from organic diseases.” He gestured to this gaudy Sacred heart sculpture whose flaming center was a mirror.
James winced. “OK,” he nodded in agreement, “but the only thing I can remember about St. Barbara was that she was the patron saint of gunnery officers. That old poem by Chesterton, remember?”
Father Sadowski nodded. “And cannons sound like thunder, so Santa Barbara is the cover name of Thunder-Rumbler, or whatever the African Zeus was called…” He turned towards the counter, and the people who ran it. “Chongo! That’s the name, isn’t it?”
Gus boomed a laughed, and looked around the store. Aside from a few women in the back of the store, dressed in Kente cloth, who obviously didn’t care how obvious they were, the store was empty.
James saw the same thing and nodded. “It appears our work here is done,” he drawled. “Can we do Tim’s room now?”
“Let’s,” said Sadowski.
CHAPTER FIVE:
TIM’S ROOM
By the time James caught up to him, at the door to Tim’s room on the third floor, the lock on the door had just sprung open, and Father Sadowski was pocketing something.
James arched a brow. “Did I misremember? I thought you didn’t have a key.”
“I don’t.”
James frowned. “How did you open the door?”
“With this.” Sadowski displayed a small, thin piece of spring steel, held in the hand he had just put in his pocket.
“That’s a burglar’s tool!” James realized that he was yelping again.
I do not belong here. I have a suburban mind. I am not suitably equipped with the mental furniture to cope with a priest who has advanced degrees in burglary. But how to I get out without hurting his feelings? concerned about the quandary in which he found himself.
“Gift from a grateful penitent,” explained Gus equably, utterly disregarding the consternation in his assistant’s face and voice. “Look at it this way: if I can open this, then Tim definitely needs a new and better lock. I’ll call the locksmith as soon as we’re finished painting.” He fiddled with the door for a few quiet seconds in deep concentration.
The doorbell rang. Nothing momentous, except that the button was on the front door and
the bell was near to James’s ear, as if it were mounted on the door frame on the inside of Tim’s room. Gus didn’t seem to hear it at first.
“The doorbell was designed to ring or not ring at several different locations in the house. It goes back to the days when different men had a rotating schedule for duty days when the one on duty handled all the walk-ins.” He tweaked the door again, then pushed it open a crack, peering in with one eye.
The doorbell rang again. He pushed the door shut.
“Luraleen hasn’t answered it. She must be out putting in her numbers again. Go ahead in. I’ll answer the door while you start moving Tim’s stuff.”
James opened the door and then stopped still. The room was a good eighteen feet by eighteen feet, like his own directly below.
But there the similarity ended.
The hunter green carpet was stained with patches of yellow, red, and brown. The far wall held three massive bookcases with contents stacked and piled, bindings showing or hidden, filed as though by a hyperkinetic retard. The paneling enclosed the sink in the corner diagonal to the door making the far wall the neatest in sight. Even the botanica was far cleaner and better organized than this. The smell was a stuffy stale mix of sour, sick, moldy, and sweet.
As James stood in the doorway, his gaze drifted right to the fireplace mantle. Empty liquor bottles abounded, skewed at all odd angles, some with stained marble surrounding the horizontally-laid mouths of the bottles out of which the last drops of Scotch or Bourbon had fallen. Plastic cups and paper ones with rotted bottoms were mixed among the dead soldiers.
The floor in the center of the room was the garbage dump. Containers from fast food stores, large green plastic garbage bags, plastic spoons, and forks, magazines, and indeterminate matter infested an amoeboid shaped area with only an outer band of rug and some vacant patches providing room to step. James shrugged off his revulsion, saw a box of garbage bags near the doorway, opened and bag, and began working.
Five minutes later, Father Sadowski heard his name being called. “Father, would you come up here please, statim?”
The last time anyone had told Gus Sadowski to ‘hurry up’ in Latin was the seminary prefect when he was a student. He covered the two flights in record time.
James was standing in the middle of the garbage. “Before Luraleen gets here and decides to freshen up the room—I need a ruling on this.”
He dumped the contents of a large plastic garbage bag depositing several dozen issues of Screw, Penthouse, Lust, Playgirl, and assorted less famous titles on the floor.
James dryly stated, “I have heard it said that there are allegedly in existence some pseudo-intellectuals who don’t look at the pictures. But do you think Luraleen would believe it?”
Gus’ eyes narrowed. “Father Tim did teach a course on love and marriage to our eighth grade class last Spring, just before the diocese closed our school. Hell, even I have some dubious books left over from my coursework on ancient Greece. All the reports I had from the parents said that Father Tim had handled the course beautifully.”
James made a mental note that this was the first time Gus repeatedly referred to Lessner by his clerical title. Defense mechanism? Refusal to believe the worst of a fellow priest? Anyway, that does not solve the problem at hand.
James ripped the lid off a cardboard box.“This is beautiful?” he asked sarcastically.
The box contained hardcore porno books, cheap black and white photos of varied sex acts among multiple persons and species, and sexual devices of assorted shapes and sizes.
“I say we throw them out.”
“Right of privacy,” intoned Gus mouthing the ritual formula.
James’ face tightened in rage. “Fuck privacy. If I’m cleaning up and throwing out his empty booze bottles and food mold, I’m throwing out this shit too…Or would you prefer that Luraleen do it as part of her duties as housekeeper?”
This achieved a reaction a little closer to what James had predicted. “Christ help us! No! Never! She belongs to one of the jump-up storefront sects. She’s convinced that all papists are weird. Take the bag and the box to your room while I stay here. When Luraleen gets back I’ll have her answer the phone and the door. Under no circumstances are you to leave this room unlocked in case there’s more of this stuff.”
“There isn’t. Not anymore. Once I found the first batch, I decided to segregate any more of its ilk. Where are you going to be?”
“I’ll be out for a walk.”
James made no reply. It was the pastor’s problem. Gus had to work it out. The best thing any executive’s assistant could do was to follow orders and not distract the boss while he’s thinking.
As James carried the box out, then began piling the empties into a cardboard box. By the time he returned from his own room and started re-bagging the magazines, he found Gus working on his second box. After securing the lock on his room, James returned to find all the liquor in bags and boxes.
Gus stood, staring at the boxes, hands in his pockets. Without looking away from the evidence, he said, “We have a small tactical problem.”
James had to restrain a smile. At least he wasn’t banging his head against the wall of Gus’ intransigence. “Oh?”
“I can’t take the empties down to my car. I can’t leave the car unlocked. I won’t leave a tantalizing box in the car…”
“And we can’t just put it out with the week’s garbage?” added James in a half-questioning voice.
Gus scoffed. “Not with people who go through the garbage while it’s in the house, like Luraleen and the girl who comes in to help her dust once a week. Not with people who go through the garbage while it’s out on the street awaiting collection. Not with the bastards who collect the garbage who dump the garbage cans, leaving fragments in the street and toss garbage bags so that when they break and leave contents scattered in the gutter. No way.”
“The trunk of your car?” suggested James helpfully.
“With my luck someone will come along and jimmy the trunk instead of just breaking a window. I once put one of those heavy industrial padlock-and-chains on the gate to the schoolyard and the only way anyone could open it was with those extralong handle bolt cutters. It was open the next morning. On top of which, our local red light house is just across the street. I would have to work on the assumption that our comings and goings are noticed. That’s the reason I pick up the bingo prize money from the bank on an irregular schedule.
“The only solution is just take this,” he said, handing James the burglar tool, “help me down to the car, and then reopen the door.”
“The last time I picked a lock was on my high school lavatory,” protested James.
That stopped Gus. “What did you say?”
“I went to a Jesuit high school where the science prof was paranoid about losing equipment so he insisted that the cleaning staff be absolutely certain to lock up the laboratories…”
“So they locked the lavatories,” Gus finished for him.
James shrugged. “…so, at eight in the morning, after a long bus ride, I… well, what’s the medieval tag about necessity knowing no law: necessitas nullam legem scit?” James turned the pronunciation of the last word into a pun and Gus gave a laugh that somewhat resembled two loud barks.
“Fine. So you are overdue for a refresher course on your manual dexterity skills.” He handed James a box. “Let’s go.”
They made it down to the basement and out to the car.
James lugged the crap and tossed it into the trunk. “Where do you plan to take these?”
The priest shrugged. “Where else? A nice empty waste bin in a better part of town. Maybe a dumpster if I’m lucky.”
James slammed the trunk closed, and turned to Gus, leaning on the lid. “Aren’t you exaggerating a bit? You really expect your neighbors to start snickering about drunken orgies?” He chuckled dismissively. “I remember the distributor pulling up at my high school, delivering beer in barrels and Scotch by the case. We we
re told it was for social and fundraising events, but there were enough beer-bellied Jebbies or skinny ones with red noses that no one ever believed it.”
Gus rubbed his temples, eyes closed, as though fending off a headache. “James, that may be fine for religious orders. They take the vow of poverty, though most of us diocesans keep it. You can tag an entire order as boozers, but that still gives the individual some measure of anonymity. But I’ve been here over twenty-five years; I don’t need some nasty-minded little old lady writing to the Bishop. How about us completing our separate tasks and talking about it later?”
Before James could answer, the pastor’s old bomb was in gear and U-turning its way out of the schoolyard.
James sighed, locked the back door, trudged up three flights of stairs and was back in Tim’s room as a little clock on the bookcase chimed the hour of ten.
“Dammit,” he muttered to the ugly walls, “I’ve got keys for the back door, the common room, my room, why couldn’t there have been a dupe made for all the rooms in the house? The idiot bishop prefers doors to be broken in and battered down in case of emergencies?”
By half-past eleven, the floor was sorted into things to be saved and things to be thrown with the indeterminates left off to one side. With a what-the-hell shrug of his shoulders, James went ahead and sprung the lock on Tim’s other room across the hall, found very little mess, disassembled the bed, threw in the ‘save’ bags, moved the parts of the bed and relocked the door.
Back in the disaster room he reassembled the bed, locked that door, and returned to his own room to remove the assorted grime. His early morning choice of blue jeans, turtleneck and loafers had proved apt for the day’s work.
He was drying his hands when he realized that the doorbell was ringing for the third time. He ran downstairs to answer it.
A little kid (six? eight? he was no good at estimating ages) handed him an empty quart jar with a yellow and blue Hellman’s mayonnaise label on it and mumbled something which he guessed was agua sacra. James closed the door, took the kid into the sacristy, drew off a quart of holy water, spun the lid shut on the bottle and escorted the child to the door. He dumped a pitcher of tap water into the top of the tank and was halfway back up the stairs to his room when the doorbell rang again.
