by Ted Thackrey
Temple of the Eternal Flame was more than a catchy name.
It described his view of the world.
Mankind, he told them, had been shamefully deceived in all the sacred writings and revelations and covenants of the past fifty centuries—particularly in accounts of the rage in heaven and its outcome. Lucifer had won, not lost, that battle and had usurped the seat of the Almighty, ruling earth and its creatures as a kind of cosmic joke and sending false prophets among men whenever they threatened to stumble upon the truth.
What were the bread and wine of the Eucharist but surrogates for the ancient tradition of cannibalism and blood sacrifice demanded by the True Ruler of the Universe?
He, Gideon, was the true Messiah given here and now to all the world, a Savior come to bear witness to the reign of incarnate darkness and to bring sinners to the knowledge of their exaltation.
“Jesus was the brother, not the son, of Him who rules from the throne,” she said, her voice suddenly rising in what I realized too late was the compulsive babble of the True Believer, “and only in anguish and in flame can his sibling be worshiped!
“Blessed be!
“Away with the veil! Rend it asunder, O mine hands!
“Let us offer the ashes of the unreconciled to Lucifer and be partakers of his blood-filled cup . . . ”
Her eyes had widened as the words came ever more swiftly, but now the lids began to flicker and the body swayed. I put out a steadying hand . . . and found myself bearing her deadweight for the second time in less than twenty-four hours’ acquaintance.
The eyes were closed, the whole musculature relaxed. But I waited hopefully for a moment or two on the off chance she might revive and be able to answer a few questions before picking her up for yet another free ride to the bedroom. It was getting to be a habit.
But what the hell had that crazy son of a bitch done to put her in this condition? And what had become of her daughter?
And what did it all have to do with the late Sergeant Pietro Palermo . . .?
Speculation without information is idiocy, but I never said I was smart. Sitting alone in the kitchen once more after tucking Angela back into her bed, I took the few puzzle fragments I had been able to gather, started trying to assemble them into a comprehensible pattern—and got exactly nowhere.
Reinventing ancient heresies and perversions is a kind of indoor sport among the theologians of our time, and Gideon’s own little mind-kink came as no particular surprise to me after seeing the shrine he’d built in the other wing of the house.
To each his own.
I have lived too long and seen too many things I could not explain to believe that I possess any special pipeline to Ultimate Truth. Worship Bahomet in cat form if it pleases you. Or a graven image. Or the Great Pumpkin; I won’t raise a hand to interfere.
But that doesn’t mean I’m prepared to cooperate.
The light of early morning clearly defined each window of the house as I began to search.
City dwellers keep their treasures in bank deposit boxes or displayed upon their persons. I once knew a Dallas oilman who swaggered through the world wearing a diamond ring so large that even would-be muggers dismissed it as patently false. But they were wrong. The ring, he explained, was “start-up financing next time I go broke—or running money if I really get me a prime case of the stupid.”
Country, however, is country. And a house like this one would not have been complete without at least one wall safe.
I found it on the first try.
Angela had converted one of the bedrooms in the old wing of the house into a combination study and winery office, and the safe was firmly recessed into the wall behind a framed landscape. It was a good strong Mosler that would have given the average professional quite a tussle, but I opened it in less than a minute by checking the two most obvious places to hide the little scrap of paper bearing the combination.
It wasn’t taped under the belly drawer of the desk, so it had to be tucked into the corner of the blotter. Nobody ever trusts to memory where a wall safe is concerned.
I removed the entire contents—they made four substantial loads; the safe was larger than the little round door made it appear—and sat down to read.
The top pile was bills. About a month’s worth. Unopened, the newest about a week old and addressed to a post office box in Glen Ellen. Which made sense. The woman who met me at the door the day before wouldn’t have been in any shape to be picking up her mail for at least that long.
I put the stack aside and prowled deeper.
Legal papers were in orderly file envelopes: canceled mortgage papers dated 1973, and new ones dates a little more than a decade later, describing the Palermo house, winery buildings, and land; a couple of stock certificates handsomely engraved on heavy paper—I didn’t recognize the company names; and the top stub of the current year’s tax bill, with a note indicating that it had been paid on time.
I was about to lay that stack aside, too, when something about the share documents caught my eye.
The dates.
Like the canceled mortgage, they were dated in the year and month Sergeant Palermo had arrived home from Vietnam. And if that hadn’t settled any lingering doubt about whether he had come home rich—and how he had gotten that way—a business letter taped to the topmost certificate, perhaps overlooked by the DEA investigators, perhaps not, would have done the work.
It was from a firm in San Francisco, a jeweler with an expensive address and claims to other offices in Amsterdam and Johannesburg, expressing cordial satisfaction with a recent but undescribed transaction, and the hope that future contacts might be similarly fruitful. I noted the name of the firm, returned the letter to the pile, and bent my attention to the next bundle.
More letters.
These had been opened, and their contents bore the fold marks of repeated readings and handlings. Letters from a soldier to his wife, stamped and dated from the far corners of Southeast Asia. Dispatches from a fading but unforgotten war:
Dear Angie,
Hope you are well and liking my hometown and the house. I wish I was there, but this is real interesting out here to. Not much to tell about. Censors wouldn’t let it by anyway, so be good and I’ll see you in a year or so I hope . . .
Dear Angie,
Thanks for the picture of the bedroom the way you made it over and it sure looks good to me. We’ll get some use out of it someday and when we do you better take you a good look at the floor because you won’t be seeing anything but the ceiling for a long time . . .
Dear Angie,
As you can see I mailed this from a stop in India where the censors won’t get to read it first so I want to tell you some good news, we are going to be rich baby—and I do mean rich! Can’t explain and you don’t want to know, take my word, but there are some good times coming for the Palermo family when I get home and I don’t mean Famiglia neither . . .
Dear Angie,
This should get to you before some packages I mailed off from Karachi going thru there and I hope it does because I want you to read it first and do like it says.
DON’T OPEN NOTHING!
No, they are not bombs nor nothing like that and there is nothing in them that would not be legal for me to send to you because the customs would see it and that would be that. But leave them the way they come anyway and I will explain about it when I see you . . .
Dear Angie,
Yes, its true I only got one more week to be out here and then I will be home and it should not take me no time to get there because I will be coming by airline, us Green berets travel First Cabin. Ha ha! Can’t wait to see you honey . . .
All the letters had been held in a simple packet with a rubber band and I slipped it back into place before returning them to the safe.
The packages he’d sent.
What could have been in them that would readily pass through customs inspection but still be something he didn’t want his wife to examine before he got home?
/>
I made a mental note to ask Angela when she woke and went on to the next batch.
Letters postmarked from a little town in Kansas:
Dear Angie,
I don’t know what to tell you I haven’t already said so I will not try to tell you nothing except just this. Hang in there, honey, and remember how it was those weeks after I got home and I will be coming home again. I mean it. I will . . .
Dear Angie,
I should’ve warned you but I did’nt think of it, those DEA bastards will be all over you and yes, they got a right to tear the whole house up if they got a warrant like you said I’m sorry if anything got busted but no, I don’t think the machines they used to X-ray the walls will give you cancer. All the same maybe you better stay out of the way what with the baby on the way and all. I’m really sorry but . . .
Dear Angie,
No what I said before still goes, I don’t want you coming out here again because it don’t do any good and it just makes me think about things I can’t do anything about. I know you don’t mind the trip and all that but you got to get used to being without me. Christ knows you got plenty of practice already . . .
Only a few more letters after that. One of them from Okagomee, a sterile little missive telling his wife he’d been moved there and repeating the admonition not to visit.
And a final item in an official-looking yellow envelope with a U.S. Department of Corrections return address.
Formal regrets.
Her husband, Pietro Gian Palermo, had died of injuries sustained in a disturbance at the federal reformatory. “Further details and certificate of decease may be obtained by application to . . . ”
I sat holding the letter in my hand for a moment, wondering about the day it had arrived and about the woman whose name was on the envelope and salutation.
Had she wept?
Screamed?
Cursed and raged?
Or had the words echoed upon emptiness, mere confirmation of a death registered more than a decade earlier?
No matter. That was then and this was now and I was ready to stuff everything back into the safe and into the past when one final communication—a single twice-folded sheet of lined tablet paper—fluttered free from the bottom of the pile.
No envelope for this one and no address but the single name, ANGELA, printed in block letters on the back. The text was block-lettered also, as though by someone who found printing easier than cursive writing:
I AM LEAVING NOW, BUT HAVE NO DOUBT THAT MY EYE WILL BE UPON YOU ALWAYS.
MARIA THERESA IS WITH ME. BY HER OWN CHOICE. DO NOT SEEK US AS YOU VALUE HER LIFE ON EARTH. SHE IS MINE.
REMEMBER!
There was no signature. None was needed.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
And even if his hunger is for power—the strength to move nations and mobilize armies—his first concern must still be for those who follow him.
NINE
The store had the same name as its proprietor: Suleiman.
In another time, another place—say 1950, in Dubuque—the sign over the door might have proclaimed “Suleiman’s Jewelry and Loan Co., Valuables Bought and Sold,” and been adorned by the traditional three gold balls above a window crammed with slightly tarnished musical instruments and lodge rings.
But this was here and now. In San Francisco.
The dark-tinted glass of the window admitted just enough light to give passersby a heart-stopping glimpse of the diamond and emerald tiara tastefully placed just below the stroller’s line of sight on an otherwise unrelieved field of black velvet. And the only indication of the presence of a going business within was a small, highly polished brass plaque bearing the owner’s name, affixed to the creamy alabaster of the entryway.
The door was locked.
Potential buyers admitted By Appointment Only.
Which made me glad I had influential friends, because I was not in town to buy jewelry. And hadn’t come to hock anything, either.
And I needed to talk to Suleiman.
Too many years ago in one of the army’s less prepossessing hospital wards, a onetime Rhodes scholar turned infantryman named Dee Tee Price and I had passed a long night working out a new and original theory of ethnology.
Needless to say, we were drunk.
An orderly with more greed than dedication had supplied us with some of the worst-tasting blended whiskey available in darkest Kansas, and we had used it to work out details of our main premise.
There were, we decided, only about ten thousand Real People on earth. The rest are assumptions, grist for the Nielsen and Audience Share polls, denizens of Television Land, digits in the latest census reports, consuming and reproducing on demand, and even capable at times of assuming a kind of eerie half-life when required by two or more players in whatever game the Real Ones have found to divert their minds for the moment.
But not absolute. Not actual. Not verifiable except in the eye of the beholder—and gone entirely the minute they are out of sight. There was plenty of supporting evidence.
How else could one account for game show contestants?
Or Oral Roberts?
Anyway, it made sense at the time. And although we both laughed about it the next day when the blended rotgut had worn off, the laughter had a slightly uneasy undertone. We never discussed it again. But we both used it from time to time.
Which was why I had phoned Beans Benedict from Glen Ellen.
Beans was a friend, a former truck driver from Muleshoe, Texas, who had stopped for diesel fuel in Las Vegas thirty years before and somehow never seemed to leave. He said it was the climate, but how he’d have known about a thing like that was a mystery to one and all. He hadn’t been outside a casino for more than ten minutes at a time since he came to town.
Or played any game except poker. Seven card stud was his favorite, as it is for many professionals, and he was one of the more vehement early advocates of a center-card variant called hold ’em, which has lately become paramount in the field.
His only other interest was women.
So of course, I got hold of him as soon as I was sure I needed information about the buying and selling of jewelry in the western United States and was not at all surprised when the first name he mentioned was the one whose letterhead I had discovered in Angela Palermo’s safe.
Beans was skeptical, though, when I indicated a desire to talk to the proprietor.
“You can trust ever’ damn thing the sumitch tells you,” he said, “right up until he opens his mouth. Then look out!”
I laughed. “Sounds like your average jeweler to me,” I said. “Or maybe a poker player.”
“He ever takes up the game,” Beans growled, “I gonna quit and go back to bustin’ my kidneys on a semi rig!”
Nonetheless, he said he would make a call for me. And he must have done it, because when I touched the discreet little button recessed in the spot where a knob should have been, the door uttered an apologetic little click and swung inward.
The first person I saw could not have been Suleiman.
She was tall, slim, elegant—striking rather than beautiful, but burnished to a gloss that made other considerations somehow secondary—and absolutely female.
“Good morning,” she said with what might or might not have been the trace of a British accent. “I’m Perdita Soames. Suleiman”—I noted the lack of honorific and decided its absence was, like the receptionist herself, part of the firm’s window dressing—“told me to expect you. And may I say that your friend—Beans, I think he was called?—described you right well.”
I thanked her, said she might, indeed, say that, and wished I knew what the Texas trucker had told her.
“Tall, skinny drink of water. Dresses like a Hoosier mortician,” she said, evidently reading my mind and offering a remarkably accurate impression of Beans’s telephone voice. And manner.
“That,” I said, nodding appreciatively, “is a bull’s-eye. Both ways.”
/> She smiled, but did not acknowledge the compliment.
“Actually,” she said, “Suleiman has only just arrived, and was on the telephone a moment ago. Would you like anything—tea, coffee, or something more sociable—while I see if he’s done?”
I smiled back, not at all hard to do, and said I’d appreciate a cup of coffee. No cream or sugar, thank you. And couldn’t help speculating about what substance, solid, liquid, or gas, might have been considered “more sociable.”
Suleiman’s clientele, I thought, might well have unusual tastes.
Perdita Soames nodded, turned her back for the briefest of moments, and turned back to hand me the requested beverage—complacent in bone-china cup and saucer—before shimmering away through a doorway behind her.
Some reception. And some receptionist. I wondered what Kelly Girl would have in stock for the days when she was indisposed. Or on vacation.
No time for bootless cogitation, however; a moment later the upholstered door at the far end of the room opened itself and I took the hint, putting aside my coffee to enter the Presence.
Suleiman was off the phone.
He was almost worth the trip in himself. Beans Benedict had given me a brief description, but it did not at all prepare me for the impact, physical and psychic, of the man in person.
He was tall, stretching into the mid-range of inches above six feet, and lean in the rawboned and long-limbed way that goes with controlled power. He was black—a deep walnut tone, its darkness emphasized by a head that was shaved clean of all hair except for a small five-point beard jutting from the jaw.
And he was regal in the way that Olympic elk and white tigers project royalty.
But Suleiman’s principal feature was not a visible one. Waiting outside his office, I had felt an unfamiliar prickling of the hairs at the back of my neck and dismissed it as normal animal wariness in the presence of the unfamiliar. Stay alert. Sniff the air and keep close watch downwind. Their claws may be sharper than yours.
