Private Demons

by Robert Masello

  “Perhaps it was.”

  Mother Agnes considered. “Perhaps it was,” she said. “Perhaps it was.”

  The next morning, Father Brendan awoke to the clanging of a bell in the courtyard.

  For the night, Mother Agnes had cleared Sister Theresa out of her cell and turned it over to Father Brendan. Like Celeste’s room, this one too had a small window that looked out on the courtyard. In the moonlight, Brendan had seen some of the faithful—the ones waiting for Sister Celeste to perform a miracle, or to cure them of their various afflictions—still gathered around the well. Some were lying down, asleep on mats the nuns had brought out to them; others were resting with their backs against the well, talking in low voices, smoking, snoring. One in particular had caught Brendan’s attention—a young girl, in a faded blue sarong, with a pair of crudely fashioned crutches lying on the mat beside her. Her bare legs, stretched out in front of her, were stick-thin, and so twisted that the feet faced each other. The pale glow from Sister Celeste’s window, only one down from Father Brendan’s had afforded the girl just enough light to continue weaving the basket she held in her lap. It was with the image of that girl in his mind, her fingers nimbly working the lengths of yellow straw, her twisted limbs looking as wooden and disconnected as the crutches lying beside them, that Father Brendan had pulled the cord on the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and fallen asleep.

  Now, the bell was ringing, but with the exception of the sister ringing it, there was no one, not even the crippled weaver, left in the yard.

  Though her wooden crutches, inexplicably, lay abandoned on the ground.

  After checking to be sure the nuns were all elsewhere, Father Brendan ducked into the lavatory, washed quickly under the rusty shower head, and went in search of Mother Agnes. He found her talking to Sister Theresa by the chicken coop.

  “Good morning,” Brendan said. “Where has everyone gone?”

  Sister Theresa looked to Mother Agnes to answer him.

  “They’ve gone to the Temple of Kaliya,” she said. “They’ve followed Sister Celeste there.”

  “All of them?” Father Brendan said. “When did this happen?”

  “Just before dawn, it seems. Sister Celeste has taken some of her things with her, and gone to the Temple to exorcise the evil and reclaim it in the name of Christ.”

  For a second, Father Brendan wondered if he was fully awake.

  “I think she expects to remain there,” Mother Agnes added.

  “Which way is this temple?”

  “Theresa, you stay here. Have the others go about their duties as usual.” Directing her attention again to Brendan, she said, “It’s a couple of miles east of here. I’ll take you there myself.”

  Along the way, Father Brendan saw signs of the others’ passing—trampled grass, cut vines, a cigarette butt. Most of the way it was slow going, through rough and densely overgrown terrain, but eventually he saw light poking through the tops of the palm trees again, and stepped out into a sort of clearing.

  The others, the villagers who had camped out in the courtyard, were all here.

  And rising up before him, at the end of a long causeway, were the crumbling walls and towers of the Temple of Kaliya.

  Mother Agnes went straight to a hunchbacked man, sitting in the shade of a slender eucalyptus. In Thai, she asked him where Sister Celeste was.

  Languidly raising one long arm, he pointed into the temple.

  “Did she go alone?”

  The man nodded.

  Agnes turned to Father Brendan. “Do you want to go in?”

  And Father Brendan wondered, was there any need? Sister Celeste had gone into the temple to escape from all this, no doubt. To commune with her God . . . to cast out demons. She was following the dictates of a voice only she could hear, and who was Father Brendan to disturb her in that colloquy? Especially in his search for a truth that he felt he had already discovered . . . when he first looked into her face . . . when he studied the holy marks upon her body . . . and when he watched, as he did now, the crippled young weaver walking, like a shaky foal, across the half-buried flagstones.

  CHAPTER

  14

  At the Commonwealth Club, there was a small anteroom, just off the main foyer, where Lucien checked his coat and gloves. An attendant wearing a black tailcoat asked him his name, and who he was there to see. After being told, the attendant nodded once and said, “This way, please.”

  Lucien followed him up a broad curving staircase, and across a marble floor set in a black and white diamond pattern. On one wall, between two huge urns of flowers, was a brass plaque that listed the names of club members who had given their lives in the Great War. There appeared to be at least a dozen, most of them titled.

  Lucien was shown into the main sitting room, a great long hall with a fireplace at either end and an assortment of leather sofas and chairs arranged, almost helter-skelter, in between. Only a few of these were occupied, and all by elderly men with newspapers in their laps, or half-empty glasses at their elbows. By the windows, heavily curtained and giving out on the street, there were several small, gaming tables, and at one of them, two men were just finishing up a round of backgammon.

  The attendant stopped a few feet short of that table, and when the man with the piercing blue eyes and steel-gray hair looked up at him, he said, “Pardon me, Lord Sykes. Mr. Calais is here to see you.”

  The other man at the table said, “Just as well—you’ve beaten me yet again,” got up, and with hardly a glance at Lucien, excused himself. Over his shoulder, he told the attendant to call for his car.

  Lord Sykes rose from his chair slowly, almost as if unfolding himself; he was well over six feet tall and rail-thin, but his dark blue suit, with the barely visible chalk-stripe, fit him perfectly. His face was as long and angular as his frame, and his hair, prematurely silver, was brushed sleekly back on both sides. He extended a hand to Lucien.

  “Very good of you to come,” he said, with a firm but brisk handshake. “Particularly on such short notice.”

  “How did you know I was in London?”

  Sykes offered a glacial smile. “I have so many friends in London. They always keep me informed.” He waved one hand toward a pair of well-worn leather armchairs, situated under an enormous portrait of a bewigged gentleman in a scarlet waistcoat.

  They sat down, facing each other and Sykes let one hand flop onto a small silver bell on the end table beside his chair. “What would you like?” he asked. “We can certainly do tea, if that’s to your taste, but if not . . .”

  A waiter appeared, also in a set of black tails.

  “Oh, afternoon, Collins.”

  “Good afternoon, Your Lordship.”

  “But as for me,” Sykes went on to Lucien, “I like something more bracing. Do you like scotch? I keep a good stock of it here.”

  “That would be fine.”

  Sykes, with a flick of one finger, dismissed Collins to go and get it. His eyes never left Lucien.

  “I’d say you’re not what I expected,” he remarked, “but you are. All but that scar on your cheek. Looks recent.”

  “It is.”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” Lucien replied. “An accident in Bangkok.”

  The sparring had begun already, Lucien thought. If Lady Birch Farms was clandestinely operated by Lord Sykes, as Lucien’s unfailing intuition told him, then there was a good chance that Sykes already knew about the fracas on the docks in Bangkok; it was his own order, after all, that was being loaded under such peculiar circumstances. Word of the melee should have traveled back to him by now . . . unless Yang, not wanting to admit to any inefficiency—particularly Calais’s escape—had elected to keep mum about the whole incident.

  Lucien knew that he was unlikely to arrive at any certainty in all this. The world he had come to inhabit was, like this room, vast, gloomy, and punctuated only by little pools of light, which afforded him no more than brief glimpses of the truth.
And sometimes, the truth he glimpsed was even harder to confront than the shadows he had become so accustomed to.

  Collins returned with a silver tray, on which a couple of bottles, glasses, and a siphon rested. He laid it on the table next to Lord Sykes.

  “How would you like it?” Sykes asked Lucien.

  “Neat.”

  “Precisely.”

  Collins fixed two glasses, handed the first to Lucien, then silently retired. The only sounds in the room were the muffled bleat of a car horn somewhere far down the block, and the occasional rustle of a newspaper page.

  “You know, your house in New York, the one on Beekman Place,” Sykes said, “it’s not unfamiliar to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “Used to belong to one of the Arab emirates, didn’t it? Qal, I think it was. Had some marvelous parties there, in years gone by.”

  Lucien thought of Mandy, the ghostly girl who still haunted the underground pool in the house.

  “In fact, wasn’t it one of those parties that got the whole place closed up in the end? Can’t seem to recall exactly, but there was some sort of scandal about the place, wasn’t there?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Lucien replied. “I bought it through a broker. I never met anyone.” Except, of course, Mandy.

  “Ah well, nothing lasts. Particularly not the good times.”

  What kind of good times, Lucien wondered, was he referring to? Parties like the one Mandy had described to him, when she’d been raped and drowned? Had Sykes, it suddenly occurred to him, been at that very party? Sykes, the respectable English lord, in the Savile Row suit, sipping his scotch in the sitting room of the Commonwealth Club? Others wouldn’t believe it, which was exactly why Lucien began to.

  “Don’t get to New York as much as I used to,” Sykes observed. “And when I do, can’t say I enjoy it as much. Plenty of money there still, but nobody seems to enjoy it anymore. Afraid to, perhaps. Considered bad form again to be rich. These things go in cycles, I suppose, though I can’t see the point of it. ‘Gather ye rosebuds,’ I say—don’t you?”

  Though the rosebuds allusion was lost on Lucien, the gist of his remarks was perfectly clear. So clear that Lucien felt no need to reply; it all seemed rhetorical.

  “Life’s a nasty, brutish, and short business,” Sykes went on, “and from what I know of your life story—and pardon me, I’ve had the same research done on yours as you’ve no doubt had done on mine—you’re the last person on earth I need to inform of that.”

  His eyes, Lucien noted, dropped at this moment to his ruby ring. What did he know? Lucien wondered. How much could he know? If he knew everything, he’d never have called this meeting. Or attempted to thwart Lucien’s designs by going after the Gold Prow shipping line.

  Not unless he had some monstrous secret of his own.

  “Rubies like that one, for instance, don’t fall off trees. You must have paid a pretty penny for a prize like that,” Sykes commented.

  Lucien looked down at the ring himself; even in a room as dim as this, it gave off a kind of dull fire. “I found this stone myself,” he said, “in a ruby mine near the Thai border.”

  “In a mine? Surely you weren’t down in those evil little tunnels, crawling about on all fours?”

  “No, I was not,” Lucien replied. “But only because that’s not how rubies are mined.” This much of Lucien’s past, clearly, Sykes had failed to uncover. It was not something Lucien wished most people to know. And yet without it—and without knowing its grim aftermath—Sykes could never hope to understand, or outmaneuver, Calais.

  The ruby, which adorned his finger like a bright, hard drop of blood, was at once a token of his deliverance . . . and, curiously, of his damnation too.

  . . .

  The guard whose foot had pressed Lucien’s head to the floor eventually lifted it, allowing Lucien to gasp for breath. The air of the central market, usually so redolent of fish and fruit, was thick with the smell of smoke and cordite . . . and blood.

  His mother was down there somewhere, in a heap of bodies under the high domed ceiling.

  “And what are you?” the guard said. “Just a spectator?”

  Lucien slowly turned his head.

  The guard couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Nor was the other one, also armed, standing right beside him.

  “Shoot him,” said the second one. “We’ve got work to do.”

  The air still seemed to crackle with the gunfire that had just finished down below.

  “Yeah . . . I ought to,” the first one said. “I ought to kill him like all the rest.” The muzzle of his rifle was pointed right at Lucien’s face, and Lucien expected it at any second to explode. “I ought to put a bullet right through your head.”

  But he didn’t. And as Lucien looked up into the boy’s face, he could see fear there—and shock. Lucien could even see the barrel of the gun shaking slightly, as if the massacre down below had unsettled the boy’s nerves. Perhaps he’d never imagined so much wanton killing as this, perhaps he’d never planned to fight for his country’s freedom by gunning down crowds of helpless civilians, perhaps he’d never expected to look another man, almost his own age, straight in the eye and then murder him for no good reason.

  “If you’re not gonna kill him,” the second one said, “then you’d better let me do it.”

  From below, there was another burst of static from the walkie-talkie, which had been turned on again, and the sound of soldiers emptying their spent cartridges.

  The second soldier had unslung his rifle.

  Lucien looked into the eyes of the first one—and willed him to stop it. With his eyes, he begged him to intercede, to prevent his friend from shooting, to spare his life. The boy seemed paralyzed with fright and indecision.

  “Move over,” said the second one, “or you’re going to get splattered.”

  He lowered his rifle—at this range he didn’t need to take aim—and as Lucien watched in horror, he put his finger on the trigger, and squeezed.

  Nothing happened.

  “Shit.” He squeezed the trigger again, while the first soldier stood by, mute.

  “I forgot to release the safety. Damn.” He flicked it off with a bat of his hand, and pulled the trigger yet again.

  There was a click, and a stutter, but no shot.

  Lucien still didn’t breathe.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He seemed more embarrassed than angry. He turned the rifle over in his hands, and shook it.

  There was a shout from below—an officer telling everyone to turn out in the front of the market, on the double.

  “Fuck this gun,” he said. “Give me yours.” He reached for the first soldier’s rifle, but the first one held on, almost as if the gun were stuck to his hands somehow. “Give it to me. Didn’t you hear? We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “This one’s a prisoner,” the first soldier said. “He looks strong. He can work to create the new Kampuchea.”

  “Fuck the new Kampuchea. Shoot him, and let’s get out of here.”

  There was another shout from below. Lucien could hear the boots of the Khmer Rouge soldiers as they left the market.

  The second soldier, worried about being late, said, “Then he’s your problem. I don’t want anything to do with this. I’m getting out of here.” And slinging his broken rifle over his shoulder in disgust, he tromped back down the staircase.

  Lucien and the first soldier were left alone, face to face; at last Lucien felt it was safe to breathe, and move. He rolled over the rest of the way, onto his back, and leaned up, slowly, on his elbows. The soldier’s gun was still pointing down at him.

  “Thank you,” Lucien said.

  The soldier didn’t answer; if anything, he looked even more skittish and scared, now that his comrade was gone. Lucien knew that he had to be careful not to alarm him in any way. But it was all he could do not to leap to his feet, race down the stairs, and search for his mother, or the body of his mother, on the market floo
r. It was all he could do simply to keep his sanity.

  “Is it all right if I get up?” Lucien asked, as calmly as he could.

  The soldier still didn’t answer, but he did, mechanically, step back to give Lucien some room. Lucien slowly stood up, and though he knew that even this was a risk, he glanced over his shoulder, at the floor below.

  It looked, in an awful way, like some sort of orgy, with bodies flung in every direction, lying on top of each other, legs spread, clothing open. But the stillness, and the blood, argued against it.

  Under the blood-soaked white coat of one of the doctors, Lucien thought he detected the black chignon his mother wore.

  He heard a click from the soldier’s gun. “Come on,” the soldier said. “Down the stairs.”

  Lucien moved away from the railing.

  “And don’t try anything.” It was as if he was trying to remember the proper protocol for this. “Put your hands on your head. And don’t do anything I don’t tell you to do.”

  Lucien did as he said, and with the barrel of the gun occasionally touching the small of his back, he went down the narrow, dirty stairs. At the bottom, he paused to survey the bodies. A cloud of flies had already found them.

  “Keep going,” the soldier said. “Out the back.”

  They left the market the way that Lucien had come in, passing dozens of empty and abandoned stalls, and then going through the rear gates.

  In the street, a ragged file of civilians, what looked like the last to be rounded up, were marching away from the city. All of them were carrying baskets of fruit and fish and meat—provisions, Lucien guessed, for their Khmer Rouge guards.

  “Need some more help?” his own guard called out to them.

  One of the soldiers, his black cap pushed way back on his head, looked over without much interest. “You don’t need him?”

  “No,” Lucien’s guard said with evident relief. “I don’t want him. Let him carry the food for you.” He pushed Lucien forward with the end of his gun.

  Lucien walked toward the column of survivors, his hands still pressed to the back of his head. The soldier in the cap gave him a quick once-over, then said, “Get in line.” He kicked a man who was struggling with two heavy sacks of rice. “Give him one of those,” he said, and the man left one of the sacks lying at the soldier’s feet. “Pick it up,” he said to Lucien.