Cruel Mercy

by David Mark

  McAvoy looks again at the picture of the peaceful cottage. Compares the frontage to the blueprint of the farmhouse on the deeds. He sees the similarities at once.

  McAvoy calls up a map on his phone. Crow is an hour farther on from Cairo, not far from the interstate that Brishen had taken on his desperate drive north. Could that be where they were going? Could Molony have told him something that made him risk everything in a frantic drive into the wilderness on the night Shay Helden was killed?

  “What are you thinking?” asks Valentine, looking at the leaflet.

  “Everything points to reverence,” says McAvoy manically. “He’s venerating Saint Anthony and his deeds.”

  “Saint Anthony? What’s he—”

  McAvoy shakes his head. “Not a real saint. Not a true martyr. He’s venerating somebody. Somebody he has spent a lifetime idolizing and revering.”

  “Father Whelan?” asks Valentine, surprised.

  McAvoy shakes his head. “The rose on the first gold leaf. The place it all started. In the attic and on the wall of his church. There was no name on the first leaf. He left it blank.”

  “What?”

  “Tony. Saint Tony. The martyr who saved souls at his quiet little retreat in the middle of nowhere. The mute who found a way to be understood. How many souls, Valentine? How many did he take?”

  McAvoy is not in pain anymore. He’s not tired or frustrated. He thinks he understands. He thinks he has made the connections that will allow him to go home.

  Like Brishen Ayres before him, Aector McAvoy feels he may have stumbled onto an evil that has lain undetected for decades—festering beneath the cold ground. Festering in a place that all the holy water that has passed through the sacristan’s hands will never be able to make clean.

  He turns to Valentine. “You can steal a car, right?”

  The younger man smiles, eyes sparkling. “Yes, Officer.”

  JANUARY 1981: THE FINAL ABSOLUTION

  Father Whelan feels as if his heart is going to come apart. He sees it as a clockwork mechanism, all cogs and springs, and as he slides down the wall of the church, he pictures it bursting into its component pieces in a maelstrom of jagged metal and crooked silver teeth.

  “It was you who got into his head,” spits Salvatore. He has a hand on Whelan’s throat and is pushing him back against the wall.

  “Sal,” he hisses. “Sal, I can’t breathe.”

  “He seen bad things, yeah. Done bad things. But fuck, I never . . . I never . . .”

  Sal releases his hold on Whelan’s neck. He collapses back onto a pew. His face is white. The hems of his flared jeans are soaked with snow and there is blood upon his knuckles.

  Whelan stays where he fell, barely moving in the shadow of the column beside the vestry.

  “I wasn’t supposed to be visiting,” mutters Sal, pushing a hand through his hair. “But I got a delivery. Just some powder from another supplier, but Dad doesn’t like it when I do things my own way, so I figured I’d keep it safe and out the way. He wasn’t expecting me. I walked in and there he was. In his rocking chair, talking like he’d always had a voice. Talking to you about the things he’d done. The girls he’d buried alive. Said he could only talk to the dying. His throat would close if he tried to speak to the living. He said he’d found a way to confess. And that voice, all crackly and low, like it was coming straight out of hell. I know I done things, Father. I’m no saint. But fuck!”

  Whelan rubs at his throat. There are dots dancing in his vision.He cannot tell what is candlelight and what is stained glass and what is hallucination brought on by the horrors that fill him like too much wine.

  “You seek absolution?” he wheezes. “You seek forgiveness?”

  “I don’t know what I fucking seek!” bellows Sal. “I came here for something . . . something I thought you had. Some answers. Some explanation. But look at you, all busted up and sorry for yourself. You’re just a man, ain’t you? Not some bouncer for God, not some wizard with an eraser who can take all the bad shit from your soul. You’re a sniveling mick bastard and you’re going to burn. We’re all going to burn. I put a hurting on him but he still won’t say a word. I need to think. Need somewhere I can take him. I need to think . . .”

  Whelan tries to speak but finds his tongue sticking to his mouth. Through the tears he sees Salvatore stand. He reaches into his coat. Whelan recoils, shuddering. He is suddenly terrified of death. He has fallen so far, plunged himself into such darkness. He cannot meet God like this. He suddenly yearns for redemption with a hunger that threatens to overwhelm him.

  “Please,” sobs Whelan. “I can make things right. There can be absolution . . .”

  Sal spits on the flagstones and pulls out an envelope from his jacket pocket.

  “For you, Father,” he says coldly. “They were all for you. I got to think. I don’t know what to do. Fuck. Got to think . . .”

  He drops the envelope on the pew and turns his back, stalking toward the door without looking back toward the altar or the fallen priest. His shadow lengthens and then shrinks, and he steps back into the darkness beyond the great double doors without making the sign of the cross.

  It takes Whelan several moments to find the strength to open the package. He closes his shaking fingers around the reel for a tape recorder. Written on the center, as if scrawled by a child, he can make out his own name.

  When he plays the recording in the solitude of his bedchamber, he wishes he were back against the wall. Wishes Salvatore had put a bullet in him rather than give him this.

  As he listens to the mumbled words and the desperate screams, he stops being Father Whelan. He becomes Jimmy from Hell’s Kitchen. And his heart and soul speak to him in the voice of a devil. Jimmy knows he can never be a good man again. But he knows how to save a little piece of himself. He knows that for all of his bullshit, Salvatore has hurt as many people as the “brother” whose actions have so appalled him. Was that why he reacted so angrily? He saw something of himself in the actions of the emotionally scarred Tony? Jimmy begins to think. Starts to work out a way to remove an impure soul from the world. Two, if he plays it right. At no point does he remember to pray.

  —

  An hour later, he is sitting in a bar on Mulberry, drinking brandy with hands that shake. Paulie Pugliesca is sitting opposite him, his face as cold and stony as that of a corpse. A cigarette has burned itself out at his lips and a column of curling ash hangs in front of his face.

  “You’ll go to hell for this, Father,” says Nicky Savoca, seated at the smaller man’s elbow. “The seal of the confessional is sacred.”

  Whelan shakes his head, huddling in on himself, teeth chattering against the glass. “It wasn’t in confession, I told you. He hadn’t said the prayers.” He forces himself to look up at the big man and show a little fight. “And I know more about the soul of man than any of you.”

  At last, Pugliesca takes the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it out on the ashtray that sits on the red-and-white tablecloth beside an empty bottle of quality Sicilian red.

  “You know what I have to do,” he says, teeth locked. “By telling me this, you know what I have to do?”

  “God forgives all,” says Whelan, and blesses the man across the table.

  “My own son,” says Pugliesca, half to himself. “A fucking rat. A fucking rat!”

  He turns away and clicks his fingers. From the darkness, a tall, potbellied man emerges, hands clasped loosely at the wrist in front of him like a choirboy.

  “We never speak of this,” he says. “Fucking never. And you absolve me, Father. This shit gets wiped, you hear?”

  Father Whelan nods.

  “Claudio,” says Pugliesca, thinking aloud. “Wake him up, Giulio. He’s good. Quiet. It doesn’t have to hurt.”

  He turns back to Whelan. “I don’t want to be damned for this,” he says, and the
black in his eyes devours the white.

  “God forgives all,” says Whelan, and drains his drink. It ignites a fire in him. And as he sits in the quiet and the cool of the little Italian restaurant, he smells the burning of another man’s soul, and the resurrection of his own.

  TWENTY-NINE

  If there were still any teenagers left in the village of Crow, the creepy house at the end of Euclid Creek Road would be the kind of place they would dare one another to enter after dark. With its sagging roof and rotting timbers, its litter-strewn stoop and flaking paint, it could earn a place in local legends. It could serve as an initiation ceremony of sorts. You weren’t a man, you weren’t ready for the big wide world, until you’d set foot inside Molly’s Farm and counted to ten.

  It would have happened in any other village. Not Crow. There aren’t enough people in this community to produce enough teenagers for adventures. This is a farming community—fields and forests, creeks and rock pools, straggled out at the foot of the Catskills. Economically, times have never been as bad. Today’s residents are incomers who have moved out of the city looking for a different kind of life. They mow their grass with ride-on mowers and maybe buy themselves a few chickens and a goat and tell themselves they are farmers while the yield from their orchard of apple trees turns to mulch on the ground. Most don’t last more than a few winters. The dark months are vicious up here, as if the wind and the snow are possessed of a malicious spirit.

  Those resident whose roots go back further have no more affection for the area than those who have been attracted by the falling prices of property and land. There are those who can trace their kin back through the centuries and whose ancestors are buried out the back of their timber homes, headstones bearing names that have cropped up again and again through the generations, daily reminders to the current householders that their problems will not last forever. In such homes are serious, hardworking men and women. The grind of their existence shows in their hands and in their faces. Each line in their foreheads tells of a bereavement, a foreclosure, a bad harvest, or a stillborn calf. Such people have little time for daring one another to enter the spooky house at the end of Euclid Creek Road.

  There are even those in Crow who remember when Molly owned Molly’s Farm. She sold up in the seventies. Went to live in Florida with a great-nephew who had taken one look at the run-down house where she was living and did the Christian thing by inviting her to live with him. He sold her house to some city folk for a decent price. Nobody brought over a housewarming basket or a peach cobbler for the newcomer. Nobody was even sure when he took possession, or whether he lived there full-time or used the place as a vacation home. And nobody questioned him about the state of the overgrown lawn or the peeling paint. Only a couple of locals saw him, and when he failed to return their waves, they put him down as an ignorant city slicker. They carried on with their lives, even as the woods closed in around the house and the bumpy, potholed road leading to his front door became more and more difficult to drive down.

  Over the years, a few lost motorists knocked on the door in the hope of using the telephone or the gift of a glass of water. A handful of walkers in their hiking boots and waterproofs rapped their knuckles on the rotting wood of the squat, two-story property. Nobody ever answered. And nobody went inside. The windows held firm and the front door was locked and bolted. Sun-bleached curtains still hung at the window, and those who peered through the dusty glass could make out a few sticks of furniture and the signs of habitation. This was not an abandoned property—just an unloved one.

  The next town over from Crow is called Summit, and in the bars of that quiet, pretty town, the talk would occasionally stray to the occupant of the old house by the river. On the occasions that the subject came up, people instinctively lowered their voices. Old anecdotes were regurgitated. Even as recently as this winter, old George Severn retold the story of the time he saw the owner back in ’81. Pale, he was, says George, when asked how he looked. Almost see-through. I swear to God I thought he was a ghost. No prettier than his house.

  And soon the others would chime in. They would tell and retell their yarns about the occasional pilgrims who have knocked on their doors, asking for directions to St. Anthony’s. They had heard tell of a place of healing. Some had even displayed leaflets glorifying the saint’s name and illustrated with a picture of the old cottage.

  The Penitent, Peter Molony, knows it was folly to print the leaflets. He never intended to show them to anybody. But he had journeyed, in his quiet moments, into a world behind his eyes in which Tony Blank was revered by all as a saint. He had imagined how it would be if the world knew the truth about his actions and his sacrifice. He had indulged his whim and incorporated the fantasy into the list of fake charities set up to help launder Pugliesca’s money. To do so was a mistake, and in the moments after he knocked Claudio unconscious, he had allowed his rage at himself to lead him into a bout of violence and destruction. He had smashed up his beautiful home. Torn at his papers as he liked to lash at his skin, spilled precious ashes among the blood and the broken glass.

  Here, now, Molony is again at peace. This is his church, his occasional sanctuary. He knows that nobody has set foot inside the house on Euclid Creek Road because behind the rotting façade is a state-of-the-art alarm system. The last time he came here was in August, when he discovered that the hole in the roof had grown so bad that rain had found a way through the rafters and watered the grass seeds that had blown into the holes on the moth-eaten couch. The grass has grown tall now. The sofa looks as though it is being swallowed up by nature. So, too, does the man who lies on it, blood on his face, hands bound tightly at the wrists. He woke up on the drive here and Molony was forced to pull over and hit him afresh. There is blood on the lens of his eyeball now and more trickles from his ear, as if something is broken in the man’s head.

  Molony feels the same sense of calm he has always enjoyed when visiting this place. He finds it almost remarkable that so many years have elapsed since he drove out here to assess Sal Pugliesca’s estate the day after the poor man had been blown apart. Sal was very clear in his instructions. If anything happened to him, this property was to be Molony’s priority. Tony needed taking care of. He deserved the lawyer’s attention. Molony had made it here within twenty-four hours of the mobster’s death, arriving with a briefcase full of documents that made sense only to a man with Molony’s ordered mind and that divided up the dead man’s assets.

  The different companies set up by the murdered Mafioso had interests in two refuse businesses and owned a property on South Broad Street in Philly. He also had a part share in a nightclub and owned half a condo in the Florida Keys. The house was a gift for his brother, Tony, when he was released from St. Loretta’s Hospital in 1976, having been declared sane enough to live alone. It was at once a kind gesture and a selfish one. It ensured that Tony had a place to call his own, and also that Sal had somewhere to hide the occasional shipment of contraband.

  Molony had not yet passed the bar exam, but he was already proving an invaluable asset to the law firm that Paulie Pugliesca had set him up with. He was the junior staff member but the partners knew he was the future. He had a gift for numbers, a flair for creativity. Sure, he was a peculiar piece of work, but he was efficient and he made money. Who cared about the sweat patches and the little round glasses, the fleshy face or the perfectly bald head? He was a lawyer, not a pinup, and if their Mob clients wanted him to look after their assets, the senior partners were happy to hand off to him.

  The day after Sal and Tony were blown up at Sal’s house in Philadelphia, Molony drove to Crow to assess the value of the property and to ensure that any possessions of questionable origin could be matched to fictional bills of sale should there be any difficult questions. Molony remembers weeping for Tony, though the tears were not of grief. He envied the boy who had suffered so much and who had now been granted his place in heaven.

  Here, now, Molo
ny remembers the sight that greeted him. The house was in a poor state of repair. The roof sagged, the wood panels were splitting around the rusting nails. And yet Molony liked it. Tony’s living room was spartan but not uncomfortable. There was a sofa and a rocking chair, books and magazines. The floor was dirty and the sills needed dusting, but for a young man who had spent time in so many dreadful institutions, this was a place of luxury.

  It was only when Molony sat in the rocking chair that he felt the breeze coming up from the floor. It caused goose pimples to rise up on his arms. His investigations led him to the basement. And in the basement, he made the discovery that changed everything.

  Molony finds himself smiling as he remembers that day.

  Now would be a good time, he thinks. I am ready. This is right.

  Molony looks at his watch. It has a blue face and a gold band. It was expensive. A gift from Sal Pugliesca. He wore one himself, like his father. Like Tony Blank. Molony had not been sure about taking it, but Sal had been so pleased with him for the work he had done in laundering a huge score from a hijacking that Molony had felt it wrong to refuse. He has worn it ever since. It is as much a part of him now as his cross and his scars.

  It is almost seven a.m. The sun has yet to rise but Molony feels no sadness at the thought that he will die by moonlight. It seems right, somehow. He has never been one for sunshine. He burns.

  “Wake up,” says Molony softly, and shakes the man on the sofa by the arm. He has to do it quite forcefully. Claudio coughs and retches as he wakes, and Molony can see how much pain he is in. When he pulls the gag from his mouth, he sees with regret that the tape takes some pieces of skin.

  “Are you quite well?” asks Molony, peering at him. Claudio recoils a little. “Can you smell me?” he says apologetically. “I’m very sorry. My skin is ulcerous in places and parts of my stomach are rotting away. Cancer, I’m afraid. It has consumed me from the inside out. Would you like some water?”