The Lucifer Gospel

by Paul Christopher

  “Which one is it?” Hilts said. Finn reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the passport she’d picked up no more than an hour before.

  “Idiot!” groaned Hilts, chiding himself.

  “What do we do?” asked Finn.

  “Hope they don’t notice,” said Hilts. He pulled Finn back into the shadows. The sound of footsteps was very clear now. Finn was suddenly aware of the impenetrable darkness behind them, and her imagination was more than capable of visualizing what that ghastly blackness held. Miles of corridors, millions of skulls, twice as many sightless eyes staring into eternity.

  The footsteps slowed. Finn saw shadows cast off their pursuer by the thin light overhead. The footsteps stopped dead. One person. He’d seen the passport and was trying to figure out what it meant. The figure stepped forward into his own shadow. It was the bearded man from the car; he’d managed to switch back and meet with his companion from the opposite platform at Denfert-Rochereau. He had a gun in his hand, a very modern-looking automatic made from some sort of flat black composite polymer. There was a fat sausage-shaped thing attached to the barrel. A silencer, she guessed. He wasn’t going to draw any attention to himself. As he bent to pick up the passport, the gate pin settled into its socket with a small clanking sound and the moldy old bones finally proved too much for Hilts. He sneezed.

  The man whirled, gun arm extended. A cold green light leapt out from the top of the weapon like a sinister ghoulish thread—not only a silencer, but a laser sight. Finn felt Hilts’s hand on her shoulder, pulling her back even farther into the darkness. She held her breath and stepped back as quietly as possible. She reached up with one free hand to guide herself back through the dark, her fingers trailing over the stacks of bones. The bearded man shoved the passport into his jacket pocket, then stepped up to the gate and started manhandling it out of its sockets. Hilts’s hand squeezed her shoulder again, and silently she kept moving back. Her free hand suddenly reached out and touched empty air. Hilts guided her around into a second side passage, this one running away at a right angle from the first. Finn’s fingers touched a skull in the wall to her left. She slid her fingers into the eye sockets, hooking them around the nasal sinus. She eased the skull from its place in the wall. It slid into her hand with a faint wet scraping sound. She gritted her teeth and hefted the skull. About two and a half pounds. It suddenly occurred to her that she was ahead of Hilts. If the bearded man turned and fired she’d be the one to get shot. She froze. Directly ahead of her she could see the line of green light from the laser sight. She felt her muscles tightening. If he continued along the side passage there was a chance they could get in behind him and escape. She held her breath again, listening for the sounds of the man’s footsteps. Instead she heard a small scurrying noise behind her and then a squeak. Hilts swore and the line of green light turned down the second side passage and blazed into Finn’s eyes. She didn’t even pause to think. She took one step forward, totally blinded, and straight-armed the skull at a point two feet above the searching beam of the laser, holding the bulbous cranium like a boxing glove on the end of her hand. There was a hard cracking sound as the skull connected, then fell apart on her fist. She heard a sighing hiss like air going out of a tire and the laser light wavered, then spun down as the bearded man dropped to the floor of the passage. The beam illuminated the mess Finn had made of his face. He was unconscious, his nose broken and his lip gashed. The left side of his chin also seemed a little out of place.

  “Glass jaw,” commented Hilts. He bent down and retrieved his passport from the man’s pocket. He picked up the gun, slid out the clip, then threw the weapon into the deeper darkness behind him.

  “Strong left jab,” answered Finn. She picked up the two bloody pieces of the skull and examined them.

  “I wonder who you hit him with?” said Hilts.

  “We’ll never know,” she replied. She gently placed the two pieces of the skull back on the stack of bones.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Hilts.

  They made their way back to the main corridor and ran down it. Ten minutes later they reached another portal and the passageway began to slope upward, the walls bare limestone now instead of bones. Another ten minutes brought them to a second spiral staircase, where a woman sat behind a desk selling postcards and slide sets and a second uniformed guard sat with a sour expression on his face. Finn and Hilts climbed the long flight of stone steps and reached a small, plaster-walled room with a single push-bar door. They pushed and stepped out into blinding sunlight. Finn felt a swift wash of relief, as though she’d been granted a reprieve.

  “He’ll be coming to by now if he hasn’t already,” Hilts warned. Squinting, Finn looked at their surroundings. They were on an unnamed backstreet somewhere. The wall behind them was whitewashed stone covered with peeling old graffiti. The tag on the wall read “Bad Idea.” Finn couldn’t have agreed more.

  “Where to? she asked.

  “Well, thanks to you we both have passports again, so maybe we should use them,” offered Hilts. “I’m beginning to think we’ve worn out our welcome in Europe.”

  “Simpson said DeVaux’s last port of call was Nassau.”

  “I can’t think of a nicer hideout. The Bahamas it is.”

  28

  In any other country Nassau International Airport would have been a bus station. Low ceilings, fake wood paneling on the walls, cracked floor tiles, and cheap yellow plastic seats in the waiting room. Sometimes, if the Tourist Office is in the mood, a grouchy steel band will be banging away in one corner surrounded by cardboard cut-out palm trees and homemade Christmas tinsel.

  U.S. customs preclearance for people on the way out means that lines sometimes trail outside the building and into the parking lot. Most of the time neither the air conditioning nor the conveyor belt work. The airport personnel don’t work at all unless they have to. The security checks are about as lax as the ones you get at Ouagadougou Airport in Burkina Faso. There is only one set of toilets and one cafeteria-style restaurant, and only one shop, called Nature’s Gift, which sells only soap. This is the place where people from the United States come to catch a flight to Havana. Once this was the gateway to Paradise.

  This Eden, however, like any other, was prone to corruption. The snake in this garden was organized crime, and the apple from the tree of knowledge looked suspiciously like cocaine and marijuana going in one direction and bales of hundred-dollar bills going in the other, after spinning around in electronic Laundromats with names that sounded like banks but weren’t. One way or the other six hundred and fifty metric tons of cocaine and ten times that much marijuana flowed through the islands of the Bahamas every year. The cash would fill a hundred freight cars. Cockroaches in the Bahamas have wings, lizards are everywhere, and the roads are full of potholes. When the Disney cruise ships dock in Nassau they play the first four bars of “When You Wish Upon a Star” on their horns so loudly you can hear it on the other side of New Providence Island.

  On the other hand, the sand is blindingly white, the sea is the color of emeralds, and the sky is like sapphires. Swimming is like paddling around in a giant hot tub full of tropical fish. The people are polite and genuinely friendly, it rains for an hour or so every day just when you’re getting a little too hot, and they don’t put white people in jail, if the Fox Hill Penitentiary is any indication. Public transportation is cheap, fun, and frequent and the food is wonderful.

  Finn and Hilts managed to catch a shuttle from Paris to London and then a nonstop flight from there to New Providence. Thirteen hours and ten minutes after climbing out of the Paris Catacombs they were climbing into a cab at the airport in Nassau. The sun beat down like a hammer, and the cab was without air conditioning. Swain & the Citations were doing “Duke of Earl” on the stereo.

  The driver introduced himself as Sidney Poitier. He looked just about the right age for it, his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin stark white against his dark skin. He was wearing round,
tortoiseshell glasses that looked old enough to really be made from tortoiseshell. The eyes behind the lenses were watery with age and desperate experience beyond imagining. They were also bright with humor and intelligence. Uncle Remus driving a taxi. What Richard Pryor might have been like at seventy, Finn thought.

  “Is that really your name or just something for the tourists?” Hilts asked, surprised.

  “My name before his. I believe I’m a year or two older. Poitier’s nothing special on the islands for a name. Sidney neither. He from Cat Island, as I recall. My old dead mother say he was a bad one so they send him to Miami to get good. That a laugh, General: the word ‘good’ and the word ’Miami’ like oil and water; no mixing them up. I say to people, my name’s Sidney Poitier, and they say, Guess who’s comin’ to dinner, but it sure as shit ain’t this Sidney eatin’ at the Royal Bahamian in the damn heat of the night. Which say, you goin’ anyplace in particular or you just want me to drive you around, General?”

  “A hotel,” said Finn. She’d slept well enough on the long flight but she definitely needed a shower.

  “You come from England on the B.A. and you don’t have a reservation?” Sidney asked.

  “We were pressed for time,” said Hilts. The only luggage they had were a pair of British Airways flight bags they’d picked up at Heathrow and filled with necessaries from the airport shops.

  “You eloping or something like that, General?” asked Poitier. The taxi was sweeping around the forested edge of Lake Killarney. Pine trees, not palms.

  “Something like that.”

  “Then you lookin’ for something you might call more or less secluded, right?”

  “More or less,” Hilts agreed.

  “Got just the place for you then, General,” said Poitier, agreeably.

  “I thought you might.”

  They turned off John F. Kennedy Drive onto the scruffy track of old Blake Road and soon came out onto West Bay Street and the chain of condo complexes, gated communities, and million-dollar beachfront bungalows that make up Sandyport.

  Following Bay Street along the coast they reached Cable Beach, with its long row of high-rise hotels, nightclubs, and restaurants. Eventually the hotels faded away as they went around the deep, pretty curve of Go Slow Bend and reached the narrow strip of public park at Saunders Beach. After that the bloom was off the rose. A mile out in the water a white concrete tower that looked like something out of The Jetsons ruined the view, and Poitier told them it was the old Crystal Cay Observation Tower and Aquarium and was usually closed for one reason or another.

  On shore the beachfront houses became older and crummier, interspersed with bars, clubs, and condo units poking up through the sand and limestone and sparse patches of grass. Just past a yellow house, surrounded by a razor-wire-topped stone wall, the taxi turned again and they pulled up into the driveway of a time-battered Victorian clapboard with a screened porch and narrow windows that looked as though it belonged on the set of Psycho. A carved wood sign out front announced that this was the office of Sir Percival Terco, M.P., Minister of Justice. Directly across from the big old house was a row of fish-fry shacks. The nearest one said Deep Creek.

  Poitier grunted. “Percy hasn’t been Minister of Justice since Linden O. Pindling in ninety-two, but he likes the sign. And nobody here calls him Sir, believe me, General. He went away to England on holiday a few years back, came home and said Queen Elizabeth knighted him while he was there. Brought back a fancy piece of parchment with the Terco crest on it. Said it was hundreds of years old. Swans on it.” He snorted. “Black swans, maybe.” The old taxi driver laughed. “Motel’s around back.”

  He drove in behind the house. A long L-shaped white building that looked like renovated slave quarters or a transformed chicken house stood at the end of an asphalt lot. There seemed to be seven units. There was a strange cupola like an afterthought on top of the building and a set of stairs running down to the ground with a banister made of old pipe. In the middle of the parking lot was a raised wooden platform in the shape of a boat. Above it was a sheet of rippled fiberglass, just like the one over the carport of Pyx’s place in Aix-les-Bains, except this one was yellow instead of green and topped in turn by a big satellite dish. There was a television mounted in a padlocked wooden box in what would have been the bow, a Ping-Pong table amidships, and a charcoal barbeque in the stern. Where the rudder would have been on a real ship was a public telephone mounted on a pole. In between the barbeque and the satellite TV were rows of padded benches and some lawn chairs. Behind the deck of this wooden boat sailing in its parking lot sea, between the edge of the asphalt and a swampy-looking inlet, was a huge cream-colored old Daimler Princess, tires rotted off, weeds growing up around the winglike fenders and the wide running boards. Something from another time.

  A very black, very skinny man in baggy pants and a moth-eaten wifebeater undershirt was cooking something on the barbeque that was creating enormous amounts of smoke. “Lloyd,” said Poitier. “Percy’s brother. He owns the motel.”

  “Where’d he get the car?” asked Hilts.

  “The Duke of Windsor,” said Poitier. “Creamie-pie leave it here when he left the king’s employ. Lloyd been going on about fixing it since 1956. Which is about as much true as Percy been knighted by the Queen. Lloyd’s a good man though, General. He won’t do you wrong.”

  “Creamie-pie?” Finn whispered.

  “The Duke, I guess,” Hilts said and shrugged.

  An elderly black woman as skinny and ropy as beef jerky with a face to match came out of one of the motel units wearing bright blue rubber gloves and carrying a red pail with a mop in it. She saw the taxi and waved her free hand. Her smile was more like a grimace of pain.

  “Mrs. Amelia Terco herself,” Poitier explained. “Mother to Lloyd and to Percy. Does the cleaning for her boys. Looks like her rheumatism’s acting up.” He laughed. “ ‘Course, it’s been acting up since Hemingway came here to bonefish once.”

  “A little old for that kind of work, isn’t she?” Finn asked, startled. The woman was ancient.

  “Don’t you go telling her that,” Poitier said with a laugh. “She bite your head off. Tell you Percy was useless except for lying in Parliament and Lloyd too lazy to clean up after himself, let alone other people.” They climbed out of the taxi. Lloyd waved his spatula then went back to staring down into the smoke pouring up from the grill.

  “Good mornin’, good mornin’, how are you this mornin’?” said Poitier to Lloyd Terco, joining him at the barbeque. “Brought you some business.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” said Lloyd, squinting through the smoke. “You want some nice grouper, young lady?” he asked, smiling at Finn. The smoke wafted over her. It smelled delicious, and she told him so.

  “Get the pretty young thing a plate, Mr. Poitier, and one for her friend as well,” instructed the chef in the undershirt. Poitier went to a table laid out in front of the big TV and picked up a couple of paper plates and some plastic cutlery. “He tell you his name was Sidney Poitier?” Lloyd asked.

  “He did,” Hilts said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Far as I know,” answered Lloyd. “Calling him that since he was six years old, which in his case was a long, long time ago. Just wondered if he brought it up. He usually does. Thinks he gets better tips that way.”

  Poitier came back with the plates and the utensils.

  “Telling lies again, Lloyd Terco?”

  “Whenever I can,” Lloyd answered. He used the spatula to slide a couple of lightly battered slabs of fish onto the plate. “If I had a deep fryer we’d have some chips or some conch fritters, but I don’t so we won’t.” He pronounced “conch” konk. “Sad thing, but I’d burn myself if I had one,

  so p’raps it’s for the best.”

  Finn sat down on the nearest bench and rested the plate on her knees. She started to cut into fish with the plastic knife and fork.

  “Eat it with your fingers, girlie. Mr. Poitier there brought you the knife
and fork just to prove we have manners. Won’t cook you in a pot or some such.”

  “No bones in your noses either,” said Hilts.

  “Those are African niggers, my son. Island niggers got civilized a long time ago,” said Poitier blandly. He winked at Finn. She took a bite of the fish and winked back. Poitier liked that. The fish melted in her mouth. She tasted beer and lime. Lloyd handed fish out to everyone and then took some himself. He put his plate down beside one of the lawn chairs, went to the front of the boat and opened up a small fridge under the TV. He uncapped four bottles of Kalik and brought them back to his guests. Finn took a swig. She wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but this was like drinking liquid honey.

  “Great,” she said.

  “Funny name,” said Hilts, reading the label. He pronounced it kay-lik.

  Lloyd corrected him. “K’lick,” he instructed, just barely separating it into two syllables. “Named after the sound the cowbell in a steel band makes.”