Parishioner

by Walter Mosley

  “The boy is in AA and falls off the wagon each year in July. Smokes too much and according to his Facebook account finds a new girlfriend every August.”

  Mothers hit a pink key and two new photographs took the place of the one. On the left side of the screen stood a tall and slender man next to a buxom woman who looked like she should be grinning but instead forced a frown. Both in their forties, they had the old-fashioned aesthetic to look dour for portraits. It was an older photograph, fifteen years or so, Xavier thought. On the other side was a newer picture of a young blue-eyed, crew-cut blond man in an orange jumpsuit. He was sitting on the other side of a bulletproof glass window. A California prison. San Quentin, if Xavier wasn’t mistaken.

  “Lester Lehman murdered his parents for no apparent reason on an April afternoon at their home in Oxnard,” Charlie Mothers said. “He used a shotgun. Killed his sister and the housekeeper too. He’s about to get a second trial because certain facts brought up in the original hearing were illegally obtained. Cylla Pride’s firm is representing him.”

  “No shit.”

  “The law is the law,” Mothers intoned.

  “You think these two are my boys?”

  “They were both adopted in April ’eighty-eight. The same witness signed both papers—Sedra Landcombe.”

  Ecks frowned and sat back in the office chair.

  Mothers went on. “But that’s not the kicker.”

  “No?”

  “Not nearly,” the bronze man said with an unconscious goofy grin plastered across his face. “This Verify thing was a real poser. I finally found a data trail of false identity papers for underage children that led to a legal adoption agency named Libertas, Unitum, Veritas Incorporated, called LUV. This nonprofit corporation is one of many subgroups belonging to Wicker Enterprises. The legal major revenue stream for Wicker is a company that makes commercials for third-world television companies. But if you look closely you can see that there’s another business buried beneath the commercial company.”

  Mothers hit a key and a group of photographs organized themselves into the general form of Picasso’s Guérnica. The images in this collage were even more disturbing than the antiwar original: young boys being buggered by fat tattooed men, girl children suffering triple penetration by men wearing dresses, a naked child praying while a man ejaculated over his face and hands. There were two dozen images, each more unsettling than the last.

  “Verify’s films cost at least a thousand dollars per copy,” Mothers said. “They’re sold all around the world. Even I can’t locate the IP where the offers originate and the money is collected. It’s probably in some country that has an absolute monarch or dictator. They make double-digit millions.”

  “What does this have to do with the third boy?” Ecks asked.

  Mothers switched off the image and turned to his fellow congregant.

  “On May third, 1988, LUV gave Leonard Oscar Phillips to Loretta and Manly Hopkins for adoption. Again, Sedra Landcombe signed the adoption papers. Over the years the Hopkinses have adopted nine children—every one of them a moneymaker for Wicker Enterprises.”

  “That, um, that poster,” Ecks said. “Was it Wicker’s?”

  “No.… What I mean to say is that I got the images from a secret Wicker website but I used an image system that uses various surrealist paintings for templates to present collections of images. Like it?”

  “Where do the Hopkinses live?”

  “In the hills of Santa Monica. They’ve made a lot of money over the years.”

  Xavier considered the information presented by the computer geek in the demigod’s body.

  “How many hours?” Ecks asked Charlie.

  “How many hours what?”

  “Do you work with your trainer?”

  “I’m down to five a day, three days a week.”

  “Does it help?”

  “I haven’t used a computer to blow up a Chinese robot factory or kill some guy in an ICU for a long time.” Mothers’s smile was sickly hopeful.

  “What do they call that?” Xavier asked. “What you do.”

  “Techno-anarcho-terrorism. Tat-a-tat, tat-tat-tat, the ultimate virtual machine gun of the modern world. The battle cry of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. Man-machine against machine-men.”

  “But now you funnel these desires into bodybuilding?”

  Charlie nodded, looking much less like a deity.

  “Pretty much,” the pumped-up hacker agreed.

  “Not completely?”

  “I want to get into the guts of systems and strip them bare. A hunger like that doesn’t go away. Sometimes I want it so bad that I start sweating.”

  “But the exercise stops you,” Ecks said, “that and the bikini girls upstairs.”

  “That and the fact that I know Frank would have me killed if I crossed the line.”

  “Killed?”

  “After the baptism your soul belongs to the church.”

  “My soul?”

  “Didn’t Frank ever tell you his theory that Earth is Eden for animals but hell for humanity?”

  “Just the other day.”

  “Didn’t he add that it’s a proving ground and we are here to prove it wrong?”

  “He didn’t say that exactly.”

  “Frank, as far as I can tell, is the devil,” Mothers said. “Not some evil being but the last chance for evil souls like you and me. He’s there either to usher you into redemption or to bury you underfoot.”

  “Nobody ever told me about a baptism,” Ecks said.

  “It’s a secret ceremony. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “Because, Ecks,” Mothers said, “because you’re special. All the anointed know it. Frank is … Frank is grooming you for something. He brings people into the fold now and then, but rarely does he go out recruiting, not for years now. When he brought you in we all knew to expect greatness.”

  “Has Frank ever told you that he’d have you killed if you turned back to your old ways?”

  “No. He didn’t have to.”

  “You’re crazy. You know that, don’t you, nerd boy?”

  “Maybe I am. Maybe it’s crazy to have faith in a higher power. I don’t know. All I can tell you is this—I was planning to put out a virus that would jam the controls of a hundred jumbo jets all at once, all over the world. Every one of them would have crashed in an urban setting. I had it planned down to the microsecond.

  “I was nearing the end of the data distribution design when one Sunday morning I was grabbed in my own home and taken to Seabreeze City. I was brought to a sermon and I listened. I was made an initiate, as you are now, and then after three years I was given my first mission. After that I was baptized and now my life belongs to the church.”

  Ecks wondered whether the new man in his heart had anything to do with the church of Father Frank. Did he feel the faith that Mothers did, or Iridia, or Captain Soto?

  “Do you have all this information printed out for me?” Ecks asked Charlie.

  “About the baptism?”

  “About the boys.”

  “Yeah … yeah.”

  Charlie got up from his chair and went to a small shelf under a bank of computers somewhat larger than the regular desktops. There he retrieved a thick black folder and a thinner orange one. These he handed to Xavier.

  “The orange one has the names of the kids and the people who bought them,” he said. “The black one has as much as I could get about Verify. It’s international and really, really corrupt. About twelve years ago there was a shakeup in the organization. After that it got much more difficult to define.”

  “But it’s still child pornography?”

  “Like a tobacco company,” Charlie said. “They stick to what they know.”

  On the way back home Ecks found himself wondering about something he’d not considered before. It wasn’t an existentialist dilemma as he had studied in his Survey of Philosophy course online
. He wasn’t searching for his identity but rather his purpose—what he was doing, not why. In church on Sundays he concentrated on what the words meant to him. Frank preached and people confessed in Expressions. They all hung together, trying to rid themselves of long lives filled with sharp knives and evil deeds.

  But what happened after the end of the movie, when the bad man dropped his pistol and walked away from the intended victim? Where did he go? What was to become of him? Who was he then?

  The Kokoran Building on Temple in La Puente was chrome and glass, overlooking a broad green park. There were no guards or even video cameras evident. The man sitting behind the reception desk in the broad, air-conditioned lobby looked to be a retiree who had taken this do-nothing job to supplement the rising cost of health insurance.

  In essence it was the most banal, nonthreatening space Xavier had seen in a very long time. He sat in his car across the street from the boxlike nine-story structure and closed his eyes, trying to locate the reason his pulse had jumped and his forearms ached.

  Finally he gave up this internal divination, reached under his seat, and pulled out a .38 pistol that was an exact duplicate of the gun that he’d discarded after killing the nameless Hispanic at Sedra Landcombe’s home. Pocketing the pistol, Xavier walked with slow steps across Temple and into the vast lobby guarded by the old man behind the oval green-glass reception desk.

  “Can I help you, son?” the grizzled and graying white man said.

  Xavier’s mind flashed back more than forty years. His mother had brought him to the Brownsville precinct to visit his father, who was awaiting arraignment. Xavier had been brought along with his younger brother and cousin because there was no one to take care of them, and Panther Rule was in jail for something called assault. Xavier’s mother, Pearl, brought them there to confer with his father about when the lawyer would come and what he would say.

  Xavier was five and it was hard for him to bear the idea of his father in chains, his face bloodied, bruised, and swollen from the terrible beating the police had given him. He didn’t understand all the words that had been said, but he gleaned that Panther had attacked a white man in a grocery store who asked the question, “How can I help you, son?”

  Xavier went to bed wondering about a simple sentence causing so much pain. The grocer was in the hospital and his father set to stand trial on charges that might send him to prison for years. All because of a question that Xavier had heard many times.

  Standing there in that air-conditioned lobby, Xavier remembered the year that he spent silent because he thought that any innocent word he might say could call down a bloody beating.

  Language is the great edifice of humanity, Father Frank had once lectured. Our words have thousands of meanings and histories longer than any nation, people, or tongue. Some of our utterances have come down from our animal ancestors and are older than the human race itself. Languages die and are reborn. They create our minds and transmit our thoughts down the long corridors of history. And so every word spoken is blessed and greater than the speaker and those who listen. Language is an avalanche of meaning and we, our minds, are tumbling stones babbling and muttering into existence the entire epoch of the divine.

  “I’m looking for a man named Calvin Leigh,” Ecks said to the aged receptionist. “He works for Wicker Enterprises.”

  “Do you know his extension?”

  “Not really. I got his name from a friend. She needed me to ask him a question.”

  “Why not call?” the old man asked.

  “I’ll be happy to talk to him on the phone if you dial the number,” Xavier said, still wondering what his father might have done if the old man had called him son.

  The semiretired receptionist stared at Xavier through watery brown eyes, weighing his next question.

  “Who should I say is calling?” he said.

  “Egbert Noland for Doris Milne, concerning Loretta and Manly Hopkins and their adopted children.”

  “Say again?”

  “I can write it down if you want.…”

  The call was made and the introduction given. The old man waited a beat and then repeated the words that Ecks had written down for him. He waited a bit longer this time and then looked up at the man calling himself Egbert Noland.

  “Mr. Leigh says to go right on up. He’s in nine-oh-nine on the ninth floor.”

  If Ecks had been a superstitious man he might have consulted a numerology handbook before taking the elevator. Four-oh-four followed by nine-oh-nine might have meant something. But he just took the old man’s direction, walked to the lift, and pressed its rectangular chrome-coated button.

  It was at the end of a long and wide hallway. The suite was behind double doors made from solid planks of white wood. The handles were brass and the ringer was an emerald glass button.

  Ecks pressed the button, a click sounded, and he pushed the doors inward.

  He walked in consciously keeping his hand away from the pistol in his pocket.

  Behind a waist-high barrier of the same white wood the door was made from a big oak table stood in for a proper desk. Behind this table sat a voluptuous woman who was in her forties but had not yet given up the struggle for eternal youth. The dress she wore was tight and on a theme of peacock feathers. The fabric was silken and shimmery. From her earlobes hung fans made from strips of pink coral.

  She had brown hair, brown eyes, and skin that gleamed from makeup that cost more than most receptionists made.

  “May I help you?” she asked out of insincere courtesy.

  “Calvin Leigh,” Ecks said.

  “And what is your business with Mr. Leigh?”

  “Private.”

  The furrow of her eyes told Ecks that she wasn’t used to flippancy.

  “Are you going to tell me?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  The woman squared her shoulders. They were impressive shoulders, wide and with some muscle. Xavier smiled, wondering whether the woman might try to remove him physically.

  He might enjoy that.

  “Mr. Noland?” a man’s voice said.

  He was Eck’s height and suggestive of the desert. He wore a sand-colored suit to go with his tan hair and sun-burnished skin. His eyes were faded amber orbs. The silk T-shirt he wore was sweatpants gray. He might have been a Western desert in a previous incarnation.

  “Mr. Leigh?”

  “It’s okay, Fannie,” the sandman said. “Mr. Noland called.”

  Fannie’s contempt might have been for either man, possibly both. She turned her head in a dismissive gesture, lifting a single sheet of peacock blue paper from the table-desk.

  “Come with me, Mr. Noland,” Leigh said.

  Ecks followed the man, who was somewhere in his thirties, down a long aisle that ran at an angle bisecting a pen of desks separated by waist-high, movable walls.

  There were people moving around the cubicles in this area: office workers in dress uniform, men and women going about repetitive tasks like bees or starlings, grass growing, or zombies in one of George Romero’s films.

  They came to a dark green metal door. This portal seemed out of place. Everything else was lightly colored, with vapid personality and air-conditioned breath. But this metal door was almost medieval, unashamed of its darkness and opaque nature. Xavier thought that if he were a night watchman and alone on this floor he would set his chair next to that door for company and solace (though solace was not the word he imagined).

  Calvin pushed the door open and ushered Ecks in.

  If the door was an anomaly the office was completely unexpected. The walls of two sides, north and west, were all glass looking out over the unmanicured park. The workspace was wider than it was deep—but it was very deep. The ceiling was also transparent with the exception of three steel girders holding up the roof. The furniture was all plastic, mostly colorless, and transparent.

  Leigh lowered into a glasslike chair behind what should have been a classic walnut desk th
at was instead made from see-through plastic. Ecks could see the files and papers, paper clips and condoms, even the half-pint of amber-colored liquor in the bottom drawer. There was nothing on top of the desk: no computer or desk lamp, blotter or pencil jar.

  The emptiness of the desktop reminded Ecks of the clutter on Lou Baer-Bond’s desk. The thought of the detective set off a concatenation of suspicions that had been brewing in the back of the gangster’s mind.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Noland.”

  The guest chairs were festive: green, blue, and red plastic—see-through like almost everything else in the room.

  Ecks chose a red chair to sit in.

  “How can I help you?” the young businessman in the see-through office asked.

  “Pops downstairs asked you my question.”

  “Something about adopted children,” Leigh said with a bewildered look on his face. “I didn’t understand.”

  “You the president here?” Ecks asked.

  “Executive vice president in charge of operations.”

  “And you let just any old fool talking gibberish up in your office?”

  “I …” Leigh’s pale amber eyes examined Ecks closely. Then he asked, “Are you in the business?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You seem to be … a very physical man. You come in here talking about Manly … just a natural leap.”

  Ecks laced his fingers and put both hands on his lap.

  “Leonard Oscar Phillips,” he said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A child that Wicker Enterprises bought from Sedra Landcombe.”

  If Leigh was an expressionless desert, there was a storm brewing somewhere in the atmosphere above his head.

  “This is America, Mr. Noland. As an African-American you should know better than anyone that slavery was outlawed here.”

  Ecks tried to think of some urbane reply that would keep the conversation going in order to stave off the thunderstorm. But banter did not come easily when he remembered the photographs revealed by Charlie Mothers’s reinterpretation of Guérnica.