Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  The tone was neither friendly nor unfriendly. Neutral. Very cold. Impersonal.

  Jamsie still thought he could get through to Beedem if he could just give him some idea of the dimension of the personal problem that was torturing him. But when he tried, Beedem broke in slowly and emphatically: “If you cannot make right decisions in personal affairs, you cannot be trusted with matters that involve our clients and our listeners.”

  Then Beedem lifted his head for the first time since Jamsie had entered his office. Jamsie looked for some spark, any inkling of hope for himself. Beedem’s eyes were blank. Really blank. No metaphor. They could have been made of colored glass, except that, unlike glass, they did not reflect the office or the objects around them or the light from the windows.

  Jamsie knew then that there was no use trying to get through to Beedem. He said something about catching up on the vacation days he had missed. Beedem bent once again over his notes.

  As Jamsie closed the door on his way out, he threw a quick look back: Beedem was sitting bolt upright in his chair, eyes fixed on Jamsie, glaring steadily. Beedem was looking through him, Jamsie thought. Was that a look of hate and sneering contempt in Beedem’s eyes? Or was it simply the natural reaction of a harried station manager to yet another personal problem of an employee?

  Going down the corridor to his office, Jamsie tried to remember some of Mark’s after-dinner conversation with him. He seemed to be the only one Jamsie had met who was sure he had a bead on Jamsie’s problem and what to do about it. But nothing was clear to Jamsie now. He sat down at his desk. He tried to clear his mind. He wanted to go over everything that had happened to him since he had taken up work at the station. His thoughts were in a maelstrom. He could not think logically. Words such as “good,” “evil,” “Satan,” “Jesus,” “Ponto,” “marriage,” “possession,” “free will” twirled and tumbled around inside his head. He could not straighten them out. Then “Beedem” began bobbing up in front of his mind. Beedem? Just like that, with a large question mark. “Jay Beedem? Jay Beedem? Jay Beedem?”

  “Jamsie, I’ve got the schedule for next month worked out.” It was his producer, Cloyd.

  Jamsie looked up stupidly and muttered: “Jay Beedem?”

  “Oh, he’s seen it. It’s okay. We’re all set. Wanna see it?”

  Jamsie took the schedule. But he could not concentrate on it now. “I’ll call you, Cloyd,” was all he could manage.

  When he was alone, he tried again. It was no use. He could see Mark’s face, Jay Beedem’s face, Ponto’s face, his own face, Ara’s face, Lydia’s face, Cloyd’s face. And Jay Beedem’s again, with that look of contempt and hate. But they were all question marks now.

  Slowly Jamsie began to calm down; and he tried to get some questions in order, at least. Was Mark right, and was he being invited to be possessed? Was he possessed already? Was Mark just another priest trying to make a convert out of him? Or maybe somewhere along the line the shrink had been right? Was he paranoid or schizophrenic? Making it all up?

  Still restless, his thoughts switched back to Beedem. What was he anyway? Just another stupid, heartless jerk? No, this guy had something else. And he had it in spades. Until today, when Jamsie had happened to glance back, he had never seen Jay Beedem display an emotion. Nothing from inside. He had never even seen him really laugh.

  He started to think more about Beedem as a person. What did he know of him? Beedem was a natural salesman. He could speak in 10,000 different tongues and tones, so to say, when he wanted to sell something. He had a vicious wit and could turn without warning on anyone and cut them down mercilessly in public. He often used four-letter words as if they were gilt-edged securities to guarantee the authority and accuracy of what he said. The women at the office shunned him. Some had slept with him once—but no one ever repeated the performance. He was either feared or despised, even when he made people laugh.

  Uncle Ponto still never appeared when Beedem was around. Ponto appeared everywhere else, goddammit, Jamsie thought bitterly. Why not whenever he was with Jay Beedem? Why not today, when he could have used a little of that glib coaching?

  Some strange edge to Beedem worried Jamsie. He was angry, sure. But that wasn’t it. He just couldn’t get it together in his head.

  Then all of a sudden Jamsie was distracted from his thoughts about Beedem. It had been a long time since he’d worried about it, but now he felt he had to solve the old puzzle of the “look,” the “funny-lookin’ face,” Great! As on that crazy night in Cleveland, he was sure now he was on the verge of discovering what he had “been told about it,” For the first time in years he tried desperately to get all his memories together, in order to piece the fragments into a composite robot sketch.

  Time and time again, as he sat at his desk, he thought he had it. His knuckles were white as he gripped the arms of his chair in the effort. But each time, the bits fell away from his bidding. He sat hunched up in his chair, laboring at this mental sketch: and slowly, bit by bit, the fragments started finally to fall into place and stay put.

  After some time, Cloyd stopped by Jamsie’s office again. He found Jamsie in extraordinary efforts of concentration, groaning and muttering to himself. When he could not get Jamsie’s attention, he became frightened and ran for help. He found two station engineers, and together all three of them watched Jamsie. wondering what they should do.

  Jamsie, meanwhile, was totally absorbed in his effort. He was on the very verge, he felt. But, at once, all the fragments fell apart into a long, jagged line at the end of which were Jay Beedem’s unsmiling eyes. Then, again in a lightning flash, the line of fragments seemed to pour out his right ear, make for the window, and disappear up into the blue midday sky. The last trace he saw of it was Jay Beedem’s face, for once broken by an ear-to-ear grin, trailing off at the tail end of the retreating line.

  Jamsie clapped his hands to his ears. He was shouting, a tangled, throaty gust of protest and rage.

  Finally he heard Cloyd’s voice coming from a great distance: “Jamsie! Jamsie! Are you okay? Jamsie! Wake up!” He felt three pairs of hands on him, and he looked into the frightened faces of Cloyd and the two engineers.

  “What’s going on here?” It was Jay Beedem, calm, dispassionate, annoyed, and bored all at once. He stood in the door and motioned with his hand to the others to leave. He told Jamsie almost paternally that he should take the rest of the day off.

  Jamsie felt completely beaten. He had not solved anything. He had not understood anything. It was idiotic for things to start flying out of his head again. He had not even gotten a leave of absence. The rest of the day off! Thanks a lot, he thought.

  He stood up drooping and bowed, almost in tears. Jay Beedem stood aside. Jamsie stumbled out of the office, down the corridor, and out it into the parking lot to his car. It was Jamsie’s last day at the station. He would not see Jay Beedem again. But at that moment Jamsie could not think ahead for five minutes.

  The moment he entered his apartment, he knew Ponto was there somewhere. There was that smell…

  “Now, don’t be angry, Jamsie,” the voice came from the hall closet. “I’m going to remain away from you until you call me. Don’t be angry. Just give the matter some cool thought.” Jamsie brightened slightly. But fatigue took over. He fell on the bed, and in a few minutes was fast asleep.

  It was about seven o’clock on Saturday morning when he awoke quietly. He was sure that some sound had awakened him. He listened for a few moments. Then he heard a rustling and scraping sound from the closet where Ponto had been the previous night.

  Jamsie grew tense and suspicious. What was Ponto up to now? He tiptoed over, stood listening a moment, then jerked the sliding door of the closet aside. What he saw galvanized him with a disgust and outrage he had never felt before, even in his worst times with Ponto. Ponto was sitting on top of the old icon, picking away at the bits of mosaic that composed the face of the Virgin. Already the eyes were two sightless black holes, and Ponto was workin
g on the mouth.

  When Jamsie looked in at him, he stopped in a leisurely fashion, one fingernail curled around a mosaic fragment.

  “We won’t be needing this garbage, Jamsie, will we, you and I?” He smiled self-assuredly. The smell wafted around Jamsie’s nostrils. “After all, I can’t spend the night with this thing beside me, now, can I?” Ponto smirked.

  Jamsie saw red. All the resentment that had piled up inside him since his early teens—his anger at being frightened, his frustration about that “funny-lookin’ face,” his disappointment with his father and mother, his final desire to be rid of Ponto and his importunings, his perpetual loneliness—all burst out from his inner self, flooding his mind with a nausea against knowing anything more about life. In that moment his will went rigid with a firm decision that pointed him to dying and death as his only release and hope of rest.

  For some seconds he stood swaying from side to side, his head aching. Then he broke into the desperate rage that propelled him like a wild man, swearing and cursing out loud, as he bolted down the front steps to his car.

  THE MUSHROOM-SOUPER

  There was nothing very unusual about Father Mark A.’s childhood or about his family. Mark is a native New Yorker. His father, still alive, is a Yankee from Maine who settled in New York after World War I. His mother, now dead, was a Kelly from Tennessee. Her family had come over from Ireland to America in the late eighteenth century. She had been educated in Kansas City. When she came to New York to stay a while with relatives, she met her husband. He worked in a large accounting firm.

  Mark was the third of five children. His two brothers still live in New York. One of his sisters married a Swiss manufacturer and lives in Zurich. The other sister, a missionary nun, was in the Philippines when World War II broke out. She survived in a Japanese concentration camp, but she was badly weakened and died in Manila after the war was over.

  All in all, no one could have guessed that a man of Mark’s normal and uneventful background would be the one person who could not only believe, but understand Jamsie’s predicament, or that Mark’s father’s rather prosaic profession as an accountant would be the chance link to complete the chain of circumstances.

  As a young man, after a year and a half of college, Mark entered the diocesan seminary. Seven years later, in 1928, along with eight other men, he became a priest. He spent ten years as an assistant in four parishes of the New York diocese. He became known as a hard worker and a very effective priest. He was practical rather than mystical, an activist decades before that was fashionable, and very hard to discourage. Those who knew him then recall him as bouncy, almost jaunty, with clear blue eyes, quick gestures, ready words, sudden flare-ups of temper and equally quick returns of good humor.

  Mark himself tells how in those early years life always seemed to him to be made up of “scenarios.” Each situation was composed of people and objects. You assessed the people, got to know the objects, and plotted your course of action, your “scenario,” for that situation. Mark shunned any wishy-washy ideas about “motivations” or any “mystical realities.” To many of his contemporaries he seemed to have a shallow and brittle approach. And, indeed, Mark now admits that in those early years it was as though his inner self was covered with a hard, protective rind that nothing pierced. He was impervious to any emotional appeal; and he was not held up or influenced by the intangibles of a situation.

  When Mark was about to be moved to his fourth parish, his ecclesiastical superiors offered him a choice: a parish in the suburbs, or one in the center of midtown Manhattan. Mark chose without hesitation to work in the heart of the city. And for the next two years he experienced a new set of problems, totally different from those he had been confronting in the outlying parishes where he had already served.

  At that moment in its history, just prior to World War II, New York was a mecca of sorts, and not merelv for those with financial and economic interests. Serviced by 21 tunnels, 20 bridges, 16 ferries, 6 major airlines, New York received 115,000 visitors on an average day and an additional 270,000 out-of-town delegates who came to 500 annual conventions. Through trunkline railways, buslines, airlines, highways, they poured into the city and, as one statistician of that time calculated, on any one given night the hotel bedsheets in use would have covered 840 acres of Central Park.

  The visitors could stay in any one of 460 hotels with a total of over 112,000 rooms costing anything from 25¢ in the Bronx to $50 per day at the Ritz. And, with or without the courteous and patient help of the eight young ladies in Macy’s City Information Bureau, they found their way to one or another of New York’s 9,000 restaurants, where they ordered their heart’s desire from Irish stew, Japanese sukiyaki, and Creole gumbo, to Swedish smorgasbord, Budapest salami, and Cephalonian afgalimono.

  “Hard-boiled New York is just a three-minute egg” rhapsodized the Convention and Visitors Bureau in one of its blurbs. Visitors rapidly discovered the soft center of that marvelous city. But Mark discovered that there was also a smell of human suffering and degradation.

  Mark’s parish was in the center of the tourist and hotel area. Between chambermaids, bellhops, desk clerks, cashiers, stewards, chefs, waiters and waitresses, and kitchen help, Mark calculated that there were 50,000 to 75,000 men and women whose hours were irregular and long. They went to bed when most church services were starting. Many were holding down two jobs at the same time. There was no way for these men and women to keep religion as part of hotel-life schedules. But it was such a hidden problem—or at least one nobody would normally think of—that it was practically neglected by every church.

  What heightened both the plight and the peril of those neglected people in Mark’s eyes was the web of organized crime—mainly in drug traffic, prostitution, and the numbers game—into which many were willy-nilly drawn. From simple steering of individual visitors to pimping for one or another of the several madams and their parlor houses; from simple bet collecting to bet agenting; from drug running to drug peddling and distributing; the road in every case was easy to find and too attractive not to try. Even with the Seabury investigation in 1930 and the breakup of the Luciano syndicate by Thomas Dewey some time later, there was no real cessation of this traffic in crime and vice.

  Mark’s father, as a certified accountant, handled the affairs of some major hotels in New York City. When Mark took up his new post, his father provided him with introductions to some of his friends and clients in the area. It was exactly the opening Mark needed in order to get to know the conditions in the hotels and restaurants, and to talk often and easily with the personnel. His factual mind seized on the salient elements, and his priestly experience and instincts indicated to him what could be done to meet the religious needs of the hotel and restaurant workers.

  By the time his next tour of duty came up for consideration two years later, he had his mind more or less made up as to what he wished to do.

  In August 1938 he got his chance. He had a long discussion with his superiors. He had a simple proposal to make: to undertake a special mission as chaplain extraordinary to the hotel and restaurant personnel in New York City. As Mark presented the case, it must have sounded like asking to go as missionary to savage lands. The superiors were impressed with his analysis of the situation. They were not difficult to persuade. The decision was made, and Mark went to live in a midtown parish rectory. He was relieved of all duties in that parish. It was to be merely his home base.

  His new parish actually lay in every hotel in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. He divided this parish into six areas based on a rough grouping of hotels. The Grand Central area was centered on the Commodore and the Biltmore. The Penn Station area had the New Yorker as its center point. Times Square was relatively self-contained. The East Side was dominated by the Waldorf-Astoria. The Central Park group centered around the Plaza and the Sherry Netherlands. Brooklyn Heights centered mainly on the 2,641-room St. George.

  But Mark’s beat was not exclusively hotels, and it definit
ely was not all first class. He knew restaurants, nightclubs, swing joints, dives, second-, third-, and no-class hotels. He was as familiar as the “regulars” in the Paradise Cabaret on Broadway and in the Cotton Club on 48th Street (where, as he recalls, “50 Tall Tan Girls” danced to Cab Calloway’s music). He knew Billy Rose’s Casino de Paree, and was well known at swing joints such as the Onyx, the Famous Door, the Hickory House.

  It was not surprising that Mark got to know some of New York’s best chefs (and some of the worst!). Partly as a means to help him reach the hearts and minds of some of his “parish,” Mark began to take an interest in cooking. One fine day he even found he had a genuine talent for cooking and that he had a real interest in it.

  It would not be long before he found that this was not the only part of his new life that would reach inside and become part of him always.

  Mark was on a late-night call—ordinary for his new beat—when he had his first close brush with a force that would later become the focus of all his efforts. It was at the bedside of a young prostitute who had been found bleeding and unconscious in a vacant lot near Ninth Avenue and 43rd Street. This and Sugar Hill in Harlem, where the mulattoes plied their trade, were the cheapest and the most dangerous areas in prostitution. Mark never went there except on urgent call.

  When he entered the ill-lit room where the girl lay, her mother was there. She indicated the little cot in the semidarkness of one corner. The girl was moaning in pain. In the shadows at the foot of the cot Mark could see the figure of a man wearing a hat and overcoat, hands thrust in his pockets. As Mark approached the cot, the man took out one hand and held it up in an arresting motion. Mark stopped.