She didn’t have to work very long putting that thought out of her head. What he told her did it right away. Whatever she had been anticipating, it was not this!
Julie Whitcomb belonged to a group that called itself the “Dante’s Delight Purgatorio.” They had existed in Forest Green for almost half a century, new members joining as older ones retired or “went emeritus,” always between four and six active members. Six in theory—in actual practice, it had never been more than five. And no wonder! How had they ever found as many as five? From what Angela combed out of Corwin’s description, they spent their get-togethers taking turns torturing one another. And Julie had brought him an invitation to join them!
“Good God, Cory, they’re smasters!”
“Not smasters,” he replied, sounding a little hurt and stiff. “Purgatorians.”
“Oh, really? What’s the difference?”
“Purgatorians participate in these activities not for titillation, but rather to assist in the penitential purification and spiritual balancing of our world.”
“Whatever fancy excuses you give it, they’re still smasters.”
“Angela, don’t you understand? Not even you? Purgatorians are in all significant ways the diametric opposite of smasters. Purgatorians have this motto: ‘Pain enjoyed is hardly penitential.’”
“It’s still wrong. Why, it’s sinful!”
“In what way sinful?” he argued. “In what way less meritorious than the fastings, hair shirts, and thorn bushes of the honored saints? The cilices and hard beds of Opus Dei? The scourges of the flagellants? The pious practices of the Penitentes, those who voluntarily participate in the Triduum by passing several hours of Good Friday affixed to crosses?”
“All of which we’re busy outgrowing! What do you think Madre Eleanor would say about this in Reconciliation?”
“What purpose would I have in confessing meritorious activity? The sacrament was never designed for boasting.”
“Boasting?”
“Are not the penances allotted us in sacramental Reconciliation mere vitiated echoes of the more stringent practices once enjoined on all notorious sinners and voluntarily shared by our greatest saints?”
“And shouldn’t we all have learned better by now?”
“What of the veneration still universally accorded to stigmatics? What, indeed, of the Passion and Crucifixion of Our Savior Himself—with Whose sufferings we are all bound to consider ourselves conjoined in mystic union? For what purpose does Holy Church so strenuously admonish us to eschew ‘Risen Christ’ and ‘Christ the King’ images on our crucifixes in favor of the writhing and bloody corpus portrayed with at least quasi-realism?”
“Oh, Cory, Cory, Cory, all that just happened to them. They didn’t do it to themselves! Not Christ and certainly not the stigmatics.”
“Not even through the purity of their prayerful self-identification with the suffering Savior? It’s a moot point—arguable. And does not the Pauline Epistle to the Romans beg us ‘through the mercy of God to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God’?”
“That’s misquoting—misinterpreting—making it mean something it shouldn’t! Offer our bodies in the ordinary way of everyday living—that’s what it has to mean!”
“And what of the famous Roman Martyrology and its still more famous successor in the Protestant branch of our joint creed, the magnum opus of John Foxe? Are we to adulate and strive to imitate our saintly sufferers, without aspiring to emulate their pangs? Are the merits and blessings of holy agony reserved strictly to those who can tease their enemies into administering them, never—outside the walls of certain religious orders and the Purgatory of eschatological contemplation—to those who serve one another thus in amity?”
“Oh, Cory, you’re getting it all twisted! Don’t you know—haven’t you even stopped to think—there are people all over the world suffering—really suffering, really being tortured—without ever signing any silly ‘consenting adult’ forms—look at poor Harry Jackson—and you—I mean, people like your so-called ‘Purgatorians’—just want to make a sort of—of spoof of it!”
“On the contrary,” he said, for the first time sounding more than just a little stiff and hurt. “Purgatorians are all too keenly aware of the involuntary sufferings of all these others. It is why they willingly choose to undergo similar treatment: in the hope of alleviating in so far as they can some small part of the world’s pain.”
“They’re idiots, then! Think, Cory, think! How can you alleviate the rest of the world’s suffering by adding your own to it?”
“Through some mystery of Cosmic Balance,” he replied slowly. “They met last Friday, and did not the atmosphere throughout Forest Green seem more relaxed already on Saturday? They held another, a special-need meeting on Saturday afternoon, and by Sunday the city felt almost returned to that sense of secure normality which has rendered it notable for almost half a century—the same half-century of the Purgatorio’s existence.”
“Coincidence!”
“Is it? Something of the need for Cosmic Balance of grief and joy, good and evil, we have sensed ever since the primordial awakening of our human awareness. The ordeals of shamanistic initiation, the blood sacrifices of native cultures—those pre-Columbian kings who drew spiked cords through their own tongues —”
“Oh, Cory, don’t—don’t tell me these people do anything like that!”
“Angela, please be reassured. The members of Dante’s Delight employ none but safe techniques, leaving neither scar nor permanent trace, excepting a single tasteful stamped tattoo in lieu of membership card.”
“Safe? Safe? How can you be sure —”
“Two of the Purgatorians are trained paramedics, Julie a nurse —”
“Julie!” Up till now, Angela had been so appalled by the rest of what she was hearing, that she hadn’t even remembered—“Isn’t Julie dating Dave Clayton? He’s a police detective, isn’t he? What does he think about all this?”
“That, I conceive, is between them. In any event, the work of the Purgatorio has no bearing on the…amorous activities of its members, who are bound in honor to engage in no such relationships among themselves and to regard the…procreational areas of the human body as sacrosanct.”
“Would Julie ever even dare tell Dave about it at all?”
“I entertain some suspicion that Julie might be in quest of a replacement, enabling her to go emeritus from purgatorial activity. Angela…I am honored by this invitation to join in their efforts.”
“Cory!” Reaching across the armrest, she clutched his upper arm. “Cory, it’s one thing to rolegame all this kind of thing in your imagination, but this—to really do anything like this—it’s sick! Whatever you say, whatever holy-sounding arguments you come up with—it’s sick! Think how I’d feel —”
“You would witness nothing of it. Attendance is strictly limited to the membership.”
“And that doesn’t tell you anything? But think how I’d feel, just knowing you were being hurt, really hurt, not pretend hurting—I don’t care how ‘safe’ and ‘no scars’ it is!”
“How you would feel…as a friend?”
Angela hesitated. If Julie really was with Dave Clayton, now…should she? “Cory…as your oldest friend, your best friend…maybe, someday, even more than that…I’m begging you, don’t, DON’T ever get yourself involved in anything like this, this ‘Purgatorio’!”
“As…someday…‘even more than a friend’?”
“Promise me! Promise me you won’t.”
He pulled her hand gently from his arm, lifted her fingers to his cheek, his forehead, his lips…then laid his other hand on top to sandwich hers between. “Angela…you have my solemn promise. Now—now, I think, lest matters precipitate over-hastily, I had best seek the solitary sanctuary of Arnheim. Apprise me by telephone when you are safe at Aunt Sall
y’s domestic abode.”
“You didn’t even need to ask. The library coffee shop tomorrow?”
“Bien sur—no, wait. Tomorrow is Saturday. The Sorrento?”
“At two.”
She watched him safely inside his building, and drove away with her head in a whirl.
Had she really hinted…? And had he really jumped on the hint? Pounced on it? And didn’t that mean…?
Not Julie. Not Julie at all. Why so slow on the uptake, Angela Garvey? Monday…till today…five full days…no, maybe Monday shouldn’t really count, she—Angela—hadn’t seen him at all that day, because of Julie, because of…
Why, she wouldn’t really have had to extract that promise from him, at all! They had to do these things to one another, didn’t they? And Corwin would never have been able to handle hurting anyone else like that! All she’d really had to do was remind him…
But she was glad she had made him give her his solemn promise, because that was the way she’d hinted, and he’d hinted back…
Wallace Library itself was open on Saturday and Sunday, and you could even get into the coffee shop and out on its terrace to use the tables, but only for vending-machine beverages and snacks, because they didn’t have enough volunteers to staff the kitchen on the wraparound days of the week. Angela had her name on that volunteer waiting list, too. Maybe somebody else would sign up, and then they’d have enough volunteers to keep it open all seven days. Then she’d be right in the same building where he researched things for his writer clients. Maybe she could get in touch with Gaia…Gaia what?…again, talk her into volunteering, too. What fun, if they were staffing the place at the same time and tried tricking him sometimes as to which was which, each pretending to be the other one!
There was the Forest Green Community Theater, too. She was on the list for their behind-the-scenes work.
And he’d hinted back! “‘As…someday,’” he had said, “‘even more than a friend.’”
The big, overgrown boy with his Peter Pan ideas about pain and manly heroism!
“‘Even more than a friend.’” Of all that last argument of hers, those were the words he’d zeroed in on, the words he’d repeated back to her, the words that must have clinched his promise. “‘As…someday…even more than a friend.’”
It wasn’t until she was pulling into Aunt Sally’s garage that she remembered he never had told her who the other three were, the ones in it with Julie.
Well, it really made no difference, did it? He wasn’t going to join the…silly group—maybe I really shouldn’t call it anything worse, that might be like throwing stones—the silly, stupid group of fools. Ever. He’d made her his solemn promise.
If she found herself looking at people suspiciously, wondering, “Is he or she one of them?” to the point where it made social functioning awkward, then maybe she’d have to ask Cory. Otherwise, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Judge not. Unless maybe to call them silly, stupid idiots.
“‘…even more than a friend.’”
Being alone in Aunt Sally’s car just now, Angela hugged herself.
CHAPTER 12
Saturday, September 30
Guiderules insisted that a bow kept constantly strung lost the resilience needed to shoot arrows, and therefore everybody had to take time off for “rest and relaxation,” the resemblance of people to bowstrings being so obvious. Much as Rosemary Lestrade hated her workline, she hated her mandated time off even more. How the heck did a floater put away thoughts about people suffering injustice, long enough to perpetrate personal “rest and relaxation”? Shouldn’t mealtimes and sleep hours be plenty? Who the hades had ever come up with the thirty-hour work week, anyway? Not that Lestrade had ever felt herself bound by ten-to-four—ten hundred to sixteen hundred hours as it was now—five days a week, but national as well as local guidelaws limited the amount of overtime anyone on salary could put in, even voluntarily and without pay, except during emergency conditions. Called the “Anti-Sweatshop Laws.”
Well, even in Forest Green, the Department apparently didn’t count just one murder victim grounds for letting any of its members stretch “emergency conditions” out longer than the first week. And, thank the Lady! almost two weeks and they hadn’t found a second victim. Forest Green continued one of the safest small cities in what was considered a pretty safe era in the fifty-five Reformed States of America.
But it left Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade feeling not only unstrung, but unraveled these two wraparound days when last week turned into next week.
She dozed in bed as long as she could, with her radio tuned softly to a jazz station. It was about the only kind of music she could rely on neither to mention somebody doing somebody else wrong criminally or otherwise, or to remind her of the various kinds of soft music—slow classical, gentle Big Band, lush and moody, or the quieter sounds of nature—the guiderules made them pipe into their interrogation room at the station. Not that Lestrade had ever agreed with those of her fellow pollies and of the general citizenry who complained about coddling criminals. Better coddle twenty real perpetrators through the preliminaries, she always felt, than make one innocent party squirm by mistake. Her fallen-away Wiccan heart applauded every guiderule designed to guard people under arrest from the police brutality of the bad old days. But her psychomystical head felt that, if you were going to be reminded of your workline, you might as well have been out on the job.
She finally got up about oh seven hundred, made coffee (not as well as they made it down at the station), scrambled herself a couple of eggs, read a couple of children’s picture books from Wallace Public, surprised herself with a chuckle or two at that eccentric just-home-from-college floater who had a reserved study carrel there, always dressed in black, let the fanciest words anyone could find in Webster’s Unabridged flow out of his mouth like a waterfall, and was still about the only person she had yet encountered who seemed to understand how a middle-aged polly might like to check out children’s picture books for her own consumption. Everyone else, fellow patrons and librarians alike, tended to ask her about the sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and neighbor tykes they assumed she was reading to.
She was flipping through a Dr. Seuss when her phone chimed.
It was Chris Grunewald. “Les?”
“Chris.”
“So you actually spend some quality time at home, after all.”
“I serve time at home. What ‘quality’ it is, I couldn’t say. What have you got for me?”
“The full report is in the mail, second copy on its way back with the corpus delicti. Just thought I’d make triple-sure with a phone call. Also one more chance to hear your dulcet tones.”
“Skip the flattery, Grunewald. Just give me your best guess.”
“Okay. Best guess. My educated opinion: most of the marks were inflicted post-mortem, with a high enough probability to satisfy most courts. Impartial courts, anyway.”
“If you can ever find any such thing as an impartial court in cases like this one.”
“First, you sort of have to find a viable candidate for defendant, don’t you?”
“Mmm. You said ‘most of the marks.’”
“Almost an equally high probability that the tattoo was stamped on pre-mortem.”
“Interesting.”
“Exact figures, probability percentages, and other pertinent details in the report.”
“Didn’t by any chance check for poison?” Lestrade asked without much hope, already knowing the probable answer.
“Les, Les, Les!” A couple tsks of the tongue. “There are some limits even to my wonder-working powers. You know before we can start running tests for poison, we’ve got to have some idea what kind of poison we’re looking for. Otherwise, more different toxins out there, than there are tissue samples in a body or minutes in a year. I had to sneak Jackson’s corpse in for you on my own time, as it
was.”
“Some injectable poison.”
“Want to ship Jackson back and wait a century or two?”
Lestrade sighed. “I just thought you might have some new testing stuff in that up-to-date big-city lab of yours.”
“No such luck, Les. No such luck.”
“Okay, Chris, thanks. You’ve been a big help here. Blessed be.”
“Wow! A personal blessing from the high priestess of the Earth Mother herself!”
“Never exactly ‘high,’ Chris, and defrocked for years.” Rosemary Lestrade had sold her soul to the police force in order to clear innocent people, and ended up sneaking in unpaid overtime, only to see too many get put away in spite of her best efforts. Thanking Chris again, with the promise of coming back up to Chicago sometime for a flower show on Navy Pier or something, she signed off and cradled the receiver.
* * * *
Julie had two phone calls Saturday morning before lunch. The first at 0930 hours, from Dave, anticipating tonight’s Date Number Four with an hour of checking her menu preferences: after their splurge Thursday evening, they were economizing a little with an early dinner of his cooking at his place, followed up with an early and long night in his bed. The second call was from Corwin at 1115 hours—for him, as she understood, very nearly the crack of dawn. With most sincere apologies and heartfelt appreciation of the honor, he grieved to tell her that he must decline her highly commendatory and gratifying invitation into Dante’s Delight Purgatorio, in order to fulfill a solemn promise he had pledged the evening before to one whose happiness he prized above all lesser considerations.
All But a Pleasure Page 11
