I started hitting airports, train and bus stations, taxi stands. Zip. Ditto hospitals and morgues. If Isabel had left town, it wasn’t via public transport or pine box. Reaching out to my last few friends on the police force was similarly dispiriting. I started visiting churches, synagogues, arbitrary places of worship. Isabel’s face brought me downturned mouths and Isn’t that a shame s, but no results.
My reports to Miss Lopez were perfunctory. She told me Cora had slid further downhill. I think it was keeping itself going by sheer will, hoping that someone would bring Isabel back.
I sat in my office and bit my lip until it should have bled, walking though options. Isabel’s pic was propped up next to the girls’. So, Jo, Isabel. My eye flickered over the trio.
Three expressions of utter guilelessness. Faces alit with heady expectancy. They could go anywhere, do anything. They were hope. They were life.
But they sat here, on my desk, captured in moments of wonder. Frozen in possibility.
These children did not belong in my office. Their being here was a violation. They should never have put their faith in me.
I knew where I had to go. I had always known – and had wasted days.
I put my head down, hands over face, resigned, loathing myself.
I hate moots.
Every city has a Greytown. Ours is a northside slum once intended to quarter miscellaneous population detritus: junkies, immigrants, juicer hoboes between train hops.
Soon after Moot Point – that day when death became debatable and funeral homes lost business – a decision was made from on high to reorganize the social hierarchy. Ghetto denizens found themselves shifted to more suitable surroundings, and the new Greytown was abandoned to moots. While no laws actively forbade a conscious corpse from lingering in Lifeville, moots were politely encouraged to consider Greytown their new home.
A handful of jazz clubs operated on its borders. Joints with names like The Belly Up, The Dirt Nap, The Worm Bait – dismal haunts where lifers got their giggles slumming with the dead. The music wasn’t anywhere near good, moot combos being reliant on fate to supply them with musicians still gifted with lips to blow and fingers to tickle ivories. Any moot of real talent inevitably found itself onstage at a lifer’s club, eking whatever pleasure it could from its extended sojourn aboveground. I’d caught Charlie Parker at the Carleton while on a case. If anything, death had only improved its playing, adding an indefinable touch of despair that resonated long after the tunes had ended.
My best bet was The Death Knell, the closest a Greytown club would ever come to respectability. After tipping the lifer doorman with a growl and a flash of Marion’s ample assets, I took a seat at a booth and motioned for the waitress. A group of businessmen was laughing uproariously as the moot behind the bar painstakingly assembled a fleet of complicated cocktails with its one good arm. The joke was on them, I knew. Not only was the hooch watered down, it was a safe bet the bartender was leaking juice from one of its open orifices into every glass.
The waitress walked up – another moot, all appendages intact and body deloused should a discerning customer wish to order an Open Coffin, a nice-nellyism for corpse coitus. I slipped her a fin and asked for the manager. While I waited, I took in the onstage trio. The saxophonist managed to blurt out a passable “Harlem Nocturne,” even with the hindrance of an open torso. A dwarf in clown makeup added a touch of macabre theatricality to the set by squeezing the sax player’s lungs like bagpipes, to the delight of the audience.
“You know, Terry wasn’t reborn like that.” A moot with skin dark as java, one whitened eye, and a body that was an altar to infidelity slid in next to me.
“Good to see you, Jimmy.”
“Tut, tut. Madame Destiny of the Nine Spheres, when I’m at work.”
“Apologies. I like the eye.”
“Flatterer. Rubes love it. They think it bestows some kind of extra perception into,” it shifted its voice down and took on a robust Jamaican patois, “the vast all-ah-knowing cloud-uh of the great beyond! ” The moot tapped its head against the back wall of the booth and its left eye, the blue one, popped out and bounced into my waiting palm. “They were both white once, but clients were beginning to think I was blind, not psychic. So out went leftie.”
Business was obviously doing well, well enough that few would suspect Jymma Olfonse was one of the oldest moots in town. In life she had been a card sharp with a gift for prophetic fabrication. I’d crossed her palms a few times and she’d never steered me wrong, but since my death I’d kept away.
After its murder and resurrection at the hands of a disgruntled client, Jimmy took up with some resourceful miscreants who could craft opportunity out of atrocity, renovated an abandoned dive, and became a success. All its profits must have gone into body upkeep, which, I could see, was worth every penny. Even up close there wasn’t a trace of moot. Except for the eye, and the bruises around its neck, which Jimmy kept visible as a badge of some sort of honour.
I tossed the marble back. Jimmy slipped it in and blinked it into place.
“There was nothing wrong with Terry’s body, he just isn’t a very good musician. He needed a gimmick, so he cut his chest open and gets the shortie to man the bellows. How could I ever turn that down?”
“You’re all heart.”
“Ain’t that the truth. Plus, I’d swear he’s a better player now.” It laughed at that, a laugh in sound only. “Brass tacks, Duds.”
“Is the reunion over?”
“You died years ago, yet I only see you now? You’ve hurt my feelings.”
“Something tells me you’ll get over it.” I handed Jimmy the photo. “I’m looking for this girl.” I ignored its smutty tsk tsk. “I’ve caught a missing kid case. Can’t find her among the living. Maybe she’s found her way down here.”
Jimmy considered Isabel’s face. “Cute. Too cute for a place like this. Sorry, don’t recognize her.”
“I figured.” I slid the crumpled journal page over and tapped it with my fingertip. “This mean anything to you?”
Jimmy let the paper lie, reading the scribble from above. Even with one eye false and the other cloudy, I could see them frost over. “Nothing to me,” it said. “Looks like gibberish.”
“I’d never play poker with you, Jimmy. Doesn’t mean I can’t read a lie.”
Jimmy looked at me, something blazing behind its one good eye. “How’s the family?” it leered. “Keeping well?”
I stiffened. “Stick to the subject.”
“Those girls still run you ragged?” Jimmy leaned forward, painted lips carved into a smile that wouldn’t fool a blind man. Its voice was empty as my wife’s marriage vows. “Why, they must be adults by now. Any grandkids on the horizon?”
I fought the urge to drive my fist through that smirk. “You’re still a sick twist, Jimmy,” I managed.
“And you’re still dull. Death hasn’t changed that.” Jimmy feigned a yawn. “Show yourself out, Pasko. I’m not interested in what you’re selling.”
The moot made to leave. I grabbed its forearms, pushing my mug up close. “Let’s not mince. I don’t like being here, so let’s bypass the dance. I’ve got a girl who went all churchy, stole some cash, and vamoosed. A doornail writes a note, that’s all I have to go on. You know something. Who’s this Nex?”
“What should you care, some spoiled breather brat wants to dance on her grave?” It spat in my face. “Look at yourself. Detective Pasko, always worried about the lifers.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Everyone knows. You’re shuffling blind in the light. You’ve lost touch with who you are. There isn’t a Greytowner around who doesn’t know this word. And none of them will tell you a thing.”
“Talk,” I said, squeezing tight. “Or I’ll cause you so much hurt you’ll go bankrupt trying to put yourself back together again.”
“You’re a traitor to your race, Pasko. You know what we call you? The self-hating moot. The lifer lover. The
great dead dick, pretending a pulse.”
“Talk. ” I snapped its left arm like a matchstick. Letting go, I whipped out Marion and pointed her at the approaching doorman. The room went quiet, the band ceasing its desecration of Cole Porter, all eyes now on the Dudley Pasko floor-show.
I looked back at Jimmy, arm bones splintered through skin, its face mild, as if I had just suggested we go grab a bite.
“How’s Marion, Dud? You allowed conjugal rights? Keeping the bed warm for when she gets out?”
I pressed the gun against Jimmy’s neck. “I’ll puncture your brainstem, babe.”
“Did the razor hurt, Duds? Such a clichéd exit. I’d figured you to eat your gun.”
“You’ll be a brain in a jar. Really limit your career choices.”
“Boring,” it said. “I never liked you in life, Dud. I like you less now. The ol’ S&M.”
“What?”
“That’s where you’ll find your girl. That’s where they all go.”
I let go, warily watching the doorman as I stood to leave. “And what happens at St. Mike’s?”
Jimmy looked at me, almost sadly, rubbing the open bone. “Maybe you’ll wake up.”
St. Michael’s of the Celestial Anima Cathedral had been an oozing blotch of pessimism since its erection. Nestled among some of the shoddiest buildings in the ghetto, it should have been a beacon of hope by default. Instead, its grand archways and eloquent gothic spires somehow expressed a sardonic outlook on the futility of existence, as if its low-balling architects had foreseen mootkind and infused the stonework with apathy. It made a perverted sort of sense that Bishop O’Shea found a home there.
After his conviction following one too many kicks at the underage can for the Holy See to ignore, the ol’ S&M had been unceremoniously forsaken. Even moots didn’t bother with it, preferring to attend services in one of the other Greytown churches.
The roads grew steadily worse the farther you trekked toward Greytown’s heart, and it was full night by the time I made my way to St. Mike’s. I’d had to walk the final dozen blocks, the streets barely walkways through a wilderness of concrete and steel, lit only by the occasional working street-lamp.
I approached the façade cautiously. A few candles flickered behind its windows, beams of sickly light fighting vainly against the murk. From within, a lone voice warbled in the theatrical cadence of what could only be a sermon. After a pause, a chorus of “Amen.” A wheezy pump organ began to gasp a barely recognizable rendition of “Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear.”
I tried the doors. Locked. I took a few steps back, looking for another way in.
“Help you?”
I swallowed a yelp. A hatchway in the door had slid silently open and a bored-looking lifer looked out, his tumbledown face lit from beneath by a candle.
“Sorry, you frightened me.” I made a show of regaining my composure. “Is this St. Michael’s? I’m not sure if I have the right place…”
“You here for the sermon?”
“Yes, the sermon. I apologize for being so late.” I could make out a collar and cassock, but if this mook was a man of the cloth, I was the pope. Most clergymen I’ve come across have fewer facial scars. And more teeth. “The roads, you see…”
The man smirked. “Helps keep out unwanted guests.” He squinted at me. “I don’t think I know you, Mr…?”
“Smith.” I took my hat off and held it to my chest in both hands, taking a step back into the shadows. From behind the fake priest I heard the music mercifully end. A shout of “Hallelujah!” reverberated through the passageways. “Dudley Smith.”
“This is a private meeting, Mr. Smith. And I don’t know you.” The trapdoor began to shut.
I reached out and blocked the opening. “There must be some mistake,” I stammered while I pulled at the panel. “Madame Destiny said I would be welcome. She said Nex was the one I needed to see. Please, I’ve brought the money.”
He paused. “Show it.”
I hurriedly fumbled at my pockets and finally held up my billfold, letting it drop through my grasp. “Dammit.” I bent down, hugged myself to the door below the opening. “Sorry, it’s dark out here,” I called out. “Could I get a light?”
The man pushed his head through the opening for a better look. I reached up, linked my fingers behind his head, and yanked, crushing his throat against the wood and holding fast. He shook briefly while his lungs wondered where all the air went.
I let go and he slid back, thudding to the floor. Reaching in, I fiddled around blindly for the latch until the door swung open with a creak that couldn’t sound more ominous. I picked up my wallet and stepped inside, kicking the false priest as I passed. Half to make sure he was out cold. Half to make sure he knew I had been there.
The voice became clearer as I crept forward in the murk, holding Marion out in front. I heard “death,” and “God,” and “absolution.” A lot of “Amen!”s. And finally, as I neared the inner entrance to the main chapel, “communion.”
I pulled the door open a crack and peeked in. Candles lined the walls, directing balletic shadows about the room. At the opposite end, an enormous wooden crucifix loomed over an apse, the eyes of its tortured inhabitant wide and judgmental. Beneath its gaze, between the pews, a group of about thirty worshippers lined themselves up. I couldn’t make out their faces, not in the gloom, not with my eye. I opened the door as wide as I dared and slipped inside.
The organist launched into an abysmal interpretation of “Amazing Grace.” The queue calmly shuffled forward. I sidled up the left aisle, keeping to the dark. A figure in religious vestments stood atop the dais, placing a communion wafer in each obediently open mouth and offering liquid from a garish chalice. The music droned on, the organist a suspiciously mature altar boy.
I edged closer, crouching behind a pew. I could see faces now. The parishioners were all lifers – old and young, men and women, several races. The only thing they seemed to have in common was their attendance. Those finished with communion had retaken their seats. A few had their heads lowered in prayer. Or slumber.
I scanned the parishioners, not seeing her.
I felt a slight prickling in my upper back. Then, my chest. I tried to stand but remained fixed to the pew. The knife pinned me to the wood like a butterfly on display.
“Still moving, Mr. Smith?” The voice breathed in my ear, each word a croak, as if their speaker recently had his windpipe violently pulped. “What a clever little moot you are.” The most definitely not a priest pried Marion from my hand while I futilely pushed against the bench. “I don’t like clever little moots, not at all.”
The barrel of my gun pressed up behind my ear.
“Careful with that, she’s a present from Mom.”
He cocked the hammer, a disrespectful click that ripped through the quiet. The priest paused and looked over, sizing up the situation. I could make out a wispy Van Dyke staining a weak chin, lips equally at home in a smile as a scowl. Its eyes glinted, lenses opaque with scratches. A tendril of fear tickled my gut as the former Bishop O’Shea took me in, frowned, then resumed its theological ministrations.
“You work for a moot?” A few of the faithful had noticed me. None looked particularly compelled to intervene.
“Quiet,” the henchpriest hissed.
I scanned the faces. A few candles had snuffed themselves out, making identification difficult. Near the procession’s end I thought I could see a ponytail, maybe a dress.
“Seems odd, you working for a moot,” I went on. “What with your noticeable antipathies.”
“I don’t like moots. I do like getting paid.” He motioned the gun at the lineup. “These people? Five large each.”
An elderly Chinese couple stepped forward in unison and accepted the Eucharist. I watched them potter back to their seats, the man staggering near the end, the woman weakly pulling him along. I looked back and saw Isabel Lopez joyfully open her mouth to accept a wafer placed serenely on her tongue by the good bishop. She t
ook a few tastes from the vessel, crossed herself, and peacefully retook her seat, the last supplicant of the evening.
“What now?” I said. “We all go in peace? Something like that?”
“Now, Detective,” O’Shea intoned, “we begin the crossing.” It spread its arms outward to the congregation and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Smiles lit their faces – those with eyes still open. Isabel’s face beamed with sleepy contentedness. Her eyelids drooped closed, then opened again. All around her, members of the congregation began to drop their heads.
“You have done so well, children,” said the moot, its prayer complete. “Very soon now, you take the next step toward eternity.”
“Sounds like quite the deal,” I called out. “Anyone get in on this who doesn’t have five grand?”
The henchman pistol-whipped the back of my head. I put my hands up, performing the actions of the wounded. My legs tensed beneath me.
“Ignore this heathen,” the moot continued, unfazed. “He is unworthy of the gift God has bestowed upon him. Embrace the darkness when it comes, it shall last merely a moment. And then…” The smile of a kindly Samaritan creased its face as it gestured to the wooden messiah “…you shall know the rapture of his righteous love.”
“Rapture?” I shouted. “That’s the grift?”
“I said!”
Another blow to my head.
“Be!”
Another wallop.
“Quiet!”
I pushed up with my legs. The knife resisted, its blade carving into me, sliding off a rib. I yanked myself left and fell free, dodging the next blow.
Off-balance, the henchman lurched forward into the pews. I grabbed the knife, now loosened in its berth, prying it free. Before the henchpriest could regain his footing I blundered toward him, knife out, an ample flap of me dangling loose beneath my arm. The blade met his chest as Marion’s barrel met mine.
He pulled the trigger twice as I plunged the knife in. I felt one of my lungs deflate. He fired once while he fell, once more while he bled out. I pried Marion from his grip as he died.
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