Nocturnes

by T. R. Stingley

  The blanket they were seated on offered the best of what she was able to scavenge from the old city…and some of the things that they were saving for better times. But Lessa had realized that this day might be the last of the “better times” for the foreseeable future. So there was the Macedonian wine that a cousin had brought back to Warsaw as a gift to her. A thin kabanosy sausage, smoked and spiced with caraway. Some Kasar cheese from Turkey that she had sliced from the wheel in her mother’s pantry. And a crusty bread, still warm, from her uncle’s bakery. The perfect picnic. A feast worthy of the lover’s-table. And a feast all but ignored by hers.

  Isaac had been morose for many days. Lessa knew his unspoken misgivings, and his guilt over not having taken her from Warsaw. For, now, the Nazis had occupied Poland and were encamped around the city. There was no escape, especially for the Jews. There was even darker gossip that concerned their people: the centralization of all Jews into one controllable area of the city, possibly the ghetto.

  This had all had a profound impact on Isaac’s mood. And Lessa had watched him change from a secure and confident young man into a troubled, fearful caricature.

  But, in a strangely paradoxical twist, Lessa was no longer afraid. She watched as the breeze danced along the tops of the tall grass that concealed them and she identified with that freedom. She was basking in the warm memories of their wedding night.

  That single night had fulfilled her as a woman and had empowered her with a confident courage. There was a new awareness to her life…an evolved understanding of the rooted connection of all things. She had come to realize the true nature, and the awesome power, of spiritual surrender. There was a shared vitality in allowing her self to be fully absorbed in her husband’s self, and into the living, essential world in general. She was necessary. Even more than that, her love was necessary. From this perspective she was even able to see, with great wonder, how the ugliness and the beauty of the world fit so seamlessly together.

  “We are so much a part of everything else,” she had mused that night as Isaac slept beside her. “There is no beginning or end…to life, or to love…there are only different forms.”

  In learning this, she had learned to abandon her fear of the night.

  She had wanted to awaken Isaac, to share her excitement. Life was precious. Each moment was weighted with significance, and love justified all hope. She had watched him sleeping and laid her head on the rise and fall of his slumber, listening to the strong, deep music of his heart. They sailed on gentle currents through the first night of their marriage.

  But now Isaac was drifting from her. And she knew that it wouldn’t help for her to say, “Love is eternal.” This was something his heart was going to have to learn on its own. Still, she needed to find the words that would bring him back to the precious moments of Now.

  “Darling,” she had spoken softly. “Talk to me. Tell me what it is that has hold of your mind, and what is choking your heart.”

  Several minutes of unanswered silence passed before she propped herself on an elbow and spoke again.

  “Isaac, don’t you understand that by worrying so much over the future you are robbing us of this glorious present? We are here, now…alone and free in this field. I am right here, beside you, your wife, your friend. This day belongs to us. Oh please, Isaac, let us laugh and talk as we did not so long ago. Teach me things…”

  “I can teach you nothing!” Isaac turned suddenly to face her, bitterness flowing out of him. “You knew long ago what we needed to do but I ignored it. And I have put you in danger. Don’t look to me for guidance, Lessa. A husband is supposed to protect his wife, and I have only…”

  She interrupted him quickly. “Isaac, you are wrong! You haven’t put me in danger. If we are in danger, it is not through our own doing. We have always loved and looked after one another. This is far beyond our control. But believing in our love, and appreciating our precious time together, is not. Love will see us through this, I know it. Don’t isolate yourself from me now. Don’t beat yourself up with what-ifs and why-nots. I need you, Isaac.”

  He stared up hopelessly at the heavens. The clouds were swollen with rain, and his thoughts were like them. He wanted to tell her…he needed to say…“I’m so sorry…”

  Suddenly the wind shifted, bringing the darker clouds toward them and pushing the stifling heat aside as they came. Isaac could smell the approaching rain beyond the trees and he rose to collect their things. But Lessa reached up to take his hand and pull him back down onto the blanket.

  They looked into each other’s eyes, each with their own desperate need. The first raindrops kissed their faces like tears as Lessa drew his lips to hers.

  “Eden was never tame,” she whispered into his open mouth.

  Isaac pushed her back and grabbed two handfuls of her windblown hair as the storm unleashed itself. Her mouth tasted of wet urgency. And despite his melancholy he felt the familiar arousal for her sweeping over him like the warm wind. It was easier than anything deserved to be. The way she unzipped him and found him ready in her hands. It was easy the way he lifted her skirt above her waist…easy…exposing the very center of herself to his need. And the easiest part, merging with her and with the erotic rhythm of her hips, with the erotic rhythm of her sighs…filling her to the apex…So. Damned. Easy. Nothing had been that easy since.

  And he hoped, as the warm rain fell unnoticed upon his back, that the darkness before them would be as light-foot quick as this pleasure, as this brief and terrible joy.

  Lessa opened her mouth beneath him, tasting the rain, tasting the mercury-goodness of her life, tasting his very heart. With the rain washing over her upturned face, she allowed the tears to fall freely.

  “Oh, Isaac,” she prayed. “My sweet Isaac.”

  Isaac curled himself into a ball of prayerful agony. “Dear God! Release me from this Hell and forgive my failure. Please, lord. Return me to my Lessa.”

  He covered his head with pillows. Two hours later a certain sleep came, and a mercy from his memories.

  *

  The next morning found a woozy, weary Isaac at the New Orleans coroner’s office, a cup of chicory in hand and some sixty-two files in front of him. He was welcome to them but he would have to make the copies himself. “And would you like a cup of coffee while you’re working, darlin’?”

  After an hour of copying and reading files as he worked, he realized that it was missing. There was no similar pattern here in New Orleans. He would take everything back to his room for closer scrutiny but, aside from a very random and insignificant similarity or two, there was nothing in common with the other cities. Nothing close to what was happening just upriver in Baton Rouge.

  That was odd. Why was New Orleans different when it shared the proximity of the other affected cities? Isaac left the coroner’s office and returned to his room. A closer inspection revealed nothing new.

  “Well,” he thought aloud, “tomorrow I’ll be in Biloxi. We’ll see what’s happening there.”

  Chapter Five

  Father Evan Connor left his residence and walked four blocks to his church. He entered the sacristy and prepared himself to receive confession. As he pulled the chasuble over his head he focused his thoughts on the sacrament that he was about to administer.

  It had, of late, begun to mystify him…to stir his imagination at the power men had assumed. He was about to grant total absolution for a myriad of sins. And he would do it, as he had so many countless times in the past, in the name of God.

  There would be a line of devout Catholics waiting for his blessing. For most of them, it was a powerful new beginning, an opportunity to start afresh. But for him it was, increasingly, redundant and pedantic. The same penance for so many different sins. Ten “Our Fathers”…five “Hail Marys”…or five “Our Fathers” and ten “Hail Marys”…or ten and a rosary recital and don’t ever do it again unless you are prepared
to confess yet again, etc., etc. For Father Connor, it was like administering a placebo to cure cancer.

  But he supposed that their faith took them beyond the predictable nature of it all, and genuinely freed them from the burden of their most recent sins. At least he hoped it did. He only wished that he could find the same fulfillment.

  It had been too long since he had experienced any of the dynamics that were supposed to accompany his calling. Most of his parishioners took it for granted that he was an enlightened man, that the Keys to the Kingdom were clutched in his certain grasp of the hereafter. They mistook his apathy for some sort of inner peace.

  His dilemma was particularly acute when he was called upon to instruct prospective converts to the faith. A man, a woman, or a married couple would sit before him, eager to embark upon the journey to salvation. They would explain to him how they had come to this point in their lives, how they had been moved by something deep within themselves, or by some experience that they could not easily explain away. And he would nod and say, “Yes,” and “yes.” They would glean whatever they needed from that to confirm the rightness of their decisions, and would leave the old priest feeling more and more the useless icon.

  He had prayed for deliverance from his weakness so many times that even the prayers had become numb and empty. He was running on pure habit.

  But it hadn’t always been so. He remembered clearly his youth, his early years as a firebrand in the Church. His acts, his works, and the passionate delivery of his sermons had earned him respect, and the grooming approval of the Roman hierarchy. It had all served to fulfill him in God. Evan Connor had been a stone-cold believer in his mission.

  When he met the young Isaac Bloom, he was at the apex of his calling. And when Isaac had confessed his desire to convert, the priest had taken it as a personal tasking from On High. He had committed himself to the task with zeal. He had wanted to teach Isaac, to foster an appreciation for the wonder of the here and now while offering a glimpse beyond the celebration of the Mass to a mystical place where love eclipsed the weary burdens of the world.

  In those first few months with Isaac, he too had come to believe in the possibility of all things. His mind and his spirit had expanded, and his daily partaking of the Host caused him to tremble with visions. At night, alone among the simple furnishings of his room, he would lay prone upon the floor and converse with God.

  Then, a year after Isaac’s emotional conversion, Evan Connor caught the attention of a controversial French priest who was doing some anthropological work in India: Pierre Chabot. Chabot had dedicated himself to the overlapping messages of love, compassion and tolerance in the world’s oldest religions. Messages that he saw as a vital bond between all of humanity. Messages that might, one day, rid the world of the plague of war. He had heard of Evan, and had become fascinated by the almost heretical sermons that rang out like warning shots from Connor’s pulpit.

  For Connor had begun to question some of the Church’s most fundamental paradigms. He saw a critical need for global birth control, particularly in the starving desperation of the Third World, where thousands of children each day were folding themselves into bony little balls of suffering and death.

  Chabot knew something about the charges of heresy. He had been accused on more than one occasion of an over-zealous effort to undermine the teachings of Creationism. And his work in India’s ancient places had taken on the trappings of exile. But above everything, he remained a devout man of God, who saw no threat to Heaven in the mysterious symbiosis of the world’s oldest religions. Even when those religions were more worshipful of nature than cathedrals.

  And he could see many of the same attitudes of loving rebellion in the young Irish priest here in London. It took a rare and unflinching courage to speak and act upon one’s conscience, especially while adorned in the robes of the Holy Roman Empire. Chabot could use such passionate commitment in his own search for truth.

  Evan had been both flattered and frightened by Pierre’s offer join his team. He prayed and contemplated the matter for a week. But, to Chabot’s surprise, the young priest decided against it, and the Frenchman returned to India, where he would be excommunicated three years later. From that point on Evan Connor fell into the party line and abandoned his idealistic challenges to official doctrines.

  It took the passage of many seasons for Connor to admit to himself that he had been afraid. To have gone off to work with Chabot would have placed him forever at odds with the political favorites of Rome. For the first time in his life, he had allowed his selfish interests to dominate his decisions. It was a habit he soon became comfortable with. And his once-powerful relationship with the Divine began to wither like a neglected flower.

  A few months later, he accepted a safe and comfortable position in Boston. From there he would be able to see clearly to the rank of Cardinal. But the anticipated call had never come. And the once feared and dynamic Evan Connor had aged and grown weak in his own service.

  Now, some fifty years after his first meeting with his one remaining friend, Father Connor was on the threshold of meeting his maker. The test results had been confirmed to him yesterday. Eight months to live, maybe less. And wasn’t that a cosmic kick in the pants? He wondered if, after all this, he would ironically burn in Hell now that his faith was gone.

  He stepped into the darkened interior of the confessional, looked back once more at the missed opportunities of his life, and sighed deeply. Then he slid back the screen and received the first of many, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…”

  *

  Isaac finished up his article at home with six hours to spare on his deadline. The phone had rung every hour since his return, but his machine had fended off the anxious pleas of his editor until his work was complete. With the paying job accomplished, Isaac was free to concentrate solely upon the mystery that he had uncovered in Atlanta. He still could not guess at how long the murders had been taking place. His data only went back five years, but it seemed to him that the pattern was well in place even then.

  For the next couple of weeks, he pored over his files and his notes, establishing the boundaries and the pattern to a point that would leave few questions as to its validity…at least in his own skeptical mind. As he did so, an uneasy awareness settled upon him. There would be another murder in Biloxi in approximately ten days.

  Isaac began to tremble. It had been relatively easy to keep his emotional distance from this thing, to look at it as a sort of amateur detective game until now. But here was a black and white prediction of where and when another innocent life would be taken. This kind of knowledge had to be passed along to someone with resources and manpower. Someone who didn’t have the uncomfortable feeling that it was more than mere coincidence that he had been in Atlanta that night. Someone who didn’t feel trapped by the circumstances, and by the urgency of his own ghosts.

  Like a reflex, he reached for the phone and dialed 911.

  “Emergency services. How may we help you?”

  Isaac stared at the receiver for several heart-pounding moments, then lowered it until it dangled from the end of his arm. The voice coming from the device asked questions regarding his health and safety. What could he tell her?

  “A mass murderer will strike in Biloxi in less than two weeks, and I know this because I have done my homework. But I don’t want you to think that I am involved…of course, I could be wrong about the whole thing…uh. Never mind.”

  Instead he spoke carefully into the mouthpiece, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I accidentally hit the wrong button on my memory dial.”

  He replaced the receiver and sat down to think about it for the hundredth time. He was boxed in. This “pattern” might well evaporate beneath the trained and analytical eyes of the authorities. Their obvious question would be, “Why does this seem so unusual to you?” That could be a difficult question to answer if Isaac came off as the only one intereste
d in the matter. This would be followed by meaningful glances between the interrogators, with discreet notes taken in the margins of their official reports... “check personal info and question neighbors on the activities of one Isaac Bloom…”

  Now a thought came that didn’t even surprise him. It was if he had expected it on the heels of all the others. He had to go to Biloxi.

  It was a long shot and would, probably, hopefully, involve a great deal of wasted time. But he would go, hole up in some comfortable hotel on the beach, and scan the obituaries every day until a likely prospect turned up. Morbid? Yes. But this would prove it or disprove it once and for all. And perhaps he could finally extract himself from this increasingly tangled web. Because the longer it dragged on, the more he felt himself a player and not a spectator.

  He took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair, forcing the machinery of his mind into idle gear. He had been sitting very still, allowing his thoughts to flow unimpeded through his head, when the doorbell announced a visitor. He opened the front door to the weary frame of Evan Connor, standing there like a cardboard cutout. He invited him in.

  “How are you, Evan?”

  “Not bad, Isaac. I just thought I would stop by on my way back to the rectory. It is a lovely afternoon and I have been enjoying a walk. I haven’t seen you in church in a while and I just wanted to make sure that you were all right. I’ve called a couple of times and gotten your machine, so I wasn’t too concerned. I know that’s how you dodge your pesky editors. But I thought I’d stop and say hello just the same.”

  The old priest had taken responsibility for Isaac’s safety from the time he first arrived on the boat, following Evan from London to America. The habit had evolved over the years. And with the technological breakthrough of things like answering machines, they had devised a system where the old friends could check up with one another from their own homes. If Isaac was out of the house or away from the phone, or simply screening his calls, then the machine would pick up. If the answering machine did engage, Evan would call back with a three-ring query, at which time Isaac would pick up. The phone would never ring unanswered unless something was wrong. If Isaac was home and all right, and not dodging editors, then he would answer himself.