“Well, I’m glad you stopped by, Evan. I have just recently completed my latest assignment. It may well be my last. I think that it may be time to retire for good. Things are getting strange in this world of ours. In fact, there are a few matters I would like to discuss with you.”
Evan looked carefully into Isaac’s face. He could see fatigue. But there was something else there as well.
“I can appreciate your sentiments, Isaac. I have been feeling the call to leisure myself. I intend to speak with the Bishop next week about plans for my own retirement.”
Isaac smiled. “That is news well-met. I have to say, I am surprised that you have waited this long. You have given so much to your flock. It’s time that you enjoyed some time of your own beside those still waters.”
The priest frowned and looked away. “Yes, I suppose that it is time to reflect some upon the winding road of my life. Maybe I’ll go down to the Carolinas for some fishing…”
There was a wistful catch in his voice that invited Isaac to examine the gray sorrow of the priest’s eyes. He realized with regret that he hadn’t looked closely at his friend for many years. They had fallen into the routines of their private lives, both of them struggling under the burdens of their respective pasts, drifting along on the subtle currents of their losses.
Like so many in the church community, he had taken the priest for granted, knowing that he would always be there, ready to respond to any crisis promptly and with compassion. But where did priests go for their own renewal? Isaac sounded the depths in Evan’s eyes. To his sad dismay, he saw that there was little fire there.
“What is bothering you, Evan?”
“I’m not quite sure,” he replied stiffly. He hadn’t decided how best to break the medical news to his friend. But he did feel a need to reveal his ennui, to pour the emptiness of his heart into the encouraging hands of his long-suffering comrade.
“There is a numbness that has overcome what I used to feel. Everything I do and say seems to echo with the hollow ring of doubt. I know that I am tired. But I think this may be more than retirement can cure. I am afraid to admit it,” he paused and examined the edges of the rug beneath his feet, “but I feel that my faith has died.”
Isaac took the priest by the arm and guided him over to a chair. He sat down across from him and tried to find a thread of thought upon which he could weave the meaning of the priest’s life. But before he could say anything, Evan had risen and was looking down at Isaac with a worrying blankness in his eyes.
“I have become a phony. People come to me, to me,” he emphasized by tapping himself on the chest, “for guidance and direction. But I am the most lost of the lost. And I have been for many years. The flock is following a shepherd who is astray in the wilderness. They are my responsibility. All of those souls seeking for God, and their priest hasn’t been in touch with God for so long that God has moved away. I am so afraid. What has happened to me, Isaac?”
Isaac’s mind was spinning and turning upon itself. Of all that seemed certain and solid in the upheaval of his world since his loss of Lessa, this priest had been the rock. Everything suddenly shifted beneath him, and the ground of his life fell away into the gravity of a foreign place.
His mind raced back to London. The circle had come back around. Evan Connor had once pulled him away from the brink of hopelessness and put him back in touch with some semblance of life. Now he sat here drowning in his own despair. Few things were worse than seeing an idealistic man shackled by the harsh jailers of disillusionment. The question was, what could he do for the priest when he, himself, so often struggled with a paltry faith?
“Evan, listen to me carefully. You have had a dramatic impact on countless lives, including my own. I have known you long enough to bear witness to that fact. What you are going through is common to the human experience. What would your faith really mean if it were never tested? You have often told me that suffering and uncertainty are necessary experiences for the forging of unshakeable faith. Take them into your own hands now, Father. This can only make you stronger.”
Evan walked slowly to the window. The leaves had begun to betray the arrival of autumn. He considered the cycles of life. Perhaps he should have tried harder to recapture his friendship with God before old age had caught up to him. Now he could only look upon his coming death with a weary resignation. He was a priest who had come to doubt Heaven…to doubt the encompassing love that he had once implored Isaac to place his trust in.
“You are right, Isaac.” He spoke with his back to the room. “And I am tired. More than I have ever been. I will go back to the rectory to consider this some more. I’ll work my way through it.”
He turned and smiled at his friend as an offering of reassurance. As he started for the door, Isaac spoke quickly. Perhaps too quickly.
“Evan, why don’t you come to Biloxi with me? Take some time off. I’m not leaving for another five or six days. That will give you time to make some arrangements. We could play some golf, maybe spend a day at the track. What do you say?”
“Idiot!” Isaac’s mind barked at his spontaneous request. “What are you doing? You’re going to Biloxi to look for a serial killer! And you’re inviting a depressed priest to keep you company? Great idea. Why not take the entire catechism class as well…make it a field trip…”
But the weary priest solved his dilemma. “No, thanks. I wouldn’t be good company, though I do thank you for the offer. Something tells me that I need to spend more time alone with this. But I’ll see you at Mass before you leave.”
He stepped across the threshold of the door, leaving Isaac relieved, concerned, and more than a little anxious.
He had almost confessed to Evan the mess that he was in. But Evan’s problems precluded that. And if he couldn’t confess it to the priest, at least for now, then he couldn’t share it with anyone.
Chapter Six
Five days later he was sprawled beside a pool on the Biloxi strand, sipping a Cotes de Provence. The bone-dry Rose had a mineral crispness that was the perfect antidote to the humid afternoon. Aside from the habit of enjoying an expensive wine, he was involved in his other habit…waiting. He was trying to absorb a Kesey novel, but the fluid prose kept catching in the rocky shallows of his preoccupation. A stranger was about to die. He or she might be out on the streets right now, looking for a handout, a kindness from some unconcerned passerby. But, if his theories were correct, that person would be dead within a week, and would no longer depend upon the used-up compassion of a used-up world.
He daubed sunscreen on his flaking nose. He was trying to accept the last true warmth of the season even as he was trying to accept his purpose here. The spectrum of emotions wrapped up in this matter utterly fatigued him. This was no place for a grieving, past-dwelling old man to be. And he consciously knew it. His days should be spent in the writing of memoirs and the tender handling of faded photographs. That was all he wanted, and nothing more. To draw the shades and lean back in a chair…and think of her in terms of there, and there. To wait, to wait…for that hopeful evening, that last lonely night when he would finally close his eyes and there would be no more dreams…there would be only Lessa, always.
But for now he was here. Reading the papers twice a day, anticipating a death that was perhaps even now moving among its potential victims.
He found himself drinking too much as he waited. This had always been a lurking problem. For fifty years he had kept a wary eye on that jinni. Now, with time to kill—time waiting for the kill—he was turning more and more to the liquid easings of a troubled conscience.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of his involvement with these murders was the fact that his nocturnal imagining were becoming increasingly vivid and disturbing. Memories he had thought mostly buried were suddenly lumbering like zombies among the landscapes of his dreams: the camp, the cries, the foot-dragging shuffle of the oven-feeders. He hadn’t sl
ept well since Atlanta. “Hell,” he thought sourly, “I haven’t slept well since my wedding night.”
He shaded his eyes and looked obliquely at the sun to judge the time. He never wore a watch. Time had never been his friend, so why remind himself of its cruel passage? It looked to be about two. He would waste another hour and then go in for a shower and a brief nap. The sun and the wine were draining his resolve, and he had probably spent too much time in the company of both already.
He closed his eyes behind his sunglasses, felt the muscled tension of his fatigue and tried to pinpoint it but couldn’t. Instead of fighting, he let it take him completely. As he succumbed to a restless slumber, he heard a child crying out on the strand. “Mommy, mommy!…”
“…Mommy, mommy!...” The child, a boy of eight or nine years, darted past them, weaving his way through the throng of strangers, seeking the comfort of his family. On the breast pocket of his black coat was sewn the yellow Star of David: the identifier of their race. Isaac watched the boy as he ran through that sea of yellow stars…as some children, somewhere far from Warsaw, might be running through a field of sunflowers.
All around them, the dense mass plodded forward, pulling carts and dragging trunks and luggage as if they were about to board the Titanic. All the mementos of a doomed people, already dead, but not yet buried…not yet burned.
The members of their once proudly-defiant clique had dressed in black, as in mourning, and had set out for the ghetto, as ordered by the Nazis. The entire Jewish population was being relocated so that the Germans could “ensure their safety from a hostile population.” Patrik had insisted that they link arms and sing Jewish folk songs. “A solidarity of the damned,” he had icily remarked. They had posed for a final photograph as free Polish youth before they were herded into the walled death-pool of the ghetto.
Isaac was amazed at the resolve and the repose of his friends. In particular, Lessa seemed almost a stranger when compared to her previously-fearful self. His wife was now a leader among the young Jews. Her humor and compassion were sought out by all who knew her.
By contrast, Isaac was almost numb with apprehension. There had been rumors of this day for many weeks. Now they were passing away from their old lives and entering a time and place where they were at the mercy of a machine that wanted only their removal.
He could only imagine the worst. A great many of their people had already been shipped away from Warsaw. No one knew for certain where these people had gone, but there were horrible rumors of mass killings, and open graves where hundreds upon hundreds had gone to their end. When he pondered these things—it was impossible for him not to—when he thought of his beloved Lessa at the hands of these butchers, he would nearly go mad with anxiety.
For the next five months, Isaac waited breathlessly for the knock at their door. Each morning would find yet another family gone, taken from their community. The terror was brilliant in its execution: a three a.m. pounding at the door, the jackboot rush through the rooms, the bellowed threats and blows as they were rounded up and shoved onto waiting trucks already loaded with the startled, sobbing faces of the lost.
Isaac knew that terror. He was the prime example of what terror was meant to inflict. A paralyzed waiting…a seasickness of certain disaster. The Nazis didn’t even need to come for people like Isaac. He was already a psychological slave to their will. Their random calculations, their night-terror tactics, had done the lion’s share of their work. Auschwitz was merely a formality.
But Isaac was no coward. His fear was not for himself. The way his mind left him was a dark fantasy, an opportunity for the escape he had denied his wife. The moment had played itself out before him in so many ways and with so many happy endings that, after a month or two of waiting for them to come for Lessa and himself, he came to prefer the only place where they were safe…the sanctuary of his escapist thoughts.
Lessa knew what was happening to her husband. But she had chosen to immerse herself in a routine of mercy and service. There were many lost souls in the ghetto. Food was scarce. There were few medicines to help the sick. Lessa did what she could with her creative compassion. And each day she would attempt to enlist the aid of the man she loved and still believed in.
But Isaac stayed off the streets and implored her to do the same. The illusion of locked doors was a comfort to him. There, he could wrap a blanket about his shoulders and devise clever methods of escape. His schemes grew more fantastic and bizarre with each passing day. He would fill blank pages with the details of complex plans dependent upon split-second timing and bold daring. Then, as he ran headlong through the thickets of his imagination, he would come to a clearing and see the folly of it all, and sink once more into a shuddering despair. “Oh, Lessa!” he would cry out in his anguish. “What have I done to you?”
Lessa prayed for his recovery. But she would not join him in his hopelessness. She was unmoved by the weapons and the swagger of the Nazis. She could guess easily enough at their motives. She was not ignorant to their intentions for her people. But she knew that much of their power came from the easy surrender that they depended upon. She could withhold that from them, if nothing else. And if she were meant to die then she would die in a place that their terror couldn’t reach.
So Isaac withered as she blossomed; she renounced her fear for all time, proclaiming her faith in love above all else. She swore that she would make him see. Somehow, someday, she would find the keys to unlock Isaac’s courageous, powerful love. This was her sacred promise to both of them. It was her prayer to God on the very night they came for Isaac and Lessa Bloom.
Isaac awakened with a sudden astonishment of sorrow and stared blankly at the shimmering surface of the pool. He shook the lingering cobwebs from his head. What he wouldn’t give for some real rest, some dreamless sleep. Maybe another bottle of wine would grant his wish. He peeled himself off the lounger and walked stiffly to his room.
Chapter Seven
Three days later he was completely bored and bewildered. There hadn’t been anything in the Biloxi obituaries that would even qualify as being remotely similar. He had been so certain that the pattern was going to be perpetuated here. But now he was having third and fourth thoughts about the entire affair.
He made up his mind to give it three more days, then fly back to Boston and forget the entire morbid business. In the meantime, a new thought occurred to him. One born of too much monotony and perhaps a little too much juice of the vine—but he decided to become less of a passive observer. He intended to find a likely locale and make a few rounds. Maybe he could learn something about the motives or methods behind the killings just by being out there among those people. Maybe he could see what the killer was seeing…tap into his thoughts.
He spent the next afternoon shopping for menswear of the second-hand variety. He purchased a natty pair of wool trousers, a polo-type shirt with a fetching jungle-cat motif above the breast pocket, a light jacket with a busted zipper, and a rather extravagant silver-knobbed walking stick. The latter was a surprise find, but a comforting one. He offered his platinum card for payment, but the young, bepimpled clerk only yawned at him.
“We ain’t set up to handle credit cards. All five locations of the Scrimp-a-Lot chain deal only in cash.”
“Ah. Of course. Sorry. Here you are, then. Twenty-four fifty. And would you mind hailing me a taxi, please?”
“There’s a phone down by the QuikeeMart. Have a nice day.”
Back at his hotel, Isaac waited until the darkness had settled completely over the Gulf shores, then called a taxi from his room. He told the driver to take him to “where the homeless people spend their nights.” The driver answered him with a very disapproving expression but shrugged his shoulders and pulled away from the curb.
He deposited Isaac at a poorly-lit intersection and pointed across the street to the darkened interior of Evangeline Park. As the cab sped off, Isaac suppressed the nagging
fear and knee-jerk reminders of his night in Atlanta. He was somewhat comforted by the fact that he had promised the driver a twenty-dollar tip to return in ninety minutes, and had gotten an eager affirmative.
He walked into the park and paused, allowing his eyes time to adjust to the lesser light. Then, like apparitions divorcing themselves from the backdrop of the night, he saw them in their numbers. The American refugees. Even more than he had seen in Atlanta.
Most of them were already lying down for the night. There were small groups of men smoking and talking among the reclining figures on the ground and the low benches. He walked deeper into the park’s darkness.
After fifteen minutes of aimless wandering, ignored by the few night-walkers that he passed, he came to the silent, shadowed heart of Evangeline Park. He concealed himself in a small stand of trees, where his instincts told him to stay put for a while. There didn’t seem to be anything more that he could do.
He pulled a travel flask from the breast pocket of his jacket and sipped at the expensive brandy, reassured by its familiar warmth. Isaac, ever the observer of life’s ironies and strange circumstances, shook his head at the fact that here he was, dressed in a manner to suggest he belonged at this calloused juncture of time and space, sipping 25-year-old brandy that cost as much as any one of these people were likely to see in months of begging. Their lives could hardly be more different, on the surface of things. Yet…there were certain shared experiences. He could relate to them on certain levels. And just by pausing among them…just by passing through…he could feel the palpable anxiety that never rested, that slept with one eye forever open. Perhaps this was why he kept allowing himself to be pulled more deeply into the mystery of their demise.
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