Vespers

by Tom Piccirilli

  My scalp prickled as the icy sweat ran through my hair and down the back of my neck. I shivered violently. My pulse beat like the blessed heart of Christ, like the throbbing efforts of the world.

  I prayed. I always prayed in my dreams. I remembered my mother teaching me how to kneel at the side of the bed and clasp my hands together. She taught me to cross myself. I did it now with my gun hand, the butt of the pistol leaving its white stamp in my blazing crimson skin.

  I am a child of Sodom. I am a child of Gomorrah.

  My aunt had kissed the palm of an altar boy. An altar boy had bitten Niko. God’s plan had been set in motion since before the dark had separated from the light. Since before the fall of the seraph. Since before the fiery swords had been set at the four entrances to Eden. Since before I made men tell me their secrets in dark hot rooms full of dust and blood.

  The bonemeal sand that had once lain across the mount of Golgotha, place of skulls, had taken two thousand years to finally drift across the streets of Brooklyn.

  My head pounded with my boiling blood. The images beat at the back of my skull again, threatening to break in or break out. I heard crows scrabbling against windows somewhere in the other room. The black rain would fall and drain away into the soil. Why were we sick? Because we had brought it upon others and it had been brought back with us.

  Blood splashed upon a tree. A strange black bug bouncing inside a glass jar. Sister Abigail paying the delivery boy who brought an apple among the fruit basket with a kiss tot he palm. The symbols of our history and our damnation were everywhere. We’d never escape them no matter how we lived or where we lived or how hard we tried not to die. Heaven’s lessons are hard taught and harder learned.

  My aunt’s prayers twisted indecipherably inside my own mouth. No wonder their faces split open. My jaw couldn’t contain the inhuman language. I cried, sneezed, coughed, spit, pissed, shit, hissed, and vomited at the same time. The Nazarene Fever tried to steal my soul away from every orifice.

  I climbed into the shower and washed myself down. The water was ice cold but steam fogged the mirror.

  I asked again, “What do I have to do?”

  I clambered across the room naked and fell into bed, my sins stacked upon my chest like rocks upon witches, and not sorry for any of them.

  Hours later I slipped into Gina’s room. After making love I held her while she sobbed briefly. Grandma was upstairs with the cousins and uncles and the rest of the family, half of them hugging crucifixes to their chests. Every so often we could hear her bolt across the room and grab something off the wall, maybe Niko’s portrait, and bang it around.

  “It doesn’t feel like we’ll ever get though this,” Gina whispered.

  “We will.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  “You have to be sure. You have no choice.”

  “Is that why you do what you learned to do? Over there? Is that your way of living with the things you’ve endured?”

  “Yes.”

  “You never talk about it.”

  “Be glad I don’t,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to hear.”

  She was honest enough to say, “You’re right.”

  She took her time caressing and licking my scars. Some were white and faded. Others were livid and puckered. I’d had some good triage surgeons and some awful ones who couldn’t stitch a ripped shirt. I was covered with welts as thick as a finger that curved across my belly and chest. My groin and thighs were cross-thatched with burn and shrapnel scars. I should be dead ten times over. Even lying in my own shit on prison cell floors I’d managed to avoid the worst infections. I’d watched men with less serious wounds succumb and die of gangrene. Somehow I always managed to survive long enough to find proper treatment.

  She fell back against the pillows and turned herself to me and hooked one hand around the back of my neck and drew me to her into a kiss abandoned to pain and a crushing wave of despair. Those emotions drove me much more deeply than love. I lifted her into my arms like a child, hugged and rocked her while she began to drift.

  At midnight Gina fell into a restless sleep where she occasionally whimpered and whined. I stared at the ceiling and listened to Grandma really throwing it down. Ma was chasing her around the room trying to get her to drink down some tea and take her heart meds. The doctor was up there too, doing what he could to get her to calm down. I wondered if he had any serious sedatives. Thorazine or lithium. I had a feeling we were going to need to break them out soon.

  I checked the television. The reports were eight hours old at least and had been looped. They had the standard array of government officials, scientists, local administrators, military bigwigs, CDC and FEMA directors instructing the populace not to panic and declaring that everything was under control. Their lies were ridiculously transparent.

  I padded past the bedrooms of our sleeping legbreakers who snored or wept in their nightmares no different than the kids in reform school, the soldiers in boot camp, the prisoners in the dust. I moved downstairs and stood in the doorway to the troop quarters and watched the four security details walking the perimeter with flashlights and kerosene lanterns. The Ganooch’s estate grounds were as black and cold as the desert before dawn.

  I could imagine rural settlements in Europe trying to keep the plague outside their communities, keeping watch for anyone with the disease who might appear on their borders. The sanctified penitents flagellating themselves and testifying to a deaf god, offering further agony as consecration. The monks bearing witness and torturing presumed witches. Everyone still receiving communion from the same dirty black hand.

  The lights moved at a steady rate in the blackness. Will-o’-the-wisps. Lost souls bound to walk the earth for their sins.

  It felt as if night might never list. I wished I’d managed to fit in a final mass before my death or the death of the church or the death of humanity. Even born killers enjoyed the structure of Roman Catholic rites and services, especially that of the evening mass. The fever tried to rise back within me as I imagined the service. I’d thought about it a great deal while imprisoned in Fallujah. It was one way to stay alive and sane.

  If I was alive. If I was sane.

  I prayed. I found no irony in it. I held Vespers in my head. Opening with the singing of the words Deus, in adiutorium meum intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen. Alleluia. Translating in my head was always like repeating the prayer, getting twice the mileage out of it, really grabbing God’s attention where he lurked in the stained glass, crouched upon the pulpit, hidden in the baptismal. In every hymnal there was a piece of the Holy Spirit. In every sip of wine there was the blood of Christ. O God, come to my assistance. O Lord, make haste to help me. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end. Amen. Hallelujah. There was meaning in history. There was purpose to two thousand years of supplication, focus, and concentration.

  Singing the appointed hymn, the appointed psalmody is then sung, two psalms and a New Testament canticle. Each concluding with Gloria Patri. Traveling across Afghanistan, listening to the Muslim prayers, I would always follow along, thinking of Vespers, thinking about readings from the Bible. Singing of the Magnificat — the canticle of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the Gospel of Luke I: 4655.

  The Our Father, the closing prayer oratio. Followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. While they electrocuted me. While they held swords to my throat. While I kneeled before them and they threatened me with beheading.

  There in the land of the Bible, surrounded by enemies of my faith, the seraph and djinn on fire in the dunes, I would read the most vengeful passages of the Old Testament aloud in my mind. I enjoyed infiltrating cells and destroying the enemies of my country and my god.

  Gina put her hand on my naked back and said, “What are you doing? Come back to bed.”


  I followed her back up the stairs. It was time for a shift change. The mooks clambered through the halls with their semi-autos. Gina was naked. I was naked. No one said a word.

  Gloria Patri. Gloria Mia Madre.

  My course had been set by the murder of my mother and father. The Ganooch had put me on this path. He was as much my father as he was Gina’s.

  I nodded off at four a.m. but was awake again twenty minutes later. I turned and Gina was staring at me. Moonlight backlit her so that her face was heavy with twining shadows. She kissed me but it was almost chaste. I couldn’t read her eyes in the darkness. What had attracted me to her the most was the fact that she could always keep me guessing. Others were easy to read. Once you knew what they coveted, you knew what drove them, and you could figure out exactly how far they would go to get it.

  I knew what people held close to their hearts and could take advantage of it. I could see if they were going to jump left or right, praise Allah and push a button, pull a gun, call the cops, or make a run for it. I could predict their actions and ascertain their weaknesses. That was the real job of an interrogator. Not merely breaking bones or spirits, but understanding and sympathizing.

  Gina was a paragon of cool, calm, and seeming indifference most of the time. Like Nicky, she was destined to be in the business. The Ganooch never wanted it for her, and Gina never said anything about it, but I used to see her running the whole show in a couple of years when guys like Nicky and Johnny Tormino went up on RICO charges and the other old wiseguys retired to Miami.

  If we ever came out the other side of this thing she’d take care of the business somehow. If anybody was left they’d need their vices, large and small, and there would always be somebody around to provide them.

  “Why did they say our names?” she asked. “You heard their voices. They’re not the same. The illness is transformative. They’ve endured changes. Why did they speak as if they were–”

  “Angels of death?” I offered. “Seraph sitting in judgment?”

  “Is it as simple as that? Mother Superior has been telling me since I was four years old that I was going to hell. Is it really just Judgment Day? Armageddon?”

  I didn’t want to talk about any of this. I turned aside. I could feel Gina waiting for an answer. Her need was almost as great as mine.

  I rolled onto my back. “Armageddon simply means ‘the hills of Meggido,’” I explained. “Megiddo was an ancient city in the middle east where the three great traveling routes of the ancient world met. If anyone went to war, that’s where the armies finally faced one another. To the primitive peoples of the time, if a final destructive conflict was ever fought, that’s where it would be. Megiddo was destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times after dozens of wars.”

  “The prophecy is probably right, in one facet anyway. Whatever this is–a manmade contagion, a natural virus, a neuro-toxin, chemical warfare–I think it started in the land of the Bible. The doctors will never figure it out. Medical science can’t keep up with our mutating diseases. They haven’t cured a significant illness since polio. We’re still hounded by the common cold. Viruses are almost as life itself.” I thought of helicopters firing missiles into mountains with ten thousand year old caves and tunnels carved through them. Places where the first ascetic monks built their fortress abbeys and the Byzantine peoples faced down Christian crusaders bent on laying siege to the holiest cities. “We either brought it back with us. Or they set it loose on us. Or it just came on its own.”

  “So it’s all just… the will of God?”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t we though? Care?”

  “No.”

  “Shouldn’t we pray for forgiveness, if this is the end of days?”

  “No.”

  She kissed me and climbed on top of me and writhed like a witch on fire, and when she was done she fell forward and I held her and she whispered, “You’ll protect us from the devil himself. From God himself.”

  “I will,” I told her.

  The day was practically twilit. There were a lot more ash clouds blooming across the sky. There were huge thousand foot flame fires on the eastern end of Long Island and across the river in Jersey. The skyscrapers of Manhattan stood like lone stone figures waiting to be brought low by wind and flood. The air was getting thick and difficult to breathe. The security detail wore handkerchiefs tied around their noses and mouths and probably imagined themselves looking like cowboy train robbers.

  I stood on the limo hood and watched the biters outside our gates milling, laughing, half-heartedly trying to get in. The crowd had dispersed some. Those that remained eyed me gleefully, hatefully.

  “Tommy Flowers, the olive gardens of Gethsemane flavor your suppers.”

  “Tommy Flowers, kneel in humility for your sins.”

  “Tommy Flowers, the seraph fly among the dark clouds of penance.”

  “Tommy Flowers–”

  “Give it a rest.”

  I fired into the crowd. I shot brains into the sewer. It was a petty gesture. It made the horde laugh louder. It made them speak my name louder. It scattered more gravestone teeth. The guys in the booth watched me closely, wondering if I’d caught the virus. I looked at them the same way.

  I hopped down and got more ammo out of the booth. The men on duty were goombahs who hadn’t been made yet. They were two of the Ganooch’s gofers, pulling small muscle jobs and shakedowns. Falco and DiMeo. They were cut from the same cloth, middle-aged with bad dye jobs, and hanging guts that said they should’ve been car mechanics but they preferred scaring drunk gamblers to crawling under transmissions and changing brake pads.

  “What other names have they mentioned this morning?” I asked.

  “I think they’ve been through about everybody,” Falco said. “They know us all.”

  “Even the doctor,” DiMeo added. “Doctor Ventimiglia. I didn’t even know he was here, but those fucking things outside knew it somehow.”

  “Have they made a concerted effort to break in?”

  “They stick their fingers through the fencing and talk at us, but they’re not putting their shoulders to it. Nobody’s tried to ram a car through.”

  I noticed there were no sirens wailing anywhere within earshot. “Any traffic at all?”

  “Not today. Either they don’t remember how or they don’t want to. Anybody else has either gotten out of here or they’re sick or they’re dead.”

  “There’s something else,” Falco said. He looked up at me from beneath his steel wool eyebrows. “Nolan’s out there. He’s not there now, but he was earlier. Grinning with that twisted smile they’ve got. Laughing. Talking about hell. Talking about cities and armies in hell. I don’t know what all else.”

  I glanced back toward the gate. I wondered if I should hunt for him and try to clip him before Gina got a look at what he’d become.

  DiMeo clutched at his shotgun and rubbed a bead of sweat from his face with the muzzle. “It gets you thinking crazy thoughts,” he said. His faraway gaze kept returning to the monitors, then he’d stare off again. “Are we dead? Is this purgatory? Are we souls lost in limbo?”

  I reached out and tugged the twelve-gauge away from him. Then I casually grabbed him by thumb and bent it inward and then snapped down. His wrist followed the thumb, the arm followed the wrist, the body followed the arm. In a moment he was on his knees whimpering. I gave another short wrenching yank. He screamed.

  I said, “You think you’d feel pain like that in limbo?”

  I let DiMeo go and he slowly clambered back to his feet, rubbing his arm as if he couldn’t figure out how he could be in so much agony one instant and none the next. That’s the nature of pain. It’s mutable and transitive.

  “Keep focused,” I said. “All our lives depend on it.”

  “Yes, sir,” they both responded.

  My phone rang. I was surprised that cell phone and satellite communication was still functioning. If this was an attack, communications sh
ould have been a primary target. I thought of the biters calling me at midnight and laughing in my ear.

  Cole Portman said, “Please come see me.”

  “Just you?”

  “Yes, at my home. And please hurry.”

  “Ten minutes.”

  Portman lived in his own cottage on the Ganucci estate, about a quarter mile from the main house. He’d never invited me there before, but I knew every inch of it. I’d crept the place and gone through his desk, his files, every hidden cache and cubbyhole. I knew the combination to his safe. I knew the password on his password-protected computer. I knew his habits, his sexual proclivities, his preference for track lighting, the fact that he hadn’t talked with his sister for thirty-seven years and the reason why.

  He knew about my aunt. He knew about my fevers. He might be consigliere to the Ganucci family but he could trace his family roots back to the Mayflower and was as WASPish as you could get. He didn’t share our Catholic penchant for drama, history, and superstition. He didn’t believe my aunt had been blessed or cursed. He thought she was a schizophrenic and that I shared some of the same traits. He didn’t mind so long as I remained effective. Now he was a little worried because the don had deferred power to me, his left hand.

  I walked the grounds. I passed two of our patrols and got the all-clear.

  Portman met me at the door, his face full of near-hysteria. I could smell the liquor on his breath. He’d managed to wrap a robe around himself, but he was still wearing his pjs and slippers.

  He didn’t look sick. Not the way that Nicky had when the illness hit him. Withered, with that deep weakness and flood of age and infirmity taking him over. Portman just kept jabbing his thumbs against his temples like he was trying to keep his brains in his skull, and he was trembling so badly that his back teeth were clicking.

  “Stay back,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

  He withdrew and I stepped into his small foyer. He led me to his living room where a half-bottle of scotch stood open on the coffee table. He sat heavily on his couch. He hadn’t been using a glass but drinking straight from the bottle. A Bible lay open beside it. That surprised me.