A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  I heard Clete behind me. “Ready to boogie?” he said.

  “When you are,” I replied.

  He was wearing his porkpie hat and a raincoat, his hands in the pockets. He looked at the waves sliding in with the tide; they were dark, laced with foam, filled with shell life. “Smell that air.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I got a feeling about something. We’re standing on the edge of creation. Or maybe the end of it.”

  “Could be.”

  “Dallas is putting his airboat in the water,” he said.

  “What’s under your coat?”

  He opened the flap. A cut-down sawed-off Remington twelve-gauge pump hung under his armpit.

  “I hope we don’t have to use that,” I said.

  “Shondell could grind us into fish chum and nobody would miss a beat, Dave.”

  I let my eyes go flat.

  “Not in front of Penelope Balangie?” he said.

  “Something like that.”

  “Dave, your learning curve never ceases to surprise me.”

  * * *

  DALLAS LANDRY HAD pulled the airboat up to the dock. I knocked on Carroll’s door at the motel. He pulled it open so quickly that my hand fell into empty space. “It’s time?” he said.

  “Yeah, what do you think?” I said.

  He had showered and changed into elastic-waist slacks, boat shoes, a long-sleeve jersey, and a sport coat. He was wearing a shoulder holster, his badge hanging from his neck. “What are you carrying?” he said.

  “Snub thirty-eight.”

  “You got an ankle rig?”

  “Dial it down, Carroll.”

  “What do we do about the guys on the tug?”

  “That’s up to them,” I said.

  “You’re not talking about blowing up anybody’s shit?”

  “No.”

  “Because that sounds like Purcel. Are there twelve-step programs for brain disease? That guy doesn’t understand boundaries.”

  “Is there anything you want to tell me, Carroll?”

  “Like confess something?”

  “Call it what you will.”

  “I already told you. My daughter needs my help.”

  “Time to rock, partner,” I said.

  We walked outside, into the wind and salt spray and the smell of shellfish stranded in the sawgrass by receding waves. Carroll was breathing heavily, his mouth tight, his nostrils swelling. “I’m with you, Robo. If we got to put hair on the walls, that’s the way it is. Right? Fucking A. We got to keep the lines simple.”

  This was the guy afraid of blowing up people’s shit?

  * * *

  WE RODE ON the airboat to the stilt house and got out on a floating dock that was fastened to the pilings. Dallas Landry cut the propeller just as a big man exited the cabin on the tug and shone a flashlight on us. Carroll lifted his badge from his chest so it caught the flashlight’s beam. “Get back in the cabin, asshole,” he said.

  I could hear waves slapping against the pontoons on the airboat. The man went back in the cabin. I told Dallas to come back in one hour.

  “I t’ought you wanted me to wait,” he said.

  “We’d rather have you in a safe place,” I said. “If we’re not standing outside in one hour, call for the cavalry.”

  “Yes, suh, I got it,” he said.

  He clamped on his ear protectors and restarted the propeller, then drove away, the backdraft flattening the water. I started to mount the steel steps that led to the deck above us, then I heard a sound I had heard before: wood stroking against wood, oars lifting and dropping back into the waves, perhaps a taskmaster drumming cadence on a forecastle. Clete heard it, too. I searched the horizon in all four directions but saw only the black-green curl of the waves and a lighted ship on the southern horizon.

  “That bastard is out there, isn’t he?” Clete said.

  I nodded but didn’t answer. Carroll looked at me and at Clete and then at me again. “What are y’all talking about?”

  “You didn’t hear anything?” I said.

  “No, nothing. Something’s going on?”

  “It’s probably a buoy,” I said.

  Carroll’s eyeballs were clicking back and forth. “You’re not talking about this ghoul or whatever?”

  “Stay behind me,” I said.

  I climbed the stairs, my shoes ringing on the steel steps, then crossed the deck in the wind and knocked on the door. The waves below were gaining strength, pitching against the tugboat and smacking the floating dock against the pilings. I wondered about the tolerance of Dallas Landry’s airboat.

  Mark Shondell answered the door in a red smoking jacket like Hugh Hefner might wear. “Why, Dave, how good of you to come see us. And Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Purcel. We were just discussing the possibility that the Aryan race might not be the most intelligent after all, and then in you walk.”

  The interior of the living room was exotic, the walls covered with bookshelves and leopard and zebra skins, the furniture made of African blackwood and ivory and glass, the carpet an inch thick, swirling with color. A chandelier burned with the warm radiance of candles.

  Adonis and Penelope and Johnny Shondell were standing at the mantel below a brass clock. They stared at us like people who had suffered a heart attack. But I was no longer looking at them or the decor in the living room or even Mark Shondell. Through the window, I could see waves bursting on the bow of a double-decked galleon, its long oars dripping green fire.

  “We were in the neighborhood,” I said. “Is Isolde home?”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  JOHNNY WAS FROZEN at the mantel, his face sick. “Dave, you’re such a fool,” Penelope said. “And damn you to hell for it.”

  “Where’s your daughter, Penelope?” I said.

  “Don’t address my wife by her first name,” Adonis said.

  “Hey, Adonis, time to keep your mouth shut,” Clete said.

  “Let’s not have unpleasant words,” Shondell said. “Do you have a warrant of some kind, Dave?”

  “We don’t need one,” I said. “We’re not here to arrest anyone or to search your dwelling.”

  “Dave, I don’t appreciate your being here,” Shondell said. “You struck me in the face. In an earlier era, you would have been called out. Under the Dueling Oaks. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  “I’m trying to grab a noun or adverb here and there,” I replied.

  “Our situation is not a humorous one, sir,” he said. “You are meddling in things you know nothing about. I am going to ask you once, and once only, to leave the premises.”

  “Listen to him, Dave,” Penelope said.

  “Where’s your daughter?” I said.

  “She’ll be here soon,” Penelope said.

  “Good. We’ll wait,” Clete said.

  “Did y’all see the galleon?” I asked.

  “What?” Shondell said.

  “I just saw Gideon’s galleon,” I said. I pointed at the window. “Take a look. To the southeast, perhaps fifty yards from where we’re standing.”

  Shondell walked to the window. “The wind and the waves have played a trick on you.”

  “Dave?” Carroll said behind me.

  I did not want to hear any more from Carroll LeBlanc. “What is it?”

  “I’ve really messed up.”

  “In what way?” I said.

  He looked deathly ill. “I didn’t pass on some information I got from Helen.”

  “What information?”

  “Somebody scooped up Father Julian from the hospital,” he said.

  I turned around. “Say that again?”

  “People went into Iberia General and grabbed him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because he’s on a pad,” Clete said.

  “Dave, I’ve been trying to tell you,” Carroll said. “My daughter was gonna be on the street. I didn’t know Shondell was gonna do all this.”

  “You didn’t have
a clue, huh?” I said.

  “You wouldn’t listen to anyone, Dave,” Adonis said. “You were too busy bedding my wife.”

  Clete stuck his finger in Adonis’s face. “You open your mouth one more time, and I’ll paste you all over this room.”

  “Apparently, we have a little problem,” Shondell said. “Mr. Bell, would you step out here, please?”

  A large man in a fedora and a rumpled suit came out of the kitchen. He had a dissolute, fleshy face, small eyes, and bad teeth. He was holding a pistol-grip AK-47 with a thirty-round banana magazine. He grinned, exposing the gaps in his teeth. “Put your hands on your heads or we’ll have a great deal of mop-and-bucket work to do.”

  “Dave, this is the cocksucker who sapped me in Key West,” Clete said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bell said.

  “Take their weapons, Adonis,” Shondell said.

  Adonis didn’t move. “Did you hear me?” Shondell said to him.

  “You don’t take out cops,” Adonis said.

  “Do you want to see black or white sails tonight?” Shondell said.

  Clete and I didn’t know the significance of the black sails we had seen, but obviously, Adonis did. He peeled back Clete’s raincoat and pulled the cut-down twelve-gauge from his shoulder, then disarmed both me and Carroll. Penelope’s eyes were shiny with shame.

  “How about you, Johnny?” I said. “Whose side are you on? Where is Isolde?”

  He stared at the floor. Carroll could not look me in the face.

  “People know where we are,” I said.

  “Afraid not,” Shondell said. “Your airboat pilot no longer exists. Your colleagues have no idea where you are, courtesy of Detective LeBlanc. You slapped me in public, Mr. Robicheaux. You cannot imagine the ordeal that awaits you and Mr. Purcel.”

  “What about LeBlanc?” Clete said.

  Shondell studied Carroll’s face. “Maybe we’ll make up some games. A behavioral study of sorts.”

  Two men from the tugboat came heavily up the steps and hooked up our wrists behind our backs with plastic ligatures, then pulled black cloth bags with drawstrings over our heads. One of the men soaked our faces with a spray can. I smelled an odor like ether, then my knees caved as though I had been dropped through the trapdoor on a scaffold.

  * * *

  I WOKE ON A hard surface, wrists bound, hood secured tightly under my chin, surrounded by a humming sound like a ship’s engine. I realized my ankles were bound as well, and my Velcro-strapped hideaway was gone. I felt a pain like I had been kicked in the back, and I groaned when I moved.

  “Is that you, Dave?” I heard Clete say.

  “Yeah.”

  “Glad you’re awake,” he said, perhaps three feet from me. “I can’t see anything.”

  “Where’s Carroll?”

  “There’s a third guy in here. I can hear him breathing. Maybe that’s him.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I think next to the engine room. I heard somebody slamming a hatch and clanging down a ladder.”

  “I can’t remember what happened,” I said.

  “No mystery. Carroll LeBlanc is a Judas. If we get out of this, I’m feeding him to the shrimp.”

  I tried to twist the ligatures off my wrists. Instead, they cut into my veins. “Did you tell your receptionist where you were going?”

  “No. After I fired those rounds at Shondell, I thought I’d keep my location unknown.”

  “Tell me the truth, Cletus. Did you try to take Shondell out?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I still had a buzz on from the night before.”

  “Maybe you’ll get him next time,” I said. But I knew there would be no next time, and so did he.

  “I think we’re fucked, Streak,” he said. “Shondell is nuts, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t think he’s crazy at all. I think he has evil powers.”

  “Don’t talk like that. We’ve had these shitheads around us all our lives. They’re just coming out of the woodwork now.”

  I heard a groan. “Is that you, Carroll?”

  “Yeah,” he answered, his voice thin, hardly more than a gasp. “That’s you, Dave?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Clete is here, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Yeah, you’re always sorry,” Clete said. “Where are we?”

  “Probably on his yacht,” Carroll said.

  “What’s this ordeal he’s got planned for us?” Clete said.

  “I heard something once. From a pimp Shondell uses. He’s got a collection.”

  “A collection of what?” Clete said.

  “Shit from the Middle Ages. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What kind of shit?” Clete said.

  “Sick stuff, man,” Carroll said.

  We heard people coming down a ladder and someone opening the hatch on the compartment we were in. The person stepped inside but didn’t speak. I was breathing through my mouth, sucking in the cloth of the hood, my heart thudding; I could hear the welt on my shoe scrape the deck when I moved. My breath was foul, my face itching and sweating as though it were encased in dried mud. “Who are you?” I said.

  “Having fears in the silence?” Shondell said. “The imagination is a powerful engine, isn’t it?”

  He went silent again. I tried to measure time by counting the seconds. But I couldn’t concentrate and I lost count, and I desperately needed to go to the head. Five minutes must have passed. I tried to pretend he was no longer in the compartment. I also tried to convince myself that the coolness in the steel deck was absorbing me into its molecular protection, taking me somewhere else in the universe, freeing me from the impotence and vulnerability that now constituted my life. I was totally under the control of an evil and sadistic man. What a fool I had been.

  “Would you like to go to the bathroom?” Shondell said. “Just say so.”

  “Yeah, we would!” Carroll said.

  “Good boy. See what can happen when you’re under the right discipline?”

  “What are you getting out of this, Shondell?” I said.

  “Everything,” he said. “The reconstruction of the republic. A new era is beginning, and it’s based on the purity of the Nordic race.”

  “There’s no such thing as a Nordic race,” I said.

  I heard Shondell squat down close to me. I could feel his presence like an obscene hand hovering above an unguarded part of my body. I could see nothing through the hood. He touched my forehead with the tip of his finger. “Scared?”

  “I’ll make you a promise,” I said. “If I ever get loose, I’m going to twist off your head and piss on it and flush it down a toilet.”

  “Let’s see how you feel by this time tomorrow.” He got to his feet again. “I need you in here, fellows.”

  I heard other men coming through the hatchway.

  “Get our friends to the bathroom and make sure all their needs are met,” Shondell said.

  The ligatures were taken from my ankles, and a man held me by each arm and led me to a toilet; one of them freed my wrists and let me relieve myself, the hood still on my head. “You guys know I’m a cop, right?” I said. “You know what happens when you kill a cop in Louisiana.”

  “We are cops,” one of them said.

  They led me back to the compartment, then took Clete and Carroll LeBlanc to the head and brought them back.

  “I want to show you my collection,” Shondell said.

  “Is Penelope in on this?” I said.

  “How stupid can you be, Dave? Would she be with Adonis if he were not a rich and powerful man?”

  “Fuck your collection,” I said.

  “You’re an educated man. Profanity is the tool early man used to ward off situations he couldn’t change—in other words, a confession of inadequacy. Does it bother you that you’re such a predictable fellow?”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  THE HOODS WERE removed from our heads, and we were marched down a passagewa
y to a forecastle that had leather-padded bulkheads and blue plastic tarps spread on the deck. There were no portholes, and I had no way to get a bearing. Chains with sheep-lined leather cuffs hung from the bulkheads.

  “How do you like my arrangement?” Shondell said. “Roomy, soundproof, and with an array of items that go back perhaps five hundred years.”

  At the far end of the compartment were primitive machines and worktables covered with metal instruments. The machines were constructed of brass and iron and oak and heavy bolts and spikes and pulleys and cogged wheels with long wood handles attached to them.

  “Anything to say, Mr. Purcel?” Shondell said.

  “Eat shit,” Clete said.

  “When it’s your turn, the man whose finger you shot off will be here to cheer you along,” Shondell said. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “What are you going to tell Johnny about all this?” Clete said.

  “He’ll know you went away. He’s a good boy. He’ll stay that way.”

  “What about Isolde?” I said.

  “Believe me, these are not your concerns. In the next twenty-four hours, you’re going to be extremely preoccupied.” Shondell gazed at the machines and instruments that represented the darkness I had tried to plumb in Marcel LaForchette. How could I have mistaken the torment in poor Marcel for the disease that lived inside Mark Shondell?

  “I love the names of these things,” he said. “The scold’s bridle for loquacious housewives, the choke pear for expansion of the mouth and other places, the iron maiden, the scavenger’s daughter for compressing people who need size reduction, the rack, and the thumbscrew. How about my favorite, the brazen bull? The victim is inserted inside and slowly boiled. There’re pipes inside that make his screams sound like the roaring of a bull.”