by Blake Banner
“You bastard! You filthy, fucking bastard! May you rot in fucking hell for eternity, you fucking piece of miserable fucking shit!”
We all stared at her for a moment. Then she collapsed against me, sobbing with deep, guttural grief. I led her back to the house as the captain and his 7th Cavalry spilled out of the French windows. He hurried toward me with a scandalized look on his face. As he approached, he drew breath. I fixed him with my eyes and shook my head. He clamped his mouth shut and watched me walk past, with Sylvie in my arms and Dehan at my shoulder.
TWENTY SIX
Maybe Paul’s God had been looking out for him, after all. The knife had pierced his left side and missed all his major organs. It had made a nasty cut in his abdominal muscles, but it was not life-threatening. The paramedics had insisted he should go to the hospital. He’d said he would, but after he had talked to me and given me his statement.
Ahmed was not so lucky. Sylvie had stabbed him through the sternum three times and shredded his heart like confetti. He had died instantly. There was no need for a CSI team, as we had witnessed everything in person, and after an hour, the ambulances and the squad cars left, taking with them Ahmed and the two officers he had killed when he’d slipped into the house, on his second mission to kill Sylvie.
Paul was on the sofa. Humberto was sitting next to him, holding his arm and rocking gently back and forth, muttering, “Pater meu… pater meu…”
My father.
Sylvie was sitting next to Humberto, and Mary was perched on the arm of the settee beside her, stroking her hair.
Dehan was sitting in the other with a ‘what the hell do we do now’ look on her face. The captain dropped into one of the armchairs and stared at me.
“You want to explain to me, John, what just happened here?”
I nodded and looked at Sylvie for a while, wondering if she would say anything. She didn’t. So I started talking.
“I have to go back to the beginning. Nineteen years ago, Simon and Sylvie Martin had a little girl in Texas. They were devout Methodists. Especially Simon. Isn’t that right, Sylvie?”
She nodded, and there was an edge of irony in her voice. “He sure was devout.”
“Simon worked for a large bank, the Federal United. They offered him a transfer to New York, which I am certain would have afforded him a good apartment, or a house, in just about any pleasant suburb in commuting distance of Manhattan. But Simon felt it was his duty, as a good Christian, to move to a less advantaged neighborhood, so that he and his wife could help the needy through the local church. In one of life’s little ironies, it was that decision that cost him his life.”
Sylvie’s eyes glittered with hard, cold anger.
“That was not the only price we paid. His damned arrogance and pride cost us all our lives, one way or another.”
The captain looked at her and frowned. He looked as though he was going to ask a question, but I ignored him and kept talking.
“Simon did his research and discovered that the Methodist church of St. George’s was in East Brooklyn, and as luck would have it, the house that backed onto that church was for sale. With the help of his bank, he bought the house and took out very generous insurance to cover the mortgage and a good income for life for his wife, should he die for any reason. What he didn’t realize was just what kind of a man the reverend was at St. George’s, or just how sick his own wife had grown of his pompous, Old Testament view of marriage, life, and everything.”
Paul snorted. “Where the human soul is denied its freedom, there shall Hell have its dominion.”
Dehan raised an eyebrow. “Who said that?”
Paul smirked. “I did.”
“I am told, Captain, that Reverend Paul Truelove is, and I quote, irresistible to women. It was not long before he and Sylvie were having an affair.”
I paused to draw breath but Dehan started talking.
“It was that, plus their unwillingness to tell the truth, that made us suspect them in the beginning. It was the oldest story on Earth. Sylvie had been informed in the February of the insurance coverage her husband had taken out in her favor. She knew that he was worth more to her dead than alive. She and the reverend were clearly into each other, and they were both clearly hiding something.” She looked at Sylvie and shook her head. “Your amnesia story was just not credible.”
“And there were other things, small details,” I added. “The fact that you were holding the phone, sitting on the stairs. However you looked at it, that didn’t make sense, the fact that there had been no forced entry. The weapon used was something you, Reverend, might have owned during your time in Brazil. It all pointed to you, Sylvie, having killed your own husband. Or, alternatively, the reverend killing him and you covering for him.
“That view was compounded when we discovered, Reverend, that you had lied about your whereabouts on the night of Simon’s death. You told us you had been at Eastchester Bay, but in fact you had been just across the garden, and had ample opportunity to slip in, kill Simon, and get back to the church. You had motive and opportunity.”
Dehan broke in again. “But somehow it didn’t make a lot of sense. If you had conspired to kill him so that you could both be together, why, after eighteen years, had you not gotten married? Also, we learned from Elizabeth Cavendish that on the night of Simon’s death, you had been with her, which did not suggest the actions of a man who was so in love he was ready to kill. And once you were taken out of the equation, it seemed improbable that Sylvie could have plunged that knife through Simon’s sternum. That would take a strong man. The theory that you and Sylvie had conspired with one another began to look shaky.”
I nodded. “But the more we looked into it, the more it seemed possible that Humberto might have been involved. His colossal strength and his passionate, quasi-religious devotion to Sylvie made him a potentially lethal foe for anyone who might simply seem to be harming her. We saw it in the church, and we saw it here, tonight. We began to wonder how bad things had become between Simon and Sylvie. We discovered that Humberto used to spy on her, or at least keep watch over her. You do not realize this, Sylvie, but just a few days before Simon’s death, you had a burglar in your garden. El Chato, who was on a housebreaking spree in the area, was casing your home.” I turned and nodded at Humberto. “Humberto found him in the garden and chased him off.
“We wondered if El Chato had not in fact got in, Simon had interrupted him, and you had witnessed El Chato murder your husband. On the one hand, it made sense, because Humberto kept talking about how he had seen the Devil in your garden and your house.” I paused and looked at Sylvie for a long moment. “But then I asked myself, why would you conceal El Chato’s identity? Because that was just what you were doing, wasn’t it?
“For some reason, you were keeping your husband’s killer’s identity a secret, by pretending to have amnesia. Which kept dragging us back to the reverend. He seemed to be the only person whose identity you might want to protect. But we knew that was wrong, too. Was it then, that Humberto had seen you arguing with Simon and come to your rescue? Had he killed Simon defending you, and you, relieved to be free of your husband, agreed with the reverend to keep his identity secret, to protect him? There had, after all, been no evil intent. He had simply been protecting you.”
Dehan sighed. “But that raised a question. It made sense in terms of the opportunity and the motivation. But where the hell would Humberto get a bowie knife? The search eventually revealed that he did in fact possess a bowie knife. It had no prints on it. But the plastic bag that contained it, did have prints on it, Humberto’s and somebody else’s, somebody who was not in the system, not the reverend’s and not Sylvie’s or Mary’s. Humberto himself said that he had been given the knife by a guardian angel. Clearly, the killer had wiped his own prints off and given it to Humberto, in the bag, assuming that Humberto would take it out and handle it, thus implicating himself, and/or the reverend.”
I shook my head. “But who, and why? We we
re out of suspects. And then it came back to me that there was somebody we had been overlooking. The gardener, Ahmed. What motive could Ahmed possibly have for wanting to kill Simon? I went and spoke to him, and he seemed a real, genuine nice guy. So much so that I almost discounted him, but, following Holmes’ famous dictum, when you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left must be the truth; he was the only suspect left. He had been there that Sunday, and many other afternoons, and there was one, very feasible motive. This whole case revolved around religious fundamentalism, and religious hypocrisy.
“Ahmed had had ample opportunity to witness the reverend paying his regular visits to Sylvie. This, to Ahmed, was disgraceful behavior for a woman, and even more disgraceful for a priest. Bad enough that you were infidels, devout Christians, but that you were also engaging in fornication—that was beyond contempt. And in an act of classic religious hypocrisy, he decided he would have a bit of the action.”
Sylvie was looking down at her hands clenched between her knees.
“That was why the lights were not on, wasn’t it, Sylvie? That was why Simon’s dinner was not ready. That was why he came through the door calling you, and you were not there to receive him. Because you were upstairs, being raped at knifepoint by Ahmed.”
TWENTY SEVEN
Her pretty face was transformed into an ugly mask of grief and hatred. Her mouth pulled down at the corners, her eyes screwed up, swollen and red, spilled tears down her cheeks. Her voice was twisted with pain.
“Why couldn’t you have just stayed out of it? Why did you have to come probing, pushing, forcing your way in? You were not welcome here!”
Mary put her arms around her and pulled her onto her lap, stroking her hair, murmuring gently to her that it would all be all right. God, she said, would make it all right.
Dehan was frowning at me. She looked confused. I met her eye for a moment. I wasn’t sure if she was confused by me, or by the fact that she hadn’t seen it sooner. That was the way I felt when it dawned on me. I shrugged.
“It was one of those things that is so obvious you don’t see it. You represented everything that he most hated. Maybe someday, somebody will manage to explain why so many people use sex as an instrument of punishment and hate. Whatever the reason, that was what Ahmed did. He raped you. And Simon was unlucky enough to arrive home just as Ahmed was coming down the stairs. Ahmed beat him and stabbed him to death, and left the way he’d come in, through the open back door.
“And just as his demented interpretation of ‘God’ had taught him that it was right to rape and subjugate you, and kill Simon, your demented interpretation taught you that it was shameful to be raped. His intention was to humiliate you, and you conspired with him by accepting that humiliation in silence.”
Mary looked at me like I was being somehow grotesque.
The captain scowled. “Look here, John, that is not…”
I looked him in the eye. “Bullshit.” I said it without any particular inflection. It was a simple statement of fact. “My job is to find and state the truth. It was the thing that kept coming up, over and over: what was it that made Sylvie conceal the identity of Simon’s killer? I knew that the amnesia was a lie. I knew that she had seen his killer and she remembered who it was. What I could not understand was what was driving her to conceal it. It was not a love affair with Paul, and it was not compassion for Humberto. So what was it?
“Then it dawned on me. She was not concealing his identity. She was concealing her own shame and humiliation. She had been raped and defiled and, worse still, she had been raped and defiled by an Arab, by a Muslim. You were brought together by your own irrational hatred and contempt for each other, in an act that was supposed to be an act of love. He dressed it up as justified by his God, you concealed it under layers of hypocrisy, but you were both playing the same game. The game of divine superiority.”
Mary was glaring at me. “I think she has had enough, Detective Stone!”
I shook my head. “Not quite.” I paused and shook my head a second time. I felt sick, deep down sick. “Not quite. That was only the beginning of the story.”
The captain looked from me to Dehan. “What? Only the beginning?”
I nodded. “It has long been a mystery to me why celibacy is supposed to be a good thing and sex is synonymous with evil.” I shrugged and spread my hands. I looked at Paul. “I’d ask you to explain it—why an act that brings so much pleasure and actually creates life, should be equated with evil—but I fear you might try to explain. The thing is, Simon was a staunch believer that pleasure is a bad thing and suffering and self-denial are proper emotions. They had brought one child into the world, called her Mary, and as far as he was concerned, he had done his job in that department. Am I right, Sylvie?”
She nodded. “Once, on our wedding night, and the recriminations never stopped.” She spat the words out, “I committed the ultimate sin of enjoying our love-making! He never looked at me again! I was a harlot!”
“But you loved your daughter. Aside from the natural love you felt, I am guessing she was the only source of affection in your life; a life that had, literally, become barren. It’s only a hunch, but I am pretty sure I am not wrong when I say that you longed for another child.”
She nodded. “You’re not wrong, detective.”
“And into that barren life, ironically, as a direct result of Simon’s religious fervor, walked Reverend Paul Truelove. I don’t know if you realize it, Paul, but Sylvie was trying very hard to get pregnant with your child. I don’t know how you planned to explain your pregnancy to your husband, Sylvie. Maybe you planned to tell him it was an immaculate conception. He’d probably have believed you. Maybe you’d reached the point where you just didn’t give a damn. I’d like to think so.”
I paused. The silence in the room was a palpable presence.
“What you didn’t want, what you prayed would not happen, was to get pregnant from your rapist, Ahmed.”
I heard the hiss from Dehan. “Shit!”
Sylvie’s lip trembled and she gripped onto her daughter. Mary clung to her in turn and they both started sobbing.
“You made yourself believe that Jacob was Paul’s, but as the years went by, you could see it in his face. And who knows whether it was genetics or a self-fulfilling prophecy, but eventually you began to see it in his character, too. And so did Ahmed. He told me himself, he ran into you in the street. I’m guessing he went out of his way, literally, to meet you in the street, and he began, over time, to recognize his own son. And maybe on some level, his son recognized him. The fact is they connected.” I shrugged. “Ahmed could be a very charming, likeable guy, as I discovered myself the first time I met him. He could turn on the charm, and I bet Jacob grew to like him very quickly. They gelled. And slowly, you watched as he reeled him in. Did you try to dissuade him? I can imagine that every word you said to him against hanging out with Ahmed was another incentive to see him more often. And the deeper Ahmed and the Mullah drew him into their mosque and Islam, the more he began to see you and your church as weak and hateful. I am willing to bet that they poisoned not just his mind, but his soul.”
I stopped and watched her, watched them both. They were clinging to each other, sobbing, rocking gently back and forth. I could only imagine—no, I could not begin to imagine—the pain they were both feeling. But in particular the pain that Sylvie was feeling.
The captain was staring at me, agog. But Dehan was staring at Sylvie with an expression of the deepest compassion. She spoke softly.
“So it was true. You began to draw Jacob back. What happened? Was it an intervention?” She turned to Paul, who had one hand over his eyes and was sobbing silently. “Your family, your church, united and persuaded him to come back. Of course, the penalty for that in sharia law is death. He murdered his own son…”
I shook my head. “No. That wasn’t what happened. Jacob converted to Islam, but he never converted back. I am guessing, here, Sylvie, but I am pretty certain I am right. A
hmed had filled Jacob’s heart with hatred, but you didn’t want to see it. Maybe you just couldn’t see it. Who can see something that ugly in their own children? How long did it go on for? A year? Two…?”
Mary looked up at me, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Four years.”
“And you, like your mother, were too ashamed to speak out. What is this sickness in the human mind that makes us take on the shame of our attackers?” I looked down at Sylvie and felt incapable of judging her. I only hoped her jury would feel the same. “It was the day of the fête. Mary was sick in bed, and Jacob refused to go. You were in a rush, having to do everything by yourself, without help. You finally got over to your stall, and realized that you had forgotten the brownies. Those damned brownies, but you were too busy to come back for them.
“It was eleven before you managed to get somebody to stand in for you. Then you hurried back. It must have been like a nightmare, coming in to the house and hearing the noises from upstairs. Noises that were all too familiar. Maybe you took the knife then. Maybe Jacob had taken it up with him. I don’t know, but I can imagine what happened next.
“You went up and found him raping Mary. The first clue I got was a simple slip of the tongue. You remember, Mary? You said that your mother ‘came back for the brownies at eleven.’ You didn’t say she went back, but she came back. That placed you at home, which made sense with your bad cold, and her being so mothering and careful. I don’t know whether you screamed at him or whether there was some kind of physical fight. I do know that he walked away from you. I can imagine his attitude. I have seen it in his father. Contempt and insults, calling you both whores, and I know that you rushed at him and he fell down the stairs. Maybe you pushed him in self-defense. I hope so.”
The captain glanced his reproof at me. I had just handed her a defense. I didn’t give a damn. I went on.
