Almost Mortal

by Chris Leibig

  Camille waited.

  “We got a second profile from the chalice. From the stem. It looks like the DNA from the stem is consistent with a profile found on the new victim’s hat.”

  Camille almost frowned for a moment. “Okay.”

  “I also tested the manuscript itself. It seems to have a similar pattern; nothing conclusive, but it certainly can’t be ruled out that the person who touched the manuscript also touched the chalice stem and the hat. If I’m right, that means one thing and one thing only, and you know it. I’ve dealt straight with you. It’s time for you to tell me what the hell is going on. Did you get a DNA swab from Andrada?”

  Camille watched him carefully. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he isn’t the Rosslyn Ripper.”

  Sam stood and paced away from Camille, then approached her.

  “That’s not how I’m seeing it, Camille. His anger. The rages. The DNA. I have to deal with the fact that there’s a pretty good chance you know a lot more about these murders than you’re telling me. I have a duty now. Have for a while. In a matter of days, if not today, the police will learn about our investigation anyway. I’ll protect you, but I gotta know more.”

  Camille stretched her legs in front of her and massaged the back of her neck. A strained look crossed her face; one Sam attributed more to an internal pain, like the sudden onset of a hernia or the sharp pierce of a bleeding ulcer. She stood, turned her back to Sam, and walked towards the window. She looked out the window and across the parking lot. When she turned back she was crying, uncontrollable sobs so at odds with her normally placid demeanor.

  Sam stood, approached her, and grabbed her shoulders as she shook.

  “Camille, you’ve gotta tell me what’s going on.”

  “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a very long time. I’m truly sorry I’ve waited for so long. But some of it you have to come to on your own. Trust me on this—there won’t be another murder.”

  Sam flopped onto the couch and covered his face with his hands. He was suddenly so tired.

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  Camille just watched him.

  •••

  Sam awoke to his buzzing phone on the couch in his apartment. Six o’clock in the morning. Juliana. He declined the call and sat up just as another call came in. Camille.

  “Hello?”

  “Did you get some rest?”

  Sam took a deep breath.

  “Did you ever care about stopping the Rosslyn Ripper?”

  “Very much. But you remember from the beginning, I told you I had more than one reason for wanting to meet you. Look, I promise, Andrada won’t leave the church grounds. If he does, I’ll call you, even call the cops if you tell me to. But bear with me. Give it another night. Before you left last night, I didn’t have the chance to tell you we received another portion of the journal. I scanned it in and emailed it to you just now. Figure out the relation, if any, between the manuscript and our present situation. Trust me. Just give it a try. Call me later. And I swear to you, Sam. Andrada is not the Rosslyn Ripper. And there will be no more murders.

  “There’s a lot of biblical stuff in those journal entries,” she said. “You’re great at the legal analysis, but do you even own a bible?”

  Sam shrugged. “I’m pretty sure I have one lying around.”

  •••

  Sam sat in a plastic chair on the fire escape with a coffee in one hand and the new section of the journal pulled up on his computer. His phone buzzed. A text from Dr. Thomas: Call me. Sam picked up the phone, but before he could call Thomas, it rang.

  “Dude,” a gravelly voice greeted him.

  “Barnabus? What are you doing up?”

  “Me? I’m a hard worker, my friend. You’re the one who sounds tired. Hey, I got a letter.”

  “What kind of letter?’

  “You know, one of those things that says you gotta go to court. Some cop slapped it on my door last night. Used fuckin’ tape, too, the prick.”

  Sam sighed. “Barnabus, you know what a subpoena is. What’s it say?”

  Sam heard some papers rustling as Barnabus pretended to be too dopey to understand his legal predicament. Just a nice guy fumbling through life. “United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Grand Jury Summons, you are commanded to appear—”

  “Got it. They’re summonsing you to the grand jury to ask you about the cigarettes. Don’t worry about it. You’re not going. I’ll call later. E-mail me the summons.”

  “Thanks, dude, you’re the best. Hey, you get my check?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll check the mail later. I’m kinda busy.”

  “No sweat, dude. But remember, I’m on your side. You rub my back, I’ll rub yours, or whatever.”

  “Wonderful, Barnabus.”

  “Hey, Sam, one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “You sound kinda stressed out. Don’t worry; you’ll get through it. I believe in you, man. And I’ve been through some shit.”

  “Barnabus, that means a lot coming from you. It really does.”

  “Oh, I know. Believe me, I know. See you, dude.”

  Sam climbed in the window and sorted through the mail on his coffee table, quickly finding Barnabus’s small, sloppily written envelope. He tore it open. Back on the balcony, he laughed to himself. Only Barnabus. A cashier’s check for twenty grand. Double the requested fee and almost a third of Sam’s public defender salary.

  Sam set the check on the coffee table next to his mother’s boxes. The lid of one of the two boxes he had dug through the other day sat off kilter. He sat on the couch, lit a cigarette, and opened the third box. Maps. Travel itineraries from her job. Sam’s old report cards and some art he had done as a kid. The fourth box had framed photos from her office and more books. The fifth box had papers. He dug through them and found bank information, school schedules, bills, and the contents of a disorganized desk drawer for the most part. And amid the clutter a small bible. He pulled it out, flipped through it with his thumb, and placed it on the couch.

  The sixth box had her nicely matted American University Diploma from 1975, her framed 1985 award from the Peace Corps for work on a development project in Eastern Europe, and then, nearer the bottom, some old greeting cards. Sam flipped through them. Congratulations cards from professors for her PhD. John Horne. William. Steven Colter. He opened a few more cards. One was a card from his mother to him. He opened it and saw that it contained a small paragraph to him on his seventeenth birthday, but shut it quickly. He placed it in his briefcase. And then at the very bottom was a thick, black, hardbound book. Doctoral Dissertation of Marcela F. Young. Sam put the dissertation and the small bible on top of the manila envelope on his bookshelf. He would look through all the items more carefully soon enough. Finally, he leaned back on the couch, breathing hard. Mission accomplished with the fucking boxes. After sixteen years.

  Back to the mystery man.

  •••

  APRIL 16, 1959

  The four seasons—the cycle of living and dying appropriate to this world—are muted in the sunny paradise of Miami. I have come to realize Paul and I will never secure legitimate employment here. We have no citizenship, no green cards, and no rubber-stamped visas from the anti-Castro camps. We are smuggled aliens, illegal, and it has taken some months for me to formulate our next move.

  A few days ago, the Sunray Motel became our home. It sits at the shit end of the beach strip but busies itself more with druggies and hookers than tourists, though the white American tourists from up north visit often enough. Funny they are, pasty and fat, with their fancy shirts and neat leather wallets and crisp, green cash. Their auras are so plain, so bereft of the basic understandings possessed by the simplest Bariloche peasant. But they do have the wallets.

  Paul sticks to drugs. He is so athletically impressive now that it seems as though he has always been a natural American thug of sor
ts. He certainly has no cause to fear the addicts and nervous travelers to whom we ply our trades. Today, a herky-jerky Cuban homosexual grabbed a bag of cocaine from Paul’s hand and ran. I’ll never forget the boy’s jagged run and his torn jeans pathetically slapping the sidewalk in pace with his rough grunts. Even from across the street I could smell the horror upon him, the years of malice and hate and greed he had seen since he was a very young boy. Indeed, I even sympathized with the thief, having myself (depending on how one looks at it) suffered the same kind of abuse that had defined his youth, sadly, as it is the human way to pass misery on to the innocent. The hophead is surely destined to return the favor on down the human line to any person dumb enough to depend on him. Paul shrugged at me from across the street. I love our moments of connection—the stark, mutual recognition that he sees my abilities and still loves me. And so the hophead remained in the human stream.

  •••

  FEBRUARY 8, 1960

  Late this afternoon I sat in a plastic chair on our balcony, watching Paul from above as he served his customers. Police are not much of a problem here. They mostly can’t be bothered to intervene in the sad commercial enterprises lining our strip. To the extent a diligent policeman occasionally decides to endeavor upon a futile attempt to curtail the suffering by making some kind of an arrest, Paul and I are safe. I can read them in their slow-rolling, black-and-white cruisers. Oh, the drama. Where to have lunch? How much overtime this month? Will the wife actually believe I am working tonight? Or will she drive by the station looking for my car? Before any police get near our block, I have the blueprint for their next twenty-four hours right down to their preferred pit stop for a shit. Until today.

  I suppose there are those like Fidel who seem at first glance insightful enough to be kindred spirits but are merely human all the same. Not siblings, but special nevertheless. I believe they are capable of seeing the truth of things, albeit only in brief glimmers. Another way to put it would be to say that some humans can see far and wide but lack the ability to understand what they see. I think these people form an extreme minority of the human population.

  I stood on the Sunray balcony, casting a subtle, protective radar round and about Paul while he finished unloading his little handfuls of cocaine. I then suffered a mental slipup. A man caught me by surprise. I saw him two blocks away, a pedestrian walking casually towards Paul. A tall, bearded black man with a fine leather jacket and some fancy red boots. Not poor. Not a hophead. I narrowed my eyes at him. Seemed strong enough, just a man looking to score for a night out with his friends, a normal man with a real job, a perfect customer, in fact. Not dangerous. Pocket full of cash and no worries.

  But then he got up near Paul, and as soon as they began to speak, I saw it. Before I could shoot out a warning, the man spun Paul around and shoved him against the wall, professionally frisking Paul’s legs and waistband. Paul, in that unique way of his, looked up at me, waiting, I suppose, for approval. Permission.

  I knew the arrest itself was not worth the cost of violence against the policeman, which would provoke a reaction beyond my ability to manage. I also did not fear the legal punishment Paul would face if arrested. I feared the question of identity. I have little knowledge of the police identification tools about which I have heard. Fingerprints. Blood tests. But my worry was that if the police arrested me, they could figure out the one thing that could truly harm us. And so I did what I had to do.

  The policeman was simply not a proper subject of immediate mind control. His studied undercover methods, his living the role as I could sense he called it—his acting—had fooled me. In his mind, he pretended to be what he pretended to be with his body. I scanned the strip, easily finding what I needed: a weak-minded hophead. I had never tried this before—prodding another with my mind to take physical action. But with the slightest of thrusts from me, he charged. He ran full speed across the street, where he dove, jaws open like a rabid dog, into a group of young men who gathered on the corner one block down from ours. He made full contact with one of them, flattening the man to the ground, his teeth digging for the neck. The melee was loud and furious and (I did not intend this) gunshots banged and echoed loudly over the block. Everybody ran. The detective looked only once from Paul to the fight and then broke into a run towards the danger. I jumped into his mind briefly as he passed under the balcony. Brave and smart, a truly impressive human. A cousin. Were he not so focused on his job, he would have sensed me above him. Instead, he desperately performed CPR, banging on the hophead’s chest again and again.

  The tawdry scene once again brought into focus a question that has been weighing on me more and more heavily and demands an answer. Why am I this way? What did I ever do to warrant being sentenced to this solitary exile? While I may not be totally alone, it is beyond question that I am among an extreme minority of creatures different from, and perhaps less protected than, the Great One’s humans. Are those like me barred from the reward promised by the Great One? Are we, indeed, the descendants of those cast out of heaven and forbidden to return? Of Satan himself. The victims of our ancestors’ decisions? Would that not make God crueler than the most arbitrarily abusive parent? Worse than Miguel, who at least suffered from some kind of disease? Where can I find someone to teach me the answers to these questions?

  •••

  NOVEMBER 17, 1963

  The best drug dealer on the strip this year is Marcus Fowler, a black man from New York who poses as a Jamaican, with his dreadlocks and phony lilt. He also pimps as it suits my needs, and this mutual endeavor allows me to own his mind. Drugs, on the other hand, are a way to earn real money.

  Marcus is a talented drug dealer, having lived it since his youth. He has a decent heart by the standards he knows. But his mind yearns so badly for guidance that I can move around his cluttered brain like a shopkeeper stocking my shelves, swapping one item for another to suit my daily fancy.

  Last night I asked Marcus to take me to a hotel downtown. To relax, I said. For fun. I would make him feel good. I still remember the view from our window at dusk. The Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. Soft light shone from the windows, illuminating the old stone.

  I let Marcus pump his load into me one last time. In his frenzy, he could not possibly notice my vacant eyes and dead touch as I soared along the beautiful Florida coastline like a dragon. When he finished, I decided to spin his neck. He would be gone. No further need to concern myself with his pursuit. Paul and I would have our earnings free and clear. I placed my hands on either side of his face. His eyes shut and he crumpled onto a pillow next to me—tired from the drinks and the pot and the sex. My palms adjusted themselves on each side of his jaw, ready to twist.

  Moments later I stood by the door, breathing deeply, rhyming my breaths with Marcus’s, who now slept soundly with his drunken little snores. “Thank you,” I said aloud. As for whether I was thanking Marcus, the universe, or even the Great One, I had no idea. Leaving Marcus alive puts us in danger. He’ll wish to chase us, for the money and for me. Then why the inner sense of levity as I softly shut the door on his snoring? I took the stairs, popped out on an alley, and purposefully crossed the street and entered the cathedral. It was near midnight. An old woman knelt in a pew near the front, sobbing about who knows what. I strolled straight down the center aisle, leaning back on my spine. Slow time. Observe. Christ on the cross looked sad. His depiction mirrored his reality by remaining still, unmoved by earthly events. I could feel the tears on my face. I whispered to him a short message. Part of me wanted to tell the Great One’s son I was sorry for everything, for Salome and Ortiz and Miguel and the tan-coat soldiers and the hophead and the drug dealing and for selling my body and for all my other sins. But all my life I have only acted consistently with my nature. I may as well be what the universe says. I am anyway. And yet, why did I leave Marcus alive? I wanted to ask Jesus. But instead, I said something more important.

  “He made me this way. You get that part, right?”

  I stoo
d in silence for what must have been many minutes, listening to Jesus ignore my question.

  “Repent, you said, and enter the kingdom of heaven. That means me too, right?”

  I looked deep into Jesus’ eyes. I know the eyes were crafted to be kind. To me they were cold.

  “We’re alike you and I. Surely not equal but alike. You went through this, did you not?”

  I would have kissed him on his bloodless lips had he not been suspended so far above me. But that would not have made any difference. Like always with the Great One and his Son— nothing.

  Trinity was waiting for me outside the cathedral on the empty sidewalk, wearing a blue beret and a black business suit. Both hands were in her pockets. She smiled at me. Tears ran down my face and onto her neck. Where have you been? Where have you been? I tried to ask her through sobs.

  “Don’t bother with Jesus. He doesn’t welcome us,” she said.

  My heart burned like a fire inside a forge with love for Trinity, but I felt terror all the same. Terror because the emphasis she placed within her sentence conveyed what I have feared all my life about myself. Not “He doesn’t welcome us.” Not “He doesn’t welcome us.” Not “He doesn’t welcome us.” Trinity’s sentence meant I had been right all along. That we were, but for so few, alone. “He doesn’t welcome us.”

  “I know you wish it were some other way,” she said.

  Trinity and I stood, clasping each other’s hands for many minutes without speaking. In her eyes I could see the pain she had both endured and, yes, caused others, on her journey, many, many others. I feel for her, but I must say this insight grants me some relief. That my sister has more blood on her hands than I do. That she believes she is also, by birth and acts, destined for hell.

  “I think there’s a way out of this,” Trinity said. “But people have tried it before, and it’s not going to be easy.”

  “Are we people though?” I smiled at her.

  “My point exactly.”

  CHAPTER 19