The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) (22 page)

“I am a man of God, Mr. Hunter, as I suspect you yourself may be a son of the church. I have taken vows. Do you doubt my trustworthiness?”

“I suspect your employer would grant you absolution for any number of minor transgressions, up to and including burning us at the stake, if he was convinced they’d been necessary to accomplish your mission here, Brother Dominic. Come on down, and let your associates show themselves, as well.”

“I suspect your Egyptian friends are in a bigger hurry than I am, given that representatives of their own government have been snooping around, threatening to impound this book. My associates will be here shortly. I am content to wait till then for the Egyptians to decide if they want to make a sale, or not.”

Outside, thunder rumbled, noticeably closer.

* * *

Chantal was still without her cell phone, meaning she couldn’t even call Marian at the store. And then there was the other hostage, Rashid. What she was considering would have been sharply rejected by her instructors as “playing the Lone Ranger.” You could take risks to recover members of your own team, but trying to rescue innocent bystanders just risked making a hostage or worse out of your ownself, which could cost more casualties as your teammates then risked their lives to extract
you
. Was Rashid the Egyptian a member of her team? That was a stretch. The rule was to Just Get Out.

She tried. They’d passed an outside door on their way to the ladies room, but it was chained and padlocked. She threw her shoulder to it, tried the butt of Brother Anselmo’s pistol on the window panes. But they were some kind of safety glass; they barely cracked. She considered shooting up the heavy padlock with her small-caliber rounds, decided the most likely result would be for a ricochet to seriously damage her future reproductive prospects, so she decided to give that one a pass.

Outside there was a rumble of thunder and a few scattered raindrops. Down the hall she could hear the TV playing the sound effects as Wily Coyote plummeted off the cliff to his doom. What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound.

She glanced around the corner. The fat monk had his back turned to her, holding another can of Coke and laughing till his chest shook at the old cartoons. She gestured to Rashid on his puke-colored couch to keep his mouth shut and stepped out, her revolver aimed firmly at the bozo’s back in a two-hand grip.

No response. She took a step closer. This guy was completely oblivious. She moved slowly forward until she was actually having to move off to the side to keep the barrel of her piece out of grabbing range. Finally the cartoon must have ended because the smiling idiot started to turn around to look behind him. He spotted Chantal and . . . put his hands up.

“OK, Daffodil,” she said. “Your boss went to collect the book, at which point the plan was to either let me go or not let me go. Where?”

“
Cosa?
”

“Where is the exchange? Where is Matthew supposed to turn over the book to the Dracula guy, to Dominic Penitente, like that’s his real name?”

“Oh! Yes! At the old library.”

“Which old library?”

“
Che c’e’?
”

“Speak English. There are at least three old libraries on the university campus alone. The John Carter Brown? The Hay? Robinson Hall?”

“Yes! Robinson! As you go to this morning! Like the Negro besball player!”

“OK, Petunia. First you’re going to dial 9-1-1 on one of those cell phones there and report your buddy fell and hit his head in the bathroom, give the street address of this place, then you and me and Mr. Rashid are high-stepping it over to Jackie Robinson Hall. Not
my
cell phone; use one of the others.”

“Street address?
Indirizzo?
”

“You DON’T KNOW WHERE WE ARE?”

The chubby plainclothes monk looked like he was going to pee his own pants.

“Jesus fucking Christ. This is the old Catholic high school, right? They built a nice new campus out in the suburbs, so tell them the
old
Saint Pius parochial school; we’ll leave the door open. Oh hell, give me the phone. Wait, you got a gun?
Pistola?
Yes, put down the Coke and give me your pistol. Slowly!
Lentimente
.”

Now she had three handguns, felt like she was getting dressed up to go out to a singles bar.

“Rashid, does this idiot have the key to those handcuffs?”

“Brother Anselmo kept it on his key ring.”

She tossed the key ring to the Egyptian. “Get free, bring the handcuffs in case we need them, hang onto the car keys, get this guy moving outside, it’s starting to rain. Hello, nine-one-one? Yeah, we’re in the old Catholic high school and my boyfriend fell and hit his head and he’s not moving. There’s blood everywhere, it’s like coming out of his ear. My name? Julie Andrews, A-N-D-R-E-W-S. What do you mean? You’re damned right I’m serious, there’s blood coming out of his head and he’s in the girls room. Is it my fault my mom named me after some old TV actress? I know it’s closed, we broke in here to smoke crack and have anal sex, OK? It’s raining out. No, I don’t know the goddamned street address, we’re down in Fox Point somewhere, the old Saint Pius parochial high school. No, of course I don’t know the name associated with this cell phone. I get my cell phones by stealing them at Starbuck’s, like everybody else. Can you send an ambulance? I would drag him out in the street to make it easier for you, but he weighs too much. Which entrance? How ’bout the only one that doesn’t have a chain on it, does that help? Send them to the main parking lot; I’ll go prop the door open.”

She recovered her purse and loaded it with her own cell and the two Italian pistols as she talked, keeping her Lady Smith in her free hand. The fat monk hadn’t quite finished his latest six-pack of Coke, a couple of cans remained unopened and cool enough to still be sweating. It wasn’t the really good Mexican Coke, this was the standard low-grade fructose corn sweetener stuff, but it looked good enough that Chantal grabbed a can and also shoved that in her purse, which resultantly now weighed as much as a bowling ball. Then she herded the Egyptian and their surviving kidnapper out of the room the way she’d been brought in earlier. Pretty soon there was a door that opened with one of those pressure bars and they were outside under a dark cloudy sky in a mostly abandoned parking lot except for the blue Nissan Sentra and, weirdly enough, Skeezix.

“Skeezix, thank God,” she said as she pushed a cinder block with her foot till it would hold the door open. Did she have to do everything? “I’ve got to get to Matthew before he hands over the book. I assume he’s not carrying a cell, as usual?”

“He never does. He hates them. Matthew is really old.”

“Yes he is.”

“Fifty or something, like one of those giant tortoises.”

“I suspect you’re right.”

“Are you two sweeties again?”

“Yes, we are.”

“I’m glad.”

“How’d you find us, Skeezix?”

“Matthew has friends, they got the license number.”

“Have you called it in?”

“I just got here. Are you OK?”

“I’ve got the gun, don’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Skeezix smiled.

“Where did they go?”

“I think they said Robinson Hall, same place you guys went this morning.”

“OK. One of the Italians is hurt in there. He fell down and hit his head in the ladies room, understand?”

“Sure. That happens all the time.”

“I called for an ambulance, when it comes can you flag ’em down and tell them to go in this door, turn right, down the hall to the ladies room?”

“OK, sure.”

“Then make yourself scarce before they try to get your name and address. You’ll be OK if it starts to rain?” In fact, a few large cold drops were already coming down.

“I hate rain.”

“I know you do.” Though it never seemed to stop the Skeezer from wandering around in it, no matter how forlorn and bedraggled he looked. It was not clear that Skeezix drove, or even knew how. “Call Marian and tell her Rashid and I are OK, please? Maybe she can reach Lance White. Did Lance White go with Matthew? The good-looking guy in the white pants?”

“Not sure.”

“Then, once you point the medics inside, you can go hide out somewhere dry. Do you need your glasses to see?”

“Of course not.”

“Put them in your pocket. Got some kind of kerchief?”

Skeezix produced one. Chantal tied it around his head. “There, Covers up your most distinguishing feature,” which was of course his tabby-patterned brown, gray and gold hair. “No sense making you any easier to identify than necessary. Thanks, Skeezix, I really appreciate your tracking us down. Show them the way into the building, then make yourself scarce, then check in with Marian. I’m afraid we’ve got to go.”

“Glad you’re OK, Chantal.”

She gave him a quick hug, shoved a couple of bucks into his shirt pocket to make sure he could afford a bowl of soup at Rue de L’Espoir, then told Rashid to drive the blue Sentra; she’d sit in the back where she could keep an eye on everybody.

As they turned out of the parking lot she could hear a siren coming in the distance. In fact, they passed the ambulance as they started up the hill. Chantal used her own cell to call Marian at the store and report they were OK, that she’d seen Skeezix. Marian let out an “Oh thank God,” then said she had Skeezix on the other line. She confirmed Matthew had no cell, as always, but said she’d try to get word to him through the Reverend White.

A chill wind blew up, now. Paper bags and scraps of newspapers were picked up from the gutters, sent swirling across the street and sidewalks. Then, surprisingly loud like insects splatting came the large, tentative splashes of rain on the windshield. The whole sky had grown as dark as the horizon, making it a shock as she directed Rashid to turn onto Waterman Street and Robinson Hall loomed in front of them and then the old building and its weird marble animal gargoyles was blasted with an illumination of white light, followed by a peal of thunder like the clap of doom.

* * *

Lance White, having apparently abandoned his role of bodyguard to Professor St. Vincent and the book, climbed up on a table at the opposite end of the reading room from Dominic Penitente’s balcony, from which the inquisitor still dominated the huge and sparsely-lit space, looming like a giant bat in his black cape.

The weird hollow light penetrating from the stained glass windows overhead edged both men in luminous shades of red, purple, and green. Lance, particularly, seemed almost to shimmer and glow. Matthew caught himself wondering if he was fully recovered from his mushroom trip of the day before. “Recover” was the wrong word, anyway. Your perceptions never quite went back to the way they’d been before. Some fragment of that extra richness always remained to inform the way you saw the world thereafter.

“It’s not the crucifixion, is it?” asked the Californian in his bright shirt and white slacks — now a kaleidoscope of shifting colors from the stained glass overhead. “The reason the masses can’t be exposed to
The Testament of James
— the reason you want to haul it away and bury it in your catacombs — isn’t because of James reporting his brother survived?”

“Of course it’s not the crucifixion,” replied Dominic Penitente, clearly exasperated at another delay. “Are we schoolchildren?” Thunder rolled again, sounding like it was just down the street.

“A week later our Lord visits the disciples in Galilee; he shows them his healing wounds; he joins them for dinner,” Brother Dominic intoned in his deep, James Earl Jones voice. “To be a Christian it is not necessary to believe that the dead eat fish dinners. Why do you think the church celebrates the Ascension forty days after? He remained for forty days. Of course it’s not about surviving the crucifixion. All this is already there, in the canon. The reason the masses cannot be exposed to the infection of the
Testament of James
is the other!”

“Who again made us one in the sacrament,” smiled Lance White.

“Yes, ‘Who again made us one in the sacrament’!”

“Healing the rift between our animal natures, our human intellect, and the spirit of the divine. It’s the miracle of the loaves, isn’t it?”

Penitente waved his arm, then changed the direction of the gesture and crossed himself. “Do you have any idea what kind of madness would result if this account of the Saviour’s ministry were acknowledged — how long we have worked to suppress this heresy? It would destroy civil order as we know it. You think we have violence and chaos and madness now? The brother of Jesus, a most holy man, must have gone mad if he actually wrote this, he must have been possessed by a demon. The dangers are too terrible to contemplate!”

“So Jesus condemned the priests, the Sanhedrin,” asked Lance, in a calculated tone, “for keeping the knowledge of the sacrament secret from the people, and then, what was worse, for not even using it themselves, for turning their backs on a chance to experience God directly, to hear the voice of God as Moses heard the voice of God in the burning bush, by consuming the manna?”

“You tread on dangerous ground, now.”

“So what was he handing out? Shall I tell them, Brother Dominic?”

“There was a time you would not have dared to speak this way,” the black monk warned.

“Back when you guys could burn anyone who asked the wrong questions on a pile of green wood? How many did your great abbot Arnaud massacre at Beziers? Twenty thousand? Who said ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’? Your guys made him an archbishop for that. Judaism was a mystery religion, and the guy you chose as your savior was dedicated to bringing the mystery of Moses back out of the shadows. Moses told them to keep the mystery safe in the Ark, so it would always be available to the younger generations. But the priests grew jealous of their power. If just anyone could learn how to speak to God directly, to hear the voice of God, then why would they need the priests and the temple full of blood? So to protect their power and their privilege, to maintain their monopoly over telling people how an angry God could be propitiated, they hid the mystery away until it was lost and forgotten, even to them.”

“Abomination!” shouted Dominic Penitente, as a flash of purple-white lightning lit up the whole room, followed instantly by a crack of thunder overhead at the cupola, close enough to make the rest of them duck their heads.