Chapter Five
The man responsible for the carnage had been born forty years earlier in Pawtucket, Rhode Island to a Presbyterian minister named Joshua Welsh who believed that all human feelings were a weakness and a French Canadian mother named Blanche, whose mystical Catholicism and French temperament accounted for virtually all of the emotion in the marriage. Their lone offspring was named Darius because his mother read in a magazine that the name meant “good and kingly”. His father didn’t think names had any meaning, so it was not a concern to him. And so Darius Welsh became the apple of his mother’s eye and the object of scorn from his father, who saw the boy as nothing more than a squalling interruption of his composition of sermons, which nearly every member of the flock believed were boring to an extreme.
Darius spent his childhood under the guidance of his mother, who secretly practiced Old World Catholicism in Latin, and his grandmother, a woman who spent her days experiencing visions of the Virgin Mary and who believed that suffering was the highest form of human existence. Darius came to believe that the world was divided between men like his father, cold and disconnected from God, and his mother and grandmother, emotional and spiritual with a raw and sometimes painful connection to Heaven.
He went to seminary at the age of twelve and devoted himself to an unsuccessful attempt at purging his earthly passions, by a self-imposed punishment if necessary. He became a Jesuit and worked for a time as a parish priest in a prosperous area of Connecticut, spending his days listening to the spiritual whining of the comfortable, developing a loathing for all they represented. His evenings were spent in flagellation, whipping himself for his own sinfulness and weakness, a punishment that almost always gave him a shameful release. He became a devoted follower of the Virgin Mary and he believed she appeared to him with messages of love and understanding. It encouraged him to even more extreme forms of worship. He believed he was a mission for Her and he would do anything She asked.
And so, on this day, his back was bloody from fresh wounds and scarred from old ones. The whip, its knotted cords soaked with blood and skin, lay limp over his shoulders. He was losing blood and it troubled him that he could not go on. He worried that he would lose consciousness and be unable to defend himself should they come for him. He concentrated on his breathing, in and out. The pain was exquisite. He felt at one with Christ, who suffered in such a way. Another of the Sorrowful Mysteries. First, Jesus sweats water and blood on the night before his passion. The man could not make himself sweat blood, but he could make others offer such a mystery and he had. Priests, all of them. Ten Hail Mary’s, each with its own thrust of the knife. Hail Mary, full of grace. The priests had died in a glorious mystery. Now he, in this act, was living in the second mystery of sorrow, The Scourging at the Pillar.
When he was able, he would move on to the third mystery. He had marked the chosen one who would be crowned with thorns. He must act soon. They were coming, he knew. They would try to stop him. He glanced behind him and saw the blood pooling on the plastic sheet he had placed upon the bed. He was light headed. He picked up the knife and began his prayers, flicking open the handle to expose the gleaming blade. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth… The blade was his bead, his concentration, in his Novena of pain and death.
As he bled and prayed, another man sat on a hotel bed four hundred miles north, in the gritty former mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. He was on the phone.
“You got a lead?”
He paused, listening to the man on the other end of the call explain that this time two priests had been killed.
“Washington? How the hell did he get to Washington? I thought we had eyeballs on him!”.
The man on the other end talked for several minutes. The fellow on the bed grew angrier and jumped up, pacing. “We gotta stop him, goddam it! I’m going down there and I’ll call you again and I want you tell me where he is. Got that? Jesus, how damned hard can it be to find this guy? He’s driving a rare fuckin’ car! How many of these things are on the road? Goddam it!”
He packed his small bag and climbed into the ten year old sedan he had picked up from a rent-a-wreck outfit in Lawrence. It was a car that would not be noticed. He headed south, pulled into a truck stop, stomped the cell phone into pieces and threw it into a trash can. He would buy another one in Washington.
His name was Peter Malone and he was a member of The Warriors of Mary, a band of eye-rolling fanatics who believed that they were chosen by The Virgin Mary herself to keep the true faith and protect those who serve it. Malone was tracking one of their own who had gone rogue. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He fumed as he drove south on I-95 and he pounded the steering wheel of the car when he was stuck in a traffic backup on the George Washington Bridge. He tried to make up the time in New Jersey but he was pulled over by a cop who clocked him on radar at eighty-three miles per hour. He managed to get away with only a warning ticket. The cop appeared uninterested in the middle-aged man with thin hair and a paunch who looked scared because he had been pulled over in a speed trap. The cop himself was middle-aged and felt sorry for the guy in the old car. He was more interested in the young Spanish punks who had the attitudes and the fancy rims and, he suspected, drugs in their cars. So he quickly filled out the ticket and told the man to watch his speed.
Malone kept up with traffic past Philadelphia and Wilmington and was stuck in slow traffic near Baltimore, but he kept moving, stopping only for gas and fast food at the service facilities along the highway. He did not turn on the radio and he did not pray. He stared at the road ahead and tried to form an image of the man he was chasing dead on the floor of a church, prostrate before a statue of the Virgin, eyes open, arms spread, a leather Rosary around his neck. The image made him happy.
I-95 proper empties onto the Capital Beltway in Maryland, directing travelers south across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge into Virginia to a maze known as the Springfield Interchange and an escape from the Beltway to points as far away as southern Florida. But this man had no interest in those places. He exited the Beltway at I-295, a short freeway into the District of Columbia. He drove the car to Constitution Avenue at Fourteenth Street and stared at the Washington Monument, illuminated by the powerful lights that ignited the patriotic spirit of those who gazed upon the capital’s landmarks after the sun went down.
Malone was a veteran of the last days of the Vietnam era and his patriotism was mixed with the cynicism that was left in the wake of the war. What he felt as he gazed upon the obelisk was sorrow for what he believed were the lost ideals of his country. He believed that the Virgin Herself had a hand in the nation’s affairs and that she had been ignored and thus the nation was in peril. His twisted logic had produced a belief that he was on a mission to save his country. He saluted the monument and drove up Fourteenth Street until he found a tourist hotel near Thomas Circle. He checked in and went to his room to cleanse himself.