“I’m not afraid to die.”
“That very well may be, blinded to reality by this folly you and the others are engaged in,” Frey said. “In fact, I’m sure you want to die to fulfill your mission, otherwise you’re just punch lines, failures.”
Lucy was silent.
“Whether you live or die, what is important to me is that you fail,” Frey continued. “That you are repudiated by the one institution that can verify you and abandoned by those who follow you.”
Frey placed the canister down on the table in front of her and loosed the shackles that held her.
“If you move, I will destroy it.”
He extended a stand and mounted a camera onto it, turning on the video function to capture events for later use. To humiliate her, to rebuke her, publicly.
“Your friend Jesse might be interested in this footage,” Frey said. “If he lives.”
“A hostage video, Doctor?” Lucy said, eyeing the canister and the tools spread out before her.
“Think of it as an infomercial,” he said snidely. “You are familiar with those, I’m sure.”
“I have nothing to sell,” she said.
“Except yourself, isn’t that right? Who you believe yourself to be?”
“I make no claims, so I have nothing to deny.”
“You are stubborn, Lucy, strong willed,” Frey opined. “In my profession, we call it oppositional defiance.”
“I don’t need a diagnosis, Doctor.”
“That’s true. I’m afraid you and your friends are past help.”
“I have all the help I’ll ever need.”
“Well, I will leave it to you and the good cardinal here to resolve this disagreement,” Frey said. “I trust you will be in touch, Your Eminence.”
“Leaving so fast, Doctor?” Lucy said, her words dripping contempt.
“This is your show, Lucy. I’m just here to make a cameo, like everyone else in your world.”
The cardinal nodded and Frey departed as stealthily as he’d come. DeCarlo resumed his interrogation in his best fire-and-brimstone voice.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Tell me!”
“You already know,” she said bravely, “or I wouldn’t be here.”
Cecilia and Agnes waited in the shadows as Frey left.
“That was quick,” Agnes noted.
“Whatever is happening in there,” Cecilia said, “he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty.”
They peeked in the doorway and quickly pulled away, out of sight, backs to the wall.
“We’re outnumbered,” Agnes observed somberly.
“I’m used to it by now.”
The guards had a hungry look in their eyes. Agnes swallowed hard and smiled nervously.
“Seriously, Cecilia, the two of us aren’t going to be able to take them.”
“You’re right,” Cecilia said. “I’ll handle them, you get to Lucy.”
“How?”
“What you did in the subway. Can you do it again?”
Agnes paused uncertainly. “I don’t know.”
Cecilia took Agnes firmly by the shoulders.
“Lucy is in there. The heart is in there. We need to get inside that room.”
“But, what about you?”
“I’ll keep them busy.”
“That’s suicide, Cecilia!”
Agnes reached for her friend and held her tight. Cecilia brushed Agnes’s hair away gently.
“Lucy needs us.”
Agnes nodded. “I’ll see you inside.”
CeCe started toward the heavily guarded door and called back to Agnes. “Do your thing.”
The brown four-door sedan swerved around potholes as it rolled up and Captain Murphy stepped out.
A uniformed officer in charge of the scene walked quickly toward him.
“What do you got?” Murphy asked.
“Teenage Male. Deceased.”
The officer pointed toward an alleyway between the coffin factory and the hot dog stand.
To Murphy’s ears it sounded like a hundred other deaths. Death by misadventure, it was mostly called. Unintentional. Death by stupidity is what Murphy called it. Young people, with everything to live for, pissing away their most valuable possession. Their lives. Drinking, drugs, gang murder, and every kind of foolishness. For some reason his mind traveled instantly to Lucy, Cecilia, and Agnes, each of whom, he believed, was putting herself in great danger.
“And you needed me here because?’ the captain queried, spying the flashes of the crime scene photographer’s camera flickering like a night-club strobe light.
“I thought you should see this.”
Murphy saw a young man dangling from a fire escape, a jumper cable twisted several times around his neck. His body swung easily in the light breeze, his back to the crowd of law enforcement gathering just beneath it.
“Suicide?” Murphy groused. “I’ve got to escort a diplomat arriving at JFK in an hour and you drag me down here for a suicide?”
“No, I dragged you down here for this.” The officer grabbed the stiffening legs of the victim by the ankles and spun him slowly around.
Murphy looked up and saw the pale and bluing face of the teen. He was young and handsome, but that wasn’t the thing that troubled him so deeply. What troubled him most was the long blade sticking out of his chest. A letter opener.
“Not a suicide,” Murphy mumbled, looking at the officer. “Do we have an ID?”
“We found a wallet lying on the ground. Right here,” the officer pointed to a spot directly below the hanging corpse.
Murphy opened the black leather holder and pulled out a high school identification card. He recognized it as the school attended by Agnes Freemont.
“Finn Blair.”
He exhaled and handed the wallet back. “Let me know what you find out,” Captain Murphy ordered. “Take him down!”
“Yes, Captain.”
Finn’s body was lifted down gently onto a gurney.
“Oh and Sergeant, send a car over to the Freemont house in Park Slope,” Murphy ordered.
“Any particular reason?”
“Just check in. Make sure the girl and her mother are okay.”
“I’ll call it in now.”
Murphy walked back toward his car.
“Captain!” the sergeant called to him.
Murphy turned and walked back to the officer hovering over Finn’s body.
“Look at this.”
The sergeant ordered the medical examiner’s evidence collector to lift the lapel of Finn’s jacket, where the blade had pierced his heart. There was a piece of paper about the size of a large Post-it note affixed to Finn’s bloody shirt pocket by the blade. The sergeant shined a small flashlight on the paper on which was written a single word.
Sinner.
“Cancel the squad car,” Murphy said. “I’ll go myself.”
Agnes could feel the cold brick and mortar cutting into her shoulder blades as she leaned against the exterior wall of the archbishop’s residence for support. She crouched down, let her neck relax and her head hang forward to her knees.
Her hair fell to the ground, enshrouding her.
She tried to relax, despite the stakes, and get to that place. The place where heart and soul, mind and body, come together, so that they could come apart. A place only Sebastian had been able to take her. Agnes pictured his eyes, his mouth, his hair. She imagined his voice, his touch. She let herself . . . dream.
She felt herself disappear, break down, transform, like paraffin melting into liquid, dripping, looking for a new place to re-form and solidify. She separated from herself and departed; her mind, her senses intact. In an instant she found herself in a wood-paneled antechamber between two sets of doors. She heard an argument, grunts and screams.
She pressed her ear against the heavy mahogany barrier and listened. She heard the forceful threats of an older man and Lucy’s defiant protests from the next room becoming louder and more intense.
<
br /> “Repent!” Cardinal DeCarlo raged. “Confess your sin.”
“Confess my sins to a sinner?” Lucy shouted back.
The tension in their voices was clearly rising. Agnes turned the large golden knob slowly and opened the door just a crack. It was unguarded. As ominous as the sounds of the dispute were, what Agnes saw was even more mind-boggling. Lucy was seated in a large uncomfortable chair, a tall but hunched figure lording over her, the bottom of his red cardinal robe bouncing along the floor with each frustrated gesture. On the table in front of her, a collection of instruments, none of which Agnes recognized but all of which looked medieval and deadly.
“You have made your choice and left me with none,” DeCarlo threatened. “In pain you will find truth and redemption.”
DeCarlo approached the table and raised the iron implement, part scoop, part claw, like a cat’s paw, and waved it slowly in front of her face as he prayed.
Lucy closed her eyes as DeCarlo brought the torture instrument closer.
“Deny Sebastian. Deny this blasphemy.”
“Never!” she screamed.
“No! Stop!” Agnes screamed, running toward them, feeling herself suddenly torn away.
13 Cecilia approached the outer doors of the cardinal’s quarters, which were guarded by the small group of men who’d escorted Dr. Frey inside. She approached the thuggish human wall slowly, counting heads.
Three men in priest’s robes stood guard at the entrance to the archbishop’s office. The tattoos showing above their collars and holsters bulging under their garments at their hips indicated that these were the most aggressive men of the cloth she’d ever encountered.
“Waiting for an audience with the archbishop?” CeCe snarked. “I hear he’s away for a few days.”
“Can I help you?” one asked.
“I’ve come for my friend.”
“She’s inside,” another said coldly, daring her to pass, each flashing a black hardwood baton.
“Let me tell you something about myself,” Cecilia began.
The men started laughing condescendingly. “These are your last words. You can say whatever you want.”
Cecilia took a few steps back, reached for her belt, and unfastened it. The guards tensed up. Ready for an attack.
“You know,” she mused, “when I was little, my father warned me that I was about to get punished by taking off his belt and hanging it from the chair of the kitchen table.”
“Maybe that’s why you have a thing for older guys.”
Cecilia heard the dis and recognized the voice of the man who’d murdered Bill. What had started as a rescue had suddenly become even more intensely personal. The chance to kill two birds with one stone. She continued, emotionless, on the outside at least.
“That if I pushed him just one tiny bit further, I was gonna get it,” she continued, stepping closer. “I knew that he meant business, knew what was in store for me, but somehow I just couldn’t stop myself.”
“Come to Daddy, naughty girl,” one said, wagging his fingers.
Cecilia smiled. “Time for a spanking.”
“Are we going to fight or fuck?” the guard said, laughing.
“Are you going to whip us for being bad?” the other mocked, licking his lips.
Cecilia let the urumi unspool, two thin metal straps hitting the floor with a springy metallic crack.
“Whip you?” she said flatly. “No . . . I would never whip you.” She paused. “I’m going to cut the tips of your fingers off, then I’m going to slice off your ears, then your balls, before cutting you into little pieces. That’s what I do to bad boys.”
The guards rushed Cecilia.
She whirled the belt sword around her like a helicopter blade, and struck, slicing up the first attacker. His legs were cut off at the knees and he dropped to his bloody stumps, crying out in agony. “Change of plans,” she said as splintered bone and shredded flesh splashed the walls and floor around them. “It’s a killer accessory. Don’t you think?”
“So’s this,” another shouted, he and his partner drawing their guns.
Before they could squeeze off their first shots, Cecilia levitated straight up from the floor, and the spray of bullets flew by beneath her. The attackers were momentarily stunned by the sight of Cecilia’s lithe body floating above them.
She put her head down and the bullets raced to her head as if she were magnetized, forming a golden saintly aura. She raised her head. They raised their guns, aiming higher for a second shot. But Cecilia was faster, snapping the metallic whip, removing the guns and their hands with them in a single, swirling strike. A second angular stroke as she descended, across both of their thighs, cut through their pants and through their femoral arteries. Both men writhed in pain, immobilized, torrents of blood spewing from terminal wounds.
“Bleed for me, boys,” CeCe said, standing over them, not a hint of remorse or satisfaction in her eyes. She watched them grow paler and colder as the puddles of ooze quickly expanded and thickened.
“Like the good book says: Do unto others, before they do unto you,” she sermonized. “I’m paraphrasing of course.”
Her headpiece fell to the ground like rain and the bullets scattered everywhere.
She approached the first attacker who was still squirming on the floor. He tried to raise himself. She kicked him hard in the jaw and sent him sprawling, a smear of his own blood trailing him.
“You’re no better than us,” he spat, bits of his teeth dribbling out of his swollen lips.
“Maybe,” she admitted, surveying the carnage she’d wrought.
“Who made you judge and jury?”
“This isn’t a trial,” she replied.
He struggled to right himself, cursing her name.
“You want to get up?” she asked. “Let me help you.”
She grabbed him by the hair and pulled until he was balanced on his bloody stumps, upright. His screams echoed through the grand foyer as protruding bones and severed nerves scraped the marble tile. Cecilia dragged the urumi from side to side through his blood pooling beneath him.
“Some people think Jesus went to India to preach,” Cecilia said, circling him like a lion tamer.
“Tell someone who gives a shit,” he snapped, still grabbing for her.
Cecilia ignored the slight. “You know who also went to India? My friend Bill. Remember him?”
“No.” The legless killer laughed, gurgling blood. “Does anyone?”
“I do,” Cecilia answered solemnly. “He got this sword there.”
Cecilia knelt before the killer and wrapped her urumi around his neck three times then stood holding the handle. He was helpless to stop her, and gasping for breath.
“If there’s a hell below . . . ,” the man sang maniacally through cracked and blood-soaked teeth.
She knew the song. Cecilia sang the chorus back to him, tapping her foot. Marking time. His.
“I said don’t worry,” she sang softly in a gospel-blues cadence, raising her hand in faux-spiritual praise.
CeCe looked directly into his eyes and he looked back at her, heavy lidded, fading fast but croaking the song louder with his last watery breath.
“I said if there’s a hell below, we’re all going to gooooo.”
“You first,” she rasped, pulling the handle of the whip, launching his head from his body like a champagne cork from a bottle of New Year’s bubbly.
Cecilia briefly surveyed the carnage around her, blood, bone, and guts smearing the archbishop’s home. A sudden scream from inside, which she recognized immediately as Agnes’s, and a commotion outside, cars approaching the residence, engines and headlights blazing, startled her all at once. She ran to the entrance to wake Agnes’s entranced body. Cecilia grabbed Agnes by the shoulders and shook her gently at first and then harder, calling her name.
“Agnes!”
Agnes murmured “No” urgently over and over again as she came to.
Cecilia held her head steady to focus her.
“What’s happening?” CeCe asked.
“We have to get in there. Now!”
Sister Dorothea arrived at Perpetual Help hospital searching for some word of Jude. She approached the triage desk in the emergency room and gave his name. The nurse checked the computer for him and frowned.
“He’s already been transferred,” she informed.
“So quickly?”
“He was unmanageable when he arrived,” she said perfunctorily.
“Where is he?”
“Upstairs,” she said. “In Psych.”
The nun walked straight to the elevator bank and pressed up for the lift. The nurse nodded to the watchman to let her pass. Sister Dorothea stepped out onto the penthouse floor. She’d been there before with Jude on one of his many visits, but she’d never been there to see him.
“May I help you?” the night nurse asked.
“I’m looking for a boy, Jude, who was admitted earlier?”
“Are you next of kin?” the nurse asked, checking her sheet.
“There is no next of kin,” the nun replied.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not permitted to give out any information on our patients.”
She’d hoped that Jude might be released to her, but perhaps under the circumstances that was too much to ask for. The best she could hope for was to find him a new home and get his city-assigned caseworkers to cut a few corners to get him out of there.
“Can you just tell me if he’s here? If he’s all right.”
Before the question escaped her lips, Sister Dorothea saw the boy escorted from a room at the end of the hall, dressed only in a smock.
“Jude!” she screamed.
Her dulled cries just barely reached the boy. He turned. The look of terror on his face was undeniable and one she’d seen many times before on the playground. He reached out his hands for her, straining against the grasp of the orderly holding him. The nun reached for the doorknob, pulling at it, twisting it, and pounding on the shatterproof glass to no avail. Within seconds, the night watchman from the desk downstairs appeared as the elevator opened.
“Sister!” the guard shouted, reaching for her shoulders to calm her. “You need to leave here. Now.”
Reluctantly, the nun stepped away from the door and gathered herself.