Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Yeah…I see what you mean. Our own lifestyles might be examples.” Ransom had lost his parents at an early age to an epidemic, and Philo had never known his father and had lost his mother to pneumonia.

Philo then shrugged and sipped at his drink. “Here is what the children of the street think, Alastair, if you wish to know.”

“I do. Go on.”

“If I’m homeless, and I am killed, how then can I make my life resonate beyond the grave?”

“You make it sound like a sense of mission,” countered Ransom.

“Damn it, it is a mission for them!”

“Some would say that is ridiculous. These kids know what’s what. They know they’re making up shit as they go.”

“This shit, as you call it, keeps them anchored, Inspector Ransom. You’re likely familiar with Cajun beliefs, right? Superstitions out of Barbados? Haiti? West Virginia coal mines? Alastair, a belief system and a culture is necessary to well-being. It provides a sense of mission .”

“I agree but I am also reminded daily of reality-what our own religious leaders push along with the merchants and money men of this city.”

“Fools. Look at it this way, these kids have nothing but their beliefs, and their beliefs may explain why some children in crisis-and perhaps the adults they become-are brave, decent, and imaginative, while others more privileged”-Philo thought of someone he knew-“can be callous, mean-spirited, and mediocre, and lacking any sense of mission.”

Alastair only now realized that Philo spoke from experience, and in a moment of realization, Philo saw that Alastair knew this. Alastair said, “I grew up here in inner-city Chicago, Philo, and let me tell you, there was very little sign of God on the landscape then as now.”

“Same in Montreal where I grew up, but I wish I’d had half what these kids had in the way of a spiritual leaning or anchor.”

Alastair nodded. “I begin to see.” A series of words flashed through his mind: homeless, violence, death, commonplace . “Often highly advantageous to grovel before the powerful and shun the weak, and where adult rescuers are no place to be found.”

“Ahhh,” countered Philo Keane, “but the ability to grasp onto ideals larger than oneself and exert influence for good- a sense of mission -is nurtured in these eerie, beautiful, shelter folktales as sure as they were in Beowulf, which tales were encouragement to men to go out and slay dragons, giants, and beasts.”

Ransom sat silent a moment, his cane at his side. “I’m sorry, professor, but regardless of any good intentions you or I or our friends may have for the homeless, their numbers are just too great for us alone to make much of a dent, wouldn’t you say?”

Philo dismissed this, saying, “In any group that generates its own legends-whether in a business office, a police department, an agency like the Salvation Army, or a remote Amazonian village-the most articulate member becomes the semi-official keeper of the secrets. The same thing happens in homeless shelters. You’ve done well to gain even a temporary hold on these kids.”

“So this is what I was actually being told by the street children, that their secret stories lay down the rules of spiritual behavior.”

“The most verbally skilled children-such as this Robin and Danielle, and this Audra you describe-impart the secret stories to new arrivals. Ensuring that their truths survive regardless of their own fate. It’s a duty felt deeply by these children, including one ten-year-old chap I met named Myles. After confiding and illustrating secret stories on a slate for me, Myles created a self-portrait for me.”

“Really?”

“A gray charcoal drawn gravestone, meticulously and carefully rendered, inscribed with his own name and the year nineteen-o-six-thirteen years hence.”

“How sad…. Listen you must never relate this to Jane or to Gabby.”

Philo ignored this. “There is something more…something far more disturbing coming out of our few shelters, Alastair.” Philo absently knocked over his now empty glass.

“And what is that?”

“Well…simply put,” he began, righting the empty glass, “the children may have trusted you and Jane and Gabby, but only up to a point where they draw the line on first meetings.”

“I got that loud and clear.”

Philo raised a hand to silence his friend. “The bottom line in their theocracy, Alastair, is quite strange and disturbing.”

“Trust me. All of us have been disturbed by all this, especially young Gabby.”

“They did not get that far with you, so trust me! You’ve not yet heard the real disturbing stuff coming outta these kids.”

“Tell me, then.”

“As…as happens, there are Bloody Mary and the mother of Christ, Mary, but in essence they are one and the same.”

“One and the same? What are you saying?”

“Mary laid down with Satan to beget another child-”

“How blasphemous do you intend being, Keane?”

“Hold on! Don’t scream at the messenger! I’m only passing along the facts of reality according to the general belief of the shelter child.”

“Sorry…go on.”

“It’s become a tenet of their faith, Rance, that Satan’s child, born of Mary…not some stand-in but Mary Mother of God will carry on Zoroaster’s evil plans throughout eternity.”

“Such a horrid worldview.”

“Agreed, yet there is more and worse.”

“Worse than Mary pregnant with the Devil’s seed?”

“Worse, yes, since it was Mary herself who killed her son.”

Somewhere in the back of his head, Ransom seemed to recall how Bloody Mary in a drunk tank screamed out at him that she’d killed babies. “Killed Christ, you mean?”

“To replace him on the throne with Satan’s son, the Anti-Christ.”

“Damn…”

“And Mary abandoned God on His throne. In fact, it’s as always, that woman Eve did it-this woman betrayed not Adam but all of Heaven itself, showing and leading the way for Satan’s minions to overthrow God’s throne. A kind of Joan of Arc for the dark side, so to speak.”

“We didn’t hear any of this from the children, and it is so outlandish, Philo, that quite frankly, I’m not at all sure I believe you.”

“This is their secret of secrets. They trust no one in authority because of this; they know that no one wants to believe it! That no one will believe them. This is what they hold back. I can show you my documentation of this belief.” He began rummaging through a brown valise lying in a pile on a nearby table. “I have it all right here.”

Ransom examined Philo’s notes and looked closely at the boy in the photographs who had purportedly told Philo the secret of secrets among the homeless and shelter children. The smiling, grimy face looked familiar. It was Samuel, the boy who Ransom had paid to keep his eyes and ears open.

“It’s all such a perversion of Christianity.”

“I know. It’s the reason I’ve not shared it with anyone else, not Dr. Fenger, not Dr. Francis. It’s difficult for men like you and I to swallow, men of the world, so to speak, but a lady?”

Ransom took another drink and lit his pipe.

“Thought you were getting off tobacco-that cough of yours.”

“Tomorrow. I’ll quit again tomorrow.”

Philo returned to his subject, adding, “What this means to the average homeless child out there,” Philo paused and pointed out the window, “is that the forces traditionally in Heaven, all the powers of God’s throne overhead, are now under Satan’s hand. That we are in the midst of an apocalyptic war, and our angels are not only on the run and bedraggled but losing, and losing badly, and why are they losing? Largely because they are abandoned. Abandoned by an embittered God who has seen His son killed by his mother, who has slept with Satan to spawn-”