Walter Mosley - Parishioner

Sister Hope turned away and left through the exit door.

Frank watched both men with a wary and yet somehow world-weary eye.

“Are you telling me everything, Ecks?” Soto said.

“I told you enough.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“Free at last.”

The big Mexican’s eyes narrowed. He seemed about to ask something else but swallowed the words.

Turning to Frank he said, “I got a job to do. You can’t blackmail me or browbeat me or talk me down. I will find out what happened, and those that are guilty will pay. It doesn’t matter if you turn me over too. I will do what’s right.”

“I would never betray your trust, Brother Soto,” Frank said. “Your confessions among us are sacrosanct.”

“Even if these crimes were committed by members, Frank,” Soto uttered through clenched teeth. “You’ve said more than once that you are not here to protect us if we stray.”

“Just so,” the minister said.

Another shiver went through the big cop’s frame and he turned on his heel, strode up the aisle and out of the church.

Xavier was still thinking about the young girl who killed and gutted children so that her brothers and sisters could survive. For a moment he was nearly overcome by the feelings of empathy and impotence.

“You will have to take her out of here,” Frank said.

“Who?” Xavier asked; he was still thinking of the cannibal.

“Doris. Guillermo might turn his work over to an associate and they could very well get a warrant.”

“That would destroy the church,” Xavier said, the sheathed knife in his mind.

“I doubt if it will come to that. But better be safe. Brother Soto may be having a crisis of faith.”

“What will you do?” Xavier asked, trying to shake the knife out of his thoughts.

“Pray for him. Maybe pray with him. He doesn’t like you and so it is easy for him to believe the worst.”

“I hear that.”

“Find Hope and tell her to bring you out of here through the Revelation Road. Take the girl somewhere where Soto won’t find her. Leave the church and its safety up to me.”

Sister Hope was kneeling in the corner of a doorless white stone room carved out of the inner wall of the courtyard. He suspected that she was praying for the spirits of eaten children.

“Hope,” he said softly.

She stood up automaton-like and turned her huge head and face toward him.

“Yes, Brother?”

“Frank told me to ask you to get Ms. Milne and show us the way out down something called the Revelation Road.”

“Certainly.”

Hope walked across the yard with measured steps and climbed a rough-hewn ladder up to the second tier of the fortress wall. Then she disappeared within the catacomb inside.

Xavier sat at one of the outside tables and wondered about the inevitability of a violent death.

He had always been a fighter. Ambidextrous, naturally strong, and bathed in the hormonal chemistry of rage-he had never backed down and rarely lost a contest. This state of being for him was natural, like rats in an alley or the sun chasing after the moon. He didn’t realize that he was an evil man until the day that he and Frank sat and talked in that dark bar. He wasn’t able to remember most of the words that passed between them. All he knew was that he’d follow Frank anywhere. Right after that initial meeting Frank took Xavier up to Seabreeze City to spend three weeks in a solitary fourth-floor room that faced the ocean. Food and drink were brought for him at regular intervals and there was a bathroom down the corridor.

He met with Frank every Wednesday and Saturday and sat on the back pew at the services on Sunday. He attended the Expressions but was asked not to speak or comment.

He was instructed in how to pray by giving life to the Spirit rather than asking for boons, apologizing for being human, or thanking the Infinite for being.

He disliked Guillermo but still considered him a brother. They were all on the same page of damnation and they all worked hard to dispel the stench of their lives.

Soto might have shot him in the main hall; or Ecks might have killed the cop. But these actions were not from hatred, not hatred of each other. And even if they despised each other they were still brothers-even in conflict.

Xavier smiled and shook his head.

Always give yourself enough time to reflect , Frank had said on more than one occasion. The Infinite always takes the right step. We are like the Infinite, only infants that are, ever so carefully, experimenting with first attempts at walking .

“Mr. Noland?”

Doris Milne was wearing a green dress with yellow polka dots that came down just below her knees. The neckline was high and the sleeves short. Her pumps were medium gray and she carried a small pink suitcase that Xavier did not remember bringing.

“Where’d you get the bag?” Ecks asked.

“Sister Hope gave it to me. I didn’t have anything the right size.”

Hope was standing there behind the girl.

We are all sinners , Frank said at some point in every sermon. Xavier understood this claim more and more each day.

Inside Frank’s antechamber, behind an antique African tapestry depicting an early European settlement somewhere on the Ivory Coast, was a doorway that Xavier had not seen before. The tapestry was composed like a rude painting, with some people made from white cloth and others rendered in red. Frank had explained that the red people were the whites whose skin flushed under the strong African sun.

“And the white ones are black like me,” Ecks had said.

“Amen, Brother.”

The doorway led to a ladder that carried the trio down forty feet or so to a wide tunnel that had been excavated and reinforced decades before.

“Bootleggers once used this route to move their liquor and guns,” Hope said.

“You mean this wasn’t always a church?” Xavier asked.

“It was always a house of worship,” she replied. “Sometimes their intentions had gone astray.”

The tunnel went on for nearly a mile until they came to another ladder. At the top was a door that was disguised from the outside as a stone slab. They exited into a cave where the smell of the ocean was strong.

Outside, from behind a stand of coastal mugwort brush they came to a parking lot not twenty feet from the sand beach. The lot was made for eight or nine cars but there was only one vehicle there-a dark green 1961 Cadillac with its stubby fins and heavy white shark form.

“This is the minister’s private automobile, brother,” Hope said. “He asks everyone who borrows it not to dent it-if possible.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s only a car,” Hope said.

Knowing her past, Xavier thought that he understood what she meant.

“So,” Xavier said as he drove the Fleetwood in heavy morning traffic down the coast highway, “how did those two thugs know to come to the house?”

“What?”

“Come on now, Doris. Two men came to the Culver City house to remove evidence and burn the place down. They even had a plastic body bag with them.”

“Did you kill them?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

“I … I knew somebody was coming but I didn’t call them.”

“You knew that they’d get rid of your aunt’s body.”

“She called them. She told me that they were going to do scorched earth on the house.”

“What about the body bag?”

“Isn’t that obvious? That was meant for me.”

“The note came from your hotel.”

“Auntie had a whole stack of that stationery. If you have the note you can see that it’s in her hand. Anyway, I don’t know how to write.”

“So you figured they’d take Sedra out with the bones. That way there’d be no evidence against you.”