“I know,” Bryce said. “I told him. But you
can’t
tell him. He has these idiotic blind spots. Anyway, regardless of the line, the reality is once we’ve got what we need you’ll be killed. Both of you.”
To which, the momentum said, there was an alternative. It was unpleasant that we understood each other so well. It created an obscene feeling of kinship.
“So here’s what I’m offering,” Bryce said. “I’ll get your daughter out. Keep her safe. To be returned to you when I’ve got what I need.”
“Which is?”
“Salvatore’s thinking’s one-dimensional. The fact is half the audience just isn’t going to buy the religious angle. The religious angle will
undermine
it. It’s so obviously a vested interest. People will assume it’s fake. What I’m talking about is the no-holds-barred fully secular version. Not
just you. I want 24/7 access to the pack. All of you. You’ll be masked, obviously. I don’t expect you to kill and eat people on camera with the whole world knowing what you look like. But everything else, completely up-close and personal. It’s
Big Brother
with werewolves. Live coverage for a month, leading up to a group kill on full moon. Then I’m gone. You get your daughter back, no one knows what you look like, I make history.”
“As an accessory to mass murder,” I said. “You’re stupider than Salvatore.”
He shook his head. “You let me worry about that.” Then a flash of irritation: “Do you seriously think I haven’t got that covered? Christ.”
The choice wasn’t much of a choice. But Bryce’s project had at least the virtue of me not being in religious captivity.
I managed—just—not to say: You’re all fucking insane.
Instead I said: “I want to see my daughter.”
I
DIDN
’
T GET
what I wanted for another twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of not knowing if she was alive or dead. Twenty-four hours to feel sick with fear and filthy rich with self-loathing. The thing you swore you’d never let happen again. And now here it was, happening again. Congratulations.
They moved me—in wrist and ankle restraints à la Guantanamo and in the mute company of four
Militi Christi
, including beatifically beaming Lorenzo—to a twelve-by-ten cell with an unsurprising thin bunk and a pair of buckets. I was given a litre bottle of water and a ham sandwich I wouldn’t have been much interested in even if I was eating regular food, and told to get some rest.
There was no rest to be got. Rest isn’t available when you don’t know if they’ve killed your child. Nor had the journey from the interview room to the cell helped me much. Three long corridors, two left turns, striplights and ammonia-scented vinyl floors, half a dozen other cells. I didn’t even know what country I was in.
Then Salvatore showed up with a couple more armed guards (silver buzzed my bones from the Uzi magazines), toting a digital camera.
“Put this on, please,” he said, hooking a tiny wired earpiece through the bars. “The wire goes down the back of your shirt. The earpiece you can conceal with your hair.”
For a moment I sat still on the bunk. He smiled. The same implacable delight. The same patience. The same certainty. The exercise of his will all but visibly swelled him, as if his body were receiving rich nourishment.
“It’ll be painless, I promise you.”
“My daughter,” I said.
He nodded. “After this. Please. The earpiece.”
I got up and fitted the device. Awkward, given the restraints.
“I’m going to interview you,” he said. “I will ask you just a very few questions. The responses you’re required to give will come through our
little friend in your ear. Obviously there will be an unnatural delay in real time, but don’t let that worry you. Bryce will edit it, he assures me, seamlessly.”
One of the guards pulled a chair up for the Cardinal, at a safe distance from the bars.
“Tell me, Talulla, do you believe in God?”
The voice in my ear—female, filled with surprising clipped passion—said: “ ‘Of course not. God’s a fairy tale to calm frightened children.’ ” I hesitated, then repeated it, verbatim, feeling my jaws tightening. It made me weary to see the thinking here: Atheist monster converted to the one true religion. The more entrenched her faithlessness at the start, the greater the miracle by the end.
“So obviously it follows that you reject the authority of the Catholic Church?”
“ ‘Are you an idiot? The Church is nothing. A house of lies.’ ”
“Please,” the Cardinal said. “A little less robotic.”
“I wouldn’t talk like this,” I said.
“Nonetheless, try not to sound like you’re reading the ingredients on a packet of washing powder. Now. You reject the existence of God, the mystery of the Trinity, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the power of the Sacraments?”
The voice in my ear actually
laughed
, before replying: “ ‘The Sacraments? Hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo. You might as well carry a rabbit’s foot or a lucky penny.’ ”
“You don’t think we can help you, then?”
“ ‘I don’t need help,’ ” I parroted. “ ‘And even if I did, there’s nothing for me in your sad bag of tricks. If anyone needs help it’s you people. You’re all fucking lunatics.’ ”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Salvatore said. He looked genuinely pained, the genial uncle whose niece’s wayward behaviour had let him down. “I truly am sorry. But I’m also filled with gladness.” He leaned forward in the chair, clasping his kneecaps. “Because I happen to know that we
can
help you. I happen to know that Christ died for
all
our sins, even yours, and that the Sacraments are real and mighty gifts.”
“ ‘You’re pathetic. Go ahead. Give me the full treatment. It won’t make a scrap of difference.’ ”
“God loves you, Talulla,” he said, frowning at what an incomprehensible contortion this would be for anyone other than God. “And it’s our job, as His hopelessly flawed representatives on earth—it’s our highest
duty
—to help you to see that. We have a long and difficult time ahead of us. But understand something: I have absolutely no doubt of the outcome.”
“Neither have I,” my prompter said, with such scorn that I wondered if this role-play wasn’t an outlet for some doubts of her own. I wondered who she was.
“Very well,” Salvatore said. “Soon, we will begin. But that will do for now.” Then, after the guard had switched off and lowered the camera, he said to me: “Not bad for a first attempt. We need to see more emotion, but I know you’ll get the hang of it. You can take the earpiece out now.”
I opened my mouth to speak but he held up his hand: “I know, I know. Your daughter. Calm yourself. I’m as good as my word. We’re taking you to see her now.”
She was in a steel-doored white room three times the size of my cell, to accommodate in addition to its infant prisoner, chairs and a table for two nuns. Zoë sat on the edge of the bed in a miniature version of my wrist and ankle restraints, the ankle chain fastened to a steel loop bolted to the cell floor. She had a movement radius of about five feet, marked (the Sisters needed to know if they were anywhere near within range of a scratch or bite) by a yellow chalk semi-circle on the floor. All of this visible to me on a wall-mounted monitor outside the cell door, which was overseen by yet another guard at a fold-out table and chair. (How many guards so far? Four for the move to the cell, two from the cell to here, and this one at the desk made seven. But the air in the facility said more. There must have been fifty or sixty for the assault on the farmhouse. Maybe they were all here? Maybe there were hundreds?)
The nuns were ordered out. I got five minutes.
She’d been holding the tears in—but they came when I put my arms around her, though I had to lift my cuffed hands over her head to do it.
I DON’T LIKE IT HERE.
I KNOW, ANGEL, ME NEITHER. WE’RE LEAVING SOON. VERY SOON.
PROMISE?
Oh God. Oh
God.
YES, I PROMISE.
I WANT TO GO
NOW.
NOT YET, ANGEL. BUT VERY SOON. ARE THESE LADIES HORRIBLE TO YOU?
The compact soft warm smell of her hurt my heart. The precise weight and shape of her pressed tight to me. The bravery she’d had to summon so far unravelling now that Mommy was here and she didn’t have to be brave by herself.
THEY TELL ME STORIES BUT I DON’T LIKE THEM.
WHAT STORIES, BABY?
ABOUT JESUS IS MY FRIEND. WHO IS JESUS?
You forget they’re three years old. You forget all the shapes of the world they don’t know.
HE’S LIKE PETER PAN. I’LL TELL YOU LATER.
DON’T GO! MOMMY!
Because Salvatore had opened the door and our bodies knew separation was coming again.
“Let me stay with her,” I said, with my back to him. Her tears were wet on my neck. “What possible difference can it make?”
“That’s not permitted yet,” the Cardinal said. “The environment we’re creating for you—the set, I suppose we should call it—isn’t quite ready. And in the meantime you and I both know you’ll be more biddable if we keep you separate. It’s just to ensure your cooperation in this unfortunate interim. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. Don’t make me behave brutally.”
Oh, I’m going to kill you, you fucking idiot, I thought. You fucking
nothing.
ZOË, LISTEN TO ME. I’LL COME FOR YOU. BE BRAVE FOR JUST A LITTLE LONGER. I PROMISE I’LL COME.
DON’T GO! PLEASE!
REMEMBER HOW I TOLD YOU LORCAN HAD TO BE BRAVE WHEN WE LOST HIM FOR ALL THAT TIME? THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO BE LIKE THAT.
All the engines of her infancy saying No … No … No …
CAN YOU TRY? JUST FOR A LITTLE WHILE?
The two guards were standing over us. The silver in the magazines was making her frown, though she didn’t know why.
ANGEL, CAN YOU?
YOU COME SOON.
It was killing her. I could feel the size and threat of the world to her without me in it. She was small and afraid. The impulse to attack Salvatore was all but overwhelming. But it was like pain. There was nothing to do but bear it.
YOU COME SOON, MOMMY.
How could she do this? How could I have given birth to something that could summon this much courage? My heart was breaking. I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it. The inches then feet then yards and walls and closed doors that would come between us. I thought I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
YOU PROMISE YOU’LL COME SOON?
I WILL. I WILL, ANGEL, I PROMISE. GIVE ME A KISS.
Her little face was hot and soft, her lips like furled buds. She was scrunching my shirt in her fists.
One of the guards rested the muzzle of the Uzi very gently on my shoulder.
T
HAT NIGHT
I had the dream about the vampire again, in a more confused form, with the beach and twilight and the extraordinary fucking all mixed together, his dark face repeatedly in close-up saying something I couldn’t understand. I felt sick with pleasure yet death was a stink wrapped around it, woven through it. The landscape was remote, otherworldly, like something in an old science fiction magazine,
Weird Tales.
His face kept pushing me right to the edge of waking with what it was he was saying that I couldn’t understand, until eventually I woke myself up saying it myself:
I’m coming for you.
I’d sat up involuntarily on my bunk. My face was full of panic. In the dream I’d suddenly shouted it:
I’m coming for you!
But of course in reality it had been a mumbled whimper. Enough, nonetheless, to bring the guard to his feet. He was a tall skinhead with long wrists and large hands and big, dreamy grey eyes. Not thrilled with this duty, I could tell. Held the automatic rifle a little too tightly. I hoped he hadn’t made out what I’d said.
I’m coming for you.
Impossible to quell the mix of scepticism and excitement. Scepticism because he had, after all, said much the same before—
I’ll see you again
—but two years had passed without it happening, and excitement because my body was alive with the dream’s instilled conviction, a whirl of butterflies around my heart.
I’m coming for you.
Jake and my mother in the afterlife casino were available, of course, smiling and shaking their heads, clinking glasses (a Mai Tai for my mother, a Macallan for Jake) in delighted incredulity and saying: Really, Lu?
Dreams
? Dear oh dear oh dear …
But my palms were wet (as, with characteristic contempt for my predicament, was my cunt; the dream hadn’t neglected its other business), my blood electric.
The guard was staring at me. A look of fascination that was part fear,
part revulsion, part something else. An all but dead aspect of me wondered, wearily, if I’d had my hands down my pants in my sleep.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” I said to him.
He didn’t respond, but his knuckles blanched around the automatic. If the weapon had had a voice it would have said, Ow, you’re hurting me!
“I never forget a face, you know,” I said, scraping the damp hair back off my forehead. “Seriously, we’re like elephants.”
His lips moved. He was saying something to himself. A prayer, I realised, when he sat down, carefully, and took a rosary of amber beads from his pocket.
Two more days passed. Same dream, every night. Same unhinging response of conviction and self-ridicule. I was allowed a few minutes each day with Zoë, who was miserable, and who had, whether she liked it or not, begun to get slightly interested in the stories about Jesus. Especially the raising of Lazarus and the healing of the lepers and the wedding feast at Cana. I had a disgusted admiration for the nuns, who had simplified things down to a level a three-year-old could understand—albeit with the aid of large picture books they held up for Zoë to look at, from the safe side of the chalk semi-circle.
Every waking minute I thought something would reveal itself that would help. A soft guard. A clue to the way out. An opportunity to grab one of the automatics and take my chances. But the minutes passed, and the math remained the same.
Then, on the third night, Lorenzo came to see me.
The guard he relieved seemed a little confused, but after a quiet confab slouched away down the corridor.