The Acolyte (13 page)

I
drove streets slick with night rain.

I felt more awful than I could ever recall. Humbled and broken-hearted and moronic. How could I have let that slit-eyed sideshow curiosity rattle me?

My reasoning was idiotic: it had struck me that the man, Swift, ultimately lacked some critical essence of humanity—the essence commonly known as a soul.

Tom Swift. Lately of New Beersheba. I’d be running a background check on that fine fellow right quick.

As I idled at a stop sign not far from Trinity Square, a homeless wreck shambled up and tapped the glass with one frostbitten finger. I unrolled the window and the stink of his mouldy flannels filled my nostrils.

“Spare a shekel so a down-at-his-heel Follower might receive his daily benediction?”

My eyes followed the black stump of his finger to the DBB across the street. I was less than surprised to find five words graffiti-tagged across it:

LET YOUR SINS GO UNPUNISHED.

I dug into my pocket but instead of a crumpled shekel I came up with the sketch composite from earlier today. I tossed the poor shambles a few shekels from my duster pocket and set off for the Healing Hands Centre.

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the parking lot. The Centre was all steel and glass and calculated angles. Dark at this hour save the odd square of light burning in the upper galleries and a stained glass portrait of Saint Luke, patron saint of physicians, backlit above the revolving entry doors.

The air lacked that antiseptic undertone, everything constantly wiped down and sterilized. Instead the sweet, slightly cloying scent of frankincense. You would find not a single medical instrument—not a thermometer or an enema bag, not saline solution or calamine lotion or baby aspirin—at The Healing Hands Centre. Patients were treated with the power of prayer alone.

I walked down a hallway past speakers piping out madrigals. When I dinged the bell a charge nurse parted a pair of thick purple drapes separating the desk from the ICU ward. Her nametag read:
HEAD PRAYER-MASTER.

I informed her that I came with questions of great importance to the Republic to pose to the witness of the Up with God minstrel show bombing. She guided me through the drapes.

A contingent of off-duty Prayer Maids lounged in the break room near a punch clock. Young, female, dressed in diaphanous crimson robes, they were rented out at an hourly rate to offer bedside prayers of succour. The richer you were, the more Maids you could afford. The Healing Hands Centre administered exclusively to males; the Maids’ garb was purposefully revealing to ensure a patient’s last days in this fleshly realm were palatable. But the Maids were devotees of the Immaculate Mother, quaffers of Purity Purge, and so most of them resembled little more than ambulatory anatomy charts.

The witnesses’ room was the last on the left, next to a broom closet. A Maid knelt at the man’s bedside.

“Leave us,” I told her. “I need to talk to this man alone.”

I scanned the clipboard hung off the foot of the bed. Jack Hanratty. Devoted Follower. Sixty-four years old. A retired bookkeeper last employed at a Republic munitions factory.

Hanratty had been hit broadside by the bomb’s blast. Snarls of shrapnel were embedded in his skin: any other hospital would have teased them out, but at The Healing Hands Centre it was the Lord’s will to expel them . . . or not. The fluids pumped out by his immune system had leaked over the twisted bits of metal, oxidizing them: they’d all gone the fungoid green of coins after a thousand rainstorms.

I closed the door and locked it. Holding fast to the doorknob, I steeled myself against what I’d have to do next. The trick was to convince yourself that you were only doing your duty—acting for the good of the Republic.

I pulled up a stool and hiked back the sheets to expose Hanratty’s right foot. Jamming my thumbnail into a wrinkled groove on his big toe, I grasped firmly and applied steady pressure. The toe went white from blood loss. I squeezed so hard that my thumb joint cracked. My nail bit in. Blood squirted.

Hanratty’s eyelids fluttered.

“Alice?” he said dazedly. “Alice—that you?”

I wiped my bloody thumb on my trousers and said, “Who is Alice, Jack?”

His eyes achieved a temporal clarity. “Who’s asking?”

“Acolyte Murtag. I’m here to ask a few questions.”

Hanratty’s eyeballs twitched up and down my body. “My wife. I thought . . .” he hacked weakly. “. . . she’d come to visit . . .”

Hanratty shifted and all that shrapnel shifted with him: this tortured grinding, metal squalling against bone as his body struggled to eject all that foreign matter.

When I showed him the police sketch he said, “Yeah, that’s the son of a bitch who did it.”

“You’re sure? Must’ve been a lot of confusion.”

“That’s him. Some turbaned fanatic who blew himself up because another cuss told him he’d go to the land of milk and honey to canoodle with virgins if he did.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“Already told the other fellows who came round.”

“One more time. In light of some new information we’ve received.”

“I’ll give you the short version. Get your little notepad out and let’s get it ov—”

Hanratty embarked on a prolonged coughing jag that culminated with him ejecting an oyster of blood-veined phlegm and passing out.

I wiped the mucous off his chest with a Kleenex and thumbed one of his eyelids open: nobody home. I was set to give his toe another tweak when he switched back on just as abruptly as he’d flicked off.

“Who are you?” He cast his eyes about, bedeviled. “Where’s the Maid?”

“I’ve introduced myself . . . sir, we were . . .”—momentarily bedeviled myself—“. . . we were just speaking, weren’t we?”

Hanratty showed not a whit of comprehension. So far as he was concerned we were meeting for the first time. Evidently Hanratty’s brain seemed to have decayed in a very specific way: it appeared he couldn’t remember this minute from the last. Otherwise he seemed pretty lucid. This was bad for him. But it was good for my interrogation.

“Who the devil are you?” he asked again.

I made it up on the fly: “I’m with the Centre. A Maid’s assistant. I’m going to ask you a few questions, some of a personal nature if that’s alright, so the Maids might incorporate them into prayers on your behalf.”

“Anything that might help. Lord knows I can use it.”

I flipped to a bare notepad page and took down pertinent details. Middle name: Olen. Children: Ellen and Franklin. Childhood pet: a beagle-hound cross named Bandit.

There was an old scar on his right knee; I asked how he’d gotten it.

“You think that’s important?”

“We believe in being thorough here.”

“I was splitting logs for the woodstove. Axe stroke.” He made a feeble chopping motion with his hand.

“This last question is a tough one. The information stays confidential; only me and your Maid will ever know. Mr. Hanratty, tell me the worst mortal sin you ever committed.”

The old guy looked at me a long time. “What’s the use of that?”

“The Maid needs to know the offence to offer up a prayer of absolute penitence. To be honest, nothing else is working.”

Hanratty sucked his teeth and said, “Water.”

I grabbed the plastic jug beside the bed and guided the straw to his lips. He finished drinking and flopped back onto the pillows, staring up at the ceiling slideshow: bugling angels and sunlight spearing through dark clouds.

“My wife and I married young: me twenty, she eighteen. You’ve never seen a prettier bride; my heart nearly burst at the sight of her coming down the aisle.” His hand bunched up the sheets. “But there are things you can’t ask from a wife. But not being able to ask doesn’t mean you don’t still crave.”

He turned his face away and spoke to the wall. “There’s a stretch near Preacher’s Row where you can buy, rent—
have
a woman for an hour. I didn’t know her name and didn’t want to. I wanted . . . only flesh. She took me to her place. I remember the wallpaper, these shiny bumps in a wacky pattern . . . then one of the bumps skittered up the wall. A boy sat in the front room. Her son: they had the same red hair. She told him she needed to talk to me about a church bake sale. In the bedroom.”

Hanratty’s voice went throaty. “I didn’t want to see her face so we did it that way. Sad truth was, sometimes I didn’t want to see my wife’s face. I hated myself for loving it so much. We’re in mid-rut and her kid comes in the door. I’m peering into his startled saucer eyes and they’re just flaying me bare and I scream, ‘Get out, you little bastard! Get the hell out!’ and he screams back at me, a tortured yowl like I’m murdering his mother and so she tells him real soft and sweet that she’s okay, she’s okay, just go wait in the front room, baby. The weirdest part is, I don’t know what I feel more shame over: the adultery or the way I screamed at that young boy.”

“Thank you for that honesty, Mr. Hanratty.”

“Won’t be able to look that pretty young Maid in the eye again, now that she’ll know that about me.” He crossed himself and said, “Get me through this and I swear I’ll make amends.”

We talked a bit longer. I was only waiting for him to pass out again, which he did after a while. Then I went to work.

I patted my pockets and located the plastic devil horns I’d pocketed back at the stationhouse. They were an inch long, weathered-looking as deer antlers. I slicked my hair back, applied a blob of spirit gum to each horn, and affixed them to my forehead. Standing on the stool, I pried open the overhead light fixture and unscrewed the bulb so the contact points touched intermittently: the light flickered on and off. I filled a plastic cup with ice then stuck the index finger of my left hand inside it.

All Acolytes were instructed on this interrogation method at the Academy; the course was called
Coercion Through Satanic Threat
. I’d received the highest standing; my instructor said I had a gift for invoking a demonic aspect.

The technique worked best on suspects whose minds were untethered. Hanratty, on death’s door and suffering from memory lapse, fit the MO.

A cheap illusion, but if you were a skilled illusionist—if you made a man
believe
—well, it would make him more candid than any Confessional chair.

I waited. Before long Hanratty’s eyes trembled. He awoke in Hell. Or this was my hope.

I let him get a clean look at me, a glimpse of the horns—yes, yes, there it was: an expression of mortal fear. This was when I leaned forward and in a soft mocking voice said:

“Jack . . . Olen . . . Hanratty.”

“Wh-wh-who are you?”

“I go by many names.”

The light fritzed and popped; the room lit up then plunged into darkness. Hanratty gulped. Hanratty’s lip quivered. Most crucially, Hanratty
believed
.

Plenty of Acolytes would’ve blown the illusion by chortling maniacally or something. But restraint was the key. I smiled the most ghastly smile in my arsenal and said, “Hello,
Jack
.”

Hanratty’s eyes rolled wildly in their sockets. The man was petrified. I felt horrible. This was cruelty beyond measure, perpetrated on a sick man. But he knew things I needed to know.

“What did I do?” he wheezed. “I’ve led a good life.”

“Oh?” Cocking my head. “Do you think you can hide secrets from me? I know everything about you, Jack Olen Hanratty. I know your wife, Alice, and your children, Ellen and Franklin. I even know about your cur of a childhood dog—what was that mongrel’s name? Ah, yes:
Bandit
.”

If there was a doubt left in Hanratty’s fraying mind, I’d erased it. But I needed to go beyond belief to the realm of sheer psychic horror. God help me.

“I know you got this scar . . .” I pulled my finger from the cup I’d kept hidden and ran that ice-cold digit over his knee “. . . chopping wood for the stove.”

Hanratty’s chest heaved. He was on the verge of hysteria.

“I’m a devoted Follower,” he protested. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“You are an adulterer. An adulterer and a
whoremonger
.”

That took him over the verge. He sobbed uncontrollably, chest hitching as tears rolled down his face.

I said: “The truth is, Jack, Hell is overflowing. Every day sinners pour in from all points of the compass. Men like you are on the borderline: one foot in Hell, the other in . . .”—I spat the word out like a bug I’d swallowed—“. . .
Heaven
.”

“How? How can I go to Heaven?”

And there it was. The moment of truth.

“A person is currently roasting in Hell for the mortal sin of suicide.” I unfolded the sketch and held it up. “This is not that person. You purposefully misidentified the perpetrator and lied under oath about it—didn’t you?”

“Yes. . .
yes
.”

“The person is—” A calculated guess: “Caucasian.”

Hanratty began to nod uncontrollably. “She was white. A beautiful white girl. Blonde hair, wearing a funny old-looking white hat. She couldn’t have been more than a teenager.”

That took me a moment to absorb. “So the . . . woman was not a Muslim, as you told investigators. Why did you lie?”

Hanratty looked helpless. “Followers . . . we don’t
do
that to ourselves.”

A predictable wave of exhaustion rocked me: it always did after I’d broken a slew of Commandments to accomplish my ends. Guilt prickled my forehead, a pair of searing white dots where each horn was stuck.

“You are not an evil man, Jack,” I said softly. “Your motives were pure. And for your honesty you shall surely go to . . .” Spitting the word out again: “
Heaven
. Now go to sleep.”

Not surprisingly, he did just that.

The Heaven-sent Hero