Sacred Page 5

  “Obviously,” I agreed.

  “So what’s bothering you, Mr. Doohan?” Manny had the softest voice for a man his size. It was calm, earnest, the voice of a kind uncle.

  “Well, I don’t know, Manny,” I said as we waited for a break in the rush hour traffic at the corner of Beacon and Arlington. “I’ve become saddened lately by the state of it all. The world, you know. America.”

  Manny touched the back of my elbow and led me into a momentary lull in the traffic. His hand was firm, strong, and he walked with the strides of a man who’d never known fear or hesitation. When we reached the other side of Beacon, he dropped his hand from my elbow, and we headed east into the stiff breeze.

  “What do you do for work, Mr. Doohan?”

  “Advertising,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Ah, yes. A member of the mass media conglomerate.”

  “If you say so, Manny.”

  As we neared the Therapeutic Center, I noticed a familiar group of kids in their late teens wearing identical white shirts and sharply pressed olive trousers. They were all male, all with neatly clipped hair, and all wore similar leather bomber jackets.

  “Have you received the Message?” one of them asked an older couple ahead of us. He thrust a piece of paper at the woman, but she swiveled past him with a practiced sidestep that left his hand holding the paper to empty space.

  “Messengers,” I said to Manny.

  “Yes,” Manny said with a sigh. “This is one of their preferred corners for some reason.”

  The “Messengers” were what Bostonians called these earnest youth who stepped suddenly out from crowds and thrust literature at your chest. Usually male, sometimes female, they wore the white and olive uniform and the short hair, and their eyes were usually kind and innocent with just a touch of a fever in the irises.

  They were members of the Church of Truth and Revelation and unfailingly polite. All they wanted was for you to take a few minutes and listen to their “message,” which I think had to do with the coming apocalypse or rapture or whatever happened when the Four Horsemen descended from the heavens and galloped down Tremont Street and hell opened up beneath the earth to swallow the sinners or those who’d ignored the Message, which I think was the same thing.

  These particular kids worked this corner hard, dancing around people and threading themselves through the weary crowd of pedestrians heading home from a day’s work.

  “Won’t you receive the Message while there’s still time?” One desperately asked a man who took the piece of paper and kept walking, balling it in his fist as he went.

  But Manny and I, it seemed, were invisible. Not one kid came near us as we approached the doorway of the Therapeutic Center. In fact, they moved away from us in a sudden wave.

  I looked at Manny. “You know these kids?”

  He shook his massive head. “No, Mr. Doohan.”

  “They seem to know you, Manny.”

  “Probably recognize me from being around here so often.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  As he opened the door and stepped aside so I’d enter first, one of the kids glanced at him. The kid was about seventeen, with a light freckling of acne across his cheeks. He was bowlegged and so thin I was sure the next strong gust of winter would cast him into the street. His glance at Manny lasted about a quarter of a second, but it was telling enough.

  This kid had seen Manny before, no question, and he was afraid of him.

  6

  “Hello!”

  “Hello!”

  “Hello!”

  “Good to see you!”

  Four people were coining out as Manny and I entered. And God, were they happy people. Three women and a man, their faces glazed with joy, their eyes bright and clear, their bodies damn near rippling with vigor.

  “Staffers?” I said.

  “Hmm?” Manny said.

  “Those four,” I said. “Staffers?”

  “And clients,” Manny said.

  “You mean some were staffers, some were clients?”

  “Yes,” Manny said. Obtuse bastard, our Manny.

  “They don’t seem terribly grief-stricken.”

  “We aim to cure, Mr. Doohan. I’d say your assessment is a selling point of our operation, wouldn’t you?”

  We passed through the foyer and climbed the right side of a butterfly staircase that seemed to take up most of the first floor. The steps were carpeted and a chandelier the size of a Cadillac hung down between the wings of the staircase.

  Must be a lot of grief going around to pay for this place. No wonder everyone seemed so happy. Grief, it seemed, was definitely a growth industry.

  At the top of the stairs, Manny pulled back two great oaken doors and we stepped onto a parquet floor that seemed to run for a mile or so. The room had probably been a ballroom once. The ceiling was two stories up, painted a bright blue with gold etchings of angels and creatures of myth floating side by side. Several more Cadillac chandeliers shared space with the angels. The walls bore heavy burgundy brocades and Roman tapes tries. Couches and settees and the odd desk or two occupied the floor where once Boston’s staunchest Victorians, I was sure, had danced and gossiped.

  “Some building,” I said.

  “It sure is,” Manny said as several brightly grief-stricken people looked up from their couches at us.

  I had to assume some were clients and some were counselors, but I couldn’t tell which, and I had a feeling ol’ Manny wouldn’t do much to help me differentiate.

  “Everyone,” Manny said as we passed through the maze of couches, “this is Deforest.”

  “Hello, Deforest!” twenty voices cried in unison.

  “Hi,” I managed and started looking around for their pods.

  “Deforest is suffering a bit of late-twentieth-century malaise,” Manny said, leading me farther back into the room. “Something we all know about.”

  Several voices cried, “Yes. Oh yes,” like we were at a Pentecostal revival meeting and the gospel singers were due on the floor any minute.

  Manny led me to a desk in the rear corner and motioned for me to sit in an armchair across from it. The armchair was so plush I had a feeling I’d drown in it, but I took a seat anyway and Manny grew another foot as I sank and he took a high-backed chair behind the desk.

  “So, Deforest,” Manny said, pulling a blank notepad from his desk drawer and tossing it on top, “how can we help you?

  “I’m not sure you can.”

  He leaned back in his chair, opened his arms wide, and smiled. “Try me.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it was a dumb idea. I just was walking past the building, I saw the sign…” Another shrug.

  “And you felt a tug.”

  “A what?”

  “A tug.” He leaned forward again. “You feel displaced, am I right?”

  “A little,” I said and looked at my shoes.

  “Maybe a little, maybe a lot. We’ll see. But displaced. And then you’re out walking, carrying that weight in your chest that you’ve been carrying so long you barely notice it anymore. And you see this sign. Grief Release. And you feel it tug you. Because that’s what you’d like. A release. From your confusion. Your loneliness. Your displacement.” He raised an eyebrow. “Sound about right?”

  I cleared my throat, skipped my glance across his steady gaze as if I were too embarrassed to meet his eyes. “Maybe.”

  “No ‘maybe,’” he said. “Yes. You’re in pain, Deforest. And we can help you.”

  “Can you?” I said, working the slightest crack into my voice. “Can you?” I said again.

  “We can. If”—he held up a finger—“you trust us.”

  “Trust isn’t easy,” I said.

  “I agree. But trust is going to have to be the foundation of our relationship if it’s going to work. You have to trust me.” He clapped his chest. “And I have to trust you. In that way, we can work toward a connection.”

  “What sort of connection?”

 
; “A human one.” His kind voice had grown even softer. “The only kind that matters. That’s what grief stems from, what pain stems from, Deforest—a lack of connection with other human beings. You’ve mislaid your trust in the past, had your faith in people broken, shattered even. You’ve been betrayed. Lied to. So you’ve chosen not to trust. And this protects you to some extent, I’m sure. But it also isolates you from the rest of humanity. You are disconnected. You are displaced. And the only way to find your way back to a place, to a connection, is to trust again.”

  “And you want me to trust you.”

  He nodded. “You have to take a chance sometime.”

  “And why should I trust you?”

  “Well, I’ll earn your trust. Believe me. But it’s a two-way street, Deforest.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “I need to trust you,” he said.

  “And how can I prove I’m worthy of your trust, Manny?”

  He crossed his hands over his belly. “You can start by telling me why you’re carrying a gun.”

  He was good. My gun was in a holster clipped to the waistband at the small of my back. I’d worn a loose, European-cut suit under a black topcoat as part of my ad exec look, and none of the clothing hugged the gun. Manny was very good.

  “Fear,” I said, trying to look sheepish.

  “Ah! I see.” He leaned forward and wrote “fear” on a piece of lined paper on the desk. In the margin above it, he wrote “Deforest Doohan.”

  “You do?”

  His face was noncommittal, flat. “Any specific fear?”

  “No,” I said. “Just a general sense that the world is a very dangerous place and I feel lost in it sometimes.”

  He nodded. “Of course. That’s a common affliction these days. People often sense that even the smallest things in such a large, modern world are beyond their control. They feel isolated, small, afraid they’ve become lost in the bowels of a technocracy, an industrialized world that has sprawled well beyond its own capacity to keep its worst impulses in check.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “As you said, it’s a feeling of fin de siècle common to the end of every century.”

  “Yes.”

  I hadn’t said fin de siècle in Manny’s presence.

  Which meant the accounting offices were bugged.

  I tried to keep that realization from flickering in my eyes, but I must have failed, because Manny’s brow darkened and the heat of sudden recognition rose between us.

  The plan had been to get Angie inside before the alarm system was engaged. She’d trip it on her way out, of course, but by the time anyone official arrived on the scene, she’d be long gone. That had been the theory, but neither of us considered the possibility of an internal bugging system.

  Manny stared at me, his dark eyebrows arched, his lips pursed against the tent he’d made of his hands. He didn’t look much like a sweet, big man anymore, nor like a counselor in grief. He looked like one mean motherfucker who shouldn’t be messed with.

  “Who are you, Mr. Doohan? Really?”

  “I’m an advertising executive with deep fears about modern culture.”

  He removed his hands from his face, looked at them.

  “Yet, your hands aren’t soft,” he said. “And a few of your knuckles look like they’ve been broken over the years. And your face—”

  “My face?” I sensed the room going deeply quiet behind me.

  Manny glanced at something or someone over my shoulder. “Yes, your face. In the right light, I can see scars along your cheeks under your beard. They look like knife scars, Mr. Doohan. Or maybe from a straight razor?”

  “Who are you, Manny?” I said. “You don’t seem much like a grief counselor.”

  “Ah, but this isn’t about me.” He glanced over my shoulder again, and then the phone on his desk rang. He smiled and picked it up. “Yes?” His left eyebrow arched as he listened and his eyes found mine. “That makes sense,” he said into the phone. “He’s probably not working alone. Whoever that is inside the offices”—he smiled at me—“hit them hard. Make sure they feel it.”

  Manny hung up the phone and reached into his desk drawer and I put my foot against the desk and pushed so hard I knocked the chair out from under me and toppled the desk onto Manny’s chest.

  The guy who’d been behind me making eye contact with Manny came at me from my right, and I sensed him before I saw him. I pivoted to my right, my elbow extended, and hit him so hard in the center of his face that my funny bone shrieked and the fingers of my hand numbed.

  Manny pushed back the desk and stood as I stepped around and placed my gun in his ear.

  Manny, for his part, was very poised for a guy with an automatic weapon against his head. He didn’t look scared. He looked like he’d been through this before. He looked annoyed.

  “You’re going to use me as a hostage, I suppose?”-He chuckled. “I’m a pretty big hostage to lug around, pal. Have you thought that through?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  And I hit him in the temple with the butt of the gun.

  Some guys, that’s all it would take. Just like in the movies, they’d drop like a sack of dirt and lie on the floor, breathing heavily. But not Manny, and I hadn’t expected him to.

  When his head jerked back from the hit to the temple, I hit him again where the neck meets the collarbone, and once again in the temple. The last shot was the lucky one, because he’d been raising his massive arms and would have tossed me across the room like a throw pillow if his eyes hadn’t rolled back into his head instead. He pitched back into his overturned chair and smashed into the floor with just a bit more noise than a piano dropped from the ceiling would have made.

  I spun away from him and pointed my gun at the guy who’d collided with my elbow. He had a runner’s ropy build and the trim black hair on the sides of his head was offset by the swath of bare skin on top. He rose off the floor, face bleeding into his cupped hands.

  “Hey, you,” I said. “Asshole.”

  He looked at me.

  “Put your hands over your head and walk in front of me.”

  He blinked.

  I extended my arm, leveled the gun on him. “Do it.”

  He locked his fingers together atop his head and started walking with my gun between his shoulder blades. The crowd of shiny, happy people parted in waves as we walked, and they didn’t look very happy or shiny as they did. They looked venomous, like asps who’d had their nest upended.

  Halfway across the old ballroom, I saw a guy standing behind a desk, a phone to his ear. I cocked the hammer on my gun and pointed it at him. He dropped the receiver.

  “Hang it up,” I said.

  He did, his hand shaking.

  “Step back from the desk.”

  He did.

  The guy in front of me with the broken face called out to the room, “Don’t anyone call the police.” Then to me, “You’re in a lot of trouble.”

  “What’s your name?” I said and dug the pistol into his back.

  “Screw you,” he said.

  “Nice name. Is that Swedish?” I said.

  “You’re dead.”

  “Mmm.” I reached around him with my free hand and slapped his broken nose lightly with my fingers.

  A woman standing frozen to our left said, “Oh, God,” and Mr. Screw You gasped and wavered for a moment before he regained his footing.

  We reached the double doors and I stopped Screw You by placing my free hand on his shoulder and the muzzle of my pistol under his chin. Then I reached down and pulled his wallet from his back pocket, flipped it open, read the name on his license: John Byrne. I dropped the wallet in the pocket of my topcoat.

  “John Byrne,” I whispered in his ear, “if there’s anyone on the other side of these doors, you get an extra hole added to your face. Understand?”

  Sweat and blood dripped off his cheek into the collar of his white shirt. “I got it,” he said.

  “G
ood. We’re leaving now, John.”

  I looked back at the happy people. No one had moved. Manny, I guessed, was the only one packing a gun in his desk.

  “Anyone comes out that door after us,” I said, my voice a little hoarse, “they will die. Okay?”

  I got several nervous nods, and then John Byrne pushed the doors open.

  I pushed him out, holding on tight, and we stepped out at the top of the staircase.

  It was empty.

  I turned John Byrne around so he was facing the ball room. “Close the doors.”

  He did, and then I turned him around again and we started down the stairs. There are very few places with less room in which to maneuver or fewer places to hide than a butterfly staircase. I kept trying to swallow as my eyes darted left, right, up, down, and back again, but my mouth was dry. Halfway down, I felt John’s body tense, and I yanked him back into me, dug the muzzle into his flesh.

  “Thinking about flipping me down ahead of you, John?”

  “No,” he said through gritted teeth. “No.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’d be real dumb.”

  He went slack in my arm, and I leaned him forward again and we walked down the rest of the staircase. His blood and sweat mixture had found the arm of my topcoat and formed a moist, rusty stain.

  “You ruined my topcoat, John.”

  He glanced at my arm. “It’ll come out.”

  “It’s blood. On virgin wool, John.”

  “A good dry cleaner though, you know…”

  “I hope so,” I said. “Because if it doesn’t, I have your wallet. Which means I know where you live. Think about that, John.”

  We stopped at the door leading to the entrance foyer.

  “You thinking about it, John?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There going to be anyone waiting for us outside?”

  “I don’t know. Cops maybe.”

  “I don’t have a problem with cops,” I said. “I’d love to get arrested right now, John. You understand?”

  “I guess.”

  “What I’m concerned about, John, is a bunch of grief-stricken behemoths like Manny waiting out on Beacon Street with more guns than I have.”