Gods Go Begging (49 page)

The photograph of naked Sabine had been taken from the body of a second boy. The photo had been taped to a string and worn around the kid’s neck like a dog tag.

In a few months the padre would testify to all of this. He would say to the members of the jury that he had witnessed the executions of all of those poor boys and that Reggie Harp had been the murderer

“Why didn’t you save them? Why didn’t you intercede?”

“I am a chaplain, sir, a noncombatant. Only force would have stopped him. I spoke to Reggie, pleaded with him, but he wouldn’t listen.”

In response to Jesse’s questions, and despite his Fifth Amendment rights, he would confess to the jury that he had twisted the tallis until the boy’s breath was gone.

“There are mercy killings during wartime,” the padre would quietly explain, “when there’s no choice, no way out, when someone is wounded beyond hope. Reggie struggled for air, but he did not really resist. There was a strange look of irony in Little Reggie’s eyes as he experienced the very death by strangulation that he had arranged for Calvin in the jail.”

The padre’s voice broke as he related from the witness stand that on Reggie’s purple face there had appeared an unmistakable expression of gratitude.

“He seemed curious about death.”

After a decent enough burial, the padre had called in a phony bomb threat in hopes that the authorities would find the shallow graves. It was he who had informed Sabine of her son’s crimes and of the exact location of his grave. It was he who had witnessed her cackling and dancing wildly on the dust above her dead son’s body. It was the padre who had heard her sickening confession in the moonlight, and he had sworn by his sacred calling to keep it a secret. He had been forced to change his mind, to break his vow of silence, when Biscuit Boy was charged with the crimes. Despite these admissions, the prosecutor would never file charges against him.

The chaplain would explain to the jury that it was Reggie who had killed his friends out of jealousy, shooting as they walked from Sabine’s apartment. It was he who had murdered the Amazon women. He had slaughtered them for their beauty and for their pure and resolute hearts. He had dishonored their eyes because they would never have given him a second glance; he had dishonored their bodies because they never would have lured young boys into their home and used them the way Princess Sabine had. He had despoiled Persephone and Mai because destruction is the only power left to men who cannot love.

Vô Dahn would tell the absolute truth, that the killer behind the killer was still out there. The true fiend was even more devious, more dangerous than Little Reggie, and that person was living free and unchecked on the hill. Even while he was testifying before the jury, Vô Dahn knew that his own days on this earth were numbered.

Jesse drove to Glen Park, parked on Surrey Street, and bounded up the stairs to Carolina’s small house. The porch light came on and the front door opened. She stood silently, wearing a T-shirt and tan shorts. Jesse was surprised to see that she was wearing lipstick. Carolina never wore makeup. It was obvious to Jesse that she hadn’t put in her contact lenses because she had to lean forward and narrow her eyes to mere slits in order to see who was standing three feet in front of her.

“Topolina,” said Jesse. She looked like a pretty mole when she squinted like that. Carolina grimaced. She didn’t really like the name.

“Are all of your closing arguments like that one?” she asked. Greetings could wait. The question had plagued her from the moment she had left the courtroom. “Are there always two summations, one for the jury and one for an empty courtroom? Are they always so passionate?”

“It wasn’t empty,” answered Jesse, still standing out on the porch. “You were there. But you’re right. I always talk to the empty jury seats after the occupants have gone to deliberate. I tell them what the Evidence Code won’t let me. As for the passion, it must have been the jade,” he said with a look of calm amazement in his face.

“Come in,” Carolina said with a confused smile. Jesse hadn’t been on her front porch in weeks and he had never before mentioned anything about jade.

“Are you hungry? Are you happy about the verdict?”

“Why wouldn’t I be happy?” asked Jesse as he entered the front room and followed her toward the kitchen. “It was a complete acquittal on all counts. What have you got to eat?”

“I asked the question because I know you, Jesse Pasadoble,” said Carolina without turning around. “Only you could find the negative in a victory, focus on it, and embrace it with open arms. You’ve lived your whole life that way. That’s what you’ve done to us,” she said almost beneath her breath.

After a moment of private reflection she shrugged the moment away and said in a jaunty, playful voice, “I have tofu and broccoli marinated in organic soy sauce.”

“I don’t know why, but I think that’s about to change,” said Jesse quietly as he put his arms around Topolina’s waist and pulled the back of her body toward his chest. “And I’m not talking about the tofu. I’m so damned tired of seeing the death in things.”

Despite the deep tenor of weariness in his voice, he raised his hands to cup her breasts.

“Besides,” he said with a growing smile, “you know very well that you can’t feed tofu and broccoli to a Mexican.” He kissed her neck softly. “That would be a blasphemy, an abomination in the eyes of God!” he exclaimed. “Organic soy sauce is even more poisonous to La Gente than strychnine or arsenic. Only spirulina is more virulent to La Raza. In fact, hundreds of Mexicans died in Ciudad Juarez in the great spirulina outbreak of 1892.”

Carolina laughed, then turned around slowly. She looked into Jesse’s eyes and saw a man whose face and demeanor she knew well, yet his inner being, his soul, had always remained a stranger. The man she had heard in the courtroom was no one that she had ever known. And now that unknown man seemed to be evolving, changing into something else, someone else.

Somehow she sensed, with both trepidation and eagerness, that a new being was forming beneath his brown skin. The man with his arms around her was not the Jesse Pasadoble that had walked out on her. Perhaps the dead thing inside of him was gone, finally put to rest. Carolina shivered with uncertainty. She closed her eyes for a moment to regain her composure. The man she loved, someone she didn’t know, was becoming another person altogether. Perhaps she was about to discover that she didn’t love him. Or perhaps this night would reveal why she always would.

“I have a can of menudo that you left here the last time you stayed over.” She pulled away from his embrace and walked toward the cupboard. “Actually, you left six of them, but I couldn’t throw all of them away. I guess I’m just a sentimental fool. I can heat that up and throw in some chopped onions and oregano and half a bottle of chili sauce.” She shuddered as she recited the recipe for his favorite concoction. “I have some whole-wheat tortillas in the freezer.”

“No tortillas de harina?” said Jesse dejectedly.

“Don’t tell me,” said Carolina with a sigh of resignation, “there was an outbreak of whole-wheat plague down in Quintana Roo in 1928?”

“Nineteen twenty-seven,” said Jesse in a professorial voice. “And don’t laugh. It decimated whole towns. Thousands of Mexicans rioted in Chetumal, killing anyone who sold rose hips or alfalfa sprouts. Did you know that Mexican Customs at Tijuana has dogs that sniff out herbal teas and ginseng? The
federales
no longer allow psychological self-help books into the country from California.”

“I do have one package of frozen flour tortillas.” Carolina sighed patiently. “Just let me open the windows so the smell of tripe and lard doesn’t settle into my curtains and the upholstery.”

“Now you’re talking.” Jesse smiled. He pulled Carolina’s lips to his own and kissed her deeply for two beats and a measure. Their bodies began a slow, swaying dance near the stove.

She opened her eyes during the kiss and saw to her astonishment that his were closed. She had never known him to do that, never. Jesse could never give in to the moment. He could never lose control. She had always wanted to dance with him, just a two-step, but he wouldn’t allow it. When their lips parted, she noticed that Jesses’s lower lip and chin were dark red. Carolina blushed when she saw it. Somehow the lipstick made her feel naked. He then kissed one of her eyelids and the other, then bent down to kiss the two rising points on her shirt where her breasts were sequestered.

Now she knew for certain that something was different—some basic, alchemical change must have taken place. They joined lips again just as the phone began to ring. Carolina hesitated at first, unwilling to give up this unprecedented and precious moment of intimacy, but reluctantly answered it on the fifth ring. Business had been very slow of late, and it just might be a client needing a photographer.

Slowly the look of joy on her face turned to one of regret and confusion. She handed the phone to Jesse, explaining nervously that it was Eddy on the line and that something was dreadfully wrong. Eddy sounded terrible. She could barely understand what he was saying. Jesse took the phone from her. As he listened to Eddy Oasa the glow of the morning’s victory in court dissipated into nothing-ness. The romance that had filled the kitchen just moments before evaporated like steam. After five minutes without speaking, Jesse laid the phone gently in its cradle, then slumped down into a couch.

“What’s wrong?” asked Carolina. “What’s wrong?”

For the first time since infancy Jesse cried. He sat on the couch and sobbed endless, unstoppable tears; a long, belated deluge for the children on the hill,
pour les enfants dans l‘enfanterie,
for the infants who had always made up the infantry. At long last, after twenty-eight dry years, he shed his salt tears for skinny Cornelius, Indian Jim-Earl, the sergeant, and all those boys in both uniforms that had littered that hill so long ago.

He wept for the prisoner of war, Hong Trac; for Hollis and lonely Evie and her tamale pies; for Trin Adrong and Amos Flyer, locked in their widowers’ embrace, for Persephone and Mai, who wished with all their being to know how their husbands had died. Their fervent wish had been granted: they had been forced by fate to reenact it, every moment of it.

“The Biscuit Boy is dead,” he sobbed through clenched teeth. “It was a head shot. The padre was shot, too. They’re both dead. I just know it. They’re both dead.”

At that moment the body of Vô Dahn lay face-down on a table in the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital. A young nurse examined his back with some curiosity. Just then a harried surgeon flashed into the room and began to scrub up at a nearby sink.

“Fill me in,” he said without removing his mask.

“Doctor, the patient is stabilized,” said the young nurse. “His vitals look good. There was substantial loss of blood. He sure looked dead when he got here. I thought he was gone until he started feeling my kneecap,” smiled the nurse. The doctor glanced downward at the nurse’s kneecap.

“There is a large tattoo on the upper-right quadrant of the patient’s back,” she added. “You should look at it carefully, Dr. Beckelman. It looks like a large brown spider with a scarlet violin on its abdomen. I’ve never seen anything like it. The entry wound is right on the bridge of the violin. The police officer out in the lobby said that it was a nine-millimeter bullet.”

“It’s a fiddle spider,” said the doctor as he began to probe the wound with his gloved finger. “It’s also known as a Mexican brown recluse. There is an exit wound ten centimeters from the midline.”

The nurse made notations as the doctor spoke.

“He’s a lucky man. The bullet was deflected by something that should not be where it is. He has a broken rib, a very old injury that was never treated. That twisted piece of bone kept the bullet from hitting the heart.”

The doctor moved his bloody index finger from one hole to the other.

“The projectile left a jagged circular wound and an abrasion in the center of the Star of David tattoo. He’s one of us.” The nurse and the doctor shared a moment of mirth.

“Must be Sephardic,” answered the nurse. “Only Sephardim allow tattuage of the skin. I think it’s beautiful,” she said almost wistfully. There was a clear note of envy in her voice.

“Haven’t had too many Jews in here,” said the doctor with an obvious note of pride in his voice.

“What do you suppose America would be like if there had never been Jews on its shores?” said a third voice. “None of them are here because they’re all over in geriatric.” The startled doctor and the nurse looked at each other in bewilderment, then back down toward the patient. The man should be unconscious. It was that damned anesthesiologist again. He had done his usual shoddy work, then dashed off to intensive care to flirt with the nurses.

“I’m not very good at this, but I think there would be no humor in America,” continued the dazed, groggy voice of the padre. “No vaudeville, no Henny Youngman, no one-liners, no knock-knock jokes—just the polite, lace-ridden twittering and giggle of British naughtiness. All the Jews would’ve ended up in Honduras.
¿Quién sabía?”
The wounded man on the table managed a shrug. “Who knew?”

“You know, Dr. Beckelman,” said the nurse, suddenly aware that the doctor was not unattractive, “he just might be right.”

“You can call me Eliot,” answered the doctor.

“Princess Sabine shot them both,” cried Jesse. “It’s her sick revenge for the death of her son, for the death of Little Reggie, her second husband. She’s holed up in her apartment right now, shooting it out with the cops. They’ve secured the hill and set up a perimeter around her home.”