Need (19 page)

The only black he had met in person, Da, was not around to tell him. Besides, that man would be bound to be biased. Given hindsight he wished he had wriggled loose and tried to pin Briege down, not let her escape in a Starburst. She could have set him straight in a jiffy. Or told him a good book to read. As it was, he hadn’t a clue.

Still didn’t. Since he’d fallen to earth in New York, he felt his own skin as false colours. Blacks passing on the street spoke to him in code, assuming a connection, but he lacked the key.
I’m chilling
and
you be illing
and
he’s down with that
, and who was this Momma person, what evil could she have done them? He would have liked to question Crouch. Ask him, man to man,
Is it dark in there?
But he didn’t like to presume.

And now the roof was on fire again.

At first he’d thought it was an illusion, the power of suggestion, because Mr. Ferdousine was playing
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
upstairs for his dancing lesson. Then a streamer of burning newspaper fell flapping and flailing to the ground like a winged bird at the Zoo’s door where he was watering the wandering jew.
O
VIRGIN
EXPOSED
, the remains of the headline read.

For a trice, his impulse was to run upstairs and start battling the flames. But no, he would not be exploited. Let someone else go piss on them this time; firefighting was not his hire.

He had more than enough on his plate as it was. Another day, another duty, so it seemed. Imagine Juice Shovlin, thirty-one floors up above Park Avenue, waiting and waiting to no avail. But how was John Joe to get away? When Miss Root needed him in the Zoo; and Anna Crow needed him to run errands, needed him to serve; and Bani Badpa needed him for a night barman. And the Black Swans, of course, they had their needs as well. Those people depended on him.

Since that first time in the tunnel, he’d come to see them in a better light. Master Maitland, on fuller acquaintance, had proved no bad sort, although a mite intemperate. He had known great sadness in his life; you had to remember that. Try to see things through the Master’s own eyes, and there was much a toiling man could learn.

As for the Swans themselves, they lived in a space they had named Mount Tabor, though it was located deep underground, five levels below Grand Central Station.

According to Crouch, there were hundreds, even thousands of citizens who existed in a like manner, scattered in tunnels and sealed chambers throughout the subway system. Some were homeless and some criminals, some not right in the head, but most were only refugees from daylight. The guards
and journalists called them Mole People; that was incorrect. They were subterraneans just.

There had been such dwellers for many years, maybe for decades. Nobody had paid them mind till recently, when some lady from a university had written a book. Now magazine writers and TV crews were following her trail. The subway guards had started to polish their shoes and spruce their hair, hoping for a moment’s stardom. What was not so pleasing, they had also started to oil their guns.

To reach Mount Tabor this day John Joe passed through the subway stile onto the platform for the Times Square shuttle and simply kept walking.

The tracks led him into blackness. When the trains came roaring down upon him, he hugged the walls, hiding his face till danger passed and he could find the secret vent that took him down deeper, crawling on his belly through a steel tube that brought him into an echoing chamber.

Just like in the tunnel beneath Riverside Park, the first time he’d met Master Maitland, he didn’t see faces or bodies here, only eyes. For a long space, he walked a high ledge above abandoned tracks, picking his way past sleeping bags and mattresses and piles of human excrement; then he descended a rusted iron stairway that ended in naked rockface; and finally he swung himself down by a cable, hand under hand, to a last tunnel that brought him home.

As good as any spy film it felt when he stopped halfway down this tunnel, tapped with his keys on a metal steampipe and received two taps in reply. A door swung open in the rock-face, and he had reached Mount Tabor.

Twenty-three Black Swans and eleven of their children were grouped around a concrete clearing lit by two gas lanterns, some eating Egg McMuffins and others sipping Coke. Two
women were hanging up laundry, a man was fixing a leaky waterbed. “You’re late,” said Master Maitland.

“The Severe Macaw took sick. A dose of the French Moult.”

“Ananias,” the Master said. His shoulders hunched and rocked in anger, and the great bull’s head that rose straight out of his monstrous chest seemed lowered to charge. “
And there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings
,” he cried in his high girl’s voice. But as quickly as his rage had flared, it withered. “
And an earthquake
,” he sighed. “
And a great hail
.”

He had found and built this shelter by himself, two years ago at Pentecost. Or found it again, to be exact, for he had known of the place’s existence long ago. Before he was the Master, he had been plain Luscious Maitland, employee of the Manhattan Transport Authority (MTA), who mapped the subways for his living.

The way that John Joe had heard the story from Crouch, Luscious Maitland had once been a rising star in that authority, freely tipped for high honours, until an efficiency expert named Randall Gurdler was turned loose on his department. A smiling smooth man with a furled silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and the smell of violets on his breath, this expert had uncovered certain irregularities, financial in their nature. In truth, it was all a misunderstanding, a foolish mistake, but Gurdler refused to accept this. Instead, he had twisted the facts to his own unclean purposes, using them as building blocks to further his career, which vaulted him ever upwards, from efficiency expert to publicity officer, spokesman to comptroller, and finally to President of the entire MTA. While Luscious Maitland lay caged in jail. Three years in Attica, and Crouch had been his cellmate.

Another man in his position might have been crushed, his spirit shattered, but Maitland was not the fall-down kind. Instead of brooding on his wrongs, he sought the reasons that
lay behind them. Studied his Bible day by day, and by night he read another book.
The Deaths of Joachim
, this second book was called, and in its pages at last he saw the truth clear. His fall had been no accident. Nor was Randall Gurdler a casual interloper. The entire story had been foretold.

In his cell a vision came to him by night of Gurdler in a telephone booth, dialling a number with eight digits, and those digits spelled 666-BEAST. At that moment the scales fell from Maitland’s eyes and he saw that violet-breathed hypocrite in his true created nature, with his body like unto a leopard, and his feet as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. Then he saw the smiling head wounded to the death, and that deadly wound healed, and he knew that the Antichrist was alive and well in Jay Street, Brooklyn, at the offices of the MTA.

The thing that puzzled him at first in this revelation was the function of the subways. Why had Gurdler chosen them as his battleground? What could be their hidden power? Then he bethought him of the fiery flood to come when Babylon falls, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of her wrath of her fornication. And everything made sense. By infiltrating the MTA, Gurdler had positioned himself at the heart and core of the city’s nervous system. At the moment ordained, he needed only to throw a switch, and the tracks would be consumed by flame, a holocaust that would burst from underground, from deep within the belly of the Beast, and devour the metropolis above, exterminating all sinning creatures in a torrent of fire; a flood.

What could be simpler or more devastating? With Luscious Maitland safely confined, the one man with the nerve and knowledge to face Gurdler down, who could hope to deflect his aim? The guards and even the warder laughed when informed, the mayor never answered his letters. The only man alive who would listen was Crouch, and he was given no choice.

Crouch at that time was a tap-dancer by profession, a forger by trade. Artwork had always been his forte, and he had decorated their cell with many paintings. Under Maitland’s influence, he now drew a figure on a throne, his face like unto jasper and sardine stone, with a rainbow around the throne, in sight like an emerald. And another figure in the midst of seven candlesticks, clothed in a rough garment down to his feet and girt about the paps with a golden thong. And horses with the heads of lions and tails like scorpions, and their riders like angels of the bottomless pit had breastplates of jacinth, and of brimstone.
You told my story. You are my eyes
, Master Maitland said.
My own eyes a flame of fire
.

The first day he was released, the Master returned to the subways that had been his life, scouring the labyrinth beneath them for sanctuary. Crouch thought him crazy to go house-hunting there, so close to the Beast’s own lair. But that was simply because Crouch did not know Physics. Couldn’t grasp the simple fact that a flame flies upwards, and the safest place to shelter is directly beneath its source. When the doomed and damned city overhead was blazing, freed souls five levels down would merely be pleasantly warmed, snug as bugs. And when flame turned to flood, no sweat, they would turn to black swans, and fly.

By the time that Crouch himself was paroled, he found the Master surrounded by twenty-four elders and their families. Some had been subterraneans when he found them, others had been awaiting a sign. One had been a nurse, and one a schoolteacher. There was a plumber and a short-order cook, an electrician and a whore. All the necessities of life, you’d say, except for Art, and that was where Crouch came in.

By the wayside one day, fallen off a truck, he chanced on a job lot of mannequins. They had been created in the images of supermodels and Hollywood icons; he turned
them into prophecies. Cindy Crawford and Elle Macpherson and Madonna were transformed into three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. Ava Gardner became a mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud. And to Brigitte Bardot were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness.

These apparitions lined Mount Tabor now when John Joe stood mumbling in his lateness, and Black Swans watched smirking. Of the original twenty-four, all were still present save three, who had wandered off or perhaps been hijacked by the transit police, Randall Gurdler’s men.

That was the one great danger in this place—the squads of licensed thugs who swarmed the tunnels some nights with drawn guns, rounding up crack addicts, thieves and freed souls without distinction, breaking heads. Sometimes they sprayed gunfire without even aiming, blasting at rats and anything else that moved. Jerzy Polacki, the plumber, had lost a thumb that way. Marvella Crabtree had lost her son.

Though that murder had tried them sorely, their faith had endured, and even strengthened. The Boniface brothers, Brulant and Toussaint, had requisitioned a few rifles. Luther Pratt and Joe Easter had added six Beretta 9-mils, 92F, plus a couple dozen snub-nosed .38s, and Burdette Merryweather had chipped in an Uzi. Mount Tabor, which had started as an asylum, was become a citadel:
New Jerusalem
, Master Maitland said.

Still and all, John Joe felt easy here. Not so much when the Master called him Ananias, maybe, but as a rule he felt right in his element. And not because of Randall Gurdler and the Beast and 666, that sounded a load of bollix. But who could tell for certain sure? In any case, he wasn’t bothered. What he
liked about this spot, citadel or no, was that it felt like a social club, and he was a welcome member.

More than welcome, honoured. From the first time Crouch had brought him along, and made him display his birthmark, he had been the special guest artiste round here. Though anyone with half an eye could see that was no swan, more like a rook if anything, you’d have thought he was bold Robert Emmet reborn. Any class of treat that crossed his mind, a cup of tea, a ginger biscuit, love, it was his on a dumbwaiter, help yourself.

Another kind of mascot.

Well he knew that, of course; he wasn’t blind. At least this time there was no mockery to it, he wasn’t made a freak. A quirk among other quirks only, and where was the damage in that?

Besides, if he was a mascot, he was also a sign.
A patent portent
, the Master called him. As advertised and foretold in
The Deaths of Joachim
.

That volume was the Swans’ holy book. A battered volume wrapped in canvas sacking, it told a martyr’s tale.

According to its text, Joachim was born a slave in 1522. Mulatto son of a Venetian trader, a bastard born in Tunis, he had been raised at the court of a local potentate, where he’d showed an aptitude for languages and music, and in due course had been sold to another trader, this time a Genoese, who brought him back to Italy. His master dying suddenly, he had then commenced to wander through Europe, sometimes working as a farmhand or day-labourer, sometimes begging, or making music in the streets.

His musical talents were many, he played the pipes and stringed instruments and a form of xylophone, but his greatest love was the drum, and it was as a drummer that he earned his keep in Würzburg, playing daily in the city’s central
square, while another North African, a one-legged beggar named Emico, accompanied him on the fife.

The winter of 1545 was bitter hard, and the two musicians almost starved. A great storm swept through the city, freezing all living things. Joachim and Emico huddled against the blizzard in the doorway of Würzburg’s cathedral and prepared themselves to die. At the storm’s height, however, just as Joachim was lapsing into unconsciousness, the Virgin appeared to him.

She was wearing white robes, and surrounded by a heavenly radiance, but her feet were bound in a supplicant’s rags, and her message was austere. She spoke to him of the fiery flood to come, and the black swans who would survive it, and she told him what his own role must be. Instead of using his drum to make people dance, he was to employ it as the instrument of God. And this he promptly did. Rising out of his stupor, he found that the storm had quite abated, and his hunger with it. Entirely restored, he strapped on his drum and began to march through the sleeping town, spreading the pure Word.