Are you still naked?
Yes, I am. When I finish with you I’ll get dressed again. The point is, I had no idea this would occur when I came to work tonight. And certainly the guard didn’t know. The dog didn’t know. It was just this momentary occurrence. Won’t happen again in a lifetime, probably. But it did happen tonight. You just never know. It jumps out at you. You have to go with it. Shake up the routine. Shake down the system. That’s where the juice comes from, caller. That’s where life heats up. It’s that little mystery-charge that makes breathing worthwhile. You’ve got to stop looking for these signals to confirm everything for you. You’re looking for sureties that just aren’t there. You bought into this religion that says logic exists, that one and one will always equal two. And I’m sorry, but I can’t say that’s the case. That guard tonight had his math shaken, okay? And if you ask me, it was for the better.
So you’re naked right now?
Okay, there’s no helping some people. I’m pulling your plug, caller. Give your girlfriend a flare gun for Christmas. Maybe that’ll help you out. This is Libido Liveline and we’ll be back after these messages.
4
Detective Shaw is on her knees. She’s leaning against the wooden railing of the choir loft, all her weight on her elbows. She’s looking out into the enclosed cavern of St. Brendan’s, trying to remember how long ago it was when a structure like this one could invoke feelings of both security and doom, majesty and abomination, and a vague, hazy kind of awe.
She thinks that maybe a lot of these feelings were products of perspective, the overwhelming smallness of the child set so harshly against the enormity of the cathedral, the bishop’s own church, with its ceilings that rose up so high that looking at them, striving to make out the biblical icons depicted in their curves, brought on vertigo and even quick belts of frightening nausea.
Now St. Brendan’s just looks overly ornate, an example of misplaced economic priorities and fashions that will never come back. Maybe, more than anything, the church is a lesson in the cost of stasis, the bland, cold fact of obsolescence.
The choir loft door makes a whining sound and Hannah turns to see an elderly Oriental man shuffling toward the immense organ.
She stands and shakes her head.
“Dr. Cheng,” she says, “you didn’t have to climb all the way up here.”
“Detective Shaw,” he says, his voice a raspy whisper, his eyes closing and his head bowing slightly.
The old man takes her hand in his, comes forward, and plants a subtle, fatherly kiss on her cheek. They settle down onto the organ bench and Dr. Cheng slowly begins to unbutton a black Burberry overcoat and loosen a paisley silk scarf from around his neck. Hannah sees that, as always, under-neath, he wears a simple black cassock, a coolie-type cotton gown that’s completely out of step with his wealth and status. She knows that parked down in the street, somewhere behind the cruisers and the M.E.’s car, is the doctor’s chauffeured Rolls-Royce. And she knows that if anyone can steer her down the right road after Fr. Todorov’s killer, it’s the unofficial emperor of Little Asia.
From below comes the flash of the cameras documenting the charred confessional booth and the hushed murmur of the chancery’s director of communications conferring with a reporter from the Spy’s city desk.
Hannah reaches over and touches Dr. Cheng’s arm. “I want to thank you for taking my call. It wasn’t necessary for you to drive down here. I could’ve come to you.”
“It’s better this way,” Dr. Cheng says.
Hannah nods and fingers some white keys on the organ.
“Meaning you don’t want me down Little Asia anymore?”
Dr. Cheng lets out a rough, wheezy breath.
“The landscape is changing, Hannah. You know this. Ever since our mutual friend left. Things are deteriorating more and more. I can feel the ground crumbling under my feet.”
Hannah looks up at him, tries to smile, and manages a shrug.
Their mutual friend is Lenore Thomas, already a dark myth in Bangkok Park. Lenore was the original strong-arm goddess, a woman with the will of Stalin and a tongue like a razor. When Hannah applied to work narcotics, Lenore was the one who backed her, then showed her the trade. And though more often than not Hannah fell victim to Lenore’s bullying wit, she also fell under Lenore’s spell, came to view her as something beyond a role model, something more like a wildly complex Zen master, a roshi of not simply narc detail, but the landscapes of power and force and persuasion and dominance.
It was no secret to Hannah that Lenore had a bone-deep amphetamine habit, but it did seem inconceivable that any chemical could outmaneuver the woman. Lenore was just too savvy, too smart and instinctive and obsessively disciplined. But about a year back, Lenore got involved in an unsanctioned bust down in St. James Cemetery. To this day internal affairs has blanketed the details, but the entire department knows something went utterly wrong that night. A fellow officer and a department liaison were killed and the king of Bangkok Park, a Latino named Cortez, disappeared with an undetermined cache of what the rumormongers simply call product.
And after a week talking into a tape recorder in Mayor Welby’s office, Lenore also disappeared. The official word was a leave of absence and an extended stay at a detox clinic in Vermont. But Shaw will never buy this. It just doesn’t wash with what she knows about Lenore Thomas.