“I wouldn’t know about that.”
The Inspector tries to clear his throat and fails. “Do you carry a gun?” he asks.
Gilrein pulls his.38, holds it up for Lacazze to see.
“Bring it inside,” the Inspector says. “One of us may need it.”
Gilrein looks in the mirror and says, “I’m not going inside.”
“I think you are, Mr. Gilrein,” Lacazze says, without annoyance. “I think you want to come inside.”
The old priest climbs out onto the sidewalk, fumbling with the flap on his breast pocket, finally pulling free a Magdalena and launching into a new search for his lighter.
Gilrein watches him through the window and says, “That’s just what I want to do,” with as much cruelty as he can manage, “spend the rest of the night in a small room with a man in the last phase of the Grippe.”
The Inspector comes up with a pack of matches and with a little difficulty ignites the end of the cigar. Gilrein wonders how he can sustain a draw with the trouble he has breathing, but in moments the barrel end of the stogie is glowing and the air is filling up with a heavy, woody smell.
Lacazze holds the Magdalena like some fragile musical instrument and through the smoke he says, “Do you know what I think the Grippe really is, Gilrein? It’s a parasite. Genetically manipulated but completely organic. It’s a microscopic vermin. Enlarged, I think it would look like a tiny worm. Transferred by the spray of spittle when one has a simple conversation. ‘How about this weather?’ and you’re infected. It crawls through the brain, relatively harmless until it meets the language centers. It lays its eggs as soon as it lands and it immediately starts feeding. Quite insatiable during pregnancy. Gestation is just forty days. The eggs hatch and the offspring join the picnic. That is when you know something is horribly wrong. You can’t find the correct word. Or you can’t find the graphical symbols to represent that word. Any hope of communicating is torn away. Any hope of meaning is devoured. Thank God it’s ultimately fatal.”
He pauses to take a long draw on the cigar and then adds, “I don’t think you could care less about the Grippe, young man. I think you might welcome a chance to contract the Grippe. Such a romantic way to go. Not as dramatic as a shower of bullets, but surely more lingering. A longer period of suffering.”
“You have to be a smug prick right to the end?”
Lacazze taps some ash to the sidewalk.
“You mistake insight for arrogance, Mr. Gilrein. But you’ll follow me inside anyway. Not really for the contagion, however. That’s just a bonus for you. You’ll follow me because I knew Ceil better than you did. And you can’t bear that. After all this time. You want to know what I know.”
Gilrein throws his door open and goes after the old priest, grabbing him by the lapels and running him up against the bricks of the station house. Lacazze doesn’t struggle, just goes limp, lets himself be carried by the force of the attack, eyes open the whole time and staring at Gilrein.
“Why were you waiting in my cab?” Gilrein yells.
“Inside,” Lacazze answers. “And bring the gun.”
The station house is a definition of chaos. It has evolved beyond its standard of extreme clutter and into the domain of the ruined. File cabinets have been overturned and their contents spread like fertilizer over every square inch of floor space. Some of the piles of paper have been saturated with water. Possibly with urine. Others are covered with perfect black bootprints that, when combined, resemble a set of instructions for an elaborately complicated dance routine. There are trails of vermin droppings here and there. Some graffiti artist has had a party on the walls, spraying can after can of Day-Glo and metallic colors, looping and curving and slashing lines of paint into letters, symbols, pictograms, doodles, everything but intelligible words, then crossing out the bulk of the drawing and starting over again on top of the previous layer, painting over the paint.
There are also dozens, maybe hundreds of bullet holes in the walls. One desk is covered with mud and silt and dried leaves. Another desk has a fire axe protruding from its surface, the blade imbedded in the wood up to the handle. And then, in contrast to this, there is Ceil’s desk, left neat as the last night she sat behind it, preserved as a shrine, everything in order, pencils still sitting in a coffee mug that advertises LOFTUS FUNERAL HOMES, reference books lined up along the outer lip, a green blotter occupying the center. And a framed photo of Gilrein, a small candid shot that depicts a content man seated on the edge of his bed in the perfect bungalow. Only someone has altered the photo, defaced it, taken a black marker and drawn onto the picture, making round glasses over the eyes, filling in a pointed goatee on the chin, blacking out the two front teeth. And fixing horns at the top of the skull. Gilrein refrains from touching the picture; instead, he leans down and sniffs at the desktop, smelling the aroma of a recently applied lemon polishing agent.
They move past Geil’s desk, walk to the door of the Inspector’s office. The interrogation chamber. The place were the ritual of Methodology was performed. A piece of scrap paper is tacked to the door. It features Ceil’s handwriting, or, more likely, a bad imitation of Ceil’s handwriting, that reads
ESCHATOLOGY SQUAD COMMANDER
KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING
and beneath this someone has added, with the dry sarcasm that was one signature of Ceil,
THEN ABANDON ALL HOPE.
The Inspector unlocks and opens the door and Gilrein follows him inside. If it’s possible, Lacazze’s office is even more chaotic than the squad room. It’s as if the chamber were trying to transmute itself into a small municipal dumping ground. The interrogation blackboard has been knocked over and its backing mirror is shattered, slivered glass sprayed everywhere like foam on the crest of a frozen wave. Random holes have been gouged into the plaster, each about the size of a fist. One wall displays an abbreviated piece of writing that’s illegible and could just be a line of smeared blood. Every one of the paper stacks and file towers has been knocked over, covering the floor with a thicket of yellowed reams. The room smells like a lavatory that has never been properly cleaned. There are also traces of burned gunpowder, alcohol, and a cloying hint of dying vegetation.
They sit on opposite sides of Lacazze’s desk, the red chalice in front of Gilrein, the crystal decanter, half-filled, as always, with Spanish sherry, in front of the Inspector. The only other thing on the desktop, spread beneath the chalice like a blotter, is a crumpled and partially wet tabloid-style newspaper.
Lacazze raises the heavy glass bottle to his lips and says, “To your health.”
Gilrein picks up the red chalice and brings it to his mouth, then glances inside and sees fat globules of an oozing white substance refusing to mix with what must be the dregs of some sherry.
“Is it consecrated?” Gilrein asks.
Lacazze breaks off his swallow and comes forward in his seat as if he’s about to choke. He manages a hard gulp before barking out a laugh, then rubs away the dripping sherry with the back of his newly grotesque hand. Gilrein notices some of the pustules are bubbling slightly.
“Didn’t you hear?” Lacazze says, voice weak and raspy, but his tone mildly sarcastic. “I’ve been stripped of my powers.”
“Secular or spiritual?”
“Forgive me,” Lacazze says, “but those two always confuse me.”
“I’ll bet. Ceil used to say that as a cop you made a terrifying priest—”
“She had such a way with the langauge.”
“—or maybe it was the other way around.”
“I suppose we’ll never know,” Lacazze says, then takes another drink, more moderate this time, and adds, “but what do you think she meant by that?”