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Hallowed Ground
You’re in, now, in proper. It’s cool and dim and quiet. Your eyes still haven’t adjusted from the brightness outside; you can barely see a thing. But that doesn’t matter yet. After the scorching sun outside, simply the cool dark of the wide low atrium is as welcome as a bucketful of cold water.
Sweat makes your collar damp. You slide a finger between it and the hot back of your neck and hope you haven’t been burnt. You’re not stupid: ordinarily you wouldn’t be walking about at the hottest time of the day. Ordinarily you’d be in a dark deserted bar or stretched out insensible on a hotel bed, waiting out the sun, like everyone else. But ordinarily you aren’t given errands as irresistible as this. For this you would have waited in that heat for four hours, lying low like a sniper, every fibre of your soul focused on the entrance of this church, a black open mouth in the white glare. The best snipers you’ve known aren’t the flashy, dashing sort in movies but those staid, stolid, imaginationless individuals who can treat the waiting as an art in itself: no reading the paper or drinking coffee or catching up on their correspondence for them. Like Caine. Can’t imagine him reading the paper. You’ve heard him speak maybe twelve words this year. Of the whole bunch, he’s the only one to make you even mildly uneasy. Aside from the boss, of course; but then, he’s something else entirely.
Now that your eyes are a bit more used to the gloom you can begin to take it all in properly. Glancing to your left and right, quick assassin’s glances, past the Give What You Can box, you note the tired, faded paint covering the unevenly plastered walls in a dark, oppressive red, a colour you recognise from somewhere; the scarred wood bench upholstered in faux plasticky leather (though who would actually want to sit and contemplate this thoroughly depressing entrance hall you don’t know); the large crucifix above the inner door. The brass nails pinning Christ’s palms to the cross gleam like jewellery. You’re standing on the bar of a yellow G painted on the stone at your feet, almost a yarz high. God Is Light, the message reads. Which is odd, given just how dark it is in here. For all it’s a place of worship there’s an indefinable seediness here that seems to seep from the very woodwork. You’re feeling vaguely claustrophobic, uneasy and nervous, with the low-key stomach ache and dry mouth which usually go with pre-performance jitters. The walls seem to press in. The colour of old blood. Where have you seen it before? Old blood… God, it’s a grotesque colour, really, and you really should – but you can’t quite –
And then you’ve got it. You laugh, a reflex action, pleasureless, short. You can taste the acid from your stomach at the back of your throat.
The whorehouse. His church walls are painted the same colour as the whorehouse.
Who chose this colour? Who picked a red so dark it is almost purple for church walls? Perhaps it was him. After all, this is and has always been his place, his rightful place in the order of things, just as the whorehouse was yours. His place. Most likely he has dragged his fingers along the dusty scratched top of this bench, feeling out the scars; he has probably touched the faded paint of these walls, perhaps peeled a bit more off with his nail, just for something to do. He has stood where you stand now, on the step worn smooth with years of Sunday shoes, in front of the heavy wood door. You can practically smell his aftershave, like blood off a wounded animal.
You place your hands flat on the door. Not pushing, just resting. It feels odd not to fling it open and just stride in. You haven’t waited like this outside a door since you were nine years old. Nine, hands pressed to splintery cheap wood, staring, counting the lines in the grain until you were shooed out by one of the ladies. Can’t go in while your mama’s working, hon, casual, wiping the sweat from between her breasts with a tissue. Ladies. No more ladies than you were. And then hours of playing in the street until the other kids got bored or called in to supper by their mothers. Hours of wandering around until you got too tired and then you’d sit under the wide low porch of that place, in the dirt, waiting until ma was finished and you could go up to the bed that you and she shared. She’d stroke your hair in the fast, desperate way you hated, the way snotty Magdalene stroked the fur coat one of her besotted regulars had sold his premium bonds to buy for her. And then while you pretended to be asleep she’d cry, which you hated a thousand times more.
Misgivings clamour like crows in your mind. Dusty, musty silence presses in like a living thing, into ears nose and mouth. It’s hard to resist backing out of this place, slowly, as if away from a dangerous toothsome thing, into the sick heat of the noonday sun. But you do resist, because you’ve got to. And because if you weren’t you you’d be slapping yourself for being such a pussy, standing here dithering, spooked by your own imagination. How can a church be like a whorehouse? It sounds like a riddle.
You push hard and the door gives immediately, moving inward on newly-oiled hinges that still glisten.
Candles. Hundreds of candles, lining the walls, nestled in alcoves, dripping on to threadbare scarlet carpet. Candles, at noon. Bizarre. But they’re necessary, you realise, if your priest doesn’t wish to preach in darkness. The sunlight barely pierces the thick layer of dust coating the high stained glass windows, creating a sinful twilight, flavoured with incense and sweat and guilt (Christ, it even smells the same, exactly the same). In here it probably always feels like night, however fiercely the suns beat down outside. And they are beating down now, opening cracks in the dirt, invisible white-hot fingers prying the very ground apart, splitting the foundations of this church. White dizzy spots pop in front of your eyes and you have to reach out for the pillar in front of you, fingers gripping gritty plaster as tightly as if the floor might crack beneath you any minute.
How can a church be like a whorehouse? With ease, apparently. God, the elaborateness of this place. Reds and golds and browns. Rich fabrics are a shock in a poor area like this, where outside you saw overrunning weeds poking out through sandy topsoil, dirty children, shanty houses, thin mangy cringing dogs. There are frills and flounces of architecture everywhere, all nestled under a high plain ceiling, like lace petticoats peeking out from under an imitation silk dress. And those candles: tall, dark red, almost phallic. You thought churches were supposed to be austere places where man and God could commune, bare places with no draperies to muffle prayers and no twiddly bits of architecture to tangle them. You never imagined anything like this. The whole place looks like some upmarket madam’s waiting room. On the far wall hangs a large tapestry of a woman in blue holding a very young child. They’ve got gold circles over their heads. Your mother, holding you to her, rank with the stench of four, five, six different men. You tend to remember your childhood most vividly by its smells, and it’s a nightmarish olfactory mess: sex and booze and blood, gun smoke and tobacco and too much cheap whorish perfume.
The candle perched in a wall bracket on your left hand side hisses, sputters, and drips hot wax on the carpet. There’s the hint of magnolia in the air. Maybe the candles are scented. (Unbelievable.) The incense is getting up your nostrils. You swallow a sneeze, but it’s one of those painful sneezes that makes the back of your throat feel raw and hurts your lungs. Uncomfortably hot now and what with the pressure in your chest like a hot hand grasping your heart and squeezing irregularly so that the blood gushes round your vessels in painful spasms you haven’t felt this trapped since – since – Oh, God, don’t get so goddamned melodramatic. You take a long breath of warm dusty air. A moment later you’ve forced yourself calm. Sure, you’ve got problems – show you someone brought up by a prostitute who kills for a living and who doesn’t have problems – but you can deal. It’s not like you need a therapist. All that crap about do you hate your mother and did your father beat you. Don’t need it. Don’t want it.
Couldn’t afford it, anyway.
Today the boss had been going to send someone else. You remember the hard stab of jealousy and anger you felt, directed outwards at them all, when he told everyone. It should be you, of course it should; none of them had anything like the right to bring Chapel to heel. But then the boss stopped, mid-sentence, and looked at you, and he was even smiling a tiny little bit. Ouch, he said, with deadly soft humour. Everyone else looked variously confused or nonplussed. If thoughts – well, if Midvalley’s thoughts could kill, he said, sliding his gaze round the room, you all would not be standing here now. And Leonof, Rai Dei, Gray, the rest, they looked at you and they understood, then looked at Legato for guidance. Legato shrugged, a slow, elegant lift of his shoulders (his mouth tightened minutely when he did this, as if he felt some deep-seated pain – which was fair enough, you thought, given that he’d been a broken pile of human being at Knives’ bare bloody feet only so many months ago) as if he couldn’t care less. Rai Dei looked as if he would like to volunteer – that boring frigging honour thing again, you thought, plus the fact he’d never liked Chapel very much anyway – but you stared at him until he looked away, pretending furiously that he hadn’t even been considering it. Then Legato pressed his hands deliberately together, gave you his pretty, insane smile, and told you where you would be going.
So here you are, in your resistant, recalcitrant ‘lover’s’ church. Come to collect this grown man, drag him out of his dark crawlspace by the ankle like a naughty runaway child. You position yourself half-hidden behind a thick column on the back and right, carefully out of sight, and focus on the empty pulpit. God, you’ve missed him. You wonder briefly if he’s been sleeping with anyone else. Probably not. Like you, he’s too self-serving to keep a lover. In the bright light of day, he wouldn’t know how. You’ve been celibate too: compared to him, none of those sluts hanging round the hotels held any attraction whatsoever. You couldn’t have been more faithful to him if you were married.
So it’s been what, two years? Twenty-four months since you’ve seen him shoot, handling what Dominique, before her time ran out, used to call ‘that B.F.G.’, with all the ease as if it were made out of plywood. (Before her time ran out – Legato’s euphemism, that – Dominique used to tease, an amused sneer twisting her pretty mouth, saying in her low, oddly flat voice: When you declare your adoration, mind and watch out for that B.F.G., won’t you, Middy love? And no one ever reacted except Zazie, that midget freak, who smirked. It’s always been an open secret. The only one who doesn’t know is probably Caine, but he’s got an excuse. Tranquilliser addiction, after all, ain’t very pretty.) You love to see your priest shoot almost more than anything. He holds the gun just so, with an insolent tilt that is him through and through; squeezes off rounds from his killing machine with something like tenderness. Spends hours oiling and cleaning it afterwards. His shots are precision-perfect poetry in bloody motion. He is better with a gun than you, but you don’t mind: you’ve got Sylvia, after all. You and Chapel are something to be reckoned with. The kids no one gave a damn about, grown up into men of skill, men who can put the fear of God into all but the bravest or the most ignorant. You’re successful together, too. The handsome priest and the nice-looking guy with the even smile walking out of the bar tend to be the last ones fingered for the pile of corpses inside. The only thing more private and more powerful than committing murder is watching someone else commit murder, standing close enough that the blood spatters on your face, on your white jacket. A most amazing thing, the taking of a human life. You have shared it with him many, many times, and it never gets any less breathtaking.
How could it not be you today? You and he are bound in blood.
At last the service has begun. Shaky organ music starts playing. You don’t recognise the tune. Some of the women adjust their hats and bid their offspring sit up straight. Some of the men clear their throats and fidget. The others stare straight ahead. The pulpit stands high and solitary: a little box with a lectern, on which rests a large open book. It’s all so mannered, so orderly. And then there he is, black and angular as he hops up the few steps, as if he hasn’t a care in the world, to stand in front of the book. He makes a wincing ‘sorry’ face to his expectant audience; they practically squirm with delight at his appearance. He is obviously adored here. Allowed to get away with murder. His dark blue eyes flicker over the congregation as if counting them. He’s not even aware of it, you’re certain, but his feelings are written as clearly across his face as the huge REPENT banner strung out above his head. Where’s the rest of you? The congregation shifts on its hard seats with guilt. These trusting idiot people, trying to trade their time for salvation. How you want to laugh at them all and how you want, with a sharp almost physical pain, how you want him, how you want him here, now, amidst the trappings of his over-elaborate religion, in this superstitious whorehouse. You’d like to have him right there, on the deep scarlet of the worn carpet, under the mournful doe-eyed stare of the picture of the woman in blue cradling the tightly-swaddled baby. He’d sob your name and take the Lord’s in vain and it would amuse you, like it used to. His pain used to be like anyone else’s, and having him beg used to do it for you. That used to be all you wanted. Amusement. A quick fuck. A cheap, guiltless screw. A good-looking guy.
It used to be a hell of a lot easier before you fell so hard.
Not that you can slip into soft focus thinking about that now. Sniper, you remind yourself. You were sent. You have a job to do. But he’s so magnetic, so effortlessly sexy as he pushes his hair out of his eyes and wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand that you (and most of the housewives in the congregation, no doubt) can barely take your eyes off him. How many of those housewives must fantasise about him, you wonder, while their middle-aged husbands grunt and sweat away? Understandable, though. Twenty-six, lean, tanned, and positively radiating the kind of mustn’t-touch sex appeal that will always, always fascinate this type of woman. Maybe I’ll be the one, they think. I’ll be the one he breaks his vows for. They’re not to know that whatever vows he made were broken years ago.
He leans forward, supporting himself on the lectern, hands braced as if pushing something, as if wishing to show with his body just how sincere he is. His black hair shines when the light hits it. Bloody light, from the small stained glass panel above and behind him. He’s had it cut since the last time you met, to just above his collar. It looks more respectable now. Still long enough, though: long enough to tangle your fingers in, to hang on to. A rush of warmth in your stomach, there and then gone with the suddenness of a match flare. Devouring him with your eyes never seemed so attractive before (mostly due to your abhorrence of cliché, granted) but that’s exactly what you’re doing now, head to toe, dark hair to grubby once-white socks. You rake him over greedily, mentally stripping off his clothes and redressing him; you can’t decide if you want him more in his black and white or stripped and tanned and gloriously nude and half-smiling and wanting it and yours and soon, soon, hallelujah.
But it’s not even just that any more. You want to make him coffee; you want to call him ‘sweetheart’ and ‘gorgeous’ and ‘Nick’. You want to kiss him chaste on the mouth. You want to take him by the hand and lead him out into the sunshine. So this is what being in love feels like? So this is love? You really wouldn’t know. People talk about loveless sex and they think of two people doing it in silence, mechanically, like a health demonstration. It’s not like that at all. It’s just like normal sex, except completely selfish. Two bodies straining for separate goals. Taking from each other but not giving back. Instead of the wordless shuddering gasp or the sharp ‘Oh, fuck’ you want him to look into your eyes and say ‘I love you’ and mean it. Whether you just want someone to say it and mean it or whether it would only work with him you don’t know and don’t care to find out. Did your mother love you? Can’t afford a therapist.
Strange, isn’t it, that you’ve fallen pretty damn hard for someone you hardly know anything real about. When was the first time he killed? Who was it? When did he lose his virginity, and to whom? When did he start smoking, and why? You don’t know these things. You only know what’s on the surface, what’s within easy reach. How he takes his coffee (black, sugary); which side of the bed he prefers (the right, or whichever is closest to the window). It always did make you jealous that while all you got was the inconsequential stuff, the boss, talented in that way, got to find out all the deep things.
And you know he has found them out. When your priest stumbled out of his company white and shaky didn’t you recognise the symptoms? The dizzy, not quite awake, what-just-happened look; the way his hands trembled when he attempted to strike a match and light the cigarette that stuck defiantly out of his mouth. All forced insouciance. It had happened to you, too. You weren’t so sure about the others. But it wasn’t that uncommon to find yourself the play toy of the day, so you assumed it had been their lot too at some point. What else, after all, does a bored telepath devoid of morals do but delve into the minds of his lackeys? The boss knows all the deep things about you and then some. But you don’t begrudge him this. You owe him. You know it. He knows it. He never talks about it – that would be entirely too crude, not his style at all – but you’re aware of the depth of your debt every time you happen to glance into his strange gold eyes.
Fifteen, you were – fifteen-and-a-half, actually – and well on the way to following in Ma’s footsteps when he came, like some kind of beautiful gold-eyed avenging angel, reached out his hand and pulled you out of that squalor. Ma, she’d been stabbed by some drunk jealous customer who thought he had some kind of ownership over her while she was in flagrante delicto with another and even though she’d always begged you to get out as soon as you could, you’d somehow became enmeshed in the game too, too deep to hoist yourself out without help. You needed money to get out, after all, didn’t you? And what else could you do to get money? Sex was all you’d ever known; it went on round you, over you, creaking floorboards and squeaking mattresses above your head. It did not touch you, though; not until Ma got herself murdered and you found yourself faced with an ultimatum: work or starve. You found yourself taking over a lot of her clients, like some appalling legacy in lieu of a will. She had nothing to put in a will, anyway. You’d always lived hand-to-mouth. If she was ill and couldn’t work, you didn’t eat.
And now you were the one providing the bread, now there was no one else who would care if you starved. You hated it, of course; hated every minute, every man you had to do, every low demeaning shameful act and every minute on your aching knees and every endless shower afterwards – cold, not hot, because the electricity bill was hardly ever paid on time – where you scrubbed mercilessly for half an hour, like some cruel clichéd parody of a rape victim, and still did not feel like yourself again. Not for you the comfortable acceptance of some of the other whores of their lot. You strove to better yourself, to make yourself more: taught yourself to read music and to play your second-hand saxophone (you’d found it, covered in dust in the cellar, cleaned it up and kept it and no one had said a word) to make a bit of extra money. How you wished you could make enough for music to be your living. Every night, as the thin sheaves of notes stacked up on the dresser and the faces changed, the flushed drunk guilty faces of these men who were straight, yeah, and don’t you forget it, but who fucked around with boys, you thought about what it would be like to be free from this. To choose whom you slept with. What profession could you go into, besides music? You could always become a priest. They were celibate, weren’t they? That would be so perfect.
When Legato Bluesummers came you thought he was another client. You’d done three already that night and you ached, a whole-body ache, deep, under your skin. You wanted a bath. You wanted to crawl under something and hide. You hadn’t felt this low in months, low and cheap and miserable and exhausted. Oh, it wasn’t enough to just lie there and let it happen; you had to do your bit, too, or else they’d complain and you’d have to do it again, better.
So it was understandable that you looked up wearily as he came into the dim room that was rank with the sweetish smells of sweat and sex and stale air. He looked straight at you: into your eyes instead of at your legs or your backside. His look, the reptilian stillness of it, made you feel cold all the way through. It felt for a second as if everything had been sucked out of you. And yet at the same time you thought you might not mind doing this one; this one you might actually enjoy. He was young, you thought, only a bit older than you, twenty maybe, and he was beautiful. It certainly made a change. Honest-to-God beauty was rare in here. And because he was so good-looking he had to be kind, too; yeah, he’d probably be really sweet. Nobody that pretty could be anything but sweet. And he smiled as if he’d heard, a weird, thin smile. He held out his hand. You remember looking at it, bewildered. Did he want to shake on what was about to happen, or what?
That smile again, chilly and almost condescending.
Would you like to take a walk? he said.
You couldn’t comprehend his meaning. Was this slang for some practice you hadn’t heard of yet? Or, if he did mean take a walk as in take a walk, where would you walk to? There was nowhere to go.
He repeated his question, exactly the same wording, only this time with less patience: Would you like to take a walk?
Out? you hazarded.
Yes. Out.
You couldn’t leave: you told him this. It was your job. This was the only thing you could do. You couldn’t afford to get kicked out. He had probably never had to work a day in his life, you thought. He probably had rich parents or something.
This time his weird wonderful eyes lit up and his inexplicable smile blossomed into a laugh. He stopped laughing and you were a bit glad of that, his laugh was sort of creepy – then he took your face in his hands as if he were about to kiss it and stared straight into your soul. And as he stared with his flat, still gaze that reached in and scoured you inside out you thought, really, truly, headily thought, for the first time in your fifteen-and-a-half years, that you might be in love.
Releasing you – you, delirious, almost reeling – he said: You’ll do. Bring your instrument, Midvalley. (How did he know your name?) There may be a … use for it, later.
And that, for the time being, was that.
Your priest has both hands out, palms up. He’s asking his flock to give what they can for the wards of the church. His blue eyes burn in his face, terrible, as he tells them about the kinds of hardships these poor kids have suffered. Abuse. Hunger. Crime. Prostitution. Last resorts. He speaks of these things with such passion. Such conviction. And yet with enough careful professional detachment that no one would ever suspect he was speaking from experience.
The collection plate goes round. The self-conscious chink of cent pieces.
The first thing you did when the boss took you out into the dizzying clearness of that night was to kill, with the gun he’d so kindly lent you, as many of your regulars as you and he could hunt down in your godforsaken shanty town. It was they who whored themselves to you, then, it was them on their knees, begging for their lives. You could remember their taste. And you with the gun to their forehead and the boss’ voice whispering remember, though his lips weren’t moving. One after the other after the other, down they went like skittles, and each time the boss’ voice got quieter and your rage stronger and your hand on the pistol steadier and pulling the trigger easier. You killed seven men that hot, still night, and the sheriff was either too scared or too befuddled with heat to do anything about it.
Life lessons, Legato said, as you walked out of town a free man, the gun he’d given you still warm at your hip. Make them so afraid that they’d rather kill themselves than face the death you’d provide for them. You were so struck by his poise and his icy beauty and the blood thirst you’d seen in his eyes when he’d watched you kill and so grateful for what he’d done for you that you could not make a coherent reply. His words pealed in your brain like some great religious truth. Would you kill again for him if he asked you? More garbage like the men you just took care of? Of course you would, of course you would. What did it matter what he asked of you now? What he had done for you was incalculable. For him you would kill any and everyone. Murdering while you smiled.
Abruptly you’re aware of the absence of your priest’s voice. In its place a thick quiet, punctured semi-regularly by a phlegmy cough. The congregation has its head bowed in the awkward hush of communal prayer. Dust sparkles float upward through an aura of pale light, borne up towards the dark deep arch of the ceiling. And through that dotting of motes, wafting like indecisive pilgrims to their invisible mecca, your eyes and those of your priest finally meet.
There is a minute – it feels like a full minute but is perhaps ten or twelve seconds – where the two of you just stare at each other, unthinking, unblinking. He has the stunned, blank look of a man who has just come hard up against a wall he did not know was there. His face is completely empty. It’s the eerie emptiness of an abandoned dining hall with the plates and cutlery all laid out but no people to use them. You can’t begin to imagine what he’s thinking. Slowly you raise one hand, not sure whether you’re waving or beckoning. The gesture seems to wake him and the planet crunches into rotation again, jerking the people in the pews back to life as they lift their heads and murmur amen. His eyebrows draw together and his eyes – those blue-black eyes, the exact colour of a deep, fresh bruise on the edge of turning yellow – darken, not with fear, no, not that, not he, but with loathing and impotent rage and territoriality. This is his turf, and here you are, contaminating it with your presence. How did you find him, he wonders, furious, frantic, cold with dread on behalf of his precious orphans, how did you find this sanctuary, where none like you is allowed to tread?
The congregation stirs as the silence lengthens; they wait, sheeplike, for him to lead them through the rest of the service, fingers expectant on prayer books. His fingers grasp the edges of the lectern. Even from here you tell yourself you can see the thin black rims of unshiftable dirt under his fingernails. Determinedly he drops his dark head, staring blindly at the open Bible lying in front of him. He can’t find his place. Turning the page, he actually bites his lip, which provokes an odd little flutter of want in your stomach. Riffling through the book’s rice-paper-thin pages, he manages to knock it off the lectern. Heavily bound and ancient, it slams on to the floor with an almighty bang, enhanced to gunshotlike proportions by the echo-y high ceiling. Everyone jumps. The candles on either side of the lectern flicker.
—The Lord’s Prayer, he says desperately, struggling to collect his composure as he fumbles to pick up the book. Our Father…
With a murmur of confusion at things not in sequence, the congregation straggles to its feet and begins. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. His lips are moving but you can’t hear his voice. Oh, God, that rough, accented voice, the one which makes you want to do unholy things to its owner every time you hear it. And you haven’t heard it in a long, long time.
He glances up at you, making sure that the wolf is staying outside the sheep-pen, and his look – sharp, hating – feels like a slap. But it does not leave a sting. You’re too used to that look by now – and anyway, you’re more taken with the beauty of his rageful eyes, more black than blue in this half-light, like burning holes in his face. You could go on for hours, like the lovers in songs, about his eyes, their shifting colours. Under his toffee tan he’s turned quite pale. It’s flattering that you can cause such a reaction. As he distractedly mouths the end of the prayer (forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us) his eyes flicker from you to his congregation and back again. He looks trapped. (and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil) Poor lamb. You turn your attention to the mass of drably clothed people filling the benches. (for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory) None of them is here for pleasure, you’re sure. How long does a church service last? An hour? (forever and ever, amen) They seek a sixty-minute absolution. And they don’t even know that they, this shifty guilty flock, are led by the blackest sheep of all. Your own black sheep. Your bloody-handed blue-eyed priest.
Afterwards, when the last of the people have left, gone blithely past you with the incurious glances of the innately trusting, you go to the front. He’s not at the pulpit, but he hasn’t run, either. Not him. He’s sitting in the front pew, head in his hands, the clichéd picture of despair. You sit beside him. Between you falls the kind of silence, a not-uncomfortable silence which doesn’t require filling, that usually only falls between best friends or people in love. He rubs his eyes with finger and thumb in a tired way. Tiny creases at the corners. He looks noticeably older since the last time you got up close to him. But then, probably so do you.
—It’s time to –
—Go. I know. He lifts his head, and his beautiful dark eyes glint with annoyance. Just let me –
—You’ve had long enough.
—You’re enjoying this, Midvalley.
You reach out to smooth his hair.
—I missed you.
—Is that right.
Firmly he moves his head away, and you put your hand back in your lap.
—How are you, Nicholas?
—Listen, don’t fuck around with me. I’m not in the mood.
—I care about you. You know that.
—You care about me, he repeats. His voice is flat, disbelieving.
—Yeah, for my sins, you say, keeping your tone light, and your heart gives a dying flop in your chest because he’ll never believe that you really, truly do, even if you got down on your knees and declared it properly.
He starts chewing distractedly on his thumbnail, staring at nothing in particular. You recognise the tic. He must be dying for a cigarette. Now he looks up to the crucifix at the apex where walls curve in to meet ceiling. From his profile someone would never guess he was stop-and-stare handsome. Most people would say, Change the nose and he’d be perfect. You wouldn’t change a thing. There. That’s love. That’s got to be love. And if he can’t appreciate that then –
—Midvalley.
—What?
He gets up and stands facing you, hands rammed in his pockets, shoulders sloping as casually if he’s waiting in a bus queue. You’ve gone cold all over, a thrill of anticipation. Is this it? Is he going to – ? They do say absence makes the heart – ugh, God, what are you saying – but even so –
— I’m not going to do it. I’m not coming back with you. I’m through with this double-agent shit. I’m not going to lie to them any more.
He says it so matter-of-factly, practically emotionlessly, that you know he’s rehearsed it carefully in his head. He must have been waiting for today. Must have known it would come. Your priest isn’t stupid enough to be caught out that way. But them? Who’s them? It can’t be those flapping, idiot girls who insist on tailing round after Master’s grinning idiot twin. Surely not.
—So from that rambling, you say slowly (you can convince him later, just don’t react), I’m to take it you’re not going to kill him.
—Vash? (Like it might be the milkman or someone instead.) No. I’m not. I owe him a lot. I owe him – more than that. Assuming he’s not already dead –
—He’s not.
He looks sharply at you now. Badly-concealed hope – serious-eyed, biting the corner of his lip and frowning – makes him painfully handsome.
—You know that for sure? he says carefully.
—Knives knows. (Why are you telling him this, why are you banging nails into your own coffin?) But no one knows where he – where Vash is.
—Well, tomorrow I was planning on going to Augusta. And I’m going to find him. He might kill me. I’m more than ready for that possibility. He’d be well within his rights. Whatever he dishes out, I deserve it.
His tone is guarded, protective, and – oh, God, no, you can’t be hearing this – tender.
—And if he doesn’t kill me, then I’ll protect him from you bastards till I do die, he says, and crosses his arms across his chest.
Silence follows this impressive, if overstated, proclamation. Why, after all, would this Vash – if he’s as strong as his brother – Legato’s puppetish body crumpled like a heap of sticks, one staring golden eye – need protection from a priest, even if that priest were, admittedly, a bit more and less than human himself? And why would that priest, who until now has only ever shown concern for himself and those accursed orphan brats, offer said protection?
Why, indeed, Midvalley.
He’s staring you down. Mad-dogging, they call it, the ultimate disrespect from one gang member to another. You’ve always been intuitive, but this is like telepathy, really it is, you can practically read it in his eyes; it’s as if someone is yelling his secret in your ear at this very moment even though you’re trying not to listen. At this minute you want to believe in his fidelity more than you ever wanted sex from him.
And so the question which must be asked forces itself from you in a voice that, if you closed your eyes and listened, you would have said belonged to a complete stranger, and into the warm quiet you say:
—You’re not – not his lover, Nicholas.
Tell me you’re not. Surely not. Not him. Gunsmoke’s first humanoid Act of God is blonde and very good-looking, sure, with fine cheekbones and large blue-green eyes, but sweet and stupid, if the smile on the wanted poster is anything to go by, and sexless too, if he’s anything like his twin. What could possibly be there, in that naïve charm, for someone like your priest, dark and shrewd and passionate, with his streak of malice and his kink for things no clergyman should even think about, for whom sex precedes a nice dinner rather than follows it?
Millions Knives’ twin.
No. No one’s that stupid. No one’s that reckless.
No one’s that suicidal.
Recovering from his surprise, his mouth quirks into a thin smile, though his eyes are cold.
—My, news travels, don’t it, he says quietly. That or you’re a damned good guess. You always were.
—You’re joking. (God, you can barely speak, gasping, almost, a fish flopping around and choking on air, and all the time his eyes, cool and passionless as marbles under the dark spikes of fringe.) Wolfwood – Nicholas – tell me you’re –
—Jesus, don’t give me the betrayed spiel, he says acidly. What did you expect me to say? ‘No, Midvalley, because I was saving myself for you?’ That it? Well, like hell. I owe you precisely zilch.
It is like hell. Exactly like hell.
—I’m through, he says, and spreads his hands. We’re through. Now get the fuck out of my church. Run back to your boss. And tell him when he comes, I’ll be ready.
—Knives will kill you, you tell him. Your voice doesn’t even shake. Your throat feels completely numb. He’ll kill you.
—Leave now, Midvalley.
—He’ll kill you.
This time he doesn’t even acknowledge that you’ve spoken. Just nods towards the doors. And when you reach them, just before you reach out and push them open, you stop. Like so many other jilted lovers, you think, It can’t end like this. You’ve known him nine years, been his lover for four, been in love with him for one. Maybe if you can look into his eyes, really look, remind him of the time when you and he screwed slow and sweet right there in the sand two or three iles outside October while you waited for Legato, or the time when he got shot in the thigh by a hick with a shotgun and nearly bled to death and you were the one who saved his goddamn life, you were the only one who knew how to make a tourniquet. Then he might show a flicker of feeling. He might even call you back, say he’s sorry, say he was just kidding, of course he’s coming back, of course he’ll do the job.
You turn, turn to cast this one last meaningful look at the man you’re in stupid shameful pointless love with, putting everything you have and every ounce of love you ever felt for him into your eyes until they must be as powerful as the boss’s gold ones, until he must see –
He’s not even watching you go. He’s back up in the pulpit, tidying up, closing his heavy Bible. Then – sensing somehow that you’re still not gone yet – then, slowly, he looks up. He finds you easily, skulking here at the back. He holds your gaze, and there’s nothing like pity in his eyes.
Then he leans forward and blows out the two candles, and the pulpit is darkness.
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