Father Whelan feels as if his heart is going to come apart. He sees it as a clockwork mechanism, all cogs and springs, and as he slides down the wall of the church, he pictures it bursting into its component pieces in a maelstrom of jagged metal and crooked silver teeth.
“It was you who got into his head,” spits Salvatore. He has a hand on Whelan’s throat and is pushing him back against the wall.
“Sal,” he hisses. “Sal, I can’t breathe.”
“He seen bad things, yeah. Done bad things. But fuck, I never . . . I never . . .”
Sal releases his hold on Whelan’s neck. He collapses back onto a pew. His face is white. The hems of his flared jeans are soaked with snow and there is blood upon his knuckles.
Whelan stays where he fell, barely moving in the shadow of the column beside the vestry.
“I wasn’t supposed to be visiting,” mutters Sal, pushing a hand through his hair. “But I got a delivery. Just some powder from another supplier, but Dad doesn’t like it when I do things my own way, so I figured I’d keep it safe and out the way. He wasn’t expecting me. I walked in and there he was. In his rocking chair, talking like he’d always had a voice. Talking to you about the things he’d done. The girls he’d buried alive. Said he could only talk to the dying. His throat would close if he tried to speak to the living. He said he’d found a way to confess. And that voice, all crackly and low, like it was coming straight out of hell. I know I done things, Father. I’m no saint. But fuck!”
Whelan rubs at his throat. There are dots dancing in his vision.He cannot tell what is candlelight and what is stained glass and what is hallucination brought on by the horrors that fill him like too much wine.
“You seek absolution?” he wheezes. “You seek forgiveness?”
“I don’t know what I fucking seek!” bellows Sal. “I came here for something . . . something I thought you had. Some answers. Some explanation. But look at you, all busted up and sorry for yourself. You’re just a man, ain’t you? Not some bouncer for God, not some wizard with an eraser who can take all the bad shit from your soul. You’re a sniveling mick bastard and you’re going to burn. We’re all going to burn. I put a hurting on him but he still won’t say a word. I need to think. Need somewhere I can take him. I need to think . . .”
Whelan tries to speak but finds his tongue sticking to his mouth. Through the tears he sees Salvatore stand. He reaches into his coat. Whelan recoils, shuddering. He is suddenly terrified of death. He has fallen so far, plunged himself into such darkness. He cannot meet God like this. He suddenly yearns for redemption with a hunger that threatens to overwhelm him.
“Please,” sobs Whelan. “I can make things right. There can be absolution . . .”
Sal spits on the flagstones and pulls out an envelope from his jacket pocket.
“For you, Father,” he says coldly. “They were all for you. I got to think. I don’t know what to do. Fuck. Got to think . . .”
He drops the envelope on the pew and turns his back, stalking toward the door without looking back toward the altar or the fallen priest. His shadow lengthens and then shrinks, and he steps back into the darkness beyond the great double doors without making the sign of the cross.
It takes Whelan several moments to find the strength to open the package. He closes his shaking fingers around the reel for a tape recorder. Written on the center, as if scrawled by a child, he can make out his own name.
When he plays the recording in the solitude of his bedchamber, he wishes he were back against the wall. Wishes Salvatore had put a bullet in him rather than give him this.
As he listens to the mumbled words and the desperate screams, he stops being Father Whelan. He becomes Jimmy from Hell’s Kitchen. And his heart and soul speak to him in the voice of a devil. Jimmy knows he can never be a good man again. But he knows how to save a little piece of himself. He knows that for all of his bullshit, Salvatore has hurt as many people as the “brother” whose actions have so appalled him. Was that why he reacted so angrily? He saw something of himself in the actions of the emotionally scarred Tony? Jimmy begins to think. Starts to work out a way to remove an impure soul from the world. Two, if he plays it right. At no point does he remember to pray.
—
An hour later, he is sitting in a bar on Mulberry, drinking brandy with hands that shake. Paulie Pugliesca is sitting opposite him, his face as cold and stony as that of a corpse. A cigarette has burned itself out at his lips and a column of curling ash hangs in front of his face.
“You’ll go to hell for this, Father,” says Nicky Savoca, seated at the smaller man’s elbow. “The seal of the confessional is sacred.”
Whelan shakes his head, huddling in on himself, teeth chattering against the glass. “It wasn’t in confession, I told you. He hadn’t said the prayers.” He forces himself to look up at the big man and show a little fight. “And I know more about the soul of man than any of you.”
At last, Pugliesca takes the cigarette from his mouth and grinds it out on the ashtray that sits on the red-and-white tablecloth beside an empty bottle of quality Sicilian red.
“You know what I have to do,” he says, teeth locked. “By telling me this, you know what I have to do?”
“God forgives all,” says Whelan, and blesses the man across the table.
“My own son,” says Pugliesca, half to himself. “A fucking rat. A fucking rat!”
He turns away and clicks his fingers. From the darkness, a tall, potbellied man emerges, hands clasped loosely at the wrist in front of him like a choirboy.
“We never speak of this,” he says. “Fucking never. And you absolve me, Father. This shit gets wiped, you hear?”
Father Whelan nods.
“Claudio,” says Pugliesca, thinking aloud. “Wake him up, Giulio. He’s good. Quiet. It doesn’t have to hurt.”
He turns back to Whelan. “I don’t want to be damned for this,” he says, and the black in his eyes devours the white.
“God forgives all,” says Whelan, and drains his drink. It ignites a fire in him. And as he sits in the quiet and the cool of the little Italian restaurant, he smells the burning of another man’s soul, and the resurrection of his own.