Passion Play

  White said, “Are you a murderer when you turn in a criminal to be hanged?”

  “I turn him in! I wait to be sure. The courts make the final judgement: I don’t play God, Deacon.”

  “The President called for ‘A Law in keeping with the Law of God.’ There are no extenuating circumstances when the Law of God has been broken, Ms. Fletcher, and Christ is the only court of appeal. Redemption comes only from Him.” White shrugs. “If you feel you must arrest me, then go ahead—but I have done no wrong in the eyes of the Lord.”

  The melting wax is thick and uneven; swollen and invisible from the front, its tangled hump clings to the back of the candle like a malignant growth.

  Disgusted, I pull away from him, trying to calm down, trying to imagine a white circle around myself, severing the lines between us. Rutger White is going to hang, on my evidence. I can almost pity him; he was a man once, until something broke him—a love affair? a secret vice? a childhood he could not overcome?—and he surrendered himself to the Infinite: let his God wipe out his human form and stamp him in the pattern of an implacable Justice.

  I am calmer now. Pity is a great resource, for shapers: pity is a god’s emotion, that comes down from above, and from a distance. It is infinitely safer to pity a man than it is to understand him. “‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone,’ Mr. White. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

  The deacon rises; fire leaps through him. Melting wax—flying like Icarus to the sun. Now will come the long, long fall. “Very well,” he says, as if sorry I should waste my time. He crosses to the hallway and reaches for his coat; oval sweatstains bloom beneath his armpits. He is smiling—smiling!

  Damn it, something is wrong, the pattern is broken, unfinished. Something in the apartment. Kitchen? Cot? Sofa? Bathroom…Where is the trap? Can his confidence come from some lunatic belief in divine protection?

  Bathroom?

  Feeling White’s heat as I wait, I remember one of my father’s grim historical anecdotes. After capturing a town a medieval general was asked what to do with the citizens. His answer—White’s answer—“Kill them all; God will find his own.”

  I try to look casual as I follow White into the hallway, but inside—a coil of triangles, hooked together on a hair-trigger, leaning forward into sudden action.

  White straightens and suddenly I feel the pattern coalesce within me. “I’m ready,” he hisses, and the candle-sun blazes.

  Knife! A ringing switchblade snap and I leap back as White stabs the air where my stomach should have been. Fear muddies our exhilaration as I whip the taser from my jacket pocket. He lunges for me. And I…

  hesitate, tasting the hard steel taste of our desperation, savouring the sting of it. He grunts; my finger stays frozen on the trigger for one eternal moment. The fire is burning through him, a searing pale nothing in the depths of his eyes and he is lunging forward onto the sharp point of his martyrdom and at last my fingers tighten on the taser’s trigger.

  His knife is five inches from my face when the charge hits him. The current convulses his muscles, snaps his body back, flings his arms into the taser cross. He arches, pinned at the palms, falling on his back in the hallway. The scorch marks streak across his jacket and neck. The knife clatters in shards of sound to the floor.

  All the lines in White’s apartment have gone limp. A thin line of smoke hangs in the air for an instant, and then it too is gone.

  I reset the taser, dragged White into the main room and heaved him onto his cot, still wired on adrenalin and the exultation of the make.

  I slipped a disposable syringe from my inside jacket pocket and administered a judicious dose of Sleepy-Time. The synthetic opioid would keep him unconscious after the taser-shock wore off. White was sweating and fleshy; it took three tries to get the vein, pricking the needle in and out of his arm. Blood beaded slowly on his pale skin, staining the cotton pad I taped inside his elbow.

  My fingertips still ached with the crackle of charge as I laid White under his blind saviour. That constricted Christ hung suspended above it all, untouched and untouching, eyes as blind and remorseless as a Greek sculpture. Unnatural. It was a scene that would make anyone nervous, and I make my living by being sensitive to such patterns. I felt the chill settling in, the greyness that always comes over me when the hunting ebbs.

  With the make taken care of I had to arrange for transfer. White had no phone; I would have to use one of the neighbours’.

  I couldn’t help looking at him one more time before I left. A streak of superstition runs deep in me; I hesitated, afraid he would rise like Lazarus and escape if I left the room. Stupid of course. Between the taser charge and the Sleepy-Time it would take a miracle to rouse the deacon in the next three hours. I walked out the door and jerked it shut behind me; his Christ wasn’t one for miracles.

  Although ebbing, the hunt was still in me like a low dose of the Chill I used to score in my rasher days. Outside, a screaming couple in the tenement across the courtyard smashed the frail silence. The moon was bright above the thickening dusk. Overhead I picked out the belt of Orion, the Hunter, and wished him well.

  “Sorry, we don’t want any. Go away and Godspeed,” the voice mumbled from behind #8.

  “Amen and God bless, neighbour. My name’s Diane Fletcher, and I need a favour from you.” I couldn’t stop myself from smiling at the weedy young man who answered the door. I flashed my identification; it caught him in the eyes like a searchlight and he winced unhappily.

  “O God. I mean—uh. Oh. Please, come in. Right here—oops—don’t step on that. Sorry about the mess—oh—you have to duck—Sorry! Uh…? So—you wanted…?” The heavy Persian smell of templar was everywhere. Against the Law, of course, but I had bagged my limit. One advantage of not being a cop is that you don’t have to arrest people for stupid things, like smoking a twist of templar or having sex outside of marriage.

  “J-Jim Haliday,” he mumbled. He had long, uncoordinated limbs and a nervous, good-natured face. Attractive, in a disjointed sort of way. He was about my age—thirty, thirty-one; his apartment looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since he became eligible to vote. I could spot at least three cups of cold coffee where he had left them half-drunk, and four different books were lying around the living room, open and face down. I had to dig the phone out from under In God We Trust: Mass Media and the Redemption Presidency. I hunkered down on the wrinkled rug to call in my make.

  On hold at Central, hostage to the easy-listening New Classical garbage they insist on playing, I continued my casual inspection—an occupational vice all hunters share. Not what you’d call a pious household: TV, Vid-kit, CD-player—he cared enough about his music to have bought a Panasonic, despite the Jap Tax. Interesting.

  At last I got through and ordered a police car. As I hung up Jim glanced over from the kitchen. Diced onions curled and hissed in a smoking skillet. “Wow—smoky. I’d better get some air, eh?” he said, opening the front door wide.

  “Uh, look, Jim: whether it’s open or closed your place is still going to smell like a Turkish harem. I’m not going to haul in your ass for smoking a few twists of templar, OK?”

  This is how hunters make friends: the careful application of guilt, relief, and gratitude. There are better ways, but I had forgotten most of them, and Jim’s anxiety grated on my shaper’s soul, still bruised and tender from making Rutger White.

  Haliday looked at me like someone who has just been told that he won’t need root canal surgery after all. He laughed, embarrassed. “Hey, thanks. It wasn’t me, you know: I lent the place to this Turkish sultan friend of mine for the weekend, see…”

  I grinned back and sat for a minute, breathing in the smoky, cozy essence of Haliday’s apartment as if it were stainless mountain air. Pleasure wound through me, loosening aching muscles. God I’m starving, I thought, surprised. I glanced around for an extra cushion, settled myself in a more comfortable sprawl on the floor. One of the fringe benefits of being a
hunter; regular police are required to be more formal, more professional. Not so with hunters; the Tracker films have established our image so firmly in the public’s mind that they’re disappointed if we don’t smell of scotch and finish every other sentence with a disdainful spit, even indoors.

  Haliday’s eyebrows rose. “So…? What’s a nice cop like you doing in a place like this? Is there a problem with the Deacon?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “In the Biblical sense? Nah: I like girls, and I think the Deacon prefers to spill his seed on the ground.” I must have looked startled, because Jim grinned. His image was quick and sloppy…yellow mostly; bits of blue and green. Wind-shaken; pond in June?

  I stopped short. It was less than an hour after a make, and I was reading Jim by accident. Unless I’m hunting I don’t do that without permission. Everybody deserves privacy—unless you kill some lonely, defenseless young woman. Then you’ve stepped outside society and its protections; you’ve waived your right to privacy from people like me.

  But Jim was just a guy, and I had no damn business reading him. I smiled and tried to look non-threatening. “Why don’t you and Mr. White get along?”

  Jim considered. “Well, it might be the blasts of Korpus Kristi after eleven, or then again it could be the generous portions of Pink Sin Ladies I try to give him bright and early every Sunday morning.” Jim was relaxing. He had slim, long-fingered hands that filled in the gaps between his words. “So, what’s up? You called for a car.”

  “Mr. White is wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Angela Johnson.”

  Jim’s sleepy eyes widened. “The Deacon? Wow.” He opened his small refrigerator. “Want something to eat while you wait?” He rummaged through the left-overs inside. “I’m getting myself an omelette; you’re welcome to some of that. We got some macaroni…potato salad…some chili. A couple of bee—um, a calcium + Coke,” he stammered.

  I hesitated, surprised by friendliness in a district I hadn’t found full of Samaritans. But the hunting edge was melting away, and when it was gone I would be dull and grey again. “Thanks. Maybe some omelette,” I said. I squirmed inside as I heard myself lamely trying to make a friend, scared silly that he might think I was imposing, or shaking him down for a meal because of the damn templar. Or coming on to him. Dying with embarrassment, I felt the skin on my face prickle and flush; O God I must look like one of those lady cops in soft-core films, about to unzip my pants and reveal fishnet stockings underneath. And me with only white athletic socks: what a disappointment!

  Diane—stop.

  I hoped the fixed smile on my face would cover me while I got a hold of myself. Damn it, I wanted to talk, just to talk with another decent human being, now, while I was still open enough to feel it. I wanted to stay in Jim’s warm, grubby apartment, not go back to the Deacon’s barren cell.

  Places, like people, have shapes I find hard to resist. Waiting for the cops alone with White in #7 would have left me quoting the Old Testament and arming myself to track down the iniquitous. I didn’t want that. I wanted just to talk, to make contact, outside the magic circle that had imprisoned Rutger White for so long. Not that I was dying of loneliness; I wanted company, that’s all.

  “So—I never saw a cop with a pony tail before,” Jim said.

  “Not a cop,” I said, correcting him. “I keep the pony tail to annoy cops.”

  Jim made a funny face. “Can’t say I blame them. After all, it was a girl that committed the original crime; what kind of a track record is that?” He took a couple of eggs from the refrigerator and cracked them against the edge of a mixing bowl. “So what’s with Deacon White?” He glanced quizzically at me, trying without success to keep the last dribbles of egg off his fingers.

  “He’s alive. I left him in his room.”

  Jim grinned at me. “Good Lord! By tomorrow everyone will know the Deacon had a Woman in his rooms. It will be a sensation! I warn you, there’s many a twisted mind that will be wondering what kind of perversions you could possibly have used to tempt the Patriarch!”

  “110 volts and 20 ml of Sleepy-Time,” I said drily. “Pretty decadent, hunh? He pulled a switchblade.”

  Jim whistled. “Amazing!”

  He glanced at me and yes, he was interested—I felt it in the sudden touch of his smile, his eyes. He had the kind of eyebrows I like, classic bows like those on my father’s bust of Apollo.

  Jim mixed eggs, mustard, pepper and oregano, then poured the result into the skillet with the onions. “So I guess you must have seen it coming. The knife, that is.”

  Hm. Well, in a manner of speaking, but for shaper reasons—and talking about them was neither easy nor wise. “I was waiting for him to make a move, yeah.”

  “How did you know he was going to go for it?”

  “The bathroom light.”

  “Oh,” Jim said, frowning. “I get it. Sure.”

  “White was too confident,” I explained. “I knew he thought he was going to get off. But he was the kind of guy who would go crazy if his faucet leaked, right?” Jim nodded. “Yet when we started to leave, he didn’t bother to turn off the bathroom light—so I knew he never meant to get out the door. I knew he was a good Red—wouldn’t have a taser or a gun: too techie. So it had to be a knife.”

  Uh, right.

  Well, maybe I had known at the time. If I thought he had a gun, wouldn’t I have dropped him with the taser before he could turn? So often that’s the way with shaper reasons: you follow the line, the pattern, and react to it long before you could ever consciously articulate your reasons.

  “You’re a pretty well-spent tax dollar,” Jim said, shaking his head. “Where do you learn to think like that?”

  God, this was getting too close to the truth. Jim seemed like a nice guy; but you might never tell your best friend you were a shaper. It twists people up. They get scared; they want to hurt you, study you, or just get away from you.

  I played with the fraying edge of an orange throw-rug, avoiding Jim’s eyes—you never shake the fear that they can read you as easily as you read them. I shrugged. “Part of the job,” I lied.

  Making contact.

  Half-way through dinner the police hauler arrived like a hearse, killing my pleasure in Jim’s company. I was happy where I was; I didn’t want to be dragged back into the case. Now, halfway through an omelette and a can of Coke in Haliday’s apartment, the hard thrill of the hunt didn’t compare with the simple pleasure of eating dinner with another human being. I had a sudden wild urge to play dead, ignore the cop; drink my Coke and talk to Jim about the President’s ban on gene splicing research, or the Pink Sin Ladies’ latest album.

  Instead I left some omelette on my plate as an excuse to come back.

  Outside #8, Jericho Court was a great cold square of emptiness. The armoured cop wagon, marked in cop colours, hushed the neighbourhood chatter. The courtyard lamps had long since been smashed and would never be repaired; tired light showed intermittently in tenement windows. I was glad of the dark. Glad those hidden eyes wouldn’t get too good a look at me.

  I don’t like dealing with the regular force. The cop and I kept our hands in our pockets as we greeted one another. He was slim, bland and impassive, his only emotion a vague unease about risking his hauler in this neighbourhood. “Number seven,” I said.

  Rutger White was lying just as I had left him. He was so pale and motionless that for one wrenching instant I knew he was dead. I opened up completely to search for any life in him. It was there, thank God, running below the surface like a stream beneath ice. I saw his chest rise and scowled, embarrassed by my fear.

  We carried White out to the hauler and strapped him in. “Sorry about the scorch. It’s only light plus Sleepy; he tried to knife me, so…”

  “I don’t care if they come in with one scorch line or nine, as long as they’re alive,” the cop said, slamming the steel doors shut.

  I was glad to see him go. I stood in Jericho Court until the sound of
the hauler had dwindled into the night. Longer, while my face grew cold and my limbs stiffened, mechanical and insensitive. Knowing I ought to go in, I was held, filled up with silence.

  When I started walking, I didn’t know where I was going. I do that often; start the line and let the shape build itself. This time it took me to the door of #7. Averting my eyes from the empty cot I stepped into the bathroom. My tanned face startled in the mirror, green eyes narrowing, crinkly pony tail swinging behind, making me wish for the thousandth time that my hair would just hang straight.

  There is a wrongness in the blind symmetry of mirrors. They scare me, sometimes. I slapped the light switch and hurried from the apartment, locking the door behind me.

  Back at #8 the omelette was cold. I tried to sit with my back against one of the bookshelves, but the floor was cluttered and I couldn’t get comfortable. Cautiously Jim came over. He fumbled with an upturned paperback, made a show of tidying up. We were both embarrassed. Damn it, I had no business being here. Jim settled himself next to me and looked over slantwise. “Can I get you a glass of wine?”

  “O no—don’t bother,” I said, and then I realized I had missed the point. He had been trying to throw a rope between us, but I had dropped my end.

  He turned away, more embarrassed yet. “I’ll just take that plate,” he mumbled.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sorry about the omelette. I don’t usually burn them.” He stacked the dishes in the sink and ran some water.

  “So,” I tried at last, “thinking of going to Late Service tonight?”

  “What? Oh. Oh, yeah, uh, probably.” He was rinsing dishes as if he hadn’t done it often. He had problems packing them in the antique washer, a cluttered field of discs and edges.