The truth is, I wanted the world to be enchanted, hung with mysteries and flights of the imagination. Why? Because with that belief, we become subsumed by creation and a participant in it, a living particle inside infinity. We abide in the presence of Charlemagne’s knights jingling up the road to Roncesvalles; we flee mediocrity and predictability, and we delight in the rising and setting of the sun and no longer fear death because indeed the earth abideth forever. I wanted Gideon to be real; I wanted to hear the clash of shields and Arthur pulling his sword from the rock and see Guinevere waiting on the parapet of the castle in the dawn, shrouded with a golden nimbus.
Why not? It beats dining out at Chuck E. Cheese.
We soaked the compartment with gasoline, and Clete lit a piece of paper and set the deck ablaze with his Zippo. In minutes flames were curling outside the hatch, flattening on the passageway ceiling. We worked our way forward again and started a fire among Shondell’s collection of torture instruments. The padding on the bulkheads burst alight and, in the heat, seemed to blacken and split instantly into lesions. The smoke was thick and black and noxious, like the odor that comes from the stack on a rendering plant.
Clete gagged. “What is that?”
“Blood,” I said.
“Shondell is going down for the count, right? We’re agreed on that?”
“We don’t know the politician he’s working for, the rich-kid gutter rat.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Clete said. “Shondell is joining the Hallelujah Chorus? We’re copacetic on that?”
“What do I know?”
“Don’t get in my way, Streak.”
Twice we encountered Shondell’s employees or acolytes, all of them carrying either flashlights or fire extinguishers. Only one had a firearm. Clete threw him overboard before he could use it, cracked another man’s skull against the bulkhead, and caused the others to melt back into the darkness. I began to feel there were different levels of people who worked for Mark Shondell. Louisiana’s economy is based on the oil industry. If you’re in, you’re fine. If you’re out, you might have to close one eye. Babylon might be a real fling with Beat-My-Daddy Slack, but you don’t have a lot of selections when you’re in the mop-and-pail brigade. It’s hard to be proud of your spendolies when you’re working in a porn shop or in a drive-through daiquiri window.
I thought I saw women in the shadows, perhaps the prostitutes I believed were on board the tugboat anchored by Shondell’s stilt house. Shondell was the light inside the lantern. The candle moths swirling around him would always be there, and if they were singed and killed by his flame, others would replace them. Bell was one of them, although more intelligent and experienced in the ways of the underworld. There must have been others on board like him, but we didn’t know where they were. Rats abandon sinking ships. I hoped that was the case.
Clete opened the valve on a propane tank in a compartment behind the galley, flung an emergency flare inside, and locked down the hatch. The aftermath of the explosion sounded like a junkyard falling off a truck.
Up ahead I could see flashlights inside the bridge, the beams crisscrossing and bouncing off the panoramic windows and consoles and panel monitors and chart tables and myriad dials that had been rendered inoperable by a force outside the yacht. The sky was now sealed with purplish-black clouds, except in the south, where a vaporous green ribbon of light stretched across the horizon and a solitary boat was pitching toward the yacht, its white sails swollen with wind.
Then I saw Johnny coming toward us, below the bridge, his clothes sculpted against his body, his hands held up as though he were trying to stop traffic on a street. “Don’t go up there, Mr. Dave,” he said. “Y’all don’t know what you’re doing.”
“How many people are up there?” Clete said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Y’all and Gideon are messing up the deal.”
“Messing up what deal?” Clete said.
“Isolde is on her way. Everything is set up. Gideon shut down the power. Fire is coming out of the portholes on the stern. Uncle Mark is backing out of the deal.”
“How many guns are up there, Johnny?” I said.
“That’s all you got on your mind?” he said.
“Where’s Bell?” I said.
“I don’t know. Belowdecks, maybe.”
“Does he still have the Kalashnikov?”
“The what?” he said.
“The AK-47,” I said.
“You’re going to get Isolde killed.”
“We are?” Clete said, touching his chest. “I feel like flinging you over the rail, Johnny.”
“Then do it,” Johnny said. “If I lose Isolde, I lose everything.”
“Where’s Penelope?” I said.
“On the bridge,” he said. “With Adonis.”
I rested my hand on his shoulder. “Take care of Father Julian and Leslie and Elizabeth and Detective LeBlanc. We’ll do everything we can to protect Isolde.”
“I already went down there,” he said. “Leslie and her daughter are gone. So is that LeBlanc guy. Father Julian is real sick.”
“Leslie is gone?” I said.
“Yeah, what did I just say?”
“You’re really starting to piss me off, Johnny,” Clete said. “How would you like me to dribble your head on the deck?”
“I said she’s gone. Maybe with Gideon. Now Gideon is screwing up everything, and y’all are doing everything you can to help him.”
“Get lost,” Clete said, and shoved him in the back.
“Don’t do that,” Johnny said.
Clete shoved him again, this time along the rail. “I’ll count to three, then you’re going over the rail.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Clete.”
“ ‘Fuck you, Mr. Clete’? I just love that,” Clete said. “I’m about to knock you down.”
“Johnny, there are lifeboats on both sides of the ship,” I said. “Get one ready and put Father Julian in it. We’re not going to let your uncle destroy us.”
“What are you going to do about Gideon?” he said.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I said.
“Sell that when Uncle Mark’s yacht blows up and Isolde is dead,” he said.
In Johnny’s way, he was right. In my vanity, I had thought I could find the origins of human cruelty. The upshot was the discovery of a time dimension that perhaps existed simultaneously with our own. I knew no more about the nature of man than when I’d visited Marcel LaForchette in Huntsville Pen, a man who turned out to be my half brother and who killed himself in my living room. In my search for the origins of human cruelty, I had come to the same dead end as the psychiatrists who look into the heart of darkness and are so frightened they thank God for the clinical term “pathological,” because it allows them to cleanse the images planted in their minds by the patients they tried to cure.
What’s the lesson? That’s another easy one: Don’t be taken in by bullshit from people who have no idea what evil is about.
Johnny left us, perhaps to launch a lifeboat, perhaps to help Father Julian, perhaps to betray us. Clete and I had few choices. We had the .25 semi-auto and the duffel bag and the Molotov cocktails and the emergency flares. We could try to take the bridge or launch a lifeboat with Johnny and Julian. If we chose the latter without putting Shondell out of business, we would probably be machine-gunned in the water. Clete seemed to read my mind. “Worried about Penelope?”
“What do you think?”