Song of Susannah

FOUR

“He’s all right,” Jake said, setting Oy down on the sidewalk. “I flipped, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

“Perfectly understandable,” the Rev. Harrigan assured him. “What an interesting dog! I’ve never seen one that looked quite like that, praise Jesus!” And he bent to Oy.

“He’s a mixed breed,” Jake said tightly, “and he doesn’t like strangers.”

Oy showed how much he disliked and distrusted them by raising his head to Harrigan’s hand and flattening his ears in order to improve the stroking surface. He grinned up at the preacher as if they were old, old pals. Callahan, meanwhile, was looking around. It was New York, and in New York people had a tendency to mind their business and let you mind yours, but still, Jake had drawn a gun. Callahan didn’t know how many folks had seen it, but he did know it would only take one to report it, perhaps to this Officer Benzyck Harrigan had mentioned, and put them in trouble when they could least afford it.

He looked at Oy and thought, Do me a favor and don’t say anything, okay? Jake can maybe pass you off as some new kind of Corgi or Border Collie hybrid, but the minute you start talking, that goes out the window. So do me a favor and don’t.

“Good boy,” said Harrigan, and after Jake’s friend miraculously did not respond by saying “Oy!’ the preacher straightened up. “I have something for you, Father Don. Just a minute.”

“Sir, we really have to-”

“I have something for you, too, son-praise Jesus, say dear Lord! But first… this won’t take but a second…”

Harrigan ran to open the side door of his illegally parked old Dodge van, ducked inside, rummaged.

Callahan bore this for awhile, but the sense of passing seconds quickly became too much. “Sir, I’m sorry, but-”

“Here they are!” Harrigan exclaimed and backed out of the van with the first two fingers of his right hand stuck into the heels of a pair of battered brown loafers. “If you’re less than a size twelve, we can stuff em with newspaper. More, and I guess you’re out of luck.”

“A twelve is exactly what I am,” Callahan said, and ventured a praise-God as well as a thank-you. He was actually most comfortable in size eleven and a half shoes, but these were close enough, and he slipped them on with genuine gratitude. “And now we-”

Harrigan turned to the boy and said, “The woman you’re after got into a cab right where we had our little dust-up, and no more than half an hour ago.” He grinned at Jake’s rapidly changing expression-first astonishment, then delight. “She said the other one is in charge, that you’d know who the other one was, and where the other one is taking her.”

“Yeah, to the Dixie Pig,” Jake said. “Lex and Sixty-first. Pere, we might still have time to catch her, but only if we go right now. She-”

“No,” Harrigan said. “The woman who spoke to me-inside my head she spoke to me and clear as a bell, praise Jesus-said you were to go to the hotel first.”

“Which hotel?” Callahan asked.

Harrigan pointed down Forty-sixth Street to the Plaza-Park Hyatt. “That’s the only one in the neighborhood… and that’s the direction she came from.”

“Thank you,” Callahan said. “Did she say why we were to go there?”

“No,” Harrigan said serenely, “I believe right around then the other one caught her blabbing and shut her up. Then into the taxi and away she went!”

“Speaking of moving on-'Jake began.

Harrigan nodded, but also raised an admonitory finger. “By all means, but remember that the God-bombs are going to fall. Never mind the showers of blessing-that’s for Methodist wimps and Episcopalian scuzzballs! The bombs are gonna fall! And boys?”

They turned back to him.

“I know you fellas are as much God’s human children as I am, for I’ve smelled your sweat, praise Jesus. But what about the lady? The lay-dees, for in truth I b’lieve there were two of em. What about them?”

“The woman you met’s with us,” Callahan said after a brief hesitation. “She’s okay.”

“I wonder about that,” Harrigan said. “The Book says-praise God and praise His Holy Word-to beware of the strange woman, for her lips drip as does the honeycomb but her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell. Remove thy way from her and come not nigh the door of her house.” He had raised one lumpy hand in a benedictory gesture as he offered this. Now he lowered it and shrugged. “That ain’t exact, I don’t have the memory for scripture that I did when I was younger and Bible-shoutin down south with my Daddy, but I think you get the drift.”

“Book of Proverbs,” Callahan said.

Harrigan nodded. “Chapter five, say Gawd.” Then he turned and contemplated the building which rose into the night sky behind him. Jake started away, but Callahan stayed him with a touch… although when Jake raised his eyebrows, Callahan could only shake his head. No, he didn’t know why. All he knew was that they weren’t quite through with Harrigan yet.

“This is a city stuffed with sin and sick with transgression,” the preacher said at last. “Sodom on the halfshell, Gomorrah on a graham cracker, ready for the God-bomb that will surely fall from the skies, say hallelujah, say sweet Jesus and gimme amen. But this right here is a good place. A good place. Can you boys feel it?”

“Yes,” Jake said.

“Can you hear it?”

“Yes,” Jake and Callahan said together.

“Amen! I thought it would all stop when they tore down the little deli that stood here years and years ago. But it didn’t. Those angelic voices-”

“So speaks Gan along the Beam,” Jake said.

Callahan turned to him and saw the boy’s head cocked to one side, his face wearing the calm look of entrancement.

Jake said: “So speaks Gan, and in the voice of the can calah, which some call angels. Gan denies the can toi; with the merry heart of the guiltless he denies the Crimson King and Discordia itself.”

Callahan looked at him with wide eyes-frightened eyes-but Harrigan nodded matter-of-factly, as if he had heard it all before. Perhaps he had. “There was a vacant lot after the deli, and then they built this. Two Hammarskjold Plaza. And I thought, ’Well, that’ll end it and then I’ll move on, for Satan’s grip is strong and his hoof prints leave deep tracks in the ground, and there no flower will bloom and no grain will grow.’ Can you say see-lah?” He raised his arms, his gnarly old man’s hands, trembling with the outriders of Parkinson’s, turned upward to the sky in that open immemorial avatar of praise and surrender. “Yet still it sings,” he said, and dropped them.

“Selah,” Callahan murmured. “You say true, we say thank ya.”

“It is a flower,” Harrigan said, “for once I went in there to see. In the lobby, somebody say hallelujah, I say in the lobby between the doors to the street and the elevators to those upper floors where God knows how much dollarbill fuckery is done, there’s a little garden growing in the sun which falls through the tall windows, a garden behind velvet ropes, and the sign says given by the tet corporation, in honor of THE BEAME FAMILY, AND IN MEMORY OF GILEAD.”

“Does it?” Jake said, and his face lit with a glad smile. “Do you say so, sai Harrigan?”

“Boy, if I’m lyin I’m dyin. Gawd-bomb! And in the middle of all those flowers there grows a single wild rose, so beautiful that I saw it and wept as those by the waters of Babylon, the great river that flows by Zion. And the men coming and going in that place, them with their briefcases stuffed full of Satan’s piecework, many of them wept, too. Wept and went right on about their whores’ business as if they didn’t even know.”

“They know,” Jake said softly. “You know what I think, Mr. Harrigan? I think the rose is a secret their hearts keep, and that if anyone threatened it, most of them would fight to protect it. Maybe to the death.” He looked up at Callahan. “Pere, we have to go.”

“Yes.”

“Not a bad idea,” Harrigan agreed, “for mine eyes can see Officer Benzyck headed back this way, and it might be well if you were gone when he gets here. I’m glad your furry little friend wasn’t hurt, son.”

“Thanks, Mr. Harrigan.”

“Praise God, he’s no more a dog than I am, is he?”

“No, sir,” Jake said, smiling widely.

“Beware that woman, boys. She put a thought in my head. I call that witchcraft. And she was two.”

“Twins-say-twim, aye,” Callahan said, and then (without knowing he meant to do it until it was done) he sketched the sign of the cross in front of the preacher.

“Thank you for your blessing, heathen or not,” Earl Harrigan said, clearly touched. Then he turned toward the approaching NYPD patrolman and called cheerfully, “Officer Benzyck! Good to see you and there’s some jam right there on your collar, praise God!”

And while Officer Benzyck was studying the jam on his uniform collar, Jake and Callahan slipped away.

FIVE

“Whoo-eee” Jake said under his breath as they walked toward the brightly underlit hotel canopy. A white limousine, easily twice the size of any Jake had seen before (and he’d seen his share; once his father had even taken him to the Emmys), was offloading laughing men in tuxedos and women in evening dresses. They came out in a seemingly endless stream.

“Yes indeed,” Callahan said. “It’s like being on a roller coaster, isn’t it?”

Jake said, “We’re not even supposed to be here. This was Roland and Eddie’s job. We were just supposed to go see Calvin Tower.”

“Something apparently thought different.”

“Well, it should have thought twice,” Jake said gloomily. “A kid and a priest, with one gun between them? It’s a joke. What are our chances, if the Dixie Pig is full of vampires and low men unwinding on their day off?”

Callahan did not to respond to this, although the prospect of trying to rescue Susannah from the Dixie Pig terrified him. “What was that Gan stuff you were spouting?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t know-I can barely remember what I said. I think it’s part of the touch, Pere. And do you know where I think I got it?”

“Mia?”