quaked.
“I see no reason why the church can't allow me the luxury of low overhead. And besides,” he continued, “people come more readily to my psychiatric practice for their spiritual needs than their intellectual needs. Wouldn't you agree?” he asked Jessica. “And it's convenient to the area people. Most of my clients live in the shadow of St. Albans. Don't you see the logic of it, Dr. Coran?”
“Yes, in fact, I do.” She felt somewhat unnerved by him, as though he had seen the emotional turmoil she had had brewing within her for so many years, and as if he were speaking about this and not his usual clientele at all.
Still, she genuinely liked the old minister. Not knowing why, she felt he, and his insights into her, were strangely comforting. Similar again to the ancient seer she'd met once in Hawaii who had “foretold” her future so accurately. Luc Sante didn't slow his pacing or his verbosity. “People find comfort in the aroma and aura of an old cathedral like St. Albans. It is a place to heal, and how many places are there left in this world to heal?”
Finally, he calmed when his ancient secretary promised to type a letter addressed to the Cardinal. She said, “I won't bother the Pope with such trifling problems, but those Cardinals, they haven't a great deal to do anyway.”
“And the Bishop. Write my old friend the Bishop, but before you become involved in the letter,” countered Luc Sante, “please, Miss Eeadna, bring in that tea and crumpets for my guest and me, in my inner office, please.”
“Yes, sir, as you like, but I may not get that letter finished by quitting time.”
“That will do. Miss Eeadna… Janet.”
Over tea and crumpets, nestled in Luc Sante's luxurious old office, surrounded by lamps and leather and warm browns of every hue, Jessica felt encircled by books that had enlightened a life. Jessica finally found the opening to ask him directly, “Dr. Luc Sante, what is your personal take on the crucifixion killings?”
“My personal takel Ahh, you Americans and your American English. You mean, what is my personal viewpoint, my feelings and thoughts on the matter?”
“You must have formulated some personal feelings about the killings, the mimicry of Christ's death each victim is put through.”
He pursed his lips, tapped a toe, shuffled a bit in his seat, and finally said, “Engaging case, really. Impassioned killer, well acquainted with the nature of evil.”
“So close to it that he, or they, have become it, you mean?”
“Excellent, yes.”
'Tell me more, please. Go on, Doctor.”
Instead of replying to this, he asked her how her trip to England had been thus far. Intentionally, the old man held her at bay, as if testing just how sincerely she wanted information from so old a warrior on a battlefield that had decimated so many before him. Jessica held the image and wondered what kept him so firmly on that field, how he kept his armor in one piece, how he kept his footing amid the gore and gruel and horror of it all: all he saw as both minister and psychotherapist; all he had chronicled of depression, mania, madness, murder, and mayhem done in the name of Christ and God and church as it filtered through twisted minds. Still, like a gothic warrior with shield and sword in hand, stood the white-bearded, white-headed old soldier. How? She wondered if she could be so strong at his age.
He repeated his first question and added, “So, how do you find England? London in particular?”
She sensed she had to play his game. “Is the weather always so… dreary?”
Luc Sante laughed heartily. “No, not always, but when C. S. Lewis depicted hell, he described it as a gray British Midlands city.” He again laughed and added, “A terrible dreariness indeed.”
Jessica knew of the theory that weather patterns-especially weather that sits atop a region for long periods of time, as when the sun fails to show for three and four weeks at a time-caused depression, irritability, some forms of physical illness, and some forms of violence, generally domestic violence.
“Are you saying that whoever did these killings is perhaps bored with life as it is, bored with the prevailing winds?”
“Perhaps. More importantly, evil takes as many disguises as a Shakespearean villain, so…”
“So, I'm to draw my own conclusions…”
“Despite their pretense, the evil among us are the most insane of all. Evil is the ultimate disease. The stage upon which evil struts, my dear Dr. Coran, may be as brilliantly lit as, say, your Las Vegas with all its pretense and glitter and tasteless neon lights, all designed to hide C. S. Lewis's depiction-the very same terrible dreariness that is our lives.”
“I'm not sure I follow what this has to do with-”
He pushed on. “Imagine a hell in which people mindlessly and forever yank at your one-armed bandits forever and ever and ever and ever on, all below the colored spotlights of a Siegfried and Roy production, while their children, infants to teenagers, mill about the casinos at two and three in the morning, sleeping in the lobbies, waiting for Mommy's and Daddy's addictions to abate.”
“That would indeed be hell.”
Miss Eeadna entered with tea and crumpets laid out on a silver tray. She silently and expertly served them, accepting Jessica's thank-you with a curt nod and smile before leaving, a ghostlike figure, Jessica thought.
After sipping her tea, Jessica asked, “So, you've been to Vegas?”
“I had the questionable pleasure, yes.”
“I came away with sickening feelings myself.”
“As I said, evil comes to all lands, in all lives in one form or fashion or another. To deny evil is to deny breath, life, beauty, its opposites.”
“Are you saying that Satan is crucifying people here in London?”
“In the broadest possible interpretation… yes. And if not he, then Christ.”
“Christ? Really?”
“There is a war going on in cosmic spheres of which we have no control or understanding.”
“Ahhh, I see, and Satan oft masquerades as Christ, does he?”
“You've read my book closely. Was it not Satan disguised as Christ who prodded the Grand Inquisitor to create the infamous Inquisition? Was not Hitler a guise for Satan purporting to be the voice of God?”
“And, of course, he can take the form of a serial killer,” she added. “One who thinks himself doing the work of Christ?”
“Precisely.” He settled back in his chair with his tea and took several long sips, the steam rising to his eyes.
“Evil is grandiose,” she muttered, tasting of the pastry in her hand, watching helplessly as the sugar-dust sprayed her lap.
“It, evil that is, likes to think so; it likes to think big.”
Jessica had long believed that evil and Satanic behavior originated within mankind alongside superstition, fear, ignorance, cruelty, and the like, and not from some supernatural force. Father Luc Sante apparently believed in a living, breathing Satan that infused evil into humanity. Perhaps the two nouons were not mutually exclusive.
Father Luc Sante, his eyes going to one side, his body language telling of fatigue, added, “But most times, it fails, and it embodies or insinuates itself into quite ordinary people in quite ordinary circumstances as well. So ordinary, in fact, that it goes by unnodced and unheralded. Not all evildoers can be a Hitler, certainly no assassin has reached his level.”
“So evil comes on many planes?”
“Yes. You have read the book, haven't you?”
She smiled. “Approximately two-thirds through.”
“I'm impressed. Most people don't get that far! But getdng back to your question, you want to ask this: Are serial killers manifestations of him, of Satan? Are spree killers him? Are mass murderers, bombers like your McVeigh and your Unabomber, are they manifestations of the same it-the Evil One?”
“Yes, good question.”
“Aren't serial killers just that in the end, little men with little identities, whom no one thought to fear, whom no one recognized as pure and primal evil? Aren't they Satan gone undetected among us? And yet they display all the signs of the Evil Thing which so oft comes on little cat's feet, silent in the night, not so loud or grand a thing as a Ghengis Khan or Vlad the Impaler or Hitler.”
