Page 7 of Clive Cussler The Iron Storm (An Isaac Bell Adventure #15)
P eggy O’Shaughnessy waited outside the confessionals in her neighborhood church in Brooklyn.
In the more than ten years since she and other Irish immigrants were forced out of the Vinegar Hill area when the Manhattan Bridge was built, Peggy wasn’t yet comfortable with the little Catholic church nor its French-Canadian priest. She still missed old Father Donner.
He was a man who knew how to pour on the guilt and make confession a real soul-cleansing torture, and the acts of penance he meted out could take days if the mood struck him.
The Frenchman, Father Rivard, was too easy on them for their sins in Peggy’s opinion. She hadn’t had to ice her knees from praying on a hard stone floor since moving here with her sister and husband and their eight children, all but two grown and gone, and making this her parish.
She was by her very nature a judgmental person.
She wore her morality on her sleeve, and woe to anyone who didn’t adhere to her standards.
For that reason her days were filled with unkind thoughts about nearly everyone she met.
Just yesterday she admonished a young teen because her ankles were showing.
It turned out that the girl was ashamed that she was outgrowing her hand-me-down skirt and that her older sister was now shorter than her.
Peggy vowed she would double whatever penance Father Rivard asked of her for that one.
There was no one else in the church, so it was dead silent, and the light coming through the stained glass windows was weak, which gave the stone chapel a cold, eerie feeling. The glow of candles on the altar looked as distant as the nighttime stars.
She was thinking about other sins she had to confess when she heard a strangled gasp from the priest’s side of the confessional.
She’d never heard anything in all her years except faint whispers.
This was the Catholic confessional, the sacred and secret rite between parishioner and priest. Such a show of emotion from Father Rivard just wouldn’t do.
But…
Peggy O’Shaughnessy inched forward a couple of steps, knowing if someone opened the church’s main doors she’d have time to jump back before anyone saw her.
She was fifty-eight and her hearing wasn’t what it once was.
She heard a man’s voice, as sibilant as a snake’s hiss, but not individual words. She took another step.
“…knife…belly…blood…”
Father Rivard gave another little gasp and Peggy stepped back quickly.
She turned to look down the length of the church.
The doors were still firmly closed. The overcast sky and threat of rain were keeping others away from the confessional this Wednesday evening.
Despite herself, or maybe because of it, Peggy O’Shaughnessy crept even closer to the mahogany confessional cabinet to eavesdrop again.
“…screamed…too late…remain unborn.”
Peggy and her priest both gasped. Knowing she’d gone too far, she rushed back to the pews, sat and bowed her head as if she’d been at prayer since vespers the night before.
The confessional door swung open. Peggy kept her head down, her fingers working her rosary like a pianist practicing Rachmaninoff.
The stranger paused at the confessional door.
She could feel his eyes on her, feel some sort of primal heat washing off him.
She prayed in earnest.
He closed the door and began striding down the aisle, his shoes loud on the flagstone floor. Peggy dared give him just a small glimpse as he passed and then cast her eyes downward again. The church’s outer doors creaked open and slammed shut with an echoing finality.
Kindly Father Rivard stepped out from his side of the confessional.
His face was flush, his hair unkempt as if he’d been trying to pull it out in tufts, and his eyes had a wild, frightened look to them.
Peggy stood and crossed to him. She was a big woman, broad at the hips and busty, while the French clergyman was small in stature.
She had little problem guiding him to a step and helping him sit.
“Are you all right, Father? Do you need some water?”
His breathing remained ragged for another minute and so he didn’t answer.
Knowing he couldn’t tell her anything, her natural curiosity got the best of her and she blurted, “Who was that, Father Rivard?”
He finally pulled his gaze from the distant closed doors and regarded her face. “The devil, Peggy. I believe he was the devil.” He paused, contemplating his words. He asked, “What does Satan look like?”
They both turned to study the doors the man had passed through moments before. “The truth, Father? An angel. He looked like a beautiful young angel.”
—
T he angel had had many names in his young life.
He currently went by Balka Rath, a name his brother had given him before he’d emigrated from Europe the year before.
His brother, now called Karl Rath, had stayed behind as leader of an anarchist cell that had all but raised Balka.
While other children learned fables and fairy tales, Balka had learned political theory and the best way to disrupt a society.
He’d killed his first man when he was fourteen, a French tax collector known both for his corruption and for the protection given to him by a particularly powerful superior.
The decision to come to America had been Karl’s.
Their cell had been in German-occupied Belgium for some time and the fact that Balka was a conscription-aged man not in the military was just too hard to cover up.
Karl, a mountain of a man in his forties, already looked like he’d served, given his flame-ravaged cheek and missing eye.
But Balka risked being accosted by recruiters and had twice nearly fallen into the hands of a roving press-gang searching for laborers to be sent back to Germany.
He could not remain in Europe. Karl had assured him that while their fight was with the aristocracies of the Old World, America would suffer in the upcoming anarchist revolution.
Balka Rath wasn’t Catholic. Even before becoming an anarchist he’d had no religious training at all.
His family were from the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe.
They were itinerant woodcutters who poached trees from royal forests in the summer months and shaped them into lumber during the long winters.
Religion had no place in such a nomadic and risky life.
He went to confession before embarking on one of his missions because he felt the need to tell someone else what he was about to do, in the off chance he was killed.
It wasn’t an unburdening, nor was it bragging.
He simply wanted another person to be an unwitting chronicler of the evil he committed.
He chose to tell Catholic priests because he knew that in the Church’s nearly two thousand years of existence there was not a single incident of a priest breaking the sanctity of the confessional.
Not one. No matter what he said inside the tight little cabinet, the priest would never divulge it, not even to another priest.
When he’d started this tradition, he’d considered visiting the same priest over and over just for cruelty’s sake, but then he decided to never go to the same church twice.
He liked to imagine some New York priests getting together to talk theology and faith and all of them burdened with a secret they could never share.
Tonight’s mission wasn’t particularly dangerous, but he’d wanted to tell a priest about a woman he had killed who was trying to extort one of the Irish mobsters he did occasional work for, because her body would doubtlessly be discovered soon.
While he’d been waiting in the church for his turn, dusk had become a cool, moonless night.
Balka Rath turned up the collar of his wool coat as he took the church’s steps down to the sidewalk.
He had a Ford parked at the curb. It wasn’t his car.
It belonged to a local anarchist cell that was run by the son of a wealthy Wall Street broker.
In truth, the cell was only financed by him, to be more precise.
It was his passive retaliation for his father’s aloof distance.
Rath considered him a spoiled fool, but welcomed the money.
A quasi-intellectual Columbia dropout named Frederic Fowler was the cell’s real brains. He led discussions in the back rooms of bars near various college campuses, expounding on anarchism and the class struggle, and trying to recruit new members.
Rath started the car and headed southeast to meet Fowler and a couple of the other cell members.
Karl had cabled him recently and told him to suspend all operations because he had a big role in an important upcoming mission, and it was no longer worth the risk helping the various criminal organizations who used his ruthlessness.
That also included the cell he’d joined, but Balka thought tonight’s job, while high-profile, was actually low-risk, and was thus worth him defying his older brother.
The city quickly gave way to rural Nassau County.
It was always a surprise to go from the world’s second-largest city to a pastoral setting of farms and country lanes in just a few miles.
Cities in Europe seemed to go on forever before slowly petering out.
Twenty miles from the church, Rath pulled the car into the parking lot of a clapboard restaurant that sat on a crossroads alongside a general store with a pair of gas pumps out front and across from an old swaybacked barn that was being dismantled to make room for something newer.
He pulled into the lot next to Fred Fowler’s car, a Ford built more than a decade earlier that burned nearly as much oil as gasoline. He killed the engine and stepped out into the chilly air.