15
Jack had cabbed home and changed into something more suited to the far West Village—black jeans, a faded White Stripes T-shirt, and Doc Martens. He'd finished it off with an oversized black bomber jacket, big enough to hide the Glock in his SOB holster.
He took a couple of trains down to the West Village. There, in the fading light, he stood on a narrow, debris-strewn street across from The Header and kept an eye on Sonny Boy's window as an uneven stream of bikers pulled up and swaggered into the bar.
He gave it ten minutes, letting the light dim more. No sign of life up there, so he crossed over and went to the side door where the apartment dwellers entered and made quick work of the lock with his autopick. On the third floor he found the apartment he assumed to belong to Johnny, and knocked. Picking the lock of an occupied apartment could be, well, embarrassing.
No answer, so he again put the autopick to work and let himself in.
Dark inside. He flicked his flashlight on for seconds at a time. The place seemed neat and clean, but stank from the rare delicacies nuked or fried in the bar kitchen two floors down. He spotted a poster of a robust-looking Cooper Blascoe on one wall and a shelf stacked with Dormentalist tracts on the other.
Okay. This was the place. All he had to do now was wait for Johnny "Oroont" Roselli to show his face.
A partially packed duffel bag sat on the bed. Planning a trip, Johnny?
Maybe half an hour later footsteps in the hallway stopped outside the door. As a key rattled in the lock, Jack stepped behind the door and waited. Johnny flipped on the light as he closed the door behind him. Jack didn't give him time to turn. He grabbed him from behind and took him down.
"Not a sound!" he said into Johnny's ear as he straddled his back. Jeez, his ratty clothes were filthy and he stank. "I'm not here to hurt you, just to talk. Keep it down and we both end up healthy. Start calling for help and one of us winds up hurting. And it won't be me. Got that?"
Johnny nodded, then whispered, "If all you want is to talk, why didn't you just call me on the phone?"
"I did, but you started calling me strange names and hung up."
"That was you?" He started to twist his neck, turning his scraggly-bearded face toward Jack. Jack pushed it back.
"No peeking. You see my face, I'll have to kill you."
Johnny pushed his nose against the floor. "For Noomri's sake, what do you wantV
"I was hired to deliver a message. Here it is: Call your mother."
"What? That's crazy. You were hired? By who?"
"Your mother. She's—"
"That's impossible!"
"She's worried about you and—"
"My mother's dead!"
Jack opened his mouth but closed it after a second or two. He felt his shoulders slump. He should have seen this coming.
The problem now was how to salvage the situation.
"Impossible. I spoke to her just the other day."
"You couldn't have. She's been dead four years."
"Skinny old lady with bad arthritis?"
"Not even close. She was an Old World Italian mama."
"Shit. Perhaps I've made a mistake."
"Perhaps?"
"Well, she told me her son was a Dormentalist."
"Well, at least you got that right. You—hey!"
Jack was digging into Roselli's back pocket. "Just checking some ID. How do I know you're not lying?"
"I'm not. Who are you looking for? Maybe I can help."
"Can't mention names. Professional ethics."
The expired driver's license in the wallet showed a more clean-shaven John A. Roselli.
"Okay. You're not him. My bad. Sorry."
"Can I get up now?"
"No. Remember what I said I'd have to do if you see my face?"
Next to the license was Johnny's temple swipe card. Jack glanced at the clothes-stuffed duffel on the bed. An idea began to take shape.
"I see you're packed for a trip. Skipping town?"
"No. Going camping, if you must know. It's the only place a person in my state of…"
"Ripeness?" Jack said.
"Well, yes. Plus being alone in the wild helps me commune with—oh, never mind. You wouldn't understand."
"You never know."
Jack quickly pulled out his own wallet and extracted his temple entry card. No name on either card, no way to tell one from the other. He looked around and spotted a couple of magnets—with the Dormentalist logo, for Christ sake—on the refrigerator door. He leaned to the side and plucked one off.
"What are you doing?" Roselli said.
"Don't worry, I'm not stealing your money."
He began rubbing the magnet along his card's magnetic strip.
If Jensen was worth a damn as security chief, and Jack believed he was, he'd have either inactivated the Jason Amurri entry code in the computer or tagged it with a detain-on-sight warning. Either way, it was useless for getting Jack into the temple. He hadn't planned on going back, but now with Jamie incommunicado, it might prove necessary.
Which meant he needed a working model.
He slipped his card into Johnny's wallet and pocketed the other, then dropped the wallet on the floor next to Johnny's face.
As much as Jack wanted to move a good six or ten feet away from this smelly clown, he couldn't let him up yet. Also he was curious as to what Roselli had done to deserve being declared a lapser.
Jack made a loud sniffing noise. "You ever hear of soap? Or dry cleaning maybe?"
"Of course. Normally I'm a very clean person."
"Yeah?" What had Jensen called his punishment? Oh, yeah. Solitarian Exile. "So how long are you stuck in SE mode?"
He felt Roselli tense beneath him. "How do you know about that?"
"I know a lapser when I see one. Used to be in the church myself. That's why I was hired to find this missing FA."
"Used to be?"
"Yeah. Got out years ago." He needed to stick to the Dormentalist patois here. He tried to picture the list Jamie had given him. What the hell did they call ex-Dormentalists? "They started saying I had Low Fusion Potential and wanted me to take all these extra courses to raise it. But I couldn't afford it so I went DD on my own before they could kick me out."
Roselli laughed—a single, bitter bark. "That's pretty close to why I'm not allowed to bathe or shave or change my clothes for a month."
"LFP too?"
"No. Because as soon as fall rolled around the Church raised the fees on every course for every step of the FL. I said it was too much, that it would hold too many people back from FF. That was an unpopular position with the FPRB, so I wound up LFA for objecting."
"And you just take it? They say go make yourself dirty and stinky and you do it?"
"I have given myself to the Church and must abide by its decisions."
"Does that also mean you've given up the right to your own opinion? Your pride? Your self-esteem? I once saw this film of thousands of Shütes whipping themselves bloody in the streets of Teheran during Ramadan. If the FPRB told you to do something like that, would you?"
"I… I don't—yes, yes, I would. The work of the Church is far more important than one man's foolish pride."
Jack could only shake his head. True Believers never failed to amaze him.
But on a more practical level, he wondered if Roselli was as rich as his ersatz mother had said.
"Well, seeing how you live, I can see why you'd object to rising prices on the Dormentalist menu."
Roselli tensed again. "Too many creature comforts are distracting and clutter the road to Full Fusion. Money is not a problem for me. I live this way because I choose to."
"Yeah, right."
"I have a decent amount in the bank, enough to support me, but I gave all the rest—a small fortune, if you care to know—to the Church."
"And this is how they thank you?"
"I didn't give it for thanks. I wasn't looking for special treatment. I gave it to further the Church's mission."
Jack wished he could open this turkey's eyes.
"So after they pretty much sucked you dry, they gave you the shaft by raising the fees."
"No, that doesn't affect me. I gave the Church so much that I'll never be charged FL fees, no matter how high they go. It wasn't—isn't myself I'm concerned about, it's the others who aren't so lucky."
"Not so lucky? I'd say their luck will change for the better when they get booted from the church for not being able to come up with the necessary jing to stay in."
"So, that's it. You've become a WA. Lots of DDs do."
"Wall Addict? Out to destroy Dormentalism? Not likely. You have to care about something before you want to destroy it. I don't even think about the church these days."
That would have been true last week, even early yesterday. But after what had happened to Blascoe last night, and with Jamie missing, nothing would please him more than seeing Brady and Jensen and their whole crew brought down. Way down.
But he couldn't let Roselli know that. Blindly loyal Dormentalist that he was, he'd go running to Jensen.
Jack rose to his feet and placed one of his Docs on Roselli's back.
"Don't move."
He reached over to the wall and flicked off the lights. Then he paused, searching for the right parting note as he left this loser in his self-imposed filth.
"Looks like I made a mistake about you. You're not the guy I was looking for. We'll let bygones be bygones, okay. I'll keep looking for the right guy, you keep avoiding soap. And hey… sorry about your mother."
Jack slipped out, closed the door behind him, and hurried down to the street. On his march back to the subway station, he placed another call to the lady who called herself Maria Roselli. Still no answer.
Are you avoiding me, lady? he thought. Hope not. Because I need to talk to you. I mean, we really need to talk.