Codex - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by HF
Last updated: 09/18/2008 08:14:09 PM

Chapter 1

Winter in New York City rarely ever meant snow, in Remy leBeau’s estimation. Instead, it meant rain-an awful, penetrating rain with enough merciless chill in it to freeze the spaces between his bone marrow, enough to keep him cold no matter where he went to get warm. Steaming coffee shops, meticulously climate-controlled libraries, the teeming blood-heated crush of the underground... They only made the chill shrink down into a tiny, frigid knot that refused utterly to be dissipated, and this made Remy think that maybe the chill was not purely physical, but something else.

He had stood under the near-boiling stream of water in his shower and had shivered.

In the security of his hotel room, he had tried to charge up crumpled-up wads of paper, a pack of playing cards, the ubiquitous Bible from the top drawer of his bedside table, and all of them had flashed to ashes after only the briefest evincing of heat. After the Bible had disintegrated, Remy vowed to himself not to dredge up his power again-there was simply too much pain attached to it, to what he was, and watching pages and papers glow with that unnatural, reddish hue only brought back the cold again.

Now, he strode down the packed and seething boulevard, hands shoved in his pockets and head bowed against the cold. St. Patrick’s rose up in the near distance, its grandeur made almost quaint by the omniscient skyscrapers that loomed over it. Men and women in rain-slicked overcoats, wielding umbrellas or cell phones (and sometimes both) brushed past him, graceless feet pounding into puddles that splattered against the legs of Remy’s jeans. His socks and shoes had long since soaked through, and his rain-darkened bangs were plastered to his forehead and the lenses of his sunglasses.

Nearly six and nearly dark it was, and the sunglasses made things seem colder. The streets glowed with a bizarre dreamlike luminosity, the kind just as likely to create darkness and shadow as light, and threw everything into stark relief. A woman’s pale face was a death’s-head against the black of her conservative business suit, her lips painted a dark red the color of dried blood, her eyes a forbidding void above cheekbones painted in chiaroscuro shades of clean snow and ebony. Remy shivered as she passed, tried to berate himself even as the chill settled more deeply into him: she was just a woman, made up in the fashion that likes to take living people and transform them into animated corpses... she wasn’t HIM in disguise, she wasn’t an agent, wasn’t a helpless dupe under HIS control.

The anxiety that had been firmly welded to his stomach lining for years had overridden his usually firm control over his body and its movements. His steps had quickened markedly, lengthening into a long stride that ate up concrete and forced slower pedestrians to hop aside. One man shouted something impolite after him, but Remy was already quite a ways down the street and the curse was lost amidst the buzz of cars and footsteps. With some effort, he moderated his pace, although the knowledge that he was wet and cold and the church was dry did not help. "Professionalism" he told himself, slipping through the crowd like a well-oiled ghost, slick and invisible. "Don’ want t’ be makin’ a spectacle of yourself."

Of course, the problem was that, for a person who by vocation (and some would say, by nature) operated in the shadows, he had a tendency to create a spectacle. The gods-be-damned ability to start an irreversible buildup of kinetic energy in otherwise latent objects, as HE had called it (human translation: being able to make things blow up), only added to the difficulty of being discreet, although it occasionally had its uses. His natural swiftness, silence, and agility were far more prized talents-even in these post-HIM days, those abilities allowed him to sleep in a decent hotel instead of a hole in the wall.

Those abilities had caught the attention of one man just two weeks ago, and they had arranged a meeting over 128-bit encrypted email-Remy had done that both out of natural suspicion at what was a nonstandard request and also the uneasy sense that the man, who had referred to himself as ’Father Clay’, was not the most competent professional. In addition to a brief sketch of the assignment, they’d arranged for the deposit of $300,000 into one of Remy’s offshore bank accounts, and he had received the confirmation of deposit yesterday, which was the green light for the rendezvous today - six in the evening, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His contact would be waiting at the transept with both the goods and Remy’s eventual destination in hand.

Remy extracted his left hand from his coat pocket to check the time-5:55, and he was at the doors to St. Patrick’s. This close, the church dwarfed him, a bulwark against the wind, the beating rain, and the tides of humanity sweeping against its steps. He lingered at the entrance to the nave, feeling tall and oddly awkward as a procession of bent old ladies shuffled past him, their gray kerchief-covered heads bent over their rosaries. The great doors creaked open and the warm, musty, and somehow holy scent of an old stone church wafted out to him, redolent of wood polish, warmed marble, and incense.

He thought suddenly of all the old gangster movies and history books. Churches were supposed to be holy places, where no blood was shed because to do so was a sin so black a man’s soul could go to hell on the spot, do not pass Purgatory, do not collect $200. But how many movies had some kind of shady deal be finalized in a holy place, or an alliance vowed over Holy Communion, and then just as one party turned to leave someone drew a gun... and fired...?

He took one last moment to wait for the last woman to file in, to wonder whether or not he should take his sunglasses off out of respect, to decide against it, to square his shoulders, to walk in.

Warm air engulfed him, almost uncomfortably close despite its relative dryness. Remy’s sunglasses took that moment to fog up and, suppressing a curse, he shut his eyes, took the glasses off and wiped them on one of the few patches of dry shirt remaining to him. Only when the sunglasses were restored to him did he open his eyes again and enter the sanctuary.

The old women had fanned out through the church and their murmurs rose up around him, cobwebby reminders of the senior members of his old Guild in New Orleans, who whispered their Paternosters and Ave Maria’s without cease and walked through the Stations in endless penance for a life of crime. He remembered the old, old ones who had been alive since time out of mind, fingers clasped perpetually around the beads of their rosaries, massaging them like worry beads, muttering prayers in the dead space of guild meetings.

Remy had never understood it. They were thieves, weren’t they? Why apologize for what you are?

"Bad justification" he thought even as his eyes settled on a lone, black-clad figure standing squarely in the middle of the transept. "You got lots o’ apologizin’ t’ do, boy, f’r what you are."

As he drew closer, he saw with not a little astonishment, that the man waiting for him was a priest. The small white square at the throat was quite visible, an almost unnecessary confirmation given the presence of the bright silver cross on the man’s lapel. The man was skinny and short, his head of thinning blond hair just barely making it past Remy’s chin, but determined gray eyes gazed up at the taller man from their screen of wire-frame glasses. He held something square and bulky in his arms. He spoke politely to a parishioner who greeted him.

"*This* is what 128-bit encryption was for?" Remy wasn’t sure whether to be relieved, surprised, or deeply annoyed at being trapped for two more weeks than necessary in New York City, in the middle of winter, to meet a middle-aged and apparently un-felonious priest. He remembered, with painful clarity, the letter the man had sent him.

TO: sy0981 @ nomail.com

FROM: Rclay @ stpatricks.org

RE:

Referred by parishioner, would like to employ services for courier work. Please reply.

Sincerely,

Father Clay

"God damn it all, he really is a Father Clay" Remy thought, not quite believing it. Relief? Surprise? Annoyance? He still couldn’t decide. As the seconds ticked by and Father Clay watched him with a benign curiosity that did not change, Remy fixed on annoyance. It wasn’t professional, but it was at least an outlet for everything that had passed over the previous few weeks... and months... and years... And there was, too, the perverse enjoyment he got out of needling anyone in a position of authority. It was something that hadn’t changed since he could remember.

No... no, it had changed, hadn’t it? HE could never be needled-no, there was an aura about HIM that forbade harassment. It didn’t need a glance from those cold, terrifyingly blank eyes or the brief scowl that would flex the sickly slug-white-no, it needed only HIS presence, and in the months that Remy had worked for HIM, he felt nothing but inferiority, anxiety that would degenerate into outright terror if he wasn’t careful. His bravado was always there, forcing him to the occasional challenge, to rebellion... but those always failed.

This man before him was a human, though, decidedly and thankfully human. Remy’s eyesight, keen even behind his sunglasses, could pick out the fine lines that came with middle age, the pink tracery of veins in Father Clay’s eyes, the natural way he carried himself, with none of the cold drama and arrogance of HIM. It was another moment before the desire to be annoying passed, and Remy opened the conversation.

"Father Clay?"

A nod was his answer. "You are Remy leBeau," Father Clay said. "Thank you for coming to meet me...." He paused, and the grayish eyes became disapproving. "You can take off your sunglasses."

"I prefer t’ keep ’em on."

Father Clay’s voice lowered, but he did not move closer as he said, "I know what you are, Mr. leBeau."

Remy couldn’t disguise the shock that cascaded through him. The man knew! The man knew his secret! Who had... how had he... Suddenly the cathedral became a huge place of echoes, and his breathing was loud and reverberant in his own ears. If he spoke, everyone in the place would hear him, no matter how quiet his whisper. The gargoyles would hear his reply and spit it back out. Were there gargoyles in St. Patrick’s? Angels? He didn’t know. But there were ears to hear, yes, and minds to remember, and he didn’t know how this man-this *priest*-had found out about the secret he kept so close.

"Who told ya that?" he demanded as quietly as he could, which he felt was not quietly at all. Why had he agreed to this? He should have known churches were no good places to carry out this sort of thing. He wondered if he would have to kill the priest; he could do it before the man would even register the movement. And he could also have the death of an innocent man-a *holy* man-on his conscience, another blot to join the ones that were already there, but just as damning.

The priest appeared regretful of having spoken. "A friend," he said after a moment, the fingers of his right hand touching the silver cross on his breast. "A friend to you who would not see you be harmed..." He trailed off for a moment, as if trying to make sure Remy was processing all of this. "You may leave the sunglasses on, if you like," he concluded.

Remy accepted the invitation and made no move to take the glasses off. Instead, he indicated the package under Father Clay’s arm with a brief nod. "Those the goods?"

"Yes, yes it is." Father Clay removed the package from its stowing place and handed it to Remy, who grunted at the surprising weight of it. "I would ask you not to open it here... Or to open it at all, if you can help it. I can guarantee you that it is nothing illegal-no bomb or narcotic or anything of the sort," the man sounded worried that Remy would take him for a gun-runner or drug trafficker, and Remy found himself believing the man was genuinely not either of those things, "but it *is* something precious, something that I would see only in trusted hands."

"Trusted hands, hey? Kinda funny you’re givin’ it to a t’ief," Remy said, hefting the package. What was it? It felt like a book of some sort, that kind of square, uniform weight. "I’m just as likely t’ make off with this like a bat outta hell, ain’t I, as I am t’ take this wherever ya want it took?"

"You are that," Father Clay admitted. He did not sound concerned about that; rather, his tone was that of a man who has considered the option and found it possible but not overly troublesome. He continued in the same unruffled manner: "But then I would have to worry about this with any other courier I employ, wouldn’t I? And isn’t a thief the best person to keep something from being stolen?"

"Ha!" Remy couldn’t restrain the laugh that broke from his lips. It felt odd to have a laugh surprised out of him, to laugh in real amusement rather than bitter, resigned hopelessness. The cold inside his bones eased a little bit and he said, "Y’ might have a point there, Padre... Y’ just might have a point."

Father Clay smiled, and then reached into the inner breast pocket of his black jacket to pull something out. It was an envelope of airline tickets. "These are for the 3:00PM flight to Heathrow out of LaGuardia, leaving tomorrow" he explained as he handed them to Remy. "You’ll have to rent a car or get a driver to take you to a town called Haight’s Pond, in York. Any of the locals there can give you directions to St. Nathan’s, which is where you must take this, and you must give it directly to Troy Marcus, who is the prior there. Do you have that?"

"Heathrow, 3:00PM, LaGuardia, Haight’s Pond, York, St. Nathan’s, Troy Marcus," Remy repeated obediently. He had to shift the package so that he held it in both arms, cradled against his chest. He could feel indentations through the paper wrapping, and he wondered how precious this thing must be, if Father Clay was just going to wrap it in a thin layer of brown paper and Scotch tape. Fortunately his trench coat was water-repellent. Unfortunately, it meant he was going to have another cold walk back to the hotel.

"Good, good." Father Clay heaved a sigh and then smiled. "I have the utmost faith in you, Mr. LeBeau," he said in a tone so redolent of confidence it made Remy guilty for entertaining the thought of vanishing, along with this valuable whatever-it-was, into thin air, and also made him feel bad for a man who had somehow been deluded into thinking that Remy was a decent person. "The utmost faith," he repeated, staring directly at Remy so the younger man would know he was honest.

Remy could only nod uncomfortably and push his sunglasses further up his nose. It occurred to him that he should take them off as a sign of reciprocal trust, seeing as Father Clay had-however wrongly-given him his endorsement. He didn’t, and instead he muttered something designed to be reassuring: Father Clay seemed reassured, at least, and as quickly as that the priest turned away to go speak quietly to an elderly gentleman, and gave no sign that Remy was there, or even that Remy existed at all.

By the time he looked up, Remy was out the door, the package wrapped up safely in his trench coat and pressed against his chest. The rain had slackened and faded into a mist that fell, gossamer and light as a breath, upon his skin and settled over his hair like a cloak. And for all its lightness, it was cold, thousands of cold little needles pricking into him. "Def’nitely *not* a Yank" he thought to himself, trying to keep up some ghost of his old spirits. "Just ain’t cut out for dis cold weather, no sir, not a’tall."