Chapter 23 A Man Who Answers to No One
A Man Who Answers to No One
The subway train rocketed beneath the metric gigatons of the city. Across from Evan, Anca flinched at every noise. Brakes squealed. Fasteners and joints rattled. Ventilation whooshed. They clattered through darkness and light, darkness and light.
One of her diminutive hands gripped the other, a timid clasp on her lap. Seeming to notice, she unclenched her fingers and sat taller.
They’d moved through three cars before she’d chosen her spot.
A few weary souls swayed at the far end, dangling from grab bars or pinning down blue molded seats of easily disinfected plastic.
The sparseness of riders and the cacophonous rush of gray noise offered them privacy.
As the tracks banked, the train slammed into an abrupt snake-wind, the trailing cars vanishing through the intercarriage windows and then slotting back into realignment like a magic trick.
At the jostling, Anca winced, the ketorolac wearing off. Over the course of Evan’s missions, he might’ve met a tougher person than her. But he could not be sure.
He tipped his chin down, a nonverbal inquiry: Are you okay? The question had to be asked but the words were too stupid to speak.
“It’s all different.” She looked around tentatively. “Everything is different. I don’t recognize where I am but of course I know where I am. I don’t understand what I am paying attention to now. What I’m … What I’m seeing.”
“There were five men at the station,” Evan said. “Four on the platform and one sitting on the stairs. Three in the first car, seven in the second, two in here not including me.”
Her mouth held slightly ajar. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.” Again he felt that X-ray stare, the sense of her taking a deeper inventory. “How…?”
“It’s how I see, too.”
Her youthful face looked weary, and in that weariness he could see premonitions of the older woman she’d one day become. “Camo paint,” she said. “Sniper black. Is that who you are?”
“It is part of who I was.”
“Evan,” she said, trying on his name. “Who are you now?”
“That. And more.”
“Who do you answer to?”
“No one.”
Her mouth set, lips pursed. “A man who answers to no one is very dangerous.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Is that why you came to find me? To go after … those who did this?”
“To help you. I didn’t know where you were. If you were still being held. All I had was the description of what happened given by the young woman who abandoned you.”
“Abandoned me?” Anca blinked at him as if he were inane.
“Bless her. If she hadn’t remembered me, I wouldn’t have had your help.
If your associate hadn’t tracked me down.
If your friend hadn’t provided the helicopter to fly you here.
So many people heeding the call. I wasn’t abandoned. I was found.”
Someone coughed and her head snapped over, the cord of the sternocleidomastoid muscle pronounced at the side of her neck. It took a moment for her shoulders to relax once more.
“You were found,” Evan said. “And now they must be found.”
“Whatever happens to them, it must be legitimate. It can’t come from a man who answers to no one.”
These were men who believed it their right to carry off an impaired woman, to drug her, to gratify themselves with her unconscious body, to bite and bruise and mark her skin, to bathe her violated flesh in chemicals to remove forensic traces.
Who’d left her discarded with blood between her legs in an underground apartment with no money, no ID, mere shreds of clothing, and an eye nearly swollen shut.
That had to be answered for in this life. It just had to.
Anca’s case and the inconclusive forensics would get plopped down on the bureaucratic conveyor belt with scant chance of progressing through a sluggish crime lab to an overtaxed detective bureau to an overburdened DA’s office.
“What is,” he asked, “the legitimate way to handle what happened to you?”
“That’s not for me to say. They will be judged before Someone Else.”
“They need to be judged here.”
“Vengeance is not mine to have. I refuse to give my heart to it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to,” she said.
“What they did to you—”
“What is it, your vengeance? Who’s it for? For you?”
“No.”
“For me? Protective of me, are you? Is that what this is about?”
“In part. Yes.”
“So protective that you can’t see them for who they are?”
“Who are they?”
“Humans. Fallen, wretched humans in need of saving. More than I am. They are already in hell. Right now, as we speak.” She scrutinized his reaction. “What?”
“I tend to give religion a wide berth, along with politics.”
“Why’s that?”
“The hypocrisy chafes me.”
Her gaze narrowed. “I will make this right with God and then He will let me understand and then maybe someday I might even find forgiveness. But I am not my damage. I will not harden and hate. What happened to me is not for you. It is not your wound to heal. And it is not the flag you’ll wave into war. I don’t allow it. I won’t allow it.”
The criteria for Saint Augustine’s just-war theory appeared in Evan’s head, and he ticked off the boxes, one after another, though two and nine admittedly proved shaky.
“Men like this don’t stop,” he said. “We have a responsibility to the other girls and women they will hurt next.”
“How dare you,” she said. “How dare you talk to me about my responsibility right now.”
“There’s a place where forgiveness ends and duty begins.”
The sides of her nose reddened with fury, her eyes hard as basalt. “And there’s a place where your justice ends because it’s your justice. Because you’re only one man.”
It was incredible to see a face so delicate snarl like that.
They rode in silence until her stop.
Unsteady from pain and meds, Anca clutched Evan’s biceps as they glided upward on the escalator. The circle of the world above irised ever larger until they stepped into the night air.
She shuddered against him and again he felt her birdlike delicateness. She gestured faintly. “A few blocks this way.”
He kept his arm on offer and she kept her grasp. At his side, she coasted forward, light on her feet, as if something were carrying her. They threaded through foot traffic, the night quieter than made sense for the Bronx.
The church was more austere than he’d anticipated, a humble white-stucco building fringed with black mold at the gutter lines.
Barred windows, weather-beaten mosaics, several metal crosses rising from the roof sat alongside dishes and vent pipes.
Security lights and snarled wires cluttered the eaves.
The sole note of grandeur was a hexagonal cupola, its peak topped with a Latin cross featuring a lower beam of a footrest.
They stepped between a row of scraggly trees with whitewashed trunks thrusting crookedly from the pavement and crossed the street. A broad set of newly poured concrete steps led to a brief plaza and the plain wooden front door.
Anca slowed as they neared, her grip tightening on Evan’s arm.
“Wait,” she said. “Hold on, please.”
She stooped, hands on her knees.
“Would you like to sit down?”
Her mouth pulsed, as if tasting something bitter. “Need to … get horizontal.”
She slumped and he caught her, easing them down on the front steps of the church. Her head lolled and then came back. “Please … help.”
“I will.”
“Can you stay?”
“Yes.”
“You’re gonna need to—”
“I understand the protocols. It’s okay. I got you.”
“I don’t have…”—her eyes rolled up to white, fluttered back momentarily—“pillow.” The words came slurred: doan have plillow.
Evan cradled her, nestled her head in his lap, her temple on the meat of his thigh.
She gazed up at him.
“I have you, okay? Look at me. I have you.”
“Don’t leave me here alone.” Doane lee me hee lone.
“I’ll be with you until you’re back.”
A few shuddering breaths. Her hand clawed at his shirt, made a fist in the fabric.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t leave you.”
Her hand went limp.
Her eyes, shut and fluttering, lost to a dark kind of rapture.
She seized. Legs kicking, hip rattling on the step, her free elbow flailing until he pinned it gently down. Rolling her partially onto her side, he kept her head tilted, horseshoe-gripping her chin and cheeks, popping the mouth open to make sure her tongue was clear.
Passersby kept passing by, an oblivious parade of pant legs and loafers, Air Jordans and high heels.
“Dude, get a room. Your girlfriend’s freakin’ out.”
Evan glanced up at the cruel smirk of a young man in a hoodie, automatically calculating the strike point at the hinge of his jaw to knock the lower mandible clear off the temporomandibular joint.
But he focused back on the young woman convulsing in his arms. He brushed the hair from her face, guarded her elbows and knees, kept her safe.
On the steps of the church, he held her. Her parted lips were full and pink, her eyelids fluttering beatifically. She was lost to an aura, her features alight with a preternatural luster.
The seizure lasted nearly three minutes.
But felt a lot longer.
At last, she quieted, stirring gently in his arms.
“I remember now,” she said, her voice little more than a rasp. “I saw it.” Her eyes blinked unseeingly. “A goat-skull tattoo on one of their chests. Devil horns.”
Lifting a tremulous hand, she felt her cheeks with her palm, as if checking that her face was still there, and then wiped the tears watering from the sides of her eyes. Pushing up out of his lap, she groaned. She leaned forward and let a few breaths shudder through her.
Rising under her own power, she continued up the steps to the church.
The homely outside of the church cracked open to reveal an interior befitting a Fabergé egg.
Gold and bronze iconography everywhere—bejeweled crucifixes and ornately carved newel-posts, countless vigil lights guttering in an immense candlestand, display tables overburdened with art.
A massive box with carved fringes resembled an abandoned palanquin.
A half-dome painting beneath an empty rear balcony depicted the Last Supper, nimbusless Judas looking shifty.
Imagery abounded, relics crowding every surface, pictures tucked into the frames of larger paintings.
A marble baptismal font, mosaics, a throne befitting a Middle-earth king.
Beside the ceiling plate of an elaborate chandelier, Christ peered down from a gold-wreathed spot of heavenly blue.
A glow suffused the church, bleeding through stained-glass saints to blanket the pews and idols and living souls with a many-colored raiment.
The simple wooden pews of the tiny church were crowded, everyone standing.
A priest in elaborate vestments of iridescent bottle-fly green prayed in Romanian.
He was bookended by life-size standing icons of Christ and Mary, and backdropped by a vast decorative partition wallpapered with icon panels, each as detailed as the next.
Among the shimmering imagery, he seemed a part of the church itself, which of course he was.
Between his incantations, a small choir lifted their voices in four-part harmony, transforming the service into a continuous song.
The acoustics were shockingly good, the hymns seeming to emanate from the carved and painted faces all around.
Evan and Anca stood unnoticed where the door let in at the side of the nave, Anca seemingly as surprised as he was to find a service in full swing.
The heavy door clicked shut at their backs.
The priest’s attention moved to them, his pale, concave face filling with joy.
He halted in midsentence, breath catching, and then the focus of the congregation found them.
Utter silence.
The priest took an unsure step off the pulpit toward Anca and then another, broad sleeves hanging like bat wings from his spread arms. Beneath his robes, he floated toward her, staring as if unsure that she was real.
Her eyes filled with tears to match his.
Nearing, he lifted a bejeweled blessing cross from around his neck, and she closed her eyes and kissed it.
As he set it upon her head, whooping and cries broke loose, Evan jostled to the fringe as the congregation surrounded Anca.
Confusion pulsed in his chest, to have allowed himself to be pushed to the periphery, to lose someone he was protecting to a mob.
But of course it was not a mob, it was a community, and he felt a sense of loss that his muscle memory had never been taught to distinguish between the two.
There were Slavic three-cheek kisses, nose bumping, the worshippers crossing themselves in threes right to left, thumbs and first two fingers pinched together.
Double bowing and more kissing—kissing the icons, the edge of the priest’s sleeves, the crosses around their necks.
And Anca in the center, held in an immense embrace.
“Father,” a woman cried in accented English, “should we finish the Akathist service?”
“Why keep praying,” he said, “when our prayers have been answered?”