CHAPTER TWO
Once, in the days when there were congregations, children would have been christened here, women married, old men buried. Now the place smelled of dust, candle grease, and the faint, unmistakable tang of burnt cloth.
Elijah Cox liked it. The two martyrs, Simon sawn in half, Jude beheaded with an axe; the violence of their deaths was beautifully fitting for this stage of his mission.
Not to mention the fact that Kate’s father met his end at a church in Portland, Maine, with exactly the same name.
She’d be shocked by the parallel, he was sure of that.
Although he wasn’t sure if she’d ever find out. He liked the uncertainty of that, too.
He sat in the chancel where the pulpit had once stood, the floor littered with the relics of old sermons—splintered pews, hymnals swollen with damp, the unidentifiable husks of dead birds. Around him, the walls bloomed with images. Hundreds of them.
Man Friday had been busy. Pasting up page after page of false-breasted, pretend-smiling, older-than-advertized girls from porn magazines.
Who even read such things these days? Who wanted to deal with the awkwardness, handing over your money to some smirking checkout girl, when you could download it all on to your phone in privacy?
Was Friday really, truly unaware of what had happened over the last thirty years?
Cox sat in a folding chair, examining the living space that the little man had carved out of a decaying church. Artwork aside, he’d done well. Clothes hanging neat and straight on a rail. The former altar now home to a little gas stove. Prison-cosy. Everything in straight lines.
Cox had learnt his own straight lines in the army. Where everything was folded, everything was about clean corners and everything — from your boots to the unseen underside of the taps in the bathroom and the hinges on your locker-box — had to shine.
The godless rituals of the army had been the seeds of his faith. Each sunrise inspection re-enacting the opening of Genesis, each man in the platoon claiming mastery over chaos with little more than a brush, a cloth and a tape measure.
There was a peace to be found in that purity, a stillness that soothed the inner screaming. For a while. For some years, in fact. Longer than his brief, undistinguished career in the military, at least.
Outside, the sound of traffic seeped faintly through the broken stained glass, the noise of the Bronx on a Sunday afternoon—delivery bikes, children shouting, a radio playing bachata somewhere far down the block.
Sunday.
He thought about that, and he smiled. The day the Lord had rested, but the rest of humanity could not.
All those little men and women who could not sit still, who felt the gnawing emptiness of the seventh day and sought to fill it up with errands and emails and phone calls and the bottomless brunch.
The Sabbath, shabbat to the Jews, stemmed from the ancient Semitic root sh-b-t meaning ‘cease’.
Because it was as simple as that. People only had to stop.
Only nobody was capable of it anymore. And this day, set apart by God for reflection and renewal, had become a day for bargains, for shopping, for gossip.
That displeased and pleased him, equally. Because Sundays revealed the sinners. He looked down at his hands, cut in the struggle, now cracked and sore from the rubbing alcohol. The sting reminding him that he was alive, and his first victim was not.
From one of the back pews came the sound of movement—soft footsteps, hesitant.
“Man Friday,” Cox said, without turning his head.
A small, thin shape detached itself from the shadows between the columns, shuffling forward. He wore a long coat, grimy, maybe two sizes too big, but his smell was relatively inoffensive. Cox wondered how he managed that.
“You’re back early,” he said.
The person he called Man Friday looked startled, displaying teeth too big for his mouth, teeth he might have stolen from someone else. “I thought we was meeting under the bridge.”
Cox gestured to the pew opposite. “I changed my mind. Sit.”
Friday sat, string bag on his lap. There was a dog-like eagerness in the way he obeyed, a gratitude that made Cox’s heart swell—not with affection, satisfaction. Here was proof that even among the lost, a man could be reborn if someone only gave him purpose.
“Got more names,” Friday said. He lisped it. Nameth.
“All from today?”
Friday nodded, rummaging in the bag. He produced a buff-colored notebook, its cover decorated with doodles, its pages curled. “All working today. Broke the Sabbath clean in two.”
Thabbath. The guy had a lisp, a twitch and a limp. Then there were the teeth. The Lord surely moved in mysterious ways.
Cox accepted the book, weighing it in his hands. The handwriting inside was clumsy but diligent, columns of names and numbers, little arrows connecting them to office towers or storefronts. A labour of devotion, in its way.
“How did you find them?”
Friday straightened, proud. "As you told me, pretend I'm an undercover journalist."
Cox massaged the smile off his lips. It had been a singularly bad suggestion on his part. Man Friday bore as much resemblance to an undercover journalist as he did to Jennifer Lopez. On the other hand, if it worked...
“That I was digging into some big Wall Street scandal," Friday continued. "Told the DoorDash guys I needed to know who they were delivering to. Gave them ten bucks a name. Easy as pie."
Cox nodded. “Resourceful.”
Friday beamed, a child praised for his drawing.
Cox turned another page. The neatness of the first few entries gave way to chaos—ink smears, doodles. And then he saw them: Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn. Captain Ahab. Sherlock Holmes. A cluster of literary ghosts among the living.
He tore out the page irritably.
“Who is Huckleberry Finn?”
Friday frowned. “Works at that place. Big old silver grey building. Looks like a whale on its belly. It’s in the next column, wrote them all down like that. Name. Place of work. Lunch order. Like you said.”
“So you’re telling me that the Senior Consulting Analyst at Dietman Laroche is Huckleberry Finn?”
“Must do if I wrote it.”
Cox let the anger wash over him, accelerating its passage with a heavy sigh. He folded the torn out page and put it in his pocket, before passing the notebook back.
Cox glared at Friday. The silence that followed was heavy. Dust drifted through the light slanting from a broken pane high above.
“Half of those names do not exist.”
Friday blinked and repeated Cox's words silently. "But the delivery guys, they…"
“You approached the delivery drivers on the corner, didn’t you, where they gather together?”
Friday nodded eagerly, then stopped. Cox could almost see the thoughts taking shape.
“When I told you to speak to them individually. Individually. Do you know the word?”
“One by one.”
“One by one. And because you didn’t do that, the delivery drivers took your money… my money… and had a laugh at your expense. Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe are dead authors. Captain Ahab is a fictional character, as are Billy Budd and Oliver Twist.”
Friday considered this carefully, while staring at his shoe.
“You were told you would be rewarded for diligence,” Cox said. “Half your task was done well. Half was not. Therefore, you will receive half of what was promised.”
He withdrew a folded wad of bills. He peeled them apart, counted out a couple, and held them out.
Friday hesitated. “Half?”
“Half,” Cox repeated. “For half the truth. If you want the rest, you’ll have to wait until next Sunday when you can go back and do it again. And don’t let them rag you.”
“How’m I suppose to do that? How’m I gonna know who's a real person and who's a… a fractional?"
Cox cast his eyes heavenwards for a second or two, appealing for strength. “Use your instincts. Use your common sense. If the guy’s grinning like the Cheshire Cat, he’s probably teasing you.”
Friday pouted. “That ain’t fair, Reverend.”
Cox’s gaze didn’t waver. “Fairness is a word for the playground. God only cares about justice.”
Friday looked at the money, then at the fire. Finally, he leaned forward, took the bills, and stuffed them into his jacket pocket. His shoulders slumped.
“Don’t them justice neither.”
“I’d advise you to shut up right now.”
Avoiding Cox’s glare, Friday’s eyes stuck to the girly posters. A thought struck him. Again, Cox watched it in real-time, moving across the man’s grimy face from the forehead to the eyes to the lips.
“She here yet? That girl?”
“Not yet. She will be, though.”
“She a cop, right?”
“She is more than that,” Cox said. His voice softened, almost tender. “She is my mirror. My adversary. My proof.”
Friday frowned, looked up. “Proof of what?”
“That the Lord’s design is perfect,” Cox said. “I shaped her. Not her body, not her face. But her path. Thirteen years of pain and trial and loss. Thirteen years in which she was tempered, like steel in fire. The girl who began all this is gone. What remains is the instrument I intended.”
Friday shifted on the pew. “Sounds kinda messed up, Reverend. No offence.”
“None taken,” Cox said mildly. “The prophets were always misunderstood by their companions. Moses stammered. Jeremiah wept. Elijah fled into the wilderness. Did you know the Lord sent ravens to feed him?”
Friday shook his head.
“Then you have reading to do,” Cox said. “Knowledge, Man Friday, is the first step to obedience.”
The younger man rubbed his hands together, nervous. “So, uh, what do you want me to do now?”
“Stay here and rest,” Cox said. “Eat. I’ve left food in the sacristy—cans of meat, fish, bread. Enough for a week. Finish the task next Sunday. But this time, think. Observe. Check.”
Friday nodded, eager again, desperate to redeem himself. “Got it.”
“Good.”
Cox stood and picked up a small metal cross from the camping table, table, turning it between his fingers. “Do you remember what day this is?”
“Of course, it’s Thunday.”
“And what is Sunday?”
“The Lord’s day.”
“Then remember this also,” Cox said quietly. “Sunday is when the mask slips. When men who claim to believe show the truth of their faith by the things they choose to do instead of worship. They think no one sees. But He sees. And now, so do we.”
Friday nodded, almost reverently.
Cox watched him for a moment longer, then waved a hand. “Goodbye, Friday.”
Later, much later, Cox arrived back at his own lodgings. Not a church but another place with a different, original purpose. The only surviving reminder of that was a sign saying Strictly No Smoking Anywhere and a row of rusted gas taps.
He reached for a cigarette, an old habit he rarely indulged. The match flared briefly, a tiny dawn in the gloom. He inhaled once, a single, almighty drag to the bottom of his lungs, then set the cigarette down, untouched, to die in its own smoke.
He had his own wall art here. On the wall opposite, Kate Valentine stared back at him from a dozen angles.
He rose, moved closer, studying her through the years.
The early photos he had obtained from newspapers, old Bureau archives, a few Facebook hacks and a childhood neighbor, willing to sell memory for cash.
Later, he had taken them himself—or had others take them.
There she was at twenty-eight, standing beside her partner outside a courthouse; at thirty-three, looking awkward in a peach-colored bridesmaid’s dress.
Every stage, an unfolding. Every trial, a step in the pilgrimage he had mapped.
He spoke softly, as though she could hear him through the paper.
“You have walked the path I set before you, Kate. Each loss, each terror, each test—you endured. And now you are almost ready.”
He touched one of the photographs, the pad of his thumb resting briefly on her printed cheek. “When you find me, you will understand. You will see that I was never your enemy. I was the fire of your refiner.”
A noise made him glance upward—the creak of the roof in the heat, or perhaps the shifting of a pigeon in the rafters.
For a moment, the sound reminded him of Brennan, the last confession gurgling in the man’s throat.
Cox had expected more from that one: defiance, perhaps, or some effort at justification.
Instead there had been only disbelief, the blank animal incomprehension of a man who had no idea what sin he was paying for.
He’d been a small man, Brennan. Slight in body, slight in faith.
The kind who worked on the Sabbath and pretended that his moral blindness was a different, ghastly, modern word.
Drive. His death had been clean, almost merciful.
Cox had prayed over him after. He always did.
The prayer for release, the one that began, “Lord, take this soul who has trespassed and deliver him unto the light of thy judgement.”
He knelt now on the cracked tiles and repeated the words under his breath.
“Lord, take this soul who has trespassed, and deliver him unto the light of thy judgement. Cleanse him of the lie of labor, of the delusion of self-righteousness. Forgive his ignorance, if not his pride.”
The echo in the building made the words larger than they were, turning prayer into proclamation.
Cox stayed kneeling, eyes closed, breathing evenly. He let his mind drift. In the darkness behind his eyelids, faces appeared—Brennan’s, fading; Kate’s, vivid; Friday’s, blurred and shapeless. Around them all, the slow-turning wheel of the plan.
It had taken him years to build the pattern, each act another spoke. People thought of him as a killer, but he wasn’t. Killing was incidental. Necessary sometimes, yes, but never the goal. His true work was revelation—forcing the world to see what it was.
He rose, stretching the stiffness from his knees. His eyes fell upon the reception desk, or what remained of it: a crescent of painted plywood, spattered with mildew. Someone had sprayed NYCRIPS neatly in the center.
A gust of wind rattled the loose boards at the door, sending a flurry of dust swirling through the light. He looked toward it, sensing the shift in temperature, the whisper of rain. Evening was nearby. Soon the city’s lights would bloom like wounds across the skyline.
He took out the list of names. He sighed, in the manner of a man who has made a decision. And he smiled, basking in the calm that came only when you knew what was next.
Outside, the Sabbath waned, and the sinners worked on.