My Soul to Keep Part 6

"You thirst," Khaldun says, rubbing Dawit's wrist.

In a silent line, they follow Khaldun down the stairs into the magnificent sanctuary carved from stone. Khaldun has told them how men broke their backs bringing the stone down from the Lasta Mountains under the reign of King Gebra Maskal Lalibela. Khaldun knows all that has come before. Dawit gazes at an archway as they pa.s.s beneath it, and he sees birds painted above the chiseled stone. Artists have covered the walls with images of saints and Christ, all of the figures' big brown eyes wide and full of piety.

In a corner of the church, they find seats in the rows of flat wooden benches. Khaldun mounts his torch in a hole carved in the wall and sits before them on the floor, his legs folded beneath him. They seem afraid even to stir as they wait for Khaldun to speak.

"My pupils," Khaldun begins in the voice that sounds ancient though his face is not much older than Dawit's, "your thirst for knowledge is the magnet that brings you to me. It is your brotherhood. You seek all knowledge, and all knowledge you shall attain. But to walk this path, you must follow with your heart as well as your mind. You must follow without fear, without doubt. This is a path from which no mortal man returns. There are no visitors to this home. Once you enter, it is yours to dwell in for all time."

They sit before Khaldun as if statues. His lessons do not usually begin this way. Dawit had hoped Khaldun would bring them the hollow bamboo instruments he is teaching them to blow to produce pleasing music, or that he would tell them more tales from African kingdoms. What is this he speaks of tonight?

Khaldun's voice floats between Dawit's ears like a magic balm. Dawit wants to move, yet he cannot. The voice fills his veins, seducing him. He knows he is hearing a sorcerer.

"You Christian brothers ... remind us why Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit," Khaldun says. "What was it they sought? Was it riches? Was it sins of the flesh? What did they seek?"

"Knowledge," one of the monks answers him.

Khaldun's face breaks into a smile of perfect teeth. "Yes. Knowledge. Knowledge, in the end, is the only prize."

"You drank Christ's blood?" Dawit blurts, interrupting.

The eyes of the others fall to him. Khaldun, instead of appearing angry, continues to smile. "Dawit ... yes ... the inquisitive one, the new son of Islam. What can I tell you of Christ's blood? There is more than you learned in your Scriptures. There is more than what you find in the Bible, or in Muhammad's Qur'an. There is much more. Did you know that precious ounces of Christ's blood were stolen from the fresh corpse, drained into a leather pouch? This is true. I was there when it was done."

"For what purpose?" Dawit asks, his mouth dry.

The flame's dance alters Khaldun's face slightly, shifting him into shadow. "Once, in my travels long ago, I joined a group of shepherds. We met another traveler-in the random manner in which all of you met me-who told us of a dream. He asked if we knew of this man called Jesus. We did. We had all heard stories of his claims. The traveler said he did not follow this man's teachings, yet in his dream he learned that Christ was among the prophets chosen to rise. The traveler told us of a plan. And we listened.

"Our hearts were not ready for faith, but we were greedy for life. The dreamer took us to Calvary, where Christ was nailed, and we stood among his followers to watch him suffer and die. His death was not so serene as these paintings you see all around you. When the corpse was brought down, I watched my companion help clean his wounds and steal blood from Christ's own veins. We sat vigil for two days over the cold pouch. Then, not long before the reports of the empty burial cave miles from where we sat, the blood in our pouch grew warm. We could feel the heat when we pa.s.sed it between us. The blood lived."

With Khaldun's words, the room fills with gasps, murmurings of wonder. Khaldun silences them by raising his arm above his head. His voice grows as heavy as the rain pounding on the roof of the church.

"Our friend learned an incantation in his dream, a Ritual of Life for the Living Blood. He held up for us a vial of poison. Only through death, he said, could life return. He instructed us to drink the poison. At the instant of death, he told us, he would inflict a small wound and pour the Living Blood into our own veins to perform the Ritual of Life, repeating the words from his dream. There were six among us. One by one, we drank.

"Only I survived the Ritual. This, I believe, was in keeping with his design. The dreamer, who had not taken the poison, needed only one of us for his purposes. By morning, when I awoke, I cursed him. I thought him a devil, and a devil I now know he was. He asked me to perform the Ritual of Life on him, as I'd seen him attempt on the others, but my heart was overcome with fear. I had a vision that he would become a monster, perverting the blood to harm scores of men and make himself a G.o.d. After he drank the poison, I stood over him with the pouch of Living Blood in my hand, but I gave him none. I allowed him to die. Does that answer your question, Dawit?"

Dawit nods, transfixed and silent. "Why do you tell us this?" whispers Mahmoud. His voice shakes.

Khaldun studies their faces a moment before answering, his head turning from one side of the room to the other. "I have learned much in my years. I have been alone too long. I need obedient pupils who are willing to journey with me in Life for the purpose of knowledge, and knowledge alone."

"Do you have the blood still?" Dawit asks.

"The Ritual of Life awakened me from the dead, and I drank what little blood remained. Its saltiness coated my throat. The Blood of Life is inside me. I have lived much like a hermit for many years, asking G.o.d to forgive me. But He does not hear my prayers because I have stolen from one of His favored children. So, I no longer seek redemption. I seek knowledge instead, because knowledge is infinite. And I seek pupils. Two hundred years ago on this night, I found a lame dog. I poisoned his food and performed the Ritual of Life as I remembered it, emptying blood from my veins into a wound I made in the animal's flesh. That dog is with me still, and he has never been lame since. He guards me when I sleep." He paused, shrouding his voice in a near-whisper. "I can do the same for a man."

Another gasp fills the dank room. The men stare at one another, their eyes wide. Excited, Mahmoud squeezes Dawit's knee hard, peering at him with wonder. Dawit brushes his hand away, leaning close to Mahmoud's ear. "He lies," he whispers. "He says he has a dog. Where is the dog, then? What proof could we have of its age? He is a storyteller. These are Christian lies."

"Silence," Khaldun instructs, and they obey. He drops his robe past his shoulders until his hairless chest and abdomen are exposed. Then he pulls from his belt a long knife that gleams in the torchlight.

"Before I do what I must to show you the miracle of the Living Blood, you must promise to remain here the night, no matter what you see. You must wait as we waited. In the morning, all will be clear to you. Then you may choose to follow me."

They promise aloud, one by one, to remain the night.

Satisfied, Khaldun grasps the dagger so tightly that the muscles in his slight arm quiver. He closes his eyes, his face turned upward. Then, he plunges the knife into his own side. His mouth agape in a soundless scream, he drags the blade across his belly, leaving a yawning wound in his flesh. A river of blood gushes forward, releasing his coiled insides.

Frightened, the men leap to their feet and huddle in the back of the room. Khaldun looks like a slaughtered cow. He sits for a moment, watching his own innards escape through his wound, and then he crumples in a puddle of blood on the floor.

Instantly, two men break their promise and flee up the stairs. Dawit and Mahmoud watch them go, then they gaze at each other. They have promised to stay. With weak legs, they walk to the bench closest to Khaldun's corpse and sit before him, watching. Slowly, uncertainly, the others follow their example.

For hours, nothing happens. The torch is burning low.

"Look," one of the men whispers at last, pointing.

When did the b.l.o.o.d.y wound begin to close itself? Have they imagined this? Dawit leans close. He can see that, although Khaldun's innards and blood still lie around him, the long wound across his abdomen has sewn itself into a sealed, b.l.o.o.d.y scar.

"What Devil's work is this?" a monk mutters.

They wait, but still Khaldun does not stir. Dawit, like the others, dozes to sleep shortly before dawn, his chin resting against his chest. He awakens after someone places a warm hand on his shoulder.

Dawit opens his eyes to find Khaldun standing before him, wearing the smile of a father. His b.l.o.o.d.y scar is gone, his belly healed with barely a trace of the knife's treachery.

"Will you accept the Life gift, Dawit?" Khaldun whispers.

How can this be? A man can die and yet live again? And all wounds will heal as though by miracle? An army of such men would rule for eternity!

His mouth open with amazement, Dawit can only nod.

9.

"Her name is Rosalie Tillis Banks. The nursing-home lady. I have a case number," Jessica said into the telephone receiver, trying to sound patient with the police clerk in Chicago. "I'd love to swing by, but I'm in Miami. If someone could just fax it to me ..."

With their book deal signed and four days to go before her scheduled leave, Jessica wanted to get as many long-distance calls out of the way on the Sun-News's tab as she could. Sy was livid about losing two investigative reporters with only two weeks' notice, and she and Peter felt guilty, but it couldn't be helped. There was so much to do. They were trying to decide if Chicago should be one of their trips, and red tape had prevented her from getting the police report, which would have the names and telephone numbers of people she needed to talk to. Someone had supposedly mailed her a copy, but it never arrived.

Jessica had a sister on the phone. She'd have to play that card now, slipping into a more down-home vernacular. "Can't you hook me up? I see what you're saying about procedure, but it's a long way to Chicago. Sister, please."

The clerk, who sounded honestly harried, relented. "You better mention me in your book," she said.

Within an hour, the eight-page fax transmission began, and the old woman's death took shape. Banks, a widow, had no next-of-kin except an Indianapolis cousin who'd sent for her things. She'd suffered from advanced pancreatic cancer. Died January twelfth. The regular night nurse hadn't come in because of a storm the night of the murder, so the wing had been unattended for several hours longer than usual. (Made sense, Jessica thought. David had been in Evanston lecturing at Northwestern University that week,and he called home every night to complain about the snow.) Body wasn't discovered until morning. Only clue at all was an unfamiliar black male who'd asked about her the day she was murdered. Composite sketch to follow, the report said.

"Hey, Jessica, congrats on the book," a female reporter called to Jessica, walking past the wire room, where she hovered over the whirring fax machine.

"Thanks, Em."

Page eight was the composite sketch. The image on the fax was too dark and splotched to be helpful. All Jessica could see of the man was the curly outline of his hair and the whites of his eyes.

It figured the suspect was supposed to be black, she thought. That could be some staffer's convenient lie, like the white guy years ago who'd made up a story about a black attacker after he had killed his pregnant wife. That crazy woman who'd drowned her own sons, Susan Smith, had tried the same ploy. Pretty cozy, having a mystery visitor.

"The thing I like about Banks," Peter said, scanning the report over Jessica's shoulder at her desk, "is that her father was a legend in Chicago. Didn't the Trib say he was a jazz artist? Split, or vanished, when she was a kid. It's just interesting to me. The father vanishes, one of the great mysteries in jazz lore, and now the daughter is murdered."

"I don't know ..." Jessica sighed. "This isn't Unsolved Mysteries. The question is, Do we think this was abuse? We don't want to include her and then have some nutcase step forward and say s.p.a.cemen told him to do it."

"We can pin it on neglect, then, at the least. No night nurse. Someone comes in off the street and murders a patient."

Jessica still wasn't convinced. They'd heard about some heinous cases of long-term abuse in the past few weeks, and suddenly the Chicago incident seemed pretty mild. She scrawled the woman's name on a folder, slid the report inside, and dropped it on top of the pile of papers on her desk. "I don't think this is for us. Too many loose ends."

Peter shrugged, walking away. "I'll let you call it," he said. "By the way, would you please take those d.a.m.n flowers home?"

"I'm saying," the courts reporter who sat behind her spoke up, "you're stinking the whole place up."

Jessica had two dozen purple-hued roses on her desk, awash in baby's breath, delivered Monday from David to commemorate her last week until her book leave. A cynical part of her told her it wasn't coincidence that David sent the flowers after he saw the troll Peter had given her, but the gesture was thoughtful anyway.

He was being a good sport. Today, he was out pricing computers for her. He'd already cleared enough s.p.a.ce in their tiny bedroom-how, she didn't know-to furnish it with a small computer table. They would both be working at home, out of each other's way. He joked about erotic midafternoon "work breaks," when they could explore new areas of the house to ravage each other. The thought of it made her smile even now.

Her phone bleeped, and she expected it to be David. Their telepathy was frightening sometimes. But it wasn't him.

"Hey, Miss Wol-dee. This is Boo."

Boo. For long seconds, Jessica's brain was dumb with a lack of recognition. This man didn't sound like one of her usual sources, and she didn't recognize the street nickname.

The man lowered his voice slightly. From the hollow echo, she guessed he was at a pay phone. "Evergreen Courts projects. You don't *member me?"

Boo. Evergreen Courts, Like microfilm, it all came into focus. He was a small-time crack dealer who'd called months earlier with a tip that the county's housing maintenance staff was involved in trafficking and dealing in the projects. He'd given her one lead that turned out to be good and promised more, but she never heard from him again.

Jessica couldn't believe the bad timing. Here she was on her way out the door, and a potentially great story had reappeared.

"What happened to you?" she asked.

"I'm just chillin'. I still got that stuff for you. You know, what we talked about."

"You mean names?" Jessica asked.

"Yeah. One of *em just went up on a possession tip. But I don't trust the phone, if you know what I'm sayin'. I got it all wrote down for you. Then you can check and see if I'm lying."

"I know you're not lying. Everything you said panned out, but then you disappeared."

"Yeah, sorry about that, you know? But these m.u.t.h.af.u.c.kers don't play, so I gotta watch my back. *Scuse my language. When we gon' get together?"

Jessica looked up at the newsroom clock. It was three. She wanted to tell him to forget it, she was about to go write a book, but she couldn't resist the easy lure of written information. She could make a few calls while she was on leave. If nothing else, she could file it away and have a great story waiting for her when she got back. That would be a nice peace offering for Sy.

"Now's good for me," she said.

He breathed hard. "Uh-uh. Bag that. I can't have you comin' 'round here. They already think I narced on *em *cause I went clean. I got a job now, a security gig at the mall, the one on Hundred Sixty-Third Street."

"You're out of drugs?"

"I been out. I got a little boy to worry *bout, and he's old enough to start figurin' out s.h.i.t for himself, Daddy standin' on the corner. I ain't raisin' him up like that. You know?"

"I hear you," Jessica said. "Good for you."

"I go on at eight. Meet me up there, if you want. I'll be at the gameroom *til it closes, *bout eleven. Then I patrol the lot."

Uh-oh. Another late night. David wouldn't like it. And if he knew where she was going, he'd insist on escorting her. But she'd been to that mall a hundred times, and there were plenty of people around at that time of night.

"Can I bring a tape recorder?"

"Bring what you want," Boo said.

They agreed to meet at eight o'clock. Jessica called David and told him she'd have to work late, covering a meeting of elderly residents in Miami Beach. It sounded a h.e.l.l of lot safer than saying she was meeting a drug dealer at his night job. She considered her story an exaggeration rather than a lie, since sometimes she had to stretch the truth with David just to be free to do her job. He still grilled her on how late it could go, whether there would be any security, where she would park. Then he reminded her that Kira had asked to sleep over at Bea's because a teacher planning day had liberated her from school. With Kira gone, David had planned to come by to help Jessica load up some boxes from her office later that night.

"Tell you what, honey," she said, "I'll call you when the meeting lets out, then I can meet you at the paper. *Kay?"

Reluctantly, still not sold on her safety, he agreed.

Peter, too, was finishing up some loose ends, she discovered. She found him sitting in the newspaper's library doing a property records check on the computer. He said he was in for a long haul.

"So maybe I'll see you and Mr. Perfect later?" he said. "I have some boxes that need loading too. Ha, ha."

She ignored his sarcasm. "What are you working on?"

"Mob stuff. The usual. You?" he asked.

"Drug dealers."

He laughed. "All in a day's work, right?"

"That's for sure." She paused, watching his fingers at work on the keyboard as he typed names onto the screen. Not knowing why, she drank in every detail about him that night: his white shirt, his Warner Brothers Sylvester and Tweetie tie, his gray slacks. Even the fine hair on his neck, just below his hairline. She felt a pull toward him that was not romantic, but as natural and bittersweet as could be. Like saying goodbye too soon.

She felt an impulse, as she had at O'Leary's, to hug him.

"Peter? Don't you ever get afraid of p.i.s.sing them off?" she asked instead.

He chuckled, not looking up at her, his fingers tapping away. "You and David have watched those G.o.dfather movies once too often," he said. "This isn't personal. It's business."

"That's what I'll tell my drug dealers," she said, laughing.

It was seven-thirty, an hour after a blazing sunset beckoned five reporters, all on deadline, away from their computers to the window facing the city's skyline. The cafeteria downstairs was serving carved roast, a staff favorite. There hadn't been any shootings on the police scanners all day, and there were no accidents on any major expressways.

All the signs indicated it would be an extraordinary night.

10.