Grief Street

you feel you’re up against, Neil? A force of especially intelligent evil?”
    “That’s it, yes.”
    “And it’s the help of the church you’ve forsaken that you’re now asking?”
    “I—”
    “Never mind, save to rejoice you’ve come to the right place. But I’ve not the proper guidance for you myself, Neil. Nor the time. Tell me true, though, are you afraid?”
    Was I?
    “By your silence, I take it you’re afraid indeed, son. ’Tis no shame, even for a policeman. Can you remember the Carmina Gaedelica? The ancient prayer of preservation given to God by Irish fishermen caught in their boats in hurricanes, and crofters in their fields as the cyclones blew?” Again I was silent, in the shamed way only a shamrock Catholic who has forgot a sacred boyhood lesson can be.
    “God to enfold me, God to surround me, God in my speaking, God in my thinking...”
    Father Declan intoned the old words quickly. I remembered the rest, as if reciting the Baltimore catechism itself. God in my sleeping, God in my waking, God in my watching, God in my hoping, God in my life, God in my lips, God in my soul, God in my heart, God in my sufficing, God in my slumber, God in mine ever-living soul.
    When he was through keening aloud that which drummed through my own memory, Father Declan consulted his wrist-watch. “Now I’ve got my next mass, and after that the preparing to do for the march in the street tonight. The Way of the Cross, you know. Meanwhile, son, remember the Carmina Gaedelica and you’ll be safe from Satan himself.”
    “I’ve got more questions.”
    “Do you remember Father Gerald Morrison?”
    “He’s still alive?”
    “Yes, and I know what you little shits called him—Creepy Morrison. That I keep track of, too.”
    “We were only kids—”
    “Hellions you were, it’s truer said. Anyway—Father Gerald, that’s your man, not I. The kind of priest I am’s good for the usual sins, such as getting drunk and cursing and idling. But Father Gerald, now there’s a man studious in the Ways of keenest perfidy. It’s because he’s Society of Jesus, of course. The Jesuits know even the sins of the popes.”
    “Where do I find him?”
    “Father Gerald serves in hermitage.”
    “Creepy Morrison’s a hermit?”
    “Aye. He’s living upstate in the Catskill mountains, studying and praying for the sins of the world. There’s a way of seeing him if you like. I can arrange it. It’s not far, but the journey’s no easy one.”

    Anybody in New York with access to a radio or television set had heard about the murder of Rabbi Paznik. Not really all about it, but certainly as much as the department wanted the public informed for the time being.
    I stopped at Alps Pharmacy on the comer of Ninth Avenue for some aspirin and caught the public line on WINS radio. People were not being told about Marv’s face being stolen away, nor about fourteen eyewitnesses claiming the killer was a “shadow.” These details were omitted for the purposes of fact-checking against a perp, a necessary withholding tactic in high-profile homicide cases likely to attract a parade of remorseful wackos wanting to be locked up on account of what their demons supposedly did. The Paznik murder was such a likely case.
    Ruby had heard the news, such as it was, and by the sight of me understood something beyond the headlines: namely that this was a job with my name written all over it. One look at my troubled face coming through the door and she knew I was on a case requiring a detective possessed of that special quality Inspector Neglio once praised in me. “Hock,’ he said one grand, boozy night back in my drinking days, the night he presented me with my gold shield, “you’ve got an imagination just this side of being a lunatic.”
    Again, I found Ruby curled up on the couch below the parlor window reading the script of Grief Street through her froggy wire-rims. And again, the sky through the window behind her was turning black and blue with the approach ot another Hell’s Kitchen night.
    She took off the glasses. Ordinarily, Ruby’s hazel chocolate eyes are bright and eager. But not now. They had gone vacant and gray-brown, like a street in a driver education film waiting for some terrible accident to happen.
    “Don’t cry,” I said, knowing Ruby’s own considerable imagination. I sat down beside her, kissed her brown cheeks, which smelled of blueberry-scented soap, put a hand over hers. I might well have been touching