Passionaries Read online

  “You sick sonofabitch,” she railed as the bottom of her skirt started to catch fire. Cloaked women ran to her to put it out, but she remained oblivious to everything but the priest. “What about his body?”

  “His heart,” he gasped, wiping the blood from his lip, trying to stay incognito before slipping away into the crowd. “It’s been taken.”

  The lights in the penthouse boardroom at Perpetual Help Hospital burned brightly long after midnight. An assembly had been called. Senator, international bank chairman, hedge fund CEO, university president, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, telecom magnate, ad agency founder. Barometers of public markets, consumption, and perception with the means and mechanisms at their disposal to shape them. Men and women with global influence and reach. Big shots. Their names and reputations widely recognized and acclaimed, but their agenda known only to one another. All the chairs around the conference table were filled. All but one. The one reserved for the media mogul, Daniel Less. Frey noted the absence and rose to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. Good Friday . . . night.” Dr. Frey circled the table, pouring glass after glass of fine Bordeaux into each of his seven distinguished guests’ goblets.

  He raised his drink and offered a toast. “To the future.”

  The others joined, but their lack of enthusiasm was obvious to him.

  “Your invitation sounded urgent, Doctor,” the billionaire investor began. “I didn’t come here for a cocktail.”

  “I’ve asked you here to quiet rumblings I’ve been hearing. Concerns about the rise of the three Brooklyn girls, Lucy Ambrose, Cecilia Trent, and Agnes Fremont.”

  Frey’s tone was somewhat casual. It did not land well on the ears of his colleagues. Sebastian’s escape, the events at Precious Blood, and the investigation and trial that followed had caused a fracturing in their normally united front. He had not expected the meeting to become so contentious so quickly.

  “Don’t soothe us like one of your patients, Doctor,” the Ivy League chancellor groused. “You have brought much unwanted attention to yourself and notoriety to the girls. Exactly the sort of thing we hoped to avoid.”

  “Don’t worry, no one’s anonymity has been compromised.”

  “We are expecting that you have some news to report.”

  Frey returned to the head of the table and took his seat. “I do have some news.”

  “About those girls, I trust. And why they are still alive?” the senator asked. “Is your strategy to lull them into a false sense of security before you act?”

  Frey considered his next statement before speaking. “The girls are alive because I need them to be alive.”

  “Need them?

  “Yes.”

  The sour faces in the room hardened further.

  “Surely I don’t have to remind you of the legends?” the banker nearly shouted.

  “It has taken our kind nearly two thousand years to undo the events in Bethlehem,” the tech wizard insisted.

  Frey inhaled deeply. “Sebastian identified them. Empowered them. They imagine themselves the incarnation of ancient Christian saints. Martyrs.”

  “Be that as it may, we are the ancestors of the brave and the powerful. Of Herod, of Pilate, of Maximus Thrax,” the ad agency executive shot back. “Of those who sent their kind to the lions, the chopping block, and the cross.”

  “And they must be sent again, before things spiral out of our control,” the telecom tycoon added. “Unleash those worthless addicts, those vandals, on them as you must and let’s be done with this.”

  “There is time,” Frey advised calmly.

  “Time for what?” another challenged. “Once the spark is ignited, the fire spreads quickly. Remember, the so-called martyrs whose legacies they claim were born into a pagan world. It didn’t take them long to change it.”

  “Yes,” the mogul concurred. “These girls herald the Parousia, The Second Coming, and we cannot afford to let that happen.”

  “We will not fail again.”

  “I have my reasons,” Frey said, doing little to calm the angst of those assembled.

  “And I have my doubts, Doctor,” the fund manager interrupted. “They made quick work of your assassins in the bone chapel. They will be even harder to defeat the longer this goes on.”

  “They are like heatseeking missiles, launched from the distant past into the present,” the senator analogized. “They must be extinguished before they hit their target and complete their mission.”

  “Thank you for the history lesson,” Frey replied arrogantly. “It is most unnecessary.”

  The room grew thick with tension. The banker rose and slammed his fist on the boardroom table. Frey remained calm, his eyes closed.

  “They are disruptors,” the tech whiz croaked in the vernacular of his industry. “Each day that passes their reputation grows.”

  “While our job becomes more difficult.”

  “Billboards. Websites. Headlines. Rumors of miracles. People following them to corner bodegas, camping out in front of their homes, turning stoops to shrines, building roadside altars, genuflecting to them in the streets.”

  “I would think such chaos would provide perfect cover for some sort of accident?” the banker opined. “Surely our friends in law enforcement and the media would help us manage such an occurrence.”

  Frey rose and pointed at the billboard of Lucy, eyes aglow, suspended above the distant Brooklyn Queens Expressway, visible from the penthouse window. It read simply:

  SEE FOR YOURSELF

  “Yes, but why? Why do people follow them?” Frey questioned the group like a professor goading his students.

  The gathering fell silent, unwilling to believe that Frey would ask such an obvious question. Frey answered it himself.

  “Because they believe them. They believe in them.”

  “How long before they realize their full power and become impossible to defeat?”

  “To kill them is not to defeat them” Frey insisted. “People die. In colosseums. On crosses. Not ideas. History is proof of that.”

  “You’ve framed the problem,” the Wall Street titan advised. “What is your solution, Doctor?”

  “They must be rejected first. It was the mistake made at the very beginning and we’ve paid for it throughout history.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “This brings me to the second reason I need them alive.”

  “Are we in a classroom, Doctor?”

  Frey once again took his seat, looking each of his colleagues in the eye as he began his discourse.

  “When the subway workers brought the chaplets of Saint Lucy, Saint Agnes, and Saint Cecilia from Europe, they brought not only antiquities, but their cults of devotion from the old world to the new. They brought their faith. An entire legacy of it.”

  “And they paid a heavy price,” the advertising bigwig noted.

  “Yes, but so did we. Precious Blood rose above their graves. The chapel was dedicated to their memory, the pews filled for generations, their bones revered, the chaplets enshrined. Waiting for this moment.”

  “But no longer,” the ad exec concluded. “We chipped away at the culture, the so-called morality, at the congregation until it was but a shell, like so many others here and around the world. Marginalized. Brought low.”

  The meeting was interrupted when the conference room door opened unexpectedly.

  “But it has not been brought low,” the newcomer exclaimed abrasively, taking his seat opposite Dr. Frey’s. “Sebastian changed all of that.”

  “Mr. Less, so good of you to come.” Frey welcomed him through pursed lips. “And congratulations on the quarterly earnings for the teen fashion magazine group you publish.”

  “It’s my pleasure to improve the value of your stock portfolio, Alan, but don’t expect the same for next quarter.”

  “The economic downturn,” Frey suggested snidely.

  “No, not the economy. The climate. The cultura
l climate. Truckloads of subscriptions have been canceled in the New York area alone. ‘Tired of their insecurities being preyed upon’ is the feedback we’re getting.”

  “Teens can be fickle,” Frey replied defensively.

  “Yes, they tend to gravitate to what’s happening, and those girls are happening,” Less informed. “It is no longer just the old, the desperate, and the old-fashioned that gravitate to them.”

  “Say your piece. We are listening.”

  “The empowerment message they are peddling is resonating across the board, and it does not need to be merchandised and therefore cannot be co-opted.”

  “Are you saying we are powerless?” The tech guru laughed. “With the assets at our disposal?”

  “No, I’m saying we are losing.”

  Less’s sobering analysis threw a pall of silence over the meeting. The media mogul took his seat and continued.

  “The symbolism of replacing Precious Blood with a gleaming high-rise of multimillion dollar condos was perfect. The triumph of money and modernism over a bankrupt morality and outdated superstition,” Less enthused. “But now, the church has been replaced not by soaring steel and glass but by these three girls. It is revived in them.”

  The Constellation Entertainment chairman was known among the group not least for his foresight. He saw the future and parlayed his independent record label, Tritone, into one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world, crushing and then swallowing less savvy competitors in music, film, television, video, live performance, broadcasting, publishing, and new media technologies while cultivating a roster of artists and brands that read like a who’s who of contemporary pop culture. To be with him was to have the world at your disposal.

  Several in the room had partnered with him to change laws, gut regulations, lower standards, finance acquisitions and buyouts, and manipulate public opinion for a variety of purposes. Several, but not Dr. Frey, who’d always been wary of the executive’s high-profile and unbridled ambition.

  “The three girls are only part of the problem,” the doctor offered cryptically.

  “You could have fooled me,” Less griped. “There are petitions to reopen Precious Blood circulating through these neighborhoods with tens of thousands of signatures on them. A year ago they couldn’t put twenty people in a pew on Sunday morning. Now there are overflow outdoor services in Prospect Park. Even the archbishop is astonished, I might even say worried, at the sudden change.”

  “Perhaps because the archbishop has nothing to do with it,” the banker asserted. “They have been blindsided as well.”

  “What else could be the matter?” Less asked incredulously.

  Frey approached the other end of the table with his nearly empty wine bottle, pouring the last drops into the latecomer’s glass.

  “There is a new relic.” Frey’s declaration was met with skeptical stares and confused gasps around the table.

  “From the chapel?” the senator queried.

  “No, from the morgue.”

  “How?” Less asked.

  “Rumors came to my attention that such a thing might happen, and I arranged for a few of my staff from the hospital to be present at the autopsy, but they were turned away. It was done quickly and secretly.”

  The grumbling in the room was so loud it threatened to bleed under the door and through the walls.

  “You’ve had our friends in the police department twist some arms, I presume?”

  “Yes, but the body had been cremated by that time,” Frey explained.

  “And the heart stolen?” Less chided.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think the girls did this?”

  “No, but it won’t be long before they hear about it,” Frey said quietly. “Once they do, they will be compelled to find it.”

  “And lead you to it?” the senator concluded.

  Frey nodded.

  “We are watching them closely and working our other contacts in the medical examiners office.”

  “It must be found!” the telecom baron exclaimed.

  “I will find it.”

  “This is of grave concern,” Less responded, tapping his manicured fingernail on the polished mahogany table. “The boy is already regarded as a saint in some circles. Saints leave behind relics. Relics inspire cults. Cults grow into movements. The longer the heart remains hidden from us, the greater the danger.”

  A brief silence was followed by an alternate proposal.

  “This must be of some interest to the church as well?” the banker assessed. “Have you made them aware?”

  “I assume you are reaching out to our colleagues at the Vatican,” Less said.

  “Let them deal with this and we can wash our hands of this whole affair,” the banker said.

  “Yes,” Frey advised tersely. “Some in place there are suspicious and perceive a threat to their authority as well. They will share our interest in debunking the relic and the girls.”

  “But not killing them,” the investor retorted skeptically. “They are clergy after all, not Mafia.”

  “Once I possess the relic, I will take care of the girls.”

  Less was not persuaded. “Doctor, we left this matter in your hands because of your position, and your unique background, but our patience is now being sorely tested.”

  “Perhaps I could prescribe something for your anxiety?” Frey answered snidely.

  “Your arrogance in the face of such failure astounds even me,” Less chided. “The boy escaped you. The attackers were defeated. These self-styled saints are making their mark. A new relic is in the hands of our adversaries. Our investment in Precious Blood is lost.”

  “But not our cause,” Frey pushed back.

  “Not yet,” Less countered. “You seek to influence minds, control behavior. We seek to control attitudes. Influence trends. I tell you this for sure, things are trending away from us. Gradually now, but the floodgates will eventually open unless they are dealt with quickly and decisively.”

  “I have every confidence in my strategy,” Frey reassured.

  Less pointed in frustration out at the billboard of Lucy in the distance.

  “What is that girl saying?” he conjectured. “Pull back the curtain. Ignore the illusion that’s been created for you. Friends, we are the curtain!”

  “Surely it will take more than signage and words to roll back the tide that has been surging in our direction for centuries now.”

  “That billboard was financed with small donations. Kids emptying their piggybanks, college students sacrificing their daily lattes, old ladies lighting fewer candles on Sunday. And that space doesn’t come cheap.”

  The ad exec nodded. “True. It was leased from my biggest client.”

  “Everybody loves a bandwagon,” Frey observed dismissively.

  “Everybody loves a winner,” Less parried. “Ours is a collaborative enterprise, but also a competitive one. Time and our patience is running out. We’ve tried it your way. Next, we will try it mine.”

  “They will lead us to it,” Frey declared with certainty. “And this matter will be closed for all eternity.”

  “Then we are all agreed on the task?” the senator asked.

  Everyone present nodded their approval, even the media mogul, reluctantly.

  As the meeting disbanded, the doctor approached Less.

  “Is your problem with the girls or with me?” Frey challenged.

  The mogul did not mince words.

  “Find the heart. Kill the girls,” Less stated. “The clock, Dr. Frey, is ticking.”

  13 Cecilia sat cross-legged on the wide-plank pine floor in her washed-out black tank top and panties, strumming her guitar, staring out at the harbor through the grungy factory windows of her Red Hook apartment. Trying to find her voice for the comeback performance she was planning. The loft space was poorly lit except for the early morning sun, unfinished and unfurnished but for a ratty couch and table and chairs she had picked up Dumpster diving. Pretty mu
ch status quo apartment-wise ever since she’d come to New York. Her eviction from the Williamsburg place turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Red Hook was a place for her to hide. Away from the fans, away from the prying, judgmental eyes of the press and her hipster brethren. It was safe, if a little lonely.

  She stood in the window and could see the Statue of Liberty from one side and lower Manhattan from the other. The bay was bustling with ferries and water taxis and tugboats and freighters, their enormous hulls leaving powerful wakes, adding exponentially to the characteristic chop of the restless, unpredictable waters. Behind her was the less picturesque view of the public houses, the onetime epicenter of the crack epidemic in New York City, now just an eyesore, the very definition of an apartment “block,” grim and styleless but functional. An inconvenience to the developers looking to gentrify the peninsula with furniture superstores and big-box organic markets most locals couldn’t afford to shop in. The gray and blue suited brokers anxiously boarded the water taxis for their Wall Street offices on one side while the tenement tenants dutifully boarded buses to clean houses and babysit children on the other. Cecilia pondered the 360-degree view of success, of struggle, surrounding her. She left her guitar lying on the floor and walked to the window.

  She dropped her head, her sharp black bob meeting her lips, trying to figure it all out, surveying the signs of life amidst the urban blight for an answer. Her eyes hopscotched over lot after vacant lot, all the way to the ferry piers. Children played hooky in some, making up games from the rubble; others were fenced off and furrowed, transformed into tiny farms with rows of tomatoes and lettuce. Indeed, signs of life were everywhere. A neighborhood rehabbing if not yet reborn. It wouldn’t be long before construction began, she figured. In a few years, she laughed to herself, this place would be worth a fortune.

  What is the difference between success and failure, she pondered. Desire. Determination. Diligence. Definitely. But it was something more. Belief. That it was possible. That it could be done, whatever it was. It was the hardest part, and the most essential. You had to believe in it, in yourself, before you could do it. Only you.