CHAPTER 9

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT TO THE REDEEMER’S LAW PROJECT, YOU ARE COMING INTO THE STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS. YOUR EXPERIENCE HERE WILL BE FAR LESS CONFUSING IF YOU USE THE CHAPTER INDEX ON THE RIGHT TO GO BACK TO THE INTRODUCTION. OR AT LEAST TO THE PROLOGUE.

-- DAN

CHAPTER 9

Despite the weather services’ forecasts of scattered showers, the next morning dawned with an intensely blue sky, marred only by a few thick clouds on the eastern horizon. Traffic was noisy as usual, but the air tasted clean, and Darius Clay enjoyed it as he walked to work.

A neatly-kept man in his late thirties with coffee-colored skin and a few threads of gray in his tightly cropped hair, Darius adjusted the lapels of his double-breasted suit as he made his way down the sidewalk.

Monolithic buildings rose all around him, and every now and again he amused himself by imagining they were all made of stone, each one a single colossal shard meticulously carved out by a giant sculptor.

He related them in his mind to the Chinese ivory eggs he’d seen as a child at the 1982 World’s Fair: each piece of ivory, about the size of a large man’s fist, intricately fashioned into an egg and covered with tiny figures of people on bridges and balconies, in windows and doorways. And yet, inside that egg was another egg, completely separate from the outer one, that had been carved inside the larger carving. No seams, no hinges. The sculptor had to send tiny picks and probes through the openings of the outer sculpture to fashion a totally separate egg.

Staring at one such egg, mightily impressed by the feat, Darius thought about describing it to his friends—and then realized there was a third egg inside the second, and a fourth inside the third, each of them unconnected to the outer ones and all of them just as exquisitely carved.

The patience and mastery of skill required to accomplish such a thing, the lifetime it would have taken, boggled his mind. Thinking of it still filled him with a delicious sense of awe.

And so he tried to imagine, every so often, that all of the city’s buildings were like the Chinese eggs, all of them the products of a master craftsman’s life work. Every hallway, every elevator, every light fixture carved from living rock. In this way he could sometimes appreciate them as something besides the festering ant hills they so often turned out to be.

Darius moved up Peachtree Street and prepared to turn onto Ellis. The newsstand he passed every day would be there, he knew, and he switched from his contemplation of the city’s architectural structures to the somewhat less lofty debate he’d held internally, for about twenty seconds each morning, over the last seven weeks. Rounding the corner, he stopped at the stand, picked up copies of the Chronicle and the AJC, and stared at the latest issue of Mandate, the gay skin magazine his new lover, Frederick, enjoyed so much.

Darius had been trying to decide whether or not to buy one of the magazines for Frederick, bring it home and surprise him with it. He’d seen how much pleasure Frederick took from the glossy photos, and he agreed that the men in the pictures were indeed beautiful, but Darius had never bought a magazine of that kind in his life. He felt, and would admit it readily, unreasonably squeamish about it.

Frederick bought them himself; Darius wouldn’t be doing him any kind of special favor by bringing one home. There was really no need to. Or was that just a rationalization, a convenient excuse not to make the purchase? Why shouldn’t he buy one? He was a grown man, after all—past grown, hell, he was almost middle-aged. So what stopped him? Simple embarrassment? Fear? If so, fear of what?

He took his hand out of his pants pocket, made as though to pick up a magazine, and hesitated. He glanced up at the proprietor, who favored him with a dull stare, cocked one eyebrow and said, “Decisions, decisions.”

Darius had his mouth open for a retort when a tortured voice carried over the ambient sound of traffic.

“The judgment of the Lord is at hand!”

Darius swiveled around, searched for the source of the voice, and heard it again: “He hath responded to the wickedness that plagues our world today, and he hath sent his servant!”

Darius spotted it: an old homeless man, clad in rags, stood on the opposite street corner and waved a scrap of newspaper. Darius thought he recognized the scrap, but couldn’t tell for sure at that distance. He dropped his own newspapers back on the rack, waited for the light to turn green, and crossed the street.

Atlanta had more than its fair share of the homeless. Many of them were frighteningly aggressive in their requests for money, and many more gave strong impressions of mental illness. But the man across the street seemed different right away. His voice, though badly strained, held a note of coherence and purpose that Darius suspected had come from formal training.

“Thieves, murderers, rapists! Thine evil ways do not escape the Lord’s sight! Thy days of chaos are numbered, know ye this!”

Darius drew close enough to see the newspaper clipping. It was one of the front-page Chronicle articles from a few days before, describing the “masked man” who had allegedly appeared out of the night to save the lives of two cops in a fouled drug sting. A couple of subsequent sightings had surfaced, carried by several of the smaller papers as well as the Chronicle and the Journal-Constitution. The tattered street preacher waved the clipping like a flag.

“The servant of God has come! The servant of God is among us! The Redeemer is here!”

Darius stared at the old man as he passed him. The preacher had undeniable charisma, and Darius wondered what he might have been earlier in his life. An actual preacher? A motivational speaker, perhaps? ...Maybe a drill sergeant?

His conjecture cut off abruptly as he jolted hard into a stringy teenager who seemed to be equally mesmerized by the old man.

The teenager was certainly distinctive, and gave Darius momentary pause. The kid had shaved one side of his head bald and dyed the straight hair on the other side a brilliant red. It hung down past several facial piercings to the collar of a battered leather jacket. Until Darius bumped into him, the kid’s eyes were big as the proverbial dinner plates, staring alternately at the old man and at the clipping.

Startled, the kid and Darius made mumbled apologies, and Darius hurried along his way, faintly embarrassed by his clumsiness. The preacher’s voice grew fainter behind him, and faded completely as Darius turned another corner.

The voice stuck in his head, though. Through the lobby, into the elevator, up to the sixth floor and the Chronicle’s rabbit warren of desks and privacy dividers, the street preacher wouldn’t leave him alone. One word rang in his ears: Redeemer.

Through a window, he noticed the sky beginning to turn overcast after all. Darius rapped on the glass wall of his editor’s office, then pushed on the door just below the name “Edgar Watts.” Watts looked up as Darius entered.

The antithesis of the harried, cutthroat newspaper editor, Watts dressed even more neatly than Darius, with razor-cut hair and a meticulously trimmed gray beard. He didn’t wait for Darius to speak.

“This masked man thing is turning into something real.” His voice flowed out deep and smooth. Darius loved to listen to him. “Fodder for your column, I’d say. There’s a doctor over at Gavring who claims this guy delivered a patient to her last night before vanishing into thin air. Name’s Carla Gates.” Watts paused to take a long swallow from a bottle of spring water, and Darius casually and with faint and lingering disappointment regarded the framed pictures of the man’s wife and children on his desk.

“Well, then, the fates have smiled on us this morning,” Darius said. “Forget calling him ‘masked man.’ The guy’s name is The Redeemer.”

# # #

Outside, on the street, Nathan Pittman shuffled along the sidewalk toward the MARTA station, the homeless man’s speech echoing in the back of his mind. Nervously he adjusted his eyebrow ring. He couldn’t stop thinking about school, though. Couldn’t stop thinking about Paige.

At his old school he’d made the dean’s list every quarter. He maintained at least a 3.87 GPA. He was staff photographer for the yearbook, and had five trophies in his room from kickboxing tournaments. It hadn’t mattered what he looked like; he’d chosen his own appearance and been accepted that way, and whether or not he dyed his hair or put a ring through his eyebrow hadn’t mattered one bit. Nobody said, Hey, there’s that freak with the crap in his face. Or Man, just look at that loser. If anyone said anything at all, they said, Hey, that’s Nathan Pittman, he’s up for Star Student, or Hey, Nathan, killer rings.

Well. Maybe not total acceptance. The old administration wasn’t too crazy about his appearance, no. But the principal was pretty liberal, and the few times a teacher had called his parents... Ha. Wrong place to look for concern. The two ghouls he had to call “mother” and “father” never gave a rat’s ass about him, unless he somehow directly inconvenienced them.

Then his mother got transferred, and all that peer acceptance was swept away.

Here no one knew him. Though more than ready to prove himself, to show his new classmates who he was, no one gave him the chance. No one except Paige.

He closed his eyes briefly, and corrected that thought. No one at all.



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