The men had set down Cody on the stage so he could face the man in the cocked hat. “The killer? I saw him once
at Miss Ling’s house. But I don’t know him,” Cody said.
“I need to find my friend the Preacher and his companion Noie Barnum. I think Ms. Ling has probably told you where they are.”
“No, sir, she didn’t do that.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why shouldn’t you? I don’t know anything about Barnum. I wish I had never heard of him.”
“But you do know Temple Dowling.”
“I wish I’d never heard of him, either.”
“Did you know he was a pedophile?”
“No.”
“When you went to work for him, he didn’t ask you to find young girls for him?”
“I’m not gonna even talk about stuff like that.”
“Before this is over, you’ll talk about many things. We have all night.”
Cody felt himself swallow. The man with the Russian accent sat down in the front pew and smiled and made a gesture to his men with his right hand. His men picked up the cross that had been propped against the back wall and laid it down on the stage, then spread Cody Daniels on top of it and removed his shoes. Cody had constructed the cross out of railroad ties, and he could smell the musky odor of the creosote and oil and cinders in the grain and feel the great hardness of the wood against his head and back and buttocks and thighs.
They’re only going to scare me. They won’t do this, a voice inside him said.
Then he heard the pop of the nail gun and felt a pain explode through the top and bottom of his foot. He tried to pull himself erect, but a man on either side of him held his arms fast against the cross’s horizontal beam. He closed his eyes and then opened them and stared upward into the cathedral ceiling. For the first time in his life, Cody Daniels had a sense of finality from which he knew there was no escape. “I shot over the heads of poor Mexicans coming into the country,” he said. “When I was a boy, I made a fifteen-year-old colored girl go to bed with me. I wrote a bad check to some old people who let me charge groceries at their store. I stole a woman’s purse in the bus depot in Denver. I took a watch off a drunk man in an alley behind the Midnight Mission in Los Angeles. I almost killed a woman outside Baltimore.”
“What is he saying?” said the man with the Russian accent.
“He’s sorry he’s on the planet,” said a man holding one of Cody’s arms.
“See what else he has to say,” said the man with the Russian accent.
Cody heard the nail gun again and felt his other foot flatten against the vertical shaft of the cross and try to constrict against the nail that had pinioned it to the wood. This time he thought he screamed, but he couldn’t be sure, because the voice he heard did not seem like his own. The popping of the nail gun continued, the muzzle working its way along the tops of his feet and his palms and finally the small bones in his wrists. He felt himself being lifted up, the top of the cross thudding against the wall behind him, his weight coming down on the nails, the tendons in his chest crushing the air from his lungs. Through a red haze, he could see the faces of his executioners looking up at him, as though they had been frozen in time or lifted out of an ancient event whose significance had eluded them. He heard himself whispering, his words barely audible, his eyes rolling up into his head.
“What’d he say?” one man asked.
“‘I’m proud my name is on her book,’” another man said.
“What the fuck does that mean?” the first man asked.
“It’s from the song ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’” Dennis Rector said.
“What is this speckled bird?” asked the man with the Russian accent, standing at the foot of the stage.
“In the song, it’s supposed to mean the Bible,” Dennis Rector replied.
The man with the Russian accent gazed through the side window at the rain striking the glass.
“What do you want us to do, Mr. Sholokoff?” Rector asked. “Is he alive?”
“I think he is.”
“You think?” Sholokoff said.