Deacon King Kong(112)

That was Elefante’s opening, and he cleared his throat, the big man again. “I can find out who sends i—”

“Did I ask you that, son?”

“Maybe my moth—”

“Son, why you keep wanting to get your momma all gooked up in this mess? You asked me what I wanted and I said it. I said just pray for Jesus to send me a hunk of that cheese. I told old Sportcoat to do it, but he’s scarce these days. Jesus sends that cheese, son. Nobody else. It comes from Jesus. I’m asking you to ask Jesus to send me some. Just a piece. I ain’t had it in years.”

“Um . . . okay.” Elefante stood and moved to the door. Melissa followed. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Well, if you want, you can tip Mr. Mel before you leave.”

“Who’s Mr. Mel?”

“He’s that old white feller by the front door who makes sure none of us old folks escape.”

Elefante looked at Melissa, who nodded down the hall at the building entrance, where an old security guard could be seen, nodding off into the Daily News.

“I been sending my tithes to Five Ends every week for twelve years,” Sister Paul said. “Four dollars and thirteen cents, from my Social Security. He walks it to the post office every week. He gets a money order and puts it in an envelope and mails it. Unless the post office is paying him in beers and liquor, I owes him twelve years’ worth of stamps and envelopes. Plus the cost of making that four dollars and thirteen cents into a money order. Now Mel’s donated that whiskey down his little red lane free as the rivers run for as long as I been here, till he quit a year or so past. But, honest to my savior, he’s a good man. I’d like to pay him what I owes him before I gets my wings. You think you can spare a little something for him? He won’t take money. He says he’s too old.”

“Does he like anything else other than booze?”

“He favors them Mars candy bars.”

“I’ll give ’im enough to last the rest of his life.”



* * *





They made the move into the wall that night at 4:20 a.m. Elefante and Sportcoat. Melissa remained in the car at the curb, the lights out and motor running. No need for her to risk getting busted. She had done the work, and the research too. After hearing the description of the object, reading a few newspapers from the period, then calling the man in Europe to make arrangements for transfer and sale, she knew what it was. Apparently “the soap” her uncle Macy—the Governor’s brother—had hidden and brought back to America among his “collection” stolen from the Vienna cave in 1945 was not soap at all. It was the oldest three-dimensional object in the world. The Venus of Willendorf, the goddess of fertility. A tiny piece of limestone, carved in the shape of a pregnant woman, said to be thousands of years old. And it was sitting in the palm of Jesus’s hand, a colored hand, painted on the cinder-block back wall of Five Ends Baptist Church of the Cause Houses in Brooklyn, New York, by Sister Bibb’s son Zeke with Sportcoat and Sausage’s help, at the direction of Pastor Gee, who some years before felt that Jesus should be transformed from a white Jesus into a colored man. What hand was there looked like a blob. But it was a hand nonetheless.

There was no moon out as Elefante and Sportcoat made their way along the side of the building to the pitch-black yard of the church, hidden by high weeds, the twinkling lights of a few Manhattan skyscrapers seen in the distance. Elefante had a flashlight, covered with a black cloth, and a hammer and stone chisel. Sportcoat glanced at Elefante’s tools and said, “I don’t need no light.” But when he led Elefante to the back wall, he took the light and flashed it a moment, revealing the portrait of Jesus, now badly discolored, a white man painted brown, his arms outstretched, the two hands roughly eight feet apart. Then he handed the flashlight back to Elefante.

“Did Sister Paul say the right hand or the left hand?” Elefante asked.

“Can’t recollect. Ain’t but two hands there,” Sportcoat said pointedly. They started on the left hand, carefully tapping around the brick. They chinked the mortar away until the brick was nearly free. “Wait,” Sportcoat said. “Gimme a minute to get inside, then just chink that brick in toward me. There ain’t nothing on the inside wall. Tap it. Don’t hit it too hard now. It’s hollow. That hammer’ll bust a hole in it.”

With the head of his hammer, Elefante carefully tapped at the edges of the cinder block softly. The block gave way with a few taps and the cinder block tumbled inside.

It occurred to him as it fell in, What if the thing falls?

He heard the old man on the other side grunt as he grabbed it. Elefante spoke through the wall: “Anything there?”

“In where?”

“In that cinder block. Something like a bar of soap in there?”

“Naw. No soap.”

That caught Elefante off guard. He could see the old man’s face in the hole left by the cinder block. He stuck his head in the blank space where the cinder block had been removed and looked, at an angle, shining his flashlight at the cinder block below and the one above. Nothing. He could see inside the church, and saw the old man’s eye peering out at him.

“There’s nothing here,” he said. “These blocks are staggered. That thing could’ve fell off the edge of these blocks and bounced all the way to the bottom and broken to pieces. We’ll have to take the whole wall of the church down to see the bottom. Let’s try the other hand.”